Guild Wars 2

I’d like to open a discussion on the elite utilities we have available and the various reasons certain utilities are taken almost exclusively and others are taken almost never.

Basilisk’s Venom provides the thief with a powerful control device to land damage and stop a target cold. Because the class relies on mobility, having the chance to stay in one spot for even a few extra seconds is a huge benefit towards extra damage. As such it remains fairly universal for a thief to take this option.

Thieves Guild, by contrast, is an option that is almost never taken. The damage on the summons is weak and easily ignored. The cooldown of 180 seconds baseline is absurd in a PvE setting and a PvP setting. This is the elite skill that is most in need of changes and balancing in general.

Dagger Storm falls in the middle. It’s 90 second baseline cooldown is not absurdly long, although it still is quite long for what it does. Sending out daggers and reflecting projectiles sounds good in theory, but the practical application is not as effective as the cooldown might justify it being.

Proposed changes:

Overall, I suggest changing the elites to follow a 30, 60, 120 baseline cooldown structure. This would be paired with a cooldown reduction on venoms in general to 30 seconds to make them more user friendly. Basilisk’s Venom would take the 30 second slot.

Thieves Guild would take the 120 second slot. The summons would be reworked to use more diverse skills, including stealth, and deal better damage than before.

Dagger Storm should be on 60 second base cooldown. Duration should be reduced to 6 seconds. Should also gain retaliation in addition to reflecting projectiles.

Oh dear friend, how I wish those would be seen and cared by developers.

I would suggest buffing tricks and deception skills and nerfing others a little. I am disgusted with the new thief forceful builds. You either play x/x or x/y, or you are dead. There are wonderful utilities that a thief can use, but some do not work (cough…scorpion wire) and some not that effective ( all others maybe).

Dagger storm should be 60 seconds
Thieves guild should be more useful and 120 seconds
Basilisk venom should be 60 seconds with a reduction trait not lesser than 45 seconds.

Dagger Storm needs to be reverted to pre-nerf so that it actually hits properly. Thieves Guild remains relatively useless so it needs a pretty dramatic buff.

BV is pretty solid but I wouldn’t mind see it cut through invuln.

BV is good as-is. 60 seconds I think would put too much emphasis on making the skill require Venomus Aura, which for many, is not really desired. A 45-60-75 progression is probably better for the skills if they saw some adjustments.

Leave BV as-is or maybe even cause it to work on 3 hits with .75s durations to let D/D stab be more consistent while not really affecting most other sets or its use.

Dagger Storm should go down to 60s but see its duration reduced to 5s from 7.5s. This proportional cut allows DS to be more useful when needed with less remaining excess (all you really need to is reflect Rapid Fire and similar skills) and even be used more than once in a fight, while boosting its synergy with Trickster as a cleanse.

TG needs a lot of help, but I think the drastically-cut cooldown could enable the skill to work reasonably well with venomshare builds, as this enables more frequent use of NPC allies to gain the benefits of venomshare when no other PC allies are nearby or maybe perish while fighting. There may be more needed, but I’m very unsure as venomshare as a build I’m not a particular expert of and don’t want to over-buff venomshare..

alain.1659:

Oh dear friend, how I wish those would be seen and cared by developers.

And yet, they’re on Revenant forums all the time, trying to figure stuff out. >.<

I agree, TG needs the cooldown shortened to about 120 seconds, and their damage output (and survivability) needs a slight buff. I get they’re summoned allies, but given how much damage pets can take, it’s a little frustrating.

Take dagger storm back to pre-nerf, and it’s fixed. Neat.

Basilisk Venom is weird. I don’t want it to be so easily applicable (because PvP), but I also don’t want it to require Venomous Aura to be useful. It’s an awful conundrum.

