The real issue balance is facing, A plea for the community to come together.

[Psycoprophet.8107]

@Burnfall.9573 said:

@Psycoprophet.8107 said:

@Thornwolf.9721 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:

@Thornwolf.9721 said:

@Psycoprophet.8107 said:

@Drennon.7190 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:It's been a while but today I got reminded of exactly why I hate playing against thieves.

Deadeye ambush.. pew pew pew STEALTH!!several seconds later pew pew pew STEALTH!!several seconds later pew pew pew STEALTH!!few more seconds later pew pew pew STEALTH!!

Oh and this was one of several encounters with thieves using the same tactic on multiple different builds.. pop in, few hits, run away invisible before taking damage.It's so kitten annoying and cheap and there is far too little counter to this kind of troll playstyle.. specially when they have so much mobility and can even fast stomp a downed player and run away again.. invisible.. and nobody can do anything about it.

So thieves playing the way they are designed to play?

I love op posters like this lmao literally in first few sentences I already kno thier completely clueless. Thiefs need damage nerfed more, my dp sets up 3.5k backstabs on power builds and 250-350 dagger autos and sometimes rarely breakes1k on last auto chain hit, yeah nerf the damage lol. Then less mobility cuz u kno that's why it's got 11k base hp and low toughness cuz it's got great mobility like all rogue classes do so let's also nerf mobility. Aka high I'm op and pretending to care and be less bias than other players, that said I dislike thief and want it unuseable. Here's a list of others as well. These changes would force them even more into the already lame +1 decap role while making them even better in raids and zergs, u kno being kitten at the few things it's good at lmao.

Like seriously.

I don't hate thieves I just think they have a lot of loaded stuff in their kit that could use some toning back? I feel the same way about all the classes, I just want them to nerf what is broken and NOT remove what makes them unique and different from one another.

Stealth alone is all.I have no issues with thieves mobility or their damage, it's their abundance of cheap stealth mechanic that makes me hate fighting them because there is very little counter to it.It leaves thives with an almost unique ability to be annoying trolls that are capable of harassing multiple players with very little risk.

In PvE it's fine but in competitive stealth shoud come with restrictions.. for starters not being able to use it without some kind of timed CD.. Stealthed ambuses dealing more damage yeah fine.. but thieves should suffer a several second reveal debuff for it.

By all means increase stealth duration hell even mobility too and give theives the ability to scout exceptionally well while invisible etc.. but if they choose to engage an enemy they should not be able to cheese fights by abusing stealth the way they currently can.

All I said is they need to choose one. I don't feel them having mobility and the POTENTIAL for stealth is fair, I feel that one subsequently makes the other OP so one has be to be toned back to make room. I don't want them to be trash, I hate when people assume that because I don't agree with the design they've been given because for one it makes it hard to make E-specs and two it makes it difficult to balance.

You want stronger damage and presence? Well sacrifice a bit of stealth or mobility and I could justify it....

Trust me most thief's would love to give up some stealth to get some of their general damage back.

how about not have neither and keep their mobility?

Yeah no one wants to run around and not be able to kill anyone, sry as much as us wish for that.no class should be designed to always need a +1 to have a chance.

[Psycoprophet.8107]

@Yasai.3549 said:Thieves need cooldowns. End of story.They were designed with proper execution and planning in mind when given Initiative, but what we got in the end was extreme frontloading of skills to the point that other Professions cannot hope to keep up.

Thief vs other Professions is just like a guy who is playing a Card game, except instead of playing a set amount of cards per turn, he straight up combos his whole deck in the first turn.

Some might call this broken, or cheating even.

Just lol wow

[Psybehr.2518]

@Yasai.3549 said:Thieves need cooldowns. End of story.They were designed with proper execution and planning in mind when given Initiative, but what we got in the end was extreme frontloading of skills to the point that other Professions cannot hope to keep up.

Thief vs other Professions is just like a guy who is playing a Card game, except instead of playing a set amount of cards per turn, he straight up combos his whole deck in the first turn.

Some might call this broken, or cheating even.

@Yasai.3549 said:Thieves need cooldowns. End of story.They were designed with proper execution and planning in mind when given Initiative, but what we got in the end was extreme frontloading of skills to the point that other Professions cannot hope to keep up.

