Without Might from Revenant: 2037
With Might from Revenant: 2135
I think the results speak for themselves.
I could certainly do that also. I was just more interested in the condition damage on my condi mesmer over the power damage. It would be very interesting if the Condition damage was increased (since it is listed as a secondary stat) but the power damage was not. That would match your original statement.
I tried that. Due to the changes to the Signet of Inspiration, It only shares a single stack of Might for 30s. That does not produce a noticeable effect.
I tried to get a ps war to join me to have 25 stacks of might on my illusion, but none responded to my map chat.
What I can do is adjust my build so that all my bleeds are integer values to avoid the floating point round off. In addition, I can just do a ton more sets of data to avoid some of the random fluctuations due to crit and proc chances and other random variations. It will have to wait till I am done with work however.
But that 32 additional damage is certainly something that seems to suggest that illusions do benefit twice from might.
(edited by DrEckers.2039)
I can also link gear and build if thats useful. But It should be a difference so all that should just even out.
I do not think that is the case. I believe I have proof that it does stack twice.
Here is my method. As a condi mesmer, I tried to test this by summoning a single illusion and then autoattacking with a staff at short and long distances against a dps golem. Staff Projectiles randomly grant might and fury when they strike an ally or an illusion. At short distances the staff projectiles bounced off me, but I had 25 stacks of might and fury so they did not alter my or my illusions stats. At long distances, the staff projectiles bounced off the illusion, granting them either Fury or might. I noticed they averaged 3-7 stacks of might depending on RNG. I then took 5 screenshots at each 20% mark for both tests. I then calculated the average damage per bleeding tic for both short and long ranges. If the bleeding damage per tic increases, then the illusions are gaining condition damage from the might.
At short distances: 177.82 damage per tic from average(3547/19, 4695/28,6558/35,4254/23,4385/27)
At long distances: 210.60 damage per tic from average(6702/28, 5180/28,5449/34,6173/24,4857/23).
Therefore, I believe might does affect an illusions condition damage.
I have attached the screenshots to this post as proof of my claims. Especially interesting is the difference between screenshot 46 and 47 since it has the same number of stacks on each, but the amount of damage tic is extremely different. This could be due to a massive difference in the might stacks on the illusion.
(edited by DrEckers.2039)
The wiki claims that might applied to a mesmer instantly increases illusions power and condition damage. So, if the illusions then gain might would they gain additional power and condition damage? For example, would the illusions have 1500 power and condition damage above the mesmer’s base value if both the mesmer and the illusion had 25 stacks of might?
Accessibility in terms of “Hey, my 5 man Fractal group wants to try raids, but we can’t find 5 other players!” is also something we talk about. It’s just a much more difficult problem to solve.
So, we now know the reasoning behind the latest balance patch pushing the 5-5 comp. Logically, its an easy leap to see 2 different fractal groups merging with all bases covered in kitten comp as opposed to the old 4-4-2 or 7-2-1 where some players of one fractal group would have to reroll a new class.
cough
Lich Form—Jagged Horrors: These minions will no longer lose health over time and will instead die 30 seconds after they’re summoned.
See, there’s hardly anything I would consider a nerf in here. if anything, this is a list of buffs
cough
Would the trade in for fractal tonics also apply to White Fractal Weapon Skins? I have almost several complete sets, and am hoping to free up the bank slots.
They already have a use: you don’t need to consume a tranmutation charge to apply the skin to a weapon.
What else do you want?!? If you dont want them to clutter your bank delete them.
I have completed the collection for them. So to me they are now worth less than a transmutation charge, but still “cost” 20 pristine fractal relics.
Would the trade in for fractal tonics also apply to White Fractal Weapon Skins? I have almost several complete sets, and am hoping to free up the bank slots.
Maybe the Raid will be inside the Foundry!
As long as they insist on the restrictive raid model they currently employ, they really need to stay away from popular lore-based landmarks/settings/scenarios – and definitely stay away from anything to do with the story the current game is trying to tell.
