Guild Wars 2

NinjaEd.3946:

Raiden.1375:

babazhook.6805:

NinjaEd.3946:

I think they should go along the lines of something a little simpler but that benefits any sort of dagger usage and the same goes for potent poison to benefit a condition build as a whole. Something like

[Dagger Training] Gain increased damage and condition duration for each dagger equipped. Off hand dagger skills refund 1 initiative if they land (dancing dagger would be limited to 1). Damage increase 5%. Condition duration increase 5%.

[Potent Poison] Increase condition duration by 15%. Poison deals an additional 15% damage.

That an interesting idea on dagger training but I really do not think 5 percent duration increase will help a lot. I assume you talking about all durations rather then just poison? 5 percent extra damage is exponentially better then 5 percent increase to condition duration.

We already had 5 percent extra rolled into daggers baseline. In power builds there are NO issues with daggers ability to inflict damage and I do not see why they need to be boosted damage wise yet again.

I still feel applying poison via dagger training is the way to go .

I agree that daggers don’t really need another 5% damage bonus since the last one was already rolled into daggers baseline. I also don’t think there needs to be 2 general condition duration increasing traits in the same line.

Not sure if you guys missed it, but what do you think about my last suggestions, including the one for Dagger Training?

Its a neat idea except that d/d isn’t the only condition set that can have dagger in the mix so I’d hate to see p/d punished when it already is underperforming in pvp (only works in wvw because of condi foods). There needs to be more welcoming traits for any weapon set, and d/d, although flawed, is our best hybrid weapon set and it’d be nice to see it succeed.

I know 5% damage =/= 5% condition duration but the durations on the conditions dagger applies are already fairly up there (6 sec poison, 10 second bleed). 5% is just an example anyways, the idea I was trying to put dagger training with was for either/or builds, or both for that matter. You can be strict power and would love that 10% bonus damage and rewarding CnD or you could be condition and appreciate that extra second of bleed in addition to the heavy ammo of dancing daggers in case you find a field to utilize it in. Remember its not exclusive to 1 condition type, so 10% would affect more than 2 skills which the power portion only sees.

Either way, I think our access to poison is present already but the removal of our 30% condition duration hit kitten top of the severe nerf to choking gas. If DT is kept as is it only promotes risky behavior with initiative spending and if it turns to an applicator with an ICD its either underwhelming or becomes too simple minded to put it to use in a condi burst. Dagger already has the conditions needed to function (minus swapping vulnerability with blind for CnD) as a condition set w/o the current dagger training, I much rather see a more skill based trait to bring some light to this weapon set.

I like the sentiment here. While I agree that D/D has the potential to be a condi set or a power set, I don’t think thief will ever be a hybrid class because we lack the might stacking that is available to all the classes that have had successful hybrid builds.

I don’t get the choking gas nerf either. Even if people stood in it for all the pulses, it still wouldn’t have been great because poison doesn’t stack duration anymore and SB is more of a utility weapon than anything. The duration nerf to the line was also pretty bad which is why I advocated boosting the base durations of a lot of the skills. I went with only increasing poison duration on potent poison because it fit the thief thematically and would have brought D/D up in terms of condi damage. Also any build in DA has at least limited access to poison through steal so boosting that was important. Finally both (potential) condi builds share an OH dagger so improving that was the basis for giving it an ICD with a decent duration.

Highlie.7641:

@ Sagat: I think most people assume it’s going to be a two handed weapon simply because it would take less work then say s/s d/s p/s ect.

Yeah, look at the nightmare that it is balancing pistol skills for both P/P and P/D. It’s a lot easier to give us a 2 handed weapon and balance the 5 skills around each other than worrying about the interaction with 2-3 other sets which have entirely different playstyles.

fixit.7189:

Wish they would announce thief weapon and elites soon….just want to know!

Elite speculation? This I have no idea.

Weapons? This can only be 1 of 4 possible choices imo; rifle, one hand mace, one hand axe, or one hand sword for offhand. Staff makes absolutely no sense to me for thief so I doubt it’s that….but you never know.

Personally, I am rooting for team two hand sword.

It might be last, since if they gave it to us early they’d have to go through the whole thing of “Teef specialization OP!” If they wait to announce it they can point to the other specializations. When they first announced how specialization would work they actually had to tell the stream “wait till we get to your class” because of how much it was blowing up.

Hey, keep at it. S/D is pretty difficult to pick up right now. It’s outclassed by D/P and a lot of other professions. You have to be very picky about your 1v1 targets, however you can still be a great +1er and finish off targets when they aren’t expecting it from around 50% health. Usually I come in to finish off D/D eles for the team because those that have the sustain to fight them on point don’t have the burst to finish them off. Here is a video I took recently while playing S/D (sorry it’s just a raw video, it was to show the quality of shadow play to someone in a different thread). You’ll notice that I never engage the guard in the video in 1v1. It takes a massive amount of outplaying guards to actually down them in a 1v1 because of the blocks, blinds, and heals. This particular guard was tanky so I just tried to prevent decap/cap when it was just me. The build is in the video description, but for quick reference it’s DA/CS/Tr because our defensive lines are a horrible trade-off for the loss of damage right now (at least when paired with S/D).

PS: Were you playing unranked the other day and telling your team ahead of time that you were practicing thief? Human with some firey weapons?

babazhook.6805:

NinjaEd.3946:

Maugetarr.6823:

babazhook.6805:

Well as a poison using theif who has been using the current iteration of dagger training I am going to have to disagree with you on your suggestion. It WILL mean less poison damage and will become less useful to any build that wishes to focus on daggers delivering poison.

An ICD favors those that use poison to inhibit healing and not those that wish to use poison as a main source of damage as they build up stacks. With an ICD one can only apply 2 stacks every 5 seconds. That does not work for a poison build. Even with full duration of 100 percent posion off dagger training is limited to 4 stacks (predicated on no cleanses) which does not cut it when compared to the other traits at that spot.

3 (or MAYBE 4 base) seconds durations with 50 percent app rate results in poison being a much better damage source. (I think 3 is the minimum the duration should be meaning 33 percent adds 1 second off potent with the existing potent poison)

To potent poison I think your suggestion reasonable. I was thinking perhaps one option would be to keep as is but add “on applying posion to an enemy tansfer one existing condition” but yours works as well. 25 percent might be more in line with what needed albeit I am sure the powers that be worry on the effect on Venemous Aura.

About transferring condis, skelk poison should actually transfer 1 condi per succesful strike. I think that would make it a strong contender as a heal (along with a 30 second CD).

Remove ice drake venom, no one uses it and chill is very odd for a thief to apply thematically, add [Karka Venom] Transfer condtions with your next 3 strikes. Number of conditions transfer 1. Cooldown 40 seconds.

:)

I did try out a chill based thief using Grenth , Ice drake and Ice sigils and it was not ALL bad but with the changes to duration in ice drake (even with the extra strike) the loss of 30 percent duration on the DA line and all I just do not see it as usable current form.

It does work to an extent in a venom build using Venomous aura but there much better choices for venoms (skale, Spider) meaning to take ice you give up a condi cleanse utility or drop skale or spider.

As there more condition sources added to the game , forcing one into utilities that better cleanse conditions , our ability to use those utilities drops as there no room for them. A venom that transfers a condition would seem ideal here and help open up more build types. (I intended much the same with adding that to potent poison)

I stopped using devourer venom for the same reason as well because they nerfed the base and the %duration. There’s no point in basically copying the same thing panic strike does and wasting a utility for it on a longer cooldown.

