Complete Thief Overhaul - Concept

[Zacchary.6183]

All rentries:

Thief Overhaul - Profession Changes

Thief Overhaul - Core/SotO skills

Thief Overhaul - Traitlines

Thief Overhaul - Daredevil

Thief Overhaul - Deadeye

Thief Overhaul - Specter

What did I change this time? Let's start with the stuff you're not going to like.

• Stealth gutted, access mostly through use of smoke fields.
  • Don't worry. Won't need it with all the interrupts, siphoning, passive defense and sustain you'll be getting.
  • Also...
• Weapon skills not bound to initiative.
  • New Gambit system will use up the initiative instead.
    • Gambits go into a pool and some effects can grant you a random one from this pool.
    • When no gambits are stocked, you have basic gambits which are mostly defensive and free to use so long as you have initiative.
    • Some utilities can optionally use initiative too.
    • Initiative generation has changed.
  • Plenty of nice defensive/offensive attacks to stock and use added.
  • Weapon skills use regular cooldowns, but you'll be able to string more attacks together than before with the amount of Gambits you'll be getting.
• Venoms incorporated into dagger skills and NEW Utility Type.
  • Larcenies will replace Venoms as a utility type.
  • Their gimmick is they are Larcenies + one of the other utility types and they do something related to stealing.
• New offhands!
  • Focus adds burning to thief.
  • Shield adds defense and barrier manipulation.
• Weapon types now have their own "gimmick".
• Traitlines reworked to have more of an identity.
  • Deadly Arts - Now about venoms and condition damage rather than just poison and hybrid damage.
  • Critical Strikes - Enhancing strike damage and conserving initiative.
  • Shadow Arts - Healing and group support (only a little stealth support)
  • Acrobatics - Defense and utility boon enhancement.
  • Trickery - Profession mechanics enhancement. (Preparedness is gone btw, you won't need it c: )
• Daredevil is now the real dodge/evasion line.
• Deadeye malice reworked.
  • Mostly the same.... except:
  • Stolen skills do not stealth anymore. Instead they get a 50% effectiveness boost.
  • Instead of 5 or 7 malice, it is based on your current initiative. Generation is also changed.
  • Malice costs are limited to ~2x the initiative cost for gambits and 5 for cantrips.
• Specter mostly the same but with two changes:
  • Bonus 450 vitality out of the box so it isn't stuck in ritualist jail.
  • Shadow Shroud HP now 100% of max HP with a 33% damage reduction.
  • Also changed scepter a little.

Edited May 17 by Zacchary.6183

[Antycypator.9874]

I want ANet devs to print this Deadeye overhaul, put it somewhere in a visible place and mark it as "never add this to game or you're fired".

[agnlaa.7594]

its so funny when people who clearly dont enjoy (or even play) a given class think their opinions on it are relevant. overhauling a class to appeal to those people would just cause its current players quit (see: mechanist)

Edited May 19 by agnlaa.7594
left out a word

[Zacchary.6183]

On 5/19/2024 at 11:49 AM, agnlaa.7594 said:

its so funny when people who clearly dont enjoy (or even play) a given class think their opinions on it are relevant. overhauling a class to appeal to those people would just cause its current players quit (see: mechanist)

Thing is, I have been maining the profession since two weeks after GW2's launch. Stealth and initiative have historically been a balancing disaster for anet. And even worse, for an entire decade, anet has been catering to the purist pvp players who only ever want the d/p drd +1/decap meta to be viable and the screaming kiddos who refuse to git gud. I didn't need to take a year+ break from thief to know just how bad it is, but I did and it is pretty kitten bad. I don't expect thieves who just started using/maining it the last five years to really understand why anyone would perpetually call for the removal of Preparedness or why M7 practically carries the profession. But longstanding issues have kept the profession in a niche state and the overhaul has addressed all four of them.

[agnlaa.7594]

weird cause i main thief and use it in every aspect of the game - openworld, fractals, strikes, raids, pvp, wvw. rn ive got 5 gear slots and 7 build slots, plus a few in storage for niche uses. so that to me doesnt seem like the class as a whole is by any means niche, really the opposite

[Zacchary.6183]

I believe you. What I don't believe is you did much beyond skips, roaming, NM strikes, +1/decap, gate/lamps and some DPS. 

[kash.9213]

Initiative isn't a balancing disaster. It's just often used as a balancing scapegoat by pricing a skill out of use, so they don't have to bother with the skill for a while longer. 

I'd keep Initiative and Skills the same for now until, GW3 maybe. 

I like your approach to the trait lines but I'm kind of digging Acro right now and that change looks kind of boring and we just got Acro dusted off recently.

I'm down for the Venom, Offhand, and maybe Specter ideas.

[Zacchary.6183]

1 hour ago, kash.9213 said:

and that change looks kind of boring

Care to elaborate so if and when I do a writeup I know what to avoid?

[kash.9213]

42 minutes ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

Care to elaborate so if and when I do a writeup I know what to avoid?