I realize that is an unpopular opinion among a subset of the community, but it is the situation they have created for themselves if they want to avoid alienating or frustrating a sizeable number of their players.
Why? Look at Forsaken Thicket. The raiders roleplayed as a group of mercenaries that attempted to stop Lazarus Resurrection and failed. It tied into the current Living Story without impacting the Living Story in any way. Key example of the raid impacting the Living Story: Having Lazarus the Dire as a raid boss would be a big no, no.
Why would this alienate a sizeable number of players? It does not impact new GW players, Raiders, or any player who does not care about the story of GW, which is definitely the largest subset of players in the game. Sure, it may alienate a group of GW1 lorehounds who cannot complete the raid, but that is a minority of a minority. And while they may be vocal, they have plenty of options in terms of free cleared instances, in game dialogues and story journals, and out of game youtube videos for catching up on any lore they missed in the raid.
So my point is it would not alienate players to have the raid tie in to the current direction of the Living Story as long as the raid does not impact that direction.
This is without food. Those numbers from qT are with Best in slot food.
Plus you are ignoring the affects of Permeating Wrath. For every extra enemy you cleave, your burn damage will increase by 4-5k. So at 2 adds, you will be dead even with the power builds. At 3 adds, you will pull head and be competing with DD and Necs with epi. At 4-5, you will not get as large of increase since your sword aas only hit up to 3, but your symbols will trigger extra procs. So situationally, this could be the highest damage in pve.
(edited by DrEckers.2039)
This is a burn guardian for raids. I managed 17.2k dps on a medium hp golem fully loaded with conditions, without food, and with the realistic buffs (as defined by qT) shown in the screenshot.
The basic rotation is you stay in sword for 2 Symbol of Blades, but in Scepter for 3 Symbol of Punishments using Purging Flames and Zealot’s Flame while off CD.
With Food, it should be competitive with the other condi builds or meta Guard Builds considering it can also get another 5k damage in burning for each additional enemy cleaved by Permeating Wrath. This makes it ideal for bosses with some amount of Adds, such as Gors, Sab, Sloth, or Xera.
Good point, gonna re test without that trait active.
Is Executioner bugged? It seems to only give a 10% increase to damage to enemies under 50% hp even though the individual displayed numbers are 20% higher.
Dropbox image of the results of the dps Test
I used all boons and buffs on the 10 million hp golem, only auto-attacking with the meta build. The first 404 s was the test with executioner, the second 443s is the test without executioner.
With the latest patch, venom share was made baseline. This should see venom share thieves be picked up in raid scenerios as a condi class with heavy break bar damage. The question is which armor. Should it be a vipers/sinisters mix like every other condi class, or pure sinisters using Potent Poison + Rune of thorns + Super Veggie Pizzas to cap poison duration. This means the bleeding/torment stacks will be much less, but the overall condition damage is greater. I.e. choosing between these setups:
If you are going to troll with your rune choice, at least be clever about it. I highly recomend Runes of the Thief for this. Here is the logic you can use to get in any pug raid using these runes:
1) You are always behind the boss, so it is much easier to upkeep thief’s +10% damage modifier than Scholar’s.
2) The extra precision allows me to swap some of my assassin trinkets to Zerker, which offsets the loss of power.
3) There are enough Condition applied on crit traits for the extra condi damage to not be worthless. Granted its not as good as the extra ferocity on Scholar, but Thief runes are much cheaper.
AndrewMcleod, Inquiring minds wish to know if legendary armor will require a Gift of the Maguuma per piece or per armor set? So, will we need 6 Gifts of the Maguuma for the full set of legendary armor? Or will it be one of the Gift of the Fleet, Tarir, Chak, or Jungle per piece with a possible two more gifts for map completion being added with LS3?
