Guild Wars 2

Greetings, recently i’ve been PvP’ing alot and i have some questions to ask regarding the profession, it’d be great if anybody could answer them!

First: why no cele thief?
I tried a celestial build today (with some generic runes/sigils) and i actually was unkillable! A celestial ele, zerker sword/dagger thief and a zerker scepted guardian tried to kill me for at least two minutes, at that point i couldn’t defend the point anymore and had to sr away.
Of course, hitting 2.7k backstabs did hurt my feelings, but the overall damage wasn’t so bad. Plus nobody excepts a thief to be able to take hits so everybody tries to kill you asap just to discover you don’t go down.
I mean, i’ve always heard people comment how p/p and d/d are weird sets because they are both condition and power focused, so why not cele?

Second: Why not using shadow refuge as a replacement for veil in zerg vs zerg?
While SR has a cap of maximum players stealthed when placed, it doesn’t have the cap with people entering the area after it has been placed.
Thus if one thousand people are clumped in one place, sr is activated and people move inside it, they’ll all be stealthed.

Third: What’s the general opinion on leeching venoms?
It seems it applies when attacking and not when applying the venoms, thus an untraited spider venom should trigger it five times.
As long as we don’t overlap venoms, isn’kitten crapton of healing and extra damage?
Plus, most venoms deal conditions, with the trait they’d deal considerable extra damage too…couldn’t a bunker/celestial build be made out of this?

1) The cele amulet is best suited for professions that can fill the brawler role in team fights. Since the thief, even with this amulet, can’t contribute and survive in team fights as well as eles/engis/warriors, there’s not much benefit to going this route. Instead, thieves are very well suited to playing a high mobility roaming role where they utilize burst to win fights quickly and finish off low HP targets. This role is enhanced the most with the berserker amulet.

2) SR, in theory sounds like it would work, but in practice, it’s terrible for large numbers of players. Not only would you have to get the entire zerg to walk into the SR instead of having it applied, but you also run the risk of having members lose stealth and get revealed by accidentally walking out of the ring. Even if this wasn’t an issue, mesmers still generally contribute more to zerg fights with AoE boon stripping, confusion, reflects, portals, and haste.

3) All venom skills and traits are generally rubbish compared to other options. There are a few reasons for this: To gain any decent benefit from venoms, you need to dedicate most if not all your utility skills to venoms and make heavy trait investments that come at a very high cost. While doing this, you also lose vital stun break, condition removal, and shadow step utility that is vital to staying alive. The healing benefit of venoms sounds great on paper until you realize that thieves can easily die in very few hits before healing can even benefit. Because of this, you’re better off avoiding damage with blinds, evades, stealth, and shadow steps than trying to heal through it.

People have been trying to make venom and condition builds work for a long, long time and while you can get by using them, they are simply outperformed by crit/power-based high mobility builds that play to the inherent strengths of the thief profession.

Well, SR can be used on top of mesmer’s veil. I believe any commander can coordinate a zerg nice enough to tell everybody to don’t go past the circle.
If we assume everybody thinks/knows that SR is a great tool for zergs and exiting the area will negate its effects, then it’d outperform veil. The reason it doesn’t is simply because it’s not what everybody does, maybe if some commanders call for shadow refuges and see it working things might shift. Still, that’s 4+11 seconds of stealth compared to 4-5.

Regarding the cele gear… wouldn’t it work as a point holder/capper?
Basically, your only job should be holding c.points until your teammates can help and if something goes wrong, just pop sr and casually walk away.

By the way, isn’t pistol/dagger a viable condi build?
I believed it was…

I used to run P/P clerics/dwayna in sPvP with full healing effects and blind spamming like leeching venoms and Black powder + SR + Dagger storm, with additional burst healing off of shadow arts/HiS and stealth regeneration effects for limited periods of time to prevent decaps, etc., and was literally unkillable. The nerf to black powder, while justified, hurt the build far too much to really remain effective. Being able to stand firm against decap engis and out-heal elementalists was really funny, as nobody really ever saw it coming. Otherwise, I don’t think there’s much merit to running more skirmishy-based builds. As far as #3 goes, it’s only really useful as a venomshare tool for extra party damage. Venoms aren’t really condusive to any existing style of play, as P/D is by far the superior condition damage spec, and one of the single strongest available setups in the game across all classes, and venoms simply don’t work well enough without investing 12 points for sharing, and even then, the benefits are best as party support via burst heals more than anything from skelk venom.

Regarding #2, for reasons that exiting the circle at any point before it finishes force reveal effects and doesn’t stealth users. It’d require a lot of extra setup time and coordination for marginal rewards. A lot of groups aren’t actually that skilled or coordinated anyways; most blobs in WvW get carried by the easy-to-play, easy-to-win GWEN strategy and thus prefer veil because it’s easier to pull off, and doesn’t keep people waiting inside of a tight space.

What is the advantage of a celestial thief at holding a point vs ele/engi/warrior/guardian? You don’t really have any secondary healing or regen outside of SA if you run that, your heals either take you off point or stealth you, neither of which is helpful to actually holding a cap/decap and you don’t have enough aoe pressure to actually force people off. I just don’t see it.

DeceiverX.8361:

Regarding #2, for reasons that exiting the circle at any point before it finishes force reveal effects and doesn’t stealth users. It’d require a lot of extra setup time and coordination for marginal rewards. A lot of groups aren’t actually that skilled or coordinated anyways; most blobs in WvW get carried by the easy-to-play, easy-to-win GWEN strategy and thus prefer veil because it’s easier to pull off, and doesn’t keep people waiting inside of a tight space.

I may be wrong, but if a thief drops SR on himself, heals with hide in shadows and moves away, doesn’t he retain the stealth?
It might be as easy as dropping one SR plus one veil if that’s true (i’ll test it asap).

edit
Just tried a few times, it seems that doesn’t work, i swear it worked a few times tho.
Either way, SR+portal wouldn’t be brutal? xP

If he exits Sr prematurely for any reason it’s insta reveal no matter what.

Edit: most of us have the timing and size of it down to a science. We can riverdance inside of it and exit as it fades to appear we’re out of it beforehand.