Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing for around 4 months now, mainly in PvP with a S/D Marauder build which I’m happy with, however since I wanted to improve I played with each class to learn what they can do so I can battle against them better, but I noticed something when studied each PvP build for every class, the Minor Master trait for Daredevil, Driven Fortitude, plainly sucks compared to other specializations from the rest of professions, even Thief itself, if you don’t know what that trait does it heals the Thief every time it evades an attack, the problem comes when with a >17k HP pool it heals for 400 with a 1 second cooldown, on the other hand, the other professions have much better Minor Master traits that go from for example:

Furious Demise which gives the Necromancer Fury when it enters on Shroud mode being a nice bonus.

Transmute for Engineer which, as the name says, transmutes a condition to a boon with a cooldown of 15 seconds which is actually really nice.

Or Illusionist’s Celerity and Flow of Time for Mesmer that give 20% cooldown reduction on Illusions and Alacrity every time you shatter an Illusion respectively making them incredible bonuses that you don’t have to invest any point in them.

Keep in mind that 3 of those 4 examples used non-Elite Specializations.

I know I don’t have any power to change things but I would like to share how I think this trait could be modified to make it relevant:

Leave the healing value as it is but remove the cooldown, that would make sense from a lore point of view since it’s a DAREdevil which should survive really chaotic and risky scenarios, it would still be useless against 1v1 scenarios where the opponent (NPC or Player) hits you with single, powerful strikes, but it would make you survive much better on scenarios where fast consecutive attacks or a lot of AoE damage is dealt, the con of this option is that it would most likely heal the Thief for at least half of his/her total HP every time it dodged on a big team fight in PvP or in a big AoE attack on PvE making it broken.

The other approach I though of is one that I’m sure a lot of people have though, just increase the numbers, make the Thief heal for more making it relevant during the gameplay but with a bigger cooldown to compensate for the “buff”, I think that maybe a 2k heal with 10-15 secs cooldown should be nice.

So what do you think fellow players? Do you agree with my idea?

Things without icd have a great potential to spin out of control.
Aaand I also dont think the game or our profession needs any more heals.
I would rather add a secondary effect.
It cant be initiative, since we already have that on dodge and DD doesnt need to become even more a replacement of acro then it already is.
Endurance would be an idea, to reward our opponents to stop spamming into our dodges and rather time their attacks. Then again it would make dodge spamming for us even easier.
How about instead of healing we get a stack increasing healing power.
So effects like assassins reward or our heal skills are much stronger if successfully evading a couple of attacks. That would lead to stronger synergy with acrobatics, make the traitline more viable on burst builds and promote good use of ressources.

Just run D/D or S/D so you can evade every second

Asrat.2645:

Things without icd have a great potential to spin out of control.
Aaand I also dont think the game or our profession needs any more heals.
I would rather add a secondary effect.
It cant be initiative, since we already have that on dodge and DD doesnt need to become even more a replacement of acro then it already is.
Endurance would be an idea, to reward our opponents to stop spamming into our dodges and rather time their attacks. Then again it would make dodge spamming for us even easier.
How about instead of healing we get a stack increasing healing power.
So effects like assassins reward or our heal skills are much stronger if successfully evading a couple of attacks. That would lead to stronger synergy with acrobatics, make the traitline more viable on burst builds and promote good use of ressources.

It’s funny because the Acrobatics specialization of Thief has the Endurance bonus you talk about: when you evade an attack gain Vigor for 5 seconds. Healing Power I find it useless, at least on PvP where you heal at precise times and only with your healing skill so the current trait would be better in that case, I agree that without cooldown it would be OP but the second option was to improve our 1v1 game play in PvP since we could use an improvement.

Ghotistyx.6942:

Just run D/D or S/D so you can evade every second

As you can read on the first line of my post I use a S/D build, even with that 400 HP for every dodge is a bad trade, it’s a really valuable resource to waste spamming it.

Hmm. lets just say you successfully evade 10 times in 30 seconds with dodges. Not considering sd or dd extra evades.
With 430 healing on each evade this actually adds up really fast. I’d say the trait is arguably weak.
I dont like the single heal for several reasons:
-It could very well turn out to be less healing total
-It could very well turn out to be way too much healing total
-It could trigger at the beginning at combat after the first bleeding tick, effectively being wasted and unavailable for an extended duration where you might need it.
-It doesnt reward your opponent. Right now it can be the smarter choice to not attack a dodge spamming thief. Holding back your key skills and not letting excapists absolution or driven fortitude proc. With this skill it wouldnt really matter, you’d only have to dodge a single attack and the other evades are just that.
-This could be killed by a single instance of poison
No. I really dont think I like the single strong heal either. Its not exactly a terrible iDea, but i dont see the need for or the advantage in it.
Ncrs. And driven fortitude aint broken enough to need fixing.

Just did a test, no vigor, no CDs, full Endurance, in 30 secs you have 6 dodges spamming (obvious thing since every dodge takes 10 seconds to charge), and since the trait says “when you successfully evade an attack” you don’t have to worry about poison/bleed ticks.

