So lately I have been trying out non-stealth thief builds. Damage wise they seem work really well but the only problem is survivability. Direct damage is usually easy to handle with the amount of dodges, evades, blinds, and teleports the thief has, but when it comes to condition damage I am a sitting duck. Thieves have barely any condition removal that does not involve stealth. Withdraw removes cripple, immob, and chill which are annoying conditions but don’t deal damage. Roll for Initiative removes the same as withdraw. And Signet of Agility only removes one condition. This is hardly enough condition removal when fighting a necro or engi who can stack almost every condition in the game on you within seconds and do it very often.
IMO if Anet wants to fix players complaining about thieves, give us condition removal to make non stealth builds viable.
Azawrath the Silent – Thief
Primi Agminis Legio [PAL]
Yaks Bend
I see where you’re coming from, but wanted to throw out there that with some builds (mine being one of them, and no I’m not posting it, sorry), the idea can become, basically, to out-heal the incoming damage via doing damage. Unfortunately, however, there’s squat I can do about confusion, making it the single most infuriating condition.
I also wanted to point out that our stealth heal cures a few things inherently – IE, you don’t have to be IN stealth for it to work, it does it right away. Not sure if this undermines your point or not.
Sword #2, PR (master trait in acrobatics), lyssa runes, or food (condi removed on heal skill). Other than that I don’t see out of stealth condi removal to be all that suitable. You can get generosity or purity sigils but that’s not a thief mechanic, I wouldn’t call it a fix as much as a Band-Aid for the time being. Atm condi removal outside stealth is difficult and requires a lot more defensive play just to keep things off vs stealth which is upon entrance and every 3 seconds for 10 trait points.
“I’m waiting for the staff to get off their lunch
break. I feel like they should be back by now..”
I see where you’re coming from, but wanted to throw out there that with some builds (mine being one of them, and no I’m not posting it, sorry), the idea can become, basically, to out-heal the incoming damage via doing damage. Unfortunately, however, there’s squat I can do about confusion, making it the single most infuriating condition.
I also wanted to point out that our stealth heal cures a few things inherently – IE, you don’t have to be IN stealth for it to work, it does it right away. Not sure if this undermines your point or not.
I have tried builds similar to out healing the incoming damage by deal damage. I don’t know about you, but I find it very hard to out heal burning + poison + bleeds + everything else :P which deals more like 2-3k dmg a second.
And since we thieves don’t have access to stability except for the Dagger storm or runes we can get CC while conditions tick on us and how do you gain health then? Sure you can use a stun breaker but some classes are very CC heavy and very condition heavy cough engi cough
Azawrath the Silent – Thief
Primi Agminis Legio [PAL]
Yaks Bend
Anyway what your asking for will make the problem worse.
Unintended consequence you give thieves access to good out of stealth condition removal tools. Thieves who are heavy stealth built will have them too. Speaking specifically to Shadow’s Embrace it is an adept tier trait. There is no where you can put out of stealth condition removal trait that wont be able to have both. Next unintended consequence that would most likely happen is shadow embrace gets “nerfed” by being moved up to master or gm tier. Most certainly people will make a build that involves the out of stealth removal and shadow’s embrace if it stayed at current tier.
People will still complain why would you want to have your class changed just because people complain about something that is an important part of your class? They will still complain even if they turned thieves into kungkittenmasters that don’t need stealth but have evades. Then they complain bout evasion(which is about as strong as stealth imo). So the last choice is change the entire thief into a totally different class. What’s left? A medium armored warrior I suppose.
Anyway what your asking for will make the problem worse.
Unintended consequence you give thieves access to good out of stealth condition removal tools. Thieves who are heavy stealth built will have them too. Speaking specifically to Shadow’s Embrace it is an adept tier trait. There is no where you can put out of stealth condition removal trait that wont be able to have both. Next unintended consequence that would most likely happen is shadow embrace gets “nerfed” by being moved up to master or gm tier. Most certainly people will make a build that involves the out of stealth removal and shadow’s embrace if it stayed at current tier.
