Guild Wars 2

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

evilapprentice.6379:

On top of that, your “fun idea” that boons be turned into conditions on elite activation is just… there is no nice way to describe how bad an idea that is. No other rune set in the game penalizes you in that manner, and Lyssa’s strength is entirely based on the 6/6 effect (the other set bonuses are lackluster in comparison to other runesets) – not only are you advocating a nerf, you’re suggesting the 6/6 penalize people for having boons! In a team based game where many classes have ways to generate boons for their allies!

Might want to re-read what was written, since you have it backwards. He advocates the 6 rune bonus to convert conditions to boons, not the other way around. You keep the full condition clear, but the boons you get aren’t totally overwhelming in power.

Directly quoted, bold added to pertinent sections but otherwise unedited.

KarsaiB.9475:

FUN IDEA :

Completely change lyssa’s effect :

- Using Lyssa transforms all condis on you into boons.
- Transforms all the boons on you into conditions.
- No threshold on elite cooldown.
NOTE : Warrior’s signet of rage boons would be applied after your current boons get converted and you’d still get protection/stability.

There you go, let’s discuss.

@OP
This is by far the most entertaining “Nerf Lyssa’s” post to date. Lyssa’s needs a tiny shave on Warriors (who deserve access to protection despite their current insane level of sustain), but it’s crazy OP for thieves (because they have stealth, which if you’ll recall does not include any kind of damage mitigation). This synopsis is a good indicator that your understanding of the games mechanics and meta isn’t quite strong enough to go making changes to things.

On top of that, your “fun idea” that boons be turned into conditions on elite activation is just… there is no nice way to describe how bad an idea that is. No other rune set in the game penalizes you in that manner, and Lyssa’s strength is entirely based on the 6/6 effect (the other set bonuses are lackluster in comparison to other runesets) – not only are you advocating a nerf, you’re suggesting the 6/6 penalize people for having boons! In a team based game where many classes have ways to generate boons for their allies!

Vuh.1328:

And for you guys who don’t know who karsaib is, he is a member of 55hp Monks which is one of the top tPvP teams in the world right now and plays warrior

I’m fairly sure you didn’t need to point out he was a warrior (seeing as he feels warriors deserve protection, but it’s broken for thieves apparently). Top tPvP team in the world seems….suspect, considering his suggestions paint a picture of a player who does not appear to have a strong grasp of the games meta and mechanics, unless of course they pertain to buffing/minimizing nerfs for warrior.

out of curiosity

Are you asking for them to include the fact that the skill evades on the second portion?
OR
Are you asking that the evade be removed?

Swagg.9236:

Ah, Reasons – something I can work with. Not good ones, mind you, but reasons nonetheless.

Instant teleports

Hardly the only class with teleports, though thieves do get alot of them – comes with being “the class with the best mobility in the game”, as described by the developers. Thieves are the class that sticks to you – it’s the thing they do. Many classes in this game have their niche, and that’s the thief’s.

evasion while attacking

Both reactive evasion attacks do awful damage – they have their place, but they don’t do amazing damage for a reason – even another GC should be able to eat an FS to counter after the evade is over, which is the proper way to counter S/D. As for Disabling shot, it’s damage is even worse. There’s a slight issue with it being spammed to buy time atm, but it isn’t much different than blocks/immunities other classes get, and they don’t cost those classes All their offensive power to use.
As for pistol whip, you can dodge/walk out of the last swings – it provides evasion because for some reason the Dev’s designed it to root you in place and swing like crazy. Hopefully when they split the skills it’ll be better designed. It’s a poorly designed “Shotgun” style skill.

blind spam while attacking

If you’re having trouble with BP, just walk outside of it – you can melee a thief in BP from outside of it easily. Shadow Shot is a single blind, and not that hard to deal with.

very high damage with every attack

Really? Some counter examples – trick shot, slice, slash, double strike, disabling shot, flanking strike, infiltrators strike, Dancing dagger, Heart seeker over 50%, Death Blossom, Cloak and dagger, Headshot, Black powder, Tactical Strike, Surprise shot, vital shot, body shot, Infiltrators Arrow…hey, that’s like the majority of thief skills!

no cool-downs

The way thieves have been designed since launch – if you’re still having trouble with that, I’m not sure what to tell you. Look at thieves weaponskills and identify every immobilize/stun over 1s. Then tell me every skill which grants a boon (any boon). They don’t exist, do they? The downside of spammable skills is that your weaponskills can never have powerful effects tied to them because they’re spammable – it’s perfectly fair, but every player who cries about spammable skills somehow misses this fact.

very short—if non-existent—activation times

Short I agree with – non-existant, not significantly more than other classes. Thieves don’t tend to have skills that CC you for 3s or do massive amounts of damage that aren’t telegraphed (HS, BS and LS are all highly telegraphed), so their shorter activation times are justified.

I’m not saying that other professions don’t have access to these kinds of abilities, but the Thief is founded on them. The Thief is founded on the kinds of mechanics that undermine the fundamentals of acceptable, legible GW2 combat.

Thieves are quicker, but their attacks are less impactful – they don’t have a pin down or an earthshaker or a shatter or a condi bomb like other classes – their attacks are less impactful to let slip through, except of course the highly telegraphed, easily countered ones (Backstab, heart seeker, Larcenous strike, Sneak attack for condi specs, Unload)

We don’t have monks to reduce obviously incoming damage or heal back damage that just pops up out of nowhere.

The only signifigant damage that “comes from nowhere” is BS. There’s almost no long term stealth in this game (besides SR) – if a thief with a dagger MH stealths near you… you should know how to counterplay that at this point – if you played a thief for an hour around a half decent player you’d realize a 3-4 second stealth makes it insanely easy to predict where a thief attempting a backstab is headed with his extremely limited time – you even get the choice of punishing him for it with AoE’s/predictive swings or avoiding it completely!

There’s nothing fallacious about saying that Thief is a poorly cued offensive class that breaks a lot of balance-related rules that govern GW2.

Your previous argument was fallacious, because you didn’t bother to qualify any of your statements, instead making broad emotion based statements. These arguments are merely inaccurate and exaggerated, although you did attempt to back it up with logic, however faulty.

Swagg.9236:

ANet said that GW2 was a game that was supposed to be played by reading your opponent’s skill cues and then reacting or planning ahead appropriately in order to counter any incoming attacks.

And then they made the thief.

The Thief profession is a lie incarnate that shouldn’t even belong in the game. It really would be simpler to just delete the Thief from the game rather than attempt to properly balance it because of the sheer amount of effort that it would require to address the many rules that it breaks with regards to balanced combat in GW2 without COMPLETELY changing the profession.

