Guild Wars 2

Highlie.7641:

Reducing Quick pocket’s to 5 seconds base would be extreme when paired with (runes of warrior?)

3 second weapon swap, then add some on swap sigils

Warrior runes reduce the swap by 20% iirc (so 4 seconds) and swap sigils have their own icd so i think that it wouldnt be too extreme. I do think it could create a really fluid playstyle and a unique way to build in thief.

Anonymouse.4760:

Changing from optimal runes, sigils, traits and utilities just to come a little bit closer to former dodge uptime isn’t the solution we need as that creates a whole new set of problems.
1. Pack runes needed to supplement both power and precision
2. Air / fire runes make up a huge part of damage, what would you do, run double s/d with energy sigils on each? theres a reason nobody plays jumper spec anymore.
3. Was already using signet of agility
4. Hard to catch competes with swindler’s equilibrium — a must have if an s/d thief decided to trait acrobatics
5. Was already using withdraw ( most builds do now a days, even DP )
6. Roll for initiative would take the slot of either shadow refuge or shadow step, both crucial for survivability
7. Trickster? No sane person is going to give up bountiful theft, the only stability and aegis prioritizing boon rip for a 3 second shorter withdraw cooldown and additional 1 condi cleanse.

Thanks but no thanks. No offense — I’m sure that’d work just fine for trolling in obsidian sanctum or something but it’s not going to stand up to level it needs to in any competitive field.

Define optimal runes and sigils.
last meta “optimal” was a combination of runes and sigils based off past build choices.
From the moment the patch roled out, everything we know about “optimal” are just questions in the air.

SoulSin.5682:

Anonymouse.4760:

Changing from optimal runes, sigils, traits and utilities just to come a little bit closer to former dodge uptime isn’t the solution we need as that creates a whole new set of problems.
1. Pack runes needed to supplement both power and precision
2. Air / fire runes make up a huge part of damage, what would you do, run double s/d with energy sigils on each? theres a reason nobody plays jumper spec anymore.
3. Was already using signet of agility
4. Hard to catch competes with swindler’s equilibrium — a must have if an s/d thief decided to trait acrobatics
5. Was already using withdraw ( most builds do now a days, even DP )
6. Roll for initiative would take the slot of either shadow refuge or shadow step, both crucial for survivability
7. Trickster? No sane person is going to give up bountiful theft, the only stability and aegis prioritizing boon rip for a 3 second shorter withdraw cooldown and additional 1 condi cleanse.

Thanks but no thanks. No offense — I’m sure that’d work just fine for trolling in obsidian sanctum or something but it’s not going to stand up to level it needs to in any competitive field.

Define optimal runes and sigils.
last meta “optimal” was a combination of runes and sigils based off past build choices.
From the moment the patch roled out, everything we know about “optimal” are just questions in the air.

Optimal runes and sigils would give stats pertaining to and supporting the class’s primary objective. In the case of a Thief: damage. If you’re having to put your runes and sigils towards defense while running a support oriented line then there’s an issue.
I don’t think the patch has changed that, unless you plan to run a bunker a thief build now?

I’m still playing S/d, and I’ve managed some stuffs to make it batter as before, or I tried!
First of all, let’s say that playing a thief full berserker is now pretty impossible due to really low health, so first thing to do is replace some gear with Valkyrie (or soldier at least). This means lose some critical chance (If u take soldier ferocity also).
I’m still doing some try, but now I’m trying to play in this way:
the main changes comes from replacing Deadly Arts with Critical strike.
With critical strike i have a sort of perma fury, so around 65% , this gives me an improvement of critical damage (due to “no quarter” trait) – Rune of Pack- . I lose 70-80 power only instead of full berserker gear, but i have 1,4k tough, that gives me more survivability.
I tried, and the only thing that we could regret i think is “Mug” .

NIKJOLDBHORN.7315:

I’m still playing S/d, and I’ve managed some stuffs to make it batter as before, or I tried!
First of all, let’s say that playing a thief full berserker is now pretty impossible due to really low health, so first thing to do is replace some gear with Valkyrie (or soldier at least). This means lose some critical chance (If u take soldier ferocity also).
I’m still doing some try, but now I’m trying to play in this way:
the main changes comes from replacing Deadly Arts with Critical strike.
With critical strike i have a sort of perma fury, so around 65% , this gives me an improvement of critical damage (due to “no quarter” trait) – Rune of Pack- . I lose 70-80 power only instead of full berserker gear, but i have 1,4k tough, that gives me more survivability.
I tried, and the only thing that we could regret i think is “Mug” .

