Guild Wars 2

I think you missed the part that says “no support” along with your ability to not be an arrogant kitten.

Oh and my lame p/p build will mop the floor with your head any time, btw.

Yea, bunker guardian, i agree.
Let you thief friend dps the kitten out of your foes while they are busy ignoring him and chasing after you, for whatever reason. Like mobs, actually.

The first black powder shot blinds your target at a 900m range, then you have a smoke combo field you can 20% with unload or 100% with body shot / headshot, it’s not that melee really.

Well, we are designed to trade resistance for burst, to kill quick before it gets hot, which is meaningless against silver+ mobs running around with huge pools of hp.

We have the means to survive, dodge, reposition, break aggro and such, but sometimes it just doesn’t cut it.

I am running Crucible of Eternity a lot with my guildmates these days, and some particular rooms are shouting don’t enter if you’re a thief at you.

Especially the fights against subject alpha, where every time we go up against him, he decides there is no one else in the room but me, no matter how many times i reset, stealth, or even stop attacking, he will rush to me soon as he can see me, and avoiding his teeth of mordremoth is pretty hard considering you can’t always tell which direction he is facing with all the fx, and despite me running full acrobatics, endurance isn’t free.

That’s just an exemple, but i think some mobs are designed to chase after the player with the lowest toughness value.

You end up dying a lot sometimes, and you can’t make up for it with your useless dps.
Guardians on the other hand can soak up damages while still being able to steadily dps the targets.

It really feels like the game is designed around tanks sometimes, and yea it can be a bit frustrating.

Those are rare situations though.
FotM isn’t hard as a thief, AC neither, TA can be pretty rough against the nightmare vine, etc.

We have our advantages though, shadow refuge is an awesome prot skill to help an ally lose aggro or to res, agility signet will help a lot against pesky burn / poison spammers, scorpion wire to pull that one mob every one hates from 1200 range into your team, shadowstep and even sometimes steal to avoid stuns, prisons and such that would mean your death otherwise, and shadowstep again in puzzles like CoE laser room.

In the end i think people hate thieves because many of us persist with using d/d GC with no support whatsoever during dungeons, and also because of how it is with every MMOs, people want it fast, so the majority of them will want to pug the most efficient and fast team. Like you would get some teams made out only of monks and eles in GW1.

I am running a p/p build in both pve and pvp so i am not affected by the d/d issue, on the other hand i believe this is the perfect example that calls for the ability to at least store a second build on which you can switch for no cost, so my fellow thieves running GC d/d in wvw can have a viable pve option without losing all their money into respec.

And last, community is a kitten sometimes, my guild would never complain about me running a thief in any dungeon. Find some reliable friends.

All done, took only two hours

By the way it doesn’t matter which class you use, every armor type is available.

Oww :o

Thank you so much, gonna work on this immediately <3

Dear Anet

I undertsand this is a very small matter, but like some others out there, i chose to join an order based on how i would think their strategy was the best, and how their principles would suit me better.

Soon after i made my choice, i learned there was now no way i could access the two other orders armor sets.

I would really love if you could create a way for us who love mix matching armors for looks to be able to buy armors from every orders.
Maybe allow it once we completed our character story, maybe with later content allowing us to work for other orders, just please make it possible.

Best regards ~

Once again, if you find pistols good now, then it was good before, 5% is not such a change that it would bring an entire weapon set from subpar to totally fine…

Hanzo.9624:

P/P: Unload. The end.

Yea… No. Good luck with that though.
The only useless p/p skill is body shot like we all know and i can tell you if you aren’t fighting a scrub you’re going to need a lot more than press 3 until it dies.
The few thieves i fought p/p to p/p were actually thinking the same as you do, spec’d 30/30-something and trust me i mopped the floor with their heads.
Try 33333 against a shatter mes or a d/d ele, don’t ever use positionning, blind and rupts, and see what happens. Even a ranger autoattacking will beat you this way.

