Guild Wars 2

Dagger/Pistol uses a ton of initiative, so make sure you take all of the initiative returns you can.Your big damage is done similarly to dual dagger, but instead of cloak and dagger -> backstab -> heartseeker finisher, it’s blackpowder -> heartseeker -> backstab -> heartseeker again because the first one didn’t do any more damage than autoattack. Basically you’re sacrificing some burst damage, AoE poison and a cripple to gain a daze, a shadowstep, and an AoE bilnd.

Sounds like a great idea, but it would have to be an Asura-only class. Those other races would just bookah it up!

Thieves have plenty of control That’s not an issue. Survivability could use a little work, but not much. Just a slightly higher base health pool would go well towards that.

The only things keeping Thief from being a perfectly balanced class are bugs and oversights such as player culling, melee range misses, friendly spell visual effects making it impossible to see the target, etc.

When they get the jump on me and I have my stunbreaker down from fighting someone else, it becomes fairly ridiculous.

That’s not a balance issue, that’s how the thief is designed. Thieves are designed to jump in, take out a weakened target, and jump out. The entire class is based around this concept. You are alone and weakened against a fully rested thief. This is precisely the scenario where the thief was designed to reign supreme. To try to destroy this would be to try to remove the thief class from existence. If you don’t like how it is designed, perhaps guild wars 2 pvp isn’t the place for you.

Fury.6248:

It’s the same exact situation that occured with fury warriors at the start of cata. They could pop all CDs are pretty much one shot people. It was soooo incredibly easy to counter. Just CC them or kite them or remove enraged. But the point is… it does not fit in the pvp environment we are trying to create. Why would anyone want to be discredited for using a kitten utility? If it was reworked at least we would have another utility at our disposal for our builds.

Quickness utility skills are designed to temporarily increase burst damage output while decreasing the user’s defensive capabilities. All four of the quickness skills do this quite well. It’s working as intended. You may not like it, but it fits fine into ARENANET’s plan.

Martym.6971:

Lol, Terrorcookie it stuns for 1 second, ONE PERSON, then 1 second later it starts the chain of attacks, easily avoidable with double tap.

You got killed because you cannot utilize evades, L2P and quit asking for nerfs to circumvent your apparent lack of skill.

Stuns for HALF a second.

Paradox.8563:

I’m not sure the problem is that initiative encourages spamming of highest cost:effect ratio skills. The highest cost:effect skill should ideally change often depending on the situation.

My thought on the matter is the people are focusing on dps to the exclusion of all else. Now for much of the soloable pve content max dps will get you by, so people can just spam that hight ratio skill and continue. but if you find yourself outnumbered or outmatched spamming the one skill will most often just get you killed.

In those situations i find myself having to change up which skills I use on a second by second bases just to stay alive.

I think that for many people, the problem is either an disposition towards that kind of strategy or baggage from other games of the type.

People are going to have to learn that max dps is not the target, but overcoming the challenge (dps is obviously a part of this though, just not to the the exclusion of all else)

Anyway just my take on the matter.

Precisely right. This is where I was trying to go with my ramblings, but I’m way too tired :p

Honestly, initiative isn’t a problem as is. The only people I see having problems with it are people who don’t understand the class or don’t understand the whole overarching system of guild wars 2 combat. Guild Wars 2 offers a more involved combat system, where the name of the game isn’t damage rotations but situational usage. This is true on thief even more than it is on some other classes. Something like an elementalist may have 10+ damaging abilities that they can cycle through, but a thief weaponset generally only has 1 or 2 direct damage abilities and then the other 2-3 are utility skills that a good thief will make targeted precise use of only in certain situations. People look at the damage log and only see one or two thief skills and assume that that is all the thief is doing, but it’s not, the thief just happens to have more utility on their weapon sets than direct damage skills, and a well-played thief will be be every bit as active throughout a fight as any other class is.

TLDR: damage skills appear to be spammed because the thief only has one or two. The rest is support which won’t show up in your fancy death-damage charts.

Once more and more people start getting used to the system and understand how it works, it’ll seem a lot more balanced to everyone involved with NO changes.

The thief loses all endurance and endurance regen during haste, and it’s a fairly long cooldown so if you do manage to stop it you just completely shut down that build for a while and he’ll be a fairly easy target if you jump on the opportunity right away. It’s a high risk high reward build.

Warriors when using frenzy take 50% extra damage. That’s like 50 stacks of vulnerability on them for the duration. They go from rock-hard juggernauts to… well, about cloth level armor, I’d suppose.

