Guild Wars 2

bwillb.2165:

When? How about half of TBC and all of WotLK? I never even bothered to level my rogue past like 72 once I got my druid into the high end content and saw how poorly rogues were doing. I can’t speak to how they’re doing now, though, because I’ve left that game completely behind in response to their nonsensical sad excuse for “balance”, much like the situation brewing here in GW2.

Yup fury warriors outdamaged rogues and got preference on loot over rogues. As it was because of PVP centric nerfs, rogues ended up doing most of their damage as white damage (autoattacking)

It’s not fun to play when your character just stands there and autoattacks.

I think the thing that most needs buffed is pistol offhand damage. Before people say “but those skills give so much utility!” So do dagger offhand skills. Dagger offhand skills also do good damage, pistol offhand skills do not.

another thing I think needs reworked is initiative itself.

Your initiative regen should go down every time you use the same skill within 5 seconds. It could go down to 0 initiative (not counting traits). If you go down to 0 initiative regen (using the same skill 5 times in a row) you should get a debuff called “predictable” that lasts 10 seconds. In predictable, all outgoing damage is reduced by 50% and base initiative regen is 0. The debuff is refreshed every time the same skill is used.

So you’d still be able to spam if you needed to, but it’d exhaust you and put you in a situation where you couldn’t do much, you’d have to probably flee the scene and wait it out.

To balance that out, base initiative regen would need to go up, so that a thief that is mixing up their skill usage is able to get the same actions per minute as other classes, allowing for our autoattack damage to go down so we don’t rely on autoattack so much in longer fights. Damage would need to be balanced across the skill bar so again, people don’t feel they have to spam 1 skill in order to do decent damage. That is, every skill needs to do more damage than autoattack. Autoattack needs to be something you do when conserving initiative, not the backbone of your damage.

Setima.8741:

If they change most of the normal skills for all the weapons to be really useful, then even I could deal with losing a good bit of spike damage. How about:
Dagger/Dagger:
~auto attack is faster and the poison lasts longer
~Heartseeker evades attacks during the leap
~Leaping Death Blossom stacks more bleeds and they do more damage
~Dancing Dagger stays about the same but if it hits only one target you can hit the button again within 5 seconds to knock them down for 1 second and remove the cripple effect
~CnD has a cast time of 2 seconds can hit up to two targets within 150 range and gives 5 seconds of stealth

Shortbow:
~Trick Shot fires faster and hits mokittengets
~Cluster Bomb flies faster and the explosion always puts at least 7 bleeds on any target hit or 5 bleeds on anybody hit if you detonate it midair
~Disabling Shot costs 1 less initiative, the cripple lasts 1 second longer and the distance you evade backwards is based on how close they are to you when you shoot. At point blank you’d evade twice as far backwards as you do currently.
~Choking Gas fires faster, the poison lasts 10 seconds, the field lasts 5 seconds and does 25% more damage to players standing in the field.
Infiltrator’s Arrow fires faster, costs 1 less initiative and has a larger radius of effect

Pistol/Pistol
~Vital Shot’s bleed lasts 1 second longer per shot and does about 10% more damage
~Body Shot fires faster, gives them 10 stacks of vulnerability and does 10% more damage
~Unload has a 1200 ranger and fires 10 shots, the final shot applies 5 stacks of bleeding for 3 seconds
~Head Shot’s Daze lasts 1/2s, causes Confusion for 1 second and does 10% more damage
~Black Powder’s radius is larger and the field lasts for 5 seconds. I think this skill should become a ground target attack but that might make it way too good in large group PvP.

And that’s my initial suggestions for the weapons that I enjoy using. I’ll leave out Sword/Pistol, Pistol/Dagger and Dagger/Pistol for now only because I have much less experience with those types.

anything involving buffing the autoattack as a rebalance for nerfing skills I’m vehemently against. Autoattacking is excessively boring.

what appealed to me initially about thieves is that they have the mechanic to choose skills based on what they need at the instant rather than just cycling cooldowns.

Now the class is quickly becoming autoattack central.

Takehome message for Arenanet:

Autoattack for thieves should be what you do when you’re conserving initiative, but it should NEVER be the highest dps skill in your repetoire.

Paranoid.9542:

Devildoc.6721:

They’re going to nerf backstab damage and leave everything else as is, they aren’t going to add any damage back in anywhere else.
Look at heartseeker, overall damage just dropped, they didn’t put damage anywhere else.

I only based this on “but we’ll be careful to increase other areas to compensate.” – in regards to lowering raw damage of these builds (backstabbing). I dont recall seeing any Anet dev saying that they’d compensate those other builds like they’ve said here.

