Guild Wars 2

For WvW.

I’m talking suiting up in marauders with cavalier trinkets and weapons, infiltrator’s signet, bandit’s defense, and shadow step with dagger storm.

Running staff of course.

Acrobatics 1, 3, 2.

CS 3,2,3

DD 1,1,2. I could switch staff mastery for escapist’s absolution if I’m struggling against condi’s.

Using 10% damage reduction 70 toughness food.

to front line all you need honestly is shadow step.

Taobella.6597:

to front line all you need honestly is shadow step.

Grabbing bandit’s defense because even on my revenant with similar gear and foot setup, im getting pinballed to hell by those kitten guardian trains if not their pulls.

An extra low cd stunbreak, since shadowstep is a 50 sec cd which means i need something more for when we’re drawing and re-engaging.

yeah bandit def is solid i ran rune of guardian with it one time on my bunker thief was pretty lol. did not end up being very effective but trying something different is fun.

An old guild mate of mine used to front line a thief years ago, and from what I gathered from him is you need constant healing + stability. So I had em send me his build and it was pretty off the wall in terms of builds back then, but I tried to put something together for you that MIGHT work based on what I saw/heard.

disclaimer: I do not thief so don’t flame me too hard

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQJAWVl8MhCnYpTw5JQ/ELUF1c1v9j/WOOYVXXCEANAA-T1CBQBsUJ46OCAM4QAkJVK0nuAlpkqI7PoQ1VAwDAQCXAgtocJAACwN3Z2cnBO6RP6RP6R7m38o38o3sUAiu0C-w

As you can see the heal, utility, and traits are all geared to give you healing constantly as you wade through zergs. I was also informed that Shortbow >>>>> All in terms of front lining a thief.

Either way I hope this helps

edit

Forgot to add with an organized boon share group you’ll get your stab/resistance that will nullify the weaknesses you are concerned with

D/D is tough. The front line aspect is Death Blossom which doesn’t work that well – short evade and moving through targets (putting you out of position) coupled with primarily condi damage doesn’t work that well. Dancing Dagger spam is better done from mid-line/back-line but why when you have SB. Not all weapons are created equal – Staff (Dust Strike is insane) and Shortbow if you want to frontline.

@ Azukas – he is (or his friend) is correct. The key to Thief and really any bunker build is healing (self and group generated). But that’s why Venoms/Venomshare is so good. Stealth isn’t bad either if you want to escape/rez on occasion. Sustain healing is the key but Signet of Malice is not nearly as useful as an evade/remove condi/short cooldown heal Withdraw.

IMO, poison condition is highly underrated in WvW zergs but even with the condi cleanse, it still is good with all the constant heals going on and makes it extremely good even with zero condition damage builds. SB has it all (attacks that can’t be reflected/Poison, mobility/blind, AoE bounce for tagging, on demand secondary evades, Blast Finisher, ranged immobilize – if it had 1200 range on Autoattack, it would be king).

The #1 thief issue in WvW zerg is lack of stability. The only alternative besides running with Guardian is lots of stun breaks and evade/position away from front line (or running a perma-stealth build). It’s not easy.

Artaz.3819:

D/D is tough. The front line aspect is Death Blossom which doesn’t work that well – short evade and moving through targets (putting you out of position) coupled with primarily condi damage doesn’t work that well. Dancing Dagger spam is better done from mid-line/back-line but why when you have SB. Not all weapons are created equal – Staff (Dust Strike is insane) and Shortbow if you want to frontline.

@ Azukas – he is (or his friend) is correct. The key to Thief and really any bunker build is healing (self and group generated). But that’s why Venoms/Venomshare is so good. Stealth isn’t bad either if you want to escape/rez on occasion. Sustain healing is the key but Signet of Malice is not nearly as useful as an evade/remove condi/short cooldown heal Withdraw.

IMO, poison condition is highly underrated in WvW zergs but even with the condi cleanse, it still is good with all the constant heals going on and makes it extremely good even with zero condition damage builds. SB has it all (attacks that can’t be reflected/Poison, mobility/blind, AoE bounce for tagging, on demand secondary evades, Blast Finisher, ranged immobilize – if it had 1200 range on Autoattack, it would be king).

The #1 thief issue in WvW zerg is lack of stability. The only alternative besides running with Guardian is lots of stun breaks and evade/position away from front line (or running a perma-stealth build). It’s not easy.

That was my initial commentary to him about signet of malice, but then he schooled me on why.

The signet procs on all damage. So what he would do is throw down the caltrops in the middle of a zerg while dropping cluster bombs. He would easily tag 20 people and getting healed 20×132 every second is quite substantial when you are also blasting water fields. Now add in 15% of all crit damage as health and 102 heal for every point of initiative you spend…..

You pair that with perma stability protection might etc and Frontline thief isnt a myth anymore.

Azukas.1426:

The signet procs on all damage. So what he would do is throw down the caltrops in the middle of a zerg while dropping cluster bombs. He would easily tag 20 people and getting healed 20×132 every second is quite substantial when you are also blasting water fields. Now add in 15% of all crit damage as health and 102 heal for every point of initiative you spend…..

You pair that with perma stability protection might etc and Frontline thief isnt a myth anymore.

I think SoM procs at the time of application and condition ticks do not count. So unless a build has a lot of hits (Pistol Whip, Unload etc), its effectiveness is limited.

Azukas.1426:

The signet procs on all damage. So what he would do is throw down the caltrops in the middle of a zerg while dropping cluster bombs. He would easily tag 20 people and getting healed 20×132 every second is quite substantial when you are also blasting water fields. Now add in 15% of all crit damage as health and 102 heal for every point of initiative you spend…..

You pair that with perma stability protection might etc and Frontline thief isnt a myth anymore.

Caltrops is capped at 5 targets per hit so 5×132 per second (per your example) IF no one evades/distorts and there are 5 targets in the 240 radius.

Withdraw also triggers the DD evade traits. Beyond movement condition clear and evade frames, it’s also a low cooldown and insta cast. IMO, no choice except for certain solo roaming builds and even then.

Perma stab/protection ??? from your team … honestly, any class would do in that case.

Straegen.2938:

Azukas.1426:

The signet procs on all damage. So what he would do is throw down the caltrops in the middle of a zerg while dropping cluster bombs. He would easily tag 20 people and getting healed 20×132 every second is quite substantial when you are also blasting water fields. Now add in 15% of all crit damage as health and 102 heal for every point of initiative you spend…..

You pair that with perma stability protection might etc and Frontline thief isnt a myth anymore.

I think SoM procs at the time of application and condition ticks do not count. So unless a build has a lot of hits (Pistol Whip, Unload etc), its effectiveness is limited.

Its a static field though apparently and sitting in it is what creates the sustained healing.

This is just what I was told and what I witnessed when he ran front lines. Always stayed up and dealt stupid damage

Artaz.3819:

Azukas.1426:

The signet procs on all damage. So what he would do is throw down the caltrops in the middle of a zerg while dropping cluster bombs. He would easily tag 20 people and getting healed 20×132 every second is quite substantial when you are also blasting water fields. Now add in 15% of all crit damage as health and 102 heal for every point of initiative you spend…..

You pair that with perma stability protection might etc and Frontline thief isnt a myth anymore.

Caltrops is capped at 5 targets per hit so 5×132 per second (per your example) IF no one evades/distorts and there are 5 targets in the 240 radius.

Withdraw also triggers the DD evade traits. Beyond movement condition clear and evade frames, it’s also a low cooldown and insta cast. IMO, no choice except for certain solo roaming builds and even then.

Perma stab/protection ??? from your team … honestly, any class would do in that case.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Caltrops

It even says it triggers malice every second.

Also I’m not talking about solo roaming but only a front lining a thief in an organized guild group to zerg bust. So in today’s game you’ll have resistance, protection, and stability permanently to combat your weakness as a thief. Back then the group just had to properly plan out their stab rotation + ice field blasts.

