Guild Wars 2

aLovedhater.4096:

Also please explain how i can stealth -> steal (doing dmg) and when i do dmg i stay in stealth and then -> backstab? not possible.
.

Use steal and backstab at the same time

In order for this to work they would need to finish splitting WvW from PVE. They implemented this before, and while it didn’t have much of an effect on WvW thieves it ate into PVE thief DPS pretty badly. If they were able to add it without hampering PVE thieves then I wouldn’t have a problem with it.

Buzzcrave.6197:

5 to blind your opponent, while having blind field on you making you invul to melee.

Blinding Powder shot is clearly telegraphed and easy to dodge, and the field itself does not make you invulnerable to melee at all. Melee range is greater the radius of the field itself. Furthermore, BP can be overloaded with skills like 100b and PW.

Buzzcrave.6197:

Follow up by 2, which deal damage if your enemy is near while having the ability to stealth thus cleanse condi, gaining might and getting a lil bit of healing if you use the normal d/p build.

As you stated though, this is build-dependent, not weaponset dependent. SA is popular for most WvW builds. BP+HS is also interruptable.

Buzzcrave.6197:

Lastly backstab, and 3 to blind and teleport to your target and immediately 5 to rinse and repeat.

Movement to counter backstab. Shadow Shot is telegraphed and predictable, which makes it dodgeable. Shot doesn’t land=blind and teleport don’t happen=wasted initiative for nothing.

All of this brings me to my main point (which isn’t directed at you, but rather the general sentiment that I see in this thread): D/P can win fights with perma-stealthing/blind spam just like S/x can win fights with 3 spam, but neither will work reliably against good players so it’s pointless to center arguments around them. It seems like people in this thread are looking exclusively at the skill-floor while ignoring the ceiling.

JonPeters.5630:

• Pistol Whip. Reduced the after cast on the first half of this skill by .25 seconds.

With this reduced after cast, how will the new PW compare to the pre-Oct. 15th patch PW? I haven’t played in a while so I don’t remember the exact values for flurry time and post-flurry aftercast, but will this change at least allow S/P thieves to land 2 hits before the stun wears off again? In other words, will PW be at or close to where it was before the changes to all stuns on October 15, or will it still be in worse shape overall?

1. S/P, SB
2. 0/30/0/20/20
3. WvW

Hitman.5829:

Here,

I tested this with a mob of 5+ Hoping to see some heartseeker damage. I made sure to stay still to see how long I survived and for how much I got hit. AS you can see the video shows the thief was the only one to deal crazy damage. I’m not sure why the hits where ridiculously high. I wanted to see some heartseeker damage but instead I recorded more crazy damage coming from other skills named clock and dagger, and backstab.

Probably there is some kind of game code that is not working properly. I am not sure how 3.7K toughness can result with a 5k critical hit. I have even fought zerker warriors and they don’t hit me as hard as thieves. For this reason I am a little bit suspicious about these thief’s skills that deal this crazy damage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvu0hpg3MGw

Video is set to private.

Enemies can see your Shadow Return circle if you use Shadow Step, so I assume that it’s the same for Infiltrator’s Strike.

nerf zumy pls too much legendary

Sigil of Paralyzation will increase Tactical Strike daze to 3 seconds. It won’t make significant difference on Pistol Whip stun.

Burnfall.9573:

I’ll do than..

Mesmers- 2,540 results
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mesmers+wvw+zerg&oq=mesmers+wvw+zerg&gs_l=youtube.3...119279.120949.0.121179.9.9.0.0.0.0.156.583.4j2.6.0...0.0...1ac..11.youtube.r8VLcdunwME

Warior- 3, 050 resilts
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mesmers+wvw+zerg&oq=mesmers+wvw+zerg&gs_l=youtube.3...119279.120949.0.121179.9.9.0.0.0.0.156.583.4j2.6.0...0.0...1ac..11.youtube.r8VLcdunwME

Nectomancer- 2,110 results
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=necromancer+wvw+zerg

Ranger— 1,910 results
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ranger+wvw+zerg&oq=ranger+wvw+zerg&gs_l=youtube.3..0j0i5.37515.39479.0.39753.8.7.0.1.1.0.140.687.4j3.7.0...0.0...1ac..11.youtube.D8JTXHNavx8

Engineer- 1, 670 results (not a Suprised at all.. sadly.. the loiwest at thej bottom)
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=engineer+wvw+szerg

Elementalist- 2, 250 results
Elehttp://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=elementist+wvw+zergmentalst- 2, 250 results

And to be The Superior Class that tops them all for zerges.. goes to Thief

Thief -3,330 result

So there..

