Guild Wars 2

So after a few weeks we have the most of the traits and skills reviewed. As always, this was done with multiple members from various playstyles all putting their input into each single skill. These suggestions were all evaluated on, discussed and finalized before they were put into these notes.

Click here for Specs and Traits!

Just a disclaimer, these SoTs are meant to show anet the direction we want their balance changes to go in. In no way do we expect anet to actually go along with these suggestions given the nature of balancing. We only aim to show players and developers what it takes to make certain parts of the thief profession an option so that this profession might gain some diversity and choice for the thief community.

Since venoms really just require a mechanical change we took them out of the main body and gave them their own spot. We think you’ll like the idea.

Untraited venoms mostly are worthless in a slot unless venomshare is slotted. The main reasons are due to the mechanics of the venoms, the near insignificant conditions it applies and Venomous Aura turning them into powerful utilities which keeps their mechanics from really changing for the better.

During the discussion, an idea was submitted that essentially turned the venoms into combo fields that applied venom charges to allies within the field. It became the accepted idea. After much deliberation, we agreed that activating a venom would place a combo field at the thief’s feet on top of the usual venomous aura effects. The fields will be as large as Choking Gas and will not pulse anything. These will last for 5s before dissipating. The combo fields will be as followed:

Skelk Venom = Water Field (because of healing)
Spider Venom = Poison Field (because of poison)
Scale Venom = Fire Field (Scales barf acid > acid burns > burning. Couldn’t really find anything else for this venom that makes sense or wasn’t redundant)
Ice Drake Venom = Ice Field (because of chilled)
Devourer Venom = Dark Field (because the lifeleech effect matches the arid devourer of the silverwastes)
Basilisk Venom = Lightning Field (to keep the theme of stunning)

This we feel will make venoms more appealing and have more utility outside pure venomshare builds.

Name: Hide in Shadows
Comment: This is a decent heal. During the discussion the only issues was that it’s HPS wasn’t entirely as good as players wanted it and that it could easily be interrupted.
Suggestion:Reduce the cast time by ¼-1/2s and the CD by 5s.

Name: Withdraw
Comment: This heal is awesome. The main concerns were that we still havn’t gotten the 10% healing compensation for the CD increase and other minor gripes like a bit more control.
Suggestion: The overall opinion was that this skill didn’t really need a change. Its fine as it stands and useful as a heal.

Name: Skelk/Spider/Ice Drake/Scale/Devourer/Basilisk
Comment: See Venoms
Suggestion: See Venoms

Name: Signet of Malice
Comment: Of course, we did think about the Signets of Power trait and how it statistically makes signets better and we did make a recommendation that it keeps passives active while the signet activates. However, since SoTs are meant to review on a 1-on-1 basis from a player’s point of view, we still think that there should be alternatives if not. SoM’s issue comes from the poor active which doesn’t provide much healing and can be easily interrupted.
Suggestion: While our Signets of Power trait idea would make this more viable in all areas of the game, we were torn between doing a 1-2 condition transfer and adding Resistance to the active. Whichever works best.

Name: Tripwire
Comment: This trap, while useful, is limited in it’s utility. After discussion we realized that its effects were too sudden to be effective against anything but a single player.
Suggestion: So our idea was to make the effect linger for 3s, as much as the knockdown duration, with a maximum of 5 activations to keep it from completely stopping a zerg. The way this lingering works is the trap gets sprung and trips the one who activated it once. Anyone else who touches the trap’s field of effect will also get knocked down once. This will happen to the one who tripped the trap +4 others.

Name: Needle Trap
Comment: This trap is good for condition bursting and possibly setting up for a backstab.
Suggestion: On the topic of lingering traps, there was a debate going on about spreading the effects out via pulsing vs. adding a 2s linger. The pulse will inflict 1 bleed (10s), 1 poison (6s) and immobilize every second for 4 seconds while the linger would work like with Tripwire.

Name: Shadow Trap
Comment: While good, the main gripe is the loading screen that happens when shadowstepping at max distance.
Suggestion: By reducing the distance covered down to 2-3k, the loading screen will not appear and the trap maintains it’s escape function.

