Guild Wars 2

You can’t give the Thief cooldowns, you can’t replace Initiative with something else, you can’t get rid of Stealth. Period. It would mean a total redesign of the class from the ground up. It would mean going all the way back to nothing and starting over. Anet will not do this. I mean come on, we can’t even get them to fix half the broken traits on Warriors almost 4 months after launch and you want them to completely overhaul a class? Good grief, even Blizzard with their billions of dollars per month revenues have never completely revamped a class like that. Though, apples to oranges here.

Culling needs to get fixed first and foremost. It’s fixed in tPvP / sPvP and nobody is complaining about the Thief there, so that ONE fix (that wasn’t due to the Thief), changed the whole game for the Thief. If anything, the Thief builds should be fixed and MORE Stealth mechanics added. Right now, without a Dagger in your offhand, the heal or a few utilities, we can’t Stealth at all. I believe half the skills for every weapon should put us in Stealth, and once there, each weapon set should have 5 different attacks to choose from when coming out of Stealth, not just 1 attack. Stuns, immoblizes, saps, pick pockets, weapon/armor stealing, shadow steps, spinning knockdowns, explosions, air combos, etc, etc. The Thief could be a zig zagging blur of Stealth and decent damage, where the person can chose to focus all their damage into one or two attacks against one person, or spread it out over several hits against multiple targets. What about attacks that make us hit people’s heads and double jump off them to other targets? A weapon set that’s a long chain with a dagger on the end for huge AoE attacks with low damage, snares and “get over here!” Scorpion style attacks (which would get rid of the semi useless utility Scorpion Wire).

This wouldn’t even need a redesign of the class, just making a new weapon set and adding animations to the attacks, something akin to what Blizzard does with each expansion. But I digress, I doubt Anet will change the Thief much at all, as they already put out their statements saying the Thief is meant to have high burst damage and high mobility, and the fact that they’ve done little to change either of those two core ideas since Beta, I don’t think they’re going to start now.

Well they have to hype it up, there’s so much rage on their forums you could create a new sun with the energy from it all. The fact is WvW has no long term goals and very little variation to it’s purpose. The maps aren’t dynamic, they don’t change, they don’t rotate, it’s all static and the tactics for taking towers or castles is always the same since there’s only so many good places to set up siege to take them. Also as I mentioned before, there’s not that much going on in the WvW maps to encourage PvE players to spend months upon months of time doing it. One ugly armor set that I’ve never seen another person on my entire server using, useless weapons, it’s all very basic and even if you somehow did want to grind them out, most people with the grind mentality already have.

As lame as it sounds, PvP needs PvE to survive. 90% of any PvP population is PvE players playing around in PvP for the easy rewards, unless you really don’t have the rewards which is the problem with this game. Again, look at World of Warcraft’s PvP. You have the “serious” PvP mode, Arena, and the “ho hum gimme some epix” mode, Battlegrounds and of course the “world pvp” zones like Wintergrasp and Tol Barad due to the instances in those zones.

Sooo, perhaps Anet could steal something from there? For example, since they consider WvW PvE anyway, why not have each map have it’s own “World Boss” event that can happen when that maps home server owns, lets say at least 85%~90% of their map? It could pop up in random areas and even take over camps and siege castles and towers on it’s own as it meanders through the map. It would be designed to take a beating and you could even set up siege to help defeat it. The rewards would be drops equivalent to the best PvE dungeon armors and weapons.

And since Eternal Battlegrounds is the only one that’s not a palette swap of the others, why not make that one have a special dungeon that you can only access when your server owns 100% of the map? You could probably add a cooldown on that map to control massive zergs and standstills from big guilds wanting to hog it for themselves. Again, rewards would be on par with the best PvE dungeons have to offer and the instance bosses would be very hard to defeat as well.

Just adding something like this would flood the servers with PvE players looking to take on “easy” bosses for “easy” loot and give the PvP players all the red names they could gank! But since the rewards would now be worth dying for, rather than rage quitting and whining on the forums, PvE players would respawn and run back to get all the shinnies! I’d wait until February for that, more stuff to gank. =D

And this is what I was telling people and warning Anet about two months ago. They may not want to take WvW seriously, but there’s so few games that have 3v3 server type battles like this, they must be completely money hungry to ignore an aspect of the game that almost everybody plays or tries. You can put all the blame on Anet, they had Guild Wars for what, 7 years now? They should know at this point, at least as much if not better than Blizzard, how to balance and cater to PvP players. In tPvP/sPvP there should have been double the amount of maps out of the gate, and at least some sort of randomness to the WvW map layouts instead of 3 of the 4 just being palette swaps.

I can’t even give them credit for being cautious about throwing too much into PvP before knowing whether or not it would be a hit because there’s PvP games out there, some even free to play that are nothing BUT PvP and they rake in the money. Anet has had years of data rolling in showing just how crazy PvP is in games, including the dreadnaught World of Warcraft.

I think Anet is doing the reverse of what they should be doing. They focus so much on tPvP / sPvP and that mode of play is less accessible to the common PvE player than WvW is, especially when you have to get a team together, have voice chat, etc to be able to withstand a good team. Lets assume in WvW, 5% of all the players that join in are the “real” PvPers, the ones that will play it as long as there’s a red name on their screens. So that of course leaves 95% of the players remaining as the PvE players. The ones who cry on these forums when they lose to a Thief, the ones in there to do their dailies or monthly achievements, the ones following a zerg and keyboard turning, the ones doing the jumping puzzles for loot. These players make up the bulk of what WvW is and when you don’t please them, they leave.

There’s just not enough reward in place to please modern players, especially after a good majority of them probably started with World of Warcraft, a game that literally gives you epic items just for logging in a few times a week. WvW rewards should have been on par with the tPvP / sPvP rewards right off the bat with the intent to add 5~10 new armor sets and weapons every 3 months or so after that, to keep the PvE players running after their carrots and to give the PvPers some red names to erase.

I think Anet should understand that “fun” is really only proportional to the “reward” players get from doing the “work”. When the success of PvP depends on the amount of candy you can give to a PvE player, you better keep up with them or they’ll drop you like a bad habit and tell all their friends about it. It sucks, but that’s just how gamers today are. The golden age of MMOs is over, there’s not going to be those “played it for 8 years!” types anymore. I’d like to see this game do better, but if WvW, maps and rewards aren’t up to par, can you really expect anybody to stick around past February?

I think the horse has died, been resurrected and then beaten to death again! Really, if you and your friends quit, or lets be honest, if every single one of the whinny kids quit, this game would still be around, just like the first Guild Wars. So out of lets say, 1 million players in GW2, if half of them cried a river and sailed away on it, that’s still 500k people playing. Sure, populations would shift again and there would be less servers, but the game would move on down the road.

The problem as people have pointed out already is YOU. People make or break the game, and the crying goes on and on, regardless of where the game goes. You can take the Thief Stealth away completely and you will still die to them. In case you didn’t realize a few things, no Thief is sneaking up on you IN Stealth to begin with, not unless they’re not trying for their 3 hit killer combo (CnD>Mug>Backstab) because being in Stealth first ruins the setup. Either that or they’re a P/D Condition build and can’t burst you down at all.

Another fact that compounds these problems is culling of course, but even moreso than that is the complete lack of anything other than P/D Condition builds or Glass Backstab builds. They nerfed Sword / X to uselessness, P/P is garbage even with a few tweaks and Shortbow is good for running away and making people look stupid during a siege. So that means the Thief has to make due with two builds and 1.5 sets of weapons. I’m not saying other classes don’t have similar crap weapon sets too, but the Thief has the least weapons they can use of all classes right off the bat, and almost nothing worth a kitten for 90% of what they CAN use.

Nerf the Thief, nerf it as much as you like and you still won’t be happy, that’s the simple fact of the matter. As long as you have a chance to die to ANY class, Stealthed or not, you’re going to complain. None of your cries mean a thing to Anet, they already have your money, but you’ll do it anyway. Look at World of Warcraft, look at the forums, listen to the crying. They’ve been crying for 8 years, and yet, over 10 million players are still killing and looting it up. If you’re willing to cry and quit games over the rage of losing to a Thief in the middle of nowhere in the middle of World vs World which isn’t real PvP to begin with,(it’s like saying Marvel vs Capcom games are “real” Street Fighter games) then you weren’t going to stay with the game that long anyway. You want better balance in your PvP then you play tPvP / sPvP. That’s the balance, that’s the real deal. WvW is kitten waving trash with trash rewards and useless crying. Suck it up and play real PvP then tell me you have trouble with the Thief.

As I said, the arguments will just do loop after loop because the people that die to the Thief get upset and will never see things from the Thief’s perspective. They don’t like the style, they don’t like the “overpowered” aspect, blah blah blah. It’s still just an excuse not to learn to counter them. First and most important, whether you like it or not, culling does affect how effective the Stealth is in this game, and it does not just affect the Thief, it will affect any class that can use Stealth. It’s a bug, it’s something Anet is aware of and working to fix. They’re not going to screw up sPvP/tPvP or PvE content just because a few hundred people are crying about the “culling” shiet in WvW. They already fixed the issue in sPvP/tPvP and you see that nobody is complaining about the Thief in those contexts.

