Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I thought about creating a list of possible changes to improve the steal mechanic of the thief and hope you will add your ideas to the list.

Please be aware that the ideas in the list wont take account the changes of each other and each idea has to be looked at individualy. Only 1 or 2 of the ideas should be implemented. Otherwise stealing would become way to overpowered

I will start with some ideas and hope that you will add alot of other ideas to it

Basic:

• Reduce the cooldown from 45 to 35 seconds. (Class mechanic of thief has such a high cd compared to other classes)

• Make it possible to have more then one stolen skill (F2 to F4) and add a steal mechanic to 1 or 2 skills. The skills with steal mechanic shouldnt trigger “on steal” traits.

• Better indication of what the stolen skill does (Kasama.8941)

• Increase the base range of stealing to 1200. change the trait that does it to something else (Issues.5789)

• Put the stolen skills on F2 and change the F1 to a shadow return after stealing. (Folk.2093)

• Make steal a ground targeted AoE that steals from up to 3 targets (randomfightfan.4091)

• Increase number of stolen skills you can have at the same time (F2 – F3) and maybe add cooldowns between the use of each stored skill,
  tone down the skills for balance,
  2% faster steal recharge per trait point (instead of 1%)
  and more: please read full post for more info: long post by Auesis.7301 (3 posts long)

Traits:

• Combine some of the traits (not all that will be listed). Some give only a minor bonus.
  Long Reach – increase range,
  Serpent’s Touch – 10s poison on steal
  Sleight of Hand – 1s daze on steal (grandmaster trait. rly? thief has at least two other ways to apply daze more efficient)

• Sleight of Hand – 1s daze on steal Steal recharge 20% faster (grandmaster trait)

• Improvisation: Stealing recharges all skills of one type two types. (With only one type you’d need to have 5 skill types equipped to get a granted recharge. To get 5 types, you’d have to equip the healing signet AND the elite venom. Changing the skill to work for two types will make it viable for more builds)
  (inspired by Travlane.5948 . His idea was to only recharge skills types you have equipped. But that would be to strong because you could pick up to 4 skills with the same type.)

Stolen Skills:

added some ideas and reserving some space for more ideas

I made a lengthy post a while back about improving Steal. Here’s a re-hash of it:

Firstly, the mechanic itself:

F1: Functions as normal, however, it is now a Shadowstep. It does not cure any conditions or break stun, but it has a Shadow Return mechanic that is active for 10 seconds after the Steal. This emphasises what a steal actually is: you don’t sprint up to a target, rip something from their hands and then stare at them. This gives the option of a more elusive stealing manoeuvre for players who choose to remain at range.

F2, F3 and F4: These are now “pockets”. When the Thief uses Steal, the stolen skill is placed in to F2, then F3 and then F4 if none are used during the Stealing process. These skills last until a map change or until you are downed. If you attempt to steal more than you can carry, the Thief will dump the F4 skill, and the skills will cycle across to accommodate the new stolen skill in F2.

Example: A Thief is facing two opponents. During the fight, he steals from both. F2 gives him a Fear skill, and F3 gives him a Chill skill. While cornered, he quickly pulls out and uses the Fear skill. The Chill skill then cycles back to F2, and a subsequent steal puts the next Fear skill in F3.
That basically outlines the actual mechanical change to Steal. Now the nitty gritty:

Secondly, the Stolen skills:

Giving such diversity to the Steal mechanic means that some of the Stolen skills are going to be immensely powerful such that they are not realistic in the new pocket setup. Thus, the individual skills will need to be toned down to compensate for the plethora of combinations and utility that Steal can now give. PvE skills can remain the same simply for the case of making the Thief’s unique mechanic useful in dungeon environments etc, but PvP equivalents need to be mixed up. Thus:

Mace Head Crack: This daze is reduced to 3s.
Whirling Axe: Attacks 33% faster, but now does not reflect projectiles.
Throw Gunk: Can remain the same.
Healing Seed: This removes a condition, plants a small Water field and gives a small flat heal instead of regeneration.
Blinding Tuft: This now has no attached blind condition, and is renamed to “Illusory Tuft”, “Cloaking Tuft” or a similiar name.
Ice Shard Stab: Chill reduced to 6 seconds.
Consume Plasma: Still grants Stability for 3 seconds and Retaliation for 5 seconds, but all other boons are also reduced to 5 seconds. Gain 3 Might stacks instead of 1. Cast time reduced to 1/4s.
Skull Fear: Instead of functioning identical to “Fear Me!”, it is a straight up 2s Fear from 0-600 range.

