I mean, if they’re gonna give us a melee staff, just let us use spears on land. That way we’d have a bunch of good skins. I’d also settle for OH sword. or really anything except torch and mace.
We seem to be beating a dead horse with a melee staff now. I wish ArenaNet would get the [Reveal] over and done with, whichever weapon it is. >.<
Yeah we are…. Let’s hope this week is our turn. Cause i can’t handle it anymore.
Yeah, that was a decent series.
Makes me want OH sword also. My hope for this patch is that thieves talk with a Revenant channeling Shiro and learn a thing or two from him.
What I mean is, I have Twisting Fangs only if I have no offhand equipped it seems… which makes no sense or else it’d be a skill that people only use from lvl 1-5 and then never again.
It is. Other professions get 1-3 filled with just a mainhand weapon. Twisting Fangs is a placeholder skill so you don’t have 2 skills until you equip an offhand weapon. It’s a shadow of its former self anyway with no deep wound condition in this game.
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.
lets talk about the real problem for s/d acro builds…..really low damage…
Hihey is right. There’s supposed to be a tradeoff in survivability for damage when you take acro, but it’s just not worth it. Go CS and the damage is great.
Well, they could take that damage off and roll it into baseline. It’s not like any of the pistol skills are particularly high damage except for shadow strike and unload. Remove the conditional damage and add some utility back, then rebalance the multipliers as needed.
I mean, if they’re gonna give us a melee staff, just let us use spears on land. That way we’d have a bunch of good skins. I’d also settle for OH sword. or really anything except torch and mace.
It’s simple, if you buff s/d dmg it overshadows d/p obviously then you’ll get the same thing you had pre-patch. Do you want that back? Because it looks like most thieves do, then you’ll just get nerfed yet again some other way. Thieves were broken pre-patch , you have to think of another way to balance it or else we’re just moving backwards or going in circles.
They shouldn’t buff the damage, just undo some of the utility nerfs. Larcenous Strike could remove 2 boons again since it no longer rolls over without landing Flanking Strike. Tactical Strike could be reverted to a 2 second daze since daze and stun no longer round up when extended. Cloak and Dagger could blind the target on successful landing (this would help D/D also). There’s a lot they could do to bring S/D back up without buffing damage. They could also lower the auto chain damage while increasing the speed so that they maintain the same DPS but allow you to proc the effects of crippling strike more reliably and more often.
Edit: If they lowered the damage and sped up the autoattack by removing some of the pre/post cast, this would help the set immensely as Flanking Strike wouldn’t get queued behind the autos as badly which sometimes gets you killed.
Edit 2: If the entire chain was 2 seconds total (hey the same length as the reverted TS, weakness, and cripple…interesting) they could make the multipliers 0.65>0.65>1.05 and maintain the same DPS and ratios of damage.
Don’t use acro? It’s useless unless you are maybe in wvw.
That’s really not how balance works. If something sucks, you improve it. You don’t just leave it to fester.
…but what can WE do about that, aside from venting in the forums (when it has been proved that Devs rarely listen to us anyway? I mean, even though Devs said that they were looking into the old “Last Refuge” trait, it took them 3 years to actually “fix” it)?
What swinsk said is correct. For the time being just stop using Acrobatics. It is just a worthless traitline. I played yesterday against some classes and I could literally go without it and it would feel the same.
^^^
Yeah, if you want more dodges on demand now, trait CS with Signets of Power and take Signet of Agility. You get the extra damage from the line and better, more controllable endurance regen.
S/D is sub par… you will not be competitive at high level…
And its not the nerf to feline grace like everyone would think…..
its actually the power creep that every other class has ..s/d theif did not get at all.
To be competitive, they need to improve s/d damage…. how im not sure… when every other class can do more than you from range while having perma protection, crazy invulnerability, great heals, almost as much vigor as you…. well something is wrong.
S/D thief got the short end of everything this patch… harder than any other class.
Revert back to the 2 boon steal for larcenous strike for a start. Since you can’t pre-rollover anymore, there’s no point in leaving it only stealing 1 boon. It’s hard to get through all the trash boons flying around now to get to the nice stuff like protection and and those huge stacks of might. Tactical strike could also be reverted (it hasn’t been yet so far as I know).
