Guild Wars 2

That’s doubtful. While later ninjas were trained, most were not trained as well as the samurai to fight fair. Almost all of the tactics employed by ninjas historically were deliberately to fight unfair due to the risky nature of subterfuge assassinations where targets were typically well-guarded daimyos.

Most of the legacy is widely-regarded as fantasy, with the origins of the ninja coming from rebels and mercenaries which fought for pay and not for honor either from frustration or desperation; most of said warriors were untainted.

As far as the thief’s capabilities go, it depends heavily on builds. I can stomp almost everyone I know while playing D/D condi and barely have to try. D/D power core thief OTOH requires me to perform at my absolute best to scrape some wins.

A lot of people are just bad at fighting thief because they’ve never played it, tbh. The better you are at a class, the better you are at fighting against it. DH has a lot of natural counters, but it’s very far from the only thing that can beat it.

I’d actually have to argue that most professions when played well can beat a thief. I say can, because that also depends on builds and the skill level of the thief.

I consistently beat most thieves on my reaper using a greatsword, which is is supposed to be the the least favorable matchup and the weakest weapon against them.

And a lot of the thieves in the game are very far from their potential, and subsequently very, very weak.

The only truly broken thief build imho is dire/TB condi D/D. But that’s still more of an issue of Dire/TB being so safe and Death Blossom horribly-designed.

Ensign.2189:

Biggest issue with the 1s cooldown is that it disproportionately hurts the weaker sets. The big difference between the strong PvP sets (D/P, Staff) and everything else is that the strong PvP sets have a clear workhorse skill that gives incredible value for the initiative (Shadow Shot, Vault) on a kit that otherwise provides good utility – and that workhorse is still very good from stealth. If you are playing D/P and miss a Backstab, a Shadow Shot from stealth is a very good option for you – there’s a good chance you are out of position, and it still applies a blind with pretty good damage on the hit. Not ideal compared to hitting a Backstab, of course, but still very good. If you’re stealthed in staff (not uncommon as more people switch to D/P + Staff) firing off a Vault onto a target that is out of range of / you have missed a Hook Strike on is quite strong. It’s really hard to dodge a Vault from stealth, it gap closes for you, and it hits harder than Backstab!

Basically, in both cases, even if you miss your follow up is a gap closer + big payload that you don’t feel bad about using at all.

On the flip side, if you are playing power D/D, or are playing with a sword, you’re basically screwed if you miss your stealth attack. D/D gets to…Heartseeker as a backup? Do less damage than autoattacking and spend initiative, oh boy. S/x doesn’t have any heavy hitting attacks to follow up on, just utility and more mobility. If you don’t hit your stealth attack with any of those sets, you’re pretty screwed.

So if you’re playing one of the core, strong sets, the 1s cooldown is probably just forcing you to play better, and to use an alternative pattern if your stealth attack misses – yeah, it sucks, but it’s not so bad compared to using Shadow Shot / Vault from stealth anyway. If you aren’t playing one of those sets, and make good use of stealth? You’re pretty much screwed, and every missed stealth attack is going to make you rage.

You’ve totally nailed it.

Lalainnia.3598:

DeceiverX.8361:

Lalainnia.3598:

Somewhat confused here how exactly is the 1 sec icd on stealth attacks the death of the class. Does missing a stealth attack apply reveal??? As for the invul and aegis/blocks why would any thief waste a stealth attack on a target with aegis or an invul up do ppl not look for boon icons or ability tells isn’t the whole point of stealth to gain the upper hand or retreat. If someone pops an aegis/block or invul anticipating a stealth attack isn’t that just a good move on them and poor play by the thief if they attack?

This is why the nerf was more or less specifically a problem for D/D power; the set’s functionality when built power comes entirely from backstab, and requires an extra risk of getting up close out of stealth, landing the CnD to gain access, and still having the opportunity to land the backstab as well. Any passive proc of blocks, stealth, etc. negates pretty much the entire weapon set, since skills 2-4 are useless on engage with D/D.

D/P can still work since it has powerful skills on 3 and 4.

There are two further things to consider:
Backstab has a long aftercast delay, and the cooldown for backstab doesn’t start until after the aftercast, putting it closer to a 2s cooldown than 1s overall. This means players without SA get at absolute most, 2 backstabs per stealt, and that’s demanding absolutely zero wait time between gaining stealth and stabbing, which with the back/side condition on stab for the damage, is rare to happen, as a re-position is needed.

Again, D/P doesn’t suffer here as much, since if the backstab misses, it won’t be revealed, and can therefore try again via another BP + HS/Bound and thus never actually lose stealth. D/D doesn’t get this luxury, since it must leave stealth or have perfect timing on chained CnD, and not have any negation be on the target at that specific time in order to re-acquire it.

A big culprit here is Hunter’s Determination in the DH and similar traits. Mug will break their Aegis, BV will apply the CC and proc it, CnD might land if pre-casted before the fragments get absorbed, but then the guard has passive Aegis again and you can’t deal the damage, and you’re also in point-blank range. You’re forced into a burn-all-initiative disengage and weapon swap and physically cannot deal damage, even if the guard fails to play well or his traps were on cooldown from a prior engage. While backstab spamming should be discouraged, and could have been argued as a problem over a year ago, the powerful safety nets provided to professions and builds through HoT kind of negates the need for a cooldown in many respects, and especially in the case of D/D, the cooldown is overly-punishing.

Rending Shade, the supposed compensation, is also a terrible trait in an uncommonly-selected line with little benefit these days. It requires the stealth attack to land in order to steal boons. But stealth attacks landing is already now a huge problem in many cases, so the gains are totally missed.

I 100% agree with that at the same time most of these passives have long cds hunters determinations cd should be something up for review for a cd increase imo based off everything you stated. That time frame though I’m pretty confidant a thief could reset the fight to their advantage at the same time the DH could have called for help depending on how and what they’re teammates are doing.

The real issue again pertains to D/D’s lack of capacity to really reset a fight well without burning other important cooldowns like Shadowstep which are typically needed mid-fight, anyways. Most passives have similar or even shorter cooldowns than what the thief has for options to reset. Typically the success of a reset comes from slowly rotating other timers to make things like elite utilities on cd while other effects are also on cooldown. The highly-committal nature of D/D doesn’t really jive well with this philosophy, unfortunately, which again, is why this change really exacerbated the weakness of D/D while not affecting skilled D/P play very much, and thus, is worth re-evaluating the change entirely, since it largely failed in its objective and had huge undesired collateral.

Lalainnia.3598:

Somewhat confused here how exactly is the 1 sec icd on stealth attacks the death of the class. Does missing a stealth attack apply reveal??? As for the invul and aegis/blocks why would any thief waste a stealth attack on a target with aegis or an invul up do ppl not look for boon icons or ability tells isn’t the whole point of stealth to gain the upper hand or retreat. If someone pops an aegis/block or invul anticipating a stealth attack isn’t that just a good move on them and poor play by the thief if they attack?

This is why the nerf was more or less specifically a problem for D/D power; the set’s functionality when built power comes entirely from backstab, and requires an extra risk of getting up close out of stealth, landing the CnD to gain access, and still having the opportunity to land the backstab as well. Any passive proc of blocks, stealth, etc. negates pretty much the entire weapon set, since skills 2-4 are useless on engage with D/D.

D/P can still work since it has powerful skills on 3 and 4.

There are two further things to consider:
Backstab has a long aftercast delay, and the cooldown for backstab doesn’t start until after the aftercast, putting it closer to a 2s cooldown than 1s overall. This means players without SA get at absolute most, 2 backstabs per stealt, and that’s demanding absolutely zero wait time between gaining stealth and stabbing, which with the back/side condition on stab for the damage, is rare to happen, as a re-position is needed.

Again, D/P doesn’t suffer here as much, since if the backstab misses, it won’t be revealed, and can therefore try again via another BP + HS/Bound and thus never actually lose stealth. D/D doesn’t get this luxury, since it must leave stealth or have perfect timing on chained CnD, and not have any negation be on the target at that specific time in order to re-acquire it.

A big culprit here is Hunter’s Determination in the DH and similar traits. Mug will break their Aegis, BV will apply the CC and proc it, CnD might land if pre-casted before the fragments get absorbed, but then the guard has passive Aegis again and you can’t deal the damage, and you’re also in point-blank range. You’re forced into a burn-all-initiative disengage and weapon swap and physically cannot deal damage, even if the guard fails to play well or his traps were on cooldown from a prior engage. While backstab spamming should be discouraged, and could have been argued as a problem over a year ago, the powerful safety nets provided to professions and builds through HoT kind of negates the need for a cooldown in many respects, and especially in the case of D/D, the cooldown is overly-punishing.

