Guild Wars 2

We are not talking about revs here. they will eventually face the same nerfs we have, given that they receive the same hate. But revs are supposed to be more of a support option, at least the whole herald tree is. Rev is also more of a team fighter, using heavy armor and boons.

I have been thinkin, at least i believe i have.

Step 1) What should thief be in pvp: Extremely strong in 1v1, weaker in teamfights
-Is thief extremely strong in 1v1? -no

Step 2) Why? Because of the mobility. Having a dueling godclass is one thing. Having a dueling godclass that can choose their fights, quickly move to less contested points and basically force the enemy to duel them is a completely different thing.
Also, being able to escape and restart a fight even if you mess up gets progressively worse if the class is extraordinary strong.

Step 3) If thief is buffed to a level, where they are more than just supporters, the mobility has to be reduced, or they will end up op. However: to preserve the feeling of the class we can not just take away all mobility.

Step4) We have swiftness, we have vault, shadowstep, heartseeker…but in the end of the day, there is really only one movement skill in the entire game.
It is fast, it is a teleport and there is not a godkitten thing you can do about it.

Step5)If you could, would you be willing to trade one of our coolest skills for the power to win the vast majority of your direct combat encounters?
Potentially sacrificing the shortbow to save everything else?

What do you think. Is it a possible solution? Would the problems still persist? Would it cause even more problems?

My original concept, but that is just logic, not what I actually want to see.
Its pretty interesting, people already brought up spear and offhand torch, since that pretty much resembles my ideas:

-Main hand spear, not to be combined with a shield, but rather for a wardancer style.
aka pretty much what they turned the daredevil into.

Off-hand torch, but only due to the lack of alternatives, the main concept, that is really fitting the thief class would be a witchhunter. Something between
this
and this

Have just seen the deadeye thread for the first time. Appearently it is possible and therefore disproves my entire point. Havent had the time to look into everything in detail yet, but it seems to be good, really good actually.

I am still not convinced. Yes, a thief can make up for their combat weakness with good rotation and mobility. But having a class just for the ability to decap on your team? We all know that is not going to happen. So yes. Warrior might be even worse a choice, i dont play warri so im in no postition to judge.
But mathmatically speaking lim x->inf (exp (-x)) =0.
Meaning: it does not really matter if we are worse or better than warrior, if the both of us are in a spot where we are basically unplayable on a competitive level.
Even if that might opposes my original question.

I do not think im a bad player. I can see where other thieves make mistakes and as you say: its pretty sad to watch them.
I still play thief in unranked and I have fun slaughtering people on a much lower skill level, but for ranked it has simply become impossible. The only way I will win a competitive match with my thief is, if my team is superior enough to carry me.
The best I can accomplish is not holding them back. But I can not really help winning the game.
That is pretty much the same a warrior can hope for, so i’d argue if they are effectively in a worse spot.

If you want to learn the fractals and the guides/wiki really arent enough, I can offer you help. FotM is one of the areas in the game I have some knowledge about and I have helped a couple of new players on my parties to understand it.
You were really unlucky with the groups tho. Both, when I was a noob and now if I meet them, 90% of all players are extremely nice and helpful. Most people dont mind if they have to carry you, at least not if you ask them to. Just join, admit you dont know what to do and you should recieve some advice. Creating a party with the name ‘new to fractals, need help’ is an even better idea. There are always bored players like me checking the lfg in case someone needs to be shown how awesome we are.

Just wondering, what your opinions on this are. Until very recently, I would have considered mesmer and warrior to be worse, but now…
Mesmers are undoubtly back in the meta. The class might not be completely fine, but I see a lot of people asking for nerfs, a lot of people saying you can carry your team on a mesmer…so the class is decent at least.
Warriors are still in a bad spot, but with some of the new builds that are flying around, they can be pretty brutal. Some warriors are claiming they wreck basically everything and I have seen them winning teamfights on their own. Again: far from being the best class, but maybe still better than we are?

So yeah. I belong to the people who claim to win duels on a thief. Im also not considering us squishy or easily down in a team fight.
I can not think of anything we are particulary bad at, and I still think we are a well balanced profession overall.

But the more I play and the more I read through the forums, the harder I find it to think of a profession that is actually weaker than we are.
I mean, even if thief is not completely unviable, can you say we are better than ‘x’? I dont think I can anymore.

