Guild Wars 2

The title says it all. X/D is pretty rare these days (aside for S/D, which is taken entirely for skills 1 2 and the dual skill and has little to do with the offhand skills), partly because the dagger offhand skills pale in comparison to pistol offhand skills in general, and especially when paired with Dagger mainhand. (S/P and P/P don’t really factor into this conversation, because they both have issues that aren’t related to your offhand choice.)

There are a few culprits at play here, the largest of which was the overzealous nerf dancing dagger and CnD got a few months back. I’m fine with Anet saying “These skills do too much damage”, but not replacing the lost damage with any additional effects left both skills vastly inferior to other weaponset and speccing choices.

The point of this post is to propose some changes (that would only affect PvP) that I feel are fairly balanced and bring something to /D that would make it work taking again.

- Dancing Dagger
— The problem: the skills costs 4 initiative, does fairly poor damage, has a very obvious wind up (“Hmm, I wonder what skill that D/D thief could possibly be using from halfway across the screen?”), and a very slow travel time. In addition, it seems to have very kittenty hit detection – I’ve recently used it on a number of bunker guardians (to eat Aegis, if anyone is curious) just standing still, while clearly in range (I usually wait til I’m closer than absolute max range), and watched it miss or be obstructed by thin air, on targets which were, again, standing still. I’m assuming it has something to do with the extremely slow flight time of the projectile.
—- Proposed solutions:
——A) Speed up the flight time of the projectile. In addition to this either make the skill instant cast, or reduce the Init cost to 3. If the skill is going to keep its low damage, it needs to function as a utility – cripple is a good utility, but not among the best. If it’s intended to help me escape/catch up with targets, it needs to be good at hitting those targets – that can be achieved by being less obvious, or cheaper to use.
——B) Give the skills back 25% of the damage it lost (making it a 25% reduction, rather than 50% from its pre-nerf value). If the skill is intended to be a hybrid damage/utility skill, it needs to do decent damage – the skills current damage is crap for all the issues it has. Having some of its damage returned makes it an alright option in cases where you want to hurt your target and slow them down.

-Cloak and Dagger
— The problem: CnD is a pretty inferior choice for stealth access to D/P’s BP->HS. It can be blocked, miss, evaded, blinded, and so on. It has a .5s cast time, and is fairly obvious when its coming (“Hey, why is this D/D thief right in my face but not hitting me?”). It does poor damage since the 33% nerf, and costs 6 initiative (half of a standard initiative bar).
—-Proposed solutions:
——A) Make CnD unblockable. Before you go up in arms about how thieves already got LS, and more unblockable is unfair to bunker builds, hear me out. CnD is a good candidate for unblockable for a couple of reasons.
-It’s a really kittenty skill to spam. It’s got a high init cost, mediocre damage and grants stealth (which means spamming it would give a theif revealed for no reason).
-Being in stealth does not give the thief access to any more unblockable attacks. It’s not as if allowing CnD through block would suddenly allow the thief to continue to ignore block; Backstab, sneak attack and tactical strike are all blockable. All CnD hitting through block would do is allow a thief to access one of its defensive measures even through block when wielding a dagger OH.
——B)Remove vulnerability from CnD, add 2s Protection, Retaliation and Vigor (Possibly also stability, though I see Stealth/stability stomping being too powerful). Again, before you think to yourself “Did Daecello buy a second account or something?”, hear me out. First of all, I’m not suggesting these abilities be tied to stealth, only that they be tied to hitting with CnD. This means the availability of these buffs is tied into hitting with CnD, which as I noted above, is a very poor candidate for being spammed. With only a 2s base for these 3 buffs, it would be impossible to stack durations to the point where the thief would have these except when in stealth (or for 2-3 seconds when hitting CnD with revealed up). It would give dagger OH spec’s the ability to reposition more confidently than other builds which use BP->HS or rely solely on utilities for stealth, while also punishing mindless team fight AoE spam via retaliation (though admittedly not much), and giving them a small window of increased endurance regen.

Mind you, my multiple suggestions are either/or scenarios. Perhaps some of suggestion A and some of suggestion B might be mixed, but I’m not proposing that the skill get both changes. Feel free to weigh in politely even if you disagree, but if all you have to offer is scorn and derision, Please do not bother.

