Guild Wars 2

Any thoughts on mainhand pistol builds? The Body Shot change was put into place and players have had time to test it out, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference.

First of all, thank you for taking the time to come here and explain your though process on the changes.

Initiative changes

I’ve been asking for a Initiative regen bump for months now, so Kudos on that decision. Part of it though was to remove/modify some of the init regen traits to be more interesting. The initiative per second changes to opportunist, quick recovery and kleptomanic make complete sense, considering the new base init regen. What doesn’t make any sense is that the traits haven’t gained anything in compensation – they’re now fairly kittenty.
Quick recovery will never, ever be slotted at .1 init per second – consider adding “Cleanse one condition on dodge” with a Five Second ICD.
Opportunist is underwhelming for a 15 point minor trait – .2 init per second is bland, and does little to help differentiate thieves with points in CS from other thieves – consider adding “Strips 1 boon on crit” in addition to the init regain, 5s ICD.
Klepto is in the same boat as opportunist – boring, bland, does nothing to differentiate specs – consider adding “Transfers 1-2 conditions to target on successful steal”

Infiltrator’s Return

Please elaborate on why it’s necessary to kill Sword mainhand. A Sword thief has to go full Zerkers in PvP to do enough sustained damage to actually drop a target. With the amount of random, mindless CC spam flying about in every single fight, relying on stunbreakers just doesn’t cut it, because we’re not running a spec that drops a target in 10 seconds and is made of glass. We’ll be out of stunbreakers long before the fight is over, and 1 stun can result in half our HP disappearing. If you must, shorten the return distance on IR to limit just how far a thief can go when escaping using the skill or reduce the amount of time before IR flips back to IS (to force the thief to keep spending init on IR/IS to have his escape button ready), but a cast time will just ruin the spec entirely (IMO, of course, its not like I’ve tested it). Please test any changes to this thoroughly. Please also remember, you designed thief with 0 access to stability – I feel 1 skill on a specific MH weapon that allows a very squishy class with evade based survival mechanics to move but still remain stunned is a fair trade off.

Infusion of Shadow

Couldn’t agree more – perma stealth has always felt cheap and against the design of stealth to me.

Flanking Strikes

Flanking strikes needs to be good enough to compete with Uncatchable, Long range and Thrill of the crime before you can discuss moving it out of tier 1 – In tier 2, it clearly doesn’t compare to Bountiful theft.

Vigorous Recovery & Bountiful Theft

Thank you for considering this – 50% seems like a very big change for a “Shaving” balance philosophy. I think 25% on Vigorous recovery (reducing it to 6s) and 33% on Bountiful Theft (reducing it to 10s) makes much more sense – if it’s still a problem, we can address it in the next patch.

It’s also worth noting that you’ve moved Hard to catch down a tier, without addressing how awful the trait is. No thief is “gaining survivability in the Acro line” by slotting Hard to catch – it’s poorly designed, and has too much potential to be a hindrance to ever be slotted by a serious player. Please consider redesigning it entirely.

The PW ‘fix’ feels like a bandaid, not a true fix – it feels like PW will be marginally useful like it was prior to the 15th.

There’s been plenty of attention paid to nerfing S/D into uselessness (IMO), and fixing permastealth in D/P, but absolutely no attention paid to underperforming weaponsets (P/P, D/D) – I Understand fixing overtuned stuff comes first, but you can’t just keep wrecking our few TPvP viable weaponsets without fixing the ones that have been useless for months (or in the case of P/P, since launch)

Thank you again for keeping us informed, I hope my opinion on the matter can be of some help.

This patch will turn off most of players, who plays Thief…
New players wont play kitten class, so time to say good bye sweet Guld Wars 2

I understand the Changes and agree to a few of them considering the increase in base regen, but how about Opportunist specifically? I think it is a trait that brings that feeling of reward for sticking it out in a fight and it would be harmful to nerf it to a 5 second ICD.

Thanks for the response

JonPeters.5630:

Infiltrator’s Return
The thing I have heard the second most discussion regarding. This is a big change to this skill, but we beleive it is a necessary one. In many cases this is not going to matter. There are only 2 situations where this is a truly impactful change.
1) It stops you from using this skill while stunned, which puts more burden on Sword/Dagger thieves saving their stun breakers. This is the kind of gameplay we want to encourage because it puts more risk in using a rewarding skill like Infiltrator’s Strike.
2) Mostly in PvP, this skill can no longer be used by S/D thieves to teleport stomp someone. This is actually the more impactful moment as it occurs more often, but I think it puts the burden on these players to run a second weapon set that can help them in these situations (OH pistol for instance.)

First I’d like to say thanks for coming here to explain some of this. I’m interested to see how the changes play out but some of them are a little concerning.

It seems like you’re pushing Hard to Catch as the new survivability option to replace some of what was lost on the Shadow Return change. Any comments on the feeling a lot of thieves seem to have that HtC is not desirable because it takes control out of the hands of the player and often hurts as much as it helps?

In a similar vein, will we ever have some comment on Last Refuge? So many thieves hate this trait and it very often acts as “Gain revealed when you fall below 25% health.” I was really surprised it was not even mentioned in the update notes.

I agree with all the changes and want to respond to you in a constructive manner.

I want to stress this that as of right now we have a couple of utility skills that are so inferior in comparison to other skills (not just our own but in comparison to all utilities of all classes).

These bring nothing to the table unless heavily heavily traited into them and even then are still inferior to other utilities.

-Venoms need to work for a duration, not charges.
-Traps, useless in the way they work (lines) + their effect pales to Ranger traps (Also a cast time on a stunbreak? Really?).

We have no 1200 range, I can’t tell you how disheartening it is that I cannot range something properly it’s really breaking my heart.

- Pistols should be 1200 by default, making them the long range single target weapon set (Traited semi-AoE) and let shortbow be close range AoE.

- Daggers need to cleave somehow (New Trait: Flashing Blades 75% to hit up to 3-4 targets with your dagger attacks).

We also have no defense outside of stealth, please please we need protection and or stability so badly!

I would really appreciate it if you would look into these things, because the state of the Thief as of right now is that we have nothing to bring to the table that other classes can’t do better (Projectile blocking, Reflect, Portals, group wide stat boosts.)

Thanks for the communication. I like the direction of the changes, though that is largely because I never played the D/P build (I prefer the playstyles of S/D, D/D or P/D). Some specific comments, mostly from a WvW perspective:

- Please don’t underestimate how flimsy a non-stealthed thief is. If we’re not hiding, we better be dodging, or we’re stunlocked and dead. The Vigorous Recovery change struck me as too much, and I am glad to see you are rethinking its severity

- It sounds like the cheesy use of Infiltrator’s Strike stomps is a big part of the motivation to nerf it. That sounds like part of a larger problem. It also feels like there are more stuns out there than we can really load up to counter. The fix feels broader than the problem

- Flanking Strikes should be readily available and powerful. It’s a good reward for skilled play at the most important aspect of being a thief — hitting them where they least expect it!

