DeceiverX.8361

DC is fixable by just adding short-duration chill to RS AA chain. Like half a second each max or like 1/4 + 1/2 + 3/4 on the chain. This way you get the bleed procs reliably and without insane burst the other 5->4 spam build ran if you were to buff stacks, works with Dhuumfire builds, and can still opt for a tankier BM/DM setup while still actually having damage. It also addresses some of the kiting problems and will cause power to make some big decisions on if it wants to cut kiting or keep its damage via RO. I will say, RO getting its casts fixed and removing the quickness could be one of the best buffs reaper could face due to the necro/scourge matchup brutalizing the reaper since slow's penalty is bigger than quickness's gains. BB woudn't suck so badly if Chilling Victory was useful at all and if we were playing release reaper prior to when Spite's might access got nerfed. Reality is that even if the healing was decent, you're in Spite and the might access itself is heavily nerfed. Might as well just play DM or BM with RO and be tankier and with better damage. It honestly just needs to be reworked into something entirely different. Personally, I think LF generation would be the play here since that way it's self-contained to reaper itself and offsets the penalty incurred via RShroud, and not leaning on other trait lines to fix sustain woes. Usually when this dependency happens, a bunch of bad situations come from it; it's one-dimensional and there's no room for choice/expansion without nerfing the impacting trait line, it ends up gating new mechanics/becoming super OP because of some new implementation (see: Corruption mechanics and Scourge, and MANY issues with Thief over a years with expansions), or it gets nerfed anyways and the trait ends up sucking because it was carried by another trait (like BB right now). I don't think numbers or strictly more power is really the answer except for maybe helping DChill out a little bit to make condi reaper a viable DPS.

Damn, I was hoping it was a feature.

Damage modifiers stack multiplicatively which is why Malice is so potent. It gets multiplied by the other modifiers which DE gets decent access to. If you combine all the modifiers on CS/TR/DE and add a sigil of force, the total damage ends up around 3.47x the normal crit via a stacked DJ (possibly more, but I'll assume a reasonable build and not idealistic scenarios), plus all the extra ferocity and power from CS. If you combine with this Assassin's Signet, the thief can pretty easily hit 3k (4k PvE/WvW) power and some of the highest crit damage stats in the game. This is a difficult scenario to achieve for the thief, but absolutely possible. If anything 11k is actually rather mediocre and suggests the DE was in fact not a CS build but spec'ed for SA. Formula for crits is base value * critical damage modifier * all other modifiers. None of this is reflected in the damage aspect of the tooltip, since it varies per target and per person casting. It's also worth noting any tooltip info you see is based on your current stats, meaning your link of the tooltip can appear very different than what they see. There is no such thing as "base" damage in this game; it's solely determined by weapon damage * power * ferocity/crit damage * misc. extra modifiers / opponent's armor. The tooltip you see will be VERY different if you see a linked skill between builds, classes, boon status, other additives, etc. Tooltip damage is really more of an estimate based on average level-based scalings and the likes; it assumes a ~2600 (2597) armor target, so any profession with less armor will take the appropriate amount of damage increased. In the case of core light armor classes, this is about 1900, indicating that in reality, light armored targets take an additional (2597/1920 [or 1888 sPvP) damage = 35% **MORE** damage than listed in the tooltip, regardless of any other factors. So that damage listed ends up being a huge bit different when all the variables not included in the tooltip are actually calculated. Here's some math: Such a thief in sPvP hovers at 245% crit damage with Berserker amulet and Scholar Runes with NQ up. With an additional 3.47 multiplier and then 35% additional damage on the armor difference, actual real damage is... **11.48 times the listed value**. Which roughly checks out and can be further modified by vulnerability and other such factors. A 768 tooltip indicates you have substantially less power than would be expected by a thief. Even on the marauder amulet, the DE's unmodified tooltip for DJ is 1036. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage As I said, use the tooltip as a gauge of relative strength of skills in a vacuum, not a listing for what exactly you'd see on screen, and then do research as to the professions and what kind of builds exist (and the respective skills on a profession; DE in particular gains 15% on DJ damage per stack of malice, up to a 2.05* multiplier with nothing else) to possibly modify said damage. It's why damage modifiers are a huge deal and contribute greatly to any given damage, and why in my opinion, they should be restricted to low-utility traitlines only, as a form of investment in dealing damage rather than free bonuses for taking a given traitline. Edit: This is also why you see DE Mark (Mug trait) damage dealing so little. It's unimpacted by almost every other modifier on the thief, including crits, and so you see it deal about 1/10'th of the damage you took. So the match generally checks out.

