Guild Wars 2

Aberrant.6749:

Thieves also have issues with putting conditions on targets other than bleeds. This makes large stacks of bleeds easy to wipe. This was agreed upon with the dev’s in the state of the game interview when it was brought up. So what do they do in this patch? Nerf thieves ability to bleed in multiple ways -.-

Seriously… what the kitten…

This is the problem with Arenanet’s strategy in balance mechanics. The incredibly painful, stretched-out pace of small changes every month is simply NOT fast enough. Small changes is always a good thing, because if something goes wrong, it is relatively easy to invert those changes and try a different solution.

However, I guarantee that we will not see any buffs like promised additions of other methods of condition applications like burns, or methodical, non-spike bunker-buster approaches like the mentioned “boon-hate”, for months, if not over a year from now. In other words, the team is perfectly happy to sit on professions being kicked in to the dirt for extensive periods of time. Ranger comes to mind. Monthly is NOT enough. We need weekly balance tweaks, at MINIMUM. I have this horrible sinking feeling that the “balance” changes at the end of each month are almost just a criterion, a tick for the “what have we added this month?” box. The whole thing feels lazy, contrived and uninformed. The sudden last-minute jump to a total non-solution is good evidence of that.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Daecollo.9578:

Raine Akrune.8416:

Daeqar.8965:

Raine Akrune.8416:

I’ve been playing a S/P thief and beat d/d and d/p thieves all the time in WvW/sPvP.

S/P in WvW…wow, I hope I run into you out in the wild someday. I can always use another sparkly bag.

Although, I could see you catching some glass cannon builds or low skill players flat-footed and blowing them up. Against a high skill player patiently running a balanced build with D/D or D/P, you’d be pretty severely handicapped, though.

One day perhaps, it’ll be fun to teach another cookie cutter thief about thinking outside the box. =)

Yeah, we should all go “P/P.” and do less damage then Mesmer’s autoattack by spamming unload and only being able to hit one target.

If your goal is to hit multiple target, why P/P?

As for doing less damage than Mesmer’s autoattack is subjective since it relies which damage connects and actually dealt damage. Immobile target, sure, Mesmer wins, but hardly anyone will just stand there and take damage.

The funny thing about it is, Mesmer’s have 4 other abilities that do damage, and “Unload.” is bursty, but you have to wait 0.75 seconds after using the skill to use another “Unload”, whilst a Mesmer can use Spatial Surge immediately afterwords.

The reason I said that is because they are both channeled “beam” type attacks, and unload should hit targets that get in the way of it, that is what bullets do.

However, because of the high initiative cost and the wait time, and the fact it doesn’t even go up to par with an ‘autoattacks’ damage, and the fact its the ONLY damaging ability…

Yes, the class needs a revamp, nothing else needs said.

,I have been playing since 3 day headstart. I have one 80, my thief. I have never made a complaint about any of the changes, in fact, since i consider myself, and my server considers me an extremely above average thief, even the intended nerf to stealth being the reveal buff always applied, i was ok with. that was workable. but this new nerf is unacceptable. You ruined my class Anet. you ruined my character. the 800+ hours i put into my thief don’t mean much now. i can’t even get a CoF farm group to take me anymore because the extra second on reveal demolished my dps and survivability. You solved nothing you set to accomplish. CnD spam is still viable, however my well thought out build that took months of trial and error has been destroyed overnight. The good thieves have been punished. The PvE thieves have been punished. and for what? a few ignorant forum complaints? This is disgusting. Haven’t even mentioned the buggy stealth and the hidden killer trait. Way to kill a class overnight.

Is this patch a joke? Seriously… Early April fools day joke or something? I have seen my fair share of bad patches in other MMORPGs but my god I don’t think I have EVER seen a company drop the ball this huge on a class… The changes they made DID NOTHING to fix what they were addressing. I know this is usually said as a joke, but DO THEY EVEN PLAY A THIEF? Seriously. How could you possibly make this change if you even have a moderate understanding of the class… Especially when they already had a PERFECT FIX written up and ready to go… No other words to describe this then just WTF!!!

