Guild Wars 2

Thanks, but I posted about this issue ages ago and stated that the nerfing (fixing?) of abilities like SReturn would result in buggy patching issues which would ultimately lead to the demise of the “fix”. Or that it should, anyways.

Thanks for the replies all!

I’ll still probably try to run a build with 2-3 mantras (includes the heal), but the information here has been extremely helpful, thank you.

Honestly don’t care who the “father” of dual S/D’s is, just who wins and who has the better play style/ build crafted.

“LOL you’re that one n00b theef that once made a post about mesmers dodge-rolling, rite? Water u doin in the mez 4ums?”

Now that that’s over with…

… How are mantra builds, in terms of competitive ability (tPvP)?

I want to start playing my mes a bit more, but I want to have a bit more of a unique build (that’s always been my thing, particularly among thieves). I’ve heard that Fay plays mantras, but I have yet to see any big talk about mantras anywhere on the forums.

Help would be much appreciated.

I’m not sure what you’re doing with your math here… Dividing heal power by your total heal? That doesn’t tell you how much you’re healing by per point of heal pow.

Your healing per point of HealPow is simply .1 .

It’s funny that virtually every single post disagreeing with me, ever, starts off by saying “I didn’t read your post, but…”. That, or the post will completely miss the major premises that I based my arguments on in the first place. Or the commenters will just say that I’m a stupid kitten who doesn’t know anything and should probably go kill himself. That kinda thing.

Anyways, my post wasn’t even about thief- whom, by the way, virtually nobody is complaining about, particularly in sPvP, because stealth is near useless (point capping), and people have learned how to counter LS spammers to the point where you can’t just press “3” over and over again. If they haven’t learned, then clearly they don’t understand the concepts of range, initiative draining, burst, interrupts, or AoE. I’ve actually had people complain to me before that it wasn’t fair that they were losing to ranged opponents, while they wielded two melee sets… Anyways, the post was about nerfs in general.

Finally, coming from somebody who once said

Mate, I’m a Warrior and I’m taking the mickey out of Thieves.

(Warr is a class, which, btw, is commonly considered one of the worst off in sPvP)

I’m not sure why you’re complaining. Especially if you’re so confident that the UP warrior can easily crush thieves.

Please go learn a bit of reading comprehension. Thank you.

I’m gonna quote myself here, as 1. I’m writing everything on my phone atm, and 2. I believe that it is sufficient in explaining the topic. You may have seen this on the thief forums.

Without further ado…

Arganthium.5638:

6. Argument: removing this skill removes diversity between different professions.

The last argument that I’m going to make applies to all nerfs. As it so happens, this game seems to be experiencing far more nerfs than buffs, which I cannot understand. This recent nerf reduces from any unique-ness of the thief. While this was a skill that once only the thief had access to, now the sword consists of some fairly standard attacking ideas. As we nerf everything into balance, professions by nature become increasingly more similar and stale. Nerfing this skill just means that the thief has one less unique skill to its name. In the long run, this has serious consequences in that it makes the game less diverse and interesting, and simply drives the game into one direction of complete uniformity among all professions. What person wants to shoutcast a game when every person is playing the exact same build, strategy, and tactics? However, as we nerf everybody into oblivion, viable builds are being reduced and this is the ultimate effect. If revealed was automatically boosted up to 10 seconds, who would use a stealth-reliant build? There goes another build type. When confusion was nerfed, similarly, that destroyed another build: confusion shatter builds for mesmers. This constant “NERF ERR’THING” button that ANet uses, while very easy and convenient, is resulting in stale gameplay that doesn’t address the problems that the community wants them to address. Rather than devoting time to this issue, for example, ANet could have fixed the 14352724509284752 things that people are complaining about with PvP. Instead, they nerfed a skill which is ultimately going to have negative effects anyways.

…I find this patch highly disappointing and hope that ANet will change this in the future, and consider my last argument as well, that the constant nerfhammer is doing nothing but damaging the game in the long run. Rather than destroying variety and utility, why not try to increase both of those concepts?

