Guild Wars 2

In a recent topic I listed a few things that needed to happen before thief’s strong points were to be nerfed. The idea is to replace thief’s reliance on stealth with a combat design based around theft (BECAUSE THIEVES STEAL kitten, RIGHT?!) while turning stealth into an extra tool the thieves have access to.

What this would accomplish is making thief more malleable to balance changes while making thief fun and effective (also annoying) in it’s own unique way. Through theft, the thief will be able to gain defensive and offensive capabilities normally not available.

Now the way Theft is going to work is like this:

1.) Each skill and utility will have some form of Theft ability.
2.) Theft abilities only activate when criteria is met. For example: if someone has Protection at 76% HP or more and is hit by Heartseeker that has a Theft ability stating “If target is above 75% HP, steal a boon.” the remaining protection gets applied to the thief.

Now I have some ideas of my own, but it would probably be more fun to ask for everyone’s ideas first. Before I let you do so, I am going to list the possibilities I am looking at and if there is enough I might list them. Here is the list of the type of Theft effects I am looking at:

• Steal a boon.
• Switch a condition with a boon.
• Apply a boon on you and apply a condition on your target.
• Copy affected allies boons onto you.
• Transfer conditions onto affected targets.
• Steal Endurance.
• Copy a random skill from target. (Replaces w/e is in F1 slot. Single use.)
• Etc.

Let the ideas flow!

Wow, that all sounds like so much fun and sounds relevant to Thief flavor as well as fun in the current meta while not being OP.

Honestly, I’ve always felt the only reason why the profession was called a thief instead of an assassin was because of the steal mechanic. Without that, we are literally assassins.

Thus, if a core mechanic of the profession were to be changed (which won’t likely happen, but hey, specializations are a thing now right?), I feel it would most likely be steal being replaced with something else. I’ve always thought some gw1 hexs would be really cool in gw2. For instance

• Shadow Prison – Shadow step to target foe and chill foes in the area.
• Assassin’s Promise – Mark a foe for a few seconds (5-10) and if the foe dies/goes down while marked, regain 6 initiative or recharge a random utility.
• Shadow Shroud – Mark an enemy for a few seconds. All boons applied to target during this time are stripped.
• Siphon Strength – Apply weakness to a foe and gain fury for 10 seconds.

Something like that. Honestly, they don’t even need to be profession mechanics, they could easily be utilities for an assassin specialization.

All in all though, hexes were awesome in gw1 and I want to see them in gw2.

yolo swaggins.2570:

In a recent topic I listed a few things that needed to happen before thief’s strong points were to be nerfed. The idea is to replace thief’s reliance on stealth with a combat design based around theft (BECAUSE THIEVES STEAL kitten, RIGHT?!) while turning stealth into an extra tool the thieves have access to.

What this would accomplish is making thief more malleable to balance changes while making thief fun and effective (also annoying) in it’s own unique way. Through theft, the thief will be able to gain defensive and offensive capabilities normally not available.

Now the way Theft is going to work is like this:

1.) Each skill and utility will have some form of Theft ability.
2.) Theft abilities only activate when criteria is met. For example: if someone has Protection at 76% HP or more and is hit by Heartseeker that has a Theft ability stating “If target is above 75% HP, steal a boon.” the remaining protection gets applied to the thief.

Now I have some ideas of my own, but it would probably be more fun to ask for everyone’s ideas first. Before I let you do so, I am going to list the possibilities I am looking at and if there is enough I might list them. Here is the list of the type of Theft effects I am looking at:

• Steal a boon.
• Switch a condition with a boon.
• Apply a boon on you and apply a condition on your target.
• Copy affected allies boons onto you.
• Transfer conditions onto affected targets.
• Steal Endurance.
• Copy a random skill from target. (Replaces w/e is in F1 slot. Single use.)
• Etc.

Let the ideas flow!

