Guild Wars 2

For stealth heavy builds, any build with dagger offhand (for C&D) or D/P are ideal, with the addition of stealth utilities.
As for a particular build, you can ask 10 thieves and get 10 different answers. What matters most is what build fits the playstyle he wants most.

You can go with:
Conditions:
- Tanky (Usually P/D with Carrion or Rabid)
- Evasive (usually D/D or SB with Carrion, Rabid, or Rampager’s)

Direct Damage:
- Tanky (typically see P/P, S/D, S/P with this most often and Soldier, Knights)
- Burst (usually D/D, sometimes see D/P With use of Berserker’s, Valkyrie or a mix)
- Sustained (S/D, S/P, SB, P/P, SB with a well balanced gearset [power, prec, tough, and vitality])

While stealth isn’t as heavily utilized in some of the builds, most do use it quite a bit.

As for Trait point distribution. The more Shadow Arts, the more survival traits at your disposal. A balance between survival and DPS that fits each individual player’s needs simply has to be found on trial and error basis.

Thiefz.3695:

WvW is not PvP. PvP is PvP.

snip
WvW is fine for small guilds however what I am reading is “I want to Player kill against moderately sized forces with my 5 man team.” That’s not WvW because that is what PvP was meant to be.

That’s not entirely true. sPvP is built around point control, not player killing; if there were deathmatch PvP maps available, then you’d have a point, even if it is a small one.
The issue with that is it does not fill the “roaming PvP” role many players are looking for, with PvP maps being such confined spaces.
I can understand that not everyone has played RvR style games in the past and that many of those fail to grasp the concept of 8v8 (or in this case 5v5) roaming PvP. For some of us though, it’s the only PvP worth playing.

halovarga.6479:

anyone want to start a fight club come to south windmill in cd

Yeah, let me get logged in and I’ll shoot ya a whisper

The revive system is one of the many reasons I solo roam on S/D. Unless the reviver has enough sense to pop stability I can just daze them and interrupt revive. I don’t know what class you play, but would suggest you look into how you can get a daze or stun to do 1vX battles.

Fenomenon.5318:

Just laughing at all the Maguuma zerg comments… cant people understand the idea that Mag usually moves borderlands to do what is needed, whether it is defence or offence. I was helping defend a Garrison with about 10 other people.. we must have been a zerg in there in the minds of IoF and YB… Also, the people from [KILL] on IoJ needa calm down in JP’s, people are there for the chest, not a fight, even if you did chase me out and get killed. Jumping Puzzles are a place of peace… so CALM DOWN

WvW JPs are PvP dungeons, plain and simple. They are many things to many people but never have I heard them called “place of peace” >.<.

Draygo.9473:

Saying they failed is a bit wrong.

There isn’t much you can do to hold a supply camp outnumbered like that. Instead it becomes your job to delay the superior force as long as possible so your team can retake or take other objectives on the map.

They succeeded in holding that zergs attention, and as a bonus sending a good number of them back to base where they would have to spend additional time running back. Look at the entire time the fight took, now that’s an extra 25 people on their team taking objectives for that time period.

Any time you can stall a larger force with a smaller one, its a win. If AR just left the supply camp and ignored the small team and refused to be delayed by it, then they would have lost.

Did you even watch the video? Nothing fail about wiping a zerg with a 4 man wasn’t even a “delay them” they roflstomped those zerglings ! Well played guys, best ele play I’ve seen to date.

Jinks.2057:

Mag 2.0

ROFLMAO @ all the players who xferred to get away from the zergs.

Yeah….I transferred to mag due to it’s population of solo roamers and the fact that they rarely had a blowout match where they were on top. Guess I’m headed to IoJ, was great running with iRez and OG though ^.^ gonna miss you guys.

Don’t forget to add thieves to that boon stripping list ^.^ and Ours is spammable.

It only works on walls. Anything that will actually take damage when you hit it will not trigger this glitch. Gates will apply revealed as normal.

