Guild Wars 2

Looks like it’s…get a life time!…shame none of us has one.

Swim.6830:

Meridian.8730:

I played ele for a long time, it was my very first class. I haven’t played it in a while but I remember some of the mechanics and I know what I was fighting against.

So you fought an untraited Ele that randomly got protection without armor of earth?

The ele had traits, I said I wasn’t including traits in all the defensive boons I listed. Add traits and it’s basically…really, really, really hard to kill. Impossible for most.

Thief is the most fun class to play, period. However it’s also the most inferior class to play for pve, and one of the worst classes for pvp now. If you beat anyone who plays ranger, ele, mesmer, etc.., then they were a bad player.

Teamkiller.4315:

Oh wow

Would you perhaps be the guy known as meridiangreen?

What would give that away? Which one are you, perhaps novah or holla or one of the others who plays an OP build and says thief is not underpowered when you always kill them easily?

I played ele for a long time, it was my very first class. I haven’t played it in a while but I remember some of the mechanics and I know what I was fighting against.

PVP: Ok here’s the deal…bunk vs bunk = nobody dies. Bunk vs glass = glass dies. Bunk vs thief = thief dies.

Is there something wrong with this picture? Maybe that glass doesn’t have a chance vs bunk and ANY thief doesn’t have a chance vs bunk?

Example 1: Ele with massive regen and acceptable damage…constantly uses util to bring to full life every 20-30 seconds, has melee stun, 2 knockdowns, protection, and that’s BEFORE traits. Traits add lots of regen, more protection, condi removal, etc…this ele basically can’t be beat by any thief. Any thief. Not d/p, not s/d, etc…thief simply can NOT burst this ele down. Can’t. And thief’s crappy condition damage can’t condi the ele down either. I spent…10 minutes? multiple times…and watched others do the same. The only person who beat this ele was a…any guesses?….PHANTASM MESMER.

Now, as a thief with any of my builds I have used…I got him down to 25% a few times but he could heal all his life right back. Meanwhile, I am forced to retreat to stealth over and over and over again. I died eventually both times…because I made mistakes, couldn’t/didn’t evade his fire spells in time, etc. While he can just spam spam spam the same bs ele stuff, take minimal damage even with two berserker build, or a condi p/d build…and I just can’t get him down. Incidentally, one of my builds is borrowed from an excellent pvp thief. Same results, I survived for a long time but never could get him down, and eventually I died. Too much regen, too much protection, too little damage from me, not enough stuns/etc. from me.

Example 2: My ranger vs this ele….both bunkers….played 10 minutes, nobody won. It got BORING. I didn’t hardly have to do anything, he didn’t do much damage to me, and I didn’t do much to him.

This is a kinda stupid IMO.

p/d cd is pretty much useless in 1v1 but can be good in 2v2 etc…pvp. Only ever saw one good p/d cd thief. Ever.

Some professions have basically worthless condition damage and can’t beat a phant mesmer at all, it’s pretty much an impossibility because the chances of doing everything perfect and evading all that huge phant damage while ALSO killing a semi-bunker enemy is extremely unlikely without necro, engi, or maybe a bunk ranger.

I really loathe the imbalance.

I know all you mesmer fans love it because it’s soooooo easy to abuse…but anyone can see phant mesmer needs a massive nerf the size of Australia. Why? Well let’s see…unavoidable without 1-2 dodgerolls, is not blindable, crits extremely often, very easy to produce quickly or rebuild, and VERY high damage…it’s like having total OPness without even lifting a finger yourself or having any personal risk.

This does not belong. It is very broken and OP. Fix please. Thanks!

Oh and mind wrack, 6-8k + 3-5k with sword #2 skill?….in about 1 second? Instakill broken too! Did you know that even thief can’t do that anymore (with the mug nerf)?

evasion sucks for thief, only pistol whip has any decent evade and it plants you very firmly in one spot. s/d isn’t used for the evade, it’s used because they tried to give thief a fighting chance vs some really OP classes in recent patch…but they didn’t actually want thief to have a REAL chance, only think they had one so they won’t whine as much…

But so far all the “devs” have done is make thief burst weaker and now nonexistent.

