Guild Wars 2

The Thief is the class imo with the most lackluster traits of all the classes currently.
Alot of them should get merged, alot of them would be better placed in other Trait Lines.
Certain ones are completely useless and should just get completely removed to make space for the really more useful traits that Anet removed from the game and with that literally butchered the Thief into nothingless to give the current DD line just a reason for existance, while nerfing acrobatics into oblivion at the same time.

I like some ideas here and will use them in a slightly changed way for a new iteration of Thief Traitline Concepts, because they include things I haven’t ever thought about yet.
But for a better overview, I’ll post it in an own thread.

My Feedback so far.

Staff:

Auto Attack String.
Part two feels too unspecial, it should get merged with part one, making the first part do 2 strikes. Make Part 2 then an line of sight Quick Thrust with an little evade frame which grants you Vigor. The last part, the Staff Whirl would feel better, when it also would hit up to 5 targets.
It feels still too weak and would be better, if its speacility as a weapon would be, that you can hit up to 5 nearby targets with the Staff instead of only 3 with Part 1 to 3

Weakening Charge Should get its distance increased about like 50% and its amount of hits in that aninmation from 3 to 5 and it should convertfrom you a condition over to the first target hit

Deliberating Arc : Its distance feels bugged and the direction of where you want to roll to should be shooseable byadding a little arrow marker first that you have to confirm before you perform the skill to decide, into which direction you evade after the attack, so that you could also evade just to the sides or forward if you want.
The Cripple on this skill is just useless and theres a bug with 2x the evade skill fact in the description (at least in German) The Cripple should get changed into Torment, to make the Staff also a bit more interestign to be played as Condi, because under its current design its a 100% pure power weapon. Rename the Skill then to Punishing Arc

Dust Strike Is too weak, it needs more function, instead of like a 600 line blind for 3 targets it should create a 600 line vertical thicker smoke screen for like 4-5 seconds that can be used to combo with it with say vault or the dodge trait bound so that you can use Staff 4 as a good opener to get steealth, while the skill itsef can protect you from projectiles while it blinds foes peiodically in those 5 seconds, if they touch that smoke screen. This way would become the E Spec a very good on demand range skill defender that could forge ranged enemies to go into melee combat with them.
Using Staff 4 to quickly dodge into it 3x should be possible in the tiem that smoke screen is up so that you could steack with the 3 dodges up to 9 seconds of stealth for example before the smoke screen disappears or theoretically more, if you use multiple Staff 4 together with a Signet of agility to refill your endurance.

Vault: Should get slightly its distance increased from 600 to 750, and it needs either an evade frame, or it should give you for the time of its animation stability/resistance, because the long animation makes you also at the same time very vulnerable to attacks/conditions.
It should have also a little side effect agaist targets that have lesser than 50% health.
If you hit targets that are under the threshold, then should vault remove a boon, before the damage occurs to make Vault as a skill more impactful in combat.
And the attack needs to be unblockable.
——

Traits

• Empowerment should get baseline into Minor Adept to make in general the damaging dodges by those 10% more powerful for every dodge, its too useless compared to the other 2.

• Weakness on critical hit every 10 seconds, feels not right, reduce the Weakness duration from 5 to 2 seconds and reduce the internal cooldown from 10 to 5 seconds

• Brawler should get changed from the 10 Endurance that you get when using a physical skill instead to the passive effect, that when you use this trait, that all your weapon skills get their Initiative costs reduced by 1 and after usage of physical skills you gain Quickness. Move it then up to Grandmaster Traits

• Guided Valor + Escapists absolution > Merge them, so that you get conditions removed and healed on dodge with that little internal cooldown

• Move that automatic pulmonary trait on interupt to Adept Tier

• Master of Staff + Endurance Thief > Merge them under Master of Staff as Minor Grandmaster

• Move all the 3 Dodge types from Grandmaster to the now 3 free spots of Master

• New Trait for Adept Tier: Self Defense: You gain the chance while equipped with a Staff to automatically block incoming melee attacks with Bandits Defense every 10s.

• New Traits for Grandmaster Tier: Bulletproof Monk Grain Protection and Stability whenever someone shoots Projectiles at you. Grants you also Resistance on successful Dodge.

• House of Flying Daggers: Increases the amount of Dagger Charges from the throwable dagger utility skill from 3 to 5 and the amount if daggers thrown from 1 per charge to 3 per charge to hit per throw up to 3 targets.
  and you throw on Death Blossom usage now also Impairing Daggers at your targets that you hit.
  —-

Utility Skills

• Fist Flurry: Remove the limitation of having to hit with all attacks juts to be able to use Palm Strike.

• Bandits Defense: You shoulld steal a Boon with this also and it should recharge by 2 seconds or so your Steal Skill

• Both Dagger Utilities should get ther recharge Times reduced to 20s

Elite Skill
The Skill is missing the Fact, that you dash now towards when you use it (if that is even intended)
And if it wasn’t yet changed, then when you finish with Finishign Blow, you should useyour finishing Move style that you have activated and not the default finishing animation
——

Dodge Animations

Dash: Would be awesome, if it would receive some kind of Aftershadow Effect to make it a bit more visually impressive, to show you, how fats you move and the animation should be quicker. While you dodge should the character move with Super Speed. Or instead of granting Swiftness it should grant Super Speed.

impaling Lotus: for the sake of god, please change back to the old animation lettign you perform death blossoms per dodge roll, looked way cooler and alot more martial artistic, than this silly spiral pirouette now that just looks stupid.

bound: is ok.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Orpheal.8263:

Tasida.4085:

Orpheal.8263:

And please make sure, that everyone this year can finally get that flaming book back item from the very first halloween, which thousands over thousands of players COULDN’T GET, because the game was at that state so incredible unsafe, that douzens of hacker waves made it impossible for many people to participate on the first halloween, because people got their accounts stolen from some anti social kittens …

Many people which got their accounts back, just hadn’t (like me including) then not enough time anymore to complete the whole item hunt to get that flaming book, because characters were simply too weak and not progressed enough in the game to be able to reach all the places where you had to go for that book back item…

Who the hell back in the past had the thought even, that making the first halloween event a partwise lvl 56 event is a good idea, when most of the players back then weren’t even so high already???

So please, how many freaking years must we wait, until you give all your hacked players finally a fair chance to get that back item too !!

This becomes ridiculous, if this years isn’t finally our chance…and really frustrating, giving me if this year we get not finally our chance really the impression that, that Anet must give a peep about what happened to all the hacked players back in the first year of the game when everything was due to the hacker waves pure chaos for many people…

I’m not sure which game you are talking about but I was here for that event (and all others) and there were no mass hacker raids nor was the game unsafe etc. I got the book with no problem. Perhaps they’ll bring back the item for you and all others that weren’t here for the first (and best IMO) Halloween. Was a blast to see the Mad King burst through the Lion statue in the first LA. GAME ON

The same game as you and the were hacker raids. If you weren’t part of them , lucky you, how good for you!
But 2012 there were in the early months of the game alot of hacked accounts, because the game was by far absolutely NOT as safe, as it is today!

I described the situation also in my last posting only out of my broken memories from 3 years ago (as if you could tell us now , what you did exactly 3 years ago to the fullest details..so please …I just remembered myself, that parts of that item hunt required you to go through the Blood Coast with lvl 45 enemies around and at that time were most of the players by far not already around that level at Halloween for sure, especialyl all of those, which could start first weeks to months later after getting their hacked accounts back, which had to restart from new, because, who the hells wants to play with a hacked character that will always remind you on this?)

It wasn’t that the game wasn’t safe. It was that people didn’t have logins that were unique to Guild Wars 2. Remember back when they made everyone change their password to something different? They also invalidated a large number of passwords back then. I remember a long ago post where they said they could watch in real time as hackers tried out combinations of emails and passwords they had gotten from a wide variety of other sites. The hackers computer’s would try out an email, try out a few passwords they had found used with that email in those sites and then either get a hit and log on or move to the next email/passwords. As Gaile said once about this topic. If the game itself wasn’t secure, there would have been a lot more hacked accounts than what there actually was.

This doesn’t change my standpoint, that all people who got hacked back in 2012 and had no chance to work for the book back item should get a fair chance to work on it this year finally.
ANet has constantly brought back already also too in the past several rewards from the past in the other ongoing holiday events, except for that one thing.
Its about time that this reward finally returns also too, maybe not via exactly the same thing to do for it, but it should return – no discussion!
Otherwise its a again another year of a big middle finger to everyone back in 2012 who had no chance to participater in the halloween event 3 years ago, only because there live alot of kittens somewhere out there, which have nothing better to do in their pitiful lifetime, than to steals other peoples accounts to strike their egos…

With this back item is it exactly with the Gemstore items that people constantly please about that Anet should bring them back and also there does also Anet constantly bring back items from the past back…
Its absolutely nothing different here with the halloween grimmoire back item.
It’s just about time, that it finally returns as an earnable reward for this years halloween.

How selfish can be people just be over 1 single back item in a game, that is all about fashion, that we need to have again here a discussion over this item, like the last years before – to even the point again, that some people try to threat ANet not to bring them back… its really ridiculous how hard some people try here to do everything to stay some kind of special snowflakes rolleyes

sigh

Hey, better start out grossly op and have then space to correct thigns down slowly, till you hit the right spo,t instead of starting off mediocre and nerfign then everythign to death until the point is reach that a whole weapon set isn’t viable compared to most other sets.

Its easier to nerf something down until you find the right spot, than to constantly buff somethign up, until you find the right spot, where you have to constantly consider all other class builds too.

I don’t my suggestions as OP as you…
Myking backstab 100% guaranteded critical is absolutely REALISTICALLY, you attack someone out of surprise, who didnt see the attack coming. Such an attack has to be always critical and the only counterplay to such attacks should be well timed preventive block skills.

The Auto Attack of Daggers feels imo too slow and makes not enough pressure, because the damage you deal with dagger AA as thief is absolutely mediocre compared to the Dagger AA of classes like Necro or Elementalist which do with their AA alot more dps.

By doubling the Double Strikes, which lies already in its NAME, that its attacks should hitting daggers should each hit twice, the AA DPS can get slightly increease without beign OP and it gives the thief from AA a slightly better chance at proccing sigil effects due to 2 hits more in the chance, that could be critical and trigger sigil effects.

by making D/D with the AA and Dancing Daggers more of a Boon Steal weapon set, it underlines absolutely in my opinion the true role of the thief, as a class, which should play out the inherent role as the superior Boon Denial Class, which uses that gameplay to empower themself with that at the same time, while they weaken foes that way.
Boon Steal is the spirit of the thief gameplay design and in my opinion its an absolute must, that Thief should become the very best class in that role.
No other class should be better at removing and stealing boons, than the Thief. Thats their expertise. Stealing, its their lief, it should be everything the thief class is build upon in first line and not Stealth. Steal is their Class Mechanic, not Stealth or Dodge and for that is stealing in my opining way too much underrepresentated in the current thief design and this includes heavily Boon Stealing to.

Putting it into AA2 and to DD are in my opinino the two best spots in the D/D build, where you could put Boon Steal into to have 1 in melee range and 1 for medium range that can effect multiple targets at the same time with the help of bouncing daggers, which requires sitional awareness of the thief player and good positioning just to get the best results out of DD.

Ok, maybe I went a bit too far by saying increasign the direct damage of DB, but the condition split is an absolute muts, if DB shouöld ever count as a viable skill for a Hybrid Build and should ever become a viable skill with that you can produce pressure.
Just 1 single condtion, even if it is bleeding with 3 stacks per DB use is NOT good enough for a hybrid build and 1 single condition is way too easily removed to deal alot of condi damage.
hybrid builds are only effective, if you have enough conditions, damaging as like non damaging ones, that can work for you as cover conditions to keep the damaging ones as long as possible working. before the enemy can remove them.

And yes, 6 initiative is alot, for that many initiative is CnD way too risky, way too easily mitigatable and i know, that im not alone with that opinion.
However, there needs also a reward for playing CnD out riskfully over just choosing a safer stealth. There needs to be an incentive, whhy you would want to go into melee.
The damage alone isn’t enough.But an AoE blind and 2 seconds of quickness for a short pressure play or for a very quick finishing move if you know, that your CnD will down the enemy. that woudl be very rewardign then and a good incentive to risk it to go into melee combat.

SB is on demand shadow step blind
OHP is on demand pulsing blindness and with a little SB blast also on demand stealth that you can use quickly whenever needed from safe range, costs a few initiative this way mor,e but therefore you have more mobility and a better blindness, where currently CnD offers no blindness at all, offers no mobility offers just only stealth on hit that forces you currently to go into melee combat just to get frustrated, that your tries either get easily dodged, or blocked or evaded or blinded through whattver for gameplay mechanics that make it easy the way too obvious animation seeing coming.

So for the lesser helpful utility effects that you have as D/D, in regard of mobilit,y in regard of damage mitigated and all this for having to play currently perfectly, with way more risk, than with the x/P > SB combo – yes, its well deserved that CnD gets for its same initiative cost a more riskless on demand stealth to be more on par with the x/P > SB combo.

my top 3

Daredevil (and even more so, if it would get the buffs it deserves to get on par with all the rest without its special mechanic hidden behind a grandmaster traitwall and acrobatics unnerfed, brought back to its old state, so that DD actually becomes a traitline with its own special stuff and not with butchered it acrobatics traits just to give DD a reason for existance, that an deserved buffs for D/D and a range increaser trait for shortbows/pistols would immediately skyrocked my hype for DD into infinity)

Reaper
Chronomancer

Tasida.4085:

Orpheal.8263:

And please make sure, that everyone this year can finally get that flaming book back item from the very first halloween, which thousands over thousands of players COULDN’T GET, because the game was at that state so incredible unsafe, that douzens of hacker waves made it impossible for many people to participate on the first halloween, because people got their accounts stolen from some anti social kittens …

Many people which got their accounts back, just hadn’t (like me including) then not enough time anymore to complete the whole item hunt to get that flaming book, because characters were simply too weak and not progressed enough in the game to be able to reach all the places where you had to go for that book back item…

Who the hell back in the past had the thought even, that making the first halloween event a partwise lvl 56 event is a good idea, when most of the players back then weren’t even so high already???

So please, how many freaking years must we wait, until you give all your hacked players finally a fair chance to get that back item too !!

This becomes ridiculous, if this years isn’t finally our chance…and really frustrating, giving me if this year we get not finally our chance really the impression that, that Anet must give a peep about what happened to all the hacked players back in the first year of the game when everything was due to the hacker waves pure chaos for many people…

I’m not sure which game you are talking about but I was here for that event (and all others) and there were no mass hacker raids nor was the game unsafe etc. I got the book with no problem. Perhaps they’ll bring back the item for you and all others that weren’t here for the first (and best IMO) Halloween. Was a blast to see the Mad King burst through the Lion statue in the first LA. GAME ON

The same game as you and the were hacker raids. If you weren’t part of them , lucky you, how good for you!
But 2012 there were in the early months of the game alot of hacked accounts, because the game was by far absolutely NOT as safe, as it is today!

I described the situation also in my last posting only out of my broken memories from 3 years ago (as if you could tell us now , what you did exactly 3 years ago to the fullest details..so please …I just remembered myself, that parts of that item hunt required you to go through the Blood Coast with lvl 45 enemies around and at that time were most of the players by far not already around that level at Halloween for sure, especialyl all of those, which could start first weeks to months later after getting their hacked accounts back, which had to restart from new, because, who the hells wants to play with a hacked character that will always remind you on this?)

Hmm, if ever something like Class Mixing comes back as a form of “Hybrid Classes” as a unique form of Elite Specialization, I would mix together the Thief with the Mesmer and bring the “Rogue”

Utility Skill: Mantras
Basically a Thief Spec, that is kind of feeling more like a mixture between Melee Combat and Shadow Magic with mixed in Illusions and Shadow Clones.
Steal improved to 4 different Skills
- Thievery
- Mugging
- Pilferage
- Exploitation

which have all their own unique effects

Traits

Minor Adept: Lord of Shadows
Gain access to the Longbow Weapon, your Steal Skill gets advanced to four more professional forms of Steal Skills with different specialized effects and receive 6 Mantras

Major Adept: Shadow Phantoms – When you Shadow Step, create at your location a Shadow Phantoms that will mimic you and fight against nearby foes with exactly your same build, while having lesser health.
Major Adept: Dark Assailant – Reduces Mantra Cooldowns by 20% and lets you gain Initiative when you activate Mantras from Stealth
Major Adept: Deceiving Swiftness – Increases the Evade Frames of your Evades and Dodge Rolls by 100% longer Duration and blinds nearby foes on successful dodge.