This looks like an extremely flawed method when it comes to proving thief viability in zerg fights. The biggest reason that this simply doesn’t show what you seem to think it shows is the fact that typing “thief wvw zerg” into a youtube search will not only return videos that shows thieves fighting in zergs, but also thief solo roam, thief group roam, thief pve, other classes fighting thieves in wvw, other classes zerging, and an assortment of random, non GW2 related videos that have “thief” in the title. A more reasonable conclusion to “thief wvw zerg” having more results than other classes is that thieves are a popular class and more likely to record their WvW play.

It also falls apart when you actually start comparing the number of results to the actual WvW zerg meta. For example, if I search “guardian wvw zerg” I only get 2610 results, and yet I seriously doubt you’ll hear anyone say that a guardian isn’t as useful as a thief in zergs. If you look at zerg fight or GvG videos from top WvW guilds, they aren’t stacking thieves in either situation. How can a certain class be the best for zerging if, when they have a choice, no one seems to want more than one or two of them?

Dovgan.8605:

To be fair, it started after a SF player decided to chest-thump about keeping two smaller servers at a 65 PPT.

+65 PPT comment

AR post about wiping ET, 3 hours before +65 PPT comment

AR post about wiping ET and SF, 3 hours before +65 PPT comment

Doesn’t look like SF started it to me.

Dovgan.8605:

I honestly think forum readers cherry pick what they read to make themselves feel justified.

Sure seems that way.

I’m currently running this to test Pain Response. Before that I ran 0/30/0/15/25

Tons of mobility from steal, shadowsteps and shortbow means that you can juke and kite all day if you need to. Headshot, Infiltrator’s Strike and PW into Infiltrator’s signet or steal means that you can lock someone down pretty hard, and the blinds and evades from PW help you survive against melee.

Getting stomps in 1vX situations can be tricky, but you can nterrupt single rezzers constantly and drop heavy PWs onto multiple enemies when they try to rez their downed friend. In addition to shadowstomping with Shadowstep you can also chain Sword 2’s Shadow Return into your other shadowsteps to stomp enemies while you’re outnumbered. For example:

• Infiltrator’s Strike in on a half HP target and down them
• Start the stomp and Shadow Return out
• Use Steal or Infiltrator’s Signet to port back and finish the stomp
• Infiltrator’s Strike out and pick a new target

Guardians can be a pain due to retaliation uptime though. If you aren’t careful you’ll basically hand them the win.

Probably something like this

Popping all of your signets along with Thrill of the Crime puts you at or near 25 stacks of might. Factor in +20% damage from Executioner, +10% from First Strikes, +10% from Exposed Weakness, +10% from Sigil of Night, +5% from Dagger Training and +10% from Scholar runes for a total of 65% extra damage on targets below half health. Throw in 25 bloodlust stacks, the 3 vulnerability stacks from Cloak and Dagger and however many stacks Sundering Strikes might give (5?) and the Sigil of Air proc and you should have a very hard hitting combo.

Finally took S/P out for a spin today with Sarrow’s build and I’m really enjoying it so far. It took me a while to get the hang of it and I still have a long way to go but there’s definitely a lot of potential here. PW is still pretty solid after the nerf, but retaliation is turning out to be a far bigger problem than I had anticipated.

Surviving and fighting with the no-stealth setup is more difficult than stealth builds by a good margin, but that was to be expected. It’s also way more fun though, so I think I’ll be sticking with this setup for a while.

Thanks for the writeup Crawford. I’m looking forward to your video.

I decided to ignore the Shadow Arts tree in my builds since I wasn’t going to use stealth, but I took your build gave me some ideas about fitting SA traits into no-stealth (or in this case, minimal stealth) setups.

