Thief needs help in PvE, particularly Deadeye.

****A picture is worth a thousand words.

https://snowcrows.com/raids/thief/deadeye/power/

DPS is what we do, we has very little utility besides it, why is our sustained damage so abysmal in PvE?

I wouldn't mind if we were given more PvE-friendly utility or any way to justify a spot in a fractal or raiding group besides damage, but that would probably requires a lot of reworking of some of our traits-lines who feel extremely outdated (Shadow Arts) along a lot of our, literally never used, utility skills such as pretty much every single one of our "trap" skills.

So in the meantime could we just hope for some blanket damage buffs to at least put us on par with others?

I wouldn't be against PvE thief buffs. But i would be against direct damage buffs for deadeye since ya'know its ranged. If they want to buff damage for thief it should be core thief and daredevil since those require melee and their melee DPS is already falling behind others.

@TexZero.7910 said:I wouldn't be against PvE thief buffs. But i would be against direct damage buffs for deadeye since ya'know its ranged. If they want to buff damage for thief it should be core thief and daredevil since those require melee and their melee DPS is already falling behind others.

I don't mind seeing Rifle being relegated to a swap weapon, just like Longbow is for DHs, but even playing D/D Deadeye struggles, so does Power Daredevil.

@TexZero.7910 said:I wouldn't be against PvE thief buffs. But i would be against direct damage buffs for deadeye since ya'know its ranged. If they want to buff damage for thief it should be core thief and daredevil since those require melee and their melee DPS is already falling behind others.

to be fair, a power ranged option isnt terrible in PVE, its not like it would be affecting to much gameplay wise.

With the way the game works right now, whenever they release new Elite specs, we can already assume whoever lands a ranged weapon as its new option is more or less boned in PvE, or at best can only hope that some of their new traits will work with some of their core weapons.

@Griever.8150 said:DPS is what we do, we has very little utility besides it, why is our sustained damage so abysmal in PvE?Thief in general (and power thief in particular) is boned when it comes to sustainable damage output, it's called bad game design but there's nothing we can do about it since the developers seem to think that it's somehow a good idea to give an almost exclusively singe taget damage focused class with extremely limited tank and support options a mediocre singe taget damage output.

@Dante.1763 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:I wouldn't be against PvE thief buffs. But i would be against direct damage buffs for deadeye since ya'know its ranged. If they want to buff damage for thief it should be core thief and daredevil since those require melee and their melee DPS is already falling behind others.

Yes, but given the relative safety of ranged in general, buffing that is a silly concept.

@TexZero.7910 said:

@Dante.1763 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:I wouldn't be against PvE thief buffs. But i would be against direct damage buffs for deadeye since ya'know its ranged. If they want to buff damage for thief it should be core thief and daredevil since those require melee and their melee DPS is already falling behind others.

Then maybe they shouldnt make an elite spec with ranged weapon as its special weapon. Its a bloody sniper rifle and it should have a decent amount of damage.

@Dante.1763 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:

@Dante.1763 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:I wouldn't be against PvE thief buffs. But i would be against direct damage buffs for deadeye since ya'know its ranged. If they want to buff damage for thief it should be core thief and daredevil since those require melee and their melee DPS is already falling behind others.

Then maybe don't ask for it ?Because you know thief's have been clamoring since launch for a ranged weapon, now you got it.

@"TexZero.7910" said:given the relative safety of ranged in general, buffing that is a silly conceptThere is no point in keeping the damage of damage oriented ranged builds low just cause "they're to safe", that's what the low HP is there for. Every enemy worth a damn already has big ranged AoEs, some form of CC or some other game mechanic to abuse vs. ranged characters and everything else doesn't matter anyways since random trash mobs aren't supposed to be challenging.

@Tails.9372 said:

@"TexZero.7910" said:given the relative safety of ranged in general, buffing that is a silly conceptThere is no point in keeping the damage of damage oriented ranged builds low just cause "they're to save", that's what the low HP is there for. Every enemy worth a kitten already has big ranged AoEs, some form of CC or some other game mechanic to abuse vs. ranged characters and everything else doesn't matter anyways since random trash mobs aren't supposed to be challenging.

