Please read the title of the thread.
I did, more than once to be clear. But if those two classes are capable of executing a combo that damaging in about the same time you also have to consider other factors trying to find the…um…“better” class.
The elementalist in your example would probably suck in fights against more than 1 opponents and if his opponent dodges RtL whereas the thief only loses his steal and a bit of initiative.
You really need to watch the video that was linked. That elementalist was clearly having no trouble running into big groups and taking out multiple targets.
Willfully ignoring the evidence and pretending it doesn’t exist won’t help your argument.
Also, updraft knocks you up, taking away your ability to dodge. So really, no, you’re wrong.
Everytime he charges into a group the current scene ends and he isn’t even shown finishing his target. I guess that’s because the other players ripped him to shreds after he used all 3 utilities, his elite + his escape skill to down a single opponent. Also he mainly targets twinks.
Also….dodge before updraft? It’s not like you wouldn’t notice a huge ball of lightning moving towards you while making loud and easily recognizable noises.
No, he charges into a group of multiple targets, knocks them all down, and begins finishing them off with lightning.
I can use that same logic for thieves. Dodge when you see a thief move into steal range? It’s not hard to anticipate what a thief is going to do. It’s not like we have free roam stealth, though based on this forum you would think it had an infinite duration.
You can remember the video different or make up conclusions about what is happening off screen all you want, but that doesn’t change what the actual video shows.
Please read the title of the thread.
I did, more than once to be clear. But if those two classes are capable of executing a combo that damaging in about the same time you also have to consider other factors trying to find the…um…“better” class.
The elementalist in your example would probably suck in fights against more than 1 opponents and if his opponent dodges RtL whereas the thief only loses his steal and a bit of initiative.
You really need to watch the video that was linked. That elementalist was clearly having no trouble running into big groups and taking out multiple targets.
Willfully ignoring the evidence and pretending it doesn’t exist won’t help your argument.
Also, updraft knocks you up, taking away your ability to dodge. So really, no, you’re wrong.
I just want to clarify things. Im not saying the above comments are wrong but some make it out to seem DD has no survivability at all. Yes its a GC weapon choice but you can spec to where to have a decent amount of health and toughness as well as a high amount of dmg (still not near GC damage). But yes, I do agree SD offers more durability and utility whereas if you use DD, you will be embracing the darkness a whole lot more.
You’re actually not saying the statements above are wrong. You’re confused about the definition of the word durable.
Adjective
Able to withstand wear, pressure, or damage; hard-wearing.
A sword does not suddenly make you a tank. You do not suddenly gain more armor/toughness or increased health. You do however get a few abilities that make you survive easier, such as the ability to remove stuns/conditions with your infiltrator strike, as well as shadowstep out of a fight where you would otherwise take damage (Avoiding it, not soaking it).
You also gain the ability to blind or daze targets, which does not give you the ability to soak additional damage, but rather avoid damage altogether.
Also, just to clarify, saying something has more of something does not automatically make the thing it is being compared to have none of it. The word ‘more’ implies in addition to.
Make an outtakes reel of you dying.
As cute as these numbers are, you forgot 10% bonus damage for being attuned to air, and 5% bonus damage for being within melee range which occurs after Ride the Lightning, which applies to it, and the 30% chance on crit to cause burning, which results in a 10% additional bonus to damage (+5% from a minor and a major talent.)
That’s another 15% guaranteed, with 10% more on chance.
Guaranteed crit on attacks along with all that bonus damage and thieves are the ones who can kill you before you react? Hahahaha.
Updraft comin’ ta take the wind out of your argument.
(edited by Yuujin.1067)
Yeah. Fortunately, you won’t run into a lot of disorganized groups with people wandering off by themselves in sPvP all the time. I like Scorpion Wiring haste thieves in fights because it interrupts their spam and they can’t dodge.
I hear when it comes to killing people damage works better.
I ran a 30/25/15 build, CS/SA/Acro.
CS: Practiced Tolerance/Critical Haste/Executioner
Shadow Art: Infusion of Shadows/Cloaked in Shadow
Acro: I dunno, pic whatever! I usually went with Power of Inertia
You couldn’t tell by looking at it but this build focuses around dealing respectable sustainable damage while providing support to your teammates by keeping the blinds up on foes.
