Guild Wars 2

I second every point you made

As to your last point you can change traits at any time out of combat, isn’t that the solution you’re asking for?

And it is conclusive.

Thief still has no role.

And apparently no place in Gw2.

-Almost all of the animations feel clunky throughout the staff and DD traits and skills.

-Staff itself is very underwhelming that makes me ask why would I even use this for pvp or pve.

-Distracting Daggers needs a rework, either an instant equip and a long time to actually use the daggers. As is a cast time and a 15 sec use time makes them basically useless. Maybe treat them like a mantra?

-The Physical Skills themselves…also pretty underwhelming…like why use these over what I can already do without the DD spec.

-Currently don’t see any reason to use the DD spec at all expect for maybe pvp. Maybe raids will need someone to spam dodges?

-Honestly the whole DD spec needs a rework or to be scraped all together.

Not salty….just very underwhelmed.

Shinobi.3240:

• Can you please consider to put the Grandmaster Traits that alter your dodge ability into a toggle. So we can change the type of dodge we do during combat. The daredevil is an agile fighter that adepts to the situation. Please put something else into grandmaster and give us Lotus Training/Unhindered Combatant/Bounding Dodger as Stances.

Best regards!

Shino

Best idea I’ve ever heard O_o

Driven Fortitude trait (gain health when you successfully evade an attack) is not working at all – was checking combat log and I was never healed on evade.

Imparing Daggers skill uses one initiative for each dagger thrown (3 in total). If you don’t have any initiative, you won’t be able to use this skill. If you have say 1 initiative, only 1 dagger will be thrown.

Can’t use Steal during Vault animation.

Imagine Lotus Training/Unhindered Combatant/Bounding Dodger like the attunement of an elementalist.
You would be able to change them during combat.
You can give them a cooldown or let them eat a bit of your endurance when you switch between them.

Best regards!

ZameR.4613:

Driven Fortitude trait (gain health when you successfully evade an attack) is not working at all – was checking combat log and I was never healed on evade.

Imparing Daggers skill uses one initiative for each dagger thrown (3 in total). If you don’t have any initiative, you won’t be able to use this skill. If you have say 1 initiative, only 1 dagger will be thrown.

Can’t use Steal during Vault animation.

Yes tried that all aswell. Try to dodge out of Staff Skill Nr.2 or right after it. Doesn´t work. ^^

Best regards!

The animations on the evades and the staff are TERRIBLE. By far the worst of all of the classes and all builds. These need to be completely redone and made a lot more fluid.

No access to Fury and initiative restoration puts too much emphasis on Trickery, still. Not much really changes the way this profession is played in this spec, seeing as there are a lot of other equally-evasive ones that can offer still-better damage or sustain.

The Dash trait dodge animation applies an animation that makes no sense for any of the weapons (looks like Rush) and also removes any existing weapons from the character while dodging.

The rush animation is just extremely awkward and does not properly depict the responsiveness of a dodge or its proper animation time.

Most of the traits only synergize within an evasion-based build; aside from the leap finisher availability, there seem to be no meaningful ways to use this trait line with anything other than specs using an offhand pistol.

The staff feels weak in its entirety with poor animations except for skill #5. This skill feels overly-strong in regards to its damage potential and too easily-spammed with the other skills offering limited purpose in comparison.

Did I mention that none of the functionality in this spec synergizes with other trait lines found necessary or required to have a build be competitive at anything?

Staff auto-chain 3 comes way off of the character such as the staff is floating almost a foot forward. It looks poor.

Overall, in its current state, I’d argue that this spec does not feel like any kind of change whatsoever to the style of play for the thief except giving a few underwhelming options to x/P builds. It feels unfun.

1. The way the staff is held looks like a hammer, not very agile. Plus the backwards dodge roll on skill 3(?) just looks silly, either make the dodge 600 back so it doesnt happen so fast or make it a leap back?

2. It isnt feeling very survivable, possibly due to bugs on the skills, but condi clearing on dodge doesnt seem to be happening 100% of the time and the heal on dodge doesnt proc.

3. The physical utility skills just dont meld well, they dont feel like they are worth taking over other utility skills, the best has to be Bandits Defense, a stun break every 10 seconds is nice to have but sadly the stun locking that happens frequently kinda ruins that, as soon as an enemy hits you your block drops, you (might) knock them down if they don’t have stability. (I’ve noticed this being rather useless against hammer warriors).

I feel like a lot of the issues come from the current meta and balancing, but there is definitely room for improvement.

!PLEASE! use the monkey king tonic animations for the staff wielding, its so much better looking !PLEASE!

Update

I’ve found its not as bad as my initial impressions, though the animations still bug me.

A big problem is having to choose between recharge endurance on staff skills and remove condition on succeful dodge, having , more endurance is almost necessary to play DD, so you either have to put up with our terrible condition removal, or not enough endurance to stay in the fight.

The other way we can get some more endurance is on physical skills, but they are underwhelming compared to our other utilities providing much better survivability.

Adamantium.3682:

As to your last point you can change traits at any time out of combat, isn’t that the solution you’re asking for?

Because not everyone play PvE and Wvw. Some player may focus their attention on Spvp where it’s more balance.

vault and steal does work, you kinda got to steal right before you leave the ground.
plus i wouldnt expect you to dodge out staff #2, your not able to dodge out of most if not all movement based skills

I feel so slow wielding the staff. The skills and animations need to be sped up and deal more damage. Everything feels very lackluster.

The 3rd dodge bar mechanic is very underwhelming when compared to the other elite’s new special abilities. I mean Reaper Shroud is much better. This elite spec has a lot of possibility but it really needs a buff.

Pulminary Impact does not do enough damage to make it worth using.

Maybe its just a case of misguided expectations. When I heard about this and watched the presentation I immediately thought of Lancer from the Fate/Zero and Fate/Stay Night anime mixed with a “monk”.

Would really like to see improvement in the whole elite.