Thank you. We also have ranged weapons on other classes that DO plenty of damage somtimes greater than melee weapons at range. Eles staff, Rangers Longbow and shortbow for two easy examples. The argument that ranged is safe anymore is silly. Melee is the safest spot you can be in this game.

The thief was designed to be a highly mobile, high burst damage class with an evasive, hit and run playstyle. A class like that is never going to be a sustained DPS king. Building to restore initiative and endurance is probably your best bet if you want sustained damage, particularly with a Deadeye.

One of my favorite characters is my thief, I'm playing him as power daredevil for a long time. I would love to see some more utility and/or group support added to thief:Currently when I'm playing fractals i need to wait for a right PUG to show up on LFG or to get my guildies to create a 5man premade: What we bring to the table is outshined bu other professions in that setting.Having said that, I do enjoy the challenge thief brings, i just wish to get some more impact on the group I'm playing with. Steal sharing boons is nice, sometimes i switch to sword/dagger if insability demands boonstrip....but splittin some skills and giving them boon generation in PvE only would go a long way in making thief desired part of the group. *Just an idea off the top of my head

@"Mercurias.1826" said:A class like that is never going to be a sustained DPS king.This is not about being the "sustained DPS king", of course sustained DPS should be lower than burst DPS but that's not an excuse for lowering the sustained DPS to the point were the average DPS oriented build from other classes have a roughly 50% higher DPS than some of the damage oriented thief builds while also having access to proper AoE attacks in addition to better CC and suport options on top of it. Even upscaled elite mobs can have upwards of 500k HP which requires at least a decent amount of sustainable DPS in order to deal with it which shouldn't be to much to ask for a damage oriented build from a class which is almost exclusively specialised in one on one combat.

@"Mercurias.1826" said:The thief was designed to be a highly mobile, high burst damage class with an evasive, hit and run playstyle. A class like that is never going to be a sustained DPS king. Building to restore initiative and endurance is probably your best bet if you want sustained damage, particularly with a Deadeye.

This is why traits are a thing, nobody is asking to have our cake and eating it too. Daredevil has to choose between Dash, bound and Lotus training for a reason for example.

The problem, specially for Deadeye, is that outside Be Quick or Be Killed, our Grandmaster's trait are horrible. What should be our "longer wind up, higher damage" grandmaster, Maleficient Seven is ENTIRELY useless for the current "viable" (i use the term loosely) Deadeye PvE playstyle as showcased in the videos posted on Snow Crow's website, as stacking up malice instead of simply using backstab as often as possible is a DPS loss.

Fire for Effect is also entirely useless as boon sharing is something we'll never be able to effectively do as we have to gear for DPS to be of any use at all, unlike, a Chrono or Druid, wich means no concentration on our gear.

One thing that could possibly band aid all of this would be to buff Heartseeker (in PvE ONLY) to make it worth using over simple auto-attacks again, as it would give us a way to generate malice as D/D and possibly allow us to take advantage of Maleficient Seven while also giving us a more engaging rotation than what we currently have.

Anet can't balance a rubik's cube on a flat table, so I don't have much expectation in them making classes much less elites / weapons have anything resembling comperable performance. So much of the game needs to be fixed to get Deadeye into reasonable shape: Projectiles have severe deficits over playing a magic ranged hitscan. The trait selection underperforms, The rework was so bad that I hope somebody got fired for it. At the end of the day, the only advice I could give is to basically make a bunch of alt characters and play whatever Anet has deemed to be the worthy class.

@TexZero.7910 said:

@Dante.1763 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:I wouldn't be against PvE thief buffs. But i would be against direct damage buffs for deadeye since ya'know its ranged. If they want to buff damage for thief it should be core thief and daredevil since those require melee and their melee DPS is already falling behind others.

