Guild Wars 2

@babazhook
I’ve been playing d/d condi build some time ago in various forms and I know how terrible it is. It works quite well against PvE noobs, but against decent players you have almost zero win chance.

Even if you somehow manage to win against somebody good, they quickly learn how to counter it, and it is really easy to counter.

Other condi classes will deal more condi damage than you (burn, confusion), and if you stay in melee range for too long against a power build, you will die (no protection or weakness, low armor and hp pool).

@Anthony
No, most people have more than 1 condition removal, and that’s the problem. There are also jewels like automated response and diamond skin.

Rabid amulet, two swords with longbow condition build. With this build just use WSAD for movement, turn on auto attack, sometimes press random buttons, and win. If you become more experienced player, spam everything from left to right and switch weapons whenever possible for maximum slapping power.

babazhook.6805:

(I am speaking from the viewpoint of WvW btw. I do not do pvp)

No good player would allow themselves to be killed by condi d/d thief. Death blossom is too underpowered to be any threat to anybody but mobs. Pistol/dagger is way better, because the bleeds are easy to apply from range, plus you have torment.

If you want to have a good condi build, you need to have multilple easy ways to apply conditions. They need to be short duration and on short cooldowns. It’s better to apply 3x 3 sec bleed than 1x 10 sec, because the second option is too easy to cleanse.

The curent condi cleanse system is bad, because it harshly punishes single damaging condi users like thief while promoting mindless spam of random condis, but that’s another topic.

Use sword/pistol – 30 points in deadly arts and critical strikes for maximum damage output will melt them.

Your suggestion fixes nothing, because venoms need to be entirely redesigned rather than simply patched.

I agree the final idea of this venom is terrible. All venoms are supposed to be precasted to compensate their absurdly long cooldowns, but precasting skelk venom is pointless. It is also balanced all around a single trait, which is venom share, what makes it underpowered in every other aspect of this game… Not to mention venoms are so bad it is not even worth traiting into venom share, so the circle is closed.

@up
Using Death Blossom in sPvP or WvW is a mistake, because your entire damage output is all about bleeds. Pure bleeds deal rather weak damage. They need cover of burn, poison and other condis, and are easy to cleanse. Not to mention you have to be in melee range to apply them as d/d.

About mesmers – cluster bomb with power/crit gear is 100x better than condi DB, add to it sb’s auto-attack and these clones with their master are roasted.

About PvE – same as above, and to be honest, everything works in PvE…

About signet of malice – it is the best with shortbow and sword (pistol whip), and these two weapons are all about power/crit damage.

In PvE, it would be better to use carrion than dire.

In WvW, dire is the best, but it’s also very boring, not to mention you shouldn’t use D/D with this gear.

In sPvP, condi thief is not viable no matter how you build it.

Puz.8529:

Easier is a P/D condition setup. You can use nr3 to stay at range and apply torment. Then just back up using auto attack from pistol. While running my dire setup I almost felt sorry for warriors. If you manage to open up with a poison field from SB, then go P/D, steal, nr1, nr 3, nr 1 they go down so quick, especially when chasing you due to torment!

This – Pistol/dagger is a direct counter to this kind of warriors. Shadow strike totally removes their damage output. The only drawback is they are going to flee with greatsword whenever they are low on hp, and most likely you won’t catch them. You could try using devourer venom at this point.

People would QQ more to gain ,,reputation". Posts about complaining have the most upvotes.

You could try guesting on some unofficial PvP server to meet some good players to help you (in Heart of Mists), but I don’t know which one it is in America.

Not worth effort it would cost, and it is not even guaranteed to give wanted results. Better to focus on new abilities, maps and game modes.

MightyMicah.7451:

Honestly, though, I’m more of a fan of difficult builds which, when mastered, can defeat most others.

In GW2, easy builds are also played on high ratings.

Of course, there are easy builds and ,,braindead" builds, but still you will need some practice to win against others – who also play these. But if you play your ,,unique & hard" build as a newbie, prepare for big lose streaks, serving as food for others.

PS: what server do you play on?

If you want to boost your win ratio, then go to your favourite profession’s subforum and ask for ,,up-to-date cheesy sPvP build".

This is awesome, I always wanted to launch these clones and pets chasing me!

Okay, but seriously, our traps are so bad because usually random things walk into them instead of actual players. To make them even worse, they can be dodged. With exception of shadow and ambush, they need redesign.

