Guild Wars 2

Nimrud,

Near the beginning of the game, dagger offhand took a damage nerf. Many people who were still interested in a backstab build switched to d/p after that. The damage is roughly the same now between the two sets (heartseeker damage, instead of cloak and dagger damage, is roughly the same). The only real difference in the damage is the setup needed for d/p, but the aftercast on heartseeker allows you to get off your backstab quicker than CnD into backstab – CnD has a longer aftercast.

What you gain by running d/p over d/d, however, is huge. d/p is way more of a team support setup than d/d. The only thing d/d can do is damage people and that’s it. d/p allows for more team support – as others have pointed out with headshot, shadowshot, and blackpowder. Also it is important to mention that there are subtle tricks you can pull off with shadowshot whereas deathblossom, and also dancing dagger, is virtually useless on a d/d set.

The reason why people avoid running shadow arts in spvp is because it’s less useful. That’s the straightforward answer, but the long-winded answer would be to say that shadow arts line is incredibly selfish. You would ether put thirty in shadow arts, or thirty in trickery, and the amount of team support offered by putting thirty in trickery is way more than what you would get by putting those points into shadow arts.

Besides, you shouldn’t need that much survival by running points into shadow arts. Whereas you can gain so much, and contribute so much more to your team, by just playing better and running a trickery build.

To be honest though, the argument is somewhat rather pointless as shortbow is the weapon you need to learn since you will, or rather should, be sitting in it more than d/p. It doesn’t help that most thieves are terrible with shortbow.

I think these are all reasonable suggestions infantry div. Brevity is beautiful as it is so rare on these forums.

bhagwad.4281:

And what if they have a bunker on their close as well as mid?

If they have a bunker afk on their home, then you can get a numbers advantage at mid – assuming your home defender knows how to rotate.

gesho.9468:

looks like trend is to focus starting from squishy dps, leaving bunky build for later

Mostly because there are ways around the concerns of reviving downed state that you have. For the most part, it just takes paying attention to get the counters off.

Tao.5096:

Good video, good kiting, proper use of all available skills.
nice music too

I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or not… :/

That engie was terrible in that vid, btw.

The typical bunker is a guardian bunker/support with more emphasis on support than bunkering. Outside of this, any team running an abundance amount of bunkers usually can’t do any significant damage. The typical counter to this is to push all points.

Regarding the guardian bunker/support, it’s really only effective in team fights, and just an afk deadweight when it is not.

Fighting a lone bunker in a 1v1 is simply too risky and ultimately a waste of your team’s time. At the very least, they will be able to hold you off until more help comes. At the very worst, you will be making yourself essentially as much of a deadweight afk’er as a bunker sitting on mid not supporting the team.

This being said, if an enemy bunker is just afk’ing on a point, it’s far more effective/less risky to just push the nodes that the bunker is not on. As you can most likely get a numbers advantage, which is far more effective than trying to fight a bunker in a 1v1 to prove how “manly” you are.

In soloque, however, communication is pathetic. So even the simplest strats can go awry.

team comp wise?

Usually the standard is:

1 Bunker/support guardian
1 Spirit ranger
1 – 2 Warriors, usually hambow
1 Thief usually ether s/p or d/p
1 optional if only taking 1 warrior

Blackhat.4016:

Back in GW1 I used to interrupt 0.5+ sec skills reliably, now it’s ~0.75-1+ sec skills. No cast bar really makes a difference imo. Keep in mind I’m only an average player.

I would too. My main was R/Mo cripshot. I’m in the same boat as you, but most of my interrupts come from just knowing the general “feel” of the other player and how they play, so sometimes (to the point of it not being just luck) I can nail an interrupt right when they decide to use their skill.

azuzephyr.7280:

IMO 1 second is the first acceptable average breakpoint for ‘if you see this telegraph and want to interrupt it you have been given reasonable time to do it’

I would agree with this. You can maybe get away with 3/4’s of a second (warrior combustive shot). But really otherwise, you’re going to have to predict when they’re going to use their heal.

Just a general change:

Adding in an additional resign feature before clicking go to game.

Azawrath.7304:

Does D/P have counters?

