Guild Wars 2

The Rogue is a concept of mine for the Thieves true first Elite Specialization with the Daredevil in mind becoming merged withthe Base Thief Gameplay, because lets be honest, Daredevil was from begin on nothing but just a powered up Thief 2.0 for which Anet sacrificed Acrobatics to give them a reason for existance through HoT.
All of the aspects would fit prfectly as well under the Base Thief and under the current Game Balance its what exactly Thieves need to stay competitive with the rest of the Game.

However, this here is now about the “Rogue”, my vision of the first real Elite Specialization for the Thief, which does exactly, what the Daredevil should have done – change the Gameplay of the Thief and alterate its mechanics instead of expanding just only existing mechanics like Dodging Styles and adding another 3rd Dodge.

Weapon of Choice: The Longbow

Rogues in Guild Wars 2 should be essentially themed after “Robin Hood”, Thieves which steal from the rich and give what they got to the poor.
With other words – their whole Gameplay should be completely mainly focused on Boon Stealing and Boon Sharing

This is neccessary to give the Class the needed Group Support that a Class needs to have in this game to be everywhere in the Game viable – be it in PvE (Story, Raids, Fractals), or be it in PvP and WvW – you always need classes, that add to your group somethign benefitial and that was always sicne day 1 of GW2 somethin in which the Thief class totally lacked in, because all we’ve got are only Stealth and Venoms – two gameplay mechanics that are not very impactful, or at leats not impactful enough compared to other group support mechanics of other classes to be with them on an equal level.

Boon Stealing and Boon Sharing CHANGES that. The Herald is exactly the perfect example for this. A class which currently shines only due to its massive Group Support, which is the reason why this class is wanted in Raids so much from the begin on, or why Mesmers are so wanted there – because of superb Group Support!!

The Rogue will fix for the Thief Class also some other things, which will help in balancing the game. Namely the fact that there are noo real good counters against Boons like Might and Protection, which are too powerful, if you can keep them up permanently high, if you have no way of removing these from your enemy, then you are in a very bad disadvantage.

Thus the Rogue will come with improved Steal Mechanics and Skills which will give this Elite Specialization the unique feature of receving some exlusive new Conditions which only Rogues will be able to give their foes – namely:

- Disarmament = Reduces per Stack Power and Condition Damage from the Enemy. Max Stack 25 = Direct Counter to Might Boons.
- Robbed = Increases temporarely the Damage the Target receives by 30% = Direct Counter to Protection Boons

Additionally to these two things, they receive 1 exclusive new Boon, called Presence

Presence is an aggressive Debuffing Boon, which works essentially like a temporal Banner Effect on you, just with the difference, that it reduces Attributes of your Enemies, that are under effect of your Presence in your near.
And it additionally steals Attribute Buffs from Enemy Banners and other evnironmental similar Attribute Buffs and shares them with your allies insteads, basicsallyneutralizign the Attribute Buffs for your Enemies, if you stand with your Presence in the near of their Banners, so that Banners finally receive a neccessary overdue Hard Counter

Lastly will Rogues be specialists, when it comes down to Trap Control, so that this will help finally balancing out the game in all those annoying powercreepy Trap Builds, while giving at the same time more Group Support for your Group’s other Classes, that aren’t able to safely see and remove laid traps for them, so that builds like DH and Ghost Thief get finally a counter class, that can do something actually against all the trap spam.

Weapon Skills

With the Longbow in use, this makes the Rogue a very simple and quick designed Specialization when it comes to their Weapon Skills. Examples:

Stealth Skill) Night Raid: Shoot a powerful Arrow from Stealth, that will be 100% critical damaging and steals up to 2 Boons after ignoring first Aegis. The hit will be so powerful, that the enemy will get launched away for a distance of 300

1) Rogue’s Tongue > Broad Head Arrow > Splinter Shot
You shoot a poisonous Arrow, which torments foes and leeches health as long the Torment is active, followed by a quick unblockable shot against the Weapon Arm of your foe, to cause Disarmament Stacks for some time, finished by a last volley of arrows, which splinter at targets they hit to cause AoE Bleedings.

2) Triple Shot, Costs 3 Initiative.
Lets you shoot 3 arrows at once to hit the target quickly three times.
The Damage of them increases so lower your Initiative Pool is when you use this Skills.
Regain 2 Initiative, when used with your last 3 Initiative.

