Guild Wars 2

Get good with sword/dagger, you will find yourself roflstomping thieves….. I can occasionally kill level 80 thieves in 1v1 in WvW on my level 12 ranger atm >.< At 80, will be no contest.

Pichichi.1975:

Hopefully we get another night of Fight Club going.

Definitely looking forward to it!!
[/quote]

I start one every day, just whisper me if ya want in. The location always moves to keep zergs from knowing our location as much as possible.

NightFox.3957:

Getting rid of downed state would allow servers with larger numbers to just steam roll the smaller numbers and cause a imbalanced in WvW. Smaller number servers being outnumber in WvW rely on the downed states to revive team members quicker which keeps there numbers a little more reasonable.

The solution to your problem is get used to the F key to finish them off instead of whining about it. As I saw someoe else post “it is fine as it is”.

I believe it would be the exact opposite. Zerglings, by nature, are terrible at PvP. A good group of PvPers that only has to kill them once could mop up vs greater numbers way more easily if they couldn’t pop back up……

@Giit

Show me where the mean thief touched you…….

http://www.ehmry.com/topic/1419-thieves-looking-for-a-survivable-wvw-build/

My tank build

Tulisin.6945:

The major argument against the downed state is consistently: “Well, it doesn’t exist in other games and I don’t want to learn how to use it” rather than any actual imbalance within the mechanic itself. As soon as you stop seeing the downed state as something that is “getting in the way of how things should work” and more as an organic part of GW2 combat that you need to learn and manipulate, it stops being as much of an issue.

To use an example that has come up in the past: Nobody would make a thread saying “siege is broken and should be removed from the game”, because people can recognize siege as an organic part of how WvW works and integrate it into their playstyle. The same approach should be taken to the downed state.

I’m all for rebalancing the downed state and downed state skills, but asking for removal is more a statement of “I don’t want to learn this skill” than “it marginalizes my skill”.

My argument is it prevents small groups from killing zergs, even if they outplay them. It’ simply not possible for a 5 man to whittle a 30 man down. It should be, especially if those 5 are highly coordinated and build around that.

plasmacutter.2709:

sylvari t3, they’re like shards of glass

NOES!! I use these and like the fact that few ppl do >.<

Yes, more warriors please!! I need more badges ^.^

ensoriki.5789:

Foss.4830:

Iove.3902:

He wasn’t hacking he is playing a stealth spec. There are traits, that sacrifice damage and mobility, to allow the Thief to regerante HP while in stealth. He could also be using Steal Life food/sigils/runes.

If you know nothing of your enemies you are not going to defeat them.

I know about the trait but literally. Full health every time he came out. 50% up to full in what? how long does CND last? 3? 4 seconds? That seems like an outrageous amount of healing.

That isn’t from Shadow Rejuvenation.
At base 30 it heals 323. With Shaman’s 410. So 1200-1600 if you don’t attack in stealth.
With Shadow Protector regen gives 269. So 679 if that’s how they set it up. Which is 2716 in 4 seconds. Out of 10805 health that’s still not 50%. Mind you if his health was 10805. That’s really…low to begin with. Unless he was getting ticks from SoM or using Withdrawl while hidden it has to be an exaggeration.

Combined with signet of malice + the signet trait to make it a 12 sec CD heal. I do this regularly.

Zatria.5783:

Uh Oh!!! I’m in trouble. This 20 man group is going to kill me. Yep I have 100 hp left.

I’ll just stealth and get away.

I call BS on stealth.

Stop trying to kill soloers with your 20 man zerg? :-P

A week ago I would suggest any other class for PvP…… But last night I watched a SB ~ S/D ranger take on a bunker ele.
Just let me say I’d never want to cross paths with that ranger…..

snatch.2584:

The truth is thieves are op versus weak players who just started playing and complaining about them. Versus good players and versus actual meta-bunker-game they are unplayable imo.
Do i have to play smarter? What do you mean? People sometimes call me hs spam, backstab noob, so what am i supposed to do? ANet didn’t give me any other abilities to make a damage… Anyway i don’t think i spam HS im just using it while people have <50% hp. In teamfights there’s nothing to do expect spamming cluster bomb. It’s not me, it’s the way how they designed thieves.