• Master of Deception to cut Shadowstep down to 40 seconds. If you run Blinding Powder to keep access to Tactical Strike then that would also be cut down to 32 seconds, but I think the interrupts from Headshot and PW stun should be enough.

• Slowed Pulse (10 seconds of regeneration) was recently changed so that it activates after 2 stacks of bleed, and I believe the ICD is still 30 seconds. Considering that every profession but Guardians can apply bleeds this could be worth exploring for the stealthless/minimal stealth solo roamer.

• Hidden Thief combined with Shadow’s Embrace to act as another cleanse, but since it only provides 2 second of stealth it would only clear one condition. I’m assuming that Meld in Shadows would bump that up to 3 seconds which means that you could potentially clear 2 conditions, but I’ll have to check to make sure. With the 15 in Trickery this would be available every 30.4 seconds.

Running Hide in Shadows with the standard Shadow’s Rejuvenation+Shadow’s Embrace combo would probably be better than all of those though, but that breaks the theme a little more than I would like and opens you up to interrupts.

Interesting suggestions. The main reason that I was deadset on going full Trickery was the ability the interrupt stability rezzes/stomps (and Shelter, apparently) in one go. I should be able to do most of that with your build though with a quick headshot or PW after stealing. I run Feline Grace with my current build and it would be great to keep that along with the boons and boon ripping from Trickery.

Sarrow.2785:

You have a few playstyles available. Each comes in handy depending on your enemy.
- Inf strike in, spam auto, inf return and repeat. This is a low ini way to get maximum damage from your +15% in trickery while staying mobile and clear of condis
- Pistolwhip spam. It’s surprisingly sustainable depending on how many times you generate ini from your crits. Not good in AoE though, best vs melee opponents
- Spam autoattack for weakness and cripple. Best for chasing wounded targets.

My current S/D playstyle is already pretty auto attack and IS heavy so I agree with you on those points, but I’m not sure about the PW spam. It seems like most people would just evade out of it. Are you spamming after they’ve blown their dodges or is the spam mainly for the evade?

After a quick test in the mists it seems that PW stun benefits that much from Sigil of Paralyzation like Tactical Strike does. The stun only seems to cover 2 PW hits with and without the sigil and there’s no other +stun duration runes or food. I could try running Sigil of Impact for the +10% damage to stunned targets, but I need to run some tests in order to determine if the damage boost carries through the whole PW. Even if it does carry through I assume Sigil of Fire will still be better for straight damage, but I could possibly run both.

Originally I was just going to not burst while retaliation was up or try to rip it with Bountiful Theft before bursting. Sigil of Nullification is a good idea though, especially for the Acrobatics builds. I’d rather not run S/D on swap only because I’ve been playing it since December or January and would prefer something new for a while.

I actually kicked that idea around while thinking about building might stacks over the course of a fight with Orrian Truffle and Meat Stew food along with Power of Inertia. Having a heal on such a short cd would be great but I don’t know if it would be worth losing the instant cast and evade from Withdraw and opening myself up to interrupts, especially Headshot. Thanks for the suggestions though.

bobross.5034:

I’ve played around with this a bit too…tried one similar to your second one, but with clerics gear instead of pvt. On mine, I run clerics armor and zerker trinkets, gives a good amount of survivability and crit chance/damage.

Two recommendations:
Pain response (acrobatics – – is actually very respectable now, especially if you have some points in healing, its nearly 50% uptime on regen when you need it (that is when taking damage) and free condition clears every 30 seconds. I believe it`ll keep you up better than assassins reward.

for the second build, putting that extra 10 into trickery instead of deadly arts can give you thrill of the crime. Reduces steal cooldowns and gives you fury about half the time. If you take furious retaliation, you will have solid amounts of fury coming in. This has the added benefit of giving you solid swiftness uptime without wasting dodges.

Thanks for the response. I forgot that Pain Response was dropped to 30s. I’ll definitely have to take that into account.

Putting 10 points in Trickery on the second build will drop my Steal cooldown to roughly 32 seconds, and since I don’t have to worry about using it as an interrupt I could use it more freely. Waiting for Furious Retaliation to kick in along with Executioner then stealing with Thrill of the Crime for heavy pressure and finishing.

