Guild Wars 2

Trying to argue with Daecollo is like trying to argue with a brick wall.

SoM currently is fine for those people that have builds that can utilize it well, those who don’t have such builds will always get more benefit from the other 2 heals in any case.

If you increase the healing it does it will start doing way more healing than either of the two other heals, considering a dagger dagger thief can already outheal and untraited hide in shadows with it.

I assume by permanent swiftness you mean the fleet shadows buff?

well overall damage shortbow comes out better because of the better direct damage base (hence why Im stating its ideally a power based weapon not a condition damage one if your trying to utilize it as your primary weapon) but when it comes to sustaining damage from conditions alone the other two are superior in their own ways but loose out on the direct damage.

You gain base power as you level, you do not gain base condition damage.

Daeqar.8965:

Technically, the condition builds can outpace the direct damage builds in terms of long-term sustained damage – especially against targets with high toughness. The trick is you have to boost bleed durations a lot and running something with boosted initiative helps, too.

With food, a thief can get up to +125% bleed duration, which turns the normal 4 ticks of bleed into 7 ticks. Using point blank CB shotgun (pre-detonate at feet), combine with high condition damage and easily maintained 100% poison uptime and the condition build easily outstrips the direct damage IF there’s not condition removal going on. Dagger Storm is a good companion elite.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea to do, though. There’s a lot more to build value than damage in a vacuum.

One other thing… Shortbow PBAoE pre-detonated Clusterbomb is the highest sustained condition damage the thief class is capable of producing. No, Pistol MH and Leaping Death Blossom does not keep up. So, if Shortbow can’t produce competitive condition damage, then nothing else the Thief class does can either.

Actually dagger/dagger when built right has the highest sustained condition damage due to the longer durations.

If you have 100% condition duration and the +3 initiative base from trickery

Shortbow opens with 15 bleeds for 8 seconds with another 3 applied every 4 seconds (so with no extra initiative regen after the first 8 seconds it maintains 6 bleeds)

Compared to deathblossom which opens with 9 bleeds for 20 seconds and can maintain 9 bleeds through out the fight with no initiative gain, so initially has less bleeds but over time has more.

If you add extra initiative regen in death blossom gets more and more, if you reduce the condition duration deathblossom still wins etc.

And of course for safety pistol is best as you can do all of your bleeds at a distance that neither shortbow or daggers can match at the cost of being single target only.

Your calculations totally ignore the higher amount of direct damage stats you get.

60% of your condition damage to actual damage may sound better than that 42% but that 42% is 42% of a number thats going to be around twice that of the condition damage.

And yeah we aren’t given the PvE mob armour however they do tend to follow players armour roughly, at 80 2600 is a rough estimate of the high armour mobs which is also a rough estimate of what a balanced heavy armour build would be running at.

Actual damage wise unless the target your fighting has ridiculously high armour compared to an average norm the power build will always do more damage with the shortbow than the condition will with equivilent gear and thats before you factor in other things such as how terrible shortbow is for keeping conditions up compared to the other 2 condition build weapons.

Shortbow just simply isn’t a condition damage weapon.

the description for that oil is wrong, it adds precision just like the others

phor.7952:

I just want to make something clear so people don’t get confused.
Cluster is better with power/precision/crit at 80 while using an Exotic weapon.

While leveling and using a blue or green weapon, the (weapon damage/armor) portion of the direct damage equation hurts direct damage enough that condition damage comes out slightly ahead vs equal level PvE mobs and quite a bit ahead vs anything that’s over your level.

So it’s only “wrong” to build shortbow for condition damage at 80 with an exotic weapon.

That is not true though, I ran the calculations and power build always comes out ahead of condition damage even in optimal conditions for condition damage compared to just blue weapons for power because while the weapons lower damage scaling effects power the condition damage scales even worse at all times.

And of course there is the massive limitations of shortbow as a condition weapon, it just doesnt work well as one, any situation where it starts being “reasonable” other weapons choices far out do it for condition and a direct damage build with it is still better than its condition damage.

The only scenario where going condition build with shortbow beats direct damage builds for shortbow (outside of something grossly unfair like full rares for condition and naked for power) is if you fight something with insanely high armour

I have to ask the painfully obvious question but: You have turned autocast off it right?

