FrancisN.9276
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Posts posted by FrancisN.9276
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3 hours ago, Antycypator.9874 said:
No more endless bonk and melting defiance bars.
I hope ANet will fix axe animations this time.
I guess they want us to switch to spears or pistols for cc spam
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1 minute ago, bq pd.2148 said:
which situation do you run staff acrobatics and would it be an option to weave in vault there?
It is possible to put vault in the middle of the combo, but ini cost-to-damage-wise, it is worse than Weakening Charge by itself.
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I am a bit torn about Weakening Charge change. On one hand, forced movement is horrendous when fighting bosses near a cliff or an area with lethal boundary. On the other hand, it works well with Acrobatics because of Fluid Strike giving 10% damage increase buff after movement skill.
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Thief
This update includes a couple of significant quality-of-life improvements for the thief's staff and scepter weapons. First, Weakening Charge will no longer have a movement component, meaning that players are free to move during its casting time. We've also changed Shadow Sap into a ground-targeted skill to give scepter-wielding thieves a way to support their team without needing to target allies. Our goal with these changes is to improve the fluidity of the weapons and make them more enjoyable to play. We've also updated Helmet Breaker to only be usable a single time before flipping back to Debilitating Arc, giving more access to the defensive evade. This is part of a set of changes targeted at improving staff's usability in competitive modes.
- Shadow Sap: This skill is now ground targeted and will fire a projectile at the target location. When the missile lands, it will strike enemies and grant barrier, might, and protection to allies. The strike no longer inflicts weakness on enemies.
- Orchestrated Assault: Reduced the damage increase from 33% to 7% in WvW and PvP.
- Harrowing Storm: Reduced the torment duration from 6 seconds to 4 seconds in WvW and PvP.
- Debilitating Arc: Reduced the initiative cost from 5 to 4 in PvP and WvW.
- Helmet Breaker: This skill can no longer be used multiple times in a row. Increased the power coefficient from 0.6 to 1.1 in PvP and WvW only. Reduced the initiative cost from 3 to 2 in PvP and WvW.
- Dust Strike: Increased the power coefficient per hit from 0.2 to 0.35 in PvP and WvW.
- Weakening Charge: This skill is now named Weakening Whirl. This skill no longer moves the player.
- Cluster Bomb: Increased the power coefficient from 1.45 to 2.25 in PvE only.
- Shadow Refuge: Reduced the cooldown from 48 seconds to 40 in PvP and WvW. Reduced the stealth duration per pulse from 3 to 2.5 seconds in PvP and WvW. Increased the healing from 1,775 to 2,851.
- Even the Odds: Increased the vulnerability stacks from 5 to 10.
- Sundering Shade: Increased the vulnerability stacks from 5 to 10.
- Hidden Killer: Increased the duration from 2 seconds to 4 seconds.
Specter
- Well of Sorrow: This skill now pulses conditions in a specific order. It will pulse torment, bleeding, torment, poison, and then torment.
Debilitating Arc change is to give thief access to a defensive evade, which sounds like an improvement at first, until people remember Staff 5 is already an evade that hits like a truck, works on multiple targets, is more flexible and only cost 1 ini more. They did not bother to pump Defiance damage on Helmet Breaker either after making it cost more to access (now staff thief has to go through Debilitating Arc (4 ini) everytime, making a Helmet Breaker cost 6 ini in total).
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5 hours ago, Jeyzer.1605 said:
Yeah, surprised at how they tried to paint this as a QoL buff when it's a huge CC nerf for Thieves in PvE.
I am aghast that they said the reason for this nerf was to give us access to an evade skill - while we have already have staff 5 as a more controlled evade and 3 endurance bars.
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Whenever I play group content with everyone stacking together, it is almost impossible to see what animation is being played, so I have to rely on the skill icons to see which part in the chain skill I am at. The biggest issue with this is these icons flip WAY too late. Devs can easily fix this by making the icons flip to the next skill right at the moment of input, rather than after the end of the skill animation.
