Guild Wars 2

OP …

It doesn’t even matter anymore in PvP, not as a thief. Picking fights would be something that could actually make sense and help a team out in SPvP but with the introduction of this patch, there is no need to do that anymore.

Thief’s best role in this game now is just running away. Try to +1 a fight, do a little damage and literally run away, that’s it. There is nothing else for thief to do, because thief is in a terrible spot now thanks to Anet being the bunch of moronic trash developers they are who listen to nothing but crying idiots on the forums because they themselves at Anet suck far too much at their own creation to actually know what to do with it to make it balanced.

If you want to enjoy a stealth class, roll mesmer. Thief isn’t worth playing. It is an utter pathetic joke now, kind of like “Karl” and how he couldn’t even remember thief traits during a live stream because that’s how much this ridiculous idiot cares about his job and thief class and why we’re in such a stupid spot as it is.

“Build diversity!” Yep, D/P only or suck as a thief. Anet logic 101 right there. Rock n’ Roll baby, WOO!!!

Anet’s the only company in the MMO field I’ve ever known to employ ONLY idiots.

I really like this post … informative and helps thieves out who need it, but I’d like to add something to this if you do not mind and if you do … well I’m sorry! T_T

I run a hybrid build and I want to add that a mixture of celestial and carrion can also work very well for a hybrid setup, I recently switched some of my armor to carrion (the lesser pieces) and weapons to carrion, then swapped out my infusions for different ones. I was previously running full celestial but due to trait changes lacking stats, that no longer works.

I didn’t know how well it would perform in WvW but it actually feels very strong and has multiple options that are as simple as changing some traits and middle utility slot.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAoYVlsMhunYbTw0Jw/EHIFFvBCgFw/C3w8pfyTYxA-TlCFABN8AAaUVF/UCSpaFAcCAE4QAYlyva2fAO9BKfEACAgAsz6sO3ZghO0hO0hO025R35OP6OLFwiCrA-w

IE: If you are going against a necro with heavy condition return, then taking mug with revealed training and Blinding Powder / Ambush Trap / Assassin’s signet / Haste (etc etc) can be beneficial compared to running even more condition sources via traps so you nuke yourself less from condi return. (Another benefit to being hybrid and not full condition damage, you will not be completely hard countered from plague signet and it’s ridiculously stupid short cooldown)

This also helps vs classes who have a lot more condition clear, so on and so forth. But I find in many situations it’s actually really … really good as it is, but the point is there are options to change up vs would be weaknesses with the change of two traits and one utility.

Also, sigil of leeching is open to change, you could use blood – rage – or whatever suits your fancy. I just enjoy having that added bit of sustain and near-gauranteed burst on a backstab so long as it lands, which on a double (or in an ideal situation triple trapped) target 10 (or 15) vulnerability and 10 (or 15) might … backstab crits clear 7k + leeching which pushes roughly 8k and then sigil of air pushes that up to about 9k, which is really good damage considering the added condi pressure the build has.

Not to mention plenty of health and armor so you don’t explode and even comes with a little bonus healing to help sustain slightly more and play a bit more aggressive. The healing also affects sigil of blood so, that’s part of why I mentioned it.

Bah, sorry for the lengthy rant …

I had a random thought and I honestly feel like this would not only help thieves out with a much needed buff to help keep up with power creep but would also help with build diversity while not pushing us into levels of being OP as sin, because face it, if we get more damage we’ll just turn into one trick ponies that are incredibly boring and lame to play – but we do need a little help in this patch to keep up.

Why I say this? As either a burst or condition thief, it’s easy to have a lot traited into steal, and the lack of Bountiful Theft can completely nullify Mug, Improvisation and Bewildering Ambush or Sleight of Hand – not to mention the lack of steal effects you get simply because an Aegis boon popped up right as you used steal – then there’s the fact you do not steal boons (on top of being able to steal Aegis) or the ability to steal stability, which is huge. The other traits don’t even compare to this, this is something thieves NEED and makes taking a would-be good choice for burst thief or would-be good choice for condi thief pretty much counter intuitive. There really isn’t a choice.

Also, in favor of P/P thieves missing Ricochet trait … not that I use it … perhaps considering returning it in slot for Bountiful Theft – or at least something else like Piercing Shots … let it pierce / hit up to 3 targets? Something to give P/P and P/D a little more viability against tons of clones / pets / turrets / grouped players etc. Just some ideas, I don’t care what, but give the P/X thieves some love – this would then give some actual options that feel like valid choices for various thief types.

I don’t play P/P or P/D but I can’t see that being a terrible thing to add to the list of being potentially viable considering how generally useless they seem in PvP (at least P/P which needs the most love, hence suggested trait ideas), especially with multiple players present. And in any case, if Bountiful Theft was baseline this would allow for Pressure Striking – Trickster – or whatever other option, to allow being chosen without simply gimping thief play style overall – hell it might allow for something other than Trickery being taken which if I’m not mistaken, would support the idea of “Build Diversity”.

Forgive me if post is redundant or has ridiculously bad wording, I’m really tired upon writing this. :l

How about if Diamond Skin wasn’t just a 100% immunity to conditions above 90% health and instead was just a 50% reduced condition duration / effectiveness above say 75-80% health?

Who am I kidding, Anet loves their passive easy mode trash. Expect it to stay. Passive hard counters are Anet’s way of “Esports”.

Oh yeah, I’m not saying the build is worthless, don’t get me wrong. It looks like it’s had some serious thought process put behind it for a while now and it seems really interesting and potentially devastating in the right circumstances, but not something I’d run personally is all I’m really saying about it – sorry if it sounds otherwise, I do think it’s well thought out.

The only things I don’t really agree with in the build is using fleet shadow vs pain response – especially because of good swiftness uptime due to using acro and that’s a pretty substantial condi clear + regen you’re replacing for speed in stealth. That and a potential issue vs diamond skin elementalists, most specifically the most common cancer among them, celestial.

What I do like about the build though, is the fact shadow step is taken out in place of caltrops or needle trap due to having Hard to Catch, which really gives room to make some scary pressure if someone runs into traps that are already down while heal / utilities are ready, not to mention improvisation has less RNG considering there’s a signet, deception, trap, trick and venom in the build – that’s honestly really awesome to consider.

I really don’t think the build is bad and in fact looks like it has good potential but it’s possibly weak vs condi bombs and I don’t know how it would play out vs something like diamond skin celestial trash, but I won’t say it’s bad vs that without trying it – I simply do not know.

One other point I’d like to bring up is cleanses being so strong is also part of why I run scavenging as well. It helps to get more damage out of the limited duration my condis are actually applied in many pvp situations. Also, don’t underestimate having sigil of intelligence even with carrion stats, there’s multiple ways to add a nice effective burst to the condi pressure we have and when combined with anywhere between 5-13 stacks of vulnerability (situational, frailty on SB / CnD combined with traps etc) and +5-10 might from traps triggering, it actually adds up quite nicely if done right.

Then there’s having a leeching effect on top of a gauranteed crit backstab with basi venom behind it. A healthy crit + stun that leads into a crit heartseeker which also stuns and also lets you follow up with stolen ele bundle crit + chill or maybe another heart seeker if you don’t. The whole point of that is to bring them out of diamond skin, which if done right it should, and then you can utilize traps & condi damage vs them to prevent them from recovering. (There are, of course, other applications to having burst damage like this)

But mostly, the reasoning ^ is why I prefer what I do. Otherwise celestial cheese with diamond skin feels nearly like a hard counter unless played stupidly well because that build is so unbelievably forgiving. I could see how S/D might be able to deal with it between boon steal and having outs vs all the fire field crap though. My issue is that traps are hard enough to utilize as it is, but when someone is simply immune to all condi effects, it adds that to the list on top of evades / evade skills, invulnerability, pets, minions and clones that completely nullify needle traps – which ultimately makes it less effective – so I like to remove at least one of those possibilities as soon as possible.

