Guild Wars 2

What do you do? (yes, you even have the power to give baseline 9000 vitality if you so desire) You get 5 minutes to list changes that they will implement.

Here’s mine (im trying to be optimistic):

1)Up Backstab damage to be equal to Eviserate (idk what the coefficients are, but Evi always hits harder on my warrior than my BS on Thief)

2)Replace Death Blossom with Rook Takes Knight (RtK is a shadowstep behind target enemy, 900 range, 45% of current BS damage, faces you towards enemy’s back, hits 4 times so that venom builds don’t lose too much)

3)Double bleed duration on pistol

4)P/D 3 now applies 4 stacks torment and 2 stacks burn

5)Our Quickness trait icd is reduced to something more modern (Ranger has 15 sec icd with 3 second active, BM GM trait for reference)

6)Take away cast time on Sword 2 return (stun break)

7)Change Cloak and Dagger to some kind of skill that people can’t just backstep outta (so annoying they take 2 steps back after you get cripple/chill then you lose 6 init)

8) Trickster removes 2 conditions instead of 1 and now grants swiftness (or some random useful boon)

9) Shortbow 5 is now an aoe field (like SB4) that inflicts Confusion and Burn. same animations too, it just pulses purple

10) Reduce our utility cooldowns across the board (180 second TG is just bogus)

11) Baseline Preparedness

12) Sleight of Hand now also gives Thief 1 stack of stability pre-cast (so that the stun reflects on Mesmer and Necro do not kill us harder than we daze them)

13) Bugfix the bajeezus outta Daredevil

14) Vault has 3/4 cast time and you evade during that time

15) Up dagger auto damage to rival Necro auto damage on daggers

You guys?

1. Balance pass all weaponsets, Utilities, Traits, and Elites. As a few quick examples, I’d:

• Get the Acro line back up to par
• Make some form of underwater equivalents to the skills we currently lose while taking a swim
• Replace the missing Ricochet on P/P #3 with something similar … that quasi-pierce Revs have sounds kitten ed workable. Hell … Why not make it a two-parter, where part 1 is an evade, part 2 is a bullet-flurry. (For ideas, look at the crap Grammaton Clerics pull in Equilibrium.)
• Make Traps something Thieves can be frigging proud to use, with or without Runes of the Trapper. No class should have functionality buried behind a freaking Runeset. Eff that noise.

2. (This goes for profession-based health, in general)

• The hp brackets are too far apart. I’d put low-health as 12.5k, medium at 15k, high at 17.5k. This would help Thief to get somewhat caught up on the hp lost from removing Vitality from the Acrobatics line.

But, that’s just my couple of coppers. /shrug

needs more cowbell

Gonna’ need longer than 5 minutes.

You can change weapons instantly or 2 sec cd. You have 3 different weapon sets, keybind for each instead of weapon swap.

And uh, feline grace pls.

No point in re-writing it

1. Give the thief the mesmer’s greatsword, including all animations and effects.

2. Potent Poison: Healing reduction of poisons increased to 66%, poison damage increased by 20%.

thief should have permanent 25% movespeed (without trait or signet)

I still think an Acrobatics minor would be the perfect spot to put a 25% move bonus. It would bring some much needed identity (and utility) back to the line, too.

Base 9001 vitality
All pistol attacks bounce to 100 targets within 1800 range
Increase Backstab by 700%
Stealth instantly heals all hp
Sword 3 costs no initiative
Shortbow 2 blasts for each projectile plus initial explosion
Stealth lasts 200% longer
Unload evades during channel
Withdraw reduced to 12s cd
Shadow Refuge has no target limit and doesn’t reveal
Heal on dodge has no icd
Condition removal on dodge has no icd
Dodging returns 70 endurance
Attacking from stealth no longer reveals.

Are we happy now?

Ghotistyx.6942:

Base 9001 vitality
All pistol attacks bounce to 100 targets within 1800 range
Increase Backstab by 700%
Stealth instantly heals all hp
Sword 3 costs no initiative
Shortbow 2 blasts for each projectile plus initial explosion
Stealth lasts 200% longer
Unload evades during channel
Withdraw reduced to 12s cd
Shadow Refuge has no target limit and doesn’t reveal
Heal on dodge has no icd
Condition removal on dodge has no icd
Dodging returns 70 endurance
Attacking from stealth no longer reveals.

