Guild Wars 2

Like others have said it can be used as a primary for a lot of condi specs for the poison, and I have even fought power thieves that start shortbow as primary to steal/cluster bomb. Believe it or not that kitten can hurt when you catch all the explosions point blank (7-8k total?). I think it’s just the fact it’s a difficult weapon to use makes it seem less appealing to use primary, but with some practice you can blow people up.

An 8k backstab is very good for pressure and or execute when you’ve gotten your target to blow their cooldowns. In order to get the juicy 5 digit backstabs i think it’s fair that you would need to use d/d for the vulnerability and combo, while d/p should remain as a stealth/control set with smaller backstabs.

I agree that PI needs a nerf, but only if we get some love in other areas. I kind of think that the daze shot should use the ammo system and a small ICD on PI. I’d also vote for some love to /D for extra build paths to compensate

Read a post on reddit suggesting some skills that each class is missing, and I definitely agree some core classes could use some updates for flavor. I feel like an elite signet would really have its place on a thief, and could be very interesting to see the extra uses from it.

Some ideas of mine: (albeit some of them may be op )

Passive:
increase range of shadowsteps by 100 units
every 10th attack steals health
+ferocity

active:
stealth and gain a small amount of initiative
attacks are unblockable for 1.5 seconds
+++ferocity

What do you guys and girls think?

You do realize that it only takes like two hits to kill a thief, right? I’d say it’s pretty daring to try and jump around in a zerg, when all it takes is a stray hit at the end of an evade frame to put you out. And you said it yourself,
“I thought the whole point of the Daredevil was High Risk, High Reward.
It seemed more like No Risk, No Reward, No worries.”.

If that thief stops for a kill, it’s dead. Movement is the only form of survivabilty. It’s the thiefs fault for not getting the reward and not stopping, but your zerg’s fault for not catching it when it lands,(which it will land).

And retaliation instead of block on bandits defense? LOL yeah let me reflect all that damage while im sitting with 14k hp. Bet that would teach you a lesson not to beat on a thief! /s

You can still dodge roll when kneeling. also weapon swap automatically takes you out of kneel so if you get jumped you can swap or use utilites to create distance. Deadeye is not supposed to be mobileeye, you blow people up from afar and if they close the distance you have to use the tools available to deal with it(they get a grenade utility they can teleport to). It makes a lot of sense from a counterplay perspective.

also- PoF isnt out yet. Dont judge it – or try to fix it- until it’s out. it may be better and more fun than you think.

My take on it: Daze/stuns should cancel gliding, each time you take damage from direct attacks it should stack a debuff on you, at 5 stacks it knocks you off balance and cancels gliding

Class standard should be the +3 total initiative and the daze on steal. Since trickery gives two traits that reduce the CD, the base line could be moved to like 25 seconds and one passive CD is removed (and replaced with an unblockable CnD passive ). The other 20% reduction, +2 initiative on hit and boonsteal should remain as traits to trickery I think. The last passive could even be changed to something like rending shade, to turn trickery into a boonsteal traitline. Probably broken but ideas nonetheless.

babazhook.6805:

The reason it harder to land CnD is not so much blocks and dodges, it because you need a target to Ini from and they can drop AOE, This is unlike d/p which can be done at range and stacked consecutively.

True, but if you’re seen stacking stealth, AOEs can be dropped regardless. The same goes for CnD, as in if you port in from a distance with CnD precasted the hitbox should land. The difference is d/p has practically gaurenteed method of stackable stealth, while CnD requires melee range, isn’t stackable and is denied by almost every passive in HoT elites. This is where the tradeoff for melee unblockable stealth vs higher ini cost but stackable stealth come into play.

As far as reducing costs/increasing stealth duration, i do not think this would be necessary since equipping shadow rejuv. will already give you high enough regen to be perma stealth if you time CnD right. lowering cost/increase duration will only allow non shadow arts builds to perma stealth, which would defeat the purpose of that spec.

I do like your suggestion of added a second or two of resistance, since that could help with being in the fight, but that would still require the skill to land in the first place of course.

Turk.5460:

All it would take to open up a world of new possibilities is to get rid of preparedness and give Thieves +3 initiative permanently.

