Guild Wars 2

Division.9618:

Devildoc.6721:

That’s really bad that for thieves their weapon skills are all “utility skills”

Every other class does the bulk of their damage via their weapon skills.

We do the bulk of it through auto attack.

Really? You mean to say you have it worse than rangers, who’s only viable weapon is pretty much the shortbow autoattack?

It’s an utility skill. It’s made to cripple. Before, thieves could pull off ridiculous damage AND cripple up to 3 enemies constantly with a single skill. Do you know what other class can do that? Mesmer, if he manages to pull out 3 berserkers and keep them alive, and even then not nearly as well.

Every other class has a fairly large cooldown on their cripple and the damage isn’t anything amazing.

Get used to this feeling. It’s the feeling of having a skill in your weapons that doesn’t do great damage. Every other class has skills like this. You don’t get a spammable skill that does massive damage and cripples.

Virtually every other class, now I don’t play a ranger, so i wouldn’t know them, and if they aren’t this case they should be fighting it…

all of their weapon skills are higher damage than their autoattack, even taking dps of the entire chain into account. Autoattack for them, is something they do while waiting on cooldowns, or in between skills, but it’s never their best dps option.

Thieves, depending on your weapon, autoattack has now become the biggest dps skill you have. it essentially defeats the purpose of initiative, which was designed so that thieves could do burst damage. Autoattack initially, in beta, and at launch, was intended to be something a thief falls back to when initaitive is low, or while they’re waiting for the opportune moment to burst. Because our skill use per minute is lower than any other class because of the shared nature of our resource, our autoattack was buffed to make sure our sustained dps didn’t fall behind everyone else.

Now, as they’re stripping away damage from skills…

we won’t be able to burst using initiative anymore, autoattack becomes our primary damage.

It breaks the class’s original design.

Fritz.5026:

brute.1607:

That was the reason why I thought about making a warrior because every class gets nerfed except for them. All I see is buffs for them.

lmao.

all those combo finishers to the harpoon gun were some leet warrior buffs.

Better than a 50% nerf on one of your most popular weapon skillsets.

I’d love to see the warrior reaction if whirlwind attack got a 50% damage nerf, and rush got a 33% damage nerf with promises that they were looking very closely at 100 blades damage and probably nerfing it.

garethh.3518:

They talked about toning down burst dps and giving them defensive abilities to compensate.
They did pretty much none of that short of buffing a few defensive abilities and beating on S/D.

Mug still does up to 6k dmg and applies basilisk venom leaving the instagib spike completely intact, shortbow #3 is still blatantly OP, nothing really changed in the spec short of not being top tier pew-pewers from off BO to boot…

They said they knew d/d-shortbow was over the top yet didn’t actually fix the issues about it in question…

How the hell is shortbow #3 blatantly OP? It does like autoattack damage and the cripple lasts an instant. It’s an escape tool, nothing more.

Now that we’re starting to split skills between PVP and PVE, can we undo the nerf to pistol whip that put it under autoattack damage for PVE? it was a good skill to use in PVE and most PVE thieves who used it weren’t using it in conjunction with haste (the real culprit behind the skill being “OP”

I for one am getting really tired of standing in a cloud of smoke autoattacking.

Eduardo.4675:

evilapprentice.6379:

Eduardo.4675:

evilapprentice.6379:

I see alot of people talking about the nerfs – is anyone else as disappointed and annoyed that we didn’t receive a single fix?

My list is above (Shadow shot, flanking strike, P/P in general, ranged attacks obstructed for no reason, adding venoms still suck, traps still suck, PW still roots and does sub par damage without quickness)

We’re still basically locked into Shbow and either D/D, P/D or S/D, because our other weapon sets have GLARING problems. Every single one of those specs use Dagger offhand, which now does terrible damage for non-glass cannons.

Fixing those bugs was the only bad thing is this patch, specially the channel>follow that thief bug.

I disagree. 50% damage nerf to Dancing Dagger is over the top – the skill still costs 4 initiative, and has a slow travel time (its rather easy to dodge). Increase the travel time and reduce the init to 3, and I’m fine with it.

CnD doing 33% less damage is just a terrible idea all around. It’s intention was obviously to nerf insta-gib builds, but does almost nothing to nerf them. 1 skill out of 3 doing 33% less damage just means you’ll probably need to hit HS once. Instead, every thief who didn’t want to run insta gib now has a 6 init ability that does 33% less damage.

I’m not claiming the game is ruined. I’ll still play. But Anet has set a disturbing trend – every single thief change (besides changing HS % thresholds) has been wildly off the mark. Nerfing PW to counter Quickness->PW builds? Nerfing CnD to counter Insta-gib builds? They’re nerfing every thief spec to counter extreme burst, rather than just toning down extreme burst. It’s stupid, poorly planned, and extremely worrying.

Edit:The icing on the cake is they just keep nerfing our small pool of working weaponsets, rather than fixing the issues with the broken/poorly designed ones so we can expand as a class.

