I wish I could get this through my thick skull. The major reason I run 10/30 over 20/20 is for the extra 100 precision and 10% crit dmg. Now I could get that from food, but I just love Omnomberry ghosts/pies too much. I like the utility of 20/20 a little better, but I feel like I benefit more from the higher crit chance and damage due to the lifesteal capabilites. The other benefit is w/60% base crit chance + phantasmal fury, my phantasms have 80% chance to crit. This works great w/iSwordsman and iWarlock since I usually spawn them, let them hit once then shatter. This almost guarantees a crit on that first hit, especially once I have some precision stacked.
This whole thread baffles me and reeks of people who have never played a mesmer. I run a full glass cannon shatter build mesmer. I have 1 condition removal on my build and it comes from my sigil of generosity. Once every 10 seconds I “might” transfer a condition. That’s it, no other removal. Condition classes are the rock to my scissors. That said, in all my time in WVW, I don’t ever recall dying to a condition mesmer. I don’t understand how people with multiple removals and most likely more hp/tou than my glass build are dying unless it’s just a complete lack of understanding on how a confusion build works. I tried to build one, but just couldn’t find a playstyle I liked. By doing that, I learned what a basic rotation would be like on a confusion mesmer, and now when I see one in a fight I can pick my opportunities to burst.
I run standard decoy/mirror images/blink. Those give me the mobility to make up for the low toughness. I use staff2 quite a bit too so I can get away when things get hairy. I followed your guide to the letter at first, then I started to branch out. That’s why when you see my weapons, I first had a mixture of knight/valk weapons. I still use those to bump my toughness in dungeons. Now I have full zerker weapons. I like to have the exact same stats when I weapon swap. Then I use trinkets to make up the difference. I set my goals to be 1100 tou, 16k hps. I’m low on the hitpoints but that’s kind of new since i recently swapped to another ruby for more crit chance. I think I make up for it with the steady stream of 315 lifesteal procs. Two nights ago, I did a 4clone shatter in a group of 5 enemies, then hit blurred frenzy and there were so many green 315s floating up, I just cackled w/joy, lol. All 5 of them scattered in different directions and that allowed my group to break their line and take the supply back. I really think that food will get nerfed soon, but for now it sure is fun. A high crit bs thief will wreck me pretty quickly if he catches me off guard. Had one hit me for over 17k w/his steal/cnd/bs combo, so I’m very squishy. Usually, I can see them coming, but this time my blink and decoy were down. :/
I’m still very torn on the 20/20 vs 10/30. I love daze shattering with rending shatter for all the stacks of vuln. If sword4 wasn’t bugged and actually set off dazzling, I would be 20/20 for sure. I’m sure the trait retrainer loves me. I’m constantly switching between the 2.
Love the builds Osi. Currently I run s/s w/10/30/0/0/30 though I often switch to 20/20. I usually run with a base crit chance of ~60% when i’m 10/30. Since I’m s/s I can use phantasmal fury which makes my phantasms crit 4/5 times they spawn. I found that to be better than the 15% dmg since I usually shatter them after their first attack. Now, the reason I like 10/30 is for the boosted crit chance. I’m not sure if you’ve experimented with it yet but Omnomberry ghosts + blurred frenzy with 60%+ crit (80%+ if i have fury from woc) is insane. It synergises very well with generosity which I’m still running atm. I may switch that to accuracy just to boost my crit chance even more, but I’m still undecided on that. Does sigil of accuracy stack with the 5% damage one?
Thanks for all the work you put into it. I rolled this mesmer months back after reading and commenting on the thread, and now my mesmer is a beast! And, it’s so much more fun than my original thief.
I love WVW and I still find it stupid that it’s required for completion. Anyone that’s WVW’d for awhile understands that some matches never change and certain points will always be held by 1 side. They either need to take the wvw points out of world completion or randomize the color of each side, each week.
I came to post something similar to this. On my thief, I have 10% duration from traits, 10% bleed duration from agony sigil, and 15% bleed duration from Rune of the Krait. My condition duration on the hero panel states 20%. If I unequip my weapon it drops to 10%. Equipping or unequiping my armor pieces does nothing. So it appears that I’m getting no duration stat from my Krait runes, similar to your nightmare runes. Hopefully, this is just a display problem. It’s just odd to me that the bleed duration from the weapon sigil works, yet the duration from the armor runes does not.