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I have the same issue. This Lance skill never works for me unless I use my mouse cursor to click on it manually.
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Spear power coeffiency is pretty bad, but because it has always been like that since beta and they did not bother to buff it (when nerfing condi output), I cannot keep my hope up for positive thief spear change. In its current state, spear is, at best, a mediocre defensive weapon with some sustainability to facetank champions while sacrificing most mobility that staff has.
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2 hours ago, Antycypator.9874 said:
Perma evade Deadeye, block and counterattack, pull and stealth to quickly finish enemies, good mobility. Yeah, I would definitely play it. Spear thief is pretty good.
Except for the power coefficiency. In full berserker gears, I almost always rank 3rd or 4th on arcdps
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I soloed this guy today down to 55% and then 4-5 more people jumped in. I thought it would scale him up, but we ended up swooping him together. Epic.
Edit: the rewards were not worth the time, though.
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Please correct me if I am wrong, but here is my understanding of thief class mechanic:
1. Alacrity does not increase initiative regen.
2. Thief does not have 2 separate initiative bars for each equipped weapons while other classes have 2 separate cooldown bars, both of which are benefited by alacrity.
3. Relic of rivers give 4s alac on 10s CD dodge. With vigor, it is 4s alac every 7.5s.
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On 8/30/2024 at 4:42 PM, ArcanistSeven.8720 said:
other classes do even more damage than thief now, initiative cost was increased across the board, other classes are almost just as mobile. some other classes also have access to stealth or more of it.
On top of our increased initiative cost, other classes have permanent access to alacrity with relic of rivers now.
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The idle combat stance looks cool, but the character should hold those spears a bit further from the tip. Also, for thief, the autoattack, swirling the spear in a figure of 8 with one hand while the other hand stays idle, is awkward.
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I have been enjoying thief spear gameplay so far, despite the low dps number it provides. In its current state, it leans more toward a defensive weapon than an offensive one because the offensive combo hits like wet noodles while the defensive combo is the best sustain option thief has ever had.
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14 minutes ago, Leo Schrodingers Cat.2497 said:
Power or Mixed.
The Spear dumps a lot of condi, but with poor scalability damage wise. It only has two damaging conditions. The condi is better seen as an addition to your power damage. The rest of the condies it puts out usually cripples the victim in some way, Immobilize, cripple, vulnerability, reduced healing. Overall it has 5 unique condies, useful to know this for later.
The nice thing about spear that is keeping me using it despite the nerf it took is that it is probably the cheapest weapon thief has in their arsenal, allowing you to finally drop trickery for something else. And it interacts so nicely with just about every trait line.
The spear also interacts pretty well with most of the traitlines.
Acrobatics is actually a good match with spear if you like using 3. Three has movement, and evasion which allows it to proc things in this tree pretty easily. It's good for additional damage as well as survival and speed if you're not running DD with dash. Dodging off of 3 restores only 1 init.... Sooooo it helps. Not something I'd rely on. But your vigor and regular evasion helps. Combine with DD's bounding dodger or Lotus for additional nasty.
Deadly Arts is also an extremely good pick. You have a brief immobilize on two allowing you to apply poison. If you do pvp, this is nasty even if you're not speced for condi damage due to poison reducing healing. If you spam your combos you will often have reveal on you, making revealed training solid for random burst fits. Even the Odds you can easily proc as well. Spear also passively dumps a few unique condies onto people making it easy take advantage of exposed weakness.
Deadeye with Be Quick or Be killed is downright demonic with spear as it is capable of some very disgusting burst damage. In WvW I like to open up with Basilisk venom, binding shadow and 3 spam into a stealth attack. It kills people running zercs before they have a chance to fight back. And it chunks bulkier targets.
I wouldn't go full condi with this weapon, but Having mixed wouldn't be a bad idea. Your choice on increasing duration or condi damage in priority
A really interesting point about Acrobatics you have there. I did not choose it out of fear that they have not fixed Swindler's Equilibrium not triggering for land spear. Would you say, for spear, choosing Acrobatics fits Daredevil better? The same way Shadow Arts fits Deadeye?