And it’s fine. For pvp pubsmashing somewhat…for instance, I can run away from lots of stuff, come back, help teammates kill…and I can go through an entire spvp game without dying…but play against any actually good players and it gets totally trounced. I have to either run from them or I die. It cannot beat a good mesmer or ranger or d/d ele. It can’t because they outdamage/outheal/outcondition it.

Back to square one with thief…guess they really don’t have ANY good builds anymore. If one more complete idiot says that lacerating strike is actually good for anything besides committing suicide…well that will just be one more idiot I can clearly identify.

The revealed debuff yes, I am visible to other players when these proc off..

In particular, bunk ranger, phant OR shatter or other mesmer, d/d ele, bunk engi, retal guardian are all basically anti-thief machines. And necro is also very difficult…maybe not as impossible, but still very difficult.

How can people be so totally ignorant as to make statements like, “quit whining and get off your butt and try to improve.” Do you not realize that those of us in the situation of frustration have been trying, trying and trying to find good builds, techniques that work, etc., against certain professions/builds and the brick-wall that is imbalance in favor of the other professions is what we are facing? And the feeling of the imbalance results in frustration, not because we haven’t tried more than one or two things already, but because we have tried MANY things and still run into the same impassable barrier.

IOW…I have tried probably 40-50 different build angles, tweaks, etc., and many different fighting techniques, and still run into the same inevitable answer that certain profs have total superiority…and that we need a buff in order to have a fighting chance against them.

I am talking 100% about PvP like sPvP. Our damage is quite heavily nerfed there. However, in WvW there are plenty of professions I will avoid a 1v1 against because it’s a guaranteed loss…especially bunk ranger and any mesmers I see. They are impossible for a thief to beat when played well. Impossible is the word that lots and lots of experience has taught me means that it would take absolute perfection, no mistakes, some luck, a very fast internet connection, and some hyperadvanced mental function on the Thief player’s part to be able to actually EVER beat certain professions/builds.

Give us something meaningful to do with them…for isntance, make the venoms have a shorter cooldown or add a percentage of damage/etc. to each attack. Give traps shorter cooldown as well.

And instead of the minor trait doing 10% more damage if enemy has a condition, make a major trait that does 8% more damage for EACH condition the enemy has…

This patch was good for me in one way: It didn’t add a new nerf to sPvP thief. Since I play mostly PvP now because the rewards for WvW are negligible/virtually nonexistent anyway and PvP at least lets me fashion infinite builds like a sandbox mode…I don’t really care much about WvW nerfs anymore.

I can’t recall specifics, but yes in some instances I am noticing things like trait-activated stealths that occur while I’m already stealthed actually end up revealing me for some unknown reason.

Why not just remove thief altogether?

By playing thief, you are already playing at a disadvantage to at least 4 other professions whose very powerful builds are all capable of holding their own vs every profession and who can easily beat thieves…

Thief gets ignored for any updates at all this patch (though to be fair, the updates to each profession were mostly cosmetic this time)…except traps. Anti-stealth traps to disable, for 30 seconds, what thief basically needs in order to survive (or escape) most fights for any length of time…one of the absolute most important, integral, critical and necessary traits of thief…and they have to take an already limping profession and add more insult.

So…with all the nerfs and inconveniences constantly piled onto thief without any remediation in the form of correcting other massively imbalanced professions/builds (e.g. phant mesmer, bunk bm ranger)…why would most people bother playing thief anymore?