Thief vs other Professions is just like a guy who is playing a Card game, except instead of playing a set amount of cards per turn, he straight up combos his whole deck in the first turn.

Some might call this broken, or cheating even.

Honestly, this sounds like a case of “get good.”

And before you go thinking that I’m a Thief main, I’ll let you know I play mostly guardian and ranger.

[Turkeyspit.3965]

@"Thornwolf.9721" said:I've been here the past few weeks watching what has transpired and I have to say, if this was a case study it would be a heck of a book on A-nets end. Everyone is screaming for nerfs and when someone offers a constructive way to fix an issue, to remove an issue while not gutting the class it gets poo pooed into oblivion. No one is willing to compromise and no one is willing to give. "My class can't possibly be the issue, there is no way. GiT GuD sCrUb!"

You feel this is a new thing? This is what I've seen since the day I started logging into the forums, which was no different than the years I spent logged into Blizzard's forums.

Also, you forgot jUsT dOdGe, the devs don't even play their own game, the devs hate 'x' / love 'y', we've been bottom rung for so long, we deserve what we have now.

Reading the forums/Reddit is the same as reading The Onion; great for entertainment, but that's about it.

[Dadnir.5038]

I'll give you a good criticism:The reason balance is a mess is because the player's complains are subjectively based on how things feel instead of over metric and objective arguments.

The truth is that subjective complains lead ANet to tune numbers while the game is in need of "design" tuning.

• Thief is designed to dish out shit load of damage when he leave stealth and that's the true issue.
• Warriors are designed around power/might breaking them in making their support builds stronger or equal to their dps build (there is no trade off possible)
• Guardian were designed to block a lot of damage and deter foes to hit them through retal. They initially didn't have lot of damage nor did they have short CD, FB made it the opposite.
• Rev still have it's core in beta (maybe alpha). The energy system isn't quite perfected, I would even say it is "rushed" and "flawed".
• Necromancer main "defensive" mechanism is also it's main source of damage which is a broken design through and through. Boon corruption is on rampage in PvP and nigh useless in PvE. All while utility trait favor passive over active when the gameplay is supposed to be extremly offensive. Everything is a mess.
• Elementalist have it's elements tied to tightly to their core traitline, which make the attunment system giving a shot at versatility but failing hard in the end.
• Engineer have the scrapper as a balance ressource blackhole. The spec wasn't even close to be finished when released and changed so many time accross the years that in the end it feel like it's used to give the feeling that ANet don't forget the engineer.
• Mesmer's trade-off are the most poorly thought trade-off in the game. The profession is just crippled and forced into exploit.
• Ranger have always have an issue due to it's pet mechanism. Currently the most eye catching issue related is how SB interact with core pet's effects.

Where ANet should have minimized issues aver the years to the point that they become negligible, they instead accentuated them, playing the card of the "personnality"/thematic to an absurd level. The same way, where players should have accepted that some builds are meant to counter them, they shout and argued till ANet messed thing up. For 7 years, most players have been looking at the microcosm of their favourite gamemode without care for the overall balance while ANet's path of balance was the overall balance. This have led ANet's dev to sometime favour 1 gamemode and sometime another following the complains, messing things up in the process. Now, ANet acknowledged that there is an issue and step up to draw a true line between gamemodes, unfortunately they have yet to acknowledge the mess and the design flaws.

[Diak Atoli.2085]

@Yasai.3549 said:Thieves need cooldowns. End of story.They were designed with proper execution and planning in mind when given Initiative, but what we got in the end was extreme frontloading of skills to the point that other Professions cannot hope to keep up.

Thief vs other Professions is just like a guy who is playing a Card game, except instead of playing a set amount of cards per turn, he straight up combos his whole deck in the first turn.

Some might call this broken, or cheating even.

Of course, you're forgetting the part where the combo is countered or nullified, and the combo player is then punished for the rest of the game by the other players...

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

@"Thornwolf.9721" said:I've been here the past few weeks watching what has transpired and I have to say, if this was a case study it would be a heck of a book on A-nets end. Everyone is screaming for nerfs and when someone offers a constructive way to fix an issue, to remove an issue while not gutting the class it gets poo pooed into oblivion. No one is willing to compromise and no one is willing to give. "My class can't possibly be the issue, there is no way. GiT GuD sCrUb!" When in reality all the classes have a fundamental if not over-arcing issue that is plaguing it and its either un-healthy for its opponents or worse yet is it is unhealthy for the players who love that class.