It just seems to me that players who spec more defensively whether that be with traits or utilities should have more survivability and be more defensive. Am I right? Other wise there would be no point to putting traits into that line. If they trait more defensively by getting more condition removal through traits or through utilities then they are giving up points that could go into the crit or power tree and they are losing a utility spot for more offensive play.
A problem does occur when a class can spec into heavy defensive traits and utilities and do not lose any DPS. Cough Warrior cough
But I do see how some noob players in this game would think it to be OP since thief can survive better against condition damage and thieves are still able to dodge and attack and exist in this game.
Azawrath the Silent – Thief
Primi Agminis Legio [PAL]
Yaks Bend
Yeah, this is a big factor really limiting build diversity.
You can’t survive in WvW without condition removal and the only viable removal we have is in stealth. Fleet Foot really needs to remove any condition type of condition when we dodge (only one, obviously).
Yeah, this is a big factor really limiting build diversity.
You can’t survive in WvW without condition removal and the only viable removal we have is in stealth. Fleet Foot really needs to remove any condition type of condition when we dodge (only one, obviously).
With no ICD also. Without an ICD it would only burst remove 3 conditions unless combined with SoA, which would make the utility part of SoA awesome (but still weaker than the warrior’s signet clear).
I would want to have condition transfer on infiltrator’s arrow, blind and transfer 1 condition to a random target within the reticle.
Within S/x and stealth builds, condition removal is good though.
SS – 3
IS/IR – 1
HiS – Damaging besides torment
Withraw – Movement Impairing
Roll of initiative – Movement Impairing
Fleet of foot – Weakness and cripple
Pain Response – Damaging besides torment
Signet of Agility – 1
Shadow’s Embrace – 1
Torment is easy to remove if you use use your skills in the right order.
nope.
Well, I’ll formulate further, it’s easy to remove if you put 10 points in shadow arts which is costly or play S/x, but otherwise it’s not if someone throws up additional conditions next to torment.
Torment is easy to remove if you use use your skills in the right order.
nope.
Well, I’ll formulate further, it’s easy to remove if you put 10 points in shadow arts which is costly or play S/x, but otherwise it’s not if someone throws up additional conditions next to torment.
Yeah if you don’t want to use stealth at all, then it’s a lot harder. I use withdraw though with condition removal food. Shadow step clears a lot, but has a long CD. Sigil of generosity is brilliant though on a crit build. It’s more that torment is a nasty condition in itself, because without stealth it’s generally hard to remove specific conditions.
Withdraw could be patched to remove torment though, because I think HiS would be too good if it removed that as well. I play S/D and the only stealth I use is CnD. I do remove conditions on stealth though. We may have our strong condition removal on stealth, but at least it’s fairly balanced, since it’s a 10 point trait.
Not using stealth at all as a general principle, will limit your condition removal ability, but I don’t feel like I rely very much on stealth at all.
+support, i used to run a non-cloak build with withdraw/shadowstep it was good until the meta shifted to something condi heavy. when necros and mesmers can easily apply condi to visible targets (add to the fact that necros barely have any animation) it just becomes too heavy of a burden to fight em in a Medium-long period of time cause you would just lose.
(back then i used p/p with sword/p)
Now i’m using D/P and S/P not because i got tired of my old set, it just couldnt keep up anymore.
You don’t need to remove every condi a necro throws at you to beat them in a fight.
True, you just need to remove the ones that deal damage. Such as poison/burning/bleed/torment/confusion BUT any half decent player knows combos that will mask these conditions behind blinds/cripple/immobilize/weakness/vulnerability.
So Thieves need more condition removal in order to cleanse the conditions that are blocking the damage conditions and then remove those. We have utility skills to get rid of most of the masking conditions but nothing that targets damaging conditions specifically. We have the Hide in Shadows health skill but it involves stealth which just supports the fact we have little non stealth based condition removal.