Ranged is actually both more dangerous and less effective in this game, and has always been.

@Tails.9372 said:

@"TexZero.7910" said:given the relative safety of ranged in general, buffing that is a silly conceptThere is no point in keeping the damage of damage oriented ranged builds low just cause "they're to safe", that's what the low HP is there for. Every enemy worth a kitten already has big ranged AoEs, some form of CC or some other game mechanic to abuse vs. ranged characters and everything else doesn't matter anyways since random trash mobs aren't supposed to be challenging.

I'm going to challenge this ... it's a recurring theme on these forums and it's nonsense ... You don't think it's reasonable trade off to have less damage because of the reduced risk to bad stuff happening to you when playing ranged? I do, and generally, so do most games. How could it be otherwise? It's not like it's a novel concept in this game that this trade off exists ... in fact, MOST games I've ever played acknowledge a differentiation between melee/range and the various factors impacted by those two positions.

Let's take a step back ... if the point of ranged weapons isn't to give you a margin of error with freedom to position yourself ... then what is it? Just flavour? I don't think so. There MUST be a meaningful differentiator between melee and ranged weapons, if only because of the generally favourable factor of positional freedom you get with ranged vs. melee. It can't be any other way as long as the devs want players to have meaningful options to make meaningful choices.

What's funny, is deadeye is the fastest single target mob killer with 0 downtime ever in open world.

@"Griever.8150" said:****A picture is worth a thousand words.

https://snowcrows.com/raids/thief/deadeye/power/

DPS is what we do, we has very little utility besides it, why is our sustained damage so abysmal in PvE?

Deadeye sustained damage is not absymal in PvE. Disclaimer: it is for speedclearing but then again most professions don't do well in that aspect. For the standard sort of raid group that just aims for comfortable clears of W1 - 5 Deadeye can be absolutely fine.

Snow Crows appear to have made that assumption on the basis of benchmarks (where it is not possible to stack additional Malice during low / zero DPS phases) and there aren't many people trying to make Deadeye work so the voices pointing out that we are actually pretty okay are drowned out. It probably doesn't help that I was one of the loudest proponents of Deadeye being in a very poor place in PvE, calling for buffs and changes. Funny thing with actually testing and sticking with something is that it can change your opinion.

So when you do try Deadeye and attempt to work out the best time to build Malice beyond the auto-attack, Cloak and Dagger, Backstab rotation then you get things like this:

Deadeye is ranked 2nd for power DPS on Keep Construct , 2nd on Vale Guardian, 4th on Gorseval , 2nd on Samarog and can hit decent numbers on Sabetha and Slothasor -Raidar just hasn't got enough logs to show these performances (also for anyone reading this post since my last edit, rankings might change - Deadeye is still fine for DPS though). It is worth noting that none of those compositions were changed to benefit me and I don't run a full DPS build with Thieves Guild. I also have quite a few logs that are hidden on these sites due to how GW2 uses an interpolation based method to band the 100th percentile "rank" instead of having a nearest rank system with one 100th percentile performance. In my opinion, collated logs such as these are always going to be a better reflection of what matters to the majority of raiders (who aren't speed clearing or solo-druid healing or stacking Scourges to mid-strat VG).

As for utility, I've run Samarog and come out with 19k+ DPS while using Shadow Gust for knockbacks and extra CC because my group was struggling. You'll pull decent numbers on both Dhuum and Slothasor, even when you need to take Signet of Agility for condition cleansing, and Binding Shadow is underrated CC with the option to do some boon-stripping.

To go back to the Snow Crows page, Snow Crows suggest that Daredevil is at least a viable but poor choice on Vale Guardian. Daredevil damage range is the following:Meanwhile Deadeye is at:

Checking https://snowcrows.com/raids/guardian/dragonhunter/power/ shows that Dragonhunter is highly recommended for Samarog. Conversely, Deadeye is apparently useless at every single boss. Looking at collated logs from the performance of different builds suggests something very different:

That doesn't include this attempt where I was hitting 21.4k as a Deadeye despite poor RNG. That 19k-20k is also very approachable with Basilisk Venom and Binding Shadow which is a considerable amount of CC.