Minor Master Foray
Whenever you use one of your Steal Abilities, will gain your nearby allies a random Boon and you convert Condition for every affected Ally into a Boon (Max 5)

Major Master Shadow Runner Create periodically Shadow Clones, while you are affected by either Swiftness or Super Speed while being in combat. When you are effected by Super Speed, you will periodically create Shadow Clones faster.
Major Master Illusion of Haste Whenever you gain Swiftness, will all nearby foes get crippled. When the cripple of a foe near you ends, you will gain Quickness.
Major Master Sham > Give nearby foes when you use your Healing Skill for 2 seconds Regeneration, Protection and Stability. After those 2 seconds do these Conditions turn into high stacks of Vulnerability, Torment and Fear for 2 seconds.

Minor Grandmaster Rule of the Outlaws
When you use your Stealing Skills, you have a chance to instantly recharge Skills of your nearby Allies

Major Grandmaster Inspired Initiative Whenever you use your Mantras, do gain nearby Allies Alacrity, Swiftness and if your Initiative was full, you gain Quickness for 0,5 seconds per Initiative Point you had at that moment.
Major Grandmaster Mirror Edge Whenever your Shadow Clones/Phantoms deal damage, you get healed for a part of their damage they deal. Whenever they receive damage, will a part of that damage get reflected to all nearby foes of them.
Major Grandmaster Twilight Eclipse Perform whenever you do a Shadow Step a Twilight Sphere Attack that will cause massive AoE damage to nearby foes at your Shadow Step Location, causing Blindness, Confusion, Burning and Chill at that place and steal a Boon from your target.
—-

Mantras

Heal
Mantra of Betrayal
Charge a Shadow Spell that turns Conditions into Healings and Stat Buffs in case of non damaging Conditions.
> Deceitful Swap Gain Health and for the next 5 seconds are all your damaging conditions healing you instead and non damaging conditions boost all your Stats by 2%

Mantra of Darkness
Charge a Shadow Spell that lets you Shadow Step on demand to a Target Area and return.
> Shadow Walk Shadow Step to you Target Area. You blind all foes in your line of sight while you evade in that state attacks. Flips to the Skill “Shadow Robbery”
> Shadow Robbery > Return to your old position, having caught the Shadow of your enemy, causing immobilization first, then tethering the shadow to you for the next 10 seconds. While the Shadow of your foe is tethered with you, will you gain all profitable effects from your foe too. Means, if the enemy heals itself, you get the heal too. 2 charges means, you can practicalls tether yourself with 2 enemies at the same time.

Mantra of Cunning
Charge a Shadow Spell, which poisons foes and grants random Venoms.
> Venom Splasher > Throw a Toxic Powder Grenade, which poisons foes on impact, creatign a Poison Field and grants nearby allies and you random Venom Effects while standing in that field periodically for 1 Charges.

Mantra of Fears
Charge a Shadow Spell that stuns foes and calls for Shadow Phantoms
> Reflection of Nightmares > Lets your enemy see hallucinations that fear them. When you attack a feared, stunned, dazed or knocked downed enemy, it will create a Shadow Phantom while you have this Skill in your Skill Bar.

Mantra of Retreat
Charges a Shadow Spell that lets you gain Stealth, Protection Stability and Resistance.
> Dark Sanctuary > Gain for 3 seconds Stealth, Protection, Stability and Resistance

Elite
Mantra of Nightshades
Charge a Shadow Spell, which lets you turn into a Shadow, where your body becomes one with the shadows completely
> Shadow Form > Transform into a Shadow, completely exchanging your Weapon Skilsl out with Shadow Skills based in which Weapon(s) you use.

Thinks I would change on D/D to make it more viable compared to the other Weapon Builds

Backstab: Now is 100% always a guaranteed Critical Hit, which gives the target on hit also 10 Stacks of Vulnerability, if the target had more than 50% health

That trait that gives 100% critical for stealth attacks gets baselined and replaced with a better more general useful trait for the thief, like somethign that increases the maximum range of shortbowes and pistols and lets their auto attacks bounce once or in case of trick shot bounce once more.

Auto Attack String: Increase the Attack Speed of the string and let the Double Strikes hit twice, so doubling their hits. Let Wild Strike Boon Steal instead of giving back a tiny bit of Endurance and rename it to “Thievery”

Twisting Fangs: needs a massive damage buff (like 150%+ therefore that you you fight only with 1 Dagger and should cost 1-2 Initiative lesser

Heartseeker: Reverting the Damage so that it deals more damage agaisnt targets with high health ancd becomes weaker against enemies with low health that are already nearly dead. Raise the range from 450 to 600 to make it a better gap closer and add an evade frame to it.

Death Blossom Increase the Evade Frame to its Full Duration, let it grant while that animation runs also Resistance and Stability for 1 second and give it a 100% damage buff and let it deal instead of 3 stacks of bleeding 3 different conditions 1 stack each.
1 Stack of Bleeding, 1 Stack of Torment and 1 Stack of Confusion so that this skill becomes much better of a Hybrid Skill for thieves going for both, direct and condition damage to make with this skill more pressure. 3 stacks of just only bleeding are way too easily removed, but by gettign from this skill 3 different conditions, its not so easy to clean them all away instantly so that its more likely that the conditions will deal over tiem some more damage, if you perform some quick death blossoms after another, confusing your enemy with your quick and wild moves, while slicing them up from all directions. This change would give especialyl then synergy with the Impaling Lotus effect from the daredevil.

Dancing Dagger: Should steal boons from foes, when the dagger hits a foe through the bounces multiple times and get some increased velocity by like 20%

Cloak and Dagger: Just change it to an on demand stealth, that doesn’t require anymore targets to hit. For 6 initiative, it deserves to be an on demand stealth.
replace vulnerability with blindness. If you hit with it, the damage that you deal then is just an extra reward for risking it to get into melee and that damage from cloak and dagger should get slightly increased and give the thief for 2 seoncds quickness, so that there is a rewarding incentive to risk going into melee to land the hit also instead of usign just the safe way by going into stealth with it from safe range without hitting someone.

Zodryn.4216:

Hold on, I found out what the boot is for!

So very totally cool

wtf have i seen right now oO

ANet can give the game much better money sinks then this, at this poijt of the game its much better to make out of all this trash in the game item sinks and thats exactly what the mystic forge solution would be..

If ANet still wants to have both, item and money sink, then they could take the crafting solution as an alternative

And please make sure, that everyone this year can finally get that flaming book back item from the very first halloween, which thousands over thousands of players COULDN’T GET, because the game was at that state so incredible unsafe, that douzens of hacker waves made it impossible for many people to participate on the first halloween, because people got their accounts stolen from some anti social kittens …

Many people which got their accounts back, just hadn’t (like me including) then not enough time anymore to complete the whole item hunt to get that flaming book, because characters were simply too weak and not progressed enough in the game to be able to reach all the places where you had to go for that book back item…

Who the hell back in the past had the thought even, that making the first halloween event a partwise lvl 56 event is a good idea, when most of the players back then weren’t even so high already???

So please, how many freaking years must we wait, until you give all your hacked players finally a fair chance to get that back item too !!

This becomes ridiculous, if this years isn’t finally our chance…and really frustrating, giving me if this year we get not finally our chance really the impression that, that Anet must give a peep about what happened to all the hacked players back in the first year of the game when everything was due to the hacker waves pure chaos for many people…

Green and Yellow runes should be useable in a refinement process via either Crafting or the Mystic Forge to be upgradeable…

Say put 4x a green rune of the same type into the forge = 1x Yellow
Put 4x yellow rune into the forge of the same type = Exotic
Put 4x Exotic rune of the same type into forge = Ascended Rune

Ascended Rune = Accountbound Rune which when unlocked for your Account works like an Exotic Rune which you can always put on every Lvl 80 Equipment and remove from Lvl 80 equipment as often as you wan,t practically making FINALLY runes/sigils work in PvE/WvW exactly like in PVP!!

Its only a real funeral, if you delete all your thiefs – however, personally Id never go so far.

When Anet suddenly sees in their statistics a huge spike down of a massively lesser thief population… when it goes suddenly drastically towards 0, thats imo the only sign that Anet would understand, that here is somethign going really wrong with the class design and that a change by design has to be done – by either Karl finally waking up either, or Karl giving his design responsibility scepter over to an other Dev like Irenio or Robert Gee to let them fix the Thief, what he couldn’t to the likings of the thief community and concentrate hisself on other design tasks, that have nothing to do with Class Designs (not meant bad towards Karl, but one should be blind not to realize, that the the major part of the thief community currently isn’t very happy about their state of their class by his design)

Nemesis.6938:

Orpheal.8263:

wrong time and moment I think..

I strongly believe, these concepts are willingly held back to be implemented first with an expansion that brings us to the far nothern shiver peaks where we have to fight against Jormag together with a strongly Norn related story about shamans where we will be then able to earn them somehow over the course of that expansion.

I think this makes alot more sense, then to put these into the game with HoT now, which is absolutely not connected at all with the Norn… this expüansion is 100% all about only the Sylvari. There has norn content no place in it.

oooh cool…looking forward to it…2019 then? So we are looking forward then to 100% sylvari exclusively themed content and armors…

More like 2017, thats more realistic :P

wrong time and moment I think..

I strongly believe, these concepts are willingly held back to be implemented first with an expansion that brings us to the far nothern shiver peaks where we have to fight against Jormag together with a strongly Norn related story about shamans where we will be then able to earn them somehow over the course of that expansion.

I think this makes alot more sense, then to put these into the game with HoT now, which is absolutely not connected at all with the Norn… this expüansion is 100% all about only the Sylvari. There has norn content no place in it.

With my Concept I try to want to follow just a few Main Goals that should help the Thief to become again for itself competitive on a similar level of Warriors, Mesmers and Elementalists.

The whole Thief Gameplay is currently lacking massively a clear vision of what the Role of a Thief is in combat. and to make right of the start one thign clear – +1 is not a role, its a very bad and thoughtless game design result of permanently nerfing thief from patch to patch to death slowly, while givign all other Classes, especially with the last patch obscene total absurd power creep.

So this are the things, in which a Thief should be baselined superior in this game and clearly sublime over all other classes that can use these mechanics too. but the Thief should be in these thigns just the best, as it are mechanics , which DEFINE what a thief is and what a thief constantly tries to DO.

• Stealth – Its the absolute Brandmark Mechanic if the Class, this mechanic is so heavily intertwined with the whole Class, that it completely decides over it, if we have a chance to win, or not.
  Having any Classes in there game, like the Mesmer or the Scrapper, which are at Stealth currently (or soon) totally superior at Stealth compared to a Thief is completely unacceptable!! Thieves need to have the best Stealth from all Classes with the longest durations and the best effects while being stealthed, thats for why we have Shadow Arts in the end since game release, as its a whole Trait Line that when used should make a Thief the absolute best Stealthers of the whole game!!

• Boon Stealing – This is the next thing in which Thieves need to be absolute sublime in over any other Classes. Thieves should not have problems getting ANY Boons, because they should be baselined inherentry constantly trying to steal from the enemy – whatever they can to weaken them and at the same time to empower themself with what they have stolen. The Thief Class lives from the motto of “Fight Fire with Fire”, so its absolutely needed to find this alot more significantly also in the Gameplay of the Thief.
  This should be solved via 2 significant bigger changes.
  1) Improving the whole Steal System to 4 different Steal Skills for F1-F4
  2) Making Boon Stealing alot more existent in the whole Thief Design ,be it in Weapon Skills, be it from Traits. When you play a Thief, you should get the feeling, that he is constantly stealing Boons from enemies in his reach. All Skills that give the Thief Boons, or all Traits that give the Thief Boons shouldn’t give him Boons, because of that beign their own powers, but because they have stolen them from foes.
  Thief needs to be come the absolute natural nemesis for all super boon heavy builds (Bunker Guards, Eles, Revenants) to deny them their super OP defense and heath regeneration, and high might stacks, while receiving these things at the same tiem from enemies, if an enemy is so thoughtless to burst all of its boons up against a thief just to get them all stolen seconds later….
  Boon Steal is the by design unique gameplay mechanic of a thief and his role as a Frontline Controler whose work it is to deny the enemy to have too much Boons.

• Dodging – The Daredevil will adress this now with the Elite Specialization will become thieves the best Dodgers of the Game. Thieves were that already before of the Daredavil, however, to cripple down Acrobatics, just to give Daredevil a reason for existance is not correct. Acrobatics needs to get changed and buffed, so that it actually is becoming again a trait line, that is worth it to be used and which in combination with Daredevil offers also great synergies, so that Daredevil actually feels like a great synergizing Speazialization that you will want to combine with Acrobatics and not more like an Acrobatics replacement…

• Single Target Hunter
  Thieves need to become alot strogner, like they were once in 1v1 situations. Thats they Speciality to take down very quickly single targets to slowly decrease in a massive battle the numbers of the enemy side. For that sole reason does exist the D/D weapon set to be able with to to take out quickly with it single target.
  Backstab is just too weak for that for all the required positioning and the very short stealth time window that CoD gives you for that moment of burst damage.
  The reason for it being too weak is, because Backstab should have a baselined 100% crit rate. You freaking ATTACK SOMEONE OUT OF !SURPRISE! FROM BEHIND IN A DEFENSELESS POSITION, such an attack should always be critical.

That Hidden Thief trait just needs to become finally baselined, so that all your Stealth Attacks are always 100% critical. Would give the devs also the chance to give the thief an more useful new trait as replacement for that old trait.

• Weaknesses must get finally adressed.
  The Thief is way too much reliant on Stealth and Dodges, it has absolutely no plain stupid and unrealistical God Mode Invulnerability Skills or constant Blocking Skills.
  All of the damage mitagations the thief has absolutely help not agaisnt Conditions, the Thief has the lowest health pool and despite of having more defense than an Elementalist from equipment, they are the squishiest class of all, because we lack the superior self heal and self condi removal that the Ele has and we lack the options to mitigate conditions.

So change balance changes to solve this, without giving the thief also plain stupid god mode skilsl liek the warrior/guardian… would be to make these changes:

• Give the Thief more Resistance through letting them steal it, remember, Boon Steal
• Also add resistance more to Sigils, Runes, this Boon is just plain too less implemented in th game for the current balance condition fiasco!
• Change Weakness to affect also Condition Damage and reduce Condition Durations! Or add a need Condition to which Thieves have access to that actualyl does this, reducing Condition Damage and outgoing Durations, something like Fatigue (from all the chasign of Thieves…). If Condition Damage wouldn’t be so out of control right now, then there is also no need to raise the Base Health of Thieves, but I think it would be anyways best for the game to stop balancing Base Health afterClass typers and instead balance Base Health for each Class individually and raise the Base Health from a Thief from its lousy 11000 to a respectable needed 20000 as long nothing gets done about the condition mess and Conditions in itself stay liek they are now, that they absolutely ignore all kinds of defense and mitiagations, except Ressitance, which is imo a Boon that should have existed since release of the game and be fleshed out far more by now in the whole game…because then we wouldn’t have all these condition problems now….

People – balance changes and design reiterations to even complete concept changes don’t happen just only in 1 month. they can happen even several months to even years later.
Anet will also make still balance changes and maybe concept changes here n’ there via balance changes after HoT has been released and what Ive done here is not a 100% complete redesign.

I mostly reused everything, that is already there and provided by Anet in regard of mechanics and names, renamed here n there just a few things and added just only the idea, that the spec should have for each theme its own avatar and primal beasts – yes, that means adding also some new skills, but adding new skills and some animations for them is something that can be done in a month I think or what can still be added later through a balance patch, once its ready and have meanwhile as temporary filler some traits, that don’t require much work, until they can get later replaced with a balance patch ,once the stuff that requires a bit more work is finished to take place in its supposed spot in this E Spec, like for example if pimal beasts and their skilsl would be now too much work, replace that trait with somethign that means no work and replace that trait then later on the next balance patch when the work on primal beasts is finished and its ready to get implemented.

my concept surely is not 80% nature, 20% Astral … I absolutely made sure, that there is from everything something, especially in the traits where I tried to make for each theme its own Trait Line so that there is basically an Astral Traitline, a Nature Traitline and a Beast Traitline.
So that section is pretty much 33% everything.

Staff is under my Concept 40% Astral, 40% Nature, 20% Beast
With my proposed Aspect Change its not anymore 100% Astral, but again instead 33% for everything due to all themes gettign their own aspect Avatar that changes your Weapon Skills, so that there is one, that is Healing Intensive, one which is more Condition Intensive and one, that is more Damage Intensive.