Underwater combat on the thief is literally the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in a video game. All you do is spam Shadowy Assault. THAT IS IT. You don’t have to do anything else. Actually, anything else would be a terrible waste of time. Sure Haste > Deluge is cool before they actually notice you, but once they do, oh man. Time to spam 5. With a build high in initiative regen and traits for the same like Roll for Init and Infil Sig, you can just sit there all day spamming 5, killing things while evading the entire time. Sure it’s effective, BORINGLY effective.

Again, pressing 5 until it dies won’t work against anyone who actually has some live brain cells, i’m very sorry you never got to fight against such opponents though.
The issue with 5 is not how it kills things, it’s more of how you hardly die while spamming it, but the damage is actually not better than auto attacking.

No matter what you do, the class is based around spamming something. This is why Initiative is terrible. You’re either spamming 2, spamming 3, or spamming 5. Once you can’t spam anymore, you go stealth until you can spam again. Or you just run away. For some reason this is appealing to players as you can’t play any sPvP match without there being a ton of thieves on each team. In an 8v8 today my team had 5 thieves and theirs had 6. I’ve never seen so many people spamming 2 in my life. This isn’t a QQ nerf thieves thread. This is a plea for some diversity. I loved my thief, and after going back to it today I just couldn’t stomach it. Every build is just stale, repetitive, gimmicky, and boring.

Haste > BS burst >222222222 is also extremely disappointing me and i can’t wait for it to get body shot’d so people have to actually learn to be better and stop getting free points while being that bad.

Of course I don’t expect them to majorly overhaul a class, especially based on one person’s opinion. It’s just upsetting that such a supposedly fast-paced class is in reality extremely shallow and redundant. The class is effective, there’s no doubting that. But it’s not fun. They need to work on making it fun. Adding cooldowns and increasing the damage of certain abilities would be a huge step in the right direction.

I may disagree with some of your statements but overall, i also think that right now the thief class is way to forgiving with bad brainless button mashing players, and i would be very gratefull if it could be tweaked with a much higher skill floor.

The positive fact is that it is already very rewarding with good players, what is not fine comes from how it is still rewarding for bad players.
We never ended up rewarding Wamos in GW1 (although yea gw1 would sometimes reward 1234) so i’m really not very confident as to where this will lead us in the future, if Anet doesn’t decide to ask their players to get a bit better soon enough, by deprivating them from benefiting skilless gameplay.

I think i read a post somewhere, from the pvp dev team, mentionning a more detailed scoreboard coming with future updates.

I’m not complaining about rangers, i’m saying, people are still like hey keep on buffing rangers, and i’m not sure it’s still that needed, on certain weapon sets at least.

(so yea, rangers seem fine to me atm)

Yea all right, nerf mug along with any other build that actually doesn’t involve a BS burst and everything will be fine… Come on… Think this through…

Oh come on… I can take a few hours grinding spvp and give you some similar screenshots involving rangers, mesmers, eles and warriors.

Am i the only one around here thinking people underestimate rangers a lot ?

I’m not talking about your regular bow Ranger Mc Quickness… Rangers with greatswords / sword-torch should worry people, yet they don’t, makes me curious.

As a thief myself i find a bit ridiculous that we don’t lose stealth after a missed attack.
If you guys really are so desperate to nerf stealth, that’s where you should start complaining, tbh.

Yes it’s broken, which is a shame because it seems like a very nice utility to start with.

The trigger is actually smaller than the visual (small circle in the center as i heard), but even considering this, people will often walk even right in the center and the rap won’t do anything.
Also it’s very hard to manage properly with all the bots running around, eg pets, minions, clones and such.

daydream.2938:

Well. p/p is good for 1on1 with d/d elementalists.
So, if you know for sure your going to be facing such an ele in a match, and maybe in there backlines, perhapst hen pistols would be viable.

Funny you should say that because i specifically designed my p/p build to hold my own against d/d eles to start with, and it actually gives great results, at best i win, at worst the nasty bunker and i just fight endlessly until one of us decides to leave.

And of course being able to hold it against d/d eles means you can hold it against most other builds.
Still having a lot of trouble against mesmers though, losing LoS way to often to apply a proper pressure.

