Calstryder, A Thief In The Night
Dungeon & Fractal Rotaions/builds/weapons
There is actually a lot of viable variants, so it comes down to what you want to focus on and whether or not you have Daredevil.
The builds listed on metabattle are purely glass cannon and are trying to get the most amount of damage out of the traits, but at the expense of sustain and no condi clear. They are focused on organized group play where you are running doing a team run with a composition that makes up for those weaknesses, but outside of that, I don’t find the builds to be very ideal.
I tried a lot of variants and the one I ended up settling on focused on bringing AA damage and lots of CC for shredding break bars to the table while still having some degree of survivability in the form of personal healing, condi cleanse and a stunbreaker on a 12 second CD. The main weakness of it is the lack of swiftness for skipping content, but outside of that, I find very situations in which I am at a disadvantage.
There is not much of a rotation to it. If you proc quickness from Haste trait, then you pool your initiative for the 15% dmg bonus, dodge for the 10% dmg bonus and just auto attack. Vault and Weakening Strikes are for large groups.
As far as break bars, you wait for all CDs to expire and then use all of your abilities at once to fully drop the bar. If you use them individually as they come off CD, the regen on the break bar will counter.
Your sources of CC are…
Daze off steal with a reduced cooldown.
Stolen abilities (Boss mobs seem to give you a higher chance of stealing a CC ability. The knockback branch one takes a huge chunk out of breakbars)
Stun after hitting all Fists of Flurry.
A stun and a knockback in the Impact Strike combo.
Access to a knockdown after successfully blocking with Bandit’s Defense.
With all of this, in fractals, I don’t have much issue handling break bars on my own, making CC optional for other group members, allowing them to focus on group support or just pure damage. The majority of your sources of CC are from physical skills and taking the reduced cooldown trait over the 7% dmg increase means they will all cycle off cooldown before the break bar fully regens.
Rehabilitated Elementalist. Now, trolling the Thief forums with my math.
(edited by MadRabbit.3179)
Seems like a reasonable build, especially for beginners/returners and people who arent running with perfect parties.
Just some quick notes: I havent done the math but i believe Deadly arts might come up with higher numbers than trickery, every major target should have one condition on them. Probably depends on wether you can put the boonstrip to use or not. Also: I can not count the amount of times mug saved my life.
I like escapists absolution but since you already have a condi clean and pve really isnt that condi-heavy: If you take a staff, you probably want to take staff master too.
Unhindered combatant over bounding dodger if doing swamps or similar, you already pointed this weakness out, but theres no reason not to retrait if needed.
Assassins signet over bandits defense. Unless you have srs problems with breakbars or hostile cc.
There will be certain situations (less in fractals, more likely in dungeons) where you will be expected to provide stealth, so keep an open mind for shadow refuge and smoke screen.
Should work equally well with d/p or d/d, in any case you will mainly autoattack and use weapon skills for utility.
So much for my unprofessional opinion, most of it is a matter of personal taste I suppose. Thankfully you dont have to min-max for fractals or dungeons. Its nice to kill a molten berserker in a matter of seconds but not necessary, and the rather difficult stuff might even require specialized builds (like running seals on 94) so there is always a small room for preference and interpretation.
There is actually a lot of viable variants, so it comes down to what you want to focus on and whether or not you have Daredevil.
The builds listed on metabattle are purely glass cannon and are trying to get the most amount of damage out of the traits, but at the expense of sustain and no condi clear. They are focused on organized group play where you are running doing a team run with a composition that makes up for those weaknesses, but outside of that, I don’t find the builds to be very ideal.
I tried a lot of variants and the one I ended up settling on focused on bringing AA damage and lots of CC for shredding break bars to the table while still having some degree of survivability in the form of personal healing, condi cleanse and a stunbreaker on a 12 second CD. The main weakness of it is the lack of swiftness for skipping content, but outside of that, I find very situations in which I am at a disadvantage.
There is not much of a rotation to it. If you proc quickness from Haste trait, then you pool your initiative for the 15% dmg bonus, dodge for the 10% dmg bonus and just auto attack. Vault and Weakening Strikes are for large groups.
As far as break bars, you wait for all CDs to expire and then use all of your abilities at once to fully drop the bar. If you use them individually as they come off CD, the regen on the break bar will counter.
Your sources of CC are…
Daze off steal with a reduced cooldown.
Stolen abilities (Boss mobs seem to give you a higher chance of stealing a CC ability. The knockback branch one takes a huge chunk out of breakbars)
Stun after hitting all Fists of Flurry.
A stun and a knockback in the Impact Strike combo.
Access to a knockdown after successfully blocking with Bandit’s Defense.With all of this, in fractals, I don’t have much issue handling break bars on my own, making CC optional for other group members, allowing them to focus on group support or just pure damage. The majority of your sources of CC are from physical skills and taking the reduced cooldown trait over the 7% dmg increase means they will all cycle off cooldown before the break bar fully regens.