I think a more interesting question would be what we buff on other classes to make might more preferable than from a ps war with the understanding that these “stronger mights” would take priority over base might. For example to shoot out random ideas, traiting a thief’s might to also grant ferocity, a nec’s might to grant expertise, or an engi’s to grant a small amount of all stats. It may put more of a preference on the appropriate might instead of just pumping out 25 stacks from everywhere.
Ohoni,
We understand your point. You have said the same thing for over four pages. Move the raid team elsewhere so that casuals would have gotten the release instead of raiders.
Disregarding how selfish that view is, people have pointed out how wrong you are. To summarize
1) Software development time is not additive. Reshuffling members to new teams does not lead to faster development times.
2) These are specialist member trained in raid developments. Reshuffling them would not cause other content to be magically better as their talents are specific to raids.
3) This thread itself is provided by an anet dev to highlight how the raid team was not stealing resources from other teams.
4) Raids were developed last year concurrently with HoT. Their release dates where actually delayed from their intended release date with HoT last year.
At this point Ohoni, you are a caricature of a casual player who is irrational and unwilling to hear any point of view but your own. You said so yourself. You are actively sabotaging your own viewpoints as people just ignore you for being extremely unreasonable.
If Arenanet should not invest in raids that only 5% of the player population plays, why should Anet invest in opening up the bossfights to the even smaller lore enthusiast and role playing community?
Do some of you understand why people enjoy narrative game design? Why there are people out there who buy games for the story? They could very well stick to books and movies only (but they don’t).
Gameplay allows for very immersive storytelling in an unique way. It allows you to experience the story right within it, interacting with the world, with the characters/ NPCs and having to deal yourself with the dangers of adventure.
If your most intelligent suggestions are to “go to youtube”, “ask for a instance with gameplay cleared” or “ask Anet for a mode where all bosses have 1 health”, then you are clearly missing the point. You could very well tell them to ignore GW2’s story, ignore storytelling in videogames, stick to books and movies and play GW2 only for its “intended gameplay”.
I personally am not a hardcore raider. I can’t see myself ever raiding. However, the story that they are presenting in raids is really interesting, touching on subjects that players (especially from GW1) have been asking for years.
Yes, I definitely want a “story mode” for raids. Ideally, by having it work like Arah’s story mode: tuned for solo playing that scales if you invite someone else. Let us enjoy the raid’s storytelling at our own pace, do some of its explorable achievements (those that can already be done through “cleared instances”), a simple final reward at the end of it, and call it a day. And, who knows, maybe that would also be a good way to have more players jump into actual raiding.
When Spirit Vale came out, Woodenpotato made the point that one the key elements to the story was the difficulties of the bosses. It made the bosses feel like real threats to tyria that the player characters actually had to band and strategize together to defeat. When Salvation Pass was released, anet released a video talking about making the white mantle the main villains of the raid. They had wanted to tell this story, but they could not find a setting “epic enough” to tell it. Raids provided that setting.
Adding an easy mode or Solo mode tears down this epic setting for Players.
Shadelong, I agree that power reaper needs some look at. Either raising weapon coefficients on Dagger/Greatsword or reworking traits to actually be effective in a raid encounter (looking at you Reaper’s onslaught and Soul Eater). If Power reaper was buffed to be comparable to other power dpses or a new specialization for ranger came out that was more in line with normal Power Ranger, would that get you to Raid?
In a reddit survey, over 70% of the respondents had tried spirit vale and 30% intended to keep raiding?
Erm, not exactly. Yes, that’s true, that almost 80% had tried spirit vale. Out of 2362 participants. On Reddit, the place where people too casual to raid haven’t generally had a chance to even see that survey. But even if we pass over the fact that the polled group was hardly representative for the community, out of this 2362 participants only 162 said they will continue raiding. The 30% value comes from most of the participants not even bothering to answer that question. Which in itself is telling.
Which, by the way, was even addressed by the survey’s author in the very post you linked.
I agree. But my point is that all evidence we have at this point is that the raids have been a success in GW2. Rising dusk just confirmed that anet feels the same internally in the above comment.