- You’re making a lot of changes to initiative regen. I assume you guys have done the math, and you’re being accurate when you say builds that don’t currently make use of the +initiative traits will get a boost. For a typical crit-power build, however, I wonder how the nerf to Opportunist will balance this out. I wish I could parse the combat logs, so I could tell how much regen I am getting from it now.

Mostly, I want to express my happiness with the Infusion of Shadow change. Though part of me hates to see fellow players get nerfed, the other part of me hated to feel pressured to run a cheesey build because it is so very effective. The best builds should involve fun and sensible gameplay, not adjusting your camera angles and jumping back and forth in a tiny area to somehow become less noticeable.

Thanks for giving thief community some thoughts Jon.

I find it acceptable if Infiltrator’s Return wont function as an escape for stuns.
But the cast time eliminates skillful use and avoidance of stuns and high damaging attacks as well, also it makes Infiltrators Return interruptible, unforgiving and the usefulness of it would decrease by huge marginals. So why add the cast time? If just by making it not castable while stunned and make it interrupt current action would do exactly as you wish?

Also I think you should make the shadow return circles a lot clearer and marked with enemy/friendly color as well, making it easier for the opposing players to spot where the thief may teleport, instead of directly whipping the thief.

The proposed vigor changes you mentioned are reasonable, they still make a hit,
but much lesser than the suggested ones earlier.

Literally got my thief to 80 today, now they’re being nerfed again. So done with this game, please just remove them from the game :\..

Thank you for the clarity. I agree with the direction. A few months down the road, I hope the elimination of perma stealth allows for more changes to improve versatility. I’d let the dust settle on these changes for a good while, however.

Jon,

Thank you for the response!

Initiative
I don’t have a problem with the select-able initiative regen trait changes, Signet Use is still viable because of its additional benefit, Quick Recovery will be fairly useless now, but at least I don’t have to take it. Regarding Opportunist, the change doesn’t really seem to fit your intent of rewarding a thief for staying in the fight as well as giving him/her more options on select-able traits. I feel like leaving Opportunist alone and taking a wait and see approach with it would be better.

Also, the condi-removal suggestion on Quick Recovery would keep it viable. You might even make QR an adept trait and switch Vigorous Recovery to Master Tier and reduce the base duration to 6.

Vigor
I appreciate that you’re reconsidering the Vigor changes, if I can influence you… 6 seconds would be nice, that way we can at least get back to the base 8 seconds we have now by going fully into acrobatics for the 30% boon duration.

Assassin’s Reward
Regarding the assassin’s reward changes, is it a base 35% increase with a 35% scale on healing power? I was a bit confused by the notes.

Infiltrator’s Return
This one hurts. But if you’re mind is made up…

Everything else
There are some good threads on the first few pages detailing some bugs with the class, softening some of the blow from Infiltrator’s return, Vigor, etc. might be addressing some of these… The change to Infusion of Shadow is justified, imo, and I think most of the thief forum agrees with it.

Shadow Step

List-Venom, Traps, Lackluster traits, etc.

I think instead of heavily nerfing opportunist, it swap places with practiced tolerance. Reason being its a precision trait line, and the major trait feels like something that could benefit all thieves more as a minor trait, due to our low health pool. Now if a thief traits 30 into CS, they have more of a choice to trait for what their build needs.

Do I suffer from low initiative? I should probably get opportunist. Or
My initiative regen is fine, do I care for a little spike of dmg? Critical haste, or

Maybe its just me but I don’t agree with nerfing minor traits so severely because we have no control over them like we do with major traits. This ofc wouldn’t fix the trait, but at least we won’t be FORCED to deal with it.

That or lower the proposed ICD to 2 seconds. The trait is there for quick attacks to restore initiative, don’t ruin its purpose if the plan is to already nerf all traits granting small bursts of initative.

Kvzakau.6472:

Literally got my thief to 80 today, now they’re being nerfed again. So done with this game, please just remove them from the game :\..

Just practice d/d or p/d, they will be better after the patch, not sure about d/p without the cheese. p/p gets destroyed if the Opportunist nerf passes, s/x builds get severely crippled because of vigor and shadow return nerfs.

OH BTW – my guard can keep perma vigor up with 35 crit chance. While having 3.1k armor. And perma protection. And perma regeneration. And heal himself and allies around him pretty good on dodge rolls. But it’s ok, nerf vigor on thieves, because… guess pvp.

JonPeters.5630:

I couldn’t find a thread to place this in. Here is a summary of what I have seen discussed on the thief changes and some more clarity into what our initial thoughts were and where we stand currently.

Initiative changes
We believe this is one of the most controversial but important changes this patch. The important thing to understand is that we have been and will playtest this a lot more before we push this change. The default rate of initiative regeneration was simply to low and was causing players to either take traits to suppliment it, or to have their effectiveness suffer. This is something that has to change. What these changes intend to do is to increase the power of every single thief build that is not running these traits, and to ever so slightly reduce the maximum amount of initiative you can have per second if you min/max those traits. I know its easy to theorycraft what is going to happen here and there is a lot of danger in that. It is hard to get a sense of this change without playing it, and believe me if I could I would let everyone test a change of this magnitude and gather some more empirical and data driven feedback, but currently our resources are limited, but we still believe that this is a change whose time has come. We will monitor it very carefully when we do release it to make sure it is working as intended.

Infiltrator’s Return
The thing I have heard the second most discussion regarding. This is a big change to this skill, but we beleive it is a necessary one. In many cases this is not going to matter. There are only 2 situations where this is a truly impactful change.
1) It stops you from using this skill while stunned, which puts more burden on Sword/Dagger thieves saving their stun breakers. This is the kind of gameplay we want to encourage because it puts more risk in using a rewarding skill like Infiltrator’s Strike.
2) Mostly in PvP, this skill can no longer be used by S/D thieves to teleport stomp someone. This is actually the more impactful moment as it occurs more often, but I think it puts the burden on these players to run a second weapon set that can help them in these situations (OH pistol for instance.)

Infusion of Shadow
For basic use this trait’s functionality is not going to change. By many players it was being used to grant some initiative when going into stealth. However there were some abusive builds that were using this to maintain very long stealth uptime without having to use their utility skills. The problem with this is that it lets them recharge those skills while in stealth, which takes away the risk associated with using them. We are ok with thieves blowing their cooldowns to have longer stealth, and we are ok with theives bouncing in and out of stealth, but we were not ok with thieves maintaining long duration stealth through abusing a single trait.