The last time I remember them coming to this board and talking with us (back and forth) was a long time ago during a balance patch preview when they were going to be nerfing the vigor duration of vigorous recovery and bountiful theft. While they didn’t change the nerf, they eventually nerfed vigor on crit on mesmers and guards to 50% uptime rather than 100%. I think our forum just isn’t very dev friendly because we basically jump down their throats about not getting the incoming nerfs.

Here

Sagat.3285:

Maugetarr.6823:

Sagat.3285:

Maugetarr.6823:

How about OH sword so we can tell Tempests that we stole their weapon?

Isn’t that rumored impossible since we have MH dagger?

I see nothing wrong with switching back and forth between D/S and S/D.

Similar Skin

It seems odd the primary reason for OH sword is because we already have MH sword but isn’t rev’s s/s what thieves want? It seems less likely then either staff or rifle to be honest but that’s just my opinion.

Well, warrior and mes also have OH sword. It seems odd that we can’t be ambidextrous as well. We’re the only class that combos our weapons (dual attacks) and can dual wield all of our other weapons (barring SB) so dual wielding our other weapon just makes sense that it would take a little more training. We’re probably getting a 2h weapon though cause it will be easier to balance.

babazhook.6805:

Obviously one problem with the introduction of the Specialization line is how it will match up with other traitlines. There are issues with ACRO and SA in particular and a few weaponsets and utilities that need a look at and the danger is that if the SPEC is what we all HOPE it will be the other traitlines will pale in comparison.

Actually I hope it’s just on par with DA, CS, and TR. We don’t need any more necessary/obvious lines (looking at you DA/Tr). That said it needs to actually be on par, so I agree with the sentiment overall.

Maybe they’ll leave it. That’s a pretty small window and they’d probably introduce a bug into mug/HT interaction again if they reduce the window.

Zero Day.2594:

Our staff spec, demo of each skill (elite skill at 1:33):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPPj6viIBmU

You know, honestly, if they’re gonna give us staff, just give us spear access on land. The only reason I say that is more skins make sense for a melee polearm with Spear than Staff (+ we can wield it in water already).

Sagat.3285:

Maugetarr.6823:

How about OH sword so we can tell Tempests that we stole their weapon?

Isn’t that rumored impossible since we have MH dagger?

I see nothing wrong with switching back and forth between D/S and S/D.

Similar Skin

babazhook.6805:

Well as a poison using theif who has been using the current iteration of dagger training I am going to have to disagree with you on your suggestion. It WILL mean less poison damage and will become less useful to any build that wishes to focus on daggers delivering poison.

An ICD favors those that use poison to inhibit healing and not those that wish to use poison as a main source of damage as they build up stacks. With an ICD one can only apply 2 stacks every 5 seconds. That does not work for a poison build. Even with full duration of 100 percent posion off dagger training is limited to 4 stacks (predicated on no cleanses) which does not cut it when compared to the other traits at that spot.

3 (or MAYBE 4 base) seconds durations with 50 percent app rate results in poison being a much better damage source. (I think 3 is the minimum the duration should be meaning 33 percent adds 1 second off potent with the existing potent poison)

To potent poison I think your suggestion reasonable. I was thinking perhaps one option would be to keep as is but add “on applying posion to an enemy tansfer one existing condition” but yours works as well. 25 percent might be more in line with what needed albeit I am sure the powers that be worry on the effect on Venemous Aura.

I know I haven’t put up the utilities yet, but my idea was to put spider venom down at a 20-25 seconds CD, which is why I reduced venomous aura to 2 stacks only. This would allow you to burst poison more frequently while keeping long stacks at somewhere around 5-7 with autos, Dagger Training, potent poison, and additionally +2 that you get from steal when taking the DA line. That number seemed reasonable as poison has a reduced healing effect. (total:7-9 continuous, burst 15 max from self)

About transferring condis, skelk poison should actually transfer 1 condi per succesful strike. I think that would make it a strong contender as a heal (along with a 30 second CD).

How about OH sword so we can tell Tempests that we stole their weapon?

babazhook.6805:

Dagger Training and Poison Uptime

I am going to disagree with you a bit on this one. Basically, I took Lotus Strike’s effect and put it into a proc across all dagger skills. What this changed for a poison dagger thief was to basically add an extra autoattack per 2.5 chains. With a condi thief seeing virtaully all the autoattack damage relying on this last skill, I thought it would make an excellent addition to their auto damage while also strengthening the intermittent dagger rhythm you would get in a P/D setup. The part I disagree with though is that dual daggers should see more of a benefit from this skill than P/D. I think they should equally benefit from picking up this trait.

babazhook

Sundering strikes concern

I did not word this properly (although I think NinjaEd got what I meant). It should increase the duration in addition to it’s current effect, making the effect that it provides 8 seconds. I will edit my wording. This would allow for the proposed P/P auto attack to put out 12 vuln as well as work nicely with the vuln bursts from body shot and Unload.

babazhook

Pressure Striking Preference

The change he was to basically unify Bewildering Ambush into it. If taken with SoH, it would potentially increase the damage of BA by 20% in addition to giving you long single stacks of a condition that punishes you for attacking the thief (and thematically made more sense to me). It is simply a matter of preference.

Raiden

Compensation concern for P/D

Well, I got to these numbers partly on what I’ve seen for other classes, but partly on also whats available to us currently. I’ll explain using Bleed Seconds (number of bleeds*length of bleeds*number of targets)/Intiative cost.

Deathblossom: 3 stacks*10 seconds*3 targets/4 initiative=90BleedStacks/4 ini=22.5 (potential)
SB: 4*3*3/3=12 (potential)

Sneak Attack (is a little tricky because you need stealth, so it either costs a utility or minimum of 6 initiative): 10*8*1/6=13.3

Yes this reasoning is in an Ideal situation against stacked targets (such as someone rezzing an ally), but at the same time what I’ve found when playing P/D is you’ll often land only 2-3 of the sneak attack shots against a decent opponent meaning that realistically you’re only dealing about half of the full damage (like realistically landing the other ones mentioned here). Sneak attack should be a dangerous attack since it requires stealth. Yes, your gear set can be safer than a power set, but the attack can also be reflected or transferred back making it decently dangerous in itself.

As for the buff to torment on P/D, I based it on mesmer scepter potential since those are also single target attacks. At its base duration and CD, Illusionary Counter puts out 5 torment for 8 seconds on a 10 second CD that can be used at range (and produces a clone that also gives a small amount torment). That’s a potential TormentSecond of 5*8/10=4. A traited scepter can be 5*8/6=6.66. If we equate initiative to seconds of CD, we get 3*8/4=6, but this skill needs to be used in close combat and limits it’s reuse by shadowstepping you away.

Overall, while these may seem strong still, keep in mind that with vuln on the auto, the damage from the set will require you to either go into close combat or use a utility to gain stealth. At range it sets itself up for an increased burst from these attacks. Overall I wanted to increase the risk of the set while increasing the potential reward from it (slightly).

Raiden

Weakness over Immobilize

My intentions for P/P to get it stronger in a longer fight. While weakness wouldn’t help the set kite, it would cut the opponents damage output while simultaneously increasing yours with the vuln. In addition, it would cut the endurance regen making it harder for people to dodge as often.



I appreciate the back and forth discussion guys

Edit:

magi

Hidden Killer – Add Unblockable.

I think this would be too strong as it eliminates the counterplay to stealth attacks (yes, there is counterplay no mater how much people want to say there isn’t).

A while ago I suggested that HK should also add +50% crit chance while having the status “revealed” similar to how Death Perception and Unsuspecting Foe work. It was met with mixed reviews so I did not include it again. The idea was to make HK useful for both D/X and S/X while allowing you to trade a little precision for Vitality.

