Guild Wars 2

dimgl.4786:

Your traits are supposed to be what changes your playstyle, but apparently traits only give you more statistical bonuses.

Untrue! Most real builds I’ve seen actually get something out of their trait picks. The raw stat boosts are useful, but in many cases aren’t as important — because you can offset them with gear.

dimgl.4786:

Which let’s be honest… the most useful statistical bonuses in Guild Wars 2 are vitality and toughness, because the combat is based on dodging!

This statement is internally incoherent. If combat is based on dodging (i.e. avoiding getting hit altogether), why are Vitality and Toughness the best stats rather than the worst?

Undertow.2389:

You still kill easy stuff faster than others, but you feel weaker against harder encounters.

Exactly. Warriors don’t really have active defense skills comparable to some of the other classes. My warrior can probably take 3-5 times as many hits as my thief, but my thief is much better for avoiding getting hit altogether — which is the superior strategy in harder encounters.

I actually only use one exotic skin, which is my pistol. Everything else is lower-tier skins skinned onto exotics.

(The thing is, if the “ascended” gear rollout is as slow as they claim, most of your exotic gear will be top-of-the-line for a really long time. I dislike the idea of the new gear, but it doesn’t obsolete most of my equipment.)

Enh, I dunno. Worst case, your victim’s teammates can attack the air.

I usually don’t bother to stealth myself when stomping. Takes too long. Popping Signet of Shadows to counter your target’s interrupts works just as well against most classes (maybe not Rangers, if they have a pet, like, right there to eat you).

God Sealer.4103:

1/2 a second of seeing you as you appear on your screen seems better, ghostly image, gives just enough time to have a general idea if they’re going fight or flight, and lets the thief know he needs to reroute if he’s smart.

I’d actually be fine with this. (Maybe 1/4 second? Half seems like an eternity sometimes, in GW2.)

The troublesome part of the initial suggestion is that completely breaking stealth would make sneak attack skills untenable. This suggestion — showing the thief on the screen briefly — doesn’t have that problem. Make you work for the sneak attack more, but I don’t mind working for it if the payoff is actually significant, you know?

Makes it harder for a thief to use stealth to run away, too, but, jeez, that’s why we get 10000 evades and shadowsteps.

Biggest open questions would be how you handle DOT conditions and pulsing AOE (would it be a bit too easy to just preempt stealth with one of those?), and what you’d do with Shadow Refuge. I think these issues can easily be solved in a satisfactory way, though.

Anything works, really. My recommendation is to just look through armor galleries to pick whichever race you think will look best in medium armor.

I made a Sylvari thief because they have a decent personal story and I thought she’d look good in a coat.

midnightjazzy.7415:

Cya then. No offense, but backstab is too much. Even on my All toughness guard, it can do 2.5k damage and sometimes worse. That skill also can be spammed, and used while invisible. What do you expect Anet to do?

Backstab can only be used from stealth. Due to a recent patch, every time you use it will force you to be Revealed (unable to stealth for 3 seconds; it doesn’t always look that way to your opponent, though, due to the client “culling” bug). At best, it can be spammed every 3.5 seconds or so, since that’s the quickest you can chain stealth with Backstab + Cloak & Dagger. Also, the damage is lower if the thief is hitting you from the front.

Are you sure you weren’t just being repeatedly hit with Heartseeker by a stealth-bugged thief?

Also, having a melee attack do 2.5k damage to a Toughness-focused character seems entirely reasonable to me. The game’s just not designed to allow you to stand toe-to-toe with someone taking melee attacks to the face instead of doing something active (movement, dodging, defensive skills) to negate them.

My main hope would be some culling fixes. Because it’s super-stupid to be invisible to an opponent for 2-3 seconds after my own client says I’m out of stealth. This prevents you from being able to actually enjoy the game mechanics the way they’re supposed to work, you know?

azurrei.5691:

Skins are fun…but having the ONLY way to progress your character is by playing dress up with a new outfit, it makes the game BORING. This is why it worked in the single/multi-player RPG GW1 but it does NOT work in an MMO-RPG – people need things to do AND things to work towards – I’m not saying that they HAVE to add gear power creep, but they sure as hell needed to add something.

I don’t follow. If anything, outfits have more value in a “massively multiplayer” game since you actually get to show them off to other people.

In every online game I’ve played, including MMORPGs, most of my satisfaction has come from the gameplay, not the loot. At the moment, my enjoyment of GW2 is based on learning and becoming a better player. I’d be quite content to never think about upgrading my gear again.