Name: Ambush
Comment: The AI in this game is not that great. The AI of the thief that appears from the Ambush Trap is not very good either. It dies really fast and doesn’t do as much damage as we figured it should to be considered useable.
Suggestion: What we figured was that Ambush could instead have a theme of diversion while showing off the magic involved with the profession. So instead of a thief npc out of nowhere, the trap will instead create a dark tornado of what looks like crows and this tornado both blinds (6s) and confuses (6s) those caught in it for 4s. It’ll look cool and give us a little more condition strength.

Name: Assassin’s Signet
Comment: This signet is really just good for maxing power. The issue with it is that the active mostly translates into the 180 power it gives. While this issue could be solved with our SoP idea, it still has a long CD for its effects.
Suggestion: Reduce the CD to 30s.

Name: Infiltrator’s Signet
Comment: The active is excellent for pvp. The passive is horrible though. It was much higher before it got nerfed Dec 10th. Like around every 3 seconds instead of 10.
Suggestion: Increase the rate to 1 initiative every 5 seconds. The active will have more of an effect in combat.

Name: Signet of Agility
Comment: During the discussion we realized every kind of thief uses this signet, more or less. It actually has plenty of viability within most builds. The only thing is that it really is up to the player whether to use this over something else. It is still useful.
Suggestion: No change needed.

Name: Signet of Shadows
Comment: While this signet is pretty decent both active and passive, the only issue that was brought up was that the active effect was far from good simply because the CD was too much for the effect.
Suggestion: We took our SoP idea in mind when we talked about how to make SoS better and came up with reducing the Cd to 10s if Anet decided to go with our SoP idea. Otherwise a reduced CD would be fine.

Name: Scorpion Wire
Comment: This was interesting. Everyone agreed that nothing was wrong with this skill. The only issue it has is pathing which is a broad issue for many movement skills.
Suggestion: Increase the arc of the skill and change the pull to a launch towards the thief. This will essentially bypass the pathing issues.

Name: Roll for Initiative
Comment: This is a long CD skill with a good reason to be. Useful but could be better.
Suggestion: Using Shadowstep as the bar for decent stunbreaks we figured that simply halving the CD and the initiative gained would put this on par with Shadowstep and make it see more use.

Name: Haste
Comment: Same thing as R4I. The cooldown is too long for players to consider using it.
Suggestion: Reduce the CD to 40s.

Name: Caltrops
Comment: A lot of us love it and find use for it in all game modes (yes even pvp).
Suggestion: It’s fine but reverting some of the nerfs done to it would be nice. Mainly removing the refresh on cripple in exchange for lower cripple duration.

Name: Shadowstep
Comment: This is the standard we hold other stunbreaks to.
Suggestion: No change needed.

Name: Blinding Powder
Comment: We agree this is a good skill to have. However like all other deceptions, this utility has a long one for the effects it brings.
Suggestion: To offset the long CD we would like this to break stuns. Thieves do not have that many good stunbreaks this would help keep us from getting entirely screwed during a stunlock seeing as how thieves barely have enough HP to begin with.

Name: Smoke Screen
Comment: This skill is actually pretty useful outside it’s trait. Projectile destruction and smoke field access is nice.
Suggestion:No change recommended.

—-
Name: Shadow Refuge
Comment: While this skill can be an issue if you want to stealth, it can also be used to distract. So it really isn’t that bad still considering that players are getting smarter.
Suggestion: No change recommended.

Name: Thieves’ Guild
Comment: This elite is nice but the only gripe everyone had was that the CD was way too high.
Suggestion: Cut the CD in half to put it on par with Daggerstorm.

Name: Daggerstorm
Comment: There are bugs associated with this skill. During its animation, it’ll sometimes stop firing. More investigation and testing might be needed but the idea of this bug is that when daggerstorm got nerfed, one dagger would do damage at a time instead of all daggers damaging at once. The theory we came up with was that if a dagger failed to register the end of it’s cycle of damage, that the game would prevent daggers from firing until it was resolved. Again it is still a theory.
Suggestion: We do think that increasing the fire rate of the daggers would offset it. Assuming that the nerf is what we think it is, setting the fire rate to only the first hit instead of waiting until the dagger finishes bouncing would help.