All PvE equivalent stolen skills can remain the same, or perhaps improved. I’m open for suggestions on those, too. Those are just changes from the top of my head, but yeah, having access to 3 of these skills at once if prepared for it could become problematic, hence the toning down of them in a PvP area. You could just attach an internal cooldown between skills, also.

Finally, the Traits:

1) Mug: After the recent discussion about non-crit and lifesteal, not sure how I would go about changing this. It seems fine with this new setup.

2) Acrobatics and Trickery: +% Boon Duration and +Condition Damage are swapped in the trait trees. This leaves Trickery with +% Boon Duration and +% Steal Recharge Rate and Acrobatics with +Vitality and +Condition Damage. This gives the natural boons from Trickery more synergy.

3) Trickery: Currently gives +1% Steal Recharge Rate per point. This increases to +2% per point.

thanks alot, that are some nice ideas you have

I think since the no crit nerf, this would make steal quite useful again. I really like all these ideas. I’d personally say to make it base 1200 range, and make the trickery trait into something else.

1200 base range would be strong, but i will add it to the list

crouze.3078:

1200 base range would be strong, but i will add it to the list

Well they want thieves to have high mobility. I think this will definitely make a difference, and we’ll have other uses for mug since no more bursty bursty.

yeah, you could also change the trait to give even more range on stealing. so the thief becomes the best profession to chase a target

Here’s to hoping they add more mobility to thief lol.

Remove Steal. I just want Shadowstep and Shadow Refuge as baseline skills, now i can actually play a venom build without losing tons of mobility.

yiksing.9432:

Remove Steal. I just want Shadowstep and Shadow Refuge as baseline skills, now i can actually play a venom build without losing tons of mobility.

No steal for a thief? that would be like a mesmer without illusions or a elementalist without attunements… would be just wrong in my oppinion.

I’d like steal to be an ground target aoe where you steal from anything in the area (max target cap of 3) and trait effects effect all hit. This would go well with the new mug so you could do a nice small aoe burst (similar to a cluster bomb) with a quick 6k heal. I mostly got the idea from bountiful theft though. Striping 2 boons from 3 targets would help a LOT in things like tpvp where EVERYONE is boon heavy bunkers. It would also give more mobility to the thief as it’s a ground targeted shadowstep. Don’t know how this would affect the stolen skills but I’m sure something could be thought up.

Just replace Steal with some ‘Shadow Warrior’ teleport and rename the class to Assassin. The class behaves more like an assassin/ninja than a thief anyway. Steal was just a poorly designed gimmick (the ability doesn’t even make sense) in order to change the name to Thief in my opinion.

No need for a compilation of suggestions when what you really want can be done in 2 steps. Rename the class to Assassin and slap on some wierd shadow teleport. There’s your ninja (which is apparently what everyone wants but doesn’t want to say it out loud).

Aveneo.2068:

Just replace Steal with some ‘Shadow Warrior’ teleport and rename the class to Assassin. The class behaves more like an assassin/ninja than a thief anyway. Steal was just a poorly designed gimmick (the ability doesn’t even make sense) in order to change the name to Thief in my opinion.

No need for a compilation of suggestions when what you really want can be done in 2 steps. Rename the class to Assassin and slap on some wierd shadow teleport. There’s your ninja (which is apparently what everyone wants but doesn’t want to say it out loud).

Joking right? Steal is great and how does “steal” not make sense on a thief?

randomfightfan.4091:

I’d like steal to be an ground target aoe where you steal from anything in the area (max target cap of 3) and trait effects effect all hit. This would go well with the new mug so you could do a nice small aoe burst (similar to a cluster bomb) with a quick 6k heal. I mostly got the idea from bountiful theft though. Striping 2 boons from 3 targets would help a LOT in things like tpvp where EVERYONE is boon heavy bunkers. It would also give more mobility to the thief as it’s a ground targeted shadowstep. Don’t know how this would affect the stolen skills but I’m sure something could be thought up.