Please somehow qualify and clarify this long list of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion fallacious “arguments”

dylan.5409:

@jportell
Rangers have 1 competitive build, spirits with cat bunker. That’s it.
OP I agree, thieves single handedly keep other glass builds out of the game. I think its a function of the time to kill vs defence in this game. The only viable defence for gc builds is avoidance altogether or burst before you die. Thief can combine the two, hence apex predators. It is sucky imo, would like to see MOAR DIVERSITY but this would probably entail power creep to some degree as nerfing a thief would leave it incapable of dealing with other builds in this game , cond bunkers/bunkers.

How does thief combine evasiveness and burst? S/D has sustain not burst, S/P’s evasion is easily countered and has kitten windup (Which means it can’t really be used reactively like FS or dodge), and D/P has burst and no evasion (besides dodges of course)

ens.9854:

I wanted to consolidate the huge array of complaints about thieves into a thread that discusses the source of the problem—thieves are simply too effective as a class, causing enormous problems when attempting to scale their power level.

The thief single handedly excludes all other professions from glass based builds

Thieves in the current meta are, in my opinion, in a pretty good spot. Berserker thief vs soldier warrior feels like something of a slog for the thief, but left alone neither has an overwhelming advantage.

This feels…inaccurate. A Hambow warrior using soliders can make a ton of mistakes (lets say around 10-15) before they are clearly going to lose the fight. If a Zerker thief makes 2-3 mistakes, the warrior is going to win the fight (Assuming similar skill levels).

It’s not that a Zerker thief can’t win, their spec is just about 80% less forgiving.

Compare this to a “non-meta” matchup such as berserk thief vs berserk ranger and you find there is literally nothing the ranger can do to outside of banking on their opponents total ignorance of the ranger moveset to come out ahead. At the same time, non-glass(non meta) thieves are perceived as almost totally worthless in the majority of situations.

If we want a meta where players have to consider whether or not the opposing team runs a thief, and alter their builds accordingly, then the current state of affairs is fine. However this is not what I think players are asking for—and GW2 is not set up for the type of “pick-counter pick” matches we see in MOBAs.

The thief profession has been balanced around glass builds in a defensive meta, while only becoming more effective the lower their opponents armor is

Making thieves less effective versus low defense builds while maintaining effectiveness against armored opponents should be the goal of balance in the future. Trying to target specific abilities of the class (stealth, backstab, shadowsteps, mug) which are characteristic of this flaw has only led to increasingly frustrated attempts to create an impossible equilibrium.

Anet has hinted in the past that they are thinking about revising base damages on the thief’s attacks so they can move them away from burst skills for damage and toward auto attacking for damage (which makes them more vulnerable while DPSing), and this could be one solution; but I feel this could ruin what makes thieves interesting.

Personally I think the best bet, if technically possible, would be to give certain thief attacks (backstab, etc) an element of armor penetration(ie. using a weighted armor value instead of the targets true armor value) so that their power can be toned down across the board without thieves becoming totally useless in certain matchups.

I don’t think damage is the culprit here – Mesmers and Ele’s can deal similar burst to thieves at this point of the game. The real difference is the defenses – thieves rely on damage avoidance rather than damage mitigation. A GC hitting a bunker with high armor and the protection boon see’s reduced damage – that same attack against an evading thief does no damage.

Since thieves defenses are Entirely based on complete avoidance(no access to protection/stability/aegis/retal, no blocks, no immunity skills, poor regen access), they’re understandably very good at evading/blinding. Evading/blinding another GC’s big burst attack is more detrimental than said class blunting the GC thief’s damage with protection/aegis/block/regen/etc…

If the dev’s want to reduce thieves access to evades/blind, they’ll need to supplement it with immunities/blocks/protection/stability/etc just like every other class gets (although that will lead to the homogenization of classes – it’d just be easier if players learned how to time their attacks in between evades)

hooma.9642:

i wasnt comparing the evadesskills of ranger, i was telling the skillcoeffs.

So you brought up rangers evades, unbidden…for funsies? You weren’t drawing a comparison, you were just typing out some facts….for no reason whatsover? It’s not as if the person you were quoting had brought up rangers… its fine to be wrong, just own up to it.

what i had compared was the shortbow 3 with flankings strike. same evade time, same cost but different dmg coeffs.

FS is riskier because it’s melee range and moves you toward your opponent, it should have a higher coefficient. All you did was compare the evade frames and claim the coefficient should be identical, completely ignoring all the other things that are different about the skill – you’re not interested in a discussion, you’re interested in nerfing S/D – there’s a difference

11-15 disjoints? well maybe u should watch some highlevel play of s/d and s/p to see the difference and whats make s/d so strong.

This doesn’t make your points any less disjointed – feel free to post some video’s and give me your synopsis of them, but just telling me “Find a video” isn’t helping your point.

I’m not claiming here that S/D isn’t strong – just that it isn’t OP. It’s a high skill cap
build (it used to be much higher) that’s powerful in the right hands, but it’s not OP or without counter – All you need to do is play one for a bit and you’ll quickly learn it’s weaknesses.

hooma.9642:

EoNxBoNx.9213:

I love these threads, these are the kinds of threads that really show some players don’t know why S/D has so many dodges, or does SO MUCH DAMAGE.

Fun Fact: ( I hate repeating myself) 30 into acrobatics gives a lot dodges!

Fun Fact: 30 into Critical Strikes gives a lot of damage!

Joking aside, but its almost like no one knows that this has nothing to do with sword dagger at all. I could play…anything literally any weapon set and have the same results with x/30/x/30/x really now. Back in October I would say you could S/P and have the same amount disengage, same damage, only little less evades, but for blinds, interrupt, and a stun. S/P is actually decent now with the small buff it was given.