Right, it’s a bug and an exploit, and no, I don’t use it. I don’t even bother with all that keep taking/defending silliness. I just solo roam or duel.

Aodh.6418:

Speaking of being insulting. I’m not really sure why there is a debate in the first place. It seems everyone agrees that camping corpses is lame and un-fun but it’s not the fault of any class in particular but the system put in place for dead players.

This is true. Dead players should not be resurrectable while in combat. Revives, of course are fine in combat, but once someone is dead they should remain so until combat is over.

You don’t get it, you don’t have to every 4 secs. You spam it and stack 12 secs of stealth. Then repeat once it’s about to drop. Since revealed isn’t applied the only limiting factors to how long you can stack stealth for is initiative and the hard cap on stealth duration.

I’ve transferred off of 2 different T1 servers so far mostly because it’s too hard to find anyone any good at 1v1 there. Everyone gets soft with all the zergs. In my experience so far, T3-T5 is the “sweet spot”. Enough population that zones aren’t just absolutely dead, but still enough people good enough to run solo around to fight.

Aodh.6418:

I honestly don’t know what to say. If a thief is using the smoke field with HS combo and you can’t find him maybe you should play some PvE. I hear it’s more friendly. Anet mentioned something about an auto-waypoint on death after a short time in the live stream anyway, so chill out. I’m sorry you watch animations, that bull’s rush combo must hit you a lot.

That’s not the problem. Long duration stealth is currently possible by spamming C&D on a wall piece as it does not always apply “revealed” as it should.

Pvp.2758:

You guys are missing the point. It shouldn’t be possible for a thief to be perm-stealth inside a keep while a mesmer waits to be ressed. So for 30min 2 people waste the time of 15 players.

Edit:

Sypsy.7318:

Pvp.2758:

Sypsy.7318:

you mean you didn’t stand near the dead body watching for a res so you could aoe the heck out of the area?

He wouldn’t res him all at once, just 2% at a time over a long period of time.

So you let the mesmer out?

Blink, invis. Heard of it?

Only takes one player…. Just have a S/D thief camp there and and prevent rezz.

It’s so easy to interrupt. Cast a daze/stun spell right over the corpse and procede to pound the area with attacks til you kill the thief. Eventually they will have to run out of thieves inside the keep, barring exploits, which a mesmer could just use rather than wasting time with a corpse camp.

covenn.7165:

You can extend in this game against disorganized masses decently, but it pales to the extension you used to be able to do in certain games with actual meaningful CC.

If DAoC is your reference here….then, yeah IKR? The weakness of CC in this game is almost appalling.

The initial matchups, as in the ones from headstart? That would not work at all as the populations of all the servers are completely different from then.

Cempa.5619:

Hi,

How can a zerg counter x4 Ele’s, I know the 4 Ele’s used a choke point but shouldn’t a zerg be able to win?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-919RMwyfnk

Depends on your definition of “zerg”. To me it means a bunch or players lumped together who are typically under-geared and under leveled and who lack much skill on an individual basis. All of this plus little to no true “organization” in the blob.

If your definition is the same as mine, then most emphatically, NO. A small group of highly coordinated players should win vs a zerg every time.

Using tactics such as:

Extending – causing players to chase such that the faster, more mobile players outrun their support and are, consequently, much easier to kill

Choke Points – commonly used by coordinated AoE specialized parties to lump the zerg into as tight a formation as possible.

Target Assisting – parties assign a “Main Assists” who is responsible for calling out targets that the rest all focus on with him, ensuring the target dies

These are just a few tactics that a small coordianted group is able to use to wipe a zerg. Zergs, on the other hand are quite simply are not capable of using these. (With one exception maybe being choke points, but organizing any zerg to use any of these is like herding cats).

What do you suggest they be “reset” to? Larger servers don’t necessarily “farm” anyway. In my experience it is the lower population servers that sport the more solid PvPers, who do the “farming” of the zerglings on high pop servers.

