(edited by Asrat.2645)
Update: appearently this is still happening.
Description: The game randomly freezes, ‘tabs out’ or gets a blackscreen.
(It continues to work normaly after several seconds)
Occasionally it also crashes my entire pc.
This is related to the 64 bit client. I had it back 3 months before, stopped using it and it never occured again…until now.
Im not sure if it happens on multiple maps, but it does happen on the sPvP map forest of nifhel.
It mostly occurs around the capture points.
Especially around mid. I have no idea why.
Another edit: I cant guarantee that the crash log is related to the described problem. It was the most recently recorded back in the days, but it could already have been older
Attachments:
(edited by Asrat.2645)
I cant say that I like having two thieves on my team, but I see no weakness in having one. We can add to fights, we will not just die and get finished, ruining a teamfight.
Enemies without a thief will either have to sacrifice players to defend points they should hold secure or have to deal with occasionally uncaps or even caps, costing vital points.
A good thief is far from beeing a weakness and who else would you pick? Scrappper, druid and reaper probably have their place secure. Revenant, elementalist and thief are competing for the last two spots. Most people would likely choose the rev too, but with already two bunkers on the team and a lot of people considering the ele underpowered, the thief is just as good a choice as the ele, if not more so.
(Warriors are not open for discussion, i cant think of any role for the mesmer, that the thief could not perform better, and guards might be a good way for idiots to kill idiots, but they havent been seen much on pro teams last season if I remember right, i doubt the nerf has changed that)
Im playing higher tier fractals on a regular basis. First: berserker. You will always pick berserker stats on everything unless you know what youre doing and have a good reason not to.
partially marauder or even soldier has often been considered a good choice for beginners, but you dont really need it and its better to learn to play with a low health pool from the beginning instead of ‘easing in’ (just my opinion)
You take d/p or staff if you have daredevil and a shortbow as second weapon.
Other weapon sets are possible, but those two will always provide you with highest damage. Agian: You may pick something else, but only if you know, what and why youre doing it. The shortbow is not open for discussion. probably 19/20 thieves use it.
About the traits: take a look at the build at metabattle.com, but dont use it. Its crap, especially for beginners and people without perfect parties.
I strongly recommend you to take critical stikes for invigorating precision but thats a matter of taste.
You will always be wanting to take daredevil, if you own hot that is.
The last one will likely be deadly arts, but trickery might also be valuable.
Try to take all damage boni possible without dying over and over.
Your main role is dps+some break bar, and thats what you focus your build on, take as many defensive traits as you need but not more.
As for the skills: damage (sigils), breakbar(physicals), utility(tricks and deceptions) those are valuable picks that you can use, you can theoretically take wichever you prefer, you will likely experiment around and end up with the same, we all use.
Two beginners mistakes here: I took venoms for quite some time until I actually did the math and was like: ‘I do that whole damage on one autoattack’
And dont take dagger storm, it is a cool skill and seems pretty useful, I used it for long, but actually…you are again better of if you just spend your time autoattacking, rather take impact strike for faster break bars.
If you want any actual builds, i can send you links, but i would need to know if you own HoT or not. My suggestion again: go to metabattle, look at the build with a rational mind and think about what you would do to make it better suit your playstyle.
Edit: if you have problems with the skill or trait names, press right ctrl ingame and you should be able to find them.
(edited by Asrat.2645)
The buff dindt entirely remake our profession, there are still…issues that have been there before. But for now: thief is a viable pick for direct combat, a 50% winrate should be possible even in the highest tiers, even in the past season there have been thieves claiming a top player could overcome every opponent.
Also the common +1 is still effective. no matter what others say, we still are the fastets profession and I have seen thieves carrying their team just by denying fair fights.
So yes: there might not be a thief on every team, they might not be your first choice in a lot of scenarios, but we will have our place, especially considering the huge fanbase this profession has.
Also: if you play a couple of matches, you will encounter 2.3 necros on every team. Thieves are one of the classes that can deal with them relatively good.
‘Warrior’ ‘Condi reaper’ ‘Power rev’ These are exactly the three words I’d love to see in my opponents description. Along with ‘mesmer’ maybe.
Sry but you simply wont win with any of these, the rev might still have a chance, but only if you play exeptionally well or your opponent exeptionally bad.
