Guild Wars 2

Jana.6831:

Dahkeus.8243:

It’s not about whether a thief can win a 1 v 1. It’s about whether a thief should spend time in a 1 v 1 instead of +1ing or decapping.

No.

You madame, are perhaps the most skilled interlocutor I have encountered. Your counter-argument, so full of reasoning, critical analytics, and bereft of logical fallacy, is indeed beyond reproach.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Dahkeus.8243:

I’d love to see Thief buffed enough to be competitive with condi. Venom share basi is decent utility for break bars, but there’s just too much else holding the class back in condi. =(

VenomShare hits 24k on a single target sustained under ideal circumstances in my testing, which is great. This also lines up very closely to expected DPS in DEKeyz’ rotation calculator. Its downsides, however, include that cleaving multiple targets burns venoms and lowers overall DPS a lot. This means it’s overall fairly sub-par in raids given that so many bosses have adds. It does have a lot going for it, however, including very, very high evade uptime (and thus sustain) and arguably the strongest single skill break in Basilisk Venom.

Yea, but I don’t see how they could solve the cleave issue without making condi thief too strong in PvP. As it is, condi thief is a very strong 1 v 1 build that’s held out of the meta due to the same cleave issue that makes it weak in team fights. If it could deal cleave condi, it would easily become a very popular and very hated build due to the relatively simple play style and very high evade time.

But until it sees some buffs, guilds will generally just want a Slick Shoes engi for any role they’d otherwise consider a condi thief. The Mathias fight may be an exception, but I haven’t actually seen a condi thief used there yet, nor gotten to try it myself, so I don’t know if it would work as well on that fight as it sounds like it would in theory (frequent break + strong mobility on sb + lots of self condi removal + overall high survivability on a fight where there’s a ton of dmg).

It’s not about whether a thief can win a 1 v 1. It’s about whether a thief should spend time in a 1 v 1 instead of +1ing or decapping.

Worst part of playing a profession that’s not ‘meta’ is how you always end up with at least 1 person on your team who will spend the entire game watching every step you take just waiting to blame you for something.

I made legendary primarily as Thief and after hitting that, I played around with Ele for a while. I played terribly with ele, but I never had anyone call me out on any mistake I made while playing ele.

Meanwhile, I got at least some criticism on any random rotation I made on most games I played as thief, even when I ended up making game winning plays that turned the tides on score.

You like Ranger best.

…because of reasons.

You’re welcome.

Yea, the difficulty definitely ramps up at the end of Diamond. I was in a similar position. I got halfway through Ruby before I ever lost a match due (outside of a teammate DCing) and from there through most of Diamond, I probably had a 75%+ win/loss.

The last tiers of Diamond, however, were really rough for me (pun intended) and I bounced back and forth a lot before I got in the groove enough to pull off some consistent wins.

Yea, the path could have been a bit smoother, but the reality is that if you want to hit Legendary, you’ll have to play better and smarter than you ever did for any of your previous games. Good luck!

I’d love to see Thief buffed enough to be competitive with condi. Venom share basi is decent utility for break bars, but there’s just too much else holding the class back in condi. =(

Could this be another BuzzFeed-style click bait title thread with a troll post?

Click here to find out!

Asrat.2645:

that baby stealing dingo.7216:

I like to go mid because I can get there faster than anyone else on my team. I can almost always cap it before enemy gets there.

After capping it, I agree with Asrat that rushing the enemy effs them up. Shadow step onto their platform and meet them as they approach. (if you have a trap or two to lay on the platform, so much the better.)

As Asrat explained, you give the enemy a poor choice between dealing with you off-point or ignoring you to de-cap mid. You can go far if they ignore you, or pick one of them off if they don’t. At a minimum you can deal some damage and hold them off for a few while your teammates get to mid.

Fullcapping mid before they even get there? I mean: i havent tried it out, and if it works on any map it would be nifhel, but that seems to be a little too fast, even for a thief.
Are your enemies using movement skills in the matchups you are doing this? Or are they just running?
If I would try to replicate this: any specific suggestions? Are you taking the stairs or do you have a teleport spot to get up to the keep? Do you have to triple dodge and SoA?

Yea, you’ll almost never cap mid in higher divisions, where people know to stack swiftness before a match starts.

