We’ve had plenty of time now to see the consequences of the latest patch for the Thief, and I want to make a sugestion about this trait change that hurt so much the support version of the Thief.
From all the changes, this was the one I hated the most as a firm defender of the support Thief.
Granted that Weakness now affects Zerkers too, but IMO this is how it should’ve been since the beginning as an specific atribute distribution made you nearly invulnerable to a condition. It was logical that it would end up changing to affect them too.
But many times when a change is introducted, several things are changed across the board for fear of the new thing affecting too much the meta-game.
In the case of Lotus Poison, I think it was way too much. As I said it was a slap for all those Thieves trying to do anything else than hitting hard and dying fast and instead help their teams. A Guardian can keep buffing his team to make them survive. The Thief, as the name sugest, should be able to act as a saboteur (in fact if it’s named Thief and not Assassin it shoud be MORE focused on sabotaging than on single target DPS, but that’s a different topic), and it makes sense that he should have ways to apply Weakness on foes.
Reducing Lotus Poison to once each 20 seconds per target was too much of a nerf for the trait. Now we can’t protect our team by sabotaging the opponent. Keep in mind that Weakness isn’t as strong as Protection (33% versus 25% and Weakness needs you to apply it in all attackers separately to protect yourself from all damage unlike Protection that is applied in you and your teamates), so this was way too much, specially considering that the change was how Weakness should’ve worked since the beginning.
With those arguments here is my sugestion for this trait, as I don’t think it will be fully reverted (I hope they revert it though):
- Reduce the cooldown to 5 seconds and keep the new 4 seconds duration. 20 seconds was way too much. I’ll admit that giving 12 seconds of Weakness in AoE with the Shortbow (and more if you used it multiple times and your opponent didn’t move), or 15 on each use of Spider Venom might’ve been too good, but 20 seconds made it horribly bad.
The tools we have to apply Poison are basically those 2 and the dagger auto-attack. If the cooldown is increased to 5 seconds: It will only trigger once per Choking Gas, so if you want to keep Weakness to protect your party (a very useful tool in dungeons that made support Thief so desirable) you will have to focus on constantly throwing Choking Gas (and have +25% condition duration) to maintain it, instead of throwing 2 and see the Weakness stack while you use other skills. Spider Venom will only trigger once like currently, and you would need to go through multiple dagger auto-attack chains to keep it (and dagger builds rarely go through constant auto-attack chains anyway).
With 5 seconds cooldown per target you still vastly limit the Weakness aplication through this trait (and for Thief in general as the only non-traited weakness we have is 2 seconds in sword chain), specially with so much condition removal in the game (way more than buff removals which again gives points to Protection over Weakness) but at least Support Thieves can still use it to help their team in dungeons and crowded fight at the cost of focusing on it.
We’re Thieves, Thieves steal stuff and sabotage their foes. We should be able to focus on that instead of being cornered by nerfs to only focus on assassination roles. As I said I hope the trait change could be reverted as it looked like a panic move nerfing it so bad for fear of the new Weakness state, and Weakness is inferior than Protection by far (way easier to remove, less damage reduction and needs you to apply it in everyone, at least it reduces endurance regen a bit, but it worked that way before the change anyway).