The Thief is likely the replacement for the Assassin because under NCSoft’s world view, they did not want Cantha in the game as they were an Asian representation. Then they jammed a Steal skill into F1 to call it a thief instead of assassin, which we basically are.
At your level, go 0/0/0/20/10 and you won’t regret it.
Get Caltrops on dodge, might on dodge, and if you are getting beat up too much, take assassin’s reward for more healing. You get lots of dodges, and your dodges become both attacks and might buffs. The might on dodge gives you the power and condition damage you are missing from putting traits into the strength line. You will clean up, I love it.
The “vice-versa” is the part that makes me laugh. In game rich = RL rich. That’s amazing.
Why did you take Last Refuge over Residual Venom?
I was a little upset when I saw the Pale Tree’s vision of Orr and Trahearne got to deliver the military speech. I feel like my character should have been given control of the pact later on to replace Trahearne due to an injury or something. The Tree’s vision could have been Trahearne’s speech, but then the PLAYER gives the speech in real time later due to fate changing etc. This would have been a sweet way to do it.
Also; all Sigils with a cooldown cannot proc when another Sigil is on cooldown and only one can proc at a time (The main hand one will take precedent over the off hand one) meaning you won’t be able to run with the effects of 2 “On Swap” sigils (Which is generally why Intelligence gets passed up for something like Battle + Geared/Traited Precision for more damage)
Ah that part sucks. If you only equip D/P D like you said, does the offhand P that “remains equipped” proc the swap sigil? Still thinking if you swap to the same weapon set you could benefit from the ini regen and get the 100% crit just like Hidden Killer, but only worry about 1 “on swap” sigil on the off hand weapon.
The idea is taking Quick Pockets and equipping the same weapon combo twice to maximize its effectiveness. What I mean, is equipping D/P and D/P again so you can swap whenever cd is ready for a 3 initiative bonus and continue your rotations.
This is also unique way to also maximize the “on weapon swap” sigils like Sigil of Intelligence – Your next attack after swapping to this weapon while in combat has a 100% chance to critical. Get stealthed, swap weapons to gain 3 ini, then 100% crit backstab which is basically like stuffing a Free Hidden Killer into your build every 10 seconds. The offhand weap could be a Sigil of Energy, Hydromancy, Battle etc. to recover endurance, freeze opponents, or stack a bunch of might.
Quick Pockets looks like crap on paper for a master trait unless you incorporate constant swapping into your playstyle and use the same weapon set again. This might be the most ini regen you could get every 10 seconds. Has anyone tried something like this? Sounds like a lot of fun but wanted to hear if anyone has tried it before buying the sigils.
Are you sure it is your character? I know the thieves themselves talk sometimes.
Caltrops is here to stay, but there may be hope on the 4s reveal. I hear PvE and WvW are getting some splits between them in the next PvP patch, which might involve PvE going back to 3s. No idea if it stays in WvW. Again, all speculation and rumor, but stealth as it is is not done being tweaked.
Thieves do it… From Behind
I would make it a point to tell people that you are black when you join a party, so if they kick you for something stupid, you can report them for racism.
Backstab gets used as much as an opener as it does in the middle and end of fights. Stealth is more or less a setup mechanic to access stealth skills while fighting an opponent.
It was, but I think internal cooldown would be better beacuse then it wouldnt be overpowering.
If we went the ICD route, I wouldn’t put it on a venom at all. Venoms already have 45 second cooldowns minimum. Also ICDs don’t have visible timers so it would just be another random and uncontrollable proc, and you would have no consistent way to reapply it once it gets cleansed, negating the purpose of building for conditions. Underpowered if anything, why even have it.
What if it was something like:
Searing Venom – 15% chance to add one second of burning to poisoned foes (2.5 second cool down).That way you don’t necessarily have to bring your own poison but it would complement dagger main hand and short bow very well.
I like this as a condition build helper, but it doesn’t do anything for venom specs. I mean, it doesn’t really Have to, I just think they need some love as well.
Man, only Sith deal in Absolutes…
Searing Venom would only be as useful as you make it. You want to run 4 venoms now all of a sudden to get access to 40 consecutive seconds of burning, be my guest. This probably wouldn’t be the best setup because all of your other utilities are now gone. PvE it could probably fly, but I wouldn’t PvP that way. 40 seconds of burn gets removed in 1 cleanse just the same as a10 second burn does. So does 25 stacks of bleeding or 5 stacks.
Say you choose 2-3 venoms and pick this trait. There is no point blowing all your venoms on one target immediately if you only have burning them in mind. You can stack up bleeding condition damage then pop a burning to bury it so your bleeds are not first removed. Or pop a venom to get a burn on a target then a few quick bleeds on top to protect it.