Acro feels like it has the choice to be scrappy at the moment and with options all the down the line. I guess I would need to know what Utility Boon Enhancement means also. 

Edited May 24 by kash.9213

[Zacchary.6183]

On 5/24/2024 at 4:11 PM, kash.9213 said:

Acro feels like it has the choice to be scrappy at the moment and with options all the down the line. I guess I would need to know what Utility Boon Enhancement means also. 

The Utility Boon Enhancement part is from two minors that enhance swiftness and vigor. Swiftness increases to +50% movement speed and Vigor also acts like a weaker Regen. This line has also been reworked to work with the gambit system a little and buff shield. You can check it out on the traitlines rentry. There is a table of contents at the top that you can click to go straight to acro.

[DeceiverX.8361]

Hard pass.  This is a wildly convoluted solution seemingly just to answer "How can we make the thief not use stealth?" which isn't really inherently a problem, while also killing off a ton of thematic builds and wildly overloading MH Pistol lol.  Plus a bunch of RNG.

If you want to fix initiative and stealth, make preparedness baseline, have a fixed/unchangeable stealth duration, and force Revealed at the end of that cast to make stacking not possible. 

If you want Steal to be not so bloated, profession power needs to get diverted elsewhere as to interact within the scope of those respective trait line bonuses.

If you want Steal to be thematically relevant, the bundles need to not suck.

[Zacchary.6183]

@DeceiverX.8361 I respect your opinions but I have to point out a few things. Preparedness is never going to be baseline. If it does, initiative costs and damage will just be based off of 15 ini instead of 12 and then preparedness just turns into a stat boost.  Its like raising the minimum wage. Either your burger prices are going to skyrocket up to $20 a/o you're going to just not get that $20/hr burgerflipper job.

Stealth will always be a problem to everyone because the people who can't/won't deal with it are going to throw tantrums at anet until they eventually respond. Then anet will respond by reducing the power of thief rather than nerf stealth any further. Because at this point stealth is a few nerfs away from becoming useless. If it becomes useless, anet will either have to lean in on dodge spam, come up with an entirely new active defense for thief to replace stealth, or give them more passive defense just to keep people playing thief. And any of these could lead to a big rework anyway, so why not just rework it all if that's the case?

[DeceiverX.8361]

3 hours ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

@DeceiverX.8361 I respect your opinions but I have to point out a few things. Preparedness is never going to be baseline. If it does, initiative costs and damage will just be based off of 15 ini instead of 12 and then preparedness just turns into a stat boost.  Its like raising the minimum wage. Either your burger prices are going to skyrocket up to $20 a/o you're going to just not get that $20/hr burgerflipper job.

Stealth will always be a problem to everyone because the people who can't/won't deal with it are going to throw tantrums at anet until they eventually respond. Then anet will respond by reducing the power of thief rather than nerf stealth any further. Because at this point stealth is a few nerfs away from becoming useless. If it becomes useless, anet will either have to lean in on dodge spam, come up with an entirely new active defense for thief to replace stealth, or give them more passive defense just to keep people playing thief. And any of these could lead to a big rework anyway, so why not just rework it all if that's the case?

Skills are pretty much already are balanced to 15 initiative (See:  IArrow).  If we want to really go back in time, most skills used to cost more because there were more traits which helped regenerate initiative.  Even if some skills were raised, they'd be normalized across the lines, which is a good thing.

Few people have problems with intermittent stealth.  Otherwise ranger and mesmer would be constant targets of complaints for their access.  People have a bigger issue with chained and sustained stealth.

While the SA rework was a step in the right direction, there are still so many sources of stealth in the game that moments of counterplay aren't really well-defined and the thief can't be balanced well around them.  Thief's stealth as a mechanic specifically isn't the culprit here so much as it is its access broad-spectrum.  That's why all that's largely needed is a forced End-of-stealth Reveal and some minor tweaks elsewhere.  What you described, especially through the introduction of so many new skills, is a wildly different scale of undertaking when account for the sheer number of art/animation labor involved.

I think the reality of the matter is that ANet actively supports sustained stealth is the bigger problem, as it's frequently used in PvE with non-PvP/WvW players on other professions also actively encouraging its use for skips etc.  So no matter what, people are going to be upset.  Even as a thief I've complained about it for over ten years now, and it's not like that's actually been heeded, either.  ANet doesn't seem to care one way or another.

[Zacchary.6183]

15 minutes ago, DeceiverX.8361 said:

That's why all that's largely needed is a forced End-of-stealth Reveal and some minor tweaks elsewhere.

They could add some revealed traits like revealed training to compensate if they ever decide to rework stealth. Like make the goodies come from revealed rather than stealth.

