Revamp of Initiative.

[Xelqypla.6817]

Just now, Zacchary.6183 said:

No, you actually don't understand and I doubt you read Yasai's entire post.

Initiative is prioritized first and then cooldown. The initiative system hasn't changed. You run out of initiative first, then cooldowns apply. Should you have enough initiative to pay the initiative cost, regardless of cooldown, the skill will go off anyway. But then you must wait for whatever remaining cooldown is left or wait for initiative to regen to use it again. You will never have "ALL of your initiative" while anything is on cooldown unless you get it all back through traits and utilities. The "extra skill usage" is the singular cooldown buffer, and that is specifically meant to keep your other weaponskills from being locked out while you have no initiative. That is what they meant when they said "cooldown bypass".

I understand now.

It's STILL free skill usage. I'll just change my priorities to burn each cooldown while I am bottomed out of Initiative, starting with the lowest cost to the highest cost.

You understand that the ONLY thing that changed was that I got things on cooldown a little later. I am 100% still going to get what I can on cooldown, especially if I can bounce back with initiative boosts from traits/skills.

I'll 100% bottom out, D3 for the evade, D4 for a cripple, D5 for the Stealth. If I am rolling with "Shadow Rejuvenation" that's 3 initiative. Another 2 initiative if I am using Axe/D. Not hard to rebound.

[Zacchary.6183]

40 minutes ago, Xelqypla.6817 said:

I understand now.

It's STILL free skill usage. I'll just change my priorities to burn each cooldown while I am bottomed out of Initiative, starting with the lowest cost to the highest cost.

You understand that the ONLY thing that changed was that I got things on cooldown a little later. I am 100% still going to get what I can on cooldown, especially if I can bounce back with initiative boosts from traits/skills.

I'll 100% bottom out, D3 for the evade, D4 for a cripple, D5 for the Stealth. If I am rolling with "Shadow Rejuvenation" that's 3 initiative. Another 2 initiative if I am using Axe/D. Not hard to rebound.

And yet you're on the old system again after putting your entire kit on CD. That 5 initiative will only get you so far and you'll still have to wait for initiative a/o CDs to use more unless you pop a utility. Just as intended.

You still get punished for spam, but the consequences of it are not as severe. Again, my whole point of the idea is to create a buffer so you're not screwed out of your entire kit unless you willingly opt into it. So what, you get an extra heartseeker on top of your extra death blossom. It isn't like these single attacks are going to put a cosmic dent in your overall DPS considering thief is plagued with having damage stacked on auto and dual wield skills. Everything else is for utility.

[Xelqypla.6817]

1 minute ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

And yet you're on the old system again after putting your entire kit on CD. That 5 initiative will only get you so far and you'll still have to wait for initiative a/o CDs to use more unless you pop a utility. Just as intended.

You still get punished for spam, but the consequences of it are not as severe. Again, my whole point of the idea is to create a buffer so you're not screwed out of your entire kit unless you willingly opt into it. So what, you get an extra heartseeker on top of your extra death blossom. It isn't like these single attacks are going to put a cosmic dent in your overall DPS considering thief is plagued with having damage stacked on auto and dual wield skills. Everything else is for utility.

... and that's where you miss the point.

I am getting an extra evade and an extra stealth. But this is just talking about D/D.

Maleficent Seven Rifle would get really interesting.

[Zacchary.6183]

3 minutes ago, Xelqypla.6817 said:

... and that's where you miss the point.

I am getting an extra evade and an extra stealth. But this is just talking about D/D.

I didn't miss the point, it just doesn't matter to me because you are still limited in the end.

Quote

Maleficent Seven Rifle would get really interesting.

Not really. Just about every M7 build nowadays has infinite chaining.

[Cuks.8241]

2 hours ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

Yes, exactly. So its more noob friendly, so more people play it, so more players learn how to counter it, so more understand how badly the profession needs a revamp, so bad players can actually get better instead of taking to the forums to air their self-inflicted grief because of a one-trick pony one-shotting them through their blue berserker gear.

I'm not sure it would become more noob friendly. You're actually increasing the overall resources that way, abilities would be nerfed as you could get more usage out of them, apm requirements would go up. Yeah your weapon utility abilities (so the ones that are now just not part of your combos, rotations) would be free to use. But only when you're out of ini so need to track that. There is a simpler way to do it, decrease ini cost. Or refund in specific builds via traits (because an ability in 1 build might be an occasional utility while a core rotation ability in another- mostly for pvp/pve split)). But either way those would then get severely nerfed because they would just be available more often. 

Thief is generally strong. It's just a bit special (which is good). And your proposal would be super overpowered in current state as you basically get another "free" weapon ability usage per engagement (depending on CD, maybe even more) or interval of rotation. So it would be followed by huge nerfs. Hammer to the ground nerfs.

[Zacchary.6183]

31 minutes ago, Cuks.8241 said:

I'm not sure it would become more noob friendly. You're actually increasing the overall resources that way, abilities would be nerfed as you could get more usage out of them, apm requirements would go up. Yeah your weapon utility abilities (so the ones that are now just not part of your combos, rotations) would be free to use. But only when you're out of ini so need to track that. There is a simpler way to do it, decrease ini cost. Or refund in specific builds via traits (because an ability in 1 build might be an occasional utility while a core rotation ability in another- mostly for pvp/pve split)). But either way those would then get severely nerfed because they would just be available more often. 

Thief is generally strong. It's just a bit special (which is good). And your proposal would be super overpowered in current state as you basically get another "free" weapon ability usage per engagement (depending on CD, maybe even more) or interval of rotation. So it would be followed by huge nerfs. Hammer to the ground nerfs.

Nerfs are going to happen regardless, so I don't see the point. Players refuse to get better and would rather perpetually scream nerf than take that stab to their ego. Nobody wants to even acknowledge that's a problem, even though it is the catalyst that makes stealth and initiative so toxic. Another "free use" is not going to change anything other than the consequence of mindless spamming.

[Eugenides.1274]

As much as it could help breath some life into thief I doubt we'll see any large change to the initiative system at this point. Most likely just continued tuning of the existing traits/initiative costs.

They've created a balancing nightmare for themselves with all of the initiative related traits. They pretty much HAVE to assume that you will have Trickery (+3 base increase, +2 gained on successful steal) in PvP/WvW at this point. Throw in Shadow Rejuvenation (+2 gained entering stealth, +1 gained exiting) and the recently buffed Upper Hand (+1 gained on dodge w/ 4s cooldown, +1 gained on evade) and now you have even more initiative generation problems to try and balance around. Shadow Rejuvenation being the obvious biggest issue.

Their solution to reduce the effectiveness of specific traits based on the other traits you're taking doesn't feel like the right way forward. If this is just a bandaid solution while they work an adjustments for a later patch, fine. If it's just a one-off change, fine. Either way they really should have added some notes about their mindset behind this change in the patch notes.

Making 15 initiative baseline, removing initiative gain from some traits (mainly Shadow Rejuvenation), and rebalancing current initiative costs would probably be best but it would also require a lot of testing to make sure things remain viable.