Hi everyone o/
With HoT, the “meta” for all game modes have changed. While this is all great, the majority of the Thief community believe its been for the worse.
While I think “Daredevil” has spiced things up, it feels like in all game modes the class suffers and could use a slight push to make it more in line with the rest of the bunch.
Now, unless they balance the 3 game modes (WvW/PvE/PvP) seperately, the only way I see this happening is through a change of our resource system; the initiative.
Most classes are balanced around consuming their weapon/kit/attunement skills. And its arranged conveniently so that once you cycle through 1 set and move on to the other, the previous weapon recharges at least half of those weapon skills.
Thieves, however, have 2 weapon sets that share the same resource pool. Yes, we don’t have cooldown on skills, but most of our key abilities are on such high initiative cost that once we consume our initiative, we have a lot of downtime to fill in with our “auto-attacks”.
Although it looks like a solid system, I believe due to the slow regeneration and very limited ways to regain initiative, we hit a brick wall, as auto attack damage isn’t nearly fast or effective enough to compensate for that downtime. To compensate this I have 2 different suggestions:
1) Weapon auto attacks recharge initiative.
I strongly believe, simply adding initiative regain on our weapon auto attacks while keeping the regular initiative regeneration would definitely be a positive step for the Thief class in general. Obviously, the numbers should be adjusted according to the weapon set… fast and single attacks like Shortbow or Pistol main hand will recharge 1 initiative, while Dagger and Sword will recharge a bulk of initiative (lets say 2 or 3 respectively) on their 3rd skill chain.
-PvE would get a HUGE boost, as you’d actively reduce the downtime of initiative with the filler auto attacks. Scripted monsters have very few evade/block mechanics and its very easy to get the chains off to reliably help this happen.
-PvP wouldn’t be affected in a broken way at all, since many players actively avoid getting hit from thieves and the amount of auto attacks you’ll chain back to back would mean you’d risk exposing yourself to more attacks… a.k.a. high risk, high reward
-WvW would be affected more or less in the same way as PvP, thus would be fine.
2) Weapon swap regenerates ALL initiative in combat. (EXCEPT duplicate weapon sets).
OK… Before you go WTFASDSDASDWDQWEKKDAJLHL… Think about it for just one second. You will get full initiative bar for your new weapon set, eliminating the uselessness of weapon swap on low initiative: Opens up more exciting gameplay and weapon set combinations, for ALL game modes:
-PvE would benefit from a lot of weapon set combinations and this would also eliminate the downtime of initiative system. We’d have more consistent DPS with each weapon swap, putting our damage output on par with other classes.
-PvP would definitely be harder to balance with this proposal, but as it appears to many people (including the top-tier PvP players) we’re falling back on this game mode greatly, when classes such as Dragon Hunter, Revenant, Reaper, Chronomancer (basically almost all classes) have more use to the team than just high mobility +1 and decaps.
-WvW would be affected more or less in the same way as PvP, thus would be fine.
Now out of these 2 ideas, I won’t lie, 2nd one is going to be much harder to balance out for PvP purposes… but given the “state of the class” we hear every single day since the decline of this class, I’d say it may just be the thing to put us on par with the power creep. Meanwhile, 1st suggestion is a lot more tamer and smooth to implement and we’d see instant improvement that might just make it.
TL;DR: Initiative system creates a lot of downtime and doesn’t synergize well with weapon swap. We need supplementary mechanics to compensate this. Look at point 1 and 2.
edited for formatting
Looking forward to your comments. Thank you.
(edited by bliss.4305)