Utilities under my Concept are 40% Astral, 30% Beast and 30% Nature, including 2 neutral ones that count to none of the themes really.

And I tried to bring back alot more GW1 Nostalgia with my Concept, than anet did as I used alot more GW1 terms for KSills that existed already in GW1 and would make for this Elite Specialization under this Design the perfect chance for their comebacks.

(Part 2: Traits)

(Minor Adept) Aspects of Life – You can equip staves and gain access to glyphs. You can become either an Avatar of Universe, Avatar of Nature or Avatar of Beasts once you gain enough Essence of Life. Generate Essence of Life by healing allies, removing Conditions and receiving Damage from enemies.

(Major Adept) Druidic Clarity – Becoming Avatar of Universe removes 1 condition. Becoming Avatar of Nature grants you Protection. Becoming Avatar of Beasts grants you Fury and your Pet deals increased damage with the next 3 Attacks.
(Major Adept) Natural Mender – Increase outgoing healings whenever you heal your allies
(Major Adept) Primal Echoes – Reduces Staff Recharge Times and dazes nearby foes, whenever you swap to Staff.

(Minor Master) Cultivated Synergy – Increases the Radius of your Healing Skills by 50% and improves the amount of allies they can affect by 100%. Example: Water Spirit will have then a Range of 1500 and will affect instead of 5 then 10 People.

(Major Master) Aura of Aspects – Grants Effects when your Aspects end.
Grants Stealth and Superspeed at the end of Avatar of Universe to nearby allies.
Grants Protection and Stability at the end of Avatar of Nature to nearby allies.
Fears for a second nearby foes and grants Resistance and Regeneration at the end of Avatar of Beasts to nearby allies.
(Major Master)Verdant Etching – Reduces recharge Times of Glyphs and summons a Seed of Life on activation of Glyphs at your location.
(Major Master) Natural Stride – Reduces Effectiveness of Taunt, Fear, Cripple, Chill and Immobilization. Your Movement Speed is permanently increased by 25% while you are not affected by these conditons.

(Minor Grandmaster) Grace of the Land – While you are in any Avatar Form, are the Condition Durations and Condition Damage on your allies reduced by 25%

(Major Grandmaster) Lingering Light – Healing an alliy creates orbiting Astral Wisps
(Major Grandmaster) Ancient Seeds – Striking stunned, dazed, knockdowned or launched enemies, will immobilize them through entangling roots that need to get destroyed to stop the immobilize.
(Major Grandmaster) Primal Wrath – Shapeshifting into an Avatar, lets also your Pet shapeshift into a Primal Beast with its own unique Primal Beast Skills.

Primal Beasts
Based on your Avatar you activate, under Primal Wrath, your pet will turn into 1 of 3 different Primal Beasts

1) Avatar of Universe = Celestial Kirin/Celestial Turtle (Underwater)
2) Avatar of Nature = Fenris Wolf/ Kraken(Underwater)
3) Avatar of Beasts = Rainbow Phoenix/ Leviathan(Underwater)

That Part I’d leave open for Anets creativity for now in regard of Primal Beast Skills

As I have mentioned it, I kind of am in a current love hate relation with the Druid, mainly because it is for my opinion way too much Astral Theme and too less Nature Theme.
Currently the Design feels like being a ratio of 80/20 towards Astral Theme and here I want to show ANet (and you), how the Design would work under my concept better when it would be designed more after a 50/50 ratio version concept.

So lets start:
(Part 1 – Skills)

Staff

1) Solar Beam – Fire a concentrated Beam of Light, damaging foes in line of sight and healing allies in that line of sight too.
2) Astral Wisp – Send a Wisp to attach to your foe, which encircles it, healing allies that it passes through, granting them on touch also Protection for 1,5 seconds
3) Vine Surge – Send forth vines, which immobilize foes, clenase conditions from allies and convert up to 3 Conditions from you over to the targeted foe.
4) Leaf Storm – Create at your Ground Target a Storm of Leafs, which peridically weakens foes inside of it and deals damage over time through razor sharp leafs that cause Bleedings also periodically in exchange with the periodic Weakness (Bleed > Weakness > Bleed > Weakness ect.)
5) Bestial Fury – Call for Beasts to cause a Stampede that knocks foes down in line of sight, while granting yourself and nearby allies Fury, Swiftness and Might for each foe that got knocked down by the Stampede (Max 5)

Class Mechanic

Aspects
A concept, under which the Druid shapeshifts his own form based on various different natural, astral or bestial aspects, using all kinds of environmental sources that the Druids specialized Nature magic can make use of)
Astral Force is renamed now to “Essence of Life”
Essence of Life, that you need to activate the Aspects will be gained, whenever you heal yourself or Allies or remove Conditions from them and when you receive damage, but Essence of Life from receive damage will be minor compared to Essence of Life you gain ,when you heal Allies or remove Conditions.

F1) Aspect of Astrology
F2) Aspect of Nature
F3) Aspect of Beasts

Based on which Aspect Force you activate, whill you change your Weapon Skills regardless of which Weapon you use at the moment to practically “Aspect Skills”

Aspect of Astrology

1) Cosmic Ray – Call down energy onto the target area, that will heal allies and disables for a while there Effects from Enemy Banners, Nature Spirits, or passive Traits)
2) Ancestral Grace – Become a Wisp and traverse to your target location. Remove conditions at the target location from allies and heal them per removed condition. Blind enemies around you while you traverse as Wisp.
3) Meteor Impact – Call down a massive meteor that crushes down dealign damage and knocking foes down in its arena of effect
4) Interstellar Barrier – Create a Barrier Field of Astral Force, that grants Regeneration and Vigor periodically, which can’t be entered and blocks projectiles as long the Druid keeps the barrier up. But the costs for this skill are so immense, that the Druid will receive constantly stacks of Self Bleed, Cripple and Vulnerability for every projectile this skill blocks.
5) Astral Convergence – Channel your celestial powers to create an energy field, which peridically cripples and slows foes inside and which turns projectiles from outside when they enter that field into line of sight healing shooting stars for allies.
—-

Aspect of Nature

1) Toxic Mist – Send out a Toxic Mist of Spores, which will Poison and Torment foes.
2) Seed of Life – Summon a Seed of Life at your Ground Target, which heals and removes conditions when it blossoms. Will revive downed allies if it blossoms near them.
3) Frozen Soil – Summon a Nature Spirit that causes enemies not being able to rally, while its up, as also allies periodicalyl cause Chill and Chill being 50% less effective against you and allies
4) Fertile Season – Summon a Nature Spirit, that increases the efficiency of passive Traits, Banners and Signet Passives for you and nearby allies, while its up.
5) Edge of Extinction – Summon a Nature Spirit, which deals whenever it receives damage (includes also condition damage ticks) also damage to all nearby enemies. Once it dies, it will send out all conditions it had on it at that moment of death to all nearby enemies.

Aspect of Beasts

1) Scavenger Strike > Serpent’s Quickness > Symbiosis
Attack the foes nearby with a Scavenger Strike, which will cause Vulnerability, followed by Serpent’s Quicknes,s letting you evade and deal a poisoning hit that grants you also for 2 seconds Quickness, followed by Symbiosis, which is a Combo Attack with your Attack, which grants you Boons and Effects based on which Pet Class you use.

2) Predatory Season – Summon a Nature Spirit, which raises all Stats of your Pet, while its up and lets your Pet leech health with its attacks, that you gain then. Conditions of your Pets last also longer while this Spirit is up.
3) Predator’s Pounce – Call for a stealthed Predator(Panther), which will pounce out of Stealth with a Lunge attack, knocking foes down and causing Bleeds. Your Pet will gain Fury, Might and Swiftness if this Attack hits successfully.
4) Bee Swarm – Summon Swarms at your Target Area Swarms of Bees which home into nearby enemies and follow them arround as long their duration runs (that Mordrem Bee skill) Enemies in contact with Bee Swarm will constantly receive damage and get weakened and slowed
5) Eagle Sight – Summon a Pair of Eagles which will follow you for the next 20 seconds and attack like homing missiles automatically nearby targets following them until they hit, causing with their attacks Bleedings and Blindness. On activation, causes strealthed enemies to get revealed as you gain also the sight of your eagles (and they oversee nothing!)
—-

Utility Skill – Glyph

Healing
Glyph of Rejuvenation – Heal yourself significantly and nearby Allies gain Regeneration
Under Aspect of Astrology – Heal significantly nearby allies and you gain Resistance
Under Aspect of Nature – Heal yourself significantly and nearby Allies gain Resistance.
Under Aspect of Beasts – Heal yourself, gain Vigor and nearby allies lose up to 3 Conditions and get a minor Heal

Glyph of Nature Nearby Foes receive damage and become immobilized, poisoned and slowed
Under Aspect of Astrology – Convert up to 3 Conditions on you and nearby alliers into Boons.
Under Aspect of Nature – The Conditions of the Glyph will be 50% more effective.
Under Aspect of Beasts – Summons a Wild Beast (also underwater) at your side for 20 seconds, that will help you in combat.

Glyph of Universe Dazes nearby foes with so much knowledge about astrology, TMI
Under Aspect of Astrology – The Effect of the Glyph will be 50% stronger and causes additionally Confusion
Under Aspect of Nature – Burns and Chills on nearby enemies will get extended by 3 seconds.
Under Aspect of Beasts – Poisons and Weaknesses on nearby enemies will get extended by 3 seconds

Glyph of Beasts Increases Damage of outgoing allies (includes Pets, Minions ect.)
Under Aspect of Astrology – Increases outgoing Healings of nearby allies
Under Aspect of Nature – Using Healing Skills lets your allies regain 50% Endurance and gain Vigor and receive Heals on next Weapon/Attunement/Kit Swap
Under Aspect of Beasts – The Effect of the Glyph is 50% stronger.

Glyph of Tides Push nearby enemies away from you.
Under Aspect of Astrology – Pull nearby enemies to you.
Under Aspect of Nature – Grant Stability to yourself and nearby Allies and stun break them.
Under Aspect of Beasts – Your Pet and allied Pets/Minions gain Quickness for 1 second whenever you deal critical damage.

Elite Glyph

Glyph of Unity Tether yourself to nearby foes. Whenever you receive damage, deal damage to all tethered to you foes too.
Under Aspect of Astrology – Tether yourself with nearby allies. Heal them as well, whenever you get healed.
Under Aspect of Nature – Tether yourself with nearby allies. Convert Conditions for them to Boons, whenever you remove a Condition or gain a Boon.
Under Aspect of Beasts – Tether your Pet with nearby allies. Whenever your Pet deals damage, tethered allies will leech health from that attacked enemy.

I’m currently at a love hate relation with the druid… parts of it I love, other parts I hate, and to make it short about what I hate, is basically just broken down, that anet messed up the ration between nature theme and astral theme for my taste..

Thie concept looks on paper like 80% astral and 20% nature.
The whole concept would work and come over for my opinion alot better, if the design of this Elite-Specialization would have been more like a 50/50 thing, balanced between both themes, so that the player can decide for his/herself, what kind of theme they like more…

Under the current design, this specissame as worse as like the Dragonhunter, just only that it has a good fitting name instead that is actually worth it to be called a profession, where Dragonhunter is nothing but a generic title that everyone wears and not a specialized profession…

I personally expected the design to be more biologically theme, more about true NATURE MAGIC, that fits to a jungle!!!
its in the design, yes, but as said for my taste way too much underrepresentated in comparison to the superior celestial part of the whole design.

I can accept astral powers based on the sun, moon and stars as being part of the nature in a higher concept, but from a lore perspective, this whole design screams just massively out loud FAIL, what wouldnt just be the case, if the design around this Spec would be more mixed in a 50/50 ratio.
It all comes down again like with the Dragonhunter due to the reason of ANte making terrible naming decicions (for trying hard to make everything look over unique) and trying to mix multiple themes into one spec, which seem to look like black and white with each other (Trapper + Witchhunter + Paragon + Dragon Design Elite to just justify the terible name as a cover for the sole reason of existance for this design being Brahams revenge for Eirs death being forced upon our throatsfor why he becomes a DH, where thank god the Druid is just story neutral like all other E-Specs except the DH…)

I would have expected persionally a kind of Astrologist E-Spec rather under the Mesmer as a kind of Visionary for the maybe next round of E-Specs, because it would fit them imo alot better, instead of that theme beign merged into tzhe nature part of the Druid (where it makes thematically sense yes, but as i would compare it with the DH, sometimes is simly less just more, less try hard over uniqueness would suit here just better to the whole game)

How that could look like will I post later in the ranger forums

So, now the next part

Elite Skills

Basilisk Venom
Apply Basilisk Venom, which disables enemies to use Dodge Rolls while they are petrified for a while after Petrification ends and immobilizes hit fors for the next 5 seconds of duration. So time this Skill right and you can immobilize a foe for up to 5 seconds maximum against a foe with no stun breaks literally.

Daggerstorm/ (Dagger Spiral underwater)
Spin around reflecting projectiles and your thrown daggers deal Cripple, Torment and Poison. So more enemies are around you, so higher will be the chance, that your thrown daggers will also bounce between targets, making this skill in large enemy crowds even deadlier.
While you spin for the next 10 seconds you gain periodically per second Stability, Resistance and Protection, where Stability procts always last to get covered by protection and Resistance, so that this Elite skill can’t be anymore instantly interrupted by a single silly boon corrupting Fear so easily -.- the counterplay of this skill should be melee combat (and was that also from begin on) and not Fear. Recharge Time is now 60s instead of 90s.
Daggerstorm is used as a Crowd Breaker to force a big amount of players to spread out and not stack together, while punishing enemies that use mindless projectile spam in zergs.

Shadow Clones (renamed Thieves Guild)
Summon for 30 seconds two Shadow Clones, which aid you in combat with helpful effective support and control builds, while having enough health to actually easily survive also those 30 seconds to be actually worthful as an Elite Skill.
The attacks of those Shadow Clones heal you and remove conditions periodically over the course of the 30s, basically every 3s. While they are up, last your Stealths 50% longer. Their attacks don’t remove your Stealth as the damage doesn’t come from you personaly, but from a different origin. recharge Time is reduced from 180s to 120s

Next the Utility Skills, here I’d make some greater changes.

Signets

Signet of Shadows
Passive: Grants level based Power and increases the Duration of your Stealths by 50%
Active: AoE Blind Enemies around you, gain Stealth and gain Swiftness

Signet of Agility
Passive: Grants level based Precision increased Movement Speed of +25%
Active: Removes 2 Conditions, Refills Endurance by 50% and works as Stun Breaker, giving you also some Resistance.

Signet of Infiltration
Passive: Gain increased Initiative Regen. Gain Health Back when you regain Initiative.
Active: Shadow Step to your Target. Gain Quickness and Swiftness on you turns into Super Speed. Recharges Stealth Skills by 10s if your Health was below 50%

Signet of Assassination
Passive: Increased Ferocity based on Level and killing something grants you Fury, Swiftness and Might.
Active: Your attacks within the next 5 seconds deal 20% more Damage and against downed enemies 33% more Damage.
—-

Traps

Shrapnel Trap/ Needle Mine
Lay a Trap (Mine underwater), which immobilizes, bleeds and poisons an enemy.
It will deal on trigger unblockable Damage. Underwater it is visible, but it will have therefore increased range and deals there more damage.

Reinforcing Shadow
Call on trigger (underwater just directly) a Shadow Clone of yourself that will aid you in battle for the next 25s with exactly your same build. Health Pool significantly increased, so that they also easily survive these 25s, unless when used at a totally outmanned situation. But as long its maximum 1v3, they should have enough health to survive the duration, unless it gets from all 3 for the constant time all the maximum burst damage, but then it has fulfilled its role of being an distraction at least well, if 3 targets prefer to focus themself fully on the summoned ally, instead on you to get thet summon quickly away.

Shadow Trap/Mine
Set a Trap/Mine on land which stealths you and teleports you back also with Fury to its layed position, if it gets triggered and that over a range of 5000 units.
The Underwater version will work the complete different way around, it will teleport on trigger blinded , weakened and slowed over 5000 units range the enemy that triggered it to your actual position instead of you shadowstepping to your prey.

Tripwire/ Net Mine
Lay a Tripwire, that will knockdown targets on trigger and which removes boons..
The underwater version instead will lead to enemies sinking instead immobilized on trigger.
—-

Venoms

Skale Venom
Apply Skale Venom, which lets enemies suffer on Vulnerability and Torment from your attacks within the next 5 seconds.

