Guild Wars 2

If you try to do JUST the storyline it will fast out level you, I made a new warrior fairly recently as a char and by time I was level 7 I was upto the level 14 story quest which obviously not doable at half the level.

And that was with a bit of level grinding at an earlier level.

You don’t have to do ALL the heart quests you can potentially get enough levels without depending on how many dynamic events you take part in, how well you do in them and how many and what you kill (with XP bonuses for killing old mobs etc)

However doing the hearts both helps with map completion, fills in a bit of story of the area AND puts you in position to find local dynamic events.

So if your at the point where your story quest has outleveled you too much its pretty much time to head back and do some hearts (either old ones you missed or move to new ones that are level appropriate, either works just as well)

With the downscaling you also have to be wary of being on the edge of two scaled area’s

So many times have I been casually wtfpwning things on a level 80 character in low level zones then suddenly BAM killed by mobs randomly not taking any damage.

I check their levels and its something like level 14 wolves in red numbers, I check my downscaled level at the bottom of the screen: “8” well darn…

I go back fight them again but this time I move a bit past where they where stood and then im scaled down to level 14 (or sometimes higher depending on the exact zones)

wouldn’t work for me, everything BUT the might, fury and vuln stack yellow boxes where adjustable

Oh and the Custom gear boxes

after downloading it and working on the numbers it seems a lot more accurate in general, but it still works on the assumption of 25 stacks of might, perma fury and 25 stacks of vuln which for a thief isn’t exactly a common situation.

That said I don’t take the spreadsheets DPS calcs I use the combined damage and work the dps out manually as im not sure exactly how they calculated reuse times and such as some skills work differently from others.

HS is generally not going to get them that far if they are using it to escape the speed it actually gives isn’t exactly brilliant and could only be used 4-6 times depending on traits before waiting on initiative. Just cripple, chill or immobilize them during that time, immobilize roots them in spot the other 2 reduce the distance HS travels to the point where its almost pointless to have tried.

Then you have Infiltrators arrow, which can be used twice back to back if you have full initiative then its approximately 8 seconds between each extra one, so if they have been trying to use HS (or attacking) before switching they most likely will only get 1 off, utilizing repeated infiltrators arrows will give a speed of around that of swiftness (perhaps a tiny bit faster) if you just chase them once the run out of initiative they won’t really get much further without utility support (for another shadow step and such)

Against signet of shadows just use swiftness, you’ll move faster than they will unless they use swiftness too at which point you’ll both be moving swiftness speed.

Worst case scenario is they are using signet of shadows AND infiltrators shot AND shadowstep utility at which point they have a good chance to escape through the 3 shadowsteps generally being enough to break LoS and annoy people, actual speed wise though, running at swiftness speed would eventually catch them up unless they have traited and built for lots of initiative regen and/or are using swiftness themselves (again requiring a fairly specific trait build)

Of course if you have any “mobility” moves yourself you’ll be able to keep up or in some cases overtake them easily, as others said profs like Ele, warrior and ranger can general keep up if not overtake completely.

swinsk.6410:

Dasorine.1964:

Except stand just outside the field and still hit them

You do know that if you are in a 1v1 with someone you don’t have to stand directly in the middle. You can just stand on the edge furthest away from your enemy and he won’t hit you.

Just saying positioning works both ways…

Then they just need to stand on the other side and have no problems hitting you etc etc yes if they stand in the small field they will be blinded but there is generally no reason other than to stop a second stealth stack for them to do so in most circumstances

Very much a problem of how you’d calculate the % as others have said.

Armour isn’t a % decrease its a divider, to get a % based reduction you have to compare 2 sets of numbers rather than it just being X amount of armour reduces damage by X% like other games tend towards.

For example if you are taking 1000 damage with 2000 armour, if you raise your armour by 500 to 2500 you will now be taking 800 damage for a total of a 20% damage reduction over what you where doing with 2000, if you raise it another 500 to 3000 your now taking 666 damage which compared to your 2500 is around 16% less damage but compared to your 2000 armour is nearing the 40% damage reduction.

The % always vary between the comparisons and such, with damage their is an easy solution when calculating power and thats just to compare actual damage gains rather than convert it into percentage, so rather than saying 10 power gives me 1% damage increase if I have 1000 power you state 10 power gives me 5 damage with that skill.

With armour there is no real simple statement you can make other than “You have X amount of armour, this is how much you are dividing your enemys damage by” which gives you exactly how much your reducing the damage by but in an almost useless and hard to compare way.

