SoulSin.5682

Hello Planning to play the game again. I've quitted in the last chapter of PoF living World (Champions). Question one: Is purchasing EoD and the new Living World chapters individually the cheapest method? Question two: Why is there dots [...] in my PoF story journal? Anything got retconned? Question three: What are relics? Any other mechanic change I should be aware off?

They don't wanna accept that their free kill has ran away. Thieves barely kill anything nowadays unless a huge disparity in skill level is involved.

Sad life. Every class try their best to push their limits on their own builds and here we are here posting stuff like "oh, we should play more non-stealth builds, just so they don't nerf then, and the rest, even more". The whole class balance history is bs.

Are we gonna talk how Warriors can instantly cast 18 seconds of revealed on thieves?

GW2 is still one of the best MMos under that requisite.That or you are free to play catch up to level cap and gear progression on every other MMo ad eternal .

Frankly speaking I won't even bother voting. I will just let some steam off my chest: I am getting tired of all those initiative increases on key skills. -More than just numbers, Thief is becoming more and more of a shore to play.

To say we are not buffing anything, we've buffed two builds that we killed a few patches ago. No one uses then, so it's safe for us to buff something that won't cause impact. More importantly: Last few patches we nerfed Deadly Arts so much, that the community has moved to... Shadow Arts, which proved to be a fatal mistake since it raised the number of stealth complaints on the forums. Since thieves are now harder to kill. So we decided to nerf the only reason thieves were picking the traitline. Since we predict that thieves are still to hard to kill, we expect people to move to... Critical strikes, which builds are known for dying faster. So we buffed 3 traits that make Thief builds extremally squishy as bait. We expect that this way thieves will die faster.The damage was raised of course, and we buffed the cancerous rifle DeadEye by accident, but we can always move back and nerf it again later, like always. We also forgot to nerf said egregious condition builds. Sincerely,From the Buff-yet-Nerf secret balance team.Working against the thief community since 2011.

I wish dodges and stow weapon could cancel kneeling. To kneel after a dodge is strange. Since if I needed to dodge it means that I need to move.Stowing weapons does cancel kneel, but it is at the end of the stow animation, not at the start. And that's weird.

We are still slaves to trickery, more now than ever since the amount of initiative for key skills have raised, again. Some skills have changed: Blinding Powder is no longer instant for example, but now works like a stunbreak. All traps were revised and remade. Shadow Portal, especially, becomes usable on some builds depending on your personal preferences.Some skills like Scorpion Wire got charges.Smoke Screen is no longer a line, but a circle.Dagger builds are in a bad situation for years: The build was already off-meta when Sword/Dagger was the meta build.Arena Net decided a new approach to specializations, so that they would have at least a disavantage compared to core builds. For thieves, that means that Daredevils lost "Steal" and got "Swipe". That is pretty much "steal" with half the range. This change pretty much killed Dagger builds that relied on daredevil traits to work.Thanks to some high skilled players (Sindrener, specially), dagger found new uses running Core build again with DA, TR and SA. The clutch of the build was to switch the Signet of Agility for Assassin's Signet and to bring the new Smoke Screen. The build got popular for some time but got nerfed to oblivion again.After many nerfs to Deadly Arts, people just started using Shado Arts, killing the damage of dagger even more. Current build of Dagger hits like wet noodles and run SA / TR / DD. But ultimately works.Sword got plenty of "new builds": TL;DR: Sindrener got tired of Sword/Dagger and started running Sword/Pistol. The build popularity exploded.Despite being just a weaker build roamer wise, the scrubs cried so much that the build got nerfed either way. The current state of the build is unusable. Still works somewhat tough.Players found out that messing with some Deadly Arts traits and Spider Venons could create a Condi Build. Also know as Condi S/D.Build became a total cancer.Build got nerfed to oblivion. Deadly Arts trait line sank with it. The build is still usable tough, especially that lacks fast condi cleaners. Not as lethal. Scrubs still cry about it tough.Ultimately, everyone went back to Sword/Dagger.... again.Many stealth related nerfs due to abuse of stealth builds on DeadEyes. Vigor uptime and stamina also took a hit because of the nature of DeadEyes to convert stamina to stealth. Countless hours of arguing and discussions over stealth, DeadEyes and DJ's and Malicious Backstabs. Everything got nerfed at some point, some way. Just like everyone else, damage of all skills were capped at modifier 2.4 (?). Pretty much every skill in the game got nerfed by around 33%. Worth mentioning that this was the second time Thieves auto attack got nerfed past 2 years.Due the new policy over soft-CC's and Hard CC's, some skills got nerfed harder. hard CC's no longer deal proper damage and other skills like Pulmonary Impact are nearly useless right now.TL:DR: Dagger is suffering from damage insufficiency.People are tired of Sword/Dagger.New builds appeared but got nerfed due to complaints.

