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The Elephant in the balance room: How Cheese has evolved to hurt GW2 PvP more than balance.


Master Ketsu.4569

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@Fueki.4753 said:

@Kageseigi.2150 said:I'm not complaining. Just stating that Thieves are among the most vulnerable targets to Stealthed enemies. So we adapt and survive. It's part of the game... along with every other problematic function that causes Thieves grief.

How are Thieves more vulnerable than other professions to stealth instant kills?Even a Warrior with marauder Amulet and Wurm runes is down to 1/4 or less health when a medium-skilled thief decides to eat them from stealth.Stealth attacks deal way too much damage to ANY class and can NOT be anticipated. If it somehow was negated, it's pure, lucky coincidence.Stealth is straight-up anti-pvp.

They don't, just stuff like malice and assassins signet makes it feel like it. D/p daredevil use to max at around 5-7k

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@"Master Ketsu.4569" said:6. Win buttonsThis is when a skill is able to just do everything at once. A good example for this would be Mirage sword ambush: Dodge, Mobility, damage, CC, leap finisher. Counterplay and decision making means very little in the face of abilities that just do everything. Why think about counterplay when you can just press a button that does it all?There is plethora of clic to win in the top 5 metaclass and you choose mirage sword ambush who is kinda bugged, can be rupt and don't do damage as an example... (I change mirage ambush to real 4 in 1 skill like bullcharge when you want.), but yeah there is too much op skills.

-Stealth works in GW2 in such a way that seriously bugs out depending on latency and often desyncs animations for 1/2 a second after revealing. You can even precast a ton of skills while stealthed and they will all hit before your model even renders on other players screens. Anets current model of fixing this problem is to add revealed on cast to certain skills - while this is a good fix that should be added to more heavy hitters, a better way would be to just add better counters to stealth. There are a lot of underpowered abilities in the game that are due for a buff, and just adding "Reveals nearby enemies 600 range" to a few utilities for every class would go a long way.Stealth builds aren't even considered since holo PASSIVELY auto reveal.

@"JusticeRetroHunter.7684" said:Ya. People say this all the time then the counter complaint is : “but there’s no mirages in top 25”

It’s a terrible counter argument because not everyone is Sindrener. Cheese builds are designed to do one thing, which is to win an encounter with minimal effort or skill. Most of these cheese builds also happen to be unfun to play against and players lower than top 25 suffer.

You might be a player that has no problem with these cheese builds, but everyone else on your team does...so you end up losing a match because the enemy exploits their lack of counter play to the cheese. It’s not your fault but you’ll always be on the receiving end of the consequences.

Bunker DH traps were pretty cheese thing. long time ago during HOT. Players would just chain blocks, heals and damage negation while piling traps into a node to force people off of it...even if you won the fight you could not stand on the node, and the DH would win through node attrition...by constantly forcing you off node even if they are out on res pawn. It took close to a year before they did something about it and it plagued low tier games so long people started quitting. It was just the beginning of node cheese...followed by ventari knockback bunker, scourge condi aids followed by the current mirage aids.

Yeah, talking about cheese build they removed a third of mesmer gameplay ('clone death) beacause of "cheese" then they give cheese evade effects to everyone. But yeah no mirage in top 25 isn't an argument ofc.Bob the casual who came here with his "feeling"' argument is probably much better.

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@Fueki.4753 said:How are Thieves more vulnerable than other professions to stealth instant kills?Even a Warrior with marauder Amulet and Wurm runes is down to 1/4 or less health when a medium-skilled thief decides to eat them from stealth.Stealth attacks deal way too much damage to ANY class and can NOT be anticipated. If it somehow was negated, it's pure, lucky coincidence.

I think you answered your own question. Warriors can naturally take more damage than a Thief. If a Warrior gets hit that hard from a single attack, a Thief that gets hit is going to be completely downed. Unlike Warriors and most professions, Thieves don't have much access to blocks or Protection or invulnerabilities or passives.

We can argue about unfairness all day long, but Thieves certainly don't hold any exclusive claim on unfairness.

@"AngelLovesFredrik.6741" said:There is already a still to counter reveal. DE elite.

That is literally a single skill on an Elite spec. It literally doesn't help any other Thief at all. If it were a Core utility, then it would be a different matter.

Running actual reveal skills on your bar is just not worth it.

