Janthir Wilds Spear Beta Event Feedback: Thief

[Rubi Bayer.8493]

The beta event for spears has begun and is open to all players with an account in good standing! The event runs from June 27 at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time until June 30 at 10:00 p.m. Pacific Time and we'd love to hear your feedback. Let us know what you think of the new weapon for the thief in this thread!

[Zodryn.4216]

Immediate impressions: flows pretty nicely between 2 and 3 combos and alternating 4 with a a 2 finisher and stealth attack with a 3 finisher.  Idk about numbers but I like the skills so far.

It may be hard to tell where you are in the combo in a crowd with a bunch of effects depending on how the skill icons look/if there isn't any other indicator. 

Leap on 3 should be a leap finisher. Not sure why it isn't. Also can heartseeker get this kind of start/end lag? Spear leap feels great while HS feels choppy as a mobility tool.

Melee range auto animation is super lacking. It doesn't even look like I'm trying to hit anything. 

Edited Thursday at 05:05 PM by Zodryn.4216
Added note about combo indicator and heartseeker

[Antycypator.9874]

Important info: It's PvE perspective. All damage was tested in "solo mode" and against regular mobs. No added boons, no conditions on golem. I'm testing stuff exactly like I would go smack mobs in open world.

Power Scaling on Barbed Spear is critically low. 344 tooltip damage with 2383 power. Crits for 1k per hit with +240% crit damage.
Short bleeding, with even full viper and trapper runes, Barbed Spear does avg. 1500 bleeding damage with only AA.
Barbed Spear (AA chain) is simply not worth using over other skills. It does weak strike damage, weak condi damage.

Ashen Assault (stealth attack) gets interrupted by pressing 1. It's a minor thing, but shouldn't happen that easy.

Distracting Throw mechanic is hidden behind whole skill chain, it makes completly impossible to keep it's buff on Daredevil, because you either burn you initiative at some point and you're unable to use skills, or you use AA whitch is damage loss. I would suggest granting Distracting Throw buff if the skill is used as a FINISHER, or just trigger it against movement-impaired foes. Daze could be Lead attack feature.

Mantis Sting and other #2 skills. Strike-damage wise is weaker than the sword. Condi-wise it... OK, I guess?

#3 skill chain which name remains unknown to me because tooltips didn't fit my screen. The mobility + healing + stealth combo is fine.

Shadow Veil lacks an indicator on successful block.

 

Edited Thursday at 06:33 PM by Antycypator.9874

[Zodryn.4216]

34 minutes ago, Antycypator.9874 said:

Barbed Spear (AA chain) is simply not worth using over other skills. It does weak strike damage, weak condi damage.

Ashen Assault (stealth attack) gets interrupted by pressing 1. It's a minor thing, but shouldn't happen that easy.

Distracting Throw mechanic is hidden behind whole skill chain, it makes completly impossible to keep it's buff on Daredevil, because you either burn you initiative at some point and you're unable to use skills, or you use AA with is damage loss. I would suggest granting Distracting Throw buff if the skill is used as a FINISHER, or just trigger it against movement-impaired foes. Daze could be Lead attack feature.

Agree auto is low. I think it's intentional since the design is to always be doing combos, but it could be bumped. Also agree interrupting stealth attack with 1 isn't good.

On Distracting Throw, I wouldn't mind alternate functionality as a finisher, but I have no idea how you aren't able to keep up the buff as DD. I tested without any initiative generating traits on DD and could do combos endlessly without ever needing to auto. Keep in mind the stealth attack generates 4 initiative. My combo is 222 423 1 repeat. 222 costs 6 initiative total 423 costs 5, stealth refunds 4, and the whole thing takes ~6-7 seconds (with 1 initiative regen/second) so you should be able to do it more or less forever without deadeye or other initiative gen. 

On a separate note, with the animation on 5 it'd be neat for it to have a self contained smoke field you could then leap through with 3. Idk if that'd be OK, but it would be fun. Maybe pve only?

Edited Thursday at 05:59 PM by Zodryn.4216

[Doggie.3184]

First impression is pretty positive. This weapon feels like a true Thief/Assassin weapon mechanically, everything about it is fast and unhindering~ finally a weapon that allows me to retain full control over my own movements.

I also like that there's kind of a failsafe with missed combos~ such as the stealth still activating. And the leap spam mobility is a lot of fun.

