Guild Wars 2

I am really curious.

• Why did we get a buff to melee autoattacks?

• Why is our lack of group support not adressed?

• Why do Impairing daggers still miss two out of three times?

• Do you think the acrobatics traitline is worth it now?

I really try to look behind the reason why they went that route.

Best regards!

Shino

I honestly don’t know, the last thing I wanted was a buff to damage. But I’m not complaining…

Now we can be like every other class with those cancer passive immunity traits. Only reason to even use acro, and still not worth it.

Assassin’s Reward is the only thing that would make sense using out of all 3 TERRIBLE GM traits in acro, and it’s a… sustained heal trait? What? Does ANet even know how thieves survive? It’s called evasion and blinds, you idiots. When has thief ever survived from sustained healing? We die in 1 hit outside of an evasion frame.

If yet another passive braindead trait in the game is their answer to thieves being too squishy then I don’t know what to say.. other than they could have put in a source of protection in acro.

Because ANet understands now that having thieves need to empty their initiative pool for damage makes for a rather weak and cumbersome class, or on the other extreme a burst master that kills everything in a (short) rotation.

So their plan is to give us real damage that isn’t bound by initiative but is melee and they expect us to spend initiative for utility : gap closers, tankyness etc… and not for burst.

Just press 1.

https://youtu.be/eA126dULIr0

Thief doesn’t belong in group support and buffs. We’re straight up assassins, name an mmo where the assassin dolled out buffs like he’s a paladin/priest type.

It’s like people don’t know how to place a character archetype.

We got a number of nice bumps while most other classes got nerfs. I say good enough on the first 2016 balance patch. If it holds true, we should see more in three months or so.

Leo Schrodingers Cat.2497:

Plus landing all attacks can be a pain. I still wanted better group support and sustainability.

They buffed the already nearly OP Bandits Defense into what is probably one of the best sustain skills in the game. A stun breaker and block on a 15s timer… seriously hard to ask for more sustain after that. Oh and it also comes with an optional knockdown. The prior mechanic made it sometimes dangerous. The new mechanic makes it awesome.

Group support is not our bag but Venom Share just got a notable bump thanks to the new BV changes.

Shinobi.3240:

• Why did we get a buff to melee autoattacks?

Rather than cutting the cost of weapon skills and increasing the maximum initiative pool (like making Preparedness baseline), which frankly will increase the Thief’s DPS, they instead choose to increase the Thief’s DPS via AA. In their own world and in their own mind, the end result reached the goal of increasing the Thief’s DPS without doing it the right way.

• Why is our lack of group support not adressed?

ArenaNet only see Thief as +1 and mobile profession capping and decapping nodes. Until they get their mind out of this idiotic mindset, they will not address this issue.

• Why do Impairing daggers still miss two out of three times?

ArenaNet has gotten rid of homing projectiles in some skills.

• Do you think the acrobatics traitline is worth it now?

I pick Acro for general PvE content specifically due to Expeditious dodger, Hard to Catch, and Don’t stop. In other words, none of the “rework” worth picking.

Yeah agree wit Aidal here. It’s not the thief’s niche.

If you want to be a supportive boon class with decent mobility and offensive power play rev. Not every class has to be an AoE boonlord.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Rather than cutting the cost of weapon skills and increasing the maximum initiative pool (like making Preparedness baseline), which frankly will increase the Thief’s DPS, they instead choose to increase the Thief’s DPS via AA. In their own world and in their own mind, the end result reached the goal of increasing the Thief’s DPS without doing it the right way.

They are trying to increase the thief DPS without increasing massively it’s evade uptime or burst damage potential when they dump their initiative on a poor target.

I don’t want to be support, tbh. The SA line as it is now is a botched support botched sustain line.
I’m fine if there were options so one could chose a support role, but I don’t want half of the support traits to be minors.
Shadow Protector is that weak that it’s not worth taking it.

So, Anet, how about reworking that line?

stof.9341:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Rather than cutting the cost of weapon skills and increasing the maximum initiative pool (like making Preparedness baseline), which frankly will increase the Thief’s DPS, they instead choose to increase the Thief’s DPS via AA. In their own world and in their own mind, the end result reached the goal of increasing the Thief’s DPS without doing it the right way.

They are trying to increase the thief DPS without increasing massively it’s evade uptime or burst damage potential when they dump their initiative on a poor target.

