saerni.2584

The thing that gets me in these discussions is everyone always wants to nerf things in SA that have nothing to do with permastealth gameplay. People usually also come up with convoluted (unimplementable) suggestions about stealth in general (new kinds of pseudo-stealth, artificial limits on overall stealth duration, removing stealth entirely, stealth revealing based on duration, for example) when the issue is quite obvious and simple. Dagger-Pistol stealth combo with Smoke field and Heartseeker leaps through it (1) cost a lot of initiative, and (2) have a stealth duration per leap that isn't affected by Shadow Arts stealth duration bonus. That means that the thief using this combo can only maintain permanent stealth by using https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shadow's_Rejuvenation or using a large number of stealth utilities that limit their other utility (I'd still say that without SR a thief will be unable to effectively maintain permastealth while being a credible threat). Now, that basically means "how do we nerf SR (while not overly hurting thief)" is the only applicable question people should be discussing. But that is almost never the discussion for some reason. A lot of people get heated and accuse thieves of being biased when the thieves responding are skeptical of "remove SA, delete stealth, delete thief" flavor of the week (although those ideas are poorly thought out). And then there are the people who don't mind the "remove SA" type discussion as long as their preferred thief build is buffed to "compensate" (even if their build was already ok and not running SA anyway). You have one problem with SR. That's the initiative regeneration in stealth. It's a huge bonus. The utility signet adds 1 initiative every 10 seconds. SR adds 1 every 3 seconds. That's a 33% buff to base initiative regeneration in stealth. Effectively, a 33% buff to all weapon cooldowns (which means 33% more skills can be used over time). That's why I'd suggested in the past making SR's initiative regeneration on initially entering stealth and on landing a stealth attack. You'd get more initiative than currently possible by going into stealth and immediately leaving stealth by landing stealth attacks. But you wouldn't camp stealth. Camping stealth would get you 1 initiative until you attacked. It's a simple and elegant solution that neither nerfs SR (it can perform on par in non-permastealth gameplay) nor allows permastealth gameplay to persist. I offer this up for consideration because these massive threads can't pressure Anet to do anything if they don't advocate for concrete and manageable balance changes. No new system, just a straight forward change using already existing mechanics on other traits currently in the game.

Im saying you lack the expertise to holistically balance Thief. That thread represents looking at SA, taking the problematic parts out and, yes, buffing other aspects of thief to compensate and improve the balance. The suggestions in this thread are unimplementable, unbalanced, not well thought through, and often self-contradictory.

If you browse the thief forums you'll see a number of suggestions for balance that include nerfs to SA. For example:

Most condi can only "burst you" if you don't have any cleanse. Which is the same as complaining about power damage while not wearing armor. Block, evade are how all damage is avoided. Cleanse is mitigation (like armor) meaning it doesn't avoid all damage. And to be viable (condi should be viable) it needs to do appreciable damage. The argument that condi should do more damage over time misses that this already happens for balanced builds. Condi only outshines power against people with no cleanse. I have little problem against condi builds (even with moderate cleanse) because I use active mitigation.

One place for Invigorating Precision in WvW is against tanky necro. It's not always necessary but a lot of necros like that will face tank because they don't feel like it's necessary (landing their hits is better use of their focus). You can CS/Tr/DE and just burn them down using M7. But as you said the method doesn't really work outside of specific 1v1 scenarios and you are better off 95% of the time using different methods.

To be fair, if their home capper went mid then your team was 4v5 at mid. Assuming someone on your team was low that extra person can tip the scales hard and snowball into a hard wipe. That said, if your entire team was partially wiped before you finished capping home and you had to rotate far to decap because joining mid was futile...I don't see how anyone could reasonably blame you for that situation. I think teams should really focus more (over complaining a thief is 'bad') on figuring out who is their biggest threat/problem and then asking the thief/roamer to +1 target that person first. If a team doesn't want the thief to just decap it helps to direct them to a target. If I have to spend precious time figuring it out (staying in a team fight) then that is more time for them to force me to disengage and less time for me to focus on map control (decap). Sure, I can probably figure it out as an experienced player but not every thief will be in that headspace (especially since people have drilled "decap" into their brains as the only role for thief in conquest).

