TheDeafGuy.4519

I was thinking of something similar too, an increased initiative regen rate may increase the dueling aspect of thief without giving them the ability to spam abilities back to back when they arrive with a full initiative bar to a +1 or team fight. if you don't shortbow 5 everywhere, lmao. But at the current rate of initiative regen, these insanely high costs is going to leave us vulnerable and only able to auto more often on the side, and increasing our baseline initiative is basically just the opposite of increasing our costs. However, a slight increase in our initiative would still give us some power back with the initiative cost nerfs still taking effect if we run out of initiative with our current regen rate, if that makes sense

Anet seems to forget that thieves BASELINE initiative is 12, and they just increased choking gas initiative once again, another reason to pigeonhold thief into baselining trickery. 1 choking gas is now over 50% of our baseline initiative. I understand it's an extremely powerful spell, but please, either remove the unblockable affect, make it so it takes 3 stacks of poison before it triggers again, OR just revert the cost back to 4 inititiative and have it not daze anymore, I really don't care. The initiate cost increase on our abilities ruins the point of the thief class being able to reuse the same weapon abilities without cooldowns creating a unique playstyle based on what skills we want to actively reuse during dueling or team fights. Please. Anet think carefully about this nerf and advise nerfing our skills in different ways rather than just increasing initiative costs

Thanks for understanding the thought process and wholeheartedly agree

Lucian explained my worries extremely well, we no longer have an form of poison cleave besides shortbow 4 spam and and maybe lotus dodge in it? If this new trait is first target ICD only, and not per target, this will be terrible in a lot of scenarios. Also SA sounds fun and intriguing , but the problem is that you will need to sacrifice an elite specialization, trickery (which is overloaded and needs some aspects of it baseline), or DA which is the primary poison damage application. Also stealth based game play is not very useful in Open world PVE and PVP as the fight tends to drag out way too long and you provide no point pressure. The only time i feel Stealth based game play shines is in WvW when it comes to fighting random people. My final thought on this is just rework the new trait to rather limiting us with ICD's, let us have a way to apply more poison frequently so we can make use of the grand-master trait and not limited to 1 target so we dont get gimped when it comes to attacking more than 1 target or by ranger pets etc.

no? it's still an adept in DA. Sorry just changed "traitline" to "trait"

After reviewing the changes, I can say I do like most of them, but the deadly arts changes. I know you guy's have been wanting Poison condition thief to happen for some time now and you guys have done amazing work with some of the changes for the past few years to the deadly arts trait line. But hear me out when I say the removal of condi application from daggers is a huge mistake for the few of us who like to run DA D/D condition. The poison application on our daggers is what makes our build. I understand you're shifting the poison application to a new trait, but the gain is nearly not enough of what was lost for daggers. Especially in PVP and an internal CD of 5 seconds...... I'm going to talk in the aspect of sPVP and dip into PVE a little. The "old" trait was apply a stack of poison with a 33% on your dagger skills. If you added this with the grandmaster trait, your poison turned into two stacks. This was a very great addition and made D/D poison thief feel very nice or even D/P. It was nice knowing that I can autoattack (besides final attack on the chain), deathblossom, and bouncing dagger and can consistently apply poison to my enemies so they lose their regeneration capabilities, and of course ramping up damage. This was also a very amazing clutch when it came to preventing enemies rezzing their allies when applying cleave damage. The new trait that applies 2 (or 3 with grandmaster) every 5 seconds doesn't even compare. Now into the PVE aspect, I'll tell you this right now that you just nerfed condition daredevil by a grand amount. The poison application will not be nearly as much with the old dagger training. Auto attacking and death blossom contributes more stacks than this new trait will. I understand what you guys were aiming for, you wanted to allow more builds rather than just daggers when it comes to poison application. But please, you are really only destroying one of the only good poison builds (besides the toxic condi sword/dagger). What you really are doing is just shifting the power of D/D condi to other potential builds, which is completely acceptable, but not enough power is being shifted to account what a huge loss this will be. I would please rework the new trait to just have your mainhand weapon type to have a 33 % chance to apply poison if you really want more build diversity. Sincerly, a D/D condi thief main

Right now I currently have a PvP rating of 1702 in NA playing GS/Rifle Berserker, just need to play 5 more games to get back on the leader boards. Cancelling berserker mode in exchange for a faster cool down is power creep. I know people or a person in this thread have mention that the trade off is losing core berserker skills and reduced toughness, however activating berserker mode near somebody counts as a 3 adrenaline bar burst skill, which triggers some traitlines. Also counts as a heaving damaging attack. On top of that getting access to a a super powerful burst skill immediately afterwards that only takes 10 adrenaline to ramp up with short cds. But I'm all for cancelling berserk mode early for the SAME current cooldown to reset a fight knowing you're going to need it again soon refreshed or during a raid boss phase mode.