Daendur.2357:

then do it also for others melee aoe.

for other burst melee AoE, like hundred blades, yes. for just autoattacks or something I’d say no just because it would defeat the purpose.

Give it a red AoE ring. That’s it. If you stand in a red ring for its full duration without moving out or evading, you should fully expect to die.

I notice the same thing when I use assassin’s signet, actually. it automatically activates an auto-attack.

Humorless.1573:

And another group of bad players that somehow manage to carry 0 stun breaks. If one of you was competent enough to do so (or simply didn’t stack up in 1 square meter of land…) you could’ve interrupted him, his haste would be wasted and his endurance/initiative would be mostly gone. Easy kill.

It’s worse than that. Pistol Whip isn’t an AoE stun. Only one of these three clowns was stunned. The other two stand in the fire during WoW raids.

I believe it is intentional so that you’re not completely sacrificing damage traits if you go with a support or defensive trait line. Or maybe they just ran out of space on Deadly Arts and Crit Strikes.

As the name suggests, First Strike is all about buffing your opening attack. You can use it with a dual dagger build quite well by opening with cloak and dagger and then backstab while your initiative is still over 6. Combine with the 25 point Deadly Arts trait and you’ve got a 20% damage bonus on backstab, since cloak and dagger causes vulnerability.

Sorry for the double post, it’s not letting me edit again. I wanted to add that pistol whip has about a 1-second cast time before the stun even goes off, which is, I believe, about 1/2 second with haste. These numbers may not be entirely accurate but they should be close.

Also, while the damage is AoE, the stun is not.

And to clarify because I just know someone is going to lash out in confusion: “Damage (9x): 1,026” means it does 1,026 damage spread out over the course of 9 attacks, not that it does 1,026 damage 9 times.

It’s also worth noting that without haste, the stun is completely over by the time it starts doing the bulk of the 1,026 damage. With haste, it does about 2/5 of the damage during the stun.

Daendur.2357:

@Fateless: your “if” sentence has no meaning … no endurance end no stun breaks = death, but not only against a thief.
however a solution could be make the stun scale with haste; 0.5 sec normal -> 0.25 sec with haste.
Double speed swinging your sword and double speed in recovering from the stun.

Sorry, did you just suggest that the skill should have a shorter stun duration when the thief has haste? That makes absolutely, positively no sense. No other skill in the entire game gets penalized because you have a boon, and rightly so.

What I wouldn’t give for a game that gave assassins proper weapons, like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katara_

That game is called Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction.

I’ve been playing around with Strength sigils in sPvP. They’re pretty awesome, they can stack quite a bit of might on you if you can fight for a while without dying. Nice mix of precision and vitality in traits and gear to sustain them. I forget which runes I’m using… I think Eagle.

The two kinds of thieves seem about the same strength to me, but thieves’ guild thieves last longer and you get two. If you take thieves guild, ambush, and the trait that drops an ambush trap when you revive someone, you can have 4 thieves up at once. It’s pretty awesome.

Shredicus.8706:

If the stun is so worthless why not just take it off Anet? See how many of your explode into tears.

Because nerfing something that isn’t OP would prove that they don’t care about balance and only do whatever people cry about most. Get better.

bad tactics only work against bad players. Most of pistol whip’s damage takes place after the stun has already worn off. It also only stuns one target, so don’t go out solo and you will never have a problem with sword thieves unless both of you are pretty much AFK.

Shomaruki.7395:

Just going to point the finger and assume most people who say learn to dodge a thief are the people who are actually the thief players themselves. I wouldn’t have an issue with a thief as long as he couldn’t attack me with 4 different attacks while under stealth.

Well, yes, of course it’s the people playing thief. Because everyone else jumps on the bandwagon of “ERMAHGERD I don’t understand how thieves work so nerf them!”

Oh, and they CAN’T hit you with 4 different attacks while under stealth. As soon as a single attack is used, stealth breaks and is prevented for 3 seconds. The problem is that there is an oversight in how the server sends relevant player information when it tries to make them visible. It’s not a stealth bug, it’s not an exploit, it’s not a balance issue. The thief won’t even know that they’re still invisble to you. This is the same issue that causes large zergs to not be visible until after they’re right on top of you.

Daecollo.9578:

You pay for repair costs and armor from your character, no?

Golems can move.

Golems don’t have 1950 range abilities, and they move quite slow. They also cost a gold and 100 supply to deploy, and are immobile and defenseless while building.

