Guild Wars 2

I must respectfully disagree with your base proposition. It is not a good idea to have the most skilled players in the game shoehorned into one or two class choices in order to shine. That means that the skill ceilings for the classes should be somewhat normalized, which likely means raising some and lowering others. Would be tough, but I feel like that’s what we pay game devs to do…make good games.

A second note, I don’t think that one can really say thieves have the highest skill cap. Yes, you can do some great things with them, but the stealth mechanic always causes a skill cap to plummet because it largely removes the opponent from the equation. In cases where there is stealth, burst damage and cc all in one combined with multiple leaps (some of which are stun breakers)…that’s too many tools that the opponent cannot reasonably answer to to say that it is a high skill cap class and deserves to be more powerful for it. A thief without stealth would be high skill cap, a thief with stealth is just hard to respond to.

That said, I don’t like that the recent changes seem to make the least interesting thief builds the favorites. I’m no fan of backstab.

I can’t say anything about engis though as I haven’t played much on them.

Let me preface this with saying that I don’t want this to end up as a QQ thread. I am genuinely confused and hope that, with your wise and patient guidance I might improve as a player. Or such. Who knows…

I am working under a few assumptions here.
-Condition damage bypasses toughness.
-In terms of armor stats, only Condition Damage affects the damage of conditions.

My initial thoughts were that this was kind of weird because there is an armor set that is Condition Damage + Toughness + Vitality. At first, I thought this was similar to Soldier stats (Power + Toughness + Vitality) but I later realized that Power damage is also greatly affected by Precision and Ferocity. Thus, Soldier gear offers defense with a significant sacrifice in offense. On the flipside, Dire (I think?) offers full Condition Damage offensive stats along with full defensive stats.

From this I concluded that Condi builds were meant to be tanky but rely on doing damage over time. In theory, I thought this was fine, but in practice it seemed very strong. That may be because, as a thief, I cannot clear conditions fast enough or often enough if someone is really trying to ruin my day. It also seems less effective in large group fights (WvW style) than Power based builds.

Then, in the recent raid announcement, I saw a remark about players maybe having to put extra Toughness gear on to protect the Condi builds in the back. This confused me because, in my experience, the Condi builds tend to be the toughest folks around.

I’m guessing that this is less of an enigma to someone with more experience, so…help~? Are there secondary damage stats for Condition Damage? Or some reason to include non-defensive stats alongside it?

You’re taking this waaaay too literally.

This doesn’t look like EotM at all to me. Yes, it has ‘more verticality’ but it’s not like you’re going to be falling to your death from the relatively low bridges and what not.

I imagine people are going to be upset that WvW is moving away from ‘Unofficial gvg with towers, if you’re into those’ to something closer to fighting to gain land and keep it. For me, this is a pretty wonderful change, though.

Granted, I don’t know how everything is going to work out yet and I’m kind of concerned about that cannon that hits everything business, but I’m excited to try it out.

The stab changes haven’t killed open field fights, there’s just a little more thought that has to go into it besides melee training in the enemy. Those who were worth fighting will adapt soon enough, the rest…well…

Wicked Witch of the…West?

^Yes!

Most of my game time is small group fighting in WvW or solo roaming on home BL. If I’m in a zerg fight for some reason, I use shortbow for the AoE and switch to pistols if I need to blast one guy in particular.

I don’t know about the community, really, but I do think it’s problematic that a bad thief is super awful (had two friends almost quit after getting wrecked trying to lvl thieves…they went to guardians instead) and a good thief doesn’t allow for their opponent to do much of anything. It makes the class either really frustrating to play as or against, depending on skill levels.

Whether or not it’s OP is sort of irrelevant at that point, though (besides dire builds) I don’t think that thieves are OP, just frustrating.

I think we must play P/P very differently, or perhaps there’s a misunderstanding about what drew me to the class?

What excites me is the necessity of dodging to stay alive. With the 6 dodges I have with my set-up, I’m not missing out on that at all. If things get hairy, I have a SB secondary for creating distance or extra evades.

What I missed when I was playing melee was that high risk, all on the line gameplay. Those builds tended to be “do XYZ to remain safe at all times, then do ABC to punish enemies when appropriate.” Yes, I was very mobile, but things like Infiltrator’s Strike meant that I only died when I picked stupid fights. Thus, the fights became more of a ‘how well do I follow protocol this time’ and less of an exciting back and forth.

I’m not knocking those builds, just they aren’t what I was looking for.