Azawrath the Silent – Thief
Primi Agminis Legio [PAL]
Yaks Bend
^ No, you just have to make the Necro run out of health before you do. Build some health and healing if you want to endure damaging conditions that are covered up by garbage ones, or adjust your build to include more no-stealth omni condition removal, like soup/Lyssa/SS/SoA.
I don’t understand the idea that anything short of completely countering this game’s best condition-applying profession is an inadequate result. ArenaNet DOES have a responsibility to make the Necromancer viable, too, you know, and the chance to win can’t just be “hope for Thief to make a critical mistake”.
^ No, you just have to make the Necro run out of health before you do. Build some health and healing if you want to endure damaging conditions that are covered up by garbage ones, or adjust your build to include more no-stealth omni condition removal, like soup/Lyssa/SS/SoA.
I don’t understand the idea that anything short of completely countering this game’s best condition-applying profession is an inadequate result. ArenaNet DOES have a responsibility to make the Necromancer viable, too, you know, and the chance to win can’t just be “hope for Thief to make a critical mistake”.
I might agree with you that the best defense is killing your enemy before the touch you. But the problem is that tactic requires heavy burst which a non stealth build does not have. Also it doesn’t work if your target is extremely tanky which most condition build are. So your ideology doesn’t really apply to a non stealth thief.
Secondly if you want me to become even more tanker by taking my DPS food and runes for condition removal which would make your idea of “killing your enemy before then can hit you” even harder to obtain.
And I already use SS and SoA which clearly isn’t enough since SS is on a long CD and SoA only removes one condi.
Azawrath the Silent – Thief
Primi Agminis Legio [PAL]
Yaks Bend
I might agree with you that the best defense is killing your enemy before the touch you.
That’s not what I said. You don’t need to burst down a Necro from 100 → 0, you just need to last longer than they do. I guarantee that you have more damage in your build than I do (typically I have ~2150 pow/80% crit/55% crit dmg), but I also run Withdraw with full Lyssa’s, so I have a chance of beating a Necro in a longer fight.
At the end of the day, Necromancers are supposed to be top tier condition-appliers, so it’s not really fair if someone can remove all of their power. You can take a chunk out of it, and try to heal through or survive the rest.
2150 power/ 80% crit/ 55% crit dmg??? What build do you run? Sounds like full glass to me. Which just makes me think that you have trait points in Shadow Arts to survive a condi necro, or you are in the upper tiers of WvW and you just mostly face sucky players.
Azawrath the Silent – Thief
Primi Agminis Legio [PAL]
Yaks Bend
I’d really like to see a buff to Fleet of foot (remove 1 condi per dodge, no icd, the icd is the dodge recharge rate), a buff to assassin’s reward (~150 hp/s) and a buff to hard to catch to give a nonstealth thief more options and more sustain in a fight.
2150 power/ 80% crit/ 55% crit dmg??? What build do you run? Sounds like full glass to me. Which just makes me think that you have trait points in Shadow Arts to survive a condi necro, or you are in the upper tiers of WvW and you just mostly face sucky players.
Not full glass. I run 0/10/0/30/30, Knight’s Armor, Lyssa runes, saffron soup, zerker/soldier trinkets, triple signet, Withdraw. I have very high Fury uptime, is why I added the crit rate in. No stealth, no SA. S/P + SB.
Pushing #0 clears all conditions, #6 heals movement + one extra, SoA heals another one, IS/IR good in a pinch. Lots of evades built-in to avoid power-based damage. Pain Response is useful for Regen and some condi clear. Assassin’s Reward gives a slow tick of health alongside Regen. Pushing signets gives me 13s of 5 stacks of Might for burst power.
A good necro is a tough fight, but a winnable one. When I lose, it was my fault. That’s how it should be. Necros can’t really disengage anyway, whereas I can backflip out of sight if I goof.
They have to think of something.