One other thing I would mention is that a very common strategy for solo Q is to see a 4:1 split where 1 person goes for home and the rest go mid. If you end up on a team that does this, make sure to disengage to +1 home if an enemy attacks there, regardless of the map. Here’s why:

In a 1 v 1, you double the effective power of your side’s advantage when you +1. In a 3 v 3, you only increase the advantage by 1/3rd. So, not only are you very vulnerable to the high AoE damage and CC in a larger scale team fight, but the fight will still take a long time to play out.

Alternatively, if you disengage to help the 1 v 1 at home, you will quickly turn the tides in that fight. Even if your home defender would have won the 1 v 1 anyways, you’ll ensure that they win faster. And when you return to the 3 v 3, health bars will be a lot lower and it’ll be easier to find a low HP enemy to burst, who will also be less likely to expect your burst.

Interesting, thanks for the tip!

Good suggestion. There definitely needs to be more incentive for legendaries to stay competitive.

Thief should almost never 1 v 1. They’re there to get to a 1 v 1 or 2 v 2 and 1 it just long enough to make sure their teammate wins, then do the same somewhere else.

…from the Year of Ascension achievements. (Title length restrictions, lol).

So, I noticed that the consistency of teammate performance changed a lot when I hit diamond and after I went into legendary I realized why this was. A lot of people, myself included still needed to do the achievements to get wins on other professions.

The result of this is a lot of really bad play from people on characters they have little to no experience on. When these low tier legendary players then get matched with high tier diamond players, it makes it really tough to get any momentum with a win streak to move up.

So please, ANet, reconsider these achievements since they’re hurting matchmaking in a way that you can’t prevent otherwise.

Jana.6831:

My sigil of choice is actually sigil of bloodlust
Maybe you have a point but I haven’t seen big numbers with sigil of fire since they nerfed it ~1 year ago. Will observe it further.

Thanks for the calculations although it isn’t always clear where all these numbers are coming from :P

ETA: And the damage calculation seems to be a big mystery on GW2 – the site now lists the weapon coefficient, it hasn’t in the past, I think – I have been on reddit pages, blogposts etc. to find the numbers for daggers.

Bloodlust is a solid choice, but I’ve actually found that it works best on Shortbow with something like Leeching. This way, when you down an enemy, you can swap to short bow for the poison on downed enemy and/or to port away so that you get the stack without having to sit on dagger. You also get more burst on dagger by having your air + blood or fire + bloodlust stacks.

Krysard.1364:

Furajir.3815:

I’m simply stating a fact. If you wanna call it backpedaling, so be it. I call it misspeaking. There are classes that are constantly the meta. Ele, Mesmer, Necro. Now revs. One season or one period of time is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the same classes CONSISTENTLY being at the top of the food chain, not just once along the way with one good build that carries the garbage core class.

I would say warr/guard/thief have been top tier during more metas than nec/mesm, so dunno. In fact, until this few last months, those three classes were meta for a kittenload of time.

Yea, that’s pretty much the case. They were all pretty much meta up until HoT.

My 2 copper (assuming sPvP):

Blood > Fire

If you’re running a staff build, then fire may be better since you’ll be doing some more meaningful cleave with that weapon, but for D/P, Air + Blood is more ideal. Part of this is because you’re less likely to lose a charge of BV to a fire proc and the other part is that blood will help keep you at higher health and more likely to stay >90% hp for the scholar rune bonus.

“racist”

I don’t think you know what that word means…

Have lightning reflexes (pun intended) and burst them fast. Seek them out and start the fight. Don’t wait for them to attack first.

Interesting poll…if you went off the results here, then this would mean that about 40% of all PvPers are in the Legendary rank…

But a few glances around the Mists pretty much shows that this is far from the case.

I’d say that it’s interesting to at least see a representation of ranks for people who visit these forums, but I’m not sure that’s really captured here either since people at low ranks are probably a lot less likely to want to answer a poll that admits a their rank.

Awesome, congrats! =D

May your internet connection be as strong as your will to win!

Nocta.5274:

D/P thief with scolar runes is pretty up there currently with the classic black powder, heartseeker steal backstab combo. Especially if you get an interupt with the steal for a pulmonary impact proc.

It’s up there, but it’s more of an effective burst than a high damage burst.

Gun Flame or Enchanted Daggers/UA burst will deal more damage, but a thief combo is generally less expected and CCs at the same time, which is what makes it so effective.