The critical counters: You can interrupt the Heartseeker. You can use aoe ranged attacks on the circle or yourself as a defensive measure – thieves (at least thieves who don’t touch anything but their d/p set) hate engies for good reason. You can use skills which overload blind (clusterbomb detonate kills perma stealth thieves, as an example). Don’t stand in the blackpowder circle if you cant overload blinds. Instead, you can wait and time your attack until they heartseeker as you will know their positioning and they will be out of their blackpowder circle.

Ideally, you’re going to want to immobilize the thief as immobilize is very strong against a thief. I’ve won many fights against other d/p thieves (them being usually gimmicky permastealth) simply because the other player doesn’t even touch his shortbow stealth attack and I do. A key time to put pressure on the thief is right when they use their heal, so try and judge when they are going to use it (this is less of an option if they are using Withdraw, since it has a 15 second cd, but withdraw is suseptable to poison). Hide in Shadows can be used while in stealth to cover the long cast time of it, so be aware of this if they use blinding powder after a big hit to them and don’t pop up for a while. The better thief players (usually non-perma stealth thieves) will use their shadowstep as a movement skill. A common tactic for a thief is to blackpowder, heartseeker into a shadowstep. Once he drops out of stealth, bad players will then all chase after the thief, not recognizing the shadowstep buff on him, only to be tricked as the thief ports back. This can go on for many minutes if the group is dumb enough. The way to stop this is to make sure someone is watching the thief’s port spot as there is a white circle about the size of a blackpowder circle indicating its position.

These are what I can think off of the top of my head.

Brigg.6189:

Overall balance is pretty good, some of the largest build diversity I can remember as well. Ele and mesmer are both having trouble finding a role in the meta, but still have dangerous specs, warrior sustain is a little high.

Probably the biggest issue is that some of the meta specs are a little lame. Warriors, spirit rangers, decap engis, and minion mancers can all be frustrating to fight against and easy for inexperienced players to be moderately successful on.

These forums have always been excessively negative, so take them with a grain of salt. Every meta is the worst meta. I don’t think warrior is overall more dominant than ele at it’s peak atm.

OP, listen to this guy ^

However on another front, the competitive infrastructure is still very weak, but the next patch apparently is going to help address that.

The more I play other classes, the less I place any type of recognition for players who say, “Class A is no risk, while Class B (conveniently the class I play the most) is the most high risk.”

Except Warriors and Spirit Rangers. No matter what iteration I play of those classes/specs, it’s mind-numbingly boring to play.

I honestly cannot understand how Tany or Deku Scout plays such a braindead spec. I guess someone has to do it, but… I just… nope.

style.6173:

Just remove the water field from cleanse and healing turret would be fine

And one of the most integral parts of bringing an engie to a team gets destroyed. No problem.

The patch notes arn’t real. There is no reason why this should raise any concerns.

RyuDragnier.9476:

See Eviscerate coming? Black Powder.

If you’re out of stun cooldowns (which you really shouldn’t be), time your Eviserate right when the Thief uses his heartseeker. You will “track” him and be able to hit him when he is out of his blackpowder field.

Nothing is more satisfying when you reflect a killshot with the axe you stole from that warrior.

Funny fact: if you reflect the third hit off of a mesmer autoattack scepter, it will create a clone of you.

Arkard.3970:

Honestly, I don’t even know where you’re coming from with this. Shortbow is the LEAST used weapon in the game for thieves as a main weapon.

Any thief worth their weight spends a majority of their time in shortbow.

Arkard.3970:

Nerf Detonate? Why? 18% damage + crit damage nerf is enormous.

Detonate utterly destroys classes like Mesmer. I would assume this plays into it – I am uncertain that this will be a severe hindrance. Thieves do rely on it heavily when fighting classes like engies, mesmers, eles, and there are quite a few warrior builds that demand its usage – not being able to put a dent into warriors is extremely worrisome.

Arkard.3970:

Make Disabling Shot cost more initiative but increase the damage? It wasn’t a damage skill to begin with.

With the change to initiative that we have had, disabling shot was a bit ridiculous – a possible 4 spammed DS shots in a row instead of about 3. I am uncertain if this is going to severely hamper the thief or not.

Arkard.3970:

Choking Gas duration nerf? Duration considered too OP? Are you kidding me?

This is the biggest hit imo. Choking gas, next to poison grenades, is one of the only reliable ways teams can create a dent into all the passive healing in the game.

Arkard.3970:

This is all on top of the previous nerfs from 1,200 range and the Trick Shot nerf.