Name: Sword Auto Attack
Comment: Using dagger as a standard for all autos we figured that do a few things to sword to give it a little more utility.
Suggestion: 1.) Move cripple from the third attack to the first attack and make the duration 3s. 2.) Add a 1/4s evade. 3.) Exchange the weakness out with +1 initiative. The reason for all of these is to increase the utility of the sword auto. The first attack will help with positioning since it will keep the enemy from moving around too much, the second attack will help with a short evade just incase the player counters and the third will reward us will a little initiative for landing a full combo since it is a bit uncommon for a full sword combo to land when there is still initiative left.

Name: Infiltrator’s Strike
Comment: S/D might have few issues but it synergizes well with CnD. S/P on the other hand almost exclusively sees use in pve because it does not have as much mobility and it’s defense access is lackluster compared to other sets.
Suggestion: Really all s/p needs is a leap which is why we recommend placing the leap finisher on the return. This would most definitely make s/p more viable in the pvp setting. Infiltrator’s Strike > Black Powder > Infiltrator’s Return gives stealth > reposition or use Tactical Strike. A lot of use really had good feels with this idea.

Name: Pistol Whip
Comment: In our previous SoT, we did the math and realized that this skill’s damage nerf was uncalled for and that thief really didn’t have anything to make this attack stick unless we blow all of our shadowsteps. The poor damage combined with the long total cast and the root makes using this not worthwhile.
Suggestion: Increase the damage coefficient by 20-30%. This will put Pistol Whip somewhere under 80% of the damage that 100b puts out while still keeping it’s hard to land feel. You could always just revert the 15% damage aswell. The point is that pistol whip is just a bit better than the auto assuming all hits land and that yells useless.

Name: Flanking Strike/Larcenous Strike
Comment: This is a pretty solid skill albeit lacking 2 small but needed buffs.
Suggestion: The evasion on this skill is low for what it can accomplish and LS tends to take too long to activate making it hard to land on those who are aware. We suggest taking 1/4s of the cast time for LS and place that 1/4s on the evade of FS. This will help make evasion builds more viable.

Name: Trick Shot
Comment: The overall opinion was this attack was too slow. Good for multiple targets but still slow.
Suggestion: We recommend a small decrease in aftercast and an equal increase in projectile speed. This would be a decent alternative to simply increasing the damage.

Name: Cluster Bomb
Comment: The damage is great but it bad that the projectile speed is so slow. It forces us ontop of the target just to deal damage.
Suggestion: Increase the projectile speed by about 50%. That would help with this issue.

Name: Disabling Shot
Comment: There isn’t a single redeeming quality about this skill. The evasion is shorter than a regular dodge roll. The damage is tiny. The cripple is easily ignored and the evasion frames are almost pointless.
Suggestion: This skill needs +50% effectiveness buff. 50% more damage, evasion, evasion distance, etc. If you feel thief needs to stay in the fight longer, then change the evade from away-from-target to in-the-direction-of-movement. More maneuverability and less running away this way.

Name: Choking Gas
Comment: While we are fine with the damage added to keep us from condition bombing someone in stealth, we are not fine with the tiny amount of poison it inflicts now that poison stacks.
Suggestion: Increase the duration to 5s since duration won’t be the issue anymore. Secondly this will bring condition SB out as a possible concept.

Name: Infiltrator’s Arrow
Comment: We have few gripes about this skill.
Suggestion: Allowing the skill to activate and shadowstep to max range when the target circle is beyond maximum range would be a nice thing to have. Just my opinion. However it was agreed to reduce the initiative cost to 5. Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Name: Dagger Auto Attack/Heartseeker/Shadow Shot
Comment: All three of these skills are good.
Suggestion: No change is needed for either of them.