Jana.6831:

Dahkeus.8243:

There’s a couple reasons for the lack of diversity, outside of balance changes and HoT:

1) MetaBattle. It used to be pretty tough to find an exact build that there was much of a consensus over. Back in the early days, at best you’d be able to get builds from what people ran in tournaments, but that information was less readily available, so less people followed it.

2) The new PvP League. With the new league, competition in GW2 PvP overall has gotten a lot tighter. With pips at stake, people are a lot less likely to risk losses by running experimental builds outside of unranked.

I disagree with your 1) and maybe even 2) – I’ve been a ranger back in the day (2,5 years ago) and got nooo love – people always wanted to win, it’s not just the League.
To 1) : people always had “meta builds” because back in the day there were tons of youtube videos of people doing pvp or wvw stuff around and most of them linked their builds.
So, I guess the Meta is how it is because this game is pretty very much imbalanced.

ETA: Yeah, hadn’t had coffee yet. You already wrote that. Still I think that people have always been running meta builds. If it wasn’t on youtube/streams it was on the forums.
But I think there was more freedom to swap some traits here and there – I did so with a metabuild and found a streamer running that exact build later on.

I’m not sure you really disagree with my 1, but you may misunderstand it. Yes, there were definitely meta builds and there was information on strong builds, for sure. However, they weren’t all in one place, and it wasn’t as easy to tell a real good build from an overhyped mediocre/bad build.

As for 2, yes, there have always been very, very competitive players, but not on the same scale as there are now simply because the rewards for being competitive have never been so good. In the early days, you could really get any PvP rewards you wanted, just from grinding through enough games.

The leaderboards also pushed a lot of competitiveness, but not to the same scale as today where not only is being a high rank more visible (icon next to your name), but the actual leaderboard within the Legendary division is a lot more exclusive and won’t be topped by some new account that got a lucky 10 game win streak against low tier enemies. =P

If nothing else, the league system has attracted a lot of achievement point hunters and legendary gear seekers into the scene.

foogison.5067:

New Question:

Given that warrior has the highest single burst skill currently, is there any way for a warrior to gain on-demand stealth?

By themselves? No, lol. They would need an engi, mes, or thief to stealth them.

However, this is why thieves and revs often pair up to push far and burst. The thief can stealth and then together they can jump a target to bring them down quickly, even if the target has decent defensive cooldowns.

R O C.6574:

Thief counters ele 1v1. Team fight focus target

Umm…what build are you thinking of?

Because, if you’re talking about something like the meta D/P build, you will never be able to down them fast enough to win a 1 v 1 against them before it becomes a 1 v 2.

Of course, with the meta D/P build, you should rarely be engaging in any 1 v 1s anyways, aside from something like an Invoc Rev or another Thief.

PlagueEphlik.3067:

Berserker. Not even joking.
go condi and kanye west them to hell.

Yea, if Berserker really fit in the meta, it probably would work well since warrior’s lack of sustain isn’t a problem against a full bunk tempest.

But really there isn’t a specific hard counter to tempests like there are to certain other classes (i.e. reapers countering scrappers, scrappers countering DH, etc.), but there doesn’t necessarily need to be. Tempests work in team fights, but a coordinated team can take down a tempest or at least disable a tempest to win a team fight with he right plays.

I think of all the meta builds, tempest is the one I’m happiest with from a balance perspective, even though I don’t play one. That’s probably because they remind me of the bunker guardians of ye olden days.

I agree with the OP’s sentiment, but realistically, there’s only so much nerfing you can do to the new elite specs without a total overhaul/redesign, so there will be some buffs that are needed, at least on a small scale.

R O C.6574:

NeXeD.3042:

sephiroth.4217:

R O C.6574:

Meta battle takes all the theory crafting out of the game for most players

So much this.

There is plenty of build options if you know your classes well enough. This season I think is the best season for build diversity, but the worst for match making.

EG: Tempest can do a lot more than just “Clerics Heal” lol just a shame no one actually knows how to use an Ele outside of D/D cele and whats posted on METAbattle.

No not so much this. It doesn’t take theory crafting away at all. You are more than welcome to theory craft all you would like, meta’s change. You may have a build that does better against some classes etc than the meta build. Truth is though the meta build is usually the best option for a variety of situations.

But if you know better than the pro players I’m excited to see them get stomped by some build they probably never thought of.

I’m just saying people go to meta battle to get their builds a lot of the time. What would Pvp look like if meta battle didn’t exist?