Map completion, dungeons, jumping puzzles, and legendaries/quasi-legendaries are all tangible tasks for players to pursue. I think a better achievement/title interface might actually go a long way towards making people feel like they have more stuff to do. The achievement screen is just a bit too cryptic — and titles a bit too minor — to appreciate.

Yunni.8296:

I guess it’s worthless now to continue to work on acquiring my exotics?

Based on Anet’s current info, the “ascended” roll-out is going to be quite slow. You’re going to get months of use out of those exotics — and, for all we know, they might just stop at jewelry and never get around to armor. So, worst case, just don’t buy any guild backpacks and save exotic rings for last.

OrchusGhole.9846:

That said, if you go with the glass cannon type build, you will be very very easy to take down unless you are very proficient in staying in stealth as much as possible and revealing yourself only to do burst attack. With that type of build you are generally confined to attacking people solo and you can forget taking part in large battles because you are just too fragile.

I WvW in full Zerk and maxed-out Critical Strikes, with some points in Shadow Arts and Acrobatics for various useful traits — basically “glass cannon” for people who actually like to dodge. Haven’t had any trouble making myself useful in large battles with shortbow. The key thing is managing range and LOS, and being able to hit hard to punish your opponents for overextending.

I don’t think Spear 5 is “the elephant in the room.” It’s fine for what it does, and spear does already have decent area-attack options. I don’t think it’s weak or redundant. I really don’t think thieves need a full area-effect attack underwater, you know?

Spear 4 is the skill that just doesn’t work. The way it’s implemented, it’s like Scorpion-Wiring yourself. It’s a really awkward self-stun at anything other than max range.

Moreover, Speargun 1 doesn’t work. The damage is pitiful, even with big bleed specs. I basically only use it to test range so that I don’t miss with Speargun 2.

Man what? I love thieves underwater. You’ve got great tanking ability, damage output, and some cool escape skills (though I’m a bit spoiled by shadowsteps on land). It’s trickier to facetank groups, because you have to learn to time 3 and 5 to avoid multiple attacks. But you can do it and the payoff is huge. Also don’t forget you can avoid a ton of damage just by moving around a bit.

The only thing I’ve had serious trouble with are Risen Megaladons, because for the life of me I can’t figure out how far away they are when I’m fighting them. They’re like a swimming optical illusion or something.

That and having Basilisk Venom as your only elite is kinda awful.

“Our goal is to ensure we have a proper progression for players from exotic up to legendary without a massive jump in reward between the two.”

Here’s the thing, guys. The progression from exotic to legendary was totally optional. If you didn’t want to spend days and days for prestige gear, you could just stop at exotic and be happy with your gear. Now you’re adding an extra tier of gear with better stats.

Giving people “endgame” stuff to do that’s not a legendary: good idea.
Shifting the goal posts for what top-of-the-line “endgame” gear is: awful idea. DO NOT WANT.

I don’t have 100% map completion. I haven’t been actively pursuing it, though.

Instead, I’m doing:
- WvW, mostly.
- Dungeons with friends.
- Saving up for a not-quite-legendary weapon (there are Mystic Forge recipes with unique skins and ridiculous ingredient requirements that aren’t quite as intensive as the Legendary weapons).
- The actual new content (rather than new gear) added in every monthly release.
- Waiting for Anet to fix a blocking bug in my personal story.

namastex.8906:

So what should the people who have full exotic sets and a legendary do?

If they did the grind to get their legendary even though it had the same stats as an exotic they could have crafted for 4g, then clearly they don’t need ever-increasing stats to motivate them in the first place. They could always add more legendary gear, or more exotics (like Infinite Light). Players who like to grind for sweet gear would still want the gear.

showatt.9413:

Some of the lower level gears actually look better than endgame gears. Once you have obtain these, there really isn’t any need for you to advance further other than getting exotic gear and then transmute them to fit the style.

Well, that’s the point: “need” is bad.

Having decent skins at various “tiers” means everyone can look good, but players who want prestige can pick up blingy skins to show off their wealth. Seriously, this is a system that worked for 5-6 years of GW1’s lifetime.

I have my exotic set. Now I do what I want instead of doing what will bring in the most cash/tokens to pay for my gear. This is exactly what the devs promised about “varied endgame” and it’s way more fun than the raid-of-the-month-style progression that other MMOGs pursue.

ekimsfree.9406:

And in WvW stats mean very little, you can join in at a low level with low level gear and still play.

