Guild Wars 2

Can the thief beat either of these?

They both have area denial, crowd control, and deals decent damage.

Rangers have stealth and Engineers got a truck load of ways to heal themselves.

Even “abusing” stealth, I couldn’t get close to these guys. The rangers will area cripple and bleed me, and the engineers just got a bunch of turrets, oil spill etc all over the place. If I get too eager they’ll outlast me due to their hp and defense.

Seriously, these guys can keep distance, they’ve stealth, deal tons of damage, have area denial and can soak an ungodly amount of damage.

There’s no hard counter to them and even the spirits take forever to kill.

Please reduce nerf either their damage, the spirit health, their cc or stealth.

Well 5 / 10 of your skills are offensive. And zerkers is effective because it boosts the effectiveness of at least 1/2 of your skill bar.

If you go defense, on the other hand, it’ll only help you with your healing skill and probably 1/2 utility skills. It doesn’t help that healing scales very poorly.

Dancing dagger needs torment or cripple duration increased to 10 seconds.

Traps should be changed to circular, for greater coverage.

Besides that I pretty much agree.

S/D is still used, because D/P won’t help you take down heavy bunker builds such as Guardians/Engineers. Also S/D has some good snare/cripple/boon hate, which’s a lot more utility than D/P.

Hype.8032:

Bud you make it seem like every profession out there is an absolute nightmare! D/p is our most complete weapon set and all the rest of them (besides shortbow I’d say) are lacking.

D/D needs some attention but it still has some uses (pve mainly). Wouldn’t you rather they go off and make p/p a good set to choose? I’d rather take that set out of the trash before I work on d/d…. d/p already gives you much of the same flavor.

No, every profession out there played well, will give thief a hard time. The classes are actually very well balanced at this point.

Plus all non melee attack tends to suck , except for mesmer GS and Ranger’s Gatling bow.

A few other things of note.

Well the warrior has multiple CC, and skills that can pretty much one shot thieves, repeatable every 8 seconds. Insanely high regen rate and condition reduction and immunity from most stuns. Their reach is also much longer. A thief will be hit twice getting into their melee range before the warrior will be within dagger range. Given their health pool the thief will be 1/3rd dead (if not dead after being stunned), before they can even land a paltry 2k damage on their 32k some health pool.

Mesmers spam phantasms. 3-4 of them can take out thieves in pretty much one go. Those phantasms even auto target you and will attack the second you break out of stealth and will still hit you after you re-enter stealth, due to the AI. Meanwhile the real mesmer will snipe you with long range beam that continues to hit after you re-enter stealth. The beam also pretty much tracks your movement while in stealth, giving the mesmer information as to your location and probable intent (fight or flight)

Rangers spam spirits and can easily push you out of black powder field with their bow, which makes it difficult to enter stealth, given how slow the D/P stealth is setup. They can also stealth now, w/o ever having toe to toe like the thief.

Necros spam marks and endless conditions and will hit you, regardless of stealth or not. Their pet will also lock you down and can attack you while stealthed. Of course marks pretty much disclose your stealthed location to the necro, and they’re always surrounded with a few of them.

Ele can also chain stun (KD) while dishing about 20k AoE damage, and frankly more than enough to insta glib a few thieves at once (which has no access to stability) . They also spam cantrips and can get away faster and more safely with the 3-4 seconds invulnerability frame than thieves on Shadow Refuge. You can still swing around, and many times, the thieves would still end up dead.

Engineers can spam cc, which’s the bane of a lot of thieves, and high damage and ability to hold down location that best perhaps even the guardians.

Guardians can’t be taken down easily with D/P due to access to multiple heal and protection combined with the low-ish D/P dps.

Considering all of the above D/P is fine where it is, if not a bit lacking. D/P is only strong because D/D is especially kittenty in sPvP.

Slot D/P for the other weapon, so you can condition cleanse at will. Also get trait that’ll restore your health while stealthed.

Get sigil of superior bloodlust and kill every bunny you run accross along the way.

Get sigil of superior force also. Get power runes, eat lots of food like omnom berry pies and master maintainance oil and pray for the best.

