Guild Wars 2

I was wondering what the design philosophy in regards to thief being the only class whose weapon skill cooldowns are not affected by chill is.

Granted, thief utilities and heals are still affected by chills, but chill significantly hinders the cooldown management of other classes, while not affecting the cooldown resource of the thief: initiative.

I feel it evens out since chill can really negate the defensive capabilities of stealth. Gaining stealth while chilled probably won’t prevent much damage because you’ll still be in range of attacks(if melee) or still relatively close to the point of origin(if ranged) meaning AoEs or simply people who continue autoattacking in melee still have a good chance to hit.

You can’t really make cross class comparisons either, cds and initiative are very different. For example, if I’m playing say a mesmer, I can exhaust my cds on one weapon set, then switch to the next and start all over. However, if I’m a thief and I spend all my initiative on one weapon set, switching to the other still leaves me with the same initiative and no skills to use till it regens.

In addition, if it slowed initiative regen, you would be hurting thieves arguably more than other classes. Initiative is required for ALL weapon skills, so slowing its regen affects all weapon skills. But against other classes, chill will only affect the cds of skills that are already on cd or put on cd once chilled.

This has been discussed heavily within the community since launch, ANet at one point mentioned they thought about it affecting initiative gain, but that it was too effective.

I’ve done a lot of analysis on this myself comparing the global resource pool of initiative to being able to double dip on time with skill recharges and comparing the amount of weapon 2-5 skills that can be used over time, and the result is that thief loses currently in the amount of skills that can be used over time (even to warrior which has the least amount of skills that can be used).

Basically because every other profession can double dip and beyond on time for recharging skills (aka having multiple skills recharging at the same time) and thief can’t (because it has a global resource pool), it doesn’t matter that thief weapon skills aren’t impacted by chill.

^^^ Basically what shockwave said.
And yeah, ANet did at one point show up to say that, I was trying to find it but I think it was in the “Balance” forums that they archived.

:/ I will try later to find one of the old threads for you so you can re-read it as oppose to re-create it….

here’s one:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/archive/balance/Chill-and-thiefs

Here’s a whole google search on it that shows this topic repeated a million times…:
https://www.google.ca/search?client=opera&q=thief+chill+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fforum-en.guildwars2.com&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#q=thief+chill+site:forum-en.guildwars2.com&safe=off&start=0

Link to the “balance forums”, where you can search for chill and thieves to find it 21 pages of search results…:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/archive/balance

Bugs me that I can’t seem to find that dev post. So that the discussion could not grow out of control again. Yeah… really need to find that post x.x’

! I know the reason why I can’t find the post…
It was by Jon Sharp, whom has left ANet, which apparently means all his posts must have been swept up (even his goodbye post, mentioned in wiki refence link http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Jonathan_Sharp)

:/ shame, i guess this topic will re-create itself.

That was all actually really well said. I like your arguments.

Necrotize.2974:

I feel it evens out since chill can really negate the defensive capabilities of stealth. Gaining stealth while chilled probably won’t prevent much damage because you’ll still be in range of attacks(if melee) or still relatively close to the point of origin(if ranged) meaning AoEs or simply people who continue autoattacking in melee still have a good chance to hit.

The defensive options of a thief are not limited to stealth. Mobility is a gigantic part of it. Instant mobility from multiple skills that have the capacity to teleport you. On top of that, some of these teleports remove condis. Look at shadow return and infiltrator’s return.

That aside, thieves have some condi removal to deal with chill. In regards to chill, they don’t even need any traits to remove it every 15 seconds with the use of withdraw – the heal that evades, removes chill, cripples, and immobs. If traited for it, going into stealth has the capacity to cleanse condis every 3 seconds as well.

Necrotize.2974:

You can’t really make cross class comparisons either, cds and initiative are very different. For example, if I’m playing say a mesmer, I can exhaust my cds on one weapon set, then switch to the next and start all over. However, if I’m a thief and I spend all my initiative on one weapon set, switching to the other still leaves me with the same initiative and no skills to use till it regens.

This is true. However, this also allows the thief to exhaust their cooldowns in ways other classes cannot. Thieves have more of a choice to make as to which skills they wish to use, but they can do so repeatedly and with huge flexibility.

Initiative typically regens at a rate of 1 ini a second if I’m not mistaken, but this can be augmented with initiative regen traits and utilities, such as hastened replenishment (heal skill grants 4 ini on use) and roll for initiative (grants 6 ini, breaks stun, evades, removes chill, cripple, immob, is an evade) to name two. Roll for initiative also removes chill, while also granting initiative.

