Guild Wars 2

Hi, I’m new to the game and am rolling a thief – currently level 17. I’m a casual weekend gamer. After I hit 80, I intend on PVPing quite a bit (but i’m not trying to rush through PVE content though / speed leveling).

I read the Thiefs guide on the sticky, and it says that D/D is painful to level with – it recommends a mindless/easymode short sword / pistol spec rotation (I guess continually blinding the enemy). However, I don’t want level and get trained on using this methodology – only to have to relearn how to kite and attack using D/D for pvp – it seems if I’m going to spend hours PVE’ng, I would also really like to learn the skills and techniques that will best prepare me for PVP.

I’m also a fan of dual guns on my swap, but hear shortbow is the way to go.

Also, if d/d is viable for PVE leveling – any recommended pull and rotation approaches.

Side question – I keep getting wasted by the level 15 hero point quest: "Defeat the Ancient Ember and Its Minions is a hero challenge outside the northern face of the Thaumanova Reactor that occurs when a character releases the Ancient Elemental Fire Energy. " Any advice? and do I have to activate the quest or can I join someone who already activated it to get the point (do I have to wait my turn if someone else activates it first?).

Thanks!

All weapon sets, skills, traits, classes, runes, sigils, foods, and utilities are viable in PvE.

Well, I suppose you are going for power D/D, which explain your need to relearn kitting and attack. D/D is pretty much a condi set applying loads of bleed ( I know you power d/d believers are out there in the shadow :p ). Anyway, for leveling just try every sets, play around with one, try power and condi variants then switch weapons. You will meet different playstyles and find the one you like the most.

As for harder HP best way to do them is to get someone to do them together. It doesn’t matter who activate the HP, even one attack when the boos is at 1% hp is enough to get the point.

The only reason condi D/D even exists is because of buffed condition effects/stats and the fact they cut the non-evasion animation time by more than half. It’s fundamentally designed as a power set that has exploitable condition access on one skill. If they returned the cast delays, everyone would drop D/D condi (and D/D then generally would be objectively underpowered from all angles) because it wouldn’t be able to be abused like it can be right now, especially with Daredevil.

As for the OP, yea, it’ll work in PvE because anything works in PvE, but if you plan to PvP or WvW with Power MH dagger, don’t even bother trying to learn/master the kit because it’s not worth playing. D/P is strictly better for all competitive environments in literally every way except signet burst, and even then that’s debatable.

If you are aiming for PvP “viability” there are plenty of options. Knowing how to play—the game as a whole, the pvp map mechanics, the class, and the weapon set you are using—will ultimately be most important in making you viable.

If you want, you can add me to your friends list and message me in game. I’d be willing to help you learn the class if you are interested.

Pve is insanely easy in this game, so don’t worry about it. You don’t even have to worry on world bosses or 80 zones. raids/fractals all builds are dps and cc oriented, and there’s a thief build for it you will use.

It not true that the only reason d/d condition exists due to the buffs to Conditions. D/D unicorn builds go back right to the first days of GW2 and worked well in Pve . People used SOM , dropped caltrops and just Deathblossomed their way through most content.

You could solo many open world champions with relative ease.

d/d condition was never a real thing in WvW or PvP because players are different then NPCS and could exploit the weaknesses it had.

D/D was always a hybrid set intended for condition and or power or some combination of both as made evident by the DB skill. That this did not work as well in WvW or pvp does not change this.

By the way DB was nore potent in those early days and was able to apply 3 stacks of bleeding to 5 seperate targets. 3 stacks of bleeding for 15 total stacks with a spammable skill was the fastest way of applying bleeds in the game and does not suggest a power set. No build could touch this in raw condtion apps.

Condi shortbow ranger and sword warrior both provided the same or superior amount of bleeding/DoT application compared to D/D thief. If we’re talking “used to’s”, Uncatchable and Caltrops on what was the standard DA/Acro/Tr build (from better vigor and old FG) provided almost the same amount of bleeding as dumping all initiative on Death Blossom. It wasn’t so much D/D itself but the fact a lot of conditions like burning and poison didn’t stack, confusion was on-hit only, and Torment didn’t exist. It wasn’t a good build; the only merit DB and subsequently D/D posed was the evasion, and from a raw condition damage perspective it’s been relatively mediocre or poor for PvE forever.

I can’t say you’re correct in the set being designed as a hybrid one. Strictly speaking, D/D, unlike every other condition-oriented weapon, saw no kit concept changes or revisions since pre-release, which did not have condition damage as a stat in the game; DoT conditions as originally intended were small amounts of “true” damage dealt over time (which is why there is no defensive stat for them and why the ticks ignore armor and most effects) to help assist more durable builds, ones with more innate sustain, and to act as potential execution skills for extremely-low-health targets which used negation like blocks off cooldown. Ultimately, all sets that were not changed since their inception were designed as power sets. If the damage source wasn’t on the evade and was placed on another skill, DB would have either been reworked a long time ago, or everyone would still be complaining that the skill has little use and is weak, just like Dancing Dagger.