Outside of having that still on them I can’t really think of anything that isnt just a complete bug

technically they will eventually scale up to ascended but yeah, additional damage from them is bad however if they changed the animation of already present autoattack chains (without effecting activation times etc) it would be cool.

Ahh fair enough outside of stacking 2 shadow refuges to skip twilight arbour last year I’ve never really bothered with a long duration stealth

If I remember correctly the stealth hard cap on duration was around 25 seconds

Im guessing because of the chaotic nature of a field that gives randomize conditions every second

Yep pretty much, Jump Shot is the only one that applies it in that specific way but as far as Im aware its also the only leap finisher move that hits more than once.

It would work like all the others if it was the second hit that was the leap finisher though.

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Dasorine.1964:

Aquin.3192:

I hope they realize this is screwed up and revert it… personal opinion. Same crap as heartseekering through black powder and hitting the heartseeker AND stealthing.

The heartseeker through black powder is intended, otherwise the stealth combo attack would be utterly pointless as a combo attack.

Then why does Jump Shot break it and cause Revealed if it damages something?
Disclaimer: I don’t know if other Leaps break it or not, since only Thief and Engineer have Smoke fields on land, making it far more difficult to test on anyone else.

Because jump shot gets it “leap finisher” aspect at the start of the leap (on the first instance of damage) meaning you stealth before you deal the second damage on landing due to its 2 hit aspect

All other leaps apply the finisher on landing (after they do their damage)

Aquin.3192:

I hope they realize this is screwed up and revert it… personal opinion. Same crap as heartseekering through black powder and hitting the heartseeker AND stealthing.

The heartseeker through black powder is intended, otherwise the stealth combo attack would be utterly pointless as a combo attack, it would be like Cloak and Dagger breaking the stealth it gives as it lands its hit.

If anythings a bit off its the ability to get the stealth (or any other combo attack buff) without actually landed the attack (thus it not actually being a combo attack) but its unlikely anythings going to change.

And yeah, you don’t get the damage from the shadowshot as you interrupt and cancel it with the backstab.

Cleyran Knight.8291:

@Dasorine
You’re right, but I know how it works.
Let me use your own example:
Player A puts all his burns that combine into 20 seconds for 100 damage per tick. Player B does the same, but his only deals 50 damage per tick. The monster died in less than 20 seconds.
How much damage player B did with his burn?

Also, bleeds have much higher (and even) durations (you can get Shrapnel Grenades to apply 4 stacks every 4 second for more than 20 seconds) and can easily be reapplied, so the DPS lost from the fractions of seconds that didn’t tick aren’t proportionally as important.

Well as I said, if player A keeps his up until the mob dies currently player B will never see any damage from his burn.

As for the bleed durations, theres a fair few 2s bleeds and due to the non stacking of durations on it all those fractional seconds are gone unlike duration stacking ones.

There are, as far as I am aware, no burn skills that only apply a single instance of 1s burn which means unless a target happens to dodge away or such those fractional seconds will rarely go completely to waste for them and while they don’t get bleeds higher base duration the fact that bleeds cannot be extended themselves by reapplication (rather they just get replaced with fresh versions) it sort of works out fairly even.

But all in all, it is pretty ridiculous/annoying that condition builds get this fairly massive downside while any other style of build doesn’t.

Technically Im guessing its because elementalist vapor form actually revives them for the duration, as does the warrior one, while our teleport we’re always “downed”

As for why this is the case, comes down to “Because its Anet”

but thats just it, its not another item to “go” for because out side the 1 month you get to “go” for it you don’t really have many options, sure there will be some on the TP but eventually those will be gone, the fact that your then going to be doing the same content other people did to get those rewards but without actually getting those rewards…

If you take your legendary example, its more like currently people get legendarys at some later patch that introduces new items if you do the same thing (farming everything up, getting the precursor etc) instead of getting the legendary like everyone else did, you get nothing or something completely different.

Atherakhia.4086:

Too similar to the necromancer mechanic IMO.

Is the reason for the change because you feel stealth is too powerful? Or because you feel the mechanics of it are too clunky?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with stealth in this game. It’s quite a fragile mechanic with too many ways to enter it. I’d rather it be made more reliable but make the ways to re-enter it much more limited.

