Guild Wars 2

Solo’d, 80 Thief. Got an exotic as well

I stayed out in the open and used my backup (CoE golemancer outfit and Thieves Guild) to keep a little aggro away, and evaded constantly with shortbow. Took down all the spider mobs first, but that didn’t take long.

Cross server is possible. I’m on Gandara and always up for CoE exp, since I am in dire need of those lodestones. Hit me up whenever.

Thirded. I’m fed up of being easily spotted by this.

Dzonatan, you’re asking for complete stupidity. Defeats the point of a legendary weapon if it has more stats – that means that everyone aims to get one – legendary weapons become commonplace. Leave it as an optional visual extra – that’s the entire kittening point.

That is a VERY neat idea. This would synergise SO well with Shadow Strike (dagger off-hand). Blast with a plethora of vulnerability at point-blank and then escape to range to continue dishing out bleeds, perhaps throw a Dancing Dagger after you’ve gotten away to keep them crawling. Brilliant idea.

There are many different things you can do with a Thief – it’s correct to assume that you’ll be a lot more involved when playing as one. Thieves rely on positioning and tactics more than any other class besides Mesmer.

Me, I run a Sword/Dagger + Shortbow build and dance around targets with stealths, immobilisations and evades. Dancing Dagger is my form of a burst between 2-3 targets (it does huge damage if you land a whole initiative bar’s worth). Sometimes I’ll run Sword/Dagger + Dagger/Dagger if I need to get a target out of the way extremely quickly (run S/D in a fight for a while, switch to D/D mid-stealth and burst to death). It’s a mix of damage and survivability.

Mercury, you are aware that those 3 points are given to you in the calculator by assumption of account link through HoM, and don’t actually exist?

It IS a bug. It’s a rendering issue that makes anyone in stealth appear 1 or 2 seconds later than when they actually came out of stealth.

Nothing about the Thief is broken.

My Bolt disagrees.

They’ll hopefully learn a valuable lesson in creating meaningful and epic boss fights. So far, 99% of experiences of a dragon event have been spamming autoattack at range and going afk while the zerg handles it. However, last night, most had gone to bed and we had a group of 10 or so fighting the Claw of Jormag. It was one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had in the game. The rush to battle the champions while the Claw hit us with barrages of ice and constantly on the rush to ress allies while the golems advanced slowly towards the ice pillars etc. I felt like a real hero using the fire shield from the gun to protect the golem against icebrood and stunning the dragon for the last time. I actually felt like I mattered. We actually had to “try”. That’s the important part of these big events. For one thing, I wanted dragons to be MUCH more difficult for zergs. The link to the Vindictus video is a good one. The battles should last for a LONG time, and you should always be on your toes. The dragon’s attacks should be vast and powerful, wiping out huge groups of your friends in bigger battles if they’re not paying close attention. The dragons should be in the sky, moving constantly and raining hell upon us until we find crucial openings. Obviously it should scale (not too much, though), but they don’t really feel like dragons right now. For example, rather than the Claw sitting behind an ice shield, I would have preferred it for him to be in a constant aerial assault against the cannons that are firing at him, and we have to pick our moments to nail him as he swoops down and weaken the dragon enough to slow him down and enable the cannons to knock him out of the sky, and THEN the ice shield battle begins as the FINAL stage and not the FIRST. Even then, he should be truly fighting for his life, slamming the ground desperately and causing huge storms/blizzards around us. I feel like I’m playing WvW and bashing in a reinforced door right now.

If you just want the 3 points by linking, then you still need to buy Eye of the North with a base game (any campaign). You also have to unlock the Hall of Monuments by playing EotN to the point where you get there (it doesn’t take long). Then you just link the accounts.

You get 3 points for completing the campaign of the original (Prophecies) – that brings you to 6 points for the full set. There’s 20 or so missions in the Prophecies. It doesn’t take long. You also need Eye of the North to get to the Hall of Monuments and to place the statue for completing Prophecies, and you will then need to link the accounts.