That is especially sad considering that thief is, by its concept, a class that should be rather strong in pvp if played right.
Call my view warped if you want, but pvp is literally what the thief class should be about. If there is any class that is, even a little, stronger than any other choice on top tier, it should be us…

Hansen.3264:

And :
Spvp: remove berserker/marauder/valkyrie amulets

Powercreep lowered

Lol what? cause we are totally out of the bunker meta and should start working on those op damage dealers of ours? Especially with several high damage sources receiving nerfes.
And of course those bad boys on power builds are the main source of damage, some of them might actually kill a necro before they die from conditions.
Sarcasm aside. I dont try to be mean or anything, hope I dont sound insulting, but the idea is just plain ridiculous. If you think you can make a good point there, go ahead and try to open my eyes, but i doubt it…

PvP League Season Two (February 23, 2016 – April 18, 2016)
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_League

Well you can play with double pistols, but the damage is not exactly what it should be and it does not really offer defense either.
Soo, play with what you want. Its possible, but dont expect to succeed with pistols in high level pvp or pve, it just wont work. At least get a decent/meta main weapon and make your pistols’ use situational.
But if you have the concept of a cool, rogue style fighter in mind, who unloads swarms of bullets on those who oppose him, you better wait for further balance patches and pray.
This sums up pretty wellw hat pistols are and what they should be.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Can-we-get-a-new-Pistol-auto-attack/first#post6017717

Problem is people are just skipping through your thread, reading the changes of their favourite class and think ‘wahwahwah’
You have to see this as a whole.
And whilst it is far from being perfect, it really provides a much better base to start fine-tuning balance from.

Actually the second one doe not fit either. The crit chance should be 52,62, not 57,61.
(First should be 51,95)
So it looks like you have a flat increase of 6% on the first and 5% on the second one.
Easiest way to explain could be by assuming, you have attribute transforms active (like 7% of stat x converted to stat y)
Condition damage and toughness come to mind. Unfortunately, even if you combine both values (=152) you would need to have an unlikely high transformation value to get to the kind of number you need. ([152/100]*k=~21)
I will assume there is no way you were affected by any boons, food effects or external effects.
It might be helpful to repeat the test with fully repaired equipment. Im not sure, how it could cause the critchance-decrease, but it could, maybe, explain why the precision does not fit the crit chance.

One of the vital points about threads like this is that you do not comment on previous statements but insetad write down your own ideas. So start getting some unique points in here, aint hurtin’ nobody.

1. Reward diversity in fractal choice.
2. Reward high level and challenging fractals.
3. The same fractal scale can only contribute towards your personal reward level a maximum of two times.
4. Add unique drops and rewards dor each fractal, based on lore and background of the level. (much work for devs, but potentially really cool, for example items or skins exclusive to molten maps or cliffside, chance and quality increasing with fractal scale)
5.Semi-hardcore pve content should be (slightly) more rewarding than open-world grinding. That applies to fractals as well as dungeons. That does not neccessarely apply to organization-requiring maps like dragons stand or other hot maps.

Hah. I ended up with cobalt antique. But Im always hoping for a better one whenever they release a new weapon set. I mean: all the shiny whitey angel stuff they add (wings!)…I like that too, in some way, I use it…but not on my thief.

I actually really enjoyed doing the challenging fractals for elite fractal master and veteran. Im probably the only person in the world who likes high-level cliffsides. Makes me feel so useful.
I actually would not mind doing the harder fractals as daily, just to stay in shape, but waiting for a group for over an hour is not worth it.
So yeah. For now we can only hope they make both higher level and harder fractals more rewarding. Especially making fractal diversity rewarding. like a swamp specific dimishing returns. But there are some concerns about it too: if people cant kill the freakin mossman without climbing on trees, im a little worried what will happen if they try to do the harder stuff…

Not the best picture I guess, but I hope it gives you an idea.

Depends on how much of a skill gap we are talking here…
If you mean: tearing pvp-newbies apart, sure. very possible. with pretty much everything.
But actually that should not count.
But if you are talking about people who rightfully play in the same division and maybe differ in skill and experience around 20%, it comes down to classes and builds.
So, for example I can defeat a newbie rev or even a decent rev. but never a good rev, even if I am the more experienced player and perform better overall.
And that is not due to counter mechanics, its just a matter of power. I actually read throughb the rev skills and traits in detail today, for the first time.
I cant believe it. Give me but one of those traitlines and there will be no witness left to tell you what I did with it.
Rev is not the only one ofc.

