BrunoBRS.5178

To give my post more concrete suggestions instead of broad "feel" feedback: The spec in general is lacking thief flavor. It feels excessively like necro in both speed and all the cooldowns. I'd like to see the scepter and shroud skills sped up and give them more interesting animations to make them feel like a thief is casting them. Even if I'm playing a support caster, I want to feel like a thief when I play thief. The auto attack feels really bad mostly because it's such a bad animation and such a boring flavor. It might as well just be a single attack with how linear the timing of the attacks are. I'd like to see it have some flavor to how it animates, change the timing on the second and third attacks to make them feel distinct, etc. Shadowstep wells are cool. Cast time on shadowsteps feels odd. Maybe it could shadowstep instantly and only cast the well after? And to make the thief less vulnerable, it could have an initial pulse on shadowstep, but the well is only cast if you wait the full cast time. Ally targeting doesn't feel particularly good, but the tether felt fine for me. On top of that, a lot of skills felt extremely convoluted and hard to parse because the tooltips were so massive. So maybe instead of targeting allies, the thief automatically applies the effects to the bound ally as the thief casts their stuff? Would streamline the profession's clunkiness a lot, though it would require some number changes to justify it.

Honestly really disappointed with the specter. I was already iffy on the idea of a spellcasting thief, but I decided to go with an open mind when trying it out. The main issue is that it doesn't feel like a thief. It feels like necro got bolted down onto a thief. Cast times and cooldowns and overall it feels very clunky and slow. It doesn't feel like a thief-flavored support caster, it feels like purple necro. The character doesn't feel nimble, the animations don't feel nimble, and the skills overall feel slow and clunky and basically everything I try to run away from when I pick thief to play. On top of that, the skills are all so convoluted! There are so many conditionals and clauses to it, it's hard to wrap my head around many of them. One of them (I think one of the dual skills) had a tooltip so big it didn't fit my 1080p monitor! Please streamline them. I think a support, magic-y thief can be done. The shadow shroud ally tethering was actually much more intuitive than I expected. But I think a lot of work needs to be done to make the profession actually feel like an extension of thief, and not like you ran out of ideas so you bolted a scourge on my back and painted it purple. Also for the love of god, give the auto attack a new animation. Whacking the air to throw tennis balls looks so bad. Give it some flourish, some flair, make the thief do some spins or something. Casting magic doesn't have to be like I'm hurling a rock at my opponent or playing whack-a-mole.