IGN: Maugen Rawr
Thief Type: Scholar/Teacher
Server: Fort Aspenwood
Experience with Thief:
Thief has been my main since the 3 day headstart. Lately I play mainly S/D in PvP while also dabbling in a couple of other professions. Looking to learn more from thieves that are better than I am, and help bring others who are just starting out. I would consider myself average.

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Sagat.3285:

No just drop the vulnerability for blindness.

+1

I also like the idea of shadowstep on dancing dagger.

Jasher.6580:

zaxon.6819:

who cares about wvw it is a skillless blob fest. If you think winning wvw is in any way based on player skill you are fooling yourself.

I once attended a book club meeting and we started giving thoughts and suggestions based on our reading. When my turn came I firmly grabbed the book and raised it slightly, and said “Well, the book can also be… a hat!” And proceeded to place the open book on my head majestically.

I’m about 95% sure this is from family guy.

Edit: 99.995%

Raiden.1375:

• Poison Duration General Agreement

Woohoo! General agreement on an internet debate.

• Ankle Shots Trait

You could be right. Overall Ankle shots is sort of a weird trait because P/P lacks cripple output without this trait and the damage is only 30% uptime on 10% damage for a specific weapon set. Maybe they should just note the range increase and have it be a permanent +5% damage to pistols. Boring yes, but at least decent for pistols.

• Explosive Speed Trait

It’s still useful for the immobilize immunity which would allow you to dodge (gaining superspeed) and effectively cancel out the cripple you receive instead.

• Dodge Amount

Yeah, I know the endurance regen is there, but I don’t usually count it because you don’t have control over it. You have some control over FG and would have control over Fluid Strikes, but HtC has a very wide range of power that spans from awesome to “meh.”

Raiden.1375:

• Poison Duration Concern(Quotes trimmed due to character limit and improving readability)

Condi bomb was overstating it. I think we’re just not seeing eye to eye on the ramp up and duration which is fine really. I like a slower ramp for condis, but they last longer, and you favor shorter, higher damage output. I settled on 50% duration though because previously the line buffed all condis 30% and now the trait just buffs 1. While the dagger auto saw an increase in poison duration because of this, nothing else did to my knowledge, so poison should be lengthened a little more to make up for the difference.

• Sleight of Hand Trait

Again, while I agree that leaving the 1 second daze was too weak, I’m not sure about adding too much utility to it. Actually I thought it would still get taken for heal interrupts and combined with bewildering ambush/pressure striking would see lots of use still. Additional boons stolen might be the way to go or maybe just converting a boon to a condi (which would be a nice slight of hand).

• Ankle Shots Trait

Well the deception recharge-smokescreen/hidden thief – fall trait/choking shadows is what was in my head since and pistols have ample access to blind and my proposed changes put weakness on body shot too. Also if they take DA, they’d get lotus poison triggering it from steal.

• Cloaked in Shadow Trait

I get where you’re coming from on this too, I just wanted to see some out of stealth defenses too in the line that made sense thematically in the line. Shadowshot, BPS, and the proposed CnD would all trigger this allowing for some additional defense in the line when other professions reveal you.

• Vigorous Recovery Trait

The other possible option in my head for this was to make it remove cripple and weakness when gaining vigor because they removed fleet of foot. The idea in you thread is a little stronger mechanically.

• Explosive Speed Trait

A 5 sec ICD might be a useful addition as then it really would be on par with the ele one. (Yeah they finally removed the ICD from fresh air, but it’s still limited by attunment recharge, so 5 seconds seems reasonable to guard against abusing buffs from allies like guard symbols)

• Pain Response Trait

I mean condi mesmers, rangers, necros, and engis came to mind when I gave it the 3 condi qualification. That would basically ensure that their autos don’t trigger it. For limited condis, I think the change to upper hand would cover it.

Well, about merging FG and ES, there’s a couple of ways to look at it. ES either gets you a dodge ~1 second earlier or it provides 1 extra dodge every 40 seconds over regular vigor. To me it’s mediocre, so rolling 2 currently mediocre traits into 1 would make a single decent trait (which isn’t too strong I don’t think).

While fluid strikes could be powerful, I think in actuality the time off target and the way attacks land before and after the ICD would keep it in check. As soon as you back off someone, it stops benefitting you so its usefulness is entirely dependent on how aggressive you are. If it proves a little strong (or perhaps even weak during actual play) the endurance returned could be adjusted up or down. I used 5 as my starting number because of the dagger auto chain which yields 5 endurance per second as well (10 every 2.02 seconds).

Finally, yeah my Guarded Initiation is situational, but it was designed to let you drop into a fight and burst someone, like maybe into a blind well or ranger trap (as well as those auto procs I mentioned originally ).

[/quote]

tomwjd.8172:

I really like the ideas. I would also add that SE should also remove weakness condition because a long duration of it can both neutralize thief’s damage pressure while reducing effectiveness of their important defense that is dodge… also using withdraw with trickster trait should remove the condi BEFORE the heal is applied, right now when we have poison condi and use traited withdraw, the healing portion is effected by poison despite it being cleared…also healing coefficient needs to get increased by 10% as promised…

If anything, I think the acro line should remove weakness since it affects endurance regen (fleet of foot removed it IIRC).

Revealed training trait needs to remove a damaging condition upon being revealed with an ICD of at least 6 sec on top of the 200 power increase because atm it is out shined by panic strike. Also we dont want reveal utilities and passive traits from other professions to simply hardcounter us (soft counter is ok). Its hilarious to easily condi stack as an engi then put a 10+ sec reveal on the thief as they melt…

Well, as I was talking about with Jana, I’m hesitant to give an offensive line defensive capability and vise versa because I think it’s an important choice to make. I wouldn’t mind giving it more offensive capability though.

TwoShanks.4827:

I like most of these ideas, although I believe Flashing Blades would be a bit too powerful; maybe set a 10s ICD. I would also like to see SE reverted. Without it being able to remove all types of conditions, thieves can be very easily locked down with spam condition builds and it forces you to use utilities such as shadowstep and withdraw to clear them. Also, the 10% increase in healing to withdraw would be nice too.

Regardless, lets keep this topic bumped so that hopefully one GM will see this and utilize the advice.

I thought about that too for flashing blades, but the successful evasion part limits its power as well as the radius being 180 (I based the damage and radius in my head off of warrior’s reckless dodge).

I’m also trying to attach another condi clear to a dagger weapon skill, so both daggers and swords would have the option. I think that would help with the problem of getting locked down by the utility conditions.

AFAIK the healing on withdraw/oversight is a bug that needs to be fixed so I didn’t mention it, but when I address utilities, I’ll make sure to put it in.

Raiden.1375:

Abridged Poison Comments (5001 chars)

Interesting ideas. My goal though was to get back the duration on poison that we used to have. Choking gas in particular is one that I think needs longer duration poison so we have better area denial. I’m in agreement with you that even with the proposed buff to potent poison a single stack wouldn’t be very much damage, but with the large duration increase, if they took all the pulses it would be quite a dangerous skill. Leaving it at 1 stack for a longer period would be more useful for pushing bunkers off point since sitting in the skill would kill their sustain. A poison based thief should get significant more dangerous the longer you fight them, which is why I wanted less burst from poison while having more sustained damage. With these changes a D/X build could upkeep about 6-7 stacks of poison, but not be able to burst it onto the opponent unless they used a utility like spider venom on top of it. I like your ideas, I think we just have different goals in terms of ramp up and sustain. I don’t want to see thieves turn into just another condi bomb.

Sleight of Hand strength

While I do agree that this version of sleight of hand is a little underwhelming, I hesitate to add too much utility to it lest it become a manditory trait again. I think fiddling with the duration would be the best thing to do, possibly even extending it to 2 seconds so it could cover a round of auto attacks.