From what you guys are reporting, it seems that they went a lazy path and try to cut and paste existing skills and animation “hoping” that it will all work out instead of giving the profession its proper and unique animations and skills.

Its not even the animations, after quite a a few matches in pvp, i’m feeling none of that “Daredevil jumps into the fray, evading and staying in the fight.”

Still die to all the same things i did before, not just a l2p issue. The thief is still suffering from all its other weaknesses, this has done nothing to improve its survivability.

Perhaps you all should try DD without the Staff and with more endurance gain traits and utilities.

The big problem is that the stick is a weapon that requires offensive playstyle against several players without the survival capacity for work.

Dodging and debuffs are unable to keep us alive during a bus impact.

yolo swaggins.2570:

Perhaps you all should try DD without the Staff and with more endurance gain traits and utilities.

Which makes me sad, i want to use a new weapon ;-;

Healing skill looks strong, highest base out of all them even on the low end, and doing the math,
you got a 1.125 scale on the low heal and 1.5 and high end. Both which are also the highest out of all of them, just in a few pug matches and if you time it right you can get a lot of use out of it

The dodges themselves seen extremely clunky. I’ve found that the Bounding Dodge actually roots you in place for a moment when you land. The Dash dodge just feels like ranger sword in that it feels unresponsive and you end up leaping off cliffs on accident.

For staff, maybe if it was given a short duration smoke field on skill 4 to give it something. The lack of reliable stealth reminds me of thief spear in terms of usefulness. The functionality of 3 feels so much like a crappy version of shortbow 3. The evade backwards just seems like a really bad idea for a melee weapon, especially with such an expensive distance closer in skill 5. Skill 2 is remarkable only because you can’t even dodge out of it.

I found myself starting off full daredevil: staff, all physical utilities, etc- and then stripping them back until I had to ask why I was even using DD in the first place instead of the other 5 trees. Essentially, DD doesn’t do anything that another build can’t do twice as well.

I second almost everything on this thread. It is a beta though, and I hope the devs realize that there is a lot of work to be done…

Definitely a lot of finetuning needed for the specialisation and the new weapon.

Thank you all for sharing your oppinion and finding those nasty bugs.
Keep the feedback coming and stay constructive.

Good night buddies!

Best regards!

Shino

Going to post my initial impressions here so whole forum is not full of these threads.

The biggest problem that i also mentioned before, as almost everyone else, is the clunky feeling of staff and evades, both animation and mechanical.

Second thing is that while i played pvp with staff, i just had all the time this “why even use staff” question in my head. Sure it has nice burst in form of vault and other small things, but eh.

Staff:

1# Damage is not terrible but not very good either, has pretty weak utility. Also god kitten that flying staff is annoying me.

2# This one is actually pretty good, it deals decent damage if you turn your camera down and shorten the distance traveled, and applies a lot of weakness which is a strong condition and comes at reasonable ini cost of 3. Problem is that it just feels bad to use this skill because of the clunkiness, you travel to the direction you are facing ingoring target, and the animation at least on asura just looks lame. (someone suggested using using “butterfly twist”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahOFZ-to8XY, that would be much much better)

3# Not much to say about this, would rather have the evade start right away instead of whacking your enemy first with your staff. But i would had really preferred to have a skill that lets me stick to the fight, not take distance to my enemy.

4# Amount of hits this skill deals seems to wary randomly. Not much to say about this either other than it is way way too slow for what it does. also has pretty painfull cost of 4 ini.

5 # This is “the” skill of staff, very high damage and travels quite a nice distance in horizontal direction. Was really hoping to also get plenty of vertical mobility but that doesn’t seem to be the case, sadly. A bit too slow at the moment.

Many of the skills aren’t bad if the usability is fixed, but it stills leaves me with the question “why”. What is staff supposed to achieve that sword/dagger already doesn’t do, as it certainly lacks some things like superior mobility and boon steal.

I’m not going to go more in depth staff nor utilities now because I’m tired.

I found the staff disappointing. Most of the abilities do not really seem like staff abilities. I didn’t get a feeling that I was a martial artist with a staff. When I use daggers it really feels like I am using daggers, same with short bow and pistols. But staff…It has no identity. What I would have liked is a staff that did things like block, a wide arc knock back, a great circular sweep that did damage to 5 targets, or a circular sweep that blinded 5 targets, a quick hit with the end of the staff to interupt or daze. It just seems they asked what should it do rather then how should it feel. It doesn’t feel good, imo.

The niche it could have filled was as a brawling weapon. Get in, stay in, using blocks and blinds and do good melee aoe. But it is built as an in and out sort of weapon but the sword does that already, and some stealth builds too such as pistol dagger. I see dodgy builds using sword not staff.

I feel that this spec, after some overhaul and fine-tuning, should be hella fun to play.
Here’s my feedback:
-I agree that the autoattack feels slow and clunky. The third part of the AA doesn’t really fit with the theme, as the thief sends out the staff at the opponent. I see the DD as a very physical brawler, so this seems inconsistent.
-Staff 3: The actual animation of the hit doesn’t have a good pop to it. I would recommend using the Staff 2 animation for the Staff 3 skill, but just make the thief move backwards instead of charging forward. This would allow Staff 3 to evade and hit multiple foes.
-Staff 2: If we were to use the existing Staff 2 animation for Staff 3, then I’m not sure what would go here. Something that’s mobile and hits multiple enemies, along with the existing vulnerability.

Grumwulf.9602:

What I would have liked is a staff that did things like block, a wide arc knock back, a great circular sweep that did damage to 5 targets, or a circular sweep that blinded 5 targets, a quick hit with the end of the staff to interupt or daze.

