Guild Wars 2

The idea of a completely ranged thief is interesting but I think your utility skills arn’t in line with what it should be about. If you plan to go SB/PP then you really need to be thinking about using venoms to add conditions in with your ranged burst. Scorpian wire seems to defeat the purpose of being ranged.

Sounds like you may just be taking advantage of the culling issue and you can get to the back of the zerg due to that. Also, it sounds like you have a very good ping if you are never lagging. If you outside the US your ping can pose a problem.

If you are always in stealth as you say, when running to the back of the zerg, why do you need SoS? I think you need to make a choice between SoS and shadowstep then and a choice between stealth run speed and SoS. If you look at it like this, then when you have stealth run speed you should have shadowstep but if you don’t have stealth run speed you can consider either SoS, shadowstep, or none of them if you go heavy burst.

The recent patch for thieves did not provide a buff to any spec currently being used. The purpose of it was clearly to diversify the range of specs possible. I am not 100% sure this goal was achieved, but I understand it. Before, not too many people were using dual pistols so they chose to buff useless pistol traits to something that may at least be viable in some sense. They also buffed a trait that provided stealth when you took over 20% of your hp as damage in a single hit, so that it is now 10% hp. This is because mathematically even if you had only 15k life it is quite rare to take over 3k in one hit, where most 3k hits were the result of a channel that did not trigger the trait.

In terms of theives having mobility and stealth, they buffed the run speed in stealth for this purpose. I would say this is in a trait line that isn’t specced by burst thieves all that often. Acrobatics does not do too much to increase your damage. When I specced full burst then swapped to go for 10 in acrobatics for the run speed in stealth and also to pick up stealth traits in shadow arts, my heartseeker dropped 200 base damage (which is 400 on a crit) and backstab also dropped around the same.

I understand that a squishy thief becomes reasonably survivable through stealth. However, it is important not to mix up an actual survivability tank specced thief with bleed stacking/caltrops/dodging/stealth for a burst thief. The former is very survivable and the ones you see on the front lines in wvw with the guardians and just not dying. The latter uses stealth and utility to get out of bad situations since they cannot take the same amount of hits. You cannot have 3k armour and high hp and do great burst. The burst specs generally have 2k or less armour and anywhere from 14 – 16k hp. The full glass cannon spec has almost no mobility and no stealth, which is why it is not really used because it involves a full trade off for more damage (the spec is basically 30 DA, 30 crit strikes, then 10 in trickery using D/D).