Depends on what you’re doing.

It’s easy to contribute usefully in WvW with any gear and level, but better stats do help you contribute a little bit more.

Przemek.6835:

Why can’t gw2 be good for everyone?

It can be, to a point. You just have to balance their interests and make sure features designed for different players don’t step on each other.

“We added better gear that makes exotics looks like rares!” is a poor approach to this, because it might please some hardcore dungeon-grinder subset, but it’s actively bad for people who were happy to get their exotics and be done with hunting for bigger numbers — which is something they’d come to expect from GW1, and was always part of the core proposition of GW2. I think there are much better ways to please both kinds of players.

Kromica.2831:

They have higher stats because you can not add runes or gems to them , without this they would be worse than exotics.

The ring in the example screenshot has 5 Power and 5 Precision over the exotic ring+gem. Note that these are the minor stats, since they’re both Magic Find rings. (I’m assuming the significant increase in Magic Find might just be specific to Magic Find scaling.) That’s similar to the gulf between rare and exotic rings (6 points on minor stats), and nothing we’ve been told indicates that these bonuses don’t apply everywhere — just the infusions, which aren’t in that picture.

Dungeon grinders are also, what, 5% of the GW2 community?
People who want more gear-grinding because they “already have their legendary” are, what, 0.2% of the GW community?
I think both of these are outnumbered by the volume of folks who got their exotics and were actually happy to be done with stressing about stats.

showatt.9413:

You pour hours and hours into grinding, only to acquire some skins, how is that satisfying?

Because blingy looks turn heads, whereas nobody wants to look at screenshots of your stats.

The “prestige skins” model kept people playing GW1 for a long time. Folks did all kinds of crazy grindy stuff in FoW and DoA for prestige skins — and other folks who didn’t want to didn’t have to, without feeling like they were being denied anything. WoW-style tiered gear is actually much, much worse. With fancy skins, your old gear never becomes useless. You just acquire more options as you play.

At the end of the day, a lot of the psychological validation in MMOGs comes from playing dress-up. The endless slog for higher numbers is clumsy design and causes just as much burnout as it cures.

Hide in Shadows is on a 30-second cooldown. The fact that it removes a bunch of degenerative conditions really isn’t that big of a deal, I think (note that it doesn’t do crap against Immobilize, which, IIRC, is one of your best conditions as an Engineer). Other forms of stealth don’t remove conditions unless you trait for it (then it’s basically one at a time).

Since you need stealth to set up stealth attacks, “damage breaks stealth” would make stealth almost pointless against any competent player. That’s just pushing thieves towards Pistol Whip or condition-spam strategies. I don’t think that’s desirable at all. Allowing the little numbers to still show up when you hit a stealthed player might be acceptable (although this over-rewards condition spam and area-attack builds), but straight-up revealing on damage would just break the mechanic altogether.

Kitono.9152:

stealth is our only real defensive ability

People have said this, like, 20 times on the forum today.

It makes me sad that you all have forgotten dodging. And shadowsteps. They, too, are your friends!

Asum.4960:

If we are talking about weak downed skills now, Thief “wins” that competition, always.

Enh, I dunno about that. Shadow Escape is pretty good. The autoattack is respectable. #3 is really the main weak point — you spend all that time using your auto-attack and Shadow Escape to keep yourself alive, and then your big final downed skill becomes available and… it doesn’t really do anything.

Keiran.1896:

I shot ’em 3 times, they stealth, they heal, they attack me.

You make it sound like you were doing the same tactic over and over even when it wasn’t accomplishing anything.

Some stuff you could have tried, in the moment, without really knowing anything about specific about thieves:
Move around.
Drop poison on him to reduce his healing.
Start laying down area damage.
Try to mess up his stealth: you describe a very consistent pattern, so you should be able to figure out the pattern. E.g., dodge when he attacks with Cloak & Dagger — it’s the horizontal dagger slash animation; there’s a bit of a windup.

ZombiesTT.3619:

Cloak & Dagger: this is much worse than heartseeker although not that many thieves use it (yet). Players can stay cloaked indefinitely, making them near unbeatable in a 1v1 confrontation.

Except if you actually want to use your attacks, there’s this little thing called Revealed. You can get tricky with using C&D as your stealth expires to stay hidden most of the time… and do what? Now you’re not actually attacking more than once every couple of seconds.