If someone can try this build and give any feedback that would be great http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQJAWVn8lCFOhtNBmOBkmiFeCbuA2AngeHhnQVQ7M9DCAA-TVSBQBdRpXEeEAAc/hFpEUDHBALp+DAuAA6RXAWUGEA4AY4hT4hD88zP/8zP3yLv8yLvcpA6brF-w

Idea is to dodge vault spam, all crit from DD runes, while leaving crippling caltrops. Also has 2x Immob trap to stop enemy melee. Obviously it needs 2 guardians but the build may still not work.

akaCryptic.2389:

If someone can try this build and give any feedback that would be great http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQJAWVn8lCFOhtNBmOBkmiFeCbuA2AngeHhnQVQ7M9DCAA-TVSBQBdRpXEeEAAc/hFpEUDHBALp+DAuAA6RXAWUGEA4AY4hT4hD88zP/8zP3yLv8yLvcpA6brF-w

Idea is to dodge vault spam, all crit from DD runes, while leaving crippling caltrops. Also has 2x Immob trap to stop enemy melee. Obviously it needs 2 guardians but the build may still not work.

with out trying it i can tell you upfront it may work in current meta of ultra heavy nerco but when meta changes that build probably die pretty fast mostly do to wards bypassing dodge.

SoM is junk sad to say, Azukas, even coming from an all-in SoP main. Even if you managed 10 seconds of continuous procs on 5 targets, it barely out-heals Withdraw (and would pretty much tie given Driven Fortitude), which also cleanses conditions and provides another evade. Marauder is also very testy, for it’s really not durable enough to let a thief stay on the front lines against a group of skilled players or larger numbers. Soldier’s/Cavalier’s is probably the best approach to do be consistently durable, and I’d recommend S/P over staff due to the invulns paired with built-in condition cleanses the set offers paired with an additional port in/out if needed (especially to retreat behind the crazy amount of walls of denial, test of faith, fear, etc.). S/D also offers a ton of utility as it can spike down guards/blocking classes since LS is unblockable, and the two boonstrip can be huge in getting initial downs or spiking a comm.

Typically it isn’t ideal to stay in the front lines for extended periods of time on a thief. While I often engage as such and lead the charge to penetrate a backline and get some early downs, you’re going to lack the staying power that other classes will have, and will be heavily-dependent on boon-sharing to stay alive if you plan to stay constantly attacking. Further, IP is rather underwhelming as a whole, especially since your build will be consistently dealing low damage to the beefy targets you would be going toe-to-toe with on the front lines, and lacks the punching power to really mean anything when playing periphery or anti-backline.

DeceiverX.8361:

SoM is junk sad to say, Azukas, even coming from an all-in SoP main. Even if you managed 10 seconds of continuous procs on 5 targets, it barely out-heals Withdraw (and would pretty much tie given Driven Fortitude), which also cleanses conditions and provides another evade. Marauder is also very testy, for it’s really not durable enough to let a thief stay on the front lines against a group of skilled players or larger numbers. Soldier’s/Cavalier’s is probably the best approach to do be consistently durable, and I’d recommend S/P over staff due to the invulns paired with built-in condition cleanses the set offers paired with an additional port in/out if needed (especially to retreat behind the crazy amount of walls of denial, test of faith, fear, etc.). S/D also offers a ton of utility as it can spike down guards/blocking classes since LS is unblockable, and the two boonstrip can be huge in getting initial downs or spiking a comm.

Typically it isn’t ideal to stay in the front lines for extended periods of time on a thief. While I often engage as such and lead the charge to penetrate a backline and get some early downs, you’re going to lack the staying power that other classes will have, and will be heavily-dependent on boon-sharing to stay alive if you plan to stay constantly attacking. Further, IP is rather underwhelming as a whole, especially since your build will be consistently dealing low damage to the beefy targets you would be going toe-to-toe with on the front lines, and lacks the punching power to really mean anything when playing periphery or anti-backline.

I don’t think you understand what we are talking about here. We are talking about frontlining a thief only. This isn’t about popping in or out ganking backline targets. Its purely staying on the driver while zerg busting. In this situation Withdraw makes it harder to stay on the driver due to the roll (i’m correct that that’s the heal he’s talking about right?) Signet of malice if you detonate your cluster bomb hits how many times? If i’m correct it hits 15x in the middle of a zerg that’s 132×15.....1980 health back per cluster and its spammable. If you only get five hits it’s 660, and even if we go by that how many clusterbombs can you spam in 18 seconds?

The conditions/cc are covered by the boon sharing of resistance and stability. The 2800 armor rating with 17k hps along with -10% damage food and perma protection pretty much guarantees you’ve got serious damage mitigation.

Now I haven’t even talked about the caltrops part of the equation which heals 132×5 a second for 10 seconds that gives you 6,600 health.

I think you misunderstood the thread mate.

p.s. S/P and S/D are not good frontline weapons btw. S/P roots you in place which creates a problem with staying on your driver.

Azukas.1426:

p.s. S/P and S/D are not good frontline weapons btw. S/P roots you in place which creates a problem with staying on your driver.

S/P is excellent for your SOM build. Sure it roots you in place but it gives you invul evade frames negating a huge chunk of damage(as a frontliner). It also hit 8x after the stun with the added ability to cleave 3 targets. So that’s a maximum of 3*8= 24 SOM procs.

Set.7461:

Azukas.1426:

p.s. S/P and S/D are not good frontline weapons btw. S/P roots you in place which creates a problem with staying on your driver.

S/P is excellent for your SOM build. Sure it roots you in place but it gives you invul evade frames negating a huge chunk of damage(as a frontliner). It also hit 8x after the stun with the added ability to cleave 3 targets. So that’s a maximum of 3*8= 24 SOM procs.

Yes I agree if you were staying in place the problem tho is zerg busting you on continuously moving through the zerg while dropping DPS. When the time comes to bomb on the driver you aren’t going to be using s/p over SB.

I put staff on there because it has 2 mobile evades that will help stay on the driver.

Azukas.1426:

DeceiverX.8361:

SoM is junk sad to say, Azukas, even coming from an all-in SoP main. Even if you managed 10 seconds of continuous procs on 5 targets, it barely out-heals Withdraw (and would pretty much tie given Driven Fortitude), which also cleanses conditions and provides another evade. Marauder is also very testy, for it’s really not durable enough to let a thief stay on the front lines against a group of skilled players or larger numbers. Soldier’s/Cavalier’s is probably the best approach to do be consistently durable, and I’d recommend S/P over staff due to the invulns paired with built-in condition cleanses the set offers paired with an additional port in/out if needed (especially to retreat behind the crazy amount of walls of denial, test of faith, fear, etc.). S/D also offers a ton of utility as it can spike down guards/blocking classes since LS is unblockable, and the two boonstrip can be huge in getting initial downs or spiking a comm.

Typically it isn’t ideal to stay in the front lines for extended periods of time on a thief. While I often engage as such and lead the charge to penetrate a backline and get some early downs, you’re going to lack the staying power that other classes will have, and will be heavily-dependent on boon-sharing to stay alive if you plan to stay constantly attacking. Further, IP is rather underwhelming as a whole, especially since your build will be consistently dealing low damage to the beefy targets you would be going toe-to-toe with on the front lines, and lacks the punching power to really mean anything when playing periphery or anti-backline.

I don’t think you understand what we are talking about here. We are talking about frontlining a thief only. This isn’t about popping in or out ganking backline targets. Its purely staying on the driver while zerg busting. In this situation Withdraw makes it harder to stay on the driver due to the roll (i’m correct that that’s the heal he’s talking about right?) Signet of malice if you detonate your cluster bomb hits how many times? If i’m correct it hits 15x in the middle of a zerg that’s 132×15.....1980 health back per cluster and its spammable. If you only get five hits it’s 660, and even if we go by that how many clusterbombs can you spam in 18 seconds?

The conditions/cc are covered by the boon sharing of resistance and stability. The 2800 armor rating with 17k hps along with -10% damage food and perma protection pretty much guarantees you’ve got serious damage mitigation.

Now I haven’t even talked about the caltrops part of the equation which heals 132×5 a second for 10 seconds that gives you 6,600 health.

I think you misunderstood the thread mate.

p.s. S/P and S/D are not good frontline weapons btw. S/P roots you in place which creates a problem with staying on your driver.

I understand the thread. I said it above: you can’t run a thief in a front line for extended amounts of time, especially in Marauder gear. Period. It’s not a matter of how much you heal over time or staying on the driver; you are always more valuable as any other class while front-lining (thus any competent driver will replace you out of group stability), and you will die instantly on engage without mass disengage potential. Nomad’s gear you’ll be able to tank some hits with protection, but again, what purpose does such a thief serve? Front-lining for the sake of front-lining, the class brings almost literally nothing, and any party you’d get invited to wouldn’t be a front-line crew, because again, those boons are effectively wasted and aren’t being compensated for with support. And by front-lining, you’re inherently gimping your group’s effectiveness, because the thief would be strictly more useful playing periphery, regardless of the size of the group. Nobody brings a thief to zerg-bust, anyways. It’s not good enough in outmanned play to mean anything since boon and inherently durable builds that can take 10-20k damage a second incoming are what define that. A thief can get prot from someone else and run that food, but so can a guardian or warrior or mesmer or necro, and have strictly better durability.

