Guild Wars 2

teg.1340:

Kanadaj.8510:

With a Valkyrie armor or some other defensive set you sacrifice out-of-stealth crit rate and thus DPS, but mistakes or being outplayed becomes less punishing. It’s just so kitten easy for nearly any class to destroy someone with 12k hp and no bonus thoughness, when compared to someone with PVT armor and -33% damage from protection.

I wont call valkyrie armor a defensive set. With 2/3 offensive stats its clearly an offensive armor set.

The difference is due to stealth thieves have to opportunity to totally ignore toughness because you can dish out massive single target burst damage in like no time.
Other professions have to rely on toughness and vitality, so they dont implode on spike damage.

Take a look at this D/D eles build posted in the video. He massively stacks toughness to get a ~30% damage reduction. He also got 16k HP while ele being on the lowest HP pool (like thieves).

So at the end he got 22% more damage reduction than a thief running around in full valk/zerk ignoring all toughness (medium armor is ~8% more damage reduction for free compared to light armor).

Its not the boons alone which make the difference.

I’ve never said that it’s only about the boons. Valkyrie is not a full defensive set, that is true, but it’s a lot more defensible thakittenerker armor, which most thieves use.

I’ve never even said that thieves are worse than eles when it comes to roflstomping noobs. I’d rather say that playing against thieves have an exponential curve – you are terribly bad against them, but there is a point where you can fight them on 50-50 basis, and over that thieves are easy to handle. Compared to this, the elementalist have a kind of linear curve – though their values are higher than for most other classes, if you are moderately better, you can beat them.

So in a situation against bad players, thieves will shine more, whereas against veterans an elementalist of the same skill level will bring more to the table (assuming that both the thief and elementalist are decent players or better) since thief mechanics are stronger but more susceptible to counter-play.

I wouldn’t exactly say “without sacrificing DMG output”. Sure, with a Valkyrie armor and good gameplay one can definitely go into 1vX as long as the enemies are not experienced sPvP players with the thief, but with a Zerker armor I assure you the second lvl 80 warrior in sight will make you slice you into tini-tiny little pieces. 50% haste + knock down+100b is still dangerous for us. With a Valkyrie armor or some other defensive set you sacrifice out-of-stealth crit rate and thus DPS, but mistakes or being outplayed becomes less punishing. It’s just so kitten easy for nearly any class to destroy someone with 12k hp and no bonus thoughness, when compared to someone with PVT armor and -33% damage from protection.

So, sure, you can beat even 10 bad players, but even if there is only one good between them that knows how to handle you, the damage from him and the others will screw you. Though for D/D eles the skill graph isn’t this extreme since there is a lack of boon removals in the game, especially when compared to the amount of boons.

So in the end, I’d say D/D eles have a more stable 1vX experience, while thieves are either godlike or “food” in these situations.

I usually roam around with thief, and usually I just either kill everything without being threatened, or just pulled out from SR, stunned and, bursted down. If I have Shadow Step up, good for me, otherwise I just die.

Okay guys, enough of the QQ fest, ANet won’t listen to what we have to say in the matter with thieves anyway. Now I’m here to ask you – how did you adapt to the nerf in PvE, sPvP and WvW? How did you change your build and playstyle?

I’m especially eager to hear the opinions of people using Valk/Berserker armor, since I’m using that build, but others are welcome as well.

Okay guys, I’ve met this issue a few times before – I’m throwing Dancing Dagger towards a foe on a flat area and the game shows the message “obstructed”. I’ve never met this message on other ranged abilities, just on this one, but this one is quite frequent. As a thief I use it frequently to stop my foe from running away (sometimes it’s more convenient than HS spam) but it just won’t work properly…

If you are alone you will get stomped by your opponent anyway, stealth or not.

If you are 1vX against the thief, your mates are just bad. No sane thief would try to stomp you if you have some ppl around you that can actually do damage since he would suffer too much damage. Blame your people, not the thief. If I can stop another thief with auto attacks from stomping my mates, so can yours.