Aervius.2016:

Meh, in optimal conditions it would make Unload worth 5 initiative, especially considering that the other classes that have access to Piercing projectiles have much greater range on said weapons.
900 range Piercing wouldn’t be OP unless the morons all perfectly lined up don’t move *at all* while the P/P Thief dumps ini on Unload, even then, all it takes it’s the target to perform a dodge roll and he/she has just saved everyone in the line of fire.

IMO, 900 Range attacks that Pierce would be inherently balanced as "short-ranged firepower" especially considering that P/P leaves little in regards to survivability, inherently. Just going off experience with my Rifle Warrior, as the Risk/Return balance for Piercing Volley seems disproportionate (in favor of the warrior) due to Rifle’s range advantage.

Just food for thought.

_edit: It’s also worth considering that it would enhance syngergy with Thief traits already in-place, specifically Flanking Strike, meaning P/P would also stress positioning to an extent._

My unloads output varies a lot depending on my targets, form 2k to 8k per unload, i know it is definitely weak against bunkers or anyone running this stupid 90% uptime prot boon...
But i think we need a better mean to strip boons instead of more damage that may eventually lead to an other flow of tears, and i really don’t want to see p/p on the nerf side of the wheel :’(

Anyway, considering the numbers i gave you, that’s a possible 8k to 5 targets 2-3 times in a row, i know the stars have to be lined up for it to happen but the fact that it can happen may still be an issue.

Also, as of now, with my current build, every time i use unload i heal for 8x100+346 (+450 if it procs), if you give me piercing i potentially get the ability to heal 5x800 more every times i shoot inside a furball.

I’m just giving some numbers, i can’t tell for sure, sometimes p/p seems so weak and exhausting to manage, and some other times i just roll through my opponent staying at full life.

ehtom.5047:

Its really sad that Fellknight is having to fight a one-man battle with all the thieves in this thread. Especially since his argument is very clear and rather difficult to argue against – he is pretty much saying thief design philosophy is bad. Unfortunately anet have stated themselves “Thieves are the masters of mobility, stealth and high single target damage.”.

I dont agree with this which is why I pretty much quit sPvP a while back. Given the state of sPvP I suspect that a great deal of other people agree with me. It really has come down now to if you dont like it, don’t play it.

Are all you thieves happy with the virtually empty mists?

What the hell is wrong with you ?

Read his “rather difficult to argue against arguments” he doesn’t even know the proper effects of the skills and traits he quotes.

Yea, but, you know, these are absolutely fine, we just suddenly had a huge income of highly skilled people that for some reason all chose to play shatter mesmers or d/d bunker eles.

Aervius.2016:

Body Shot – 3 Initiative
Leap away from your opponent, firing an explosive round that applies 1x bleeding (4s) and 1x weakness (3s) to enemies near your target. 900 range, 300 range rear-directional leap.

A backward leap would be an awesome utility indeed, even more considering that pistols are way more dependant on mobility rather than stealth imo.

Now i still think piercing would make p/p way too powerfull, it’s true it would help especially against classes protected by freaking bots (rangers-mesmers-necros), but if you really wish piercing on pistols then the piercing has to be reduced, 5 targets is way too much for multiple unloads.

Fellknight.4820:

Mobility:

Fleet Shadow: 50% run speed in stealth coupled with shadow refuge makes you the only class in the game that can cross a map unhindered.

Yea and we all know every thief is running this decisive skill. Can’t see how anyone would pick this unless they run a p/d condition build currently, and there are other more interesting traits to pick under the shadow arts line.

Shadow trap: Better than Mesmer’s portal in the fact that it’s brainless set it on a node, trebuchet, Savnir/Chieftan and you auto port back to it the minute it detects movement and it stealth’s you for 5 seconds.

I love how you poorly tried to convince yourself that this is in anyway brainless’er than a mesmer portal. Both just require planning and, well, that’s about it.

Shadow step: A teleport and teleport return with stun breaker that REMOVES CONDITIONS!