Flanking Strikes
I agree that this move may be overkill on the thief. We are currently discussing undoing it. The main motivation was that we really wanted to move Trickster to adept tier to encourge use of those utilities, and the most obvious candidate to move up was Flanking Strikes. This isn’t how we should be making that decision, so we will discuss this and get back to you.

Vigorous Recovery & Bountiful Theft
I’ve seen a lot of talk about this as well, and discussing this already this morning the current vigor is a bit too high, but we may have overdone the reduction. I was thinking about going back to 5s or 6s on Vigorous Recovery, and going back to 10s or 12s on Bountiful Theft.

Thanks,

Jon

Thanks for the reply and thoughts. But you guys are basically destroying S/X here. It’s a bit strange to me and others that you guys say you want thieves to have some mobility and survivability that does not rely on stealth…and then you continually nerf sword skill #2 (IS/SR) which is one of the only non-stealth bread and butter options for thieves to have mobility and survivability.

Please stop nerfing it.
-Signed, every Thief alive that’s tired of IS/SR getting nerfed every patch and then having developers claim they want to increase mobility/survivability

Also, as many are going to point out, it’s a bit ludicrous to cut down on vigor time on the thief when you have a heavy armor class in the game, the guardian, that can maintain 100% vigor uptime.

A lot of the things you are saying are contradictory. You want thieves to have mobility and evasion, but then when they do as intended, you nerf it while leaving the same things on other classes that are not meant to have such evasion/mobility…

I think in the end…please leave the thief alone unless you’re considering ever making P/P not suck

Vigorous Recovery & Bountiful Theft
I’ve seen a lot of talk about this as well, and discussing this already this morning the current vigor is a bit too high, but we may have overdone the reduction. I was thinking about going back to 5s or 6s on Vigorous Recovery, and going back to 10s or 12s on Bountiful Theft.

Look, no thief is going to take your “balance” seriously when you are handing out nerfs every single patch. Thieves want serious buffs. Not some extra fuzzy extra cloak and dagger every 24 seconds or ridiculously silly things like give you 25 extra HP/init with grandmaster tier assassin’s reward.

This is what I think is acceptable, +/- a little on whatever needs to be fixed.

- Vigorous recovery gets 25% nerf on vigor, AND removes 1 condition every time you use a healing skill.

- Bountiful theft gains 1 additional init upon stealing, applies 2 boons stolen to 5 allies in a 600 range radius. 25% Nerf on vigor.

- Assassin’s reward. 15 percent chance to remove 1 condition from every init spent. That justifies grandmaster tier and gives thieves room to breathe.

- Trickster. Utterly useless trait because utility skills suck. It doesn’t have any synergy outside P/D build and DD spinning blossom spam.

- Hard to catch gives stealth while being teleported away.

- Infusion on Shadow+Signet use. Directly affects DPS for D/P users. It would have made sense if you buff signet usage to gain burst initiative and repeatedly use it to maintain D/P stealth, not nerfing it. Init gain is mostly negligible since all the DPS that comes from thief is the cloak dagger/backstab.

This change is fine. No objections on this. Init gain upon using signets? Disagree completely. Try adding 2 random boon upon Signet Use (Seriously, this is the mastery line.) and we can think about nerfing the init gain.

tldr; Infusion is fine, buff signet use to justify nerf.

- Improve Pistol/shortbow even more. It has been a year. Hardly anything worthwhile has been done to improve the ranged weapons.

- Infiltrator’s return nerf is overkill because of vigor’s nerf. Add better traits and you can discuss on how OP this weapon skill is.

S/P with your current changes is a nerf rather than a “buff”, because pistol whip spam is how thieves roll out the damage. With opportunist hit, this is more of a DPS nerf.

Rebalancing init gain PASSIVELY doesn’t make the thief fun. Creating new traits that has different properties (gaining initiative+different boons through clever builds) makes people go out to test different kinds of builds. Thieves should be allowed to go different trait branches and find their comfortable weapon builds.

One size fits all init change is the worst thing you can do (Critical build lines are obviously affected the most with opportunist nerf) . I seriously suggest you discuss with your team again to make sure the majority of the current builds are not affected by this massive nerfs to traits.

ok, so all this very negative feedback from the thief community on your upcoming changes was worth nothing as you only say “the time has come” and " its necessary"?

s/d is limited to 2 skills. infiltrator’s strike and fs/ls. THIS is not our fault, you nerfed tactical strike / cnd / dancing dagger into oblivion. at least in pvp (and that is what act matters).
so you nerfed fs/ls twice, its balanced/maybe even underpowered i guess. now you continue nerfing the only skill which kept s/d alive.
so from 5skills on this set (AA not included) , 3 will be crap (tactical/dancing/inf strike), 2 mediocre (fs+ls/cnd) and you really think this will be balanced?
s/d needs a buff, a rework of tactical strike as you cannot really balance it in pvp.
maybe let tactical strike transfer 2 conditions on top of dazing them (as the daze alone is a joke at best)?
or gain hp the amount of dmg you inflict…this would be much more tactical than a random 2sec daze.

opportunist: why not 50% chance and 3sec cd? still less than our current trait but more reliable. because thiefs always need a nerf in order to buff something.

thanks for the vigor thingy, thief really needs reasonable vigor uptime.

JonPeters.5630:

Infiltrator’s Return
The thing I have heard the second most discussion regarding. This is a big change to this skill, but we beleive it is a necessary one. In many cases this is not going to matter. There are only 2 situations where this is a truly impactful change.
1) It stops you from using this skill while stunned, which puts more burden on Sword/Dagger thieves saving their stun breakers. This is the kind of gameplay we want to encourage because it puts more risk in using a rewarding skill like Infiltrator’s Strike.

2) Mostly in PvP, this skill can no longer be used by S/D thieves to teleport stomp someone. This is actually the more impactful moment as it occurs more often, but I think it puts the burden on these players to run a second weapon set that can help them in these situations (OH pistol for instance.)

I would like to talk to #2 first. I have not seen this in spvp or solo que. I think I know what you’re talking about; you would use IS to start the stomp then IR then use Infil Signet or Steal or SS for the stomp.

I think this is a clever way to use class/wpn mechanics to overcome the lack of Invul and Stab that is inherent with the thief class. As the same time, I think this is fair since 1; it cost a lot of init (5 total which is 40% or 33% of total init pool), 2; it cost either a Steal or a utility. When you compare that to what other classes spend to secure a stomp, you will see that it take more resources on a thief to complish the same result; elix S, mist form, diversion, obsidian flesh, etc.

