Guild Wars 2

This is great – I might actually considering using it for non-BS builds now. Dancing Dagger would be insane with those 5 boosted hits.

Consider it this way – if you get instagibbed by backstab now, you have no excuse.

I can’t stand this. I missed 10 kills in a ROW just by this stupid method. Simply disable all methods of menu/shortcut interaction while downed = instafix.

So you’re perfectly fine with supposedly epic battles against champions of the legendary forces of nature granting you some blues that you just throw in the trash?

57g right now. Just steadily climbing until I reach 100g for the Icy Runestones and it’s back to 0.

Increase the difficulty of the events tenfold (remember those dangerous crystals that the Shatterer spawns? Oh wait, of course you don’t, DPSDPSDPSDPSDPS). They don’t feel like dragon battles at all. All the attacks are pathetic/easily dodgeable, slow and mostly pointless (Claw of Jormag’s fear is almost entirely worthless). When you have an army against a single, massive force of nature, it should feel that way, instead of what it currently feels like (bashing a door in WvW).

To compensate for making them insanely hard, give out rares commonly and exotics slightly less commonly (but not to the extent of the current drop rate of rares anywhere in the world).

Am I missing something in relation to their attacks here? I hate underwater combat, so I will often just stealth and/or dodge past enemies while getting from A to B. However, when one of these things comes along, they’ve hit me about 5 times before they even reach my character. I’m floating helplessly as numbers/dots fly everywhere and he still has a good 20 feet to go before he’s touching me.

Is this intentional?

Redscope.6215:

Likely not going to happen since the players that make the ‘L2P’ posts are the ones using the gimmick builds and have no idea, nor do they care to learn, how to counter them. They’re likely to just fill their posts with “dodge more bro” since they don’t realize how much more often thieves can dodge/evade than any other class in the game.

For your information, to get the benefits of increased dodge capabilities in comparison to other classes, you need to invest in the Acrobatics traitline, which ruins any idea of running what you call a “gimmick” build, since you don’t have any damage benefit from it, just a bit of extra HP.

Perhaps you should actually look at the Thief’s class before you make judgements like that.

And to VictorTroska, being a sarcastic, self-righteous ninny will get you nowhere. Not to mention how hilariously wrong you are to begin with.

Permastealth is also only really possible because of the rendering issues. Blame that, because it’s nothing to do with the Thieves themselves.

Exactly. Downed =/= dead. He knocked some of your pals down, but could never finish the job. I still don’t see an issue here.

S/D with 30 Critical Strikes, 20 Shadow Arts and 20 Acrobatics. That’s what I run almost all the time, and it nails glass cannon thieves. I have a plethora of stealth and shadowstepping opportunities that will break a glass cannon’s opener every single time. I also have the Shadow Arts major that blinds upon stealth, so when they go in to 2-spam mode, I hit C+D and suddenly they don’t know what the hell to do. Cue stealth sword daze, and at some point Critical Haste might have procced, in which case I tear them up instantly. If not, they die in a few more seconds.

This is what happens when every other class moans about Thief. Half of them re-roll, realise how stupid they were being and go back to their mains.

Permastealth means he’s constantly hitting Cloak and Dagger and nothing more. If you can’t combat that with a huge group of people, I really don’t know what to say. He’s still there, you just can’t see him. Predictions and AoEs go a long way.

Also, if he didn’t actually finish anyone, what’s the problem? He’s being a nuisance, not a one man army.

It’s the camera angle. Everything looked in range to me.

Why have this event at all? It’s INSANELY boring and slows the dungeon right down to a crawl. I avoid Path 3 just for this part.

This fight is just incredibly tedious, no matter how you put it. It also doesn’t fit in CoE’s ethos. Aren’t you meant to be escaping while the building collapses around you? Suddenly, you’re held up for 10-15 minutes while you grind a boss that simply stands there and poses no threat to you whatsoever.

There’s a good portion of people on Gandara that play CoE, myself included.

I love my Thief – I love my Thief so much that I plan to get a legendary and bind it to her – specifically, the sword Bolt. I’m not really a fan of D/D, and I love the fencing feel of S/D and the sturdiness of S/P. Naturally though, many of my builds have stealth somewhere in them.

Bolt has the following effects:
Lightning surrounds the weapon when it is drawn.
Lightning surrounds the user’s body when the sword is drawn and in the main hand.
Leaves trails of lightning when slashing.
Unique sound effects when slashing and striking.
Plays a continuous buzzing sound while drawn.

