Guild Wars 2

I am just curious as to what thieves feel is the area in most need of attention as far as balance and as importantly diversity goes. I am not going to speak to gear/runes and the like but only those things specific to a thief.

In my opinion there three general categories of things needing attention. They are the Weapon skills on particular weapons , traits and the utility skills. Many feel certain weapons are underperforming when compared to others and in need of work. Some feel we still have issues with trait lines that are poorly designed or have elements so important you simply can not take them in a build leaving other traits in the same tier unused and there are those that feel too many Utility skills , be they the heals, venoms or elites just not worthwhile taking.

While it true all of the areas need some manner of tweaks , just for the purposes of the discussion if you could pick one area to pick now which would it be ? I will give a sort of synposis of each and suggestion.

1)Weapon skills (slots 1-5) While Staff an d/p are in a good place many feel other weaponsets subpar and offer few reasons to take them over the big two. Others feel they all in a good place outside some small handful of tweaks and feel all that is needed is for the person to adapt to the set rather than force the given set to adapt to their own preference.

Example solution.

Add 1 second quickness to dancing dagger for each target hit.

2>Traits. There many that feel the DA lines, Trickery and Daredevil are very close to being there. Some feel CS is underperforming and there little reason to take it while some feel that lines like SA just need a juggling of where the traits fall in the various tiers. Acro is still being dismissed as subpar while others swear by it.

Example Solution

Shadows Embrace moves to where merciful Ambush lies. Merciful Ambush replaces Shadows Embrace.

3>Utility skills (slots 6-10) Many mention that Impact Strike and Basilisk Venom are the only real choices as far is Elites go and that Cooldowns or utility of Daggerstorm and Thieves Guild give no real reason to use them. Some feel venoms need tweaks, others Cooldowns lowered on things like Shadowstep or Shadow refuge.

Example solution Signet of shadows. Change function to Passive. Increase the distance of all shadowstep skills by 100. Active Blind nearby opponents and gain superspeed for 5 seconds.

Now the examples of fixes are just that , examples but if you as a thief main , in order to increase diversity of builds seen in the game which of the three categories do YOU think needs the most attention and will accomplish that diversity or do you feel there some other changes needed entirely?

Instead of buffing everything else and thereby introducing even more powercreep to the game I would rather see nerfs to currently overperforming skills/traits/weapons.
Obviously along with nerfs to other classes.

Anyway in my opinion the biggest discrepancy is between our weaponsets.
Compared with d/p nowadays x/d builds have an even harder time gaining stealth with all those blocks flying around. Adding the high damage and the nice gap closer/blind through shadow shot there is little reason to use another weapon for a stealth based build.
Making it harder for d/p to gain stealth or making it easier for x/d would increase diversity the most imo.

Turamarth.3248:

Instead of buffing everything else and thereby introducing even more powercreep to the game I would rather see nerfs to currently overperforming skills/traits/weapons.
Obviously along with nerfs to other classes.

Anyway in my opinion the biggest discrepancy is between our weaponsets.
Compared with d/p nowadays x/d builds have an even harder time gaining stealth with all those blocks flying around. Adding the high damage and the nice gap closer/blind through shadow shot there is little reason to use another weapon for a stealth based build.
Making it harder for d/p to gain stealth or making it easier for x/d would increase diversity the most imo.

One thing I wouldn’t mind is if they gave offhand dagger an on use invisibility rather than on hit

It still needs a way to catch up to foes but considering that invis is your engage/disengage tool – on use would make it far more useful

Tis just one thought as to bring it up to par
Maybe bring the int cost down by 1 point too

I would say that the biggest problem is with utility diversity. This is a fairly big topic, so as a general rule I would say that utilities that do not work because they (1) grant too small an effect, (2) have an excessive cooldown, and (3) are generally broken/inconsistent need to be fixed by (a) increasing their effects, (b) lowering their cooldown, and © addressing the bugs/inconsistencies in the mechanics. My list of skills below.

Category 1 Skills (Effect is not sufficient to justify use in most cases):

Ice Drake Venom (add bleed), Devourer Venom (add confusion), Ambush Trap (summon two), Thieves Guild (summon four), Dagger Storm (suggestion for changing skill below)

Dagger Storm—now a cone AoE that throws daggers in a stream for 5 seconds. Provides directional (front facing) reflect of projectiles. Can be used while moving.

Category 2 Skills (Cooldown too long to justify selecting it):

Blinding Powder (30 seconds), Thieves Guild (90 seconds), Dagger Storm (60 seconds)

Category 3 Skills (issues with mechanics):

Scorpion Wire (this needs to actually pull people consistently). There are other pulls that do work and this should act like them.

