Guild Wars 2

Petoox.6570:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAoaVn0MBlPhFOBmOBkmiFYCTLBEAyAzdwTYL0LNcGaDA-TpBEABmXGIijAgBnAAm2fggHAAAHCAA This is what most high level thieves use.

Thanks, I specd that with the mauraders ammulet and different utilis. Won 12 out of 15 games in ranked so far. Pretty stoked with this new daredevil trait line, it’s strong to say the least.

Haven’t played for 6 – 8 months.

Play style is d/p – sb

Thanks

Immune is how you spell it btw. It sounds like you werent landing your entangle. Maybe try to press 1 more often, when you are closer to the target to land your attacks.

It will say immune if you are missing attacks from a distance, where as up close it says evade.

IP is much better then No quarter and synergizes well with the skill tree. Id only take no quarter if you were really low on damage.

Uncatchable is an evade – not a trick.

If you make a skill like uncatchable a trick, you may as well make every dodge roll a thief does a trick.

Come on my friend, let us use common sense.

imo D/D is much more powerful now. This seems to be a skill issue on your behalf, rather then the actual patch.

Zero Day.2594:

Still in game.
Still OP.

Great to hear! my fellow thief.

What is the weather looking like, after patch?

MrForz.1953:

Peow peow.2189:

the past is the past my fellow thief. I have changed my ways. However, this up & coming patch strikes fear into my soul.

Even those Dynasty Warriors folks don’t switch sides this brutally. :P

I happen to know a few dynasty warrior folks, and they dont see it as switching sides, but rather going and flowing with the tides.

godz raiden.2631:

I don’t know. We’ll only know for sure where our class stands once we spend some time creating new builds and testing out the traits. I don’t think it does any of us any favors by assuming the worst already. Besides, none of the changes (nerfs) to our class has stopped it from being my favorite class so far, so I’m going to keep a level head and do my best to adapt to the changes.

Taking an optimistic approach, i like it. Just like you, my favourite class is the thief – hands down. However, the nerves that flow through me before each game update is enough to give an anxiety attack.

Recently I have been experimenting with P/P. To find out in this patch, that pistols are basically no longer viable. It breaks me in two.

We already have very few builds that are worthy of speccing. What will you be playing after the patch?

Cynz.9437:

wat? https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Thief-is-overpowered/first

the past is the past my fellow thief. I have changed my ways. However, this up & coming patch strikes fear into my soul.

Having being a thief player since beta, I am truly horrified at some of the up & coming patch changes.

This class has been nerfed relentlessly and recklessley. From the many reveal tactics being brought into the game and now to our blink skills needing vision to make contact with the enemy. As well as ricochet being removed.

After seeing the preview of the new changes and updates to the trait lines, and P/P finally killed off. I find myself in a tough situation, and I am sure other thief players will agree with me.

Is the thief class really dead? , will we be as useful as we once were.

How many of you will still be playing thief after this update?

I’ll 1v1 you Tarzan. No thief spec. Just d/p with utilities 0/0/0/0/0 and I’ll show u how cheap this class is

How Anet Can Buff The Condi Thief P.1

The condition thief is a difficult spec that requires patience, well-timed plays and quick decision making by the player.

As of now, condition clearing is very easy to accomplish. Most classes run some kind of condition transfer utlity, that allows them to be immune to conditions at certain health, or to change condi into boons giving them extra power.

Because of the increase of these utlities in recent patches, specs that focus mainly on conditions have become harder to play and are rarely run by newer players or in SpVp arenas.

In order to improve the thief condi spec, we have to consider some of their current skills and buffs that can be applied.

Firstly – CnD.
Cloak and dagger is a high initiative cost skills, with a small radius of impact. It’s easy to use up to 10 initiative trying to CnD after poor positioning, which is more then 75% of a full intiiative bar.

What makes CnD so difficult for the condition spec, is that this spec main hands pistol. This requires you to move into close range, which totally goes against the point of the spec. Then to use your skill and back out.

