Guild Wars 2

Captain Obvious.6951:

I haven’t played one yet but I watched some vids on Deadeye. Class stolen straight from SWTOR which I’m fine with, everyone copies.

But one of the benefits of being ‘immobile’ as a sniper was that you got cover.

So why isn’t the Deadeye getting this?

http://imgur.com/a/YcKvW

I’m thinking a lot of Deadeyes are gonna get rocked pretty hard in PvP the second they kneel down. Having a 50% cover and immunity to teleports seems like it would be immensely useful and almost required, as to not having kitten burn guardians tele to and burn your butt down in 2 seconds, or condi thieves stealing to you and plopping 20k condi dmg on you in 2 seconds.

Stolen from SW:ToR? Can’t say I agree with it as they play very different and have completely different mechanics.

Deadeye don’t use cover, they kneel to get a more stable shot from range. The SW:ToR sniper use cover as a defensive tool too. Deadeye relies on shadowsteps, evades and stealth to survive.

The way I played during the preview weekend was marking an enemy and only kneeling to deliver the killing blow (10-15k shots) at max malice stacks. You kneel either when your enemy are unaware, you got a good position and are safe or to drop a huge burst and get up again. It isn’t meant to be solely played kneeling. Use your mobility and stealth to disrupt and position yourself properly and you’ll be a true force to be reckoned with.

In PvE I’d run Deadly Arts, Critical Strikes (take the health return on critical strikes) and Daredevil. Use staff and Sword/Pistol or dual pistols. Full berserker, agility signet and healing signet. Your basic rotation on the tougher mobs: Staff 2 into Steal, evade back with damage trait, AA chain. Repeat. If you die a lot you can use S/P and keep a permanent blind field to evade most attacks.

In sPvP you should use the meta battle build. In WvW you should NOT use only berserker. I’d use Marauder gear for the added health bonus. P/D condition is pretty funny in all game modes with high survivability and trolling potential, but you’re not meta in any way. But it works ok if you’re a casual player (like myself).

I’m also on EU, so if you’d like any help or tips just hit me up in-game and I’ll gladly assist you! I’ve been playing since beta and have been on and off the last few years, but I’ve always been a thief main with a few thousand hours on it.

I really want Shadow Trap to work, but it have been beyond broken since launch. It is sad that they haven’t touched it since then

I completely agree with you. I too have played thief almost exclusively since launch and I found Deadeye to be a good addition to our profession. The damage we can dish our are outright disgusting, and we can do so from 1500 range.

We are not as mobile as Daredevil (that would be broken with our rifle damage), but we still have a ton of mobility skills. Use stealth and shadowsteps to confuse your foe and move around a lot.

Daredevil just wasn’t my thing, but Deadeye seem to be it!

The mark should be instantly applied. Why they made it a channel are beyond me as the only thing it do, are stewing up our rotation.

10 second are longer than most thieves will be able to stay alive in a fight or they’ll have to disengage. I think they designed it to be so you have to keep moving and reposition yourself until you have enough stacks to blow your target up.

Not sure what to think tbh. We will just have to play around with it and see.

I’d rather have them reduce initiative cost across the board and remove Preparedness (or just make it baseline).

I would love to see a build that didn’t have trickery, but even in PvE it is basically mandatory…

Daredevil will stay just as strong in the new expansion. Daredevil and Deadeye are two very different play styles, so I don’t see the problem there

1. What profession and what weapon are you using against thief?

2. What game mode are you talking about?

3. Daredevil have a ton of evades, especially if specced into acrobatics as well.

4. Blinds. D/P have two skills that blind you. If you stand in their blind field and have a slow attack speed you miss most of your attacks.

Are you on EU or NA server?

The reason D/P are so strong are because it have everything: interrupt/stun, easy access to stealth, gap closers, high damage burst and blinds. As our role are primarily roaming it is amazing. We can hold our own pretty good and can disengage if things get hairy.

I’ve been a thief main since the first beta test where it was available. I just love everything about the profession.

D/P Daredevil are still the meta, but that’s for high level play and tournaments. Sizer still play S/D and perform well, but he is a top player though.

I play around with S/P, pulmonary impact and bound. Been pretty fun and people doesn’t expect the damage and control.