I’ve always thought cnd should be unblockable. Not sure about the rest tho.

I doubt this would ever happen. People would cry rivers because thieves received a buff to a stealth skill.

The Dancing Daggers in GW1 is better IMO. If they change GW2’s Dancing Dagger to that, I’d be happy.

CND unblockable would allow d/d back in the meta game. especially if they tweak dancing daggers

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The Dancing Daggers in GW1 is better IMO. If they change GW2’s Dancing Dagger to that, I’d be happy.

I’ve read the DD description for GW1, but didn’t play the game. Elaborate?

the fact that its to the face and not overly costly/recharge. more about single target dmg and not needed like 2 targets for it to be effective. it only does decent dmg when theres 2 targets ….no more no less…..3-4 (the dmdg is spread out too much) and 1 target it only hits once. its a VERY situational weapon and i usually use it in pvp only to get credit for multiple kills. i dont remember willing to spend the 4 initiative to use it wvw/pvp

Make dancing dagger provide aegis. Idea being it threw the enemy off target so their next attack can be countered easily.

Make CnD’s stealth provide endure pain.

Atherakhia.4086:

Make dancing dagger provide aegis. Idea being it threw the enemy off target so their next attack can be countered easily.

Make CnD’s stealth provide endure pain.

That CnD change you’ve proposed is a bit over the top, don’t you think?

As for the DD change, I don’t see it as overpowered as much as not in line with the skills intended purpose. They designed DD as a ranged snare for a reason – it should function as one. It should either be a reliable ranged snare (through faster projectile time and either cheaper cost or no cast time), or a hybrid skill that does decent damage and snares your target, to justify the slow flight time, the wind up, and the cost.

evilapprentice.6379:

Atherakhia.4086:

Make dancing dagger provide aegis. Idea being it threw the enemy off target so their next attack can be countered easily.

Make CnD’s stealth provide endure pain.

That CnD change you’ve proposed is a bit over the top, don’t you think?

As for the DD change, I don’t see it as overpowered as much as not in line with the skills intended purpose. They designed DD as a ranged snare for a reason – it should function as one. It should either be a reliable ranged snare (through faster projectile time and either cheaper cost or no cast time), or a hybrid skill that does decent damage and snares your target, to justify the slow flight time, the wind up, and the cost.

I don’t feel a brief immunity to direct damage to be overpowered, no. Especially when you consider stealth doesn’t break target logically so all projectiles in path still hit. But if 4 seconds is too much, make it 2 seconds.

DD already snares. I also highly doubt we’ll see any damage on any skills increased for this class since they clearly don’t like the burst potential of this class. Anything that can be initiative dumped into a target will never be increased in damage.

What this class needs right now more than anything is longevity in battle. Any changes suggested should focus on this imo.

…..
“Maybe HS+ BP combo isn’t healthy in the first place and should be changed itself”.
If you really look at /P and /D and remove D/P from the equation, there is not a large gap if at all. The main issue is Dancing daggers underperforming. There is a clear choice between the ability to Stealth vs Black Powder. You can see this looking at S/P vs S/D very well, or P/P vs P/D. I don’t know why you’d bring up how great /P is and then say we should basically ignore 2/3 /P sets. Reality is if you look at D/P without the combo usage it’s not that great, actually somewhat poor outside of being the best-chaser. /P sets generally are very susceptible to ranged damage since they can’t stealth within the weapon set to invalidate that excusing D/P. There is a fair cost to going /P over /D just looking at the 5th slot. BP and headshot damage is practically non-existant vs DD and CnD. CnD has good counter-play at the moment it is what it is, making it unblockable somewhat craps on that and for what I don’t know the skill isn’t poor. You can’t compare Cloak and dagger to Black powder and call it a bad skill you simply cannot. The sole thing against it is the D/P set, if you remove that from the equation can you really say CnD is poorer than BP? Nope, how could you possibly? Better immediate trait support, significantly higher damage, vulnerability and stealth has multiple-purposes vs the smoke field which can be useful for teamplay or even play with SB, and some melee pressure for poorly-positioned melee targets.

