Thief Elite Spec Idea - The Anti-Stealth - Assassin

What is the Elite Spec about?

• Anti-Stealth for Competitive Modes
• Hopefully having at least a pseudo rotation in Raids
• Verastile enough to be used in all modes

How does it accomplish these goals?

• Tons of Reveals. Both for the thief itself and the enemies
• Access to Revealed in hopes to stay away from 5111.. "rotation". Stolen Skills Bar for a pseudo weapon swap
• Sword off hand means you can tailor different weapon combinations for different roles and even game modes. Thanks to Dual Attacks! (skill #3). Something previous Elite Specs couldn't since they provided a 2 handed weapons

Why the Assassin name?

• Nostalgia
• Fits the new Factions expansion
• The utility skills (And some traits) are all heavily inspired by GW1
• No Stealth like the GW1 Assassin

What are the core elements?

• Reveals themselves and their enemies. Stances. Off-hand Sword

Can skip the rest

Indepth look:

Utility skills: Tired to have a negative effect to them as I enjoy that playstyle (like the Necro's Corruption skills) as it adds depth to decision making in realtime

• Heal skill - Vampiric Assault : Each Thief heal skill removes different condis. The combat condis (as they're referred to by the Golem in Aerodome) were "missing". The heal itself fits the Assassin theme and playstyle perfectly imo
• Utility - Aura of Displacement: Very strong effect, I know. It can have a short duration and long cooldown to balance it out. But I do love the idea of it as it's my favorite skill in all GW1
• Utility - Shadow Form: An "Oh Shit!" skill like the Mesmer's Distortion but with the huge side effect of not being able to use skills. Stunbreak effect is before the pulsing Daze on-self. Long cooldown obviously
• Elite - Dark Apostasy: Huge effect with a matching side-effect. Can be used both offensively and defensively
• Stolen Skills - Mirrored Stance: Like the WvW Core Swap Event. Once entered flips to "Break Stance" that you can activate only while Mirrored Stance is active

Weapon Skills: The most unimaginative part of this for sure. Just copy-pasted skills from other professions I thought would match well. Of course they would be a bit different to match Thief

• Dagger/Sword needed Stealth access but I didn't want it to be instant. You need to work for it and there's counterplay around it

Traits: Affects your active gameplay. No boring attribute points or damage modifiers. Revealed and Sustain.

• Minors: Revolve around Reveal and changes the way you play Thief
• Adepts: Access to Reveal
• Masters: Advantages from being Revealed
• Grandmasters: Augments F1, F2 or Elite spec core mechanic respectively

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Indepth interactions:

Interactions with current traitlines:

• Shadow Arts: The big one. While it has clear counter synergy it actually has one very good interactions; Flickering Shadows. The thief wouldn't be able to Stealth like they used unless they heavily play around it, which was one of the main points of this Elite Spec.
• Deadly Arts: Mainly Revealed Training. Most thief builds in Raids revolve around using this trait effectively. Which lead to the 5111.. "rotation". Hopefully all the Revealed sources from this Elite Spec can solve this issue. Improvisation may also be very good with Mirrored Stance, especially when traited with the Middle Grandmaster Trait (x-x-2)
• Critical Strikes: Great interaction with the Bottom Grandmaster Trait (x-x-3)
• Tricekry: Is a must in PvP since day 1. May be good in Raids for Boon Assassin (see Acrobatics for more info)
• Acrobatics: May be useful if the Mirrored Stance from Raid Bosses can apply boons. Doesn't even have to be all the boons like from Detonate Plasma.

interactions with current skills:

• Shadowstep with Utility - Aura of Displacement (And Steal - Cut) for insane mobility albeit risky
• Assassin's Signet Funnily enough fits perfectly in PvE with the Assassin Elite Skill for an insane burst potential. Especially good for fights with many phases
• Signet of Agility with the Revealed on dodge trait
• Triated Signet of Shadows Can be great for Open World PvE. With constant Stealth which leads for more Revealed
• Any Stealth skill for both Stealthing and Revealing oneself

There will just be another thing to cry about."We have too much access to reveal" nerf Thief

That banter being said, I do like the direction of this suggestion. I haven't as yet read everything yet, just wanted to give an initial first look reaction in terms of the picture and it's skills and such. I will circle back around after reading everything.

