Your problems with Thief?

For fun, I'm writing up a detailed "report" on problems I have with Thief and how I personally would address them. My current problem however is that because of my ping I have little recent experience with PvP and WvW gameplay and would like outsider opinions on what they would change, improve or remove.

examples;

• Do weapons not feel like they should when you think of how a thief would play?
• Are play-styles you associate with Thief not being addressed?
• Not enough variety?

This kind of stuff. Thanks in advanced.

Here's a few

-Poorly thought out nerfs that negatively effect more aspects of the class than what's supposedly being addressed.-Every effective skill or playstyle being nerfed eventually due to nerf crys do to class design as a whole.-every skill or attack feels like ur hitting with a wet noodle against the crazy sustain creep in the game all the while you can get 2 shot by any class any skill.-only high burst are designed as one trick back stabs etc.-have to use trickery in every build or run out of ini very fast and can use 0 weapon skills.There just a few. List would be too big lol

Thief's playstyles in pvp are progressively being reduced to rely heavily on certain tools. Anet usually nerfs the tools that thieves mostly flock to. But it doesn't seem like they understand that a thief's viable options tend to be greatly limited by their doings, and other professions built in functionality. Dagger/Pistol was often selected because it offered a good deal of bang per buck. Thief's damage doesn't come from their skills as they can't afford to rotate them like other classes for bursts. D/Ps was dropped like a hot potato due to the Auto Attack nerf making the weapon nearly unmanageable in PvP unless you can get a repeated backstabs..

Thief in launch revolved a lot around the idea of pressuring your enemies. Your Mobility, and stickyness made you difficult to fight. Your damage and ability to interrupt, and evade attacks made you incredibly dangerous in 1 on 1s just as they had been advertised. But the consequences were that you were incredibly vulnerable to fuck ups. You had the bare minimum to keep yourself alive. And stealth which is supposed to protect you from channeled attacks, help you escape bursts, or reposition safely. Years later, other classes have so much sustains, self buffs, and other do-dads. But thief has yet to have been updated to help them deal. Rather, it looks like ANET intends for them to stay as a class that can no longer 1v1 safely. Which unfortunately bleeds into any other plans they have for them.

The introduction of Raids also greatly changed how classes were balanced. This is probably the most infuriating for me. As the current implementation of Raids do not feel like guild wars to me. A profession's performance in Raids now seems to hold a great factor in how the game is balanced. If Raids were designed to be different from stacking up in some bosses face, we might see better balancing for thief.

Utilities. Thief's utilities are pretty lack luster. There's only a few that are used frequently due to how general purpose they are. But the rest are underused for good reasons, and there has been no real attempts at making them better. Caltrops are slow to use, and applies cripple which is very easy for someone to shake off these days. Smoke Screen's uses are pretty limited, it's really only good for projectile destruction. Unless you are running a DD with Bounding Dodger (Which the way DD has been dumpstered... unlikely). Scorpion Wire is buggy. And most of thief's traps are absolutely worthless for more than the area they cover.

Initiative and Skills. Initiative feels like it has been balanced as if thief will always be taking Trickery. Which makes the dependency for Trickery even worse and a much bigger problem. For the past couple of years, Thief players have been asking for a few things from trickery to be made baseline. Or for a complete overhaul on the initiative system. As it stands, Initiative recharges way too slowly for you to go without the trait line. And a lot of skills are not very efficient in their initiative costs. For instance... Headshot from Pistol offhand is a key defensive skill that is useful for dueling. While the damage is low, the most important part of it is the split second daze which allows us to interrupt attacks. Not only is the skill slow, but it costs 4 initiative to use. Using it once, to force an opening and punish someone severely hampers what you can do. So... it's used for healing skills... except it's still not even worth it for that. Black powder is another huge offender. An insane initiative cost to drop a smoke field at your feet. The smoke skill is very useful... to combo with other things. but the high cost means it will deplete nearly HALF of your availiable initiative pool.

Initiative Regain: what methods you have to regain initiative is pretty damn pitiful. You have the 1 point on dodge with a cool down. You have the 1 point every 10 seconds from a signet(worthless). And a few other with stingy allotments. If thief is supposed to be high risk, high reward then make it reflect that. Reward the theif for doing high skilled plays so he can actually punish someone.