3) Focused Shot Costs -1 Initiative/Second as long you charge the Skill
Aim directly for the Weapons Arm of your enemy, to disarm it, causing Stacks of Disarmament and Bleedings. Charge Skill, the Range of this Skill increases, so longer you aim and charge, before you release the shot. If you charged longer than 3 Seconds, then you gain Fury, Might and Quickness for 5 seconds.
While charging your Focused Shot, you can’t move and you lose 1 Initiative per Second. +50 Range gained per second charged.
So simple 3 seconds charged increases the Range of the Shot from 1200 to 1350 for example. Focused Shots are unblockable for the exeption of Aegis.

4) Eagle Eye Costs 4 Initiative
Hit a target and cause around that hit target a small AoE 2s Reveal Effect, that will cause stealthed enemies and hidden traps to appear to become visible in a 360 range around the hit target.

5) Arrow of the Giver Costs 6 Initiative
Hit a target, causes Disarmament and steals a Boon, which is automatically shared with all your Allies.

Traits

The Rogue will add the following Traits to the Class.

Rogue

Minor Adept: Give Wealth to the Poor
Gain access to the Rogue Specialization, unlocks the Longbow Weapon, gain access to the Utility Skill Category “Plagiarisms”, Steal Slot + 1 (2x Steal before recharge)

Major Adepts:

• Rogue’s Dexterity = Adds a chance to cause with Critical Hits Disarmaments and increases the Duration of them by 20%
• Boon Hunter = Using your Healing Skill gives you for the next 3 Hits a 50% chance to steal Boons and share them with your Allies.
• Trap Expert = Increases for you the Reveal Time of Eagle Eye by 2 seconds, reduces for you Damage and Condituion Durations received from Enemy Traps by 25%

Minor Master: Grand Theft
Adds Robbed to your Steals and increases the Effectiveness of your Steal Skills to their Improved Forms. Weapon Skills against robbed targets cost 1 Initiative lesser

Major Masters:

• Rogue’s Agility = Increases Movement Speed by +25% and the Chance to receive critical hits is decreased by 20% for you.
• Wealth Spreader = Boons gained from your own Skills and Traits are always shared as well with your nearby next 5 Allies.
• Reactivatable Traps = Your set Traps can activate now a second time and have 100% longer durations.

Minor Grandmaster: Copy Master
You gain a Chance of 33% to Counter Attack your enemies with copied Skills from your Enemies. If you get hit by Rapidfire from a Ranger, then you can counterattack the foe back directly with Rapidfire as well for example. The copied skill will have 75% of the power of the original.

Major Grandmasters:

• Rogue’s Cunning = Gain Presence for a brief time when you attack foes with lower health than you.
• Stolen Wealth = Reduces Cooldown Times of Plagiarisms by 20% and makes them 15% more effective. Steals recharge also your last used Plagiarism.
• Trap Controler = Laying a Trap or using your Heal Skill reveals for you in your near also Enemy Traps with bigger distance from you away than 180. Further increases the Reveal Time of found Enemy Traps by additonal 5 seconds

Utility Skills

Plagiarisms

Plagiarisms are a Rogue unique Utility Skills in which the Rogue either steals Skills from their Enenemies like fighting Fire with Fire, or they rather copy their enemies directly as a form of an improvised counterattack, bringing practically the improvisation theme of the Thief Class to the next logical higher level – Plagiarism.
Plagiasrisms essentially work like Shouts. So they can have AoE Effects as well to work also as well as Group Support Skills.

Heal

“What You Can, Can I Do Too!!”
Heal yourself and copy your targets equipped Healing Skill for the next Usage when the Skill recharged. After using the copied Skill, returns the Skill icon bakc to What You Can, Can I Do Too!!" to be able to copy again another Enemy Heal Skill

Utilities 1-4

“What’s Yours, Is Mine Now!!”
You copy one of your Enemies Utility Skills randomly and gain for a while the Boons Presence, Fury, Swiftness and Might.
When you use the plagiarised utility Skill that you have stolen, then you will share as well the gained Boons with your nearby next 5 Allies.

“I’m Your Fearful Shade!!”
You copy with this Utility Skill the next Weapon Skill with that you get hit by your Target Enemy that is not an Auto Attack. When you use it successfully against a Target, you will shadow step away from the Enemy, while the Enemy will get affected with Fear for a second, to create this way some distance between you and your enemy.