Ice Drake Venom
Apply Ice Drake Venom, which lets enemies suffer on Chill and Slow from your attacks within the next 5 seconds.

Spider Venom
Apply Spider Venom, which lets enemies suffer on Poison and Cripple from your attacks within the next 5 seconds

Devourer Venom
Apply Devourer Venom, which lets enemies steal Boons and get immobilized from your attacks within the next 3 seconds
—-

Tricks

Quick Roll
Roll to evade attacks, gain Quickness and Fury, works as Stun Breaker.

Caltrops
Scatter Caltrops, which will Torment and Cripple targets in its range over time.

Grappling Hook (renamed Scorpion Wire)
Pull a target to you within a range of 1200 units. If the target is heavy, then you get pulled to the target instead and daze the target. Velocity will be now affected if you are under Swiftness The Attack will be unblockable Steals a Boon from the Target.
Can be used practically in WvW now as Grappling Hook, as it will pull you up on walls if you target an heavy enemy on a Wall.

Throwing Dagger Kit
Exchanges out your Weapon Skills Bar with a Set of Throwing Dagger Skills.

1) Fan of Flying Daggers
Throw a fan of 3 Daggers which will bounce once from hit target to a nearby target.

2) Explosive Daggers
Throw Daggers to which explosive seals are attached to, that cause on impact burning and vulnerability to foes at range of the explosions.

3) Wind Daggers
Throw super fast daggers, that cause bleedings and hit all targets in a line of sight as they pierce through armor.

4) Distracting Daggers
Throw a Dagger, which will interrupt targets and causes their utility skills to get increased Recharge Times

5) Impairing Daggers
Throw Daggers at a target which will slow, immobilize and poison the target.
—-

Deceptions

Shadow Refuge
Causes no viewable red circle anymore. You and up to 5 Allies gain Stealth and Regeneration per Pulse. Shadow Refuge will pulse 5x granting each pulse 3s of Stealth and Regeneration. If it granted on 4 pulses its Boons without being hit, you gain on 5th pulse also 3s of Resistance.

Smoke Bomb
Shadow Step to your Ground target and throw a Smoke Bomb on that Position to cause a Smoke Screen that will block projectile attacks and blinds enemies that come in contact with it.
Becomes Shadow Return letting you return to your Starting Position, losing 3 Conditions

Shadow Pilfer
Shadow Step to your Target, deal damage and steal the Shadow of your Enemy, causing the Enemy to lose half of its Endurance, while you gain 50% Endurance back.

Path of Darkness
Create a Path of Darkness for the next few seconds in front of you, which blinds foes in its area of effect over time per second/pulse and grants you and nearby allies stealths.
—-

Physicals

Ascetic’s Defense
Evade all incoming attacks for the next few seconds and perform at the end of the evade phase a sweeping kick like a dragon’s tail that will knock all foes around you down, while working as strun breaker.

Palm Strike
Strike your foe once to deal massive Damage that will launch the foe away from you with such a force behind the attack, that it will deliver few seconds later more damage from Pulmonary Impact. A foe, that suffers damage from Pulmonary Impact won’t be able to perform for some seconds Dodge Rolls and Invulnerability Effects turn into just Damage Reductions

Roundhouse Kicks
Perform several Roundhouse Kicks with that you will deal damage to all nearby targets and which functionate as Whirl Finishers, while creating around you a whirling wind, that will reflect also projectiles.

Grab & Throw
Grab an enemy and throw it into an other enemy, dealing that way damage to multiple enemies.

Now to the Healing Skills

This would be the Healing Skills that I would give the Thief:

Hide in Shadows
Gain Health and Regeneration. Cures Burning, Poison, Bleeding and Torment.
1 Second Charge Time. 25 Seconds Recharge Time. Gain 5 Stacks of Stealth and lose 1 Stack per second.

Withdraw
Dodge Roll backwards, gain Health and remove Cripple, Immobilize and Chill.
If you are a Daredevil then you will perform your activated Art of Dodge. You gain back also 6 Initiative if you had lesser than 4 Initiative at the moment you used Withdraw

Signet of Malice
Passive: Gain Health back whenever your Conditions deal Damage.
Active: Steal the Healing Skill of your Target and use it for yourself. Convert 2 Conditions and steal also 2 Boons.

Skelk Venom
Gain Health and apply for the next 10 seconds Skelk Venom to your venom which lets your attacks leech Health the way the old Passive of Signet of Malice did.
While Sklek Venom is used, are your Poisons significantly stronger in Damage and reduce Heals from enemies by 50% instead of 33% and Boons from poisoned Enemies will last 50% less long. (this change is absolutely a MUST as counterbalance to the Insane Boon Gameplay that Glint Revenants will bring to the game!! and in general to make this skill finally more competitive and interesting to use)

Inner Balance (Daredevil)
Gain Health and over the next 3 seconds also Endurance back per second.
Gain more Health at full Endurance as also Resistance. Can be used now also underwater! Won’t root you anymore. Your next 2 used Weapon Skills that cost more than 4 Initiative after using Inner Balance will let you gain Stability and Aegis.

General Stealth Change
Stealth is now a Boon Effect, Thieves won’t get revealed anymore, but when using Stealth Attacks, they will lose instantly all their Stealth Stacks.
The Counterplay to Stealth will be from that point on then PBAoE Boon Removal, Boon Steal and Boon Corruption.
So this means that a Thief will be able again to instantly stealth the moment they lost the Boon.
The Skills from other Classes that caused earlier Reveal, will get changed to Boon Removal, what will make those skills also in general then more interesting to use against other Classes also too and not only against Thieves, which was total stupid by design in itself to design Skills around 1 single Class in mind to hard counter 1 gamerplay mechanic only with them… under such skill design are those skills just a waste of an utility/elite slot

Now to the Concept

I would first change the Main Class Mechanic:

Steal System Change

The current Steal is just plain boring, its nothing unique, its just a Shadow Step that gives you some random skills or a class based skil lthat can be helpful to counter the enemy when used at the right time, but you loose the skill sadly if you get interrupted, which happens in this game way too easily and oftenly and most of the effects of the skilsl are just plain to weak for the current state of power creep from GW2 to be at all efficient and competitive
—-

I would give the Thief instead a Class Mechanic Theme, that is easier adaptable in regard of upcoming Elite Specializations via changing their Main mechanic into an Arts System as we are already talking in regard of Thief Specializations about some Arts they have (Shadow Arts, Deadly Arts)
SO I think this design should be better integrated also into their Main Gameplay Mechanic by turning the Steal Mechanism into many different interestign and more useful “Arts” from which the Thief Player then can choose situationally which Art of a certain “School” is for the moment the most useful to perform.

Here an Example for the Main Profession of the Thief, that is teached in the School of Pickpocketing.

The School of Pickpocketign will consist of 4 different F-Skills that the Thief will use, which have all different increasing Recharge Times so more effective they are from F1 to F4 with F4 beign the most effective Ability.

F1 = Thievery
F2 = Exploitation
F3 = Mugging
F4 = Ambush

Thievery= When used, you Steal an actual Utility Skill from your Enemy and gain Stealth and Superspeed for 3seconds. The Stolen Utility Skill will be set onto Cooldown fro the Enemy. The Duration of Stealth and Super PSeed will be doubled, if the Enemy had no Utility Skills to steal cause of them all being at cooldown at the moment you use Thievery

Exploitation = Steal from your Enemies their Boons and regain Health for every stolen Boon you receive and deal extra Damage for every stolen Boon also for the next 10s. Explotation works as a 1200 ranged Shadow Step/Stun Breaker which removes also Immobilize.

Mugging = Steal from your Enemy their Weapons, disabling them for the next 10 seconds to swap their weapons. Enemies which can’t swap Weapons will get instead stunned for 2,5 seconds. You will shadowstep away from your foe to create distance after Mugging and you convert up to 3 Conditions on you over to your mugged Target

Ambush = Gain for you and up to 5 nearby allies 10 seconds of Stealth, Ressistance, Fury and Quickness and cause 1 second of Fear to Targets that you attack from Stealth.
—-

As comparison to the Daredevil, he would get then the “School of Martial Arts”
with F1 to F4 being 4 different Arts of Dodges, while the Thief has 4 different Arts of Stealing under the School of Pickpocketing
The Daredevil would have then these F Skills

F1 = Storm Dash
F2 = Impaling Lotus
F3 = Somersault Bound
F4 = Shadow Sphere

Storm Dash = Activate this Art of Dodging and your Dodges turn into Storm Dashes which let you dash quickly like a Warrior using Whirlwind Attack with the help of a directional line of sight over an increased distance, dealing while you dodge all foes in that line of sight damage. You gain still all positive Effects like using a Standard Dodge Roll from your Traits that might affect Dodges, when using Storm Dash, but you gain additionally after a Storm Dash also for 2 seconds Quickness and Super Speed.
Storm Dashes work as Stun Breakers and remove Immobilize, Chill and Cripple.
Storm Dash will cost you Initiative instead of Endurance, unlike the other 3 Arts of Dodges which cost Endurance. The Damage of Storm Dash will be increased when wearing the Staff, while it will cost lesser Initiative, when wearing Dual Daggers.

Impaling Lotus Activate this Art of Dodging and your Dodges turn into Deadly Blossoms that deal damage to multiple surrounding targets by throwing several daggers at foes that inflict Torment, Bleeding and Cripple to foes.
When wielding Dual Pistols the Condition Damage of the Daggers and Velocity will be increased. When wielding Dual Daggers you will perform actually also a Deadly Blossom that will deal also Extra direct Damage and the Evade Time of your Dodges is increased.

Somersault Bound Activate this Art of Dodgign and your Dodge Rolls become combo finishing leaps that deal on impact massive damage with increased chance for critical hits.
When performed with the Staff, the Damage is increased and the impact is so strong, that enemies will get knocked downed for a second.
When performed with a Sword the Velocity will be faster and on impact you will cause Weakness and Cripple
When performed with a Shortbow, you will halfway in the air shoot a Clusterbomb that will cause an explosion that leaves a fire field at your landing spot that will burn on contact and when you finish it at your landing, gives AoE Might.

Shadow Sphere Activate this Art of Dodging and you leave a trail of darkness behind you when you dodge, which pulses AoE Blindness and works like a Smoke Screen blocking also projectile attacks, which can be used then naturally by your leaps to gain Stealth also. Based on which weapon you use with this, you gain different Boons when you dodge with it:
Staff = Vigor
Sword = Might
Pistol = Regeneration
Dagger = Fury
Shortbow = Resistance

Next Step:

General Game Balance Changes

There are also some General Game Balance Changes that need to happen from which everyone would profitate from:
In List Form:

• Redesign the Attribute System, make the defensive Attributes same as valuable as like the offensive Attributes, by adding also synergies to the defensive Attributes
  You can go full defense i nthis game and sadly stil lreceive nearly samge as much damage, as when you’d not be a defensive build-. This just speaks for itself, how massively underpowered and ineffective Toughness and Vitality in itself are, because thesedefensive aatributes are just way too weak to have any impact in a combat against someone who is offensively builded.
  Toughness just needs to significantly decrease more the damage you receive, while Vitality needs finalyl to significantly increase Maximum Health, so that we can last longer agaisnt Condition Spam with is always faster reapplied, than out Condition Removals can recharge. Healing Power is just so weak and meaningless, it wold be just the best to completely merge the effect of it to Vitality as part of the next point.

• Give all Attributes DUAL EFFECTS, as this will allow much better to give defensive Attributes fitting synergies with each other. It would give each attribute more efficiency and impact, so that dual effect attributes could help breakign up the constant Zerker or GTFO mentality of players, once players would realize after these changes, that it would be actually quite good for them, if they just don’t go for all DPS only, but also use more defensive stats due to their much more helpful Side Effects and if those defensive Side Effects are just generally more useful for a player, than the offensive ones, then we will effectively see a shift in the Meta for sure to a more balanced state where Zerker/Condition Spam don’t will be just everything you need.

• Condition Duration needs to get massively reduced for all condition skills of the whole Game. Condition Duration needs to become an overall attribute, into which Condition Players need to invest Attribute Points into to raise their overall Condition DPS. Condition players finally need to have to use more than just 1 single Attribute to maximize their DPS. They should need to have to use 3 Attibutes like Direct Damage Builds too.

• To achieve the above point, lower also the Condition Damage Calculator so that Condition Damage for everyone just in general gets reduced, but allow Condition Damage to be Critical also too now. This way would have Condition Build Players finally to use 3 Stats also too for maximizing their DPS. Condi Damage, Precision and Condi Duration and for Condi Players it should not be possible to have at the same time maximum Condi Damage together with maximum Condi Duration.
  Condi Players should sacrifice either Condition Damage over Durations, or vice versa, so that they have to decide, if they want to be rather short and bursty Conditioners, or longer lasting weaker Conditioners

• Buff Items finally need to get removed from WvW. the only Buff Efffects there should come from Shrines, WvW Claim Buffs, WvW Trait Progression and stacking Sigil Boosts from kills. Removing them from WvW and makign them PvE only would allow Anet also finally to make much more and alot better and interesting Buff Items for PvE, without having to fear, that these items bring WvW automatically out of control.

First about some Basics.

Base Health and Defensive Stat Efficiency
Base Health if for the Thief Class under the current Game Balance Meta just laughable weak. With 11k Base Health, a mosquito’s fart of a condition spam can basicalyl brign you already quickly to lifethreatening danger, especialyl now where Burning is so power and especially when mixed together with the current OP Conditions of Torment and Confusion you will definetely eat quickly dust with so low health when fighting agaisnt a full condition spammer that can you quickly full with these conditions as also high stacks of Bleeding and Vulnerability, which further increases now sicne the last patch procentually your condition damage!! PROCENTUALLY!! And 25% more Condition Damage from high Vulnerability with Conditions which already ignore all kinds of defense mechanics is absolut outrageous and totalyl ridiculously OP.

There exist 2 ways how the Health problem could be solved.
A)
Just raise the Base Health of the Thief – Easy done, but that would be unfair for Elementalist and Guardian!! So for me personally non optimal solution.

B)
Just significantly the efficiency of Vitality that Vitality increases much more the maximum health for simply everyone, who decideds to go for more Vitality in his/he Build.
By increasing the efficiency of Vitality would automatically Anet soft balance out the Condition Damage Creep, as everyone would become able to sustain longer this Condition Spam, without that ANet had to nerf anything on the Conditino Damage Side and this solution would especialyl reward the most players that decide to go for more defensive builds over offensive ones, by becoming that way alot more sustainable against Conditions, if Vitality would just give per point instead of lousy 10HP at LEAST 25 HP. This would be for me the perfect soft balanced solution for Thieves to solve their problem about beign way too squishy under the curren’t Game Balance, which is still in regard of Health Values balanced around the Game release State of 2012 where all this power creep that we have by now 3 years later DIDN’T EXIST AT ALL.
So ANet absolutely has to recosider finally for Game Balance reasons, if they don’t want to nerf everything just simply, that they finally stop completely ignoring Base Health and Defensive Stat Efficiency and use these factors for once and buff them accordingly to brign them up on par with the current DPS stat which went already through the roof everywhere, where the current Base healths and Defensive Stat Efficiencies are just not enough and too weak for all this DPS.

How would you do it? What would you change, what would you keep from the current Design.
fact is the way how the Thief is right now, it can’t stay under current Game Balance.
And before we start nerfing things for 8 other classes, making alot of other players frustrated because of nerfing them down to current Thief Level, its much better, quicker and easier done to redesign just simply the whole Thief Class and rebalance it by this step to the point, that they are finally on par with the quality and power creep of the other 8 classes mostly, so that no one will complain that they got nerfed and Thief Players get happy, that thy finally aren’t anymore just stupid +1 pets for everyone else most of the time!!

So here I want to start with a new iteration of how I would do that job, after having received some new inspirations lately that I let flow into that concept now and I’m just interested to see, what people will think about it, once they can see the full concept

Arctarius.2649:

Orpheal.8263:

Arctarius.2649:

Orpheal.8263:

Monks are all about “Balance”, “Meditation”. “Harmony”, “Peace”, “Gracefulness”, “Humility” and “Respect”.

If you want to make a song/melody, that catches all these aspects of a monks life and puts it downright on the pojnt with the melody and rhythm, I suggest you to hear these masterpieces, take the best parts out of them and make out of them a mixture:

The Strength from a Monk comes from Harmony, not from being ferocious like a wild Warrior, so any hectical, fast, loud and aggressive sounds, even for a “combat” song don’t really fit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPitHrf0a-w

This is much more fitting for a Daredevil played out as “Monk” with Monk Outfit.