Are we happy now?

needs more cowbell

A whole lotta stuff to acrobatics.

endersluck.4708:

Ghotistyx.6942:

Base 9001 vitality
All pistol attacks bounce to 100 targets within 1800 range
Increase Backstab by 700%
Stealth instantly heals all hp
Sword 3 costs no initiative
Shortbow 2 blasts for each projectile plus initial explosion
Stealth lasts 200% longer
Unload evades during channel
Withdraw reduced to 12s cd
Shadow Refuge has no target limit and doesn’t reveal
Heal on dodge has no icd
Condition removal on dodge has no icd
Dodging returns 70 endurance
Attacking from stealth no longer reveals.

Are we happy now?

needs more cowbell

Stealing from female characters gives a 50% chance the stolen item is a Cowbell.

Cowbell: provides nourishment “Blue Oyster Culture” +100 Power 33% chance to daze on crit.

Better?

Ghotistyx.6942:

Stealing from female characters gives a 50% chance the stolen item is a Cowbell.

Cowbell: provides nourishment “Blue Oyster Culture” +100 Power 33% chance to daze on crit.

Better?

Yeah but why should my eviscerstab be melee range and blockable?

it would be a long list, maybe i will get time to write it down
few things need to happen:
- weaponsets need to have better synergy between spells and generally be more useful (dp is great example how all rounded weapon set can be that is why it is meta)
- acro and cis need complete rework, given the current state of thief and other classes they are total lackluster….
- remake/buff anything that is not the holy trio of refuge/shs/agi or inf siget…. really other utitilities are just underwhelming in many cases…. there are long posts from [TEEF] guild with quite few good suggestions how traps for example could be more team supporty

Renny.6571:

Yeah but why should my eviscerstab be melee range and blockable?

Heart Seeker causes 10 stacks of bleeding for 180s.
Grants attacks the Unblockable effect for 5 seconds after landing a hit. Increased range to 900.

And as an added bonus:
Dancing Dagger. Create a Dancing Dagger at your location. All enemies in 1200 range are stunned for 5 seconds while your dagger dances.

F1 skill become Nucular.
Nucular: destroy everything in your map. If it is a player his account will be freezed for 3 days. (10s cooldown)

Daendur.2357:

F1 skill become Nucular.
Nucular: destroy everything in your map. If it is a player his account will be freezed for 3 days. (10s cooldown)

Come now, we’re trying to be serious here.

1. Win when you press the windows button and lose when you press the apple/command button.

Ghotistyx.6942:

Come now, we’re trying to be serious here.

Well… So far, let’s rejoice that no devs give any of those the ability to change Thief.

Classes are symbiotic.

To just dream and theory craft fixes really doesn’t accomplish much unless your into wasting your time with “what if…” or “if only….” type hypothesis which really counts for squat and detracts from actual class mechanics and issues.

Without being more specific you’ll just get a bunch of dorks posting for lols.

Whatever floats your boat I guess but I’d say this is another thread from an OP that never replies while others use it for giggles.

In saying, more than happy to be proved wrong.

fireflyry.7023:

Classes are symbiotic.

To just dream and theory craft fixes really doesn’t accomplish much unless your into wasting your time with “what if…” or “if only….” type hypothesis which really counts for squat and detracts from actual class mechanics and issues.

Without being more specific you’ll just get a bunch of dorks posting for lols.

Whatever floats your boat I guess but I’d say this is another thread from an OP that never replies while others use it for giggles.

In saying, more than happy to be proved wrong.

MrForz.1953:

Ghotistyx.6942:

Come now, we’re trying to be serious here.

Well… So far, let’s rejoice that no devs give any of those the ability to change Thief.

It’s mainly because numerous posts about how to change the thief have already been posted before… like maug just re-linked his.

And it’s going to take more than 5 minutes to make any decent change, so I think this post is tailored for the funzies.

List of changes:

Old Feline Grace Baseline.
Fleet shadow Baseline.
500 Vitality, tentative.
Pistol/Pistol Ricochet baseline
Pistol range increased to 1200 (why does it travel a shorter distance than longbow?)
Condi removal on dodge capped by proc instead of icd, 3 condis max from evading per dodge

The rest is fine.

Pistol bounce to 100 targets?

Dude that’s artillery.

- Baseline 1050 range for pistols.
- I add ricochet to ankle shot trait.
- I put a forward dodge instead of a backward dodge for staff #3
- 1s Smoke field for staff #4 (or even smoke screen lol)
- shadow step/return and the likes become ports and aren’t hindered by props or walls or stuff like that.
-traps last 1s after being triggered by an ennemy before disappearing.