Regarding cluster bomb, no, the detonation can get at best 9 hit procs; the number of targets is reduced on Detonate to 3 with 3 bombs, and the capable range to get three hits on three targets would literally require the targets standing in the same hitbox while not moving, since the clusters have such a small radius; even landing nine hits in huge GvG is rare; otherwise misses strictly will happen. The AoE radius to get all three hits to land in the same target is roughly 50. This cuts the healing down by 40% minimum even assuming the best circumstances, to 1188. Now with this out of the way, each bomb would need to wait a 1/2 second cast time on top of the 2.5s flight time before detonation while at 900 range. Since detonate is a re-activation skill, the skill cannot be applied, meaning each cast is on a 3s interval, dividing the effective max healing per second to 396. So c bomb “spam” with one attack every three seconds at peak performance is only a little better than regeneration Big whoop. How many times has a battle been swayed in GvG by regen? Too few to count.

Similarly, Caltrops is used with a 1/3 uptime. The EHP gained thus becomes 220/second. Withdraw’s 4766 is 265 and has no dependencies. It’s strictly a better heal. CV is even better in most cases.

So basically, SoM gives you a little more than regeneration tick at peak, and caltrops on SoM gives you less HP/S than spamming withdraw off CD, which also gives an extra dodge and debilitating condition cleanse on top of an additional likely proc on DF, permanent vigor, and a DoT cleanse.

This also assumes the thief is never being hit by poison Such a build requires permanent poison-free status to heal as well as it’d be able to, which is still awful. The healing on the skill is only reasonable at best if played on a pure healing power build with lots of attacks, and even then, it’s still awful for GvG, because even brief poison still hard-counters it and the other heals scale better.

If it were to get ganked by a proper periphery, it’d still die in maybe three seconds or less. From my thief, probably on engage.

I understand you’re trying to promote an innovative concept, but I tried running a build like this close to three years ago. Hell, I even ran an unkillable full healing power P/P venom build in sPvP, and still didn’t take SoM, because the healing was still too poor. Many people have tried to get the signet to work. With the cast time, it’s not even good for signet backstab (which I main and have tried to make this signet work for years). SoM is just a horrible skill, and has no place in pretty much any build at all for any reason.

DeceiverX.8361:

Azukas.1426:

DeceiverX.8361:

SoM is junk sad to say, Azukas, even coming from an all-in SoP main. Even if you managed 10 seconds of continuous procs on 5 targets, it barely out-heals Withdraw (and would pretty much tie given Driven Fortitude), which also cleanses conditions and provides another evade. Marauder is also very testy, for it’s really not durable enough to let a thief stay on the front lines against a group of skilled players or larger numbers. Soldier’s/Cavalier’s is probably the best approach to do be consistently durable, and I’d recommend S/P over staff due to the invulns paired with built-in condition cleanses the set offers paired with an additional port in/out if needed (especially to retreat behind the crazy amount of walls of denial, test of faith, fear, etc.). S/D also offers a ton of utility as it can spike down guards/blocking classes since LS is unblockable, and the two boonstrip can be huge in getting initial downs or spiking a comm.

Typically it isn’t ideal to stay in the front lines for extended periods of time on a thief. While I often engage as such and lead the charge to penetrate a backline and get some early downs, you’re going to lack the staying power that other classes will have, and will be heavily-dependent on boon-sharing to stay alive if you plan to stay constantly attacking. Further, IP is rather underwhelming as a whole, especially since your build will be consistently dealing low damage to the beefy targets you would be going toe-to-toe with on the front lines, and lacks the punching power to really mean anything when playing periphery or anti-backline.

I don’t think you understand what we are talking about here. We are talking about frontlining a thief only. This isn’t about popping in or out ganking backline targets. Its purely staying on the driver while zerg busting. In this situation Withdraw makes it harder to stay on the driver due to the roll (i’m correct that that’s the heal he’s talking about right?) Signet of malice if you detonate your cluster bomb hits how many times? If i’m correct it hits 15x in the middle of a zerg that’s 132×15.....1980 health back per cluster and its spammable. If you only get five hits it’s 660, and even if we go by that how many clusterbombs can you spam in 18 seconds?

The conditions/cc are covered by the boon sharing of resistance and stability. The 2800 armor rating with 17k hps along with -10% damage food and perma protection pretty much guarantees you’ve got serious damage mitigation.

Now I haven’t even talked about the caltrops part of the equation which heals 132×5 a second for 10 seconds that gives you 6,600 health.

I think you misunderstood the thread mate.

p.s. S/P and S/D are not good frontline weapons btw. S/P roots you in place which creates a problem with staying on your driver.

I understand the thread. I said it above: you can’t run a thief in a front line for extended amounts of time, especially in Marauder gear. Period. It’s not a matter of how much you heal over time or staying on the driver; you are always more valuable as any other class while front-lining (thus any competent driver will replace you out of group stability), and you will die instantly on engage without mass disengage potential. Nomad’s gear you’ll be able to tank some hits with protection, but again, what purpose does such a thief serve? Front-lining for the sake of front-lining, the class brings almost literally nothing, and any party you’d get invited to wouldn’t be a front-line crew, because again, those boons are effectively wasted and aren’t being compensated for with support. And by front-lining, you’re inherently gimping your group’s effectiveness, because the thief would be strictly more useful playing periphery, regardless of the size of the group. Nobody brings a thief to zerg-bust, anyways. It’s not good enough in outmanned play to mean anything since boon and inherently durable builds that can take 10-20k damage a second incoming are what define that. A thief can get prot from someone else and run that food, but so can a guardian or warrior or mesmer or necro, and have strictly better durability.

Regarding cluster bomb, no, the detonation can get at best 9 hit procs; the number of targets is reduced on Detonate to 3 with 3 bombs, and the capable range to get three hits on three targets would literally require the targets standing in the same hitbox while not moving, since the clusters have such a small radius; even landing nine hits in huge GvG is rare; otherwise misses strictly will happen. The AoE radius to get all three hits to land in the same target is roughly 50. This cuts the healing down by 40% minimum even assuming the best circumstances, to 1188. Now with this out of the way, each bomb would need to wait a 1/2 second cast time on top of the 2.5s flight time before detonation while at 900 range. Since detonate is a re-activation skill, the skill cannot be applied, meaning each cast is on a 3s interval, dividing the effective max healing per second to 396. So c bomb “spam” with one attack every three seconds at peak performance is only a little better than regeneration Big whoop. How many times has a battle been swayed in GvG by regen? Too few to count.

Similarly, Caltrops is used with a 1/3 uptime. The EHP gained thus becomes 220/second. Withdraw’s 4766 is 265 and has no dependencies. It’s strictly a better heal. CV is even better in most cases.

So basically, SoM gives you a little more than regeneration tick at peak, and caltrops on SoM gives you less HP/S than spamming withdraw off CD, which also gives an extra dodge and debilitating condition cleanse on top of an additional likely proc on DF, permanent vigor, and a DoT cleanse.

This also assumes the thief is never being hit by poison Such a build requires permanent poison-free status to heal as well as it’d be able to, which is still awful. The healing on the skill is only reasonable at best if played on a pure healing power build with lots of attacks, and even then, it’s still awful for GvG, because even brief poison still hard-counters it and the other heals scale better.

If it were to get ganked by a proper periphery, it’d still die in maybe three seconds or less. From my thief, probably on engage.

I understand you’re trying to promote an innovative concept, but I tried running a build like this close to three years ago. Hell, I even ran an unkillable full healing power P/P venom build in sPvP, and still didn’t take SoM, because the healing was still too poor. Many people have tried to get the signet to work. With the cast time, it’s not even good for signet backstab (which I main and have tried to make this signet work for years). SoM is just a horrible skill, and has no place in pretty much any build at all for any reason.

You really don’t know what you’re talking about from a group combat PoV. Look up boon share mesmer and Revs then understand your not even worrying about 1/2 the stuff you say.