Those ideas, especially zero cooldown on Mark, couldn't be implemented because of all the "on Steal" traits. Unless you added internal cooldowns to everything (which would likely tend to make the traits unreliable): You'd be able to permastealth just by rotating Mark on a target. You'd have 100% Fury/Might/Swiftness. You'd have infinite initiative. Your ability to poison and bleed a target with just Mark at 1500 range would be limitless. Now, I totally get the frustration of needing to build malice. You either need to use piercing attacks or otherwise ensure you hit your specific target to build malice. If you don't you can't get stealth from your F2 or extra initiative/boons from M7. Other people, geometry, or even random obstructed bugs can make things just not work. And in PvE there are bosses that just don't work with Mark because the obstructed bug prevents you from doing your damage rotation (Octovine is a classic example). But those bugs don't justify anything. Anet should fix the bugs. That's a much more simple and reasonable ask. You'd need to rebalance the entire Thief profession otherwise—not going to happen.

I was once asked to decap home while I had literally just decapped far. My brief response in chat was to ask how they expected me to be in two places at the same time.

Probably the "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" crowd. At least trapper DH is glassy to do their damage. And if you force them to use traps to stealth defensively they lose a lot of their offensive pressure from the traps. Yeah they can be a pain but that's more about using invuln to cover themselves so they can drop another trap and disappear.

And this is literally something everyone can get behind. Thieves do fight other thieves. The de-sync issue impacts everyone negatively. Unfortunately, it seems like something that doesn't happen consistently, meaning the cause is probably complex or unsolvable. I wish them luck but solving a technical issue like this may just be beyond their (or anyone's) capability.

There are a number of profession builds now that closely match thief in mobility. Sure, they don't all have teleport but even the ones without teleport tend to keep up pretty well. Lots of people who think thief is a mobility god in a league of its own have clearly never been chased down by mobility oriented builds for Ranger or Engineer. Willbender (depending on how it ends up post balancing) could provide some of the same based on the idea of a ninja guardian. But it depends also on players having the mentality required to go hard in on mobility and not just assuming they can drop other guardian teleports because they got more mobility as baseline. Like, thief can't just drop Shadowstep or Shortbow (even neutered) just because of the 1200 range core Steal. I agree with your general point that it isn't so much a question of thief's balance but a question of what other professions can do. At least with Willbender the open question is whether a specialization designed for mobility (closer in role to thief) is a play style guardians want, or that can be fit into the rest of the guardian profession without sacrificing damage or some other critical aspect that makes them worse than thief in that role. It's not impossible to imagine. Soulbeast and Holo can both be super mobile and excellent +1. There's more but those two come to mind.

Well all I've learned so far is people really don't understand Shadow Arts all that well and @bluri.2653 is apparently "Big Daddy." Thanks @Crab Fear.1624 for that lol. Making Shadow's Rejuvenation only regen initiative on entering stealth would address 90% of the issues people have with fighting SA D/P thief builds. But people always flail around calling to remove life steal or blinds (which require active gameplay) or calling for nerfs to stealth duration bonuses (when those don't even apply to the smoke leap finisher combo responsible for unhealthy stealth uptime) or saying things like Rending Shade shouldn't exist (when it's the alternative to blind on entering stealth or aforementioned initiative regen traits, aka the traits most people take). Or they call for nerfs to skills on less played specializations because they think the skill must be OP (ie removing Shadow Meld because apparently we haven't been talking about D/P Daredevil which doesn't have Shadow Meld). ... SMH

All he was trying to do was goad you into over committing. It is usually a tactic employed by tanky people who plan on holding out until they get some help from an ally to secure the kill (or otherwise prey on weaker skilled players who can't keep up with the sustain). The block whisper combo is just what he resorted to after the emote spamming failed to get the results he wanted. The only "rule" of wvw here is "players are only human and manipulating them into making a mistake is always an option."