I would also like to mention that there are counters such as Guardian Hammer #5 on top of the body or Sanctuary, or the Necro’s Reaper’s Mark.

If you’re talking about SS/IR utitily, the same applies. Basically, almost all classes have a way to secure a stomp. So…please reconsider this.

One more thing on #2. You do realize mesmer staff’s phase retreat does that same thing right? Will it also see a cast time change?

Regarding #1, isn’t the whole point and or strength of the class dependant on how evasive/elusive you are? Isn’t this the reason the thief class has no access to stability, lowest HP and Armor? I understand your concerns reguarding risk/reward and IR uptime, but there is probably a better way to change this. Changing how much init it cost maybe a better approach then adding a cast time.

First, thank you and the rest of the anet team for having this level of interaction and transparency.

Initiative changes
Totally agree, glad to see that initiative is being tweaked.

Infiltrator’s Return
S/D for life. S/D is about mobility, utility, and control. I live in the Acro and Trickery tree. It seems to me like Acro is perfectly suited to S/D play, however, all user controlled stun-breaks are Deceptions, Signets, and Tricks, which have more synergy with other trees.

Hard To Catch
S/D lives and dies by positioning, it’s what makes 2 skill so great. HTC is not controllable, if it moved you straight backwards, or was in some way predictable it would be more useful to those who play S/D with a “positioning control” mindset.

Infusion of Shadow
Can’t agree more.

Vigorous Recovery & Bountiful Theft
Using both of these (and having 15+ in acro), I currently have more vigor than I know what to do with in most situations.

Bountiful Theft/Boon Ripping
With the reduction in effectiveness of Larcenous Strike, I feel Bountiful Theft must have it’s Boon ripping enhanced in some way.

Closing remarks
As it stands, there is simply no way for a S/D thief to stand up against either a condi necro or a boon drenched guardian. Which I feel is counter to the style. S/D doesnt have the burst of other thief specs, it’s about outplaying the opponent (remove condi on Infil Return, rip boons with LS) yet we are not effective a that currently. I feel that lessening mobility is fine, because I already have way more of that than I need, however, we need something. Either more damage or more control. I’d vote control.

Woaden.9425:

Bountiful Theft/Boon Ripping
With the reduction in effectiveness of Larcenous Strike, I feel Bountiful Theft must have it’s Boon ripping enhanced in some way.

I gotta go ahead and +1 this. I only use it in dungeons but i have always felt that bountiful Theft should rip full boon duration from targets like LS does. It would make me feel just that much more valuable to a group in dungeons/fractals.

LoneWolfie.1852:

- Hard to catch gives stealth while being teleported away.

I like this idea for hard to catch, maybe give it 2 seconds of stealth. That would make it helpful in WvW if you got disabled while fighting in an outnumbered situation or in alot of AoE pressure.

First off I want to say thank you for replying to the Thief community. This is my feedback on the changes to S/X.

• Pistol Whip. Reduced the after cast on the first half of this skill by .25 seconds.

Ok you are on the right step towards a fixing but…that’s it? I’m not trying to be greedy here or anything but surely this won’t be enough to fix S/P current state. S/P needs special attention and also needs to be relooked at. I know there aren’t a lot of players who runs this weapon set due to the recent nerfs, but maybe you could relook and see what can make this weapon set more rewarding.

JonPeters.5630:

.
Infiltrator’s Return
The thing I have heard the second most discussion regarding. This is a big change to this skill, but we beleive it is a necessary one. In many cases this is not going to matter. There are only 2 situations where this is a truly impactful change.
1) It stops you from using this skill while stunned, which puts more burden on Sword/Dagger thieves saving their stun breakers. This is the kind of gameplay we want to encourage because it puts more risk in using a rewarding skill like Infiltrator’s Strike.
2) Mostly in PvP, this skill can no longer be used by S/D thieves to teleport stomp someone. This is actually the more impactful moment as it occurs more often, but I think it puts the burden on these players to run a second weapon set that can help them in these situations (OH pistol for instance.)

I honestly can’t believe this is set in stone now to be nerfed. The thief is the second most fragile class in the game that is destined to have the best mobility on the field of battle. With this nerf that statement when applying it with S/X is now false. Heck many people has already spoken out that the most mobile class is now warrior (grumble), but that is for another topic. Adding a cast time has destroyed our survivability and it’s going to be better to spam our #3 skill button to dodge these stuns. Without even seeing this is also pushing players to use the trait Hard to catch. There is so much stuns and dazes on the battlefield that it’s ridiculous. This is almost the main skill that is keeping us S/X users alive.
It seems like this is now set in stone. If we are going to add a cast time to shadow return, then I advise reducing the initiative cost by one on the return at least. This is going to change the S/X weapon-sets in such a way that it cause a giant ripple effect in changes to its play styles yet again.

hard to catch gives stealth is not a solution. last refuge anyone?

Hi Jon. The problem we have with these nerfs isn’t so much that that specific build doesn’t need to be nerfed (although that’s a concern), it’s the fact that EVERY other build we have is awful compared to other classes. So, even though the effective builds that we have may need nerfing, the problem is that once those are gone, we are done. We have no other options. It’s like you’re bringing all builds down to one terrible level.

I can’t understand all this whine about perma stealth thieves!
I played thief, ele, necro, ranger and the new fotm warri. I never had any trouble with perma stealth thieves. All you need to do is to screw the first heartseeker and pump all your dmg into them, boom dead thief. They can stay all night and day in stealth but that didnt kill a player. Oh you took your lv 24 ele twink to play some wvw to gain exp? That is the mistake, but every class would kill you 1on1. And kitten is perma stealth usefull in a zerg vs zerg situation. You can walk in the enemy zerg and die while you have stealth.

Lets look at this: (patch plans for 10.12.13)
CnD gives with 30 SA 4 sec stealth for 4 ini
BP+HS gives for 1 time 3 sec stealth and cost 7 ini
and every new attemp costs 3 ini for +3 sec
so for 5-6 (due to lag/cast hs) sek stealth you would need 10 ini
now you use backstab and now…lets autohit them for 8 secs to gain 10 ini (yay 33% increase and 5 sec cd on opportunist)
you see that is just stupid.

