Guild Wars 2

Using offhand air dagger 4 – Ride the Lightning – gives you the new ferocity bonus from Fresh Air despite already being in air attunement.

I mostly play tempest and chrono, I can hold my own against them fine(impossible to kill, but they can’t kill me either) but in a 2v2 or something the healing and constant CC is a bit much, can’t focus them cause they’re immortal, can’t focus the other guy cause the druid keeps healing them.

Anyone got any tips?

Well, since the expansion I found that the old way of playing thief for me is not that enjoyable anymore, there’s too much random bullkitten AoE damage with DH traps and Chrono wells and whatever else visual clutter gets spammed on the point. I switched to P/P with DrD, DA and Trickery/Acro and it’s super fun. DrD with the dash dodge gives you some mobility that P/P usually lacks and with signet of agility you have so many dodges it’s ridiculous. It may not be meta, but 99% of the players don’t play in organized teams on voice comms like the tournament players do, so the “meta” impact is questionable anyway. Most importantly, it’s really kittening fun and it works well enough for average PvP.

Going for more of a casual look.

1. I(engi) cap close at start
2. close is capped, I see on the map that a mesmer that is very good at pvp and knows to “fight on point guys” already downed at mid because he was standing in the circle and eating cleave
3. A ranger goes downstate mid because he was trying to rez that mesmer with a zerker amulet on point, mesmer goes full downed
4. I say kitten it and push far, maybe I can at least get a decap or we have 2 points and the 2 respawns can at least keep close decapped a bit before dying

90% of my soloq games

DeceiverX.8361:

5/6/0/0/3 hits harder on the stab unless you wait for 2 seconds before stabbing in 6/6/0/0/2.

Yeah, but panic strike is so good after the opener to actually finish off.

Well, thief also hits a lot faster than ele and warrior, so I guess that counts for something. The signet is pretty weak, but tbh there are way bigger problems with thief right now and every class has heals they never use, I’d rather they fix the other issues first.

A thief’s strength in PvP is not about winning 1v1s by standing still and autoattacking warriors. Ignoring the fact that s/d(sizer’s build) CAN win pretty much any 1v1 in the game, it’s main advantage is the mobility, there is literally no class in the game that can come close to thief mobility. Comparing classes by who can do more damage in a 1v1 is silly.

Here are some reasons to take a thief over a warrior: decapping, stealth stomp prevention, interrupting stability stomps, countering other DPS classes(mesmer mostly), stripping lich form stability, +1ing fights, stealth crosses.
Those are all things that thieves can do and warriors either can’t do at all or do it a lot worse than thief.

Having the best engage and disengage in the game is a huge advantage over every other DPS class. Stop comparing numbers.

What is the advantage of a celestial thief at holding a point vs ele/engi/warrior/guardian? You don’t really have any secondary healing or regen outside of SA if you run that, your heals either take you off point or stealth you, neither of which is helpful to actually holding a cap/decap and you don’t have enough aoe pressure to actually force people off. I just don’t see it.

66002 with long reach is hilarious against everything, but especially rangers. Full zerk, scholar runes, shadowstep + inf signet + steal with long reach traited is like a 3600 range port that can instadown glassy rangers and such. Who needs stealth in wvw.

Keyboardwarrior.8021:

Narkodx.1472:

Jugglemonkey.8741:

Keyboardwarrior.8021:

What a touching statement, but hummm… every one has a keyboard can type these kitten. Show some proof or don’t BS here, you can take multiple players at the same time with no SA setup. this is the biggest word I read so far on this forum.

Winning fights vs multiple players is more than doable without SA, it’s just harder and involves a lot more kiting. Just because you personally can’t do it, doesn’t mean it’s not possible.

Keyboardwarrior.8021:

Narkodx.1472:

You obviously are a new player – You are using shadows rejuv in pvp

You have no basis to make any claims about the balance of this game

well, 26600 build is one of the major build in pvp, same as 20606, you are probably a new player here, look around this forum, you will find a lot people talking about 26600 build.

Actually, those are major builds for WvW as stealth is stupidly good for that game mode and because damage is higher in WvW due to equipment choices not being as limited. These two things make these builds viable where they may not be otherwise.

PvP has its own meta based on the fact that stealth actually hurts your teams’ performance in a point capture based game. Try 2/6/0/0/6, 6/0/2/0/6 or 5/6/0/0/3 for D/P, depending on what works better for you and for your team.

