Guild Wars 2

I think people are getting muddied up in the Agony issue when the OP is trying to make a different point.

There isn’t really any elegant way to do it without resorting to making more attacks % based. What it comes down to is basically ANet saying “some professions are easier to play” since some professions are absolutely intended to dodge out of attacks (active defensive mechanism) while others are intended to just take the hits (passive defensive mechanism). Obviously there are telegraphed mechanics everyone is supposed to avoid, but the presence of extra mobility and defensive tools in lighter-armored professions means they have to exert more effort to stay up. The “no holy trinity” philosophy, of course, precludes lighter armored professions from having innately superior damage capabilities, so it just leaves them as a bit more difficult to play.

Venoms are good under the conditions that you’re actually taking all the venom traits and using them to their full potential. That includes running with a group and using venom share. If you’re off trying to be a solopwnmobile I would not bother.

Mufa.1326:

1. Unload is ranged, sword is melee. If you want safety of the range you should have lower dps. I do not know why people think you should be doing the same dmg standing safely on the ledge at 800 range as going into the melee and taking all the risks that implies.
2. Even sword skills that are initiative costly like pistol whip do not have much higher dps (if at all) than sword auto.
3. Maybe, just maybe, p/p should be looked at as a good situational 2nd-ary weapon choice, rather than your primary choice, and people should stop trying to make it primary choice because you will have to sacrifice dmg for the safety of range and as a thief you have no need for that in this game. Here is where p/p is better than any other weapon set thief has: The situation where you are snared, rooted or you simply cannot close the distance to your opponent who is low on health and you have your initiative bar pretty full. If p/p is your secondary weapon choice, you can switch to p/p and unload on him to finish him off. p/p has the best ranged spike of the thief weapon sets (bow’s explosions require you to be in melee range pretty much). It has other perks (blind field and interrupt) (but so does d/p).

1. That is fair, the main problem with Unload, though, is that there’s no reasonable alternative for ranged DPS, so you’re stuck spamming a “bursty” skill that does less than melee auto attack damage. I’m fine with pistol auto being worse than melee auto, and pistol burst being worse than melee burst, but with the current situation you trade both damage (because Unload has mediocre damage) and utility (because Unload eats all of your initiative) for safety (via range).

2. Sword auto does indeed do more DPS than any other sword skill, as well as any pistol skill. Whether this is an issue with sword auto being too good (not likely) or other thief burst options being nerfed into the ground is up for debate. People quickly came to the realization that if thieves have initiative-for-burst options then they’ll spam those to maximize DPS. The solution: Bring all initiative-burning options down below auto attack to disincentivize this behavior.

3. In the situation noted, sword/anything would serve you better than P/P, thanks to Infiltrator’s Strike. P/P does have situational uses, but they’re rather limited, and thanks to recent changes to make P/P at all competitive you have to take pistol-specific traits. Dumping two or more traits specifically into pistols makes P/P a very poor choice for “situational swap weapon”.

One of the main problems with Unload in specific is that Pistol Whip does what Unload does (huge hit volume) so much better. There are certain buffs that could be made to thief traits to make Unload much more attractive, like removing the 1 second CD from the vuln-on-crit trait. The problem is that these same buffs would affect Pistol Whip even more than Unload. I’d like to see Unload be revamped as a whole into something less focused on hit volume.

MasterDeere.3417:

lower backstab dammage by 50% and add a effect like cripple or stun

This is on the right track, but too drastic.

Raw BS damage should be lowered in favor of something more synergistic that can grow with thief skill instead of remaining boring and stagnant.

Daendur.2357:

1 stack of might when you already have 10 is not so noticeable; nor the +1 dodge every 30s
obviously if you play around dodges, vigor will be mandatory

By that logic no one should use berserker gear because “some extra crit damage when you’ve already got lots is not so noticeable”, overall strength is made up of a bunch of smaller boosts, and the +70 offensive stat points you get per Might stack at 80 is hardly a tiny boost.

Not sure where you’re getting “+1 dodge every 30s” either, Vigor stacked with the same trait line’s dodge refund mechanic allows thieves to dodge more than any other profession and further synergizes with the other on-dodge mechanics thieves can achieve through traits. Dodge is amazing as an avoidance mechanism on its own, but it really shines when each dodge gives the thief an offensive buff, swiftness, does damage/cripple/heal, and refunds endurance for more dodges. Dodge synergy is easily one of the more powerful thief synergies, on par with stealth.