(not talking about animations of DD which clearly need rework)

I would remove deathblossom from my power Dagger dagger build and replace it with a utility skill.

Allow them to transcend into Mesmers: Masters of deception and assassination.

MakubeC.3026:

Allow them to transcend into Mesmers: Masters of deception and assassination.

I actually like that, allow them to re-roll/pick their class. Armor converts to the new class’ armor.

1) Remove casting time from weapon skills
2) Remove pre-cast delay from weapon skills
3) Remove after-cast delay from weapon skills
4) Stealth Attacks becomes Flanking Attacks — requires position instead of stealth (i.e. Attacking from the back will change Skill #1 to Backstab)
5) Evade time lasts for the whole skill animation (i.e. Death Blossom’s evade frame will be roughly 1s long)
6) Restore Feline Grace to 1.0 then add regen for successfully evading a non-AoE attack.
7) Change Last Refuge to Shadow Form — when health drops to 25%, prevent all damage for 5s-10s.
8) Bring back Pistol Mastery into CS, then give +20% damage bonus if using P/P. Get Initiative back for each critical hit.
9) Unload gets baseline 1050 Range and Ricochet.
10) Steal’s cooldown is 20s. Remove Steal CD reduction from Trickery.

I’m going to say something radical that people are going to hate. You are warned.

Put an ICD on stealth from leap finishers.

Remove other “accidental” stealth interactions like keeping 10s stealth after waiting out SR, etc.

Give us the ability to sustain now that we don’t have much greater stealth capabilities than they originally designed for.

Seriously. I know d/p stealth stacking is a staple. I know that using SR to set up a long stealth is a staple. It would suck to lose it, but we have to face the fact that we were never actually designed to use these skills this way. We said we liked those interactions loud enough we were allowed to keep them, but the end result is that every single element of our class was adjusted around the idea that we all have access to much more stealth than anet originally intended us to have.

If we took those “accidental” interactions away, maybe we could see some increased scrapping ability, and increased base durations on our built in stealth abilities, better heals on SR, and overall end up in a much better place in terms of balance in stead of always being balanced like we have permastealth despite the fact that only a small portion of our builds are actually able to leverage permastealth in to something useful.

PopeUrban.2578:

…
Remove other “accidental” stealth interactions like keeping 10s stealth after waiting out SR, etc.
…

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shadow_Refuge (Pulses)

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stealth (Stacks in duration)

As for as I’m aware, the 10s after waiting in SR is intentional, not accidental.

:| Though, most profs/teachers don’t give credit to wiki’s/wikipedia, so we need a dev in on this.

Zero Day.2594:

PopeUrban.2578:

…
Remove other “accidental” stealth interactions like keeping 10s stealth after waiting out SR, etc.
…

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shadow_Refuge

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stealth

As for as I’m aware, the 10s after waiting in SR is intentional, not accidental.

No, it was brought up around release in PvP balance, and a red post basically said “well, we didn’t design it to do that on purpose, but it’s a fun interaction and you guys seem to like it a lot so we’ll let it stand”

So in stead they nerfed the kitten out of sustain and damage.

This is similar to the situation where they nerfed the damage on C&D because of its permastealthing interactions because it was an unintended interaction that allowed permastealthing while dealing damage, or nerfed mug because of unintended interactions with backstab.

Basically, arenanet QA is really bad at thinking like actual players when testing skill design, and thieves have suffered for it greatly.

Their answer thusfar has been, basically, “give everyone else more stealth and reveal” in stead of “make thief have the limited but powerful stealth we designed them to have” because it’s easier to write and they don’t want to upset the house of cards and red posts they’ve made thusfar in regard to thief balance.

PopeUrban.2578:

No, it was brought up around release in PvP balance, and a red post basically said “well, we didn’t design it to do that on purpose, but it’s a fun interaction and you guys seem to like it a lot so we’ll let it stand”

…

Their answer thusfar has been, basically, “give everyone else more stealth and reveal” in stead of “make thief have the limited but powerful stealth we designed them to have” because it’s easier to write and they don’t want to upset the house of cards and red posts they’ve made thusfar in regard to thief balance.

Well kitten, I must have missed one of their handful of posts :|

If by house of cards you mean pile of cards, then yes, it would be a shame if it gets blown away more and only a couple cards remain. The one thing I’m aware of is that they seem to be happy that the thief’s role is back-capping and +1’ing. Like there was a stream where the guy was acting cheery about it (I think they were previewing a pvp map in that stream/episode).

Here’s the episode for reference, skip to 9:36 – 10:25

http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/v/12099037