Initiative is very powerful and flexible, which certainly makes balancing thief skills trickier since you can’t just slap on a long cooldown. However, it also allows thieves to have a set of really situational weapons skills, which is how we get interesting stuff like Headshot and Infiltrator’s Arrow instead of the usual variants of “stun a guy,” “do area damage on a cooldown,” and “do burst damage on a cooldown.”

Stealth-stomping isn’t actually that great. I mean, it’s a nice option to have, but you can stomp people just as easily with Signet of Shadows and Infiltrator’s Signet (or Signet of Midnight and Blink, if you’re a mesmer) — and it’s faster, because you don’t waste time casting your stealth skill.

testpig.5018:

stunbreakers are not necessary. Any damage i do sustain, i quickly heal back while in stealth.

That’s assuming you survive til the end of the stun or knockdown. You’re playing a build that’s super-soft to stuns and conditions (not damage, but Immobilize / Crippled / Chilled). In WvW especially, being stuck in one place means you’re going to be blasted down by focused fire — because you’re such an obvious target that even halfway decent players will take notice and throw damage your way.

Because of how the Revealed mechanic works, you really don’t get very much from running five stealth skills, as opposed to, say, CnD and one utility “panic button” for when you can’t connect with CnD.

I’m playing a thief. Sometimes, when I get blasted down while using the short bow, my character immediately teleports in front of me and my Shadow Escape (the #2 thief downed skill) is on a long (like 12+ seconds) cooldown.

Shadow Escape and Cluster Bomb have the same hotkey, so this seems like the result of button-mashing 2 while dying.

But the weird thing is that Shadow Escape is supposed to start out on cooldown when you’re downed, you know? So it shouldn’t be available immediately to begin with. (The larger concern is whether you can do this with other downed skills, like Vengeance.)

I got this to happen twice in the course of 3 hours in WvW.

testpig.5018:

with the above build, you get:

No stun breakers or shadowsteps? :O

testpig.5018:

ASP, then you are not the type of thief playstyle players are worried/complaining about.

… But my point is that I met the guys who were, and what happened most of the time is that either they made an ineffectual escape or I murdered them. So every time someone popped a Shadow Refuge it didn’t really do squat. One guy Shadow-Refuged after I Shadowstepped out of his Basilisk-Backstab, presumably to avoid any counterattack — but if he had his own Shadowstep he could have just finished me instead.

(Also, I do use CnD to stealth a bunch. Taking a bunch of other stealth skills just seems kinda stupid to me, especially given how much better Withdraw is than Hide in Shadows.)

Rystlwulf.1476:

If the thief opens with Basilisk venom and Steal, chances are you are done for.

This is a reflex test. You have to pop your stun breaker and then evade. It’s certainly not easy, but it’s doable.

Thieves and Mesmers probably have the easiest time of it, thanks to stun-breaking teleport skills like Shadowstep and Blink.

So, your actual complaint is that thieves try to hide forever in Shadow Refuge, and it’s annoying to get them out?

I ran into a ton of Shadow Refuge guys last night in WvW last night (TC vs. CD and Yaks). It didn’t seem to do much for them. Half the time they’d be dying on the ground when SR was over; no one ever successfully killed me by casting Shadow Refuge.

So, I dunno, this doesn’t seem that good. The Shadowstep on my bar seems way more powerful than Refuge.

BabelFish.7234:

the problem is most thieves try to go the stealth/glass cannon route which isn’t how you play PvE, that will get you killed in the later level areas such as Orr and dungeons.

That’s not true at all in my experience.

Orr in particular is actually easier with a big-damage build, since you only need to avoid damage for a couple of seconds before you kill your enemy. If you do go down to a surprise attack during a group event, you can teleport out of red circles and your downed-state auto attack hits hard enough that you can just rally yourself off some trash.

Finding the right stats for dungeons is trickier, but everyone dies constantly unless they know how to dodge.

It might just be level-scaling.

Try this:
Go to Lion’s Arch. Check your crit stats.
Exit LA north, into Gendarran Fields. Check your crit stats.
Go back into LA, then exit LA south, into Bloodtide Coast. Check your crit stats.

Does that match the fluctuations you’re seeing?

You’re already using a lot of the better skills. Especially if you get in the habit of actually using the activated ability on Signet of Shadows sometimes, to get the most out of it.

