Guild Wars 2

% winrate doesn’t always show the problem. gw2 pvp is usually balanced (or should be) around the highest level of play and what you can achieve there with a class/build and what is unhealthy for the game (like turret engi). a bad thief is a burden and will get facerolled by all builds that are more easy to play. on the other hand a bad thief can do pretty well against other builds that need more effort to play. on the highest level, where a thief knows what to engage and when to engage, he can pretty much turn every fight around and kill off the other damage dealers and start +1 and snowballing.

for thief it’s both.

thief can achieve the most as a damage dealer and roamer on the highest level of play, is so good that other classes have difficulties finding a place in the meta (same role) and destroys the pvp experience for casual players because of cheesy class mechanics.

the problem with this class is: it’s made of glass. touch it the wrong way and you will break it, so leaving everything as it is, is simply more easy. balancing everything with the current system of no cooldowns and initiative would be very hard and could easily go wrong. i said this multiple times already: thief needs a complete rework but this will most likely not happen because the devs just don’t have the time for it.

do you even know about the nonsense you’re talking about here?

ride the lightning is also 1200 range per 2 seconds on a 40s cooldown so the reaper dash is essentially 4x ride the lightning in the same time…

hoelbrak runes is not only about condition duration but also about other things and flesh wurm instacast and stunbreak would be insanely op….

i can’t help it that they designed necro to be a class with no mobility and if they don’t feel like giving base necro more mobility then so be it. i am totally happy with what they gave reaper and if you can’t see the potential in it then that’s your problem.

thanks for the clarification still not too bad i guess^^
so all that’s left of a 2s immob is 0.28s. not sure how the game handles this atm… i know some effects used to get round up to the next full second but afaik this changed with a patch that addressed stuns and condis.

what people tend to forget is, popping rampage in a 1v1 can zone out many enemies and giving you a free decap or a full cap if you really need it. obviously it needs to be done against the right class at the right time and is a total waste otherwise. i am not a fan of transform elites as they are very situational, sometimes op or sometimes complete garbage, hello tornado.

i would take dash 600 range every 5s (with trait) a thousand times over 40s 1200 range rtl… it’s just a different way of using your movement skills rather than just rushing out and that’s it. while on ele you just gtf-out and everything is on cooldown on reaper it will be more of a constant putting distance/reducing distance between you and the enemy.

and as i said before, with the proper traits movement reducing conditions will not have any effect on you so you’re more or less an unstoppable force like they described that never stopping movie monster.

when i play necro what i usually do is i troll them with plague, they can’t do anything anymore at all, it’s a pretty good counter but you kinda sacrifice and elite for an elite. also works against lich and tornado.

you can’t nerf chill of death without nerfing focus 5, otherwise chill of death would have to get a full overhaul or a mug treatment.

reaper gets leaps on a short cooldown, basically you have a ride the lightning every 10s, tons of chill, a pull (2 if you take grasp), +25% speed in shroud, -91% movement condis (with hoelbrak and trait). tell me how anybody is going to kite that. if they use a teleport then just bring flesh wurm…

reaper won’t have any burst mobility but definitely good combat mobility and will be very hard to kite and to take down.

gotta see it this way, not that it is an excuse in any way but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

by taking the reaper trait that gives you +25% movement speed in shroud, -66% movement condition duration, hoelbrak runes and the 5s 600 range leap you will be more or less an unstoppable force with:

+25% movement speed (in shroud)
-91% cripple, chill, immob duration (i think it’s calculated that way)
600 range leap on 5 kitten cooldown and a 600 range pull.

now this comes nowhere near what other classes have but it’s at least better than what necro has now. flesh wurm could also use a 1/4s cast time.

the problem with that is that it gives away the location of the thief, same as condition damage. if you wanna do that you can just blur the outlines of the stealthed thief lol.

not only guardians have aegis, and guardians are the longer the less hard counters to thieves.

tbh i don’t think there is a proper way of balancing thieves. it’s the overall class design that would have to change completely. as somebody mentioned before, thieves need the revenant treatment with short cooldowns on skills but with a higher initiative regeneration. that way initiative doesn’t need to be affected by chill because the short cooldowns will be. thief is getting solid defensive stuff with the patch so i guess with a bit of fine tuning this would definitely work out if the devs put a bit of effort into it.
hello karl.

would be enough to just fix skills and make the useless ones less useless. hello shatterstone.

will get nerfed to 25% after the updates afaik.

it’s more about aegis than blocks, aegis blocks 1 attack and is most of the time on a 30-40s cooldown or more, so if they make it that hitting aegis counts as dealing damage and therefore reveals the thief it would be fairer as it is now because you can just remove it and backstab again. doing this for normal blocks is well.. not that helpful because you can just sit them out. the problem with sitting out skills comes from the easy access to stealth. while mesmers can already do this with decoy or torch it’s even easier for a thief whose stealth “cooldown” is lower than a mesmer’s.

there’s a lot of problems with aegis anyway, it’s useless against ai builds, bad against mesmer clones and so on.

