Is Thief spent? - Part 2 [Balancing Discussion]

[SexyHair.9104]

I want to thank everyone who posted in the previous thread (https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/59255/is-thief-spent/p1) for sharing their thoughts and opinions on the current state of thief. I thought I'd make a new thread specifically for what could possibly be done to repair thief with the state it's in and leave the other thread purely for discussion.

 

The most prominent issues agreed upon were as follows:

* Low survivability (Low health pool and health sustain along with little access to key defensive boons such as Stability and instead relying on evading for damage/crowd-control mitigation)

* Low damage capabilities (Outside of initial openers and intermittent burst combos there is no continuous damage throughout fights)

* Difficulty in 'honorable' fights (Alluding to points one and two, cannot reliably fight in 1v1 scenarios without breaking away and 'resetting' the fight to heal or prepare a combo)

* Unfavored profession (Similar mechanics to Mesmer or Revenant but ultimately out-shined due to superior weapon/profession skills)

 

Most could be solved purely by a numbers buff to put it on par with other professions but some things would require tweaking. Daredevil was a step in the right direction, offering some increased evasion with some small boons on dodging but I think we can do better. Instead of an animation for dodges, why not make it a boon similar to Instant Reflexes where we can act freely but still carry the bonus of evading? Additionally, in the realm of sustained damage, why not make attacks such as Lotus Strike more prevalent? Not only would this make Condition Damage builds more popular but it increases overall damage for every build as well. Faster cast times for skills would be a good pseudo buff to help damage as well as making us appear quick and agile being too fast to interrupt. Broadening initiative costs over to utility bar skills would be interesting but potentially disastrous in allowing certain skills to be freely cast. (It could make an neat elite specialization though.)

 

These are just a few personal ideas but I'd like to see what other people can offer as solutions to our predicament.

[Turk.5460]

> @"SexyHair.9104" said:

> Instead of an animation for dodges, why not make it a boon similar to Instant Reflexes where we can act freely but still carry the bonus of evading?

 

It's nice to see interest in improving Thief, but this particular suggestion would not be welcome. Mirages already have this, and it's been one of the most unhealthy additions to the game to date.

[Riko.9214]

I think in the defence department they just need to change a bit how the stealth works to make it better.

 

In particular:

Nerf - finishers (leap/blast) no longer provides stealth while in stealth (no stack, no extend, simply nothing)

Buff - channelled abilities no longer track in stealth

 

After that I would see if thief needs extra defences.

 

As for damage totally agree, 10-20% buff is needed across the board or at least for most things.

[DeceiverX.8361]

> @"Turk.5460" said:

> > @"SexyHair.9104" said:

> > Instead of an animation for dodges, why not make it a boon similar to Instant Reflexes where we can act freely but still carry the bonus of evading?

>

> It's nice to see interest in improving Thief, but this particular suggestion would not be welcome. Mirages already have this, and it's been one of the most unhealthy additions to the game to date.

 

It's completely contrarian to the entire point of the game's original vision where you could watch a character and know what it's doing versus needing to pay attention to status bars.

 

Thief doesn't need to look to other professions to copy from or be buffed up to for improvements. It needs some improvements from a build diversity perspective, some adjustments to remove unhealthy playstyles in the form of camping stealth with SA/DE, and some tweaked weapon skills.

 

The rest... it's on the other professions to be nerfed. The thief is still capable of out-playing people. It's just way too steep of a learning curve and the builds able to do so are very specific because other professions are overbuffed.

[meepeY.2867]

Thief is extremely unforgiving and as others have pointed out, has a steep learning curve. A steep learning curve for a class is fine so long as the payoff is worth the effort. In most pvp aspects Thief gameplay revolves around: A Strong opener -> short burst combos -> resetting fights to save defensive cooldowns for "ohsh.t" moments. It has a heavy focus on timing (interrupts, your bursts) and patience or else you'll end up trading damage instead, and a Thief almost always will lose a trade and will have to blow crucial defensive cooldowns. A low healthpool and low damage skills cause no viable builds to incorporate defensive gear choices ultimately forces Marauder/Zerk+Valk mixes (maybe one or two Soldier pieces). The only brawler build is Staff Daredevil which relies very heavily on evade spamming and has a pretty low skill ceiling.