I’d say “That’s all” but I just TL:DR’d – sorry.

Interesting build … but it’s missing burst damage. Which you might not think is necessary for a condition build, but it has it’s place.

I say this because it’s going to be really hard to get through diamond skin without mug and or any kind of immediate burst damage available. I play something similar to this, but I use scavenging runes with bursting + frailty on SB and bursting + intelligence on D/D.

This gives me the option to not only gaurantee a crit backstab and follow up with 1 or 2 crit heartseekers but can layer a leeching proc into the small burst as well which is generally enough to get them beyond the health threshold of diamond skin and then use steal to stealth / apply condis (if available) and follow up with needle trap right on top of them from utilities, maybe another backstab followed by some death blossoms to keep their health down and descending before switching to SB to kite and prevent being wrekt from OP burns that will do more damage than all of our efforts applying condis combined.

Maybe just maybe S/D would be the saving grace vs celestiamentalists with diamond skin (among their general OP trashiness) but the burst to get them below that thresh hold is a bit low, however, at least the boons can be slowly stripped away from use of S/D which may actually work. I wouldn’t know, I don’t generally try to S/D in a condition build, but considering how I’ve been running intelligence with D/D to break that health thresh hold, maybe that’s worth playing around with.

Interesting find on signet of malice too but I’m not sure I’d want to go with such a low amount of condi clearing though. No shadow step or shadow’s embrace for dealing with a condi bomb, not even pain response which is pretty huge in place of movement speed in stealth. Yeah there’s sword #2 & trickster, but you literally have one trick (caltrops) in this build and then one condition clear from signet, that’s not much on demand clearing. Compare to shadow stepping away to use hide in shadows, stealth which activates shadow’s embrace = up to 4 condis removed, then shadow return, 3 more removed – or simply camping inside shadow refuge / stealth if nothing else.

I don’t think this build is bad, but there are going to be some matchups that could potentially render it totally ineffective, such as an ele with diamond skin. If you can’t apply any conditions, then you aren’t going to do much pressure if any at all. It’s honestly pretty nice to have the availability of a crit backstab, even if it’s only about 3.5-4k, that’s still a nice immediate amount of damage – with the ability to still do up to 2 crit heart seekers, then start applying condis to keep the pressure going.

Sucks compared to Improvisation and Executioner, hands down, it’s not on par.

GM trait that gives us 33% poison duration, which isn’t enough to boost Dagger Training to another tick, same with Choking Gas or whirl finisher in a poison field. Honestly, it’s a huge slap in the face to see that Revanants get an adept tier trait to give 50% more poison duration while our GM Tier is still sitting at it’s previous patch 33% when it was adept, and that 10% damage bonus isn’t anything compared to resetting utilities.

Seriously Anet, please. Could you maybe care a little more about thief traits outside of burst or bust land? :l

Yeah, as a long time D/D user in a condi build, I can vouch that the evade frames are indefinitely too short. The evade is very unreliable and can really help you waste initiative. I’ve used it for years and I can’t really tell exactly when the evade frames come in, they are just too short and feel so random when they actually evade skills. 1/4th of a second is too short, I think it needs to at least be 1/3rd of a second to feel at least a little bit reliable, anything more than that is really debatable material. The animation is over one second long, so 1/3rd still allows for counter play and at least is a step in a direction of making it feel like you can preemptively evade attacks with it rather than just using it and hoping for the best.

Also I’d like to point out that it is not “just 33333333” spam in a condi build. You want 1-2 death blossoms on an immobilized target, not more unless they are REALLY stuck there. Heartseeker and CnD are still useful, even with carrion stats.

Spamming only 3 with condi is about as effective as spamming only 2 as burst. Just sayn’.

Wow … it used to be 10 seconds … I assume that was before patch went live?

I guess they did that because then improvisation makes potent poisons look like even more of a joke than it already is. Like if our heal resets, then that’s another trap, which would be really great on a 10 second CD. But no, instead I get to love how there’s ridiculous burning / cheesy crap from literally everything, but our condition options are a joke, thanks Anet.

People can argue that “venom share” is a good condition build but … really? You’re relying on your team for that to be effective, and anyway in a team fight in spvp condition cleansing is very much a thing at higher level play. Or the occasionally well coordinated squad in WvW.

I think either other classes need toning down in damage, or thief needs to be brought up in terms of survival. Either a higher base health pool so we can also take advantage of zerker without being worthless or some kind of intrinsic or traited survival mechanic that every other class has.

We have no damage immunity. No blocks. No boon spam with tons of uptime on protection or viable sources of stability, definitely no ability to self max might at all or for prolonged periods of time and I’d say at least we have stealth but let’s just look at a PU mesmer who can keep fighting from the safety of stealth – people have nothing to complain about on thieves compared to literally everything else.

Catch a thief, it’s dead. “Catch” a mesmer and it’s going to get away if it wants to and or can just keep using phantasms and clones from stealth to apply pressure, healing up while doing so, then actually re-entering the frey and fighting again with damage that can 100%-0% someone instantly with refreshed CD’s.

Also I’d really love it if Shortbow wasn’t nerfed to hell, especially from a condi thief perspective. The nerf to choking gas was an absolute and poorly thought out joke. Previous reasons for nerfing it was to prevent from poison durations being too long. But now that poison stacks, the durations are ultimately meaningless and hardly worth using, it’s a huge toll on initiative / damage if you use choking gas over cluster bombs. You already nerfed choking gas with the new formula to poison and then went to nerf the duration further because you were afraid of it doing “too much damage” – meanwhile guardians can instantly apply 10-24 stacks of burning and down someone in 3 seconds with ONE condition source outside of the damage they dealt applying the burns.

Previous patch we had 3 seconds of poison per pulse which stacked duration. This equated up to 12 seconds of poison duration which with previous formula was like having two stacks of poison worth of damage for 12 seconds. Now even if we trait our poison duration up to 3 seconds using a venom sigil and a near worthless grand master trait the maximum duration is 6 seconds when combining all choking gas pulses.

This is not a very worthwhile investment when considering taking improvisation being able to reset valuable defensive or offensive utilities, heal, or even elite – also a sigil slot. Not to mention, considering the formula changes, we actually lose damage on top of uptime to choking gas even while traited using a grand master trait with venom sigil compared to last patch when it was used without trait or venom sigil.

Potent Poisons NEEDS more to be worth taking. I am 100% certain that 50% duration increase baseline is where it needs to be sitting to even begin to become truly useful, and the 10% damage bonus is not enough to really seal the deal on top of that, not compared to the rest of the damage being thrown out every where else. So move the damage bonus up to at least 20% along with a 50% duration increase and this trait gains some potential viability. Don’t scream at me that this is in any form or way OP in SPvP, all I need to say is look at burning. At best, with fully blown utilities and the time + effort involved trying to stack poison, this still wouldn’t do half of what burning does which requires far less effort to continually re-apply.

Or you could try using it with hide in shadows since it shares the same CD. Positioning the trap is much easier that way, too.

Though if you run improvisation you can reset hide in shadows so then it too can “only trigger every other heal” every now and then. Not really a huge problem though. Your suggested change would just nerf it for other thief builds because you selfishly want it to be better for withdraw.

Needle Trap is already pretty poor as it is since players can literally just evade over traps and it doesn’t trigger the effect, the trap just vanishes. So … instead of just having it reworked for the one heal that you use, how about an effectiveness rework so it’s more similar to the effectiveness of ranger traps? :l

Would be nice to have persisting traps that aren’t turned to completely worthless traits / utilities because of an invulnerability / evade attack or dodge roll – on top of tons of minions, pets, clones that trigger it away from the intended target, even if you try to drop it right on top of them.

