The pathing definitely needs work.
I only use it when I need to remove stability at the moment because other boons are not worth the relative high chance of it not landing at point blank and the rooting on the 2 strikes after invincibility frames end…
I think a more reliable implementation would be shadow stepping behind the enemy with about 300 effective range and compressing the two hits into a single strike with less animation time and less damage, but with evasion throughout the animation, much like how the evasion works on SB for disabling shot.
I’d prefer just a simple change to the steal mechanic.
F1 for steal.
F2 to use stolen item.
I mean the buttons are there. Why exactly they decided to not use them in the first place is beyond me.
It would be nice if they could add a F3 and F4 to store additional stolen items if the previous ones were not used, but that’s just my wishful thinking and would require a drastic rebalance of the current set of stolen items available.
(edited by Kaon.7192)
I also find it very hypocritical that Legendaries are tradable while Ascended items are not.
I highly agree with you on that!
But, I think there is a reason. Legendaries are simply a cosmetic item, with no increase in stats.
Ascended Items have better stats than normal exotics.
Legendaries have the exact same stats as exotics, and therefore are called Cosmetic items, unlike ascended items which have better stats.
ANet have said that Legendaries are and always will be best-in-slot. The only reason that they have the same stats as exotics now is due to the fact that there are no Ascended weapons released yet.
- Pistol whip needs a tweak – Lower the Init cost and the total number of swings/damage the ability does. People should not be able to just walk or dodge roll out of the last few swings. Make the ability more of a sustained DPS tool than a silly Haste fueled burst tool, or the kind of attack that never hits more than half its swings without immob or player inexperience being involved.
Yeah, and I think that 100blades should have immobilise, haste and shadow step on the same skill. After all, people shouldn’t be able to just dodge roll away from the last swing!
I’m sorry, but you’re not exactly giving constructive feedback here. If you actually read his suggestion, he is saying to reduce the number of swings on pistol whip and the damage and cost proportionally. The fact that people can’t dodge through would be a side effect of the shorter animation time.
I’m not suggesting that this is a great idea, but attacking strawmen isn’t going to help move the conversation forward.
Get rid of DB already – CnD does poor damage
Last time I checked it critted 5-7k on my semi-defensive thief build.
Let me guess… WvW?
Support thief? Only someone who don’t actually play a thief can even say that with a straight face. Thief is by far the class with least group and support skills.
As thief is today, all it brings to a group is DPS and stealth-resses. Its not strange if people see thief as a DPS class and nothing else, because that’s what we are now.
Yeah, Been there donde that completed, all explorable modes usually without breaking any armor (and resurecting loads of self-proclaimed tanks and DPSs), close to 700 hours and 5000 ach points of Thief gameplay alone, God Walking Among Mere Mortals in GW1 with an assassin but yeah, I have never played the profession and can’t say the difference between GW1 assassin and GW2 Thief roles.
I didn’t list that for braging, I always try to stay humble about my peformance because I hate elitists and I play to nejoy the game, but I think you CAN’T downgrade what I say using as an argument my low or non existent experience with the profession because I think I have a very good share of experience with the Thief and wouldn’t post what I said about support Thief viability without being absolutley convinced from my own experience and success during months of play.
When you exit your ninja tunnel and can see the light of how versatile Thief is instead of sniffing at other opinions and use arguments from your imagination like that they’ve never play the Thief just so you can dig deeper in your dps tunnel, I recommend you to try support builds and be of some real help to your party.
Thief is the most underrated support class in the game ( so much that many assume he can’t and never try it) but he can excel at that. I’ve been playing it months amd I’m having a huge lot of fun and success with it and I highly recommend it. You still can do a lot of damage (and of course more than paper canons that stay as corpses most of the time lowering the whole team dps while they resurrect him) and you really feel like your team is having a lot more of success because of your job.
The GW2 Profession is called Thief and not Assassin for a reason. Yes, it can do some great dps like the assassin and other games rogues, but it’s a far more versatile profession than that.
If you want to sniff at that and stay in the ninja tunnel that’s fine, but then don’t cry if being a dps and try to survive becomes more difficult because you can do more stuff than raw dps.
It’s possible that our DPS builds might need some boosts to excel in PVE specially after the last patch, I agree and I hope people who like DPS builds can have them fixed, but that’s very different than deciding the whole class is garbage because you’re limited to only DPS roles.
