DD offers CD reduction on physical skills, besides they are already on pretty low CD
There’s CD reduction on most skill types now. It doesn’t mean improvisation is incompatible with them.
Either we’re faced with a nerf to how effective improvisation is now, or a trait that is simply incompatible with a whole set of skills.
I’m under the assumption that Physical skills will be added to the “list” of skill types that Improvisation will refresh. That will split it into 6 categories and make it even less likely that it will benefit one of the skill types you’re currently using.
Improvisation has always been annoyingly RNG-oriented, but this is pretty much the final straw. It needs to change to be something that is reliably useful instead of staggeringly awesome when you get lucky and completely useless when you don’t.
The problem is that any reliable way of refreshing a specific skill is going to result in some ridiculous combos. Perhaps some way to reduce the cooldown of all your skills by a percentage. Or maybe just rework the trait altogether.
another way would be changing skill 2 replacing physical projectile with a new blast finisher allow thief to combo in to cloak getting all his healing trait bonus off. you could lower the range of skill to like 200
The problem with this is two-fold:
- - Buffing pistol mainhand or offhand skils will not result in P/P being popular, it’ll just result in more people using P/x or x/P and continuing to ignore P/P. Half of P/P’s current problem is that there’s nothing it can do that other builds can’t do better.
- - Your proposition basically amounts to making P/P into a stealth/condition heavy build similar to P/D. Except the /p offhand doesn’t support this at all, and it takes away everything unique about P/P in the first place.
To make P/P viable, it needs to be given a viable and desirable niche, not made into a weak version of an existing build. This means single skill changes aren’t going to work (unless there are some huge changes to #3), the entire synergy of the P/P set needs to be looked at in the context of all five skills as well as supporting traits.
Even if PW is unrooted, it still does less damage then autoattack and does not apply weakness and cripple.
SoM is playable for leveling actually… just once you get 80 it doesn’t heal enough to be useful.
true but i dont consider lvling a “viability” variable. i like the evades on PW….i think thats a decent trade off for weakness/cripple. really u can spam 5 PW in a row before you run out of energy ….. if its unrooted atleast ur not a sitting duck….also needs the dmg reduction taken off from the huge nerf a long time ago. i think sword attack auto attack should also be about 20% faster. its way to slow right now. if it were faster i think it would help us make a viable zerg build.
idea IF 20% faster auto attack and unrooted PW.
sigil of rage(quickness on crit)
rage trait(quickness on crit)
roll for init(6 init 3/4 evade)
Haste(stun break + quickness)
Sigil of paralyzer (15% increased time)
sleight of hand
long reach
bountiful theft
mug
inifl signet
assassins signet
20% recharge on signets and 2 init per
Signet of malice
executioner
7% chance for crit
This is a classic case of going by how things “feel” instead of the numbers. Sword auto attack is already one of the thief’s best damage abilities. It might “feel” slow because you’re used to dagger auto attack, but it matches dagger auto’s damage while having AE capability and debilitating conditions. Furthermore, Sigil of Rage is pretty terrible unless you’ve got strict control of combat uptime that allows you to fight in short bursts with long periods of recovery. These are the same ideas that were brought up shortly after release, but quickly dispelled as people came to understood how the game worked beyond how things “felt” at face value.
SoM is a great heal. The three thief heals are pretty well balanced as a whole, they’ve each got their own synergies, weaknesses, and strengths.
The main problem is one of perception. Namely, the majority of thieves stick to a single archetype play style (heavy stealth high-offense “assassin”). This desire to play the thief one particular way versus the myriad of options means that their analysis of what constitutes a good ability is entirely flavored by its relevance to their particular playstyle.
In short, SoM is extremely bad at filling the role HiS fills, and that is a good thing. HiS is great at what it does, there isn’t a need to reduce the viability of other thief playstyles in order to support what is inarguably the most popular one.
If you approach every situation with the idea that you’re already >15 points deep in shadow arts and using full ‘zerker gear, of course skills aren’t going to make sense to you.
What SoM does have going for it, if you’re willing to look beyond the assassin archetype:
-Sustainability far exceeding any other heal, particularly if you have the toughness/healing power to back it up.
-Fastest CD, particularly with signet traits, allowing it to be used for “on heal” activations
-Signet synergy traits, making it play nice with things like SoA and therefore Acrobatics as a whole
-Great AE potential, particularly with things like dodgetrops (up to 2000~ HP healed per dodge), Choking Gas, and Sigils of Fire.
SoM already got a boost a little while ago, and the kind of build the OP speculates about is indeed possible, just not popular. Frankly, another 100 % boost would break it.
(edited by Tulisin.6945)
yes unload does a lot of damage(i think people are underestimating how hard this can hit) , but is that’s not enough to carry the set imo.
They really aren’t underestimating it. This thread pops up literally once a week. Someone claims: “Guys, guys, guys, I just discovered Unload is MASSIVE DAMAGE!”
Unload is a relatively bad damage skill that puts out high numbers because it is an approximately ten year long channel skill. People see big numbers, assume that means it is actually doing good DPS (the only metric of damage that actually matters), and come to the forums to post this wonderful discovery.
Now, I absolutely agree with OP that this is a fun build, that Ricochet has helped it become better, that it is low effort, and that Unload is awesome for hit volume (thereby awesome for procs). However, Unload is still not a good damage skill in the grand scheme of things.
For PvE (dungeons) where would you say a good balance between crit / crit dmg / vit / toughness and power could be found? For a mediocre skill player (such as myself) who is still not able to dodge enough?
Thank you.
TBH, if you’re going to take the damage/utility/mobility hit of using P/P (and using pistols does indeed make you worse at all three of those things than most builds), at least take some emphasis off survivability stats. If you’re going to sit at 900 range and shoot things in PvE, there’s no need to load up on toughness/vit.
(edited by Tulisin.6945)
Case 2 – ANet doesn’t understand this. This means that they are clueless, don’t listen to feedback and operate in a moron-like vacuum. This scares me.
I have to agree that this is by far the most frustrating aspect of the recent changes. They demonstrate that, while ANet may perceive some issues, they don’t really understand the source of those issues.
Underwater combat for thieves is another example. Water combat as a thief, since release, has been terrible in every way. Most utilities don’t work under water, thieves cannot leverage their mobility nor stealth. However, spear #3/5 allowed thieves to function under water, albiet in a limited capacity, for PvE and holding in place in PvP. Doesn’t mean thief water combat was good, just that it was viable enough to get by on two broken skills. ANet obviously recognized both of these issues. The fix, however, makes no sense. They removed the only viable under water skills and boosted stealth attacks in an environment where stealth is nearly unachievable. The end result being that thieves are still terrible at water combat, it is still boring, and now there’s not even a stop-gap solution. They didn’t even simply nerf the water skills for PvP (where they were causing issues in hotjoin water matches), opting instead to destroy thief water PvE as well.
