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[Patch Feedback] Consolidated Thief Thread


saerni.2584

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Hi all,

Going to make a consolidated thread for thief specific feedback, including some comments on what other professions are performing too well post-patch. I’ll try to add things to the top post that are potential issues raised by people in this/other threads. As much as possible please keep your feedback in the format of:

  • Problem trait/skill/utility
  • Why it is a problem
  • Your proposed solution

I’ll also ask for your feedback if you are happy with a specific change and want to say so.

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Weapon Skills

Bola Shot

  • The initiative cost feels too high given the fact this is a slow projectile and damage has been reduced on other skills (making spending more initiative on those skills required, leaving less initiative for low-damaging skills like Bola Shot).
  • Proposed Solution: Reduce initiative cost to 3 in all game modes.

Disabling Shot

  • The initiative cost increase (4 -> 5) doesn’t make much sense given that Shortbow already has two much better abilities (Choking Gas and Infiltrator’s Arrow) at a similar initiative cost point. Why would anyone choose a short evade over a teleport?
  • Proposed Solution: Reduce the initiative cost on this skill.

Heartseeker

  • Placeholder text
  • Proposed Solution: Placeholder

Shadowshot

  • Placeholder text
  • Proposed Solution: Placeholder

Choking Gas

  • Before this skill gave a potential for pulsing daze and was less reliable due to the poison stacking requirement. However, despite making the initial daze longer and 100% reliable the cost makes this ability much harder to use as a combo field (because you need to save up all your initiative for Choking Gas). It also has issues where before it was possible to gain multiple interrupts off a single field whereas now you can’t.
  • Proposed Solution 1: Divide the daze into 2, 1/2 second durations, with one daze initially and another after 2-3 seconds.
  • Proposed Solution 2: Make CG initially daze for 1/2 second and then pulse daze over a poison stack threshold (once per field). This combines both the conditional model of the older version with the reliability of the new version.

Traitlines

Critical StrikesDeadly Aim

  • Pistol skills lost a lot of damage in the patch. Making this trait also decrease damage in exchange for pierce makes some sense but may be redundant with other damage reductions.
  • Proposed Solution: Disable the damage reduction and reevaluate damage.

Shadow ArtsRending Shade

  • The decrease from 2 boons stolen to 1 has moderately impacted the relative value of this trait. Boons are rarely singular and often refreshed so often that being able to steal several at once is the only way to be able to have a moderate impact on a boon reliant build (which is most of them). Stolen boons only become a balance problem when the targets of boon steal were generating and having stolen long durations or maximum stacks of boons (Which is no longer as big of an issue).
  • Proposed Solution: Revert the number of boons stolen. Reevaluate at that point.
  • Note: This trait is better than the alternative life steal on blind and slow regeneration of initiative and HP in stealth because the other traits don’t produce sufficient benefit (not because Rending Shade is particularly strong).

Shadow Savior

  • The heal on teleport is very under performing compared to the other options. Leeching Venoms makes for both heal and damage/utility from the poison. Flickering Shadows has a unique place as an option to make reveal less of a debuff. Shadow Savior doesn’t heal much, the group aspect is hard to pull off and coordinate with a teammate, and the other options support stealth gameplay while Shadow Savior supports teleports.
  • Proposed Solution 1: Make Shadow Savior heal and remove vulnerability upon entering stealth.
  • Proposed Solution 2: Teleports remove 1 second of active revealed duration (10 second ICD).
  • Proposed Solution 3: Add self regeneration to the current teleport.

DaredevilPulmonary Impact

  • Damage coefficient is now too low given the need to interrupt a target. The trait will not be taken if it can’t do at least some reasonable amount of damage.
  • Proposed Solution 1: Increase coefficient by 0.5 then reevaluate.
  • Proposed Solution 2: Revert coefficient nerf and then reevaluate.

Utilities

Smoke Screen

  • The cooldown was set to 45 seconds (36 with cooldown reduction trait). The cooldown feels slightly too long now.
  • Proposed Solution: Set base cooldown to 40 seconds (32 traited) to make this more reliable without being overpowered.