I am also of the opinion that Thief support is lacking currently compared to most other classes. It’s an unfortunate state of affairs, but that is what I see to be the case right now after rolling a full set of level 80 alts.
So I’m genuinely curious as to what specific things that you tend to on your thief to support your team that is better done on a Thief than any other class. So far the obvious ones that have been outlined include: stealth ressing/skipping, venom share (which is quite lacklustre in PvE tbh), blast finisher spamming, and defiance stripping.
These support options are all quite situational and require every member of your group to have good communication and know exactly how the Thief mechanics work and exactly when you’re going to be using them. For instance, I’m sure we’ve all had times where we tried to stealth an ally for ressing and he/she keeps on autoattacking, getting one or both of us killed, and times where we spent all our initiative to strip defiance from a boss waiting for a strategic moment to cc when a teammate just throws a random stun at it for no apparent reason.
The Thief shines in a team with good communication and understanding of its mechanics, but this is nowhere near a given for most practical PvE groups that most Thieves are forced into. And in these groups, I can see why we’re considered inferior in terms of support compared to the more “universal” support options of other classes like Mesmer’s portal, time warp and boon sharing, Warrior’s group damage boost through fury and might, Guardian’s group damage mitigation, healing and boons, Elementalist’s passive regen/active healing + boon stacking through fields and auras, Engineer’s vulnerability stacking through explosives, Necro’s group condition management, and the guaranteed multi-res skills that most other classes have.
Unless you have something more specific and valid to add to the list of things a Thief can bring to a group better than any other class, I think it’s disingenuous to just call the state Thief support A-OK without juxtaposing them at all to options that other classes have available.
Yeah it hurts. Thief was my first class so i can safely say ive learned the ins and outs so i dont fold easy, and I can say ive brought more to the table than guardians, not in the form of buffs but in flat out making a dungeon easier. COF Path 3, I can stealth everyone past the bombs. COE I can Infil Arrow across the lasers making it so thats one less you have to worry about. COF Path 1, I can shadow step past the flaming boulders. I can rez when most cant thanks to shadow refuge. I dont need a stealth kit for hacking making me favored amongst my friends for those objectives. The dredge boss in FOTM, I can literally pull him into the oil aoe with scorpion wire making the fight 5x easier for you. when played well, we can make dungeons easy.
While I personally love having thief in my group, just like I love having good elementalist, ranger, warrior, mesmer, engineer, necromancer or even guardian , and while I do play with guardian -not thief- as my main, I still need to point out something here.
- You can stealth, granted.
- No need to Infil Arrow. Everyone should be able to do little jumping, even backwards.
- No need to shadow step, it’s should be easily doable by any player worth their salt no matter the class.
- Yes – you can stealth, granted.
- Yes, you can still stealth.
- Isn’t scorpion wire under same (defiant) rules as every other pull? Such as guardian GS#5 (guardian, who’s bringing way less to table)? But yeah, you’ve 1200 range instead of mere 600. Then again, its rare to see failure here simply because mining suit was moved too slow..
Anyway, don’t get me wrong. I love having thief in my group – you just had bad arguments. I love praising (good) thieves for their clusterbomb-spam on (water)fields, their large arsenal of blind and the damage they bring to the table – compared to poor little guardian-fellah.
Have fun
Yes scorpion wire is affected by defiant stacks. For that fractal I tend to use pistol offhand to headshot the defiance away and then scorpion wire. =)
Cluster bomb is another great example of Thief utility. I love it when rangers use their healing springs because it means I can literally do over 9000 (!) points of AoE healing in that period. With all the fire fields that tend to go around I can pretty much keep my entire party at full might stacks using melee range cluster bomb alone.
(edited by Kaon.7192)
Bump…
If there is a limit can it be implemented in a more stable fashion? Let me give an example…
Currently I can post items as fast as I please, up to about 5-7 items, then I can’t post anymore for an unknown time.
Instead, why don’t they implement an unlimited number of postings, but make a 2-3 second gap between each posting.
What this would accomplish is obvious, no one person could post a flooding number of posting at extreme rates however when posting large quantities of items you could still get into a rhythm.
I think it is human nature to become more custom to rhythmic posting methods than the current “all” than “nothing” style the trading post currently uses. It just becomes frustrating to be blocked and not told how long it may be before you can post again.
That would be horrible for most casual TP usage scenarios:
Say you just did a fractal and got 3 rares and a lodestone out of it. In the current implementation you can sell all of them in succession without triggering the sell posting ceiling. But in your suggested implementation they will have to wait out the 10 or so seconds between each posting.