I think that would need a major nerf for most stealing traits and would make the thief less efficient in 1v1 situations.

Ground targeted would make it harder to use as a gap closer but the idea is not bad.

randomfightfan.4091:

Joking right? Steal is great and how does “steal” not make sense on a thief?

Yeah, I’m tons of laughs at parties with my dry humor.

I did not say that Steal makes no sense on a Thief; I said the ability makes no sense.

If ANet were to remove Steal, rename the class to Assassin and give you a 1200 range teleport on F1; most of you would probably be overjoyed and quickly forget about Steal.

But currently I read the OP and the suggestions make me believe some of you guys want F1 to become like the ‘Hand of God’. I mean cd reduction? base range of 1200 (so traited to 1500 I assume)? Shadowstep/return? Area steal? To me this thread feels less about the concept of ‘stealing’ and more about what it would be like to become a god simply by pressing F1.

I do hope we’re on the same page here in believing that every class mechanic is just a gimmick? Ranger pets are a gimmick, Mesmer shatters are a gimmick, Warrior burst skills are a gimmick. So if you want to offer suggestions, you should also be realistic and treat Steal like one in my humble opinion.

Ever since I first heard about the Thief class, something didn’t sit right with me. Reading about what Steal would do didn’t sit right with me either. So to me the Thief is just a thinly veiled Assassin with Steal tacked on. Who knows, NCSoft could have been against the Assassin class as they pulled the plug on anything remotely related to Cantha.

60% recharge instead of 30% from traits, no other changes.

But then the ability is still lousy for anyone who does not trait heavily into Trickery.

Aveneo.2068:

But currently I read the OP and the suggestions make me believe some of you guys want F1 to become like the ‘Hand of God’. I mean cd reduction? base range of 1200 (so traited to 1500 I assume)? Shadowstep/return? Area steal? To me this thread feels less about the concept of ‘stealing’ and more about what it would be like to become a god simply by pressing F1.

As i said at the beginning: look at them individually.

Dont think that these ideas should be all implemented together. lol

Its more like “only one” and we are good. Maybe implement 2 of them… but i totally agree that it would be way to overpowered if the whole list would be implemented in the game ^^

I like steal as it works now. The only thing I would like to see, is a better indication of what your stolen skill does. More clearly readable steal skill icons (using distinctive colors and shapes), and possibly a kind of popup message, with one to three words, that describes the usage of the stolen skill.

Kasama.8941:

I like steal as it works now. The only thing I would like to see, is a better indication of what your stolen skill does. More clearly readable steal skill icons (using distinctive colors and shapes), and possibly a kind of popup message, with one to three words, that describes the usage of the stolen skill.

I think its allready pretty good. But maybe increase the size of the icon.

The devs wanted to lower the burst of mug, which is fine with me. However, if it was me, I would have just lowered the cooldown while removing the ability to crit. This would offset the burst while increasing the damage to offset the dps loss. At the same time, this would allow thiefs to use their unique ability more often.

I know the heal was added because the devs want to increase thief defense. I agree that this is an issue that needs to be addressed, but just adding a heal to the ability is a clunky way to do this. Decreasing the cooldown instead would still assist with defense since so many stolen abilities grant defensive utility.

crouze.3078:

Kasama.8941:

I like steal as it works now. The only thing I would like to see, is a better indication of what your stolen skill does. More clearly readable steal skill icons (using distinctive colors and shapes), and possibly a kind of popup message, with one to three words, that describes the usage of the stolen skill.

I think its allready pretty good. But maybe increase the size of the icon.

Yeah, but it would be nice for new Thieves. If you asked a bunch of level 40 Thieves, if they use steal or not, I will guarantee that the majority of them would say “no” or “very rarely”. Steal has a very steep learning curve.

Although I like the “pocket” system, but how are you going to prevent someone from hoarding stolen items?

Imagine if I have Mace Head Crack, Whirling Axe, and Consume Plasma. Can you see the potential problem with that setup?

I use Consume Plasma -> Steal/SS -> MHC -> Whirling Axe -> Steal/SR

Or Throw Gunk, Mace Head Crack, and Whirling Axe Combo?

All that damage and skills from one mechanic is not a good thing.