-Staff 4: The “circular sweep” that blinds or sends up a smoke field could work wonders for this skill. Right now, the skill is a little too narrow and slow to allow the DD to take on multiple foes.
-Staff 5: few complaints here. I feel this is the defining move of the spec, and it looks suitably kitten.
-I’m finding that the general consensus is that the holding animation doesn’t fit. I definitely concur: while the animations in general feel clunky, this stands out. Holding the staff over the shoulders, or holding the staff downwards with the bottom half behind the back, would be far more fitting with the DD theme.
-Physical skills are interesting. I love the idea, but they sometimes are more hindering when dealing with more than 1 enemy, given that they only affect one foe. I’m not sure how to address this for each, however. That being said, I love Bandit’s Defense. It’s a gem of a skill.
-The elite is awesome. However, the animation for the finisher is a little banal, given that it’s the generic finisher animation. Maybe the animation could be tweaked to give it more personality: in my mind, I see the DD doing a fancy twisting flip in the air, then slamming their first down to put their poor enemy out of their misery.

Shinobi.3240:

Imagine Lotus Training/Unhindered Combatant/Bounding Dodger like the attunement of an elementalist.
You would be able to change them during combat.
You can give them a cooldown or let them eat a bit of your endurance when you switch between them.

-I love this idea. This would give the DD a more unique profession mechanic, and allow it to be more adaptable and versatile. This could really round out the spec in addition to the (fantastic) three dodges.

Overall, I applaud the devs for their efforts so far: this is a bold idea, and it has real potential. It just needs some reworking. Cheers!

I rather have my normal dodges. Do not like being forced to take 1 of these dodges because I trait into daredevil tbh. 2 of the dodges reveal me, and are hard to land. are lower and less responcive, and the dash also takes longer and the animation I just hope is a place holder ^^…. so yea rather have the option to actually use my Original DODGE

other then that I love about anything on DD

I’d take default dodge over any of the grandmastertrait dodges. as its just more smooth and good enough. esspecially with 3 dodges.

I do hope karl reads this type of feedback

Grumwulf.9602:

The niche it could have filled was as a brawling weapon. Get in, stay in, using blocks and blinds and do good melee aoe. But it is built as an in and out sort of weapon but the sword does that already, and some stealth builds too such as pistol dagger. I see dodgy builds using sword not staff.

That’s unfortunate being that the feedback here seems to be that a lot of this elite specialization from weapon to utility to traits limits movement somehow and doesn’t handle multiple targets very well. I’m sure the dev knows and will clean some stuff up before launch. Some of what is being described here is making me cringe, largely how the animations are being described and how stop and go everything is, like one of those frustrating dreams where you get in a fight and can’t hold steady or land a hit.

gonna leave mine here, since this seems to be the combined thread.

also, apologies for the length, I did try to cover… everything.

Specialisation: Daredevil

Overall:

• Was it fun: yes, though it could be improved
• Did it change how I play thief in a meaningful way: Yes – it provided a reasonable front-line fighter with passable sustain, as well as allowing the thief to play without relying on stealth
• Dodges are fun and useful, but feel a little underwhelming as a combination of class mechanic and grandmaster trait.
• Conditions are pretty bad with this. Thief’s not great with conditions at the best of times, but daredevil has almost no room for a condition build. Lotus training and imparing daggers are the only parts of the entire spec that work with a Condition Damage built – the staff has no damaging conditions, none of the traits have any damaging conditions – barring lotus training – and only one of the physicals uses condition damage.

Weapon (Staff):

• Overall: a fun weapon, with nice skills.
• Staff Strike -> Staff Bash -> Punishing Strikes: a good basic attack chain, with damage that’s reasonable but not exceptional. The animations don’t fit too well; the first two feel kind of stuttery – they’re less flowing like a staff and more sharp stiff hits one might expect from a hammer. the punishing strikes animation feels like something off a mesmer – with the weapon spinning in front of us without being held.
• Hook Strike: a good stealth skill, and more fitting for a more control-based class.
• Weakening Charge: a good skill in theory, I feel the mechanics would benefit from a slight mechanic change – the skill currently charges in the direction your character is facing, which isn’t always what you’d want. instead, the skill should either focus on a target, like the Warrior’s Rush skill, or be direction targeted, like their Whirlwind Attack skill.
• Debilitating Arc: not much to say, it’s a backward roll that cripples enemies – it’s a good way to get away from enemies, and it all seems to work. only suggestions might be to increase the range a bit or remove cripple as well as immobilise, but these are more personal preference than something the skill needs.
• Dust Strike: I like this skill conceptually, but it doesn’t really feel like it fits in with the whole engaging multiple enemies thing. having the shot fire in a line that can hit up to 3 enemies is nice, but it would work better as either a cone or fan, or as a field (not necessarily a smoke field – could be a dark field…) which enemies can pass over and be blinded in. as it stands, it’s only going to be single target 90% of the time.
• Vault: I am a big fan of vault. the damage is nice (and it’s nice to have a thief weapon on which the sneak skill isn’t the big damager) the range is reasonable, and while I would personally like an evade (because every game needs a troll pole), I can understand why it doesn’t have one.

Skills (Physical):

• Channeled Vigor: I like this as a skill, it’s got a nice heal, reasonable cooldown and you’re not rooted by it, as some suggested. that said, the increased healing on full endurance seems counterproductive to the daredevil, who seems to be all about using endurance. it’s a skill that seems to be at its best when you’re using the Elite Spec wrong, which is a little confusing.
• Bandit’s Defense: I really wanted to like this skill, but I found it very difficult to use – the low duration makes it tricky to actually block anything with it, relegating it to a glorified stunbreak – albeit one with a reasonably low cooldown. I think an increase to the duration would improve the usefulness of the block section of this skill.
• Fist Flurry -> Palm Strike: I enjoy this skill, and being able to leave a target with a whole bunch of damage about to land is a nice feeling, but it’s quite easy to not hit all of them. it feels like the area hit by the fist flurry is quite narrow, which can be irritating. (especially when you use it when facing away from an enemy, instant fail right there.)Edit: as someone suggested below, switching these around (palm strike with a stun first, then fist flurry with the PI on landing all 5 blows) would make this skill a lot better, while still leaving room for counterplay.
• Distracting Daggers: this is a nice skill, the function is pretty obvious, and it works pretty well.
• Imparing Daggers: this is actually a really nice condition skill, but it’s let down by the fact that daredevil really doesn’t work with conditions.
• Impact Strike -> Uppercut -> Finishing Blow: I found this skill to be disappointingly underwhelming. the damage on the entire chain is usually on par with a single vault, and the animation on finishing blow feels waaay off. I get that a finisher makes sense in PvP/WvW, but in PvE it looks ridiculous. it doesn’t look like a physical skill, it doesn’t look like a blow, and I’m left wondering what my thief is doing. I’d suggest replacing the animation with something like the warrior’s Stomp, which has a similarly timed but much more appropriate animation – a large, physical blow which could feasibly finish off a downed enemy. that all said, the first two animations are nice and the control skills are pretty good.