How the patch could form the future:
1. many thieves quit or join other classes.
The thief who roamed and was nearly useless for wvw rerolls a guard or warri or something else. The whiners will be…wvw is unfair the enemy server has so much zerg powaaaahhhh nerf nerf i cant win cause zerg here where everywhere rainbow.
2. The thieves switch from perma stealth and S/D to full backstab D/D or D/P
and you crybabys gonna cry…oh the 2 thieves just killed me and all they did was backstab nerf nerf and a-net hears your crying and boom backstab nerf
3. A-net realise how stupid this crap is and that bad players will always be bad and cry cry and cry. They just take a seat and rethink what would be good and not just some crys from bads

And now excuse me im gonna kill some lvl 24 ele’s in wvw cause it’s super good for my ego and i can give you some more reasons to cry.
Tears are delicious!111!1one!1!!

Hi Jon thank you for taking the time to post here.

I think the proposed cast time to Infiltrator’s Return will kill Swords build. S/d burst in comparison to D/x is much weaker and the spec needs the mobility from IR to be viable there is so much CC and AOe damage flying around everywhere that 1 or 2 stun breakers is not enough . After LS nerf we are already starting to see the meta shift away from S/d thief. Considering the effort how effective are S/d thief at the moment? So many other class would be a much better addition to a tpvp team. Also there is lots of AI which keeps track on a thief even if he is porting around place. Mesmer are already a pain for S/x thief as the plantasm do lots of dmg and can hit you and be summon from 1200 range.

If this change was to proceed S/d would not be viable anymore. Sp would be hit hard aswell with no access to stealth and with the nerf to vigor IR in its current state essential for this wep set survivability.

You also mentioned teleport stomping which is not possible to do with this skill alone you have to either use steal or a utility(30-50sec cd) to successfully complete a tele stomp. Also a tele stomp can still be interrupted(OH pistol Mesmer, thief toolkit pull of engi ect ect.....) and ranger in down state can still interrupt it. Teleport stomping doesn’t come without its cost and in group fights its the only way for a thief to secure a stomp its much easier for a bunker spec to do a stability stomp.

Another concern is how a cast time would negatively affect the feel and gameplay of sword build across all game modes. Right now with IR as is it feel fluid and neat I think the cast-time would really make the rotation of S/x thief feel clunky and awkward.

Though if you need to nerf Infiltrator’s Return might I suggest increasing the Initiative making it more costly to use but not effecting the user if they remain in the fight.

Also, we are so so squishy. That’s FINE if it’s a high risk high rewards system. That’s awesome and fun and exciting. Problem is when we’re high risk no reward. We “l2p” our kittens off just to be able to compete with other classes. While being squishier than everyone. It’s not right. Thief class is supposed to be something that is uber damaging, but easy to take down without evades and stealth. Now we are mediocre at best damaging with evades and stealths nerfed.

Lets look at this: (patch plans for 10.12.13)
CnD gives with 30 SA 4 sec stealth for 4 ini
BP+HS gives for 1 time 3 sec stealth and cost 7 ini
and every new attemp costs 3 ini for +3 sec
so for 5-6 (due to lag/cast hs) sek stealth you would need 10 ini
now you use backstab and now…lets autohit them for 8 secs to gain 10 ini (yay 33% increase and 5 sec cd on opportunist)
you see that is just stupid.

no its not, x/d should be the stealth king, d/p is control and chasing

Heizero.9183:

I understand the Changes and agree to a few of them considering the increase in base regen, but how about Opportunist specifically? I think it is a trait that brings that feeling of reward for sticking it out in a fight and it would be harmful to nerf it to a 5 second ICD.

Thanks for the response

I totally agree on your vision of Opportunist, but i don’t think that the changes will be such a nerf.

There is no king! Both specs should be good for stealth while D/D is the single target close combat monster in pve.
D/D is just easier to counter while D/P can stealth regardless of the enemy.
Just look at it from another perspective. Now the have 2 good speccs S/D and D/P
No 1 is good in tpvp and No 2 is good in wvw for roaming. With the patch they take the speccs dunk them down the toilett and now the have all thief speccs on the level of D/D. High effort to kill another equaly skilled class. Sure now you can be happy when you kill another player but most of the time you will see where thief will stay in this meta.

This may not be constructive feedback…
But please, guys, just re-roll guardians or warriors already. save some nerves and enjoy the game with less hassle/problems/nerf-every-patch.
Can’t you guys see, the game will be truly balanced if everyone plays either a guardian or a warrior.

I like Infusion of Shadow nerf and i also understand infiltrator’s strike nerf. It’s really deserved. Don’t listen to those whiners, ppl just can’t accept that they won’t be able to spam IS brainlessly anymore. Vigor nerf is a good one too. But opportunist nerf is really bad. You practically nullified effect of initiative rate buff with that change.

JonPeters.5630:

Initiative changes
We believe this is one of the most controversial but important changes this patch. The important thing to understand is that we have been and will playtest this a lot more before we push this change. The default rate of initiative regeneration was simply to low and was causing players to either take traits to suppliment it, or to have their effectiveness suffer. This is something that has to change. What these changes intend to do is to increase the power of every single thief build that is not running these traits, and to ever so slightly reduce the maximum amount of initiative you can have per second if you min/max those traits. I know its easy to theorycraft what is going to happen here and there is a lot of danger in that. It is hard to get a sense of this change without playing it, and believe me if I could I would let everyone test a change of this magnitude and gather some more empirical and data driven feedback, but currently our resources are limited, but we still believe that this is a change whose time has come. We will monitor it very carefully when we do release it to make sure it is working as intended.

Most thief-only players have very little understanding of how combat feels with weapon cooldowns. I wouldn’t expect a lot of them to react appropriately until actually playing with the increased initiative regen.

You’re also getting a lot of stealth-stacking players complaining about the trait working the way you’ve originally intended while totally overlooking this change

JonPeters.5630:

Infiltrator’s Return
1) It stops you from using this skill while stunned, which puts more burden on Sword/Dagger thieves saving their stun breakers. This is the kind of gameplay we want to encourage because it puts more risk in using a rewarding skill like Infiltrator’s Strike.
2) Mostly in PvP, this skill can no longer be used by S/D thieves to teleport stomp someone.

In other words: Play by the rules and be properly countered by players who have some skill. This is important. Thieves currently have many, many skills that can nullify control without actually breaking it. Thief-only players don’t quite understand that those skills have longer cooldowns because they create much-needed openings for specific attacks that would otherwise be useless.

JonPeters.5630:

Infusion of Shadow
For basic use this trait’s functionality is not going to change. By many players it was being used to grant some initiative when going into stealth. However there were some abusive builds that were using this to maintain very long stealth uptime without having to use their utility skills. The problem with this is that it lets them recharge those skills while in stealth, which takes away the risk associated with using them. We are ok with thieves blowing their cooldowns to have longer stealth, and we are ok with theives bouncing in and out of stealth, but we were not ok with thieves maintaining long duration stealth through abusing a single trait.