Shadowstep (change to clear 3 conditions when it teleports). This is a minor tweak, but necessary because—if I just got hit with a ton of conditions/damage, why on earth would I want to teleport BACK to where I was just smacked around in order to clear them?

Shadowstep is an engage tool with a secondary disengage, thieves who do not use it for an engage tool can reroll scrapper plz, I hear it doesn’t take much thought.

those cd’s are all fine as basilisk will still be chosen by any thief who use Shadowstep right.

you actually managed to make daggerstorm worse.. gg

omg… Ice Drake Venom (add bleed), Devourer Venom (add confusion), Ambush Trap (summon two), Thieves Guild (summon four), Dagger Storm (suggestion for changing skill below)

anyways… this is why we can’t have nice things…

I would rather not into the details of specific changes as there multiple threads for that. I am more interested as to where thieves think the major issues lie out of those defined categories.

My own opinion is that the utilities need the most attention. Many are unchanged since rollout and have been passed by.

This does not mean I think traits and weapon slot skills are fine.

If you can’t appreciate condition damage thief as a viable alternative to power then there really isn’t anything I can say.

Babaz is right though, simply ranking the balance issues for me:

(1) Utilities, (2) Weapon Skills, (3) Specializations.

Number 1 priority to me is Shadow Art — more shadowstep traits.

Example:
Shadow’s Embrace – in addition to 1 tick per second while in stealth, it should also trigger every time shadowstep is used. The local cooldown on each shadowstep skills (Steal, Infiltrator Arrow, etc.) should be enough to limit this. This simple change will give the Thief the necessary utility it needs. Besides, it’s called Shadow’s Embrace so it makes sense to also trigger on shadowstep while not in stealth.

Resilience of Shadow and Shadow’s Rejuvenation – should trigger on shadowstep. It could linger for 3s after using shadowstep while not in stealth.

All venom traits should go to Deadly Arts to free up space for more shadowstep traits. Venom traits do not belong in Shadow Arts.

Cloaked in Shadow should be baseline to weapon skills that typically spec’ed for it (i.e. Cloak and Dagger) or merge CiS and Hidden Thief together and put it in GM. This will free up more slot for more shadowstep traits.

The next priority is Trickery — a lot of traits needs to be baseline (15 init max without spec’ing Trickery)

The problem is that the traitlines are all SUPER synergistic. We need more traitlines like Daredevil, where all of the relevant things are contained in one line, INCLUDING skills.

Instead, I have add-on effects to Steal (one of Thief’s profession mechanics) spread out across three different traitlines, sometimes with bonuses to recharge based on what actions I take WHILE holding a particular weapon.

It’s not helpful.

This is in contrast to Trickery, which for the most part makes sense (though I’m curious as to why Flanking Strikes are here and not in CS). It has buffs to steal, and adds to Trick skills even though they have almost all been knocked out of the meta.

Thief, perhaps more than any other class, could use a return to the GW1 style of spec’ing characters.

The more and more time that goes by, the more sense it makes to add blind to d/d 5

Of course like some have said, maybe there is nothing lacking, perhaps the bet course of action is to bring other thing in line aka nerfs.

Personally? I’d love to see the trait and specialization system reworked completely. It has been a huge drain on everyone, and thief especially since its inception.

I’d much rather see the ability to freely select 9 Major and 9 Minor unlocked traits across all specializations rather than needing to slot three of five (or six, with HoT) specializations. In the very least, this would help build diversity as a whole and bolster synergies without being shoehorned into specific specializations.

So from the perspective of thief, rather than my choosing Acrobatics, Critical Strikes, and Trickery to make a nicely durable and versatile sword/dagger build whilst exploiting Invigorating Precision as I have been since the trait was first introduced, I could pick and choose in a way similar to how traits were prior to June 23rd, 2015. Thus I could dabble in Shadow Arts (for more stealth and durability) or take Daredevil (for more dodges and staff) as well.

And the biggest bonus is that players could begin with a pair of traits at 1st level, gain a second pair at 10th, and so on every 10 levels thereafter (to the maximum of 9 pairs at 80th level).

(That and, in theory, we could get more than 9 major + 3 minor traits per line, allowing build diversity to continue to grow.)

If I were to ask for anything on thief, it would be a buff to group support in some way. Whether that’s buffing venoms to be actually useful (and automatically hitting the party without the trait), or adding shouts of some kind.