Guild Wars 2

Sure sure, we have wvw, we have pve where bs can pull nice numbers once in ages…

I am talking about pvp. Certanly thieves can still get relative high backstab numbers on squishies. The problem is you don’t see them so much in pvp really. Most of the classes either play celestial or are just generally tanky/have high uptime on protection/weakness.

Most (high) backstabs i see are around 4-5 k. Celestial classes can do actually more dmg which kind of kills whole purpose of going zerker on first place (and thieves don’t have alternatives really).

Might sound a lot but it is not if you consider the set up time and requirements:
- getting stealth /blow CDs or a lot of initiative
- get behind the target
- mostlikely eat a lot of aoe dmg/CC while trying to get behind the target

Meanwhile given the set up time and execution time i probably could have done double dmg by spamming auto attack, even with sb… So what is the point of backstab? The risk/costs are just too high imo.

Maybe specialisations will change it but highly doubt it (inb4 traps spec is all thieves get) so few thoughts on it(brainstorming):

- maybe make it that crit backstab has xx% chance to ignore protection/certain amount of armor be it via rune/sigil or trait

- make ferocity more meaningful and maybe allow characters with high ferocity do more dmg if target reached certain armor level

- reduce backstab requirements? add trait that doesn’t require to be behind the target (lowers skill cap but really what is the point of skill cap in this brainless meta?)

You would say, omg u cray? You want thieves to do more dmg vs tanky ? But but but… yeah exactly isn’t it why zerkers give up everything for dmg anyway? Seeing them doing as much if not less dmg than celestial is just dishearting and makes me question Anet decisions. Seeing as Anet has 0 interest in changing celestial meta (which we had for 1 year now) i think it is time to ask for changes for thieves or zerkers in general.

tl/dr: My point is: backstab should be actually worth the amount of time/recources it requires. Thoughts? Suggestions?

Yeah, sometimes it’s frustrating hitting a heavily armored target and watching it do nothing relatively speaking, at the same time I hit other squishies for 8.5k in pvp still occasionally. I think the only thing that they could do is remove the double damage from behind and bring back Deep Wound from guild wars 1. That would improve BS against heavy armor, but decrease effectiveness against light armor. Deep wound could just stack intensity up to a max of 35% of their health with 3 stacks. First stack 20%, 2nd stack 10%, 3rd stack 5%. Counterplay is that a condi removal essentially gives players back a large portion of their health. Pairs nicely with poison too.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Deep_Wound

I just use shadow shot over backstab, people RANDOMLY dodge my backstabs when I come in with signet + steal while stealthed when I stealthed out of their sight 24/7. If you try to black powder – > HS – > backstab people always dodge it in 1v1 situations 100% of the time Majority of my damage is sigil procs, shadow shot and auto’s. I feel like I’m doing it wrong but it’s so much easier to deal damage that way than to attempt to backstab, and the damage isn’t much lower if lower at all.

I’d like to see a way to drop stealth early in order to attack earlier while avoiding the revealed debuf. Imo forcing a drop target and just auto attacking can often times be more effective as you have the option to stealth again during those 4 seconds you’d be revealed.

Revealed is like a 4 second ATTACK ME sign in big neon lights hovering over dagger thieves’ heads. After a dagger thief is revealed you should often focus them (assuming they’re in dagger), because you’ll force them to blow cooldowns, or initiative via swapping to bow 3/5 or you’ll kill them. Either ways it’s value for your team.

Consider this: A zerker warrior in wvw will hit a zerker thief for almost 10k with eviscerate, the warrior’s 100 blades will down the thief, rush will hit 5k+. The warrior has better healing, more armor, better movement (meaning can out run the thief), and more hp.

Backstab will hit the warrior for max 5k.

I think backstab is totally worth it, thieves are dangerous, we can kill mesmers and other thieves (and the odd necro who gets caught without prestacked lifeforce).

Why people still think thieves are played for anything else than the style factor and the swoop sounds is beyond me. Face it, if you want to win do not play thief. And do not give me any “but the mobility…” nonsense thief mobility does not win a flower pot anywhere in the game.

