Guild Wars 2

Don’t exactly remember when or where it happened, but I recall a tournament where the counter to thief was simply “don’t pay attention to it” and that resulted in the win for the team without a Thief…
FeltBadMan.

Don’t bother with them. Takes too long and it’s an uphill fight against most DH/Scrapper builds for a Thief if you’re on equal skill.

That said, burn guards are one of the easier DH/Guard builds to fight.
Bait out and either avoid the burst completely or take it completely before using a Cleanse. And then proceed with counter pressure.
Their cd’s are relatively high (compared to ours) and taking a bit of risk like that can pay off, just be careful about it when you do take all of it…

Don’t forget that the meta is theorycrafted by the top percentage of a gamemode.
This group of people does know about and use(s) might/stealth stacking and such.

I think that with the recent patches, there’s simply been more people trying Thief (again).
Many of these might know that they’ll probably lose, but still try to because they’re not sure yet how badly they’ll be losing. This especially holds true for people who come from different classes take Rev for example which isn’t in the best state ever, but is normally a good pick to take the 1v1 against a Scrapper and even win it. Many Thieves have switched to Rev in the past and I think the reverse is happening now.
Consider it an ‘old habits die hard’ sort of thing.

Cynz.9437:

Starlett.9087:

Cynz.9437:

Starlett.9087:

A worst problem than thief stacking is that 90% of you thinks that condi thief is the way to go

and your statement is based on which statistics exactly?

Is this a serious question or just trolling?

I am serious. I rarely ever see condi thief so i am not sure where you pull your numbers.

They are so evasive that you just don’t see them.
No, I’m not serious. I just really don’t actually see them that much either.

Aftercast, pretty easy to use against them.

Hah, as a Thief Main who learnt to multiclass because of this issue. I don’t see the problem. Something like this can be used as a drive to practice other classes (which I believe every (Thief) Player should do: Play what kills You and Learn from it). You can’t be a good Thief if you don’t have atleast some idea of how the other classes work, play and rotate, in my opinion.
So yeah, I play Thief 90% of the time, but for the other 10% I’m very happy to play any other class. Just got to suck it up sometimes and be the bigger man of the two Thief Players, even though you’ll often end up shouting at your screen for it, it does improve your understanding of the game, rotations, decision making and mechanical skill.

So jump into some unranked, hotjoins and 1v1 servers, git gud and be prepared to reroll. No biggie.

Had it happen twice to me with DH’ Spear of Justice and saw it happen to my duoqueue partner yesterday.
That skill seems buggy all over the place, launching you into Space, pulling into walls…
Quite annoying, I think it’s got something to do witch collision data and not so much these skills though.
Happened to me the first time on the scaffolding around Mine node on Forest of Niflhel, then on the staircase to Waterfal from the Graveyard on Foefire and my partner had it on Foefire too but then on the stairs from Graveyard to Quarry…
Pulls seem to fight it out against NASA on slanted slopes on all maps.

Good luck fixing such collision/pathing errors though…

Since either Season 2 or 3 (would check but I’m on my phone which makes it tedious), there’s no point in queuing with a lower rank partner.
All matches get based of the highest ranking player of the duo.
Time to take off the tinfoil hats lads.

EDIT:
Was actually easier to find than expected.
It’s been since season 2: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/pvp-league-season-two-changes/
It’s also in the patchnotes.

Didn’t really affect my gameplay the first time around and it certainly won’t affect it now.
AoE PI like that was rather ridiculous both on paper and in practice though.
So yeah, I’d say it’s a just nerf.

Rage is indeed amazing for S/D’s initial burst!
Personally I landed on using a Sigil of Strength. The might stacking accompanied by the Rune of Strength almost makes it feel like our good old ‘Power of Inertia’ is back again.
I’d say it comes down to playstyle, I usually get into long fights so the Might Stacking pays off more than the brief Quickness from the Sigil of Rage. But they’re both good options for sure! Though if you’re not running Strength Runes with the Strength Sigil, the added damage is a bit lackluster.

