Guild Wars 2

How long exactly?

If you’ve been gone for long enough, you won’t have seen a new trait being introduced called Revealed Training, which grants 200 Power while Revealed. Since that trait got introduced, the new PvE meta is Berserker/Scholar with 6/6/0/0/2 traits using D/D pretty much exclusively. If you can’t get good positioning for backstabs on some bosses or when stacking on a wall or something, 56003 S/P still works great. 6/6/2/0/0 D/D with Infusion of Shadows is good for long boss fights or high level Fractals where things take a while to die, since you can maintain your initiative for much longer.

For WvW, I’ve seen and use a variety of builds. D/P still works well, S/D has always been fairly strong, P/D is as strong as ever. Metabattle probably has a full list, and you can see my P/D Trapper build here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFzKDepokBE

Your Valk set will be fine there.

For PvP, S/D has seen a bunch of nerfs over the past few months but is still very popular for the mobility and +1 team fight role. Old school D/P 26006 still works reasonably well but there’s also been a trend of using 60206 for Panic Strike, enough to warrant a slight balance change to that trait. Again, Metabattle will show these builds as well.

Welcome back!

I’m not buying the Rifle hype, people are digging a little too deep in to that trailer in my opinion. If we do get Rifle then cool, but I’m not putting any money on it.

As for what the specialisation itself will be, I’d like to see a return to the Assassin roots with a new utility type, Stances, just like GW1.

For those unfamiliar, here are some examples of GW1 stances and how they can be interpreted by GW2 mechanics:

Dark Escape
Stance.You move 25% faster and take half damage. Ends if you hit with an attack.
->
Healing Stance. You heal yourself, gain Super Speed and take half damage for the duration. Ends if you attack.

Deadly Paradox
Stance. Your Assassin skills activate and recharge 33% faster. Disables your attack skills (10 seconds).
->
Stance. Your skills activate and recharge 33% faster, and Initiative regenerates at double speed. Disables the use of auto-attack.

Unseen Fury
Stance. Inflicts Blindness condition on adjacent foes (3…9…10). You cannot be blocked by Blinded foes for 10…26…30 seconds.
->
Stance. Periodically blind foes near you. You cannot be blocked while your foe is blinded.

Flashing Blades
Elite Stance. You have 75% chance to block while attacking. Block effect: 5…17…20 damage to your attacker.
->
Elite Stance. Gain Aegis every second. Foes that break an Aegis take X damage.

Obviously not final numbers or anything, just a concept.

I also created an OH sword skill set here http://imgur.com/a/dQYrY#0 (I am aware one of them is called Flashing Blades but this was a while ago and I wasn’t thinking about Stances back then)

Alternatively, if we’re going with the Rifle route, I would think something like Highwayman would be the specialisation, and then a utility type based around that. I had a set in mind a long time ago that would suit that, in my opinion. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/New-Utility-Type-Concept-Contacts/first#post2552920

Or maybe we could actually see how the mode is going to work and see how the meta evolves and work from there, instead of starting a nerf/delete panic with ABSOLUTELY ZERO INFORMATION TO WORK FROM?! You literally pulled your assessment out of nothing.

My god, what kind of insanity is this? This is beyond paranoia.

Chill actually DID affect Initiative in early versions of the game. It was hideous – as soon as the condition even touched a Thief they were literally useless.

I don’t think anyone who wishes for Chill to work this way realises just how bad it is, since we are talking about a relatively small pool of resources affecting your entire offensive repertoire on a global cooldown, compared to other professions that can access more skill bars via kits, attunements or weapon swaps with totally individual cooldowns, as well as many other factors besides that to do with the survivability of the professions themselves.

It’s simply not fair to equate initiative on Thieves versus standard profession cooldowns in a “this affects me so it should affect them” way.