I dont think u got the devs idea. It was a preemptive nerf, just to prevent future cries from meta shift. In case u dont know, dancing daggers has a brutaly fast activation time, its 1/4 secs + travel time, it hits the target usually within half a sec, and its not that easy to dodge, i rarely miss it, and u should also know that it has some kind of bug that more often than not makes the “ripple” hits(or bouncing) do more dmg than the first hit, wich sometimes resulted in brutally increasing the final dmg output,its like that similar bug with rifle warrior where piercing killshots gain power as they perfurate subsequent targets (u should read this as, its prone to exploiting, and we all know that there is no exploiters,right?). The dmg is insane when the enemies accumulate, and if they nerfed the BS combo, wich REQUIRES some few button presses, positioning,etc, the meta would eventually shift to a new form of heartseeker: dancing daggers spam. An Assassin (thief) is suposed to preform stunts like the backstab combo,it has allways been like this in other mmo’s, and im in favor of staying this way, however,one button kills is cheese… that cheese is the reason i dont play death blossom cond build,for me spaming 3 is cheese, specially in that infamous UNICORN build. The meta, if BS was nerfed, would now be either dancing spam,or daze lock spam. In the first, the QQ’ers would come here and say"nerfnerf, 1 hit kills", in the second, the permalock would bring “OMG, Anet, what did you have in mind when u allowed a thief to perma lock me into oblivion?”…
This is my take on this patch, the also powerful P/D setup was actually improved, but that setup takes a lot more time to kill and leaves the victim with a chance to survive and beat you, if he is skilled enough, unlike the very similar S/D setup, wich dazelocks…
Also, on cluster thingie, it was somewhat powerfull, allowed a thief to do a lot of dmg in a weapon set that has the #3 skill, wich is a evade backwards ohsheet button, followed by a shadow step skill on #5, ,without the half a second delay of having to swap weapon. Think of the new map, and a thief spaming cluster safely from above, already in a map that benefits their shortbow so much…
Look, im a thief, its my main, i only opened 2 slots yet,one for thief and one for mesmer, wich i opened to understand that class, so dont think im one of the whine crowd, i looove thieving like a boss!!

You’re saying this as if Thieves have infinite initiative so they can just use all those skills in succession.

Initiative is a SHARED resource, even across weapons.. When we run out all we can do is autoattack.

Mirage.2597:

Nothing has change for WvW goes in builds , WvW is pve therefor , we were buffed not nerfed in WvW

Cept that whole 50% dancing dagger reduction.

evilapprentice.6379:

Eduardo.4675:

evilapprentice.6379:

I see alot of people talking about the nerfs – is anyone else as disappointed and annoyed that we didn’t receive a single fix?

My list is above (Shadow shot, flanking strike, P/P in general, ranged attacks obstructed for no reason, adding venoms still suck, traps still suck, PW still roots and does sub par damage without quickness)

We’re still basically locked into Shbow and either D/D, P/D or S/D, because our other weapon sets have GLARING problems. Every single one of those specs use Dagger offhand, which now does terrible damage for non-glass cannons.

Fixing those bugs was the only bad thing is this patch, specially the channel>follow that thief bug.

I disagree. 50% damage nerf to Dancing Dagger is over the top – the skill still costs 4 initiative, and has a slow travel time (its rather easy to dodge). Increase the travel time and reduce the init to 3, and I’m fine with it.

CnD doing 33% less damage is just a terrible idea all around. It’s intention was obviously to nerf insta-gib builds, but does almost nothing to nerf them. 1 skill out of 3 doing 33% less damage just means you’ll probably need to hit HS once. Instead, every thief who didn’t want to run insta gib now has a 6 init ability that does 33% less damage.

I’m not claiming the game is ruined. I’ll still play. But Anet has set a disturbing trend – every single thief change (besides changing HS % thresholds) has been wildly off the mark. Nerfing PW to counter Quickness->PW builds? Nerfing CnD to counter Insta-gib builds? They’re nerfing every thief spec to counter extreme burst, rather than just toning down extreme burst. It’s stupid, poorly planned, and extremely worrying.

Edit:The icing on the cake is they just keep nerfing our small pool of working weaponsets, rather than fixing the issues with the broken/poorly designed ones so we can expand as a class.

Me, I was hoping they’d bring offhand pistol skills UP in damage, to be on the same level as offhand dagger skills.

Yeah I get that skills have utility, but it’s just silly that the lowest amount of damage I can do on my class is to shoot someone in the head.

Looks like the route they’re going is to bring dagger skills DOWN instead.. so that autoattack is the biggest damaging skill thieves have. This statement will be true by Christmas.

brute.1607:

I want equip my thief for wvw and was wondering if backstab is still a good source of damage or should i go into something else?

My last resort is rerolling a warrior. Any tips would be helpful. Thanks

Just reroll warrior, they’re immune to nerfs apparently.

Do the most burst damage in the game for both melee and ranged, have the highest base health and tied for highest base defense, have great group utility/support… never get nerfed once, instead they look to bring other weapons up to Rifle/Greatsword’s level with buffs.

Me though, I find warriors really boring to play because they just faceroll everything.

PhoenixDown.5467:

Shortbow damage nerf – what were they thinking?!! Nerfing mediocre weapon…

Scorpion Wire – oh poor people in zergs and on the walls /insert evil laugh here/

50% damage reduction on dancing dagger?
It now does less damage than a shortbow auto attack and STILL costs 4 init?
Methinks they did not think this one through very much.

It’s a utility skill.

That’s really bad that for thieves their weapon skills are all “utility skills”

Every other class does the bulk of their damage via their weapon skills.

We do the bulk of it through auto attack.

wintermute.4096:

It could be worse. Look at the ranger forums if you feel down sometimes…

They actually doubled the cooldown on flame trap this update, after promising there would be significant buffs for utility skills today. =)

I saw nothing but buffs in the ranger changes, and minor bug fixes.. not a single nerf.

I see Engineer, Mesmer, and Thief nerfs., some Ele and Guardian pvp healing nerfs, 1 Ele nerf and mostly bug fixes for them.

No ranger nerfs..

The buffs may not have been what you wanted, but at least you’re not losing damage by 33-50%.

Note warriors have yet to receive a single nerf, and in fact got buffs.

Haha, I called the dancing dagger and cloak and dagger nerfs, along with the cluster bomb nerf.

We’re literally at a point where autoattack is our main source of damage in most of our weapon sets now.

Sword/Dagger = Autoattack
Sword/Pistol = Autoattack
Dagger/Dagger or Dagger/Pistol= Waiting on backstab nerf, but i’ll soon be autoattack unless you’re condition build, or until you get under 25% and heartseeker is good.
Pistol/Dagger = Autoattack/Stealth attack
Shortbow = Autoattack

What’s left? well pistol/pistol still has more damage on unload than autoattack.

