Thief's Time To Shine?

[ManaKing]

you know its pretty bad when the rdms think your worse off than they are, still se does need to do some kind of boost for 1 handed jobs

The only 1H that has a real chance at damage is Axes because they are solid and have Ruinator. Everything else is ill-suited for any real consideration. It's been that way for awhile, but 76+ with everyone making prestige weapons made it extremely obvious. They said they were going to look into it, but I haven't seen them actually identifying it as a problem so an actual fix is probably a long way off.

[Calatilla]

It's been well over a year since the complete disaster that was this developer response to our concerns

Camate, can we get an update as to the developers' plans and vision for THF to "shine":

Because all I really see is the addition of events that marginalise Treasure Hunter (or just render it completely useless) and are very very difficult to get a pickup invite as a THF.

If no one needs THF for treasure hunter

No one uses THF to manipulate enmity

And no one looks for THF to Deal Damage because our DD is weaker than other DD's...

Where does that leave us?

SCH`s proposed new 2hr is taking enmity management away from THF as well, so if people did need it they`d still pick a SCH over a THF so all we`d really have left is TH, which the devs seem to like handing out to everyone else.

And I still call BS on Aura Steal being overpowered, its on a 5min timer, Absorb-Attribute is a spell on a 1min timer and isn't considered overpowered.

AuraSteal(5 minute recast)
Add a Dispel effect to Steal. Occasionally absorbs dispelled effect

Absorb-Attri(1 minute recast)
Steals an enemy's beneficial status effects.

[Nebo]

So what would it take for THF to shine?

I think in a general sense I'd like to see:

Steal type abilities made to be completely battle related. Lowered and seperated timers. No more (worthless) items.

Mug adjusted to deal damage +stun. Lowered timer. No longer takes gil.

Native subtle blow to be added to THF.

Less abilities that are useless without party cooperation. More abilities that are enhanced by party play, but flexible without it.

More opportunities to make use of Sneak and Trick Attack, or other similar abilities added afer level 30. I think the timer bottleneck is restriction enough (especially in the mega haste era), and positional restrictions are unreasonable. I believe the positional nature of the job can be kept by simply changing the positional requirements to positional enhancements.

This could be achieved by adding any number of enhancements when positional conditions are met: increased increased chance for TH proc, Bonus to WS damage, various enmity properties, etc. This way, you'd still want to be positioned properly when you can, but when you can't they don't become useless.

Square Enix to tell us exactly how treasure hunter functions (and to be more transparent about stats in general). This way, we can move past it as a reason we can't have nice things, because beyond TH2, it really doesn't seem to do much of anything that can be quantified without large statistical samples.

[Mirage]

More opportunities to make use of Sneak and Trick Attack, or other similar abilities added afer level 30. I think the timer bottleneck is restriction enough (especially in the mega haste era), and positional restrictions are unreasonable. I believe the positional nature of the job can be kept by simply changing the positional requirements to positional enhancements.

This could be achieved by adding any number of enhancements when positional conditions are met: increased increased chance for TH proc, Bonus to WS damage, various enmity properties, etc. This way, you'd still want to be positioned properly when you can, but when you can't they don't become useless.

Personally, I'd suggest sneak attack to be changed so that when used, it would always be a critical hit with 100% accuracy regardless of positioning (main thf only, tie it to the "Assassin" job trait), but if you did it from the sides of the enemy, you'd get 50% of the damage boost from dex, and from behind, 100% of the dex damage boost. Maybe also add a chance of forcing more than one critical hit when performed from the sides and behind (and of course anywhere with Bully). The chance of this could be increased further by the amount of merits put into SA recast, where 5 merits would grant a 100% critical hit rate on the second attack in your attack round as well. The base rate could be 50%, +10% per merit.

As for trick attack, sort of the same deal. Critical hit anywhere, but damage boost from agi would only take effect if used behind another player. Perhaps the 100% accuracy part should still require correct positioning, seeing as SA would already force 100% accuracy once a minute. As with SA, merits put in recast timer would increase the chance of multiple forced critical hits.

[Lokithor]

Personally, I'd suggest sneak attack to be changed so that when used, it would always be a critical hit with 100% accuracy regardless of positioning (main thf only, tie it to the "Assassin" job trait), but if you did it from the sides of the enemy, you'd get 50% of the damage boost from dex, and from behind, 100% of the dex damage boost. Maybe also add a chance of forcing more than one critical hit when performed from the sides and behind (and of course anywhere with Bully). The chance of this could be increased further by the amount of merits put into SA recast, where 5 merits would grant a 100% critical hit rate on the second attack in your attack round as well. The base rate could be 50%, +10% per merit.

As for trick attack, sort of the same deal. Critical hit anywhere, but damage boost from agi would only take effect if used behind another player. Perhaps the 100% accuracy part should still require correct positioning, seeing as SA would already force 100% accuracy once a minute. As with SA, merits put in recast timer would increase the chance of multiple forced critical hits.

Like! It would be nice to be able to use my hard earned Rudra's Storm when soloing more often than just when Bully is up.