Unfortunately thats not how they designed the thief, unlike other games where you can only get 1 big stealth attack off per fight they decided they wanted to allow thieves to be able to reuse their stealth attacks (and thus make actual stealth builds) in combat so you get thieves popping in and out of stealth many times a battle.

The trade off being weaker stealth attacks (backstab is the thieves highest damage skill and its way lower than other single target damage dealers hits) and of course a more fragile character (no press a button, evade all attacks for 5 second buttons and such other thieves get to make up for lack of restealthing) technically stealth is a bit less fragile as it doesn’t break on hits but other games often allow hits taken while stealthed to do less damage and of course the aforementioned having actual defenses.

Personally I quite like this style stealth, multiple attacks during combat meaning if I build to use stealth attacks its not unusable for 99% of a battle however many people seem to be unable to handle this slightly different way of stealth and of course we pay a lot for being able to do this.

Tulisin.6945:

Dasorine.1964:

Thats before you factor in the need for condition duration gear at the expense of other damage stats to make condition build viable for shortbow outside of shotgunning and before you factor in the extra trickshot hits you get when you fire a longer range cluster bomb.

25 points in the power tree also gives you exactly the amount of condition duration required to hit the first major breakpoint for your 4-second base bleeds (turning them into 5-second bleeds).

Yep but at a reasonable range your still taking 2-3 seconds to actually apply the bleeds meaning even with 25 points in the tree for 5 second bleeds your looking at around 6 bleeds maximum without going to shotgun range, thats of course if you have a decent latency as a big of skill lag and you could very well miss the optimal detonate time (not so much an issue for direct damage builds but absolutely vital for someone trying to make it a condition weapon)

Without those condition duration increases your going to really struggle to keep even the singular stack of bleeds up continuously.

Compared to the other condition weapons where pistol can easily maintain 7-8 bleeds with just autoattack and dagger/dagger you can hit 12 in an aoe.

atrossity.6437:

Its cool when they are limited because, like the other guy says, it shows you played during a certain time period.

For instance, I might have a cool chainsword from halloween 12, but then I might miss out on getting a meat cleaver for halloween 13. It makes the items have value.

A lot of cool swords that are in game now aren’t special to a lot of players because they are a fairly common skin, and easily obtained.

A few problems with that, first of all the content that gives the current stuff will still be there in later builds meaning people doing the same content no longer get the same reward.

Secondly time limited exclusive gives you that warm happy feeling but soon become relics only seen occasionally and will eventually die out, meaning the time and effort put into that content eventually becomes wasted as people leave the game, delete items etc etc it also means that the item is relying on “exclusivity” for value rather than actual worth, if something looks really cool it would be valued regardless yet just by limiting the time it can be gotten you could make a boring item “valued” for however long it remains in the game until of course there are non left outside of perhaps a handful of collectors bank.

And thirdly its almost punishment for people who didn’t play the game before or such, with the seasonal content that comes around once a year theres a chance that the old content will remain each time it comes around but with new stuff added (which a lot of games have been doing now after they realized people want the older stuff as well and those that had the chance to get it have long since left etc) we currently couldn’t say for sure how they are going to do it in this game as it hasn’t been out a full year, hopefully they’ll do what some games have learnt over their long run times, that people don’t mind old content reappearing at holidays and that limiting them to that one year only annoys more and more people as things go on.

I think you may have confused some things.

For example bleeds stack in a first one on first one off fashion, if player A applies 25 stacks of bleeds then player B applies 10 stacks you now have 15 stacks from player A on and 10 stacks of bleeds from player B on the target, irregardless of how much condition damage people have.

What your working on is how the duration ones stack, if player A puts 5 seconds of burn on the target with 200 condition damage and player B then puts on 3 seconds of burns with 201 condition damage player B will get the damage ticks for the first 3 seconds then afterwards player A will recieve the ticks for the remaining 5 seconds.

However if during the first three seconds player B then applies another 3 seconds player B then gets 3 more seconds of having the damage ticking before player A’s damage will happen, if player B then keeps his own burn up permenately player A will never see the damage from his 5 seconds of burn happen.