I just hope they never make an underwater-heavy combat dungeon.
Do people really not understand the rule 1. of strategy? In order to win, you attack the strongest, as soon as possible, in order to become the strongest, or risk them swallow smaller competition and grow so much, you will never reach them. That is the no1. reason of the unbalanced match results.
Here’s the thing: WvW doesn’t really incentivize being in first place. The actual reward schema for WvW has very little to do with mastering your tier, and even less to do with moving up a tier. For most people, farming the weak server is more fun than banding together with it (thus reducing available targets), and perhaps more importantly in the context of GW2 it is more rewarding. First place doesn’t get anything but a few small server-wide benefits that end as soon as the match does. Most WvW rewards are at the personal level, and at the personal level you get more rank and more loot taking the easy path.
This is why most MMO devs refuse to release class definitions. Professions are dynamic, and the goalposts for success in their balance are constantly changing. The second you release an actual statement that statement is used as gospel forever. Anything within that statement must be adhered to strictly, and anything outside that statement is clearly unintentional and should be changed.
They just outlined what they wanted the Thief to be.
If they want to make every profession feel different, they HAVE to outline the feature of each profession and focus to archieve balance around those guidelines.
If you don’t, you’ll end to have every profession to feel the same. Of course there will be balance, but then it will feel extremely boring.
They do have to outline it, but they should do it internally, like most dev teams. Releasing profession definitions has never not been a terrible idea in the long term.
“Thieves are the masters of mobility, stealth and high single target damage. They can be very fragile if you counter their stealth with area of effects or large stacks of conditions, but they trade this fragility in order to have some of the highest burst damage in the game. They are able to help allies through traps, venoms and the mobility to flank most encounters.”
Design concept of thieves according to ANet. (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-December-14-2012/first#post999247)
I can’t see where ArenaNet said that Thief is supposed to be good at long range.
In that topic there are also listed which professions are supposed to be effective at long range but, as you can see, thief is not one of those.
This is why most MMO devs refuse to release class definitions. Professions are dynamic, and the goalposts for success in their balance are constantly changing. The second you release an actual statement that statement is used as gospel forever. Anything within that statement must be adhered to strictly, and anything outside that statement is clearly unintentional and should be changed.
Secondly, reality check: Procs trigger and your combat log records hit like any other hit in the game. The constant arguments “I can’t tell if I’m hitting” and “You can’t use ranged attacks against stealthed targets” go to show that a large portion of people having issues with stealth do not understand how to play GW2.
Right… So, aside from the second swing of your weapon in the auto-attack (if there is one, depending on the weapon and class) or looking at your combat log and hoping to catch a glimpse of some damage against an opponent that very likely isn’t there, how are people supposed to know they just hit someone that’s Stealthed? And ranged attacks? Again, how to you target something that can not be targeted, and has the highest mobility in the game?
Again, nothing that anyone does can remove an enemy from Stealth once they have gone into it. Once there, the Thief is basically 1 or 2 Infiltrator’s Arrow shots away from running off and ‘Derp! Fight reset! Hur hur!’
Again, you don’t, aside from a very few skills GW2 doesn’t require a target to attack. You use your screen to aim ranged attacks. The fact that a large portion of the community is still 100 % reliant on tab-locked autotargets in a combat system that doesn’t require them shows that the issue is much less “X profession is good” and much more “I don’t want to learn how to play”. It’d be akin to someone saying “I don’t want to use dodge” and then complaining that they’re getting destroyed. If you don’t use the tools at your disposal, and refuse to learn how to do so, you have no ground to stand on.
You get to the core of the issue in your second paragraph here though. Infiltrator’s Arrow, while a great example, could be replaced with any type of thief mobility advantage. The important think to note here, though is that those mobility advantages do not require stealth to use. Stealth gets blamed for thieves escaping whenever it is used, even though the real culprit to thief escapes is almost always mobility. The fact is that stealth has very little to do with whether you’ll catch a thief or not. Having played a non-stealthing thief quite a bit myself, if I have the mobility advantage there’s still no chance that I’m going to be caught. Having played high-mobility professions against stealth heavy thieves that don’t have a mobility advantage, it isn’t difficult to track, down, and kill them regardless of stealth.
Most stealth threads devolve into this issue: People are really annoyed that thieves are hard to catch, but don’t understand that thieves escape due to mobility, not stealth. What you really want is thieves to be slower and less mobile, not less stealthy.
ITT: People still fail to understand that the major drawback to stealth is the combat downtime. Thieves are trading the ability to attack for the ability to not be seen, essentially self-dazing for the duration they want to remain hidden. That is huge, and the main reason why “go attack them why they’re stealthed” is the best and most viable counter. A large majority of the population now, a year after release, still doesn’t even bother to try exploiting stealth’s greatest drawback, and simply gives thieves free un-pressured downtime. Thieves don’t steal their kills, they’re handed them on a silver platter by players that react to stealth like NPCs (“Welp, he’s gone, better wander off now…”).
Right… I keep hearing this argument.
‘Attack the invisible guy you can’t see and have no idea where he is! Just attack him!’
‘Throw down AoE and hopefully you’ll hit him!’
Reality check. Even if you do hit him you aren’t likely to drop him. Even better, you aren’t even sure you hit him, because nothing breaks a Thief out of Stealth.
But its okay… Just keep attacking the invisible guy…
Firstly, I didn’t say to throw down AE and there’s a good reason why: AE is great for movement control, but it is an abysmal way to pressure a stealthed target. Anyone who is suggesting “use AE” as a way to kill stealthed targets is perpetuating a very ineffective tactic. If your response to losing your targets is to throw circles all over the ground then you need to stop, and you need to tell your misinformed friend to stop too.
Secondly, reality check: Procs trigger and your combat log records hit like any other hit in the game. The constant arguments “I can’t tell if I’m hitting” and “You can’t use ranged attacks against stealthed targets” go to show that a large portion of people having issues with stealth do not understand how to play GW2.
As for where to attack, that onus is entirely on your skill as a player. Good players anticipate where the thief will be and strike there, good thieves will anticipate that their opponents will try to do that and will move deceptively in stealth. The good news for you as someone trying to kill a thief is that most thieves are terrible and have never learned how to move properly in stealth (because, as mentioned, nobody actually pressures them, they just wander off). If you anticipate the thief is going to remain on the offense, they’re probably making a beeline for a spot behind you so they can reinitiate. If you anticipate that the thief is trying to escape, they’re probably beelining towards friendly territory directly away from you. It only takes one or two successful strikes to completely obliterate any advantage stealth has given the thief, they’ve traded combat uptime for effectively nothing.