You just refuse to believe a thief can frontline, but it can be done. In this meta of boonshare a thief can REALLY work because its brain dead in the effort department to cover the thief with stability/resistance/protection/etc.

I’m not saying it’s the best class for the job i’m just answering the OP’s question about frontlining a thief as a Daredevil. It is possible with the right set up.

In Response to the original post.

I take it that what you mean by front line is a DD build that can stand and fight at the front of a zerg, Survive, Dish out damage, and of course get those all important tags. In that case I strongly recommend Full Celestial Full Endurence D/D Daredevil. You can roam with it, you can fight hordes of enemies with it, and you throw out tags like a boss, Run Four daggers if you want to be really cheesy as you can swap to your second Dagger set to regain about 75% endurence though Sigil of energy and you thief trait. You’ll gain swiftness when you dodge. The fun thing about the build is that the more people you are fighting the more effective you are because of your traits that are procs when you evade attacks. (pore opponents mean more attacks to evade. the toughness, Healing power, and Vitality, along with your condi clearing and multiple ways to abuse evades makes you an extremely hard targte. you one be one shot, even by a killshot or gunflame (though of course it will fragging hurt).

Azukas.1426:

DeceiverX.8361:

Azukas.1426:

DeceiverX.8361:

SoM is junk sad to say, Azukas, even coming from an all-in SoP main. Even if you managed 10 seconds of continuous procs on 5 targets, it barely out-heals Withdraw (and would pretty much tie given Driven Fortitude), which also cleanses conditions and provides another evade. Marauder is also very testy, for it’s really not durable enough to let a thief stay on the front lines against a group of skilled players or larger numbers. Soldier’s/Cavalier’s is probably the best approach to do be consistently durable, and I’d recommend S/P over staff due to the invulns paired with built-in condition cleanses the set offers paired with an additional port in/out if needed (especially to retreat behind the crazy amount of walls of denial, test of faith, fear, etc.). S/D also offers a ton of utility as it can spike down guards/blocking classes since LS is unblockable, and the two boonstrip can be huge in getting initial downs or spiking a comm.

Typically it isn’t ideal to stay in the front lines for extended periods of time on a thief. While I often engage as such and lead the charge to penetrate a backline and get some early downs, you’re going to lack the staying power that other classes will have, and will be heavily-dependent on boon-sharing to stay alive if you plan to stay constantly attacking. Further, IP is rather underwhelming as a whole, especially since your build will be consistently dealing low damage to the beefy targets you would be going toe-to-toe with on the front lines, and lacks the punching power to really mean anything when playing periphery or anti-backline.

I don’t think you understand what we are talking about here. We are talking about frontlining a thief only. This isn’t about popping in or out ganking backline targets. Its purely staying on the driver while zerg busting. In this situation Withdraw makes it harder to stay on the driver due to the roll (i’m correct that that’s the heal he’s talking about right?) Signet of malice if you detonate your cluster bomb hits how many times? If i’m correct it hits 15x in the middle of a zerg that’s 132×15.....1980 health back per cluster and its spammable. If you only get five hits it’s 660, and even if we go by that how many clusterbombs can you spam in 18 seconds?

The conditions/cc are covered by the boon sharing of resistance and stability. The 2800 armor rating with 17k hps along with -10% damage food and perma protection pretty much guarantees you’ve got serious damage mitigation.

Now I haven’t even talked about the caltrops part of the equation which heals 132×5 a second for 10 seconds that gives you 6,600 health.

I think you misunderstood the thread mate.

p.s. S/P and S/D are not good frontline weapons btw. S/P roots you in place which creates a problem with staying on your driver.

I understand the thread. I said it above: you can’t run a thief in a front line for extended amounts of time, especially in Marauder gear. Period. It’s not a matter of how much you heal over time or staying on the driver; you are always more valuable as any other class while front-lining (thus any competent driver will replace you out of group stability), and you will die instantly on engage without mass disengage potential. Nomad’s gear you’ll be able to tank some hits with protection, but again, what purpose does such a thief serve? Front-lining for the sake of front-lining, the class brings almost literally nothing, and any party you’d get invited to wouldn’t be a front-line crew, because again, those boons are effectively wasted and aren’t being compensated for with support. And by front-lining, you’re inherently gimping your group’s effectiveness, because the thief would be strictly more useful playing periphery, regardless of the size of the group. Nobody brings a thief to zerg-bust, anyways. It’s not good enough in outmanned play to mean anything since boon and inherently durable builds that can take 10-20k damage a second incoming are what define that. A thief can get prot from someone else and run that food, but so can a guardian or warrior or mesmer or necro, and have strictly better durability.

Regarding cluster bomb, no, the detonation can get at best 9 hit procs; the number of targets is reduced on Detonate to 3 with 3 bombs, and the capable range to get three hits on three targets would literally require the targets standing in the same hitbox while not moving, since the clusters have such a small radius; even landing nine hits in huge GvG is rare; otherwise misses strictly will happen. The AoE radius to get all three hits to land in the same target is roughly 50. This cuts the healing down by 40% minimum even assuming the best circumstances, to 1188. Now with this out of the way, each bomb would need to wait a 1/2 second cast time on top of the 2.5s flight time before detonation while at 900 range. Since detonate is a re-activation skill, the skill cannot be applied, meaning each cast is on a 3s interval, dividing the effective max healing per second to 396. So c bomb “spam” with one attack every three seconds at peak performance is only a little better than regeneration Big whoop. How many times has a battle been swayed in GvG by regen? Too few to count.

Similarly, Caltrops is used with a 1/3 uptime. The EHP gained thus becomes 220/second. Withdraw’s 4766 is 265 and has no dependencies. It’s strictly a better heal. CV is even better in most cases.

So basically, SoM gives you a little more than regeneration tick at peak, and caltrops on SoM gives you less HP/S than spamming withdraw off CD, which also gives an extra dodge and debilitating condition cleanse on top of an additional likely proc on DF, permanent vigor, and a DoT cleanse.

This also assumes the thief is never being hit by poison Such a build requires permanent poison-free status to heal as well as it’d be able to, which is still awful. The healing on the skill is only reasonable at best if played on a pure healing power build with lots of attacks, and even then, it’s still awful for GvG, because even brief poison still hard-counters it and the other heals scale better.

If it were to get ganked by a proper periphery, it’d still die in maybe three seconds or less. From my thief, probably on engage.

I understand you’re trying to promote an innovative concept, but I tried running a build like this close to three years ago. Hell, I even ran an unkillable full healing power P/P venom build in sPvP, and still didn’t take SoM, because the healing was still too poor. Many people have tried to get the signet to work. With the cast time, it’s not even good for signet backstab (which I main and have tried to make this signet work for years). SoM is just a horrible skill, and has no place in pretty much any build at all for any reason.

You really don’t know what you’re talking about from a group combat PoV. Look up boon share mesmer and Revs then understand your not even worrying about 1/2 the stuff you say.

You just refuse to believe a thief can frontline, but it can be done. In this meta of boonshare a thief can REALLY work because its brain dead in the effort department to cover the thief with stability/resistance/protection/etc.

I’m not saying it’s the best class for the job i’m just answering the OP’s question about frontlining a thief as a Daredevil. It is possible with the right set up.

I genuinely don’t think you do large-scale enough and as a thief to understand that it’s still going to melt in real fights, and that especially in zerg-busting groups, the build is a strict liability and thus will be kicked or rerolled. You don’t bring a class that can’t output tons of support to a zerg-busting group, because the group will not let you run with them. The OP asks for a decent front-line thief. To be decent, it has to perform to a certain measure to warrant its use. You’re insistent that your suggested idea using SoM is some kind of amazing concept when it’s been tried before, tried now, and still sucks. SoM is junk from healing, junk from reliability, and won’t be a good choice to help the rest of the force. Caltrops/Shortbow isn’t even optimal for healing; S/P is, as it can get up to 40 procs on PW. It still isn’t a good build, despite the fact people have tried to make it work for so long.

If you want to take a thief to the front lines, you need to have disengages and get in there at the right time, and just simply be a good player. You don’t need to sit back and watch half the fight end before jumping in, but for those one or two second moments of high-impact, crazy damage where sentinal/nomad warriors melt and every guard in the GvG is popping invulns and mass-cleansing, a thief isn’t staying alive, unless the enemies aren’t running real large-scale numbers or are disorganized and not playing the right classes/builds. In such a case, if your group is in order to get the thief the boons to even have a small chance, you’ve already won the fight and the thief is a nonfactor.