Daecollo.9578:

Some WvWvW artillery has more then 1950 range.

Yes… artillery. That you have to pay for and use supplies on. That can’t move at all once you place it down. That once it gets destroyed, it’s gone for good until you buy more. That can actually be destroyed before it’s usable. That, of course, can’t be used at all outside of WvW. And that any class has access to.

lonewolf.2601:

I noticed that it mostly misses when you hold the right click button to control the camera and then use Heartseeker. Try for yourself, it happens often and the animation changes a bit when it happens.

Hm, that could be it. I’m always using the mouse for movement. Definitely something that needs to be fixed, in any case.

Yes, 2k per target sounds about right, with a max of 5 targets. Which is actually pretty low damage compared to a lot of other AoEs. But that’s balanced by the bleeding added on, so I’d say it’s working as intended.

I guess today is one of those days where we just cry about every skill the thief has with completely made-up numbers. Why don’t you cry about Flanking Strike next? I head it does like 50k damage and lets the thief evade for 30 seconds!

Terrorcookie.8560:

Oh no it’s not skilled he just stood there and used the skill and it was gg, its not even that we just suck but if you have a skill that deals like 18k dmg with one button
its op

18k damage? Yeah, sure. It doesn’t do anywhere near that, even if you have stacks of vulnerability and every hit crits. Post a screenshot with a combat log or don’t bother posting at all.

So there were three of you, you saw him coming, but none of you thought to flank him or lay down traps? You all just stood around in a tight cluster waiting for him to own you? Sounds about right. If you aren’t going to play well, you’re going to get destroyed in PvP. One of you could have easily taken that thief out in a split second if you got behind him and unleashed a backstab.

Wait, it doesn’t even do an AoE stun, only the primary target gets stunned. What the hell were the other two people even doing?

Daecollo.9578:

Still have Blind, Vulnerability is a warrior thing, P/P sucks for utility anyways, should be pure damage.

Vulnerability is a warrior thing? What? I have to ask, are you trolling, or do you really… I mean… nevermind, I give up.

Sounds a little underpowered, Vexus.

It seems to be a bug with gap closers in general. I noticed my newbie warrior’s “Rush” attack missed a bit more after that patch too.

Daecollo.9578:

Thief Pistol Reimagined.
P/P

“1” Pistol Blast. (0 Initative.)
Damages.

“1-2” Double Blast.
2x the damage of Pistol Blast, has a cast.
(Animation: The animation is, your constantly pulling down the hammer and firing off 2 shots like a cowboy.)

“1-3” Triple Blast!.
3x the damage of Pistol Blast, has a cast.
(Animation: The animation is, your constantly pulling down the hammer and firing off 3 shots like a cowboy.)

“2” Unload (3 Initative.)
(Basicly, move unload here.)

“3” Last Ditch Shot. (4 Initative.)
This is a high damage attack, it does little damage, but the less health you have, the more damage this attack does.

So add more direct damage but remove all condition utility. No thanks. Also fairly off-topic, since he’s discussing the number of targets.

I completely agree. Thief underwater combat is simultaneously overpowered and underpowered. Overpowered if you’re the target of an enemy, underpowered if you’re not. Incredibly boring in either case. But it’s not just thieves. I’ve played several classes (really all but necro) and the only one that has underwater combat that’s even a little bit exciting is Engineer.

The whole underwater combat system is a bust, and I dread coming upon an area where I need to utilize it.

Warriors have heavy armor and a huge health pool. Also most of their melee attacks are AoE. Some of the thief skills require us to stay in place as well (namely our main AoE direct damage dealer), but we don’t have heavy armor or a huge health pool.

Yeah i agree, we should have one pistol and two shortbows

Nah I think dual pistols would make just as much sense with multiple targets as the bow does, not more. it’s insanely hard to accurately fire pistols at two different targets at the same time. Actually, I’d call it pretty much impossible without a lot of set-up time.

Daecollo.9578:

Whats stopping another thief from killing you, I could just roll for the blast, anyone with a brain can just roll for it, that is NOT a good way to deal damage.

The Vulnerability applies utility that some classes can do but others cannot, it offsets the damage lost.

Also, “LINE OF SIGHT”.

Of course you can. I even said myself that it would be easy to avoid. The point of it is to force the enemy to move, or take huge damage if they don’t. It’s support and control. You know, those things that you’re supposed to be able to do in addition to damage? Those things that help your team do more or take less damage? Yeah, those. The thief already has good damage and condition damage sets, so why not something a bit more supportive? A good sniper is 1000x better with a good team on the ground.