“We Are Raiders!!”
You use this Plagiarism Skilland you and your nearby Allies will steal with their next Attack a Boon from their Targets and you recharge a bit faster for some seconds your Steal Skill. If your attack could successfully steal a Boon, then will you and your Allies receive some Health back based on 10% of their Max Health.

“I’m Better Than The Original!!”
Copy another random Utility Skill of your Enemy and if you defeat that enemy either with the copied skill, or defeat the enemy, before your Utility Skill has recharged, then you will gain all Boons for a brief time and share them with your Allies for a few seconds.

Elite Skill

“I’ll Take What’s Most Precious To You!!”
Copy the Elite Skill of your Target Enemy. This Copy Skill Attack will recharge your Steal Skill instantly. The next Steal you land will deativate for your Enemy the usage of their own Elite Skill for some time. If the Skill was at the moment in Cooldown, then the Cooldown will be increased for that Target Enemy so that the Enemy has to wait longe,r until their Elite recharges. If the Target had nothing to copy (Enemy is no Player, then the Enemy will get Robbed for a longer time)

Source and Inspiration for this Idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtDwO38Okdw

Set Underlines to English for those who can’t understand German as this source originally exists only in German and Japanese

+1 Like the robin Hoody longbow idea, and screwing with your opponents boons and skills seems thematically appropriate. I like it.

I like the idea of Reveal working on traps in general. It would bring counterplay and more relevance to revealing something/someone.

Nice to see, that my idea so far finds positive resonance

I hate to be the one to shoot down this idea, but I tend to be the only one around here not encouraging game-breaking additions to the thief.

While it’s great recognizing boons are too strong, I don’t think this issue should be resolved in an elite spec. The Daredevil should absolutely not be merged with core thief. Like all HoT specs, the Daredevil needs massive nerfing to keep it niche like the use of a trait line, nothing more, nothing less, and to add a little bit of a difference in style of play otherwise.

Really, all this profession does is deny what’s OP directly from culprit mechanics and then re-distribute it back to its allies. Anyone running without this spec is blatantly screwed in a lot of cases, and anyone running with it will depend on having more of them than the opponent for denial pressure. I see this as quickly being the worst arms-race profession in the game in a lot of ways, and its design suggests it either provides way too much power when against boon-heavy opponents or insubstantial power when against foes without boons. Something that’s OP only by encounter designation is unfortunately not good design because it isolates certain meta possibilities and/or then simply becomes no good thereafter.

I have to criticize trap synergy because that’s already done in DA. It isn’t good design to have these kinds of interactions happen twice for only one type of ability, not to mention Unblockable traps with increased potency + trapper runes that don’t reveal while running DA and SA with higher base initiative rivaling Preparedness would only perpetuate problems with trapper builds.

A lot of this is really, really OP, though, too, if not even more so than Daredevil.

Innate +2 initiative is too good. Synergy below with Tr.

The AA on longbow alone is OP. Venom reset proc with only Devourer Venom slotted + Expertise = permanent immob on the enemy. Unblockable daze is just unfair because then this prevents cleanses, meanwhile causing stat reductions and boon penalties to opponents. Even with just Spider Venom, it’d be the best PvE damage in the game, and probably the best WvW gank build while running perplexity runes for interruption on AA + stat denial.

I like the concept of Triple Shot but I think it’d be too strong; a build running this and Trickery would maintain permanent use of the ability and Lead Attacks without issue. The concept of having a “second AA” is cool, but either it’d be too weak compared to the normal AA chain of the weapon, or be too safe.

Rogue’s Agility is excessive since it’d make a thief running Acro/Tr/Rogue immune to all soft mobility impairments like cripple and chill since superspeed overrides these, and permanent swiftness from Acro with ToTC in trickery + Pack runes would be very easy to achieve, with DS providing an immob removal as well stacking into this effect.

Copying utilities is creative but poses huge problems mechanically. Random stealing could allow for huge-cooldown, high-impact abilities to be taken (like Portal), abilities which would be blatantly overpowered on the thief if stolen in general (another blink, Endure Pain/Berserker Stance, Bane Signet, SoS/SotW, another thief’s Shadowstep, etc., and it has a lot of mechanical incompatibilities:
- What would happen if the Rogue stole a “Pet” type skill? Is it just useless? The pet skills applying to themselves would also be too overpowered (see: Sic ‘Em bonus damage)
- What about Engineer utilities which have a heavy emphasis on replacing weapon skills and have dedicated secondary abilities on the player’s profession bar? Without access to those secondary abilities they could be very weak, and further, kit-swapping would proc Quick Pockets which would enable huge initiative restoration against opponents with these types of abilities due to the lack of ICD on it (consumption of kit (3) -> stow kit (6) -> legitimate weapon swap (+9).
- What happens if you steal a Herald’s Facet? So does the thief now have permanent Superspeed if running Rogue’s Agility?

