Guild Wars 2

Everyone knows thieves are a controversial topic right now thanks to their ability to stay in stealth for the majority of the time, and invisible nearly all the time thanks to culling. But I have one question.

Has anyone tried fielding 10-15 thieves built for stealth in a single coordinated group with voice chat? EDIT: 10-15 is likely overkill. 8 thieves should be sufficient to lock down a BL on supplies.

Seems to me that small number of coordinated thieves working in pairs could easily shut down an enemies dolyaks and supply camps, providing a ridiculous advantage for their entire Battleground. Seems just a true with the neutral NPC camps, in fact that only helps their cause.

Because then the question becomes: How do you stop that?

Honestly I have no answer. To guard a dolyak vs 2 thieves would be nearly impossible without committing an enormous force. Even to guard a supply camp would take 3-8 people, giving a clear numerical advatage to the team utilizing the thief squad. 2-4 people caught in the open would be easily handled by such thief pairings as well, adding the additional benefit of ganking to their activities.

Even if you DID provide substantial resistance in a single area you’d leave other areas vulnerable OR they could just bring the rest of the thief squad in to take out the entrenched camp.

I’m really not trying to be sarcastic. Has anyone organized this and, if so, how would you stop this?

Bonus Points: Coordinate an experiment for me and make a video showing how effective or ineffective this is. I’d be interested in seeing the results.

I’ve seen 20+ guys stopped on a camp, for almost 5 minutes, trying to cap it while one guy was almost perma-stealth on it. Probably using the last skill of the dagger to do it.
I’ve also seen 2 berseker thieves insta-owning a 5-man group.

Anyway, it’s certainly effective, even without 10-15 guys. In fact, it seems a bit too much for perfect coordination.

Charmide.4891:

I’ve seen 20+ guys stopped on a camp, for almost 5 minutes, trying to cap it while one guy was almost perma-stealth on it. Probably using the last skill of the dagger to do it.
I’ve also seen 2 berseker thieves insta-owning a 5-man group.

Anyway, it’s certainly effective, even without 10-15 guys. In fact, it seems a bit too much for perfect coordination.

While you may have a point on that, it has been beating to death and is currently at an impasse.

I am aware however that WvW is not a solo or duo experience but a team environment and coordinated guilds are normal even on smaller or lower tier servers. Thus I felt that it would be good to know/test the impact of a coordinated group of thieves on large scale WvW, not just small scale.

How well a class compliments it’s realm of stacks with each other or certain classes is actually more important to WvW than the individual abilities of a class. No doubt there are other strong combinations, but this is the one that worries me most atm and why I started this thread.

So I’d really like a testimonials and if possible a recorded test run of this idea by a coordinated guild out there if possible.

This should probably be in the thief class forums, but yeah it would be really deadly… In fact I have made a thief team build that is actually not based on stealth, but is still insane.

Kysin.6349:

This should probably be in the thief class forums, but yeah it would be really deadly… In fact I have made a thief team build that is actually not based on stealth, but is still insane.

Hmmm, I am unsure. I’ll leave it up to a mod. On one hand it’s intimately involved with thieves. On the other hand the impact and core of the question is still WvW balance and tactics.

Thief yak slapping already happens… You have to fan out and scan a wide area to find/take out the thieves before they get anywhere near the dolyaks or they’ll just suicide instagib them. It is a stupidly effective tactic as-is since yaks are so squishy.

Guarding a camp vs a few thieves is extremely easy unless they go really tanky builds, in which case you have all day to respond.
If you regularly lose camps to small groups of anything you’re messing up badly.

I have yet to see people coordinating 5+ dagger storms to aoe spike a zerg, I’m sure that would be pretty effective.

yertle.5837:

Thief yak slapping already happens… You have to fan out and scan a wide area to find/take out the thieves before they get anywhere near the dolyaks or they’ll just suicide instagib them. It is a stupidly effective tactic as-is since yaks are so squishy.

Guarding a camp vs a few thieves is extremely easy unless they go really tanky builds, in which case you have all day to respond.
If you regularly lose camps to small groups of anything you’re messing up badly.

I have yet to see people coordinating 5+ dagger storms to aoe spike a zerg, I’m sure that would be pretty effective.

That’s just it, so far all thieves hitting supply camps have been rather random PUG groupings. But if you actually had 2 smart thieves they could pretty much spike the guards with precision 1-2 at a time and return until the defenses were light enough to spike a few players in the camp. And if they called in more than just the 2 the camp would have real issues being defended by even a larger number of people. A coordinated Dagger Storm isn’t the only worry.

As far as yak slapping goes fanning out and securing the area works on some locales but not others and requires far in excess of the amount of thieves you are trying to stop. Like 5:1 odds. Especially if they just pick one of the squishy members and take out one of your point men. Many yak routes however contain perfect ambush locales involving broken lines of sights and even different levels of terrain that are not horribly big drops.