Rending Shade, the supposed compensation, is also a terrible trait in an uncommonly-selected line with little benefit these days. It requires the stealth attack to land in order to steal boons. But stealth attacks landing is already now a huge problem in many cases, so the gains are totally missed.

I never agreed with bleeding on backstab. Quite frankly, I don’t. I simply stated that DT wouldn’t break having “massive bleeding” on backstab; the “massive bleeding” itself would be what broke it, because in the context of “massive bleeding,” a single 2s stack of poison that may or may not happen is really not going to matter. Okay, it can cut a heal or endurance regen or whatever, but again, how does this matter? If the person fails to cleanse, which is the important part in this case, then the poison isn’t really relevant. If DT applies weakness, it means the thief never used steal (which would apply it first), or that the fighting has been going on for an extended period, since Lotus Poison has an ICD of 10s, which would make DT not apply weakness. In which case… it doesn’t really matter, considering within that 10s period, many instances of Death Blossom could be applied, statistically offering more poison, and likely, more bleeding.

As mentioned, we have no idea what the OP even means by “massive bleeding,” and obviously our definitions of it are different, which is what I wanted to clarify, and why I raised it to begin with. We’re not going to agree if our perceptions on an ambiguity are obviously vastly different.

If “massive bleeding” is enough to make a few ticks or seconds of it deadly enough such that a heal is required and gutted to such extremities by DT maybe happening, then the problem lies in the bleeding still, though, and not really in DT.

Kageseigi.2150:

DeceiverX.8361:

A still kind of resides in that haze of “what did I just get hit by/how should I react to this?” or non-noticeable damage in group contexts.

In your opinion, what would be an acceptable “amount of notification” for a potential lethal attack? I guess that’s the issue that needs to be pinned down.

With your previous example, using Steal-CnD-Basilisk-Backstab can hit hard and fast. But it will be even faster with Flanking Strikes traited for quickness. How much time does that even give an unexpecting opponent before it has already suffered all of that damage?

I must confess… I don’t have too much pity for passives that don’t get a chance to take affect. I don’t know if it’s because I feel like the Thief would deserve to bypass the passive if it has set up a perfect engagement with a very risky build, or if it’s because as a glassy Thief myself, I’ve suffered insta-downs with little time or tells in order to avoid it… especially in hectic combat.

Oddly enough, I cannot remember the last time a Thief has been able to insta-burst me down from 100%… even while caught completely by surprise with Basilisk… even when running with the Berserker amulet. Your Signet Thief may be able to do it, but those are very rare. However, I’ve suffered insta-downs from other professions including Guardians, Revenants, Warriors, Engineers, and invisible Mesmers.

What’s especially annoying are DH trap stacks at completely empty points. Alas, let your guard down for just a moment, and that’s all it takes. It wouldn’t be so bad if Dragon’s Maw didn’t make Roll for Initiative worthless (it’s literally my reflexive save skill)… by the time I notice, it’s too late for Shadowstep to save me. Haha, and then there’s that DH pull into the traps. Good times… good times :-P

Yeah, mostly L2P issues on my part, but it still makes me want to be able to return the favor ;-)

Who knows? Maybe Anet just needs to give everyone a Thief Proximity alarm that goes off whenever an enemy Thief is within a range of 1,000. There will be no excuse then! :-D

The way I see it isn’t so much about time but that an attentive player should be able to determine how to react to what they’re being hit by if they’re quick. If a bunker druid attacks you and maybe RF’s for at most a few thousand damage, the response you give is going to be different from if you suddenly lost most of your health from an offensively-built GS warrior. Your reaction speed is going to be the same, but the decision made should be different. The thief playing D/D offers significant awareness to the enemy as to what exactly is happening; they take a substantial portion of damage from CnD, the thief disappears, and they understand they’re being hit hard by a power D/D thief. If there’s only a little bit of damage dealt or none at all, it’s harder to discern what exactly they’re up against. Quickness certainly speeds this up and makes it harder to make the decision (though one fast kill every 60s with no swiftness is imho pretty meh imho, not to mention it won’t begin until after CnD lands unless you come with Mug from behind), but careful attention and being ready for such effects allows players to have the opportunity to understand a need to immediately stunbreak and dodge when they lose a large chunk of health quickly. Panic reactions and the safety of the dodge can let the player responding catch up and make the decision then. If all of the damage ends up front-loaded, it becomes harder to even understand the fact a panic dodge is necessary. If you take minimal damage from someone, odds are you’re not going to consider them much of a threat of death from their other sources of damage. If a massive-burst thief only CnD’s for a few hundred damage, it’s difficult to discern really how much the backstab would hit for. Especially if you’re already engaged in combat with someone else, you have stuff like regen and healing being applied, and may not be able to tell at all really how much damage you took. Was it 200 or 500? That could mean the difference between a thief in soldier’s versus full berserker’s, which obviously changes things, while as right now, you’ll definitely know and feel the difference before the huge nuke (or not) comes in.

sPvP makes things massively different from WvW, mind you. There’s around a 40% damage loss minimum just being in sPvP as opposed to WvW. Relative damage loss as a comparison to enemy sustain/defense from just a numbers perspective ends up being greater than 60% depending on the build. This makes the thief very hard to burst with in sPvP and much more viable in WvW. If you’re not getting bursted by thieves in sPvP, it’s because simply put, in most cases they just physically can’t do it.
Other classes have superior coefficients, which lets them get more relative damage in sPvP, as well, and tied with better boon access, typically means reaping way better benefits.

It shouldn’t so much be a strict matter of speed but knowing what to expect. You don’t know whether that DH is bunker or full burst until you try to engage or vice versa. As you mention, however, this is tough to call, and there are facets of the DH which really shut you down, almost irrespective of reaction timing. When huge burst is at hand, I think it important to give opponents the relative important information to have enough time to both have the capacity to react physically and if they succeed in doing so, have information on how to start winning. It’s not so much about disliking the possibility of killing someone in one hit so much as it is important to give them the knowledge that it could happen. If they’re slow to react, then it’s their error. But processing a huge amount of numerical data coming from multiple sources based on a constantly-fluctuating health bar while focusing on the action on screen and preventing other actions is a lot to ask for. Having such tremendous demands and expecting the average player to recognize slight nuances as such is a little bit too much, and in my opinion, is largely what makes builds OP.

Typically when you fight someone for a long time of roughly equal skill, you’ll see an ebb and flow of wins and losses on both sides; you learn from each other in a back-and-forth matter, piecing together strategies and trends as you try and figure each other out. If one side gives the other his build and associated strengths and weaknesses, however, while the other says nothing, the player who reveals anything will be at a distinct disadvantage, even if his build is objectively good or even better than the other’s. While we should be striving for balance, what most commonly determines the outcome of encounters is knowledge. Playing against the class you know best is often the easiest, because you have the foresight to know how to react given certain things. You’ll know what constitutes damage from a bunker or berserker, and what to expect next.

Which is why I like where CnD’s damage is for the most part; it’s currently enough to mostly not remove players of their rights to learn about their opponents and provides them with the information needed to try and figure out how to approach their foe (obviously edge cases like the screen shot above exist, and getting the perfect number is hard, considering my build is also an edge case on what could be an edge case opponent, too), while providing enough damage and pressure to impact the fight substantially.

An opponent oblivious to an incoming D/D thief should be punished to an extent by getting jumped, and if he’s also unprepared, he may not react fast enough to the incoming attacks and thus die. And that’s fine. We don’t want to punish the person who sees the thief coming on the horizon, but doesn’t know anything about it, and is unsure whether to turn and burn on engage, get ready for mass cleanses or heals, an invuln, let it proc passives, etc. The player can be amazing but a lack of information or difficult-to-achieve information shouldn’t cause a death.

More along the lines of the fact that such a tremendous hit would reduce available counterplay even on the passive effect levels. Traits which apply passives at health thresholds only when on an attack made after being below that threshold. If you OHKO a warrior running Defy Pain, it won’t actually proc. The same is said for other abilities. It’s not so much important to keep the thief visible but moreso for the opponent to know he’s being put in combat with one. The incoming damage from CnD is a pretty blatant tell as to what the thief is building and how he’s trying to play. If he doesn’t hit with CnD-level damage on engage, how does one necessarily discern what the build is, or recognize he’s being hit at all in larger-group battles? I certainly know when I take a skill for 7-10k, even in group play. A random surprise 30k could be kind of game-breaking and make it overly-difficult in that context.

Now, I hate passives. I really do. I wish all of them would be removed from the game. That said, some professions are dependent on them and many are intertwined with the profession. Contemplate warrior without any passives, or a necro not having Last Grasp. They’re a pain, but kind of important to the professions. Denying them this on top of making the thief just more difficult to read in terms of its damage is a little harsh. Plus, let’s not also forget the potential problems that could come with rangers taking huge damage reduction due to Bark Skin and similar abilities, either. The whole deal is a two-way street.

