Screwed again: Proposed THF job adjustments.

[noodles355]

Think I speak for most when I say I would hapilly accept a greatly nerfed/reduced absorb rate from aura steal if it meant a shorter recast and separate timer. Absorbing sometimes is nice, and we understand how powerful this ability can potentially be, but we all use it much more for the dispel than for the absorb.

Dropping it to a 1 minute timer, on a non-merited ability with a bas of 0% absorb chance and each merit giving like 2% or 5% chance to absorb would be great. Max you could achieve is 10% or 25% absorb rate if you merited it to 5/5, but you would have to sacrifice other merits like Assassin's Charge or Feint to do so. That would keep it balanced.

[Economizer]

OK, to be clear, I'm staying out of the discussion about Aura Steal for now, since the discussion is pretty heated.

I believe this is the Japanese thread for Thief.

Now, the best way to get a feel for where the other side of the discussion is going would be to get someone who can read Japanese to read that thread and give an impression of thoughts. Considering the shear amount of specialized terms used to talk about Thief, like Treasure Hunter, SATA, and so on, it is hard enough to get a feel for what the general opinion is from our fellow players while reading machine translations, so I can't actually give even a slightly accurate guess for what the opinion is there.

I think the moral of the story here is that I need to learn Japanese the next time I'm learning another language...

[Raksha]

So what are these awesome buffs that can be dispelled anyway?

Can you Aurasteal AV's bracelets or something?

[Yinnyth]

I have a TH Macro as well to equip THF knife in offhand and re-quip a good one after the initial hit for harder NMs, but in events like Dynamis and Such its not an option as the TP given up so often is unreasonable.

If the item is going to be forced in our slot to be effective, we should not have to be gimp in using it in my eyes.

I feel the request is reasonable

That is quite true. There are situations in which switching to thief's knife, then switching away are quite impractical. For dynamis, I consider whoever is playing thf for my LS (usually Heri or me) to be the lowest of DDs, and if more than 3 show up, the thf gets kicked out of the party with the bard (usually me) in it. That is a somewhat depressing scenario. It would be nice if thf got pushed back up to nearly the same level as other DDs seing as how Heri has mandau and twash(both 90), and I have twash(90).

[Karbuncle]

I think the best buff a THF Can steal is likely the Haste from Wivre's, or E-peen DMG Shots via Boost by Hippo's or UFOs.

We cannot steal Wamoura's Haste last i checked, but that was a long time ago. We can dispel it, but not take it.

[Longshot]

I don't post much but here's my 2 cents:


Aura steall:

Can't say how many times I've stolen something like ice spikes only to have the mob immediately cast it again. Also as already stated it doesn't have a high accuracy and most of the stuff you really want to dispel cannot be.

Is it fun to try and absorb a buff now and then? Sure. Is Aura steal useful? Once in a while it saves your butt, but most time its doesn't make much of a difference in a fight.

Do I care if they separate steal and aura steal timers or lower recast? No.

If they are not going to put anything worth stealing into the game, maybe they could get rid of the steal ability altogether and just make it aura steal for those THF that do seriously use it. It seems silly to have a job called "Thief" with an ability called "Steal" and nothing worth stealing anyway.


Accomplice/Collaborator:

Neither of these are very helpful in a real party situation after most of the party hits the enmity cap. At level 95, that will not take long at all (it doesn't now). You might buy a party member a few seconds with Accomplice but not much else. Above all, I don't want anybody's enmity. I'm not trying to tank, I want to make use of SA and TA etc.


I am interested to see how effective Bully is going to be.


I would like Rudra's Storm beefed up a bit. If not stacked with SA or TA or Climactic Flourish, the damage it deals feels very low for an empyrean weapon and is very inconsistent.


To Camate, this thread seems pretty heated right now while some people express their frustrations and disappointments about the direction that THF seems to be headed, but do we have any offensive abilities or traits to look forward to?

[Monchat]

Finale and Dispel have like 10seconds recast and almost never resist, and even if they do you can recast 10 seconds later. Very few mobs fully resist. Aura steal has a 5 minute recast, a high but not 100% dispel effect, and a high chance of missing. come on. This ability is USELESS. end of the story. If i want to dispel a mob I'll be 100x more efficient subbing RDM, as dispel is rarely resisted.