Ensign.2189:

What do you mean by viable?

This.

“PvE” is a wide range of stuff.

Events: P/P works fine for doing events, but any weapon set works fine for doing events, including empty-offhand lolsetups. However, even with Ricochet P/P still has arguably the worst AE capability of any setup except D/P, so in the vast majority of events where you’re going to be fighting swarms of weak mobs, P/P is going to be one of the least effective choices. For single-target events (kill-the-champion, mostly), P/P will do fine but the amount of people usually focused on that enemy during these event types will mean the damage-for-safety trade-off you make with P/P isn’t really necessary.

Open-world killing/gathering: Again, you can do this with any set, but again P/P is one of the worst with no organic stealth, no organic movement abilities, weak AE (with trait), etc. The upside being that you can govern the amount of enemies you’re engaging here so you can pull one at a time to focus on P/P’s strengths (burning down one target at range), the downside being that “focusing on P/P’s strengths” will leave you killing one mob about as fast as anyone else kills a group of mobs with AE.

Dungeons: P/P actually shines in some boss fights that are single target and heavily favor range. Not really worth using outside of those fights though, for the same reasons P/P isn’t that great in the open world.

Daendur.2357:

Power of inertia = gives only 1 stack of might, not needed if you have Hidden assassin

Might stacks to 25, and synergizing towards it means multiple sources are better. The stacks that Power of Intertia grants have a pretty long base duration and it isn’t difficult to maintain 3+ stacks via dodging alone. Pair with Orrian Truffle Meat Stew + Signet of Agility and you can do 12+ stacks of Might just from dodging.

It doesn’t pair well with one-shot backstab style play, but it is a powerful trait, especially at the 10 point level.

Vigorous recovery is also pretty solid considering that thieves can get their heal cooldown to 12 seconds and vigor synergizes very well with the Acrobatics traitline. Descent of Shadow is great in WvW where you can actually use the environment to your advantage. Master Trapper and Assassin’s Retreat are pretty bad, although I hear that Assassin’s Retreat gives stupid amounts of swiftness when mass-killing in PvE for an extended period of time.

Are you using GW2lfg? I’ve not had problems finding 1-10 groups on alts.

Narcoleptic Insomniac.3179:

Bootysweat.2371:

sigil of rage
sigil of fire

If I remember correctly, Sigils that trigger on critical hits share the cooldown. So 45 seconds after you get quickness, you won’t see any fires.

Yeah, Sigil of Rage is terrible, especially if you’re basing your build around “wait for random sigil to proc, then be awesome for 3 seconds every 45 seconds”.

Pistol is far from overpowered, especially with a setup like the one in this thread.

DaveGan.8065:

Finally, I do believe MF is a terrible mechanic that should either be removed or changed to be less parasitic.

I’m all for that, even if I don’t follow the rest of your reasoning.

The only difference between someone running a life steal sigil on their weapon so they can be lazy and dodge less and someone running a MF sigil on their weapon so they can get more loot is that in the latter case they get rewarded with loot and in the former case they get rewarded with being able to pay less attention. Heck, at least they can max the MF sigil and switch it out for something that helps them in combat.

Either you’re forcing everyone to get with the program and play in an optimally combat effective way or you’re just bitter about people being rewarded with loot instead of requiring less effort. Basically, “Look, you don’t have to fight hard or use effective attacks, as long as doing so doesn’t get you more stuff than it gets me”, which is a philosophy that not only hurts the inidividual person but the group as a whole.

Sometimes I swap berserker jewelry to valkyrie jewelry for survivability because I know an upcoming encounter is particularly unforgiving and I either don’t want to put my full attention into dodging or I don’t want to spend money on some dodge food. I know this hurts my group as a whole, and I’m only doing it to cover my own desire to use less attention or spend less money, but I do it anyways. If I gave it my A-game or ate some dodge food I could just as easily swap to MF jewelry for the same effect, but under your group philosophy that is wrong while the former is okay.

Rissou.7213:

Tulisin.6945:

Rissou.7213:

The 5% crit works but I would prefer the 5% damage since crit above 60% is unnecessary because of diminishing returns.

