Guild Wars 2

I have strength runes laying around but wondering what’s the best for p/d build. Anyone help? :o

Krait, Balthazar and Undead..

I am currently going with Undead runes because of the added survivability and condition damage (more than with the other runes). I focus on reapplying conditions fast, and don’t have that much focus on condition duration.

My current build.

If you want more burst then Krait and Balthazar are good alternatives. Balthazar are great since you get access to Burning, which is the hardest hitting condition in the game. Paired with Withdraw it is just amazing!

Krait pretty much requires you to work with Basilisk Venom, which I rarely use.

I have tried each of the following and all work dependent on style.

Rune of Aristocracy; Great for building might stacks especially if you take marjories experimental chili and Withdraw as your heal. This will give might of 6 stacks every time you use heal. This works great in hybrid builds and you can easily build up to 3k condition damage in normal play. Your normal attacks also hit much harder.

Rune of Nightmare; The 15 percent added condition duration coupled with Sigils of malice and bursting can get condition duration to 100 percent. Now people point out that this not needed but this not entirely true. It gives very specific and meaningful advantages. You can build more stacks of your damaging conditions but more importantly those you rarely use will see increased effects.

Just as example the p/d slot number 2 skill is now a full 2 second Immob. The vulnerability stacks now last a full 6 seconds. Poison on steal will last a full 20 seconds. Weakness 8 seconds when a target is poisoned. Bewildering ambush and confusion stacks now a full ten seconds. Torment and bleeds are all longer. This is akin to having the durations of Grenth/torment/krait/perpexity runes all in one.

When using this extra duration, i see it as getting more bang for the buck out of your INI. Again that number 2 skill. 100 percent duration is almost like using that skill twice which would obviously cost more ini. Caltrops and daggertorm also see bleeds and cripples doubled .

The fear on the last piece of the rune is a great bonus. Think if it as a “throw feathers” in that if you are back stabbed or caught off guard with CC from an enemy they are very likely to be feared allowing you time to recover.

Runes of Grenth; These are what I currently use. Chill is a very powerful skill and coupled with Sigil of ice on one of my weapons I have great access to the same. Chill on heal coupled with withdraw and sigil of hydromancy can lay a ten second chill on a group of enemies. Ice drake venom becomes somewhat useable. The number 4 skills procs a lot and is handy when you are in melee range and see it go off.

If you read the commentary from Eles they absolutely hate Chill as it impacts their ability to change attunements. The steal off an ele is now a source of 20 second chill.

Runes of the Scavenger: These give a great bonus to conditions and extra sustain with the added heals. The bonus is equal to that of undead and they are very cheap.

Runes of the Adventurer: If you like the dodges and acrobatic trait line which MIGHT see more usage in the future the number 6 skill on this set is significant coupled with withdraw. Use the skill Roll for Ini and you gain a whole lot of survival with a combination of dodges evades and stealth.

The 50 percent endurance gain is a full free dodge every time you heal and the rune set also adds to power.

Other Condition friendly sets have been commented on so I will not add to those. These are the ones often overlooked. Have fun. Pick the one that suits your play style. Some I have listed are very cheap so you might wish to experiment.

Strength is good for power pd. Though the 2 best for condi is pexplex and krait its not much of a contest. There are other runes that work well but these two are the best.

Geiir.7603:

My current build.

I settled in on almost the exact same set-up with a couple of minor differences.

I’m currently using resilience of shadows for 50% damage reduction while stealthed over health regen when stealthed.

What are your thoughts on RoS?

Thanks in advance!

It really depends on what you’re using the build for.

I use p/d for wvw roaming in a condition build, so runes of strength don’t make much sense for me. If you build p/d with more power, though, then runes of strength or other might stacking runes might be a little better.

For p/d condi, I use perplexity with slight of hand. Slight of hand is just way too good to pass up. With poison on steal + daze + a well-timed interrupt + the confusion from the perplexity runes and any torments you apply with sigils or venoms, you stack a ridiculous number of conditions at once. My elite is also Basilisk venom for potentially another interrupt between steals.

In my opinion, the only other real viable option is Balth. Burning is incredibly strong, but you need to get used to using withdrawal. Now for the p/d condi build, I just don’t think any other runes even come close to viable b/c condi duration isn’t what makes this build strong; it’s how often (and how easily) you can throw an absurd number of conditions on someone fast enough. Other runes might be cheaper, but again your goal should be to put as many dangerous conditions on your opponent at once. Because the thief does not have skill access to burning or confusion, you want either of them in your rune set to give you access to another condition.