To me what I’d change.
Dancing daggers would inflict poison for 3 or 4s and perhaps a small damage boost to compliment that addition.
That should be more than enough to cement the skill at the 4 ini cost.
Poison giving P/D and D/D condi specs better depth, scaling with trickery to make any usage of that in general more rewarding say for D/D and S/D power specs. It would give you another reason not to slot the Shortbow though it wouldn’t be able to stack poison as frequently, to as much enemies and create a field. Vs headshot it would be a damaging mitigator of heal vs Headshot which is a very weak damaging deny of heals.
Cloak and dagger would stack more vulnerability than it currently does and possibly at a longer duration.

With that S/D should be fully designed as a harassing set in having weakness, cripple, vuln, poison, boon removal, stealth and evade. P/D would just be using it’s 4 whether power specced or condi specced helping to solve how shallow it is in terms of condi spread and make it less reliant on Caltrops as a credible threat. Plus it would annoy mesmers.

ensoriki.5789:

…..
“Maybe HS+ BP combo isn’t healthy in the first place and should be changed itself”.
If you really look at /P and /D and remove D/P from the equation, there is not a large gap if at all. The main issue is Dancing daggers underperforming. There is a clear choice between the ability to Stealth vs Black Powder. You can see this looking at S/P vs S/D very well, or P/P vs P/D. I don’t know why you’d bring up how great /P is and then say we should basically ignore 2/3 /P sets. Reality is if you look at D/P without the combo usage it’s not that great, actually somewhat poor outside of being the best-chaser. /P sets generally are very susceptible to ranged damage since they can’t stealth within the weapon set to invalidate that excusing D/P. There is a fair cost to going /P over /D just looking at the 5th slot. BP and headshot damage is practically non-existant vs DD and CnD. CnD has good counter-play at the moment it is what it is, making it unblockable somewhat craps on that and for what I don’t know the skill isn’t poor. You can’t compare Cloak and dagger to Black powder and call it a bad skill you simply cannot. The sole thing against it is the D/P set, if you remove that from the equation can you really say CnD is poorer than BP? Nope, how could you possibly? Better immediate trait support, significantly higher damage, vulnerability and stealth has multiple-purposes vs the smoke field which can be useful for teamplay or even play with SB, and some melee pressure for poorly-positioned melee targets.

To me what I’d change.
Dancing daggers would inflict poison for 3 or 4s and perhaps a small damage boost to compliment that addition.
That should be more than enough to cement the skill at the 4 ini cost.
Poison giving P/D and D/D condi specs better depth, scaling with trickery to make any usage of that in general more rewarding say for D/D and S/D power specs. It would give you another reason not to slot the Shortbow though it wouldn’t be able to stack poison as frequently, to as much enemies and create a field. Vs headshot it would be a damaging mitigator of heal vs Headshot which is a very weak damaging deny of heals.
Cloak and dagger would stack more vulnerability than it currently does and possibly at a longer duration.

With that S/D should be fully designed as a harassing set in having weakness, cripple, vuln, poison, boon removal, stealth and evade. P/D would just be using it’s 4 whether power specced or condi specced helping to solve how shallow it is in terms of condi spread and make it less reliant on Caltrops as a credible threat. Plus it would annoy mesmers.

We have to ignore P/P and S/P because they have issues that have nothing to do with /P. Technically, S/P is a pretty solid set – blind field, on demand daze, and Sword’s MH abilities make it versatile – it’s just boring as kitten to play because PW is so poorly designed you have to rely on AA for your DPS AND headshot makes the stun portion of PW in its current incarnation utterly inferior. Prior to the S/D patch, it was a set that relied entirely on AA for damage, but brought more utility to the fight. Post patch its 100% inferior. P/P is all over the place, and requires alot of work to get back into shape, the pistol OH skills are the only good and versatile skills in the set.