The trap needs a different kind of rework, not to become nerfed into trash tier for anyone who isn’t running withdraw, IMO.

Oh my gawd, shortbow just ate another nerf that it honestly did not need … please don’t give Anet a reason to excessively nerf it some more. ._.

Interpret Interrupt.3824:

Amulet stats keep balance. You can balance amulets much more effectively than balancing point distribution.
While I think some amulet stat combinations are strange, that was their decision.
Amulets force you to pick a play style. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. i.e. (Power, precision, crit damage, toughness, vitality). You must pick what you value.

Actually some people can have their cake and eat it too, they take celestial and then thanks to Arenanet’s brilliance, they are able to self stack might to max, allowing them to tank / sustain better, while dealing actual hybrid damage that out classes someone vested into one or the other.

Either more classes need self stacking might mechanics so that more than one class can run it dominantly (with two-three others who’re okay with it), or more realistically, the self stacking might mechanics need to be toned the @#$% down so that celestial is more of a support amulet rather than a god-tier ‘I will out-role you in every role thanks to my class being built the way it is’ amulet.

Eeeeyup, and this patch is even worse than ever before. With how high damage is, Anet can’t really buff thief damage or they’d be really stupid with a zerker amulet, and I’d honestly hate to see thief go in that direction. It’s possibly time we get some other kind of actual survival mechanic instead of just 25% damage reduction because we’re in stealth which guess what, takes away from our damage.

Meanwhile heavies who don’t need stealth can sustain incredibly well compared to us, be in the fight quite a lot more, and do similar if not greater damage than thieves can. The amount of effort required to do well on thief compared to other classes is definitely an annoying gap to deal with now, it’s simply too much.

Honestly, things need to just start being toned down. I personally don’t feel like it’s all that fun to see a non “assassin” class who’s much tankier than said class with higher sustain that often times does similar if not more spike damage damage than the supposed assassin class. What’s the point of playing a risk vs reward class if there is no reward for that risk. :l

Forsaken.4215:

babazhook.6805:

Ok i finally decided to try out Condi dagger dagger, SB off hand focusing on poison. Venomshare used along with leeching venoms.

In Pve this works fine. As soon as I specced him out we were figthing Jormag and after shares i was getting 3+k tick bleeds 5+k tick poisons and 2k+ torments on the dragon and the various champions we fought. This even when the dragon up in the air. With leeching oodles of healing came in. the sharing really boosted overall damage .

I took it over to WvW and about break even in 1v1’s. There a whole lot of conditions flying around at this level and it was hard to get a stealth to cleanse them but when I did get into Iv1 or two i could easily get over 1k poison ticks (more if shared) from the poison and it was easy to put on again.

I did not have a runeset of Orr completed yet so I used Rata Sum of all things. Given bleed duration on base daggers is so high I wanted to get poison as high as possible without taking potent poison and got that up to 90 percent. Rata sum has a radiation field and that piles on bleeds and weakness if they decide to stand in it.

I tried potent poison but found i could get more damage on with Improv as any utility reset allowed more in the way of poison and bleeds. (withdraw/RFI/spider venom/XXX/Basi) .

Precison was fairly decent at 28 percent chance of crit meaning a DB would tend proc a crit so I put a generosity sigil one weapon malice the other. I might switch up malice and put blight , earth ot AOE torment. I did not take pressure strike instead taking trickery so the withdraw and RFI could clear conditions.

Weakness runs a full 7 seconds on posion with that 10 second cooldown so unless cleansed there reall good uptime on that and with vigor nerfed the impact of 50 percent less endurance gain is significant.

it not as survivable as p/d or the p/p trapper condi build I was using but if you play it right in a group your venom shares can really turn a battle around quick.

finally d/d is just more fun than PD. I really had a blast with Jormag fight and those death blossoms/AAS endless dodging in and out dropping caltrops.

I find d/p fun and it also was the previous condi meta set up for reasons you don’t seem to understand. It was clear that you needed pistol main hand to create distance and to avoid aoe with skill 3 and dagger was only used for stealth. I don’t need to be stealthed using DIRE and I don’t know why you think d/d condi is more fun its like a cheap old school power d/d that will never compare so I don’t know what you’re trying to say anywhere.

Along with this and you simply calling me noob and typing “ahahahahahaha” as if that was some kind of intelligent argument, I rest my case towards you. I don’t even need to mention that you are joke in PvP because even given the chance to challenge you, you would find some kind of mundane excuse to avoid such challenge and simply keep typing “Omg hahahaha noob you’re bad” instead of having any kind of intelligent discussion what so ever.

Seriously, not only learn to play issues here, but I wish there was an age limitation on forums so 12 year olds couldn’t voice their opinionated garbage on the forums. :/

That being said, enough of you, back to topic. I do think thief traps could use a little QoL change. Condi thief isn’t totally dead, but compared to burning which by itself can overshadow our entire layering of conditions, is just too much. Burn Guards / Burn elementalists are prime candidates for how ridiculous it is. Other classes seem okay, except maybe engineer, but I would put them in 3rd compared to the other two.

Not sure why I have an idiot laughing at me when I’m just discussing possible thief changes, other than the fact idiot probably doesn’t care about thief and would hate to see it being buffed in a condi sense. Burst thief is fine, condi thief is not. But most burst players do not take condi cleanse to max their burst output, which makes them somewhat weak vs condis.

Of course an idiot troll would come here hating on condis and acting like condi thief is in an all around good spot. Yeah, easy to say in WvW when you can take perplexity runes + food buffs to carry your lack of skill, but in SPvP that is a completely different story.

I am talking for the sake of SPvP thieves since I’m not really interested in drilling the hell out of WvW players who’re generally just PvE hereoes and offer little to no challenge at all, much like Forsaken here.

Seriously. I am 100% assured that Forsaken could never, ever, not even with the cheesiest thief build he could imagine – could beat me on either my burst or condi thief spec that I play. :l

I just want to see condi thieves get some proper adjustments, not have some idiot who only knows how to fight in PvE laugh at me for wanting such things.

Tabootrinket.2631:

The only problem I have with our traps is that even though it can target up to 5 foe (I don’t remember the exact number), it disappear right when the first foe activates it, effectively trapping… only him, and not his comrades that are just 0.05 seconds behind him.

To be able to trap all those 5 targets we have to use our traps like melee attacks which is kinda… weird.

I’ve suggested placing a delay of 1seconde after activation of the traps before it disappears so we can effectively trap multiple foes at the same time.
I think other people have made this suggestion too before.

Or maybe Anet could for once not skimp on thief options and make taking some of our utilities more worth taking. Like if it can affect 5 targets, then how about allowing it to stay after it’s activated, but if someone’s already been hit by it, they can’t be hit by it again – thus allowing for other targets to run into it (up to it’s listed amount) while it “persists” for a 3 to 5 second duration, giving it a chance to actually hit other targets.

Potent Poison isn’t worth taking so I too like the fact he didn’t even mention it. Also it would be pretty baller if executioner & exposed weakness applied to conditions.

PP needs a duration increase and possibly more of a damage increase to be worth anything at all.

Chrisco, you’re right, at least some things did get fixed. But it seemed mostly on the lines of what was so ridiculously broken they absolutely had to fix it such as symbols and grenade issues.

I wonder how many more weeks (months, realistically) we get to put up with the rest of the garbage from this patch? I guess 4 weeks later we’ll see some more minor class changes.

They admit to issues with the game like burning dealing too much damage, yet they don’t fix it. But they were okay with buffing classes that didn’t need a buff. I guess the newb necros must have REALLY been crying hard in the forums to change that consume conditions effect from 10 stacks of vuln to 5, I mean it only lasted 5 seconds and kitten they are stupid levels of sustain now, not like it really hurt them in the first place.