The counter to stealth is dynamic-behavioral, yet people continue to request a mechanical counter to a skill that is not mechanically-based.
The only stealth skill that has an actual counter is Shadow Refuge, every other stealth skill that’s available to the Mesmer and Thief has absolutely no drawbacks or counter.
ITT: People still fail to understand that the major drawback to stealth is the combat downtime. Thieves are trading the ability to attack for the ability to not be seen, essentially self-dazing for the duration they want to remain hidden. That is huge, and the main reason why “go attack them why they’re stealthed” is the best and most viable counter. A large majority of the population now, a year after release, still doesn’t even bother to try exploiting stealth’s greatest drawback, and simply gives thieves free un-pressured downtime. Thieves don’t steal their kills, they’re handed them on a silver platter by players that react to stealth like NPCs (“Welp, he’s gone, better wander off now…”).
Want to make pistol all-conditional? Give Body Shot confusion and the dual skills Burning. A major weakness of current thief condition builds is that they rely far too heavily on bleed. And it makes me sad to see high-condition damage/duration thieves with no way to apply that sweet sweet burn pain.
… (free/easy stealth+benefits if there’s anyone around to revive). …
It’s two seconds, of stealth, 3 when traited in SA, wow.
3s is nothing to sneeze at, and brings a lot of benefits with traits. Even 2s is more than enough to get all of the “enter into stealth” benefits and exit stealth with an attack. You can try to downplay it, but another tool to access stealth whenever there’s a downed ally is pretty powerful, especially for zero initiative and no burned utilities.
I don’t necessarily believe it is overpowered, but I’m almost 100 % sure it won’t be used like the devs are thinking it will, and will generate a lot of community angst to pile on top of what thieves get already.
My problem with it is that it is likely intended to support the unpopular “combat medic” style of thief play. While it is great that they’re expanding on that role, most thieves will likely just use it for offense (free/easy stealth+benefits if there’s anyone around to revive). It’ll create an even larger community backlash because thieves will now benefit from their allies being downed and instead of trying to get them up will use this trait to achieve more burst damage.
At the end of the day, it is going to end up kitten ing everyone off and getting nerfed in a couple months because the developers didn’t anticipate how the tools they gave out would be used.
See here (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Thief-is-not-a-Thief/first#post2187795) for some venom ideas that could actually become reality if the structure of venom/trait synergy was changed. At the very least, venom share could be offloaded to an elite.
Traits are the main problem that venoms have currently. Venom traits should be removed, not added. Venoms will never be useful to a majority of thieves when they’re balanced around taking every venom trait and building around them. I’d rather see malleable and useful venoms that every thief can integrate into their playstyle than a single viable venom build that loads up on them while everyone else ignores them.
if 6 people were attacking a boss it would outdamage. the total dmg is +150 ( 6 players hitting a mob with 25% vuln)
Here’s the problem with this assertion: Even if we assume the thief can maintain 100 % uptime on the 25 stacks, the thieves’ DPS will be substantially lowered (due to time/initiative investment and the traits needed to run the build in the first place). Now, if we assume an even distribution of DPS (20 % from each player), this seems like a worthwhile tradeoff. However, most groups with (good) thieves don’t have an even DPS distribution, the thief should be doing more than their share of damage, which means giving up that damage in return to buff the group is an even poorer choice.
Vulnerability can be an asset at the group level, but not when it requires a significant investment to stack. Passive vuln procs? Great. Giving up an actual DPS profession to boost everyone else isn’t going to work well.
still a useless skill unles like tulisin said u are in a dungeon /champ etc and have 5 people and ur job is to stack vulnerability and have 100% condition duration.
I said quite the opposite. Vulnerability is usually not worth using like that in a 5-person scenario. The group would be better off if the Body Shot spamming thief was just doing actual thief damage. Proc Vulnerability is a different beast, and it helps, but you probably won’t be able to tell the difference unless you have an insanely long boss fight.
I believe they’re real, but are most likely test server patch notes. These implementations need plenty of testing before they’d be ready to hit live.
Sundering strikes: Vulnerability caused by this trait has been increased from 5 seconds to 10 seconds.
It looks like ANet wants to replace thieves’ defensive utility via weakness with offensive utility via Vulnerability. This is a good trait, but Vulnerability is still pretty bad.oO?
Why that? Vulnerability is the BEST Debuff in PvE… If we can hold around 10 stacks with CnD and Sundering strikes it’s pretty good. Now we only need to stack might with our autoattack :P
Depends on the cost of applying the vulnerability. Vuln is only heavily useful in PvE situations where the number of players is large enough to benefit from applying the vulnerability but not large enough to max it out. For stuff like Body Shot, the vulnerability was too expensive DPS-wise to make it worthwhile at the 5-man level, so the only place Body Shot was good was open-world events that had 10~ people, but no more or less. Proc vulnerability is significantly less costly, but carries the same issues of only being truly worthwhile in a small number of situations.
That isn’t even accounting for the massive effectiveness nosedive vulnerability takes if some of the people attacking the mob want to use condition-based damage. Vulnerability is supposed to be a support condition, but fails in so many ways at playing nice with others.
Panic Strike: This trait’s cooldown has been reduced from 60 seconds to 30.
As befitting a grandmaster trait, this will see a lot more play now
Lotus Poison: Increased weakness duration to 4 seconds, but it can only apply once every 20 seconds per target.
Woo, more weakness nerfs, I like how they tried to play is as a buff though. This utterly destroys stacking weakness via poison fields and the like.
Shadow Arts
Last Refuge: The cooldown of this trait has been reduced from 90 seconds to 60.
Slowed Pulse: The effect of this trait now occurs if you have 2 or more stacks of bleeding.
As above, they failed to miss why people hate these passive unreliable traits.
Shadow Protector: This trait has been changed to apply 10 seconds of regeneration when you stealth them. This effect will not occur if the ally already has regeneration on them.
This is some neat defensive utility, it might see some play in PvE now
Trickery
Merciful Ambush: This trait now grants 2 seconds of stealth to you and your ally when beginning a revive.
A much better implementation of the combat medic thief motif. The previous implementation was just silly. That said, I’m a little worried thieves will just use this to start reviving an ally and then turn around and use the stealth offensively, which might cause this to get nerfed back down.
Long Reach: This trait now increases the range of Steal to 1500, up from 1200.
An attempt to make up for neutering thief range maybe? If Steal had shadow return it’d make more sense
Ricochet: The chance to bounce for this trait has been increased from 25% to 50%.
Good try, still won’t fix pistols, ANet still doesn’t understand why they’re bad
Sleight of Hand: In addition to dazing your target, this trait now reduces the recharge of Steal by an additional 20%.