But if you want to reach the upper ranks you should play D/P decap/+1 build ^^

Pretty much been like this since I started playing sPvP in the early days of the game…

First of all I want to say that if you’re running D/P Daredevil you shouldn’t 1v1 unless you know you can kill the target really fast. Our job are, as you say, to decap far and +1 other fights. If far are uncontested you can get there, decap and get back to mid very fast. If they have someone bunkering far you shouldn’t be there, but +1 mid to easily win that fight. If your home get capped you and 1 or more other from your team should respond.

It seems like you have been matched with terrible players. A bad thief can lose the game, but it seems like you are doing the right thing and making the right decisions. Your team however, are not by the looks of it.

Yeah. Thief stacking should be stopped completely by ArenaNet. They want thief to be a roamer and +1 fighter, and there are only room for one on every team. Having 2 doing that job makes it almost impossible to win. I find it even more hilarious when stuff like this happens: 3 thieves on my team, 0 on the enemy team. How can the matchmaker be that bad?!

JonnyForgotten.4276:

saerni.2584:

I’ve been testing with Deadshot Amulet and P/D. The build runs with Krait Runes, Agony Sigil and Torment Sigil (works well with the crit chance on the amulet).

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQJAqYlsMhSnYRTwpJw/ELDFGXAYBkB8yBBh+zc+7/dAB-TJRAQBA4BAoxyA9Y/hudCAAA

I’m not done quite done testing and refining. It takes some getting used to given the lack of HP compared to Carrion.

I will say that I’ve used Shadowstrike several times now in contexts where projectile hate would otherwise prevent me from contributing damage. If you can maintain about 8 stacks of torment it can tick for around 2k (without vulnerability, boons, or other map specific stat bonuses).

What’s the point of Shadow Arts on this build? Don’t see much stealth access. Not trying to be a kitten, just curious.

Hide in Shadows, Steal and Cloak and Dagger. If you’re good at landing CnD you shouldn’t will have any trouble without more stealth abilities.

Since we aren’t contesting a node when we are in stealth, this build will never be viable. You won’t ever be killed (if played properly), but you will lose the point and use too much time killing anything for it to be worth it. P/D aren’t he best team fight set either after they removed Ricochet.

Thanks for the input ^^

Reece.7341:

For me I like trying anything non-meta.

Yeah. Always been doing that. Spent the first two years of the game exploring tons of different builds, talents, weapon combinations and signets/runes. So much fun trying out the “bad” stuff.

babazhook.6805:

IP can help a lot in new areas and in particular against things like the raptor and mushroom swarms. A vault with staff into a cluster of raptors not only kills a whole lot of them but can add a lot of healing.

D/P is weak on AOE damage and mainly single target

Yeah, figured that out last night. Crazy how much healing you get from some lucky crit procs from a vault :’D

shagwell.1349:

Anet finally needs to learn that “passives” don’t fit into any pvp environment. It’s stupid as kitten when passives save your kitten every time when you make mistakes – instead you should die or at least be forced to play defensively or run after making a mistake.

Passives can be used as active abilities to save you. On the lower brackets people doesn’t even know what their passives are and are usually lucky when they get saved by it. In the higher leagues and in professional play they know their passives and their cool downs, and use them to their advantage. Passives aren’t necessarily bad, but they need to balance them properly so that they won’t be abused.

Thanks all. Been away for really long, so I’m probably just a bit rusty :p

Hi all!

I have returned to the game from a longer pause (left just after Hot launched) and I find myself confused. I have gotten all the DD skills and traits and are using staff, but I am having huge trouble surviving while leveling my masteries in the jungle.

Anyone got any tips or builds that I should be using?

Finally some hard open world content though!

I used to carry it with me in sPvP. I remember some pretty awesome plays where I could port myself from mid to far/home to decap/cap. I ran a duelist build back in the days that was capable of killing most other decappers, which made it really strong since I could port to them when I saw my trap triggered.

Haven’t used it in two years though. It isn’t reliable enough, which makes it an inferior pick for almost all builds and situations. Can be really fun when it works ^^

I have yet to encounter a single thief with P/P in my entire GW2 time. I have only encountered that once in hot-join, but he was just messing around :]

I never saw a single warrior in sPvP that ran greatsword, so I have no idea where you got that from.