YUP. could change preparedness to initiative regen/10 seconds to compensate

Turk.5460:

Or tie unblockable Flanking Strikes to something in Acro, as Condi DD wouldn’t really benefit from unblockable CnD, and Power DD generally doesn’t take Acro.

This would work, and while I agree unblockable cnd doesn’t benefit condi d/d, it would benefit more p/d builds.

Asura/human would be my pick. Asura has the small frame that fits the theme, and human armor and animations are really good.

could roll a charr and try to be rengar tho

Turk.5460:

No, they made the correct skill unblockable, especially with how many blocks there are thrown about with reckless abandon since HoT. They just could have made CnD unblockable in addition to the other changes.

I would whole heartedly welcome those changes, but I doubt anet would dish out that much unblockable to one weapon set, especially if you include basi venom.

“Flanking Strike(s/d 3): This attack is now unblockable.”

I get that their overall goal was to improve sword use, but this feat could have easily been moved to cloak and dagger (/d 5). With the additional buffs to pistol whip, this would of improved FOUR total weapon sets that pretty much have been seen as lack luster, (d/d, s/d, p/d, s/p) flooding the class with build diversity that it has been craving for so long

Thief is great a killing things quickly, and has very nice damage. As far as comparison, the two classes are pretty much opposites.
Engi is a bit beefier, throws down turrets/explosives/shields and is very utility based, often using toolkit weapons like flamethrowers and elixir guns.
Thief is much more of an evasive playstyle, think hit and run. Level 80 content likes to throw big groups of enemies at you, so it can be easy to die if you try and sit in the fight too long. It may take time to adapt to that style but it is very fun and rewarding to play.
I highly recommend it!

they changed the power signet to give 540 power on active, so they basically allowed us still get tons of damage without having to run the signet might build. I personally really like the changes since 7% crit chance/damage on a single passive and 2 seconds of 100% crit after leaving stealth is fun

Ramoth.9064:

I’m feeling a D/P critical strikes, shadow arts, VALKYRIE daredevil. Who’s with me?

And i’ve tried this but used D/D. Sad to say it has a lot of issues since trickery is king and needs to be used in almost every build. 30 second cd on steal, no daze, 3 less initiative, no initiative gain on steal, no lead attacks for 15% extra damage is a pretty big hindrance.
However if you’re a god at initiative management you might be able to get away with less.

TiNG.3964:

I tried many Daredevil builds, condi and power. I just couldn’t get in to it, I personally found the play style of Daredevil boring and to easy. So i dusted off the core d/d thief and haven’t looked back.

I will be trying Deadeye when i can but i do think again i’ll continue to play core d/d thief as its just so much fun.

Fantastic gank setup but too many HoT elites have good sustain now. The occasional 6k cnd into 13k backstab is glorifying to see but demoralizing how easy it is to get locked down if miss/get cc’d/blocked by passives

d/p will still be relevant because it kind of counters deadeye’s low mobility. I wouldn’t be upset if it fell out of meta though. Something new would be a nice change.

I’d probably run shortbow with rifle though. you get plenty of stealth through rifle and utilities anyway so some repositioning tools will help

Absolutely. Infact I got tired of running meta d/p so I switched back several months ago. Fine turned a build to my playstyle and haven’t went back since. I’ve been pretty successful thus far but it is a very difficult build to run by nature. For what it is, d/p will almost always be an easier/more solid build to run, but d/d is still very much viable.

D/d + shortbow with valkyrie armor and pack runes. I run crit strikes/trickery/daredevil with dash. Berserker armor can work but the thing is so many classes have annoying sustain, so cloak n dagger + steal + backstab alone is rarely enough to kill people. Having some extra health in preparation for a longer fight will be very welcomed i assure you. Pack runes and crit strikes tree make up for the loss of precision from valkyrie. I occasionally use the 7% crit sigil on my daggers too.

Pro wvw tip: Don’t fight DH guardians using d/d unless you know their weak points, and you will never successfully gank a warrior thanks to their passives. Other classes are much easier to manage.

I wouldn’t bash on what they’ve shown without personally playtesting it, because the new elites along side it (spellbreaker specifically) will still be able to shut down any warnings you may of had against it. Who knows, after playing you may even like it.

I kind of understand their reasons for nerfing it, but would still like to see the CD removed or reduced to like .5 seconds instead of 1. However, as you get better, you’ll start to adapt and use backstabs more precisely.

