Guild Wars 2

Increased the base rate of initiative gain from .75/second to 1/second.
This change is good, a higher base initiative regeneration was needed due to the fact that everyone whom did anything other than engaging in C&D/backstab combinations would run out of initiative a bit too fast without investing in the proper trait lines. Having some more initiative to play with in extended battles allows for more trait diversity.

Shadow Return on Sword. Renamed to Infiltrator’s return. Added a 1/4s cast time.
A thief using S/x can no longer escape a disable when using proper positioning. The need for more stun breakers as utilities is required as a single disable is usually more then enough for someone to kill you, so there is a pressing need to invest in Travelers Runes to free up the movement speed slot for another breaker. Even so, a non-stealth dueler will be forced to stealth often in the hope to migrate disables.

Pistol Whip. Reduced the after cast on the first half of this skill by .25 seconds.
Good for those who still use S/P. The delay between disable and damage was ridiculous. The skill still roots and the weapon set still leaves you otherwise completely vulnerable, so I suspect that the majority of thieves will still neglect the weapon set. There might still be the occasional skilled thief that uses it, but since the teleport in disable is gone, I’m not sure how effective it will remain (lack of everything, including stealth?).

Deadly Arts VI – Sundering Strikes. Increased the trigger chance from 50%. Remove ICD. Decrease Vulnerability duration to 6s.
A high critical rate paired with vulnerability stacking without cooldown on a very accessible trait? This change might give us the support we needed, as regular attacks will start to stack vulnerability on everyone in a group that is hit (e.g. shortbow bombing for vulnerability). I suspect that this change might warrant the most cries due to every thief suddenly having access to vulnerability. This would also be most effective on D/P blind spamming for additional damage.

Critical Strikes 15 – Opportunist. Increased trigger chance to 50%. Increase cooldown from 1s to 5s.
ICD is too high to actually ever use now (not that it was decent before).

Critical Strikes VIII – Signet Use. Reduced initiative gain from 2 to 1.
A useless trait that became more useless.

Critical Strike X – Critical Haste. Increase trigger chance to 25%.
Critical haste is nice but also rather unpredictable. This change might make the bursting thieves have a more reliable access to haste without the sacrifice of a utility slot to do it. Assuming a thief with 80% critical change, you will have 20% chance to trigger the trait, so an attack consisting of Steal/C&D/Backstab/Heartseeker has an overall chance of triggering 80% of the time for a follow-up auto attack flurry. Not bad I suppose, but the trait chance should be higher to become a dependent tool.

Shadow Arts V – Infusion of Shadow – This trait functionality has been changed to “Gain initiative when you enter stealth.” 2 init.
This might be a result to counter the perma-stealth D/P leaping through the blinding field, but also screws up other viable tactics such as regenerating initiative in a Shadow Refuge pulses. If this was only intended to deal with D/P leaping then it was a bit overkill to apply it on everything else as well (including healing skill giving stealth in stealth), instead a change to disallow initiative regeneration on a combo effect while in stealth would be preferred.

Acrobatics III – Vigorous Recovery. Reduced Vigor duration to 4s from 8s.
This was an amazing trait to get a high up-time of vigor. Being the least defensive profession around, we were in dire need of tools to help us achieve migrate damage. Vigor was one of these tools and has been effectively reduced from ~53% to ~26%. A good and viable tactic to migrate damage has been reduced in effectiveness.

Acrobatics IV – Assassin’s Retreat. Increased swiftness duration to 20s.
Nobody cares.

Acrobatics IX – Quick Recovery. Reduced initiative gain from 2 to 1.
Effectiveness was moved into base initiative regeneration, so less motivation to actually take this trait over Assassin’s Reward. Oh, wait, Assassin’s Reward was moved into a Grandmaster trait. The viable remaining traits to choose from are Pain Response or Hard to Catch (being moved to Master) so this might actually migrate some pain from losing the sword shadowstep in a disable.

Acrobatics X – Assassins Reward. Increased healing scaling by 35%. Moved to Grandmaster Tier.
The heal scaling change might be nice for condition thieves running a condition/healing set, but otherwise is moot. Moving this up to Grandmaster restricts access to it from a 20/30/20 trait configuration so this trait will probably see even less action then it does now (albeit 0/10/30/30 duelers might like the healing increase).

Acrobatics XI – Hard to catch. Moved to Master Tier.
Yay. See Quick Recovery patch note.

Trickery 5 – Kleptomaniac. Reduce initiative gain from 3 to 2.
Why was this changed? To keep it in line with initiative regeneration change? Steal doesn’t allow to be triggered that often, and this trait is entirely dedicated to gaining initiative. The returns were already slim and have been made even slimmer, I don’t see why anyone would use it now.

Trickery IV – Flanking Strikes. Move to Master tier.
Feels like a response to 30/25/0/0/15 to disallow more damage in a burst configuration.

Trickery VII – Bountiful Theft. Reduced vigor duration to from 15s to 8s.
Same point as Vigorous Recovery.