Must not have been hitting the thief then. What a talented group of rangers.

I like the patch. It brought damage down and, sure, there are outliers on sustain or damage but that's not a problem with the patch just the sustained attention to balance (much more focus on EoD development). No patch can be perfect and I agree with the direction the patch brought us in.

Well the short answer to part of what you said is...you can't win because people will always blame the thief to cover their own shortcomings. The longer answer is that you need to focus both on your mechanical skills (reaction time, execution of skills and combos, decisions in a fight) and your map awareness (sometimes called rotational skill). The latter meaning you are constantly checking the map and then making the best possible moved based on what you see. In a fight you also need to decide who to target. You can choose the enemy's lowest HP person. Or you can choose a high damage target to get their focus off of one of your team's people. Or you can focus their healer to break the sustain of their team. It depends on a lot of different factors that can change at a moments notice. Sometimes people actually call targets but half of the time those calls can be wrong. Learn which ones are the right ones and don't just blindly trust the target call someone made is the right one (even so don't totally ignore them as even a relatively bad call, if followed, may work out well enough). In terms of rotation you need to keep an eye out for openings to decap. You also need to watch for +1s you can take. Some +1s are bad ideas because that player is actually stalling multiple people and you are better off helping your mid fighters 4v3. Going into team fights isn't bad as long as you treat it as an opportunity to +1 and then decap or +1 elsewhere. The longer you try to sustain a team fight the fewer escape options (cooldowns) you will have and you become more and more a free kill. How long you sustain in a team fight is a matter also of skill, so in silver you may want to focus more on decap and helping +1 your team's defenders on a node.

Do you have a total of 90 games or more?

Well, to be fair Meld with Shadows complicates a lot here because now we are talking about two traits. Replacing that bonus duration would require a significant rework to several other traits because it is factored into the balance decisions about the durations of stealth on X (such as stealth on dodge and stealth on heal). I guess my practical point here is that we need to be clear on exactly what traits you think are bad and what to replace them with (which is highly unlikely to happen but that's another topic). Stealth isn't the problem. Duration is the problem. However, because the interaction between initiative regen in stealth and combo fields from offhand pistol combined with leap finishers is so central to those durations, trimming miscellaneous durations such as removing stealth on heal won't actually make a major balance shift. Regardless, I think my point about Smoke Screen stands. It doesn't have excessive duration relative to cooldown. It provides a limited area of defense but can be played around. It is a support skill and we should want more support skills on thief rather than fewer (which I think you'd agree with in general given your original suggestion around what Shadow Arts "should" be doing).

How can you say only nerfing skills benefits the thief? You didn't offer up any suggestions for improvements to "support" and, as I pointed out, actually nerfed what is actually quite a strong support skill. It's a field skill. It can provide those blind and projectile based advantages to your entire team. That's support. It doesn't pulse damage (unless you count a trait interaction to pulse a minor life siphon once per second). The cooldown for Smoke Screen was even nerfed in WvW and sPvP to 45 seconds during the February patch that set up the current meta. So this isn't some kind of invulnerability skill that is constantly up or is out of line with the meta. It's also funny to see people randomly declaring it OP when the popular builds don't even use it. And you should reconsider complaining about stealth. Shadow Arts is a stealth focused specialization. Thieves have been suggesting ways to make it more active versus passive for years. But, even so the stealth on heal is super short duration by itself, turning it into a detargeting and minor repositioning opportunity. You haven't suggested changes that would accomplish anything positive, rather the only thing you've suggested is nerfs. Btw, Concealing Restoration is 1/2 second duration in sPvP, not 1.5.