CnD should work differently when using a pistol as a main hand weapon. Personally, I think changing it to HnD would be a better move. Hook and dagger. The thief would then throw a long distance hook at the enemy, the hook can only be dodged using a dodge roll, nothing else. This would then result in the same benifits of landing a CnD.

Second. Torment strike (The third skill).

Once used, the thief shadow steps away and causes torment on enemy.

In order to make this skill more applicable, it should shadow step the thief half of the current range, however it should cause a 75% movement speed reduction on the enemy for 6 seconds, as well as causing double the ammount of torment currently.

With current condi clears, torment is easy to clear and this skill is not strong enough.

Third. increase the range of steal.

Right now, it’s difficult for the thief to land steal, especially when it goes on 20s cooldown for no apprent reason. By increase the steal range to double of what it is now and making it undodgable.

it would make this utility more useful, and give the condi thief more survivability when paired with mug.

Thoughts?

Gcostanza.2086:

Thief is not OP. Condi thief is very OP. They are thieves with training wheels.

Condi thief is not OP, in my opinion it’s the most balanced spec of the thief class.

Firstly the damage is not so high that you can’t heal it back. They have alot of drawbacks in terms of survivability and require good positioning to land your 5th and 3rd skill.

I hold Condi thieves in high respect. Infact the spec deserves a few much needed buffs.

DarkSyze.8627:

Odyssey.2613:

It boggles my mind some of you actually listen to Darksyze. Apart from his incoherent jibberish and affinity for quoting. He talks with authority on the mechanics of Thief profession, yet he doesn’t own a thief. Let me repeat that for some of you that seem to have 5 stacks of confusion.

HE
DOES
NOT
HAVE
A
THIEF

Ignore the tool.

I never tell anyone to ignore anyone including you: do you see who is the one want to cause a problem? I do my best to respect other players decision: i hope you do same next time

Last, I want to share something with you:

" Experience is not what you have, it is what happens to you " I do not have thief profession but i know what happens to me by thief profession.

-The reason why i quote is because: I honor other knowledge and experience who are more than mine. In return: will help improve my knowledge and experience better- That is why i do research and investigate so i can use other experience and knowledge to help me make case.

That is all

(by the way: i am working with my thief profession )

100% agree with you man. The only people defending the class, are the ones that play thief.

Those that aren’t attached to this overpowered class and aren’t abusing it’s imbalance, always ask for it to be nerfed.

I hope that ANET executes come better balance, or atleast applies some of the ideas in this thread. By the next patch.

@Klowdge, @ Davee

First of all, there is more then one build that gaurantees win on thief.

As an experiment myself and 4 friends all qued up in spvp kitten d/d thiefs. We roamed the map in groups of 2 with 1 guy holding home and literally 1sec comboed the enemiy team. Players were disconnecting because what we were doing was unstoppable, and simply overpowered.

Sure at the moment you dont see thief picked up in every battle, but give it a month and people will start noticing how strongly buffed the class has become in comparison to others, over the last few patches.

The first thing that must be done if we wish to have a good game, is to cut all weapon evades from the thief class, as they currently have enough evades through dodge rolls and utilities, as well as vigor.

The second step to making a more balanced thief, is to give each class that isn’t a thief a new ability. This ability will counter stealth for a few seconds. Lets say the thief is DP and spamming powder/heart seeker or DD with CnD. Well stealth lasts up to 5 – 10 sec, therefore we make a skill that reveals invisible units for 4 seconds on a 20 second cooldown. This skill will be called eye seeker and a hard counter to perm stealth builds. Every class but thief will have this as an optional utility.

The last step to rid the game of this Overpowerd character and to balance the class, would be to scale attack speed according to enemy armour. The thief currently puts out to much damage to fast, with a quick attack speed and 100% crits with hidden killer. If an enemy has high armour, the thief will then be dealt a frost effect after hitting from stealth, this effect would reduce attack speed per strike. The effect will stack up to 4 times, reducing attack speed by 25% each stack.

With these changes made, we have a more balanced meta with thiefs becoming a more challenging class to play, instead of the insta-win they are at the moment.