Also, I’m thinking about trying out a SB condi evade build sometime in the future when I’m less poor, though that’s somewhat unrelated? Or has it been done and it didn’t turn out well?

The walls! That’s what gets me, really. A patient thief has nothing to worry about. There’s no waiting out the stealth or guessing when it’s going to end…you just have to clench your butt cheeks and hope their knives aren’t too sharp.

Chaba.5410:

Sviel.7493:

Organization can make up for a minor population imbalance, which can turn tides. Coverage is a bigger problem, though.

That’s true, until your opponent creates a larger population and coverage imbalance, teaching you the folly of playing that way.

That’s not too easy to do, though.

Also, when I think of PPT, I think of fighting for structures, fighting to keep supply lines open, fighting to defend something while outnumbered because the bulk of the forces are on offense somewhere…things like that. I can’t stand just running around sieging empty buildings…that’s why I’m never in eotm.

I think the bigger issue there is that they do condi damage while stealthed while also being very hard to bring down due to the tankiness that comes with a condi build and all the healing/condi removal that goes along with the stealth. If they actually could be killed in a reasonable time frame, it would be ok.

While they’re not all that great in a zerg, in popular opinion, they’re excellent for tacking on vast sums of damage and a bit of critical cc from super far away. Condi trap rangers are also pretty good, but that’s probably more of a ‘Dire is op’ thing than the spec actually being good on its own.

Organization can make up for a minor population imbalance, which can turn tides. Coverage is a bigger problem, though.

Shade, nobody cares about steal. This isn’t a thread about nerfing a class mechanic; it’s about nerfing stealth. Whatever you want to call it, the contention is that it’s not cool right now and it would be better with some changes.

edit: rereading this, it sounds far more sassy than I intended. Please forgive that bit; I love you all~

There’s a group that hates PPT and tries to make it seem like they’re everyone, but in the end, it seems like more people care about it than don’t, at least on the higher tier servers.

There are set-ups similar to these on my server, though not so extreme, so the organized is definitely there. It’s just not ruthless, because that cuts into the fun.

Stealth is definitely poorly implemented for WvW, though it sort of works out in PvP since you tend to be aware that there’s someone stealthed and as long as they remain so their team is down a member. While I’d love a full reworking of it, I think that, realistically, a WvW specific change makes more sense, even if it was just an extended revealed state.

From the video, it looks like it could go either way. I like that it’s not just blank space, at least…open field fights are fun and all but I wish they weren’t the end all be all of WvW combat.

Assuming they also make some small, quality of life changes, WvW might start being fun again and less like that thing I do because I want my server to win but that hurts and drains all of my gold.

At this point, I think I’ve learned the ropes. After testing most everything, I’ve decided that I have way more fun with P/P than any melee combo, so I’m sticking with that despite the weaknesses. I’m effective enough that I don’t feel guilty, but I do have a growing resentment q_q

Is that supply dump more significant than grabbing supply from the eotm map? Or is that not a thing?

I think the problem is less detecting the zerg and more doing something about it. It would make life suck for roamers, though, while cementing thieves as even higher tier roamers than they already are.

Rimmy.9217:

Sviel.7493:

Taking minutes to down a wall isn’t what I’d consider melting. Also, if the catas are too close for mortars, one person on an arrow cart can completely shut them down.

Though, it’d make more sense if mortars weren’t so easy to kill…

Mortars are rock solid compared to cannons – when was the last time you actually found a cannon on your wall when the barbarians were at the gate?

It happens sometimes, though I get maybe one shot off before I/it dies. It does seem rather silly that they’re so exposed and can’t be repaired.

Taking minutes to down a wall isn’t what I’d consider melting. Also, if the catas are too close for mortars, one person on an arrow cart can completely shut them down.

Though, it’d make more sense if mortars weren’t so easy to kill…

papaiggy.1345:

So let’s talk about the SoS guys who keep getting into the SBI Citadel area and setting up siege on the walls above North North. Exploit much? I mean seriously with a stupidly large lead you now have to cheat to drive the score up even more? Not impressed at all. No class, No honor, No sportsmanship. SoS can just go suck it.

What are you talking about here? I don’t know of anyone doing such a thing, but if it’s happening, you’ll have the full support of SoS in putting a stop to it. A screenshot would be ideal, but if you’ve got that you can likely go right to Anet.

Oh, and as to this Blank Jam thing, I actually feel kind of bad about it…but we have no choice but to be cruel in order to maintain our rating and avoid permanently falling into T3. If we went even with SBI and NSP, we’d lose an immense amount of points…we have to tick at like 450+ on average just to break even.

