Lately I’ve been kinda bored with my engie build so I made a similar one on my thief for fun. It kinda worked out possibly too well and now I have two characters with tanky condition builds (not enough variation).
Well I’m wondering why more people don’t run P/D builds as they are tanky pretty fun and very easy to troll with. The dps isn’t too bad if you can get high bleed stacks on someone. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRjJZjIwnOo
Is there something I don’t know about P/D or do people just prefer dagger builds because of their raw damage. Also if someone has a good P/D build they’d like to share they’d be welcome to.
Also I know there are people who use P/D I just only remember encountering 1 person in wvw.
Re-Edit: Removed my build to keep it a partial secret
Because against a good player/team, you’re going to be squashed like a tiny insignificant bug on a Mesmer’s carpet.
Try it in tPvP against a premade.
I’ve been playing it for a bit and the worst that really happens is a stalemate (or a group comes along and maybe CCs you to death). Also I’m mostly refering to WvW as I don’t play s/tPvP (much). Furthermore I can’t really see how going agaisnt a premade is a good way to judge one build.
Because against a good player/team, you’re going to be squashed like a tiny insignificant bug on a Mesmer’s carpet.
Try it in tPvP against a premade.
^ This. (Unfortunately.)
It’s fine(fun) for yolo queuing and WvWvW roaming,. However, in tPvP, Thief condition builds are practically non-existent. Pistol main-hand damage could use a boost honestly, but even that won’t help it break into tPvP tier.
Because against a good player/team, you’re going to be squashed like a tiny insignificant bug on a Mesmer’s carpet.
Try it in tPvP against a premade.
I’ve been playing it for a bit and the worst that really happens is a stalemate (or a group comes along and maybe CCs you to death). Also I’m mostly refering to WvW as I don’t play s/tPvP (much). Furthermore I can’t really see how going agaisnt a premade is a good way to judge one build.
Because in WvW, a stalemate means you just run away. Which is actually a loss. Like I said, against a good player, you’re going to have to run away. Try it in tPvP, you’ll see how bad it really is. Fighting a premade is a very good way to judge a build, because you’re stressing it under intense conditions. Any good build would be able to last/significantly aid your team, such as my Necro wellmancer builds, or Mesmer shatters. I have used P/D, P/P, S/P in every possible build combination in high level tPvP, and every single time I get squashed. It’s simply not good.
Contact me ingame for Necro, Ranger, Mesmer, and Thief advice.
Because against a good player/team, you’re going to be squashed like a tiny insignificant bug on a Mesmer’s carpet.
Try it in tPvP against a premade.
I’ve been playing it for a bit and the worst that really happens is a stalemate (or a group comes along and maybe CCs you to death). Also I’m mostly refering to WvW as I don’t play s/tPvP (much). Furthermore I can’t really see how going agaisnt a premade is a good way to judge one build.
Because in WvW, a stalemate means you just run away. Which is actually a loss. Like I said, against a good player, you’re going to have to run away. Try it in tPvP, you’ll see how bad it really is. Fighting a premade is a very good way to judge a build, because you’re stressing it under intense conditions. Any good build would be able to last/significantly aid your team, such as my Necro wellmancer builds, or Mesmer shatters. I have used P/D, P/P, S/P in every possible build combination in high level tPvP, and every single time I get squashed. It’s simply not good.
I’m sorry but I can’t see why someone would even try P/D or P/P in tPvP. P/P has no survivability and P/D builds generally rely on stealth. You cannot cap or hold points with stealth so you’d end up being more focused on more supportive roles with dps thats probably too low. You shouldn’t really be dying unless playing poorly but you can’t do anything useful. Hence why going against a premade is not always the best way to judge a build, you should know beforehand if you can do anything useful. After you decide you can, you can test it if you like to see how it performs.
The stalemate I’m refering to in WvW is when you encounter someone who outheals your damage, with you outhealing them too. It’s not really running away more like getting bored of making no progress and leaving.
WvW is much different from tPvP and like I said I wasn’t really refering to that anyways since I don’t play it.
Edit: Thanks for the feedback, I’ll be sure to give it a try to see how bad it is there.
I have used it for about 3 weeks now in WvW and I am seeing more and more people use it.