Further, your elite would allow for thieves to combo the above into 15 straight gained initiative off an engineer, PLUS allowing for the stealing of Sneak Gyro from a scrapper, if that wasn’t punishing enough on top of also disabling theirs (their reveal access).
Further broken, you’d have thieves now with access to Rampage, Moa, Renewed Focus, Lich Form, and good luck catching a thief who steals FGS from an ele…

The boon sharing with I’m Better than the Original with Concentration and utility steals would also be pretty broken in the case of stealing something like SoI which shares all outgoing boons as well, or even Save Yourselves.

It’s flavorful, but it’s really not aligning with a lot of the mechanics in the game and seems wildly overpowered even on the conceptual level.

Wow cool guide XD

Shhh is a secret really lol . RIP

@ Deceiver

1: Daredevil is no Elite Spec, its just Thief 2.0 and deserves to be merged into base Thief, so that we actually receive a real gameplay changing Elite Spec with the Rogue and something else with the next expansion as second Elite Spec.
All what DD added to the Thief, could be very well be used by a Base Thief too and you’d see no differences between both, if Staff woudl get baselined into Thief, if the DD Traits would get merged into Acrobatics and if the Dodge Styles would get redesigned into F3 Skisl that you can switch while being out of combat, so that a mechanic like this doesn’t need to get wasted on unneccessary Grandmaster Traits, when it simply can functionate also very well too as switchable F3 Skills

The current DD design is the epitome of just someone, who doesn’t play the Thief Class and doesn’t care for that Class and just had to come up with something right in time, so that we get also something, regardless of how uninspired and bad designed the outcome will be in the end. Its not the Daredevil that needs nerfing, its the other total powercreep E-Specs that need nerfing like Chronomancer, Berserker and Scrapper, while Revenant/Herald needs a complete redesign, cause that class is way too niche and just currently wanted only for its superb boon support only. This class simply doesn’t fit by its design currently to the other classes and just feels like being a merge between warrior, thief and guardian at once with its gameplay design making racial skills not even usable for them. The whole Stance thign is their problem for that which needs to get redesigned.
They need to get access to the stance stuff, without that they disqualify the class then to use racial skills

2: the Rogue is designed by with with Group Support in mind, you won#t play it later to be the perfect DPS monster in the group or to tank enemies ect, no , your role as Rogue is it to weaken ypour foes, and to strengthen your allies with what you do and where you are through your positioning, while providing overdue hard counters to boons like Might and Protection and especially Banners, which have since day 1 no counter and where there are Stat buffs in this game, then there needs to be also Stat DEBUFFS and thats where my Rogue comes into play with Presence, because Rogues make people feel uncomfortable and unsafe of their belongings to not get robbed out by them.

3: If you fight against someone who doesn’t use Boons, then this is fine, this doesn’t mean that you instantly become useless because you still can disarm and rob your foe to weaken them, you still can weaken them with your presence and you can still prform your supportive role as trap controler to reveal traps for you and your allies so that you can see them where enemies have layed them for some time
If you want to play a pure DPS role, then the player should stay on Base Thief, but if you want to change your gameplay, like a real Elite Specialization should do that, then you play Rogue to help your party with Group Support mainly by debuffing your foes helping you and your allies out with boon by stealign them from enemies that have boons – hoever this doesnt mean thats your alltime job now as a Rogue to steal only boons like you make it look like by your analysis.