DeceiverX.8361:

Condi shortbow ranger and sword warrior both provided the same or superior amount of bleeding/DoT application compared to D/D thief. If we’re talking “used to’s”, Uncatchable and Caltrops on what was the standard DA/Acro/Tr build (from better vigor and old FG) provided almost the same amount of bleeding as dumping all initiative on Death Blossom. It wasn’t so much D/D itself but the fact a lot of conditions like burning and poison didn’t stack, confusion was on-hit only, and Torment didn’t exist. It wasn’t a good build; the only merit DB and subsequently D/D posed was the evasion, and from a raw condition damage perspective it’s been relatively mediocre or poor for PvE forever.

I can’t say you’re correct in the set being designed as a hybrid one. Strictly speaking, D/D, unlike every other condition-oriented weapon, saw no kit concept changes or revisions since pre-release, which did not have condition damage as a stat in the game; DoT conditions as originally intended were small amounts of “true” damage dealt over time (which is why there is no defensive stat for them and why the ticks ignore armor and most effects) to help assist more durable builds, ones with more innate sustain, and to act as potential execution skills for extremely-low-health targets which used negation like blocks off cooldown. Ultimately, all sets that were not changed since their inception were designed as power sets. If the damage source wasn’t on the evade and was placed on another skill, DB would have either been reworked a long time ago, or everyone would still be complaining that the skill has little use and is weak, just like Dancing Dagger.

We will agree to disagree. 45 stacks potential bleeds (3 dbs) was greater then a ranger/warrior could muster. In fact this one reason they lowered it to 3 targets. Thief had no cooldowns unlike the other professions. DB always had that long bleed duration (ranger base durations sb were low) and the duration coupled with som heals ( at that you could get 15 seperate heals just on a db) made the build work.

The OP was speaking to PVE directly and early on I used this build in PVE. You could get through anything with ease.

It a hybrid weapon from the get go.

Even after the change to number of targets it still worked in Pve. It COULD work in wvw but with the poor evade frames was not as good as power builds.

That’s 45 assuming it is hitting all of said targets, and assuming there are five targets to even hit at any given time. For single target, it gets one cast every three seconds in a sustained encounter (or really, once every four with the old initiative regen speed) and netted 3 stacks * 10s (30 ticks) as a result over this period of time.

A sword warrior will land five bleeds with no trait investment in the same period. At 8s base this yields 40 effective stacks. Innately 33% better. Then you look at Precise Strikes and Flurry and the bleed uptime skyrockets in comparison. Such a warrior pumps out more than double the effective condition damage in the end despite cleaving only three targets, which makes its “stack count” measurement still beat out the thief when DB hit five, and almost triples DB’s effectiveness when tied at 3.

Obviously ranger’s was single-target, but the attack speed on shortbow is so fast that such long durations would be excessive, plus such builds used to run double Sharpening Stone and Sharpened Edges which would proc often. It wasn’t a competitive build, either, due to the required back-attacks at range the build required prior, but it could permanently maintain well over 20 stacks of bleeding on a single target at any given time without considering its (no longer) effective 25s cooldown for 60 effective stacks of bleed via dual Sharpening Stone casts and not accounting for a bleeding-base pet like the hawk which stacks 2 stacks of 15s bleed every 6s without cooldown reduction abilities.

And again, nothing changes the fact that D/D has gone without major design changes since before the game launched when conditions as a primary source of damage literally did not exist, unlike every other condition weapon I’m aware of that received substantial changes into launch. Many weapons were designed to be “hybrids” and none of them are. DB is coincidental and nothing more. It was/is good due to its evasion and it had good sustain + pressure mix for some PvE encounters back then, and it got made better, but I can absolutely assure you it was never intended to be made as a primary source of damage for D/D in its original design because it’s tied to the evade frames, and hasn’t had the reworks necessary to make its kit cohesive for bringing to anything except open world (in which case anything works) and a few niche encounters (and frankly P/P and S/P have historically had much more success at these same ones). Condi D/D isn’t a PvP build because its solely-dependent on a punishable (especially in this meta) and extremely repetitive attack to deal damage, and is only strong in cases because of said attack being an evade. Get rid of the punish frames and it turns into being something objectively overpowered with no counter; keep DB as it is and the whole kit is forever weak. Such design to me screams that it’s consequence of enabling the condition build and ANet’s known bullheadedness of not wanting to change skill functionality getting in the way of reworking it since it would change a build some people are attached to.