Jump to content
  • Sign Up

1 torment per malicious sneak attack?!


Lithril Ashwalker.6230

Recommended Posts

5 hours ago, Nomad.4301 said:

I was actually enjoying using cDE in fractals after the May 11th patch. It was actually somewhat refreshing to be able to use a different build for the first time in the last 5(?) years even if it was only really usable on some fights (Sunqua, shattered etc..), I even went so far as to set up a build/gear template for it. But alas I guess Anet wants thieves to do nothing but spam auto-attack on staff daredevil forevermore, because it seems like any time we're able to do anything else it gets the nerf-bat before it can even become "mainstream".

 

cDE did a lot of damage sure, but it also was probably the single most limited, annoying and single-minded build to play in the entire game. It was only good with allies around, required ALL your utilities to be set to venom/stealth (so very little cc), had ZERO cleave, it was based on projectiles so if anything got between you and your target good-bye DPS, and your main attack had the annoying side-effect of teleporting you away from your group every 5 seconds, not to mention you had to juggle initiative, malice and reveal to do the "insane" DPS that some people were posting, in short you had to both sacrifice almost everything to get that DPS and you had to WORK for it by juggling all that bs nearly perfectly throughout the fight.

 

Despite all those short-comings I actually liked playing this build as it was something a little different, a little spicier if you will. Even if in the end you were still just spamming 1-3 buttons. But I guess all Anet seen was some benchmark from a very specific setup of hardcore players and flipped out thinking every thief was running around hitting 68k DPS 24/7?

 

I'm really not sure what the problem with classes that literally can't do ANYTHING but pure DPS (and having to give up everything else for it) having slightly better DPS than classes that are essentially jack-of-all-trades e.g guardian.

 

As for Condi Daredevil, I've yet to try it post May 11 patch but if it's anything like what I remember it being (running back and forth spamming '3' constantly) then regardless of how much damage it does the DPS isn't really worth it to me as that 'rotation' is even more boring than spamming autos and dodge on staff DD. To me D/D is a power weapon set with 1 condi skill shoehorned in on a whim by some misguided dev pre-launch and was never intended to be the main source of condition damage for the entire thief profession. P/D on the other-hand was clearly designed to be a 'pure' condi set, given that every single skill in it has conditions present (even CnD has vuln), this is further reinforced by the fact that they changed it many patches ago to give it a spammable bleed application specifically to cement it as the go-to condi weapon.

 

Oh well 🤷‍♂️ guess it's back to spamming staff autos on every fight, yay.. 😂

 

cDD looks to be very strong now which is a sign of poor balance against cDE for exactly the reason you mention - the rotation is very simplistic and has an insanely low skill floor. It also doesn't have the target switching limitations, can run Basilisk Venom at a small DPS cost and brings Stolen Skills like Detonate Plasma on relevant fights.

 

Deadeye balance has always been all kinds of odd in the DPS it can do against its very large restrictions, which is a shame as the interplay between the Malice and Initiative systems makes the spec massively more engaging than what Daredevil offers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'd like to chime in and just say I'm very confused how "fine tuning" existing balance changes involves cutting significantly into torment application. The biggest source of condi damage boost post May was in the change to breakbars and the change to how torment works. That's where the largest ticks of damage were happening. 
 

Before, assuming 7 malice Sneak Attack you had five stacks for 8 seconds (40 seconds total). Now you have 1 stack for 14 seconds. This is a huge decrease in overall damage and heavily impacts competitive play by making the torment applied to someone literally trivial. 1 to two stacks of torment can be face tanked. Even if the skill needed a nerf, the far easier change would be to nerf the duration applied. And, if you need to reduce torment damage you can also adjust down the maximum damage when a target is standing still. 
 

It also runs entirely contrary to the stated May patch goal of increasing thief build diversity. 
 

The notes didn't even discuss the change and said something vague about quality of life. This wasn't thought through and should be reverted or heavily modified. 
 

@Ben Phongluangtham.1065

@Fire Attunement.9835
 

 

  • Like 1
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

@saerni.2584

They were very careful with nerfing renegade and scourge. Nobody of them plays anything besides guardian anyways so they just nuked it. 50% higher initiative cost on repeater, >50% lower torment on sneak attack. Meanwhile they nerf ren by like 1k dps max each patch while it still has a 43k bench.

Currently DD is the only way for thief to dps in pve because DE is just that dogshit. It could be decent. All core weapons just don't really work with it. Only rifle, dagger and formerly pistol have a good sneak attack but dagger mh has no good way to generate malice. Heartseeker is an execute and dagger 3 + 4 are both useless for power. Why is there even a condi skill on d/d.

I dont get why they want condi DD to be a thing. condi DD has a single condi trait and spams 1 button + dodge.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

They threw an extra bleed on the d/d set for the #1 attack and thought that would be a thing. A Condition thief can not stand toe to toe with any class and expect to get many attacks off thus that death blossom spam in the d/d condition set.  No game designer seems to understand how a thief works. The  adds to INI costs even as they remove damage from something like malicious sneak attack shows a fundamental disconnect. If thief has higher INI costs they have to rely on #1 more as INI affects all other skills and if #1 gutted it an exponential decrease in damage out.

Edited by babazhook.6805
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...