Like I said in the beginning of my post: “Please do not use this post as an opportunity to regale myself and your fellow readers with tales of how Sword Dagger still works great for you as you effortlessly dispatch up-levels in the eternal battlegrounds, or mercilessly crush hot-join hero’s across the nation. I am not saying Sword Dagger can’t be played, only that it isn’t up to par with Dagger Pistol for tpvp.”

In other words, this is an educational thread — explaining why it is likely we won’t see S/D anymore in competitive PvP.
It is also a protest of sorts to raise awareness that in order to protect build diversity we need to get acrobatics S/D back to a level that can rival D/P builds for viability in certain team comps and situations. As such i’d like the comment section to be a place people can voice suggestions for Acrobatics.
Feel free to make your own thread for WvWers like yourself that want to try to make a S/D build that covers trait weaknesses by min-maxing stats.
Good luck!

SoulSin.5682:

Anonymouse.4760:

Changing from optimal runes, sigils, traits and utilities just to come a little bit closer to former dodge uptime isn’t the solution we need as that creates a whole new set of problems.
1. Pack runes needed to supplement both power and precision
2. Air / fire runes make up a huge part of damage, what would you do, run double s/d with energy sigils on each? theres a reason nobody plays jumper spec anymore.
3. Was already using signet of agility
4. Hard to catch competes with swindler’s equilibrium — a must have if an s/d thief decided to trait acrobatics
5. Was already using withdraw ( most builds do now a days, even DP )
6. Roll for initiative would take the slot of either shadow refuge or shadow step, both crucial for survivability
7. Trickster? No sane person is going to give up bountiful theft, the only stability and aegis prioritizing boon rip for a 3 second shorter withdraw cooldown and additional 1 condi cleanse.

Thanks but no thanks. No offense — I’m sure that’d work just fine for trolling in obsidian sanctum or something but it’s not going to stand up to level it needs to in any competitive field.

Define optimal runes and sigils.
last meta “optimal” was a combination of runes and sigils based off past build choices.
From the moment the patch roled out, everything we know about “optimal” are just questions in the air.

Exactly!
Nothing is written in stone anymore.
Time to try new things, adapt and move on.

Best regards!

I have to agree with acrobatics now being terrible. Thieves need the 15 endurance regen on dodge. Even pre-patch D/P thief was better than S/D and everyone knew that. I still played S/D because it was so fun. Now I can’t play it anymore. Thieves are way too squishy to take hits. You either used stealth and blind spam to live, or you used dodge and evasion to live. Vigor alone even with the 50% increase trait is not enough to keep a thief alive especially considering S/D doesn’t have the burst potential D/P has. S/D needs even better sustain.

And speaking as someone who has also played against hundreds of thieves in this game, I haven’t noticed them being overpowered in the slightest. Every fight I play with or against a thief, I know exactly why I won or lost.

To be precise, this patch simply revealed flaws in GW2’s combat structure. The s/d’s idea of evading attacks and counter-attacking is awesome, but it is not possible to evade attacks, when the attacks are:

1) instant and hard hitting (can be cast even while casting some other ability);
2) short-channeled, animations almost invisible, and hard hitting;
3) hard hitting and can be freely spammed without any drawbacks (aside of putting them on short cooldowns), not exposing the spammer for counter-attacks.

On top of that, auto-attacks put weapon’s evades like flanking strike on global cooldown, making it literally impossible to precisely time an evade. We can turn-off auto attack, but then our damage output drops by 80%.

Conclusion:
If you think that you can skillfully evadade attacks and this way gain upper hand in a fight, you are going to hit a wall of reality. In ~80% of cases, evades in GW2 are about luck, what means playing an ,,evade build’’ is not about timing evades, but about keeping ,,evade uptime’’ as high as possible. This is why nerfing feline grace won’t fix the problem, but only make people annoyed.

Hammerguard.9834:

I have to agree with acrobatics now being terrible. Thieves need the 15 endurance regen on dodge. Even pre-patch D/P thief was better than S/D and everyone knew that. I still played S/D because it was so fun. Now I can’t play it anymore. Thieves are way too squishy to take hits. You either used stealth and blind spam to live, or you used dodge and evasion to live. Vigor alone even with the 50% increase trait is not enough to keep a thief alive especially considering S/D doesn’t have the burst potential D/P has. S/D needs even better sustain.

And speaking as someone who has also played against hundreds of thieves in this game, I haven’t noticed them being overpowered in the slightest. Every fight I play with or against a thief, I know exactly why I won or lost.

