Guild Wars 2

Venoms are kitten. Welcome to gw2.

My trickery build prob won’t take too much if a hit in spvp.

I’ll try thief after patch but if I have to change my build and gear I’ll just play my warr instead.

D/P is better than D/D. I think Yishis just likes D/D better which is why he uses it. He sacrifices damage for more HP though with his armor stats. A D/P in the current game can run full berserkers and do just as well as Yishis and hit harder with condi removal because the blinds come from the weaponset.

D/P has a much higher skill cap though. You can do well with it as a noob, but to do extremely well with it requires a lot of practice because you have 5 viable skills vs. 2-3 from D/D.

Arcuss.6457:

swinsk.6410:

Stompy.1387:

I don’t see why people think D/P is going to be dead. Sure, you won’t be able to really perma stealth anymore, but if you are going to be actively fighting somebody, I doubt you would anyways

9 init, 7 if traited to stealth vs. 5 init or 3 if traited.

I will try to use D/P after patch, but if it doesn’t work I quit because D/D is even more broken.

D/P wasn’t made for constant stealth, It’s more for blind. I personally played D/P very effectively (PvE/WvW) without ever even knowing about the stealth exploit. You just have to play with the traits. I run D/D now, and I don’t know how you think it’s more broken. The stealth is achieved by contact with the enemy and can miss very easily. There is no risk with D/P exploit.

D/D is more broken because it lacks blinds, good gap close, and #3 and #4 skill are useless in a power build. The synergy just isn’t there with D/D and you need to run valk gear or something else to cope with no blinds or you have to give up condi removal. D/P is the best weaponset we have, not sure why you wouldn’t use it.

Stompy.1387:

I don’t see why people think D/P is going to be dead. Sure, you won’t be able to really perma stealth anymore, but if you are going to be actively fighting somebody, I doubt you would anyways

9 init, 7 if traited to stealth vs. 5 init or 3 if traited.

I will try to use D/P after patch, but if it doesn’t work I quit because D/D is even more broken.

I agree with everything you said. I would much prefer the thief class have a greater risk:reward ratio. The current proposed changes make me want to quit the class. Nerfing infusion nerfs every single on stealth trait. S/x is going to be useless. What do we get in exchange for big nerfs ? We get less initiative because of opportunist nerf.

Just sad day for people who enjoy thieves. I have warrior but I don’t think its as fun as thief, but definitely stronger.

I run full zerkers and d/p also on my warrior full zerkers skull crack/100 bads build.

To beat a warrior you have to play perfectly and use perma stealth.

D/d and s/d are useless against a good roaming warrior. I killed a d/d thief from 100% to 0 in seconds while I was at 20% running away from 5 other people.

First, if you him pop berserker stance use perma stealth or run. Dodge as many skull cracks as possible. Be prepared for a long fight.

I’ve only lost to one thief on my warr in 1v1. I made about 10 mistakes he made 0. I dueled him again and he made 1 mistake and died.

Post patch thief will not be able to kill a warrior.

You can nerf thieves all you want but anet will never really give the class a buff.

Hard to catch as master trait is not a buff.
Asssassins Reward healing increase is not a buff.
Init regen is a buff but compared to the huge init nerfs across the boards it’s an over all nerf.

Everything else is just a plain nerf.

So while thieves get nerfed into the ground they receive no buffs anywhere else offered as alternatives to huge nerfs.

True story!

Sanduskel you are a kitten to think d/p doesn’t have counter play. It just requires having a little more brains than mashing 2 keys to counter perma stealth.

D/d is worthless because it has no blinds/interrupts/900 range gap closers.

D/d will still be useless but next patch d/p thieves get nerfed because anyone who knows how to play a thief uses that set because it has such a high skill ceiling. I used to be a d/d noob too until I learned how to play game.

People who thought perma stealth was OP just stand in the red ring and you cause thief to have no init and revealed, interrupt the hs, aoe the ring

You guys realize that scholar runes exist right ? Changing this rune would not make it OP, otherwise you are saying scholars is OP.