PvP existed long before MetaBattle existed, lol. There was a bit less diversity, but people still knew mostly what the meta was and ran meta builds. The biggest difference was that it was just less convenient to find out what was meta.

kdaddy.5431:

Dahkeus.8243:

kdaddy.5431:

I just wanted to ask the question about the state of PvP. I see in alot of ranked matches that people ask thieves,warriors and guardians to change classes before the match even starts.

Before HOT and obviously the god D/D meta this was never a problem. If a team ran 5 rangers i didnt know if 1-2 were pew pew, bunker or trap. Depending on skill these classes builds did well.

Same with thief, you had the venom thief, dps thief, and i know of 1 bunker thief and he had success with it. People didnt like it because he didnt play the quote um quote thief role.

I could go threw all the classes but i truly feel this game took a giant step back in build quality. We all saw the mirror matches if you watched even 2 matches in ESL.

I just want to ask the question if people are having more fun with the new HOT builds or like myself forced to play similar builds as other people with the same class to stay competitive and not having fun with less creative freedom?

There’s a couple reasons for the lack of diversity, outside of balance changes and HoT:

1) MetaBattle. It used to be pretty tough to find an exact build that there was much of a consensus over. Back in the early days, at best you’d be able to get builds from what people ran in tournaments, but that information was less readily available, so less people followed it.

2) The new PvP League. With the new league, competition in GW2 PvP overall has gotten a lot tighter. With pips at stake, people are a lot less likely to risk losses by running experimental builds outside of unranked.

I can understand this but alot of the older builds had some give and take.

Guardian had the medi dps, bunker, burn burst. None were necessarily better then the other but it depended on what the team needed. I mean out of no where Tage came with a hammer guardian at the WTS. In WTS 2 we saw a ranger when people said it couldnt be done. Even with some imbalance high level players could make classes work.

I always felt you could see a unique build in the AG/ESL tournaments even with meta battle.

Yea…I guess you have a point. I mean, historically, most classes have generally had one meta build, but there usually at least a class or two that had some wiggle room. There seems to be a little bit of play for necros between two very similar builds and druids have a bit of flexibility with their build as well (Bunker vs DPS), but none of those variants are really that much different from each other compared to earlier days when you had medi vs bunker or traps vs longbow, etc.

Either way, I’m definitely looking forward to the next balance patch. The changes from the last balance patch were definitely good, but they just weren’t enough to deal with all the problems that came with HoT’s release changes.

kdaddy.5431:

I just wanted to ask the question about the state of PvP. I see in alot of ranked matches that people ask thieves,warriors and guardians to change classes before the match even starts.

Before HOT and obviously the god D/D meta this was never a problem. If a team ran 5 rangers i didnt know if 1-2 were pew pew, bunker or trap. Depending on skill these classes builds did well.

Same with thief, you had the venom thief, dps thief, and i know of 1 bunker thief and he had success with it. People didnt like it because he didnt play the quote um quote thief role.

I could go threw all the classes but i truly feel this game took a giant step back in build quality. We all saw the mirror matches if you watched even 2 matches in ESL.

I just want to ask the question if people are having more fun with the new HOT builds or like myself forced to play similar builds as other people with the same class to stay competitive and not having fun with less creative freedom?

There’s a couple reasons for the lack of diversity, outside of balance changes and HoT:

1) MetaBattle. It used to be pretty tough to find an exact build that there was much of a consensus over. Back in the early days, at best you’d be able to get builds from what people ran in tournaments, but that information was less readily available, so less people followed it.

2) The new PvP League. With the new league, competition in GW2 PvP overall has gotten a lot tighter. With pips at stake, people are a lot less likely to risk losses by running experimental builds outside of unranked.

Yea, I honestly think they could have gotten more mileage by offering 150k and then spending the extra $50k on providing some better coverage and/or publicity.

Arkvan.3561:

Dahkeus.8243:

Wow, that picture is really appropriate. I’ve seen a lot of self pity party posts about being stuck in tiers, but you’re not even trying to hide it.

So tell me: Do you honestly think you have no room for self improvement?

Oh I’m sure I’ve got something to improve on. I still make mistakes and I’m far from perfect. But there’s always these little giveaways at the start of matches that tell you how it’s gonna go – certain classes being over-or under-represented, a completely silent group, and so on. It also boils down to no matter how good I (think I) am, I’m not gonna be able to be everywhere at the same time, and I’m not gonna be able to pull a bad group through.