Whether this happens or not is an entirely different story, however I’m hopeful.

Well, as a S/P thief I’m not exactly optimistic.

I spend most of my time autoattacking in a smoke cloud now since that’s highest dps. I only pistol whip on enemies that can’t be blinded, like the mad king.

and let me tell you, spending that much time autoattacking is just not fun, at all.

it makes me want to stop playing the game entirely.

Paranoid.9542:

Overall damage nerf, no.

Same damage but more difficult to execute or easier to avoid/counter, yes.

Edit :Example (potentially a bad one), lower damage on BS but increase damage on #3 abilities when dagger is in the offhand to give the same damage. Same/similar burst, easier to counter/avoid

This is just an example to show what I mean, btw.

Double edit: Or just leave it exactly as is, have steal interupt CnD cast and have steal not apply bas venom.

They’re going to nerf backstab damage and leave everything else as is, they aren’t going to add any damage back in anywhere else.

Look at heartseeker, overall damage just dropped, they didn’t put damage anywhere else.

Look at pistol whip, S/P dps just overall dropped, and now autoattack is the best DPS on the skill bar.

Do you think they’ll change their tune this time?

No.

Thief damage is just going to keep going down until we’re all just autoattacking.

Dancing dagger and cloak and dagger damage nerfs are coming next.

Just like the pistol offhand skills do next to no damage because they have utility, it’ll be argued that the cripple on dancing dagger and stealth on cloak and dagger make them worth the cost alone and the damage will be reduced to near nothing.

If any class should have most of its damage on autoattack, it should be warrior.

But nope, they get to do the highest skill damage in the game.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Just wanted you guys to know we’re looking at this specifically right now. We will probably bring down the raw spike DPS for some builds, but we’ll be careful to increase other areas to compensate.

really? Jonathan, you realize that we’ve taken a nerf of some sort every single patch. I don’t even use daggers and I feel for the builds already. You realize that right now on some weapon sets autoattack is the highest dps skill on their bar? Does that not scream “broken” to you when the thief mechanic is based on being able to use the same skill multiple times in a row for burst dps?

It doesn’t add up that you’re making all of our skills basically utility skills with lower damage than autoattack and making most of our damage come from autoattacking. It’s not engaging play, at all.

There’s blood in the water and people know all they have to do is complain “thief OP” and you guys give them the thief nerfs they want.

Is it only going to stop when ALL thieves are autoattacking exclusively?

Let’s look at it this way

Pistol whip is ONLY useful while under quickness, otherwise you’re better off autoattacking.

I autoattack, get a proc, hit pistol whip.

Kain Francois.4328:

Josh, I actually think we need MORE super-hard Jumping challenges like Clock Tower! I didn’t complete it either, but in my few attempts, it was AWESOME!

Please don’t feel bad! It’s a great addition for hardcore jumpers who enjoy these things, especially since you don’t have a carrot at the end of a treadmill (as all you got was slippers…)

As for the Mad King fight, I am really a fan of how it had platforming involved on multiple levels. What REALLY spiced it up is the sheer variety you had for progressing downwards in the map! Please make future mini-dungeons like this!

As long as the difficulty doesn’t come from an awkward camera or objects (including other players) blocking your vision I agree.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Latorn.4209:

Josh Foreman.8250:

Jalad Lantana.3027:

As long as jumping puzzles are optional, that’s fine, but requiring one as they did with the Mad King fight crosses the line. If they are going to require jumping puzzles to complete regular content, then they should fix things so all players have an equal chance.

I did not consider the MK boss map as a jumping puzzle. All you are doing is dropping down. And I made it so there are MANY paths down.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback.

Noooo! Don’t change what you’re doing! The mad king mini-dungeon layout was fantastic, really spiced it up with the small amount of jumping required. Think of how boring it would be if you just went in and fought him on a flat level :/

Oh I wasn’t saying I was changing anything. I was just seriously surprised that anyone would consider the verticality in that map a ‘jumping puzzle’.

Just a bit of feedback on that. The drops were a little bit high, as even with the trait that halved fall damage I was losing half my health and then immediately in a combat situation. I didn’t ever die from it, but I wonder if that was the intent, to make you be really low on health right as the fight starts back up.

Also for the real jumping puzzle. I only would have changed 2 things. Obviously you know now the drawbacks of everyone running it at once (people getting angry at each other for blocking their vision, artificial added difficulty), and there was also 1 brick in the first jumping portion right after the pause on the gear. Once the puzzle started up again, I’d always hit 1 specific brick that caused my camera to go wonky.