How does dodging waste the backstab? If it’s evaded, stealth doesn’t break and they can just try again. Not to mention, if they weren’t in the act of stabbing, it’s a wasted dodge.

The ‘revealed’ business only happens if the thief breaks stealth by dealing damage, as in a successful backstab. If they don’t manage that, they can just keep cycling stealth. The non-utility stealths do cost a lot of initiative, but since the backstab itself costs none, that doesn’t really matter.

Yes, I can stealth to avoid the backstab, but then I must surrender whatever objective I was guarding to the enemy. Even then, it’s only a ham-handed draw at best since neither of us can see the other.

I do often see them before they stealth, but there’s little I can do about it. They disappear and generally use Shadowstep to close the distance. There’s also no shortage of times where I’m engaged in some other activity or combat and thus I don’t see them before they stealth.

I think the SA line is rather too good, actually, so it wasn’t me saying that. I don’t use it though as I don’t run a whole lot of stealth.

I don’t see how blinding powder is going to stop a backstab when you’re surprised. Unless they stop to wave at you, the ‘surprise’ is usually a knife in the ribs, no? Blinding them at that point matters little.

How does one avoid backstab? Assuming you see the thief before they stealth, what do you do? If you pop an invuln, they can wait it out. If you dodge, their stealth doesn’t break. You can run, but they’re likely more mobile and don’t need any initiative to do the actual backstab. You can try to hit them, but it’s literally shooting/swinging blind. If you somehow avoid it until their stealth runs out, they have no cooldown before they can stealth again, assuming they don’t just stack CDs so that they never pop up.

My strategy for dealing with them is dodging after their initial strike after prepping Basilisk venom. If there’s something I can do to not start the fight with a 50% hp handicap, I’m all ears.

Rapid Fire (and Unload for that matter) do their damage over a second or two, making them much easier to avoid. If you eat the whole thing, it means you made a mistake. A backstab comes without warning and there’s very little one can do to mitigate the damage. Same can be said for shatters and lich form; one can tell what’s about to happen and can perhaps react favorably.

@Warshade
I’ve never played a Mesmer, but playing against them is hit or miss for me. I think I’ll enjoy it more once I better understand their trickery.

My least favorite fights are also against Rangers, btw. They just have soooo many tricks up their sleeve. The way I have to dodge twice for Rapid Fire, have to deal with a 6 second invuln, navigate their stealth and avoid their pet…not to mention that shot that knocks a target back/down. It feels like the fight is all but over by the time they have any openings.

Mayama.1854:

Thieves are not that strong, people in general are just bad. Play against a good player on something like a terrormancer or condi engi and tell me how powerfull your felt while fighting one.

They’re very one-dimensional, but they’re strong in their own right. The ability to backstab someone for upwards of half of their hp with no cooldown other than the next stealth is over the top imo. Obviously, it won’t work against tankier condi builds, but high-mobility + stealth means the thief should always be able to get away. As a fairly glass player, it’s pretty frustrating since my only chance to win is to kill them in the 3 second window between their first attack and the subsequent stealth.

Warshade

Personally, I see little problem with the fact of winning based on my GOOD performance, and losing based on my POOR performance. Why do you find that to be troubling?

Also, how would a person lose against a sandbag?

Since it’s not a single player game, I want to have to react to what my opponent is doing. I want to win because I reacted to that dynamic situation well rather than because I pulled off a fairly memorized chain of inputs.

Ah, I’ve been playing for just under a month, so I didn’t think that it would make so much of a difference that I needed to say it up front, sorry

I have noticed a ton of condition builds and I can’t say that they give much room for healthy counterplay. Basically, they get tons of defense while ignoring their target’s defense and, if it’s a thief, they basically sit in stealth while the conditions tick away. Either you’re playing a class that can scrub conditions well or you’re screwed…surviving has rather little to do with your actions on the field.

At any rate, I’m not too worried about trying to beat those. The odds are way too stacked against me. Even when I deal damage to them, they just shrug it off while in stealth.

I switched out Assassin’s Signet for Shadow Refuge like someone suggested and spent some time learning other classes to improve my ability to dodge. Thus far, I think it’s going pretty well, though I’m definitely compromising some effectiveness for the P/P playstyle. I don’t really understand why thieves are, in general, ridiculously strong , but P/P is so underwhelming. Having experienced Killshot Warriors and rangers in general, it’s…perplexing.

