A week on after "changes" thief sucks in wvw

[Arheundel.6451]

@alain.1659 said:Let me introduce you to online combat player mentality. People hate range, because being kited makes them feel annoyed and helpless. Instead of adapting, as they hate disrupting their min maxing builds, thry complain.

People hate assassins. They feel powerless against them. They do not care how well the assassin prepared, what is his skill level and build etc. They hust complain.

Dear Anet devs, may they be forced to play their own game, found a quick solution. Projectile hate for ranged (except rev but class is meh now so only thing it has is CoR dmg) and making thief a complete joke for assassinations.

Is thief powerful? Hell yes. I feel safe when I play my thief. Is thief annoying? Hell yes. I can dodge and shadowstep/inf arrow all day and annoy the hell out of anyone except thieves. But does thief satisfy its player base? Dont think so. A class that used to be really good at assassination became a hyperactive acrobat with great dance moves.But it is not limited to thief sadly. Many professions lost their core archetype after HoT.

Just received a 12k malicious backstab out of thin air..maybe you're not that good with thief as you think to be

[alain.1659]

@Arheundel.6451 said:Just received a 12k malicious backstab out of thin air..maybe you're not that good with thief as you think to be

Sadly what you said is not really related to what I wrote. I do not know what you blindly try to attack but it is not related to me. I wrote that thief is powerful yet it fails to satisfy the player base due to the failed archetype representation. So please try to read and understand. I will take this as a mistake due to an accumulated anger towards wvw balance.

[Jugglemonkey.8741]

@Arheundel.6451 said:

@Jugglemonkey.8741 said:Lol, thread necro much.

Thief has some stuff that still works, mainly gank builds. The thing I'd ask non thief players to think about is why do you not see tank thieves, healing thieves, etc?

They're simply not viable, that's why. We have one niche; high damage with high mobility or stealth in order to +1 or gank, and in order to achieve that damage, we have to be glass (yes, marauder is still glass when you start with 12k health, have no blocks or protection outside of one skill/trait each that can't be taken together, and when every class can pull off 20k combos should they wish).

The only other niche we used to have was condi, but with the amount of cleanse on some classes these days plus antitoxin rune and cleansing sigil that's now an exercise in futility. So when our niche gets nerfed either directly or indirectly, it disproportionately affects the class as there is no effective way to play thief other than than that one niche. Other classes can swap roles easily, we can't.

So yeah, thief does still do what it does better than most. We're just seeing other classes get damage and mobility comparable to thief on top of their usual advantages and wondering what the trade-off is supposed to be, and if there isn't one, why are thieves forced into a niche as a trade-off for what we do? As Turk said, a lot of us would happily give up the stealth, but how would you feel if we had higher health plus access to blocks and protection to compensate?

It would be paradise...imagine a world where you as thief can't stealth reset when you kitten up....and people can chase you down now..no more stealth and run away...

PLEASE PLEASE anet remove stealth from thieves and give them whatever they wish....

just remove the bloody stealth uptime

...I wonder how many would still play thief without stealth

I used to main S/P both in vanilla and HoT, no stealth outside blasting smoke fields, and my condi builds tended to be stealthless DD builds, so I'd happily play without stealth if the change were made tomorrow and if DE didn't require some stealth access to make malice work. If anything, people tend to get more salty when I kill them without stealthing than they do with it, probably because they don't have that excuse for losing anymore. As far as a world where thieves can't reset when they mess up is concerned, I'll tell you what; I'll play stealthless, you play without passives and invulns, and we'll see who lives longer :)

People also seem to conveniently forget that the devs made a community response thread shortly before HoT for improvements to thief, and the majority of the ideas put forward to reduce thief's dependance on stealth ended up being part of revenant. ANet clearly want thief to be the stealth class, and as things stand now, the majority of thief builds that don't utilise stealth are severely underpowered; firstly as thief relies on it to survive as a defensive mechanic, and secondly because the biggest advantage a thief has is in it's initial attack, something that mounts negate entirely. I mean, core S/D is only relevant since PoF because boons are OP and the combo of boonsteal and unblockable is one of the only ways to deal with firebrands in teamfights. Take the boonsteal away from S/D and it's utterly irrelevant in today's meta, just like it was for most of HoT when it only had half the boonsteal and the first strike was blockable.

