This may be a bit late to suggest something like this so late in development but I’ll give it a go since its a relatively simple idea:
Along with the additional dodge bar Daredevil gets, also allow them to gain access to their stealth skills for 3 secs after 3 successful evades (1 icd) within a set time perioid shown on a user-friendly U.I. for both player and enemies to see possibly resembling a breakbar.
Reasoning
When people think of the thief’s unique mechanics, people think of steal but often forget that actually we do have other things which makes us distinct and these distinguishing factors are used to ‘balance’ the thief. Example, our initiative system means that our weapons skills can’t have hard cc. But the thing I want to focus on is stealth skills because these can be powerful attacks which means that consciously or unconsciously, our stats and skills in general are balanced around that added potential for the thief. Of course, this is assuming the thief is heavily reliant on stealth in the first place and I think its no coincidence that d/p has become the last viable spec for the thief since not only is stealth a defensive tool for thief (arguably our most/only reliable form of damage mitigation, we are also depended on it for our offense whether your a stealth lite or a stealth heavy build.
Even now, the Daredevil’s grandmaster trait ‘bounding dodger’ is advertised as a trait which will finally give sets like p/p and s/p access to stealth and I have a feeling it’s so they can get access to their stealth skills. And that’s cool and all but shouldn’t the Daredevil be encouraging out of stealth combat. Hence their are reasonable complaints on the forums that the Daredevil does not actually significantly change the playstyle from the core thief but imo something like what I suggested will have significant impact on how we play thief and on paper isn’t even a complicated concept.
Cool Synergies
As s/x users, we heavily rely on evades for our defense and tbh it just ain’t cutting it anymore, especially since our access to evades isn’t much more to some other builds. But being able to more regularly blind/daze the foe could help us stay in the fight for longer. I mean classes like eles and mesmers got blinds from more passive play with the trait overhaul and I will argue they didn’t even need it. Furthermore it would add another dimension to s/d gameplay as you would have to decide do you just blind the foe or use flanking strike to go for the daze. Similarly, d/d builds could use death blossom for the 3rd evade while also getting behind the foe for the backstab.
Staff could also get more aoe cc in its play so the knockdown could be nerfed down to but hook strike could hit multiple foes so that staff users could actually fight off multiple foes as intended.
Why this wouldn’t be OP
Some of you might be thinking, but wouldn’t this be OP for certain builds? Well first of all backstab and tactical strikes would still require positioning to work which is already difficult in stealth as it is. Furthermore, d/p and p/x builds don’t have weapon skills with in built evades which mean they would be dependent on the dodges and utility skills for their evades so you won’t be seeing sneak attacks being spammed nor will you see many out of stealth shadow shot —> backstab combos.
So what do you guys think?