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A case for the WvW support thief, and how to make it viable.


Vyrek.5019

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As many of you may know, thief is mostly relegated to roaming in WvW. Only staff daredevil is really viable in group play, and even then its not preferred. What if I told you thief is very close to having a viable, support focused, build for WvW group play? Enter the boon thief.

The boon thief is a Deadeye that uses a few different traits and skills to dish out some solid AOE boon support, mainly in the form of might and fury. The two main traits that give thief this power are Thrill of the Crime and Fire for Effect. Thrill of the crime is fine exactly how it is, but Fire for Effect is where the boon thief goes from looking good on paper to having some serious flaws.

The problems lie in the way Deadeyes Mark functions and how Fire for Effect interacts with it. Whenever you mark a foe, they will be marked no matter what. It can be dodged, and traits like Thrill of the Crime will not trigger, but the target will still be marked. You will not gain a stolen skill if the Deadeyes Mark is dodged. Since the Fire for Effect trait triggers off of the stolen skill and not the mark itself this is one of the major flaws of the boon thief. Not only do you have to hit the initial Deadeyes mark to gain a stolen skill, you also have to be in range of the target and actually land the stolen skill as well to trigger the Fire for Effect trait. This makes it very unreliable in a group fight. Random dodges or blocks can completely negate your main source of providing boons to allies where other classes can freely give boons without worrying about an enemy target at all.

So how can we fix this? I propose the following changes to the way Deadeyes Mark functions:

  1. Make Deadeyes Mark always give a stolen skill even if the initial mark is dodged or blocked. The skills themselves aren't that powerful on their own. Only with the investment of a grand master trait do they become powerful tools. I propose changing the trait Fire for Effect to in addition to granting might and fury, to always grant a stolen skill even if Deadeyes Mark is dodged or blocked.

  2. Increase the radius of boons applied by Fire for Effect. The radius is fairly small, even though it applies boons around your marked target and yourself. Not much value is gained from the boons applied around the marked target because most of the time in a fight they are much farther away than your allies.

  3. Remove the range cap to activate Deadeyes stolen skills and allow the trait to trigger on activation, not on successfully hitting the target.

These three changed would likely make "boonshare" thief viable in WvW group play. The concept of the build is essentially already viable in a PVE setting due to the lack of dodging and blocking from mobs. Only in PVP and WvW does thief run into these issues. If needed the changes can be split between game modes if any imbalance to PVE would come from them. If any balance devs read this post please consider the changes I have listed. Thief is in a bad place in the WvW scene right now and is sorely lacking any kind of team support.

Thanks for reading.

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@MUDse.7623 said:why not use a rev instead and gain ontop decent range pressure?

Because Deadeye has the benefit of, when built right, to apply might fury and swiftness, as well as vigor and any other boons stolen with Bountiful Theft, to 5 allies as well as stacking 25 stacks of might and huge durations of fury very rapidly on 10 people. It just isn't reliable enough in its current state. It already takes trading almost all damage for concentration to be effective and has no way to heal allies like other boon share classes. The unreliability of the way Fire for Effect functions is the only thing holding it back. If the changes I proposed were made boonshare thief could become a valuable tool to a group, without falling into the overpowered territory that was the boon mesmer.

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@Derenaya.3479 said:

@Sithia.3158 said:Anet made it very clear after Chronogate that they do not want a boonsharing support class in the game.

They do, but they dont just want one class for all boons.

This. Thief is in a very good spot to provide might and fury access. Yes rev can do it also, but Deadeye has a 3 traits in the Deadeye line that synergize together for boon sharing. One even straight up gives concentration. Deadeye is intended to have some support capabilities, it just has some glaring mechanical problems in a pvp setting.

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It's impossible to make balanced or even useful without being OP elsewhere because of the class's foundation. A support that can nope out of fights overly-well has too much self-peel to be killed and thus keeps its allies alive too well, and for use in blobs, the spec needs to either completely gut all aspects of core thief including its base mobility and damage to justify it being good enough to replace guardian, warrior, or ranger; it otherwise ends up as a weaker version of each of those three since the class would have to remain glassy to justify any semblance of its core mechanics.

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