Guild Wars 2

It was very much a needed nerf. They had waay too much burst for a single combo.

An indirect buff they got was the removal of counterplay against confusion. Should be split for pvp. Anyway condi thieves need more condi traits honestly. There R too few

Often you also dodge behind ppl resulting in making their skills fail but that doesnt show up as an evade either

Ausfer.1853:

blitzkrieg.2451:

Translation: “I want brainless gameplay… I don’t want to actually THINK of skills I need to dodge, I just want to dodge! Anet what are you THINKING?”

Like, I’m all for rewarding more than 4s of vigor for successfully dodging an attack (ranger only gets 5s of vigor on successfully dodging btw , and it’s in a horrible trait line) , but this ….

Smh

No, it’s more like … there’s an endless amount of situations where you can dodge an attack but it doesn’t count as a successful dodge. Dodge out of an AoE that’s just going down? You don’t get rewarded. Dodge early because you anticipated your opponent’s moves, rather than reacting to the attack? You don’t get rewarded. Dodge early because your opponent has telegraphed an attack with a large windup time? You don’t get rewarded.

This design really punishes thieves for actually playing smart. The design as it currently holds, forces you to be risky by always dodging at the last possible moment, just to make sure the game recognizes it as a successful dodge. If you play smart, by reading your opponents and how they telegraph their attacks, or by anticipating what they are about to do, and you dodge before the game recognizes it as a successful dodge (because the attack hasn’t begun yet), you are effectively punished because FG didn’t apply its vigor.

This is a terrible design.

Then, you add this on top of the other changes to FG (no instant endurance regen, only vigor, and not even a lot of it) and FG is just a terrible trait to take right now.

EDIT: Actually, most of the entire Acrobatics trait line is terrible now. Anet is effectively telling us to use stealth for survival or have fun dying a lot.

Now that is something you should be shaking your head at.

Well if u dodge early because they have a long attack animation thats pretty much ur fault but also dont forget about the tons of instant casts that guardians mesmers and eles have the most of, just like stealth attacks you have to dodge them preemptively because u cant see them coming

Haze.9075:

T raw.4658:

Dueling builds are completely worthless because they aren’t viable in ANY aspect of GW2.

So unless you are dueling with a meta build or something viable its pointless.

There’s actually a large community that regularly plays in ‘dueling’ servers. So if this is what a player wants to do, it’s perfectly reasonable to look for a dueling build. Furthermore, duels happen on a regular basis on / off points of spvp and with the introduction of Guild Hall, there will be plenty more opportunities for dueling. It’s far from ‘worthless’.

As for OP, look into metabattle and you’ll find some builds there.

Ppl go there to hone their skills on their conquest builds. Dueling is a fun way to practice but when you go there with a cheesy 1v1 build it loses its purpose.

So yeah you missed the point entirely

SB is, like u said a utility weapon. If they restored its poison upkeep capability to its earlier state and add a bit more leap range to skill3 it would be perfectly balanced. So

• choking gas should cause a longer poison on its last tick like 6s, so ppl staying in it get punished,( it was only used against downed bodies anyways and its still weak foe condi specs)

• disabling shot has such little leapback that always get hit by melee attackers right after the evade frames before the skill finishes casting

• it has decent cleave potential, but its dmg isnt too high especially single target. Which is fine because it has to have its weaknesses

This post touched on the issue very well but IMO

• Guarded initiation would still be useless
• assassins reward should heal on succesful evades(up to 5times for about 200 with 0.75s ICD) and i would merge it with upper hand
• ur swindlers equilibrium would spare too much initiative but might on evade sounds great
• vuln spam on vital shot would be rather annoying im not a fan of 1stack of vulnerability getting cleansed, skills should cause 5stacks at a time at least but less often or the condi cleanses should ignore vulns under 5-8 stacks if other condis are present.

I fancy the rest of the ideas tho

Yes they have to keep in mind that taking healing power as a thief wont ever be worth it when it comes to designig heal-scaling traits.
I think chaos armor wouldnt make any sense nor perma resistance and stability but the main principle u have that there should be a lot better on evade procs i can very much relate to.

Shadow’s rejuv is in fact op, it already heals more than it should and it would be chosen by ppl even without any init gain whatsoever, the problem is with cloak and dagger its a rly high risk medium reward skill.

Sooooooooooooo true.