D’awwww <3

Seriously though, go ET. We don’t have nearly the numbers of every other server, so, unlike them, we really, y’know, actually need more people. The people here are pretty good too; we’ve had to adapt to having smaller numbers in every battle. We’ve been very good at this adaptation, even if we still suffer because of our lack of players.

Please join ET! I might even be willing to go do a bit more WvW myself again if more people would join…

Condi/power would be better than condi/crit.

CC Shiloh.3512:

I’m sorry it took so long to get this stickied. This is a great resource, thanks everyone for keeping it as up-to-date as possible!

If you come across threads you feel are a great asset to the community and think they should be stickied, drop us an email at forums@arena.net.

…

YESSSS FINALLY! Thanks.

I know I haven’t been keeping this up-to-date very well as of late, but once I get back from my vacation I’ll make sure to edit it.

Thanks again.

I get the feeling that some of the responses to this post were simply statements of hateful opinion, specifically:

Timeandspace- didn’t consider the weakness of stealth in capping points- this is, after all, a thread about sPvP, as stated in the OP.

frans- read my analysis of the usefulness of the stats brought by 30 CS. I don’t share a lot of Jumper’s beliefs, but I’m pretty sure that he’s smart enough that he realizes that the stats aren’t what makes CS so powerful, it’s the traits, namely Executioner. Just because other classes have a prec line, doesn’t mean that those trees are any good. After all, it isn’t the stats that are the problem.

I’m running Force and Bloodlust, personally.

I agree with most of this. I would like to say, however, Jumper, that 30 CS is absolutely not mandatory whatsoever. In fact, all of the traits in CS honestly suck except for the 25 minor (kinda), Executioner (sometimes), and HKiller (in very specific builds). Everything else is absolutely… Just… Negligible, really. The init regen is ok, but is dwarfed by traits from other trees entirely. The 10% bonus on the aforementioned minor requires a very strict set of restrictions that are extremely limiting in battle. Executioner is good, but easily counterable if your opponent knows/thinks you are running it. HKiller… Well, I don’t need to go into detail about that with you.

Then, from a mathematical standpoint, 30 CS actually increases damage by less than if you run 25 DA- easily, as a matter of fact. So the stats on the tree aren’t that good either.

And is it really necessary for damage? Well, if you run zerker (for example), why do you need to boost your damage by that extra couple of percentage points? In your case, it would actually be to your benefit to run Soldier’s ammy over Zerker, as the toughness and vits amplify your defensive capabilities more than the stats on zerker increase your offensive capabilities. And, either way, compared to the amount of offensive amplification from either amulet, 30 CS, statistically, has virtually no significant effect on your damage output.

In all honesty, the only particularly good reason to pick CS is if you’re gonna go all-in, and even then the line is lacking.

Excalibur.9748:

Teamkiller.4315:

Excalibur.9748:

Honestly, I’d rather steal better skills.

As of right now the only ones I sorta like are

1) Ele’s chill
2) Necro’s fear
3) Warrior’s whirling axe (though hate it sometimes cuz you can’t cancel it once started)
4) Thief’s invisibility
5) Mesmer’s all-buff

For the other 3, I have no idea what they are and what they really do…

6) Guardian 4 second daze
7) Engineer inflict random condition
8) Ranger regeneration/condition cure tree

Those 3 are pretty bad though. I don’t really use them.

6 is an interrupt that lasts a huge amount of time. 7 isn’t very good by itself, but allows you to stack confusion and also give tons of AoE Chaos Armor. 8 gives amazing team healing options.

Wiser with Age.3714:

1) There are no forms of diminishing returns for +stats. I believe that there is a hard cap for +stats, but it’s high enough that you’re never going to potentially hit it without some AoE buffs from other people. Even then, you’ll probably be still below the stat cap. So for all intents and purposes, don’t worry about it.

2) Once you reach 100% Crit Chance, there is no point in going any higher. Having said that, you won’t be reaching 100% very easily at 80th level. Assuming that you’re constantly getting the Fury boon (+20% Crit Chance) on a consistent basis from yourself and other AoE buffs, you might get close. Yet like Answer #1, reaching the Crit Chance cap isn’t something that you need to actively worry about.

