Guild Wars 2

So i’ve been thinking for a while about why it is so many thieves rely so much more on stealth then they do their agility… maybe people think it’s more reliable than being able to dodge a bit more than other classes? i’m saying this because i think that our evading should be just as good as our stealthing. Sometimes i feel like it’s really not enough to counter certain things… Let’s say conditions. More often than not, i’ve fallen over because i had a billion seconds of burning and poison, but i choose to use withdraw for my healing skill… whereas hide in shadows removes all damaging conditions except confusion, but even then most people have the trait that removes other conditions in stealth once every 3 seconds.

Well could we maybe have a trait being like a stop drop and roll that removes burning on a roll? (either a regular evade or on withdraw or roll for initiative with an internal cooldown). Also another idea could be to manually roll forward when you fall from high enough to take fall damage and nullify it at the cost of endurance? if you don’t have endurance you take fall damage… Call it tuck and roll or graceful fall or something… Basically i think it would make more sense if we had some defenses in this trait line (defenses that would actually be worth taking) and not HAVE to go into the stealth trait line for better defense… traits like pain response or fleet of foot i feel are not very strong and are normally a waste to take them, unless y’know… we got protection from pain response, then it might be worth taking?

What do you guys think about suggestions like these? would they work? or would it just be a waste? Feel free to add on suggestions that could be put into the acrobatics trait line.

Also… did anyone else notice that withdraw rolls you farther away when you have swiftness or some speed increase? :o

Only changes I’d make to acrobatics making Assassin’s Reward activate instantly not after the skill and increase the healing power co-efficient. Merging Fleet of Foot with Sins retreat or Hard to catch and doing something to PR. Would hold out on Master trapper until Traps get a check.
Otherwise it’s a really good tree.

Acrobatic’s 30-point traits are pretty poor. Hard to Catch is finicky and hard to predict, Quick Pockets should just be an innate part of the thief profession to give benefit to weapon-swapping.

I’d like to see a 30 point trait that gives Acrobatics more consistent access to Vigor. I feel like thieves are purposefully held back from Vigor because of how well it synergizes with Acrobatics (“regain endurance on dodge” stacks with endurance regen boost, in particular). Maybe work some synergy with the dodging + boons thing Acrobatics has going and do “Thief gets 1s Vigor every time they apply a boon”.

Tulisin.6945:

Acrobatic’s 30-point traits are pretty poor. Hard to Catch is finicky and hard to predict, Quick Pockets should just be an innate part of the thief profession to give benefit to weapon-swapping.

I’d like to see a 30 point trait that gives Acrobatics more consistent access to Vigor. I feel like thieves are purposefully held back from Vigor because of how well it synergizes with Acrobatics (“regain endurance on dodge” stacks with endurance regen boost, in particular). Maybe work some synergy with the dodging + boons thing Acrobatics has going and do “Thief gets 1s Vigor every time they apply a boon”.

We have 50-60% vigor uptime with Vigorous recovery if you use it with Withdraw or Signet of Malice. Withdraw being the prefered trait, though malice gets a mention for its synergy with the signet trait which reduces cooldowns by 20%. Which means you can get ~80% vigor uptime.

ShadowLordX.5148:

Tulisin.6945:

Acrobatic’s 30-point traits are pretty poor. Hard to Catch is finicky and hard to predict, Quick Pockets should just be an innate part of the thief profession to give benefit to weapon-swapping.

I’d like to see a 30 point trait that gives Acrobatics more consistent access to Vigor. I feel like thieves are purposefully held back from Vigor because of how well it synergizes with Acrobatics (“regain endurance on dodge” stacks with endurance regen boost, in particular). Maybe work some synergy with the dodging + boons thing Acrobatics has going and do “Thief gets 1s Vigor every time they apply a boon”.

We have 50-60% vigor uptime with Vigorous recovery if you use it with Withdraw or Signet of Malice. Withdraw being the prefered trait, though malice gets a mention for its synergy with the signet trait which reduces cooldowns by 20%. Which means you can get ~80% vigor uptime.

Exactly, the only reliable vigor within acrobatics revolves around constantly burning your heal, an especially poor idea if you’re trying to run dodgetrops+malice+acrobatics synergy.

I personally wish Thieves had the ability to dodge while immobilized, at least in some limited fashion. I bet that’s partly why thieves rely a bit more on stealth, because it doesn’t matter if you’re crippled or rooted or even stunned, as long as you stealthed first.

Conditions are also pretty rough. There’s good talents that remove conditions while in stealth, but nothing similar for dodge. Maybe some internal cooldown of 10 seconds, where every dodge removes one condition?

But I may be asking for too much there. I love dodging personally, I just wish I could do more of it and be more effective while doing it.

From what I know.. I could be wrong there are only 3 moves that remove conditions not traiting into the stealth line. One is our healing skill [Hide in Shadows] but we are avoiding stealth here. Another being [Shadow Return]. The other [Signet of Agility] which can be used every 30secs and gives a passive precision increase. You can run Sword #2 to also get rid of conditions. Thought I am not fond of spamming sword #2 to get rid of my conditions nor am I of wasting my stunbreaker of [Shadow Return] and I personally dont know of many thieves who run [Signet of Agility].

