Guild Wars 2

There are only two problems with thieves:

1) They are the only class that kept the Energy mechanic (called Initiative now) after Anet decided that they would remove it in GW2 so that they could balance through recharge alone. SOLUTION: remove initiative or make it so that repeated use of the same skill cost 1 more initiative each time so no single skill can be spammed. Otherwise spamming the highest DPS per initiative skill will be the most viable strategy for every single thief build that doesn’t rely on several cooldowns to perform a two hit kill.

2) Single attack boosts far beyond what is reasonable: the 150% damage signet and mainly quickness. If 33% IAS was so powerful in GW that it always had tradeoffs and was nerfed so much, I don’t understand how they thought 100% IAS would not get abused, especially in a game with no healers. Whoever thought this was a good idea after GW is incompetent. Quickness is mainly what people complain about when they complain about melee spikes although they don’t realise it. SOLUTION: rework skills and mechanics that boost damage from one or two attacks to unbalanced levels. Don’t nerf backstab, which is the obvious next Thief nerf. Instead, nerf quickness and the kitten signet, alongside reworking how initiative expenditure with repeated use of a single skill works.

An additional problem is thieves (and mesmers) abusing the server model culling bug for de facto >80% invis uptime: stealth —> client not loading model —> stealth —> client not loading model… so that you have to select them through target nearest, which is a pain with a lot of people around.

The problem with Healing Power is that except for selfless daring (healing power * 100% + 129) and the active on Virtue of Resolve (healing power * 75% + 1625), the scale factor is bad e.g. 7.5% on Writ of the Merciful, 6% on Virtue of Resolve passive (7.5% if you have Absolute Resolution), 12.5% on regen etc…

So unless you stack vigor, +40% endurance regen food, and superior runes of energy so you can dodge around like a monkey it’s not going to help much. You would take less damage and kill faster with damage stats + CCs + block/prot.

That’s why Monk’s Focus is so nice for sPvP: it scales like 10% + 1960. It means if you take Monk’s Focus you can just take damage stats (and some tough/vit) and forego healing power completely and not lose much.

If you go full cleric you can have perma +700hp per second through VoR, regen and Writ of the Merciful, but then you’ve just kittening yourself in terms of damage. The tradeoff is rarely worth it. Water eles heal better. Buffing allies is more efficient than healing as a Guardian imo, and you can do that without foregoing damage as much.

The only time I use cleric trinkets on top of Knight’s armor is for dungeons for pseudo-tanking. With enough toughness and a little vit so you don’t get one-shot, healing power becomes a lot better than vitality for your EHP. EHP is linear in both Toughness and vitality in this game so they are interchangeable, subject to not getting one-shot and having regular condition removal. In most of PvE including most dungeon that holds true. But EHP increases faster with toughness than vitality if you take healing into account.

So I’d say maybe invest in healing power depending very much on your build if you want to support and/or tank in dungeons but otherwise it’s not worth it.

It is quite annoying. I find myself sheathing the weapon or switching to another set often so I don’t have to see the weak/ugly pose. It isn’t consistent with the weapon’s idle animation either…

I have the same issue on my Guardian since the patch. Removing all armour and putting it back on solves it for a short time or until map travel. For now I have just turned sound effects completely down. This horrible clank sound is way to distracting and annoying otherwise. I hope this is a bug and not an intentional change, because playing without sound effects from now on would suck…