Guild Wars 2

There are many things the thief is and isn’t, but both sides of the fence can certainly agree that there is something really ****ed up about this profession. As someone who has played a thief for over 1.5 years, I can assure you that the core of the problem is the innerprofession balance between traits, skills, and mechanics. It comes down to extremes.

These extremes contribute to thief meta and crying posts which snowballs into the conundrum thieves face today. To start fixing this, everything needs to be brought to level. Since I have no desire to appease the wishes of bad players and turn this profession into a free kill for them, I am going to (only) buff parts of the thief that are bad. Removal can also be a buff.

Hopefully I can kill several birds with one stone. Here I go…

Venoms – Passive: Inflict X conditions every Y strikes.
Active: Place X combo field at feet for 3 seconds and inflict Y conditions. Radius: 360

• Spider: Poison (2s) 4th strike. Poison field: Poison (6s) per second.
• Skale: Vulnerability (2s) 4th strike, Torment (2s) 7th strike. Poison field: Vulnerability (8s) and Torment (5s) per second.
• Ice Drake: Chilled (1s) 5th strike. Ice field: Chilled (2s) every second.
• Devourer: Cripple (3s) 6th strike. Ethereal field: Immobilize (1s) and then Cripple (3s) per second.
• Basilisk: Petrify (.75s) 10th strike. Lightning field: Daze (1s) per second. 60s CD
• Skelk: Leech Life every 3rd attack. Water Field: Heal 1260hp per second. 25s CD

Venom Traits

• Venomous Aura – Removed
• Venomous Strength – Venom fields grant Might (3s) per pulse.
• Residual Venoms – Venom fields persist 1 second longer. Master trait (switch with Quick Venoms).
• Quick Venoms – Venom passives activate 1 strike sooner. -20% Venom CD. Grandmaster trait (switch with Residual Venoms).
• Leeching Venoms – Removed.

Traps Moved due to idea and 5001 character limit conflict.

Deadly Arts

• Potent Poison – Poison damage +30%.
• Improvisation – Stolen items have +25% effectiveness. 10% damage when holding a bundle.
• Dagger Training – Dagger damage +7%. Increase max initiative by 1 for each dagger equipped.
• Combined Training – Dual skills damage +10%. Critical chance is also increased by 5%.
• Panic Strike – Cooldown is now 20 seconds.

Critical strikes

• Concealed Defeat – The Smoke Screen placed is a small circle.
• Magnum Rounds – Pistol damage +10%. Range +300.
• Combo Critical Chance – Removed.
• Critical Haste – 15s CD.

Shadow Arts

• Last Refuge – Removes Revealed before activating.
• Slowed Pulse – Removes bleeding. 15CD
• Compound Bow – Shortbow skills are augmented:
  - Range is increased by 300 for all skills.
  - Trick Shot: 5% more damage and an extra bounce.
  - STEALTH: Brutal Shot – Deals 10% more damage, launches and bleeds. Launch: 300.
  - Bomb Shot: Faster, more direct shot that automatically explodes when it reaches its target. Impact will also cause it to explode.
  - Shatter Shot: Cripple is now AoE on impact.
  - Tear Gas: Like cluster bomb except with a poison field and no damage.
  - Infiltrator’s Lance: Blinds enemies between you and the target area now.

Acrobatics

• Assassin’s Retreat – Remove.
• Fleet of Foot – Removes 1 condition. 2s CD
• Pain Response – Removes Torment and Confusion too.
• Quick Recovery – 5s CD
• Hard to Survive – DELETE THIS CRAP
• Assassin’s Reward – Heal scaling is .1.

Trickery

• Spare Trick – Using a trick instead gives you a buff that lasts as long as the trick’s CD, allowing Tricks to be used twice in a row. But using a trick while this buff is applied will put it the trick on 1.5x the original cooldown.

Sword

• Pistol Whip: Damage +10%.
• Add offhand sword skills.

