Guild Wars 2

I want to know the general consensus regarding the quickness trait and utility. I do like quickness, but I’m wondering if either are really worth taking in their current state over other traits and utilities a thief has.

Critical Haste is a master trait in the CS tree. It procs at a 25% chance on a critical hit for 2 seconds on a 30 second cooldown. In my opinion, I feel that this trait lasts far too short and is on cooldown for far too long to make much use of it. Furious Retaliation seems to out perform it, even when solo.

Haste is a trick utility skill. It activates immediately and works as a stun breaker. The downside is that it reduces endurance to 0 and cuts endurance regeneration by 50% on a 60 second cooldown. In my opinion, Haste just seems…okay. It’s a huge tradeoff having no endurance for 6 seconds, but having Signet of Agility or someone providing Vigor makes it less dangerous to use.

My problem with this though is that this requires having two utility slots dedicated to the usage of extra DPS from Haste and under the assumption that a thief is running full DPS utilities of Signets of Agility and Assassin, you lose the utility of Smokescreen and Shadow Refuge, which seems too valuable in group play. If you want to take Smokescreen or Shadow Refuge in addition to Haste, you’d have have to give up one of the Signets…which would obviously be Assassin as Agility synergies better with Haste. Unfortunately, I don’t know if giving up Assassin for the Haste + Agility combo is actually better or worse.

Thoughts? Is going for quickness worth it at all?

I personally dislike Critical Haste. I don’t like passive abilities on random triggers like this with such long cooldowns, and the last thing you want to happen is have it go off for nothing. I suppose it’s not much different than a wasted signet CD, but at least you can control those. Some people like it though

Haste is not good. There are much better utilities (like you mention).

If the effect time and cooldown timedidn’t have such a large difference between eachother, this utility would see more use.

I have been using Critical Haste for a while and honestly find it to be a bit under-tuned, so I’ll be tweaking my build soon and likely bumping it off.

I used to use Haste all the the time, but less so nowadays because I find that, while the utility is fairly decent, it gets edged out a lot mostly because it sacrifices defense for offense when, if anything, the Thief more often needs the opposite. It’s a decent skill, though.

Quickness is great, but sometimes it can do more harm than good to the user, especially when dealing with evades.

The trait is meh.

The utility is too “nerfed” at the moment. With the 60s CD, the reduction of endurance regen, and endurance drain, it adds up to too much.

IMO the cool down needs to be lowered slightly, and either the endurance drain or negative regen needs to be dropped entirely.

Haste should be on the skill bar of anyone grinding up a thief the “normal way”.

I remenber that when I used to train both of my thiefs, I had critical haste, haste and sigil of rage for an awesome Quicknes uptime.
It made grinding thief even more awesome when I could dodge anything with BP and attack really fast with criticals (that Ragnarok assassin feeling)

But yeh, randon triggers and the endurance issue are both a problem,
Critical haste used to work on S/D builds, but most S/D thieves don’t trait on CS anymore.

D/D and D/P don’t use CH because it screw ups the Dagger 1# timing rotation.
It still works fairly great on Pistols and Shortbows tough.