What about “LINE OF SIGHT”? Was that just some Tourette outburst?

It’s not the same thing at all. The stealth skill only does slightly higher damage than autoattack, not the massive damage that backstab does. It’s a debuffing tactic, not a kill move. This isn’t really a big damage set at all but a control/debuff/distraction set. The biggest damage would come from Explosive Shot, but that would be fairly easy to avoid.

Ah, yes, I intended it to only stealth if you hit but didn’t specifically state that. It won’t do anything if you miss except waste initiative.

You do realize that attacking breaks stealth and gives you the revealed debuff, right? Nothing in the weaponset or traits will change that. If it ends up being overpowered, increase the initiative cost of 4 a bit to bring it in line with Cloak and Dagger. No big deal. No idea is perfectly balanced right in the conception phase, it requires testing to see how it works.

Daecollo.9578:

bwillb.2165:

Daecollo.9578:

bwillb.2165:

How about this:

1 – Rifle Shot – does medium damage, causes vulnerability if hit from the back or side., 20% projectile combo finisher, 1200 range

1 Stealth – Hidden Sniper – does slightly higher damage and bleeds, causes cripple if hit from the back or side, projectile combo finisher, 1400 range

2 – Weakening Shot – does medium damage. Places a 2 second mark that causes target weakness and vulnerability on their next attack. 1200 range. 3 initiative

3 – Exploding Shot – Does low damage and places an explosive trap at target’s location. Trap explodes after 3 seconds with a small blast radius which does high damage and 3xbleeds. Blast combo finisher. 800 range. 4 initiative

4. Quick Getaway – Very low damage. Evade backwards and gain stealth, leaving behind a smoke cloud that has a 20% chance to block projectiles for 5 seconds. Combo-field smoke. Melee range. 5 initiative.

5. Mark Target – No damage. Causes 10x vulnerability on target, and your next attack within 3 seconds will crit if you have at least 6 initiative. 1400 range. 6 initiative.

So basicly engineer with stealth, that does not sound thiefish at all.

Your placing explosives on the ground like an engineer does? (why does a thief have explosives?)

Warrior Rifle skills are 10 times better, there AUTOattack does the same thin as 1/2 and they ALWAYS critical pretty much everything anyways, so they pretty much have “5” up all the time, it even has a strong melee attack that knocks melee back far.

You might as well just be a warrior or engineer.

Not really. I’ve combined some aspects of pistols with some aspects of the shortbow, and added a focus on flanking.

Yeah, but if your too much all around then your useless at something else, HOW DO You kill something with that build?

It seems all situation, it would be a REALLY nice weapon to switch to if I need to get away.

So basicly your build is good for D/D and getting away? How is that fun?

With “4” I could remain in stealth forever if I keep using it.

It’s meant as a hidden sniper, a guerrilla fighter that takes enemies by surprise. In a PvP situation, imagine them as the type of class that would hide above a capture point ready to strike at anything that tries to steal it.

How is your idea fun? It’s just spamming vulnerability until they get in melee range and then being useless.

And no you wouldn’t have permanent stealth, because it would give the same “revealed” debuff that cloak and dagger gives.

Daecollo.9578:

bwillb.2165:

How about this:

1 – Rifle Shot – does medium damage, causes vulnerability if hit from the back or side., 20% projectile combo finisher, 1200 range

1 Stealth – Hidden Sniper – does slightly higher damage and bleeds, causes cripple if hit from the back or side, projectile combo finisher, 1400 range

2 – Weakening Shot – does medium damage. Places a 2 second mark that causes target weakness and vulnerability on their next attack. 1200 range. 3 initiative

3 – Exploding Shot – Does low damage and places an explosive trap at target’s location. Trap explodes after 3 seconds with a small blast radius which does high damage and 3xbleeds. Blast combo finisher. 800 range. 4 initiative

4. Quick Getaway – Very low damage. Evade backwards and gain stealth, leaving behind a smoke cloud that has a 20% chance to block projectiles for 5 seconds. Combo-field smoke. Melee range. 5 initiative.

5. Mark Target – No damage. Causes 10x vulnerability on target, and your next attack within 3 seconds will crit if you have at least 6 initiative. 1400 range. 6 initiative.

So basicly engineer with stealth, that does not sound thiefish at all.

Your placing explosives on the ground like an engineer does? (why does a thief have explosives?)

