Guild Wars 2

Indeed this update might be the thing that gets me to buy HoT and start playing again after about 1.5 years away. I’ve been watching thief forums and seeing bad news get worse each time balance changes hit. This is the first report that differs from that trend. Even so, I can’t imagine any thief buffs will last very long. Any time anet buffed thief they backpedaled over the next few patches and reversed everything to trash-grade again.

Really wanting thief to be worthy in pvp again. PvE lost all appeal in the first year…

It’s possible all the balance fixes and patches meant for this game are accidentally being put into other NCsoft titles instead, like wildstar…

…because nothing good seems to be happening to certain classes (thief) in GW2 for like two years now…

Oh right, and they’ll reduce black powder duration to 1 second.

They will remove all evade buffs and vigor, and remove all initiative regen buffs.

Then they will reduce shortbow range to 600 for all attacks, make sb 3 a 1/4 second dodge instead of 1/2 second, reduce sb2 damage by 25%, sword damage by 15% and dagger damage by 35%, make backstab reveal for 6 seconds, make LS remove boons instead of stealing them and charge 1 more initiative, make infiltrator 1/2 second cast time in and out each and not remove a condition on return.

They will increase the CD on shadowstep to 60 seconds, increase the base damage you take when stealthed by 35%, and reduce the condition removal of stealth to 1 every 5 seconds. Then they will remove shadow rejuvenation entirely and update Resilience of Shadows to decrease the damage you take while stealthed to the normal base damage (as if unstealthed).

Then they will increase our base defense by 5, increase pistol damage by 5%, and call the patch a “significant thief buff.”

Then a bunch of warriors will come on the thief forums and say “nerf thief it too OP.”

Buff thief. That’s my suggestion. Give us back the damage they stole from us so we have something besides a foam bat to beat people with without going 100% glass. That has always been my #1 belief in what would FIX thief.

The OP doesn’t acknowledge that there are plenty of professions and builds that he will NEVER do enough damage to actually kill, like any decent necro, warrior, engineer or bunk ranger.

Nowadays with the new runes and traits for condispam, and thanks to the massive damage nerf…

There are only two usable types of thieves that serve a definite purpose anymore.

1. Full zerk all out dps BS/etc. burst builds.
2. Full condi all out spambuilds. These are inferior to dps builds because there are plenty of professions out there that either EAT condis or simply won’t take enough damage from the rather limited thief condi abilities to die.

The condi thieves are best at killing those weak to condi, and the dps builds are best for killing those weak to dps. However, in both cases they CANNOT reliably function in 1v1. They MUST be ganking.

A “balanced” thief does not have the tools to KILL (through lack of total damage) anybody who plays well in 1v1. This is simple fact. Our damage gets nerfed over and over, and without a full dps build we cannot kill anyone even slightly tanky or anyone who actually knows how to play. Thief will lose 9/10 of the time.

Thief requires a GREAT internet connection or very low latency to perform even fairly well. It has no room for error.

A balanced thief, as I said, basically has NO place in this game at all. At least an extreme dps thief has the ability to gank fast.

In PvP, a dps thief can gank and then run to another point quickly. A balanced thief will fight, fight, fight, and frequently stalemate ANY 1. warrior, 2. necro, 3. engi, 4. guardian, 5. ele, 6. ranger who chooses to bunker down. A balanced thief can NEVER take a point from a bunker, ever. A balanced thief frequently cannot kill ANY kind of decent engineer or warrior or necro.

Only a dps thief (and sometimes condi thief) actually has the CAPABILITY of killing any of these. It can die to them too, but at least it CAN kill them. This is a key difference between balanced thieves and pure dps thieves. A dps thief CAN kill just about anything, whereas a balanced thief CANNOT kill hardly anything played well.

You can’t have a 45 second cd heal on an ultra-low-HP glassy profession. It just doesn’t make sense.

I am absolutely serious.

At what point has any skill/ability on thief forums EVER been praised without henceforth being nerfed?