Your list is missing Infiltrator’s Signet and Shadowstep, though. I think any thief bar needs at least one stun breaker (you can’t keep Infiltrator’s Strike ready forever, so it doesn’t count), which these skills provide; and you pretty much can’t go wrong with two. Infiltrator’s Signet provides a decent passive benefit and has a nice low recharge if you’re running the Crit Strikes signet trait. Shadowstep is more versatile but you pay for it with a longer cooldown.

Armor:
You forgot gems, it seems. I just use Ruby Orbs for PvE/WvW. They’re like way cheaper runes of Divinity. I think Scholar is better for structured PvP than WvW, since in WvW you’re more likely to want to be in a protracted battle with your health below 90% most of the time.

I think “on hit” armor is generally a bad idea because thieves generally don’t take hits very well. So either you’re doing well and getting nothing out of your armor or doing poorly and your armor is unlikely to save you.

Weapons:
Sigil of Air is a pretty decent source of damage. Like getting a double-hit every once in a while. Also, it’s just straight-up fun.

The common claim is that a Sigil of Paralyzation has the same actual effect on Daze duration as Runes of the Mesmer, due to rounding. If that’s true (I haven’t been able to verify conclusively one way or another in testing; I think you might need to Fraps it to be sure), there’s no reason to run Mesmer over a single Paralysis sigil.

I switched from Warrior to Thief for PvE (well, WvW also, but predominantly PvE at the time).

The easiest PvE thief playstyle to understand is Sword/Pistol. Sword’s basic attack hits multiple targets and does pretty good damage if you take multiple swings. Pistol offhand gives you Black Powder, which sets up a field that spams Blindness on enemies around you every second. So you can kill almost any non-champion without taking damage by just autoattacking and pressing 5 every few seconds; you can kill a whole crowd of them, too, if you wrangle them all together. With your stats focused on offense, you can also do this quickly.

Your second weapon is usually Short Bow. It has a default attack that hits up to 3 targets, and Cluster Bomb, which is a really spammable area-attack with good damage. It’s really easy to rack up a massive kill count in group events by just pressing 2 a lot.

So, at the basic level, you can do pretty well by just mastering a couple of skills and positioning. This is how I butchered my way through Orr (with the major exception of Lyssa-charged areas in Malchor’s Leap, because that constant dazing is awful).

On top of that, thieves can dodge like crazy, which makes them pretty nice for the “avoid the red circles” part of the game (i.e. most dungeon encounters). Thieves’ ability to keep up Cripple or Poison on monsters is very useful in certain boss fights, and a couple of utilities, like Smoke Screen and Shadow Refuge, can totally save the party in a bad fight. Generally you’ll do good damage with an offensive build in dungeons, though sometimes you’ll be stuck using bow attacks because it’s too dangerous for you to get in close, and that’s when you’ll envy tankier guys a bit.

How ‘bout something like this?
Gear, since that build site doesn’t do PvE gear:
Full zerk everything.
Ruby Orbs in the armor (you could do Divinity runes, Scholar runes, &c. to taste, but Ruby Orbs are cheap and very aggressive).
Sigil of Paralysis in the dagger, your favorite damage sigil in the sword (I use Air).

Good damage, lots of survivability through dodging. Contributes usefully in 1v1, small skirmishes, and large battles.

Thanks to the gear, the damage is comparable to builds that run heavy Deadly Arts. Long-cooldown bursty skills are less valuable in WvW than SPvP, so we’re not traiting into Mug.

Keep a pistol handy for switching to S/P when you want to solo a bunch of NPCs at a camp.

In both WvW and PvE, I trait heavily into Crits and Acrobatics. You get a lot of initiative regeneration, which is very helpful since most fights will require you to do more than just kill a single opponent and call it a day. You also get to dodge lots and lots and lots. Full Zerk gear for damage.

What’s the point of a “bunker” build? It’s to hold control points, right?

Thieves are really good at escaping from combat, but when they do, more often than not it means they’re ceding control of the thing they’re actually fighting for. Seems like the proper “bunker” character avoiding death accomplishes more.

Black Powder and Headshot are amazing for Sword/Pistol. They provide tons of control while your auto-attack does the heavy lifting with damage.

With Pistol/Pistol, the ranged interrupt is even more useful, and Black Powder lets you spread blindness very aggressively; it’s very much worth the initiative in its current state. If you feel Pistol needs more damage, I think the obvious places to add it are the basic attack and Body Shot.

A moderate damage increase to these two skill swouldn’t break anything, though. But they’re really solid as they are. (Though I would guess most players don’t use Headshot very much.)

rhycochet.5268:

does this mean i can’t get my order armor when i hit 80 before the patch comes out?

