Not sure if you read correctly, but I just agreed that it should be changed to something that is not complete invisibility, no replacing of stealth skill would be needed. I don’t really know how to describe it, but maybe you know the game with aliens, where you have special suit that can make you invisible? Your skin/armor will change shape to hexagons that bend light around you. Very very very hard to spot, but it is still possible to be spoted. More like predator stealth.
EDIT: Forgot to reply about initiative: You should read the post of Sir Vincent as I am going to completely repeat it as I agree with it: Initiative system can (and WILL) completely lock out all of your weapon skills in no time. Thief is a very weapon reliant profession, most of its utility skill provide just a way to escape, not really a way to fight back like nearly every other profession has. Which means that even single mistake or blunder can blow you to hell if you dont run away. While most other professions can keep combining weapon skills and utility skills for a long long if not infinite time. Thief can only try to use skills like Roll for Initiative, but as I said, that is not really a way to keep fighting, as it has 60 secs cooldown and you will be able to use only 2 weapon skills, or one if you special or 5th skills.
Perspective I suppose, I still don’t see the problem with Initiative, your description sounds like it’s on point.
Anything that’s visual at all, regardless of it’s shape or obscurity, is still visual and will likely be more apparent depending on graphics settings. That’s fine, I’m sure competitive players will find another way to navigate maps for their role but I’m not a competitive player so what do I care? Backstab however, is a positioned skill along with some other skills and traits, those would have to be changed to Stab and some other stuff because the full stealth allows us orient ourselves for the effect.
I’m sure I’m missing something, I don’t get the time to play to really dig into this stuff but that’s what’s jumping out at me right now. I get what you two are saying but I’m just not agreeing with it yet. I’ll read back a few posts and see if I can put it together to make sense.
Upon reading all i gathered was: you cannot compare offhand Dagger into offhand Pistol because it is clearly offhand Dagger was inferior than offhand Pistol in terms of Utility offhand Pistol brings on the table. Why? because they serve different purposes and usage which make Thief fun to play.
Some of the gripe i read was, Thief is all about Trickery, well you’re right, i’m not saying tricking are for advance Thief players but yeah, because it bring more synergies than the other. right.
Interms of stealth capabilities going in and out, i believe Thief suffered enough? Though i would love to be proven wrong.
Conclusion: i see nothing other than revolutionize Thief further which is fine on my side.
[Urge]
Between a master and apprentice, i would love to see the differences.
Well the big things in my opinion is the d/p meta only is meta because of a smoke field on offhand pistol. We really need a rework as a class on how stealth works and imo one of the better directions would be to make it a class thing like maybe a shadow form for being stealthed(not like the old gw1 elite but for fun purposes). The idea I had behind it is you drain initiative while you stay in stealth and then if it had functions that actually give us an advantage for being so squishy that would solve a bit of problems we face.
The next one is trait lines which trickery and daredevil have so much utility you almost never see a build that doesn’t have them in it. The reason is obvious though because trickery holds all the cards with stealing and the lead attacks, boon removal/stealing, swiftness, and vigor. With things the way they are now there is no diversity in builds .
So to wrap it all up… We have a lot of problems as far as how thief goes but hopefully anet can address some of these issues too because to some degree other classes have same problem like the dragonhunter without the utility of the virutes line. Daredevil has so much utility you just have to use it and then trickery boons to allies, boon stealing, multiple steal cd reduction and lead attacks trait. Anyways here is to hoping they can give us wiggle room or revamp/re work certain things that hold us back as a class.
They opt for the amulet system to make it easier for them to balance PvP and I don’t think that will change anytime soon. The major problem is not really the amulet but ArenaNet’s stubbornness in not separating the skills for each game type. If they accepted the fact that skills needs to be separated for PvP, they can adjust the Thief’s skills in PvP where it scales better with amulet. But I guess that’s “too much work” according to them.