A still kind of resides in that haze of “what did I just get hit by/how should I react to this?” or non-noticeable damage in group contexts. I’m not trying to shut anyone down so much as get people thinking on this, and why it’s such a tough nut to crack. I’ll be honest and say this has been a hot topic for discussion (one which I’ve been heavily involved in) for a while. We don’t want any balance blunders favoring the thief excessively just as much as we don’t want the thief to be totally left in the dust.

B and C again don’t really solve the core of the issue. It’s just extra punishment tha also kind of invalidates a SA trait.

For D, an aftercast doesn’t really help, either, since at times that speed is just a strict dependency.

MiS does… sort of. If you have excellent timing, you can chain-stealth CnD. If they fixed it, I’ve forgotten; I’m still able to do it, and I’ve seen many continue to do so. They changed MiS a while ago so that it only applied after losing the “Stealth” effect to prevent D/P from just permanently being in stealth by getting refunded the initiative every HS, but the one or two frames that keep the thief invisible after it ends are still there, per my testing in game now (took a while because I’m not used to 4s stealth duration, so my timing was laughably bad there) such that the thief can still chain it with D/D.

Yea, but it’s still on a 1.25 coefficient with lots of potential scaling. If I saw a chrono blocking, I’d forgo the backstabs entirely and just kill it by mashing 5, revealed or not.

I mean, contemplate this for a moment happening three consecutive times, even if you got out-played and the enemy dodged a BV’ed mug or something and then popped the block to avoid the backstab. Why not just go for CnD more?

The bug allowed the thief to shelf shortbow in favor of something else is all. It added a lot of utility to the weapon that it otherwise really lacked, and didn’t have the tools to really do much about.

This isn’t so much really an issue of people not willing to adapt like the FS/LS changes (which I was fine with). The FS changes were always positive imho, and I saw the tweak to FS as a buff (you could dig through my post history and find me claiming chained evades would make evasion builds played by skilled players better). I think it was at its worst at launch, when there was no second component, and was just a super-cheap, very spammable source of evades, just like DB is now. The real issue is the simple fact it just hurts the utility options the weapon carried so much. It’s still usable as a main set, although it definitely struggles a lot more than it did since it can’t catch much now (600 range teleport is kinda crappy). I just depended heavily on the set in WvW since I don’t like shortbow, and preferred the options S/D gave me. With forced return, it makes D/D also harder to play and weaker to D/P, again, since the shortcomings of having poor stickiness cannot be resolved via another weapon and well-played swapping.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Idea, mostly because I know Anet will never remove their power creep, make CnD unblockable keep Ini cost boom CnD becomes more viable. kitten idea but it’s an idea

It’s a tough nut to crack, and honestly, this isn’t outlandish to suggest. One side of me says it’s fine – it was pretty much unblockable when BV had two changes by default – but the other half of me still struggles with the “is it fun/fair?” question. Strictly unblockable abilities are very strong, and the lack of a cooldown on a high-damage ability would allow thieves to spam CnD to kill players who rightfully should earn blocked attacks.

Really, I think the best approach for the skill is to revert the BV/VA change (since it also nerfed VShare), and just reduce the initiative cost to four. This gives D/D a better once-per-combat engage without totally hard-countering builds that should earn their defenses, like running a shield on warrior or guardian.

Of course, that still doesn’t change the fact OH dagger needs changes for DB and Dancing Dagger, too.

Yes, but moderate success doesn’t make it so weak as to propose absurd buffs like cutting skill animations in half and dealing way more damage. I find myself having fewer issues in WvW than in sPvP. The open-field nature of WvW allows GS to flourish, particularly Grasping Darkness. GS could use some minor tweaking, again, particularly via the Soul Eater trait being reworked, but that’s not what this thread initially asked for; the title is literally “GS needs massive buff.” I think it’s almost there to be a very competitive weapon. It’s reasonably good when played well, and when played differently than pretty much the rest of necro, which is something I think a lot of people are missing. Too many people are attached to Blighter’s Boon. Play with onslaught, and the speed goes where it needs to in Shroud. Mess around with sigil of rage and sigil of strength, and you reach capped performance in a matter of a few seconds. The number of people who die to my reaper in < 3s windows is crazy. I find myself often cleaving down groups of 3-4 on my initial first few skills.

The thing about sPvP is that hyper-competitive players min-max absolutely everything (or get it min-maxed for them) to determine what’s objectively optimal in most cases. If dagger puts out even a little bit better results than GS and is more-suited to sPvP’s current meta, then it’s going to be used, be used more, and be pretty much the only thing used in that scene, and players will react accordingly. The same is said about PvE; some of the optimizations come out with figures differences between certain builds or setups at < 1% margins, and yet many demand explicitly the superior one, because that’s just what’s most optimal based on what they’ve read from the people at the top.

@Muchacho,
Top-tier sPvP? No. But that’s more along the lines of builds and stats than anything, since GS’s biggest strength is from comboing with GD, and the CC a reaper does as a whole means so little when everyone runs around with so much stability, endurance regen (boons, utilities, etc.) and general sustain.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

DeceiverX.8361:

Basing skills on others is how the very act of balance is done. I do not forget that CnD requires a hit to gain stealth. Frankly, though, the weakness of the kit is in its inability to deal with an opponent’s defenses, not in the skill requirement in landing a hit. CnD provides strictly more reward than BP + HS on the basis that it carries a larger risk and requires a certain degree of timing. Removing that risk element and reducing the required timing by putting a teleport into the skill ends up simply demanding that the some other element of skilled play be required. The dynamic of CnD requiring a risk for engagement isn’t the problem; its yield is objectively better than BP + HS when it comes to stealth, and can maintain it much better with less investment than any other weapon combo. The conceptual-level design is to open up a higher risk/reward style of play for aggressive players. The risk of getting into range is skill-driven, as most things in the game should be. The problem is that engaging in melee combat, the risk element of using CnD, is excerbated by a bigger problem in that it isn’t reliable enough to provide a reward.

I don’t get you. If CnD has a high risk, then why did you entertain the idea of making it cost 7 init? However, contrary to your perception, there is no “high reward” in CnD, just high risk, thanks to all the nerfs.

BP+HS has no risk but is rewarded by a chance to extend stealth beyond 3-4 seconds. HS will also place the Thief in a more favorable position before going in stealth. All these rewards are not present in CnD.

Sorry but I’m done. Your comparison practices don’t even make any sense, thus it’s difficult to take it seriously. Calling CnD a high risk/high reward is nothing but laughable.

BP + HS is a slow and predictable means of acquiring stealth. It’s easy to interrupt, and easy to know where the thief will be. The best thieves in the game will tell you that, and the best players in the game will tell you that the easiest time to kill a thief is immediately following the dropping of BP, and typically, it’s not hard to know where a thief which just used BP + HS is located. Many of the best do not stack stealth via one BP unless they’re way far from an encounter. This is often how I also kill other thieves, and how most other good players kill thieves. This isn’t debatable, either, since most reputable players have been very vocal about voicing this when giving tips and insight.

Bad D/D players would end up pressing 5 until it landed, with no worry over chasing or skilled play. I despise Shadow Shot for this same reason, and do not want the integrity of the weapon set I prefer to play most to be degraded to such an extent for something which does not actually fix the core of the problem.

As opposed to BP + HS, CnD is harder to predict, and much harder to know if, when and/or how you’re going to be hit next if it does land. A thief using it could potentially immediately backstab and land it, because the thief would have no aftercast from HS, and would already be on top of their foe to make it land. The thief could also wait two seconds… or three… or maybe closer to four with SA.

If it were to be given a teleport, it’d logically have to see an increased initiative cost. I have zero interest in providing the thief with drastic power creep to strictly match HoT, but rather re-designs and tweaks to try and nudge its performance potential there. The risk is high by engaging your foe. The reward is high by allowing unpredictability and the possibility of rapid-succession attacks, and a rapid burst pattern if desired. D/D’s stealth attack options and setup are very logical and were well-balanced for the core game. HoT’s power creep demands some increase in reliability, but not necessarily safety or ease-of-use in play. Nobody, including ANet, the posters on the forums, and the likes, should be trying to justify compromising the integrity of other weapons/classes in their design as well as the underlying mechanics of the game in the name of demanding more power. Increased demands for power got us in the sad state we’re in. More of it will solve nothing.

Kageseigi.2150:

DeceiverX.8361:

Frankly, though, the weakness of the kit is in its inability to deal with an opponent’s defenses, not in the skill requirement in landing a hit.

Just trying to think out of the box here. What if CnD went in a bit of a different direction? Again, this is just a conceptual thought. The following changes as a whole would be…

---

1. Remove all damage from CnD.
This will allow Stealth stacking while still requiring the Thief to actually strike the target. But the main purpose for this is for the next step to be acceptable.

