So recently i made a thief, what is the best beginners build?
Not that a Thief is particularly hard but there are some specs that make it very easy for you.
This one for example: http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mMkzzc0Mz9mk9mkG9Mppcacscs
This is a Bleed/Condition Damage spec focused on spaming Death Blossom until something dies. Since Death Blossom has an in-built Evade you should rarely take damage. Since it’s very taxing on Initiative however you have to take a lot of Initiative regen abilities.
Gear wise you should focus on +Condition Damage > Power > Vitality or Toughness.
Yeah….the current implementation is rather poor although people do tend to follow them around.
But having 100 Gold really isn’t the best way to qualify somebody for command.
I’m all for a cast-bar,
but yeah, that’s why I prefer playing small characters in MMOs. People tend to ignore them in Zergs.
Except for Gnomes in WoW. The Horde really hated them with a passion for some reason and went out of their way to stomp them.
Wow, you must be special. Because looking at that build you posted I’m having a hard time coming up with a build that has worse synergy than the one you posted.
But since I’m constructive, let me tell you why this is a poor build.
1. No synergy between Critical Strikes and Condition Damage
Condition Damage can’t crit and Critical Strikes rarely cause Conditions. There’s little to no synergy between the two trees, unlike say Power, which both scale with.
2. Overlapping traits
Furious Retaliation overlaps with Thrill of the Crime. Both give you Fury making albeit at different moments but they will still overlap roughly 50% of the time. And again, Condition Damage doesn’t Crit…so yeah, poor synergy.
Same applies to Thrill of the Crime and Exp. Dodger. Both those Swiftness boons will be overlapping a lot. Same with Might.
Concealed Defeat while good in itself is one of those skills that doesn’t help until you’re downed. Most people prefer to not get downed at all. There are better skills that will help you while you’re alive.
I’d simply suggest they add an “undercut” option to the Trading Post that automatically posts and item for 99% of the previous price.
Thus you’re undercutting the previous price by 1%, which is a fair amount.
That way you don’t have to manually enter a price anymore when you undercut which should make the market more adoptable.
Geez, most people are upset that the feature exists in the first place.
Finishing someone is already tedious as hell and you want to put it on cooldown?
60% of the time people are already opting to simply beat someone down, not bothering to finish them with that stupidly long animation.
TA really isn’t hard from an encounter PoV.
But the lack of waypoints and the constantly respawning poison vines are what make it really annoying.
1. Pack a ranged weapon for when thing get hairy. You should really be swapping weapons constantly. GW2 isn’t meant to be played with a single weapon set 95% of the time.
2. Keep your gear reasonably up to date. I’d say replace anything that is 10 levels below your current. Don’t bother spending Karma on gear, you’ll need it later. Just buy stuff of the Tradepost. Not only will it offer you anything you want, you can also prick your preferred stats and it’s fairly cheap.
4. If you wanna stay in melee range, watch for telegraphed attacks. Mobs like Ettins for example are good for practicing evades since their animations take a long time.
5. Skills like Death Blossom have an inbuilt Evade. If you build a bleed/condition damage spec with points in Trickery you can spam it almost endlessly. That should allow you to avoid a lot of damage.
Yep, that really does make PvP in GW2 kinda suck although I do hate having to run everywhere.
But the fact that everyone can come back to live really ruins a lot of strategic options. You can’t “wear down” an attacker. You have to either wipe them out completely or not at all.
Really poor design actually.
Generally speaking I too hate it,
but I feel people would die a little too easy without it, even in PvP. But this can easily be remedied by giving everyone some additional HP.
I agree about free server transfers. It seems odd that ANet would pass up on such an opportunity to generate additional revenue, especially when the community is asking for it.
I realize they want friends to play together and that’s great. But currently free transfers are really getting in the way of building stable communities and the general health of the game.
Why can’t they simply give new accounts a 2 week grace period in which they can switch servers and after that, start charging for it. I’m not sure what the current Gem-rate is but roughly 8 dollars or 6 Euros is a fair price to pay for such a service.
I’d say Elementalists are probably the class that scales with player-skill more than others.
Bad Eles will be really weak, good Eles will be a wrecking ball.
I think these two videos highlight the evolving meta game quite well using the example of the Elementalist class.
Just three weeks ago, Elementalists weren’t considered a serious threat in PvP. Most considered them underpowered or no much less than average. This video reflects that pretty well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh5zjK7ITpQ
Yet now, not three weeks later we’re seeing stuff like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r15NcmZoF_M
Now granted, these are two very different videos but they help me make my point. The relative power of Elementalists has changed drastically simply due to the meta-game and all that without any significant balance changes.
This is to all who cry for nerfs/buffs and expect ANet to respond immediately. Some requests are warranted surely, but some imbalanced just find a way of sorting themselves out.