[bq pd.2148]

43 minutes ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

They could add some revealed traits like revealed training to compensate if they ever decide to rework stealth. Like make the goodies come from revealed rather than stealth.

the traits already work on entering and exiting.  so if you were to camp stealth you will not keep benefiting from them anyway. and if you use the stealth for just a quick reposition +/ stealth attack access, then it has the same effect as adding it to revealed.

so attaching the traits or even just the "exit" part to revealed instead of exiting stealth would do 2 things:

•  remove the almost permastealth any d/p thief has with shadow rejuvenation. also the probably not quite intended interaction between CnD and Walls in WvW. notice this is only a matter of initiative and not the other traits.
• give (SA) thief a nice boost when someone uses a reveal on them.

i think that  if one uses all initiative for stealth with only blips of visiblity in between, especially as the specific form still gives enough information about your location + a predictable animation lock in a game riddled with AoE, it is fine.

however on the topic of initiative restoring traits i think they are in general an issue for the thief, which can especially be seen with the nerfs to axe condition damage due to the ini regen from m7. it might still be ok with m7, but without that trait its just not good enough. this problem we will see with any potential future weapon that can proc that trait reliably and has a decent stealth attack.
but it is not just m7. rending shade is an incredibly strong trait, but the cost for taking it is not having the initiative from shadow rejuvenation, it can work on an axe build in competitive because the axe stealth attack restores ini and again when recalled, but on other weapons it will cost too much.
trickery is not just having a bigger ini pool but also restoring ini from steal and if you can reliably proc it quick pockets.
 

how are weapon skills supposed to be balanced if one build can spamm 2-3 times the skills of another build?
i think it would be good for thief to remove (rework into something else) all/most (maybe keep ini on steal) ini restoring traits and adjust skill costs/natural ini regen to account for that.

 

Edited May 29 by bq pd.2148
wording/structure

[DeceiverX.8361]

2 hours ago, Zacchary.6183 said:

They could add some revealed traits like revealed training to compensate if they ever decide to rework stealth. Like make the goodies come from revealed rather than stealth.

Like bq said, most of the existing traits post-rework already behave on-stealth-gain/on-stealth-end.  Forcing Reveal after the predetermined few seconds already works with these traits.

It's just in most cases, sitting in stealth for multiple seconds has more  value than weaving it.  And if the thief has options in the build, they'll set up their casts perfectly to just barely exit stealth for a fraction of a second to gain full effects before dipping back in, similar to infinitely chaining CnD without becoming visible.

This is why I don't believe a big rework is necessary; most of the existing mechanics already support stealth downtime existing.  Beyond this is largely numbers tweaking and a handful of minor trait changes to make stealth more fair-feeling while still keeping most of the thief's playstyles intact.  And the side effects of giving the thief periods of distinct downtime in stealth access enables non-stealth mechanics to be buffed wholesale, since all thief builds will be brought closer to parity in this regard.

[Zacchary.6183]

Stealth may not need a big rework, but there is still the issue of those players that throw tantrums and anet's propensity as a business to try to keep as many players playing as possible by catering to balance issues brought up. I do like the reveal at the end of stealth as a standalone change for the sake of maybe opening up thief to better designs, don't get me wrong, but I do not see it happening with anet since thief is at a point where any major changes would require more things to be reworked than their laborforce can handle. The problems the writeup tried to address have even been mentioned by you and bq.

Stealth could probably be nerfed with the forced reveal at the end, but as you said anet would have to compensate elsewhere where simple number adjustments might not be enough. They can't break stealth or evasion any further because movement and Impacting Disruption (which defined interrupt gameplay) have been gutted. They would need to bite the bullet and buff either or do a rework on something. Its a lot easier to just handle this mostly experimental class with baby gloves and ignore the usual issues. Writeups like these, however, are meant for throwing out ideas for later dates, like GW3 if it happens.

[vardeleanu.8972]

On 5/17/2024 at 9:36 AM, Zacchary.6183 said:

New offhands!

• Focus adds burning to thief.

 

Didn't even read the whole post, was just looking over, and ..... you do know that torch is a weapon type in this game, right ?

[Zacchary.6183]

On 5/31/2024 at 9:59 PM, vardeleanu.8972 said:

Didn't even read the whole post, was just looking over, and ..... you do know that torch is a weapon type in this game, right ?

Yes and torch is boring on every profession that uses it except for necro.

[Voodoo.3201]

Why would anet rework a class to something different after 10+ years? It would ruin what thief is

[Rezok.2709]

On 5/19/2024 at 5:49 PM, agnlaa.7594 said:

its so funny when people who clearly dont enjoy (or even play) a given class think their opinions on it are relevant. overhauling a class to appeal to those people would just cause its current players quit (see: mechanist)

Ok, but I really want a new class to be added to GW2, because it would be fun. And I do not like thieves, because they do bursty damage with stab and I die :( I really hate thieves, they kill me so much, it's not fair for my warrior. So if they rework thief to new fun class that doesn't kill me, that would be really fun for me. Also, I want my warrior to have buffs. Warrior is strong, they need strong damage. That would be very fun for me. Thieves are skinny, they are not strong. Why do they deal strong damage then? It makes no sense. Please remove the class and add new so I don't die as much in WvW. Also, please I need buffs for my warrior. This would be really fun for me. I hope Anet sees this, because it would be so fun for me.

/s