The only reason were unviable Arganthium sadly, is thieves can still murder us right now, as shown by the latest ESL. Sizer was murdering Helseth the entire game and there wasn’t much that Helseth could do. Otherwise, besides thieves focusing us, I agree with Arganthium. We have a lot of unused potential in our builds, since we’ve only really explored shatter/phantasm. Lockdown still remains to be used still which I love using coming from gw1. Hopefully it will be seen soon :O
Mmm. I just watched the replay (though only the first match, felt that was enough for me).
I almost no respect for Helseth, either as a person or a player. Unfortunately, the video in which he did this is now gone, but…
Yeah, I asked him on his stream to justify some (not all, but some) of the things he said in his rant. He responded by throwing out all kinds of insults at me, and completely and utterly evading the question altogether.
He’s incredibly rude, and it’s not wonder ANet doesn’t want him coming on these forums; he’s a stain on our otherwise decent community.
He’s not a very friendly person, and he’s extremely egotistical (okay, I know that he at least seems to mean a lot of these comments as jokes, but after the fifteenth such joke in a 5-minute span they stop seeming like jokes). He’s probably the person that hates S/D the most out of anybody ever. While I do think there are some things that could use nerfs (but many more things that could use buffs), the way he describes (or, at least, described) it makes it seem like warriors are elementalists compared to S/D thieves. In truth, they’re not. They have some relatively long cast times (empirically speaking) and after casts that can be taken advantage of by a wide variety of different types of play. For instance, Mesmer’s GS is one of the weapons that I point to as being the most natural counter to S/D. The auto attack, in and of itself, can take advantage very easily of those aforementioned cast times.
However, as you play more with S/D thief, and do more experiments with it, you find all kinds of holes in its playstyle. Tankier builds have a theoretical advantage against S/D. Mathematically speaking, the extra vitality that Mesmers have over thieves tends to be far more valuable than thief’s 7% damage reduction. Cripple, chill, and weakness are all absolutely devastating against thieves. Mobility-impeding abilities, like Line/Ring of Warding and Unsteady Ground, are all extremely powerful against S/D.
Then you delve even further into the weaponset, and that’s when you find its ultimate weaknesses. See, S/D relies almost entirely on evades as a defensive mechanism, with mobility via Shadowstep, Infi Signet, and IR taking up the lion’s share of what’s left. Each evade that a thief makes, however, has some kind of weakness. When it’s a regular evade, that weakness is the time right after the evade has finished. When it’s FS, then it’s the last part of the animation (by the way- FS does very little damage. It’s LS that does the vast majority of it). The better thieves know ways to combine the after cast on attacks like Slice and LS with evades, but usually that doesn’t suffice for those other weaknesses. Granted, this isn’t novice-level strategy; this is, IMO, specialist knowledge that only those of us who have stuck with the weaponset since its revival with the FS/LS chain know. However, once you understand its application, S/D almost ceases to exist. The last time I played against another S/D thief on my own, I killed him/her using mostly my auto attack for damage. There’s simply no reason for me to invest time and initiative on non-auto skills when I can basically just auto at the right time in order to kill my opponent.
I’m not saying that S/D is the worst weaponset in the game or anything, but there are a wide variety of specialist’s counters that you can take for virtually any build in the game that take advantage of the weaknesses that S/D does have, and run to the bank with this.
I’ll just add one more thing: Helseth’s near-complete apathy towards the S/D thief was, in general, a mistake, particularly when he was on-point. You can’t beat an S/D thief by playing passively, defensively, or otherwise non-actively. S/D builds are some of the most annoying builds in the game, and that’s because they attack vigorously (no pun intended) and they keep up the onslaught. If you play too defensively, you will lose. That’s why Helseth wasn’t all that effective against Sizer (though Sizer only actually killed Helseth when there were additional players backing him up, if you watched carefully).