Yes, Thieves do lack options which is why we tend to gravitate heavily to what works. It also means there aren’t a lot of choices for people who chose to follow a particular build (bleed vs. crit).
I mean realistically, how many weapon choices does a Thief have who specializes on Condition Damage?
I also agree about the missed opportunities with the combo-system. I mean skill-combos are great, but they seem so useless in the overall scheme of things.
Nah, it’s just a risen priest boss. But he is terrifying none-the-less. I can’t tell you how many times getting “fear” forced my character to run right into an AoE field. Also, his fireball attack owns. Got double hit for 11k dmg per hit (immediately back to back).
Ah yes. in ANets vast arsenal of challenging boss mechanics it seems like they opted for the classic “let’s one-shot players” mechanic.
What a rare and unusual choice.
Yes, it’s been broken since last Tuesday.
Really quite annoying that they keep breaking more stuff than they’re fixing.
We have plenty of talk going on about PvP here but I wondered what you guys played in PvE (and possibly WvW if you don’t respec).
I’m currently playing a D/D + Shortbow build as follows:
15 points into Deadly Arts for Mug and Lotus Poison.
-Mug is great additional burst in WvW for your good old backstab-combo and comes in handy in PvE as well.
-Lotus poison is invaluable in PvE as it almost halves enemy mob melee damage. This also means Gas Cloud auto-applies Weakness to every target so you don’t have to toss in a Cluster Bomb right after.
30 points into Critical Strikes for MOAR DPS.
-Nothing really to say here as the point is to maximize damage output. I change the traits around occasionally depending on content getting stuff like Practiced Tolerance for Dungeons (although the HP addition is quite low).
5 points into Shadow Arts
I was originally going to put these points into Acrobatics as well but misclicked and didn’t bother to respec. The proc has saved me quite a few times but also left me to die often enough. I’d say it’s so so.
20 Points into Acrobatics
The Acrobatics tree is really good. I like to pick up Vigorous Recovery for dungeons, just because you have to dodge a lot and then I take Descent of Shadows in WvW and PvE just because I’m constantly jumping off stuff. It’s hard to let loose once you’re used to it.
I like to take Fleet Foot for WvW because it’s important to get away even when crippled or people will sit on your face tea-bagging your mouth. I take Assassin’s Reward or Pain Response in Dungeons, depending on the fight.
Gear wise I picked up the Karma set of Lyssa with some crafted exotics in between. It gives me fairly well-rounded stats.
Generally I favored Precision > Vitality > Power > Toughness > Healing, also in retrospect Power is clearly the better stat.
Me gusta,
very cool idea.
The longer a mob has been alive, the better loot it should drop
in Suggestions
Posted by: Dee Jay.2460
Currently we’re all being conditioned into farming particular events across the Cursed Shore for maximum profit.
This is questionable for various reasons I won’t delve into here.
However, in order to encourage exploration rather than farming events in zergs I suggest you a feature that increases the chance/quality of loot from a mob, the longer it has been alive.
Say for example, every hour a mob lives unmolested it gains a stack of “precious – increased chance of containing valuable loot”.
This buff then continues stacking once every hour until someone finally kills the mob. Then it resets and starts over again.
This would encourage people to fan out and explore the world in search of these rare and unmolested creatures instead of farming the Cursed Shore like a Bot.
You could even hide difficult mobs in hard to reach places etc. making it a real feature.
What I’m not sure about is if this buff and the number of stacks should be visible to players or hidden.
Yes, the fact that AoEing 10 zombies should be more rewarding than killing a Champion or Veteran mob does seem like an odd design choice.
Yeah, I don’t have too many problems with it in WvW but it’s annoying as hell in sPvP.
But I think you make a good point in that it’s detrimental to skillful PvP play.
Yes, somehow ANets design choices in Orr go AGAINST EVERYTHING they previously said and their entire philosophy with the game.
Instead of having the entire World as your playground you’re pigeonholed into these areas because they’re the most efficient to grind.
The reasons people stick with Orr are:
1. No/little transportation costs
2. Highest probability of getting valuable loot.
3. High chance of getting high-level crafting materials
4. Orchicalcicum/Acient Orrian Trees
5. More Karma than elsewhere
6. More money per Event.
If ANet really wanted to encourage us to play anywhere they’d have to:
1. Reduce travelling costs (by at least 50%), especially within lower level zones.
2. Scale loot according to character level (already the case, but needs fine-tuning)
3. Scale crafting materials according to character level.
4. Litter Orchicalicm and other rare materials throughout the world.
5. Make every event reward the same amount of Karma at level 80.
6. Scale Event rewards with character level.
With such a system I wouldn’t even mind Diminishing Returns because I could simply move on.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
I agree, with Exotic Gear being purchasable, crafting a Legendary is essentially GW2s “endgame”.
And as such, the crafting process is really, really disappointing.