This guy breaks it down for you

Again, probably lots of you here make your statement while your thief is level 20.

I saw a lot thieves play those build, trust me, they spent more time lay down on the ground than in a fight.

I don’t think any one of you here can show me or play with me your 26006 build in the game, please, don’t simply open your big mouth and bla bla here. or we can even duel, you 26006, me 26600, see who is the last stand. what a joke.

Look, I’m not sure if you’re a troll or not, but please take a look on twitch/youtube at any high level pvp game featuring a thief. Or watch someone like caed/sizer/magictoker, these guys are some of the best pvp thieves in the game. Abosultely no thief you’ll find playing pvp at those levels will be using 6 SA, with the only build that specs into it just takes 2 points for the condi removal(that’s the d/p panic strike 60206).

Casual elegant.

I’ve mostly been playing PvP on my ele as a fresh air s/f build, and I really like the playstyle. I understand wvw might need more mobility, which is why I’m thinking s/d, but I’m having a hard time finding a good bursty build that will not have me dying in seconds, are there any?

Black Box.9312:

Sagat.3285:

Conquest and wvw are fine,remember the game doesn’t support 1v1,have people on squad to cover your weaknesses and cover theirs, we just need more types in pvp the deatmatch is not enough.

If this game wasn’t meant to support 1v1, then we wouldn’t have classes like ranger which are balanced around single target combat. So somewhere down the line Anet is giving us mixed signals.

Single target combat =/= 1v1. It’s not the same as 2 classes with full HP and cooldowns coming to fight just for the sake of it. The game definitely SUPPORTS 1v1, as in, you can do it, but it’s balanced around holding points and 5v5. Builds like hambow are mostly trash in 1v1 fights where the enemy can kite, but are considered very strong because they can fight on point and survive. A thief, probably the most single target damage focused class in the game, isn’t usually used to “1v1” people, it’s used for applying pressure to priority targets in teamfights.

Fiorrello.8126:

I think that conditions are a little to prevelant in PvP right now. It is accepted that to have a viable build for PvP you need to bring tons of cleanses with you. While I think having that as an option is fine I would like for other builds to have some more viability. Conditions are fun to play with but they are also suppressing a lot of possible builds.

I suggest making protection also apply to conditions. It would help a lot of classes and ease the potency of conditions without nerfing them directly.

No, no they are not. I have no idea where this is coming from, maybe wvw, but most builds in the meta are not condition builds – most are celestial/hybrid. The only classes with pure condition builds are engi and necro, and even then they also have builds that are hybrid/power based respectively.

Cygnus.6903:

You can not seriously argue that Soldier’s gear gives you sufficient damage to kill anything right?

Sure it does, soldier hambow can kill plenty. Rom was even running a soldier axe eviscerate build and it worked well.
In general, I think someone did the calculations and I remember them saying that a soldier and a zerker trading hits soldier will eventually win.

Fiorrello.8126:

i’ll throw my bid out there.

make heal as one a survival skill.

This is actually really elegant, +1.

What does “make condis mitigatable” mean? They already are, with cleanses and several runes/food. The condition cap is mostly a technical issue anyway, since the game keeps track over every stack from every player(so if you gain might while the bleed is ticking, your bleeds get stronger ticks but bleeds from other players do not). I don’t think this will be easy to implement without changing the whole system.

And having armour affect condis is a bad idea, it would make bunker/celestial builds even harder to kill. It has nothing to do with the cap anyway, I doubt anyone ever had 25 bleeds stacked on them in sPvP anyway without dying right away, that’s nonsense.

Ok, some points:

It’s not a “3 minute cooldown mobility skill” like some suggested. It’s not a RTL with 180 seconds of CD, it’s a skill that gives you pretty much the best mobility in the game for a minute, with the possibility of giving it to another ally as well.

It might be a bit weak, sure, but elites in this game are not designed as an “I win” button on a huge CD, they’re all situational. Plague form doesn’t tilt the fight in your favor the second you pop it, signet of rage gives you some boons, thief basilisk venom is a 1 second stun. The game isn’t balanced around “2 classes meet, they both dump their elites on each other”, you have to take into account the whole class, or I may as well say thief is unplayable because it has rather weak elites compared to the other classes.