Winning and losing is determined by a lot more than just a few mistakes at the start. If you focus on what your team is doing and get bent out of shape by their mistakes, it’s just going to cause you to play worse.

Players who believe that they can win will find ways to pull those wins off more often than players who believe they’re just screwed anyways.

Citing other people’s mistakes may make you feel better in the moment, but that practice will stunt your own self improvement and lead to a worse situation overall.

People that focus on everyone else’s mistakes are also generally kittens that other people hate being around.

Novuake.2691:

Dahkeus.8243:

Of course there’s a correlation of skill. It’s not perfect, but there’s a reason that pro league players are all legendary.

It’s also the same reason why you can watch low tier games and see huge mistakes. I mean, I steamrolled through amber, sapphire, and even most of ruby doing things like winning 1 v 1s on a thief and capping an undefended mid point. There’s still plenty of dumb stuff that happens, even in legendary games, but not nearly to the same extent that you see at lower tier games.

Is that why people in low legendary that ive seen still have no concept of rotation?

Obviously the pros will climb out, they roflstomp poeple, just because they are in legendary+ does not mean the system isn’t flawed.

The average player shouldn’t be in ruby in the first place, which is how it is now.

“There’s still plenty of dumb stuff that happens, even in legendary games, but not nearly to the same extent that you see at lower tier games.” It’s like you didn’t even read that.

And the system was designed to have average players in ruby, above average in diamond, and great players at legendary. I agree there’s probably too many legendary players now, but there’s no good way to fix that:

1) You could shift all players down so that average is Sapphire instead of Ruby, but that would be incredibly unpopular since everyone expects to hit the same tier or higher on the next season.

2) You could ramp up the difficulty increase faster between Ruby and Legendary, but that would also greatly increase the amount of QQ about “MMR Hell” and cause even more inconsistency across matches due to a greater variance of skill across each division.

3) You could add another division between Ruby and Legendary, but that would mess up the reward track for the wings and would probably require a lot of work to handle all the side effects of this on the back end of the game.

Either way, the shift of where the average player lands isn’t really reflective of whether there’s a correlation between skill and division rank.

Flail good. Want flail.

Well…I’m definitely not a big WvW player and I haven’t played a ton as a necro, but here’s my thoughts, at least from watching your fights against the first thief:

It looks like your biggest mistakes in your first two fights were burning your shroud trying to close the gap instead of pressuring from range with staff/axe. Once you burned through your shroud, the thief jumped in and pressured.

It looks like you learned from that in your later fights for the most part, which is why your next two games were wins. You lost the last game because he switched his strategy and instead went for a hard burst at the start, which you weren’t expecting.

So basically, you’d want to be patient against a thief staying at range and focus more on building up shroud and when the thief pushes for a hard burst, dropping chill and using shroud to counter burst with shroud AoE.

Think of it this way: If a thief and necro at full health both go full DPS against each other and don’t use any defensive skills, the necro will win every time. However, if the same thing happens with a thief and necro at half health, the thief will likely win. Because of this, the thief will generally try to win the fight by resetting until you’re at low shroud + hp. Be patient at the start and save your shroud so that when they go for the burst, you can change what they expect to be a quick burst into a longer DPS match that you’ll overtake them on.

Anyways, that applies to dagger power thieves at least. Condi thieves are a whole other story and I can’t speak much towards staff thieves.

There’s no perfect opening strategy since it all depends on how the other team splits, but here’s my recommendation for solo Q:

Head towards mid and watch for anyone crossing. If you see someone crossing to home, stealth and +1 the home fight. If there’s no crossers, you can hang back, then burst to try for a quick kill in the mid fight. Necros are the best target for this. Even if you can’t burst a target, some heavy CC with something like Basilisk or Impact can help your team gain enough momentum to win the fight. Don’t stick in this fight for long, however, and check on Far to see if it’s unguarded after the enemy caps it.

In lower tier games, you may actually see an enemy go for a beast kill at the start of the game, so it may be worthwhile to go for a steal, but you’ll rarely see that in more competitive games.

Alternatively, if there’s a revenant in your group, you can ask them to split and go far with you at the start. Black Powder → blast with short bow at the start of the game to stealth and go for far or burst any enemy that tries to cross by themselves if you see anyone.

Wow, that picture is really appropriate. I’ve seen a lot of self pity party posts about being stuck in tiers, but you’re not even trying to hide it.

So tell me: Do you honestly think you have no room for self improvement?