TheReaperTheFourthHorsemen.7894:

thief is getting rifle i can confirm, rewatched the trailer 5 times or so noticed something in the mursaat meeting scene

the norn is obviously a thief, wouldn’t make much sense to have 2 the same profession in the trailer when you show one every other class

There are 10 players there alongside Rytlock. There’s at least 1 duplicate class among them (if none of them are a Revenant then 2). I wouldn’t call this proof. Also it’s worth noting that alongside that medium player earlier in the trailer there were two heavies, a Sylvari and a Human, using a sword/shield and hammer respectively, both of which are usable on both current heavies. Not every character in this trailer is meant to be spoiling something new – we can’t really gleam anything from it.

Basilisk Venom on autoattack, triple-mega-evade Death Blossom that reflects projectiles, Dancing Dagger that immobilises, Dagger Storm on skill 5, Bleed + Torment Caltrops, rush that evades, and Second Shadow.

What.

kittening teach me, Caithe.

Channelled blocks/evades are an absolute no-no for initiative skills. Block ONE attack for an effect? As long as it’s expensive, yes, that’s as far as it can go. Have you seen Spear in its current state? I’m amazed it hasn’t been nerfed even more. evilapprentice already did a good job showing just how insane that would be.

An idea I had a while back while thinking of staves was for a skill like Guard Impact from Soul Calibur. A swift block that incapacitates an opponent for a very short time to allow a counterattack. So it would be something like this:

Shadow Riposte (4 initiative):

Parry your opponent’s next attack and knock them off-balance.

Block duration: 1.5s
Knockback: 0 (no distance, purposeful design)
Vulnerability: 10 (3s)
Range: 130

That’s the base skill. You could do a number of things after that. For example, you could attach some short-duration Might and Fury on a successful parry for a follow-up attack, or you could chain to a 2nd skill, or both, eg.

Shadow’s Retaliation (3 initiative):

Exploit your opponent’s momentary exposure with a swift, yet heavy blow. Guaranteed to be a critical hit.

Damage: ~300 (1.3)
Critical Chance Increase: 100%
Range: 180

Something like that. Think of Kilik doing Guard Impact followed by one of his signature twirly heavy overhead attacks. Not perfect by any means, but I think this kind of skill is much fairer than what is, quite frankly, absolutely broken levels of strong in the set above.

We have to be very, very liberal when considering blocks, evades and the like with global resource-based skills. It’s an entirely different ballgame.

I also think we have more than enough Vigor, even after nerfs. Maybe consider projectile destruction/reflection on your whirling skill with a very heavy cost eg. 4 to activate and 2 per second to maintain (resulting in degen of 1/second due to natural regen of 1/second)?

Oh my god, I couldn’t just stand at the boss’ feet and spam 1 over and over while watching TV? NERF PLS.

evilapprentice.6379:

Auesis.7301:

Most classes have borderline useless trait lines for sPvP – SA for Thieves isn’t some crazy exception. It works fine in WvW and could do with some reduction, but nuking the whole thing from orbit because it doesn’t work in one game mode is just stupid.

But it doesn’t “work fine” in WvW, does it? I don’t WvW so I’m not qualified to call it “broken”, but I can certainly see how powerful SA would be if I didn’t have to worry about losing the game because I was in stealth and it was harder to read my position while in stealth due to the fact that I don’t have to stand in a tiny circle to win the game.

Ignore OP’s silly thought of deleting shadow arts – it’s a pointless, dead-end argument. Instead, take a look at my suggestion of shifting the focus from “sit in stealth” to “engaging in combat”.

You might see it as a “nerf” from a WvW standpoint, but it’s better for the class and for the game. It also has the added benefit of semi-countering all the new “apply revealed” skills that have come and are coming in the future(make no mistake, more classes will get the power to apply revealed). Instead of an SA thief being completely locked out of the SA traitline as well as stealth (thief is the only class in the game that can have an entire traitline locked out without a counter, btw), it allows some of your traits to continue to function.

I don’t mean that it works fine as in it shouldn’t change, though it probably sounded that way. I mostly agree with your adjustments. I was only referencing the stupid assessment to just remove the whole thing.

That being said, I’m still skeptical of any attempt to shake up SA to work in sPvP. Unless the overall meta undergoes a dramatic paradigm shift, investing in SA takes away too much damage potential/pressure from the Thief’s roaming role. I can see it being forever a WvW-centric line, and I’m okay with that. Everything doesn’t have to work everywhere. For me, issues arise only when something isn’t useful or valuable anywhere, and there are definitely a lot of those in most classes.