I can understand if there are groups of people who indvidually dislike raids. But when those people claim raids need to be dropped due to lack of participation, the onus is on them to provide equal to or greater evidence than what we already have in terms of surveys (flawed as they may be) and anet employee comments for raids being participated in above anet’s expectations.
While they do a good job, this is probably the last set-piece we’ll see concerning Raids for a very long time….
I wouldn’t expect Raid 2 to happen for at least 6 months if not longer.
If ever.
While the raid team does a great job, I have a feeling that Arenanet will be moving away from raid content design. It just doesn’t attract enough players compared to the ressources it consumes.
Best result would be a new raid per future expansions but I doubt new raids will get added outside of those.
Where does this idea come from? Last we heard the raid team was only 5 people and that anet said in thier amas “raids attracted more people than they had been suspecting.” In a reddit survey, over 70% of the respondents had tried spirit vale and 30% intended to keep raiding?
Massively overperforming for a 5 man team.
One of the selling points for me for this series, has always been the lack of a subscription fee. Even one as innocent as each month you get free Waypoint costs and a small amount of gems would not go over well with me as it would create the psychological need to play the game. One of the great things about this game is how easy it is to breaks. The playerbase even encourages it for when players become burned out or bored but to come back when the next Patch, LS, etc. etc. comes out. A subscription fee would be counter to that healthy culture.
Well of suffering is also a dark field, which can lead to either blinds or lifesteals making it a much stronger defensive option. Plus, it can be traited for support aspects like granting protection to allies. While PoB when traited is more control based with its daze.
What people are saying is true, you are definitely comparing the wrong skills to prove your point of favoritism for elite professions.
Scholar wins hands down. Guards have a ton of blocks to maintain the scholar bonus, which is the best DPS increase in any reasonable pve situation. In most cases, you will be at 25 stacks of might so the bonus from dragon hunter runes is wasted. Finally at 100% crit chance, 11 ferocity is roughly equal to 10 power in terms of your increase to damage potential. So prioritize choosing power when the interchange is 1 to 1.
Awesome contest idea. I have a fun idea that I will post when I get off work.
Hate to be that guy, but I love how the reddit thread resulted in speculation about what mechanics requiring Ley Line gliding could be.
On the other hand, the official thread devolved into griping…
So you are saying its a good thing that one person can carry an entire group of bads?
Edit for some proofs for what I said :
All classes have a power spec, a condi spec, a support spec, a tanky spec and a general spec (which sould be an alternative elite spec in my opinion). i.e for guardian :
Zeal = power
Radiance = condi
Honor = support
Valor = tanky
Virtues = general
I think that when I choose Zeal and Honor, I should be truly recognized as a dps/support hybrid. Or with Zeal and Radiance a pure DPS. But it isnt enough defined in the game, for now.
Why then does Zeal have the primarily Condi traits like Kindled Zeal and Expeditious Spirit, or Control based traits like Binding Jeopardy?
Why Does Radiance have primarily power traits like Right Hand Strength and Retribution or Control based traits like Wrath of Justice and Justice is Blind?
Why does Valor have support based traits like Communal Defenses or Monk’s Focus or Power based traits like Retributive Armor?
Why does Honor have Power Enhancing traits like Writ of Persistence or surival Based Traits like Purity of Body and Force of Will?
I could go line by line down those trait lines to show that those specific labels you have attached are false. Trait lines typically enhance certain aspects of a profession like how Zeal does with Symbols, Valor does with meditations, or Virtues does with Virtues. In fact, trait lines are actually proof of how Classes in GW2 have no specific role.
Since when have their been tanks and healers in gw2? I jest, but that is the truth. GW2 identifies Damage/CC/Support as its trinity, not Damage/Tank/Healer.