Another grandmaster trait getting the love it really needs, Trickery may be worth maxing more often now
Instinctual Response: This trait now properly blinds enemies struck by the feathers. Increased radius from 120 to 180.
Bugfix mostly, but this is another example of a defensive proc that is just unreliable. Maybe if thieves actually had obviously-missing blind synergy traits…
All in all? Meh, this is a pretty bad round of nerfs for thieves targeted at reducing thief utility and underwater effectiveness (which is beating a dead horse)
Skale Venom: Replaced Weakness with Torment.
On one hand, cool, I hope Torment is useful. On the other hand, this is part of an overall initiative to reduce one of the only viable utilities thieves can bring to the table (weakness), as you’ll see below.
Dancing Dagger: Reduced initiative cost to 3.
This should have happened when DD got a massive damage nerf. It might actually get used again, but this change taking >6 months is pathetic.
Shadow Return (infiltrator strike toggle): This skill is no longer a stun breaker.
This was a great thief asset and it’ll be sad to see it go, it encouraged skill-based play and access to a stunbreak on demand gave thieves a lot of options and set them apart from most professions
Withdraw: Travel distance cut in half underwater to match the land distance.
Why? Every other skill under water throws PCs and NPCs halfway across a lake and way out of the thief’s pathetic ability to manage mobility and chase under water. Just another symptom of ANet not understanding how bad water combat currently is.
Deadly Strike: Reduced weakness duration to 3 seconds.
Seems to contradict above patch note? I believe it though, as part of the mentioned initiative to rid thieves of one of their only useful utilities (longterm weakness)
Crippling Strike: This ability no long applies weakness.
Rusty Scrap Strike: Reduced weakness duration to 8 seconds.
Throw Scale: Reduced weakness duration to 6 seconds.
Thieves apparently shouldn’t be able to contribute utility via conditions. In PvE Defiant already mostly wrecked condition utility, but removing weakness should seal the deal.
Acrobatics
Assassin’s Retreat: This trait now grants 10 seconds of swiftness when you kill a foe. This effect has a 5 second internal cooldown.
Woo, still useless.
Pain Response: This cooldown of this effect has been reduced from 45 seconds to 30.
Hard to Catch: The cooldown of this effect has been reduced from 60 seconds to 30.
The problem with these kind of traits isn’t the cooldown, it is the fact that they’re utterly unreliable
Critical Strikes
Furious Retaliation: This trait now grants 10 seconds of fury when striking a target that is below 50% health. This effect can only occur once every 30 seconds.
*A small buff and mechanical change, but Critical Strikes wasn’t exactly lacking in good damage traits. With 100 % Fury duration this one trait can now manage 66 % uptime on Fury, which is pretty neat.
Signets of Power: This 5 stacks of might that this trait grants has been increased to 10 seconds.
This is a very nice change because of how the double duration will by multiplicatively affected by boon duration. This opens up some more Acrobatics+Signet synergy that I’ll be interested to see people use.
Deadly Arts
Corrosive Traps. This trait now 5 stacks of vulnerability for 8 seconds, up from 5.
Looks like a positive change but is actually pretty bad for thieves. The more trap usefulness is offloaded onto traits, the more traps will be terrible unless heavily traited. This is pushing traps the way of venoms (terrible unless you build around them) and that is bad for the profession as a while. Traps need to be fixed first.
Sundering strikes: Vulnerability caused by this trait has been increased from 5 seconds to 10 seconds.
It looks like ANet wants to replace thieves’ defensive utility via weakness with offensive utility via Vulnerability. This is a good trait, but Vulnerability is still pretty bad.
Lotus Strike: Poison duration increased form 2s to 4s.
Not a bad change, but an obvious attempt to throw dagger auto a tiny bone to make it better DPS than sword auto since it is single-target, too bad most thieves using dagger auto don’t care about conditions
Shadow Trap: Increased recharge to 45 seconds.
Destroy Shadow Trap: This ability now teleports the thief back to the trap location when it is destroyed. Added range skill facts. This skill now breaks stuns.
Shadow Pursuit: This ability now grants fury and 10 stacks of might for 5 seconds along with stealth when used to teleport to the enemy who triggered Shadow Trap. This ability now breaks stuns.
A neat set of changes to the only trap that was already sort of useful. This trap may actually find its way onto more people’s skill bars now. I do wish the boons were AE shared with nearby allies though, thieves could use the utility
Death Blossom: Now costs 4 initiative.
ANet made thieves, but nature, have a spammy playstyle by allowing them to repeatedly use the best skill for the situation. ANet continues to hunt down and destroy any instance wherein the thief does spam a certain skill. I understand they don’t like the dynamic of it, but the entire thief profession needs to be rebalanced around the fact that ANet apparently wants thieves to cycle through different skills despite the entirety of thief mechanics not supporting that.
Body Shot: Aftercast reduced by .4s. Decreased Vuln duratrion to 3s. Increaased to 10 stacks fo Vuln.
Cool, but this isn’t going to fix Body Shot. The problem with Body Shot is that Vulnerability is terrible, not that Body Shot doesn’t apply it well enough.
Pistol Whip: Decreased the time between the sstun and the sword flurry.
Will hopefully bring PW more firmly above auto attack in DPS and allow more strikes with PW to actually land, but I don’t see it really changing the role of the skill or how popular it is. PW’s mobility tradeoff is simply too great in most situations (it’ll continue to be good for stuff like PvE and attacking groups of revivers).
Scorpion Wire: Decreased aftercast by .2 seconds. Reduced cooldown to 20s.
This is what Scorpion Wire needed. It is a decent utility and fits the profession very well, but it needs to be a frequently usable tool and the current cooldown doesn’t support that
Signet of Malice: Increased the base heal by 33% of the passive ability.
This is pretty awesome. SoM was already pretty good and a 33 % boost will be welcome. Thief heals are highly situational and SoM catches a lot of flak for being terrible in the same situations the other heals are good in. I think this creates some misplaced pressure to boost SoM so it is equally viable to, say, Hide in Shadows in every situation, which is silly. SoM will continue to excel where it did before, but this boost won’t make it any more viable where it was previously bad.
Steal: Recharge reduced to 35.
Pretty significant, especially coupled with the Trickery trait changes farther down. This is likely only happening because of the Mug nerf transitioning Steal from something so many thieves used for burst damage to a much more utility-heavy skill. Low-CD Mug will actually give thieves a good amount of staying power.
Cluster Bomb range set to 900 from 1200.
I guess ANet really really doesn’t want thieves to be able to reach out and touch people at 1200 range. It’ll mostly hurt siege combat, I suppose.
Larcenous Strike: Initiative cost increased to 2.
This should probably have been expected, LS is amazingly cheap at 1 initiative. I’d like to see the time LS is available to be used extended a bit though.