OK, so an ele just blew some cantrips or flipped to water to strip your burn off. Now you pop your 2nd venom and put it right back on. They’re gonna have to eat some fresh burn every time they cleanse it.
If this existed, I can’t tell you how to play with it and not suck by popping 4 burns on a guy at the same time expecting them to just die, then watch as it gets cleansed. Nor would it be the 1 trait intended to give 100% uptime PvP burn for anybody who took it.
1100 condition damage = ~603 damage a tick on burning / sec.
603×10 = 6,030
6,030×4 = 24,120Even assuming they aren’t idiots and have a cleanse… I think it’s a bit much.
so 24,120 damage over 40 seconds every 45 seconds, if cleansed its xdamage over however long it took to be cleansed every 45 seconds at the cost of all your utilities and your elite.
Compare that to people that get to have a permanent up time on burning at the cost of equiping their condition damage weapon with a reapply time of anywhere between 2 seconds to 10 seconds depending on who is applying it.
Yeah the thief one is totally to much.
Personally I think it would be a terrible way to do it simply due to the next to no way to maintain the burn for any real length of time outside of PvE.
So you’re saying it sucks because it is Not Enough burning?
“Burning is a condition that inflicts damage over time and stacks in duration.” ~ Wiki
With 1100 condi damage, at best you get 6,030 damage in 10 seconds. You can stack it to last Longer, or reapply it after it gets cleansed. I think it would allow you to keep the pressure on an opponent if you are venom spec’d since you aren’t exactly bursting them or stealthing relentlessly. PvE it is only 24,120 damage over 40 seconds, not exactly game breaking.
5 seconds might be a more likely duration if 10 is OP. Make sense?
Thank you for championing the cause, randomfightfan. Keep up the good fight.
Organically came up with this in one of the many other ideas threads and thought I’d bring to the foreground to see what others’ impressions are.
Searing Venoms – Adds 10 seconds of burning to a target when a venom is cast.
The idea is to buff venom and condition builds in a sensible way since those are our weaker build options at the moment. Burning when CAST and not APPLIED I feel would be appropriately balanced. How this might fit into the traitlines still needs workshopped, but I think it could be fairly added on to Quick Venoms so the trait would look something like this:
Searing Venoms – Adds 10 seconds of burning to a target when a venom is cast. Venom skills recharge 20% faster.
Hear me out. Take a look at Warrior’s Forceful Greatsword trait, which is “Critical hits with a greatsword grant a stack of might. Greatsword skills recharge 20% faster.” That’s an amazing trait. Our venoms would apply a burning condition and are still subject to much longer cooldowns even with the 20% reduction you would gain from this. It is a Master level trait, same as Forceful Greatsword, so it is not too cheap in the tree. It would be cool if Venomous Aura worked with the burning, but that might get OP which is why I say burning on Cast, which belongs to the thief only. Who knows, maybe it wouldn’t be imba.
At any rate, thieves could really use another condition type to help with everything we apply being removed too easily, and speccing full venoms is not as balanced as it could be.
I see where you are going with the burn buff, but in my personal opinion, messing with heartseeker isn’t the ability we want to tweak this on. It would be a nerf unless they increased the damage to Double since the init would be 6 instead of 3. What other abilities have you played around with that just feel too weak or never used? Those are the ones that would be good burn candidates. I think body shot or headshot could add a burn at the expensive of another initiative point.
That or a trait like Searing Venoms which would add a stack or two of burning to a target when a venom is cast (not on strike). Venom builds need some attention/power.
I would like to see heartseeker make rainbow sparkles however.
Goloith I don’t mean to sound insulting, but isn’t your thief like level 15? You were asking advice on getting through early levels a day or two ago and this is the second “nerf heartseeker” thread you have going. I don’t know how you would think it is as strong as you say if you tried spamming it yourself, but you should at least have an idea of how it works now when you play against it as another class. Nobody is using it against you if you have over 50% health, and if you are under that, using it as a finisher is as situational as any other ability from any other class. Another class might hit 2-3 to finish you, but a thief does 2-2 and it takes the same amount of time.
I’ve noticed that Sometimes now during combat I am forced out of stealth to do damage for some reason. My build where I max out Power, Precision, Toughness, Vitality, Healing, and Condition Damage (no room for condi duration except on gear) doesn’t do any damage when I stay stealthed forever anymore. I don’t want people to see me while I kill them, that’s why I rolled thief in the first place!
Also my F1 skill stopped stealing gold. This bug needs fixed ASAP so I can afford to keep making enough gold for gems to buy more stealth for sPvP.
Why do I see more and more self-nerfing thieves in here? Why are we asking for suicide buttons? Every other thread is a thief suggesting a nerf to itself. I think they are all secretly mesmers stacking confusion on me IRL.