Trickery is already a staple so the evade uptime and burst damage is already here. By making Preparedness baseline, it can open up a wide range of builds. Increasing AA damage doesn’t change anything in terms of diversity, thus doing it the wrong way.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Trickery is already a staple so the evade uptime and burst damage is already here. By making Preparedness baseline, it can open up a wide range of builds. Increasing AA damage doesn’t change anything in terms of diversity, thus doing it the wrong way.

It wouldn’t help my D/D thief tbh.

Sad thing is now we wait 4 months till next balance patch where hopefully they address the problems they missed.

Make it 8 months, they will have an excuse like HoT to skip the balance patch.

Jana.6831:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Trickery is already a staple so the evade uptime and burst damage is already here. By making Preparedness baseline, it can open up a wide range of builds. Increasing AA damage doesn’t change anything in terms of diversity, thus doing it the wrong way.

It wouldn’t help my D/D thief tbh.

Of course it will since you’ll have more initiatives at your disposal, however the goal is to encourage diversity.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Jana.6831:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Trickery is already a staple so the evade uptime and burst damage is already here. By making Preparedness baseline, it can open up a wide range of builds. Increasing AA damage doesn’t change anything in terms of diversity, thus doing it the wrong way.

It wouldn’t help my D/D thief tbh.

Of course it will since you’ll have more initiatives at your disposal, however the goal is to encourage diversity.

As long as I can’t land a CnD because the enemy is faster, evades, has passive and active blocks it won’t help me one bit.

Jana.6831:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Jana.6831:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Trickery is already a staple so the evade uptime and burst damage is already here. By making Preparedness baseline, it can open up a wide range of builds. Increasing AA damage doesn’t change anything in terms of diversity, thus doing it the wrong way.

It wouldn’t help my D/D thief tbh.

Of course it will since you’ll have more initiatives at your disposal, however the goal is to encourage diversity.

As long as I can’t land a CnD because the enemy is faster, evades, has passive and active blocks it won’t help me one bit.

In that case, that’s a whole different issue. It would be nice if CnD has a built in shadowstep.

Yes, or unblockable CnD – and I’m not so sure that I like the only (theoretical) option to be fighting OP with more OP.

Jana.6831:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Jana.6831:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Trickery is already a staple so the evade uptime and burst damage is already here. By making Preparedness baseline, it can open up a wide range of builds. Increasing AA damage doesn’t change anything in terms of diversity, thus doing it the wrong way.

It wouldn’t help my D/D thief tbh.

Of course it will since you’ll have more initiatives at your disposal, however the goal is to encourage diversity.

As long as I can’t land a CnD because the enemy is faster, evades, has passive and active blocks it won’t help me one bit.

Isn’t that what Basilisk Venom is for?

Acrobatics is completely worthless on a thief. The entire trait line. They seemed to focus on it this patch…but it just fundamentally doesn’t work on a thief.

Azure Prower.8701:

Jana.6831:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Jana.6831:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Trickery is already a staple so the evade uptime and burst damage is already here. By making Preparedness baseline, it can open up a wide range of builds. Increasing AA damage doesn’t change anything in terms of diversity, thus doing it the wrong way.

It wouldn’t help my D/D thief tbh.

Of course it will since you’ll have more initiatives at your disposal, however the goal is to encourage diversity.

As long as I can’t land a CnD because the enemy is faster, evades, has passive and active blocks it won’t help me one bit.

Isn’t that what Basilisk Venom is for?

Alright: “Oh, there’s an enemy, let me just get my BV (5s clear animation), then, I’m gonna pre cast CnD (1s), then I’m gonna steal…”

Honestly; being a D/D thief is hard work.

Any other class: “Oh, there’s a D/D thief, gonna faceroll my keyboard”

ETA: I hope you get my point: Anet messes the game up and instead of fixing things they make it harder for some to get “equal” results they had before – great!

Link.1049:

Acrobatics is completely worthless on a thief. The entire trait line. They seemed to focus on it this patch…but it just fundamentally doesn’t work on a thief.

I completely disagree. My current build is CS/Acro/DD where both CS and DD are traited for offensive and Acro as my defensive trait line. The only way that Acro would be worthless is if you use DD as defensive — which would be your own fault and not Acro’s.

