Proposal for Initiative Mechanic Rework

[Zacchary.6183]

The Initiative system is limiting to both the profession and balance team. Everyone has their hands tied because even minor changes to the profession creates imbalances and salt from all angles. So I am going to attempt to alleviate the problem by targeting the main points of conflict and changing how they function.

These are the problems:

1. The initiative system is ultimately a shared cooldown/resource and having no initiative puts all skills on a hard CD.
2. While it allows for the chaining of multiple skills in quick succession, this also creates an issue for the balance team to balance the skill around initiative use rather than the skill itself. Skills get their damage nerfed or initiative cost raised because they can be used four times in a row, as an example. The impact of doing this has a greater affect than other professions, simply because initiative affects all abilities.
3. This focus on initiative also bleeds into the rest of the profession as initiative gain from other sources must be considered. This will eventually lead to a lack of build diversity as certain skills will get nerfed into uselessness (like Disabling Shot on shortbow) because of traits and vice versa.
4. The way initiative functions is unique compared to the rest of the professions, meaning that balancing decisions overall require a unique approach that is incompatible with the rest of the professions. 
5. This unique system caters to niche demographics making it harder for this profession to gain popularity than normal.
6. This unique system exponentially increases the effectiveness of strong tools, like stealth, by providing greater access to them. This has forced thief into reliance on Active Defense, as adding passive defenses without mitigating Active ones would make thief fairly hard to kill and repel regardless of skill level.

 

Proposal:

1. Weapon skills can be used regardless of remaining initiative, but are subject to short CDs (like 7 seconds max).
2. Each weapon skill has an initiative cost that, when paid, powers up the weapon skill and reduces it's CD to 0.
3. If a weapon skill's initiative cost can't be paid, no initiative will be used and the weapon skill will not power up.
4. As a side proposal: Replace Preparedness and Quick Pockets with something else (another topic for another time) and provide each weapon means to gain more initiative through use, preferably at the end of melee auto-attacks and expanding upon unload's conditional initiative gain onto other weapon skills.

[ASP.8093]

I don't like it, to be honest.

 

I just don't see a difference between being out of initiative relying on utilities and autos and being out of initiative and only being able to cast anemic versions of your normal weapon skills at the cost of putting them on cooldown so you might not be able to access them later.

 

What would a weaker Infiltrator's Strike or Shadow Shot look like? Would they still reposition you? (People will get mad about that even if the damage is lower.) Would they have reduced range? (Then they're bad and you should never use them.)

 

What would a weaker Heartseeker or C&D look like? Why would you want to use them instead of just using your auto attack chain?

 

42 minutes ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

This unique system caters to niche demographics making it harder for this profession to gain popularity than normal.

Why does this matter at all? As long as a class isn't horribly oppressive to the meta or a total waste of space, why does it matter whether it's got 5% of total playtime or 15% of total playtime?

[Felices Bladewing.3914]

I don't think Initiative needs a hard rework.

it is supposed to be either used in quick succession to burst and than needs time to recover, or used more sparlingly to be more fluid and smooth. The system itself is brilliant tbh.

in the game right now the big issue lies in the cost/usefulness ratio of some skills (or even most in some weaponcombination) most of this coming from the aspect of pvp and the balancing in that regard. 

Anet just need to consider the direction where they want the thief to operate in the future and either increase the damage (for more burst) / or lower the costs (for more liquidity)

that stuff like infiltrators arrow got nerfed is in my eyes understandable, skills like this should not be spammable.

Edited September 10, 2021 by Felices Bladewing.3914

[shrew.3059]

I think a higher level approach might work.

 

Right now INI gains are passive, but this can be supplemented/replaced by INI Generators and INI Spenders, which means a Thief has to be clever about what skills to use and when so they can fuel their big impact abilities. Waiting for INI to recover is less fun than being given options for generating it (outside of Steal + Trickery).

 

This could open up some really fun design choices like “X costs 3 INI; if target has Y condition, refund 5 INI”, allowing skills to be Generators without being free or mindlessly spammable?

Edited September 10, 2021 by shrew.3059

[Psycoprophet.8107]

Initiative cost needs to be lowered on skills like AI and pistol whip etc, that's all that really needs to happen. The devs have to simply realize raising the ini on any effective skill as a way to nerf it is lazy and harmful to thiefs current design and actually doesn't just nerf the skill but also deletes whole weapon combo options due to the shared resource pool. Just raising pistol whips cost deleted the viability of s/p builds in competitive play. Honestly these devs are truly not very good at balancing their game, almost as if they have little understanding of the class their making changes to.

Making Preparedness baseline, lowering ini cost to specific skills like pistol whip to original cost and replacing the traits in Acrobatics line that were given the ridiculous 300 sec cd, or lower the cd's to180 sec would do a lot to fix some of thieves issues.