At this stage, it might just be that we're getting closer to a balance patch and it is easier to continue saying an underplayed and consistently made fun of class is useless instead of having to reassess all performances and draw conclusions on collated data from raids instead of relying on benchmarks. It may also be that Snow Crows are speaking from a speed running perspective, though it is raid viability that is listed, but then all DPS options should be pretty useless aside from Weaver / Scourge / Mirage.

That isn't to say that Deadeye is in a brilliant spot - our single target damage should see a buff in PvE (perhaps by increasing scaling of Malice on Malicious attacks and yes that would be skill split before PvP players jump down my throat again - alternatively and a little shout out to MUDse, Iron Sight could be buffed) to make up for our low cleave - 3rd power boss DPS on Xera, worst cleave and, admittedly, lower utility (group support, passive boon sharing, pushes and pulls) and that would actually afford us an interesting DPS niche. Support Deadeye needs a considerable buff, again split for PvE, to Fire for Effect. More Might for a longer duration coupled with a higher baseline damage rotation and Might share Deadeye might actually become something useful for non-Druid off-meta compositions.

TL;DR Deadeye isn't in as bad a spot as people (including myself originally) would like to believe. SC seem to have drawn conclusions from benchmarks which don't accurately mirror what Deadeye is able to achieve in raids for a pretty average player. Deadeye would benefit from increased single target damage in PvE and a buff to Fire for Effect support.

@TexZero.7910 said:I wouldn't be against PvE thief buffs. But i would be against direct damage buffs for deadeye since ya'know its ranged. If they want to buff damage for thief it should be core thief and daredevil since those require melee and their melee DPS is already falling behind others.

You don't use Rifle aside from openers and niche cases as Deadeye in PvE. So that isn't a worry.

@"Griever.8150" said:The problem, specially for Deadeye, is that outside Be Quick or Be Killed, our Grandmaster's trait are horrible. What should be our "longer wind up, higher damage" grandmaster, Maleficient Seven is ENTIRELY useless for the current "viable" (i use the term loosely) Deadeye PvE playstyle as showcased in the videos posted on Snow Crow's website, as stacking up malice instead of simply using backstab as often as possible is a DPS loss.

Actual raid bosses have times where you can build additional Malice and it is a net DPS gain to do so and align the Malicious Backstab with Assassin's Signet and Shadow Flare (as well as remarking for a higher Malice second Backstab under Assassin's Signet active).

This is why the GW2Raidar rankings are very disparate from the SC advice.

@Dante.1763 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:

@Dante.1763 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:I wouldn't be against PvE thief buffs. But i would be against direct damage buffs for deadeye since ya'know its ranged. If they want to buff damage for thief it should be core thief and daredevil since those require melee and their melee DPS is already falling behind others.

I don't understand why you believe a new weapon should always be the best for everything.

Rifle has unparalleled ranged burst. Ranged burst is meaningless in DPS/PvE environments. The spec itself is very clearly designed around PvP, especially since the Malice rework. It's a sniper rifle. So it should deal very low sustained damage, given how slow and methodical sniping is in actuality.

You can't have both high burst and sustained damage on a ranged option as it then by default phases out everything else, and I don't think it's a good idea to make such a weapon clearly optimal for the class a whole via one elite spec. It's the same thing as ranger's longbow. PvE optimizations will only ever consider what's the best for the job, so there's really no sense in arguing it should be buffed in DPS unless you'd simply like to ask for the rifle to be the universally best weapon as a whole at this point. Which is pretty silly, as it then invalidates everything; this trend would mandate ANet makes the next spec simply better than rifle for PvE in every regard, nullifying the purpose of DE and what you're asking for.