Really what everybody is complaining about goes away when you fix the time a Thief technically stays “in Stealth”. Burst damage will always be there, and it’s there for every class except possibly the Necro, offset slightly by having good defense. The burst for a Thief is decent, but it’s ONE build that needs specific gear and utility skills to put out the damage. Without the Signet and full glass cannon, the biggest hit coming from Backstab will be in the 5~7k range, hardly scary unless you’re also a glass cannon with 12k health, but then you shouldn’t be crying about it in the first place.

I don’t mean to keep going with the broken record stuff, but honestly unless Anet comes here and says flat out they’re going to listen to the people crying and moaning about the Thief, I don’t know why we can’t just let the topic die and play the game as it is. If you don’t like the Thief, don’t play one. If you don’t like to die to a Thief, don’t play WvW or don’t play the game at all because if people cry about dying to a Thief, I bet they still cry regardless of what class kills them. I think it’s just the dying part that people hate and rage about, not the class.

Yeah because 30 seconds of revealed would be so nice for a Thief. May as well just suicide off a gd cliff at that point. The point of stealth in this game is to do what we want when we want to. If we want to stop the fight and run, we can, it gives us a bit of an edge. And why does it matter if we run away? If you’re not dead, then we didn’t win but we just blew half our cooldowns trying to kill you in the first place, especially if we’re running Berserker Backstab.

Again and again, you can see the problem right? It’s the players, not the class. Anet gives you EVERY skill you need to kill a Thief. They give you heals, they give you stun breakers, they give you invincible rolls and they give you stuns, immunities, and immobilizes. Your troubles start when you stand there letting the Thief control the fight. You have 3 seconds where that Thief can’t stealth, he can’t do anything but take damage from you. If they’re glass cannon, they will DIE in those 3 seconds IF you take your head from out of your azz and lock them down. Every class that I know of has some sort of crowd control, even the so called “weakest” class, Ranger, can chain lock a Thief to death if they pick the right pets. I mean Mulch just pointed out a good way to counter them and of course immediately the excuse goes up “Oh but you’re a Guardian!” Really? This is why the circle continues. People point out the exact methods to stop a Thief cold and you rotate it 180 back to the victim mentality of “well it’s obviously the Thief and not ME!” If you don’t want to die to a Thief, figure out how to beat them, join them, build to counter them (which means building to counter ANY burst glass cannons) or don’t play in WvW.

Mister Mustard~ it’s obvious why people aren’t complaining (even though they are) about the other classes, because they don’t have Stealth. People think if they nerf Stealth, that somehow everything will be just fine. It won’t. People have already proven that. People were crying about Rangers having their Haste+SB combo until it got nerfed because Rangers had “too much haste it’s overpowered!” People have yelled and screamed about Bull’s Rush>100B and it’s still there and still just as noob friendly, but that’s okay because it’s harder to set up due to being able to “see” the Warrior.

The biggest problem of course is WvW, if it didn’t exist, I think PvP would be pretty balanced. Nobody is complaining about the Thief except for WvW when Anet has already shown WvW is just PvE with some zerg rushes running around accomplishing nothing but epeen waving (ooo my team has more meaningless points than yours!). They didn’t even bother to give us all the cool armor and weapons that sPvP/tPvP has but made the entire ONE set take months and months of grinding to obtain. You don’t have to look far to see where Anet is focusing, and it’s sure as heck not WvW Thieves.

And “effort” in a video game is subjective. To me a Thief takes above average skill to kill above average players, but I could say the same for all the classes. I really haven’t had trouble killing bad players on my Necro, Warrior, Ranger, Thief or Elementalist. I’d gladly agree with making the Thief almost impossible to play as long as I get to completely destroy any and all other classes once I master it. As an example, Akira Yuki from Virtua Fighter. Hardest character to master, yet nigh unbeatable once played at a grandmaster level (except against another Akira of equal skill perhaps). But that won’t happen since in a good business sense, you want any and all classes to be easily available to use by all levels of players, so of course by design, people will tend to gravitate toward the “best” at killing people, which again is still subjective. What is the best way to kill somebody? Fear you into dot strings? Instantly kill you with a 5 second cast spell from 1200 range? Maybe a bunch of combo hits strung together ending in an Ultra? Each to their own I guess! /shrug

And again here it is, you don’t like X mechanic so it must be the problem as to why I CAN’T WIN! See here’s the best part, you can win, they die as fast as any other glass cannon, and in some cases, even faster. You can make up as many excuses as you want as to why X needs to be nerfed and all you’re still doing is voicing why it gives YOU trouble. It’s not giving 99.9% of the rest of the people who don’t suck trouble, because I don’t see them here on this forum whining about it. It’d be one thing if instead of 200 posts and 2000 views on a post it was 350,000 posts and 4,000,000 views, but it’s not. It’s the kids who want X nerfed so they can eat their cake and have it too.

It’s not the game, it’s the players, and it’s been this way ever since the RPG mentality started. Anything and everything that people see as overpowered is immediately jumped on, and in this case, it’s the history of Stealth mechanics. And when companies start to balance around either Stealth or Burst damage, they don’t get it right and the class dies. Rogue in Rift=Dead. Witch Elf in Warhammer=Dead. The only Stealth type that is still around is the Rogue in World of Warcraft and right now they’re dead last in usefulness (again, according to players). The only reason they never completely died off is because the way Blizzard made every class almost able to do everything. Now the Rogue can half tank, can be DPS and has a much passive healing as a gd Druid kitten They’ve turned all the interesting classes into one big ball of shiet with only a handful of skills reminding you that you even have classes at all.

I’m fine with taking Stealth away, I don’t need it, and if they left it behind, much more fun for me. You know why? Because if they took it out, if they change it completely, whatever they do, YOU people will still cry about losing to them. If you’re not crying about Stealth, it’d be Burst Damage. If you don’t cry about Burst Damage, it’d be Condition Damage. If it was just kittening auto attack, you’d cry about that. I’m indifferent about the whole damn mess because the world keeps on spinning regardless of what any of you or I want, it upsets me because there’s barely even a decent argument or solution presented by anybody in any of these forums. It’s all still boiling down to “you lost, you’re upset, you’re crying about it”

And yes looking at real world events should be things normal humans do, whether you like it or not, this is still a video game and none of what you waste your time, anger or frustration on means anything at all here. So rather than worrying to death, and crying to everybody that you’re the victim, that there’s nothing wrong with you, it’s always something else or someone else’s fault, maybe you should step back, breath and move on. Enjoy the game as it is, for what it is, or don’t play it.

Looks like you’re running mostly glass cannon gear since you have high power and critical chance and not even 16k health and here you are, crying that you lost. He even hit you with 2 Heartseekers several seconds apart from all the other damage and you didn’t dodge or heal in between any of it. The opening damage was around 13k which on any glass cannon is near death already. If you had some more vitality then the burst would have been far less WTF on you and you probably would have recovered at that point and beaten the Thief or he’d have ran away. Then again he looks like he has at least a few friends with him anyway, so either way, you were probably dead.

If you want to run glass cannon, or some hybrid cannon with 1500 more HP like I see a lot of people do, then prepare to die, that’s just how it is. But please stop coming into topics to cry how you lost, and post screenshots of how dead you were because you screwed up. Learn from it, improve yourself and try again later.

Also ProTip! Did you know that if you walk toward a Thief that decides that 2222222 is the best way to kitten and you pass through him between the point where Heartseeker leaps and when it hits, you won’t get hit at all? It’s hard to time, but Heartseeker won’t track you once it leaves the ground so passing through him while he’s in midair means the skill will miss once he actually lands. For fun times you can just hit W/S to watch a Thief leap frog back and forth over you, hitting nothing. Shhh don’t tell anybody or they might fix it!

Well the reward system became something much more focused on after the initial generation of kids started to want something other than just the “win” so to say. Back when I played Quake and Tribes, you didn’t upgrade anything, you didn’t get anything for a reward outside of your team winning if you did well and losing of course if your team sucked. Then games like WoW hit where time=reward=more time spent=more reward, etc. So now we have a generation of gamers who probably started with WoW as their first MMO (much the same way a lot of people’s first Final Fantasy game was 7) and became used to getting rewards for doing well in PvE. PvP in WoW initially had no rewards at all outside of reputation vendors who sold PvE gear and a couple of potions you could use in PvP. People started to wane in the populations inside those battlegrounds, so Blizzard added all that shiny PvP gear and a hell of a grind for Grand Marshal, but at that point, that gear was so awesome, that thousands of people grinded and grinded to be top dog.

I’m not asking they don’t add content or designs. I’m asking that if you’re going to make WvW something for casual PvE players to enjoy, you have to give them something to keep them going. One armor set isn’t enough, especially when it looks like azz. We didn’t even get a choice, it’s just one thing and that’s it. No achievements for buying them either. I would have thought for a company that had one of the largest PvP type MMOs out there, they would have had 10 WvW maps and 30 or 40 different maps to play on in tPvP/sPvP. Again though, it seems 90% of the game was PvE thoughts first, PvP second, and while that is okay from a business sense (as most players of MMOs are PvE based), for the rest of the crowds that rely on PvE players to give us stuff to do in PvP, it’s just not enough in this case. I’m sure things will change, but with the rate I see things going, it may be too late to recover by the time the changes get here.