We’re being nerfed into autoattacking.

Here’s my predictions, now maybe some of these won’t make it and amounts might not be exact but the general idea seems like it’s in the works whether it’s this patch or the next:

Dagger offhand ability damage reduced significantly due to their considerable utility value and above intended thief burst damage. This brings them in line with their off hand pistol counterparts.
Backstab damage reduced by 20%, damage capped at 8000 damage.
Mug major trait no longer applies direct damage, it now applies 3 stacks of bleeding (9s duration) to the target.
Cluster Bomb damage reduced significantly to account for versatile utility of skill as blast finisher.
Unload damage reduced by 15%. Instead Unload now applies 3 stacks of vulnerability per use.

Thief: We autoattack now

Teva.2807:

Devildoc.6721:

Teva.2807:

alanis.6094:

Most of what you have written here is incorrect.

Please do list what is incorrect.

Legendaries are currently the same stats as exotics.

There will also be ascended gear that has other stat combinations other than magic find. I have a hunch they showed the magic find because the power/prec differences will be LOWER than if you showed berserker or rampager or any other stat combo. Each piece of gear level 65+ has 3 stats, 1 major stat, and 2 lesser stats.

I didnt say same stat. I said legendaries are better. That means appearance and that extra 80 attack.

They don’t have an extra 80 attack. GW2DB uses old data. You can watch youtube videos of people crafting their legendaries and see they have the same attack ratings as an exotic of the same weapon type.

AcidicVision.5498:

I like this topic. It shows how Ascended might not be the end of the world. I see lots of you are still using rare or even masterwork…yet still doing content, still doing dungeons, still doing big events.

There has largely been a “I’m just going to play the game and ill get it when I get it” mentality.

A new tier of gear isn’t going to change that.

It is the end all be all though, because without ascended gear you won’t be able to do the new dungeon. Ascended gear is the only way you can get infusions to counteract agony.

Teva.2807:

alanis.6094:

Most of what you have written here is incorrect.

Please do list what is incorrect.

Legendaries are currently the same stats as exotics.

There will also be ascended gear that has other stat combinations other than magic find. I have a hunch they showed the magic find because the power/prec differences will be LOWER than if you showed berserker or rampager or any other stat combo. Each piece of gear level 65+ has 3 stats, 1 major stat, and 2 lesser stats.

marnick.4305:

Armor 4/6 exotic
Trinkets 1/5 exotic + guild back
Weapons all exotic

As a casual, I took my time because I knew gear wouldn’t increase. Apparently it will…

How’s your exotic status?

I have a full knight’s armor set with full emerald jewelry set, a full berserker’s armor set and full ruby jewelry set, all exotic, I also have 2 exotic pistols, 1 exotic dagger, 1 exotic shortbow, and 1 exotic sword. My only non exotics are my back slot item, and my underwater weapons.

Reposting this because it got merged even though it is about INFUSIONS, not ascended gear.

Infusions seem a lot less like the infusion of GW1, where you completed 1 mission and you were infused (or did several infusion runs in about 10 minutes each back in the old days), and more like attunements in WoW, or Radiance in Lord of the Rings Online. They were awful systems that accomplished one thing: Gating so that you couldn’t play content with your friends because they didn’t have the attunement/radiance gear to be able to participate in the content with you. A new guild member, same story. A lot of guilds simply would not accept new guild members without the proper attunements, keys, or radiance levels. Trying to form a PuG for the new dungeon? People will reject for not having the proper infusions.
This is possibly the most backwards thing I’ve ever seen from Arenanet, in 7 years of being an Arenanet fan. Arenanet has in the past shown that they are very educated, forward thinking people as developers, why on earth can they not use the hindsight of predecessors to realize that infusions are a very bad idea? Guild Wars 2 was supposed to be different, Guild Wars 2 was supposed to not be about gear and stats, but about player skill. Putting in a mechanic that cannot be overcome by player skill but requires a specific stat to overcome absolutely rejects that philosophy, and that has been a part of Guild Wars’ philosophy from before Prophecies was launched. I just don’t understand.. especially when WoW and LotRO threw out those gating mechanisms, they looked at the feedback, looked at their metrics, and decided, hey, this was a bad mechanic to have in the game, let’s remove it. Now 3 years later Guild Wars 2 is ADDING a similar mechanic? It makes 0 sense..
Help me understand what you’re trying to accomplish with gating content Anet?

Again, this is about infusions as a gating mechanism, not about ascended gear. It doesn’t belong in the merged thread about ascended gear.

Okay here’s a bit of misinformation OP.

Currently there is no gap in power between exotics and legendaries. They currently have the exact same stats. Their only benefit is cosmetic. This is no “in between” of anything currently in game.

This is adding a new tier, that is a direct upgrade to older exotic gear, and all legendary weapons will be increased in power to be direct upgrades to exotic weapons. Unfortunately they’ll all have power/vit/toughness instead of someone’s personal choice of power/prec/crit damage, or power/condition damage/vitality, or power/healing power/toughness, etc.

Currently you can transmute your favorite stats into a legendary weapon. When the patch hits you’re stuck with P/V/T or you downgrade your weapon to an exotic.

Bad idea.

STRanger.5120:

Devildoc.6721:

The boost is going to be in autoattacks, autoattacking on thief will be the best way to do dps on thief, like it already is for sword, and already is for pistol/dagger.

Anet stated that they don´t want it this way, hence they´ve done it for the S/P weapon set. I´m kinda confused about this

But autoattack is the best dps for S/P.

It’s an 8% increase. That’s significant..

Just wait for the berserker’s ascended pieces, that’ll show the increase in potential power even more. 30% increase in magic find instead being more crit damage.

