Shroud nerf feels horrible in PVE

[Squeesidhe.4761]

I'm a simple player. I don't pay much attention to numbers or class minutiae. I don't care at all about min/maxing. I settled on Thief because I like its concept and style, and I really feel in love with Specter because I enjoyed how it felt to play. I liked the shadow-magic theme, I enjoyed using the scepter, and Shroud made the class actually viable to play for me. I.E., I wasn't dying to every stupid sand lion. 

 

I just tested my Thief out, doing nothing more than running around Dragon's End fighting a few trash mobs... and it just feels wrong now. Shroud is knocked down by mobs way too quickly, but it takes the same amount of time as far as I can tell to build back up. Reduced shroud impacts not only my defense, but my offense as well. I'm just overall less effective now.

 

But worse than that for me is that the spec and class just isn't as much fun to play as it was yesterday. There's a flow to gameplay that is vital and I don't think Anet considers that fact in these changes, or even understands that this is important. They seem to look at numbers only, but numbers are just one aspect of good game design. 

 

You know, I invested time in this class. I invested money in the Gem store to get skins to make my Thief my own. Gutting the class in such a ham handed, artless, short-sighted way is not cool, to put it mildly. 

 

[Tenal.1546]

What he said.

[ZeroTheRuler.7415]

The irony is that the October 4th patch was a 'WvW/PvP' patch. 

I do high end content (raids/fractals/CMs), but I couldn't agree more with the flow of things in open world content on specter.

Edited October 5, 2022 by ZeroTheRuler.7415
clarity

[Nihlus.9724]

Came here to say this.

 

This has GUTTED specter healing in PvE. Some fights, my Shroud just disappears now. The heals are rinky dink assuming I don't get pulled out of Shroud immediately because of damage. HP Scaling in Shroud should not be below 1.0 IMO. And furthermore, if this patch was for PvP and WvW, why wasn't this change split among game modes? Seriously.

 

And honestly, I don't think Specter was all that hard to kill in PvP and I say that as someone that plays Daredevil in PvP.

 

TL;DR: This was overly nerfed in PvP and needlessly nerfed in PvE.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

I haven't noticed much of a change at all, damage-wise.  I just ran DPS and Alac-Specter through a couple of the map metas for PoF and EoD, as well as a few strikes.  My DPS rotation hasn't been touched, and I'm noticing no difference in performance in that department.

The only thing I do notice is that, while I'm on DPS-Specter, my barrier application isn't as high from Consume Shadows.  Instead of being absolutely massive, it is just mediocre.  Low, sometimes, if I get focused or caught in a lot of AoEs.  Granted, I expected that to be nerfed, because having a spec output 37k DPS while fulling healing the party every 13 seconds was a bit ridiculous.  While playing alac-specter, my group barriers are still absolutely massive.  At the moment my biggest lamentation is that the shadow bar was set to 0.69 instead of 0.75, but that is more of an OCPD thing than anything else.

My biggest gripes with Specter at the moment come from other things.  First, there's no real alternative to Consume Shadows in adept tier.  Consume shadows is both offense and healing at the same time, being far better for group survival than Second Opinion is.  I will still take Second Opinion while alone, however, because I don't want to blow my Shroud for Consume Shadows, and also because Shallow Grave is even worse IMO.  As a general trend, I never go down on Specter while I have sufficient shroud energy.  Either I die with no shroud energy left, or I do not die.  Likewise, I'd much rather have traits that prevent me from going down in the first place.  

My second issue is that Well of Sorrows does far, far too little damage when compared to Caltrops and Thousand Needles.  Well of Sorrows has a perverse design, in that it gets worse the more conditions your enemy has.  It goes down to as little as 5 stacks of torment if your enemy happens to already have bleed, poison, and torment on them.  

[Antycypator.9874]

I always say that if you don't want to die too quickly, then stop using full Viper stats and maybe put some Carrion/Ritualist pieces in your armor.

[MrChatters.9461]

2 hours ago, Antycypator.9874 said:

I always say that if you don't want to die too quickly, then stop using full Viper stats and maybe put some Carrion/Ritualist pieces in your armor.

 

Wait, this is sarcasm isn't it?