you could level a necro now, yes, it’s just that people don’t see the necro as the most viable profession currently. condi necro is not worth playing due to the massive condi cleanse and power necro brings quite a lot of damage but is also a very easy target to kill.
getting a profession to 80 is never a bad thing so you could always give it a try and stuff like soldier necro isn’t that bad if played right.

only pieces of the revenant are currently known so i wouldn’t judge the class yet as there is still more stuff to come.

rampage has -66% movement impairing condi duration so immob is not that much of a reliable counter. best way is to just disengage. if you waste all your cooldowns to stay alive then you won’t have anything left when the warrior comes out of rampage.

you could wait until they release the expansion, the necro’s elite specialisation will be based on gw1 dervish stuff and the new class, the revenant, also has some dervishy elements to it.

as my main i gw1 was a dervish too, i’m definitely looking forward to those.

blocks are generally on a long cooldown, so being able to make them useless without getting punished makes some block users angry, also gotta view it this way. then again some block skills are unbalanced so if block revealed they should also balance certain blocks.

would pay money if swirling winds applied reveal to stealthed players in it.

this thread is about thief, thief stealth and stealth in general. rangers and warriors have no invul skills, the only true invul skills in the game are obsidian flesh and distortion and i rarely see people complaining about them because well.. who cares about ele focus, and people don’t seem to have many problems with the mesmer invul it seems.

been playing heroes of the storm a bit lately because gw2 doesn’t offer much atm and in that game DoT damage is displayed as muddy green part of the hp and HoT as dark green part. so you kinda always know where your hp are even with heals or condis.

wouldn’t be opposed to this suggestion.

ventari as a natural guy would prefer an apple over an android i guess.

you can maintain stacks if you go for a full might rotation which is most of the time less desireable than a rotation that counters what you’re facing (except the might rota is the counter) so you will have maybe 10 stacks at best or less if you don’t run battle sigil anymore.

what you seem to miss is that while it’s a mediocre benefit for celestial classes it’s a crazy boost for condition classes.

not only will ele war and engi be able to, more or less, stack might but so will revenants necros and rangers. you can actually stack might on all of the classes it’s just that the access to condis or self sustain are not that great to make celestial viable on them.

+- you can keep 10-15 might stacks uptime on all classes and i have tested this before. who knows, maybe celestial necro or ranger will be a thing after the patches, or maybe celestial won’t even be meta anymore.

all in all this thread is just another celestial whine. “nerf celestial” more, even before it gets nerfed and has already been nerfed once.

idk where you pull your strange numbers from but eles and engis don’t stack might anymore..

as a d/d ele you have (now) 538 condi damage, -10% from celestial nerf, -100 from traitlines and +80 or so from the base stats increase which will result in around roughly 480 condi damage. they say the break even point is 700 condi damage, so to achieve that you would need 6 might stacks to only deal the same amount of condition damage you deal now. all the time before you reach 6 stacks you will actually deal less condition damage than now.

the loss of 30% boon duration will also cripple might stacking a lot so in fact celestial will deal less damage than it does now. maybe warrior will still deal the same amount because they generally stack more might but ele and engi certainly won’t.

if they add it they need to rebalance some stuff. what i suggest is lowering the condi damage stats so that it’s the same as toughness and vit but as compensation add condi duration to the amulet.

please do the same for courtyard and everybody will be happy again.

afaik arenanet uses their own programs and will have issues if somebody does not create stuff with the exact same programs.

i’m not opposed to the idea but i think it’s not really possible. i do really like the map creator of dota2 and would like something similar here even if it might be only for personal arenas.

they announced that elemental attunement will become a minor, most likely merged with the fury on swap minor. if you’re able to take vig renewal, e contingency (+ e attune minor) and evasive arcana d/d ele will be the most op build in the entire game.

the other question is if that minor trait will be selfish, if the durations will be nerfed or whatever they do to it or do to other traits. if it’s selfish then it’s gonna be useless again and will not be viable for team support. if it’s gonna be allies only then well so be it because the other buffs will make up for it and you won’t lose the support.

to make conjures viable they need to act like engineer kits. create a trait that summons a one time pick-up version for allies (merged with other traits).

fix what needs to be fixed.. think about new stuff once everything is fixed…

Terrorsquad.2349:

Also, Fresh Air can deal with a thief 1v1 easily.

and that’s where you’re totally wrong. as a fresh air you can only kill a thief if you manage to actually land your burst and oneshot him. if you fail at that the thief will hide until he can come at you again. if the thief is in stealth it’s hard to do anything as a fresh air because every damage skill except phoenix, arcane wave, shatterstone which is useless, and the earth3 blind don’t need a target.

invuls are useless because the thief will run away for those 5 seconds or just go in stealth again.

hammer guards can already lose against thieves now that they are running vamp runes and after the trait changes this will be even more in the thief’s favour.

just to put this in here.. in any other game i played during the last few months, stealth was always removed upon using an attack or any sort of skill no matter if it hit or not (also when you recieve damage but that would be too much in gw).

guess guild wars 2 is a game of special snowflakes.

fix pvp before you host more cash tournaments. the amount of teams even trying to compete for the wts is laughable.

