Guild Wars 2

First of all, thanks for posting the results feedback! My post will be pretty much covering the staff, as I don’t have much left to say about the dodges that hasn’t been said a thousand times before (aka “better be as smooth as regular dodges or no one will use them, bounding dodger breaks momentum”), and I’m pretty satisfied with the utility changes.

Now I must say, I don’t like the staff changes. EDIT: going to put it in bullet points to make it an easier read.

• Weakening Strike being multi-target is cool, but it needs polish so that it actually hits the targets in the first place. Right now (i.e. as of BWE2) it was nigh impossible to get more than one hit from it, even on a static enemy.

• Dust Strike needed the faster reaction time, but I still feel (and I’ve seen this echoed in plenty of places) that an AoE around the thief would be far better than an AoE in front of the thief. It makes the skill work better for the “leap into the group fight and stay there through active defenses” playstyle that I feel the staff is trying to have but doesn’t.

• Vault having a faster cast time is an improvement, but the range really needs some addressing. 600 is just not enough range to work as a mobility skill, which I think would be HUUUUUUUGE for the thief (having a mobility-oriented weapon skill that isn’t shortbow). At least give it the same range as Jump Shot from engineer.

• Still on Vault, I would still argue that it shouldn’t deal the amount of damage it does, instead being more of a mobility/utility skill. Drop the excessive damage (put it somewhere else, the rest of staff’s DPS is pitiful), and add evasion during the leaping part of the vault (but not the landing. it’s the part dealing damage, people should be able to interrupt that). As it is right now, the daredevil needs to spam vault to deal damage, or be relegated to really, really low DPS output. For the sake of the flexibility of the weapon, I think this is a needed change.

• You didn’t touch on it, but debilitating arc was a very, very underwhelming skill. In its current state, its only use is “oh I’m immobilized, let me fix that”. It’s not a particularly great evade skill, and it puts you out of range with no way to get back in range other than vault, which feels like a waste of initiative. Not to mention, thief already is packed with ways to deal with immobilize (including a certain acrobatics trait i’m expecting a lot of DDs to take), making its effect rather redundant.

TL;DR: Weakening Strike needs to more reliably connect with enemies, Dust Strike should be a circular PBAoE around the thief, Vault should be heaviliy tuned towards mobility and utility rather than damage (the rest of staff could use a damage buff), and debilitating arc is a pretty lame, uninteresting skill.

On a side note, if I may, the so desired hybrid condi D/D thief is SO CLOSE to working, SO CLOSE. but a few things still hold it back. The reason I bring it up is because the daredevil specialization really helps this spec, and with some more tweaks to the core thief, the spec I’ve been wishing to (and attempting to, to less than stellar results) run since launch could finally work. Here are my suggestions:

• Death Blossom could really use some tweaking. It has 1/4 of a second of evasion. That’s less time than the latency most people outside the server areas play with (I play with ~200-250 just fine, for reference). It’s an absurdly low evasion, and coupled with the heavy aftercast on landing, means that, for an evasion skill, it actually makes you far more vulnerable than simply running away.

• Heartseeker, Cloak and Dagger, and Backstab are all very high power-scaling skills, which is great for power-oriented D/D, but means they’re pretty useless for condi, and pretty sub-par for hybrid. Now that would be a LOT of work, so I’m not expecting this suggestion to follow through, but Dagger Mastery (that trait that allows dagger attacks to cause poison on a 33% chance) should be reworked, so that each dagger skill has a different effect (say, guaranteed 2 stacks of poison on heartseeker, instead of 33% chance per hit on auto). I do realize that’s unviable, but it’s an issue I hope is discussed within the balance team. Side note, I’d like to see Dagger Mastery and Potent Poison combined, because those traits don’t make sense on the thief context unless put together, so splitting it into two traits is just reducing the interesting choices thief can pick.

• Last but not least, Dancing Dagger (that skill #4 that no one ever uses) is still pretty lame. Maybe add a damaging condition to it? The ranger’s sister skill (Crippling Talon) applies 3 stacks of bleeding, though yeah, it can’t be spammed and doesn’t bounce. So maybe something like 1 stack of torment, since it’s already a movement-impairing skill?

TL;DR: Death Blossom could use some animation tweaking and improved evasion to be a more reliable evasion skill (something that would benefit power builds as well), Dagger Mastery could use some tweaking to take the power-only dagger skills in consideration, and could be merged with Potent Poison, Dancing Dagger could apply a damaging condi (suggestion: 1 stack of torment) to make it something people actually use.

Would still love to see the dodges selectable with f3 f4 f5 10 second cooldown and changeable in battle.

Distracting Daggers changes still don’t address the fundamental issue that it’s not just worse than a mantra, it’s worse than a mantra four times over.

It has to be cast in combat (interruptable) you only have a limited window to apply the interrupts (stallable) and it can be blocked/evaded (and many classes do this passively) and it has a bizzarre 1s internal cooldown so you can’t use it to break a passive block and follow up to still get the interrupt when you see the block procced.

I understand that you don’t want this to be as good as a mantra, but as it stands it’s so much worse that I can’t find a use for it. How about cutting the down sides of this by like half if you’re really committed to the whole “cast in combat and only use during a short window” mechanic.

Or throw that out and just treat it like a mantra that throws counterable daggers with a 1s ICD

Also I echo the concerns (and have for a long time) about deathblossom.

Also, can we get a confirmation that the art was just unfinished in the last build and we’ll see some polish?

These changes are looking good. I still feel like Staff’s autoattack could do with a small damage bump, but we’ll have to see how things play out now.

Animations

Something I thought I’d still keep emphasising is that I’d like to see more work on the animations of Staff. It just doesn’t feel even remotely Thief-y apart from the cool somersault on Vault. The spin on Punishing Strikes is useful but doesn’t look right. Maybe copy the Revenant’s third Staff attack which has a proper Bo Staff-style animation on it, but keep the same damage + vulnerability + aftercast etc? Debilitating Arc also looks really wonky and could do with a new animation. If Dust Strike became PbAoE (as I hope for if you read below), I’d like to see something nice for that as well, else I still wouldn’t be very happy with the recycled Silverwastes shovel animation on the line version.