I use Krait. Pretty straight forward choice and they’re cheap.

>>Because the thief does not have skill access to burning or confusion, you want either of them in your rune set to give you access to another condition.

Thieves do have access to Confusion. That said if one is looking for cover conditions, you can get plenty of them without using a specific rune set.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQRAqY4Imgmo4dFqBvvivYD1LAA-TVRSwA00DAW9DAqgsUJ4GlfAA-w

As you can see no sigils selected. No runes selected and access to every condition but burning , chill and fear. A steal inflicts poison weakness and confusion. Bleeds and torments are easily applied.

Now you can make a choice here. An access to burn every fifteen seconds which will hit hard but can often miss or use up a heal when it not efficient to do so. Use Balthazar.

A constant access to chill wherein you can all but get a 100 percent chill uptime use Grenth. It does less outright damage then a burn but has great utility.

A 4 second fear that kicks in around every 90 seconds. Use nightmare.

Or forgo those entirely, count on the number of base conditions you have as enough and get a more defensive utilitarian build. Having access to ONE less condition is not going to break your build.

Yes, you’re right. You can get confusion with BA, but taking BA over slight of hand isn’t a good idea. The 20% CD reduction on slight of hand alone makes it worth it. So I don’t see BA as a viable option; I see it as a liability.

I’m just not seeing an advantage to having chill over burning/confusion in a p/d build. Skill #3 means that no one comes near you anyway, so you’re already a kiting god. Burning or confusion increases your damage output by so much that I could never imagine passing one of them up, especially when you already have an on-demand immobilize with skill #2 and an instant get-away-from-me skill #3 (that also applies torment).

P/d is already going to win against just about any melee build you encounter, so I think the extra damage is the way to go. I think the more challenging fights for me with p/d are ranged enemies who I can’t instantly shadowstep away from with skill 3. Of course, that’s probably just a weakness in my play style, so for me it makes more sense to have more damage for those more difficult ranged fights (as chill won’t do much for me there).

As far as Shadow’s Rejuv or Resilience of Shadows, I always go Shadow’s Rejuv because it scales nicely with healing power, whereas Resilience is just a 50% decrease. Also, Shadow’s Rejuv is more reliable because no matter what (I mean unless you’re already at full health), you’ll benefit from the healing. With Resilience of Shadows, you’ll only see a benefit IF you’re attacked in stealth.

>>I’m just not seeing an advantage to having chill over burning/confusion in a p/d build

The chill gives a great ability to close on an opponent that is fleeing It better then cripple in this regard. P/d is lacking in this regard . It is also very useful tracking down fellow thieves. That immoblize on number two takes INI away and its duration is very short which does not allow a lot of time to close on someone fleeing.

The increased cooldown on skills means your conditions will stay on longer and keep ticking before they are cleansed again. If you keep your stacks on 4 more seconds because of the cooldown duration increase, that is 8000 more damage if your stacks tick at 2k.

If you have a 10 second chill on an opponent that has used a 20 second condi cleanse that next cleanse can not happen again for at minimum 4 more seconds. If you go to the Ele thread the thing they hate most is Chill because it compromises their ability to switch attunements. Wait till they switch TO water chill them as they go out and their next condi cleanse/heal is significantly delayed.

That is four more ticks of your existing conditions. Coupled with that all of the other skills go on increased cooldown. That is a significant advantage that can well outweigh the damage from fire on Balthazar.

I tried Balthazar myself and it is a very good choice BUT that is the only source of fire on a thief build. That means that duration increase goes to waste when one is not using a heal to inflict burns.

Think of it this way. In a Balthazar build using withdraw assuming it burns for the full duration and one heals every 15 seconds you will get 6 seconds of burning out of that 15 seconds for some 5000 total damage.

With Grenth and the same assumptions you can keep an uptime on chill of close to 100 percent and lengthen the time between heals and condition cleanses for those full 15 seconds.

Since a Thief has other sources of chill (hydromancy/sigil of ice/ice drake venom) that percent duration increase is used more often.

Ice drake venom becomes a 6 second chill. It now usable.

There a reason most sources of chill have low durations and why something like sigil of ice is on a 10 second cooldown. It because it a VERY powerful condition. Grenth gives sigil of ice a 4 second chill over a 2 second chill on a 10 second cooldown. THAT is significant.