3) Skills: That kind of answer would take far too long and many of the answers would be far too subjective. Attacks which primary give out condition damage dots will want +Condition gear. Physical damage attacks want Power, Precision, and +Crit Damage. Then things start to get less clear when you’re looking at attacks which do partial condition damage and partial condition damage.

1) yes there is, the reward for 1 point of power is given by (Pow+1)/Pow, and as Pow increases, the damage amplification decreases.

Zenith.7301:

Pow/prec critdmg blows every other stat combo out of the water in terms of damage yielded.

This is not news.

This is a poorly worded statement that, while true in and of itself, suffers from a large variety of issues.

dovrak.4376:

Arganthium.5638:

So… Uh…

Have you actually done the math on how “strong” crits are?

I didn’t find any reliable information or numbers about toughness, just people discussing if vitality sucks more or less than toughness.

/sighs PM me, I’ll get you the equations/numbers required if you’re interested in them when I have the time.

Yours truly,

My Countless Hours of Sitting and Doing Math

So… Uh…

Have you actually done the math on how “strong” crits are?

Still don’t think SR should’ve been “fixed”, but whatever. Nerfing everything into the ground only makes for a more dull game.

However, I don’t think that comparing the two skills was very accurate.

Quells.2498:

Why can’t you “main” shortbow?

I main a Shortbow. I also alt a Greatsword and a Longbow.

mPascoal.4258:

Daecollo.9578:

Yes, as long as you don’t fight necromancers, guardians, or anything with retaliation. Or Zergs.

Well that restric a lot what i can do with it
Gosh I can’t I just main shortbow? bah every class should be able to main the weapons they have at disposal
All I see is D/D here, D/D there, I like the shortbow, but beside zerg and PvE people say that is useless

I don’t like the Ranger as much as the Thief to go and make one for just the sake of using a bow

Don’t listen to him, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Ever.

Both S/P and P/P are perfectly viable. If you use P/P though, you’ll need to find a good place to get condi removal from.

@all: I’m writing on my phone right now, so I have neither the time/thumb strength to write a full-length response to the OP. However, I would suggest showing Chaos a bit of respect (y’all know who you are) as he is an extremely respectable mes and likely plays far beyond your playing abilities.

With that, y’all may continue.

Just to add to what Geiir said- I might place Quartermaster anywhere beneath Scouts, actually. Not because they deal a lot of damage, but because they drop like flies. It’s nice to get rid of that extra DPS and chaos.

Setsunayaki.4907:

(cool idea)

I like the idea, but the issue is that ANet can’t simply impleement a “one size fits all” kind of a deal if they programmed this way. For example, maybe I would prefer to hit the players over the siege. Perhaps our strategy works better by damaging players instead of siege. Furthermore, and related to the first point, there may not exist a good objective standard on which to base the values assigned to different potential targets in the first place; it’s so situational, that it’s an extremely difficult idea to implement.

So why don’t you duel me in-game with a thief, and then we can see how little skill they require?

(watches interview)

(starts laughing uncontrollably)

1. Stealth has multiple viable counters. Usually the best one just requires swinging a chained auto-attack around, and whenever the chain changes from one link to the next you know you’ve hit something.

Otherwise, AoE spam, or understand the mechanics behind the stealthing skills. When you get to the bottom of things, you find that most stealthing skills tend only to last a few seconds.

2. Extremely bursty builds lack defense entirely; Eviscerate them once and they’ll probably go down. Not every thief has burst though. For example, my build focuses on sustained damage and team fights. Its burst is pretty terrible, and even when I do burst, it usually only happens once when I engage my opponents, and the burst remains on cooldown for the majority of the rest of the fight. That burst would be Basi Venom + Flanking Strike + Mug, + whatever damage comes from the stun, and even then I wouldn’t tread to say that maybe that entire combo can hit 5k max. That’s just how much burst I lack, and realize that I can usually only pull off this entire combo once during a fight.

So, my answer to this would be: burstiness comes at the price of defensive concessions. The math behind these burst builds doesn’t always work out great, and it ends up often turning out that, once you learn to avoid the initial burst, you’re good for the rest of the game.

