Guild Wars 2

Jana.6831:

To your post: Pistol 2 isn’t useless – 5% more damage and daze = perfect to use before you use unload.
On the contrahery Dagger 4 is pretty useless, yes, because it’s wonky to apply and because there’s no more movement restrictions on leaps. So the initial purpose of slowing down a fleeing enemy is obsolete.

I think you are quite confused, friend. Pistol #2 applies a short Immobilize, not Daze (that’s Pistol #4). Also, THREE SECONDS of Vulnerability on an attack with long startup and non-existent damage is not what I would call “perfect” for PvP or anything else.

Dagger #4 has issues, but I’d take it over Pistol #2 any day of the week. At least it’s usable.

Daredevil feels half-baked and unfinished, with loads of recycled animations, forced roots and aftercasts on what should be “fluid” animations, etc. As of now, the vision of the DD as a mobile, agile skirmisher is DOA.

Staff:
Clunky and underwhelming in all the ways people said it would be. AA too slow, #2 sends in random directions instead of working like HS, #4 too slow (and still no field), #5 too slow and telegraphed…
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New Traits:
Most of the trait line is ok, but having to spend a GM slot on choosing a dodge makes it feel like we have to pay a premium for our elite mechanic in ways other elite specs just “get” along with a real GM trait choice.
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The Dodges:
Extremely clunky and unnatural right now; some actually feel worse than the base dodge. Lotus is the closest to functional, but still not there. These should make us feel awesome, not encumbered, ESPECIALLY when we pay a Grandmaster trait slot for the ‘privilege’.
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Physicals:
Bandit’s Defense and Impairing Daggers fulfill their roles well enough. Distracting Daggers sucks, due to the unnecessary startup cast and the delay between casts (neither of which mantras suffer from, hmmm). Fist Flurry seems pointless, as the damage is low and the net effect insignificant for something with a 20~ second cooldown. The Elite seems easily avoidable from what I can tell.
P.S. Most/all Physical skills still eat initiative. Was any of this tested beforehand?

So, Daredevil feels very buggy and unfinished, which makes it difficult to even properly test the new stuff. With only one more Beta Weekend between now and HoT likely, things are not looking good. DD needs more time in the oven, please see that it gets it.

Needs smoother animations

Dastion.3106:

And because Thieves are virtually immune to interrupts you can’t punish that kind of button smashing play style. It’s like playing Mortal Kombat or Street fighter back in the day where someone could win by spamming a single button once they got you stuck.

I’m rather impressed that you managed to mischaracterize Thieves AND fighting games simultaneously. Bravo!

sinject.4607:

honestly last time celestial was a the issue (ele/engie/war) i was all for nerfing the professions using them instead of the amulet itself. at this point, i just want to see the amulet removed entirely. nothing good has ever come from it, it’s been by far the most corrosive thing in pvp for years now and has only lead to overpowered builds that completely dominate and shape the meta for all the worse. it should be abundantly clear by now that an amulet that has 30% more stats than all others will never be balanced when there’s builds that are capable utilizing every one of those stats. it’s just basic math.

THIS. It’s a badly designed amulet with very binary usage. Either it’s useless for your build, or insanely overpowered (D/D Ele)

If anything, Channeled Vigor should heal for more when Endurance is not full, and for less when it is (as you have unused evasive resources remaining a form of “effective health”).

There arguably already are a few viable condition damage setups in PvE. Condition builds are better in the Maguuma Wastes areas than they were in a lot of previous ones, and said areas are a blueprint for what a lot of the HoT content will be like.

Now, the real question is if HoT will offer a viable condition damage setup in SPvP, but that’s a problem bigger than just Thief unfortunately.

Very likely, but Assassin’s Reward also isn’t very good, so there’s that.

Yeah… I really wish ANet would stop passing out condition cleanses like candy.

Not only that, but some of these automatic traits trigger when you DON’T want them to. One example would be Thief’s Pain Response, which triggers under 75% life to give 10s of Regen (meh) and removes all Bleeding, Burning, and Poison on you (yay!).

This sounds nice, except it also triggers if you have none of those conditions on you and are just under 75% life, which is the case nearly 100% of the time in combat given how glassy the Thief is. And thus, what should be a good trait ends up getting completely wasted a lot of the time.

