Guild Wars 2

T raw.4658:

You don’t have to give up anything IMHO. All the other classes get have their cake and eat it too.

Now we are staring at a whole slew of new broken reveal skills with HoT and you want to nerf mobility? No.

Things are about to get worse unless they get DD up to par (which i doubt)

Well, I don’t think that those classes should be able to have their cake and eat it too…thus I don’t think that we should have both either.

As for mobility, it’s not like we won’t be compensated. My main point is that with our mobility nerfed, we can be given more staying power in a fight. The reason DD isn’t as good as it could be is because they still have access to shortbow.

I’m not asking for another nerf to the class. That’s been done enough. I think we just need to rebalance our strengths. Since all of our eggs are in one basket, I am asking for some of those eggs to be removed and placed in another basket.

As it stands, most engineers will probably not use Stealth Gyro anyway (taken from Wolfineer’s review) because Supply Drop and Mortar Kit are just that much better. If they use Stealth Gyro, they’re going to be gimping themselves just to win harder against us…an obviously silly choice on their part.

T raw.4658:

First you revert the nerfs to the defensive trait lines and thief is FAR from OP. Even before June 23rd thieves were UP.

Ok…so here’s my point. As it stand, any good thief can basically escape any situation he finds himself in, provided he does not commit anything to that fight. The ability to decide any terms of engagement, whether on an enemy or by an enemy on the thief, is an incredibly powerful ability. Yes thief cannot fight worth kitten right now, but they can indeed run like hell. In essence, a good thief (even now) has presence around the entire map, and in practice, will be around to +1 fights and turn stalemates in favor of his team far more often than any other class. I am not saying that this is a good role to play, or that thief is balanced because of this. If you give thief the ability to survive IN combat as well as allow him to have the ability to decide any terms of engagement, the task of catching and killing a thief is just that much more frustrating. I agree that thief wasn’t strong in a fight before the June 23rd patch, but fighting was never the reason thief was played in competitive PvP, as I’m sure you understand. The fact of the matter is that as long as shortbow is what it is, ANet will never allow thief to become any better at fighting, regardless of what we think.

Warriors already out pace thieves over long distances. So according to you no changes to thieves mobility is needed.

As for your point about warriors being able to outrun thieves in long distances. This kind of warrior runs GS + S/wh. How good is this warrior in a fight? Not very, honestly, since any decent player will find dealing with GS by itself to be a fairly easy task, and S/Wh is a very weak combination for dealing damage. Thus, to achieve this kind of mobility, the warrior is giving up a massive amount of combat capability.

T raw.4658:

In today’s game my proposal will give thieves some sustain without making them OP. They will remain weaker 1v1 vs all other classes but hopefully gain the ability to skew the 1v1 odds to 40/60 or 30/70 instead of the insane up hill battle you have today

Maybe here is where we differ. I don’t want to be weaker in a 1v1 situation. I want to be strong in a 1v1 situation. To this end, I will accept being weaker in bigger fights, but I’ve always thought of thief to be the class that punishes players for being caught out alone…like any assassin archetype in any game. I also want to be able to trade some 1v1 strength to have more stay in larger fights (ie old D/P for old S/D). To get this, though, I will have to let go of the ridiculous amount of map control that thief currently has, and that is absolutely fine for me. I don’t care that thief maybe be less competitive or whatever in esports…I just want to have fun again.

In the end, we all want what is best for our favorite class…but we also need to see things for outside perspective beyond the amount of fun we are having. I think it’s a good idea to get more people to tell us what they think about thief, even if we think they are wrong.

T raw.4658:

Your whole argument fails and reeks of bias and ignorance on the subject matter.
give and take scenarios you like to spout on about.

As far as I can tell, yours does as well. I know that thief isn’t in the best place right now, and I know that other classes are not terribly well balanced either, but that is not an excuse for us to become just as overpowered. You want to be given something without compensation, and I understand the mentality behind that. Since every other class is doing so well, it is only fair for us to be brought up to their level right? The problem with this is that the issue with thief extends to much more than a simple number tweak. The CORE of our class puts us in the situation where we will either be completely overpowered at what we do, or completely useless.