3. Thieves are given mobility as their class weapon, essentially. Just like how rangers have tons of healing and range, how guards have tons of defense, etc.

SmoothHussler.6387:

Arganthium.5638:

SmoothHussler.6387:

XII.9401:

As for the stealing boons being useless..does that count for the warrior 30 second elite: Fury, might, Swiftness? How about the long duration potion buffs by Engineers?

Am I missing something?

Signet of rage is a 48 second (traited) cooldown which can be stolen by a thief for 0 cooldown.

L2p though and all that good stuff…

Or don’t pull out the signet against a sword thief and then cry “OP” about it later? It’s like complaining that a necro killed your build that is full glass and runs practically no extra vitality.

Fair enough, but the point I was trying to make was that boons are kinda hard to make for certain professions and a skill which can be spammed over and over stealing them seems kinda unbalanced.

Perhaps its time thieves had mechanics to generate more of their own boons?

It depends on the profession. Guards and engis have no problem generating boons, for example. Warriors… For some reason, warriors always seem to have a decent number of boons on them. Kinda odd to me.

The thing is- there needs to be some kind of counter to boons. If boon steal is taken away, then stuff like HGH is bound to come back and wreck the arena. At least for now HGH has a very viable counter. If thieves can’t boon steal, then that only leaves Necro as a viable counter to HGH, which is an extremely small list of professions to pick from. -_- anyhow, builds that have a few boons tend not to rely on them that much anyways, and they have such short duration that they tend to disappear very quickly after being stolen, while builds that do rely on boons tend to have so many boons, it’s difficult to steal the ones that really matter, like the 25 stacks of might.

XII.9401:

Arganthium.5638:

SmoothHussler.6387:

XII.9401:

As for the stealing boons being useless..does that count for the warrior 30 second elite: Fury, might, Swiftness? How about the long duration potion buffs by Engineers?

Am I missing something?

Signet of rage is a 48 second (traited) cooldown which can be stolen by a thief for 0 cooldown.

L2p though and all that good stuff…

Or don’t pull out the signet against a sword thief and then cry “OP” about it later? It’s like complaining that a necro killed your build that is full glass and runs practically no extra vitality.

So wait..in order to combat a basic spammable zero cool down weapon skill on a class..another class should not use its only valid ELITE skill?

I got a better idea..how about you fix that regular spammable zero cool down weapon skill? Sounds more fair to me!

Sadly, I don’t think the game is called Thief Wars where everything should be balanced around thieves and everyone has to trait/build their stats to fight one single class.

It’s called a hard counter. Furthermore, it’s a friggin’ signet, it can be used without having to press the button.

And it’s really not zero cool down. Seriously, I suggest you go play a thief yourself and then tell me how easy the initiative system is to master and abuse, when each skill on each weapon has to draw from the exact same resources.

Stealth.9324:

When will be your team fight up???I want to watch it.

It may not be for a while, given that I’ll be gone after this week for at least another three weeks. sorry ‘bout that. However, I’ll make sure that you’re notified as soon as I capture a video of us playing.

Bumper sticker.

We’ve got a lot of people applying, and I’ll be out soon on a month-long trip of mine, so if you want to apply, do it soon!

I can give you advice, but unless I know the build/strat, it’s practically meaningless forme to give you advice on where to put the points.

If you’re interested, we’re always an option.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/lfteam/Team-Akatsuki-looking-for-experienced-thieves/first#post2154321

Of course, you may not be entirely comfortable with an all-thief team, but I’ve already got a lot of the strategy planned out for us. It just depends on how good you think your mobility is.

EDIT: however, if you hate cats, we may have a problem. jk, jk.