Name: Death Blossom
Comment: This skill is useless unless you are a beast and can land all three bleeds consistently. The BIGGEST gripes were the evade and the out of place condition damage skill in a power set. As a personal note the bleeds are powerful which is something I advised considering when discussing this skill. The skill is weak for a power build, however a hybrid build could get use out of it while a condition build can currently get a lot.
Suggestion: The suggestions were to either remove the bleeds, increase the damage by 50% and the number of hits to 5 or increase the evade time to ½-3/4s and damage by 50% while leaving the bleeds. Possibly a small reduction of duration on the bleeds.

Name: Dancing Dagger
Comment: While this sometimes suffers from the same glitch that Scorpion Wire suffers from, it is still a good tool to use to chase. There are, however, a few things that could make this more appealing and effective at its job.
Suggestion: Increase the range to 1050 and increase cripple duration to 5s. This will make it effective as a chase skill for a group.

Name: Cloak and Dagger
Comment: This skill is good all around. Didn’t really have many suggestions or reasons to improve.
Suggestion: One member did suggest that it blinds for 5s instead of inflicts vulnerability though.

Name: Vital Shot
Comment: This is the crappiest auto attack we have. 4s of bleed doesn’t really matter when the attack is slow and the overall damage it produces is poor.
Suggestion: Aside from increasing the bleed duration to perhaps 8s and increase the fire rate on the skill, have it change to a power-build-friendly autoattack when a second pistol is equipped, preferably one that has more damage and no bleeds.

Name: Body Shot
Comment: This skill has been reiterated multiple times by anet. It still is bad. The immobilize and vuln are too short to really do anything meaningful.
Suggestion: Change out the immobilize for weakness (3s) and increase the 5 vuln duration to 6s. It might not be perfect yet but we are getting there.

Name: Unload
Comment: This is the standard for power pistols. We really think the rest should follow suit or work with this skill.
Suggestion: No change needed.

Name: Headshot/Black Powder
Comment: While the Black Powder nerf did feel unneeded, these two skills are fine where they are.
Suggestion:We personally want the nerf removed from BP but otherwise these are fine as they are.

I like the idea of venoms dropping a field that doesn’t pulse anything. Hopefully this idea gets some attention!

Yussss, teef is finally posting our SoT discussion
Sry I haven’t been on teef, my computer broke

I had to leave before you guys got to weapon skills, but your change to infiltrator’s arrow already exists in game. It’s in general options (and poorly worded) but check the box that says “lock ground target at maximum range.” It makes all ground target skills go to their maximum range if you move your mouse beyond it.

As for a functional change to the skill, it should have a higher arc but have the projectile move faster so the horizontal speed stays the same but it’s less likely to clip the ground on the way to the targeted location, which results in a short shot.

Definitely enable the max range ground target option from a few patches back. It is such a nice QoL improvement.

Amante.8109:

Definitely enable the max range ground target option from a few patches back. It is such a nice QoL improvement.

Yeah. They really didn’t publicize the option well though. A friend of mine was watching a video of mine and asked why the ground target on IA wasn’t going to where my mouse was. He just responded with FML after I told him. I think he was on a nade engi at the time….

Okay, on to some feedback for the feedback:

yolo swaggins.2570:

Utilities

[snip]

---

Name: Shadow Trap
Comment: While good, the main gripe is the loading screen that happens when shadowstepping at max distance.
Suggestion: By reducing the distance covered down to 2-3k, the loading screen will not appear and the trap maintains it’s escape function.

---

[snip]

You guys found a possible loading screen more annoying than the fact that the trap often if not most of the time ens up porting you into the next pebble on the road or not at all because of serious pathing issues? Thats disheartening because now i feel like i´m the only one having problems with this. In addition to your suggestions this skill should work like a teleport. Make it a personal, one-way one-time portal. At least it would work consistently this way. I lost count of how many times i endured the lengthy cast of the return only to find myself not moving a single inch or moving only a fracture of the distance.