Pros: High HP and survivability for thief. Lots of might uptime. Escapable. Can survive 1vx for a long time. Extremely effective vs bads or groups of bads. Uses most easily obtained asccended backpiece. High stealth uptime. Really good if you are in a group. Can kite people. Excellent for roaming. Can quickly take out guarded yaks. With Orrian meat and truffle stew you dodge a LOT.
Cons: Some characters are a very tough kill (shout guardians for example). Need cover condition (poison) in many cases (I get this on weapon swap). Low autoattack damage. Low burst. Hard to kill thieves (but they have trouble killing you because you have 22k HPs). Takes longer to solo camps than with D/P (I don’t really try). AOE is weak (SB) but not that weak since armor has power.
This is my build although I use the Lost Shores tentacled Ascended backpiece.
Is it the best build (for WvW?)? Probably not, I would think D/P would be but I have trouble landing backstabs and other people don’t. It’s absolutely viable however. I recently added caltrops and removed blinding power (I had forgotten to change it) and wow, it worked really well.
I carry a Sword for guardians and if i have time I switch up.
Because against a good player/team, you’re going to be squashed like a tiny insignificant bug on a Mesmer’s carpet.
Try it in tPvP against a premade.
I disagree. I’ve been using it on my sharer build for quite a long time now (with Shortbow switch for situations like crowded fights or mesmers or taking shortcuts) and I’m doing a great job with it, always getting multiple “top stats” per game and most times getting the top score both in hotjoin and tournaments.
P/D is not a 2 seconds assassination and run build, but you can kill a lot with it while being able to survive a burst or scape from a fight and also support your team as you’re not concentrating all your cooldowns on a kill and run.
From my own experience I highly recommend P/D, and other weapon setups too of course, but P/D is not a bad set, it’s very competitive in the right setup (for example it’s very recommendable to have multiple cover conditions, something that I have in spades on my sharer build), P/P is what we would call a bad set.
Score means nothing in tPvP. I have rolled P/D before in both burst and condition, it is not nearly as effective as other classes that attempt doing the same thing. I would rather have Beastmaster condition Rangers to do that, as they are far more reliable.
If you truly believe it is effective, I will give you the benefit of the doubt, and if you like, send me your build ingame for me to try. If it is effective, I’ll support it 100%.
Contact me ingame for Necro, Ranger, Mesmer, and Thief advice.
P/D is only bleeds. Cond removal kills P/D. You have zero burst. Pistol #2 is also worthless.
It is good for a scout/yak slapping if that’s your role though. I’v had 10+ people unable to stop me from killing a yak with it. It’s hilarious to watch people spam the area where I c&d-ed when I’m nowhere near that area anymore. The build I used is in the thief build compilation if that’s still kicking around in these forums.
Score means nothing in tPvP. I have rolled P/D before in both burst and condition, it is not nearly as effective as other classes that attempt doing the same thing. I would rather have Beastmaster condition Rangers to do that, as they are far more reliable.
If you truly believe it is effective, I will give you the benefit of the doubt, and if you like, send me your build ingame for me to try. If it is effective, I’ll support it 100%.
I know the score at the end isn’t what matters in tPvP, but if someone gets good scores on a regular basis something good is happening at least.
Scores aside, I always feel like I’m a big part of my team’s push with this build, it really feels like you’re making a great contribution to your team. At the end it may or may not suit each person style (for example I hate playing backstab builds but I recognize their value), but I truly love playing it and after so many months I mastered it and it gives me really good results in all 3 enviroments (I always try to find builds working in all enviroments).
I will try to find a small guide on my build that I once sent to another user that asked for advice many months ago (to my surprise, another one found that buried thread some time ago and sent me a PM ingame to thank me for it, I have to say it felt great to have someone unknown to me whispering me for that).
“P/D is only bleeds. Cond removal kills P/D. You have zero burst. Pistol #2 is also worthless.”
Dont want to start a fight but this is not necessarily true.
I move around in WvW with SB 5 and dodges. I dont use SoS.
I see enemy, I poison field enemy and if they are dumb I cluster bomb the field to add weakness. I typically Caltrops, steal then C/D. this also adds cripple.
If they cleanse I then swap to P/D and give them poison from sigil of doom and then apply bleed stacks.