The difference between a good and a bad guardian was often their use of virtues. A well timed block could save his team from death or deny huge bursts. They were never useless, just not as strong as today.

Thief got gutted. There’s only one way to play thief now, and that is daredevil. As others have mentioned: they cut off our feet and sold us prosthetics back.

The reason I hate elite specs are because they are mandatory if you want to play any part of this game above average. That is bad design and a lousy way for ANet to push HoT.

Thief. I loved my thief to the bone during vanilla but left shortly after HoT was released. I was active in both sPvP, WvW and PvE, but the elite specializations (that ended up being mandatory for every aspect of the game) destroyed it for me. I hate Daredevil, but you can’t play competitively without it.

I miss the old D/P times :/

I use to bounce mid and watch where the enemy goes. If anyone crosses to home I’ll go there and +1 that fight. If they’re going for beast I’ll try to steal it. If they’re going mid I’ll help out there. Pretty much what I do every time in the first minute :p

Zedek.8932:

How to say that now.. But aren’t you OSX and Linux guys not quite aware that “Windoze iz only for gaiming”? You are not the target group and things have changed.

After all, if you don’t want to reboot, it’s your fault and you should not want developer time get devoted into niche OS. I also have a MacBook, but I use Bootcamp.

Oh, I was quite aware of that when I got my Mac. In the beginning I played a lot of games that only run on Windows, but as my life have changed and I have grown older I don’t have time to play that many games now. I only have Windows for GW2 as of now because I think it is a kittenty OS for anything else that I do.

I know it is my “fault” for not wanting to reboot, but the thing is that GW2’s biggest competitor literally won me (and many, many others) back because ArenaNet can’t offer a native OS X client for my favorite game.

OS X isn’t a niche OS any longer. More and more people change to OS X and more and more people start to play video games compared to back in the days where only “geeks” and “nerds” played them. Now almost every single person below 18 years old play a video game of any type. The world are going that way and developers of video games need to realize that and make the appropriate changes. I know many that have a Mac that don’t play GW2 but would love to do it, if they had a native client. Most people will never use BootCamp to try out a new game. They’ll just find something that work on their OS (WoW in this comparison).

Game developers today need to realize that OS X are starting to take a serious market share and they need to act accordingly. Justifying it by saying that they could just use BootCamp and be fine isn’t going to work much longer.

So this game was a really joy for me for the 2 first years of its lifetime. I really loved it and was super hyped when they announced the Mac client. Well, we all know how that went, so I quickly uninstalled and had to make a BootCamp partition with Windows.

Over the years I found it more of a chore to reboot every single time I wanted to play the game. I did less and less on my Windows partition and more and more on my OS X partition. Now it has come to a point where I only have Windows to be able to play Guild Wars 2, which is really frustrating as there is a Mac client that doesn’t work properly available.

Me and almost all of my friends left the game because there isn’t a native OS X client. We all moved back to (cringing) World of Warcraft. If there ever was to be a native (NOT a port) client for GW2 we would all be back in a jiffy, and we are probably not alone!

I would really love to see ArenaNet put in some effort and make a native client for OS X and keep it up to date as Blizzard do with all their games. GW2 have such potential that I feel are wasted because a large part of their player base left due to the lack of any Mac support.

I log on maybe once a month now and I can’t find myself to enjoy the game with only that. I even have an SSD, which make the reboot take about 10 seconds, but I feel it is too much of a chore to keep Windows up to date and GW2 up to date. I always have a lot of apps running in OS X, so I never bother to reboot just to play GW2 again. This is all coming from a player with over a thousand hours logged in the game…

What do the rest of the community think? Should we get a native Mac OS X client or not?

This is definitely something I would love to see! Either do 4 seconds in all game modes or 3 seconds in all game modes. I vote for 3 because it flows so good with the dagger auto attacks and just feel right.

I remember when they changed from 3 to 4 seconds in PvP, that was a real pain! It still is though. In PvE I lose dos if I come from PvP, because I’m used to 4 seconds and wait too long. In PvP I end up trying to re-stealth while I’m revealed, which is wasting initiative….

I say go for 3 seconds, or 4 if they want to, but they need to make it the same across all game modes.

Surprise Shot: Decent opener if I’m in stealth and can’t engage melee. Good for locking down targets that try to flee from my team.