Sagat.3285:

Haven’t seen one of those in a while, where are your all mighty nerf suggestions O.o?

stay tuned

First of all you cannot shut down this class anymore. They have too many evades and escapes. Why should a class be given weapon evades, utility evades and dodge rolls with vigor. When can your enemy even touch you?

Secondly, they have to much regen. If a thief uses vamprism runes or shadows regeneration skill set, they either run away and heal or continue to heal every few seconds. Some thieves have low life cause they know they will regen it all every few seconds and cant be killed no matter what. I hardly see thiefs get killed inpvp anymore.

Thirdly, the class has too much swiftness uptime and can daze every few seconds with pistol. It’s only class that can achieve such mobility and fly around the map dazing people.

Anet needs to nerf this class before its to late.

Returning as of today to get back into some conquest pvp

Any big nerfs that happened in the last 6 months? – I main thief and Ele.

I hear that you can’t play hotjoin during solo q – is this true?

King Noob IV.3560:

I come from a history of crappy mmos so the stuff I ask may be completely out of the question for a game like this.

For one, is there prejudice against this class? Like do people not want you in their party for certain things? and are they bad in those big pvp battles?

Also, how fun is this class? Does it sort of feel like Zed or Talon from league where you go in, kill someone, and go out. Or is it some high squishy dps class that has the name “thief” but isn’t actually ninja-like, like in a lot of other mmorpgs.

edit: oh wtf I forgot to finish my title lol…

Its 100% like you go in and go out. In this game we call this reseting and you dont necesarily go out of the fight, but kite and keep sustained damage until your skills reset their cd.

This class is the most fun but its much harder to play well then other classes.

Example: I learned how to play a warrior well in 50 pvp games, a d/d ele well in about 100, but to get decent at thief its around 200 – 300 pvp rounds.

D/D eles are easy – immobilize them and use headshot alot.

The only way to get good at this is to actually play d/d ele and learn the rotation of spells they follow. (lightning/fire/earth/water)

in order for them to land their spells their is alot of movement and casting involved… Shortbow auto combined with invis is an immob – use ur imob, steal up and deal heavy dps

they will quickly switch to water to try and recoup life, spam headshot in between autos to cancel casts or heals and eventually even when they do heal the health they gain is not enough for them to reset.

Gaurdians – Yeah i just run

Edit: what guy above said as well – dont get close in fire and steal up during lightning or water

I have 1k solo games in a mixture of hotjoin and spvp… never even touched tpvp lol, yet it’s still my favourite thing in this game and all i do.

2/2/6/0/2

Pistol Pistol with runes of the hoelbreak and sigil of fire – This build easily stacks 25 might and your unload will do devistating ammounts of damage.

Zero Day.2594:

Can you at least write it in kind of like a poetic theme, kind of like burnfall did… his posts were fun.

befor you respond to my thread you should really consider what goes through your mind? Do you think about the people that are going to read your response, or whether or not you are adding value to the lifes of others.

Personally I try to be a value giver rather than a value taker, I try to brighten the day of others as any normal human being would do.

The problem here is, you are focusing on the wrong things in life – infact I think you should take a good hard look at yourself and ask… Am I really the kind of person I want to be?

If the answer is No, understand that we are here for you and that together we will make it. The trick is to start making positive changes each day, eating healthy foods – attending cross fit classes, meditating in quite places, doing yoga with a close aquintance. When you collectively add up these changes, you’ll become closer to your inner core – the real you.

Aggrostemma.1703:

The Game Slayer:

I agree. RtL should have 600 range and always target the nearest enemy… heck lightning always strikes the shortest way available… Also Lightning Flash should be nerfed. You should just produce some bright light blinding people for one second (does not stack).

But please also change the Warrior Charge ability too… The warrior rushes to the nearest wall and tries to find a socket to charge his/her phone. Evade all attacks.

Warriors have much less ability then elementalist – ill even say thieves have either the same or slightly less.

