Guild Wars 2

If you gave Feline Grace as an innate trait, that would make thieves way too OP, and if you removed the heavy armor on warriors/guardians, they would be too useless. The way things are its fine. They don’t have to make things 100% balanced, every profession got its ups and downs.

Man, they made the thief sound pathetic, we are still good. I personally prefer the crit damage thief over conditions. They have totally different game play, so try to check which style you like better. You don’t need to go full berserker, you can mix between Berserker, Valkyrie, and Cavalier!

Hey Yashi, amazing work there mate! One question, how can you manage without the Shadow’s Embrace trait (Remove one condition every 3 seconds while in stealth) ? I tried without it and had a very hard time. So I usually use that instead of gaining two initiatives with every stealth. I haven’t stopped playing D/D even after the revealed nerf. I just didn’t enjoy the P/D as much. I run a close build to yours, but with much cheaper gear replacements hehe

Warriors are warriors, and thieves are thieves, pretty much obvious isn’t it? Why compare the two? If you want to be useful in dungeons as a thief put up some toughness so that you survive boss fights, and don’t forget you are by far the best resurrecter, whip up that stealth and revive the fallen/dead. If they aren’t grateful for that I don’t know what would.

We, as thieves, still got good single target damage, and we can burst any single target faster than any other class. Our AOE isn’t too shabby as well, shortbow’s cluster bombs is just awesome!

As for not having enough party support, I would rather have a guardian over any other class. The rest, if they know their class well, they would do fine!

Sebrent you aren’t promoting thief good play, you are promoting other classes LAZY play. “Oh, the thief stealthed? Let me stand there with my Aegis up….”

You are only seeing half of the cup, if you look at it the other way around, it would be thieve’s backstab was made this way to differentiate good opponents from bad ones. The good ones can easily avoid a backstab, where the bad ones will take it in!

So please stop with this silly nonsense about promoting good play when you spend most of your time on your mesmer or ranger rather than thief. Oh, and stop comparing your phantasms or any other skill with backstab, we don’t press 1 and watch the backstab run off to kill others by itself….

FinalPatriot you got a +1 for making me laugh.

I don’t know about you guys, but I like to do different kind of contents without needing different gear stats. Having less than 1200 toughness will make any pve content annoying, especially dungeons and fractals. I seriously hate the feeling when I get one shotted for missing a dodge, but with a 1350 toughness, I have second chances

It isn’t a clone, it is a thief ally:

Ambush
½ 35
Trap. Set a trap that, when triggered, calls in a thief that attacks nearby foes for twenty seconds.

Thieves that you call can either use daggers or pistol. So they aren’t always melee.

sorrow.2364:

Azraeel.1238:

You are all forgetting one main aspect, other than stealth and evade, we don’t have any defensive buffs to actually compensate. To actually dodge 3 times consecutively you need at least 15 in acrobatics, the vitality tree, which also means you are sacrificing dps for it. As for the endurance refill signet, it is good, but not as good as shadow refuge, Shadowstep, and the increase movement signet.

Another thing is, to be able to refill endurance faster, we need to melee, again, without enough toughness, going face to face with anyone could be deadly.

Last thing is dodging requires good timing, unlike popping buffs and taking everything to the face.

You know what 15 traitpoints are worth? Nothing.
Why can’t I have the same survivability on my Necromancer by putting 15 traitpoints into Death Magic? The only thing I have is Reanimator, maybe Greater Marks and Protection of the Horde. Kind of a big deal, you say? What about Blood Magic? Full of Life (5s of regen on 90 HP!), Vampiric (40hp healed on hit! OMG!).

What about any other profession?
Let’s say Guardian.
15 points in Valor -> Valorous Defenses (Aegis on 50% HP! WOW!), Courageous Return (Courage recharged on Rally! OMFG!). Adept skills also do nothing relevant.
15 points in Honor -> Vigorous Precision (Vigor on critical hit, kinda good, but enough?), Selfless Daring (100 hp healed on dodge). Adept traits -> nothing worth taking.

I can continue this kitten for every profession in this game. No profession allows you to run full berserker that carelessly at the cost of ONLY 15 traitpoints. This is the whole point.

Last thing to say: dodge requires skill and timing if you have only few dodges available, not if you have loads of them. In that case, you can just guesstimate when to dodge.

Oh please, you are giving this ONE EXTRA DODGE way too much credit. Well guess what? In my thief’s build I don’t have 15 in acrobatics, and I play just fine. If I added 5 points to acrobatics, I will either lose the 100% critical damage from stealth, or the healing while in stealth, and both of them suit me WAY better for my gameplay (0/30/30/10/0). After the 4 seconds revealed I doubt anyone is going with full zerker builds, unless you enjoy running around with 900 toughness and 11k hp… My toughness is 1350 and I have almost 16k HP.

Just for your information, my main is a Necro and I also have an 80 guardian. For the necro the deathshroud is just an awesome defensive mechanic, I can’t count the number of times it saved my behind. As for the Guardian, they have shouts with VERY low cooldowns that give them protection, regeneration, aegis, swiftness, retaliation, and stability. Do not compare things literary, like you did with the silly trait comparison, take the WHOLE picture instead.

What people seem to miss is that if they just move around, it becomes nearly impossible to land a backstab on them. Those who get backstabbed are the ones who stand still, and in most of the cases a backstab turns into a facestab because we either run out of stealth time, or the guy turns around in the last second. So stop nagging, and learn to play.