I feel that they are overly biased towards some particular options for thieves, like 30 CS (a question I specifically asked them about in the first Revealed podcast), which, they say, is the thief’s only source of damage, and that if you aren’t running 30 CS, you aren’t bringing anything to the team. Or Zerker amulet/gear; I know that Jumper runs Zerker amulet, for example, although even he admits that the sum of the damage amplification and defensive amplification combined from Soldier’s Amulet actually is greater than the sum from zerker gear. His response is that Soldier’s amulet doesn’t “bring anything to the team”, but from my watching his streaming, he tends to run solo or right in the middle of the fight, and so sitting back and dealing damage from afar, while waiting for the perfect opening in the enemy’s defenses brought by a weakened opponent, in a kind of Caed-esque style, isn’t exactly an option, which is the only particularly good reason to take that extra DPS over the lower DPS but higher survivability provided by Soldier’s Amulet. I could, of course, go further into detail, but y’all get the point.

On the other hand, I haven’t seen a single thief… Even mentioned by the thief community who plays a tanky spec as opposed to a straight-up DPS spec, which most thieves seem to be trying to run, whether it’s by going full GC or perhaps going slightly more defensive, like Jumper (although not defensive enough, IMO). I’m guessing that if my spec was brought before the current podcasters, they’d simply laugh and call it some kind of noob build, in spite of the fact thakittens stats are near equal to Jumper’s build, but includes the SB (granting more mobility and ranged versatility), more defense (which is better for getting right into the thick of the fight), and more passive initiative regeneration (meaning that you don’t have to use skills quite so often just to recharge your initiative, like utilities, and can focus more on the fight). And, of course, none of this is including the condition damage and duration bonuses I get for my shortbow from my 30 in Trix and 10 in DArts.

I’m not saying that I play better than these guys; in fact, I’m far from their tier of play. But I don’t think that their strategic choices for builds are very well thought-out, and that’s the issue that I take with this podcast.

I get the feeling that some of these people have extremely narrow perspectives on everything about the thief, even if the math doesn’t support what they say…

ozzero.3892:

EU or NA? and when are u playing?

A bit of both. Which are you? If you’re EU, then we might have Geiir test you out, otherwise I’ll do some tPvP with you.

Stealth.9324:

Hm.. A team compose solely of Thief. Sound pretty fun.Can you guys record one of the match you play? The team has to be Thief only right? I want to see it badly. Plus, I lack experience in Thief side, mind if I join you guys for a few games in dueling? Some tips and instruction should be helpful too. Thanks in advance.

Haha yeah if nothing else, even if our team sucks, we can always run 5 S/D evasion thieves and annoy the kitten out of our enemies.

Also, I’ll probably start streaming on Twitch once the team starts taking off (right now we’re still grabbing a few new teammates here and there), but once that’s finished I’ll make sure to message you some recordings of our games.

And yeah, if you want to duel us, just message us in-game, no problem. Nothing from [OP] actually did this yesterday (though I was the only person from the team online at the time), and I’m generally ok with duels anyways.

TheMightyAltroll.3485:

Have one of your friends play Necro, corrupt his boons or send his conditions back. He should melt fairly easily. Either that, or have a Thief backstab him. Guardians aren’t going to be able to do much except retaliation, reflect, and keeping their teams safe.

Or have the thief play S/D boon steal.

Zikory.6871:

SoLeciTO.3490:

TheMightyAltroll you don’t know a thing, some thief killed you like a noob and you just troll in this forum crying for nerf.

12k backstab HAHAHAHAHA . . . no armor? lvl 20? . . . LOL

Go back and look at his post history. While I don’t agree with everything he posts, hes normally fair in his opinion.

12k backstab is easily done for a GC thief built for it and under the correct situation. I don’t think he is saying you can get consistent 12k crits every time.

This.

Like Zikory, I don’t totally agree with every single thing Troll says (not sure if he still thinks SRefuge is overpowered… I don’t even want to touch that thing any more, so awful o.O), but he does have a point. You can get a 12k backstab with relative ease, as compared to some other things that I’ve seen people post. Simply put, against another GC, you could very well backstab crit for 12k+.

Hey all, Arga here.
Team Akatsuki is a team comprised solely of thieves, that seeks success by synergizing well with one another via tactics and superior mobility. With good communication, we believe that we can easily fit together on a team.
We are focused on tPvP, and hope to compete in 3rd party tournaments as quickly as possible.