In that case, let's just remove them from the game and call it even. No harm done.

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This game needs less skills overall. Some builds already have a number of attacks which inflict near-lethal damage on their own. Why have anything more than that? Why not just design classes around one or two powerful attacks and devote the rest of the class' toolkit to unique role support and/or mobility? Within a paradigm like that, protracted damage negation and stability probably have no need to even exist at all. Instead, every GW2 build across all classes boils down to 20 lethal attacks and 4 panic buttons which negate incoming damage and effects.

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@Kageseigi.2150 said:

@Fueki.4753 said:How are Thieves more vulnerable than other professions to stealth instant kills?
Even a Warrior with marauder Amulet and Wurm runes is down to 1/4 or less health
when a medium-skilled thief decides to eat them from stealth.Stealth attacks deal way too much damage to ANY class and can NOT be anticipated. If it somehow was negated, it's pure, lucky coincidence.

I think you answered your own question. Warriors can naturally take more damage than a Thief. If a Warrior gets hit that hard from a single attack, a Thief that gets hit is going to be completely downed. Unlike Warriors and most professions, Thieves don't have much access to blocks or Protection or invulnerabilities or passives.

We can argue about unfairness all day long, but Thieves certainly don't hold any exclusive claim on unfairness.

@"AngelLovesFredrik.6741" said:There is already a still to counter reveal. DE elite.

That is literally a single skill on an Elite spec. It literally doesn't help any other Thief at all. If it were a Core utility, then it would be a different matter.

Running actual reveal skills on your bar is just not worth it.

In that case, let's just remove them from the game and call it even. No harm done.

Or let's buff them to a point they are worth running. Stealth is already way stronger in this game than literally every other mmo out there. Let's not make it stronger.

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@Fueki.4753 said:

@Swagg.9236 said:Why not just design classes around one or two powerful attacks and devote the rest of the class' toolkit to unique role support and/or mobility?

Yeah, let's shoehorn every class into a single Build. Because that works so well.

GW2's fundamental design paradigm already shoehorns all players into more or less the same playstyle regardless of which class is chosen. If you were to limit the ways in which each class respectively deals damage but still maintained the threat from each attack, you would end up with combat that would not only be a lot more legible (as in you wouldn't have each class on the field striking 5-6 times with different actives and passives within 2-second spans), but you would also probably infuse a lot more risk/reward encounters into combat considering how people would know what to watch for and inflicting heavy damage on a targets would require either joint effort among players or a repeated effort from a single player with a limited attack kit.

This is the difference between a Warrior just sort of PvE rotating through 8, fire-and-forget combat CDs, some blocks, and some panic buttons before eventually just defaulting to Rampage and a Warrior who would need to move constantly and quickly, only stopping to throw out multiple Eviscerates (or something) when there might be an opening to pressure or finish. It would mean more clarity and risk to combat, which would also mean a much, much higher skill ceiling. If there's only one or two, risk-associated attacks per class to watch, everyone is suddenly charged with avoiding and countering them actively rather than the current meta strategy of just popping a bunch of damage negation and CC immunity before charging/teleporting in and spamming.

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@"AngelLovesFredrik.6741" said:Or let's buff them to a point they are worth running. Stealth is already way stronger in this game than literally every other mmo out there. Let's not make it stronger.

I'm not against weakening Stealth in general. I am, however, against weakening the Thief's Stealth, seeing that it is supposed to be the Master of Shadows. Besides, if Stealth were really that strong, every Thief would be taking it. It's certainly not so strong in Conquest, so you've got a lot more Sword and Staff Thieves running around with evasion instead of Stealth. What irritates me is the Thief has become more condi-oriented than pure power, and that's a shame.

Now, in WvW, it's a different matter. However, with all of the changes, Stealth's effectiveness has been severely reduced. Mounts have absolutely crippled the Thief's ambush potential, and sentries make it extremely difficult to hide in enemy territory.

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@Kageseigi.2150 said:

@"AngelLovesFredrik.6741" said:Or let's buff them to a point they are worth running. Stealth is already way stronger in this game than literally every other mmo out there. Let's not make it stronger.