Blizzard was enabled to make a Mac version of WoW because the game was compiled using both D3D and OGL calls. It was written in from the ground up.

To go back now for A-Net would likely cost them more than it would make them and it all comes down to the almighty “buck” in the end.

+1.
Only reason I bought Win7 at all.

Lifewaster.5912:

To fix this:
Allow defenders to target/damage the health bar of defeated players so you can at least prevent the res from ticking up, just as it works vs downed enemies.

Actually, I believe that rezzing players should only be doable outside combat. Reviving is fine in combat. This would help in more ways than one…for example, how many times have you gone to revive a downed player only to have the system autotarget and start rezzing a dead player which takes much longer.

I propose that while in combat, players who have been fully killed simply not be interactable until combat drops.

It’s not that they are omnicscient, it’s just that out of the 4million plus accounts that have been created and all the people from those who have played ranger then reported bugs/balance issues, there’s nothing new left.
I can’t remember the last time I saw something on these forums that I hadn’t already seen. I would expect the devs to be even more “in the know” than I am.

There is a hard cap on stealth duration that can be stacked. Nothing in the OP’s description of events would be possible (assuming skills were being used without exploits) without the use of shadow refuge.

domxnik.1453:

The best way is to keep playing the class and give accurate feedback on the problems it has, not to just quit playing it overall.

Sure, but there is no feedback possible to give that they haven’t already gotten by this point.

Sure but can they do rezz while doing that? I highly doubt it.

They had to be using shadow refuge for this. One knockback as soon as that shadow refuge is dropped would instantly knock them out of stealth and apply “revealed”. They are confined to that radius.
There is no practical way to stealth enough to do this with blinding powder as it has a limit of hitting 5 players and only applies 3 secs of stealth (so 15 secs if rotated perfectly by all 5 thieves) with a 30 sec CD.

I just broke into Tier 5 of 6 for WvW kills. The only title I care about.

ykyk.2740:

Everyone wants to win =/

Some servers are just trying to plug outright gaping coverage gaps, others want to stomp more because they realized stomping is more fun than being stomped. Can’t really blame any of them.

Wrong, some of us actually prefer low tier matchups. Less zergy more individual player skill.

russia.9057:

Psychatog.8246:

GuardianOMS.8067:

Why do people think that the enemy won’t react when you put up swords…? Then when they do, oh it has to be a spy! It’s like people don’t get that wiping groups at the lord is the greatest dream crusher there is.

Clear siege, watch entrances/exits, call out scouts, and watch your butts, and you’re least likely to get jumped.

Because zergs have been showing up before swords go up….in absolutely random locations. ive tested it out in our TS personally, when we give out info in party only or give out conflicting info in TS we’ve been significantly more successful. Its clear someone is feeding info….not that i really care personally, Ive found ways around it.

Just to give you a little insight into the structure of WVW on Maguuma. We have a tiered system to determine who is tasked with offense, defense, roaming, commanding zergs, commanding strike forces, etc its all very organized thanks to a couple of ex-Seal GOONs. If you transfer over you can take a look at the Organization Structure and Culture document on the public file server.

Anyway….

Our server initiates are tasked to only watch the map and report what’s happening in Mumble the instant they suspect anything. If you’re new to the server and do not prove your fighting abilities or if you mess up in front of JerkJerk you get assigned map duty for a week.

It’s not so bad, Rebel Daughter worked his way up from map duty. Bunzy was on map duty for a long time and now look at him. I personally have never had map duty but that’s because I’m ex-military with 4 tours under my belt.

I’m going to call BS on this as well. This may be how your guild functions, but not the server as a whole. I know many players who exclusively WvW and none of them would take someone’s “order” to do “map duty” seriously. This is not military, nor will it ever be, since there is no way to enforce this hierarchy on the players or discipline them should they choose to not do as asked.

Columba.9730:

I’m sorry, but due to culling, stealth lasts a lot longer than 4 seconds, and tab targeting doesn’t work.

