Guild Wars 2

I run stealth trapper on my ranger in WvW now. It’s better than perma-stealth thief days. The pet continues to eff up the opponent and a very heavy condi build synergises with the traps and makes it way OP.

Also love being chased by high mobility targets. I can cycle traps by throwing them way off to the sides and blink across the landscape on superspeed (the other attribute of those runes).

The fastest trap recharge is 16 seconds traited so it’s a lot of stealth.

Just got to spec differently for the other maps.

Ridiculous trying to play twitch specs with this ridiculous lag. Have used VPN and non VPN… doesn’t matter.

Arikyali.5804:

Where all this hate for thieves is coming from.

For the first time in a long time, I took my mesmer for some WvW roaming. And my goodness, now that I wasn’t a thief, kitten thieves!

CnDing off my clones for stealth uptime, and SR before death to run and flee. I’ve done it so many times myself before, but now I can see it through my opponent’s eyes. I knew that if I could just get that sucker out in the open long enough, I could wreck them to the waypoint and back. And…sweet mercy, what hit me!? I was focusing on this ranger!

So. You know how every hater is like, “we hate stealth, thieves OP, thieves abuse stealth, no skillz, spam 2 all day, blah blah blah,” Well, it’s not the thieves’ fault. And I have two suggestions:

Option 1:
Give other classes a method to lose the targeting from their enemy. Even though I wasn’t playing PU mesmer, I was still semi-stealthy. Certainly not as much as a thief, but enough that I can be lost among my clones. But not every other class has a method to lose targeting.

Option 2:
Nerf everyone else’s damage!!

-nod nod-

This way, a thief can stay out of stealth at longer intervals and fight back. Besides, thieves can’t do much while in stealth. Especially condi damage, ya know? Condi is just OPness overload.

Personally, I support idea numero two.

You didn’t fight thieves when you were on your thief?

GOSU.9574:

Faeyd.5094:

Moving hot join back to 8v8 I hope then as all matches there are 5v4 but group voting etc is just silly overkill for a mash-em up game mode.

This is just not gonna happen to a hotjoin. There isn’t a massive queue of players as it is, bringing it further down to a handful of active matches will only harm the game further.

If anything I hope future modes will have smaller team member requirements as a viable option. 8v8 would be better suited to a GvG mode.

The reason why it died is because it was forced into 5v4. This is pretty obvious. The 8v8 crowd left leaving what… 5v5 aspirationals? Silly idea. Solo Q is for wannabes, 8v8 was for folks who value fights over standing on points in a certain order.

Moving hot join back to 8v8 I hope then as all matches there are 5v4 but group voting etc is just silly overkill for a mash-em up game mode.

I think people are simply playing for fun.. a lot of the time that’s ‘fights’. Sadly the game is about zone control, not fights, but what is fun, is fights.

Need to ensure we are not confusing people’s inability to comprehend extremely simple routines (which is what rotations are, they are simple and obvious), with enjoying smashing folks in the face a lot.

Einlanzer.1627:

Narkodx.1472:

Shadowstep/Pain response is actually not enough – Necro will destroy you easily

2/0/6/0/6 is actually the best condition build with p/d sbow and perplexity

d/d sucks
caltrops suck
givers weapons suck
nightmare runes suck
apothecary sucks
signet of malice sucks
lotus poison sucks

Um, no.

I know… mind boggling really.

witcher.3197:

D/D is outclassed by every other thief build. They will just hunt you down. Even in teamfights, you can’t gain stealth in a safe spot (D/P can use the Heartseeker + Blackpowder combo), you have to be in the fight to even set up burst. Makes it counterable and vulnerable. You lose access to blinds, teleports and on-demand dazes just by taking off-hand dagger and not pistol.

D/D’s more of a PvE/WvW set.

This is true but I still play D/D in sPvP because it’s fun and still blasts most people down in a few seconds. Play what you want.

The warrior in the middle of the video must have thought you were dead 5 times. He didn’t budge off full health while you went through about 4 health bars Nice play.

Like Colo said – the upside to dog outweighs the downside. I find it irritating to fight against as well… I play a lot of D/D and it eats one of my mini-cleaves.

Like you said Necro it’s a hotjoin lulz thing. I’m open minded but struggling with it just because there may be a real sustain class around and no matter what you do outside of stealth just leaves you feeling envious.

If I want to contest points against other sustain classes I revert to very heavy heals and just attack out the stealth often so invisible time is minimised, but heals are plentiful. The old unicorn specs are more visible but still require piano playing skills to stay alive.

The thief isn’t a one-shot class. Even burning 4 signets with full stacks will only work against the most unaware and glassy people in WvW. Everyone knows how to counter thief burst and it has been nerfed down hard over and over (CnD, Mug, etc).

4k backstabs is fine as long as you have your strong defense worked out (e.g. are you heavy evades, heavy stealth, heavy blinds?). You will just need a lot of them and durability to make it work.

Simplest fix is go back to 8v8.

It was a big mistake to force hot join down to 5v5. It didn’t help solo Q nor tPvP… And the less folks on each team accentuates an imbalance (8v7 is far more competitive than 5v4).