And Cogbyrn I’m sure there’s always a few people that would PvP for the rest of their lives because that’s just how they are. But most people in games and in real life, want something for their time or they just don’t do it. People wouldn’t get involved in professional sports if they didn’t make good money for it. Doctors wouldn’t go to school and bust their azzes if they didn’t get to save lives. Firefighters wouldn’t risk their lives going into burning buildings if there wasn’t a chance they’d save one life even if it cost their own.

Games are not nearly as crazy as all that but since the risk isn’t physical, it has to become more psychological in nature, the virtual carrot. In these games, competition is fine and dandy for a while, but at some point somebody wants to show off that shiny new weapon or armor set. Eventually even that will get boring as you can see from the state of WoW PvP for example. Some people just don’t bother with it anymore because the gear looks like crap. I remember back when I had to have that “Skeletor” looking armor (Deathmantle I believe?) for my Rogue. I played everyday for weeks to get the honor to get that set, then on to the next and the next. Since there’s no stat boosts in GW2, then it has to be from aesthetics that we strive to achieve. Since the majority of players in PvP are generally PvE type players, rewards=representation=competition. If they threw dungeon bosses into WvW maps that dropped super awesome tokens for some super awesome gear, the que for these maps would be like 10 hours long, flooded with PvE players going for the gear. That’s probably a bit extreme but still, the idea will always remain that a lot of people don’t mind competition and loss as long as in the end, they get something cool out of it.

It still boggles my mind why they didn’t have hundreds of armor and weapon models in WvW already, putting achievements into the game for getting each set. It’s a grind, but you’re already grinding for tokens anyway, so why not give us tons of things to strive for while we’re doing it? It certainly would motivate people no matter what the score is rather than deflate the populations in the maps once one team takes the ball and runs everybody else over with it.

On another note I suppose related to the slowdowns in WvW is the lack of real incentive to go there and do anything. I’m a Thief and me and a Thief friend generally hit all the camps and kill all the guards in a big loop for a few hours, ganking any small groups that dare to take us on. So we don’t get that many badges of course (20 or so per night usually) but it’s fun for a little while. The thing is, I have no real goal per se to achieve with the badges. The badge loot looks stupid for my Thief. Maybe the coat is okay, but I just don’t like the look of it. And since that’s the ONLY thing there I can really buy with the badges, I’m hard pressed to really want to get in there and grind out the stupid amount of badges I need for the set.

I hear they’re going to be adding more gear for badges later on, but I’ve heard no ETA on when. It could be two expansions from now for all we know. I’m sure a lot of people consider the incentive of doing WvW to be for the fun factor, but come on, at some point I want to see myself getting something out of it. The same incentive excuse could be used for PvE dungeons as well. Sure, maybe the first two or three times you do the dungeon it’s “fun” but after that it becomes a grind to get the gear. If that gear wasn’t cool looking or useful or whatever you wanted to get out of it, you wouldn’t be doing it. Think of that like World of Warcraft. Does anybody really still do Blackwing Lair? Molten Core? Serpent Shrine Caverns? Unless people are doing it for achievements or for transmog gear, nobody does it. So there needs to be a goal to strive for because that’s going to be one of the factors to making people do the content once the “fun” is gone and it’s become a boring grind without a purpose.

Hopefully they will add WvW gear sets that actually look completely different than anything you can get anywhere else in the game. With that idea, then if you wanted that “cool, sexy, black, spikey, armor of major amazing awesomeness” it would mean doing WvW only until you could afford the gear with badges. A grind? Pretty much everything will become that way eventually, but a grind with no real purpose? That’s just not something that will make people play very long.

Also just to throw it out there, other games have now come out that have taken players away from Guild Wars 2 and so server numbers have gone down a bit. Frustrations with culling and recent nerf/buff rollercoasters started some fires and upset more players who of course quit. Not to mention the uproar of upset players over Ascended gear treadmills pushing even more players away with no ETA on when all that yummy new gear will come to WvW. Again, the game is starting to lose it’s interesting qualities and little things are starting to nag on people more and more.

I know the “true” players will stick around for awhile, but at some point there just won’t be enough players on enough servers to keep WvW interesting enough. I mean over half of the people I knew on FA quit and went to Planetside 2, WoW or Tanks just out of being bored. It’s not doomsday yet of course, but I’m seeing a big decline of interest around the game more and more these days.

Four hits in a row means four hits back to back to back not 4 Backstabs. If you have hidden killer of course it’s 100% critical hit and it will always critically hit with that trait. That isn’t what you said and that’s sure as heck not the only attacks you use to do a 3 hit combo. The only 100% critical chance you have is on Backstab, the rest is up to the RNG so no, it is not 4 100% critical hits in a row. The only thing you could do is to start a fight with one weapon set, swap to D/D with a Sigil of Intelligence so that your Mug/CnD would 100% critically hit for at least 2 guarantees of critical hits during your opening, but that means giving up some surprise elements and Sigil of Air of course.

Of course you’re going to heal for more because you just pointed out that you’re not running the normal setup that most glass Thieves run. Runes of Divinity are good (it has also been shown that 5x Runes of the Scholar+1x Rune of Divinity gives the highest DPS increase once you’re under 90% health) but that also raises your stats so you’d gain healing from that and the Triforge Pendant also has +healing on it, thus you’re using +healing gear. Chew on some +healing food and you’d probably heal for more than that as well.

I still won’t say Mug will ever hit for that much damage even decked out. I’ve tested the hits in The Mists and even doubling the damage it never came close to an 8k hit.

I think what happened here is that the way you worded your post up there made it sound as though you thought all the traits you listed were overpowered and it seemed how it was written that these traits were overpowered because you could get them all at once. So I may have jumped the gun there a little seeing as how it’s obvious English is not your first language.

First, Mug never hits for 7500 damage even on the squishiest classes in the best possible gear. Post a screenshot or quit spewing bullshiet. You can take a talent to immobilize somebody for 4 seconds when they’re low on health, but that isn’t a burst build since it’s at the end of a trait line that focuses on Poisons (Deadly Arts). Sure I guess you could weaken yourself and put 30 points into Deadly Arts and another 30 into Critical Strikes and lose the extra initiative gain from Trickery along with the reduced steal cooldown, though that’s not the common build I usually see. Not to mention the cooldown for that immobilize is on a 1 minute cooldown and we already have a poison that will immobilize you (Devourer Poison) and it’s only on a 45 second cooldown (36s traited), thus making that immobilize somewhat useless compared to other traits.

100% critical strike for four hits in a row? Since when is any attack outside of Hidden Killer giving you a 100% critical strike chance? OH yeah, none! 350 hp/sec while in stealth would only happen if you’re chewing on some major +healing food or stacking some +healing gear (thus lowering your DPS). As a DPS burst spec, they won’t have either of those things, which means the maximum heal per sec is closer to 290~300 hp/sec. Yes you can remove cripple and weakness when you dodge. However, that is a weak azz trait on a 10 second cooldown in the Acrobatics tree that no burst Thief will have either.

Yes you can gain Might on Dodge and Might when you go into stealth, but again, to get Might on Dodge you have to spec into Acrobatics and to gain Might when you enter stealth, you have to spec 25 points into Shadow Arts. Again, Burst Thieves won’t have points in either of these trees. Now if they ever decided to give me a 30/30/30/30/30 spec, then I could understand some of your complaints. As it stands, you list off skills and abilities that somebody able to kick your nuts in in 5 seconds or less would NOT have. Once again it’s somebody crying that they lost to a Thief with no desire to learn how to counter them, spewing bullshiet because they have no idea what a Thief can and cannot do. Next!

Backstab will work from any direction, but it won’t do double damage unless you’re behind them though I guess side is still sort of behind them. If he’s using both Basilisk and Devourer, then he’s really wasting a lot of slots just to kill you every 90 seconds. He wouldn’t even need both. If you’re immobilized you can’t dodge the Backstab anyway, so I don’t see the point in using both at the same time.

Assuming you’re quick and saw him coming, you should still be able to stun break>dodge the Backstab, but again, sometimes you’ll just have to be ready before he gets to you. Yes he can bait you to blow your dodges early, so don’t fall for it. One really good way to tell if he’s getting ready to burst is to watch his buffs. If Assassin’s Signet is up and suddenly drops off, ROLL! I could probably go nuts on how to deal with a Thief on a class by class basis, but I’m really only good with my Thief vs Thief scenario stuff. Sometimes you’re just going to die, but nobody should get upset over that, it’s just a game. Respawn and go kick his nuts in while all his skills are on cooldown and watch him run away like a little girl!

Also, they probably won’t change Mug+CnD because as others have also said, it’s not just the Thief that can precast something during the animation of another skill. Elementalists are also a class that uses that to do really awesome burst/surprise tactics. It’s built into the game engine and changing it would be like getting rid of the Jumping Roundhouse>Low Forward Kick>Hadouken combo from Street Fighter games.