I’m not one for nerfing. Dumbs the game down and takes away from the game rather than adds to it. I think thief should be buffed vs each class. Each class had a specific build that can destroy thieves. Most don’t run it or play it poorly.

Blah blah, I hate arenanet and their balance of thief.

What? Sword/Dagger has tons of evades/jukes and kills people? NERF INTO OBLIVION!
What? D/P has lots of stealth allowing removal of condis and healing? NERF INTO OBLIVION!
What? Dancing Dagger has amazing dps and kills people? NERF INTO OBLIVION!
What? Thieves stealth every 3s? NERF TO 4s!

We have never received a “real” buff to this class ever and if those kittens at arenanet think increased init regen is such a huge buff to cover all the incredibly huge nerfs this patch they are on some serious drugs.

I’m having fun until dec 10 on thief, after that, bye bye gw2 probably.

If this is the case good bye getting full init from dropping refuge or using blind powder+hide in shadows right after.

Dumb change if you ask me. Thief is dead after dec 10.

Who cares about thieves? After dec 10 they will be nerfed into oblivion. Have fun with your thief until dec 10 then reroll warrior or anything else besides thief.

Problem with moving to d/d is that you are completely exposed while unstealthed and you need to mitigate damage with a larger health pool or more toughness or both instead of using blinds/evasion/stealth like d/p.

Thief is about to become useless in almost aspects of the game except for maybe pve.

Reroll a warrior.

This may be the patch that makes me stop playing thief all together. We will see…

Mr. Peters wrote:

Infusion of Shadow
For basic use this trait’s functionality is not going to change. By many players it was being used to grant some initiative when going into stealth. However there were some abusive builds that were using this to maintain very long stealth uptime without having to use their utility skills. The problem with this is that it lets them recharge those skills while in stealth, which takes away the risk associated with using them. We are ok with thieves blowing their cooldowns to have longer stealth, and we are ok with theives bouncing in and out of stealth, but we were not ok with thieves maintaining long duration stealth through abusing a single trait.

Does this mean the trait will only trigger on entering stealth the first time or will it continue to work as usual but give less init per stealth applied ?

I am confused on exactly what’s happening to infusion of shadow.

After having some time to process all this information and responses it seems that anet is trying to dumb down the thief. Nerfing skills that are activated and putting power into passive stuff. Destroying sword/X. Nerfing general evasion/stealth tactics. Buffing completely useless traits to justify it. Completely limiting build diversity into only 1 viable build now for tpvp and in wvw. D/P will be the only usable weaponset, even after infusion nerf because d/d offers no defensive capabilities at all and doesn’t have any DPS advantage over D/P.

I feel like arenanet is trying to fix something that isn’t broken and in the process they are going to break the thief on dec 10.

Sanduskel.1850:

Would be nice, but unjustified and will only make other classes hate us even more,

You obviously do not understand stealth classes.

Even if we had no attack skills and all we had was stealth people would still hate our class.

That is the life of stealth classes in every game. Doesn’t matter if you have perma stealth out of combat and none in combat or if you blink in and out of stealth. People will hate your class because it can invisible and some people just can’t handle that mentally. Which is the reason I like stealth and play assassin/thieves in every game I play.

If you made your balance choices based on which class was hated the most you would never have a balanced game.

Sanduskel, this guys suggestion is valid but I wouldn’t incorporate it in the Dec 10 patch. Let’s see how that goes first, but anything to buff this class rather than nerf it even more is a good thing.

xmtrcv.5236:

Sanduskel.1850:

Little survivability? Are you kidding me? My thief has tons of survivability AND decent dps.

Define survivability. Better yet, please post your build. Thanks!

He’s talking about cancelling daggerstorm and lyssa runes.

He’s obviously pro.

He is also saying his thief has survivability, but for a thief that means nothing when you compare it to almost any other class which can get true survivability through protection/invulns/block stances, etc. Good luck holding a point on a thief in spvp Sanduskel. That’s what survivability is about.

Sanduskel is just a troll.

Movement during combat is slower than out of combat.