Do not take acrobatics, that’ll not safe you. Pick zerker and and health runes, as armor is useless against necros. Engineers will be an even harder fight once they start camping. Your best hope of winning against engineer is to ambush them, while they’re not looking and hit as hard as possible and spam heart seeker before they can get all their defenses up. If they survive that, run!

TheGuy.3568:

Tbh I still think D/P is OP (but there are bigger offenders on other classes) and if you do not know why it is not really about the stealth. That being said when comparing D/D and D/P I think the gap in the sets is just too wide. D/D can a achieve more DPS due to CnD but that about where the advantages end. D/P can stick to a target better, blind better, can not be denied stealth, can daze, and still has access to the main DPS of a D/D build. I do not think Anet has any intentions of nerfing D/P but I think there needs to be some analysis of the D/D set.

Unless someone wants to go glass and instagib with it the counter play is pretty straight forward. Dodge CnD to deny stealth. The animation is long enough for that and obvious enough to spot most of the time (minimum height asura might be hard). Dancing dagger isn’t particularity useful (given how easily cripple is removed these days) and still has a cringe worthy initiative cost for what it does. Death blossom is nigh useless in a power set. Overall the set has relatively easy tells outside of stealth and no real defense beside the regular dodge.

I think the synergy between the skills in the D/P are simply superior to anything in D/D’s. I do not have direct solution but I do know things aren’t fair and while I do not expect each and every set to be equal to each other I do expect them to have clear differences. There is no defining quality in D/D that sets it above D/P in any area.

I think D/P is fine where it’s. What did you expect for a class with the worst healing, worst health, shortest attack range in the game? Plus the D/P attack is so easily telegraphed… it’s so obvious it’s not even funny.

Stealth is “just about right” trade off for all those drawbacks.

It’s D/D that’s extremely weak in PvP. There’s just no word for it. Dps is higher, but just about everything else sucks. Death blossom is begging for longer evade frame like 1/2 – 3/4 second to make it a good defensive move.

CnD takes about 1 second to cast, and without sword, you’ve no access to CC eg. cripple, immobilize, which makes landing 1 a real PITA. Then there’s the 4 second revealed debuff as opposed to 3 and the stupidly high init cost.

There’s also no defensive move in D/D combo. Sword has infiltrator, and flanking strike, D/D has Death Blossom… so yeah… Sword snare costs 0 initiative and deals about 3k damage, D/D snare cost 3 initiative and deals ~700 damage.

D/D sucks man. If you take them to PvP instead of S/D or D/P you’re asking for kitten whooping. You can make it work sorta, but the amount of effort involved and the payoff isn’t really worth it. The only time it shines is in cheesy insta-glib build, because anyone that survived the spike, will surely kill a D/D thief. That’s just the reality.

TheGuy.3568:

Why does the HS spam even matter anymore. While I agree spamming skills and spammable skills should not be part of the game. Among the offenders this is the weakest and crappiest of them all. If the target is between 100 and 50% health the damage isn’t even very good.

Here a little truth. Thief is cheese but most players run cheese builds where you are either stun locked while they DPS. Most player run builds with rotations designed to gib in one way or another. HS is likely one of the easiest to counter and can not instagib.

There’s truth to that, sigh… I just wished it’d be stronger in return for requiring a bit more skill to use.

I mean I know, you can land it. And some would even argue you can land it reliably – which I have yet to see in sPvP when fighting against other thieves. But whatever I’ll give you the benefit of doubt.

But it makes no sense to go through all the hassle when a much more viable alternative is available.

The casting animation is so slow, a turtle can literally walk away from under you while you’re doing it. Not taking into account blind/block/evade…

I propose making it insta-cast or at most 1/4th a second.

Any thief relying on CnD needs a viable damage mitigation, because they won’t be stealthing as much, even with the shortened cast time. Hence Acrobatics also needs some serious buff to include a bit of healing. What little there’s is laughable. There is also no condition mitigation in the current condition heavy meta to even contemplate taking that line instead of shadow arts – none. Unless you want to troll your own team. Something to the effect of (remove 1 condition/per dodge may be in order).