If I drop Practiced Tolerance for Furious Retaliation (or Side Strikes for more constant crits) I would need to swap some gear around to get back at or above 18k EHP, but overall the build should still hit pretty hard.

I’m currently running a S/D D/P stealth build that I’m growing a little tired of so I started looking into the Acrobatics and Trickery lines to see how well they stand up without having stealth to fall back on. S/P combines some of my favorite aspects of the weaponsets that I’m currently running while fitting nicely with the no-stealth theme.

I haven’t finalized any gear choices yet so I would really appreciate any input on the subject. The target values that I’ve been building around for each build are a minimum of 50% crit chance with Signet of Agility and 15k HP/18k Effective HP. I like to create builds with 1vX in mind and 18K EHP seemed to be the point where I struck a nice balance between survivability and effective power. That being said, most of the survivability in these builds should come from blinds, shadowsteps, dodging, evades, and well timed interrupts instead of sheer stats.

BUILDS
Keep in mind that the 180 precision bonus from Signet of Agility was added manually

• 10/30/0/0/30
  Smart initiative management combined with First Strikes and Lead Attacks could provide a potential 25% damage boost that goes up to 45% on targets below 50% HP. Signet Use helps keep initiative up along with Kleptomaniac while providing a 24s cooldown stunbreak and condition clear/endurance regen through Infiltrator’s Signet and Signet of Agility. Sleight of Hand gives more control through dazing along with relatively frequent boons, boon ripping, and small heals via Mug. I’m also thinking about running Centaur runes with this in order to stick to targets better. I’d rather not blow a lot of initiative on back to back IS since 2 of the 3 damage bonuses are initiative dependent.

• 10/30/0/30/0
  Good HP and high effective power. Changing to PTV armor instead of zerker still allows you to keep a respectable EP while boosting your EHP to over 23k. The combined damage bonuses of Fluid Strikes and First Strikes should be way easier to maintain considering how much dodging would go on with this build. Throw in Orrian Truffle and Meat Stew for more dodgebeasting. Quick Pockets and Quick Recovery provide good initiative regeneration, but I’m considering swapping Quick Pockets for Assassin’s Reward. This build also has way kitten on support than the 30 Trickery build and can’t do anything about enemy boons.

• 0/30/0/25/15
  Similar to the above build with more boon support. Higher initiative pool and Kleptomaniac would let me be a bit more aggressive with blinds/interrupts/etc while keeping all the damage boosts, but obviously not as good at control as the 30 Trickery build.

Notes and Other Ideas

• One of my biggest concerns about going the no-stealth route was how susceptible I would be to condition burst, but between Shadowstep, IS/Shadow Return and Signet of Agility I think I should be fine, but if someone could provide a different viewpoint then that would be great.
• Sigil of Generosity/Purity- I’m thinking about swapping out Sigil of Fire on the SB for one of these. That way I could swap to SB to deal with condition pressure instead of using Shadowstep or repeated IS/SR. Has anyone tried these?
• Roll for Initiative – Replacing Infiltrator’s Signet with this would be great for keeping initiative up while still providing a stunbreak and an evade, but it comes at a price of a cooldown that’s 250% higher than the signet with Signet Use. Also, this may be overkill as far as initiative regen goes, but any feedback on the idea would be appreciated.
• HP on Crit food- even with the internal cooldown I think this could be pretty beneficial to the builds. Anyone still running these?

So what do you guys think?

Those crazy Sword/Pistol thieves and their easily achievable permastealthing capabilities. How one weapon set could be allowed to be so powerful I simply do not know.

jbondo.9817:

hey maybe you guys shouldn’t rely on transfer guilds as much anymore?

Which transfer guilds did SF get again?

A thief that traits/gears for pure defense will have higher armor than a warrior that traits/gears for pure offense.

A thief that traits/gears for pure offense will have lower armor than a warrior that traits/gears for pure offense.

Meanwhile, a warrior that traits/gears for pure defense will have higher armor than a thief that traits/gears for pure defense, due to the innate bonus from heavy armor.