FGS did, IMO, trivialize PvE encounters. Sure, they are badly designed with the stacking thing, but FGS made those stacks 10000x easier. Thus, trivial. I agree that it’s not a solution to the bad design on Anet’s part, but you can’t argue it to be a negative change. What’s funny is that mostly nobody complained about it before when they were happily abusing an exploit.

I suspect the change wasn’t even taking PvE into account THAT much, but rather has to do with players in sPvP using FGS to kill the bosses on forest and the lord on foefire in seconds, which is something that looks bad to spectators in tournaments and such as it can completely turn a game around(more so on foefire) by using an exploit.

Zeta.3198:

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAoYVlsMp8pdPx0J0PNxOBtdAq9E4+EdoEd1CA-TFDFABrpF4Q1Ikb/BAOFAXpEEJlPC8EAQRlgkUClhmg00BoiqKBAOA+tvBwzx588wDP8wDXKgn2CA-w

In my opinion this is a fairly good burst build for roaming that also grants some survival capability.

Credits to Yishis

No offense, but I don’t think that’s a very good build. It’s effective at killing bad players, people who aren’t paying attentions and people who get tired of fighting you. It’s unfavored against most serious roamers/pvpers because it’s predictable as hell and doesn’t put a lot of pressure(lack of poison on steal for example, is really crucial). It was a bit better pre-ferocity, but right now this build is outdated, IMO. You may be able to kill zerker bearbow rangers and think “oh wow this has so much burst” but the main way to win with this build is by dragging out fights and resetting until the other player makes a mistake or has no cooldowns, I wouldn’t recommend it.

d/d in general is a bit of a bad spec right now, as it does almost nothing better than d/p except straight up one shot burst damage.

Staff clones already do that, from 1200 range, while giving you boons. How is this worse?

Condition damage NEEDS more health, armor and sustain because conditions take time to deal damage. If you had something like “condi crit chance” and “condi crit damage” you could get away from having more sustain on condi classes.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

METAShift.2913:

It’s actually the opposite, with hidden killer you can ignore crit chance a lot more than with an s/d build, where it’s practically required to proc the sigils and GTFO.

Who builds 6pts into CritStrike so that they can have 100% crit in stealth using a f-ing S/D?

Don’t be ridiculous. Stop talking now.

What? Other way around dude, d/p can build with valkyrie armor and hidden killer so they have less crit chance but make up for that with the trait, while s/d can’t, so berserker gear and thus crit chance is more important for s/d.

Anyway, to the OP, if you like running s/d acrobatics I suggest zerker armor with maybe some valk and/or cavalier trinkets. Your evades and vitality from the acrobatics line should be enough.

Ascended armor in general, IMO, is a waste unless you have nothing else to spend your money on. The stat gain is minimal compared to the effort and you’ll be disappointed if you ever decide to switch builds. Weapons are a different story, as not only do you get the stat boost, but the weapon base damage increases as well, which is much more noticable.

What’s with all the “Passive play” arguments? My celestial axe warrior does about 1-3 autoattacks in PvP, and that can’t be cleansed. Is that “passive play”? A thief stealing from my necro gets 3s of fear and about 1.5k damage without me having to do anything, is that “passive play”? How about my engi throwing chill grenades and applying chill, bleed, vulnerability and burning with 1 skill?

So mesmer GS doing about 1.5k damage from 1200 range instantly with no reflection is fine, but 2secs of torment is not?

Someone PM’d me and asked me to post his reply:

I am not bothered by the nerf for its “untended” use. I am however annoyed that is it SILL very situational. I play WvW and havent touched PvE in months. FGS before the nerf was used for Mobility, after the change it is still going to be used for mobility.
This MUST be changed. Currently offers SO little in WvW outside of running away…
For me, what i would do:
Fiery Greatsword: This, i would reduce the duration to 30 seconds. Remove the usage cap. Remove/reduce the mobility and increase the damage so it is on the levels of Lich Form and such. i would even consider:
1) 120 Second cool down without a secondary FGS being dropped
or
2) Kept at 180second cool down with a secondary FGS being dropped
With such changes the skills would need to be adjusted:
Flame Wave: Increase the damage, reduce the speed of the projectile. So it is something similar to. Maybe reduce it to 1 projectile at a time and increase the damage. Cast time would need to be reduced as well.
Fiery Eruption: Think this skill is in a reasonable place. Maybe reduce the cast time a little as it is currently a little too long. Maybe make it so that it makes a trail for a few seconds following its target
Fiery Whirl: This would be one of the skills that would need a total redesign. It has too much mobility currently. Could make it something like Warriors 100b that it locks you in place and you swing the flaming sword around damaging and burning foes.
Fiery Rush: Second skill that needs a total redesign. It is okay for it to have a little mobility. Its “exploit” needs to be fixed that is for sure. Could maybe make it so that it is a leap that leaves something like a Larva Font or something at the target and inflicts say 1-2 second Immbo as well
Firestorm: Radius needs to be increased a little, the damage is rather low as well
All skills would need cool down adjustments as well. I think this would actually bring it into being USED more as offensive utility rather than a escape everything on a 180second cool down.