Sure, it’s good to get everyone to enjoy every aspect of the game but currently it seems like 80% of the Legendary comes from farming Orr like a Bot.
I’ve seen this a lot so I thought I’d make a thread about it.
Whenever someone goes down, people are always quick you resurrect. In general, this is a good thing but often enough, people will endanger themselves while doing so, sometimes dying in the process.
Especially when fighting low level creatures it can be far more effective to kill off mob in order to Rally someone than to rezz him manually while taking a beating. This applies to PvE as much as it applies to PvP.
On the same note, this can also come in handy when solo. Should you be fighting a group of mobs and then suddenly realize you might actually go down, it’s better to get a mob low than it is to kill it. That way you can kill it for a quick Rally once you do go down and continue fighting with 50% HP.
I just want to add that this “feature” is a big part of what makes underwater combat so tedious.
It seems like the vastly excessive mob density and respawn rates seem to have increased further underwater.
This really needs to be looked at because it’s hell of annoying.
The Dragon fights…except maybe Claw of Jormag were the single biggest letdown in this game.
I mean they look great, have a pretty epic setup and the animations especially are really good. But the fights themselves are just hugely disappointing and basically glorified loot pinatas.
The Shatterer for example doesn’t seem to have any real mechanics…or at least nothing noticeable once you have 20+ players fighting him. He doesn’t down anyone, doesn’t attack anything….just dies and drops loot.
Tequatl has a few mechanics, but none of them really seem to matter much. Sure, you can do various thing, attack bone walls, fight adds and minions etc. but you might aswell just spam damage into the boss while watching TV.
The Claw is definitely a step up but doesn’t seem to scale well beyond 30 players or so.
I think a problem is that GW2 basically never wants you to fail. You should always win…and that is kind of boring. Because even if the Dragons did occasionally kill a player or two….they’d just respawn and walk back….still kill the Dragon and still collect loot.
Failure has to be a real possibility or ANet and I are going to have a very underwhelming relationship.
Well a lot of the time the mobs are invulnerable for some reason but yes, this is a huge problem.
In general, HP scaling is completely off.
On one hand, the waves of trash mobs die within seconds, seemingly not scaling at all.
On the other hand you have Champion mobs with so much HP it takes dozens of people ages to kill. Nobody likes tanking and spanking for 5+ minutes.
In my opinion scaling in events should work something like this:
1 player: Mob HP 100%/ Mob Damage 100%/ Number of mobs 100%
2-5 players: + 10% mob HP per player / + 5% damage per player / +20% mobs per player
6-15 players: +10% mob HP per player / +5% Damage per player / +10% mobs per player
15-25 players: +5% mob HP per player / +2% Damage per player / no additional mobs
25+ players: replace all mobs with Veterans ;D
So, say your standard base defense event spawns a wave of 5 mobs, each with 10.000 HP, 1000 DPS.
This would then 10 mobs with 14000 HP and 1200 DPS with 5 players participating.
With 15 players participating you’d then have 20 mobs per wave with 25000 HP dealing 1750 DPS.
With 25 players participating you’d have the same 20 mobs with 30000 HP and dealing roughly 2000 DPS.
Now, none of this would make events actually challenging with a large number of people. But it should ensure everyone can at least tag a mob before it dies to AoE spam.
I think if we had duels or other forms of PvP people would have a different perspective on Thieves and class balance in general.
I agree with the OP, if this forum weren’t so buggy and I could give +1 I would.
Quickness simply isn’t a healthy ability to have in game and it should be replaced and removed.
I concur. Load times have definitely increased since the patch. I’m not sure what is going on at ANet but the most recent patches seem to have been making the game worse rather than better.
For every minor bug they fix, they seem to add another major one.
Since the patch last Tuesday the game has stopped saving my traits I use to sPvP in the Mists.
As a Thief, I constantly have to re-select my traits fro the Poisons and the Critical Strikes tree. This only happens the first time I enter the Mists and then it seems to work fine until I re-enter again after being in PvE.
So, what happened after the 8k Backstab?
If there is one universal constant with GW2 so far, is that every build is a cheese build to someone. The opinion of someone that thinks a SB trolling build is somehow less cheesy than the others, is meaningless.
True,
again, I wasn’t trying to bash the player. I too play a form of cheese build if you like and don’t have many regrets.
But imo it doesn’t make for very pleasurable viewing or skillful play. I blame this more on Initiative than anything else though.
Try a different tactic than “Jesus”.
But yeah, the problem is that Thieves can stack a huge number of effects to frontload their Backstabs. We’re talking 150% Singet + 6-14 addittional stacks of Might
That’s the real problem.
In regular PvE a non-critical Backstab might not hit for more than 3k.
I just go my 1000th kill Achievement today and have around 340 Badges in total. Quite a few of those have been from jumping puzzles however. No more than 300 will have been from players.