I'm not against weakening Stealth in general. I am, however, against weakening the Thief's Stealth, seeing that it is supposed to be the Master of Shadows. Besides, if Stealth were really that strong, every Thief would be taking it. It's certainly not so strong in Conquest, so you've got a lot more Sword and Staff Thieves running around with evasion instead of Stealth. What irritates me is the Thief has become more condi-oriented than pure power, and that's a shame.

Now, in WvW, it's a different matter. However, with all of the changes, Stealth's effectiveness has been severely reduced. Mounts have absolutely crippled the Thief's ambush potential, and sentries make it extremely difficult to hide in enemy territory.

Staff is the only thief build without invis. Sword dagger has dagger 5 for on demand invis. They can't have improved invis and all the on demand evades all in one package.

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@"AngelLovesFredrik.6741" said:Staff is the only thief build without invis. Sword dagger has dagger 5 for on demand invis. They can't have improved invis and all the on demand evades all in one package.

But Dagger 5 isn't Stealth on demand. It must successfully hit a target from melee range in order to apply Stealth. And getting a valid hit has as much to do with luck as it does skill.

The only weapon sets that have Stealth on demand are Dagger/Pistol and Rifle. Everything else requires offhand Pistol in combination with switching weapon sets or having the Daredevil's leaping dodge.

What's really odd is that a Thief cannot even naturally enter Stealth. There's no F3 function for a basic short Stealth. To enter Stealth, a Thief must build for it through traits, utilities, and combos. Of course, a Thief cannot naturally outrun or evade more than anyone either. Everything about the Thief is about how you build, and you can't have it all. There are always sacrifices that must be made.

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@Kageseigi.2150 said:What's really odd is that a Thief cannot even naturally enter Stealth. There's no F3 function for a basic short Stealth. To enter Stealth, a Thief must build for it through traits, utilities, and combos. Of course, a Thief cannot naturally outrun or evade more than anyone either. Everything about the Thief is about how you build, and you can't have it all. There are always sacrifices that must be made.

Seeing how overloaded Thief already is with stealth, it doesn't need a F3 for it.

@Swagg.9236 said:GW2's fundamental design paradigm already shoehorns all players into more or less the same playstyle regardless of which class is chosen.Not everyone is playing Meta Builds y'know.

I for example, I play Fire/Air DD Tempest and DD / Shortbow condi Soulbeast.I play my Holosmith with ElixirsMy Herald is always Jalis/Glint with Hammer as my main weapon.

Lately, I only play Core Warrior in pvp, with Dual Axes / GS and as much stunbreaks a possible.

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@Fueki.4753 said:

@"Swagg.9236" said:GW2's fundamental design paradigm already shoehorns all players into more or less the same playstyle regardless of which class is chosen.Not everyone is playing Meta Builds y'know.

I for example, I play Fire/Air DD Tempest and DD / Shortbow condi Soulbeast.I play my Holosmith with ElixirsMy Herald is always Jalis/Glint with Hammer as my main weapon.

Lately, I only play Core Warrior in pvp, with Dual Axes / GS and as much stunbreaks a possible.

Even if it's not "meta," that doesn't at all mean that your builds serve unique, functional roles. Making unique, functional class roles is the goal of legible combat and a "risk vs reward" attack design. No matter what you tell yourself, you're just basically playing less effective versions of the sole, generic playstyle which permeates all classes in GW2.

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@Kageseigi.2150 said:

@"AngelLovesFredrik.6741" said:Staff is the only thief build without invis. Sword dagger has dagger 5 for on demand invis. They can't have improved invis and all the on demand evades all in one package.

But Dagger 5 isn't Stealth on demand. It must successfully hit a target from melee range in order to apply Stealth. And getting a valid hit has as much to do with luck as it does skill.

Imagine thinking "skill" equates to chaining a teleport into a buffered attack with a 0.5s activation time.

What's really odd is that a Thief cannot even naturally enter Stealth. There's no F3 function for a basic short Stealth.I actually wouldn't mind if Thief had an "enter stealth" F-button, but only if that F-button was the only way in which Thief could stealth, and only if then smoke fields were removed from the game (or at least lost their function of granting stealth). At least that way [sTEALTH BUTTON] could technically be a unique (if not dreadfully shallow) class mechanic.

To enter Stealth, a Thief must build for it through traits, utilities, and combos.Nothing about this is difficult.

Of course, a Thief cannot naturally outrun or evade more than anyone either.