I agree that if it isn’t broken don’t fix it but why there are professions with decent/good Minor Master traits and there are others that are barely noticeable (DD isn’t the only one with bad ones), I see more healing with a longer cooldown like a good solution, of course, I’m speaking from a PvP point of view, from a PvE one where you can peacefully spam dodge systematically without any harsh repercussion it’s obviously better to have a lower heal for just a 1 sec cooldown, it the long run of course you heal more with the actual trait but I’m trying to make it noticeable when you play, I’m looking for burst healing, not total healing, I prefer surviving situations where I should have died that healing more in the long run, you can’t dodge when you’re dead hahaha.

Im assuming channeled vigor and signet of agility for such scenarios.
I dont say your suggestion is particulary bad, but there are potential problems with it and I dont think the change is important enough to happen.

If you’re going to use Channeled Vigor for Endurance either you have full HP and you don’t need the passive or if you do it for HP you healed enough where that trait is not needed anymore, for Signet of Agility it should be used as a last resort escape so 400 or 800 HP aren’t going to save you.

Well, obviously it’s not going to happen, it’s not a severe problem, I prefer that they tone down Mesmer and Revenant first than to make this trait better but yeah, as with any change problems may occur, but by just increasing the heal to 1k-2k and the cooldown to max 10 secs I don’t see how it could go bad, maybe for PvE vs AoE heavy battles? But even with that passive and active recoveries should keep you alive no problem even with that change.

It does not add anything to gameplay. Don’t know the point of it’s existence beyond filler meant to look like it serves a purpose.

Hahaha, yeah, it basically does that on PvP, on PvE which I don’t play much I suppose it serves for sustain on big AoE battles or vs a large group of NPCs but even with that 400 HP heals having HP pools higher than 18k it’s unnoticeable.

It’s too bad, as there is an opportunity to add something just with one trait. Like ‘after a successful evade for 2s you cannot be interrupted’. Both the player and the opponent can at least play with that created situation.

Yeah, that’s also a possibility, instead of healing give that trait another use, that isn’t a bad idea either.

Espidow.1729:

As you can read on the first line of my post I use a S/D build, even with that 400 HP for every dodge is a bad trade, it’s a really valuable resource to waste spamming it.

I mean, you could run either weapon set and not be able to evade every second. 400+ health isn’t actually the worst reward for evading, and with the icd at 1s, you can theoretically get 400+ hps. That’s pretty quality healing when you need it (in combat and evading)

If you look it for total healing yes, healing 400 HP each second is nice, if you look it on a real scenario in my opinion is not good, yes, if you dodge every second for a while you’ll recover quite some health but at least from a PvP stand point you need burst healing to survive, it doesn’t matter if you can recover 4k HP in 10 secs if you’re going to die in 1, that’s why increasing the healing even if you increase the cooldown makes it relevant, it makes you get out alive from some situations where you should be dead, it’s a pretty good deal, impossible-to-keep-up sustain for survivability.

I just wish they would switch it with escapist’s absolution. That one is a more universally useful trait, and I would love to have it and impacting disruption at the same time.

I do not think you can look at the trait standalone and compare on a one for one with other traits.

As example “fast Hands” lowers recharge on weapon swap.. That pretty decent but in the same line you get Versatile power which gains might and allows burst to recharge faster. Now you throw in brawlers recovery and the act of swapping weapons, coupled with an on swap sigil makes a warrior swap of weapons better that any other profession if traited. Fast hands becomes very much better just because of what else traited with it.

Same too with driven fortitude on an evade. If it the only thing that happned on an evade it would be subpar but you can trait vigor, regen , condition cleanse , a lower cooldown on steal and INI regen. That makes the thief evades out of the ordinary.

Added to that were I wanting that heal to be meaningful just as a heal I would want to trait up other skills/traits/utilities to match up with it. SOM as example on an evasive attack with driven fortitude. Throw in assassins and or IP and suddenly there a lot more healing coming in. You can get regen uo full time out of acro seemingly a paltry 130 but stacked with fortitude or some other source and the heal is decent.

Just as example . I traited up a d/d condi build using this along with SOM and assassins reward.. Regen has high up time off the PR in acro. Healing in the build brings that regen to 270 per second and SOM close to 200 per hit.

Assassins reward gets about 800 on a DB and driven forttude around 540 per evade.

Against a single target this build can heal around 600+540+800 if there an evade and an extra 280 comes in per second with regen. That ~ 2 k per death blossom with evade plus regen. Between evade frames if that enemy hits you every time for 2k you will stay at full health.

Now this a WvW build and I doubt it translates well into PvP but a whole lot of or traits that seem useless in PvP are much more effective in Pve And WvW. PvP is limiting in that regard.

I do not think it useless in other words. I do think in certain builds what it adds is marginal. It predicated on the build and what you want to accomplish with it.

seems like a good trait to me
only problem is it isn’t very visible. it’s a lot of relatively hidden sustain