We don’t require that our applicants have extremely high sPvP rank or Leaderboard ranking, just that they play well, although we will require that any applicants that we are considering to take into the team prove their skill to us in-game. Furthermore, we only want applicants who are willing to take more open-minded perspectives on thief builds, i.e. we’re not going to accept you if you play D/D burst really well but hate anything that is not 25/30/x/x/x. Furthermore, we are seeking to take more mathematical routes in calculating build combinations; we don’t care about your three videos where you gank a couple of upleveled noobs in WvW with your BS build; we design builds with more factual ideas in mind.

If you want to apply, PM me or comment below. Please tell us about your past experience in PvP, as well as playstyle. You can also contact me in-game, or you can contact Pentalic.5409 or Geiir.7603, and we’ll try to set a schedule to evaluate your performance.
Thanks!
~Team Akatsuki~

TheOneNOnlyGeneralBama.9586:

Arganthium.5638:

Anyhow,

@the rest: I decided that it was just an extremely strong elite in 1v1 duels, and about where it should be in proper tPvP, so this thread can be locked. I would like to say that I am somewhat disappointed in a lot of the responses to this thread, as rather than trying to be constructive or helpful they seem to be meant more towards flaming me as opposed to anything else. I typically welcome other players from other communities fairly readily to the Thief forum, and while I understand that it can be frustrating to have something called “OP”, I did not instantaneously come here to ask “NERFNERFNERF” (unlike other profs have done to thieves), I just came here to ask for a more useful perspective on the elite, and I maintained a very open-minded view throughout my posts. A few of you, earlier in the thread, were quite helpful and generally friendly, but I’m disappointed that the rest of you decided to act so immaturely.

~Arctu

We don’t welcome your kind around these parts …drop the stealth act and maybe we’ll think about not dropping Fort Knox on your frail body , and that goes for you or any other mouth breathing thief you summon

Best Regards
Fed up Engie

I wasn’t going to say anything, but I couldn’t resist…

I don’t even touch stealth, it sucks in tPvP for almost every single thing imaginable. Nice try though.

SmoothHussler.6387:

XII.9401:

As for the stealing boons being useless..does that count for the warrior 30 second elite: Fury, might, Swiftness? How about the long duration potion buffs by Engineers?

Am I missing something?

Signet of rage is a 48 second (traited) cooldown which can be stolen by a thief for 0 cooldown.

L2p though and all that good stuff…

Or don’t pull out the signet against a sword thief and then cry “OP” about it later? It’s like complaining that a necro killed your build that is full glass and runs practically no extra vitality.

Ralathar.7236:

Arganthium.5638:

Is this in WvW or PvP? Because my answer to your question will vary greatly based on where this occurred.

Either way, I probably will have some degree of good news for you.

WvW unfortunately. In sPVP scaring him off would indeed be the win that some here claim it was. Same story if I was capturing something and this enabled the cap in WvW. However in other situations of WvW this is most assuredly not a win as such a thief will most likely shortly be killing one of my allies not lucky enough to be able to pull off such a feat.

Yeah, it’s way better in PvP to have an enemy run off like that than in WvW. however, that doesn’t entirely mean it’s unable to be countered.

The best thing to do would be to try and grab a daze or stun on the guy early on and have him burn his teleports and stun breakers. Immobilize, cripple, and chill, for example, are all extremely painful for thieves because we really need that mobility. Typically, for cripple and chill, we don’t use any particularly long-cooldown skills (i.e . Roll For Init or Shadowstep), as those are easily applied conditions. However, immobilize is different in that it can be insanely powerful when used correctly, forcing thieves to get out of a position fast. A lot of the time, that means Shadowstepping away. Also, general CC does all of these things as well.

