Guild Wars 2

What if a Thief had to use some skills or auto attacks in order to build up initiative, instead of having a full bar from the start and it being regenerated over time?

It’d kind of work like the Death Shroud of the Necro, where certain skills grant you x% of Life Force.

Then, Thieves wouldn’t be so gimmicky and would actually have to have a certain rotation of skills or plan when going in to a battle, instead of just 22222222herp222222 (I exaggerate, of course. :p)

This way, nobody can say, “I blew my load! I’m dead now!”, like they like to use as their excuse for their high burst.

I can understand why some Thieves would be against this idea, as it would significantly increase the skill level required to use it. You know, putting it up to par with an Engineer, Ele, or a Necro.

Before getting “you are only defending because you play a thief” I play 6 professions in PvP.

Engis necros and ele’s have access to every one of their base skills without a build up, the comparison is nothing alike. And pressing buttons in a certain sequence isn’t a measure of skill. It’s pressing buttons.

If this was done, thieves would be the only class forced to be stuck using their autoattack and unable to do anything until they land it.

I largely prefer the idea of getting rid of initiative and bringing back the combo system over this one.

What if instead of having access to all abilities at once, your class had to use certain ones.

Have to auto attack 5 times before “skill 2” becomes active.
Need to use “skill 2” 5 times before skill 3.

There’s a reason why no one designs games this way. It’s limiting in the choices you make.

Should stop making whine posts about thieves.

A D/D ele can faceroll a D/D thief. Want to “fix” them next?

Merciless.5349:

What if a Thief had to use some skills or auto attacks in order to build up initiative, instead of having a full bar from the start and it being regenerated over time?

So, lemme get this straight, every class in the game get’s multiple “kits” or weapon sets to swap around and plow through all of their CD’s at will… except thieves?

Am I reading this right?

A warrior still get’s the ability to pop his dash, root, 100 blades then swap to hammer and obliterate with CC all in less than 5 seconds but thieves have to back load before they can use any abilities? Ok. Gotcha.

Now I know why you’re not a game designer.

You misunderstand, o Thief lovers.

I’m not talking about locking out every other Thief skill except for the Auto-attack.

There’s a large difference between the Thief class and all the others: No CD’s. This gives you the freedom to spam your most powerful skills.

The revamp would only help to make you make smarter decisions.

Merciless.5349:

I can understand why some Thieves would be against this idea, as it would significantly increase the skill level required to use it. You know, putting it up to par with an Engineer, Ele, or a Necro.

I mostly play warrior, ele, and engi. Sometimes I play thief when just solo farming glory.

Comparatively speaking, ele’s are easier to play than thieves, especially glass backstab thieves. It’s easier to kill people with a thief, but against any decent competition you’re going to have very small windows of opportunity compared to ele’s and the profession in general is way more unforgiving of mistakes when you’re fighting somebody who knows how to capitalize on yours.

Also, if you think that thieves can just roll into a fight and spam buttons without planning ahead in a serious game, you’re smoking crack – they’ll get insta owned.

Sure.

Obviously C&D, steal, and backstab would build initiative.
Heartseeker would spend it.

I like your change.

Merciless.5349:

You misunderstand, o Thief lovers.

I’m not talking about locking out every other Thief skill except for the Auto-attack.

There’s a large difference between the Thief class and all the others: No CD’s. This gives you the freedom to spam your most powerful skills.

The revamp would only help to make you make smarter decisions.

You mean decisions like spamming Heartseeker, the single worst DPS option available to us which is incidentally the easiest to counter and dodge despite every bad player coming to the forums and whining about it and thus outing themselves as a bad… Vs. …
Dancing Dagger > Heartseeker > CnD > Backstab > CnD > Backstab?

Thieves are front loaded.

Deal with it and get better or keep crying on the forums.

One of these two choices will net a result. The other will not. The choice is up to you.

Merciless.5349:

What if a Thief had to use some skills or auto attacks in order to build up initiative, instead of having a full bar from the start and it being regenerated over time?

It’d kind of work like the Death Shroud of the Necro, where certain skills grant you x% of Life Force.

Then, Thieves wouldn’t be so gimmicky and would actually have to have a certain rotation of skills or plan when going in to a battle, instead of just 22222222herp222222 (I exaggerate, of course. :p)

This way, nobody can say, “I blew my load! I’m dead now!”, like they like to use as their excuse for their high burst.

I can understand why some Thieves would be against this idea, as it would significantly increase the skill level required to use it. You know, putting it up to par with an Engineer, Ele, or a Necro.

ANet needs to remove initiative, and give skill cooldowns like other classes.

I see I touched a nerve.

And Heartseeker is a gap closing, do more dmg the less health your opponent has spammable ability. What is the drawback to Heartseeker?

Considering you’re making a whine post on the forums and calling people “thief lovers” in a game where you should be able to multi class all classes out there (or at least the 5 slots available), pretty sure the only nerves that have been struck are yours.