Pistol

• Vital Shot – Damage +10%. Bleeding is 5s.
• Unload – Damage +10%.

Shortbow

• Trick Shot – Damage increased by 10%.
• Disabling Shot – BIG issue here. It tries dodging away from the target and backwards via the camera at the same time and this causes rubberbanding. So here is the fix: Disabling shot dodges in the direction of movement. This skill also makes a thief go downhill when used on an incline like Heartseeker, so fix Heartseeker and you fix this.

Also Rifles.

k im dun

Is there a TLDR?

Most things sounds good, even great. Except for last refuge. It won’t solve the problem. Most people tend to complain about how it triggers just when they try to use skills like c&d.

I don’t call aoe spray and pray counterplay… that just relies on youre opponent being a bit dim… not to mention having an aoe skill that can actually do some decent damage

I don’t call spam 1 on youre highest hitting cleave melee weapon and hope they walk into it counterplay

I don’t call count to 3 and dodge and hope they actually waited that long counterplay against attacks from stealth its just dumb luck…

couple that with evades up the a…. and extremely hard hits there is nothing you can do but get lucky or die eventually, because even if the first attack fails there is always 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or eventually until all your survival mechanics are on cooldown then its just a free kill ….

you have been given too many heals and too much condi clear… I can smash you with condis on a necro and you just pop out of stealth after with nothing left ticking.. that’s if I actually land a hit after all the evades attached to your weapon skills and vigour and normal dodges. -.- combine that further with using stealth as a way to remove a target almost constantly forcing your opponent to try click you or waste time pressing target (if nobody else is around this works-.-) it just becomes ridiculous..

im not saying its impossible to kill a thief but usually it relies on the thief making a mistake and that’s it

ozzy.8059:

I don’t call aoe spray and pray counterplay… that just relies on youre opponent being a bit dim… not to mention having an aoe skill that can actually do some decent damage

I don’t call spam 1 on youre highest hitting cleave melee weapon and hope they walk into it counterplay

I don’t call count to 3 and dodge and hope they actually waited that long counterplay against attacks from stealth its just dumb luck…

couple that with evades up the a…. and extremely hard hits there is nothing you can do but get lucky or die eventually, because even if the first attack fails there is always 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or eventually until all your survival mechanics are on cooldown then its just a free kill ….

you have been given too many heals and too much condi clear… I can smash you with condis on a necro and you just pop out of stealth after with nothing left ticking.. that’s if I actually land a hit after all the evades attached to your weapon skills and vigour and normal dodges. -.- combine that further with using stealth as a way to remove a target almost constantly forcing your opponent to try click you or waste time pressing target (if nobody else is around this works-.-) it just becomes ridiculous..

im not saying its impossible to kill a thief but usually it relies on the thief making a mistake and that’s it

Uhh these forums make me puke, im out of here.

I like some of the suggested changes but some seem a little far fetched. For example, 30% poison damage as an adept trait would be far too broken, although I get the need to make them compete with other traits in their tier.

Also I would not go that route with vital shot. P/X needs a distinction between its sources of damage and simply buffing the aa solves nothing.

Same deal with last refuge, no matter how they look at it, its design is it’s own flaw. You can’t put stealth in any form to be out of your control, it just doesn’t work. Even if they removed reveal for it to proc, you could still have a cluster bomb out there or swing for a CnD revealing yourself after it proc’ed. Idc what anet Dev said they want that to be stealth access, it simply can’t with the way reveal works no matter how they try to manipulate it. The only exception to such a design would be for HtC since you would be porting away from a recent disable but until they discover how pointless swiftness is when you are stunned, it will continue to suck.