As for the condition duration issue, bleed, poison, burn and fear all only do their damage every second so they all suffer the same issue, however bleed potentially suffers the most as its duration doesn’t ever stack so a 1 second bleed with +50% duration increase will only do 1 tick ever, while a burn can potentially be reapplied to give a total of 3seconds duration allowing for 3 ticks. And all conditions have similiar variances in durations from different sources.

As for the solution to this diminishing returns from condition users… well it all comes down to how the game is coded and how much effect increased numbers take, though how conditions are that much worse than people hitting constantly with direct damage attacks… welll… yeah.

For stuff like burns, your already tracking individual conditions at the same time, all would be needed is to tick them in tandem, player A puts a 10 second burn on that ticks for 100 damage, player B puts on a 5 second burn that ticks for 50, for the first 5 seconds both player A and player B see their burns tick, for the next 5 seconds only player A see’s their damage tick.

On the icon on the enemy Player A see’s a 10 second burn while Player B see’s a 5 second burn, once player B’s wears off he just see’s a burn symbol denoting that the enemy is still burning but not from his own burn.

For bleeds one big change could be to add the damage up so if your bleeds are hitting for 100 damage instead of seeing 25 hits of 100 every second you instead see a single tick of 2500 damage every second, then you basically do the same the duration stacking.

You see your own personal stack of bleed number on the icon (if you have none you just have a bare bleed icon letting you know the target is bleeding but not from your attacks) and then they tick in tandem.

In total that wouldn’t be a massive increase in numbers over say people utilizing stuff like whirlwind attacks or spamming fast hitting autoattacks the main issue would be the big encounters like claw of jormag which would need some thought perhaps converting conditions on these specific encounters into singular direct damage hits (which hundreds of which are already happening every second)

But when it comes down to it, its upto anet to figure out wether they wan’t to spend time working on any sort of way to make condition builds work in a better way within their own coding and resources etc etc which is unlikely as stated by colin, we just got to get used to condition builds not really being all that viable.

Yramrag.3026:

Markadis.9012:

.. but somehow that seems like a waste of a Token you spent your whole character career building up to.

I didn’t spent my whole character career building up to dungeons and tokens, and I do feel there are a lot more to dungeons and tokens for a level 80. So with that perspective, and the fact that you can speed farm COF1, I don’t find it a waste to spend tokens on rares and salvage for globs.

Wrong tokens, talking about the singular pact token you get at completion of the personal storyline.

I have not heard of any plans for more stuff released to spend it on, nor any way to get more

You’d have to put in a new resource for it, you’d also have to rescale all the stealth attacks and such if the stealth comes longer/harder to pop in and out of.

You’d possibly also have to start going towards a more hard counterable build if the durations become too much etc etc.

It wouldn’t be a simple swap over and would require a lot of rethinking of the thief as a whole

Either way its a silly idea, if the releases aren’t special just because they are new releases baiting it with “1-off” trophys are going to annoy more people than they’ll entertain for the most part…

Doubly so when the content that actually gave it is still in… I mean how annoying would it be if they suddenly removed all the dungeon vendors in the game? You’d still run the dungeons and such but you’d not get any of the specialty items that people want.

Grimwolf.7163:

The most effective way to use Shortbow would be to use a combination of Condition Damage and Power.
You can hype up how awesome you think the direct damage is all you want, but it deals even more condition damage. There is no way in frozen fiery hell you’ll get more damage out of something like Precision than you would Condition Damage.
With how much Bleeding and Poison it provides, Precision and Critical Damage together probably would not boost the damage as much as Condition Damage alone.

Actually having done at least some of the base maths, a good critical rate and damage modifier with a high power set up is going to do more damage.

Thats before you factor in the need for condition duration gear at the expense of other damage stats to make condition build viable for shortbow outside of shotgunning and before you factor in the extra trickshot hits you get when you fire a longer range cluster bomb.

Shortbow is probably the least effective condition damage weapon for thieves even with the permapoison ability of it.

If the people geared for condition damage are hitting 25 stacks before you attack then yes, your reducing their damage by however many stacks of bleed you will be putting on.