Here’s an example of a turret build (that I just BS’d :P) that does these things, for example:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQFAUlIqyVntSZF17IxoCMO0jED6FD6xezrfB-TkAg0CnIQShkDJDSSksINuA
(and yeah, it’s PvP, but w/e)

The Rifle provides both immobilizes and knockdown. Net Turret provides more immobilize, as well as 3s immobilize from your belt, and a possible stun too. Thumper turret provides cripple and knockdown. Rocket turret gives you burst (will get to that in a second) and knockdown. Supply Crate gives you a possible stun, but is really good in general for 1v1’ing. Knee Shot gives you cripple with your (many) immobilizes. Hair Trigger gives you more immobilizes and CC more often, and Rifle Mod is just generally good for helping your burst and overall DPS. Inventions… Well, I’m sure you can figure out that. the ability to target-deploy turrets is also nice because it gives you a bit more control over them and where they go, which is very good against thieves. Zerker/ogre runes for burst and DPS, Ice Sigil because chill is extremely good against thieves as well.

Now, the idea behind heavy DPS and burst is one of two things. With high DPS, a thief has to choose between two things when engaging in battle with you: fight or flight. Fleeing will obviously still be an option against you, then, but it’s certainly better than being committed to a fight and having the thief escape when you’re about to win. However, if the thief commits to the fight, then they’ll have to burn up a lot of resources in order to get at you while avoiding being mauled by your DPS. That means more initiative usage, which means less mobility later on, and it also means a higher likelihood of that thief using up their CDs on stuff like heals and Shadowstep in order to get out of your bursting whenever you CC/cripple/chill the thief.

By the time they start getting low, you can just start pulling out the reserves of what resources you have left to destroy the thief. At this point, you’re going to want to burst them so hard that, with their lack of initiative and all of their CD’s, it’s going to be difficult for them to back out of fighting (and even mores when you have so much cripple, chill, and immobilize on them), in which case you’re probably going to down the thief.

Just be careful for Withdraw, it heals all of those condis at once. Still, immobilize and chill in this build last too short to be worth healing off, but last long enough to give some benefits to using them.

Hope that helps.

Stealth.9324:

Even with Valkyrie for some extra Vit, the max we can reach is just over 14k a bit. Using Soldier Amulet is even an option but u reduce your Healing Power too much.

Huh.

Don’t you guys run any water points any more? I mean, the old standard of 30 water was obviously nerfed, but… Still provides some vit.

I’ve never really liked Healing Power all that much, personally speaking, as it doesn’t seem to increase your healing by a significant amount whatsoever unless you build up the HPower really high (granted, my math may not be entirely accurate right now, as I haven’t gone too much into heals yet, but from what I have seen it doesn’t seem to do much for you, relatively speaking). However, I do suppose you could use a Soldier’s Amulet with Cleric’s Jewel (that’s what I used to run on my thief), and then grab some Healing Power with vitality from Water.

I dunno.

SniffyCube.6107:

Just wasn’t in the cards and things became a bit toxic for us to the point where people didn’t want to go into wvw anymore and were being burnt out. Gotta do what’s right for the guild and all. But anyway, I’ll be pulling for you!

Yeah, I understand that. It’s unfortunate for ET that we’ve been doing so poorly in general, but on the bright side, it has brought me over to tPvP.

Actually, I just salvaged my WvW gear today. I don’t think I’ll be going back any time soon, anyways. Still have a backup magic find gear set if I ever want to farm, though.

SniffyCube.6107:

Parktou.4263:

SniffyCube.6107:

these are all on the wiki

That’s why I put the link in there. By the way, best of luck to you guys on your new server, Sea of Sorrows was it? I gotta know, did people give you guys as much trouble as they did Flappy and BC when they left? Anyways, good luck Sniffy.

Nah we moved to crystal desert… I’d never forgive myself if I moved to a green server :p

As far as the trouble goes, things were pretty civil. We didn’t want to really slam on ET or make any kind of attention grab / spectacle of ourselves on the forums. The majority of people there, like yourself, are very cool individuals who will be missed.

Server is treating us very well.

/sighs

Later, y’all. Just another reason I won’t play WvW again. I can’t blame you, though; our forces have just become so weak, we can’t pull anything together any more and we continuously get crushed by the other servers every week.

And hey, at least you didn’t pull an [Agg]…

… I don’t think they were very happy when I called them out on what they did, which, IMO, was hugely demoralizing and seemed to be more like a recruitment pickup rather than an actual commitment to the server.