Traits:
Adept:

• Minor – Enforcer Training: well, not much to talk about here. it gives us access to the staff, physicals, and an extra dodge. the lack of changes to the F bar is a little abnormal.
• Major – Evasive Empowerment: I do like this trait – it encourages the daredevil to make use of their dodges much like backstab encourages stealth or Berserker’s power encourages use of burst skills.
• Major – Weakening Strikes: Another nice trait – gives damage reduction through weakness.
• Major – Brawler’s Tenacity: This trait feels a little lackluster. the 20% cooldown reduction on physicals is nice, but the 10 endurance on use is negligible. as is, you’d have to use all 5 slot skills to get one dodge roll, which makes this borderline useless. an increase to 20/25 endurance would at least make this worth considering.

Master: the traits here are nice, but I feel the choice of minor could be better.

• Minor – Driven Fortitude: the health on evade is nice, but ultimately not a massive factor. add on to that the fact that we already have half-decent healing, and this trait feels like something that would be best left optional.
• Major – Staff Training: this is a nice traits, and both components work well. the endurance back on staff allows for more use of the Daredevil’s dodging, while the damage increase incentivises the use of endurance. the only downside is that this means no other weapons work quite as well with the daredevil, but that makes sense.
• Major – Escapist’s Absolution: this is a pretty big thing for thief – a decent condi clear. I’ve heard suggestions that it’s overpowered, but there’s a big difference between on dodge (spammable) and on evade (much more skill-based). that said, it’s necessary to the point of making the other two traits irrelevant, and might be better as a minor – swapping this with Driven Fortitude would put both traits in a better position.
• Major – Impacting Disruption: this gives daredevil more access to Pulmonary Impact, which is always a good thing, and synergises really well with Distracting Daggers.

Grandmaster: Daredevil’s Major Grandmaster traits are the 3 dodges, which feel like something we’d expect to see on the F bar. the placement of these (which seem to be on par with other profession mechanics, such as berserker’s new burst skills) in the grandmaster traits means we lose out on a set of potentially powerful traits which would make a big difference to the class. (suggestion – give thief a sort of F3 box which can be changed out of combat between dash, bound, lotus jump and normal dodge, much like the revenant legend slots)

• Minor – Endurance Thief: this is decent I guess, feels a little like it’s trying to remind us steal exists, but it’s actually quite good – gives a free dodge roll on steal, which ties in with daredevil nicely. a deceptively useful skill.
• Major – Lotus Training: this is a nice skill on paper, but the lack of any real condition synergy in this line makes it less appealing. (note, daggers don’t seem to hit neutral mobs, so you can dodge without aggroing, a nice touch.)
• Major – Unhindered Combatant: this is perhaps the simplest of the dodges, with a simple speed and range increase. the lack of finisher makes this feel a little weaker than the others, and I’ve seen rubberbanding on repeated use. the animation appears to be recycled from warrior’s dash, which doesn’t feel quite right (especially the greatsword-holding pose…) and this could use some improvement.
• Major – Bounding Dodger: this is an interesting dodge – you might not feel the dodge, but enemies near the end of it will. that said, despite the appearance of a thief trapped in a minefield, this is a really nicely done dodge. animations are nice, the damage is good enough to turn dodging into an offensive component of your playstyle, and the leap finisher is nice (though a blast finisher would feel more appropriate)

For the most part, daredevil is a nicely made elite specialisation, which provides an interesting new playstyle for the thief. however, it can be let down by the almost complete lack of condition damage synergy and some seriously immersion-breaking animations.

Anet guide to thief:
“Hmm what should be thief elite spec?”
“I know! Lets Destroy already existing style of s/d s/p evade builds and give them evade specs”
“But every class gets diferent version of F1/F2/… skills how will we name new one?”
“New one? Why new one? We hate thief so thief is only class that will get nothing to f1”
“So before they had 100 endu and flat endu on evade… we will make it same but 150 endu. We will take thier 10% dmg boost and put it into new weapon that aside from 1 average dps spell sucks, we will force them to take 1 Gmaster trait that makes them STOP in place to evade! BRILLANT IDEA”

This whole DareDevil feels like its rushed non tested, it gives “less working” old playstyle back… Ofc its not bad at DragonHunter lvl but guards alone have some insane builds… Prepare for new pvp when we will easily spot bad thief if he holds staff/signet of shadow/etc

Great to see that you and your team are on top of things, gives the thieves hope
Keep up the great work!

Will edit this post after more extensive play with Daredevil.

Thanks for the good work Karl!

Here’s my feedback from my other thread since we’re centralising everything here.

“General

Aftercasts on dodges and a few Staff skills are very clunky. A lot of tidying up needs to be done. There’s just a serious lack of fluidity when using the new dodges that NEEDS to be addressed.

Staff

Dust Strike is too slow to be a reactive skill. I would say it needs to come down to maybe 1/4s to be used properly.

I wouldn’t be against getting the autoattack damage up a bit more. Compared to S/D, it doesn’t feel like you’re gaining much at all, if anything, by using Staff instead. More damage vs. more mobility would be a fair trade between the two sets but in the auto chain we’re not really seeing that.

Weakening Charge needs tweaking on its aftercast. The way it locks you in place at the end of the animation is very awkward. Its damaging radius should also be increased by a fair margin since it’s very difficult to land even 2 of the 3 hits against a moving target.