Ravenmoon.5318:

Thief is not the weakest class. Thief has aces against any other berserker player, but they are by far not OP or kitten like most of you try to put.

Endless teleports? Please … blow initiative and utilities to teleport around and you are sitting duck. What can you do with low initiative and utilities in reuse? Absolutely nothing, that’s what you can do. Pray for your passive traits to trigger on time. That’s all you can do

And please, the guy above that played thief 2 years ago. You do realize the fact that thief has been nerfed almost exclusively on every patch every since. Did this thought ever cross your mind? When was the last time you saw pistol whip thief owning everything in 2 attacks? The player skill bar in thief is super high. A single mistake can get you killed. Don’t twist it around because it is a fact. The thief has no blocks so if they kitten up and you know how to press anything other than auto attack, you win.

Also your last post clearly show how bad you are. There is a window in flanking strike animation where you can absolutely destroy the thief. And the thief can do nothing about that.

Again, learn to counter it and wait it out.

I love fighting S/D thieves. You just have to bait them spam #3 like losers and soon after they are sitting ducks because guess what. No initiative. It is vital to thief’s survival. More so than heals to be honest.

Also there will always be a class that runs faster than the others. Take that away and warriors or mesmers will happily take that spot. Would you complain about them then? Or you’ll chill when everybody moves like a turtle and they remove dodging, because clearly dodging speeds you up for a second, thus unfair …

i still played my thief when pistol whip was in use before it got nerfed. by that time i was already multiclassing though.
it’s the fact that you can use the same skill multiple times if you need it whenever you want it. obviously it’s not gonna help you in any way if you just blow all your initiative on a skill spam.

try playing an s/d thief using flanking strike only every 15 seconds and you will see what i mean. many s/d thieves don’t even use their 4 or 5 skill on that weaponset (this is anet’s fault because those skills, especially dancing dagger, suck).

why do you think pistol whip was nerfed in the first place? because people just spammed it and still did fine. after the pistol whip nerf thief has not been nerfed anymore as far as i know but even got buffed with air/fire sigils (this is accessable for every class though but increases the damage of a fully defensice s/d by a lot and is very good on the fast dagger auto attacks) and even got buffed with panic strike.

the skill floor on thief is very low, you can totally suck on it and still deal a decent amount of damage, similar to how power ranger and medi guard work. the survivability is a different thing but even then thief has many get-out-of-jain cards. and a single mistake can kill many dps classes, not only the thief.

and why do you even come with stuff like “bad thieves spamming this and that”? what do i care about bad players? it’s not them that make it strong but the good ones.
it’s the same for bad shoutbows, bad rifle engis and bad d/d eles, why would you balance around the bad ones.

MadVisions.4529:

Jekkt.6045:

#1: please give us a more biased opinion.

#2: thief gets punished the least for making mistakes out of all the dps classes.

#3: you miss a skill? no problem because it doesn’t go on a long cooldown and even if you want to take initiative as a cooldown the cost of skills is usually not higher than 5-6 seconds worth of initiative.

#4: on thief you use your daze and if you need it just a second after again you can use it without having to wait any single second, see the difference?
.

#1: you did right now. hint: your post shows enormous baised factors good Sir! pls face the fact. also make sure if you want to make kittenefull suggestion you shoud at least master the spec you are talking about.

#2: i cant really see why some people think thisway. all thieves got MELLE bursts so, if you want to do decent damage you need melle range, which doesnt allow any mistakes with a grassy class.

#3: you shoud never see initiative as cooldown becouse it isnt. its much more like ‘mana’ in other MMOs which is required to cast abilitys. luckyly other classes dont have to bother with mana meenagement couse theyr skills run without it, the ones of the thif got do not. even in other games if you dont use your mana wisely you gonna be drained out and find yourself dead in a second (much reference to bad GW1 monks etc..). still think that missing skills does not hurt thieves?

#4: 4 + 4 = 8 | 15 – 8 = 7 < 6 + 3 (by 2) so this means thief cant even fkln try to OP!!!!ASDASD stealth for 2 seconds considering he was on full initiative beforhand (which is really unlikely). here is a totally awesome moment for you to kill him/force big cooldowns

E: cheers && have a fun day

1. i might have a rude tone in my posts but i always give objective feedback when it comes to balance. i also have 1200 played matches on my thief with 1700 played hours on it, i’m not a random kid raging because i lose against thieves, even less because i play d/d ele as my main so i will not lose against thieves in 99% of the cases.

2. many classes have their burst in melee range but if they mess up they can’t run away as well. that’s a big deal for a dps class.