Infusion of Shadows refunds 2 inits each time to use an ability that stealths you, which let’s you keep tactical strike up on your primary target. Cloaked in Shadow blinds all nearby foes around you when you go into it, so it effectively lets you blind more people that just the victim of tactical strike.
Going twenty-five points into Shadow Arts gives you might everytime you stealth. The build focuses around going into stealth and always having the inits to do it, so you’ll keep around eight stacks of might on yourself while consistently blinding your foes. Also, 15 points into acro allows you to dodge roll three times instead of two.
Take Shadow Refuge, Signet of Agility (Condition removal for your and allies/Refills yours and their endurance) and whatever else you feel comfortable with.
Scholar Runes for power/crit damage (To make up for no deadly arts) or Strength for might duration. Let’s you keep the might you stack on yourself longer.
Fire for your main hand for the extra AE damage explosion.
In terms of raw, burst single target DPS, you can’t beat a dagger. You will always deal more damage with a dagger/dagger thief. However, sword attacks cleave so you’ll see quite a bit more damage with your regular old auto attack on a sword/dagger thief which will make you feel extremely powerful in face to face skirmishes assuming you don’t die incredibly fast, but even with that your damage is not on par with that of a dagger/dagger thief.
Technically, sword/dagger offers a tiny bit more survivability than dagger/dagger because of the condition removal/stun break attached to Infiltrator Strike, and the blind/daze attached to your tactical strike. Your Infiltrator Strike also immobilizes targets which makes landing your Cloak and Dagger significantly easy.
With dagger/dagger, you trade that for just straight up damage.
I’m not going to go by 36 ways.
You want a useful change? Force revelation from stealth when struck or taking damage. I don’t mind ANYTHING else as Thieves are fightable and good Thieves can get to bypass this change, it’s just that stealth as it is right now gets you to be forgiven of alot of errors you’d make.
Then they would have to have stealth break channeling moves and provide half a second of invulnerability to counteract the melee swing that we usually take while stealthing. If not, the thief would never be able to stealth as it would be popped out immediately.
Not to mention you’d have to tone up our unrelated stealth damage to make up for it. That would mean ramping up our auto attack damage and significantly reducing the cost of Cloak and Daggers. I’m cool with that. Drop Cloak and Dagger to baseline 3 since anyone swinging wildy at the air or AEing can render its secondary effect useless, and we won’t have to rely on stealth.
They need to find that fine line between defensive and offensive stats like every other class.
But if you want it to be like the other classes why not just play them instead… i personally like its unique playstyle. in small fights you can kill a theif in stealth but what a lot of people try to do in wvw is attack a theif roaming around solo with 20 players and expect to win. what will happen is he will stealth and hide obviously but if he is trying to kill you, so can you. this is a balanced mechanic and they don’t have as many options for defensive skills. backstab usually do 3-7k those who get for 20k+ are players without armor no wonder.
turn the theif into a warrior clone = bad idea. if you want warrior play it.
I wouldn’t even bother responding to people like the person you quoted. They don’t play a thief, they play another class. From the looks of it, I’m going to go with warrior. I have to laugh at it too. If you are having trouble against thieves as a warrior, chances are you’re doing something wrong. In most cases warriors burst puts ours to shame, which is a big part of the problem, and a good warrior knows that stealth means nothing.
You can continue attacking a thief in stealth, and they have a limited amount of time they can be in stealth so it isn’t like in WoW (Which it seems most people thing it is) where you can stealth forever and wait for the perfect time to attack, you have to position yourself quickly or you lose your burst damage. When you consider a dagger/dagger thief’s primary form of attack is CD/Backstab, and we have a small window to do our backstab before we have to wait to restealth again, it really is a wonder that people complain about stealth at all.
Someone suggested thieves be able to see other thieves while in stealth earlier in this thread. I’ve got news for you, we can. We know all their tricks because we use them ourselves. It is a fair assumption to make that one out of every two engagements with another thief, I continue to DPS him while he is stealthed, and he continues to DPS me while I am stealthed.