More “play by the rules”, “stop abusing OP”, “get some skill” changes. Good. Can we get some more of that for the mesmer now?

JonPeters.5630:

Flanking Strikes
The main motivation was that we really wanted to move Trickster to adept tier to encourge use of those utilities

The trait you should move up is Uncatchable. That’s a very powerful trait that most thieves take because they’re a dodge-heavy class who benefits most from targets taking damage while they can stealth or move. Definitely worth a Master tier and an important change to keep Trickster from being overshadowed.

JonPeters.5630:

Vigorous Recovery & Bountiful Theft
I was thinking about going back to 5s or 6s on Vigorous Recovery

Agreed that perma-booning is an issue in general in this game (see Mesmer Duelist line), but be careful about boon duration on Vigorous Recovery. The trait is down the line that gives boon duration and the thief has a choice of two 15s cooldown healing skills.

Initiative changes
We believe this is one of the most controversial but important changes this patch. The important thing to understand is that we have been and will playtest this a lot more before we push this change. The default rate of initiative regeneration was simply to low and was causing players to either take traits to suppliment it, or to have their effectiveness suffer. This is something that has to change. What these changes intend to do is to increase the power of every single thief build that is not running these traits, and to ever so slightly reduce the maximum amount of initiative you can have per second if you min/max those traits. I know its easy to theorycraft what is going to happen here and there is a lot of danger in that. It is hard to get a sense of this change without playing it, and believe me if I could I would let everyone test a change of this magnitude and gather some more empirical and data driven feedback, but currently our resources are limited, but we still believe that this is a change whose time has come. We will monitor it very carefully when we do release it to make sure it is working as intended.

Fair enough, but it doesn’t address the fact that many of the traits that used to be, as you said, necessary to increasing Ini gains, are now practically worthless. You’ve freed up those slots so that we can pick other traits, if other traits are worth having in that line, but you really need to look into those specific traits, particularly Kleptomaniac, and figure out ways to make them just as useful as they were before, even if you’ve reduced their original purpose by half or a third. At the very least, move Bountiful Theft to the Adept tier post-nerf.

The trait you should move up is Uncatchable. That’s a very powerful trait that most thieves take because they’re a dodge-heavy class who benefits most from targets taking damage while they can stealth or move. Definitely worth a Master tier and an important change to keep Trickster from being overshadowed.

Uncatchable is not that great, because the radius is fairly small and bleed caps still have not been fixed. Adding new bleeds is often not useful when the enemy is hovering around 24-25 stacks already. If they moved Uncatchable up the tree it would need a solid buff of some kind, at the very least a radius and duration buff.

The initiative change is on par with something you would see in a beta stage. Very significant for something that the class is based around. Does having to invest so much to increase the initiative regen become a pain in the backside? Yes, but that’s what was handed to the Thief community and what they have had to work with. I would think such a change would require strengthening in other areas. However we are not seeing this. I like and appreciate the effort, but I am not sure these changes will push others to vary traits/builds. I think the community will need a little more give with this take. Just my opinion though.

You forget about the condition removal on shadow return. It saves me plenty of times in WvWvW with the huge landslide of conditions that cover me, even more so if I’m retreating and double tap 2 without a target. Signet of Agility doesn’t help at all VS conditions as it only removes 1, which usually isn’t the one hurting you most. S/D doesn’t and shouldn’t have to use Hide in Shadows, as stealth isn’t and shouldn’t be an aspect of this playstyle, aside from CnD to stomp someone w/o instadying.

Keep in mind I’ve used S/D in SPvP a lot and use it in WvW and I don’t use the shadowstep stomp, so you’re going to hurt innocent people who don’t use it without compensating it with anything.

It wouldn’t be as bad if both Infiltrator Strike and Infiltrator Return removed a condition or we were giving condition removal elsewhere, such as Signet of Malice every 10 seconds or on use, or improving steal to reverse pickpocket conditions to enemy for example.

I’ve personally found a lot of fun using S/D with 10/30/0/0/30 in wvw as I love the Steal ability and want to make the most of it. With that I’m completely 100% reliant on Vigor and Shadow Step for avoiding damage. IDK if this playstyle will be possible with the proposed changes.

As for using Stunbreakers, I do have some, but I’m thrown right back into stun after using them against most classes. Against a stunspam Warrior the only thing I could do against them would be running Roll for Initiative to escape stun and then run from battle as fast as possible, because further engaging him will just get me stunlocked again. Shadow Return breaking stun would be the only possible way to stand a chance against them.

Also, just throwing this in there again, but please do something about Last Refuge. I honestly don’t care what you do to it, as long as it stops killing me when I’m using a shadow arts build. I wouldn’t even mind a blank space at shadow arts 5 instead. This trait should not be forced as it is now.

By the way, can you change Shadow Protector to give us Aegis/Regen/Protect? This will increase stealth build substain.

Thanks.

So Lets put these changes in one.. There will be no thieves on tpvp after the patch. Reason is simple they will lose 50% of their mobilty due to shadow return nerf as s/d s/p thief. This nerf is more blast than nerfing warrior’s healing signet by -50%hps presuming which of course not occur. Last patch cuts our boon hate skill by 50%. I really dont see the reasoning. Less mobility, joke boonhate, squishy hp, less evades, less init regen due to nerf all traits giving initiative.

Just replacing thief by ele or mesme?. And now on Hotjoins we will see some hybrids thieves doing nothing.

Dear JonPeters
What about Retaliation?
Guardian buff mesmer’s clones. Thief eat 7k + damage.
Can still add a cd to this boon, that just kills the possible thief builds.

It’s great to see what’s going on with the thinking process behind changes. To be honest, I’m mostly concerned about two things that are totally untouched so far: a.) survivability/attrition, and b.) the viability of Pistols. Vital Shot is weak-ish which, for P/P, leads to overreliance on Unload for basic DPS. This messes up resource management for the whole set and leads to a situation where the most optimal way to play P/P is staking power/crit and spamming Unload, keeping you mobility-less and Initiative starved.

Surely that isn’t intended – is Vital Shot every going to receive a buff to its damage or attack speed so that it can perform its needed role of bread-and-butter shot, and allow Unload to play a more utilitarian role?

Perhaps we could get a range increase/obstacle ignore on infiltrator’s strike now?
That is a ridiculous hit to the reason to take a sword without a single recompense.
How many there are stuns that need more than 1/2 sec to be inflicted? How many more attacks will a thief take in 1/2 more seconds?
It does not seem that much in 1v1… But in WvWvW if you are not away instantly you will be CC’ed to death the very moment after you use stun break.
I would love to have an answer on how should thief handle those situations if previously he went for the sword for a sole reason to be able to escape those situations.