So yeah, I’d like to see those kind of automatic traits changed. Not good design.

Be that as it may, COMMUNICATION goes a long way. If their opinion has changed that much in two months, then they should say as much. Dead silence makes it seem like an issue they might not even be aware of, so OF COURSE people will keep asking.

That is unless you have a red post handy where they overtly say “oh yeah, we decided not to raise Withdraw’s healing by 10% like we said we would because [reasons]”? If it’s out there, it’s sure not on the Thief subforum.

Coulter.2315:

Why do you want Withdraw buffed? Kinda shoots your “I really want balance” ideals in the foot.

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

They increased the CD. That was a nerf. Now you’re asking for an increase in healing. That’s a buff. If they nerfed the heal and found it was in a good place, why would they buff it?

Guys, please don’t be this deliberately dense. It’s embarrassing.

During the trait revamping process, ANet openly said that Withdraw’s CD was getting raised, but to compensate it would heal for 10% more. This change was never actually implemented, and to date no explanation has been given.

Assuming that ANet decided to leave it that way because it’s “more balanced” is silly. I suppose Thief being the only profession in the game that still has a weapon range increasing trait (as a hidden and unlisted effect) is also their “balanced” intention, eh?

atlrising.5134:

Thieves basically can fill your bar up with cripples, poisons and bleed stacks up to 35, that wipe out any combat experience at all. I had a thief show me them doing this to a golem in the pvp lobby. Not to mention the fact they can stealth hit you from behind with venom and immobilize to effectively two hit you during a match without even breaking a sweat.

For starters… I hope you realize that a single Thief build can’t accomplish BOTH of those things (and that they’re a little harder to do when you aren’t hitting a target dummy). Thief does not “two shot” people with conditions in SPvP; if you are being bursted then it is most assuredly a Power Thief, not a Condition Thief. Hybrid Thief is not a thing.

More importantly, Thieves are actually quite bad at applying damaging conditions. People tend to assume otherwise because because Thieves are good at applying controlling conditions (cripple, daze, immobilize, weakness, etc), but those are not analogous.

Various reasons as to why Condition Thief is not viable in SPvP:

1> Thief lacks good access to the consistent application of damaging conditions.
Pistol #1 applies a piddling amount of Bleeds—even with Sigil of Earth slotted—and is a badly designed weapon you generally won’t be using as a mainhand in SPvP. The only other weapon skill that applies Bleeds is Dagger #3, and it is extremely clunky and telegraphed in PvP. Dagger #3 also requires Condition Damage to be useful, while the rest of the Dagger skills are sorely Power based.

That leaves Poison and Torment. Thieves are pretty good at applying Poison, but it is used more for its heal reduction, as its damage scales rather poorly at the moment (much like Bleed). Torment is cool, but the only meaningful source of it is P/D #3. As already mentioned, Mainhand Pistol is not so great.
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2> Thief has no room in its build for traits or utilities that apply conditions.
Unfortunately, Thief has 3 out of 5 skill slots already spoken for in SPvP. Withdraw and Shadowstep are necessary to survive, and Shadow Refuge brings so much in support that you significantly reduce your impact if you take something else. As a result, Trap and Venom skills that you’d think one would want don’t end up making the cut, both because of the aforementioned and also because most aren’t very good.

The same goes for traits… are you going to take junk like Dagger Training instead of Mug, or even a decent trait like Potent Poison instead of Improvisation or EXECUTIONER? No.
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3> Damaging Thief conditions are easily cleansable.
Thieves are very vulnerable to condition cleansing, which is not something that is hard to find right now. Thief’s damaging conditions don’t stick very well, as it doesn’t output a good amount OR variety of them. Bleed and Poison are on opposing weapon sets, unless you want to run a D/D gimmick build or try to poison someone in a 1v1 with Shortbow #4 (good luck with either). Torment is not available enough, and Burning isn’t something Thief can naturally apply at all.

Even Thief’s vaunted control conditions have gaps. Until DD goes live, Thief application of Weakness could be much better. Same goes for Vulnerability, which should be a Thief specialty, but instead is mostly applied by the laughably bad Body Shot (Pistol #2). To put this in perspective, see the Revenant, which can apply 20+ stacks of Vulnerability faster through autoattacking than a Thief can by blowing all of their Initiative.