I am for the reduce cool down, but for 30s, that’s all we needed. With a reduced cool down, it’s like having multiple pocket already without the ability to hoard stolen items for some insane burst potential.

Mug – One way to fix Mug is to remove the damage and make it cause a 1s knockdown, that way the name and flavor of the skill makes sense.

I am for the “Sleight of Hand – 1s daze on steal Steal recharge 20% faster (grandmaster trait).” I’d like that.

I think that’s all the steal mechanic needs. No AoE steal. No 1200 range. No “pockets”. No SS/SR.

Just keep in mind that whatever you want to change Steal to that you also consider how it would play out with many different scenarios. Also identify any potential abuse in combination with other skills, because if this change will produce more problems than a solution, it is not worth Anet’s time to add more problem to their plate. Let’s keep things reasonable and keep in mind that any major overhaul of any single mechanic is kinda too late to change unless they want to overhaul the entire game.

Steal should TP you behind your target.

It makes more sense to steal someone from behind rather than from in front of them, plus hitting foes by behind or the sides is one of our profession characteristics (traits and skills).

1- Steal should work in yellow targets, like world bosses, objets, walls and doors in pvp and so.

2- Steal should always steal 1 random buff from target and 3 if traited, 1 of them shared whith his/her team.

1. Steal takes boons. So i dont have to go S/D to steal boons. Add the trait you can nearly fully strip someone (4 boons), without the trait it still takes 2.

2. Lower cooldown. It is the opener on Dagger/x, and always will be used as an opener.

3. Have it work with venoms in some way that is interesting, venoms are very boring at the moment and are also a thief mechanic.

4. Shadowstep back after steal, since if your a full range build, it just isnt used enough.

5. Elemental steal should be throwable so it can be used at range. Engineer steal is awesome, but to easy to avoid, also struggle to beat engineers in a fight and find the other class steals really help to kill that class but engineer one doesn’t.

6. Steal should not be blockable by aegis, but take aegis.

7. Steal should shadowstep if no target is selected to improve mobility.

8. Completely seperate but basalisk venom should do high damage, and be able to crit, and be unavoidable since it is an elite, and would give back the burst that mug is loosing on the steal.

I don’t know/care if steal should take boons or simply remove boons. But it should do something against boons. The Mug trait would no longer deal damage, but would put a debuff on the target making it so they can’t get new boons for X seconds.

I’d also change steal so it had a 50% chance to stealth you (trait increases this to 100% and reduce the cooldown) as you’re clearly not a very good thief if you’re caught doing it!

I’d also like to see the ability gained when attacking another thief changed. While it’s useful, I think the thief class has enough ways to stealth that it doesn’t need to steal a new one. Hell, why not make it so instead of stealing from a thief you put a rotten egg in their pocket and you can see them when stealthed for 5 seconds.

i just want better stuff to steal.
i mean what you get from guard, ele, engi are just much much worse than from war, thief or necro. regen from ranger and short boons from mesmer are meh.

Possible changes to the Thieves F mechanics:

1) Put venoms on the F bar (F2-4). Your choice which venoms. Number of venoms on the F bar debatable. Could just be 1 on F2. Leave venoms as utility skills as well. Venomshare only works on utility venom, not F venom.
2) Steal breaks stuns
3) Gain 5 seconds of protection on steal
4) Stealing grants 10 seconds swiftness (seriously, we need more swiftness access)

Not all at once of course, each are separate. Swiftness is a big deal though, 10s on steal if traited, or a couple of seconds on evade don’t really cut it for the supposed most mobile class in the game. SoS isn’t even the best speed signet anymore, and is often a waste on the utility bar anyway.

Katsumoto.9452:

Possible changes to the Thieves F mechanics:

1) Put venoms on the F bar (F2-4). Your choice which venoms. Number of venoms on the F bar debatable. Could just be 1 on F2. Leave venoms as utility skills as well. Venomshare only works on utility venom, not F venom.
2) Steal breaks stuns
3) Gain 5 seconds of protection on steal
4) Stealing grants 10 seconds swiftness (seriously, we need more swiftness access)

Not all at once of course, each are separate. Swiftness is a big deal though, 10s on steal if traited, or a couple of seconds on evade don’t really cut it for the supposed most mobile class in the game. SoS isn’t even the best speed signet anymore, and is often a waste on the utility bar anyway.

steal already gives 10s swiftness. 10 points into trickery. Thrill of the crime is AMAZING.