If you're complaining about someone opening a fight from stealth giving them an unfair advantage then you're missing the entire point of an ambush; you shouldn't be able to shrug off an attack you didn't see coming regardless of which class managed to catch you out. Thief has the best ambush potential, but also one of the weakest presences in a teamfight, there's a tradeoff. Sure, I get that you find it annoying to fight, but since mounts are a thing you have absolutely no reason to complain imo as the mount health soaks up the initial attack from stealth, and you can avoid any fight you see coming. Not trying to be blunt, just trying to show you things from the other side of the fence here.

[Jugglemonkey.8741]

@DemonSeed.3528 said:

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@DemonSeed.3528 said:

@Dawdler.8521 said:Funny thing, I saw an entirerly new type of thief today: DE rifle condi.

Yeah you read that right, rifle and condi. Seemed completely immortal as a roamer, like 90% uptime on stealth, always popped condis at range that locked you down, then vanished again. Sure you could knock 20-40% of hp off when you saw him, then he just stealthed and came back with 100% hp, every time. Half the time spent "fighting" him you suddenly just had condis on you that he applied while in stealth.

TL;DR the cheese is still alive and well, situation normal.

This has actually existed since pof came about, people only flocked back to it after changes to deadly arts and shadow arts made more lucrative.US servers or something?

I've literally never seen such build on any EU tier, not even when when PoF was fresh and everyone was running DE - they where all power rifle builds. Any condi build was running other weaponry, mostly of the dump-6+-condis-in-one-trap-burst type. This thief only used the rifle and barely anything else. I suspect he even used double rifle, lol.

Yeah it was used both na and eu, but of course it was not as prevalent as stealth de. It had a resurgence when World of enders made a vid on it, then it went away, and made one more return with a long void, and now it's back again. It wasn't used much because it was niche immob spam and poison etc. When pof came out I made condi and hybrid variants but I prefer hybrid one for rifle. Condi can still work as you are offloading most of it not from the rifle itself but from marked/stolen skill/util

Yeah, I messed around with that one too, it felt weak outside of griefing soulbeasts that don't bother with cleanse. The DA changes aren't all that much to worry about concerning it, give it a month and odds are you won't see it again.

[DemonSeed.3528]

@Jugglemonkey.8741 said:

@DemonSeed.3528 said:

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@DemonSeed.3528 said:

@Dawdler.8521 said:Funny thing, I saw an entirerly new type of thief today: DE rifle condi.

Yeah you read that right, rifle and condi. Seemed completely immortal as a roamer, like 90% uptime on stealth, always popped condis at range that locked you down, then vanished again. Sure you could knock 20-40% of hp off when you saw him, then he just stealthed and came back with 100% hp, every time. Half the time spent "fighting" him you suddenly just had condis on you that he applied while in stealth.

TL;DR the cheese is still alive and well, situation normal.

This has actually existed since pof came about, people only flocked back to it after changes to deadly arts and shadow arts made more lucrative.US servers or something?

I've literally never seen such build on any EU tier, not even when when PoF was fresh and everyone was running DE - they where all power rifle builds. Any condi build was running other weaponry, mostly of the dump-6+-condis-in-one-trap-burst type. This thief only used the rifle and barely anything else. I suspect he even used double rifle, lol.

Yeah it was used both na and eu, but of course it was not as prevalent as stealth de. It had a resurgence when World of enders made a vid on it, then it went away, and made one more return with a long void, and now it's back again. It wasn't used much because it was niche immob spam and poison etc. When pof came out I made condi and hybrid variants but I prefer hybrid one for rifle. Condi can still work as you are offloading most of it not from the rifle itself but from marked/stolen skill/util

Yeah, I messed around with that one too, it felt weak outside of griefing soulbeasts that don't bother with cleanse. The DA changes aren't all that much to worry about concerning it, give it a month and odds are you won't see it again.

You're right, it isn't particularly great but you have to mostly find your quarry by poking with mark all the time. When you finally find the right one that does not know how to cleanse, you can eventually drop them but it's harder without some additional damage coming from elsewhere. Other than that, you will get out cleansed, but people panic from the immob and binding shadows (if used - I prefer mercy). These builds only rock up once in a while, stay for a few weeks and then disappear longer.

[Kovu.7560]

@Jugglemonkey.8741 said:

@Arheundel.6451 said:

@Jugglemonkey.8741 said:Lol, thread necro much.

Thief has some stuff that still works, mainly gank builds. The thing I'd ask non thief players to think about is why do you not see tank thieves, healing thieves, etc?

They're simply not viable, that's why. We have one niche; high damage with high mobility or stealth in order to +1 or gank, and in order to achieve that damage, we have to be glass (yes, marauder is still glass when you start with 12k health, have no blocks or protection outside of one skill/trait each that can't be taken together, and when every class can pull off 20k combos should they wish).