I too use the ACRO line. It works very well with both s/d builds and with d/d builds.

CS/Acro/DD with my s/d is becoming a favorite.

Aidal.4901:

Thief doesn’t belong in group support and buffs. We’re straight up assassins, name an mmo where the assassin dolled out buffs like he’s a paladin/priest type.

It’s like people don’t know how to place a character archetype.

Rift.

You can play any roll as Rogue, from assassin to a bard to a ranger to a healer. Also tank.

Rift is the closest game I could find to Guild Wars 1 where you can literally play anything as basically 1 class and has a ton of build diversity.

Can we not turn into the warrior forum and start asking for unnecessary and over-the-top buffs? That kitten gets annoying real quick.

Rukia.9860:

Aidal.4901:

Thief doesn’t belong in group support and buffs. We’re straight up assassins, name an mmo where the assassin dolled out buffs like he’s a paladin/priest type.

It’s like people don’t know how to place a character archetype.

Rift.

You can play any roll as Rogue, from assassin to a bard to a ranger to a healer. Also tank.

Rift is the closest game I could find to Guild Wars 1 where you can literally play anything as basically 1 class and has a ton of build diversity.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guide_to_playing_as_an_assassin

Also i briefly looked over the meta battle and most every build is basically some form of dagger spam.

Edit: Also after looking it over, rift (all of five minutes) looks like it tried to be Ragnarok. Thing is once you’re a bard, you lack on damage, and rift seems to have a different debuff/buff system. You listed an mmo, fair enough. Now go play it.

Aidal.4901:

Rukia.9860:

Aidal.4901:

Thief doesn’t belong in group support and buffs. We’re straight up assassins, name an mmo where the assassin dolled out buffs like he’s a paladin/priest type.

It’s like people don’t know how to place a character archetype.

Rift.

You can play any roll as Rogue, from assassin to a bard to a ranger to a healer. Also tank.

Rift is the closest game I could find to Guild Wars 1 where you can literally play anything as basically 1 class and has a ton of build diversity.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guide_to_playing_as_an_assassin

Also i briefly looked over the meta battle and most every build is basically some form of dagger spam.

Edit: Also after looking it over, rift (all of five minutes) looks like it tried to be Ragnarok. Thing is once you’re a bard, you lack on damage, and rift seems to have a different debuff/buff system. You listed an mmo, fair enough. Now go play it.

I’ll throw in The Secret World as the gold standard for build (mostly…) however you want – which unfortunately I’m spending most of my time playing now, since GW2 can’t give me five decent skills to use.

Just rambling now but I find archetypes interesting: The two MMOs who get the feel of P/P the most right IMO (TSW and Wildstar) both associate the set with being team buffers and healers.

But dual pistol is more Rogue than Assassin… kind okittenwardly* squished in with Thief in GW2.

*FFS: ‘awkwardly, kind of’.

Sicarius.4639:

Just press 1.

https://youtu.be/eA126dULIr0

Dude has extremely high quickness uptime, get your cancer posts out of here.

Aidal.4901:

Thief doesn’t belong in group support and buffs. We’re straight up assassins, name an mmo where the assassin dolled out buffs like he’s a paladin/priest type.

It’s like people don’t know how to place a character archetype.

Would be nice if we filled those assassin shoes too, pretty sure our dps is still lower than most, not to mention we die incredibly easy so a dead thief = no dps.

Shinobi.3240:

I am really curious.

• Why did we get a buff to melee autoattacks?

• Why is our lack of group support not adressed?

• Why do Impairing daggers still miss two out of three times?

• Do you think the acrobatics traitline is worth it now?

I really try to look behind the reason why they went that route.

Best regards!

Shino

1) Because people have been complaining VERY LOUDLY for a VERY LONG TIME that thief is too bursty and doesn’t have enough consistent sustained damage. In fact, that has been one of the SPECIFIC complaints about the usefulness of power based thieves in Raids, that they don’t have enough sustained damage to keep up with other classes. Now a lot of the same people are complaining that we didn’t need an auto-attack buff.

2) Thief is not, will not be, and never has been a support class of any kind. They are from start to finish advertised as a mobile duelist class. Get in, burst down, get out.

3) Because it’s friggen broken…

4) Short answer? Probably not worth taking over the other options still, so long as you have Daredevil. For non HoT players, though, it might be slightly viable again as a third traitline choice.