Kay I’ll try thank you for the input, I’ll try to precast

Forz.1725:

Bud.5617:

What is the best strategy to reliably land it (in sPvP)?

Somehow the way I’m using it, this thing seems to be dodged a lot if not an out right miss. Not to mention the recent spats of lags makes landing one a total PITA.

I usually set it up with HS, and then CnD, but between the aftercast and lag, I end up not getting a clean hit. Is there a bettter tactic for successfully landing one – preferably something that doesn’t involve steal because the cool down on that is a tad excessive and there’re really better traits to take than 30% faster steal.

At 6 init, it’s really hard to afford a miss.

You just made a post that was saying HS spam is overpowered, and now you post this…But I’ll bite anyways.

Honestly, the best way to learn to land CnD is to learn its range and learn when to pre-cast it while running up to someone for the best results in my experience.

Some more obvious tips:

1. Don’t keyboard turn
2. Don’t click your skills.
3. Go into a pve setting so that you can learn the range of CnD.

It’s not overpowered in a way that it needs a straight up nerf. It’s more correct to say HS is decent rewarding skill that a monkey can use. It needs to be a great skill, that requires a human to use.

That out of the way, why running to someone isn’t a great idea:

1) The caster types, will usually run away from you. Mesmers will nuke you to death in the process and eles will kite you until you say uncle…

2) Warriors will daze and wipe the floor with your corpse – even if manage to land C&D.

3) Rangers will push you back and you start from square 1 while sprouting 3 feathers every second.

4) Engineers will gladly let you get to them only to blast you away and set you on fire.

5) Necro… will o well, I guess Necros will stand there so you can safely land C&D on them if not 1 of their minions.

Bottom line, running up to anyone in thief armor and health tends to be… rather unhealthy shall we say.

Madjack.4598:

Using some kind of “shadow step to your target” skill usually works when combined with cnd. Personally i use infiltrators sig. although a well placed shadowstep can work as well. and as always the thief staple steal will usually work.

1. cast cnd
2. immediately cast the shadowstep skill
3. ????
4. ownage.

I like to safe infiltrators for when I really need it though… ie, that stun warrior barrelling down your way… Its cool down is also on the long-ish side of things and def. not something you want to miss when you really need it…

Any chance of using Sigil of Ice (a little weak I know due to long-ish cd) or some other form of snare?

I don’t play warrior, but I do somewhat think they need that HS buff though. Before that, warriors weren’t even in sPvP, at all. The ones that’re there were just free lunch.

I think it suits the class all right, otherwise they really do drop like flies. That said the damage however, might be another matter…

I dunno engineers seem to be in a good place. They move faster than guardians, hit just as hard. Good access to numerous stuns and cc as well area denial skills.

They don’t heal as well, but that’d make them OP.

Once an engineer starts holding a point down it’s really hard to dislodge them. So again I don’t know what the complaint is.

What is the best strategy to reliably land it (in sPvP)?

Somehow the way I’m using it, this thing seems to be dodged a lot if not an out right miss. Not to mention the recent spats of lags makes landing one a total PITA.

I usually set it up with HS, and then CnD, but between the aftercast and lag, I end up not getting a clean hit. Is there a bettter tactic for successfully landing one – preferably something that doesn’t involve steal because the cool down on that is a tad excessive and there’re really better traits to take than 30% faster steal.

At 6 init, it’s really hard to afford a miss.

Where are they? I never see them in sPvP.

I thought sword got a decent buff recently – what’s wrong with it now?

It’s got a good immobilize on F1, a lot of CC, and decent dmg from Final Thrust and a trait that easily gets you the magic 100% critical chance.

So why aren’t they played?

I think S/P might work… hmmm but that’s another kinda lame build.

Forz.1725:

Why are you shifting the HS spam complaint into a different direction??? First you were complaining that you were dying to often to it, now it makes them too mobile?

If a thief is spamming HS to be mobile in a fight, then they won’t have the firepower to take anyone down…

Your arguments are flawed and I don’t see the point of this thread.

Duh it deals better than mediocre damage while closing gaps and is very spammable.