Tom is right. If you took away our stealth, you’d have to give us base health and armor in line with warriors. That means taking us from the lowest vitality at 80, and moving us up to the highest to be in line with warriors. Then do something about the base armor, and we can talk about it.
A warrior, without investing points into vitality or toughness, is significantly tougher than a thief and can still put out and in some cases out damage a thief.
I ran into a roaming pack of theives that did nothing but stealth over and over again. Stealth on steal, blinding power, hide in shadows, shadow refugee. They couldn’t do much of anything in a group fight and had to wait for stragglers before they started picking people off. Their damage was low because they had to go into the toughness tree to get stealth duration and stealth on steal, but in the end we killed most of them while they were still in stealth. The had to rely on eachother to stealth rez them, which meant less time to deal damage, and in the end the only time they managed to pick off the aforementioned stragglers was in 3v1s.
I don’t see an issue with stealth. The game already does what is being suggested, nerfs damage for extra survivability. If you ask me, it is too harsh.
(edited by Yuujin.1067)
We’re tied with Elementalist for the lowest amount of health in the game.
People complain that when we fail in a fight all we do is stealth and run away, but I’ve got news for you, that is all we can do.
We don’t have the luxury of running into a fight and standing there soaking up damage like a warrior does without sacrificing our own ability to do damage.
If a glass cannon thief gets away from you because of clever use of stealth, that’s a thief that can deal damage but had to use all of his utility slots to keep from dying. That’s where we are right now. It is just as annoying and painful for us to have to do it as it is for anyone to have to deal with it.
We were given the lowest amount of health, but as far as crazy nuke damage goes, it really only comes from three abilities; Cloak and Dagger, Heartseeker when an enemy is at low health, and Backstab when we are standing behind our targets.
Our nuke damage has been artificial culled by the restealth timer. Originally, we were only supposed to be hindered by the amount of initiative we have, but that changed so now we are slaves to our restealth timer if that is the kind of damage we want to do.
I get it, we were given too many ways to stealth ourselves. Shadow Refuge, Blinding Powder, Hide In Shadows, specced we can stealth on steal. Too many ways to do what feels like our only respectable source of damage in PvP.
So what? Stealth has a duration. If you see us drop a refuge you roll back, turn around, then run. Same mechanics are applied to just about everything else. We lack the snares we need to keep people in place for backstabs that we used to have, and you we can still be hit while we are stealthed so if you choose not to run away and swing blindly at the air, you’re still dealing damage to us while we try to position ourselves.
We have extremely low health, no protection or stability boons (Save for stability that comes from one of our elites while it is active), and deal all of our damage while we are in melee range while wearing medium armors we are assassins and as such, we need to be able to unload a crap ton of damage and escape if need be.
As far as group utility goes, we don’t bring the buffs. Hell, we don’t even buff ourselves. If we want might, we have to assign traits that give us might on use of venoms or signets. When you compare that to the setup engineers have, it just feels lackluster. Sure, theres requires 30 points in a tree, but when you compare the rewards they get just from their elixirs (Fury/Might/Retaliation, conditions to boons, health + Regen + Protection) and then the additional reward they get from their toolbar elixirs which also buff and aid allies (Big bonus there), plus the 1% damage per boon they have on themselves? Yeah, that’s awesome. Popping signets for 5 seconds of 5 stacks of might and dumping their passive effects for the active effects that in some cases are extremely conditional, is not fun.
That really ties into my next point. Our trait trees need to be looked at. Deadly arts really just feels very lackluster. Critical Strikes is in a good place. You might want to consider dropping Keen Observer though and replacing it with Practiced Tolerance because we kinda need the extra vitality. I love Acro and Shadows arts but I can’t go far enough into those trees without sacrificing my damage. You don’t get enough toughness and health our of them to feel comfortable gearing for damage stats, so you still need more toughness and vit to feel less than squishy, which sacrifices even more damage. That’s where our passive group utility feels like it is. Shadow Arts has the AE blind on stealth and the regen when we stealth our buddies but I’ve found that when I’m running with a group, other classes just do it better, and I’m better off just dealing damage.
Damage and cloak rezzing allies!