So, try something besides pure damage, there’s a whole big world of roles to fill out there.
Just to name 3 other than dps……

Support: With smart supportive use of your shadow refuge, blinding powder, and poison share; you can get some clutch revives, set up ambushes with your group, and provide some amazing venom benefits to your whole party.

Tank: with proper armor set/build thief can actually be surprisingly tanky! Great at distracting enemies while your buddies pick off the squishies.

Crowd Control: Try out sword main hand, sooo much crowd control. It’s really a ton of fun.

I actaully find the OP downright offensive as a thief main. We have arguably the best PvP CC build available to any class.

Most of the mags I know are out there just to PvP. They tend to prefer player kills to pvdoor and will purposely target areas with an enemy zerg rather than try to avoid them.
I’m sure you’ve just been on the receiving end of a good old fashioned kitten jamming.

I run a 0-30-30-10-0 build in both PvP and PvE. Use S/P in PvE and play as support tank. However I do swap to S/D on some encounters that need a ton of condition purging.

If you want to go purely S/P, it might be best to drop the shadow arts line down and up the Acrobatics, since you won’t have easy access to stealth to make use of the best major traits in that line.

I run a mix of soldiers/knights to have enough defense to tank bosses.

Victory.2879:

Seems most of the ’it’s easy to counter a thief’ answers are coming from people who mainly play THIEF. Tells you everything you need to know really.

For a lot of players being basilisked, then hit for 8k steal/mug, 6k, 6k cnd and being dead or almost dead within one second, can’t even see them while they finish you isn’t their idea of fun (with 1800 toughness and 22k hp).

Defend it all you like, but in wvw thiefs hit way too hard, have way too much space to kite away if you do manage somehow to guess EXACTLY when they are about to hit you whilst being invisible, and by the time you managed to avoid something your HP is so low you’re as good as dead anyway- as they can kite around 5/6 people all throwing aoe and swinging like mad, pop up and finish you off.

They don’t have much affect in the overall scheme of wvw (except when they hunt in groups of 5 or more), but they do annoy a lot of people into quitting wvw or at least contributing to them not enjoying the game and hence going to play another game which might be more fun.

Thief class I guess is where the usual ’i’m leet’ (for which read ’I’m a chicken ganker’) players go- every MMO has a class which attracts this type of player, and they will usually defend it’s OPness by saying ‘l2p’ or ’it’s easy to counter (play a thief)’.

No, it’s coming from players who played thief long enough to learn exactly how everything works. To be able to identify skills by animation etc; learn which have which weakness. Simply put, learn your opponent.
Pretty much every thief by now has played the other classes at least some, testing builds, learning which boons to look out for etc. This is out of necessity and is done early in every MMO for people who commonly play the assassin archetype. Not really that far fetched for you to do the same.

TL;DR: You can’t beat an opponent that understands your strengths and weakness while you don’t understand theirs…..

Raincrow.1840:

Adaneshade.2409:

Yet, in a 1vs1 situation….

I thought we were talking about WvW?

We are comparing 1 build vs another……. if you want to blow it up to higher. 20 tanks vs 20 GC builds…..Tanks win >.<

Can’t believe engineer isn’t mentioned here with grenades……infinite spam, no cooldown strongest blast finisher ever.

Asum.4960:

Auesis.7301:

Disagree with dungeons. With a bad player, Thieves are nothing but carry weight. With a good player, they have excellent DPS and rarely go down. The only difference between a Thief and other professions in dungeons is that Thieves have a higher skill minimum. Plus, Shadow Refuge is THE best support skill in the game, without exception.

It’s not about good or bad Thieves in dungeons.

It’s about Thieves with enough money for at least 2 armor sets (one for dungeons, and one for everything else), and the ones without it. Combined with resetting traits every single time they want to do a dungeon (and again when they want to do anything else).

