Guild Wars 2

It’s the godkitten cause for every problem thief has, as long as initiative is in for thieves there will always be 1 ability that will be rather broken and can be abused in annoying ways and other skills being completely useless, or just not worth using since you can spam a couple of them.
Make thieves work like every other class in the game, give them cooldowns and instead make the skills synergize with each other better and give them a better class mechanic instead of this broken one.
Thieves do need a redesign, initiative is stupid and will keep thieves either op or bad.

I guess a complete rebalance of abilities would work as well but honestly, it would be easier for them to balance thieves if they had cooldowns.

whatever it’s going to get ignored and i’ll get flamed.

So remove skyhammer instead.

Vuh.1328:

So remove skyhammer instead.

I lol’d.

I will agree that the initiative system is broken, is entirely black and white. But there is one sentiment that whenever this argument is brought up, some people always seem to ignore.

Imagine, Heartseeker, with a 5 second cooldown. Sounds terrible to me, lets move on.

Imagine, Shadow Shot with a 5 second cooldown. Sounds awful.

Imagine, Dancing Dagger with a cooldown at all…

Imagine, Headshot with a 3 or 5 second cooldown.

Okay I think you see where I am going with this, the thief would need a entire and complete overhaul more than just removing initiative.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_Use This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Infusion_of_Shadow This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Quick_Recovery This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Kleptomaniac This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Preparedness This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lead_Attacks This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Initial_Strike This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hastened_Replenishment This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

I might have missed some, but I am sure you get the point.

EoNxBoNx.9213:

I will agree that the initiative system is broken, is entirely black and white. But there is one sentiment that whenever this argument is brought up, some people always seem to ignore.

Imagine, Heartseeker, with a 5 second cooldown. Sounds terrible to me, lets move on.

Imagine, Shadow Shot with a 5 second cooldown. Sounds awful.

Imagine, Dancing Dagger with a cooldown at all…

Imagine, Headshot with a 3 or 5 second cooldown.

Okay I think you see where I am going with this, the thief would need a entire and complete overhaul more than just removing initiative.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_Use This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Infusion_of_Shadow This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Quick_Recovery This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Kleptomaniac This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Preparedness This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lead_Attacks This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Initial_Strike This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hastened_Replenishment This trait would have to be removed and replaced i.e development time, anet does not have.

I might have missed some, but I am sure you get the point.

ofc they would need a skill complete redesign. Anything else would be stupid.
But instead they could just remove skyhammer from solo queue

A skyhammer thread in disguise. Clever Vuh.

Acandis.3250:

I think if they just made it so every consecutive cast of the same skill costs + 1 (Eg. Cast 3 heartseekers in a row will cost 3 + 4 + 5) it’d go a long way towards the blind spam of the same skill.

Would also be nice if chill affected initiative regeneration.

But hell, I’m only a player with top competitive background, leave it to the bright minds of the balance team to dig us out of this meta.

That is a really interesting idea, i like it a lot..
I also like the way SWTOR had their energy for their “thief” classes, the more you were sitting on the faster it regened, so if you were sustaining your abilities you had really nice regen but if you dumped it all in a burst it took quite so time to refill.
So you had to choose between sustain and burst. Don’t think it would work very well with the current weapon skills they have though.

I just posted in another thread regarding this but the class could be so much better without an initiative system. It could still be a strong class with good burst. As long as there is an initiative system, like you said, there will always be that one attack that will be abused and there will always to the end of time be threads littering the forums about thieves. Of course the weapon skills and trait system would have to be reworked but the end result could result in a more fun class to play and play against. Stealth wouldn’t be a problem as well as spamming and solely relying on that one attack to win. I can’t repeat enough how boring it is to stealth backstab over and over again, or to teleport pistol whip over and over again is. The initiative system makes other skills on weapons besides the ones I mentioned absolutely useless. The evade attack on D/D #3 skill is never used. Why? Because why would you waste initiative on a skill that doesn’t give the results as CnD and Back stab? Any skill that would replace that attack would ever be used regardless unless it had a higher damage output than back stab or a higher damage output than CnD AND gave you stealth. I would settle for a complete rework of thief over a brand new class any day. Thief/rogue/assassin has always been the class that I mained in every game until this one when I finally gave up on it because of how repetitive it is all because of the initiative system. It’s simply broken and boring to play with.

Oh and I have no opinion on sky hammer.