3. i said missing skills on a thief won’t hurt as much as on other classes and you have to manage your cooldowns on every class and with every build. if you spam all your stuff off cooldown you might come into a situation where you would have needed skill X to blind/escape/whatever but sadly it’s still 20 more seconds on cooldown. on thief this is by far not as punishing, again i’m not saying that it is not punishing at all.

4. when people are going for skills like consume conditions or banner they will already be in a defensive position so it is highly unlikely that they just decide to go for you, and even if they do your team will still be able to protect you or you might still have a shadow step or withdraw up. good thieves will also keep their steal for such situations, wether you interrupt somebody with headshot you can get 3 initiative from steal back or you interrupt with steal and you won’t have to use any initiative at all.

cheers and have a fun day too.

glock.6590:

Stealth should be capped to 5 secs even as a group stealth . Because logically speaking stealth does have counter play if its a short duration stealth , you can use some cooldowns and be prepared, but if the thief or the stealthed group just waits and spikes you down from a mile away because of infinite stealth then I see no counterplay. Same for 1v1 when thief uses refuge. And I main thief so not biased, perma stealth has always been stupid in this game and it even ruins the thief v thief 1v1. That’s why I never do wvw , because I know other thieves will just sit in stealth for a century until they heal back up and try again.
Basically long stealth duration its what dosent have any counter play. Short stealth duration is balanced that’s why nobody QQ about mesmers except lordsicky.

thank you for your honest opinion without a “l2p” attitude.

i can agree on shadow ref. the biggest problem with it is that while the thief sits in stealth you do not know when he is coming at you during those 15 seconds. on some classes you can pop aegis or run away or go in stealth too, but not everybody can do that.

reducing shadow refuge to a 6s stealth with 2 pulses, 3s per pulse, and no reveal when you get kicked out of it anymore would be fair if you ask me.

arenanet reducing stealth duration is not gonna happen though, take a look at the new prismatic understanding, it will double the duration of all mesmer stealth skills

tbh most of the thief pov posts are always so extremely bad and try to make them look like the biggest victims of all the classes…

remove stealth from weaponskills and you can get your invul right away, other classes have invuls aswell and nobody ever complains about it.

so you call s/d random dodging something else than actively mitigating damage?

obviously against thieves it’s always l2p because every thief is a pro mlg hero

yeah and now compare your cooldowns to other classes’ cooldowns, withdraw on a 15s cooldown and when other classes go invul for 4-5 seconds they have a 50-70 seconds cooldown on it.

the best one is this one though:

How about a thief using Shadow Arts in conquest to heal up & keep you in combat? Chances are you were actually beating it down and it hid and has to heal for a long time if not just run away and reset or just leave entirely

try and do that on a necro and you’ll see how fast this living punching bag is and how well he can disengage or reset a fight. oh and a dead necro can’t do anything for his team either.

stealth might not be god mode but stealth + mobility is definitely better than the majority of other class mechanics.

Madisonlee.9641:

If it were up to me stealth on any class should never have been implemented and thief should of been given some other playstyle.

i even said this back when i played thief mainly. instead of stealth they should have given the thief an f2 skill that activates the old assassin stance “flashing blades”:

Elite Stance. (5…25…30 seconds.) You have 75% chance to block while attacking. Block effect: 5…17…20 damage to your attacker. a couple of seconds without the damage part baseline but traitable. could even give him stuff like alacrity when using this.

smoke bomb could have been a smoke field that damages on use and shadow refuge could have been a field that gives you boons when you stand in it, like condi cleanse, regen, protection and stability.

you name the solution yourself: builds that can’t easily be picked off by a thief surprising them.

and i will say it again, even if thief kills you, as long as you bring enough utility to the team that makes you worth babysitting you can still be viable. if you’re useless and a liability nobody will want you.

and you’re basically dead against everything that comes after you when your stuff is on cooldown.

i know, that’s why i said in my first post after i listed the possible nerfs for thieves that it would actually be better (and make more players happy) and more interesting to bring other builds to thief’s level instead of trying to nerf the thief and breaking the class in the process.

at the moment it’s this: again, shatter mesmer gets beaten by thief but is still taken because of the utility. but! other classes don’t have utility so why even take them?

even if they would beat thief (hello pu condi mesmer, signet ele, mace sword carrion warrior) would not be taken because they are useless in other situations and basically just stupid 1v1 builds.

what arenanet needs to do is make those builds, preferably berserk builds for celestial classes and celestial builds for berserk classes (or even cleric and rabid/carrion) appealing for a team. condi spirit or survival ranger might be strong in a 1v1 situation but is close to useless in a teamfight (the same applies to power ranger).

classes need distinct mechanics that add something to the whole picture. this is also the reason why they’re ruining d/d ele atm because they remove what’s appealing for the team.

it’s really really hard, i have to admit that and it would certainly take me a long time to figure something out for all the classes that would make them desireable in a 5 man team.

