Guild Wars 2

It is only a 1/2 second evade. The book icon is used for extra things that happen as a result of the skill, and the hourglass icon lists the duration of effects created by the skill (see smoke screen for an example). That it is listed twice seems to be just a minor bug.

I’m in the same camp as MadRabbit, in that it’s very situational. Weakening strikes will do more damage per initiative if you hit all 3 strikes. However, vault comes with evade and free positioning, while maximising WS’s damage requires very precise positioning against standard mobs. In most situations, I prefer to just autoattack, while saving Vault for a high damage evade in place of a dodge.

When I’m running pve with pugs for fractals or open world, I tend to go with invigorating strikes and full zerker (or half zerk, half marauder, the HP does help). Invigorating strikes pumps out so much healing on a glass cannon thief that I rarely have to rely on anyone else. It is somewhat of a dps loss over gaurenteed perma-fury+ferocity, but a dead thief does no dps, and nor does one who has to hide in a corner and wait for healing cooldowns to come back up (the free heals also keep up scholar buff better).

Valoofx.1798:

Also, if i have light, nature and elements upkeeps active, swiftness wont go above around 42 seconds. I guess because regeneration may be capped at around 45 sec. and the bug cancels out the the other subsequent boon refreshs

This one is actually not a bug, it’s just the way that duration-stacking boons work. While intensity stacking boons apply all of the stacks at once, duration stacking boons still gather stacks of the boon and sets them end to end. Duration boons have a cap of up to 9 “stacks” this way.

So for example my thief’s dash will give him 10 seconds of swiftness each time I use this, and if I’m spamming it on end I’ll eventually build up to 90 seconds of swiftness. If I dash again during 81-90 seconds remaining, it won’t add a “stack” because my swiftness is effectively capped. But at 80 seconds remaining I’m down to 8 stacks of swiftness, so I can add another.

Herald facets work the same way, repeatedly applying a 3 second boon every 3 seconds. With no boon duration, this will never be able to grow in size (3-3=0, there’s no leftover boon to stack). But with the 65% boon duration heralds get from passives+nature facet, you’re applying an ~5 second swiftness boon, so it will cap a duration of 5×9=45 seconds.

TLDR: Not a bug, boon duration caps at 9x the base duration being applied

As someone who has played WoW, I can tell you that there’s not a whole lot of parallel between the raids. GW2 raids have one singular difficulty, designed around high end gear (exotics/ascended), proper builds (no wasted talents, food buffs, right weapons, etc.), and medium-high skill (knowledge of class, ability to adapt, and necessary reflexes). WoW instead has multiple raid modes. These range from the easiest LFR- you get thrown in a group with 20+ random people and only 2-3 of those need to know the mechanics to carry the raid, it’s basically a glorified target dummy. Then there’s the lower level of player-formed raid groups, wherein you have to pick the players you’re taking, those players have to know what they’re doing and be willing to learn the fights, and there are timers that require you to perform at a moderate level, but with a decent margin for error. This one is about on par with what GW2 raids are like. And then in WoW there’s the mythic level raids, which require 20 people, have new and more difficult mechanics, higher numbers, and a much tighter timer, and to even stand a chance in this level of raid you need to have gear from the medium-level raids. In GW2 this would be the equivalent of making a raid that requires all members to be high dps classes in full glass cannon ascended builds, and have such a small margin that just 1 person being downed can make or break the kill.

Quick overview: inside the chest at the end is an item called Writ of Tyrian Mastery that gets consumed upon pickup for about 28k xp. Different fractals will give a different number of these, ranging anywhere from 1-2 (28-56k xp) for the very quick fractals such as swamp or molten duo, up to, as far as I’ve seen, 18 (around 500k xp) from Mai Trin boss fractal. So therefore:

1) Different fractals give different amounts of XP, with the longer/harder ones giving out more.
2) From what I’ve seen, the total scale doesn’t affect the amount you get, only whichever fractal zone does.
3) Personal reward doesn’t make a difference either.
4) No diminishing returns, the amount you get doesn’t change if you’ve done the fractal once or ten times that day.

If you have HoT for daredevil then I suggest either Bifrost or Nevermore. Bifrost’s rainbow trail looks great with the melee animations and it’s one of the few staves that’s not overly lopsided. Also a lot of other classes can use staves as well in case you have a lot of alts.
Of the traditional thief weapons, Incinerator is by far my favorite. This is partly due to the fact that it’s just awesome on it’s own, being a tiny jet of flame! The other reason is because there aren’t a lot of other really great dagger skins, whereas pistol has some pretty cool ones, and sword is just overflowing with them.