Never. Although not many patches have come along where thieves actually had anything to be happy about anyway…

LS is a great example: People said Yay we get to steal boons and total cost 4 init. What do the next patches do? Increase cast cost, reduce boon steal. They made it almost as bad as before they changed anything at all. If you had any sense you would’ve kept your happiness to yourselves.

If you tell them you like it, it will get nerfed. If you want to keep good changes, don’t tell them you like it – just keep complaining as usual!

I’m dead serious.

What are you guys thinking, saying things are good??? Clearly you have forgotten your sense.

I have said it before…

I don’t want thief to have more HP or defense.

I want thief to have more dodges, escapes, etc., because that is what a thief SHOULD be about.

The design should be made to deliver high damage bursts and then escape.

Thief is MEANT to be this way. Glassy, high risk if you get caught, satisfying with the high numbers and quick kills IF you earn it by being good enough to use it properly.

The original design is built around that concept. However, every time a stunbreak gets removed or nerfed or an evade buff gets reduced (vigor etc.), it’s another step away from that philosophy. And every time our damage gets nerfed, it’s also a step away.

I have looked at traitlines several times and realized that…in most trait lines, there are several GOOD skills…but you can’t have them all. This having trouble choosing between GOOD traits is where the balancing act becomes a personal preference and sacrifice thing. This is also, IMO, important to choosing your profession’s functionality…

I compare trait lines to professions. Each profession is different, but some are better than others right now or have more versatility. Several professions are only good because of one or two skills that ALL of the best players of those professions must have. The imbalance of professions and skills is part of the problem – a few skills (warrior healing signet) are REALLY good…and the alternatives are not as good by a long shot. Warrior is considered OP in current meta by many people for good reason, although a lot of it is based on just a few skills that EVERYBODY runs (pigeonhole effect).

I propose this: Follow the concept of traits, how there are MANY good options that have tradeoffs and sacrifices that come down to personal taste…and make each profession have GREAT options that trade off somewhere. In fact, make EVERY profession OP so they all CAN be OP…vs each other, the effect would be to balance them out. They just have to be played properly to be OP.

Make it like, “gosh this skill is great and that one is great too, I don’t know which one to choose…well this one might benefit this playstyle more, while the other etc. etc..”

Instead of making so many subpar skills, make most/all of them GREAT skills and make them tough to decide between instead of being common sense to avoid (e.g. most thief venoms and traps, etc.).

So…what this is telling is…you’re going to nerf thief again in every conceivable way you can get away with to make the class useless, EXCEPT you’re going to increase base initiative recovery rate.

1. Init recovery increase…Okay, thanks.

2. Removing infiltrator’s return’s stunbreak = forcing a low HP, glassy profession to stay within range of a stunspammer or any number of other melee enemies that can and will crush the thief EXTREMELY easily if the thief lacks some way to escape from melee range quickly each time (or evade)…and it’s not like we can swap weapons faster than every 10 seconds, assuming black powder or head shot would even be enough to save us (which won’t matter if we’re STUNNED anyway). Nobody in their right minds would ever use sword main again on thief because it would have NO useful escape.

3. Infusion of shadow…another thief nerf coming down the road.

4. Flanking strikes…and another thief nerf.

5. Vigor and bountiful theft…so you’re going to nerf thief vigor access so they can’t really dodge quite as often. Why would anyone want to reduce the evasive abilities of a profession that is an damage/evade/escape/glass by design, unless they want to make the profession more useless? Same as infiltrator’s return: We have limited access to useful stunbreaks while several classes have access to many stuns on much shorter cooldowns than all of our stunbreaks except infiltrator’s return.

The summary: You’re going to rob thief of every functional dodging and stunbreaking boon they have access to and turn them into worthless squishy warriors without the meaningful escape abilities that allow them to survive.

Nobody will play sword main if they can’t escape with it. Pigeonholed.

Everyone will find good builds to counter dagger main. Pigeonholed.

Fewer people will use vigor builds or bother with the vigor trait because halving the duration makes it far less useful. Pigeonholed.

GJ.

No, do not give thief more defense. I do not believe thief was ever meant to be warrior-mini. That would be putting it in the position of warrior-mini.

