Guild Wars 2

Edit: With Jon Peters posting their proposed changes to Thief along with the other classes, I thought I’d post them here and comment.
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Thief:
One of the issues we are working on for thieves this patch is the dependence on the traits which boost initiative. We did this by shaving a significant amount of initiative gain from these traits while simultaneously boosting the generic rate of initiative gain by 33%. We have also somewhat reduced the effectiveness of high evasion thieves by reducing vigor up time and adding some cast time to the Shadow Return skill on the sword. This prevents these thieves from evading too much and too easily dealing with being disabled (stun, daze, fear, knockdown, etc.). Also we are trying to improve the survivability of thieves in the Acrobatics line through easier access to the Hard to Catch trait and increased effectiveness of the Assassin’s Reward trait. This will reward thieves who are actively engaged in the fight rather than those who are just dodging over and over again. The change to Infusion of Shadow is meant to stop players from gaining initiative by applying stealth while already in stealth. This should keep thieves from being able to recharge all of their power while idling in a very long stealth. We felt that using a lot of different abilities to maintain stealth is ok, but re-using the same ability over and over for almost permanent stealth was just bad for the game, especially when gaining large amounts of initiative.

Increased the base rate of initiative gain from .75/second to 1/second.

Shadow Return on Sword. Renamed to Infiltrator’s return. Added a 1/4s cast time.

Pistol Whip. Reduced the after cast on the first half of this skill by .25 seconds.

Deadly Arts VI – Sundering Strikes. Increased the trigger chance from 50%. Remove ICD. Decrease Vulnerability duration to 6s.

Critical Strikes VI – Practiced Tolerance. Increased conversion from 5% to 7%.

Critical Strikes 15 – Opportunist. Increased trigger chance to 50%. Increase cooldown from 1s to 5s.

Critical Strikes VIII – Signet Use. Reduced initiative gain from 2 to 1.

Critical Strike X – Critical Haste. Increase trigger chance to 25%.

Shadow Arts V – Infusion of Shadow – This trait functionality has been changed to “Gain initiative when you enter stealth.” 2 init.

Acrobatics III – Vigorous Recovery. Reduced Vigor duration to 4s from 8s.

Acrobatics IV – Assassin’s Retreat. Increased swiftness duration to 20s.

Acrobatics IX – Quick Recovery. Reduced initiative gain from 2 to 1.

Acrobatics X – Assassins Reward. Increased healing scaling by 35%. Moved to Grandmaster Tier.

Acrobatics XI – Hard to catch. Moved to Master Tier.

Trickery 5 – Kleptomaniac. Reduce initiative gain from 3 to 2.

Trickery IV – Flanking Strikes. Move to Master tier.

Trickery VII – Bountiful Theft. Reduced vigor duration to from 15s to 8s.

Trickery VIII – Trickster. Move to Adept tier.
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Here’s my 3 things:
1. Steal should shadow step even if no target is selected
2. Increase the stun duration on Pistol Whip to a base of 1s, think about slightly decreasing the time it takes to go from whipping to slashing
3. Give P/P an identity, is it a condi-spec? Why all power on Unload …I’m so confused.

Thanks! Add your 3 and keep it civil.

1) Fix weaponsets in general. Fix Death Blossom and Unload so that they make sense to use for both condition and direct damage specs (which would help fix P/P, and address a glaring weakness in D/D). Design PW so its fun and interesting to use. Fix LS so that it counters boon bunkers again without overly punishing classes that rely on a few long duration, long recast boons.
2)Fix the Steal “Obstructed” bug – I’m sick of seeing one of my major class mechanics go on CD but not actually steal(Bonus hate if I was relying on that stolen item or a trait to trigger).
3)Increase base init regen, change some of our boring initiative based traits into something that gives the class more flavor and spec diversity. No other class has to dedicate so many traits into actually using their skills. Thief DPS and burst has been nerfed repeatedly from day 1, yet the initiative regeneration rate has remained the same as it was at launch. The class is nigh unplayable with unmodified base initiative regen, and that’s just silly.

(1.) An improvement to Steal. I agree with Pixels that I’d like to see it get a teleport of some kind, but I think we should have more micromanagement ability. It’s been a common suggestion since betas to have F1 steal an offensive item, F2 steal a CC item, and F3 steal some kind of healing item or boons.

(2.) Improvements for traps. Right now, they are clunky to use and build around, and lackluster compared with the stealth and mobility options in the utilities.

Perhaps, instead of being small-radius skills that trigger upon hit and disappear, Thief traps could be made more like Ranger traps. Increase the radius to 120, with an effective range of 180, and make them static objects with charges. Auesis provided a more detailed description of this kind of trap change in the fourth post of this thread.

Provide additional options in the traitlines like Crimes’s suggestion in that same thread. His particular suggestions—which I agree with—were Explosive Traps for extra damage from traps, and Trap Artist which will provide initiative upon using a trap skill.

(3.) I second evilapprentice’s first point. Many of the Thief weaponsets have issues—like the acknowledged Pistol Whip problem that resulted from the stun change and the renewed uselessness of Larcenous Strike against boon bunkers—but P/P is downright contradictory, and has been complained about since the early days of the game. Why is Unload, the core source of damage for P/P, dependent on power and crit while Vital Shot is purely conditional?

Edit: minor formatting change.

1) No more nerfs until thieves and other classes can play at same lvl warriors does
2) PP builds i mean at the moment we do more dmg with SHORT BOW tho PP is single target and SB is aoe
3) utility skills: I mean i think i would be correct saying 80-90% thieves use deception and signet only… ignoring venoms and traps at all.

Well…

We tried.

Pixels.6532:

Well…

We tried.

Don’t give up! Anything can happen if you believe.

So… I have a couple of questions:

Acrobatics X – Assassins Reward. Increased healing scaling by 35%. Moved to Grandmaster Tier

Are you saying it will now scale at 35% of Healing Power or are you increasing the current scaling by 35%? Seems like it would have to be the following:
69+Healing Power *.35 per initiative… because a 35% increase on a 3.5% modifier ain’t much.

My other question is, are there any thoughts to giving thief more condi removal? You’ve sort of set the stage with the infusion of shadow change to making one of our best condi removal builds obsolete (D/P w/ at least 20 points in SA).

One idea would be to give an on-crit trait a condition removal with an internal cd or let us trait in deadly arts a way of transferring or removing a condition with a venom (with an icd of course). Why not combine Quick and Residual venom into one Grandmaster?

That leaves you an open slot to do something like: Tolerance: when you apply a condition with a venom, lose one condition (icd 5s or something).

Anyway, would be nice to get a dev response or two… or three.