Thief really needs more than just vigor when other classes get 20% or 50% endurance regen flat which means that rangers get -from a minor trait- 180%endurance regen with vigor or 120without vigor(thief gets 175/100)+they get PROTECTION on the end of dodge instead of thieves getting less SWIFTNESS because its at the begginig of a dodge roll so 0.75s wasted and has the same duration as protection (2s)
Could cry for a day about other classes having more dodges and way better on dodge effects but

the point is acro -which ought to be about evades- should get feline grace revertd then the vigor on evade could move to Swindler’s Equilibrium as an addition. Upper hand is also really weak i’d suggest merging it with assassins reward but also changing assassins reward to heal on evade beforehand.

I agree that it has too much cd…
and trickery trait is pretty weak, rangers -with the respective trait- remove 2condis and gain fury while u only remove 1condi yet not even rangers use quickness. It also competes with bountiful theft which is a must even if trickery trait grows stronger in the future.

All quickness utis should get a cd reduction.

Thief is not meant to win 1v1s, it is meant to win games.

Eye of the storm needs extra effects because kitten cd stunbreak and super speed is terrible.

Zodryn.4216:

Tarkan.5609:

Zodryn.4216:

I haven’t had that issue. If anyone can reproduce it I’ll add it to the list.

it happens. quite a bit, you use 6 initiative on sb #5 and the animation and cast time and all come through, the arrow lands, you dont get ported. (cant get it on video as shadow play doesnt work for me)

btw: please add any bug that gets listed down here to your original an first post, maybe make the names of the skills/traits that are bugged fat, maybe a dev will stumble over it… dem hopes

I have had that happen, but I know why. As the arrow travels if you move to a place where it would return a pathing error, it won’t port you. It does suck. I’ve been updating the op with after each comment, but I’ll bold each skill for ease of reading. Thanks for the suggestion.

The solution to this would be rather simple. Make the shadowstep watch your location only when you fire the arrow.

CrimsonNeonite.1048:

They should perhaps revert the change to FS/LS back to what it used to, instead of having it as an evade skill, that you have to hope hits.

Personally I think it shouldn’t change to Larcenous Strike when you use the Flanking strike in the air. However, when your target evades it or something it should still switch.

Maybe i’d use SE if it was merged with upper hand and assassins reward…MAYBE

Id be more happy if they reworked the current weapon skills than releasing a new weapon type. d/p+sb is all they can buff each patch

Kicker.8203:

Cloak and dagger from outside melee range+steal results in instarevealed when you cast steal by the end

This happens with mug but without the gain stealth on steal trait

Cloak and dagger from outside melee range+steal results in instarevealed when you cast steal by the end

Shadow’s rejuvenation heals for extra ticks after you reapply stealth. About after every third tick you gain an extra tick

If you want to shoot ppl go ranger.

Basilisk venom gets triggered by sigils wasting the 2nd charge.
Basilisk venom gets consumed when people evade skills of your that wouldnt even apply it(choking gas ticks, infiltrators arrow etc) these apply to other venoms as well.

@Kocoff
Thats the whole point other builds can be played but they are nowhere near D/P.

D/P is the only viable thing. The whole weapon set and Shadow rejuv is cheesy and boring. I also went to mesmer since s/d became utter crap. Thats still more skillful than dp

D/P is strong but any other weapon set is terrible

Its still way worse than old feline grace. The other on evade traits need a huge buff in acro too and the sd weapon set needs buff in general

Assassin’s reward could be merged with upper hand. To compare, in Shadow arts 1 stealth=1200heal and about 2 initiative.

This would bring the 2 trait trees more in line.

It’s 20% max on dueling servers and people have the 20% because they can abuse changing utilities.
Necro is supposed to collect life force by nature, if u make the minimum too high it becomes a revenant. Well 20% tops. But 10% is just enough to acces a few skills from ds quickly.

My Sword/Dagger PvE Tip is: just don’t.
It’s a pvp weapon set and it is even bad for that ATM.

-Burst combined with PU is a bit too high, it shouldn’t 1-shot ppl just alone.

-The random blindspam trait is really unskillful and should be removed from the mind wrack and daze shatter, they already have countless defense mechanisms.
—-
Other than these, mesmers are fine.

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Elite Shout: OH GOD IT’S SO BAD. Seriously. Eles were always lacking in the elite department and THIS is what they give us? An Elite to make other elites better, nothing more? That’s some high level irony. It should AT LEAST function like Mesmer’s Mimic on yourself.

Agree. On top of being so bad its also boring. It should at least recharge a skill instantly on 1 ally or recharge a non-elite instantly for nearby allies.

All ele needed was a good elite. Now they get just another elite below the quality of utility skills.

MrDark.8632:

90s ICD?

This is a joke post referencing the GW1’s Smiter’s Boon: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Smiter's_Boon_%28PvP%29

If you’re serious: I can’t take this post seriously coming from an Ele.