It’s basically a decent reward, no risk involved skill against the right classes, for thieves that are so traited. You need to add some element of risk to it, and may be a buff to make it higher risk and higher reward, so not just any zombie can spam it.

Excalibur.9748:

it would still be spammed, but now with more damage to boot. this wouldn’t change a thing except hurt the people who use it for mobility.

The spammable mobility is the most broken thing about it. Which’s exactly what should be nerfed. How about 6 init, but hs stuns target/ imobilize, and allow you to combo off CnD. Again it’ll be useful, but it won’t be stupidly spammable. And if they dodge you, you lose a lot of initiative.

Get the thieves some other mobility skills that isn’t as broken, eg. the minor adept trait could give 5/6 second swiftness on dodge roll instead of a paltry 2. Something like that.

Right now there’re too few options in the thieves arsenal, but the ones that work, work too well for the level of skill involvement.

Excalibur.9748:

Bud.5617:

My main is a thief and it’s the only one at 80.

I dunno how to fix it, it may be balanced, but it’s so effective despite being skill-less I dunno what to make of it. It seems to be begging for a dmg and initiative increase, so it’ll be just as powerful, but won’t be as spamable.

how is it effective???

it’s called dodging the heart seekers. try it sometime it works good.

Yes except that other classes besides thieves don’t have as many dodges perhaps? You’re thinking a thief vs. thief fight, which’s a no brainer unless they get the jump on you while you’re busy fighting.

Regardless there needs to be a bit more thought to using the skill than spamming 2. I rather see the damage goes up along with initiative to give it a bit more risk to using it. At least make it 4 init, and move the damage to the way it was pre-nerf. It’ll be more effective, but at the same time you’ll need to think a bit more before mashing the button because dodges/block/even heal will kitten you worse.

Another thought would be to use positioning. Eg. 100% more damage from the front and simply do away with the whole less than x% health crap. That’ll make our attacks a lot less predictable, than just cloak… wait 3-4 second, and back stab at 6 o’clock. At the same time this will incentize thieves to reposition rather than simply hit “2”. Another option would be to “leap” only if the enemy is facing away from you. That’ll also cut on the spam-aton metality.

My main is a thief and it’s the only one at 80.

I dunno how to fix it, it may be balanced, but it’s so effective despite being skill-less I dunno what to make of it. It seems to be begging for a dmg and initiative increase, so it’ll be just as powerful, but won’t be as spamable.

pantsforbirds.9032:

What kind of build are you running? The only way you are going to beat this buid is to abuse evades and blinds. I personally run s/p in tpvp so i strip their stability (if they even use it) with steal and then just pistolwhipping them (that stun is really kitten warriors), and if i see the warrior swap from greatsword to mace/shield dodge. They will usually shield bash or skull crack you as soon as they swap. Every time they are in mace/shield i fight them in blinding powder or i kite them with shortbow. I use lyssa runes, so when they are low i pop basi venom, giving myself stability and i go for the pistolwhip/autoattack down and stomp. If you use sword mainhand really make sure to have shadow return up the entire fight. If the warrior hits you with skullcrack let him start hundred blades and then use shadow return as soon as he does. Hundred blades will go on cooldown and he wont be able to do his burst on you (i have a 2 second daze on steal traited on my build so if i have to shadow step out i wait until the warrior gets close to me and i daze them with steal right before he attacks me. this will usually daze him long enough for my stun to wear off and allow me to continue the fight).

Some things to note:

If he has the reflect on block trait do not use p/x or shield on him while he is blocking, or you will kill yourself

If you are x/d take the blind on stealth trait and if you are x/p use blinding powder to destroy his ability to attack you (they dont have a ranged weapon)

ranged attacks can destroy this build

Ha I guess I was using dagger/(dagger|pistol) combi, but even with blind their hit hurts bad. A random swing takes out almost 2-3k of my health or something close. And this being a thief there’s just a few way to regain that back. I also gotta watch the initiative as I said before, they just keep soaking hit after hit – and running away to regenerate health.

I think it might have been a mace/shield and GS combo.

Excalibur.9748:

if dancing dagger nerf was reverted we would see some more diverse skill usage for sure. I mean thieves USED to use dancing dagger against packs of 2 since it did more damage than heartseeker, but only for that case.