Will never happen though, not only will these devs never admit they were wrong but also never revert a bad decision, at least almost never. They will continue to listen to the loud biased claims from players who don't play the class and balance as such.

Edited September 10, 2021 by Psycoprophet.8107

[Felices Bladewing.3914]

50 minutes ago, shrew.3059 said:

I think a higher level approach might work.

 

Right now INI gains are passive, but this can be supplemented/replaced by INI Generators and INI Spenders, which means a Thief has to be clever about what skills to use and when so they can fuel their big impact abilities. Waiting for INI to recover is less fun than being given options for generating it (outside of Steal + Trickery).

 

This could open up some really fun design choices like “X costs 3 INI; if target has Y condition, refund 5 INI”, allowing skills to be Generators without being free or mindlessly spammable?

From a players perspective and also from a skill perspective something like this would be fun i agree on that.

But this also makes the balancing part extremly difficult to a point where i dont see any good going out of it - we got balancing issues right now with a way simpler structure.

 

For any possibility to generate Ini outside its time-component, ALL skills have to balanced around this, even if you with your build and/or playstyle dont have this generation available. Thats exactly the problem as with Preparedness now!

 

So three possibilities:

1. Anet are putting on some GGG-like balancing (which is still not perfect) and rocks this.

2. Most skills will feel underwhelming if not played in their optimal environment

3. Some or even just one Condition/Build/weapon/skill combination with this will be broken for sure resulting in more nerfs that might not only affect that particular CBWS-Combo (since it might be not 100% clear to the balancing team what causes the issue) thus throwing us back to the point where we are standing right now maybe even worse.

 

 

[shrew.3059]

5 minutes ago, Felices Bladewing.3914 said:

From a players perspective and also from a skill perspective something like this would be fun i agree on that.

But this also makes the balancing part extremly difficult to a point where i dont see any good going out of it - we got balancing issues right now with a way simpler structure.

 

For any possibility to generate Ini outside its time-component, ALL skills have to balanced around this, even if you with your build and/or playstyle dont have this generation available. Thats exactly the problem as with Preparedness now!

 

So three possibilities:

1. Anet are putting on some GGG-like balancing (which is still not perfect) and rocks this.

2. Most skills will feel underwhelming if not played in their optimal environment

3. Some or even just one Condition/Build/weapon/skill combination with this will be broken for sure resulting in more nerfs that might not only affect that particular CBWS-Combo (since it might be not 100% clear to the balancing team what causes the issue) thus throwing us back to the point where we are standing right now maybe even worse.

 

 

 

It would also make learning the profession much more difficult, so that’s another strike against it. It would require a lot of spreadsheeting to get right, so maybe it wouldn’t be worth the effort. Complexity is the enemy of balance, but critical to deep gameplay. It’s a hard job!

[BobbyT.7192]

5 hours ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

The Initiative system is limiting to both the profession and balance team. Everyone has their hands tied because even minor changes to the profession creates imbalances and salt from all angles. So I am going to attempt to alleviate the problem by targeting the main points of conflict and changing how they function.

These are the problems:

1. The initiative system is ultimately a shared cooldown/resource and having no initiative puts all skills on a hard CD.
2. While it allows for the chaining of multiple skills in quick succession, this also creates an issue for the balance team to balance the skill around initiative use rather than the skill itself. Skills get their damage nerfed or initiative cost raised because they can be used four times in a row, as an example. The impact of doing this has a greater affect than other professions, simply because initiative affects all abilities.
3. This focus on initiative also bleeds into the rest of the profession as initiative gain from other sources must be considered. This will eventually lead to a lack of build diversity as certain skills will get nerfed into uselessness (like Disabling Shot on shortbow) because of traits and vice versa.
4. The way initiative functions is unique compared to the rest of the professions, meaning that balancing decisions overall require a unique approach that is incompatible with the rest of the professions. 
5. This unique system caters to niche demographics making it harder for this profession to gain popularity than normal.
6. This unique system exponentially increases the effectiveness of strong tools, like stealth, by providing greater access to them. This has forced thief into reliance on Active Defense, as adding passive defenses without mitigating Active ones would make thief fairly hard to kill and repel regardless of skill level.

 

Proposal:

1. Weapon skills can be used regardless of remaining initiative, but are subject to short CDs (like 7 seconds max).
2. Each weapon skill has an initiative cost that, when paid, powers up the weapon skill and reduces it's CD to 0.
3. If a weapon skill's initiative cost can't be paid, no initiative will be used and the weapon skill will not power up.
4. As a side proposal: Replace Preparedness and Quick Pockets with something else (another topic for another time) and provide each weapon means to gain more initiative through use, preferably at the end of melee auto-attacks and expanding upon unload's conditional initiative gain onto other weapon skills.

Would the cool down and power scale when you have some initiative, but not enough to cover the cost of a skill. Like using unload when you have 3 ini ?