1. Non-deadeye backstabs hit like wet noodle. Whole d/p has no dmg at all if u look at survi it has.
2. 12 base initiative is useless. Make preparedness baseline (new mantra). Thief without trickery is a meme Tbh, and prolly we need some traitline overhaul.
3. Daredevil was meant to be Duelist, but we just don't have any way to survive in some situations. It's to easy to get 1 shoted. And I don't feel this class can be enough rewarding for the risk (but it may be l2p issue, idk)

To sum up- high risk, low reward. To win with any other class u need to greatly outskill him

Edit: some time ago I made backstab in pvp lobby on boonbeasts. It hit for 350.

thief/10teefs

I kinda like how thief "feels" playing, you have to work for damage and use tricks/combos to achieve something.Imo the problem is that such things are not the Meta, seemingly you achieve some great damage with little to no interaction on other metabuilds.But that's more that i'd prefer other proffesions had clearer skill ceiling increased.That might be beyond the point tho, so trying to not look at what other classes do what I have "problems" with on thiefs.

• Stealth attacks 1sec CD; afaik its a technical limitations as thiefs could remove aegis by spamming..(why doesnt dmg break stealth even if absorb/evade/block is beyond me)
• HookStrike tooltip says "enemies" and hits a singletarget, also its 3/4 s casttime ..
• initiative making weaponsets stale and making Shortbow feel mandatory as secondary; you spend ini on one set and then shortbow to disengage/kite.
• Lack of counterplay to long stealths; One thing I like about blackpowder is that if used in stealth it still is visible to enemy sorta hinting where you are. Id kinda like it if every 3 seconds spent in stealth you drop a small darkaura field visible to everyone.. can then "track " people who longstealth, and anticipate the next aura drop to be ready with cc to hit it.

The way they designed dual wielding, rn it's either hit or miss. Dual wielding should have changed the weapon sets depending on what they need and not the stupid "3 is a dual skill and everything else is weapon dependent" formula. P/P for example is completely dysfunctional because of it. Unload should have been the cost free baseline skill at 1 but nope, thanks to how dual wielding works you can either attack which means you don't have enough initiative for your utility skills or you can use your utility skills which means you don't have enough initiative to attack. Mix that with the fact that these skills also suffer heavily from synergy issues and it shouldn't be hard to see what the problems with the dual wielding system are.

There of course are more problems I have with the profession but this is by far my main issue, some weapon sets depending on the synergy of the skills like with the aforementioned P/P should be completely redesigned if necessary.

to me the issue seems that thief has alot of annoying mechanics that anet doesn't know how to make not annoying so they just nerfed him instead.

because annoying builds aren't a problem if they're ineffective.

My biggest complaint right now is the lack of good zerg options in WvW. The only unique buffs that thief brings is Venoms. The problem is that most of the venoms are pretty lackluster:

Spider Venom: This is just condi damage. It scales with teammates, but counter-scales with enemy teammates, so in a zerg this skill is a pittance. Even on condi builds.Skale Venom: This is just a weaker Spider Venom. Torment has no synergy with thieves, and a few stacks of vulnerability spread about an enemy zerg is, again, a pittance.Ice Drake Venom: This is objectively the worst venom. The chill doesn't last long enough to mean anything, and it has no versatility outside of chill.Devourer Venom: This skill has some group utility, since throwing out waves of immobilize can actually mean something while in battleship mode. However, this skill is also woefully inferior to another one, making it almost completely redundant.Basilisk Venom. This is an "elite" skill only on technicality. That unblockable stun on a 40 second cooldown actually means something.Skelk Venom: The heal skill. On its own this is pretty good, giving all of the attacking teammates a 6k heal every 30 seconds. Not too bad. The problem, however, is that it can't compete with the personal survivability of other thief heal skills. The defensive abilities of Withdraw and Hide in Shadows are very necessary for thief survival, and the thief can't sacrifice those for a group heal.

The only trait that venoms get has been nerfed many times. It is oddly placed in Shadow Arts and does... almost nothing. An extra 400 damage on strike and 300 heal is accomplishes very little. The recharge reduction is nice, but largely trivial unless an engagement lasts longer than 40 seconds. So, overall the venoms have no utility, cannot be built around, and only one of them is realistically usable. Venoms could be so much more if they did so much more, but currently they do very little. The bizarre part is that this skill used to be much stronger, giving might to teammates on use. That was removed for... some reason, and replaced with absolutely nothing. Thieves weren't great on boons to begin with, and aside from venoms the thief offers almost no direct group support.