Laraley.7695:

Cynz.9437:

Jekkt.6045:

Cynz.9437:

You can have all nerfs for thieves all you want…. If thieves get same survival as other classes… aka HP pool of 28K, endure pain, team heals etc. tnks

- can thief sit on point? no
- can’t thief rez other players while being cleaved? no
- can thief stomp? rarely if enemy team is not dumb
- can thief win most 1v1? given same amount of skill and current meta – no
- does thief have amazing condi removal besides being forced into LR which kills thief more than helps? compared to other classes no
- does thief have load of CC that they can chain? not really… you may argue head shot is good but extremely short duration daze that works only if you actually interruped something is hardly CC compared to what CC chain engi for example can pull
- do thieves have amazing range to pew pew ppl from across the map? no
… the list of what thieves can’t do is actually long

we are talking about berserker classes here, none of them have 28k hitpoints and none of them can sit on a point. other classes would gladly give up their pew pew and cc if they could get similar stuff that thieves have. and while you cry that you are “forced” into the berserker role other classes that would love to play a viable berserker build are also not able to do so.

you can even take a look at the current metabuilds and you will see how some classes/builds struggle for a place in the meta. thieves never had this problem and in fact have 2 very viable builds.

warrior – shout celestial
ele – dd celestial
ranger – delete
necro – delete
mesmer – shatter
engi – rifle celestial
thief – dp or sd
guard – medi

i am sure some thieves would like to play bunker but they just suck at it, your point?
condi thief is garbage in conquest, stop calling it viable

- wars can play zerker fine actually, cele is just better
- ele can play zerker just fine, cele is just better… at least zoose was doing more than fine on s/f glass ele when nobody played eles~
- ROM on power ranger would disagree~
- i see a lot of power necros lately, your point?
- mesmer shatter isn’t zerker?
- engi is probably only class which has not so great glass build but frankly other builds are just sooo suprior i don’t even know why bother with one; i wouldn’t play it even if thieves and mesmers didn’t exist in game

classes struggle for spot in meta because:
- it is 5v5 and we have 8 classes, someone will be left out one way or other
- conquest either reuires being extremely tanky and doinmg a lot of dmg or be extremely moblile and do a lot of dmg; some classes are just better at it hence why people choose those classes

In all honesty, zerker ele, warrior, ranger…is not really fine. It’s not because playing cele is better, it’s because they’re close to being completely useless. Zoose was playing zerker ele, but I wouldn’t say he was fine. Each time someone tries to play fresh air against some decent team, they get destroyed. But it’s definitely not because of thieves, it’s because the specs is trash.

indeed, i don’t disagree here. fresh air doesn’t add anything useful for your team, you need babysitting all the time, you dont bring much utility other than swirling winds and you need to play it with a 150% effort while other builds don’t even have to invest 50% to do as good. thief is not the only culprit, that’s not what i’m trying to say, it’s just a part of the problem.

Ravenmoon.5318:

Jekkt.6045:

ravenmoon^
please give us a more biased opinion.

shadow shot has no cooldown, it costs initiative yes but you can use it right again
shadow shot – enemy teleports away to kite – shadow shot, see why it’s unbalanced? you make a utility teleport that is usually on a 35-40s cooldown useless.

stealth by leap is 3+1 not 2+1…

and yes, thief has no actual cooldowns on the weaponskills, cooldowns here mean that you need to time when you want to use a specific skill, not that you need initiative. so what does that actually mean? on a fresh air ele you have a blind on a 8s cooldown and a daze on a 25s cooldown. need your daze? use it, then you can’t use it for another 25 seconds.
on thief you use your daze and if you need it just a second after again you can use it without having to wait any single second, see the difference?

thief gets punished the least for making mistakes out of all the dps classes (excluding medi guard because of the heals). you miss a skill? no problem because it doesn’t go on a long cooldown and even if you want to take initiative as a cooldown the cost of skills is usually not higher than 5-6 seconds worth of initiative.

thief is both viable as berserk and also as condition with the only difference that the condition thief needs more stealth and is therefore not desired in a game mode that makes stealth capping impossible. i saw plenty of condi thieves in stronghold and they seemed to work out very well.

what kind of argument is this? every class without utility skills is a sitting duck. but not every class can go in stealth without utilities.

landing a backstab is not as hard as you wanna make it sound, in fact the areas that trigger the “back” of backstab apply to more angles than the “not back” part…

so you wanna say that thief doesn’t have damage and gap closers? and condi builds generally wreck all berserk builds, i have yet to come across a build that has enough condi cleanse to “yolo” something like a condi engi or condi ranger.

as if 50% of the other classes’ utility skills were not completely useless or niche.
think about it before complaining. thief doesn’t need “huge boosts” at all, thief needs to get finally balanced by either putting it down to the level of other roamers or by powercreeping them up to the level of thieves.

more than 2 years and the excuses why thieves are oh so fragile are still the same while the problems that this class brings are also still the same.