 

[kash.9213]

That could really offset what's really useful about Initiative when in the moment, especially if we're thinking about team play. 

[Zacchary.6183]

15 hours ago, ASP.8093 said:

Why does this matter at all? As long as a class isn't horribly oppressive to the meta or a total waste of space, why does it matter whether it's got 5% of total playtime or 15% of total playtime?

Because anet collects game data from the players constantly and uses that data to make most changes. Thief is one of the least played and the profession does not have a dedicated dev, so they have to pull some design acrobatics to make any changes to it rather than judge based on their data. Consider that they have been pigeonholed into handling this profession with an archeologist's touch for years because they have one side screaming for nerfs and the other side threatening switching mains. But that's what happens when you don't play thief enough.

[Zacchary.6183]

10 hours ago, BobbyT.7192 said:

Would the cool down and power scale when you have some initiative, but not enough to cover the cost of a skill. Like using unload when you have 3 ini ?

 

No, it'll be base strength with no initiative cost until the full cost can be spent.

[shrew.3059]

8 hours ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

Thief is one of the least played and the profession does not have a dedicated dev

 

I did not know this. Which professions have dedicated devs and why would only certain ones have that?

[babazhook.6805]

Never thought this out to the end but might a system if cool downs based on INI remaining work.

 

As example everything has a base cooldown of 8 seconds as a starting point in the 2,3,4 and 5 slots. This number is lowered for each tick of INI left in your pool.

 

Something has to be done as the method they now use wherein they just jack up the ini cost makes far too many builds unplayable .

 

 

Edited September 11, 2021 by babazhook.6805

[ASP.8093]

17 hours ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

Because anet collects game data from the players constantly and uses that data to make most changes. Thief is one of the least played and the profession does not have a dedicated dev, so they have to pull some design acrobatics to make any changes to it rather than judge based on their data. Consider that they have been pigeonholed into handling this profession with an archeologist's touch for years because they have one side screaming for nerfs and the other side threatening switching mains. But that's what happens when you don't play thief enough.

The class is near the bottom on gw2efficiency charts but only 1-2 percentage points away from the mean. That's… a perfectly normal place to be.

 

And there's also no reason to believe that adding cooldowns to the weapon skills is the secret sauce to making thieves more popular.

[ASP.8093]

1 hour ago, babazhook.6805 said:

Something has to be done as the method they now use wherein they just jack up the ini cost makes far too many builds unplayable .

If you go with a "hybrid" method like this, what'll happen is Initiative will atrophy over time and you'll be left with a cooldown-based class with a minor "use as kill twice sometimes" gimmick. And the weapon skills themselves can't carry that, because *they are very specific.*

[Zacchary.6183]

5 hours ago, ASP.8093 said:

The class is near the bottom on gw2efficiency charts but only 1-2 percentage points away from the mean. That's… a perfectly normal place to be.

By what context? Are we talking about playtime? Because I heard that afking is the most popular activity across all game modes.

3 hours ago, ASP.8093 said:

And there's also no reason to believe that adding cooldowns to the weapon skills is the secret sauce to making thieves more popular.

Yes, there definitely is.

Adding cooldowns while turning Initiative into a buffing resource takes all weapon skill reliance off of initiative while still allowing for chaining. This allows devs to base thief's weapon skills' effectiveness off of the cooldown, rather than just initiative, and connects initiative primarily with their buffs. They can then balance around situations when a player uses a skill nix initiative rather than initiative itself, since that will happen often. Meanwhile, the player still has other skills they can use because initiative is now tied to effectiveness rather than utility. Mismanagement of initiative will become more forgiving and make the profession as a whole more noob friendly. Then when more players (and maybe devs) actually play it, anet gets more data for even more quality balance decisions. 

[Tails.9372]

1 hour ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

Mismanagement of initiative will become more forgiving

Which can also be done without shoehorning a CD system in. Initiative should have never been such a restricted commodity to begin with. You can basically completely remove the ini cost from all primerly damage oriented weapon skills and it wouldn't cause any problems by the bases of their own performance alone as the ones that you actually don't want to be spammable require some additional setup anyway. The main reason why you still want to give them an ini cost in spite of that is to keep the primary utility based weapon skills (e.g. headshot) in check. Initiative regeneration on crit (without ICD) would be one workable solution to the problem as it would considerably ease the burden the ini costs put on offensive stills without doing the same for utility skills as they're generally single hit (if at all).

So no, the issue doesn't lie with the system but its implementation which is something they actually can address without redesigning it.

Edited September 12, 2021 by Tails.9372

[Zacchary.6183]

8 minutes ago, Tails.9372 said:

Initiative regeneration on crit (without ICD)

This would make the initiative system pointless. You would be getting back so much initiative that you'll never not be topped off. Initiative costs would have to be heavily jacked up to compensate and thief would be right back where it started. That's why I am suggesting small cooldowns on top of the initiative system. The problem isn't initiative supply and demand, its the way it is designed.