Killthehealersffs~ the way I look at it is more preemptive than reactionary. You have to make the first move and not let the Thief get the big hits on you. Remember that all pieces of that combo can miss and be evaded. You dodge Mug and you’ll also dodge CnD which takes the Thief down by half their initiative and now they just lost their burst. Lets assume you misjudged and eat the Mug>CnD. You know they want to Backstab you, so dodge backwards twice. There’s no way they will be able to stay behind you to hit you with the full Backstab damage. If they mistime the hit, you take about 2k damage, if they miss you completely you’re now at range and they’ll be out of stealth in 1 second. Swap to ranged yourself and keep them away from you. Their Mug is down for 45 seconds (default) and the only utility skill they’re using to stay safe is Shadow Refuge. They generally won’t have Shadow Step, Caltrops or any type of trap. They could be using Devourer Venom to immobilize you, but unless they swap to ranged also, they can’t apply it. If they do swap to ranged, you’ve got 8 seconds to blow them up before they can even go back into stealth due to the weapon swap. They most likely have Shortbow which had it’s damage gutted last patch.

Lets assume one step further and say they used Basilisk Venom to stun you. You have two choices here. Wait for the stun then break it (no duh!) or use any form of Stability or Damage Immunity immediately before or after it happens.

As I said, is it easy to do it? No it requires a little thinking ahead and good reactions. What I think people here whine about most is that they’re either alone in WvW and get taken out by a lone Thief, or they’re part of a zerg and get downed by a Thief taking people out in the back. Now if you die in the middle of a zerg to a Thief, really, who cares? So you got singled out and ate it, happens to people (and me!) all the time. Thief gets blown up at that point and I get a res, negating his pathetic attempt to make me rage. If you’re out roaming, expect to see a Thief or two. Look around sometimes, watch your back. I’ve been blown away by how many people will run by me in WvW when I’m standing near a rock or a tree in plain sight of them.

On a side note, have you ever Shadow Refuged a Warrior, snuck around the corner of a keep and watched him Frenzy>100B 12 people beating on a gate? Nobody was whispering the Thief with rage on that one! FUN! =D

Killthehealersffs~ well from my perspective, I 3 shot anybody in cloth. Ambush>Backstab>Cold Blood+Eviscerate= 10k+ easy especially if you had the Grand Marshal gear before it became easy mode to get (like most everything in WoW these days). The way I look at it though is that a Thief is like the old Warlock’s Fear that didn’t break on damage. Fear chain into dots into more Fear chains=dead guy. Unless you had a PvP trinket to break that stuff, it was easy to get locked into some chain of death. Here though, having a stun breaker or some sort of blink/teleport will save your azz all the time, even from a Backstab combo. I’ve had D/D Elementalists light me up in a heartbeat from nowhere and without Shadow Step I was dead before I could get up from the knockdown.

None of this is any different in how you die outside of how you react to what’s happening. You can deny a Thief his burst the same way you can deny a Warrior his Bull’s Rush>100B. Is it as easy to see coming as a Warrior? No, probably less obvious, but by now everybody knows it’s coming just as much. Every class has a burst rotation (again, except Necromancers and Rangers, though I’m sure somebody out there made a video to prove me wrong!) and if you play the class or watch a couple of videos, you’ll know what to expect, because the setup will always be the same.

I’m not saying all the burst in the game should be on one class, I’m saying that burst is a part of this game for ALL classes to deal with. For some classes it’s easier than others or more obvious than others, but the fact remains that everybody is given the tools to deny that burst or at least survive it and get away. People want to focus on only the Win/Lose aspect without realizing there’s more to it than just that. What I fear is that people crying too loudly over things they can do something about now (i.e. learn to counter it) and won’t be happy even if the Thief ends up doing a full burst combo that does 1200 damage tops with their combo. =(

You can’t give the Thief class skill cooldowns. It’s not what the class is about. kitten do you even read what the heck you’re typing? The class is a burst class, it is a spam X button class. Get the kitten over it, that’s what Anet said our “Rogue/Assassin” class is supposed to be. Our “cooldown” is our limited initiative supply. We have 12 unless traited for 15. By default we can use CnD twice or Infiltrator’s Arrow twice and we’re without power to stealth or get away very efficiently for a good bit of time.

At least it wasn’t a gd energy bar like in WoW or Rift. The Thief still remains the same as those other versions from other MMOs because the same rules apply: Apply spike burst and run out of gas in 4 moves, or spike a little bit and conserve the energy for getting back out. Anet isn’t here asking how to delete the Thief and turn them into Backstab Warriors. They don’t give two shiets if you like the class or if you like how they play or how you want them nerfed or redesigned. The only thing they can do at this point is adjust the damage, range and initiative costs of our skills and other minor changes which we’ve already seen is all they do.

The problem is there’s very little middle ground for the Thief. It’s either all burst, no survivability or all survivability and no burst. The in between stuff like P/P, S/P, D/P just are not as effective or are just too useless to be much fun. And again, people are putting up unrealistic suggestions because they lost to a Thief and it got them all upset so they come here to throw their anger at the Thief. If you can’t figure out how to kick their faces in, make one, or quit, or even easier, stay out of WvW and do sPvP/tPvP where the Thief is barely even played at all.

Skupuz~ Toughness is a defensive character attribute. Each attribute point put into toughness increases the armor of the character by one, which improves the character’s ability to withstand direct damage. As far as I’m concerned, the two are effectively the same thing and do the same thing which is reduce incoming damage. Of course you add your defense stat+toughness stat to get your total armor, but since you didn’t say how much armor you had total, it sounded more like you meant to say you had 1400 armor and not toughness.

Either way I should have corrected myself but oh well. So you probably have in the range of 2200+ armor or a bit higher then? (my Thief has 2300 armor by comparison) Either way it still isn’t in the 3000~4000 range you’d need to really laugh off the damage a Thief does. I’ve ran into those bunker builds plenty of times on my own Thief. Backstab critical hits for 2500 aren’t too fun.

Overmind~I wouldn’t say D/P is useless but as Kurow said if you’re traiting to hold a node and waste time in stealth for long periods of time, you’re not killing anybody. The entire point of the build is to stall the capture until your zerg can show up or at least hold up their zerg to slow things down. These types don’t go out and start trying to fight somebody in the middle of 30 people, that’s instant death. They throw down black powder and heartseeker through it a few times to keep up their stealth. Somebody posted a “theory of permanent stealth” video and while it does work, they eventually find him and he dies. There’s flaws in that strategy the same as any. One screwed up auto targeted Heartseeker and the Thief pops out in front of 20 people and is dead 5 seconds later. It’s never 100% of course some luck is involved, but again, while he’s not “useless” he’s not dealing damage in any meaningful way and they don’t even have CnD to stealth with in the first place (and if he’s not careful he’ll definitely take damage).

Highlie~ I agree that they should make it so if you’re in stealth, you can’t hold a point just like in sPvP and tPvP. However, I still believe the CnD>Mug>Backstab combo should always stay. I mean outside of that one combo, what are Backstab Cannons supposed to do? The entire reason for the build is high damage+fast attack, i.e. surprise! While the setup is pretty simple, so are the means to defeat it. You can see the Thief coming because they can’t be in stealth first or they ruin the combo. If you think they’re going for the combo, ready your stun break or dodge just as you see them hit 900 range. A good dodge or stunbreak ruins their big damage for 45 seconds. At that point, they’ll probably run away or risk dying.

Again and again I see most people complaining due to them not understanding how to play a Thief and just hate to lose to them. Everybody, please, stop with the crying and make a Thief. Even if you hate their guts, even if the thought makes you throw up, make one, go join The Mists and play around with the class. Go glass cannon Backstab some of those NPCs or the mini-boss mobs in there. You’ll see really quick just how fast you can die and where you’re weak. Once you know the downsides, the upsides don’t seem nearly as good as people think they are. I’ll even bake cookies for the ones who try to do this! Mmm cookies! =D~

Then you fail as a Mesmer. You have more outs than anybody including a Thief and you have clones to distract them with. 1400 Toughness is nothing at all. You’d need up closer to 4000 Toughness to start noticing a big drop in physical damage (50% less) and I really don’t see any class outside of bunker Guardians even bothering to come close to that much. Go with higher Vitality if you want to survive. You sound like a glass cannon build to me. Also for a Thief to hit you for 6k with Heartseeker you had to be under 25% health and the fact that he was able to hit you with two without you dodging, porting, cloning or even Alt+F4ing either means you were getting zerged by more than a Thief (stunned, immobilized, knocked down, Feared) or you just suck. In either case, you lost, respawn and move on.

Killthehealersffs~ just wanted to point out that in some cases, Vanilla Rogues could ONE shot anything in cloth. Warlocks, Priests and even Paladins wearing cloth (remember back when they didn’t have healing Plate?). Vanilla WoW players had around 6~8k max health assuming they were tanks with top end gear for the day. But we had counter classes that could chew us up and spit us out in record time (mainly Warriors).

