Hi,
I will go straight to the two changes I propose and that would, I believe, greatly improve the viability of thieves’ weapon sets other than d/p in PVP (though these changes should not be game-breaking in WvW and PvE)
1. Dancing dagger (X/D number 4): now suppresses one boon to all targets it hits
2. Absolute poison (Deadly art trait line), becomes corrosive poison: does not increase poison damages and duration by 33% anymore, but applies one stack of vulnerability, each time you apply one stack of poison instead. You inflict more damages to enemies suffering from vulnerability (+1% damage power and condi alike) per stack. Meaning: if your target has 10stacks of vulnerability: you will deal 10% +10% (20%) extra damage (your allies will still deal only 10%).
Ideally, by making intelligent use of skills such as bodyshot, CnD and other skills/trait dealing poison or vulnerability such as “dagger training”, the thief should be able to reach 10 to 15 stack of vulnerability on its targets in 5-10 sec and to maintain them through the fight.
How does it increase diversity?
1. Dancing dagger suppressing one boon: X/D offers now a real alternative to X/P: suppressing one boon seems like a good trade-off against the possibility to interrupt from X/P. It synergizes well with S/D and D/D and can gives the thief another dimension in a team fight, acting more like an AOE debuffer and offering some nice potential combos with other professions.
2. Corrosive poison: nowadays thieves burst hard, and become increasingly ineffective as the fight becomes longer. This trait allows flipping the table. Think of vulnerability as a “might boon” in reverse: by building more and more vulnerability stacks during a fight, the thief raises its damages and the ones of its allies providing in this sense a form of team support. The fact that building vulnerability stacks will require time prevents the issue of thief one-shooting light classes. It suits also well with the thief background I believe. This would finally allow hybrid builds to shine but would also be interesting for full power of full condition builds. I am aware than making the thief be able to stay longer in fight would be critical.
Those changes will be better with some other small scale changes:
- making CnD unblockable/stealth nearby allies for 1 sec, reducing the number of initiative points required and increasing the vulnerability stacks (I believe that to make CnD apply blinds only makes it a worst version of d/p, it must differentiate itself it term of its utility).
- making dancing dagger also bounce to allies/thief, suppressing conditions.
- making dagger training trait having 50% chance to deal poison with daggers/ lower the initiative cost of x/D skills.
etc…
Overall, the idea is to give options that are not interesting for typical d/p meta build but would give new dimension to other weapon sets. I will not write another paragraph as it would be too long to read, but I can give further arguments in the comments if some of you find those ideas worth debating.
