Leo Schrodingers Cat.2497

It made sense at launch. It prevented people with teleports from getting to sections other players could not reach in competitive modes. It also stopped issues with players going out of bounds. And breaking dungeons and raids, which was what thief was really good at for speed runners in fractals and dungeons. Depending on how they coded it. They aren't going to remove that due to how many game modes depends on it when you don't have mounts or gliders.

Anet nerfed the dagger mainhand needlessly to try and make thief use other weapons, instead of bringing the other weapons up to snuff. They then nerfed autoattack damage to try and make thief use the skills more often when the skills were either too expensive to spam or entirely situational.

I mean its a start. Kinda nice they finally realized that the top percent is not who you balance to.

Hopefully thief gets back to what they were

No. Just improve pvp mode rewards. Cuz it takes over twenty weeks still for legendary armor that was barely given a care. But 6 or 8 weeks for raid armor.

I don't see a reason to rework them other than tweek init costs. My only gripe is the reflect is on an Auto Attack Chain instead of just being available as a weapon skill. I would honestly prefer it having positions swapped with weakening charge so you can deal with the annoying rangers spamming bows and engies. It would make a better pvp weapon and visually flow better. Staff 3 is an escape jail card. Its if you get trapped or immobilized. Which makes it useful as ANETs "grandmaster" wisdom was to punish thieves for using a trait by locking out stamina regen for a few seconds. And remove the escape from acrobatics. If you want to rework it, tweak its init cost. Or leave it as it is and transform the attack into a low damage weak knock back or interrupt, with the escape for putting distance between you and the enemy to reset a bad engagement. Or to stop channeling attacks that would continue going. Staff 4 has its use as well. And for the most part it is fine. It lends to staffs general tankyness by outright denying damage by causing blinds. I would -maybe- lower the init cost and damage to make it spammable for dealing with attacks that have long channels that can't be escaped outside of burning all your dodges or blocking LoS . Alternatively... Make it a conic smoke field. The issue isn't really the staff outside init cost. Its other professions which have all the tools in the world.

Nah... Even sub mmos charge you for that

I wanted a support spec for thief... In the end I don't care for it. It has so many fundamental problems that it just feels aweful.

That would lead to a whole mess of issues. A better solution would br simply to remove the dependency of having constant uptime on all boons. And instead adjust the raids or PVE combat to force more pressure onto individual player responsibility. Know the class. Not the rotation.

Welp the thief one raised my blood pressure. Stealth is a major part of our survivability. And you basically said... Lets limit the access thief as to stealth, to force them to fight. Then give them tools for stealth that they can barely access now for their survival. Against crap... That out performs thief on every level. Then we gotta be stuck with this bs for another three months. HOPING TO GOD you finally do something about EVERYTHING thief players have been screaming about. How about returning init regen back to half a second? So we can actually use our skills in drawn out fights? How about improving acrobatics so there's a reason to take it beyond sword damage buff? How about finally addressing our dependency on trickery. Or getting rid of that REDICULOUS backstab cool down. Instead. We get several builds crippled heavily because the mechanic we depend on is frustrating to other players, when the nerfs and changes increasingly made the dang profession more frustrating to play forcing us into that playstyle in the first place. Sure it might seem unreasonable for me to be infuriated. But I had to put up with this bs since HoTs! The stupid profession only got throne a bone maybe once or twice since 2012, while all the changes were to "Encourage a different behavior" by constantly applying nerfs rather than bringing those other tools up.

The keyword is "You say that like". Reality is, every thief eventually gets to this point. The problem is, that over time your kit fell behind and theirs only improved. Timing counter attacks against other players skills? Yeah. Thats how thief USED TO WORK. You had burst damage which let you punish. Thief was a single target duelest. And it used to be the best at it. Now you don't have that massive burst. You don't have the init to stay in a prolonged fight. Hell, acrobatics used to be good back when cats grace refunded half of core thief's stamina while providing vigor. So core thief could actually go blow for blow with a warrior and stay on top of them. Init regen used to be faster, so you could blow up mes's phantasms to reduce their damage on you temporarily and get back to them. You can't pressure as well anymore. They have easy access to crap like stability, protection, aegis, regen, invulnerability. Spammable AOEs to zone you out, or blow you up. And the same people who can't seem to figure out that the easiest way to stop a thief isn't reveal - complain causing more and more nerfs to get stacked on the profession. Cuz reveal isn't that big of an issue. Its just DO SOMETHING. Anything than just stand there waiting for the thief to be visible again. The most infuriating part? I have to put more effort into this profession to take out another player than they do for me. And now if you're not a deadeye, they can eat a backstab without worry, and faceroll the keyboard to burst you dead. If you're not a specter the survivability you used to have has been sliced in half and set on fire.