Other than Staff, I’d like to see Finishing Blow’s jump cleaned up. Rather than have the weird hand raise for the finisher, I’d maybe like to see just the jump, slowed down to match the cast time. That would look far cleaner after the Uppercut.

Weakening Charge

Weakening Charge becoming targeted with movement through the target, as you have written it, would be literally perfect. It’s exactly what the skill needs. The bump in target count is great as well.

Dust Strike

The lower cast time is great but I still maintain that Dust Strike needs to be a PBAoE instead of a line on top of that. It fits the gameplay of Staff much more.

Physicals

The Physical changes are looking good. I still think the Pulmonary Impact on Palm Strike (and only Palm Strike) should be able to crit as a reward for being able to hit with all of Fist Flurry (which is very difficult in PvP engagements).

Evasive Empowerment
This change is perfect (and also the exact thing I suggested so thanks for listening if that was part of it haha).

RE: Vault and evasion
I feel like evasion definitely needs to be part of the skill. For a weapon designed to engage multiple opponents with little to no Stealth, there aren’t many reliable evade frames to be found on it at all. S/D does a much better job at that. I would love if it were kept at 6 initiative but evaded for the majority or all of its duration. If evasion proved too strong, then I’d like to see initiative cost reduction.

An alternative would be to reduce Vault’s initiative cost to 5, give it evasion AND reduce its damage by a margin, giving that damage back to other skills, mainly the autoattack.

All in all I’m quite happy with what’s going down so far. Excited to see how Staff and the dodge rolls get cleaned up in future and looking forward to trying these changes!

Karl McLain.5604:

Vault: Reduced initiative cost from 6 to 5. Reduced cast time from 1 second to 3/4 second. note: We’ve discussed leaving the initiative high and giving this ability an evade component at the beginning or end. Feel free to let us know what you think.

Not a bad idea, if it doesn’t seem up to par once that change is implemented can always just go from there. Great work!

Karl,

Some great responses to our feedback here, its good to see you have actually been listening.

First off I would still really like to see some improvements to the way we hold our staves so it doesn’t look like we are lugging around a sledgehammer.

Weakening Charge: 100 times yes to making it targeted ala Heartseeker, it needs it otherwise it’s simply too difficult to land and displaces us from combat too much.

Vault: Reducing the cast time was a great move, I personally vote for giving it an evade while keeping the ini cost at 6. It makes no sense for the Lotus dodge to behave like Death Blossom buy not have Vault behave like Bounding Dodger.

Looking good so far Karl, lets get it working before BWE3, then Daredevil will have my vote.

When was the next BWE by the way?

Karl McLain.5604:

Staff:
We’ll be looking at updating these abilities as we are able. There was a common tone in that the staff was too slow and didn’t feel as well as it could in its utility. We’ll be working on this now and in the future, so please continue to give feedback as you play the Daredevil.

This is so close to working. Is there any chance you guys can do anything about the 3rd stike of the AA? It looks, frankly, terrible.

Karl McLain.5604:

Weakening Charge: Increased the maximum number of targets from 1 to 5. note: we’re still working on making this animation feel better. In addition to basic clean-up I’m hoping to make it targeted (ala Heartseeker) but still pass through the target. At the point of writing this, though, it’s not in yet.

Dust Strike: Reduced cast time from 1/2 second to 1/4 second.

Vault: Reduced initiative cost from 6 to 5. Reduced cast time from 1 second to 3/4 second. note: We’ve discussed leaving the initiative high and giving this ability an evade component at the beginning or end. Feel free to let us know what you think.

Weakening Charge: YES. Please for the love of god get this to work. This might be enough to save DD for me.

Dust Strike: Mentioned before, needs to be PBAoE. It would just gel better.

Vault: I’d take the higher initiative cost for some evade and longer distance. Agree with others that you could put damage elsewhere on staff and give us longer distance.

Thanks!

Dust strike

How about a single 5 target pbaoe blind pulse (no damage) at the start of the animation, and the current ranged 3 target cone at the end?

This wouldn’t make it any better against single targets, since blind stacks duration and is always removed extremely quickly, but it would increase the survivability in group encounters, which seems to be the focus of staff right? if that seems too powerful, that skill could lose some damage and move that damage to debilitating arc?

Thank you so much for looking at the dodges… they really need it. I’m not sure what you mean by the common tone that the staff was “too slow” though? Slow to do damage, or the animations were slow? I’m disappointed that you’ve left Dust Strike targeting as is, I think most feel it should be an aoe and not a line. I think Vault could definitely be left with high ini cost, with an evade (PROBABLY at the start, when the actual leap occurs).

Other than that I’m glad you stopped the wild ini eating and increased the damage on some of the skills, but I’m overall disappointed. You’ve made changes, but not on anything that I had an issue with…

Part of me still feels like distracting daggers time limit on how long you can hold onto the dagger charges still feels kind of weak in a sense for pvp or wvw if we are talking about preemptively holding onto them until conflict occurs.

Basically I’m asking for something similar to how the mantras work: you use a mantra and you can hold onto those charges until used up.

Time to take another break from gw2…

I will be back when they make some good progress on thief class!!

I still feel like Staff #4 needs to actually do more. The thief’s other weapon skills that blind have far more utility. Shortbow #5 also gives you incredible mobility. d/p #3 shadowsteps to an opponent and x/p #5 gives you a smoke field.

Perhaps make Staff #4 into a PBAoE smoke field as well. It doesn’t have to have a long duration, but it would go a great length in helping staff to synergize with thief’s core stealth mechanics and traits. Further, it would go into the brawler gameplay as you can swing freely in that smoke field for much needed damage mitigation.

