Hook strike is powerful ONLY because staff doesn’t have stealth access by itself. Daredevil wasn’t about stealth, it makles sense you don’t get a smoke field on the elite spec set.
Staff is really good already. If you want to use Hook strike more, take a stealth utility, like Blinding powder.
SA with steal on stealth and blinding powder make Staff a very effective weapon set. It does mean dropping the big damage of either the CS or DA trait lines but that knockdown makes landing vault 1 or 2 times a snap. Once BV cuts through blocks I can certainly see a substantial amount of added pain to several builds.
Sarcasm For Hire [SFH]
“Youre lips are movin and youre complaining about something thats wingeing.”
Daredevil staff is based around evasion not stealth for defensive mitigation, what you are asking for would cause so much QQ that it would see Thief nerfed yet again.
I’m not so sure staff is optimal in PvE actually. I can see the arguments as hook strike not needing a smoke field on staff itself in pvp but on the Hot maps – or against any boss with defiance bar – nope – too little to be effective.
I’m not so sure staff is optimal in PvE actually. I can see the arguments as hook strike not needing a smoke field on staff itself in pvp but on the Hot maps – or against any boss with defiance bar – nope – too little to be effective.
Staff works very well in PVE given unlike WvW or PvP critters rarely block of evade a vault. If one traits IP one can get a whole lot of health by vaulting into a mob. This works very well in HOT as example taking out those raptors.
I use Staff in conjunction with p?p for the meta events in TD and Auric basin. Staff aoe vaulted into a group of chak/mordrem takes them down fast. I will switch off to p/p when fighting things like the Chak crown surrounded by the gunk or the Gerent.
Staff works very well in PVE given unlike WvW or PvP critters rarely block of evade a vault. If one traits IP one can get a whole lot of health by vaulting into a mob. This works very well in HOT as example taking out those raptors.
I use Staff in conjunction with p?p for the meta events in TD and Auric basin. Staff aoe vaulted into a group of chak/mordrem takes them down fast. I will switch off to p/p when fighting things like the Chak crown surrounded by the gunk or the Gerent.
Staff works very well in PVE given unlike WvW or PvP critters rarely block of evade a vault. If one traits IP one can get a whole lot of health by vaulting into a mob. This works very well in HOT as example taking out those raptors.
I use Staff in conjunction with p?p for the meta events in TD and Auric basin. Staff aoe vaulted into a group of chak/mordrem takes them down fast. I will switch off to p/p when fighting things like the Chak crown surrounded by the gunk or the Gerent.
Raptors don’t have a defiance bar – thief’s methods to CC are subpar in comparison most if not all other classes and useless against bosses/mobs with defiance bar which is a thing especially in HoT.
Raptors don’t have a defiance bar – thief’s methods to CC are subpar in comparison most if not all other classes and useless against bosses/mobs with defiance bar which is a thing especially in HoT.
Edit: Grammar
Against the Gherent you do not want to use CC. You just pound out damage as quickly as possible and the staff does that.
can you please try to get the point and not go offtopic because you got things wrong and are too smug to admit it? thanks!
ETA. Let me guess, your answer on this will be “Excuse me, but I’m playing this game too followed by more offtopic”.
The topic of this thread is: Please give staff stealth because it’s very hard to land a hook strike without the possibility to stealth on the weapon itself.
One can argue that this is good enough for pvp/wvw – for PvE it isn’t because the bosses and some vets carry defiance bars nowadays. So while my Revenant breaks about 70% of a champ’s defiance bar, my thief gets 2%. That paired with the inability to use this skill often because I don’t have a smoke field on that weapon. So if it’s meant to be completely stealthless, then make Hook Strike work without stealth and give it more power in at least PvE.
can you please try to get the point and not go offtopic because you got things wrong and are too smug to admit it? thanks!
ETA. Let me guess, your answer on this will be “Excuse me, but I’m playing this game too followed by more offtopic”.
The topic of this thread is: Please give staff stealth because it’s very hard to land a hook strike without the possibility to stealth on the weapon itself.
One can argue that this is good enough for pvp/wvw – for PvE it isn’t because the bosses and some vets carry defiance bars nowadays. So while my Revenant breaks about 70% of a champ’s defiance bar, my thief gets 2%. That paired with the inability to use this skill often because I don’t have a smoke field on that weapon. So if it’s meant to be completely stealthless, then make Hook Strike work without stealth and give it more power in at least PvE.