Therefor, Thieves are pretty bad in dungeons. They are the only class i can come up with that needs to do something completely different in dungeons, than in SPvP, WvW and open world PvE.
Just for this part of the game, they need different weapons, different skills, different stats from armor and different traits than they need for everything else (or they would be average in dungeons, but suck at everything else).

Thats not what makes me think of Thieves as a good dungeon profession.
And while i came up with great dungeon builds (which means average compared to other professions, using standart setups), I don’t want to rebuild my character everytime i enter and leave a dungeon.

@OP:

Thanks for trying stuff out for yourself, and your honest opinion after that.
You got a good grasp of what we Thieves struggle with (which is a lot), and at what we excel (which is very, very little), instead of flaming us with QQ after you got pwned by some random Thief in a SPvP pug match or a uncoordinated WvW run.

Just run tank stats everywhere, you only need the one suit.

Run S/P in dungeons as main tank with perma-blind on bosses. Pretty much ez-mode…

And S/D in any pvp meta as control tank. Works great, but does have a high minimum skill threshold so expect to take a beating while you learn the complex build in PvP.

Karolis.4261:

You can consider every class/weapon few button spam class/choise then, since every weapon has 5 attacks

I think his definition of “spam” in this context is hitting the same button over and over in quick succession. Aside from the 1st ability which is intended to be auto attack….no class other than thief can be a true “spam” class.

Raincrow.1840:

Rhyis.7058:

Raincrow.1840:

People die too fast in this game already.

Are we playing the same game lol?

Yes, and I’m dead serious. DPS is far more powerful than stats like toughness and the defense ratings on armor. I’ve played a lot of MMOs and this is one of the few in which you can loose 2/3rds if not all of your health in just a few seconds.

Yet, in a 1vs1 situation the people with full on dps builds will lose nearly every time to someone who focuses on defensive stats and control abilities over raw dps.

Fritz.5026:

I tried to play a thief and it felt like I was playing the class for dummies so I deleted him right away. I know that seems insulting, but its really how I felt.

I mean you start with a dagger and the first ability unlock is Heartseeker which is your go-to spam move for a dagger build. It starts you out by teaching you the proper method to play a thief is 2-2-2-2-2.

Then you can go to youtube and find countless videos where its 2-2-2-2-2 for daggers, or 3-3-3-3-3 for pistols, or some guy with a shortbow who never stops teleporting…. then you come to the forums and read these claims that its not a one button class, or that thief doesnt have insane mobility….

and it just feels like its the class for dummies.

.
I would love nothing more than to play an exciting thief class that really took a noticeable amount of skill to shine at, but this current model just is not it.

Funny you fail to mention Sword in any of those “spam” builds…… The issue I take is just saying all thieves are button spamming noobs…..Do they exist? Sure…maybe even a majority in pug sPvP stuff and in WvW…..
But as a thief playing a build most complain about as totally impossible to play; I find it incredibly insulting that people are so quick to dismiss “thief” as “ezmode”.

Jericho.4521:

OP: No good thief wants to be lumped in with the rest, I understand.

However, a lot of what I’ve seen proposed as nerfs would hurt thieves across the board, but especially S/D, P/D, or anything that uses stealth offensively for sustained rather than burst damage. It’s probably hard to make even minor nerfs without hurting or even ruining some of the less popular builds, which is ultimately what I’m afraid of.

Nerfing backstab directly would do nothing to hurt the other builds. Heartseeker’s damage I really feel is quite balanced as it’s really only valuable as a finisher. It could have range shortened just a hair and the initiative cost raised by 1, though.

I think what the OP wants is the same thing every thief with any skill at all wants…. a respectable class.
We don’t run the cheese builds but because so many failures do, we are slapped with a bad name. Currently 90% or more of the noobs funnel into ONE class because it has the most noob friendly, entry level build.
I, and all of my friends, would like to see the noob population spread out a bit more among the classes.

BASE:
1838 Power
1979 Precision
2063 Toughness
1459 Vitality
2828 Attack
55% Crit Chance
+30% Crit dmg
3127 Armor
16235 HP
+300 Healing Power

WITH FOOD + stacked Sigil:
1838 Power
2179 Precision
2063 Toughness
1459 Vitality
2828 Attack
64% Crit Chance
+30% Crit dmg
3127 Armor
16235 HP
+300 Healing Power

As a S/D lifesteal/control tank build on my thief, there is no single build of any class that I simply don’t stand a chance to beat. Yes I do occasionally lose these fights, but usually it’s due to my own mistiming of Tactical Strike use or some other mistake.