This is simply a counter mechanic, cant say that I like it, but its the way it works. If you really have so many d/d’s, roll a dragonhunter or a scrapper. You are the paper, we are the scissors, either you get the rock or you try to avoid us.(tho we can pick our opponent, might be hard)
First of all: I doubt anyone was ever considering to create fractal seasons with resetting levels and players having to work their way up again.
About the leaderboards: I dont care about any leaderboards, but the score beeing based on kills, damage or anything like that would just lead to people farming kills or anything instead of actually playing. There is always an exploit in systems like that, always! You would rather base them on a couple of hidden bonus objectives, beeing a mix of things currently included in achievements, challenges or new stuff.
Like: the time you needed to clear a certain boss, if you got hit by molten berserkers shockwaves, if any of your party members got downed…
Finally: if I leave aside the leaderboards for a second: the idea of considering the rewards seperately for each fractal, but only based on the highest you’ve played is purely awesome. It would highly promote high-level fractal gameplay, wich is pretty dead currently, instead of running that kittening swamp 8 times a day, people might consider to play the challenging fractals after they claimed rewards from the easy ones.
Im beeing serious! This might not have been what you wanted to say, but its genius.
Well yes. Power thieves are…different. we still cant allow you to hit us tho. And this has been discussed recently but I still see no point in playing a thief without escapists absolution these days. Why would you even consider that?
Anyways a hard hitting power thief with bv and stealth can sometimes kill me, its difficult if you give me the opportunity to fight back.
Still: its not ‘forgiving’. more so than a common thief I believe. But still a lot more unforgiving than pretty much every other class.
After all: you are incredibly fast dead if you dont evade everything they throw at you. The key thing about this build is not mindlessly spamming evades, thats the easy part. The hard part is managing your ressources in the most optimal way. You stay in fights longer than the average thief, waiting for your enemy to tick down. The mass evade is merely a tool that allows you to do so.
Judging from the forums you recently posted in I suppose you are playing either revenant or necro. Both are in a pretty bad spot to fight d/d thieves.
I play that build (in spvp but anyways) and first of all: its not stupid. It might be considered cheesy for a thief build, but it offers great potential while still allowing zero mistakes.
Now with that out of the way: Keeping distance is a good start. They are faster, they will close the gap, but they might waste skills or initiative on it and they might be irritated or so caught up in chasing you, that they miss a dodge or anything else.
You will also need constant condition removal. A single cleanse skill wont do. A passive one might be a good start.
Do not use condi of your own. ofc you can bust out whatever you have, but dont focus your build on it. We can basically shake of everything. If you however do manage to apply a decnt amount of condi, stop attacking. If we cant evade, we cant cleanse. Just like that.
No matter how good your opponent is there will be short periods of time when both initiative and stamina are out. This is easier to achieve if you force us to chase you.
This will give you several seconds in wich not all of your bursts can be evaded. Use that seconds wisely.
I dont know if everybody does so, but i prefer bandits defense as stunbreaker. This means 12 sec cd and a block. If you use cc, do it twice within these 12 secs, and we will hate it. We cant afford to stand around and take hits.
Thieves perform poorly against bunker Tempests, Celementalists, trapper DH, most Scrappers, bunker Druids, most Revs, Mesmers and Chronomancers. Even some zerk based Warriors are a problem as they can “accidentally” down a thief just spamming skills or nuke them from long range with Gun Flame.
The prime targets are wounded players, zerg builds, other thieves, kiteable necros/reapers and the other base classes not inlcuding Mesmers. They are also solid as +1.
Basically if you encounter an enemy of equal skill in an even matchup, the thief is often at a sizable disadvantage. Their biggest asset is running away.
Sorry, i know this thread is meant to discuss scrappers, but since the original discussion is basically finished: i cant leave this standing like that.
You point of view is unfortunately very popular and still the way many thieves play their class (might even be the most effective way, i dont care)
We do not perform poorly against eles and druids, we just cant kill them. They cant kill us either.
Mesmers and warriors are simply prey, both classes are in a very bad spot right now, both classes are outright countered by thieves. While a skilled mesmer might down you with an unexpected burst, if youre loosing fights to warriors youre doing it plain wrong.
The last time I lost against a warrior i was wounded, on full cd and ignored a long chargeup rifle skill that i could have dodged easily.