They guttered daggers auto-chain saying bit was something like 16% damage reduction. But its only 16 if you could land the last hit of the full chain. In reality the damage was much worse, nearly thirty percent, as you realistically will only land one or two on another player. Their reason was thiefs relied too much on the auto attack and wanted them to use their weapon skills more. Meanwhile... They did nothing to encourage us to use the weapon skills more which is still on a tight resource. Never mind that most of thiefs weapon skills on melee weapons ARE NOT designed for damage. I highly doubt they are going to do anything reasonable or kind.

You say that like its a simple solution. It is against someone that didn't know how to deal with a thief. Against someone with more than two brain cells to rub together, this advice is meaningless. Considering that you have a heavily neutered kit, going against someone with more tools to deal with you than just reveal. And access to their entire hotbar without fear of global cooldowns getting in the way Honestly. Im near the point of just quiting. As they feel its fine to make crippling changes and address it three or more months later.

Oh joy... 3 more months of my thief being in a janky state. And unable to do anything better than other professions.

Anet has been slowly murdering thief. So... Go back to sleep.

Not well I'd imagine. It offsets the cost by refunding three. But the move is slow and difficult to land on a player. Nevermind easily dodged or interrupted The CDR loss is more painful than the benefit of the init regen. Since we no longer have stealth on steal. It could've had synchronization with acrobatics on a DD... Since Acro gives the buff for stamina regen. Leap finishers on the dodge for stealth which can be done with smoke from dagger pistol. But acro is hot garbage to sacrifice a full trait. And because trickery is always taken, we don't really have a choice anyways.

3/10 Thief changes primarily. The thief changes would be great... if the the insurnumberable problems that we've been complaining about had gotten fixed first. Right now? It doesn't help in the slightest.

I don't know dude. The way things went with this patch? I'll touch it with the hope that it is better than I thought. If not. Im not touching the game till the next major balance patch.

It's nice to see buffs for once... and more buffs than thief has seen in a life time. But I'm still annoyed that they won't fix some of the more core issues.

Guardian. Guardian practically gives up nothing, in comparison to what they gain upon swapping to an Elite Spec.

Would be excited bout this as a Thief main if my initiative costs and regen still weren't awful enough to force me permanently into taking trickery for all modes. Any ETA on that? Or am I just going to wait till the game's end of run time? I got a weapon skill that costs 8 init out of a base pool of 12, and some skills that costs 4 and even 5! That pool only regenerates 1 every second, and the traits that're supposed to offset this don't do crap. I can be SOLed for just pressing two buttons against a class that can press all five, and two seconds later do it over again. And if I only got two init when I swap weapons, it's still two init! I gotta fight crap that can swap weapons or elements and have fresh skills ready to go!

I use it. One of the few aggressive utilities you got.

It was more than that back then. Every class could do a bit of everything so you wouldn't need tanks or healers. Every class was also supposed to be good at specific things and weak in some areas. That got lost. Thief was supposed to be a strong 1v1 duelist with high risks and rewards. It got shafted hard into a +1 meme where it gets out bursted by every class. And now is expected to be a heal bot for one dude when they get a support spec.

Stealth will now apply faerie fire to thief, rendering stealth moot.

Eh. I much prefer the days when thief was closer to the jungler of LoL and Dota. Where you can gank an on going fight. But your primary roles was more than that. Your goals were to slow down the enemy's team progress by killing players whom were alone and out of position. Destroy criticial targets in team fights then scurry off to capture something. Lead players on a chase. Right now? sPvP thief can barely hold up in a fight. So you're more harassment than anything. Contest zones if you can't duel the target till help arrives. Contest the artifact if you can't capture it due to how hard you ised to be to pin and kill.