GW2 stats don’t have diminishing returns. It is 21~ points per % crit chance at 80, whether you’re going from 10->11 % or 60->61%. Don’t fall into the trap of assuming that as you near 100 % crit chance the relative value of another 1 % crit chance falls either.

That said, a 5 % damage boost will be superior to 5 % more crits only if a critical hit isn’t doing at least double damage (<50 % crit damage from stats), and crits also confer better on-crit proc rates as well as some resistance vs. weakness. Which of them is better is going to depend on your stat/trait setup.

Thanks for proving my point, there is no burst built thief that doesnt have above 50% crit damage.

I think you misunderstand. The fact that most bursty thieves have >50 % crit damage makes crit rate the logical choice.

Lets make up some numbers and assume a thief hits a target 1,000 times for 100 damage with a 0 % chance to crit. Give the thief +5 % damage and he’ll hit 1,000 times for 105 damage. Overall he’ll gain 5,000 damage, or about as much damage as 50 extra hits. That is all immediately obvious just because of how percentages work.

Now assume the thief has base crit damage (crits have a 1.5 multiplier) and a 5 % chance to crit. The thief hits 1,000 times, but 50 of those times (5 %), he does 150 damage. As a result, the thief nets 50×50, or 2500 damage, about as much damage a 25 extra hits. Half the benefit of the raw damage increase, right?

But what if the thief has 50 % crit damage on gear? That damage multiplier is now 2, meaning the 5 % crit chance thief pulls out 5,000 damage, just like the raw damage thief, they’re equal at 50 % crit damage from gear.

Now what if the thief is pushing a ton of crit damage, pulling in +100 % from gear? The multiplier on each of those 50 crits is now 2.5, which means the thief is pulling int 7500 damage over 1,000 hits, a huge increase over the 5,000 damage the raw thief is still getting.

At >50 % crit from gear, 1 % of crit chance beats 1 % of damage.

As for proc chance, you’re right that there are diminishing returns when cooldowns and stacking are involved. Bleed was a poor choice to demonstrate this since it is unlikely you’ll be hitting the 25 cap with just procs, but proc cooldowns are important since you get no benefit from crit as far as procs go if your proc is on cooldown, which allows you to essentially have “too much” for that particular application. It should be noted, though, that not all crit procs have a cooldown, and those that don’t will never have a falloff in the rate of return for crit rate. However, regardless of your proc cooldowns/stacks, the benefit of adding more crit rating to get more procs is less than zero, even if it does diminish, which just gives crit rating another leg up on pure damage.

Wiredgunslinger.5480:

You guys realize less then 5% of thieves take this trait right? It’s in our weakest trait line and the only thieves that go into that line are those that use it to build up their vigor for mad dodges.

“Less than 5 % of thieves use this ability because it is bad so it doesn’t matter if they make it less bad” is incredibly circular reasoning. Yes, it was underused because it was terrible, now it will be less underused.

Acrobatics is far from our weakest trait line, it easily has the most synergy of any trait line and is very well-rounded for offense and defense. What it is not, however, is a popular trait line for glass cannon assassination-style play. People are right when they say thieves currently not using acrobatics won’t dip into the trait line solely for 50 % stealth runspeed, but it has nothing to do with the trait line being bad and everything to do with it not supporting their play style.

As for the people not noticing the 50 % difference, you may be trying to compare 33 % swiftness vs. 50 %, which will make it much harder to see. It is pretty easy to notice a difference if you do something like run in a straight line at base run speed and then pop Blinding Powder. That said, with no rigorous way to measure runspeed, it could very well be less than 50 %, even if it is doing something.

ZLE.8293:

They can be very fragile if you counter their stealth with area of effects or large stacks of conditions,

Incidentally, neither of these are effective counters to stealth, especially conditions if the stealthed thief is running condition removal on stealth.

So, yeah, I’m saying ANet doesn’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to actually combating stealth on the field. Maybe they intended for AE and conditions to be effective counters, but they aren’t.

Kumakichi.2583:

I’ve had runs with groups that had dismal dps. Maybe they were wearing magic find gear.

While that is possible, poor trait choice, an ineffective play style, or even bad utilities contribute much more to DPS than all but the highest concentrations of MF. If your thief is running Signet of Shadows, for instance, getting them to change that would be enough to offset everyone in the group going from 0 % MF to 70 %~ MF, easy.