I spend substantial amounts of time on the front lines on my thieves. I say substantial, because those disengages are critical. Even full nomad SA/Acro/DrD thieves who play dedicated res bots will tell you that they can’t stay in the front lines and live, despite having another 25% damage reduction from RoS and better passive healing from Rejuv from the SA line.

DeceiverX.8361:

Azukas.1426:

DeceiverX.8361:

Azukas.1426:

DeceiverX.8361:

SoM is junk sad to say, Azukas, even coming from an all-in SoP main. Even if you managed 10 seconds of continuous procs on 5 targets, it barely out-heals Withdraw (and would pretty much tie given Driven Fortitude), which also cleanses conditions and provides another evade. Marauder is also very testy, for it’s really not durable enough to let a thief stay on the front lines against a group of skilled players or larger numbers. Soldier’s/Cavalier’s is probably the best approach to do be consistently durable, and I’d recommend S/P over staff due to the invulns paired with built-in condition cleanses the set offers paired with an additional port in/out if needed (especially to retreat behind the crazy amount of walls of denial, test of faith, fear, etc.). S/D also offers a ton of utility as it can spike down guards/blocking classes since LS is unblockable, and the two boonstrip can be huge in getting initial downs or spiking a comm.

Typically it isn’t ideal to stay in the front lines for extended periods of time on a thief. While I often engage as such and lead the charge to penetrate a backline and get some early downs, you’re going to lack the staying power that other classes will have, and will be heavily-dependent on boon-sharing to stay alive if you plan to stay constantly attacking. Further, IP is rather underwhelming as a whole, especially since your build will be consistently dealing low damage to the beefy targets you would be going toe-to-toe with on the front lines, and lacks the punching power to really mean anything when playing periphery or anti-backline.

I don’t think you understand what we are talking about here. We are talking about frontlining a thief only. This isn’t about popping in or out ganking backline targets. Its purely staying on the driver while zerg busting. In this situation Withdraw makes it harder to stay on the driver due to the roll (i’m correct that that’s the heal he’s talking about right?) Signet of malice if you detonate your cluster bomb hits how many times? If i’m correct it hits 15x in the middle of a zerg that’s 132×15.....1980 health back per cluster and its spammable. If you only get five hits it’s 660, and even if we go by that how many clusterbombs can you spam in 18 seconds?

The conditions/cc are covered by the boon sharing of resistance and stability. The 2800 armor rating with 17k hps along with -10% damage food and perma protection pretty much guarantees you’ve got serious damage mitigation.

Now I haven’t even talked about the caltrops part of the equation which heals 132×5 a second for 10 seconds that gives you 6,600 health.

I think you misunderstood the thread mate.

p.s. S/P and S/D are not good frontline weapons btw. S/P roots you in place which creates a problem with staying on your driver.

I understand the thread. I said it above: you can’t run a thief in a front line for extended amounts of time, especially in Marauder gear. Period. It’s not a matter of how much you heal over time or staying on the driver; you are always more valuable as any other class while front-lining (thus any competent driver will replace you out of group stability), and you will die instantly on engage without mass disengage potential. Nomad’s gear you’ll be able to tank some hits with protection, but again, what purpose does such a thief serve? Front-lining for the sake of front-lining, the class brings almost literally nothing, and any party you’d get invited to wouldn’t be a front-line crew, because again, those boons are effectively wasted and aren’t being compensated for with support. And by front-lining, you’re inherently gimping your group’s effectiveness, because the thief would be strictly more useful playing periphery, regardless of the size of the group. Nobody brings a thief to zerg-bust, anyways. It’s not good enough in outmanned play to mean anything since boon and inherently durable builds that can take 10-20k damage a second incoming are what define that. A thief can get prot from someone else and run that food, but so can a guardian or warrior or mesmer or necro, and have strictly better durability.

Regarding cluster bomb, no, the detonation can get at best 9 hit procs; the number of targets is reduced on Detonate to 3 with 3 bombs, and the capable range to get three hits on three targets would literally require the targets standing in the same hitbox while not moving, since the clusters have such a small radius; even landing nine hits in huge GvG is rare; otherwise misses strictly will happen. The AoE radius to get all three hits to land in the same target is roughly 50. This cuts the healing down by 40% minimum even assuming the best circumstances, to 1188. Now with this out of the way, each bomb would need to wait a 1/2 second cast time on top of the 2.5s flight time before detonation while at 900 range. Since detonate is a re-activation skill, the skill cannot be applied, meaning each cast is on a 3s interval, dividing the effective max healing per second to 396. So c bomb “spam” with one attack every three seconds at peak performance is only a little better than regeneration Big whoop. How many times has a battle been swayed in GvG by regen? Too few to count.

Similarly, Caltrops is used with a 1/3 uptime. The EHP gained thus becomes 220/second. Withdraw’s 4766 is 265 and has no dependencies. It’s strictly a better heal. CV is even better in most cases.

So basically, SoM gives you a little more than regeneration tick at peak, and caltrops on SoM gives you less HP/S than spamming withdraw off CD, which also gives an extra dodge and debilitating condition cleanse on top of an additional likely proc on DF, permanent vigor, and a DoT cleanse.

This also assumes the thief is never being hit by poison Such a build requires permanent poison-free status to heal as well as it’d be able to, which is still awful. The healing on the skill is only reasonable at best if played on a pure healing power build with lots of attacks, and even then, it’s still awful for GvG, because even brief poison still hard-counters it and the other heals scale better.

If it were to get ganked by a proper periphery, it’d still die in maybe three seconds or less. From my thief, probably on engage.

I understand you’re trying to promote an innovative concept, but I tried running a build like this close to three years ago. Hell, I even ran an unkillable full healing power P/P venom build in sPvP, and still didn’t take SoM, because the healing was still too poor. Many people have tried to get the signet to work. With the cast time, it’s not even good for signet backstab (which I main and have tried to make this signet work for years). SoM is just a horrible skill, and has no place in pretty much any build at all for any reason.

You really don’t know what you’re talking about from a group combat PoV. Look up boon share mesmer and Revs then understand your not even worrying about 1/2 the stuff you say.

You just refuse to believe a thief can frontline, but it can be done. In this meta of boonshare a thief can REALLY work because its brain dead in the effort department to cover the thief with stability/resistance/protection/etc.

I’m not saying it’s the best class for the job i’m just answering the OP’s question about frontlining a thief as a Daredevil. It is possible with the right set up.

I genuinely don’t think you do large-scale enough and as a thief to understand that it’s still going to melt in real fights, and that especially in zerg-busting groups, the build is a strict liability and thus will be kicked or rerolled. You don’t bring a class that can’t output tons of support to a zerg-busting group, because the group will not let you run with them. The OP asks for a decent front-line thief. To be decent, it has to perform to a certain measure to warrant its use. You’re insistent that your suggested idea using SoM is some kind of amazing concept when it’s been tried before, tried now, and still sucks. SoM is junk from healing, junk from reliability, and won’t be a good choice to help the rest of the force. Caltrops/Shortbow isn’t even optimal for healing; S/P is, as it can get up to 40 procs on PW. It still isn’t a good build, despite the fact people have tried to make it work for so long.

If you want to take a thief to the front lines, you need to have disengages and get in there at the right time, and just simply be a good player. You don’t need to sit back and watch half the fight end before jumping in, but for those one or two second moments of high-impact, crazy damage where sentinal/nomad warriors melt and every guard in the GvG is popping invulns and mass-cleansing, a thief isn’t staying alive, unless the enemies aren’t running real large-scale numbers or are disorganized and not playing the right classes/builds. In such a case, if your group is in order to get the thief the boons to even have a small chance, you’ve already won the fight and the thief is a nonfactor.

I spend substantial amounts of time on the front lines on my thieves. I say substantial, because those disengages are critical. Even full nomad SA/Acro/DrD thieves who play dedicated res bots will tell you that they can’t stay in the front lines and live, despite having another 25% damage reduction from RoS and better passive healing from Rejuv from the SA line.

Did you ever think that maybe you’re just not good enough?

I wouldn’t dream of playing a thief on the front line because I know I’m not good enough.

The problem with Decievers post regarding SOM is a heal can not be predicated on just measuring the heal itself otherwise Skelk would be most popular.