2. Make CnD unblockable.
This will allow the Thief to gain Stealth even if a target is actively blocking. Because CnD no longer does damage itself, being unblockable won’t make it overpowered.

3. Applies a new effect that enhances the next attack.
This effect cannot be stacked. It will be removed on the next attack that hits or is blocked/evaded.

---

As for what the effect actually does, well, that’s up for discussion. Possible examples…

A. Add 1.25 to the coefficient of the next attack (or whatever would make up for the removed damage of the successful CnD).

B. Double the direct damage of the next attack.

C. Double the condition damage of the next condition application.

D. Double the duration of the next condition/CC application.

---

Or perhaps it could apply the proper option(s) based on which skill was used while the effect is active. Backstab could use either A or B. Dancing Dagger could use A or B plus D. Or something along those lines.

Anyway, just trying to figure out how to improve D/D without actually changing it too much.

I’ve thought of similar things, but then you need to ask yourself, does this really make it fair and fun to fight against, and how complex should the skill be for those while learning to fight against it?

While I’m in the minority playing signet power, I can’t in good faith advocate getting much more damage on a given attack. Getting ramped damage would reduce the amount of fair counterplay to the actual abilities like backstab itself; imagine if you did Steal -> CnD -> BV (Unblockable) -> Stab for huge extra damage. It’d likely one-shot a lot of people and give them really no tell as to what was going to happen. Albeit a small period of time, there is the (imho) obvious tell of a thief engaging you and you losing a chunk of health immediately before it stealths to know it was D/D, and that it’s probably going to backstab you very soon. Imagine a thief that dropped Mug and went CS/Tr/DrD for damage instead, and maybe even dropped SoH. You’d have no conditions, and no damage taken, and then a second later, would be on the ground 100-0’ed. Despite the fact that I leave my enemies with very little time to live as it is, I can’t in good faith approve of anything that in one single, individual attack with very little or no tell does so much damage. I’d be more infuriated than anything if I just suddenly fell over dead and had no time to react.

And that’s exactly how you also need to play the thief, especially power D/D. Probably why I find moderate success with the GS. You learn when and how to use the skills by your opponent, and you can force them into really, really bad situations.

You do, however, pretty much need to play Speed of Shadows. Swapping in and out of DS/other weapons is critical to make it work in the PvP environments.

It’s far from an AA and win weapon. It’s also very far from trash. It could afford to be buffed a little bit, but I’m almost certain just a few tweaks via cooldowns and making Soul Eater actually a good trait would get it there.

No love for skirmish power shredder reaper

And a fast dagger AA and spamming it with DB have nothing to do with backstab at all. Backstab isn’t a fast attack or a multi-hit ability.

It doesn’t mean backstab will apply poison, either. It means a random hit will apply poison at some time, and the gained damage is negligible, barely better than using Mug from straight AA’s. I have a separate condi D/D thief that I made for kittens and giggles. I sometimes go many seconds of AA without landing DT’s poison. Other times, I’ll get multiple occurrences in a row. It’s random, and it typically takes a lot of ramp time to make the stacks deal maybe a few hundred tick damage over their duration in total. Much of the damage comes from just the default poison on the AA chain on dagger MH, and quite frankly, shortbow spamming CG does more poison damage than trying to utilize DT. Heck, I only run DT because I made the character named Poisoner Ivy for the Batman reference as a joke. The trait is awful, and does not affect the damage output of the thief. Even its use as a heal cut is trash, since steal and the AA of dagger MH provide extended-duration poison on their own.

I’m not even speaking on the context of having conditions on backstab. DT is just straight up a garbage trait; if backstab applied “massive bleeding,” whether or not it would be broken is entirely independent of DT, because DT would still be a terrible trait to take.

Since you’re forcing it, though:

“Massive bleeding” was never clarified. We have no idea what that means. 25 is massive, but that’s also obviously broken from just a condition damage build POV, and still has nothing to do with DT. “Massive” could mean five or six stacks, and maybe only for a few seconds at most. In many respects, that’s not much. particularly since pure condi is better off spamming 3 or playing pistol, and power power’s ticks would be horridly low to a point where it’s really negligible. Without condition damage, you’re looking at 22 damage per tick per stack. A few hundred extra damage won’t break backstab, considering PW/Unload/Vault hit harder from a coefficient POV by several hundred to several thousand damage when geared. 2s of 10 stacks of bleeding from backstab on a power build would be less than the difference between backstab and vault, even including the vuln applied from CnD. It’d take over 20 stacks for 2s duration to get there on lower-damage builds, or 10 stacks for 4 seconds. On real power damage builds, the backstab would need to apply roughly 20 stacks over 4-8 seconds to make up for the difference, in which case, yea, it’d be way too strong because condition builds would be doing an absurd amount of stealth-based damage with all the safety of stealth + tankier gear. But that makes the damage from DT on a lucky proc insubstantial.

Your argument isn’t based on anything coherent. DT is a horrible trait except as a best-damage option for condi PvE builds after they’ve run out of initiative and spam AA for poison stacks on a boss. The real source of damage comes from Potent Poison more than DT.

Basing skills on others is how the very act of balance is done. I do not forget that CnD requires a hit to gain stealth. Frankly, though, the weakness of the kit is in its inability to deal with an opponent’s defenses, not in the skill requirement in landing a hit. CnD provides strictly more reward than BP + HS on the basis that it carries a larger risk and requires a certain degree of timing. Removing that risk element and reducing the required timing by putting a teleport into the skill ends up simply demanding that the some other element of skilled play be required. The dynamic of CnD requiring a risk for engagement isn’t the problem; its yield is objectively better than BP + HS when it comes to stealth, and can maintain it much better with less investment than any other weapon combo. The conceptual-level design is to open up a higher risk/reward style of play for aggressive players. The risk of getting into range is skill-driven, as most things in the game should be. The problem is that engaging in melee combat, the risk element of using CnD, is excerbated by a bigger problem in that it isn’t reliable enough to provide a reward.

The primary example being the prospect of fighting a guard. D/P does not need to try very hard to engage safely since it can get stealth at range/OOC and simply break aegis and backstab the guard. D/D thief, on the other hand, doesn’t get to engage on its terms, and thus the aegis from the guardian’s virtue is enough to stifle said engage. This is especially apparent when blocks and invulns are taken into account as well; D/P has the option to stealth and lose targeting while D/D is stuck with no options, because 5 doesn’t work against targets that they physically cannot hit for damage, and the remaining aspects of their kit are simply too poor to work with. I can kite a greatsword warrior indefinitely with D/P and S/x. The same cannot be said about D/D. Giving CnD a teleport alone will not fix OH dagger, and that’s where a bulk of the problems in the kit lie, since D/P is the superior chain-stealth set by design, because it’s not as an aggressive set.

ANet is never going to make five separate profession skills for each dual wield set for the thief. That’s asking for more than almost every profession, and you know as well as I do that they would absolutely fail in the design/implementation and we’d be even worse off than now.

And that’s the thing: ANet can rework D/D isolated from D/P, and quite frankly, S/D is no longer very usable considering the fix to the IS bug. I’ve proposed this before. With tweaks to CnD’s reliability, moving condition pressure and normalized AoE damage onto Dancing Dagger from DB, and enabling Death Blossom to be a mobility tool with some re-distributed/new coefficients would certainly fix D/D without affecting any other sets into a problem state. The issues with D/D power is that it has poor options available at almost all times except for CnD/Backstab, cannot chase or disengage, and suffers from inconsistency on CnD, thus making the entire kit weak compared to the rest. This same change also boosts P/D’s viability slightly, by giving it slightly more condition pressure, and unifies the dagger kit’s design to have mobility-oriented skills all on skill 3, while also boosting the necessary skill requirements for D/D condi, and could further enable DT buffs as the skill floor would get raised tremendously. This all objectively improves D/D power without at all affecting D/P’s or S/D’s performance.

Fields themselves are unblockable last I knew, but the attacks which get generated from them (which is what do damage), unique to each skill can be blocked unless otherwise specified, just D/P has all the tools to negate the power-creeped defenses of HoT, and in general, the rest of the thief weapons suck.

D/P 3’s blind and teleport, as well as Shortbow 4’s projectile are also unblockable.

1 init stealth is absurd when considering all those effects. Not to mention the teleport range was unspecified.

600 range teleport is not enough to engage with and too safe/easy to justify such cheap stealth and those effects.