[Tails.9372]

1 hour ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

This would make the initiative system pointless.

I already explained why it wouldn't which you apparently just ignored.

 

1 hour ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

You would be getting back so much initiative that you'll never not be topped off.

Except that's just factually wrong, mindlessly spamming utility skills would still easily make you run out of initiative and your opponent avoiding your attacks would also make you pay the full prize without anything in return. Furthermore, you shouldn't be runing out of initiative from damage focused skills that are essentially on par with or slightly above AA level damage anyway.

Edited September 12, 2021 by Tails.9372

[Zacchary.6183]

21 minutes ago, Tails.9372 said:

I already explained why it wouldn't which you apparently just ignored.

 

Except that's just factually wrong, mindlessly spamming utility skills would still easily make you run out of initiative and your opponent avoiding your attacks would also make you pay the full prize without anything in return. Furthermore, you shouldn't be runing out of initiative from damage focused skills that are essentially on par with or slightly above AA level damage anyway.

I didn't ignore anything you wrote, especially:

1 hour ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

Initiative regeneration on crit (without ICD)

Have you ever used Signet of Malice? Because if you haven't I suggest you go find a group of mobs (5-7), probably in the Auric Basin meta, and wait until you get to half hp before hitting Daggerstorm. Your HP will return to full from SoM's passive, which has no internal cooldown. Imagine what that means for all of thief's spammable multi-hit and aoe attacks. It isn't hard to get 80% crit rate and fury is abundant. You wouldn't need any other initiative trait.

[Zacchary.6183]

18 hours ago, shrew.3059 said:

 

I did not know this. Which professions have dedicated devs and why would only certain ones have that?

Not thief, that's for sure. Dev in charge of thief is a weaver main. And the last time any dev was seen on thief was the Thaumanova fractal stream. I don't doubt that they get on for testing purposes, but you can tell how much the profession isn't played by how delicately the profession is handled.

[AikijinX.6258]

2 hours ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

This would make the initiative system pointless. You would be getting back so much initiative that you'll never not be topped off. Initiative costs would have to be heavily jacked up to compensate and thief would be right back where it started. That's why I am suggesting small cooldowns on top of the initiative system. The problem isn't initiative supply and demand, its the way it is designed.

This would have to be put in CS line. That would atleast make the CS line have more utility than it does now. Most thieves sit at 40-50 crit chance, and of course with fury (20% extra crit)  you’ll never get the 100% crit chance without specc’ing 100% into it. I agree there should probably be like some type of trade off. Like 1s ICD but I think that would work. Plus people would need to choose between SA and D.A. I didn’t mention Acro because it’s a joke. And this change would open builds up, so trickery isn’t a necessity.

Edited September 12, 2021 by AikijinX.6258

[Tails.9372]

10 minutes ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

I didn't ignore anything you wrote

Sure you did, your:

1 hour ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

This would make the initiative system pointless.

after my:

1 hour ago, Tails.9372 said:

The main reason why you still want to give them an ini cost in spite of that is to keep the primary utility based weapon skills (e.g. headshot) in check.

implies exactly that.

 

17 minutes ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

Imagine what that means for all of thief's spammable multi-hit and aoe attacks.

That you can use them "back-to-back" like you are supposed to.

 

19 minutes ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

You wouldn't need any other initiative trait.

You would if you want to sustain your ini as you would still be running out of initiative just much slower and your scenario assumes no use of utility skills at all which is also rather unrealistic. What it would do however is that people wouldn't feel the need to run Trickery anymore (unless they really want to extend their ini pool for increased utility usage) which for several builds is something many would consider to be a good thing and you have yet to make an argument as for why having decent ini sustain on primarily offensive focused weapon skills would actually be a bad thing especially if someone would have to make various concessions in their build to get access to such an ability in the first place.

[Zacchary.6183]

@Tails.9372 I think you need to understand what "no internal cooldown" means in this game, because you obviously don't. And you can do that with Signet of Malice that has a passive with no internal cool down. Where every hit, no matter how numerous, procs its passive. Imagine it, but instead of 132 hp its one initiative and how rapidly you could regain all your initiative back with a very high Crit Rate and shortbow. All you need is full marauders and constant access to fury. AikijinX is right to put a short cd on it because what your suggesting would cause serious balance issues.

[Tails.9372]

 

6 minutes ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

I think you need to understand what "no internal cooldown" means in this game, because you obviously don't.

I do understand what it means but I'm not so sure that you do as all your arguments in this regard boil down to "its bad cause its bad", I even asked you to explain your reasoning as for why that is which you unsuprisingly failed to do.

Edited September 12, 2021 by Tails.9372