4: DA does nothing for Trap Control. absolutely NOTHING. all it does is reducing your trap cooldowns and makign them a bit more effectful with added Vulnerability while giving you the ability to drop a trap when using your heal skill, thats all what DA does for your Trap build, but it adds in absolutely no way any trap control effects to you that help you to be a better group support!!
Guess you completely misunderstood here, whats my proposal with Trap Control at all and why that feature is needed to balance also this game! Revealing Traps would hard counter any Trapper Build in this game, be it your feared Ghost Thief, or Dragon hunters, both would have a much harder time to win if they’d dare to fight against a Rogue that does his job well to reveal the Traps, cause a Ghost Thief mainly does only damage with his traps, if you can reveal them/the thief, before you run into the Traps, then your enemy is automatically pwned and outplayed by you.
Same with the Dragon Hunter, because those who set on traps only, do their main damage through them, reveal the traps before you run into them and you automatically outplay the Dragon Hunter by not running into their traps

5: +2 initiative as Rogue isn’t too good, don’t forget that you also have to sacrifice a traitline for Rogue. Preparedness is anyways a trait, with should already be baselined to give the thief finally more build diversity.
+2 Initiative is not any much better, like getting a 3rd Dodge Bar, which you would by the way LOSE also if ANet would merge DD with Base Thief, don’t forget that as well!

6: The Longbow AA is just an example, just add a proc chance to it, and that should be enough to balance this out, that you don’t receive always 100% back a charge. Better? The thought behind this is simply to give the Rogue something, to make us Group Support of Venoms longer lasting, plus also dont forget you need to hit the target to get the charge back, if your enemy dodges the attack or blocks it, you won’t get back anything! And permanently shooting with Rogue’s Tongue, and stopping your Attack chain then just to keep up permanently your Venom Charges isn’’t really the best way how you should fight, because this makes you very ineffective, don’t you think too???

7: About Daze in AS, it wil ldaze as I’ve written only enemie,s that are about to use channeling skills, like for example if you hit an Elementalist while hes casting Meteor Shower. if you hit the target, while no skill is being channeling, then nothing happens!!
This should be simply a little rewarding attack for hitting a target just at the right time to bring your enemy out of concept and to turn the battle this way eventually.
Also dont forget that you have to hit first with Rogue’s Tongue, before you shoot the Disrupting Shot, this gives a cautious player enough time to react quick enough, don’t you think too??

@ About Super Speed, Rogues are about fleeing, when they have robbed something, so its just natural to them, that they need to be very good in mobility and hsould be out of all thieves the fastest runners, because they are specialized in escape techniques like nobody else. Thats why I added as little coutner the duration reduction from Swiftnesses. Swiftness already replaces Cripple as well, so I don’t see whats your point here. My point with this proposal is just only to make Rogues the fastest running Thieves with the cost, that receiving Super Speeds from Swiftness reduces the duration of that receive Swiftness> Super Speed by 1/4th.
Means if you receive for example 4 seconds of Swiftness normally, you would receive then instead 3 seconds of Super Speed as a Rogue. This will make you just run a slightly longer distance before you would need to receive the boon again to run faster

4s*25 Metre/s = Distance of 100 Metres made in 4 seconds.
3s*50 Metres/s = Distance of 150 Metres made in 3 seconds.

Thats the difference what would happen under my proposed idea essentially…
also it isn’t so as if there aren#t existing already certain other class build in this game, that provide basicalyl immunity to movement imapring conditions like cripple and chill. it would be just fair for a thief spec liek the Rogue to have this feat as well, beause they are specialized in escape techniques more than any other thief..
And when silly warriors in heavy armorsare already nearly unstopable, then this should be this specialization as well to be able to catch up with them.

8: About copying utility skills.

The is nothing overpowered on receiving RANDOM skills from others, when you have no influence on it, which skill you might receive, what also depends on it, which skills your stolen enemy has with him/her, cause you won’t be able to steal skills, that your enemy hasn’t equipped in his skill bar.
About your mentioned mechanical imcompabilities:

- Rogues won’t be able to steal Pet Skills, the copy feature will work only on Class Skills of player characters, not on pets, minions, summons and the like. If used on anything that can’t be stolen skills, then the attacked target instead will get “Robbed” as condition

- If you steal a Kit from an Engineer, then you will receive just one random skill of that Kit. Example: You steal the Bomb Kit from an Engineer, then you will receive randomly as Skill in your Utility Bar either Fire Bomb, Concussion Bomb, Smoke Bomb or Glue Bomb, so any Skill from the kit, that is not the AA.

You steal instead the Grenade Kit, then you can receive randomly from it either Shrapnel Grenade, Flash Grenade, Freeze Grenade or Poison Grenade.
And so on with the other Kits

- Weapon Swapping can’t be stolen
- If you steal a Facet of the Herald, you can just use it like a Herald. When stolen, you receive in a weaker form some AoE effect, when consumed you receive a weaker direct effect and the Skill returns to your original Utility Skill so that you can steal after its reloading again another new random Utility Skill from an enemy.
What did you believe, how this should work out??