Anyway, good to see that you’re having fun with S/D!

Reading this topic made me realize how much people care about the “lives” of their pixelated alter ego. It’s actually rather worrisome…

I haven’t seen any more toxicity from this change, if anything it’s more reason to take the kitten and just have a laugh with one another, enemies included.
Don’t take everything so serious and be happy they actually find time to give these little victories an extra bit of flavour…

The Smurf thing has been fixed since Season 2…

Justine.6351:

kash.9213:

Justine.6351:

You said frontline and many of us were thinking you meant run with the tag not rushing the backline-freecasters. If you are rushing to gut the glass cannons I wouldn’t even worry about anything other than staying alive and damage. Just don’t stop the rampage to spike or kill, keeping them spooked will stop their freecasting. Rupt meteor showers, drop the hammers and maybe even barrages if you got the resources.

The auto reflect is nice right on tag but everything about the build lets you tether at a small range to hit out and sling back, it’s how that build feeds itself anyway. You might have to get stupid and reach out with a Bound into Steal for a quick down sometimes but it’s mostly still a frontline.

Frontline implies playing with the frontliners, not playing around them. A commander isn’t going to put any thief into his frontline subgroups. He hits a ward and he is probably dead since he wont likely have stability.

And that’s why you run in a Frontline group on this Build… Oh my.

Interesting build, I’ve been trying something similar myself, although with Scrapper Runes and probably more Marauder gear than what you’ve got on. Plays the exact same though, really.
I can definitely see the benefit of Valkyrie (I think that’s what you run?) with Daredevil Runes though. Good stuff

Necro’s, Guards and Revs can damage AC’s (sometimes due to auramancers sharing Chilling/Fire Aura). It’s a great counter to siege and a just mechanic that really should stay.
Noone likes a siegemonkey anyway.

As a regular WvW Player (Roaming and Guild Raids, no PPT) with a rank of 1290 something, I actually don’t mind that I can’t get the armor yet.
It’s a proper Prestige item of sorts that only really dedicated players got (and ofcourse those who farmed eotm pre-nerf…). I’ve got probably 2k hours in the game mode already and I’ll gladly work towards the rank 2000 mark in the slow but steady way.

Boohoo, suck it up. You’re not entitled to anything.

Capricorn’s fine I’d say. Coliseum though… The original map had it’s flaws, but after a rework they really should’ve given it another test period before allowing it in the ranked queues.

Skill lag, Skill lag everywhere…

megilandil.7506:

Vornollo.5182:

We can also take some fights against Necro’s and Warriors, but they take way too much time to actually be worth it.

this is the worse and more recurrent argument that thieves uses: fights againts x last so long
when talking about balance or x class countering y class time is not a measure, the matter of it is the final outcome and the odds of it
in thief users view seems that if they can instagang other class that clas is a harcounter to them when in most cases that class only had capability of resist thieves atemps to instakill them and recover faster when thieves try to reset the fight, but not any capability of chasing down the thief if they run out of the combat, a hard counter is that one that can make the thieve invisible and meaningless in the match and there is only one , other thief(that also is soft-countered in some way cuz they only hunts the other thief having litle time to decap/+1(his main role))

“Some Fights” is rather key here. It requires us to have our CD’s ready to go (which often we don’t due to having to use Initiative, our Dodges -> Heal and sometimes even our Stunbreak/Condicleanse that is Shadowstep) [<QUICK EDIT: This also includes a situation where they have spent most of their CD’s… It’s both very circumstantial, especially the warrior matchup>].
You simply can not judge PvP on a 1v1 basis. PvP doesn’t work like that. If you got issues with an enemy thief, it’s an issue for your entire team not being able to simply hold 2 points.
Like has been said before, if you can hold onto 2 points the Thief gets forced into teamfights and (s)he’ll be as close to useless as one can be.

Really, what is the deal with people and judging a 5v5 gamemode based on 1v1’s..?
5v5, 1v1, see the difference?