[Skyve.6758]

I have a lot of healing pieces and the whole shroud does so little healing now. Did healing specters completely dominate the dungeons or something, like Mechanists? I think not. If the problem was PvP balance, then please return PvE healing to previous levels.

[Squeesidhe.4761]

I checked in with my Necro after this Thief nerf. As Harbinger, she has 40k health and it takes a concentrated mob to even scratch anything off that number. I pop Harbinger shroud not to survive, but when I want to annihilate a group of enemies like John Wick.

 

You know that bridge in the Char civil war area, the one that has like 10 Elites all bunched together? I once stood at one end with my Harbinger and just started taking them out as they all ganged up on me. I ended up killing them - not even moving, just standing in place and taking them out one by one -  and at the end my health bar was the same.  If I tried that with my Specter... LOL

 

Anyway, I hear that Anet has a team specifically assigned to balance, huh? Huh. 

 

 

[Player.2475]

It feels horrible in PvP and WvW as well. You quite literally get hit once or twice in the mid of any of your cast animations and you already lose shroud. 🙂

[Jumpel.3972]

55 minutes ago, Skyve.6758 said:

If the problem was PvP balance, then please return PvE healing to previous levels.

It's actualy not clear if they are able to split shroud health coef between PVP and PVE

Edited October 5, 2022 by Jumpel.3972

[Valisha.8650]

Don't bother, they will keep ruining this game for everyone who isn't firebrand or mechanist.

[Squeesidhe.4761]

2 hours ago, Player.2475 said:

It feels horrible in PvP and WvW as well. You quite literally get hit once or twice in the mid of any of your cast animations and you already lose shroud. 🙂

Noticed that as well. Shroud is gone so fast I was getting killed because I was vulnerable again at the wrong moment when I thought I had the extra health bar. 

[Jugglemonkey.8741]

The thing that makes me laugh is that they didn't fix the tooltip. It shows the old amount, just to taunt us xD

[Sarge shot Grif.6450]

Oh this was a problem in pvp/wvw? BETTER OVER-NERF IT IN EVERYTHING.
Many changes over the last year have pushed me out of thief but specter was the one thing keeping me on it and I legit loved the class.... but now that some pvp/wvw crybabies whined about it I guess we aren't allowed to enjoy anything thief related in any game mode. Anet seems to be trying pretty hard to push people off of gw2 and it's honestly starting to work with me.

[Ashgar.3024]

Use Ritualist's gear even for DPSing, the dps loss versus full vipers is like 5% as the only abilities in our entire kit with any power scaling are shroud 2, shroud 4 and dagger 4 and makes build not completely miserable to play unlike Viper's.

 

If you can't afford that gear mix Carrion and Trailblazers to stay under your tank's toughness (raid only).

 

But yeah the change was pretty heavy handed, should had came alongside a buff/rework of the specter support traits that are currently trash.

Edited October 11, 2022 by Ashgar.3024

[Ashgar.3024]

On 10/5/2022 at 8:42 AM, MrChatters.9461 said:

 

Wait, this is sarcasm isn't it?

 

Full glass viper's bench with 0 incoming damage while hitting an immobile golem.

 

 

Full Ritualist bench that isn't miserable to play from not getting knocked out of shroud by getting sneezed on in a realistic scenario.

 

 

Same but mixing Ritualist and Carrion.

 

Which sounds like the better choice in a REALISTIC raid environement? The 30k health 20k shroud build doing 2k less BENCH dps, or the 14k health 10k shroud one who provides nothing but dps and drops shroud or dies from getting sneezed on cause it doesn't have any built in defenses anymore?

[Vismooth.4128]

3 hours ago, Ashgar.3024 said:

Use Ritualist's gear even for DPSing, the dps loss versus full vipers is like 5% as the only abilities in our entire kit with any power scaling are shroud 2, shroud 4 and dagger 4 and makes build not completely miserable to play unlike Viper's.

 

If you can't afford that gear mix Carrion and Trailblazers to stay under your tank's toughness (raid only).

 

But yeah the change was pretty heavy handed, should had came alongside a buff/rework of the specter support traits that are currently trash.

Don't forget about celestial gear as well. While not as good numerically on stats as carrion or ritualist, it still provides all of the stats relevant for a specter.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

Now you know how it feels to be a Reaper in group content in PvE, and lose your entire shroud from one attack you didn't dodge properly, then lose half your damage on top of it.

