Leo Schrodingers Cat.2497

I don't think acrobatics is garbage. The problem is thief generally only has one trait line free to select from. Which anet pretty much made clear they have no intention of fixing. And nine times out of ten... You're going to go for damage. The exception is core with sword.

Welcome to thief. Here's your salt shaker. There's really nothing you can do about it. Thiefs underwater toolkit generally sucks for condition based builds. And one of the heaviest design flaws for specter is how little it helps weapons other than scepter. Shroud has little to offer for it to be reliable in the water other than as a vibe mode for when you wait for initiative to regen or go heal someone If you have to go under water. Switch to something else.

If they refuse to get rid of the single target nature of this build. Then I can agree that anti-frustration measures needs to be added. Though rather than just making it health bars. Add in some additional options that allows the player to fine-grain control these elements. For example... the easiest way the thief can target a player is to manually click on their party icon. Which is fine and dandy... unless the player is on high resolutions then it's a large travel distance. I'm playing on Super Ultra Wide resolutions, so the party icons are almost an entire foot and a half away from the center of my screen. Instead the player should be given the option to have icons appear in certain circumstances over the other players heads. Clicking those icons takes priority over the other clickable of combat, letting the thief more easily select someone. These conditions should be something the player can set. For example, below a certain threshold of health. These are party members. Or they are dying. I still would rather them remove the need to singularly target someone, as unless that functionality is insanely powerful, it will not compete with other specs who can do more with less effort.

Its usually hate for the class. The class fights dirty and does things that other classes cannot at the trade off for being unable to do things most classes can. Additionally requiring more effort from the player. It forced players to be careful in pvp when they were traveling alone, because the thief's high mobility and ability to counter-act most kits via blinds and interrupts close to launch allowed them to pick off players whom were alone. But because the thought process many have is they associate thief with other MMOs rogues rather than letting it be its own thing. Or taking the time to play the class and understand why it is the way it is. Additionally, many specs don't have the same weaknesses that thief was designed to exploit anylonger... so a good portion of thief's kit is obsolete. So... it went from a high-risk but powerful duelist at launch. To a high-risk, high-effort, low-reward punching bag.

I don't care... Because I have little intentions on touching the spec for a very long time after I complete the collection. Because apparently they think the auto attack chain is the only reason why this spec isn't terribly fun to play. It will probably be another year before specter becomes worthwhile as support. And never for anet to fix any underlying issues of thief rather than nerfing.

I should note here the context behind the link you posted. The DPS listed on snowcrows is the result of having friends. Additionally, the Specter has a very long ramp up time making it worthless for any fights that have a lot of movement, burst phases, or need for awareness. The primary source of damage comes from torment. If the boss moves, thief loses a large source of damage The average player will reach roughly 80% of the max value consistently in actual play without moving on power. While moving to avoid mechanics you can expect 60-70. But with specter it can be worse. The specter relies on giving barrier to allies to generate venom. Additionally, they need to trigger their venom utils for the damage too, which has a short enough range to miss

You might complain about people in WvW getting PvE items... Except that most of the legendaries requires you to do PvE kitten, as there's no way to get them from exclusively WvW. Additionally. The PvP legendary armors and equipment is more time consuming and frustrating to get than the PvE legendaries respectively. PvE legendary armor for example takes roughly 12 weeks for a full set. Where WvW takes nearly 22 weeks minimum with significantly less rewards in gold and mats to assist, unless they have been playing wvw long enough to quickly max out a reward pips. Even then, the pvp legendary armors have barely made it on the "give a dang" list as they have less visual interest than the PvE counterpart. Thats also not considering the elements that can further delay the acquisition of the WvW armor which still needs the gift of battle anyways. The legendary back piece takes nearly 12 weeks for wvw, where it can be done in a day for pve Tldr: I think you're fine suffering three days of two hour dives to get your gift of battle.

I fail to see the game breaking nature of thiefs stooen skills. When they have only two rare but powerful items that almost never show up in pve. Consume ecto, for all boons. Can't call it powerful because thief has almost no boon generation. And Whirlaxe. Solid dps. Great combo with smoke in pvp.

There was a reason why GW2 avoided single target supports. The primary reason was to avoid fighting the UI. The second reason was so a pkayer didn't have to stop everything they were doing to find and support one person that could be doing god knows what. So... I would have preferred if they kept the need to target an ally out of the equation. This single target mess basically prevents the specter from seriously competing for support positions. Additionally, I still don't see the specter taking a support position in raids. It can only provide alacrity consistently for a pretty paultry 25k-29k damage where other support specs provide much more. Every other point though, I agree with

I don't think the game counts them as shadow steps. None of the shadow arts abilities activates correctly with them. Nor does the one specter trait. If that is a bug... You probably won't ever see it fixed. Cuz there's still plenty of bugs in thief thats been known... But never touched for years

Specter still isn't very fun to play for me. It holds no synergy with other weapons. You pretty much have to go full sinister if you want to do any meaningful damage... as taking ritualist causes you to struggle badly in the time attack missions. Scepter Pistol is it's only cleaving option, but the forced movement makes it pretty impractical. The 2 skill is still relatively useless for the initiative cost, low damage, and might gen. Scepter/Dagger 3 skill is probably the most reliable item in the kit... but it gets intercepted by pretty much everything but your intended target. So giving it pierce would be nice...