It should be pretty obvious which offers the better user experience.
That said, I can understand the core of your complaint. The cooldown on sell orders past the first 6 should really be adjusted lower so that we can post a bit more rhythmically even after the 6th item.
Right now, conditions are already tracked personally. Your bleed ticks are separate from someone else’s bleed ticks.
The real problem is the 25 stack limit on conditions that stack by intensity. That is where the technical issue arises. On world bosses and the like, if that stack limit is removed there could be thousands of stacks on a single mob, that has to be displayed to every single player, which would use up insane amounts of bandwidth.
I don’t buy the balance arguments because right now there is a clear imbalance toward direct damage builds in PvE precisely because of this limit.
I also find it very hypocritical that Legendaries are tradable while Ascended items are not.
Blind doesn’t work on bosses. Or their AoEs / Cleaves. I’m not talking about trash, were probably the best class to have for clearing trash.
Blind works but it’s a bit more tricky
1) AoE aren’t rly targetted, it’s like us shooting clusterbomb (Need to edit this later, ‘cause I’m not sure what I stated actually is true about clusterbomb)
2) Cleaves hit more then 1 person, only the first person gets missed. When in frac fighting the tentacles at bonus event it’s easy to see this. With blackpowder on point blank area they should be blinded at each hit. However if there are 2 melee persons hitting him (both on 1 side), only one gets missed, the other gets swinged away like a ragdoll in a crash test.So blind does work, but only if there is only 1 melee person and he’s capable of dodging the aoe. Takes some time to learn which attacks you can and which you cannot avoid with blind.
Nope, he’s talking about Champions and above. Their Unshakable buff makes blind effective 10% of the time. Which means it has a 10% chance to miss its next attack instead of 100% on any normal mob.
So yeah. It might as well not work at all.
S/P needs work, but adding a leap finisher to Inf Strike is not the way. It’s already an amazing ability. Gap closing immob for 3 init that set up a stunbreaking, condition cleansing retreat move? Its the only thing I miss about Sword MH.
The Immob from Inf strike + stealth would = effortless back arc strikes with tactical strike.
I probably should have showed the initiative use to better clarify my point. I was hoping people would understand what I meant. Anyway, you cannot spam IS/SR. You’d have one chance at it. Once you go stealth, you will have used up most of your initiative. As I mentioned, D/P is a way better weapon set right now. Why not even it a bit?
Same thing with D/P, and I don’t have any problems using BP->HS for stealth most of the time. Once you get the playstyle down (and if you trait right), the ability to stealth on demand is powerful enough to overcome the extreme cost.
Its also worth noting that IS has no cast time – this seems silly, but better players will attempt to KD/KB/Launch me from outside my BP they second they see it – even I’ve started my HS, if I get CC’d before the animation finishes, I’m out 9 initiative, CC’d, and have no stealth. With IS, this won’t be an option. You can also choose to IS without a target (meaning you’ll stealth in place), which can be considered an advantage compared to HS.
A couple of misconceptions in this post:
IS + BP is NOT spammable simply by virtue of its shadow return component costing another 2 ini. Even with the ini on stealth trait it will cost 6 + 1 + 2 ini before you can spend 3 ini to use it again. I don’t think spending all your initiative to use it a skill a second time can be considered spam. Contrast this with HS + BP, which is just 6 + 1 ini and you can see that the OP makes a fair point.
And IS is NOT an instant cast skill. The associated shadow return is, but the IS opener itself cannot be activated while CC’d, and CAN be interrupted during its brief starting animation, although the window for interrupting it is minuscule compared to heartseeker.
Mesmer sword 3 works similarly to IS and is a DOUBLE leap finisher, so I really don’t think adding a leap to the Infiltrator opening is as absurd as everybody here seems to think.
It will give more playstyle options to S/P players without imbalancing the other sword set S/D due to its lack of a weapon based combo field. I’d say it would make a fairly reasonable addition.
When used on an Elementalist, the Ele item is very poor indeed due to their insane capacity for condition removal.
But I think a lot of people here don’t quite realize how insanely overpowered a 10 second chill really is when used on a class that doesn’t have a condition removal at hand. There is a reason why most chills accessible to any class have extremely tiny durations. The 66% movement speed reduction pretty much completely shuts down a melee class and makes most ranged classes sitting ducks to friendly melees. The cooldown increase reduces their damage/utility/healing potential by quite a bit in that duration as well.