Ive tried a pure dodge based build. It just doesnt have the same effectiveness of a stealth based one. I will openly admit I am 10x better at the stealth based since that is what I learned to play. In a 1v1 the dodge build does well but when 1vx comes you might as well dodge your way out. AoE and Conditions tore me apart. But I could have been doing something wrong.

+1

A better condi removal would rly be great for the acrobatics trait line.
At the moment there only is pain response that activates automaticly when you are below 75% HP with an internal CD of kitten . And it activates even when you dont have conditions…
Idea:
The condi remove on dodge with internal CD sounds great.
Either make it a simple condi removal or something more interesting like a grandmaster trait that also includes one of the following effects for the dodge with 10s internal cooldown:

• Gain 3 Initiative
• Gain 5s Vigor
• Gain 2s Stealth

And there are alot of other interesting changes we could think about.
Like making Fleet of Food increasing the dodge distance.

I would like to see something similar to what crouze posted but maybe it only activates on a successful dodge/evade. I think it would be fun for a more active trait buff then passive.

Acro XII “Saw it Coming”

Gain 5 Might and Vigor for (X) secs after a successful dodge roll. This cannot occur more than once every (Y) secs.

Would hope the current traits are improved.
Sins reward doesn’t heal much even if you go in Healing Power.
Sins Retreat is…sins retreat.
Fleet of foot has that ICD.
Pain has that ICD though it’s not bad.
Hard to catch can get you killed unfortunately.

Devon.9061:

From what I know.. I could be wrong there are only 3 moves that remove conditions not traiting into the stealth line. One is our healing skill [Hide in Shadows] but we are avoiding stealth here. Another being [Shadow Return]. The other [Signet of Agility] which can be used every 30secs and gives a passive precision increase. You can run Sword #2 to also get rid of conditions. Thought I am not fond of spamming sword #2 to get rid of my conditions nor am I of wasting my stunbreaker of [Shadow Return] and I personally dont know of many thieves who run [Signet of Agility].

Ive tried a pure dodge based build. It just doesnt have the same effectiveness of a stealth based one. I will openly admit I am 10x better at the stealth based since that is what I learned to play. In a 1v1 the dodge build does well but when 1vx comes you might as well dodge your way out. AoE and Conditions tore me apart. But I could have been doing something wrong.

I run Signet of Agility simply because it’s one of the only non-stealth condi removal options.

Regarding vigor, you can have 15s vigor our of 21s with trickery and steal (it requires a target to steal from, doesn’t activate with no target like Thrill of the Crime), which is pretty solid given you won’t be instantly stripped of boons

Coldin.2840:

I personally wish Thieves had the ability to dodge while immobilized,

Yeah, if only thieves had withdraw, roll for initiative and http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Disabling_Shot_

Would a “Remove a condition on dodge” be OP?

Needs to be a more interesting option than something that just mirrors what we already have in Shadow Arts and is like blah on dodge.

I don’t know how they’d code this but I always thought that something along the lines of

‘Gain temporary immunity (short duration) to conditions avoided through evasion (some reasonable ICD)’

or maybe

‘Incoming conditions during an evade are converted to boons. (some ICD)’

or

‘Incoming conditions during an evade are inflicted on the enemy instead. (some ICD)’

would be really cool. Classes already have condition removal, conversion, whatever. Although, dodging a fear and gaining stability would be kinda nice. Sending conditions back is fairly rare, and gives condi specs something in Acrobatics. Having to time all those extra dodges for beneficial effects sounds cool.

At any rate they need to get rid of that other GM trait in Acrobatics, it’s just awful (Shadowstep away and swiftness or w/e). Anything is better than that.

Acrobatics need to promote not only dodge rolls, but also weapon dodges and positioning. Also, traits like flanking strike (5% damage when attacking from back) and side strike (7% crit when attacking from back) belong there, and need to be buffed up the wazoo.

This is one thing that’s kinda beyond me with the thief, how so many traits just seem out of place or randomly selected. It’s like they had a list of stuff and just pseudo randomly assigned them to traitlines. What makes back fighting objectively more deadly-artsy than, say, signet use and vice versa?

If you want more % dmg in acrobatics (be it positional req or not), then you have to put it in the grandmaster tier, otherwise the stacking of dmg % modifiers without spending a single point in the power / atk trait line becomes absurd.

I already have +25% dmg boost with my spec (0 acrobatics) which requires for me to not use too much initiative (aka not spamming skills), and I get 20% more when target is <50% for a total of +45% dmg boost with no might stacks / fury etc.

Zacchary.6183:

Would a “Remove a condition on dodge” be OP?

No, it would be similar to an ele dodge rolling while attuned to water on certain builds. I’d be for having a skill like this replace the current functionality of hard to catch. Make it remove the damaging condis first so you can stack it with fleet of foot. In the current meta, you could burn 3 dodges in a row and still have a couple on you.