The Uncatchable trait is a bit weak too. This could be due to Caltrops being easy to avoid and weak in general, along with this trait’s version of Caltrops having such a small radius. It could have an added effect to look like this:

Uncatchable: Leave behind Caltrops when you dodge. Immobilize foes for 1s when you cripple them. (10s ICD)

• The immobilize on cripple would synergize well with Caltrops to make them a bit stronger.

That would be a good addition. I didn’t really think to change them since they’ve basically been the same since launch, but we have fewer dodges now with the vigor nerf and can’t extend condi duration via lines, so this seems like a reasonable and thematically fitting buff.

3) Ankle Shots issue

That is an interesting quandry. Since it’sa damage boost you wouldn’t use caltrops with it most likely so your cripple uptime would be poor. I would rather change the trigger condition to weakness because then it would play well with the suggested body shot giving you a reason to use all of your skills on P/X. If you took the proposed choking shadows also, you could actually have a fairly decent amount of weakness uptime on the opponent.

Practiced Tolerance name

Agreed. Vicious Precision maybe?
—-

4) The Cloaked in Shadow GM trait suggestion

I like it, but I think it would be too strong even without the quick pockets change. Without an ICD it could be the new PU spec, and with any reasonable ICD I think it would become the nerfed version of kit refinement where it’s sort of a happy accident when it procs. I was looking at adding some sustain while killing some of the endurance regen of foes, especially when combined with a blinding CnD if you can bait out dodges.
—-

• The Vigorous Recovery trait now increasing the duration of vigor by 25% would be redundant. We already have access to permanent vigor possibly without this trait, as we should. Elementalists have a single adept trait that grant them permanent vigor all by itself, and thieves should have equal/better access to vigor.

Well, the idea was to do something that synergizes well with the new FG and Withdraw. This would put withdraw at a 33% vigor uptime and FG at 5 seconds on proc leading to a much better vigor uptime from a single line than we have now. On the other hand, I wanted to bring back something that stacked with vigor with the proposed fluid strikes. So while we wouldn’t have it all with one trait like eles get, our potential (and hopefully actual) endurance regen would be higher. I agree that endurance regen should be top priority for the line which is why fluid strikes can grant up to 5 more endurance per second on top of vigor.

• Explosive Speed concern

I based this on the potential uptime on superspeed that fresh air ele has. Since this is in a defensive line, and we’re supposed to be the kings of mobility the uptime seemed reasonable especially when everyone except necros seems to have permanent swiftness in combat now. It would significantlyhelp with repositioning too since dodges are more precious now.

• Pain Response Concern

Yeah, this CD should probably be at 30 seconds, but since it only offers regen, I think the burst removal of the damaging conditions is fine.

Good discussion!

Jana.6831:

Still conditions eatme up, that while using SA and Trickery/trickster and 2 tricks – most tricks don’t really work with SR which is my main source for getting rid of condis and still SA only removes maybe 50% and that really slowly. So SA alone doesn’t work against condis and I don’t think that any otherclass has to take 2 “defensive” trait lines to get rid of condis. And all of them have got a higher health pool – soI don’t see why SE shouldn’t get reworked. Maybe to “Clear a condition every 1 or 2 instead of 3 seconds” and include priorities maybe although being able to clear fear is really crucial, especially in SA – I mean it wasn’t automatically but you had to think to do it – don’t see why that needs to be punished.

Well simply limiting it to damaging condis could be seen as both a strentgh and a weakness. Yes, it won’t remove everything, but if you get condi bombed, instead of leaving you to melt in stealth, it will attempt to remove all the damaging condis from you rather than removing the utility condis. Yeah, this can leave you open to getting immobilized in stealth though and taking additional damage on top of what you have already. I guess it could be reverted, but I doubt it will happen which is why I didn’t suggest it.

Jana.6831:

I don’t really know how your proposed #4 skill is meant, to be honest – likely a language barrier. I’d like it to immobilize or/and interrupt and maybe that’s what you meant, I don’t know. I hardly use that skill because it’s wonky and costs too much initative for doing so little.

This is basically supposed to be an offensive version of Infiltrators Strike. First, I’ve removed the bounce and doubled the single target damage. If you hit with Dancing Dagger, you’ll get a rollover skill replacing dancing dagger. This rollover will shadowstep you to your foe and remove a condition. This is intended to help with D/D’s lack of gap closers and utility. This would also help with the fact that Shadow’s embrace no longer removes utility condis because it could be made up for those not being removed by using this skill instead.[/quote]

Jana.6831:

1% more damage for 1 point initative left – increase the initative thief has got (both are minor traits) – that’s pretty offensive and I like it – and I liked the might I got from SA before the patch, now it’s all defensive and someone who traits into every other traitlines has got an advantage over me (especially since SA is so weak defensive-wise).

The problem is though that SA is strong enough defense-wise that they can’t really put offense back into it. I would rather other classes have to make a choice between going offensive or defensive as well when they pick a line rather than getting both. As a replacement though, if you were going 2/0/6/0/6, you can now go full into Deadly Arts and get the damage boost. I think that’s also the reason they split the lines like they did since you get a full damage line now.

Jana.6831:

I don’t need hidden thief, I’m a D/D thief. It’s a useless trait to me.

I mean, it’s a free stealth attached to steal and with the proposed damage reduction on fall and stealth on fall it would increase your survivability.

Jana.6831:

I disagree with CiS falling away completely, there are more ways to gain stealth than from using CnD as a D/D thief – I’d still like to have that trait. And Shadows embrace is not fine as it is – fear isn’t taken away from you now, so you can be feared out of your SA which you formerly could prevent and I still have to take at least 2 “defensive” trait lines in order to get rid of 70% of the conditions.
SA has been offensive and defensive before the patch, trickery still is and I think every line should be defensive and offensive at the same time so that no one has got a disadvantage for taking that line. And SA is still the best line for condi remove.
Also, your master tier has got no options for me as a solo roamer (the current line doesn’t really have either but I’d like that to be changed).
For the rest: Haven’t really read through all but you guys know that I’m a strong defender of the old SA line

I actually didn’t realize fear was no longer taken off during stealth. I can see why they did it though; It seems like they wanted SE to basically only remove damaging conditions, so I don’t think that would get reverted. Proposed Dagger #4 was intended to help with this though. Moving the blind to CnD will cover most of the blind that you need (putting it at least on the board when comparing it to D/P, but for less ini).

As for Offensive/Defensive lines, Trickery is a utility line mostly. It does weird stuff that could be considered either. On the other ones though, for thieves in particular, they made a clear delineation between Offensive and Defensive lines with Invigorating precision being the odd man out (and mug I guess). I went forward with that theme in mind.

Master tier has hidden thief for solo roaming which would have the fall trait and allow you to enter into combat with stealth. Fleet shadow would also be a strong contender on D/D to Allow for better gap closing since you can’t cancel shadowshot like you can with D/P. If you have suggestions for the Master tier, I’d be open to them. Good conversation starters.

Acrobatics

Expeditious Dodger should be 3 seconds

Pain Response should trigger on number of conditions (3) only, the same way Burning Fire does. Instead of gaining might on [type of] skill usage though, just have it remove all damaging conditions.

Vigorous Recovery should increase the duration of vigor on you by 25% as well.

New Trait: Explosive Speed: When you gain swiftness, gain 3 seconds of superspeed.

Feline Grace is probably the reason you’re skimming this. Ugh. Merge Endless Stamina into this. (Just keep reading)

Guarded Initiation should be changed to “Gain (1) stability (2 seconds) and Resistance (2 seconds) when striking a foe while above 90% health. This is honestly the auto proc to counter auto procs. If you’re tired of tempest defense, nightmare runes, mirror of anguish, reaper’s defense, etc… this is for you. ICD 10 seconds.