And again even after this many pages I’ve seen maybe two constructive and thought out suggestions, and the rest are “I’m terrible at the game and lost to a Thief one time in 100 fights when I was alone in the middle of a jumping puzzle. Nerf Thieves!” Unless Anet is like Blizzard (which I pray they’re not talking to each other) they’re not about to start over with the class and change how it plays completely. So get this part through your heads:
Stealth isn’t going away
Steal isn’t going away
Mug isn’t going away
Burst damage 3 shots aren’t going away

Those are key aspects to the class and the burst part is not a Thief specialty either. Youtube some burst videos of any class and I bet you can find nice big hits for all of them (maybe Ranger and Necromancer are the exception here). Burst is damage based on you having no defense. The Thief has the fastest burst and pays for it with the lowest health pool and two skills to try to get out of trouble: Shadow’s Refuge and Infiltrator’s Arrow. Other classes have even higher burst, but pay for it by it being easier to avoid but at the same time, theyhave more health. A full Berserker Thief is sitting around 12,500 health before any buffs. A Warrior in similar gear is 19,000 health or more (these are the numbers my Thief and Warrior have in similar gear).

I’m telling you all to stop worrying about a glass cannon that can kill 1 guy in WvW in the middle of fking nowhere every 45 seconds. What good is that to the team? It’s not. That’s the point. You don’t see people in tPvP or sPvP screaming about Thieves because the skill cap is higher, the players are better, the teamwork is better and Thieves have to try even harder to pull off big hits (which are reduced even more because of the lowered damage potential in those modes of play). Anet isn’t going to balance WvW Thieves because 1 rolled you over there. They don’t care about balance in WvW anymore than Blizzard gives a rat’s azz about PvP balance in anything but the maximum level brackets.

If I assume correctly, I’d think the things Anet wants to hear are why out of the skills Thieves have, we use about 4 or them and everybody uses the same two or 3 utility skills and that’s about it. Tell them why Dancing Dagger blows now, or what’s wrong with Unload or Flanking Strike. How about making Infiltrator’s Arrow not root us when we shoot it? Ya know, things that aren’t interesting to play with, not things that make you all cry that you suck at the game. I don’t think they wanted to drown the Thieves in a sea of tears, but find out what things make them boring as heck to play and half useless in teams/dungeons/zergs/etc. Just my two cents, I could be wrong.

Some people here are requesting things because they 1) got beaten by a Thief and ran here to cry and 2) need to learn to play against the Thief. Culling is the big issue in WvW. Nerfing stealth and adding longer revealed debuffs will change nothing. You could take stealth completely the kitten away and I will still kill you. For goodness sakes, Rogues in World of Warcraft have had permanent stealth from day 1, 3 shot any cloth class in the game and people still play them, still kill people and people still whine about stealth. It will never end until people cry enough that the game just dies like every other MMO out there but World of Warcraft.

Trick Shot’s slow missle speed and amazingly hard hitting 200~350 damage auto shots really tear it up huh? You can’t be serious about this. The missile is 3x slower than anybody else’s long range attack, about on par with Ranger’s longbow speed. The only saving grace is of course that it can bounce like Dancing Dagger. Shadow Refuge doesn’t need anything else done to it. It’s useful, it’s one of the most useful skills we have. Buff everything else we can use up to that level and maybe the thought of tossing Shadow Refuge off our bars will happen. It’s invaluable for saving half my team depending on where I drop it to res or to stomp people and lets me get a lot of people the hell away from danger while healing them. It’s no different than any other bunker classes super shields outside of the fact that mine gives a few seconds of stealth.

But seriously, leave the stealth alone until they fix culling. If revealed time goes up, then major damage would have to start happening along with more survivability or longer stealth times to compensate. People just don’t seem to understand that the reason why we can survive at all is because we have an ENTIRE trait line dedicated to us not dying so easy as long as we can go into stealth a lot. And if we have speced into that entire trait line, guess what? We’re not glass cannons. So bite me, learn to play, tell Anet to fix their broken WvW culling stuff and move the heck on. Lubs! <3!

I can stay in stealth up to 10 seconds if you let me (i.e. sit there with your thumb up your azz) sit in a 60 second cooldown Shadow Refuge. You know you can just knock me out of it, knock me down in it, kill me inside it with AoE even if you can’t see me? What part of this whole Thief thing do people just not understand? They HAVE to be in and out of stealth for 95% of the fight or THEY DIE! Think about it for a second. How many times have you killed a Thief? And out of all the times you’ve killed them, what was a big factor in it? Keeping them out of stealth. If you deny them their stealth, they die very, very quickly.

I mean come on, it lasts 4 seconds assuming the Thief doesn’t attack. If we’re sitting in Shadow Refuge letting stealth stack us to 10 seconds, in general it’s because we just about got out azz handed to us and we’re getting ready to book out of the fight to reset it. You can see where I dropped the house, so here’s a tip, run the other direction. We don’t move very fast in stealth and if you take off, you’ll get away from us. I know I’m not chasing after some guy when I’m sitting at 1500 health left, I’m letting my stealth stack, booking it far enough to get out of combat and heal to full before I do anything else.

The problem is once again, and I hate repeating it, is that people find a reason to blame the game and not themselves when they LOSE to a class. There’s not one class forum here where somebody isn’t whining about a class beating their azz and how that class should be nerfed. No your brain needs to be nerfed because you’re failing to use it in a video game. Nobody can counter every class, everytime. Backstab Thieves have a quick opening that you can see coming into 900 range, can be blocked, dodged, immuned or even stunned/knockbacked, whether you see them or not after the steal. Don’t show the Thief your back and he can’t stab it for good damage. One dodge away from the direction the Thief came from will negate their entire move. It’s the same way good players could deny Rogues their Ambush or Backstab in Arena in World of Warcraft: skill.

But of course arguing here is as pointless as anywhere else on the internet. Bottom line is people get upset when they lose to a class, no matter what weaknesses they have or strengths, they just see black or white, win or lose. I never see anybody coming here to complain that they WON against a Thief though reading the forums clearly shows many a good player winning against them all the time. Why doesn’t everybody?

Nerf Backstab damage by 50% My goodness. Okay fine, I’ll let them take 50% of it’s damage if it still does max damage from the front, costs no initiative to use and doesn’t require Stealth just like Rogue’s Backstab in WoW. How about that? You’re whining and crying about something YOU have total control of. YOU decide to show your back to the Thief when you KNOW already he’s got one move he’s trying to hit you with, the only move he has that will hit anybody in decent gear for 6~9K. Hitting a glass cannon for 15k is one of those “one in a million shots in a Thief montage video” hits. What you never see in that video is the ten seconds after that nice finish where the Thief gets ran over by a zerg of 30 people and gets blown over like a tree in a hurricane.

You can’t take away the ONLY kitten thing the Thief has going for them Burst Damage. Stealth is just a way to set up that burst and run away. It’s here to stay just as much as the “downed” state. If they get rid of or tweak anything more with the mechanics of the class, it’ll turn them into nothing more than cannon fodder for people that don’t know how to play the kitten game.

Nsidiously iNsane has the right idea: learn to play the class and exploit their weaknesses. For Thief? 13k Health is their weakness. Exploit it. Dot them up, AoE when they stealth, save your cooldowns. If they have 18k or more Health, they’re not bursty enough to 2 or 3 shot you and are probably just going for survivability over big damage. Exploit it, drag the fight out rather than trying to burst. Create distance between you and the Thief when he stealths. If he’s ranged watch which direction he’s going when he hits you with CnD (or dodge the CnD) and roll in that direction and swing as the air. If he rolled the same way you’ll be hitting him and take away some of his range, if not, get ready to dodge the stealth attack next. Stealth is only 4 seconds if they trait it so outlast that and deny them the stealth attacks by dodging.

It’s all in playstyle and a little bit of knowing the class. The stealth helps them play mind games with you which most people can’t handle. It’s like playing Poker and sometimes you guess right and sometimes you guess wrong, but regardless of the outcome, you both learn something. How to take what you’ve learned and apply it to future fights is entirely up to you.

You can’t nerf the stealth of a Thief more than it is now or else you destroy the entire mechanic of the class. It’d be no different than if you made all the toolbelt skills on an Engineer 5 minute cooldowns and static regardless of the kit they had equipped. It’d ruin the class completely. Or how about 20 second cooldowns on all the Elementalist’s mode swaps? Yeah, they could “still” kill stuff and swap elements, but really, the class would turn into a pile of garbage.

The Thief HAS to stealth or they die. Unlike other classes I don’t get any nice stuns or knockdowns and I sure as hell don’t get 1200 meter dashes or skills that make me invulnerable to damage for 5 seconds or give me stability. Even when I stealth, if the player is good, they WILL not only hit me, but if I’m not on my game they will KILL ME. If I mess up even in the slightest and go low on Initiative, I can have a hard time getting away or surviving.

And fighting a Thief that’s in stealth 80% of the time is easy as it gets. If he’s in Stealth that much, he’s not doing damage to you. CnD has been nerfed and if you keep distance from them, Backstab isn’t much of a threat either. You know what to expect from them, so stop falling for the same simple tricks. The Thief is pigeonholed into either D/D Backstab Burst build or P/D Condition Build. One is a glass cannon 13k HP wonder, the other is a slow killing, half tank built to fight you all day. If Anet nerfs the Thief any more than they have without compensating them, everybody will just roll Warriors or Elementalists and really screw you over. Three 100B Roaming Warriors are even more dangerous than a Thief. Sure you’ll dodge one bull’s charge and eat another, or another. Wouldn’t that be fun!?