Bazzoong.7145:

Consider this: A zerker warrior in wvw will hit a zerker thief for almost 10k with eviscerate, the warrior’s 100 blades will down the thief, rush will hit 5k+. The warrior has better healing, more armor, better movement (meaning can out run the thief), and more hp.

Backstab will hit the warrior for max 5k.

I think backstab is totally worth it, thieves are dangerous, we can kill mesmers and other thieves (and the odd necro who gets caught without prestacked lifeforce).

Why people still think thieves are played for anything else than the style factor and the swoop sounds is beyond me. Face it, if you want to win do not play thief. And do not give me any “but the mobility…” nonsense thief mobility does not win a flower pot anywhere in the game.

Ikr it’s only viable in spvp lol I’d rather have to ability to duel anyone.

RIP DP Thief

SD Thief OP

I’m….on the fence here. I like Maugetarr’s idea of apply deep wound over double crit. But I think it still should cost a lot of initiative for such a sudden spike of damage. As for positioning…it should still utilizing positioning.

But I question the amount of spike damage it should be doing. Two lucky backstabs should not down a shatter mesmer from full health to no health in a half second. (And I am irked by this because thief in question was a ‘22222’ HS spammer who couldn’t kill my shatter mesmer at 5% health and got rekt in the process since I kept timing interrupts and distorts >.> Freaking…lucky….gah.)

Anyway…

I dislike d/p for same reasons. Initiative costs. It’s most effective when played in the mindset of ‘stay in stealth’ until the opportune moment. It’s safe, stealth is safe, and it should not be cheap in initiative to stay safe.

If we consider it for PvP, what does it contribute to team effort? Ganking and removing other spike damage users. Not so much for decapping or countering bunker builds, no. Bunkers are meant to hold points, at the tradeoff of doing less damage. Even celestial is arguably balanced against backstab, because they don’t spike damage from one person, like a backstab. But I – I don’t know. I just don’t feel like I’m helping my team out by focusing only on kills and ganks. Maybe I just haven’t found a way to maximize it’s potential, but to me, that seems to be where D/P is the weakest.

tl;dr – if it needs any rework, it should be done in the interest of leveling damage output to the skill’s viability and risk of use. Don’t make backstabs easier to land or cost less initiative, make it so a misaligned backstab can still cause threat, but a proper backstab, direct backstab can still be reacted to. It’s not the amount of damage, but the timing and implementation of damage. How much time you have to react and negate/defend from that damage. Sidestab anyone?

D/P thief is not dead. I play it and I wouldn’t give it up so easily.
Sure, some backstabs leave you with a (._.) expression on your face (4.5k backstabs on tanky wars/guards), but overall it’s still a very viable burst damage. Just gotta time it right.

I run a 26600 build. I use stealth on steal (which most people don’t use), which imo is VERY good for a couple reasons:
1 – you can get an easy backstab using basilisk venom → steal → backstab on petrified target
2 – it’s an additional stealth = some hp regen and all the other good things that come with being in stealth
3 – can help with stomps
4 – leaves you with FULL initiative after your first backstab burst

For my utilities I use SR, BP and either shadowstep or infiltrator’s signets. My heal is vanish in shadows. All of these things combined give me plenty of stealth options, so what I mostly use my initiative for, is simply blinding enemies. Even if it’s not as good as it used to be, pistol 5 is still great. Use it to its full potential.

Long live DP thief!

It will never be a useful source of damage in the format. Before CnD’s nerf D/D was somewhat reasonable as it netted overall a large sum of damage.

Anything too bursty would make them overpowered by design (the perfect decap/roamer).

Critical damage and power values are way too low relative to PvE/WvW to make the skill worthwhile, and all classes and builds have inherently higher toughness and vitality on even the glassiest builds relative to PvE and WvW as well – sometimes up to 50% more.

For as long as thief remains so mobile with the stealth access it has, damage-based backstab will never be a viable way of playing in sPvP. Perhaps specializations can change this, but I would not expect much.