And when you hit level 20, put your first 10 points into Trickery and take the Uncatchable trait which drops more caltrops when you dodge. I use it offensively with D/D like this and it is a lot of fun to play:
Get within Steal distance, Cloak and Dagger, hit Steal before CnD goes off, you will shadowstep to enemy and attack and go into stealth instantly. Stand on top of them and dodge backwards dropping caltrops. Dodging does not break stealth and since you are invisible, the enemy will just stand in your caltrops and take 3 stacks of bleeding. Then backstab and just start beating them up, continuing to dodge and run them through your dodgetrops. It is free condition damage without casting anything and single mobs go down pretty quick. I still do this well into the 60’s.
Groups of mobs, just run into the center and pop the real caltrops utility, then deathblossom 2-3 times over them and dodge out of there. Mobs will melt and you won’t even be hit. For some reason this never gets old for me.
What about +crit damage %? The math above is all about straight damage % increases, but what about high crit damage?
You could try soloing guild challenges.
For the first 15-20 levels yes, it is the hardest class to level. If I were you, I would make a B-Line straight for unlocking Caltrops, then everything changes instantly.
I agree in your reasoning for defending Mug, but don’t agree with your proposed solutions. Specifically, rooting CnD would be pretty terrible. Mobility is the key we are pushing, as you’ve also stated, and more rooted abilities stand in direct opposition of that ideal. Anyways, it is worth defending Mug since it is one of the few good things thieves still have, and I really hope they do not change it without giving us Something back. Thief morale is pretty low at the moment.
A little off topic, but I’ve been pushing that the root on Pistol Whip be removed, even if the evasion has to go with it. The point being the thief always has maximum mobility and no skills root them or detract from it. The evasion on pistol whip isn’t useful at all imo because the small interrupt at the beginning resets a mobs attack so they just auto attack you the instant you stop evading from pistol whip, guaranteeing you take damage.
Sounds right to me. It was a bigger nerf to us than all the other professions think it was. The only thing I can think of to rationalize this is that chain CnD stealth gameplay is intended by the devs so thieves retain ability to decide when they want to engage a target at the right moment.
Can anyone explain what the new stealth is after the nerf? Never played a Thief so I was wondering how it affects them. Is it a debuff at the end of stealth that makes it so a Thief can’t be stealth continually or what?
Basically, if you leave stealth via attacking something while stealthed you get a debuff called Revealed which lasts for 4 seconds. While you have the Revealed debuff you cannot go into stealth by any means.
The nerf just made it so that Revealed lasts for 4 seconds instead of 3, which while it doesn’t sound like much, that 1 extra second makes a huge difference when you rely on going into stealth often.
This extra second delay doesn’t affect PvP or WvW much either, it mostly screws with PvE rotations so you get significantly fewer backstabs into a boss over a lengthy fight.
If a fight lasts 2 minutes and you can CnD/Backstab every 3 seconds, you used to deal 40 backstabs. Now, a thief can only deal 30 backstabs, and the loss of 10 CnD/Backstabs is a TON of damage for thieves who rely on it, especially when our DPS wasn’t top tier to begin with.
So does manually pressing 11111 make a pistol fire faster than letting the auto attack do it? or are we basically talking about #1 skill speeds in general?
I think we have our answer.
Agreed, you should post this in your Violated PvE thread again and keep that one floating so devs know it is an issue that won’t die out so quickly.
I don’t know why you would want to delay DB at all, the init is high enough that it can’t really be Spammed to the extent that HS is. Also HS spam seems relatively ineffective so who is really complaining about it, is it really a problem?
Init does seem too high on a few skills but not on D/Anything, so I am not sure where the balance would come in if they did this.
1 sec delay will not stop HS spammers as it is, they will just keep mashing 22222 until their init is gone anyways, and people will still complain.
In short, I guess I would say I am against it because I am not sure what it would fix, or if it would fix anything. Plus I’m not sure what is broken.
I’m level 50 using D/D and just asked a similar question the other day and got some good advice from the community.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Leveling-tips-for-50/first#post1767228
I decided on 0/0/0/20/20 and it does more damage than you would think, with the best survivability you can get at that level. In your case at level 40, try out 0/0/0/20/10. In Acro, get Might on Dodge, which gives you the power and condition damage you are missing from putting points in Strength, and for the 20 point trait you can switch between 2 init/10 seconds, or Assassin’s Reward which will heal you for every init point spent, making you much less squishy. Acro minors also give you swiftness and endurance back for more dodging which is good.
10 in Trickery is the best trait going so far with caltrops on dodge. Combined with the acro traits, your dodge is a great offensive weapon while letting you avoid lots of damage. I always have the full caltrops skill equipped and death blossom groups of mobs, they melt very quickly with this setup. Beyond that I have more to learn about the class, but I love this build for leveling.
