Shadow Arts vs. Acrobatics
Some good ideas here. I’ve been trying out new builds since the patch and I kept wishing there was another way to be able to remove conditions other than going into stealth. Having some way of removing conditions via dodge is a great idea. However, I think that your proposed change to quick pockets would be OP. It’s already quite strong as it is for certain builds.
Very true! I also agree with the proposed quick pockets becoming OP if you traited it with trickery, quick recovery, and infiltrator’s signet. I guess realistically if they did add a reduced cooldown to weapon swap it would be at most a 20% reduction.
Mmm. Quick pockets is already one of, if not the best ini regen thief has. Compare to ini on heal (4 every 15 secs), ini on steal (3 every 21 secs), ini on stealth (2 every 4 or 5 secs), the 2 ini every 10 secs passive trait – 3 ini every 9 secs is a good deal.
I agree that hard to Catch is never going to appeal to anyone who cares a whit about strategic play, since there’s no strategy involved. Like Last Refuge, this trait can be often be a hindrance. Cleanse on dodge is a great suggestion. Instead of having dodge-cleanse work on 75%+ endurance though, maybe having some kind of 10 second CD would be more appropriate. Reason being, it would promote hoarding endurance, which goes against the grain of Acrobatics.
For another alternative to Hard to Catch that retains some of it’s original intention: perhaps an increased range to all shadow steps? That would effect SB#5, Shadowstep, S/P#2, D/P#3, and the signet I can’t remember the name of. Steal would be exempt since, although it’s shadowsteppish, it’s kind of it’s own thing and boosted by many other traits already.
Admiral Mournn, Tarnished Coast
I think Quick Recovery should be:
– Gain 1 initiative every time you use a Skill that uses initiative.
Just makes more sense to me.
I think Quick Recovery should be:
– Gain 1 initiative every time you use a Skill that uses initiative.Just makes more sense to me.
That’d probably be too good on certain skills, but notably heartseeker.
As for QP, Quick pocket is a good trait, but swapping can be akward just for the initiative gain. Say you’re using dagger dagger versus some stationary boss. Your offweapon is short bow. If you’re initiative starved, you’d want to switch, but using a short bow for 10 seconds would be a large DPS loss. Using it with the same weapon set allows you to really get the most out of it… but you sacrifice much flexibility.
I love the trait, however. One of the better designed ones in terms of tradeoffs and stuff.
I was the best at burning things. Especially bosses that
didn’t move.
didn’t move.
I’m finding the same thing. With the new patch I really wanted to play with the Trickery and Acro lines, but I’m really missing the condition removal. Any solutions?
Shadow Arts is a lot better, but it requires frequent stealthing. In small scale combat with certain weapon sets, this is not even a downside because you’re probably looking to stealth as often as possible anyway.
In large scale combat where you are trying to do multi-target damage or stay active in a group, stealth often ends up being more of a “break in case of emergency” type thing that you hope to not need to use. (Or just using a weapon set that has no stealth.) This is where Acro stays valuable and Shadow Arts doesn’t.
I would agree that Acro needs a little something more so that there isn’t such a big disparity in the usefulness of a Thief between large scale and small scale situations. IMO, it needs a good condition removal trait somewhere that doesn’t require the use of stealth – maybe with aoe ally benefit for large groups.
(edited by Daeqar.8965)
I’m finding the same thing. With the new patch I really wanted to play with the Trickery and Acro lines, but I’m really missing the condition removal. Any solutions?
Sadly no there is no reliable condition removal (trait wise) on a thief. This is the reason why Thieves are sorely lacking in build diversity since a thief has to trait in SA in order to use non sword builds while not traiting in SA forces the thief to carry S/X at all times as one of their weapons in order to have a reliable condi clear.
Shadow Arts – Toughness / Healing Power
Acrobatics – Vitality / Boon duration
Vitality only helps for burst damage while Toughness + Healing Power lets you stay in the fight way longer.
This is the kind of thing i’d like to see changed to acrobatics as well… since it’s a defensive tree, it should be just as good as shadow arts. Most of the suggestions are pretty awesome. What i’d like to see changed is or made into, is some trait that adds different benefits to our dodging utilities like: shortbow 3, withdraw, roll for initiative, deathblossom, and etc… Maybe have this be a grandmaster trait and call it… Nimbleness?
