Story time. Decided to try to climb from low rank to plate.

[Rodzynald.5897]

I wish devs themselves played the game and stumbled upon such research on their own, instead of "investigating the data". But who is to do it? PvP team who has no power over balance, or PvE devs who fight 1v1 and whoever wins, the victor's class gets nerfed? :D

[AliamRationem.5172]

Are you sure thief is underpowered? I mean, you said you're playing an old core build. Would mesmers and necromancers be OP using out-dated core builds? Is any class? Probably not.

You're also playing in the low tiers, where people can much more easily get away with playing meme builds. A lot of those builds probably don't break into platinum because they fail when they aren't just rolling noobs who don't know how to defend, counter, and apply pressure in return.

I'm sure you know more about PvP than I do, but you should probably regain a true perspective before deciding that everything is OP and thief is broken. I'm pretty sure that is not the case, even if some classes are obviously overtuned.

[voltaicbore.8012]

I'm bad at/hate playing thief in spvp, so my only consistent experience with thieves is from fighting them. At least in low plat (1550 is where I'm at now), I find that the same factor matters most when it comes to thieves: player skill. I main a ranger, and even when running bunker I could outright kill bad thieves while the smarter ones always disengaged and did something more useful. I find the same applies even though I've switched to a glassier damage-dealing build on ranger. The bad ones just die a lot faster, but the good ones can still disengage, reset, and continue to harass or just move onto more useful tasks. I feel this has been a fairly consistent pattern for at least the past 3 seasons.

[Kakutodani.5749]

@"voltaicbore.8012" said:I'm bad at/hate playing thief in spvp, so my only consistent experience with thieves is from fighting them. At least in low plat (1550 is where I'm at now), I find that the same factor matters most when it comes to thieves: player skill. I main a ranger, and even when running bunker I could outright kill bad thieves while the smarter ones always disengaged and did something more useful. I find the same applies even though I've switched to a glassier damage-dealing build on ranger. The bad ones just die a lot faster, but the good ones can still disengage, reset, and continue to harass or just move onto more useful tasks. I feel this has been a fairly consistent pattern for at least the past 3 seasons.

I think the issue here is that the only realistic thing that any thief, be it a good thief or a bad thief, can do, is lose the node and lose the fight, either by dying or running away. There is no realistic chance of the thief winning, and I guess the question is, should it be that way?

Thief is supposed to have "mobility," but the reality is that Warriors, Mesmers, Rangers, all have caught up in that arena, and all blow thief out of the water in terms of combat. In order to maximize its speed, thief has to spend all its initiative, which leaves it with nothing after reaching its desired location. If it does not, all the other aforementioned classes will be faster at traveling. On the other hand, because all the other classes run on regular cooldowns, they still have their whole rotation available after rotating. This was somewhat alright before as thief still had high autoattack damage, but that has also since been nerfed, which leaves thief with 0 combat potential at all.

Yes if you want to specialize as a bunker/dueling build with some DD+Acro evade spam, thief can do that, but other classes can also pull off the same things without having to put all their eggs into one basket.

[Raiden The Beast.3016]

@AliamRationem.5172 said:Are you sure thief is underpowered? I mean, you said you're playing an old core build. Would mesmers and necromancers be OP using out-dated core builds? Is any class? Probably not.

You're also playing in the low tiers, where people can much more easily get away with playing meme builds. A lot of those builds probably don't break into platinum because they fail when they aren't just rolling noobs who don't know how to defend, counter, and apply pressure in return.

I'm sure you know more about PvP than I do, but you should probably regain a true perspective before deciding that everything is OP and thief is broken. I'm pretty sure that is not the case, even if some classes are obviously overtuned.

S/D Core is Meta...

[lLobo.7960]

@Alatar.7364 said:

@"Mefiq.7039" said:And if i land this perfect hit will it be any considerable dmg? No? ofc no, warrior deals more dmg doing any skill.

This is what bothers me the most.If Thief doesn't have BP or if it's on CD, it has to undergo chained combo and then perfectly position itself, just so it can do lower dmg with this "speacial" attack than Warrior does with it's AA or 8sec cooldown AoE skill. Not to mention it takes several seconds to set up, unlike "I win" buttons of Warrior.

Pistol#5+dagger#2+steal.Yea such a long hard convoluted combo... No idea how people manage that.

[ugrakarma.9416]

Is all about timezone, from Friday to Saturday im my timezone(around 2 to 5 am) i climbed easily to plat with a trash necro minion build. On Sunday afternoon i gotta beaten hard, died in seconds in everytime. This explain the old mistery of loss streaks. Ppl who climbed on a "easy timezone" that plays the "hard timezone" wreck the matchmaking and the teams.

[Sampson.2403]

I was in a game yesterday with a thief player by the name of "thelol" whose always in like the top 10-50 NA. Seen him in other games and in the ffa arena, he plays some kind of one shotty/super evade/stealth staff build. I love his style, always talks sh*t after he kills you by saying "bad" "so bad" with poor english.

Anyway, in yesterdays game Vallun was playing thief on the other team and these two guys were going at it the entire match. Thelol annihlated vallun over n over. It was hilarious. Youd just see valluns death message in the lower right and then in chat "bad" "so bad" "baddie" over n over.

Whoever says staff thief isn't viable should watch this guy.

[Alatar.7364]

@lLobo.7960 said:

@Alatar.7364 said:

@"Mefiq.7039" said:And if i land this perfect hit will it be any considerable dmg? No? ofc no, warrior deals more dmg doing any skill.

This is what bothers me the most.If Thief doesn't have BP or if it's on CD, it has to undergo chained combo and then perfectly position itself, just so it can do lower dmg with this "speacial" attack than Warrior does with it's AA or 8sec cooldown AoE skill. Not to mention it takes several seconds to set up, unlike "I win" buttons of Warrior.

Pistol#5+dagger#2+steal.Yea such a long hard convoluted combo... No idea how people manage that.

Excuse me, where did I state it's hard convoluted Combo? Can you quote please?I guess if you don't want to see the point, even though very obvious, then you simply won't.