Once I got past that first part where the crowd thinned out.. I actually started having fun, having enjoyed all the other jumping puzzles in game even if I raged as I failed them in trial and error.

But every time I had to repeat that first fourth of the puzzle I felt miserable and wasn’t having fun at all.

I think if this had been a solo instance you would have gotten much more positive feedback on it, especially if you made it clear that the jumping puzzle achievement didn’t count towards emissary of the mad king. I may not have spent the 5 hours I did on the puzzle if I’d known that.

Sigil of Force on main hand sword, sigil of rage on offhand pistol.

Shortbow I currently have sigil of ice I was thinking for better kiting and all that, but now I’m thinking sigil of bloodlust.

Build up stacks on shortbow, profit on your melee set.

It’s nothing personal OP, but most people need to be able to see their character in order to see where they’re going and make jumps.

Most of the time I attempted the jumping puzzle, I fell within the first 1/4 of the puzzle, because between the camera issues (zooming in on a block and obscuring my entire FoV), and large norn/charr, you can’t see. If you can do the jumping puzzle while blindfolded, I commend you but don’t expect it of everyone else.

I main a Charr. After I saw how difficult not being able to see made the puzzle. I logged off my Charr and did it on my human instead, because I didn’t want to block everyone’s view.

Maybe other people should be as considerate and log onto human/sylvari alts.

It took me a little over 5 hours of trying and I didn’t have 1 second of fun out of the entire thing, 7/10 tries I’d fail early on because I couldn’t see. The other 3 times I’d actually try to make progress because i pulled ahead of the pack and could see where I was going.

Awful design.

Let people run it solo, and remove 1 brick from the first section after the pause at the gear (it’s the one you have to scramble over, it trips up people’s cameras), huge improvement.

I’d enjoy it more if I could consistently see improvement in how far I get as I keep trying. However due to the camera issue very early on, and the massive Charlie Foxtrot at the beginning obscuring your character, you don’t consistently get better. Getting past the Charlie Foxtrot depends on everyone else’s failure as the herd thins out. That’s not consistent because other people aren’t consistent. Sometimes they do better so the Charlie Foxtrot persists longer. Only time i see improvement is when everyone else around me fails early on so that I can see myself and make the jumps. Then I get further along each time I manage to do that.

But that first 1/4 of the puzzle, I’ll fail a dozen times in between making it far enough to actually see progress.

Worst designed puzzle ever for those 2 specific reasons. Artificial difficulty is NOT fun.

Just horrible anti-fun design to have everyone doing it at once with people blocking each other’s view.

the artificial difficulty due to not being able to see your character just wrecks the whole thing.

The puzzle COULD be fun but there’s some major issues preventing it from being fun imo.
1. If you’re a Norn or Charr, when the first pause ends and the platforms materialize, it zooms up on your character and makes them invisible, impairing your vision. This also happens when you round the corner while jumping onto a new platform if you’re on the inside of the turn. This is a common problem with the camera in general.
2. If you’re an Asura, running the puzzle with multiple people at the same time makes it extremely hard to see your character. No joke if you have 2-3 Norn and Charr doing the puzzle with you you can’t see.
The puzzle would be better if you weren’t doing it with other people at the same time, and weren’t doing it on a Norn or Charr.
Hey, I can’t even see my human character because of one huge Norn standing on top of me. Makes the puzzle virtually impossible to do when you can’t see.

Kyus.3812:

Devildoc.6721:

Buzzcrave.6197:

Auesis.7301:

Buzzcrave.6197:

A spec which teleports to you from 900 away, stealths itself then kills you in less than 2 seconds is just not good game design whether there are counters or not.

So by your logic, even with ways to counter it, it’s still bad? Right. You see, now, because the DPS is more spread across the combo, you have a bigger window to retaliate. As soon as you get hit, you have every opportunity to hit any AoE, CC or bunker skills you have. A glass cannon backstab Thief will be instantly destroyed by any CC. Learn your class. This is coming from a Thief that specs in survivability and snaring. If I can beat a glass cannon Thief without stealth and with my pitiful HP, you can too.

Buzzcrave.6197:

Please, please don’t start fooling yourself by telling me how about those 1500 nukers… You have a kittening Sidestep skill in your phony backstab build for kitten sake.