This also counts for them as well though, if between all 3 of them they are applying more than 25 stacks of bleeds they are replacing each others bleeds constantly which will be lowering all of their damage over time.

the trade off is that we get stealth and the ability to choose upto 4 skills to use back to back from both our weapons in trade for half as many skill uses back to back, lower damage coefficients on average across all our skills, no static or guaranteed defenses, lowest effective health etc etc..

Yeah welcome to the thief class

Though as Swick said, there are ways to build to be closer to what others can do but we still have a big trade off with the biggest thing we gain is the ability to cause complaints on the forums while technically hitting for less than others

SwickHobo.5096:

Dasorine.1964:

even if after moving them to f1-2-3 you only got to pick 3 utilities that hit the enemy 100 damage each you’d still be gaining in power, but of course nothing is that weak.

A thief with 3 of the 4 deception skills given passively then gets to take ONTOP of those skills any 3 of: assassins signet, signet of agility, signet of shadows, infiltrators signet, roll for inititiative, caltrops, haste, scorpion wire etc etc etc.

Its not just venoms or traps left over.

The fact is if you just moved them to fskills they would either need to be nerfed to a point where those relying on them would then complain or it would make thieves much more power.

Those people with strong fskills get weaknesses else where, us with weak fskills get strengths else where, just doubling utilities with little thought is not going to be balanced in any shape of form.

This is just another vintage Daecollo suggestion that has very little thought put into it and mainly focused on the build they think is the only acceptable one and sod anyone who things otherwise.

Its a bad, it wont happen.

I’d give up, they clearly want no logic in this thread.

Yep, this is me giving up, comparing fbutton mechanics that have been balanced with utilities and other profession stuff in mind to just plain old giving free utilities is just idiotic… so yeah I give up but safe in the knowledge that those in charge of doing changes probably would for the most part factor that in.

even if after moving them to f1-2-3 you only got to pick 3 utilities that hit the enemy 100 damage each you’d still be gaining in power, but of course nothing is that weak.

A thief with 3 of the 4 deception skills given passively then gets to take ONTOP of those skills any 3 of: assassins signet, signet of agility, signet of shadows, infiltrators signet, roll for inititiative, caltrops, haste, scorpion wire etc etc etc.

Its not just venoms or traps left over.

The fact is if you just moved them to fskills they would either need to be nerfed to a point where those relying on them would then complain or it would make thieves much more power.

Those people with strong fskills get weaknesses else where, us with weak fskills get strengths else where, just doubling utilities with little thought is not going to be balanced in any shape of form.

This is just another vintage Daecollo suggestion that has very little thought put into it and mainly focused on the build they think is the only acceptable one and sod anyone who things otherwise.

Its a bad, it wont happen.

Travlane.5948:

well u could ignore what i said about other classes not being OP? f1 f2 f3 f4 are actually better than the skill utilities for an engineer. higher dmg etc. mesmer burst clones.. and the dozens of boosts you get from guardians f1 f2 f3 and SHared with allies….if u go back a few pages i showed you that guardians have atleast 4-5x more power in f1 utilities. and yes every thief uses atleast TWO of these at all times in pvp (shadowstep shadows refuge SoS blind powder). movign 2 of them to f2 f3 will change nothing. although it would give us acces to choose other skill utilities which if u are a thiekittennow are all bunk. if i had those 2 in my f slots…id pick prolly 1 venom and 1trap. so basically what i get is a trap and a venom to use. how about this . would it be op if i put the venom / trap in f1 f2 instead? would that make it feel better? bc it shouldnt its the same thing. :P

Well I can’t really read everything you write (may want to press enter now and then to break up the wall of text)

But other peoples fskills where designed around them, if they are stronger than some of their utilities its because they utilities are weaker and such, they don’t just slap extra utilities on without thought.

As for a thief getting 3 extra utilities for free not being any stronger because whats left isn’t that good? Thats just ridiculous, the fact that you still have your strong utilities means your not going to get weaker, adding on even fairly weak utilities on TOP of that is a strength gain.