I'm more curious about who the heck thought it was a good idea to require this crap for the ascended gear. 150 notes for a friggen sigil. On top of that, crafting exotics barely rewards you with anything worth while. This bs isn't what I would call fun.

I'd say take Ritualist. Honestly, the healing mechanic in the scepter is terrible. Why the hell should I have to stop everything I am doing to lock onto a player with all sorts of crap going on and heal them. When someone else can throw down a healing field and do the job better. And yes, I've actually bothered with using the stupid healing mechanic, and it's not worth the trouble due to the misclicks, the incorrect targeting, and what have you. Consume Shadows is all you need. As long as you're generating torment, you can have a pretty quick uptime on it. Or till Anet decides to suck even more joy out of this profession...

Still annoys me to no end that they asked for feed back. Then seemed to just flat out ignore the feed back.

I've been trying to make this spec work for me. After faffing about with it... it's not horrible after having beta and my first few hours in EoD to get used to it (along with manually targeting players or friendly NPCs)... but it just feels extremely mediocre for me in PvE. Haven't tried PvP, don't plan on it after the recent patch notes. I tried running without Trickery to try and pull in some additional help from Shadow Arts and Deadly Arts. It just doesn't seem to cut it since you blast through your Init pool quickly. But your Shroud abilities don't do as much damage or activates too slowly (that enemies will move before the 2 and 3 actually triggers -why should I stand still at all-... or the skill 5 takes 5 years of sundays to go off.) Specter/pistol seems to feel like it puts in more work than Scepter/dagger. Though Endless Night lost the functionality that made it more interesting (letting you switch targets and drag the beam across a wave of enemies). I'm trying out ritualist equipment... not a full set yet due to how expensive this gear is. Took me from 300g down to 150 just to get a full armor set. It still feels like it takes too long to kill normal mobs compared to just rolling through with Core, Daredevil, or Deadeye. Have yall found a way to make it work for you yet? This is more of a nitpick... but it also seems like the wells are bugged for some reason. As they can fail to cast. They won't go on full cool down. But it's still rather annoying ontop of a delayed cast that feels too long.

I love the class, even though I hate every unjustified nerf Anet does. I've been playing the class for so long, it's hard for me to enjoy the others. Even though after touching them... objectively they are better than thief now.

I give it a week.

Holy crap... what the heck is that nerf. I get when you have a spec dedicated to healing... you want to make them useful. But this game was supposed to not need healers.

My experience? Its pretty awful. It comes down to the issue that you're fighting against the UU and Mechanics. While it works well for other MMOs, things move extremely quickly in GW2 comparatively that misclicking an ally punishes you. If you have a large monitor, the position of the party UI punishes you for travel time. If you have keybinds for specific players, it punishes you cuz how are you going to know if this guy is 1, 2, 3 or 4. If your ally runs from you, it punishes you. Id rather it be a targeted AOE rather than me experiencing a frustration thats equivalent to trying to build a tent from the inside.

A 6K Barrier means very little with how quickly it gets slapped off of someone whom doesn't run armor normally, and it is the same problem with shroud. Add as much HP as you want... You're only layering tissue paper. Additionally, while those things you pointed out are good on paper. In Practice they are still worthless due to overly long cast times that suffers the same problem of caltrops (and the same reason its never ran.) And while strength of shadows helps you.. The conditions you can push out aren't exactly stellar. You don't have a wode spread of them. The poison you get doesn't stack, which means you have to flood your bar woth cenom utilities that still needs a rework. Oh.. and your two easily spammed condis are bleed (congrats you might as well drop specter for not using scepter ) and Torment, which torment would have been great... Till it got redesigned to only proc when someone isn't moving.

Its not really counter play. You see a thief running scepter, or any healer, who's out of position and you take them out first. Thats counter play. Specter is actually extremely easy to kill when pressured. And the Shroud might be a second hp bar, but the skills are horrendous. Hincevibe till init restores.

All that feed back from specter, and this is what it lead to? I mean... I guess I'm not touching it on release. Heck, the changes alone looks like you don't want anyone to play this spec. I wasn't expecting the changes to make something genuinely worse than how it started. And as others have mentioned, while you are really shoe horning the specter into a single target healer, you seem to have forgotten the number one mantra of GW2, which was playing the game and not the UI. Well... You have to fight with the UI untop of some other things just to heal someone in PvE. Why would I want a class that can only effectively heal one person with projectiles that can miss or be blocked? When I can throw down a field with another spec and that takes care of it very quickly. And now you're doubling down on a boon that thief benefits poorly from.

Their first mistake was trying to theory craft in fractals, a game mode that most people I encounter - me included, couldn't give a skritts behind about meta. In T4, only a scant few seem to make it an issue.

I think you are making a strawman out of the concerns. It's less of the damage, and more of what does it have to offer that would make it stand out among the AOE heavy support specs.

I don't know about Effective for Willbender and Specter. Willbender had so many delays before their damage actually proced, making the spec pretty useless in my opinion. Specter was just overall unpleasant to play in WvW.