Again, suppose ANet grants us our wishes and decides to revert all the nerfs to out class. What is thief then? Thief is a class where the skilled player can choose to only engage in favorable conditions, and disengage from all unfavorable ones. Is that balanced? Maybe that is what the thief flavor is supposed to be but in terms of game balance that is NOT fun to play against. If we are to become reasonable fighters, we’re going to have to give up something, and that something will probably have to be our ridiculous mobility. To keep our theme of mobility, I would like to see us become sprinters and travel very quickly across shorter distances, but fall behind, say, a warrior who I would consider a marathon runner. As it stand, we are currently both, which I feel is the main barrier to us getting buffs.

I’m of the opinion that for thief to be capable of fighting well, they have to give up some of their insane mobility. I actually got into a somewhat heated argument with a friend over what thief should and shouldn’t be able to do. now of course we are talking idealistically, but in terms of mobility/escapability and staying power in a fight, we came to agreement that the two should be inverses of each other. In other words, the more mobility you have, the less fighting capability you should have, and vice versa. As it stands, thief is on the extreme end of this spectrum (great mobility but no fighting power).

Now in terms of my opinion on the matter. My belief is that thief’s greatest strength lies in its ability to decide the terms of engagement. My friend managed to convince me that the reason thief is balanced competitively is because it can also decide the terms of disengagement. In generalized terms, if a class is allowed to choose when to enter a fight, as well as when to leave one AND is capable of winning more often than not, then that class is overpowered.

So this brings me to why I believe our traits don’t lend themselves to helping us fight well. Regardless of what trait setup we take, we will always have the option of taking sb5. With the insane amount of mobility offered by sb5, if we were given traits that allowed us to contend evenly with other classes, we would essentially be allowed to pick fights we can win, and leave any fight we are losing…in other words, we would never die. THAT is what I feel is the root of our problems, as well as why the devs are so hesitant to give us nice things.

It isn’t so simple as removing sb5 and putting something else in though. Thief is supposed to be one of the most mobile classes in the game. The problem is that all of thief’s mobility comes from one skill…sb5. To keep the feeling that thief is still mobile, while not keeping all of the mobility offered by sb5, my suggestion is to rework Shadowstep (skill) and sb5 together to become something like such

Infiltrator’s Arrow 6ini
Blinds target for 5s and grants 3s stealth on hit.

Shadowstep 20s cd
Shadowstep 1200 units. Remove 1 Condition. Holds up to 3 Charges.

Maybe my reworked Shadowstep is too strong, but the idea is remove thief’s consistently extreme mobility and give them a potentially high burst of mobility while still allowing decent, but not as powerful, escapability. With this in place, thief will be able to dictate what fight it enters, but not necessarily what fight it leaves.

As a final note, I want to say that this is the groundwork for giving thief more staying power in a fight. It would simply be unreasonable let to take away thief’s mobility and give nothing in return, so my suggestion isn’t a nerf, bur rather is a rebalancing of thief’s strengths.

So a pretty huge problem I have seen is lack of competition between traits in many trait lines.This is clearly due to the fact that one trait per tier is just vastly superior to the others, and has a defined purpose, while the others don’t really do much or aren’t useful for the purposes of taking that trait line (ie Fleet Shadow in acro).

To this end, I think having a defined structure for each trait line would be beneficial for making traits more effective and synergetic. The idea is to have in each tier one trait for each of 3 purposes: Utility, Defense, and Offense. So as an excuse to showcase my wishes for Acrobatics, here is what I have come up with

m = minor
u = utility
d = defense
o = offense

Acrobatics
Adept
m Expeditious Dodger – 2s Swiftness / dodge
u Blinding Speed – 2s Blindness (radius: 120) when gaining swiftness
d Vigorous Recovery – 200 hp / s while under effects of Vigor
o Power of Inertia – 5s Might / dodge
Master
m Pain Response – 3s Protection + remove damaging conditions when taking damage below 75% hp (20s ICD)
u Swindler’s Equilibrium – 2s Steal cd reduce / evade (3s ICD)
d Roll with the Punches – 10% reduced incoming damage while under effects of swiftness
o Vigorous Assault – +10% damage while under effects of Vigor
Grandmaster
m Endless Stamina – 4s Vigor / dodge + Vigor effect +100%
u Upper Hand – +1 ini / 3s while under effects of Vigor
d Don’t Stop – 50% reduced Cripple/Chill potency + Hard to Catch (30s)
o Off Balance – 5s next attack deals 1s knockdown / evade (20s ICD)

Of course I am not a balancing specialist, nor a thief expert so take all of this with a grain of salt. It’s mostly to illustrate the concept of the three roles per tier.