SOM has a few specific advantages albeit it only works in a small number of builds those being that like Withdraw , the heal itself can not be interrupted and put on a cooldown like can happen with channeled vigor and HIS and second, the heals occur as one remains in combat.

Contrary to the claim that withdraw heals for more over SOM very specific builds other than SP allow more healing from and SOM when considering the fact heals can come in from other sources then just the number 6 skill itself.

As example Impaling lotus heals, uncatchable heals, daggerstorm heals, thieves guild heals, caltrops heals.

That said usage of that same SOM is advantageous in very limited builds and the heal itself is undertuned. It my belief it needs a bit more such as increasing the passive heal to .10 based on healing attribute and allowing Initiative gain on making it active. There simply no reason to use the active side of the heal to proc those on heal effects that one can trait for .

As to SOM in a frontline build, I am a bit leery on that. SOM can work for a 1v1 and smaller scale battles where one has attacks that have multiple procs (it used to be very good with p/p and ricochet as example) but it just can not fuel the amount of healing one needs frontline and especially given it only really heals while in combat.

In order to make it work frontline you have to get a lot more heal sources such as ip/assassins reward/venoms/regens and it pretty hard to get a build that can do this while still doing the desired damage.

Azukas.1426:

Did you ever think that maybe you’re just not good enough?

I wouldn’t dream of playing a thief on the front line because I know I’m not good enough.

I speak for not myself but the thief majority and the best players in the game when I say such an idea isn’t doable in the large scale. I’m good enough to dive 50 people alone with the worst thief build/weapon set in the game, down two or three people, and often get away. I can’t speak for my skill because it’s hard to measure personal performance in mass scale. I can tell you, however, that at one point or another on most of the servers I’ve played on, I have been the talk for minutes at a time in TS by leading commanders and such players when I dive zergs alone and pull way more weight than most periphery and backliners do. Maybe I’m not good enough, as I admit I make mistakes often, but when when so many people who were and are such good players and so many people have theorized and discussed and tried this, all to no avail, it’s an indicator that such concept isn’t in fact “decent.” If a better-than-“decent” player is needed to get “decent” results against players which may be worse than “decent,” then the build isn’t “decent;” it’s deficient, which is what the OP asked for. It’s why I do not recommend my build for people to play, despite the fact I can beat most thieves; the build itself isn’t functional for most people and most purposes. I play it for fun and to excel in a very narrow scope of performance measures while testing myself to do more with less to emerge victorious when out of that scope.

—

Can’t really tell if you’re agreeing or disagreeing, baba. I used optimal numbers to demonstrate even at maximum performance the healing is poor, and stressed that it is very unlikely said math would be realistic. Unless you start doing things like using all of those abilities at the same ,time, the HP/s gain is fairly low, and still, would depend on the thief not being affected by poison for many seconds at a time, all while being dependent on the highest cooldown of the AoE skill used. What needs to be considered is that because the “good” healing from SoM depends on other skills like Caltrops and Dagger storm, the benefits of the heal itself are tied to the cooldowns of those abilities, which is what needs to be used to define calculating HP/sec. Without getting peak performance from multiple targets with AoE’s from SoM, or never not attacking quickly and cleaving, the heal is just simply less than withdraw. Even SV, which has great burst heal potential, loses to withdraw in the HP/s race when considering its uptime and susceptibility of being negated by blocks, invulns, etc. It’s because SoM loses both in respects to burst healing and sustained healing in most realistic scenarios on top of the fact that the thief has few or no windows of opportunity to totally regain the health that the heal isn’t usable. Even on P/P, which I played a cleric’s/dwayna’s leeching venoms tank build in sPvP some years ago with immense success, SoM was not good enough as a heal to warrant it uses; I still used withdraw or HiS (as it enables Rejuv) because the healing was simply better.

Yes, SoM can’t be interrupted, but all abilities which let it heal can be, and often quite easily can be. In WvW on the front line, a thief will be getting hit by a lot of CC’s. Caltrops has a full second cast time, and many such AoE’s have similar casts. Withdraw is the hardest heal to negate this way, since it has no cast time, and the healing happens on cast, even if the player is KD’ed by a wall or something.

It’s just not viable to make a thief frontline without either requiring some degree of retreating to heal up and get boons again, especially if busting zergs or peak performance are considered; it will objectively hold a group back, and it will not really reach passable play standards without resetting, which is what my original post said regarding the nature of how escapes will be required and that such a concept isn’t really functional. It may not die easily, but that frankly means very little in large scale. If you don’t die easily and the rest of your group does, you’ve only managed to mean less than a couple of extra points in the immediate future, rather than potentially providing enough to your group to have saved lives, which is why the support/boon meta exists, and why thieves can have a place on the battlefield if they’re both played well and built to kill the backline dealing the heavy damage and/or control.

You indicated Withdraw outhealed SOM.

Base numbers shows in 15 seconds SOM needs 36 procs to exceed Withdraw heal.

You can get that amount of procs rather easily in 15 seconds time with the right build. Dodges and impaling lotus alone can generate that many against a grouped enemy and there the added advantage of getting heals even as you are killing minions/pets clones npc guards with your attacks.

If you have SOM running and come up against a minion master it hard to lose the fight as you will have so many heals come in.

As to using “all of the abilities at the same time” , well Uncatchable is used on every dodge, there nothing extra you have to do and the types of builds I talk about are those that have multiple attack procs.

SOM is not going to work in d/p or d/d power as outside the cleave there just not enough attacks generated. It can work d/d condition s/p or p/p.

I concur that frontline (dependent on opponent skill) you better off keeping mobility and getting in and out of a fight and SOM not conducive to that. SOM also has a problem in that any on heal procs that we get from traits /runes/ foods or even the trait to help lower cooldowns on signets are of little use as it very rare you want to turn that heal off.

DeceiverX.8361:

Azukas.1426:

Did you ever think that maybe you’re just not good enough?

I wouldn’t dream of playing a thief on the front line because I know I’m not good enough.

I speak for not myself but the thief majority and the best players in the game when I say such an idea isn’t doable in the large scale. I’m good enough to dive 50 people alone with the worst thief build/weapon set in the game, down two or three people, and often get away. I can’t speak for my skill because it’s hard to measure personal performance in mass scale. I can tell you, however, that at one point or another on most of the servers I’ve played on, I have been the talk for minutes at a time in TS by leading commanders and such players when I dive zergs alone and pull way more weight than most periphery and backliners do. Maybe I’m not good enough, as I admit I make mistakes often, but when when so many people who were and are such good players and so many people have theorized and discussed and tried this, all to no avail, it’s an indicator that such concept isn’t in fact “decent.” If a better-than-“decent” player is needed to get “decent” results against players which may be worse than “decent,” then the build isn’t “decent;” it’s deficient, which is what the OP asked for. It’s why I do not recommend my build for people to play, despite the fact I can beat most thieves; the build itself isn’t functional for most people and most purposes. I play it for fun and to excel in a very narrow scope of performance measures while testing myself to do more with less to emerge victorious when out of that scope.

—

Can’t really tell if you’re agreeing or disagreeing, baba. I used optimal numbers to demonstrate even at maximum performance the healing is poor, and stressed that it is very unlikely said math would be realistic. Unless you start doing things like using all of those abilities at the same ,time, the HP/s gain is fairly low, and still, would depend on the thief not being affected by poison for many seconds at a time, all while being dependent on the highest cooldown of the AoE skill used. What needs to be considered is that because the “good” healing from SoM depends on other skills like Caltrops and Dagger storm, the benefits of the heal itself are tied to the cooldowns of those abilities, which is what needs to be used to define calculating HP/sec. Without getting peak performance from multiple targets with AoE’s from SoM, or never not attacking quickly and cleaving, the heal is just simply less than withdraw. Even SV, which has great burst heal potential, loses to withdraw in the HP/s race when considering its uptime and susceptibility of being negated by blocks, invulns, etc. It’s because SoM loses both in respects to burst healing and sustained healing in most realistic scenarios on top of the fact that the thief has few or no windows of opportunity to totally regain the health that the heal isn’t usable. Even on P/P, which I played a cleric’s/dwayna’s leeching venoms tank build in sPvP some years ago with immense success, SoM was not good enough as a heal to warrant it uses; I still used withdraw or HiS (as it enables Rejuv) because the healing was simply better.

