Guild Wars 2

Aenesthesia.1697:

Disclosure: i am by no means asking for a nerf. Just stating that thieves are not that bad either….

Interesting how the only people who ever seem to say this are ones who don’t play Thief… very interesting. I wonder if there’s a reason for that?

Aenesthesia.1697:

The problem seems to be you dont like playing a glasscannon, i’d suggest you roll a warrior then…

Or ANet could improve Thief’s core durability so it’s not the squishiest profession in the game? Guild Wars 2 is supposed to about diversity and choice of builds. That’s all Thieves are asking for: the ability to play something with a modicum of effectiveness that isn’t glass cannon D/P + Shortbow.

Even THAT is less effective than people think. If you don’t believe me, try playing a Thief in SPvP for even a week. Your uninformed opinion won’t last long.

Who cares what it’s called and where it’s “from”? Slow is a powerful effect barely represented in the game at all, so it’s good we’re getting more of it. The only pre-HoT Slow in the game is Mesmer’s Time Warp and Necro corrupting a Quickness boon.

MatthiasL.5346:

Just a sidenote for next bwe: can we get a stolen skill from revenant pls?

It hasn’t been posted in our subforum yet, but they confirmed Thief will have a stolen skill from Revenant next BWE akin to Essence Sap (900 range 1s Slow), but stronger.

Unfortunately Trapper, Torment, and many other rune sets aren’t available in SPvP. Perplexity I get, but the others seem like they’d fit in SPvP just fine.

babazhook.6805:

With trappers and the right trap selection you get just as many sneak attacks off as a p/d set and never have to use INI to do so and then can use a venom(s) or pressure strike for head shot to interrupt and torment.

I’m thinking more for survivability reasons than anything else, because Shadow Strike is a godsend for keeping people out of your face (and the Torment doesn’t hurt, either).

It is a bummer not having Headshot, though, and P/P is poised to improve further on account of Bound letting you stealth more readily… but then again, so is P/D with the addition of Impaling Lotus. Hopefully both will find their niche, but we’ll see I suppose.

I still think the best solution is to make Ankle Shots our version of Warrior’s Crack Shot (which makes their Rifle attacks pierce). I imagine that piercing shots on our Pistol attacks would be a lot more reliable—and easy to balance—than the RNG cleaving of Ricochet.

I seem to recall something about the Monkey King model having weird skeletal rigs that don’t jibe with a lot of races, so maybe that’s why they didn’t reuse those? They still seem like the most appropriate preexisting animations though…

babazhook.6805:

Hopefully when they rexamine the set this can be looked at. The fly in the ointment is how to boost p/p without doing the same to other sets using a pistol wherein p/p makes no real gains on those sets

One commonly echoed suggestion is to redesign Unload so it has a Ricochet-esque effect baked in. That would keep the effect constrained to P/P without, say, making P/D ridiculous (and make no mistake, P/D is THIS CLOSE to being legit, and Impaling Lotus + Impairing Daggers alone might do it).

Kocoff.7582:

I keep posting this vid. Daredevil P/P in PvP.

OP should take a look
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbVXooJU7yg

Opportunity cost, my friend. Just because you can get more out of P/P with Daredevil’s tools doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be better off playing another build instead.

But hey, GW2 is mostly about having fun and doing whatever, which is why people still managed to have some modicum of success with P/P before the June trait update totally dumpstered it. If you just want to mess around and have fun, P/P should definitely be better come HoT… just not better enough to crack the crust of competitive SPvP builds.

Honestly, I think Ricochet has been pretty overrated in the grand scheme of things. It was a FUN trait, but not a very good one, and there is a meaningful difference there. A random cleave proc means that Ricochet ranged from anywhere from situationally useful to complete garbage you were wasting a trait pick on (and remember, you used to have to PAY to switch them…)

It’s obvious at this point that they removed it during the big trait revamp because it didn’t fit their current design philosophy, and I can’t say I blame them. The mistake they made was not putting something else in its place, and I hope that’s rectified soon. P/P’s multi target damage has always been terrible, and without Ricochet it’s even worse.