Instead of balance maintenance, they’re so proud of their current trash that WvW gets Golem Rush!

Omg such wow, many golem, very stupid – just like Anet. Color me not surprised that this patch was a joke.

Here’s a question to go with our trival garbage traps!

Why are our traps such worthless trash compared to a rangers? Have you seen what a condition damage ranger does with them? You can die to their traps by themselves. That is to say their utility skills alone can kill you … “Balanced”

Meanwhile thief traps … oh man, that 3 second immobilize and 3 bleeds and one stack of poison!!! LOOK OUT … IT MIGHT BE A SLIGHT INCONVENIENCE!!! Or how about Ambush Trap, alright I got an NPC helping me … wait wat, it’s already dead. Tripwire? How about they just evade over it and it’s like it never even existed in the first place. At least shadow trap doesn’t suffer from that, but it completely negates a trait that it doesn’t even work with anyway, “Resourceful Trapper”. Really, our traps are a pathetic joke, another clear indicator that whatever idiot is balancing our class, doesn’t care about his job.

Meanwhile ranger traps have persisting effects that are useful and do a lot of damage, so even when triggered with an evade, they can still @#$% you up! Totally and completely fair to have such powerful utilities where as ours are borderline worthless.

Oh yeah, celestial in SPvP for thief is a joke now. Before this patch it was possible to make it work, sure it wasn’t an outstanding meta build but it could work since damage from the condi side helped the lack of raw damage, not to mention you could become insanely hard to kill. But now the condi damage suffers a lot due to changes (and really just isn’t strong for thief now anyways) while your burst just isn’t high enough to really make it count on top of that.

(WvW was an entirely different story though. I loved it and miss it. -.-)

The most I could see celestial doing in SPvP on a thief now is being run as some kinda “Ninja Medic” with runes of mercy and shadow arts with shadow protector to not only revive 30% faster but also apply 25% damage reduction from stealthing allies and applying an additional 600 heal through regeneration while reviving – that mixed with shadow refuge would be a pretty fast revive and you’d sit at 3100 toughness +25% damage reduction while reviving and it would stack extra regeneration for when they also revive with 30% more health.

Other than that though, you’re just an annoying target to try to kill that doesn’t serve much of a threat otherwise. Having might stacked from a team fight would help to deal actual damage, but it’s squat compared to say an elementalist who not only hits hard while running cele, but also has burning and the ability to self max might.

Prior to this patch I used to run full celestial in WvW using pack runes to push my crit up to 54% with fury, as well as having that nice condition damage added under my burst at a 50% bonus duration, the build felt quite strong actually … won many 1vX fights, even up to 1v4 (bad players … what can I say) with it.

After patch though, full celestial is extremely weak for thief now due to the way condition damage formula now works, so I have to add in some carrion to the mix to keep the condition damage from being worthless. So the build comes out to be something like this:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAoYVlsMhunYzTw0JQ/EH0EFvGShZwfFfxGqDgJMCA-TliFABL8AAWUVF+UCKpaFAcIAoS53M7P4m+AEOBAIfEACAgAsz6sO3ZghO0hO0hO0m5R35OP6NLFwiCrA-w

However the formula changes really make thief condition damage feel a lot weaker, especially considering how much higher burst feels on a thief, not to mention necros just laugh at thieves trying to play condi now. So it’s likely I am going to switch my gear over to something like this instead:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAsYVlsMhunY5Tw0Jw/EH0EFvGShZwfFfRZoDgJMCA-TFCFABHq+DAPCABODAJp8gPlg1s/QVKxwTfQAAEgdWn15ODM0hO0hO0h2NP6O35RvZpAiYMA-w

Definitely a lot of damage, added toughness and health so I hopefully won’t just explode on contact with any burst class … just have to actually make the switch. Problem is, I find burst to be very boring … but what can I do, this is Anet. Thanks Anet :l

And if you wonder why I take uncatchable in WvW for PvP, even on a burst build … two reasons. 1) I fight a lot with short bow and kiting is very useful now that we can squish so easily due to power creep. 2) It helps with keeping a condition on my target to make better use of Exposed Weakness & chasing while wielding S/D. Pack runes are my source of fury so it opens up the ability to take uncatchable …

Edit: Now that I think about it, I previously used the torment for condition layering for my hybrid build but that has changed too and the necessity for it is potentially less. So I could consider just taking air & fire on SB instead to have max burst potential, debatable what to put on D/D.

I honestly don’t recommend playing thief in this patch. I’ve mained thief since pre-launch betas and I’ve seen a lot of changes and toughed it out.

This patch though … build diversity down even further and we’re very niche in SPvP which makes it quite boring to play IMO. This patch is so boring / bad to me as a thief that I’ve finally for the first time since launch switched to another class, that class being Mesmer.

As much as I would rather stick with thief, mesmer is a superior class, has stronger burst / sustain with AI and plenty of stealth. I mean kitten you can force Celestial ele’s to run away instead of them being able to easily out sustain your damage as a thief.

Unless you plan to PvE, don’t pick thief IMHO. It’s not worth it now.

So … pets that taunt apparently don’t care about stealth. I’m almost wondering if Arenanet did this on accident, but I say almost because really after all the stupid things they’ve done with this game it doesn’t surprise me that they would intentionally do something stupid like this on purpose.

It seems to go through everything and obviously it’s okay for it to ignore block, stability, evades? and that which cannot be seen in the first place. Between this, burning … and really so many other rage-inducing problems with this patch (like skill queue not working well / if at all and just how glaringly bad some of the balance is) … I honestly hate this patch more than any other patch I’ve ever played that Arenanet has released since launch.

Time for another half year to year long break from this game so hopefully they’ve at least tweaked some of the current crap by then … (hopefully) … and then oh wait, Heart of Trash will be released. No thanks. I don’t even want to know what kind of atrocious problems that will bring into SPvP. At least they aren’t going about Esports as a sales pitch this time, because that’s all it was before launch, a sales pitch. A promise as empty as their passion for the PvP in this game.

No, not “just condi” is the problem. Of course you want to say “The rest is great” because it still supports celestial ele’s being imbalanced and literally the most forgiving thing to play that is also incredibly strong at the moment. They still burst VERY hard while retaining additional toughness AND healing to supply a lot of extra sustain which makes things like the burning they stack a layer that simply pushes the class well over the top. If you simply nerf burning too hard, this makes taking a condition damage amulet worthless for an ele while still keeping celestial strong due to the fact it still bursts pretty hard due to being able to max might alone and makes the desire of taking something like marauder or zerker amulet less tempting – making the game effectively more “stale”.

Also, I’m pretty sure a zerker ele doesn’t need a full 25 stacks of might to do massive damage. Let’s just say, for example, that they manage to stack 25 stacks of bloodlust which is 250 power, roughly 1/3rd of what you can get out of maxing might stacks.

That by itself is very high damage even without any might. And I can say that I’ve personally felt that from a zerker ele with 25 stacks of bloodlust as he literally charged through me and I went down in well under one second, and this was while using Marauder Amulet on Thief so you can’t try to pin it on me being at 11k health. I simply got hit by one small combo which resulted in 100%-0% in less than a second and that was that.

Let me say again, this was done without might stacked. To say that zerker eles need the ability to self stack 25 might in this patch is pretty much ludicrous and is literally transparent as you probably play cele and really enjoy being carried by something that is so obviously easy mode over powered.

All I’m thinking of is similarly to how sigil of battle got nerfed, perhaps with these damage values, might stacking from finishers could be considered in terms of stacking less might as well. Face it, you know something is really strong (if not TOO strong) when that’s the only thing people use, that thing being celestial on elementalist because it’s incredibly strong in literally every role it plays which does not support supposed “Build Diversity”. Even with those nerfs, it’s tankiness and sustain will survive and it would probably then fall more under a support category rather than “I’m S class in every category”.