Personally the only changes I would make to it is reducing the duration to 5s and making it a ranged attack to compensate.
I’d like some way of applying burning on Pistol 2. I’m finding that condition builds simply can’t apply enough pressure to bunkers without making use of all 3 damaging conditions: bleed, poison, and burning.
But it’s probably never gonna happen. =/
I liked the idea of gaining might instead of applying vulnerability though. Then it won’t be as useless as it is now for condition builds.
We’ve had quite a few threads about this before and I’ve always maintained that Legendaries shouldn’t be something that money alone can buy.
Can’t be bothered to find the exact quote but wasn’t wielding a Legendary supposed to mean you have mastered multiple areas of the game, and not just CoF P1 farming or power trading? This was what distinguished Legendaries from any other weapon skin. As long as it remains tradable it will be just another weapon skin, nothing Legendary about it.
Either way I can’t see them reverting the decision now that the cat is out of the bag. The backlash from the people who have only been farming or trading in hopes of buying their legendary will be too great.
(edited by Kaon.7192)
In my opinion the problem is not with the listing fee, but rather the fact that you can undercut an item worth 100g by 1c (which is the same price, for all intents and purposes) and have it sell earlier than someone who listed the item before you.
This essentially makes the current market a First In Last Out system for high price, low volume items. It doesn’t matter how low a price you list the item at initially. Another seller can come along and post the item AFTER you, for 1c lower, making essentially the same profit margin, yet sell his item BEFORE you do. In a fair market, to get ahead of the queue, you should be willing to take a loss to your profit margin. Currently, no such loss needs to be incurred, so everybody engages in it to get ahead. (Before someone starts telling me 1c is a loss: No, on these types of items, it’s a rounding error at best.)
The listing fee only compounds this problem by discouraging further competition from the original seller to drive down the price, significantly slowing the pace at which items drop down to equilibrium price.
I strongly believe a minimum undercut (and/or “uppercut”) threshold that scales with the item’s current listing prices would make the system a lot more fair to both buyers and sellers by respecting the First In First Out nature of the market for all items, not just those with high trading volumes, and promote healthier competition by allowing item prices to reach equilibrium much faster.
(edited by Kaon.7192)
On my mesmer, with one build, I can be effective in 1v1s, small skirmishes, as well as zerg fights while my Ranger seems unable to do this. The pet dying so quickly and easily in zerg fights is one part of this.
Rangers are able to do it. Just equip a long bow, throw down a spike trap, and be mindful of your barrage and you’re going to make a big difference. A well placed barrage from 2 or 3 rangers will make rushing forward a lot less appealing to an attacking army, and when they finally do come charging in switch to axes or some other close quarters weapon and micro your pet.
I just don’t like the big battles and tend to avoid them – but longbows are pretty strong in WvW.
Hi Robert,
It’s very encouraging to see you being active in the Ranger forums. This kind of communication between devs and players really does help in reassuring players that their concerns are being taken into consideration when ANet makes balance changes and offers some much needed insight into ANet’s agenda.
I would love to see the same kind of player-dev interaction in the other class forums as well. All of them have many valid concerns but most are practically void of proper dev responses. I’m sure that internally at ANet, you must have a decently balanced representation of each profession. So, if you could get ahold of some of your colleagues who can be considered “representatives” of other professions, and encourage them to take some time out of their busy schedules and actively participate in forum discussions as you have recently, I think that would do much toward improving ANet’s apparent lack of communication and transparency, and make many players happier as a result. =)
Keep up the great work!
Lewis.
P.S. I noticed the number after your account name is 1327… Ever thought about changing that third digit to a 3 with your admin powers? =D
My anecdotal 2c on Thief’s awesomeness in speed clears:
When my guild runs the harpy fractal, I can stealth my party through the entirety of both platforming portions using a combination of Shadow Refuge and Smoke Screen blast spamming and coordinated short stops along the way.
Never aggro’ing a single harpy.
Near vendor value commodities with extremely high trading volume are your safest bet. One example is elder wood logs. These kinds of items limit your losses to under 20% and should increase in price along with inflation if it were to hit the economy in your time away.
Others have already pointed out the usefulness of vigor on heal so I won’t repeat them.
Pain response is actually a very handy “burst” condition removal for 45s cooldown.
Against condition heavy builds it completely negates their openers since it removes the 3 major damaging conditions.