But the overall solution is still to change offhand dagger in such a way that it allows it to compete with d/p without making d/p stronger in the process. I main d/d and have played plenty of d/p as well, and can say the CD does not just affect d/d backstab builds.

Personally I think the secret is in deathblossom because it’s a unique skill to the d/d set, and it’s trash so no one will be upset if it changes. It can be used as an extra evade frame but since it locks you in an animation, anyone who pays attention to the timing can cc you down as soon as your feet hit the ground.

I made a suggestion to change deathblossom to this:

new death blossom: normal skill activation is a front flip and evadeframe.

Dancing dagger: throw a bouncing dagger to damage and cripple foes. Marks first target hit for 3 seconds.

If death blossom is used while targeting a marked enemy, shadowstep, daze and damage enemy. consumes mark. unblockable.

I hope they nerf /p to the ground honestly. Getting tired of head shot spam ez mode since it makes using other weapon sets so much more difficult to use against it. I’d be happy if they changed stealth attacks based of both hands instead of just main.

Yeah, another thread about /dagger to ensure this doesn’t slip away. Please allow stealth to go off on block(even if it doesn’t do damage), to compete with d/p’s stealth reliability. It’s pretty frustrating having d/d feel 218% useless against every guardian build, ever. Advice on fighting dragon hunter as d/d is welcome as well, even more now that their pull reveals.

I’m tired of d/p and d/d is more fun. Thanks

The thing about backstab is that everyone expects it after they see the daze from steal, and will often use some form of evade or block. Since there is a 1sec ICD, and unless you stacked stealth significantly, you will miss and stealth will expire without getting another chance to backstab. It is still totally worth it if by some form of miracle you land it, since it can be an easy 7k+ damage chunk.

Apolo.5942:

They can either control the fight or do stupid amounts of damage, they cant do both.

lol

Not really a huge fan to the idea of /p getting a buff, since it is already very strong(I would prefer /d getting buffed for build diversity). However if they added a slight back roll like staff 3, it would increase the animation preventing headshot spam, which is something I think is very needed. As long as they bring other thief weapons up to par then I would be all for the change.

I’ve made a post on this before, but this thread is appropriate to repost.

This armor set looks sick, but there is nothing that I have found that looks similar in game. Anet y u tease us with sick game art but not include the armor sets!!?!

Id be willing to pay a hefty amount of gems for this.

mike put.6892:

how about we keep rifle like it is so pleb wars wont be able to 1/2shot people anymore.

Too late for that. Still getting 20-25k gunflames to the face

Here is a relatively standard build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZEQNAoaVn8lClOhFOBGmC8PhFYCzLNcGaDzhwSYLULBEA2NA-T1SBAB4pPAgTAwDPAAsU6ZmSQKVL4KlBEt/wCHCANOCAWqqDZAy3CA-w

The armor sets and runes are pretty much personal preference. A mix of valkyrie and zerker give you a higher health pool while still maintaining damage. When using valkyrie gear, pack runes are nice for extra precision and utility. If you have access to marauder that would be preferred, and you could swap to scholar runes for more damage output. Trinkets are the same way. valk+zerk stats will give you a little more health while maintaining good DPS.

As for the build, you have really good endurance refill on your heal and signet of agility for allllll dayyyy evades. Shortbow 5 and shadowstep will help with creating distance, and bandit’s defense will be your oh-crap button if you get jumped on. Combine stealth with your shadowstep skills and you will be pretty much uncatchable.

Hope this helps!

DeceiverX.8361:

On an actual glass opponent, it’s not hard to deal more than 30k.

Yeah, was roaming around and was greeted with a 25k gunflame to the face at full hp. That was fun. I was running zerk so no surprise there, but still.

omganetplsnerfthisjunksoopcanthandle

At least I was able to find him later and blow him up so I feel better.

Keyboardwarrior.8021:

Whoever designed thief in this game is really just bad, every time I play it, it kittenes me off, this might be the last time I spend money on this game. Always want to give this game a try, but it is just poorly designed, the pvp is really a mess.

A heavy armed warrior has better mobility, damage burst and defense, some other class can stealth too and can output better range damage burst.