He’s not joking.
Clearly what guardian needed was 1 more instant skill that is a Meditation.

If it was at the end of the heal I’d say alright but still it would be super-powerful because it heals and gives fury too on top of skill effects.

I guess it has happened to everyone that they engage in a 1v1 against a necro and when you think you almost got him he suddenly pops his death shroud that he piled up to 100% during last fight. This mechanism should be toned down a bit IMHO.

I’d suggest limiting life force to 50% outside combat, especially since in form of bugs there are many walls/floors in Khylo, Skyhammer and the Stronghold map that you can autoattack for free life force(which should be fixed too).

On the other hand it’s very limiting in terms of rotations when necros start at 0 life force so the out of combat life force could go up to 10% min.(which is the minimum requirement to acces death shroud).

Before flaming at me for suggesting a -partial- nerf for necro, think about that 50% life force is still plenty and that warriors lose all their adren outside fights.

good, idea, necros need current ds for ranged dmg. staff deals a low amount of dmg and they dont fix that with the specialization.

we are used that every class gets more dodges for free and get extra dodge effects “cough” basically every other class has a good on-dodge effect except thief “cough” ranger’s +20%endurance regen grants way more endurance than thief’s vigor effectiveness +50% trait, engis even have +50%energy perma, etc

Kayji.4390:

Infiltrators Return- Evade (1/4s) and return to your original location. Cure one condition.
Originally this skill was instant as to allow us to skilfully use to evade big attacks but was OP as it could also be used to port away while stunned. Anet added the 1/4s second cast time to stop us from being able to do that. While it is still useful as it is, it’s difficult to use as a way of avoiding an impending attack as it currently is.) I envision the animation being something similar to disabling shot before shadow stepping away. If take a look at the thief’s skill video for steal on the GW2 website; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFxdwi18tiQ at 0.15; this was originally going to be the animation for infiltrator’s strike but thankfully that was changed. However, maybe have that return animation replace the current CnD copy.

It doesn’t have have a CD in order to forbid the usage in stunned state. Look at Torch 4 for mesmers. With 1/4 sec cast time it’s too fast for opponents to react but you still take random hits while casting it. I’d suggest removing the cast time but making it respect the rules of aftercasts, like it does now.

Kayji.4390:

Flanking Strike- Evade and stab your foe. Apply weakness (4 sec) if striking from behind or the side
Every successful build has at least two ways of mitigating damage/recovering whether it be their blocks, their blinds, stealth etc… S/d thieves are overly dependent on their evasion to mitigate damage as other means are limited and now that vigor has been nerfed all around along with the change to feline’s grace, their one defence is kitten in the face of all around increased damage. However, it seems to me that when Anet originally designed Sword on thieves, they intedned another defensive mechanic which is weakness on the 3rd strike of the auto attack. As of right now however, the s/d set is unable to reliably apply weakness. If we compare s/d to it’s cousin d/p thief, the d/p set has access to blinds, easier access to stealth, better endurance regen from auto, and arguably better access to weakness if traiting for Lotus Poison because of their quicker auto attacks; all while having a better ability to burst than s/d. Before someone has a hissy fit towards me, I’m not saying d/p is OP, but rather explaining why it seems to be fairing much better than s/d even before the patch. Furthermore, I don’t think something like this would be OP as Flanking strike can’t be spammed if hitting the target and it also requires some prior positioning.

Adds more play: Flanking strike is easy to see and can be dodged or even blinded at the end so this would make more incentive to avoid it.

Necessary for damage trading: After dodging key skills of your enemies, other classes out-DPS you just by autoattacking. This would make it possible to have beneficial auto-attack trades for thieves.

Yes acro needs a buff just in general because ATM has just as much synergy with a D/P build as S/D because the bottom line in acro is obvious for the taking. The minor traits should already have synergy with sword, the idea of gaining vigor on any evade is good but you need to evade with 8 separate skills successfully AT LEAST, to get an extra dodge roll. Even the CD is 1 sec, so if you do 2 flanking strikes (1/2 s evades) u’ll get only 1 proc anyway. →This is just negligible. All the other evasion traits are also too weak and there should be more of them in acro.

—The problem is D/P does his burst dmg and then can leave, so he has to survive for a very short duration then they can switch to bow for cleave or go stealth. While S/D has no real burst and you do autoattack for damage if you autoattack in a team fight and do some flanking strikes u still die really fast. If you go shortbow or try to melee more carefully then u are nearly useless for your team.