@TeamBattleAxe
Going for 30 DA is a waste for you, while it passively gives about 22% damage increase, and makes your unload(s) impossible to dodge under 50% hp? This combined with 30 CS is perfect for ambushes, which are quite easy to set up in sPvP environment, especially with shadow trap. Most people die before you even need to kite them, so the biggest pp’s weakness is taken away if played properly.

Ricochet is a waste, because even with this trait your AoE will be laughable and inferior to shortbow. Bullets from ricochet can’t hit the same target twice, like trick shot.

Dancing dagger needs poison to be useful both for power and condi builds, not torment. Revert cripple to 5 seconds. Additionally, increase damage slightly, let’s say 15%.

About LDB – give it 3/4 sec evade like shortbow #3, and increase power damage by 50% (or even more, so it deals as much damage as pistol whip minus bleeds). Right now, I can get stunned in mid air while trying do evade warrior’s stun.

Seriously, these skills are so terribly weak right now that they really need heavy buffs.

Give titles for hard achievements, not just for playing hundreds or thousands of hours.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE_msAKWdOs

Marcos.3690:

Lies, lies, lies and more lies

Does it make me a liar, if I tell you I’m going to buy a new car, but few months later I fund studies for my son instead?

Easiest is dps guardian, then spirit ranger or minion necro, and last warrior with setup mentioned above.

But you can really say if a class is easy to play, because each class has both builds taking a lot of effort to play successfully and total faceroll ones. Take away from warriors healing signet, berserker stance and 20 points in defense to make them challenging.

Sad thing is, these totally faceroll are also among the most effective builds in the game, but that’s another topic. I hope devs know how to sort it out before it’s too late.

@runeblade
Since you at last managed to see flaws in your build, here are other tips to get rid of the rest of them:
- Panic strike roots an enemy for +5 seconds, allowing you to unload 2x without them being able to dodge.
- This combined with executioner is a death sentence.
- If you additionally throw gunk stolen from an engineer or some mobs, when your target is immobilized, you will also inflict few stacks of confusion from unload spam, burning, etc. plus physical damage it deals per pulse.
- Assassin’s signet is good only for support, when you stand behind wall of allies and never activate it (or with signet glass D/D build), but you want be able to solo people, so get rid of it.

PS: you can also throw gunk without target selected under your feet, use hide in shadows and shoot for 5 confusion stacks + few stacks more from unloads.

@Romek
If a random aegis pops in the middle of burst rotation, or the guardian pops some instant shield, it is no way worse than evades, which also consume your initiative, therefore also offensive capabilities.

And last time I played a thief, flanking strike didn’t steal any boon – larcenous strike did; and it doesn’t have an evade, but has a channeling time, which allows to counter the thief.

Romek.4201:

best video

and i said it before
evades on skills should cost endurance like 10-20% – thats the resource made for this and would stop all this spam

same for 1 spamming sword rangerz

evades+ dodges should have be timed (risk reward) not just spammed (only reward)

And what did that thief achieve outside of making you laugh?

Zero damage output while evading, zero damage output AFTER evading and no mobility or any form of utility from weapon skills.

Personally, guardians continously shielding themselves with random aegis popping here and there kitten me off more than evade thieves. Not to mention they can heal from 20%->100% hp as opposed to thieves, and it cannot be interrupted.

In PvP, you don’t use math. There are far more important factors than these formulas.

If you backstab a lot and entering stealth is not a problem for you, then pick hidden killer. It’s better for more defensive play.

So, if you play 30 shadow arts and critical strikes, pick hidden killer. Otherwise, executioner.

@runeblade
Ricochet is soo bad trait for PvP. If you want to hit multiple targets, you should immediately switch to shortbow. You have zero condi removal, what means a fart can kill you, not to mention zero mobility. Also, you said you trade everything for damage, yet you skip executioner. Dead meat build.

Investing 10 points in shadow arts for condi cleanse with HiS is very cheap and effective way to get rid of condis – and you don’t have to trade any damage for it.

And no, any decent thief will kill you without problems if you use this build. Even another P/P with simply better chosen traits and utility skills.

If haste wears off in the middle of stomp animation, the animation will be speeded till it’s finished, but stomp won’t. You should just wait for stomp confirmation; don’t move your character before you see the stake on your enemy, because moving cancels it.

Other players can stomp without problems, but once they see you doing it faster, they usually cancel it and continue fighting. They don’t have anything disabled.

I am all in for giving more risk/reward to stealth skills, but with this change it would be only risk and a little reward.