Regarding Withdraw, RfI, FS, Disabling Shot: You didnt address the problem that skills like these need to take priority over any other currently ongoing skill or animation. When i am immobilized i need to break it asap ond shouldnt have to wait for a non existing animation to finish since immobilize stops them. When i see a heavy blow coming i want to use FS or Disabling Shot, but those simply won’t activate in time due to animation restrictions. RfI shares the same problems like Withdraw.
To prevent abuse, aftercast conditions should be altered in a way to only allow evasion / defense skills during their course. To even things out, the aftercast time remaining when using said skill should be added to the end of the used skill and then some as opportunity cost, for example .25 seconds. This way you cannot do more DPS by disrupting aftercasts, but you can properly evade on reaction.

Dancing Dagger, Scorpion Wire, Trick Shot, Disabling Shot, Clusterbomb: I wholeheartly agree with these, but cannot stress one thing enough: please, for the love of god, increase their projectile speeds. Dragonhunters got the same treatment for their bow skills:

Karl McLain.5604:

While the changes listed are the ones you’ll be seeing in the next beta weekend, we haven’t stopped making changes as we work to improve the Dragonhunter specialization. Here’s a few more changes we’ve been playing with for the longbow.

Puncture Shot: Arrow velocity is slow! We’re looking at increasing it so that it’s less strafe-able. What we’ve got it at is ~66% increase, putting it at around Hip Shot (engineer rifle) velocity. We’re also looking at the base and bounce functionality.

True Shot: To make this ability more rewarding for stopping you in place, we’re looking at further increasing the damage.

Deflecting Shot: We’re looking at increasing the damage values of this ability, so that it has a bit more impact to it.

Symbol of Energy: It’s really hard to place this in a position on allies/enemies without them being gone by the time the arrow gets there. Upping the missile velocity by ~60% and allowing it to be fired behind you.

Thanks for your constructive feedback, everyone. I’ve got to head out for now. We’ll be back with more stuff, like traits, soon.

-Karl

So please, Karl. Please do the same for thieves and make Trick Shot, Disabling Shot, Dancing Dagger, Scorpion Wire, Clusterbomb etc. finally usable at 900 units distance. All of them can be sidestepped at 500-600 units distance. Clusterbomb is essentially behaving like Symbol of Energy, it could use a speed up as well. At least bring it to the same level of speed as Arcing Shot from Warrior Longbow (#3). Better would be to use the same speed and arc of Choking gas, or a higher speed but keeping the arc of the current Clusterbomb.

Thats it from my point of view. Great compilation and ideas from [Teef] overall, so thanks!

Yes, please. If we’re going to be stuck at 900 range max, at least make our ranged stuff consistent within that range.

I agree with most.

On the subject of Deathblossom though:

Keeping the bleeds and increasing the evade is the best option. Condi d/d is a stable thief build for pve and the real issue the skill has is lack of utility due to its animation lock making the evade useless in pvp.

Keeping the bleed and upping the evade to sync better with the animation would make it retain a useful function for d/d power builds without eliminating the thief’s only solid aoe condition/hybrid build, as it seems staff is headed for a power aoe route.

As a guy that plays such a hybrid, and has done so successfully for quite a while (within the strict limitations of where it’s viable to use) I’d hate to see any weapon, dagger included, lose a core condition application skill that actually gets built around.

I’d even be okay with leaving the damage exactly where it is and increasing the init cost if the evade was usable in pvp, as the new elite traits shore up a lot of the condition DPS loss you’d otherwise incur by making it less spammable.

If we’re talking about making it useful across the spectrum of d/d then the evade rather than the damage is where heavier adjustments should be placed, as evade is a tool useful for both the hybrid and power gank specs in equal measure.

Maugetarr.6823:

I had to leave before you guys got to weapon skills, but your change to infiltrator’s arrow already exists in game. It’s in general options (and poorly worded) but check the box that says “lock ground target at maximum range.” It makes all ground target skills go to their maximum range if you move your mouse beyond it.

As for a functional change to the skill, it should have a higher arc but have the projectile move faster so the horizontal speed stays the same but it’s less likely to clip the ground on the way to the targeted location, which results in a short shot.