Nine tail strike: 3 initiative to 5
Shadow assault: 5 initiative to 7
Woo, water combat nerfs to the only part of water combat that isn’t crazily underpowered for thieves. This is a bit infuriating, thieves went from having almost no water combat options, all of which were terrible and boring, to having zero water combat options. Fix thief utilities under water so thieves aren’t hamstringed and useless. Someone probably complained about these two skills in terms of PvP and ANet completely ignored how utterly bad water combat is for thieves when they decided to “fix” them.
The ripper: 5 seconds of bleed – > 7 s of bleed
Deadly Strike: Weakness duration 4s – 5 s, damage increased from 1 to 1.2
Yeah, that’ll help, especially considering there’s almost no way to get into stealth under water and use these skills. See above. If these patch notes are real then ANet is blatantly ignoring how thieves actually function under water.
ITT: Thieves who only know how to use a single stealth-heavy playstyle.
Having run Might-based builds quite a bit, I favor Trickery hugely over Shadow Arts. Trickery V lets you leverage that boon duration/Might even more. Furthermore, condition damage is very important for getting the most out of Might stacks, and Trickery lets you further boost that condition damage as well as letting you pick up dodgetrops to apply bleeds with your frequent dodging.
If you want to push even more Might, since you should be running both Signet of Agility and Signet of Malice (due to dodgetrops) you can pick up Signets of Power from Critical Strikes for massive burst Might whenever you want it.
All of the people straight-up ignoring 50 % of the benefit of Might by only looking at the power-based benefits are probably not the type that’ll most benefit from a Might-heavy build anyways.
tl;dr – Shadow Arts doesn’t do Might particularly well, but if you’re already running a stealth-heavy build and want to integrate Might it can work.
Permastealth is the stupiest excuse someone can say about thiefs. If he’s permastealth what harm can he do? Only if he attacks you, if so he’s not permastealth anymore. Even if he CD over and over you stil can see him and counter that, if you can’t you just need more practice, cuz its easy. Whiners don’t win, they whine.
It is not the harm it does, it is the unfairness of it all that is the issue. You cannot target what you cannot see, it’s the laws of nature.
You don’t need a target to kill thieves, it is “the laws of nature”. Failure to understand GW2’s combat mechanics does not an overpowered stealth make.
Take personal responsibility for your unwillingness to learn how to fight in GW2 and make the argument that “thieves require us to use a broader skill set than we’re used to” and you’ve at least got a valid point. If you want thieves nerfed on the basis of them making the game too complicated for casual players you might get more support.
I will, however, point out that complaining that thieves broke your tab-target is like coming from an MMO without dodge, refusing to learn how to dodge, and then complaining that you’re getting destroyed by everything. Ignore mechanics (like learning how to aim) at your own risk, but it isn’t the fault of the profession in question.
We weren’t able to finish them. I am sure we several times downed one of them in stealth, but the other one easily could rez the downed one without us noticing.
When you’re getting hits, just keep smacking the same spot. I can outdamage someone reviving pretty easily while solo, especially when they’re reviving a low-HP thief. There’s no excuse for letting them revive eachother, downed or not.
The main problem that I see is target lock break with every stealth and shadow return, with only 3 secs of reveal most people can’t re-acquire target and use a skill other than auto attack. Melee types can’t use gap closers without target and ranged atks also require a target. I think this and the reveal not activating on a miss or blocked attack are main problems…….. you would see alot less GC thieves with these implemented.
No, no they do not. Very few attacks in GW2 require a target. Most of the complaints about thieves are because there’s a large portion of the community that still doesn’t understand that GW2 combat is not target-based, and most abilities can be (and should be, in many situations) free-aimed.
But, again, the “melee can’t close the gap” is an issue of mobility, not one of stealth. When I’m playing a profession that is more mobile than a given thief, I can and do catch them with melee.
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Well, if I can without much trouble down a thief in 1v1, I should be able to down him in a 10v1 (with the 10 on my side of course) too, wouldn’t i?
You’d think so, but the difference is that it is usually more like 10v5+ than 10v1. In a target rich environment people’s short attention spans will usually cause them to immediately forget a 10 % HP thief who has stealthed and focus on something else.
Once again this really has very little to do with the thief though. Terrible thieves survive very bad odds all the time because players continue to act like NPCs and forget what they were doing the second they don’t have a locked target.
As a result of never being pressured in stealth, many thieves never even bother to learn proper deception meta when moving in stealth. The end result? A majority of thieves still move incredibly predictably in stealth. Why not? They’ve never had to learn anything else, since people just give up when they can’t see the thief anymore.
“Mitigation” is the exact opposite of what stealth does. On the mitigation/avoidance defensive scale stealth is an example of a mechanic that is 100 % avoidance, 0 % mitigation. Attacks do 100 % of their regular damage to stealthed targets, and this is something so many people, almost a year after the game has come out, still forget. Your very use of the word belies the idea that you think you can’t damage stealthed targets, and probably stop trying as soon as they stealth. When you give up attacking because you lost your locked-on target and the thief uses that advantage it isn’t because the thief is good or overpowered, it is because you are terrible.
There are good thieves out there, but the majority of the ones people complain about don’t even know how to play well and just win fights because their opponents essentially shrug and give up as soon as they don’t have a locked-on target. I get the majority of my downs (and subsequent kills) on thieves while those thieves are stealthed. Tracking and killing a stealthed target is not particularly hard, especially since many thieves drop giant red combo fields to go into stealth.
You need a mobility advantage, though, if the thief is more mobile than you then you aren’t going to catch them, stealth or not. This is the key point though: if you’re less mobile than the thief the fact that they escaped is due to mobility, not stealth.
The fact is that “stealth thief” has received nerfs every couple weeks for the past year, and the complaints about them haven’t stopped. That is because the nerfs are mechanical, and the complaints are social-dynamic. No amount of nerfs to the mechanic are ever going to change the fact that a large portion of the community just plain doesn’t want to learn how to play effectively (less reliance on tab-targeting, mainly, learning how to free-aim attacks and hunt stealthed targets). Getting killed by the weakest most nerfed stealthed thief in the world is still going to draw some complaints from people because they feel helpless and unable to defend themselves against a low-feedback combat mechanic. It is somewhat analogous to the nerfing of sniping weapons in FPS, no matter how much you nerf the mechanical aspects (ROF, damage, etc), anyone who manages to die to it will still complain because they didn’t feel like they could’ve done anything to survive (despite that not being true, in regards to GW2 stealth combat and FPS sniping both).
tl;dr – Thieves get a +10 bonus on rolls vs. incompetence, and it makes them seem godly in WvW.
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Some of us just feel that it is a crappy mechanic that rewards poor play and spamming abilities.