As to assasins reward you are too focused on the meta. Lots of theives have fit healing into their builds. IP has become more widely used just for the healing. While this predicated on getting Crits and healing attribute is not an issue that it chosen shows how important healing is.
Assassins reward boosted as I suggested wherein one gets translates to an extra 864 heal on an unload. It means using SOM one will get a total health of 1176+864 from the trait and heal. Assassins reward is not intended as a standalone heal that will allow one to survive battles. It best used with a build that maximizes other sources.
An Unload using IP , SOM and Assassins reward on a typical crit based power build will see 1176+864+ 800 in healing if not more. A simple death Blossom using leeching Venoms, against two targets and using the proposed AR will see 2310+416+882 in healing if using SOM and Areward with base heal of 300.
When you want to make a build that focuses on sustain you do not just pick one trait that brings in health and expect kitten be adequate.
Acrobatics is not intended for s/d only. Were I s/d I would choose Pain response, Swindlers equlibrium and upper hand. Were i d/d i would choose other skills entirely.
If your only interest is PvP and you want traits that help only PvP then you should expect to fail as there three game modes. ANET will not design skills around PvP only.
Do you think the nerf to FG was based on WvW or PvE? The problem with the line now is that they assumed you had S/D when they made the changes. If you watched the stream where they mentioned that they could track evasions now, they mentioned that weapon evades counted towards it. The problem is that over half the weapon combos available have poor or no evades tied to them. Realistically S/P wasn’t being used that often in combination with the acro line in PvE or PvP, so they nerfed the line around S/D in PvP. They do a lot of general balancing around PvP because you can directly compare the strengths and weaknesses of classes versus each other. WvW is not something that can be balanced around because anyone, at any level, in any gear, can go there. Normalized gear with a limited selection of stats and no consumable buffs is really the only thing you can directly balance around.
These are my own suggestions to fixing the Acrobatics line. I will start with GM traits.
Assassins reward. Boost the base heal by 20 percent. Boost the portion coming from Healing by 60 percent. Thus base heal per ini will go to 84. Healing for a person with 300 healing will add another 24 for a 108 heal per ini from the current 84 per ini.
This leaves us with a GM trait that’s worse than base regeneration – not much for a GM trait. In 3 years, there has never been a thief spec that could fit healing power into it, it’s time to give up that dream.
Don’t Stop. The effectiveness of Chiiled and Crippled is decreased by 66 percent rather then 50 percent. This means that swiftness and the 25 percent movement boost from the Signet and or runes will both give mobility slightly higher than base even when chilled or crippled.
How much does S/D thief gain from this? Between IR and withdraw, this trait is massively undervalued – again, not at all fitting a GM trait.
Upper hand. Lower cooldown to 2 seconds. Add to the trait On successful evade gain one stack of Vitality, One stack of vitality will be equal to 20 Vitality. It will cap at 15 stacks and be lost when downed.
This in essence is applied fortitude albeit harder to get and can add a potential of 3000 health to the thief at maximum stacks which is what was lost by removing Vitality from the traitline. I would also add a slow degeneration to these stacks wherein one stack lost every 30 seconds when out of combat. (I think building these stacks in combat will be fun)
Lacking the healing capacity of other classes, the extra vitality means little, and 1 init every 2 seconds does nothing to alleviate S/D thief’s problems, which are a lack of survivability due to reduced dodge capacity on a set that does sustain damage rather than burst damage.
The extra vitality means little? You obviously do not play in WvW where the thief goes out of his way to get those stacks for that extra health because of how much they add to survival.
No, I’m only interested in PvP, the mode in which the game is balanced on.
Our healing did not go up since the major patch and people wqere taking Practiced tolerance and traiting into Acro just to get extra health.
This was before marauders gave you ~17k health. * Also, nobody in PvP was going acro “Just for the extra health”*, and practiced tolerance was taken due to the kittenpoor competition in the slot that it was in.
Virtually every build out there now has Vlakyrie added as e means of getting extra vitality this with the thives lower healing.
Which no thief would ever be caught dead with in PvP.
Can confirm. I was 3 into acro to pick up FG to make up for the weaknesses of D/D. With the health attached to the amulet and the poor active defense provided by the line now, there’s little reason to trait into it. Adding more passive defensive locked behind active defense is sorta boring. In WvW you’d see a bunch of thieves outside spawn dodging wolves to build stacks.
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.
