(edited by Ivonbeton.6814)
A possible thief PVE build
Anyone? Some feedback would be appreciated!
I’m really iffy on Toughness on the whole. Simply because like every other game, you need enormous amounts of it for it to really start to be effective(noticeable outside of some kind of parser). I think vit helps us out a lot more. That aside, the traits for that tree are promising.
As for the 100% from stealth, if you’re going to be spamming pistol from stealth, the trait is worthless, since only the first hit would get the 100% bonus. Better to go with Executioner(20% more damage when target under 50%).
Depending on party composition, this will hit an artificial cap on damage fairly quickly, since a target can only have 25 stacks of bleeds on at any one time. Hopefully ANet does something about that soon.
I can see why you went up the precision tree, but with a condition heavy build, power is really the way to go(someone else will have to give you numbers, I’m a flat damage kinda guy m’self).
And to address the concern about the 10% damage when over 6 ini, You could find 5 points somewhere(acro imo) and stick those points into Trickery for the extra ini there. As long as you’re not spamming your abilities willy-nilly, and you’re making liberal use of Steal, then you shouldn’t get under very often. I will often go under 6 on boss fights once they’re close to dying to try and speed the process along a little bit.
My 2 pence.
every time i try to make Pistol/Dagger work in PvE i end up abandoning it in under an hour of playtesting out in the wild.
P/D just has really low damage, and its all single target. What the weapon set excels in is being REALLY slippery and hard to catch (with both a jump-back and a stealth skill on the weapon bar) while providing ranged harrassment. its an attrition build that has alot of merit in PvP. in PvE i see no reason to use this. none of the advantages of this weapon set matter at all in PvE.
P/D was awesome build and fun to play with, however the damage makes it having the short end of the stick as you cannot use your sneak attack unless you are on top of the face of your enemy as well.
its all single target.
This is what kills pistol mainhand for me in PvE. AE attacks just blow single-target attacks away in efficiency as soon as you start engaging multiple targets, and usually PvE is target rich enough that you should always be pulling and killing 3+ at once.
I also found thief to be most effective with condition damage. It wasnt until I got to 80 and got my crit gear together that conventional damage builds became more effective. I leveled from 1-80 in under 50hours by stacking condition damage gear and just luring massive groups of enemies into caltrops + deathblossoming over them and stealthing.
Thanks for the feedback guys! I know the pistol is about single target damage, I wanted to create a build which has both survivability/utility and damage. most of the time I’m using my shortbow for damage because of the range and aoe. But when things get tense you can switch to the P/D and still do somewhat decent damage. Or do you think it’s not worth it? I actually wanted to focus less on condition damage and more on physical damage, the only reason I went with trickery is for the extra initiative. But that might have been a bad decision, since I lose 100 power.
I’ve been playing with condition builds a lot, but I wanted to try and create something which is useful in more situations. A lot of time to condition damage is wasted because of the bleed stacking limit. Plus damaging constructions is a pain in the *.
I’ve been playing around with a build similar to this one and so far I feel like I add so much to a team that other classes can’t. I can reset aggro on teammates a lot, I can revive safely and sometimes survive insane situations. But yeah, the damage could be better, so I’m trying to up it. Last night I was doing a dungeon, most of my party got instagibbed, thanks to my thoughness and (albeit moderate) vitality I survived with a flikker of health (my stealth went up due to the massive damage). I then evaded the boss his attack, called out the thieves guild, evaded another attack, stealthed and proceeded to revive my entire team. With most of my previous builds I would have been one dead thief.
@CF Skyy : I didn’t know most of those facts, so thanks for that! Saves me the dissapointment from finding out myself hehe. The fact that the 100% crit only works with the first shot sort of defeats the idea behind my build, which is a shame. So do you think that taking 10 points from critical and 10 from trickery to put them into deadly would up the damage?