Yes, SoM can’t be interrupted, but all abilities which let it heal can be, and often quite easily can be. In WvW on the front line, a thief will be getting hit by a lot of CC’s. Caltrops has a full second cast time, and many such AoE’s have similar casts. Withdraw is the hardest heal to negate this way, since it has no cast time, and the healing happens on cast, even if the player is KD’ed by a wall or something.

It’s just not viable to make a thief frontline without either requiring some degree of retreating to heal up and get boons again, especially if busting zergs or peak performance are considered; it will objectively hold a group back, and it will not really reach passable play standards without resetting, which is what my original post said regarding the nature of how escapes will be required and that such a concept isn’t really functional. It may not die easily, but that frankly means very little in large scale. If you don’t die easily and the rest of your group does, you’ve only managed to mean less than a couple of extra points in the immediate future, rather than potentially providing enough to your group to have saved lives, which is why the support/boon meta exists, and why thieves can have a place on the battlefield if they’re both played well and built to kill the backline dealing the heavy damage and/or control.

OP asked if anyone tried. It’s been done before so I gave him w/e help I could.

You say it can’t be done yet it’s been done before. You then go on a tirade about insignificant things pertaining to the OP’S request.

1. Withdraw is 18 sec CD and in the middle of a zerg SoM will out heal it with ease. This is NOT debatable and is a fact and will only take 4-5 cluster bombs to surpass it. Withdraw with no healing power heals for 5278. SoM heals for 147 per hit….3 hits a second is all you need to do it. (Not counting the bound/caltrop damage either)

2. OH dagger inside a group of enemies isn’t some mecca of skill. Hint: You aren’t missing your CnD. You build your gear right and you’ll tank some hits.

3. You are speaking from a stance of ignorance in regards to front line zerg busting on a thief. Act more appropriately plz

No, the OP asked if anyone has tried a decent one and proposed a build. The proposals thus far are far from decent, especially from the zerg-busting perspective. “It’s been done” on a build concept like what you proposed has never been seen, heard of, and quite frankly, probably never put to a real test in real ZvZ. Nomad builds, stealth res bots, and venomshare have all seen succesful play and use in large scale WvW, and none of the above frontline, because even these durable builds die quickly and can’t sustain against the incoming damage.

Some groups think 15 is a zerg. Depending on tier and server, that’s a havoc squad. SoM’s butter zone is probably a group of 15. At 10 people, the group will have enough vision and movement to avoid the field, and I imagine around 20 the numbers stop mattering because staying in the front line permanently likely means a dead thief based on incoming damage and the cooldowns required. Real talk, though, unless that other group of 15 is a zerg busting group, they’re likely running more damaging builds, and a marauder thief will get bursted down pretty quick. If a real zerg-busting group were to enter, the thief still has no chance, because it’ll be composed of better frontline-based professions and builds which are border-line immune to damage, and while the heals from caltrops and the likes are on cooldown, such a group will be organized and will focus such a thief down if it does not disengage. All it takes is a paltry 500 damage per hit from the 15 people (which is incredibly low and unrealistic), and said thief, despite all the healing, goes down in roughly five seconds considering conditions, including the 2s from IR, which depending on how long ago your friend ran this, didn’t even exist as a trait.

Cluster bomb isn’t the answer, and even 3 attacks per second on shortbow is difficult to do against good groups. Aegis/blocks, invulns, reflects, etc. in a pragmatic perspective, it’s not happening, since this also cuts out bounces from the AA chain. It looks good on paper; it doesn’t work in reality. To really get healing benefits, you need caltrops, which is on 30s, which can hit a maximum of 50 times, pushing the heal to roughly 7.5k at best over 10 second, which also assumes no poison or disables. HP/s, this is lower than what withdraw offers, offers lower burst healing, doesn’t cleanse conditions and comes with all the negatives of not being a dodge or reposition. Yes, SoM can outheal withdraw if it constantly maintains peak performance and is always-attacking with something, but that peak performance is so unlikely to occur when fighting against such large groups that it ends up not performing well.

I do bid you to roll a thief and dive a 50-man blob alone on a D/D power thief with no boons or support and try downing two people and tell me how well it goes for you. You don’t even have to play my build, which is DA/CS/Tr. “A few hits” is roughly 100k damage per second and enough CC to make a nomad warrior weep. If you do not play literally perfectly, you will die. I don’t claim to be perfect, as I die all the time in hilariously laughable Leeroy Jenkin’s style, but saying “building your gear right” to tank “some” hits is just ridiculous. CnD isn’t what keeps you alive, and isn’t easy to land in these environments, because CnD is negated very often between shared aegis, invulns, dodges, marks, traps, etc., and often times being careless will proc passives (like Protective Ward) that cause you to lose the capacity to fight well or simply fall over dead from interrupting your flow. No, careful consideration of when and where to strike keeps D/D alive. Reliably landing CnD is the trickiest part of engaging in such a way, and often where I fail and subsequently die the most. Using of all of the rest of D/D’s kit is needed to stay alive.

And to then have the audacity to make the claim that I speak from ignorance when your claims are such falsehoods demonstrating a clear lack of understanding of the profession (you mention in your first post in bold text you don’t play thief and to not flame you too hard for it, which initially I said only SoM was junk out of support for a disagreement of someone else saying literally what I said above because you still continued to claim it worked) and the actual reality of ZvZ and zerg-busting. I have a reputation (albeit a small one as I do not rep such big guilds and don’t record my play to brag about these trends often, and most of my previous WvW buddies quit with HoT/DBL’s) for frontlining a thief well. I’m trying to give the OP advice to do the right thing and not waste his time and frustration pursuing a build that won’t work except on paper. To attack me (and pretty much everyone else in the thread who has doubted or straight up disagreed with the build on the claim of ignorance is just foolish, when frankly, you yourself initially said you’re not qualified to discuss the matter.

The build will perform okay-ish at best in large fights (it still needs an escape/disengage to recover as it will not function as a full-time frontline; no thief can), and would have the capacity to survive fairly well as a periphery, however the party slot is a complete waste for true zerg-busting groups and doesn’t come close to reaching decent frontline standards.

Artaz.3819:

D/D is tough. The front line aspect is Death Blossom which doesn’t work that well – short evade and moving through targets (putting you out of position) coupled with primarily condi damage doesn’t work that well. Dancing Dagger spam is better done from mid-line/back-line but why when you have SB. Not all weapons are created equal – Staff (Dust Strike is insane) and Shortbow if you want to frontline.

@ Azukas – he is (or his friend) is correct. The key to Thief and really any bunker build is healing (self and group generated). But that’s why Venoms/Venomshare is so good. Stealth isn’t bad either if you want to escape/rez on occasion. Sustain healing is the key but Signet of Malice is not nearly as useful as an evade/remove condi/short cooldown heal Withdraw.

IMO, poison condition is highly underrated in WvW zergs but even with the condi cleanse, it still is good with all the constant heals going on and makes it extremely good even with zero condition damage builds. SB has it all (attacks that can’t be reflected/Poison, mobility/blind, AoE bounce for tagging, on demand secondary evades, Blast Finisher, ranged immobilize – if it had 1200 range on Autoattack, it would be king).

The #1 thief issue in WvW zerg is lack of stability. The only alternative besides running with Guardian is lots of stun breaks and evade/position away from front line (or running a perma-stealth build). It’s not easy.

DD, not D/D. I meant DD= daredevil.

Artaz.3819:

Azukas.1426:

The signet procs on all damage. So what he would do is throw down the caltrops in the middle of a zerg while dropping cluster bombs. He would easily tag 20 people and getting healed 20×132 every second is quite substantial when you are also blasting water fields. Now add in 15% of all crit damage as health and 102 heal for every point of initiative you spend…..

You pair that with perma stability protection might etc and Frontline thief isnt a myth anymore.

Caltrops is capped at 5 targets per hit so 5×132 per second (per your example) IF no one evades/distorts and there are 5 targets in the 240 radius.

Withdraw also triggers the DD evade traits. Beyond movement condition clear and evade frames, it’s also a low cooldown and insta cast. IMO, no choice except for certain solo roaming builds and even then.

Perma stab/protection ??? from your team … honestly, any class would do in that case.

I would never take withdraw in a frontline. It places you out of position when the whole point of a frontline is to truck through the enemy team into their backline, I don’t want to isolate myself behind my melee train to be blown up to bits.

PS: a Nomads thief will still outdamage a soldier/knights guardian or revenant running the meta staff/hammer build.

