Guild Wars 2

The current design of “Swindler’s Equilibrium” has an other flaw, beside it’s activation when steal is already ready.

Look on how the traits internal cooldown correlates to the cooldown of steal:
When the trait is activated, it recharges steal and starts it’s internal cooldown. Usually you would use steal shortly thereafter and start steal’s own recharge cooldown. Which means Swindler’s Equilibrium will always be ready when there are some few seconds on the normal steal cooldown left. Now there are three possibilities:

• You evade before the normal steal cooldown has finished and recharge steal surprisingly a second or two early.
• You evade when steal is ready and waste the use of the trait.
• When you let steal normally recharge, then use it and only then start evading again, you gain a second use of steal.

Nearly every time you would prefer the last possibility, get one normal use of steal and then get nearly 100% off of you next steal cooldown, instead of winning only very few seconds.

Hence Swindler’s Equilibrium punishes to much evading. That is a bad mechanic for a trait for the weapon sets sword and spear or the acrobatics specialisation, which otherwise only encourage evading, like the old trait.

While it is sometimes possibly to differentiate between an activation of Swindler’s Equilibrium and a normal refresh of steal and therefore make a guess about the trait’s internal timer, it is quite hard to plan when you have to and when you shouldn’t evade enemy attacks. Therefor the activation of the new Swindler’s Equilibrium seams most of the time entirely random.