Thanks for simultaneously introducing a new fun feature in WvW while at the same time breaking my class making me not even want to play it.

Oh and to top it all off, lets just break hidden killer… why not.

I really dislike how it messed up the synergy with the auto attack chain, you used to get a nice little audio cue when you could stealth again. Made it easy to watch the target for telegraphed moves instead of having to play the UI & watch your buff bar.

edit: queue, cue, q?

Honestly it’s less about the damage for me so much as it is about how awkward our attack chain feels now. It synced up perfectly before. The class just feels less polished now.

Please ditch this nerf and go with the supposedly more harsh one you had planned instead. The one that was actually much less harsh. Preferably without making us deal with this for another few months.

JonPeters.5630:

As we played with the stealth changed mentioned in the SotG, we recognized that in conjunction with the change to culling this was an unpredictable change to make. We also felt that it was too big of a hit to these stealth professions, so we ended up pulling that change in favor of just increasing revealed duration by 1 second.

So, can we get another response? You’ve seen the threads. You’ve seen the INTENSE opposition, mostly backed up at that.

I’d also like some concrete explanation as to the logic of the 1 second increase (that post is NOT it), and I would also like to know what dev is responsible for Thief changes, or even plays a Thief at all.

I am 100% aware that I will not get an answer, but it’s worth a shot, right? It’s nice to know who you’re dealing with when a profession goes so disastrously wrong in an area of the game that is totally undeserving of it.

This is hardly a PvP nerf; C&D is a fairly niche skill in PvP simply because it is unreliable between the dodge, aegis, and invulnerability frames on so many skills. You were not using it on cooldown outside of some niche S/D high uptime daze builds. There’s a reason D/P keeps gaining popularity – you have easy access to a very reliable stealth skill and get a good gap closer, which a lot of your initiative goes into anyway.

This is a PvE nerf, where C&D is reliable and high volume.

I cannot help but marvel at a patch that nerfs thief in PvE and nerfs warrior in PvP. Do the developers even play this game? Do they even talk to anyone who plays this game?

The original nerf, which anet though it was too heavy, WAS BETTER. I’d rather have revealed everytime I pop out of stealth than this 4 seconds revealed.

JonPeters.5630:

As we played with the stealth changed mentioned in the SotG, we recognized that in conjunction with the change to culling this was an unpredictable change to make. We also felt that it was too big of a hit to these stealth professions, so we ended up pulling that change in favor of just increasing revealed duration by 1 second.

Basically you are saing that you decided to change the initial stealth nerf in favor of Mesmers. ok understood, tks for pointing that out.

Adaneshade.2409:

Come on guys…. just nut up and learn to use it, we needed this nerf.

We needed the exploit cleared up, and they didn’t do it (wtf).
They have to stop stealth chaining eventually.

Daeqar.8965:

Scootabuser.4915:

…revealed apply to us even if we leave stealth without doing any damage.

That wasn’t as much of a nerf as this was.

Disagree completely.

That change would have destroyed a thief’s ability to turtle and play defensively, which with this change remains entirely, 100% intact. Taking that defensive ability away from the class just to preserve a little bit of offensive capability would have been a huge mistake.

Frankly, I’m ashamed that so many thieves on the forums are so short-sighted to think the 4s revealed is a worse nerf.

There’s a difference between playing defensively versus popping out of stealth only for a fraction of a second every 4 seconds, the latter of which is the only “playstyle” (read exploit) that the originally proposed change would prevent.

Instead, this new change is a blanket 33% nerf to the entirety of the stealth mechanic EXCEPT for those who make use of the aforementioned exploit, ahem, excuse me, I meant “playstyle”.