Certainly if the goal is to make stealth abilities weaker/useless, they are well on the way. And since stealth is so integral to thief design, it’s basically saying that they don’t really want thief to be able to do anything anymore. Eventually people will get tired of playing thief because it’s so inferior post-nerfs, because their build mechanic is being slammed hard by nerfs every time. Take away the fun, make thief less viable, make fewer people play it…then they can say that thief isn’t being played enough anymore to justify keeping it in the game…and then just remove it entirely.

Why not jump the gun and remove thief now? It’s already inevitable based on the process clearly in place…

I am noticing double proc stealth behaviors actually cancelling each other out with no damage done to the enemy. Good example….anything that pairs with black powder + hs.

Basically it doesn’t DO anything….anet are you gonna fix this?

Henrik.7560:

They should make heartseeker cost more initiative since the huge amount of damage it deals + you can spam it heaps of times.

@OP, #4 is impossible since warriors, guardians and engineers can easilly crit above 4k

It’s COMPLETELY possible, and I cite recent example as follows: Mug is the first and only skill ever limited by the feature “cannot critically hit.” With precedents like that set aside just for thief, anything is possible.

Anyone care to venture a guess? Will it be…

1. Reduce base damage
2. Reduce base hp
3. Reduce stealth healing/other stealth benefits
4. Make thief incapable of ever critting above 4k
5. Make infiltrator strike cost 4 initiative instead of 3
6. Reduce mug damage by 50% and increase healing by 25%
7. Reduce heartseeker damage by 25%
8. Reduce backstab damage by 25%
9. Reduce sword damage by 50%
10. Make pistol whip have even longer cast time and reduce damage by 25%
11. Call the next nerf a buff

Any other guesses?

Isn’t a profession/build OP when it can basically destroy every other profession/build or at least never die to someone else (bunker vs bunker) 1v1 easily? E.g. bunker ranger?

Where is the fairness in an spvp game where the thief can only kill select profs but the ranger can kill all profs? How does a thief actually CAPTURE any points when it gets chased off and must run from the ranger? What happens if there are…gasp…TWO such rangers/etc. bunker builds that thief simply has no counter to, cannot possibly win against, etc.? Why then the thief becomes completely frigging USELESS.

So why does anet continue to leave thief without any effective way to counter so many professions/builds (bunk ranger, any mesmer, d/d ele, retal guard)?…NO counters? None at all? Why does Thief get singled out for this? Warrior has never had it good but they are sort-of on the right track towards improvement…and war at least has massive PVE damage to make up for crappy pvp. Thief has bad pve and now bad pvp.

Fix. Thief. Damage. That’s all thief needs. Damage. No more HP, no more armor, no more anything else…just damage.

bhagwad.4281:

Oh I’m not afraid of thieves anymore. I run the immortal mesmer build and no thief can get me down without dying of retaliation . Or if I run my phantasm mesmer it’s even easier to kill them. Naturally I can’t prevent a thief from running away, but still…

I was just responding to the assertion that 1v1 doesn’t matter. I really don’t care about which server is on top. All I know is that I should personally be able to take care of myself 1 on 1.

That is so very easy to build. Mesmer can become invincible vs thief, but thief can’t build anything to counter mesmer. This is part of the problem I have noted many times in the past. It’s called OP mesmer builds vs UP thief profession.

Lighter.5631:

when you see thieves everywhere in tpvp, you know it means something

That people are trying desperately to figure out a useful build for thief in tpvp…only it doesn’t exist.

No reason to pick thief for pve OR pvp anymore. Only function now is a scout in wvw.

I simply don’t enjoy any other profession nearly as much as thief…so when I get discouraged enough by fresh thief nerfs, I stop playing gw2 altogether rather than switching to any of my other chars. I’ve got 5 professions maxed (thief twice). Thief is the most fun for pvp for me. However, it’s also the most disadvantaged and inferior prof right now…and it’s incredibly frustrating.