I tried S/D and it worked better outside of group fights at first, but it felt like I was playing against myself. I won or lost based solely on my own performance; the enemy player may as well have been a sandbag.

I also looked up condition builds but they’re so frustrating to play against that I didn’t want to unleash more of that on the world.

I suppose there must be engine limitations blocking a less bulky solution :<

Oh well, it’s still a problem for me since I need certain underwater skills for WvW, but if it’s here to stay I’ll just have to deal with it.

What was the positive side of the intent? Unless, skills didn’t go on land CD if used underwater?

We have to remember that P/P does not work with much stealth, so despite being melee, other set-ups do have higher survivability. Range and dodging are poor substitutes for just disappearing off of the map.

Ah, so it has to do with the positions of the underwater skills. How long has this been going on that you sound so…optimistic?

If Shadow Refuge is on cooldown when another skill is swapped out for Signet of Agility, then the signet will instantly go on cooldown with equal time remaining as the Shadow Refuge cooldown.

I can understand not wanting to cause inflation, but it’s silly to worry about that when WvW doesn’t even turn a profit. It’s fair to say a profit may be too big…but how can one argue against a profit that isn’t there?

I just want to be able to afford playing WvW q_q

If the maps can’t get any bigger and reducing the population cap isn’t going to fly, then PvD should at least be removed, along with some of the AoE on walls business. It wouldn’t be good to punish large groups, but if an 80 man group is no more effective than 20 man group, there will be more incentive to run in 20-mans.

As it stands, having a blob is useful because the enemies can’t respond to the Rams/Catas due to huge amounts of pressure on the walls of the Keep/Tower. The only way to defend is to have higher numbers so that you can push them off…meaning it’s less of a siege and more of a convoluted doorbell for your sparring partner. If there were some built in defensive structures on the walls that could help deal with AoE, defenders could actually stand a chance.

In addition, since structures do not appreciate in PPT value, there’s not much point in holding on to any particular keep/tower. Upgrades don’t mean much against blobs (except waypoints), so trading a T3 tower for a T1 only hurts during the times when small (20-30) groups are running. This also means that there’s no point flipping a T3 tower when there’s a T1 a hop and a skip away. What if upgrading it made it give more PPT and also increased the rewards for taking it? Perhaps even if upgraded towers gave a small, on-capture point boost?

The damage increase from regular to superior is not so high as to make regular siege worthless. At the same time, given all the complaints I hear about low population, I don’t get why there’s so much hostility against new players (who can’t afford skill points for siege) if they’re not siege capping keeps or such.

More on-topic, though, the risk/reward is totally there.

I run P/P and don’t have an issue with initiative in a PvE setting, but I have no illusions about it being on par with other classes. I have to put everything into boosting that Unload DPS to decent levels, so while I do more damage than some other classes, I have no bells and whistles like utility or defense. It’s fun, but Anet doesn’t seem to want it to be good, actually, else they would have given it a once-over by now.

Basically, Thieves are a melee stealth class as far as they’re concerned.

Sneak Attack isn’t something I want to make a mainstay. It’s just not all that impressive with a pistol outside of condi builds.

Using SR for the dark field is a pretty good idea, though. It could also double as an escape from other thieves when they drop SR.

As a side note, is it not extraordinarily silly when a thief fights a thief? It’s like watching a ninja parade.

Played around with it a bit. I had tried it before, but not since hitting 80 I think.

I don’t like it as much as P/P, but it does have the upside of being a 5 skill set instead of 1.5 skills. I’ll have to see how it goes, though I mainly play WvW so I think I’ll have to tweak it.

tl;dr – I’m pretty sure I’m not doing this right, but I want to try to understand what’s wrong about it so I can figure out if I should give up or explore new options. Preferably before I go through the trouble of making ascended gear.

Experts at stealth and surprise, thieves can move through the shadows, vanish into thin air, or steal items from their opponents and use them as weapons. Thieves practice an agile, acrobatic fighting style, which can make them very hard to hit.

When I was choosing my first class, I read the stealth part and cringed a bit, then read the agile, acrobatic…hard to hit part and was hooked. I love the idea of surviving based on my ability to avoid enemy attacks, but I hate using stealth as it removes any meaningful interaction with the other player.