D/D has no evade skills apart from Death Blossom, which wastes your initiative in seconds. Critical Strikes and Deadly Arts have no dodge enhancements. The only tree with dodging benefit is Acrobatics, a vitality tree with no relation to a backstab build. Your only hope is to run backwards and spam Disabling Shot with a Shortbow, and that will get you nowhere because you do pathetic damage and just make yourself an eyesore of a target.

What the kitten are you talking about?

Sidestep as in utility skill, it doesn’t take a genius to know that Sidestep is a must. Seriously do you even play this game?

There is no sidestep skill. Roll for initiative is bad if you meant that.

roll for iniative is awesome! but no idea what he meant by sidestep… flanking strike?

There are much better stun breaks, infiltrator’s signet is on a much shorter cooldown, shadowstep is on a shorter cooldown and removes ANY 3 conditions rather than only a limited few. Haste shares the cooldown and has a drawback but can quickly turn a fight around, break a stun, and then open up on them.

1 dodge on a 60s cooldown is pretty terrible.

The skill USED to be amazing.

It got nerfed into being a niche skill at best.

it USED to remove ALL conditions and restore ALL initiative.

I think if it removed all conditions I’d use it again.

Buzzcrave.6197:

Auesis.7301:

Buzzcrave.6197:

A spec which teleports to you from 900 away, stealths itself then kills you in less than 2 seconds is just not good game design whether there are counters or not.

So by your logic, even with ways to counter it, it’s still bad? Right. You see, now, because the DPS is more spread across the combo, you have a bigger window to retaliate. As soon as you get hit, you have every opportunity to hit any AoE, CC or bunker skills you have. A glass cannon backstab Thief will be instantly destroyed by any CC. Learn your class. This is coming from a Thief that specs in survivability and snaring. If I can beat a glass cannon Thief without stealth and with my pitiful HP, you can too.

Buzzcrave.6197:

Please, please don’t start fooling yourself by telling me how about those 1500 nukers… You have a kittening Sidestep skill in your phony backstab build for kitten sake.

D/D has no evade skills apart from Death Blossom, which wastes your initiative in seconds. Critical Strikes and Deadly Arts have no dodge enhancements. The only tree with dodging benefit is Acrobatics, a vitality tree with no relation to a backstab build. Your only hope is to run backwards and spam Disabling Shot with a Shortbow, and that will get you nowhere because you do pathetic damage and just make yourself an eyesore of a target.

What the kitten are you talking about?

Sidestep as in utility skill, it doesn’t take a genius to know that Sidestep is a must. Seriously do you even play this game?

There is no sidestep skill. Roll for initiative is bad if you meant that.

Shark attacks are actually not synced properly to their animations last I knew. They’d do their charge and you’d actually get hit while they looked to be quite far away, like 600 units.

Derk.3189:

Devildoc.6721:

Dervim.3817:

I don’t know what’s next, but I’m starting to believe that I know what awaits thiefs at the end of the tunnel. In the end, we’ll have pillow for weapon and 1hp.

People complaining on the forums have managed to get their way getting thieves nerfed every single patch. There is blood in the water now, nerfs will never stop until we’re all autoattacking and autoattack roots us in place.

People know it gets results so they just keep playing squeaky wheel and a certain Anet dev in charge of “balance” obliges, as long as thieves keep the attention away from his babby warriors.

Why on earth do you think its ok that a class can do 10k+ damage in ONE hit?

hundred blades, evis, and don’t tell me because that’s a combo it’s okay, it’s still 1 skill.

Dervim.3817:

I don’t know what’s next, but I’m starting to believe that I know what awaits thiefs at the end of the tunnel. In the end, we’ll have pillow for weapon and 1hp.

People complaining on the forums have managed to get their way getting thieves nerfed every single patch. There is blood in the water now, nerfs will never stop until we’re all autoattacking and autoattack roots us in place.

People know it gets results so they just keep playing squeaky wheel and a certain Anet dev in charge of “balance” obliges, as long as thieves keep the attention away from his babby warriors.

phor.7952:

Turbo Whale.1738:

Unless… and stay with me on this… you don’t be an idiot and instead you should save your most powerful attacks for the signet? I dunno… requires a bit more thought than getting B1G N4MB3R2 PWN4G3 but with certain attacks it will do more damage than the old signet. I know, it can be difficult doing more than looking at your highest number skill and clicking signet before it. But you can do it kitten

The thing is, the % damage bonus scales exponentially with Might and CritDmg.
Since you can get up to 25stacks of Might for ~5 seconds and 100% crit rate on a single attack, that 50% on the tooltip actually became closer to 200% in actual usage.

There’s just no way to sustain those Might and Crit buffs for 5 attacks, so the damage potential WAS nerfed.