It’s actually the opposite, with hidden killer you can ignore crit chance a lot more than with an s/d build, where it’s practically required to proc the sigils and GTFO.

Lyssa runes are not quite worth it anymore after the nerf. The current dominant rune for damage is strength, and failing that, pack or ogre perhaps.

It really does depend on the build you’re planning to run, but if you’re planning on crafting ascended armor(which is IMO a bad idea btw), go for berserker. It’s useful with both d/p and s/d, and you can do PvE as well if you’re ever interested in that. Other than that, d/p works well with valkyrie armor as hidden killer will allow you to mostly ignore precision.

No, really, the FGS nerf whine is way too much atm. In PvE, I don’t see how anyone could argue that FGS trivialized nearly every fight ever, so I believe it’s justified. For pvp/wvw, how often were people rushing other players down next to a wall? Is that a thing that happens right now that I’m unaware of? Is there some PvP meta where teams used fiery rush next to the altar wall in temple of the silent storm? What’s going on?

For normal usage, in PvP FGS was used mostly as mobility, and it could arguably be said to be buffed in that regard as you now have a high damage attack opener rush. And for PvE, a lot of other classes have bad elites – look at thief and engi for example.

Thieves are in a really mediocre spot right now in pvp, a lot of top teams don’t run thieves anymore. In the ToL you could see the teams with thieves in them being overrun by teams without and both NA and EU winners didn’t have a thief in the comp. The thieves that were there weren’t that impressive as far as their contribution went.

Sure thief is still the best class to kill bad players, tied with mesmer perhaps, but it’s really not among the top classes anymore(warrior, engi and ele).

Personally, I think hide in shadows should remove torment. It looks like it just wasn’t updated after the torment condition was added. Also, it would be nice if condi removal like signet of agility and shadow return and whatever prioritized conditions which are more dangerous(either by dps or just a fixed order – immob, burn, confuse, bleed, torment, then the rest) to help against cover condi spam like vuln on engi.

Most AoE is easy to dodge when you’re 1v1ing someone, sure, but a standard mid fight will usually have so much random crap flying around the point that it’s impossible to dodge everything. Engi turrets and grenades, necro wells, hambow fire and earthshaker, lines of warding, fire rings, meteor showers, etc etc. Going into a fight like that and doing any meaningful damage is suicide, which is where SB is useful.

I don’t see the big deal, sure it will probably be strong but imo it’s not any more broken than the current condi PU mesmer builds, considering it has a lot less defense. And, really, I don’t see this build being better at condi spam over something like engi, which can do 3-4 conditions with just 1 skill.

Really, all this build does is stack torment and confusion, and the full dire gear prevents consistent bleeds from sharper images.

Eh, I wouldn’t call it hybrid, it’s on the same level as the warrior rifle – bleed on autoattack while the rest of the set had nothing to do with conditions whatsoever. Since anet changed the warrior rifle to be more consistent, I think d/d should get the same treatment.

Hahaha, what? A 1 second daze on the autoattack chain? On the second hit? Really?

Was on mag as well, can confirm roaming solo and in small groups is usually good. It’s a bit more problematic on other classes since t2 does have some rather large blobs coming around occasionally, and some do have tryhards that will chase you down halfway across the map with 10 people, but as a thief that shouldn’t be a problem.

Can somebody explain why s/d acro was considered so OP? I understand that if you watch sizer or someone like that play it it would seem so, but then how do you explain not every team running an s/d thief? In the TOL qualifiers, every team ran a hambow, not every team ran a thief, and not all the thieves were s/d acro. Just because something is GOOD doesn’t mean it’s overpowered, instead of just taking the top builds on a class and nerfing them, just make other builds/classes more viable by adding more options. Nerfing anything that becomes strong is a pretty bad balancing strategy.