Of course there’s a correlation of skill. It’s not perfect, but there’s a reason that pro league players are all legendary.

It’s also the same reason why you can watch low tier games and see huge mistakes. I mean, I steamrolled through amber, sapphire, and even most of ruby doing things like winning 1 v 1s on a thief and capping an undefended mid point. There’s still plenty of dumb stuff that happens, even in legendary games, but not nearly to the same extent that you see at lower tier games.

The more I play other professions, the more I realize just how uphill of a battle playing a thief is.

To clarify: I don’t just mean that it’s harder to play a thief due to mechanics, meta, etc., but it’s also just really draining because your teammates notice your mistakes more easily than anyone else and have much higher expectations for your results.

Was the other team guarding their home closely? Your team will blame you for not decapping enough, even if you forced someone on their team to constantly sit or run back to home while you gave your team the +1 advantage on fights elsewhere.

Did you miss a beast kill due to a split second tick of an enemy’s attack that registered before your HS+Steal or did that tick just land between the HS and Steal damage, getting credit for the killing blow? You’ll be blamed for that.

Did you miscalculate your health for a split second and get burst?

Meanwhile, if you play one of the tanky meta builds, you’ll rarely if ever be blamed for a loss as long as you’re generally with the zerg ball on mid and aren’t too blind when it comes to stomps/revives. Even if you’re just facerolling your skills during fights, no one will notice.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

Take 2 players.
They duel.
One is melee. The other is ranged.
At 180 range they can both hit each other.
At 300 range one hit the other, the other has very few skills that will hit.
At 600 range one can hit the other, the other can’t hit until their back at 180 range.
At 900 range one can hit, the other can’t hit until their back at 180 range.
At 1200 units one can hit, the other can’t until their back at 180 range.
At 2000 units one can possibly hit, the other can’t until back at 180 range.
At 200 perch height one can hit the other can’t.

Observations;
Range is its own defense. Range has more opportunities of strike than melee.

Conclusions;
Anti projectile/reflect/deflect skills are needed to put range vs melee weapons on an even tier.

Result;
We have multiple ranged attacks and types in straight, piercing, rebounding, unblockable. Ergo we need multiple forms of projectile hate from blocking, deflecting, reflecting.

Overall deduction;
All’s fair in love and war.

In practice, rarely is ranged at such an advantage. Melee can easily line of sight and tends to have plenty of gap closers, may of which are also CC.

This is why the OP classes in games like WoW aren’t necessarily ranged, even though ranged characters in that game can do just as much if not more DPS.

Ok, we get it. You two don’t agree. How about we all stop playing the ‘I want to get in the last word, even though I have nothing productive to say’ game, eh?

https://xkcd.com/386/

Thiefz.3695:

Projectile hate is fairly balanced because this is a projectile meta. Without it, p/p thieves and longbow rangers would be way to strong.

P/P thieves…you’re hilarious.

Yea, there’s lots of potential for endless evades…

…but there’s not much reason to ever go for it, especially in PvE. =P

So, setting aside the current class-level problems with the meta, I think there’s just too much projectile hate in the game with all the HoT changes and that this is really cutting down on build diversity. I mean, consider the following skills that are all staples of current meta builds:

Scrapper: Defense Shield and Electro Whirl
Chrono: Master of Fragmentation (reflect on Distortion)
Druid: Staff 5
Tempest: Swirling Winds and Magnetic Aura
Dragonhunter: Zealot’s Defense

Considering that all but two of those anti-projectile skills are full on reflects, it’s no wonder that gun flame warriors don’t stand a chance and that Grenade Kit on Engis is dead.

For god’s sake, no. Of all the things in this game that need fixing, this map is not one of them.

With all the reflects on Scrappers, I’d imagine that a Scrapper would counter a condi engi pretty well too since that shuts down both P/P and Grenade Kit.

So, there’s some problems with your utilities:

1) You have no stun break.
2) Shadow’s Refuge has fallen out of the meta for a reason. There’s too many anti-stealth moves to make a long term stealth like this worth while, especially with heralds and scrappers so strong in the current meta. It’s also too small to allow for you to really dodge within when traited for Dash.

It may be nice to be able to snare people running, but not only are you making a major investment for chasing people when you probably shouldn’t be chasing people running that much in the first place, but you’re doing so at a terrible expense.