Most classes have borderline useless trait lines for sPvP – SA for Thieves isn’t some crazy exception. It works fine in WvW and could do with some reduction, but nuking the whole thing from orbit because it doesn’t work in one game mode is just stupid.

1) Warriors aren’t magical. They don’t, can’t and never will teleport.

2) BC works fine. It has only EVER failed for me if I was out of range. That’s it. When in range, it functions absolutely 100% perfectly.

3) Even if it were made a teleport, what would that solve? Nothing, because teleports are not somehow flawless, in fact they bug out constantly.

A teleporting KD. Jesus, people. Take a moment to think about that. When the instant teleport doesn’t bug you in to a rock, counterplay to a CC → Eviscerate is removed. That’s just stupid in every aspect.

IA has also had it forever. This is not a recent development. It has always been affected by projectile destruction/reflection.

This has been there forever.

Completely revert it.

I will only accept that or a minimum increments down to 25. ANY chance of wasting gold on gems that you don’t want is wrong.

“But newer players will benefit from the updated system.”

Oh, will they? Will they REALLY benefit from being forced to blow 400 gem increments on items that cost something OTHER than 400 or 800 or 1200 or 1600, wasting enormous amounts of gold in the process?

In what conceivable universe should someone have to use gold on 400 gems to get a single black lion key worth 125?!

This is just making me even more furious than before. If the team legitimately cared about any kind of integrity this would be optional. It’s not. That is unacceptable.

I’ve defended Arenanet many times in the past. This is absolutely indefensible and one step away from extortion. Microsoft tried to pull something like this with Xbox Live and got riddled with lawsuits.

This is absolutely DISGUSTING, and I am now convinced of what I was trying to deny for the longest time – this game is nothing but a front for the gem store and every patch is taking another step to nickel and dime me out of more money.

I’d love to say I’m taking my business elsewhere, but sadly there are many aspects of GW2 that have spoiled me, so I can’t. I’ll just not do business at all and forget about MMOs until something truly revolutionary comes along, which could be a long, long time.

This is absurd and you should all be ashamed of yourselves. You had a fantastic game and every step you take is ruining it beyond repair.

The worst part of this is that you make this change under the guise of “eliminating confusion”? Intentionally presenting this practise of forcefully squeezing money as helping players. Nothing short of a disgrace and I refuse to be a part of it any longer.

Regarding traits, this opens some other options as well.

- Leeching Venoms is now much more advantageous to a lone Thief (up to completely broken levels, we’re talking 5.7k healing per Venom in full Berserker), but group healing with a full party would be diminished somewhat. Playing with numbers can find a good middle ground, but I won’t get in to that.

- The existence of an Overcharge/Coagulation gives way to new traits to encompass the usage of them.

- Residual Venoms would be more underwhelming in its current state, so this could be changed to something else.

- Venomous Strength could be changed to gaining a Might stack for each successful hit of a Venom. A lot to play with there for lone and group support.

Some examples of new traits:

Poisoneer’s Altruism – Transfer 3 conditions from yourself and nearby allies to nearby foes when you trigger a Coagulation.

Alchemist’s Reflexes – Break stuns when you trigger a Coagulation.

Dissolution – Venom charges remove boons (ICD per target)

Hopefully a revamp in this sense would provide true individual worth for each Venom without requiring 12 points of trait investment and providing perhaps even greater strength to a lone Thief than with a group (I think this should absolutely be the case when considering sharing – you go from amazing solo utility to great group utility. That’s how sharing works, dividing resources among yourselves instead of magically conjuring 5 more sets of the same thing). Taking even 1 Venom as a choice over Infiltrator’s Signet or a Deception would be a win for this, in my book.

Thanks for reading if you got this far and let me know what you think. Not only about this, either – I’d like to hear how you would tackle Venoms!

Let’s take a Venom as an example, and apply my idea to it. Remember, numbers are not quite so important, just think about the concept:

Currently:

Spider Venom (45s CD) Poison foes with your next five attacks.