Also for the underwater skill points that our stealth abilities don’t necessarily work on, get some Spy Kits . Actually, you should buy a full stack on every character you have for that reason alone.
I ran the numbers for this last week on a damage calc. spreadsheet. The massive increase in precision did help crit chance quite a bit, but that didn’t turn into any extra damage (due to the lost power). It actually decreased upfront damage, but helped condition damage due to toughness>condition dmg calcs. I basically compared full carrion vs full rabid (with chrys. runes on trinkets).
As a mesmer, I do the exact trick as above. I’ve been through that a few times and have yet to have anyone take my portal. I was beginning to think portals don’t work there or something lol. I even had someone say, we don’t need a portal on this, as I waited for someone to make it to the other side with me, with portals active on both sides….
They really should add enemy names along with kill spam. That was the best part about DAoC. I guess the problem comes with them not wanting cross server chat. I imagine it would be pretty easy to chat cross server if they added names to enemies.
Thanks for this thread Osicat. I’m still in my early stages on my mesmer (30ish). This guide and the videos have been a blessing when learning this class after playing a thief for the past 3 months. Keep up the good work.
out of curiousity what runes do you guys run on your carrion armor? and what sigils on your weps?
At first I had all Chrysocola Orbs (20con/14pow/14vit) in my armor. I liked the additional stats over specials. I have since replaced 2 of them with Runes of the Krait to get the 15% bleed duration. Krait runes just happened to be the cheapest rune with those first 2 stats (28 condition dmg, 15% bleed duration), and I wouldn’t recommend them past 2. For sigils I use, a sigil of agony (10% bleed duration), and sigil of corruption (+10 condition up to 25 stacks). With the 15%+10%+10% (from traits) bleed durations, I have 35% bleed duration. I then eat Rare pizzas (+40%) to get to 75% bleed duration.
My main is also full exotic geared thief, only I run a P/D condition heavy build. I really think the BS build is cheap and way too easy, and I was very surprised not to see it nerfed last week. I totally agree with Mjk. When I’m on the thief boards it’s funny to see all the thieves defending the build. I abandoned that build a long time ago for the one I run now. I just hope when, not if, the nerf comes, it’s to BS and not stealth. Without stealth, most alternate thief builds just wouldn’t work. It would be like taking away a mesmer’s phantasms…oh wait, anet basically did, heh.
I agree w/Loading. I run full carrion with the same traits shown. Really I think that 30pts in SA is the major building block. For me I have to have minimum 10/0/30/15/0. I need the 10 in DA for the extra 10% duration I get on my bleeds. That gets me to the magic 75% duration number w/my pizza. I need the 15 in Acro for feline grace. The other numbers shift depending on my mood/situation. I could be 10/0/30/30/0 one day, 10/0/30/20/10 the next day, 20/0/30/20/0, etc. I love the versatility of the build. When I’m running 25 stacks of cond. dmg on my pistol, my bleeds tick for ~135, and I have about 21k hps.
P/D has no gap closer. Dancing dagger is really the only quick way to slow someone enough to hopefully catch up. That’s what I use it for. Most people playing P/D aren’t playing the build for ranged combat. That’s why I always wanted a shadowstep TO my target instead of away from my target.
Well put Mystic. I mainly play a condition P/D thief, and typically never fought Mesmers 1v1. That was the one class that really gave me a hard time. The fights got so confusing for me that I just decided to avoid them altogether. I never thought the class was overpowered or anything, I just didn’t understand anything about it. My solution was to roll a mesmer as my first real alt. Mid-20s now, I feel I’m really starting to understand the class, and now understand what tools I’ll need to beat them in the future. Of course, with this new patch, that should be quite a bit easier since my build is built heavily around, stealthing (auto blind, remove conditions), and evading. It’s going to take a pretty talented mesmer to actually cast a phantasm on me. I’m still not experienced enough on the mesmer to understand how deep this change goes, so I’ll continue to level up the alt, because I do love the class.