Leaving these here for the people that don’t know what they are:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/First_Strikes

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Feline_Grace

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fluid_Strikes

Also Lyssa runes do need to be changed, but not only because how good they are on thieves.

obv. math isnt your strength

fun fact 1: its dodges + evades
fun fact 2: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Feline_Grace gives 15 Endurance back. thats 30% of 1 dodge. means u need 3,33 dodges to get 1 back
fun fact 3: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vigorous_Recovery + http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Withdraw gives more endurance back
fun fact 4: its the combination of 2 and 3
fun fact 5: critical strikes is used in a lot of builds. every traitline except shadow arts gives a dmg boost on 25 traitpoints.
fun fact 6: ls is unblockable
fun fact 7: fs has a 0.75 dmg coeff. thats 5% less than autoattack 1 & 2 chainskill
fun fact 8: ls has a 1.5 dmg coeff. thats 20% more than autoattack chainskill 3
fun fact 9: fs+ls is faster than aa and provides per second more dmg
fun fact 10: all evadesskills on ranger as example have a recharge. 2 have 0.7 dmg coeff, 1 has 0.2, 1 has 0.4, the one on greatsword has 0.65 and require to complete the whole chain.
fun fact 11: s/p pistolwhip does less dmg than aa + self root + no autopathing like fs+ls
fun fact 12: shortbow nr3 has a dmg coeff of 0.4 so why not fs?
fun fact 13: unless stunned or dazed ir = out of jail card
fun fact 14: unless on s/p no self root so if not fact 13 then disengage on demand
fun fact 15: is can be precast without enemy

suggestion either lower the amount of dodges or evades, what would imho maybe hurt other builds that are more balanced and not borderline broken i would change following
- fs skillcoeef to 0.4.. its a evade after all!
- ls remove the unblockable part. its a heavy hitter!
- is can only be cast in range of a enemy and the teleport only happens if a hit would be successfull.

or
- fs + 1 initiative
- ls + 1
- is + 2
- +new way to remove condis

Your comparisons are mostly pointless, when they’re not hyperbolic or loosely defined. You compare Thief to Ranger evade skills, but strangely forget to mention Ranger’s better base HP, access to immunity skills, and strong access to protection and Regeneration- all things that should be taken into consideration when we’re comparing defensive skills. Let’s not also forget that you’re comparing damage coefficients on the one class in the game that has a dedicated pet, and therefore sees lower damage coefficients on it’s skills

Fun “Facts” 1 through 8 don’t seem to serve a purpose for your argument – they’re just basic information we’re all already aware of. 9, while technically true, is misleading – AA and FS-LS Spam do nearly the same amount of damage – I believe FS-LS spam might do ~12% more damage than AA over the same time period (Without cripple or weakness while costing initiative, mind you). I pointed out my issue with 10 in the previous paragraph. Points 11-15 just seem like disjointed thoughts.

This long rant just seems like alot of “I Hate S/D thieves because they’re annoying to fight” rather than an argument based on merit.

Karl McLain.5604:

Thief:
Much like the engineer, we wanted to take this opportunity to tone-down excessive poison stacking through poison fields.

• Choking Gas: Reduced the poison per pulse from 5 seconds to 3 seconds.

Will Thief be seeing any updates/adjustments to the Dec 10th acro changes? As was stated at the time, the Dec 10th acro changes were intended to increase thief survivability for those who took Acrobatics – those changes unfortunately did not live up to their intention.

The net difference of the Assassin’s reward changes were 1 additional HP healed per init spent for every 100 healing power you have – that is a mathematically insignificant change, I can’t see how anyone would define it as a buff.

Hard to Catch is far too reliant on RNG to be used by a serious player, because the skill can’t be counted on – it can move you off a point, into an AoE, or away from your target, all at the whim of another player. The fact that this still occurs even when the thief has Stability helps cement it as a trait that is more harmful than helpful.

Will these 2 issues be resolved in the patch?

hooma.9642:

1. u should read the dmg coeff. of skills. nr3 chain does nearly the same dmg as aa. on the same time nr3 chain destroyes any defense based on boons and provides surv. with evades.

That last sentence is proof enough you have little experience with S/D Thief. When LS stole 2 boons, it most certainly did destroy boon based defenses (which was it’s initial design goal). Now that it only steals 1, it does nothing to boon based bunkers. I learned that about 5 minutes after the patch that changed LS to 1 boon steal, when I fought a guardian who covered his protection, 17 stacks of might, and other vital boons with junk that I couldn’t strip faster than he could produce – it’s exactly like it was pre FS/LS split, when FS stripped 1 boon – useless for countering boon bunkers.

I’m not sure exactly what your point was – what does AA and FS/LS doing similar overall damage matter when we’re talking burst? What does either have to do with CS and LS being the only skills in S/D that do any damage?

2. low damage? u mean vs all the other broken specs? sure.. against normal balanced specs? no. locks in place for 5seconds? sorry, but u are a bad thief. i hope u know that a thief can cancel the aftercasts on s/d.

Speaking of damage coefficients like you did early, why don’t you post some math for FS – keep it simple, go to gw2skills and spec out an effective S/D setup – you’ll see FS does ~550 damage in a full glass setup. You’re going to have a hard time convincing anyone that 550 damage isn’t low for any class running a glass cannon setup. Please also feel free to explain how dodging clears LS and allows FS to be used again within 5 seconds.

3. lyssa provides low bonus? only the 6 is worth it? lol.. i suggest that u look at withdraw and rune bonus for 4 of the 6. counter basiliskvenom on a 36/45 second cooldown with anything that has nearly double the recharge? sure? or boons? just lol.

165 precision is much weaker than 165 power for an S/D thief – considerably so. 10% condition duration – yay, Serpent’s touch lasts another second. That leaves a random boon on heal (which is just that, random – it will be at times useful, and at other times useless), and the 6 piece, which is where all the value of the set lies.
Insinuating that BV might have a 36s CD with an S/D thief (which would require 20 points in DA and quick venoms, of all things) is laughable – you’ll never see an S/D thief with 20 points in DA – the fact that you would even suggest this casts serious doubt on your ability to understand how an S/D thief even works.

Phantaram.4816:

No other class can do that much raw damage with that much mobility and still bunker points 3v1 for large periods of time.

Some things that could be looked at to balance it.

1. Too much damage (I feel like this one is never brought up but the amount of raw damage an S/D thief can do is insane, and none of it is on a cooldown. Their burst and consistent damage are all the same thing, they are constantly doing both.)
2. Too much dodging
3. Lyssa runes

Bring up whatever else you think could be looked at balance wise for an S/D thief.

I believe the best balance that could be applied to S/D is for other players to roll an S/D thief, and learn how it plays. There’s literally nothing else that can be done, seeing as your above list is painfully lacking in any sort of details or proximity to the truth.

1. Burst? With S/D? Do you mean Mug + Larcenous strike? Or maybe CS followed by LS (which would require completing an AA chain in the 5 seconds LS is up after an FS, all while your opponent ignored the 2 very obvious 1/2s cast animations for CS and LS AND the thief survived without any of his defensive skills besides for dodge)? because that’s literally as hard as S/D can hit in a second, and while “burst” isn’t a strictly defined term, there’s easily a dozen setups that can hit harder in half the time – S/D is characterized by it’s lack of burst.