Katsumoto.9452:

Possible changes to the Thieves F mechanics:

1) Put venoms on the F bar (F2-4). Your choice which venoms. Number of venoms on the F bar debatable. Could just be 1 on F2. Leave venoms as utility skills as well. Venomshare only works on utility venom, not F venom.
2) Steal breaks stuns
3) Gain 5 seconds of protection on steal
4) Stealing grants 10 seconds swiftness (seriously, we need more swiftness access)

Not all at once of course, each are separate. Swiftness is a big deal though, 10s on steal if traited, or a couple of seconds on evade don’t really cut it for the supposed most mobile class in the game. SoS isn’t even the best speed signet anymore, and is often a waste on the utility bar anyway.

The protection would be nice since the thief is squishy. But i dont think that it would fit the steal. protection would be better on stealth^^

randomfightfan.4091:

Katsumoto.9452:

Possible changes to the Thieves F mechanics:

1) Put venoms on the F bar (F2-4). Your choice which venoms. Number of venoms on the F bar debatable. Could just be 1 on F2. Leave venoms as utility skills as well. Venomshare only works on utility venom, not F venom.
2) Steal breaks stuns
3) Gain 5 seconds of protection on steal
4) Stealing grants 10 seconds swiftness (seriously, we need more swiftness access)

Not all at once of course, each are separate. Swiftness is a big deal though, 10s on steal if traited, or a couple of seconds on evade don’t really cut it for the supposed most mobile class in the game. SoS isn’t even the best speed signet anymore, and is often a waste on the utility bar anyway.

steal already gives 10s swiftness. 10 points into trickery. Thrill of the crime is AMAZING.

As is the ability to read. I clearly knew of thrill of the crime as I stated our swiftness giving abilities, one of which was 10s swiftness on steal if traited. The suggestion is for swiftness regardless of the trait, and the trait giving a further 10.

*Another suggestion, would be to literally steal a key skill from being used by them. On steal, you blow a random cooldown on the enemies utility bar. You don’t gain it for yourself, but you put it on full cooldown. But tbh, that’d probably be OP.

crouze.3078:

Hi,

I thought about creating a list of possible changes to improve the steal mechanic of the thief and hope you will add your ideas to the list.

Please be aware that the ideas in the list wont take account the changes of each other and each idea has to be looked at individualy. Only 1 or 2 of the ideas should be implemented. Otherwise stealing would become way to overpowered

I will start with some ideas and hope that you will add alot of other ideas to it

Basic:

• Reduce the cooldown from 45 to 35 seconds. (Class mechanic of thief has such a high cd compared to other classes)

• Make it possible to have more then one stolen skill (F2 to F4) and add a steal mechanic to 1 or 2 skills. The skills with steal mechanic shouldnt trigger “on steal” traits.

• Better indication of what the stolen skill does (Kasama.8941)

• Increase the base range of stealing to 1200. change the trait that does it to something else (Issues.5789)

• Put the stolen skills on F2 and change the F1 to a shadow return after stealing. (Folk.2093)

• Make steal a ground targeted AoE that steals from up to 3 targets (randomfightfan.4091)

• Increase number of stolen skills you can have at the same time,
  tone down the skills for balance,
  and more: long post by Auesis.7301 (3 posts long)

Traits:

• Combine some of the traits (not all that will be listed). Some give only a minor bonus.
  Long Reach – increase range,
  Serpent’s Touch – 10s poison on steal
  Sleight of Hand – 1s daze on steal (grandmaster trait. rly? thief has at least two other ways to apply daze more efficient)

• Sleight of Hand – 1s daze on steal Steal recharge 20% faster (grandmaster trait)

• Improvisation: Stealing recharges all skills of one type two types. (With only one type you’d need to have 5 skill types equipped to get a granted recharge. To get 5 types, you’d have to equip the healing signet AND the elite venom. Changing the skill to work for two types will make it viable for more builds)
  (inspired by Travlane.5948 . His idea was to only recharge skills types you have equipped. But that would be to strong because you could pick up to 4 skills with the same type.)

