Balance Thought for Thief, What do you think?

[Leo Schrodingers Cat.2497]

I've been thinking on this for some time. One of the primary complaints for thief was just the initiative system and how expensive many of the skills are.
I've been playing a build that revolves largely around the ability to regenerate initiative and stamina, and so far it's felt much better than standard thief gameplay where you can't be as aggressive as you'd like.

So... my thoughts came to this. What if instead of trying to buff thief's damage output, or giving thief the same passive access to buffs that others had. You buff their ability to regenerate their initiative? As we've all said, make Preparedness baseline, as without it, certain skills quite literally deplete your reserves into uselessness. But now for every minor trait in the core trees, you give the thief an added bonus that restores some initiative. Preferably something that rewards aggression  but makes it very easy to make mistakes.

 

So for example, and these are only examples...

Remove the 1 initiative restoration from upper hand, put it into the minor adept trait with no cool down but specifically on dodge rolls. This means that channeled attacks that can be dodged like Ranger's Multi-Shot, or Revs 7 sided strike, and even being in a group fight,  will quickly restore thief's stamina. The potential mistake here is that poor timing easily means that thief is likely to burn through his reserves. This trait will not effect things like Bow's Evasion, Sword's Evasion, Withdraw, Roll for Init, etc.

 

For the Minor Adept something along the lines. Of successfully landing Sword's Auto Chain, gives back 2 init, 5sec cool down.

 

And so forth. Providing this benefit to the Core Traitlines only, which gives Core thief a strength that isn't found in the elite specs.

Edited August 21, 2021 by Leo Schrodingers Cat.2497

[Zacchary.6183]

I had a similar idea. Both would definitely help.

[Tails.9372]

I agree with adding more ways to gain initiative but I don't think that adding traits to the baseline is something A-Net would do but there are some other ways they could go about to address the issue. First and foremost give a purpose to auto attacks by making them regenerate initiative on hit (1 ini if the base execution time is 0,5 sec. or les, 2 ini if the base execution time is 1 sec. or les but > 0,5 sec. and 3 ini if the base execution time is 1,5 sec. or les but > 1 sec.). Right now the AA is just something you try to avoid using as much as possible which I don't think is good game design, other action based MMOs with mana esque systems (e.g. PSO2) do the same thing which is working out just fine for them.

 

Another thing they could do here is to make slight alterations to some of the existing traits like changing the activation condition for Signets of Powers bonus effects from "on kill" to "on crit" which would also bring it more on line with the specialization it's actually in.

Edited August 21, 2021 by Tails.9372

[Vidit.7108]

An idea I had back when alacrity was added to the game was to have an invisible trait on thief that would regenerate 1 initiative if the thief has alacrity and have it on a cool down of 2 1/4th seconds.
So after 6 and 3/4th you have an extra 3 ini for a skill or at 9 seconds 4 ini for a skill.
With that cool down it doesn't become an issue in pvp much because the thief can't really give itself alacrity reliably. In PvE/WvW it would come close to providing a similar amount of dps other classes get from alacrity. I don't trust my math on that though so it might need to be longer than 2 1/4th seconds.

Edit: I remembered you can't tell I put a heart. You have a good idea anything like that is an improvement over what we have right now.

Edited August 21, 2021 by Vidit.7108

[Vornollo.5182]

Preparedness' 3 initiative should just be baseline, really.

Opens up some room to swap off of Trickery more reliably too.

 

General initiative generation would be quite welcome for that matter, though I don't feel it's that's necessary to be fair.

[Salvatore.3749]

Honestly, I'm going to throw out a different point of view since I played GW 2 since it was launched. Since Thief had an initiative system for rapid attacks, it was balanced out with longer utility CD times.

 

IMO, I think all core and specialization Utility CD times for thief should be reduced by 20-30%, maybe even 40% in some cases, since initiative cost is so high for everything, we can barely get significant damage out without using Trickery traits. Honestly, we don't have a support thief since smoke screen, shadow's refuge, and blinding powder take so long to recharge.  Venoms, take forever to recharge so we can't buff allies with them. Daredevil, could actually become condi daredevil if impairing daggers and the other throwing daggers had a shorter cooldown. I love throwing those daggers to inflict conditions, swipe, use fit flurry, and annihilate an enemy breakbar in PvE, but it sucks that I can only do it once every couple of minutes. Same thing with Deadeye, lower the CD times of the cantrips to provide more damage and bonuses.

 

If we had shorter CD times, thief could literally become one of the best support classes in the game while simultaneously being provided with way more sustain. If Skelk Venom (the healing skill) had a 20 second CD versus 30 second CD, you would see more DD and DE in PvE and PvP groups since they could apply that to team mates. Plus, the self-healing would be wonderful. 

 

The reason why I say this is because the moment they provide a preparedness initiative base, you know other classes are going to complain and then initiative costs get increased all over again and we'll be right back where we started. With shorter CD times, you may not even require preparedness since you could apply venoms and stealth effectively to other classes. Could you imagine the old core, trickery, critical strikes, and shadow arts thief with more support buffs? That would be so much more effective. Now that rapid attacks are no longer a thing, the best way to balance the class is to reduce utility CD times. 

 

Edited August 27, 2021 by Salvatore.3749

[BobbyT.7192]

Back in beta, and shortly after I think thief had a trait that granted initiative on crit, which was pretty good.

Don't know why they got rid of it. Its wasnt really that strong, and I would think 1 or 2 initiative per crit every 8-10s icd is in line with most other passive initiative regens.

[Tails.9372]

1 hour ago, BobbyT.7192 said:

I would think 1 or 2 initiative per crit every 8-10s icd is in line with most other passive initiative regens

 

Which are, often times, already terrible enough. We do have a trait that can gain more than one ini per second with no cooldown and no one thinks that that's an issue. Depending on how it's handled even a strong ini reg trait wouldn't be an issue. You can for example change the ini on kill bonus effect from Signets of Powers to ini on crit without causing any issues as this would also come with multiple trade-offs. If you however are too focused on compromising the ini gain you run the risk of rendering it useless, e.g. Infiltrator's Signets passive which is far to weak to be useful and thus also fails to serve as a propper trade-off for the active.

[BobbyT.7192]

14 hours ago, Tails.9372 said:

 

Which are, often times, already terrible enough. We do have a trait that can gain more than one ini per second with no cooldown and no one thinks that that's an issue. Depending on how it's handled even a strong ini reg trait wouldn't be an issue. You can for example change the ini on kill bonus effect from Signets of Powers to ini on crit without causing any issues as this would also come with multiple trade-offs. If you however are too focused on compromising the ini gain you run the risk of rendering it useless, e.g. Infiltrator's Signets passive which is far to weak to be useful and thus also fails to serve as a propper trade-off for the active.

Its unfortunate really if you think about it, thieves used to have quite a few ini regen sources.  Like the 1 ini on crit ( was actually 5s icd), ini on steal trait gave 3 instead of 2,

others got combine into other traits like the ones in shadow and Acro lines.

 

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_updates/2013-12-10#Thief_2

That update if your curious

 

The idea at the time was make it so thieves didn't have to prioritize speccing for initiative regen in their builds to be effective, and to compensate natural initiative regen went from .75/sec to 1/sec. (Or 45ini per min vs 60, 66 with the signet)

 

Over the years though, initiative cost have risen here and there slightly to the point where it feels like those traits are needed again. But is that really needed? Because if your speccing for ini regen, means your not speccing for something else.

Edited August 29, 2021 by BobbyT.7192