As much as some people would love animation changes (I’ve just watched videos…) as well as how the thief holds the staff on idle/while running changed – I don’t think that will happen, since it’s too “costly”/hard. While changing/tweeking numbers is editing a few variables/entries in a table – though mentally/logically straining… -, making/editing animations needs quite a bit more work along with polish to straighten them out. Like the current idle/running animation would essentially be scrapped and which ever group of people work on animations would need to redo the whole thing again. Can’t see that happening, considering they’ve already recycled some animations for the elite specs.

:P But then again, I’ve only barely touched model animations in my experiences… So maybe there are technologies/tools that make it a lot easier than I perceive.

Personal finishers on Elite skill or riot.

I would like to see Impairing Daggers velocity bumped up.

These daggers shouldn’t get obstructed by air either, and definitely shouldn’t miss all 3 daggers if the target strafes to the left or right a centimeter.

I also found myself seeing that only 1 dagger actually hit, when target did no dodging or blocking involved.

P.S bring back 1500 range steal.

Karl thanks for listening to all that feedback. I know the thief forums get pretty rough between folks asking for buffs/non thieves complaining that we are the anti christ. Even after the elite specs launch, if you could occasionally let us know what feedback you need/want, it would be a huge boon to the thief community. Dev presence is nothing if not helpful when players get this involved.

Personally I would MUCH prefer a 6 cost evasive strike at the end to a 5 cost. Even with quickness the risk/reward factor leaned toward auto attack rather than risking the big drop. Either a slight damage or range increase would be the real selling point though. I got one 8k hit off it, but that nearly killed me while dagger dagger would still drop higher damage. Reducing the times on both dust strike and and giving us a targeted weakening charge (that still goes through to allow a camera spun strike for quickness? BE STILL MY BEATING HEART). More on dust strike though… It needs something to make it special. I wish I could give more help on this, because I feel really lame being like ‘pistol 5 is just… better.’ Either a high damage ratio or perhaps a cripple/slow effect would be my first go to toward making it unique and useful. Again I know neither of those are brilliant options but it’s my hope that someone brings something more to the table than just ‘make aoe.’ Pistol 5 will still win out against this as smoke field with built in repeat blinds > line of ‘wish I could see clearly again.’ I can understand some of the comments about the 3 skill seeming a little lack luster, but combining it with a targeted weakening strike would just be legend…. wait for it….

oh wait that’s Reverent’s thing.

Concerning utilities it’s like 75% good news to me. The Elite should be a three click because it is fracking epic in spvp (I was on the receiving end of one over the weekend, but alas I didn’t have time to try my pvp build). Pulminary impact hitting harder gives it meaning. Bandit’s defense was amazing and I can understand the 15 second cool down. The mere thought of impairing daggers with a sinister build makes me quiver. That said… a nitpick I’m still having is with the distracting daggers. While the projectile traveling faster is nice, the epic then use within a set timer mechanic still feels flawed in the theme of being a physical skill.

First off lemme focus on the good parts of it. The appearance of daggers on your arms is cool, but in my mind that always makes me think of a kit. In fractal/dungeon PVE it was quite good in combination with the pistol to remove stacks of stability. I never got that clutch “No it’s my turn again!” moment against a boss, but I wasn’t solo fighting anything. IF there was a way for those to ignore stability and cause an interrupt against anything without a break bar, equipping them within a window would be huge for certain fights like flame shaman/Mai Trin.

That said, equip to throw with such a low window feels wrong compared to the simple click to win pistol 4. If it was equip 3, start cool down timer upon final use (with a longer cool down timer that still got reductions for successful interrupts) I could get behind that. If it was ‘click to use’ with the third use starting the cool down timer at current rate but ignored stability, also useful and awesome for the pulmonary interrupt mechanic that I would love to see. But as it stands it competes against excellent utility skills that we already have without a countdown from the start timer. So while I love the theme of the skill, I feel those improvements are not enough to fix the heart of the problem.

One other note is that healing skill. I get it, we have three pretty cool healing skills… but I’d really like this to be a viable alternative instead of that spike heal I will never risk. One thought could be to tie it in to our dodge training to grant unique boons, like using it with dash ends with a different effect as apposed to using it with Lotus training. Again I get that competition is hard against healing skills but this one does come off as the most lackluster of both healing options and the total daredevil utilities.

Finally, our traits were pretty excellent. Not ‘zomg that’s so broke’ but, ‘oh those probably won’t be immediately nerfed and negate and work i put in toward a build.’ I REALLY REALLY wish the Escapist’s Absolution proc’d on an evasion instead of only a dodge. Admittedly between the new/awkward mechanic timing on the dodges (looking at dash and leaping bound) and being a thief with low armor and lower health… it would be nice and really make us choose between damage/survival. As it stands I’d rather risk the damage and condi cleanse either through a signet or through sword/pistol.

There’s probably tons more to say, but I’m waiting until we hear more details about the dodge alterations before droning on. Thanks again, and keep up the good work!

Auesis.7301:

Animations

Something I thought I’d still keep emphasising is that I’d like to see more work on the animations of Staff. It just doesn’t feel even remotely Thief-y apart from the cool somersault on Vault. The spin on Punishing Strikes is useful but doesn’t look right. Maybe copy the Revenant’s third Staff attack which has a proper Bo Staff-style animation on it, but keep the same damage + vulnerability + aftercast etc? Debilitating Arc also looks really wonky and could do with a new animation. If Dust Strike became PbAoE (as I hope for if you read below), I’d like to see something nice for that as well, else I still wouldn’t be very happy with the recycled Silverwastes shovel animation on the line version.

my post was very mechanic-oriented, so i didn’t bring it up, but yes, i would LOVE to see some changes to the staff animations. my biggest gripes are the idle pose and the 1c attack. the latter baffles me because you already have a pretty sweet 1c melee staff attack, the revenant uses it.