Utilities

Palm Strike doesn’t feel rewarding to land. Fist Flurry’s strict requirements to reach it don’t really have much payoff. I would suggest either a slightly lower cast for Fist Flurry to more easily land it or just buff Palm Strike’s initial damage.

Channeled Vigor doesn’t make much sense, since you’re encouraged to be USING your endurance, not saving it up. I feel like the healing effects need to be reversed or there just needs to be a single healing value between the 2 current ones. Also, the cast time is just a tad too long – Thieves can’t be expected to hang around channeling a heal that isn’t much more potent than Withdraw’s healing (at non-full endurance). Consider bringing it down to 2 or 1.75 seconds.

Finishing Blow looks a little awkward. Maybe just take the last part of the finisher animation (the jump) and slow that down to make up the cast time.

Traits

Evasive Empowerment doesn’t give enough of a damage benefit to outweigh the Weakness uptime or Physical skill benefits. I would maybe change this so that you do 10% more damage for a tiny period of time (2 seconds) after a dodge roll instead. That way you can get off a couple of attacks for a bigger benefit. Or, just make the number bigger, I guess. That would be the cheap way out.

Escapist’s Absolution is mandatory for PvP. I think that nobody would take either of the other traits while this is a choice. Not sure what to do about that. Making it a Minor and swapping it with Driven Fortitude would probably mean a jump in the ICD which is NOT what this trait needs as the sole source of reliable condition removal for stealthless gameplay.

Impacting Disruption is strong, but not that strong. I feel like this is the reason why Palm Strike is unrewarding – because they use the same skill (Pulmonary Impact), and making it good for Palm Strike (crittable) means breaking this trait. I would suggest splitting them up. A crittable Pulmonary Impact for Palm Strike and some kind of Lesser Pulmonary Impact on this trait instead."

I think staff needs a lot of work!! going back to CS until they fix thief class.

the GM traits are worthless, nobody is running them and nobody should… There is delay on the dodge and its incredibly frustrating

I would like to give some feedback too:

-I would like to see the Staff #3 work as the Withraw heal.
At the moment you turn towards your target to hit and then roll backwards. I don’t wanna turn to hit, I just wanna hit and rollbackwards. It would give more synergy with #2 skill too. As it is now you often go through your target using the #2 skill, followed by the #3 skill putting you even further away from the target.

I made a really funny rant post, but then realized it’d probably get deleted or something like the really funny Nerf Wish List.

The gist:
Staff auto needs fixing, damage needs to go up because it’s very lack luster. That or faster attacks or something. Staff stealth needs a damage booster, full glass build hit for 1443 damage. That’s something else. Staff 2 needs to go TOWARDS targeted enemies just like heartseeker, I don’t wanna go cliff diving. Staff 3 works and is fine. Staff 4 is hit or miss, usually miss or multihit- meaning you either do nothing, or the damage procs 2 or 3 times at once. Staff 5 needs something to it. Damage is fine, but the hitbox is wrong (people in my hitbox don’t take damage. but they are in my hitbox.). Give it an evade or make it 3/4 instead of 4/4 cast time? All of the utilities are fine, maybe speed the heal or give it stability so you don’t get interrupted out of it? Not worth taking the heal. Traits are fine, but right now ALL of the dodges count as skills and proc damage via Confusion which makes taking this line sound like a deathwish. Also the really long dash dodge procs super high damage on torment. So mesmers kill us. Still. I forgot some stuff. [Edit] Distracting daggers does neglible damage and if used while chaining the elite, puts elite on full cooldown. Fabulous o.o

That’s the tl’dr. Enjoy =P I’m back to trying to make it work. And using the Staff 4 bug for maximum damages.

Well, here is my feedback as a fellow thief player:

Staff

Weakening Charge should autoaim your target if you have the option enabled. It’s quite difficult to land it on my foes and since it’s a charge attack, you can end having some “accidents”.

The staff animations are disapointing. Most of them are recycled from other existing attacks and it doesnt feel you are playing a martial arts fighter at all.
I was expecting my character to move the way you move when you use the King Monkey tonic.

Traits

Traits are ok. They are usefull and they suit perfectly both DPS and condition playstyle.

Dodges

The new dodges are cool in theory, but they feel clunky and disfunctional in reality, even whithout lag.
Animations are, simply recycled from others skill attacks and is very noticeable. They feel specially wierd when you perform a dodge-jump.

In combat they feel less reliable than regular dodge and it should be the oposite since you are improving your dodge.

Utilities

The new utilities are mostly ok. They are not spectacular, but they achieve what they offer. Maybe physical skill combo should do something more besides pure damage.

I have been maining thief for well over a year now in pvp and and I have to say I was extremely exited for this Specialization, and still am… but I have to point out a few flaws I find with it opposed to the fluidity of a normal thief.

- My biggest issue…Dodge rolls….Although I love what was done with them animation wise and the abilities attached to each, I cannot stand how my character stops for a split second after every roll..This also drastically hinders the effects of the first trait in Acrobatics where you get swiftness from dodging, not too helpful when you lose about a second of that swiftness from being locked in place. it really messes up the play style of a thief as they rely on maneuvering quickly and those split second moments can be a win or lose in a fight. As for dash..although it gives a burst of speed, the freeze before AND after its use are insanely annoying making it almost useless to run this dodge.

-Weakening charge, on that same note, weakening charge also has that lockdown / animation lock feeling to it losing its viability and fluidity. I also noticed on casting this move, unlike flanking strike for sword, when this skill is used while targeting a player you will not automatically dash in the direction of the player, instead you will continue to cast it in awkward directions you last cast it in thus making it very difficult to land and also burning initiative if cast subsequently.

- Distracting daggers, Equipping this takes entirely too long for only a 13 second window to throw all three daggers. I love the skill over all though.
-Fist Flurry, another extremely well done skill overall, but i feel it needs more damage attached to it as it is not easy to land all 5 punches on moving/dodging / warping / blocking players. I feel it would be much more rewarding if palm strike was truly devastating dmg as well as the pulmonary impact. over all though the flavor and animations for this skill are perfect.

