My main is a thief. I played thief and necro through all BWE’s and decided on thief for launch. After getting bored with the class and going back to my necro, then going BACK to the thief, it occurred to me just how mind-numbingly boring the thief profession actually is, based solely around spamming something, which is sad for a class supposed to be completely the opposite. This is my own opinion that is based on PvP only.
D/D: BV > AS > CnD > Steal > BS > HS. If they don’t die, spam HS. If they have a friend, run away. Forced to run as glass cannon to be even remotely successful, so either instagib them or you get instagibbed. Boring. Or you can be a D/D bleed thief and spam Deathblossom until you run out of initiative, stealth, and repeat. Super boring.
P/P: Unload. The end.
P/D: Quite literally the most boring build in the game. Autoattack, hit 5 for CnD stealth, open with 1. Repeat. While when I initially quit D/D and went to the now typical 0/0/30/20/20 I enjoyed how easily I could win any fight 1v1, now I go back to it and it just feels disturbingly gimmicky. There’s nothing fun about playing or fighting this build.
S/P: PW > Steal > Haste > PW. Boring. Just as stupid as warrior 100b spam but with less damage.
D/P is just weird and doesn’t feel remotely effective. There’s no spamming other then HS.
S/D is probably the only build that when traited properly offers the type of dynamic gameplay available to the other classes. It’s got decent damage with a cleave and great mobility.
Underwater combat on the thief is literally the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in a video game. All you do is spam Shadowy Assault. THAT IS IT. You don’t have to do anything else. Actually, anything else would be a terrible waste of time. Sure Haste > Deluge is cool before they actually notice you, but once they do, oh man. Time to spam 5. With a build high in initiative regen and traits for the same like Roll for Init and Infil Sig, you can just sit there all day spamming 5, killing things while evading the entire time. Sure it’s effective, BORINGLY effective.
No matter what you do, the class is based around spamming something. This is why Initiative is terrible. You’re either spamming 2, spamming 3, or spamming 5. Once you can’t spam anymore, you go stealth until you can spam again. Or you just run away. For some reason this is appealing to players as you can’t play any sPvP match without there being a ton of thieves on each team. In an 8v8 today my team had 5 thieves and theirs had 6. I’ve never seen so many people spamming 2 in my life. This isn’t a QQ nerf thieves thread. This is a plea for some diversity. I loved my thief, and after going back to it today I just couldn’t stomach it. Every build is just stale, repetitive, gimmicky, and boring.
Of course I don’t expect them to majorly overhaul a class, especially based on one person’s opinion. It’s just upsetting that such a supposedly fast-paced class is in reality extremely shallow and redundant. The class is effective, there’s no doubting that. But it’s not fun. They need to work on making it fun. Adding cooldowns and increasing the damage of certain abilities would be a huge step in the right direction.