The gist of this is that these gaps in the application of control conditions makes Thief’s already lacking damaging conditions even easier to strip.
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4> Thief has a lack of viable stat packages in SPvP.
We all know that Power builds need a certain amount of Crit (and to a lesser degree, Ferocity) to function well. Many Condition builds also need Crit to be useful, and for Thief this is a problem. Why, you ask?

11k base HP. That’s tied with Elementalist and Guardian as the lowest HP in the game, but those professions have a lot of defensive tools to make up for it. Thieves have to run an amulet with Vitality or Toughness on it, lest they instantly explode when looked at the wrong way in SPvP.

That means Thief needs Power, Condition Damage, and Vitality/Toughness to make a Condition build potentially viable. That mostly leaves Carrion amulet… but then you don’t have any Crit. Take Rabid and you have that Crit, but all of a sudden you do no damage because you have no Power and a lot of Thief’s base damages are surprisingly terrible (especially on Pistol, the weapon you’re mostly forced to use for Condition builds). Seeing any problems yet?

I’m sure that was more words than you wanted to read, but hey… you said a lot of very incorrect things

I would predict a minimum of two Vault nerfs, whether they’re truly needed or not.

A lot of the DD skills/traits actually look APPROPRIATELY strong right now, Vault and Bounding Dodge in particular. I would hate to see a repeat of the earlier days of the game where Thief ate straight nerf after straight nerf. It was part of what caused me to take a two year break from the game in the first place.

Improvisation definitely has some quirks and hidden attributes. Seems worth extended testing on target dummies to find out more.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

I don’t get why people like Flanking Strikes…it’s such a bad trait. In order for this to be viable, the cooldown needs to be drastically reduced. In my opinion it should be either 15s or 20s cooldown…60s is just trashy.

It’s currently bugged to receive double the cooldown reduction from the Trickster trait, which actually makes it quite solid.

Of course, that means taking Trickster instead of Bountiful Theft…

Generally not a huge fan of Norn, but that mustache is pretty amazing!

Maybe they could add an extra bit where if nothing gets refreshed, one category of skills you DO have slotted gets their cooldowns reduced by 33% or 50%.

I continue to feel that Daredevil, as an elite specialization, is very promising. It’s underlying core Thief issues (and how they’ll interact with DD) that I’m more worried about.

Ah, that’s probably it. Between that and the Air (and Fire?) nerf, I might as well replace my sigils with something else.

I would like to see Dagger Training’s poison application both improved and separated from the dagger. Specs like P/D should be able to passively put poison on too! Even with Dagger mainhand it’s not a great trait right now, so what’s there to lose by opening it up?

Thieves are so starved for condition removal in PvP that Escapist’s Absolution will be taken in 70-80% of builds without a second thought. The few that don’t will take Impacting Disruption to play with Pulmonary shenanigans instead, so… RIP Staff Master.

Escapist’s Absolution is simply going to be too vital to skip in a vast majority of builds. Please, MAKE IT A MINOR.

Foundation rotted away

Minimum height supremacy

I’m aware of those traits, and it doesn’t seem to be that. My stealths just… randomly fail sometimes, without Revealed being up or anything. It’s weird.

Goldenrevolver.4371:

if you really want to be so nitpicky you want to lose the mechanic steal and you want to lose the 50 extra endurance but you want 3 different dodges to choose out of combat and 3 new traits? because reaper, berserker, tempest and dragonhunter get their core mechanic replaced not added. only chronomancer gets something added without a loss of something (technically berserker is between both as they have access their normal bursts but also lose access to them in berserk mode).

Berserker might not be the best example. You technically don’t HAVE to go berserk while you have the trait line equipped, and if you don’t things will continue to function as they always have. Going berserk will give you BETTER versions of burst skills that are still mostly the same. While going berserk makes your adrenaline bar one stock instead of three, everything functions as if you have three in this state.

Similar goes for Tempest, as overloading is something that extends the functionality of their core profession mechanic rather than replacing it. Like with Berserker, you can still have the trait line equipped without being forced to use the extension—just don’t push the button of an attunement you’re already in.