I’m not saying nerf ONLY ele by all this either, as anything else with fire field finishers would be affected as well, but it’s one possible step in a direction of toning things down because obviously, the class (not to mention much more) is in need of such. And ele isn’t the ONLY class that needs toning down, if that needs to be said on top of all of that.

Going down instantaneously without any ability to actually react to it =/= counter play or any form of “balance” that you’re supposedly speaking in favor of. This includes mesmer shatter as well, I’ve seen the same crap happen there too. It’s sooo much fun to be unaware that a stealthed class is about to literally one shot you in roughly 0.2 seconds which is not nearly enough to time to even react at all outside of simply observing that you’re now down.

This patch is ridiculous at the moment and I really hope to see a lot of things get toned down (inb4 6 months later / “soon” / never), and I’d really enjoy seeing more than 95% of elementalists just playing celestial cheese. Because that’s what it is, a cheesy build and I’m going to say it again, it is not just burning that’s making it so stupidly strong. Burning is simply the icing to an already rich cake.

Necros are quite tanky now and their sustain is incredibly hard to deal with. When someone can tank up to 3 DPS classes and be okay for a solid minute or more, especially with this game’s current power creep … :l

The least I will say is that you’re completely wrong, OP. They do not need more because if you gave them more than what they have now, they’d be unkillable demi-gods.

Elxdark.9702:

ele is fine, burn damage isn’t.

Ele is not fine even with a burning damage nerf, but it will definitely help. It’s their ability to stack might so high that makes them far over the top with celestial. The class turns into something that literally spams rotation to survive – the hardest part is probably swapping to “the right attunement” to fit the situation, but even if that’s messed up, the build is still incredibly forgiving, which with the damage available in game now is mind blowingly stupid to watch.

Nerf their ability to maintain so much might along with the justified nerf to burning and then they won’t be stupid tanky with high sustain that also does really high damage.

Honestly, I don’t believe that any class should be able to self stack max might. That should definitely be a team play mechanic, not a solo play mechanic, as that creates ridiculously strong classes like what we have now with celestiamentalists.

There really is so much more that needs nerfing other than ele, too. This game’s balance is just atrocious right now. :l

I can deal with the changes to Shadow’s Embrace only removing damaging conditions, but IMO this should include fear as well considering terrormancer, or is this not a thing anymore? However, what does need to change is the fact that the ICD for Shadow’s Embrace removing conditions needs to stop “pausing” while you are not in stealth anymore.

That way we will again cleanse conditions upon entering stealth and once again every 3 seconds we remain in stealth … I say this because with how powerful damage is now, those cleanses are absolutely necessary. It’s really not fun to have multiple stacks of burning with just a few bleed, only to see the bleed get wiped after 2 seconds of stealth, then try to wait for burning to go away but it brings you down anyway.

Reason I’m not too worried about immobilize / etc is because skills like heartseeker don’t even care about movement imparing effects anymore, so running away / chasing people is actually easier than it was last patch so long as you have the initiative.

Which I guess ^ is a problem for people who have a hard time managing their initiative and instead spam it all out on 22222222222 trying to down someone without really paying attention to the flow of battle.

All in all, Shadow’s Embrace needs to effectively cleanse conditions better. :l

“I could hold a 3v1 with very little effort” excluding the part where you probably weren’t killing them because you spent a majority of that time just hiding. Not to mention, this is WvW we’re talking about, the majority of players there are vastly inferior to hard core PvP players.

I’ve won 1v4’s out there kitten and I run a hybrid build that isn’t even P/D. SPvP though, much much different story. Condi was already pretty weak in SPvP and now thanks to these changes and extreme power creep, plus the formula changes due to stacking nerfing our core source of condi dmg, these changes have actually pushed condi thief out of SPvP in terms of being effective.

It’s so bad due to all of these changes that I went from always playing a condi thief, even in SPvP, to now playing burst thief. Having the ability to stack poison doesn’t make much of a difference for condi thieves other than opening up spider venom as a viable venom for venom sharing. And even then it’s likely they’re still playing burst while using leeching venoms as added burst / healing. Also, another would be good option for poison stacking was also nerfed before even given a chance to run live and see it in action, which not only loses poison uptime, but damage due to formula changes and duration loss – so it’s pretty much unsuccessful as a condi option now. (Speaking of Shortbow / #4 skill choking gas)

And anyway, condi thieves weren’t OP, especially not in a team fight. P/D is way better in a 1v1 than a 1vx situation. And really what made it “OP” is Rune of Perplexity which was much … much easier to utilize as a stealth class, than a non stealth class. So the whole thing that made it feel so ridiculous is confusion on steal + confusion on being hit thanks to the set and lastly, confusion on interrupt.

Really though, P/D was pretty hard countered by deflect / reflect projectile. Can’t say how many times I’ve wrecked P/D thieves using stolen warrior skill or simply dagger storm. They’re also quite ineffective vs elementalists and necros will simply give them the condis back.

The build was hardly OP. even with perplexity runes if you actually knew how to fight it instead of just spamming skills through confusion. And as it stands now, condi thief NEEDS some buffs to traits / weapon sets to be worth anything at all now compared to everything else in the game. As it is now, condi thief is pretty bad.

So bad that I’ve forsaken my favorite play style to play something that’s actually effective.

Yeah, it feels like total crap to use in PvP situations. Hell even PvE, like, why does it even have a poison effect anymore? The uptime is nearly nothing, especially in PvP, it is not worth wasting the initiative on unless you plan to blast finisher inside of it.

The poison duration seriously needs to be reverted or even buffed up to 4 seconds per pulse due to the fact it stacks. It’s not like it’s going to do crazy damage, even with a condi build invested fully into poison duration.

I really wish Anet cared enough about things like this to actually test them in pvp situations to see how worthless it is right now. I now out of habit from years of using it prior to this trash-patch, use it when people are running away to try to slow healing.

Even with hidden thief to immobilize them in choking gas from surprise shot, it ticks for maybe two pulses, that’s THREE seconds of poison uptime, which is a total waste of effort. Anet, are you serious? Like, please, I’d love to know why thieves of all classes basically ate nothing but nerfs to condi damage and pressure thanks to formula changes due to stacking higher than 25. (Bleeds do less, what little torment we could apply do less, and poison got nerfed too. Yes it stacks but if you don’t have at least three stacks, you are losing damage, which I don’t know about you, but to me that = nerf)

You could say SB can do more damage now that it stacks. Honestly it cannot. Formula change + duration nerf makes it do not only less damage than previous patch but our poison uptime from it is borderline worthless, as in no value, as in Anet please sit down and play your game with these changes and tell us this is somehow “sick in practice” from actual experience.

Poison stacking is I was looking forward to the most in this patch. I honestly thought that it might have brought condi thieves up to par with other classes that have access to burning and they would be able to hold their own with the changes.

But then Anet went and changed SB #4 and on top of that, completely skimped out on our poison stacking related traits. Potent Poisons … received a 10% damage increase to poisons (which doesn’t even help) and stayed at it’s base of 33% duration which then moved to Grand Master as if it somehow belongs there thanks to that literally negligible amount of damage increase.

I really hope Anet does something for condi thieves. But from my experience and their negligence, I’m hoping for nothing at all.

Jugglemonkey.8741:

If you want power too, carrion is the way forward. It depends how durable you want to be, dire is better generally on a pure condi build and the extra toughness really makes a difference.

If you want power and some crit chance to work with critical strikes, consider some sinister gear. Direct damage would be akin to knight’s gear, you’d have condi instead of toughness which means more bleed damage but no better defence than a zerker build has.