The only exception would be if they nerfed the utilities that are then moved to the fbuttons for free (which they most likely would have to if this ever happened) at which point all your really doing is taking something people like daecollo thinks are absolutely necessary and then nerfing it in return for more over all abilities to use, which means those that have been relying on those utilities are now much weaker while those that didn’t really use them/rely on them are still gaining in strength.

actually crit mixes quite well with bleed builds, not only do crits mean your attacks applying bleeds hit for at least 50% more damage it also allows you to maximize on crit procs such as on crit extra conditions or on crit heals etc etc.

Travlane.5948:

devaking.2397:

Travlane.5948:

a key stroke is a keystroke. it doesnt change if u hotkey it. i know what you mean. but other classes have a few more abilities than thieves. would be nice to have an f2 f3. not that we need them to be certain things. just nice to ahve a lil more option. we use everything in the first 5 seconds of battle. :/

yes but having a free shadowstep and a free refuge is alittle too good.

its not free tho. its just being moved. so we can use other utilites on our utility bar instead.

Um it would be free as you’d get them without spending skill points and without using up utility slots.

As for daecollo’s statements that these make the profession, thats not true there are plenty of people that don’t use them and use other things, they are very good utilities but they are not needed to perform well, but doubling a thieves utility because you want them for free just reeks of overpoweredness.

Have you visited the first shop in world 1 again?

Have you visited the bonus round after the frog on infantile mode?

You’d use bloodlust until you get the 25 stacks before swapping out to a force as once your at max stacks the bloodlust runes giving you nothing (unless you go downed lots) if you can’t get a second weapon to swap into after you get the stacks bloodlust is still technically a better investment.

As for runes of scholar they are nice if they give what you want.

Not heard that it caps at 100% before (though I tend towards not bothering with duration that much) you sure about that?

Fade.7658:

It depends if that extra 10% agony would bump you to 25%/50%/75% duration etc.

If you only have a total of 10% condition duration, another 10% won’t make much, if any difference. You need to hit the 25/50/75/100% increments to see any benefit.

If that +10% won’t get you to that next threshold, then you have two choices, get more duration in addition to hit it, or use something else. If you’re primarily a condition build, don’t bother with an air or fire sigil. You’ll see damage of around 500-700 or so at most.

If you can’t get more duration, try a Chrysocola Orb (these can be placed on weapons – 20 condition damage. 14 power, 14 vitality)

Incorrect, 10% can have an effect depending on the base duration of the bleeds, as they are using dagger/dagger condition build their bleed base duration is 10 seconds meaning 10% is a 1 second gain to their bleed durations

really hope they decide against doing something that silly, even if they only leave them in as drops from the chests in world 1.

It just makes no sense to me to remove the older content to try and make the newer content feel “special”

No because you’d still have the risks outside of that, if stealth guaranteed you could escape with it up then it would be low risk, the risk coming from being made unable to activate it via stuns, knockdowns, instant death etc etc.

Right now there is no guarantee that stealthing will actually achieve anything, on top of that thieves have the lowest defense in the game due to lack of static damage reduction meaning that in any given encounter theres a high risk the thief will be killed before accomplishing anything.

Arkham a person who is condition build requires on all the conditions they apply regardless of wether they hit cap.

Removing any one of them from them lowers their damage.

For example a thief uses bleeds and poisons, a thief can usually maintain around 12-15 stacks of bleeds permenately and keep poison up indefinitely at base condition damages that means that condition thief will deal 721.5 damage a second.

Lets say you have 2 condition thieves in your party and you tell 1 to do just bleeds and 1 to do just poisons to avoid condition stacking issues.

The bleed thief will put 15 stacks of bleed on and deal 637.5 damage a second base.
The poison thief will keep poison up permenately and deal 84 damage a second base.

So what you have is the bleed thief is doing a little less dps than he could and the poison thief is doing a LOT less damage than he could.

And in total the entire party is doing less damage than it possibly could as even if they where fighting over condition placements they’d still be doing more damage each then if they stuck to just 1 condition each, in that situation the party damage will be higher than if they stuck to 1 condition each but it would still be less than if they had their own personal stacks etc. This is also base damage, a real condition build will be doing at least twice that damage meaning both losses are twice as big.

The reason people want the mechanics of this to change is because its a stupid limitation on builds thats not present for any other type of build and no amount of “cooperation” will get around the fact that if you have more than 1 person in a condition build in your team they will both be doing less damage than if they were alone.