Do not give thief more HP (or not much anyway). Same reason.

Give us what the class is SUPPOSED to have, since it is built around it: Fast burst damage.

Thief ends up having very poor sustained damage because it cannot stay in the fight. It can’t handle melee range vs any other class (played well). It simply doesn’t have enough damage output to compensate for its ubersquishiness.

For that matter, warrior has better sustained mobility than thief. Warrior can and does outrun thief over distances. Thief can cover 3k+ range in a second, but then it has to wait for all the CDs to reset…so thief can “burst” distance, but it can’t sustain that.

Guardian doesn’t really have mediocre damage, and it can win fights solo just fine. You can basically construct a guardian build to counter ANY class effectively. They can also purge conditions very well if built for that.

Ele does NOT always have mediocre single-target damage. It has capacity for extremely high, HIGH damage. However it is very squishy without protection builds.

Warrior presently has no weaknesses, I agree.

Since the beginning of thief nerfs…

Thief needs more damage.

I’m guessing…dagger damage will be reduced, or LS will lose about 50% of its damage….or maybe sb will now do the same damage per hit as pistol…or maybe all thief stealth skills will be reduced by 1 second…or maybe they’ll just cut thief base damage by 20%?….since thief is obviously OP in pvp, what with none of the top players being thief it’s only because the other classes are trying SOO much harder than thief players…

And pre-Oct 15 Bas venom too…Now they are both “fixed.”

That’s pre-Oct15 LS btw…

Nooo but you see, they “fixed” it. Get it? It was a fix! They made it better! Can’t you see that? They always make thief better, more viable for tpvp, and so on, with each nerf to the already low-end profession.

You seriously just don’t understand. It’s working BETTER now! If you can’t see that, then you just don’t understand Anet-ese…

Thief roll = good snack for warriors, necros and guardians. MMmmm.

If you try that with a guard, a warrior, a necro, a ranger or most engineers…you’ll never pull it off. The first three will either block or simply have too much HP and/or defense to ever give those numbers…so this build is automatically NOT viable vs them at all because as soon as things start not working out for the thief, they’re dead.

No, actually…none of those weapon sets beats either necro or warrior when set to their OP builds.

Here’s why:

Warrior doesn’t lose any hp to any ranged thief builds, period. They can stand still and never have to use heal and never go down, ever. Cancel ranged.

Necro is all AOE and has no problem hitting with ranged AOE feardhuumspam and throwing the entire book of condis on you. Thief has NO way to remove all conditions except from lyssa runes. The most that can be removed is 3 conditions with a 50 second CD or heal if you get hide in shadows, 30 sec CD and you must not be disabled (fear etc.) to be able to cast it. During the entire time you are taking burning damage from dhuum. Melt, melt, melt, dead. You can’t kill these necros with thief even if you manage to dodge and evade out of half the condis. They hit hard with condi spam and have tons of HP. Impossible to beat with thief.

Warrior gets in melee range of you and perma stuns you. You escape, heal, rinse, repeat. Each time you have to back off and evade to avoid damage he is still healing and easily recovers full HP before you can return to a good situation for fighting. If you use anything to poison/etc. him, he can pop zerk stance or any number of other things to make the condis fall off. So you can’t kill with condis or power. Warrior is unkillable by thief. Ask anyone who rolls healtankwars, they just laugh anytime a thief challenges them because it’s one of the easiest wins for them.

P/P thief vs warrior….warrior stands there, laughs while P/P thief pew pews them without actually doing any damage. Warrior health bar stays at max whole time.

Good enough counter?

Zerging with thief IMO is not the issue…it’s 1v1 roaming vs healtankstun Warriors that absorb 90% of your damage from melee range and stun you the rest of the time, and feardhuumcondispam Necros that melt you in 3-5 seconds with condition spams you can’t remove fast enough.

Feardhuumcondispam Necros, Healtankstuncondiimmune Warriors. The rest…I simply don’t see enough of any other class that is played well enough to not beat at least fairly often.

Anyone who says we have a counter/tool necessary to beat these two classes is simply WRONG.