Spider Venom (30 s): Your next five attacks inflict poison.
Poison: 6 s (504 damage)
Number of Attacks: 5
Venom Duration: 30 s

Revamped:

Spider Venom (30s CD) Deploy a vial of Spider Venom around you that poisons foes struck within.

Spider Venom (30 s): Attacks inflict poison.
Poison: 3s (252 damage)
Number of Attacks: 15
Venom Duration: 30s
Radius: 600

Miasma (Coagulation) (increases Spider Venom CD to 45s):

Concentrate your Spider Venom in to a hideous Miasma that knocks foes off their feet before dissipating.

Knockdown: 2s
Unblockable
Radius: 600
Number of Targets: 5

Let’s take another example, like Ice Drake Venom.

Currently:

Ice Drake Venom (45s CD): Chill foes with the next three attacks.

Ice Drake Venom (30 s): Next three attacks inflict chill.
Chilled: 1 s
Number of Attacks: 3
Venom Duration: 30 s

Revamped:

Ice Drake Venom (30s CD): Deploy a vial of Ice Drake Venom around you that Chills foes struck within.

Ice Drake Venom (30s): Attacks inflict Chill
Chilled: 1s
Number of Attacks: 15
Venom Duration: 30 s
Radius: 600

Brain Freeze (Coagulation) (increases Ice Drake Venom CD to 45s):

Concentrate your Ice Drake Venom, dazing and Weakening foes before it dissipates.

Daze: 3s
Weakness: 8s
Unblockable
Radius: 600
Number of Targets: 5

First, I’ll establish my stance on Venoms and Venomsharing.

I heavily dislike the concept of sharing at the moment. BV and DV being somewhat of an exception, Venoms are simply forbidden from being strong by themselves because of the possibility of sharing them out.

evilapprentice said it best in another thread – “Go ahead – try to design a utility worth taking on its own that won’t become OP when shared with 5 people.”

However, I still like the aura concept. I’d like to find a middle ground where Venoms all have proper individual strength, but don’t require such enormous investment that build diversity is flat-out impossible.

So, how about this?:

- Venomous Aura as a trait is abolished

- Venoms, as a default, deploy as a consistent AoE aura (let’s say a radius of 600) around the Thief. When an enemy is attacked within this aura, the enemy receives the Venom effects until charges run out. Missing or blocking will not remove a charge.

- Subsequently, the amount of charges, condition durations etc would be changed to be somewhere far above normal Venoms but then not reaching the maximum potential of the previous Venomous Aura (5 times more charges). This means that a lone Thief can get a lot more out of each Venom without teammates around.

- Then, when the Venom has been deployed, a second skill would become available, an Overcharge of sorts. I’ll call them Coagulations. This creates a secondary effect and expires the aura immediately on use. Cooldown would be increased on using it. These skills would add more use to Venoms other than condition application, getting decent AoE effects. To get these extra effects you would lose the conditions, but the trade-off should be good.

- An important thing to note here is that now the Venoms will not be cooling down as you are applying the charges, as the Coagulation will be in the slot at that time. You must expire the aura yourself by Coagulating or using up all charges, and THEN the cooldown begins. In my examples you will see what might be considered odd condition uptimes if you do not recognise this.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/It-s-a-Trap-Thief-Trapper-Build-for-WvW/first#post4450729

I’m not directly equating the two things. I’m pointing out what happens when you reach the extreme end of accommodating weaknesses via trait investment.

As for the rest, speaking in personal experience, every single P/P Thief I’ve ever met has been an easy kill, and I’m not seeing an increase in popularity either. I’d like to be proven wrong, but they have literally never posed a challenge to any class I play should they appear. Hell, I usually pop some Retaliation on my Guardian and they kill themselves without making a dent.

“If we wished we could have one class and fix all weapon skills so they are the same in mobility and damage and utility. That IMHO would destroy the game.”

At no point have I said that the game should be homogenized in this way. It’s perfectly possible for every weaponset to be at comparable levels of usefulness and also have individual flavors.