Necrotize.2974:

In addition, if it slowed initiative regen, you would be hurting thieves arguably more than other classes. Initiative is required for ALL weapon skills, so slowing its regen affects all weapon skills. But against other classes, chill will only affect the cds of skills that are already on cd or put on cd once chilled.

Other classes also do not have ways to reduce their cooldowns through initiative regenerating skills. Thieves also have several ways to deal with chill, especially with two skills that remove it on demand – one of those also granting initiative.

Most people do not take initiative regenerating skills and traits on thief because if they can skillfully manage their initiative, there is more than enough of it to go around. Having chill affect initiative regeneration would not be a huge deal with the ways that thieves have available to them to deal with the threat of it, and I feel that it would be balanced as opposed to them completely avoiding half of the condition’s effect.

Thief is the only class that relies on its active weapon set abilities to survive . Any other class can just press an invul while being pressured. Which is ( most of the time) not on their weapon set but in utility bar and f . skills.

Chill affecting initiatives would be too effective .

>>Other classes also do not have ways to reduce their cooldowns through initiative regenerating skills. Thieves also have several ways to deal with chill, especially with two skills that remove it on demand – one of those also granting initiative.

Other classes do not have initiative so obviously they do not have skills that address initiative. They do have traits that act in very much the same manner such as those that reduce the cooldowns on their weapon skills.

Other classes can also trait to remove conditions with those weapon skills. The warrior trait Quick breathing reduces the cool down on warhorn skills (which is the equivalent of an ini generating skill) and can convert that chill to a boon.

Cleansing conflagration does much the same with a mesmers torch skill. That they are not directed at chill in particular only means that a thief has an advantage removing CHILL a condition that affects mobility. Mobility is one of the core strengths of the theif and they should have ways of addressing it just as a warrior can ward off all damage with defy pain.

The warrior weapon skill charge can be traited for a lower cooldown and will remove chilled.

Chill actually DID affect Initiative in early versions of the game. It was hideous – as soon as the condition even touched a Thief they were literally useless.

I don’t think anyone who wishes for Chill to work this way realises just how bad it is, since we are talking about a relatively small pool of resources affecting your entire offensive repertoire on a global cooldown, compared to other professions that can access more skill bars via kits, attunements or weapon swaps with totally individual cooldowns, as well as many other factors besides that to do with the survivability of the professions themselves.

It’s simply not fair to equate initiative on Thieves versus standard profession cooldowns in a “this affects me so it should affect them” way.

thief is weird place for something like chill.

Small fast recharging resource pool. -66% recharge on initiative would be crushingly brutal.

I don’t subscribe to the idea that:
“thief too weak, its class mechanic to not be chilled on weapon skills or we need more evades/stealth/blind to compensate”
but there really isn’t a good uncomplicated way to make it right.

TBH, it doesnt really matter, first thieve owns builds that do not possess chill mostly, and builds that have chill kill thieves anyway mostly.

so it doesnt really matter, lol

Chill does affect the skills that remove chill though. The only thing it doesn’t affect is the weapon skills. If you bait out withdraw or RFI (not that many thieves use it), you can chill them immediately afterward, and it will extend the length of their utility cooldowns. On the flip side, thin about the impact it would have on initiative. If it put the same 66% reduction on it, that would be 1 initiative every 3 seconds. To put that in perspective, that would be 1 heartseeker every 9 seconds, which uses up the entire resource regeneration for that 9 second block. Basically it would kill all the weapon skills on both of the thief’s weapons sets.

The thing about chill is that it affects base mobility which is massively important to the class as well as it affects the cooldown of steal, venoms, etc.

Pretty much any thief not using Withdraw will get hit by this skill similarly to every other class, as chill durations are fairly short and often aren’t stacked so much as applied fairly frequently. This makes SE less useful for removing the effect.

And as mentioned, cutting the initiative regen rate is just way too powerful. Chill would effectively act similarly to what is a bare minimum 6 second daze due to the shared resource pool on all cooldowns.

It’s been looked into officially a number of times and was tested internally (I also recall the dev post from a while back) and even the response from internal testing, which is obviously not perfectly accurate due to some of the monstrosities we see in the game recognized that the regen rate punishment was just too harsh to the point it made the class border-line useless unless either the thief only had chill applied and had initiative for an Infil Strike/Return for the one-condi cleanse, or had shadowstep or withdraw available, things which cannot be counted on.

That hard of a counter simply shouldn’t exist for any class, and especially since chill already resides mostly on the classes and builds that best counter the thief as it stands, anyways.