Inkida.8925:

I still feel like Staff #4 needs to actually do more. The thief’s other weapon skills that blind have far more utility. Shortbow #5 also gives you incredible mobility. d/p #3 shadowsteps to an opponent and x/p #5 gives you a smoke field.

Perhaps make Staff #4 into a PBAoE smoke field as well. It doesn’t have to have a long duration, but it would go a great length in helping staff to synergize with thief’s core stealth mechanics and traits. Further, it would go into the brawler gameplay as you can swing freely in that smoke field for much needed damage mitigation.

well if the radius is pretty large (i’m thinking “cap point” large), then it would be a decent trade-off for not having secondary uses.

Still on Vault, I would still argue that it shouldn’t deal the amount of damage it does, instead being more of a mobility/utility skill. Drop the excessive damage (put it somewhere else, the rest of staff’s DPS is pitiful), and add evasion during the leaping part of the vault (but not the landing. it’s the part dealing damage, people should be able to interrupt that). As it is right now, the daredevil needs to spam vault to deal damage, or be relegated to really, really low DPS output. For the sake of the flexibility of the weapon, I think this is a needed change.

A solid point here. What if they upped the damage on Weakening Charge to all targets, making it a solid “bread and butter” strike, and then greatly dropped the damage on Vault, but gave it the Weakness and perhaps some other condition effect, so that it works ideally as an opener, softening them for your other attacks. I tend to think that they won’t allow us a longer range on it though, not for a targeted hop. Between the DD’s dodges and Steal, I don’t think we desperately need more gap closers.

Oh also… any luck on steal/vault as a combo? And could I get a confirmation that utilizing my assassin’s signet could buff damage on 5 finger death… i mean 5 point exploding…

Fist Flurry. that one. I didn’t get enough time to mechanic test that damage comparison.

These proposed changes are profoundly disappointing. It sounds like the dodges will be fixed, and that is good news, but that’s also the least that can be expected—the spec simply won’t function AT ALL without the dodges being improved.

The vast majority of our other feedback seems to have been ignored in favor of shallow number buffs (and a few extremely questionable nerfs on top of that). There aren’t enough hours in the day or words in the English language to express how frustrating it is to have your core concerns and feedback perpetually ignored.

Comparing the OP of this thread to the ones for other professions paints a stark picture. Many professions got EXACTLY what they wanted as a result of their collated feedback, and why shouldn’t they? Like our little Thief community, the other professions came together to really figure out what about their respective elite specializations NEEDED to be changed. The key difference seems to be that those professions have developers behind them that are invested in making a quality elite spec that meets people’s needs, whereas ours seems to be trying to put in as little effort as possible.

Thieves have gone years without attention on needed issues at this point—literally years. I’m having a hard time of thinking of any other profession in the game that has consistency gotten this poor of treatment, and Ranger is the only one that even comes close. Thus, I am forced to conclude that Daredevil, as we see it now, is largely what we will be getting when HoT releases, and that changes from that point will be minimal and, again, largely number based. If this indeed the case, I will not be playing longer than a month or two into the expansion, and I have a feeling I won’t be the only one.

Weakening charge: Instead of targeted like heartseeker, could you make this directable and have an evade like Warrior’s GS #3. I’ve been playing GS warrior a fair amount lately and the evasion and reposition would compliment the rest of the staff, especially in a teamfight. I think it would be better than tacking on an evade to vault. Also if you’re keeping the pass through, the directable targeting becomes really useful. So overall, the skill would look like: 0.75 second total cast time (including the after cast), 0.5 second evade, range 400 directable slide.

Bandit’s Defense: Could be made into a skill that has a rollover instead of being activated by the opponent. Right now this gets activated way too much by AI and really hurts in a teamfight or if an opponent with stability triggers it because it locks you into an animation that will get you killed quickly. Having it be a 1.5 second block that you can activate again for a knockdown or let expire after the duration is up would greatly improve the usefulness of it.

Staff Master: Remove the weapon requirement from it (and rename it) and this could be a nice general trait.

Edit: An afterthought: Staff really lacks utility. It has some burst damage, but it’s way underpar when compared to something like S/D. There’s no hard CC (except the stealth attack, but staff can’t stealth by itself) or boon hate or access to stealth.

Meanwhile on the Revenant section….

“we took 90% of your suggestions and did them "

*random post about maybe adding a unique Dodge animation * – " sure why not, in fact I’ll change a few other animations too because I love you guys".

I only wish all the classes got the same love rev is getting.

I wish they would just be honest. If you don’t like thief just say. Amante basically hit the nail on the head. . The feedback thread and some others were full of extremely good ideas. Most if not all were ignored. Another person even came up with some amazing drawings for attack animations. Whilst I’m aware animation takes time, the fact that on the Revenant forum one can simply be added on a whim shows how much pleasure the dev there is taking in his work. Instead of recycling old existing ones from rarely used parts of the game in hopes we don’t notice.

I’m not trying to say Karl doesn’t work hard as I’m sure he does, because I’m aware he’s working on the other elites too. All of which are doing well with their feedback and changes. The point I’m trying to get across is that in comparison the thief class just seems like an afterthought and side project.

babazhook.6805:

Would still love to see the dodges selectable with f3 f4 f5 10 second cooldown and changeable in battle.

I feel that this has so much potential in pvp…it makes up for the fact that you lose shadow arts or deadly arts. It solves many problems with the current daredevil from a pvp perspective.

Please make this happen.

Ohoni.6057:

Still on Vault, I would still argue that it shouldn’t deal the amount of damage it does, instead being more of a mobility/utility skill. Drop the excessive damage (put it somewhere else, the rest of staff’s DPS is pitiful), and add evasion during the leaping part of the vault (but not the landing. it’s the part dealing damage, people should be able to interrupt that). As it is right now, the daredevil needs to spam vault to deal damage, or be relegated to really, really low DPS output. For the sake of the flexibility of the weapon, I think this is a needed change.