Koga.7215:

Crit builds especially need to be tested over a 3-5min time frame to get average dps to take into account for long chains of crits (or lack of them) on the major skills.

Given that most linear boosts will affect skills predictably, once you hammer out the differences in effectiveness of the base skills with steady weaponry you can extrapolate how good they’ll be relative to eachother with gear.

But, yeah, it is better for comparison than for raw numbers.

Brutal Arts.6307:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Brutal Arts.6307:

Can we turn normal relics into Pristine ones or not?

I will talk to some other designers about this, but our intent was to afford unfortunate people the chance to obtain the rings so they can progress forward.

Allowing people to turn their arguably useless (at most you need ~2075) fractal relics would only aid you in helping players realize that intent.

Even if they allowed trading current relics for rings, I’m pretty sure I’d continue to bank mine even up until I had >5,000 simply because rings are currently available through other avenues and I’m sure they’ll be adding important stuff for other slots to the vendors in the future. I’ll take a leg up on getting Ascended armor over the ability to select an Ascended ring any day.

ensoriki.5789:

Outside of that it should reinforce the thief as a hit and runner. Hit, get the hell out and come back.

I think people are underestimating what a 50 % speed boost will mean for practical combat stealth applications, instead of just running away. Makes it a heck of a lot easier for P/D to control range without using Dancing Dagger cripples, for one. It’ll also change the max range at which a thief can charge in for a backstab/tactical strike when opening with a stealth utility/heal.

Loading.4503:

You always hear people say a counter to stealth is aoe

Those people are, and have always been, wrong. AE isn’t a good counter to stealth, and people only say it because they’ve heard others say it, not because they’ve actually implemented the idea and found it effective.

At best, AE is a better counter to stealth than standing around doing nothing, which is what a lot of people do when confronted with it.

senoph.2930:

frans.8092:

Just curious, how do people do all these DPS measurements?

They don’t. They’re just guessing. I’m not kidding. A vast majority of DPS discussion is just guessing because big numbers. If/when you see any serious discussion over DPS it’s usually based off of killing golems in the mists (the time it takes to down them)

Thieves also have the luxury of being able to repeat high-damage abilities without long CDs, so it is actually pretty viable to hand-clock the damage different abilities do over a given amount of time when spammed.

For a quick and dirty calculation, however, using steady weapons against golems in the mists is a good way to demonstrate that, for instance, one skill does substantially more DPS than another.

Could be preparation for introducing a hard-counter to stealth. I can’t follow the reasoning for it either. I wish they’d annotate the patch notes with their reasoning instead of just “X now does Y”.

Incurafy.6329:

The increase of Fleet Shadow from 33% to 50% is quite an interesting choice though, it’s like they’re trying to say “Yeah Thieves can get away easily in Stealth, that’s the point! In fact, you don’t like it? Good, we’ll make them even better at it!”

What are your thoughts?

This actually grants some legitimacy to “stealth is what allows thieves to escape” whining, unfortunately. Previously it was mostly pure mobility that allowed thieves to escape, with the stealth masking the mobility taking most of the blame for thieves being hard to catch. People were beginning to understand, however, that if you had superior mobility then thieves were catchable, it wasn’t really the stealth at all. With this change, stealth and mobility will be directly linked so folks saying “they get away because STEALTHAX!” will be technically correct.

Jahva.1895:

P/P was simply not adequately addressed.

Pretty much this. Addressing P/P’s issues means making actual changes to Pistol mainhand skills (#1/#2/#3). The ricochet buff brings it from being a near-useless trait to something that’ll allow pistols to have some AE capability, but neither trait change really does anything for the core issues of P/P.

As for the other changes, water combat is getting a pretty big revamp for most professions, and I appreciate getting a combo option for thieves, even if poison fields are usually “meh”. Dunno who thought 50 % runspeed boost in stealth was warranted as a trait. If they wanted to fix the existing trait they should’ve just made it give 5s swiftness on stealth, I guess it’ll be interesting to see what access to 50 % runspeed will do for thieves.

They’re in the patch notes. Basically they’re giving a non-RNG option for rings by giving you 10 % of a free ring per daily.