The boost is going to be in autoattacks, autoattacking on thief will be the best way to do dps on thief, like it already is for sword, and already is for pistol/dagger.

I kind of want to throw up. Part of why I was so excited for this game and loved Guild Wars so much was that there was no gear treadmill. Now they’re adding one in, after a bunch of other mismanagement problems that have haunted this game since launch with the economy and such.

I waited 5 years to enjoy playing this game for a couple months and now it’ll become the things that I hate in other MMO’s.

This genre just might not be for me anymore.

DJLab.1760:

“Why don’t we make a Blood Legion cannon that fires Ash Legion turrets?”

Brillaint! I’ll take 100!

as a side note I recently completed my personal story, and all these people that were in my level 40 and on personal story were there, but no Dinky, or any of my other personal story characters from the best part of my personal story were there. I was disappointed, I wanted Dinky to be there especially.

Ichishi.9613:

EasymodeX.4062:

Anyone not specifically built for duelling should be disadvantaged in this context by design.

It’s fine for Thieves to have a general class advantage in 1v1. It’s not fine for Thieves to instantly kill almost any 1v1 opponent they find in WvW when they look at them from 900 range.

Again, I am pointing this out. WvW means World vs World, 1v1 means one-on-one.

It’s true, and in a massive group fight a thief is not nearly as valuable as other classes with better ranged attacks and aoe. I can do some ranged harass with cluster bomb, but really the most effective thing i can do in a large battle is pull someone into my group with scorpion wire. If I jump out into their group to do my main damage I get absolutely destroyed.

Thief is strong 1v1, but mediocre at best in large scale fights.

Falcon.8509:

@DevilDoc

Where did you get these numbers for thief crit? There are many more variables to be added that you havn’t added. 1- Thieves don’t often get 25 stacks of might 2- in SPvP thieves don’t often get 25 stacks of bloodlust (unless the opposing time is the worst time ever made.) If a thief is running D/D How is he supposed to stack 25 Vuln? (Can’t because if i did any of these proposed things i would be under 6 “pips” Of initiative.) Next your base attack in HoTm is 2139, if you pop assassins signet it lowers the bonus after the next hits. Next you didn’t add the VS Toughness, you only calculated raw damage, so yes if i was hitting a naked level 1 with no toughness and 18k hp i could probably hit a good 18k the “5990” would actually end up to be the average crit after all of that was added it. i tested this out under all of your theories and here is what i get, proving that whole arguement is so far off base that it is impossible. How does hitting a target from the behind with the correct traits produce that low of damag? Noting this chain is ONLY possible every 45 seconds. The reason you are complaining is because you see that high burst and say HEY THIEF OP, but the thief doesn’t just backstab, added airstrike from air runes 1.5k dmg. steal for 3k, initial burst, because you arn’t hitting them from full HP with backstab or it does way less damage. So 5.5k i will say for the backstab. thats 10k DMG in 1 secound. THAT is the burst you are seeing, not backstab alone. So then you must ask, is that too fast? If so Nerf the burst surrounding backstab, not the skill itself. Say mug damage? Or air rune damage? Every class has access to air runes. Then ask yourself, is the damage truely that great? You may not have time to react to the inital burst, but after that you have health. You can choose to heal or stun or do something else besides try to hurt the thief and just roll over. The problem isn’t the thief. Once the inital burst is gone there is a THREE SECOND WAIT on another stealth, and even then they wont get the same burst, only a measly portion of the inital one. It comes down to player intelligence. And you can NEVER buff player intelligence. Backstab is not that strong. It is everything added in, this is called a build.

I was putting forth the “perfect storm” ie the maximum damage you can do against a level 80 in various levels of armor, mostly to show the effect of armor. Posting maximum values gives larger differences so it’s easier to see changes.

I already said yes, it’s a perfect storm, not something realistic. Realistic would be something like 7 stacks of might (poison and signet might traits), maybe 10 stacks of bloodlust if they’re even using that sigil. I also forgot to calculate in assassin’s signet so values would be a little higher, but anyway, my point was, toughness could stand to be more effective.

For the crit values. Base crit is 1.5x damage, 6 runes of divinity is an additional +0.12 multiplier, 30 points in critical strikes is an additional +0.30, and berserker amulet is an additional +0.20, for a total of 2.12. In PVE/WvW it can get higher.

BTW realize I’m not saying backstab is OP, I’m saying toughness is UP.

sorrow.2364:

I only see thieves prophesying the apocalypse of the thief class based on the possible nerf of just one skill. This is a clear indication of how you guys are the ones who can’t adapt to changes and that you are the whiny kids and casual players.
It is clear to any hardcore and high-level PvP player that thieves, right now, needs some work. Now if you aren’t that kind of pubstomper kids, you’ll know that backstab nerf doesn’t hurt at all any thief capability, both in PvE and in tPvP. The only ones who this possible nerf is hurting are people who likes to roam around WvWvW and sPvP killing random guys and enjoying their easy wins.

STRanger.5120:

sorrow.2364:

Thieves have the best single target damage out of this game by far.

Care to clarify this? I didn´t know of any DPS measuring option for this game so far…

Initiative.
Thieves can use their highest damage skill over and over till the initiative is over, dealing massive damage.
Other professions are locked to a cooldown and can’t do this, but thieves can just focus on their high-damage output skill on their skillbar ignoring any utility, while other professions are forced to cycle their skills till the high-damage skill is rechared or to use autoattack and save utilities for better situations.

Their burst damage is really high but their sustained damage is definitely not towering over others, it might even be a bit lower than some classes because when your initiative runs dry you’re left autoattacking. In fact the reason why thief autoattack damage is higher than pretty much anyone else is to counteract that and give them some sustain.