- Some staff animations. i know this is not a game-play manipulating aspect but as a huge fan of what you did for the staff 5 animation and the dodge rolls, the rest of the skills feel lackluster. I mean debilitating arck, i was expecting to do an uppercutting back flip dodge with the staff on this one. .. and the dreaded shovel animation for dust strike could have been a cool leg sweep type move that could be used while moving (i know it can be used while moving currently too i am just describing my image of the animation.) I know It seems a silly thing to ask of you guys and i know animations are no joke in the programming world..its just as a class with not too many flashy skills to begin with, the physical maneuvering aesthetics would be nice to have.

That is about all I have to complain about, I hope my input is valuable and that others see these things as issues as well.

Fist Flurry uses initiative, and I don’t think improve procs physicals. (Although you don’t really need it that much since they have such low CD’s.)

Fist Flurry is very hard to land, although when you do land it the bonus is very nice. Gotta combo it with something for it to land usually. I would just make it so that just the last hit is needed to proc Palm Strike.

I know this has been said many times, but some of the skills just feel a bit clunky. But regardless of these things, I kittening love this elite spec. Pretty strong especially in 1v1 situations. Very fun playstyle.

Preliminary thoughts. I don’t feel I have gotten to play enough, as I love my job, just not how much I have to be there lol.

Anyway, on with it…

What I used:
Zerker gear
Staff
Sword/Dagger
Traits: Deadly Arts+DD+Trick, Deadly Arts+DD+Acro, DD+Acro+Trick, DD+CS+Deadly Arts

What I did:
Basic PvE, take it with a grain of salt.

The Staff:
Visually, it leaves a lot to be desired. I was disappointed in the animations of the aa chain#3. I was using an Asura character, but the spinning without even holding it is just awful in my opinion.

I am okay with the actual skills, though feel they need slight tweaks.

I enjoy the freedom of movement 5 gives, it just needs to be sped up, as it is very clunky looking. Damage:Ini is good in my opinion

I enjoy the blind in 4, I was just hoping more of a… Hmmm… Yasuo’s wind wall ability in League of Legends? Similar, throws out a wall. I could care less if it is a field or not, would just prefer it as it makes more sense to me than current animation/targeting functions.

I don’t feel the roll back on 3 is far enough, but that could just be me. Other than that it seems to work.

2 is a piece of work… I feel the animation is not so great on this one as well, and that the aiming is strange. I feel like it’s similar to burning speed but it feels so different. I can’t quite put my finger on it but that is my only complaint about this one so far.

autoattack chain I am fine with except the awful animation of last part of the chain.

Damage is okay in my book, it seems to have more overall damage buttons than our other sets while still maintaining some decent tools. Again I have not pvp’d so I am not sure how it will turn out there, and I don’t have the time or dedication to mess with it right now. It’s a long week. I’d love to but I probably won’t get a chance for the pvp side of it until next bwe, or release even.

The heal is slow, but I like it… would like it even more if you dropped .25-.5s off of it, with a 5% base reduction or some minor trade like that. I still like withdraw more, and will probably use it more (read: still almost exclusively in all likelyhood). I don’t plan to give up on it yet.

Haven’t messed with physicals too much. Will take some getting used to, didn’t like how the dagger skills felt so far. But again, this is very cursory.

I think DD paired with Acro might be a bit overkill (not overpowered, just overkill). It is frustrating that you guys destroyed acrobatics for a class mechanic that feels like old feline grace. I am disappointed there, but I try not to be salty because I love my thief… And not because of you guys(ArenaNet), sorry to say. You’ve done a great job creating a game, but if I continue I will go off topic, and perhaps rant…

So, thus far it seems like a really interesting spec from a basic pve standpoint. Hopefully I will have time to get into the real nitty gritty in other game modes.

Sorry I don’t have more time to play with it.

I can see the possibility of staff working well and being a lot of fun, but right now it definitely feels clunky, slow and underwhelming.

Outside of Vault (which is extremely easy to see coming and dodge it) & steal we don’t have any other real gap close on this weapon set. I think weakening charge needs to have a longer range on it and/or give part of our auto attack a ranged strike. Weakening charge, for lack of a better term, feels weak primarily due to the fact it doesnt feel like a charge. The range should be around what Vault is and then it would be in a good place.

Staff feels so easily locked out of sustaining any kind of pressure on a target. Sure we mitigate a fair amount and it has nice dodge uptime but it’s very difficult to get decent damage uptime on a target. The only ability on that weapon set that effects the targets movement actually puts us further away with the evade (staff #3).

If I were on a time budget and had only a few weeks to make tweaks to the class, I’d prioritize two things: The Staff autoattack #3 and the animation/timing of the dodges.

One of the greatest things about all of the classes in Guild Wars 2 is the fluidity with which each profession flows with their animations and skills. The Daredevil— while I very much love the concept and approach— seems to be a little lacking in this regard when it comes to its main weapon, the Staff. The motions of the attacks by themselves and when combined with one another feel a bit stilted and jerky.

Personally, I think making the autoattack #3 a variant of the humanoid Revenant’s third staff auto-attack would go a long way towards addressing the problem.

Karl McLain.5604:

Hey all,
Let’s start using this thread as the place for feedback, so it’s more centralized. That being said, thanks for all of the constructive feedback! It’s been fun watching a lot of thieves bounding around today. As this is beta, there’s always some kinks to work out. Some notes on the dodging mechanic:
We made a few changes to the system in order to alter your dodge ability. While it’s behaviorally accurate, it doesn’t seem to feel as great when dealing with latency. We’re looking into this and hope to be able to resolve it so that these dodges feel as good as your normal dodge.

We’ll be keeping watch (and playing) over the weekend.
PSA: There’s an issue we’re tracking that if you attempt to use your Daredevil dodge abilities while Dazed, you won’t dodge and you’ll lose the endurance anyway. We aren’t able to fix this for the weekend, but a fix is in the works.