Nah, they already did range. They had an opportunity, they listened to RPvEr's and people with no idea about the implications of why DE can never be balanced. Or they're just that clueless. A bit of a tossup, really. Inb4 OH Torch/Focus that nobody wants or plays, that will feature a gigabroken traitline that D/P will commandeer, and will thus cause more nerfs to core thief.

Only need to see title; it'd be busted as hell unless the necromancer itself was to get absolutely gutted in everything else. Not worth it. The old Speed of Shadows trait putting shroud on a 7s cooldown at the cost of making staff a trash weapon (which it already largely is regardless) without SM was enough to fundamentally change how necro could be played and made Reaper/necro a **MUCH** stronger duelist than it is now, to the point where it had very few downright bad matchups. That should say a lot - I don't think this needs to be fully explained just because the existing shroud cooldown trait was already amazing for flickering plays, with 7x the cooldown.

> @"Stand The Wall.6987" said: > > @"Swagger.1459" said: > > > @"Stand The Wall.6987" said: > > > yeah i always found it weird how they limited stance share duration with allies and instead went with increasing it on yourself. i mean, its supposed to be a team support option, why would you limit what the trait is supposed to be? then ofc they nerfed stances cuz they were too powerful. coulda just fixed this trait and the prot gives -33% condi dmg trait. godamit. > > > > Because the main function of Soulbeast isn’t to be a strong team support. > > the main function of the trait is team support So is the trait Shadow Savior. Do you see any S/x support healing thieves around? No. Because the trait isn't designed to act as group support. It's situational benefit where pro/con is weighed against other traits and given utilities. The trait is innately selfish because it extends the duration of your own stances, too. The extra for allies is a side effect. That's how it **should** be. Just because there's some degree of synergy doesn't make it viable to build entirely around or make blatant claims that the entire spec is designed to offer premier results in once facet of gameplay. It's like playing condi longbow because of Sharpened Edges and Sharpening Stone. Yes, there is synergy and there is logic for huge condi burst there. No, it's not something which can leverage any kind of competitive advantage because of how cleanse-happy the game needs to be for everything else, and the kit carries zero synergy otherwise. WvW blobbing is nothing more than an efficiency race just like PvE raiding, except that rather than DPS and coefficients, everything that matters in WvW is fight/boon control, AoE bombing, and raw sustain. None of which the soulbeast does exceptionally well above other classes. Soulbeast **can** bring solid support to justify its place, when played well, in a blob, as a pug. It is **never** a staple by virtue of how selfish the spec is, and is why, like thief, it's top-tier in roaming and bottom-tier in zergs.

> @"otto.5684" said: > > @"Heizero.9183" said: > > GS2 already does insane damage If you land the whole skill. I dont think buffing damage is the right fix, however I think removing the movement penalty so that it behaves more like Reaper shroud 4 would really benefit the while weaponset. > > Insane damage as 6k in sPvP? Assuming you somehow managed to pull the entire damage on enemy target. You know this is not PvE we are talking about, right? GS damage in the PvP modes is insane per cast relative to most other skills with its cast time. If its projectiles hit, it deals twice backstab's damage per cast (or 55% more damage if none of them do) and substantially more than a triclone Mind Wrack, and per cooldown acts as the same amount of damage dealt as a thief investing in two backstabs over 8s. If you're only hitting 6k, it's because all builds favor bunkering right now since DPH/DPS builds were so aggressively nerfed in February that it's pointless to play squishy on virtually everything. The only majorly comparable skill is Soul Spiral on Reaper, which still does less damage, has 3x the casting duration, and has nearly 4x the cooldown. The problem is the movespeed of this game has been so massively powercreeped it no longer reliably hits most classes because of the movement penalty/escape potential on most targets, not the actual damage it deals. Welcome to core game, where the core game design is negated by the demand for everyone to get a power fantasy from the expansion classes.