I highly doubt they’ll allow people who’ve got a bunch of stocked normal relics to just buy whichever rings they want, but I guess we’ll see when the servers come back up.

NightyNight.1823:

To give you an idea of how fast that happened.
2x double strike = 0.25s
Wild Strike=0.25s
Lotus strike=0.25s
Cloak and Dagger =0.5s
Backstab=0.25s
Heartseeker=0.75s
Thats a total of 3.50 ? I wont do the maths again ,its tedius >.<

Activation time is not an accurate gauge of how long an ability actually takes to use and how long before you can use another one, which is why you can’t do things like Pistol Whip in under a second, or throw 4 Dancing Daggers in 1 second. Cloak and Dagger is particularly obvious in its actual animation and execution not matching the mere 0.5s listed “activation time”.

While all those skills were used in rapid succession, I’m sure, you’ll find the actual clock time for execution to be well over 3.5 seconds unless you’re using quickness.

DaveGan.8065:

I’ve started asking my groups if anyone is running MF (food I can deal with, gear not so much). I will not boot/leave if people have green/rare/lvl 75 stuff, but parasite suits and leech sticks are another story.

Not the first time I’ve heard this but I don’t follow the logic. You don’t care about people being less effective in combat, just less effective and getting more loot. If you aren’t also booting people for using low-level gear, bad utilities, less effective trait builds, or just being bad players (admittedly harder to gauge up-front), why kick people for using MF gear? Do you kick people using MF food? How about no food (which is weaker even for combat than MF food)? How about for using stacking MF sigils? How about for using no sigils at all? All I’m really getting is “I’d rather my groupmates be half-naked and half-AFK than be able to trade combat effectiveness for better rewards”.

Either you’re trying to optimize your group to be better or you don’t care.

I’m of the opinion that not using MF is a poor investment in most PvE content, particularly content that isn’t really challenging, and I’d urge my groupmates to run at least some MF.

ASP.8093:

Ranged is a problem, though, because untargeted shots tend to just fizzle out, like, ten feet away from your character.

They go to their full range or farther if you arc some of them, you just have to use your screen to aim them.

While all professions played well bring a lot to a group, some professions are straight-up easier to play (at least to achieve group benefit) than others in PvE. Thieves are an excellent example, and it follows that since more thieves are poorly played than, say, guardians, that thieves are in general weaker in dungeons. While a coordinated guild group may definitely want a thief for what a skilled one can bring to a group, a pick-up group is going to seek professions that are generally easier to play. Guardians/warriors are generally better largely because they allow a lot more room for mistakes due to their natural durability, and their utility roles are pretty easy to pull off.

Rissou.7213:

The 5% crit works but I would prefer the 5% damage since crit above 60% is unnecessary because of diminishing returns.

GW2 stats don’t have diminishing returns. It is 21~ points per % crit chance at 80, whether you’re going from 10→11 % or 60→61%. Don’t fall into the trap of assuming that as you near 100 % crit chance the relative value of another 1 % crit chance falls either.

That said, a 5 % damage boost will be superior to 5 % more crits only if a critical hit isn’t doing at least double damage (<50 % crit damage from stats), and crits also confer better on-crit proc rates as well as some resistance vs. weakness. Which of them is better is going to depend on your stat/trait setup.

Maugetarr.6823:

Also if all AoEs are so ineffective, I guess we should just tell all the other classes to not even use them.

This is my advice. Red-circle AE effects aren’t very helpful when combating stealth unless you’re dropping them on yourself as a defensive measure. You’ll get more mileage out of reading and anticipating where the stealthed target will be and then using auto attacks.

“Use AEs to combat stealth” is poor advice that much of the community gives and only really serves to further the problem of people not knowing how to fight stealth when they think their best option is to blow all their resources covering the ground in red circles. When someone stops thinking like a player and starts acting like an NPC, they’re going to die to a thief like an NPC would in PvE.

jkctmc.8754:

So yes, Steatlh prevents all single target damage that requires a target.

Which is nothing in GW2, because GW2’s combat system isn’t target based. Some players have become very reliant on locked tab targets to do damage, and stealth punishes their refusal to learn how to actually fight very harshly. Someone spamming projectiles into the ground when faced with a stealthed opponent is an excellent indicator that they never learned to fight without a locked target.

