Hi all. We are one week from the end of sPvP Season 6. As thieves we have had an interesting time this season and I thought we should have a thread commemorating and discussing how the season went for us and for thieves generally.
To start, a little thief history. This season was the birth and death of the infamous ghost thief. A spillover occurred when traps, previously underused, were buffed with additional condition application. WvW players began protesting the ability of thieves to permanently stay in stealth with the damage potential of the traps by running groups of them in WvW. Perhaps because of this some thieves tried to make the build work in pvp with predictably bad results. Lower damage, the need to stay close to targets on point, and likely unfamiliarity with the build made it essentially useless beyond trolling bronze players. This all came to an end when the cries were heard and traps were needed by adding a revealing damage component and an arming time to thief traps. This resulted in the effective removal of the infamous ghost thief from even trolling gameplay in WvW and pvp.
Now some general history. Season 5 was marred by MMR manipulation. Not many matches were required to be placed on the leaderboard and MMR volatility increased significantly over time. This meant good players would duo queue at off hours for a few games. Their high volatility would give them plenty of MMR even for beating much lower players. They could also get away without playing many games in this way so many top spots were filled by alts. Getting a title was therefore made more exclusive by players effectively stacking the leaderboard to keep others off it. The MMR manipulation also inflated the ranks of higher level players by giving them “harder” opponents to beat who were actually not nearly as good as their rank suggested.
To fix this, Anet removed MMR time volatility and increased the minimum game requirement for leaderboard placement significantly. People felt the population went down in season 6. Mostly, they cited the drop in MMR as evidence. While fewer players may have played in season 6 compared to season 5, it appears the MMR drop had more to do with the volatility and minimum game changes, which effectively weeded out players who should not have been as highly placed last season.
Now, let’s look at some thief builds. The most common thief build continued to be d/p power. The damage output of a well played d/p thief is one of the best in class and overall this set provides high value gap closing, interrupts and stealth on demand.
In second place was staff thief, often paired with D/P. This build brings the high evade and aoe cleave that combine to make this thief quite a strong team fighter. If well played this build can do a lot of damage while stalling for time. Less viable in theory since the changes to vault, in practice it is still strong enough to come in second in popularity.
In third place is the D/D condition evade thief. This build brings the same evade potential as staff, albeit with less soft cc. This line of builds has numerous variations but the main advantage this build has is damage with being hard to pin down. Unlike staff, however, this build lacks some of the escape mechanisms and has only one evade skill that can be overcome with proper timing. The build is popular in bronze/silver due to those players being unfamiliar with conditions or unwilling to plan for sufficient cleanse in their builds. This build has potential at higher level play but requires something extra to make it unpredictable enough to work.
P/P showed up a few times but is arguably the odd power thief out. Most P/P thieves lack the evade or stealth capacity and will be easily ganked while they spam Unload. Still this set showed up mainly in bronze and silver. I think this set has potential but needs some theory crafting to make it more useful at higher levels. I would say that D/D power is in a similar place but requires more skill to make it sing compared to P/P.
Sword/X remains in a bad place. Few tried running it and I haven’t seen it attempted in a ranked setting.
Last, P/D remains an underused set in PvP. I will only note that I’m in T3 gold and have only played P/D the entire season. I have over 150 ish games in season. This is viable and I hope more people try it in the future.