No, the only prereq is that you join an order. If you’ve got through to the level 30-ish quest where you pick an order and the take your first mission (which I think is whe you also get the order’s banner in your character select screen), you’ll have access to all the gear they sell. Go to your order’s headquarters and look around for an armorsmith.

Having the personal story bugged at The Hatchery does prevent you from getting certain PvE-rewards-only armor skins, and Pact weapon skins, on this character.

“Choose which oddball set of balance changes you want applied to you at any given point in time” is a pretty awful idea for a class mechanic.

If you think Steal should interrupt other abilities, just say “Steal should interrupt other abilities.” Making up an elaborate system in which you can either be in you-really-want-to-Steal-burst-but-you-can’t mode or you-can’t-burst-at-all-but-Steal-works-like-it-used-to mode is ridiculously over-thinking it. (Why does a pure-conditions no-crits-allowed thief even care about being able to Steal in the middle of skill use?)

Daecollo.9578:

Its more of an “idea” thread if they are nerfing the class as badly as I predict.

You’re wasting a lot of time rewriting things that don’t need to be changed.
I mean, seriously: Vigorous Recovery. In the context of a thief’s other skills (15-second heals), it’s amazing. And yet y’all are suggesting doubling the duration. Why? What is the point of writing that up at all?

Adein.2031:

The thief class is (according to the game designer) a tricky, hard to pin-down class (through stealth and mobility). This is amazing in pvp, but mostly worthless in pve.

However, a warrior is designed to be a class where once you get caught in melee range, he beats your face to the ground – quickly. This has some weaknesses in pvp (few escape options), but is amazing in pve.

All this stems from the PvP-centric game design. PvE is more of a side-game.

See, here’s the thing. Those “few escape options” are also a problem in PvE. You get Shield Stance, Endure Pain, and an extra dodge roll if you spec right; you’ve also got easy perma-swiftness, which of course helps a ton; and some weapons have a mobility skill. But overall you can’t dodge all the red circles and your defensive skills don’t compare favorably against a guardian or even a thief.

Y’all are talking like warriors can just run through Orr pulling 20 guys and beat their faces in without breaking a sweat. That’s not really the case. They roll through isolated trash but have to work for it quite a bit in challenging encounters.

I love Withdraw. It breaks immobilize and throws you pretty far — twice the range of a regular dodge (and more underwater, as far as I can tell). Being immobilized while outnumbered is certain death.

Having two shadowsteps is very powerful. Take a look at the last third of this video. You’ll see several good examples of Infiltrator’s Strike comboed with Shadowstep for a long-range (2400-ish) escape.

I stressed about gear when I hit 80. “What if I do these three pieces Knight’s?” “What if I mix in some Valkyrie?” &c. &c. Then someone reminded me that you just don’t get that much survivability from splashing in these bits. And the math really does favor maxing out power + crit chance + crit damage as much as is feasible.

So I just went full Zerk. And it was brilliant; put up Black Powder once and most things are dead before they can get a good swing at you. If I weren’t putting points into Acrobatics, I might change my gear a bit to get slightly more Vitality. But Acrobatics is soooo good that I’m unlikely to ever ignore it completely.

So, at least in my experience…
How much hp is enough? 13-14k is sufficient.
How much Toughness is enough? Whatever you start with.
Dodge, stun-break, and break immobilize, because you’re going to be taking way more damage than even the tankiest build can handle otherwise.

In dungeons and WvW, knowing when to use Withdraw is worth more than 10k extra hit points.

The best use case I can see for Valk is if most of your damage comes from Backstabs, since you can just use Hidden Killer to make up for the lower crit rate. Maybe throw in Furious Retaliation so that you’ve got a good crit rate on your finishing attacks after the Backstab has brought your opponent under 50% hp.

jwburks.9735:

I really don’t know how these glass cannon types do it.

When you kill enemies quickly, you’re reducing how much damage is sent your way. A zombie who’s only alive for 10 seconds can’t deal as much damage as one that’s alive for 20 seconds.

Compressing your kill time also makes it easier to get value out of active defense. Skills like Smoke Screen and Caltrops are much more potent when you can accomplish something before their duration runs out.

I’m still on Sword/Pistol, because it’s got ridiculous PvE power and tons of utility in WvW. I trait for massive crits but focus my trait perks on initiative and endurance, so I can actually apply them.