The Elite Skilsl of the Thief are in they wayhow they are currently mostly all absolute Junk and need all to be overworked completely

1) Basilisk Venom (as like all other Venoms) should get reworked into a duration based skill with unlimited charges. Instead of having like 30 seconds of duration, it have only 5 seconds of Duration where you can perform with it as many charges as you can land hits.
The Effect of Basilisk Venom will be changed and the Skill will get renamed to “Viper Venom”

Viper Venom: While Viper Venom is active will cause all your Hits Bleeding, Weakness and Toxin. Toxin is a new Thief unique condition, which enhances Poison, Vulnerability and Torment and causes additionally Hallucinations, an effetc under Toxin that deactivates for enemies affected by Toxin to get friendly fire deactivated, so that their skills will also harm their allies as long.

Antitoxin Spray as Healing Skill will return, so that all Classes will have access to a Healing Skill that can remove Toxin from the Thieve’s Viper Venom Elite Skill.
Certain traits will also get added the feature to remove Toxin to further increase a bit the defense side so that Toxin doesn#t become too powerful.

With such an effect the Thief would be able to spread some chaos within the 5 seconds with that he could ause as much bleedings, weakness and toxin as possible with hits hits among as many enemies as possible.
Cooldown stays at 40 seconds, this skill shouldn’t have any shorter or longer cooldowns, 40 seconds is absolutely right, unless you use a trait that reduces Venom Cooldowns by 20% to be able to use it every 32 seconds, like Venomous Aura.

Petrification is somethign, that should get moved over as official condition to the Earth Elementalist to give the earth build of the Ele a bit more bang and defense through Hard CC.
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Dagger Storm is absolutely useless as it is, since the nerf of Stability and the accuracy nerf, because you nearly hit no s*** with this skill anymore compared to how the skill effectively hit targets all around you before of the nerfs.
Dagger Storm should get its Cooldown reduced to 60 seconds, its duration reduced from 8 seconds to 6 seconds and while its activve should grant you Retaliation, Resistance and Stability in that order, so that Stability has 2 cover boons so that this elite skill can’t be stopped instantly anymore by a single boon corrupting fear attack of a freaking Necromancer and the accurary and the damage shpould get returned to pre nerf state, so that this skill actually hits secondly again alot of targets all around you, so that people will want to stay away from you for the time you spin around or attack you with PBAoE attacks from far away…
Dagger Storm is a skill thats designed with the goal behind to give the thief for some time some BREATHING ROOM for when they have to recover endurance or have to wait on skilsl rechargign so that they can stealth egain, its a defensive skill with main foucs on countering ranged burst attacks like Rapidfire or Kill Shot that could otherwise defeat you, if they hit you in your weak moment where you can’t dodge or use stealth.
Also what needs to have is to make this skill useable UNDERWATER, redesign Dagger Storm to “Dagger Whirl” underwater by changign the spinning animation from a vertical one into a horizonmtal one similar to the spinning attack animation of the warrior underwater with his spear and similar to the elementalists elite underwaterform of Tornado > Maelstrom, changing Daggerstorm underwater into a 360 degree all around attack that hits targets for its 6 seconds regardless in which angle they are from you. while you are horizontally spinning around your self.

Thieves Guild needs to get its colldown cut down to 90 seconds
And the skill pattern of the two summoned thieves needs to get chaged.
The summoned thieves should always be based on the 2 weapons sets THAt YOU use.

if you are a D/D /Shortbow Thief, then you summon a D/D and a Shortbow Thief.
If you are a S/D/ P/P Thief, then you summon a S/D and a P/P Thief…
if you are a D/P/ Staff Thief, then you can guess it, then you summon on usage of TG a D/P and Staff thief to you aid.

This would provide more build diversity in combination with this skill and it would make TG alot more useful, especially through having its cooldown, making it this way possible to use this skill strategetically more oftenly in combat, when you need it, especially in PvP and in WvW.

Also summons in general need still alot of more improvements.. the A.I. is still super terrible and as long this is the case, should all kinds of summon skilsl take when directly targeted not 100% damage, but only 33% of the damage, that the real player would take, while still only 10% of damage, when not directly targeted.
The A.I is still way too dumb for this game to let the summons intenligently avoid incoming attacks or to move out of AoE skills, or sustain incoming attacks by making right choices of skills at the right time to avoid damage through blinding foes or blocking their attacks and so on…

summons as they are right now still are nothing but cannon fodder for players.