Just like Karma, core game resources seem to only be there for Posterity's sake. They could put actually good food in the WvW merchant inventory, but that'd be expecting way too much.

> @"Exitus.3297" said: > I know, I know. Another thread on this topic. Just hear me out. > > Let me first start by saying that the nerf to Consume Plasma is fine because Mesmers have an incredibly difficult time vs Thieves, so this should help them out a bit. I'm still indifferent on Essence Sap due to how big the nerf was but it was pretty strong so I don't see a big problem. > > With that out of the way, I want to get into why the change to Infiltrator's Arrow and Signet of Agility is shortsighted. Players have already pointed out the issue of the 8 initiative cost being clunky due to the Thief only having up to 15 initiative to begin with, and that is with the Trickery traitline which they were already pigeonholed into to begin with. To add to that, Mobility isn't just a staple of the Thief; it is what is keeping them relevant. Taking it away or severely hampering without giving them something elsewhere to make up for it at least a little bit puts Thief players in position where they don't know what direction you want them to go in. The fact that the Signet of Agility got nerfed along with it just compounds that confusion because it just tells Thieves you want them to be less mobile, but you don't want them to fight as well either. > > But there is even more at play here. Either Thieves are going to toss Shortbow, or find a way around the cost. I'm going to specifically address the latter. What do you guys think Thieves will do to make up the cost in Initiative to keep Shortbow relevant? They are going to find a way to make up the cost, and that cost happens to be made up for by Shadow's Rejuvenation. Thieves that avoided this trait are now going to feel obligated to take it, whereas before it was just a really strong (and imho a crutch) trait. > > This is because Shortbow 5, without the use of other Initiative regen sources, took 6 seconds to regen the initiative they need to fire off a single Infiltrator's Arrow. Now it takes 8 seconds. Shadow's Rejuvenation gives 1 Initiative every 3 seconds (or 2 per 6, totaling 8 initiative over 6 seconds), meaning it perfectly makes up the increased cost as long as a Thief camps stealth when they are running around. That means you are going to see Thieves camp stealth _more_, not _less._ This is further compounded by the Signet of Agility nerf because they won't be able to sustain fights now. This trait also happens to be the reason why Thieves were able to do so much while still stacking stealth. It mitigated the decision of choosing stealth over mobility/damage because a Thief could stack stealth with Black Powder, Blinding Powder and Heartseekers and get a bunch of their initiative back. This trait by itself is why Thieves can Perma-stealth with very few to no cooldowns. Now it's going to be nigh-mandatory along with Trickery. > > Part of the reason I write this is because I am seeing a lot of people in the forums saying that the nerfs are good because the Thief needed nerfs for the sake of needing nerfs. I see _alot_ of those same people complaining about stealth uptime on the Thief. I am telling everyone right now that this change is going to make that problem worse. Pretty much; ANet is continuing to address symptoms and not what's actually problematic. Shortbow keeps the thief relevant, and always has. Daredevil keeps the thief in full control of both its **and its opponents'** melee engages, since Dash will keep most melees from getting back into range for land attacks, and SShot controls the re-engage on the thief's terms. While D/P Daredevil did face some nerfs here, the issues are less with shortbow/core thief and more with how Dash and BP being a stunbreak makes the thief impossible to catch in melee without excessive mobility skills or range. This pretty much only modifies the ranger/thief matchup to favor ranger more, which was already pretty well-favored to the ranger, and definitely makes shortbow devoid of any value in combat itself; you can't swap into the weapon to temporary dodge and keep pressure going, because either you'll be out of initiative after the primary engage to use it, or because you'll be incapable of using other weapon skills to make using the weapon worthwhile for any other context except running away.