You have to look past the tooltip number to the actual damage formula interaction to get a full picture.

But really, who cares if it was nerfed. It was never practical to pop every ability you have in order to buff a single attack and then have precisely 0 utility until all your cooldowns were up again.
And it’s actually better for several other builds now.

Finally someone else who understands it’s not as simple as “+15% over 5 attacks is +75% damage, it’s better!” When you factor in things like traits for short duration buffs, and crit damage scaling the damage reduction becomes much more dramatic.

Like with the pistol whip nerf, the base damage dropped by 15% but the damage in glass cannon builds dropped by more like 30% because of crits, power, and all those other scaling effects.

Pistol whip used to have a tooltip damage for me of 3300something, now it’s 2400something. That’s 27% Then factor in those 250% crit damage hits.. Pistol whip for 10k did NOT get reduced to 8500 as a 15% reduction would indicate, but 6.5-7k.

For assassin signet, you’re still likely going to lose damage in the long run and especially lose burst damage on backstabs because of those compounding scaling effects.

Is the signet more viable for other builds now like pistol whip or unload? Sure, pistol whip is still neutered even with assassin signet, but once every 45s you’ll get an 8500-9000 pistol whip that is what would be more representative of a “15% reduction” instead of a 30-40% reduction, and unload gets about a 10% overall boost once every 45s, and spamming 5 heartseekers in a row will do probably more damage than it ever has done before, once every 45s.

But for backstab builds, don’t pretend it was a buff.

Daendur.2357:

p/w got a -15%dmg
now we have a +15%dmg for 5 hits
ANet = Penelope ?

once every 45s, and it’s still not as good as pistol whip used to be. Pistol whip is 9 hits.

Remember, Arenanet hired someone from Nexon, that had previously worked on Maple Story, to handle the BLTC. First thing she did, make dyes character based rather than account based. She even tried making identified dyes soulbound so that you couldn’t buy/sell dyes on the TP.

So yes, you are seeing the same strategies used in other MMO’s to leech money from players because that’s the experience of this employee.

Ivanov.8914:

Devildoc.6721:

While a certain Dev’s favorite class, that has the highest base HP, tied for highest base armor, and highest melee and ranged damage gets buffs.

I’m sort of lost.Which class is that?

Warrior.

I never used assassin signet, I was a sword/pistol thief, aka an autoattack thief now.

Just getting really tired of every build being more nerfs.

While a certain Dev’s favorite class, that has the highest base HP, tied for highest base armor, and highest melee and ranged damage gets buffs.

Padstone.1685:

Devildoc, just turn off auto attack on your daggers?

You’ll end up losing more damage over time if you do that actually.

Incurafy.6329:

Why on earth do you need to use four auto-attacks after your first attack? Do your other keys not function properly?

your autoattack chain is 4 strikes, maybe not all 4 of them will consume the signet, but you’ll lose at least 2.

Incurafy.6329:

Wtf are you talking about? The nerf to Assasin’s Signet was 100% required and has turned out to be an awesome balance tweak. Instead of a single attack being buffed, we now have 5 attacks being buffed. This opens up the paths for new builds such as Unload/blind builds and more.

Excellent tweak Anet, well done.

yeah, 1 attack and 4 autoattacks for +15% damage is going to make the balance. it might be better if only 2-5 skills and stealth skills could be affected by it.

It’s coming. People know that complaining on the forums can get thieves nerfed whenever they want.

Soon it’s going to be “autoattack thieves too stronk, anet nerf pls”

and it’s going to keep happening as long as one person works at anet.

Leuca.5732:

S/P did not get crushed. Your pistol whip got a slight damage reduction and now you can’t hit for 15k+ with backstab. Your damage is still more than respectable.

It did get crushed, the best dps skill on the S/P bar is now autoattack, so please stop being ignorant and do some research before you run your mouth.

Crit damage multiplied the reduction in damage and the overall loss was closer to 40% if you ran berserker gear.

Blazer Hellsing.9184:

ehtom.5047:

I think the excellent point that the OP is trying to make clear is that in its current state thief will never be balanced. Being based around one-button spam builds means that either the “button” will be overpowered or it will be underpowered.

That is what Arenanet wanted, deal with it. Good Thieves don’t spam the same ability back to back, they time it and make sure it lands.

The problem is they still only have 1 damaging ability, unless you’re talking dagger/dagger thieves.

Sword/Pistol will always have to use pistol whip until the pistol offhand skills do decent damage and infiltrator’s strike does decent damage.