We’ll try not to find a decent build that works for you because you’ll just get it nerfed

Thanks Ameno. I had a play around with it a bit myself again and it was a bit too binary (burst works or completely fails).

Was it effective?

yes to increasing the frame.

No to all other suggestions of ‘improvements’, especially ‘powerizing’ it.

I don’t really get this position where some thieves think it should be toned down because it’s easier than their super hard man spec that takes real men to play.

Don’t you guys play all specs/modes depending on mood? Who’s actually playing ONE spec all the time in ONE game mode? I play SA heavy if I want to relax, last night I was playing pure glass signet burn build because I was fidgety and wanted to twitch and blammo people. I get WAY more reward (personal points, team support) by playing power so let the shadow lovers be so they can enjoy the game too (and I can enjoy it when I get bored of power specs and play defensive specs). All classes can be played this way… relaxing or twitchy. That’s good. Floor and Ceiling.

This game has been going the way of DAoC for too long now… whiners everywhere, class envy all over the shop and intra-class spec envy.

Apothecary/Settler thief is strong, viable and different. Leave it.

Fun experiment, grats to OP. I’ve tried similar with Krait runes (Dagger Storm is a beast with Krait runes) and managed to drop a few without using weapons but mostly ended up resetting.

I run D/D P/D conditions in sPvP now and it owns hard there too when fighting players. Not so awesome for conquering and holding inanimate pieces of graphics, so no good for tPvP. But if you want to kill people and not die… yum.

I absolutely wanted to look at seeing what could be done to with immobilize… I was going to look at maximising condi duration and trying to find immo stuff available but I think this is a much better angle.

You have to try it and vid it it looks interesting

Impossible to play at the moment.

I have an SSD core i7 monster that runs everything incredibly well. GW2 game performance is decaying so badly week after week – now utterly impossible to play anything that requires timing. Fix it.

I didn’t know there was an event on but I got lots of those ticket things and bought nice things with them.

Where was I supposed to go to see what I supposed to be doing?

DAoC used to do it pretty well… the less folks you had in relation to the enemy the slower the conflict markers on the map would appear. E.G. you can beat on a keep for a decent amount of time before the alarm is raised on map.

[quote=4483298;PacoXI.7690:]

I officially love this thread.

I killed a thief duo last night and got a LOT of aggro from them after I was running full Dire D/D P/D so lots of Blossoming and such… they were able to res several times (refuge each other’s downed states) so it took a while but was a comfortable. Turns out one of them was very close to my spec and wanted to show me how bad I was in a duel. I mean… I just killed you and your mate… several times each.

Then ran into a brilliant Ele who ran rings round me – I couldn’t get him down, great cleansing, timing and rotations. I legged it as I would have lost and was about to send some props to a great player and got a mouthful from them just before I could send my message. People hate thieves… even thieves.

Some good help above but I do think folks forget how hard it is to run a thief when you are new to it and everyone else has had years of 1v1 and 5v5 experience. And on D/D too… that’s a twitch set for ADHD Korean orphans.

Even if you’ve run it a lot (I do personally in sPvP) it has become FAR harder right now thanks to the tone of the game overall in terms of class strengths and weaknesses. I don’t think you are going to get better to the extent you want to in the timeframe you are looking at by running a power set at all.

The noob friendlyest build is a heal thief if you want to study how other folks play from a position other than horizontal. You’ll still get to contribute in fights by not respawning and stomping / resing. Then you progress to Carrion Condition when you feel like you are pretty indestructible but realise you aren’t killing anyone. Then go power when all your reactions and other class knowledge are in place.

You simply can’t start with a D/D full glass thief in PvP… it’s like jumping in an F1 car and racing Hamilton because you drove a go-kart once.

This should help you simply observe and dip in and out of fights: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQRAoY6YlsMp7plPx5J0PRRSRw9SQint160XHA-TJRAwAsLDA4JA8b/hOnEAA

A lot of folks would find it heretical – just ignore them and play it. I’ve introduced thieves this was before and it provides a very low skill floor and a lot of safety. You’re not using backstab on the D/D set Deathblossoms, cripples and stealths.

When I run power I run P/P as a second set to D/D and then it’s fun… you get to do some ranged drilling but you are mainly using the goodies of D/D.

It has been very easy pickings in there recently.

DB is amazing, especially in conjunction with the blind trait on CnD, dancing dagger (cripple) and poison on auto. The only thing that doesn’t fit in D/D is Heartseeker – please move it to a power set!!!

Having a spammable evade on a heavy condi application is epic. Seriously… I’ve even stopped playing power sets in sPvP now favoring D/D P/D condition and the whining has increased tenfold. Every class/build combo considered powerful in there is naturally countered by it. Turrets, minions, hambows… the smack talking is a good indicator that their face-rolling is running into issues.

I’m not really going to comment on these ‘change DB to power’ threads any more because frankly I’d rather people theorycraft why it isn’t as good as D/P or whatever and simply not play it… I prefer being the exception and I prefer folks felt it weak rather than abuse it and attract the inevitable nerf.

It looks like those teams are winning too Imagine 3 rangers coordinated 1500 range drilling everyone on the map. Ugliness.