Revs are the same as necros: they may win, they mostly dont.
Ofc thats just personal opinion but we are in a more than fair spot regarding 1v1. We just have to work twice as hard as everybody else and cant afford a single mistake but then again: thats why we play thief.
I am not excatly sure about how it works now, but i doubt a lot has changed:
There used to be a certain build called valkyrie jumper i think, that would used the decribed effect.
It worked in a way where you would first dodge, to get a guaranteed critical hit on the following vault. So unless they changed it for no reason, the daredevil rune actually applies the effect after the dodge move has been completed.
On the first matter I believe its just a minor mistake in the description.
Yes. There undoubtly is. Had one guy referring to himself as ‘best thief in the world’ whilst insulting me a s ‘kittening noname scrub’
I dont care how good a player actually is, you should leave it to other people to rate your performance, never yourself. As soon as you start to do that, you become pathetic.
Applies to you as well morgul. If you had just played cool and instead wrote smthng like: ‘ive made some gameplay videos, pls let me know what you think.’ people in this thread might call you a great player, the hero of all thieves (didnt bother to watch the vids, dont know how good you actually are) instead of mostly ridiculing you.
But of course that is just my humble advise. Its your own decision in the end.
You dont. I mean: maybe there are certain builds capable of dealing with them but…couldnt imagine how. The problems to consider:
1. They have access to retaliation. Hit them with high power and you just keep killing yourself. Even on a condi build the selfdmg is mostly enough to counter your passive heals. And you cant evade it either.
2. They have access to conditions and conditionremoval.
3. They have great defensive skills without sacrificing damage and good healing.
4. They can still put out nice amounts of damage, even without trying
5. Good cc and good access to stability, making them hard to counter with cc.
6. They can either reveal or simply outstealth you
Im running d/d sage and most scrappers mean to play on time. I can keep them busy for a while, but if noone saves me, I have to leave the point.
But lets analyse their possible weaknesses:
Boonstrip to get rid of mostly retaliation and protection. I believe their main boon access is through one particular elixir, so initially stealing those boons could be beneficial.
In general i had most success while using staff. It allows you to stay away from your enemy (their autoattack is fairly strong) and still land quick hits for high damage. Also you can use it inside a stealth gyro with a fairly high chance of hitting the near-death scrapper and kill it.
Quite a couple of damage as well as healing comes from a perk, that procs on critical hits, so the less hits they score the better. Stealth might be an option.
Personally I see them>thieves in a similar position as guards. They simply hardcounter us, not much we can do about it. Also scrappers are probably one of the most powerful classes in the current game, one of the few that regulary win 2v1s.
Thankfully, as cheesy as the class might seem, they are not exactly easy to play. I’ve tried. there are a lot of scrappers with a mere semi-optimal understanding of their class, those you may still beat, the really good scrappers however, you may not.
Unless of course some admireable thief figured a way out. I’d really like to hear that too ^^
edit2: put the ’edit in the wrong place. Edit: one more tip: If you somehow manage to get them to the 25% percent threshhold, the next hit will likely decide the fight. They are now on auto evade, as soon as they get back out of it, their healing skill has auto-recharged and they are ready to start over. So make sure you have a hard hitting skill to finish what youve begun, land it in perfect timing as they become vulnerable again and get rid of any remaining steathgyros.
(edited by Asrat.2645)
As someone who mains a thief and runs a rather mean build on it: Mesmers and warriors deserve a buff. Not as bad as alacrity was before the nerf but: if I see a mesmer or warrior closing in for a 1v1, they are dead, doesnt matter, how good they are. Even if im on cd or already wounded, unless i srsly mess up i cant loose.
As someone who plays a druid from time to time: I know how awful they are to fight against, but they aint as easy as it seems. Maybe they should recieve small nerfs to their overall skills but have some casting times reduced since outside of SotP they are incredibly weak to well timed cc. But i’ll leave that to players, who know the class better.
About guards: The only thing that seems op is the size of the traps. They are easy to avoid, but it will also force me to leave a point, effectively giving them a cap for free.
1. I do believe d/p would benefit much more. Not only by having the offhand pistol blind field, but also thanks to the blind on shadowshot, wich is a spammable skill and already gets a lot of hate for its damage. And, in any situation where you would use SA over DA on d/d you could also use it for d/p. Access to stealth is just as easy if not better.
