So I was looking through the thief traits again while some guildies were theorycrafting and noticed that the only shortbow trait is +5% damage in the shadow arts traitline.
Does anyone else think there should be more shortbow traits to give it more variety? Some that come off the top of my head are: Infiltrator’s arrow gives stealth and extra bounce for #1 skill (with appropriate damage reduction for the bounce).
To be honest i am happy with shortbow atm.
It has the best blast finisher ingame. If you combo cluster with water /fire /smoke fields ,might even look grossly overpowered. (area heal /area might/area stealth)
tbh I personally think SB could do with some tweaks, the lack of damage moves that use initiative sort of make it real slow.
Autoattack is fine, cluster bomb is rather slow and you can’t really burn your initiative with it unless at melee range which makes using a bow redundant and it could really do with having an auto burst at the end or to apply 3 bleeds regardless to maximise it.
disabling shot and infiltrators shot are both good mobility moves but mostly thats ALL they are.
And poison clouds only real redeeming feature is synergy with cluster for a aoe weakness combo, it deals no real damage even on condition builds and theres lots of sources of poison that actually deal initial damage also.
I’d say that the shortbow was pretty much fit for purpose. It only lacks range.
This is on point imo. I feel it would be nice to have a trait to extend the range to 1000. Not looking to be on par with ranger range.
Though I do feel like the trait for pistols to have a bounce on crit could extend to short bow and have an extra bounce on crit. but then again I wouldn’t trait it as I wouldn’t trait in now for pistols so it might end up a wasted trait.
The placement of the 5% damage increase is odd, maybe stick it in DA. Otherwise, I think SB is fine. It’s got great utility and puts out decent damage on its own.
Well… Choking Gas + Lotus Poison (Deadly Arts 15) = Amazing.
As far as traits that would benefit it? A trait increasing the flight speed of Cluster Bomb would be amazing. Not only would it make CB effective at range, it’d increase the skill required to get maximum benefit from it (Less time for it to get from best time to detonate to hitting the ground)
And poison clouds only real redeeming feature is synergy with cluster for a aoe weakness combo, it deals no real damage even on condition builds and theres lots of sources of poison that actually deal initial damage also.
People really underestimate the damage that poison deals… With an average amount of condition damage it will do ~234 DPS. Combined with the fact that Choking Gas can apply it to multiple targets within an area that can be 1170+ DPS (The poison lasts for a decent amount of time and if targets move into/out of the field it can allow more than 5 targets to get poison applied to them)
Sure it’s not the 25 Bleed 2950 DPS (14750 DPS if on 5 targets) , but the 25 Bleeds can only really be done by D/D and in melee range (Even with the evade during the animation there’s time where you’re vulnerable to being insta-gibbed)
“Pull the trigger, move out ahead,
There’s two kinds of people… The quick and the dead”
Lol – ‘ranger range’ is 1200, traited to 1500. Even if thieves had their shorbow increased, they would still fall ‘short’ of Rangers.
Thieves are the only class in the entire game with no 1200 auto-attack range weapon (water doesn’t count) is a serious disadvantage (though Guardians pretty much also are). Ok, so thieves have cluster bomb (their one and only long range move)… which if you use at that range, takes seconds to reach the target negating any hope of it being a real DPS option. This means that they are very ineffective at helping attack people/siege on walls in WvW. Any ranged group tactics the thief doesn’t qualify for as he has 2/3rds the range of everyone else.
So I basically see two options:
1) Thief has a MASTER trait that currently gives only 5% damage. It’s completely pitiful, and justly not even remotely worth it vs other trait options. This could be boosted to increase Shortbow range to 1200 as well.
2) Give thieves a ‘sniper rifle’ or a ‘blow dart’ (if a new weapon is feasible – thrown options also come to mind, but those make sense to be limited to 600-900).
I’d like to see a Shortbow-centric build just because I’d like to be able to run it more efficiently in dungeons, but I understand where people are coming from when they say it’s a strictly utility weapon.
Also, I agree that I’d like a longer range. Doing events like Jormag make me feel incredibly useless, simply because the ideal standing areas are too far away from the event mob for me to reach. On Jormag specifically, I always end up standing there like a potato and auto-attacking with the rocket launcher.
More ranged options outside of SB and P/P would be interesting as well. I, for one, would like to see rifles for both Thieves and Rangers.
Either way it would be cool to run a “scout thief” but then again the cries of favoritism would be louder then they already are. Shame, as a bow centric build not based on having a pet when it was being developed would be nice.
Well… Choking Gas + Lotus Poison (Deadly Arts 15) = Amazing.
People really underestimate the damage that poison deals… With an average amount of condition damage it will do ~234 DPS. Combined with the fact that Choking Gas can apply it to multiple targets within an area that can be 1170+ DPS (The poison lasts for a decent amount of time and if targets move into/out of the field it can allow more than 5 targets to get poison applied to them)
Sure it’s not the 25 Bleed 2950 DPS (14750 DPS if on 5 targets) , but the 25 Bleeds can only really be done by D/D and in melee range (Even with the evade during the animation there’s time where you’re vulnerable to being insta-gibbed)
hmm not sure what your counting as “average” even with 1k+ condition damage your only just going to be pushing the 200 mark (with 984 it hits for 184 damage a tick), to hit the 234ish you posted you need 1500 condition damage, thats not average thats top end amounts utilizing atleast full exotics and some food/consumables.
