Guild Wars 2

In an effort to make them more useful I’ve come up with a few changes to traps and Smoke Screen. Trapper should be a viable option as a build. Smoke Screen should be a viable support ability. Hopefully this achieves that in balanced fashion.

Traps:

All traps need a bit of a buff. Give them the ability to trigger up to twice, with an ICD between first and second trigger. Make this require the master trapper trait (20% faster cooldown). Additional changes below.

Poison Trap: Cooldown reduced from 30 seconds to 25 seconds.
Ambush: Cooldown reduced from 35 second to 30 seconds.
Shadow Trap: instead of a second activation Shadow trap gains 5 seconds of cripple and weakness with master trapper

Smoke Screen: Why is this dropped at your feet?

Make it ground targeted.
Make it an area of effect, similar in size to swirling winds. (400 radius)
Enemies within are blinded every 3 seconds.
Increase recharge to 40 seconds.

Change the animation: Thief throws a bomb, grenade, or vial looking object at target location. This throw has approx the same travel time as Engineer Grenades. When it reach the target location the projectile smashes/explodes and the animation from Black Powder Shot (only 400 radius) appears.

GW2 is a game of team cooperation against multiple foes, be in open pve, be in dungeons, be in WvW and even in SPvP. The main problem with the traps (Needle trap and Tripwire to be more specific) is the 1 sigle target activation/aplication, that make both of it very lackluster in this game.

I belive the firt step that Anet must do with Needle trap and Tripwire is make both hit at least 3 targets. After that we can see if those traps need more love or not.

Shadow trap, well, i dont know what to do whit that trap, some people love it, many hate it (including me), so no ideas for that.

Ambush trap is fine rigth now.

Also, thieves need a trait for use traps at range, just like ranger´s traps or necros´s wells.
Master Trapper need something more besides the 20% of faster recharge, maybe fuse together Master Trapper and Corrosive Traps in 1 trait, and then create the aoe trap trait that i just suggested will work fine.

magom.3275:

GW2 is a game of team cooperation against multiple foes, be in open pve, be in dungeons, be in WvW and even in SPvP. The main problem with the traps (Needle trap and Tripwire to be more specific) is the 1 sigle target activation/aplication, that make both of it very lackluster in this game.

I belive the firt step that Anet must do with Needle trap and Tripwire is make both hit at least 3 targets. After that we can see if those traps need more love or not.

Shadow trap, well, i dont know what to do whit that trap, some people love it, many hate it (including me), so no ideas for that.

Ambush trap is fine rigth now.

Also, thieves need a trait for use traps at range, just like ranger´s traps or necros´s wells.
Master Trapper need something more besides the 20% of faster recharge, maybe fuse together Master Trapper and Corrosive Traps in 1 trait, and then create the aoe trap trait that i just suggested will work fine.

This is all true, but Thief is bent alot more towards single target and the exact kind of trapper that Ranger is has already been done. Also, only one of the traps would be useful at all in an AOE and it’s posion.

I was attempting to make traps a bit more useful vs a single target and groups both, because to put traps on their bar a thief must give up some very good utility skills. Either you limit their mobility or they risk setting off the trap for a second time. With reduced recharge and a possibility of multiple activations (with an ICD of a few seconds per activation) per trap this could be something that could be done fairly often.

After all, even AOE these traps will PALE in comparison to the Ranger traps. They must go in a different direction to be more useful.

I think you’re not really getting the idea behind smoke screen. It’s a missile defense that doubles up with some smoke. So increasing the cool down is dreadful since missile defense is a really strong ability (even it other classes can do it better). If you turn slightly in melee you can also put the smokescreen quite neatly onto melee opponents for the blind. The one change I’d like to smokescreen is a slightly faster activation, cutting it from 1/2 second to 1/4 second.

I thought about the throw traps thing.
Kinda weird when you think about it given their shape.
Wish the effects were just improved, maybe some Cd drops here and there.

Stooperdale.3560:

I think you’re not really getting the idea behind smoke screen. It’s a missile defense that doubles up with some smoke. So increasing the cool down is dreadful since missile defense is a really strong ability (even it other classes can do it better). If you turn slightly in melee you can also put the smokescreen quite neatly onto melee opponents for the blind. The one change I’d like to smokescreen is a slightly faster activation, cutting it from 1/2 second to 1/4 second.

You didn’t read very well did you.

Ground targeted: Currently it’s placed at your feet and angled as you are, making it cumbersome to place accurately and dangerous as well. This change could be made and it would still be highly inferior to Wall of Reflection.

Make it an area of effect, similar in size to swirling winds. (400 radius): This makes the area blocked much larger, at this point the skill becomes slightly weaker than Feedback. Feedback can be traited to actively blind and confuse AND it reflects. Combo effects are equally useful.

Enemies within are blinded every 3 seconds: This would essentially give the Smoke Screen the blinding power of Feedback. Still minus the reflection and confusion, but the blind is slightly stronger.

Increase recharge to 40 seconds.: This puts it on the same recharge as feedback, which is now a directly comparable skill. Feedback would have damage possibly traited into it as well as having reflection built it. However Smoke Screen would blind better and possibly be useable as a poor man’s veil with leap finishers.

As the skill stands now it’s inferior to every projectile block and reflect in the game and you are in here telling me it’s fine. Thieves do alot of things well, support is not one of them. Broken skills like these are part of the reason that is the way it is.

I like that traps are set at your feet. I think placing at your feet makes it feel more like setting a trap. Plus, it makes it so you have to lure the enemy to it (like a trap) instead of casting it on the enemy (like an aoe spell). However, I do have a problem with them being single target. Why not have a trap that, when triggered, creates an area affect, like the caltrops skill but instead of using caltrops directly, you drop the trap and when the enemy hits it, boom caltrops everywhere.

Darkwing.2081:

I like that traps are set at your feet. I think placing at your feet makes it feel more like setting a trap. Plus, it makes it so you have to lure the enemy to it (like a trap) instead of casting it on the enemy (like an aoe spell). However, I do have a problem with them being single target. Why not have a trap that, when triggered, creates an area affect, like the caltrops skill but instead of using caltrops directly, you drop the trap and when the enemy hits it, boom caltrops everywhere.

tl;dr didn’t work for you lol.