You can reapply bleed very fast. This works vs most chars that aren’t really specced for Condi removal (like shout guardian) but I find lots of people in WvW aren’t specced for it or don’t really pay attention.
Depending on how lucky i am i give them Poison x2, weakness, cripple and lots of bleeds.
If they are pro, doesn’t always work, if they are not – pwn
“P/D is only bleeds. Cond removal kills P/D. You have zero burst. Pistol #2 is also worthless.”
Dont want to start a fight but this is not necessarily true.
I move around in WvW with SB 5 and dodges. I dont use SoS.
I see enemy, I poison field enemy and if they are dumb I cluster bomb the field to add weakness. I typically Caltrops, steal then C/D. this also adds cripple.
If they cleanse I then swap to P/D and give them poison from sigil of doom and then apply bleed stacks.
You can reapply bleed very fast. This works vs most chars that aren’t really specced for Condi removal (like shout guardian) but I find lots of people in WvW aren’t specced for it or don’t really pay attention.
Depending on how lucky i am i give them Poison x2, weakness, cripple and lots of bleeds.
If they are pro, doesn’t always work, if they are not – pwn
Thems be fightin’ words!
From my experience anyone worth a salt will have some form of consistant cond removal. If they are baddies and don’t… then you could have downed them much faster with another weapon set. The only class I can think of this not being true for would be the mesmer which naturally lacks cond removal and has so many wonderful clones to c&d off of while staying within range of the actual target.
P/D is only bleeds. Yes you can take a sb as your other weapon (which I did as well) but then the damage from that is really low outside of the pois/cluster bomb explosion bleeds.
Weakness as it stands is pretty bad… and to get that you have to not explode the cluster bomb (fewer bleeds).
I took the pois on steal minor trait to help avoid needing to swap to sb to get another condition on them. It helps… but it’s still not great.
Yaks lack these things and it’s very hard to stop a p/d from killing a yak. You’re also very survivable so you make a good scout. But for PvP vs. anyone decent… it’ll just go on endlessly. P/D takes a while to kill just about anything regardless as well.
I’m not saying you can’t kill some one with P/D or that P/D can’t play a good role. It’s just lacking in several areas including application of conditions outside of bleeds. A few state of the games ago this was brought up and the dev’s agreed. So… I really hope they change pistol 2 to a pois shot… it would really help this weapon set as well as PP.
I also forgot that you get Vuln from C/D as well. The other condis don’t need to be good, they just need to eat their cleanse. Once cleanse is on cooldown you can load them up with bleeds.
I’d like pistol 2 to be daze/interrupt like D/P 4. That would really make you better.
I find this build is great if you want to roam around and add value by killin gyaks, sentries and small groups of people = you can do 1 on 3s etc. If you run into someone who is built to counter you then just go away.
I normally run with a PD thief, Guardian, Mesmer and Warrior.
People ignore me and I load them up with bleeds and i feel I add a lot of value. Certainly weaken them up for the other thief to kill them.
IMO pistol 2 is just a waste of time/ini. It’s not worth it to just give a 50/50 chance of your bleeds not getting ripped off. You also technically have dancing dagger cripple… but dear god that thing never hits. Caltrops used to be better before the kitten red circles. Only complete noobs will just stand in them now.
I also used 3 krait/3 afflicted plus the pizza instead of what you have. Iirc the 3 15%‘s didn’t kick it up to another bleed tick… so instead I went with more cond dmg + cond dmg/duration food to get it over that hump.
Some apothecary jewelry/trinkets (settlers) and/or the event back would be a good/cheap way for you to up your survival (back then I opted to use a couple apothecary armor pieces since the trinks were SO expensive). Having only vit and no toughness doesn’t do a lot of good. You lose a little power, but your main damage is from bleeds anyways. Some of the condition damage loss is returned by the crystals (higher % with toughness) and you get more healing. I wouldn’t go full apoth or anything, just toss in a few to up your toughness.
I ran 5/0/30/15/20 instead of what you’re running now. Fluid strikes doesn’t add to condition damage, just direct. Hard to catch… since your #3 basically does the same thing. You should be tanky & survivable enough to deal with the stuns with that and shadowstep.