First, there are only 2 possible bosses in the game where having a tankier player makes any bit of sense. In any case, tankier toons in gw2 primarily survive through a combination of evades and blocks. So your suggestion for “remove nonsensical passive damage reduction buffs” would not help tanks at all.
Second, Druid are support/damage boosters, not healers. Healing just happens to be one of their primary ways of distributing out grace of the land (3% damage and condi damge per stack). The other main “healer” at the moment is auramancer ele and auaramancer ele is also still a support/ boon bot that heals as a side effect of a single trait.
As for your suggestions, most of them are inappropriate for Gw2. Gw2 is a game of playing together and helping your allies. So “nerf base healing to allies HARD” would remove a lot of interactions of players in groups. I have already explained why “nerf nonsensical damage reductions” would not all of a sudden add tanks to the game. Toughness should never affect Condition Damage. Condition Damage’s hallmark is being unreducable, but not being instant and every condition skill is balanced around that currently. Your suggestion would absolutely destroy all condi class balance in WvW and SPvP. I am a fan of making Healing Power scale better, but that has been a long standing gripe of the game.
Yes, but the fractal team would still have to design the method of acquiring the Fractal Armor. Whether that is by a collection, reward track, token system, or RNG, they would have to dedicate manhours for fractal armor to the design, balance, Q&A, etc. I would really like fractal armor to be added, but I want the fractal team to keep their priorities straight.
I’ve been suggesting Fractal armor to the Fractals team for a long time. I think it’s on their long-term radar, but I’ve heard nothing specific confirming that they will do this at any point in the future.
I agree with their decision. I would love a set of Fractal armor, but fractals need new content like new fractals and polish to older fractals much more.
If anet wanted stacking sigils to be useful with raids there would be so many better ways. Like every time you phase a boss stacking sigils gain 5 stacks or adds granting a stack when killed.
As a guardian, your main responsibility is to bring projectile destruction for Mai Trin. The reason for this is to keep Mai from blinking all over the place and out of static fields while having her stacks stripped. It also helps against the aetherblade sniper which spawns half way through the fight. You want destruction over reflection as reflection will actually teleport you right into Mai’s auto attack chain pretty much guaranteeing you to go down. So you absolutely need shield of the avenger and “retreat” and I would recomend having a mace/shield offhand for the extra pressure the sniper brings. Mai’s teleport shot is on a 30ish cd, so by rotating those skills you will completely negate that mechanic.
Your next responsibility is to bring condition removal as people have already mentioned. The trait Pure of Voice is great when combined with all the shouts you may bring such as “Retreat,” “Feel my Wrath,” and sometimes “Receive the Light.” Another option is to bring Purging Flames or to use a whirl finisher (such as Greatsword 2) on a light Field.
Finally, do as much damage as you can. I would recomend Greatsword over hammer/longbow for the higher dps against moving targets it brings as well as the great utility in terms of condi clears mentioned above and pulling with GS5 the adds that spawn together. Enjoy!
X=8.0000000000000000000001
Edit:
In all seriousness, the best check is a quick quiz of the main mechanics. I have had people leave because of this quiz, and I have had people extremely thankful that I quizzed them instead of requiring insights, etc. However, when you are recruiting 2+ players for a raid, you do not have the time to personally quiz every applicant.
Raids require a high level of personal responsibility, and unlike dungeons, you can not trust one or two players to carry your PUG party through the raid. If a clueless puggie joins a group, and wipes them a few times that will cause more rage than if the clueless puggie was screened out in advance. When it takes 2+ hours for an average group to clear the raids at the moment, groups do not want have to add extra time to organize and teach new players. There has to be some requirement that groups can use to quickly determine if an unknown players is good or not. Legendary Insights fills that void at the moment as it is the only method to filter experienced players from inexperienced.