Other than the highest parts of the walkways, I don’t run into the issue too often.
But yes, it’s really weird how pathing works on this map (_and in general, to be completely fair).
I recall they fixed how you couldn’t port up to the blue side’s walkways at all. I just can’t but stop and question why they didn’t fix it completely.

Most DH builds and Scrappers. If they’re in a fight, any Thief with half a brain will go somewhere else. Other than that, we can +1 almost anything if we play our cards right.
That said, Thief is still terrible at 1v1’s against anything other than another Thief and Revs. We can also take some fights against Necro’s and Warriors, but they take way too much time to actually be worth it.
Aside of all that, a good Thief will pick his fights very carefully and shouldn’t pretty much ever take any 1v1’s because it’s simply not what we’re good at and what we should be doing.

Yeah, some maps are worse than others. I don’t PvE too much, but I checked out LA and it’s definitely been at it’s worst there.

Ashantara, my current laptop is made for gaming (I actually study to make games myself, so I needed it). Funny enough, my old laptop runs the game just fine albeit with lower FPS as is to be expected.
I’ve checked out the CPU and the cores were parked. Unparking them now and hope it helps.
I’ve got a fan below my laptop for cooling purposes, plus (although it doesn’t mean much) my laptop doesn’t feel like it physically warms up.
As for OS, I’ve got the dreaded Windows 10. So yes, I do believe that it’s likely some automated update(s) have slipped through, despite having that option turned off.

EDIT:
Sadly, unparking the CPU cores doesn’t help. I do pull better FPS when I turn on Vsync, but it’s still lower than how I previously ran without Vsync (and without issues…).
I’ll keep looking.

Well, seems like it’s back!
Albeit in a slightly different form with a bit more of a target as to where the problem is (again, nothing actually changed as far as I’m aware).
Now I got more of a ‘screen tearing’ thing going on. Due to that I decided to mess around with the ingame Frame Limiter. Putting it at 60 made it bad, putting it to 30 made it worse, so obviously I’m leaving it on unlimited. I can completely fix the issue by turning on the V-Sync though (Never had to do that before), though that results in the artifically low framerates that the game warns me for.

I’ll start mucking about with my framerate setting tomorrow, but it’s really weird that GW2 is litterally the only game where I get this issue…

Well, don’t know what changed but it just suddenly stopped freezing up on me since yesterday.
Wish I found out what ended up fixing it though…

Withdraw for duelling and stuff like a bruiser role, Channeled Vigour for rotating around the map.
So for PvP, Channeled Vigour’s your best friend. Don’t just think about the single use, think about how often you use the heal just for endurance. The amount of endurance =/= dodges =/= mobility gained throughout a match is very much worth it.

Never played OW, but the idea does sound rather interesting to be fair.
Could you elaborate on how you’d envision this in a GW2 setting?

Ran tests concerning overheating, clearly not a problem either…
As to the issue being patch and/or ping related, as I mentioned in the original post; My issues started last Friday (several days prior to the patch) and my ping doesn’t go over 50, really.
Still at a loss for what might cause this issue :\

Ashantara.8731:

I am having those too every once in a while, I assume it’s the Internet as there are no hardware issues (I tested everything). I suppose it is the same with your case.

However, since you are using a laptop, I would check the hardware temperatures as laptops tend to overheat easily.

Yeah, I’m getting them at least once every minute…
Overheating can also be ruled out considering it happens even when I’ve only just started up the laptop. I’ve also got one of those fans below it to prevent it from happening.
I’ll run some tests on it anyway, cheers!

Hey!
So as of last Friday I’ve suddenly been getting these brief moments where my game freezes up for a second before continuing again. Though these stutters really don’t take long, they are really kitten annoying because it makes me miss critical animations and results in not all of my keypresses getting registered.
I get good FPS, good Ping and my settings are all low because I want to maintain good FPS during zergfights in WvW. I’ve never had these issues before plus my laptop should be more than able to handle this game without issues.

