Guild Wars 2

Hey guys,
Level 80 Human F. Thief. I used to play GW2 from release to late November last year, then quit for a bit because I hit the gear cap/PvP was a tad dull. I used the good ol’ D/D backstab build, cause I was one of the founders of it at the time.

Can anyone bring me up to date on thief notes? Nerfs, buffs, viability of builds, etc.?

Also, if you’re kind enough, just bring me up to date on the game in general? I remember I ditched when Fractals just came out, I missed the first few days and quickly realized how far behind I was. Kinda showed me Anet wanted to jump into a gear treadmill (the whole levels thing) and I bailed.

So between then and now, wassup?

I was in your situation and only started back up about three weeks ago, so here’s where things are.

1) If you’re doing a Fractal, you no longer need your personal Difficulty Level to match up with the rest of your group. For example, let’s say that you’re Lvl 1 in the Fractal series. You go with a group at Lvl 8 since your group leader is flagged for being that high. After finishing the dungeon chain, you get personal loot based on Lvl 1 and your personal Difficulty permanently increases to Lvl 2. Yet at the same time, the rest of your group can possibly recieve their own personal rewards up to the Lvl 8 setting. This means that you can now tag along as a low Difficulty character, though you wouldn’t want to go along for any Fractal above Lvl 19 due to the Agony scaling mechanics. (See the Agony page on the wiki for how the damage scales by tier.)

2) You can now get Ascended gear from Laurel vendors. You get Laurels by completing the Daily (for x1 Laurel) and the Monthly (for x10 Laurel). This means that you can get an Ascended necklace in x3 weeks. Then you can craft a +5 Stat / +5 Agony Resistance infusion using the Mystic Forge. The infusion should cover you pretty well up through Lvl 19 in the Fractals.

3) The Revealed debuff from exiting Stealth just got increased by +1 second. It now lasts for x4 seconds, which has really thrown a lot of people off. (This was a very recent nerf.)

4) The Quickness boon now makes you only attack at +50% attack speed, instead of the original +100% attack speed. (This was a very recent nerf.)

5) If you’re part of a large guild, they might do Guild Bounty missions against Champion mobs. There’s a weekly bonus chest for the 1st GB mob that you kill that week. It gives you some loot and x2 Guild tokens. By accessing the new Guild vendor, you can pay 5g and x12 Guild tokens for an Ascended earring.

6) At some point while we were gone, open world zone boss mobs started to give a special daily bonus chest that give you a guaranteed Rare piece of gear. More recently, ArenaNet reduced the bonus chest to once a day for every account (instead of once a day for every character). With this in mind, people are now trying to farm both the dragons and the lower level zone bosses for the extra gear to tear apart for ectoplasms.

That’s the bare bones about what you need to know.

Also, mostly since the Revealed nerf, D/P has drastically risen in popularity and is now basically the primary direct damage set. Another large piece of this rise was the buff to Shadowshot, so it no longer roots you in place. I don’t know if you could do it before, I don’t think you could, but you can now also interrupt the slash portion of Shadowshot, allowing you to use it to shadowstep to someone while in stealth and immediately Backstab simply by hammering the Backstab key after firing.

Wiser with Age.3714:

<Helpful info here>

Thanks a lot, I appreciate the update.

I’m considering dropping thief, as it seems to be crashing and burning. How’s the economy? Like, precursors, T6 mat values, etc. on the TP?

Also, as I want to class change, how are Guardians and Warriors doing? I’m looking in to playing as a tank for a guild/more useful in a lot of situations. Last I remember, Warriors were being OP QQ’d over 10k Strikes (can’t remember the name) and Guardians were being nerfed every patch.

1) Precursors – Average selling price is around 400g – 600g, depending on the specific weapon. Inflation is constantly driving the prices up inch by inch, so it’s almost impossible to catch up. The only way that people can buy those things is to chain farm Citadel of Flame: Path #1 and to play the BLTC stock market game.

2) Warriors are in the world of QQ right now. While their Banner skill +stat buffs were almost doubled (which still doesn’t make a lot of difference), the nerf of Quickness hit them hard. Their personal Quickness skill had its duration extended by a bit, but their debuff that doubled incoming damage was not changed. Now the 100 Blades spam builds are only half as effective in the burst compartment and are still as easy to kill. While the class is still very decent in PvE, they’re not doing very well against other players.