Rayya.2591:

Thief is very weak in pve compared to other classes.

Not by any reasonable standard, but it does require you to stay quite a bit more mobile unless you’re running S/P to facetank stuff. For this reason I’d say thief PvE is less newbie friendly. The reward for the struggle being that once you learn to make thief PvE work you’ll have gained valuable PvE skills that’ll benefit any profession.

jkctmc.8754:

a Thief can remain stealthed … and avoid any damage they might have taken.

Stealth only works this way against NPCs and really bad players. Thieves don’t take damage during stealth because people don’t try to attack them, not because stealth is good at preventing damage.

Stiv.1820:

for the ravens when you pop Guild

If you’re popping the one thief elite with a huge cooldown, the ravens may not be worthwhile.

Bsquared.3421:

Gladiat.6278:

If you’re fighting a full burst thief then they take out about 40-45k HP in about 3-4 seconds

Just pointing out how big of a lie this is. I don’t even play a thief (in full disclosure, I have a lvl 10 thief “alt”, so yeah), but this is just plain wrong.

It is definitely mathematically doable by several thief builds, just not very likely. Even the burstiest thieves aren’t usually prepared to do 40K during one Haste activation. Pretty much any glass cannon spamming their highest damage abilities with Quickness can get into the realm of 10K/second though, especially if the necromancer isn’t running much toughness.

Aervius.2016:

It would be awesome if Anet replaced “Last Refuge” minor trait in Shadow Arts with something like that.
Like +1 Initiative when attacking from Stealth.
^ At least that minor trait wouldn’t get me killed more than it saves me

The OP wasn’t making a suggestion for a new initiative regen ability, they were saying the UI should be revamped to make initiative gain more obvious.

Krathalos.3461:

You definitely want Mug if you’re using S/P, though; it is way too good with Pistol Whip to ignore.

Problem is OP didn’t really specify an environment to be tanky in. If he’s talking PvE, I wouldn’t bother with Mug. As mentioned before, S/P with Signet of Malice and heal-on-crit food will allow you to face-tank most PvE. I tend to take Uncatchable + Acrobatics as well for extra dodges and heal/damage on dodge.

For PvP you’re going to get more “tanky” mileage out of S/D because you can trait for defensive stealth and use dazes to heavily mitigate enemy damage.

Lymain.6723:

Tulisin.6945:

Whelm.9072:

Any thoughts about taking away Bleed from pistol entirely and making it a dedicated Power set?

I’m rather a fan of having condition damage or power damage be viable with any mainhand weapon, to the point where I’d rather see S/x get some way to apply burning/confusion than see other sets “streamlined” into one or the other. Following the “both these skills are awesome, just not necessarily with the same build” paradigm is a good way to mitigate the direct skill comparison thieves fact as a result of the initiative system.

On that note, an apply-burning-on-daze/stun trait would be an interesting way to boost Head Shot, Tactical Strike, and PW.

How is P/P even an option for a condition build as it stands now? Vulnerability doesn’t improve condition damage, so the only thing remotely condition-y about the weaponset is auto-attack.

Which is why I said “mainhand”. Pistol mainhand is completely viable as-is for condition damage, and should be even moreso if VS is boosted. Similarly, dagger mainhand has viable condition builds, even if D/P isn’t a viable condition build. All mainhands, not all weapon combinations.

XII.9401:

An in-depth look into the class is needed. Thieves should only have a stealth on approach. By granting them stealth during the fight it just turns them into the rogue class in every other mmorpg that Anet was trying to avoid. Not only that, but the thief in this game stealthes much MUCH more than any other mmorpg game stealth class.

Combat stealth gives the thief two basic options:

A. Immediately break stealth via an attack, in which case stealth only acts as a focus breaker and attack setup.
B. Stay in stealth to reap long-term benefits (regen, condition removal, etc from traits). In which case they’re giving up offensive uptime for those benefits.

The only case in which combat stealth gives a huge advantage is when the thief is using Case B and their opponent doesn’t press the attack. By not punishing their decision to get stealth benefits instead of offensive uptime, you’re basically giving the stealthed person a no-cost break. Against someone that continues to stay aggressive and attack the thief the tradeoff of being beat on for 3 seconds for condition removal and some regen is actually a pretty bad one.

tl;dr – People don’t understand that staying stealthed means not being able to attack while your opponent is free to do so.