Stolen Skills:

thanks for the shout out but what i “meant” it should recharge ONE of the skill types you have equiped and could add a “(2 max)” or something. i mean i used it with 2 deceptions 1 trick the other day and not 1 recharged after 10 steals. tbh ive used it about 20-25 times my entire life as a thief on gw2 and i cant remember it working once…..i cant even vouch that it does :P

Auesis.7301:

Secondly, the Stolen skills:

Giving such diversity to the Steal mechanic means that some of the Stolen skills are going to be immensely powerful such that they are not realistic in the new pocket setup. Thus, the individual skills will need to be toned down to compensate for the plethora of combinations and utility that Steal can now give. PvE skills can remain the same simply for the case of making the Thief’s unique mechanic useful in dungeon environments etc, but PvP equivalents need to be mixed up. Thus:

Mace Head Crack: This daze is reduced to 3s.
Whirling Axe: Attacks 33% faster, but now does not reflect projectiles.
Throw Gunk: Can remain the same.
Healing Seed: This removes a condition, plants a small Water field and gives a small flat heal instead of regeneration.
Blinding Tuft: This now has no attached blind condition, and is renamed to “Illusory Tuft”, “Cloaking Tuft” or a similiar name.
Ice Shard Stab: Chill reduced to 6 seconds.
Consume Plasma: Still grants Stability for 3 seconds and Retaliation for 5 seconds, but all other boons are also reduced to 5 seconds. Gain 3 Might stacks instead of 1. Cast time reduced to 1/4s.
Skull Fear: Instead of functioning identical to “Fear Me!”, it is a straight up 2s Fear from 0-600 range.

All PvE equivalent stolen skills can remain the same, or perhaps improved. I’m open for suggestions on those, too. Those are just changes from the top of my head, but yeah, having access to 3 of these skills at once if prepared for it could become problematic, hence the toning down of them in a PvP area. You could just attach an internal cooldown between skills, also.

will all due respect. this is some of the trashiest ideas ive heard in a long time. ummmm really? debuff all the crappy steal items we get? none of them other than whirl are worthy of thought. everytime a face a thief andhe steals from somebody….i never ONCE think"hmmm…i better what out if he uses that….bleh bleh bleh thingy" or “i reaaaaaallllllly hope he didnt get the one im thinking of bc ill be in trouble or that could really change the tide of this fight”. nothing in there is like cool…that really helps the fight. 3 sec invis + blind is too much? i think u need to compare steal…..*45seconds….to all other character f mechanics. we dont have half as good or half as much production from ours as they do theirs. that is a fact my friend.

It would be nice if you actually took in to context the entirety of my posts. Under my proposal, it would be possible to have Steal on an 18 second cooldown. And again, you ignore that I also thought about just slapping an internal cooldown between pocket uses (which could be affected by a reduction from Trickery traits etc.) instead of rebalancing the skills themselves. Steal usage would potentially become cyclic and not bursty.

I’m really liking this discussion, I’d hope some Anet devs would look and give us some feedback on these ideas.

Auesis.7301:

It would be nice if you actually took in to context the entirety of my posts. Under my proposal, it would be possible to have Steal on an 18 second cooldown. And again, you ignore that I also thought about just slapping an internal cooldown between pocket uses (which could be affected by a reduction from Trickery traits etc.) instead of rebalancing the skills themselves. Steal usage would potentially become cyclic and not bursty.

I wanted to keep it short. but if you insist, i will expand your point in the list to reflect your whole concept. Just give me some time

edit: did you mean 28 seconds cooldown on steal?

I was talking to Travlane there, but thanks for that :P

I’ve outlined my idea in more detail in a Suggestion thread here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Overhaul-Proposal-Steal/first#post1923087

As for the cooldown, 30 Trickery would give a 60% reduction in cooldown. 40% of 45 is 18. Unless I’ve done something embarrassing with basic math, that seems right to me :p

crouze.3078:

• Put the stolen skills on F2 and change the F1 to a shadow return after stealing. (Folk.2093)

• Make steal a ground targeted AoE that steals from up to 3 targets (randomfightfan.4091)

• Increase number of stolen skills you can have at the same time (F2 – F3) and maybe add cooldowns between the use of each stored skill,
  tone down the skills for balance,
  2% faster steal recharge per trait point (instead of 1%)
  and more: please read full post for more info: long post by Auesis.7301 (3 posts long)

My ideal Steal mechanic would integrate aspects from all 3 of these ideas.