1. Thieves: They need either mobility, utility or damage just flat out nerfed. They are too front-loaded and even after the big balance patch they have been un-hindered, Note I don't hate thief I just feel it needs to not have so many tools. (This was the same argument A-net has used in pruning the Rev of its tools, it was too loaded. I feel all classes should be held to this if that is the case.)I concur. There is too much going on in their favor. I think if stealth went through a major rework it would fix a lot of things broken on Thief and Mesmer.

2. Warriors: Have a TON of broke traits, and some of their skills and weapons even have been dunked on but it leaves them in this odd place of feeling kinda... meh.SO TRUE. At least half the traits are broken/useless to be frank. Warrior does have some great weapons, and some cruddy ones. It has a strong chassis, but outside of roughly 3 traits per trait line the rest are garbage tier outside of certain niche builds.

3. Guardians: Are still an issue, way too many forms of sustain for the kind of damage they can dish out. Something has to give, you either do insane damage or you have insane sustain you should not be able to build both and just blow people up. (Not as bad as it once was, but still pretty annoying.)I confess your Honor... Been ripping people apart since the patch on my Burn DH, even coming out alive in 1v3 situations, due to the amount of sustain, blocks, and burning.

4. Rev: Power rev feels terrible and is trash in anything but Raids, like everyone wanted. Now condi Rev is on a rampage and you really only need to nerf or remove rune of tormenting, this solves a good chunk of their sustain. True nature on mallyx could use a nerf, but don't make it complete trash as condi-rev is really the only way to play anymore if you don't want to be at an extreme-disadvantage.

5. Necromancers: Im not sure where to begin but they seem a little over the top right now, I don't know where its coming from but I dont want them to not be relevant or be terrible. They do need to be toned down slightly NOT a lot but enough to make it so they can't just perma-shroud or keep their sustain to insane levels.This is more from all the power skills getting gutted into the ground and shroud damage reduction not being touched in competitive play. If they bring back some of the damage then nothing needs to be done, otherwise they need to reduce the damage reduction from 50% to 25%. I say this as someone who plays and enjoys his Reaper immensely.

6. Elementalists: Tempest seems strong, I have yet to really be annoyed by one so.... I mean keep doing you? I don't know don't play or see many of the class.Kind of the same situation as the Necro, the drop in power DPS globally helped out the Ele to a great extent. Weavers are almost impossible to kill now unless you have some sort of boon/barrier hate.

7. Engineer: You seem to be in a decent place, dunno might need some buffs if anything.

8. Messmer: I still feel like portions of your Kit are too loaded, but the way they gutted your core features and basic mechanics leads me to believe they need to restore your dodge and cull some of the overtuned portions of your kit. Make you viable and strong, but don't make you overpowering and honestly flat out REMOVE stealth from this specific class. With your clones, and capabilities (Prior to the balance patch) you were out of control. So bring them mechanically back to where they were, remove stealth and limit clone amounts to like three or four and bam done.I think stealth should be reworked to be less broken first prior to removing access to it entirely, Mesmer was killable pre patch so long as you kept your eye on the real one and had enough AoE. Now its a lot easier.

9. Ranger: Im not gonna slap you... you just got hit again.... I dont play you anymore, and im waiting on the next E-spec because I hate the two you currently have.Both Especs have playable competitive builds, some of the best I've played against were actually Druids believe it or not. Ranger is where it should be now frankly.

All of us need to stop bickering and come together with CONSTRUCTIVE criticism and actually help A-net figure this out, or at leas have it out there that we are not all going to hate on each other.. With the way we are pushing class design will become all about homogenization and that will litterally end this game; We need to have our classes be unique and not some cookie-cutter aesthetic of some such dribble like "Rev is just an edgier warrior, and guardian is blue warrior." No. Bad. Stop it. We don't want that please don't push them to do this, can we for ONCE come together as a community and at least preserve portions of our class identities before they are completely gutted from us. As a Power Rev, I feel this on a deep level as I don't enjoy my main anymore and its because the changes over time have made it..... anything but what I loved about it when it came out.