Julie Yann.5379:

That’s over a month for 1 weapon, I have 5 weapons for 3 builds I use in WvW only on my main. I have 3 alts with 2 builds each, 5 more weapons. It would take a year to get BiS weapons only playing the part of the game that I enjoy. That’s just the weapons, add in the armor, 9 sets, and you have an endless gear grind. It also kills the fun out of experimenting with new builds cause who wants to go through the trouble of inventing a new build that won’t have BiS for months?

This…I agree with, especially the last part. Ever since ascended weapons came along, I have had very little interest in WvW because, in order to get the best weapons and try to even the odds, it takes a lot of grinding and a ton of waiting for time-limited refreshes of crafting materials and dragonite. But, even more than this, it really DOES kill the desire to try to experiment with different builds…the two/four weapons you got with zerk in mind, well you would have to go through the same amount of time and drudgery to get ascended versions if you decided to try a condition build or pvt or something else…OR if you wanted to play fair with an alt and get the alt’s weapons up to par, same problem: Takes forever. Experimenting with builds is severely hampered when you have time-gated equipment.

So I rarely play wvw anymore. I only got one ascended weapon, a few ascended rings and ammys…but the weapons are just no fun to bother with, they take way too long to acquire and kill my desire to play wvw because of the fairness factor and amount of time it would take to try a new build.

Should this make me want to get legendaries? Yuck, what an incredible amount of grinding I would have to do for those…yes I could pick the stats at will, but it would take as long to get all the stuff for one legendary as it takes to make like 10+ ascended weapons…

I don’t like grinding. It’s boring. I like quick rewards because I’m a human being with limited time in this world to 1. play videogames, and 2. be alive. We don’t have infinite time – that is the missing concept in these grinding challenges. Not everyone is willing or able to devote that much time just to even the playing field…

…..and so I have been playing PvP a lot more lately. And SimCity. Because GW2 isn’t as fun since the ascended weapons came out, and since they nerf my favorite profession every time (thief).

I have sympathy for ele but they have some very nice damage to make up for their other deficiencies….and good AOE-based attacks and various ways to negate damage besides dodging.

But I don’t want to play with crappy teammates who never win forever because they don’t know how to play or fight or cap points. I want 1v1 skill to MEAN something. I want to be able to roam and actually WIN fights in 1v1 duels vs those tank bunkers. As it stands, they will always eventually kill me if I stick around long enough, simply because they can outheal all the damage I do with full zerk gear.

There should be NO build in the entire gw2 system that negates all ranged damage in 1v1 dueling. How many actually do this? Ranger and warrior can, but warrior does it better.

There should be NO build in the gw2 system that a person can stand still in 1v1 dueling and only heal occasionally, and never die. Warrior, Ranger, Guardian can do this.

There should be NO build in the entire gw2 system that is completely unbeatable by all builds of some other class. All builds should have tradeoffs. HealtankstuncondiimmuneWarrior is completely unbeatable by any thief build, and feardhuumfirecondispamNecro is also unbeatable by any thief build. Warrior also never loses to elementalist and likely would never lose to Mesmer or Necro.

What is ANET going to do about underpowered thieves and overpowered bunkers like Warriors and overpowered Necro condi builds? Why not nerf them since you always nerf Thief? Last nerf made sword the most worthless mainhand weapon next to pistol for wvw/pvp.

You might as well remove thief altogether and decide that ranger and warrior take up two sides of thief to the point that thief is redundant (which it is becoming due to homogenizing the class) and inferior (which it is).

It has to be able to beat fearburningspam necros and healtankstuncondimmuneRunsAwaywhenLosinguntilHealingsignetfullyrecharges warriors.

Show me.

What I don’t understand is why they ever gave us LS in the FIRST PLACE if they were just going to make it worthless…

Thief…can’t kill most bunkers at all. Our bunker busting skill LS got nerfed into worthlessness. Yay anet, you know how to destroy a class like a bunch of pros.

What I want…is for thief to have effective counters for every possible build, just like all other professions have counters for everything thief can do.