9: About copying Elites. If this should be really to broken (what only Anet can decide), then this is open for change. Can easily come up with an other Elite Skill for my Rogue, I just wanted to Elite Skill to be consistent with the rest of the design of Plagiarisms, because when you can copy Utility Skills, then it shouldn’t be also too much of a problem to copy Elite Skills as well in principle.
I’d simply balance this out by making sure, that the stolen Elite Skilsl aren’t smae as powerful, like those of the original class, by having lesser durations, or dealign lesser damage. That should be enough.

Lastly, your example with SoI won’t work, you can’t defeat with it enemies, because its a Utility that deals no damage.
If you wait for the an enemy to get defeated before the plagiarism cooldown is reached, or if you use the SoI, will lead to the same nearly, only with the difference, that if you wait for the cooldown, then you share your boons while receiving also self all boons.
If you just use unpatiently SoI directly, then you give only your allies all boons, but you receive self nothing, unless the enemy dies before I’m Better Than the Original has recharged.

Best would be to use SOI instantly, because this gives you then the best chances, that while your copy skill is then on recharge, that your target enemy will die before it has recharged, so that you and your allies then will receive all boons once again for some seconds

1.) The amount of power creep in Daredevil is astronomical. Making it baseline would just be silly and quite frankly, terrible for the game. Yes, it’s thief 2.0, but so is chronomancer to mesmer, scrapper to engineer, berserker to warrior, in most cases DH to guardian, etc.

2.) There have been counters to boons and buffs since day 1 and were very hard counters. Might/Fury/Vigor (and +damage buff effects) → Weakness; Protection → Vuln; Healing/Sustain → Poison. Buff effects are also not an issue considering these can’t be stacked between multiple professions and rarely have an influence in the PvP scene. The real problem is exclusively with boons and it’s only this way because ANet has not kept boons limited to short-term bonuses as originally intended. If boons had only a 20-30% uptime, we wouldn’t be having this problem at all. This isn’t something that should be fixed in a single profession; the entire game needs a huge boon re-evaluation, because then you’re going to run into the same problem as with Daredevil and the likes: it becomes an essential component answering the power creep that will never become non-essential by the current nature of the game.

3.) Controlling of traps is highly situational and limited to a weapon skill specifically. Currently this profession offers the single most increases in damage over every trait line and more than most of them combined. If I chose to run this over DA on my thief, for example, I’d be able to reach 30k backstabs on targets with 3k+ armor with no need to even bother stacking Disarmament. Anything outside of a max-tank high-tier base health profession would die to CnD or Shadow Shot – no backstab needed. Further, refreshing venoms in an environment with Quickness would still move such a condition build to top-tier damage since venom application from allies is now baseline and comes from the users’ condition damage. All I see here happening is permanent maintenance of venoms which is blatantly overpowered.

4.) Your traits do not reflect controlling traps; your traits buff traps. The only element of countering traps in this profession is on the longbow, not even on your utility skills (where they belong)

5.) It’s too good when stacked with Trickery and especially so for how much damage and utility this line provides. I don’t think you’re actually understanding how OP this spec concept is and some of the numbers behind what you’re suggesting. If not the third dodge on said merge with Daredevil to base thief (which is pretty much the point of the spec), what would they merge, then? And I am aware that elite specs are incompatible. It doesn’t stop this from just being excessive and exacerbating excessive dependence on this trait line.

6.) RNG proc effects are widely-considered bad design, especially for GW2. People have quit the game over them in mass quantities, particularly with HoT. Adding more won’t be healthy to the game as a whole, and especially to the thief profession, which depends almost entirely on controlling a fight as it needs to. All it does is massively improve the low-skill potency of the profession while making skilled players’ play feel inconsistent and binary. No thanks. You’d be better off by just saying that the skill interrupts channels, then, rather than inflicting Daze (as these are two different things – see Rune of the Mesmer, etc.) No, I think permanently resetting venoms would be the optimal way to fight, since either it would lead to permanent and persistent immobilize for power builds while letting weapon proc effects deal the bulk of the damage, and it’d allow for condition builds to maintain capped poison and near-permanent immobilize in group scenarios. Mind you, this is just assuming this doesn’t apply to Basilisk Venom, otherwise you’d have permanent CC uptime because again, baseline venoms are shared to one’s entire group, now. I see no other purpose in using almost any other weapon skill on the longbow at all, frankly.