The expansion isn’t out for another five weeks, and Karl is slowly showing signs of being receptive to widespread feedback. Don’t give up on EA, as it should definitely be a minor for many reasons listed above (although you might want to move your major feedback on it to the BWE3 thread for more visibility).

Yeah, I don’t think having the dodges swappable in combat adds much to the spec, and it could potentially cause balance issues. That’s still no excuse for the chosen dodge not being a drop-down list instead of GM trait, though. Having one extra trait choice is a bigger impact than people realize, especially one designed as a Grandmaster trait.

Sounds promising to me. Slow is one of those effects that is very underrepresented, and as of HoT Thief will have two sources of it! Now if we could just get that Dark Field on Staff #4…

Karl McLain.5604:

Ricochet in its previous implementation is not slated to return at this time.
When the trait system was condensed, the standard was set in that each weapon set could only have one trait. Being that a player might want to receive increased damage from pistols, but not necessarily inherit the RNG bounce attacks from the secondary trait, this secondary trait was cut.
I will say though that pistols are something we’ll be looking to improve, being as they feel under-tuned at the moment.

-Karl

It is great to hear an official response on this! Beyond what you mentioned with consolidating traits, I imagine a random cleave effect didn’t seem like a design healthy enough to carry forward. Has any thought been given to having Ankle Shots—the current singular Pistol trait—make Pistol attacks pierce? Think Warrior’s Crack Shot trait, which does the same with Rifle.

And since we’re on the subject… could we get an official word on the hidden range increase to Pistols on Ankle Shots, and whether it’s intentional? It’s not listed in the tooltip, and weapon range increases through traits seem to be something that you guys have phased out on a design level (usually by adding to the weapon’s base range).

Thank you again for responding! P/P is something near and dear to many Thieves.

It’s nice to hear more from you Karl, but it really feels like you’re polishing the brass on the Titanic at this point. I know you have to be careful with what you say lest you promise something that might not make it in before launch, but can we please get some acknowledgement on the big issues like placeholder animations, needed mechanical Staff changes, and the wasted GM trait debacle (even if it’s just “we’re looking into it”)?

It’s good to see you’re dipping your toe into posting more. I know there’s a lot of negativity around here, but please continue to post. Two-way communication goes a long way in terms of making players feel heard and understood, even if we can’t always get what we might want. Right now a lot of people are on the fence about whether to invest their time and money in HoT. Hearing some direct communication—even if it’s to tell us you can’t get to certain issues until after launch—would do a lot to help people pick a side of the fence to fall on.

Cecilia.5179:

Thief is not the worst class; however, it isn’t close to being the best either. People calling for thief nerfs are overreacting to a learning curve. Thief needs to be moved in a positive direction to regain some of the distinction it has lost.

Thief is the second weakest profession at worst. Nothing other than Ranger really comes close. I feel bad for those guys having the last elite specialization revealed, because it’ll definitely get less dev-time than it needs as a result. Kind of like our elite spec…

MakubeC.3026:

What I’m saying is: make stealth blink so QQers can’t complain about not finding us anymore and give us what we need. I personally wouldn’t mind blinking if that results in a fair treatment compared with the other professions.

There is no amount of nerfing that will make QQers happy when it comes to Thief. That’s why we’re in this position in the first place… people complained loudly about Thief and ANet continued to listen to them.

Is this your first time playing a rogue class in a MMO? Sadly, they tend to be hated by players, because of stealth, high burst, or other things casual players don’t like going against. Worse, they tend to be ignored by the people on the development side, whom for whatever reason never seem to be passionate about rogue classes (or able to find a single person with design experience who is).

If the QQers had their way, Thief would be EVEN WEAKER than it is right now. Please consider that in the future before suggesting arbitrary nerfs to the few things still keeping us playable at all.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Amante.8109:

These are fixable problems, but unfortunately they seem to have no intention of doing so.

The intent is there for sure, but they simply don’t know how. They believe that EA is powerful enough and it shouldn’t be baseline.

I wouldn’t call a hastily thrown together elite specialization “intent” to fix our profession. Elite specs for everyone is a bullet point on the back of the expansion box that they HAVE to deliver, or they’re guilty of false advertising.