I must put emphases on the anti-scaling of venoms. Normally (i.e. every other skill in the game), the efficiency of a skill scales with how many targets there are. I.E. the sword cleaves for 3, so if you have more than one enemy, the sword does twice as much damage overall. Likewise, an invulnerability skill prevents more damage the more enemies you're fighting. But venoms are... the opposite. Since they apply their condition on hit instead of on attack, it means that as you face more enemies, the skills get worse. Likewise, the venoms are balanced assuming you have multiple teammates with you. Without having 4 other players to spread the venom, the effectiveness of this skill decreases exponentially. This means that venoms only reach their peak performance when you outnumber a single target 5:1, and venoms are at their worst when YOU are outnumbered. I.E. when you need them the most, venoms aren't there for you.

There's also a lack of good range options. The rifle is good at ganking an unsuspecting player, but when it comes to assaults, siege, or battleship combat, then it doesn't work. The shortbow has too short a range, and the cluster bomb takes way too long to use. Worse yet, the cluster bomb's second skill means that you can't fire consecutive cluster bombs, making it cumbersome and terrible. Every other skill on the shortbow is just utility. The pistol is just a shorter range rifle, making it strictly worse.

I can understand giving the thief a lack of boons and team buffs. It's not their role. The other issue is that thieves are pretty bad at debuffing and control, too. Well, aside from basilisk venom. Their boon stealing abilities are all melee and limited to a very select (and very remote) set of skills. This makes them terrible at boon stripping for teammates. Their traps only affect a very small area, letting them hit only a single target. Thieves can only afflict enemies with blind and weakness at melee range, and not a significant enough amount to contribute to group play. Most of the other skills (deception, trick, cantrip, physical) are either for personal survival, or they only affect one target.

There's a conflict of interest in these skills, however, since Thief's survival is heavily dependent on their utility skills. All of the other classes have their skills merged, so that they can do their chosen role, damage, and survive with minimal skill input. Thief skills are much more inflexible. There's no coherent build that a thief could make where they survive, debuff/control groups of enemies, and do damage all at the same time. Because of this, the thief's wvw role is relegated to havoc and dueling.

---

I have misgivings with condi thief in general. The ramp-up is terrible. It requires enemies to sit still in a single spot. The death blossoms and DD dodges will fling me into dangerous positions, the venoms have anti-scaling, and every single utility slot must be dedicated toward condi damage. The condi thief has slow DPS and no defenses. This makes condi thief a gigantic pain in the butt to play.

Also, I dislike larcenous strike. It takes way too much time, and should be integrated into flanking strike. Boon steal and all.

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Some good points on venom scaling.

I disagree that Pistol is a strictly worse rifle. Rifle has better damage at superior range but Pistol has different utility depending on the offhand. Rifle doesn’t have an interrupt and offhand Dagger offers a direct stealth skill in melee range. Rifle has a few more boons but Pistol’s Sneak Attack has more projectiles to combo with a field (with 100% chance). I do think some Pistol skills should get a damage buff.

I don’t find that condi thief has slow DPS (although D/D isn’t my preferred condi weapon). I find it has its burst neutered by overabundant cleanse. This isn’t specific to thief though.

My main issue is the lack of reliable option to make the thief able to take a beating. Somehow it cruelly lack a reliable access to protection and/or way to increase it's toughness. I know that there is a bunch of damage reduction traits but they feel unreliable.

Otherwise:

• "Bursty" stealth attacks aren't good design. It's fun to use but unfun to play against and I got the feeling that the whole profession's damage is nerfed to take into account the potential burst of these stealth attacks. Dagger and riffle stealth attacks should be reworked to give an advantage which isn't "burst". I believe that a daze and maybe some vuln stacks, even with medium to low damage, would create an healthier gameplay.
• The exhaustion thing need to go. Replace it by weakness if needed, but this debuff that cannot be cleansed should not even exist in this game.
• The shape of the traps make them difficult to use in combat unlike all other traps in this game.
• The ambush trap is not a bad idea in itself but the thief it summon is neither strong enough nor resilient enough to justify a 35 second CD. Reduce base CD to 25 seconds in order to allow a gameplay where you sustain the thief.