Elementalist have at least 5 movemet skills and blinks – where as warrior has 2 and thief have 4 – (including their utilities)

Right now there is no way to catch an elementalist in wvw they just run water – zoom away – water – ride lightning.

I agree with most ideas in this thread to make RTL 90 seconds cool down when not hittng a player and 75 seconds when it does hit.

Probably shorten fire skill 3 range to 300? and keep its damage the same but take away burning stacks it causes.

Shockwave.1230:

Yes please, if you look since the launch of the game, the only thing thieves have received are buffs.

They never get nerfs, it’s so unfair, and all the buffs keep making the profession easier and easier to play.

It’s pretty lame.

well they have got nerfed – but they have got ALOT more buffs then nerfs.

Look at the history of updates to classes – elementalist, engineer and warrior have recieved much more nerfs then thief.

In fact thief is in top 2 classes that have recieved an ammount of neutral changes/buffs.

SilverWF.4789:

Conditions cure – another strongest option.
All classes have a 9-10 sec limits for autocure and skills with long cooldowns

Thieves cures it every 3 seconds in stealth (and 1st cure immidiately), also, sword’s 2 just didn’t have any limits, spammable and pretty low cost

Celestial gear just sucks.

So other classes cure 1 condition every 9 second

yet thief can do it every 3 second

You see how this is not a balance?

Thievies are always given special treatment by anet

Kocoff.7582:

You have: armor, shouts, and some sexy health regen to survive.

Do you know how we survive? We try not to get hit… that’s it.

Since you cannot hit what you cannot see, it has become the main thing of this class.

All your suggestions must be dismissed immediately. seriously revealed for 6secs? lol

You should be more open minded to things that make thief more skill class.

It takes alot of skill to time your shouts and health regen well as warriorand to dodge because we havent got vigor we only hae limited dodging capability …

Where as a thief who can dodge 9 times in a row? really u gotta be kidding

In my opinionin thief has become a class with very low skill cap to play – try something like engineer or warrior for a challenge

sinject.4607:

so first of all, you seem to be under the assumption that it’s possible for thief to run a 6/6/6/6/6 build or something, because almost every single thing you bring is characteristic of distinctly different builds, not one single build.

1.) this is an absolutely horrid idea that completely destroys stealth for thief as a whole. there are other thief builds out there that all use stealth in some form or another, and gimping stealth to the point of uselessness for the sake of one build you unreasonably think is overpowered is ridiculous.

2.) backstab is one of the hardest burst skills to land thanks to the requirements of being in stealth, within melee range, and behind your enemy. complaining about damage is even more useless because of the grossly exaggerated damage output across ALL professions in WvW. even then, the numbers of “14k-16k” damage you pulled entirely out of thin air; for all practical purposes, backstabs over 12k are pretty much impossible, let alone 14-16k backstabs being even remotely within the realm of reality. you are either lying entirely about how much damage backstab can do or are simply ignorant, either scenario being cause enough for your opinion to lose all validity.

3.) vigor can be destroyed or stolen. ask any mesmer, necro, thief, or anyone willing to use sigil of nullification. nerfing vigor uptime on a build that loses a lot of offensive strength for the sake of sustainability is uncalled for.

etc

your “buffs” are absolutely abysmal, and are nothing more than shallow attempts to justify incredibly heavy-handed nerfs that have no basis in reason at all.

Backstab is actually very easily landed – i never even seen 1 thief miss it.

Also you know as much as me that thieves dodge to much and abuse stealth with perm stealth builds.

You dont need to get 6/6/6/6 to be having the buffs i stated in my post.

THe pistol pistol should be a viabl build so i buffed it to make it an option with the stealth nerf.

Stop hugging stealt so much its not a skill style of playing just passive abuse that I hope is removed to balance this game.

Tao.5096:

Not being a kitten but, I never heard about OP and even more being a Celebrity.
Another thing – thieves are the squishiest with low HP pool class in game.
As from personal experience, I believe that vigor spam + s/d is annoying due to almost perma evasion.
That still doesn’t change the fact that you can kill such thieves.