Everything about Daredevil reeks of a hasty band-aid meant to hold Thief over through another 2-3 years of no attention. Where is the love and attention most other professions are getting? Is it really so hard to find a single design lead that is PASSIONATE about Rogue archetypes?

Stealth is not the problem; Mesmer actually does it BETTER right now and they’re one of the top three professions in PvP.

For whatever reason, ANet seemingly can’t figure out what to do with Thief, apparently because of the Initiative system and Shortbow #5. These are fixable problems, but unfortunately they seem to have no intention of doing so.

A roll back with an optional roll in afterwards would be nice—like an inverse version of that one Mesmer skill.

I know, right? As if needing to remove conditions in combat is “situational” in a game wholly centered around combat! Karl, have you PvPed on the live servers with ANY character recently (let alone Thief)? Does needing to deal with the stream of constant conditions everyone faces 100% of the time in SPvP sound “conditional” to you?

DresdenAllblack.1249:

BTW, you shouldn’t play anything because its ‘meta’. Play it because you enjoy it.

End. Of. Discussion.

If you ‘enjoy’ getting steamrolled in PvP then by all means, run P/P.

It’s Thief or bust for me, as I’m simply not interested in maining other professions. I’ll dabble with them in PvP a bit, sure, but I play the game for the Thief.

As it is, I was gone for large chunks of the first three years due to not liking the lack of attention Thief got. Things are even worse now post trait revamp, and Daredevil doesn’t look to change that.

I’ll give the game until one month after HoT launches… if I haven’t seen some meaningful improvements to Thief by that point then they’re not gonna happen, and I can better spend my time and money elsewhere.

Courtyard would be fine if it were a separate ‘mode’ you could optionally queue for, like how Stronghold is currently handled in HoT beta.

You can tell that the earlier elite specializations have benefited from having more development time and more BWEs to gather feedback on. Unfortunately, it’s looking like Daredevil, Forge, and Druid will get the short end of the stick in this department.

Engineer will manage, I’m sure. But it’s very problematic how the two most neglected professions in the game—Thief and Ranger—are continuing this trend by getting elite specializations that are less developed and less tested.

Guess we’ll see how it plays out, but as a Thief player I’m not feeling optimistic.

Yep. P/D is far more suited for Venoms and condition builds than P/P is… and far better in general, honestly.

In an attempt to add some more useful feedback to the pile, I am going to respond to the OP point by point and note where major points of community feedback were missed:

Karl McLain.5604:

Staff:
We’ll be looking at updating these abilities as we are able. There was a common tone in that the staff was too slow and didn’t feel as well as it could in its utility. We’ll be working on this now and in the future, so please continue to give feedback as you play the Daredevil.

For starters, it’s hard to enjoy using the Staff when it consists almost entirely of reused and/or placeholder animations. The Staff is the main selling point of Daredevil and what most casual Thief players seem to be looking forward to. As things stand now, I can state unequivocally that they will be disappointed. There is plenty of feedback both in the DD feedback thread and Staff specific threads at to what you should look for in terms of Staff animations, whether they’re new or reused. Please update us on this issue.

Karl McLain.5604:

Weakening Charge: Increased the maximum number of targets from 1 to 5. _note: we’re still working on making this animation feel better. In addition to basic clean-up I’m hoping to make it targeted (ala Heartseeker) but still pass through the target. At the point of writing this, though, it’s not in yet.

I wanted to note this, because along with the Dodge animations being improved this seems to be one of the few pieces of widespread feedback that was received and responded to. I look forward to trying the improved version of the skill in BWE3.

Karl McLain.5604:

Dust Strike: Reduced cast time from 1/2 second to 1/4 second.

Number tweaks will not change much. The skill has a bad animation and questionable usefulness in general. I understand that, for whatever reason(s), you don’t want Staff to have a Smoke Field (although I think you’re overestimating how powerful the Stealth Staff #1 Knockdown will be). Dust Strike still feels underwhelming mechanically. The best suggestion that I have heard echoed several times is having Dust Strike drop a line-shaped Dark Field that pulses Blind. There are very few Dark Fields in the game; this would give Staff something unique to bring to the table in terms of utility.