Warrior tankhealstunimmunetocondioutrunseverything is basically the perfect never-beat-me thing right now and no thief build can take it down. Necro feardhuumspamfire noskill condiburst is basically a kill-all-thieves build that takes down every single thief build within 5 seconds (unless they miss a few casts, in which case it takes 10-15 seconds).

We have NO counters to those. We can’t beat them. The few tools we had to try to use against them have been taken away (damage, meaningful boon stealing).

Thief doesn’t roam well because they can’t kill any good players of other classes anymore.

Thieves are great…if you don’t want to kill anything, ever. They don’t do any DAMAGE without zerks. Anything without zerk = can’t kill anyone. All of the viable thief builds are zerk. None of the viable thief builds can beat guardians or warriors or good mesmers or fearspam necros.

Currently thief just can’t beat some builds. Thief is not a good roaming class. Warrior is the OP current 1v1 champion. Mesmer might be second but much slower to roam. Guardian is at LEAST third best roaming class…thief is somewhere around last.

Nothing the new patch did affected pve and thief does OK as a pve class anyway, though not as fast at killing as warrior and not quite as good at looting as guardian.

However, thief is getting weaker and weaker for pvp/wvw. Even before Oct 15, the possible GOOD builds for pvp were mostly limited to s/d with sb…and maybe a niche d/p every so often. But none of thief’s weapon sets beats every class, and now the s/d and s/p have been nerfed to the point of being ineffective vs the classes they worked best against (guardian, ele)…so all we really have left are stealth-based builds or simply running away. In PvP, having to run away is a total waste of time. In WvW, it’s just depressing not to be able to beat someone no matter how hard you try.

PvP: S/D, now nerfed again, so you can’t kill good eles or guards at all (because you can’t debuff them fast enough). Warriors have been very tough/nearly impossible to beat since they got such OP healing and damage reduction that negates ALL ranged damage (you can hit them forever and never notch them down at all) and most of melee damage. Now they get to keep their boons too, so they are even more OP vs thief. Ranger got a hackjob skill against thief now. Necro’s been annoying ever since they learned how to spam fear and dhuumfire and so on to push massive amounts of condi damage to down thief in seconds. Mesmer has always been the anti-thief with phantasms. Engineer…well not sure, but they bunker very well.

WvW: Same problem, except you can run away without really costing anything.

d/p is only effective if you can actually blind the enemy, they stay within the blind field, and they don’t attack fast enough to be not blinded for some of the strikes.

What’s the solution? We need more damage.

I’ll give you another reason why it won’t work: any melee-range evade build thief has is not very effective vs. many/most professions and builds BECAUSE telegraphing is nearly non-existent for many melee skills and thief can’t handle the damage it receives between evades. In order for evade to work as thief, you HAVE to either be fighting fairly bad players, a few specific builds/professions, and/or have sb to do most of your fighting with.

And there are many builds thief melee-range evade builds just can’t beat.

But right now there are many things thief can’t beat at all, even if the thief has superior skill to the opponent. THANKS ANET!

Basically…after this patch, thief is no longer viable at all in pvp and is at best an average support profession for ranged attack (sb aoe) in wvw.\

I guess that’s what they wanted. I stopped playing my thief now because of this patch. If I play anything at all on gw2 anymore it’s probably ele/mes/war/guard. But not thief, because it’s just pointless now to continue playing a profession that has been nerfed 10 feet deep to such inferiority.

The irony is…this patch will probably push more people to play dagger main again since sword has been effectively nerfed so much…however, all those boon builds will basically walk all over thief every time now. As if that wasn’t already happening with warrior and various other tank builds.

Please, please don’t nerf larcenous strike. It will make thief sword completely non-viable for any wvw/pvp fights as anything besides comic relief for other professions. That will pigeonhole all thieves into dagger main, which is already easily countered by many professions.

And…btw…you CAN hit what you can’t see. It happens all the time. Thieves are just as fragile while invisible as when visible.

It’s one of the newer OP warrior builds. Not many classes can beat it, and thief has the least chance because of inability to keep pressure on while also surviving and doing enough damage to offset the massive regen.