Having the DH or Reaper trait lines equipped straight up replaces parts of their core mechanic (DH’s Super Virtues, Reaper’s Reaper Form) so you have more of a point there.

Not sure, to be honest. I’ve had a lot of my stealths randomly fail lately, especially the one from Hidden Thief (2s stealth on steal).

I really like Shadow Strike being on P/D as is. It’s our best source of Torment, and it reinforces a specific kiting based playstyle that I find very enjoyable.

In my opinion, Human and Sylvari make the best thieves due to animations, camera angles, the way armor looks, etc.

Rainman.6978:

The Thief mechanics are solid and we have trait lines that everyone agrees are good.

Actually, that seems to be a sizable point of contention, judging by the tone of both this thread and rest of the Thief subforum. It suggests that a large amount of dedicated Thief players are NOT satisfied with the current state of their class and its core competencies.

Steal is a reasonably useful—but still clunky—class mechanic that has a lot of issues that come with it. One is that you are forced to go Trickery if you want Steal to be genuinely worthwhile; most of the other trait lines enhance it, but in ways that are not good enough on their own.

So yeah, I’d say Trickery is the only Thief trait line that is widely agreed upon as “good”, but in a sense where it’s so vital that it’s not even a choice… you really need that +3 Max Initiative in particular. This leaves the following trait lines as choices:

Acrobatics: Universally agreed upon as a bad traitline, except in S/D builds where it is borderline TOLERABLE. This will improve in HoT with S/D builds using the DD traitline, but that’s probably it.

Critical Strikes: A gimmicky trait line that has some good stuff but is real hit or miss. It is good for D/P and great for Pistols, but you can rarely fit it in regardless.

Deadly Arts: Suffers from some focus issues, but is up there with Trickery as one of our best lines (or really, the only other one that comes close to being good).

Shadow Arts: Seems to be a real point of contention. Some people think it’s a great line, some think it’s awful. My take is that it’s a clunky, badly arranged trait line that you shouldn’t HAVE to take, but in today’s awkward SPvP meta, are often forced to.

If we assume that everything stays the same as it is now, other than what’s been revealed (which is quite an assumption to be fair), I don’t think a lot of the new stuff will see play in SPvP other than the DD traitline and the stunbreak. The rest looks interesting but probably won’t displace stuff like Shadowstep, Shadow Refuge, D/P+Shortbow, et al. Unless more changes between now and HoT release, which I certainly hope it does…

Fair enough. I will admit that I have spent a vast majority of my time in SPvP rather than WvW, so my WvW knowledge is anecdotal at best.

P.S. How did I not notice until JUST NOW that the thread title says “Davedevil”. lol

No one knows how it’s going to turn out: welcome to life!

People not knowing everything is a given for any particular form of communication. We meet to discuss things BECAUSE we don’t know, or we’d just be off in the corner by ourselves, knowing exactly how specs will turn out and getting rich from our inborn knowledge of futures on the stock market.

Can’t tell if that no-effort troll post was targeting me or someone else, but…

I did just say DD has a lot going for it as an elite spec. At the moment, I am genuinely excited by what DD brings to the table. But like I said before… without some core changes, it’ll ultimately be for naught.

Turns out you can’t build a stable house on a shaky foundation! Who knew?

The signet is fine against PvE enemies (including camps in WvW). The problem is when you face a human opponent and they jump in your face. At that point, SoM (or HiS even) isn’t going to save you. This is why Withdraw is so widely ran—not by preference but by lack of any better choice.

Agreed on just about all of that!

To me, the most illustrative example is how you can run P/D full condi—Dire/Rampager/Sinister amulet, Sigil of Earth on weapon, +Bleed Duration Rune (Afflicted, Krait, Mad King) and STILL not apply as many stacks of bleed as other classes do with one skill/trait.

So frustrating!

Actually, I think Daredevil has a lot going for it as an elite specialization… but that it won’t be enough to overcome three years of accumulated developer neglect. If our core skills and traits aren’t adjusted at all, nothing meaningful will change.

Seabreeze.8437:

Given that this is an entirely brand new way to fight with an existing weapon, I would’ve thought that a slew of new, fluid and dynamic animations would be part of the package rather than just oddly recycled hammer animations which, as a weapon, is worlds different from a bo staff.

