Let’s get this out of the way: I don’t main thief. I’ve never been able to master the finese of perfectly managing my initiative but knowing that I can’t; I admire those who can rock this class even more than any other. As of late, there’s been a fairly significant drop in people on thief, and those who are playing it aren’t contributing as much to their team as they have in the past. “Why is this?” I found myself asking. I, for the most part (there are always exceptions), beat thieves to a pulp in pvp, duels which is a new thing since the change from traits to specialisations. So let’s take a look at some of the reasons I found why thieves got, arguably nerfed.
Thieves didn’t get any traits made baseline during the change. Many of the classes, most notably mesmer, had traits made baseline, giving them an all round buff to the class. Steal was increased in range by 300 and the recharge was reduced but that was it. The change to deadly arts has essentially made it required to take for any thief build. I think mug needs to be made baseline since it increases survive and damage, so there is literally no reason not to have it. Before it required 2 trait points which was fairly minor and many classes had a trait or two that needed one or two trait points but needing the entire line for it so your build options are dropped drastically. Trickery’s minor traits, grandmaster one not with standing, could also be made baseline on the argument that it’s hard to not take for the bonus initiative.
There is no way to remove conditions outside of shadow arts and even then its just damaging ones. First of all, most DPS classes have a way to deal with weakness where thieves don’t. Thieves really need some way to get rid of weakness since its a hard counter and it has been made easy to apply with cleave skills. Secondly, there’s no way to rapidly remove condis. The remove in stealth trait has been reduced to 1condi per 3s and that’s going to do nothing next to nothing for survive. The only skill that really removes condis for thief is shadow step but that won’t help much against, say, a necro or a burn guard. It really weakens thieves to not have a solution for condis, especially when a lot of abilities now don’t require a target to apply them.
There’s little potential for on point fighting. Thieves have always been bad at this but with acrobatics being turned into what is essentially a worse daredevil, there isn’t exactly an option. Sword dagger was annoying but it was on par with d/p or considered worse and its the one that got the nerf. Now there is daredevil which can fight on point but in no where near the same level, as say, a revenant. Also daredevil plays like an offbrand revenant. It has little stealth, about the same to worse dodge potential, equal mobility, and less damage with out any of the survive. You could say rev needs a nerf, which it does, but even if that happens daredevil still won’t get used as much since it lacks survivability.
Lastly, and most notably, is the introduction of reveal. Being able to reveal a thief for 6 or more seconds is more than enough to kill a thief and between engineers and revs, there is a lot of reveal to go around. There was nothing added to the thief to compensate for this, and that hurts them a lot more than anything. It would be like adding a skill that prevented blocking party wide. Better yet imagine if there was a skill that prevented a necro from using death shroud or, don’t, because it exists and its called moa morph (or signet of humility). Now imagine if it could be used on a 40s cool down. That’s basically what thieves have to deal with. Now, I am going to say, I like the addition of reveal but something should have been done to thieves to make up for it, since I can on my herald use glints gaze 2 more times than a theif can use sr.