Yes, the consistent damage is there because, well, if the set didn’t have any consistent damage OR burst it’d be a pretty worthless direct damage set. Most of S/D’s damage is concentrated into CS (end of AA chain) and LS – both with 1/2s casts and obvious animations. There’s very little incentive to dodge anything else S/D can throw at you (slice, slash, DD, CnD, FS all do kitten poor damage) so you shouldn’t have a hard time with just CS and LS.

2. If you’re having trouble with FS, like I suggested at the start of this post, roll an S/D thief. It’s a very obvious animation with very low damage that locks LS in place for 5 seconds afterwards – if you can’t figure out how to counter that, playing as an S/D thief and watching your opponents counter it should be helpful. S/D has to roll with glass stats just to do viable consistent damage – you don’t need to waste dodge’s on anything that isn’t LS/CS, and the S/D thief likely has to dodge a majority of your attacks (including Auto-attack) just to survive long enough to kill you – use this knowledge and the experience you gain while playing S/D to your advantage.

3. If you’re having trouble with a rune set that offers 5/6 underpowered bonuses for over 90% of the fight, then offers extremely powerful bonuses for 5-6s, plan accordingly – if you can plan to use an immunity skill/block/have protection or stability up (those things thieves don’t get) when you see a thief casting BV (since it’s an obvious 1s cast), you can almost completely counter the entire runeset. This is as opposed to other runesets (Pack, ogre, Scholar, etc) that would offer worthwhile bonuses for the entirety of the fight, and can’t be countered by planning out 5s of a fight.

Nice idea in spirit, way too clunky in execution.

As Paulo said, who wants to spend 6 init to drop low damage conditions/conditions that are soon expiring? You’ll also run into the situation where you suddenly lose access to IR because someone hit you with a condition – not a good thing.

Even discounting those above situations, 6 init is alot – you won’t have initiative for anything else. If there was some intuitive, smooth way to pick and choose when you spent additional init for condi removal it would be nice, but that just isn’t possible with the way the game is designed.

Just a few comments

NyuuNeeChan.2891:

• VIII – Signet Use – it was good when our initative regen was 7,5 per 10 and it gave us 2 initative. Which meant that if we used all 4 signets avaible to our class we would get more initative than we normally got in 10 seconds. Now It gives us 4 initative out of 10 we regen during 10 seconds. From over 100% to 40% that’s really a huge nerf. Best idea would be deleting that initative regen thingy and merging it with Signets of Power, even if it meant lowering might stacks gained.

You’re judging the power lost on the trait without acknowledging the overall buff Init regen got (in fact, you’re using it as a tool to make the trait look worse) – this trait is fine as it is.

• I – Master of Deception – 20% cooldown reduction without any bonus effect…

It’s a 10 point trait and covers 3 powerful utilities (Shadowstep, Shadow Refuge, Blinding powder), it’s fine.

• V – Master Trapper – again, 20% cooldown reduction, wrote about it in deadly arts II

Impossible to really judge how useful this is until traps are fixed – traps are currently garbage, this trait could cut CD by 50% and it’d still be hard to take.

• V – Thrill of the Crime – We get swiftness, fury and one stack of might? Deleting that one stack of might and extending fury and swiftness duartion would be nice.

10s of Fury/might/swiftness to everyone in 360 radius is good for an adept level trait – yes the single stack of might is meh, but who cares, it’s still a solid trait.

• VIII – Trickster – and again, 20% cd with no bonus effect

Here I agree – a master level trait that covers meh utilities, this is kind of crap.

• XI – Hastened Replenishment – move it to acrobatics instead of Assasin’s Reward

I like this suggestion, but instead of quick pockets – AR is where it needs to be, it just needs to be rebalanced.

Maugetarr.6823:

Josh Davis.6015:

Last Refuge is something we’ve been talking about quite a bit internally, and we certainly don’t like the way it can occasionally unintentionally punish players.

We’d like to keep the minor traits in Shadow Arts thematically the same (stealth based) rather than simply providing boons or something similar. Keep that in mind when you’re suggestions changes for Last Refuge.

Thanks for the feedback!

Alternatively, could you guys make the trigger interrupt the current thief action(maybe just attacks if possible so it doesn’t interrupt a heal and put that on a cooldown longer than the last refuge duration)? This might not help with ranged weapons when you include the flight time, but it would help with close combat which is where the danger is.

Not a big fan of the idea of the game making a decision that LR triggering properly is more important than my attack going through. True, it will save you from using CnD when LR is triggering, but what if I was using an attack that was going to drop my opponent? The automatic trait shouldn’t be overriding player input. Look above for my suggestion regarding “Cloak” instead of “Stealth” (Like mesmer’s Desperate Decoy)

Dynnen.6405:

Charge, Heartseeker, Leap of Faith, savage leap, monarch’s leap, etc, etc, etc…these really need to be changed to be used at a target, would fix a lot of mobility issues in wvw.

Why? One of the best choices the dev’s made when designing this game was the combat style/engine – the entire idea that you can use most of your skills without a target/target in range is one of the biggest difference between this game and most other PvP MMO’s – your reason for wanting it changes is pretty minor in comparison to that.

Seth.4927:

How about we make it trigger Black Powder (Thief Pistol #5) or a shorter version of Smoke Screen?

Would give the Thief survival through blinds and access to stealth through finishers. Plus, revealed or not, running or in close quarters…It’ll always be a good effect for the Thief.

This doesn’t meet the criteria of the skill remaining “Stealth based”, as one of the dev’s stated in this thread.

Yes, you can access stealth if you’re using dagger MH or Shbow (kind of, you’ve got to be able to launch a cluster bomb that wont hit anything), but it’s not really stealth-based.

I’m not trying to belittle everyone else’s suggestions, but IMO cloak is the clear winner – It’s exactly how the skill was initially designed, only it will never screw over the thief – yes, it’s a little less powerful then gaining stealth, but it’s a 5 point minor, and well worth it to never be in the situations where LR gifts you 3-4s of revealed for no reason ever again.

I honestly prefer your suggestion, but seeing as the Dev’s specifically want the skill to remain stealth-based, I think switching LR to “Cloak” is the answer, and frankly I’m a bit surprised the Dev’s didn’t come to this conclusion months ago.