The trick shot nerf was needed. FAF (fire and forget) autoattacks are ridiculous. Be glad the surprise shot is still FAF.

ens.9854:

Gw2 takes skill insofar as good reflexes and decision making are ‘skill’, except for maybe fire grab, that kitten is hard to land. Also maybe burning speed too requires some basic ability to aim and manage proper spacing. But 99% of skills are just about pushing the button at the right time.

Lol just try playing a dagger mainhand ele: “kittenmit! Sit there for 2 seconds while I blow crap into your face!”

All while being in “Imma kill u easy, silly ele” range.

Slim.3024:

Which is why those fights were close. Greatsword and Longbow are great against thieves and blinds, especially with bull’s charge and Frenzy. there is a reason why warriors don’t use that build anymore, however.

If I had a dime every time someone on this forum says, “That build isn’t viable.” I would be very rich. This is what he runs. That is what he runs in tpvp – this isn’t just a random build. He prefers a roamer spec.

Slim.3024:

And the dodges and whirlwinds on steals that come out of stealth are still not “skilled play”. That warrior plays with energy runes and building momentum and was basically spamming dodges even when not necessary (which is fine, I am not saying he didn’t play well).

You can’t spam dodges with one energy sigil.

Slim.3024:

That’s called luck and random chance.

I disagree. The warrior knew what he was doing, so was the thief.

Gesho,
There are certain skills that the blind from blackpowder cannot keep up with. Pistolwhip for the thief is one example. Detonate Clusterbomb is another. They will blind one of the attacks, but the consecutive blinds will not be able to handle all the other hits.

Slim.3024:

Caed doesn’t even use heartskeer with steal out of a black powder.

If he does that too many times against a greatsword warrior, he dies. Greatsword has too many options to overload those blinds.

Go ahead and watch the full vid. He’s not doing what your saying he’s doing.

Slim.3024:

you can not possibly try to sell the fact that he dodged 4 steals in that fight as knowing when to dodge. […]That was pure luck

Those dodges wern’t luck. He knew that most thieves use Blackpowder => Steal+heartseeker. That’s very predictable. When he could, he also put a tremendous amount of pressure on the thief ether through ranged aoe or skills which overload blind right when he saw the blackpowder go down. In response, caed timed his backstab right when tarcis finished his whirlwind attack as tarcis has limited control over his character when he’s whirlwinding. There is a reason why tarcis put the annotation that he did in the bottom of the vid.

Slim.3024:

Trickery thieves are 80% steal and 20% the rest. If you miss 1, it’s bad, if you miss 4, you are absolutely done.

Exactly. In the first fight, caed got completely outplayed. Watch the full video and you’ll see that the fights were pretty even.

Bsgapollo.5364:

Oh kitten I still got 60k left and I was planning to spend it on that.. fml

^ Me too

Don’t even bother apollo. The kid obviously has no interest in listening to anyone but himself.

Norvos.9304:

When you cannot engage in a polite and constructive debate.

I called you out on your outrageous comment. In response, you said, “okay I exaggerated, it’s more like 4 to 5.” I say, that’s still outrageous and here is a video of two of the best players – the warrior was the guy who actually created hambow – of their class to show why that is an outrageous statement. Then you proceed with this:

You’re no better than the village idiot.
That Thief sucks.
Or that video of him sucked.
How much you want to perform fellatio on him, that performance was terrible.
Nice try though Thief fan boy.
Crying to nerf everything else to match your skill level. (Of which, I said absolutely zero, nothing, nada of the sort)
You just fail.

So I ask you…

Norvos.9304:

U mad bro?

Norvos.9304:

I’d say about 4 or 5 very quick ones.

If any guardian or warrior dies to a thief in four to five hits, they are REALLY bad warriors and guardians.

Here is a video of an actual good warrior not even using hambow, instead favoring greatsword/longbow – on top of it, the warrior is using zerkers ammy no 3.5k armor here. Quite frankly, he’s running the glassiest thing a warrior can operate. No Berserkers stance, he has fury stance. He doesn’t die in four to five hits.

The people you kill in four to five hits need to play better.

Edit: Notice how the warrior always uses ranged aoe or skills which overload blind whenever he sees the thief pop blackpowder. Moreover, he knows when to dodge – completely screwing up the thief’s steal skill. This is critical for the thief to land in order to get an advantage.