Tried a pletora of things already, but so far to no avail. Checked for driver updates, reinstalled drivers, reinstalled windows even etc. etc. It’s only an issue that I get with GW2, for example games like the Witcher 3 I’ve been able to play smoothly without any hiccups whatsoever.

Specs:
Intel Core i7
16 GB RAM
256 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M

Fire away with the suggestions!

Play like a kitten.
Dodge to stay out of harms way (make use of LoS and Kiting to improve CD management), then sometimes do some quick sneaky hits with Shadowshot and AA’s (keep up poison on Warriors!). Try to interrupt the DH’s F2 and really make sure to dodge/interrupt/LoS the DH’s F1 now that it reveals.
P/P should make it easier because you don’t have to get in their range too much.

I play every class on a pretty regular basis. but after maybe an hour I always miss my Thief and hop right back on it.
That said, I do got some classes that I play more often than others. After Thief, my most played (and enjoyed) class is Mesmer, it’s similar to Thieves in that it’s a playmaker and that’s just a role I feel comfortable with.
After that it’s probably Revenant and Engi. Anything else, I just play whenever I feel like it or when my team needs it.

I truly hope you did. It’s pretty much the only way I can see Rifle work as an enjoyable weapon for Thief without becoming incredibly unbalanced.
Atleast I like the name, lol.

I’d say there’s 2 solid options.
There’s the D/P with DA/SA/TR: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAoa1k0MxSnA/TcATQ+0cm2oTQA2NvHxYHA-TpBEABmXGAgjAQEHCADOBA5s/ABPAAA
It has High Stealth uptime, solid Condi Cleansing and some rather impressive sustain with the Health Regeneration.
The other option is D/P with DA/CS/TR: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAoa1k0MxSnA/TcATU7Ad5GUdCEA7mPNOj2A-TpBEAB5s/g5lBA4IAExhAwgTAABPAAA
Much riskier to play than the SA variant, but you gain a bucketload of damage potential in return. Real solid on the +1’s against tankier classes.

For the empty Utility Slots there’s a few options: Infiltrator’s Signet, Blinding Powder, Signet of Agility and possibly Shadow Refuge or Shadow Trap.
For traits, there’s also some other options. Against tanky comps where you don’t face an enemy Thief, you could opt to swap ‘Improvisation’ to ‘Executioner’ (Deadly Arts) and ‘Thrill of the Crime’ for ‘Flanking Strikes’ (Trickery).
Other good Runes are Scholar, Eagle and maybe even Strength or Rage.

Good luck! Hopefully Cynz sees and replies to this topic as I know (s)he has played a lot of core thief in/into the higher tiers of PvP since HoT’s release.

Ah like that black powder. I never played in the beta, no.
And I’ve got no problem thinking of scenarios, rotations, general usage, upsides, downsides etc.
Which is exactly why don’t see a point to dig a pit for S/P and D/P for the sake of P/P. That’s pretty much what it comes down to.

Headshot, you mean.
I can see how it’s useful for P/P, but for S/P and D/P it’d work rather counteractive in my opinion. As melee oriented sets they may often not benefit of being pushed backwards by a skill that sees a lot of use (regardless of Pulmonary Impact, plenty of skills require interrupting), I know I’d get annoyed real quick in PvP, lol.
So unless they could make it so that it only works for P/P, I’d be against the idea.

The problem isn’t with Condition Damage itself. The problem is that there’s less ways of dealing with Conditions than there is with Power Damage.
So Power and Condi Damage, on paper, is on par to one another. However, the ease-of-application of Power and Condi Damage is not on par.
This is in part due to dull passives (Defy Pain etc.) that generally do affect Power Damage to a large extent, but not Condi Damage.

If you want to make it fair, make it fair overall.

Please, no. Just… No.

Same issue as Ghost Thief, Traps deal Physical Damage. They reveal you.
So no. Ghost Druid isn’t a feasible thing and I truly hope something utterly ridiculous such as the Ghost Thief will never come back.
Just L2P, GW2 really isn’t a hard game.

