Thief Changes 12/11/18

ThiefWhen we changed malice to no longer generate over time in an earlier update, we also carried over the portion of Death's Judgment that could not be blocked. However, now that it takes a shorter time to build malice, we no longer feel like this benefit is necessary. Additionally, we've toned down the initial burst of damage that the thief can apply by removing the ability to stack Lead Attacks when outside of combat. We've also had the opportunity to update thief weapon traits to the new standard of having a baseline value in addition to the benefits while wielding that weapon.

Consume Plasma: This skill has been split between game modes, reducing the protection it grants from 10 seconds to 4 seconds the stability it grants from 5 seconds to 2 seconds in PvP only.Cluster Bomb: The projectile speed of this skill has been increased by 50%.Death's Judgment: This skill can now be blocked.Lotus Strike: The number of poison stacks this skill grants has been increased from 1 to 2, and its duration has been reduced from 6 seconds to 5 seconds.Vault: The damage of this attack will no longer occur if the thief shadowsteps after the skill has begun.Hide in Shadows: This skill's description has been updated to clarify that it removes conditions before it heals.Withdraw: This skill's description has been updated to clarify that it removes conditions before it performs its other functions.Ankle Shots: This trait now grants a baseline 5% damage to crippled enemies and an additional 5% damage if the thief is wielding a pistol. The chance to cripple a foe upon landing a critical hit with a pistol is now 100%, and the tooltip regarding this trait's chance to critically hit has been removed.Dagger Training: This trait no longer grants an additional 5% damage when wielding a dagger. Instead, it now grants a baseline power of 80 with an additional 80 granted if the thief is wielding a dagger.Lead Attacks: The duration of this trait's Lead Attacks stacking effect has been reduced from 15 seconds to 10 seconds. It now requires the player to be in combat in order to generate the stacking damage effect. Initiative skills that cause the player to enter combat will generate stacks of this trait.Malicious Restoration: This skill now transfers conditions before it heals.Silent Scope: This trait no longer grants an additional 20% chance to critically hit with kneeling rifle skills and Death's Judgment. It now grants up to 120 precision regardless of the weapon the thief wields, and an additional 120 precision while wielding a rifle.Staff Master: This trait now grants 5% damage when endurance is not full, which increases to 10% when wielding a staff.Swindler's Equilibrium: The cooldown of this trait has been reduced from 20 seconds (30 seconds in competitive game modes) to 10 seconds in all game modes. It now reduces the cooldown of Steal by 50% (25% in competitive game modes) instead of 100%. This trait no longer increases damage by a percentage and instead grants 120 power with an additional 120 power granted if the thief is also wielding a sword.

the only thing I didn't like was the change to lead attacks but they nerfed everybody else so I guess it's fine.

They are saying now that you cannot stealth as one of your primary mechanics you don't need this to be unblockable since an npc, trap, trick, watchtower etc will get you killed and not even be able to use it anyways so it doesn't need to be unblockable.

Might be harder to pull off dj since there are a ton of things already stopping it, but for the last week or so I've been playing around with basilisk venom for my rifle build but it puts me in a very bad spot, so I can only go in as a +1 so it looks like I got some practice at least. It's not going to stop the complaints about dj though, people are still going to die and blame it even when it can be blocked/los/terrain/etc. Overall I don't see anything useful that came in, for instance I don't think I would choose silent scope over payback on my non rifle build, but I will check it out. Most of the changes seem negative but nothing that can't be adapted to.

Cluster Bomb buff?What? Didn't expect that. Overall not much is going to change for me. Glad to see straight multipliers getting replaced with stat-boosts though.

@DemonSeed.3528 said:Might be harder to pull off dj since there are a ton of things already stopping it, but for the last week or so I've been playing around with basilisk venom for my rifle build but it puts me in a very bad spot, so I can only go in as a +1 so it looks like I got some practice at least. It's not going to stop the complaints about dj though, people are still going to die and blame it even when it can be blocked/los/terrain/etc. Overall I don't see anything useful that came in, for instance I don't think I would choose silent scope over payback on my non rifle build, but I will check it out. Most of the changes seem negative but nothing that can't be adapted to.

especially now the ' why did my reflected DJ not kill the DE ? ' posts will return :)

very interesting

I just don't understand the changes from percent to power. It's unintuitive.

What does it actually increase % damage by now?

@Kain Francois.4328 said:I just don't understand the changes from percent to power. It's unintuitive.