But I like the armchair developer in you.

Initiative is the drawback to every single skill avaible on Thief weaponsets, just like cooldowns are for other classes. The extra drawback to Heartseeker is, okay, I used Heartseeker, but now I can’t C&D for Backstab, use Dancing Dagger for the double hits on 2 people, or use LDB (if its a bleed build). That is the drawback to using any skill that requires initiative. If you use this, you can’t use this.
Oh yeah, at +50% health, autoattack does more damage than Heartseeker.

I wonder what the most talked about class is on the forums, and why?

Which class had their own stickied thread?

Which class could do over 10k damage, with 1 skill, and still have the nerve to complain about blowing their load and not surviving?

Which class has arguably the best survival mechanic (Stealth) in the game?

Which class has the lowest skill requirement to use, yet be more effective and useful than half the classes in the game?

cab.4072:

Before getting “you are only defending because you play a thief” I play 6 professions in PvP.

Engis necros and ele’s have access to every one of their base skills without a build up, the comparison is nothing alike. And pressing buttons in a certain sequence isn’t a measure of skill. It’s pressing buttons.

Compared to just spamming away it demands more planning. Simply because the skill you use is on a cd – and in some cases this cd is considerable.

If you really play many classes, then you would agree that the rogue is the least demanding class when it comes to e.g. weapon switching. That’s also a reason why some people say that the class provides too much reward for too little effort.

Also, if you run out of initiative before your target bites the dust (except on certain bunker builds) then either your build needs rethinking or you really screwed up. And even if that happens, which is rarely the case, I stealth and just reset the fight and give it another go.

@Merciless: Locked animation, below average damage when misused, slower than auto attack when spammed.

On my warrior, HS is just fluff.

Imo I think half the reason people have trouble with Thieves is because they rely on tricks and deception over conventional tactics.
In my experience with games, most NA players, at least the ones I’ve played with, are not so good at thinking outside the box, and Thief and Mesmer primarily operate from outside the box.

I would like it if they make it so if you used a weapon skill, it gets locked until you use different skill. This way you wont see thieves using HS or death blossom 50 times in a row.

I personally don’t rate thieves, but they are broken, not OP or UP, just broken. And they are broken because of initiative, having 0 cd’s just doesn’t work and I wish ANet would make some comment saying if they agree or not…

Age of Conan used to have exactly a system like the Original Poster is describing for it’s Assassin class, named Soul Shards.

It was horrible, and Assassins were greatly underpowered for a year and a half. Eventually it was changed to a system that works exactly like Initiative in GW2.

The initiative model in this game is bad and inherently unbalanceable. It needs to shift more to an energy style model where regen is faster and more constant but dumping generates less benefit. In other words, thief ability to damage dump needs to go down while sustain needs to go up.

The init system is pretty bad in my eyes. You need to limit the abilities of a thief since he can spam it. Due to that you dont have any hard CC in your weapon sets.

I would think that a combination of CD and Init could work. Give every ability a cooldown and if you want to ignore some of the cooldown which is left, you use some of your init.
For instance heartseeker:
CD: 2 seconds
if you use it with 2 second CD left, you need to spend 4 init, if there is 1 second CD left, 2 init.

Every unspend init on the other hand should buff the thief abit (more dmg, maybe abit movement speed, maybe armor, whatsoever… just buffs). That means the more init he uses to spam stuff, the weaker he gets. It would still open the possiblity to use skills on demand and depending on the situation, while removing the usefullness of spamming things. At the same time abilities could be reworked and made stronger as the core mechanic would still rely on cooldowns.

Since every init would buff the thief, they would even think twice if they use an ability now or prefer to wait abit more and weaponswapping would also be more useful.

I would also revamp steal (got an idea for it aswell) and maybe even give thiefs the possbility to switch off with mainhand weapon for a certain amount of init to offer them a different skillset since that “special” swapping would only work decent for pistol/dagger | dagger/pistol Anet could include a few more combinations like pistol/sword… only dagger/dagger, pistol/pistol and shortbow sadly wouldnt gain anything from it.

How about you change it so it goes up faster when you have more, but goes up slower when you have less.
Regeneration Rate Currently: 1.6

Under 10% Initiative = 0.4 Initative Regeneration per second.
20% Initiative = 0.8 Initative Regeneration per second.
30% Initiative = 1.2 Initative Regeneration per second.
40% Initiative = 1.4 Initative Regeneration per second.
50% Initiative = 1.6 Initative Regeneration per second.
60% Initiative = 1.8 Initative Regeneration per second.
80% Initiative = 2 Initative Regeneration per second.
90% and over Initiative = 2.2 Initative Regeneration per second.

So if you spam all your initiative, your regen is very low, but if you pay attention to your stats and use your skills slower, its very high.