I’m slightly worried that if I carry dagger off-hand and hit C+D, or use any stealth skill, the noise and effects might still appear in some way, shape or form. This might actually make me more detectable in render issues in WvW if you can hear a giant lightning roar behind you, but still – do I have a reason to be concerned? :P

Congrats Ten!

I agree with reducing health and increasing head count. Once you have figured out an enemy’s capabilities, it’s just boring whittling down the ludicrous HP bar. Instead, put more pressure on us with numbers.

NinjaEd.3946:

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? troll much? stealthig is the core to thief. You honestly wana eliminate an entire profession? You say perma stealth is dumb, I agree but…. We don’t have perma stealth. Its at max 4-5 seconds excluding Shadow refuge which we have to stay in the circle to get. Your suggestion, I’m sorry, but is god aweful.

I think what he means is quick successions of C+D keeping a huge stealth uptime. That would be a problem, but you’re not doing anything productive in combat if that’s all you’re doing. Also, if the enemy is stupid enough to hang around while you do that for hours on end, that’s their fault. The moment that stealth cycle stops, you have the chance to CC them to death. This is a non-issue.

No. Stealth is a core combat mechanic for Thieves. There is literally no point in stealth existing if it is non-combat only, and what you are basically asking is for the Thief profession to be deleted from the game. Not to mention that Mesmers also have offensive stealth utilities and you’d break them, as well.

/thread

I really only made this thread so I could vent, but I genuinely am interested to know if there have been times where your dungeon runs have also gone horribly wrong, due to anything. Could be your teammates, could be connection issues, bugs, whatever.

My contribution:

I created a party with one of my friends for CoE, and decided we’d pug the other 3. This usually goes well, since CoE is pretty routine to those who run it. We got a third player, and he said he hadn’t done it before, and naturally, we told him not to worry, we’ll just explain to him as we go through (the mechanics aren’t that special). A 4th and 5th join together (one invites the other), so they must have been friends from elsewhere (I’m not going to drop any names here).

We chose path 1 after the escort, with about 50 minutes until the token reset. Our DPS had just proven to be extremely high and our playstyles had a decent synergy, so we go through the first half extremely confidently and efficiently. We nailed every stage up to the golem with the 4 turrets surrounding him, and we get to the point where the console run with the bomb golems is waiting at the top of the staircase. The 3rd player has already pointed out that he is new, so we stop to quickly explain what’s going to happen, what to do etc. However, the 4th and 5th do NOT wait. Instead, they sprint right in, so I’m forced to type tiny strings of text as I struggle to keep up with what’s going on in-game at the same time. Both of these players do not even attempt to guard me, and instead proceed to murder infinitely spawning bomb golems (they have claimed that they’ve done this before, many times). I immediately ask what in the name of Balthazar they’re doing, and the 4th’s response is simply “YOU’RE A THIEF, STEALTH IT.” It takes me a few knockdowns and ragdolls from explosions to point out that bomb golems can pretty much detect you in stealth at the console, and will plant themselves down to blow me up anyway, so I need support. Even if I turned out to be wrong, there are so many golems that I needed someone to guard me anyway. He responds with a “NO THEY DON’T, IDIOT, GO STEALTH CONSOLE.” So, I plant a Refuge, hack away and get blown up, exactly as I predicted. I managed to get one hack in before the player left in a panic when he realised he was wrong (he didn’t even try and come to my aid during it either, the newbie and my friend stayed there and backed me up). The 5th player starts complaining that our strategy (our?) is terrible. I point out that this wasn’t even a strategy at all, and that the pair had ruined our approach to the objective, since I hadn’t even begun to explain or discuss with the team what to do before they rushed ahead. Sighing, my friend and I just tell the others to kill the big golems that have spawned, so we can keep going and maybe grab another player later. He then starts crying, saying “THEY SPAWN FOREVER YOU IDIOT OMG”. I’m almost at breaking point here, since it is obvious to anyone who has run this path even once that the big golems do not respawn at all. I point this out passive-aggressively, and he calls us idiots once more and goes to leave. We kick him before he gets the satisfaction, apologise to the newcomer and add him to our friend lists so we can run it with him another time.

We abandoned the run with 5 minutes to go before the reset.

I hate pugs.

I don’t have a panic button at all, but sometimes I will hit the return for Infiltrator’s Strike (I have an S/D fencing build) to get out of danger quickly. Stealth is an extra tactical layer I use to reposition or safely stomp. I never hit C+D or a stealth skill out of panic (running out of initiative is really the only time I hit BP, and Shadow Refuge is for ressing allies).