I see your point when you talk about toughness, which is why I’m thinking about getting some runes which add enough toughness, since it’s inherent to the shadow arts trait line, it might be better to just roll with it, or does that seem like a bad idea?
(edited by Ivonbeton.6814)
Pistol dagger is very good for kiting groups of up to 4 mobs. Simply autoattack one target while running in a tight circle and hit dancing dagger every few seconds as initiative allows. You can kite more targets than this just as long as dancing dagger gets all of them.
Or you could take shortbow and caltrops-on-dodge and just dodge and spam #1 to kill those same four mobs four times faster.
The only time I take P/D for kiting is against champions where there aren’t enough targets to make shortbow worthwhile.
@Ivonbeton: I’d still learn towards the vitality side of things to balance it out. Toughness doesn’t make a lot of sense(imo) if you don’t have the HP to back it up; but that goes for Vit too. Just cause you have lots of HP doesn’t stop some mobs from hitting like a train.
As far as the traits go, I think it’s kind of a toss up. Executioner is a strong talent(seriously, 20% damage is amazing). But going 20 points into Deadly Arts could net you some really amazing things as well. Specifically, if you pick up Sundering Strikes and Quick Venom. Sundering Strikes is a 40% chance on crit to cause Vulnerability for 5 seconds, the 15 point talent Lotus Poison causes Weakness for 3 seconds whenever you poison the mob, and Quick Venoms makes your poisons recharge 20% faster. And while all of that sounds amazing(it is), you’re losing some precision, 100 Condition Damage, the 3 Initiative refund on Steal, and Either Flanking Strikes or Thrill of the Crime. Thrill of the Crime btw is pretty beast if you can hit your party with it.
Just comes down to how you wish to build your character.
Gotta say though, talking about this with you has made me really happy to have gone 25/30/0/0/15 on my Thief.
If you want to play ez side, go with sword/pistol m8.
The blindess area works miracles in PVE, PVP however, better learn some new tactics.
@CF Skyy : Yeah I do feel like I lack vitality. You think vitality on my jewellery would be sufficient? Or should I take a superior rune with it aswell?
The extra boost to power and vulnerability traits were one of the reasons I changed from trickery to Deadly. I wasn’t using poisons, but I realised that the combo field on my shortbow (which I use a lot) has a poison.
I’m currently running 25/20/10/15/0, 25 in deadly for the reasons above + the 10% boost on enemies with condition, 20 in critical because… well its pretty nifty, 10 in shadow arts for the condition removal and 15 in acrobatics for the extra dodge and swiftness on dodge.
Thing is, I feel like my damage really isn’t all that much better from when I was still running 30 in shadow arts. And eventhough the shadow rejuvination only healed up prolly about 1 or 2k iirc, the toughness/+healing and traits still helped with how much you can take.
I’m still not sure though, it could have been my imagination, but it felt like I’m not really lacking damage no matter how much I spec in shadow arts. Ideally it would be best to spec for condition damage with a shadow arts build I presume, but I prefer it as an addition to my normal damage because it can be bad in certain situations.
EDIT: If I got time I might even test how much +healing does to shadow rejuv lol, would be incredibly strong if you could heal up lets say 40% of your health in 2 or 3 seconds everytime you go stealth
My accessories are the only pieces that I have that aren’t exotic, and I was planning to make get them in Power/Vit flavor. So yeah, I definitely thing that’s a great place to pick up vit.
Another just depends on what runes you’re running. After I pick up my Cultural T3 kitten you 30g chest piece), I’m going to outfit myself with Superior Runes of Divinity(+10 all stats, +2 crit damage per rune). When all is said and done I’ll probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of 13.5k HP with full Berserker’s of Divinity. A ‘good enough’ alternative would probably be Superior Rune of the Soldier, which is +Vitality, and +Toughness(90 vit, 35 toughness).
As far as damage goes, could just be the weapon sets you’re using. I’m sure that if I dropped my build and respec’d to yours, I would notice a pretty decent drop in my backstab crits.