Stolen Skills

General/Uncategorized

Condition Builds Over-performing

  • Firebrand/Guardian applies too much burn and bursts harder than power builds by a significant margin.
  • The new condition revenant traits apply a lot of torment and may be applying too much for the current damage balance. The builds out there are producing torment in spikes of up to 15 stacks.
  • Placeholder Note: Necro has a lot of sustain/condi pressure. It is not clear if the sustain or the condi pressure is in fact the problem. Will update once more people have the chance to test and provide feedback.
  • Proposed Solution 1: Nerf the application rates or durations of burn/torment on problematic professions.
  • Proposed Solution 2: Nerf the damage coefficient on certain conditions and increase durations to compensate.
  • Addressed in 3/4/20 patch

Initiative costs/pool

  • Initiative costs have over time been boosted up to 6 for all “major” skills to try and balance them for competitive play. This has resulted in a few issues given the total initiative pool has a base of 12. Unlike increasing cooldowns for other professions any increase in initiative cost impacts all the thief’s weapon skills on both slots. Dagger has a total initiative cost of 16 with an average cost of 4 and a base average of 3 skills before regen. Pistol has a total cost of 20 with an average cost of 5 and a base average of 2.4 skills before regen. Sword has a cost of 19/21 with an average cost of 4.75/5.25 and 2.29/2.53 skills before regen. Shortbow has a cost of 20 with an average of 5 (2.4 base skills before regen). Staff has a cost of 18 with an average of 4.5 (2.67 base skills). Rifle has a cost of 14/15 with an average of 3.5/3.75 (3.2/3.43 base skills).
  • Proposed Solution 1: Nerf/Buff effectiveness of the weapon skills sufficiently to justify their initiative costs in relation to other weapon sets.
  • Proposed Solution 2: Adjust initiative costs down on the most expensive sets and then reevaluate their performance in light of the adjusted initiative costs.
  • Proposed Solution 3: Increase initiative baseline by 2 and make Preparedness increase initiative pool by 1.Positive Feedback

  • Shadowstrike->Repeater now correctly labels Repeater as a Dual Wield skill when used in the P/D weaponset. This lets the skill properly trigger Deadly Ambition and is a nice quality of life change.
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I fear this is just going to be wasted effort, but sure, why not.

Pulmonary Impact.

Straight up Useless due to a severe lack of damage (200-400, doing as much damage as the headshot that proced it, which is just pathetic), and never a viable choice as a result.

Revert nerf and retroactively fix the accidental overnerf from last time and change its scaling to actually be 2.0 rather than 1.5.

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@"UNOwen.7132" said:I fear this is just going to be wasted effort, but sure, why not.

Same. But here goes anyway.

  1. Battle Scars - though promised by the Devs to be a superior Siphoning trait or mechanic compared to previous Siphons accessible by Revenant, when placed in PvP and WvW setting, it is basically a past Minor trait, Focused Siphoning, but now requires the player to sacrifice 3 traits to make it somewhat consistent.

  2. Removal of Empty Vessel - Some Legends can't function without it, namely Ventari and to a lesser extent Jalis. Stunbreak costs are also absurd for Revenant in competitive settings : Essentially causing the Revenant to put all their utilities and some weapon skills into cooldown upon Stunbreaking due to the enormous amount of Energy spent.

Revert the change and give Empty Vessel back or make sure every single Legend has a cheap, reliable Stunbreak.Jalis and Shiro Stunbreaks costing 40 Energy is absurd, Mallyx barely gets away with 30 Energy cost Stunbreak, and Ventari straight up doesn't have one.

Nerf the skills if need be, but Stunbreaks need to be reliable, able to cast on demand, and doesn't totally cripple the player after due to the huge Energy cost.

  1. Pulmonary Impact - Just rework this. It's so so weak for a conditional trait. I actually find myself agreeing with some Thief players : this trait is basically a wasted slot now for competitive settings.

  2. Condition Damage - Does too much. Actual damage scaling per Condition stack never changed. Coupled with the frequency that Conditions are being applied, plus Corrupts for Necromancers in some cases, Condition damage has become extremely overpowered when combined with the fact that sustain got nerfed across the board.

Please just straight up nerf Co-efficients for Condition damage. Some Conditions deal way way more damage than others (Burn and Torment) and the builds that can apply these Conditions are able to still stack massive stacks onto targets due to the frequency in which they can apply these conditions.