Compared to other MMOs, stealth attacks in GW2 are pretty weak. Nobody uses stealth with sword (tactical strike is quite weak and situational); sneak attack with pistol is just faster auto-attack; shortbow surprise strike is medicore and its potential can be easly wasted (situational); backstab only gives numbers with full glass cannon against another glass cannon.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAqaFlUmbPJdi+ciY7RPBKP5K4UtH0EnwE-TsAg0CnIQShkDJDSSksINsYBxECA

Rottaran Owain.6789:

To be fair, they did drop the initiative cost to 3 to compensate.

… And then, ninja nerfed cripple duration from 5 to 3 seconds.

So, damage was lowered by 50%, cripple duration by 40%, and ini lowered by 1.

I might be terribly wrong, but it looks like anything but fair. But anyway, I expect the game to be balanced, not ,,fair", but this skill isn’t balanced – it’s absurdly underpowered.

Warrior as a class has weaknesses, but healing signet, 20-30 points into defense (cleansing ire) and berserker stance – not.

When you take these items from them, or leave just one, suddenly they have both weaknesses and advantages. To win, they have to plan instead of spamming their wombo-combo with their eyes closed.

In beta, pistol whip and hundred blades were without evades, but after seeing how easy it was to destroy a thief and a warrior when they were locked in these stationary animations, they added evades.

Advantage? You have an interrupt on your steal, and as d/p you can interrupt pistol whip. S/P thief can’t interrupt any of your moves.

@Ihales
Yeah, I forgot to mention totally useless traits in my post. All +5% dmg traits give pretty much nothing. We have +5% physical damage on shortbow, which is a hybrid weapon, resulting maybe in 2-3% total dmg increase – are you sure this is a trait for master tier? Who came up with this idea?

Look at merciless hammer of warriors – 20% cooldown reduction with +25% dmg increase to CCd foes – now, this is a trait I might seriously consider to pick, or even build around… and then, we have thieves with +5% dmg on daggers, what forces me to pick a trait from adept tier insead (all other traits from master tier are equally useless)…

jportell.2197:

I play a stealth thief in PvP. Thieves should be used for purposes of ganking and back capping… In team fights they kill the person with the lowest health and then go back cap.

Thief stealth/mobility is bar none. Instead of trying to cap a node in stealth use your stealth to get there unnoticed.

To quickly decap a node without being unnoticed you don’t use stealth, but swiftness, shadowstep, infiltrator’s arrow/heartseeker or even shadow trap. Stealth in GW2 is used as a combat mechanism, not utility on F1 like in every other MMO. Besides, even if it worked as a toggle, in 90% cases there would be no need to use stealth to get to a node.

Being unable to cap nodes with stealth made all stealth based builds very weak in sPvP; talking about top level tournaments, not hotjoin or WvW, where losing a few seconds on a node in favour of enemy may costs your team a victory.

About thief:
- Venoms are still useless. Many threads were posted on thief forums how to fix them.
- Traps aswell (except shadow, and ambush for leveling purpose).
- Thief still has no viable condi build in sPvP (look below).
- Leaping death blossom and dancing dagger skills are terribly underpowered. Unusable both with power and condi builds.
- It should be possible to cap nodes using stealth under some conditions. I want to play stealth based thief in sPvP for a change.

Landing a proper backstab is a hard thing to do against a skilled opponent. Sometimes they will simply damage you harder with AA or sort of close range abilities than you could damage them with a backstab, while trying to sneak behind them.

Revealing a thief after avoiding BS by evade,blind or block is just silly. There are already many ways to counter a backstab attempt.

Bad idea- too complicated and doesn’t really make you feel unique; encourages imbalance. If you want to feel unique, maybe use runes of your_class?

Example:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_the_Mesmer
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_the_Necromancer
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_the_Thief
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_the_Elementalist
and so on…

Some time ago I wanted to suggest the same thing, but after deeper thinking I realized this idea is very bad.

For example: utility you receive from 30 trickery is very high, but you pay for it with much lower damage output, and less passive defense.

Allocating stats within trait lines in fact improved balance, and encourages build diversity. If you need more damage, then drop 30 trickery and get 30 deadly arts. That would give you passively +23% damage increase from power and exposed weakness grandmaster trait, which has almost 100% uptime.

Yes, this would cause imbalance in the game initially. Although I’m pretty sure we’ve already noticed the game is imbalanced anyway. - Worst argument I have ever read on this forum.