Yesterday, the only backstab I got in WvW was ONCE, and that was because a guardian immobilized me.

As for adding a cooldown on backstab, the difference between Thieves and the rest of the classes is that our weapon skills do NOT cause cooldowns, which ALSO means switching weapons won’t gain us extra attacks unless we saved enough initiatives. Moreover, backstab replaces the AUTOATTACK skills, which are SPAMMABLE for all the classes. So deal with it!

Sunflowers.1729:

Doing a Backstab on a block does not reveal you.

Honestly, a pretty fair middle ground is to increase the range of Backstab by a decent amount and slap a 2 second cooldown onto it (even if you miss).

Guess I got revealed by coincidence then, in any case, your suggestion will sound logical if it was a ranged attack, but a real backstab should remain close very close. The way it is now is challenging and fun, going with any of the two suggestions would kill it.

God, I sure do hope Arenanet doesn’t read all the silly suggestions posted by people like the OP. My gear is a mixture of Berserk, Valkyrie, and Cavalier. Giving me 1350 toughness, 108% crit damage, and 45% critical chance (+5% if health > 90%, +7% if side or behind). The rest falls on how good you use your skills. If you are a thief getting harrased by another thief, you can simply use shadow refuge and run away if you don’t like it, as simple as that -_-.

You are all forgetting one main aspect, other than stealth and evade, we don’t have any defensive buffs to actually compensate. To actually dodge 3 times consecutively you need at least 15 in acrobatics, the vitality tree, which also means you are sacrificing dps for it. As for the endurance refill signet, it is good, but not as good as shadow refuge, Shadowstep, and the increase movement signet.

Another thing is, to be able to refill endurance faster, we need to melee, again, without enough toughness, going face to face with anyone could be deadly.

Last thing is dodging requires good timing, unlike popping buffs and taking everything to the face.

Sebrent.3625:

Travlane.5948:

:P yeah. i know.. thief has 2 months before its dead i think. maybe on the 19th :/

Based on what exactly?

Azraeel.1238:

I couldn’t help myself but login to reply to this thread. I have 4 80s, last of which was a thief. I totally understand the 4 seconds revealed, but a backstab should never cause revealed if it was out of range miss. As far as I’ve seen, block and blind already throws us out of stealth with revealed. Heck if we leave the Shadow’s Refuge we get revealed.

It looks like you are getting nailed by backstab so much that you are taking “bad/average thieves” as an excuse. Backstab is one of the main thief mechanics which by itself is already hard to land. If your mesmer can’t defeat thieves, doesn’t mean they should get punished for throwing a BS far from you. So far I’ve read your arguments and all I found was someone who wants his mesmer to win easily against a thief.

(1) Look at the parts of your post I put in bold. The first one bolded proves that the second one is a lie. Why? Because if you actually read my posts, you would have read that I’ve said several time that I do not think a thief missing backstab for being out of range should reveal them; only if they are countered by an active defense (i.e. block, dodge, etc.)

(2) I have also listed in several posts why I think it should reveal:

• It punishes good non-Thief play (skill goes on cooldown and you still eat a backstab unless you use another 1+ defensive skills) and tt rewards bad play by the Thief (don’t care if you use a key attack against a blocking/dodging/etc. opponent, you’ll just put more of their defenses on cooldown.
• It is how every other attack mechanic works … with there even being a patch in January 2013 devoted to making sure they were working like this.
  • Note: if you’ve read, you’ll know that it’s already been discussed that this involves an assumption that backstab, tactical strike, etc. should work the same way just as it’s an assumption that they should not.

---

If going to put in your 2 cents, actually read what has been posted and focus on that rather than on the people. Your post could be summed up as: “I think you suck and that’s why you are posting what you’ve posted”.

That’s not very mature, does nothing for the conversation, borders on violating the CoC, and simply not true.

And if you read what I wrote, you will realize that I already said doing a backstab on block will reveal you, happened to me several times unless these several times were a coincidence? I’m doubtful. Anyways, the idea behind the backstab revealed is to delay stealth in case someone landed a hit while stealthed. Being blocked is the only logical thing to cause revealed, miss and evade both technically means you haven’t landed a hit yet, and so they shouldn’t reveal you.

Moreover, as a warrior, their F1 skill doesn’t consume adrenaline if they miss or get blocked.

You summed up my post perfectly right, all those that agree with you either got nailed by a thief, or have hard time defeating one, and all those that enjoy backstab build thief, found this suggestion to be ridiculous. No one can deny that.

Too much nonsense talk!!! Especially from Sebrent who seems so much persistent to show how easily he gets nailed by thieves…. >.>

Anyways, if they add this item, they should remove the revealed debuff, because now people can “reveal” thieves pretty much anytime they like. Unless they have something against stealth, then they should remove it alltogether and maybe change the whole mechanics of a thief to compensate. -_-

I couldn’t help myself but login to reply to this thread. I have 4 80s, last of which was a thief. I totally understand the 4 seconds revealed, but a backstab should never cause revealed if it was out of range miss. As far as I’ve seen, block and blind already throws us out of stealth with revealed. Heck if we leave the Shadow’s Refuge we get revealed.

It looks like you are getting nailed by backstab so much that you are taking “bad/average thieves” as an excuse. Backstab is one of the main thief mechanics which by itself is already hard to land. If your mesmer can’t defeat thieves, doesn’t mean they should get punished for throwing a BS far from you. So far I’ve read your arguments and all I found was someone who wants his mesmer to win easily against a thief.