Leriff.8362:

stof.9341:

Leriff.8362:

Because blinding the knockdown while you execute is bad. Blinding the HB after getting bull rushed is bad. Et cetera.

Someone maybe wise once said :

Leriff.8362:

You have no idea what you’re talking about.

AKA, L2P. Blind doesn’t work against 100 blades because it only stops one hit among 9.

The blind soaks enough of the first hit that shadowstepping away lets you retain over half your life, as opposed to 1/4 of it. That lets you turn the battle around instead of turning to run to reset the battle.

Blind works against HB because your job is to survive with enough health to beat the now 100% exhausted warrior.

“L2P”

Edit: Spelling errors.

Because you have unlimited utility slots and there’s no opportunity cost. Most thieves don’t even use Signet of Stealth’s active, and of those that do the only ones who are truly getting enough use out of SoS to make it worth the loss of a better utility are those actually running signet synergy.

The fact that SoS has enough synergy potential to be a mediocre combat utility doesn’t discount the fact that most thieves run SoS out of laziness and don’t touch the active.

So, again, other professions getting upgrades to their run speed signets will, on average, degrade their combat effectiveness by causing many of them to become reliant on a sub-par utility out of sheer convenience.

I don’t know why you folks are getting worked up. Runspeed signets are trash signets in any sort of high-intensity environment (dungeon PvE, most WvW/sPvP combat). If the professions getting this 25 % signet begin to become reliant on them as some thieves have it’ll only weaken their combat capabilities. It is a lazy-man’s mount-style signet, and anyone using it for anything other than mindless long-distance travel is consciously giving up combat capabilities.

Rezzet.3614:

Selver.1307:

Stealth is fine. Fix culling, reavealed to 4 seconds if not enough. If you cant target, immobilize, beat down a thief in that time, you are both wasting time. One or both of you need more. It’s not like prediction is difficult.

why does everyone use that as excuse prediction really? everyone seem to forget Thiefs are also persons With Brains and wont do the same patterns and such over and over you might see him running to the rightfor a moment but he could dodge roll and run to the left or behind you the next moment while stealthed.

Everyone mentions it because it is true. The best way to combat stealth is to read enemy movements and continue being aggressive even when you lose your tab target. If the thief is trying to be deceptive with their movements instead of taking the fastest route to their objective then they are making a conscious decision to trade efficiency for evasion. It is a rich metagame that develops between the movements of both players based on prediction and counter-prediction, a metagame that gets thrown completely out the window when half the people presented with stealth stand there or wander off.

Can a thief learn to move deceptively in stealth to make themselves harder to read? Absolutely. Do most thieves actually do so? No, because there isn’t any point when so few people try to counter stealth.

Thadren Calder.1397:

Unload has an activation time of 1.75 seconds. Multiplied by 4 is 7 seconds. Haste then makes that 3.5 seconds. With traits thieves have 15 initiative. Opportunist grants a 20% chance to regain 1 initiative with a 1 second cool down. 3 unloads by itself is 24 shots so in 3 seconds your going to get 3 of the 5 more initiative you need for the 4th unload. You naturally regenerate initiative at 1 per 1.33 seconds. so all you need is 2.66 seconds to get 2 more for the final unload burst. Since were talking about 4 seconds of haste we have to work with it sure is easy to get that 5 more initiative for the 4th unload.

You’re starting with the false assumption that activation time = the amount of time it takes to fully use an Unload before you can use another one, which is not accurate. Activation time is only loosely related to how long it takes to use an ability, as easy demonstrated by the fact that you cannot use Dancing Dagger 4 times a second, do an entire Pistol Whip in less than a second, or get off two auto attacks a second. Part of the reason that Unload has mediocre DPS is that it actually takes longer than the stated activation time to fully utilize the ability.

Avalon.4809:

I have limited time for this game, and I want to make this puzzle daily. I don’t have that much time to do this puzzle again and again each time I got killed because of getting thrown down the cliff.

I, too, have limited time for this game, but I want every legendary. Can I just, you know, have them, for free, right now?

We’re back to “I want stuff, but I don’t want to do the stuff to get it”. “The stuff” you have to do to complete the EB JP is either fight or avoid fighting.