SoS does work during combat.
No, FS does not stack, the fastest movement buff overwrites.
No, traveler does not stack, the fastest movement buff you have is what is active.

S/D hasn’t been nerfed yet. Why not wait until after dec 10?

S/D still good for the moment.

For some reason it always seems to strip stability also. Even if they just used lyssa and have all boons .

Sanduskel.1850:

Noty angry. Just presenting facts. they wouldn’t be so insistent to fix this if they didn’t think it was a serious problem. abuse is abuse. it’s a strong word to use for something that you think isn’t a big deal.

I don’t have a problem with the infusion change. I have a problem with the opportunist nerf. It completely counter intuitive and a much larger nerf than 33% boost to init regen.

Also I am tired of having thief traits nerfed and nothing else buffed to compensate and make thief build diversity grow.

Sure nerf infusion , but make it our 5pt minor so we can choose different traits and grow our build diversity.

Anet never does stuff like this for the thief class, but they do it for every other class.

I also feel sword #2 nerf kills s/d build. Thief doesn’t need another useless weaponset. Also another nerf with no real alternative other than never using the weaponset again.

These changes are good but it limits our class even further.

If anet is going to close doors for this class they need to open some others.

Sanduskel.1850:

Well apparently Anet disagrees. they basically said as much, using the term abuse when referencing this topic.

You are just reading what you want.

“We are ok with thieves blowing their cooldowns to have longer stealth, and we are ok with theives bouncing in and out of stealth, but we were not ok with thieves maintaining long duration stealth through abusing a single trait.”

You know thieves will still be able to perma stealth after patch right? They just won’t be able to achieve it with Infusion of Shadow all by itself.

The word abusing != game breaking.

No where in this statement did ANet say that remaining in stealth is breaking the game. In fact they said the opposite, they are absolutely fine with it as long as we use utilities or other combinations of traits to obtain it.

You’re obviously an angry poster.

Sanduskel.1850:

I disagree with your rant. Just because certain game breaking mechanics such as permastealth have been fixed doesn’t give you the right to attack a group of hard working developers, toiling to make the game better for everyone. You may not have gotten all you wanted, but it’s all for the health of the entire game.

Perma stealth is not game breaking bud.

You can compare fast hands to opportunist.

Both allow you to use skills faster.

Warrior gives adrenaline on swap and set of new weapon skills to use every 5s for 15pt minor.

Thief gives more init every 1s if you land a crit 20% of the time.

Anet reasoning is that it pigeon holds you into taking this trait because it’s so powerful, so it needs a nerf .

Why not nerf warrior fast hands also ? It’s a mist have for any warr build that’s not condi based, same as thief trait.

Yet thief, gets nerfed and warr barely touched.

Stealth classes are always hated in every game I’ve ever played. I came from Daoc and in that game you could not stealth in combat. You could perma stealth while out of combat. Stealth classes were by far the weakest class in the game for years before they received any kind of love. They got completely ignore while the rest of Daoc got huge buffs and new skills. All because the vocal community hated stealth.

I feel that’s how it’s going in this game as well. When I play other classes I don’t feel like thieves are OP. In fact I know thier patterns and react to them. I avoid most backstabs. I don’t have problems with other thieves on non-thief class.

In fact the number one class I complain about is mesmers and the class everyone else complains about is mesmers. At least the people that I know who don’t post on the forums. So if anet listens to the forum posters that’s only one small portion of the community. Which is a bad idea. Just because the forums get spammed with nerf thief doesn’t mean the majority feels that way.

I bet Mesmer is the class that everyone hates the most.

HtC in its current implementation is a useless trait. Even on a 0s ICD.

My problem with thief class and every change they have ever made to the class is that build diversity has been shrinking with every patch.

Just because you nerf opportunist doesn’t mean we are aren’t going to go 30 points into CS. You pretty much have to or you won’t do damage as a thief. So any build running 30CS is going to get a huge nerf and nothing in return for it. Better base init regen by 33% but all init regen traits have been nerfed by 33%-50%. So overall, the actual changes to init generation is a nerf not a buff. You took away a big bone and gave us a smaller one to play with.