If it’s a small group against a small group, like 2v2 or 3v3, you won’t really get up anyway unless you have a thief to cast SR on you and heal you. It’s just too intense.

In a big (most likely WvW) fight you’ll just die anyway unless you are an elementalist that can just vapor form out of the way.

Stealth Stomp is a class mechanic. We are fragile, we don’t have huge ranged damage, epic PBAoE or heavy armor. If we want to take you down in a group, we are risking our lives. Never seen a QQ thread about teleport/portal/stealth finishers on mesmer forums. Believe me, they can do it better than us.

/thread

Venom by itself is bad, it seriously needs a buff. But a bleed+venom build can become quite decent according to my experiences, given that you have enough cond dmg and cond duration. But that only works in solo. Imho until ANet solves the issue of a common condition stack between players you shouldn’t stick to these kind of builds.

Btw I don’t understand why poison bleed and burning are a thing shared between players. If 5 condition build people attack the same target, they should deal the same kind of damage 5 power based people would do, even if only in a longer time. Reduce max stack to 15-20 and give us individual condition stacks, that’s what ANet should so.

I’m rolling a Thief with Valkyrie armor with Ruby Orbs and Berserker jewelry. Traits are 0/30/30/10 for improved sustain, though more into Acrobatics can work as well instead of Shadow Arts 30.

The point that many thieves don’t get is that you actually don’t really need all that precision your Berserker’s give. Hidden assassin gives you 100% CC in stealth, Side strike gives 7%CC from side/back, but in PvP you will either use BS or spam HS (which I don’t recommend). With my build I have 45%(+5% from weapon) CC without consumables but 15K HP to start with.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/thief/?7.3|8.1g.h14.8.1g.h1|5.1g.h1m|1p.a7.1p.a7.1p.a7.1p.a7.1p.a7.1p.a7|4s.d1e.1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.cg.67|0.u63c.u56b.a6.0|0.0|57.5b.5h.5c.5v|e

Note that the Crit value Calculation is not good somehow since it shows much higher chance than I have with the same stats (62% instead of 50%).

I can easily fight solo between 3-4 enemies as long as they don’t have heavy AoE CC, even down some of them, but at this number they usually won’t let me stomp them. I could solo most thieves I’ve met so far with this build (unless they had 25 overpower stacks, that rune is kinda like a kitten cheat. People with 25 overpower, 10+ might and power food+sharpening stones hit so much it’s impossible to mitigate)

So if you ask be berserker armor is overvalued since our strongest skill, BS actually crits all the time. And you don’t want to facetank a warrior, do you?

Also, as Yishis already showed in a video, we can actually beat D/D eles (but it’s tad hard). For that though, you need a Valkyrie or a Cavalier armor since they burst you down hard otherwise.

Condi/Crit hybrid is a nice idea basically, but the problem is the initiative system. If we were a cooldown based class, having every skill deal 0.75 times the damage it would do if we are specialised would add up nicely, so in the end you would have 1.5x the effectiveness.

However, because all of our skills use the same initiative, going hybrid reduces the effectiveness of each skill’s damage/initiative to 70-80%(depends on skill and build). In case of DB it’s not that annoying since it will deal decent damage on crits as well and that replaces the missing Cond Damage somewhat, but CnD-BS combo will deal a lot less damage than it otherwise would(2-3k less).

With a hybrid thief, you give up a lot of burst potential for some DoT effectiveness or the other way around. If you are good, this tradeoff can be quite good in the end, since you “only” lose about 50-60% critical damage and 600-700 condition damage compared to spec builds but you have 17.4k life. You can trade off some vit for thoughness if you replace Carrion with Rabid (also some power for precision) but I think it’s not really worth investing too much into thoughness in armor. Conditions ignore it, and it’s not a flat value but a divider that gets less good the more armor you have. If you can’t get your thoughness to +300 or more you won’t really feel the improvement.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/thief/?7.3|8.1o.a7.8.1o.h9|5.1h.h2|1h.7l.1h.7l.1h.7l.1h.7l.1h.7l.1h.7l|1h.62.1h.62.1g.61.1g.61.1g.61.1g.61|0.u63c.p46.f2.0|31.e|57.5o.5e.5h.5v|e

This is a somewhat more realistic calculation of your stats, unlike the GW2DB calculator. This one works in WvW and PvE, and the numbers seem to be where they should be.