Confirmed – just got my Gift of Mastery – thanks! Now to get to work on shards for clovers…

I was going to suggest that he chained traversal skills eg. Infiltrator’s Signet -> Steal, but since you saw that he was hacking, nevermind.

Honestly though, watch out for that sort of thing regardless. I run with a sword, and if an enemy is going to get away at a considerable range, I hit Infiltrator’s Signet -> Infiltrator’s Strike -> Steal. That’s a 2400 range, almost instant travel that could also damage if used with Mug and if the IS strike is timed to hit after the Steal. If you’re not that far away, IF will immobilise and deal damage as well.

Pennry.9215:

lol Another thread on this? Why don’t all you “only need shards” people band together, pick a server, and take the temple? I’d love to see the vendor set to only sell to people that helped take the temple. Way harsh, but would be funny none the less!

That would work if the event wasn’t bugged on almost every server.

Is it still uncontested?

Just going to carry on bumping here. Just got 525k karma and want my Gift of Mastery, but Gandara’s is obviously bugged. Need a server asap

In that case, yes, it blinds downed enemies and stealths downed allies.

What? Why would you want to stealth an enemy?

Yes. I use it to ress people all the time.

My solution:

In WvW, once you die, unlike PvE, where you stare at your corpse, the map forcefully opens to show your possible respawn points, and there is no way to remove it. In other words, you can’t see anything around you until someone starts healing you and the map gives way.

That doesn’t even warrant a response. You’re an idiot.

Scarlac.4265:

I havent played a lot since this patch but I have read through most the posts. I Feel this is a nerf and hers why

1. people are talking about sustained damage. Well we all call thieves “GLASS” cannons. They arent meant for head to head. Take away the cannon? Take away the Glass then.

2. This burst build isnt as simple as running up to everyone and hitting a button. ALL your cool downs must off, have full initiative and then find the right opportunity to execute at least half of your skills at one time. If you dont pull it off, your done most often….no skills to use (cool downs) all initiative is gone. Its literally a all in attack. What other class has to walk around and look for opportunity to execute most of their skills at once? None that I have played (not saying there aren’t)

Im hoping I can live with it but in theory I dont see it working well. Especially in PVP where a thief relies on always having the opener. If you dont believe this watch any 2 thief’s duel and they will always try and reset the fight to have that advantage.

This is a load of rubbish. If you hit the entire combo, you’re still doing close enough to the same amount of damage (it’s 3-4k off, I believe), and if you don’t kill them, you have a 15% boosted Heartseeker or two to finish them off. You’re making it sound like they’ve completely nerfed the concept of backstabbing combos, when the opposite is true. You also only need 6 initiative, not your full bar (that being C+D, steal and backstab do not require any initiative). I have used this build pre- and post-“nerf”. I still have a large distaste for it and prefer my survivable builds, but it’s as “effective” as it ever was. Personally, I think it’s actually a boost overall and helps multiple builds instead of one lame build.

If you feel that you HAVE to rely on having the opening shot and resetting fights, you need to re-think your Thief. It’s very rare for me to see 2 Thieves constantly struggling to get a reset mid-fight to gain an advantage. Only with bad Thieves, perhaps. It’s always nice seeing the shock of a fellow Thief when I take his damage like a sponge and wipe the floor with him without even needing to stealth.

Scarlac.4265:

Forgot to mention. I have a full set of soulbond exotic gear geared to this spec. Maybe someone telling us to quit complaining will buy me new exotics with toughness stats? Any takers?

Oh, boo hoo. You and you alone made the choice to go full glass cannon, and it’s only on you if you suddenly decide that getting wiped the second you press a wrong button was a bad idea. I currently have 3 exotic sets, each for a different purpose. It’s not hard to get them. Besides, what makes you think you have the privilege of the entire game world revolving around you and your character’s needs?

Huh, our party never even hits the turrets with the golem. I spam Flanking Strike and remove all the boons before he even has a chance to use them. Every time they fire, I’ve taken them away a second later. Easiest fight ever.