A solid point here. What if they upped the damage on Weakening Charge to all targets, making it a solid “bread and butter” strike, and then greatly dropped the damage on Vault, but gave it the Weakness and perhaps some other condition effect, so that it works ideally as an opener, softening them for your other attacks. I tend to think that they won’t allow us a longer range on it though, not for a targeted hop. Between the DD’s dodges and Steal, I don’t think we desperately need more gap closers.

it’s less about having a gap closer (sword 2, dagger 2, D/P 3 all do a better job than vault could ever hope for anyway) and more about having something that can compete with shortbow for out-of-combat mobility. i suggested pairing the range with the engi’s rifle 5, which is a targetable leap. i doubt it will be enough to replace SB on people’s skill bars, but with some of the other suggested changes, it could happen.

The fanboy in me is glad that Fists of Fury is getting an outright damage buff. Before it had DPS on par with haste, but now it’ll be even higher.

The evade component on vault sounds pretty sweet. But, I am worried that it might be overpowered. Vault is essentially an AoE Backstab that has no usage limitations. It is somewhat balanced by the fact that once you start the bound, an enemy pretty much knows where you’re going to land and can counterattack. But, if it has an evade component, then there is no counterattacking. I don’t PVP that often, but that is a concern I still have.

Most of these changes are good, if not ambiguous and undecided. For Evasive Empowerment I would give the buff a 3 second duration, but otherwise these sound pretty good.

Thank you for all the changes!

Karl McLain.5604:

Yo!

Vault: Reduced initiative cost from 6 to 5. Reduced cast time from 1 second to 3/4 second. note: We’ve discussed leaving the initiative high and giving this ability an evade component at the beginning or end. Feel free to let us know what you think.

Bandit’s Defense: Increased recharge from 10 seconds to 15.

For Vault, higher initiative cost to 6 for reduced cast time and evade frames in the beginning seems like a really good idea.

I’m not surprised Bandit’s Defense got a slight nerf, but could we get an increase of 1/2 second on the knockdown as a buffer.

Nice changes so far and here is hoping to see more improvements on the DD animation department, like really.. the Monkey King tonic have such an amazing animation on every single jump, it might be tough to pull off an entire new animation set just for one elite spec though and I might be asking too much but please please, make us feel the Daredevil theme!

it’s less about having a gap closer (sword 2, dagger 2, D/P 3 all do a better job than vault could ever hope for anyway) and more about having something that can compete with shortbow for out-of-combat mobility.

Well, as someone who likes SB so much that I run with a Dreamer (flaming unicorn death!), I still think Staff will have it’s function. In overall terms, SB is about “trolling,” sort of, applying attacks at a decent distant, spamming out of melee, teleporting back in if desired, etc. Staff has some of that, but is better at sticking in melee once you get there and straight brawling, and I think it should be balanced on that. It’s also ONLY an option with DDs, who already have the dodge perks (which could be a bit better), but the idea is that you can use dodges to make up some of that lost mobility.

As for Vault vs. Infiltrator’s, they each have their uses. Vault does do more damage, but is less defensive. Vault has lower range and speed, but can also be used across gaps that you can’t Shadowstep. I don’t know that the range would change, but I do think it would help if they added either more survivability to the move (in the form of AoE weakness or something else), or more agility to it (like applying Swiftness or Vigor to yourself to allow you to bounce out of Vaults at speed). I think the basic focus should be more on using it to open fights with an advantage, rather than something you’d spam during fights to deal max damage.

Regarding Vault
Please keep the initiative cost at 6 and either further decrease the cast time to 1/2 seconds like all other untargetted leaping / jumping skills in the game (reasoning given in this post by me: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Daredevil-Feedback/5458448 ) or increase the distance to 800 in order to increase distance being truely airborn, just like Jump Shot behaves. While Jump Shot does have a 1 second casttime as well, it’s time spent moving is just about 1/2 seconds, thus allowing the skill to reach the target before landing on the ground. Else this skill will have multiple issues with “pathing” because of not being in the air while looking so, resulting in unusability when trying to cross gaps or uneven terrain. I´m not asking to increase the vertical height, but since all leaps of this kind are associated with a jump, all of them should reach their taget destination within the timeframe they’re airborn.
Evade is not needed in my book if the skill was executed in 1/2 second, and also not on the proposed 800 range version, all i want is that the skill is as usable as Engineer’s Jump Shot. Damage can be tweaked (read: reduced slightly) of course in this case, but the increase in usability would be more than worth it in my opinion. Daredevil should be mobile, and this would increase the mobility.

In an attempt to add some more useful feedback to the pile, I am going to respond to the OP point by point and note where major points of community feedback were missed:

Karl McLain.5604:

Staff:
We’ll be looking at updating these abilities as we are able. There was a common tone in that the staff was too slow and didn’t feel as well as it could in its utility. We’ll be working on this now and in the future, so please continue to give feedback as you play the Daredevil.

For starters, it’s hard to enjoy using the Staff when it consists almost entirely of reused and/or placeholder animations. The Staff is the main selling point of Daredevil and what most casual Thief players seem to be looking forward to. As things stand now, I can state unequivocally that they will be disappointed. There is plenty of feedback both in the DD feedback thread and Staff specific threads at to what you should look for in terms of Staff animations, whether they’re new or reused. Please update us on this issue.

Karl McLain.5604:

Weakening Charge: Increased the maximum number of targets from 1 to 5. _note: we’re still working on making this animation feel better. In addition to basic clean-up I’m hoping to make it targeted (ala Heartseeker) but still pass through the target. At the point of writing this, though, it’s not in yet.

I wanted to note this, because along with the Dodge animations being improved this seems to be one of the few pieces of widespread feedback that was received and responded to. I look forward to trying the improved version of the skill in BWE3.

Karl McLain.5604:

Dust Strike: Reduced cast time from 1/2 second to 1/4 second.