Lmao teleports and Shortbow 5. No Thief ever dies unless it is blatantly their fault or they're going in for some bot-forward, dog-pile play in which they hope to get a positive outcome based on the rest of their team's efforts. There is effecitvely no match-up (aside from another Thief) that can consistently chase down a Thief who knows that they're in a bad position (which should be easy to recognize because this game has a huge field of view and a super helpful minimap with loads of freely given, real-time info; basically zero game-sense required).

Everything about the Thief is about how you build, and you can't have it all. There are always sacrifices that must be made.Traits are nothing but benefits; never sacrifice. Shortbow is stapled to literally every Thief bar because it can allow them to move freely across any field far more rapidly than any other class in the game. There is no opportunity cost associated with Thief because GW2 combat is almost entirely governed by instant damage and instant movement. Thief already has so many teleports inherently stapled to its most popular skill bars as well as another surplus of teleports jostling around in its utility pool, that everyone just chooses the best ones and gets along fine. Arguably, teleporting and stationary damage negation are respectively better than stealth anyway, and it shows in how every Thief utility bar is typically Withdraw, Shadowstep, condi cleanse signet, [teleport signet/evade and gain initiative], and Dagger Storm.

GW2 is a shallow game. Thief, without sacrificing damage (which is the only thing that really matters in GW2), gets all of GW2's best mechanics in spades without really worrying about opportunity cost. It's effortless.

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Weakening stealth should be about reducing durations or access. In that I agree with @Kageseigi.2150 about how to address issues of “too much stealth.” I also think it’s hard to complain about the net code delays when 95% of the time the game works. I get attacked regularly by stealthy thieves and this isn’t usually an issue for me. I may be an outlier so take that with a grain of salt.

On reveal:

Adding reveal, especially long duration reveal, is an automatic retreat or die for stealth based builds, unless they can use LoS cover or Shadow Meld to clear it. It’s very heavy handed and feels like a hard CC if your primary defense is from stealth.

Forcing someone out of stealth is reasonable counterplay. Locking them out of re-stealthing is where it goes too far in my opinion. Stealth requires burning a utility or weapon skill or combo. Stealth isn’t free and forcing them to expend cooldowns is a cost. They also are visible and targetable with all the risks that come with that.

My suggestion:

Every build should have a reveal skill or trait that gives a 0.1 second reveal. Longer reveals should be on meaningful (longer cooldown) skills/traits and not able to be attached to large AoE (looking at Holo here).

There should also be fewer professions with long duration reveals because not every person needs to have a 6+ second reveal in addition to their regular abilities. It opens the door to chain reveals if you only need half your team to get 15+ seconds of visibility on an otherwise squishy target.

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@MyPuppy.8970 said:Thief class mechanic is steal, not stealth, which is just a part of their tools for survival, like evasion.

The Thief class is a flavor-based show-case class for the stealth mechanic. It's fundamental gimmick has always been stealth (even if stealth has been co-opted by basically every other class at this point to some degree). The only reason it has Steal is because somebody (probably sometime around 2009 or 2010) said that it needed a different cover-gimmick so that everyone wouldn't think that they weren't just trying to bait the WoW crowd with another generic rogue rip-off.

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@"Swagg.9236" said:Lmao teleports and Shortbow 5. No Thief ever dies unless it is blatantly their fault or they're going in for some bot-forward, dog-pile play in which they hope to get a positive outcome based on the rest of their team's efforts. There is effecitvely no match-up (aside from another Thief) that can consistently chase down a Thief who knows that they're in a bad position (which should be easy to recognize because this game has a huge field of view and a super helpful minimap with loads of freely given, real-time info; basically zero game-sense required).

You're clearly anti-Thief, so it's useless to argue with you, so I'll just be quick.

First of all, I said that Thieves cannot NATURALLY outrun or evade more than anyone else. Shortbow is NOT natural, it is a build choice. It has only one teleport naturally (Steal), but it is useful only for placing the Thief on top of a target... it cannot be used to run away. Daredevils only have half the range on it, and Deadeyes lack it altogether.

Secondly, in Conquest, it is status quo for the Thief to be "in a bad position" in terms of combat. Of course, a Thief can hide in the corner all day long and run along the edge of the map to avoid getting killed, but he is not contributing anything to his team if he does so.