For a duration stacking condition its damage is just so minor to the point where if it wasn’t something that gets applied as a matter of course im sure most people would never use it, the only few real saving graces for it is how common it is, that it can be combo’d with stuff like lotus poison to gateway to something more useful or for those times where reducing the targets healing comes in handy or to buffer any other more damaging condition.
For a duration stacking condition its damage is just so minor to the point where if it wasn’t something that gets applied as a matter of course im sure most people would never use it, the only few real saving graces for it is how common it is, that it can be combo’d with stuff like lotus poison to gateway to something more useful or for those times where reducing the targets healing comes in handy or to buffer any other more damaging condition.
First off, I’m using 1500 as an “Average” amount of condition damage, as it’s about average for condition builds (Yes, full exotics. People actually use them when considering average DPS at level 80) 1800 being the high end of Condition damage requiring Ascended items (Over 2k is possible with Runes/Gear/Sigils combined with food + Tuning crystal).
Sure as a primarily D/D thief poison just looks to be a barely noticeable ticks of damage, but when it’s as strong as ~2 stacks of Bleeding and easy for various classes to keep high uptime on it does become strong.
In the case of Shortbow, you’re not going to be getting super high stacks of bleeds (Even with point blank CB spam) without heavy investment into bleed/condition duration. Yet with no condition duration a single Choking Gas shot can apply 20 seconds of poison onto 5 targets. Meaning you miss out on a cluster bomb (Direct damage won’t be too high if on a condition build) and get guaranteed high/perma poison on a target(s) which will roughly even out – About 1410 Bleed damage from 1 detonated Cluster Bomb compared to 4680 Poison damage from 1 Choking Gas.
“Pull the trigger, move out ahead,
There’s two kinds of people… The quick and the dead”
but if you’ve invested that much into condition damage and then you main shortbow then your sort of doing something wrong, cluster bomb is not sufficient for stacking bleeds (unless at pointblank range) which would mean all your condition damage comes from that poison of doing a few hundred a tick. That said you’d still acheive way more damage from cluster bombs as you would still be doing initial burst damage (you’d be looking at least 600-800 damage from it with no power increasing gear)
Poison as a damage source is not viable, poison as a CC move in PVE is not viable, it is in its current iteration basically just a throw away condition that happens in the course of your other sources of damage that wouldn’t be missed by the majority if it stopped doing damage/only got applied by intentional moves.
Lol – ‘ranger range’ is 1200, traited to 1500. Even if thieves had their shorbow increased, they would still fall ‘short’ of Rangers.
Thieves are the only class in the entire game with no 1200 auto-attack range weapon (water doesn’t count) is a serious disadvantage (though Guardians pretty much also are). Ok, so thieves have cluster bomb (their one and only long range move)… which if you use at that range, takes seconds to reach the target negating any hope of it being a real DPS option. This means that they are very ineffective at helping attack people/siege on walls in WvW. Any ranged group tactics the thief doesn’t qualify for as he has 2/3rds the range of everyone else.
So I basically see two options:
1) Thief has a MASTER trait that currently gives only 5% damage. It’s completely pitiful, and justly not even remotely worth it vs other trait options. This could be boosted to increase Shortbow range to 1200 as well.
2) Give thieves a ‘sniper rifle’ or a ‘blow dart’ (if a new weapon is feasible – thrown options also come to mind, but those make sense to be limited to 600-900).
On the note of your master trait there are plenty of traits through out the profession that are weak compared to other similar traits look at Signet of Power (an adept) compared to Signet Power (necro master) and Beastmaster’s Might (Ranger master). I’d be careful what you ask for there because if they get to normalizing traits I have a feeling the thief community will be hurting a bit more for it than most.
Pets have been hidden due to rising Player complaints.
15 in DA, basically traits Shortbow to become Perma weakness.
It doesn’t have to specifically say “Shortbow” to have shortbow synergy.
Just as Combo skills may not say Sword but they do work well with S/P and P/P.
imo, the shortbow is the opposite of our other weaponsets where it is more dependent on the choices of runes, sigils and utilities, whereas the other weaponsets we pick our traits to make the build and the utilities, etc.. compliment the build.
ive been trying out ALOT of different ways to incorporate my shortbow more as my main instead of a secondary utility weapon and that is what ive noticed.
I currently run 0/30/30/10/0 and often angle into the middle of a zerg, drop the CG CB combo and Withdraw out and drop BP if I need to, works pretty well. May have to try the above build myself
I currently run 0/30/30/10/0 and often angle into the middle of a zerg, drop the CG CB combo and Withdraw out and drop BP if I need to, works pretty well. May have to try the above build myself
It says bad link. That’s a shame, because I was curious to see what you had.