The regen is a very nice bonus too, especially if you’re heavily specced into healing power like me. In fact it tends to be more efficient than assassin’s reward since the heal proc’d by that trait is limited by initiative regen, which gives it a maximum of somewhere around 3.5k heal over 45s with default ini regen rates. The 2.5k from the 10s regen + condition dmg mitigation on this trait compares favorably if you put it into perspective.
(edited by Kaon.7192)
I think the forums would greatly benefit from this addition.
I know that it is possible to easily navigate from 1 dev response to the next, but in many threads, finding that first response is practically impossible due to their lengths.
Please add a link near the beginning of the thread to jump to the first Dev response where one is available.
Excuse me if this has been suggested before or if there is already a way to do this.
I’m sorry, you lost me at protection against bots is a technical restriction.
Let me begin by saying, this is by far my favorite feature in any game I’ve ever played, not even exaggerating. =)
As much as I love this feature, it is in a pretty rough state right now when it comes to polish. So I would like to document some of the issues I’ve found with it so far:
1) Crafting playlist never plays
If you open a crafting interface, after the current track ends, you get complete silence.
2) Boss music playlist is not randomized
This is really problematic when you’re like me and have over 50 tracks in the playlist.
3) In PvP, battle music often fade out to silence as soon as a battle is about to begin ._.
Anti-climatic much?
4) Occassionally, music from ambient playlist gets played in PvP (and other times when battle playlist is supposed to play?)
Really destroys the atmosphere when it happens…
5) Main menu music fades to silence once the loading screen begins
These should really last until the end of the loading screen. Right now my menu music last on average about 5 seconds. It would be nice if it played starting from the launcher as well but that’s probably not a trivial change.
6) Certain game music overrides our playlist choices (especially in dungeons)
Really would like to be able to turn this off. The CoF and CoE themes are getting really old now.
Feel free to add to the thread any issues you’ve noticed.
I think it’s reasonable to infer that if this behavior was by design, the dev wouldn’t have had to ask what the error message was, as the steps described in the preceding posts were fairly specific. Thereby it is reasonable to infer that this was unintended behavior, i.e. a bug.
Any problems with that logic?
Also, this: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Trading-Post-6-Stack-Sell-Cap/first#post808444
You mean, you’d need extra 950 AR for lvl 80?
No, you need it to live through the current damage of Level 50 Jade Maw.
Healing Springs + 4 Cluster bomb spam = 6k AoE heal per second.
Fields have a cap on how many times they can combo, as far as I know. I think the number is 5.
Really? I’ll have to test that out later with a longer field but I’m almost certain I’ve blasted healing springs more than 5 times before, with the healing proc’ing every time. It lasts 15s after all, you can get in quite a few cluster bombs in that time period.
This is just a theory, but 4 thieves + 1 ranger should be able to out heal agony until it does over 6k per tick.
Healing Springs + 4 Cluster bomb spam = 6k AoE heal per second.
Regen from healing springs and extra healing from shadow refuge could add up to another 1k to that depending on how the Thieves are traited.
OP mentioned that he was kicked from CoF runs because he was a Thief.
Does this actually happen to anyone else? ._.
I’ve pugged CoFs, CoEs and Fractals at least dozens of times each and haven’t ever been kicked just because I play a thief.
Maybe I just happened to be lucky so far?
A legendary should not be something that money alone can buy.
That is how I feel. Feel free to disagree.
Best part is when it activates and bam: Lupicus reset…
Oh I know right…
This was happening to me so many times last run I gave up and went to WvW to reset my traits.
There is something seriously wrong with both the trait itself and Lupicus’s reset trigger.
that’s a notification program, not a bot. a bot would go one step further: take those notifications and place bids for you. I expect it’s that human bidding component that makes that notification program legal.
Yes but I think his point is, with the notifier, it is relatively easy for a human player to react upon his item being “uppercut” (it’s what I call it) almost immediately and uppercut the new price himself. So the phenomenon observed by OP can be easily attributed to the notifier since it’s a relatively popular program.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Error-Selling-in-Auction-House/first#post668652
According to the dev reply here it seems to be a bug.
I tried this out in the mists for a while and with or without the 6th Mesmer rune piece, the daze on my Tactical Strike would end right before the start of the third hit in my sword auto attack chain.
Can anyone confirm whether or not the 33% daze duration worked at any point?