On the other side, thief is light armed, damage burst is weak, the only thing good might be the mobility, but this is not a car racing game.

Thief is one of the hardest classes in the game hands down. Once you clear a valley in that pile of salt to see your screen you can get started on practicing.

Thief is different in several aspects.

-First you don’t always just get to precast backstab into steal and one-shot. There are too many ways to mitigate damage that most decent players can avoid your burst. On the flip side, no class has the kill potential a thief has when your presence is unknown.

-Second you have to not only have to know your class mechanics, but you have to what your enemy does, as well as what they can do to lock you down. Each class has ways to not only stop you in your tracks, but also create moments of high vulnerability that you can easily punish.

-Lastly thief is not the class for walking up to a warrior (or any fighter class)and trying to brawl it toe to toe (staff DD may disagree however). Our class was designed on surprise and patience. Start with a burst, commit until you get them to react. If you can get their invuln down, disengage. Wait for invuln to clear and go back in to burst. Your mobility/evades is king at buying time for your next engage. If you cant out-burst someone, out-maneuver them. I can’t tell you how many times I could of lost a fight, but with shortbow to kite and using LOS around objects I was able to create favorable engages.

I do not claim to be the best thief, but I have had my fair share of fights. This is just my 2 cents.

Was browsing the gw2 wallpapers and came across one that will be attached.

Is this armor set available?? If not, it would be more than epic to get this skin in game!

Anet Pls

The Game Slayer.7632:

I’d much rather have that than the rampant condi bunker specs in wvw that we see today. There’s at least some counter play to zerk builds.

Granted, I’ll admit that some of the HoT skills need some toning down.. Including gun flame. But the opportunity cost for the warrior to hit an 18k in wvw like that is very, very high. If you sneezed on him he’d die. Sounds like you got outplayed. You’re also a staff thief using signet of agility. I don’t feel sorry for you at all.

^ & staff 3 evade is pretty quick, although you would probably have to see it coming.
18k gunflame is still pretty kittening ridiculous though, when you consider how much invuln they have.

martin.1653:

Rifles or riot.

Wouldn’t you rather play something that people would not wish death upon you for using? :P

Jokes aside, if you really want to have no fun and play a brainless build :

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZEQNAoaVlsMhunYbTw5JwvGHyEFfEahbQvnTRA43ix4DB-TVyCQBA4EAsRlfFU9njdEAC3+DI7QAMvHAQ90HsSlgkCAilVA-w

For good beginner builds, i would say just running the standard daredevil d/p build (you can find on metabattle) would be fine. Currently it is the most common and solid thief wvw build right now, next to the condi evade crap going around.

I remember patch notes going out about a fix for bound dodge, to where impact damage will activate when you hit the ground, rather than going off mid air. Did some testing in EBG and it still goes off before you hit the ground.

This is the same build tomwjd uses. It seems to work very well for him:

Hello team,

Halloween casual group roaming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGTaMA-t3TI

Previous:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0sNGmi5Nww&index=15&list=PL8S4B4-r-QfRB3EQ8noX-krPgplP5V98Z
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp6-l9O4EkI&list=PL8S4B4-r-QfRB3EQ8noX-krPgplP5V98Z&index=2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giSl8GFmr8s&index=3&list=PL8S4B4-r-QfRB3EQ8noX-krPgplP5V98Z

Duels vs a proleague Dragonhunter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OL2kVQeyps&index=3&list=PL8S4B4-r-QfS2M3Nkbc74XWDhSvobX4zE

Staff Daredevil & Build tips:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpo_yXO8dDU

I hope you enjoy.

I personally have tested it, minus the daredevil runes, and is a pretty solid roaming build.

As for a fun dash build, I love using an all physical build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZEQNAoaVn8lCFmiVmCemCkmiFYCzLMcGaDaJgAQGYOEWCbhA-TVSBABP8AAWUJIe6DA4EAQ0+DYp8jjDBwCHBAKV/BA-w

Pretty much gaurenteed death to one enemy every 20 seconds. Rough condi removal and hard to duel thieves with, but overall still a really fun build.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Or they could remove it, especially since they have given absolutely any reason for this implementation.

Dangus.6572:

I vote for complete removal and removal for thieves only as second option.