The only other niche we used to have was condi, but with the amount of cleanse on some classes these days plus antitoxin rune and cleansing sigil that's now an exercise in futility. So when our niche gets nerfed either directly or indirectly, it disproportionately affects the class as there is no effective way to play thief other than than that one niche. Other classes can swap roles easily, we can't.

So yeah, thief does still do what it does better than most. We're just seeing other classes get damage and mobility comparable to thief on top of their usual advantages and wondering what the trade-off is supposed to be, and if there isn't one, why are thieves forced into a niche as a trade-off for what we do? As Turk said, a lot of us would happily give up the stealth, but how would you feel if we had higher health plus access to blocks and protection to compensate?

It would be paradise...imagine a world where you as thief can't stealth reset when you kitten up....and people can chase you down now..no more stealth and run away...

PLEASE PLEASE anet remove stealth from thieves and give them whatever they wish....

just remove the bloody stealth uptime

...I wonder how many would still play thief without stealth

I used to main S/P both in vanilla and HoT, no stealth outside blasting smoke fields, and my condi builds tended to be stealthless DD builds, so I'd happily play without stealth if the change were made tomorrow and if DE didn't require some stealth access to make malice work. If anything, people tend to get more salty when I kill them without stealthing than they do with it, probably because they don't have that excuse for losing anymore. As far as a world where thieves can't reset when they mess up is concerned, I'll tell you what; I'll play stealthless, you play without passives and invulns, and we'll see who lives longer :)

People also seem to conveniently forget that the devs made a community response thread shortly before HoT for improvements to thief, and the majority of the ideas put forward to reduce thief's dependance on stealth ended up being part of revenant. ANet clearly want thief to be the stealth class, and as things stand now, the majority of thief builds that don't utilise stealth are severely underpowered; firstly as thief relies on it to survive as a defensive mechanic, and secondly because the biggest advantage a thief has is in it's initial attack, something that mounts negate entirely. I mean, core S/D is only relevant since PoF because boons are OP and the combo of boonsteal and unblockable is one of the only ways to deal with firebrands in teamfights. Take the boonsteal away from S/D and it's utterly irrelevant in today's meta, just like it was for most of HoT when it only had half the boonsteal and the first strike was blockable.

If you're complaining about someone opening a fight from stealth giving them an unfair advantage then you're missing the entire point of an ambush; you shouldn't be able to shrug off an attack you didn't see coming regardless of which class managed to catch you out. Thief has the best ambush potential, but also one of the weakest presences in a teamfight, there's a tradeoff. Sure, I get that you find it annoying to fight, but since mounts are a thing you have absolutely no reason to complain imo as the mount health soaks up the initial attack from stealth, and you can avoid any fight you see coming. Not trying to be blunt, just trying to show you things from the other side of the fence here.

Well said.

~ Kovu

[googel.3278]

Just keep running away and out of combat, I don't think Anet has changed that. Better than other classes in escaping fights.

[Safandula.8723]

im running drd build - Tr/Sa/Drd (312/232/213) d/p + staff. marauders with some soldiers for toughnessBasicly u can perma stealth, to disengage + u got stealth on withdraw, which makes this build rly safe. u get -33 % of received dmg so if u manage to get in stealth frequently (u regain health as well while stealthed) u got quite a good sustain. both dmg on d/p and staff are kinda ok. i experiment with runes but inflitration runes looks decent.s/d condi daredevil looks fine to mei find d/p dash daredevil trash(or mby i just suck at it) - its dmg is crap - it rly needs buff imoacro double staff daredevil with energy + cleansing sigils is perma evade fiesta.s/d core is decent as always

tldrimo thief is not that bad as some may claim, but could definietly get some buffs here and than - buff d/p set, and make prepardness baseline

[Vieux P.1238]

Git gud & dodge it

[XenesisII.1540]

So which group are you stating that to? the I can't dodge 21k backstabs from stealth? or the we only have 13k hp get and no defenses and lose 1/3 chunk health on one hit?

[Kageseigi.2150]

"Just received a 12k malicious backstab out of thin air"

"I can't dodge 21k backstabs from stealth?"

I'm assuming that these are opening strikes (surprise ambush).If so, can anyone list the circumstances where these numbers can happen? Builds, stats, boons, conditions, etc. on both Thief and target?

If they are not opening strikes, then perhaps it's more of a L2P issue than at first glance?

[KeyOrion.9506]

Deadeyes still doing pretty good in kicking my butt with only two shots. If that doesn't tell you that going glass cannon doesn't help, I don't know what does.