Ok, so I’ve mostly been playing s/d in spvp and I wanted to change to d/p trickery, most meta builds I found are running either ogre, privateer or strength. The question is, why? Your only source of might for strength runes is steal and the on hit proc, which as a thief I’d rather not do very much, and it basically makes you dependant on stealing other’s might stacks, which is harder on d/p as you have no LS.

As for ogre and privateer, I understand the point, but are the summons actually any good? Can someone explain the reasoning for these runes? Basically, I don’t really like the on hit procs for d/p, as unlike s/d you don’t have that much sustain in a long fight.

From what I can tell, it seems like scholar runes might be a better choice(power, ferocity and extra damage on opening burst, which is kinda the point of d/p), or maybe even runes of the pack.

Liewec.2896:

i think the root of the frustration is the lack of dev support/communication.

the balance speed of a narcoleptic snail
one balance patch in half a year if you’re lucky, and even that won’t touch everything,
hambow for example has been a ridiculously easy and powerful build for over 10 months, there is always a hambow in the major league matches.

lack of rewards
with the addition of the new “reward” tracks we lost our gold income from dyes, we lost the easy ability to gain skins and tomes/skill points, and even worse we have REWARD CAPS in hotjoin and custom arenas, this is unacceptable.
“reward” tracks pretty much reduced the rewards right across the board unless you get extremely lucky with the RNG.

rank too, rank 80 used to be a goal that most of us would never see, but now its a goal that most of us will achieve and then have nothing else to aim for.
i play maybe 2 nights a week and only hotjoin (for multiple reasons, hatred of meta, skyhammer, queues etc) and i’m already at rank 71 playing casually.

Have to disagree here, on your first point, just because hambow is “good” doesn’t mean anything should be done. The game will always have some good builds. Hambow, however, isn’t completely dominating every pvp game – a team of 5 hambows won’t be a good idea against a team of balanced specs. Sure it’s boring and it’s easy to play, but those are also reasons that contribute to how popular it is, and not the other way around. There are other warrior builds atm(celestial axeswordbow is one I heard of) which are also very good, just not as easy to play as hambow.

As for the rewards, I think they’re decent. You get your rank points, your achievement points, your chests, exotic weapons and armor that you can pick, exp tomes and transmutations. It’s a lot better than, say, WvW, especially for small groups, as you’re actively spending money on food and gear if you want to be better.
Sure, it’s not flashy, like getting a precursor drop at the end of a reward path, it’s more like a lot of small rewards more often. I can play 5 soloq games, that takes, say, hour to an hour and a half depending on queues and whatever, and get a CoE(or whatever) weapon, or I can run 3 CoE paths to get 180 tokens, which I can only buy offhands with, in around the same time in a PUG. Plus you get tokens from the reward track as well.

When I first started playing I really wanted to do dungeons. I did them, over and over, until I could get my dungeon master title and I was really happy with it. Now I only do them for easy money, fun with guildies or just when I’m really bored. Same thing, if you feel like maxing the reward tracks and getting your dragon finisher is the end of PvP, you either keep playing it for fun(and compared to dungeons, it’s a lot less static and repetitive), or move on. There is really no way for the game to offer infinitely increasing rewards for that.

I don’t understand the need for a nerf, SA is rarely used in PvE, not used in PvP and only used in WvW. d/d with SA is fine, so is s/d and anything else, so it’s only d/p, right?

Now, d/p SA is pretty good in WvW, sure, but:
- d/d ele can beat it
- nearly every engi build can beat it
- condi necro can beat it
- PU mesmer, especially condi, can beat it
- condi ranger can beat it
- condi thief p/d has a good chance against it
- warrior has a good chance against it, especially with hammer or longbow
All these are rather common roaming specs.

The only thing d/p SA is unbalanced against is other thieves, namely s/d and d/d. Maybe guardians? I don’t have a lot of experience with guardians.

On tier 2, I don’t even see that many d/p thieves anymore, if there is a single class overrepresented it’s engi. In fact, condition builds for engineers work for both PvP and WvW, only in WvW they get stronger because of dire gear and food.
All the classes listed above I encounter daily.

It’s basically a trait line giving thieves a subpar healing signet in stealth with some condi cleanse while giving up damage. Considering our options for dealing with condis are already pretty bad, I don’t see the outrage.