I mean technically you could convert the divider into a percentage so for example at 2000 armour your taking 0.05% of the damage the enemy is dealing which again isn’t really that informative “Wow Im taking less than 1% of their damage?! woo!” you could then express that in terms of % reduction, at 2000 armour you are reducing the targets damage be 99.95% at 3000 armour your reducing damage by 99.966666(reaccuring) % and so on so forth

Except stand just outside the field and still hit them

tbh with as long as the fight went on before he ran back his cooldowns would have cycled around 3 times so he probably just got bored or was seeing his server was pushing something and decided that instead of spending another 3 minutes fighting the battle that the thief is sitting away hiding from he’d actually go do some WvW

Teamkiller.4315:

Grimwolf.7163:

Teamkiller.4315:

I have a D/P thief and it’s troll in terms of survivability.

Then why would you suggest hitting with Heartseeker through a Smoke Field cause Revealed?
Combos are supposed to be helpful; if they did that then 99% of the time you’d only get Revealed. Smoke Fields would become massive liability.
You’d only bring it down from the top by completely negating any viability of it.
The set itself is far from overpowered anyway; the other options are just that much more terrible.

Because you hit someone “after” stealthing, plain and simple? There should be a way to counter D/P stealth, and allowing yourself to be hit by that heartseeker skill should be one way to counter. Of course, the thief can “counter” that by turning off autotargeting, he wouldn’t hit the other player unless the other player was in his black powder field or something. Wouldn’t you say it’s fair? He would still get off his stealth the vast majority of the time, unless the other player put himself at risk by going into melee with pulsing blinds on him.

When I said troll in terms of survivability, I meant it’s REALLY survivable. And this is coming from someone who isn’t even good at D/P.

So then should CnD give you revealed every time also?

It wouldn’t be a combination attack if you didn’t get the combo effect when you attacked, the first time you do it you finish the attack before getting the stealth, if you happened to try it again and still hit someone you do already get revealed same as if you hit someone with CnD while stealthed already.

What your suggesting basically means this one singular combination attack would only work if you didn’t attack.

tbh it sort of sounds like people are confusing crit chance (technically capped at 100% as you can’t crit more than 100% of the time) and crit damage (which as far as I’ve seen is no hard capped at 100% additional critical damage)

Issues.5789:

randomfightfan.4091:

Issues.5789:

TheBandicoot.5294:

Issues.5789:

Edit: I personally like the 4 second stealth change, as 3 second was very very OP imo; thieves just don’t want to admit it because they liked perma stealth and backstabs lol.

Wait. How in hell do people get the idea a 4s revealed will stop thieves from perma-stealthing? It NEVER stopped perma-stealthing because you can still perfectly time CnD to restealth and you can still chain smokescreen/shadow refuge/ smokescreen! What makes you think a 4s revealed is preventing thieves from doing that?

All this nasty 4s revealed does is nerfing the damage output of players who play their thief like it is meant to be played. Quickly entering and leaving stealth. This nerf hit the wrong side of the coin, so to speak.

It should be reverted in EVERY gamemode and instead it should be applied whenever the stealth “boon” (that nice little symbol you have when you are stealthed) disappears, no matter how, be it because it ran out or because the user broke it with an attack.

And while i am at it… i seriously ope this patch will finally align thieves with other classes in PvE, mainly the currently existing trinity of guardians, mesmers and warriors. Nothing a thief does is what a thief excels at, thats why almost no group asks for thieves – or any other class besides the trinity. I dont want to be a rezzing bot or the stealthing kitten to bypass trash groups, i want to bring something to the table. And currently its neither superior damage, support or control. ArenaNet, please make us thieves and the other missfits worthwhile to be taken in a dungeon group!

My bad, not perma stealth, but those 10/30/30 D/D backstab builds were overpowered. People had like 18k hp, did c+d and would backstab for 7-8k+ and then spam 1 for 3 times, very short, then c+d again, now you have to stay out in stealth for quite some time so the opponent knows where you are instead of almost going back in and bursting for a lot of damage.

not really sure what you’re saying here as it doesn’t make much sense but you’re wrong on the numbers you posted. If someone is 10-30-30 backstab build, they will have 10k hp (full zerker) not 18k. 30 into sa gives 0 vitality, it’s toughness and healing. Also that build very, much so, isn’t overpowered. It’s a noob slayer build. Doesn’t mean only bad players use it, just means when used against bad players, it makes them cry. Against good players, it can be hard to win if you don’t first take them by complete surprise.

I tried it out once because I was lost and then decided to make my own builds; but I had 18-19k hp. I use Power Vitality Toughness gear alongside Ruby Orbs and even on level 80 players averaged 6-8k backstabs and was only out of stealth for not even a full rotation of 1 on my D/D, before I could C+D again.

Then you where getting some bad latency, with a D/D auto attack chain being 2 seconds long and even pre-nerf revealed duration being 3 seconds long what you were seeing was not revealed being shorter than your 1 D/D auto attack rotation but your D/D auto attack rotation being longer than your revealed duration due to delay in starting it and other similiar issues.