Norvos.9304:

That’s cool, i’ll be here discussing Tpvp.

Have fun though!

“They can come out of nowhere and kill a 3400 Armor Warrior or Guardian in 3 hits.”

You’re ether in the wrong forums, or very good at cherry picking.

In no case will a thief will 100-0 a Warrior or Guardian in 3 hits.

Watch this video as it highlights a little bit of everything. Keep note that Super (the warrior) pushes up to treb via home point instead of pushing up through the tunnel below clocktower. This is because having a direct visual in the lane via home point will prevent most early rushes to your home. A lot of the “strategy” to this game is to constantly have visual on where the opposing team is at all times and respond with correct rotations.

Norvos.9304:

The WvW forum is this way.

Troublesome,

As it stands right now, (with the exception of certain builds, some in the meta and some not) there is a clear line between a bad thief and a good thief in spvp – this should be the standard for all classes imo. If played well, the thief is pretty much a staple class on a team. Knowing when to go in and when to go out, being very careful that people don’t have eyes on you at all times (at least against good players who pay attention), and not blowing your damage are all critical components to playing the thief atm. Not to mention knowing where you need to be and not wasting your team’s time. It’s not a faceroll class like warrior, but it’s still a very strong class to play.

Quite frankly infantry div, I don’t want my Mesmer to play like a thief. I’d rather my Mesmer play like a Mesmer and have a stronger comparative advantage in one area over the thief because of an inherent class mechanic. A long time ago, ages past (lol balance @ balance team), Mesmers were more favored in large-scale teamfights (3v3’s and 4v4’s) than thieves by far. Moreover, their ability to portal people across the map meant that they had the ability to out-rotate enemies.

Now, with the presence of warriors, spirit rangers, necromancers, S/D or S/P thieves (virtually direct counters to Mesmer), Mesmers just don’t have the comparative tools necessary to compete beyond superior boon removal (though boon spam exists via lyssa now).

Dee Jay.2460:

It would be nice if other Thief weapon sets had equally well-designed weapon-skills.

If D/D and P/D actually used all 5 of their weapon skills on a regular basis they’d be much more compelling to play.

This. So much this. The one thing the thief class needs is an incentive to use all weapon skills on ALL weapon sets. Not just D/P – though perma stealth really only cares about 2 (blackpoweder, and heartseeker) skills because if you use anything else, you’re not going to be perma stealthing. Better need for initiative management is the most desired change.

gesho.9468:

Thieves are ok, just some limitation on d/p permanent stealth.

Perma stealth isn’t a thing in spvp. Perma evade, however, is a thing.

Lyssa is for sissies who need a crutch. Use ogre because men use it. Enjoy the 7k backstabs on squishes with less than 50% health.

Perma Stealth/Perma Evade is sponsored by Kraft.

infantrydiv.1620:

1. Condition ranger is in a good place, power ranger is not.

Power ranger was never in a good spot in this game – ever. Primarily because of the atrocious AI system.

infantrydiv.1620:

2. Eles received some minor nerfs and now can no longer kill warriors or thieves because they were both buffed. Warrior has far too much sustain, and giving the strongest passive heal in the game to a class with great condition removal as well as invulnerabilities to both direct damage/condi damage is bad design.

Going from a 15 second ride the lighting to a 40 second ride the lighting isn’t a minor nerf. Not being able to use any utility skills while using mistform (which justified its long cooldown) was also pretty big hit. The removal of stunbreak from lightingflash (arguably the best utility of the ele) was also a huge hit.

And primarily, this is the big one, S/D and S/P perma evade thieves utterly destroy eles and even mesmer. Not to mention anyone with condi nukes – oh the condi nukes.

Coupled with it, as you’ve said, they don’t really have any targets that they can comfortably say, “okay, i can deal with this.”

This video highlights a mesmer having to deal with a kittenstorm of an opposing team comp.

Wereas warriors can just faceroll stuff. And thieves don’t faceroll, but have the tools to deal with this meta.

eleshazar.6902:

And yes, people can switch but the two eles (one was champion hunter, and the other was champion phantom) decided neither would switch, and the same went for the two thieves (one of whom was a champion paragon).

