Guild Wars 2

(tl:dr: see last paragraph)

I didn’t play in any of the beta weekend events, so when a friend of mine described to me how thieves’ steal worked in GW2, I thought it sounded awesome. When the game came out, the first thing I did was make a thief.

I was not impressed.

So instead, I went on to make an engineer (which has its own issues). Now that my engineer is 80, I’ve been looking at a second class to play… and I really, really want to like the thief, but steal just doesn’t do it for me.

Stealing—ignoring all the extra damage and poison you can stack on it to make it "effective"—which thematically should be the epitome of tactical combat, is impossible to use tactically.

Now, many people will say that, of course, stealing isn’t actually random at all, and they know precisely what they can get from a certain creature, but still the only choice the thief has is 1) Whether to use steal at all, and 2) When to use the item stolen.

This, I think, can be improved with very little effort. The shallowness of steal is made clear in the fact that it only uses one of the four keys devoted to class mechanics—why not change that?

What I propose, is that F1 be steal, and when you steal an item, F2, F3 and F4 become offensive, defensive and support options for that item. I don’t expect these skills to be any more complex than the current stolen items, but they would put meaning into what is now for many people just a carrier for the secondary effects you can stack on top of it.