However, the bigger problem is that there needs to be some encouragement for Experienced Players to help new players learn the raids. With the weekly lockout and extremely low shard cap, most players who have already cleared the raid are losing 1+g an hour due to food for every hour spent raiding on repeat runs. This is a big problem in my guild as there are 5ish players who can consistently clear the run early on in the week, but another 10ish players trying to learn the raid. The 5 players who have completed the raid then spent long hours and much food on wipes with the newer guild players and random pugs who join are later week raids. Each time losing gold through food and opportunity gold cost with dungeons and fractals being so much more profitable. There has to be some mechanic to reward players helping new players learn the raid. I wish I new what that was.
(edited by DrEckers.2039)
On Ascended Ring Salvaging: Always remember to attune the rings first before salvaging. That will give you two rolls for the number of stabilizing matrices (3 in the case it was infused). At an average of 3-4 stabilizing matrices per roll, you will break even on average for about 6-8 stablizing matrices. Since the bare minimum price is 20s, that nets you 0-20s profit per salvage (subtract 1s for the kit and 26s for the attuning process). While this may need to be looked into since in comparison salvaging a rare ring is much more profitable (30-40s depending on ecto prices), it will not result in a net loss.
Also, Ascended Salvage kits are dropping much more commonly from the daily chests. This means Ring Salvaging can actually be quire profitable when you get a 20x ascended salvage kit from the dailies.
Heck before the patch, I would solo entire fractals other than swamp or dailys. Constantly update the lfg on my progress, but people would not join even when the boss was under 10% hp. I was not selling the fractals or anything, but people were so stuck on Swamp of the mists, they would not join any other fractal even when it was essentially free.
Edit: yes, you could choose to do any other fractal to complete the daily. But that choice was completely illusionary. You would not be able to convince 4 other people to also choose to do a fractal unless it was swamp, Molten Duo, or the 2 listed dailies. And the listed dailies provided it was not mai or cliffside.
(edited by DrEckers.2039)
If you the daily fractal above level 76, you get all 4 of the daily chests for each tier: 1-25, 26-50, 51-75, and 76-100. For example today if you do the Urban Battleground on fractal levels 78 or 85, you will get credit and a chests for each Urban Battleground daily fractal for a total of 4 chests.
On dungeon gold reward, remember that you still get the normal 26s per path and 30s per daily (for most paths that is). So with the 5g per 8 paths run, you should get 26s+30s+62.5s=118.5s which is roughly equal to the 126s we got previous to the nerf.
Swamp isn’t dead, but Swamp of the Mists is. Today’s specific fractal was 21, which is Swamp with Mossman. Plenty of people, including myself, ran it. Also, I would be very surprised if there is no daily adept through master fractal to do a Swamp. It just has not popped yet.
What is Dead is people running Swamp, Swamp and maybe Duo to get all their dailies done. Aka Swamp of the Mists. Look at what was run previously, 9 total fractals dailies of which 5 were going most commonly going to be 5 swamp, 2 molten duo, and 2 of the specific fractal dailies (and only these if they were short like Snowblind). All of these were always ran at the lowest level possible. So only around 10% of the fractal content was consistently run. Besides this just being poor game design, this also bored most players out of the content.
Now people will run the three different dailies fractal types at the highest level a player can run plus the two specific daily fractal levels. This encourages players to get to a higher fractal and do every type of Fractal like Cliffside (which was never ever, ever run previously people would skip it when the daily came up) for the best rewards. As for you being forced to run every daily, that is false. If you do not like a specific fractal, you can just skip that daily for the day. There are other runs you can run as well as the fact there will be new ones to run tomorrow. Is it a perfect system, no, but infinitely better than what we had previously.
Also, they buffed the ascended drop rate from 25-50. So that should help you gear out your toons as you go higher. And do to the fact the daily chests have a buffed drop rate of ascended gear and they added ascended mats to the chests, you will be able to gear out alts or alternative builds much easier once you get that first toon kitted out.
(edited by DrEckers.2039)
Wow, I am surprised that within a day someone is already calling for Swamp of the Mists to return. That was an incredibly toxic environment that convinced many long term fractal players to just give up on fractals.
