Guild Wars 2

With the proposed patch notes, Opportunist, Quick recovery, and Kleptomaniac are now garbage traits. It seems silly to finally buff our base init regen (which I’ve been suggesting for a while), and turn 2 minor traits you cant avoid if you go into CS or Trickery into a complete waste of time.

Here are my suggestions to keep them competitive and help flesh out thief specs.

Opportunist -50% change to regain 1 init AND Strip 1 boon on crit, 5s ICD

Quick recovery – Gain 1 additional init every 10s, cleanse one condition on dodge, 5 (or 10?)s ICD

Kleptomaniac – Stealing returns 2 initiative, And transfer 2 conditions to your target.

These changes keep the traits interesting and help define the trait lines more thoroughly – as it stands, Opportunist is .2 init Per second for crit based specs (which sounds god awful for a 15 point minor trait), quick recovery will not ever be slotted over Pain response and Assassins reward, and Kleptomaniac is at its best, with steal being used every single time its on CD with SoH, .1 init per second – which makes it worse than Opportunist.

Woah woah woah there…. what do you want, for them to buff (or balance) thieves?
(Still have hope?)

evilapprentice.6379:

Quick recovery – Gain 1 additional init every 10s, cleanse one condition on dodge, 5 (or 10?)s ICD

nope …. it has to be cleanse one condition every 5 secs
why ….. warri can cleanse 3 while weaponsswitch every 5 secs
i dont want to spend all utilies Slots/rune slots for condition cleanse , and after the vigor nerf ….

Arkantos.7460:

evilapprentice.6379:

Quick recovery – Gain 1 additional init every 10s, cleanse one condition on dodge, 5 (or 10?)s ICD

nope …. it has to be cleanse one condition every 5 secs
why ….. warri can cleanse 3 while weaponsswitch every 5 secs
i dont want to spend all utilies Slots/rune slots for condition cleanse , and after the vigor nerf ….

The numbers are just suggestions – everything needs to be playtested and balanced using a much more complicated process than I’m willing to do as a non-paid volunteer.

The heart of the discussion is adding things to traits that with these proposed changes would be butt-kitten useless.

I would absolutely love some form of a decent condition removing trait that doesn’t require stealth. I like the Kleptomaniac one the most, :P I want to be able to use 30 trickery w/o shadow arts and not have 0 survivability against conditions.

Doggie.3184:

I would absolutely love some form of a decent condition removing trait that doesn’t require stealth. I like the Kleptomaniac one the most, :P I want to be able to use 30 trickery w/o shadow arts and not have 0 survivability against conditions.

I like my suggestion for klepto because it forces a choice.

Do I steal whenever I want, or do I try to save it for when I can ditch 2 conditions?

It also fits the trickery traitline well, seeing as it boosts condition damage.

I really like all of these suggestions.

Condition transfer is definitely something that should be explored more for Thieves as a condi removal option. It would alleviate much of our problem with poor access to critical condi’s like burning and even fits well with the Thief theme IMO.

Boon steal definitely needs to be explored further also. The following themes should be looked into:

1. Let it scale to the number of boons a target currently has so that it can punish boon spamming while not overly penalize classes that make strategic use of fewer numbers of important boons.

2. Each boon steal skill/trait needs to define exactly what category of boons it can steal (Offensive or Defensive), and within each of these categories there must be a pre-defined priority list rather than the almost random manner that it’s determined at the moment. This will make it possible for skilled Thieves to make strategic use of even very limited boon stealing capabilities, rather than being forced to spray and pray against most boon bunkers.

I tentatively suggest the following priority lists (from high to low):

Offensive: Might → Fury → Retal → Swiftness
Defensive: Aegis → Stability → Protection → Vigor → Regen

Kaon.7192:

I really like all of these suggestions.

Offensive: Might -> Fury -> Retal -> Swiftness
Defensive: Aegis -> Stability -> Protection -> Vigor -> Regen

I disagree on the defensive end – Protection is by far the most important. 33% damage reduction is insane – it allows a GC to pretend like its doubled its toughness for the duration. Followed by stability, vigor, and regen. Aegis is (IMO) the least important – 1 block that is telegraphed (since the aegis boon is visible) is fairly easy to counter.

50% chance to strip a boon on crit? Are you serious? Lacerous strike stripping 3 Boons would less OP and your suggestion is on a minor adept trait!

Neoheart.2750:

50% chance to strip a boon on crit? Are you serious? Lacerous strike stripping 3 Boons would less OP and your suggestion is on a minor adept trait!