@alamore
HS effectively kicked out pure zerker builds (at least from sPvP), although I have seen zerker warriors with it doing fine. You don’t have to cast heal, and getting interrupted while casting a healing spell with zerker gear usually means death.

Saying that stability makes burst heal more powerful than HS isn’t entirely true, because a warrior would rather save stability for a stomp or some more tactical move rather than just to support a single heal.

MiLkZz.4789:

Drop it by 20-30% and everyone will go healing surge for roaming and defiant stance for zerging. And people using healing signet will be called nub again.

Right now, everyone running without HS are called nubs.

After 20-30% nerf, newbies will be still running with HS, because of its lucrative effectiveness/brain usage ratio; while veterans will choose other healing skills, which reward them for active and smart play. Defiant stance is a perfect example here.

PS: Mending needs some attention aswell. It needs to cleanse at least one more condition, or have some kind of condi protection a few seconds after using it, while cleansing ire has to be nerfed to basement, preferably removed.

Signet of malice can be used in sPvP with specific builds. It works well with dagger storm, shortbow and P/P support build (where support means just killing everyone from distance with berserker amulet). If you use runes of scholar, you can keep yourself above 90% hp all the time for bonus 10% damage – retailation won’t stop you.

But that’s all. Even if S/P can dish out a lot of hits, SoM is weak for this weapon set in sPvP. Some people also use SoM with condi P/D + projectile bounce, but that’s for WvW.

Play team arenas solo (I know, lol) – it gives huge rank bonus per win.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

i do not mind that.

20% health is quite low.
for a 28k health necro that would be below 5.6k health.

5.6k melts rather quickly to focused bleeding, burning, poison.
the trick is to apply them after the necro exhausted all condition removals.

You must be kidding. And what about people who have not only zero condi damage stat, but also zero abilities that apply damaging conditions (or at least in a reasonable way)? You will ask them to bring friends?

I can agree this game needs more hybrid builds, which would be a counter to this sort of traits/abilities, but hybrid builds with current game design are very weak.

Agreed, although I don’t usually play full condi builds, but I know how these things can kitten off. Hard counters without any drawbacks are just not fun to play against.

There are different sets of rules for hotjoin, solo que and organized team arenas with voice com. In the first two, in which 99% players are (including OP and myself), you should go as glassy as possible. Explanation is simple – matches are more or less chaotic, and you have element of surprise. Surprise + burst = victory.

Rouge.

Additionally, add a class achievement of killing 10k undergeared players in WvW with mug+CnD+backstab combo, giving you a title ,,The Overpowdered".

Viking Jorun.5413:

[…]Hitting big numbers is about as helpful as standing in Lion’s Arch. Your team doesn’t need you dying.

Common combo in a teamfight of precast pistol whip + steal/infiltrator signet is an instant 5-8k damage against a non-bunker. It is also a cleave, and PW can be cast a few times in a row. If you jump to a target who triggered a shadow trap (10 might + fury) and you are lucky with crits, you can hit even +9k PW… 2 times in a row.

You don’t die, you make people die, and they die in a fraction of second. Go full power/crit build or go home. Anything else other classes can do better than a thief. It is a fair trade.

Sigil of force only increase damage of the weapon it is on. So, if you equip this sigil on main hand weapon, it will increase damage of 1-3 skills only, and if on off hand – 4-5 skills. Equipping 2x sigil of force increases total damage output by 5%.

PS: this was tested on my thief in Heart of the Mists.

206.127.159.166
hour- 4pm

I am 13 routers away (last router 206.127.157.102), tracert pings are all right at the moment, terrible lags (waiting about 1 second on each skill for activation) only in hotjoin and HotM.

@edit
206.127.159.203
hour- 6pm
HotM on server Piken Square – lags like hell. Server refresh takes a lot of time.

I think leaping death blossom should be top priority instead of PW. Its damage is below terrible with power stats, and unlike flanking strike (which also does no damage) the evade is extremly unreliable. Similar thing with dancing dagger – wasted slot on action bar.

Quick solution: increase power damage on LDB and decrease bleeding, plus increase evade duration to 3/4 sec like shortbow #3. Later we can think about splitting the skill into two parts.

In other words – change priorities please.

As a rampager/celestial thief, you will never do as good as a berserker. Your damage output will be kitten because of initiative system. Sure, you can still outplay somebody, but you are holding back yourself; and you could do the same with any other class by rolling your face over keyboard.

But as written above, do what you enjoy.