Domey.9804:

They want this trait to be stealth-related, so just swap it with an adept trait from Sa. I Do Not even care which One…if i could choose to slot Last refuge i would ofc Not.
Swap it, Problem solved, ty

As I said in the post directly above this one, that’s not the intent of the trait. It’s supposed to be an automatic “Oh kitten” skill that fires without player input to save those not quick enough to react to burst – Like defy pain or desperate decoy.

Switching “Stealth” for “Cloak” literally fixes all the issues players have with LR – since Cloak is not stealth, it prevents LR from screwing over a player with revealed or forcing them to play around the trait while at the same time preventing thieves from getting some form of “Double Stealth” and all the other bonuses stealth offers via the SA line.

Not trying to be rude, but your suggestion sticks a dysfunctional trait in a slot where it will never be used – my proposed situation turns LR into exactly what the dev’s intend it to be, without screwing over the thief or his opponents in any scenario.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

now, imagine, does that feel overpowered?
le me imagine …
long bow (leeching, doom)
hammer (battle, intelligence)
hmmm … no, i think no. working as intended.

Its great you feel that way – many others feel as though it’s too going to be too powerful. Obviously none of us has experience with it (since it doesn’t even necessarily exist yet), but on paper it’s very versatile which makes it very powerful. It’s literally twice as powerful as sigils currently are, which is going to be hard to gauge until we see it in action (though it’s much more reasonable to assume it’s going to be OP rather than “Fine” – any time anything doubles in power, it’s safe to speculate it’ll be too powerful)

after all, that is the function of “fast hands” trait.

No – the point of the fast hands trait is 5s swap, which in itself is very good for a 15 point minor trait. Having half the CD for swapping weapons is a powerful tool in the hands of an experienced player. Doubling the power of sigils for 1 class that’s already considered top tier in every level of play doesn’t sound like a well thought out plan.

them warrior haters whine and complain so much, well balanced warriors has been receiving many nerfs, many of which were uncalled for, but whiners win so tough luck.

Your an extremely vocal warrior defender, which would be fine if you ever qualified your statements. You however do not – you simply state “Warrior’s are fine”, as if you typing it and posting it made it true. Warrior is currently much too forgiving for inexperienced players, and too powerful in the hands of experienced players. One of your heals is among the highest HPS in the game while also having the least amount of counters.
Your condition mitigation is among the best in the game with CI (and taking CI also adds to your best-in-the-game-with-the-least-counters Healing via AH). Berserker’s stance allows you to become immune to condition damage While also becoming immune to the soft CC/Debuffs some specs rely on for defense. You can combine this with another stance to become entirely immune to all CC (Soft and hard) and all conditions. You also have access to some of the best CC options in the game. There’s more (hard to believe, but true), but I think I’ve made my point.

but this time, warriors will get a chance to shine a bit again, with fast hand and sigils.

In what game did warriors stop shining?

Blackhat.4016:

2 ideas which came to my mind:

• Last Refuge moved to 10 points and a weaker 10 point trait moved to 5 points.
  Players are still able to use Last Refuge if they want to while having a decent 5 point trait.

• Remove Last Refuge completely and add a new trait. Something like “Heal for X the next time you enter stealth when your health reaches Y threshold (ICD)” would fit the trait line.
  The new trait improves the sustain without being overpowered. Keep in mind it’s only a 5 point trait.

Option 1 sounds fine, but has been suggested 1,000 times – something tells me Anet won’t be making that change.

Option 2 isn’t in the spirit of the skill. Just have LR trigger “Cloak”, a separate effect from Stealth, which does not activate SA’s traits, stealth attacks, or revealed.

Just have it work like desperate decoy – you should gain “cloak” instead of stealth. “Cloak” would not activate any of SA’s traits or allow the thief to use any stealth attacks (Since it is “Cloak” and not “Stealth”). There would be no “revealed” tied to attacking from cloak (Since the point of revealed is to mitigate stealth’s benefits, and you’re not gaining any of those benefits while in cloak).

Problem Solved – Mid CnD while LR triggers? No problem, go straight into stealth. Mid-attack while LR triggers? No problem, no revealed since you didn’t gain any of stealth’s benefits (except for being invisible) from LR.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

dear killahmayne,

as a casual warrior player myself, yes i agree hammer and long bow are best weapons to benefit from cleansing ire.

as for the other weapons, ugh.

i think cleansing ire is fine as it is though.

Deimos, your opinion is extremely biased and it’s hard to take anything you say about warrior seriously. I’ve seen your post history, it is almost 100% blind defense of the current state of warrior without ever making any points or arguments backed up by fact.

Cleansing Ire should have some conditions removed from its cleanse – Poison and weakness most definitely, and perhaps some combination of blind/vulnerability/cripple. This would go a long way into tuning down how easy it is for a warrior to completely resist soft CC and help balance out how resilient HS warrior is (since you could actually keep poison on a warrior if CI wasn’t dropping it every 7-10s, HS’s only counter)

killahmayne.9518:

hey I’m complaining about torment on a 15 second cooldown against a cheese condition based warrior (I have no condition removal), when I can easily play an equally cheese condition based thief and apply 2 stacks of torment on no cooldown and own the warrior.

Please elaborate – I’m having trouble following your logic here.

juno.1840:

You’re going to get little sympathy as a thief… especially using words like “cheese build”.

Most of the player base (as in more than half) feel that the stealth mechanic is total cheese.

The entirety of the TPvP playerbase and any SPvPers who have more than an hour’s experience with the game understand that stealth is in no way cheese in PvP – It’s actually seen as fairly weak. Seeing as Ghost has said repeatedly his problem is in TPvP/SPvP, the other opinions do not matter.

As for cleaning torment: it’s really an anti-thief condition. You should not be able to clean it easily without making some sort of sacrifice. At the very least it should impact what utilities you take. At the worst you should have to sacrifice offensive traits for defensive ones. Otherwise your build decisions are meaningless and the game becomes junk.

Have you read literally anything Ghost has pointed out? The entirety of his point revolves around the fact that Even when you do specifically take utilities for cleansing conditions, the reapplication rate far exceeds the maximum amount of cleanses a thief can possibly take into a fight, even when choosing utilities specifically for their ability to cleanse conditions. Shadow’s embrace is not a viable solution because not everyone wants to play stealth, it does little against burst conditions, and stealth has a ton of drawbacks in capture point play – there are no other trait options for a thief that will handle torment, and only 1 other trait that will help against conditions in general (and poorly, I might add)

Oh god no.