I just want to have fun again, and we can't do that if we constantly scream to get every class BUT our own neutered for the sake of our own petty and childish reasons. We all have been out played. There is always someone better than you out there; So learn and become better and overcome or sit here and complain and not give real feedback, so that in the end nothing will feel cool and everything will be the same.

I'll say that there are traits across professions that just need to be redone (Warrior in particular has so many useless ones...). There are things that need to be reworked, like stealth. The CC vs Stab situation needs to be looked at (see the WvW thread on that one). Power was gutted, but condi DPS was not brought in line at the same time. Power was gutted, and many sources of sustain were along with it, but not all. There are sources of sustain like the amount of blocks, evades, and %damage reduction that some classes have access to that were not balanced accordingly.

We're going to get new E-Specs, Lets hope that the Dev team takes the time to clean up the other trait lines as they are make the new specs.

[Ansau.7326]

I've been playing this game since it launched (even played the betas), over these nearly 8 years there's has been a plethora of constructive feedback regarding balance, both in specific professions and global ways. And yet, very little (to be optimistic) has been accounted by anet when implementing changes or adjusting them.Put it in a straight an honest way, anet has never given a damn about constructive feedback.

I could spend hours talking about examples of how the community has spoken about pros and cons announced by anet or the issues of already implemented and ways to improve them. In fact, old forum was a dream compared to the current one.You can help yourself to get the glimpse by checking last year balance patch threads, and how dozens of pages were for nothing because the implemented patches were 100% what anet was announcing several weeks previously.

And this situation is not exclusive to profession/traits/skills balance, it also affects game modes and their designs. I always wondered what was going on inside anet to build a separated WvW mode (Edge of the Mists) with the initial intention to be used as test bench of future WvW changes, and yet not only they never used it as it was intended to, but also they released Desert Borderland that was nothing but a magnified EoTM after ignoring all the feedback of the few WvW guilds that tested it.

What I've seen over all this time is that anet balance is driven mainly by:

• A ridiculous mindset to try to reinvent the wheel every 6 months - 1 year (latest patch with over 900 changes isn't an exception).
• Loud and mindless raging feedback, always has been a faster and more reliable way to get the job done.
• The 2 or 3 game modes they consider priority receive all the attention. The rest are completely ignored even if they blatant issues affecting the experience of the players.

With this I don't want discourage people from giving proper and constructive feedback, just to inform that you should be aware your efforts will be futile.

[Downstate.4697]

If anet was gonna touch stealth they'd of done it already. They can reset and burst pretty easy. Between blind spam and stealth and mobility it's no wonder it's the best +1er. Granted playing thief well is difficult.

Also the problem with ele is they made weaver what we wished core ele was. A hard hitting build with decent sustain. Core ele does less damage and offers little in a team fight. I've made tons of suggestions from giving earth traitline access to barrier and changing healing ripple and cleansing wave to no longer affect allies but increase base heal. Tempest needs stab on overload always, not from a trait. Other than that its decent.

[Thornwolf.9721]

All pretty good suggestions, Im enjoying the conversation and reading through these posts so far. Id like to thank everyone for not being the "guy" and we know who im talking about. Even if A-net doesn't care about our feedback we can still talk among ourselves, about how to fix things and what could be done you never know one of the might be reading and gleaning some insight to things they themselves could of overlooked given how busy I am sure they are.

[Aeolus.3615]

Some of the things that m8 be creating balance gaps m8 be the boon and some condi stacked :\ but that's how Anet wants skills and classes to behave :\ stackkkI really love how enchantments/boons, hexes, shouts, etc.. worked in gw1 each effect felt unique as well and harder to stack if not impossible.

[Dadnir.5038]

@Aeolus.3615 said:I really love how enchantments/boons, hexes, shouts, etc.. worked in gw1 each effect felt unique as well and harder to stack if not impossible.

Well, it worked because the health of both players and AI in all gamemode was standardized. The difference between gamemodes in gw1 wasn't as big as it is in gw2, everybody had the same base hp, all professions needed to manage a ressource lest they would be forced into auto attacking... etc. I you were to introduced GW1 conditions damage/hex effectiveness in the current GW2 you'd have players riot about condi/hex cancer, afterall, those were dealing %health bar degen.