Acandis.3250:

I think if they just made it so every consecutive cast of the same skill costs + 1 (Eg. Cast 3 heartseekers in a row will cost 3 + 4 + 5) it’d go a long way towards the blind spam of the same skill.

Would also be nice if chill affected initiative regeneration.

But hell, I’m only a player with top competitive background, leave it to the bright minds of the balance team to dig us out of this meta.

I like. It would limit HS spam as well as the ridiculousness of PW.

EoNxBoNx.9213:

I will agree that the initiative system is broken, is entirely black and white. But there is one sentiment that whenever this argument is brought up, some people always seem to ignore.

Imagine, Heartseeker, with a 5 second cooldown. Sounds terrible to me, lets move on.

Imagine, Shadow Shot with a 5 second cooldown. Sounds awful.

Imagine, Dancing Dagger with a cooldown at all…

Imagine, Headshot with a 3 or 5 second cooldown.

.

What’s so bad with those? I’m being honest here. It sounds awful in comparison to what thieves currently have, but compared to other professions those are still very modest cool downs for the strength of the abilities.

I do like the suggestion of increasing the initiative cost on consecutive use. The question is, does AA reset the using of an ability?

Acandis.3250:

I think if they just made it so every consecutive cast of the same skill costs + 1 (Eg. Cast 3 heartseekers in a row will cost 3 + 4 + 5) it’d go a long way towards the blind spam of the same skill.

Would also be nice if chill affected initiative regeneration.

But hell, I’m only a player with top competitive background, leave it to the bright minds of the balance team to dig us out of this meta.

Another +1 to this idea.

Maybe add a cooldown to each skill - it doesn’t disable it like everyone else’s cooldowns do, but using the skill again within this cooldown window incurs an additional initiative cost?
Chill could also affect this ’background cooldown’, again not stopping the Thief from casting skills in any order, but meaning that they couldn’t use any one skill so frequently.

Oh, ninja’d by Pyriall - my method would potentially stop a single AA from resetting initiative penalties?

Pyriall.5027:

EoNxBoNx.9213:

I will agree that the initiative system is broken, is entirely black and white. But there is one sentiment that whenever this argument is brought up, some people always seem to ignore.

Imagine, Heartseeker, with a 5 second cooldown. Sounds terrible to me, lets move on.

Imagine, Shadow Shot with a 5 second cooldown. Sounds awful.

Imagine, Dancing Dagger with a cooldown at all…

Imagine, Headshot with a 3 or 5 second cooldown.

.

What’s so bad with those? I’m being honest here. It sounds awful in comparison to what thieves currently have, but compared to other professions those are still very modest cool downs for the strength of the abilities.

I do like the suggestion of increasing the initiative cost on consecutive use. The question is, does AA reset the using of an ability?

Heartseeker at 50% below is roughly about the same strength as an ele’s lightning strike, with half the range, an execution requirement, and 3/4 cast time.

Headshot is very strong, but when the stun rounding change came in the game, the skill got a lot worse. There is no justification for this skill to have a CD with its current state.

Shadow Shot is maybe arguably the only one I can agree with here. It’s a unblockable blind and good damage. I would want to see some changes to this if cooldowns were implemented.

Dancing dagger is literally the worse skill a thief has in my opinion. A cooldown would either get it buffed to become more of a utility based skill or even more useless.

And the only thing I see wrong with increasing initiative costs consecutively is, IA, or using HS to go for a decap.

Cush.4063:

Why? Because why would you waste initiative on a skill that doesn’t give the results as CnD and Back stab?

Thieves don’t use them because they are terrible skills. Not that everyone would just rather cnd and backstab. They are simply terrible skills.

Deathblossom is a condi skill that does crap damage and has a terrible evade – which doesn’t fit at all with the other skills of d/d. And dancing dagger does crap damage with a crap cripple duration that has a crap projectile speed. There is no point into using poorly designed skills.

Having these weapon setups changed is the core of what I think the thief class needs right now. It brings initiative management to specific weapon sets instead of just 3 spamming like S/P does currently. As phanta said, “Want to deal damage? Pistolwhip. Want to evade attacks? Pistolwhip. Want to cleave downed bodies? Pistol whip. Want to interrupt something? Pistolwhip.”

D/P and shortbow are the only weaponsets which a thief has to truly manage where they want to put their initiative. It’s pathetic.