Challenge is a waste of time when it is constantly unrewarded. I am still trying to play mine simply because I enjoy the mechanics of the prof so much more than any others…but I am not playing it as much anymore. Ranger, boring as it is, now gets more attention…and my mesmer is coming back. Mesmer is fairly enjoyable, but not nearly as much as thief. However, I can actually win fights with a mesmer or ranger.

The destruction of thief has led me to want to buy a few more slots with gold so I can add new characters/professions to my account.

There is no improving on a worthless profession until they fix the massive nerfs that make it worthless.

Agonoize.4021:

I play a thief as main in a guild that focuses on WvW mostly.

Stats : 19,5k Life,2800 Armor,3250 attack,55% chance,88 CD

I call bs on those stats, there is no combination of equipment that gives all of those things at once. Thief can only manage 19k life with lots of vit boosting e.g. valks, which makes 55% cc impossible. 2800 armor isn’t possible with valks either, and 19.5k life isn’t possible with knight’s. 3250 attack as a thief requires extremely power-focused equipment and trait build, and probably the 180 signet passive. 55% cc is extremely hard without some rampagers.

Any thief with those stats would be so OP that it would be basically unstoppable if the player isn’t totally kitten

The build that I have most consistently used is…

10 III
30 I, X, XI or XII
10 II
20 III, VIII

Combined with stealth skills and shadowstep or roll for initiative.

Unfortunately thief damage is so nerfed now that I am basically not playing it anymore. It’s the most fun profession for me mechanics-wise, but every other profession is superior now.

This profession…is now worthless in pvp. It was always inferior in pve, which we all accepted because it was good at pvp. Now the only thing thief is good for is a “scout” for wvw because it can run fast and escape from everything else that can kill it easily. Which is everything else.

Thief…has no damage anymore. a single 3-6k shot every 4-5 seconds does not cut it when your enemies all have 15-25k hp on average, more armor than you, and are hitting you all the time while you wait to deal your next 3-6k shot. And when they hit you for more than that with 1-skill spam over the time it takes for you to land yours…and when you have 11-16k hp yourself and are glass NO MATTER WHAT you do…

This profession was built for DAMAGE, not surviving, not hp. Well, we still have NO surviving and no hp, but now we also have no damage. Mug crit nerf is an example of the “chipping away” at thief damage that has been happening forever. A few thousand here, a few thousand there…and pretty soon you end up with a worthless class that doesn’t kill anything before it gets killed.

Anet…I have loyally played thief because it is a fun, enjoyable class. Because the mechanics are fun. But I have to put mine away for now just because you have nerfed it into uselessness.

It is a sad day for me. My favorite class. Every time a new patch comes along I hope and pray they…make thief viable again for pvp. As I said before, it’s already pretty slow for pve compared to higher damage or better aoe profs like warrior/ele/etc…but now it’s also inferior for burst damage to many classes that have much more hp/survivability than thief ever had or was designed to have.

Stop driving towards balance and ending up making all the professions level and equal and boring in every way. Thief had damage, ranger has balance and good ranged attack and pets, ele has aoe and damage and survivability, war has massive damage, guard has defense and retal and great support abilities, necro has aoe and lots of survivability, mes has great burst, good skill survivability and good sustained damage…but thief doesn’t have any of these things anymore. Thief never had survivability except through invis, its only remaining ace up the sleeve that hasn’t been totally destroyed (though they tried last patch, too many people realized it was an error). However, invis isn’t helpful for killing if you don’t have damage to accompany it…so all a thief can do is run away from everyone. Limited aoe, mostly single-target-focused skills, you would think it is designed for 1v1…but it isn’t any good at 1v1 anymore.

Some might disagree, but many/most will agree that thief needs that “imbalance” of high damage in order to balance it again.

Don’t do a diablo3. Don’t do a one-world new world order thing where everyone is blended and similar. Don’t make everything homogenous. Don’t give thief more hp or survivability, keep it delicate and glassy. That’s the nature of the profession. Keep the differences and strengths (and weaknesses) to each class that makes them all uniquely viable. Give thief their damage back.