—Sword autoattack is countered by blinds and blocks because even a warrior hits faster with sword (even without the attack speed increase trait or the haste trait they all have). A double hit for half dmg each on first autoattack would help a lot against their main counters while not helping much against other classes.
Dagger autoattack -in contrast- hits super fast which helps proccing sigils and has a powerful effect on each hit. (double hit, endurance gain, poison+weakness).
After running some autoattack tests on D/P vs S/D half of the time Sword half of the time Dagger wins so Sword doesn’t even have a stronger damage over time than Dagger.(Also note: too much RNG effects in the game)

—Sword has 2 attacks that do OK dmg then you do a more powerful 3rd hit with some short(2s :/ ) but useful condis. Dagger has 3 really quick hits at the start (that you can finish before sword lands a second hit). And what happens when in a fight?: your auto chain resets because you obviously have to use other skills or face pauses, Sword goes back to the weak start of the chain while Dagger gets to proc both of their sigils instantly with their quick hits and almost ignore blinds and aegis.

////Solution////: make the first attack double hit and move cripple to second attackto help land the third, and improve survivability to help staying in teamfights(for example Assassin’s reward could become a trait that heals you each time you evade with a 0.75 sec cooldown per 5 heals so during a good dodge roll if you avoid 7 things you get healed for 5 of them and the next time you dodge you can also be healed for 5 of them. Thus you are still encouraged to evade a lot of stuff at once but it can’t heal for absurd amounts.) Maybe 200 heal per evade but it would need some testing. Moreover Cloak and Dagger should get a buff because its way-way more risky to use than the smoke field+leap combo, possibly an aoe blind could be added when it hits or increased stealth time on it. Buff Acro in general and make it more sword-reliant. Add a short weakness to Flanking Strike to allow beneficial auto-attack trades & to make opponents have to dodge something at least.

Dagins.5163:

Before new expansion I would like to suggest removing ‘two part’ thing from the ability, and bringing it back to single piece. There should be just one important thing included – sword strike must be immediate like dagger strike, without any delays.

Right now, if the thief hits something, the evade is locked. It shouldn’t work this way as the survivability is already under acceptable level.

Additionally, the sword strike (boon stealing) should deal bonus damage when the thief successfully evaded an attack. The evade must be somehow rewarded. Maybe a guaranteed critical hit, allowing to drop ‘absolutely must have’ marauder amulet if played smart?

Also, death blossom begs for change since headstart, but that’s another topic.

PS: I know the devs wanted to convert all dual abilities to ‘two parts’, but that’s a bad idea if the abilities also serve for defensive purposes, while thieves have terrible passive defense.

guaranteed crit after evade sound like a really good idea for an acro trait! It could be added instead o steal recharge/evade trait or that trait needs a number increase.

Rain.9213:

considering our survivability got slightly nerfed in acrobatics line and sword sorely lacks the burst damage of a dagger/pistol set, a buff to sword damage would be nice to bring it up to par. I mean, sword still works but winning a fight with it especially in pvp is an uphill battle and d/p just works far better.

Edit: opened a new thread about this beacuse this doesn’t entirely fit the topic.

—The problem is D/P does his burst dmg and then can leave, so they have to survive for a very short duration then they can switch to bow for cleave or go stealth. While S/D has no real burst and you do autoattack for damage if you autoattack in a team fight and do some flanking strikes u still die really fast. If you go shortbow or try to melee more carefully then u are nearly useless for your team.

—Sword autoattack is countered by blinds and blocks because even a warrior hits faster with sword (even without the attack speed increase trait or the haste trait they all have). A double hit for half dmg each on first autoattack would help a lot against their main counters while not helping much against other classes.
Dagger autoattack -in contrast- hits super fast which helps proccing sigils and has a powerful effect on each hit. (double hit, endurance gain, poison+weakness).
After running some autoattack tests on D/P vs S/D half of the time Sword half of the time Dagger wins so Sword doesn’t even have a stronger damage over time than Dagger.(Also note: too much RNG effects in the game)

—Sword has 2 attacks that do OK dmg then you do a more powerful 3rd hit with some short(2s :/ ) but useful condis. Dagger has 3 really quick hits at the start (that you can finish before sword lands a second hit). And what happens when in a fight?: your auto chain resets because you obviously have to use other skills or face pauses, Sword goes back to the weak start of the chain while Dagger gets to proc both of their sigils instantly with their quick hits and almost ignore blinds and aegis.

////Solution////: make the first attack double hit and move cripple to second attackto help land the third, and improve survivability to help staying in teamfights(for example Assassin’s reward could become a trait that heals you each time you evade with a 0.75 sec cooldown per 5 heals so during a good dodge roll if you avoid 7 things you get healed for 5 of them and the next time you dodge you can also be healed for 5 of them. Thus you are still encouraged to evade a lot of stuff at once but it can’t heal for absurd amounts.) Maybe 200 heal per evade but it would need some testing. Moreover Cloak and Dagger should get a buff because its way-way more risky to use than the smoke field+leap combo, possibly an aoe blind could be added when it hits or increased stealth time on it.

