Guild Wars 2

To start, Pre-patch I was running D/D 0/30/30/10/0 Hidden killer/Shadow’s Rejuvenation. I’m sure most thieves know the build well so no reason to jump into it but I got about 5 hours last night to really play WvW in a few BL’s and EBG. Here’s my take on how I felt the build needed to be changed and how I feel about the over all change of stealth. I’d also like to note that I’m on Blackgate T1 and I was doing solo roaming and with the new patch to WXP basically small groups were close to nonexistent as most everyone was zerging to get that rank up. (Thats a different discussion)

Change to the build: As most of you know by now hidden killer is/was bugged (was last night I don’t know if it was hot fixed or not) So that a side, I didn’t change my build at all but did find that I was taking much more damage and with less time in stealth to heal I had to change out some gear for more toughness. So now I’m running a Mix of Valk/zerker/soldiers sitting me around ~16.5K HP and 1.6k toughness (without food buffs) In the few small groups I found I was still able to maintain the control of the fight (1v2-3) just like before, the hardest part was relearning the timing on C&D. Also I found that I could no longer sit in the middle of a enemy zerg and ninja kill people. They were on to me to fast and would just AoE the area till I died or ran away. (Who knew AoE was a good counter to thieves…hum) But I was successfully able to surf the tail end of a zerg for a very long time getting quite a few kills.

Right now its hard to make a strong judgement call if this build will still be fully viable. There are to many things that could have accounted for it being seemingly easy on the battlefield. With the new content, It could have been more pugs or PvE players that I was killing or people were just overwhelmed by all the red names everywhere. (I’d like to note I very rarely saw many upleveled player)Who knows…but right now in WvW for me, my play style and build the stealth “nerf” wasn’t a huge hit on my performance. I’m looking forward to the next few weeks once the rank farming dies down and use thieves can get back out there full force and keep people crying about our class.

Thanks for reading, I’m not really looking for a huge discussion, I just wanted to point out my success with the “nerf” and with all the negative posts yesterday I think a lot of people were ready to write off the thief as a class. Lastly, Sorry if this offends anyone but I feel that this change really puts a gap between Thieves and people that play a thief. After talking to some other veteran roamers, it seems that they are easily beating thieves that they would normally not have but there are still some thieves out there that just stomp them into the ground like nothing changed.

TL;DR Don’t feel the nerf was that bad for good thieves. Bad thieves were hit hard because they can’t bandwagon to a win.