Nerfing sword #2, who will play sword main hand anymore other than crazy people who like making the game harder for themselves?

These changes are making all thief builds shift towards d/p trickery in spvp.

Thief in wvw is going to be dead with the “perma stealth” changes. They literally have no other defense other than stealth. Take that away and you are left with free points.

Mr. Peters, you make it incredibly frustrating to play this game as a thief with your “balance” patches.

JonPeters.5630:

No, I am saying that I don’t want the balance of the thief held hostage by a 15 point minor in critical strikes so we need to take that initiative away from there and put it into the base class mechanics, which is exactly what we are doing.

Jon

I had no idea the thief class was being held hostage by 15 pt minor in critical strikes.

Condi thieves (even tho they are terrible) don’t put a point into CS and do just fine.

Any non-condi thief is held hostage by the ENTIRE cs line. If you don’t use CS, you don’t do damage, plain and simple as a power thief.

Instead of nerfing CS, why not improve the rest of our trait lines to get us alternative options for damage?

Just so sick of LOSING abilities/traits on this class instead of GAINING cool stuff to play with.

Look at warrior and necro, they got so many new traits and reworked traits and in some cases new weapon skills in death shroud. Things like that keep the class fresh and interesting.

Thief is the opposite and just loses stuff and the “new” stuff that’s given to us isn’t even worth mentioning over half the time and it’s very minor.

Sanduskel.1850:

i kill warriors all the time on my thief. Perhaps you will be next.

All it takes to beat a thief is let him do his stun break on your first stun, skull crack him again while he is standing in his black powder using berserker stance and HB him.

Dead thief.

I joined em like several weeks ago.

Warriors are OP. I run 3 stances to be even more stupid.

JonPeters.5630:

I said it in he other thread but this trait has to get hit hard because it is breaking the profession. We need to push the effectiveness of this trait into base thief functionality. If any other profession had a trait that reduced weapon cooldown by 30% for all weapons as a 15 point minor we would have to balance around that. A single trait shouldn’t be holding thief balance hostage so we will steal from this trait, no pun intended, and impart the savings on to every build via base initiative regeneration.

Jon

You philosophy is not wrong but your implementation is.

The whole cs line is a must have in any non-condi build. Without putting points in this line the thief class does no damage. It’s not just the one trait that’s the problem. It’s the whole cs line. You need this line or you will suck. It’s not like a warrior where you don’t need 30 arms to do good damage.

According to your philosophy the entire cs line needs “to be hit hard”. In my opinion everything else needs to be brought up to par.

IR will no longer work while stunned/KD/etc…

Bye bye S/X thieves…

I’d be fine with all these changes Mr. Peters as long as we got some significant changes.

For instance, Last Refuge is a terrible trait and everyone hates its. Why not replace last refuge with infusion of shadow? Infusion of shadow is a must have trait for anyone going into the shadow arts line and last refuge is not.

This would open up some build diversity.

Why not give venoms to all thieves as F2-F4 skills with the exception of basilisk venom? This would be a flat out buff to the class. Thief community might actually say, hey thanks for giving our class something new and useful instead of whine nerfs 24/7.

I’d like to see some of these changes be added into these huge nerfs. This is a huge nerf patch. No more perma stealth, no more s/d builds, opportunist nerf is going to effect every thief build as well.

Opportunist and depending on the mechanics of shadow return are possibly the 2 biggest nerfs this patch.

If you cannot use shadow return while stunned because of the cast time, that’s a huge nerf and sword/dagger is pretty much dead.

Opportunist is pretty self explanatory and I don’t understand why it got nerfed so hard.

Wvw builds in general rely on chain stealthing, either it be CnD or BP+HS… Otherwise you die in like 2 hits if you can’t confuse the enemy.

Good bye thief in wvw IMO.

In tpvp they will still be able to run d/p burst build imo.

D/P burst trickery build in spvp is getting buff because it doesn’t use any of the nerfed traits except Opportunist.