@Clip, I get what you’re saying. I guess my point was, on my thief, I’m usually only out of stealth a couple of seconds before I’m right back in (as long as my cnd continues to land). This got harder with the pistol bug introduced a few weeks ago. Now, that they fixed that with this patch, it should allow me to get back into stealth very often. With the blinds in place, I don’t see how a Mesmer will ever have time to cast a phantasm on me. This helps me greatly on my thief, as Mesmers were the one class I avoided in 1v1s.
I don’t see this as a major problem honestly, how many times do you get blinded? How many times do you get blocked? Invulnerable only lastst 5 sec max…
It only means patience & skill become more important.
NOTICE what debuffs are on you and act on it, NOTICE what your enemy is doing (blocking, invuln) and react.
> when blinded, hit with a normal skill and then cast your phantasm
> when you see an aegis/shield block, same thing…
My thief is traited to ae blind every time I stealth, which is pretty much every 4-5 seconds. I also have multiple other ways to blind. I always avoided mesmers in the past due to the way my spec works against them. I actually rolled a mesmer to learn more about the class and because the class seemed so neat to play. I find this change to be class breaking, and I say this as a thief.
As a P/D thief, I personally use Chrysocola orbs (20cond, 14pow, 14vit each). I’ve looked into a few rune sets (mainly condition duration), but I can get to my 75% duration with traits, sigils, and food. I didn’t’ feel the runes were worth losing quite a bit of vitality, nor the price to do so.
Love your vids Slic. You and I have nearly the exact same build, only i’m 25/0/30/15/0. I have a couple of questions for you though. Do you find Leeching venoms to be better than the condition removal of Shadows Embrace? 2nd, is Pain response worth taking another 5 points out of Deadly arts and subsequently losing the 10% damage when you have a condition up? My spec tends to jump between 25 in DA and 25 in Acro, and it’s always been for the 10% damage increase. Maybe I’m just locked into the mindset that the 10% is beneficial. Also, it’s good to see that you’re on SBI now, maybe I’ll see out out sometime. I’m always up for some JQ bashing.
On 2 separate occasions this weekend, as a P/D condition thief, I fought 2 different elementalists. One stood strong in his aoe circle and never moved and used his condition removals. The other ran all over trying to find me as I cnd’d and stacked 15-20 bleeds on him. Which fight do you think I won? And which one came to a forum whining I’m sure. I stealthed the same amount in the first fight as the second, only I took major damage anytime I had to get in close to cnd. I actually knew pretty quickly into the first fight that I couldn’t win, but I didn’t want to run.
I’d say go P/D instead of P/P. For added benefit (if you can pry your shortbow out of the 2nd slot), put your dagger in your 2nd slot. Then, you can swap between P/D and D/D conditions. Plus, you have access to cnd on both weapon sets.
Yes! I thought I was going mad last night. I started first noticing it in WVW but it was zergy at the time, so I just figured it was lag. Then, I proceeded to hit up orr for some completions and started noticing that my 2nd cnd wasn’t stealthing me. This, coupled with the Assassin’s signet putting me in combat on activation and wasting my 15% dmg on auto attack has soured my taste for this patch. (Unless they actually buffed vital shot, then, yay!)
This allows p/d condition builds to actually open up with steal>cnd>stealth “unload”. I can’t wait to try it out (though it sounds like it’s bugged according to the poster above). Before, I never had any reason to look at that signet.
I agree with the kiting approach. There’s nothing worse that blowing your Thieves guild wad, and then having a guy kite them away. I typically use my TG as a closer since I’m a cond. spec thief, and usually only against multiple opponents.
P/D is my favorite set. Although what I don’t understand is the #3 shadowstrike ability. It seems to me that the #3 ability should be swapped w/D/P. I have to basically play P/D in melee range, and there’s no reason for me to shadowstep away and auto attack. I need to be close to land CnD to keep my stealth bleed chain going. What I could use is the gap closing shadowstep from D/P. D/P already has a gap closer in heartseeker. P/D desperately needs a gap closer. That said, it sounds like you have a slightly different playstyle.