I’d just like to repeat the following:

“It’s fine to have a couple of traits that fulfill this purpose, but not a gazillion of them such that you must take them all to be fully effective and have pretty much no room for variation left over ie. extreme pigeonholing. This is one of the key issues with Venomshare at the moment, requiring a minimum of 10 trait points to bring out any real strength when focusing on Venoms.”

You’re still missing the point. You’re adding traits that focus on strengthening a specific weaponset. This is a philosophy I vehemently disagree with across the whole game. I don’t care if it’s optional. If you want to strengthen your weapons and your playstyle for those weapons, your choice of build is mostly going to be limited to those traits rather than traits like Sleight of Hand or Shadow Rejuvenation or Hidden Killer, the kind of traits that are more open-ended and can be applied and used on a broader spectrum of weapons and playstyles.

In order for this to work, weapons need to have strength in their own right, and shouldn’t require significant trait investment to become a competitive choice. Traits should mostly determine HOW you play, now WHAT you play. For example, you can use D/P and D/D in the exact same Critical Strike + Shadow Arts trait spread and be effective. What changes is how you play, with D/D being generally more offensive to land more C+D and D/P being more independent from interaction with the opponent in order to access regular Stealth. In neither of these builds are there specific modifiers to a Dagger or Pistol or to any skills for either or both of them. Same with 26006. You can fulfill the same role of the trait spread with either S/P or D/P or even S/D if you really wanted to. Right there, you can see that D/P fulfills 2 entirely separate roles in 2 separate builds (and very well, at that) without any need to specifically focus on the set itself.

If there are fundamental issues with a weaponset, the first plan of action should be to look at what the skills themselves have to offer. If this requires significant overhauls across the board (worse so for Thieves due to the Dual skill system), then so be it. It’s fine to have a couple of traits that fulfill this purpose, but not a gazillion of them such that you must take them all to be fully effective and have pretty much no room for variation left over ie. extreme pigeonholing. This is one of the key issues with Venomshare at the moment, requiring a minimum of 10 trait points to bring out any real strength when focusing on Venoms.

Incorrect. P/P has no skill that grants any mobility. It has no skill that grants evasion. You can either interrupt one or two attacks or overspend on a blind field which, as you said, is rare. By its own merit, it is a sitting duck set.

It is an inarguable fact that the skillset, in a vaccuum, is subpar to every other set available to a Thief. This is all I have been trying to say. Every time you talk, every time you describe how you are using the set, you are in agreement with this statement.

>You get two dead enemy and a wiped flame ram in short order.

I wasn’t aware that there were flame rams in tournament PvP. Perhaps you could re-read what I asked for.

Also, can I just clarify that I am talking about NEW traits that you are proposing. I am NOT talking about Ricochet or Pistol Mastery.

“Deadly Arts MASTER When 2 pistols equipped gain 20 percent condition duration.
Critical Strikes MASTER Change Pistol mastery to “Gain 10 percent more damage for each equipped pistol”
Shadow arts When wielding two pistols gain stealth when taking a critical hit. (20 seconds cooldown) (Adept)
Acrobatics Gain 10 percent endurance regen when wielding two pistols. (Master)
Trickery (adept) Gain 25 percent movement speed when wielding two pistols.”

This. These are new traits that exist to solve a problem with P/P. This is what I am saying is the completely wrong approach. Rather than seek to change the set itself to allow diversity of usage, you would pigeon-hole more popular usage of the weaponset in to a very specific set of new traits in order to strengthen it. Before you mention anything about similiar traits with other classes, I disagree with ALL of those design choices as well. Weapons should be strong in their own right, with utilities and traits being supplementary and defining playstyle instead of viability.

Thanks for claiming so many things I’ve never said that it was actually physically painful to read.

First of all, I never said every weaponset can operate without traits. I said that attempting to fix a weaponset’s core issues by adding traits AND THEN SAYING YOU DON’T NEED THOSE TRAITS is ridiculous. Those 2 statements are the exact opposite of each other. “Oh, here’s your solution to this problem. You don’t need the solution, though!”