@"Blood Red Arachnid.2493" said:My biggest complaint right now is the lack of good zerg options in WvW. The only unique buffs that thief brings is Venoms. The problem is that most of the venoms are pretty lackluster:

Spider Venom: This is just condi damage. It scales with teammates, but counter-scales with enemy teammates, so in a zerg this skill is a pittance. Even on condi builds.Skale Venom: This is just a weaker Spider Venom. Torment has no synergy with thieves, and a few stacks of vulnerability spread about an enemy zerg is, again, a pittance.Ice Drake Venom: This is objectively the worst venom. The chill doesn't last long enough to mean anything, and it has no versatility outside of chill.Devourer Venom: This skill has some group utility, since throwing out waves of immobilize can actually mean something while in battleship mode. However, this skill is also woefully inferior to another one, making it almost completely redundant.Basilisk Venom. This is an "elite" skill only on technicality. That unblockable stun on a 40 second cooldown actually means something.Skelk Venom: The heal skill. On its own this is pretty good, giving all of the attacking teammates a 6k heal every 30 seconds. Not too bad. The problem, however, is that it can't compete with the personal survivability of other thief heal skills. The defensive abilities of Withdraw and Hide in Shadows are very necessary for thief survival, and the thief can't sacrifice those for a group heal.

The only trait that venoms get has been nerfed many times. It is oddly placed in Shadow Arts and does... almost nothing. An extra 400 damage on strike and 300 heal is accomplishes very little. The recharge reduction is nice, but largely trivial unless an engagement lasts longer than 40 seconds. So, overall the venoms have no utility, cannot be built around, and only one of them is realistically usable. Venoms could be so much more if they did so much more, but currently they do very little. The bizarre part is that this skill used to be much stronger, giving might to teammates on use. That was removed for... some reason, and replaced with absolutely nothing. Thieves weren't great on boons to begin with, and aside from venoms the thief offers almost no direct group support.

I must put emphases on the anti-scaling of venoms. Normally (i.e. every other skill in the game), the efficiency of a skill scales with how many targets there are. I.E. the sword cleaves for 3, so if you have more than one enemy, the sword does twice as much damage overall. Likewise, an invulnerability skill prevents more damage the more enemies you're fighting. But venoms are... the opposite. Since they apply their condition on hit instead of on attack, it means that as you face more enemies, the skills get worse. Likewise, the venoms are balanced assuming you have multiple teammates with you. Without having 4 other players to spread the venom, the effectiveness of this skill decreases exponentially. This means that venoms only reach their peak performance when you outnumber a single target 5:1, and venoms are at their worst when YOU are outnumbered. I.E. when you need them the most, venoms aren't there for you.

There's also a lack of good range options. The rifle is good at ganking an unsuspecting player, but when it comes to assaults, siege, or battleship combat, then it doesn't work. The shortbow has too short a range, and the cluster bomb takes way too long to use. Worse yet, the cluster bomb's second skill means that you can't fire consecutive cluster bombs, making it cumbersome and terrible. Every other skill on the shortbow is just utility. The pistol is just a shorter range rifle, making it strictly worse.

I can understand giving the thief a lack of boons and team buffs. It's not their role. The other issue is that thieves are pretty bad at debuffing and control, too. Well, aside from basilisk venom. Their boon stealing abilities are all melee and limited to a very select (and very remote) set of skills. This makes them terrible at boon stripping for teammates. Their traps only affect a very small area, letting them hit only a single target. Thieves can only afflict enemies with blind and weakness at melee range, and not a significant enough amount to contribute to group play. Most of the other skills (deception, trick, cantrip, physical) are either for personal survival, or they only affect one target.

There's a conflict of interest in these skills, however, since Thief's survival is heavily dependent on their utility skills. All of the other classes have their skills merged, so that they can do their chosen role, damage, and survive with minimal skill input. Thief skills are much more inflexible. There's no coherent build that a thief could make where they survive, debuff/control groups of enemies, and do damage all at the same time. Because of this, the thief's wvw role is relegated to havoc and dueling.

---

I have misgivings with condi thief in general. The ramp-up is terrible. It requires enemies to sit still in a single spot. The death blossoms and DD dodges will fling me into dangerous positions, the venoms have anti-scaling, and every single utility slot must be dedicated toward condi damage. The condi thief has slow DPS and no defenses. This makes condi thief a gigantic pain in the butt to play.

Also, I dislike larcenous strike. It takes way too much time, and should be integrated into flanking strike. Boon steal and all.

While agreeing with many of your points I do NOT think Torment has no synergy with thief. I find it synergizes better then poison in p/d wherein I rely on poison more for the heal inhibit and the torment does as much or more damage. Nor do I think the p/d set needs a condition put in very utility slot. In fact I have only one slot dedicated to that in P/d. What I use the torment for is to punish the enemy in the chase after I port away with shadowstrike. That said in a d/d build it not as useful.