The venoms and traps seem OP too. In their current form, multiple traps would be op unless in a zerg where thief shouldn’t be anyways. The issue is the trap effects don’t justify the cooldowns, and the trap traits are spread out and lackluster. They need dual effects (you have some nice ideas there) but the traps themselves need work like making the ambush thief not die so quickly (evade perhaps, use a heal skill, etc), needle trap should persist after it springs to immobilize those who cross it (a thief line of warding if you will), trip wire just needs a rework, shadow trap should have a longer window to port to the enemy who triggered it. Venoms on X attack would be broken especially if they took BV while spamming cluster bomb. Could just be a number tweak though, the field accesss would be nice both for supporting purposes and self-combos (sneak attack + DV active, oh the confusion).

My old post although it is buried to hell:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Improving-thief/first#post3969432

:) Then allow me to justify my decision.

Venoms
Take every applicable condition for each of the venoms and multiply it by 3. That is what will be inflicted if the person afks in those red circles. Granted, having a second look at them Spider Venom active looks like it applies a wee bit too much poison so I will lower that.

However with Venomous Aura removed, I compensated with a 3 second combo field that anyone nearby can use. Just think of them as Choking Gas with different effects and a CD.

Traps
Needle trap is never used. Tripwire and Ambush is used once in a blue moon. Most of them do zero to crappy damage and then you have Ambush where the NPC summoned has 5.5k HP. They can die real quick. However, in terms of being outnumbered having all 3 out every 30 seconds could be a bit OP so I am switching charges with Needle Trap.

The bouncing betty is there to have a trap focused on AoE damage. Aside from BB traps, having tripwire and NT persist a few seconds would help.

Traits
My entire goal was to take the fillers that nobody ever uses and either attempt to make them appealing (keyword), fix them or remove them because they just plain suck.

Potent Venom was changed to damage because poison with as much condition damage as I was able to manage (2137) ends up only dealing 298 per tick. :I That sucks for max condition damage.

As for Last Refuge, I did goof. I’ll fix that.

tsawr.7905:

Is there a TLDR?

TL;DR read it anyway

ozzy.8059:

stuff

Expecting your opponent to die for you is not counterplay.

Thinking about their next move is. Try harder.

Last refuge definitely needs a fix. Mesmer’s Desperate Decoy is so similar that it really looks like an oversight.

I like the venom suggestions…still in the bandwagon for having f venom skills, but I like these

The basic fix for venoms is to remove venomous aura (or limit its potential to roughly 2x for a master trait rather than x5 for grandmaster) and then balance venom skills accordingly. We can then get to the stage where balanced venoms are worth a slot without traits, balanced for SPvP but also balanced in PvE.

Many thieves have known this for a long time and there’s no point in throwing away all the existing design until this one obvious fault is corrected.

I don’t see how you can salvage venoms. I never did like the concept of a counter that ticks down regardless if it did anything. And if you try to go around that people will complain that it makes their blocks useless.

The way I present it, it allows the thief to sorta customize their attacks with a condition that ticks every so often and if they choose they can make a strong but short-lived tool for them to use.

Its just more appealing to me.

In a way it seems like venoms would become less of an investment to make use of them, which I say is good however it runs into troubles with risk:reward when theory crafting.

Right now, yes venoms are quite bad even with the invested traits but I feel like its more a numbers issue than a mechanical issue. We have conflicting venoms (ice drake/devourer), we have venoms that need quick thinking but have a cast time (skelk) and we have venoms which are completely useless outside of 1 trait in combination with it (spider with leeching venoms due to max hits).

It follows a similar problem with warrior burst skills, a uniform cooldown with completely different results where some are far better than others. IDK if dev’s just got lazy or they think that all venoms are equal therefore should share the same cooldown but its most certainly not the case. I don’t think treating them like virtue of justice is the way to go, simply because thief isn’t about passive play. They are all about quick decisions, and an effect every x hits just doesn’t fit thematically but venoms and their associated traits do need looking into.

As for traps, no one picks them because their single effects on long cooldowns are hardly worth looking at. However it’d be like saying ranger should have the ability to have 2 pets out. 1 pet pretty much sucks, but 2 just made things complicated. Doubling or tripeling the effect is not the way to go, tbh I’d say they should scrap traps altogether and come up with something different or redo the traps entirely. Shadow trap is the only one worth looking at but it still underperforms as a stun breaker (long cast time on early release making it easy to be interrupted).