Before the nerf there was of course culling which gave you 2 seconds of the enemy not seeing you after you break stealth however you yourself wouldn’t see yourself invisible and of course that was “fixed” in the same patch as the nerf, now of course it seems they are realizing with culling fixed and such there is little reason to extend the revealed duration in a way that muchs up people rotations while not preventing any cheesy “perma-stealth” (Which again I must reiterate is doing very little to zero damage while being almost completely vulnerable) and giving negligible effects on peoples attitudes to how long the thief is stealthed (people still think thieves running the basic backstab burst spec are stealth 90% of the time)

technically beserker isn’t a defensive build unless someone in the team are rolling toughness, if there isn’t then your likely to still be pulling the aggro.

If your pulling with secondary toughness your already topping multiple parts of the aggro table which, unless your humping the bosses leg, is most likely to include the dps table, switching to bezerker removes that from the calculation to the same level as the other 4 ‘zerkers however your still topping any other list and would most likely be hitting even further ahead in say highest dpser meaning now your still going to be getting aggro but now you don’t have that extra defense.

So unless you bring back the trinity in someway your always going to have to decide on something to sacrifice to drop aggro in a team full of worse players in the same gear.

So yeah either you can have no trinity and allow everyone to have the same chance of being chosen to “tank” depending on play skill and such at the cost of a few people who have defensive stats for personal reasons in teams with people who dont but also don’t seem to be pulling impressive damage get aggro, you can remove any real choice of building “tanky” if they want with the general vibe of the game being they don’t want to so that aggro then becomes random or more focused on the squishier people (thus more deaths overall) or you can just give up and put in a proper trinity system so those that want to just dps full out with no thought and no thought about the quality of their team can at the expense of any issues a full trinity system brings.

Arganthium.5638:

Lol. There were a lot of hits and misses here. I thought that you used your Shadow Returns very well, and your diversion was excellent. That being said, there were a lot of chances for you to stunbreak via Shadow Return that you missed out on. :P also, can’t believe the warrior decided to try and revive the mes during the battle, lol.

It seems to be something about warriors, almost every thief gib vid I’ve seen where the thief downs someone in the middle of a group fight against them the warrior ALWAYS stops everything to start rezzing…

It seems to be like a big shiny blue light to them…

Humorless.1573:

Dasorine.1964:

While the revealed on all stealth end would “fix” the issue of CnD spammers who are annoying people by sitting around invisible next to them not hurting them it would still nerf thieves playing properly who are for instance trying to flee or use it defensively in other circumstances.

Theres really little need for either of the changes.

If there’s no need then it shouldn’t hurt thieves that much either.

If nerfing mug is all it takes to destroy all viable burst specs (which is what some people seem to think) then there’s something wrong with that regardless. A mandatory trait if you want to burst anything? lol

And mug damage isn’t going to get nerfed by 90%. Arenanet isn’t very good at balancing but they’re not stupid enough to nerf it by that much. And who knows, even buffing backstab would be acceptable as a general buff to dagger burst… it would be OP right now, possible after mug is toned down. Not saying it’ll happen, but it’s one of the things that -could- be done thanks to this nerf.

There being no need for a nerf doesn’t suddenly make implementing that nerf benign, in fact it makes implementing that nerf WORSE because your essentially nerfing something that was average to below average.

Also I never said mug was needed by all viable burst specs what I said is mug is only POWERFUL in burst specs outside of burst specs that 1.5 damage coefficient every 45 seconds is not going to be that noticeable it at best boosts 1 attack up by that much which considering the low coefficients of thief skills essentially means every 45 seconds you get 1 attack thats equivalent to someone elses big hitter.

What Im saying is having mug where it is, doing what it does doesn’t really stop them improving other area’s of the thief as those other area’s are not area’s generally utilized by the thieves that get the real benefit from mug and if other types of thieves got the additional buffs the fact that they still have that bit of damage from mug fairly easily won’t suddenly make it broken either.

There has been too much nerfing for nerfings sake going on, nerfing things that aren’t particularly powerful themselves in the hope of solving something completely unrelated and such and the attitude of some thieves that seem to think they get to decide how a thief is meant to be played and look down on other methods of play (regardless of how valid I personally think those methods of play really are) isn’t helping the matter.

While the revealed on all stealth end would “fix” the issue of CnD spammers who are annoying people by sitting around invisible next to them not hurting them it would still nerf thieves playing properly who are for instance trying to flee or use it defensively in other circumstances.

Theres really little need for either of the changes.

Mugs power is often grossly overestimated its only as much damage as cloak and dagger itself.

All of its “power” comes with the instant nature with the shadowstep on steal in the burst combination, outside of that combination its essentially a cloak and dagger on a 45 second cooldown.

So unless the buffs to other builds and aspects of the thief would directly benefit that specific burst build without sacrificing their damage which is unlikely its not really stopping any reasonable increases where needed.