BabelFish.7234:

I still use PW in PvE. It’s not THAT bad…I still own mobs in Orr…I tank better then guardians and warriors in dungeons and my dps is still pretty bloody high (even without being a glass spec).

To be honest what got nerfed when it came to PW thieves was the glass PW burst build, not the tank-y version but yet, the nerf was overkill and should be reverted. Auto attack does comparable damage to PW now.

You’re doing less damage than you’d be doing autoattacking while standing in black powder’s smoke.

Honestly pistol whip is only useful if you’re fighting something that cannot be blinded, but won’t one shot you if they hit you.

If it’ll 1 shot you or near 1 shot you, I wouldn’t risk chancing on the 1s of evade in a 2.6s animation skill, you’re more likely to get hit during the activation time, or stun time (that won’t happen becaue a mob that’s virtually immune to blind will also most of the time be immune to stuns), or in the tail end of the animation while you’re still rooted but the evade has worn off. If it can be blinded you’re better off using black powder and autoattacking. Take less hits (unless the mob does several hits at once in under 1s), do more DPS, add cripple and weakness.

Pistol whip is pretty garbage in PVE now.

SKuDDer.1860:

Devildoc.6721:

SKuDDer.1860:

Typical, brush it off on something else with no proof to back it up? You thieves keep saying show proof, but yet you show none in return. I just showed you a video of a current thief (who’s not all that good) easily rolling people, sometimes multiple in WvWvW.

I like the response though. Its like saying, well mesmers can push one button and kill the whole server instantly, there is a video out there somewhere.

@nightynight, hardly any of them I see in the video have greens arrows, but good try derailing it.

WvW should NEVER be used as evidence for something being in balance or not. WvW is not INTENDED to be balanced. People who are low level may get scaled to 80, but they are NOT on an even playing field with level 80 players in exotics. Not to mention orbs.

Yes but someone who is lvl 80, fully geared is an equal comparison, and FYI, orbs have been out of the game for almost a week now. It is no different then when people in PvP get things nerfed for other professions which have a greater or different impact on WvWvW and PvE.

Videos of people doing ridiculous damage in WvW are not against actual level 80’s in good gear, they’re always against scaled up low levels in garbage.

SKuDDer.1860:

Typical, brush it off on something else with no proof to back it up? You thieves keep saying show proof, but yet you show none in return. I just showed you a video of a current thief (who’s not all that good) easily rolling people, sometimes multiple in WvWvW.

I like the response though. Its like saying, well mesmers can push one button and kill the whole server instantly, there is a video out there somewhere.

@nightynight, hardly any of them I see in the video have greens arrows, but good try derailing it.

WvW should NEVER be used as evidence for something being in balance or not. WvW is not INTENDED to be balanced. People who are low level may get scaled to 80, but they are NOT on an even playing field with level 80 players in exotics. Not to mention orbs.

and I should add that while stacking toughness and being a bunker would hard counter direct damage, conditions would hard counter people stacking toughness.

Ensign.2189:

Toughness isn’t underpowered, but its strength is that it’s a force multiplier for your healing as well as your maximum health. That strength in multiplying your healing is totally irrelevant against lolspikes – you need vitality, which is roughly twice as powerful as toughness for spike resistance, to do that.

Well, I think that it doesn’t scale well and that stacking toughness doesn’t increase survivability against spikes well at all. I think it should reduce damage by a much more substantial amount.

so…. we’re looking at maximum possible results here we’ll say a thief with 25 stacks of sigil of bloodlust (250), 25 stacks of might, the target has a condition (we’ll say 25 stacks of vulnerability, for good measure +25% extra damage on them) for an extra 10% damage from a trait, 5% extra damage from daggers, they’re under 50% health for an extra 20% from executioner, they’re over 6 pips of initiative for an extra 10% damage, and an extra 5% damage for being behind their target, with an of force dagger (5% extra damage), the hit is a top end of weapon range hit and is a critical strike, and since this is sPVP, the max critical multiplier is 2.12, and the base power on the thief is 2199 and top end weapon rating is 983. We’ll assume % based increases stack multiplicatively, though that could be wrong.

On an elementalist with no toughness, just base armor.. 1836 defense.. okay first let’s establish what backstab does all on it’s own: 983 * 2199 * 2.4 / 1836 = 2826 damage normal, 5990 crit.

With all those extra modifiers.. 8974 normal, 19025 crit, see how much a difference the build/extra factors make rather than just the skill being “op”?

Now let’s take that same hit on a warrior, base armor 2127. 7747 normal, 16423 crit, so that extra 291 defense from heavy armor decreased damage by 14%.

Stack toughness on that warrior, even throw a shield on him, we’ll even say he’s got turtle’s defense for an extra 200 toughness because he’s immobilized, and he’s got a banner of defense up and has dolyak signet equipped but not on cooldown. That’s 4146 total defense, that’s taking it to an extreme. On a crit he still takes 8425 damage. That’s still quite a bit. He had to stack everything he could possibly do, all conditions in his favor to reduce damage, 2019 extra armor, almost double his base armor, more than double a light armor wearer, 2310 armor over that first ele, and it reduced damage by 56%. That’s an unrealistic amount of toughness to stack btw, that’s toughness at the expense of everything else. Realistically they’d probably have about 800 less toughness than that, even specced down the defense line. That’s pretty much capping out how much damage mitigation you can build for in this game with toughness, both the 4100+ warrior and the thief with 25 might 25 bloodlust and 25 stacks of vuln on the target are perfect storms (minus wvw orbs, this is spvp)

I personally think toughness shouldn’t scale so linearly. It would be more of a hard counter to direct damage if it scaled in such a way that at say, 3600 armor, you reached a damage reduction cap of 75% (to prevent making people TOO tanky), and then you could reduce damage a further 33% after that with protection. If a perfect storm backstab only hit a tanky warrior for 4800 damage, that’d be a more effective counter.