I’ve seen a few people using the party of theives dagger storm to mow down a zerg, I think it was used by SFD on MAG server. I believe they also had a meteor storming party of elementalists that were putting on the hurt to our zergs.

I myself have been a part of some thief squads, though coordination is always a lot harder in live-fire situations. We noticed our greatest strength was the target dropping, it was easy for a couple of us to disengage while another couple came to clean up the rest of the fight. The foes had a hard time, understandably, keeping track of any one of us to finish us off.

So nobody has done this yet I take it?

we took out a siege position at redvale with chaining 3 thieves stealth the other day with two other guys in our group worked really nicely.

Who needs stealth if you have 15 thieves?

Here’s the idea, have all thieves spec in either full glass cannon mode or switch in a couple of valkyrie to add some HP. All thieves should use Signet of Malice and atleast Shadow Step.

Create a rotation of Dagger Storm, #1 Thief Shadow Step in, Dagger Storm while the rest either spams SB or Dancing Dagger, when #1 Thief’s Dagger Storm is done Shadow Return and make #2 Shadow Step in with his Dagger Storm while the rest still spams Dancing Dagger/SB. When #2 is done Shadow Step out, #3 goes. Rinse repeat untill #15 at which time the CD of Dagger Storm of #1 should be done.

I know what you’re thinking, that’s stupid. You should just let 5/6 Thieves go in at once all pop Dagger Storm and whenever most enemies are in down state let another 5/6 Thieves pop in and finish them off with Dagger Storm. While an amazing burst you are still thoroughly screwed if another zerg pops in after that.

I honestly don’t think there is a proper way to stop a group of 15 Thieves doing Dagger Storm after each other. However coordinating this is a proper pain in the kitten

Tbh I think this thread is silly.

Not because you’re wrong but because if someone has gone to the effort of setting up a well coordinated group of thief’s THE single worst thing they could do would be to post about it here.

As soon as you admit to coordinating/participating in such a thing the next step in that process is having a discussion about that. Is it/isn’t it fair, balance, counters etc etc. If it doesn’t happen, you don’t need to do anything right?

15 thieves all using thieves guild would be insane lol, 15 run in and boom army of 60 instantly, not many zergs in the open would be able to handle that, near forts and towers is another story, thieves do not do to well against heavy aoe, but with the appropriate builds and gearing could be one hell of an army.

I run in a pretty well organised unit and whilst there are classes that we do stack more of or in some cases out right prefer, there is an upward limit where this won’t be as effective. We often have a few thieves with us but I have to say that without our guardians our effectiveness is reduced dramatically.

Not to say the idea isn’t good to run as a novelty but I’d suggest that when you go past a 5 man party running all of the same class is probably not going to be that beneficial. 5 man ninja capping thieves though is a definate win! also thieves as a defensive team for keeps is also very very nice 4 thieves + 1 guardian is the combo i’d go for though.

My guild is small, never more than 2 groups, and we constantly field all thieves as each of us has an 80 thief. The real power is in the size of a zerg you can drop with alternating spinning blades.

cannons.8109:

A homogeneous group of anything (except rangers) would be awesome. 15 mesmers would take the cake.

Mesmers are strong but mesmers are also far less zerg proof than thieves. They don’t have the mobility, ease of traveling without getting zerg rolled, the ability to deal spike damage while invisible, or the ability to choose thier battles and escape darn near anything. I’m also talking about a max of 15 people in pairs coordinating to utterly shut down all supply on a battleground.

In all honesty the 15 number is likely massive overkill. You’d only need like 8 thieves. That is 4 groups of 2 thieves each roaming and killing dolyaks/supply camps.

Kyus.3812:

I run in a pretty well organised unit and whilst there are classes that we do stack more of or in some cases out right prefer, there is an upward limit where this won’t be as effective. We often have a few thieves with us but I have to say that without our guardians our effectiveness is reduced dramatically.

Not to say the idea isn’t good to run as a novelty but I’d suggest that when you go past a 5 man party running all of the same class is probably not going to be that beneficial. 5 man ninja capping thieves though is a definate win! also thieves as a defensive team for keeps is also very very nice 4 thieves + 1 guardian is the combo i’d go for though.

What I meant was not them all running together. Them running in teams of 2. No other profession can run a duo that has the mobility, spike damage, or ability to avoid being run down by zergs that a thief duo has. They also have far higher survivability than thier hp/armor suggests thanks to the massive amount of stealth and the ability to escape nearly any fight.

They could easily 2 man both camps and dolyaks while picking off the occasional small group of people. If needed the 2 man groups could gather up to break a somewhat fortified position.