Karl McLain.5604:

Vault: Reduced initiative cost from 6 to 5. Reduced cast time from 1 second to 3/4 second. _note: We’ve discussed leaving the initiative high and giving this ability an evade component at the beginning or end. Feel free to let us know what you think.

Why do we have to choose between the skill being cost effective and the skill being functional? Try and understand that 6 initiative is a LOT. 5 initiative is a large enough cost as it is; note that most Dual Skills are 4, with the three that cost 5 being the least frequently used. The only 6 cost skill we have at all is Shortbow #5, and Vault is no Infiltrator’s Arrow… not even close.

Vault’s animation is very slow and telegraphed, and after the first week of HoT PvP people will figure out that they can just knock the Thief out of the air with any form of hard CC. Vault NEEDS the Evade during transit to make it functional. It should not have to be overcosted to function as designed.

Karl McLain.5604:

Bandit’s Defense: Increased recharge from 10 seconds to 15.

Why, God, WHY? The Berserker version is still 10s CD; why is the Daredevil version 15s? Why does a profession already far more durable than Thief get a BETTER version of a much needed Thief skill? It’s just baffling, honestly.

As noted by others, the automatic triggering of the knockdown is inconvenient and often gets triggered by throwaway minions. Please make it a flip over skill you can manually activate after the conditions have met (with the 1.5s block lasting the whole time regardless).

Karl McLain.5604:

Impact Strike combo: Removed endurance gain from Uppercut and Finishing Blow when Brawler’s Tenacity was equipped.

Again, WHY? It’s a three part skill that involves considerable windup on 2/3 of the parts, and I doubt a little extra Endurance was lighting the world on fire.

The animation for the third part still doesn’t look right. As with the other animation issues, could we please get a response on the feasibility of changing this? The best suggestion I’ve heard several times is reusing the animation from the Warrior’s Stomp Rage Skill. It would also be nice to know if the elite will ever use our chosen stomp flags…

Karl McLain.5604:

Distracting Daggers: Reduced equip cast time to 1/2 second. This ability now lasts for 25 seconds. Thrown dagger velocity has been increased by 100%. Fixed an issue that wouldn’t allow this ability to increase interrupt cooldown.

Sorry, but this isn’t going to change anything for reasons other people have noted. Distracting Daggers has too many arbitrary mechanical limitations to make the cut on a Thief’s bar at present. The delay between uses is completely unnecessary and should be removed. If you’re looking to balance this skill, why not let the user take as long as they want to use the daggers—without delay between them—but have the skill not go on cooldown until the last is used? This would stand in contrast to Mantras, which go on CD immediately after being pre-casted.

Karl McLain.5604:

Fist Flurry: Increased damage per hit by 36%. Each successful hit applies one stack of vulnerability for 5 seconds. Removed hidden initiative cost.

This skill doesn’t really seem to have a niche or purpose. It’s a bit of extra damage with no utility on a profession that already has too many unused skills like that.

It strikes me as ridiculous that a Revenant can stack Vulnerability with greater ease through autoattacking than a Thief can by using multiple weapon and utility skills and blowing all their initiative. Throwing a few stacks of Vulnerability on a 20s cooldown utility will not change that. Unfortunately, this skill is probably going straight into the dustbin.

Karl McLain.5604:

Traits:
This iteration was mostly bug fixes. I’ve seen a lot of feedback on how Escapist’s Absolution should be baseline. It is the case that we believe this trait is powerful enough that it should be a choice in the trait line between damage, survivability and utility, rather than just a given. Driven Fortitude’s healing allows for usefulness in all modes where you take damage, where EA’s condition removal is situationally useful in a combat scenario.

I’m gonna level with you here… if Daredevil is as much a band-aid for unaddressed core Thief issues as it appears to be, this kind of rhetoric simply isn’t going to cut it. Thief is the squishiest profession in the entire GAME, and the trait revamp in June only added to that. Thief is lacking core damage mitigation and condition removal that it should ALREADY have. Your line about the “choice” between damage, survivability, and utility only makes sense in an environment where Thief isn’t already lacking core durability.

