I am putting on a tinfoil hat and throwing my speculations on the thief specializations, cos HYPE!!!11
Specialization 1: saboteur
-new weapons:
staff/spear-a weapon with melee skills and skills with a range up to 600 focused around debilitating and staggering your enemies with conditions (cripple, weakness, vulnerability, poison, blind) and blocking/counterattacking (like the underwater skill nine-tail strike).
mace (mainhand)-it would be faster than the other classes mace skills, focused on doing steady damage which ramps up if you fulfill certain requirements (like dagger backstab doing 2xdmg if flank) e.g. you do more dmg vs targets with 5 or more stack of vulnerability, or a skill from mace could apply double the duration of it’s condition if you strike a blind target (cripple for 3 sec, 6 if you hit a blind target).
-Choosing to become a saboteur replaces your steal with 2 ‘sabotage’ skills that have a short cd, but share it, and are short range (something like 450).
the first ‘sabotage skill’ would hinder your foes ability to wield his weapons, causing him to have a 50% chance to fail his attacks and reduce his condition duration by 20% for a short duration (say 5 sec or so).
The second ‘sabotage skill’ would put your foe out of balance for a few sec (again say 5 sec), causing him to get knocked down (2 sec) the next time he tries to dodge, is struck
while blocking or while using a movement skill (rush, heartseeker, hornet’s sting ect..).
-You would get traits that complement putting (non damaging) conditions on foes as well as traits that scale your damage (like the trait Lead Attacks thieves have now) if certain requirements are met (lets say you get +10% dmg and +5% crit chance if your target is moving slower than normal).
-Your steal traits would be replaced with traits that enhance your new ‘sabotage’ skills, and you would get access to more utility skills like the trick skills and venoms (that don’t suck)
Specialization 2: assassin (or hassassin to sound less mainstream)
-new weapons:
Rifle: a range single target way of dealing heavy direct damage as well as a tool for interrupting/immobilizing targets (basically a power version of pistol with a 1000 range).
Sword (offhand): a hybrid weapon with very quick attacks that cause blindness, bleeding, and cripple (slashing your opponents eyes and joints).Damage from offhand sword skills, and it’d dual skill, could scale based on how many stacks of bleeding your target has: you do a 0.5% bonus damage per stack up to 12.5% if someone has 25 stacks.
-Choosing to become an assassin replaces your steal with a new shadowstep skill called ’assassin’s promise’ (for nostalgia purposes) that is the same range as steal but has a much longer cd (lets say 90 sec), and instead of giving you a ‘stolen skill’ marks the target giving you swiftness and fury, the duration of the mark and the 2 boons you get is longer if the target has more hp(works like heartseeker: if the target is over 75% hp the mark and boons lasts 10 sec, 75%-50% mark & boons are 6 sec 50%-25% mark & boons are 4, 25%-0% mark is 4 sec and you get no boons)
If you down and kill the target before the mark expires you get your initiative and endurance refilled, you get healed for a % of your target’s max hp (something small like 10%) and assassin’s promise instantly recharges.
-Choosing to evolve to a assassin would grant you access to traits that encourage going in and out of stealth repeatedly (not camping in stealth with s.refuge but rather hoping in stealth for no longer than 2 sec), and traits that encourage rapid use of different weapon skills, say you get a bonus to power or attack speed if you do not use the same skill twice in a row (including the auto attack chain, if you view the whole chain as 1 skill).
-Your steal traits would be replaced with traits that enhance your promise, by making it apply vulnerability, chill, etc. and you would get more utilities like deceptions and traps (again, that don’t suck).
Tinfoil hat off.