Scavenger runes are good with high vitality, plex and krait work well too (plex more for WvW).

Frankly though, hybrid builds don’t work amazingly on thief, you’re generally better off going full zerk or dire and doing either condi or direct damage, not both. P/D cele may be an exception, but since you don’t wanna change weapons or trinkets you’re really limiting your options.

I would like to say that before this patch, I ran a hybrid thief and it was incredibly successful for me personally. After patch though, I agree with your statement, hybrid thief is a thing of the past / worthless.

You either go full investment, or you go home. You’re going to need x amount of power to get through the initial defense of something like say an elementalist running diamond armor, and of course x condition damage so that you actually have pressure because compared to what other classes can do with burning alone you are going to need it.

IMO, Condi thief needs a little bit of love. >.<

Yeah, I suppose on Golems that doesn’t compare to in actual practice, but as far as PvE goes it actually does. All Guardian team is the new meta, until this joke is fixed.

Still, I really think condi thief needs a little love. I’m not suggesting putting burning on it, that would fix nothing other than add to the mess that this game is currently. I’ve posted about it before but I think Dagger Training, Potent Poisons, and SB#4 need love.

I don’t know what to suggest for P/D but I feel like they might be able to utilize dagger training while running P/D & D/D. Maybe not ideal, and if that’s the case, P/D definitely needs something. Even if it’s just a faster #1 attack which would help P/P as well since they also got the nerf stick up in unmentionable places this patch too.

:/

I used to play condi thief, but thanks to these changes and Anet’s version of “Build Diversity”, I am now a typical burst thief in PvP.

Don’t worry S/D lovers, Anet also pushed condi thieves into uselessness in PvP too. Meanwhile just having a dagger mainhand with burst damage is the only way left to go. Doesn’t really matter what offhand you take, doesn’t make too much difference, as long as you have the only thing that’s even remotely effective for thief anymore, backstab.

#Arenanubs #BuildDiversity #Esports \o/

Not even 20-25 stacks, even with Potent Poisons, venom sigil, runeset with 30% poison duration and SB #4 spam … Arenanet is just straight up, stupid. Hands down, stupid. They do not think / test things out in the field, type stupid. Ready to assume things are strong when they aren’t, and assume things are weak when they aren’t without testing it at all type stupid.

You can get maybe 12 stacks when running potent poisons (trash trait) a venom sigil and a runeset with a 30% poison bonus on it by spamming SB #4. Even if SB #4 were buffed to a 4 second duration base and Potent Poisons buffed up to 50% uptime and took that along with a venom sigil and poison rune set, we would get 12 seconds total uptime out of the field if someone were to stand in it like last patch, except it would do a little more damage yet would still pale compared to cluster bomb, especially detonated which ironically costs less initiative.

Meanwhile, burning. Do I even need to say more? Burning ticking for thousands of damage with easy instant applications baked into powerful damage rotations. God forbid you ever seen more than 10 stacks on you. Take an Elementalist which is bad enough or the new burn Guardians … absolutely ridiculous what they can pull off with burning. Who needs condis / layering (or skill) when you can litter the ground with burn effects, or when your constant block spam applies burning on top of your other sources to it + great damage even with condi stats.

I’m going to say this again. Anet it … is @#$%‘ing stupid. ^^ Condi thief is no longer a viable option, at all. Our condi dmg actually went down due to formula changes and stacking going higher without giving us any compensation – and we are the only class that can condi without burning, so now we’re the joke-tier condi class \o/. And if you think at least our damage is good? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlU76B50hvs

Enjoy.

I can promise ya’ll, that at this rate, there is no way in hell from a pvp perspective that I will ever considering buying Heart of Thorns. I knew based on what I read that this patch was going to be a trainwreck in terms of balance and that thief was going to suck thanks to Karl being an idiot who stutters over our traits during livestream with things like “I haven’t looked at these in weeks” – Oh, that’s nice, glad to know we’re in not only capable but also caring hands, hahahaha.

“Trainwreck” is an understatement. This is by far the most garbage patch with the most mind blowing level of terrible balance that rewards bad players far more than any other patch I have ever seen.

Ensign.2189:

Jesiah.2457:

Kind of like Sundering Strikes in CS, there’s no point to take that over Practiced Tolerance … ever.

In PvE Sundering Strikes is generally a better trait than Practiced Tolerance.

Practiced Tolerance will raise the DPS of a full berserker thief by about 5%. After a relatively short ramp-up time, Sundering Strikes will raise the DPS of everyone hitting the same target by 3-4%.

You run Practiced Tolerance in 3 situations:

- You are doing solo content where no one else benefits from the vulnerability
- Your target dies in less than 5 seconds, or you otherwise cannot stick to it (PvP)
- Your target already has 25 stacks of vulnerability from other players

Otherwise, you should be running Sundering Strikes.

Let me re-itterate then, Sundering Strikes is completely worthless in PvP. I guess if PvE is your thing and that works for your team, great, at least Anet did that right then. I’m completely PvP focused, and that’s it. My thoughts will be PvP / WvW biased.

Rai.9625:

Dagger Training: I would like to see it as applied poison training and working with all weapons. The 2s are okay, but it would become really a formidable choice with 3s.

Potent Poison: Well… yea it is kinda weak. Though we can really get poison running like mad, just spam SB4 for example, the fields stack together.

Spamming SB #4 even with Potent Poisons, Venom Sigil and a Poison Focused runeset is considerably less damage than simply spamming cluster bombs. And yes I am talking about while running carrion stats with runeset of orr. Not only does cluster bomb deal immediate damage in a much much larger number, it also applies up to 3 stacks of bleeding. I tested with Carrion + Runeset of Orr, venom sigil & bursting. (No duration buff to bleeding)

You literally lose damage spamming SB #4 vs detonating cluster bombs unless it is going up against 5 targets vs 3, and even then, undetonated it far outweighs the poison aoe damage. Not only does it immediately deal it’s damage, in a pvp situation where the poison field has to be stood within for the full duration to get the effect it is even less effective, but even if they stood still in the field the damage is totally weak compared to cluster bombs.

SB #4 did not need a nerf and considering these changes, it honestly would not be even remotely close to OP with a 4 second duration per pulse. You do realize that through poison stacking, the duration nerf and poison formula damage changes, that nerf to 2 seconds per pulse made it’s damage completely inferior for condi thieves, right?

We got nerfed in poison damage formula and duration, basically a double nerf. SB #4 would have been nerfed simply because of the poison damage formula changing so now it is utter trash in a condi thief world. Works great for burst though, since weakness is your friend for survival while trying to burst someone down and it allows for that reliably. Other than that, it has no purpose.

Spamming #4 over #2 is a huge damage loss. Go test it on golems! Take Potent Poisons, Venom Sigil, and Runeset of Orr. Spam #4, look at damage, then spam #2 and look at damage. Even without bonuses to bleed duration, cluster bomb wins not only in the ability to stack bleed & deal immediate damage, it also costs 1 less initiative per cast, so it is superior to SB #4 damage in every way, even without bonuses to bleeding while SB #4 is stacking three bonuses to duration, one of which boosts poison damage by a measly 10%.

The only way that SB #4 could even come close to contending with cluster bomb damage is with at least 3 seconds baseline (and realistically I don’t think 4 would be OP and IMO should be considered) with the potential for 100% increased poison duration by changing Potent Poisons to 50% increased duration, this would turn a 4 initiative skill into something that then contends with cluster bomb’s damage, which considering it costs more initiative than cluster bomb, makes sense that the damage would be about the same at that point given the whole healing reduction argument – and again that’s only if you stand in the field.

This would also give room for Dagger Training to be worth something as well at 3 seconds baseline, and like I said before, would open up build options through sigil / rune set for thief, without still being OP like burn or current bugged trash like grenade barrage that 100%-0%’s people with no telegraph instant cast. Thanks Anet!