Well I know the thief petrify doesn’t stack it overwrites, as do immobilizes so I’d suspect stuns also do but I cannot guarantee that.

Its not that hard to detonate at the last second to ensure the detonated ones all hit the same things.

with the low base duration on the bleeds coupled with the long delivery time if doing anything but shotgunning and the non issue of poison damage power builds win hands down with the shortbow and outside of combo fields, detonating at the right time nets the higher damage potential (it does vary a bit with crits and such but in general your looking at a slightly higher damage potential with the detonated to the non detonated)

phor.7952:

Karolis.4261:

Trickery is not where you want to be for condition damage, condition gear is where you want to be for that, couse bigest part of it comes from gear, not from traits.

He’s talking about pre-40 so sorry, but you’re wrong.
At that point you get just as much out of the stats from traits as you do from gear.
Sure at 80 in exotics the stats from traits don’t matter nearly as much, but in low levels they’re arguably more important than the traits themselves.

And again, at 80 you are correct that power/precision scale slightly better than conditon damage for cluster bomb, but that’s only because the (weapon damage/armor) modifier is more favorable at 80 while you’re using an exotic weapon. While you’re leveling with a blue or green weapon, that modifier hurts the direct damage portion of cluster bomb enough such that both the base damage and scaling are better with condition damage.

Not to mention condition damage also increases your damage from choking gas whereas power/crit do nothing.

Hmm lets run the maths with level 40 blues:

In full ravaging gear you would have 137 condition damage, against a level 40 mob you would deal 29.35 damage a second with 1 bleed or with the 12 stated by the OP, 352.2 damage per second with 221 damage from 3 mini cluster explosions (against a target with 725 armour, which would be green heavy armour plus base level 40 toughness), of course with 20 traits in the condition damage trait line the condition damage goes upto 472.2 dps with the 12 stacks. So with 4 cluster bombs and the bleed damage you will do a total of 2773 damage to them

Now in a power base build (all these are discounting crits just for base comparisons) the bleeds will be down to 270 dps however with power build you then have the cluster bombs hitting for 457 damage if all 3 hit the same target. So again with 4 cluster bombs and the entire bleed duration you will deal 2908 damage.

Power wins even at 40 unless the target armour is really high and this is without any crits, throw in a high precision with your high power and it gets even further ahead.

Of course if you want to throw choking gas in as well over the 4 second bleeding duration the power damage build goes upto 2952 damage with poison, the condition damage goes to 2851

That doesn’t solve anything arkham, your still lowering the damage of every single condition user in your team (some more than others)

if you have any extra power above base stats cluster bomb does more direct damage than bleed damage, add into the fact that while your out of initiative or if your firing off long range clusters your also getting trickshots off that gain nothing from condition a direct damage build is the best choice for SB damage because otherwise your just relying on the small amounts of short bleeds you can stack with cluster bomb (if your shotgunning it for those conditions you’d be better off with a different build to apply more conditions in the same situation) and poison (less damage than 2 stacks of bleeds…)

As for the OP questions:

1) Depends what you see as valuable, it won’t be the best damage absolutely ever possible which is what a large number of people think is the only thing that matters but for PvE it will be ample damage to kill things with and such.

2) The damage won’t be bad depending on what you build for, as stated above a good direct damage build with the shortbow can kick out a fair bit of damage, I would be wary of making it a condition build however, the clusterbomb bleeds are quite possibly the least efficient way a thief has of applying bleeds so you could find your not doing great damage if you go that route.

3) Totally depends what build your going, if your going a condition build you’ll need the condition damage to do any reasonable damage but in that build with the shortbow the precision becomes debatable (still useful, just others will get a bit confused) with a direct damage build precision is basically a requirement.

4) Personally with your playstyle I’d try for a direct damage build, however 3 signet utilities are not that good an idea really. You might find utilizing something like caltrops would give you a better time kiting than say the signet of shadows.

