What is the last POSITIVE change to thief that you can think of?

[Voraxen.2035]

I'm sitting here thinking about how bad the current balance team and Anet as a whole have treated the thief class. It made me consider if there was ever a positive change to thief that I was excited about. My main and only character since beta has been a thief, 8700 hours and 17k spvp matches. The ONLY things I can think of we're adding interrupt\daze to shortbow 4 and making all venoms share by default. 

How about you?

[Antycypator.9874]

Pierce for Death's Judgment. As a Deadeye main, this is huge QoL improvement, because DJ being blocked by ambient creatures, or by whatever on it's path, was pure hell.

Dagger and Rifle buffs in PvE are also nice.

 

But let's not forgot that Staff Daredevil is a forgotten spec.

[Jugglemonkey.8741]

About this time last year I was still hyped about specter. Now, not so much. 

[cyberzombie.7348]

The very first rework of deadeye, it traded a 32k death judgement for all-round utility and we still had the range marker on kneel. Which was way more accurate than gw2taco or blish hud. Plus the kit wasn't as focused on running and gunning at the time.

[Vidit.7108]

Recently there have been some positive changes, they're just rare and disproportionately fewer than most other classes.

As a long time thief player I've mostly been disappointed with balance patches. There hasn't been a ton to celebrate and more often something i like just dies instead of getting tweaked. 

I'm not expecting it to get better though when the guy whose idea it was to remove stealth from shadow arts is in charge. And on top of that sending Double Tap to go get thief feedback for them because they won't apparently look at it themselves.

[reddie.5861]

i want old pre any patch thief back added to every elite.

meaning by far most mobile and FAT dmg.
thief is hitting with a wet noodle nowadays and every1 ports around like a idiot aswell.
for example willbenders dmg is close to what thief used to be and it teleports like a tool around aswell. but its not thief.

[Myror.7521]

@reddie.5861 I mean the difference between Thief and willbender is pretty clear. It does not gain any source of stealth and can only Port tough enemys. Also besides this it also does not have 3 Dodge Bars. All of this is also the reason why daredevil is not allowed to Deal more DMG. And cause drd itself where not gain Thiefs any dmg modifire (besides this less dodges available = more DMG Thing) they Just nerfed core Thief. 

 

Still i ever said If you want to have drd make any more DMG you have to remove its third Dodge bar and remove some stealth (Last one was semi good done)

 

[Bern.9613]

The last positive change?

August 28, 2012

Game release: Steal has been added to the game.

[draxynnic.3719]

On 5/8/2023 at 6:44 AM, Antycypator.9874 said:

Pierce for Death's Judgment. As a Deadeye main, this is huge QoL improvement, because DJ being blocked by ambient creatures, or by whatever on it's path, was pure hell.

Dagger and Rifle buffs in PvE are also nice.

 

But let's not forgot that Staff Daredevil is a forgotten spec.

Not sure if it was before, after, or simultaneous, but being able to move slowly while 'kneeling'. The animations are a bit awkward, but it is a big QoL for situations like being juuuuuust inside a circle of bad.

[WhoWantsAHug.3186]

1 hour ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Not sure if it was before, after, or simultaneous, but being able to move slowly while 'kneeling'. The animations are a bit awkward, but it is a big QoL for situations like being juuuuuust inside a circle of bad.

Yea that's great, but the skill 4 combo while kneeled is fking amazing in PvP.

A great change they recently made to thief was reduce deception skills CD and remove the CD reduction trait. After all of the shadow arts changes, thief now has a very healthy design IMO. Talking about PvP only. 

[Myror.7521]

I like how no one here mentioned the Daredevils swipe removed for 1200 Steal yet. That was indeed a good "buff" to Thief or better said daredevil. How ever the rest is not touched at all or nerfed. Would like to see a buff to Backstab so it would be able to Deal good burst again that need to see good timing when and how to Hit instead of a buff though letz say Dagger Pistol 3 which is allready dump and spamable. 

#letzmakethiefgreatagain xd

[andrewlcl.8176]

Just a filthy casual here. But from the little I know, the big positives are:

 

- Change for Daredevil Steal. 

- Death's Advance (DE) and ability to move slowly while kneeling. 

- Death's Judgement (DE) now pierces, but also at a cost. I used to switch targets sometimes before using DJ, so it can be used to pressure or down a low health target that isn't marked. 

 

Distant fourth improvement is being able to move at normal speed while casting DJ. 

 

To partially compensate for these, they kittened over Shadow Meld. I think it is still usable, but you have to be that much more careful about when you choose to press the button. It's no longer a faceroll skill. 