It’s not a difficult concept to grasp. You’re attempting to apply RP/classic trinity rules to a system that prioritizes player choice over predetermined class roles, or at least tries to. A player that chooses to gear themselves defensively should have higher defensive stats than a player that chooses to gear offensively, regardless of armor class.

I Monk For L O V E.7528:

Some call him NSP, some believe he is half man, half god. I believe he is 100% squirrel

Wurm runes give vitality and crit damage. Divinity runes give +60 to all stats along with crit damage.

povV.5681:

the titles are really strangely organized. lots of them are lame. legend seems like it would be near the cap. but isn’t the cap like 5k? idk. I play too many different toons to care

It’s likely that the ranks are split into tiers and recycled. So you’ll have Invader→Legend, then Bronze Invader→Bronze Legend, Silver Invader→Silver Legend, etc.

Can’t wait for my Mauve Avenger rank.

Sevenred.3890:

pulsecodesgnl.3470:

Sevenred.3890:

That you blame your lack of numbers to explain how we could make this happen is downright laughable though.

What’s really laughable is that you think NSP is the reason we are in t6 as opposed to IoJ.

Eat as much ratings from NSP than you did on HoD and you’re in tier 6. You didn’t, you stay in tier 7. SF is clearly superior to NSP right now, I’m saying we fought tooth and nails this week and that made you stay in tier7.

Well, not really.
TL;DR: T6, and specifically Darkhaven, is the deciding factor, not NSP.

If we’re going by point totals, you guys are actually doing worse now than you were at this point in last week’s match. Using the latest updates for mos.millenium.org, the current difference between SF and NS kitten 6,908 points. At around this time on Wednesday of last week’s matchup, the point difference between SF and NSP was 44,930 points.
http://mos.millenium.org/servers/view/42/30 (April 17 at around 22:00, assuming I got the timezone correct for the millenium site)

To be fair, SF is also doing slightly worse, while HoD is doing noticeably worse due to lack of participation.

Attempting to look at things objectively, it would seem that the primary reason that SF isn’t moving up this week is the recent shift in T6, not how well NSP may or may not be performing. Darkhaven went from a 113,000 point average lead over T6’s second place server starting from May 30th to a 37,000 point lead, resulting in large rating gains for IoJ and DR. That plays a larger role since SF is still gaining rating in this tier (more than what was gained last week), but the rating target that needs to be reached is being pushed further away by events in T6.

Bazeleel.8219:

Humorless.1573:

d/p with mixed gear and 0/x/30/20/x

That is not very helpful
What does x mean?

Distribute the remaining 20 points however you see fit in the ‘x’ categories (Critical Strikes and Trickery.) For example, you could do 30 Shadow Arts, 20 Acrobatics, 20 Trickery, or 20 Critical Strikes, 30 Shadow Arts, 20 Acrobatics, 10 CS, 30 SA, 20 Acro, 10 Trickery, etc.

WhiteRose.6934:

To the SF thief, black human male, that shadow stepped around our BL tonight. Maybe try and stand and fight me eh? Let’s see that skill your server always boasts about, cause all I’m getting when I find one of you alone is that you’ve all practiced hard in the art of running away. ~

Thief in question here. When I get bored I like to mess with small groups. I’m sorry if you don’t find it as amusing as I do. I don’t see why you feel the need to misrepresent the situation, presenting it as a 1v1 when it was actually 3 VLK and one guardian from a guild who’s name I can’t recall at the moment while we were near the camp, and a similar situation while we were near the tower (Fought that guardian alone later a few times. If you’re reading, good fights.)

I’m not sure what it is about my play that apparently irked you so much that you decided to bring this to the forums (unless you’re the VLK thief that I downed and stomped a few times in front of your group), but if we find each other alone out there in the field I’ll be happy to fight you to the death. Of course, if you prefer grouping and PvPing with your friends that’s perfectly fine, but I primarily solo roam, and considering that you already have the numerical advantage I don’t see why the rest of the fight should be on your terms as well.

airstu.2579:

Manoa.5897:

airstu.2579:

DR and Kain actually got out of T8 on their own merits thanks to massive free server transfers.

Fix’d

And SF didn’t get transfers either after hitting t8.