Yeah, ANet has really screwed up on their encounter design.
Either bosses are snooze-fests you could beat while auto-shot afk or they have some weird abilities or ability combos that practically 1-hit everyone around them.
So far I’ve seen very few challenging, engaging yet fair fights.
Not to bash the player but I honestly think that these Bleed spaming builds are on the same level of cheesiness as Heartseeker spam or Pistol Whipping.
You don’t even really have to aim Death Blossom. Just spam it when your enemies is near by while enjoying the benefits of almost constant evades.
Now that I think about it, the only non-cheesy Thief video I’ve seen (depending if you consider Backstabbing cheesy or not) was by a guy using a Short-Bow.
I just don’t get ANet with the way they’re dealing with this “problem”.
They punish you with up to 5s transportation fee for one way if you decide to do events somewhere else but Orr.
Then you also get significantly less Karma for doing Events else where.
And less Gold on top of that.
Hell, I’d have to do 3 events in the Ice bear zone just to compensate for teleporting there.
ANet has their heads screwed on the wrong way the way they are dealing with this.
I disagree, she’s a boss, and bosses SHOULD be hard. I fought the witch with a group 3 times and won 2 times and if we are able to kill it every time then it won’t be challenging and not fun.
Funny how this is different to 98% of the events in game.
Being one-shot isn’t a fun mechanic. Not at level 15, not at level 80.
Yet somehow this seems to be the only mechanic ANet knows to make something “difficult”.
The core issue is Initiative.
Whereas cooldowns force other classes to vary their skill use, Thieves don’t have that limiting factor. Instead they share the universal limiter that encourages them to only use their most effective attack, rather than mixing it up.
You forgot the Bleed-focused build that spams Death Blossom. It’s currently more popular than even the Backstab build.
Anyway, the problem is Initiative. Without conventional cooldowns Thieves are encouraged to spam their most efficient attack. And in many cases, this is only one particular one…which they then spam.
Initiative is just a flawed concept. Even if they make an ability very costly to use, people will still find ways to spam it.
Btw. as cheesy as Backstab builds may seem, they aren’t that easy to pull off and can be very taxing. You have to press 4-5 buttons within about 2 seconds to achieve full effect. And then wait another 45 seconds before doing it again. You also drop really, really quickly.
I’m not saying it’s balanced, I’m just saying it’s not faceroll.
I’m pretty sure English is the dominant language on every server not specifically labeled as either DE (German), FR (French) or SP (Spanish).
Maybe your were just unlucky to bump into a group of Swedes or people from Eastern Europe. English servers tend to be very multi-cultural.
Why would I purposefully avoid DE when they spawn waves of easy mobs and reward Karma for basically spaming a single button?
It’s not an exploit, it’s just a really stupid ability.
Underwater abilities in general are really quite unbalanced and this is just the pinnacle.
Until they fix it, simply avoid the ruins if there’s a Thief there.
Poor rabbit, it died hard.
It seems like for every bug ANet has removed over the past two weeks they’ve added two new ones.
I play a Thief Backstab build and I’ll be the first to admit that burst is pretty insane.
However with the rise of Bunker builds, Bleed spamming builds and knockdowns, the build is not longer an auto-win in any 1v1. A single knockdown can be enough to screw a glass-cannon Thief right over. A lucky Dodge at the right time negates the vast majority of said burst etc.
I’m not saying it’s balanced, I’m saying it comes at a big trade-off.
That said, I agree that the damage needs some adjustment. I think they need to reduce the number of Might stacks you can add on top of your burst with certain traits. Poison Might + Singet Might can add well over 10 Might stacks to those Backstabs.
This happens quite a lot. I’ll use my heal…or any other Stealth for that matter and position myself behind the enemy (be it mob or player) for a Backstab.
Yet despite being right behind my enemy….Backstab doesn’t execute properly and constantly misses the target. Sometimes even if the enemy is stationary. I hear the sound, I see the animation, but no damage is applied and I’m not decloaked either.
I remain in stealth and try again a split second later but sometimes even that fails for some reason. This happens in PvP as much as it does in PvE and I can’t figure out why. This doesn’t have anything to do with Blindness…I’ve checked…it seems to something about collision detection or a player model issue.
I’m a male Asura, and…iirc…this tends to happen vs. larger targets. Maybe there’s some sort of player model issue…I don’t know.
Anyone else experiencing a similar issue.
These glass canon thieves are funny in WvW.
And you condition thieves(which I assume you are) are also funny in WvW.
You all think your kitten doesn’t stink and that you are somehow better, more skilled players. Truth is, anytime I cross a progamer condition thief skillfully spamming LDB and flip-flopping like someone who’s having a seizure, I always make sure to /laugh at them before they get sent back to their spawn point.
True…the best counter to DB spaming Bleed Noobs is to equip a ranged weapon.