Trick Shot: Very good for proccing sigils.

Cluster Bomb: Good for AoE damage spam against stealthed targets and amazing for blasting combo fields. Damage is okay, but I would like to see its travel speed a bit faster.

Disabling Shot: Not worth the initiative. Was good but got nerfed to the ground…

Choking Gas: Amazing in combination with Deadly Arts or Cluster Bomb to weaken an entire team or make reviving slower.

Infiltrator’s Arrow: The main reason thieves pick this weapon.

I don’t find it lacking as it definitely still are one of, if not the best utility weapon in the game. I would like to see the nerf to Disabling Shot reverted and some speed added to Cluster Bomb. But that’s about it. Overall a solid choice for any thief build.

As someone who have very low condition removal in my build I know I have two choices when facing a condition thief:

1. Kill him with my initial burst.

2. Run away and do something that actually benefit my team.

I don’t get why people always try to engage a fight they know they can’t win… If I’m not running any good condition removal I won’t stay long vs condition specs unless I got them down in a few seconds. Once they start to stack me up I’m going down, which is my fault for not doing the right thing.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Geiir.7603:

From lore I would say that Charr are the race that fit thief the most.

If you don’t see that many of us, then we do our job just fine: Staying in the shadows, gathering knowledge and waiting for the opportune moment to strike.

For the Ash Legion!

I don’t know about that. Sylvari has a natural stealth ability when standing next to shrubbery.

Comment of the week!

Ricochet, I loved that trait! I remember hitting a Ranger with a Head Shot and stunned him for like 4 seconds xD

On a serious note, I completely agree. I miss that trait as it was the only way for P/D to ever spread its poison AoE and for Unload to be useful in PvE….

I for one love conquest, so please let it be. I would rather see them implementing more game modes for some diversity.

Use key binds or get a gaming mouse. I am using a Razer Naga gaming mouse and it is awesome, really took my gaming to a new level!

What you are doing might work for PvE but will put you at a huge disadvantage in PvP. Use your mouse to turn your character by holding down the right mouse button and moving your mouse. Use WASD to move forward, backward and strafing. Then map all your skills to custom keybindings that you feel comfortable using.

In the beginning any of the options will feel weird and unnatural to you and you might play really bad for a few weeks. But the more you play the more comfortable you’ll get and soon you’ll play at a whole new level!

Hope this helped!

Lordrosicky.5813:

Game has been dead for over a year. Anet decided to give a small amount of money to some dudes so they have try harded. There is about 20 or 30 people in the world who take this game seriously. Probably been that way for 2 years. There is no serious element to the game. I know for a fact the pro players are nothing special at all, because there is o competition. Dead game is dead. Has been dead and will always be dead because it sucks

Partly agree with you. The “competitive” scene probably involve 30 people at max. Abjured, TCG and oRNG have been dominating since forever with absolutely no other team getting close. That alone say enough about the “competitive” scene of this game. It doesn’t have enough players.

The reason it doesn’t have enough players are because they failed at launch. There was a bunch of streamers and top players from other MMORPG’s coming to try this new take on the genre, but they all left when ANet kept neglecting the community, screwing up balance and not doing a single thing to fix it for over half a year. If they do something wrong or screw up their balance they need to fix it ASAP, not after 6-12 months….

All these pro players and popular streamers left when they understood that ANet don’t give a kitten about PvP or WvW. Balance have never been high up on their priority list and it never will be. The game is good though, and I LOVE the combat, which is why I have stayed for this long, but the balance is a complete mess. Elite specs completely OP compared to all the other trait lines so that you have to buy HoT to be competitive. Well played ANet, wp..

From lore I would say that Charr are the race that fit thief the most.

If you don’t see that many of us, then we do our job just fine: Staying in the shadows, gathering knowledge and waiting for the opportune moment to strike.

For the Ash Legion!

I’m going to answer from a sPvP perspective.

It all boil down to your play style. Staff has more of a staying power that allow you to fight for a longer period of time and stay in a 3v3. D/P does not offer that.

But here is what D/P offer: I am usually always moving between nodes to +1 fights and decapping. When I arrive at home where one of my teammates are dueling someone they won’t even know what hit them. I’ll go straight into BP-HS-Steal-Backstab combo to almost instantly down the intruder. This goes for almost all fights. If they try to run I’ll just stick on them with Shadow Shot and Heartseeker.

