The nerf to swindlers equilibrium: is it justified? Let's discuss.

Swindlers equilibrium was a great little trait that rewarded a successful by recharging your steal. While admittedly theives have good access to evades, they lack any sustain or staying power in a fight. Steal is an integral part of thieves burst and earning a second opportunity to deal good damage could make all the difference In a fight. SE was a good trait that rewarded theives who knew when to steal (not just spam it) and I find it was an unjustified nerf that rewards players who refuse to learn the technical points of the game in favor of easy wins.

1. Steals are avoidable and predictable: the best thieves can consistently land steals and Bc of this can consistently deal damage, while the initial steal of blindsided usually will land, wary opponents can(and do) predict and bait steals. A failed steal can be punished hard and less skilled theives who fail to understand this and just spam steal whenever it's off cd will always lose matchups against anyone who is aware of this fact
2. Paying attention helps! Weapons, buffs, icons etc are often indicators of what an opponent is running and can prepare you ahead of time. For example being mindful of when a rangers signet of stone is available to decide to dump your damage on them....a thief running s/d is going to be running SE and as such makes it counterplayable from a technical aspect. You can CLEARLY see when an opponent evades and as such when up against a thief running SE you can realize when their steal goes off cd Bc of those. In other words allows you the chance to bait a steal and punish (whether with evades a block or invuln) intricacies like this separate the better players from the not so good.

In conclusion. I done believe this nerf is justified as it's not something that is unbalanced in a sense that it's unfair or spammy as spammy thieves don't really benefit from it past mid tier players, instead the nerf imo seems to reward players who refuse to improve their technical understanding of the classes in the game and in turn closes the skill gap so that they won't QQ. I understand balance is difficult to do but when nerfing a class I think it's necessary to take into consideration things like technical understanding and if it's still too hard or impossible to counter with said knowledge then a nerf is necessary. So please return this trait to 100%

Thoughts?

P.s. Some nerfs arent necessary but understandable for example the PP initititive nerf. PP theieves are really annoying but really easy to counter and truthfully the higher you climb the less you see them Bc ppl et how to deal with them however I get that anet doesn't like the idea of a class pressing one button only to play the game and so I actually agree with this nerf as it allows players to expand their arsenal of attacks. I don't think this applies to S/D and the SE nerf tho.

Thanks! Sorry for any typos I'd be happy to hear your feedback on this

they nerf thief to be only good for low health targets out of cooldowns and moving around the map.

SE should be revertedauto attack on daggs should be undoneundo PI nerfundo UC nerfmake prepardness baseline

@"epoc.7941" said:PP theieves are really annoyingThat's a faulty argument and can be made against anything depending on personal preference, "I don't like your playstyle" is not a valid reason to nerf something.

@"epoc.7941" said:I get that anet doesn't like the idea of a class pressing one button only to play the game and so I actually agree with this nerf as it allows players to expand their arsenal of attacks.As you said it's already easy enough to play around it if you know what you're doing. The build is high risk medium reward anyways which makes this nerf incredibly dumb and it's not "expanding the arsenal" either cause the reason this build "only uses 3" is thanks of a general lack of utility. The obvious fix would be reworking weapon skills 1/2/4/5, not killing it of entilery.

@Crab Fear.1624 said:they nerf thief to be only good for low health targets out of cooldowns and moving around the map.

SE should be revertedauto attack on daggs should be undoneundo PI nerfundo UC nerfmake prepardness baseline

Idk about pi nerf Idk if ur being sarcastic now either lol

It was justified

@Tails.9372 said:

@"epoc.7941" said:PP theieves are really annoyingThat's a faulty argument and can be made against anything depending on personal preference, "I don't like your playstyle" is not a valid reason to nerf something.

@"epoc.7941" said:I get that anet doesn't like the idea of a class pressing one button only to play the game and so I actually agree with this nerf as it allows players to expand their arsenal of attacks.As you said it's already easy enough to play around it if you know what you're doing. The build is high risk medium reward anyways which makes this nerf incredibly dumb and it's not "expanding the arsenal" either cause the reason this build "only uses 3" is thanks of a general lack of utility. The obvious fix would be reworking weapon skills 1/2/4/5, not killing it of entilery.