Trickery VIII – Trickster. Move to Adept tier.
Does anyone use tricks?

TL;DR: Relevant changes to most thieves are base initiative regeneration higher, no sword return in disable, vulnerability without ICD, initiative when entering stealth (not when pulsing/re-applying), vigor traits reduced, assassin’s reward moved to grandmaster with slightly better healing, flanking strikes moved to master. Feels like the changed accommodate D/P blind spam style with new vulnerabilities/hard to catch and better base initiative regeneration while reducing effectiveness of every other style.

Deathspike.1870:

Critical Strikes VIII – Signet Use. Reduced initiative gain from 2 to 1.
A useless trait that became more useless.

it’s not useless, signet use also decreases signet cooldown by 20% which was pretty sick for people like me who use signet of agility (+2 rolls every 24 seconds) and infiltrator’s signet (another shadowstep to close the distance and a stunbreak every 24 seconds)

kinda seems like a waste now with only 1 init gain on usage though.

ill miss this one.

Deathspike.1870:

Trickery IV – Flanking Strikes. Move to Master tier.
Feels like a response to 30/25/0/0/15 to disallow more damage in a burst configuration.

Why would anyone give up executioner to put those 5 more points in deadly arts for a “burst” build ?

No sense made.

I don’t like the change to critical strikes 15. If they made the ICD 3 seconds instead of 5, I think it would be fine.

Takato.4976:

No sense made.

Yes, I made a typo and swapped deadly arts and critical strikes. Thanks for pointing that out.

Why are they nerfing ini regen so hard? as well as major nerfs to mobility. They claim they making thieves more survival capable but instead they making it even harder to dodge attacks when most attacks are capable of 1-2 hit downs on a thief even if you were to go for a no damage survivable based thief (not sure why anyone would do that anyways)

Why don’t they just remove all the “regain initiative” traits entirely? With the decrease in their new return rates I can’t imagine why anyone would find them worth slotting now. It’d be like slotting an ability that says “when you [meet some condition] you get +1% damage,” who’d bother?

I get the idea, they’re raising base Ini gain so they need to nerf all other forms of ini gain so that Thieves can’t just perman-spam their abilities, fair enough, but when they take form a given ability they need to give with the other hand.

Drop Kleptomaniac from 3 to 2? Ok, but what do we get in return for that? Maybe it also deals a little more damage? Maybe it gives you a second of Vigor or a flat +20% Endurance?Maybe it heals you a tiny bit? It needs to do something new in exchange for being 33% less useful!

Quick Recovery was changed to HALF it’s usual effectiveness? Ok, why would anyone bother with such a meager reward? EVER? If gaining an entire TWO ini every ten seconds was just too impossible for them to balance, what else could the move offer? Again maybe an Endurance return of some level, or a minor heal ticker, or some effect that would be useful.

Halved the Vigor gained by Bountiful Theft? Well what do we get for that? maybe a one time 50% Endurance return on each Steal? Maybe 5s of Regen or Protection? Put something in there.
They seem to be worrying about balancing classes as a whole, if they add a general use buff then the feel the need to reduce traits that already did that thing to compensate, and that’s fair enough so far, but they also need to balance out the individual abilities, and if they completely slaughter the effectiveness of the core function of a trait, they need to figure out some reason why people should still pick that trait.

Your breakdown is highly subjective and does not take account for all different parts of the game or builds. If you are looking for non-biased commentary on the Thief proposed changes. Dont read this one

Cuteypie.7835:

Your breakdown is highly subjective and does not take account for all different parts of the game or builds. If you are looking for non-biased commentary on the Thief proposed changes. Dont read this one

Fact is other classes got buffs for condition removal and now it seems the only viable one for thief is Shadow Arts and the only damage mitigation thief has, avoidance, is significantly reduced with melee weapons.

Say hello to ranged kitten thief

Your breakdown is highly subjective and does not take account for all different parts of the game or builds. If you are looking for non-biased commentary on the Thief proposed changes. Dont read this one

There’s no such thing as a non-biased commentary. Any response will be biased, even if the bias is towards “not caring.” If these changes messed up a build you enjoyed without offering anything of value, it’s perfectly reasonable to complain about it.

Ohoni.6057:

Your breakdown is highly subjective and does not take account for all different parts of the game or builds. If you are looking for non-biased commentary on the Thief proposed changes. Dont read this one

There’s no such thing as a non-biased commentary. Any response will be biased, even if the bias is towards “not caring.” If these changes messed up a build you enjoyed without offering anything of value, it’s perfectly reasonable to complain about it.

I agree you cant make a proper commentary with having some descent exp as a thief anyway. But to those who play with and against thieves frequently one of two things should happen: You either like or dislike the class and therefore your comments contain some amount of bias.

Now as for the patch preview my opinion is that apart from the justified nerbat or not they take away more than they give back in return. Maybe the nerf is the first stage to redesigning which they decided to to implement first then try to gather new feedback and deside if they need to nerf more or add the new stuff, idk. However short term its unfair for players.