Steal F1 becomes a ground targeted AoE with an associated Shadow Return after use, similar to the way Shadowstep works at the moment. This gives us the freedom to use Steal itself for mobility, utility, healing or damage if traited, without having to waste time “burning” whatever stolen item we already have.

F2-4 will become slots for stolen items. You will Steal items from all enemies in the Steal AoE up to a maximum of 3. This would open up so much more tactics and room for improvisation to the Steal mechanic.

If you have a target selected and your Steal AoE lands on that target, you will always get the stolen item from that target placed on F2. This is needed so that there will be some degree of player control and predictability in terms of stolen ability placement and to deal with the AoE target number limit when there are more than 3 targets present in the AoE.

Using Steal again will insert new stolen items from the left side and push all stolen skills to the right and discard any item past the 3rd slot, so if you have 3 items in F2-4 from a previous Steal, using Steal on a single enemy would put a new item in F2 and move the old F2 and F3 over to F3 and F4, and the old F4 will be discarded.

Of course, the individual stolen items, and Steal related traits, will have to be reworked to maintain balance. Also, the system should not allow us to be able to hold more than 1 of the same stolen item at any time, as it would be impossible to balance stolen items for 3x the effect without making the 1x effect completely lacklustre.

I would gladly trade ridiculous burst for a Steal mechanic like this.

Oh and a side note: Please remove CC’s from the stolen item pools of unstoppable or perma-stability enemies and put in something that’s not completely irrelevant…

EDIT: I just read Auesis’s post and he seemed to have a similar idea without the AoE part, which honestly is powerful enough to be implemented as a Grandmaster trait.

Auesis.7301:

I was talking to Travlane there, but thanks for that :P

I’ve outlined my idea in more detail in a Suggestion thread here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Overhaul-Proposal-Steal/first#post1923087

As for the cooldown, 30 Trickery would give a 60% reduction in cooldown. 40% of 45 is 18. Unless I’ve done something embarrassing with basic math, that seems right to me :p

Yes, you did something wrong but its not as embarrassing.

Its not a “cooldown reduction” but an “increased recharge rate”.

So for 60% you would have to calculate it this way:
45s / 1.6 = 28.125s

For 30% it would be:
45s / 1.3 =34.62s

And 100% faster would mean you can use it 100% more often
(2 times in 45s instead of once every 45s):
45s / 2 = 22.5s

It would take an 150% increased recharge rate (5% for each traitpoint) to get a 18s cooldown

bump for grape justice!

Only just saw that response crouze – makes sense, I just went the opposite direction. Thanks for that!

Make it possible to have more then one stolen skill (F2 to F4) and add a steal mechanic to 1 or 2 skills. The skills with steal mechanic shouldnt trigger “on steal” traits.

Glad we think alike I made this as one of the suggestions back in BWE3. Tried to find it again but I think the post got deleted when the game opened doors. Here’s a mockup that I made.

http://i.imgur.com/ff4svtM.jpg

Had another screen with 15 initiatives in a 5×3 layout. It’s floating on the internet somewhere.

Oh, man. Just the concept of adjusting steal itself and adding those “pockets” to carry several stolen skills would be so great, and in the right direction (for one of the first times in this classes history).

They would have to possibly limit you to only 2 or so of the same skill, though, for skills like the warrior spin imagine 3x the duration of that!

Having 3 x feathers would be handy as an escape, though. I mean we can already cnd off of people, but hey. This would give the class such a neat dynamic because we’d be constantly thinking about what we wanted/needed to steal and what we had already stolen to adjust our play to.

Anet needs to consider this, imo!

Steal should take away people’s ability to kitten about the thief class.

Zacchary.6183:

Steal should take away people’s ability to kitten about the thief class.

I agree. I have to sate my current despair by raging/crying/breakin down/numbing myself here on the forums.

If you love playing a class, it’s not fun to have it slowly picked apart, especially the point at which you stop caring, which I think many of us have.