Guild Wars 2

My biggest concern with thief is in WvW. In PvE they’re fine (potentially too weak even), and I don’t really play much sPvP. What I have to say with regards to WvW is in small group, or even 1v1 or 2v2 action.

Thieves can initiate fights well and burst well. That’s fine. What’s not fine is that if I manage to survive their burst, they are so slippery that they can escape every time if they are halfway intelligent.

I understand that slipperiness was a design goal for a thief, but there is a huge difference between strategic and tactical stealth in a fight. Strategic stealth is what we have now, which is long periods where the thief can stealth, reposition, and plot – even completely run away. This is amplified by the culling issues in WvW, but still – it IS an issue. Tactical stealth would be more short duration (1-2 second) stealths, combined with similar duration mobility increasing mechanics to have the thief feel able to be elusive in combat. There would also have to be some mechanic to keep these from being chained to create strategic stealth, though this exists in some form currently through the revealed debuff.

Right now, thieves pay no price for failed burst, as they can stealth or teleport away with ease. Their strategic advantage makes it impossible to kill a thief who knows what he’s doing.

I’m honestly shocked by the profession changes in this patch.

Elementalists had few good builds, and they nerfed them all. No more blasts on Evasive Arcana makes staff useless. No more gaining boons from auras gained through combo fields through Elemental Shielding or Zephyr’s boon makes aura builds much much worse.

Our Fire/Air trait lines are still very very weak. Earth’s only good for Written in Stone. Now Arcana is very weak as well with the change to Evasive Arcana.

Our damage builds do far less than any other class, and are by far the squishiest. Our support builds got hit super hard by this patch, and those builds are FAR less fun now without blast finishers from Evasive Arcana.

I love Elementalist, and honestly think they were close to balanced before this patch. There were issues, like having 30 in Arcana basically being almost mandatory, but those were fixable. Instead, Arenanet decided to nerf our only viable builds.

Even with all the new content…considering taking a break until Elementalist is fixed. More importantly, I’ve lost trust in the Arenanet balancing department.

“Your faith is your weakness, human”

Because of that line, and that overall attitude of the charr.