Guild Wars 2

From the knowledgable [Teef] members comes our first thread mean to make the thief community more aware about options within the thief profession that most players do not take advantage of.

Usually the tactic for condition builds is to put up as many different conditions as possible. While thief may not be the best condition bomb in the game, it does have the best stacking capability for the few conditions it has access to. Today I want to talk to you about this and the advantages of stacking a few conditions high.

When walling conditions (many types at once) the conditions the enemy wants to remove is usually blocked by multiple conditions that take priority for condition cleanse. Other advantages include attrition where the various conditions turn the enemy into an easy target. For builds that use this kind of tactic, condition damage is the most important stat to max, leaving room for other things.

Thief is highly adept at applying bleed, poison and cripple while not so much with other conditions. Knowing this a thief can keep those three on a target almost indefinitely. What does that mean? Two things.

1.) Stacking conditions high produces a high damage output. In fact, with a full condition build dedicated to bleeding, a thief can reach bleed ticks over 2k a second. Pretty powerful.

2.) The second thing with stacking conditions high is that the liberal applications of bleeding keeps the stacks mildly high even through cleanses. With that, condition cleanse will be rendered mostly ineffective since the conditions cleansed will be reapplied. You might cleanse the 14 stacks of bleed but 8 appear seconds later. So a thief dedicated to applying bleeds will be able to keep that constant condition pressure on them. This is where the panicking comes from.

The only problem is for this to work, you need to stack condition duration as much as damage. Maxing both is the most optimal.

Now the way thief stacks bleeds mostly comes through Caltrops and Uncatchable. Lucky for us, these also apply cripple making it easier to condition bomb our target. Caltrops is best applied in stealth or when the target is immobilized. Uncatchable can be used a max of 6 times in a row (regular + Signet of Agility + Hard to Catch proc) and that also means 6 dodges available aswell. I guess you know that you’ll need an evasion build to max out your bleeds. In that case, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to max out evades aswell.

This is a build suggested by the Leader of [Teef] in regards to maxing evades and bleed DPS. He has also provided a few tips and information to get the most out of this build.

=> This build has at least 10 evades available. This includes Flanking Strike evade with ini regen, endurance from SoA active and Hard to Catch proc.
=> Dodge through or directly away from your target to increase the chances of applying Uncatchable.
=> Caltrops and Uncatchable proc Signet of Malice. You’ll be applying them alot so your SoM is going to proc alot.
=> If you are wondering why I chose Trapper’s Respite and Deadly Trapper for DA, take a look at Needle Trap. Now look at Signet of Malice. ;D
=> On that note, the best time to use the Signet of Malice active is around 75% HP and only when you are close to winning. This is because the passive indirectly cushions the damage you take. Its like a crazy protection.
=>The reason why I put Frailty Sigil in the mix is because with vuln now effecting condition damage, you are going to like the 50% chance. It’ll boost all those bleeds and poisons you’ll be dishing out.
=> This build works best when sticking to your target. But strafing from left to right isn’t enough nor is it the only thing you can do. When you dodge through your target you can strafe or steal, etc. and disorient your target through positioning. Use the dodge-throughs to your advantage.
=> Hit CnD when you need to take some pressure off and reposition yourself.
=> Tactical Strike from behind stuns. Use it to your advantage.
=> Use Infiltrator’s Return and Larcenous Strike only when necessary. Inf Strike is more important for sticking to your target and Flanking Strike is more important for evasions.
=> Time your evades!!!
=> And tweak to your playstyle!!!

Feel free to discuss the topic and build and happy teefing!

I’ll give this a roll it looks well thought out when you get a better look I’ll tweak the necessary. I question the lack of SB but great presentation. +1 for not mentioning Potent Poison.

Interesting build … but it’s missing burst damage. Which you might not think is necessary for a condition build, but it has it’s place.

I say this because it’s going to be really hard to get through diamond skin without mug and or any kind of immediate burst damage available. I play something similar to this, but I use scavenging runes with bursting + frailty on SB and bursting + intelligence on D/D.

This gives me the option to not only gaurantee a crit backstab and follow up with 1 or 2 crit heartseekers but can layer a leeching proc into the small burst as well which is generally enough to get them beyond the health threshold of diamond skin and then use steal to stealth / apply condis (if available) and follow up with needle trap right on top of them from utilities, maybe another backstab followed by some death blossoms to keep their health down and descending before switching to SB to kite and prevent being wrekt from OP burns that will do more damage than all of our efforts applying condis combined.