-Karl

Karl there’s another bug related to GM evades, I don’t know if people already noticed but if you press the dodge two or more times quickly you get one dodge but you lose 2 endurance bars.

If this is going to be the central thread for feedback, then I’m going to repost my thread here.

So I’ve got some numbers banged out. This is all done in PVP with no amulet, rune set, or sigils. So essentially at base stats. These are almost the tooltip values from ye olde days. So, tell me what you think, and if you have the animation times for the staff skills, it would be great.

Staff Skills
Staff Strike: 205
Staff Bash: 215
Punishing Strikes: 428 (4 × 8 vulnerability), x1 whirl finisher.
NOTE: All auto attack skills have 130 range.
Weakening Charge: 822. 3 Initiative cost. 2 seconds of weakness per hit, 6 seconds total. x1 whirl finisher.
Debilitating Arc: 391. 4 initiative cost. 0.5 seconds of evade. 6 seconds of cripple.
Dust Strike: 225 per hit. Up to 3 hits. 4 Initiative Cost. Up to 3 targets. 5 seconds of blind per hit.
Vault: 879. 6 Initiative Cost. 5 Targets.
Hook Strike: 73. 2 second knockdown.

I don’t have the animation times for staff skills yet. Someone else will probably have to get those. However, at the moment I am assuming that the staff AA takes about 2.5 seconds, given that the staff sustains 16 seconds of vulnerability, but only half way through its final auto attack.

Physical Skills:
Fists of Fury: 730 Damage, 20 second Recharge. 130 Range.
Palm Strike: 332. 130 Range.
Pulmonary Impact: 872 (note: cannot crit)
Distracting Daggers: 146 per dagger. 1/4 second daze per dagger. 900 range. 25 second cooldown.
Imparing Daggers: 597. 3 × 8 poison, 1 × 4 slow, 1x 2 immobilize. 25 second recharge. 900 range.
Bandit’s Defense: 1 second block. Stun breaker. 10 second recharge.
Reflexive Strike: 199. 2 second knockdown.

BUG Bandits defense will not display reflexive strike when scrolled over. Reflexive Strike has no tooltip for range.

Impact Strike: 199. 2 second daze. 300 range. 40 second recharge.
Uppercut: 598. 0 launch distance. 130 range.
Finishing Blow: 532. 130 range.

Channeled Vigor: 5520 healing when endurance is not full. 1.125 scaling when endurance is not full. Otherwise, 7320 healing, 1.5 scaling.

Traits:
Bound: 465 damage. 5 targets. 180 range. Leap Finisher. 300 Evade Distance.
Driven Fortitude: 456 Healing, 0.08 scaling.

Impaling Lotus: this skill behaves a bit oddly, so I’ll list out its behaviors.
#1: It sends up to 3 daggers outward to any enemies within 600 range of the entire evade.
#2: Each of these daggers carry the conditions.
#3: 1 × 8 bleed, 1 × 6 torment, 1 × 2 immobilize per dagger.
#4: x2 whirl finisher.

Some other numbers, for reference.
Sword AA: 284, 284, 482
Dagger AA: 198, 302 + 10% endurance, 302 + 1 × 8 poison.
Heartseeker: 255, 533, 710
Backstab: 426, 853
Pistol Whip: 1,116.

Overall I am actually a bit disappointed. The most annoying parts are the aftercasts on the dodge skills and the general clunkyness of the staff. So, currently my comments are thus far.

#1: The staff auto could use a boost. The full auto has 848 damage, compared to 1050 from the sword (same attack speed), and the scaled attack speed of 955 from the dagger. This is relatively a 23.8% reduction and a 12.6% reduction in damage. While the staff can maintain about 14 stacks of vulnerability, the other autos do so much more. Dagger poisons (which is good even for non-condi builds) and regains endurnace. The sword inflicts weakness and cripple. Thus, the “low damage” of the staff isn’t really worth it.

My suggestion: increase auto attack damage by 10%

#2: Why does hook strike do jack for damage? We already have an extremely similar skill on sword, which does 266 tooltip damage and can either blind or daze for 1.5 seconds. The 2 second knockdown really doesn’t justify the 72 base damage.

My suggestion: Increase the damage of Hook Strike by 250%.

#3: I’m not exactly sure what is being accomplished with weakening charge. This skill would be much more beneficial if it tracked targets instead leaping a fixed distance ahead. You know, kind of like how Death Blossom, Flanking Strike, and Heartseeker do. The root on use is painful as well.

My suggestion: make Weakening Charge chase and track your target like the above skills. Reduce the aftercast and make it so you aren’t rooted after the movement portion of the skill is completed. Increase range to 600.

#4: No comments on debilitating arc at this time.

#5: I’m unsure of how to change Dust Strike. Immediately, I think the skill takes way too long to use, and thus can’t be used tactically. Compare Black Powder which takes half the time and lingers, or Shadow Shot which takes 1/4th of the time. Shadow Shot does twice the damage, too. So technically it is 8 times DPS.

Suggestion: Reduce the pre-cast animation time of Dust Strike by at least 50%.

#6: Reduce the jump time on Vault to 0.75 seconds. While it is a high damage skill on impact, it isn’t that high of a DPS skill, since it takes a full second to execute its attack. This means it is actually worse than backstab and heartseeker as far as damage goes.

#7: Fists of Fury + Palm Strike takes way too long. I did a couple of generic stopwatch tests and the entire cast time of the skill is 1.5 seconds + 0.75 seconds. Again it isn’t accurate to the tooltip. I would also suggest changing how this skill works: Instead of having a 2 second stun on palm strike, give it a 2 second daze upon activating fists of fury. This will give it more utility as an interrupt and make it more reliable, instead of just hoping that fists lands all hits so you could use a stun..