The problem is that PvE balance is an unsolvable optimization problem when you try and look at it from a diversity perspective. The game is very diverse the moment the optimization goes away. This is a major issue with raids and time-gated encounters, increasing rage mechanics, etc. It all promotes the same style of play and an optimal solution no matter what. Classes can be super balanced at the top end, but like we observe with reaper - for most groups, the classes that do the job well the most consistently and the easiest tend to do way better in relative terms than their top-end counterparts. It's a constant juggle of which side do you balance for, when everyone talks optimization. You also can't just endlessly tweak numbers and have skills deal wildly different amounts of damage across the modes. Consider a new player of a given class that enjoys a certain kit and makes a build around it to use in PvP, to find the skill does only 20% of the damage. They're not going to be receptive to it. The overarching design, with animations and positioning tools and all that, is much bigger. If we could all just agree we need major overhauls rather than numeric tweaks because of different levels of DPS performance, both modes would absolutely benefit if we had conversations on what's healthy for PvP design and what's healthy for PvE encounter spaces and small tweaks across a profession's overall margins rather than huge changes to individual skill damage.

> @"KrHome.1920" said: > Infiltrator's Arrow spam became a 2 second nerf. Super "significant"! > > The skill was never meant to be a fast travel utility but a reposition utility for the shortbow or what do you think why there is a blind on it? > > Since no thief actually cared for that purpose and everyone is just using the skill exclusively for traveling (that's an euphemism for resetting btw.) for 8 years now, it is time to reduce its impact a bit. Issue is that it came at the cost of a core weapon instead of what's definitively a problem with Daredevil and SA. This impacts every build, and not as significantly the ones which were already too slippery and badly-designed. The change also runs entirely contrary to having it be used in order to reposition, since the melee kits and damage trait lines have had their power gutted such that having 8 initiative in the tank to use to reposition just isn't feasible. It's now *solely* a passive movement tool to reset or traverse maps with. Core or DE running shortbow can be caught by pretty much every profession, including necro. I do it all the time. The issues thief has are nothing more than stacked stealth via SA and other factors (D/P and BD or DE) and Scaredevil's ability to run away from anything through Dash from pure movespeed while getting free re-engage on Shadow Shot. This is just one more example of ANet not understanding why the problem exists and instead dealing with the lowest-hanging-fruit symptoms instead of the actual problems.

> @"foste.3098" said: > Now we just need to wait 8 more months for them to actually balance the class around not having as much mobility and we will get to what the thief was advertised as to begin with: a glassy and slippery duelist. If they actually wanted that, D/D would be good. Nope, it's designed as a permastealther that's intended to do nothing but run away or hide. Daredevil wouldn't be designed to only offer power in running away and DE would have been designed to play aggressively and not camp stealth if that were the real intention.

These weapons aren't even really that bad. Off-meta in a lot of cases, but not atrocious. The really bad weapons are probably so bad the OP doesn't even know they exist. When people talk about build diversity, they're talking about this stuff: * OH sword on Mesmer and Warrior * D/D and S/P on thief (worse the stronger the builds involved and the more skilled the players) * MH dagger and MH scepter on Necro, and a bit of OH dagger, too depending on MH choices. There's still a healthy amount of pretty-weak-but-playable weapons as well, ranging from stuff like longbow warrior to OH pistol mesmer to MH mace on guardian. And further still there are prominent weapons that are taken mostly because the alternatives are just worse; looking mostly at staff on Necro and OH Torch on ranger. The niche picks, hammer on Rev, are picked for specific scenarios and are often downright strong in those. Hammer Rev for example is one of the best DPS in WvW larger-scale play, and also brings a ton of utility. These weapons are strong, but badly-designed, because they can't be played in more scenarios. This is the same as shortbow on thief; it's not strong enough to be a MH choice because all of the utility of the weapon is balanced on one or two skills, and all the remaining power taken away from it to preserve said utility.

> @"Dawdler.8521" said: > Yet some people would *still* move superfast and some move superslow because some people can get speed buffs in their builds and some cant. > > There is no "fix" for this except uniform speed with no available buffs whatsoever. This was the point of signets and swiftness. Some brilliant mind at ANet decided that movespeed disparities weren't big enough, though, and to overload boons even further by changing rune of speed. 25% should be the permanent number. 33% should be swiftness. No other benefits should exist. If people want instant mobility, they should take weapons which provide it. If superspeed is necessary to evade certain things, it means AoE radii are too large and should be cut, and the effect made an extreme rarity. It's that simple, and yet, here we are...