A lot of people just don’t understand it, they say oh but the offhand pistol skills have such great utility, and they do, but when people get blown up by a thief and look in their damage log, they will see that 90% of the damage is done by 1 skill, precisely because it is the one skill on their bar that does damage.

I fully agree with heartseeker’s nerf, trying to encourage more complex skill chains would be nice, and the fact that just spamming heartseeker does almost as much damage as a more complex rotation that uses every skill but death blossom is a bit of a problem I think. I honestly think the damage above 50% health needs to be lower than an autoattack. You shouldn’t heartseeker a target above 50% unless you’re simply trying to reach them from range because it’s a leap or you’re leaping through a smoke field to stealth with it, in that case even if it is just doing an autoattack’s worth of damage it’s worth it because of the utility.

Now if only the other weapon sets had 5 good damage skills as well.

I have a warrior, and I use 100b just fine, it can be dodged, just like pistol whip could be dodged, and it can be sped up to near unavoidable by frenzy, just like pistol whip is with haste. The difference is hundred blades doesn’t stop their teammates from killing you while you’re rooted, and a certain dev really loves him some warriors and keeps them the most damaging class in the game while having the highest health pool and sharing highest base armor rating with guardians.

Pistol whip now does 7kish damage, 100b still does 30k

With Dagger/Dagger you end up doing more damage with a more varied attack sequence than if you do heartseeker spam, but with every other set you do better damage spamming because the damage on the sets is focused on one skill.

Dagger/Dagger you can in one initiative bar (with the critical strikes initiative regen trait and acrobatics initiative trait) do dancing dagger, steal, cloak and dagger, backstab, and heartseeker again (hopefully finishing them), it will do more damage than simply heartseekering until you’re out of initiative, but not that much more.

But now just change up 1 thing, the offhand weapon to a pistol.

Heartseeker spam does more damage than something like steal > black powder > heartseeker > backstab > heartseeker.

A more interesting attack combo than heartseeker spam? Yes

Is it more effective? No.

Now if black powder did as much damage as cloak and dagger, then we’d be talking. If headshot did as much damage as dancing dagger, again, you’d see more variety in thief play.

But as it is? The skills do low damage so when damage is what you need in the situation, you don’t use them, you use the 1-2 skills on your bar that do the best damage.

Until you lot stop making excuses for Arenanet “but those skills have so much utility! They daze for as long as it takes for you to blink and cost 1/3 of your initiative, the skill is fine!”, it’ll stay that way and thieves will continue to mash the 1 skill on their bar that does damage, unless a situation arises where they have to interrupt something (not as often as you’d like, because at least in PVE, the stuff you want to interrupt is on mobs that are immune to daze 75% of the time), or blind something, they’re not going for utility, they’re going for damage.

I’m trying dagger/pistol atm, and am just.. really not liking it, mostly because I’m a Charr, and daggers just don’t look right on Charr.

I’m finding myself just using black powder and autoattacking now, as in pve at least, it’s more reliable than pistol whip for avoiding damage, and does more dps since the nerf.

The problem is it’s just not that fun.

Pistol whip was more fun, since I did take hits, and healed back up through signet of malice procs, and since I liked seeing the big numbers and combo attacks (long time fan of Tales of games and Star Ocean as well). Plus I was hitting at least 1 button every 2 seconds, now my actions are cut in half as I black powder once every 4s to keep up with the initiative cost, and just stand there autoattacking.

I’d prefer a more robust rotation while still having the option to use the skill multiple times in a short period of time, but all the damage of the set is weighted on pistol whip and autoattack.

Putting roughly 10% of the lost damage from pistol whip into infiltrator’s strike, and the other 5% into head shot, while giving it an interesting mechanic like a really big crit multiplier if used on targets under a threshold of HP would make rotations at least involve those 3 skills.

It has always bothered me that I’m using a pistol, yet my pistol skills do the lowest damage possible for my character to do.

I played Gangplank in League of Legends and it just felt better that a pirate wielding a sword and a pistol hit hard with his sword, but hit extra hard with his pistol, even if it had a cooldown and a cost.

@Shintai

I actually use the poison field if I see the enemy advancing through a tight space, it’s not a ton of damage, but it will hit them.

6 I use to catch fleeing enemies or flee myself.

It’s 3 that I rarely use, in PVE or PVP.

If an enemy is close I generally swap to melee set or use IA to get away, not a short hop away and a tiny duration cripple. Seriously you have to spam the skill 3 times to get a decent duration cripple on them.