I think a good way to say it is this:

-How it should be: A duel between two equally geared players comes down to skill.
-How it is: A duel between two equally skilled players comes down to gear.

Now you might say: both of these optione are possible at the same time. Yes they are, but they are not right now. If you have played pvp, especially if you play the weaker classes, you should understand what im trying to say.

You can just take any rev build and roll your face around on your keyboard. doesnt really matter wich skills come through, your passives will do most of your work.
Jokes aside, in order to actually be helpful: there is a support build based on ventari somewhere out there. It might not be as powerful, but perhaps less responsive.
You might also consider to unplug your computer from the internet and instead save outgoing data on a flash drive and send that to anet via mail.

yep, that one is sweet. bought it when I saw it. too bad its so…colorful. Still better than most alternatives tho. I just wish there was a darker version of the lightwards battlestaff.

Stochastic.1398:

Asrat.2645:

Ruru.1302:

The last thing this game needs is more passive defense.

+this. pls.
Every defense/stunbreak/whatever triggered by traits as passive should be removed. The last you want is to add even more.
Passive defense= no need for skill. that is a fact.
Also this would probably be more appropiate in the…warrior forum perhaps?

So you would prefer to keep warrior useless under the guise(or delusion) that at some point the other classes passive defenses will be removed?

lel.

This game is so badly designed I don’t understand how the PvP team still has jobs.

At this point it would literally be better for everyone if warrior was straight up removed, at least people wouldn’t waste their time on it anymore.

I main thief. The recent addition of passive defenses in the acrobatics traitline is the same cancer as all the others.
I have no general problem with passives. I do have a problem with active abilities triggered as passives.
I also have a problem with passive defense systems.
If you dont want to die when you get hit, you either run bunkery base stats or you prepare to sacrifice some godkitten skills for it.
Passives can be used to enchance performance. Not to carry you through an enemies burst untouched.
And if everything is op but 2-3 classes, and you make that 2-3 classes op too, you did not solve any problems. You just add to the power creep.
Thats what we have the nerf hammer for. You can still also buff the warrior if that shouldnt be enough, but the last way you want to accomplish that is by adding moar passives.

Edit: godkitten huh? wp anet, thats a good one. gotta remember that.

Ruru.1302:

The last thing this game needs is more passive defense.

+this. pls.
Every defense/stunbreak/whatever triggered by traits as passive should be removed. The last you want is to add even more.
Passive defense= no need for skill. that is a fact.
Also this would probably be more appropiate in the…warrior forum perhaps?

Automated medical response and Hidden flask. This traits need to be moved into one category, so you have to choose between one of them. Or at least make them a master or grandmaster choice instead of adept and adept minor. Its literally a free ‘reset fight now’. Engis are not the only class capable of this, but there is simply no way to stop them from doing it. If you still want to automatically escape certain death and heal for your full health, at least sacrifice some other strong traits for it.

Mooncow.6847:

Link.1049:

I disagree with a lot of your thief nerf… particularly the dash clearing clearing conditions only 1 every 10 seconds. The entire point of a thief is mobility. Besides burning those to get out of a chill/stun etc burns our dodge which then needs to recharge. If we’re burnt out of dodges, we’re dead.

I think being immune to immobilize should have a cooldown

Dash is pretty strong. especially with bound also nerfed. it would become a must-have.
But make the cd 4-5 sec instead of 10. we really need it, and we will still need it if changes are made. the power is in the game now and will not be removed entirely.
Im not sure about the damage nerfs, would probably depend on how much overall sustainability across all classes goes down. If bunkers are still somehow possible on their current level, nerfs to thief damage would be out of place.

Edit: actually, how about this: for every disabling condition removed, add/increase cd by 2-3 sec?
I agree with the op’s method btw. Right now we need the nerf hammer and we need it bad. On everything. After that we can start looking into fine-tuning and applying buffs to things that need it.

pve or pvp or both? Whatever you do, at least take a shortbow with you, dont have to use it, but you might want to at some point. Im not a big fan of the weapons look either, but infiltrators arrow makes up for a lot of things. Lets just say: you are totally not forced to use a bow, but there is a reason most of us love it.