@Obtena.7952 said:There MUST be a meaningful differentiator between melee and ranged weaponsAnd there already is in form of game mechanics. Mechanics melee doesn't have to deal with which prevent you from / punish you for attacking. A melee player doesn't have to tap-dance around trash mobs in order to attack the one opponent he actually cares about, he doesn't really have to worry about some of the CC since he already wants to be in the enemy's face, he doesn't have to wait untill the big dmg reflection AoE is gone before he can start attacking his target again and he doesn't have to care about the range damage nullification field some of the enemies tend to spam. Melee is also less likely to be targeted by random elite mobs which tend to spawn a little bit away from the objective in addition to getting multiple buffs ranged characters are usually missing out on thanks to largely being ignored by support for obvious reasons.

I won't add this as an edit to my bigger post (that is a bad habit of mine) but if any spec of Thief needs improvement in PvE, that is currently Power Daredevil. However I'd argue that design time is better spent refining Dagger/Dagger Deadeye into a high single target, low cleave niche and improving Deadeye support. Daredevil already has a place as a very forgiving beginner spec with Power and has good condition damage and limited, though very strong, boon share options on a few encounters in raids. For those people wanting to do power damage, Deadeye is in a good place. It takes some learning but that is the same as every other profession in the game.

Rifle would need another entire rehaul to be useful in PvE as long as the movement restrictions / opportunity cost through both Kneel and Silent Scope remain in place and isn't counterbalanced by ridiculous (talking 40K+) single target benchmarks. The trade-offs for anything aside from absolute top tier single target by running Rifle is too high.

@"Miatela.5047" said:I won't add this as an edit to my bigger post (that is a bad habit of mine) but if any spec of Thief needs improvement in PvE, that is currently Power Daredevil. However I'd argue that design time is better spent refining Dagger/Dagger Deadeye into a high single target, low cleave niche and improving Deadeye support. Daredevil already has a place as a very forgiving beginner spec with Power and has good condition damage and limited, though very strong, boon share options on a few encounters in raids. For those people wanting to do power damage, Deadeye is in a good place. It takes some learning but that is the same as every other profession in the game.

Rifle would need another entire rehaul to be useful in PvE as long as the movement restrictions / opportunity cost through both Kneel and Silent Scope remain in place and isn't counterbalanced by ridiculous (talking 40K+) single target benchmarks. The trade-offs for anything aside from absolute top tier single target by running Rifle is too high.

Thanks for both of your posts, really good information, i'll admit i didn't have time to test things as thoroughly as you did and kinda jumped on SC's conclusions too.

One big problem is that a large portion of the playerbase also kinda mindlessly listen to everything they say, so for pugging it puts us in a bad place. I experienced it a few times.

I would disagree that Rifle is entirely useless in its current iteration though, its obviously not a good primary weapon but i find myself switching to it from times to times to burn adds or when running mechanics out of the group. Considering Deadeye lacks mobility and steal, it seems better than just waddling to mobs.

@Tails.9372 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:There MUST be a meaningful differentiator between melee and ranged weaponsAnd there already is in form of game mechanics.

Let's skip the vague arguments here. If you don't agree that damage should be a ranged/melee differentiator, then tell us what reasonable things should differentiate them. Frankly some of your examples don't even make sense. Let's start:

1. You say targeting as a melee is easier ... but if I want that easy targeting with a ranged weapon, I can still play with my ranged weapon at melee range. The advantage here is clearly ranged weapons, because I can CHOOSE to stay range OR move to melee to get the same targeting advantage you say is exclusive to melee.

2. You say you can ignore CC as a melee class because you are already in melee range, but that doesn't make sense because with a ranged weapons, I am in range MUCH sooner than any melee weapon would ever be; as long as the mob is within your attack range, the ability to 'ignore CC' is valid for BOTH ranged and melee weapons. The advantage here is again, ranged weapons, because of the increased distance I can attack from.

3. The other examples are hardly even worth considering .. they are situational IF the mobs you are fighting have those capabilities. Not only that, but if you know before hand you are encountering those kinds of mobs, you're going to be SMART and equip yourself a melee weapon anyways ...

What else you got?