Otherwise I agree with you; buffing its numbers will not affect anything; Death Blossom and Dancing Dagger need a redesign, and the damage from 7/26 needs to be undone.
I can’t speak for WvW, but in PvP, I usully use DA/CS/T for the damage output (SA feels so weak). I know it lacks power compared to WvW, but I still feel that much of the problem comes from all of the passive defenses of other professions.
What is your take on passives, and what would you suggest for the Thief to become more of a competitive fighter in PvP?
Would it be to simply normalize the stats between PvP and PvE/WvW, giving more damage/sustain to PvP? Or to give counters against passives? Or something in addition to or something different entirely?
SA is weak in sPvP because it doesn’t provide sustain comparable to other professions and depends on stealth. Since stealthed targets do not contribute to point control, the trait line is of little purpose in the entire format, and since the damage on the thief is too low from sPvP stats based on the nature of how the thief acquires damage (scaling) to compensate for this deficiency, the entire profession has no role except to roam uncontested points; consider the purpose of the thief in sPvP without the shortbow: it has none, and even with the shortbow, is often rendered non-essential due to mobility options on other professions.
Simply upping damage coefficients is a non-answer because then it overpowers the thief in PvE (already top-tier DPS) and makes the class overly one-dimensional in its power in WvW, which up until this recent patch, the thief as a whole was a well-balanced class aside from a few select small-scale builds, which typically were universal gear problems over class problems.
Passives ruined the game. At first, it was just Warriors with Defy Pain. It’s now so out of hand we have thief with invuln. If I had full authority over the game, I’d remove all passive and RNG effects from the game. Knowing exactly your enemy’s capabilities and calculating them out is essential to perform well in PvP environments. The best of the best players will pay attention to every skill use by their opponents and know the cooldowns of those abilities – even short ones – to identify exactly what to do and when while simultaneously reacting to the given battlefield. A passive with no indicator throws a monkey wrench into such calculations, and often throws too much chance into how to approach combat in general. Simply, they allow for sloppy play, and lower the skill floor while having a very ambiguous effect on the skill ceilings of various professions, making the game ultimately more difficult to balance when considering the effects of passives on low-level and high-level play.
To make the thief viable, as well as all other builds, stats need to be normalized to PvE/WvW exotic-values, which the rest of the game is largely balanced on. Professions with different allocations of boon access and scaling potential are difficult to balance when the stats swing to wildly; I can achieve 4k power, 240% crit damage, and another 70% bonus damage modifiers in WvW, netting backstabs well over 20k, but am hard-pressed to get even glassier builds to half of their health on a combo in sPvP, despite running the same builds on both thief and opponent. Further, I can run an ele way tankier in sPvP and have comparably better damage as to WvW, since the offensive stats are lower in sPvP and boons yield the same amount of stats, thus the percentage of value gained from boons is objectively better, so a boon-based build can get similar power values despite running gear with tremendously lower power values. The boon builds have dominated the scene for this sole reason; sPvP is in it of itself an imbalanced format that’s incompatible with the other two. Normalizing stats is the easiest solution, since splitting balance requires an examination of every skill change made independently and how those changes would affect format-specific play. We can run the numbers for WvW and PvE at the same time and know its result for the most part, but cannot do so as easily with sPvP and balance accordingly. Concepts and workarounds become increasingly more difficult as more of these changes are made, too, as format-specific skill and trait selection isolates many traits into niche purposes, which could have otherwise been reworked to fit all formats in mind from a conceptual and mathematical perspective.
If the stats are normalized, most issues with diversity in sPvP would dissolve. WvW has had more viable builds in small-scale than sPvP for years, the only exclusion being the existence of mathematically overpowered gear combinations like dire perplexity/TB and Durability runes. Undoing the recent change for the thief would put it among a leading aggression/decap class while indirectly nerfing pure sustain builds due to the influx of other, higher-yielding-damage stats. Previous amulets could subsequently make returns with little affect on balance, too, since such defensive amulets were taken away by the recognition that defensive stats were indeed too strong for the stat limitations of the format, for offensive options since the introduction of even Ferocity have been mathematically under-performing, exacerbated by the defensive power creep from HoT and beyond.
This isn’t a thief-exclusive issue, either. It applies to all scaling-based builds with few boons. This is the best possible change for the game as a whole, and further the thief is simply dependent on it for most of its class concepts to function properly.