Waste 8+ initiative (if u spam that) to come at me, and i’ll bury you. No initiative thief is bad. You should feel bad for ever suggesting spamming shadow shot is a thing. Spamming shadow shot is like spamming heartseeker. Only noobs do it and it is not a thing. Also the range is not 1200. So not that great. Its like a normal leap, not really a teleport…

If we are going to talk about ele vs thief, please shut up. Ele has 20 weapon kills that provide defense, cc, condi, damage and support, thief has 5 and initiative bar that is for both weapon sets. Fresh air gets instant cooldown refill. They also have blocks and blinds and toughness. Thief has none of that (except blind). You actively mitigate damage, thief doesn’t. If you don’t get this concept, don’t post here any further.

I play various classes, and I yet have to be intimidated by a thief. I don’t play ele because in every MMO i hate casters. They feel lame to me. Gw2 is no exception, but I have every other profession. Never picked my build with the thought of thief around. Push swiftness and wait 2 seconds….not a rocket freaking science…

i see, discussing something with you really makes no sense after all.

Laraley.7695:

I find it funny that everyone is crying about stealth burst from thief, but no word about the fact mesmer can do the same and hit even harder. Thief indeed does get punished. Have you ever played a thief? Do you know how much initiative it costs to stealth and then restealth if you cannot do your burst because of blocks/invuln?

Have you ever thought about that thief is the only melee zerker specs and it doesn’t have Blurred frenzy, distortion, obsidian flesh, mistform, signet of stone…etc.?

It’s also hilarious that people say thief counters all zerker specs, but you’re okay with the fact dps guard does the same and counters thieves, too?

Anyways, fresh air, power ranger and zerker warrior are not pushed out of meta because of thieves. It’s because those specs just sucks, which is even enhanced in conquest. The only class that could complain is mesmer, which is getting buffed insanely. Maybe go to the subforums for those classes and try to suggest how to make them better so they can compete with thieves.

Btw, saying ‘’Other professions are indeed punished if they get blinded and miss their skills their skills enter cooldown’’ made my day. Time to stop using your Entangle when you’re blinded.

stealth burst is a different topic but mesmer stealth is actually on a longer cooldown. nobody ever said that this is not unbalanced.

thief doesn’t need this stuff because
2 stun breaks (and teleports), stealth and withdraw > invuls on a 50s cooldown
oh and i see many thieves with mist form

dps guard doesn’t counter all berserk specs, in fact dps guard can easily be kited after judge’s is on cooldown. thieves already kill dps guards and will do even better after the trait changes. the only berserk specs that really gets the short end of the stick against dps guard is power necro because it’s even less mobile and very weak to cc.

i already stated why other builds are not part of the meta, because they don’t add anything useful. mesmer gets beaten by thief too but mesmer brings portal and moa.

yes if you waste your entangle because of a blind then it’s stupid.
but on thief you can be stupid with most of your skills and you still won’t get punished as hard for it.

Cynz.9437:

You can have all nerfs for thieves all you want…. If thieves get same survival as other classes… aka HP pool of 28K, endure pain, team heals etc. tnks

- can thief sit on point? no
- can’t thief rez other players while being cleaved? no
- can thief stomp? rarely if enemy team is not dumb
- can thief win most 1v1? given same amount of skill and current meta – no
- does thief have amazing condi removal besides being forced into LR which kills thief more than helps? compared to other classes no
- does thief have load of CC that they can chain? not really… you may argue head shot is good but extremely short duration daze that works only if you actually interruped something is hardly CC compared to what CC chain engi for example can pull
- do thieves have amazing range to pew pew ppl from across the map? no
… the list of what thieves can’t do is actually long

we are talking about berserker classes here, none of them have 28k hitpoints and none of them can sit on a point. other classes would gladly give up their pew pew and cc if they could get similar stuff that thieves have. and while you cry that you are “forced” into the berserker role other classes that would love to play a viable berserker build are also not able to do so.

you can even take a look at the current metabuilds and you will see how some classes/builds struggle for a place in the meta. thieves never had this problem and in fact have 2 very viable builds.

warrior – shout celestial
ele – dd celestial
ranger – delete
necro – delete
mesmer – shatter
engi – rifle celestial
thief – dp or sd
guard – medi

ravenmoon^
please give us a more biased opinion.

shadow shot has no cooldown, it costs initiative yes but you can use it right again
shadow shot – enemy teleports away to kite – shadow shot, see why it’s unbalanced? you make a utility teleport that is usually on a 35-40s cooldown useless.

stealth by leap is 3+1 not 2+1…

and yes, thief has no actual cooldowns on the weaponskills, cooldowns here mean that you need to time when you want to use a specific skill, not that you need initiative. so what does that actually mean? on a fresh air ele you have a blind on a 8s cooldown and a daze on a 25s cooldown. need your daze? use it, then you can’t use it for another 25 seconds.
on thief you use your daze and if you need it just a second after again you can use it without having to wait any single second, see the difference?

thief gets punished the least for making mistakes out of all the dps classes (excluding medi guard because of the heals). you miss a skill? no problem because it doesn’t go on a long cooldown and even if you want to take initiative as a cooldown the cost of skills is usually not higher than 5-6 seconds worth of initiative.