My WvW build is:

S/D
Shortbow
30 Shadow Arts
30 Acrobatics
10 Trickery

Take all the stealth/blind/might/survival traits possible, wear offensive gear for balance eg. zerker or rampager and go fencing with S/D. I have Blinding Powder, Shadow Refuge and Infiltrator’s Signet with Thieves Guild. There is so much crazy stuff you can do with this build. I can take 3-5 players simultaneously (I won’t win against them all 100% of the time, but I will put up enough of a fight to attract friendly attention that can clean up the rest of the mess).

Edelweiss.9815:

ColdSpyder.9082:

OP states that thieves kill based on what class we’re targetting. Clearly a newbie.
Not every elementalist (Or other dps-y seeming class) rolls glass cannon. Good players know they need to stack a lot of defensive stats. I have 20k hp on my thief while still outputting hilarious damage because I know that my instantaneous dps went down, but my effective dps went up.
You do more damage when you’re alive. Try stacking some vit.
Maybe put a stunbreaker on your hotbar. Mezzies can TP, eles can mistform/obby armor, warrs can endure pain, and although I’m not sure about other class specific counter mechanisms, I DO know that all classes can dodge. Please try stunbreaking and dodging that backstab thief next time. It’s far from an instantaneous process.

Defensive Elementalist is OP, no wonder you’re feeling good. Well, that is if you were playing an Ele, sneaky boy. It doesn’t matter if you can shield yourself for a few seconds when the Thief can disengage and come back with full HP/Resources whenever he wishes. I don’t know if you can stunbreak and dodge in 1/5th of a second, I sure don’t. You WILL eat Steal, CnD and Backstab. That will either kill you outright or put you in the HS/BS spam zone. Dodging won’t help.

I hope A-net won’t buy into bullkitten and nerf you guys. The game only suffers because of this class.

1) You can NOT have extraordinary healing in stealth on a glass cannon build, and combined with CDs for the BS combo (Steal on 45 sec, Assassin’s Signet on 45 sec), you will NEVER be able to execute the combo in quick succession when running full glass cannon. The only reason the Thief could ever return to attack you with the same combo is in a complete fight reset, where you will also have all your HP and cooldowns back. If a glass Thief runs back in after healing, and combat is still in session, he will not be fully restored in any way, shape or form, and his cooldowns will limit his choices severely and increase his predictability further (more on this in a second). A Thief healing spec is entirely separate from a damage spec. You CANNOT have both. This is just a blatant lie and/or over-exaggeration, and always has been.
2) Have you ever heard of CC? Use it. I run Guardian and Elementalist alts, and glass cannon thieves are completely predictable and laughable. You know the range for Steal is 900 (at maximum 1200 with a trait, but no GC build would ever get to this trait), you can see the appropriate GC signets on his target, and you can see a distinct absence of bulky equipment that immediately suggests daggers. After his burst combo, he might possibly have 2 CC breaks. That’s it. Dodge/break initial combo and CC = easy win. If not, he runs for his life with the shortbow and all is well. It’s pretty clear in most situations that just out-damaging a Thief will not work. I’m surprised 90% of people don’t think to use their brains against these guys. It’s really not complex to fight these Thieves – totally and utter predictable and easily, systematically counter-able. Do you even try against them, or you do just lose all cognition and wait for your death (that is obviously coming if you just give up)?

I’m an S/D thief and I have no issue with effects obscuring dungeons, even at maximum settings. I can understand in WvW, but in 5-man instances, no issue whatsoever. What dungeons are you doing?

It depends on the exact split-second you leave. If it is still active, you will be revealed. That’s it.

The field doesn’t stay for 3-4 seconds, it stays for a while longer than that. The indicators for it (circle + house icon) just vanish before it finishes. If you leave while it’s still active, you get de-stealthed. If it’s properly finished, you will not have walked out of anything when you move, so you stay in stealth.

ConterK.3972:

still 10s, op 10s
im using it now, lol!

10s of basically being completely immobile and exposed to attack since an enemy can just point in the general direction of the circle and down you.

OP my kitten

1) The circle is not that large and most AoEs nail it. Have you ever been in one in a combat situation against players that have any brains? Good luck EVER trying to dodge AoE attacks within the refuge. Under pressure, you could have 2-3 players bombarding it, and you’ll be dead in seconds. Even an unseparated Cluster Bomb can take out the entire circle. The circle isn’t large enough to miss anything within it. Hell, a Warrior can Whirlwind right through and kill every single person inside.
2) If you leave, you lose stealth and get the revealed debuff. Even if you walk back in, you can’t stealth until that debuff finishes. So you either stay inside without ever touching the edges or risk losing your stealth buff (and get nuked while staying there), walk out prematurely (and get nuked), or pick a wiser time to use it (away from a group of players, thus removing the need for any concern to begin with).

