Guild Wars 2

The two simplest, easiest, and necessary changes to Thief are the following:

Change Thief base HP from Light to Medium (11k base HP at level 80 to 15k base HP at level 80)

and…

Remove Thief minor Trickery trait Preparedness (increase maximum initiative by 3) and increase our base maximum initiative by 3

These are not my ideas. These are, among a great number of other proposed solutions, the ideas of many other Thief players. Among those ideas, these are the two simplest and most easy to implement. That makes them the perfect kind of changes to begin re-balancing Thief with. The purpose of this thread is to both highlight this starting point as well as give necessary direction to the immediate desires of us Thief players.

To begin a process of bringing Thief back up to par, we need more HP and we need more freedom to select a wider variety of viable trait-lines. Focusing on these very specific desires is the way to accomplish this beginning and we need to repeat our desire for it again, and again, and again!

We want to play this game. Help us not quit out of frustration.

I am surprised you actually switched to buff thief side considering you were spamming in every thread “thief is fine” pre xpac.

Not sure if extra HP would really help when dmg mitigation is lacking and we still have to actively react to miriad passives.

Agree on ini increase though, it is just too mandatory.

^sounds legit. Also, why not make steal strip one boon baseline? Not game breaking since you can take additional boon steal with trick and most people take trick for SoH anyways.

Also, buff stealth to always reduce 10-15% damage taken and passively cleanse 1 condi every second.

Normally, these ideas would be over the top, but base thief is currently chilling at the bottom of the lowest rung and needs something crazy to bring back up to speed.

Just throw it in here: I kind of want blind on (offhand) dagger (= CnD although DD and CnD would be appreciated too) since SE is not that good anymore and I realized that I will be tied to SA for as long as CiS is in that line.

Shadowstep.6049:

I am surprised you actually switched to buff thief side considering you were spamming in every thread “thief is fine” pre xpac.

Not sure if extra HP would really help when dmg mitigation is lacking and we still have to actively react to miriad passives.

Agree on ini increase though, it is just too mandatory.

To be fair, you have simplified what I said and taken it out of the context of the old meta. I said SA D/P was good as long as we were playing a support-ish role in a party. I said this in pre-expansion threads where players were noting how incredibly difficult it was to 1v1 people and how Thief, as a whole, was broken because of this limitation. I said this in regard to the meta before the expansion’s release. If I were to hold the same position in the current state of the game, I would probably be insane.

The main benefit of the HP increase is we could use a zerker amulet in sPvP and less valk gear in WvW. It’s a simpler way of increasing our damage than directly increasing damage because directly increasing our damage would lead to more gimmick insta-gib power builds that have gotten us overly nerfed in the past.

weaponsets:

• for s/d, make Flanking Strike precast Larcenous Strike like it used to. it still absolutely baffles me how poorly thought out it is to have an unblockable skill you can’t access at all if the enemy is blocking. buff Dancing Dagger’s damage by 25% and give Cloak and Dagger a built-in single target blind-upon-landing. maybe make auto attacks a tad bit faster?
• p/p: buff the damage of Vital Shot (the autoattack) to something like 600, Body Shot to 850, and Headshot to 700. this would help immensely to give thief a ranged weapon that is actually capable in 1v1s, which is currently one of our greatest weaknesses if not our greatest.
• d/p: buff the damage of backstab by around 25% and make the damage always do the same regardless of position (should probably rename too to reflect this change). thief is literally the only profession in the game that is forced have a stupidly specific position requirement that comes with tons of inherent danger (thanks to the set up via stealth and the positioning and timing due to melee range) that every other profession does not suffer through. power mesmer, engineer, ranger, elementalist, warrior, necro, guardian, etc can simply burst people without much or any setup and from any direction and to further add insult to injury the constant addition of anti-stealth mechanics and growing general player knowledge of d/p is already making backstab worse and worse. if you refuse to make backstab hit for the same from all directions, at least buff the damage considerably.
• d/d: incorporating the Backstab, Cloak and Dagger, and Dancing Dagger buffs will do A LOT for this weapon set to point where it might be viable. only further suggestion would be to up the power damage of Death Blossom to 800 per hit so it’s not a wasted skill on power builds (making it further a viable weaponset for hybrid builds as well).
• sb: make Disabling Shot hit for 500, make Choking Gas hit for 750 upon initial landing. make Trick Shot (the auto attack) hit for 650-700 when there’s nothing to ricochet off of so that shortbow isnt so awful in single target encounters.
• staff: make dust strike unblockable. also make vault’s animation reflect the actual evade windows more accurately

traits:

• make Preparedness, Bountiful Theft, and Slight of Hand baseline. Thief’s dependence on Trickery has plagued us years now. and for what? profession utility we should already have. as extreme as this might seem, it really isnt considering what it’s actually doing.

I 100% agree with sinject. These buffs will help all weapon sets without making any single set op. Viable pvp d/d is my dream. The only addition I’d add is give sb#2 a 25% faster travel time.

wtb reliable condi cleanse without shadow arts