Welcome to playing a thief. Every other profession has cooldown weapon skills that do a bit of damage + miscellaneous other stuff. They’re going to use all their skills, they’re going to get damage from each one as well as all sorts of utility. Thief skills, due to the way initiative works, are very quickly segmented into specific roles and spammed to effect whichever role needs doing at the time. As a result, thieves can’t really pull much utility while doing damage and vice versa. This has very little to do with stealth mechanics and everything to do with thief weapon skills being designed much differently from every other profession.
With skill choice pretty much thrown out the window, thieves can feel like they’re spammy and have “poor play”, but “good play” simply has to be represented by timing, positioning, and initiative management instead.
Acrobatics is a different defensive doctrine than stealth-based defense. Your stealth-inducing utilities cease to be your “best utilities” when you’re relying on dodge for offense and defense instead of stealth. By leaning heavily on stealth via utilities and investing in Shadow Arts this fits more into the category of a hybridized build than something Acrobatics-based.
But a dodgeroll doesn’t hurt your enemy. + 2 initiative when entering stealth is not really defensive, it’s an offensive attribute which allows you to attack more often with Backstab.
I think Molch wanted to mention that you lose DPS with this method
It does if you’ve traited dodgetrops, one of the things I was advocating in the first place. You can also run food + Acrobatics + might duration rune synergy to get huge amounts of Might stacks via dodging. Dodge can absolutely be synergized into an offensive tool.
I’m not arguing that the build in this thread is bad. I’m sure it is quite effective, it just isn’t really the non-reliant-on-stealth build it claimed to be.
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-Thieves cant enter stealth while in combat unless using special utility skills with high CD
-Abilities that let you enter stealth while in combat, like cloak and dagger should let you enter stealth without the need to hit anyone
-Stealth has a longer CD
-All kind of damage and blocks should reveal the thief
-Reduce draastically the burst damage of abilities like backstab, its not balaced to practically OHKO someone from stealth, its OP.
-Stealth duration its increased 60%, so thieves have more chance of run or to do something else while in stealth.
In conclusion: Take away stealth as a combat asset and give thieves access to non-combat permastealth like most games.
It is easier to balance, I’ll give you that. It is also terrible, which is why GW2 was trying not to have it.
You’ve got some valid concerns, mainly in the area of TTK, but thieves have received plenty of nerfs in that area with little to compensate and they’re far from the only profession able to kill a no-defense opponent in less than three seconds. In June 2013 TTK remains an issue only in WvW, and even then only for people whose sole defensive consideration is “I sure hope no one attacks me while I go full-zerker”.
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The major adept traits in shadowarts are huge. CD reduction on my best utility? Anyday. And even with this build, you want to D/D almost every single boss in the game. Can’t do that without + 2 Ini on stealth.
Acrobatics is a different defensive doctrine than stealth-based defense. Your stealth-inducing utilities cease to be your “best utilities” when you’re relying on dodge for offense and defense instead of stealth. By leaning heavily on stealth via utilities and investing in Shadow Arts this fits more into the category of a hybridized build than something Acrobatics-based.
For acrobatics I actually prefer to forego Shadow Arts altogether and run Signet of Malice + Dodgetrops synergy from Trickery. Trickery also gets you all-around more initiative and more access to boons so you can utilize that boon duration from Acrobatics. I’m not a fan of doing Shadow Arts unless you’re going to do it right with x/D or D/P for heavy stealth.
Using Signet of Malice in this build instead of Hide In Shadows leaves you with only 1 way to remove conditions (Sig. of Agility). No thanks!
A good point, which is why Acrobatics-heavy builds tend to favor S/x to grant access to the additional condition removal. That said, the constant healing of properly synergized SoM makes most condition damage much less of an issue so you’d mostly be saving your condition removal for things like multi-stack Confusion.
The thesis of this post is that Acrobatics is an “alternative to traditional stealth based builds”, and this is very true, but the OP just spent 25 points in Acrobatics and then continues to rely on stealth for everything via heal/utilities.
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For acrobatics I actually prefer to forego Shadow Arts altogether and run Signet of Malice + Dodgetrops synergy from Trickery. Trickery also gets you all-around more initiative and more access to boons so you can utilize that boon duration from Acrobatics. I’m not a fan of doing Shadow Arts unless you’re going to do it right with x/D or D/P for heavy stealth.
Please keep in mind that it’s still pretty hard to see us, plus we would still be untargettable.
The problem is that “untargetable” is everything vs. unskilled opponents, and nearly nothing against skilled opponents. A lot of people still don’t know how to fight in GW2 without a locked target and that is the main reason stealth is considered so powerful. The change you propose would do little to fix the “issue” of stealth destroying poorly played opponents, but would make stealth useless against the people that already do well against it (those who know how to track, hit, and kill stealthed targets without a target lock).
I hope focus and other magic weapons stay out of the thief options. IMO, dark arts magic is the necro area…
From a lore point of view we use the same branch of magic used by Mesmers which is “denial” magic. I see no reason that we couldn’t get some sort of shadow step and stealth on an off-hand scepter, although it could be pretty OP with IS on main hand sword and a shadow step on off hand scepter… just a thought though.
TBH, I’m not sure what people think Shadow Refuge is if thieves don’t have some level of shadow magic manipulation. Some fun shadow magic stuff for a focus or sceptre could be:
-As mentioned above, a “Silence” field that doesn’t allow activation of utilities/non-main weapon skills inside of it.
-Location swap skill that switches the location of yourself and your target via shadowsteps.
-“Forced return” skill that has a 3-5 second countdown before shadowstepping your target to the location where they were when it was used.
-Offensive stealth ability that stealths your target while applying ticking blind, cripple, and heavy bleeding (would be particularly painful vs. other thieves by screwing their stealth rotation)
The Thieves are just handled rather poorly in general. Take Venoms for example.
Like you said, they’re terrible because they have to be balanced around the possibility that you can share them with several teammates.
A skill cannot be balanced around the assumption that you WILL have an optional trait; especially a 30 point one at the top of an indirectly related path like Shadow Arts.
If the trait is THAT strong, you need to either remove the trait or make it base-line.
Base-line Venomous Aura would go a long way toward making the Thief a less selfish class, anyway.
Absolutely, although I don’t necessarily agree that venomous aura should be a baseline, I think it’d work well as an elite (make basilisk a regular utility, it isn’t powerful enough any more to be an elite). Step one to decent venoms on all thieves is definitely nerfing the trait lines though. To truly give thieves a varied toolset I’d like to see venoms made into passive procs with their active effects being swaps between 2/3 effects.