In a straight up duel you will have problems landing backstabs, but in the chaotic environment sPvP offers you are there to ambush, not to duel (if playing D/P that is). If you enjoy prolonged fights and want more AoE damage, then Staff is right for you. But as someone who love roaming and fast paced fights with high odds, then D/P are just perfect.

Just my 2 cents

What motivates me, considering what other professions bring to the table?

The style, gameplay and theme is what got me hooked. Other professions bring lots of team support that thief doesn’t, but we did have the highest single target damage, great cleave damage and life saving utility skills.

What keep the thief fresh for me?

Initiative. Without cool downs I need to use my brain before spamming skills in a given order. For every encounter I have to use all my abilities when I need them the most. This can be anything from blinding a crucial skill, interrupting a heal or resurrect to dropping my burst when my enemy least expect it or are at their weakest. There’s so much to the fight, and I can decide when it start and end.

I have all professions at 80 and a few hours in pvp with all of them, but my thief are a clear favorite. What thief really learnt me, which helped a lot when playing any other profession, is awareness. I learnt how to look for rotations, avoid hard hitting attacks and got a better map presence and awareness. As a thief you need to avoid that killing blow, because it will actually kill you. Standing in AoE madness as a bunker guardian is non-threatening, but deadly as a thief.

All this combined are the reason I love my thief. I don’t care if I’m considered sub-par in PvE, because thief really excel at pvp. Any good thief, however, will be a huge asset to his team in PvE too though.

Galandil.9641:

Because that’s why it’s programmed since beta days. ^^

If I remember correctly they added it after launch. Before you could drop it for a risk-free stealth since you could leave it or get knocked out without losing stealth.

It was a good change though, since it made the thief think before dropping it and opened up for counter play.

Too bad the devs won’t listen to our top players. The top players of this game probably have more hours logged on their mains than the balance team have on all their toons…

People bashing Helseth for “defending his main etc”. What? He isn’t defending bunker mesmer, he just want mesmer to have a spot at all. Maybe buff shatter so that we will see it played again?

What the devs should look into are what traits were considered mandatory to get the off-hand dagger to work. Which trait was that? Blind on stealth. Without that trait it was nearly useless because the thief will just get blown up by the next AoE attack or a channel that started right before he entered stealth.

As for DD I’d say increase its damage a little and lower the initiative cost. It is still a good chase tool and this would actually justify throwing initiative into it.

Those two fixes and D/D would see play again.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

Frankly damage even with AA has never been a problem for my thief.

The thing preventing thieves from getting into groups is the lack of group buffs & group utility.

Was just using auto attacks as an example. I’m talking about all weapon skills. The biggest problem with dual pistols are the auto attacks that are mainly a condition attack on a power set. And death blossom that is a condition skill on a power set..

Here’s a thought that I have had for quite some time:

The main problem with buffing one weapon may be that it will make another weapon set too strong. Take pistol main hand as an example: hey don’t want to buff it because they’re afraid of what it will do to P/D when P/P are struggling.

So here’s my idea:
Balance every weapon to their sets. Like making CnD hit way harder with dagger main hand than with pistol main hand. Let pistol autos do more damage with dual pistols and less with dagger off hand.

Or create new sets. Let D/D have one set of 5 abilities and let P/D have a completely different one.

That should make it easier for ANet to balance them properly…

Is rather see a buff to D/D. CnD need its damage back, same with Dancing Dagger. Death Blossom need an increased evade frame and/or better power scaling. By doing that they would increase its burst and probably bring it back.

The fact that threads like these exists is a proof that ANet failed with HoT balance. They said that Elite specs wouldn’t be any better than the current specs, but they would add something new to the current professions – which is fine.

But when they make them so good that people see them as mandatory to use then there’s something very wrong.

Tbh, I miss the old days before we got elite specs and the new talent rework :/

So they are going to change the following:

Rallying
Only one person will be able to rally when a tagged enemy dies.

Reviving
You won’t be able to revive players while you are in combat.