Tabbing works, with one exception. You can’t be in a zerg. Then again if you aren’t in a zerg, culling doesn’t exist.
(Before you try to argue this, look up the definition of culling in relation to video games. You will see that “culling” is merely the result of a “cap” put on how many sprites can be displayed on screen at any point in time. If you are not trying to render more than that “cap” nothing is culled.)

So, if someone is experiencing culling in relation to thieves, they are in a large group, ie. not alone. This means that no solo thief is a threat to them unless they, and all their allies much weaker players than the thief. In this case it’s quite purely a l2p issue.

Chance to proc a haste would be neat.

Exactly my thoughts, Gon. Obviously I don’t want zerging to go away completely. If that ever happened there would be no more zerglings returning to their ranks to farm for free badges.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Zephyrus.9680:

+1 to OP.

I’ve noticed even fighting 1v1 there’s always (or usually?) like 1 second of ‘culling’ when coming out of stealth where they basically get the first couple hits in before even appearing and it’s not that culling from large numbers of players on the screen.

Last night on my thief I took down 2 ballistas from full in the middle of about 6 people spamming all over. Took 5+ mins and I didn’t die. On the way out, a couple of them left, I killed 2 of the people (probably 1v3 don’t remember), and escaped with my life. Perhaps a little luck too but this shouldn’t really be possible to get away with, with that many people doing all they could to stop me. And this was not the numbers where true culling happens.

With my build now (not D/D), 1v2s are generally not difficult and 1v3s (lvl 80s) are very possible (depends on classes), given enough time.

Blind, block, and dodge rolls are soft counters that can prolong a fight but some harder counters are needed to stealth. Like a conditional mechanic that would bring them out of stealth (say if they took 20% of their total hp in that instance of being hidden).

At least disable the initial cast of Shadow Step while CCed because that just seems like a game breaking escape skill to me.

TL;DR: Reworking the stealth/escape mechanics on theif are needed. More lazy damage nerfs are NOT needed.

IMO.

How about a stealth CD with a compounding factor. So the more times a thief goes into stealth during a single battle, the greater the stealth cooldown is each time after going back into stealth. To remove the “drop your balls and flee” BS, tie in a speed movement penalty (think of it as fatigue) that’ll mess with their run speed which would allow them to abuse fleeing to reset the fight (and the compounding stealth cooldown).

LoL, I was ALMOST with you til the running part. I wouldn’t hold my breath as even devs have stated they want the thief to be the class that can decide a fights over, and simply run away.

Dante Dragonhand.2538:

Adaneshade.2409:

There is nothing wrong with wanting to do ranged, just don’t expect to fight your way out of being ganked while catching up to your zerg without some melee ability. There is not a single class in this game that can go pure ranged and expect to do well if they are alone vs a melee class.

Not true, warrior can do it. I do it with rifle all the time. Its not hard since in WvW kill shot hits soo hard and 1 shots 90% of the players.

90% of the players are terrible >.< your argument holds no weight. I don’t know anyone who regularly solo roams that would ever die to a rifle warrior.

Gondram.8365:

I’m pretty sure the rank system will be based on WvW “events” completed (flipping camps, towers, keeps, etc.). If they have the capability I would hope that the actual value of completing the event would be based on how long your side holds it after flipping. This would do the best job of impartially distributing whatever sort of “points” are given.

This would only further reinforce zerging, running the risk of alienating the few actual PvPers remaining in WvW. The more people you take an objective with, the less each person should be “paid”.

Players came up with this misconception of “winning and losing” totally on their own. It was never the intention of the design. These score systems were merely put in place to pit servers vs other servers that are of the same general strength. Of course allowing free transfers to continue completely broke any balance this system could have brought, (fortunately a problem that will soon be behind us).

Personally, I hope they eventually stop the 1 week battles and implement a never-ending warzone that never gets reset. This of course after server have had time to stabilize into steady rankings (like 4 weeks straight no servers moving up or down). Making WvW more about the “PvP” and less about the “PPT”.