What you get by this tradeoff is flexibility, but imho we should leave that for eles who are as good in all traits at the same time as specced characters in the same, especially D/D bunkers (oh I hate them sooooo much).

Shemsu.8721:

Kanadaj.8510:

There is a reason Shadowstep takes you out of stealth – landing BS should require at least some skill, and should be dodgeable if outplayed.

Shadowstep does NOT take you out of stealth, its currently a bug thats been reported, you become visible to yourself, but are still in stealth (look at your buff icons) and can still perform stealth attacks, as it should be. They just need to fix the graphics error of not appearing to be in stealth to the player

True, my bad there.

Grimwolf.7163:

Biggest issue would be bypassing jumping puzzles, or porting inside a keep.

IMHO it should more of work like this: use pathfinding to find the shortest route to the target. If this route (not the straight one) is within the range of the skill, then shadowstep to the target. If it’s not, shadowste kitten et on cooldown for 2 seconds (as the current 4-5 seconds is quite punishing for not being able to tell the range of Steal). This would also require an increase in the Range of Shadowsteps (like +20%) but in the end the effective range would be the same in any non-flatland situations while being able to get to the target as long as it’s within reason, such is instead of walking around a small wall you could go around, you can just shadowstep to the target, In case of jumping puzzles and walls the pathfinding would report a failure, resulting in a balanced change.

Also, they’ll give us some kitty anti-bunker utility skills. We already have our utility skills pigeonholed, so it’d be a serious decision which skill to take out, but bunker eles and guardians are nearly impossible to take down without CnD spam for regen, which they will remove. The countermechanics are a good thing to have, but outplaying should be possible. But, back to the topic, I went off from mobility to utility.

Eles are a jack-of-all-trades, but they will be nerfed in every aspect a bit I think, as we should be the most mobile class, not them. Also I think we’ll get to see some improved CC removing effects on our dodges, since our best defense is our mobility. We get a nerf on our burst, but ANet wants to keep us being able to compete with other classes and remain a high-demand-high-cap class that can outplay most classes given enough skill. So the changes should impact beginners mostly, and the godlike thieves will find a way to compete with other classes.

And I really hope condition builds gets some more love. Those have the best mobility out there IMO, but condition damage is still lackluster, it needs more DPS but less uptime, and maybe some improvement on how bleeding stacks in a group. They say that if the bleeding cap would be on a /person basis, it would be too strong, but tell me that 4 power based characters bursting on you won’t instagib you. These would make our most mobile subclass more potential, and, given they said they want to improve both cond based builds and our mobility, these changes might actually see the light.

Brassnautilus.2941:

if they let us move faster in stealth (with trait OOC speed perhaps?)
that’d help us land more of those precious backstabs aye?

We already have a Trait for that, it’s up to 50%MS, I don’t think we need more than this. That would make Backstab seriously overpowered. There is a reason Shadowstep takes you out of stealth – landing BS should require at least some skill, and should be dodgeable if outplayed.

Heyo guys, my thief just reached level 80 and I have a problem deciding which path to take. I loved using condition damage leveling, but I feel that in a condition heavy team, my “talent” would be wasted. I’ve tried a crit build from lvl 70 and I found it extremely strong, but extremely vulnerable at the same time. Can anyone list me the pros and cons for each (both PvP and PvE) and a general rotation about how I should play to achieve the best results? Numeric values are welcome

Edit: Oh, and forgot to mention that I prefer D/D or maybe P/D. Still waiting for PvP comparison + general rotations, since I’ve tried both but I found that I somehow miss the point of the crit builds, and generally always die against 2+ enemies with them.