After using two less offensive-based builds for a long time that included 30 in SA, I have gone to a much more offensive build…perhaps I die more, but it is more fun and satisfying to play when I can occasionally land 10k HS/BS, etc…

There are so many tanky enemies nowadays that think they are invincible, and mesmers have such high HP (far more than they deserve), so one of the best ways to down them is actually to hit them so hard and fast that they don’t have a chance to do all their kitten crap they love to do.

BTW…warrior’s kill shot is OP (14k damage from 1200 range). Thx.

This is why:

1. You are underleveled.
2. Your equipment is bad (green/blue/etc.)
3. He maxed just about every skill and sacrificed all utility to get uberdamage.

I wish I had known about this BEFORE buying a second RROD…

There should be a sticky about this.

I wouldn’t want to change stats of items…people will immediately start mathing that out, find the optimal damage ratio, and then the majority will use the same formula while a few dissidents will try different blends. However, the way that’s described it only means you will be able to switch legendaries from Soldier to Zerk to Carrion etc…

I’ve played GW2 practically since it was released, but I’ve gotten bored with it. Chars are basically maxed except more ascendents. I have only one char that isn’t maxed, and I’ve gotten bored trying to level it – just not that fun to go through that process anymore. I’ve gotten/found every recipe that has mattered to me for crafting, and I’ve mastered every craft split across my chars.

WvW just isn’t exciting, it’s always the same things to take by the same means. WvW money rewards aren’t big enough for me to play it anymore, because there are other things that get money faster. Karma still doesn’t have a lot of value, only useful for limited purchases like rare farming to try to get exotics from forge…and it is overshadowed by other sources of much faster money like CoF runs, or even farming lv80 areas.

PvE…well each new area in Living World up is nice, but the excitement is short-lived and not all of them appeal to me anyway.

PvP was fun for a while, but there are basically no rewards that have value anywhere else except in PvP.

The economy is showing that items are getting more and more expensive. I really think the game needs a kind of “reset” to make everything start over.
I just don’t feel like finishing the whole map, because…why?

I should note I’m not the kind of player who wants to do a lot of grinding to get cosmetic upgrades. If I grind at all, it’s because I want something very specific like a new character slot. But I’m pretty tired of grinding because it’s always the same areas and doing the same things.

I would like to see more variety of items out there with different special features that are fun, useful, etc. I would like to see new Lv80 areas for farming/grinding PvE. I would like there to be some new special fun/useful traits added to certain armors/weapons/accessories that will be useful in WvW/etc. I’d like things more functional than just cosmetic.

And I miss the Super Adventure Box.

Strongest combos I have seen are….engi/ele, mes/guard, mes/ranger, mes/ele, mes/engi, ranger/ele, necro/necro….the necro/necro duo was basically unstoppable. Thief was never in the “strongest” groups.

the only way you will see nice numbers from thief anymore is if you get massive might bursts e.g. through signets of power. Otherwise…other classes do more burst damage.

Teamkiller.4315:

novah and holla kill you easily because they’re better than you? IIRC Holla is the one who killed you without a chestpiece. And he also kills other DD eles without a chestpiece so…yeah maybe you’re just not as good as you may think.

Just because I’m not the best player in the world doesn’t also make me the worst, and I should at least have a fighting chance vs many of the mesmers, d/d eles, engineers and bunk rangers…which, ironically, are the ones who can consistently beat me even though others might not. And I wouldn’t even say that all engineers beat me, because for some reason they do not.

They aren’t the only players of those professions who can beat me, and I know how little damage I can do to most of them even with crits…and that’s the problem I will continue to have, and other thieves too, no matter what, as long as thief damage is not big enough to really do the job anymore.

Black Teagan.9215:

No, I wont nerf bunks, I would increase the base damage for the single target weapons (or all thiefweapons), because they are to low and every other class do more dmg on 3 targets and because the thief is or should be THE class to break bunkerbuilds.

I have suggested this before, but unfortunately I doubt it will happen.