I’ve played 5k games, 2k of it are thief games most of those on S/D.
I completely agree. I(&pretty much every tournament player) also felt D/P was stronger even before patch but now… S/D is now unplayable unless you want to farm newbies in hotjoin(shame on you if you do).

Dagins.5163:

If you think that you can skillfully evadade attacks and this way gain upper hand in a fight, you are going to hit a wall of reality. In ~80% of cases, evades in GW2 are about luck, what means playing an ,,evade build’’ is not about timing evades, but about keeping ,,evade uptime’’ as high as possible. This is why nerfing feline grace won’t fix the problem, but only make people annoyed.

This sounds like the ramblings of an inexperienced, random dodging thief.
Hate to break it to you but evades aren’t supposed to be 80% luck. Most dangerous attacks are highly telegraphed and with proper matchup knowledge and mechanical skill you can predict and evade attacks with even the shortest of cast times.

For example, pretend you’re chasing a low hp celestial rifle engineer and he pops his healing turret, you run towards him and he tries to blow it up to knock you back, if you know that celestial engineers use the accelerant packed turret trait — it’s easy to anticipate and with proper timing you can use flanking strike to evade the knockback and still hit the target, even though the cast time of the explosion of the turret is near instantaneous and there are no significant tells to alert you that he is doing so

Avoiding instant cast skills takes mind games and knowledge of the skill and its cooldown. Gauging your opponents play style and skill level to determine his next move. One example could be: you find yourself faced with a thief If you think your opponent is a beginner thief, then you may expect him to initiate directly with steal as soon as he is in range. However if you know he is a more experienced thief, you can guess that he might attempt to land some kind of CC or bait dodges with dancing daggers or shadow shots before using his instant cast steal. While I agree theres no way to know for certain, theres still a good deal of skill that goes into things like this and hence shouldn’t be dismissed as “luck”

In short, yes I do think you can “skillfully evade attacks” that is something every experienced PvPer does or strives to do.

As far as Acrobatics is concerned, it’s survivability focused almost entirely on active dodges, instead of passives. As such it had a higher skill-cap than other thief lines. But to say that the timing of evades isn’t important, only the quantity — is simply not true.

I believe the intent of the change to acrobatics and vigor was to punish players like you who dodge without any real thought, though unfortunately they went about this the wrong way and gutted the trait-line in the process.

Anonymouse.4760:

I believe the intent of the change to acrobatics and vigor was to punish players like you who dodge without any real thought, though unfortunately they went about this the wrong way and gutted the trait-line in the process.

Personally, I’d like to believe that the intent was to reward players who dodge better than random chance, but be it either way, it doesn’t accomplish that. Even if somebody was so good that they’d successfully evade most of the time (>75% chance), they still wouldn’t get as much use out of the Acrobatics traitline as from other lines.
In short, it’s below par for everyone.

alchemyst.2165:

Amonatory.2453:

This post pretty much sums it all up. But I don’t expect them to even change the slightest thing.

They might if we cry enough. That’s how we got here in the first place.

But the anti-thiefs cry louder than us, we are doomed. They have been nerfing us since the creation of mankind and buffing mesmers.

Learn the new traits and use them. S/d is just fine. You just need to experiment and use the new tools given that no one is even giving a chance. Yes, the build is gone for good. But you can still play high caliber if you think outside of the old way to play.

What’s this “problem” people were trying to fix about pre-patch S/D? I honestly never had an issue with any thief build other than venoms and that’s because immobilize is a ridculous condi. D/P and S/D were both very viable but more importantly could be dealt with. Even D/P being stronger than S/D, neither of them needed a nerf.

bloodymarx.9052:

Anonymouse.4760:

I believe the intent of the change to acrobatics and vigor was to punish players like you who dodge without any real thought, though unfortunately they went about this the wrong way and gutted the trait-line in the process.

Personally, I’d like to believe that the intent was to reward players who dodge better than random chance, but be it either way, it doesn’t accomplish that. Even if somebody was so good that they’d successfully evade most of the time (>75% chance), they still wouldn’t get as much use out of the Acrobatics traitline as from other lines.
In short, it’s below par for everyone.

So basically you’re both saying they made this change to punish random dodging thieves who were still being succeful on the S/D acro build aka getting carried by an abnormally high amount of evades. So isint reducing the evade up-time supposed to make good S/D thieves untouched and only affect scrubs who were random dodging ???

@Anonymouse.4760
You are making yourself look silly if you say evading isn’t mainly about luck or spam in this game. I’ve encountered many good acro thieves since headstart, and I have yet to see one who doesn’t spam flanking strike and evades empowered with vigor.