Traits are nothing but benefits; never sacrifice.

Only compared to its base capability. However, when compared to a full build, that is not true. A Thief has to choose which traits and traitlines to take depending on what it wishes to do (the same is true for weapons, utilities, and other parts of the build). To give any one up is severely weakening its ability to do something else. Does he go evasive? Does he go stealthy? Does he go mobile? Does he go lethal? The Thief cannot have it all. Yet people are acting as though every Thief is some super lethal killer who can't ever been seen or hit or caught. It's simply not true.

Thief, without sacrificing damage (which is the only thing that really matters in GW2), gets all of GW2's best mechanics in spades without really worrying about opportunity cost. It's effortless.

This is where it shows that you have absolutely no credibility on the matter.

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@"Master Ketsu.4569" said:TL;DR: Anet please start considering counterplay and interactive gameplay into your balance decisions more often. The current trend of not doing so is putting the excellent combat system GW2 has to waste and making people quit the game.

And Anet skipping straight to TLDR be like "Y da heck you need counterplay against raid bosses?"

Really good post tho. Agreed.

@"Swagg.9236" said:>

To enter Stealth, a Thief must build for it through traits, utilities, and combos.Nothing about this is difficult.Yes it is.. at least if you want any substantial amount of stealth time. Most of it only barely lasts long enough to try 1 backstab or something.. And if you want to go invis for just a bit longer (often not even long enough to outrun someone - since invis != invul and everyone's just spaming AoE and stuff which ofc still hits - you have to trait into Shadow Arts or something and therefore have to giveup something else extremely critical. As thief your traitlines are pretty much fixed, there are no real alternatives. You basically can't run any thief build without trickery and ditching deadly arts would also be very substantial. The third traitline then is either an elite spec or in case of s/d acrobatics and swapping it out would greatly reduce your utility (besides shadow arts being pretty much useless with s/d since you virtually never stealth)It's funny.. thief is one the least stealthy classes nowadays. S/D basically provides no stealth other than a veeeeery occasional Dagger5 (which costs a fuckton of initiative and doesn't do a lot of dmg - its primary use was for D/D into backstab I guess)

Of course, a Thief cannot naturally outrun or evade more than anyone either.Lmao teleports and Shortbow 5. No Thief ever dies unless it is blatantly their fault or they're going in for some bot-forward, dog-pile play in which they hope to get a positive outcome based on the rest of their team's efforts. There is effecitvely no match-up (aside from another Thief) that can consistently chase down a Thief who knows that they're in a bad position (which should be easy to recognize because this game has a huge field of view and a super helpful minimap with loads of freely given, real-time info; basically zero game-sense required).

Being able to outrun as thief has become magnitudes more difficult. Almost every class has either pretty good in-combat mobility (through teleports, blinks, leaps, charges, what not) or a huge range. Unless you have ez and instant access to LoS you realistically can't outrun ranger or mesmer for example.While thief has evades on a lot of weapon skills it has to be mentioned that 1) with ez access to Vigor for a lot of classes or endurance regen it has become a lot more equal 2) the skills cost initiative which if you force a thief to spend for dodging it also means he has less resources to properly fight AND shortbow 5 away.It's not like thief has unlimited access to everything. Force a thief to teleport around and he will be left with pretty much nothing. 3 teleports (2700 range) is all you can get.. Most of the time you can barely make 2 shadow steps when disengaging and then you are an easy pick off.

If they can successfully disengage from you every time maybe don't waste everything in your kit at once.. If I'm fighting a spellbreaker for example I also don't waste my stun breaks until he pops Rampage.

Everything about the Thief is about how you build, and you can't have it all. There are always sacrifices that must be made.Traits are nothing but benefits; never sacrifice. Shortbow is stapled to literally every Thief bar because it can allow them to move freely across any field far more rapidly than any other class in the game. There is no opportunity cost associated with Thief because GW2 combat is almost entirely governed by instant damage and instant movement. Thief already has so many teleports inherently stapled to its most popular skill bars as well as another surplus of teleports jostling around in its utility pool, that everyone just chooses the best ones and gets along fine. Arguably, teleporting and stationary damage negation are respectively better than stealth anyway, and it shows in how every Thief utility bar is typically Withdraw, Shadowstep, condi cleanse signet, [teleport signet/evade and gain initiative], and Dagger Storm.

