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Thieves are… I don’t know. Annoying. But the average player have huge problems playing thieves as “OP”. They are easy to beat if YOU know how.
I have been running the glass cannon build since August, changed my build in end of February after my 2 month hiatus, and I find this PUPPY nerf about stealth. Facepalm. For whatever reason, the devs doesn’t seem to have a clue that thieves aren’t OP, but the mechanics of thieves are just annoying to the players.
But okay, let’s just nerf the class. For a month.
Obviously when I ran WvW, I found majority of the thieves seem to have quit playing. I’m quitting too, but here, let me show you what I think of your nerf. Don’t worry, I know you will continue to nerf until the class disappears. Good job, anet (you guys are just seriously bad at balancing. Stop nerfing, start overhauling thieves, seriously. Even Icefrog do it in Dota.).
I’ll post the build later. Man, creating a video takes forever.
Glass cannon build
To be honest the video shows you quite clearly how to activate all the skill at 6:50.
The only that’s missing is the traits. Once again the build is 30/30/0/0/10.
Deadly arts
Trait 3, 4, 12
- Trait 3 is Mug. This trait gives you very high damage. A typical example will be 5000 damage.
- Trait 4 is Venomous strength. This trait when activated gives you 2 mights per venom, so in total you have 4 mights or 140 power gained.
- Trait 12 is Residual Venom. This trait allows you to use 1 more poison stack. If your first basilisk poison missed or did not activate for some reason, you have one more chance.
Question: Why not use Dagger training?
Answer: It’s a useless ability that gives you 5% of extra dagger damage, not even 50 power gained from this (and no, it doesn’t add 2 daggers worth of damage.). You can’t possibly fight head on with someone else with this. Besides, that extra 1% incoming damage from residual poison takes incoming damage as a whole package, and even if it loses out in damage slightly, you gain an extra 6.5 seconds worth of weakness.
Even though the extra basilisk poison doesn’t stack in duration, it guarantees the full 1.5 seconds duration to land your backstab (the second strike from CnD). If it misses, like the thief battle in 4:55, you can still land your secondary CnD and backstab him with the poison.
Aside from that, you’re going to use the shortbow 90% of the time. The only time you can use this on enemies is when you have a clear advantage on the tactical battlefield.
Critical Strikes
Traits 2, 3, 11.
- Trait 2 utilizes signet of power to give you even more damage in might. TECHNICALLY, you can use your heal, signet of malice to gain even more might, but I’m not sure what that achieves (mainly because you already do enough damage.). Maybe one day when Anet decides to nerf mug damage… but handling the mug damage ALSO affects other builds, so I don’t know how Anet is going to balance things.
- Trait 3 is side strike. Basically it’s very important for your backstab to be a critical strike. You want a reasonable amount of HP and yet maintain good precision stats. That’s really quite hard. The best that you can possibly do is probably traiting it instead of relying on your trinklets.
- Trait 11 is executioner. This trait is just too good in zerg vs zerg.
The only other trait you could possibly want is Furious retaliation which you cannot control actively. It has a cooldown, while your side strike is always up. And you also get Fury from the Trickery bar.
Trickery bar
- The only trait that’s possibly effective for this is, Thrill of the crime. Your allies and you gain fury.
Foods, nourishments, sigils
My shortbow is kinda silly in stats, but the only thing that matters is the sigil of bloodlust.
Daggers are sigil of air (does coefficient damage of 1.1 or CnD damage, I think. It will never use critical % damage, but just take or give 2000 damage.) and force (5% dmg).
In total, I think you should add around 600 power from these 3 alone, and an additional 315 power from activating your skills.
That should put you in 4200 power at its maximum. Good luck in your backstabs.
(edited by LoneWolfie.1852)