…revealed apply to us even if we leave stealth without doing any damage.

http://youtu.be/wYbTFzrtOUk

That wasn’t as much of a nerf as this was. The new thief rotation just feels so… “sticky” now. I guess you could chalk it up to D/D Thief having a higher skill ceiling but… It still has terrible play feel.

They have made it clear that they do not understand balancing in any way, shape or form. The change they mentioned in SOTG (revealed whether you attack or not) would have been perfect. When almost all stealths end in some form of attack, you only get punished if you miss by your own failure or if the enemy is skilled enough to outwit you, by form of invulnerability skills, dodges or otherwise. I would have embraced that change, and PvE would be largely unaffected.

Instead, a huge bunch of builds become obsolete in anywhere that isn’t PvP, where the complaints came from in the first place.

unfortunately while they still believe rolling out blanket changes is the way to go nothing will change, very rarely will an issue be with an entire mechanic, its usually how that mechanic works with 1 or 2 skills but instead of looking into ways to balance those changes they take the “easy” road and just blanket it with a change that usually barely effects the 1 or 2 actual issues while hitting everything else usually much harder.

When you have so many variations of builds, so many different skills that work with things in different ways and so many traits and other little things that effect or get effected by it the moment you decide to blanket it you either have to work out the effect that change is going to have on every single one of those combinations or not care/think of that and punish people for not being the problems.

Couple this with the painfully slow content updates which regularly fail to bring anything new to the game (southsun lul), content thats locked to only certain people (guild missions only for big guilds) my faith in Anet is rapidly running out.

And its not like I even get hurt that much by the nerfs even the old planned nerf would at most have annoyed me that I was now limited in choice, its just the fact that the changes almost never seem to be fully thought through. Though with the way they are chipping away its not long before any spec gets crippled

JonPeters.5630:

As we played with the stealth changed mentioned in the SotG, we recognized that in conjunction with the change to culling this was an unpredictable change to make. We also felt that it was too big of a hit to these stealth professions, so we ended up pulling that change in favor of just increasing revealed duration by 1 second.

You felt that it was too big of a hit? Seriously? You think the current nerf is less of a hit?

You didn’t even factor in how this affects traits that rely on stealth. Mainly the Shadow Arts trait line. Do you know your own game?

^ This.
You left exploitation that needs to be removed from the game at some point in another because it was unpredictable? The longer you wait the greater it gets used, the more people who will resent its eventual removal.
Don’t half kitten what you are supposed to do.

So instead of fixing the exploitative uses of stealth you took a giant steamy dump on core play patterns that no one was complaining about.

…logic?

JonPeters.5630:

As we played with the stealth changed mentioned in the SotG, we recognized that in conjunction with the change to culling this was an unpredictable change to make. We also felt that it was too big of a hit to these stealth professions, so we ended up pulling that change in favor of just increasing revealed duration by 1 second.

I’m sorry, but an across the board 33% nerf to all stealth related abilities and traits is a much, much more drastic change than the nerf proposed in SotG. Something this drastic should not be rolled out at the same time as the culling changes, even if you had a good justification for why stealth is in need of such drastic changes to begin with (and if you do, I’m sure most of us in this forum would like to hear it).

JonPeters.5630:

Apples are to powerful so we are nerfing oranges.

No.

It should be full duration of what the target player enjoys.

Anet claims they want the thief to be more mobile than those speedy d/d elementalists.

Well, a lot of people already know sword #2 infiltrator’s strike is basically the best mobility for the thief in the game right now, and one of the best escapes as well.

Why not change the shadowstep utility to function like infiltrator’s strike from the sword? What i mean is right now infiltrator’s strike has 14 seconds for you to do your thing, so you can run around, fight, retreat, move forward, etc.

Shadowstep utility only has a 6 second period before you cannot shadow return. And it has a 50 second cooldown…

Why not make the utility have a shorter cooldown + longer time in between activation and being able to use shadow return? That is more mobility right there.