More important is the single biggest piece of non-Staff feedback that people had, and it remains completely unaddressed: WHY IS DAREDEVIL THE ONLY ELITE SPECIALIZATION IN THE GAME THAT WASTES AN ENTIRE TRAIT TIER ON UNLOCKING ITS ELITE MECHANIC? There is no reason whatsoever that the Dodge choice couldn’t be made a dropdown box that is locked during combat/PvP matches (like Revenant Legends). This would open up a whole additional tier of sorely needed traits for the Thief. Please don’t give us 2/3 the new traits of other professions… we’re starved enough as it is.

These proposed changes are profoundly disappointing. It sounds like the dodges will be fixed, and that is good news, but that’s also the least that can be expected—the spec simply won’t function AT ALL without the dodges being improved.

The vast majority of our other feedback seems to have been ignored in favor of shallow number buffs (and a few extremely questionable nerfs on top of that). There aren’t enough hours in the day or words in the English language to express how frustrating it is to have your core concerns and feedback perpetually ignored.

Comparing the OP of this thread to the ones for other professions paints a stark picture. Many professions got EXACTLY what they wanted as a result of their collated feedback, and why shouldn’t they? Like our little Thief community, the other professions came together to really figure out what about their respective elite specializations NEEDED to be changed. The key difference seems to be that those professions have developers behind them that are invested in making a quality elite spec that meets people’s needs, whereas ours seems to be trying to put in as little effort as possible.

Thieves have gone years without attention on needed issues at this point—literally years. I’m having a hard time of thinking of any other profession in the game that has consistency gotten this poor of treatment, and Ranger is the only one that even comes close. Thus, I am forced to conclude that Daredevil, as we see it now, is largely what we will be getting when HoT releases, and that changes from that point will be minimal and, again, largely number based. If this indeed the case, I will not be playing longer than a month or two into the expansion, and I have a feeling I won’t be the only one.

Supposedly a class specific updates of some kind if coming in the next couple of days, maybe even tomorrow. Sure hope so.

A vast majority of people already run Zerk/Marauder… isn’t that already going to an extreme?

Dual pistols are in a pretty bad spot. Their damage is lacking, and worse, entirely single target. They’re fine for adventuring out in the world, though, and I tend to use them on world bosses since it’s the best sustained non-melee damage Thief has access to.

The +3 max initiative from Trickery should absolutely be made baseline. The difference between 12 and 15 initiative is huge. Going without Trickery in SPvP is simply not an option from that alone, nevermind all the other goodies.

As much as people miss Ricochet, I get why they removed it: a randomly triggering cleave is not good design. What I DON’T understand is why something hasn’t been put in its place. Warriors have a trait that makes their Rifle attacks pierce; why can’t Thief have this with Pistols through a trait? Thief is one of only two professions in the game lacking access to piercing attacks, and it wouldn’t be drastic enough to put P/P over the top.

The continued silence and lack of attention on ANet’s part is really unfortunate, as it lends Thief the air of a profession left to rot. That perception isn’t helped by traits like Ankle Shots, which remains the ONLY weapon range increasing trait in the game not yet made baseline. If they can’t even include Thief in changes that every other profession in the game receives, what are the chances of our traits and utilities getting another look?

All the feedback in the world doesn’t matter if no one’s listening. It’s time for a statement on the results of our already voluminous feedback.

Black Frog.9274:

We all have to resign ourselves: ricochet is gone for good. Single target damage is better now, esp with the right traits, so spreading it out with Ricochet would be pretty powerful.

Would it? P/P was low on damage before the revamp; now it’s even worse. Its damage is awful even for single target, so Ricochet wouldn’t really do much but let you randomly do mediocre AoE damage in between your mediocre single target damage. Seems fine to me.

Trait design seems to have moved away from stuff like random procs of AoE damage, though. If they added a multi-target trait to Pistol, it would likely be something more akin to how Warrior Rifle works (your AA and certain attacks upgraded to pierce instead of just hit one target).