I’m envisioning:
10 % base proc chance, 20-30s cooldown on proc, 15s cooldown on swap (modifiable by traits)
Drake Venoms:
-Ice Drake: As it is now (multiply duration by 3)
-Fire Drake: Applies burning
-Marsh Drake: Applies confusion
Reptile Venoms:
-Skale: As it is now (duration by 3)
-Basilisk: As it is now (same duration)
-Snake: Copy spider venom (duration by 3)
Leeching Venoms:
-Vigorous Venom: Steal 50 endurance (1 dodge) on proc
-Vampire Venom: Decent amount of life leech, the numbers would have to be worked out.
-Thievery Venom: Steals 1-2 boons, if target has no boons when it procs, grant 4 init.
Ambush Venoms:
-Devourer Venom: As it is now, double duration to account for two charges.
-Smokey Venom: 1/4s daze + blind on proc.
-Explosive Venom: Small DD + blast finisher.
New Elite: Venom share with the same effect as now, including forcing the effects to apply on your next attacks instead of being chance-based, which gives the elite a large amount of solo use as well by allowing a venom build to force-proc all of its (now useful) venoms immediately.
There, now venoms are useful, worth building around, but also not required to be an entire build to get use. They help every current build and give thieves access to more conditions and combat options via a unique mechanic. There’s also plenty of room for balanced traits to tweak them (X happens on venom type change, X faster venom proc recharge, X higher chance to proc).
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Signet of Shadows:
AOE blind signet YES!! Oh wait, just like the ele it’s tied to our movement speed. Meaning activating it makes us alot more likely to die in the long run. And no way to maintain passive benefits of signets on a thief….boo.
SoS is a poor combat skill in the hands of most thieves and if its passive is saving you from dying then your opponents are terrible anyways. Until thieves get more blind synergy (IE, some sort of trait that grants a debilitating condition application when blind is applied), this skill will continue to be treated like a mount, swapped in for long travel and swapped out for actual fights where short-term swiftness is king.
Signet of Agility:
Refilling endurance and curing a condition for nearby allies on a 30 second timer is actually kinda nice. Too bad the signet itself and the signet related traits are all offensively based and the active is supportive.
Here again is an example of a skill that already has excellent utility, is extremely flexible, and synergizes well with the rest of the thief toolset. Again you’re slamming it for not being “pure” enough in one direction or another. I don’t think you actually want a versatile set of skills.
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Just as the title says the Thief profession is not a thief, it’s an Assassin. I realize this is since it basically is the Assassin from the original Guild Wars but this is the source of most of it’s issues in Guild Wars 2.
Lets look at an overview of the two concepts:
1. Assassin is a person who sneaks in, kills 1 person or a few select people, and then either dies or escapes. It’s all about getting in, killing, and getting out.
2. A thief is someone of dubious origins who tends to do just about anything for money. This ranges from petty theft to assassination. Almost always in a bad situation thieves have become very adaptable and use any means they have to accomplish their goal and escape. This usually leaves them quick witted, acrobatic, dexterous, and able to improvise at will.
The thief fills both of these archetypes as well as a few others. A warrior isn’t just a gladiator or just a rifle-wielding footsoldier. A necromancer isn’t just a minion master or just a bloodmage. GW2 professions do not strictly follow a single archetype, the archetype they mimic is a product of build and play style. Similarly, a thief can fill the trickster archetype as well as the assassin, gunslinger, pirate, and duelist.
Your second definition of the thief is just as restrictive as the first and belies an idea that there is a “right” way to play a thief when really all of these archetypes should be supported.
That said, there’s nothing wrong with the assertion that some archetypes need improvement, and I agree that thieves could use some more utility.
Weapon Skills
Bubkiss, zero, nada. The only other class that does not have some sort of utility/supportive weapon is Engineer. They have a plethora of other utility/supportive options.
Body Shot, while absolutely terrible, can’t really be called anything other than a support weapon skill. Headshot is certainly pure utility, and quite powerful both in PvE (for quickly removing stacks of defiant), and PvP (for interrupting key abilities). Black Powder is an excellent example of a skill that offers incredible versality and utility (your key talking points) by having both defensive (via blind) and offensive (via using it as a combo field) attributes. Flanking Strike also offers thieves a cheap and effective way to strip boons, a valuable utility asset in PvE and PvP. I’d also argue that Choking Gas is most commonly employed as a utility skill in the sense that it mostly intended to spread debilitating conditions (poison + weakness via traits). I’d personally love to see some boon-stacking weapon skills, and I believe the reason they don’t exist is because of fears of thieves stacking up boons quickly through the initiative system.
You’re arguing in favor of thieves having adaptability and flexibility, yet you seem to want “pure” weapons that are full support or full offense.
Shadow Refuge: Would be a good support tool if not for it’s limitations. Placed mid battle without direct communication it’s just weak healing and a dark field. Allies will almost instantly break stealth or exit the area. Used most commonly as a selfish tool for the thief to stealth himself or stomp people. Sometimes used as a ghetto support tool to rez downed allies assuming they are not attacking. Will actually mess up other thieves by giving them revealed unexpectedly many times.
SR is easily one of the most versatile tools in the game, usable and useful at all skill levels for a variety of purposes. Marking one purpose as “ghetto” belies the idea that you believe there are very specific ways each skill should be used and seems to contradict your previous assertion that you want a versatile toolset. In short, you’re saying your way is the right way to play a thief again.
they nerfed pistol whip damage so now the auto attack can easily out damage pistol whip
This isn’t true, they’re roughly equal DPS with auto attack pulling slightly ahead, and can swap places depending on traits. I agree that PW needs some help in one way or another, but I keep watching this fish story get bigger and bigger. The fact is that PW has evade, hit volume, and interrupt while auto attack has conditions, mobility, and initiative efficiency. The damage difference is negligible on paper and mostly relies on whether you can keep the enemy in place for your channel with PW and whether you can land your third hit in auto chains (if you miss those, your DPS is terrible due to backloading).
The problem with P/P is that it lacks significant damage, lacks mobility, and (thanks to having to spend all of your initiative to do damage) lacks utility too. It isn’t good at anything, and almost everything it can actually do is done better by other weapon sets. You’re better off embracing the fact that you’re a thief and can dictate range with your melee sets than trying to make P/P work, especially since it is actually easier to stay in range with melee sets than it is with P/P thanks to the set’s terrible range control and mobility.
Finally, there’s no reason you can’t main shortbow. It isn’t a great dueling weapon just due to the nature of its AE attacks, but it is pretty amazing at everything else.
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Just because you would like to see thief going in a less stealthy direction doesn’t mean it’s right.
This mentality is the main problem. There’s no “going in a direction” in GW2, professions don’t need to conform to a single archetype because different weapons offer such vastly different combat doctrines. It is extremely obvious that thieves are supposed to be able to conform to assassin, trickster, pirate, and duelist archetypes, among others, yet the thief community will spend hours insisting to one another that their way of playing the thief is the only legitimate one.