In a team oriented play such as sPvP. The beefy warrior would hold the point and have his own roaming class (thief or whatever) go after the miscreant.

I run a mix of Soldiers (armor and weapons) and Knights (jewelry) with emerald orbs in armor. I run lifestealing food (omnomberry ghosts) and a lifestealing sigil on my mainhand with stacking crit sigil on offhand.
This gives me just over 3100 armor rating with my build (0-30-30-10-0) and tons of health regeneration:
-60% chance to steal health on crit from food (procs for 314 has no cooldown)
-40% chance (maybe 30 can’t recall atm) to steal life from weapon sigil (does have a cooldown)
-Health procs every hit from Signet of Malice
-Regeneration boon on stealth from Shadow Protector trait
-Health regen while stealthed from Shadow’s Rejuvenation (stacks with shadow protector)

All that makes me really difficult to kill.

Zosk.5609:

Sporadicus.1028:

I’ve never played Dark Age of Camelot, but is (was?) that game closer to GW2’s WvW idea than RvR from Warhammer?

That’s probably a true statement as DAOC allowed more smaller roaming groups to do things and was much faster paced (you could easily die in seconds), but GW2 WvWvW reminds me more of Wintergrasp in WoW than anything else, honestly.

Actually it’s Wintergrasp with even more of a focus on resource gathering and siege over fighting…which is saying a lot!

This….the fact that it’s so similar to PvP that existed in arguably the WORST game for PvP ever is quite sad. The devs stated they wanted it to be similar to DAoC, and it even looks so on paper; but in spirit it feels too much like WoW.

Some things that prevent it from being on the same level as DAoC are as follows:

1. Large group wins (any more than 1 to 2 odds vs the enemy and tactics cease to matter)
-in DAoC it was possible to wipe 80+ with a single 8-man party

2. Lack of strong CC.
-this is what enabled smaller groups to use their higher coordination and skill level to win fights vs huge odds

3. Caps on AOE.
-bring enough ppl to the fight and well placed aoe is irrelevant

4. Lack of progression system (they have stated plans to add this in)
-This can server to either reinforce zerging or break it up depending on implementation.
ANET TAKE NOTE HERE (If each objective/player is worth a set amount of “xp” towards your progression and that amount is then divided amongst everyone participating, it causes people to want to break into smaller groups to obtain a larger “share” of the “xp”.)
[Conversely, if everyone that participates get a set amount that doens’t change regardless of the number there, it would encourage zerging]

These are just 4 of the issues I have with the current setup. (For the record I do have faith in ANet that they have the player’s enjoyment truly at the forefront of their minds and hope this post is taken how I meant it…to be constructive.)

We do the same thing in WvW as well……If someone from your own server adds in typically you let them know it’s a duel. If they insist on being a tool, just send the people watching on the other servers in to take care of it.

Until ANet puts some method for players to test their skill in 1v1 in officially, we will be forced to use methods like this.

The reason there are so few S/D is there are so few capable players. Most just want the easy way out.

Nuzt.7894:

They are OP regardless of what all the thieves say, can you blame them for not wanting to lose their ez mode ? Most players will flock to any class that gives the best results with the lowest effort, its human nature.

Most people will take the easiest route to accomplish anything, thus the sheer number of thieves in this game.

Argue if you want but this is the sad reality of human nature.

And yes very good troll OP, I’m amazed at how many replies you got.

Carry on.

Yes, there are EZ-Mode builds for thief, but they are only effective vs complete noobs. There are also very complicated builds. (I want to see the people saying all thieves are EZmode try out a S/D build or a D/P build once….). Most of the people who say “yes I tried a thief in sPvP” played D/D backstab, by far our most noob friendly build.

Until servers are locked down, no amount of tweaking will solve anything.