7.) A player can react to skills that they know might be coming, but the initiative system prevents forced chaining of AA’s. At any time, a thief can cancel their AA chain and use another skill, and since Triple shot or uncharged Focused Shot could be used repeatedly forever when considering natural initiative regeneration speed. This isn’t predictable, and further, even if it was, you leave channels an impossibility dependent on RNG for boon stealing; if you keep successfully stealing stability with RNG procs, the opponent would never be allowed to channel. That’s just silly.

I don’t think you understand how Super Speed works and why it’s advantageous, nor are you reflecting on the concern of mine which would allow a Rogue to easily maintain permanent super speed at range. It’s overpowered.

8.) I am aware it’s random. That’s why I think it’s a poorly-designed idea, but mostly think it’d just be overpowered. A Rogue steals to a warrior and ends up with Endure Pain, Berserker Stance, or either SoM or Balanced Stance. All of these are OP on the thief’s core kit, even. To a mesmer, he gets portal, blink, SoI, or a mantra, all of which are extremely strong. I don’t think you fully understand the mechanics behind on-swap effects to think this isn’t abusable. There are more examples, such as Conjured Weapons. How do those work as well? You claim below to make them weaker, but that kind of defeats the purpose of using them, considering that they’re not all that useful in PvP environments outside the sheer mobility on FGS. With multi-level utilities, you’re getting one random ability from the kit you got randomly to begin with. I think you should research these abilities more. So stealing a facet would still provide the passive and active effects? This would be overpowered from the passive alone, and be weak on the active unless the cooldown was low, but then this would be overpowered on abilities taken from other professions which have much higher cooldowns (like another Shadowstep).

9.) I don’t think ANet is capable of deciding what is overpowered considering our game state.

What’s Yours is Mine Now (Acquire SoI) → IBttO → Kill → Cast SoI = All Boons Shared + all boons extended in duration *Concentration. Repeat this for multiple Rogues on the same target → Long-duration all-boons on kill + shared wealth = worse than SoI mesmer. Or instead what if it stole Mimic? 2x All Boons at full duration. Bottom line is it’s pretty broken.

Not to mention the prospect of tweaking every utility skill in the game and balancing them for the thief/Rogue for its own copies is a very unrealistic amount of work to ask for.

I am reading really nice things.

Change Log:

• Changed the Auto Attack Skill String.
  - Replaced the Effect of Rogues Tongue to a Torment, which lets you gain Life Leech/s whenever the strong damage factor procs, so while the target is moving, turning it essentially to a Skill that steals Health while the enemy moves around as long the Torment isn’t cured.
  - Removed Disrupting Shot’s Daze Effect
  - Replaced Disrupting Shot with a Bleedings causing Splinter Shot for AoE Damage as replacement of the Daze Effect to create more pressure and to give the Longbow a bit more bang for Hybrid/Condi Builds

Further Changes:

• Removed +2 Initiative Increase from the E-Spec and replaced it with the +1 Steal Slot that was earlier part of Minor Master’s Grand Theft.
• Removed Super Speed from Rogue’s Agility and replaced it with 20% Reduction of receiving Critical Hits as a Counter Trait for enemies that use alot Fury
• Removed the Trait Monster Hunter
  - Replaced Monster Hunter with a complete new Trait Reactivatable Traps to give Thief Traps the unique feature, that they can work twice and not just once, while increasing the durations of traps too. A called Thief for example lasts then instead of 20 seconds then 40 seconds max and can summon 2 thieves and not only one, if the trap gets activated within the duration twice.
• Cleared sentences to make them better understandable (like under Copy Master), removed unclear aspects and replaced them with clear % effects, because the wording of “random” seems to be seen negative and is actually not the right word to use, because random implies changing values and thats not what I wanted – my bad for not realizing that I used the wrong word there.
• Gave Grand Theft instead of +1 Steal Slot, which got moved, a 1 Initiative Reduction for attacked enemies that suffer on Robbed to strenthen the feeling, that you get a kind of upperhand over somebody you’ve robbed something.
• Renamed Trap Master to Trap Controler and made its wording and that of Stolen Wealth as well again a bit clearer to understand by removing unclear aspects of my wording of the sentences.