The problem is the ICD doesn’t take into account the long pre-aftercast animations on major skills like backstab itself, which some weapon sets like D/D power are extremely dependent on.
It also simply puts the entire #1 skill, including AA, on ICD on top of the cast animation. A lot of non-thief players don’t realize the pre-post cast animations for Backstab total almost .75s per stab attempt. The ICD puts it on almost a 2s cooldown. With revealed, that’s longer than True Shot and CoR, which are both ranged and have higher coefficients, the latter also being an AoE. You’re locked into either waiting out the duration of stealth in most cases since at absolute best you can get two attempts, or not using the best burst/damage option at that moment in time. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, except in the current game-state, landing a backstab is both sub-optimal for the thief to do, and in many respects, overly-punished for even trying.
Since they also nerfed BV, consistency for bypassing Aegis etc. also got dropped massively. Again back to the D/D argument you’ll see many people making, CnD no longer lands from BV’s nerf with mug procc’ing BV and thus passive deflection, and Backstab no longer lands if perchance CnD is used with BV over mug because passive aegis and blind is all over the game. Most counter-CC and single-hit negations come from passives when being CC’ed. BV’ed mug procs FoF or any other such passive causing CnD to whiff. Okay, remove Mug (DA, a “required” traitline on the thief) from the equation, but then you have it still being procc’ed before CnD because of SoH (Trickery, also a hard requirement trait line), which forces daze on steal and offers what used to be baseline steal cooldown reduction (AKA, a requirement). So now you remove two of the best traits on the thief to do what? BV a non-reduced cooldown steal/CnD chain without Mug, just to get a backstab? But now you’ve popped FoF or the passives via the BV on CnD. And backstab can’t land from the ICD.
Thank god I’m not alone on this thought. If they want BS to have 1sec ICD if it misses, they should’ve taken the huge aftercast into account. Right now backstab is just a weaker, single target and melee true shot.
Since you also touched on the nerfed basi venom stacks, in my opinion Steal shouldn’t proc BV at all. With the meta trickery it should steal 3 boons, stability and aegies being prioritized. The boonsteal should happen before anything else, not Mug proccing BV before stability/aegis are removed and the whole transformation into stone doesn’t work.
The change of 2 BV stacks to one has completely messed up my reliability to precast BS and then stealing into the enemy as Mug procs BV into the stability/aegis and then the BS eventually misses aswell because it’s not unblockable anymore. The same applies to CnD.
Setting the boonsteal to No.1 priority of Steal would give the ability to use our damage we’re capable of doing to full potential.
I don’t want thiefs damage to be buffed, I want QoL changes so I can apply the damage I should/am able to do.