Aidal.4901:

Thief doesn’t belong in group support and buffs. We’re straight up assassins, name an mmo where the assassin dolled out buffs like he’s a paladin/priest type.

That’s bullkitten. People didn’t ask for AoE heals on thief but some kind of support like granting endurance to nearby allies via traits or simply granting 150power/ferocity AoE or something which every other profession has one of. Vulnerability would be also nice for pve if it wasn’t capped at max all the time.

And there are also multiple traitline to choose from. Not all of them are about assassination.

You already give Endurance through the signet of agility. It also cures one condition.

• What i honestly wanted from this patch was a bunch of bugfixes and the rework of underperforming traits and weapons.

• It would be so nice if they just dedicate one big patch to clean up their game before they are adding new stuff on top of broken one.

• I understand that they wanted us to have higher dps in pve. But the way they did it was not right at all. They could have solved the dps problem with a stacking class specific debuff on the target we attack. Ramp up time is the key. With loading the damage upfront on our autoattacks they hurt our class more than they helped us.

• If you pvp a lot and you are honest than you will admit that the autoattack buff is over the top.

• We already have enough damage in pvp and the nerf to the bunker playstyle served us well.

Best regards!

Shino

Kicker.8203:

Aidal.4901:

Thief doesn’t belong in group support and buffs. We’re straight up assassins, name an mmo where the assassin dolled out buffs like he’s a paladin/priest type.

That’s bullkitten. People didn’t ask for AoE heals on thief but some kind of support like granting endurance to nearby allies via traits or simply granting 150power/ferocity AoE or something which every other profession has one of. Vulnerability would be also nice for pve if it wasn’t capped at max all the time.

And there are also multiple traitline to choose from. Not all of them are about assassination.

If you’re traveling in a group then you should be rolling TotC, which grants 10s of might/fury/swiftness to everyone near by.

If you’re not traveling with a group you should be rolling TotC because 20% extra crit is nothing to scoff at.

Also, we have what every other profession doesn’t, supreme single target burst. Yes all classes have a burst but the thief is one of the most effective, and has a monopoly on coverage to boot. With access to at least one, up to five shadow steps at any time, cloak on demand, and high powered fast attacks, wanting us to output buffs is just silly. It’s simply not our job. We fit the description of an assassin, our class is even based off the assassin from GW1.

I feel like the main issue forum goers have with thief is that its called “thief”, if it was called assassin it probably wouldn’t raise such a stink.

Shinobi.3240:

I am really curious.

• Why did we get a buff to melee autoattacks?

• Why is our lack of group support not adressed?

• Why do Impairing daggers still miss two out of three times?

• Do you think the acrobatics traitline is worth it now?

I really try to look behind the reason why they went that route.

Best regards!

Shino

Laziness and lack of imagination. By making the auto-attack your best skill they don’t have to spend the time and pay someone to balance all the other skills and fixing core class issues. As others have said, just press 1… until you get nerfed again in 3 months.

I doubt it was laziness in all honesty, the problems a thief suffers, is very common throughout all MMOs.

how do u balance the Spike Damage with Stealth, how do u balance the Burst with Mobility if they fixed core profession and upgraded the abilities it’d be madness thief would be insanely overpowered and would take a nerf hammer to the face into the floor for it moments later.

Thief burst needs 0 buffs therefore the skillset doesn’t need buffing. I mean the lack of Diversity (thief is always stapled to D/P and Always Demanded to have Shortbow in any build u attempt) imho damage wise the thief is actually in a really good place.

the problems are -some Utilities as Scorpion wire are rather bugged, there are a lack of Utilities which actually have a place at all, utility choices are so locked down due to a very strict profession meta.

Auto attacks were buffed to give us a Sustained DPS when we cant afford or have used all out Inititive, to allow players to use it for more utilty mobility etc etc without becoming useless I nthe damage aspects.

We weren’t buffed in anything supportive cause thief doesn’t belong anywhere close to support its a full DPS Profession we have enough hybrids boonlords and tanks in the game without turning the Thief into one also.

Impairing Daggers are missing because it seems Anet hate making utilities actually viable, every profession seems to have 3/4s of its utilities absolutely useless and anet don’t do anything about them.

Depends on what u play, theres no point using Acro in most builds u’ll be expected to use in PvP though in all honesty.