It is totally understandable as many important animations are too hard to watch, and instant casts can kill you. It takes to be a computer to evade all of these. Difficulty above human level.

It isn’t just about luck, it’s about patience, timing, understanding what tools your opponent has and once you realized that S/D became so much stronger. It had an extremely high skill ceiling that most people probably thought they reached.

glock.6590:

bloodymarx.9052:

Anonymouse.4760:

I believe the intent of the change to acrobatics and vigor was to punish players like you who dodge without any real thought, though unfortunately they went about this the wrong way and gutted the trait-line in the process.

Personally, I’d like to believe that the intent was to reward players who dodge better than random chance, but be it either way, it doesn’t accomplish that. Even if somebody was so good that they’d successfully evade most of the time (>75% chance), they still wouldn’t get as much use out of the Acrobatics traitline as from other lines.
In short, it’s below par for everyone.

So basically you’re both saying they made this change to punish random dodging thieves who were still being succeful on the S/D acro build aka getting carried by an abnormally high amount of evades. So isint reducing the evade up-time supposed to make good S/D thieves untouched and only affect scrubs who were random dodging ???

Nah they made this change to punish random dodging thieves who were SURVIVING on s/d acro, because that’s what people on the forums where complaining about. The intent of the patch was to only reward dodges with endurance on successful evade, i.e. if you played well you would have more dodges than somebody who simply spammed them because they could. But instead of just keeping by this concept they nerfed the vigor return to an amount that doesn’t provide enough survivability especially in this DPS heavy meta. It’s truly comical a critical strikes thief with a 6 second shorter cooldown on agility signet gets as many dodges as an acro thief would.

Dagins.5163:

@Anonymouse.4760
You are making yourself look silly if you say evading isn’t mainly about luck or spam in this game. I’ve encountered many good acro thieves since headstart, and I have yet to see one who doesn’t spam flanking strike and evades empowered with vigor.

It is totally understandable as many important animations are too hard to watch, and instant casts can kill you. It takes to be a computer to evade all of these. Difficulty above human level.

LOL
it must suck to suck

Dagins.5163:

@Anonymouse.4760
You are making yourself look silly if you say evading isn’t mainly about luck or spam in this game. I’ve encountered many good acro thieves since headstart, and I have yet to see one who doesn’t spam flanking strike and evades empowered with vigor.

It is totally understandable as many important animations are too hard to watch, and instant casts can kill you. It takes to be a computer to evade all of these. Difficulty above human level.

so either the sd thieves you have seen are all blind or have the reflexes of a turtle.

even a fool can enter the 5+2 to use backstab with dp,why sd need to evade something to get the regon?and the same as larcenous strike.What sd thief’s need is:1.LS not need FS to hit something. 2.old Feline’s grace

Anonymouse.4760:

LOL
it must suck to suck

I used to be top 3 in solo queue, but what a ,,pro noob’’ like yourself can know. I guess you also play with your eyes closed and hands tied behind chair; teach me master.

so either the sd thieves you have seen are all blind or have the reflexes of a turtle.

Played against this guy who used this build. Simply trying to keep high evade uptime instead of evading only hard attacks, running away or abusing LoS when out of endurance and initiative for evade spam: http://intothemists.com/guides/3740-sizers_build
Of course, that’s a good playstyle, but it doesn’t really take more reflex to play than any other build out there.

Dagins.5163:

Anonymouse.4760:

LOL
it must suck to suck

I used to be top 3 in solo queue, but what a ,,pro noob’’ like yourself can know. I guess you also play with your eyes closed and hands tied behind chair; teach me master.

so either the sd thieves you have seen are all blind or have the reflexes of a turtle.

Played against this guy who used this build. Simply trying to keep high evade uptime instead of evading only hard attacks, running away or abusing LoS when out of endurance and initiative for evade spam: http://intothemists.com/guides/3740-sizers_build
Of course, that’s a good playstyle, but it doesn’t really take more reflex to play than any other build out there.

Go on, keep posting — please continue to impress me with your astounding accomplishments and flawless logic

This is basically how I feel about S/D right now, it’s painful to even try and use it in PvP.. let alone in WvW. This is probably the worst change made in my opinion.

The suggested change for Acro is what I was honestly hoping for, I wouldn’t mind if we got back a set amount of endurance on a successful dodge with a 2s cd.

If they kept this vigor generation on dodge, it would have been great if it was initially at 100% potency and buffed to 125% with endless stamina at least this way the endurance regeneration is faster than base make the setup a bit viable. But as it stands it’s just so weak that I really don’t know why this change wasn’t thought out before implementing.

I’m having no trouble with S/D, guess I’m weird.