Warrior Rifle skills are 10 times better, there AUTOattack does the same thin as 1/2 and they ALWAYS critical pretty much everything anyways, so they pretty much have “5” up all the time, it even has a strong melee attack that knocks melee back far.

You might as well just be a warrior or engineer.

Not really. I’ve combined some aspects of pistols with some aspects of the shortbow, and added a focus on flanking. The explosive is because I see this weaponset as a sort of guerrilla fighter, attacking from a hidden position and using whatever they have available to take out the enemy. That would include stuffing a bundle with explosive powder and giving it a fuse.

How about this:

1 – Rifle Shot – does medium damage, causes vulnerability if hit from the back or side., 20% projectile combo finisher, 1200 range

1 Stealth – Hidden Sniper – does slightly higher damage and bleeds, causes cripple if hit from the back or side, projectile combo finisher, 1400 range

2 – Weakening Shot – does medium damage. Places a 2 second mark that causes target weakness and vulnerability on their next attack. 1200 range. 3 initiative

3 – Exploding Shot – Does low damage and places an explosive trap at target’s location. Trap explodes after 3 seconds with a small blast radius which does high damage and 3xbleeds. Blast combo finisher. 800 range. 4 initiative

4. Quick Getaway – Very low damage. Evade backwards and gain stealth, leaving behind a smoke cloud that has a 20% chance to block projectiles for 5 seconds. Combo-field smoke. Melee range. 5 initiative.

5. Mark Target – No damage. Causes 10x vulnerability on target, and your next attack within 3 seconds will crit if you have at least 6 initiative. 1400 range. 6 initiative.

Balanced doesn’t mean one-trick pony. This sounds like a really dull weapon skillset and no one would use it.

And nothing is more frustrating than fighting somebody on a node, winning the 1v1, and then as soon as your health starts to regen, you get insta gibbed from stealth, with no hope to even fight back, bc you used cooldowns on the previous fight.

That’s precisely the kind of situation the thief was designed for. We’re meant to prey on the weak, to attack from the shadows, and to have high burst damage but low survivability so that we jump in, do a bunch of damage, and hide. And all of these things are obtained in the current game balance.

Besides, the damage on pistol whip isn’t even that high compared to a lot of other abilities. It hits a lot of times, but each hit is really small. If you get out as soon as the stun ends naturally, you’re not going to take much damage at all from the pistol whip ability. What you REALLY have an issue with, I think, is haste. Haste is the one ability that makes pistol whip worth being used. It only lasts a couple seconds, but it significantly speeds up the sluggish animations of pistol whip, allowing much of the damage to coincide with the stun instead of following it. And you know what else haste does? It prevents the thief from dodging at all for a decent amount of time. Work with that!

Acrobatics, acrobatics, and more acrobatics. Also, offhand pistol. Either dagger/pistol or sword/pistol. If the former, you want to take advantage of blackpowder, heartseeker combo to stealth, and backstab. If the latter, you want to take haste and shadowstep, blind with blackpowder, and go to town with pistol whip.

If you go to 25 acrobatics the minor trait gives you 10% bonus damage when endurance is not full, which, as you might imagine, combos really well with the Haste skill.

Kind of off-topic, but I also really wish they’d bring back dynamic weapon range and damage based on elevation. That was in GuildWars1. So that if you’re on level ground with your target you might have 900 range, but if you get a good vantage point you have 1200 range and a damage bonus, and if you’re lower than the target you could have 600 range and a damage penalty. As the game currently stands height advantage is actually punished in PvE with mobs turning invulnerable and completely ignored in PvP.

Sorry, I’m confused. You said yourself that you can cast a single ability on the thief and then just face-roll to kill him. But you’re complaining that the thief is too easy to succeed as? Please link me to your post on the mesmer forums complaining that mesmer is too easy to succeed with.

It seems there are a few people around here who only post on the forum to try to get thief nerfed, and don’t contribute anywhere else… Thief is a mysterious class. You don’t quite understand how they work. That’s fine, you’ll learn over time. I don’t fully know how much of the engineer class works yet, but if one dominates me and all I notice is that they have a bunch of turrets up, that doesn’t mean that all the engineer has to do to win is put up a turret, and it certainly doesn’t mean that I have to try to get engineers nerfed.

Newbinator.3415:

I love the Asura homeland, and I think its the most unique one in the game despite the fact that I’m playing a Nord! What do you guys think?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw_jvucjK8o

Norn. This isn’t Skyrim

But yes, I love the Asura culture and style. Just wish the camera issues didn’t make me ill.