Guild Wars 2

Seriously after the patch every singe thief i saw is ether spaming vault and dodge or unload and dodge or pistol whip and dodge or death blosom and dodge. Wtf is this kitten thief is reduced to a 1 button spam class, is this due to poor design, poor balance or something else?
I wish they changed the weapon skills to be more like the gw1 assassin chain skills, something like your weapon skill 5 costs the same initiative as it does now but it costs an additional 3 ini if you do not use a weapon skill 2 before it or a utility skill (or something like that). Put some similar requirements on skill 3 (doesn’t have to be increased ini cost can be something like ’do a evasive maneuver over your target inflicting bleeding for 5 sec and striking nearby foe. Bleeding duration is doubled if you used the weapon skill 4 before using this skill.) anything just to turn thieves away from being a 1 button mash fest.

As far as pistol is concerned, there is really no point to use any skills but #3 and #5 in combination with bound for stealth auto in a p/p setup. The duration on vulnerability and immob on #2 is a joke, #5 sucks when any target has a defiance bar and is a pretty huge ini dump to get stealth, and #4 will mainly be used to break a defiance bar while not procing pulmonary impact in the process.

Haven’t really messed with staff, but in PvP, if you can bait out both dodges you can generally one shot a large majority of players with vault spam; it’s also great cleave on downed enemies.

While there does seem to be a lot of spam throughout all the classes, I don’t think it’s as bad as it seems to be, and it is generally aoes that are the big issue.

It’s try hards jumping the band wagon, the trait “lead attack promotes iniative spam/usage” and bound gives a 10%dmg buff. Met a lot of the try hards last night, they were all full bersker and vs an experienced thief they are no real threat but the other experienced thieves can pose an issue. The new hype should die of soon.

As has been pointed out there a whole pile of thieves testing out the changes to the new lead attacks. The players are finding out what works and what does not and as time goes by peoples at the receiving end will adapt as well.

In some ways it can act as a reverse taunt. The thief wants to maximize the stacks so attacks in a flurry of activity.

babazhook.6805:

In some ways it can act as a reverse taunt. The thief wants to maximize the stacks so attacks in a flurry of activity.

That’s all fine and well but what i take issue with is the way they maximize stacks, by spamming 1 skill and 1 skill only. And then they continue to spam the same skill even with max stacks!! They might as well not have any other weapon skills apart from the 1 they spam (vault for staff, d blosom for daggers, p whip for s/p, unload for p/p [and this is the only one that is understandable since the rest of dual pistol skills are ether condi or more of a ‘utility’ weapon skill]).

For me, it’s true that I mainly “spam” 3 for dps and 5 for defensive purposes, but that doesn’t mean I ignore the other skills. I use 4 to interrupt channels and 2 to set up a steal->fistflurry, as the immob, however short, is enough to keep them from moving during the channel. Also, auto is used when init is on recharge. So I use the whole pallet of skills. It just seems spammy because 3 is used back-to-back.

Edit: I can only speak for my use of p/p.

Initiative is build around giving thieves the ability to spam one button if they want to. The design of thief skills is built around initiative, usually with one “main DPS” skill and 4 “situational so you may want to conserve initiative” skills on the bar.

That said, the ability to spam a button 2 or 3 times is part of the design of the class and its skills. Don’t be suprised when people that haven’t grasped the concept of initiative conservation, or people playing builds where the other initiative uses aren’t designed in a compelling manner never hit any other buttons. They’re doing what the design of the class encourages them to do.

Nothing’s changed playstyle-wise for those who abide by the meta which largely consists of spamming 3 on D/P, spamming 3 on D/D condi, and for those who play pistols, spamming 3 for burst damage on unload. Otherwise, the changes to lead attacks have just strictly nerfed everything else.

Whether or not a d/d daredevil spams 3 and nothing else is related directly to how the enemy reacts.

This is the best application of conditions a thief has in his build from a weaponset. In the d/d weaponset #2 #4 and #5 do not add damaging conditions so are little used. Why would a condition build use heartseeker just to “press a different button”.? The nature of INI allows a thief to use the skill most suitable at the time. D/D is hybrid and number 3 happens to be where the conditions come from from a condition build using d/d.

6 through 10 are as used by a d/d thief as by any other build. In essence 2 out of 10 of those buttons are “less/not used”.

Someone in a pvp match one called me a Vault spammer…
I said I’d stop spamming it when they started dodging it.

I’m sure a lot of players used their 80 level-up on a Thief. I know I did. I’d like to play one but don’t want to level one. There’ll probably be a bunch of players experimenting with them for a while.

Thief is way more than a spam one button tool. You apply boons with short bow, apply tons of might, drop refuge on your allies, move fast, hit hard and you can change the tide of the battle depending on how you match with your team mates.

- Kaishina

Guess what, you are using the skills that do the DPS the most.
But if people ONLY do that, you won’t have a hard time with them anyway.
Unless you are even worse than these people.

There’s actually quite a bit of truth to the OP, at least in respect to WvW. On my Staff Thief I basically just have to spam Vault because it evades AND does very large AoE damage (9K+). On my d/p Thief, I can just use basilisk and then steal/shadow shot to a target to auto-attack them to death with Flanking Stirkes auto proc (around 6-7K per AA chain). On my P/P Thief I can now self-stack 24 stacks of Might whilst using the same high damage ranged skill over and over again. It just doesn’t feel very methodical anymore.

Encouraged through dumping initiative for gains on Lead Attacks.

Spam builds got buffed, while already-underpowered builds like signets which depended on maintaining high initiative for sustain which came exclusively from skilled play got nerfed.

The change to Lead Attacks is honestly one of the single worst changes ANet could have made. It was totally unnecessary and contrary to what the thief should be about.

Lead attack changes are fine and open up more use of a weaponset not less.

If you were the type to spam the same skill over and over before , you will remain so. If you are the type to have rotated skills before you less likley to rely on the AA and more likely to use other weapon skills.

Spamming the same skill over and over just makes you easier to counter.

What they should so with lead attacks however is make it work like warriors adrenaline. You can not build stacks out of combat and it decays very fast when out of combat.