Guild Wars 2

While I am unexpectedly disappointed, I do feel like I can be lenient, given the change of game directive. However, I do feel it would be better to postpone the second expansion in favour of finishing HoT. I can say that I am satisfied with most of what HoT has had to offer. The new content gives a much-needed challenge, the events are good (but certainly hard to jump into), and I am a fan of the mastery system. I feel that especially the small raid team works incredibly well, churning out fantastic content at a favourable rate, and the people who hate on them for making content for ‘5% of players’ are silly for doing so. I have, unfortunately, already crafted 100 Crystalline Ingots, and have continued to slowly craft Amalgamated Gemstones, in the hopes that the new dagger would look fantastic (and if not, I would craft HOPE instead). As a result, I have some questions:

As your wording seems to indicate, work on new legendaries has been postponed rather than cancelled. Is there any indication on when it will resume? After LS3 is complete? Or will they be redirected to the next expansion team?
And regarding the next expansion, I would assume this means it will not feature new legendaries, but will it ship with another batch?

I am conflicted with how I feel about your project management. On one hand you have a wonderful raid team, but on the other you put too much into content that is too far into the future, or that is in the Gem Store (though I can’t talk, I posted that I wanted cat ears the other day). Then again, it seems to everyone that the raids team is the only one being productive, as most of the only content we see is new raids.

To me, it seems that at HoT announcements you simply evaluated what you could do badly. I see it too often in gaming (Kickstarter-type games mostly). I hope that in the future you can better decide the direction you want to take your game in, and realise how much work you can actually do.
The second expansion is your chance for redemption.

After the return of the Bunny Ears, I realised we need the Furrocious Ears back in GW2! Even if we have to wait until the next Hallowe’en event until we can get it, to make it like it was originally.

Sorry, ‘immersion’-lovers.

Sorry, got more curious now, so I must ask some more things:

What exact sigils do you run on your P/D and D/D?
How have you mixed the stats in your armour?
What traits do you use?

Sorry if this is tedious.

Ah, sorry, but I’d only skim-read that entire conversation, and thought you meant for me to completely replace P/D with D/D. In that case, yes, I see what you mean, and Air and Fire are now definite possibilities.

Your strategy seems very interesting, so I’ll definitely try that out. What skills do you use? I run Hide in Shadows, Shadow Refuge, Signet of Shadows, Shadowstep, and Basilisk Venom (I probably said this somewhere), so I’d be interested to see what you substituted for Needle Trap.

Oh wow, this overnight discussion is really interesting, especially the bit about critical sigils, something I hadn’t considered as a possibility as all I had been testing was basically survivability.

As above, the idea with the Sinister build was basically focused on the main damage output, Sneak Attack, as well as how well I can just walk up and Cloak and Dagger.

Air and Fire is an interesting idea, one that completely defeats the point of having double P/D sets to switch between, as that Sigil of Battle really helps stack up the might with getting might every time I stealth, which gets me quite a bit of might. The Doom sigil could go though, but having another condition to put on every few seconds is always really good.

Regarding mixing armour, yes, it is probably best if I go something like half Dire in my armour and keep all else Sinister (other than that Rabid backpiece – should I get a Dire one then?) By the way, I have Krait runes on all my armour since most of the conditions I do will be bleed.

I also disagree with making the build D/D, it is much more reliable to stack conditions on P/D.

So the plan is this:

Use half Dire, half Sinister for armour, Sinister for everything else.
Stick with Doom and Battle for now – possibly Battle and a critical sigil could work.

Also, can someone give me advice on that backpiece?

Okay, I’ve done a bit of testing in PvE and here’s what I’ve come up with:

The Silverwastes Test:

I would maybe have done more but I need that Bioluminescence. Anyway, this works pretty well at both defending keeps and defending carriers. What it doesn’t work well at at all is taking keeps, it just can’t stand that condition. On the bosses it’s kind of mediocre. It doesn’t have the range, though the Dire version didn’t either.

Survivability wasn’t a huge problem, the Vinewrath champions are most of the time pretty easy apart from the normal moments like getting knocked out of the honeycomb and nobody killing the Pustules.

In other words, this build is a little above average in normal PvE.

The CoF Test:

I didn’t have the time to do multiple dungeons so I went for the three paths of CoF.

P1 – Works pretty easily, can do everything really well with no survivability problems.

P2 – Also works pretty easily, but don’t try to solo the Magmacyte bit. It isn’t for you.

P3 – Oh boy. Nope. Bad at surviving at the three torches at the beginning. Rest is fine up until taking back a point from the Flame Legion. We lost loads of times with like 1 wave left and one guy even criticised me for not using the latest boring glass cannon meta build. ¬.¬

In other words, in dungeons, this build does pretty well usually, mostly as a support guy who occasionally goes in with a Cloak and Dagger, but CoF P3 is a definite no-go.

Next is WvW, then conclusions. Not testing in sPvP for obvious reasons.

Wow, thank you guys. You’ve all been very helpful, and I’ve decided how I want to go about doing this.

First, I want to take the Sinister armour, substitute the Dire stuff in my Bank, and go for it, testing dungeons, world bosses and WvW (not sPvP for obvious reasons).

Then I’d like to see how often I die. When it comes to stealthing I am not particularly skilled so we’ll have to see.

If I die a lot, I will slowly return the Dire armour into the build until I find some sort of balance.

Still unsure about that Rabid backpiece though. Progress will come soon!

Just as the title asks. Whenever I ask this people don’t even mention Sinister, they just tell me to ‘go Dire’, but that’s not the point. This is just something I want to try, it’s not like I’m ditching the Dires completely, I’m keeping them while I see if this works. The point, unsurprisingly, is this:

Would a P/D Condition Build work with the new Sinister stats?

1. I currently have full Dire Exotic armour, 2 Dire Daggers with the Sigil of Battle, 2 Dire Pistols with the Sigil of Doom, and 5 Ascended trinkets, all Sinister.

a) My backpiece is Rabid. Is it worth spending 250 Vicious Claws to get a Sinister one?
b) Following on from that, should I go full Sinister or should I combine it with Dire/Rabid/something else?

2. My thief uses the following skills: Shadow Refuge, Signet of Shadows, Shadowstep, Basilisk Venom. He uses the traits 0/0/0/6/2/6, and from left-to-right, top-to-bottom, goes: IV, V, XI, VI, III, VII, XIII.

a) Would it be necessary to change any skills to better suit Sinister stats?
b) Would it be necessary to change any traits to better suit Sinister stats?

I am currently on ‘Victory or Death’. I have tried both the Hero tab and double-clicking the green story icon, neither to success.

… Whoops, forgot to add character details if those are any help. They’re [Verbor Soldanel], Level 80 Norn Thief.