As for CnD comparing poorly to BP in terms of stealth, I never made that comparison. CnD scales poorly on its own due to its high cost, .5 cast time (which telegraphs its arrival to a fair degree), and the fact that it can be countered so easily. I don’t think ignoring blocks completely nullifies the counterplay to CnD – it can still be evaded, invulned, and blinded – the point of the Block change isn’t to crap on Block builds, its to stop blocks from utterly denying /D offhand builds stealth. Like I pointed out, it doesn’t add anything else to counter blocking other than allowing the thief to stealth and do moderate damage (and Poor overall ‘dps’ due to the high init cost).

I actually like D/P even without the combo usage – shadow shot is a well designed skill and complements HS extremely well – If you aren’t hitting SS>50% and HS<50% (with some exceptions of course), you’re probably doing it wrong.

In regards to S/P wot. PW remains useful even with the AA’s strength and still puts out higher damage as well as having better defensive presence than the AA itself letting it actual do it’s damage without getting wailed upon. One of it’s biggest issues has always been boons in that both use of stealth attack, PW and HS are affected by stability, PW cleaves like nobodies business and retaliation will smash it to pieces without boon removal support it’s like flipping a coin for whether you’ll be effective on the next opponent or not though the damage nerf obviously didnt help. Specifically though /D vs /P they’re fairly comparable. I think giving Dancing daggers poison will have the most synergy with all /D sets out of anything else you could give it outside of pumping raw damage.

It has to be contemplated what the change also means for S/D. S/D already has unblockable damage moved from a weak attack to a strong attack. That set would be pulling teeth on certain builds quite hard if CnD was unblockable as well via options for defensive play period decreasing. As a result of boon defense being mitigated, as well as block. Leaving only blind and evade generally which is limited especially since S/ does bring it’s own Weakness.

D/P without the combo excels at what it’s built to do, pick off low targets, it’s the chaser set, but without that combo it’s much more vulnerable to ranged attacks and requires require use of weapon swap,util or external support to do current BS ganks instead of self reliance.

I still disagree on S/P (In its current form, of course) – there’s a reason you rarely see it in any form of PvP, Hotjoin and tourneys alike. It may work for you, and players may be able to jury-rig it into working passably, but it still doesn’t mean that the player wouldn’t be more dangerous with a better built weaponset.

S/D has an unblockable ability that’s far superior to one of my proposed CnD changes (IMO of course) – the current S/D build (at least the one I’m running) would almost never CnD over LS on a blocking target – adding the option to stealth through block would be a niche side benefit for it, not really a viable option to be considered in general play. Where it would be fairly strong is in high SA traited builds where the ability to stealth is a valuable defensive measure.

We can suppose what we will about D/P without the combo, but it will never disappear entirely – they may change it so that you only get stealth 1 time by leaping through a smoke field, but it will never go away entirely, so it’s counterproductive to compare CnD changes to a D/P without access to stealth at all.

Disagree how, I’m looking at what I said and looking at what there is to disagree about? About boons hitting is very heavily? Wot.. Or that it remains useful? That’s not questionable, S/P still has niche’s and it remains the best melee cleave on the thief you can get. It’s ability to pressure multiple targets has no competition out of the 4 melee specs. In addition to having the most CC. I’m not trying to conjure an idea that is an all around effective set, but that PW is still a useful skill.

If you have a queued up LS or go to que it up it’s faster assuming they have say 6000-9000 health to just CnD them if unblockable then hit with the LS after getting that vulnerability on them or doing it in reverse if you need to strip protection. Cloak and dagger doesn’t do 0 damage. Hence what I’m saying is you let S/D stronger ability to simply invalidate defenses and it really doesn’t require it. Nor is the change of unblock-ability really necessary for thief survival, it’s generally more about counter-play and invalidating the ele Arcane block or Guardian block as….
Ranger counterattack for instance would just be walked away from, if they use it to block CnD again that’s good play that you expect would be desired to have.
Same with Mesmer blocks, War mace/off sword block or Shield stance (which you can blow through with LS). Even disregarding effectivity and counter-play it’s a “why?” change in all seriousness. Why start disregarding block in this fashion? As it is now if you successfully pull off your CnD, stealth attacks are repeatable and unless it is a persisting block will generally hit on the 2nd press of “1”. The real benefit is say giving a reason to use it while Revealed, but it’s cornball.