It appears that OP meanwhile playing warrior, has to find another tactic against thieves, because it seems that plain and 24/7 used tactic that worked against every other class, doesn’t work.

To be honest – I play both warrior and thief – Warrior lately received only one noticeable nerf – Adrenaline decay, meanwhile thieves are nerfed constantly bit by bit.

Thank you for a constructive post

I agree with you in the case that warrio takes much more skill to play than a thief.

I also agree that s/d and vigor needs to be nerfed because it’s just to many dodges and is severely unbalanced.

True that you can kill thieves, but they have recieved to many buffs – a few nerfs should balanced things out as astated in post 1.

Whats your thoughts on my suggested changes?

Nephrite.6954:

It’s idiots like you who don’t put effort in learning how to game better. You really think landing CnD is such an easy thing to pull off? It cost around 6 initiative that’s almost half our initiative spent if we don’t place 3 points in trickery. FYI warriors have the mobility,toughness and the highest amount of CC if you run hammer and you tell me that thieves are OP? Not to mention that backstab is one of our only hard hitting burst skill. You guys have freaking eviscerate and hundred blades( land those two correctly and you can almost kill the thief in an instant). Blocks are also as good as evades. One last thing, did you know that rangers have the skill called sick em which does a 6 second reveal? it wrecks any stealth thief if they run a power build. Peow Peow just stop kittening around because I never go any other classes’s forums and build hate if they have any new OP cheese build. SICK OF PEOPLE LIKE YOU

It takes alot more skill to land eviscerate then any thief spell. You an never miss CnD because you just use it along with steal and it 100% to hit.

You can also use cnd and infilitrator signet to get 100% hit, that is the only high damage skill in the game really that cant miss.

With thief swiftness up time its almost impossible to miss backstab – so really I think this is just your lack of skill showing and not the ability of the class.

Thief has alot more mobility – you can dodge 1200 range with shadow step, all i have is great sword rush and then im out of mobile skills.

This is very much a learn 2 play on your behalf – thief is severely in need of a nerf after all the buffs they ahve been recieving.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

Mobility is part of the classes design.

What should really be looked at is the classes ability to stack might so much, thus allowing celestial & other more defensive stat combo’s to push out so much damage.

Personally I think the solution is to seperate how a few things work in PvP & PvE/WvW

1: In PVP Reduce the number of might stacks applied by the trait “Spell Slinger” to 1, WvW & PvE stay as is.

2: In PvP reduce the duration of the might applied by “elemental attunement” trait to 10 seconds base. PvE & WvW stay as is.

After that they should be a bit more in line.

Totally agree with you man, the might stacks are far to easy to get 25 of.

I’d also like to see fire (3) go less of a distance and see its damage slightly scaled down

Currently elementalist is the most mobile class in the game

In the opinion of a number of people i’ve talked to…

Right the lightning – goes to far
Fire dash (3) – can dodge most projectiles and again is quite a far mover

This means that eles can continue to run without being locked down and go into water to heal as they run

I am all for mobility but this is quite ridiculous.

I’ve come to the ele forums to get ideas on how we can remove the large ammount of mobility while still keeping the class balanced?

oxtred.7658:

Welcome back Peow Peow.

Hi there mate

Constructive replies please

I am a well known guild wars 2 pvper and spvper that mains an asuran warrior. In recent times I have tried my best to fight thieves, however your class has become more and more overpowered over time and currently it’s in a state where even an average thief can take me down.

This never used to happen btw… But with the recent buffs and changes it has become extremely noticeable.

I have come to propse some changes my clan has been mulling over and to get some feedback from the thief forum.

Proposed changes to the class:

1) Increase reveal uptime to 6 seconds.

This will largely reduce the ammount of invis spamming happening. Currently 3 seconds in game ticks is nothing and you can easily dodge and cloak and dagger you opponent as if no time has passed.

By making it 6 seconds, we wont make invisibility unreliable but rather a more tactical skill than a spammable one.

2) Nerf backstab damage by 25%

Currently in world vs world, a thief on food with might stacks can easily crit up to 14- 16k on a target with high toughness. By reducing this by 25% we drop it into the 10- 12k range.

