Showing Posts For AmbrosialK.2653:
o/ bump. Looking forward to seeing some new faces
(edited by AmbrosialK.2653)
I’m a full zerk thief running d/d and sb, 56003, and run 49 fractals daily. 40, too, if I’m especially bored. Holding up the lack of videos as proof of no melee thieves in fractals is silly: how many people record and upload their daily fractaling experience? One out of thousands? And only then if it is a timed run, or a solo, or something otherwise out of the ordinary.
Staying alive in melee is a combination of knowing the fight, knowing your class, and knowing when to back off. Shaman raises his arm? Dodge. Fighting Mai Trin? Invest in Shadow Arts. Have aggro? Swap to shortbow, kite a bit until he’s back on a teammate, then hop back into the fray.
If you are inexperienced, sure, run p/p at low levels while you learn mechanics. But refusing to learn d/d playstyle is a disservice to yourself and your teammates. Your damage as p/p is middling at best—downright bad if you’re geared with defensive armor—and the only other thing you bring to the table is the occasional stealth bomb. There’s no reason to take you over an engineer or a Mesmer, at that point: they’d put out competitive numbers and offer more utility.
Getting hit and downed occasionally isn’t a big deal, either. It happens to everybody. If anything, my teammates usually get downed more than I do: since I am so fragile, I’m alert to tells and dangers that they aren’t.
Based solely on my few months experience, I never have seen thieves melee said bosses. I’m aware that there exists thieves that melee them, that goes without saying, but they’re such a rarity I’m lead to believe that it isn’t worth the risk. Fractals has been available for a long time, don’t you find it strange that there’s such a scarcity of videos (none until Ambrosia kindly provided) from the point of view of thieves? I’m not saying a video is the all ends proof of what makes something possible or not, no, but if gives people who want to learn a general idea what to do.
I know that dying is fine, yeah, pugs look at you funny and whine, who cares? It happens to the best of us. But the bad thing about is that by dying, you’re doing nothing vs. doing something, which is what I feel is a massive deal breaker for using D/D during fights that wipe easily like Shaman and Mai in particular.
See, when I look Ambrosia’s gameplay (which was really great by the way, thanks for the upload), that time spent downed and defeated could’ve been spent doing just about anything else, like using Smokescreen, Shadow Refuge, Dagger Storm, or actually might not have been easily as defeated with P/P and would be still pounding Shaman with Unload. The damage of D/D was great in the first half of the video, definitely, but for the 2:30 minutes spent defeated + time spent kiting to position and dodge, I find it difficult to say if Ambrosia in the end put out more damage than a P/P thief that would’ve very likely still have been up (trying to avoid bias, but at range you have a better reaction time from the powerful attacks). It’s a bit unfair to say that it’s a ‘disservice’, though I can’t argue that a P/P thief isn’t doing anything more than Mesmer or Engineer (I don’t know those classes personally), but Shadow Refuge and Smokescreen are still something the thief has while still doing decent damage with berserker gear. Ambrosia did say that he/she wasn’t playing at their best, and that seems to be my issue with the set in fractals; unless you give it 100% at all times, you’ll be putting yourself and the team at an unnecessary wiping risk.
Maybe I’m just putting too much emphasis on dying and should just do it anyway just for the sake of learning to do it? I’m genuinely not trying to advocate using bad weapons or promote bad habits, but I find the choice between these sets to be one sided.
eh, despite my death (that’ll happen to a p/p thief too) and time spent dodging and positioning I most likely still out dps’d a p/p thief by quite a bit. A p/p thief running optimal traits will max out about 7-8k without might per unload, each unload takes 1 and 1/2 seconds to cast. It takes a d/d thief 1/2 a second to cast CnD and no cast time to backstab and without might or vuln thats around 10k dps. Even with all the time spent dodging and positioning, just because of the fluidness of a d/d rotation and the burst I can easily out dps a p/p who was able to constantly attack throughout the fight.
(edited by AmbrosialK.2653)
(edited by AmbrosialK.2653)