 

Daredevil has its dodges, DE has its permastealth gimmick, Core relies on Acro with S/D evades, but all of these specs rely pretty decently on resetting fights because Thief has little staying power in 1v1 fights. Thief runs out of steam pretty quickly when it's put under pressure. Relying on dodgerolls and evade frames or stealth and blinds for defence has its limit, distance and resetting for the most part is free. Thief can regain its resources (initiative, endurance) reasonably quickly but resetting interrupts the fight and at this point in the meta, it is a core mechanic to a Thief's survivability. Most thief builds do have great openers so resetting does make sense.

 

All of this forces a sort-of cylindrical problem.

 

Some proposed solutions could be

 

- Increase Thief base health pool to 15922 (Same base as Mesmer, Engi, Rev) and increase the heals from healing skills by 25% to accommodate. This would make full Marauder put you on 22k hp (No runes, no food) and allows you to take a little bit more punishment. Full Zerker becomes a viable option for those who wanna do big damage. Beyond that, just in general it opens up more options for builds. More build diversity is always a good thing. This also bypasses the "buff all damage by 10%" problem with a Thief's damage.

- Lower the cooldowns of skills like Agility Signet, Roll 4 Initiative and Blinding Powder by 5-10 seconds. They could even change Agility Signet to give 50% of total endurance instead of 50 flat endurance (buff to DD), get rid of the cast time on Blinding Powder and change the Stability to 5 seconds of Protection or Aegis (the stability doesn't do anything if there's no cast time and it blinds your enemy), increase the initiative gain on R4I to 8 or 10. A lot of other skills could use a buff too but these are the mostly used ones.

- Preparedness BASELINE! Buff, change or rework specific traits - lets face it, we could be here all day with proposed changes but Thief traits need to be brought up current standards. Thief traits don't really do much, even the grandmaster traits can be a bit lack lustre. Incorporate more defensive slants to traits. For example Slight of Hand now also Blinds for 5 seconds, Improvisation could also give you 100 toughness for every skill recharged for 10 seconds, and so on, so fourth.

 

 

[Tails.9372]

P/P needs a sustainability buff and should have more weapons skills replaced (preferably the entire set). It should also get a small scale AoE option (preferably by adding the old ricochet ability to the pistol specific weapon trait).

[Turk.5460]

> @"Tails.9372" said:

> P/P needs a sustainability buff and should have more weapons skills replaced (preferably the entire set). It should also get a small scale AoE option (preferably by adding the old ricochet ability to the pistol specific weapon trait).

 

#BringBackRicochet2020

[DeceiverX.8361]

> @"meepeY.2867" said:

> Thief is extremely unforgiving and as others have pointed out, has a steep learning curve. A steep learning curve for a class is fine so long as the payoff is worth the effort. In most pvp aspects Thief gameplay revolves around: A Strong opener -> short burst combos -> resetting fights to save defensive cooldowns for "ohsh.t" moments. It has a heavy focus on timing (interrupts, your bursts) and patience or else you'll end up trading damage instead, and a Thief almost always will lose a trade and will have to blow crucial defensive cooldowns. A low healthpool and low damage skills cause no viable builds to incorporate defensive gear choices ultimately forces Marauder/Zerk+Valk mixes (maybe one or two Soldier pieces). The only brawler build is Staff Daredevil which relies very heavily on evade spamming and has a pretty low skill ceiling.

>

> Daredevil has its dodges, DE has its permastealth gimmick, Core relies on Acro with S/D evades, but all of these specs rely pretty decently on resetting fights because Thief has little staying power in 1v1 fights. Thief runs out of steam pretty quickly when it's put under pressure. Relying on dodgerolls and evade frames or stealth and blinds for defence has its limit, distance and resetting for the most part is free. Thief can regain its resources (initiative, endurance) reasonably quickly but resetting interrupts the fight and at this point in the meta, it is a core mechanic to a Thief's survivability. Most thief builds do have great openers so resetting does make sense.

>

> All of this forces a sort-of cylindrical problem.

>

> Some proposed solutions could be

>

> - Increase Thief base health pool to 15922 (Same base as Mesmer, Engi, Rev) and increase the heals from healing skills by 25% to accommodate. This would make full Marauder put you on 22k hp (No runes, no food) and allows you to take a little bit more punishment. Full Zerker becomes a viable option for those who wanna do big damage. Beyond that, just in general it opens up more options for builds. More build diversity is always a good thing. This also bypasses the "buff all damage by 10%" problem with a Thief's damage.