Your justification also makes no sense. You’re adding effects of skills together and not adding initiative in a corresponding fashion. You’d be looking to 7 initiative baseline for CnD from your evaluated costs without even considering stealth (so + 1 to 8, just like BP/HS), but you also neglect that IS has an effective 15 second cooldown. To repeat a cast, IR costs 2 initiative, followed by another 3. You’d have to balance towards a cost of 5 + on the teleport alone, and the teleport isn’t even very good. In the end, you’d nee to justify CnD with such a powerful effect between 10 and 12 initiative. A full baseline bar seems kind of stupid considering it only yields 3s of stealth, and thus D/P would be better, but any less, and you’ve effectively combined four skills into the ability and lowered the skill floor tremendously. All that at six initiative, and I’d never do anything but press 5 to beat people. On the same note, D/P already does this with Shadow Shot, by pressing 3, except without the stealth. But I’ve said repeatedly Shadow Shot is overtuned.

Pretending that’s balanced is just foolish.

CnD doesn’t need to be buffed dramatically to offset its nerfs. It’s only ever seen two, one of which was indirect with the implementation of Revealed (which without it the thief was wildly overpowered) and one of them got half-reverted when the damage coefficient was normalized via a 16% damage cut, but the 33% nerf undone from sPvP. As a consequence to HoT’s defensive power creep, it needs to be made more reliable and cheaper is all. The problem with CnD is that half the time it’s wasted initiative because it gets negated, which negates all of D/D power. This is a 40-50% initiative loss at the start of a fight, and more resources (another 40-50%) need to be pushed to try a second time, which usually means the thief is struggling by then, and then has no tools to do anything afterwards.

This is also why a blind on CnD won’t do anything: the blind won’t happen, because the CnD never lands, and at that point, a trait from SA is just being put baseline into the weapon, which is definitive power creep.

To improve D/D, skills 3-5 all need reworks. CnD is almost where it needs to be. I’d argue that of all the OH dagger skills, it’sin better shape than most, and overall, isn’t a poorly-designed skill nor is it inherently in a bad place.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Kageseigi.2150:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

I don’t think you’re looking at this correctly.

I believe you’re making different arguments…

You said that adding a Bleed on Backstab would make it broken because of Dagger Training already gives Backstab a chance to apply poison, weakness, and 10% damage increase.

However, Dagger Training gives all Dagger attacks that same chance. Therefore, it is not a Backstab-specific issue. It is a matter of Bleeding. That is all. You could make the same argument about Death Blossom and it’s Bleeds in conjunction with Dagger Training.

And yes, speaking specifically about Backstab, a 100% chance to inflict Bleeding makes a 33% chance to apply poison really seem pathetic.

I don’t think so. Poison deals more damage than bleeding and it reduces healing power. Even a 33% chance to reduce healing power is never pathetic then adding damage to that makes it well worth it, even a single stack.

Steal has a base CD of 30s, CnD has an init cost of 6 (equals to 6s). Meaning, I have 5 chances to BS even before Steal goes off CD (this is assuming that I have zero init to start with). Steal requires Mug to deal damage. So in comparison, Steal that deal damage and applies 2 stack of poison every 30s is not even close to the damage output of 5 BS and 33% chance of poison.

Let’s assume that they add 100% chance of bleed on BS, ignoring for a minute that the OP is asking for “massive bleeding”, that would simply put BS’s damage output out of control. Keep in mind that Steal with Mug only deals ~500 damage every 30s (base), while BS can deal ~400-850 dmg every 6s. With this damage output from a single skill would mean that either the base dmg of BS gets nerfed, its coefficient, or other traits and skills. This is why power creep is bad.

But even if Dagger Training can add that additional poison potential, you’re assuming that it will be chosen over Mug… which is a much more universal trait. Trading condition damage and denial of healing for direct damage and healing.

As long as DT is available as on option, you cannot dismiss its potential.

I do agree, though, if Revealed Training gave Might instead of a power increase… or even if Backstab (or Stealth Attacks in general) granted so much Might similar to Unload (at least after a successful hit), then all Thieves would benefit from it. Even power Thieves would be able to benefit better from Bleeding ticks on Backstab.

Yes, stealth attacks granting might is the way to go. The +200 power from RT cannot be countered. At least the might stack is vulnerable to boon strip which is worth the risk and balances itself out.

EDIT: typos

Except DT it isn’t worth considering. DT does less damage via poison on 5 backstabs at a 33% chance than steal alone. Its potential lies in not being in stealth while dealing lots of rapid attacks.

It is expected from DT that there would be at most, five instances of 2s poison being applied within the period of steal’s cooldown. The probability of 33% indicates overall that there would be 1.67 occurances of it. This net total damage equates to only just over three seconds of poison total over the course of 20 seconds.

Meanwhile, on steal alone, the poison uptime is almost 50% with two stacks of poison. Even if DT had a 100% chance of applying the poison on each backstab, the net gains from the downtime are still worse than the damage applied from steal alone.

DT is just a terrible trait. The only reason for its use is via the fast AA’s on dagger MH or spamming 3 more on DB for a a 3x 33% chance of application per given DB. Otherwise, the trait is just straight-up garbage.

RT providing might wouldn’t do much. Long-term might would make it overwhelming, as then people would just stack it on monsters/critters/etc. before engaging in combat, and you’d see a reversion to DA/SA might-stack dominance like there used to be years ago. If the duration is short, it nerfs the thief’s potential in PvE (while not hitting the more troublesome matters, the AA chain potency and poor skills), and it opens the thief up for little reason, plus, any substantial short-term boost would just further-emphasize D/P’s dominance via high-might-on-impact AA chains after post-Shadow Shot/Stab.

If one of the characters is a secondary character or one you don’t play much, I do recommend the process of deleting it and just using one name change contract if you can afford to move its gear/re-gear it and have things like Tomes of Knowledge available to instant-80 it.

Swapping names will require three contracts, not two. There is no way to simply swap names equal to the number of characters interested in a swap. You can’t name a character the same as another one you already have.

Character 1 changes to a brand new name, different from character 2. Character 1’s initial name is reserved.

Character 2 renames to Character 1’s initial name. Character 2’s name is also reserved, and the reservation ends from character 1’s initial name, since it’s now on another character on the same account.

Character 1 now must change again to character 2’s initial name.

Raven.1524:

How about making a subscription based option ONLY for convenience?
-availability of free hair stylists
-no wp charge (it’s only a few coins anyways, don’t think it will affect the economy)
-no transmutation charged required for the wardrobe
-unlocked outfits only while you are subscribed (turning them off while the sub ends, unless you bought them)
-unlocked common minis and dyes for the sub duration
-portable bank, or crafting station (1 or 2 weeks)

Stuff like that, which doesn’t really upset the economy nor anything and gives a stable income to the dev for people paying for the ultimate convenience. (For that reason alone I didn’t touch subjects like the tax at the market because that would affect the economy)

People who want to spend extra money on aesthetics already do. That’s why that concurrent to the expansion, more than two thirds of ANet’s revenue came from gem sales, not the expansion itself, despite more people buying the expansion and the price being at $50. There are tons of players that spend that much money on close to a daily basis to keep up with every new costume and gem store release. That’s not the norm, but simply, people shell out money when they think the experience in the core game they’re getting is worth it. It’s why League of Legends is so successfully financially, despite having everything except aesthetics available for free with no buy-in. And many people spend much more on skins than what a WoW membership would run them, just because they like what they’re getting.

If the player is having to deliberate extensively over whether or not they’re happy paying for what they’re going to get, or feel any strain or sense of obligation to buy what they may buy, it means something is wrong. Purchases should be willingly made with a good and safe justification, without the player needing to fear about the game’s integrity or what may happen regarding the purchase in subsequent days/months/years.

Zenith.6403:

DeceiverX.8361:

Which, in all seriousness, is the entire purpose of MMO’s in general: players shaping the world. Ask yourself if you’d rather play a single player game for its story or progression or gameplay or have the community of a guild/group/clan with a shared interest.

Single player game hands down. What’s better experience than having hand-crafted storyline and systems that support your playing? Pay upfront fee for game and rest assured that money making hasn’t affected game design.

Argument could be made that playing with and against other players is more fun than playing against poor AI. But that would require systems that support it: Social systems in this game is basically a chat room. Take away chat and what do you have left?

Let’s take WvW for example. You’re running towards enemy camp to capture it. Nobody knows you’re there. You could ask in borderlands chat “anybody here?” (I’ve done it couple of times) and get no response. It doesn’t get much sadder than that. It is crucial for players to feel their contributions matter. Chipping away at some undefended structure door is not it. Yes, I would rather play a single player game where developers cared about my experience.

There’s the door. You got a ram right?
Quick, build it.
Hit the door. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Hit it again. Wait 3 second cooldown.
Door’s down. Run for the lord.