The absolute last bastion of interest in this game for me revolves around the equal footing from the get-go. I can quit when it sucks, and come back when it’s fixed, and all I’ll lag behind with is skill. Please, for the love of whatever you find holy, do not insert a grind into this game.

Cush.4063:

Lupanic.6502:

Yes, this is why skyhammer is so much fun. Thiefs/Engineers/Ranger all have funny abilities to be more important on skyhammer.

Love the map with my engi

What is the thieves skill that’s so important for sky hammer besides hoping you’re facing a necro and stealing their fear? Not being rude at all, I’m just curious if I’m missing something.

Stealth + Scorpion wire – you run across the “glass” as well so that by the time the pull occurs, your target is screwed without a teleporting stunbreaker and great timing.

Writetyper.1985:

Liewec.2896:

i don’t get the buzz about lyssa runes, mediocre stats (for none condi) builds all for a couple of seconds of boons?
i’d rather stick to divinity get 60+ to every stat and 12% crit damage bonus

Stability for a free stomp every 45 seconds, protection, a FULL CONDI CLEAR and aegis is not good? These allow you to overextend heaps past where you should be, hit sig of rage and then just disengage.

As opposed to taking a runeset where most or all the bonuses are applicable and good 100% of the time?

People keep making the same arguments and ignoring the same points. Lyssa’s is a runeset that packs 90% of worth into 5 seconds every 45-60 seconds. Yes those 5 seconds are strong, but missing out on stats/effects that would be helpful with 100% uptime is one tradeoff among many.

NevirSayDie.6235:

evilapprentice.6379:

Burst builds- Players who focus on Condition damage, precision, and crit damage. These players will have short duration, high damage condition applications – they’ll be the condition based counterpart to power/crit specs.This will slightly devalue condition removal (since the damage will be delivered in short lived bursts rather than lengthy applications).

Attrition builds – Players who are built as they are now, with condition damage, toughness, vitality and condition duration will do less damage than they are at the moment (since condition damage will now be balanced to allow crits), as they should – these biulds choose to do damage more slowly because they chose to focus on survivability via stats.

1. Current meta condition builds use condi damage, precision, and some crit damage. Dhuumfire necro is the most obvious (30/20/0/0/20) but bomb/nade engineer, most ss/lb warriors, and most condi mesmer builds use rabid amulet in PvP and have some crit damage from traits.

Rabid amulet builds should see a loss in DPS – remember, base damage is being tuned down to allow for crits – without decent crit damage % AND Crit chance, you won’t be seeing a boost. Or it’s possible rampager might need a bit of a rework (They mention discussion about new PvP amulets in todays livesteam, perhaps we’ll be seeing a power precision toughness amulet in the future)

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

They do need to do something about conditions. Why not add a stat that acts like Toughness does for Physical damage?

That’s a much bigger departure than allowing conditions to crit – you’re talking adding a new stat and balancing every existing item for that stat. Additionally, conditions ignoring toughness is part of their design, so you can’t build an all-in-one bunker who’s completely immune to all forms of damage.

Ahlen.7591:

Won’t happen.

If they supposedly can’t raise/remove the condition cap because of ‘technical issues’ I really doubt that they have the processing power to run the computation on every single condition tick to check if it crits.

The system already checks your Condition Damage for every tick, whats 1 more check per condition tick?

Interceptor.2653:

evilapprentice.6379:

I’m worried by how many posts I had to scroll through until someone said this.

This is usually when I would say “you must be new here”, but I know that you aren’t.

Worried, Not surprised.

Maugetarr.6823:

evilapprentice.6379:

godofcows.2451:

how about we all just wait first and react afterwards when details have been given?

I’m worried by how many posts I had to scroll through until someone said this.

Well, it could go one of two ways:

Dev’s don’t think crit damage is up to par with conditions, thus should be buffed

Dev’s think crit damage exceeds condition based damage and should be nerfed in some form.

Speculation and discussion is at least interesting while we wait.

While I agree speculation and discussion can be interesting, that’s not what some people are doing. They’re pre-kittening about how kittened their class will be when they nerf critical damage – just making wild assumptions.

Karolis.4261:

evilapprentice.6379:

godofcows.2451:

how about we all just wait first and react afterwards when details have been given?

I’m worried by how many posts I had to scroll through until someone said this.

Cause we are panicking! I myself dont even know the source of crid damage nerf.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Balance-Developer-Livestream-on-Friday-at-2pm-PST/first#post3501152

There is no source for “Crit damage nerf” – they are exploring “Critical Damage Changes” which could mean anything.

godofcows.2451:

how about we all just wait first and react afterwards when details have been given?

I’m worried by how many posts I had to scroll through until someone said this.

Note: I titled the post [PvP] because thats where I have experience. Its possible these changes would work well in PvE/WvW as well, I just dont have the experience to make that claim

The biggest complaint against condition classes is that their reliance on only 1 stat for damage (Condition Damage) allows them to invest alot of points in survivability while still doing great damage.

My suggestion would be to allow conditions to crit, then rebalance base condition damage to account for the change.

Before everyone goes apekitten, think about. This will enable 2 styles of condition play -

Burst builds- Players who focus on Condition damage, precision, and crit damage. These players will have short duration, high damage condition applications – they’ll be the condition based counterpart to power/crit specs.This will slightly devalue condition removal (since the damage will be delivered in short lived bursts rather than lengthy applications).

Attrition builds – Players who are built as they are now, with condition damage, toughness, vitality and condition duration will do less damage than they are at the moment (since condition damage will now be balanced to allow crits), as they should – these biulds choose to do damage more slowly because they chose to focus on survivability via stats.

Yes, this would be alot of work, but it’s mostly just math. The majority of the mechanics can remain unchanged. The real work would just be changing coefficients to allow/factor in crits.

Yes, you’d probably have to look at some of the current condition removal options/on crit condition procs and tweak them as well, but that’s true of any change to the current condition heavy meta, and most agree that the condition dominated meta needs to change.

I think this would be much easier than looking at every single skill that applies conditions and re-evaluating them.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

evilapprentice.6379:

I agree, “A change to crit damage” doesn’t necessarily mean a nerf. Maybe they’re trying something really new and changing base crit damage % based on health pool? Who knows?

That would be pretty bad choice. No one would then go for Vit stats at all if it means taking less Crit Damage, Condition builds don’t really go for Crit either just high, high Toughness.

Maybe it could just be tweaking what damage it deals based on Armor/Toughness?

I meant base healthpool – IE Thief/Ele/Guard start with 50% crit damage, Mes/Ranger/engi start with 30% crit damage, Necro/Warrior start with 10% crit damage. Not advocating those numbers, or this change, just throwing out some random ideas.