> - Lower the cooldowns of skills like Agility Signet, Roll 4 Initiative and Blinding Powder by 5-10 seconds. They could even change Agility Signet to give 50% of total endurance instead of 50 flat endurance (buff to DD), get rid of the cast time on Blinding Powder and change the Stability to 5 seconds of Protection or Aegis (the stability doesn't do anything if there's no cast time and it blinds your enemy), increase the initiative gain on R4I to 8 or 10. A lot of other skills could use a buff too but these are the mostly used ones.

> - Preparedness BASELINE! Buff, change or rework specific traits - lets face it, we could be here all day with proposed changes but Thief traits need to be brought up current standards. Thief traits don't really do much, even the grandmaster traits can be a bit lack lustre. Incorporate more defensive slants to traits. For example Slight of Hand now also Blinds for 5 seconds, Improvisation could also give you 100 toughness for every skill recharged for 10 seconds, and so on, so fourth.

>

>

 

The crazy thing is that RFI and SoA already received substantial cooldown reduction (as did many other skills, too) and BP is super hard to balance with sustained stealth builds.

 

It really just has become more or less a spam and numbers game for most people and most classes. Everything else in the game gives so much free stats and has such low cooldowns that the calculated play of baiting cooldowns and punishing flubbed skills/misses that existed previously is pretty much nowhere to be seen, and becomes mind-bogglingly difficult to maintain in target-rich environments when trying to track everyone's sub-10-second cooldown CC-lock-nuke-combo while also concentrating on positioning, dodging/reacting, and any current status effects like damage immunities, Mirage Cloak, etc. when trying to land your critical burst skills and not waste initiative and also keep track of that, too.

 

Now, I think Daredevil (among other specs) kind of led us to this in that giving more resources to a profession via an elite spec makes for gameplay that's really hard to balance without just counterbuffing numbers on the opposing side. But I don't think just buffing the thief into being homogeneous with other classes is really going to make for good change at this point - it either ends up being what amounts to a slightly-harder warrior with a way higher skill ceiling since it still has the tricks up its sleeve, or ends up remaining fairly pointless because most of its problems really do come down to numbers and weapon skill discrepancies. The lack of build diversity on the thief is almost entirely due to the weapon skills being downright unusable in a game state that's been powercreeped since launch (Death Blossom, Dancing Dagger, Body Shot, Cluster Bomb, and to some extent even Headshot with stability and projectile denial spam), as well as the primary function of the historically-good-ones not having the numbers to back up the playstyle for all but a very narrow build choices, usually directly addressed by specific configurations that are otherwise worthless, like Deadeye's MBS.

 

By giving the thief lots of answers to current game-wide problems, all it really does it create scenarios like Mirage which are just oppressive and not fun to play against. We need to be especially careful with interactions like stealth and SA/DE.

 

I'd like to feel accomplished when winning a fight and feel like I was outmatched in skill when I lose one, both playing as and against other thieves and other classes. I think the current trend of "buffs for everyone all the time" is really regressive in this respect, and thus am not really for much more than reworks to some weapon skills (which need to happen regardless) to open up build diversity.

 

Balancing the rest while keeping gameplay integrity is really just going to have to come in the form of nerfs and reworks. Thief is really weird because it's got design problems all over, but mostly to specific gameplay elements, some of which aren't even exclusive to the thief itself, and despite all this, it also somehow manages to be relatively balanced numerically in respects to most of the core game. DE is really the only thing that breaks it wide open, but that's pretty much just via MBS and the general oppressiveness of rifle as a ranged burst damage weapon, which was unfortunately expected to happen if ANet ever went that route with rifle due to the core thief's foundation. I think it's only kept the way it is because it'd be useless with the power levels of the rest of the game, so it too shouldn't escape nerfs parallel with other specs.

[Rufo.3716]

Thief needs a big nerf, not buffs. If you have trouble playing thief the issue is you, not the profession.

[DemonSeed.3528]

> @"Turk.5460" said:

> > @"Tails.9372" said:

> > P/P needs a sustainability buff and should have more weapons skills replaced (preferably the entire set). It should also get a small scale AoE option (preferably by adding the old ricochet ability to the pistol specific weapon trait).

>

> #BringBackRicochet2020

 

Put it on rifle as well, and add piercing and watch the world burn XD

[Weasel.9684]

In my opinion the only real buff a thief needs is trickery just being part of a thief’s core kit.it’s basically not optional to take it and thief is balanced with the assumption it has been taken so freeing up thief’s to take another trait line such as crit strikes or SA would be a pretty good way to buff and then making a new line with something more unique to replace trickery