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I’ve now updated the consolidation post somewhat and I’ll be adding things and updating as I can, it takes a lot of formatting work.

I’ll try to translate people’s solutions into concrete suggestions. I may also add to a suggestion if I think the original suggestion would have too many externalities if left as is (making it unworkable for Anet to implement without messing up other parts of the game that are currently working).

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Deadly Aim trait.How this trait works depends on what race you play. It gives an advantage to races above average height. Since the shot goes from the center of our HitBox to the center of the enemy, the difference in height changes the trajectory of the bullet. As an Asura, I can't hit 2 Golems standing one after the other in the heart of the mist. As a human or a Norn, I hit both. Also if you get too close to target and target taller then you, you will shot to the sky.

Example of Asura shootingExample of Human shooting

Solution: make the projectiles fly parallel to the ground or replace this trait with old Ricochet

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@"Dzheen.5291" said:Deadly Aim trait.How this trait works depends on what race you play. It gives an advantage to races above average height. Since the shot goes from the center of our HitBox to the center of the enemy, the difference in height changes the trajectory of the bullet. As an Asura, I can't hit 2 Golems standing one after the other in the heart of the mist. As a human or a Norn, I hit both. Also if you get too close to target and target taller then you, you will shot to the sky.

Example of Asura shootingExample of Human shooting

Solution: make the projectiles fly parallel to the ground or replace this trait with old Ricochet

I’d report this as a bug. That certainly is not intended gameplay.

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Oh yeah, I guess there is one more thing. Kneeling feels even worse than it already did. Even prior to the patch, kneeling felt like you were giving up mobility to replace your skills with worse ones. Now the gap is even further, and I cant ever see myself using kneel in WvW or PvP. Honestly Id just get rid of Kneel and give Rifle a new fifth skill.

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@UNOwen.7132 said:Oh yeah, I guess there is one more thing. Kneeling feels even worse than it already did. Even prior to the patch, kneeling felt like you were giving up mobility to replace your skills with worse ones. Now the gap is even further, and I cant ever see myself using kneel in WvW or PvP. Honestly Id just get rid of Kneel and give Rifle a new fifth skill.

I agree, the kneel feels worthless in competitive modes (maybe outside of very specific situations which are way too rare to justify it imo).

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Problem I have noticed in WvW

With power damage down but neutral enemies unchanged, taking camps is now seriously difficult for some classes who can't burst multiple targets at once (theif). Even a t1 camp can kill me if I'm not frame perfect because I simply can't cleave everything fast enough to kill within the duration of my smokescreen.

With power damage down, classes running condi specs with trailblazers are broken. Even after swapping to zerker gear with scholar runes a full burst combo with crits barely did half a HP bar and left me with literally no resources. It is impossible to keep up enough pressure vs trailblazers classes and eventually they just catch you without cooldowns and you burn. Something needs to be done about this gearset as it's wrong that condi builds should get so much defensive power without giving up any offence, something power builds can't do. Perhaps lowering toughness effectiveness, or some kind of toughness penetration trait would be nice.

Soulbeast can still burst for around 30k with worldly impact +maul. Even with lowered coefficient their ability to stack damage multipliers makes this crazy still. That being said I am a squishy theif so it may be balanced for other classes. Still just felt out of line though.

Positive: dueling other power classes feels really good now,the 33% damage reduction seems good and fights feel a lot less coinflippy. Once the condi build problems are sorted i really look forward to the new meta.

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@UNOwen.7132 said:Oh yeah, I guess there is one more thing. Kneeling feels even worse than it already did. Even prior to the patch, kneeling felt like you were giving up mobility to replace your skills with worse ones. Now the gap is even further, and I cant ever see myself using kneel in WvW or PvP. Honestly Id just get rid of Kneel and give Rifle a new fifth skill.

In WvW at least Kneel is for Snipers Cover. I guess if I used rifle 2 & 3 from it more I'd think it felt different but everything in Kneel feels the same to me.