What it would do is give an addition to those skills that have an evasion mechanic in it, like with withdraw and roll for initiative… the roll distance would be farther away, disabling shot would cost less initiative to use(maybe with a 2 second internal cd)…
deathblossom would have more air time? meaning the animation would be longer and our evasion window wider… just some thoughts…
The other issue that I see is the way the lines buff stats for thieves.
SA buffs healing and toughness, which go well together, but leave open a weakness – condition damage: which hurts if you don’t have vitality. Except the traits then balance this out by giving you condition cleansing.
Acrobatics buffs vitality and boon duration. Boon duration is sort of mediocre on thieves as far as survivability, since there aren’t many defensive boons (aside from vigor, which we need to specially build for. Vitality boosts survivability vs conditions. On other classes, investing in vitality alone can make them outlast a condi build without good condition removal. On thieves, with our tiny hp pool, this really only buys us a tiny bit of time. The lack of consistent condition clearing makes this build still vulnerable to conditions. Meanwhile, it does have good avoidance of damage, with the extra dodging and initiative (for use with evade skills), but it still doesn’t feel like we cover as many bases as Shadow Arts – defensively. On the other hand, all the +initiative stuff and + boon duration can help us out offensively, but not as much as either of the offensive lines would. So it winds up being a bizzarre, reckless offense-minimal defense traitline, that should ideally be taken in conjunction with another offense traitline.
Vitality boosts survivability vs conditions.
In my oppinion this is so wrong.
Vitality only helps against burst damage. (on 10k HP professions more then on 18k HP professions)
I think its the worst defensive attribut.
Vitality boosts survivability vs conditions.
In my oppinion this is so wrong.
Vitality only helps against burst damage. (on 10k HP professions more then on 18k HP professions)I think its the worst defensive attribut.
Damaging conditions ignore armor. So against a conditions build toughness is worthless, however because dots do low damage in general extra but is extra defense
Vitality boosts survivability vs conditions.
In my oppinion this is so wrong.
Vitality only helps against burst damage. (on 10k HP professions more then on 18k HP professions)I think its the worst defensive attribut.
I more or less agree with you that it helps vs burst, and that it’s not a great defensive attribute by itself. But it does give something, and the picture as a whole is somewhat complex.
Vs all damage, vitality affects the health pool, so boosting vitality makes it take more hits to get you.
Toughness also makes it take more hits to get you, but does nothing vs condi-damage.
Investing everything into toughness makes you strong vs regular damage, but vulnerable to condis.
Investing everything into vitality makes you reasonably strong vs condis, but still fairly squishy as a whole.
Investing in a mix of vitality and toughness gives the best of both worlds. Vitality becomes more valuable, the higher your toughness; so 1000 hps on a tough character may represent 2 hits negated, whereas on a squishy character, it may only represent 1 hit negated. This is why many people recommend an even split of toughness and vitality for most builds.
Similarly, toughness + healing power are great together, since decent healing on a tough character is effectively cancelling – say 10 hits. Whereas the same amount of healing on a squishy character may effectively cancel -say kittens.
Back to thieves – low vitality in general makes it hard to work this out, as ideally you really don’t want to get hit much either way.
Damaging conditions ignore armor. So against a conditions build toughness is worthless, however because dots do low damage in general extra but is extra defense
Damaging conditions ignore vitality as well, so what is the point?
Health taken must be restored, by healing. Toughness reduces the amount needed to heal from regular damage, nothing reduces the amount of healing needed to restore from condition damage, ergo. it is a non-factor in the decision.
I more or less agree with you that it helps vs burst, and that it’s not a great defensive attribute by itself. But it does give something, and the picture as a whole is somewhat complex.
It’s very simple; if you use healing toughness helps more, if you get burst down a lot or can manage healing mostly with in-between-combat regeneration then vitality helps more.
I really, really like the Assassin’s Retreat and Quick Pockets suggestions.
We do need a Sword dmg increase trait and something to reduce weapon cooldown (9 seconds is an eternity when you’re in a tough fight and need to swap to SB to disengage). Ini boost on weapon swap needs to be toned down though, 3 ini every 5 seconds is simply way too much.