> @"Stand The Wall.6987" said: > > @"TrollingDemigod.3041" said: > > How can you even consider buffing something when most of e-speces are poorly designed, did you ever though about what you write atleast once? > > I can't even imagine how broken they would need to make Druid to replace FB or even fight for Support slot in meta without breaking it into other areas, simply impossible to do so. > > Buff something to broken level so it can fight another broken thing, best idea ever. > > so instead of buffing something that is poorly designed, lets nerf something that is well designed. makes sense. > simply impossible to make something viable, so have to break it instead. makes sense. Firebrand is one of the most atrocious examples of bad design in the game, only behind scourge and mirage.

The problem is the entire elite spec, like Deadeye, is poorly-designed and just amplifies issues that players already have with core. It abuses the strengths D/P already has way above the other weapon sets. It promotes the thief getting distance rather than getting closer. It allows bad thieves to recover from their losses of getting caught without resources. Unlike the bruiser it was meant to be, Scaredevil is the king of running away or just strictly not-fighting toe-to-toe, and with that, comes a lot of power when it can choose to just leave a losing fight almost whenever it wants by mashing dodge. It's honestly sad that the best way to play Daredevil as it was intended is to literally not pick a GM trait, be it because two of them force you to leave stealth if you're in melee range trying to make an aggressive play that way, or because it pretty much forcefully repositions you when trying to get closer, which is out of range from melee, anyways, meaning the bonus dodge is almost entirely wasted. Thief is not strong; it's just frustrating to play against by abusing a very few select mechanics with a very few select builds with no wiggle room for diversity, because the class's stats and other kit options have been nerfed by collateral so much over the years in trying to tame objectively awful design which ANet just seems either completely incapable or completely unwilling to change. I think ANet balances builds by popularity, rather than by performance, which is why we see stuff like D/D thief, S/S Warrior, and OH sword on Mes left to suck forever. Which is sad, because the reason other builds aren't played has nothing to do with what people want; they're just such absolute trash you legitimately stop having any winning matchups at all the moment you deviate away from what's peak performance. Especially when it comes to the thief, ANet has lost a ton more players from D/D sucking than any gained from upholding busted design.

> @"Junkpile.7439" said: > Maybe do some good changes like give core necro stability so they would manage cast at least one skill in fight. Or just nerf the CC, so people can play things other than whatever spams boons the most. But this thread is dumb and OP has been crying about ranger being weak even when boonbeast existed at its peak power. I can already take my soulbeast into some larger group play running stance share and it's fine. Ranger is only bad in zergs because of the prominence of reflects and lack of boon sharing otherwise. If you opt for its niche utility, play it well, and the people around you know that's what you're playing, there's like... zero issue. Zerg play is about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Ranger is arguably the most self-sufficient class in the entire game and one of the strongest individually. Giving it that much power to support and act as a reliable blob DPS just makes it the best at everything and removes any kind of agency any other class has.