The issue the OP has is he can’t deal massive amounts of damage in zerg combat due to his lack of burst. The only way for him to get a large enough % of the damage on any given target is to solo them.

The heretic.1052:

Never really had a problem with thieves you just gotta slow them down. as for the stealth builds they do really low dmg and can never kill me 1 vs 1 it’s useless fighting them i just walk off.

i’m an elementalist with over 4k kills in wvw

This……
The problem is the mentality “if X ability does less damage than Y ability, why would I use X over Y?” People neglect to slot and use their control abilities because they don’t show the ohmygawdnumbers! over your target.

Most support builds are actually really good at 1v1 combat. I’ve farmed nearly all of my badges just doing roaming 1v1.

The GC == baddie argument applies to ALL classes, even the thief……

It’s easy to feel OP in WvW as almost every player you run into is a PvE’r pretending to PvP. There are a few dueling clubs in WvW with players who are actually good at PvP. If you can find one of these you’ll see that there are players that will give you a run for your money with absolutely every class……and you can forget winning any of these fights with an up-scaled character lol.

HS is a godsend vs all these noob thieves lol. They simply burn their initiative with it on your 2 dodges and run around like a turkey while you roflstomp them.

Arsenic.8259:

Valk armor for burst builds. Rabid for Bleed builds.

Soldier/Knight combinations for tank builds

Immobilize and knockdowns, don’t blow em at once force em to use up escape CDs.

To be perfectly honest, you won’t notice. Culling literally means “you will only be able to render X number of avatars at any given time” that X in GW2 is AT LEAST 20. In these 1v3 or 1v5 fights, they are simply not experiencing it. (I’ve asked many many players after fighting them in these situations every one of them has said that they weren’t experiencing the issue of me not rendering after attacking from stealth)

3100 armor build on my thief and I still see auto attack crits for over 3k. As well as being able to outright tank virtually any burst setup for a surprising amount of time (get comments from players I fight against pretty frequently about that)

AlexRD.7914:

A ranger is incapable of fighting a (GOOD) p/d thief because he can cloak and dagger off a pet. I have a P/D thief, i know how they work, this is not the opinion of someone that dies a lot to thieves and cries for nerfs.

I created my thief, took some time to get to know the skills ( ultimately realizing i only needed to press 1 and 5 and some utilities to maximize damage ), and in one morning learned how to play the thief. I did several 2v1s and even 3v1s with the combination of stealth stomps.

The first thing i thought when i was using it is how overpowered it is. You speak of condition removal. It doesn’t matter versus a p/d thief!

What really kills you is the 5 stacks of bleed from unload, which can be really easily and quickly placed in the target after the condition removal.

I can fight any kind of thief that isn’t p/d.

I will admit this is entirely truth. The issue is, though that the ranger is simply still a weak class vs any good player. They deserve a ton of TLC from the dev team. The other classes are all kind of equalized at top tier PvP (maybe aside from warrior who could use some love there too).

The issue facing ANet is, do they balance around entry level or pro level, they can’t do both as they are mutually exclusive, unfortunately.

No, would much rather the legendary remain a symbol of mastery of the entire game. (PvP, Crafting, PvE/Exploration) People who can’t master the ENTIRE game don’t deserve to tote around an item saying they have.

Have you tried S/D? It’s by far my favorite weapon set and I’ve used them all extensively.

We also make really good tanks, if built right and use pistol offhand. Even if you have another tank you can support him with your perma-blind field.

Sadly, it’s impossible to match all the possibilities that you can obtain outside sPvP with the provided amulets.
My biggest beef is the fact that we are forced to use runes instead of orbs in the armor slots.

Really, stat choices will depend largely on the weapons you plan to use. Dagger mainhand builds tend to benefit more from burst oriented stats, while Sword mainhand tends more towards the defensive oriented. Pistol/Pistol can really go either way.

Condition based builds almost all use Carrion for the most +condition damage.

Yeah, Basilisk venom is almost purely for burst builds. Those of us running condition (P/D, SB, LDB spam) or running non burst direct (Sword builds) get way more mileage from selecting either of the other 2.