Like I already said before you don't have much choice as thief when it comes to traitlines.. Trickery is absolutely mandatory, DA is almost as important and the third one is pretty much pinned to the weapon set. Swap anything out and you lose A LOT of output. It's not like thieves aren't creative or something. You are forced to use that stuff.. Also like I already said: It's not like thief gets everything for free. "It can allow them move freely across any field" is simply not true. You won't even cover half the distance between two nodes and then you are completely out of initiative which renders you virtually useless for at least a couple seconds.

GW2 is a shallow game. Thief, without sacrificing damage (which is the only thing that really matters in GW2), gets all of GW2's best mechanics in spades without really worrying about opportunity cost. It's effortless.

You clearly NEVER played thief yourself in sPvP or WvW.

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@Kageseigi.2150 said:

@"Swagg.9236" said:Lmao teleports and Shortbow 5. No Thief ever dies unless it is blatantly their fault or they're going in for some bot-forward, dog-pile play in which they hope to get a positive outcome based on the rest of their team's efforts. There is effecitvely no match-up (aside from another Thief) that can consistently chase down
a Thief who knows that they're in a bad position
(which should be easy to recognize because this game has a huge field of view and a super helpful minimap with loads of freely given, real-time info; basically zero game-sense required).

You're clearly anti-Thief, so it's useless to argue with you, so I'll just be quick.

First of all, I said that Thieves cannot NATURALLY outrun or evade more than anyone else. Shortbow is NOT natural, it is a build choice. It has only one teleport naturally (Steal), but it is useful only for placing the Thief on top of a target... it cannot be used to run away. Daredevils only have half the range on it, and Deadeyes lack it altogether.

With this logic, dragonhunter is the most mobile spec. It's the only one with movement as the class mechanic. And that just isn't true.

Secondly, in Conquest, it is status quo for the Thief to be "in a bad position" in terms of combat. Of course, a Thief can hide in the corner all day long and run along the edge of the map to avoid getting killed, but he is not contributing anything to his team if he does so.

Thieves aren't actually that squishy. You still have perma vigor and evade frames on most weapon sets.

Traits are nothing but benefits; never sacrifice.

Only compared to its base capability. However, when compared to a full build, that is not true. A Thief has to choose which traits and traitlines to take depending on what it wishes to do (the same is true for weapons, utilities, and other parts of the build). To give any one up is severely weakening its ability to do something else. Does he go evasive? Does he go stealthy? Does he go mobile? Does he go lethal? The Thief cannot have it all.

So basically just every other class?Guardian needs valor and virtues, Ele needs arcane, warrior needs disc, revs needs invocation and engineer needs alchemy.

Thief, without sacrificing damage (which is the only thing that really matters in GW2), gets all of GW2's best mechanics in spades without really worrying about opportunity cost.
It's effortless.

This is where it shows that you have absolutely no credibility on the matter.

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@"AngelLovesFredrik.6741" said:

Secondly, in Conquest, it is status quo for the Thief to be "in a bad position" in terms of combat. Of course, a Thief can hide in the corner all day long and run along the edge of the map to avoid getting killed, but he is not contributing anything to his team if he does so.

Thieves aren't actually that squishy. You still have perma vigor and evade frames on most weapon sets.

On the other hand thieves don't have anything else really. While most other classes have either blocks, aegis, prot, invul, reflects or at least some defensive passives, thief doesn't have anything from all of it. Only Instant Reflexes which is a 2 second evade on 90s cd. Not particularly great if you ask me. Or - if you are keen enough to run Daredevil on anything other than condi cheese nowadays - thief gets access to an active block, yes.I don't count blind anymore since blind is pretty much useless nowadays if you don't have a single hit burst to heavily rely on which - realistically - no class has anymore (aside from maybe d/p thief with backstab but d/p is dead anyways so who cares). Like.. Every major burst now has multiple hits per skill which massively reduces the effect of blind or you can just spam it, like conditions, so you don't need to rely on that one single hit. Or the enemy isn't bursty in the first place and just eats your health away step by step.So.. Thief only really has dodges to stay alive. In addition to the lack of basically every defensive mechanism thief has also a pretty low health pool.