Actually, that might have been the case. We stayed at range for fear of attracting more spider attention, and we might have been straddling the reset line and causing more spider spawns. Even so, I wish I could have shown you a screenshot. My screen was COMPLETELY full of Recluses. I could have gone for a swim in them.

I was willing to keep trying, but a pug left and then the party just lost all care for it. I’m sure it’s possible (perhaps, if you don’t wipe and make him spawn more), but it was such a shock.

Reevac.1748:

Haven’t run TA post patch. Im more curious as to the worms range. They already had ridiculous range to begin with.

I never noticed a difference in range when fighting, but I suppose that’s because I was running melee. I expect that was to counter the spot on the ridge that made the fight a cakewalk.

Reevac.1748:

You mean the made it so his aoe does the actual intended damage?

Less that than the whole “spawns many times more spiders” thing.

Every single group I have pugged has had no problem with this dungeon. We run forward->up or up usually. This time, we ran forward and up. We came to the last tree boss. Normally, spiders would come around the corners, so we kill them off, focusing on them before the boss. This is almost always perfectly manageable. However, this time, I have NO idea what happened. A big explosion of green, and 3 of us are instantly downed upon the start of the fight. I’ve never seen this before, and I’ve done this path every day for at least 2 weeks. Then, after the effects have cleared…

No less than SEVENTEEN Recluses. SEVEN. TEEN.

We got wiped in seconds. We go back to the boss to start the fight again. He spawns TEN MORE. TWENTY SEVEN RECLUSES.

What the actual kitten did you do to this path? Or have I been imagining the process of getting my armourset and the boss has decided to never use his full arsenal on me ever?

Unload really isn’t worth it. I use sword/dagger and tiptoe around the bosses with lots of evades, autoattacks and stealth-blinds. Most of the time I can keep decent aggro for the rest to whittle them down.

I just play dungeons and make 1g every 90 mins or so.

It’s probably a bad idea to tell everyone your strategy for making money, though. If everyone picked up on it, you wouldn’t have a market for your produce anymore.

Agreed with account-bound. After all the effort I’ve put in to Bolt so far, I want to be able to show it off on my other characters.

I enjoy dungeons in their current state, especially AC and CoE. However, I would have preferred it for the nature of mobs to be inverted. Instead of lower numbers + high HP, I would have preferred to have been completely outnumbered by huge armies of weaker trash mobs that we have to wade through. Much more fun than whittling down a small group of Panzers in every room.

Buzzcrave.6197:

Sidestep as in utility skill, it doesn’t take a genius to know that Sidestep is a must. Seriously do you even play this game?

Do you? Sidestep doesn’t exist. The only evasive utility is Roll For Initiative, which has a huge cooldown. Any “offensive” manoeuvres that also have evade attached are Death Blossom (as already discussed) and Flanking Strike. Both are useless at range and make you look like an idiot, and you’ll be exhausted of initiative almost instantly when spamming them. Not to mention that Flanking Strike is a sword skill and incompatible with a Backstab build.

Please, tell me more about how well you know this game.

You know what the counter to stealth is? Intuition. Use your head and predict movement. That is how I’ve fought every Thief so far. A few misses here and there, but if you keep thinking a few steps ahead, most of your seemingly fruitless swings at thin air will connect. I’ve nailed many Thieves who are still in stealth by watching the direction he’s running when he hits stealth and take in to account his movement previously in the fight, so I can determine if he will attempt a switcheroo or keep running. Then I make my move, and 70-80% of the time, I’ll hit him. Hell, you KNOW he will attempt to get behind you if he has D/D, so just being erratic and swinging at your blind spots will put you at an advantage.

You don’t need an in-built counter for this. Nobody does, for any class or any mechanic. Just use your head.

Still the easiest path of the dungeon. We steamrolled him just a couple of hours ago.

That’s not permanent unless you’re directly next to another person that you can help you and you have to also hope that your blast finishers don’t hit anything and reveal you.