Anyways: Ive had some fun in pvp with Sword/Dagger+ Pistol/Pistol. S/d as defensive toolset and p/p for burst.
Staff might be worth a look, in general a good weapon, also featuring the melee dps and sustain p/p might lack.
The ‘coolest’ option would be d/d, in pve totally doable, since you dont want anything but autoattack. However not viable in pvp due to requiring condidamage, which does not work for p/p.
I just guess everything with a pistol is not to be considered since you already got two of ’em, but d/p is the first choice of most thieves.

Fractal encryptions seem to be a good source of ‘liquid gold’ Its an easy 10 gold/day just for the dailies, which consume almost no time at all. Might not seem much, but I guess we have more players doing fractal dailies than we had people doing any dungeon but cof.

Ok guys. im playing ranger for ranked atm. A strong class, but not the best and not completely op.
I play a build without toughness and invulnerabilities and only one source to stability.
Do you know how I beat guards? I could trigger their traps with my pet. Sometimes I do. If they are good, I use sotp to prevent getting stunlocked. If they use test of faith I may dode through it instead of just walking. Other than that…my main tactic involves: -trigger the traps cycle one. Stand there, heal, nothing bad happens.
-Trigger trap cycle two. Stand there, heal, nothing happens.
-Deny possible bow bursts with sublime conversion if I should get remotely close to low health.
- Wait for my pet to kill the DH.
It is actually pretty satisfying: I main a thief. No matter how good and how how flawless we play, we dont seem to make any impact on dh while we see our health vanish.
As a dh, no matter how much traps, pulls and true shots you have, I remain untouched and slowly watch your health vanish.
The counters are really simple: stability, protection, decent healing. What you gonna do dh?

Report both players if it actually happens. Until then i would guess it was more of a troll attempt.
DH stacks are far from unbeatable. DH sucks, theyre good to kill nabs, nothing else.
Necro stacks are different. But in the end you only need good condi clear, good, focussed damage at one at a time or enough mobility to outrotate them.
Actually teams with 3+ of the same class are annoying, but usually loose, even if its necro or rev. Unless of course the rest of the composition happens to cover their weaknesses.
Not too long ago we had 4 eles in one team beeing a high-level viable team. Try that with necros, you will loose to most decent teams.

Probably depends on what level and situation youre in. CV right in the middle of a team fight is indeed tricky. I usually expect to loose my point anyways, so I have no problem with dodging to a safer spot to use it.
I have used withdraw in a recent build and I have to admit, that it is still an amazing skill to heal and as a panic buttom.
Not exactly sure, which one will prove to be more effective. Might just be depending on what you like better personally.

Slim.3024:

Then there’s the whole survivability side of things. A condition mesmer is virtually unkillable and can apply pressure while taking/absorbing hits. The thief can either deal damage or “evade”, but never both in the same fashion as the mesmer. The thief will die in 3-4 hits as well, has no defenses against area CC and weak condition removal comparatively.

-The main damage skill on a condi thief is damage+evade. its spammable
- A d/d thief has possibly the best condi removal in the game. YOu remove condition on literally everything you do.
-we do also have a 12 sec cd stunbreak

The only reason why nobody complains about thief is the lack of damage on our conditions. They dont really hurt you, unless you are a warrior, rev, bad necro, mesmer.
And actually I do get a lot of complaints when I play that build. Even had a necro who calle me cheesy.
Suprisingly thief s/d, which features the same amount of evades but power-based damage, got me a couple of compliments.

Krysard.1364:

Well, rev is op, the only way to outrotate a rev is to bring another rev

Now that is not true. Thies is still the fastest profession in the game. A rev has a chance at chasing me, thats all. As stated before, a 1v1 thief vs rev usually favours the thief, rev just performs better in teamfights and against most other classes.

Revs are op, but not due to mechanics or complete broken’ness. They just have too high numbers on a couple of skills and their sustain is too braindead where it should be based on skill and good movement.

Ummm. Its cool if it works for you (for now) and of course its possible that you are a natural and simply mastered the class in a short period of time.
However it is more likely that you have been carried by mmr (matchmaking is a gamble right now) and, since you said yourself you are new, have been paired against other newbies.
For example: if you have not been ripped apart by guardians, your enemy was doing something very wrong.
For you as a new player I would also highly recommend to stay out of ranked matchmaking for now. Sure it can work, sure you can succeed, skip divisions to legendary and beat every player you meet…but it is unlikely.
Usually new players in ranked are a curse, more so for thieves since we require not only combat skills, but also a type of battlefield awareness that you cant learn in less than a few hundred matches.
Even more important: ranked is an incredible toxic, unhealthy enviroment, that will take the fun out of the game as soon as your winning streak receeds and things start to get challenging.