Note: I’m having difficulty actually “balacing” the physical skills. The damage that weapons do are constrained by initiative, whereas physical skills are constrained by cooldowns. Immediately I see that, crit scaled, fists of fury only has 5% higher DPS than Bound, and lower DPS than pre-mybuffs Vault. However, when compared to auto attacking, it does have about 54% higher damage than sword. Currently, I’m going to use a haste to FoF comparison. Haste on a 60 second cooldown does 50% more damage for 6 seconds. Currently, FoF will do about 54% more damage over the span of 7.75 seconds. This means, assuming all hits connect, that FoF is actually a better investment than haste, ancillary effects notwithstanding.

#8: Bandits Defense. Skill seems fine. Would be nice to fix the tooltip errors.

#9: Distracting Daggers. Skill seems fine for the most part. Make them projectile finishers, though.

#10: Imparing Daggers. This skill is a bit… odd. Again, see above on “difficulty balancing physical skills”. From a condition damage perspective this skill is weaker than everything. Of particular note is needle trap, which immobilizes longer, does more damage, and can be pre-cast to reduce cooldowns. Also, needle trap works in an AoE and has various trap synergies. Aside from that, caltrops is more damage with a long duration cripple in an AoE, and the venoms are individually more powerful but can be shared with the team. That slow, though, does throw a wrench into balancing, and since I am not fully acquainted with how well slow works in PVP, I’m left a bit puzzled with how to balance. Also the direct damage of the skill is solid.

My suggestion: Increase the poison duration to 10 seconds, and make each dagger a projectile finisher.

#11: Impact Strike. I’ve done some generic tests, and so far this skill does about 1,329 tooltip DPS over the span of 3 seconds, coming to about 443 DPS. That… isn’t much at all. It is barely better than auto attacking. However, again I have to figure out how to balance a whole new mechanic. When traited it restores 30 endurance and effectively stops the enemy attacking for its duration, so at the moment I’m going to leave impact strike where it is.

#12: Channeled Vigor ATM is fine. Or really, I’m not sure if and where it is deficient or how to fix it, if at all.

Going into traits now. Anything that I don’t comment on is “fine”.

#13: Evasive Empowerment is crap. It needs to give a buff that increases all damage done, and not just the very next attack. A duration of 3 seconds sounds about right, beginning immediately after dodge.

#14: Increase the heal scaling coefficient of Driven Fortitude to 0.32. Currently, wearing full clerics gear contributes basically nothing to this skill.

#15: I think Staff Mastery is trying to be too complicated. Just make it a flat 10% increase to staff damage.

#16: Increase the Evade Distance of dash to 400. Currently, the extra range doesn’t do much.

#17: I’d really like to rework how Bound works. Currently it does several undesirable things:
A) Roots you in one place as you hang in the air.
B) Has an aftercast that prevents movement for a moment.
C) It only creates an attack where you land, meaning that if you dodge away from an enemy, you’ll end up not getting the damage from the Bound.

I’d like to change that. So, my suggestion is as follows:

A)Make it so bound explodes out damage at the start of the ddoge, and not the end.
B)Smooth out the animation so you don’t hang in air for awhile.
C)Remove the aftercast on the skill.

D/D condi daredevil is great.

Staff Daredevil isn’t so great.

Here’s my feedback. I’ve played primarily PvP.

Staff:
Overall animations are too stiff/slow to work for the evasion type gameplay it aims for.
– Dust Strike has a cast time that’s way too long.
– Vault also has a cast time that is too long/slow. If kept this way, it at least needs an evasion frame.

Impact Strike: This skill is perfect. Glad to see another good elite skill for PvP.

Bound – Animation is too stiff. I believe the aftercast is holding it back. Feels very awkward.
Dash – There’s a split second precast before the running animation starts that feels very awkward. It’s like you stop in place right before you actually dash. Needs to be removed.

Hello,

my feedback on the thief’s staff skills i have a few ideas in mind.

Skill #1 is fine
Skill #2 how about instead of dashing since we already have three new dash/dodging
we spin around with the staff in a 360 degree for the first sub skills then slam the staff down on the ground to create a combo field. we only have a few combo fields.
Skill #3 how about we evade like we do but then we can instant teleport behind the target/enemy.
Skill # 4 – an uppercut really. how about we can throw our target/enemy forward instead.
Skill # 5 i like

How three dodges from the traits can they all be combo finishers and toggle them like Shino says

Just my thoughts!

Also how about a skill where we can use the staff like a spear and stab the target in the front

Just my thought!

I’ll start by saying I support your idea OP, I even made the same suggestion a couple of days ago, but 70% of the replies were against it, now everyone loves it. Go figure.

Im much too disapointed and tired right now to give a lot of feedback, but might as well give something:

- A revenant dodges and removes a condition on itself and its allies, without requiring to evade anything at all.

- A thief dodges and removes a condition on itself, if an attack is evaded.

Doesnt seem very fair now does it?

Now as to Staff, most of you are already crying and complaining but you rooted for this instead of a RIFLE. Yeah, thats right.
Staff is bad, its boring, it needs a complete rework to be viable/more viable than the other weapon sets.

As for the skills:
- Daze daggers make no sense with a precast, and are not worth using over other utilities in any situation.
- Immob/Slow daggers are cool but weak, 25second cd for such low damage and low condition time (4s slow 2s immob) is not worth it over other utilities.
- Heal makes absolutely no sense for reasons already stated.
- The block is really cool, thief needed this. But the tooltip needs to be more in depth and mention its attack range for example.
- Fists of fury is a really cool concept, but the damage is bad. Five hits? really? its impossible to successfuly land this more than 1/10 times due to evades, blinds, blocks, invulnerabilities, range, etc. Needs to be reduced to 3 hits or have its cast time increased. If it were for me id make it the other way around: Palm strike for 2 sec stun, if it hits, strike the enemy for kittens, if they all hit, deliver pulmunay-whatever.
- The Elite is really cool, yeah, but its INCREDIBLY HARD to land the second and third hits, simply because it has 130 range, and oh boy thats frustrating.

peace.