Also.. high vigor uptime and endurance gain isn't something special.. Almost every class has quite a variety of endurance gain boosts (now).The only thing thief has with really superior improvements to dodges is Daredevil but Anet killed Daredevil by making d/p useless. Only thing that's still getting used is Lotus Training for condi cheese.

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Anyone remembers Turret Engi? Or Spirit Ranger? That was both in the Classic Times that people look back on nostalgically now. Cheese builds have always been a thing, and while annoying and often frustrating to play against, it is not the reason why this game has gone downhill. I'd even say it's not the balance overall, even though it was almost never really good and balance patches were too slow and too few.

The lack of content was the much bigger problem. It took them three years to start the first PvP Season, another year for an actual MMR-based leaderboard instead of pipgrind, then 1,5 years or so for ATs (that already were a thing originally but got removed) and now we close to a two year wait for Swiss, with chances being that even implemented it will be a mess (mAT final planned to remain BO1).

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Maybe it's just that nobody here played during launch. Maybe nobody remembers how the only thing that Thief couldn't dance around or utterly obliterate was the apex of the time: d/d Elementalist running 3 cantrips and as much passive healing as possible. Maybe nobody remembers how a very viable, often seen and arguably meta comp was 4 d/d eles + X, and most player-held tournaments at the time forced teams to limit their roster to a maximum of 2 instances of a unique class (entirely just to suppress Elementalists). Maybe nobody remembers how the only time any other classes rose up to challenge Thief for a team slot was either because it was a portal bot Mesmer or because some random class got a flavor of the month buff (such as spirit spam Ranger/"petting zoo"). Maybe nobody realizes that all of the buffs and additions over the course of this game's lifespan have basically all been trending toward emulating what Thief has always had: offensive capability while negating damage and movement with impunity. Maybe nobody can see beyond the surface of how basically every class in the game (besides maybe Necromancer) has more or less become a Thief to some degree: evading while attacking; negating damage for protracted amounts of time; teleporting around.

Back in 2012/2013, Thief was nearly immune to damage with a single D/P 3 into 5 while spamming autos. That, combined with built-in stealth access, was often enough to scare people into defensive postures or force players to spend huge threat skills just to get the Thief out of damage range. As skill activation times continued to lower and damage continued to increase, the Thief playstyle shifted from D/P to S/D because of the protracted evasion and teleport spam (because blinds just couldn't suppress outgoing damage well enough at that point). Yet regardless of the patch, shortbow 5 was always there to carry Thief to relevance on any team simply due to how it could let a player traverse a map at ludicrous speeds to constantly keep opponents worried about decaps or in order to +1 fights at will without having to resort to utilities or valuable weapon skills in order to speed up movement. Even as Mesmers got more and more buffs, and became a typical staple on teams, some teams would still run Thief and Mesmer in the same comp only because of how powerful that decap pressure was combined with another player's ability to just teleport an entire team to a fight instantaneously.

This whole thread was basically supposed to be a call to remove all of the instant-speed attacks and godmode that has been added into the game, but even if you managed to remove everything that was added post-launch, you'd still be left with a class that repeatedly teleports and evades while attacking as its main, baseline flavor.

@"Kageseigi.2150" said:First of all, I said that Thieves cannot NATURALLY outrun or evade more than anyone else. Shortbow is NOT natural, it is a build choice.

You are, in reality, just playing Thief incorrectly. The value of no-cooldown, ground-targeted teleports is game-defining in GW2, and has been for the entirety of the game's lifespan (which is why Thief has always appeared in every GW2 PvP metagame cycle since launch). If nothing else, Thief has always been "Shortbow 5: The Class." To just dismiss that for no reason other than because maybe Thief occasionally struggles in 2019 PvP is heinously short-sighted of you.

@"Kageseigi.2150" said:

It has only one teleport naturally (Steal), but it is useful only for placing the Thief on top of a target... it cannot be used to run away. Daredevils only have half the range on it, and Deadeyes lack it altogether.

You say this like you don't bring other teleports on top of that. Daredevils passively get extra evades and typically just run the regular core Thief sets on top of that (which are laden with teleports and evades both on the weapon and utility bars). If you run into combat as a Thief without a suite of teleports, you're again just playing it improperly (or just trying to meme on people really hard in unranked, which is perfectly fine). There is almost zero justifiable reason to consider any of the Thief's skill "options" outside of a tiny, cherry-picked set of the most obviously powerful (and often similar) skills.