Jon,

A big problem with thief is not that some traits are in the wrong place or that some traits take away from the use of others but most of our traits and utilities are either very situational, require all associated traits for utilities to be viable or are flat out detrimental/useless. Players have left the class entirely because the profession can’t do anything well except blink in and out of stealth because risk:reward and effort:reward are so heavy to the left that it is not worth it.

I can list a number of topics addressing the thief’s problems with player’s ideas. However, you need to understand that this profession needs a serious buff in about 60% of its traits, utilities and weapon skills before the profession recovers.

It is useless and not fun to play.

(1/2)

Initiative changes
I understand where you’re coming from with this, but you’ve made so many skills on thieves so initiative intensive/draining that there are several builds that DEPEND on that initiative regen that they “min max” for, and I don’t feel as if this have been properly considered. My point being that, given current initiative costs using black powder and shadow shot or flanking strike instantly drains my initiative, to the same token, a flanking strike, followed by a larcenous strike, followed by a cloak and dagger drains my initiative to 0, assuming current regen that’s six seconds of downtime before I can use another skill, and that’s including if I swap to my other weapon set. This isn’t something that other classes are hindered by with their cooldowns, I never don’t have the capability to use a skill on my elementalist, and quite frankly the autoattack chain on my thief isn’t enough to make up for/maintain this downtime in an aggressive pvp/wvw scenario.

Infiltrator’s Return
My primary concerns with the changes to Infiltrator’s Return are that you’re reducing the survivability ability of a weapon set which is already looked down on as sub par outside of sPvP. I understand that you want to reduce weapon swapping capabilities, but between the larcenous strike nerf and now this, sword dagger will become even less commonly run, there’s no alternative being offered here either, it’s not a give and take like a balance.. It’s just a nerf.

The changes to S/P might make up for it a slight bit in that we may be able to more consistently use the evade frames as evasion, but even that is a huge initiative sink. You also need to factor the survivability of thieves, when we’re launched or knocked down if we can’t pull out of the heat with our sword 2 we’re usually dead in two to three hits with a knockdown heavy warrior, that doesn’t even give most people time TO break out of short of running multiple stunbreaks as utility skills. Yes, it does give us an advantage to be able to pull out of combat (if we set it up beforehand) however as one of the squishiest classes that is intended to be a melee centric class, we NEED that extra survivability.

If you were to put the casting time on the initial use of the ability I could see that being significantly more successful.

Infusion of Shadow
I agree with the infusion of shadow changes… Permastealth is an obnoxious thing and I don’t agree with it it any way shape or form. It’s a crutch for bad thief players, albeit one that takes skill to make use of.

Flanking Strikes
I agree that this is too much, this patch is killing the ability for thieves to maintain sustainable DPS, as well as severely nerfing out survivability, the one two punch without any concessions or positive changes (because the initiative change is a negative change) is really too much for the class as a whole.

Vigorous Recovery & Bountiful Theft
My other thoughts on this matter cover this pretty well, you’ve created a class that relies on careful consideration and good timing to survive, and now you’re starting to take away the padding that we had on that due to individuals in sPvP using that padding to bunker down on cap points… This is going to be really harsh for any new Thief players and removes a lot of the survivability from the class. I understand why you’re doing it, but I think this is the wrong way to go about it, or at least, doing this without any other fairly drastic changes to the class and its play style is a poor way to go about it.

(2/2)

My primary concern about these changes is that you’re addressing skills and traits which are currently used by the thief, attempting to make them less used/usable, to the same token you’re not addressing any concerns with inconsistent trait lines, the viability of poisons for the class, the lame duck that is the “defining class skill” steal, nor the ineffectiveness of traps for the class as a whole.

I feel as if those three concerns are the primary limiters behind viability of alternative specs for the class, and without addressing the fact that there are two entire subsets of utility skills that are… sub par on a base level, at best…. we won’t be able to make effective changes to the class without someone feeling slighted.

to continue on, I’d like to see what the internals team has come up with as far as builds that these changes aid/make better or more viable, because as far as I can tell it’s hamstringing the majority of popular builds right now without offering much to others.

Specifically,

P/P unload builds are no longer viable due to the heavy initiative cost to maintain them, there’s no way around it and it’s already a very sub par build.

Sword/Pistol builds are heavy initiative reliant, I think they might be OK given the slight buff to pistol whip making it useful again, but I suppose we will see on that one, however they are going to severely suffer as far as survivability is concerned, you’re supposed to get up close but now you can’t have an out if you get knocked down, due to the builds reliance on other utility skills. (that said, I never don’t run shadowstep in any wvw/pvp scenario).

Sword/Dagger
Same concerns with initiative costs here, if I’m fighting against a bunker and I open with flanking larc to strip whatever their top boon (used to be an effective opener) is, I’m gaining one boon, lets say might, I then do an auto attack chain reducing them to maybe 80% health if I’m lucky… They’re unloading on me at the same time, I have to build fairly glassy for my auto attacks to be effective and I’m at say 75% so I cloak and dagger to get a bit of space/positioning and gain some time in the fight, my initiative is now somewhere around 3 or 4, I save this for another flanking strike after I hopefully daze them for a second, and maybe strip one more boon. If they haven’t healed at this point maybe they’re at 60% and I’m still at 75%? I’m then out of initiative, 6 seconds until I stealth again, I can’t pull out with 2 if I get knocked down and in this 1v1 scenario maybe I’m at a disadvantage at this point in the fight. (I’m imagining this versus a d/d bunker ele personally… if it helps you visualize)… I’m not doing an effective job of removing their boons, they can just switch to water and dodge roll to heal up, I heal and the fight is prolonged until someone comes along and knocks me down and stomps me… I could see myself eventually losing that fight against a player like Bitcloud or someone who’s talented at Ele, and I consider myself a really good S/D thief. Now put a new player in my shoes… someone who hasn’t yet learned to maintain perfect initiative lines etc…

I think P/D Is fine with these changes but in sPvP that’s a sub par build that doesn’t bring much to the table. In PvE It’s effectively useless as a condi centric build. WvW being its home of course.

D/P is obviously hurt by the changes in that your security is removed, that’s fine with me… It’ll be scary for new players, but whatever. This build is once again, only really effective for the team in WvW to pick off people on the outskirts of zergs/roamers.

D/D is actually helped by these changes, that’s really great, it was a fun skill intensive build that really deserved a boost up and has fallen quite by the wayside, this might be where I go after the changes assuming I continue to be forced away from sword.

I think that addresses all my personal concerns, hopefully it gives you some insight and I’d love to talk to you some time about where you see thief going/what you see thief being as a class.