Hard to Catch is surprisingly fine. One of the previously worst thief traits went to one of the best thief traits.

Swindlers Equilibrium should be changed to “Reduce steal duration by 3 seconds on successful evasion” 5 second ICD. No weapon restriction.

New Old Trait: Fluid Strikes: Gain 5 endurance on hit. 1 sec ICD. This would keep your evasion high as long as you keep hitting your enemy while not benefitting you for simply dodge spamming since they didn’t like that.

Assassin’s Reward is weak. Remove it instead of monkeying with the numbers since it’s basically a worse copy of Invigorating Precision.

New Trait: Flashing Blades: Deal damage and blind nearby foes on successful evasion (radius 180, 5 sec ICD).

Don’t Stop is fine as is.

Upper Hand is currently weak. Make it remove 1 condtion and gain 1 initiative on successful evasion (5 sec ICD)

This has been reworked below in response to Daredevil

That’s it for now. I’ll add utility skill changes later (mainly focusing on tricks and venoms). If you think something is OP or UP, please give your reasoning why so we can have a discussion about it.

Critical Strikes

Keen Observer is fine as is.

Flawless Strike is fine as is.

Side Strike is fine as is.

Signets of Power is fine as is.

Unrelenting Strikes is fine as is.

Ankle Shots is fine as is.

Sundering Strikes should increase the vulnerability duration by of all outgoing vulnerability 33% (edit: in addition to it’s current effects), making it a choice between that or ankle shots for the proposed pistol and playing nicely with the suggested Armor Piercing Rounds.

Ferocious Strikes is fine as is.

Hidden Killer is fine as is.

Invigorating Precision is fine as is.

No Quarter is fine as is.

Shadow Arts

Our defensive lines need a little more help. Shadow Arts is functioning alright so there won’t be too many changes suggested (especially after giving CnD blind), but Acrobatics needs a lot of help.

Merciful Ambush is fine as is.

Concealed Defeat and Last Refuge are going to be merged and pared down. The new skill read “Create a Smokescreen (3 second duration) when your health reaches a certain level (25%). Deception abilities recharge faster (20% recharge reduction)."

Shadows Embrace is fine as is.

Meld with Shadows is fine as is.

Shadow Protector Will be moved down to Adept Tier

Hidden Thief will have the fall damage trait be merged into it. (blind on stealth will not come along for the ride as CnD blinds now)

Leeching Venoms is fine as is.

Fleet Shadow will be moved to Shadow Arts (since I’m trying to make the triggers/effects of each line distinct). It will read gain 4 seconds of super speed on entering stealth (not “gaining stealth” so this can’t be stacked with refuge, sorry).

Cloaked in Shadow will be eliminated. Since the proposed change to CnD makes it blind foes, the only skill that will technically see a nerf from this is using Shadow Refuge. Since it no longer pulsed though (to my knowledge), this should be minor.

New Trait: Choking Shadows: Blinding a foe Weakens them (4 seconds, 10 sec ICD). When combined this would pair nicely with Lotus Poison and hopefully be a choice on par with the other 2 GM traits.

Shadow’s Rejuvination is fine as is.

Venomous Aura should only share 2 stacks with your allies. Imo, it’s still holding base venoms back because of its ability to give out huge stacks of condis. Still has reduced CDs

Traits

Traits and some of our baseline abilities is where I think our true problems lie.
First, steal should be dropped down to 25 seconds to close the distance between traited and untraited steal CD’s (SoH will have its 20% removed, but I’ll get there).
Second, Preparedness should be rolled into the baseline initiative for thief.
I’ll start off with trickery since it’s our core line

Trickery

Kleptomaniac is fine as is.

Flanking Strikes is fine as is.

Thrill of the Crime is fine as is.

Uncatchable is fine as is.

Bountiful Theft is moved to the Master Minor spot, but it no longer shares the boons (keep with me for a second). This now steals full duration and stacks encouraging you to more strategically choose between using it to enter combat or after the enemy has popped a nice CD.

New Trait: Altruistic Stealing: Whenever you steal a boon, share it with your allies (radius 240). This is to help S/D be more of a support brawler and bring bountiful theft back up. This should share full duration and stacks when you steal something.

Pressure Striking will have Bewildering Ambush rolled into it. It will now be Stealing applies (5) confusion for 8 seconds. Interrupting a foe causes (1) confusion for 8 seconds.

Trickster is fine as is. Individual Tricks need adjustment.

Lead Attacks is fine as is.

Quick Pockets will restore 1 initiative on weaponswap and reduce weapon swapping to 5 seconds.

Sleight of Hand will have its daze increased to 1.5 seconds.

New Trait: Armor Piercing Rounds: Pistol Shots Pierce. Vulnerability increases damage and condi damage by 1.5% instead of 1%. This is an amalgamation of Fragility and Lead the Wind . I Thought it also played nicely with the suggested changes to pistol. It also allows for better balancing due to part of it’s strength being position dependent.



Deadly Arts

Our Offensive Lines are in a decent spot and there will be minimal suggested changes.

Serpent’s Touch is fine as is.

Dagger Training should be changed to “Dagger attacks have a chance to inflict Poison (100%), Duration (6 seconds), ICD (5 seconds). This would allow for the offhand attacks to be more useful and the duration buff from potent poison to be more useful.

Mug is fine as is

Trappers Respite needs to drop the trap at the beginning of the heal

Lotus Poison is fine as is.

Deadly Trapper is fine as is.

Panic Strike is fine as is

Revealed Training is fine as is.

Exposed Weakness is fine as is.

Executioner is fine as is.

Improvisation is fine as is.

Potent Poison is weak. In the same tier for physical damage, you get executioner which buffs all outgoing physical damage if the requirements are met, and conditions aren’t even affected by exposed weakness, so any build you’re using this on is getting hit double. I think it should be changed to Poison deals increased damage (20%) and has increased duration (50%). Since we lack condtion variety (specifically burning) this would help bring up some damage to condi builds. Shortbow (with the proposed change) would actually be good area denial. This would also help make up for exposed weakness which is useless for condi builds. Dagger auto in condi builds would also become a decent threat (being able to put out 4.5 stacks if auto attacking continuously and an additional 2 from Dagger Training). This also makes up for the loss in condi duration from the line.

Dagger:

1.1) Fine as is
1.2) Fine as is
1.3) Fine as is

Stealth Attack) Fine as is

#2) Fine as is

#4) Remove the bounce and cripple. Improved damage to a 1.0 multiplier. Successful hit marks target yields a rollover skill for 10 seconds.
(#4.2): 2 initiative. Shadowstep to marked target. Instant cast. No damage. Lose 1 condition. Cripple your target for 3 seconds.

#5) Remove vuln. Replace with blind

D/D#3) Leave damage and bleeds unchanged. Total skill length (including pre/post casts) 0.75 second. Evade 0.5 seconds. Directional skill shot (like warrior’s GS #3). Slide/leap 300 in selected direction. Use the charr animation to make it less awkward looking.

D/P#3) Fine as is

D/P is in a great spot. D/D needs help. By making the D/D#3 a useful evasion, it becomes good for both power and condi. #4 having a gap closer helps D/D stick to their target like D/P while offering a condi removal as a tradeoff compared to D/P. Incidentally S/D would become masters of sticking to their target which is a fair trade-off since they lack the burst of D/X builds. P/D would see some fun combos from this as well. #5 would help the sustain of D/D, P/D, and S/D.

Sword:
#1.1)
#1.2)
#1.3)
#1.1-1.3) Reduce the pre/post casts to make the entire chain 2.0 seconds long. Reduce the coefficients to 0.65, 0.65, and 1.05 (this is actually a 2% increase to AA DPS). Leave the weakness and cripple duration at 2 seconds.