With a minimum of people you could literally shut down supplies for an entire BL. To the best of my knowledge no other class can do this safely and effectively like a thief can. Even if you ambushed them while they were taking a camp the chance that at least 1 thief would escape would be very high unless they had no situational awareness. I’ve had a guild mate show me the incredible sneak rezzing prowess of thieves so 1 escaping is all you need lol.

being a thief myself i can sadly say that most thiefs are not good enough to do the things you say(not even saying those things take skill people are just that bad) and it would take multiple server transfers to build asquad of more than 5 thiefs that are any good

Helathir.3647:

being a thief myself i can sadly say that most thiefs are not good enough to do the things you say(not even saying those things take skill people are just that bad) and it would take multiple server transfers to build asquad of more than 5 thiefs that are any good

Ya, it requires you to do more than stealth and spam heart-seeker lol.

Most servers seem to be about 40% thieves, with a lot of upscaled thieves currently being levelled in WvW – so we can’t be too far away from this ‘squad’ being a reality in a big way.

I group up with a couple other thieves in my guild regularly for 2 man defense teams, covert ops, supply camp raiding, scouting, etc. I run a more p/d condition build and the others run more spike backstab builds. It is a pretty sick combo to immobilize someone for the backstab spike. In general it is a good combo because of the mobility, escape, and strong burst and 1vX skills. We also like to abuse “Spin to Win” in combo and have even coordinated steals on warriors so we get double “Spin to Win” while defending a keep/tower.

To be fair any large group of a single class could be really nasty.

Imagine a large Guardian squad at pangloss? Staff 5 all day long.

As an engineer. I used to regularly take part in supply capping and yak assassination groups (back before I got commander title).

My group generally consisted of 1 engineer + 1 thief (with upwards to 1 engineer + 3 thieves). Engineer works just as well as thief does. Engineer burst damage is just as high as thief, and could be sustained after the initial mega burst. As 1 engi+ 1 thief, we could kill yaks that were guarded by up to 5 players and live through it. We were able to reliably suicide kill yaks guarded by up to ~8-10 players.

That was 2 players keeping 5+ players occupied per yak/supply camp (total of 10-15 players). When we bumped our crew up to 1 engi + 3 thief, we were taking out yaks that were guarded by 15+

Fun times, I miss those guys… they stopped playing :[

emoleas.4309:

As an engineer. I used to regularly take part in supply capping and yak assassination groups (back before I got commander title).

My group generally consisted of 1 engineer + 1 thief (with upwards to 1 engineer + 3 thieves). Engineer works just as well as thief does. Engineer burst damage is just as high as thief, and could be sustained after the initial mega burst. As 1 engi+ 1 thief, we could kill yaks that were guarded by up to 5 players and live through it. We were able to reliably suicide kill yaks guarded by up to ~8-10 players.

That was 2 players keeping 5+ players occupied per yak/supply camp (total of 10-15 players). When we bumped our crew up to 1 engi + 3 thief, we were taking out yaks that were guarded by 15+

Fun times, I miss those guys… they stopped playing :[

Agreed that your damage is just as high, but you lose in every other respect for the needs of the situation. Thief is more mobile than you (even with speedy kits perma swiftness), is extremely difficult to zerg down (movement speed, infiltrators arrow, stealth, etc.), can pick and choose their fights easier (same as last), and can deal damage while invisible. The thief is also harder to kill than you are if you are burst build because their glassiness is offset by aforementioned stealth and mobility.

2 Thieves should be able to run in, kill the yak, and have a very high chance of escaping alive. There should be no suicide run. Having thieves guild or dagger storm to use based on situation is also a huge advantage in this.

I like engineer, and they are good and versatile, but they in no way compete with a thief in this department. Not even close.

Katsumoto.9452:

To be fair any large group of a single class could be really nasty.

Imagine a large Guardian squad at pangloss? Staff 5 all day long.

Cool, you can bunker up in pangalos with a large amount of guardians and be immovable. Meanwhile half the amount of thieves could control every supply camp and dolyak on the map.

Tough guardians may be but they are not zerg proof even with siege. Also matches are not won by holding a single point. They are won by shutting down enemy supply. Without supply every fortification on the map will eventually fall unless the enemy has overwhelming odds.

Rule #1 of WvW: You cannot hold anything without supply. Supply is the lifeblood of your towers and keeps.

Rule #2: Fortify every new acquisition you plan on keeping immediately or you will not keeping. Rule #2 relies on Rule #1.

someone made a guild specifically for wvw theives so they can do what you are saying

http://theassassinclan.enjin.com/home

Ralathar.7236:

Katsumoto.9452:

To be fair any large group of a single class could be really nasty.

Imagine a large Guardian squad at pangloss? Staff 5 all day long.

Cool, you can bunker up in pangalos with a large amount of guardians and be immovable. Meanwhile half the amount of thieves could control every supply camp and dolyak on the map.