That’d be something like, for every toughness past the base 916 you’d multiply it by 4.5 for damage calculations.

Hartayke.7349:

bwillb.2165:

Previous experience, such as the Pistol Whip nerf, seem to indicate otherwise. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and whoever can cry the loudest gets the attention and validation they so desire.

I hear you, I do not understand where some nerfs come from personally, and devs in these games often do not explain them.

However, as an antithesis, I submit to you the necromancer and its community. There are more posts and threads there from the people that play the class begging for bug fixes/changes than there are whine posts in any given class forum.

Still next to nothing has changed, and certainly not a significantly larger amount than the other classes.

Devs are MUCH more inclined to nerf when there’s community whining about something than to buff or fix. We have tons of bugs, warriors have tons of bugs, etc, nerfs roll out every patch, bug fixes stagnate for months.

See here’s the thing.. if a class has something broken about it, people will complain and eventually give up, or make another class, then anet doesn’t have to hear about it anymore so they figure problem solved.

It’s like with GW1 smiter’s boon. It got nerfed to the point where it was effectively removed from play. Anet claimed that they would find a better solution for it to balance it for PVP. That was 4 years ago. It’s still effectively removed from play, because nobody uses it, and people gave up on it ever being fixed.

Meanwhile if something has the forums up in arms as being “OP” people don’t just give up and play another class.

So they nerf it to quell those people.

Hartayke.7349:

Devildoc.6721:

Hartayke.7349:

What I find most ridiculous about threads like this is the “omg kids whine and classes get nerfed durpa durp!”.

Are you kittening serious? You think devs sit at their desk and monitor your forums waiting for “QQ” threads and decide their game balance accordingly?

Get real. These things are in large part decided on vast amounts of statistics. In this case, they see exactly how often BS is used, how much it is doing, how many kills occur because of it, how many thieves use it, if the opponent was able to react, how it compares to other class abilities, etc etc ad nauseum.

All the “whining” threads and all the “my class is fine here’s why” responses mean nothing and in all likelihood are not even read in the first place. You can argue until your face is blue in either direction, it is worthless against pure numbers.

It is almost alarming how self important people are to think any differently, or that the subjective material they post matters at all with respect to game balance.

If you are nerfed, it is because the numbers said your class is OP. If you are not, guess what? Their statistics decided that, not “kids” whining on forums or lack of white knight defenders responding to them.

“With all due respect, that’s a bunch of malarky”

The posts/whining bring dev attention to those particular aspects, the nerfs wouldn’t be happening if people were not complaining about them.

So the root cause IS the complaints.

What you are saying is not the same thing I am saying.

You say, and it is possible assuming no one at ANET has ever been killed by the class/ability in question or it never occurred during internal testing, is that whine posts being dev attention to an ability.

I will concede that as possible.

However, that does not cause nerfs. If that happens, it is simply causing them to look at it. It is once again their data that would result in adjustment.

If the class/skill in question is not OP, you have nothing to worry about.

Right?

It’s not the class or skill itself that is OP, it never is. it’s not like they plan these skills haphazardly and say “look, for backstab let’s have it do ridiculous damage!”

What ends up being OP, is player creativity. They are able to piece together an entire build that between traits, utility skill usage, and gear, is able to do way more than what the developers intended. If you do a bs without being in that ideal build, with the ideal skill sequence to get all the multiplying damage bonuses and might stacks from traits, you’ll land it for about 5k (and this is in glass cannon gear). But a player who’s aligning all those utility skills, traits, etc, is doing 15k+.

So backstab itself is not OP, it’s a combination of gear, traits, and utility skills.

But because that 1 skill is the skill that benefitted from all these stacking bonuses from traits, the outcry is that that 1 skill or class is OP, and that skill gets nerfed.

Now the people who DON’T use all those specific traits and utility skills in the exact sequence (which is all around a once a minute occurance btw), will do 2.5-3.5k with their backstab, making it an awfully underpowered skill for them.. and those who still use that once a minute instagank build, will do 10k.

See it affects people who don’t use the build more than people who do use it.

Just like pistolwhip

Pistolwhip itself was not OP.

Pistolwhip without haste was easy to avoid

Add in haste, and being able to do it twice in a row in about 1 second.. then it’s OP.

They nerfed pistolwhip’s base damage.

Pistolwhip without haste is now about as useful as teats on a bull outside of trying to melee enemies that can’t be blinded.

Pistolwhip with haste still does a lot of damage because you do it twice in a row and get 1s of stun in about 3s total time.

STRanger.5120:

Devildoc.6721:

It is weird, but I’m just saying I’d rather see it than a flat out damage nerf, or worse, complete overhaul of the thief to remove the initiative system and put them on cooldowns.

I’d rather see a 0.5-1s weapon skill GCD that prevents mug+C&D+bs all going off at once than see C&D on a 45s cooldown.

Mind you, our utilities would need to be able to ignore this GCD, so it wouldn’t really be a GCD, just a CD across weapon skills.

Even 0.5s would disrupt the instant gank build, while leaving every other use of the skills viable.

Like I wrote yesterday, ppl will start to use infiltration signet instead of Steal to fasten their combo, so whiners will be still whining about the fast blink+C&D combo and backstab (because positioning for it takes some time = GCD won´t be as much problem there….)

If they do that they lose a good 3.5k damage off their combo, so you see, it works out to some degree that way too.

STRanger.5120:

Devildoc.6721:

STRanger.5120:

Devildoc.6721:

It’s not even close, 1s would just prevent all the damage from happening at once but still allow you to spam the same skill successive times.

If you want this game to be the same as the other ones (SW:TOR, WoW etc.), why bother, just go and play them.
I play GW because I want class diversity and difference, that´s the biggest pro of this game, you know?

I’m looking at it like this.