You’re also ignoring this – other weaponsets actually have skills that stand alone to sustain themselves in a significant way, without required investment from other places or the use of utilities. S/D and D/D have evades, teleport (S/x) and stealth right on the skill bar. P/D has an escape built in to an offensive maneuver and stealth. D/P can combo with itself for stealth and constantly teleport-chase with blinds to boot. Shortbow has evasion and teleports. S/P has a metric ton of evasion. P/P has NONE of these things. That is the crux of this issue – everything about P/P’s skillset is absolute garbage, and any attempts to dance around this problem via rebalancing traits or covering its crapness with utilities is avoiding that issue. Ignoring the fact that P/P lacks literally everything from other sets, then pigeon-holing yourself in a very specific way build-wise in order to hide that is just plain stupidity. A weaponset HAS to have a solid range from the get-go in order for significantly varied usage.

5 hours bumbling about in zerg warfare without dying. OUTSTANDING. Is this supposed to be some kind of feat, since any Thief with a brain screwed on should be able to do that with whatever the hell they want to use? This proves literally nothing. Show me video evidence of combat that actually matters like small skirmishes so that we can see just how much the weapon skills actually contribute (almost guaranteed to be very, very little) or, better yet, show me some tPvP and see how long you last before you implode or just how much you can contribute to the team fight compared to someone using the usual Panic Strike D/P, S/D etc.

Stop being a hipster and accept P/P’s flaws – they are objective, unarguable.

“It lacks somewhat in mobility and defenses which can be addressed through traits without making said traits mandatory.”

So you aim to address an issue with a weaponset by adding traits that fix the issue, and then claim that those traits would then not be mandatory? Forgive me for finding this reasoning mind-numbingly stupid.

Popular opinion is usually popular for a reason, and in this case it is a proper reason. P/P IS broken. It does not “somewhat” lack mobility – it literally has none. Zero. Its only option to defend itself is to totally starve your initiative for a now-pathetic, miniscule blind field or be lucky to interrupt one or two hits with Head Shot. Any attempt at using these defenses will leave you room for one, two Unloads at best before significant downtime. Any success found with the set is from either facing terrible players or from skills/builds completely unrelated to the weapon set itself, because the set is objectively, unarguably garbage.

Traits are not the answer. The skillset itself needs an overhaul in order to stand on its own.

Had a good one while messing around in hotjoin earlier.

“Why don’t you swap class and see how well you do then, noob”

So I did. Still kept killing him. He blocked me and left after a few minutes.

60206 still works beautifully, even buffed IMO. The super-long duration wasn’t even the main reason it worked well, it was the fact that you got immobilised for any decent duration at all, especially when you have a Thief bearing down on you with a Dagger at low health. It’s still a nice duration and has a much lower CD now.

26006 is still very good but I can see 60206 being more popular for people sticking to Thief in tourneys. S/D is still also very good.

We also still have all that Shortbow goodness with the mobility, corpse coverage and AoE Poison.

We haven’t been pushed out of the meta. We just aren’t absolutely mandatory for a comp anymore, which is a good thing and introduces a little variety to comp matchups. If you do take one, they still work very well for what they’re supposed to do.

Meanwhile I’m avoiding 90% of the faster Rapid Fire with one dodge then easily slaughtering the Ranger when I get up close.

First, I would remove the cast time on the Shadow Return from IS, and increase the initiative cost to 4 up from 2 to reduce spammability.

Allow FS to proceed to LS through blocks or invulnerability. Dodges still prevent it.

Change LS to rip 2 boons again.

Trait-related but incorporates S/D:

Move Fleet of Foot up to Grandmaster and move Assassin’s Reward down to Master. Change Fleet of Foot to remove any single condition or any two conditions on dodge with ICD appropriate for either choice.

It will recharge one skill type at random. If you have all Venoms, you have a 20% chance for Venoms to be the ones to recharge.

Snakebyte.2804:

I run something close to this build but I have a conundrum.
Is this setup better?

Or is a 0/0/6/2/6 better with sigils of doom and confusion on steal? I’m torn so I wanted to get y’all’s thoughts.