Tough guardians may be but they are not zerg proof even with siege. Also matches are not won by holding a single point. They are won by shutting down enemy supply. Without supply every fortification on the map will eventually fall unless the enemy has overwhelming odds.

Rule #1 of WvW: You cannot hold anything without supply. Supply is the lifeblood of your towers and keeps.

Rule #2: Fortify every new acquisition you plan on keeping immediately or you will not keeping. Rule #2 relies on Rule #1.

Rule number 1 of reading: Never make assumptions when you have literally no ground for making them.
Rule number 2 of reading: Never read something, make assumptions about it and then talk about it entirely based on those assumptions, disregarding the point which was quite clearly stated.

The point was any single class team can do things highly effectively. No kitten are Guardians not going to be more mobile than Thieves.

Also, no. It would take an incredibly stupid enemy server to let half the amount of Guardians it takes to hold Pangloss, take the whole maps supply if that number were Thieves. Eventually people actually take said camps back, and eventually after that they defend them.

Incidentally OP. Assuming you couldn’t stop it (which obviously isn’t true), then you’d simply commit some of your own Thieves to do the same to them. That way your numbers are no more spread than theirs.

Katsumoto.9452:

Ralathar.7236:

Katsumoto.9452:

To be fair any large group of a single class could be really nasty.

Imagine a large Guardian squad at pangloss? Staff 5 all day long.

Cool, you can bunker up in pangalos with a large amount of guardians and be immovable. Meanwhile half the amount of thieves could control every supply camp and dolyak on the map.

Tough guardians may be but they are not zerg proof even with siege. Also matches are not won by holding a single point. They are won by shutting down enemy supply. Without supply every fortification on the map will eventually fall unless the enemy has overwhelming odds.

Rule #1 of WvW: You cannot hold anything without supply. Supply is the lifeblood of your towers and keeps.

Rule #2: Fortify every new acquisition you plan on keeping immediately or you will not keeping. Rule #2 relies on Rule #1.

Rule number 1 of reading: Never make assumptions when you have literally no ground for making them.
Rule number 2 of reading: Never read something, make assumptions about it and then talk about it entirely based on those assumptions, disregarding the point which was quite clearly stated.

The point was any single class team can do things highly effectively. No kitten are Guardians not going to be more mobile than Thieves.

You would have a point if your comment wasn’t out of context, less effective, and requiring more players. The point of this thread is that less than 2 full groups of thieves can shut down WvW supply, which is one of the most important aspects of WvW.

The same amount of guardians have different strengths tis true, but they can make nowhere near the same impact on the entire map. Thus even if you put everything else aside they are on completely different levels.

Also, no. It would take an incredibly stupid enemy server to let half the amount of Guardians it takes to hold Pangloss, take the whole maps supply if that number were Thieves. Eventually people actually take said camps back, and eventually after that they defend them.

Yes people would take the supply camps back, and they would be recaptured by thieves shortly afterwards. No dolyaks would make it through at all without rediculous amounts of escorts for a small amount of people. Likewise cmaps could not be successfully defended without assigning alot of people to defend the individual camps.

Remember that the thieves are mobile. If you place 8 people to defend a supply camp they can easily gather up all 8 thieves and still take that supply camp. With that many thieves around you’d be hard pressed to pick out a single one for killing.

They also have the option of helping to attack towers and keeps. Because if you are forced to leave soldiers behind to guard your supply lines then your presence on defenses will be much lessened unless you are already losing. Should those supply camp defenders rejoin the fight the thieves could easily slip away from the battle and retake the camp in short order again.

Incidentally OP. Assuming you couldn’t stop it (which obviously isn’t true), then you’d simply commit some of your own Thieves to do the same to them. That way your numbers are no more spread than theirs.

Needing to counter something with the exact same thing is the ultimate sign of something that is broken. It means nothing else is effective enough to stop it and thus you would have to do it as well to stand a chance.

Right now this hasn’t been much of an issue because it requires coordination and because other broken issues are currently ruling WvW. Turtling and portal bombs currently rule WvW and minimalize the need for a long range strategy like thieves cutting off supply completely. Why take X long to do it when you can use Y and do it faster.

However turtling and portal bombing will ultimately be tweaked and balanced out. At that time tactics like this will see much more use. The tactic itself is sound and fine. The fact that thieves doing it are so effective and nigh unstoppable however is not. THAT is a fact that hurts both profession and WvW balance.

(FYI alot of things that get nerfed well into a game’s life span are things that were always present but not highly abused until easier abuses got fixed or nerfed. Dark Age of Camelot was actually a pretty good example of some of this)

gidorah.4960:

someone made a guild specifically for wvw theives so they can do what you are saying

http://theassassinclan.enjin.com/home

That will be scary when they become experienced with working together and more master the ins and outs of the thief class.