I ran the Wild Bill spec for a few months and it’s very effective at just about everything. Soloing camps, soloing 3 people at once, getting away, a mix of range and melee attacks, etc. It’s biggest strength is the bleed durations and the extra health you have from not having to be a glass cannon.

A lot of people I noticed start playing somewhat awkwardly after they blow their big burst skills at the start of the fight and I still have 15k left. It’s like they can’t understand how a Thief still has health because they’re so used to fighting glass cannons. It’s a good spec to use for a well rounded player with it’s biggest disadvantage being that it kills slow in general, but you have a lot of lasting power. The poisons heal you, the stealth removes conditions and heals you and you have up to three dodges to use at maximum endurance. Try it out if you haven’t, it’s a good spec, and even if you decide to swap out the poisons for stun breakers (Shadowstep), you can still make the spec work just fine and increase your survivability even more.

No I’m not a super glass cannon at all. I’m Wild Bill speced and have almost 23k health which is why I made it a point to look and see just how I went from having 15k health to dead in two hits, something that Backstab Thieves generally never come close to doing to me. It’s possible it rolled the damage into one, but what I saw and what happened is what it is. The numbers don’t lie to me. I’ve done the Backstab Thief thing and it’s easy as balls to play and a bit cheesy for me. I still don’t see why Heartseeker needs to have a damage range or be spammable to begin with. Maybe raise the cost to 5 so at most you’ll get hit with two if you’re locked down or they guessed wrong when hitting you with it and didn’t get all that yummy damage.

I mean though, nothing comes close to hitting that hard for so little cost. It has a lot of positives: range, gap closer, tons of damage, fast, low cost. I only wish my Body Shot could hit for 5~7k when somebody was low health. Cluster Bomb too. Shadow Strike? Even combining both hits of the move doesn’t come close to Heartseeker. Seems out of whack to me. I’d rather Heartseeker be a gap closer, snare breaker, low damage move than something you spam for 5k+ hits over and over. It’s not like you can sit there and eat more than two of them either. If we all had 50k health, then sure, I can see it being a decent sized hit, but since 25% is usually about 4 or 5k left at most, that’s a 1 shot and a good Thief has 5 or 6 ready to spam you with. You’re going to get hit and die. Feels wrong to me. /shrug

John: I wasn’t comparing how far Whirlwind moves anybody or the damage a Whirlwind versus Heartseeker does. The point was as if Whirlwind would be doing more damage than 100B as a comparison to how screwed up the damage on Heartseeker versus Backstab was. I’ve never had Whirlwind come close to hitting 15k so that’s based on me using my own Warrior.

Krathalos: Last night as I posted, I got hit by a Heartseeker for 9100 damage. The same Thief’s backstab previous to that hit was 6512. If I was more on the ball I would have screenshotted it, but I wasn’t really coming here to argue with people on a forum.

I play a Thief, I love my Thief, it’s the only reason I play the kitten game. But Heartseeker can and will hit you harder than a Backstab which is completely stupid. Halve the damage on Heartseeker and give that half to Backstab so that 1 button spamming morons don’t get to kill me, but players who know how to set up a good Backstab can. It’s the same situation as I said as a Warrior having to work to set up a perfect frenzy+100B. If I get caught in it because he mind gamed me into falling for it, then I die, he wins. Spike damage I’m fine with, but not spike damage on easy to abuse mechanics. Tracer Missle?! Yup.

I don’t really care if I was at 100% or 5%, as I said, a spammable, low cost, gap closing hit should never hit that hard ever, for any reason. Backstab should hit very hard, and nothing else. Your goal with Heartseeker is to hit with a decent hit, something about double auto attack. I mean what else hits that hard with D/D? LDB does crap damage but bleeds, Dancing Dagger is low damage but cripples, CnD can hit pretty hard, usually 4~6k depending on the critical hit.

But Heartseeker, if it’s going to have all the movement speed it does, the low cost it does, the gap closing usage it does, it should not be hitting harder at any point than a skill such as Backstab which has a stealth requirement, a position requirement AND a Signet requirement to hit somebody for big damage.

That is part of the big problem. It’d be like having a Warrior’s Whirlwind hit you for more damage than 100B when 100B takes a lot more to set up (usually Bull’s Charge+Frenzy+Signet of Rage to maximize it’s damage.

I myself won’t mind a spike damage nerf of the Thieves, but it has to be done in the right way. I’m not big on wanting to nerf a class I love, but last night I felt first hand how it feels to be semi-helpless against a high burst Thief. The problem I had wasn’t Backstab, it’s was Heartseeker. After this Thief decided to jump me when I was already at 50% life from fighting another Thief, what hit me the hardest was Heartseeker. I looked in my combat log after I pretty much just fell over in less than a second, and one of her Heartseekers did almost 10k to me (9,121). That is a just a BIT extreme for something that is 3 Initiative and spammable. For me, the ONLY hit a Thief should have that does that much damage is Backstab. I’d take getting hit for 12,000 damage from a Backstab because it has requirements (be behind them and in stealth with the signet boost’s extra 15% damage and full glass cannon build).

But Heartseeker should never hit for more than a backstab, ever, no matter how glitched to hell the skills are. Max hit for a normal, low cost, spammable move should be in the 3k range at MAX critical hit damage. If they drop Heartseeker to a move that does good damage but not OMFG damage once you hit half health, and move that damage to Backstab, I think that would help in a big way to balancing things out for the Thief without nerfing any of the other Thief builds.

Why are you still arguing over useless skills like this? Nobody uses the poison skills to do damage, not even Wild Bill who was the first person I ever saw use a condition thief that wasn’t D/D in the first place. He uses them for the healing, the small bit of damage they add is just a bonus. The lowest you can get them is 36 seconds on the cooldown and only one does actual damage (spider venom). The other three weaken, immobilize or chill them. So that leaves you one venom, steal with 5 points in DA or Shortbow 4 to apply poison. Sounds like a total waste of time when I can just keep auto attacking? And if you’re willing to blow spider venom to keep up a somewhat weak poison and give up the healing you’d gain then sure you could keep poison on them for a bit longer. But also if you’re using the poisons you have less defensive cooldowns to use when the crap hits the fan. No shadowstep, no signet of shadows, no traps, nothing. You’ll have your heal and your house and maybe shortbow to run if you find out the guy you were about to kill just found 30 friends.

And again, I keep wondering why you continue to harp on the fact that we can come out of stealth with an attack that’s ranged? I have to be in MELEE range to go into Stealth in the first place unless I’m willing to blow long cooldowns or my heal to go into it from ranged (and that’s what bad Thieves do). What is it that’s wrong with that? I mean what the hell am I supposed to do then? CnD and stand around letting you hit me while you swing at the air or suck the gd life out of me with an AoE? I’m popping into melee to stealth to gain some benefits for being in stealth and then rolling the hell out so I can gain some distance from the AoEs and reckless swinging madmen trying to kill me.

And buffing the other skills for Pistol won’t make me stop doing auto attack to stack bleeds unless they remove bleeds from the auto attack altogether. To be honest there’s really nothing they could add to skill 2, 3 or 4 that would make me waste my small initiative pool to spam them or use them, at least not in the small ways they’ve been nerfing and “compensating” Thieves as it is. The only way they could make the weapon sets better is a complete overhaul of the Thief class but even that wouldn’t shut up the whining because as long as somebody has stealth and somebody else doesn’t, they’re going to cry that they lost and instead of blaming themselves for not winning, they blame the game (or the mechanic). Either way I’m done posting my say on this stuff. I liked the video as I said but whining after showing you can destroy a Thief just makes no sense to me (in a nerf/buff/boring this or that way). Take care.

I don’t think there’s a question about how crap the poisons and traps Thieves have are underpowered as hell. I mean any game I’ve played where the Rogue/Thief/Assassin types had poisons (WoW, Rift, Star Wars, Guild Wars 2) they were usually a weapon enchantment and not something that only lasted for X amount of hits. I think if they were to be made viable, they’d have to become either extra effects that proc at set rate like in every other MMO on Earth, or they just poison the enemy for a set duration for an unlimited amount of attacks.

The same thing could be said of the traps. They’re all very limited to a small area and don’t do enough damage for the cooldown and duration they last. You can make them work if you’re part of the big zerg and just wanting to have fun, but honestly the only Trap I’ve ever found useful in PvE or PvP at all was the Ambush trap since the Thief that’s summoned is just as strong as the one from the Thieve’s Guild Elite and the cooldown is short enough to be up quite often. If you start to pick apart the class and really focus on all the semi useless to very useless skills you’ll quickly realize why almost every Thief out there has very few options for traits, weapons or skills to choose from which of course limits the builds that are going to be useful for doing what the Thief was designed to do: kill you.