Personally I have trained about 1.2k games before entering ranked for the first time and I never regrettet it. I actually play more unranked right now, mostly for the op’s reason of ‘being told to reroll’(oops, wrong thread here. Im tracking too many I guess. But i suppose you all know, what I mean^^) and its much more enjoyable, whilst I cant say im missing that few bonus rewards. With the current mmr your pvp rank also says nothing about your actual skill.

I have to admit: when I started playing hot story, I also considered the ‘new’ characters to be quite irritating. So you know what I did? I did a quick currency exchange, bought and played the living story aaand…wow, it all makes sense now.
If you are only remotely interested in the story, and i assume you are, you will have to buy ls. There is .simply no way around it. I will also say, that the story is not bad at all and the characters are amazing! They are actually alive, there is so much more depth added to the game world and to your character. I generally disliked trahearne and destinies edge, as many others did, the only character from ps I actually liked was tybalt. But trust me that, once you get used to the new team, you’ll love them.

I see. I always considered escapist absolution by far enough to deal with condi, but then again I had either pain response or shadowstep as an emergency clear on most of my recent builds.
However most of the benefits withdraw brings to the class are already covered by unhindered combatant, and channeled vigor is a strong heal with even moar dodges.
The tenacy will also lower the cd of your main stunbreak.
If you steal stability or retaliation it is a potential gamechanger, protection or even a few stacks of might should make up for the damage loss.

Looks nice enough. Pretty much what i would be playing if I hadnt too much fun trolling around with zerker.
Just two quick suggestions:
-U use trickster but only a single trick. I’d recommend bountiful theft, brawlers tenacy and Channeled vigor as heal.
-I personally like vampire runes. Healing seems better than toughness on our class.
Of course one can never predict, how changes will actually impact combat performance, but I think it could be worth a shot.

Also never underestimate the psychological aspects of the lord still being alive.
If you lord is dead and both team have about the same amount of points, you dont have to worry about anything but keeping close and mid.
If both teams run head-to-head in late mid game, and your lord is still alive, you have to watch out for it constantly and always prepare for an enemy lord rush. If the enemies lord is still alive you can use it to skip players, who start panicking the second the most feared ‘your lord is under attack’ is heard.

1. Skills that deal aoe damage/automatically hit nearby targets should always deal less damage than a comparable aimed skill.
2.If its not a heal skill, its heal/sec should not be higher than the average players dmg/sec
3.If it is hard cc, it should not be aoe.
4.Blocks, invulnerabilities, evades should never trigger automatically, neither should they allow you to attack whilst active.
5.Just to support the others: There should not be more than 2 of the same class stacked in one team. If classes are unchangeable after match start, the mmr should consider hardcounter mechanics.

I rly dont think so. Engi features too much conditiondamage to be doing anything else.
But in the beginning, due to uncommon and expensive gear and complex rotations, there were engis getting paid to join raid groups as condamagedealer, should still be a good build to find a group.

Aight. thanks for the answers. I could have checked the ama myself I suppose, but, as you said, too much.

Public Test Server(s) – Why not?
This is not a rethorical question or intented to be another dumb ‘anet get your balance right’ – thread.
I am actually curious why you decided, to not have any pts.
If that has been answered/statet before I would be very grateful for a link or at least a short summary, but if not, i’d love to get an official response.
And I’d also like to know, if there is any chance you would reconsider that decision.

I mean: I literally dont see any possible problems. I doubt you lack the server capacity, I doubt you lack the manpower to roll out experimental changes.

On the pro side: There are balancing problems. I will not adress this further, but significant parts of the community are obviously unhappy with certain elements of the game. And even if that number was actually below average, their concerns are still considerable.
Even if you said you had enough internal testers and dont really need a public test phase for upcoming changes, I believe it would make a lot of your players happier, if you made them feel like they had a bigger part in the updating/feedback process.

In the end Pts usually attracts people who are truly interested in the balance and try to offer valuable solutions. Its like a horde of free mini-devs.

So yeah. It would be cool, if I could get a real answer for this, official or unoffical, and it would be even cooler, if we would be able to test out changes ourselves before they make an impact on the game.