What does it actually increase % damage by now?

They are trying to tone down the damage in general and that's a really good step imo.

@Kain Francois.4328 said:I just don't understand the changes from percent to power. It's unintuitive.

What does it actually increase % damage by now?

For d/d DE, the change to Dagger Training is a buff if your power is less than 3200 and a nerf if power is higher than that. So, basically a nerf when you get 25 might/banners/etc in full berserker gear.

The higher indirect nerf thou was the one on Premeditation, due to changes to chronos, we'll not have that many different boons up all the time.

@Galandil.9641 said:

@Kain Francois.4328 said:I just don't understand the changes from percent to power. It's unintuitive.

What does it actually increase % damage by now?

What does this mean for pve raid dps?

@Kain Francois.4328 said:I just don't understand the changes from percent to power. It's unintuitive.

What does it actually increase % damage by now?

I honestly prefer it this way, because stacking multiplicative damage modifiers is one of the reasons the damage numbers reach asinine one-shot levels.Too bad they didn't go all the way.

@Kain Francois.4328 said:I just don't understand the changes from percent to power. It's unintuitive.

What does it actually increase % damage by now?

Correct me if I am wrong but I think;Dagger Training : 5.3%-8%(Power at 3000-2000; if only if its 160 power added)Swindler's Equilibrium: 8%-12%(Power at 3000-2000; if only if its 240 power added)

Thus, depending on how much power you have overall not including the percent amp after from food or wrench.

@Xenji.4907 said:

@Kain Francois.4328 said:I just don't understand the changes from percent to power. It's unintuitive.

What does it actually increase % damage by now?

About Power scaling... Am I understanding this right?

According to the wiki, if I have a 1000 Power, doubling that to 2000 Power also doubles my damage output, so +100% Damage, is 3000 Power then +200%?

I haven't been playing this game a very long time but is it just me or does it almost sound like Deadeye is getting nerfed to death?

@Solori.6025 said:Death's Judgment: This skill can now be blocked.So the time/initiative we spent building up malice to stealth and use DJ, all the enemy has to do now is see a deadeye that suddenly disappears > use a block/reflect skill > deadeye gets killed by their own shot?

@Solori.6025 said:Silent Scope: This trait no longer grants an additional 20% chance to critically hit with kneeling rifle skills and Death's Judgment. It now grants up to 120 precision regardless of the weapon the thief wields, and an additional 120 precision while wielding a rifle.So if I have a berserker build with ascended gear and superior deadeye runes (too broke for scholars), does this mean instead of getting a flat +20% crit chance increase, I now get 120 precision. So would this be a downgrade or an upgrade? (not too sure how many points = 1%)

Can someone explain this update in simple terms? Did the thief/deadeye class get buffed or nerfed or buffed here but nerfed there?

@Schnitzel.8270 said:I haven't been playing this game a very long time but is it just me or does it almost sound like Deadeye is getting nerfed to death?

@Solori.6025 said:Death's Judgment: This skill can now be blocked.So the time/initiative we spent building up malice to stealth and use DJ, all the enemy has to do now is see a deadeye that suddenly disappears > use a block/reflect skill > deadeye gets killed by their own shot?

@Solori.6025 said:Silent Scope: This trait no longer grants an additional 20% chance to critically hit with kneeling rifle skills and Death's Judgment. It now grants up to 120 precision regardless of the weapon the thief wields, and an additional 120 precision while wielding a rifle.So if I have a berserker build with ascended gear and superior deadeye runes (too broke for scholars), does this mean instead of getting a flat +20% crit chance increase, I now get 120 precision. So would this be a downgrade or an upgrade? (not too sure how many points = 1%)

You get a 120 precision in any weapon + another 120 precision if you have rifle, DJ nerf was predictable and it's fine. I'd rather make it a f3 skill instead of the stealth attack but this nerf also means that they don't want you to spam this skill over and over again.

Deadeye is barely touched this patch lol, malice backstab is still a big problem in WvW I think, stealth on dodge is still in the game so yeah the only relevant nerf to deadeye was lead attacks, at least in pvp trickery is a must so that hurts deadeye burst potential for sure.