But its just a matter of taste in the end.
Sometimes is simply less just more.

I did not find anything ferocious about the songs I posted. I almost used the xian song you posted in my mix, but it would throw the tempo off of the rest of the songs I used. Believe me I am an orchestral music junky, I have heard them all, I appreciate the beauty in a song of quick pace as well as a song like “A land restored” from Jeremy soule.

I respectfully disagree, for me your mix was just too loud, too much wardrums in the background at the begin and the middle to use that as a song, that symbolizes the way of life from a monk.
But this mostly has something more also to do with the controversy of monks and “battles” as monks normally don’t battle as said, the life of a monk is normally based on balance, meditating, peace, harmony and so on.

They treat everything in life with humility and respect… thats why I said, that sometimes less is more and that for a monk in my opinion a lesser aggressive and fast paced “battle music” fits just better.

My example of the Xian Song sure also has its slightly faster paced parts, but they aren’t so loud, what makes these sections not to sound so aggressive.
These kind of “epic” soungtracks have oftenly the tendency of being too loud, too fast paced to create for the hearer that immersion of sounding “epic” and impactful, because these kinds of songtracks are mainly made for orchestras back in mind, which have also a completely different accoustic when being played together with lots of people together in a good accoustical philharmony.

My point that I just wanted to express is, that I think, that when someone wants to make a kind of “theme song” for a monk, that this songtrack should also representate the values of monks which I named above and that by converting these values over onto the mood of the songtrack.
The result will automatically sound alot better and more fitting, than when you just simply mix together only various orchestra song parts together with just only looking about it, that these parts share the same “tempo”.

If tempo is just everything that was important for you, then you could just have researched as such a music junky for other good fitting more slower and harmonyful songtracks that do fit to a slower paced and less loud melody and rhythm.
For that I find that the Xian Song just would work as a good basis

But like said, in the end everything is just a matter of taste, if someone prefers rather faster paced melodies, or slower ones. I just prefer slower ones, as they are alot more relaxing and emotionally intense, giving you better the impression of feeling said values of a monks life when you hear that melody.

Because music is faster paced and more aimed for an exiting tone does not make it junk music as you described, that is your own shallow opinion. No tempo is not everything, but when I set out to make something that sounds fitting and flows well together song after song, yes tempo is very inportant. I understand that a monk is about harmony, I study daoist culture and plan to visit and learn one day… But again pressing biased oppinions as if they are whole hearted truth is foolish. Yes monks are not aggressive by nature, but what type and region of monk you speak of also can decide the line between harmony and physical prowess. A monk in tai chi wushu would indeed be more of the calm meditative type you speak of, as to where the shaolin live in the heart of battle. Though they meditate, they are structured around physical mastery and go through very brutal rigorous training.

Dude.. wait what??
I see, it makes from this point on already absolutely no sense anymore to discuss with you any further as you disqualify yourself right here for any further discussion with you about this topic, if you just can’t accept that different people can have different tastes of music!!

And what do you do? You make directly wild accusations about things I have NEVER said.
I said in my few postings in this thread nowhere, that faster paced music is “junk”

I also said nowhere in my posts that only slow paced melodies are the absolute whole truth. So stop spread lies about what I said and clearly read first what I have actually writting instead of laying words into my mouth that I have never written the way how you accuse me that I should have done that, yes please?, because I also don’t accuse you for things that you have never written.

I just posted here only my opinion about personal taste, that slow paced melodic songtracks are for me personally better fitting for a “monk theme”, unlike your mix that is faster paced and due to this sounds more aggressive (to me) and thats the only thing, where I said, its basically a controversdy for monks, because monks literally aren’t aggressive (most of them)

Also Shaolin Monks which you use as reference aren’t per se really aggressive, they use their martial arts to find their inner balance and harmony in their own way.
There are many different types of Monks, from Daoists/Taoists, to Buddhist to Shaolin to Hindhuist to Christian and ect.
Shaolin Kungkittenis not about fighting and if you want to study this, you will soon realize this. Its about to discipline the body and spirit and in regard of Shaolin Kungkittento emulate the movements of animals to bring you in harmony with nature.
And especially the Shaolin are all about Meditation, more than any other Monks to discipline their body through their your mentioned “brutal trainings” lol

If you really believe, the Shaolin live for the battle, kitten man, then you are pretty somewhat living under a big illusion I can tell you and that you have still to learn really. alot about them.
However, I can understand your intentions with your song mix, that you want to use it for a “battle related action based video” later that will most likely show your daredevil in combat using all the kinds of dodges, and martial artistical attacks, showing them as if they are some kind of “battle monks” and that you seem to prefer faster paced songtracks for that reason.
All good and fine.

My standpoint on that was just only, that I personally think that a slightly slower paced melody fits for that better, nothing else was it, what I said.
And due to knowing, that this is no strong argument, thats why I clearly said also, that its in the end just a matter of personal taste and that will always be so, because everyone has an own taste for rather slower of faster music.

I hope I made myself clear enough now, that I have absolutely nothing agaisnt your preferences.
Have a nice day.

Arctarius.2649:

Orpheal.8263:

Monks are all about “Balance”, “Meditation”. “Harmony”, “Peace”, “Gracefulness”, “Humility” and “Respect”.

If you want to make a song/melody, that catches all these aspects of a monks life and puts it downright on the pojnt with the melody and rhythm, I suggest you to hear these masterpieces, take the best parts out of them and make out of them a mixture:

The Strength from a Monk comes from Harmony, not from being ferocious like a wild Warrior, so any hectical, fast, loud and aggressive sounds, even for a “combat” song don’t really fit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPitHrf0a-w

This is much more fitting for a Daredevil played out as “Monk” with Monk Outfit.

But its just a matter of taste in the end.
Sometimes is simply less just more.

I did not find anything ferocious about the songs I posted. I almost used the xian song you posted in my mix, but it would throw the tempo off of the rest of the songs I used. Believe me I am an orchestral music junky, I have heard them all, I appreciate the beauty in a song of quick pace as well as a song like “A land restored” from Jeremy soule.

I respectfully disagree, for me your mix was just too loud, too much wardrums in the background at the begin and the middle to use that as a song, that symbolizes the way of life from a monk.
But this mostly has something more also to do with the controversy of monks and “battles” as monks normally don’t battle as said, the life of a monk is normally based on balance, meditating, peace, harmony and so on.

They treat everything in life with humility and respect… thats why I said, that sometimes less is more and that for a monk in my opinion a lesser aggressive and fast paced “battle music” fits just better.

My example of the Xian Song sure also has its slightly faster paced parts, but they aren’t so loud, what makes these sections not to sound so aggressive.
These kind of “epic” soungtracks have oftenly the tendency of being too loud, too fast paced to create for the hearer that immersion of sounding “epic” and impactful, because these kinds of songtracks are mainly made for orchestras back in mind, which have also a completely different accoustic when being played together with lots of people together in a good accoustical philharmony.

My point that I just wanted to express is, that I think, that when someone wants to make a kind of “theme song” for a monk, that this songtrack should also representate the values of monks which I named above and that by converting these values over onto the mood of the songtrack.
The result will automatically sound alot better and more fitting, than when you just simply mix together only various orchestra song parts together with just only looking about it, that these parts share the same “tempo”.

If tempo is just everything that was important for you, then you could just have researched as such a music junky for other good fitting more slower and harmonyful songtracks that do fit to a slower paced and less loud melody and rhythm.
For that I find that the Xian Song just would work as a good basis

But like said, in the end everything is just a matter of taste, if someone prefers rather faster paced melodies, or slower ones. I just prefer slower ones, as they are alot more relaxing and emotionally intense, giving you better the impression of feeling said values of a monks life when you hear that melody.

I as a passionate thief player absolutely agree.
I’m sick of the current state of the thief, that reduces the whole class to being a +1 pet, where I remember, how the class was alot better like 1-2 years ago, where it felt alot more being in a right place..

But all this condition power creep, all this mechanic conversion of stealth to other classes and that even in much superior ways that make us thieves as masters of Stealth look like pathetic bloody beginners, the for all this power creep way too low and individually unbalanced base health values and the massive lack of alternatives for stealth are simply too much.

The point has been reached, where I’m absolutely fed up with the constant nerfs of the thief from patch to patch, while all other classes got mostly more and more buffed to the sky, while having much better acces to damage mitigations, have more health, can absurdly heal themself alot better and remove better conditions without beign reliant permanently on stealth, being basically gameplay mechanically classes for braindead, as they allow for much more mistakes in comba,t wherre you have to play practicalyl always at the thin line of perfection, where the slightest mistake instantly can end in your death, because of the thief beign so squishy for a medium class, much more squishy than Eles anmd Guardians, because they both have much better and superior heals and damage mitigations without beign constantly reliant on steallth or dodges or blinds as blinds as for all that damage and condition spam around you way too weak and conditions simply ignore way too much, deal way too easy way too high damage currently and the whole defense part of this game plain simply said sucks heavy and that since the begin of this game, without any attempts of changing that stigma of zerker of GTFO of the games attribute system which needs a dire redesign to a system with dual effects and better synergies for the defense department, so that defense attributes are alot more useful and actualyl make a significant difference in combat so that you will actually deal alot lesser damage agaisnt someone with high defense and that high vitality means actually also a clear significant difference in maximum health ,as vitality is since game relase WAAAAAAAAAAAAY TOOOOO WEAK!
10HP per Vit Pot is just ridiculously laughable and should have been increased already a long time ago to at least 25HP per Vit Point, if not maybe more (50), so that a high vitality build results halso in a clease massive amount of more health, so that damging conditions will take significantly longer time to become a danger for you, while they are naturally agaisnt someone with no vitality directly very deadly.
by improving significantly alot more the defense gameplay of this game, the attribute system would finalyl naturally balance itout itself, when people would realize, that they out of a sudden NEED to have better also some vitality and toughness in their build to survive longer and be more effective over logner time in combat, than to sacrifice all of that for just maximum DPS to be able to kill anyone and anythign in a matter of seconds.
A high defensive build shouldn#t be killable in like 3 seconds.. thats the appropiate time to kill a zerker player with no vitality and not defense, if that player is not cautious.
But agaisnt a skilled defensive player it should take significantly longer time, also as a zerker build and especially for someone, that is no zerker build.

The game is missing mechanics, aside from Weakness that make it possible to reduce enemy critical hit chance/critical damage as also mechanics, that makle it possible to reduce enemy condition durations and that without having to use for this buff items!!

To be effective as condition build, its direly needed, that for super high condition dps, you should need to have to use also like a direct damage build 3 attributes!!
It can’t be, that condition builds are easily now superior to direct damage builds and require of you just only 1 single attirbute to raise the DPS, while everythign else for them is literalyl just a nice to have extra bonus, while direct damage builds need to look after multiple different attributes just to get the DPS higher and then its even stil leasier to mitigate, than conditions as they just ignore all defense and mitiogations, as a blind doesn’t stop you from suffering condition damage, a block doesn#t stop you from suffering condition damage, a didge doesn#t stop you from sufferign condition damager…

The only thing that does this currently in this unbalanced game is RESISTANCE and even that is currently WAY TOO LIMITED accessible and sadly at the complete wrong professions that shouldn’t have resistance and already are good enough!! IWth engineer i could inderstand it , but Mesmers and Warriors shouldn’t have Resistance as long Thief doesn’t have easy access to it too.
Thief as a Boon Stealer should literally have 0 problems to get all the boons he needs to survive from all the enemies around them while fighting.
Boon Stealing needs to become more baselined and part of the inherent gameplay of the thief, because then it would be lesser of a problem, if thieves have no own access to boons like protection, resistance ect. because they simply constantly take it away from their enemies to weaken them and buff them self at the same time, dirty combatants as they are, using the powers of the enemy against them to overcome their foes with the help of the element of surprise, stealth and improvisation, where no other class should be better in that category, not even the scrapper as a specialization.

Thieves become more and more of a joke, because Anet gives more and more what made the Thief unique to all other classes, including also hard counters, while doing nothing at all in the defense department of the Thief and keeping with all this power creep about conditions still the game at a ridiculous state of balance of 2012 with way too low Base Health values, that shouldn’t be balanced around just 3 Class Types, but rather each Class should get their Base Health Values individually balanced around their Gameplay Mechanics and not, in regard of which Class Type they are.
it should be condired more than just only armor values, but also, how much access the class has to Boon, how much acces the class has to invulnerability and other Damage Mitigation Mechanics, how strong the class is at controling the flow of combat and that not just only with 1 siongle build, but in general with all useable weapons considered.
11k Base Health Values are absolute laughable for the current state of the game’s balance. Condition Damage needs to get nerfed, because at the moment its totalyl out of control since the Trait Patch.
Defense Stats need to get finally buffed so that they become finally up on par with the offensive Stats to break finalyl this stupid Zerker or GTFO mentality where if you fight against a defensive player build, that you actually really see a big difference between such a defensive build and a more offensive one, by having a much much harder time to deal significant damage.

Condition Damage needs to stop ignoring defense. Vitality should not only increase your Maximum Health, but should proportionally also increase your defense against Conditions by decreasing the Condition DDurations on you significantly.
One with very high Vitality against someone with basically no Vitality, like a zerker player should basically suffer maximum 33-40% lesser condition/CC durations and toughness should reduce both, direct damage as like condition damage.
Conditions should ignore only armor defense. This way if you go fir high defense you should also receive significantly lesser condition damage if you boost your toughness very high and if you go for both, vit and toughness, then you should naturalyl have the best defense against conditions because then they will last shorter an you and deal also lesser damage. Thats a very important thing that needs finally to happen, if GW2 wants to get back onto the right path of balance in general.

When this has changed, then the Thief needs a dire near complete redesign.
This class has so many useless traits, so many near useless utility skilsl which would work alot better and would make more sense, if anet would merge them with other traits/utilities to make space for some new better fitting and overall useful new traits and utilitiy skills, which could be used to give the Thief some better group support, than to reduce the whole class only down to stealth and venoms as also giving the class some more interesting control mechanics and increase more its main role of Boon Stealing and improve it also to Skill Stealing to stop enemies better from using certain skills as a unique control gameplay that only Thieves should be able to to.

The Steal Mechanic needs a complete rework and it should get increased so that Thieves should be able to become also able to steal more oftenly than just only once every like 20-30s. A Thief practicalyl should steal whenver theres an open opportunity for them. Thieves fight dirty, they use any chance they can get to receive the upperhand in the battle.
Thieves in GW2 are way too “nice”. Saying that Thieves are no high priority target for mostly anyone just shows exactly, how anet has nerfed over time the whole class practically to death.
The reason for that is, because ANet thought it would be a good idea to give mesmers super superior stealth in combat (even it its not the longest, but for battles its the most effective one right now) and now add on top of that even a superior stealth to engineers?
What will come next Anet, will you give now to the ranger E-Spec also a stealth methiod, that will be much more superior, than anythign Thief has??.
This stealth gyro will just plain outright completely ruin the whole game, I will tell you.
You will practically never see any Zergs in WvW anymore, because they will be most of the time always stealth by all the scrappers that will hide them permanently, its just plain idiotic to think about that, as you will instantly realize very quickly, how fats this will totally ruin all the fun of WvW, cause you will get constantly overrun by perma stealtghed zergs, where you maybe thought by the gyros flyign aroud, it could have been juzst only a small roaming group of 5 enemies, ending up easily in a 25 man zerg stomping you into the ground the second they get out of stealth….
—-

Stealth needs a redesign and after readign this thread, I#m absolutely for it to turn Stealth into a Boon which could then be removed by practically PBAoE skills that have the ability to remove boons, so that they could make you visible again, if you happen to have at that moment no cover boons to protect your Stealth from being removed and that while still keepign the mechanic, that stealth disappears once you attack, lettign it practically work like blindness which disapears also on attack.

That way would become Stealth also a normalized feature for all professions. i found it always total stupid, that Thieves get punished with this idiotic “Reveal” and Mesmers/rangers/Engineers don’t get that, only because they have per se no inherent spamability of stealth. But this practically changed with the change on the rune of the Trapper giving stealth when using traps…

By turning Stealth into a Boon, this unfair treatment to Thieves would find finally an end, because the natural counterplay to Stealth would be then Boon Removal Skills and there would be no need anymore for that stupid Reveal Mechanic .
Boon Corruption of Stealth could be then the Condition Torment as currently Might is the only boon, that has 2 conditions converted. Corrupting Stealth should turn then into Torment, so that Might has not anymore 2 conditions that can be converted into it, where it should be only Weakness.
Immobilized should get converted to Alacrity by the way and not Swiftness, so that the new boon alacrity also gets a fittign Boon Corruption/Conversion.