2. To even consider this the icd would need to be much higher or offhand pistol thieves would probably become the ultimate class for boonstripping. Our job is damage, the few boonstrips we have are a nice sideeffect but shouldnt be our main goal, especially without sacrifing a lot of damage.
What if your proposed effect would proc on reveal instead of blind? Cloak and dagger is more likely used to set up a backstab, while d/p stealth is very intiative-heavy for just that one purpose and is usually used for opening attacks or emergency stealth, so it wouldnt benefit that weapon set as much. Also it would help the s/d theives, who already got a boonstrip but no blind, turning that weaponset into an actual anti-boon utility.
Yes. We are mostly damage. There is some boon strip, but nothing a necro or mesmer couldnt do better. Our condition damage is more like medium tier, the thing with venomshare is that it can be used to buff other condiclasses and therefore adds to overall damage greatly, but unless you have your entire team running condi, theres not much use for it outside of raids.
We dont really provide any buffs or healing besides stealth. Stealth is used for some dungeons i believe (not really doing dungeons) and sometimes in fractals to make skipping parts a little bit easier, but the last time I actually needed stealth in fotm was for running the seals on a high level cliffside.
Unless you have a reason not to do so, youre running full zerker, if you keep having problems to survive, you might swap some stats for marauder or anything, but that should not be an issue.
The only thing I do besides dealing damage and not dying in a molten boss fight after everybody else ran out of endurance (daredevil, yay) is skipping certain puzzles with infiltrators arrow.
Edit: there is defiancestrip. That has been our job before the breakbar, and we’re still fairly good at it.
(edited by Asrat.2645)
That is rather ummm interesting.
First things first: If you want to take conditiondamage, do it right. maybe you just didnt change it in the editor, but you do not use berserker gear for condi (naturally) either sinister or viper. Double dagger is the right choice, but you would take venoms/venomshare as skills. Also pressure striking and bewildering ambush are hardly considerable for pve.
Also: codi Thief have their place, sometimes, in raids and in pvp but in general you do not want to go with that. There are a lot of other classes that farly exceed your condi but, since the latest buff, few that can match your sustained direct damage.
Deadly trapper+Shadowtrap might seem a good idea for a solo player, but there are builds out there that focus entirely on providing a full stack of might for their team, and vulnerability is also applied by a lot of sources.
The caltrops are entirely useless, even on a condi build, just look at the dmg numbers, you do at least 6 times that damage on one AA hit.
Roll for initiative is controversial. I t can proove useful but in general i would recommend a signet, haste if you dont like signets or shadowstep since, without the daredevil, you lack emergency condi removal.
Basiliskvenom is ok, it doesnt do much, but it helps with the break bar and thievs guild aint exactly a game changer.
Edit: about the squishyness. The main reason why thief feels immortal is the daredevil, if you want that feeling, there is no real way around HoT. If the trash mobs are your problem, change to d/p, use black powder a lot and problem solved. In boss fights its mostly a matter of knowing the attacks, watching animations, good dodging and good movement. Simply a matter of training. That applies to every class but more so to thief. You can not afford to take hits but you have the tools at hand to avoid it. for now: dont be afraid to move away if you cant deal with the damage, use some ranged, regain health and get back in. You will loose some dmg, but not as much as you would when downed.
D/d also provides you with a spammable evade, that is hard to time but can theoretically protect you from enemy hits without having to dodge or loosing too much dps.
But yes: the class may feel squishy if you are not used to it. Invigorating precision is a good start (not if youre actually going for condi tho>no crits) other than that its unfortunately a l2p issue but i promise you: worthwhile.
Whatever other class I play now, I always feel incredibly vulnerable and exposed if compared to thief.
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Seems like a reasonable build, especially for beginners/returners and people who arent running with perfect parties.
Just some quick notes: I havent done the math but i believe Deadly arts might come up with higher numbers than trickery, every major target should have one condition on them. Probably depends on wether you can put the boonstrip to use or not. Also: I can not count the amount of times mug saved my life.
I like escapists absolution but since you already have a condi clean and pve really isnt that condi-heavy: If you take a staff, you probably want to take staff master too.
Unhindered combatant over bounding dodger if doing swamps or similar, you already pointed this weakness out, but theres no reason not to retrait if needed.