I don’t think we can compare the transfers that SF received to the transfers that DR and Kaineng received. All three servers received transfers on an individual level, and those are very hard, if not impossible for anyone but ANet to accurately quantify. However, it is a fact that DR and Kaineng received sizable to large, organized guilds (PRO for DR, War Machine and Rethesis for Kaineng), while SF did not. Those are significant boosts, as evidenced by the fact that, before WM dropped, the scores that FC/ET posted against Kaineng were similar to the scores that they’ve been posting against SF. However, after WM and Rethesis dropped, FC and ET didn’t even post 100k. When it comes to transfers, SF hasn’t received anything even remotely close what those guilds did for Kaineng and DR, but we’re stuck competing against ratings that were shaped by those guild transfers.

Yams.6082:

Maugetarr.6823:

Don’t forget withdraw>D/P #3 to dodge, blind and keep overall pressure up.

Does this skill still root you when firing the pistol shot? I remember something being fixed about in an earlier patch but not the specifics.

No. You’re able to move while firing the shot.

Jscull.2514:

Funny part is all you people bashing these guys have probably been Rick rolled by people like these guys in similar fashion. No one ever admits that kind of stuff hahahaha laughing for days

I’m sure that some of the negative responses are coming from people like that, but I think that there’s also a fair amount who don’t see the point in bragging about something like this. Any group with decent organization is supposed to win these types of fights.

KrazyFlyinChicken.5936:

Im seeing a lot of whining and screaming about skins.
No one is talking about the removal of culling.

I’d like to assume that culling is, in fact, totally fixed then? Since no one’s whining about it?

Im stuck at work . Can anyone confirm that culling is a thing of the past. Can you see the enemy zerg coming at you from 1500+ range?

WvW is down at the moment, so no one can really get in and test it out. It’s also WvW only so we can’t test it in PVE in the meantime.

Jinks.2057:

WvW players out number all other aspects of this game. Only PvE has a chance to beat out WvW players. Remember tho most PvE’ers WvW, but there are tons of WvWers who don’t PvE.

Well I don’t think that the part about most PvErs also joining WvW is necessarily true, but I do get the gist of what you’re saying, and I agree. WvW is a very significant part of the game, and for many players its the only part of the game. But when we compare the player who chooses WvW as their focus to the player who chooses PvE as their focus, the WvW player is always coming up short. The armor skin choice issue is just another example.

A pure WvW player is completely locked out of 8 armor sets (dungeon armor), or 11 armor sets if they haven’t done their personal story. Cultural armor is still available, but making the gold will be a fairly slow process. A pure PVE player is locked out of 1 armor set (Invader skin), on top of being able to acquire the gold for cultural armor at a far, far faster rate than the WvW player. ANET says that players should be able to enjoy the full game regardless of what they’re preferred playstyle is, but the current state of the game along with their actions don’t really reflect that ideology.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the PVE player base is significantly larger than WvW, and I understand that a lot of attention will be going to them as a result, but I really don’t think that it’s asking for much if they can just throw us a bone on this armor skin thing. At this point, I’m just assuming that what we received today is basic groundwork for future additions.

It’s very disappointing. Like you said, the available skins are the low-level, generic item skins that we could have gotten already by spending a negligible amount of money. On top of that, it seems like we don’t even get access to all of the generic skins. I’m unable to get back into WvW at the moment, but while browsing for medium armor I remember seeing the Warden set, the Duelist set, and one other. I wasn’t expecting cultural armor, nor was I expecting for them to create a bunch of new skins just for us WvW players, but I was definitely hoping that we’d be given more than this. Right now, I’m just guessing that we unlock more skins as we rank up.

This is what I’m currently working on changing to.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/thief/?7|c.1g.hd.8.1g.h1|5.1g.h4|1p.a1.1p.a1.1p.a1.1p.a1.1p.a1.1p.a1|1g.67.1i.67.1i.67.1n.67.1n.67.8g.67|0.p6a.u46b.f2.0|1b.7|e

CnD was not nerfed in WvW as far as I know.