I hope, that once HoT has been released and all Elite Specs have been properly tested out long enough by players to give fitting feedback, that we will see then a big Balance Patch for the game, which takes for once then all things into consideration, including everythign that has been constantly neglected and ignored over the past 3 years and that the Main professions and elite-specailizations including all their traits, all their utilities, and all their weapon skills including the complete underwater component get so rebalanced, taking also Base Health into consideration, nerfign Condition Danmage and tweaking finayl the defensive gameplay mechanics, so that we get finally a state of Game Balance, that can be used as a solid foundation for the next Elite Specializations to come and which provides from that point on for all professions the promised 4-6 VIABLE BUILDS that every playable profession should have!!

And not that we have a progression systme with traits, that dumb a profession down to have litterally only 1 single viable build, because everything else pof the class is so massively underpowered and totally irrelevant for the game, that it can’t compete against that one single good build due to lacking customization options in regard of Weapon Skills, way too limiting and too less trait options and very limited customizable utility skills as also way too less Healing and Elite Skill Options.

Every Class should have like 10 Healing and Elite Skill Options, then we can talk about “Build Diversity” and is absolutely not “wished too much” or “too difficult to balance/overview”

Monks are all about “Balance”, “Meditation”. “Harmony”, “Peace”, “Gracefulness”, “Humility” and “Respect”.

If you want to make a song/melody, that catches all these aspects of a monks life and puts it downright on the pojnt with the melody and rhythm, I suggest you to hear these masterpieces, take the best parts out of them and make out of them a mixture:

The Strength from a Monk comes from Harmony, not from being ferocious like a wild Warrior, so any hectical, fast, loud and aggressive sounds, even for a “combat” song don’t really fit

This is much more fitting for a Daredevil played out as “Monk” with Monk Outfit.

But its just a matter of taste in the end.
Sometimes is simply less just more.

Nike.2631:

Orpheal.8263:

Forge is just an other word for Smith … rolleyes

Not in this language it isn’t.That’s like saying garage is another word for mechanic, clinic is another word for veterinarian, and post office is another word for mailman.

And if you think ‘forger’ means “a person who works hot metal” I have a surprise for you… but its a fake. A forgery, even.

And Ii have a surprise for you too, because it just means BOTH as its one of many english words with multiple meanings.
And yes, thats thats what a Forger with a hammer does, he works hot metal to create that way all kinds of things out of metal, like gyro technical drones and it would also fit with the fiery theme we saw from the introduction trailer.
However, as it looks Anet made a backdoor class design change here and changed the theme fterwards fro mfire theme to electro theme, but just kept the rocket rammer, because it was already shown in the trailer and it surely would have disappointed many people, if Anet would have told us, that they removed that skill due to design change reasons, so it was easier to keep it than to redesign that skill more to a steampunkish electrical alternative that doesn’t involve fiery rocket blasts, while working all the same.

Don’t missunderstabnd me wrong, personally I’d prefer it also, if Anet woudl have named it “Smith”, because thats for me also the proper profession term per se and not “Forger”, but its an existing word, that gets translated for the job of a smith, one who works hot metal with a hammer to create with it and his ressources all kinds of things out of metal and personally i’d always prefer a cool battlesmith over some silly junk collectors, that do that even for one of the player races as a kind of “punishment work”

Goatjugsoup.8637:

yes its a great name, forge sounds more like an item than a class. so glad it ended up being scrapper, plus it even has interesting lore

Forge is just an other word for Smith … rolleyes and THAT IS A PROFESSION, itx just missing an R (Forger) for more correct grammar to realize, that a person/profession is meant and not the place at work of a Smith.

http://www.dict.cc/?s=Schmied

See the 3rd Entry (Smith = Schmied)
Forge = Schmiede and with Schmiede (Forge) is meant the working place of a Smith (Forger)

there has never ever been one, since game release..

if we ever wanted to put some serious Game Balance into WvW, Anet would have to do finalyl all these things:

1) Remove Food and Nourishments completely from WvW. The only Buff Effects players should get from WvW is from Shrines, Claim Buffs, WvW Traits and WvW Equipment Upgrades
2) Nerf Conditions back to their original role of being focused CONTROL GAMEPLAY and not this power creeping competitive antagonist of a Damage Role for what is mainly Direct Damage responsible for and not Conditions.
Condition Damage should NEVER rival to even overshadow significantly direct damage at all. Conditions should just be for what Conditions are mainly meant and designed for – Control and suplementary damage. For that ever to happen would have Anet finalyl to completely redesign and rebalance all Boons, all Conditions, the Base health of all Classes invidually and redesign the Stats better so that actually defensive Attributes DO MATTER and not just only the offensive ones
3) ANet would have to split up Supply into more needed Ressources for which players in WvW have to split up more to decrease the size of Zergs, so that people will make more smaller Mini zergs, instead of like 2-3 Mega Zergs only.
Its just strategetically very importan,t that Supply gets finalyl split up into more for the game important multiple ressources that players need to constantly collect to be able to fight together as efficiently as possible. If everyone just needs always only Supply, that makes things way too easy and simple. A tad more complexity absolutely wouldnt hurt WvW and would absolutely help in balancign WvW and slowing zergs more down, if they don’t actually do something constantly for all of their required ressources
4) Anet needs to add finally class specific WvW traits to give all classes in WvW better designed ROLES, stuff for that each class is special for WvW, as that would also help in balancing WvW in overall and make WvW more interesting also to play it with more, than just only 1 Class.

Sariel V.7024:

One more reason the boards are pointless

the board is not pointles, that dumb promille system or however it was called again they use for the leaderboard is pointless.

And its pointless that the leaderboards shows you only 1000 positions.
By the amount of players we have, a good leaderboard system should at least show up to 10000 positions and everyone that is out of the 10000s simply shouldn’t be shown in the list, not every with an uninteresting number and % behind, that tells you absolutely nothing, where you are exactly.

Its also pointless, that we have to go onto a website just to see our leaderboard positions.. thats somethign that should get integrated into the game UI, so that when we log in and see our login character select screen, that we there also see then the EXACT position of our leaderbord rank… and if we raised or falled since the last log in and how much.

If they could integrate this finally into the game, then woudl be the achievement leaderboard, wvw lesaer board and pvp leaderboard alot more useful and interesting.

I don’t know, what can be so difficult to show us the infos of the leaderboards also ingame from an ingame integrated UI.

Doggie.3184:

It sounded like copypasta of Ele hammer skill when I read it and so did the picture so I’m not surprised if it’s literally the same skill.

Orpheal.8263:

Ranger = Skill Redesign to “Toxic Pollens” which lets you grab in downed state a bunch of poisonous flowers, throwing them at you foe, who inhales the toxic pollens and gets dazed by that, poisoned and weakened.

How about Stun Spore? XD

or that, would also work xD and would be better than this nonsensical lightning bolt!

@ devil, lol take a chill pill… or go take some fresh air, you clearly overreact too much now.

1) I do claim nothing at all here, and that wasn’t at all the thing what I meant that you missed the point.
Honestly I absolutely don’t care about it what someone like you thinks about my ideas, just so that we two understand us clearly.
Fact is, wouldn’t I have participated in the Horizontal Character Progression CDI and presentated there the idea, that it would be a great way to give the game more horizontal progression via Sub Classes (and Elite Specializations are essentially nothing else than that, just with a different term to avoid the usage of the generic term of Sub Class, whats in per se a wise decision and something I would have never thought about), I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t end up now with Elite Specializations and who knows, maybe would get back something silly like the Dual Class System of GW1 back instead or get somethign even completrely different.
If you have followed that CDI, you should have recognized that since I brought up to the discussion the idea of Sub Classes (and since the point where Chris Whiteside even mentioned that he likes the idea, and I’m pretty sure, we got Elite Specializations now only thanks to him mostly and his support for that idea to convince more Devs, that this is the way for GW2’s future (like they officially said later it will be…) become more and more growing and taking upperhand in the discussions to the point, that Chris even went that far to propose to give that idea its very own CDI one day… (which is by now not neccessary anymore, as the general idea was as it seems at this point already so convincign for Anet, that they just started on working on it to prepare stuff about it, so that it can make it as Feature for HoT, which i guess was already at thta point in planning phase and anet just used all of the CDIs as a huge idea collection to get to know, what we all wish for GW2 the most, so that they know, what they should put into HoT!)

If I would seriously try here to claim for anything at all about an idea, which I willingly gave to Anet with the intention, that they make use of it to improve the game, I would use other methods for that… and not post in this forum.

2. You also don’t seem to recognize it, that it doesn’t matter at all, if there are already existing terms for other things in the game, that Anet gives Elite Specializations also names, which share terms for other things in the game …
Reaper, its also a term for an achievement title.
Berserker, its also a term for the mots powerful Damage Prefix for our Equipment Upgrades
Druid.. theres also those nature spirits called Druids in GW1

So please, stop making yourself look like a fool and coming up with such weak arguments, when its clear, that Anet surely woudn’t have any problems at all giving the Engineer Elite Specialization the term Artificer, when they had also no problems at all with that for the Berserker and Reaper.
Otherwise, please give me a good reason that is plausible, why Anet should make a stop at Artificer for an E.S. name, when they clearly had no holdbacks at all for Berserker and Reaper, which also share their names with terms for other things in the game so far.

This is ANet’s game and ANet practically can always rename whatever they want, when it would be required or simply better to prevent confusions.
Artificer in itself is just a synonym. If Anet would name the Engineer E.S Artificers, theres tons of variations for how Anet could rename the crafting job, if seriously needed to prevent confusions (Constructeur, Alchemist, Chemist, Scientist), because Artificers are all about constructing things, building up stuff and technical mathematics (Architects), because Artificer is just an synonym for Architect.

But the crafting job you are speaking off is nothing at all about technics, mathematics, building up stuff and constructing technical complex things like gyro drones.
They are about Potions!! Staffs, Scepters, Tridents, Focus and finishing/enhancing things up as also creating consumeables (again potions).
The crafting job has nothing technical related that would suit to a term like Artificer! BUT THE ELITE SPECIALITION HAS, ITS FREAKING ALL ABOUT TECHNIC, that anyone with eyes in a head should instantly recognize. Lets see ..

• Gyro Technique Drones – Technical Stuff Checked v
• Advanced Tools – Technical Stuff Checked v
• Gadgets – Technical Stuff Checked v
• Turrets – Technical Stuff Checked v
• Hammers – the Weapon of a Technician/Mechanic Checked v

3. I didn’t compared the Reaper Design with the GW1 Dervish, I say just only, with some right tweaks here and there ANet could turn the Reaper into a for GW2 fittign unique Dervish without having to copy it 1:1 into GW2, what would just be impossible anyway. But its just simply more than enough, if ANet would take over for the Dervish integrated into the basics of the original reaper Design some elements of the Dervish over to make it fit.. they already use for the reaper skill/trait terms that were earlier part of the Dervish – see Chilling Victory!!
The Necromancer offers already with his Shroud gameplay the perfect mechanic that could be used for Dervish Shapeshifts, just that they aren#t this time God Avatar related, but get for GW2 a different theme, like for example NEGATIVE EMOTIONS, having instead an Avatar of Hatred, Avatar of Sorrow, Avatar of Greed, Avatar of Fear, Avatar of Agony ect. pp.
My point with all this is simply to proof, that it would have been easily possible to give the class also a racial and lore neutral Elite Specialization Name, instead of Reaper, which is all about Human Lore, that is not connected at all with any of the other playable races, because Reapers are a Grenth only connected lore!!

Threy should rename definetely the ranger skill and that of of the engineer E-Spect.
In fatc, they should also redesign the ranger skill, it makes absolutely no sense at al that a ranger would cause a lightning to hit a target to interupt them… not even at all as “Druids”.
Rangers are no Elementalists, nor are the natural elements part of a nature magic using druid – they are based alot more on the 4 seasons, plants, animals, and natural aspects like growth (support) , alteration (shapeshifting), connection and fate in regard of natural consequences (life and death (regeneration/degeneration)

So I think the 3 Skill Names should be like this:

Elementalist = Keeps Thunderclap, as it was already a GW1 specific Elementalist Skill from begin on

Ranger = Skill Redesign to “Toxic Pollens” which lets you grab in downed state a bunch of poisonous flowers, throwing them at you foe, who inhales the toxic pollens and gets dazed by that, poisoned and weakened.

Engineer E.S. = Ioninized Burst (I agree on that idea) (But better would it be, if ANet just would stay with the fire theme of a Forger/Artificer Style, then we wouldn’t have had this issue now from begin on)

devil, you completely missed the point. sit 6

its a bad name, like most of the others (revenant, tempest, daredevil, dragonhunter)
Only Berserker , Druid and Chronomancer are perfect choices.
Reaper works, but there would have been a better name that isnt bound to lore so much and humans, beign a better race neutral term, that woudl have fitted alot better juzst for everyone – Dervish

Scraapper in this case is just a silly backdoor replacement name, because Anet seems tpo have changed their mind over tiem from a fire based Engineer E Spec to make now suddenly an electricity based one and that then naturally wouldn’t fit anymore a name like “Forger”, a kind of heat and fire resistant battlesmith. so they had to come up quickly now with a replacement name, that somehow fits as best as possible with the changed theme of the design and usign the hammer, most likely having THOR in their mind suddenly, so Thor used lightnings (Mjollnir) with his famous hammer…

Artificer would have been the much better name, that would work as a mixture between fire and electricity design and the high specialization into technic like gyros, having the knowledge and the finger desterity to be able to construct such complex and tiny things like those gyro technique drones.
Heck even a name like Mechanic would have worked alot bette,r but I’m sure, they didn’t want to use that, because it woudl have been the same name a class of FF14 has lately!!

This whole package over over uniqueness names our Elite Specs got just screams out lout everywhere, as if Anet was fulll in fear not to run into any copyright and trademark issues with other MMOs, while trying vey hard to come up with the most unsuspectful and unfitting names, one could think off (just my impression!)

For me personally its very disappointing as thats not what I personally envisioned for the game, when I proposed in the CDI the idea of Sub Classes, what practically lead to where we are now.
Sure, some unique class names are always very good, they are still naturally a part for the games’s overall uniqueness and its also part of marketing…
But one shouldn’t overexaggerate it with over uniqueness names non stop , like Anet currently does that in my opinion.

A ratio of 80% more generic, maybe lore bonded names and 20% absolute unique names is more than enough and not like in this case practicaly vice versa… like 30% generic classical working iconic names and 70% over unique names that are merely there for attention seeking and marketing reasons and in 1 special absolute obvious case even only because of complete HoT story related reasons and motives, which get foreced upon all our throats, if we like it or not, together with a retconned in faction that just out of a sudden appears, but gets spoken off, as if it always has been existing sicne beginning of the pact of the races…

I just can hope, that Set 2 will become alot better and not so much in the face marketing attention seeking – take it or ignore it.

Now to the comparison how I think they’d be all IDEAL:

• Chronomancer (Mesmer)
• Berserker (Warrior)
• Dervish (Necromancer)
• Druid (Ranger)
• Ascetic (Thief)
• Prophet (Herald)
• Artificer (Engineer)
• Arcanist (Elementalist)
• Inquisitor (Guardian)

That way would have been all Specs consistant and congruent in their design, beign in touch with their original main professions, themes and designs. They simply would be all then fitting immersive professions, where I would rate them then all as superb jobs, while still having good working unique class names, that aren’t try hard attention seeking over uniqueness out of fear, if most of the names are’t some crazy eye catchers, that nobody would buy HoT, while stil lhaving good unique names, that aren’t to be found in most other active MMORPGs that are out currently.

Thats just my opinion. But thats how I’d name the Specs, if I’d had some kind of influence on that xD (and making some design change,s os that the names do acutally fit to the gameplay and thems of the Main Professiions, while also having back in my, that we do use them while going into the Jungle, fighting against many plant based enemies… where stuff like electricity makes no sense…

1) Chronomancer – Very Good, but making not use of all its Potential yet
2) Berserker – Very Good
3) Reaper – Good
4) Druid – Good
5) Daredevil – Junk Name
6) Herald (Unfitting Design)
7) Scrapper – Junk Name (wordly)
8.) Tempest – Junk Name
9) Dragonhunter – Junk Name
—-

Chronomancer is on top ,because its complete design just fits, it feels in touch with the Mesmer the most as a specialization, that focus on perfectionizing Illusion Magic to the point, that you trick even the time space continuum’s reality.
Its a clear, iconic profession name, that actually sounds also like an immersive profession, unlike most of the other over uniqued nonsense that the most other specs got.

