Would that just be crazy OP or would it bring us back into line?
90% of the time when I get hit by a reveal (usually sick’em) I have just come out of stealth and already have the revealed icon. I only notice that I’ve been screwed AFTER I’ve wasted INI attempting to re-enter stealth and failed. I think it’s a little much that we are supposed to be evading, dodging and basically actively avoiding damage while at the same time staring at our buff bar to be sure someone hasn’t stealth screwed us. It’s just poor design.
That would totally make sense. Man thats annoying. There is so much stability that, if that stops it, then that really sucks. They NEED to fix that. Makes it almost useless unless you get the drop on someone.
So you are saying someone uses stability to prevent you from stunning them and it needs to be fixed?
Name another elite ability that can be completely negated by stability?
Jade winds, Chaotic release, headbutt, gravity well, chilled to the bone, dragons maw.
Then the partials are most of rampages CC, Tornado, the stun from supply crate, 2/3 of impact strike chain, summon flesh golems charge.Everything you mentioned does damage (some even grants boons) so the elite is not completely negated by stability.
That’s exactly why I wrote completely. Reading is fundamental.
That would totally make sense. Man thats annoying. There is so much stability that, if that stops it, then that really sucks. They NEED to fix that. Makes it almost useless unless you get the drop on someone.
So you are saying someone uses stability to prevent you from stunning them and it needs to be fixed?
Name another elite ability that can be completely negated by stability?
If they are going to allow other players to inflict revealed upon us then they need to give some kind of indicator that it’s happened. I’m not going to stop fighting to mouse over a 20×20 pixel icon to see the timer.
The lack of communication or acknowledgement that Thief is in a pretty bad position is the worst part of it all. We took a lot of heavy hits during the specialization update like the loss of Power of Inertia and Hidden Assassin, the watering down of Resilience of Shadows by half its potency, and Shadow’s Embrace removing specific conditions instead of any conditions ( placing us in a weird point where anyone sneezing a burn at you is a death sentence ). At this point, it’s really difficult to hold faith any of these things will be addressed with the radio silence from the devs.
^ This. I wouldn’t nearly be as salty if we just got a “Hey, we are looking into it.” I mean how f’ing hard is that?!?!?
Revealed Training to me seems a little weak and with all the new revealed debuffs that are going to be flying around I thought this could really use a buff. Perhaps if it restored 1 ini for every second of revealed then it might be worth taking.
LMAO!!!! your signature is crazy… lol
Don’t point it out or he’ll get a 2 week ban because, apparently, having a sense of humor is against the TOS.
Experts at stealth and cowardice, thieves can move through the shadows, vanish into thin air, or steal items from their opponents to utilize in running away. Thieves practice an agile, acrobatic fighting style, which allows them to interrupt fair fights as they have no chance of victory alone.
I just wish they’d fix the terrain to not block shadowstepping so much…
EoTM has a REAL problem with this. Try warping anywhere near the ends of the collapsible bridges. I am fearful that the new borderlands map is going to be rife with crap like this.
Shadow Return already cures 3 condi. Infiltrator’s return already cures 1 condi. To be honest if they actually wanted to bring our condi removal up to par with other classes they’d make Escapist’s Absolution just a baseline thief ability and replace it with something like might on dodge.
Nah man have faith Anet will….. laugh sorry I just can’t. Seriously though just roll a mesmer.
Put too many goodies into DD and you run the risk of making it a requirement instead of an option. If they manage to smooth out the dodge animations it’s already going to be very strong. I’d like to see some more baseline buffs cough HP pool cough to bring thief up to viable.
Mobility is the only thing that thief brings to the table in 5v5 (Where Anet does all its balancing). It was my secret hope that one of the new spec lines would add mobility on par with thief highlighting its otherwise poor performance as it would no longer be a good choice.
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The condi removal trait is already bordering at OP with a 1 sec ICD. I imagine post release that’s going to be nerfed to like 3 seconds.
Please, elaborate. Just saying that it’s “Bordering on OP” provides nothing.
Please explain exactly how removing 1 condition on successful evade is “borderline OP”.