I hope not but I wonder if the OP is the same guy… I killed a tanky ranger yesterday and got a group invite to be confronted with a massive discourse about how stupidly OP backstab was.

I killed him with a condi burst though – just happened to have D/D out at the time.

Very tasty play !! Nice job, and actually a build I haven’t played which is a bonus !!

I run power in PvP and Condi in WvW. In WvW I can’t remember ever losing to a power thief… we are sadly far easier to kill than anything else out there (maybe I get some help from playing power half the time).

Interrupting heals is so tough… I mean I run BP, HiS and Refuge and have CnD on tap. I genuinely don’t know how I would use my WvW power set to beat my Dire set… don’t think I could.

Maybe just don’t worry about it… if you are killing other folks, just reset and go find a suitable target. If I’ve had a lot of coffee I will roll out a full berserker signet burn build (which has been nerfed to absolute useless status and doesn’t scale well anymore with all the WvW buffs)… and I still manage to have fun, but I have to accept death too. It’s a terrible build, but still makes me laugh when it comes off.

Heheh. character.

Clip.6845:

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Issue #2:
When losing a game an increasing number of players abuses an oversight in the interface to switch places with someone on the wining team.
While the player that got switched over still gets credited for the victory, this is a case of match manipulation which is forbidden by the GW2 Rules of Conduct and should be fixed."

Most of the time it’s not “losing a game” that causes people to switch, it’s imbalanced teams. On a 4v5 ofcourse the team with 4 is gonna lose, so players join spectate to force autobalance and then join the winning team.

The only fixes I want to see for hotjoin:

• Standard servers have no spectate mode.
• Teamswapping disables after the game starts.
• Autobalance kicks in on 4v5 on 100 points difference.

Now that looks mighty fine Clip… I think you nailed it.

Needs 8v8 back. 5v5 is too formulaic for casual PvP’ers and rarely is 5v5.

Very nice play. Good control of 1v2 fights. Seems like a nice balanced build to me.

Vortex.3712:

is it just me or is the teef class after sept 15th patch become really lagy. i dont find this problem on my ele so.. idk is it just me?

I get skill lag, frame rate issues and disconnections galore now. It’s made playing power spec on the thief impossible.

the krytan assassin.9235:

Wow just lol….
might aswell give the tiefs a skill which makes him invulnerable for 10 minutes and give him wings in wvw so he can just fly in every tower.

Tbh i don’t know any class more tanky then the thief, you’ve got loads of shadowsteps, stuns, stealth and regen(if traited). You’re complaining about the fact that they lack surviveability, but the primary reason why they lack that surviveability is because you’re most likely going full beserker, what else do you expect then?

Also a permanent stealth button will cause nothing but trouble, since it will result in massive dungeonskipping and sneaking into enemy wvw keeps.

What stuns?

For me to survive no matter what armor I wear I have to twitch like hell on evades and ports. Stealth is too unreliable now.

D/D is great on full dire – folks just don’t play it so theorycraft it off the table.

You have poison, cripple, and heavy bleeds on the set (take blind on stealth trait to add blinds to the set #5 too) and you evade half of the incoming junk as you apply the AE bleeds. I find it easier to 1vX on it than P/D (WvW). Stick P/D on your second set though and have the best of both worlds.

Run Krait runes and DS for elite and flip camps in one rotation if that is what you want to do too.

Ynna.8769:

Faeyd.5094:

Yep 8v8 was way more fun and you had be much more situationally aware than the tedium of 3 capping points and 5 players to watch (sometimes 4 players). Hmmm really hard to learn. Dudes goes here so you go there. When 2 dudes go there you go here. Tricky stuff.

Yeah, sure, let’s pretend that’s all you need to know as a beginning player.

A Bunker needs to learn how to defend against two (or three) players, which is unlikely to happen in 8v8. A mobile player needs to learn to escape from just a couple of players which, again, is unlikely to happen in 8v8. The amount of CC is just bigger.

8v8 requires a different skillset (and different builds) than 5v5 (even when playing on the same maps). We can’t pretend this isn’t the case.

I’m not against a game-mode that focuses more on team fights. Team fights are fun. But I don’t think that game-mode should happen at the cost of the 5v5 hotjoin games.

Let’s pretend that keeping track of 10 people is harder than keeping track of 16.

The game is big enough for both game modes. 5v5 hotjoin is NEVER 5 people on each side. It is usually 4v3. It’s devoid of action… ergo, boring. It has no better correlation to tPvP than 8v8 hotjoin except when debated on paper. It just doesn’t work. Solo Q is fine as the training ground.

Yeah I am now getting all these. DC’s, massive slideshow lag and skills that go off 4 seconds late.

To annoy elitists who don’t appear on the list?

Yep 8v8 was way more fun and you had be much more situationally aware than the tedium of 3 capping points and 5 players to watch (sometimes 4 players). Hmmm really hard to learn. Dudes goes here so you go there. When 2 dudes go there you go here. Tricky stuff.

Sounds like scorpion wire. Thought that was ‘OK’ as noone fixed it for years.

Agree with this. It’s an absolute killer for any twitch dependent toons.