Cheers
(edited by Yuujin.1067)
I tend to avoid threads like these because I am sensitive and if my ideas get picked apart by the meanies on the forums I would just diiiiiiiiie, but since I hold thieves dear and near to my heart I felt the need to pop in and throw around my two cents.
As a thief, I feel like there are a lot of issues with my profession. There probably aren’t and you probably want to let me know that, but a wise woman once told me “DON’T TELL ME HOW TO FEEL.”
Someone posted it before, but it bears repeating.
“Thieves have the most weapon options available to them!” – Said nobody ever.
As it stands right now, I really feel like shortbow is the only viable option for range. It doesn’t benefit from our ‘special class dual skill’ setup though. There really isn’t much that could be done for this without adding a new “Quiver” weapon type into the game, or giving the thief some ability that let’s him decide what “quiver” he wants to use and ultimately determining what the last three button load out of his shortbow would be. As far as an option goes, this would be nice because it let’s use create better synergy between our melee and ranged spec.
I understand why you couldn’t give us a dual skill when we aren’t dual weilding, but it feels lazy, especially after getting hit for ~15K damage by a warriors Kill Shot. You definitely didn’t gimp ’em in the ranged department.
I saw sword/sword mentioned earlier in the thread and I love it. I think right now our melee setups are tied too directly around dealing a lot of damage. Dagger thieves deal a crap ton of damage from stealth or when a targets health is low (Though, I rarely see Death Blossom spam in dungeons, just backstab spam) and sword thieves deal moderate damage in a cleave, with a moderate damage stealth attack that blinds or dazes depending on position unless they go pistol. (But that’s not strictly melee now is it?)
Dagger thieves rely on their shortbow for AE fights, but sword thieves really lack a way of keeping up with dagger thieves against single targets unless they pick up a pistol in the offhand. I’m hoping with the introduction of something like an offhand sword, that gap can be closed.
You’re probably wondering why I haven’t said too much about pistol/dagger or dagger/pistol. Well, I don’t want to talk about things I have a very limited understanding of. I know of the specs and uses tied to each loadout, but I have never used them so I can’t provide any real feedback on them.
Now that we’ve put weapons behind us, let’s focus on the thief’s real issue: Utility!
Wow.
Just wow.
Traps. Holy crap.
I understand that when something is invisible to a player, you have to go out of your way to not make it too powerful, but I don’t understand the logic behind traps. They require an enemy to activate them meaning if no one trips it you just wasted a thirty second cooldown, their effects don’t linger meaning you either get one or all depending on how many people are on it when it triggers (except for ambush trap, which is just one), and even then the effects and damage are completely lackluster.
Poisons need a rework.
Skale venom has a consumable counterpart with a 10 minute duration that applies its effects on crit. Our skale venom gives us the effects on our next three attacks then goes on a 45 second cooldown. Here is a though, maybe we should get a a better version of the consumable? Rather than on critical hit, just a chance on regular hit?
Maybe have passive effects tied to poisons and activate effects? Passively, on hit, it has a chance to inflict weakness and vulnerability, then on use, guarantee the effects of the poison?
This couldn’t work for things like Devourer Venom or Ice Drake Venom. Passively allowing devouring venom to apply cripple for a short duration on hit, and allowing Ice Drake Venom to do something else while when then the activate would do what they do now would be a possible alternative.
As it stands now, without implementing something like that, venoms would just need a complete rework. You saw the ones that were useful in beta and you nerfed them into near oblivion. There are some uses for our elite poison, but the only one that comes to mind for me is underwater fights.
The problem with giving poisons passive and active effects is you end up just making them a lot like signets, but to be honest, if it will make them more appealing I’m all right with it.
Beta, the only specs I saw that involved poison were sPvP specs, and beyond Devourer and Basilisk venom, the only reason you put them on your bar was for the might stacks you could get out of them when using them for some heavy nuke damage.
I’m confused by all of this as well. I’ve got people in my guild gloating about how they weren’t even participating in the event (But were online playing) got mailed chest, and others who couldn’t make it/were there but suffered from crazy disconnects haven’t gotten one. Curious to know what the conditions of getting a chest mailed to you are.