Leo Schrodingers Cat.2497

Warrior and Thief. Warrior because of the whole banner thing. Thief because of the ungodly number of nerfs that relegated the profession to +1 in PvP. Horrendous init costs, and the kittening trickery problem

Evades are usually short lived, finite resources, and prevents the character from doing anything else for the duration. I don't believe there needs to be "Unavoidable" skills when often times thats a long channel skill which ruins specs who rely on dodges instead of sustains and blocks

Thieves and Warriors bros then?

Still a thief. Just don't use specter. Still feels awful to play for me.

Rev gets reduced costs... But we still get to have a skill that destroys the majority of our init pool locking us out of abilities. Seems legit

Ive generally had scorp wire fail me more often than not. Usually by failing to correctly pull.

I'm... Not fully certain if you are yanking my chain Why should they personally list the game's puzzles? They very clearly thought that part of the fun was using the achievement hints to locate each egg. Similar to how it does everything else. And no... They aren't that vague. I found those eggs well before the guides were out. Its a natter of how well do you remember the landmarks. Additionally... They sell an item that does exactly what you want regarding world bosses. It gives you an alert for when a world boss is about to spawn. And you can use it to teleport to the world boss location. Should this be a standard feature? Not really.

Play guardian if you want favoritism. If you want to be ignored, play necro. If you want to be a meme, play ele or warrior. If you want to feel like you're constantly being taken out back and shot in an abusive relationship, play thief.

Better give me a strong buff for that nerf buddy. Cuz thats pretty much half of thiefs kit. Otherwise, shove off.

Thief went untouched. It's nice dodging unnecessary nerfs. It sucks missing some of the buffs others got

Would be nice if they updated the acquisition speed for the two pvps. Makes no sense for them to require more effort. 22 weeks for wvw, vs the 12 for pve

Killed Zhaitan just fine without her flowery behind

Both are pretty heavily desirable in PvE metas. In PvP, both are pretty spooky to deal with. Warriors can get kited to hell, but the better warriors usually know how to make people come to them instead. And when a player has to come to a warrior, they've already messed up. Necro is tanky for a mage due to the shroud. They can put off some serious hate with condi builds. And Reaper is their power option.

It's an interesting concept. I was one of the ones that wanted a support spec for Thief so I was willing to try and like it during beta. Just execution is mediocre, and it has a lot of problems on top of some of the most severe tradeoffs I've seen. Less Initiative to work with, forcing you to take Trickery once again and removing shortbow as a valid option (have fun when half the skills destroys your init). You lose the steal teleport and stolen skills, so mobility and engage takes a dive. You get it back via Wells which shadowsteps... but its using the old shadowstep behavior. So the slightest change in altitude causes it to fail. Additionally, the wells are slow to get out, and they are low on the priority. So low, that they will not pre-empt weapon skills... including the auto attack. Along with some traits now being unusable thanks to the loss of stolen items. Then there are things that are just bad. Like just about everything it does has a long casttime (and tell), making Specter easily interruptible, even in shroud. Most of the influencer videos I've seen talking about the spec, usually don't offer any points of criticism to it. Which I guess is fair given many thieves do that for them already. What's supposed to be your primary support, is only given to you in the form of single target application via weapon skills - and only for a single weapon. So when I say you have to stop what you're doing. I mean you have to stop everything that you're doing to focus on someone. And the effect isn't as strong as a firebrand just dropping an AoE. In general, it doesn't really compete with any of the supports outside of pvp 2v2. Even then... I'd feel you'd be better off with any of the other Elite Specs from thief in that scenario.

It's supposed to be support. but it's pretty terrible at it. You got power damage in shroud, but your cooldowns are so long, building power isn't worth the trouble. Additionally, the Kit does not support other weapons very well, so power is almost unusable in solo play. Your primary support would be from wells. But the only note worthy support functionality you got is Alacrity (doesn't help you personally much, even in shroud), barrier, and rot wellow venom. The Alacrity only comes from the wells, so you have to mass spam wells to keep it up. Healing scaling is garbage, so you're not very good at it beyond giving barrier and using Consuming Shadows. And Rot Wallow Venom only occurs on people you give barrier too. So... with scepter you have to stop what you're doing and target someone. Or use that shadow step trait which I feel like only works half the time. You can give might, but it's not worth the trouble since you can only give it effectively to a single person, and it burns through init. Condi damage is solid, but it ramps up slowly. So you'll feel like you take forever to kill things. Especially since Torment (your primary source of damage) only deals max damage while target is stationary. And you're probably not going to be stationary, so the enemy isn't going to be stationary.

Doubt the community will let it happen. Something something, thief op, something something, nerf now.

I don't know too much about most of the specs. I think Mechanist is currently the well recieved one? Its kit seems to mesh extremely well with everything that Engineer brings with a barely noticable trade off. You just lose your toolbelt skills, but they get replaced by something equally functional. From my experience... Catalyst is... Yeesh. There's very little nice I can say about it. You want to be aurelion sol or Hammerdin, its a good rp spec then. But otherwise its not very functional. Specter. There's at least some nice things I can say about it. But thats a low bar. It's a support spec that appeals to people of standard healers in MMOs, but its bad at it. Its got the nastiest trade off so far, and the gain is purely durability that can be countered easily. Its a departure from GW2s design in a horrendous way making it very akward to play in open world and wvw. Additionally, as a support... It barely competes with the others who can do significantly more without stopping what they are doing. Damage wise, its a struggle if you're solo. The one nice thing I can say... Is its the most durable spec thief has... And thats mostly because they destroyed thiefs major form of self sustain.

