Guild Wars 2

I used Troll Unguent when soloing until I found out that with [Vigorous Renewal] (Wilderness Survival 10) Healing Spring gives you 3 seconds of Vigor every time it gives you the Regeneration, so up to 15 or 18 seconds. Also in ideal situation you can use it to give your pet Regeneration from afar because it’s a water field.
I’m not completely sure but I think it also gives Vigor to your allies inside the Healing Spring.

Recently someone made the suggestion to make Initiative regeneration conditional on how much Initiative you have. If Initiative regeneration would work like that it would improve Thieves gameplay in multiple ways.
It would give Thieves more DPS because they can use their abilities more frequently but the spike damage would remain the same. Burn all your Initiative for a spike would come with a greater opportunity cost. Skills that regain some Initiative points would become more powerful because they can bring you quickly out of that low recharging area.

STRanger.5120:

Jefzor.7145:

The CnD+Steal combo needs a fix. The backstab damage itself is fine imo.

Any suggestion how to fix it?

Give Steal a 1/4 cast time and don’t let it trigger Venom-type skills (cannot check if it already behaves so).
That way the time the target has to react to this combo goes up from virtually 0 to 0.5-0.75 seconds.

Solo PvE or dungeons as well?
Which weapon?

In my experience 30 Arcane Power and 15 Water is a very good basis that work with any weapon set and for any PvE content.
15 Water grants you AoE heal every time you attune to Water, and with 30 Arcane Power the recharge time for attunements is ~10 seconds so you can get this healing quite frequently.
Arcane Power V gives you a specific boon every time you attune to another element; with Arcane Power 30, 2xMonk and 2xWater Runes all boons last 60% longer so if you swapping attunements frequently you are enchanted by Fury, Might, Regeneration, Swiftness and Protection almost constantly.
Arcane Power XI provides you with some decent spells (especially the Water one is good) but it’s main use is that it turns every dodge roll into a blast finisher.

Ichishi.9613:

you will not be successful in main part of the spike if you dont bring devourer venom and assa signet at least.

Cloak and Dagger, Steal and Backstab hit all within less than 1 second if executed well, so Basilisk Venom gives you is enough time for your combo. You can bring Devourer Venom instead of Basilisk Venom but I wouldn’t recommended it because no other elite complements a Backstab build as good as B Venom, and it frees one utility slot.

As Wildclaw has said at lower levels the attribute bonuses are more important than the actual traits, so put points in Power and Condition Damage primarily and Toughness and Vitality secondarily.

At level 40 I advise you to switch to the Conjure Lightning Hammer build (you can use the skill prior to that, though); you can use other builds but in my experience with the limited number of traits point you have until level 55-60 they lack much needed synergy.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/What-I-imagine-is-a-very-simple-fix-for-Backstab-combos/first#post606882
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Enough-The-real-problem-with-backstab-builds-is-not-Backstab/first#post621644

Okay, this is the at least the third thread with pretty much the exact same suggestion; how about we keep it at that number?

Also:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/The-lower-you-initiative-the-slower-it-regenerates/first#post622205

Naustis.8510:

@doomdesire
So u even can’t use so easy build Becouse i got hitted for 9k in to 2000 toughntness

Make clear if you’re talking about just Backstab itself or the whole Backstab combo.
The whole combo can deal up to 16k-18k damage on a ~2600 armor target, and during that combo Backstab can hit for 8k-9k damage.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/How-many-basic-viable-builds-do-thieves-have/first#post622184

Judas.5432:

ps – Here is a link to the build. You can see how it’s designed to just decimate 1 enemy every 45-60 seconds and that’s it.

Please stop posting this horrible BS build; no sane Thief player will choose less than 5% more damage over a gab closer+stun break.

What has been confirmed is that being close to an enemy makes it likely that they will attack you; so if you’re playing a melee warrior you’ll get aggro more often than say a range 1200 Staff Ele.
Some observations also indicate that some foes are more likely to attack targets with low HPs and armor while other attack targets with high HPs and armor; afaik this hasn’t been proven, though.
Also it may be your delusion; humans remember unfavorable events better than favorable ones, so it may be that you clearly remember the one boss fight it was attacking you all the time but not the boss fight it didn’t even looked at you once.

FrozenLuv.6017:

Here we go again, talking about thieves like they have a lot more skill slots than any other class. A pure bs glass cannon thief would not have roll for initative on their skill bar, they will have haste, sin sig and devourer venom. Therefore, they don’t even have a stun breaker.

That’s what bad players run, like the ones who say “if the target survives the combo the Thief is dead”.

NightyNight.1823:

You have 1 utility skill against a char whit the bar full of them.Who can catch who now.