Quickness and Slow used to affect stomping up until the balance patch of January 26, 2016.

Function Gyro is by no means a fast stomp. Function Gyro is in fact a slower stomp than a player stomping (an Engi can preserve their Function Gyro’s stomp by double-tapping ‘stomp’ so that they finish the stomp before their Gyro does). The only benefit that comes from the Function Gyro is it’s range and the fact that you can have a target stomped while focussing on something more important (like another player).
That leaves Thief’s Impact Strike. A chain of three attacks that all need to connect to a target and get timed properly in order to be effective. Impact Strike, Uppercut and Finishing Blow can all be Blocked, Blinded, Interrupted and out-ranged to counterplay.

Honestly, I don’t know what you’re on about.
Could you add some detail to your post as to what you mean by ‘exploit’ and ‘cheating’?

EDIT#1: Added link to the wiki’s page with the balance patch I ment in it.

EDIT#2: Also, neither the Function Gyro nor the Impact Strike is a feasible way to “pin snipe drivers”. The Gyro should get 1) Interrupted and 2) Utterly destroyed by any group with the slightest of brains. A Thief is in no way able to stand the heat that would come of trying to perform a 2.75 second (or even 1.375 seconds with quickness) chain of attacks without getting Killed, Blinded, Interrupted or sneezed to death. That’s not even taking into account the simple fact that the driver would already have to be low on Health and CD’s, because honestly, even in Full Zerk you can play Guard/Warrior/Revenant or other remotely feasible “driver-like” classes/builds without dying in that amount of time without doing anything in return. If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be driving anything.
Again, I’m just trying to understand.

2 Options. 1) Catch the idiot in AoE (which is quite easy especially as a guard)
Or 2) You leave the point.
If they’re stealthed, they’re not doing anything for their team.
Go somewhere where you’re useful. If you can use his stupidity to run a bad build to create a 4v5 fight on the rest of the map, you’re golden.

None taken
And I’m aware that hardly any of them run Trapper Runes, but it’s something that I’ve heard others whine about to no end. But that’s why I didn’t say anything about changing that Rune, rather than the traps because the rune really is insignificant to the Ghost Thief. As for proper fixes to Stealth Stacking… I really don’t find it much of an issue at all. I’ve never been killed by such thieves (except one time where I went afk for a moment…) because stacking stealth doesn’t serve any real purpose. They don’t deal enough Condi damage to burst you down with, there’s a very slow reapplication of Condi that it hardly pressures you… It’s annoying, but I don’t think it’s a pressing issue of any sort. If someone wants to be an ineffective nuisance, fine by me. Ignoring them and simply Infiltrator’s Arrow away counters them well enough.
Maybe I’m oblivious to some OP Underworld Community build that capitalizes off Stealth Stacking, but I don’t see an issue. A Thief in Stealth is Harmless until he pops out and starts to use weaponskills I reckon.

@Martin
DecieverX said there that the OP’s suggestion for the easy OOC stealth was bad because it takes away part of the investment and Risk that is and should be attached to Stealth.
Essentially you just both said the same thing, though the context is different :P

Anyhow, for the OP’s suggestion.
Don’t try to fix what isn’t broken. The issue with those Ghost Thieves comes from two things 1) Trapper Runes’ effect and 2) Lack of Physical damage on Needle Trap + Caltrops.
Easiest fix is to give Needle Trap Physical Damage, it’d make the Trap Stronger, but make the Perma-Stealthing quite tedious.
That said, I don’t like nerfing a build/skill that already isn’t viable for anything other than trolling. Just ignore the Thief and there’s no way that he can pressure you enough to actually get anything done.
Another idea could be the Stealth Disruptor Trap.