The reason I am adverse to separating skill balance is because ANet clearly struggles with managing even on the conceptual level the pool of skills that already exists, and especially given the thief, the problems are more ingrained specifically with the math behind amulets and modifiers that compensating anywhere outside of amulets would result in even flukier balance; increase them to more similarly match WvW performance and you end up with all-in builds and tank builds playing overly-effectively since these would be stackable into insanity, while failing to increase them enough would still perpetuate the lack of diversity in viable build paths.
While ultimately the lack of weapon diversity does largely extend to the disparity or blatant weakness of some skills, the lack of trait/style diversity across all professions in sPvP can almost entirely be placed on the existing amulet system.
Not to mention we wouldn’t even need stat power creep like Marauder’s gear since a mix-and-match approach to stats and higher stat pools in general would enable more balanced split-stat builds and build weakness/style compensation in other areas while not just objectively losing performance everywhere.
Mix and matching gears will exponentially make balancing more difficult since they have to account for every possible gear combination. They opted for amulet to avoid that obvious headache induced situation.
Contrary to their protest against the separation of PvP and PvE skills, it will make their balancing life much easier because they can balance PvP however they want without affecting the balance in PvE. Currently, a simple buff (or nerf) in PvP has a devastating effect in PvE and WvW — and vice versa. They need accept the fact that they already separated them by opting on amulets and generic gear in PvP, so why stop there?
Right now, they can’t make drastic changes to skills for PvP’s sake because it will setback the balance in the Raid contents that they are currently developing. If they have separated the skills, they will be removing this stupid shackles they’ve applied unto themselves. They can balance the PvP skills without derailing the balance in Raids or any other PvE contents.
I agree skill separation needs to be a factor but that takes loads of time and effort for anet. A quicker and imo a better fix is to have selectable gear stats. Also take into account this change would make skill separation balance much easier because now it’s just small number tweaking instead of full reworks to every single skill so that it works in pvp.
Balancing to selectable stats isn’t as hard as you’re painting it to be. You start with making the conversion and then monitoring what combinations are overperforming, if they have counters, etc. Theoretically every build ever made will have counters so there would be no god mode build out there so balance in the end wouldn’t be all that big of a nightmare.
[Teef] Dragonbrand Thief and Engi main www.twitch.tv/ariodoesgaming and Ario Does Gaming on Youtube!
stealth already got a very hard nerf with all the revealt debuffs and bs having an icd and let’s not forget all those shields and invulnerability we have atm.
his weaponskills are also kinda strange compared to others … with only having his AA, BS and at max 2 weapon skills to deal dmg while the other weaponskills and his 6 – 0 skills are more for utility then dmg.
well let’s get back to the topic “what do you think thief needs to be balanced”
for offensive:
buff some weaponskills to make them usefull again. (currently d/p is the weaponset to go because it offers the utility a thief needs while others fail to support the thief properly)
buff the range of pistols and AA of Shortbow to 1200 (kinda strange that you can steal further then you can shoot with a pistol or sb)
for devensive:
25% chance to evade during steath (with all the reveald debuffs and visibility throu dots on a thief its pretty easy to spot a stealthed thief and that kinda makes up for his lack of defensive capabilities while other professions are dealing dmg easier and have more defensive options with shields clones pets and so on)
removing his self reveal debuff (no other class debuffs itself without gaining something)
sure there are some good thiefs out there but everyone with 2+ years of exp can stomp 6 noobs in a fight. those who claim a theif is balanced are only those few ppl and you can’t take them into account for a thief balance thread like this.
other professions deal the same (or even more) dmg way easier without the risk a thief has.
a thief has to fight 2 vs 1 or has to pick up a less skilled player or one with low health in a 1 vs 1 because against even skilled ppl the thief will always underpeform and lose…
and thats not what balance is.
Even year after xpac it still blows my mind how they dared to nerf acro and introduce it as DD. Lemme chop off your leg so i can sell you artificial one. The spec is also sooo boring. It brought nothing new to thief, if anything HoT limited builds thief can run. We really needed more group oriented build but noooooooooo, how dare thieves ask for being useful for group in xpansion that introduced raids lol /faceplam.