Interesting how "make the trait line more support" involves only nerfs and removing a skill that the thief can actually use to support their team by blocking projectiles, blinding, and applying AoE stealth through blast finishers. Oh, because it's not boon support or heals it's not a valid form of support? Or just because it's thief? Yeah...probably that.

Target painters are better than target painters traps. Instantly accessible and work better imo. Don't worry about confusion reactions on the forums. There's nothing to be gained from such indicators when the only thing you can actually react to are posts. The best advice I can give anyone when fighting anyone is 1) build your profession to kite out an opponent, 2) have both melee and ranged burst options (or really good mobility), 3) have at least one ability you can use to escape a major burst. Stealth is a repositioning tool. You need to retreat when they stealth and force them to chase you. If you have a painter you can hard counter them if they are over reliant on stealth. If they still beat you with the painter on them there is a skill level difference and you won't be winning that fight regardless of profession.

There was an issue with the beta where some accounts weren't properly placed. You can select a world from the list on the Beta tab if you were misplaced. Any attempt to join wvw without making a selection will result in an error message.

Elementalist in general is a "spam" class in the sense that they have a lot of skills and sustain (healing, evading, block//reflect/invuln, as well as damage output in general) is based on rotating through them as much as possible. What you have as a thief is a lot of potential interrupts—on steal, offhand pistol, even a well timed choking gas. You don't need to interrupt very much. Just enough that the weaver is going to be missing key skills. Then you can focus on bringing more damage into them, again it's nice if you can mix in an interrupt to keep them off kilter. Of course don't just spam yourself because then it's you out of initiative. It's a +1 so how much you have to kite out the weaver depends on the situation when you arrive. Is your ally almost dead? Or is it a stalemate health wise? If the weaver is better than your ally you might be peeling the weaver off your ally to give them the chance to recover. But it's also a +1. If you are sticking around to essentially 1v1 the enemy you might be more effective elsewhere.

That's a lot to do in the timer for portal. I saw a thief hiding in Osprey's recently and they sat around for 20 minutes or so. I scouted and made sure there weren't enemies coming to take a portal. Eventually they got bored and left the keep (visually jumped out and stayed too long outside keep to have a portal back inside). Portal into keeps are not really the biggest issue with permastealth gameplay. Imo the biggest issue is that it is entirely safe and boring to fight against.

Thief is inherently brittle without access to stealth (SA builds), evade (Daredevil builds), usually combined with some kind of mobility (teleport on weapon skills, teleports on utilities, dash/withdraw, Shortbow 5, Dagger Storm, etc). There's also the use of blind to avoid being hit, which thief has plenty of access to through traits, utilities, and weapon skills. That's a lot so I can see why people have difficulty accepting that thief without those is brittle. I think there's two definitions of brittle being used here. One is more general survivability. At which, of course, thief excels. If escaping from a situation that would have killed anyone else is the measure then thief is, to borrow the popular ranking system, S-tier. The other definition is more nuanced because it cares more about overall fight presence (ability to stay in a fight without needing to disengage) and ability to go toe-to-toe (fighting on point to hold a point from being taken. The later is not usually considered a thief "role" precisely because Stealth is such a disadvantage when it comes to capture point contribution. Thief doesn't defend and uses stealth to slip away to decap, as a rule. Similar is the rule that the thief shouldn't stay in team fights longer than necessary to help secure a kill or two before again slipping away to deal with decap or roaming into a +1. A thief who nevertheless tries to defend a point or sticks to Team fights either has a disadvantage (running away won't defend the point or help their team) or has to take a off-meta approach to contribute effectively. That tends to make thief more B-tier in terms of that definition/understanding of brittle. As an aside, skill factors in a lot here so you can potentially make some of those plays despite being at a disadvantage if you know how to play around your opponent. We will have to see how this opens up with EoD. Specter may show how a thief who remains in a support role for team fights has less personal survivability despite massive healing and barrier potential. And it may show how, if you give thief barrier and healing, thief can then compete in defensive plays using mobility to quickly defend points while waiting for backup.