Now as to cover conditions and more conditions and BA over sleight of hand , I have used both the BA and sleight of hand in my builds. I found they actually balanced each other nicely dependent on runeset used. As example I found BA worked BETTER using Rune of the Nightmare over sleight of hand. This because that build relied on longer durations and a 10 second duration confusion was more telling then that daze/boon theft every 21 seconds. In other words as durations of conditions go UP in a p/d build the advantages of sleight of hand drop.

With Grenth I find no need for confusion at all. I have plenty of conditions and use sleight of hand.

Thanks for the clarification. I’ll definitely give it a shot.

Lol P/D thief…what a joke. Like, it’s so hard to kill nubs in wvw that you have to go full condi bunker. WvW is becoming a joke but the developers don’t seem to care because they let perplexity runes and condi food run rampant. But go ahead, get carried by your build. At least I won’t see you people in PvP. Although, if you do run condi thief in PvP please be on the other team, it’ll increase my chances of winning.

-Teef Teef Teef Teef, that thief that’s better than every P/D thief in the game because Ive learned to play instead of getting carried by cheese.

Elitist.8701:

Lol P/D thief…what a joke. Like, it’s so hard to kill nubs in wvw that you have to go full condi bunker. WvW is becoming a joke but the developers don’t seem to care because they let perplexity runes and condi food run rampant. But go ahead, get carried by your build. At least I won’t see you people in PvP. Although, if you do run condi thief in PvP please be on the other team, it’ll increase my chances of winning.

-Teef Teef Teef Teef, that thief that’s better than every P/D thief in the game because Ive learned to play instead of getting carried by cheese.

Ok?

MrSilver.5269:

Geiir.7603:

My current build.

I settled in on almost the exact same set-up with a couple of minor differences.

I’m currently using resilience of shadows for 50% damage reduction while stealthed over health regen when stealthed.

What are your thoughts on RoS?

Thanks in advance!

I have only used RoS a few times. I feel like it is most a team utility, like when you roam with guildies and stealth them it is priceless. For outnumbered fights and 1v1 I think Shadows Rejuvenation is stronger. Especially in outnumbered fights! The ability to just chain CnD of the group to regain some health is very good. But so are taking 50% less damage if your foe is good at sticking to you even in stealth.

This build has so much toughness and vitality, that survival alone shouldn’t be a problem, so I find healing in stealth more valuable while roaming solo.

But again; this is all about personal preference! If you feel safer with RoS then that is what you should go with.

Elitist.8701:

Lol P/D thief…what a joke. Like, it’s so hard to kill nubs in wvw that you have to go full condi bunker. WvW is becoming a joke but the developers don’t seem to care because they let perplexity runes and condi food run rampant. But go ahead, get carried by your build. At least I won’t see you people in PvP. Although, if you do run condi thief in PvP please be on the other team, it’ll increase my chances of winning.

-Teef Teef Teef Teef, that thief that’s better than every P/D thief in the game because Ive learned to play instead of getting carried by cheese.

So you think you are a better player because you don’t play P/D? I for one have played every single thief build in this game and done a lot of theory rafting on different builds. The only build I have yet to play are the current s/d meta which I haven’t had time to play with.

To think you are better is just very narrow minded. No, I won’t run a p/d build in PvP, but I will use it when fighting 10-20 players alone in WvW.

What I do agree on is that p/d is an excellent start for new thieves to learn CnD and just some basic thievery. But to say that the build carry players are just wrong. It is very easy for any decent player to kill a bad p/d thief. It is an excellent duel build since it is a ranged attrition build, but will not work against ranged burst builds if they know what they’re doing.

Elitist.8701:

Lol P/D thief…what a joke. Like, it’s so hard to kill nubs in wvw that you have to go full condi bunker. WvW is becoming a joke but the developers don’t seem to care because they let perplexity runes and condi food run rampant. But go ahead, get carried by your build. At least I won’t see you people in PvP. Although, if you do run condi thief in PvP please be on the other team, it’ll increase my chances of winning.

-Teef Teef Teef Teef, that thief that’s better than every P/D thief in the game because Ive learned to play instead of getting carried by cheese.

^^ Doesn’t win many fights

i use balthazar from the start and use withdraw in the beginning to push my enemy to use cleanse earlier thus my seconds burst is free kill and if he push me i can dodge and stealth till 15 seconds pass and all over again

i once kill d/p thief just with withdraw and burning and AA alone (he probably wasn’t too good but was funny as he didnt know what to do with the 6 seconds burning |)

chill also great against melee classes like warrior, dd ele etc as they wouldnt be able to hit you