Guild Wars 2

Most p/d thieves know the traditional setups and builds and you tweak how you like its pretty flexible imo.

The one thing I havent done is run it with rabid gear (referring to WvW). Just theory crafting in my head I can see it has the potential with the right rune, trait, gear setup to possibly put the burst on top of the condi damage if you can get a decent crit chance a bit of crit damage and still maintain at least 75% duration on bleeds.

Just wondering if anyone has tried it in full rabid (precision,toughness, condition damage) gear and what feedback they have.

I tried direct damage no focus on condi damage with p/d and its lacking imo. If a good crit/condi damage setup is possible it might be another good alternative. I think if you wanted a bit more direct damage rampager would be better than going beserker. None of this is tested just based of how p/d work and I think you would definitely want to still have decent condi damage if your going for a bit more burst.

Also it could open the door to take something like sundering strikes to get the vulnerability on crit with your pistols which would add another condition to p/d.

Precision without a HUGE invest on Critical Damage (around 200% CD) is a mathematical waste when you can chose to have the same amount of Power.

Without Crit Damage investment, if you could distribute 1000 atribute points between Power and Precission, the optimal distribution would be to put 80% or more of those points in Power (I don’t remember the exact number, but I did a lot of maths on its day about it, I love numbers :P).

Aditionally, with the Thief being a low tier HP class, adding Vitality is much better than adding Toughness when talking about percentage increases in your survivality.

Carrion is perfect for P/D as it gives you the max Condition Damage available, while increasing your non-condition damage more than Rabid, and giving you more survivality too.

the main problem is that the precision without power makes even your crits lackluster, while you give up vast amounts of survivability from the vit on carrion. anything with crit damage doesn’t have condition damage, so to amp up crit damage you have to give up your bleed damage. rabid is meant more for condition necro’s and warriors. they get higher payouts from toughness because of their high base health, and both get talents to apply bleeds on crit.

thanks guys for the responses thanks lokheit for the math breakdown too. I was wondering I know the optimal is 200% cd but I didn’t think about that when I was just going over the idea in my head

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-cR333;0Rw-d0W5VOkd0;9;4J-TJ-37;224A27;2SNH6a;16RF9dgm91FU

20/0/30/20/0
0/0/30/20/20

x2 Centaur / x2 Afflicted / x2 Krait

Mix gear of Rabid and Carrion

Healing : -EXCELLENT
Initiative : EXCELLENT
Endurance: EXCELLENT
Bleeds that tick 1xx and are stacked every 3sec to 4sec
Spider Venom: Right before they heal
Devourer Venom: On CD pretty much
D/D: Heartseeker SPAM for lol’s

Edit: Sneak Attack (Pistol #1 from Stealth) is what P/D is about how often it hits small or large crits.

mmm thanks Cempa I know the normal p/d builds as I play p/d most of the time in wvw. I was just looking for feedback on anything different if you ran rabid as opposed to the normal carrion on setup.

I actually have a friend that is running full carrion and he has 11k hp so yea definitely not running rabid with p/d ever. He has no points in acro but even if he did put 20 points in acro no thanks lol.

I ran the numbers for this last week on a damage calc. spreadsheet. The massive increase in precision did help crit chance quite a bit, but that didn’t turn into any extra damage (due to the lost power). It actually decreased upfront damage, but helped condition damage due to toughness>condition dmg calcs. I basically compared full carrion vs full rabid (with chrys. runes on trinkets).

Since answering here I recently returned to my in-game numbers hobby, and again I realized how poor precision is (if you would have 1500 points to put on Power and Precision, the derivate result is negative for precision, meaning that even with a percentage of negative damage attacks, the average damage would be better with negative critical chance because of the increase in Power. Only at 200 CD you’re allowed to put positive precision, and just some symbolic points).

When comparing Carrion and Rabid direct damage increase through Power or Precision increase (using the 644 points from the PvP amulet+jewel) you get this:

- Carrion: 70.3% Increase on direct damage over time.
- Rabid: 15.3% Increase on direct damage over time.

If this doesn’t sells Carrion, here is the “raw defense” increase from each of them (factoring how Vitality and Toughness affect the raw damage from attacks):

- Carrion makes you 59.6% harder.
- Rabid makes you 32.52% harder.

And that’s without considering that you’re already getting Toughness from 30 SA (usual with P/D), which would make it even better for Carrion.

In this case it’s a bit harder to really consider what “harder” means, as Toughness makes your heals more useful and Vitality makes you resist Conditions much better, but in terms of “raw” survivality against direct damage, those are the increases.