Mmmh, nope, nope, shadowstep doesn’t remove any condition. µI take it you’re talking about infiltrator’s strike, but that’s a weird mistake for someone who’s supposed to run a thief. Anyway, that’s a sword feature, this goes for all your wall of tears btw, 30/30/30/30/30 and so forth

Shadow Signet: 25% steady run speed

I didn’t know this was exclusive to the thieves

Inf. Arrow: Shortbow spammable teleport

Yea 6 initiative out of 12 is certainly what should be called spammable.

Escapes:

Shadow Refuge: 10 second invis with hidden assassin trait that can be used to gain 10 stacks of might. And with shadow Rejuv can be used to get a ton of life back. And I’ve heard the Bs arguement that you can be hit in it, yeah you get a huge circle you can move around in and leave in 3 secs and retain the 10 sec stealth.

Easy to be hit inside, yes, for instance it has the size of a necro well. And since you’re also crying about hidden assassin, this is actually a well designed minor trait that is here to complement the lack of strength any thief has to deal with when putting 25-30pts into shadow arts. And Btw it requires you to stay stealhed for the whole 10 seconds to get the 10 stacks, thats 10 seconds of free cool down for your opponent too.

Blinding Powder: With trait and utility skill

Yes ?

Cnd: 6 inniative spammable invis

So i guess 6 initiative is definitely spammable

Hide in shadows: A heal plus stealth plus remove all conditions, WHAT?

Did you know there are other conditions than burn, poison and bleeding ? Because those are the only conditions it removes.

Master of Deception: For 10 pts in Shadow Arts dropping every stealth ability CD by 20%

Mmmh, wrong again, it reduces deception utilities CD by 20%, which is kinda not “all stealth ability CD”

Anyway

You’re a joke.

Just FYI, i’m not running an ele, but the few times i had an ele go RTL through me onto the wall behind, i blinded him before.

Could it be that ?

I already get very good results running my p/p build in spvp / WvW, with all due respect i’d be more cautious with all those buff suggestions, i find we would end up with an OP weapon set…

I’d prefer we get some tweaks like some of us mentionned rather than overall damage and speed attack buff…

I’ve been experiencing this exploit… err, issue a few times now, we are going to need a fix for the ranger’s down state lick wounds ability underwater, which basically prevents them from dying at all.

- Pet heal outperforms 3 players dps’ing the ranger
- Ranger doesn’t even heal himself, he autoattacks while being healed, basically transformed into an almost undestructible turret preventing opponents from capturing the ruins
- Killing the pet doesn’t stop the heal
- Even if you kill it, the ranger is able to respawn it immediately at full life, anyway

Since i’m starting to see some players abusing the issue, i think it’s about time to fix it.
I made this specific thread because we needed an explicite thread for it, I know someone made a thread telling how people wanted to report him, well, just don’t abuse the issue and all will be fine, for now.

Otherwise, grabbing a shortbow and kiting in circle works very well.

xbutcherx.3861:

Another QQ thread of the same, play the class then maybe you can learn on how to counter.

No man, read the title, this time it’s the real problem we’re talking about !

CrazyAce.3842:

I use D/D and P/P.

I wouldn’t change pistols in any way. They work perfectly fine as is. They hit hard, and the ability to blind at will makes them the ultimate ranged weapon for burst thieves. They don’t have any kind of AoE damaging ability like the Shortbow, but that’s to be expected. If you could use Pistols with an AoE, it would be overpowered, plain and simple.

I love P/P and wouldn’t change a thing. They are strong and almost the perfect single-target ranged weapon (I compare them to the Warrior’s Rifle in that way, though they don’t pierce).

I am 0/30/30/0/10 and I can spam 4 P/P shots in a row when I get ample crits (and I typically do), 6 shots if I use a few stealthing abilities to regen my initiative. Most people in WvW run with glass cannons, and I can cut down most people with around 3-4 bursts of Pistol 3 (taking into account the fact that most people dodge and/or heal when I’m shooting them). Squishy thieves and light-armor classes can sometimes go down in 1 or 2 if I get lucky with all crits or something (my crit % is 55%, without buffs or food).

If pistols were buffed, by build would be incredibly OP. Not that I’d have a huge problem with that. I’m just warning you guys.