I do agree venoms can use some sort of rework. The Cooldowns overall to high and the point you make on "on strike" and how they fail against multiple enemies is a good one.

@"derd.6413" said:to me the issue seems that thief has alot of annoying mechanics that anet doesn't know how to make not annoying so they just nerfed him instead.

because annoying builds aren't a problem if they're ineffective.

I also think a big problem (not even class or build specific) is that people will tend to call anything that manages to kill them as "annoying" or "trashy". As an experiment I even went around (not just thief but other classes) using the most randomised build traits/runes/sigils/stats, sometimes going with single wep instead of dual, testing just with a mainhand or an offhand and not even a secondary weapon and I only went after above gold people in WvW and it's surprising that I actually got more pm than when I use a 'normal' build. I think what this proves in general that people's knowledge of builds is generally lacking and the diversity of skillful players or people that want to improve are on the decline.I don't know how they can make thief less 'annoying', because people just don't want to be killed in general. I don't think there is a thin line between making it fun for both parties (for the masses I mean - personally I actually liked fighting against perma stealth, trapper, etc as it provided me a challenge). They will probably leave thief to be indefinitely neutered or let it have awful mechanics that turn everyone bald.

They kill a thief 50 times no problemA Thief kills them twice,now because the way thief killed them they hate thief and post on forums how OP they are.Seems about right.

@DemonSeed.3528 said:

@"derd.6413" said:to me the issue seems that thief has alot of annoying mechanics that anet doesn't know how to make not annoying so they just nerfed him instead.

because annoying builds aren't a problem if they're ineffective.

i agree with what you say but i find that (especially when talking about thief) it's a bit of both and also ppl tend to complain about the "wrong thing"

@saerni.2584 said:@Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Some good points on venom scaling.

I disagree that Pistol is a strictly worse rifle. Rifle has better damage at superior range but Pistol has different utility depending on the offhand. Rifle doesn’t have an interrupt and offhand Dagger offers a direct stealth skill in melee range. Rifle has a few more boons but Pistol’s Sneak Attack has more projectiles to combo with a field (with 100% chance). I do think some Pistol skills should get a damage buff.

I don’t find that condi thief has slow DPS (although D/D isn’t my preferred condi weapon). I find it has its burst neutered by overabundant cleanse. This isn’t specific to thief though.

I mean as a zerg weapon. In a duel, yes the pistol has quite the utility. But in large scale fights, plinking away at one person within 900 range doesn't cut it.

@"babazhook.6805" said:

While agreeing with many of your points I do NOT think Torment has no synergy with thief. I find it synergizes better then poison in p/d wherein I rely on poison more for the heal inhibit and the torment does as much or more damage. Nor do I think the p/d set needs a condition put in very utility slot. In fact I have only one slot dedicated to that in P/d. What I use the torment for is to punish the enemy in the chase after I port away with shadowstrike. That said in a d/d build it not as useful.

I do agree venoms can use some sort of rework. The Cooldowns overall to high and the point you make on "on strike" and how they fail against multiple enemies is a good one.

The thief has many traits which either give poison or enhance poison damage. The thief also has a lot of skills that inflict a lot of long-term bleeds. This make building for bleed/poison really easy to do. Slap on runes of the afflicted or runes of the krait and you're good to go. Torment, however, is hidden away on on just a few traits/skills, and has no buffing or synergy with traits.

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

@saerni.2584 said:@Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Some good points on venom scaling.

I disagree that Pistol is a strictly worse rifle. Rifle has better damage at superior range but Pistol has different utility depending on the offhand. Rifle doesn’t have an interrupt and offhand Dagger offers a direct stealth skill in melee range. Rifle has a few more boons but Pistol’s Sneak Attack has more projectiles to combo with a field (with 100% chance). I do think some Pistol skills should get a damage buff.

I don’t find that condi thief has slow DPS (although D/D isn’t my preferred condi weapon). I find it has its burst neutered by overabundant cleanse. This isn’t specific to thief though.

@"babazhook.6805" said:

While agreeing with many of your points I do NOT think Torment has no synergy with thief. I find it synergizes better then poison in p/d wherein I rely on poison more for the heal inhibit and the torment does as much or more damage. Nor do I think the p/d set needs a condition put in very utility slot. In fact I have only one slot dedicated to that in P/d. What I use the torment for is to punish the enemy in the chase after I port away with shadowstrike. That said in a d/d build it not as useful.