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For spear, which one is better, power or condi?
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I was expecting the nerf hammer to hit thief shortly after new expansion launch, just like when SOTO weapon master dropped, so I stayed clear away from any Deluxe option when getting Janthir Wild in case it became a flop. Perhaps next time I'll stop prepurchasing altogether.
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7 hours ago, Asur.9178 said:
Remember this?
The current shortcut was making it not stealth unless you hit something...but wait for that inevitable initiative increase as well. I mean they did it to sword randomly cause clearly sword Thieves were highly prevalent and overperforming in the gamemodes - so, expect more of it to keep happening.
So, now, spear not only sucks at mobility and damage, but it also sucks at sustain in PvP. As I said since day one of introduction, there's zero combo fields, zero finishers, zero boons, interaction with traits are completely missing because of core design, and stealth attack is terrible (especially in PvP) since it's a slow (as with nearly all the spear skills, except 4) backloaded multi-hit skill, and all in all, it sucks for PvP. Have fun playing PvE and hitting the golem though to make yourselves feel good about it.
I remember Mukluk saying he was most excited about thief's spear than other profession's spear. I wonder what he will say on the next few days.
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That's it? A bunch of nerfs to condi without any buff to power coefficiency? I guess we have to wait until December patch.
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Autoattack being just a 2-hit feels awkward, especially when those 2 hits are back-to-back like the single first dagger autoattack. The way character uses one hand to swirl the spear around while the left hand is free looks really weird.
Distracting throw, being both a range attack and a lead attack makes you lose a gap closer on spear 3, whose follow-up skill requires melee range - this does not feels right.
Combo flows smoothly. Animation team certainly make a lot of improvements compared to Daredevil staff skills.
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I have suggested Sequence Skills for Thief before, so this is exactly what I was talking about back then. How good the implementation is remains to be seen, although I can't help but be a bit more optimistic for daredevil's future.
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Housing and the ability to give other players a tour of your house, because I imagine that will help with gemstore sales.
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On 5/6/2024 at 9:05 AM, TheAgedGnome.7520 said:
I rarely see Daredevils in OW, and I can't recall the last time I saw another one using Bounding Dodger, which seems a shame, because I find it a rather fun build. In particular, I find it infinitely more fun that the condi D/D Daredevil.
I'm using a variant of Snowcrows OW power Daredevil build, with some Marauder pieces, P/P offhand set, sigil changes, and trait variations. [build - still being tweaked]
I find it most useful to think of the Endurance and Initiative systems as dual "energy" bars:
- While burning down my initiative with staff2 spam, endurance is refilling.
- While bounding until endurance is empty, initiative is refilling.
- So by managing these two alternating "energy" sources, its usually possible to keep up a good pace and rhythm of attack.
Never thought after 11 years that this would be the class I currently gravitate most toward.
I am rolling with a combination of Dragon and Marauder gear to achieve exactly 60% crit rate without infusion, which adds up to 100% after Critical Strike traitline and fury. I also use the relic that grants fury everytime I disable an opponent, which I can trigger reliably by Helmet Breaker to keep fury uptime 100%. Since this combo gives a more dodge iframe, I also choose Acrobatic to get vigor on evasion and might/condi cleanse on bouncing as well. DPS loss compared to full Berserker gear is like 15% when OW solo.
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The damage buff to sword is welcoming and warranted because that weapon has been lagging behind for almost a decade. However, venom rework is rather weak. They just make it stack more so having more than one venom-build thief in the party grants some dps buff, which is a bit of a rare occurence. If there is a need for utility skill rework, I would say the whole line of Preparation skills needs it. Did they fix the bug with Swindle's Equilibrium not reducing CD?
A tale as old as time, NERF THIEF STEALTH IN WvW
in Thief
Posted
Alright, we hear ya. In return of the proposed nerf, what do you suggest thief gains to make it balanced?