Guild Wars 2

Killyox.3950:

TheAmpca.1753:

Honestly yes, DD needed a nerf but don’t you feel it was a bit too much?
To compensate can we have it cost 3 init instead? or increase the damage a bit? or have it freeze target instead? or daze first target and cripple others?

You don’t compensate nerf. That would be against the idea of a nerf :P It was nerfed because it was op. Damage is still great compared to a lot of stuff other classes have. You can still do a total 3k dmg on each target hit when you use it on 2 guys standing next to each other.

You’re right in pointing out that it still does damage. The problem is that the damage Dancing Dagger does isn’t worth it at all if you have one opponent, and only slightly better than the first strike of your auto-attack when you do. It’s not really worth the initiative for sword or pistol, and its’ really not worth the initiative for dagger who still has actual damage abilities. So you have another costly utility skill that’s kind of sub-par at best.

I used it for AOE damage, and I don’t feel sorry for doing so. You could burn all of your initiative on Dancing Dagger to do a bunch of burst damage quickly when the situation was right at the expense of all of your initiative. I considered that a trade-off, a tactic. As a sword/dagger Thief my next best attack is auto-attack, which still does good sustained damage, it’s just really boring to rely on auto-attack as your only good method of hurting people.

I agree that its’ damage should probably have been scaled down, I just think 50% was really harsh. Even with two opponents it doesn’t do enough damage to justify the 4 initiative when my auto-attack will catch up to it without spending anything. There’s just not a lot of point to it, and I think that makes it a poorly designed alteration.

Thought about switching to warrior, but it just doesn’t feel right thematically. Really, I wanted to be a dual sword wielding evasion based ninja-thing, but settled on offhanding a dagger since thief can’t dual-weild swords for some inexplicable reason.

I might go try mesmer if I can get over all the… butterflies. I’ll probably just quit playing though, and maybe poke my head in again next patch to see if things sound better or not. I know that sounds terribly QQ, but thief was my main character, I’m finding him boring to play, and I’m not that terribly invested in this game to begin with.

I pretty much exclusively play Sword/Dagger and Pistol/Pistol (lol). While I admit that Dancing Dagger might have been doing a bit too much damaging, halving the amount of damage it can do seems extreme and rather randomly applied. I really wouldn’t be surprised if they just decided it needed adjustment, slapped a random number on it, and called it a day. The main problem I have with nerfing it so bad is that now Auto-Attack is kind of the only viable means of damage I have. The only way for Dancing Dagger to do better than 1 swing of my sword now is if there are two enemies, and even then the damage increase isn’t necessarily great enough that I want to spend 4 initiative using it. What utility it has is already somewhat overshadowed by the fact that sword’s auto-attack does the same thing as it to begin with. The only advantage is has left really is ranged, and I can just switch to pistols for that. I’m really going to struggle to find much use for it at all now.

So I can’t use Dancing Dagger to dump my initiative into a burst attempt anymore. I just plain don’t have any burst options. Sword’s Auto-Attack still does good damage in a generous cone with a useful debuff, so I still don’t feel kittened, just not particularly mentally engaged either due to how easy and mindless it is to auto-attack. Shadow-step is still situtionally useful, flanking strike is still “okay” and cloak and dagger kind of lost its’ cheese. At this point I feel like I’d be better off just one-handing sword, offhanding pistol for the boring but still useful black powder, or just… finding a more mentally engaging game.

While we’re on the subject; I only use two abilities in pistols. Blackpowder is useful (albeit boring) when it works to just facetank an otherwise challenging situation. Its’ probably overpowered and yet the rest of the set is so underwhelming that I don’t even care. Unload does good, mindless damage from a range that compliments my power/crit build. Beyond that, the whole set could really use an overhaul.