I would like to add my own suggestion:
Expeditious Dodger: Gain 10s of Swiftness on evade. 10s internal cooldown.
The current implementation of Expeditious Dodger builds a habit of bad play in encouraging dodging multiple times to move long distance quickly, and dodging to close gaps. Essentially wasting dodges.
It doesn’t even provide full swiftness uptime, which is something that many other classes already have, so it does not make sense that the Thief, who is supposedly the most mobile class, should be denied access to it.
This change would resolve both issues.
(edited by Kaon.7192)
I really, really like the Assassin’s Retreat and Quick Pockets suggestions.
We do need a Sword dmg increase trait and something to reduce weapon cooldown (9 seconds is an eternity when you’re in a tough fight and need to swap to SB to disengage). Ini boost on weapon swap needs to be toned down though, 3 ini every 5 seconds is simply way too much.I would like to add my own suggestion:
Expeditious Dodger: Gain 10s of Swiftness on evade. 10s internal cooldown.
The current implementation of Expeditious Dodger builds a habit of bad play in encouraging dodging multiple times to move long distance quickly, and dodging to close gaps. Essentially wasting dodges.
It doesn’t even provide full swiftness uptime, which is something that many other classes already have, so it does not make sense that the Thief, who is supposedly the most mobile class, should be denied access to it.
This change would resolve both issues.
I think Expeditious Dodger is fine the way it is. Considering it is quite easy to have very high vigor and dodge uptime, making swiftness last 10 seconds for perma swiftness would be very overpowered, especially for a 5 pt minor trait. A better way to encourage combat mobility without overusing the dodge button for the sake of swiftness, would be to make all our dual skills with a built in evade that last 1/4 second like DeathBlossom last the entire animation or 1/2 second like flanking strike.
I really, really like the Assassin’s Retreat and Quick Pockets suggestions.
We do need a Sword dmg increase trait and something to reduce weapon cooldown (9 seconds is an eternity when you’re in a tough fight and need to swap to SB to disengage). Ini boost on weapon swap needs to be toned down though, 3 ini every 5 seconds is simply way too much.I would like to add my own suggestion:
Expeditious Dodger: Gain 10s of Swiftness on evade. 10s internal cooldown.
The current implementation of Expeditious Dodger builds a habit of bad play in encouraging dodging multiple times to move long distance quickly, and dodging to close gaps. Essentially wasting dodges.
It doesn’t even provide full swiftness uptime, which is something that many other classes already have, so it does not make sense that the Thief, who is supposedly the most mobile class, should be denied access to it.
This change would resolve both issues.
I think Expeditious Dodger is fine the way it is. Considering it is quite easy to have very high vigor and dodge uptime, making swiftness last 10 seconds for perma swiftness would be very overpowered, especially for a 5 pt minor trait. A better way to encourage combat mobility without overusing the dodge button for the sake of swiftness, would be to make all our dual skills with a built in evade that last 1/4 second like DeathBlossom last the entire animation or 1/2 second like flanking strike.
I have to agree that 10 seconds on dodge is OP, but I do think the on-dodge swiftness should last longer by a second or two. I just kind of find it weird that we don’t really have access to these things without use of a signet that has an absolutely horrible activation (all of the classes that have this type of signet have this problem) which was actually good in beta (immobilize) or spamming dodge and using heal for vigor or throwing steal away with a trait to maintain movement speed when Thief is supposed to be the most mobile class, not to say we don’t have good mobility through skills but that’s a different discussion entirely.
Perhaps at the very least they could throw swiftness on some of our utilities like Shadow Step, Infiltrator’s Signet and Roll for Initiative. They could also give us a movement speed trait like OP suggested, but I would think it would required to have melee to use it since all of the other movement traits have some requirement.
(edited by KaiserCX.7103)
Acrobatics has to modify dodge as much as shadow arts modifies stealth.
My suggestions would be:
1 Quick Dodge – reduce the cost of dodging by 10 endurance (reduce the dodge distance by 50%)
1 would grant you the dodge without too much displacement. It would also give you more dodge instances. It would be “like” a dodge in place kind of thing.