Almost all wvw builds just got huge nerf with infusion of shadow tho…

Assassins reward will only help condi d/d thieves IMO.

How many condi d/d thieves do you see destroying people? Not many because they are terrible at every except farming noobs who can’t dodge or walk out of caltrops.

Who cares?

Theives are like assassins from daoc. They were awesome and overpowered at the start. Everyone cried. They got nerfed into uselessness for years to come.

My advice, re-roll a different class and save yourself the grief. ANet clearly stated we are to rely on Hard to Catch now as our primary defensive trait, lulz!

JonPeters.5630:

Thief:
Also we are trying to improve the survivability of thieves in the Acrobatics line through easier access to the Hard to Catch trait and increased effectiveness of the Assassin’s Reward trait. This will reward thieves who are actively engaged in the fight rather than those who are just dodging over and over again.

I thought I would try to keep this post more constructive Mr. Jon Peters.

Do you realize what you have just said here? You are saying that thieves should now rely on a trait that randomly teleports you. This trait is more disorienting for the thief than the enemy trying to kill him. It’s a joke trait that is terrible. Last I checked it also doesn’t work against basilisk venom, but that was 2 patches ago. So, our survivability is now based on a random trait. Sometimes you get ported to safety, sometimes you get ported into 5 enemies and all their AOE. Fantastic choice of survivability.

Assassins reward is to help us in stay in melee combat? Unless we are healing 1-2k HPs every hit an assassin is not going to be able to stay in a melee fight for very long. This is not going to make an assassin stay in a melee fight. It’s more of a boost to d/d condi build than anything else.

I expected nothing but buffs to this class, not a bunch of huge nerfs.

I expected infusion of shadow to replace Last Refuge and last refuge to be a choice because infusion of shadows is a must have trait for shadow arts line and last refuge gets you killed more than it saves you.

I expected to see more changes like this. How about giving all thieves all venoms (except basi) as F2-F4 skills? Every thief should be able to use poisons, it’s a class thing not a build thing.

These are the things thieves need, not a bunch of nerfs with slight buffs.

They gave us hard to catch (HTC). It’s so uber that even the thief is confused as to where he randomly got teleported…

ANet hates thieves.

My skull crack warrior will still be dropping people like crazy. Increased cast time on the crack and no more unsuspecting foe, which was OP IMO. Instead I can get like leg spec or something else. I still crit a lot with 70% instead of 100.

Thief class is dead after the patch.

Goodbye s/d evade builds.
Goodbye d/p stealth builds.

Oh wait, we get better healing when spending init and easier access to htc which doesn’t work on basi venom and some other abilities if I remember correctly last time I tried it.

I don’t even know what to say about thief changes other than I am very disappointed..

Thieves are going to be bottom of the barrel next patch. Nerfed strongest build and nerf to perma bp+hs. You boosted the healing on initiative and gave us easier access to htc? Htc is completely bugged and who cares how much we heal when it takes 2 hits to kill us. Thieves will not have the ability to stay in a fight and melee when they can get stunned every other 7s. Goodbye thief class.

Nice to see skull crack warrior will still be OP.

Who cares? I play warrior now.

I switched to lyssa runes for spvp because basilisk sucks and I use it for condi clears not offense.

I made dagger first and used my valk weapon chest on a pistol. Then quit thief to play warrior and made mace/shield and greatsword .

Not sure how p/p is going to stay away from a warr with mace/shield and gs that’s immune to your damage.

I’ve been playing warrior instead of thief lately. All it requires is a good shield bash to break a thirds stun. Then skull crack. I don’t stand in blind fields either. Just outside them to land a stun, or a well time skull crack as the thief heartseeker out towards you.

I run 3 stances , melandru runes, condi food reduc, 0/10/30/0/30 on warr. Fairly tanky with skill setup and 30 defense with good crit damage and burst mastery. I don’t think I’ve had to blow more than 1 ability vs a thief in 1v1.

I’m not a noob thief and def not a noob warr. It’s much easier to kill a noob thief than it is to kill a noob warrior, but a good warrior is not going to lose to a good thief.