Kicker.8203:

True, the blinds are a bit too much on mesmers and thieves with d/p but I wouldn’t remove all the blinds obviously just a slight nerf so that they dont spam randomly blinds on their catch-up(thief D/P 3) skill or their burst(mesmer F1)

D/P 3 should still cause blind except much shorter instead of 5sec it should be 2 sec.
Like evades don’t last longer than 0.75 sec why do blind last a year then?

Mesmer sshould have blinds removed from about 2 of their shatter skills

MadVisions.4529:

Rin.1046:

- Reduce the initiative cost of Infiltrator’s Return to 1 ini. Now it no longer breaks stun

sry?

also my openion on buffing non d/p builds:
- the stabbing autohit part and Larcenous shoud have faster execution time or some other way to allow it to hit more reliably like a 150 unit dash/jump(or this seems too op?? o.O).
- also flanking strike shoud turn in larcenous whan hit is evaded or blocked.
- C&D should give longer stealth
- Assassin’s reward should heal way more or get a 100% rework
- all abilitys that provide “evade” should start with cancel action when button is pressed. (really inportant! many times you are unable to evade things couse you are out of endurance but in mid animation so skill have to finish casting to start lets say flanking strike)
- deadh blossom should have bigger range
- thief needs some access to defensive boons.

all things in short i can think of in 3mins.

Making the thrusting skill 150 range movement skill would really help landing the skills. especially since they have a narrow hit-cone. and you have to stand in place to hit someone who is moving around :/ . But then it would suppress dodge rolls during the cast like other movement skills so the cripple should move to skill 2 instead. that would help too

C&D does need some kind of a buff but id prefer a blind.

Assassin’s reward, death blossom need a buff indeed. (death blossom is like the only condi dmg skill on the weapon set wth?!)

cancel action stuff is also a good idea on evade skills

Tarkan.5609:

Rin.1046:

MadVisions.4529:

Rin.1046:

- Reduce the initiative cost of Infiltrator’s Return to 1 ini. Now it no longer breaks stun

sry?

What do you not understand? It used to break stun then they changed it so it no longer break stun, but the ini cost remained at 2.

Edit: Ok, it never technically broke stun, but it could be used to get out of range while stunned, and that was changed by adding the 1/2 second cast time. This was often just as good as a stun break.

1/4 cast time, still feels like ages but it was necessary
would welcome that reduced ini cost and any defensive buff in acrobatics (even though that should be active defenses), generally a whole rework of quite some traits (fleet shadow… really? this is not a stealth line and it also gives you some swiftness already… doesnt make sense)

I don’t get why didn’t they just made Infiltrator’s return an instant like torch 4 on mesmers(u can NOT cast it while stunned, respects aftercast, has aftercast so act like a cast time skill except it has none.

This pulsing behavior on tornade is really passive, boring, useless, and predicatble. They should rework all the skills imo. Skill that have animation and more active play.

Pulsin aegis would be broken tho. It’s ture that they should add some extra toughness and vitality like other transforms.

I think u guys misunderstood the original post. He’s saying that D/P is op compared to all the other wepaon sets on thief leaving you no choice but to run D/P. Overall D/P is about balanced or slightly too good

True, the blinds are a bit too much on mesmers and thieves with d/p but I wouldn’t remove all the blinds obviously just a slight nerf so that they dont spam randomly blinds on their catch-up(thief D/P 3) skill or their burst(mesmer F1)

Lukas.7159:

Ask yourself: what keeps you playing pvp atm? Theres bad matchmaking, no ladder, absurd Q-times, even worse rewards, bugs that should be fixed YEARS ago and after the community literally screamed for new maps we get….pve kitten.

They should add encouraging rewards like legendaries to ladders, make them really show your skill not and not just how much you’ve grinded.
Seemingly easy bugfixes like mid-air immob or walls and floors that can be hit for 100% death shroud.
They could add 2v2, 3v3 sinlge-elimination rated arenas, no need to overcomplicate: just add a few bridges and pilalrs and done.
Stronghold as of now is too pve oriented and run back and forth with supply, but if you take these away from it it’s quite fun. Supplies should be able to be used without running back to your base. They should just remove the guards, archers, bombers or make them invulerable to players. The lord encounter is pretty fun as well as the heros. They should just make some major tweaks and it’s gonna be great

these are powerful enough as they are thats why its meta….