Yep, this is a pretty succinct list as to what’s wrong with the design of Feline Grace now.
You actually got endless stamina wrong. It boosts the effectiveness of vigor by 50%, so it’s actually 5(1+0.5×1.5) = 5×1.75=8.75. So that’s 1 dodge every 5.7 seconds, not every 5.
Playing S/D and having fun.Try running CS instead of Acro,at least you will get the chance to kill them first /o\
Yeah, that’s what I’m doing. SA might still be ok, and acro ate a hard nerf. Neither one improves your survivability enough to justify the loss in damage.
My problem with pistol whip is that it’s not really able to be used defensively. I’d like the evasion to start up immediately. If the windup to the pistol hit weren’t so long I think the whole set would be improved. Maybe if that hit came out as fast as shadow shot.
I’m just here to say Scorpion Wire has this problem too, along with the projectile often being “obstructed” over flat ground.
They should probably make pulls have an animation, but mechanically shadow step your target to you then knock them down for 0.25 seconds. Have a check for stability and return a fail message instead of shadow stepping them if they have it.
Is this some weird way of trying not to get your class nerfed, because it needs to get nerfed and badly. I do not believe anyone saying that mesmers are fine oh and also thiefs are fine too………
Wut? what do you mean?..mesmer are fine…. actually, there fantastic since the patch.
Thief also is fine. No i’m saying players needs a buff. A skill buff. Not the classes
Im really having a hard time imagining how anyone who plays this game regularly and PvP’s believes that mesmer are ok as they are. I dont understand, someone please explain to me how this current Mesmer meta is balanced. Please.
At least there was a nerf to mantra mesmers in terms of damage and recharge. Bugs of skills going through evasions and blocks have also been fixed. Finally, mirror blade can only hit you twice now.
Even if they made the Vigor on Feline Grace to have 300s duration with no ICD, Feline Grace would still remain a totally lackluster trait compared to what it was before, and to what it SHOULD be now that everything got buffed.
Tbh, i think thief weapon sets in general need to be reworked so all of them have 5 useful spells and not just d/p. That way they don’t need to heavily rely on one trait to be viable.
It’s not just one trait honestly.
Pre-patch Acro, gave the thief:
Vigor (due to 6s of Vigor every 15s thanks to Withdraw);
Condi Cleanse (Pain Response);
Boon Duration (which resulted in perma Swiftness and perma Vigor, coupled with the Trickery traitline);
A GOOD source of damage increase (10% when endurance is not full);
A nice third trait: Fleet of Foot (which would be AWESOME now thanks to all the Weakness spammed everywhere), Power of Inertia(which paired well with all the vigor+feline grace), Assassin’s Reward (same as now) or Hard to Catch (the new version is still buggy though, as you will still get interrupted – IE: it’s not like Ranger’s Shared Anguish);
Feline Grace.
Now you have no Boon Duration, “weaker” Vigor (which EVEN with Endless Stamina provides less endurance regen than other classes), less Vigor because you can’t give up Pain Response; a terrible choice of Master traits; a “meh” choice of Grandmaster traits (even Don’t Stop it’s “meh”, because it only really work against Thieves with Panic Strike. The Immob from other classes could easily be “ignored” with Sw#2, SB#5 or any other teleport.
You can’t really ask for better skills on weaponsets when an entire traitline has been NERFED to the ground, and literally EVERYTHING else in this game has been buffed to extreme.
Even people that use S/D right now don’t take Acrobatics because it’s pure kitten…
Yeah, i still wouldn’t give up the damage from CS on S/D for this nerfed line. I linked a gif in another thread of an ideal fight against an ele, and after watching it again, I realized out of 3 dodges/weapon evasions, I only prompted the “dodge” message once. I don’t think any of those 3 were wasted, but it even when ideally evading, there’s no guarantee of FG proccing when it needs to. They just need to tie our endurance regen to attacking already like almost every other class in the game if they want to promote attacking over evade spamming. The endurance regen really needs to stack with vigor alao. Look at the proposed tempest trait latent stamina if you want an example of how it could be done. Karl even talked about the interaction between invigorating precision and the new trait.