Zacchary.6183:

In a game that is constantly rebalanced, it is impossible for something to be truely overpowered because it all boils down to who complains harder. WoW goes through this. Runescape goes through this.

Even if something is truely overpowered, there is always a way to counter it. Yet people would rather gain the advantage from the nerf than find one.

Not entirely true, there has been occasions in such games when something truly broken gets dropped in, though these cases tend to be akin to exploits that may possibly be counterable but only in extreme slim chance fashion.

That said nothing the thief does really reaches that level at all, the fact that good players are having no issues against thieves and thieves lack of real high tier presence sort of shows it too.

Siva Mira.3546:

A good Thief never stacked stealth in front of you and if he want to run away he would use SR.

Exactly why the complaint about thieves stacking stealth mid combat using BP+HS being “OP” is silly

Siva Mira.3546:

Walking into their smoke and you will be dead before you knew it. HS+BP won’t get revealed on hit, instead you deal damage and then stealth and that is where the true strength of this set lies.

D/P is the hardest Thief to kill followed by S/D. To tweak these they need to rework Shadow’s Embrace and cap the stealth duration at 6sec. But what is the point of doing this when they left Ele/Mesmer/Guardian/Engie/Necro/Ranger sitting at the top of everything?

IMO, brings down all the OP builds to the same level of everyone else and then they can sit down and take their kitten sweet time and improve everything from there. Instead of keeping the Kings as a king while making the Slaves look a little richer while hoping that everyone will be using the Slaves instead of Kings. It is not going to happened anytime soon if this keep up.

Well HS would only hit and stealth if it was the first HS if they are going for the second application the hit would reveal them.

Throw in the fact that using BP+HS to stack stealth in middle of combat, well you get 4 seconds to do it, you at base have enough initiative for 2 jumps for a total of 6 seconds of stealth (if the first isn’t prevented and the second isn’t interrupted by jumping into them) with a bit of init regain you can squeeze off a third however the third one generally will come about 3 seconds after the first one… which means you use up more or less the entire first application of stealth to get the third one, giving no real net gain (sure technically you’d have been stealthed for 9 seconds but you’d still only have about 4 seconds of “usable” stealth either way as you’d still be in the same rough area which is a bad thing to be)

Hehe having experienced TF2 matches where 1 team went all spy its a great way to be entertained by standing around not doing anything..

Sitting on a point with your entire team wondering where the heck the enemy is for 10 minutes before they finally sneak into their strike range only to be instantly gibbed by a group people who are starting to get very bored with all their moves available the moment they became visible.

Even sillier when it comes as x v x where everyone is the stealth prof, all very much depends on the set up and first kill after a lot of waiting as they slowly piggy back themselves unseen into where they think the enemy might be

I’d join for the laughs but my new internet connections still being broken in.

Ahh the joys of WvW and hotjoin sPvP

Its also a bit of a symptom of 1v1 fights in team based pvp arena’s.

They don’t (for me at least).

Im pretty much expecting blanket nerfs, we will get 3s revealed back in PvE and PVP but then at the last minute they’ll reduce all stealth durations by 1s, mug will be removed and/or steal will have double cooldown time… yeah.

I have zero faith that we won’t get some form of ridiculous unwarranted nerf and no glimpse of any sort of buff or actual “mobility” or boon hate introductions (ever)

Also at issues: 3 second reveal by definition is not perma stealth.

There is no permastealth that isn’t just sitting in the corner somewhere away from any enemies spamming all your utilities and initiative endlessly on cooldown

As others say, its really a mixture of things that the average ranger player does.

Standing at the back of the pack is the most vulnerable spot when there are thieves around, they aren’t going to hit someone in the middle of the zerg because of how little time it would take a group of people to kill them in that situation, the front of the zerg is even worse because you have the most alert people AND all the attacks you need to dodge past (else your just becoming an invisible meatshield for the guardian the shots where going for)

This means they are in one of the best positions for a thief to prey on, coupled with other glass cannon ranged users.

Secondly many many ranger players are not used to moving, considering how many rangers complained when the daily dodger was put in about how its hard for them to get and how they’ve never needed to dodge before… yeah well if you don’t learn/use dodge your dead, doubly so against a person whose damage would significantly drop if their target was moving/turning etc.

Then of course you have a couple of other reasons that some thieves may disagree on, rangers are actually a pretty big threat to thieves.

If they get to shoot at the thief from range theres not a great deal said thief can do, specially with moves such as rapid fire which channels through stealth and barrage thats a wide aoe that also slows down, and of course traps are a big bane to thieves.

Add in pets not forgetting about you the moment you stealth like 80% of the player base.

So its a mixture of picking on one of the easier targets for a thief and neutralizing one of the bigger potential threats, of course that doesn’t mean the thief is always going to win, theres lots of good rangers out there that can take thieves down.

