All thief weapon skills work off of initiative, not cooldowns. Cloak and Dagger doesn’t have a “cooldown.” If you have enough initiative, you can use it.
“Backstab” is just a dagger auto-attack used while in stealth.
The problem first of is that cloak and dagger actually hits for a lot of damage (several thousand). So you do still have decent damage while you go in and out of stealth. Furthermore part of the issue with thieves is the initiative system. If any other class misses and important ability they get up to a 35 second cool down on it. If you are fighting a thief who misses their cloak and dagger, they can just use it again. Initiatives regen also rate means that even if the thief misses CnD twice they can use it again much faster than any other class would because of cool downs.
Personally I never understood why they designed CnD to do damage. It is a utility attack, it applies vulnerability and stealth it should cost initiative but not do the higher damage. Part of an initiative system should be choosing when to use an attack and a hard hitting ability that sets up a combo and gives you the defense of stealth is too powerful. Personally with the different specs I used on my thief I rarely used any attacks outside of auto attack, the attack from stealth (both 0 initiative), steal and CnD. So I am not sacrificing my initiative by only attacking with CnD.
Backstab is another issue due to the fact it can be used every 3 seconds, hits very hard, uses no initiative and if you miss it doesn’t break stealth. This means the thief is a lot more forgiving of mistakes than any other class, who if they miss an important attack get a cool down.
1) Glass cannons don’t think there should be a cost for their complete shunning of defensive stats and skills. These players are upset because thieves actually expose the weaknesses of those builds.
I agree here to an extent. But what I have seen quite a few thieves define glass cannon different than most others would. There was a video posted the other day of an elementalist with over 2500 armor and 19k health, they died in seconds and where told they are too glassy. They wore full toughness and vitality gear. This is a problem because that should not be considered glassy.
2) Culling causes issues when interacting with stealth. This is a technical issue with the game itself (not thieves or stealth) that Anet will hopefully find a fix for.
Agreed
3) Once a thief goes invisible, most players throw up their hands in defeat and let the thief kill them. Stealth does not grant any form of invulnerability. Just because you can’t target something doesn’t mean you can’t hit it. Traps, necro marks or wells, ground target AoE, cone based auto-attacks, even simply waving your weapon in front of you at random will still hit thieves. Thieves are squishy as hell. Hitting them just a couple times with auto-attacks will force them to retreat or die.
I disagree with this. I made a thief because everyone was saying how they are fine when you learn to counter them. After playing it I can tell you a good thief who knows how to dodge and not stand in red circles can get away from an attack in stealth. Once you move the people only have a very small chance to hit you in stealth because they are swinging blindly. Not to mention several classes only have a few AOE attacks that have cool downs. Also not all thieves are squishy.
4) Thieves can escape. This is a huge one people don’t ever seem to figure out. If you’ve forced a thief to run away, you won. No, you didn’t get loot. You didn’t get that measly bit of experience either, but you won. Too many people see a thief run away and either decide the thief won (even though the non-thief is still alive and completing their objective) or they make the worst decision possible and run off alone, trying to chase. But the thief had to run away to not die. They’re likely going to be stuck in combat, and unable to heal for a bit (because of some poor behaving mechanics between living targets and stealth) and they likely burned all their initiative and cooldowns. All this without actually achieving anything.
The problem with this, and what annoys me when I play my other characters is the thief runs, leaves combat and returns within a minute to try the fight again. This is what bugs me, thieves can keep attacking until they get their way and win the fight. This is annoying because your most likely best case scenario is they give up and you spent a long time dealing with someone multiple times for now reward.
