Having read through the latest patch notes in regard of the Thief, I must say, I kind of find most of the changes relatively good.
Mostly all classes received on the first look more buffs, than nerfs if I may say so
But some things I can’t understand.
Partwise because I can’t don’t fully understand the new Ammunition System Anet is talking about.
However, there are also changes, where you can obviously see on first look ,that they changed thigns to the better, due to merging mostly skill or trait effects together from underused stuff, to make space for new skilly and traits to fill up the self made gaps with new effects, which will show us soon, if they will be useful and especially, if they will be good enough to shake up the meta, so bring more new build diversity than what existed before and if these thigns will be kind of useful everywhere, or mostly useless in specific parts of the game and only of partial use for just a specific game move, like PvP, or PvE
We see also, that ANet finally starts rename more oftenly things, which I find good, to remove this way confusions over thigns which share the same names, buy why then did ANet seemingly forget to either rename one of the Skill Versions here for the Thief’s “Flanking Strike”
However, Flanking Dive imo still sounds imo too similar. personally I’d had renamed the Skill rather into “Evasive Thrust”, cause you don’ strike with a spear, you thrust with it.
And Evasive over Flanking to make clear, it are 2 completely different skills, opening eventually the chance up to improve that way the spear version with an evasion frame when using the skill to improve it.
Personally I like very miuch the change to Dancing Dagger, however, it shows me also well enough again, how much it is needed for GW2 that anet finalyl begins to merge Boons and Conditions together, reworkign those two systems to clean up the game from its massive overflow of combat effects it has gotten over the years.
The change that Anet made to Dancing Daggers would also simply have been accomplished, if ANet would merge together Cripple with Torment, because it would just make sense, that it is painful for you too move around, if your legs just got crippled, so that if you get crippled, you should suffer damage over tiem if you move around like as if you suffer on Torment. And by that merge of the cindtions would work Dancign Dagger exactly the same way, how it will work now after that balance patch, just with the difference that the game would have 1 obsolete condition lesser and an improval on its game performance, so lesser combat effects have to be permanently calculated every second in the background of a battle, which would mean reducing lags in game. SO more combat effects the game collects over time, so more will suffer the game performances of GW2 represented in more oftenly and longer lags ingame, especially in large scale battles in WvW where you get overwhelenmed by the tons of combat and skill/condition/boon effects, that it has become imo a neccessarity to reduce the amount of effects for once again, especially if ANet plans on adding more Elite Specs in the future which will make the game more complex over time.
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Some easy n quick changes, removing here n there some PvE/P splits, nothign special to me, but what I found interesting is, that Anet beings now also to reduce willingly the amount of hits skilsl do, and recompendates this loss of hits simply with a direct damage increase percentually to the loss of hits, as liek seen with Pistol Whip.
Woudl you see such a kind of change rather as a nerf or as a buff? Because this chance kinda has both. Simply by reducing the animation time by halfign the amount of hits, a skil lbasically has beeen buffed and nerfed at the same time I think?
The Animation time of the skill was used also as Auto Evade for very dangerous incoming attacks, now that time frame has been basically halved, so that you will receive damage again quicker after the 4 hits instead of the 8 have been done.
Therefore you hit now in a brief time alot more stronger like a truck your enemy as you doe in that shorter amoutn of tiem now double as much damage, than before, and your stuns last now even a bit longer.
Would like to know, if people here like the new or the old version of that skill more.