Just please don't do what you did with Axe; don't add an annoying loud sound effect to the attacks right before release. 😣The spear sounds fine already.

One of the combos is a stealth finisher though which makes the distracting throw combo a bit odd/limited. Maybe just make it a window of opprotunity instead of directly after finisher so stealth attack can be used first? The weapon combos feel nice by default but once Quickness is thrown in I worry about consistancy feeling off. Maybe add some sort of additional benefit to the finisher if used while revealed? Also the Auto Attack kinda feels silly, especially with Quickness~ (idk how you guys insist on putting up with Quickness still, I really feel like it throws a wrench into everything).

You have to intentionally slow down your combo if you wanna keep stealth chain goin' when Quickness is on you, which really exposes how much it still needs an AA chain, and power DPS isn't doin too much overall.

Edited Friday at 06:37 AM by Doggie.3184

[hash.8462]

45 minutes ago, Antycypator.9874 said:

Ashen Assault (stealth attack) gets interrupted by pressing 1. It's a minor thing, but shouldn't happen that easy.

That is the most annoying thing for me 😖

[RyuDragnier.9476]

After testing this against a golem dummy, and going simply by feel and not numbers...I'd say this may be the best weapon Thief has ever gotten, in terms of what it can do and how it feels to use. It flows well, you can quickly adjust what you're doing if you need healing/blocks, and it has just enough of everything to where you feel like you have a skeleton key for combat. That's in feel mind you. In terms of how it interacts...it does not feel like it'd work with Specter, who's stuck in Scepter jail. Daredevil and Deadeye though? This weapon will be a mainstay.

[Apollo.9103]

Are the animations something to discuss? So far I'm enjoying the follow-ups in the combo chain, the option to stealth or complete another attack is nice. But I can't not look at the knee-knocking in the auto-attack animation in melee range. It looks very uncomfortable, and from a momentum/force generation perspective I think it does very little for thief to visually look strong.

[Vavume.8065]

Love the sneak attack animation, but sadly that is all, the auto attack looks terrible, it is a spear not a staff... the 2 animation should be the auto animation.. The 2 2 3 1, 2 2 3 1 rotation flows but it feels clunky and just has me asking why? good luck getting into stealth against another player. Won't be playing it.

Edited Thursday at 07:01 PM by Vavume.8065

[bq pd.2148]

57 minutes ago, Antycypator.9874 said:

Ashen Assault (stealth attack) gets interrupted by pressing 1. It's a minor thing, but shouldn't happen that easy.

it is the only stealth attack without a 1s CD, i think to recall that before the cooldown was added, this also was the case for other weapons -might be wrong tho.

 

i tested it a bit against guild mate who was also testing some other class spears. some positive impressions first:

• while i assumed it completely unusable for lacking reliability, it is saved at the moment by having really low ini cost on skills so that i can just spamm until things do hit, weaving in the daze spamm from 4 helps a lot.
• shattering assault (skill 3 finisher) grants stealth regardless of hit, so if you somehow get to there in the chain, you can get least gain stealth 100% (has a short vuln window after the evade where you might get interrupted)
• using Ashen Assault ( stealth attack) after a finisher restores ini even if a non spear skill hit in between. this is useful as i was playing on deadeye and got frequent stealth from stolen skills + one in the chamber with also binding shadows and mercy. so you probably can for PvE rotate: 2, 2, 2, (4/2) , 2, 2  (stolen skill, 1 /mercy)   repeat
• even if only some hits from ashen assault hit, malice reset happens (+ rending shade, probably other stealth attack traits too)

as for points that could be improved upon:

• the chains are really unreliable against an opponent that avoids some hits as was predictable. that lead me to spamm skill 4 too much for a more reliably ini -> malice buildup and also spamming daze to the target, then when malice is up or about to be up try a burst, best with binding shadows first.
  i still would like the chains to advance regardless of a hit, it would make it more difficult to stay on a target that is trying to kite as one cannot spamm the leap but one could actually use the spears full arsenal then.
• skill 5 does not feel good. most classes will hit a lot more than 1 hit at a time, other skills that block 1 attack usually have a counter attack with an evade or have been changed to block for the entire duration so they work against multi attack bursts in a short window, spear 5 does not.
   extending the block in any way would just risk this becoming too good defense spamm to recover. not sure what to do with it. maybe instead of heal on block have the thief teleport behind the target and if use after a finisher cleanse condi or something like that.