FINALLY! These changes have been requested since the launch of the game. The fact that it took the devs this long to realize it disgusts me…. I left the game before HoT came, but this might get me back to roaming again with my thief. Fighting outnumbered might actually be worth it now. :p

What do you guys think about these changes?

santoryu.9815:

I completely agree with you, ArenaNet do not cares minimally with the thief
when i create a thief, was written in the description that was lethal 1 × 1 ( funy) what a joke ….. all classes at this time are stronger than thief, and what ArenaNet makes relation to that? nothing, I am main thief and not do anything in relation to this I leave this game because I do not have to be forced to play what they want (META) , I’m a customer I bought the game for fun in pvp in pve whatever, and ArenaNet meets all the pros of thief , engi guive more inv then thief LOOL mesmer remove bons and almost all class have more damage then thief , what I am asking is if a thief in pve is not as effective as the other class, ok I can understand the thief is a pvp charecter in all kind of games is a burst character, so please explainme how a dragon hunter by simply pressing 3 butons in the mid of a tf can hit 5x more then a thief in multiple targuets , and how it works I liked to have a ArenaNet’s response to explain to me why the thief is like this ?? Then we have all others op class “expect warrior” who murder you withouth skil …. my question is any one of you from ArenaNet play thief ? ’ or do you even play this game ? cause your balance in pvp is ridicoulouse i enjoy 2 much this game is a funy game i love the pvp but camon do something with thief or nerf other classes 2 it starts getting ridiculous…….. THe simple fact of you play thief in pvp is motive of flame lol

This. Thief need to get their launch burst back. As it stands now a shatter combo from a shatter Mesmer do more single target damage (and this is AoE even) than a full Heartseeker → Mug → Backstab → Heartseeker combo. Thief doesn’t have the highest single target damage any more, no sustain and doesn’t even have the best 1v1 tools anymore :/

alain.1659:

I have not been here for even 2 years but even I know that elite specs are “way stronger” than normal ones, Anet needs cash desperately so buggers balance, and there will be no balance in this game because Anet do not care.

I have been playing ranger since my first login, they hate us.
I love my elementalist, my second profession, which has no decent condi build
I love my engi (carpal-tunnel meister) which still has several bugs (others have too)
blah blah blah.

Selling an expansion without fixing bugs and problems in the game is the worst idea ever. If there were no bugs in core professions, maybe they would be able to withstand elites. Only necro & corrupt boon works very well now.

This. And hey are going to lose in the end because of their greed. Me and many else have left this game. I am one of those who are waiting for a good patch until I’ll be back, but most left for good….

They already screwed up early when they didn’t deliver any patches. Having a balance patch every 6+ months just sent all the big-name pvp players of other games back to just those games. Many of the top pvp players of other similar titles tried GW2 and loved it for its graphics and combat, but swiftly left when ANet didn’t deliver on their promises.

rchu.8945:

I rather deal with bunker meta than a thief stealth abuse meta.

Stealth abuse? What abuse? You mean those completely useless scouts that were running around trying to 1v1 people, which was literally the only thing they could do?

Well. I guess it is way more fun to have six people fight each other for an hour and never dropping below 50% hp!

I was once a very active thief player who played the profession since before launch. I managed to stick to it all the way, up until HoT…. It completely broke the game for me. Not being able to do squat in pvp is just extremely frustrating, especially given that it was the only part of the game I enjoyed the last year I played it.

It is extremely sad to go to metabattle and not find thief listed. Clicking to show thief builds will just show a list of ~10 builds…

I wonder how much ANet must lose again before they fix this game? Last time they screwed up balance they lost a huge bunch of pvp players that had moved from other games because they loved the combat. These players left because of anet’s messed up logic thinking that they only need to balance every 6-8 months. These players never returned.

I left the game almost right after HoT launched and I haven’t logged in since. I check the forums now and then just to see if anything changes, and it isn’t looking good. I love this game so much and really want to see it succeed, but they never will with this lazy kitten balance team. Having the same meta for 6+ months with only a handful of professions/builds represented is insane. Anyone should know that it will destroy a game :/

/rant

I really want to come back, because this game has so much to offer. But in its current state I wouldn’t come back even if I got payed to do so.

This is on a mid-2012 MacBook Pro Retina, top specced.

I run this game on medium to high settings on Windows 10 with about 30fps on average with Bootcamp.

On OS X El Capitan I run the game on lowest settings with 10fps on average.

We really need a NATIVE OS X client, not a Cider port…