The only way to satisfy everyone out of the thief class is for thieves to just stand there and autoattack.

spif: that’s because for a class that relies on mobility, we kind of have to have that run speed. Have you looked at our traits/skills? We, unlike a lot of other classes, are lacking good sources of swiftness. You can dodge for 2s, and waste your steal for 10s, and maybe a stolen item can give you swiftness (only one that I can think of)

A thief running at normal run speed is a dead and useless thief.

As for the active, I’d really prefer a stealth. Blinding powder is unreliable (half the time I use it, the stealth doesn’t happen, and I don’t have revealed on me, it’s like I keep autoattacking, where other stealths halt your attacks) sword thieves don’t use hide in shadows, and shadow refuge requires you to stay in a small area for the majority of its duration or it will break as soon as you walk out.

Lokheit.7943:

Devildoc.6721:

Infiltrator’s signet being run speed and the shadow step WOULD be more useful. But perhaps the combination would be too powerful.

I wouldn’t slot signet of shadows anymore however. I already find the active to be weak and I find the stun break on infiltrator’s the thing that makes it worth having the other signet. Initiative regen is nice but having that emergency out is what really seals it.

How about this:

Signet of Shadows (45s cooldown): Passive – 1 initiative regen/10s, Active – Stealths you for 3s (not a group stealth, just you).

Infiltrator’s Signet (40s cooldown): Passive – +25% run speed, Active – Shadowsteps to target (breaks stun).

I think a 10s increased cooldown on that arrangement would be warranted and the signet would still be good.

Even at 40s cooldown, those two effects together would make it a must have for every Thief. It would be wonderful? Yeah, it would. But it would become a must have, or a “too good to pass on it” IMO.

Pretty much, but if you make it any longer of a cooldown, then it loses any niche it has, as shadowstep and roll for initiative would be the same cooldown.

I still do find the signet of shadows active to be very weak, though I am coming from the perspective of a thief that always has a pistol offhand in one of his sets.

Infiltrator’s signet being run speed and the shadow step WOULD be more useful. But perhaps the combination would be too powerful.

I wouldn’t slot signet of shadows anymore however. I already find the active to be weak and I find the stun break on infiltrator’s the thing that makes it worth having the other signet. Initiative regen is nice but having that emergency out is what really seals it.

How about this:

Signet of Shadows (45s cooldown): Passive – 1 initiative regen/10s, Active – Stealths you for 3s (not a group stealth, just you).

Infiltrator’s Signet (40s cooldown): Passive – +25% run speed, Active – Shadowsteps to target (breaks stun).

I think a 10s increased cooldown on that arrangement would be warranted and the signet would still be good.

You’re supposed to autoattack and let other people kill you, doing anything else is OP

@Tulsin, good point, 20/30/0/20/0 is a good spec, or even shifting to 20/20/0/20/10, you do want at least 15 in deadly arts and 15 in acrobatics and 15 in critical strikes though, unless you’re going a full shadow arts stealth build.

Red Falcon.8257:

Because Warriors are great in PvE, just like Mesmers are great in PvP.

I would like, one day, to see all classes being great at both. One can dream no?

It’ll never happen with Izzy still an employee. Ever.

Smiter’s boon has been nerfed to the point of being removed from valid play for near 4 years now.

Every class except warrior has been nerfed since the launch of the game.

Guess what Izzy plays.

honestly, probably the best spec for solo PVE is sword/pistol or dagger/pistol with a shortbow offset.

sword/pistol used to be about pistol whip and bursting multiple mobs down with signet of malice procs keeping your health up. Since the nerf however I found it’s more effective and safe to bunch them all up and use black powder once every 4s while you autoattack them all to death. With dagger/pistol on a single target you have a little more flexibility, you can black powder, heartseeker, backstab, and heartseeker again for quite a bit of damage while they remain blind. You can pull with shortbow and choking gas/cluster bomb the area around you before swapping to your melee set if you want to get fancy but make sure you keep 6 initiative at all times for black powder.

That’s a gamble I wouldn’t take if it’s a 1 shot hit, count yourself lucky if you DO evade that hit.

It’s not the best evade skill because there are gaps where you’re still rooted and vulnerable.

I’d never use pistol whip just for the evade, chances are you’re still taking hits, it’s 1s of evade in a 2.6s skill that roots you for 1.85s.

The evade was only put in place to counteract how vulnerable you are while rooted.