Oh also, I think it was a mistake, straight up to tell thieves that you’re making Hard to Catch available to aid in survivability especially after all the talk about how you wanted to reduce the dependence on randomization for other classes. It’s as randomized and inconsistent as any of the engineers abilities and shouldn’t even be a trait in my personal opinion as someone who has tried to effective utilize it.

- Aladdin of Fort Aspenwood.

On Hard to Catch. I hope it’s understood that the only reason a lot of thieves take this trait in sPvP is because it’s the only viable trait once you’ve filled out 10/30/0/20/0.

Ningyou explains this clearly in Sensotix’s thief interview:

That does not mean it’s a good trait or that people even want it, it’s simply the only viable one.

I think it needs to, at a minimum, break stuns. But probably even more than that to be something people actually want since it can really screw you over (chasing some one and then out of no where getting teleported away is terrible).

Aeden.5896:

On Hard to Catch. I hope it’s understood that the only reason a lot of thieves take this trait in sPvP is because it’s the only viable trait once you’ve filled out 10/30/0/20/0.

Ningyou explains this clearly in Sensotix’s thief interview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR5OL9GB-VA#

That does not mean it’s a good trait or that people even want it, it’s simply the only viable one.

I think it needs to, at a minimum, break stuns. But probably even more than that to be something people actually want since it can really screw you over (chasing some one and then out of no where getting teleported away is terrible).

Hard to catch will never be a good trait as long as it moves the player around without their input. Not having complete control of where my character moves to sounds more like a control effect to me (Like say, Fear) – the fact that it’s supposed to be beneficial is just silly.

Jon, seeing your post made the Mighty Mouse theme start playing in my head. Thank you for coming to discuss these changes.

For the discussion on the specific changes in the proposal, I think the majority of concerns have been voiced. However, there are some other things that I’d like to address and have been discussed at length in other threads.

Hard to Catch
This is too unreliable to be a valuable tool for sustained combat. I think a few simple changes would make this trait significantly better:

1. If a disable is negated through some other method, like Stability, then Hard to Catch shouldn’t trigger.

2. To serve the purpose of combat sustain, it needs to grant Vigor, Retaliation, Stability, or Regeneration instead of Swiftness. Swiftness is terribly unhelpful at helping a player to stay in a fight.

3. Most importantly, I think the core problem with this skill—the random nature of it—could be solved by having it always teleport you backwards. Then the trait requires positional awareness instead of luck, and it would sync with builds that use teleports, Withdraw, and/or Roll for Initiative. It could also then be used as a positioning tool, which I believe is the kind of proactive play GW2 is trying to encourage.

Other problems

1. Steal. Many players complain that they’d like more micromanagement over this ability, which is supposed to be the “class-defining mechanic.” It’s been a common suggestion since betas to have F1 steal an offensive item, F2 steal a CC item, and F3 steal some kind of healing item or boons.

2. Traps. At best, they are lackluster and clunky.

Perhaps Thief traps could be made more like Ranger traps, as static objects with charges and a range of 120. Auesis provided a more detailed description of this kind of trap change in the fourth post of this thread. In that same thread, Crimes also provided excellent ideas for trap traits.

3. Weaponsets. Many of the Thief weaponsets have issues with incredibly underpowered and/or conflicting skills. This post is long enough without me listing out all of the problems, but hopefully ArenaNet is aware of most of them already, and they are on the list of things to be fixed in the future.

JonPeters.5630:

Show Spoiler

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I couldn’t find a thread to place this in. Here is a summary of what I have seen discussed on the thief changes and some more clarity into what our initial thoughts were and where we stand currently.

Initiative changes
We believe this is one of the most controversial but important changes this patch. The important thing to understand is that we have been and will playtest this a lot more before we push this change. The default rate of initiative regeneration was simply to low and was causing players to either take traits to suppliment it, or to have their effectiveness suffer. This is something that has to change. What these changes intend to do is to increase the power of every single thief build that is not running these traits, and to ever so slightly reduce the maximum amount of initiative you can have per second if you min/max those traits. I know its easy to theorycraft what is going to happen here and there is a lot of danger in that. It is hard to get a sense of this change without playing it, and believe me if I could I would let everyone test a change of this magnitude and gather some more empirical and data driven feedback, but currently our resources are limited, but we still believe that this is a change whose time has come. We will monitor it very carefully when we do release it to make sure it is working as intended.

Infiltrator’s Return
The thing I have heard the second most discussion regarding. This is a big change to this skill, but we beleive it is a necessary one. In many cases this is not going to matter. There are only 2 situations where this is a truly impactful change.
1) It stops you from using this skill while stunned, which puts more burden on Sword/Dagger thieves saving their stun breakers. This is the kind of gameplay we want to encourage because it puts more risk in using a rewarding skill like Infiltrator’s Strike.
2) Mostly in PvP, this skill can no longer be used by S/D thieves to teleport stomp someone. This is actually the more impactful moment as it occurs more often, but I think it puts the burden on these players to run a second weapon set that can help them in these situations (OH pistol for instance.)

Thank you for taking the time to come out and give your thoughts these changes, It’s also nice that your still discussing some of the concerns the community has internally. Just a few comments and question about a few things that been said.

Initiative changes
Personally I never had a problem with traiting for initiative management, it was like making a build in GW1 where you had to consider energy management in your build. I always felt is was a nice throw-back to that.

Infiltrator’s Return
This one will hurt a lot i feel, we lose quite a bit of utility. The ability to secure stomp is important imo. Yes black powder can be used in most situations, but what about when your target covered in aoe? Is there anyway to keep the instant cast but can get blacked out during disables?

And just to add to what evilapprentice.6379 has said about Hard to Catch. IMO that trait still won’t be taking a whole lot. It’s a bit too RNG, you can’t really control when you get disabled, or where you’ll end up. It’s the same with Last Refuge, we can’t even tell when it comes off CD, so we can’t prepare.
I know has there been some discussion about too much on the UI, but imo, these traits ( if you want to keep the current function) needs some sort of tell to know when they are active. Even better would be to know when they are about to come off CD.

As a PvE player I’m totally disheartened to see a useful skill like infiltrator’s return getting trashed to fix stomping problems. If stomps are going wrong then fix the peculiar stomping mechanics instead of breaking class skills. A statement such as “it puts the burden on these players to run a second weapon set that can help them in these situations” only gives me the impression that you’re trying to stop this weapon set being fit for purpose.

Forcing thieves to slot more stun breakers also seems a bad idea. Thieves already have a lot of vulnerability when maintaining dps, so adding further vulnerability will just push thieves further behind other classes that can perform better with lower risk.