 

no idea about the damage, i played it on cele and my opponent too with plenty of cleanse so it was kind of endless fights and good to see how the skills work. given the melee, hybrid nature of the damage with little options to properly set up bursts that actually land, i feel like my power axe thief is still much better over all.
especially as a lot of the sustain came from just being cele and able to face tank, so in 1vsX the harder access to stealth in comparison to my regular build would make it a lot more vulnerable as such defense does not scale.

[roamzero.9486]

Spear in a pvp/wvw nutshell:

get away from literally any battle or chasers by spamming 3 lead

do no damage because your combo chains will get blinded/blocked/cc'd/dodged, and if you do get chains off, you still do no damage

Edited Thursday at 07:27 PM by roamzero.9486

[Ghin.1653]

With regards to both Distracting Throw & Shadow Veil

• Distracting throw should probably be a lead attack
• Shadow Veil should grant its bonus as a follow up + finisher

Trying to do a full combo THEN use 4 or 5 is a bit much. Especially considering 5 is literally a defensive skill that would ONLY grant you the full benefit if they attacked AFTER you fully combo slammed them. That feels extremely weird. Also the icons should change when they bonus becomes available to make it clear "use this now for bonuses"

[VaegaVic.6394]

Skills are fine, I like the flow, but it's very much a Daredevil or Deadeye weapon, Spectre has absolutely zero use for it. 

 

Animations for auto attack and how the spears are held (especially in Humans) is atrocious. 

Some spears, I'm holding right at the tip, making it a sword with a long hilt. 

Can we not hold it at the end of the spear and have the tip facing down?

 

The auto-attack 1 animation is just staff? 

If we can fix the animations, I'm all in, if we can't, I don't think I'll be using it as although it feels good, I can't look at it. 

 

[Micah.3789]

1 hour ago, Doggie.3184 said:

One of the combos is a stealth finisher though which makes the distracting throw combo a bit odd/limited. Maybe just make it a window of opprotunity instead of directly after finisher so stealth attack can be used first?

This is exactly what I came here to say. Distracting Throw doesn't work at all with the power based sequence as you have to choose between activating it or a stealth attack, but it's just bad with the condi sequence as it replaces a lead attack and doesn't apply any damaging condis. 

I would minimally change the functionality to allow a window for DT bonus effects after a finisher that isn't interrupted by a stealth attack. I think it could also benefit from a modest bleed and/or poison application.

Otherwise, the weapon feels good and does a good job of breaking up the single skill spam monotony of most thief rotations. 

[Felices Bladewing.3914]

I have mixed feelings about spear so far.

While I absolutely like the fuild feel of the weapon and the intrinsic synergy of the skills, I feel like i am hitting my opponents with a wet noodle, the hybrid style adds a lot of flavor but suffers from ineffectivness. The payoff for getting a full combo in which is hard to do in WvW/PvP is simply not there.

Edited Thursday at 08:35 PM by Felices Bladewing.3914

[Zacchary.6183]

Autoattack: The damage is abysmal. 1.5k crit damage in melee and 1k ranged on 2300+ power and 200% crit damage. Bleed is so miniscule I didn't bother testing it. Melee should be hitting for AT MINIMUM 2-2.5x as much as it is doing and ranged should be 1.5-2x with that high of power. 2.25 seconds of a single stack of bleed means nothing either and would not benefit even from pure condi. Bleed gets its damage from stacking high and sticking for long periods of time. Raising the duration to 3 second and either doubling it or doubling the stacks would be better. Also:

• Ranged attack should be a small projectile finisher.

Chain 1 and 2: So far, there is little incentive to mix up your attacks and I feel the spear would be much more fun to use if it did. If you are going to go for a hybrid setup, damage must be even throughout the 6 skills and so far it looks like damage is loaded onto skill 2. But at least the numbers on it are good enough it'll benefit from either stat.