Number tweaks will not change much. The skill has a bad animation and questionable usefulness in general. I understand that, for whatever reason(s), you don’t want Staff to have a Smoke Field (although I think you’re overestimating how powerful the Stealth Staff #1 Knockdown will be). Dust Strike still feels underwhelming mechanically. The best suggestion that I have heard echoed several times is having Dust Strike drop a line-shaped Dark Field that pulses Blind. There are very few Dark Fields in the game; this would give Staff something unique to bring to the table in terms of utility.

Karl McLain.5604:

Vault: Reduced initiative cost from 6 to 5. Reduced cast time from 1 second to 3/4 second. _note: We’ve discussed leaving the initiative high and giving this ability an evade component at the beginning or end. Feel free to let us know what you think.

Why do we have to choose between the skill being cost effective and the skill being functional? Try and understand that 6 initiative is a LOT. 5 initiative is a large enough cost as it is; note that most Dual Skills are 4, with the three that cost 5 being the least frequently used. The only 6 cost skill we have at all is Shortbow #5, and Vault is no Infiltrator’s Arrow… not even close.

Vault’s animation is very slow and telegraphed, and after the first week of HoT PvP people will figure out that they can just knock the Thief out of the air with any form of hard CC. Vault NEEDS the Evade during transit to make it functional. It should not have to be overcosted to function as designed.

Karl McLain.5604:

Bandit’s Defense: Increased recharge from 10 seconds to 15.

Why, God, WHY? The Berserker version is still 10s CD; why is the Daredevil version 15s? Why does a profession already far more durable than Thief get a BETTER version of a much needed Thief skill? It’s just baffling, honestly.

As noted by others, the automatic triggering of the knockdown is inconvenient and often gets triggered by throwaway minions. Please make it a flip over skill you can manually activate after the conditions have met (with the 1.5s block lasting the whole time regardless).

Karl McLain.5604:

Impact Strike combo: Removed endurance gain from Uppercut and Finishing Blow when Brawler’s Tenacity was equipped.

Again, WHY? It’s a three part skill that involves considerable windup on 2/3 of the parts, and I doubt a little extra Endurance was lighting the world on fire.

The animation for the third part still doesn’t look right. As with the other animation issues, could we please get a response on the feasibility of changing this? The best suggestion I’ve heard several times is reusing the animation from the Warrior’s Stomp Rage Skill. It would also be nice to know if the elite will ever use our chosen stomp flags…

Karl McLain.5604:

Distracting Daggers: Reduced equip cast time to 1/2 second. This ability now lasts for 25 seconds. Thrown dagger velocity has been increased by 100%. Fixed an issue that wouldn’t allow this ability to increase interrupt cooldown.

Sorry, but this isn’t going to change anything for reasons other people have noted. Distracting Daggers has too many arbitrary mechanical limitations to make the cut on a Thief’s bar at present. The delay between uses is completely unnecessary and should be removed. If you’re looking to balance this skill, why not let the user take as long as they want to use the daggers—without delay between them—but have the skill not go on cooldown until the last is used? This would stand in contrast to Mantras, which go on CD immediately after being pre-casted.

Karl McLain.5604:

Fist Flurry: Increased damage per hit by 36%. Each successful hit applies one stack of vulnerability for 5 seconds. Removed hidden initiative cost.

This skill doesn’t really seem to have a niche or purpose. It’s a bit of extra damage with no utility on a profession that already has too many unused skills like that.

It strikes me as ridiculous that a Revenant can stack Vulnerability with greater ease through autoattacking than a Thief can by using multiple weapon and utility skills and blowing all their initiative. Throwing a few stacks of Vulnerability on a 20s cooldown utility will not change that. Unfortunately, this skill is probably going straight into the dustbin.

Karl McLain.5604:

Traits:
This iteration was mostly bug fixes. I’ve seen a lot of feedback on how Escapist’s Absolution should be baseline. It is the case that we believe this trait is powerful enough that it should be a choice in the trait line between damage, survivability and utility, rather than just a given. Driven Fortitude’s healing allows for usefulness in all modes where you take damage, where EA’s condition removal is situationally useful in a combat scenario.

I’m gonna level with you here… if Daredevil is as much a band-aid for unaddressed core Thief issues as it appears to be, this kind of rhetoric simply isn’t going to cut it. Thief is the squishiest profession in the entire GAME, and the trait revamp in June only added to that. Thief is lacking core damage mitigation and condition removal that it should ALREADY have. Your line about the “choice” between damage, survivability, and utility only makes sense in an environment where Thief isn’t already lacking core durability.

More important is the single biggest piece of non-Staff feedback that people had, and it remains completely unaddressed: WHY IS DAREDEVIL THE ONLY ELITE SPECIALIZATION IN THE GAME THAT WASTES AN ENTIRE TRAIT TIER ON UNLOCKING ITS ELITE MECHANIC? There is no reason whatsoever that the Dodge choice couldn’t be made a dropdown box that is locked during combat/PvP matches (like Revenant Legends). This would open up a whole additional tier of sorely needed traits for the Thief. Please don’t give us 2/3 the new traits of other professions… we’re starved enough as it is.

I still had the slight hope that this elite specialisation was a sort of late april fool joke ; it seems not. As usual, thanks for nothing arenanet devs.

Karl McLain.5604:

Yo!
First off, let me say thanks for all of the constructive feedback you’ve been providing. We had a great weekend watching everyone jump around like madmen. Here’s where we’ll be going with Daredevil in the future.

Yeah well… I’ve read it all and i am really disappointed with the changes.
You may have read what the community asked but you didn’t listen for the most part. In fact, the only good thing there is Weakening charge with an “ala heartseeker” mecanism.