If you listen to constant complaints from people saying this or that is OP, then what results is a bunch of nerfing that ends up making everyone equally useless. Rather, balance that with making things STRONGER. Too many nerfs = bunch of nerf bats. Put some metal spikes back in them again.

evilapprentice.6379:

Here’s a thief build that pretty reliably deals with Retal guardians (among many other things).
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQRAsY4alYmCN3aS3E/5EC3DLEqeKNF3kN1pgrkPA;TwAgzCoouxcj4G7Nubk3sCZEyGiJEA
Copy-Paste the link.

Short Synopsis – You’re tough and you heal like crazy. Leeching Sigil and Leeching venoms procs are straight, un-mitigitable damage – bring thieves guild instead of basilisk and pop spider venom if you want to watch a bunker guard drop in 3 seconds – just HS or Tact Strike at 50% and they’ll be dead before they know whats going on.

Tried it, it’s bad. Crappy, in fact – beats basically nothing except crappy warriors. No good ranged attacks, always in melee range, bad damage, no condition damage…can’t really kill anything with that build. Not that great at surviving either, actually…

jportell.2197:

Theif sword/dagger three strips a boon and they have bounitful theft which strips another couple boons…. And currently retal is the best counter to the extremely over the top HGH build.

Neither of which is guaranteed to remove retaliation, and s/d 3 is a fairly crappy skill that puts you in harm’s way and requires very close range with limited damage potential. Steal-based things have the cooldown of steal, which is a long time. No, these aren’t actually good options.

It’s not like I want there to always be a great easy counter for every build from every profession…I just want there to be some build for each profession that has the ability to be on relatively even playing ground with the other person’s build in a different profession.

Right now, thief simply has NO build that effectively counters the best mesmer builds, or even gives them a level playing field. Thief vs mesmer is massively imbalanced in favor of mesmer.

The problem with retaliation is that it is not like bleeding/poison/etc. that can be self-removed. It has to be stripped from the enemy, which is actually incredibly hard and often impossible for some professions like thief…and even if you can debuff, the debuff skill takes much longer to refresh than the retaliation, which is back on again killing you easily.

There are three overpowered and broken professions running amok in pvp now: Guardian, Mesmer, Elementalist. Each one has a god-mode build and tons of people are exploiting them. Pretty soon, no more thieves or warriors or engineers or necros will bother playing pvp anymore because of the imbalance and unfair games for them.

Tons of elementalist d/d players everywhere. No other elementalist weapon choice ever shows up in pvp unless the player is totally inept. It is extremely OP/broken with massive heals, defense, and good damage.

Guardian: Great damage while having nearly impenetrable defenses. Shrugs off both normal damage AND condition damage with various healing skills and high armor and HP. Retaliation is abused massively here. Impossible to beat as several classes, especially thief.

Mesmer: Great damage, vulnerable only to condition damage…which is unfortunately NOT available in any usable way to some professions (though really easily accessible to guardian, engineer, necro).

Wouldn’t balance be where every profession has some build that they can make which will give a fair change vs the other professions’ build that counters another build and so on? These recent guard/ele/mes builds are so powerful that everybody is doing the same patterns…but they are overpowered and make the game unfair for other professions that can’t create ANY effective counter to them.

Retaliation is one of the core problems. Unblockable, can’t remove it by healing, and most classes without any good debuffs to use on enemies can’t remove it reliably at all. It’s simply too strong to be so difficult/impossible to remove. Basically, guardian with ultra-high hp/armor and retaliation is just impossible – or virtually impossible – to beat with any low hp class. Mesmer does the same thing, retaliation plus confusion. Confusion can be removed, but retaliation can’t.

More than anything else, Retaliation is broken and gives all of these classes that abuse it an advantage over those that don’t have it or can’t remove it. I’m proposing a 25-50% retaliation damage nerf for pvp/wvw.