It’s up to you! This is very close to the framework of my setup anyway, only with more damaging condition pressure and compensating the loss of Serpent’s Touch with Doom. I assume you use double P/D to take advantage of that, but I would rather have Shortbow available for mobility should I need it, and Choking Gas is nice as well. It’s all down to personal preference and what you want to get out of the build at any time.

I like 00626 a lot, but I can’t give up Serpent’s Touch – it’s just too useful for Warriors that I encounter very often. However, some people won’t want it so much, which is fine. You get the general idea of what this kind of build is, fine tune how you please.

Odd, in every instance I place a trap directly under somebody I get Stealth. It procs 1/4-1/2s after the trap is planted, so I always seem to get the intended effect. At one point in the video I actually mention this tactic as being one of the best ways to play offensively with the traps.

There’s also a little quirk I have noticed – if you plant and then immediately perform an action like a stomp, the effect won’t proc. You have to allow the tiny delay to receive the effects. Dodging is okay, though.

All the theorycrafting points to Revealed Training being a major contributor to absolute top-tier DPS while using daggers, so it is not pointless – in fact, it’s mandatory in order to optimise.

It’s entirely automatic. As soon as you hit 25% HP or lower in any way, shape or form, it triggers instantly.

The new runes in action.

Video guide (example clips begin at 12:45):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFzKDepokBE

Quick build link:
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAqYVlsMpvptNxsJsPRRSRw9SQintz60XJA-TFyCABAcKAAUfQ47Pg8DAwT1fSUJYWK/o4IAQKgFVWB-w

You can herald D/D as a hybrid set as long as you want, but it still doesn’t work. DB needs a colossal boost to functionality and reliability in order to be taken seriously as a hybrid. I’ve only ever seen the condition side of D/D being used by investing COMPLETELY in to it with no power for killing groups in PvE. If you try using it anywhere else you’ll be laughed out of the map.

Honestly, half of our sets don’t have to be hybrid. P/D suits a condition role just fine. D/D is clearly not working and P/P is still massively broken and being buffed in the wrong places. Just get rid of hybridisation and give the sets fully unified roles.

DST actually does break stuns in order to cast. It’s one of the few skills in the game that breaks stuns but also has a cast time associated with it after the break.

I’ve been experimenting with the new runes for a while, and I think I’ve found the perfect setup for me. I’ll probably make a video about it, but here’s the basic version (replace Nightmare with Trapper):

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAqYVlsMpvptNxsJsPRRSBx9CCQC8sFzQrD3VJA-TFyCABAcKAoa/BA1Hg8DAwT1fSUJYWK/o4IAQKAYmDA-w

Depending on what kind of opponents I’m facing, I sometimes find Shadow Trap to be more of a hindrance than a help, as gaining the Stealth on the Pursuit puts me directly next to the opponent, which can be potentially dangerous even with the blind. So, I sometimes put Shadowstep there instead. I prefer TG to add to the chaos of the traps instead of BV.

Another option is to add more dodges by taking away Corrosive Traps and adding 1 to Acrobatics, but bear in mind that CT is very good for covering your damaging conditions.

That’s…hilarious.

In theory, it could. There is no reason that stuff a boxed expansion would bring needs a box when the LS format is around.

However, they are not doing things expected of an expansion. Just the linear path of the story segments being thrown at us every 2 weeks. The most expansion-esque content we have received is the 2 new maps over 2 years (SSC and DT).

So yes, it COULD. It just isn’t.

Chill actually worked against Initiative in beta. It broke the class completely. Literally. It couldn’t win against anything with Chill, you would just melt instantly. Thus, it got reverted for later beta weekends.

I can assume that Power Block’s interaction with Thieves has already been discussed and concluded that the damage would be too severe.

pdavis.8031:

Celestina.2894:

pdavis.8031:

Maybe I’m crazy, but I saw nothing in that blog post that mentioned anything about keys. They did mention that they would reevaluate rewards. My guess is that the gear you get to choose from will actually become useful. But removing keys as a PS story reward? I’m not seeing it, but maybe I forgot my tinfoil hat….

Considering so far they’ve only brought over the chinese changes with little or no change, it’s safe to assume the first “bundle” is unlocked at level 10.