The cheapest ones /sarcasm

It really depends what you want out of your weapon, they work just like above ground sigils so basically copying one from there onto it would probably be best (most likely a “On kill stacking” sigil so going underwater doesnt slow your stack gainining)

But really… personally I wouldn’t bother Im just using what ever was on the weapon when it dropped myself (heck my harpoon gun is still a level 50 green because I use it that little)

well the idea is to let the tankiest person take the hits while also forcing fragile dps’ers to monitor their skill usage, unfortunately it sounds like you were the tankiest (with the most armour) and fairly high if not the highest on the dps table.

Its sort of working how it should to a point, but there are a few issues with it, namely no “zerker” equivilence for people trying to run a condition damage dealer (best you get is the condi, power, vit stuff).

Though do think that perhaps conditions score a bit higher on the agro table than others as my condition thief build pulls and holds aggro quite insanely (with only 50 toughness higher than base)

Josh Foreman.8250:

1. I’m almost certain they will be like every other piece of temporary content. Gone when the event is over.

2. Yet to be determined.

3. Probably not. See answer 1.

See my issue is that there hasn’t really been that much temporary content that isn’t reasonably expected to come again at a certain time.

I mean if you take seasonal content as the example yes you can no longer get the items once the holiday is over but next holiday (if this is like GW1 or certain other games) you’ll be able to get them again, possibly in a different way and perhaps not as easily as the previous year (some games I’ve played have “replica” versions that are gained for doing specific content during the holiday whole the new stuff that year is easier to get).

Outside of the holiday events the only “temporary” content I can currently think of that gave anything “permanent” would be the karka event which is people took part in it gave them an Ancient Karka Shell and a 20 slot box. However the Ancient Karka Shell is still obtainable after the event had disappeared and the 20 slot box offers no real prestige. This being content thats most likely never going to reappear yet still allows the special loot to be obtained compared to what your suggesting with SAB which is content that reappears but doesn’t offer the same reward for doing the same content each time it does appear.

Out side of gem store limited items I can’t think of anything else thats been “temporary” in game with no imaginable way of them returning the next time that content appears.

RedSpectrum.1975:

Uruz Six.6594:

I should agree with Dasorine, but right now I’m just too fond of Hide In Shadows stealth and condition cleaning.

Doesnt it heal you the most too? And as for the aggro dropping, Ive said this before, I dont get why people are still worried about this. The enemies wont continue to attack you while you are in stealth, this just means they wont walk back to thier spawn anymore when they dont see you, and you have 3 seconds to escape or reposition

That sort of depends, it heals you the most for a single click at 5760 every 30 seconds (with regen counted), withdraw in 30 seconds can heal 8668 with 2 activations, signet of malice heals hits over 30 seconds Number of hits x 100 (at level 80 with no healing power)

However once you start traiting stealth hide in shadows can potentially heal a lot more in the same way using AoE’s and multi-hit attacks will make SoM heal a lot more.

For example a D/D thief using death blossom after bottoming out on initiative, dagger auto attack and caltrops can potentially heal 7600 over the 30 seconds with an additional 2800 for each additional target in range (upto 5 limit of course)

tbh it almost entirely depends on your build and playstyle.

If your playing as a high shadow arts backstab user than hide in shadows is almost always going to be better for you while if your doing an AoE build or a rapid fire build that gets lots of hits Signet of Malice is going to be better than either of the other 2.

Withdraw is a good middle ground that works well if your doing something like an acrobatic build or doing heavy kiting (at which point its a toss up between SoM’s better healing or withdraws mobility and cc remover)

Sarrow.2785:

lLobo.7960:

A stealthing thief fighting against a heavy condition build needs to stay in stealth all the time to cleanse. This mostly shuts-down the thief if there is constant conditions being applied.
I dont think its OP…

I don’t agree with this at all. A large part of a dagger/x thief’s rotation will be stealth, burst, stealth burst, stealth burst, etc. Forcing the thief to stealth is hardly shutting us down; it’s allowing for the next backstab and a natural part of dagger/x gameplay..

As to shadow’s embrace being op – 2 conditions cleared every stealth is pretty strong. I don’t feel as though dagger/x takes too much advantage of this though as it’s very easy to shutdown cloak and dagger, however dagger/pistol pushes this trait into the realm of overpowered. I don’t believe that this is the fault of shadow’s embrace – it’s the d/p that needs tweaking. This is a pattern that sheds light on d/p’s need for change. With the right build, the AoE blind shuts down melee classes, shadow’s embrace cleansing conditions ‘on call’ shuts cond. classes down hard, easy access to stealth and having the ability to stay in stealth for longer durations if you choose – all this without sacrificing a tremendous deal of damage.

Everytime I see a fellow thief heartseeking through blackpowder over and over I admit I roll my eyes. It’s unarguably effective but it’s just so lame.