Still can’t beat PU mesmers or cele eles (though with the latter I have been putting up a better fight) but other than that, it has alot of HP and has the ability to burst if timed right. Also I found that No Quarters is enough to makes up for lack of fury on runes while along side Ferocious Strikes, Practiced Tolerance, and Wurm runes make up for the lack of ferocity on Barbarian’s Amulet (funny because Wurm runes give more ferocity than Rage runes with this setup). Also timing Flanking strikes can burst ur foes if u do a steal—>CnD—>tactical strike combo. And the trickster trait has given me a bit more heal while giving me the condi cleanse needed to deal with Condi builds. However, this has only been used in PuG games because I’m a PuG type of guy and don’t know how it would fare in high rank play. ANy skilled thief care to give this build a wurl and tell us how it goes?
Hey, that’s not bad. Here’s what I’ve been using. My strategy usually goes FS>Steal>IS>LS>CnD>TS because you’ll usually put out decent damage up to the CnD, then the Tactical Strike will prevent a heal. There’s a little leeway there in the middle, but FS>Steal is usually the start for me to queue up Larcenous Strike for the damage/unblockable/boonsteal. Here’s a slight modification of the rotation when everything goes right.
I want Feline Grace back.
And I want the freedom to invest my talent points where I want, I HATE the 3 paths restriction.
They will not never ever go back on such a big implement as the new trait system, so it’s better to try to adapt to the new system (don’t get me wrong, I understand completely what you are saying, but it won’t happen).
And yes, feline grace RIP
I think you’re right about this which is why a lot of people have suggested rolling FG and ES together and adding another trait back in.
Pretty much 1/2 of the Acro line needs tweaks/buffs/reversions now, but after such a major balance patch I doubt we’ll see it any time soon. Also some other classes need shaving first so that’s probably the focus anyway right now.
I think it’s confirmed that we won’t get the underwater weapons on land :o
Also, I don’t understand people that want the Rifle weapon. I hardly see how a new ranged weapon will help the thief, especially one that looks like it’s mostly single target focused. Do people really want something they can use to weakly autoattack stuff at 1200 range? That will help how? In WvW zerg fights?
There’s a reason rifle is the less used weapon : it’s cause it has no style nor class ! Engineer at least made something useful out of it by turning it into a shotgun :p
Yeah, bad joke is bad. I wouldn’t mind rifle if it got most of its damage from a sustained auto attack that pierced and had decent utility at mid range.
What I mean is a 1.0 multiplier on autos at 0-600 range and then a ~0.8 multiplier from 600-1200 with a 1 second shot to shot time (including pre/post cast). The 2-5 skills are up for debate, but the sustained damage should come from something not requiring initiative (think of a better P/P set).
I’m simply baffled by how they completely redid the guardian elites, and some mesmer utilities and elite yet didn’t even touch our useless Tornado.
Not to mention how they completely redid some engi kits but did nothing for our scepter.
But they gave us support. They even said on stream they want us to fill the support bruiser roll we’ve never been before for 3 years and better at than everyone else at. They clearly know things about scepter/utilities/trait-lines that you don’t that actually makes them viable, we just haven’t figure it out yet. Didn’t you see the skill and understanding of the class when he almost got overloads off multiple times on cheiften? Then that time he almost died showing how great WH and tempest is in BUT HE DIDNT DIE DID HE. We should trust the Ele design team they know what they are doing.
Right? The frontline role will be completely new. And this will help with how squishy they kept saying ele was, especially since there’s no other ele offhand that does that.
For PvE, S/P might be the better choice. The long evasion of PW and the fact that mobs won’t dodge out of it will help. BPS + autoattack is great for damage and defense too. Finally, the stun from the PW and daze from the headshot are great for knocking off defiance stacks while the boon steal from FS has limited situational use in PvE. The multi-hit nature of PW will work better for your Signet of Malice too.
I might go for S/P in the end, but assuming for the sake of the exercise I stick do S/D, how should I go about it? Unless S/D is just a complete waste of time in PvE, then I’ll just go S/P.
Saital has a good explanation, although I would stick with CS and have valk/zerk armor with knight/soldier trinkets, then slowly change to zerk /valk trinkets as you become more comfortable with your evasion skills.
After the inexplicable removal of ricochet put the future of my Pistol/Pistol thief into question – I don’t know if it could work without it, really – I decided it’s as good a time as any to start from scratch and try something new. This something being sword/dagger.
The problem is that the last time I played a sword-focused thief, I kept keeling over. Now, that was a while ago, and a lot has change since then, but I’m still concerned. That thief was sword/pistol, as well, so that’s different.
