Guild Wars 2

This post is both a suggestion and a bit of an experiment on a new post style for me (apparently the Devs prefer bullet points over walls of text).

Anyone who has tried it extensively should have found out by now that HtC is not particularly reliable as a stun breaker due to some of its detrimental tendencies. For instance:
1. Wasting itself on trivial mini stuns that you wouldn’t normally want to stun break
2. Taking you out of melee range when you need to keep up melee pressure
3. Teleporting you closer to the enemy when you want to disengage

With the Dec 10 patch, ANet proposed to disable the use of Shadow Return while CC’ed, so Thieves will become even more vulnerable to CC lockdown than we already are. Access to Hard to Catch in its current unreliable state as a Master trait is simply not enough to counteract this change, because no one will ever use it for any serious build as its oftentimes a liability due to the tendencies listed above, among others.

As such, I would recommend changing HtC to the following:
Healing skills are instant and break stuns.

This change would have the following benefits:
1. Thieves can choose between access to an extra stun breaker with very low cooldown (Withdraw) or one that also reduces condi pressure (HiS) or their healing signet could break stuns if for some reason they want to play a poor-man’s sustain warrior.
2. This stun breaker would be available to any build regardless of which utilities it needs to bring (venom share anyone?)
3. This stun breaker is reliable due to its on-demand nature, as opposed to the forced reactive stunbreak + RNG shadowstep of the original

Thoughts?

Sorry I don’t agree with hiS being instant cast. In no way should that heal of all the heals in the game not be interuptable.

Withdraw would work exactly like roll for ini so I can’t see that happening. Whether people want to admit it or not now and after the sword nerf we have access to a decent amount of stun breakers.

Not forgetting our access to stealth and high mobility it would just be too much. Sorry but idea is kinda broken.

It’s a shame that HTC didn’t work similar to the trap so u can actually set it with f2 or something. If that was too broken maybe it could return you to your last steal location (within reason and a relevant cooldown)

I wrote this idea about rework of Hard to catch already in patch preview:
Now it will stubreak you and refill your endurance (instead of teleport and swiftness). It is still “Hard to catch” but now it is quite useful even if it was just short CC.

This gave me an idea I’d like to see. When stunned, give the player a target-able shadow step on f2, 900 range. Something like a 5-10 second timer before it is no longer available. It is still RNG with the HtC icd but it’s better than the crap they gave us right now.

Hard to Catch suggestion:
Change Dodge to a non-stunbreaking Shadowstep back, instant and doable while CC’d.
Or change it so that you can press F2 or dodge or stomp/interact while CC’d to activate the backwards port, as Hype.8032 suggests.

The current state of HtC is not viable. I’d like the update to happen and move it back to Grandmaster. It’s worthy of that.

HtC is one of the worse trait we have if not THE worst… It ports you randomly and normaly on the worse possible time.

i.e.
- Chasing someone that is about to die, you get CCed and ported far far away from your dying enemy allowing him to escape.

- Enemy is being stomped and knocks you down / fears / knocks back and you get ported away from him.

We have NO control over this shadowstep and it puts thieves in disadvantage more often then it helps… It should be removed completely along with Improvisation and Last Refuge.

i agree about to revamp this trait, the think that i most hate is tha devs wanna bring it down to master tier like someting great fro thieves which is not. Please Anet, dont treat us like stupids, you can bringing down this trait to adep tier and nobody will even take it, is just bad designed, is even bad in PvE when it teleport you away from you party in the most needed moment.

Its a bad designed trait, and say that you put it in master tier for better is a bad and disrespectful way to miss diretion us of the bad nerfs you are bringing.