As for how it is harder besides just more damage/hp. Take a look at some Mistlock Instablities that you can experience at higher levels. Not to mention that above level 71, a enemy will spawn whenever you down that will attempt to finish you. Finally, almost always the number of mobs increase making it hard to spread that active defense like blinds across every enemy due to the target cap limit of 5.
On the financial side of it, high level fractal players have not only spent the time to learn all these mechanics, but also spent 1000s of gold on ascended armor, weapons and agony infusions to be able to run this content. There should be some return on that investment.
On a logistic side, if the higher levels are not more rewarding there is absolutely no motivation to reach them or do them regularly. People will only ever do the easiest or quickest fractals like swamp, Molten Duo, or Jade Maw. This led to the hell that was Swamp of the Mists. I was not the only experienced fractal players who got so down right bored of it we quit the content all togethor. Arty should tell you about my rant.
Point is Death to Swamp of the Mists. May it rest in peace and never return.
And this would be a better option than the upgrade extractor.
Honestly, this would have to be added if build templates were to be added. Approval.
Heres an idea: Have the bonus shards you gain for the first boss kill per boss per week not count against the cap. That increases the max amount of shards you could gain per week to 184 currently and assumedly 226 when the next wing comes out. It fulfills RisingDusk’s goal of increasing the reward per kill while improving the raid talent pool throughout the week as more players will continue to log on to raid to shard cap.
After help from reddit, it is clear this is a case of the wiki being wrong, not an actual bug.
I recently noticed that Elemental Overloads are bugged and are not ready within 5s of camping an attunement. Currently when you swap to an element, it takes 6s before the overload is ready. Attached are 6 screenshots showing the overload having between 0s and 1s left before activation, but the previous attunement having between 4s and 5s remaining before it is active. This clearly shows that the Overloads are taking longer than 5s and one shows that it is taking at least 6s.
Earth Overload with .6s remaining and 4.6s left on Air
Air Overload with 0.2s remaining and 4.1s left on Earth
Fire Overload with 0.5s remaining and kitten left on Air
Water Overload with 0.8s remaining and 4.8s left on Water.
Air Overload with 0.6s remaining and kitten left on Water
Fire Overload with 0.6s remaining and 4.6s left on Air
Edit: To be clear, Elemental Overloads should take only 5s before they are ready to activate. Source
(edited by DrEckers.2039)
So, I was theory crafting a perma-evade thief and this is what I got:
Perma Evade Thief
The idea is to rotate between Dodges, Vault, Bandits Defense, Withdraw, and Smoke Screen to evade, block or blind every attack. Using the equation in Wolfram Mathematica:
Endurance gain per sectond: a = (50/20.75 + 100/30 + 10/13.5 + 8*3/8 + 10 + 50/14.5 + 50/10);
Specifics: (Steal+Sig of Agility+Bandits Defense+Vault+Base endurance regen+Rune of Adventure+Sigil of Energy)
b = 50/a;
c = .75/b; (Percent of time spent evading with dodge)
d = 4*2/3;
e = .5/d; (Percent of time spent evading with Vault)
f = 1.5/13.5;(Percent of time spent blocking with Bandit’s Defense)
g = e + c + .75/15 + 7/30 + 2/40 = 0.939813
or 94% of the time you should have some version of active defense up. Note that Smoke Screen makes up 23% of this time. So against bosses, you would not get near this up time, but you would not need it as most bosses do not attack often enough to get past your normal evades. I can certainly see this build used by players learning to solo upper level fractals or dungeons.
There is also a version using Viper’s for a condi and D/D version of the build. But it cannot get near as much up time in evades due to spending 1.8/4.55 seconds AAing with daggers to maintain endurance regen. It may have a higher damage output though due to uncatchable+lotus training dealing huge bleed stacks.
Edit: checked Max endurance regen rate with vigor+food+endless stamina, it is 10 per second, not 8.75.
(edited by DrEckers.2039)