The condi removal potential on this ability is already very high compared to most other class’ options in that department. The only reason that even this much is justifiable is due to our low HP pool. I’d love for this to do more but I doubt it would pass any kind of balance check.
The condi removal trait is already bordering at OP with a 1 sec ICD. I imagine post release that’s going to be nerfed to like 3 seconds.
Welcome to the Desert Borderlands Stress Test
in WvW Desert Borderlands Stress Test
Posted by: Kadin.2356
It would also be interesting to see what the effect of removing hard resing of finished players from WvW would be. It might go a long way to promote smaller group tactics if you could whittle away at larger forces.
Welcome to the Desert Borderlands Stress Test
in WvW Desert Borderlands Stress Test
Posted by: Kadin.2356
That’s great! While we are testing things could we try disabling rally mechanics all together in WvW? While it makes sense in other parts of the game, rally mechanics in WvW unfairly punish experienced groups that are inclusive of new or inexperienced players.
Punishing players that are doing the right thing by being inclusive just doesn’t seem to be in line with the established modus operandi.
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Checking my combat log and…. yea nothing.
But seriously, I have no idea why they are introducing a new weapon when they killed everything else for thieves beside dp/sb.
Is that really a question? Do you know what would happen if the day before HoT release ANet was like :
And now, for the long awaited Thief Elite specialisation, you get … NO NEW WEAPON! In fact you don’t get an elite spec at all but don’t worry, we instead rebalanced a few of the old sets that didn’t work as well as expected.
- Pistol #1 damage increased by 5%
- Shortbow Ranged increased by 50
- Sword autoattack chain now completes 5% fasterYour welcome
The reason we get a new weapon is that every single class in the game gets one with the Elite spec.
LOL but this is exactly something I could see happening, because this is basically the same tone that you see in EVERY patch release that “balances” skills/classes.
The only hope is that they might actually be forced to play the class when they are making the new spec.
I just took a hiatus with the game entirely. No way in hell in going to be spending any money on this game with the current level of mismanagement.
None of what OP suggest fix the Thief because they arent even problems.
Only having one viable weapon set isn’t a problem? Do you even play this class?
To all the knee-jerk thief haters: These change suggestions support weapon sets other than P/D stealth cheese. If you like fighting against that then please flame on, otherwise support this.
1. Bring back C&D’s previous PvE damage levels and add blind on hit. – You are balancing this against pistol’s Black Powder, if the reward is not worth the risk then offhand dagger will always play second fiddle to offhand pistol in any pvp format.
2. Revert Acro nerfs. Specifically feline grace – This was a huge hit to thief build diversity that was not warrented.
3. Add endurance on hit to sword auto chain #1. This along with #2 is needed to bring back S/D to viable levels in light of the overall vigor nerf.
4. Make Death Blossum warp to front of target (so that you land behind them) and speed up the skill animation by 2x (similar to how it operates under quickness currently) – D/D needs a buff to be viable in pvp and this is the only skill you can touch without affecting numerous other builds.
Thought I’d post this as I’ve had to respond to guildies “Well how would you fix it?” questions too often and now I can just post the link.
Ask any necro about life blast damage. It is completely dependent upon which weapon set you have equipped before going into death shroud. Very poor design IMO.
Then what should it be based on?
A flat coefficient based on the quality / level of the weapon. If all my weapons are zerk ascended then I shouldn’t be life blasting for less damage because I forgot to switch from dagger to staff before going into death shroud. It’s just stupid.
Ask any necro about life blast damage. It is completely dependent upon which weapon set you have equipped before going into death shroud. Very poor design IMO.
The BS bug really is proof that they didn’t even bother to play test the patch with thief. I understand bugs happen but that’s like suddenly having guardians empower do damage to yourself instead of healing, it is just so obvious that the only way it could have existed is if they weren’t even looking.
That was kinda the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I’m not done with the game but I’m not logging in again until I see some patch notes that hint at someone giving a flying shart over at Anet.
This has a lot to do with having some very vocal personalities playing Mesmer. I really don’t see any thief advocates out there making our case in a visible manner.
It’s hard to have faith when they fail time and again to put forward changes that even hint at basic understanding of game balance.