I’m a bit curious as to what would happen if you transmuted a Legendary with the stats of a non-max stat weapon of a different stat distribution, say a lvl 80 Masterwork. If the Legendary ends up having the same stats as a lvl 80 exotic (max-stat) with the transmuted weapon’s stat distribution, that would mean it works as we expect.
If someone would try that and report on the results then it could lend us some insight on how the stat scaling would work once ascended weapons are introduced.
Posting here at moderator’s request: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Remove-stealth-on-miss-evade-block/first#post1356947
There have been times when a thief stealths and I start moving around, dodging etc to avoid a backstab. It works and I see a “Evade” or “Block” or “Miss” or “Invulnerable” message on my screen, but still no thief. This gives them yet another chance to fix the botched attack.
It seems to me that these missed attacks should unstealth the thief. They mucked up. Now pay the price. How do they get to have yet more shots when I lucked out once by dodging at the right time?
As a thief myself, I absolutely agree with this.
If you miss a backstab you shouldn’t be allowed to repeat it every half a second until you land it.Miss should bring you out of stealth at the very least, so you can’t spam any more stealth attacks. Revealed debuff probably shouldn’t be applied here since there’s no damage being done.
With this changed, those GC BS builds might finally have a high enough skill barrier to match that burst potential.
Agreed and disagreed. “Miss” on itself shouldn’t bring us out of stealth, what if I accidentally pressed attack while my enemy was still on the horizon? (for example my cat tripped on my keyboard). I’m a thief, and I wouldn’t mind being unstealthed when the attack is blocked, blinded or evaded however.
Missing means the thief failed to land the attack, plain and simple. It is a mistake on the thief’s part, whether it be from a genuine positioning error, misclick, cat on keyboard, or any combination of the above. Mistakes should have opportunity costs. And the opportunity cost for missing a backstab right now is about half a second before you can backstab again by just spamming 1, which I honestly don’t think is enough for a skill that can easily turn the tides of battle once it landed.
Posting here at moderator’s request: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Remove-stealth-on-miss-evade-block/first#post1356947
There have been times when a thief stealths and I start moving around, dodging etc to avoid a backstab. It works and I see a “Evade” or “Block” or “Miss” or “Invulnerable” message on my screen, but still no thief. This gives them yet another chance to fix the botched attack.
It seems to me that these missed attacks should unstealth the thief. They mucked up. Now pay the price. How do they get to have yet more shots when I lucked out once by dodging at the right time?
As a thief myself, I absolutely agree with this.
If you miss a backstab you shouldn’t be allowed to repeat it every half a second until you land it.
Miss should bring you out of stealth at the very least, so you can’t spam any more stealth attacks. Revealed debuff probably shouldn’t be applied here since there’s no damage being done.
With this changed, those GC BS builds might finally have a high enough skill barrier to match that burst potential.
(edited by Kaon.7192)
@ Kasma, I don’t think you’re fully understanding. Thieves, in order to do the “OP dmg” they do, sacrafise a ton of defensive stats and with such low health pool and only access to medium armor (not complaining about that) it balances out. Warrior on the other hand, can go full power/vit/toughness, have minimal crit dmg and still plow through people. They’re brutes in both defence and damage nothing to sacrafise for them so they hardly even need mobility with how much damage they can take. I’ve messed around on a bunker build warrior with a hammer in spvp a couple times. I lived, with 3 or so players attacking me for almost a minute. Was hardly fighting back, I just would dodge, stun break, or knock down/back a couple times. I also managed to down a player but he got back up since I was unable to finish them off. Point being, even a complete idiot at warrior (me) they can perform greatly. Thief takes knowledge to get the skill you’re describing, which not many have (talking to you, HS spamming thieves out there).
The majority of stats do not come from the trait tree. You honestly think that losing 50-200 power is going to make a big difference, considering the great burst a Thief has?
You’re comparing two different playstyles here. The Thief doesn’t really need a ton of vitality or toughness, when they have next to permanent stealth, and a ton of movement skills on top.
I will just quote everything you said, its pretty much proof that you don’t play either of the classes.
This is why we have such a problem, people are just screaming OP when they have no idea how to deal with thieves.
Its more of a learn to play problem then anything.
I mean, everything you said in the post above is absolutely ridiculous, none of that is viable, why would you waste your heal/your dodges/and be forced to TURN 180 degrees to roll back, do you have ANY idea how clunky and stupid that alone sounds?