Well now we know. Can’t modify without boss’ green light though since its not my write up.

Thanks Yolo. This will be essential during BWE.

Just want to point out something, the venom fields are a great idea but I am confused as to what this combo field effect will be given to. I wasn’t there because I still am on hiatus but I am wondering if its part of Venomous Aura or part of the venoms themselves.

I like your ideas and have a few of mine. For venoms, on top of all yours, I only have one suggestion, Skelk Venom needs cd reduction to 25 sec. It is useless on 40 second.

Also I have idea how to make signet useful in pvp/wvw.
Signet of Malice could use Resistance just like warriors signet.
Assassin’s Signet imo needs some redoing. I would like to see him on 30 second cd with its active, your attacks are unblocable. Right now it’s just bad. You can use it kamikaze style and then what? Die? With it making your attacks unblocable it would give it a place vs block heavy classes like guard and engineer vs who we are already struggling.
Signet of Agility. Perfect.
Infiltrator’s Signet. Agreed. Passive should be 1 ini every 5 sec. 10 is bad.
Signet of Shadows. Honestly? 10 second cd with its current active is more than enough.

Now onto making signet build useful. Our signet trait Signets of Power is all around bad. Our signet build right now is pop signets, get 15 might, Cloak and Dagger, steal, backstab, try not to die…
I would like to see new aura called Blinding aura. It would last 2 seconds, pulsing 1 blind per second in its radius. You would get it by leaping dark field, instead what we have now, blind on strike. Blasting dark field would apply aoe Blinding aura, same as Chaos Armor.

Let’s be honest here, leaping, blasting dark field right now is almost pointless.

We have only 1 dark field on Shadow Refuge and we would get one more with your rebalanced of Devourer Venom. Getting one or 2 more on traps would be welcome change. In other words it’s not really spammable and would also bring new stuff to underplayed skills/specs.
Necros would also benefit with their Wells being dark fields, but they don’t have that many leap nor blast finishers.
How signets benefit from this new aura? Signets of Power would be changed to apply Blinding aura on activating signet.
All of sudden you stop being one trick pony and can sustain yourself in meele with signet build. Also there are aura runes for even more game play changes…

I know this is not thread about traits but I’m lazy to find it.

Shadow arts:

So while on subject of traits acrobatics is mess but one thing that always bugged me was Fleet Shadow. You trait in evasion trait line to move faster in stealth? While there is stealth trait line? Wut?

Proposed change, make it grant supers speed while in stealth and move it to grandmaster shadow arts instead of Cloaked in Shadow. You are fast and can reposition but lose sustain of Shadow’s Rejuvenation. Move fall dmg trait somewhere else and for blind on entering stealth part, give it to Cloak and Dagger instead of vulnerability since its uses mostly (90%) in off hand dagger builds, which are already underpowered. Easypeasy.

Also Shadow Protector should grant Regeneration and Protection. Gz you are useless in stealth here’s some protection since people can pull you out of it with random attack and negate your whole trait line.

Concealed Defeat, upon downed release blinding powder instead smoke screen since its only paints giant target. + reduce deception skills.

Last refuge, delete everything, use it as fall dmg trait.

Shadow’s Embrace, add burning, fear and taunt. Why was this even nerfed?? Like we had op condi removal to begin with.

Acrobatics :

Pain response: add torrent and confusion, make it 15 sec.

Guarded Initiation: without much fumbling around, remove health threshold and make it 2,3 sec Icd.

Swindler’s Equilibrium: add 1 initiative on successful evade too.

Assassin’s Reward: multiple healing by 2.5

Don’t Stop: Icd of 5 seconds instead of 10.

Upper Hand: merged with Swindler’s Equilibrium and replaced with Quick Pockets which refills your initiative bar. Seriously 3 ini on weapon switch for grandmaster is embracing.

Also, Trickster belongs to Acrobatics. Critical Strikes, Sundering Strikes 66% chance for 10 sec of vulnerability. Also critical strikes have few traits which only grant bonuses if your health is above 90%. That’s bad. We have low health pool and every fart can knock it down below 90. 50 is more reliable.