Quite a reasonable nerf that still allows the class to quickly burst down most light armoured enemies.

3) Greatly decrease vigor and swiftness uptime.

Thieves have access to what is easily the highest swiftness up time. You’d also be lucky to find a thief that isn’t running acro + trickery for 100% vigor up time.

By reducing the vigor on heal to 4 seconds and bountiful thefts vigour to 6 seconds.
This would mean you still have 50% vigor up time.

Swiftness would also be reduced to that you only gain swiftness on every dodge roll when you have 30 in acro.

4) Reduce condition cleansing ability

Thieves easily have the highest and fastest condition cleansing speed.
With Condition cleanse happening every time you heal as well as every time you become invisible – its hard for us to stack condis on you.

Change this so that you only cleanse 1 condition on heal and 1 when entering invisibility.

To counter these changes i propose these buffs.

1) Increase the ammount of toughness the stealth arts trait line gives thieves.

2) Increase the damage per shot from pistol pistol third skill – also make this skill slow enemies movement speed.

Thoughts?

Cliffs:

- Increase reveal uptime to 6 seconds.
- Decrease backstab damage by 25%
- Greatly decrease vigor up time and swiftness uptime (50%)
- Reduce condition cleansing ability of class (1 condition for stealth and 1 heal instead of 3)

Buffs

- Increase toughness aquired from stealth arts
- Increase damage from pistol 3 skill and slow movement speed of enemy

a warrior hit me for 14k today – what the hell is this

press 4 (daze) auto attack, press 4 daze auto – steal fear – auto – daze auto daze auto steal auto

They literally get interrupted between each cast. You must open with a decent burst tho – so either open from stealth or black powder heart seaker steal combo.

and instantly use fear after steal

I have been playing thief ever since this game came out. In fact all of my character slots are different variations of thief, this way I can immediately chose what I want to use without re-speccing my build.

What i am becoming frustrated with is the fact that we continue to be nerfed after each patch.

My choices are limited at the moment and I feel forced to play s/d , d/p or p/d… Literally any other build is completely weak against 90% of classes.

At this rate… one more nerf and im pretty much done with guild wars 2.

How do you guys feel about this?

max out runes of bloodlust, runes of divinity and venom ultimate. black power heartseeker + steal – then back stab.

Make sure you are using critical hit from stealth trait.

I always get 8 – 12 k. Minimum on high defence targets is around 6k – 8k.

Also check your foods and might stacks out

yeah i get this problem in wvw as well. Anyone know how to fic this?

hey guys please dont bring other theads into this one.

I have found a good p/d build i am using in spvp it is 0/0/6/2/6 and im killing alot of people. So thanks for the people that helped.

pistol dagger pleasE?

Swagginator.3246:

oh cond build, my mistake, mixed p/d with d/p

Read the first post thanks

i use 2 6 00 6 for dagger pistol. But not for pistol dagger as i feel you need more sustain to let your conditions tick off instead of burst like the dp 26006.

i seen many more thieves then necro and engi mate, not sure what you talking about.

shadowstep up onto ledge and short bow from the top.

Shadow step up to the mansion on the clock tower pvp map.

Hold shift to look backwards and shadow step behind an enemy chasing you – then shadows refuge – then shadow step back and keep running if they turned around.

Hey guys

I just levelled my thief to 80 cause i see how op this class can be when a good guy is playing it.

Anyway im playing pistol daggre in spvp – can someone direct me to a good build for this?

Right now im going 10 mug – 0 – 10 stealth condition clear – 20 acro for vigour and dodges – 30 trickery for stun and caltrops/boon strips.

good spvp build i use is 2/0/2/4/6 its fun as hell

signet of agility or put 10 in SA for the clense. Sacrifices must be made my friend…

Oh and the signet of agility gives you higher crit chance anyway … as well as 2 more dodges- so its a decent pick up

just got off runescape and felt so satisfied with my last 5 hours. Something I never felt on GW2 for the last 1 year loool good to free up 20gb on my hdd