Screaming overpowered? Did you even read what I wrote? None of what any of these professions do, in terms of movement, is overpowered. I was simply just debating that the Thief is the best when it comes to traveling and mobility, as it should be. I don’t know what you’re talking about?
It is perfectly viable. You use your healing skill as the first skill, when you have to move from one place to the next, so it will have recharged when you get there (Withdraw has a recharge of only 15 seconds). The effects I mention come from traits: Vigorous Recovery gives you get 10 seconds of vigor when you use a healing skill, meaning you aren’t wasting your dodges at all. Expeditious Dodger gives you 2 seconds swiftness whenever you evade/dodge. Preparedness gives you 3 extra initiative, which you can easily save. And Kleptomaniac gives you 3 initiative whenever you use Steal. Roll for Initiative automatically gives you 6 initiative.
Yes, I realize how awkward it sounds, but having play it, I also know how easy it is to turn 180. If you seriously think that pressing three keys in rapid succession is difficult, you must not be very good at this game. No offense meant.
Re: Withdraw.
On my condition build I roll with Balthazar and use it as an aimed fire blast burst and rarely ever miss. It’s an amazing healing skill that just takes a lot of skill and practice to aim it at exactly where you want it to go without wasting time. Call it a high skill ceiling.
On a different note, I already posted this in its own thread fearing that it’d get drowned by all the noise here. But as a formality, I’ll drop this idea here too anyways:
Leap finisher on infiltrator strike. This should give some much needed synergy between the offhand pistol and main hand sword and access to stealth albiet a costly one like that in dagger pistol.
Thoughts?
What game mode do you play?
A bit of everything. Why do you ask?
I think most people here will agree with me that sword pistol has not been getting a lot of love lately.
The semi-stunlock burst from pistol whip used to be the highlight for this weaponset, but now that it hits practically the same as an auto attack chain in terms of damage, its usefulness outside of quickness bursts has become quite limited.
Right now there is very little synergy between the mainhand and offhand weapons in this set. Personally I love mainhand sword for its hard hitting cleaving autoattack and the always ready stunbreak from Infiltrator strike. I also love the offhand pistol for its on demand interrupt and the smoke field from blinding powder. But when you put the two together, not much happens besides a haste dependent rooting multi-hit attack that deals less damage than backstab + c&d in a longer timeframe.
Unlike our other mainhand sword melee set and our other offhand pistol melee set, s/p lacks synergy in that there is no way to use the offhand skill to gain stealth and lead into the mainhand’s stealth skill. Sword dagger has the obvious c&d, while dagger pistol has the leap combo from blinding powder and heartseeker.
In my opinion the most logical way to remedy this and give this set some much needed love is to grant infiltrator’s strike a leap finisher, much like heartseeker and many other gap closers available to other professions.
This will make the set a lot more dynamic to play, giving it some much needed tactical depth, much like the dagger pistol set, which is quickly becoming a favorite in higher level play. Adding a leap won’t horribly imbalance our other sword set, s/d, either since it doesn’t have access to a weapon based combo field.
Any thoughts?
This is what I like:
When a necro is life draining you in stealth hit him with tactical strike using sword main hand.
This will end his life drain and daze him.
I suggest 30SA to regen hp in stealth. Improves survivability a lot.
Instead of calling “OP” or “This isn’t fair…” respond with a way to defeat said annoyance.
That works well in theory, but in practice trying to land a tactical strike on someone who is in a channel almost always hits the front since he turns to follow exactly where you are.
To add to the topic at hand, I think channeled skills should break after the Thief has moved past a certain distance threshold.
If the thief is an idiot and stays in the same spot after going into stealth, then by all means he deserves to be hit some more. And if the opponent is prudent enough to use an immobilize or CC to keep the Thief in place beforehand, then similarly he deserves to keep getting hits on the Thief.
(edited by Kaon.7192)
Healing/sustain is actually one of Thief’s strongest points if you’re willing to trait for it.
30 points in Shadow Arts for XI alone will give you about 300 hp/s in stealth, without any additional healing power. With SA III you can also get regen for 5s which brings the regen up to about 400/s. This is still with 0 additional healing power.
With these two traits your Hide in Shadow basically becomes a full heal if you don’t have too much extra vit, and so does your Shadow Refuge if you don’t break stealth early.
Combined with dagger offhand you won’t need your healing skill in most fights in PvE thanks to the insane sustain and the aggro drop that comes with stealth.