Secondly, in Conquest, it is status quo for the Thief to be "in a bad position" in terms of combat. Of course, a Thief can hide in the corner all day long and run along the edge of the map to avoid getting killed, but he is not contributing anything to his team if he does so.

Except the Thief is constantly pressuring un-guarded nodes, and can easily inflict troublesome damage to lone players without putting himself at too much risk. It's the nature of the class in PvP. If you can't do this as a Thief, you're either bad at video games, or you've just built your bar incorrectly. A Thief should be able to constantly pressure an opposing team's formation, and it doesn't even have to rely on being in combat in order to do this. That's how strong things like Shortbow 5 are.

@"DoomNexus.5324" said:

To enter Stealth, a Thief must build for it through traits, utilities, and combos.Nothing about this is difficult.Yes it is.. at least if you want any substantial amount of stealth time. Most of it only barely lasts long enough to try 1 backstab or something.. And if you want to go invis for just a bit longer (often not even long enough to outrun someone - since invis != invul and everyone's just spaming AoE and stuff which ofc still hits - you have to trait into Shadow Arts or something and therefore have to giveup something else extremely critical. As thief your traitlines are pretty much fixed, there are no real alternatives. You basically can't run any thief build without trickery and ditching deadly arts would also be very substantial. The third traitline then is either an elite spec or in case of s/d acrobatics and swapping it out would greatly reduce your utility (besides shadow arts being pretty much useless with s/d since you virtually never stealth)It's funny.. thief is one the least stealthy classes nowadays. S/D basically provides no stealth other than a veeeeery occasional Dagger5 (which costs a fuckton of initiative and doesn't do a lot of dmg - its primary use was for D/D into backstab I guess)

Right, but again, all I've said was that nothing about getting access to stealth or entering stealth is difficult. For Thief, there is absolutely nothing difficult about getting stealth on your bar or going into stealth. Whether or not going into stealth at any given point is "meta" is up for debate (particularly considering how almost no meta Thief build really utilizes it in huge amounts--outside of maybe the Deadeye gimmick--typically opting instead for extra evades and teleports), but what you're basically trying to argue is how just because stealth doesn't operate as a win-button or let you get away from every threat possible, it's "difficult" to use. Seriously, just spare me. That's really just how damaged a lot of this game's playerbase is.

@"DoomNexus.5324" said:Being able to outrun as thief has become magnitudes more difficult. Almost every class has either pretty good in-combat mobility (through teleports, blinks, leaps, charges, what not) or a huge range. Unless you have ez and instant access to LoS you realistically can't outrun ranger or mesmer for example.

You already talked about how you try not to waste stun-breaks until players use huge attacks like Rampage. How do you, as a Thief, not have access to easy LoS cancelling? You're basically failing at a map-knowledge level: a "skill" so fundamental and superficial that anyone should have it after playing GW2 for more than a few weeks (or even just after watching a video on some of the gimmick teleport spots among the PvP levels). Know your gimmick teleport spots and terrain through which you can teleport. It gives Thief (and other teleport classes, although perhaps not quite to the same level) a massive baseline advantage in a lot of fights. You also can just juke people repeatedly by doing things like getting chased up to that bridge area which borders Temple mid, dropping down from the bridge, and then just Shortbow 5'ing back up to the top of the bridge again from underneath. How is this even difficult?? You have evades to cover yourself while you buy time and reposition for this stuff too.

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@"Swagg.9236" said:Except the Thief is constantly pressuring un-guarded nodes, and can easily inflict troublesome damage to lone players without putting himself at too much risk.

NOTICE THIS!!!

We have gone from the Thief being cheese because Stealth is OP to the Thief being OP because it can pressure empty points and cause "troublesome damage" to isolated targets, and at one point near launch, it could actually kill things!

This is why Thief players don't take complaints seriously. Honestly, listen to yourselves!

Yup, Thieves are so special! I'm sure other professions are extremely envious of the abilities to pressure empty points and cause troublesome damage to lone targets!

I guess I should just give up my slot as a Thief so someone else can have the privilege of playing this ultimate and effortless class! I mean, I must be taking up an exclusive slot, right? Why else wouldn't everybody be playing it? After all, it seems that I've been playing it wrong the whole time!

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