Stealth Attack) In PvP, revert the daze duration back to 2 seconds.

#2.1) Fine as is
#2.2) Fine as is

S/D#3.1) Fine as is
S/D#3.2) Revert to 2 boons stolen

S/P#3) Remove the windup before the hit.

Reducing the time of the auto chain allows you to maintain weakness and cripple uptime better and proc more effects which is important for a set that lacks the burst of our other close combat set. Incidentally, by removing/shortening the pre/post casts, it’s much less likely that you’ll be stuck in a weapon animation when trying to use a dual skill defensively. Larcenous Strike needs the 2 boon steal back since it’s no longer an automatic rollover from Flanking Strike. Remove the windup from pistolwhip so this skill can be used to reactively evade an attack or interrupt/punish opponents in close combat.

Ok, well I accidently started hijacking another thread on this forum so I thought I would start a new one about some balance revisions that we could use. I would encourage reading the whole thing before you say something is nerfed or buffed too much because I spilt some skills, made some baseline, merged others, and moved some of where the damage comes from.

I’ll start with weapon skills. I’ll talk about traits in a second.

Weapon Skills

Short Bow:

#1) Fine as is

Stealth Attack Fine as is

#2.1) Increase the projectile speed by 50% so we can use it from 500-900 more effectively. Think engi grenades.
#2.2) Fine as is

#3) Revert the evade frames

#4) Increase the poison per pulse to 4 seconds

#5) Increase the projectile speed but make it a higher arc. It’s really frustrating to have a short shot because of the arrow clipping wonky terrain.

Pistol:

#1) Remove bleeding and add 8 seconds of vuln. Vuln affects both condis and direct damage now, so this would be useful for both P/D and P/P.

Stealth Attack) 10 bleeds for 8 seconds now. 1.5 multiplier. The autoattack will improve the damage from your bleeds and combined with the duration and count increase, it should make up for the loss of bleeds on autos.

#2) Make the vuln last 8 seconds so it can cover the bleed burst or even a couple of unloads. Remove immobilize and add weakness for 3 seconds so P/X has some defensive capabilities.

#4) Fine as is

#5) Fine as is

P/D#3) 3 torment for 8 seconds.

P/P#3) No changes

Overall, I’m trying to move the condi damage to the set that uses it while making common attacks between P/P and P/D useful for both. Since pistols deal relatively low single target damage, I want it to increase damage over time making the sustained damage and bursts more dangerous from both sets. While the condi damage has been removed from the Auto Attack, Sneak Attack and Shadow Strike have been buffed at least an equivalent amount.

Zero Day.2594:

Maugetarr.6823:

Zero Day.2594:

Azure The Heartless.3261:

alchemyst.2165:

Remember when S/D was considered op by the devs so they continuously nerfed it?

Well you can now get the exact same playstyle on steroids with heavy armor and high hp pool!

Yes, this is all very logical.

The developers make me not want to even continue playing when things like this happen.

Thief doing too much burst from stealth? Okay, lets nerf them. Oh, lets also give the same class that was hurt by the burst the most the very same playstyle.

Thief evading too much? Okay, lets nerf them. Oh, let’s also give a heavy armor tier the same exact playstyle.

Thief stealth has no counterplay? Okay, lets give classes uncounterable ways of revealing them for stupid amounts of time.

#TEEFstillOP

:/ Actually haven’t seen a nerf thread for a while now… wtf?

Is the HoT hype drawing away the attention…? Or is the HoT hype crash made people leave..?

It’s interesting now because there’s actually been a shift in opinion to thief being med-hard/hard to master.

That’s kind of funny. Wasn’t always like that though? Pretty sure what they mean to say that it’s harder to do the same “thing” compared to other classes, as opposed to having a higher skill cap (was always the case? no?)/ harder to master.

:D The class hasn’t been nerfed to kitten and is worthless, it’s just harder to master
Lol… harder to effectively do the same thing as other classes as opposed to mastering… mastering is a whole other issue.

Well, that wasn’t the concensus before. Now the only one they say is possibly too strong is D/P.

Sparkz.1983:

Maugetarr.6823:

I think that this rework focuses too much on weapon skills and not enough on traits where the real problem is imo. A few weapon skills need tweaks, but not the sweeping changes you’re proposing.

The problem with thief is that they have no way of playing anything other than dps, thats why the nerfs effects us so much. Thief has pretty much always played as a kill them in 5 seconds get out or die class. Now we cant kill in 5 secs we are getting swatted.

examples
pre nerfs

s/p – combat style -The Hokey Cokey: Infiltrators in bp pw infiltrators out rinse and repeat.

s/d – combat style – The Hokey Cokey with less Cokey: Infiltrator cloak and dagger cancel into steal to give damage and poison auto attack chain infiltrators out rinse and repeat.

d/d – combat style – Crouching Wow rouge: Hide in shadows stupidly high backstab crit heartseeker cloak and dagger rinse repeat

d/p – combat style – Crouching o kitten stealth ran out: bp heartseeker stupidly high backstab crit cloak and dagger heartseeker rinse repeat

p/p – combat style – Bleed for me: Hide in shadow sneak attack with ricochet everyone bleeds and dies run away shooting stealth up again rinse repeat

p/d – combat style – Look mommy I’m pressing buttons: cloak and dagger cancel with steal sneak attack shadow strike cloak and dagger rinse repeat

Thats why I proposed the weapon skill changes, this way thiefs can be viable pretty much regardless of the traits. Not forced to do this I’m gonna crit you so hard game but to actally be able to play as a tanky thief or a support thief. Atm all you can be as a thief is pure dps, that doesn’t fit with the over all game of gw2 thats why thieves are facing a hard time imo.

Thats why other classes feel damage nerfs less, because their weapon skills allow them to play a variety of different styles not just nuker.

That’s the thing though. Our trait lines should determine our play style and those trait lines should be compatable with any weapon combination. Our weapon skills themselves can’t be too powerful because they can be used multiple times until you run out of initiative. I think a lot of our current skills are just about there, but could use a little tweaking and you should pick your lines to compliments the style of thief you want to play. The fact that we are forced into DPS came largely from how acro was nerfed and D/D shadow arts was nerfed.

Zero Day.2594:

Azure The Heartless.3261:

alchemyst.2165:

Remember when S/D was considered op by the devs so they continuously nerfed it?

Well you can now get the exact same playstyle on steroids with heavy armor and high hp pool!

Yes, this is all very logical.

The developers make me not want to even continue playing when things like this happen.

Thief doing too much burst from stealth? Okay, lets nerf them. Oh, lets also give the same class that was hurt by the burst the most the very same playstyle.

Thief evading too much? Okay, lets nerf them. Oh, let’s also give a heavy armor tier the same exact playstyle.

Thief stealth has no counterplay? Okay, lets give classes uncounterable ways of revealing them for stupid amounts of time.

#TEEFstillOP

:/ Actually haven’t seen a nerf thread for a while now… wtf?

Is the HoT hype drawing away the attention…? Or is the HoT hype crash made people leave..?

It’s interesting now because there’s actually been a shift in opinion to thief being med-hard/hard to master.

Sagat.3285:

That would still be a nerf to p/d a major one the only reason it’s still used is because of WvW dire,food and/or perplexity and no I don’t trust them. If ruin thief is too much of a stretch let’s say they increasing the gap between specs and weapons drastically.

Well, both sneak attack is seeing an additional 220% condi damage and shadow strike is seeing 140% more condi damage with these changes. Additionally, you’ll be able to maintain ~9% more damage/condi damage from the autos.

