What Happened !?

[Felwal.9618]

Okay so i havent been playing Gw2 in a couple of months so i came back and jumped into some pvp and played my usual D/P DD and all i can say it what the hell happened? i feel like im not doing any damage whatsoever. Atleast 50% of the players i come across especially Guardians, Elementalists, Rangers and some Enginers can basically ignore me because they completely outheal my damage exept if they are below 25% hp and i go in for a burst other than that they are basically unkillable.

[Jugglemonkey.8741]

@Felwal.9618 said:Okay so i havent been playing Gw2 in a couple of months so i came back and jumped into some pvp and played my usual D/P DD and all i can say it what the hell happened? i feel like im not doing any damage whatsoever. Atleast 50% of the players i come across especially Guardians, Elementalists, Rangers and some Enginers can basically ignore me because they completely outheal my damage exept if they are below 25% hp and i go in for a burst other than that they are basically unkillable.

Dagger and sword autos got nerfed a few patches back, so it depends how many months you mean I guess. Also the meta is basically hard cheese vs cheese knife at the moment, if you bring a butter knife to a cheese fest you're gonna struggle.

[Felwal.9618]

i think its about 2 balance patches that i've missed

[Centurian.6571]

Welcome back. If you think you fell out of the loop, imagine how I felt several years ago when I stopped playing for about half a year and came back to a completely different trait line and points structure. Now that's painful! heh

[DeceiverX.8361]

The meta hasn't favored MH Dagger since PoF and the powercreep is worse than HoT. And hasn't been nerfed.

Play cheese/FoTM or be useless at this point.

[Tashigi.3159]

I don't know what you're doing, but I use Rifle and Sword/Pistol and none of those classes is really a challenge, except maybe the Ranger and Engi if they get the opening move or if they're heavy bunkers, in which case you need to play it smart and wear them down/force them to use cooldowns.I normally use Sword/Pistol as distraction or to lock them down in one place while teleporting out when it gets dangerous. Once I notice their cooldowns are mostly gone, switch to rifle, dodge for stealth, death judgement and prob a few auto attacks or three round bursts and they're dead.

You can do similarly with other weapons but the above is my preference and what I am most used to/efficient with.

[omgdracula.6345]

I have been doing perfectly fine in PvP with D/P it is probably the build that is good against the meta. The 2nd being S/D. Both are still good.

[Mhina.1827]

Man, my issue with thief is we've gotten to a place where if thief can kinda +1 (it's not like we're always the best at it with all the burst builds out there) and kinda decap faster than everyone else (classes are becoming extremely mobile. While not outclassing us, honestly not that far behind. Mirage's evade + sword 1, ranger GS 3 or horn 5, engi..well, honestly a ton of ways to get quickness, etc etc) people are gonna say it's fine. And the more people saying it's fine, the happier the community as a whole will be. If you want to do damage, you've got to play deadeye (maybe condi), but you sacrifice most other qualities of why people accept you on their team in the first place. Thief to me seems like a terrible class to play when you have a team that's slow to rotate. You don't "really" have the tools to make someone fear engaging you. A lot of the advice people give you, they do so smugly, saying "well you're just not doing your job." When often, it's up to your team to enable you to do that. If your team is actively working against your job of +1ing or decapping by say...one example is having 3 members that refuse to leave mid because they know they have the superior fight, so the enemy team literally just works around them at sides, that leaves you only one person to +1 and decapping difficult because regardless of what's on the other team, you're not supposed to duel at a node because the community doesn't want you to have dueling potential. Your kit has no invulns, only 1 second worth of stability (if you run the new blinding powder), no aegis, generally at most 2 stun blocks (a technical 3rd from passive), among the lowest hp pool in the game with your only method of survival being your evasion skills, (STEALTH IS NOT THAT BIG OF A DEAL. I KILL STEALTHED THIEVES ALL THE TIME. IF THEY HAVE ALREADY USED SHADOWSTEP JUST KEEP AoEing IN THE SAME GENERAL AREA. AND SO MANY OTHER CLASSES HAVE STEALTH. RANGERS HAVE IT ON A 7-10 SECOND COOLDOWN. STOP ACTING LIKE WE'RE BROKEN BECAUSE OF THE STEALTH MECHANIC, ESPECIALLY WHEN THE S/D VARIANT REALLY ONLY HAS ONE IDEAL WAY OF OBTAINING IT). All that said, you have less burst potential and less gimmicky methods of survival, in my opinion, than just about any other class. Most games would reward you for that with high dueling or outplay potential but we don't have that. We have some dueling/outplay potential against less skilled players sometimes. I think initiative is the main reason why. While I love having a different mechanic to play around than cooldowns, it's difficult to balance a class that when strong can just as easily spam skills as it can outplay you with some sort of crazy stuff. Anyway, sorry for the long rant. It's just that no one wants to talk about how hard it can be to play this class when you're not on a solid team. There are classes that can achieve small victories on the map with less than ideal teams with a lot less difficulty than we can. But hey, I'm not the greatest thief in the world either, so maybe if I keep at it I'll get to a point where I can do more than I think. It's still the most fun class to play because it's just my style. But it's crazy how I can just make a random other character, go to the mists, and in a matter of minutes be out dueling people (ranger, Mesmer, Engi). So all of that in my opinion is where we're at.

[starlinvf.1358]

@Jugglemonkey.8741 said:

@Felwal.9618 said:Okay so i havent been playing Gw2 in a couple of months so i came back and jumped into some pvp and played my usual D/P DD and all i can say it what the hell happened? i feel like im not doing any damage whatsoever. Atleast 50% of the players i come across especially Guardians, Elementalists, Rangers and some Enginers can basically ignore me because they completely outheal my damage exept if they are below 25% hp and i go in for a burst other than that they are basically unkillable.

Dagger and sword autos got nerfed a few patches back, so it depends how many months you mean I guess. Also the meta is basically hard cheese vs cheese knife at the moment, if you bring a butter knife to a cheese fest you're gonna struggle.

This cheese analogy is both refreshing and amusing.... I shall steal it for my own uses. :P

[starlinvf.1358]

@"Felwal.9618" said:i think its about 2 balance patches that i've missed

Given the nature of a Balance pass... I wouldn't expect any build to perform the same without evaluation. Especially in competitive modes where a 10% damage difference can throw an entire class out of "the meta".