Guild Wars 2

Okay, continuing the high evasion thief conversation:

I’m actually curious about what they are going to do for condition build thieves. I’ve been curious about cond thieves since I noticed the following synergy:

• Signet of Malice (a heal ability) is on a 15 second cooldown.
• Signet Use (20pt Major Trait in Critical Strikes) reduces that cooldown to 12 seconds and makes your heal now also give you 2 initiative
• Hastened Replenishment (30pt Major Trait in Trickery) makes your heal give you 4 Initiative (so now you get 6 initiative when you heal)
• Vigorous Recovery (10 pt Major Trait in Acrobatics) makes your heal give you 8 seconds of Vigor
• Signets of Power (10 pt Major Trait in Critical Strikes) makes your signets give you 5 stacks of might for 5 seconds
  So, with these traits (unconventional trait point allocation and you don’t have to take all these traits), every 12 seconds you heal, regain 6 initiative (takes 8 seconds to do this with base initiatve regen), vigor, and 5 stacks of might.
  There may be some potential there. It’s up to players to test it out.

When you haven’t used your heal, you’re benefitting from the passive. When you do use your heal, while you lose that passive for 12 seconds, you gain a plethora of other things to help you out such as Vigor (more dodge rolls while your heal is on cooldown), Might (help you get on the offensive), Initiative (give you resources to do what you need to do), and then whatever your Rune(s) give you on-heal.
When it comes to sword not being a condition weapon, they did mention that they are looking into giving more sources of poison and maybe a source or so of burning to Thieves, so that may come. Otherwise, yeah, using weapons with more conditions on them would make sense.

I think Pistol+Dagger/Shortbow would be very mean with this, especially versus a Melee enemy. You have an immense amount of mobility, still have access to stealth, bleeds and poison.

If not a fan of one of those, I guess pistol+pistol or dagger+dagger.

You could also just take advantage of the Might stacking that could be done with the build and still go with a more direct damage approach.

Here’s a quickly thrown together idea:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/thief/?7.0|a.1h.h16.8.1h.h5|5.1h.h16|1h.71i.1h.71i.1h.71i.1h.71i.1h.71i.1h.71i|2w.0.2w.0.3w.0.2w.0.3w.0.2w.0|0.k28.0.k23.u30b|30.d|58.5c.5o.5g.0|e

I had a post on various armor runes with on-heal affects, but can’t find it any more, so I’ll post those effects here again:

• Balthazar – nearby foes are burned for 3 seconds
• Centaur – you and nearby allies gain 12 seconds of swiftness (10 + 20%)
• the Fighter – you gain might for 20 seconds
• Vampirism (4) – your next attack skill steals life
• Lyssa (4) – gain a random boon
• the Adventurer (6) – gain 50% endurance
• Grenth (6) – nearby foes are chilled for 3 seconds
• Air (4) – gain swiftness for 5 seconds
• Dwayna (6) – you and nearby allies gain regeneration for 5 seconds
• the Flock (6) – you and nearby allies are healed
• Water (6) – you and nearby allies are healed
• Altruism (2) – you and nearby allies gain 3 stacks of Might
• Altruism (6) – you and nearby allies gain Fury

Are you on about a build that just makes high use of Evasion or a build that uses Evasion and Condition damage?

My build at the moment uses Evasion as an absolute must to deal damage but I don’t really use Condition damage that much I mostly just use what I would deem “Defensive Conditions” eg. Stun, Blind ect.

I can post it if that is what you were after.

Why are you using worthless SoM over withdraw?

Daecollo.9578:

Why are you using worthless SoM over withdraw?

Signet of Malice is a signet, while Withdraw is not. The traits Signet Use and Signets of Power are both suggested with SoM in mind.

On the thread where this was originally talked about, Withdraw was suggested as an alternative that provided an extra evade.

Edit: Also, I think this build actually gives SoM more utility. It’s not as conventional as the other two heals, but I don’t think it’s completely worthless. If it got buffed in a future update though, I surely wouldn’t complain.

Daecollo.9578:

Why are you using worthless SoM over withdraw?

There was actual discussion on using Withdraw instead of SoM, but that got lost in the thread movement, etc..

This is simply a branch off from another thread where we were getting off-topic from the original post. The idea is to have a large amount of evasiveness. Beyond that, it’s up to you.

The signet build stuff is simply one ideas as it also allows you to gain even more initiative, have a lower cooldown on your heal, and gain more might.

There’s another thread in the thief subforum that uses withdraw and focuses more on keeping up Vigor and dropping caltrops.

The goal is to simply show how evasive a thief can be to emphasize that the doom-and-gloom of the upcoming culling change is needless.