I’ll make my own thread about this later because I don’t want to hijack this one any more than I already have.

Sorry Sparkz

NinjaEd.3946:

I agree with most of those except the s/p #3 and pistol 1 skill.

Vulnerability helps only if you’re able to apply it in some noticeable amount and follow it with consistent attacks. For power it would be great, but conditions would no longer have that extra damage which becomes very noticeable when you go from relying some extra bleeding to none at all unless you stealth. Sneak attack is very predictable since p/d or p/p doesn’t have any reliable way of staying in stealth for more than 4 seconds, and the bullets are visible from the start so its very easy to just dodge and get hit by 1 or 2 bullets vs all 5.

I think they need to just relocate the bleeding duration to the stealth skill but keep some on the AA and slightly buff its power coefficient. The only build utilizing sneak attack is condition which uses stealth so it makes sense to make it more noticeable and turn the auto attack to a sustained flow of dps for both build types rather than somewhat helping 1 build and really helping another.

As for s/p, this skill is potentially spammable and can deal some serious damage. The windup is there for to require some effort to land it, best way to secure a landing is start with IS.

I had an edit to the pistol stealth attack since I messed up the numbers, but basically each hit from sneak attack should do 2 bleeds now for 3 seconds longer on each. So even if they dodge half of the attack, they still should have 4-6 bleeds continuously. The D#4 also allows for a higher torment burst with fun stuff like P/D#3>D#4.2>P/D#3 which would be 6 torment without the use of a utility like steal or ISig.

S/P spam would still be limited by initiative especially since it costs more in PvP. If anything, I think think the damage could be lowered if it becomes a problem, but I want pistolwhip to be a go to evasion when you see something like an earthshaker incoming.

Your concerns are valid though. It would definitely need some play testing to determine how balanced these ideas are.

I think that this rework focuses too much on weapon skills and not enough on traits where the real problem is imo. A few weapon skills need tweaks, but not the sweeping changes you’re proposing.

I’ll start with weapon skills. I’ll talk about traits in a later post.

Short Bow:

#1: Fine as is

Stealth Attack: Fine as is

#2: Increase the projectile speed by 50% so we can use it from 500-900 more effectively. Think engi grenades.

#3: Revert the evade frames

#4: Increase the poison per pulse to 4 seconds

#5: Increase the projectile speed but make it a higher arc. It’s really frustrating to have a short shot because of the arrow clipping wonky terrain.

Pistol:

#1: Remove bleeding and add 8 seconds of vuln. Vuln affects both condis and direct damage now, so this would be useful for both P/D and P/P.

Stealth Attack: 10 bleeds for 8 seconds now (edited cause Iswapped numbers on accident). 1.5 multiplier. The autoattack will improve the damage from your bleeds and combined with the duration and count increase, it should make up for the loss of bleeds on autos.

#2: Make the vuln last 8 seconds so it can cover the bleed burst or even a couple of unloads. Remove immobilize and add weakness for 3 seconds so P/X has some defensive capabilities.

#4: Fine as is

#5: Fine as is

P/D#3: 3 torment for 8 seconds.

P/P#3: No changes

Overall, I’m trying to move the condi damage to the set that uses it while making common attacks between P/P and P/D useful for both. Since pistols deal relatively low single target damage, I want it to increase damage over time making the sustained damage and bursts more dangerous from both sets.

Dagger:

1.1:Fine as is
1.2:Fine as is
1.3:Fine as is

Stealth Attack: Fine as is

#2: Fine as is

#4: Remove the bounce and cripple. Improved damage to a 1.0 multiplier. Successful hit marks target yields a rollover skill for 10 seconds.
(#4.2): 2 initiative. Shadowstep to marked target. Instant cast. No damage. Lose 1 condition. Cripple your target for 3 seconds.

#5: Remove vuln. Replace with blind

D/D#3: Leave damage and bleeds unchanged. Total skill length (including pre/post casts) 0.75 second. Evade 0.5 seconds. Directional skill shot (like warrior’s GS #3). Slide/leap 300 in selected direction. Use the charr animation to make it less awkward looking.

D/P#3: Fine as is

D/P is in a great spot. D/D needs help. By making the D/D#3 a useful evasion, it becomes good for both power and condi. #4 having a gap closer helps D/D stick to their target like D/P while offering a condi removal as a tradeoff compared to D/P. Incidentally S/D would become masters of sticking to their target which is a fair trade-off since they lack the burst of D/X builds. P/D would see some fun combos from this as well. #5 would help the sustain of D/D and S/D.

Sword:
#1.1-1.3: Reduce the pre/post casts to make the entire chain 2.0 seconds long. Reduce the coefficients to 0.65, 0.65, and 1.05 (this is actually a 2% increase to AA DPS). Leave the weakness and cripple duration at 2 seconds.

Stealth Attack: In PvP, revert the duration back to 2 seconds.

#2.1: Fine as is
#2.2: Fine as is

S/D#3.1: Fine as is
S/D#3.2: Revert to 2 boons stolen

S/P#3: Remove the windup before the hit.

Reducing the time of the auto chain allows you to maintain weakness and cripple uptime better and proc more effects which is important for a set that lacks the burst of our other close combat set. Incidentally, by removing/shortening the pre/post casts, it’s much less likely that you’ll be stuck in a weapon animation when trying to use a dual skill defensively. Larcenous Strike needs the 2 boon steal back since it’s no longer an automatic rollover from Flanking Strike. Remove the windup from pistolwhip so this skill can be used to reactively evade an attack or interrupt/punish opponents in close combat.

I’ll talk about traits later as I do think that’s where the real problem lies.

apocom.3172:

Nephrite.6954:

JaeleCt.3967:

they fixed the condi clear in stealth. its once again an instant clear + another after 3 seconds. so its actually pretty good again.

This thread is about Feline Grace buddy.

hihey said this and he is completly right.
Even if you change the duration to 300 secs without internal cooldown FG will still be trash.

It’s hard to believe but it’s true. No matter how high you stack Vigor, you have 1 dodge more in a 20 secs timeframe than the meta d/p build iff wildstrike never hits.

They nerfed FG to the ground and buried acro with it, because it was the reason to spec into acro.
I’m still a bit salty that the devs have shown again that they have no idea what they are doing and refuses to play a thief (that’s why the BS bug could made it into the game) so they bury acro for the lols. But ok, time to move on.

Yeah, that’s pretty stupid. The assumptions made are also that the acro thief will have permanent vigor while the D/P will only have it for 10 seconds from bountiful theft.

Math (in case anyone is interested or the devs skim through):

8.75(endurance/sec) × 20 (sec) = 175 enduance

7.5(endurance/sec) × 10 (sec) + 5 (endurance/sec) × 10 (sec) = 125

175-125=50 or literally 1 dodge difference.

If the acro thief can’t maintain permanent vigor (1 steal + 3 successful evades) the gap becomes even smaller.

Another problem is that fights are short now. Old FG was helpful during both short and long fights. Now you won’t see a difference in the short fight and taking acro over CS cuts your damage in that short fight significantly. Additionally, if you take Signet of agility and signets of power, you can get 280 endurance in a 24 second timeframe (100 of that is on demand) versus the 210 from taking the acro line in a 24 second fight. If you really want more dodges and more damage simultaneously CS is the better choice now.

Thief landspear confirmed! Thief hammer confirmed!

(jk, spoilers)

It’s interesting that thief is medium-hard to hard in virtually every list. That seems like a vast change of opinion over the past.

I would rather see a rollover (10sec) on Dancing Dagger after it successfully hits that allows you to shadowstep to your opponent and cripple (3sec) them. The shadow step should be instant cast so it could be combined with CnD, but it should cost more initiative (2ini) and require a combo rather than being made baseline. Attaching it to a successful DD leaves counterplay in it. I also like blind on CnD.