The class is going to continually get nerfed, every single patch, as it has been since launch.

There is blood in the water. Arenanet has been giving people the nerfs they want, so people keep asking for them, because they know they’ll get them.

I would rather have a short GCD, than an across the board damage nerf again. A short GCD would prevent all the damage in a spike from happening at once that really only has place in very specific PVP builds but allow thieves who aren’t doing that once a minute instagank build to still be strong.

If they nerf the base damage of backstab, C&D, or mug, realize that it will affect far more than just that once a minute instagank thief in pvp. In fact it’ll affect thieves who use bs WITHOUT using those instagank builds more than it will the instagank builds. It will also impact your actual damage far more than the patch notes say. Pistol whip’s base damage was nerfed by 15%. When you factor scaling with power and weapon damage into it, it was more like 27%, when you factor crit damage into it, it was more like a 40% loss. No joke overnight I went from 10k pistolwhips to 6k. But as people said.. people were still using haste and 2 pistol whips in pvp.. because the nerf hit the wrong target, not the damage output, but the fact that you can haste and land 2 pistol whips in a row in a very short frame of time, the impact on thieves who used the skill in PVE, without haste, was far greater.

I don’t want that happening to backstab thieves. Normal backstab thieves aren’t hitting for 18k. They’re hitting for about 8k, tops, usually more like 5k-6.5k.

I don’t think we have a “no nerfs” option.

At this point our best bet is to try and pick our poison and hope for the best.

I just have to think if there was a short GCD that prevented people from pistol whipping twice while in haste.. would I still be standing there autoattacking as my best source of damage today?

I see your point, and from certain point of view, you´re right. But there´s also the other fact, why should Thieves have GCD and other classes don´t? That sound weird to me, actually.

It is weird, but I’m just saying I’d rather see it than a flat out damage nerf, or worse, complete overhaul of the thief to remove the initiative system and put them on cooldowns.

I’d rather see a 0.5-1s weapon skill GCD that prevents mug+C&D+bs all going off at once than see C&D on a 45s cooldown.

Mind you, our utilities would need to be able to ignore this GCD, so it wouldn’t really be a GCD, just a CD across weapon skills.

Even 0.5s would disrupt the instant gank build, while leaving every other use of the skills viable.

Hartayke.7349:

What I find most ridiculous about threads like this is the “omg kids whine and classes get nerfed durpa durp!”.

Are you kittening serious? You think devs sit at their desk and monitor your forums waiting for “QQ” threads and decide their game balance accordingly?

Get real. These things are in large part decided on vast amounts of statistics. In this case, they see exactly how often BS is used, how much it is doing, how many kills occur because of it, how many thieves use it, if the opponent was able to react, how it compares to other class abilities, etc etc ad nauseum.

All the “whining” threads and all the “my class is fine here’s why” responses mean nothing and in all likelihood are not even read in the first place. You can argue until your face is blue in either direction, it is worthless against pure numbers.

It is almost alarming how self important people are to think any differently, or that the subjective material they post matters at all with respect to game balance.

If you are nerfed, it is because the numbers said your class is OP. If you are not, guess what? Their statistics decided that, not “kids” whining on forums or lack of white knight defenders responding to them.

“With all due respect, that’s a bunch of malarky”

The posts/whining bring dev attention to those particular aspects, the nerfs wouldn’t be happening if people were not complaining about them.

So the root cause IS the complaints.

I think your plea is falling on deaf ears Anagna. We’ve tried saying the class is fine, no nerfs needed since launch.

We get nerfed every single patch.

STRanger.5120:

Devildoc.6721:

It’s not even close, 1s would just prevent all the damage from happening at once but still allow you to spam the same skill successive times.

If you want this game to be the same as the other ones (SW:TOR, WoW etc.), why bother, just go and play them.
I play GW because I want class diversity and difference, that´s the biggest pro of this game, you know?

I’m looking at it like this.

The class is going to continually get nerfed, every single patch, as it has been since launch.

There is blood in the water. Arenanet has been giving people the nerfs they want, so people keep asking for them, because they know they’ll get them.

I would rather have a short GCD, than an across the board damage nerf again. A short GCD would prevent all the damage in a spike from happening at once that really only has place in very specific PVP builds but allow thieves who aren’t doing that once a minute instagank build to still be strong.

If they nerf the base damage of backstab, C&D, or mug, realize that it will affect far more than just that once a minute instagank thief in pvp. In fact it’ll affect thieves who use bs WITHOUT using those instagank builds more than it will the instagank builds. It will also impact your actual damage far more than the patch notes say. Pistol whip’s base damage was nerfed by 15%. When you factor scaling with power and weapon damage into it, it was more like 27%, when you factor crit damage into it, it was more like a 40% loss. No joke overnight I went from 10k pistolwhips to 6k. But as people said.. people were still using haste and 2 pistol whips in pvp.. because the nerf hit the wrong target, not the damage output, but the fact that you can haste and land 2 pistol whips in a row in a very short frame of time, the impact on thieves who used the skill in PVE, without haste, was far greater.

I don’t want that happening to backstab thieves. Normal backstab thieves aren’t hitting for 18k. They’re hitting for about 8k, tops, usually more like 5k-6.5k.

I don’t think we have a “no nerfs” option.

At this point our best bet is to try and pick our poison and hope for the best.

I just have to think if there was a short GCD that prevented people from pistol whipping twice while in haste.. would I still be standing there autoattacking as my best source of damage today?

LOCO.1785:

Devildoc.6721:

Know what would balance a lot of things? a 1s global cooldown on thief skills since we don’t have cooldowns on our weapons. No longer than that, but that 1s would give people a chance to react while still keeping burst damage high.

No global CDs for thief skills thanks.

That defeats the purpose of our initiative system. May as well scrap initiative altogether and give all skills CDs if you’re going down that route… Which I would strongly be against.