• I would recommend that skill 2's chain should be damaging conditions (with less strike damage) while skill 3's chain should be debilitating conditions (with more strike damage).
• Boosted effects should also be broader to accommodate mixing chains. For example:
  • Mantis Sting's cripple get replaced with torment while Unsuspecting Strike should have cripple and vuln. Unsuspecting strike should also be a leap finisher.
  • Entangling Asp should proc immobilize on targets with movement impairing conditions and torment, so either Lead Attack will proc it. Vampiric Slash should proc lifesteal on vulnerable foes but also proc the full lifesteal if the foe has 3+ conditions sans vuln. And that way, either lead attack can chain into the other follow up.
  • Falling Spider's strike damage buff should be given to Shattering Assault. Next, the finishers should proc bonuses based on control AND condition status so they can be chained into from Follow Up attacks. For example:
    • Falling Spider gains an extra stack of conditions if the target is controlled/defiant or suffering from 4+ conditions. 2 stacks if both.
    • Shattering Assault should deal bonus strike damage to controlled foes while stealing extra boons from targets with 3+ conditions on them.

Distracting Throw: Instead of its current mechanics, it should function as a Lead Attack baseline with an unconditional daze. Using it should make the next finisher provide the buff instead of having to use it after a finisher.

Shadow Veil: It should function the same way as Distracting Throw, but provide an identical defensive buff as well.

Swindler's Equilibrium: This needs to work with landspear.

Edited Saturday at 09:24 PM by Zacchary.6183

[Sneky.5214]

Tested it a bit in PvP with power daredevil. It does no damage, but the mobility is insane. Like when trying to duel, you have low damage, slow CC (that only works if movement impared), no "evade" (like sword/dagger 3 for instance), and stealth access requires already 2 hit combo, and is really slow to apply.

Havent tested condi version, but for PvP, i cant see it be used as a main weapon. Can maybe compete with shortbow as secondary set, where you get more mobility and survivabilty, but less damage and team fight utility

[BobbyT.7192]

222 4 231 or 222 4 331, this seems like a good combo, it lets you build the buff and get a stealth attack in. It flows really nicely and you dont have to worry too much about running out of initiative if your smart with your class mechanics and you don't mess the rotation up. Which can be fairly easy to do but I was doing it as a condi spectre, if I did mess up then I would just enter shroud for a bit to help reset.

231 does more damage then 331, but you gain health with the latter and it cost 1 less initiative. It will works well for both condi and power. I do recommend turning auto attack off on the 1 skill.

The best damage I've done is around 20k on the golem, that's with beta gear and being bad.

[HotDelirium.7984]

This is more QOL but can you guys give a 2-3 window of hovering over a skill in combat before the descrption pops up? I'm a clicker and click most of my skills and I visually fight against the skill pop up, especially with thief.

[Asur.9178]

As I predicted here; it is terrible and unusable in PvP and DE just abuses it to no end to fly to the moon with condi DPS in PvE (just like axe...what a surprise...NOT!). I literally hit for 46k+ on golem as cDE within 1st 3 attempts with my pre-beta theorycrafted rotation.

It has zero interactions with Acrobatics as of right now. Even the 3a skill doesn't even give resistance from Guarded Initiation nor the Fluid Strikes buff - so, you know for a fact that it's not even programmed as a movement skill in the backend. Of course, as we already knew, there's no shadowsteps...so, there's zero interactions there too.

I was right; zero unblockables, zero boons, zero blinds, zero disengage, only engage doesn't even have evade, pitiful damage (unless you play a meme 1-shot build against a squishy low level player), 3s weakness, 1s immobilize, 1s daze, block burned on random ticks...barely healing you enough to recover from a auto attack damage - especially bad and insignificant when you are poisoned, used and abused by everyone spamming evades, blocks, invulnerabilities, blind spams, ccs, and movement abilities...cause the range of the skills are so sad that they can just walk away from you.

You have approximately 5s to continue chain (which is already hard enough to land as is) and then it resets. So, it's literally like Flanking Strike, but significantly worse (as I predicted). Further to that, that same 5s is how long you have to benefit from the Finisher skill benefits on skills 4, 5, and stealth attack.

Pressing 1 again while casting stealth attacked immediately cancels it and starts auto attacking. There's zero bonuses to any of the stealth attack hits except the very last one. So, as an opponent, with this knowledge, all you need to do is eat all the hits and only dodge the last one (not hard to do cause the cast time is like 1.75s long and it hits like a wet noodle)...thus hard punishing the Thief further if by some miracle it landed a finisher on you shortly before using the stealth attack.