I think the fear is that longterm swiftness for only 5 trait points would be imbalanced. With that in mind I wouldn’t mind seeing swiftness-on-dodge replaced with something else for the 5-point trait and either made the 15-point trait or a selectable trait. Replacing it with Might-on-Dodge and then making 5s swiftness-on-dodge take the place of Might on the current trait would be a good compromise. Someone not running any Might synergy isn’t going to dip 5 points into acrobatics just to get it.

Whelm.9072:

Any thoughts about taking away Bleed from pistol entirely and making it a dedicated Power set?

I’m rather a fan of having condition damage or power damage be viable with any mainhand weapon, to the point where I’d rather see S/x get some way to apply burning/confusion than see other sets “streamlined” into one or the other. Following the “both these skills are awesome, just not necessarily with the same build” paradigm is a good way to mitigate the direct skill comparison thieves fact as a result of the initiative system.

On that note, an apply-burning-on-daze/stun trait would be an interesting way to boost Head Shot, Tactical Strike, and PW.

Bunzy.8674:

style.6173:

I don’t really have an issue with stealth as a warrior. Thieves are squishy and the easiest class to kill. I can’t remember the last time one killed me other than maybe if I was on auto run looking at the map.

Mesmers don’t have stealth enough for it to really matter.

I think that as the skill level of players increase, they will find that the stealth classes are not that strong.

If you fought a P/D condition thief you will notice they are in stealth basically every 3-5 seconds. You would have no chance trying to kill something you can’t see.

This attitude is pretty much the main reason that stealth is effective. Instead of trying to learn how to track, anticipate, and kill enemies in stealth, people shrug and run off or stand around and die. Far too many people in WvW still react to stealth as if they were NPCs and continue to be surprised when thieves kill them like it is PvE.

Stop relying on tab-targeting and go kill them, I get the majority of my thief kills by hitting and downing them while they’re stealthed because I don’t throw up my hands when I lose my tab target. That just isn’t how GW2 combat works.

Helenorz.2547:

at least you can find a group. I’m having issues finding a group to do Fractals lvl 28. Yeah, that’s using gw2lfg site, and still can’t find one.

You’ll have more luck when they expand fractals more. The major RvR balance points hit at levels 10 and 20 right now, fractals are barely “supported” by Anet beyond the 3rd tier (20-29).

Most people I know have little desire to continue fractals up into the 30s because they’re balanced around gear and rewards that don’t yet exist.

Nashaan.3160:

A nerf of that size to the class would render them next to useless. They are SUPPOSED to have high burst dps. Should they be able to drop a player with 20k+ hp in 2 seconds with 3 or 4 skills? No, not in my opinion, but they should have the highest dps of all the classes because they sacrifice other things for it.

I disagree, thieves should have DPS potential when they gear/trait for it, just like every profession. This is the case right now. The ability to do damage isn’t an innate class attribute, just a role that most thieves prefer. Thieves aren’t railroaded into that role, nor should they be.

CHIPS.6018:

The biggest problem is invisibility. An elite thief can pretty much invisible 24/7. This combined with their 4-8k a hit damage makes them very deadly.

It is very common for an elite thief to 1v3 guys, go invisible, look for softest target, and down him. Then he invisible again and “finish him”.

None of these assertions are true.

1. The source of thief survivability is mobility, not stealth. A stealthed immobile thief is easy to kill, a highly mobile unstealthed thief is hard to kill.
2. The only way to be “pretty much invisible 24/7” and contribute to a fight is culling. The only way to stay permastealthed involves not participating in combat at all, or needing to land an attack once every 4~ seconds, neither of which is going to help in an actual fight.
3. If this is actually happening to you in 3v1 you’re really bad, one person can kill most thieves with auto attack while they try to finish a team mate before the thief can complete the finisher. Countering stealthed finishing is cake.

FireRunner.9481:

There only needs to be one fix to thieves that is fair:

1. Place a ten second cool down on ALL stealth abilities.

Right now they can go stealth three times in a row using different skills. They need to change this so the stealth portion of those skills cannot be active if they were just stealth. As of now a thief can pretty much stay stealth all the time during battles.

This would break stealth as an offensive tool. It isn’t just something to break focus, several thief builds rely on stealthing and immediately attacking to get stealth-attack skills to go off.