Jekkt.6045:

i wonder why everybody thinks critical damage will get nerfed. “changes to critical damage” doesnt necessarily mean that they will nerf it.

the problem right now is that nobody uses conditions for PvE because they’re too weak.
if they nerf the crit damage conditions would (in PvP) be too strong.

a possibility would be that they add a cap, maybe 50% maybe 75% whatever and make critical damage (and precision) also work for conditions.

they were also talking about new stat combo amulets in sPvP, maybe they add some condition damage, critical hit chance, critical damage amulets?

that way they could lower the usefulness of berserker a bit in PvE and at the same time bring the condition damage on par. there would still be the problem with the condition stack limit on monsters.

I agree, “A change to crit damage” doesn’t necessarily mean a nerf. Maybe they’re trying something really new and changing base crit damage % based on health pool? Who knows?

Lordrosicky.5813:

mini.6018:

The funniest thing is GW2 was supposed to be the action based combat mmo but between condis, random procs and Ai it became the most passive mmo combat in existence.
If you read this devs , do something about condis already.I should just go search for a combat mechanics features advertise pre launch to have a good lol moment.

They cant because they buffed all anti-condi things including immunities and condi clears to the sky. So any condi nerf needs a reversal of the buffs to things like automated response, zerker stance, diamond skin, null field, etc

So why not just advocate both?

runeblade.7514:

Incurafy.6329:

runeblade.7514:

No. Death match should never be in GW2.

Instead, it should be disguised as a no respawn King of the Hill. Why? Thieves can just perma stealth and hide in the corner until they are found. Then they’ll stealthed away and hide in another corner.

1. “Permastealth” with D/P + Infusion of Shadows was insanely easy to counter, but no longer exists.
2. The new “permastealth” isn’t possible without using utilities with lengthy cooldowns and ridiculously obvious tells.
3. The goal of TDM is to kill your opponents. A useless Thief wasting his utilities to be useless and “permastealth” in a corner is absolutely useless in a TDM setting.

Nice try though, you may want to remove Thief from your signature.

You don’t understand the point. Zero. Nothing. So take off your thief tag.

A perma stealth thief will use this to grief. Guild Wars 1 had a warrior build that couldn’t kill anything but couldn’t be killed at all.

If Deathmatch comes, I will use perma stealth to prolong the battle and cause other players to ragequit. Why? Because trolling is fun.

So Anet just needs to include a report button along with a match timer to ensure people like you are banned. It has the added bonus of banishing trolls from the community – I can’t see how this wouldn’t be win-win.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

hmmm

Vengeance
Rally and fight normally for a brief time. When the rally ends, you are defeated.
Duration: 15 s

Sweet Revenge
Vengeance can be activated immediately upon downed, has an increased duration and has an increased chance to rally.
Percent: 100%
Vengeance Duration: 30 s

how does that sound? if we have the sweet revenge trait, we can choose to activate vengeance immediately and vengeance lasts for 30 seconds instead of 15 seconds.

source:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sweet_Revenge
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vengeance

Guaranteed instant self res on down that lasts 30s, auto-rally if something you’ve hit dies? Game breakingly OP in PvP.

No. Emphatically No. I wouldn’t give Anet someone else’s money. Their past choices have burned my good will into the ground, and salted the earth.

If they managed to deliver a patch (or series of patches) with the following criteria -

• Fixed bugs
• Improved server performance so skills always (~99%, nothing is perfect) fired when they were clicked
• Fixed balance
• Opened up multiple TPvP viable spec options for every class
• Proved they actually listened to the community
  - and then stated they were working on content, maybe I’d be willing to pay a small monthly fee.

ens.9854:

evilapprentice.6379:

ens.9854:

It want my anecdote. Corner cases can be found anywhere. What if a warriors defy pain activates just before he clicks defiant stance, that’s 10x worse. If you want to talk about a feature that gets thieves killed, make a thread about failed teleports.

Never said they shouldn’t change it, but people are not being objective about it.

I am being perfectly objective about it – my entire argument is about objectivity. A trait intended to be positive should, at worst, have a neutral effect.

In your example, endure pain did not penalize the player – it just did nothing, which is my entire argument. The worst that should happen is no effect, not a penalty.

You misread. Defiant stance is the heal skill that only heals you when you take damage. Defy pain is a trait that activates, just like last refuge, based on a warriors hp pool. This situation penalizes the warrior if he doesn’t have the superhuman reaction time to stop himself from activating his heal when defy pain incidentally triggers.

My bad – something sounded off in my head, but i ignored it. Though the comparison still doesn’t really hold up for 2 reasons – you can choose not to slot Defy pain while running defiant stance (many thieves would kill for just the option to just turn off last refuge) and your talking about the interaction between 1 skill and the trait, rather than an entire mechanic broken by anything that does damage.

I speak from experience that last refuge is extremely rarely negative if you are aware of it and being purely objective. If you want to mash buttons and need something to whine about it is a perfect scapegoat.

I wasn’t referring to you specifically; but people are being stupidly over dramatic about how bad last refuge actually is… I have survived countless times where I would have died without this trait, and won many duels because of it. There are also plenty of times that it triggers and I am able to cancel out of my attack to take full advantage of it. The number of times that it triggers and I break it AND I need to stealth in the next 3-4 seconds are nearly nonexistent; but I recognize that some players may have trouble with it in certain playstyles (x/d WvW troll builds in near death oh kitten mode). Unload is emphatically not one of those situations… how were you going to panic stealth yourself anyway?

Again, it does not matter how often LR screws you. You should not have to play around it. The consequences for not specifically altering your playstyle because LR might trigger soon should be LR was of no use to you, not LR penalized you with revealed. That is the crux of the objective argument – it should never penalize you for not specifically playing around it, that is bad design.

ens.9854:

It want my anecdote. Corner cases can be found anywhere. What if a warriors defy pain activates just before he clicks defiant stance, that’s 10x worse. If you want to talk about a feature that gets thieves killed, make a thread about failed teleports.

Never said they shouldn’t change it, but people are not being objective about it.

I am being perfectly objective about it – my entire argument is about objectivity. A trait intended to be positive should, at worst, have a neutral effect.

In your example, endure pain did not penalize the player – it just did nothing, which is my entire argument. The worst that should happen is no effect, not a penalty.

ens.9854:

First off, most people over rank 20 react to a backstab in under half a second (even though it is extremely unlikely a thief opens with backstab and not heartseeker or cnd). Second, even if you a not running last refuge, if that thief backstabs you under 25% you are going to die if you attempt to do anything other than teleport away, including stealth. In this case the blind from the effect is still beneficial.