It’s not even close, 1s would just prevent all the damage from happening at once but still allow you to spam the same skill successive times.

Or 0.5s, I said 1s as the maximum.

See, i don’t see a problem with high backstab damage, but I do see a problem with mug→c&d→backstab all happening in an instant.

See if they got hit by the mug, then dodged out of the C&D, they just countered the thief, didn’t they?

But if mug and C&D can go off simultaneously.. where’s the counter, aside from having precognition to know exactly when a thief is going to steal.

Know what would balance a lot of things? a 1s global cooldown on thief skills since we don’t have cooldowns on our weapons. No longer than that, but that 1s would give people a chance to react while still keeping burst damage high.

Ensign.2189:

I’m amused that people still think that toughness is how you counter burst damage.

Toughness is underpowered, I agree, that’s something that needs to be addressed more than any 1 “OP” skill out there.

Shredicus.8706:

NightyNight.1823:

A back stab thief is the easiest of them all to counter and beat.If you have problems against them you don’t stand a chance against the others.

If it’s such a bad spec then why is there such an outpour of anguish over it being nerfed?

Because the class has been nerfed every single patch, and not everyone wants to make a condition build thief.

Fritz.5026:

100b is an awful attack to use as an example, lol. it has a 3.5 second animation time where you are completely rooted in place.

i dont care what weapon you use, if you just stand there and let someone hit you for 3.5 seconds you are going to take a lot of damage.

its certainly worlds apart from an instant attack, like say backstab.

Know what else has a 3.5s animation time and roots the player in place and NEVER did as much damage as 100b?

PISTOL WHIP

guess what happened to it?

100b did like 2x the damage of pistol whip, and you have about double the health and 150% the armor.

Warriors fine, thieves op, thieves get nerf, autoattack does more damage than pistol whip gg.

I’m VERY VERY disappointed Jeffrey, catering to the WoW audience that considers finishing your personal story to be “free epix” and “handed to you on a silver platter”

GW1 gave max stat greens (which meant unique items back then), not non max stat purples (the equivalents of greens/yellows in gw2).

For all those ex WoW players who didn’t get to see how the system worked in GW1, I already had an exotic dagger, and guess what? It was easier to make than completing my story. In the time it took to FIND A GROUP I got enough mats to make another exotic weapon. So at best, this pact weapon would be a sidegrade, hopefully with the same stats..

Not only were the stats a mix that I had no interest in (healing on a dagger?), it was also a direct downgrade to my crafted item.

So all i got was a skin..

That I had to use a fine transmutation stone on to even use, lucky I had some stashed away, they cost like a dollar a piece.

Just to be able to use my story reward.

They should have been exotics with a selection of appropriate stats.

Or if you’re REALLY worried about the World of Warcraft crowd.. freely transmutable skins.

I highly doubt anyone is actually going to wield the yellows

Everyone is just transmuting the skins.

It’s shameful that that there’s a cost to be able to even do that, you might as well have put pact weapon skins in the gem store, since that’s really what it is… then just made a forum post: “Hey guys, your reward for the personal story completion is in the style tab of the black lion trading company. You’re welcome!”

I just finally got around to completing the story since the rewards were finally something unique and I have to say I’m a bit disappointed that they are rares rather than exotics.

Now I know there’s a bunch of people who came from WoW who proclaim this as wanting ‘free epics’ but #1, the greens in GW1 from completing a campaign were max stats, and #2, having to use a fine transmutation stone that costs real money just to be able to viably use your story completion reward is pretty terrible.

“congratulations on completing your personal story, now spend real cash in order to use your reward”

Make the rewards skins like the halloween skins or HoM skins, so at least you can apply them freely to your weapons.

@Teloran: I’m against any changes that encourage standing around and autoattacking. I’d be for rewarding mixing skills and punishing using the same skill over and over, but anything where you’re rewarded for standing there and autoattacking is a bad change. Autoattacking is just unenjoyable, unengaging play, and I think when most people chose thief, they liked the idea of using skills based on what they needed at the moment rather than what was off cooldown, not for a class that spends 90% of its time autoattacking.

I can understand the talk about bunker builds… it’s not that backstab and thief damage should be nerfed, but the effect of toughness has to get better.

Rock is supposed to beat scissors not because scissors are dull but because rock is hard.

Rock is apparently not hard enough IMO.

I think the current damage done to “paper” is what should be expected. Thieves should be a hard counter to casters., and warriors and guardians should be a hard counter to thieves. The fact that they’re not I think is an issue with toughness/armor not being good enough.

Webley.1295:

Doomdesire.9365:

Webley.1295:

ANET is fixing it,

They wont be nerfs

It to bring a class in line with the others

Isn’t that what they did with “OP pistolwhip”?

By nerfing it to the point where the auto attack chain was more powerful and ignoring the real problem with it (haste)

If you add assassins signet on PW you get the original PW. It requires an extra utility cost to get it back to its original state.

PW also stuns on top for free. The auto attack only dazes from stealth which still allows movment

It really isn’t.

It really really isn’t.

1. it’s 1 pistol whip every 45s

1. it’s still not as good as pistol whip used to be. It affects 5 of 9 attacks in the combo.

that’s not full damage.

Doomdesire.9365:

Webley.1295:

ANET is fixing it,

They wont be nerfs

It to bring a class in line with the others

Isn’t that what they did with “OP pistolwhip”?

By nerfing it to the point where the auto attack chain was more powerful and ignoring the real problem with it (haste)

Sword pistol thief here, all I do is autoattack while standing in black powder.

I can’t stand playing for more than about an hour like that because it gets boring standing there autoattacking so much, but I don’t like dagger’s lack of aoe.

I’m just hoping anet gives some attention back to the class in a positive way after they realize they reduced thieves all to just standing there autoattacking.