- Dec. 10th Balance Preview
Thief:
One of the issues we are working on for thieves this patch is the dependence on the traits which boost initiative. We did this by shaving a significant amount of initiative gain from these traits while simultaneously boosting the generic rate of initiative gain by 33%. We have also somewhat reduced the effectiveness of high evasion thieves by reducing vigor up time and adding some cast time to the Shadow Return skill on the sword. This prevents these thieves from evading too much and too easily dealing with being disabled (stun, daze, fear, knockdown, etc.). Also we are trying to improve the survivability of thieves in the Acrobatics line through easier access to the Hard to Catch trait and increased effectiveness of the Assassin’s Reward trait. This will reward thieves who are actively engaged in the fight rather than those who are just dodging over and over again. The change to Infusion of Shadow is meant to stop players from gaining initiative by applying stealth while already in stealth. This should keep thieves from being able to recharge all of their power while idling in a very long stealth. We felt that using a lot of different abilities to maintain stealth is ok, but re-using the same ability over and over for almost permanent stealth was just bad for the game, especially when gaining large amounts of initiative.
•Increased the base rate of initiative gain from .75/second to 1/second.
•Shadow Return on Sword. Renamed to Infiltrator’s return. Added a 1/4s cast time.
•Pistol Whip. Reduced the after cast on the first half of this skill by .25 seconds.
•Deadly Arts VI – Sundering Strikes. Increased the trigger chance from 50%. Remove ICD. Decrease Vulnerability duration to 6s.
•Critical Strikes VI – Practiced Tolerance. Increased conversion from 5% to 7%.
•Critical Strikes 15 – Opportunist. Increased trigger chance to 50%. Increase cooldown from 1s to 5s.
•Critical Strikes VIII – Signet Use. Reduced initiative gain from 2 to 1.
•Critical Strike X – Critical Haste. Increase trigger chance to 25%.
•Shadow Arts V – Infusion of Shadow – This trait functionality has been changed to “Gain initiative when you enter stealth.” 2 init.
•Acrobatics III – Vigorous Recovery. Reduced Vigor duration to 4s from 8s.
•Acrobatics IV – Assassin’s Retreat. Increased swiftness duration to 20s.
•Acrobatics IX – Quick Recovery. Reduced initiative gain from 2 to 1.
•Acrobatics X – Assassins Reward. Increased healing scaling by 35%. Moved to Grandmaster Tier.
•Acrobatics XI – Hard to catch. Moved to Master Tier.
•Trickery 5 – Kleptomaniac. Reduce initiative gain from 3 to 2.
•Trickery IV – Flanking Strikes. Move to Master tier.
•Trickery VII – Bountiful Theft. Reduced vigor duration to from 15s to 8s.
•Trickery VIII – Trickster. Move to Adept tier.