Edit: Remove the bounce and you can up the damage (slightly). The shadowstep shouldn’t deal any damage so you can use it while in stealth.

DeceiverX.8361:

D/P is universally better, coming from a D/D burst main since day 1 through today.

Pretty much spam 3 and win (SS + fire/air = backstab damage + teleport + blind + unblockable + ignores dodges for procs of fire/air due to a current bug (at least in WvW).

D/D’s skills are pretty much vastly inferior aside from playing full burst. If you’re not killing your enemy from CnD/Stab alone, you’re better off playing D/P, which in sPvP, since you’re pretty much never killing people from CnD/Stab alone unless you play signet burst, which is by far the most difficult build to make work in sPvP due to the dependencies of your success being solely on your enemys’ comp (it can’t do the damage to heavies and tanks it needs to like it can in WvW), which implies that D/P is always the optimal choice.

S/D used to be a solid build, though the nerfs to the Acrobatics line and the vigor boon have pretty much dumpstered the viability of it – when the best in the game switch to D/P after playing exclusively S/D for a very long time (and doing so extremely successfully despite having previously seen as a mediocre build compaired to D/P), you know it’s not as effective as it needs to be.

I love to encourage D/D as a set to learn on because it’s challenging and makes you a better thief in regards to commiting to fights, positioning, etc., but in all competitive manners, D/P is the only really viable set you can use as a thief – otherwise you’re just bested by other classes (or D/P) by a very large margin.

Just to add to what you said for the op: you can still use S/D in PvP, but there’s no point in going acro S/D since it doesn’t offer enough to enhance the set over the damage or utility you’d lose from giving up any line of DA/CS/Tr. As DecieverX mentioned though, this set is not as strong as D/P, but if D/P isn’t a good fit for your playstyle, don’t force yourself into it.

Michelangelo.1742:

NinjaEd.3946:

Acrobatics was always supposed to fit one of 3 key defenses on thief, evasion. Sadly they made this depenedent heavily on Feline Grace which was nerfed to no longer grant a unique endurance regen and bring us back to normal evasion. That is a big problem, because normal evasion is what many other professions have while also having proper healing without having to cower in stealth, higher health pools, strong defensive weapon skills or utilities, or any combination of these.

If thief had some viable methods of in-combat recovery so the loss of evasion was made up or they could help restore our evasion in a skillfull manner acrobatics would resume attention. Lately I see s/d users having SA over acrobatics simply because if offers more. It seems silly but that’s the reality even though SA has tons of flaws itself it serves as a better defense over a trait line dedicated to s/d.

I use Deadly Arts, Crit Strikes and Trickery for my S/D build… SA did not really fit how I use S/D, like at all.

I have also been using DA/CS/Tr since SA doesn’t fit me either. It’s working alright. The acro nerf just made me double down on damage. S/D could use some sideways buffs/reversions of past nerfs (2 boon larcenous since the rollover isn’t automatic anymore, Tactical Strike duration, Autoattack chain could do the same DPS but attack faster, etc). SA needs a couple of tweaks here and there, but acro is a mess right now.

Sagat.3285:

There is nothing left to nerf.

Actually our offensive lines and trickery are still decent. I mean, there’s some wiggle room there where they could adjust damage modifiers downwards and ICDs upwards.

Zero Day.2594:

Dex.6139:

Seabreeze.8437:

If we were getting an elite spec reveal on Friday, wouldn’t there be some kind of teaser image or announcement?

Honestly wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t get a teaser image.

You guys are silly, don’t you know the teaser image is perma-stealthed.

Oh hey, i was gonna say that. I guess I didn’t get the chance to ruin your punchline this time.

Haha, I was messing around with condi mesmer yesterday. Yeah it puts condi thief to shame. Not going to talk about how easy/hard it is, but the potential (and actual) condi damage is amazing. 4-8k worth of torment every 6 seconds (not including the autoattack, MtD, or clones), constant 5 stacks of confusion with bursts of 14-18. Access to burning also (not a lot, but it’s there). Condi manipulation. And minor access to poison, bleeds, chill and blind. Honestly I had myself a giggle when someone hit 14+ stacks of confusion; ~3k damage on skill use was hilarious.

(These are PvP numbers)

Nephrite.6954:

caveman.5840:

lol u could leave these forums for years and nothing changes
same old same old

I remember when they released “assassins equilibrium” they said it was a skilled trait and u could counter a warrior hammer by coming out of stealth to gain stability ……

WHEN NO ONE IN THERE RIGHT MIND WOULD DO THAT..
if u r in stealth and u have time to see a hammer stun coming u would DODGE !

AE’s stability was obviously too short. Most of us know these threads would be some where redundant but if any of the devs decide to read the thread then the first thing they’ll see are complaints about acro therefore increasing the chance of them doing something about it. I highly doubt they read but it’s definitely worth a shot. Much better than sending them a private message. Look at assassin’s reward, it still exist==

But last refuge is selectable now! They listen!

The CDR from SoH should just be baseline. If they knocked steal down to 25 seconds, taking trickery would knock steal down to 21.75 seconds (where it was pre patch). This would help immensely to narrow the gap between untraited steal (mediocre) and traited steal. On top of that they could roll trickster into quick pockets and/or make quick pockets reduce weapon swapping to 5 seconds (restoring only 1 initiative on swap). Pressure striking and bewildering ambush could definitely be merged and put in the master tier (I mean 5 confusion for 5 seconds? Really? -.-). That would still be 5 confusion on steal, but maybe just change pressure striking to 2 confusion (5 sec) on interrupt instead of 3 torment(5 sec). Well, now we’ve eliminated 1 master trait and 1 GM trait. In the GM slot maybe we could make pistol shots pierce (since apparently bouncing RNG is something they don’t like). I don’t know what to put back in the master slot though.

Acro needs help more, but trickery could be refined a little bit more as well.

What if it were more of an Assault Rifle style with the autoattack being a 3 shot burst.

Can we get an underslung grenade launcher too?!

Thief elite specialization: mercenary

Hey, I just wanted to comment on your S/D build. I think the way you’ve traited your S/P is actually a better fit for S/D than the one you’ve listed and vise versa. You’re giving up a lot of utility and damage from not taking the DA line with S/D. It’s weird to me because the weapon evades in S/D can actually be used defensively while the windup of pistolwhip makes it more useful as a proactive burst rather than a reactive skill. The long evade frames combined with the rooting would be more likely to proc FG as well (since a moving evasion or dodge seems to not trigger an “evasion” message as often).

Ok. Here’s a raw video of gameplay tonight for a reference if the quality is good enough for you. I didn’t edit it at all; the video appears to skip around at the beginning because it pauses the recording while alt-tabbed and during load screens. You can set the mic to just in game if you want. I have mine open (so you can hear my annoying sighs -.-‘). There’s sort of a quick options menu, then one with more options like the temp file and the save location. You can see my settings in the screenshot. This video was 3.57 GB for reference.

inharmonic.1975:

Maugetarr.6823:

If you have an NVIDIA card, you can get shadow play for free through NVIDIA GeForce experience. There’s a setting where it’s always recording and you can hit alt+f10 to save the last (x) minutes of gameplay. You can change the length and quality of the saved video.

I’ve been thinking about checking that out. any idea if the quality is on par with fraps recording full sized?

Well, you can record up to 20 min at 1080 60 fps, but that is like a 6 gig video in their recording format. Quality has never been an issue for me. Hard disk space on the other hand. ….

Edit: Usually I record 20 min at 720 30 fps. I can upload a raw game later if you want to look at it for quality.