Thanks for all the responses! Fractal 67 is only 91 agony resist, which seems like a relatively budget option to aim for with just trinkets, just needing +7 versatiles and +9/10 agony resists in my infusion slots.

The thief hate is indeed pretty crazy, unfortunately. People are always going to find something to complain about or blame, and the flavor of the month scapegoat just seems to be thief now.

Trice.4598:

I think the most popular are 56 or 67, my personal favorite is 67 but some group might find mossman harder so they do bloomhunger (56) instead

But one of the reason 40 is a more popular farm is because the chest is a boss chest, which have higher chance a core/exotic.

Swamp is always quick and easy so I guess I can understand that. Do people still farm any of the boss fractals in the harder range too, or does everyone just come down to 40 for that?

Sly.7502:

1.(With P/P+P/null) Stealth> 1 > Unload > Swap > Repeater [Has anyone experimented enough to see if this is dmg is worth?]

As mentioned above, the P/null set will indeed become a P/P on your action bars.

2. Does the tooltip suggest that the dmg from repeater out scales unload’s dmg?

Also note that Unload’s skill tooltip counts individual shot damage, not the total. (from the wiki: The damage listed in the tooltip is per attack, not the sum total of all attacks like for most other skills). So using the numbers of my current pistols, Repeater does 5 shots for a total of 1195 damage, while Unload does 8 shots at 397 damage each or 3176 total damage. So no, Repeater does not in any way do more damage than Unload.

3. With the Initiative on Swap trait would it be easier to manage a P/P + P/null weapon set? Especially now with the on demand stealth from the Dodge Leap finisher inside of Black powder?

Initiative on swap trait is actually pretty great when you’re using two of the same set (approximately 30% increased initiative gain), but then you lose out on a lot of utility potential. Most of the thief sets are very limited as is, P/P leaves you lacking mobility and aoe, shortbow is pretty much useless for single target dps, and all melee sets have terrible options as their ranged moves. So without a second weapon set to make up for what the first one lacks, it becomes much harder to adapt to unpredictable situations.

Hello, I’m slowly working on my ascended sets and looking for some agony resist number to aim for. I know that from the 21-50 range, fractal 40 almost always has groups farming it. So I’m wondering which of the higher level fractals also get farmed on repeat as well. Thanks

ciqq.1734:

What build shoul u use then? Is Marauder’s an gigantic dps loss? greez

Marauders offer more total stats, so it’s not as big of a dps loss as you might expect. Switching from full zerker’s to a marauder’s setup ends up at about a 10% dps loss for around a 50% hp increase. If you’re trying to min/max dps, then 10% is a pretty significant loss. However, being downed is also a pretty significant dps loss, and with thief’s low HP pool, I personally prefer splashing about half marauder into my set for only a minor loss and about 15k HP.

As said already, sword/pistol makes a great combination, with aoe damage and shadowsteps from the sword mainhand, and control from the pistol offhand, it’s great for solo leveling out in the world. I’ve also found dagger/dagger with high dps gear to be amazing for leveling, the damage output is insanely high, and you dont need survability or control if you kill an enemy before it even knows you’re there. Cloak and dagger into a from-behind backstab, and if they aren’t dead yet, a quick heartseeker or two finishes them off. Thief is a very fun class to play, with a lot of focus on positioning and mobility, and all sorts of fun traits to back that playstyle up. While we’re somewhat limited in actual weapon options, we can mix and match mainhand/offhands for more options, and every combination of weapons works together, is viable (depending on how you want to play), and is fun.

Leveling my thief went very quickly, as not only do we have massive burst damage, we also get a permanent 25% speed boost to help running around everywhere, and shadowsteps for mobility to get on mobs even quicker. As a leveling build, I’d suggest going pure dps gear, with D/D main weapon set and either S/P or shortbow offset; D/D for the massive single target damage, and shortbow or S/P for fighting multiple foes. Traits, I’d suggest maxing critical strikes whenever possible (it gives strong damage and has some very attractive traits), and then putting other points into shadow arts to 10 for perma regen (if you want to be more of an in-your-face player), OR vitality to 15 for spamming dodges (if you want to be a can’t-touch-this player), and then other points into deadly arts for even more damage. As a thief, your main defense comes from killing things before they can kill you, and augmented by smart use of dodging.

Nike.2631:

Less than 3 hours to the REVELATION.

Followed by 8 weeks of balancing lock down for the WvW season.