Elementalist, everyone already knows about: all they ever use is dagger/dagger combo, and all they do is infinitely heal, block, cancel conditions…and kill most professions extremely easily, especially anyone with low base hp. It’s broken because of the skill tree having so much synergy as others have mentioned, and the fact that everybody uses it now is a bad sign. I leave it to you to know how to fix that…

Just now…14k retaliation kills me, with very low power, p/d thief playing, I die because retaliation is 90% of my hp. That’s broken. It’s broken BECAUSE retaliation is broken OP and needs a 25-50% nerf.

Retaliation needs a nerf BECAUSE….unlike bleeding, burning, poison, confusion…you can’t heal it away.

If you don’t attack, then you can’t kill. if you can’t kill, then you automatically lose the fight. When you need to kill to take points, then this is obviously a barrier.

Bleed can be a pita, depends on what skills you have. Those with lots of regen do just fine vs bleed since their regen offsets it. However, confusion/retaliation both do MUCH more damage than bleed and are affected by your actions, thereby preventing you from performing any to…kill the enemy to take the point…

But the problem I have is that certain builds are physically IMPOSSIBLE TO BEAT AT ALL with certain professions. That means those professions who are unable to kill those builds – no matter what the losing profession’s build is, it still loses – are at a disadvantage and will eventually be considered of lesser value for pvp because they can’t win. Because it’s NOT an even playing field.

Thief is one of the best examples of a profession that simply can’t make any build that will beat a few extremely prevalent mesmer builds…because there are no thief builds that can beat a good mesmer. This is an imbalanced situation. Thief is, incidentally, also a great example of a profession that CANNOT bunker worth a kitten – whereas every other profession – including ele – CAN bunker.

Warrior is another good example of not really being good enough for pvp to bother with. Too many disadvantages.

retaliation is overpowered and needs to be nerfed by 25-50%. I see my deaths from mesmers/guardians being about 80% of the time like 5-15k from retaliation. It’s just insanely stupid.

Incidentally, this is a factual sign of a problem: When people discover something is overpowered…EVERYBODY starts doing it, pigeonholing the builds for those professions and making it so there aren’t any different options if you want to win pvp.

No actually they negate/remove conditions very easily and outlive them with their 90% life recovery per heal. Conditions kill way too slowly.

TheBeedon.6031:

Condi builds, for example, will eat these guardians alive, so it’s not like they are invincible to everything, just what you have experience with, unfortunately.

I disagree that it’s as it should be. Retaliation is still a broken tool that makes certain classes physically incapable of beating others (thief vs mesmer for instance). If it is impossible to beat a specific mesmer build with ANY build from another profession, then that build is broken.

Here’s the problem: Anyone can make a huge tank guardian with retaliation that simply beats everybody because nobody has enough hp to kill the guardian without dying themselves. This is especially a problem with very low hp professions like thief and ele. It’s impossible to do enough damage to them without dying. Totally, utterly impossible.

Second note: Mesmer retaliation is part of the same problem. They have higher HP than thief/ele and heavy on retaliation/confusion. Playing thief is fun, but it’s just not possible to beat either confusion/retaliation mesmers or retaliation guardians.

IMO all professions should have SOME chance against all other professions. This shouldn’t be rock paper scissors…except it is, because of some skills like that.

My request is that you reduce retaliation damage by 25-50% in order to make it possible to actually beat these professions with thief (and ele too). Otherwise…it’s just broken and overpowered. Retaliation is simply too powerful vs low hp professions that have NO way to negate or avoid that damage at all.

But only reduce the effectiveness in PVP/WVW, not PVE.

I like the idea, it’s a blast from the past in style and I think it’s the coolest thing to hit the otherwise same-old graphics and general aspects of MMORPGs in a long time.

I’m having the same problem in the last several days, lag bubbles I never experienced before. Sometimes they are long enough to disconnect me entirely. I’m not the only one who is getting them, others are complaining about them in-game too.