Another thing that was annoying to me when on P/D is that all conditions get wiped when they go down. In group Vs. group it’s not as big of a deal vs 1vX. They are able to get that downed person back up rather quickly. Another weaponset can take advantage of that situation far more by straight up downing the resser or taking out the vast majority of their HP while they try to res.
I just find DD/SB to take people down in groups so much faster (Valk+Div+Rest Zerk – 0/30/30/10/0). P/D is VERY forgiving though… it’s a decent place for new thieves to start. I just find it to be overall less useful outside of a few roles.
Other thief builds/other classes are better at what P/D does: single target bleeds. It’s a troll build effective at killing new/bad players + it kills yaks.
Nothing more.
Stick to your engi – better conditions, better heals, better AoE, better single target damage.
Thief has stealth, but cloak and dagger is just so easy to deny. Since this is such an easily exploitable weakness, and vital shot is so bad by itself, it’s just not a viable setup for anything more than the above.
My P/D thoughts (WvW):
It’s more of a survival build that’s extremely lacking in burst.
Kills take time and if the target starts running it’s inconvenient.
You shouldn’t die unless you take up your risk trying for a kill.
I miss having an interrupt skill.
Rolltrops can yakslap unless escorts push, pull, and turn the road into AoE hell.
Zergsurfing can be fun, but crossing the no-man’s land to reach ’em will suck.
In chaotic zerg wrecks, you are a stomp machine.
Zestee, Cryptician Zetti, Zissi The Jack, Zi Mao,
Ziffy Snidehide, Zadie Hawkkin, Zannie Oakley, Zuulja
[ODIN],[NaCl] – Tarnished Coast
I use P/D, along with S/D… And I am noticing without stealth; I won’t get any kills anytime soon. And I die a lot, so I am kind of failing. This is not in WvW though, just normal PvP.
I wanted to use P/D but the way it is somewhat effective is very disappointing.
It’s probably the most simplistic build we have currently simply because the ideal situation 90% of the time is 5-1 whether power or condi spec’d.
As well as Inf strike generally meaning I don’t have need for shadow strike where as Heartseeker and IA complement my sword better.
It was fun to play until I realized I was playing it wrong and was wasting ini using Shadow strike, didn’t benefit a lot out of body shot, and couldn’t justify throwing out Dancing daggers. Then it got boring.
people keep saying the above but i have good success with it across the board. Maybe I am just really lucky since I know I’m not super awesome.
Alternatively perhaps I only face bad players. I have faced thousands of them though. I think it is statistically unlikely.
Or… maybe you, me and everyone else having success with P/D… we’re really super awesome and that’s why we have so much success with a garbage weapon set!!! :O
Now seriously, the weapon set works perfectly fine. It isn’t just bleeds, I cover my bleeds with 4 other conditions and the stacks tend to remain there (and my personal build also has a good amount of both increased direct damage and armor ignoring direct damage, a shared spider venom gives enough armor ignoring leech damage to kill a zerker, all that extra damage to the group just by pressing spider venom).
I agree (everyone agree) that Pistol #2 is pure garbage. There has been thousands of topics about that. My personal 2 sugestions is either make it a spread shot that deals more damage (enough to invest initiative on spamming it) at close range where all projectiles will hit, or make it a melee range push without interrupt (melee range so you can’t control your target with a spammable push, it would be like a point blank explosion) that is also a blast finisher under your feet. But that’s another story.
Aside of #2, and while it’s true that most times you invest all your initiative in #5, with some #4 when someone is running, the set in the right build is very powerful.
IMO, P/D is not as bad as people made it to be. It may not be effective in most set up of the top tier team but it is far from being unusable or even being called bad. I think it is like Lokheit and others have said, you really need to love it and overcome its weakness to master it and not just by those Google formula 5-1-1-1-1-5-1-1-1-1. It is like saying BS Thief is easy to avoid with stun break or dodge but then how come it was played by people in tPvP and that was because they know how to play it.
Actually, in any competitive play it is always going to fall short. It’s a cond base damage spec that relies only on bleeds leaving it very vulnerable to cleanses. It has a slow ramp up time to do it’s damage and it’s a stealth heavy spec so any time you are assaulting or guarding a node you will lose it because you can’t cap while stealthed.
For running, messing around, and being unkillable it’s good, but, other than that, I hate seeing them with me on my tpvp matches.