This is not even an issue.

urtv.8791:

even if there is a 10s counter,people can still go to task manager and force close the program

He means server-side, not client-side. The character would remain in place 10 seconds after the connection between the client (program) and the server is cut.

S/D is so much more productive than D/D in a group fight. It’s so much more flexible and hits HARD.

Nyxmyst.5819:

What in the world is a tag? How would I go about it? Honestly, I have zero interest in entering WvW at all, let alone spending an entire day lurking in a keep twiddling my fingers unless and until attacked. I have better things to do with my day then to grind through pvp encounters.

Tagging is landing a few hits. That’s it. You don’t need to kill anyone yourself at all. Go around doing your own business (there are mobs, nodes, skill points, vistas etc.) until the server gets riled up over a tower or keep assault, and lob AoE on the doors and walls, or in to the middle of zergs. Easy 50 kills in a few hours.

It really isn’t hard to get 50 kills. You don’t even need to kill them. You can sit at a tower/keep and tag attackers/defenders. I got the monthly in one day by doing that.

Buzzcrave.6197:

A spec which teleports to you from 900 away, stealths itself then kills you in less than 2 seconds is just not good game design whether there are counters or not.

So by your logic, even with ways to counter it, it’s still bad? Right. You see, now, because the DPS is more spread across the combo, you have a bigger window to retaliate. As soon as you get hit, you have every opportunity to hit any AoE, CC or bunker skills you have. A glass cannon backstab Thief will be instantly destroyed by any CC. Learn your class. This is coming from a Thief that specs in survivability and snaring. If I can beat a glass cannon Thief without stealth and with my pitiful HP, you can too.

Buzzcrave.6197:

Please, please don’t start fooling yourself by telling me how about those 1500 nukers… You have a kittening Sidestep skill in your phony backstab build for kitten sake.

D/D has no evade skills apart from Death Blossom, which wastes your initiative in seconds. Critical Strikes and Deadly Arts have no dodge enhancements. The only tree with dodging benefit is Acrobatics, a vitality tree with no relation to a backstab build. Your only hope is to run backwards and spam Disabling Shot with a Shortbow, and that will get you nowhere because you do pathetic damage and just make yourself an eyesore of a target.

What the kitten are you talking about?

Red Falcon.8257:

1g.
Had 20 earlier but bought gear for my Thief.

On the bright side, I look like Ezio Auditore now.

I demand to know what that gear is. Now.

Full Berserker set (I have CoE set to proc a golem spawn on hit for extra support) – S/D + SB
0/30/20/20/0
In 30 CS: I or III – X – XI
In 20 SA: V- VI
In 20 AC: II – IX
HiS
Blinding Powder
Shadow Refuge
Infiltrator’s Signet or Signet of Shadows
Thieves Guild
High damage output, good survivability in terms of stealth and safety precautions, good mobility, good team support by method of dancing around for aggro and blinds/aoe stealths/ressing

Dear diary…

What the kitten am I reading?

It’s perfectly doable. I get them within a week of the monthly reset when not playing that often.

You’re completely mistaken. I can maintain blinds almost 24/7 on enemies, buff with steals, stealth allies (Shadow Refuge has saved the entire party from wiping more than once), dish out swift damage and remove troublesome enemy buffs in almost all kinds of situations (you know that golem with the turrets in CoE? Yeah, what boons?)

Thieves rock in PvE and in dungeons. The ones who suck are the glass cannons who think they’re the kitten and get downed all the time.

I meant within the game, not globally.

Considering that now it’s unblockable, I’ll use it more often than I usually do. I use it for the dodge mechanic to confuse melee players before stealth/daze and continue to dish out damage while boons are gone.

Dervim.3817:

It’s funny how people assume they’ll have enough initiative or time left to pull off all five attacks, with only 10-12k hp and a decloaked debuff.

It’s most definitely a fraggin nerf for a class that is only good at two things: damage and running away.

If you’re only good at doing damage and running away, you’re doing it wrong. My Thief is almost universal. I can keep groups busy for reinforcements to arrive, I can provide support to allies through stealth and other buffs and much more.