I tried every weapon set and settled on pistol/pistol, which I now gather to have been a poor choice, but nothing else seemed remotely viable without spamming stealth. Of course, pistol/pistol is apparently not viable under any (non-PvE) circumstances, so…

Thing is, the non-stealth utility skills seem really lackluster. The venoms don’t work well at all with pistols and many of the others are designed around melee. I’ve had the best luck with Signet of Agility and Assassin’s Signet, then Roll For Initiative or Smokescreen depending on the enemy. I usually roll Withdraw as a heal since it gives me an extra disengage and has a low CD. I tried Hide in Shadows, but the stealth it gave was pretty useless since the pistol sneak attack is laughable on a non-condi build and it didn’t help with giving me breathing room against melee enemies. Signet of Malice is a mainstay in PvE, but against players I just don’t land as many hits due to lower hp pools and more dodges. Also, the burst healing is a must.

That said, the passive stat boost from the signets doesn’t make them worthwhile, though Agility is great for the extra dodges alone. Assassin’s active is awful on pistols, though. It doesn’t even last for a Full unload, and since the per-hit damage is so low anyway, the overall boost is miniscule compared to how great it is with melee attacks.

I don’t think I need to get into how disjointed P/P skills are, but as an overview…P1 hits for less damage than the random Shortbow I picked up the other day and at a shorter range and with only one target. It has a little bleed on it but I don’t have the hp pool to rely on bleeds unless I can watch safely from stealth. When I played (briefly) around a year ago, it had a combo progression like other skills…except that it was bugged. It seemed like it was supposed to be more of a rapid fire sort of thing, which was nice…guess that was scrapped?

P2 has rare uses. It’d need to immobilize longer to be worthwhile in general, though.

P3 is great after baiting out dodges but…since it’s the only way to do any damage (see: P1 sucks), it’s hard to bait said dodges since nothing else is a threat.

P4 is wonderful in that it rewards me for reading enemies, but it does less damage than P1 (which sucks) and uses nearly half of my initiative. I interrupt one enemy action by giving up an action (P3) that was probably more important to me than whatever I interrupted.

P5 is nice in that it is the only P/P skill that gives me a Combo Field, but said field is almost totally useless. It very rarely is nice when I’m out of dodges and in melee range since P3 will put a few more blinds out when used within it, but it uses over half of my initiative and…well…face tanking a melee is less than ideal.

I’m guessing that everything has to be balanced for the D/P and P/D builds as well, so rather than getting a full skill-set, I’m working with the sloppy seconds of more traditional stealth spam thieves?

Then, in terms of build…I really liked acrobat traits, but one more dodge didn’t amount to much since my damage to initiative ratio plummeted. Full damage (6/6/0/0/2) seems most successful. On that note, any foray into survivability gets slapped in the face by the fact that I need to be able to resolve fights quickly since other classes are much stronger if they get a second round of cooldowns and other thieves won’t take much longer to kill me. Not that one can really dodge a stealthed enemy anyway, since it means they keep their stealth q_q

I can tell from these forums and other’s comments that P/P is seen as rather weak, but I’m not sure whether Anet is planning to do anything about it. Thus, I may have chosen a class where interacting with the enemy means I’ve made a huge mistake. Any tips? Or hope?

starsurfer:

If you attack while in stealth, whether it’s with your stealth attack or another skill, you’ll be hit with a debuff called “Revealed” which will prevent you from re-entering stealth for 3 seconds (4 in PvP modes I believe).

What mode does that happen in? Or, are there skills that ignore “Revealed” status? I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that.

If anything, I think thieves are going to get a lot of sideways tweaks. They’re in the nightmarish position of being awful to play against (condi builds and/or perma stealth) while not being too far off in terms of balance. They’ll probably be changed to have more interaction with other players.

DeceiverX.8361:

Originally the ranger class was supposed to be three different classes – an archer, druid, and warden, but I guess those were too specific so they merged them all together. We’ll see if they take those splits into consideration down the road.

Ah, no wonder!

I was a little confused as to why they had so many tricks up their sleeve, but it makes sense if it’s a somewhat overstuffed reduction of three classes into one.

What class are you playing? There’s not much you can do, but it’s probably class specific.

MightyMicah.7451:

Molch.2078:

Or, to put it in other words: http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win

Nailed it.

I would listen if people could demonstrate that a build other than condi pays off more in the end. For example, if P/D was merely a crutch which could only get so good, and D/P was harder to play, but could be more effective with skillful gaming, then I would listen.

But in my experience with every form of thief, P/D when played correctly, gives the most “bang for buck” so to speak.

That’s kind of the point. It’s the best, by far.

There are already too few ways to interact with thieves. It’s frustrating to try and fight something that only shows up now and then to make an advantageous trade before poofing, and it would be worse if they could cancel attacks at the same time.