Problem is if they are utilizing stealth as their attack rotation they either wont be getting the 2 conditions cleared per stealth or they are attacking really slowly.

Then you have to factor in thieves low health pool that already makes them more vulnerable to conditions without the healing support the other 2 lowest health tier professions have access to.

In all it can be powerful to a degree but I don’t think its overly powerful when you bring in all the different factors to it.

As for BP+HS combo… well thats another debatably powerful move, yes it allows them to get upto 6 seconds stealth at range but it costs basically all of their initiative its also counterable with anything that prevents the heartseeker going off/reaching far enough granted it does bring in some defensive aspect to the thief with the ranged blind (melee blind technically as well because there is always going to be someone stupid enough to stand in the field) however again this is a defensive effect on someone with little to no other defenses at that point

Using the numbers in that spread sheet for the thief (assuming same gear as warrior)

The rotation of CnD → Backstab → One full Autoattack chain → repeat comes out as 5245.6 dps

Compared to a warrior rotation of Axe autoattack chain which comes out as 6018.9 dps…

So curious to how you worked out your numbers.

Just no, the thief is already debatably nerfing himself and his team by sitting in the middle of no where doing something that burns a utility and potentially already leaves them vulnerable.

If the GC dies to that then lucky thief else its a thief that is essentially loosing the game for the team. And what if the only person to go past isn’t a glass cannon? the initial burst is going to be weaker than normal so the thief is already behind where someone not trying to gank newbie GC’s would be and that thief is most likely a dead thief and still not accomplishing much for the team. (the short period that such a thief would survive against a competent player might buy their team enough time to cap something, maybe)

If the GC didn’t want to instantly die to a burst out of no where they wouldn’t run glass cannon, its why I just jumped into sPvP on my level 20 warrior bunged zerker gear on and was sat in a corner 1 shotting people as they came past with kill shot.

Thats just it a really experienced player isn’t going to take 17k damage from backstab and mug, so it comes down to a a completely noob thief can waste his time and rely purely on luck to maybe kill another complete noob running around without and defense.

Just like anyone else can drop a burst out of no where if they get lucky as well.

The only time this would become and issue is if a thief could run around permanently stealthed with no downsides AND if backstab actually did the ridiculous damage your stating without a lot of set up and sacrifice.

Basically it comes down to people thinking thieves are able to realistically maintain stealth impermanently out of combat thus giving no possible way to allow people to know they are there, which is not true.

That thief shadow refuging is burning a 1 minute cooldown for 15 seconds of stealth at best with no guarantee they will meet anyone within those 15 seconds and no guarantee someone wont stroll past his little house and throw him out of it.

Any other time the thief is either burning up important cooldowns or is accepting they don’t have permanent stealth and thus engaging in fights with ways that allow people to potentially see them before hand.

Even if that thief gets lucky with the shadow refuge camping they’d only manage the 1 hit, backstab (not a full mug+cnd chain) which does very little damage by itself compared to other kill moves with the mug and cnd generally averaging more damage.

All the while all the other big single skill bursts hit far harder and can have the same situation by hiding in a corner somewhere that you won’t see them immediately or such rather than burning a utility and hoping you wander past.

Only if everyone elses attacks that have a damage coefficient of 2.4 or higher are also not allowed until people decide they are acceptable.

Not to mention it really wouldn’t change anything other than perhaps seeing more use of caltrops/choking gas from these mythical “perma-stealth” thieves that can start fights with out ever being seen.

Actually you’d only need to know how stat scaling goes which we do but meh, I’ve put the maths up, I’ve argued my case and all you’ve done is gones “no your wrong! ARMOUR! your full of kitten because an incomplete wiki page is incomplete!”

So yeah, do what ever you want, others can look through and make their own decisions based on what I’ve ran the numbers for and what you’ve just yelled about.

phor.7952:

Dasorine.1964:

Well for example I just tested against a level 10 ettin, a level 10 wasp and a level 10 moa and a level 10 bear.

And where exactly did you find a level 10 wasp? Beastiary shows the only lvl 10 wasp is a veteran in Queensdale.
I’m beginning to think you’re completely full of kitten at this point and just don’t want to admit to being wrong.

Phinney waypoint in queensdale

phor.7952:

Dasorine.1964:

And its actually the opposite power takes the lead straight away its not until later that condition can really match it.

Take my level 1 example, with a white bow that has an average damage of 124.5 20 power increases the damage by 25 damage while 20 condition damage only raises the damage by 12 per detonation for a difference of 13 damage gain with only a 7 point difference to begin with in the favour of condition.

You are ignoring armor again.
Jesus dude. Give it up.

That was with armour calculated in from tooltip (I made a level 1 thief specifically to get those numbers) as shown in the calculation!