Can’t say I play any different on either D/P or S/D because of it.
It’s easier to blow the Signet now to just Cleanse whatever. There’s a “loss of skill” there of sorts, you could say, as now you no longer have to think about what condition came in last and maybe walking over some burn guard’s purge on purpose to make sure to cleanse that kitten burning.
But yeah… No biggie. I reckon the cleanses are a massive help to Core Thief though, so I’m happy about that.

D/P is superior to Sword builds for many reasons. Out of Combat access to Stealth, relatively instant interrupts, amazing blinds and just more general use for yourself and/or any team you might have with you. It’s also much better able to keep up pressure on characters that have high mobility and/or strong healing (Poison on AA, high damage Gap Closer with Shadow Shot etc).
That said, Sword builds can do quite well in WvW (and moderate success in low-profile PvP) due to the way damage scales with the higher power/precision/ferocity and things like that.
As I’ve seen and tried with some S/D builds, there’s 2 ways to go about it in terms of Traitlines 1) Deadly Arts, Trickery & Daredevil, or 2) Acrobatics, Trickery & Daredevil.
The first having a whole lot more pressure and burst available to it and the second being very kitten sustainable (and rather amazing against condi pressure at that).
For gear you’ll be looking at Marauder, Berserker, Valkyrie or Berserker/Valkyrie. Mix-and-Match to your own liking, though I’d recommend to have around 17K Health.

Other than that… There’s really a lot of personal flavour to it. I personally take either Channeled Vigour or Withdraw depending on PvP or WvW respectively, then Shadowstep and Signet of Agility. The last utility slot and the Elite I constantly mess around with myself and swap it a lot for different situations.
I’d reckon the same works for S/P, but I haven’t tried that too much myself yet as I’m not big of a fan of how the set feels to me.
Hope it helps a bit

Hmm, I actually like your ideas! Having the short Quickness would also slightly help with S/D’s lower damage output.
But like Wargameur mentioned, I’m not sure if the Stealth would work with Dancing Dagger’s bounces. Still, I’d gladly settle for a single hit that deals more damage than it does now, while giving 3 seconds of stealth instead of 2-4 or 5 if traited.

Interesting and flavourful ideas!

I really hope they do something about Passives… There’s too much Passive traits and overall Passive play in a game that’s popular for it “action combat”. And perhaps a great surprise would be to see Thief’s Off-Hand Dagger made useful, yet remain flavourful.

To add to the ‘Condition Damage’ discussion going on:
The issue with Conditions is that you can build for high Condition Damage (be honest, you don’t need ‘Expertise’…) without sacrificing Defenses. Just look at sets like Dire and Trailblazer. That’s Damage, Armor, Health and possibly Duration on 1 piece of Equipment. Now if you want Power Damage, you got to have 1) Power 2) Precision 3) Ferocity. You have to make sacrifices with any or all of these 3 components if you want more to be more sustainable.
And that’s just the Equipment side of it. Fact of the matter is that Condi requires a whole lot less effort to apply than Power Damage (Toughness reduces incoming Direct Damage, but not Condi Damage), There’s also less access to other forms of mitigation to Condi than there is to Direct Damage, through Resistance and comparatively high ICD’s on Cond-Cleanses, versus a meriad of Block, Invulns (applied condi keeps ticking) and things like Endure Pain and Signet of Stone.
Not to even begin about all of the passive Direct-Damage-Reducing Effects in the game (Scrapper Runes, Mussels Gnashblade/Lemongrass Musselpasta etc.) that do nothing against Condition Damage.
That’s the problem with Condition Damage. In the PvP/WvW sense that is.

In PvE it’s kitten-easy to apply any form of damage. But for the sake of a healthy PvP/WvW combat environment, Something needs to get changed. Either the effectiveness of Condition’s Damaging component, or the application has to be made more difficult, or Toughness and Active Defenses have to be brought up to par so that both Power and Condi stand an equal chance. Prefferably a properly balanced and well-thought out combination of these.
Now, I’m not one for removing things, but Dire and Traiblazer gear are dispicable creations that should have never been allowed into the game to begin with. (Also remove Trapper Runes, or rather change the 6th Effect so we get rid of those ridiculously pointless trolls that are Perma-Stealth Thieves).