If anet is going to nerf stealth…and wants to up mobility…that’s an idea

XZERO.3014:

Dasorine.1964:

with cluster bombs long travel time and short bleed duration it really doesn’t work like you think it does and is infact better as a direct damage attack than a condition attack.

And I’ll just reiterate the point of just because you like to limit your self to 2 skills in a weapon set doesn’t mean everyone else should pay for your lack of use of everything else.

Is that a joke? I use my skills according to situation, like most next Lvl players.

If you play wow you’ll know that you want to save a death knights death grip for a hunter disengage right? Same thing with death blossom, I use it to reduce incoming damage, I’ve won fights with 1k hp against other thieves because they don’t know that death blossom is worthy to use as a damage reducing skill.

Maybe i should post this on arena junkies, I won’t have narrow minded people who just try to get the biggest numbers, because numbers mean nothing when your dead.

Game play and style will always beat numbers, good players can make those numbers mean nothing. When/if a.net implies rating/mmo in spvp arena, we will see what builds are truly good, but right now everything is work in progress and so far I see death blossom crippling burst thieves who use it for more then high numbers.

So you find it works well as a defensive move but you don’t want it to be just a defensive move you want to change it so that it works better for your build specifically regardless of its effects on untold numbers of other builds and thieves?

And you don’t see an issue with that?

In that case I want heartseekers direct damage reduce but I want it to apply some conditions and I want backstab to do no damage but refresh all conditions on the target and put a condition removal block on them!

In my defence short bow already excels at aoe condi dmg and it provides more mobility to get around the map, the condi on death blossom seems like a banana in a group of apples, it just doesn’t fit

So death lotus has a built in evasive duration, and I’m using it solely for the evasive purpose, however if a warrior is using hundred blades and I am out of endurance, I’m going to dump my initiative into death lotus. The next two options I have is:
1. Blow shadow refuge to reset my initiative
2. Trade damage shot for shot style and lose.

I feel like death lotus is gimping thief, it does mainly condition damage on a burst weapon set. death lotus is basically eating my initiative alive and putting me in a burstless state causing me to shadow refuge to reset. Look at the necro, their skills and utilities synergizes so well.

Did A.net design death lotus so I could blow all my initiative, and do no damage as a burst thief? Let’s face it, condi thief runs caltrops on dodge and pistol/dagger 90% of the time, and for them dagger dagger isn’t nearly as good as short bow for the mobility and aoe condition. My thoughts on a reasonable change to death lotus:
1. Change the bleed to poison
2. Reduce the overall condition damage
3. Increase the death lotus solid damage

I can’t provide numbers because I don’t know how the damage calculators work for this game, but overall I think these changes can provide better synergy rather then feeling useless for using a move solely for 1 mechanic,and with the up coming stealth balance this could be a good way to keep the class good and providing next level players a way to compete, because honestly, why should a burst thief using a burst weapon set be using a condition damage ability to avoid being 1 shot by hundred blades.

Tl;dr I’m asking for a death lotus change(dagger/dagger skill 3), and since your using all your initiative with 2 death lotus, you can easily make it a more bursts ability rather then a condition ability.

If you could only hit backstab once, it would be virtually impossible to land on anyone with common sense. All they would have to do is spin in circles until you pop out of stealth. lol

The problem is stealth windows are very short, and the enemy knows you are coming and can already take action to avoid a backstab.. and a lot of times a good player will. No, I am not talking about the backstab cheese builds, I am taking about standard thief backstabs which are what would be hit the hardest by a change like this.

Well I guess we can go back and forth all day arguing. However considering a warriors missed burst skill doesnt use up adrenaline, and a thieves missed stealth skill doesnt use up stealth, these things seem intended. I’m sorry you feel the need to counter skills in an ineffective manner when there are easier no cd mechanics in place for all classes to deal with them.
movement, turn around, LOS and finally L2P
/end