Faulty or not anet has literally said in patchnotes they want to avoid builds that only press one button so they actually do try to discourage those playstyles I agree the other skills might just need more love but still it doesn't make the nerf dumb. U can still play the build the variant everyone played was dumb anyways I played a dd variant with physical skills for quick bursts and would finish ppl off with P/P. It was much more effective.

Either way I wasn't here to complain about op nerds but the s/d nerf

considering how much utility traited steal brings, it is somewhat understandable that they nerfed swindler's equilibrium.my issue with this is, that the double steal on s/d power was pretty helpful to land your flanking strikes on a halfway decent opponent and the little extra burst due to mug, which are things that help a lot to wear down an opponent, got hit with that nerf.

if they gave back some damage on auto attacks along with that nerf, or at least changed flanking strike in some way so enemies can't just walk out of it lol...otherwise i can understand the nerf, when looking only at s/d condi. but it also turned s/d power a little more into s/d wet noodle.

It's justified change. While many thieves may not like this nerf, I think it's better this way because thieves can no longer evade and instantly have another steal so they can cheese their way to victory. Whenever I play thief, I never spam Steal. I always save it for interrupting healing skill and it seems that ArenaNet wants other thieves to do the same thing.

It was not justified, at least not justified enough.However I don't see too much impact of it, almost none if you use Steal to do the most important interrupts. Sometimes it presents problem when fighting Holos due to their funny skills and funny CDs in Forge where you need to very quickly interrupt two of them or kite very far away.Even though I wouldn't mind seeing it reverted, I'd trade it any time for Dagger and Sword AA nerf to be reverted instead. Those really made no sense, especially Sword.

If we're trying to balance towards a certain absolute, it was justified. Let's not delude ourselves; the build was extremely easy to get solid results with and took away most of the decision-making and skill required to play the thief or even S/D for that matter.

That said, if we're trying to balance towards the rest of the game, it wasn't justified at all thanks to the insane powercreep on other professions that hasn't been toned down to the same level.

That said, a substantial portion of damage did come from double Mug. I think sword's AA damage nerfs could have been at least partially undone to compensate, since the build did lose out on both damage and resources/time. The recent hit to EW also only hurt the build by cutting its damage by a fair margin as well.

SwEq was fine without Improv doing what it currently does (random skill type resets), which was the real problem as to why the build was so dominant. I think Improv is one of the most poorly-designed traits in the game, too.

@DeceiverX.8361 said:SwEq was fine without Improv doing what it currently does (random skill type resets), which was the real problem as to why the build was so dominant. I think Improv is one of the most poorly-designed traits in the game, too.

improv has an icd of 20s for the random skill type recharge, so it doesn't profit from swindler's equilibrium, except for the 2x2 stolen skills part.

@MechVampyre.2903 said:

@DeceiverX.8361 said:SwEq was fine without Improv doing what it currently does (random skill type resets), which was the real problem as to why the build was so dominant. I think Improv is one of the most poorly-designed traits in the game, too.

Not sure why I forgot this as it was added so long ago.

Actually, the update to Improvisation getting a 20 second ICD came along the the change to Swindler's Equilibrium getting the 100% Steal Recharge.

On Improvisation:

August 08, 2017 Path of Fire pre-patch:

• Updated the text description to refer to Stolen Skills instead of Stolen Items.
• The skill-recharge portion of this trait now has a 20-second internal cooldown.

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On Swindler's Equilibrium:

August 08, 2017 Path of Fire pre-patch:

• Increased bonus damage to 10%
• Increased internal cooldown from 1 second to 20 seconds.
• This trait now fully recharges steal when the conditions are met.

---

So it's still just under a year old.

Anyhow, yes the nerf was justified in the grand scheme of things.It went from OP to simply being a good option. It was piss-easy to just Steal, dodge into an AoE field and have it right back up again. Can't really call that rewarding gameplay. I think it's fine the way it is now, it's still a step up from merely reducing steal by 1 second on a successful evade with a 1 second ICD.

Doesn't mean that it's a good nerf in the current state of the game.There's still way too much powercreep on other classes... But I suppose they got to start somewhere, I'm used to Thief being the start of nerfs...

I don't really see a difference in performance pre-nerf and post-nerf. I never felt I was in a position where I needed to spam my Steal immediately after it was refreshed by SE anyway. S/D is still fun and effective.