In their homebrewed trinity of DPS, Support, and Control, their eye is on enhancing the contribution of support builds with this pass… maybe in mid-December Control can be allowed to have the slightest impact whatsoever on endgame PvE encounters .

I feel like the GW2 trinity has become more of tank/dps/support (with enemy control being rolled into the support role), and with each character responsible for their own healing but able to help heal others if they want. I have come to really love this “soft trinity”, in that I get to be largely responsible for my own survivability, and that I can adjust my position within those roles on a variable scale, rather than having to be 100% tank, 100% dps, or 100% healer. Instead I can be 80% dps, 25% tank, and 15% support, because yes: the sum of the parts becomes greater than the whole.

I do agree with you that control doesn’t have a noticeable enough presence in this game, as it’s effects can too often be replaced by simple throughput: bring another dps and you can kill enemies quicker, so less need to have control; bring another tanky frontliner and they can just absorb the damage, so less need to have control. And with Anet having the ideology of every encounter being completable with any composition, this means that there are no fights where control is truly necessary. Trash mobs tend to be weak enough that they can die to simple tank/dps throughput, and things like fears or knockbacks just make life harder for the dps. Champions and Bosses have defiant, making it very difficult to time things like interrupts without great organization, or to rely on debuffs to reduce damage; bosses come with rather exaggerated animations for their very dangerous things, giving your average player time to physically dodge it, whereas in holy trinity games those kinds of things would just be “pop your tank cds to soak it up”. While control isnt strictly necessary in pve encounters, I’d rather the current model than other games where certain trash groups are given mobs that you are supposed to use long-term CC on and leave them alone until the fight is over, that’s just adding in unnecessary enemies and skills who’s only purpose are to offset each other 100% in order to make PVP control skills feel like they’re being relevant for pve too.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

I loved gw1, but please for the love of god keep the stupid mana system there!! Elementalist was TOTALLY destroyed by this mechanism. 25 mana (and exhaustion!) costing skills that didn’t even have a big effect to begin with while others would spam strong no mana/only 5 mana skills and regain mana quickly. In the end, mana is also stupid cause the prof with best mana management skills wins most of time. Now at least you can keep attacking no matter what (and gw1 auto attack doesnt compare). The only place it might be good is pvp, but some profession were also not good there cause of the mana system.

I’m sorry about your poor memory, but, those 25 energy and exhaustion ele abilities hit like trucks and amazing effects to go with them. Elementalists also got up to 60+ energy without even trying. Each class had energy management mechanics to go with it, and instead of spamming exhaustion skills, they should be treated as though exhaustion is their cooldown. GW1 wasn’t just about choosing all the big skills you want and putting them on your bars and going spam happy, you had hundreds of choices and had to decide on just 8 skills that all worked together. For me, this usually ended up being 2-3 fairly spammable damage skills, 2-3 healing/buffing skills, 1-2 energy management skills, and 1-2 big cost skills. GW1 end game progression wasn’t designed around earning the highest stat armors or weapons, but about mastering your skills as a player, learning what your character can and can’t do, and customizing and playing around with all sorts of different build options.

The only place energy should have been a limiting factor was in pvp, where there was an abundance of energy denial builds, and controlling your opponents resource was one way to win a fight.

I rather loved the energy system from guild wars 1, which is why I can’t really stand playing any class other than thief. Having no resource and just cooldowns to manage frustrates me, I’m just more of a fan of having that shared resource (initiative) and no cooldowns. I played GW1 as A/x (usually monk secondary for damage buffs) or Ra/A with 13 expertise and zealous daggers for a tankier assassin with basically free attacks. I feel like the thief now really captures that old feel, and despite having very few weapons to choose from compared to other classes, each has their place, is very viable, and the different combinations can have interesting synergies with trait choices.

JonathanSharp.7094:

So that’s pretty much it! Feel free to leave feedback and ideas/concerns and we’ll be watching to see what you guys come up with!


-Balance and skill team

First thing that comes to mind to me is the thief’s major trait #7, Bountiful Theft. The automatic vigor boon from this is only granted on an actual steal from a target, unlike the boons from Thrill of the Crime, which grants its boons even when there is no target at all. The venn diagram of when I desperately want vigor and when I want to be in melee range tends to have very little overlap. I’d like to suggest making Bountiful Theft tweaked slightly such that vigor is granted whenever Steal is used, not just on a successful steal.

By using steal without a target, we’re already sacrificing the free item/ability, and with giving up the potential two boons from this trait, that seems like enough of a drawback to me. I think this would add some extra strategic use to Bountiful Theft, both in combat and out of combat, that would help make going so deep into trickery feel more impactful.