Guild Wars 2

I often find myself wondering why nothing has ever been done to address the glaring issue of steal in combination with using a ranged weapon.

Several traits make steal an incredibly powerful tool on a short cd; boon strip/steal, dmg tool, healing tool, interrupt, reset for skills, and so on. Sure if you steal with shortbow you can always #5 away, but now you’re just wasting a huge chunk of initiative for no reason. You could trap and run etc.., or waste other important cds, yet all of these ways of re-positioning put you in more danger or in a worse scenario. Why not give thieves an alternative version of steal when using a ranged weapon that still interacts with all of the traits in the same manner, but has a different base skill approach?

One idea could be a ground targeted skill (maybe it summons a decoy or something of the sorts) that taunts for 2 seconds when using a ranged weapon.

Another possible idea could be summoning an ally thief to shiv the target causing cripple and torment for a short duration.

Suggestions such as these could go a long way to adding some more active and skill based defense that Thieves desperately need. Opinions? Ideas?

I thought about this as well… but apparently most people are ok with how it is. Well I guess that’s because most people don’t really try to main the ranged ones…. which is understandable right now.

These were my thoughts a while ago https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Steal-Ability-suggestions-problems/first#post5586770

Steal should have always had a return mechanic or at least a cheap trait that activates that ability.

Straegen.2938:

Steal should have always had a return mechanic or at least a cheap trait that activates that ability.

Yeah I suggested something like that here. I’m looking for other people’s opinions on it or alternate suggestions possibly, but there haven’t really been any yet.

I guess Steal as a whole could use a lot more looking into by devs in terms of it’s current functionality; I believe a lot of what was mentioned in the other threads would also be beneficial changes.

Upon checking a few other things today I also noticed that the boons you have stolen are only a single stack/general duration of the boon; say your target has 13 stacks of might, you clear their might stacks yet only gain 1, when if you are technically “stealing” those boons why wouldn’t you get the 13 stacks, or the stacked duration for other boons such as protection. A dynamic check doesn’t seem to exist for stolen boons.

I really love the thief play style as a whole, mostly in pvp, but they really need to consider a more serious overhaul imo. Obviously it’s not really possible currently or in the past few months because of HoT, but with the attention they’ve paid to the community I feel suggestions unrelated to beta events and good communication between player/dev is really what thief needs after HoT drops and things settle.

They could give us a grappling hook to steal items with from a distance.

Maybe it could be tagged onto Quick Pockets trait, which feels kinda underwhelming.