I need to do a LOT of CoE runs. Not just for the sweet medium armour, but for the Charged Cores/Lodestones and to pass the time if I don’t fancy doing AC or any other dungeons. So, if anyone else is going to be running it, hit me up! My character is an 80 Thief, Kaila Mistblade.

Yeah, it’s perfectly fine as it is. It’s a pulse skill, just like Black Powder. The immense usefulness of SR is kind of offset by the fact that the enemy can see EXACTLY where you are and there’s nothing you can do but wait until the refuge finishes and you have 3-4s of stealth left to play with. That, or run away. If you stay in there for so long in combat, you’ll be AoE’d to death.

So no, it’s fine. Don’t make up a load of bullkitten.

I can’t say much for those kind of thieves (I run a much sturdier build that relies on stealth, blinds and swordplay), but something that completely messes up a backstab + 2-spam thief is for the first attack to miss. So, if you can, keep an extra-hard eye on approaching thieves. They usually start with a cast for Cloak and Dagger, and it’s a little hard to catch the animation. As soon as you see any sign of movement on the thief’s part that isn’t walking/running, dodge or use displacement skills. If you’re lucky, a Bull Charge might wreck his plans before the fight has even started. If he hits a stealth at any point, move erratically and/or attack where you predict they will be. Even in stealth, they can be hit, and they WILL back off when that happens. Since he will try and position himself around you, just try autoattacking around you. You might look stupid, but it works. Make the thief’s job of stabbing you in the back much more difficult with your movement, and I’m not sure what the skill is, but it’s like an axe AoE spin that does INSANE damage. Yeah, as soon as the thief hits stealth and gets close, rush it right through. I’ve seen that skill alone almost one shot a glass cannon thief. Also, at the stage where he begins spamming heartseeker, save all your CC skills until that point. If he lands the backstab and thinks he’s already won, he’ll most likely relax his playing style when using the heartseeker strikes. At that point, Backbreaker means he’s as good as dead, on the spot, right there. As soon as you hit any form of CC that stops him in his tracks, hit Frenzy and DPS him to oblivion before he can break out (he will undoubtedly have some of counter, but at the 2-spam stage, he might not even be paying much attention).

Quite simply, just remember that even in stealth, he can still be hit. Predict the movement, prevent him from getting that first hit in, and choose your CC moments wisely. Heck, you could wait until he’s mid-spam before hitting the axe spin and tearing him to shreds on the spot.

Actually, exotics have a chance of 0-5 ectos. Rares are 0-3. So I say go for it.

I’ve always imagined a scenario where, upon detecting a large concentration of entities (players, mobs, objects, whatever), the UI slightly adapts to the situation. Instead of having to look through the zillions of particles to find visual cues, the UI itself will indicate danger. Red circles will shine more vividly and take visual priority over everything else (transparent through players and other effects), small “!” icons flash when an attack is imminent on your character (preferably showing up in the direction of the attack as well, above the attacking mob’s head for example), and stuff like that.

I’m thinking about something like this now:

In addition to the slower speed, Quickness only works on your next non-autoattack skill. In other words, one pistol whip, Quickness is gone (it usually takes a minimum of 2.5 whips to get someone who isn’t a glass cannon down). Hundred Blades is a lot more lenient on your escape, so overall, I think that might work too. So your autoattacks can still nail an opponent competently, but any attempts to troll with uber-skills will fall flat after the first one.

I’m currently using 0/0/30/30/10 with all the might-related traits in those trees that are available and my sword has a superior strength sigil for 30% chance of might on crit (which sits at about 50% chance right now). I have been able to maintain 10-15 stacks of might in extended battles without any effort in consciously obtaining it.

I think the custom rent-a-server thing that’s being implemented in the Halloween update might grant this wish (but for a price? Who knows).

This is not needed. At all. As a thief, I can maintain damage while evading and blinding, effectively keeping big groups busy by myself until I get caught on CD, then I can hit stealth and someone else can take the brunt for me.

You don’t need any trinity roles. You just need to play well.

Nice. What’s your build here with traits and gear?