Edit: I guess realistically it would be wise to switch SB #4 to 3 seconds base first instead of 4, that’s more of a knee jerk buff rather than fine tuning, unlike some of the changes in this patch. ~.~

I really do not feel enough pressure trying to stack poisons even stacking leeching venoms with spider venom / basi venom, and all of the poison duration buffing things you can take.

Just going to weigh in my thoughts on thief condi builds now. The damage they put out actually feels lower than last patch due to changes. Even though we can stack poison now it is indeed underwhelming compared to other condi classes.

Burning, by itself, makes our efforts at stacking condis feel very mediocre. I used to love playing condi thief, it’s all I played, but now I’ve fallen in line with playing burst because it is simply rewarded far more than condi thief setups.

I’ve tried running DA / SA / Trickery which are ideal lines for condi thief based on Leeching Venoms and having the extra attrition from SA needed to perform with a condi build.

Dagger Training is very underwhelming and so is Potent Poisons. Mug is simply much stronger than Dagger Training ever will be and if you trait into Bewildering Ambush you are giving up a 20 second CD steal that deals damage while healing you, rips boons AND interrupts your target which makes for clutch heals or heal interrupts / added spike damage.

I feel burst thieves are actually in a good spot with proper setups, however condi is definitely under performing. I know this because I spent the first three days testing and testing and testing many condi variants until finally gave in and started working on a burst play style and have found one that feels very effective pretty quickly. Damage is fairly high and has some team utility as well, also feels great from being a thief who loves to rezbot people as much as possible.

Deadly Arts is good but has useless traits. Dagger Training and Potent Poisons do not even come close to rivaling other traits in the same tier. Trapper’s Respite has some potential and makes Deadly Trapper more worth taking over panic strike and revealed training. Potent Poisons simply pales in comparison to either Improvisation or Executioner simply due to the fact that Improvisation could reset venoms and when combined with Leeching Venom (or even further, venomous aura) the synergy / usefulness of Potent Poisons simply becomes nothing more than a lackluster filler trait.

Same can honestly be said of Dagger Training, there is really no reason to take it over mug or even Trapper’s Respite. The duration on poison is far too short and does not even mesh well with a GM trait in the same line. Both traits need buffs in order to even open up any level of build diversity / viability with it.

I mentioned it before in another thread but if PP was at 50% duration and DT started at 3 seconds baseline, PP would push DT up to 4.5 seconds base, which makes taking a venom sigil suddenly worth it and more appealing, then a poison runeset on top of that pushes it to 6 seconds. Even with changes like that, the condi damage compared to burning would still be quite a bit less, but could definitely open up some options for thief.

I’m not sure what to say / suggest for P/D, but I suppose they could run P/D and D/D with that setup combined with venoms / leeching venoms / venomous aura (or Shadow’s Rejuvination for solo play) and have potential for some damage that might actually compare to other burst setups that are out there.

Shortbow #4 needs a buff as well. It already was an underwhelming weapon set and with these changes to poison stacking plus another duration nerf just hurts condi thief options even more. Even with suggested changes to Potent Poisons, SB #4 could stand to sit at 4 seconds poison duration per pulse because even with 100% poison duration increase from 4 seconds, this makes it to where all four pulses of poison nets the same duration of poison uptime we had last patch without any duration increase.

Pressure Striking is way too hard to utilize. No boon rip & vigor from bountiful theft not only hurts the reliability of steal, it also hurts team effectiveness as well. Same with taking Bewildering Ambush over Sleight of Hand. I don’t really have a complaint with Bewildering Ambush, but the other overall added up condis / effort to try to make it work simply does not perform, not in pvp.

Also Acro got nerfed a bit too hard. Endless Stamina could use either a buff to vigor effectiveness or have a small damage bonus rolled in (maybe both), Feline Grace could probably grant more Vigor on dodge and things like Guarded Initiation are literally trash-tier worthless filler traits.

Kind of like Sundering Strikes in CS, there’s no point to take that over Practiced Tolerance … ever. It went from Adept tier in DA to Master tier in CS with no buff while being stood next to vastly superior traits. It’s what I honestly call a garbage filler trait because Anet ran out of ideas.

Still … burst teef is alright and can use both SA or CS effectively. Will not say the same for condi teef.

Honestly, Dagger Training could have have some potential if it had a 1 second duration increase with some other changes made to Potent Poisons on the same trait line, which IMO Potent Poisons is absolutely weak and in no case whatsoever worth taking in comparison to Improvisation and Executioner as it’s current values stand.

I guess Anet was worried about Thieves being able to do stupid amounts of poison damage, meanwhile burning has easy application and ticks for thousands of damage which by itself overshadows us stacking bleeds, poison and even torment combined – so they gave us pathetic durations on something like Dagger Training. Bravo Anet, bravo.

Two changes that would make Dagger Training much more appealing, let alone actually worth taking, is give Dagger Training a baseline of 3 seconds poison per application. Now, if that sounds worthless, hear me out, I’m all for opening up some build viability / diversity without doing Anet’s level of idiotic crap that creates extremely imbalanced trash.

The following change for this is Potent Poisons, considering they were looking at a +50% damage modifier which would’ve made it possibly worth taking, though with my experience with this patch so far, I don’t think that would’ve been enough. However they then nerfed that to 10% bonus damage … and left the bonus duration the exact same.

So to go from adept tier (that no one EVER took … EVER) they moved it to GM tier by adding +10% poison damage the trait, which is still effectively even more worthless than it just being a 33% duration increase on adept tier and in fact, standing next to executioner or the usefulness of improvisation is a laughable joke (consider taking spider venom with potent poisons vs improvisation and oh look, steal reset your venoms! Combine with leeching venoms and this makes Potent Poisons even more of a joke).

If the duration increase for Potent Poisons were at 50%, this would make things like the suggested change to Dagger Training look more appealing as it would have a duration of 4.5 seconds, which before you scream omg OP, please just think of burning, enough said about that.

This would open up something like a venom sigil becoming worth taking as it would push that base up to 5.1 seconds, and if you really wanted to go all out on a poison duration build, you could in combination with sigil, throw on a rune set supporting poison duration, netting a 100% duration increase with suggested changes. This turns 3 seconds Dagger Training into 6 seconds. Or you could just use the rune set and keep 5 seconds while opening up a sigil slot.

The point of that is, this suddenly gives you options to work with that actually feel like viable increases to consider, rather than a GM Trait that doesn’t even add 1 second to a trait that would replace Mug which on top of it’s current worthlessness, makes it even more of a hideous thing to even think about.

And while on the talk of poison. Shortbow #4 needs that nerf reverted, hands down. Considering how literally out of control everything else is, there was ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to nerf SB #4. In fact, due to poison stacking and how high damage is, even with the previous suggested changes, SB #4 could stand to sit at 4 seconds per pulse.

Why do I say that? Because if you stacked Potent Poisons at suggested 50% increase, a venom sigil, and a runeset supporting poison duration, SB#4 sits at 8 seconds per pulse. Which with how stacking works, all four pulses of poison from SB #4 would be (on paper) the exact same poison duration uptime as previous patch when SB #4 was at 3 seconds.

Think about that for a little bit, the fact that poison uptime with a base of 4 seconds with 100% increase duration equates to the same poison uptime as previous SB #4 at 3 seconds for all four pulses. The only difference is with suggested changes like this, it would do more damage which is GRAVELY needed. As it currently stands, SB #4 isn’t worth using, it is a complete damage loss, nothing more than a utility to activate weakness from lotus poison and drop cluster bombs inside of for aoe weakness which is about it. I guess you could also put it on a down state target, so you can have a whole 6 seconds of poison on them (which you can get simply from Dagger auto attack that also adds more immediate damage / pressure anyway).