3) Guardians haven’t been recently violated and they’re still very popular. I don’t play that class, so I’m honestly a bad person to ask about it.

Helterskelter.8490:

I’m considering dropping thief, as it seems to be crashing and burning.

In regards to this specific comment, I’ll give my personal opinion. Basically the Thief is dealing with the eternal problem of dealing with anti-Stealth whinning, which is a constant in about every single MMO. Bit by bit, ArenaNet is trying to nerf stealth as a way of making things more “fair”. People say that they hate the burst capability of a Thief who is using stealth, but it’s really the stealth that gives people a mental breakdown.

My personal Thief is a mostly non-stealth build that uses S/P and Venomous Aura. All things considered, I’m usually avoiding any of the Thief nerfs because I’m not built around stealth. If you’re willing to be a non-stealth player, then you’ll probably be fine. Otherwise I’d say that your personal play style will be slowly taken apart piece by piece.

Wiser with Age.3714:

1) Precursors – Average selling price is around 400g – 600g, depending on the specific weapon. Inflation is constantly driving the prices up inch by inch, so it’s almost impossible to catch up. The only way that people can buy those things is to chain farm Citadel of Flame: Path #1 and to play the BLTC stock market game.

2) Warriors are in the world of QQ right now. While their Banner skill +stat buffs were almost doubled (which still doesn’t make a lot of difference), the nerf of Quickness hit them hard. Their personal Quickness skill had its duration extended by a bit, but their debuff that doubled incoming damage was not changed. Now the 100 Blades spam builds are only half as effective in the burst compartment and are still as easy to kill. While the class is still very decent in PvE, they’re not doing very well against other players.

3) Guardians haven’t been recently violated and they’re still very popular. I don’t play that class, so I’m honestly a bad person to ask about it.

Thanks again for the update. I heard Rangers are still a ghost class, but Guardians seem to be standing out to me. Thanks for the help Wise.

Edit: On top of that, regarding your Thief build advice, I’ve heard P/D has risen in popularity. What’s your personal opinion on that?

I feel that if I can’t find an enjoyable build (I’m happy with either Burst, insta-gibbing, etc. or Venoms/Conditions but its to an extent) this class is more than dead for me.

P/D was popular a month or so ago, but this recent patch has thoroughly wrecked it. It relies almost entirely on Sneak Attack for damage, which can now be used much less often.

I don’t run P/D, so I don’t have an informed opinion on that issue. My personal Thief runs like a quasi-tank, so it’s a completely different play style from my current character.

Having said that, P/D had a good reputation for WvW before I stopped playing and it seems like people still like it. My only personal hesitation is about Dagger #5. If ArenaNet is slowly killing off a Thief’s stealth potential, then the reliance on Dagger #5 is an inevitable target. While a nerf on that skill would violate a majority of the Thief builds in the game, the cynic in me thinks that it will still happen sooner or later.

Case in point, just look through the past couple of weeks in the Engineer forums if you want to experience a hurricane of QQ. Almost every Engineer was built around a 10 pt trait called Kit Refinement (KR), which encouraged Engineers to use multiple weapon kit skills and for them to constantly switch between them. To be honest, the ability was brokenly powerful for a T1 trait (even though it was needed to help balance out the Engineer). Yet ArenaNet’s response was to rewrite every KR proc into a new result, to change their individual cool downs into a shared cool down (who’s timer you can never see), and increased the cool down to 20 seconds. This entire process has so horribly broken the trait that almost every Engineer in the game instantly removed it from their build because it was uncontrolled and beyond worthless.

ArenaNet likes to take a sledgehammer to a problem when a scalpel would suffice. I used to blame SOE for their point of view during my years of playing EQ2. Since GW2 has launched, it has become clear to me that ArenaNet is no better. When a slegehammer is taken to stealth, Dagger #5 is the prime target. To be completely honest, I’d feel guilty advising anyone to go P/D right now since the build is completely based on its reliance to Dagger #5 and I forsee that this will eventually run into huge problems.

Man, it sounds harsh. And with such limited build options as it is, I feel like everyone will eventually be using the same builds and we’ll end up with an 8-way Rock, Paper, Scissors game; Guardian beats Thief, Thief beats Ranger, etc.

I’m off for the night but thank you to all the contribution I’ve received.