In a perfect world, perhaps. Realistically, someone like Karl is given less than a month to come up with an “elite specialization” for a class they barely play. I’m not putting this on Karl, this is just the reality of modern games development—MMOs even more so.

All of this amounts to stuff slipping through the cracks, whether it’s the little things like new Staff animations, or big stuff like much needed skill/trait revamps.

Leo G.4501:

No props for hybrid thief?

I really like the idea, but given that Thief can’t even support a proper full condition build in SPvP right now, a hybrid build is even more out of the question.

In PvE you can just do whatever, though. One of the nice things about GW2.

Several Staff skills feel like placeholder animations. Please don’t let it go live that way.

I can confirm from personal experience that, unfortunately, Thief condition builds are not viable in SPvP. Despite this truth, I still spend a vast majority of my time in SPvP TRYING to make Thief condition builds work, because it is overwhelmingly my preferred playstyle… P/D especially.

Gray summed it up pretty well above (and elsewhere), but gist of it is that Thief just can’t output enough damaging conditions over time for conditions to be a viable playstyle in SPvP. Thief weapons are generally bad at applying damaging conditions, leaving us to rely on high cooldown utility skills. Once you’ve blown your utilities and your opponent cleanses off that stack of Bleed/Poison, you’re boned.

Another big reason is our lacking durability and weird/non-existent scaling from defensive stats. This makes it very hard to find a stat package in SPvP that works for both doing damage and not instantly dying to it.

You have more freedom in WvW, where you can mix and match your gear and you aren’t constrained to the “five-man teams holding control points on a small map” SPvP meta. Even then, you still have to use conditions in a specific way (trap setups mostly) to achieve a remotely viable condition build.

Essentially, Thief’s ability to apply damaging conditions needs a lot of work. The ball’s in your court on that one, Karl.

The only problem I see is it’d feel pretty meh to spend one of your three choices for that line on if you were a non-Staff user. Still, wouldn’t hurt to have the option.

I would rather they redesign some Acrobatics traits—given that it’s widely considered our worst line by far—and find a way to slip that old one back in, but that’s unlikely.

I hope Mr. McLain is consulting with some high level SPvP thieves, because he’s certainly not engaging in a dialogue with anyone on this subforum.

Venoms creating a small elemental field that doesn’t pulse anything is not a bad idea in and of itself. It would be silly to give Thief access to ALL the combo fields, yes, but there’s no reason it’d HAVE to be implemented that way.

If anything, I would suggest that these cloud-creating Venoms only make Poison fields, other than the possibility of Skelk Venom creating a water one—which would bring something new to Thief and give you a reason to even CONSIDER using Skelk Venom. Be honest, when’s the last time you used that clunker of a heal skill, even IN a Venom build?

Jana.6831:

Not sure about that, I guess it’s more like “these traits are just too good to not take them, but we could survive with others” wheras when I look at the thief traits it’s “Yeah well, I don’t need this, I don’t want this, but I have to take it to get to next trait which I want”.

True that. One problem a lot of our lines have is the few good choices being all clustered around one specific tier, making one choice overloaded with too many competing options, and whole other tiers with nothing but subpar ones. Feels bad, man.

We’ll be lucky if we can even get Karl to answer a few questions on the forum. An in-game guild meeting is just not happening.

One hit is fine, but I’d like the bonus to be a bit higher — 15-20% maybe. Otherwise it feels kinda meh compared to the other choices imo

It seems reasonable to ask that Staff #4 provides a Smoke field JUST long enough in duration to provide one Blast/Leap finisher’s worth of Stealth… especially given that the devs keep pushing Stealth and evasion as Thief’s replacement for the durability and diversity that every other profession in the game offers.

Whether you agree with the particulars or not, EVERYONE is in agreement that Thief’s core traitlines (and arguably core skills+stats) need work to be viable in HoT and beyond.

If there’s one piece of feedback that I hope Karl and the dev team absorb and act on, it’s this. Other professions are getting core improvements by their elite specialization designers… we shouldn’t have to settle for any less.

Every profession will have a weapon skin and some amount of armor skins (helm at least) tied to their elite specialization in HoT. For Thief, it’s that Staff and the datamined Daredevil headpiece.