[Aeolus.3615]

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@Aeolus.3615 said:I really love how enchantments/boons, hexes, shouts, etc.. worked in gw1 each effect felt unique as well and harder to stack if not impossible.

Well, it worked because the health of both players and AI in all gamemode was standardized. The difference between gamemodes in gw1 wasn't as big as it is in gw2, everybody had the same base hp, all professions needed to manage a ressource lest they would be forced into auto attacking... etc. I you were to introduced GW1 conditions damage/hex effectiveness in the current GW2 you'd have players riot about condi/hex cancer, afterall, those were dealing %health bar degen.

I think gw2 is incompatible with that due how gw2 is heavy on cleave and aoe :\ wich is the real why gameplay is hard to balance.if it says 1 target.. still bounces trough several wich at the end its a target cleave with time gate damage between targets lol...

[VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.]

@Drennon.7190 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:It's been a while but today I got reminded of exactly why I hate playing against thieves.

Deadeye ambush.. pew pew pew STEALTH!!several seconds later pew pew pew STEALTH!!several seconds later pew pew pew STEALTH!!few more seconds later pew pew pew STEALTH!!

Oh and this was one of several encounters with thieves using the same tactic on multiple different builds.. pop in, few hits, run away invisible before taking damage.It's so kitten annoying and cheap and there is far too little counter to this kind of troll playstyle.. specially when they have so much mobility and can even fast stomp a downed player and run away again.. invisible.. and nobody can do anything about it.

So thieves playing the way they are designed to play?

if that was the intention, than thieves should have never made it into the game. Because that is just BROKEN on a fundamental level.

But there is an easy fix: remove stealth from the game. At least wvw/pvp. Done.

[Psybehr.2518]

@"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:

@Drennon.7190 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:It's been a while but today I got reminded of exactly why I hate playing against thieves.

Deadeye ambush.. pew pew pew STEALTH!!several seconds later pew pew pew STEALTH!!several seconds later pew pew pew STEALTH!!few more seconds later pew pew pew STEALTH!!

Oh and this was one of several encounters with thieves using the same tactic on multiple different builds.. pop in, few hits, run away invisible before taking damage.It's so kitten annoying and cheap and there is far too little counter to this kind of troll playstyle.. specially when they have so much mobility and can even fast stomp a downed player and run away again.. invisible.. and nobody can do anything about it.

So thieves playing the way they are designed to play?

if that was the intention, than thieves should have never made it into the game. Because that is just BROKEN on a fundamental level.

But there is an easy fix: remove stealth from the game. At least wvw/pvp. Done.

It's really not hard to work around, unless you have a smooth brain.

[Obtena.7952]

The proper start to this discussion is to realize that Anet's version of balance has nothing to do with the relative performance between any two classes.

[Sobx.1758]

This thread is so unbiased that I'd take a wild guess and say you mainly/only play ranger and revenant.Also pretty funny you talk about the forums being a heck of a "case study", when you title your own opinions as "the real issue". :D

Aaaand the in-combat stealth as a mechanic isn't a problem, but the possible duration of it is.

[Thornwolf.9721]

@"Sobx.1758" said:This thread is so unbiased that I'd take a wild guess and say you mainly/only play ranger and revenant.Also pretty funny you talk about the forums being a heck of a "case study", when you title your own opinions as "the real issue". :D

Aaaand the in-combat stealth as a mechanic isn't a problem, but the possible duration of it is.

Yes they are my favorites in this title within the franchise, mainly because of their theme. But I also play all the of the others; And I admit revenant had some over-tuned stuff and condi-rev is over tuned. Ranger was a bit borked and while they are strong I personally HATE their current E-specs.

Its not biased I just think all the classes have problems, glaring problems and rather than fighting one another we should come together to try and make all the classes unique and fun. You can look through my history and be "That guy" as I can't call you what I wish too, and try to dismiss me calling out the community for the obvious bias. I literally have stated numerous times in this thread that I dont want ANYTHING to be un-playable or weak. But I also don't want them to give up what makes them unique among one another, I want them to have something... a niche? Anything.But call me what you will~ Its never stopped someone who clearly doesn't understand the topic, or who read the whole thread from having an opinion right? Right.