“All” the other Pistol traits? The only Pistol specific trait left is Ankle Shots, and ironically it generally ISN’T taken in Pistol builds.

I still think an Acrobatics minor would be the perfect spot to put a 25% move bonus. It would bring some much needed identity (and utility) back to the line, too.

I’m going to give Revenant a solid go, but Thief is still my true love. No matter how bad the profession gets, I’ll be putting the lion’s share of my GW2 time into it as long as I continue to play.

The idea of Dash as an instant shadowstep instead of dodge is actually INCREDIBLY interesting. It’d require minimal animation too, so a plus on the effort side for ANet

I am very excited by the addition of Bandit’s Defense into the game. It makes not running Shadowstep possible and opens up a few possible builds. I do agree that it needs tweaks as detailed above, however.

I see no reason not to have the dodge be a drop down box like Revenant legends, and then give DD actual Grandmaster traits. You could balance it in SPvP by locking the player into their choice once the match starts, much like the legends function now.

Supreme.3164:

I don’t know why thieves are surprised to receive such firm opposition to their demands for more sustain; they possess already the most annoying, frustrating mechanic ever designed in a MMO : stealth. Their demands become even more ridiculous as they refuse for great part to give up on their access to stealth.

I get that a lot of people hate the feeling of fighting an opponent who can Stealth, but COME ON. We’re not talking WoW style Stealth where you can stay in it indefinitely until you open on your terms with ridiculous CC (with there also being several abilities that reenter this ‘stalking’ state, of course). Stealth in GW2 is, on average, for around four seconds at a time. That makes it more of a repositioning or escape tool than the power to engage on your terms at any time like in other games.

People can complain—and make no mistake, 90% of people’s anti-Thief rhetoric is just poorly concealed whining about Stealth—but there’s nothing unbalanced about going invisible for an average of FOUR SECONDS at a time, especially with all the counters to it nowadays. The Thief is squishy, and you can hit the Thief with AOEs while stealthed, nevermind the multitude of reveal effects that now also exist.

Stealth is fine, and people need to stop being such babies over something just because they don’t like going against it. Believe me, there’s plenty of things OTHER professions can do in the current meta that I don’t like going up against, but I’m not calling for THEM to be nerfed into the ground or made useless.

If they removed the sharks, people would have no real reason left to complain… the point being underwater is fine.

For the record, I loved the map and all its gimmicks, sharks included

You could even have the Grandmaster traits all affect Steal in some way, bringing a core theme back into the mix. This could also serve to offer another trait line that could replace Trickery, if done right.

The Elite Chain needs a better animation for the third hit, too. The Warrior Stomp is the best recycled suggestion I’ve heard.

That pretty much sums it up sigh

Generally, the passives that trigger at percentages of health are fine. They should alter or remove the ones that straight up stunbreak, though. RNG stunbreaking is too feast or famine to be good design.

The point of TTK is not to pick out weird, gimmicky edge cases but to figure out both what the average TTK is, and what it SHOULD be. Given that the build you listed is non-viable in SPvP, it’s not really relevant to what we’re talking about.

Now, a D/D Ele or Medi Guard’s TTK, on the other hand… that sort of thing is relevant.

I’m over how Thieves “used to” be, both in reality and people’s perceptions. I just want the profession to be fun and versatile in the PRESENT. Buff and rework some skills and traits, throw in some higher base HP, and we’d have a lot more to work with build-wise.

If they’re willing to give us a FULL revamp (which they won’t, for time and other resource reasons), they can take Shortbow #5 in exchange for becoming more well rounded. It’s obviously a design albatross that keeps us playing waterboy as it is.

Pretty much. Revenant feels a lot like Death Knight was in WoW, where the passion they have for making a new class combined with the accumulated design experience of having worked on the game for years means the new class is simply better. More efficiently tuned and synergized, bigger numbers… just overall BETTER.

At this rate, they’re going to need another round of trait revamps just for most core professions to keep up.

Well, mostly Burn and Confuse to be honest. Bleed and Poison leave a lot to be desired in the damage department right now, and only a couple of builds can stack them reliably. Poison’s heal reduction is always useful, though.