Shadow step is much superior for the following reasons:
1) Double stun break.
2) Allows you to trigger DH traps and escape without dying to them.
3) Allows you to safety stomp.
4) Is a major mobility skill, allowing you to decap faster than anyone else.

Blinding Powder has pretty much become the replacement for SR, although it works much better on a D/P build. With D/P, you can drop black powder from pistol, then blast it with Blinding Powder, then leap through for a stealth almost on par with SR, but in a wait time and shorter cd. It’s also a lot less obvious. =P

Oh, and if you really want to be able to immob someone running away, just swap to short bow, hit Blinding Powder, then use the stealth attack for that.

However, you really shouldn’t do much chasing as a thief anyways. Thieves shine when they jump in and out of fights quickly or map travel to decap. If someone’s running so far away that you’d need a ranged immob, you’re probably better swapping targets and taking advantage of a fight which now has 1 less enemy in it.

Grr…posted a whole reply, but then the forums bugged out.

Anyways, there’s 4 points I think you could improve on, after watching the video:

1) Disengage from +1 fights sooner. You stuck around way too long both times you +1ed a side fight. The first one, fortunately, didn’t cause any issues and you only wasted a little bit of time against a DH who your teammate could have easily finished off. The second one resulted in you getting swamped at far and then getting downed.

2) Watch enemy movement better. You were slow on the home +1 fight since you didn’t have your camera pointed towards the enemy base, which is why you didn’t see them crossing over. You also got swamped at far because you never looked towards the enemy base and didn’t see their backup arriving.

3) Be more strategic with your knock backs. Save your knock backs for enemies who try to revive or for other clutch moments, such as enemies using a heal or enemies that are almost dead. You missed several opportunities because you blew this cooldown early in the fight.

4) Utilize perches better. The best place to be for mid fights as a longbow ranger is on the ledge between home and far. This will keep you out of harms way, allow you to more quickly +1 home, and will also put your ally in a safer place when you S&R. Also, you didn’t utilize the higher ground at the far point. Because of this, you took a lot of extra damage, missed some shots, and got feared when you used S&R.

Hey,

So, I think I’m stuck in MMR hell, but I’m already really good. However, I want to be super good and maybe get out of this thing. Here’s a vid of my gameplay. Please give me some feedback!

Azukas.1426:

I’ve noticed a few things that are required for a thief to be useful

1. They have to be GREAT players
2. Their team HAS to win fights/hold points
3. The other team has to be unorganized

If you do not have those a thief isnt going to bring anything to your team. So if I see a thief on my team and those points are met I know it’s a loss

1) Yes.
2) Kinda, but not really. They just have to survive a decent amount of time in fights and get at least 1 target below 50% hp. After that, you can +1 to roll the momentum in your favor.
3) Ya, but that’s pretty much always the case to some extent in Solo Q.

Urejt.5648:

First of all thief role for decap and +1 is not that much effective. If your team dies its no good and u can not do anything. Thief is useless in this scenario. And it must be said. decaps and +1 can only be achived if u leave your team. Its easy pray for enemies. So your team dies and u decap one point. Its bad trade becouse enemies will recap after they wiped your team.
Well i think many bugs reyp thief at the moment. Look at dodge steal intorev with tount trait. Thief cant steal at the ned of voult.

It’s actually really good for Solo Q and if you do it well, it allows for a lot of team carry potential.

Did a teammate just YOLO far, leaving your mid group short a person? Well, you can +1 the far fight so that he can actually cap the point without taking forever and get back to mid to keep that fight going so that the enemies don’t immediately steamroll and then defend their home.

Really any bad rotations your teammates make can be accommodated by the superior mobility of thieves.

When you play thief, the enemy also has to either lose home to a decap or keep a person constantly sitting on their home (and out of the mid fight). You can easily move between fights faster than anyone else, so you win by making sure that your team spends more time present in fights than the enemy does.

In the current necro meta, any necro below 50% HP and out of shroud pretty much becomes a guaranteed kill and spike, thanks to the CC from steal and Impact Strike.

Yes, thieves can’t tank damage and they don’t offer heal/boon support, but they can shift the number advantage of fights better than anyone else. You can instant-spike to prevent enemy rallies, you can CC spam and shut down enemy heals/utility (Steal > Overload Earth prot).

Of course, in organized Pro League-type games, the advantages of thieves can be countered since there’s superior communication and a bigger focus on sustained team fights that make Revs a better choice, but in solo Q, there’s major carry potential.