Guild Wars 2

for the sake of balance, we are the only medium class that has the lowest vitality,

engi and rangers share the same base hp, and they have an ample amount of survivability in their sleeve (E.G. dont kill me buttons like invulnerability)

meanwhile thief has stealth? arguably we can say that the two other medium classes has access to it as well with the ability to reveal an opponent who in invisible.

solutions that i had in mind:
1. increase the health pool of the thief on par with all the medium class
or
2. add an invulnerability button (skill) to the new specialization class.
-to think about it we are the only class who does not have a skill that will make us invulnerable (aside from the necro’s death shroud which is also considered “dont kill me skill”)
or
3. give us the ablity to detect someone in stealth as well

Just a base vitality increase would be fine.

Or nothing.

Theyll get nerfed anyway, players that arent thieves dont like the thief as a class by and large.

What I think they need to do is set the health of all classes individually instead of having only 3 “classes”. Thieves really should have more health than elementalists, but less than rangers.

Einlanzer.1627:

What I think they need to do is set the health of all classes individually instead of having only 3 “classes”. Thieves really should have more health than elementalists, but less than rangers.

That’s technically true because they have higher base armour values, so they can take more damage in general.

Of course, that’s irrelevant for condition damage.

I don’t think they’ll be touching the thief’s base vitality though as it’s low by design. High burst, but low potential to survive a burst by being hit directly.

Interesting fact: a profession’s base health has absolutely nothing to do with what armor they wear.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Health#Base_health_by_profession

Health tier has a lot to do with how the profession handles damage, and thief handles it by not handling it, e.i stealth, mobility, and evasion. Guardian and elementalist, the 2 that share our health pool, have an extremely good healing potential even without loading up on healing power while thief even with healing power is mediocre at recovering.

So it seems a bit strange to nerf our mobility (increasing cd of withdraw, along with some other nerfs to our defensive options) just to get us further into this dps or die theme that someone at anet made up 3 years ago. They really need to look into the opportunity costs of building thief before they so much as look at the class for the next balance patch. They don’t seem to acknowledge how badly thief is pushed into full dps which makes for an extremely boring experience when trying to break free from this “meta” bull kitten.

I’ve been wondering how a base vitality increase would affect the class lately. Seems like pvp is currently swarmed by tanky condi bomb specs which just sit on points. The longer this game survives it seems the worse stealth gets for theives, especially considering some of the changes to condi removal in the recent patch; untraited stealth is generally 2-3 seconds and this gives you 1 shot at removing a condition. Meanwhile stealth will no longer remove immobilize and you get spammed by auto attacks and aoes in stealth so I question why they even keep it in the game. The base speed increase in stealth in the acrobatics line would be fantastic, if you were not forced to go into acrobatics for it.

Currently the way I see stealth on thieves:
- low mobility within stealth unless going out of ones way to get the acrobatics trait and losing out on either damage or condi removal
- channel skills do not break when stealthing and you still end up taking loads of damage
- certain ai seems to function weird with stealth; i.e. mesmer clones or ranger pets will not have a target reset once you break out of stealth, even if you are running away from combat or at another point they will continue to chase you for 2000+ yards until they explode/duration runs out
- mesmers can caster aoe weapon spells and remain in stealth?!
- mesmers get a trait (albeit a grandmasters) that increases stealth duration by 100%, meanwhile we get 1 extra second while the thief class is supposedly based around stealth as a dominating mechanic

The longer I play my thief in pvp, the less and less I seem to care about stealth outside of condi removal which is really bad compared to most classes. Then you have to go and consider EVERY class has some access to an invulnerability, and on top of that several also have access to stealth…

Thief is a mess. This is just one of the reasons. I’ve often thought why in the hell thieves having some of the lowest HP was even a thing. You can’t really say that a thieves way to deal with damage is to not deal with it when mobility was turkittenfed. Couple this with the fact that I can get out-stealthed by a mesmer, and you’re starting to see that ANet really has no cohesive plan on how to deal with the Thief profession.

Outside of our initial burst, we’re an easily handled kitten melee range fighter that gets insta-gibbed by dmg that wasn’t even really meant for us in the first place. I got on my warrior today and practiced REAL damage, survivability and mobility and had the time of my life.

NinjaEd.3946:

Health tier has a lot to do with how the profession handles damage, and thief handles it by not handling it, e.i stealth, mobility, and evasion. Guardian and elementalist, the 2 that share our health pool, have an extremely good healing potential even without loading up on healing power while thief even with healing power is mediocre at recovering.

So it seems a bit strange to nerf our mobility (increasing cd of withdraw, along with some other nerfs to our defensive options) just to get us further into this dps or die theme that someone at anet made up 3 years ago. They really need to look into the opportunity costs of building thief before they so much as look at the class for the next balance patch. They don’t seem to acknowledge how badly thief is pushed into full dps which makes for an extremely boring experience when trying to break free from this “meta” bull kitten.

dps or die theme might have been be ok if other classes didn’t actually do more dmg atm while having way more survival :|

The thing is that most other classes have mechanics that mitigate damage. They either have heavy armor/high health, good self-healing, the ability to divert damage to pets, etc.

The thief has nothing but stealth – and the way it’s designed, it’s not adequate enough to compensate for crap healing, crap health, and average armor. Something needs to be done.

I’ve always thought that classes should have innate modifiers to their endurance regeneration based on their health and armor ratings. In other words, classes would be innately separated in 3 categories: health, armor, and agility (fast, slow, average). The light armor/low health classes would regenerate endurance faster than the heavy armored classes.

Cynz.9437:

NinjaEd.3946:

Health tier has a lot to do with how the profession handles damage, and thief handles it by not handling it, e.i stealth, mobility, and evasion. Guardian and elementalist, the 2 that share our health pool, have an extremely good healing potential even without loading up on healing power while thief even with healing power is mediocre at recovering.

So it seems a bit strange to nerf our mobility (increasing cd of withdraw, along with some other nerfs to our defensive options) just to get us further into this dps or die theme that someone at anet made up 3 years ago. They really need to look into the opportunity costs of building thief before they so much as look at the class for the next balance patch. They don’t seem to acknowledge how badly thief is pushed into full dps which makes for an extremely boring experience when trying to break free from this “meta” bull kitten.

dps or die theme might have been be ok if other classes didn’t actually do more dmg atm while having way more survival :|

^

Oldgrimm.8521:

solutions that i had in mind:
1. increase the health pool of the thief on par with all the medium class

This would do nothing.
I use to go between two specific spec/builds with my D/D build 6months ago (back from extended break). That was a mixed build relying primarily on berserker’s or going “annoying thief”. For the first there are many variations and most people tend to play this in SPvP or WvW. The latter is full sentinels gear (WvW primarily) all armor, trinkets and even weapons, depending on boost from current world it becomes a thief with 24-26k HP. When i came back from my recent break and dieing with what i felt was an unnatural amount due to almost insta-gib deaths, i put my sentinels gear on.

The surprise, i could do better damage than i remembered, but was dropped almost as quickly as with normal gear. In fact it was just stupid how fast i died. I use to run through small zergs, live and get away and have zergs chase me across the map. Now just a single person with the right build or skill can completely shut down a build that couldn’t kill a flea but was ludicrous for even groups to try and kill. Now? Throw in multiple opponents and its an exercise in futility.

I’ve been back for just over 2 weeks, so i’ve gotten back in to the swing of things that would need to happen after a long break. While I can actually get a kill here and there with the old YOLO builds, anything else is severely lacking, and i can attest with out any doubt HP will NOT make a difference to us when facing other classes. It would only help in thief vs thief as we wont be one shotting each other anymore.