And again you don’t understand how the P/D Thief needs to be played. Every skill on our bar is a situational use except for two which is useless since condition damage doesn’t do more damage with vulnerability stacks. I use Dancing Dagger when I want to hit multiple people or to stop a runner. I use 3 if I need to get the hell away from melee range but I’m slowed/chilled/immobilized since I’ll still port away even if I can’t move. So that leaves my auto attack and CnD. For condition damage, I have auto attack and sneak attack, that’s all I have for bleeds. I have to constantly shoot, cnd, shoot and shoot some more to maintain those stacks or I do almost no damage.

In case you’re unsure or not willing to understand this, a Condition Thief doesn’t have any “really powerful Sneak Attacks” unless you consider 800~1200 damage assuming all 5 shots critically hit (and with a 4% critical chance, that’s not very often) to be “really powerful”. And my auto shots hit for a maximum of 450 on a crit. Most hits are in the 230~280 range depending on toughness and armor type. And CnD? My max hit from CnD as Condition is around 1200. So stop thinking just because a full on Berserker Backstab Thief can pull off 6~10k CnD bullkitten that somehow we can do it too. They build for pure hitting power, we build to bleed you to death. Our damage is the bleeds and bleed durations, not spike damage, not massive “sneak attacks”, just a slow boring death. Now if all 5 Pistol attacks lasted longer, did more damage and bled you, then sure we could use more than auto attack to hit you with, but it still wouldn’t change the fact that we’re not hitting you hard with anything, we’re just bleeding you to death over a 3~5 minute fight. Big difference if you know the builds or play a Thief.

All I can say is go watch the videos of Wild Bill. He’s P/D and generally takes on multiple people at once. Yes the spec is somewhat “easy” to get into, but try it and you’ll find out really quick if you don’t know the other classes and what to expect, you’ll die in seconds no matter what weapons you’re using. It’s not like other Thief types don’t have “easy” specs:

D/D or D/P: Signet>CnD>Mug>BS>HS
S/P: BV>Mug>Haste>PWx2~3
SB: Signet>BV>Mug>Caltrops>Spam 2
P/P: Signet>Haste>Spam 3
P/D: Lots of auto attack>rolls>CnD>1>evasion tactics for 5 minutes

They’re all easy and they’re all useful in some way or another. You’re not bursting anybody down with anything outside of D/D’s combo (which is dying on the 15th) or maybe P/P. The other specs are tanky specs that only have auto attacks and bleeds to do their damage for them. In any case, wait until the 15th to see where Anet forces the Thief to go next. Most likely auto attack damage will go up as they keep nerfing the useful skills down (look at Pistol Whip of course). Maybe not, but I’m not holding my breath. Nice video though, always nice to see a good Necro.

Why pick on P/D Thieves now? It’s the only gd build left that has any use at all. It kills people over 5 minutes and survives because it has more endurance to roll and avoid more damage than most other Thief builds. They don’t need to do jack to P/D or CnD because if I want to stealth with CnD I have to go into melee range to do it which leaves me wide open to crowd control and AoEs the same as any other Thief. Besides that, you know there’s only ONE reason for me to ever get close to you on purpose, and that’s CnD, so why not avoid it by rolling and render me low on initiative? Again, it’s the players that whine that give the Thief the bad name. So now with spike damage being nerfed into uselessness, you want to nerf the damage we do over a long period of time too? It doesn’t matter if it’s cheesy or boring, it’s the whiners that keep pushing the Thief into using more tanky, condition based builds because they don’t like dying to cake walk BS Thieves, and now it seems people don’t like dying to a 5 minute Thief.

If anything, P/D should gain strength to, 2, and 3’s kills since P/D has almost no use for any of them. Skill 1 should bleed longer and do more damage, 2 should last longer, and 3 should hit much harder on both parts of the skill and apply some sort of useful effect. I think all of the attacks should at least apply bleeding but for a boring spec to work so well, it shows just how bad a lot of players are. P/D is easy as hell to counter, just like any Thief, but people are so used to going Thief=BS=Squishy that they never seem to recover from the shock in time to actually fight me.

Rogues were good in vanilla WoW because Vanilla WoW Rogues were basically like a Thief was here until the Signet nerf. But Vanilla WoW PvP was based on the counter class system. Rogues could kill cloth classes like Priests and Warlocks, did okay against leather wearing classes like Druids and Rogues, had a higher chance to lose against Mail classes like Shaman and Hunters and got completely crushed by plate wearing classes such as Paladins and Warriors, especially Warriors since half their attacks were designed around fighting classes such as Rogues with high evasion. It only took a good Warrior 2 Overpowers to kill me back then with my “amazing” 2500 health.

In Burning Crusade Rogues ate nerf after nerf, especially during the “Mace Spec” craze, and the only way Rogues became decent was after a ton of them ran Black Temple and got the Warglaives. In Cata, Blizzard actually stated that the sorry state of Rogues was the main reason they gave them easy to get Legendary Daggers to make up for their crap dps. And now in Pandaland, they’re the weakest class in PvE and PvP as noted by Blizzard upping half their skill’s damage, some by up to 150%.

Anyway, that’s the state of Rogues, and if Anet isn’t careful, it’ll be the state of Thieves within the next few months. Yes no matter the amount of nerfs, the Thief will always have the Hero that sticks with them and makes them look good just to piss people off, but in the end, a broken class will still be broken.

If they change most of the normal skills for all the weapons to be really useful, then even I could deal with losing a good bit of spike damage. How about:
Dagger/Dagger:
~auto attack is faster and the poison lasts longer
~Heartseeker evades attacks during the leap
~Leaping Death Blossom stacks more bleeds and they do more damage
~Dancing Dagger stays about the same but if it hits only one target you can hit the button again within 5 seconds to knock them down for 1 second and remove the cripple effect
~CnD has a cast time of 2 seconds can hit up to two targets within 150 range and gives 5 seconds of stealth

Shortbow:
~Trick Shot fires faster and hits mokittengets
~Cluster Bomb flies faster and the explosion always puts at least 7 bleeds on any target hit or 5 bleeds on anybody hit if you detonate it midair
~Disabling Shot costs 1 less initiative, the cripple lasts 1 second longer and the distance you evade backwards is based on how close they are to you when you shoot. At point blank you’d evade twice as far backwards as you do currently.
~Choking Gas fires faster, the poison lasts 10 seconds, the field lasts 5 seconds and does 25% more damage to players standing in the field.
Infiltrator’s Arrow fires faster, costs 1 less initiative and has a larger radius of effect

Pistol/Pistol
~Vital Shot’s bleed lasts 1 second longer per shot and does about 10% more damage
~Body Shot fires faster, gives them 10 stacks of vulnerability and does 10% more damage
~Unload has a 1200 ranger and fires 10 shots, the final shot applies 5 stacks of bleeding for 3 seconds
~Head Shot’s Daze lasts 1/2s, causes Confusion for 1 second and does 10% more damage
~Black Powder’s radius is larger and the field lasts for 5 seconds. I think this skill should become a ground target attack but that might make it way too good in large group PvP.

And that’s my initial suggestions for the weapons that I enjoy using. I’ll leave out Sword/Pistol, Pistol/Dagger and Dagger/Pistol for now only because I have much less experience with those types.

Unfortunately they’ve already established a track record of nerf first, do nothing later. Expecting them to nerf the Thief and give them “compensation” somewhere else just isn’t justifiable. I suppose you could hope they will keep their word and help the Thief somewhere else and if they do it’d be a little light at the end of the tunnel that perhaps Anet does give a kitten. But how they will compensate the Thief for taking away even more of the one thing that makes them what they are? Who can say. Not that anybody cares but here’s a one of my own suggestions:

Give the Thief several options other than the 1 skill while in stealth. Why not give them 5 different skills while in stealth, with each weapon that makes you choose the attack based on the situation. Right now, you have 1 button to use, 1 attack and that’s it. Why not do something such as this with D/D as an example: 1) Backstab, 2)2~3 second stun(WoW’s Cheap Shot), 3) attack that puts 10 Bleeds on target instantly, 4)puts Weakness, Chill, Confuse on them for 5 seconds, 5)cripple and poison the target for 10 seconds.

It’s as though Anet didn’t think anybody would want choices of things in stealth. This is the only stealth type of character in any MMO I’ve played in the last 6 years that didn’t have a lot of options of what to come out of stealth with. Even a WoW Rogue had a disorient (sap), a stun (cheap shot), a bleed (garrote) a damaging hit (Ambush) and could even steal actual items from almost anything (Pick Pocket). That’s 5 options all the time. While not all of these things were always useful in every situation, almost every skill was useful at some point. Anet could easily do the same for the Thief. There’s more I could suggest or say, but I know it makes no difference what my opinion is on this subject. Once Anet starts the nerf rollercoaster ride, I get off, simple as that. There’s tons of free to play games with much more interesting things in them that I can always go to, so I’ll always find something to do and I bet a lot of others will also.

