Guild Wars 2

Blowing all 8 skills at the beginning of an encounter is as reckless as blowing all your initiatives. As I’ve already mentioned, if any of those skills did not connect, they’ll auto-attacking the whole time, that’s why, as I’ve also mentioned, you only see 3-4 of those skills used most of the time. Just because they have the potential to use 8 skills doesn’t equate that those skills will be profitable — you’re just using them just because you can. That’s hardly realistic at all.

Yes I agree on that was just saying that they do have those 8 skills over our 4 skills. Yes I’m aware of our decent regenerating resource over cooldowns.

Other classes need only to wait for the moment when using skill A would be more beneficial.
Thieves need to plan ahead and make decisions in line “if I use ability A, will I be able to use ability B when I need to?”.
EG, in any given situation other classes can individually consider every skill in their @rsenal to be worth using or not. Thief must consider all skills at once before using any.

Do take note, when a thief misses with skill, he must wait before he can use ANY skill again. If someone else misses the skill, they still have a whole lot to choose from.

Yes, do take note that when a 30s cooldown skill misses that the player has to do without that skill until it becomes available again — But when a Thief misses, the most costly weapon skill is 6 initiatives — that’s 6s of cooldown after Dec 10. That’s like 8 choices every 6s while the cooldown’s skill choices gets fewer and fewer the more skills they use.

The thing I disliked the most about initiative are situational skills. With any class but thief, a skill you would use only in a particular situation, that you never use in your standard rotation, is always ready and its use won’t prevent you from using other skills. The skill is there, waiting to be cast should the need arise, meanwhile with thief you need initiative left from your rotations.

For example, let’s say I absolutely need to interrupt an enemy.

I have a D/P thief that is using his initiative to stealth and backstab. You need to interrupt an an enemy so you have two outcomes:
- You have enough initiative, so you successfully interrupt your target. You still get penalized in your offensive, or other defensive maneuvers.
- You don’t have enough initiative, you can’t interrupt.

Then I have a warrior with Axe/Shield that deals damage with axe AA and 2. He will always have Shield Bash ready to interrupt if needed. Or rifle, dealing damage with volley and kill shot, will always have 5 ready. Or necro with staff, dealing damage with 2-3 marks and s/d, will always have staff 5 ready. Or a guardian wielding hammer that attacks with AA and 2.

Sure, you can’t interrupt twice in a row with other classes… but can you with thief? Or use twice any other situational skill? Assuming you’re full initiative, which is totally unrealistic but still, you can cast headshot twice (or even trice) but then you are basically an AA bot (you know opportunist could help in this situation…).

Also, due to the spammable nature of our skills (or better your skills now), I feel the skills themselves are inherently weaker. You really can’t have a resource based class going around spamming hundred blades, volley, mighty blow and so on, so we’re left with generally weaker skills that are weakened further with any nerf we (you) get.

I played 6 classes and I feel thief is the most stiff. With other classes you are actually encouraged to use all your weapon skills, with thief you are penalized for it. Other classes are smoother and I rarely felt the need to repeat a skill twice in a row without being able to do so like “gee, I’d really like to have this skill off cooldown now” except the heals maybe.

TL, DR: Thieves don’t always have situatonal skills ready and even if they do their ability to keep going with their normal rotation/defensive maneuvers will be compromised after the cast.