Thief is already a counter to other thieves. Adding reveal would be just a solution for lazy thieves. Btw, people need to stop making complaints regarding stealth coming for WvW.This is just stupid. What is the player on stealth doing that contributes for the game mode? Is he killing players? Scouting? Taking down gates? "Oh but the thief running away on stealth is annoying". No one cares if player X or Y is annoying. Unless the player on stealth can take down a tower by himself no one should care about what you are doing. And if thieve are really killing lords by themselves using stealth, the one that needs a revealed skill are the NPCs, not other thieves.

What gives, someone is already asking for nerfs for thief.

Mind me. This game can't really be placed in an excel table for balance changes.

Guess thieves holidays are over then. Back to normal.

This seens unnecessary. You are just forcing thieves to go back to blinding powder at this point.

Except the community is clearly not fine on having a stealth-based class being good at 1v1.I mean.... this thread. Thief is already the most complained class of the game when they have close to nil duelist capability and overall damage.Plus... think about Mirages. What happened the last time we had a fast class that was also good at 1x1? Hint: Mirages had portal nerfed first. By design, we can't have a class that can roam and 1x1 at the same time. The problem that meanwhile classes like Mirage and Herald had their movement nerfed first to keep their damage, the thief always has their damage nerfed and keep their movement. This is a design decision at this point.

Healing is definitely not something that people bother outside strike missions and raids. But keep in mind that you can play support builds on GW2.And by that I mean Boon support.Want to contribute crazily to any team? Get a build that share as much as boons as you can, specially Might, fury, alacrity, and quickness.\ Some common examples: Boon HeraldAlacrity RenegadeHeal Renegade Boon Support Chronomancer Heal DruidQuickness FireBrand When outside T3, T4 Fractals, Raids and harder Strike Missions you will find out that healing is mostly optional, just change your gear for something more offensive and focus on sharing boons.

I guess Shadow Art's managed to hide from ArenaNet this time. LoL at headshot 2 seconds stun at PvE. I am a little sad that PI got nerfed again tough. This skill already cannot crit, going from 2 to 0.75 is just sad.At least keep it at 1.2 or 1.0

The funniest fact is that stealth has such a heavy utility tax in Mesmer and Thief classes that if they remove the mechanic they would make both classes insanely broken due to balance compensation. But alas, people that don't even PvP prefer to complain about what they can't see instead of what actually kills then.

Though I do find the idea of thief receiving a buff being funny, I do agree that they should reduce the cooldown of Improvisation as QoL change. Frankly speaking, it doesn't even make sense for this skill to have an internal cooldown anymore. Sword no longer reset cooldown of steal.

Sadly, steal is a CC, ranged, instant, teleport, remove boons, grant boons, a bundle skill, condi damage and power damage (albeit no critical) and heals.Plus swipe is everything above unblockable, despite half the range. I don't really believe they were talking about steal there, but it's undeniable that the hat fits.

I blame Sindrener. It just works

The whole trickery or no trickery heavily depends on weapon set.Some weapon sets are initiative hungry and it's near impossible to play properly without trickery.D/P for example, can't be used for stealth stacking without the extra initiative. Rifle, on the other hand, is not that initiative heavy. It's totally viable to play non-trickery-DE builds.

Coming from a Thief, headshot tends to fail a lot, especially when kitting is possible. At PvP you can literally hide behind something and overload. WvW is trickier because there is more open space, but you can always trick the thief to fight near trees or walls. As any ranged skill, HS don't cross walls and objects. The second choice is merely holding up overload for when the thief changes to Shortbow. You can also try to use them while they are on stealth if you are comfortable hitting invisible targets since most thieves won't break an opportunity to use a stealth skill to headshot you. Lastly, HS doesn't deal actual damage, if they start HS spamming you, just auto attack the thief. Not only you win the exchange but the thief will waste his initiative for nothing.

The catch about playing gold2 and 3 is to make decisions that make the difference.Basically, try to aim for moves that can create momentum for your team. Thief can technically drag a game for as long they want by just decapping everything and spreading the enemy team. Bid for time and seek opportunities. All that said, yes. Thief is an annoying class to climb to gold. Strategy means nothing when your teammates die in 5 seconds on every team fight.

The problem is indeed, not with a vault.The problem is how a staff thief connects one dodge to another and never stop. I am fine with thieves spamming Dodge + Debilitating Arc if they need to get more defensive, plus they still have blind with Dust Strike. There is no need for Vault to be a dodge as well.The thief must decide between playing more offensive or more defensive. Vault is an offensive skill, there is no need to have dodge frames. I can get behind those two suggestions. Tough I would reduce the cooldown of venons if they get less stacks.Or perhaps adding charges with long cooldowns? Also + 1 for the quickpocket idea.