Hi thanks both of you for your responses! I currently don’t have the Dare Devil traits or HoT but I suspect I will do sometime in the hear future,
so sounds like condition damage is a good way to roll for groups? in the mean time the sort of build which i am currently running is something like this:
Forgive me it’s bad Im sure it could do with improvement but It’s mainly based around using D/D or D/P and popping in and out of combat using the shadow step/steal moves. Ive been using this in dun runs and fractal recently but I do feel quite squishy, would either of you recommend swapping to S/D?
Cheers
Calstryder, A Thief In The Night
That is rather ummm interesting.
First things first: If you want to take conditiondamage, do it right. maybe you just didnt change it in the editor, but you do not use berserker gear for condi (naturally) either sinister or viper. Double dagger is the right choice, but you would take venoms/venomshare as skills. Also pressure striking and bewildering ambush are hardly considerable for pve.
Also: codi Thief have their place, sometimes, in raids and in pvp but in general you do not want to go with that. There are a lot of other classes that farly exceed your condi but, since the latest buff, few that can match your sustained direct damage.
Deadly trapper+Shadowtrap might seem a good idea for a solo player, but there are builds out there that focus entirely on providing a full stack of might for their team, and vulnerability is also applied by a lot of sources.
The caltrops are entirely useless, even on a condi build, just look at the dmg numbers, you do at least 6 times that damage on one AA hit.
Roll for initiative is controversial. I t can proove useful but in general i would recommend a signet, haste if you dont like signets or shadowstep since, without the daredevil, you lack emergency condi removal.
Basiliskvenom is ok, it doesnt do much, but it helps with the break bar and thievs guild aint exactly a game changer.
Edit: about the squishyness. The main reason why thief feels immortal is the daredevil, if you want that feeling, there is no real way around HoT. If the trash mobs are your problem, change to d/p, use black powder a lot and problem solved. In boss fights its mostly a matter of knowing the attacks, watching animations, good dodging and good movement. Simply a matter of training. That applies to every class but more so to thief. You can not afford to take hits but you have the tools at hand to avoid it. for now: dont be afraid to move away if you cant deal with the damage, use some ranged, regain health and get back in. You will loose some dmg, but not as much as you would when downed.
D/d also provides you with a spammable evade, that is hard to time but can theoretically protect you from enemy hits without having to dodge or loosing too much dps.
But yes: the class may feel squishy if you are not used to it. Invigorating precision is a good start (not if youre actually going for condi tho>no crits) other than that its unfortunately a l2p issue but i promise you: worthwhile.
Whatever other class I play now, I always feel incredibly vulnerable and exposed if compared to thief.
(edited by Asrat.2645)
That is rather ummm interesting.
First things first: If you want to take conditiondamage, do it right. maybe you just didnt change it in the editor, but you do not use berserker gear for condi (naturally) either sinister or viper. Double dagger is the right choice, but you would take venoms/venomshare as skills. Also pressure striking and bewildering ambush are hardly considerable for pve.Also: codi Thief have their place, sometimes, in raids and in pvp but in general you do not want to go with that. There are a lot of other classes that farly exceed your condi but, since the latest buff, few that can match your sustained direct damage.
Deadly trapper+Shadowtrap might seem a good idea for a solo player, but there are builds out there that focus entirely on providing a full stack of might for their team, and vulnerability is also applied by a lot of sources.
The caltrops are entirely useless, even on a condi build, just look at the dmg numbers, you do at least 6 times that damage on one AA hit.
Roll for initiative is controversial. I t can proove useful but in general i would recommend a signet, haste if you dont like signets or shadowstep since, without the daredevil, you lack emergency condi removal.
Basiliskvenom is ok, it doesnt do much, but it helps with the break bar and thievs guild aint exactly a game changer.
Haha yes I have just realised that I didn’t change the gear stats! Most of my stats in game forces on precision/Power, I don’t really have any top class lvl 80 gear yet so will be working on that. So perhaps rolling with more of a direct damage build would be more suitable? In terms of our group role are we just dps/sustained dps? or is there a bit more to it than that?
P.s sorry if these are noob questions, Ive just returned to the game and honestly cant remember much about the thief traits/builds haha
Calstryder, A Thief In The Night
Yes. We are mostly damage. There is some boon strip, but nothing a necro or mesmer couldnt do better. Our condition damage is more like medium tier, the thing with venomshare is that it can be used to buff other condiclasses and therefore adds to overall damage greatly, but unless you have your entire team running condi, theres not much use for it outside of raids.
We dont really provide any buffs or healing besides stealth. Stealth is used for some dungeons i believe (not really doing dungeons) and sometimes in fractals to make skipping parts a little bit easier, but the last time I actually needed stealth in fotm was for running the seals on a high level cliffside.
Unless you have a reason not to do so, youre running full zerker, if you keep having problems to survive, you might swap some stats for marauder or anything, but that should not be an issue.
The only thing I do besides dealing damage and not dying in a molten boss fight after everybody else ran out of endurance (daredevil, yay) is skipping certain puzzles with infiltrators arrow.
Edit: there is defiancestrip. That has been our job before the breakbar, and we’re still fairly good at it.
(edited by Asrat.2645)