As far as I am aware, stealing does not initiate auto attacks per the patch, but it does not cancel them either. I’ve read discussions where your automatic backstab could be the auto attacks animation finishing if you steal while an animation is still going.
Nice data reaffirming the general consensus.
Mobility Suggestion – Pistol Whip: Remove the evade and root, allowing us to walk throughout the channel. Damage can remain the same. Rooted abilities don’t fit well with the thief playstyle and don’t serve them well in PvP. They would also have more control over the ability if it were instant cast, timing an interrupt with it in addition to being rooted lowers its usefulness.
When considering PvE balance, the evade is only useful on mobs immune to the stun, so it kindof makes no sense. If mobs do take the stun, their auto attack is usually timed for the moment you stop evading anyways, forcing you to take damage when using it. Being mobile will allow thieves to move/dodge while channeling more than the current rooted evade.
Thanks for reading, ANet!
So in balancing the PvP meta, they want to make thieves less dangerous to new players by lowering our burst, while simultaneously making thieves and warriors wanted in high level PvP situations more as the anti-bunker classes. You gotta bring a thief or warrior in to tear down that bunker ele or guard since they are effectively giving us a nutcracker. Add more mobility so we can actually survive the lengthy encounter.
What I see here is more nerf to PvE Burst and damage, then compensating this damage loss in PvP with boon hate, which means nothing in PvE.
Thanks for the tips guys, I’ve got a few things to try out now. 20 in Acro sounds decent for the extra 2 init/10 seconds, and if I am in a particularly difficult area I can swap it out for Assassin’s Reward on the fly. Great advice.
Also, i was unaware that Pistol Whip counted as a pistol ability that get’s +10% damage across the board. I was unclear what category it fit in since it was a dual skill and all the chopping is done with a sword. If that is true I will consider it because I’d love to make S/P as my alternate set feel worth it. Currently pistol whip gets me hurt too bad because it interrupts mobs the drops the evade right as they are ready to attack so everything on it hinders me more than helps. Will still play with it tho.
I just hit level 50 and am enjoying the thief playstyle more and more, but I have a few questions to help better understand the class as I continue my journey towards becoming a master thief.
I currently main D/D as I feel it tears through anything and can handle multiple mobs with caltrops and deathblossom without even paying attention condition damage. It is also the most fun for me because sword just feels too slow, pistol whip feels kindof weak, and other weapons objectively kill too slow for my tastes.
My current issue is for some reason I feel like I am not getting the most out of my traits. The only trait I enjoy is Uncatchable, it’s just so useful and I use it offensively even more than defensively. We’re talking about PvE leveling here, so typically offense is king. I’ve always heard that when traiting, don’t pay attention to the stat increases and just go for the actual traits that you want. Trouble is, there are no traits on the thief that I actually want! I also have a Warrior and an Ele, and some of the warrior traits are just unreal (like I can’t believe I get a stack of might every time I crit with a greatsword, plus -20% cooldown! Crazy trait!). The only thing that looks good on paper is Assassins Reward from the Acrobatics line, but that’s a defensive trait and I don’t really feel like I need it for leveling.
The TL;DR questions I am getting to are: Should I just trait for stats and take arbitrary traits in strength or arms? Is power or precision better for PvE leveling? And are there any traits available to me that perhaps I am missing the synergy and true meaning behind that would help me get the most out of my thief?
At bare minimum it needs to do more damage than the auto attack. As of now I can’t tell a difference and I usually take more damage using it despite the evade because you are rooted, and drop back down into the center of the pile of mobs I am attacking.
If the attack did not root or evade, and even kept the same damage, I would be OK with it if I could remain mobile while using it. Using it as another interrupt that did auto attack level damage while moving would be fine. We need more mobility!
I agree randomfightfan. All I am saying is that the odds that they never touch stealth mechanics again are slim. Something is bound to change because they still have a pvp problem to address. Don’t have high hopes for pve going back to the way it was, but we’ll see Something.
Is there a suggestion here? All I hear is more generic nerfing so I can win now.
Would like to see a mod change the title to “IMO, First Two to get the New Achievement”
Snared for 10 seconds. This is sure to increase the fun.
The maps will open up when the level cap increases, if that gives you any indication of what timeframe we are looking at.
All I can say is that I really hope devs are continuing to examine and test new ideas for stealth, and I guarantee they are. Whether the 4s reveal mechanic changes or not, we will still likely see additional changes to stealth in the next 2 months.
Looking forward to the next SotG!
It’s all timing. They had to make sure the SAB was fully released by Apr 1. An April Fools event is not something they could delay by even 1 day. It is clear they wanted to do something big and shocking for us, and they succeeded.