thief is both viable as berserk and also as condition with the only difference that the condition thief needs more stealth and is therefore not desired in a game mode that makes stealth capping impossible. i saw plenty of condi thieves in stronghold and they seemed to work out very well.

what kind of argument is this? every class without utility skills is a sitting duck. but not every class can go in stealth without utilities.

landing a backstab is not as hard as you wanna make it sound, in fact the areas that trigger the “back” of backstab apply to more angles than the “not back” part…

so you wanna say that thief doesn’t have damage and gap closers? and condi builds generally wreck all berserk builds, i have yet to come across a build that has enough condi cleanse to “yolo” something like a condi engi or condi ranger.

as if 50% of the other classes’ utility skills were not completely useless or niche.
think about it before complaining. thief doesn’t need “huge boosts” at all, thief needs to get finally balanced by either putting it down to the level of other roamers or by powercreeping them up to the level of thieves.

more than 2 years and the excuses why thieves are oh so fragile are still the same while the problems that this class brings are also still the same.

Terrorsquad.2349:

snip

to be precise: i have 1732 hours on my thief and 1225 played matches in pvp. it used to be my main class for the first year of gw2. i would never say that i am a top thief but i do have my experience on it.

i agree that thief has a higher error rate (dp, not sd) than cele or dps guard, that’s exactly the reason why they are used to counter thieves, that’s the reason why they are played and why they are meta. they can hold nodes (even dps guard to an extent) and they can defend themselves against thieves, the main predator in the game. they can defend themselves yes, but they can’t catch it if the thief is good enough so what would be easier than to kill fire with fire? if they have a thief then bring a better thief to kill theirs.

it’s also not a thief’s job to 1v1 celestials if it’s not really needed but rather +1 a fight, kill an enemy squishy, like a mesmer, chase the enemy thief or set up a stealth burst.

even though thief has counters in the meta it is still so good that you can’t afford to not run it. mesmers get hardcountered by thieves but the same applies to them in some extent because of portal play and moa. and again, kill fire with fire, so your thief chasing the enemy thief prevents your mesmer from getting rekt by their thief.

why are other berserker classes not played? in eu we don’t see many fresh airs, static discharge engis and many other berserker builds because they get countered easily, have no or few disengages and bring no utility to the team. obviously most of the time they get countered by thieves.

so how could arenanet solve all of this? by nerfing thief of course (yeah people will come with torches and fork pitches at me now).
some minor stuff that could help: put actual cooldowns on teleport skills. see the revenant teleport “frigid blitz”? it has a 12s cooldown. so a 10 seconds cooldown on shadow shot and a 5-8 seconds cooldown on infiltrators strike would already be enough.
steal also needs to be changed to have a casting time for how strong it is. 1/2 or 3/4 would be fair. headshot needs to cost more initiative as it can be spammed way too often and most of the time a good thief won’t need more than 1 headshot to interrupt a necro heal or a banner anyway. it seems like stealth counters are being put into elite specialisation stuff (dhunter trap).

and now that every thief in this thread hates me, the 2nd possibility to solve the issue which will most likely make everybody happy:

we see how mesmers get countered by thieves (and also celestials) but are still represented in top teams because of the utility they bring (portal, moa, boon strips). now if more berserker classes had crucial utility to bring they would be worth having in a comp even if countered by thieves. obviously other berserker builds also need some tweaks and buffs but what they really lack is team utility.
sadly this is a difficult one in the perspective of a game designer. you can’t give a fresh air aoe stealth or portal to an engi.

it’s the sword, with the mist shredder skill that appears in the hot trailer.

Cynz.9437:

people complain about stealth in pvp? wat?

thief went to reset? good… you got point, enjoy your match points~

also i love how people cry “omg thief can reset”…. and somehow forget to mention that the moment thief goes ooc their target is also ooc and gets to heal up…

i think it is hilarious to say that thief doesn’t get punished for failed attack… if anything thieves get punished the most for single mistake in game atm….

you don’t reset as a thief. you sit in stealth until crucial skills are off cooldown, like steal or withdraw, and then you go at it again. or you sit out invul skills in stealth, another gimmick that renders other classes’ defensive skills useless. thieves don’t get punished for single mistakes at all. thieves have on demand teleports that can save their kitten s in most situations and make cc useless if you don’t force the 2 stunbreaks before.

thief is also the only class in the game that is unkiteable as they have teleports that are not tied to cooldowns while other classes’ teleports are on a 30-40s cooldown. so if a thief wants to chase you he will do so and you will not get away most of the time.

the only classes that can face a thief are celestial classes that bring self sustain and a mix of direct damage and condition attrition or guardians because they have the needed aoe damage with good sustain and blocks, this will change though as soon as thieves will be able to run 3 traitlines, in fact thieves with vampire runes can already kill guardians because mist form will save them when they eat a mighty blow combo or get trapped by the ring.

the thief’s class design is broken and to fix it they would have to overhaul the whole class which is obviously not gonna happen.

they learned their lesson with energy ressource or why else do revenants have actual cooldowns on their skills + the energy cost.

karl said you can’t attack it.

randomly.6395:

I like the idea of a warhorn for the tempest. The concept of a storm caller would be awesome. My suggested abilities are probably a little too strong, but all the elite specs seem very powerful… And one can dream, can’t they?