The staff is still a useless weapon and you won’t see many madmen jumping around on release if it stays that way.. OK now we will place our 2 with a correct animation but it still doesn’t adress the rest of the issues.
1- I’m not even sure Dust Strike with an instant animation will find usefullness.
2- The dodge is useless as it is. You can spam it so yeah you dodge but you are useless and the only times you really need to use it is when you are immobilized and because of the 2 part animation, you can’t even break it in time to fully avoid a burst.
3- Vault is the only thing doing damage. And well… Even grandma could dodge it. And the 1/4 animation gained would not cut it. The animation is too obvious, the range is kitten and even if it lands pray for crit cause it’s useless otherwise.
4- The staff does not give extra survivability. In fact, it gives less. The only real extra survivability you’ll find in staff is the endurance gain through the traitlines. BUT, you can’t have the dodge condi cure at the same time, and you WILL have it IF YOU WANT with another weapon. So you lose it, and the staff skills does not grant survivability cause of the clunkyness but you’ll lose the stealth, combat mobility and blind from D/P. Plus D/P do like twice the damage with a lot more precision and FUN.

Bandit Defense 15 secondes? Why not, but well.. It’s funny to see Berserker’s break stun is still 10 sec? I guess thief should still be nerfed in every way. Lol.
Plus, like every staff skills, there is a huge problem with this utility (which is by the way, the only good utility provided by the elite spec lol). It stops blocking whenever an ennemy hitting us is in range, so it kittens all the purpose of the skill which is blocking.
Sometimes interrupting someone is good, but i’d like to be able to use it WHEN I WANT it to be used. So i don’t die cause of the long animation at max range, cause it attacks a minion, cause the dude had a passive block, or whatever.

As for Impairing daggers, the projectiles should be a lot more faster. Most of the time it disappears in the void, it does not hit the target and it makes it useless. Even if the guy is not dodging, blocking, or goes out of range, just by moving and the terrain it misses. The animation should be reworked because of that and it will be the second usefull utility of the elite spec.

I won’t comment on the other changes because even with that the others utilities will still be of no use. The changes in the traits are useless, except the bug corrections, no one will use Evasive empowerment.

Anyway, like i said: very disappointed with the changes. I expected something good I guess. But hey, i can still be D/P like the rest of the thief world.

“Dust Strike: Reduced cast time from 1/2 second to 1/4 second.” -

I dont like it at all. It will never negate 2k dmg like small smokefield. And its much less usefull than staff “4” on revenant which heals and removes 2 conditions.

“Vault: Reduced initiative cost from 6 to 5. Reduced cast time from 1 second to 3/4 second. note: We’ve discussed leaving the initiative high and giving this ability an evade component at the beginning or end. Feel free to let us know what you think.”-

Evade seems to be a necessity. Shortening cast time does not fix a problem which is long flight time when player can not do anything and can be cought with “immob mid air bug” (effective 4 sec stun- player cant use any skill nor move).

Step in the right direction. I do still have a few concerns.

This really bugs me but the staff animations when holding the weapon and running aren’t staff-wielding like. This goes for Staff Revenant as well. It’s not like a hammer (which is the current animation). The hands should be at the base of the weapon. Others have stated about combat strikes are off in some instances so I won’t go into that.

Edit to clarify staff holding animation: Ohoni was confused by my point so I add a picture for reference: http://www.martialartsarticlesonline.com/images/bo.jpg

All I have to say is THANK YOU for the Weakening Charge change. It was very annoying not being able to get back into combat with it after using it.

I’d go with giving Vault an evade and leave the cost to 6 initiative. I’d rather have the evade.

I’m in the majority agreement with Dust Strike being a circle as it’s more beneficial than a line; it can act like a larger Black Powder. In fights, I don’t consider using it as it doesn’t feel useful in my rotation.

Distracting Daggers I feel will still be a non-pickup with it’s cooldown. Unless the “Reduced equip cast time to 1/2 second” refers to just equipping them then I can freely use the 3 daggers without worrying about an internal cooldown to use each dagger. If so, then I’d consider it.

I still have a big concern with condi cleanse. Can Escapist’s Absolution remove damaging conditions at the very least? Heck, can it be like Fleet of Foot and remove at least one condition on dodging? I think this condi meta warrants some consideration for it. Daredevil imo has enough to remove immobilizing conditions. Stealth for Thief is currently the best way to remove conditions (outside Shadowstep) but with Daredevil, the focus is on dodging. And dying almost instantly to 9 random stacks of burning gets real old real fast. I feel like, if anyone, only the high tier players that can dodge successfully almost every time will be the only beneficiaries of this trait.

• “I’ve seen a lot of feedback on how Escapist’s Absolution should be baseline. It is the case that we believe this trait is powerful enough that it should be a choice in the trait line between damage, survivability and utility, rather than just a given. Driven Fortitude’s healing allows for usefulness in all modes where you take damage, where EA’s condition removal is situationally useful in a combat scenario.”

Speaks volumes to how out of touch with the game you are when it comes to thief. Have you ever even played it outside of your Dev vs Dev fights you talk about on stream? These thoughts come to mind immediately reading your post about Condition removal.

It is almost as bad as what Roy said about engineer and their condition removal in comparison with Revenant, but at least in his defense that class isn’t all a one trick pony beaten to death by the nerf bat over 3 years.

Condition removal is always useful not just in certain situations. People not taking it will be considered Bad thieves, or be using shadow arts defeating the purpose of a stealth-less play-style……Jesus…this spec will remain terrible.

I know, right? As if needing to remove conditions in combat is “situational” in a game wholly centered around combat! Karl, have you PvPed on the live servers with ANY character recently (let alone Thief)? Does needing to deal with the stream of constant conditions everyone faces 100% of the time in SPvP sound “conditional” to you?

This really bugs me but the staff animations when holding the weapon and running aren’t staff-wielding like. This goes for Staff Revenant as well. It’s not like a hammer (which is the current animation). The hands should be at the base of the weapon. Others have stated about combat strikes are off in some instances so I won’t go into that.