That is not up for debate. Thief base numbers and benchmarked DPS from autoattack alone is like 7-8k DPS ahead of what guards/revenants are pulling.

So you don’t offer support but you offer significantly more damage. And thief staff auto has a built in reflect to boot, which is immensely helpful in a frontline build.

I don’t think people have played other classes if they think anything other than elementalist can rival thief damage output.

Signet of Malice is also pure trash because in a frontline you’re not dying to sustained damage, you die to massive spike while being pinballed to death or rooted for 193672916392 years.

And by the way, I’ve played marauder ele with pvt trinket and cavalier weapons in zergs, and ele is squishier than thief with the same low health pool and even lower armor.

No, ele doesn’t have more tools to survive than a thief in a frontline. Perma prot already comes from guardians and revenants so cantrips do nothing, and arcane shield only blocks 3 hits so its trash amidst the sea of multihits, it won’t even last a second with weak guardian staff autos taking it off.

You are hitting so many people that SoM can actually burst heal. Also you can use the signet for a quick 4k heal if needed because the CD is only 15 secs.

Try it out what do you have to lose?

A 4k heal is not a burst heal. My revenant healing for 15k+ with glint or Channel Endurance for 10k or Wash the Pain Away for 12k+ is burst healing.

And your signet of malice relies on you hitting people at all to heal, which is kinda hard when you’re getting tossed away by lines of warding and circles of warding and need to step to the side a bit to heal and then go back into the train.

i can tell you i played d/d front line s/p front line short bow front line. flaws where thief get rekt is placement you run full zerker front line if you want. second you hit a choke or a closed in fight area your build instantly trash. regardless of how much you want to heal with it sorry.

knowing where and what you can fight is what will make this build. it will not work in chokes or lord rooms fights open field i would say it could do fine.

Azukas.1426:

You are hitting so many people that SoM can actually burst heal. Also you can use the signet for a quick 4k heal if needed because the CD is only 15 secs.

Try it out what do you have to lose?

Many already have and are speaking from personal experience, like I have. It just doesn’t work.

Zenith.7301:

A 4k heal is not a burst heal. My revenant healing for 15k+ with glint or Channel Endurance for 10k or Wash the Pain Away for 12k+ is burst healing.

And your signet of malice relies on you hitting people at all to heal, which is kinda hard when you’re getting tossed away by lines of warding and circles of warding and need to step to the side a bit to heal and then go back into the train.

Which is what I said; SoM is a sustained heal, and thief lacks the innate capability of soaking hits for periods of time to let that sustained heal work. Since it has to re-position anyways, it’s better off not bothering and playing withdraw for the strictly better burst heal and using its damage in marauder to pick off the back line while not standing in the line of fire for the frontline.

As far as ele goes, it has tools to do well on sustained heals such as mist form and the lower-cooldown teleport. It’s also got a real purpose in large-scale by providing water fields, fire fields, and heavy AoE damage/CC, making the build worth taking. A thief running SoM and utilities to proc it brings pretty much nothing to the table to win a given fight except a little bit of damage, making the party slot largely wasted, making the build a pretty sub-par front-liner.

Nomad thief dealing more damage than soldier’s guard is hard to believe and likely trait-dependent. DA/Tr/DrD might get it close, but soldier’s gear provides great stats for guards. If the thief has 25 might, maybe, just because of stacked damage modifiers, but because all the damage comes from modifiers, and without CS, there aren’t enough to compensate for the massive power difference, I think you’re overstating the thief’s damage output a tad such that traits would be what makes it even a remotely competitive game, which if you’re comparing it to the meta frontliner guard, a build like SA/Acro/DrD should be used, since frontliner guard isn’t meant to even really try and deal damage.

Taobella.6597:

i can tell you i played d/d front line s/p front line short bow front line. flaws where thief get rekt is placement you run full zerker front line if you want. second you hit a choke or a closed in fight area your build instantly trash. regardless of how much you want to heal with it sorry.

knowing where and what you can fight is what will make this build. it will not work in chokes or lord rooms fights open field i would say it could do fine.

Almost exactly what I’ve said numerous times when it comes to real fights. You could be healing for 50k/second, and on a thief, it still wouldn’t be enough. A real blob will instantly trash a thief that stays on the front lines for too long or engages at the wrong moment (like being in the same location as the commander running an invuln guardian). A thief can stay there for a while if played excellently, but it absolutely needs to have a disengage and absolutely needs to use it in order to stay alive against large groups. Good positioning and timing are everything, and standing in the fire isn’t good positioning nor good timing. You can probably keep a thief in the front line for 90% of a fight. It just needs to not be there for that 10% when it’d straight-up die.

Taobella.6597:

i can tell you i played d/d front line s/p front line short bow front line. flaws where thief get rekt is placement you run full zerker front line if you want. second you hit a choke or a closed in fight area your build instantly trash. regardless of how much you want to heal with it sorry.

knowing where and what you can fight is what will make this build. it will not work in chokes or lord rooms fights open field i would say it could do fine.

There simply too much AOE at choke points for any thief build to survive in it too long. I have managed to use an SOM build to get me through a choke point and out the other side but if you caught in it nothing can really save you.

The SOM user can do very well in a smaller scale Lords room battle. I have flipped a tower solo with such a build with as many of 4 of the enemy there as well and defended them as well. This of course depends on the skill level of the enemy and how much AOE they have to toss around. If the group AOE weak you can do very well.

babazhook.6805:

Taobella.6597:

i can tell you i played d/d front line s/p front line short bow front line. flaws where thief get rekt is placement you run full zerker front line if you want. second you hit a choke or a closed in fight area your build instantly trash. regardless of how much you want to heal with it sorry.

knowing where and what you can fight is what will make this build. it will not work in chokes or lord rooms fights open field i would say it could do fine.

There simply too much AOE at choke points for any thief build to survive in it too long. I have managed to use an SOM build to get me through a choke point and out the other side but if you caught in it nothing can really save you.

The SOM user can do very well in a smaller scale Lords room battle. I have flipped a tower solo with such a build with as many of 4 of the enemy there as well and defended them as well. This of course depends on the skill level of the enemy and how much AOE they have to toss around. If the group AOE weak you can do very well.

small scale fight i prefer the healing of vemons. but that not really related to this topic.

but my point is if you are playing at the top T1 WvW roughly 60% engagement are at a choke point. so 60% of the time this type of style would be more or less useless depending on what you are fighting. when we talk zerging i talking like 20- 50+ anything less is just a large group.

i am not saying you can not do it just simply knowing where you will struggle.

I play T1 WvW in TC and most of our engagements are open field, because I prefer to play in EB than those garbage borderlands where people just sit on arrow carts and siege the hell out of a bridge.

If you get to a choke point with your melee train, that’s what shadowstep and bandit’s defense are for. You can even use shortbow 5 to port past the lines of warding as your guardians/revs push through and switch to staff when you collide with the enemy zerg.

Zenith.7301:

I play T1 WvW in TC and most of our engagements are open field, because I prefer to play in EB than those garbage borderlands where people just sit on arrow carts and siege the hell out of a bridge.

If you get to a choke point with your melee train, that’s what shadowstep and bandit’s defense are for. You can even use shortbow 5 to port past the lines of warding as your guardians/revs push through and switch to staff when you collide with the enemy zerg.

Shhhh it’s impossibru according to these people. GTFO with your logics are reality!!!

Or ya know like any choke point tactics you range em until the push then push with the driver…..

They even buffed Bandit’s Defense to a 2 sec block this patch

Zenith.7301:

They even buffed Bandit’s Defense to a 2 sec block this patch

You don’t realize what they did with Sword 2 though

lolololololololololol

Front line dagger/dagger…….LOL

Good luck with that. With the recent patch that contains the single biggest nerf to d/d in the entire games history kiss your dream goodbye.

“Stealth Attacks: All stealth attack skills will now have a 1-second recharge between uses.”

I’ve done some testing and this doesn’t affect pistol since it unstealth you on use. Staff stealth skill can’t be use twice due to its long animation. It only really affects Sword/dagger, dagger/dagger, & dagger/pistol. Ohhhhhh does this get hit hard. You need PERFECT strikes, you have to predict where your opponent is going to be since the sword and dagger stealth attack takes 1/2 sec to execute at which point they could of moved. MOVED. Dam are dagger anything thiefs screwed.

Now fight a stealth player like a mesmer or engineer. You my friend should just type /sleep and give theme the free kill.