2.1 Somersault – spend all your remaining endurance to boost your dodge distance (5 sec icd)
2.2 Somersault – spend up to 6 initiative to boost your dodge distance (5 sec icd)
These would be the dodge equivalent of stealth as a “wait!! no more.” move
3 <insert creative name> – call a thief to dodge in the opposite direction you dodge (10sec icd)
The thief would only last for the duration of the dodge roll.
I run 0/10/30/30/0 so I get the best of both worlds. Most fluid build I’ve had yet.
[MU]- my name is red
Asura Thief/Ele
HoD
Asura Thief/Ele
HoD
Honestly I don’t consider giving easy access to perma-swiftness on a class that is supposed to be the most mobile class in the game to be overpowered.
Engineers get perma swiftness from a single Adept trait, and Elementalists, Warriors, even the two supposed least mobile classes in the game, Necros and Guardians, have access to perma swiftness through easy weapon + utility combinations without being forced to trait any particular way.
For a Thief to get perma swiftness (outside of the situational swiftness on kill trait and hard to catch traits that nobody in their right mind would use) we need to trait 30 into Trickery to get steal cooldown down to 21, waste our steal every time it’s off cooldown, in combination with traiting 15 into Acrobatics and wasting all our dodges.
Actually, I don’t even have a problem with not having perma-swiftness, but rather the fact that the trait itself in its current state encourages wasting dodges endlessly for improved mobility, and eventually it develops into a habit. If you’ve ever tried playing the Thief for a long time with the trait and then without it one day (or try a different class), you’ll know what I mean.
Changing the trait to give a single longer stack of swiftness (doesn’t have to be 10 seconds) on cooldown would be a much less problematic design. Or give us some other form of swiftness through mobility minded weapon & utility skills like Infiltrator’s Arrow, Withdraw, RoI or Shadow Step.
Giving easier access to swiftness would go a long way in reducing our reliance on shortbow, and more build diversity as a result.
(edited by Kaon.7192)
I’ve been using 30 acro with 30 crit traits for a dodge theif that works pretty well. The lack of condition removals suck but that can be supplimented with rune of purity on my shortbow and s/d’s number 2 has condi removal. Trait in acro might on dodge, heal on init use, and 2 extra init per 10 secs. Eat 40% faster dodge recovery and 100% chance might on dodge. That’s alot of dodges for might/speed. That extra init means extra heals. Actually using Withdraw with refuge, shadowstep and yes, withdraw (switch smokescreen, some sig) in WvW.
For me, acro can use a tweak but what’s most sorely lacking is trickery line. Power/crit lines seem offensive so lack of cleansers there seems fine. SA, acro are defensive and should both have decent cleansers, trickery is… utility?
Feeble Old Man
(edited by nalovas.5961)
Sry this isn’t about acro/SA. Signet of Malice needs some love. I’d say replace Hastened Replenishment (30 trickery gain 4init on heal) with a new trait to keep passive heals when sig is on CD (maybe with a 15 sec longer CD if traited this). Then remove Instinctual Response (10 trickery stealth if more than 10% damage done to you) and replace is with a weaker Hastened Replenishment 2 init.
Feeble Old Man
(edited by nalovas.5961)
Signet of Malice is absolutely op if you use it right in pve……
[rT]
Signet of Malice is absolutely op if you use it right in pve……
I can vouch for this. I use it all the time in PvE. :D
I made a pretty nice s/d build that has clerics armor/zerker trinkets. Acrobatics works really nicely there. Especially the newly buffed pain response. Between this, regular heals, and some health regaining foods, I find myself not dying of attrition in protracted fights, like I used to.
The trick is it removes conditions + gives regen if you’re under 75% health every 30 seconds. with the +boon duration that’s 13 seconds of regeneration for every 30, when you need it. The condition clear means if someone bursts me with damaging condis, I’m saved. Between this and withdraw, I can frequently get in and out of a zerg, without having to wait too long to reset.
Having invested so much into acrobatics, and using s/d means I rarely stealth, and really have to rely on mobility to keep away from larger numbers. But all in all, I feel like s/d is stronger than it was before this last patch…or maybe I’ve just gotten better.