Looks like Krytan set with Karma shoulders (Orr temple sets)

gw2buildcraft.com is the only site that I know of, but sometimes I question its accuracy. I also use the spreadsheet found here. http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/136aa7/pve_gear_calculatorefficiency_optimizer/

Fade.7658:

With traits and offhand crit sigil, crit chance is 57%. As soon as I get my ascended amulet, I’ll gain 1% more crit damage and 36 more toughness.

What gear and runes/orbs are you using?

In your post on reddit, I noticed that you mentioned switching back to full berserker gear. Are you still able to more or less perform the same role in zerg vs. zerg fighting that you have in this video due to your traits/utilities, or is it simply too risky with the further drop in toughness?

Daximus.8547:

It is sword #2 skill….it even shows it on the tool bar when he is using it. It teleports you to the person and then you can push it again to teleport back to your spot you left from.

It’s not sword 2. Look at :03, :06, and :07 in the video. The enemy thief is constantly moving away from OP, not towards him then away like he would be if he were using Infilrator’s Strike. Shadow Return shows up on the OP’s tool bar, but not the toolbar of the enemy thief. At :06 he manages to port back twice while spamming Unload, which takes Sword #2 and P/D #3 out of the equation.

Columba.9730:

Maugetarr.6823:

Columba.9730:

How is it that with 3k armor I take 5 k, 10k shots from thieves, yet thieves have weak dps? That makes no sense. I have that armor and 24k health and I still die in 1-2 seconds of rom completely invisible thieves, so I don’t understand your point. Try a ranger if you want to complain about weak dps. At least with warriors, I can see them and avoid their damage.

Thieves have strong burst and weak sustained DPS in a backstab build. They have weak burst but decent sustained damage while visible with a sword main hand weapon. Assuming that you are a warrior or guardian with that amount of armor, there ate a great number of skill that can mitigate all the damage a backstab thief can throw at you in that 1 to 2 seconds. This game is not based around passive defence. My thief only has a total of 2.5k armor, but I have yet to get hit by one of these amazing 10k backstabs. That is not to say I haven’t gotten hit by the mug C&D combo, but my dodge is bound to my mouse, so the backstab portion rarely hits.

If you can put out 20k+ damage from complete invisibility in <2 seconds, lack of sustained dps is irrelevant vs most enemies,

You do realize that this thread is about thieves in PVE, right? The only things that are irrelevant here are both of your replies complaining about thieves in WvW when the topic is about poor thief DPS in dungeons.

tagnut.8621:

Add the kitten scorpion wire pulling people off walls to the nerf list. Gods a bunch of blind chimps could have balanced thieves better.

You mean the Scorpion Wire skill that doesn’t even work half the time and can be countered simply by not standing on the ledge? That Scorpion Wire skill?

Ron.4920:

“Lets just imagine this hypothetical situation.” Its right there at the top, no back peddling involved.

Blackgoat what is backpedaling, are you a florist?

He’s someone who’s correct. Your florist joke only works if he spelled it “back petal”, and “back peddling” implies that there’s some sort of sale of backs occurring.

Manoa.5897:

Valenna Tiefling.5806:

The message here is that you should be prepared to be sent right back down here like SF did. You remind us of them a few weeks ago, feel free to check that match-up’s score and how they’ve done since. It’s OK, we’ll wait a few weeks, we’ve waited months already, and it’s delicious every time.

Please remember that it was a small (but vocal) minority who were like that. The vast majority of us SFers knew the real story with the score during that particular match-up and didn’t fool ourselves into thinking that that crazy high score had anything to do with mad WvW skillz.

As far as I remember it was only one guy who was bragging. And he doesn’t even play on SF anymore.

Columba.9730:

nahj.2870:

Columba.9730:

Yep, and unrendered thieves I cannot target.

Tab target.

Nope, they don’t target. So perhaps they are actually perma stealthed? Lol, not sure that’s better.

A thief that has dropped out of stealth but isn’t visible due to culling is absolutely able to be targeted via tab targeting. Watch for the black swirl effect, hit tab, there’s your thief. I do this multiple times in every WvW session. It’s even easier when fighting P/D thieves since the bullet trails from Sneak Attack will tell you exactly where the thief is.

Columba.9730:

Yep, and unrendered thieves I cannot target.

Tab target.

This is already being addressed