Maybe just maybe S/D would be the saving grace vs celestiamentalists with diamond skin (among their general OP trashiness) but the burst to get them below that thresh hold is a bit low, however, at least the boons can be slowly stripped away from use of S/D which may actually work. I wouldn’t know, I don’t generally try to S/D in a condition build, but considering how I’ve been running intelligence with D/D to break that health thresh hold, maybe that’s worth playing around with.

Interesting find on signet of malice too but I’m not sure I’d want to go with such a low amount of condi clearing though. No shadow step or shadow’s embrace for dealing with a condi bomb, not even pain response which is pretty huge in place of movement speed in stealth. Yeah there’s sword #2 & trickster, but you literally have one trick (caltrops) in this build and then one condition clear from signet, that’s not much on demand clearing. Compare to shadow stepping away to use hide in shadows, stealth which activates shadow’s embrace = up to 4 condis removed, then shadow return, 3 more removed – or simply camping inside shadow refuge / stealth if nothing else.

I don’t think this build is bad, but there are going to be some matchups that could potentially render it totally ineffective, such as an ele with diamond skin. If you can’t apply any conditions, then you aren’t going to do much pressure if any at all. It’s honestly pretty nice to have the availability of a crit backstab, even if it’s only about 3.5-4k, that’s still a nice immediate amount of damage – with the ability to still do up to 2 crit heart seekers, then start applying condis to keep the pressure going.

I think he did it that way because he is trying to encourage managing evades. It is pretty powerful if you manage and place your evades and utilities properly.

Oh yeah, I’m not saying the build is worthless, don’t get me wrong. It looks like it’s had some serious thought process put behind it for a while now and it seems really interesting and potentially devastating in the right circumstances, but not something I’d run personally is all I’m really saying about it – sorry if it sounds otherwise, I do think it’s well thought out.

The only things I don’t really agree with in the build is using fleet shadow vs pain response – especially because of good swiftness uptime due to using acro and that’s a pretty substantial condi clear + regen you’re replacing for speed in stealth. That and a potential issue vs diamond skin elementalists, most specifically the most common cancer among them, celestial.

What I do like about the build though, is the fact shadow step is taken out in place of caltrops or needle trap due to having Hard to Catch, which really gives room to make some scary pressure if someone runs into traps that are already down while heal / utilities are ready, not to mention improvisation has less RNG considering there’s a signet, deception, trap, trick and venom in the build – that’s honestly really awesome to consider.

I really don’t think the build is bad and in fact looks like it has good potential but it’s possibly weak vs condi bombs and I don’t know how it would play out vs something like diamond skin celestial trash, but I won’t say it’s bad vs that without trying it – I simply do not know.

One other point I’d like to bring up is cleanses being so strong is also part of why I run scavenging as well. It helps to get more damage out of the limited duration my condis are actually applied in many pvp situations. Also, don’t underestimate having sigil of intelligence even with carrion stats, there’s multiple ways to add a nice effective burst to the condi pressure we have and when combined with anywhere between 5-13 stacks of vulnerability (situational, frailty on SB / CnD combined with traps etc) and +5-10 might from traps triggering, it actually adds up quite nicely if done right.

Then there’s having a leeching effect on top of a gauranteed crit backstab with basi venom behind it. A healthy crit + stun that leads into a crit heartseeker which also stuns and also lets you follow up with stolen ele bundle crit + chill or maybe another heart seeker if you don’t. The whole point of that is to bring them out of diamond skin, which if done right it should, and then you can utilize traps & condi damage vs them to prevent them from recovering. (There are, of course, other applications to having burst damage like this)

But mostly, the reasoning ^ is why I prefer what I do. Otherwise celestial cheese with diamond skin feels nearly like a hard counter unless played stupidly well because that build is so unbelievably forgiving. I could see how S/D might be able to deal with it between boon steal and having outs vs all the fire field crap though. My issue is that traps are hard enough to utilize as it is, but when someone is simply immune to all condi effects, it adds that to the list on top of evades / evade skills, invulnerability, pets, minions and clones that completely nullify needle traps – which ultimately makes it less effective – so I like to remove at least one of those possibilities as soon as possible.

I’d say “That’s all” but I just TL:DR’d – sorry.

Oh its fine. It’s his build lol.