As you level up yes the mobs armour goes up as does your base damage and such in the same fashion, every 10 levels the scaling of power gets a tiny bit weaker due to the way things scale so there will be a certain point where at base condition damage starts scaling better but thats not until much higher where power gets helped by everything else.

So unless you have some actual proper maths and/or in game evidence to back up YOUR claims like I do mine your the one thats just calling me full of kitten because you don’t want to be wrong.

Well for example I just tested against a level 10 ettin, a level 10 wasp and a level 10 moa and a level 10 bear, on average I hit the etting for 170 damage, the wasp and moa my average was around 180 damage and on the bear I was only hitting around 150 on average.

And its actually the opposite power takes the lead straight away its not until later that condition can really match it.

Take my level 1 example, with a white bow that has an average damage of 124.5 20 power increases the damage by 25 damage while 20 condition damage only raises the damage by 12 per detonation for a difference of 13 damage gain with only a 7 point difference to begin with in the favour of condition.

Condition has better base scaling as you go up through the levels due to the way all the primary stats are scaled however even at the higher levels the sheer number of different aspects you can get that effect power still puts it in the lead because while conditions have condition duration as well power has critical chance, critical damage, % damage increases, vulnerability and sheer number of hits to name a few.

Hard to say in that lighting, the chart aeonblade gives probably your best bet, though it could potentially be one of the new frost dyes

Well take for example the test golems in the mists each has a different armour type to test, this granted could just be for PvP testing and all mobs could have the exact armour the tooltip uses to calculate (so all mobs at 80 have 2600) but this is unlikely.

I used 800 because it is a fair amount higher than the heavy player will have at base, it could be more at which point yes condition damage wins over power if your only ever hitting with cluster bomb, but it could equally be lower in which case cluster bombing it only would result in even more damage for the power build.

And of course in this scenario its giving the condition build one of its best comparisons as its not calculating in anything like thief signets, traits that increase direct damage by %’s or crit rate or crit damage etc, any other attacks utilized during the last 4 seconds of bleeding etc etc etc.

Another way to look at what scales better is to see how much each stat takes to double the base damage of their component of the attack.

For condition damage doubling the base bleed damage works on the formula of 10xlevel+50 so at level 40 where base bleed is 22.5 damage a tick to double that takes 450 condition damage taking it to the 45 damage a tick level.

For power to double the direct damage all it requires is twice the base amount of power, at level 40 that is at the 314 power level.

Now ok this only shows that powers scaling better it doesn’t show the exact numbers but if the two base damage amounts are close to even as they are on cluster bomb (base condition damage of a detonated cluster bomb is only slightly ahead of the base average non-critical direct damage) then the one with the better scaling will end up doing more damage.

What this ends up meaning that at low levels condition scales the worst compared to power so unless the base condition damage is so much higher than the base direct damage your going to be behind however at later levels condition starts scaling better (at level 80 it takes 916 power to double base damage compared to only 850 condition damage) however at those levels you also have other factors coming in that help boost powers damage up above the condition damage even with the lower base scaling.

Again this is all only on paper, in actual practice power still comes way out ahead due to the limitations presented in game, such as initiative preventing constant cluster bombing and permanent 12 stacks of bleeds compared to the damage gained by power simply by autoattacking while waiting as well as gains from aforementions sigils, signets, direct damage gain effects, combination of crit and crit damage etc etc etc.

Ahh yeah sorry not slept much, but the main point still stands going from 0.1% to a 0.2% is double the chance not a 10% increase.

yeah thats a 2 out of 10 not a 2 out of 1000… am I the only one that can see those 2 extra 0’s?

If you have a 1 in 1000 chance of getting something and then you suddenly get a 2 in 1000 chance of finding it thats twice as much chance to find it (essentially becoming a 1 in 500 chance)

So if you didnt have any magic find you’d find that item once every 1000 kills, with 100% magic find you’d find that item TWICE every 1000 kills statistically.

Granted in reality having 100% MF doesnt guarantee double the loot simply because the way rolls are done but its fairly close to halving the amount of kills you need for any given drop.

“Everytime you kill a monster you roll on a number of tables, inside these tables are different rarity categories. Magic find increases the chances you will get higher categories. For example if there is a 1 in 10 category, and you have 200% magic find you will have 3/10 chances to get that category. This improves not just the rarity of the items you get but can also improve your chances at getting trophies and rare crafting materials like lodestones.”

What one of the ANet people said about it, basically magic find increases your chance of all loot types you’ll get less empty loots and potentially less greys and maybe some less whites (though bags tend to be calculated above whites) but in return more blues including t6 mats if your lucky.

As for kill speed vs loot chance, if you have 100% MF you need to have similiar loot rate you’d have to kill twice as many in the same time period as without that MF, considering MF gear doesn’t slow you that much its basically a preference…

Though there is/was diminishing returns on loot at some point but I can’t remember which one it effected most.