What are your thoughts on this idea? I’d love to get a nice discussion going…so while I get that many of you are jaded about the engi reveal (I am too), I would like to keep the pessimism at a minimum.

Thanks!

Just a suggestion for Unhindered Combatant…from what I have seen, the current animation for Dash is a short version of Rush. Might I suggest that, if absolutely no new animations can be made, the animation for Burning Speed or Shield Bash be used instead? Both of these animations retain the characters weapons (I read that the thief’s weapons would disappear when using Dash), and in my opinion, would feel more like a quick dash than Rush does.

Also…it was suggested a bit earlier that the third hit on our staff auto chain be changed to something similar to the revenant Staff’s 3rd auto, which is the helicopter spin. You could even switch the attack chains around so that the thief would do a swing, then helicopter, and finish with another swing.

Thanks.

Kicker.8203:

CrimsonNeonite.1048:

They should perhaps revert the change to FS/LS back to what it used to, instead of having it as an evade skill, that you have to hope hits.

Personally I think it shouldn’t change to Larcenous Strike when you use the Flanking strike in the air. However, when your target evades it or something it should still switch.

What about just blocks? Flavor-wise, an evade or miss may as well be the same as hitting the air.

the thing is that would force players to take a shadowarts to make x/d somewhat ok, while x/p stays stronger without it
that doesn’t balance the weaponset, it only limits the variations of builds even more

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but don’t most d/d thieves take shadow arts anyway? I’m sure some take Crit Strikes, but imo that’s pretty gimmicky. Also keep in mind that Crit Strikes is pretty essential in PvE, so it’s not like it has no uses. As for acro, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any d/x thief take acro…so yea.

D/D needs a buff to death blossom and throw dagger
death blossom shouldn’t have a delay (why even give an evade a delay?!), throw dagger needs to either do more dmg, have a longer cripple duration and/or less ini cost

I’m personally not really sure what they should do with Deadly Blossom. Definitely the responsiveness (should apply to all evade skills though). I was thinking maybe to reduce the cast time to 1/4 second, and remove the weird flip leap animation…so it’s kinda like warrior’s axe 2, except it applies bleeds and offers a short eframe equal to its cast time. As for Dancing Dagger, reducing the ini cost comes with that fancy trait rework I came up with

CnD doesn’t need blind on successfull hit if they rework CiS to not be a GM trait,
if not CnD needs either less ini cost, a function that “on successfull hit gain 1-2 ini” or blind on hit.

The problem with CiS, imo, is that it doesn’t do enough as a GM trait. With that in mind, making it more impactful (ie the rework that I suggested) would be a step in the right direction. Yes, it’s unfortunate that you won’t be able to take the health and ini regen in stealth, but with my reworked trait, you will be able to CnD much more often without having to really worry about ini all that much.

So…I’ve been reading through the forums for the past few weeks, and it seems that everyone wants to buff offhand dagger’s skills directly. I did a bit of thinking, and I think I’ve found a more elegant solution.

So here goes…the buffs should be applied via traits, not directly to the weapon. My reasoning for this is that giving blind to directly to the offhand dagger will grant utility to builds that do not need it (such as S/d). Let’s say all our wishes came true (haha) and acro got buffed back to its original state or better, and x/d got its blinds. Now S/d has access to limitless stamina AND blinds. Maybe not a huge deal, but it is a fairly significant boost to its survivability.

Anyway, you may disagree with the above…that’s not why I’m here. My idea is to work those x/d buffs into the Shadow Arts line. As it currently stands, we have Cloaked in Shadow (blind on stealth and blinding powder on fall damage). The first part of my idea is to take the fall damage aspect of CiS and add to or replace Last Refuge with it. The next, and more important, part is to have CiS reduce the ini cost of offhand dagger skills by 33%. This will mean that CnD will have an ini cost of 4, and Dancing Dagger will have an ini cost of 2.

So…guys what are you thoughts about this? I was a S/d thief prior to 6/23 patch so I don’t really have a lot of insight on the inner workings of the build.