So ether you switch, or you just do the best you can with the given team comp. Knowing what your team can and cannot handle can play a big benefit to winning a match. Personally, I would have bet on the fact that most guardians have no clue on how to rotate (and since communication is terrible in soloque) because most of the time they sit afk at mid. So instead, I would have heavily favored the outer nodes as I know that once a guardian shows up to a fight with all squishies fighting, the guardian’s side is going to win.

If that didn’t work, then oh well. You win some you lose some.

I run this in WvW. I run zerker jewels with ogre in spvp.

Any thief worth their weight will spend a majority of their time in shortbow. Learn how to use it properly OP, as it is a very effective weaponset.

I don’t really see the problem here. Ultimately the opposing team had a better team comp than your team, and from the looks of it you guys were trying to hold mid without a guardian while the other team did have a guardian. With that bursty of a spec, you should have tried to hold outer nodes.

Pyriall.5027:

stuff

Again, I implore you to figure out why people take home defenders on a team. Then maybe you might stop saying silly pants things like “all you have to do is stealth and kill the guy on node, then neut the node”.

You go ahead though and run your silly pants 30 shadow arts perma stealthbuilds in soloque. I only pray to god I don’t get you on my team.

hackks.3687:

In other words, you use it to kill people and then take their point […]

If a home defender cant hold their own weight against a thief, then they seriously need to reconsider playing that role.

dont use scholar. it takes about 2k damage to you to remove the comparative advantage it has over other runes. consider taking ether ogres or lyssa. ogres has rock dog (which is op) and lyssa has extra condi clear. you shouldn’t need lyssa if you’re running hide in shadows, but some people prefer to take it. lyssa is usually paired with withdraw as it is necessary if you choose to use withdraw.

imho, i wouldn’t use withdraw though because hide in shadows works better with shortbow than withdraw as you don’t have many stealth options on shortbow, but you always have shortbow 3. withdraw is nice because it can’t be interrupted, but really only has a comparative advantage in evade heavy builds.

the aftercast on d/d cloak and dagger takes ages in comparison to d/p heartseeker. the method of stealth is internal and doesn’t require a target on d/p. you can also provide more for your team with the blinds and interrupts.

If you want to get good at d/p, you have to be ambidextrous with your shortbow and d/p set as unpredictability is something you should aim to achieve. also you need to get good at interrupting stuff (mainly heals). never use heartseeker as a gap closer as shadowshot is virtually always better to use. you really only want to be using heartseeker as a method of gaining stealth and on rare cases to finish people off.

Play a warrior.

/thread

Pyriall.5027:

If you’re not talking about assaulting a point, then the thief isn’t the one who is maintaining a presence on the point to begin with

Well I hope I never get paired up with you on a thief in soloque then. :/

There is a reason why a home defender is a staple of all teams. I suggest you learn why people always take them.

Here OP, read this thread

As terms of tips and tricks: try not to 1v1 all game. Bad thieves do this. It’s ether too risky to do so, or you’re just wasting your teams’ time by 1v1’ing everyone. Many soloque matches are lost because a thief new to the class thinks its his job to push far and 1v1 the home defender there the entire match. Ether dieing constantly, or constantly having to disengage from the fight – both of which means that your team is essentially playing a 4v5.

Stealth builds are bad to play in spvp – don’t touch the shadow arts line for the above reason.

Thieves are great at forcing uneven fights in your team’s favor. Use your mobility to your advantage to create these scenarios. Also they are great for protecting other squishy players from being focused on by attacking their pursuers.

Ultimately, use your teammates as a “distraction” to get your damage in unnoticed.

Pyriall.5027:

In those situations, stealth is very effective as a thief moves in and out of stealth, they easily force people off a point and can get a neut in short order.

Again, this is off topic, but this made me laugh. You must be a solo far point pusher the entire match.

Frequently people say, “If I have a good thief on my team? Then I’m happy. If I have a bad thief on my team? Then facepalm, we’re doomed.”

Don’t facepalm.

bhagwad.4281:

Forest:

No. Only if your team is super bursty you may be able to get away with killing beast first. Regardless smart players will jump on mid first, take mid, then they have an advantage on those who choose to go after the boss first as they can easily pressure your home node. Boss is used as a catchup device or a snowball device.

The best part is when he thinks he has him with the frying pan, then he pops defy pain passive proc.

I like this idea. Nice job OP.