Black powder, drops a small blinding patch around you that stops many enemies being able to hit you.

Well I’ve not seen much exact lore about it but yeah thieves do utilize magic to some extent to travel through shadows and hide themselves in plain sight etc.

The most obvious way to see this is looking at some of the shadow arts trait lines, stuff like infusion of shadow and shadow’s rejuvenation clearly hint towards them manipulating shadows beyond just hiding in them.

Well I did but you ignored it and spewed some of your own confusing maths.

Bleed always scales at 20 condition damage = 1 more damage on your bleed but power is multiplicative.

So lets redo the maths based on level 40, its a nice midway level.

First of all the stats you have at level 40 (damage stats only as thats what we are interested in) lets simplify it and focus on just the armour and the weapon due to varying eligibility of the trinkets and such, also no upgrade items due to variance of runes, lets just do raw base stats for a level 40 in just blue armour and weapon.

For a condition damage build:

314 base power
314 base precision + 99 from ravaging armour and bow for a total of 413 precision which comes out as at level 40 as 18% crit chance
137 condition damage from armour and bow + 200 from 20 points in trickery for a total of 337 condition damage
339 average damage for bow.

For a power damage build:

314 base power + 137 power from armour and bow + 200 from 20 points in deadly arts for a total of 651 power
314 base precision + 99 from armour and bow for a total of 413 precision which comes out as 18% crit chance
339 average damage for bow.

Now for the damage calculations, lets say you put all 12 initiative into shotgunned cluster bombs for both builds so this is just on the damage from 1 skills, ignoring the damage given from autoattacks and other attacks etc while waiting on initiative for these calculations the enemy armour is taken as 800 as thats a good rough number of what a heavy armoured mob at that level might have:

Condition damage build:

12 stacks of bleed for 4 seconds calculation:

Base bleed damage = 0.05*337 + 0.5*40 + 2.5 for 39.35 damage a tick

39.35 × 12 = 472.2 damage a second

472.2 × 4 = 1888.8 damage total from bleeds

Direct damage calculation:

339 × 0.5 × 314 / 800 = 66.53 damage per mini bomb

66.53 × 3 = 199.59 base per detonation

199.59 * ((0.5 * (18/100)) + 1) = 217.55 expected damage per burst with crits

217.55 * 4 = 870.2 total direct damage

Total damage output = 1888.8 + 870.2 = 2759 damage

Direct damage build:

12 stacks of bleed for 4 seconds calculation:

Base bleed damage = 0.5*40 + 2.5 for 22.25 damage a tick

22.25 × 12 = 267 damage a second

267 × 4 = 1068 damage total from bleeds

Direct damage calculation:

339 × 0.5 × 651 / 800 = 137.93 damage per mini bomb

137.93 × 3 = 413.79 base per detonation

413.79 * ((0.5 * (18/100)) + 1) = 451.03 expected damage per burst with crits

451.03 * 4 = 1804.12 total direct damage

Total damage output = 1068 + 1804.12 = 2872.12 damage

SO Condition build: 2759 Power build 2872 damage which is higher?

For the very basic level:

20 condition damage = 1 damage per bleed per second
So with 3 bleeds for 4 seconds that 20 condition damage gives you a total of 12 damage per detonation

20 power with the blue level 40 bow average damage and 18% crit chance would give: (339 * 0.5 * 20 / 800) * ((0.5*(18/100))+1) * 3 = 13.85 damage per detonation

Just for example at level 1 with a level 0 white shortbow with base crit chance (4%) with the tooltip armour (around 150 armour at level 1 is used for calculations) power scales at: 124.5 (average white bow damage) * 0.5 (mini bomb coefficient) * 20 (20 power for comparison against 20 condition damage) / 150 = 8.3 damage

8.3 * ((0.5*(4/100)+1) (this is the crit calculation as per wiki with base crit chance and crit damage) = 8.466 damage

8.466 * 3 = 25.398 damage

So at level 1 with a level 0 white bow:

20 condition damage = +12 damage per cluster bomb detonation

20 power = +25 damage per cluster bomb detonation

So really conditions best chance of scaling better than power would be at level 80 due to the way they have the primary attributes and weapon damage scale but it still falls behind due to other mechanics that get introduced to power builds.

But with the condition build your not capitalizing on it, your focusing on the conditions which scale terribly in comparison. I mean those numbers didn’t even factor in the crit chance (which the condition build would get less return from) and such.

You also have the fact that power is a multiplier and condition damage isn’t

Granted for a thief outside of perhaps pistol/X conditions always going to be the weaker choice for the weapon but stating that shortbows better as condition outside of level 80 exotics is false. And if you really want to go condition thief the 2 other options are superior.

changes base power levels of a power build which is why my calculations for a level 40 character showed that power gave them better damage even in “blues” which means your assessment that it only works at level 80 with full exotics wrong.