Feedback:User/Mythwyn/Thief Balance: Stealing & Initiative
Thief Balance: Stealing & Initiative | |
|---|---|
| User | Mythwyn |
| Categories | Mechanics |
The Thief is an Assassin with the added ability to "steal" environmental weapons, hence the name.
I've been making a study of the various professions via the wiki and game play footage, as well as commentary from press with beta access. From what I can tell the Thief needs some minor "tweaking" in the area of initiative regeneration. Here are my thoughts why.
The Thief is an adventure class fighter, designed for quick melee attacks, the Thief has very limited "support" or "control" abilities, and by design should be considered to be a "damage" profession.
The Thief as a "damage" profession is constrained, due to the fact that initiative is depleted by combat, as opposed to gained by it, as it is for a Warrior.
While the concept of having no "cool-down" on skills, allows for quick bursts of damage, the current rate and means of regeneration of initiative would seem to excessively limit the usefulness of the Thief as a fighter. Given the starting pool of initiative, and the average cost of skill activation of 3-6 initiative, the Thief is only good for 2 or possible 3 skills before depletion, and must wait 10 seconds to recover the initiative pool to full, without other influencing factors. It is the influencing factors that are the cause for re-evaluating the balance of the Thief.
The Thief has 1 known weapon skill (Aquatic) that will gain initiative if you successfully block. In Utility skills you have 1 Signet that speeds regeneration if not activated, and 1 evade skill that regenerates initiative. Compared to the Warrior who can regain adrenaline via 3 weapon skills (1 of them Aquatic) and 4 Utility skills, and the possible imbalance starts to become visible. While gaining adrenaline though combat instead of depleting it, the Warrior still has more options of regenerating their skill activation resource then the Thief.
If it is the goal of Guild Wars 2, by moving from the Tank, DPS, Healer to Damage, Control, Support, how is the Thief profession meant to fulfill their role when attacking works against the ability to attack?
I understand that the two professions are not meant to function in the same way, a Thief has much lower armor and cannot stand toe to toe and fight like a Warrior, the Thief must evade, hide and sneak attack to be effective, but it should be a style of combat, not the ability to sustain a fight, that separates the professions. I think the initiative concept is fine and should work as intended, but the lack of skills that return initiative, as well as the trait system need to be reconsidered.
The Thief trait lines have 1 significant flaw that directly affects the balancing of Thief initiative. In the Thief traits, Shadow Arts and Acrobatics each have 2 traits that either grant initiative or improve regeneration, to select all 4 would required an investment of 40 points into those two trait lines, not unreasonable given the secondary gains to Toughness & Vitality.
Now for the issue, there are 4 additional traits that provide initiative benefits, within the Trickery line, and they are considerable, not the least of which is [+5 maximum initiative to your total pool size].
The Trickery trait line improves cunning (stealing) and malice. It would require an investment of 20 points in this line to fully benefit from all 4 initiative options. It's not reasonable to attempt to gain all initiative trait line benefits from all 3 lines.
The organization of the bulk of the initiative benefits into the Trickery line (4 vs. 2), means minimal benefits if you invest in more practical things like Power, Precision, Toughness, and Vitality.
My suggestion is simply this, move the 4 initiative boon traits out of Trickery into the other 4 trait lines, keep the Trickery line focused to "stealing" related boons, so that players who wish to forego the "stealing" aspect of the profession, do not have to compromise much more relevant trait lines to allow those looking to play a damage class profession to do so. If other players feel that "stealing" brings an element of fun or ability to their playing the Thief, then they will have the option of investing trait points in the Trickery line. The "stealing" feature of the game should not be forced as an element of play style, by necessitating investment in it.
Add a couple of initiative gain skills to weapon or utility and that should make the Thief a viable damage profession.