I do not have overly much experience in raids, but from what i figured:
-We deal the second highest dps, the top dps is also quite hard to pull of, so for many teams we might be the best dd.
-Theoretically we can take the tank role, but I dont think its easy.

Generally you can say, that we bring damage but nothing else and we are very reliant on our teams boons to do our job.
So my personal opinion: Thief does add to the team and can prove valuable, but only if both the team and the thief know what they are doing.
Unfortunately there are a lot of bad thieves out there. Pug thieves are a risk, even in fractals, probably more so in raids. So if I was organizing a raid, i’d be wary of thieves too to be honest.

It is also in general not easy to fing pug raid groups, you might wanna join an lfg guild.
Your chances should also increase drastically, if you can offer an alternative class, not even because the weakness of thief, more due to flexibility.
Most hardcore guilds want their recruits to have at least two classes mastered and geared, and there is a reason for that.

‘We have about 120 devs working on the live game, 70 devs on Expac2, and 30 devs on core teams that support both.’ (reddit ama)
-Seems reasonable.
I also doubt you have to worry about the next expack coming this year. And finally more elite specs will only increase build diversity. Instead of having one must-have op traitline, you’d have at least two, being forced to choose between them.

Moky.3104:

The OP lose all his credibility when he say “mesmer are actually top tier”, you might be stuck in the S1.

Pretty sure me and other 3/4 mesmer in the entire game are still playing GW2 with a main mesmer char.

But yeah, the 6 second of auto evade, so balanced… How someone can just even think about that?
The actually top tier profession are Necro/Scrapper/Thief. Mesmer are pretty much dead in every single game mode.

Moky.3104 lose all his credibility when he say “Thief are actually top tier”, you might be stuck in the S1.

I mean…rly?! Mesmers suck in pvp, sure. No doubt about it and they deserve to get buffed. They are btw still a brilliant addition to pve, but I do understand if you dont want to be a support class. I LOVE having mesmers in high-level fractals. It bursts my dps to levels not-imaginable and therefor, thanks to IP, makes me almost immortal.

But that wasnt even really the point. Thieves…top tier…we aint exactly bad, but that doesnt change the fact, that you have to reroll to another class if you dont want your team to have to carry you.

Ive been thinking again.
Stealth should not be the central mechanic of the thief class. It should be possible to make it the central mechanic, if you build for it, but you should not be forced into it.
Unfortunately, thats just what you are trying to do.
Actually, they handle that pretty good for now. You can use your initiative for direct combat but you can also use it to enter stealth, if you have a weaponset that allows stealth gameplay.
The access to stealth should be reliant on the weaponset. If I sue s/d or staff, I do not want to play stealth and thats that. But there should be better ways to stealth withh d/d, p/p and so on. Cloak and dagger simply doesnt do the job as good as it could.
It should also be more viable to enter stealth. Right now U use it to engage, run away or as a setup for a backstab.
A good start would be to slightly increase duration of stealth sources via traits and make you able to deny capping while stealthed.
All in all working with shadow arts should do the trick here, resilience of shadows, shadow protector and shadows rejuvenation could all need small adjustments.
Also what you, in the ‘warrior balance’ refer to as ‘true damage’ could work with stealth skills like backstab. It would also fit this profession much better to be honest.
The frontliner thief is actually not in a bad spot. I played some zerker staff matches recently (unranked ofc) and it feels pretty much the way it should: extreme damage output, high mobility, tons of evades and no mistakes allowed.
As soon as the op stuff gets toned down, this kind of thief will be fine in spvp. Just equalize the weapon sets and maybe slightly increase the health pool to make zerker builds a bit less suicidal.
The last way I can think of is giving us more options to buff ourselves. Thieves can deal amazing damage in pve, but only if they have a party to buff them. Thats what we miss for spvp content. Add some might here, some fury or even quickness there, and we should be able to really hurt some people, without influencing pve balance at all.

Looking at the weapon sets: Every set should have one peak skill. Like vault. An expensive, high damage skill, that can not be spammed infenitely and offers something else (like gap closer, gap opener, etc) The other weapon skills can be situational or used as utilities. Thanks to the initiative mechanic there will always be one single skill with max damage. There is no reason to try and make the others match it, as long as they offer something else.