This is bad, even for new players who don’t key farm.

If the first story was unlocked at level 10, then they would have to do away with the whole beginning part of the game. There is nothing anywhere that says the story starts at level 10. Or anything that even hints at a suggestion of an insuation of a rumor of starting the personal story at level 10. A change like that would surly be announced, just like making the PvP button invisible until level 18. This feels like making a mountain out of a mole hill.

Anyone remember the doom and gloom of the april 15th patch? That beserker was going to nerfed into the ground, and no one would be playing beserker after the 15th? Or that megaservers would completely destroy the game making it impossible to be able to do the world events or temples? Yeah none of that happened.

Well, that is exactly what is happening on the Chinese client. Your story doesn’t continue after the tutorial until you reach level 10. Everything we are getting is basically a port of the Chinese system. There is a basis for this.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Considering there really is no good way to obtain keys currently, if this does in fact remove them from story rewards, it’ll feel like an intentional slap in the face.

1. Pull out credit card
2. Open Gem store
3. Buy pack of Black Lion Keys

Keys are supposed to be their main source of RNG revenue… it was never intended for people to get them for free.

Except there have been multiple red posts in that past saying that keyfarming was perfectly okay.

Are players who have been around for months or years going to get anything for their experience, or are we going to be left in the dust to try and attract fresh blood?

So far this Feature Pack has introduced absolutely NOTHING that would attract any players that I know to come back and carry on playing.

Week 3 had better have something meaty, or this will just be tragic.

Andred.1087:

Good enough, key farming is stupid, and obviously not something they wanted players to do.

And it was also the only thing keeping BL weapon skins from being 10x more expensive than they currently are.

Fantastic. /s

Guess you also missed that they said it was perfectly okay.

Why is everyone having a hissy fit because it doesn’t do much in PvE? LOADS of skills aren’t useful in PvE at the moment across all classes. Some stuff works better in different modes, that’s just natural. Why do you even need a new PvE elite? DS is brokenly strong and TG is a nice DPS increase for bosses. PvE Thieves are SPOILED. In fact, 99.9999% of post-launch support has been PvE-focused. Stop whining when something useful for another mode appears once in a while.

I would LOVE this elite.

Way to completely miss the point, Pope.

All of our complaints about the class have been completely ignored. Attempting to support Venomshare actually HURTS Venoms because Venoms are forced to be absolute trash on their own to allow distribution to 5 people (you require 12 trait points to actually make them useful). P/P is a sitting duck weaponset with no strengths and some extra range solves none of those problems. New traits are totally misguided, make little sense and don’t help at all (no Thief has EVER competitively used ANY of them). Last Refuge still exists. Traps still exist.

In other words, instead of actually listening to our concerns and extending our gameplay options (in a way that might actually benefit these whining children because we won’t be forced to run the same specs to be useful), we’re still pigeon-holed in to the same specs and roles and 3/4 of our toolset is still completely worthless and untouched by the development team, despite our loud voices.

Every other class so far in these Skill Bar segments has received some love in some way to something that is underused, making it potentially useful and opening up other specs for viable play. We got basically nothing, and the changes we actually did get were completely misguided and won’t help the situation at all because they have no idea what they actually want to do with it. It’s really, really sad.

It’s nice to know that people have no respect for balancing the game across all professions and would rather wallow in some kind of aura of petty “vengeance”. How mature. I think everyone else will know who not to listen to when discussing the overall health of the game’s balance.

I can’t be the only one who actually DOESN’T want my daggers to cleave. Now, when fighting condi Mesmers in WvW, I’m going to be accidentally hitting clones willy nilly and getting conditions that I wouldn’t have had to suffer through if I was allowed to pick my intended target.

Sure, it might aid corpse cleave, but I corpse cleave with a Shortbow using 2 and 4 anyway.

Also, Venoms were not buffed. Venomshare was fixed to be what it was supposed to be, but it’s not going to be a new meta. Anyone who thinks so has never played Thief ever.

Range increase on Ricochet is pointless and contrived. It’s still never going to be used. P/P is still a terrible weaponset. P/D doesn’t and never will need the trait.