50% chance to strip boon on crit, on a 5 second ICD seems perfectly fair. How would an on demand skill that can potentially be up once every second stripping 3 boons even be comparable?

It’s not perfectly fair. Hard to discuss without typing math (no point as it doesn’t exist within and with the limit of other factors) but let’s say you could potentially be stripping 2 boons inside of 10 secs. 1 from LS and 1-2 off your CD. It would be potentially more OP than the 3 on LS because u can crit without spending ini. Coincidentally this whole patch seems to be addressing builds that have an abundance of ini and the abuse of skills that brings around.

Just think about the builds/traits that would effect. Not going to go into detail but with traits like hidden killer, skills like black powder and fury uptime it’s safe to say a boon would be stripped every 5-6 seconds and easily so.

Also bare in mind that this is just a minor adept trait we are talking about. Look where bountiful theft is and it’s CD…that’s wat anet deem “perfectly fair”

Neoheart.2750:

It’s not perfectly fair. Hard to discuss without typing math (no point as it doesn’t exist within and with the limit of other factors) but let’s say you could potentially be stripping 2 boons inside of 10 secs. 1 from LS and 1-2 off your CD. It would be potentially more OP than the 3 on LS because u can crit without spending ini. Coincidentally this whole patch seems to be addressing builds that have an abundance of ini and the abuse of skills that brings around.

LS steals boons – I’m suggesting stripping boons. It’s a good change for thief specifically because we have options to steal boons – with bountiful theft and LS, stripping boons can be a detrimental effect – 1 less boon to steal. It’s not entirely beneficial.
I also don’t see how this patch is about addressing “Specs that abuse Init” seeing as base init is not going to be roughly equivalent to Quick recovery + inf Sig – seems like they wanted to bring init regen up, not punish init regen specs. The poor handling of redesigning Init regen traits seems like more of a blundering oversight than a purposeful choice.

Just think about the builds/traits that would effect. Not going to go into detail but with traits like hidden killer, skills like black powder and fury uptime it’s safe to say a boon would be stripped every 5-6 seconds and easily so.

Seems fine to me – they nerfed LS from 2 boons stolen to 1, and now thief no longer counters boon bunkers. That was the main drive behind allowing LS to steal 2 boons, and it worked against boon bunkers – they were still able to generate the boons they needed, but they had to fear S/D thieves. Nerfing LS back to 1 boon has reintroduced boon bunkers who can mindlessly spam boons back into the meta, because there is no longer a mechanic that can punish it.

Also bare in mind that this is just a minor adept trait we are talking about. Look where bountiful theft is and it’s CD…that’s wat anet deem “perfectly fair”

15 points is a minor master trait, not adept.

evilapprentice.6379:

Snip

Opportunist -50% change to regain 1 init AND Strip 1 boon on crit, 5s ICD

snip

Woah woah woah! Do you want to put on a traited ICD what mesmer has on their sword auto attack?!!! Preposterous!

evilapprentice.6379:

Kaon.7192:

I really like all of these suggestions.

Offensive: Might -> Fury -> Retal -> Swiftness
Defensive: Aegis -> Stability -> Protection -> Vigor -> Regen

I disagree on the defensive end – Protection is by far the most important. 33% damage reduction is insane – it allows a GC to pretend like its doubled its toughness for the duration. Followed by stability, vigor, and regen. Aegis is (IMO) the least important – 1 block that is telegraphed (since the aegis boon is visible) is fairly easy to counter.

My rationale with prioritizing Aegis is that otherwise it would outright block the attack that was supposed to Steal/Remove the boon(s) if it was not prioritized. If we were eventually given a wider variety of boonsteal options, not all of them would be unblockable like Larcenous. Off the top of my head I remember that one of the problems with the original implementation of Bountiful Theft was that an enemy with Aegis would completely negate the boon steal portion of the trait through blocking Steal.

Protection is definitely a powerful boon, but I can think of a number of key scenarios where you’d want to rip stability before protection if an enemy has both (interrupting stability stomps, for instance), but not many scenarios where it’s absolutely crucial to rip protection instead of stability. It’s usually viable to simply do damage at the reduced rate until protection is down and then burst, whereas stability needs to be prioritized to enable a number of important clutch plays that simply cannot afford waiting for stability to expire.

Anyways it’s a tentative list so the priorities are definitely debatable, but I think we both agree that some kind of pre-defined priority is definitely needed for boon stripping to become more than just a spray and pray mechanic.