I do agree venoms can use some sort of rework. The Cooldowns overall to high and the point you make on "on strike" and how they fail against multiple enemies is a good one.

Torment has synergy more so with DE through Malicious Sneak Attack. Torment is also pretty solidly supported through Shadowstrike and Dancing Dagger.

Poison has bonuses in Deadly Arts but the bonus has to be comparatively big because outside of Choking Gas there isn’t enough poison damage for consistent DPS.

If I was ranking our condi from best to worst I’d start with Bleed, followed by Torment, then poison and then confusion (no burning rank because it isn’t effectively available). Bleed is first because we can get it from a lot of sources including autos and evasive abilities like Death Blossom and Daredevil Lotus dodge. Torment also can come from various weapon attacks or Lotus dodge or utilities. Poison can come from steal and from Immobilize or Utilities but is generally on longer cooldowns. Confusion is limited to combo fields and steal if traited.

I’m not saying poison can’t spike. Poison can still be effective. But with cleanse being the way it is now you are better off with more frequent application rates, which especially includes torment and bleed.

@saerni.2584 said:

Torment has synergy more so with DE through Malicious Sneak Attack. Torment is also pretty solidly supported through Shadowstrike and Dancing Dagger.

Poison has bonuses in Deadly Arts but the bonus has to be comparatively big because outside of Choking Gas there isn’t enough poison damage for consistent DPS.

If I was ranking our condi from best to worst I’d start with Bleed, followed by Torment, then poison and then confusion (no burning rank because it isn’t effectively available). Bleed is first because we can get it from a lot of sources including autos and evasive abilities like Death Blossom and Daredevil Lotus dodge. Torment also can come from various weapon attacks or Lotus dodge or utilities. Poison can come from steal and from Immobilize or Utilities but is generally on longer cooldowns. Confusion is limited to combo fields and steal if traited.

I’m not saying poison can’t spike. Poison can still be effective. But with cleanse being the way it is now you are better off with more frequent application rates, which especially includes torment and bleed.

That's not support. That's just the obscure places where torment is located. The effectiveness of the ticking conditions (bleed, poison, torment, burn) is sort of irrelevant, since the damage can be adjusted by changing the number of stacks and the duration. There's a few ways to handle condition distribution on a class:

(1) Basically one. Ele and Guardian, for example, are all about burn. This makes the rune, sigil, and gear choices easy, because you can buff this condition to the nines. The weakness to cleanse is more about how frequently the condi is applied, and less about having covering conditions.(2) Every condition. Scourge and Renegade, for example, inflict every condition under the sun. The advantage to this is that it is hard to cleanse them all. The disadvantage, however, is that rune and sigil choices are limited to the mediocre nightmare/malice combo for damage. It's no good if all of your covering conditions fall off.

Sitting between these two doesn't give you the strengths of both. You get the weaknesses of both. You're hard to build for and easily cleansed, because a lot of cleanse skills hit 2 or 3 conditions at the same time. Unless you break the cleanse threshold, adding one or two additional conditions doesn't help anything.

However I digress: I just noticed something. Why the heck does Spider Venom inflict 4 seconds in PVE and 6 seconds in PVP?! What is the logic there?

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493

I’m talking about rates of reapplication. Poison is harder to reapply quickly in significant amounts. Bleed and torment are much lower reapplication rates so you can get up to 2-3k ticks relatively quickly after a cleanse. That is where condition pressure starts to matter so what I ranked the condi types the way I did.

I agree with the venoms being strange and unwieldy. It’s certainly something that could be looked at. The venoms biggest issue imo is that condi builds struggle in this cleanse environment and venoms are mostly used as pure offensive Utilities. So if it is cleansed or ignored (resistance) you use a valuable utility slot for no benefit.

I’d change them to have two components. On hit for X attacks then % chance on attacks for X time. This extends their useful life and makes using the utility not completely wasteful if they just cleanse once after your venom attacks run out.

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

@saerni.2584 said:

Torment has synergy more so with DE through Malicious Sneak Attack. Torment is also pretty solidly supported through Shadowstrike and Dancing Dagger.

Poison has bonuses in Deadly Arts but the bonus has to be comparatively big because outside of Choking Gas there isn’t enough poison damage for consistent DPS.