But why is it excessive? Why is it so hard to understand that the point of the class it to kill people that are not ready to deal with burst damage? If you spec to do damage, you’re open to getting killed by damage. If you’re spec is meant as a hybrid of damage and defense, you should survive a Thief just fine, but then you’re probably open to classes that don’t use many attacks that are physical, like perhaps Elementalist and Necromancer. You are not supposed to be able to find a spec that has the answer to everything in the game. The counter to the Thief is high defense because 95% of anything a high burst damage Thief will use against you is physical damage. If you have enough defense the entire burst damage sequence of CnD>Mug>Backstab goes from hitting 15,000 down to about 8,000 assuming everything critically hits. And 8,000 damage is nothing against anything other than other glass cannons. My Thief isn’t even built for glass cannon and has over 21,000 health right now.

Think about your role, that’s what your gd class choice is for. If you want to make people feel stupid for having 14,000 health, make a Backstab Thief and kill them. You want to kitten that you died to a Backstab Thief because you had 14,000 health, then you either need to learn to play better and be very aware that you’re 1 or 2 hits away from death, or roll another class. Nerfing Thief damage will not make them kill you any less, especially if you suck against them now, it will simply turn into a much more annoying control game where not only will you die, but you’ll be stunned/knocked down/poisoned/chilled/slowed/rooted and feared for the whole fight. You take away the burst, you give them control, that’s how the balance game works kids.

I’d bet your kitten all these whiners would much rather have the Thief as it stands with its ability to 2 or 3 shot one person once per minute and able to die in 2 hits from anybody, than a Thief that has three or four stuns, incapacitates, blinds, dazes, teleports, sprints, vanish, etc. Look at the control of a WoW Rogue and ask yourself if that’s what you want here because I promise you the kitten factor would implode the planet if that’s where the road takes us.

Honestly I haven’t gone up against any good Necromancers yet. In fact the two classes that will give me the most trouble with my spec (Wild Bill) is another Thief if he catches me in the middle of another fight or a Condition Necromancer. The only Necromancers I’ve seen in WvW has been the pet version that has like 10 pets following them around. They don’t take much to kill. I still have learning to go of course, but so far since swapping to Wild Bill spec, I do far better in all PvP than I ever did as a Backstab Thief.

People won’t stop crying about Thieves and their skills until the Thief is nerfed so badly nobody plays them anymore and the whiny kittenes move on to a new class to whine about. It’s this generation of gimme, gimme, gimme, easy, easy, easy children that play games these days. It’s a lot in part of course to WoW due to Blizzard dumbing their own game down so badly that even a petrified stick could play the game.

What ever happened to people showing some balls and learning some strategies? I remember not too long ago if I was playing in an arcade on lets say, Street Fighter 2 and this dude walks in and kicks my kitten with Guile, I didn’t just cry about how to nerf Guile, I put another gd quarter in and played against that guy until I WON. I learned his patterns, I learned his weaknesses, then I used that knowledge to exploit his mistakes and patterns and beat him.

Obviously this could go back and forth, but eventually the games would be about even on every match until the matches always came down to that last little hit. That was FUN. That was competition. That was what PvP is, not this nerf, nerf, nerf, whine, whine, whine, bullkitten. And that’s the problem with 90% of the people crying about the Thief. They don’t want to put that virtual quarter in and go back and learn to beat their kitten Hell, if they even TRIED to learn how to beat their kitten I’d help them out in any way I could. kitten, I’d probably even let them win a few times against me just to make them feel better. In the end, none of this even matters, Anet isn’t going to listen to crybabies, they listen to their computer models that feed them all the data they use to buff and nerf. They don’t play their own game and they don’t care what we have to say unless it’s an exploit or a bug. Sorry for the rant, but these topics are really getting old.

I’m not sure Corrupted gear is a drop, I believe you have to make them and it would cost almost the same in material to make as it would to just buy it off the trade post unfortunately. So yeah it’s pricey, but it looks neat! Orrian gear also looks neat and most of the weapons are very large compared to most other models. The daggers for example are as long as a sword and the pistol looks more like a sawed off shotgun than a pistol. They also have this glowy goo that drips off the tips. The Orrian Shortbow is the only model that is actually as small as a normal shortbow so it’s the exception to the rule.

I used the Orrian Pistol and Dagger for my models until I tried out the Corrupted skins, both of which look cool, but Corrupted glows and has a white mist coming off of it (sort of like it’s really cold), and both models are pretty large. The Corrupted Shortbow is actually a giant bow, almost as long as my character is tall. Corrupted equipment is expensive though, 13~25g a piece. Orrian stuff drops in Orr off of just about anything so they’re pretty common.

I think you’re missing the point of the video though. He’s not disproving the rendering issue. Everybody knows it’s in there and it sucks. But if you watch the video, his point is that he’s not IN stealth outside of the first guy he hits with CnD. After he pops out about halfway up the hill, he is out of stealth for at least 4 or 5 seconds as he moves up the hill. He even starts attacking people on his way to the gate. The point of the ending scene is to show you just how many people in a zerg go all tunnel vision on the first red name they see while a Thief, not even in Stealth, can roll by and get away without taking much damage. It’s obvious that people SEE him out of Stealth just about 2 seconds after he pops out, because people start shooting at him from range. Anyway, that’s how I see it. Nothing is disproven on the Stealth bug, but it definitely shows that don’t always see or react to things that ARE visible.

Thief while stomping
should be removed from Thief….other classes don’t get anything this nice. Its guaranteed to get you the stomp no matter what.

The problem isn’t the Thief, the problem is the players. I play a Thief. I play a Ranger. I play a Warrior. In fact, I play one of each class. Some are more fun than others. Some have strengths in one aspect, and weaknesses in another. See there is the facet of the game that’s enjoyable, the fact that each class is different. They’re supposed to be different. They do different things, that’s the whole point. Players seem to think that if you’re an MMO, you should be like World of Warcraft, where every class is now in the same boat. They all do damage in their damage specs, they all tank in their tank specs, and heal in their heal specs. You know, I think even the gd Mages can heal at this point. Are the classes still somewhat effective in a certain role? Sure, I suppose so. But do any of them stand out in any aspect very much from each other? No not really. Tanks tank, damage dealers do damage, and healers all heal, and they’re ALL the same now. A Paladin can now out damage a Rogue, and Warriors were the top damage class on 90% of the fights in Cata.

The only thing yelling and whining will do is make every class more and more the same and less and less interesting. Players cause this and they always start with the stealth classes. You can look at any MMO since World of Warcraft that had a stealth class that was great in Beta, and slowly became useless once it was released. Witch Elves in Warhammer, Rogues in Rift, Assassins in Aion, Operatives / Scoundrels in Star Wars, and now, Thieves in Guild Wars 2. Every single time these classes got picked on by the whinny players, they got the nerf bat, and people left. The ones that held on got bored and tired over time, and they left. Then players started getting bored not having squishy weak kitten stealth classes to kill and they got bored and left. Then the game died. It’s like a neverending MMO plague that has been eating away at every MMO, even World of Warcraft until the gamers get their way, the real players leave and the game dies.

You know the biggest problem with the stealth classes, and lets talk Thief here specfically. It’s a skill based class. The glass cannon Thief is the easiest to kill and requires the most skill of any class in the game. One CC, one small mistake, one cooldown blown at the wrong time and you’re dead. And because this class takes more skill to use correctly than the average keyboard turning couch mummy, they won’t use the class but will do everything they can to get it nerfed down to a point where even a blind bird dog could beat them. They also won’t take the time to ask somebody who may be a Thief, like a friend, a random whisper to a Thief in game to ask for tips, to maybe meet them in a sPvP game and practice fighting them. They won’t LEARN to deal with the class and would rather come straight here, whine, cry, moan and scream how OP the class is, when in reality, every class can be OP if you see them with such clouded minds.

Since there is so much imbalance all over the place, why didn’t they actually implement an Alliance system where the two weaker servers joined together against the one running away with everything? I say a system so that you could all communicate in chat, you wouldn’t damage each other with skills or siege, etc, and would at least help to even the scores up a little bit. After the two guilds closed in by 10 or 20k of the leader, the Alliance would automatically disband and split the ownership of what the two together had taken between them evenly and warp the two sides back to their borderland waypoint.

I think a true Alliance type system would really change things up and wouldn’t really let just one server run away with all the points and ruin everybody’s time, even with people server hopping to the winning side all the time. I’d thought I’d heard they were supposed to actually add a way to ally with the other other losing server like this to begin with. Maybe I’m thinking of something else. What would you think of something like this? Crazy thinking? Useful? More fun than what we have right now? Cookies?

I gnerally go with the Wild Bill spec which is Pistol / Dagger+Shortbow. The Build is:

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mckMzc0z0MMxvMMMxvMx0GG0mRboscR

And here’s a link to the guy doing PvP with it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnqE7xnqsyI&list=PLdRu-1piROblxmQL9HcyqJKzgITtf9TTg&index=1&feature=plpp_video

It’s not a fast killing build, but it’s not really slow either. You can swap out traits all over the place depending on what you’re doing. It’s mainly a PvP spec build for 3+ people at once (I’ve done 2 at once a couple times so far learning the build). You can take a lot of punishment and can evade for a very long time. It’s ranged, the bleeds and poison hit for a lot of damage and you have full stealth abilities for escapes. If you want fast killing with less dying, Sword is probably the way to go, but for a more tanky type Thief that can solo just about anything (use Thieves Guild as your Elite), give this one a try.