In general, we need buffs to make other skills worth using instead of nerfing the only skill that is worth using.

There might be some truth to that… I even forgot Dancing Dagger was there… rather than more damage though I prefer a bit more CC. I think we got our damage end covered quite well. May be add torment to Dancing Dagger, or lengthen the cripple duration by a second or two.

I suppose to an extent even Death Blossom, evade frame too short, and damage paltry for initiative spent – you’re better off saving it up for stealth by auto attacking. Would be nice to get even a 1/2 second evade frame.

But yeah HS is still cheesy though… I submit that we go back to 1/3rd break down like before, but double the damage at the lower 1/3rd, half it at the upper 3rd and charge an extra initiative.

Could be sigil of blood lust, 25 stacks of might and some food.

WWW is very poorly balanced, the refinement is more in sPvP. As a result there are a lot of cheesed out builds out there, that would never be allowed in sPvP.

Bloodlust for example can net you about 250 extra power by killing random animals in the area. Then another 600 some from stacking might. You can use bloodlust in sPvP, but it’s risky, because you have to face a human opponent instead of a bunny NPC. If you lose and chances are high, that’s a whole stack gone.

Then there’s food…

How do you guys beat them (sPvP)?

They got stun, and then stun, and then stun again. Did I say stun?

Meanwhile catching even 1 of those 100 blades on the face pretty much seals the fight. Even a regular swing of the axe/gs hurts pretty badly.

Their health on the other hand is fairly high. High enough to take about 8 full dose of back stabs. Okay may be not 8, but definitely around 6.1 ish… if all of them hit from the back. Not to mention great mobility, block and innate regeneration.

Thoughts?

I switched my build to carry 3 cantrips instead of signets and seem to be better able to get away from situation.

But yeah I was 1 on 1 for the most part. The thief barely used any stealth. From 90% health he was spamming heart seeker and not much else. He was DD so yes I was on the look out for CnD. And I’m pretty sure I kept moving enough that I didn’t get hit by one. The damage was lame, had I been on my thief he’d be dead in no time. But this being an ele, w/o cantrips I was toast, I couldn’t outheal the damage and I couldn’t get away either.

But the whole thing just left me feeling cheesed out… that being said, there’re a lot of super cheesy classes out there to an ele. The mesmers with stupid clones, the guardians you couldn’t kill etc., but noob seeker spamming thief probably ranks at the top if not the top of the cheese awards. Although ele being hard to play and kitten is not out of the question either.

The best skills that can actually score a kill are always on cool down for eternity… may be that’s why the cantrips are so popular because there’s no way to go toe to toe with any other classes out there while your high hitters are on cool down. Might as well jet out

Okay I main thief and have until today mostly sPvPed with my thief.

I rarely encounter HS spammers, and most other thieves that cross me usually end up rather dead.

But lately playing as an ele I realize that a majority of thieves out there really just spam the number (2) button. It’s super annoying and frankly lame. Now I know why when thief vs. thief fight happens I come up on top like about 80-90% of the time, because you can’t really HS spam when your opponent is stealthed, and apparently 80% of thieves out there is used to HS spamming to glory.

Not sure what the fix is without severely gimping the class against other top tier classes (eg. Mesmer, stun lock zerker war), but man I think something should be done about the HS spam. May be further half the damage above 50%, and double when below, to force the cheese players to press some other buttons and not clobber other classes by just pressing one button repeatedly.

Granted I sux as an ele, but no class should be able to beat another class by pressing just 1 button repeatedly.

bobross.5034:

One other thing to know about mesmers – they have a harder time of hurting a stealthed thief than other classes. Usually there are maybe 1-2 skills on the bar with long cooldowns that can actually hit / maybe cc a stealthed thief. As mesmer, I can fight thieves fine, but if they want to get away, I just let them. As a thief, it’s important to remember that…mesmer is one of those classes that it’s easy to stalemate, but you should only be dying to them if you over-commit or make a mistake. Likewise, mesmers can be very slippery…so stalemates are easy outcomes. Just get used to that, other classes have to get used to that with thieves, after-all.