Hmmm. I see, where this is going. It would basically remove the dependancy on weaponsets for stealth, and I like that. It wold also make the thief thge supreme ruler of stealth gameplay once again…
But it might be too much. Instant access to stealth whenever you want to? Not having to work with limited durations but instead leave when you feel like it? It would render a couple of utility skills obsolete, exept for the few occasions, where group stealth is actually required.
All of that would be ok…but I am not going to give up on my fighting mechanics. Yes! Initiative has its flaws, but there must be another way!
What about having two pools? Two pools of initiative, or whatever you would want to call that ressource. Pool 1 would be used by offensive skills(most of the weapon skills), draining heavily and, like I proposed before, giving you a hard hitting, unforgiving source of damage.
Pool 2 could be used by defensive/utility weapon skills, for stealth or perhaps even instead of endurance.
Its not a very…nice solution, but its better than having to rely on cooldowns.

You seem to be looking at initiative the wrong way. It is a ressource we have to handle. Yes. Theoretically we can just spam the most powerful skill until we are out of it, that is the main reason, why thief is so hard to balance.
Thats why Arenanet is trying to handle it the way they currently do: All damage on AA, utility on the other skills.
Not the worst way to solve the problem, but not the best either.
A possible solution could be to drastically increase the damage on certain ‘attack’ skills but lower the initiative regeneration (probably also lower the consuption on mere utility skills.) So if you manage to score a good hit, you hit hard. But if you just blindly waste your ressources, and your enemy is not dead in the end, you are sure to be punished.
Right now, on an evasion focussed build, you can basically go on forever, without ever running out of initiative and endurance at the same time. But you still dont deal any damage. That is not the way, its supposed to be.
Another attempt could be to reward skill diversity. Im talking about simple mechanics here: like…increasing heartseeker damge against blinded enemies, so you could use shadow shot or blinding powder as a kind of setup. Or cloak and dagger increasing the duration of condition stacks already in place, so you could use it as a finisher after several death blossoms, leaving your enemy to bleed out.
Would be a lot of work to figure this out ofc, but has the potential to add ‘combos’ and ‘rotations’ to a class without cooldowns.

However, I think we can certainly say, that removing the initiative mechanic is a no-go.
It is, what makes our class unique and personally I consider static rotations to be incredibly…lame.

Edit: actually…I like my second idea (imsoawesome). Gonna work on that now, let you know if I should come up with anything valuable.

Anomaly.7612:

So why do people even play this class anymore? It just sounds like Thief isn’t good at much at all anymore.

A lot of us dont. There are a lot of decent thieves who rerolled to rev or other classes, at least for ranked pvp. Those of us, who still like their class and have fun playing it stick with it.
But mark my words: the second thief becomes a viable pick for high ranked pvp, we will be overrun. There are a lot of people out there, who enjoy the profession, and even if they rerolled for now, to not make their team loose, they havent given up the class entirely.
Creating alts, especially for pvp is extremely easy. You can go with the flavour of the month, without having to give up playing the profession you like.
Although…whenever i put my thief aside for a week or two, and return to her, I am suprised how incredibly challenging thief gameplay is and how much skill it really requires.

I know most thieves are in an unhealthy, non-platonic relationship with trickery, but you will really be wanting acro over trick on the condi build. Your conditions tick slowly and you depend on being able to stay in a fight. A good acro d/d can let you heal against most enemies damage just as good as any bunker. For the same reason I would recommend UC over LT.

On the condi sustain:
Sage>Mercenary and Assassins reward>Upper hand.
Personal taste ofc, but I have not experienced problems with running out of initiative too much and the healing feels more reliable.
Also I would replace mesmer with scrapper, unless the build actually plays much different from my own variant.

Cyninja.2954:

Not sure if you were trying to be funny, but to answer your question, just about anyone who is not a sociopath since all humans have mirror neurons.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3510904/

The extent to which individuals are/feel egocentric differs per individual. While issues regarding basic needs and instincts will trigger more egoistical responses from individuals, more abstract thoughts and emotions will vary in response severity.

Overread the link, they are talking about synaptical signals when observing a similar action to our own on others.
True empathy is still impossible, since every humans brains is unique and will react different to the same situation. All you can do is observe the situation another person is in and their outside reactions and try to imagine how you would feel in order to relate to that other persons feelings. Its very questionable, how close to ‘feeling someone else’s pain’ that actually gets you.
However, that may be ‘a little’ offtopic.