Well I couldn’t agree with both of you more, but I feel like there is little chance the devs are likely to admit they f***ed up and completely reverse the nerf. Putting a CD only on blocked stealth skills still kind of keeps the nerf but is punished a lot less on small mistakes.

Ragion.2831:

If they finally learn how to build skill mechanics properly, It would be nice to see scorp wire attached to dancing dagger as a flip over skill with a cost of 4 or 5 initiative.

That would actually be really sick. Either that or dancing dagger would mark targets and you could shadowstep to them if you use the mark with death blossom (so d/d gets buff, and /d isnt op)

But I agree scorpion wire is a bit slow, and I feel like a couple other thief skills are awesome but super slow/difficult to hit cough impairing daggers cough

I think they should just make it so stealth attacks will only have a cooldown if the enemy uses a skill to avoid the damage, such as blocks/evades/goes invuln, etc. Having a cooldown just because you missed really sucks, especially if you only have one stack of stealth (only one chance per 3 seconds pretty much). So atleast it will reward the player for blocking that attack rather than a base cooldown for smacking the air thanks to lag time.

This would be a really nice change, and they’re both 2nd tier traits so the swap shouldn’t be that hard. +1

Anet pls

I think it should work with lotus training. They’re daggers!!! …Right?!

-Because I want to watch the world burn.

Ohoni.6057:

It seems like it would be very annoying to deal with in PvP. I doubt the other classes would put up with it. What’s the counter to them? How do you see a fight going badly for this class?

Reflects?

A thief would need to be (and should have to be) specced out glass cannon in order to dish out that kind of worry-some damage. With 12k~14k hp, one or two reflected shots could send that thief up s**t creek with their mouth wide open. (thx abraham)

Even with the lockdown skills Lonami suggests that destroy reflects, using excessive resources to stack stealth, position, and charge up abilities would be impactful enough to punish a bad shot.

They also could always add some sort of indicator right before the shot goes off to add counterplay, or even just slow down the bullet just enough to see it coming (even while stealthed). Evades, reflects and blocks would still have to be timed accordingly, however.

Anyone know where to view this build? Searched around but wasn’t able to find anything recent, or even this year. And this is uh.. [cough] ..purely for observational purposes.

Kocoff.7582:

I love it. Especially switching places with a downed player. It could be a game changer.

better not kitten any thief off or else your downed kitten is getting teleported into enemy zerg xD

TwiceDead.1963:

Unless they somehow remove a lot of our mobility options, like rooting us in place whenever we want to fire.

That is actually something I was thinking about:

CreedOfGod.9764:

It could start off as a mid range weapon with decent dps, but the 5 skill could root the thief in place. The skills would change to much longer range, slower, yet more powerful shots.

CreedOfGod.9764:

Yannir.4132:

CreedOfGod.9764:

It could start off as a mid range weapon with decent dps, but the 5 skill could root the thief in place. The skills would change to much longer range, slower, yet more powerful shots.

That actually doesn’t sound like a bad idea. But it would be a balancing nightmare, trying to balance what is essentially 9 skills on a single weapon set.

Well they wouldn’t necessarily have to fill each skill slot. Since the number 5 would essentially only be used to set up “sniper stance”, they could make it to where only one or two abilities are available in which you would put (insert desired snipe abilities here).

I think as long as the extreme range and damage are only given when put in a place of high vulnerability, it could work. But then again, #druid

Yannir.4132:

CreedOfGod.9764:

It could start off as a mid range weapon with decent dps, but the 5 skill could root the thief in place. The skills would change to much longer range, slower, yet more powerful shots.

That actually doesn’t sound like a bad idea. But it would be a balancing nightmare, trying to balance what is essentially 9 skills on a single weapon set.

Well they wouldn’t necessarily have to fill each skill slot. Since the number 5 would essentially only be used to set up “sniper stance”, they could make it to where only one or two abilities are available in which you would put (insert desired snipe abilities here).

It could start off as a mid range weapon with decent dps, but the 5 skill could root the thief in place. The skills would change to much longer range, slower, yet more powerful shots.

I think thief getting rifle would be sick. Stealthy sniper seems like it would be crazy fun in wvw. And don’t even get me started on the fashion wars with The Predator.

if you’re in stealth just use the auto attack of the staff since it knocks down, then quickly use vault.