Berserker is very good, because its design absolutely fits to what you expect from a Warrior and the theme of beign a fiery fighter, who goes all nuts and on endless rage to deal massive bursts in short time with visually very impressive skills. Its a classical iconic generic name, that doesn’t need any nonsensical over uniqueness just for attention seeking

Reapoer is good, from all Elite Specs the best one that combines the best Game Lore with Game Desing without pressing unwanted anttention seeking over uniqueness into everyones face right away. its gameplay makes fun, it sounds not as much as a real profession like maybe Chronomancer does, but the fitting bonded lore to it compensates for that. However, with some more well made brainstorming I’m sure they would have been also a still better name for it, that suits a bit more all playable races. Reaper has that kind of human connection due to the gods/grenth, that the other races are missing

Druid, can’t say much to the gameplay, but I expect a gameplay, that will fit very much to what you would expect from a classical nature magic focused Druid.
its a good old classical more generic name, that actually is a well accepted and known immersive profession term (unlike most other junk we got)

Daredevil – Good ideas, terrible execution and needs alot of finetunign and a renaming to something ,that sounds actually like a fitting immersive profession and not like a generic title for everyone who likes to be reckless. Class design with bad Main Mechanic Integration, that feels like its new mechanics are hidden behind a Trait Wall!! Seriously!? gettign one Spec line screwed, so that this Elite Spec makes sense for existance! Another thing that needs to get changed immediately.. where do we get to if we now start nerfing trait lines into oblivion, just to make new Elite Specs viable replacements!!!

Herald.. nice name, but complete gameplay design that fits absolutely not to the whole class. Under an Herald I’d expect a class that uses a WARHORN and not a Shield.
It feels much better, if anet woudd practicalyl exchange the Warhorn out of the Tempest and give Tempest under redesign therefore the Shield instead.
Heralds should be the name for Revenants, as Revenants are practically Heralds of the Mist, able to communicate with legends of the Mists to be the connection between the dead and the living, and the Elite Spec shout be renamed to either Prophet or Soothsayer as they are connected to Glint, the whole reason for the existance of the FLAMESEEKER PROPHECIES and their whole gameplay should be based more on VISIONS as like Glint had visions of the future!! the name and the whole gameplay are completely out of touch!

Scrapper, nice gameplay from what we klnow so far, terrible name choice again.
They should have stayed at the Forger, or named it maybe instead Artificer and stayed at the fiery design, instead of making an unfitting unexplainable 180° turn and changing the whole design now into an electricy design, that makes absolutely no sense when going into the jungle, where FIRE IS KEY and which makes also alot more sense with skill like Rocket Charge, which we know fro mthe traielr was by design already very fire heavy in its animations

Tempest.. super boring gameplay mechanic, that feels not very much in touch, nonsensical na,me that is absolutely unimmersive as a profession term!! (naming a class after a weather effect, seriously, really high conceptual…)
They should have better started here with somethign easier and more generic, that is an iconic clear known and accepted profession term, like Summoner, Arcanist, Forcetamer, Runologist, Sage, Mystic ect. and that maybe with a weapon, that the community wished most for – the Sword, what would have been the best weapon choice for a kind of elemental battle magician stylistical Arcanist/Mystic instead

Dragonhunter.. the worst of them all, here fits absolutely from A to Z nothing together at all. The worst profression name that ive ever seen in my whole life paired with an unfitting 3in1 style wannabe witchhunter design with mixed in dragon style skilsl that have nothign at all to do with the original style of the Guardian Class at all, and that all on top mixed with a kind of Trap Hunter gameplay.. what is something, that would alot more for a RANGER E-Spec for the future that woudl be then actually named Hunter, because its already a class, that has longbow and traps. wtf do we need another class for that in heavy armors that makes no sense and swings around as wannabe angel/paragon and makes one on Witchhunter Trip??
—-

Thats my ratings with my feelings about the ratings, why I rated the specs as like I rated them

Hide in Shadows
Should remove Burning, Confusion, Bleeding and Torment
Exchange the Regeneration with Protection. and minimally improve the Base Heal by letting Healing Power significantly raise the base heal more. Reduce the Cooldown from 30s to 20s and reduce the activation time from 2s to 1s

Signet of Malice
Increase significantly the Healing Power affect here for the passive heals, improve the active affect by letting all conditions on you convert over to your target and set the targets heal skill on cooldown.

Skelk Venom
Reduce the recharge time from 40s to 30s Add regeneration as side effect for successful hits and let successful hits remove also conditions from you.

Withdraw
Should give also initiative back
——

and in regard of Utility skilsl should anet just merge alot of them and use the created gaps to give the Thief some new more useful utility Skills.

Like merging Signet of Shadows with Asssasins’s Signet
Like merging Shadow Step with Blinding Powder
Like merging Shadow Refuge with Ambush
Like meging Signet of Agility with Infiltrators Signet
Like merging Needle Trap with Shadow Trap
Like merging Roll for Initiative with Haste
Like merging Devorer Venom with Ice Drake Venom
Like merging Scorpion Wire with Spider Venom

That wold be instantly space for much better designed, more useful and generally more group supporting 8 Utility Skills for a potentially much better and more fun thief class

First how I think that Base Health should get rebalanced:

Thats from Top to Down the Base Health Values, how I think under the current game balance State should they get changed.

Warrior: 25000
Necromancer: 23500
Ranger: 23000
Thief: 21500
Mesmer: 18000
Revenant: 17000
Engineer: 15500
Guardian: 14000
Elementalist: 13000
—-

Condition Damage needs to get reduced for Torment, Confusion and especially Burning.. these 3 alone paired together are currently destroying the whole game Balance mostly alone!! When you can reach in this game Condition damage DPS thats high enough to kill ANYONE in a matter of like 2-3 seconds, before that person literally had a chance to react fast enough to get all the conditions off, before its already to late preventign to eat the dust, then you know exactly, that somethign in this games balance is currently massively WRONG! Not to mention that theres no way except Resistance to mitigate conditon damage, or lower it, with boons like Protection ect, but instead of that ANet even lets it increase with makign Vulnerability also increase condition damage by whopping 25% if you get high stacked with it!!
This change needs to get removed as well!! Instead of increasing the condition damage, Vulnertability should increase the condition durations to support condition players in gettign longer durations after the base durations got decreased by said 40%, so that a condition player actually wants to use alot of Vulnerability, not only as just a cover condition, but mainly to get longer condition durations!
—-

Based on the above points, i’d change the following Thief Mechanics

Dagger
Auto Attack:
Increase the Amount of Hits from 4 to 6, the first two hits should hit targets twice. By adding more its, should get also the Damage of the AA get buffed and the Attack Speed should get increased by felt 25% of the animations. Thief should have with D/D the absolut most superior fastest AA from all classes to give Thief players an incentive to play with D/D over builds like D/P and to give D/D thieves with Quickness an evenbore significant DPS boosting impact then!!

Backstab
Mechanic changed into a steal like Shadowstep into the back of your target. To reduce a the obnoxious perfect positioning, while giving the D/D thief a bit more mobility also, that you need to have here for a tiny time window!! while no other class needs such immensive precision and positioning without failure just to burst!

Twisting Fangs:
Significantly boost its damage, because in its current state it doesn’t compensate at all the loss of your stats from not using your offhand weapon!!
Make it a Whirl Finisher. increase its range and let it hit more targets. reduce its Initiative cost to 2-3

Death Blossom
Buff the Damage by like 100%, let it deal instead of Bleeding Torment and increase the Evade to its full animation duration and let it give you Stability and Resistance for that time

Dancing Dagger
Raise the velocity and damage by like 50%. add an affect, that it also removes boons, when being hit twice by the same dagger, to force an enemy to dodge or use an block skill, if they dont want to lose their boons.

Cloak and Dagger
Change its Effect to an on demand stealth with no requirement anymore to have to hit a target+ dodge roll that will ignore damage done by daredevil dodges, so that you won’t get instantly revealed. When used, the create Smoke Bomb should aoe blind and weaken instead of vulnerability
—-
Sword
AA’s
2nd and 3rd Attack shoudl get their animation speeds increased by halving the times forvthem from 1/2s to 1/4s for both skills

Infiltrators Strike
Initiative Cost should get reverted, Start 2 IP, and on return 3 IP. Return should have no cooldown, remove the silly 1/2s time delay and it should cure 2 conditions not only 1 Starting it should work also as Stun Break/Immobilize remover

Stab Completely replace this utter boring skill with something, that feels attrative to play with for abandoning your offhand weapon, and make it powerful enough, that it compensates for not using an offhand weapon!! Reduce its Initiative cost to 3
Never seen in a game a more plain borign uninspired useless skills than this!!

Pistol Whip
Increase the duration of the stun either to 1s, fix its facts by adding also the info that this skill lets you evade attacks. and if you don’t want to increase the stun duration, then remove the rooting effect to make it possible to use this skill also while moving and let it gain you Fury. This skill absolutely lacks on damage impact, where Fury alone would help out alot, since you permanently butchered Thieves Criticial Hit rate into oblivion with the latest patches!!!

Shortbow
AA: Increase the range to 1200, increase the velocity by 25-33%. Let it convert over conditions from you target to the target and steal boons from it also, if an arrow hits a foe twice and and was over 50% health to make SB a much better self support weapon for when fighting vs condi players, especialys Mesmers and in crowded battles where its likely to hit often multiple targets with SB that will be at the fitting health threshokld to let these effects trigger. Either make this a baseline improvement, or add a SB trait for these effects to make SB a more viable weapon for in combat, than just only a mobilityand blast finisher on demand tool mainly

Cluster Bomb
Change the Bleedings to BURNING!! We make everythign around our target nuke and explode and everything they get is BLEEDS? For real??? CLuster bombing a target should make the enemies vulnerable and burn!! raise the velocity of Cluster Bomb, raise its range to 1200 (we shoot it in a high arc!! make Shortbow for thief finally again a viable WVW defense weapon!!) Add a trait which increases the radius of clusterbomb and the amount of targets that you can deal damage with from 5 to 10.

Disabling Shot
Reduce the initiative cost to 3, raise the evade distance from 240 to 450. Change the cripple to slow. Rename the Skill “Evasive Shot”

Choking Gas
Should Stun targets, that stand longer than 2 seconds inside of it! Increase the base damage of this skills. The trait, that increase the maximum target number for cluster bomb to 10 should also increase the target number here to 10 also for Choking Gas

Infiltrators Arrow Should give you initiative and health back, if you blind enemies with it to incentivize and reward skillful play with it. Should stealth nearby allies and you, if you blind with it a target also, to give the skill better group support potential
initiative cost should get reduced to 5.
—-

Pistol

Body Shot Should weaken instead of immobilize, reduce initiative cost to 3. Should pierce and hit foes in line of size and have a base lined ricochet effect agaisnt vulnerable foes.

Repeater again here, buff the damage for compensation of havign no offhand weapon!! reduce the initiative cost to 3. Make it 100% projectile finisher. Let it grant might stacks per shot that hits. and Vigor, when you emptied with it your initiative.
Normalize its animation time with that of Unload to have the same time!

*Unload:
Add a Vulnerability Chance to it for every hit.

Headshot
Raise the Initiative cost, rase the range to 1050, increase the daze duration from 1/4s to 1 1/4s Add a self raising Confusion to it for every 1/4s second the enemy is dazed for maximum of 5 stacks of confusion if the enemy uses no stun breaker and sits out the daze duration completely

Black Powder
Raise its radius from 120 to 240. Let it pulse 4x, once per second of duration.
Give the thief a trait that lets him create on usage of Black Powder a Smoke Screen instead to give Black Powder a better defensive support effect for on demand projectile blocks.

Theres many things that the Thief needs gettign changed, the class currently feels so extremely butchered and underpowered compared to all other more or less face role builded classes (mesmer, cele ele, condi necro, warrior, burn guard, RF ranger) its absolutely not funny anymore.

The game is since the stupid trait/condition patch from june to freaking messed up beyond any sanity, that it essentially makes you want to scream out loud everytime you get face rolled by one of those brain dead faceroll builds, how anet ruined the game totally and especially for thieves.
With this I don’t want to say now, that Thieves should receive not such skyrocketign power creep changes, like lately all the devs fresponsible for the other classes are giving them.

Now, I for myself just want to see this condition change garbage to be rebalanced. Conditions were NEVER EVER be supposed to braindeadly easily surpass massively the DPS of direct damage builds.
It was never the intented role of Conditions to be used mainly for DPS. Conditions are supposed to be the games main CONTROL mechanic and not Damage Mechanic, if ypou want to fulfill the role as a main damage dealer, then you go play a direct damage build, because it is supposed to fulfull this role by simple design.
Direct Damage builds will never be able to fulfill either the role as support or control, eventuell only control, if the direct damage comes alot paired together with hard CC effects and many soft cc conditions.
The game has already way too much Damage over Time Conditions than it is good for the Game Balance.
In my honest opinion a condition like Torment should have never been implemented as a Damage over Time Condition, because it is paired together with Confusion and Burning such a braindead pain in the kitten , that it destroys all the fun of the combat .
Especially since Confusion is now with its also damage over tiem effect way too OP.

The problem with the Thief Class is, that it has way to unreliable Condition removals for all this Condition Spamfest that GW2 has turned into late,y as also way too low base health to be able to survive this crap long enough.
Getting pestered full constantly with high confusion, torment, bleedigns and burenings is basically a thieves instant death, even with a high vitality build!!

The problem here is with the general game balance, because the defensive stats of this game are just useless garbage with no synergies, while the offensive stats are just way too superior with all their synergies.

Condtions shouldn’t ignore defense and they should also require like direct damage multiple stats to deal high damage. There needs to be a stat, that increases condition duration and all skilsl tghat aply conditions hsould get their base durations drastically reduced, so that condi players need to use also that condition duration increasing stat to get back their normal long durations.
That woudl balance also then finally for WvW all those OP stupid +40% condition duration foods by simply decreasign the base duration of all conditions in the game by 40%, gettign these 40% back only, if you are high in the condition duration attribute.

If Conditions would last so extreme long, then wouldn#t struggle also thieves with their super inferior condi removals alot against condition spammers to much, because a condition spammer then wouldn’t be able anymore to have at the same time super long lastign conditions while having also vwery high condition damage.
Condition Playersa finally need to sacrifice Condition Damage over Condition Durations. They need to decide if they either want to deal high damage, but on short duratino only..or if they want long lastign conditions, but deal therefore significantly lesser condition damage.

The Base Health of all classes need also finalyl to get rebalance.
It makes absolutely no sense to balance the base health for all clases after Low, Medim or High.
It would be much better, if ANet would finalyl balance the base Health for EACH CLASS completely individually.
In my Opnion An needs to switch the Base Health from Thieves with Mesmers.
mesmers are by now much more better in defending themself, that Thieves, it makes absolutely no sense anymore, that they even have more health than Thieves.

- Thieves have not so much access to all kinds of boons like mesmers
- Mesmers are now much better at Stealth than Thieves, what is in itself already ridiculous!
- Mesmers have constantly clones and phantoms aroung themself, giving them alot more constant DPS, even while beign stealthed, without freaking getting revealed!!!
- Mesmer Bursts are alot more deadly and don’t require perfect positioning and timing as much as like it does for a Thief, especialyl when playing as D/D, a stupid mesmer just needs to rely on it that theirclones and phantoms mostly do the work for them, while they can hide most of the time in stealth..

and thats just them, dont want to start on Cele Eles and Burn Guaridans.

I just believe, if anet would just get finally some general game balance changes right, that aren’t really needed to be class specific, this would help Thieves currently alot more, than to change tons of Thief skills and traits only.

Sure, some changes to traits and mainly weapon skilsl would be nice, but I think changes there will be only totally a waste of time, as long this condition garbage doesn’t get nerfed back to the ground to its supposed main control role, instead of it trying to replace direct damage as damage role making out of it a seeming competion, which dmaage typ can outclass the other side better and easier, where Conditino Damage currentkly is the clear winner since all this power creep around it thanks to the last balance patch that brought everything about it totally out of control.

Ill post some changes I think would be appropiate, if ANet would fix first the terrible condition meta now and base health imbalances.

I’ve enough wishes, with that could ANet fill up for sure enough content and improvements for easily up to 2018!!