I’m running something similar (10-30-30-0-0, grabbed mug and been using it as a kind of semi-burst finisher combined with unload, i guess you picked trickery for thrill of the crime which is a good option too) and i share your opinion, p/p doesn’t need a damage buff, on the other hand i believe BP needs a slight buff, either slightly lowr its cost, either slightly increase its duration, and make it tick faster inside the aoe.

Also there is vital shot… The only good part about this skill comes from its ability to do a combo finisher 100% of the time at a lesser cost.

On a side note i think most thieves underestimate how powerful Fluid Strikes is, you don’t lose that much dps dropping the entire deadly arts line, and acrobatics synergises way better with a p/p build to me.

The only thieves i saw running a p/p build were obviously using the usual 30/30/something and they didn’t deal more damage than i did, on the other hand they had a lot less survivability options.

It’s true it’s kinda frustrating to be chased around a map by a sort of homing missile pet that will follow you anywhere as long as there is a path for it…

You can kill the pet quite easily though, for sure.

That said, i have three main issues with pets (four actually, i hate fighting bots when i’m supposed to be in pvp as opposed to pve, hinthint mesmer clones & pets, but, well)

- Sometimes while you decide to get rid of them, they just reset like a regular mob, run back to their far away owner, and get all their life back, you just wasted some CD/initiative on them and you are still considered in combat… Mmh.

- Sometimes when standing on a ledge or shooting at them from a point they can’t reach, they will be considered as invincible. Happens a lot with necro minions.

- I saw it happen only once, but i was attacked by a ranger’s pet while he was considered out of combat and getting his life back. I dunno if it’s just a one time glitch but if not, a ranger should be considered in combat if his pet is.

ASP.8093:

Many of the cooldowns were 4 seconds, though. IIRC, the big compressed spike had a 10-second cooldown.
Also, executing the combo was 1-2-3 easy (sometimes with a 4). It involved some work when you were making the build, sure, but most players in GW1 weren’t designing their own builds.
Most of the skill in playing assassin, like thief, was with timing and positioning. GW1 just made that a bigger deal because of the monk’s power to stop spikes cold.

QFT. Along with dshot, bbots, empathy pressure and so forth, teamwork
If people would also actually learn to play as a team and cover each others, no thief would be able to just jump in, harvest his kill and leave.

I see a thief jumping on a teammate he immediately eats a blinding powder shot in the face, almost always followed by a headshot since he will try to either hide in the shadow or 222. If he’s not clever enough to retreat he is the one who will get bursted down in a matter of 2 seconds.

If you aren’t built to be a roamer and act as one, please just don’t complain.

I’m not sure that using the late bad palm strike 1234 build trend which happened for a month or so, before PS got nerfed back, 5 years after Faction launched is really relevant…

If you really want to compare the current thief BS burst with GW1, although i find it useless since we are talking about a totally different gameplay, then talk about the early post nightfall BoA>SP bursts or dual SoS sins that got nerfed into oblivion later on.

Although once again, i’m not sure where the comparison between GW1 and GW2 brings anything on the table. I mean, one word as an exemple : monks.

If you really want my unloads to hit glass canons for 10k + air sigil proc, then by all means, increase its damage by 40%.

Overall, p/p damage is fine.
Like it has been said many times, vital shot needs to shoot faster so it doesn’t end up constantly interrupted by dodges, repositionningq and other skills activations, and on the other hand it needs to stop when you hit headshot and blinding powder.

Body shot needs to become usefull, i suggested to make it remove a boon instead.
Blinding powder needs a little buff, either a slightly longer duration, either -1 initiative cost, but more importantly the blind condition needs to proc faster if a foe enters the aoe.
Headshot is already usefull as it is, although most of what it does is pretty much the same as what blinding powder does, except for intterupting self heals. We suggested to add confusion stacks or increased damage on succesfull interrupts, but after a month or so on my custom p/p build, personnaly i would like to see it apply a CD penalty on the interrupted skill.

Piercing would make unload absolutely overpowered.

Once again, if you decide to give p/p a chance, try not to rely on stealth like you would with any other weapon set, bet on your mobility instead.

Many ranged attacks get interrupted if you no longer face your target enough, it does when i use unload, and i can make it happen against rangers or rifle warriors for exemple.