We’re talking about Mesmer right? I thought everyone rerolled already.
Buff the HP pool, add endurance gain on hit #2 to sword to make up for feline grace nerf and since black powder is always > in utility than C&D add blind on hit to C&D to help even that out. Oh and make the old riccocet baseline.
I’d make these changes then adjust damage accordingly to balance if it ends up being too OP.
I’d it just me or is the concept of a single individual being responsible for multiple class’ balance along with god knows what other responsibilities related to the expansion seem a bit ridiculous? I have no idea how the workload is being divided up over at Anet but from the slow information/content flow to the turn around time on critical bugs, it just seems like the company may be a little on the small side to be running an MMO of this scale?
I dunno I’d just like to see more reinvested back into the game.
Withdraw: This ability is now a trick. Increased the recharge of this ability from 15 to 18. Healing (both base and healing power) coefficients have been increased by 10%.
Coefficients is key here.
This basically means that healing power is 10% more effective with withdraw.Not sure what “base coefficient” actually is, but I think this is for scaling, thus making it heal 10% more on downscaled characters, taking 80 as base and the base coefficient to calculate downscaled healing.
So no, the “base healing” did not change, but people tend to read it wrongHope this clears it up a bit.
The live stream implied otherwise.
Remember to factor in the swiftness gained from being hit with pack runes. Not a factor OOC but just get used to using short bow.
Hello thieves! Take some time from instagibing me and talk about the new specializations! Either answer my questions directly or simply post about what you feel is important for the devs to know about the new changes.
Questions:
- A lot of thief builds got rolled into one (Panic Strike + Exe + Shadow Arts + Venom + Trickery Thief is possible!). How do you like the fact that thieves can do this?
- I’ve heard some people say they don’t like the critical strike line. Do you agree and why?
- I’ve also heard some people say that S/D is dead and that acrobatics sucks. I tried out a build with Don’t Stop and Hard To Catch and had trouble dying but still got some kills! How do you feel about S/D and Acrobatics? Have you tried the line?
- Thief got some new condi traits. Have you tried making a condi build and how did it go?
- Improvisation vs Executioner. Which wins for you?
- Dagger Storm and Thieves Guild got turned into a trick and a deception. Are you taking them now that they can be traited?
1. The combination of lines was well done, IMO. It feels like traits are in the line they belong, and weaker traits were rolled into more powerful ones to create traits actually worth taking…for the most part at least. There are some real stinkers, but that’s a separate discussion.
2. I -love- the CS line, but there’s some conditions to that statement. No quarter is basically perfect – it’s unique, it gives the thief incentive to stay in combat, and it’s powerful as a GM trait should be. The minors are good, and the adept line has some choices, but the master line is an absolute joke – nothing competes with Practiced tolerance, that should be fixed. I also feel like part of CS’s strength is how underpowered SA is.
When everyone saw SA, they lost their minds, but they didn’t take into account how miniscule the healing of Shadow Rejuv is considering the new damage capacity across the board, the opportunity cost of sitting in stealth, and how useless Shadow’s embrace is if it doesn’t cleanse a condition on entering stealth. CS is basically a default because it adds MUCH more damage than SA adds sustain – if the 2 were more even, CS would still be good, but less attractive.3. S/D is dead, there’s no doubt to that, even if your personal experience was positive. Acro is a joke in its current state. Ranger and Engineer get better dodge traits, which is strange considering those professions have actual access to protection and stability, blocks, immunity type skills, better condi cleanse, and better sustain across the board. The old S/D dodged like crazy, but because it needed to – no iteration of the thief class has ever had passive sustain or defenses. It’s always been active, and the current acro is basically worthless – 1 mistake means your death. Vigor uptime isn’t even viable without BT from trickery which locks you in two traitlines if you want to go S/D, and it doesn’t come anywhere close to pre-patch dodge capacity, and damage has gone through the roof! Less dodges for more damage doesn’t work.