 

Shroud as a second health bar is a bad mechanic, on both Necro and Thief. The one saving grace of Celestial Avatar on Druid is that it doesn't have this problem, its on a fixed timer instead (based upon energy), so enemies can't knock you out of it and take your skills and other benefits away.

 

They should change shroud so it absorbs only 50% of damage but also drains at a fixed rate, and allow you to be healed in it like how Harbinger works (kind of).

Edited October 11, 2022 by Mariyuuna.6508

[draxynnic.3719]

On 10/5/2022 at 11:57 PM, Jumpel.3972 said:

It's actualy not clear if they are able to split shroud health coef between PVP and PVE

They can split damage reduction while in shroud, though, since they do that with necro. Give it 50% damage reduction in PvE and it'll be comparable to what it was for everything but Consume Shadows. Then they could double the conversion rate on Consume Shadows, bringing that close to what it was too. There are ways to get around it if they can't split the coefficient.

(Mind you, a better approach with Consume Shadows might be to make it scale with Healing Power somehow.)

[Iskarel.7240]

15 hours ago, Vismooth.4128 said:

Don't forget about celestial gear as well. While not as good numerically on stats as carrion or ritualist, it still provides all of the stats relevant for a specter.

Celestial isn't really useful on Specter. Its power/crit scaling is nothing special, we have no inflict bleeding when you critically hit trait (e.g. Mesmer Sharper Images, Necromancer Barbed Precision). The Healing Power scaling on Traversing Dusk is a pathetically low 0.1. You need 1,000 Healing Power just to increase the healing per shadowstep by 10%.

Celestial is okay for a player who used a level 80 boost on Thief, though. It's a stepping-stone build IMO.

[svnset.8206]

I get that many people are frustrated that the nerf also hit PVE which was kinda unnecessary. But I want to also point out that specter fell in PVP and WvW roaming from S-Tier to basically trash tier. It dies so quick now that you should basically ALWAYS prefer another thief spec. It is beyond my understanding how such a strong nerf, literally deleting a spec, can go live. It was just way too extreme. Just apply the same shroud damage reduction buffs to specter like necro has them OR use a more realistic scaling number. We all agree that 1.5 was too much but now we can also all agree that 0.69 is way too little. So maybe something range of 1.2-1.0 and specter is a decent spec not too overpowered. Please stop deleting specs in an attempt to just slightly nerf them and apply nerfs if necessary more reasonable.

[HotDelirium.7984]

23 hours ago, Mariyuuna.6508 said:

Now you know how it feels to be a Reaper in group content in PvE, and lose your entire shroud from one attack you didn't dodge properly, then lose half your damage on top of it.

 

Shroud as a second health bar is a bad mechanic, on both Necro and Thief. The one saving grace of Celestial Avatar on Druid is that it doesn't have this problem, its on a fixed timer instead (based upon energy), so enemies can't knock you out of it and take your skills and other benefits away.

 

They should change shroud so it absorbs only 50% of damage but also drains at a fixed rate, and allow you to be healed in it like how Harbinger works (kind of).

You can even balance the shroud timer with maybe every hit you take while in shroud lowers endurance by XYZ %.

[Eleandra.4859]

On 10/11/2022 at 7:42 AM, Mariyuuna.6508 said:

Now you know how it feels to be a Reaper in group content in PvE, and lose your entire shroud from one attack you didn't dodge properly, then lose half your damage on top of it.

 

Shroud as a second health bar is a bad mechanic, on both Necro and Thief. The one saving grace of Celestial Avatar on Druid is that it doesn't have this problem, its on a fixed timer instead (based upon energy), so enemies can't knock you out of it and take your skills and other benefits away.

 

They should change shroud so it absorbs only 50% of damage but also drains at a fixed rate, and allow you to be healed in it like how Harbinger works (kind of).

And shroud for Reaper has been higher in all scenarios even before the nerf. If you feel that Reaper shroud is removed too fast, this would even have been true for Specter BEFORE the nerf, now the difference is only more pronounced (leaving out all the other aspects of these two different classes though).

[Lithril Ashwalker.6230]

On 10/4/2022 at 8:21 PM, Tenal.1546 said:

What he said.

What they said