They didn’t want to give a skill with that kind of damage mobility (just like blurred frenzy and hundred blades), but they realized how vulnerable a thief is while rooted (like blurred frenzy, again, but blurred frenzy’s evade is better)

Redscope.6215:

Your point here…

Again, what you’re not seeing, the thing you guys just plainly do not see, whatsoever, is that it is the only skill on the entire bar that does any damage of note. Yes, when they have a target where they want them, they’re going to use pistol whip, it is the only viable option for damage that they have. What do you want them to do?

None of the skills on the bar do damage, except autoattack, and pistol whip.

Quickness has no place in this game…

Only point I can actually agree on, quickness needs to be reduced to no more than a 33% IAS. Guild Wars did it that way and while it was an advantage, it didn’t cause NEAR the problems as this 100% IAS quickness does here. Make it 33%, make it a boon so that it can be stripped, and hey, you might be able to get rid of some of the penalties attached to the skills that give it on demand. Maybe not, that’d be something for further testing, but 100% IAS quickness that can’t be stripped has to go. Maybe keep the 100% increased activation time for skills with a cast time, I understand without quickness finishing off opponents when you’re outnumbered is virtually impossible. Guild Wars had 50% cast time bonuses and they fit into the game just fine. But for attack speed and the large number of multi-hit combos and skill chains in this game, 100% IAS just cannot stay.

IS

Every skill on the dagger skillbar does a lot of damage, every single skill, regardless of utility. Do you want S/P thieves to spam pistol whip? Or do you want to see them actually use other skills on their bar? Until all the skills do damage, you’re either asking for thieves to spam pistol whip, or sit there and autoattack, or not use the weapon set at all, there really are no in betweens here right now.

Not to mention, if you want IS to break stun and remove condition, it costs 5 initiative total, not 3, and you have to premeditate it, and you have to stay close enough to your point of origin, and you have to do it within 15s.

You lose a ranged weapon…

Allow me to clear up your gross ignorance here. S/P thief does not have a ranged damage skill, not at all. We have tickles from 900 and 600 range, our only actual damage is melee range.

Dagger/Dagger thief, has dancing dagger. Dancing dagger hits as hard as heartseeker on a target over 50% health. It also bounces to up to 4 targets, cripples, and has a 900 unit range (same range as shortbow or pistols), all for a moderate 4 initiative.

Wanna know how much damage it does vs the ranged weapons? Well, for starters, it does twice as much damage as shortbow autoattack, the shortbow cripple, it INSTANTLY does as much damage as a target standing in choking gas’s field the entire duration (like 20 seconds), it does almost as much damage as cluster bomb!

Pistols? Dancing dagger does 2.5x the damage of a pistol auto attack, 2x the damage of body shot, we already know black powder and headshot do next to no damage (we’re talking 500 damage on a crit in berserkers on a light armor target). Yes, unload outdamages it but unload is single target, costs more initiative, but still, doing half the damage of the most damaging single target ranged skill, across 4 targets, and applying cripple, is not too shabby for “giving up a ranged weapon”

…last hit on the chain…

So why does every skill on dagger/dagger’s skillset do more damage than the autoattack? Why does every skill on a greatsword warrior’s bar do more damage than the autoattack chain (barring perhaps the cripple)

…setting you up for higher damage output…

Sure, if it works it sets you up to do damage.. but what damage really? It doesn’t really have any followup burst damage, realistically you’re just going to autoattack.

Display of ignorance

Again, let me clear up ignorance. The pistol offhand skills do less damage than a pistol autoattack, they do like half an autoattack, and are both quite expensive initiative wise. Meanwhile dancing dagger’s doing 2500 damage for the same cost, across multiple targets, and crippling. What I’m looking at, is headshot doing about body shot damage, with an extra high crit multiplier if used against a target under 10% health. What this would mean damage number wise? About 1300 damage crits (vs 500 now) if the thief is traited for executioner, it’d be about 1500 damage crits under 50%, and about 2400 (roughly dancing dagger damage) under 10%, meaning it’d finish off someone running away with extremely low health, but wouldn’t be useful for just doing lots of ranged damage… but enough ranged damage to harass someone if your swap cooldown isn’t up. I guarantee you’d see a lot more smart play and a lot less pistol whip spam if some damage was on the other skills.

Volrath.1473:

If A-net was coherent they should have nerfed the main burst from the professions to… i mean today i got pistol whipped 2x for a bit over 8k dmg (16 hits) in the same tournament o got hit by Hundred Blades 1x for over 12k (6 hits) Both with Quickness.

imo this nerf was deliberate and do not expect a buff to it!

Welcome to Guild Warriors 2

You shouldn’t be playing tournaments if you got hit by pistol whip AND hundred blades.