Majik.8521:

Pirhana.8935:

Hopefully they will be smarter about that and base it off damage done and divided to the group. example you solo kill 1000 points. . group of 5 kills someone each gets 200 points. you hit someone once or twice in a zerg run over its more like 20 points.

It worked in DAOC

well it would need to be a more complex system than just damage done. other wise we will be asking where did all the support builds go.

Going on their track record with this game, I’d assume we’d see something like an even split among everyone involved. (If they indeed do decide to take this path, which I hope they do as it would break up some of the zerging.)

There is nothing wrong with wanting to do ranged, just don’t expect to fight your way out of being ganked while catching up to your zerg without some melee ability. There is not a single class in this game that can go pure ranged and expect to do well if they are alone vs a melee class.

Columba.9730:

Adaneshade.2409:

What class are you playing btw? I am in close contact with dueling juggernauts of every class that might could provide some vs thief tips.

I play a ranger. Largely specced for survivability.

K, I’ll get a ranger buddy of mine to send you a PM on the forums here to see if he might have some ideas to help out.

What class are you playing btw? I am in close contact with dueling juggernauts of every class that might could provide some vs thief tips.

You mention PvE, as you should since EQ has always been known predominately as a PvE game….. PvE is what the term “carebear” refers to. It denotes the “let’s all get along” attitude of the cartoon characters. No one is saying EQ1 didn’t have the most epic PvE content ever; but aside form the small populace in that game that actually played on the PvP servers, PvE is what it was about. DAoC on the other hand was about the PvP, even the PvE was simply a means to improve your PvP game.

Either way, this discussion is in the WVW forum therefore based on DAoC’s RvR as stated by devs pre-realease even. They wanted to capture the spirit of RvR but have missed the mark in a few places which is what these players are pointing out to them.

For the record, I have nothing against EQ1….. despised EQ2, though (another cna of worms there), it was a great game, but it’s main focus never was the PvP.

Even with GS to get you some range you’ll not be able to effectively kill good players in single combat if you keep swapping back to bow(as I’m sure you’ve noticed or this post wouldn’t even exist).
I run S/D and SB. If they try to melee swap to S/D and you’re near impossible to hit. When they inevitably try to run, swap to SB and snare + stun them whileshooting the, in the back. Way more effective.

Can go either way with S/D. I personally run a full blow tank as a solo roamer and absolutely LOVE it.

EQ was the most carebear thing ever unless you rolled specifically on a PvP server, in which case you’re pretty much on the same turf as a PvP server was in DAoC……

I make enough in solo roaming to purchase food + oil that cost me 6s every 30 minutes, cover repairs and still turn a decent profit. It’s perfectly fine how it is.

Columba.9730:

Samhayn.2385:

Columba.9730:

Other games have stealth break on damage and break upon attacking. I don’t understand why this game made stealth even more powerful than it is in other games. Even in other games stealth causes mass complaints although it’s less powerful.

Stealth lasts 4 sec (speced) unless its shadows refuge. No other game limits stealth to this short of a duration. Hence the reason it does not break on damage.
If it broke on damage it would be useless and we would be low hp/ low armor warriors with no group support.

I don’t buy it. I have a top of the line system and I rarely see a thief at all when he attacks me.

I don’t care how “top of the line” your system is, you can’t solve server side issues >.<

Actually, they are easier on you for repairs here. In DAoC, items took damage from simple use, here you actually have to die to damage them.

Atherakhia.4086:

It’s the same in PvE and PvP. You run around in circles spamming auto attacks until you’re in melee range and go squish.

I mean the class is broken from the ground up with almost nothing rewarding to offer this game or the player. Everything from skills, traits, pets, utility, to PvP design just doesn’t work. If you aspire to do more than sit on a wall all day (which even that is working against a handicap because no pet!) you may as well choose another class.

So wrong, where is your sword/dagger? You know you have weapon swapping right? Ranged is simply inferior to melee in close PvP combat if you don’t have a zerg to hide in, and even then really vs a good assassin. This applies to every class.