[LyraOrpheo.8450]

Deadeye still has a lot of work to be done to its fundamental design, but currently at least thanks to the last balance patch it got, it deals the damage a single-target assassin-like profession deserves to do.

[Azure The Heartless.3261]

On 5/7/2023 at 2:54 PM, Voraxen.2035 said:

I'm sitting here thinking about how bad the current balance team and Anet as a whole have treated the thief class. It made me consider if there was ever a positive change to thief that I was excited about. My main and only character since beta has been a thief, 8700 hours and 17k spvp matches. The ONLY things I can think of we're adding interrupt\daze to shortbow 4 and making all venoms share by default. 

How about you?

Last positive change to me was shadow arts cleansing/granting init on stealth transition, and it was quickly hamstrung by speed of shadows going from 50% msi in stealth to 1 second of superspeed on stealth.

Yeah the sustain was nice, but at the cost of a big chunk of mobility? Might as well just not build for sustain at all.

[ZeroTheRuler.7415]

The changes to kneel and the DPS adjustments to dagger were very positive changes in my eyes.

I always hated the old kneel. GW2 is very mobile. Because of this the old kneel felt out of place and too much punishing of a cost or too high of a tradeoff for the reward that it gave. That's why it was so unpopular before IMO. Now DE feels much more fun and is quite smooth to play in WvW / PvE content. I still don't like DE for PvP though.

[Irastira.8643]

Thief player and unarguably a Thief main.  In my mind, the last positive change to the Thief class was the nerfing of HSS all those years ago.  It wasn't fun for the enemy, and it wasn't fun for me.

Edited June 15, 2023 by Irastira.8643

[Doggie.3184]

As a Thief main since beta and game launch and Daredevil main/enjoyer since it's addition, even after DE and Specter additions, and despite it being a shadow of it's former self in PvE/PVP... the last positive change was probably getting rid of the dumb Swipe skill. Unblockable loss is whatever and only effects PvP anyways (it could easily just be a trait given to acrobatics or something, to buff the useless PvP centric tree). I absolutely hated the range nerf in all modes. I also never got used to it nomatter how many hundreds of hours I played and often accidentally pressed steal out of range.

Edited June 15, 2023 by Doggie.3184

[DeceiverX.8361]

I mean, the SA change was pretty amazing from a fairness perspective, and was a huge buff to proactive/aggressive thief builds.

Sometimes a change for the better isn't a raw, undisputed power bump for the class.

[reddie.5861]

On 5/9/2023 at 9:00 AM, Myror.7521 said:

@reddie.5861 I mean the difference between Thief and willbender is pretty clear. It does not gain any source of stealth and can only Port tough enemys. Also besides this it also does not have 3 Dodge Bars. All of this is also the reason why daredevil is not allowed to Deal more DMG. And cause drd itself where not gain Thiefs any dmg modifire (besides this less dodges available = more DMG Thing) they Just nerfed core Thief. 

 

Still i ever said If you want to have drd make any more DMG you have to remove its third Dodge bar and remove some stealth (Last one was semi good done)

 

im talking about Core Gw2 when i started (just bit after the release) it was thief who had fat backstabs and good dmg, and mobility.
tell me something a thief has nowadays? beside stealth which really isnt that great either. but okay for some people stealth is game breaking so anyway we have stealth.
so we stealth up use a backstab and then we relay on what our dodges? because any other given class out dps out and out sustain us.

[Doggie.3184]

On 6/17/2023 at 7:09 AM, reddie.5861 said:

im talking about Core Gw2 when i started (just bit after the release) it was thief who had fat backstabs and good dmg, and mobility.
tell me something a thief has nowadays? beside stealth which really isnt that great either. but okay for some people stealth is game breaking so anyway we have stealth.
so we stealth up use a backstab and then we relay on what our dodges? because any other given class out dps out and out sustain us.

Backstab is the reason we have poor AoE. We had ultra high single-target damage instead. But after years of nerfs we just have medeocre single-target damage and still poor AoE and most of our Stealth Attacks don't even deal damage at all like Shortbow, Sword and Staff (and Scepter and Pistol's being a DPS loss to use). Malicious Shortbow Stealth Attack doesn't even do anything since the rare opprotunities where we'd need 0 damage and AoE root it often doesn't even trigger cuz of bodyblock since it needs to hit Marked target~ the only times we'd need it is during the hardest moments to land it because too many enemies. Ironic.

We even got a QoL nerf that was never reverted where once we miss a Stealth attack or get Blinded then we're banned from attacking again and can't even break ourselves out of Stealth manually without wasting Ini because it doesn't flip back to our normal basic attack once it goes on cooldown.

Edited June 18, 2023 by Doggie.3184