• Implementation of Build Templates
• Tengus as playable Race
• Reimplementation of Living Story Season 1 and turning the initial Personal Story into Season 0, making it also replayable
• Adding of New Weapon Types Whip, Halberd, Greataxe, Gauntlets/Claws, Crossbows
• Adding of more Elite-Specializations
• Bringing back of Super Adventure Box W1/2/ HM and continuing it with W3
• Implemention of Polymock, Bar Brawls, Target Shooting and makign finally Towns the lively places full of Events and unique Minigames, they should be from begin on like announced they would be
• Redesign of all the World Bosses, especisally the Dragon Champions to be more challenging and rewarding and less obnoxiously boring Button 1 Spamfests.
• Implemention of Player Housing and Redesign of the Personal Home Instance to make it alot more customizable
• Implementation of Fishing and Digging as new Gathering Jobs.
• Finally Implementing Jeweler and Chef 500!!
• Complete Skill Rebalance for All Class for Underwater Combat.
• Implemention of complete own Underwater Traits for all Classes
• Finally the Name Reveal of the Deep See Elder Dragon, so far we know only, it begins with S
• Redesign of the Largos and making them also playable.
• More new explorable Map Parts of the old Tyria and EotN Regions, which are still locked as unexplorable
• More new WvW Maps, WvW should have like 4-5 different Maps of same quality liek the new Desert, stating with the reimplementation of a redesigned Alpine Map that mets also the new standards from the new Desert Map.
• More new PvP Maps and Game Modes
• Implemention of Heroic Fractals as Exansion to FotM, which works like an expanded concept of Bonus Mission Pack Instanced Chapters of History to replay, starting with a complete replayable Ghosts of Ascalon Book
• Having Wind based Permanent Crafting Material Tools, like a Sonic Sicle, a Sylph Log Axe and a Tempest Pickaxe
• Implementation of Ascended Runes, Ascended Sigils, Ascended Gemstones
• Implementation of Legendary Accessoires (Rings, Earrings, Amulets)
• A complete UI Overhaul to make it alot more visually appealing, more connected to Lore and Gameplay Aspects of the Game, better overviewable ect.
• Redesign of the Attribute System to a Dual Effect Attribute System and Rebalance of the Defensive Attributes to be more up on par with the offensive ones in regard of Synergies. Nerf of Condition Damage/Condition System Redesign to bring Conditions back to their supposed Role as CONTROL Mechanic, not as DPS mechanic for braindeads with no skill that want to deal people die in a matter of seconds without having to think about positioning, The whoel Condition Game of GW2 is currently way too much mistake forgiving, where at a little mistake as direct damage player you are instantly dead, wherep ositioning, dodging ect. is far more important, and where enemies have more options to mitigate your damage, while conditions just ignore everything and need just only 1 single Attribute to be super effecte, while direct damage requires 3 Attributes!!!!
  Condition Gameplay needs to get nerfed hard, Durations need to get reduced DRASTICALLY and only when someone spents points in a new Attribute, that increases Condition Duration, you will have long lasting conditions like now, so that Condi players need to put more points into more Stats. Also Precision needs to become more important. Let Conditions also critically hit, but reduce significantly the base damage of Conditions, so that Conditions will deal maximum damage only, if you put also points a 3rd Stat that isn’t precision. Conditions and Direct damage need to have their own independent Critical Hit Rates, so there needs to be a difference between Physical Crit Rate and Conditional Crit Rate
• Implemention of tons of new Achievements for Collections, and expanding lots of the older Achievements to get more Tiers or let them gain Repeatable achievents, which wil lget slowly incrwased over time in their maximunm amount of how many times you can repeat them for more AP
• Continuation with Living Story – bring it to Maps, that have seen in the last 3 years absolutely no attention at all
• Bring back and continue everywhere in the game the Telegraphing Design of the Scarlet Invasion Sub Bosses, these bright goldorange telegraphed AoE skills were perfect. All enemies in the game should have more telegraphed attacks.
• Return of the Marionette Fight as “Open World Fractal” (bring the concept of Time Fractals to PvE, that can turn Maps for all players into an own instance to replay stuff of the past, now with Chronomancers coming, we shoudn’t have any problems anymore to replay actions fro mthe past)
• Implemention of Toy, Tonic, Environmental Item Tabs for the Hero Menu continuiing to remove lots of unneccesary stuff from our Inventories, when alot of things could work alot better as tabbed accountbound mechnic without having the need to have an item for it in our inventory.
• Improving the LFG Tool and make it a much more powerful organization Tool by adding Features to it like Guild Search, like a Ingame Calendar Function, like a Notice Book
• Implemention of a Postcard System to improve the Mail System and make it much more interestign and useful
• Impelemention of alot more Music Instruments, like aViolin, like a Saxophone, like a Triangle, like an Ocarina and reworking some of the exitign ones, to sound better, especialyl the ridiculous Bass Guitar, that sounds more like a broken car motor, than liek a Bass Guitar
• Implemention of alot more Emotes!!!
• Implemention of alot more Character Creation Options, more Hair/Eye Colors, more hair Styles, more Face Sytles, more Body Types, more Tattooes/Fur Options. Alot of COlor and varity Improvements for Guild Emblems!!
• Bring Back Capes as Back Items
• Implemention of Mounts as Prestige Items/Toys with inherent +33% Movement Speed Increase. Remove Swiftness and replace it with a better more useful Boon like Sturdiness as counterpart to Might and rebalance accordingly all Classes around that
• Implementation of a Skill Skin System, that allows us much more Character Customization with how our Skills look like -for example changing the skin of how our Necromancer Minions look like, or how Turrets, Elementals, Nature spirts, ect. look like for a beginning together with the Menu Option for Standardized Skill Skins for WvW/PvP, like we have that for Character Models to turn everyone into humans)
• Tons of Quality of Life Improvements, like adding a Use All Button to use instantly a whole stack of an item with 1 single double click on that button.
  Or n button, that lets us instantly salvage all salvage items in the Inventory with 1 double click on Salvage ALL Marked items, adding a little box to all items with that we can mark items for Salvage All and if we mark none, it simple salvages everythign that can be salvaged (so better put stuff you dont want to get salvaged this way into a inventory bag, that protects items from accidently gettign salvaged this way)
• Fix broken Achievements, like the Hero Collection Achiuevement
  *Make Gliding and other movement related Masteries useable everywhere in the Game, this opens up more interestign potential to improve older maps and makign them more interesting for the future.
• Bring back the old GW1 Dungeons as new expliorable Dungeons.
• Add new Dungeon Types (Solo Dungeons, Dungeon Crawlers, Guild Crusades)
• Add more new Dances for all Races and Classes
• Bring back a Game feature similar to the Hall of Monuments for GW2, a place, where we can invite other placers to to show them all our achievements in a visualized amazing way
• Remove Buff Items from WvW. All Buff Items should be PvE Only. WvW has its own Buff Mechanics in form of the Shrines and Rank Progression Traits. F&N makes all these things in WvW totally obsolete and meaningless!!
• Make All Explorable Maps count for the 100% Complete Map Exploration and give all Maps Map Rewards for 100% Exploration with no exceptions. Yes, this means 100% exploration becomes harder over time, so more explorable maps get added, but it becomes also each time more rewarding, especialyl due to all new added maps beign always lvl 80 Maps!
• Bring back Elite Content, liek for example, bring back the Underworld for a beginning
• Add some more new unique Holiday Events and let things like the Pavillion become finally permanent content (maybe with changed content between its permanent state and its special holiday state, like certain Champions being only there to fight against, at special holidays, like certain thigns happening in therev only at special weekend events ect)
• Implementation of a Talent System as part of Character Progression to split off the passive Specializations more from all the active ones that actually have a great affect on Combat Mechanics. Specializations need to get focused more on real significant Gameplay Changes that affect the Combat System, while all passive Stuff should get moved over into baselined Talents that the character learns simply over time automatically and which become simply general part of the overall Class Design as integral part of how each Class gives you a different gameplay feeling.
  Strengthening this way over time, as you progress more and more, your class specific game mechanics, while Specializations focuses itself 100% only onto changes to Weapon Skills and general Combat Mechanics, where Talents are 100% focused only on the individual Class Specifics.

and im sure id come up with more stuf,f but this is enough for now xD

I’m also waiting on the Hero Colle ctiion.. want to use finally the Loot Boxes to get the achievement done.
Hasnt been imp,emente.. tsk, it should have ben already implemented 9 months ago when they announced the existance of this achievement, same as like the fractal collection achievement, but that one got at least officially postponed now to the release date of HoT, but about Hero they haven’t lost a single word at all so far >.<

@ Captain…
the huge impossible balancing came mainly from GW1s Skill System, not really from the amount of Skills. The problem wasn’t the amount of skills, but the terrible skill system that allowed to have a skill bar completely mixed of skills and the silly two class system, which led only always into countless of unwanted chain reactions, whenever Anet changed something on the skill balance, because due to all the lots of possible class and skill combination possibilities that no one at Anet could ever know how it would maybe end up after their changes in an overpowered form.
That’s the reason why they didn’t give GW2 in the first place again that dumb two class system and reduced just simply the chances of unwanted chain reactions.
The next step was just to limit the skill bar with Weapon Skills and fix Utility Skill Slots.
The drastic reducing of the amount of Skills was practically unneccessary.
The Game would also be balanceable, if all Classes would get more Utility Skills, as long as Anet keeps the Weapon Skill System and limits our Skill Bar to 3 Utilities.
As long this is ensured, will increasing the total amount of utilities skills lead then only to an increased Build Diversity.
—

@ Lord..

Come on..please Mesmer Territory.. thats an invalid argument, when you consider, how much Mesmers already butchered around in THIEF TERRITORY to the point, that they practically already outclass Thieves by now in nearly everything!
By Efficiency in regard of Stuns ect. i meant, that they would last longer.
So a Stun, that for example would last normally 1,5 seconds would last with this Skill in your Bar then instead 2,1 seconds practically

And lastly, the biggest challenge, Utility Skills …50 ^^

Deception

• Smoke Screen > Blind foes in target area and blocks projectiles
• Shadow Refuge > Stealths you and your Allies. Heals you and your Allies. Removes a Condition on usage
• Shadow Step > Move to your Target, blind targets at the area. Becomes Shadow Return, which removes 3 Conditions and lets you return to your Starting Area
• Camouflage >Turn invisible and stay invisible, as long as you don’t move or attack. reveals you, if you move or attack. Skill recharges first, when you get revealed
• Swap > Replaces your Position with that of the Target and you gain Stealth for 3s. Gain Health, if the Target had more health than you.

Traps

• Ambush > Set a Trap that calles a Thief which will backstab foes within the next 20 seconds. The first Backstab of Ambush will be a guaranteed critical hit.
• Needle Trap > Lay a Needle Trap, which immobilizes, poisons and bleeds foes when triggered
• Shadow Trap > Mark on trigger foes. Becomes Shadow Pursuit that lets you Shadow Step to marked Targets and perform that way a dazing attack.
• Tripwires > Set a Tripwire, that knocks foes down and lets them lose a Boon. Tripwire can be triggered multiple times, until the wire breaks after 3 knockeddowned foes.
• Alarming Trap > Torments and weakens foes on trigger and grants you Protection

Signets

• Signet of Shadows > Passively grants you Power and increased Movement Speed. Actively blinds your foes and grants you 5 Stacks of Might (which will be 10 with Signet Trait)
• Signet of Agility > Passively grants you Precision and a chance to gain Quickness when being hit. Actively recovers your Endurance completely and removes a Condition. Stun Breaks
• Signet of Infiltration > Passively grants you Initiative Regen and increases the Durations of your Stealth. Actively Shadow Steps to your Target and steals a Boon.
• Signet of Sadism > Passively gain Health when your Conditions deal Damage.
  Actively convert up to 3 Conditions over to your Target.
• Signet of Mobility > Passively increases your Ferocity and Maximum Range of Shortbow and Pistols to 1050. Actively doubles the Maximum range of your next 5 used Skills.

Venoms

• Spider Venom > Apply Spider Venom to your Weapon to gain Charges of Poison within the next 10 seconds.
• Skale Venom > Apply Skale Venom to your Weapon to gain Charges of Torment and Vulnerability within the next 10 seconds.
• Frost Drake Venom > Apply Frost Drake Venom to your Weapon to gain Charges of Chill within the next 10 seconds.
• Devourer Venom > Apply Devourer Venom to your Weapon to gain Charges of Immobilize within the next 10 seconds
• Snail Venom > Apply Snai Venom to your Weapon to gain Charges of Cripple and Slow

Tricks

• Roll For Initiative > Evade backwards and gain 6 Initiative. Removes Cripple, Chill and Immobilize
• Haste > You and your nearby allies gain Quickness and Fury.
• Caltrops > Scatter Caltrops that cripple and bleed enemies in the target area.
• Scorpion Wire > Pull a Target to you and poison and torment it more, so bigger the distance was between you and the target.
• Grappling Hook > Pull yourself to a Target and daze a foe when you land at their place.

Elite Specializations
——
Physicals = “Daredevil”

• Bandits Defense > Block incoming attacks and perform a counterattack, that deals damage and knocks a foe down
• Distracting Daggers > Throw 3 Daggers, that interrupt foes and increase the cooldown of skills
• Imparing Daggers > Throw 3 Daggers, that poison, slow and immobilize a target.
• Fist Flurry > Perform an unblockable fast flurry of attacks. Gain acces to Palm Strike, a launching attack that marks them with Pulmonary Impact
• Sleeping Dragon > Block an incoming attack and counterattack it with a burning spin kick. that launches foes away.

Gadgets = “Saboteur”

• Oil Canister > Throw some Oil Canisters that will deal damage over time and random conditions like throwing multiple gunks. The difference is, they can be destroyed and on destruction they cause explosions that deal heavy damage. and cause fire fields
• Wrencherang > Throw a big Metal Wrench like a boomerang, dealing damage to all targets in sight on the way and when it returns to you. Wrencherang removes Boons.
• Manipulation Signal > Weakens foes and confuses nearby targets. You can take over Turrets with this Skill to make them attack their owners instead.
• Field Scan > Scan your target area and find weaknesses of your Targets. Scanned Targets are unable to gain new Boons and are unaffected by Banners and Trait Passive Boosts while standing in your scanned area.
• Analyze > Scan a target to the Bones and analyze your enemy. An analyzed enemy will get temporarely his Power, Condition Damage, Ferocity, Precision and Toughness Stats reduced

Conjures = “Swindler”

• Treasonable Blades > Conjures Treasonable Blades that replace your Weapon Skills, which affect strongly Boon Corruption
• Sinful Blades > Conjures Sinful Blades that replace your Weapon Skills, which affect strongly Condition Spreading
• Dishonored Blades > Conjures Dishonored Blades that replace your Weapon Skills, which affect strongly Stealth Effects and Blinds
• Unfaithful Blades > Conjures Unfaithful Blades that replace your Weapon Skill, which strongly affect Evasion
• Crimeful Blades > Conjure Crimeful Blades that replace your Weapon Skills, which strongly affect Health Leeching

Mantras = “Infiltrator”

• Mantra of Initiative/ Initial Burst > Charges Initiative Bursts to give you on charge Initiative back. Works also as Stun Breaker when used with Full Initiative and in this case does this Skill Heal per Initiative Point.
• Mantra of Physical Resistance/ Invader’s Defiance > Gain Resistance and Protection on usage of a Charge
• Mantra of Persistance/ Concentration > Removes 2 Conditions on Charge and grants you Retaliation and Regeneration.
• Mantra of Revenge/ Revengeful Counter > Reflects on usage of a Charge Projectile Attacks with increased Strength back to the origin.
• Mantra of Speed/ Disappeareance > Gain Stealth and Super Speed on usage of a Charge

Meditations = “Ascetic”

• Energy Release > For a moment gets all your Attack Power added to your Defense to reduce practically all incoming damage for that moment to 0, while you prepare rooted at your location to release all your Energy at once in a mighty line of sight attack that deals multiple hits over time and makes enemies very vulnerable.
  If you channeled this skill, until you even sacrificed your Endurance, then this skill becomes extra strong
• Way of the Empty Hand > Meditate after this Teachings and when you block the next attack ,then you get healed and perform a counterattack that steals Endurance from the enemy.
• Way of the Strong Fist > Meditate after these Teachings and you gain Might, Fury and Swiftness with your next successful Block, whileprforming an Counterattack, that makes the enemy weak.
• Way of the Gentle Fist > Meditate after these teachings and you gain Vigor when you deal critical hits after having blocked an attack.
• Iron Will > Gain Resistance and remove 2 Conditions. While the Effect of Iron Will is up can’t be Boons removed from you.