I'll provide more feedback later if I find more to add considering I am already frustrated out of my mind by yet another pointless addition that does nothing for increasing non-stealth PvP option. Let's not forget that Specter is still garbage cause they overnerfed and never revisited it. Words can't explain how utterly disappointed I am. Think I might quit this game again for a year or so (or more if I lose the urge to log back in ever again) if this iteration goes live.

Edited Friday at 02:33 PM by Asur.9178

[nopoet.2960]

Best thing about it is how fluidly you can go from range to melee and back again.  It feels like you can really respond to your opponent.  It's kind of beautiful.  

That said you are very venerable to blind or anything that causes you to miss an attack because they restart the attack chain but it seems like a fair trade off.  This is especially true if the ini cost stay where they are.  

So far my only request is that the lead attack on 3 become a leap finisher. 

My only concern right now is the block skill on 5.  Do we need/want a spamable block?  It seems oddly weak and at the same time highly exploitable.  I haven't spend too much time on it so maybe its fine.  

 

[Vennyhedgie.5369]

Pretty happy with this weapon in PvE to be honest. The only thing I'm not a huge fan of is skill 4 counting as a lead attack, as it can throw some of the combos off, but it's probably something muscle memory will settle in with time so I'm not terribly worried about it.

I was able to hit 30k+ on deadeye on literaly my very first try without knowing how to play the weapon (or Deadeye for that matter) much, so that's concerning. Other tests on Daredevil / Specter were like 10k lower.

[Khalif.2076]

8 hours ago, Antycypator.9874 said:

Ashen Assault (stealth attack) gets interrupted by pressing 1. It's a minor thing, but shouldn't happen that easy.

THIS. its super annoying that it gets interrupted. if you fat finger it, the whole thing becomes moot. IMO make this a single attack or something that is bit more resilient

[UsagiShinobi.2597]

Tested in PvE, against the test golem, open-world trash mobs, a world boss, and some random champions like the Bandit Bosses in the Krytan zones. So any grievances regarding its usage in PvP/WvW aren't any that I'm aware of, and so my suggestions may seem utterly broken in competitive modes.

I agree that the autoattack animation should be different. The stance when wielding is... odd, though I realize that weapon stances are shared (like, Warrior holds their staff the same way an Elementalist would) so adding unique idle animations for all the professions would be extra effort I suppose. At least straighten the back a bit, I can feel my own spine IRL aching just looking at my character!

As someone who played a lot of Assassin in GW1, I adore the fact that Lead/Follow/Finisher weapon combos have been brought back for Thief. The 2-3 combo chains are fun and flashy, but I agree that they feel underpowered -- D/D/Staff has the same amount of flashy flips but more damage and condi potential. I do like the idea listed earlier that one chain could focus more on damaging conditions, while the other has things like blind, cripple, immob, etc. As it stands, it seems like this weapon is a weird power/condi hybrid but it doesn't succeed at either.

4 technically counting as a lead attack felt a little clunky and hard to weave in, and the timers on the attack chains should be longer. Give us a bit more of a grace period between attacks before losing the chain. Allow 4 to either count as a regular Lead Attack without the Finisher caveat, or give it a timer after a Finisher so it can be weaved inbetween combo attacks rather than a "you must do it right away or lose the bonus" situation, so it doesn't feel like a Finisher-Finisher. (Finisher Squared?)

Skill 5 being a block/defense of some kind is fine, but finicky -- blocking 1 hit is only useful against open world mobs that attack once every 2 seconds or so, and to "maximize" the usage of the skill you have to do it in the middle of your flashy combos... and then the benefit isn't that much greater and becomes a DPS loss. Either give it a follow-up "counter" after you block, or allow it to block more attacks, or even give it like 1-2 seconds of Stability or something. And then up the Initiative, of course, so it's not spammable.

And also the tooltip needs a range indicator for when you're throwing -- as it is right now, it only shows the melee range. And please, for the sake of us with regular 1080p monitors on Normal UI size, do something about the tooltips. The 3 chain literally goes off my screen when out of combat! Add something like the right-click-to-cycle thing that you have on some other stuff, like Berserker's trait tooltip that shows off all their Primal Bursts.

Overall I think this has a lot of potential but, like all the previous weapon betas before, it needs some tuning and reworks to make it shine.

[phreephur.8670]

Spear 4 being a spammable daze (on crippled targets, which it applies) is incredibly obnoxious. I found a silver creature without it even being able to attack me for the entire duration, as the initiative replenished about as fast as the daze duration.