4. I haven’t bothered with a condition spec. Burning is roughly triple the damage of any other condition, and thief has zero access to it. Their access to any condition that isn’t bleed is middling at best, and without consistent access to a variety of damaging conditions to beat all the cleanses flying around, it just doesn’t feel worth it. Pressure striking is in a weird place, since it looks like a great trait on paper, but has almost no practical use – what thief condi spec has access to interrupts? A condi spec wants bewildering ambush over SoH, and P/D is the only functioning condi spec thieves have (which means no interrupts from Sword MH or Pistol OH). The huge damage nerf to potent poisons was also disappointing – 10% increased damage and 33% increased duration doesn’t compete with improvisation in any spec or format.
5. Executioner, hands down. Improv isn’t a bad trait, it’s just that with damage the way it is currently, thieves don’t have the luxury of taking a trait that doesn’t either make them hit harder or 100% guarantees better survivability. If spec diversity ever opened up to allow a thief that wasn’t 100% focused on downing opponents, Improv might have a spot, but currently executioner is essentially a requirement for being effective.
6. No, BV always wins. Thieves only viable role is still that of the highly mobile roamer, and nothing DS or TG offers makes up for their CD’s in comparison to BV.
Thanks for posting this, I hope my input matters.
+1
Guarded Initiation: In game description is misleading. States it removes “conditions” when striking an enemy while you are above the health threshold. it then states 3 conditions: weakness, vulnerability, slow. then it states “removes conditions: 1”
In testing, while above 90% health, can confirm this trait does not remove ANY conditions, which include the listed 3 in the in game description.But the question is, was it intended to remove weakness, vulnerability, slow, AND 1 other condition PER hit while above 90% health? or just 1 of the 3 conditions listed there?
Hard to Catch: still triggers when someone in costume brawl does a CC effect while you are within range even if you are not in costume brawl.
Just tested guarded initiation on the warrior NPC in EoTM and it did remove the long duration weakness he puts on you.
Resilience of Shadows does not appear to be working, and if it is it’s definitely not 25% reduction, i have tested it with a friend and the dmg seams to be the same in and out of stealth…
Tested this with a friend and it does reduce damage but it seems like it was more along the lines of 20% reduction instead of 25%. Had a really small sample set though. Not really willing to label it bugged just yet unless I get some more data.
It wouldn’t, but the person above also threw CnD in there, which does and should reveal you.
I dunno, C&D + Steal is kinda a bread & butter combo of D&D. Even though I never ran the build I was under the impression that for quite a while the old “stealth on steal” trait did work with this combo (just extended the stealth duration provided by C&D). If we can get conformation from someone that this was working at some point I’ll add it to the list. I won’t at the moment though because I’m not 100% sure that was the case.
I tested “unrelenting strikes” again:
It does NOT work with Shortbow autoattack which is how I tested it – but it seems to work with everything else (also shortbow 2).
kind of nice to have perma rage. :-)
Just tried it in HoTM on on the NPC’s there and it’s working fine for me (killed them with nothing but shortbow auto-attack spam). Note there is an ICD of 10 seconds on the ability so you are only going to see that 4 seconds of Fury every 10 seconds. Also make sure you zone out of sPvP into the PvE world at some point, there have been reports of bugs related to just staying in sPvP related to abilities not working properly.
(edited by Kadin.2356)
Shadow’s Embrace – Does not remove condition’s listed upon application of stealth.
This is comparable to Shadow’s Rejuvenation only granting initiative after three seconds. Either ability should apply initially and then subsequently every 3 seconds as described.
Ex. (with SA) CaD = 1 condition removed on application, 1 additional condition removed after 3 seconds. With SR, initially gain 1 initiative and then after 3 seconds gain a second initiative.
SE is removing damage condi’s on entering stealth though. I ran around for nearly 30 min trying to find an instance where this did not work properly and could not reproduce it. What game mode are you in that this is not working?
in pvp for me; i had to wait 3 sec to get 1 condi cleansed
Heh, yeah I can second this… thought something was weird about it.
Tested this in sPvP and it’s working fine for me. Might have just been the whole needing to zone out of sPvP then back in for traits to update. Can’t even verify that bug as I jumped in and out before knowing it could have been a problem.
Unrelenting strikes doesn’t grant rage when target is below 90% health as stated in the trait describtion.