And I’m pretty positive that even with this suggested change, it would still do about the same (if not less) damage than a detonated cluster bomb due to it’s immediate damage that also stacks bleeds, which also happens to cost less initiative. So please, please do not tell me this is somehow overpowered. -.-

That’s not the only joke trait.

Potent Poisons, while arguably more effective than assassin’s reward … compared to executioner or improvisation, there’s really no reason to pick it up.

Dagger Training, same thing. Mug and or Trapper’s Respite is infinitely better and doesn’t force you to have a dagger mainhand to utilize with literally worthless effectiveness.

Guarded Initiation – Why choose this, why? Only time you’re really going to strike someone above 90% is when you’re out of combat / already full, this is completely worthless, like, it’s just stupid.

Okay, I agree with most of what OP said – but I have to say S/D does have some synergy with SA due to having access to CnD, allowing to make use of all the condi clear options + regeneration options, the problem is it doesn’t have as much synergy as D/D or especially D/P due to more burst on backstab and even easier access to stealth to make up for the lack of damage from taking SA over CS. And honestly D/P with DA/SA/Trickery is probably the most easy-mode thing thieves have.

S/P has absolutely no synergy with SA where as S/D at least has some, that’s the only thing I honestly disagreed with you on OP. Everything else though, absolutely right.

Meanwhile – condi thieves, hahaha. Not only is S/D suffering but … lololol. With how high damage is and nerfs to things like shortbow (one of our previous condi options) our condi damage has become pretty much a joke. I mean we have cleaner access to leeching venoms and what made it decent, but overall … it just feels inferior to burst thief damage / damage in general.

Finally, Carl “with a K” doesn’t care enough about thieves and their traits to get them right, why should we get his name right? (Potent Poisons? Joke-tier. Dagger Training? More joke tier garbage filler “options” if you want to kitten yourself. Same with what Guarded Initiation turned into.)

Yep, exactly.

Nerf was absolutely unnecessary and even at 4 seconds, it would be far from OP, even with poison duration increases. There’s a lot of options you sacrifice if you try to spec heavily into that anyway.

Potent Poisons over Improvisation is a huuuuge no, it’s way better than I thought it was. Two steal items and then randomly recharged utilities including elite and heal holy … screw Potent Poisons, not even close to worth it.

Executioner has it’s place though too. Definite balanced tradeoff there, but not that other trait that I imagine will be mostly ignored, kind of like Dagger Training. I can understand trapper’s respite, that’s good and opens up more things to play with, and mug is always welcome for burst healing, especially considering our sustain.

Dagger Training though, hahaha … haaa … haha. Nope, not even close. Still suck-tier even combined with a GM trait and rune set to give it one whole additional second.

Yeah, I’m pretty much taking shadow protector until Hidden Thief is fixed which I swear sometimes doesn’t want to work, especially when applying stealth to allies.

So basically about 6 months from now I get to use Hidden Thief again, for a short while, then it will inevitably break yet again.

Or you could just use poison aoe from shortbow and instantly put that weakness on them + blast finisher for slightly longer duration.

This also doesn’t require a trait to do the same thing with a higher effective rate of doing what you just mentioned. Dagger Training is not very good at it’s current values and SB if traited into DA is going to pretty much serve only that purpose along with with mobility, that’s pretty much it.

Not to mention dagger 1 only hits two targets and death blossom is limited to three.

This suggestion is terrible, shadow’s embrace already got a nerf. Reverting it back to normal and putting on GM tier? Laughable.

I think Kury more meant that the poison doesn’t last very long. Previously SB #4 used to stack poison duration, so it was much more useful in that aspect, but now that it stacks intensity AND took a nerf to the duration of poison per pulse and so as a result the duration is extremely short by comparison of pre-patch.

Shortbow #4 didn’t need a nerf and might even be possible to buff without it becoming ridiculously OP or anything close to such. If you’re worried that poison will do too much damage, you should see an Elementalist in SPvP with no food buffs OR might being able to pull off 8k burning ticks.

Poison with a ton of collected stacks and Carrion won’t push more than 3-4k with something that feels like “the planets aligned” for it to happen and the investment required to do so will nerf you in several other areas, netting a damage loss really.

Shortbow #4 will not even come close to something crazy like either of the above at 3 seconds base. In fact, I don’t even think 4 seconds base would be ridiculous either because realistically if even two pulses landed on someone, that is only a 5 second duration of poison where as pre-patch at 3 seconds, two pulses is a 6 second duration. Where as now two pulses at 2 second duration actually only adds up to 3 seconds of poison duration. That is absolutely huge in terms of poison uptime and really hurts.

This overall makes poison up time at 2 seconds per pulse extremely hard to work with as far as up time goes, not to mention a damage loss through shorter duration and the fact poison now needs to stack twice in order to not lose damage compared to pre-patch formula

This nerf hit shortbow excessively hard and is pitifully sad compared to some of the damaging condition setups out there. :/

Honestly Blinding Powder on steal is hardly a buff to hidden thief at all. Having use of the blast finisher on steal is really niche (only blasts on steal location, so if target isn’t in a field you can benefit from, no finisher effect) on top of the fact that the blind won’t blind your target if they aren’t in general blinding powder range.

I don’t think they honestly intended this to happen. But my thoughts on why they weren’t intending to run Blinding Powder with Hidden Thief were correct, they couldn’t get it to work right with the coding aspect of it.

So much sadface, really. I cannot use my build / play style without hidden thief, and this completely destroys my play style especially in light of extreme power creep, holy crap. :/

Actually I think Guarded Initiation would have been a good trait to take going against a condi spamming class, but as it is now, it’s easily close to bottom tier.

Honestly Last Refuge while really really bad, is better than Guarded Initiation at the moment, because at least there’s a point in which it’s more realistically going to be used. But also how about Dagger Training (compare to mug or trap on heal). Or Potent Poisons as a Grand Master trait compared to executioner or improvisation.

Kury.8210:

At random first thing I did after patch was try spamming SB#4 on a skale. The poison couldn’t get past it’s regen. A mere second or 2 after fields drop the dang lizard is no longer poisoned. What the heck is the point now?

Yeah, I’m pretty sure Anet felt that poison stacking on thieves was going to be this amazing thing … so they yet again nerfed the poison duration on SB #4, (probably because of kitten -tier GM trait Potent Poisons) and realistically it never deserved the nerf in the first place.

Potent Poisons needs to be at LEAST 50% duration + 20% increased poison damage to even start to come close to other things out there, couple that with a revert to Shortbow #4 and DT having at least three seconds baseline, and this actually opens up some build options for increasing duration without a ridiculous investment for negligible results.

Using a carrion amulet I’ve yet to clear 4k ticks using venom share with poison venom on thieves guild, DT, Potent Poisons, runeset of orr and venom sigils, steal having 2 stacks obviously, and starting from SB with #4. So on a 180 second CD (Thieves Guild) I can get up to 4k ticks on a non condi cleansing / AI target, so this is basically just on paper stuff.

Where as I’ve seen Ele’s pull off 8k burning ticks with not nearly as much setup / cooldowns required to do so. I really do not think SB #4 deserved a nerf and this is a ridiculously huge investment to try to get something even remotely strong out of it.

Meanwhile, 16k backstabs? Better nerf shortbow!

Also keep DT and Potent Poison kitten by comparison to literally everything else at this point, thanks Anet. <3

Finally, someone else who understands how Dagger Training isn’t worth a kitten !

Sigh … nerfs, more nerfs, bugs which are nerfs … gross, it’s killing the viability of a line that’s definitely going to be closer and closer to stupid to choose over CS. “Build Diversity” does not mean what Anet thinks it means.