If I was ranking our condi from best to worst I’d start with Bleed, followed by Torment, then poison and then confusion (no burning rank because it isn’t effectively available). Bleed is first because we can get it from a lot of sources including autos and evasive abilities like Death Blossom and Daredevil Lotus dodge. Torment also can come from various weapon attacks or Lotus dodge or utilities. Poison can come from steal and from Immobilize or Utilities but is generally on longer cooldowns. Confusion is limited to combo fields and steal if traited.

I’m not saying poison can’t spike. Poison can still be effective. But with cleanse being the way it is now you are better off with more frequent application rates, which especially includes torment and bleed.

You have just described why Torment is mor effective than Poison in a thief build and why P/d tends to be more effective then d/d deathblossom. Outside dagger #1 with a singular attack in the attack chain , neither the P/D or the D/D set have poison applications inside the set without traiting for the same. Due to all of the cleanses the singular most important factor outside a burst of a number of conditions at once is rate of re-application of the same. Indeed the bursts success is predicated on a high re-application rate. Poison App tends to rely on usage of a venom and or the steal both of which are on high cooldowns whereas torment/bleed can be applied readily over and over again to help maintain pressure between bursts or force a cleanse when those stacks become too dangerous even before you apply burst.

I play both the deathblooms d/d thief and the P/d condition thief (I got 7 different thieves now all built different) and as a matter of course find i MUST trait a venom + one other source of Conditions in the d/d build (be it needle trap or impairing daggers) whereas I do not have to trait any of these in the P/d build simply because P/d has ready access to both Torment and bleed. P/D is in the DE line for payback, the lower cooldown on steal (more bursts) and the added torment and INI. D/D is in the Daredevil line as it just does not function as well in DE . D/D deathblossom is much more restrictive as to what you can do with sigils and utilities simply because in essence it has only one way to apply effective condition stacks from within the set.

@saerni.2584 said:@Blood Red Arachnid.2493

I’m talking about rates of reapplication. Poison is harder to reapply quickly in significant amounts. Bleed and torment are much lower reapplication rates so you can get up to 2-3k ticks relatively quickly after a cleanse. That is where condition pressure starts to matter so what I ranked the condi types the way I did.

I agree with the venoms being strange and unwieldy. It’s certainly something that could be looked at. The venoms biggest issue imo is that condi builds struggle in this cleanse environment and venoms are mostly used as pure offensive Utilities. So if it is cleansed or ignored (resistance) you use a valuable utility slot for no benefit.

I’d change them to have two components. On hit for X attacks then % chance on attacks for X time. This extends their useful life and makes using the utility not completely wasteful if they just cleanse once after your venom attacks run out.

If the torment ticks were changed to poison, then the reapplication would be easier. Look, anet isn't going to release a rune set that buffs poison, torment, and bleed at the same time. I'd rather have poison + utility conditions (vulnerability, weakness, cripple, blind, slow, chill, etc) then just have torment. That way, we'd have better DPS in PVE, better CC in PVE, and also we'd have better chances in PVP with all the added defenses.

@babazhook.6805 said:

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

@saerni.2584 said:

Torment has synergy more so with DE through Malicious Sneak Attack. Torment is also pretty solidly supported through Shadowstrike and Dancing Dagger.

Poison has bonuses in Deadly Arts but the bonus has to be comparatively big because outside of Choking Gas there isn’t enough poison damage for consistent DPS.

If I was ranking our condi from best to worst I’d start with Bleed, followed by Torment, then poison and then confusion (no burning rank because it isn’t effectively available). Bleed is first because we can get it from a lot of sources including autos and evasive abilities like Death Blossom and Daredevil Lotus dodge. Torment also can come from various weapon attacks or Lotus dodge or utilities. Poison can come from steal and from Immobilize or Utilities but is generally on longer cooldowns. Confusion is limited to combo fields and steal if traited.

I’m not saying poison can’t spike. Poison can still be effective. But with cleanse being the way it is now you are better off with more frequent application rates, which especially includes torment and bleed.

I have just described why torment isn't more effective than poison. Torment is just a funny looking bleed, and thieves don't apply a diverse enough set of conditions to brute force through cleansing. Your example is missing the point, because it is comparing the disparate application methods of two separate builds and blaming it on the type of condition applied. If you took every application of torment and replaced it with poison, then the application problem would be solved. I'd argue that it would be stronger,, because poison kills sustain alongside of doing damage.

My main issue with thief is that unload needs to have ricochet built into it.