They would all be decent and good players can make them all work, but if you’re just starting out I would suggest something with more survival and condiclear, as you’re going to be outnumbered more often.

The most common and easiest wvw build to play is something like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAoaVlsMpzpdPx0J8PNBNBt9EGeI4uGlYGaFAA-TVRLgAvK/Y2fAQfQk6P+KBJFQEjBA-w

Runes are expensive, you can replace them with runes of the pack, or some other good +power rune(maybe hoelbrak, but not sure, I use pack myself). Traveler runes are also an option.

You can exchange some trinkets for cavalier if you’re feeling squishy, but you shouldn’t have to, as all the blinds and stealth and regen should be enough. Fleet of foot or power of inertia(VI and II in acrobatics) are also an option, replacing mug, with power of inertia being pretty decent if you have strength runes.

If you want to play dagger dagger in wvw, the same build can work replacing V in shadow arts with VI. It’s a bit harder to play tho.

And for the love of god don’t bring this build to tPvP.

Very nice video, trying to pick up s/d now after playing d/d for a long time and these kind of videos really help.

kittenes me off tho, a few times in your videos I see you kill 1 guy, the other guy with him takes a hit and then start running. WTF? Why the hell are you playing the game if you’re gonna run away from every fight? The thief already killed your buddy, he’s probably wasted some cooldowns and initiative and health, fight him kitten . It happens to me sometimes in 1v1(mostly warriors), that’s annoying, but it’s nowhere near as bad as people running away from a 2-3v1.

Why improvisation? 75% of the time, the trait is useless for you, don’t you prefer dagger training for a constant 5% boost?

Or, you know, flanking strike/LS, which is extremely important.

I think of shieldslam-evis like I think of our own Steal-CnD-BS – it’s a great move against newer players and people who aren’t paying attention, but it takes a lot of work to actually land it on a decent player who’s actively fighting you.

Ehh, warrior is strong but that’s a huge exaggeration, I play warrior and the most common zerk roaming build will evis for about 12k, while still being somewhat hard to kill. Maybe a full glass traited one, but that’s a stretch. Also, evis has much more of a telegraph than backstab and has a CD + adrenaline requirement so if you miss you can’t just try again immediately.

Skirt is magitech armor, from the gemstore, top is strider armor, also from the gemstore.

Gain might in stealth, strength runes, battle sigils, other players, lot of ways.

Anyway, I used to run a build like that, it was 6/6/2/0/0(or even 6/6/0/0/2 for max burst). I didn’t even need all those signets, with full zerk gear, ascended daggers, guard stacks, seaweed salad(10% damage bonus when moving) I could usually hit a 9k-13k backstabs on light/medium classes, with up to 19k on uplvls, that with only 5-7 might stacks and scholar runes. Those % dmg bonuses really add up.

A CnD-Mug-BS chain could easily deal around 16k damage, it’s really fun but it’s kind of a one trick pony and will most likely not win any serious fights.

Thanks for the replies guys. I did ask my friends, but a few said that the server is dead and not worth moving to, a few said the opposite, I just wanted to hear more opinions from people who are more heavily invested in wvw.

Due to my schedule, I want to transfer to an EU server, and I have friends on piken square. I was wondering, is piken wvw alive? I’m mostly interested in small groups and I don’t care about ppt as much as long as it’s fun to play.

If not, what other EU server would be good to transfer to, one without too much of a queue but which is active? I’m currently on maguuma and it suits me very well(no queues, but still people to play with) but my schedule and latency make me want to switch.

Thanks

Yep, probably. I started running that build(6/6/2/0/0 actually) again on my thief after the ferocity patch, when the standard 2/6/6/0/0 d/d build was just not doing enough damage and being generally useless(not tanky enough, not bursty enough). It’s really weak against, well, everything. No condi cleanse, low hp and armor, reliance on CnD for stealth and no extra evades. It’s still fun, mainly because people rarely expect it these days.

What?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Improvisation

“Steal is not a bundle; the damage bonus from this trait affects found items that replace the weapon skill bar such as Conjures and Banners.”

Eh, I don’t know, I’m rather content with leaving d/d as a single target focused set. Adding AoE will be a bit much. 4 ini for an evade might be harsh, but 4 ini for 1/2 second evade + blind or evade + cripple might be useful in some cases. Or just 3 ini for a 3/4 second evade with a slight aftercast to avoid spamming(NOT like the aftercast of SB #3 please).