Assassins signet over bandits defense. Unless you have srs problems with breakbars or hostile cc.
There will be certain situations (less in fractals, more likely in dungeons) where you will be expected to provide stealth, so keep an open mind for shadow refuge and smoke screen.
Should work equally well with d/p or d/d, in any case you will mainly autoattack and use weapon skills for utility.
So much for my unprofessional opinion, most of it is a matter of personal taste I suppose. Thankfully you dont have to min-max for fractals or dungeons. Its nice to kill a molten berserker in a matter of seconds but not necessary, and the rather difficult stuff might even require specialized builds (like running seals on 94) so there is always a small room for preference and interpretation.
Saying ‘The skill is just bad, deal with it’ isnt a solution. If theres a problem, one has to work on it. Also we may not be the only class in the game, but thats just the reason why balancing should be considered carefully. Appearently its really hard to make thieves worthwhile without beeing overpowered, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt try. Things have gotten better, but i rly dont want to spend another season with people crying if i enter a game.(that happens right now, even in unranked)
And its also obvious that the AA dmg buff, mostly for dagger didnt solve any problems, only made us viable enough to be considered ‘meta’ again, and im thankful for that. Still…theres gotta be more. (not like: stronger, more like: better)
But back to the subject of dagger storm. I like the idea of instant cast. If combined with Ed’s idea of being a ‘counter skill’ we could make it a ‘hold and release’ mechanic.
Basically you have an uptime of 2-6 seconds (depending on wether youre allowed to act normally meanwhile or not) where you gain stability, destroy projectiles (maybe in a 250 radius for some teamplay) and at any time you may reactivate the skill, unleashing a couple of daggers as well as all collected projectiles on your enemies.
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What about stealth? On dagger storm i mean. It would significantly improve the chance to survive your own skill, it would benefit from stealth traits and therefore prove a useful utility for stealth-focussed builds but it wouldnt be insanely powerful. I have always wanted second shadow, but that would potentially be op, so why not a non-removeable stealth, but bound to rather weak radiating attacks.
About some older stuff that i didnt bother to comment on previously: As many I disagree on the basilisk venom.
The main point of a good balance is, that theres no such thing as a non-breakable stun. Tho its tempting, it would also make every thief vs thief fight decided by the first hit.
However it would be awesome if basilisk venom ignored stability and defiance. (might be a little op for raids?)
Oh and the invigorating precision change: just dont touch that skill. Its perfect, not quite too much but a great tool for every tough pve fight.
How…how can you say this? How could anybody say thieves had no sustainability? In terms of group healing: maybe but when it comes to simple sustain i would probably put them as one of the top, if not the top class. Depends on the situation tho.
Youre immortal to scrap mobs, unless they are using ranged weapons or find other ways to get around your black powder.
You can easily stay alive in pretty much every bossfight, but you might have to sacrifice dps due to moving out of range for a while.
But in general in pve…invigorating precision, black powder, the daredevil. I doubt theres any class with that much survivability on a full zerker.
And pvp? Harder, but i was still able to run around a rock for 12 min straight, having at least 2 people chasing me all the time. The new acro-line offers some great stuff there.
But what is up with this anyways? Everywhere I go I see thieves complaining about how squishy they are. Rly, the meta build is designed for situations, where your team is good enough, to make anything but pure damage obsolete, outside of those situations: try to think for youself.
The only other class that i would consider capable of soloing a 99 fractal is ele. about as good movement and passive healing.
Survivability is not a problem. Unhindered combatant, driven fortitude, escapist absolution, invigorating precision, assassins reward, black powder. Some of them viable in pve, some in pvp, some in both + several more i dont want to list.
For pve you can easily run a full zerker thief without dying as long as youre awake, just sacrifice some traits for it. Unless you want to play meta ofc, but i dont see why anyone would want to play thief pve meta unless youre in a perfect group where dmg is all that counts.
But thats just my opinion tho. I do not die in pve unless its actually my fault, pvp is more tricky but even there you can always just run of and cap some other point.
The damage has been more of a problem, we should be top tier, if not the best, its simply the classes’ concept. Theyve tried to adress that issue, I cant yet judge if they were successfull.
Oh. And the acrobatics: thats the whole point. the traitline was useless, they were trying to change that. I liked it before, I like it now. for pvp at least, wouldnt take it into a fractal.