@Solori.6025 said:Silent Scope: This trait no longer grants an additional 20% chance to critically hit with kneeling rifle skills and Death's Judgment. It now grants up to 120 precision regardless of the weapon the thief wields, and an additional 120 precision while wielding a rifle.So if I have a berserker build with ascended gear and superior deadeye runes (too broke for scholars), does this mean instead of getting a flat +20% crit chance increase, I now get 120 precision. So would this be a downgrade or an upgrade? (not too sure how many points = 1%)

It's 21 precision per 1% crit at level 80 so this results in an almost 50% nerf to the crit chance granted by this trait (from 20% > 11.4% ) with a rifle equipped as for the 120 when NOT using a rifle, that seems rather pointless seeing as very few would take this trait if they weren't running primarily rifle, and thief doesn't utilize secondary weapons to the extent that other classes do.

@TwiceDead.1963 said:Cluster Bomb buff?What? Didn't expect that. Overall not much is going to change for me. Glad to see straight multipliers getting replaced with stat-boosts though.

If you think about how Cluster Bomb is being used, that is not a buff.

I thought everything was ok, but the lead attacks change.....

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:

@TwiceDead.1963 said:Cluster Bomb buff?What? Didn't expect that. Overall not much is going to change for me. Glad to see straight multipliers getting replaced with stat-boosts though.

More of a trade if anything. It was more of a shotgun in the past than it's intended purpose, and this brought it closer to the latter. A shame though, the shotgun approach is fun.

@Solori.6025 said:Ankle Shots: This trait now grants a baseline 5% damage to crippled enemies and an additional 5% damage if the thief is wielding a pistol. The chance to cripple a foe upon landing a critical hit with a pistol is now 100%, and the tooltip regarding this trait's chance to critically hit has been removed.Dagger Training: This trait no longer grants an additional 5% damage when wielding a dagger. Instead, it now grants a baseline power of 80 with an additional 80 granted if the thief is wielding a dagger.Silent Scope: This trait no longer grants an additional 20% chance to critically hit with kneeling rifle skills and Death's Judgment. It now grants up to 120 precision regardless of the weapon the thief wields, and an additional 120 precision while wielding a rifle.

I can now shoot ankles with my Staff and improve my Staff skills by training with daggers, with scopes too. :/

@Kain Francois.4328 said:

@Galandil.9641 said:

@Kain Francois.4328 said:I just don't understand the changes from percent to power. It's unintuitive.

What does it actually increase % damage by now?

With full attribute infusions, under revealed training, quickness, food, all the good shit, your power is 4486. With previous dagger training, which is 5% more damage, that gives you an effective increase of 224 power. Now that's 160 power increase instead, which is 3.57%-4% damage increase (4% if you are losing out on some buffs/might, whatever). So around ~1% dps loss from that change.

The bigger nerf is the chrono changes. I don't know what the meta will be like now, but I'm assuming we are going to go from 11 boon uptime to around 8, which is another 3% damage loss.

Ending on a high note though, at least daredevil got buffed because they now get 80 free power. Pretty sure that's better than mug.

Patch seems ok. It's about time they made DJ blockable. Though I would have rather them just removed it altogether and brought back Cursed Bullet...

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:

@Solori.6025 said:Ankle Shots: This trait now grants a baseline 5% damage to crippled enemies and an additional 5% damage if the thief is wielding a pistol. The chance to cripple a foe upon landing a critical hit with a pistol is now 100%, and the tooltip regarding this trait's chance to critically hit has been removed.Dagger Training: This trait no longer grants an additional 5% damage when wielding a dagger. Instead, it now grants a baseline power of 80 with an additional 80 granted if the thief is wielding a dagger.Silent Scope: This trait no longer grants an additional 20% chance to critically hit with kneeling rifle skills and Death's Judgment. It now grants up to 120 precision regardless of the weapon the thief wields, and an additional 120 precision while wielding a rifle.

your staff skills wont be improved by training with scopes, but with swords!

@MUDse.7623 said:

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:

@Solori.6025 said:Ankle Shots: This trait now grants a baseline 5% damage to crippled enemies and an additional 5% damage if the thief is wielding a pistol. The chance to cripple a foe upon landing a critical hit with a pistol is now 100%, and the tooltip regarding this trait's chance to critically hit has been removed.Dagger Training: This trait no longer grants an additional 5% damage when wielding a dagger. Instead, it now grants a baseline power of 80 with an additional 80 granted if the thief is wielding a dagger.Silent Scope: This trait no longer grants an additional 20% chance to critically hit with kneeling rifle skills and Death's Judgment. It now grants up to 120 precision regardless of the weapon the thief wields, and an additional 120 precision while wielding a rifle.

lol, yeah that's true, can't have both. But I always want scope with my sword. :D