Works fine for me
Did you try in sPvP?
I think there’s still that bug that you need to step out of pvp into LA or something, then come back in to have the traits take effect…
Unless they fixed that or I was trolled.
Hmm, I was bouncing in and out of the Mists a lot so that might have fixed it without me noticing.
Having to set your spec in PvE, sPvP, and WvW is causing a lot of confusion.
Then I misunderstood what the notes said, or the notes I was seeing didn’t match what was said in the stream (couldn’t watch it). yuck on that then.
In the video, they said the original Dagger Training’s 5% damage was going to be baseline. Since then, I’ve seen or heard nothing about it. Only the 5% from the original Combined Training trait has been officially baselined.
I was hoping for the 5% for daggers also, though I don’t know if it was included, missed, or reconsidered.
That must have been changed at some point b/c in the readup stream they state that the 5% is being added to the dagger dual wield skills. I’ll edit this with the time link to that part when I get home tonight.
Edit: Here’s the link
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F1 doesnt keep the second promissed stolen skill , F1+F2=F1(before patch) if u dont want to waste the F2 skill, the only diference is that now u have to press two keys
F1 is not supposed to store anything. The main point of the change was so that you could see your steal timer without having to discard the previously stolen skill. In cases where you want to steal again without using the skill (i.e. Throw gunk) this is invaluable.
When they said, “we are removing the 5% more damage from dagger training”, they also said they were making it baseline. It doesn’t feel like they did, but since I didn’t think ahead to get numbers without any traits and compare with same stats after update, can’t be sure. Perhaps they did and I’m just missing the other bonuses we used to have in the first lines… but a certain level of damage from air sigil doesn’t line up with the same mug and backstab damage the way it did prepatch, I’d say cloak too but that was ‘normalized’ so to be expected it does less. At least I don’t think they buffed sigils…
The 5% was to be added to “dual wield” skills. Any dagger combo #3. I don’t have pre-patch numbers to check if this was forgotten or not.
Shadow’s Embrace – Does not remove condition’s listed upon application of stealth.
This is comparable to Shadow’s Rejuvenation only granting initiative after three seconds. Either ability should apply initially and then subsequently every 3 seconds as described.
Ex. (with SA) CaD = 1 condition removed on application, 1 additional condition removed after 3 seconds. With SR, initially gain 1 initiative and then after 3 seconds gain a second initiative.
SE is removing damage condi’s on entering stealth though. I ran around for nearly 30 min trying to find an instance where this did not work properly and could not reproduce it. What game mode are you in that this is not working?
This has always been so. Any skill that inflicts damage while in stealth incurs reveal. It would be great if this were an exception, though.
The only reason I included it is I’m not sure they intended for the mug trait to redefine how steal operates. Without mug you can steal from stealth without issue and remain in stealth. With hidden thief you can even extend that stealth for 2 more seconds. Throw in mug and suddenly the “passive” steal is now an attack. This very well could be working as intended, but I figured I’d include it in the off chance that this was not the case.
*Edit- On second thought since it wasn’t introduced with the latest patch the whole argument is moot.
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Has that changed? Or was it like that before?
Don’t know if it’s a bug, but Shadow’s Embrace now has a limited selection of conditions it can clear, whereas before it didn’t. This is displayed in the tooltip, but it’s still annoying that I can’t remove Fear by clicking Blinding Powder anymore. If it’s an intentional change, learning the rationale behind it might be nice, as thieves don’t really have a lot of condition removal options!
That’s not a bug it’s a nerf. It sucks but it’s not a bug.
*Hidden Thief: It still reveals you if you are using Mug
*Shadows Embrace: Not clearing a Condition upon entering and seems to have an ICD
The only time that the Mug+Hidden Thief combo applies revealed is when you activate it starting from a stealth state. I’m not even sure if this is a bug or not. If you take it from the viewpoint that steal should never apply revealed regardless of traits then yes it is a bug so I’ll add it.
I haven’t been able to reproduce any ICD on Shadows Embrace but I’ll keep testing. Went into SR then stood in lava. It removed the burning every 3 seconds as advertised.
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