> @"Veprovina.4876" said: > > @"DeceiverX.8361" said: > > I mean let's be real, it was overpowered with two. I did the math out a long time ago demonstrating with the right runes and food alongside its previous meta builds, Mirage had higher evasion uptime than Acro thief. > > > > Unfortunately ANet took the easy way out per the usual and instead of reworking the absolutely-terribly-unhealthy-and-supremely-overpowered mechanics which were MC and ambush skills, they just removed the dodge and seemingly called it a day > > But that's the whole point of the class? > Illusion trickster duelist, evasion is kind of the point. > > Also i don't understand the logic, Mirage had probably the highest evasion like you said, so that's somehow bad - but now Thief has highest evasion, does this mean thief is bad now and they'll cut his dodges in half because you're not supposed to be the best at something? That makes no sense. Some professions will have the highest "something", be best at "something", that doesn't mean it's broken, that just means they're good at one particular thing. It's only bad if you get 1 shotted by a Mirage that has tons of defense and tons of evasion on top of that. But it had neither, it only had good evasion. > > I don't get why ambush skills were bad either, but at least i agree they should have changed something else instead of dodges. > Maybe rework mirrors or other skills or traits, idk... > > Just not mess with the core mechanic of the game - that's still present in PvE might i add, making this change very bad. Stealth is also a major facet of the thief's purpose. It doesn't change the fact that stacking stealth in general is horrible design and should have been reworked years ago to be more predictable. They also did nerf Daredevil's dodge access with the UC changes, nerfed Acrobatics multiple times, and it's STILL overloaded. And even as someone with substantial stake in the thief class I acknowledge and recognize it as flawed. It doesn't excuse Mesmer of having access to something still-better, because even the thief is susceptible to being hit when CC'ed. The mirage literally was immune to CC-burst combos because the CC actually didn't matter on its own. That's **BROKEN**. The entire basis of the thief was also built around evasion and has historically been used as the reasoning behind nerfing various facets of the thief even unrelated to its evasion-based builds, whereas the mesmer was not designed with this as a core tenet; the mesmer was built around being difficult to isolate and pin down, and as a summoner via clones and phantasms with a plethora of effects in its shatters and CC to control and react to combat as it went on. Imagine Thieves Guild being better than Phantasms with similarly-low cooldowns as most phantasm skills, and being switched to just a regular utility skill, with ammo. Now imagine a thief telling you as a mesmer that "It's okay for the thief to be the better summoner, someone has to be the best." That's a horrible argument. A class being better at something than another is not a problem. A class performing better at something that an entire other class was deliberately designed to be the best at is called overpowered. It's like advocating boonbeast was healthy because something has to be tankiest, despite the ranger not being designed to tank and the warrior having been a significantly weaker tank at the time. It doesn't work like that. The Ambush skills provided a mixture of excess utility and/or damage on their respective weapons at no real cost. It's not like mesmers weren't running MH sword for defense for BF, and their condi builds lacking huge burst damage as it was. MC, by design, is impossible to balance and just a horrible concept for any PvP environment. Even CMC acknowledged this like a month ago on stream. The mechanics themselves were bad for the game and bad for the class. It's a fun "theme" that may work in PvE for flavor, but undermines the integrity of the game's sPvP/WvW balance more than it should. Subsequently, I stand by my original statement: Mirage didn't deserve to have its dodge reduced to 1, but instead needed to have MC and Ambush skills completely scrapped and redone conceptually. Some concepts just have no place in games, and MC in particular was one of such concepts.

It's a good change. Now if we could just fix the classes...

It's fine - really. You just need to practice more. The skill is already quite strong with its Trick Synergy and charge count. DH pull is also really unhealthy in all of the environments it's actually good in, anyways. Frankly, all of the pulls are. There's no reason to ask for more power when its situational nature is more the lack of reason to take it rather than the actual efficacy of the skill.

I mean let's be real, it was overpowered with two. I did the math out a long time ago demonstrating with the right runes and food alongside its previous meta builds, Mirage had higher evasion uptime than Acro thief. Unfortunately ANet took the easy way out per the usual and instead of reworking the absolutely-terribly-unhealthy-and-supremely-overpowered mechanics which were MC and ambush skills, they just removed the dodge and seemingly called it a day

Culling. And the 50% damage mod on release Assassin's Signet, with all the other damage modifiers available to thief on DA and CS, almost all of which have been removed. 12k damage Mug was absolutely stupid, but also hilarious it was even allowed to exist.

Imagine me calling this seven years ago in a GvG guild and getting kicked for suggesting anything against the meta. Honestly, the only issue is they CC. Otherwise, let the AoE cap be hit easier. The point is obvious how AoE spam + boonballing is a trash meta and we should have more of the GvG damage come from single target damage.

> @"Trevor Boyer.6524" said: > 1. The damage will reveal you if you are stealthed. If only ANet cared about that. See: Death Blossom. The skill was balanced back in 2012, and ANet only redesigns crap when it affects PvE DPS.