It should be like that with every skill.

Well, there is the usual l2p defensive card, or you can also already prepare to adapt to what is coming :

JonathanSharp

Going forward
Tank vs spike vs physical DPS vs condie DPS. We want to keep making balance changes that allow all classes to have various builds they can use. We don’t want tanks dominating the game, and we don’t want spike builds dominating. It’s healthy to have multiple types of builds in the meta, so we’ll be improving the balance to facilitate a healthy meta.
AOE balance. We feel that in PvP some AOE builds are too strong for the opportunity cost, and we’ll be bringing those in line in the next few patches.

I think it is quite ironical to see on one hand so many people saying pvp doesn’t get any love, while on the other hand these same people immediately fear the changes. soon as they are mentionned.

Personnaly i love big balance patches, it’s almost like a fresh new pvp start.

Considering i already got hit for 10k+ with 2 HS (starting above 50% health), considering it can also proc a crit air sigil along the way, 30k with heartseeker is not even a lot since 5 hasted HS would have dealt about 50k on a glass thief like me.

Anyway, please Anet, help your players get better at the game, do not let them mash 222222222222222 til it dies.

Good post Hanzo ~

Without even considering the fact that 3k per shatter shouldn’t happen…
Do you guys throwing your usual “lolthieves do the same” and “l2p sb” even realise he actually takes 9k damage before the illusions even appear ?
Did you see they appeared and shattered after the spike ?

Nerfing mug means nerfing many possible thief builds across the board, it shouldn’t even be discussed.

Well, today i got chased around the map by a guy who apparently disliked losing two duels against me, and when he eventually managed to catch me i can tell you i felt the pain, in the form of a 10k eviscerate.

Maybe i should start a qq thread in warrior forums ?

Well i was thinking it’s a very expensive combo, but in the end i guess you don’t really use your initiative for anything else, so, yea.

That being said you can keep your distance with a p/p build and switch to sb, cluster bomb into your blinding powder.
It’s not as easy to land though.

I’m curious as to why you would choose d/p, especially since, if your point is to harrass and survive you probably would prefer some distance ?
Or maybe your main weapon is actually the shortbow ?

The latency issue probably comes into play but it was really nice with GW1 to be able to move to populated US districts while EU was sleeping for the most part.

And although it’s true there are sometimes some stupid nationality conflicts, to be honest you don’t need EU vs US for that, just put some europeans together and it happens.

There is a huge difference between “survivability : i escaped a battle without dying” and “survivability : i can tank a solid chunk of damage while dealing some myself” and i don’t understand how you guys can honestly make the confusion.

I run a P/P build and it does fine since before the patch (5% up doesn’t bring a lot although it is of course appreciated), the hardest part is to realize you have to play it very differently since you can’t rely nor manage stealth the way you would with any other weapon set.

60% chance is hardly luck considering you should at the very least be running around with 50% crit chances to start with.

In other words, Ankle Shot will cripple your opponent.

Marduh.4603:

All traits and sigils have internal cd.
All effects from stealing constantly nerf, at huge cooldown on use.
Cancel swap cd would be a great class ability.

The ones i listed have no cooldwon but the actual weapon swap cooldown, also, stealing is not constantly nerfed.

There are too many mechanics already in place to give binuses on weapon swap for this idea to be realistic.

Look, simple abuse :

Pick two sets of d/d

30 acrobatics with quick pockets

sigil ofhydromancy, sigil of energy on each set

> infinite stamina, mad cc, endless DB spamming

And that’s just a single example.
So, yea… make this change, just give it a few days and see how much it can be abused

We don’t need a cripple, we have Ankle Shots… You have to chose between this or +5% crit on dual weapon attacks and it seems like good design to me.

“Best” as in the ones who gave me the more troubles ?
Wasn’t clear ?

Why so angry ?

The best warriors i fought 1 on 1 didn’t actually rely on quickness to be effective, they would wisely root me and stun me to death, instead of throwing everything into a quickness burst.

I think it’s sad if you think the only thing that makes a war viable is actually quickness.