Idk if you thought about venoms as much as I have but simply messing with the numbers is not going to fix the problem. The problem lies within the core functionality and mechanics of the venoms themselves, not the numbers. Balancing numbers that augment eachother is just begging to cause balancing hell.

So to clarify my point let me ask you this: Why is Shadow Trap, Step and Refuge so popular? Its because they all open up options that could mean winning a fight.

Thief being a profession of quick decisions, like you said, requires options to perform and giving multiple uses for a single skill is better for the player and profession than Fire&Forgets. It makes the thief player weigh and balance their priorities and resources in realtime like they do with their weapon skills. So making the utilities require the same type of management weapon skills require essentially will make thief more uniform in playstyle while making metas more optional (like with warriors).

Venoms and traps as they are now do not provide much option beside using it at the opportune moment. That is punishing which kills their appeal. That’s why I added the Virtue-style passives. Give the players some form of advantage for both saving and using them makes them noticeably more appealing, even if its really complete crap overall (almost like signets).

The way I designed them allows that option to save or use even when the opportunity arrives where a critical decision can be made. Which brings to light another thing I am trying to shave off: the severity of punishment upon making a mistake.

With thief being an active profession, based on quick decisions, a mistake becomes more fatal. Passives soften this (as seen with warriors). It would still make sense to give thieves semi-passives (my venoms) as a means to keep them active while rewarding them for timing and management.

Same with traps. Give the player the option of planting 0, 1 or all of them because all three options can yield results when timed properly. Reward the thief for placing their traps in the best possible location or using them to control positioning in combat. You can’t just cut the CD in half and expect people to use them. :I

Disabling shot is a good name for this skill since is totally disables the thief…
The second part of the skill (when you are doing the “moonwalker”) you can’t control your character, can’t dodge, can’t do anything. It totally disables us.

Fix for this? Put it back as it was before you messed it up! There, fixed!

I think you meant “Hard to Catch”. I rather like this trait in the current meta. With all the hambows, fear fear fear necros and turret engis, a free psuedo stunbreak is pretty nice. It confuses the hell out of opponents and it can get you out of some pretty sticky situations (my favorite is Engi crate). Only time where the trait is a problem is Skyhammer, but well everything is a problem on Skyhammer. xD

@ Zacchary

It still doesn’t suit the thief kit to have a passive condition applicator no matter how short it may be. I’d have to take a good look again because maybe I’m just missing something from your pov but I don’t believe venoms should have a passive counter. The active combo field is a good way to make thief less selfish giving those who prefer thief but want to be group-friendly, however between them and the trait removal you suggested it seems like you want them to be in an near all-in-one kit versus something you invest into to make use of. The nice thing about venomshare is that you can use it on the go, you don’t need your team to hover over the field to make use of it.

The reason deception skills are so popular is because thief already has all the offense they could want from traits weapons and gear (runes/sigils). The thing they lack is defense, and venoms/traps don’t fit that at all. They are really good defenses too, giving you mobility or stealth coincidentally being thief’s’ best defense tools (excluding shadow curtain since its only real application is pve).

I agree with the changes concept but not necessarily the product. Thief needs less punishment in their utility selection but trying to slip that by the thief Q.Q’ers won’t be easy unless there are some even changes. I doubt anyone would agree to multiple trap placements, trip wire alone is not all that great but X3, the Q.Q would be endless. Reduce the duration as compensation, now we’re back where we started. Traps need a complete overhaul, since they just don’t work the way they are now. Ambush and shadow trap are the only 2 with potential but maybe they can blend into a different type of utility.

I don’t care if they QQ. I feel Anet learned a lesson last December and will be putting way more thought into their thief updates before they do anything.