An update to Scorpion Wire and Caltrops. Revisit and overhaul of initiative system and costs along with the removal of preparedness. Give every none elite trait line a way to restore init. Making Core Thief more capable of using init skills, and losing some natural generation via elite.

Whoa now, you leave thief out of this. We suffered enough Nerfs, forced build selections, bugs that make things unusable (still not fixed too), and hate over the years. I can't even use more than three weapon skills, shortbow is impossible to use on specter, and half my utilities don't work. Don't take away one of the few good things we still got.

Sure... except once again... it doesn't make sense for their intentions. If something is objectively better, and nerfing it into the ground doesn't stop players from continuing the behavior. It means your kitten design is bad. Going back to thief. For nearly eight years... thief has to take trickery to be competitive with everyone else. Because our initiative cost got increased over the years, but not our ability to regenerate it. Preparedness, boosting init from 12 to 15 so we can actually use at least three abilities instead of two in pvp modes. Keep in mind, that thief's ability to disengage, and survive is their weapon skills. We can't dump entire rotations onto people, we don't have a lot of passive surivivability, and our active survivability is basically a fraction of a second save or suck. With the introduction of Elites, we now effectively have... one free traitline. Trickery, And your Elite Spec. It's been like this for eight friggen years. A problem of their own making. We keep asking for them to fix it. They never do. So then they introduced Specter, saying and I quote "Thief has the least amount of build diversity of all professions." I wonder why. Then they show us Specter. And no wonder thieves are upset. Because they openly acknowledged that Trickery is basically a mainstay to stay competitive. And they give us a spec, that pidgeon holes us even further into taking trickery... by giving us a spec that has three less init as a "trade off". Nevermind that the stolen skills are also a trade off, because it invalidates several traits that depends on them. Now we got a spec... a wonderful spec... that has worse build diversity. Traits that aren't competitive with other options in its own tree. And a reward that's more detriment than boon in the form of a shroud. And half the spec's power being jammed into a weapon no thief asked for. So no... the argument that anet "wants something to be played more" doesn't work here.

I read the patch notes. The half of those patches were in preparation for EoD to make room for the new elite specs which the majority of them turned out rather mediocre or badly executed (despite interesting concepts and changes of pace). Rather than helping out most specs, they were largely nerfs across the board and many of the changes still made absolutely no sense for the reasons they gave. Once again, going into the point of fixing symptoms, and not the problem.

Give me an example. I have not personally seen this once.

Yeeaah, In fact... The only problems thief ever got fixed that was beneficial, was the replacement of traps into Preparations. Which was 7-8 yrs since launch. The traps where completely useless since they covered a tiny rectangular area, and provided very little utility for the thief. Smoke screen was also made better 7 years later. Bug fixes for thief has always been the smashing of beneficial bugs, where bugs that made certain things unreliable or unusable still plague us since launch. A good example is the Scorpion wire which has been unreliable since the beginning of time. And for specter, the regular failure of your wells shadowstep for a small elevation difference. Expect that to be there permanently. I guess you could argue about the deadeye rework. But its not necessarily an improvement over the previous. Outside of all weapons being compatible with malace. The trade off was they nerfed the living hell out of Deadeye's death judgement because people complained about a pure glass build getting one shotted by an attack with four massive tells and ample time to react.

Anet hasn't corrected any balance changes that have placed professions into significantly worse spots through the course of their balance change history. While I can agree that balance changes are delicate, anet historically has been heavy handed. A good example would be thiefs backstab and dagger autos. In response to an unexpected behavior of thief stabbing into a character with protection, the character would lose protection and the still cloaked thief would be able to immediately backstab. The expected behaviors most thieves would have been fine with is that stabbing into protection would reveal them. Instead, the change we got was that we get a CD on backstab (which is an auto) even if we did not make contact... In a game where things move quickly. This CD actually persists even after we are revealed. Thiefs autos historically have hit pretty hard. This is because the majority of our Weapon skills are utility oriented rather than damage and are designed with specific situations in mind. Some weapons do have spamable damage skills that were nerfed with increased init costs... Snd their damage really only shows when the target is at specific health thresholds. Anets reason for nerfing auto attack damage by an effective 33%, (sixteen if you can somehow land the whole kittening chain), was to encourage thief to use their skills more... Skills which are expensive enough that we can only use two or three skills from full init. Keep in mind... That the only realistic damage ability dagger mainhand has... Is Heartseeker, which requires a target to be under a specific threshold of HP for it to be efficient. Instead of fixing the cause of the problem. They tried to fix the symptom. And the symptom did not go away because the cause is still there. I think what you're failing to understand is that people simply do not agree with Anet. It is one thing if Anet provides a reason to their balance changes, the reason matches the issue, and player experience and not what is seen on paper. And the fix is not the symptom but the cause. It is a completely different matter when Anet provides a reason that does not align with what players experience in realistic scenarios. So I can perfectly understand why Ele is calling down the thunder on anet, even though I don't play the class. I can look at it, and see issues.

Daredevil and Core thief with a spear can be pretty spooky too. Only in the sense that its functional. Don't hold your breath. More problems are generally created over balance cycles than ones that are actually solved.