The fact is that the stealth/assassin/ambush archetypes are already extremely well supported and effective, the thief should be fleshed out in other ways as opposed to trying to consolidate a base of effectiveness in one role.
I’m all for the rifle.
While I can understand the argument that a rifle would make the thief rather stationary which doesn’t go along with the acrobatic design, neither does torch to be honest. “Hey look at me, I am a stealthed thief. So wait, don’t look at me, cause I am stealthed. But I have this super bright torch giving away my position! So yes look at me!”
The problem with that line of reasoning is that mobility is innate to the thief but stealth is not. Stealth is a play style choice, and one that a couple weapon sets are already ineffective at. More weapon sets that don’t choose stealth is a good thing for the profession and increases the options and variety available to thieves. Stuff like Burning application to make condition builds more viable, a fire field for Might stacking synergy, etc are things that will increase the thief’s utility and build diversity and get thieves away from the exclusively “stealth + high-damage ambush” role and play style that is so prevalent.
I’m not even against another low-mobility weapon set like P/P is, but “Torch would be bad at stealth” is a point in favor of the idea, not against it.
draxynnicIncidentally, thinking of ‘no offhand’ skills…
…I could see it working. Stat bonuses for 2H weapons are roughly double those as for 1H weapons, so you could just make the stat bonuses for a lone 1H weapon count double for thieves using an empty offhand. It could also make for a possible “melee only” set of weaponskills that is currently lacking on the thief – due to the requirements of offhands being useful for either mainhand, OH dagger and pistol currently are designed so that they’re useful both at range and in melee, which means they aren’t really optimised for either role. This has tactical advantages, especially for a skirmishing character like the thief, but while the shortbow provides a ranged-only option, the thief currently has no melee-only option, and expanding single-hand fighting styles would be one way of providing that. (As would, incidentally, a two-handed melee weapon like a fighting staff.)
This idea has come up before, and I like it, but it does have some itemization issues, particularly the lack of two weapon sigils. This could maybe be offset by some impressive single-weapon-only traits or skills, but it’d make the weapon options a bit tougher to balance.
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Malice is not bad as heals go. The reason it is not favored atm is because of the way thieves build, how heavily they rely on stealth for defense BECAUSE OF THE WAY THEY BUILD, and how freekin insanely good hide in shadows is.
This. Thief heals are pretty well balanced and each has their synergies. Withdraw has the best healing under constant activation, SoM has Signet-synergy that allows you to activate it extra often for “on-heal” effects, neither of which are things that HiS boasts.
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Y U NO TORCH?!?!?
T_T
Offhand torch w/ ability to apply burning and blinds + Trait revamp that includes blind synergy in Trickery = All the thief utility/build diversity.
A focus with access to a “Silence” field (1s daze every 1s?) would be a really neat way to go with the thief as well.
I’m not in favor of a rifle though, just because everyone would insist that it be a sniper rifle, and it’d push thieves even more into a one-big-crit ambush role. Warriors already got the giant aimed rifle shot thing on lock anyways. If they want to do something more creative with it then by all means…
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Are you still trying to sell stealth as a disadvantage? I think I have heard it all. Surely you are aware that backstab and sneak attack require stealth? Maybe we should jump to the single greatest benefit stealth provides. Invisibility. Did you really just say track the thief down? I need to find out which class has “Release the Hounds!”. Between heartseeker, shadow return and shadowstep no one is going to catch me on me thief after i stealth. Maybe Anet should just change stealth to a debuff rather than a buff? Keep this stuff coming, its comedy gold.
So what you’re saying is that thief survivability comes mainly from mobility, and I agree. Stealth is not, and never has been the culprit here. Stealth is not an effective means of escape if you’re not faster* than the non-stealthed person. Stealth is consistently blamed as a mechanical reason that thieves are able to win or escape, but stealth meta is grounded in skill, not stats. Mobility is mechanics based in that some professions and builds are statistically faster.
The debate is going to continue to run in circles until the people opposed to thieves finally admit that they want thief mobility nerfed, or in fact don’t want mobility nerfed and are simply too bad to combat stealth itself.
*"Faster" and “mobility” here to mean the aggregate effects of dodge, runspeed, movement skills, evasion skills, and runspeed-reduction conditions. Not only things like swiftness, but all things that give an advantage in movement and evasion.
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Don’t derail the topic, this is not a discussion about stealth itself. This is a discussion of the beneficial effects that a thief has access to when going into stealth due to traits and skill effects, namely condition removal.
Benefits more than offset by the primary detriment of stealth, that detriment being that the thief cannot attack if they want to retain those benefits. A skill allowing you to self-daze for 3-5 seconds in return for some condition removal and regeneration would generally be viewed as incredibly bad and a great way to lose a fight quickly, but with the element of stealth this self-crippling is suddenly entirely forgotten.
You’re quick to point out that you weren’t finding issue with stealth as an overall mechanic (rather some of its compounding attributes when traited), but your assertion that things need to be “balanced out” by inducing weaknesses to stealthed thieves via condition damage seems at odds with that. You believe that in the current state stealth is too powerful of a tool in the thief arsenal, particularly because it provides high resistance to condition damage and the ability to reset a fight.
In short, you want to create a mechanical counter to the thief heavy-stealth play style (namely, debilitation/pressure via things like poison/burning). However, stealth is much more a dynamic advantage than a mechanical one, and approaching it as a mechanical problem shows you don’t really understand what makes stealth powerful in the first place (it isn’t trait benefits).
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Assassin’s Reward is wonky and won’t heal you if you do not finish the animation. So if you dodge during your skill you don’t get healed. Which ends up making it problematic for PW when you may want to end PW prematurely and end up receiving no reward for the initiative spent…. As far as I’ve known AR works best with sets that have short animations so you get the heal on demand and not waiting 2s like if you took S/P. I guess it’s different with new S/D than it was for the old one (which was lengthy too) since I haven’t run it with new FS yet. Though I remember AR often not healing me if I cancelled FS with FS to chain evades or if dodged after the first hit or was interrupted…just nonsensical.
I’d agree that it is poorly implemented, if not a bad idea.
TBH for a total rework I’d look at Assassin’s Reward giving X seconds of regeneration per initiative spent. This would synergize well with Acrobatic’s +boon duration. The ability to burst heal with it would be lost, but in return it would actually benefit init-dump builds by allowing them to stack up 10-15s of regen during their burn phase to allow them to survive for the duration of their downtime. The problem is that regeneration is about as powerful as burning 2 init/second with the current AR, so it could get out of hand pretty quickly if the regeneration duration was decent in length. It also wouldn’t stack as well with Shadow Arts, but (in my experience) builds leaning heavily on both Acrobatics and Shadow Arts aren’t good for much except for being incredibly annoying.