Then like I said, you’re in the wrong genre. You’re looking for a single-player experience in an MMO. Communities of players run MMO’s. Ancient games with no new development efforts still get played because of the community backbone (private servers, smaller games, etc.). It’s not profitable to be a PvE-MMO. That’s why wildstar is failing and never actually did well to begin with. It’s conceptually a bad business move and most major development studios already know this. I can say now that FF14 from a systems standpoint wouldn’t last as long as it will compared to major PvP-centric game, either. I think its success largely has to do with the attention it’s garnered over its repeated failures, and that there are quite frankly many people who have an odd obsession with the FF lore and universe that ride the legacy of other games in the franchise to promote it.

You also can’t really talk about an arbitrary WvW server at an arbitrary time/location (context matters) as being the model for online play. Putting competitive play aside, looking to WvW as a model is flawed: WvW’s had no development focus on it until 2016. No game with no development effort is going to succeed, MMO or not, because it won’t get developed in general if there are not people developing it. The format started out as a massive success. The community is still large, albeit waning with the existing balance problems, which suggest you’re also not being part of the WvW community to have such boring play. Back to online/competitive play in general, a single, boring online experience isn’t usable as a basis for the design of online models and how to monetize from them. PvP is better than any AI, because there is nothing which can raise the intrigue of another human adversary in games, particularly when the environments are dynamic. No AI is good enough to provide just the right difficulty over a broad set of experiences. Typically it either ends up dominating, or being too easy. Wherever a given player’s abilities stand, it usually ends up being one or the other; adaptable AI is difficult to make. So difficult, it’s not within the realm of reason to expect from most game publishers, particularly, again, in MMO’s, where there is substantial overhead and an emphasis towards the community making the game what it is.

Would arguably make things worse. Then you still have D/P BP -> HS -> SS -> BS being better than CnD -> BS because then D/P can gain stealth without worrying about blocks and still get backstab without worry of being blocked, while a blocked CnD negates the whole thing on D/D.

It’d make stab on D/P better while not changing anything on D/D, making the set further relatively weaker.

The likely best approach to CnD is breaking it down like Shadow Shot such that the attack produces an unblockable hit which causes the thief to gain stealth, with a separate damage source (not unblockable) for the damage. This way, good timing from a guard or whatever be it would still be rewarded by negating the damage, while not punishing the thief excessively for potentially proccing a passive.

The only beginnings of a fix is making CnD slighltly more consistent or accessible while also changing skills 3/4 and toning down the damage or upping the initiative cost on Shadow Shot.

Typically the lower tiers have better individual players. Actually, the best of the best that I’ve seen have been on lower tiers.

Mag used to have some good players. These days, most of Mag gets carried by 10v1 gank squads and FoTM overpowered builds. The amount of spawn camp aggression and ganks is worse than what you find in a T1 server when it’s ticking 400. Most of them claim skill, despite having been terrible players on other servers before bandwagoning to the trolly gank “skilled” server once hearing of how amazing they were in fighting lol. Mag’s typically the laughing stock of other servers because their players are just so astronomically bad and try so hard it’s more funny than anything.

Their KDR isn’t from winning on an even turf. You bring equal numbers and the 10-man condi mesmer gank squad guilds and trashy thieves that spam 3 or play traps either run away at the sight of a potential threat, get absolutely melted because they actually just suck, or they call more to make it 20v10 for no reason other than precious KDR.

I got better small-scale in T7.

EA is considered the better choice over ID. ID is taken mostly for WvW OH pistol builds which literally just spam 4 while running on-interrupt sigils.

Tac Strike is okay, but not worth the six initiative really in any respect. FS/LS hits harder, is typically easier to land since LS is unblockable, and the extra evasion and boon rip is way too good on such a build to really warrant stealth attacks’ use.

CnD use on S/D is typically done only in emergency defensive plays, or in rare interrupts on long-channeled abilities while the opponent doesn’t have stability. Tac Strike’s damage is so low even on interrupt with ID, it’s still substantially less damage than backstab, unless for some reason the player running D/x isn’t playing with a crit damage-based build.

That’s not to say CnD having a shadowstep is a good idea, though. It’d become overly-consistent while massively dropping the skill floor and still not fixing the main issues with OH dagger.

BS is weak in sPvP because the thief gets all its damage from traits which scale it up, rather than boons, which have fixed stats. Since sPvP’s stats are so inherently low, scaling means much less than just stacking 15 might and having naturally higher damage coefficients. I believe I’ve discussed this issue at length with Kageseigi before.

Go into WvW, and Backstab hits like a bus. Why? Because the scaling from traits starts working since PvE-baseline stats are so much higher, and thus boons get relatively nerfed as opposed to the core stat yields from gear. Put boons on it too, with all the scaling the thief has, and it can one-shot heavies.

That said, I don’t think DT breaks anything or is even a good idea for D/D condi in any way. Poison/Bleeding on backstab just won’t fix anything, either. DT is crap as it is. Really, it is. 33% chance on CnD, which has a repeated cast interval of at best 4s in WvW, and 100% poison duration, allows its poison uptime of just one permanent stack if CnD procs DT’s poison 100% of the time. Otherwise it’s averaging 33% poison uptime on a single stack of poison for at best 4 seconds. That’s absolutely horrible.

Rending Shade is also crap, both implementation and design. SA it too big of an investment at the moment considering thief is required to run Tr/DrD to be competitive, and sacrificing tons of damage and utility from DA for a chance at maybe ripping a few boons every so often just isn’t good. Want boon theft? S/D should be the premier choice, or run BT. It’d be good if the thief had Preparedness baseline, but then again you’re left with D/P dominating way too much, since it could swap Tr for SA and get more resilience, boon theft, stealth, and initiative improvements than Tr.

Condi D/D doesn’t need a little incentive to use other skills rather than so much as its damage forcibly spread to other skills, particularly in the wake of a necessary rework to DB and DD. Mashing 3 to win is stupid by concept, and given how easy and safe the build is to play, it shouldn’t exist at all.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

DeceiverX.8361:

All CnD needs is more reliability./accessibility…

How exactly do you achieve that without shadowstep?

Even without the target’s defensive mechanics, CnD is not always a 100% hit. The only time it is reliable is when used with Steal.

If shadowstep is not an acceptable option, I would favor an instant cast CnD.

My CnD rate is almost perfect as it is. I’ve only ever missed due to clutch blinds or abilities which reduce my speed just right. Backstab misses all the time due to all the passives which proc from CnD dealing so much damage in most cases.

I understand Jana had such issues of CnD “missing”, but I’ve never experienced this once. I’ve also never heard of anyone but Jana ever having this issue. If there’s a bug, it should be fixed, but frankly, because I’ve never once seen this happen before in the game, despite probably being one of the most active D/D power players, I’m going to say anything but a very rare, odd, and obscure bug is L2P, with people not standing close enough, or not realizing skill procs or abilities which can easily negate CnD’s blow with little warning.

Which is also why I favor DB turning into a gap closing evade instead of just an in-place one which applies conditions. Thus a D/D thief can catch up to escaping targets and land the CnD. S/D doesn’t use stealth, and P/D has Body Shot spam if it needs to catch up (it’s not meant to be a chasing kit) or disengage by Shadow Strike.

A shadowstep on CnD would turn D/D into a high-skill-ceiling set into one of the lowest in the game, offering effectively a free CC + port + stealth on 6 init with huge potential nuke afterwards. No thanks, I’d rather be underpowered than overpowered. If I wanted to be overpowered, I’d play condi mes or even arguably condi D/D.

I’d be down for either. They’re amazing-looking weapons. The only problem is that on characters which I don’t give a blue aesthetic to, they look stupid at night, and those that I do, they look stupid during the day.

So… a Mystic Forge recipe could solve this?

AliamRationem.5172:

DeceiverX.8361:

Just saying now, I told you so, to all the people who kept screaming for an expansion for years, and the white knights claiming HoT would be a huge boon for profits and the number of active players.

Expansions, unless in widely-popular subscription games, do not make money. Microtransactions for cosmetics do, and focusing on important things like gameplay make any content droughts much more enjoyable. Games like League, which has an astrononical budget know this; almost all profit comes from skins and their tight gameplay mechanics and good balance, with a very occasional new champion/content release.

ANet has failed repeatedly to provide us with a quality, detail-driven gameplay experience as a whole for well over a year, now. Most aspects of the game which were once great selling points have been stymied, while an excess of attention has been put in all the wrong places in hopes to expand their bleeding playerbase via niche markets. Unfortunately, the real, hard truth is that the existing greatness of the game is being continuously tarnished through negligence, and in many respects, blatant ineptitude of maintaining such a great experience.

If every MMO has a failing, it’s lack of content. The fact is the model is designed for players to spend a lot of time at it, but in the process they rapidly burn through content and find themselves wondering what to do next. It’s the big content patches/expansions players look forward to at that point.

