Guild Wars 2

Shadows embrace swaps places with merciful ambush and becomes the new adept minor trait, remove the 20% cooldown reduction from venomous aura and place it in leaching venoms, and finally change meld with shadows from ‘stealth skills last 1 second longer’ to
‘stealth you apply with skills or finishers last 1 sec longer’.

The first change is simple to understand: if elementalists could get elemental attunement as a minor and necromancers reapers might as a minor because they always picked those 2 traits, then the thief can also get a mandatory trait as a minor (besides all rez traits should be a choice, looking at warriors tactics line).

I don’t know why venomous aura got the cd reduction when before the specialization change venomous strength had it. This change will allow thieves to make a venom build that does not revolve around allies and in a team composition it will not make a difference as you will still want to trait the v. aura.

The meld with shadows change is meant to make this trait work with the dagger pistol set (or sword pistol daredevil traited with bound). Right now you have a dead master minor trait unless you run with a dagger off hand (which no one does), at leas as far as entering stealth through weapons is concerned.

Moving SE is kind of pointless considering MA if switched would still be the best option to use. LR and CD are pretty bad, so you’d just have SE → MA on every build running SA, anyways. No real change there. Unless the other traits get changed, it’s pretty much a non-issue, because the others are so horrible.

Frankly, I’m not sure why venoms are even in SA. I feel like they belong in DA and some aspects of the traits improved. Makes no sense for the venoms to be in the stealth line. Not really sure which trait should have the cooldown reduction. Aura is more useful/considered a better trait, though, and lets the thief take HT.

I’m pretty sure MWS is just meant to be an extremely good trait in general. There’s no reason to nerf /change it because x/D benefits from it better than x/P, considering D/P as a whole and x/P Daredevil are pretty much the best options the thief has right now.

I’m not sure if you’re new to the thief or aren’t aware, but MWS currently does work on all effects that gain stealth, including combo field use.

It’d also cut down on SR’s stealth duration, Hidden Thief’s, as well as Blinding Powder’s. That’s an unnecessary change that’d inhibit diversity by a large margin.

@Decceiver
moving se is not pointless if you are roaming wvw solo or if you solo queue and end up with trash teammates that destealth themselves when you go for a rez. Even if you end up picking ma as the best trait out of the adepts IT WILL BE A CHOICE.

same for moving the 20% reduction from va to lv. If i want to use basilisk venom and devourer venom and want the cd reduction but am solo in wvw or do not wish to rely on my pug team i am shooting myself in the foot by taking va. The effectiveness of venoms is another topic all together.

And no mws does NOT affect the length of stealth you get through leap (black powder + h seaker) or bast (smoke field + cluster bomb) finishers. In both cases the default duration is 3 sec (the count down stars at 2 but ends at 0 instead of 1, so it is 2 1 0 out of stealth) and is NOT made longer by mws. Test it if you must, and also my suggestion would make it so that any stealth application would last 1 sec longer be it through a combo or a skill it would be a buff (right now you have a trait that is meant to make stealth last longer but it doesn’t work with half of our weapon stealths aka leap finishers).

And no i am not new to thief, i have been playing thief longer than most.

EDIT: yes i forgot to include traits in the new mws description so it would be ‘stealth you apply with skills traits or finishers lasts 1 sec longer’, the only difference to how this trait works now will be that stealth you get via finishers will also be 1 sec longer (you will still get longer stealth per pulse of sr).

EDIT EDIT: sry if i come across as spiteful, i am just frustrated with how weak thief is and now many disjointed traits there are that could be made better with a few tweaks.

I definitely think those two traits should be swapped. For Daredevil I’d also like to see the Swiftness in Dash just baked into one of the minor traits, and the Swiftness on Dodge in Acro changed to the might stacking on dodge trait.