As for condition removal, also in Shadow Arts is IV that removes a condition every 3 seconds while stealthed. Note that this 3 second cooldown spills over to the next time you stealth. So if you have 2 conditions, the first c&d will drop the first in 3 seconds and run out 1 second after, but the next c&d will drop the other condition after only 2 seconds. This is hands down one of the most efficient passive condition removals in the game at the moment.
Personally, I think that shortbow already packs enough power and utility without needing 1200 base range.
However, the ‘Unload’ skill could be specifically buffed to 1200 range. After all, its only purpose is dealing raw damage, without any additional effects. This alone would buff the P/P set without altering in the sligthtest the balance for other sets, thus, making the P/P more attractive in a given situation over the all-dominant shortbows.
Yes I agree that shortbow in it’s current form is a very versatile weapon.
However, thieves being the only class to not have a 1200 range auto-attack is still a glaring balance issue that needs to be addressed in some form.
I understand the need to have certain classes excel in certain areas at the cost of being mediocre in others, but as far as I can think of, no other class is missing something that EVERY other class has access to. At least not something as fundamental as auto-attack range.
(edited by Kaon.7192)
Just a quick question.
I’m looking to do this path with my guild sometime in the future and am wondering:
Can anyone confirm whether or not the regen can be decreased with poison?
I’ve been trying to get some attention for this issue for a while now with no success.
EVERY other class has at least 1 weapon option with a 1200 range auto-attack.
Even the ones that ANet specifically said to be melee-oriented in their design (Warriors have rifles and Guardians have scepters).
Not having a 1200 range option means complete misery when up on walls trying to defend a keep. Cluster bomb isn’t spammable long range because of the horrible projectile speed, and once we’re out of initiative we’re forced to just sit there like an idiot and not contribute at all to the battle.
This is one of the most glaring class imbalances in the game in my opinion, and really does need to be addressed.
(edited by Kaon.7192)
THIS. I have 2 identical EL Tonics that I WANT to sell but can’t.
Same with the Endless Halloween Tonic.
The thing that bugs me the most, is that when Legendaries were first introduced in a TwitchTV broadcast, everybody was excited for these cool visual effects, but comforted by the fact that equipping one of these rare weapons shows a certain amount of dedication and mastery of several aspects of the game. It wasn’t just something which you could buy… because you had to show, without a doubt, that you had mastered gameplay in certain ways. You weren’t just some skill-less monkey pressing buttons.
Powertrading is one area of skill. I’ll give you that. But everybody who is wielding a legendary weapon is supposed to have mastered more than one area of the game, but you can certainly now master just one area and call it a day. I don’t call Arenanet any sort of a “pay to win” company, but I really truly think this design decision is based on something other than the Fun Question.
This is what I believe as well. I’m a power trader myself and can easily afford to just trade my way to a legendary at these prices. But I really don’t want to see them reduced to just another skin.
A legendary should not be something that money alone can buy.
1) Give a bit of karma. Because isn’t that how karma is supposed to work?
2) Give event participation credit. Probably on the same level as several mob kills.
Thoughts?
I have 2 endless tree tonics…
Needless to say, I support this suggestion.
YES. I accidentally did this too while trying to kick someone from party. =/
There definitely needs to be a confirmation prompt for this.
I’m running a main monitor and a smaller extended one to the left side and often click outside of the main monitor, minimizing GW2 during important fights, and usually ending up in getting myself killed…
Civ5 has this as an option and many FPS games have this baked in to begin with.
Please implement this for GW2.
As you probably know, using a blast finisher in a smoke field is supposed to grant area stealth, and using a leap finisher in smoke field is also supposed to grant stealth, but only to yourself.
There seems to be a bug in the behavior of blast finishers, whereby if an enemy is standing within the range of the AoE skill applying the blast finisher, the stealth will be cancelled immediately by the damage caused and the player is left with revealed status. This makes blast finishers completely unfeasible for gaining stealth in most combat situations. This is easily reproducible using Smoke Screen and Cluster Bomb on a Thief near any enemy.
For contrast, when leap finisher is used in a smoke field, say Heartseeker in Black Powder, stealth will be applied even if the Heartseeker lands on an enemy and inflicts damage. Note that if you use Heartseeker the enemy a second time while stealthed from the first one, you will be revealed, which seems to be the correct behavior.
So the issue here seems to be that leap finishers are applying damage before the stealth effect, and blast finishers, the other way around, which completely breaks the Stealth functionality in many combat situations.
(edited by Kaon.7192)