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@kash.9213 said:

@UNOwen.7132 said:Oh yeah, I guess there is one more thing. Kneeling feels even worse than it already did. Even prior to the patch, kneeling felt like you were giving up mobility to replace your skills with worse ones. Now the gap is even further, and I cant ever see myself using kneel in WvW or PvP. Honestly Id just get rid of Kneel and give Rifle a new fifth skill.

In WvW at least Kneel is for Snipers Cover. I guess if I used rifle 2 & 3 from it more I'd think it felt different but everything in Kneel feels the same to me.

Eh, I feel like not moving is too much of a downside for snipers cover. I prefer to be unkneeled and just spam Rifle 2 Ad Nauseam.

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Initiative costs are way too high for the little impact that skills push out. As previously mentioned, initiative costs hits the entirety of thieves weapon sets and their play style. Which once again makes the thief far more dependent on the trickery trait line. While it is important that the thief is punished for poor initiative management, it is unreasonable to punish the thief for using two moves in quick succession thanks to the base 12 init and some frequently used skills requires six or four. Which limits the thief to taking two actions and becoming incredibly vulnerable for little reward.

Assuming that no major rebalance patches are to come soon, reducing the initiative costs will probably reduce the problem and increase the reliability of the thiefs combat effectiveness while still being able to punish the thief for poor initiative management.

I personally suggest having typical initiative costs between 2-4 depending on their functions, effects, and what have you.

It lets the thief maintain his quick slippery play style while having access to at least three actions in a single period of burst on his base pool.

Which allows the thief to fall off the dependency for trickery. And makes skills and utilities that reaards initiative a more valuable choice.

Yes, it increases the thiefs ability to flee the scene of a fight. But that should be treated as an element of the game, given that the thiefs playstyle revolves around risk assessment, pressing advantages, and mobility. Opposite to the problem. It also means thieves become more active in SPVP by being able to run down enemies. And with a more reliable combat ability, are more likely to stay and fight.

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@saerni.2584 said:

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:don't lose hope, they actually do put some stuff in from player suggestions.

Not ours.

I can name a few that were player based:
  1. Multiple Deadeye reworks that integrated many player concerns and suggestions.
  2. Making Smoke Screen a circle and not a line.

True, though Id argue the Deadeye rework missed the most important part, i.e. Kneel being terrible in PvP and WvW situations and its skills being worse too.

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I suggested prior to patch that INI and damage would become much more heavily weighted and this pretty well the case. I suggested this would result in more single skill spam and again this tends to be the case and especially in power.

The increases in INI to very specific skills was ill considered. Designers seem to equate ini with an ICD and this 100 percent wrong. Unlike other classes that can simply rotate through their other weapon skills when a skill on cooldown is gone all of thief skills shut down. This means INI is husbanded for those that do all the damage. DE based builds can still do ok based upon those other sources but Core and DD are hit hard.

INI regen needs to be looked at. Put preparedness baseline. Increase the rate of regen of ini overall or some such thing.

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My feedback / Feelings since the new "balance" patch in WvW (only)

  • too many init cost
  • too many loss direct damage
  • no more survival habilities
  • hard to catch points alone, against NPC !

At the end, i have the feeling that the fights became very SLOOOOOOW , every time... My thief seems to be asleep on fights and movement...The problem is that i play this profession only since 7 years and i have never had this kind of slow motion in the game... Please do someting.

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Spotter's Shot nerfed in damage, for...some reason? It wasn't used much over Skim Shot anyway, so this nerf was totally out of line. Feels like anet is totally out of touch with what skills were actually being used, for what, and why, and the full impact of increasing ini cost on a skill.

I now feel ini starved even with Trickery, and it's barely alleviated by M7 - I wonder what kinds of builds non-DE setups will be forced into to actually have a chance of killing someone.

I am so, so tired of being leashed to trickery.

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I have a problem with backstab, it was weak with marauder amulet in pre balance patch, but since the new balance patch its even weak with berserker amulet/power signet.I do like 8k on light armoured classes below 50% hp while with hs i do like 8 or 10k if under 25%hp. And for bs i need stealth, i have to use bp/hs which is 9 ini, or use a stealth utility which is like 30-50 secs cd. So i basically go into stealth to reposition and rather than doing a backstab i do a hs because its a leap finisher, it does not go on cd if i miss, and does more damage and closes gap

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