I find no need for a smoke field on staff in PVE or on the HOT maps.
One does not need stealth on the Staff set in order to achieve stealth. Traiting SA with BP on theutility bar and hidden thief on a 20 second steal and you get in your hook strikes .
Hook strike is a very powerful skill and must be limited in some manner.
For the thief there Soft control on the Staff build which will break defiance bars such as blind and cripple and weakness. Basi venom is also extremely powerful for taking down defiance bars as is scorpion wire. If using pistol off hand alternate weapon set as many staff users do for the smoke field and bound stealth , one also has head shots to break down that bar.
Addendum . it occurred to me that I missed a whole pile of other means of breaking down a defiance bar by a thief. Tripwire as example will take off 300 points, fully half of a creature with 600. the knockdown on staff when you do get stealth should be some 200 worth. This of course means if hook strike did not require stealth three spams of it would totally break the bar on many of those bosses. We also have launch in the new impact strike which is preceded by a daze which should rip a huge chuck of a defiance bar away.
The staff mathematically pumps out the best DPS of all of the thief weapons right now.
It may change on 1/26, but currently it offers the best. As for defiance, you let someone else in your party take care of it when it matters.
Pretty hard with 2 in wvw.
Or on the Hot maps for that matter – the defiance bar annoys me a lot of times – maybe it’s simply bad designed. And with it the weapons of the elites, minus thief.
I went in solo with staff just to see how hard it was to break down a typical defiance bar in HOT. I chose one of the creatures with a 600 strong bar which tends to be the amount the larger creatures (veterans/champions etc) have.
I traited tripwire and stealthed using SR then ran over the top of a creature. I dropped tripwire on him and loaded my BV, I made one attack out of stealth with the staff using hook strike and the defiance bar was gone. Fully half the bar was removed before I left stealth and the remainder with my first attack.
HARD cc is much more effective then soft cc. If one is concerned about removing defiance bars get some hard CC. Staff is near the top of the weapon sets thief has when it comes to hard CC .
What if I don’t want to have pistol as my second set? And that’s kind of the point. I’m really sure I tried hook in PVE on the HoT maps and my impact was minimal, so either a bug, or I remember things wrong – I’ll test it once I have my computer back. Maybe.
Anyway – Staff + SB is in my opinion a far better combination for the hot maps than staff + /P – but yeah, staff + P/P could work – still I’d be bound to use each set for at least 9 seconds.
It may be that the hook was a cheeky extra but it doesn’t make too much sense.
ETA: Most engineer weapons have skills like this – they need to switch back and forth to do a combo – with the difference that their weaponsets have no cooldowns (to switch) – so this skill is rather badly designed in my eyes.
thief’s methods to CC are subpar in comparison most if not all other classes and useless against bosses/mobs with defiance bar which is a thing especially in HoT.
Fist Flurry > Palm Strike and Impact Strike > Uppercut are enough to fully deplete a defiance bar in dungeons/fractals/five man content without any help from anyone else. The CC is there, should you choose to use it. Using those utility skills to force the break also allows you to expend all your initiative afterwards to burst the vulnerable target while it takes extra damage.
Upscaled open world HoT events are going to be a different story, but in those no one class is going to be able to deplete the bar by themselves. Something like Revenant Staff 5 is the exception rather than the rule, and it’s far more likely to be nerfed to a reasonable level than for any other class to have a CC skill buffed to match it.
I’m used to soloing towers with D/D and without CC. But I always feel sorry for that person who caps a tower with me as they will in 95% of all cases be the target while I stand still behind the lord. Best was duo-loing SM – my buddy cried because the Lord hit that hard and I hadn’t had a scratch – I tried to adopt him to be my pet.
Maybe the defiance bar should just be designed better as the mobs that carry it mostly stayed the same and still hit as many times as before, just that they can’t be interrupted now, except if the defiance bar is up and ready to be taken down. In the end; it doesn’t matter that much just that I wonder why every class got that much CC apparently while thief got only one they can’t really use (and seemed weak to me) – but again: I’ll try it when I’m back.