Hopefully there can be some nice bumping for this thread, and good discussion.

I'd rather have the replacement of stealth as part of the first minor.You could than have an effect like "Whenever you would gain Stealth gain some defensive buff.That defense buff could be Barrier, or maybe some can't of Protection that can't be stolen, corrupted or otherwise removed.Stealth and Revealed traits should activate on that defense buff, too.

That way, Reveal bloat wouldn't be an issue that gets "balanced out" later.

This looks like a cool idea(at least on paper), it won't happen because thief elite specs are all a sub-class of thief, which is the stealthy class by design. Cool ideas nevertheless. For one, I like the idea of taking a debuff and turning it into a boon you want to maintain yourself.

Interesting idea on paper.

I wouldn't mind playing something like this because I love Thief's playstyle but I would have much preferred a sort of playstyle that has more access to sustain and dueling than Stealthing and hit and run bursts.

DD didn't cut it for me because it invests too much into brawling and about dodging and not getting hit, which essentially just goes back to same old style of hit and runs.

It's funny how the concept of playing around revealed seems to change over time and with a fancy visual lol.Some of the ideas I can get behind and are similar in nature to my OG Deadeye suggestion, especially so for playing around high Revealed uptime and rewarding combat commitment. However, there's a lot to disagree with here in terms of raw implementation.

I think it suffers from part of the great problem ongoing in the game right now where it just focuses too much on boons and duration-based unique effects for its critical gameplay rather than on what the kit actually does and the skills it uses to leverage advantages; the kit seems really OP when in stances but just downright terrible otherwise when you look at the broader picture of what core thief brings to the table. That kind of up-and-down is basically one of the major design flaws Mirage and Warrior have historically had and why necro is often buffed and nerfed so much. And with a weapon like Shortbow to potentially fix the engage/disengage problem, the class really difficult to balance around given how binary it becomes.

Aura of Displacement is OP in the competitive modes. Forced point decap or forced pin snipe trades will be really bad for the game.

A lot of these issues also probably stem from not having the skills fleshed out and with their respective numbers. I think this is a major issue and something you really can't look towards traits to fix or implement until the gameplay and skills are detailed more. Breaking away from dual skills solely for OH sword and then moving other skills around just to create synergy really begs for the weapon to be reworked entirely, as otherwise any consistencies with the thief's weapon skill mechanics are completely thrown out the window which is generally bad practice. If you're going to make the kit based around self-reveal, you'll have to implement forced reveal with Cut and just make OH sword provide no stealth, leaving everything else as-is.

By extension, there's no condition damage support here since you've fallen into the design trap of making the traits and utility skills first. One-handed weapons contribute to 3 skills on thief for every kit, per MH weapon. What you've basically done here is force the spec to play OH sword which appears to be power-only and invalidate P/S as a valid combination without getting into major cheese or OP-coefficients on skills 4/5.

There's also probably just a bit too much AoE Reveal here to make the kit feel fair, especially into builds which don't focus on stealth but rely on it in some auxiliary fashion, and nothing really that seems to make the spec have a major difference from S/S rev outside of just being really good at cannibalizing D/P thief and having slightly more mobility while having less dueling potential and long-term stickiness due to its weaknesses with stance downtime.

I think you have a lot of work to do here before this becomes an idea with weight behind it. The principle is one I think the thief desperately needs, but you're going to have to change most of what you have here to make it work cohesively with the rest of the class and to keep its identity separate from S/S rev. Especially so given how the theme and weapons are already shared.

That picture looks cool. Where is it from?

Wow I really like this. For some reason a vampire-hunter ala Blade from the comics and movies comes to mind.

"Critical Eye" just sounds like a skill that makes your character insult the enemy fashion choice.

I like that nice intro, nice picture, and good presentation .. may be best presentation from last year.One small thing - any class is alti-stealth already, already very very hard run away from skilled player, and 2x harder if it is skilled thief, already thief invisibility is not solid, and already all from refuge to smoke blast is like on open palm for skilled opposite players ..

This concept is awesome, I'm just sad because Anet will ignore it as always :cold_sweat: . But hey, let's cross our fingers and hope they do a great elite spec instead of just trying to be fancy for no reason :smile:

I like it. Good idea here.That's an original direction for thief to go here.