As many people have pointed out, Pistol Whip was not the problem of burst builds – Haste was. In fact, Quickness in general is a bit of a dodgy boon. So, I propose this:

- Pistol Whip’s damage be reverted to its original damage (put that 15% back in)
- Reduce Quickness from 2.0x speed to 1.5x or even 1.4x speed

Some people are also a little annoyed at the Warrior 100b combo with immob + Frenzy, so I think this may satisfy them as well. With the speed boost decreased to this amount, Pistol Whips will be MUCH harder to chain on to a single target (there is a tiny window in which to dodge at the moment, but it’s so miniscule that you might as well give up if you’re not expecting it). The window of opportunity to break out of the attack will be opened, not by much, but just enough to allow an opponent to not be stun-locked. Also, with the intense damage delivery of 100b, the .5x reduction in speed gives an opponent a little more leeway to escape the full brunt of the attack, as both PW and HB happen so incredibly fast right now that your countering options are extremely limited once you’ve been locked in to them.

That’s what I think will help alleviate the issue. Of course, there may be repercussions I have not considered or perhaps I’m just plain wrong. Feel free to tear in to this idea.

I suggest that the Pistol Whip damage be reverted back to the way it was, but then quickness should be changed from 2.0x to 1.5x or perhaps even 1.4x speed. That way, there is still a considerable boost in what you can do DPS wise, but it’s more competitively viable since it would be MUCH harder to chain Pistol Whips on a PvP target and the combo will be no longer spammable in the way that it is now when combined with Haste.

I kept thinking this while working towards mine. After all the effort in to making Bolt, I’d like to let a few alts mess around with it as well rather than being stuck on my main.

Thief has always been fun to me. It’s the most fast-paced, exhilarating and entertaining profession in any RPG, let alone any MMORPG I’ve ever played.

Don’t force yourself to play what you don’t want to play. If you don’t enjoy the Thief, then keep mixing it up until you find a class and playstyle you enjoy.

Wildclaw.6073:

So you downed a bunch of players and didn’t manage to finish any of them off, and then you come here and complain about your own incompetence.

So instead of tackling the main point of my post (namely, the ridiculous and fragile nature of rallying and the downed state in a PvP environment that does nothing but disrupt the flow of battles randomly for either side), you attack my skill as a player on totally unwarranted grounds. Nice.

I consider being able to down 4 players and position myself to finish them all off in the presence of a 5th, only being screwed over by a stupid mob that got in the way by a total fluke of circumstance pretty competent. I can guarantee that you would not be talking in that manner if you were in my shoes.

A 5-man group of Thieves. Lay a staggering amount of traps leading in to a supply camp, with a bit of space between each. Watch small groups crap their pants and run off without you even needing to attack them. Take the camp in peace.

Let me tell you a story (a kitten cool one, bro):

I was playing on my thief character on my home borderlands, cruising merrily to the garrison that had just been attacked. I’m going up the road away from the nearby supply camp, and suddenly a group of 5 enemy invaders rush over the horizon and plough their way through to my direction. Naturally, I have to use every single skill in my disposal to survive. After landing some damage, I pull off one of my favourite tactics successfully (stealth and then hit a Shadow Refuge WITHOUT going inside it, so the enemy focus on it and nuke the inside of it). I land a monstrous Pistol Whip and nail 2 in one quick sweep. 2 downed, 3 left standing. I quickly immobilise a third and hit Thieves Guild while stealthing with a utility, and again the focus is off me and on to my pals. Another Pistol Whip rush on the 4th and 5th who went to help the others, and 4 out of 5 are now down. The last one has just broken out of the immobilisation and has successfully killed the two thieves (and kitten quickly, very impressive). My shadowsteps and stealths are caught on CD at the same time, so I simply go to AoE the already downed players at my feet before they can cause a bigger problem. Lots of Pistol Whips ahoy. The 5th launches an AoE at me, so naturally, I dodge out of the way. It hits a wolf, who had been hanging around the vicinity and occasionally getting swiped for a while and happened to walk right where I was standing at this exact moment. The wolf dies. 3 out of 4 downed players are rallied. I get instantly bursted by all of them and die before I can blink.

Absolutely stupendously silly. Get rid of it.

I don’t like to cripple my usefulness in a 5-man dungeon group with +MF gear. However, I really need those Charged Cores/Lodestones from CoE. So my question is this: Can I just carry my +MF gear with me, pop it on before opening a chest and expect a higher chance of better items before re-equipping my normal exotics to get to the next chest?

I’m only coming up to 2k kills, but I’m a huge PvE player. I only really went in for my 500 badges.

It really isn’t instant. I have dodged it many, many times, and so have the guildies in our dungeon group. The transit from A to B is quick, but he hangs before he hits the ground. You have an ample time-frame in which to evade the attack entirely.

If you can’t dodge, then CC the crap out of him and move around sporadically, spreading out so you don’t all get hit at once. He goes down quickly.