You seem to be suggesting that instead of developing the HoT expansion, ANet should have focused on class balance. In other words, the game was almost perfect and should have been left that way (more or less).

Are you primarily a PvP player? Because that actually makes a lot of sense in the PvP realm. PvP players are far more sensitive to balance issues. New content is great, but ultimately you’re there to compete against other players and you can’t do that very well when they drop a bunch of overpowered elite specs that only half the players have access to into the mix.

However, on the PvE side of the coin, these forums are full of players who dislike HoT and probably wish it had never happened. But do you think before HoT released they were looking forward to nothing but minor balance tweaks and the odd content release every now and then? Not likely!

PvE players want content. They always want content. Balance is great, but they play the game cooperatively or by themselves rather than competitively (for the most part). They aren’t sensitive to the razor’s edge on balance issues the way PvP players are and they don’t get as much replay value out of the combat itself as AI is far less dynamic.

You referenced “League” (I assume league of legends?). I’ve never played that one, but is it primarily a PvP game? If so, do you think perhaps their model of maintaining and refining class balance with only minor content upgrades would be a good fit in a heavy PvE game like GW2?

I primarily play(ed) WvW (quit on the 7/26 patch), which is the objectively most stale and most neglected format in the game. Quite frankly, I’ve been playing almost every day since before release, and still got enjoyment out of the game’s mechanics and the capacity for players to shape how events unfolded. Out of necessity to uphold my 2g/hour food, I did PvE. A lot of it. Dungeons were a great start to the game and offered substantial replayability in respects to the content design. The AI, as you said, wasn’t there, but it’s nigh impossible to make good, fast-performing AI that will extend the lifespan of the content dramatically before being figured out.

Which, in all seriousness, is the entire purpose of MMO’s in general: players shaping the world. Ask yourself if you’d rather play a single player game for its story or progression or gameplay or have the community of a guild/group/clan with a shared interest. If you’re only here for story, you’re playing the wrong game (sorry, but GW2’s story hasn’t been brag-worthy), and quite frankly, the wrong genre of game. It’s like complaining that there isn’t enough character development and interaction in FPS games.

Honestly, anyone pretending like making PvE MMO’s is a profitable endeavor doesn’t understand that unless the game is designed to take the players years to reach endgame, it’s going to lose money because the interest in PvE will wane due to its players beating content faster than what the game’s publisher can generate, unless it happens to get an absurd amount of financial backing and player support. ANet doesn’t have these resources. Pretty much nobody does; WoW being only close to an exception (and WoW also undergoes content droughts). Simply, it’s not even feasible to expect AAA quality coming at a rate as fast as players can consume it. Especially if the idea is to keep the game accessible by B2P or free.

GW2 marketed itself heavily as the play-as-you-wish, casual-friendly game in 2012 with a good amount of support and lots of developer interaction, which most Eastern imports cannot boast. The figures do not lie: ANet made back its development investment costs in the first year out of this ideology, and did well for itself within a level of expectation almost deliberately until HoT efforts began. The game was intended to be community-heavy, with extra bells and whistles thrown into things like character dyes, town clothes, and as of the early trailer/game ideals, character personalities and how they could affect aspects of gameplay or story. The core game was meant to be (and is) very deep, with a plethora of hidden secrets for people to discover, as to keep them entertained, with a diverse cast and in almost all respects, many, many options on just how players wished to play the game and be relatively/appropriately rewarded. They pushed for good profession balance with the dev transparency and attention to e-sports to monetize and gain support to turn more of a profit, since well-balanced games tend to do better than poorly-balanced ones (I.E. what we’ve been seeing since a little bit before HoT).

As far as balance goes, PvE is much more vocal about it and has gotten much more attention to their issues than the PvP/WvW side. Almost all major public releases of number-crunching, the whole “berserker meta” nonsense which largely got us into a horrible state of balance, talks over class viability, etc. via numbers come from the PvE community. In fact, I’d actually argue the exclusivity of the PvE community min-maxing has led to a large motive as to why players are so often chomping at the bit for new content: a few min-maxers post the next FoTM build or comp on a major website/stream, and the “hardcore” players copy-paste the build thinking nothing of it, and rush the content down.

The few weeks after launch were chaos in the absolute best ways, and some people I played with at level 80 didn’t even know what traits were, and most players were in greens and a few rares, with maybe an odd exotic. The few people who had figured anything out didn’t have the time and popularity to just let people copy-paste their builds, and the infrastructure of such sharing sites like metabattle or GW2skills wasn’t there, either.

The small episodes of LS every two weeks were icing to keep things fresh as to give both more hardcore and casual players a reason to keep coming back and keeping up with the game, but this cadence proved both unsustainable from a business perspective, and difficult for the players due to a constant dependency of needing to log in for an episode’ s period, which could not be replayed. So they dropped the concept.

GW2 was not meant to be a new-content-churning, hardcore PvE game.

I worked for a Korean grinder and this was quite literally a development strategy: .0000X% of a level per monster kill at the high levels just to allow patches to flow together such that players which play roughly 7 hours a day doing just grinding would reach the level cap roughly by the release of the next increase of the level cap. It did this because it was the only affordable way to guarantee their more-than-casual player-base wouldn’t just churn through content that took months to make in a week.

And this model objectively fails in the west. Western gamers don’t like being led on by a carrot on a stick, and don’t like to see that people with too much spare time end up on the top of the charts for no other reason than that spare time.

League of Legends is a PvP game. But that’s where the money is in multiplayer games. Unless development costs in terms of time/money are negligible, only PvP multiplayer games will turn massive profits long-term if the intent is to keep supporting them indefinitely. Games like those in the Souls franchise demonstrate this; long after the co-op online play dissolves, the PvP community is still going, despite no patches. After a DLC comes out, the PvE players come back in droves to beat it, maybe replay the content five or six more times, and then withdraw. The PvP community still trudges on for years afterwards.

Realistically, how else do you keep PvE players entertained while new content gets developed, all while turning a profit? It’s simply not possible on the AAA scale without just stumbling into huge amounts of money. The underlying gameplay just has to be so good to keep people invested in general. If that collapses, everything will.

Which is why you have so many people in PvE complaining about profession balance, too. The gameplay since launch has gotten stale and crippled, and rather than trying to fix it, we’re seeing massive resources go into niche markets like raids, over-designed maps, bug fixes to give programmers something to do, and ever-increasing in quantity, and inversely quality, skin releases.

The pillars which made GW2 amazing at its start have largely crumbled, and ANet’s negligence and/or incompetence has been responsible for its bleeding of players and subsequently profits, and such a lack of keeping the core tenets of the game well-maintained will be its demise.

Just saying now, I told you so, to all the people who kept screaming for an expansion for years, and the white knights claiming HoT would be a huge boon for profits and the number of active players.

Expansions, unless in widely-popular subscription games, do not make money. Microtransactions for cosmetics do, and focusing on important things like gameplay make any content droughts much more enjoyable. Games like League, which has an astrononical budget know this; almost all profit comes from skins and their tight gameplay mechanics and good balance, with a very occasional new champion/content release.

ANet has failed repeatedly to provide us with a quality, detail-driven gameplay experience as a whole for well over a year, now. Most aspects of the game which were once great selling points have been stymied, while an excess of attention has been put in all the wrong places in hopes to expand their bleeding playerbase via niche markets. Unfortunately, the real, hard truth is that the existing greatness of the game is being continuously tarnished through negligence, and in many respects, blatant ineptitude of maintaining such a great experience.

Because a shadowstep is absurdly strong as a mechanic?

Like I’m sorry but the reason D/P is as good as it is is largely from reliable ranged stealth and the damage and port on Shadow Shot.

CnD shouldn’t copy D/P. End of story. It conceptually de-values D/P, and would do little to help D/D acrually be competitive.

All CnD needs is more reliability./accessibility A blind won’t help the thief land CnD and subsequently gain stealth through a million blocks and invulns, either. OOC or ranged stealth also does too much for the init cost of only 6, and further de-values D/P on the conceptual level.

Daredevil with EA. It’s our only good option.
As of lately, ANet is who decides how you play the thief. DA/Tr/DrD D/P or staff with Escapist’s Absolution is how you play power. S/D is nerfed to oblivion, and DrD is just better than acro.
Signet of Agility is a good idea as it offers a cleanse and refunds endurance, which offers more cleansing. As it is, EA is one of the best cleanses in the game. You’ll need Shadowstep for a situational cleanse. Take BD to prevent application and use it instead of Shadowstep since it’s easier to use, often safer, and on a way lower cooldown for stunbreaking. Conditions are considered overpowered in 1v1 and small scales generally speaking, so they’re very prevalent now.

Core thief has pretty terrible cleansing options overall. You’re not going to find much meaning in any core trait lines except trickery. Daredevil for the most part does everything core thief offers, but better. People just like DA because all of its traits synergize nicely, and provides both good offense though mug and executioner as well as solid utility through poison/weakness, heal on mug, and Panic Strike.