[Nebo]

Personally, I'd suggest sneak attack to be changed so that when used, it would always be a critical hit with 100% accuracy regardless of positioning (main thf only, tie it to the "Assassin" job trait), but if you did it from the sides of the enemy, you'd get 50% of the damage boost from dex, and from behind, 100% of the dex damage boost. Maybe also add a chance of forcing more than one critical hit when performed from the sides and behind (and of course anywhere with Bully). The chance of this could be increased further by the amount of merits put into SA recast, where 5 merits would grant a 100% critical hit rate on the second attack in your attack round as well. The base rate could be 50%, +10% per merit.

As for trick attack, sort of the same deal. Critical hit anywhere, but damage boost from agi would only take effect if used behind another player. Perhaps the 100% accuracy part should still require correct positioning, seeing as SA would already force 100% accuracy once a minute. As with SA, merits put in recast timer would increase the chance of multiple forced critical hits.

The major issue that I have with ideas like this, is that while it does solve the problem of "more opportunities to use SA and TA," what it actually does is lower our (already low) overal damage potential with SA and TA as a trade off....Which is a direction I personally would like to steer away from.

I would much rather they stay the same damage but "enhanced" in some other way by being positioanlly aligned.

[Mirage]

Yep, and when you were in a party situation, it would be stronger as well, because of the chance of a second critical hit with your off-hand, as well as you would be less likely to miss out on a lot of damage because of Spinning Mob Syndrome, as the dex boost from SA would work from 75% of all possible directions instead of just behind, even if you did lose some damage from the sides.

This would be useful when the mob has cone-AoE attacks that you don't want your DDs to be within as well. They could stay outside the AoE, but even if they drew hate from their position on the sides of the mob, they'd never completely destroy your SAs, only halve the SA damage boost, and still get a guaranteed unmissable crit.

Of course, with my suggestion, TAs could still be entirely screwed up, but TAs generally aren't suffering from spinning mob syndrome, as you just need the player in front of you to not move.

[Mirage]

The way I see it, this changes SA from a behind-only attack to a guaranteed damage boost that grows stronger the better your positioning is, and when your positioning is perfect, you get an even higher potential damage output than SA currently offers, by allowing a secondary hit to crit as well. The change also makes it a bit more worth it to get SA recast merits, as it would increase the damage output in addition to frequency.

I cannot see how my suggestion would lower potential damage output. If you perform this new SA like you performed your old SAs, the damage would be a bit higher at best, but never lower. In the cases where your old SAs would be completely ruined because of a suddenly turning mob, you would with the new SA still get a reasonable damage boost, because the critical hit and 100% hit rate is still guaranteed, and you still get 50% of your dex applied instead of 0%.

While I am sure no thief (me included) would mind having the full SA damage from any direction of the mob at any time, it goes against the idea of the attack being, well, a sneaky attack, and I'm not sure if SE would like an idea like that.

Therefore, I constructed an idea that would both keep the concept of the job ability in place (big damage when sneaky), but still make the ability worth the time spent activating it while solo (at least for certain WSes), as well as making it even stronger and safer (much lower risk of completely wasting it) than it currently is in party play.

What I'm going for here is (sorry for saying this, really) balance. I am hoping that my idea is moderate enough for SE to seriously consider it, and that it is still a noticable boost to thieves by making the abilities more versatile, safer, and also have a slightly higher max damage potential.

And of course, I do not think the adjustments to thief should stop at sneak/trick attack adjustments. Hopefully, we would get this in addition to other improvements.

[Nebo]

It would lower damage potential because you are talking about lowered damage for the trade of flexibility of use.

IE full damage potential now would be riding SA TA timers with exact positional accuracy.

Your way would be riding timers and hiting from the front/side etc for less than full damage, so the damage potential for using SA TA anywhere other than perfect position would be lower. You are spending the same timer to do less damage.

I am saying that I don't feel that lowering damage potential as a trade off for flexibility is justified.

As for balance? Even if we could spam full powered SA/TA from any direction, any position at any time....we'd still be quite far behind other DD's full potential.

[Babekeke]

It would lower damage potential because you are talking about lowered damage for the trade of flexibility of use.

IE full damage potential now would be riding SA TA timers with exact positional accuracy.

Your way would be riding timers and hiting from the front/side etc for less than full damage, so the damage potential for using SA TA anywhere other than perfect position would be lower. You are spending the same timer to do less damage.

I am saying that I don't feel that lowering damage potential as a trade off for flexibility is justified.

As for balance? Even if we could spam full powered SA/TA from any direction, any position at any time....we'd still be quite far behind other DD's full potential.

No, it's still the same damage potential. Mirage isn't saying make SA damage lower when from behind, just make it higher when hit from the sides. The potential to ride SATA timers with perfect accuracy is still there, but if the mob turns on you as you hit your 'assassin's charge > sneak attack > weaponskill' macro, there's nothing you can do as you can't move once that's initiated. This is where Mirage's idea would mean you didn't completely waste your 50-60 second JA as it still helped to add more damage than it currently would.