Guild Wars 2

I’d love to get some other players’ input on the current PvE Staff meta build (DA, CS, DD) and why trickery isn’t a viable option to most players.

Now, in a raid or other organized group setting, I can definitely understand why traits like Thrill of the Crime aren’t useful, with other classes providing more consistent party-wide Might/Fury uptime, hence the thief build being focused on maximizing self DPS through DA. However, for general world PvE roaming, world bosses, map metas, etc…can trickery be viable?

So with DA, you get +10% damage from exposed weakness (because what target doesn’t have condis), plus +20% under half health from executioner (so a +10% net gain) which equals a +20% damage boost overall. Mug is useful as well, but you’re not gaining much from the rest of the spec.

In Trickery, you get +15% damage from capping Lead Attacks (Easy to spam three Vaults straight off with extra initiative pool). Then you get your choice of quickness from Flanking Strikes or perma-fury/50% Might uptime from Thrill of the Crime, Trickster (could be useful if you like healing with Withdraw or just to increase quickness from Flanking Strikes) or Bountiful Theft for 50% vigor uptime, and a little extra CC from sleight of hand.

In summary:

20% Damage + Mug = 15% Damage + 100% Fury/50% Might/50% Vigor (or 12.5% Quickness) – Vault’s DPS loss (vs Staff Auto)

I think this bothers me way more than it should, I’ve honestly just enjoyed playing Trick/CS/DD for a few days and want some validation that I’m not completely ruining my DPS. In solo testing vs DPS check golems (no boons/condis/food) I get around a 5% damage increase using Trickery vs. DA (Using what I’m comfortable calling the optimal rotations for each spec).

What are your thoughts? Anybody else tried breaking the meta with trickery?

In raids, Revealed Training matters as well on certain fights (Gorseval).

You’re not hitting your DPS substantially substituting Trickery for DA, especially when solo. As you said, you’re only losing 5% in raw damage modifiers, and pick up utility that may be more valuable (initiative, swiftness and more fury, interrupt).

For completeness, you aren’t gimping your DPS giving up Critical Strikes either – you get a lot of damage modifiers there, but each of them is fairly weak and you can get a lot more raw power in other lines. You’re basically running it for the Fury. In raids you don’t need that additional utility and it does offer more DPS than Trickery (though less than DA when Revealed Training is active), but, again, open world you might want to optimize with a broader criteria than max dps.