Personally out of the three you have the only one I tend to keep on my bar is the signet of agility for the extra precision and the condition removal and endurance refill, the assassins signet is small and nice power boost and its on use can give you an occasional boost of damage but it tends to be more a burst damage thing so while that extra power may be helping your damage slightly running something like:

Smoke screen, Signet of Agility, Caltrops would probably end up giving you more kiting power and damage (from the caltrop bleeds) and healing while giving you a defense against your main weakness as a shortbow kiter, which is ranged mobs.

And yet stealth is not a guarantee unlike other people mechanics so how can it be low risk when theres always the possibility someone will just kill you while your in it?

It would only be low risk if it was guaranteed to allow you to escape every single time with nothing the enemy can do about it, which it isn’t. Compared to all other mechanisms it has the greatest chance of been made redundant by the enemy.

That sunflowers doesn’t come down to risk but comes down to profession designs.

A class designed for mobility being more mobile than one designed for holding their ground have 2 totally different situations.

Running into a full zerg by yourself as a guardian is an idiotic move in the same way that standing your ground and taking hits to pull of your own is an idiotic move for a thief.

The fact that a thief has the potential to escape that zerg doesnt mean they have less risk engaging that zerg, they are more susceptible to being instantly killed than the guardian and such. In fact if the zerg doesn’t instantly kill the thief the moment they make an attack its not because of stealth, or because of “low risk” its because of poor playing on their part.

In any given situation that is sensible and for what a profession is designed for, the thief has the greater risk on the basis that they have the highest potential to be killed and the highest potential of their defenses being made almost useless, that doesn’t change just because it works out many times due to player skill levels, the risk is still there.

Stating “because I have x y and z I can almost always escape” doesnt change the fact that for example a guardian with invuln/stability, swiftness and a wall that stops the zerg chasing them could acheive the same but at the same time without the risk of their defenses being ignored.

Sunflowers, what your stating is basically that because you utilize 2 utilities, your heal skill and all your initiative you can escape, while that is “Easy” as pressing the buttons, mechanically its hard, your utilizing almost everything available to the profession for those circumstances, which means you don’t have everything else. Other professions could also load all their defensive/escape utilities and weapon sets up and they’d also have an easy time escaping if they were all up and ready.

Thats not exactly something new or something “op” or even something about thief balance.

Though when it comes down to it even with all of them up, escape is not as guaranteed as say a perma swiftness run with invulnerability/stability up or a ride the lightning out.

Compared to anything like those your escape utilities are much easier to stop, shadow refuge you can just be thrown out of the circle which also makes most your others unusable, heck you could just be locked in place IN the circle for most of the stealth if people have the skills on them and at the very least you’ve marked the area your stood for a good 4 seconds, the pistol+dagger only works if you haven’t spent your initiative on attacking and just like blinding powder and hide in shadows your still vulnerable to cc’s and damage.

As the game gets older and people in PvP start learning these methods of escape will become weaker and weaker simply due to the fact that it relies on them not knowing where you are and where your going, after so long people will keep an eye on where you go invisible and will know where your going to run simply due to experience and circumstances.

While things like invulnerable runs and such will remain powerful.

In the same vein those guardians/warriors/eles/engineers etc etc that can jump into small groups and fight and survive will continue to do so while thieves that do the same will gradually start finding the players in said groups start just ignoring stealth (either by just ignoring and moving on or actively killing you regardless of being invisible or not) or stop running builds that thieves can kill.

And thats very much where the risk is for a thief, yes we get good access to stealth but stealth itself brings very little to surviving, the risk is always that someone will keep track of you or that they’ll have the where with all to drop their own bursts on you the moment you become visible, thats a risk no one else shares.

Yes their risk is similiar it comes down to “Can I survive this many people fighting me” this risk is almost always the same, with a static reliable defense if you can take 5 people hitting you, you can pretty much be assured that you can always take 5 people hitting you (yes there are outlying factors that can change this but on average it holds true), the thief has no such reliability, each fight can be massively different from the last you might be able to take out 20 people if they haven’t a clue how stealth works but the next group someone might have something simple as a full adrenaline bar and eviscerate up and pow your dead because you have no way to prevent damage other than evading and hoping they don’t target you.

So really it comes down to other peoples “risk” is a reliable thing they can calculate, they can know exactly how much damage they can do and how much they can take and how much they can mitigate, a thief has no such way to know and thats why a thief is not “low risk” at any time.