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

@saerni.2584 said:@Blood Red Arachnid.2493

I’m talking about rates of reapplication. Poison is harder to reapply quickly in significant amounts. Bleed and torment are much lower reapplication rates so you can get up to 2-3k ticks relatively quickly after a cleanse. That is where condition pressure starts to matter so what I ranked the condi types the way I did.

I agree with the venoms being strange and unwieldy. It’s certainly something that could be looked at. The venoms biggest issue imo is that condi builds struggle in this cleanse environment and venoms are mostly used as pure offensive Utilities. So if it is cleansed or ignored (resistance) you use a valuable utility slot for no benefit.

I’d change them to have two components. On hit for X attacks then % chance on attacks for X time. This extends their useful life and makes using the utility not completely wasteful if they just cleanse once after your venom attacks run out.

@babazhook.6805 said:

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

@saerni.2584 said:

Torment has synergy more so with DE through Malicious Sneak Attack. Torment is also pretty solidly supported through Shadowstrike and Dancing Dagger.

Poison has bonuses in Deadly Arts but the bonus has to be comparatively big because outside of Choking Gas there isn’t enough poison damage for consistent DPS.

If I was ranking our condi from best to worst I’d start with Bleed, followed by Torment, then poison and then confusion (no burning rank because it isn’t effectively available). Bleed is first because we can get it from a lot of sources including autos and evasive abilities like Death Blossom and Daredevil Lotus dodge. Torment also can come from various weapon attacks or Lotus dodge or utilities. Poison can come from steal and from Immobilize or Utilities but is generally on longer cooldowns. Confusion is limited to combo fields and steal if traited.

I’m not saying poison can’t spike. Poison can still be effective. But with cleanse being the way it is now you are better off with more frequent application rates, which especially includes torment and bleed.

I think you are misunderstanding me and @babazhook.6805.

Yes, you could change all torment application to poison. But I don’t think that is going to happen. Also, torment adds to the diversity of conditions thief can use to inflict damage and prevent a full cleanse. We should celebrate having torment access and not complain.

You seem to be saying you want more poison application for thief. That could be through venoms or another mechanism. But I think you are underestimating the value of torment in the condi/hybrid thief kit. Torment does good damage and provides cover conditions with frequent reapplication rate.

Condi Thief would, IMO, actually lose a lot of viability if we lost torment on our weapons in exchange for poison.

@saerni.2584 said:

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

@saerni.2584 said:@Blood Red Arachnid.2493

I’m talking about rates of reapplication. Poison is harder to reapply quickly in significant amounts. Bleed and torment are much lower reapplication rates so you can get up to 2-3k ticks relatively quickly after a cleanse. That is where condition pressure starts to matter so what I ranked the condi types the way I did.

I agree with the venoms being strange and unwieldy. It’s certainly something that could be looked at. The venoms biggest issue imo is that condi builds struggle in this cleanse environment and venoms are mostly used as pure offensive Utilities. So if it is cleansed or ignored (resistance) you use a valuable utility slot for no benefit.

I’d change them to have two components. On hit for X attacks then % chance on attacks for X time. This extends their useful life and makes using the utility not completely wasteful if they just cleanse once after your venom attacks run out.

@babazhook.6805 said:

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

@saerni.2584 said:

Torment has synergy more so with DE through Malicious Sneak Attack. Torment is also pretty solidly supported through Shadowstrike and Dancing Dagger.

Poison has bonuses in Deadly Arts but the bonus has to be comparatively big because outside of Choking Gas there isn’t enough poison damage for consistent DPS.

If I was ranking our condi from best to worst I’d start with Bleed, followed by Torment, then poison and then confusion (no burning rank because it isn’t effectively available). Bleed is first because we can get it from a lot of sources including autos and evasive abilities like Death Blossom and Daredevil Lotus dodge. Torment also can come from various weapon attacks or Lotus dodge or utilities. Poison can come from steal and from Immobilize or Utilities but is generally on longer cooldowns. Confusion is limited to combo fields and steal if traited.

I’m not saying poison can’t spike. Poison can still be effective. But with cleanse being the way it is now you are better off with more frequent application rates, which especially includes torment and bleed.

I don't think it is going to happen either, but that won't stop me from complaining about it. I've seen condi firebrand do fine in WvW, and they only inflict a single condition. Look, what condi thief (and thief in general, I might add) needs isn't a covering condition that ticks for the same amount of damage. What they need is defense. No matter what, a squishy class is going to need to survive to run a condi build. A good way to do that is to add more disabling conditions, instead of diversifying damage types.

Opps, wrong thread.