Which is still poor design. Dancing Dagger should have condi synergy and normalized power damage, and DB made into a good evade for both builds to re-position or chase with. At that point, the AA on D/x could be buffed to offer more condition potency, and the skill floor and effective potential yields raised for condi builds while at least somewhat buffing OH dagger and D/D for power.

CnD is a problem because of other professions having too much to negate it now with little to no effort. Either it needs a lowered initiative cost or gain some method of reliability that isn’t just stealth without a target out of risk of making it way too strong a la D/D condi for actual combat potency + synergy with trapper ghost kit).

CnD doesn’t need a teleport gap close to copy D/P. If people want a shadowstep gap close, they play D/P, because that’s its featured skill.

Dancing Dagger needs a rework and to be normalized, Death Blossom needs to see the condi application moved to Dancing Dagger, and the evade made into a lunge to enable a gap closer or disengage tool for better out-of-stealth potential if things go wrong.

Either the ICD needs to be removed/reduced on stealth attacks, or passive defenses in this game nerfed massively. I prefer the latter, but ANet loves its passives.

While true to an extent, trait coupling and blatantly over-tuned or bad concept design that’s been rooted in some of the core kits which have not been nerfed is what makes everything seem awful.

Variation for dagger condi should come with a rework to OH dagger skills 3/4 and then traits to make it work better.

D/P trapper would end up with fight potential which is a bad idea, and D/D condi doesn’t need anything; it’d only be agreeable if they removed the bleeding from DB, but that’s weapon-set specific, and something I know most D/D condi bandwagon players would cry hard about as it’d make the build require some degree of skill to play.

Skynet.7201:

It’s starting to feel like DBL days again, but this time, it just artificially appears to seem like there are more people playing, solely due to the linkings.

Which is literally all merges ever do.

Look to pretty much every game that’s merged servers as a result of a bleeding population, and in time it ends up the same as before. Why? Because people leave for reasons, and those reasons aren’t because there aren’t enough people playing when the game is in its youth.

Population imbalance and low participation are symptoms of the bigger problem of a lack of fun and engaging gameplay due to the repeated failure and ineptitude of the profession balance team, and the substantial neglect WvW has seen for a majority of GW2’s career. We’re seeing attempts to improve the format, though I think many of the new implementations fail to recognize the specific needs of the format as a whole, are not true fixes to the underlying problems plaguing the format, and no fix to the game mode can bring people in if the combat and profession design mechanics are simply just not fun and poorly-designed.

Straegen.2938:

Justine.6351:

Stick with thief.

Don’t ask “what is good class/build that i can win with”, figure out what you can change in your own play first before completely garbage canning your time played on thief.

The only time a thief is good in a skirmish group is around other stealth classes. Otherwise the poor guy running with the thief ends up being a lightning rod for 3+ guys wailing on him. Best to run a class with overlap so that the builds they are running are elevated.

For example, two tRex running a Bunker Tempest/Guardian combo can easily handle a 2v5 scenario. They just have to stay on top of each other and will grind down most other groups fairly easily. Two thieves in that same fight are stealthing and/or running.

Bingo. The real issue is when the thief saves his butt, it pretty much requires stealth or disengage, and thus his friend gets eaten alive in the process.

Ultimately, mesmer provides much better group potential than most thieves considering they have much better shared stealth application and can effectively remove targets from the fight via moa. Better ranged options and group mobility and battlefield control enable a lot more strategic use.

The thief isn’t a good option when fighting outnumbered if you’re not with other stealth builds.

Typically, though, small groups benefit most from running very tanky/condnition and sustain-oriented builds as it allows them to out-last other groups while having just enough damage to focus enemies to downed state and secure spikes. Power-based damage is not an efficient stat combination in the game at all for PvP formats.

DGraves.3720:

Crossbows < Firearms

Not going to happen.

Bows already don’t make sense.

In the modern day they are.

Crude firearms like those represented in GW2 were way worse for small parties than comparable crossbows at the time. Firearms took off because of their power at range, which in a battlefield setting, was a massive advantage over traditional ranged weapons, which either struggled with armor (archery) or had problems in even brief storms like more traditional high-impact crossbows.

Since a firing squad could spread about as much devastation over a large area as an organized unit of crossbowman could do (albeit with more precision), and in many cases hit from a further range, all while using less resources (bullets were just scraps of lead for the most part), and not having to worry as much as some rain causing the weapons to lose function even days later, it was a very approachable method of fighting and increasing the odds of winning.

However, in smaller skirmishes, a crossbow (not even of the kind used in sieges and battles) would be undeniably more useful, especially if the wielder got the jump on his target, as its relative quietness and compactness (no need to stand up with a 60"+ longbow) would allow for much more tactical use.

It’s a fantasy game, anyways. You could argue that the advent of guns capable of a firing rate even of once per second would nullify the entire purpose of melee weapons, and that the entire concept of the oversized “greatsword” never really even existed, historically. The closest is the zweihander, and those aren’t even close in size to much of GW2’s options.

Plus, magic would probably nullify all use of really any weapons advancement. I mean you’ve seen what Countess Anise and Kasmeer can do, right?

AikijinX.6258:

DeceiverX.8361:

Welp, there goes all the great functionality from S/x in WvW lol.

ANet’s trying way too hard to make everyone play D/P + Shortbow or Staff. It’s just stupid.

Lol you were one of the people who bumped the thread, and gave information on how to do it lol.

I learned this from watching pro players fight in tournaments.

It’s not a new technique and it’s been on blatant display for years.

If you play D/P, it’s not a problem. If you play D/D, it is. I don’t whiff the air. But there’s also no reason why my enemies should get second/third/fourth chances from my attacks on passive skills and abilities when I had to do my best to just land CnD.

It’s really just that simple, and a perspective that needs to be recognized before debate.

I’m not certain what the gains from Backstab are from raw AA. All I do know is that Tr offers competitive damage while giving the thief much better burst and fewer initiative concerns.

Daredevil, however, offers more raw modifiers for damage output, better sustain, and better cleansing.

All Matters Fecal.9560:

I understand this diminishes capabilities of S/D a bit, but you guys (and others) are talking like you’re winning games by only running around spamming #2/jump and now you can’t so the weapon set is completely useless.

If you don’t play meta, this skill carried several other weapon sets and builds, including S/x itself.

The problem is there’s no compensation and the weaker non-meta sets already got nerfed ridiculously on 7/26 to border-line non-playability. This was the final nail in the coffin for most of them.

msalakka.4653:

It never left. It’s just gotten more popular now that, thanks to reward track nonsense and dailies, we have more pve clowns running around on the borderlands, and since they are not there to engage in person v. person combat, nor could they handle it if they did, they run this garbage.

And since it doesn’t involve the gem shop or spvp, nothing gets done about it.

Enjoy.

It’s one of the more viable options for thief now with the heavy-handed nerfs between 7/26 and today’s patch.

The only thing left to play is D/P.

Trapper Ghost isn’t very good except for when the opponent is hellbent on staying in the fight, and it’s just plain annoying, but I speak broadly in that most of the serious non-trolly thieves have at this point given up entirely with ANet and now succumb to the BS they allow just to help the game dig its grave.

Sarrs.4831:

IMO better solution

Damage increase as the catapult shot is charged; 100% charged shot deals more damage than a point blank tap

Damage increase = the number of extra shots you would get from point blank

Depending on how people feel about it, tune down catapult damage to match

Lets you put your catapult wherever you like and it’ll still be fully effective, people will naturally decide to put their catapults somewhere more sensible than melee

I’ve been advocating this for years and always got chewed out about it because it would kill ktraining.

I still advocate for it.

runeblade.7514:

I disagree. I rather ANet put a crossbow skin for rifle.

Which I’d have also been fine with (see link in my signature for related proposal). Though my thief days and caring for the profession as a whole are over now.

It should be. The meta trait line for DPS has been DA/CS/DrD because it offers more damage.

Tr is needed for PvP/WvW play, and the forgiving/power-creeped nature of DrD makes the build D/P (now with patch today a hard requirement) DA/Tr/DrD in most cases.

You’d need to run Trickster and Panic Strike on such a build. I play(ed) signet D/D + S/D thief (quit thief on 7/26 patch) for close to four years, and those two are absolute necessities for basic combat functionality.

Though seriously, D/D is such trash with the 1s ICD on stealth attacks now it’s not even worth trying. The nerf to S/x today killed any purpose of using sword for literally anything in WvW except more 3spam, which is weaker than D/P’s.

All other weapons have been removed from viability except Staff, D/P or D/D condi cancer. Diversity on thief is dead in the water. Play meta or play another class/game.