I don’t understand what you mean by this? Do you mean they should be holding the staff as if it were a greatsword? That is a stupid way to hold a staff. A melee staff should be held at the 1/3 and 2/3 positions, for maximum control. If you’re going to hold it from one end then you might as well put a weight or a blade on the other to maximize damage. Melee staff skills should only be holding it at the base for occasional longer range strikes.

This would be the pose I’d want for running though, but the resting pose should be more in front of you. http://www.ambrakarate.com/images/boStaff.jpg

I’m in the majority agreement with Dust Strike being a circle as it’s more beneficial than a line; it can act like a larger Black Powder. In fights, I don’t consider using it as it doesn’t feel useful in my rotation.

I prefer it as a ranged attack, it lets you reduce the threat of enemies that are outside of melee range. I would not want to see it become a PBAoE, we already have that in pistol.

Karl McLain.5604:

Traits:
This iteration was mostly bug fixes. I’ve seen a lot of feedback on how Escapist’s Absolution should be baseline. It is the case that we believe this trait is powerful enough that it should be a choice in the trait line between damage, survivability and utility, rather than just a given. Driven Fortitude’s healing allows for usefulness in all modes where you take damage, where EA’s condition removal is situationally useful in a combat scenario.

Now that’s funny and sad both because it seems PvE will fail to use all mechanics cough cough flaw and you haven’t realized how important cleansing is especially on thief. Despite your unjustified nerf on SA the only reason for taking it is SE despite it’s nerfed state the same will happen for this. Might as well put trash traits in the same tier as it speaking of that put fall damage trait in adept replacing Concealed Defeat which no one picks because it’s next to SE.

Overall really disappointing changes. The dodges are our new class mechanic aren’t they!? So why can’t you make them actually selectable with f3,f4,f5 ? Why do I have to “waste” gm traits for the class mechanic? No other class has to do so… In other words we only get 2/3 of a new trait line! So design some usefull gm traits and actually give us our class mechanic please.

Evasion on vault is absolutely needed.
Bandits defense: If you increase cd to 15 sec no one will take it! With increased cd, the knockdown duration should be increased as well to 2,5 seconds.
Wondering why no one mentioned staff#3. Split the skill like sword/dagger 3 pls so there is a “chain” in the staff concept.
Most other things are already mentioned.

Don’t forget the hidden initiative cost on the dodge trait(s). On the condi dodge trait it also has init cost. Dunno about the others tho.
— Driven Fortitude should be 1sec icd per 5 evades but should be a lower base healing like 250, meaning that a cleave-heavy situation you could heal for like 1k per dodge(we are talking about thieves here so you lose 4k hp between 2 dodges anyway) whereas in duels most likely you get healed for 0 or 250. This would provide the teamfight sustain it was supposed to give which it doesn’t ATM. (shadow arts thief heals for 400 per sec in stealth(4pulses every 3 sec) while u heal 450 per succesful evade with this….)

Wondering why no one mentioned staff#3. Split the skill like sword/dagger 3 pls so there is a “chain” in the staff concept.

What, you mean you’d prefer it to be “3→hit the guy→3 again→dodge roll away?” I don’t think I’d like that as much. If there’s going to be a roll-away move, it needs to be instantaneous, not something that only happens every other time I hit the key.

Ohoni.6057:

Wondering why no one mentioned staff#3. Split the skill like sword/dagger 3 pls so there is a “chain” in the staff concept.

What, you mean you’d prefer it to be “3->hit the guy->3 again->dodge roll away?” I don’t think I’d like that as much. If there’s going to be a roll-away move, it needs to be instantaneous, not something that only happens every other time I hit the key.

No, I thought about skill that activates after the roll-away move. So don’t change the actual skill and it’s behavior. But after successfully hitting staff #3 and doing the roll-away move, maybe activate a gap closer or a block like spear already has.

A roll back with an optional roll in afterwards would be nice—like an inverse version of that one Mesmer skill.

Amante.8109:

A roll back with an optional roll in afterwards would be nice—like an inverse version of that one Mesmer skill.

Copy paste ranger sword 2 tada

No, I thought about skill that activates after the roll-away move. So don’t change the actual skill and it’s behavior. But after successfully hitting staff #3 and doing the roll-away move, maybe activate a gap closer or a block like spear already has.

Ah, better than what I thought you meant, but I’m still not a huge fan. You could not spam the move to backflip away, which I value. I also don’t need it to “hop back, then forward again,” because I already have both #2 and #5 for forward hops if I need that (not to mention the DD dodges).

I think if I were going to add anything to #3, it would be a ranged attack, that you’d flip back and then make an attack, allowing the second or third in a row to continue doing damage, but then it’s pretty much just SB3. What about this, have it so that Staff 3 (perhaps requiring a trait for this), would leave a Darkness field in your wake, which means that then using #2 or Lotus to go back in would cause leaching bolts, using Bound or Vault would cause AoE blindness, etc.

Thanks for the updates, they look pretty nice.
On the vault having evade frames or not, I would definitely say it would up the utility on the skill, and help ease peoples issues with the slight aftercast. I would say you should add a small evade frame during the flip portion at the beginning, as well as considering increasing the range by 150. Just alittle more range would go a long way to making this skill more viable, though honestly with the cast reduction, both evade and range might be too strong. Either way, I would say the evade would need to be at the start, otherwise there wouldn’t be the nice little window where you are vulnerable after the damage, which also makes doing it out of a smoke field for stealth alot more attractive than it would be otherwise.

Like the staff skill changes you have here, only thing id suggest is keeping the weakening skill targetless, or not have it pass through the target. Having it target directed and making it pass through would be ideal, but not for the current animation, as I feel it’d look alittle silly having you spin through a solid person.

Final remark, make sure lotus training isn’t too strong. It felt too strong for how much effectiveness you could get out of it. I was using it in noncondition oriented ganker builds for the cover conditions to great success for my condition oriented teammates. Maybe have it do longer duration conditions but only 1 random one per target or something? Just so it isn’t 3 conditions per person per dodge.

Keep up the good work.