EDIT#1:
Forgot to mention ‘Expertise’ for the Condi Duration…
Well, all fun for PvE. But face it, you don’t need it in a PvP scenario because of how easy and quick it is to apply Condi in GW2.

EDIT#2:
Quick edit to improve readability and some grammar.

Having beaten that very same Mesmer (judging by the character image+guild tag, anyway) I can guarantee that you must’ve done something wrong.
The fact that there were 5 of you plus minions etcetera actually worked in the Mesmers favour, especially considering most of you probably spammed whatever you had available to pick up an easy 5v1 lootbag. That’s me guessing at how that fight went, looking at the average AG player in WvW…

All I can say is: Try to bait out the Mesmer’ utilities, (using weaponstow) and your ranged advantage. Only get close when you got your cleanses/transfers ready to go in an instant.
It’s a remarkably easy build to whittle down on a necro, just make clever use of what you got available to you.

I know what you mean, yeah… No idea what happened to that function.

Anyhow, I do see where you’re coming from and I admit, I totally read that Endurance suggestion wrong. Apologies!
I just always feel like S/D is lacking a way to keep up pressure once your target gains a bit of a gap. Previously the jump+IS trick used to take decent care of that, but that’s sadly no longer in place. Poison has always done a great job at keeping a kiting target in check a bit by suppressing the healing potential and S/D lacks ways of applying this, outside of the standard traited Steal, which results in low uptime.

To keep S/D in a bit of a “slow but steady” sort of way, adding the poison in there somewhere seems like a good place to start, without stepping on any other weaponsets.
Simply increasing AA damage and/or speed is horribly dull, Poison to me achieves that dull kitten, but in a more interesting and counter able way.
Most of the suggestions in this topic would simply increase the powercreep again, just as it’s settling down a bit. Poison/Blind are relatively harmless and easy enough to play around with.

We’ll probably have to agree on disagreeing.

Staff works for PvE and to some (lesser, though that’s arguable) extent in PvP and WvW.
S/P can also do relatively well, especially if you got the Critical Strikes traitline for Invigorating Precision.
S/D is probably not your kind of set, given it tends to be low speed/damage.

Best thing you could do (in my opinion) would be to use the meta D/P build in PvP/WvW and use the same gear for Staff in PvE, only requiring some trait changes.
So pretty much like Martin mentioned above.

There’s also a pretty interesting Power D/D build for PvE, where you put Daggers in opposite Weaponslots so that you can run with Quick Pockets in Trickery to keep up your Initiative for constant CnD’s → Backstabs. It’s not too useful in PvP/WvW though.

All that said, you’ll just have to pull through when you step from condi (back) into power, simply because all power builds got less access to sustainable stats (just compare something like Dire, Carrion or Trailblazer to Berserker or Marauder sets…)

I think the idea of “play different than existing content” is where Elite Specializations come in. Sadly we had our latest Elite Spec brought to us as a basic repackaging of past nerfs.
I want Thief to be looked at. So yes. , the sets should share the same flavour to some extent. S/D could/should have Poison to offset it’s comparatively low sustained pressure, not because D/P has it. I’d Like CnD to have a blind as a small form of active defense which would benefit D/D to a small extent as well as being overall useful to S/D and P/D, not because D/P has it. If I wanted anything from D/P, I’d simply play D/P. However, they play different, playstyle is a huge factor and just because there’s overlaps, doesn’t mean they are used in a remotely similar way.

As to the “10 Endurance” thing… D/* already “does that to death” so, frankly, I don’t even know why I tried to take that post serious, babazhook.

Making CnD stealth without a target is just silly for obvious reasons that have already been posted.
Maybe make CnD unblockable to make it more reliable, essentially also making CnD function as a better active defense. I feel like that would result in more outcry than it’s worth though, so I’d try the blind first (maybe make it so the blind doesn’t require a target..?).