There’re a few problems with that in sPvP

1) If I’m stealthed, I’m not winning points.
2) If I run away I’m not winning anything either.

I can cap some other point, but I’d have wasted time in the mean time. I don’t know at least an engineer isn’t very mobile, and their turrets while annoying rarely hurt.

stof.9341:

Venoms are weak because of Venom Share, a trait that is very seldom taken. And in turn Venoms are very seldom taken too.

Wouldn’t Venom Share trait if it was useful would have been used a lot more often?

I think the problem is that even the attribute itself is fairly weak and far too situational.

Alex.6940:

If you play d/p then remember that mesmers can’t create phantasms without a target or if they are blinded.

On other classes this would have been easy to interrupt, blind etc – but not when there’re a few copies of them, and I’m having problem just tabbing to the correct one while trying to avoid spinning propellers.

At best I can run away from the fight, but that isn’t winning and not exactly satisfying either.

I’m already doing some of the suggestions here – ie. Ctrl+T ing the target. finding the correct copy etc. Like I said when I’m at 100% of my game, I could win the match vs. less skilled mesmers, but anyone semi-decent will hand my butt in a platter.

I mean how is this even a fair fight? – How do other classes handle the mesmers anyways?

Not sure what venom is useful for.

Cooldown is very long and they don’t even last 1/100th of that. A few applications and the venom buff is gone.

At the same time conditions are so easily removed. There being only 3 slots I can’t see why anyone would bring them in exchange for so many things much more useful.

Thanks! I think it was phantasm build.

The berserkers → ramming spinning propellers looking thing, can easily take out 1/3rd of my health per run and sometimes there is more than 1 of them. I was so busy dodging them – I had no time to do much real damage.

When I play my cards 100% right – I can usually get the mesmers to a sliver of their health, but that makes all the difference between life and death. On the other hand I got the feeling that they were able to take me out with significantly less effort.

I will try out your tips.

Most other classes are ok, but whenever I run across a semi descent mesmer, I’m hosed – unless I have got back up (Or I’m the backup).

So how do you beat mesmer as a thief without resorting to gimmicky build like P/D, that can’t seem to kill anything else?

The illusionary berserkers hits for a ton of damage. They can’t be killed easily either because they apply daze when destroyed – leaving me open to other attacks.

To make matter worse, once I’m on top of the mesmer, they just stealth and re-appear a way off, firing that purpple beam thing.

Despite their low health, they regenerate that pretty fast and seem to stack a bunch of boons (regen, prot, etc.) – while mine just continues to deplete from guessing the correct clone, chasing the teleporting – stealthing mesmer and being slammed by the berserkers.

What is frustrating is that most other classes have a weakness. But mesmers don’t:

They can hit hard in melee via the illusions, put distance fairly fast, stealth and clone which makes targetting a real pain, esp when there’s more than 1.

The stealth also magnifies the problem with targetting because even after you identify the correct one, you’d lose them again.

They also have long range artillery via. the greatsword (probably the most damaging long range weapon there is).

Good up close tanking with that blurry thingy, and they regenerate their health fairly fast despite dishing a ton of damage.

The illusions also allow mesmers to continue dishing damage, even while the real player is stealthed. Thief on the other hand has to choose between surviving or dealing. The illusions also has the effect of suppressing fire. When fighting another stealthed thief I can just roam around swinging – I can’t do so with a stealthed mesmer because that’d leave me way too vulnerable to clone attacks.

If there is one thing is that their health is low, but so are thieves and we don’t have that many options to us at any given time.

I’m hesitant to call another class OP – so I’m hoping someone show me how to beat them effectively.

What’s going on? Arah’s a ghost town, same with AC, though have a bit better luck.

How does anyone find group at all in this game?

The first attack in the auto-attack chain, it feels like the thing takes ages to hit.

All other classes don’t have this debuff, see rangers and warriors and for a class that’s supposed to thrive on mobility it seems so out of character. Given the tons of nerf that had fallen on this class lately, please at least buff the auto attack.

Just may be 2 chains will fit exactly under the 4 seconds revealed debuff!

It is bugged! Remove or make it useful somehow.