If you run enough vit, you should be fine.

Otherwise, stand by some allies while you’re firing Barrage, and when you go down they’ll practically insta-rez you.

Hopefully. :/

Auesis.7301:

There are some pretty poor counter-arguments by Thieves here, but you’re not helping your case by reeling off wiki links with no respect for the place they have in builds.

Most high-end tPvP builds don’t even have 5 Shadow Arts, so Shadow’s Embrace is a rare occurrence anywhere that isn’t hot-join pub-stomping. Even if you were to use it, you would be doing the following things:

1) Allowing the target to continue capping a point (stealth essentially removes you from the game – you cannot contest points and any Thief using stealth extensively is hurting the team and should be kicked)
2) Wasting time – the exchange of 1 removal every 3 seconds is pitiful when the consequence is to remove yourself from the game. A Guardian can purge conditions in a much more efficient manner while not uncontesting the point he or she is on, while not putting him/herself too far on the defensive. Gradual removal is irrelevant. A Thief should not be designing him/herself around sustainability in that manner – every other class does it better in a competitive environment. Putting yourself out of the game for extended periods to get rid of conditions that got bursted on you – how hilarious.

I would even go so far as to say that you shouldn’t even mention Stealth in competitive PvP – in a mode where capturing and contesting points is a crucial element, talking about a mechanic that prevents interaction with that element is just stupid. If it were to be used at all, it would be for anything other than the main objective, and it would not be used in a sustainable manner that warrants Shadow Arts at all, hence the 25/30/x/x/x madness.

I could reel off every single Mesmer trait and skill and shout LOOK AT THESE OMG ALL OF THESE OP NERF – but they’re not all used at once, and some of them aren’t used at all. Learn to appreciate the actual use of each ability instead of just glossing over tooltips.

This.

Stealth has practically become a joke in tPvP. Its (rightful) inability to cap points makes it pretty bad, and people have learnt to counter stealth to the point where nobody really cares about a stealth-spamming thief any more.

Ralathar.7236:

Perfect example of how jacked facing a thief is right now. I’m fighting a thief as a turret engie (Ya I know, but it’s fun :P). Hit him a few times and place my turrets as he enters for the kill. Pop my turret abilities and he gets perma-blinded, has like 10 seconds of burning, has 6+ stacks of bleed, Rocket Turret lands the first knockdown, I time the supply crate for the second stun, rocket turret knocks down a third time. All knockdowns in a row without him being able to act after eating the first one.

At this point the thief still has all the burning, bleeding, and now poison on him, is at 5% hp, and is stunned on his back while immobilized. Shadow Return, Hide in Shadows, runs away at half health with no conditions on him already out of combat.
.
.
.
So lets add this up, shadow return removes 3 conditions, teleports you back to where you started from up to 1,200 away, and breaks stun instantly. Hide in Shadows removes all damaging conditions, so any conditions that hurt would be gone and the thief is far away stealthed and running away.

I really don’t know what more I could have done. I condition stacked, immobilized, stunned, and generally wrecked his face but he gets a get out of jail free card. I mean ya I wrecked his face because he was blatantly terrible (rocket turret knockdown is MASSIVELY telegraphed), but he still doesn’t even have to die for being terrible.

Is this in WvW or PvP? Because my answer to your question will vary greatly based on where this occurred.

Either way, I probably will have some degree of good news for you.

Puandro.3245:

Arganthium.5638:

Harrier.9380:

I had Lac.Strike crit for 9k once.

Just saying.

The skill doesn’t have a high enough coefficient to hit that hard, unless you went full glass against another very glassy build, realistically speaking.

Same Coefficient as HS 50%-25%. Thing is it allows you to steal might so if the enemy has high might you can and will hit hard.

Yes, I realize that. It also requires you to use another skill with a fairly weak coefficient first, and then use the second skill which hits like CnD does, has an awfully short range, and only steals might last.

So the counter is not to use Empower when you’re standing next to a thief… That’s about it. Usually we don’t steal might, and even when we do it’s usually only a stack or two. But against builds that stack might high (i.e. HGH), boonsteal is a hard counter.