Self-healing from Invigoration Precision, Signet of Malice and food worked really well to keep my gunslinger thief alive, but I’m not sure how it’d work for sword/dagger. If I do go with such a set-up, do I need Healing Power gear?
Or maybe I’m completely off-base here and a sword/dagger thief needs something else. I’ve already reached level 30, and it’s been going well enough, but it’s not like personal story is much of a challenge anymore.
For PvE, S/P might be the better choice. The long evasion of PW and the fact that mobs won’t dodge out of it will help. BPS + autoattack is great for damage and defense too. Finally, the stun from the PW and daze from the headshot are great for knocking off defiance stacks while the boon steal from FS has limited situational use in PvE. The multi-hit nature of PW will work better for your Signet of Malice too.
So ele is my main alt, and I usually go celestial staff Fire/Water/Arcana to be more supportive (in pvp). I have to say, Water/Arcana/Tempest shout staff could be great fun for aurashare. Not exactly excited about warhorn, but the rest looked fun at least.
Yeah, they need to revert some of the nerfs to the acro line. For a line based around evasion it has very poor endurance regen now. I think fluid strikes needs to be brought back as “gain 5 endurance on hit/crit (1 sec icd)” so the more aggressive you are, the more you benefit. That would prevent the “unskilled dodge spam” they were worried about.
Upper Hand needs a condi clear on it too on successful evasion.
Why do people keep asking if x or y weapon set/build is viable? play it your self as you use to play and decide them, no need to join the bandwagon of the meta.
it is not just the thief forums, its all. is x necro viable, is ele y viable. bloody play it lol and if thats that good then let us know.
Well, unless you rotate weaponsets regularly, there’s always a little bit of a learning curve again on a set, plus re-acquanting yourself with the game as the OP is. Asking if something is a strong contender before you put the time into it is fine.
That said, I’m enjoying S/D right now which is generally considered less viable by the community, so I have to agree with you on the “play what you want to” sentiment.
Ranger gets ranged magic staff so even with melee staff that is still a different weapon plus there is a data-mined picture of a staff wielding thief. Debate solved.
/thread
Still dosn’t make sense it will be staff.In inspite you think that ranged STAFF and melee STAFF are not the same weapon,the pattern is celar and anet wouldn’t give 2 classes same weapon.
They gave 2 classes the same utility type, maybe they’ll follow suit with weapons. I’ll wait though till we see the actual artwork. I mean they had placeholders for ele sword in game, then they went and gave them warhorn. Additionally, the specialization for warrior artwork had a two handed axe, so maybe they’re taking more liberties with artwork. Who knows.
I’d probably only be disappointed with torch. Focus, axe, rifle, scepter, and staff could be cool. Torch would just make me feel like a queensdale bandit.
Edit: If focus had some shadowstep control effects it could be a lot of fun. The dual skills could be blur effects, the 4 could shadowstep you to a targetable location, the 5 could shadowstep opponents to you and steal boons.
Hey wave, your damage seems a little low. Your twitch skills seem good though so I think you could drop SA for CS, or perhaps drop the wurm runes for a power/precision set like pack runes. While you do have 19500 health, that’s about 1-2 auto attacks over the base of mauraders amulet.
This is what I’ve been using. Crippling and larcenous strike can hit upwards of 5k. You need to actively use signet of agility for dodges and condi clears, but it hits pretty hard.
Not to read too much into the artwork, but where’s the mainhand weapon?
Empty mainhand? Warhorn a two handed weapon?
Pretty sure Mesmer picture didn’t have a main hand in the picture either.
Well, mesmer’s was (mostly) out of the picture. But that’s why I qualified it as trying not to read too much into it.
It’s in the ele’s left hand, main hands are always held in the right hand.
I am aware. I was try to make a joke/keep the hype going about an empty main hand set of skills to accompany warhorn, much like how the thief #3 skill is different with no offhand equipped.
@ Kidel: How can it not be avoided? It shows up on the buff bar right next to boons and blocks, blinds, and evades all use up the charges.
What am I suggesting? Basilisk venom stays exactly the same except that it becomes instant cast like all the other venoms.
Off topic: You keep saying that a 2 second stun would kill people, but that’s what stunbreaks and autoprocs are for, getting out of stuns or defending against the attacks while stunned.