• Fire
  Wildfire: Unleash the echo of flames, burning all targets within 600 units for 1 second. Summon a patch of wildfire at your feet that grows in size the more targets originally hit. Wildfire deals slightly less damage than lava font. Acts as a fire field. Lasts 5 seconds.
  Firemender: Blow your warhorn to heal yourself and allies for a moderate amount and cure burning and poison. Heal for much more if burning or poison is removed.

• Water
  Call Fog: Surround yourself with a dense fog that chills and blinds for 4 seconds. Acts as a smoke field that moves with you.
  River Song: Echo out the River’s Song, giving nearby allies resistance and endurance.

• Air:
  Hurricane: Summon a hurricane to push back enemies around you. Pulses every second for 3 seconds.
  Vacuum: Temporarily displace the air around an enemy (1 target), dazing them for 1 second and removing two boons.

• Earth:
  Seismic Instability: The targeted area becomes unstable, pulsing AoE cripple and torment over 5 seconds.
  Magnetize: Magnetize your body, granting 2 stacks of stability, increasing your toughness by 2000, and pulling in all projectiles toward yourself for 5 seconds. Projectiles used against allies within 360 units are redirected to yourself during this time.

just a little feedback to your skills from my pov:

wildfire: 1s burn not enough, per target hit is generally always a bad mechanic (see necro shouts and how much hate they got), a field that grows in size is interesting, starting out small and expanding would be good but 5 seconds is too short then, basically a combustive shot, not that ele needs more burn fields.

firemender: why does this cure poison? i can understand that it removes or manipulates burning though. imo it doesn’t really fit the theme of a ragin storm.

call fog: if the fog is supposed to deal damage like necro’s warhorn 5 then it’s bad. blasting smoke fields give stealth (already a reason why this would never happen) so if the fog damaged players you would just get a insta reveal. i like the moving field though.

river song: ok but it’s a defensive skill again.

hurricane: basically a weaker version of tornado.

vacuum: a 2s aoe float field would be nice. boon strips don’t fit ele.

seismic instability: a cripple field, why not, maybe a bit weak. torment is not an ele condition and will most likely never be. every class has their signature conditions.

magnetize: would be better if this skill just gave you 1 second of protection for every projectile that hits you instead.

overall the skills are just another set of support skills and don’t really show the devastating aspect of a tempest.

Alkahell.9562:

The warhorn idea seems very nice to me it would really fit tempest thematically.
There could be a very dangerous gameplay involved with tempest. My suggestions are mostly for utility skills.
Tempest can play with corruption style magic that promotes the recklessness of the tempest:
Utility 1: Summon a sandstorm that immobilizes you but blinds and bleeds foes.
Utility 2: Summon a whirlwind that follows your enemy at high speed and damages him , while this happens you are slowed
Utility 3: Apply 10stacks of burning to your enemy while you get chilled
Utility 4:(Toggle) Create a water nebula that dazes your opponents in a certain area while this i active you lose health
Elite skill: Transform into a state that makes your allies into a block of ice(invulnerable) while you apply torment, bleed and confusion to enemies.

utility 1: basically earth attunement glyph with selfroot and bleeds on top of it.
utlity 2: why do you get slowed for this? this skill would have to hit like a truck to justify it.
utility 3: 10 stacks of burning is 2500 damage per second or more. this would be op like nothing else.
utility 4: a chaos field that doesn’t give you boons but even harms yourself.
elite: interesting if you want to make an ally invulnerable when low, but if you transformed every player of your team into an ice block they would tear your head off, especially if they die because of conditions. again, torment and confusion don’t fit the ele.

not that i wanna bash on any ideas here, it’s very nice that people actually come up with stuff but if you do something like this you have to calculate class design and overall design in. people talk about “dangerous storms and tempest” and yet come up with stuff that is not really dangerous. when i think about tempests and storms the first things that come to my mind are: i kitten don’t want to be where the tempest is, it’s devastating and disruptive.

the revenant’s elite specialisation weapon is not know yet. we do have some datamined weapons but i do not believe that any of those is the elite weapon. the reason behind this is simple: there have not been any datamined elite weapons yet (no, ele datamines are dagger auto attack chains and not sword skills).

what could revenant get? a medium range weapon like shortbow. the possibilities are high because no class is yet getting a short bow for their elite and there is currently no heavy armor class with a shortbow.

i also don’t think that glinth will be the elite specialisation because of the same reason as above, no datamines about elites. we don’t even know if it will be a legend or just a change of the mechanics that lets you use your legends in a different way.

ofc i could just be all wrong, guess we’ll have to wait and see.