Deadly Arts:

Dagger Training and potent Poison are hilariously bad. Up everything I guess.
Trappers Respite: if trap would be dropped moment you start heal skill I would be so happy.
Improvisation: People are complaining about randomness of it. How about if last used skill category gets recharged? It might be op tho… 2 heals, full recharge on deception, then again elite spec are coming and reverent has 2 heals… I like it better than it being random al least this way you control what you want recharged.

About weapon skills, I really like you suggestions. Leap on Infiltrator’s Return caught me by surprise. I really like this solution.

I’m writing this on tablet so quoting, linking, copy pasting is crazy hard and I won’t do it

yolo swaggins.2570:

Just want to point out something, the venom fields are a great idea but I am confused as to what this combo field effect will be given to. I wasn’t there because I still am on hiatus but I am wondering if its part of Venomous Aura or part of the venoms themselves.

I helped with this idea yolo. Basically it creates a combo field (fire, water, etc.) in an AoE at your feet. Depending on the venom, this combo field also pulses the venomous effect on players in the area.
I don’t remember if it required venomous aura or not though, u gotta ask chris

Fenda.1398:

You guys found a possible loading screen more annoying than the fact that the trap often if not most of the time ens up porting you into the next pebble on the road or not at all because of serious pathing issues? Thats disheartening because now i feel like i´m the only one having problems with this. In addition to your suggestions this skill should work like a teleport. Make it a personal, one-way one-time portal. At least it would work consistently this way. I lost count of how many times i endured the lengthy cast of the return only to find myself not moving a single inch or moving only a fracture of the distance.

Regarding Withdraw, RfI, FS, Disabling Shot: You didnt address the problem that skills like these need to take priority over any other currently ongoing skill or animation. When i am immobilized i need to break it asap ond shouldnt have to wait for a non existing animation to finish since immobilize stops them. When i see a heavy blow coming i want to use FS or Disabling Shot, but those simply won’t activate in time due to animation restrictions. RfI shares the same problems like Withdraw.

Agreed with both points.

Shadow Trap:
Make it the Thief’s version of a private portal. Wherever you laid it, that’s where you will return to unless triggered. If triggered, you will always teleport to the target. If it was triggered, I wouldn’t even mind adding another return option so you could teleport to the target’s location, kitten the situation, then optionally return to the location you just teleported from if things were too much for you to handle (like in the middle of an enemy zerg).

Signet of Shadows:
When activated, instantly remove the Revealed debuff. If you wanted to add stealth also, then you could do so.

Infiltrator’s Strike:
I like the idea of a leap finisher, but why not have it on the Strike instead of the return? Just treat it like Black Powder + Heartseeker + Steal. Apply Stealth after the strike so you don’t get auto-Revealed just as it does with Heartseeker. That places you in perfect position for a Tactical Strike. It also allows you to get in, get your hits, and get back out without delay. Or you could just immobilize the target and run away/return while stealthed.

Trick Shot:
I’d be fine with a default 1-second poison per hit. Even if you replaced the trait Dagger Training with something that applies poison on every auto-attack, not just dagger strikes. It may not be much, but at least it gives a Shortbow a little more punch. If nothing else, it can reduce healing without using initiative.

Infiltrator’s Arrow:
Add a slight arc to the path of the arrow, though not making its flight-time any slower. The arc can help getting over slight obstructions so the shadowstep won’t be cut short.

Shadowstepping:
Lose the LoS requirement. Also, never have the targeting indicator be green when a shadowstep cannot or will not execute completely. Don’t tell me why it didn’t work, just show me a red indicator please.

Steal QoL:
If I have no target and click the Steal key, I just Steal in place. If I have a target that’s out of range and click the Steal key, my Steal goes on a short cooldown, and I get no benefit (Hidden Thief, etc). Can we get a slight helping hand? Perhaps grey the Steal button out if a target is selected, but is out of range?

The trap ones are a definite must, or have their AoE like rangers.

OMG I would have a nerdgasm if Thief’s venom became combo fields….