A lot of people are quick to blame things after the fact without really considering if they would have actually survived otherwise.

The only change that could be made that wont create an outcry of “thief OP free passive immortality” is changing it to a stealth that doesn’t give reveal or bonuses but can still be broken immediately as suggested by Ichishi a few posts ago.

Your anecdotes do not change the fact that a trait which is intended to be beneficial should never penalize you. Regardless how often it will occur, how helpful it will be, and so on, it is bad design to have the trait penalize you – the worst it should do is nothing.

ens.9854:

evilapprentice.6379:

ens.9854:

I won’t say this skill hasn’t saved me, but I have sunk a lot of hours into thief and can see how it can screw over some1 new to the profession that aren’t prepared for it and treat it like a “shouldn’t need to think about it bc it’s passive” trait. (Such irony)

This is incorrect – a positive passive trait should not penalize you, it should at worst just have no positive effect.

If you weren’t paying attention and LR went off, the absolute worst that should happen is you don’t get stealth. Penalizing the player (inadvertently of course) with revealed is not an acceptable outcome – you shouldn’t have to change your playstyle just to avoid being penalized by a supposedly helpful trait.

You speak as if the only way LR would ever penalize you is if you weren’t paying attention – there’s plenty of situations where your best course of action is to do something immediately rather than wait for LR to trigger – you should not be penalized for making the best choice because of LR.

If your health is that low, it is extremely rare that you would not want the stealth, and if you can’t stop attacking for a quarter second when the hit is incoming then I’m not sure the revealed is going to matter.

This literally has no bearing on the fact that LR should never penalize you. Regardless how often the situation comes up, it should not work this way. It should be the players choice whether or not they want to stop what they’re doing, and the worst possible outcome should be LR was useless, not LR actively hinders you. Since this is a team based capture point game, there are times when it’s smarter to keep going and let LR fizzle – interrupting a stomp/res/map interaction, just for example.

ens.9854:

I won’t say this skill hasn’t saved me, but I have sunk a lot of hours into thief and can see how it can screw over some1 new to the profession that aren’t prepared for it and treat it like a “shouldn’t need to think about it bc it’s passive” trait. (Such irony)

This is incorrect – a positive passive trait should not penalize you, it should at worst just have no positive effect.

If you weren’t paying attention and LR went off, the absolute worst that should happen is you don’t get stealth. Penalizing the player (inadvertently of course) with revealed is not an acceptable outcome – you shouldn’t have to change your playstyle just to avoid being penalized by a supposedly helpful trait.

You speak as if the only way LR would ever penalize you is if you weren’t paying attention – there’s plenty of situations where your best course of action is to do something immediately rather than wait for LR to trigger – you should not be penalized for making the best choice because of LR.

Atherakhia.4086:

Healing Signet is not overpowered. While it is the strongest heal in the game and the activated portion of the skill has no reasonable reason to exist, the way the Warrior is expected to play explains why the heal is so high.

The fact that the skill is immune to all but 1 of the available ways heals can be countered (and the 1 way it isn’t immune to it’s highly resistant to) points to an issue – “OP” is a term that has variable meaning depending on who you’re talking to, but a heal shouldn’t have the Best HPS And the least amount of counters (1 soft counter, sort of) at the same time.

The problem with the Warrior doesn’t become apparent until you start stacking things like Adrenal Health, Endure Pain, Defy Pain, Berserker Stance, Shield Stance, the second highest mobility in the game, etc.

This is the problem. Have you ever faught against a Warrior without Adrenal Health? Without Cleansing Ire? Without Endure Pain? No sword or greatsword equipped? They’re free bags much like power Rangers are.

Yes, the interaction between HS and all of the above is the reason everyone thinks HS is “OP”. The way everything fits together so perfectly is a big part of the problem.

There’s no denying that the Warrior is still too ‘over the top’. The class can bunker up and lose almost no damage by doing it. On the flip side, they can spec for high DPS and lose almost all of their survivability. I’d sooner try shuffling some of the traits around so the class actually sacrifices real damage to gain the survivability they currently get. Bandaid fixes are how the Warrior got in the state it’s in right now.

Sounds about right – the survivability option isn’t OP on it’s own, its the amount of damage a warrior can do while gaining that level of survivability that’s the issue.

The Lost Witch.7601:

We could have an animation that shows stealth is coming.

Perhaps a cloud of blinding smoke that shows an AoE ring, and ‘blasts’ into AoE stealth a second (and a half?) later. This should give you the time to disengage?

Still not a great option – the trait should aim to be beneficial, but at worst be neutral. If your options are “Cancel my action so I can gain stealth, or follow through and get revealed for no reason”, that trait is actively hindering you in some scenarios.

Enenion.8127:

Assassin’s Reward is just not good enough to be a Grandmaster tier trait. Even in it’s “buffed” state it will heal you for less than Shadow Rejuvenation, the Grandmaster in Shadow Arts. If we’re going to have two grandmaster traits that both deal with healing, they need to be either on par with each other or Assassin’s Reward needs a secondary effect to distinguish itself. What that secondary effect should be is debatable, but personally I would make it group-support oriented. Thieves currently lack many support options other than Venomshare, which is another grandmaster trait, so a redesign here could potentially do wonders for Thief build diversity.

The comparison to Shadow Rejuv isn’t exactly fair – Shadow rejuv has alot of drawbacks (Can’t cap in stealth, can’t attack, less access to in-stealth time when compared to “spending initiative”)

Group support would be nice, but that wasn’t the goal of Anet’s changes – they wanted to improve thief survivability. They need to up the base heal to at least 100 per init spent (which would still put Assassin’s reward below Regeneration in per second healing), and then we can see where we go from there.

Tim.6450:

Talyn Sneider.1825:

This allows them to be able to be competent in defense and offense. This is imbalanced because power builds to be effective need to invest in critical chance/critical damage and power obligating the player to invest less in healing power or vitality.

Most condition builds has to invist in three stats as well: condition duration, condition damage and precision. There are some builds which don’t and they can be looked furter into.

Precision is in no way shape or form a required stat for most condition specs to work – it can be advantageous, but it’s not akin to trying to run a power/crit spec without the crit.

Condition duration is also not a stat which needs to be heavily invested in. You can get 30% from a trait line, which is an amazing gain when compared to how helpful the 300 points in stats you have for going 30 points into a trait line.