Mesmer sand necros mess around with boons all the time lol. Stealing endurance… That’s kinda OP don’t you think?:/ other then that I actually agree with the idea of more access to stealing boons

They would just add another class if they were going to do that much work. Looks more like a marauder style character.

yolo swaggins.2570:

In a recent topic I listed a few things that needed to happen before thief’s strong points were to be nerfed. The idea is to replace thief’s reliance on stealth with a combat design based around theft (BECAUSE THIEVES STEAL kitten, RIGHT?!) while turning stealth into an extra tool the thieves have access to.

What this would accomplish is making thief more malleable to balance changes while making thief fun and effective (also annoying) in it’s own unique way. Through theft, the thief will be able to gain defensive and offensive capabilities normally not available.

Now the way Theft is going to work is like this:

1.) Each skill and utility will have some form of Theft ability.
2.) Theft abilities only activate when criteria is met. For example: if someone has Protection at 76% HP or more and is hit by Heartseeker that has a Theft ability stating “If target is above 75% HP, steal a boon.” the remaining protection gets applied to the thief.

Now I have some ideas of my own, but it would probably be more fun to ask for everyone’s ideas first. Before I let you do so, I am going to list the possibilities I am looking at and if there is enough I might list them. Here is the list of the type of Theft effects I am looking at:

• Steal a boon.
• Switch a condition with a boon.
• Apply a boon on you and apply a condition on your target.
• Copy affected allies boons onto you.
• Transfer conditions onto affected targets.
• Steal Endurance.
• Copy a random skill from target. (Replaces w/e is in F1 slot. Single use.)
• Etc.

Let the ideas flow!

Yes to all of this.

Especially to #2. Conditional abilities are great because the rarer the condition is, the more powerful they can be without being OP.

If this were done the stealth and smoke field would probably have to be moved off our weapons, maybe adjusting the duration of utility and trait based stealth to keep it useful.

I would like to mention that not every thief hates stealth or plays a non-stealth build alright?

GW2 has one of the most creative stealth systems in the current MMOmarket. I personally want to keep like that.

I’m not sure. Granted, this is a personal opinion on the issue (as I believe this discussion was also inteded to reflect upon). Conditional abilities are an interesting prospect, but I do play the the thief as an assassin. I have established my build to reduce the number of conditional circumstances to be as low as physically possible in that I prefer to make those decisions on my own. I think that’s kind of what makes good PvP’ers better than bad ones to to speak; they can run through a set of conditions or expected outcomes and analyze the battlefield quicker or better and thus control their character better. It’s why I particularly dislike HS as a skill in regards to how it scales, and hate the HP-percentage-based traits. Having outside influences affect damage or abilities kind of randomizes things for both the thief and the enemy, which I believe detracts from play.

I.E., you need to gain an effect where your opponent has > 75% health, and you’re ganking someone with your guardian friend. You coordinate such that as soon as the foe gets knocked down/while he’s being knocked down, you’ll use the ability to gain said effect. You know your friend is playing a soldier’s build and shouldn’t get the guy below 75%.

But, your friend crits. Now you have no effect, and you need to keep cycling these effects until some conditions are met. It’s an interesting gimmick, but I don’t think I’d want that to be part of the class I play, or even one I fight against; a lucky crit by a non-crit strikes build causes him to get a huge conditional advantage not normally obtained by his build, or something. Seems kind of unfair to have those kinds of factors in play.

Boon stealing is interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s reasonable to make so many abilities steal boons. Duplicate, maybe, as then it acts as a buff, and is played kind of like “Oh, I could use 20s of fury, too,” almost as though you’ve got your eye on something nice as you’re passing by. But blatantly stealing so many boons, especially in a build like S/D 6 trickery, it could be excessive and shut down way too many classes/builds.

Maybe something like this could be implemented as a future specialization – such as one named the Pickpocket or somethig – regarding things like boon copying, or some additional tweaks for conditional stuff (more general things like if your target is CC’ed like Sigil of Impact), but I don’t know if I’d agree to this on the basis of flavor so to speak.

Definitely creative to move that concept outside of just the Steal ability, though. I’d like to see more flavorful things like this come up in optional specializations.