Thief is always stuck between being OP in some cases and totally UP in others. Backstab vs anything zerker except guardian is still really strong but when you play vs cele bunker the dmg is pathetic, even autoattacks can hit harder than backstab if they have protection.

I would like to see them balancing thief more by reducing its advantage vs zerker classes and increasing it against cele bunkers.

I’ve been running 6/6/2 for fun. Hits hard and has condi clears. 2/0/6/0/6 is also pretty good in hot joins. A lot less damage but survivability goes way up.

In WvW, you still shouldn’t over rely on backstab, there’s Auto-attack, shadow shot and heartseeker. It should be in your Spike rotation, but otherwise there is also Steal if you fully trait into Trickery, even if you miss backstab, there’s no need to waste Init for the Black Powder + Heartseeker rotation – which is often followed by pre-casting backstab, by using shadow shot as a gap closer.

I think it’s time to step back and consider what some of you are saying… Because it’s completely illogical and just helps spread misinformation.

(Weapon strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

This is the equation for base damage. You can add protection, vulnerability, damage modifiers, etc, into it too, but those are also all multiplicative, meaning if you double for instance power, the total damage is also doubled. Add a 10 % modifier, and the damage goes up 10 %, add protection and damage is reduced by 33 % – pretty straight forward.

Now taking from wiki, we get these damage coefficient for some of the dagger skills:

Backstab: 2.4
Shadowshot: 1.25
Full auto chain: 0.56 + 0.85 + 0.85 = 2.26

So as we can see, backstab will always deal almost twice the damage of shadowshot (provided it hits from behind of course), and the damage is still around 6 % higher than the damage dealt by the full auto chain. You can make claims that backstabs hits too little, but if it hits like a wet noodle, you can be sure the rest of your skills will do the same. Adding protection and high toughness doesn’t magically alter the skill coefficients.

Lol 62006 or 60206 is still very good. 26006 can be underwhelming but still playable against celery comps without ez targets.

critical theory.8750:

I think it’s time to step back and consider what some of you are saying… Because it’s completely illogical and just helps spread misinformation.

(Weapon strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

This is the equation for base damage. You can add protection, vulnerability, damage modifiers, etc, into it too, but those are also all multiplicative, meaning if you double for instance power, the total damage is also doubled. Add a 10 % modifier, and the damage goes up 10 %, add protection and damage is reduced by 33 % – pretty straight forward.

Now taking from wiki, we get these damage coefficient for some of the dagger skills:

Backstab: 2.4
Shadowshot: 1.25
Full auto chain: 0.56 + 0.85 + 0.85 = 2.26

So as we can see, backstab will always deal almost twice the damage of shadowshot (provided it hits from behind of course), and the damage is still around 6 % higher than the damage dealt by the full auto chain. You can make claims that backstabs hits too little, but if it hits like a wet noodle, you can be sure the rest of your skills will do the same. Adding protection and high toughness doesn’t magically alter the skill coefficients.

did you consider time and resources in your calculations? no…

the thread is not about builds really.. just backstab in itself… i feel like correlation between dmg it deals and costs is just not justified in current meta (which apprently is desired by devs considering they didn’t bother touching it for 1 year now, lol @ might nerf)

giving flat dmg buff to bs would be wrong as it would just push thieves too much over other zerkers hence suggestions that would rather affect tankier targets

Some more thoughs:

I agree with the notion that increasing the flat damage to dagger attacks is a bad idea (mesmers and other low armor proffesions would suffer to much disadvantage if the damage would be increased so that it actually threatens guardians and warriors).

What we should get is a “armor penetration” trait linked to daggers like: Your dagger skills now ignore 30% of your targets armor. I would suggest this to be a master trait in deadly arts, replace dagger training with it. There should be a status icon on the thief visible that shows this is traited. This would allow builds specifically against high armor targets, without introducing more one-shot threats to low armor targets (eviscerate is bad enough, we do not need more of that).

This is not going to happen, though, just look at the game the imbalances between professions are by design and are deeply entrenched, they will only be more pronnounced and sharpend in the future.