What would fix it:
-1minute recast, separate ability, 100% dispel, absorb rate not 100% or...
-30s recast, not 100% dispel.

Nobody cares about the absord effect. Nothing is worth abosorbing. When it came out people were saying its amazing to absorb a warcry from dyna mob and have attack at 999 for 15 seconds... no its not awsome lol. It's useless. The only reason I put one merit in it is to dispel the spikes frome the soulflayer NM from salvage because rdm couldn't and I didn't bring BRD.

While we are at it:

- Mug is useless. remove it from our job abilities.
-Steal is useless. reduce the recast time to 1 minute, or remove it. Nothing is worth stealing. Nobody cares. Look at Neo dynamis and how useless steal is. Omg, the single coin I manage to steal during the 2h is so awsome. And I only managed to proc TWO ability mobs since May with steal, doing dynamis almost daily. lol.
- Despoil is useless. See above.
- Hide is almost useless: Either leave its effect and reduce the recast to 1 minute, OR leave it a 5 mn but make it 100% and not just one specific mob families/remove the no enimity rule on NMs and unhidable mobs.

Once you get rid of those useless abilities, give us real hate transfer tools and I might play THF again, I like the stance ability from above, and the reverse collaborator.

Stop giving our defining ability ( Treasure hunter) to other jobs, and make its effect more noticable.

[Insaniac]

I would like Rudra's Storm beefed up a bit. If not stacked with SA or TA or Climactic Flourish, the damage it deals feels very low for an empyrean weapon and is very inconsistent.

The catch with single hit dagger WSs is that they can't be made very powerful unstacked because they would be extremely overpowered when stacked with SATA. The reason DE and Evisc can do reasonable damage unstacked is because when you stack them with SA and TA only the first hit of the WS receives the base damage increase and auto crit and they receive a far lower damage increase. Mercy stroke and Mandalic stab both suffer from the same limitations. The only option for RS would be to make it a multi hit WS and lower it's fTP to ~1.0 depending on how many hits there wer ein the WS which would have it's ups and downs outside of abyssea. For instance on HNM level mobs it's spike damage would probably be lower than SB but in events like WoE or einherjar it would be more realistic to full time the WS even when your timers were down to keep your aftermath up. Inside abyssea the WS would be far worse off than it is now.

[Zirael]

It has been said by numerous people already (directly and indirectly), but I'd like to say it in simple words as well to the Developers:
You are wrong in your judgement.
You are unfair in your judgement.

Your arguments brought up to this conversation were weak and misinformed at best. We have told you how reality looks like. If a player came in here saying what you have sad, I would ask him "Do you have THF leveled? Do you even play THF at all? Have you ever taken THF75/THF90 to any endgame content and tried doing anything meaningful beyond Treasure Hunter --> afk?" It really feels like what the Developers have said might have come from someone who's skimmed through THF's wikipedia page and writes in here to score a post count, it really does to me.
People who leveled THF beyond 37 tell you over and over again how the reality looks like. If you still don't believe, level THF, join any endgame linkshell and see for yourself how it feels like.

[Atomic_Skull]

StanceTHF
Lowers Critical hit Rate, But increases Attack and Damage from SA and TA
Lowers Critical hit rate by 10%, Increases Attack by 10% and SA/TA DMG by 15% each.
*Now you may think the trade off is wierd, But this stance would be really useful in tough content like Voidwatch, where the THF is mostly only using SA and TA then moving out of range.

15% attack and lowered critical hit rate is going to lower your damage on voidwatch NMs because daggers have low weapon rank Voidwatch NM's have crazy DEF and 15% attack isn't going to raise your overall damage as much as 10% critical attack rate.

Give THF a force crit JA that works from any direction which provides a cRatio bonus in place of the DEX and AGI based weapon DMG bonus of SATA. Said ability would have a 20 second cooloff, and share it's timer with Sneak Attack *and* Trick Attack.

Give THF a stance that increases attack and critical hit rate 15% but lowers evasion and defense by 20%

Give THF a stance that increases defense and lowers enemy critical hit rate by 15% and lowers critical hit rate and attack by 10% (this is mutually exclusive with the above like Hasso and Saigen)