And secondly, imagine that a player finds a thief is randomly jumping in a confined location in the middle of an open field. That player begins to charge when after a second he is suddenly knocked down and assaulted by another thief out of nowhere.

The player, not know what is exactly happening, uses a stun breaker and gets away from the add only to have a bouncing betty blow up in his face before getting knocked down again. The thief, still jumping, is watching this unknowing player trigger all of his traps in delight while the player becomes rageful.

The player’s health is now at 70% with the field of traps cleared. Just as he turns to his target, the thief teleports to the nearby ruins and runs up a flight of stairs where he continues to jump at the top of them. The player is now thoroughly kittened and runs towards the stairs wanting to kill this jumping thief.

But in their rage they trigger every Bouncing Betty and Ambush the thief has before succumbing to a third Tripwire and a few Needle Traps. As the player’s health drops to about the thief uses their Thieves’ Guild and kills the hellbent player without swinging their weapon all because the player wanted a free kill.

The lesson here is that things that seem to be too good to be true really are too good to be true. This would also make a great video.

It would be a good video indeed, but nothing past a fantasy. Besides, I think engineer can accomplish this without a total rework.

If I’d make a suggestion on the traps themselves,

Bouncing betty: Sweet idea actually, but I’d add a dual effect like a 1 time blind or daze. Something to spook your foe other than a random slap in the face.

Ambush: Up the health/toughness, make them dodge if they are spiked, give the pistol thief a skill to use (dagger thief uses scorpion wire, so maybe shadow curtain), merge trip wire into this while increasing the cooldown to 50 seconds while increasing the duration of the thief to 30 seconds, and removing the cripple (a lot, I know) . Reason being trip wire alone is pretty easy to avoid but also because when the thief is summoned, there is that short window where they are appearing and doing nothing but soaking up AoE. At least this would have some “oh no” attached to it if used and be worth slotting for a good combo. If need be reduce the knock down duration to 2 seconds.

Trip wire: merged to ambush.

Shadow trap: Remove the cast time on the early release. It’s a pretty good skill but for getting out of a sticky situation its not all that great. Also you can’t really call it a “stun break” when it has a cast time that’s 1.5 seconds (easily interrupted).

Needle trap: Same trigger effects except a persistent effect after the first trigger. For (4?) seconds afterwards , anyone who crosses the trap is immobilized for 1 second and adds their current conditions they are suffering from into the trap application. Basically it’s a diseased trap acting like epidemic for those who cross it, which would work great for group play but also overall giving a purpose to slotting it. In other words, you could safely use it for escaping or in a group fight as opposed to just being annoying.

I really like those ideas alot. Gimme a sec while I move them. 5001 character limit sucks.

Traps – Each trap has a specific amount of charges. Each use removes a charge and places a trap at the thief’s feet. When all charges are used, the trap is placed on cooldown. Traps persist for 30 minutes. Placing a trap after the skill is off cooldown will replace traps of the same name currently deployed.

- Can be placed a certain number of times before they are put on cooldown.

• Ambush – Enemies that activate the trap are knocked down. A Thief then assails the target. 2 charges. 50s CD
  - Knockdown: 2s
• Needle Trap – 2 charges. When tripped, Needle Trap copies the conditions of the one that tripped it and makes a Poison Field that inflicts them to enemies that enter the field. Persists for 4s.
• Shadow Trap – 1 charge.
• Tripwire – Merged with Ambush.
• Bouncing Betty – Explodes a second after its triggered, inflicting damage and a random condition. Range 300. 2 charges.
  5 Bleeding: 5s
  3 Torment: 5s
  Blindness: 5s
  Burning: 5s
  2 Confusion: 5s
  Daze (rare): 1s
  Cripple: 5s

Trap Traits

• Trap Mastery – Traps have an extra charge. -20% trap Cooldown. Master trait (switching with Fleet of Foot)
• Corrosive Traps – Unchanged.
• Anticipation – Damage increases by 1% for every deployed trap. Trickery Grandmaster trait.

Bumpity.