Guild Wars 2

Initial thoughts:

Acrobatics will continue to be used only by owners of the vanilla game, like me. The two minor tweaks in Acrobatics will not lure many people away from the DD spec.

Buffing Upper Hand is an obvious win for S/D thieves that are already taking this trait, like me. The free regen will give us a TAD more sustain, but nothing to get excited about.

Fleet Shadow to Instant Reflex is irrelevant. An evade that you can’t time is not an evade. Fleet Shadow arguably served a better purpose with certain builds.

Basilisk Venom will be relevant again, too bad most of the other venoms remain irrelevant.

Sword auto attack speed increase: As a S/D main I obviously am happy with this. I would rather see the Flanking Strike/Larcenous Strike chain made relevant again, however. Bottom line: S/D still nowhere near meta compared to D/P or staff, but I’ll take what I can get.

These days I only play sPvP for the reward tracks and dailies anyway.

Necromancer gets more corruption, thief should get more boon steal (ofc not to crazy, will be op otherwise, not on auto attack for sure). On Steal would be fine (1 boon steal by default).

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Necromancer gets more corruption, thief should get more boon steal (ofc not to crazy, will be op otherwise, not on auto attack for sure). On Steal would be fine (1 boon steal by default).

Nah, I think it’s fair that mesmers continue to have the better boon strip.

Dahkeus.8243:

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Necromancer gets more corruption, thief should get more boon steal (ofc not to crazy, will be op otherwise, not on auto attack for sure). On Steal would be fine (1 boon steal by default).

Nah, I think it’s fair that mesmers continue to have the better boon strip.

They should differentiate the Thief’s steal and Mesmer’s steal. Thief should only steal tangible objects (i.e. Axe, Seeds, etc) while Mesmer should only steal intangible objects like boons — Thief shouldn’t be able to steal boons. I think that was a bad decision in their part and now it’s a mess. If they want Thief to steal boons, they should give them off-hand Focus and make them an Arcane Thief — otherwise, it’s not making any sense why Thief is better or should be better than Mesmer in stealing boon.

meepeY.2867:

The Bandits Defence “fix” will be interesting – a bit vague but I hope it means the skill is now a flip-skill and doesn’t auto kick

It will be a flip skill now rather than auto-kicking. It looks as though the kick stays available for five seconds after a successful block while the cooldown counts down in the background, similar to Palm Strike for Fist Flurry.