If the target has all utility left it means they haven’t used their stun breaker and thus have lost about 16k of their hit points; not really a bad initial situation for a Thief.

Ichishi.9613:

Thief cannon be stealthed permanently from over 3k view range to 900 of his steal.

Actually they can:
Shadow Refuge → Venom → Signet → Infiltrator’s Arrow → Shadowstep, Backstab combo for ~16k against medium armored targets → Shadow Return

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/How-many-basic-viable-builds-do-thieves-have

Aliatis.7836:

1. Thieves to immobilize need the Elite (Basilisk Venom) or an Utility (Devourer Venom) – otherwise they won’t stun you and you are free like a butterfly.
2. Thieves need Utility (Haste) to be in “quickness” (and they loss their endurance and cant regen it for 4 seconds).

You don’t need Quickness for the Backstab combo.

If you combine a Fire combo field with a Blast finisher nearby allies gain 3 stacks of Might for 20 seconds. With Arcane Power V each time you attune to Fire you and nearby allies gain 1 stack of Might for 15 seconds. With 30 points in Arcane Power and 2xMonk and 2xWater runes boons last 60% longer. Evasive Arcana turns every dodge roll into a blast finisher.

Assuming they were using a Staff:
Eruption → Lava Font, useable every ~10 seconds, Might lasts 30+ seconds → 9 stacks of Might
Lava Font → Evasive Arcana, useable every ~10 seconds, Might lasts 30+ seconds → 9 stacks of Might
Renewing Stanima → Evasive Arcana, dodge rolls becomes useable every ~5 seconds → 9 stacks of Might
Arcane Power V → Attune to Fire, useable every ~10 seconds, Might lasts 20+ seconds → 2 stacks of Might
Lava Font → Arcane Wave, useable every ~30 seconds, Might lasts 30+ seconds → 3 stacks of Might

That’s actually a very good concept.
It would allow to give Thieves better sustained damage because they could use their skills more frequently without increasing the frequency a Thief can put out a heavy spike.

I don’t see how any Thief can be against this suggestion…

Conjured weapons count as an environmental weapon which means traits which give bonuses to attunement skills doesn’t work on them; e.g. [Pyromancer’s Puissance] doesn’t work with your Flame Axe.

About the build: As a basic rule you should have at least one stun break so I advice you switch out one of the Conjure Weapon skills with a stun break.

NightyNight.1823:

Backstab combo? Lets see..Steal + C&D+BS Thats about 1.5 seconds and its not enough to take someone down.Id love to see ya try that on a Warrior whit over 30k HP and some decent thoughness.

You can use C&D prior to Steal, so if you time it right all three hits can connect almost as fast as the Backstab animation.

Kelderon.1096:

[One With Air] does work however it makes you 5% faster after 10 seconds and 10% faster after 20 seconds which is pointless because [Zephyr’s Speed] already makes you 10% faster; so, unless you stay attuned to Air for 30+ seconds that trait does absolutely nothing.

No, thats not correct.
The 10% of Zephyr is permanent but One with air makes you faster up to 25%, so your’re on 25% after 30 seconds. Its working as described.

To be honest I’ve only tested it in the first weeks after release and I’ve never read anything about it in the patchnotes I assumed it still works like that.

Judas.5432:

Here’s the build: http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mzkzzc0zMMTowmMTowmxx9MacmsMcqV8kiG7kiH7khA7070M7kNb70V7ofD8ofY

Point me to the additional mobility and/or survivability, please. There’s a reason all those videos displaying this build only showed clips of them killing 1 guy at a time instead of entire play sessions. And, just to mention it, this build is a little slower to kill it’s opponent with the A-Signet change.

Yes, posting the one-trick pony variant of the Backstab build totally proved your point…

And btw, they’ve said they’re thinking about giving Steal a cast time and/or an aftercast delay.

bwillb.2165:

I don’t think you understand how the build works… Like, at all… The build that gets the very high damage numbers everyone whines about puts EVERYTHING into backstab. that means taking signets to pop for might, venom to keep the target from moving, and forgoing initiative traits in favor of raw damage bonuses. After the thief performs a buffed up backstab, all they can really afford to do is try to cnd then run away, since they’d die in 2 hits.

Unless I’m no longer up-to-date the typical Backstab build is 25-30/30/0/0/10-15. For that build you need either Basilisk Venom or Devourer Venom for the Stun/Immobilize and Assassin’s Signet for the damage boost. A Backstab combo with only those skills already take a huge chunk of health away from your opponent; sure, you can put in more practically useless Signets or Venoms for a few more stacks of Might, but you’re better of putting some utility/defensive skills in there to have a good fighting chance in case your opponent survives the combo.
And the high burst damage from 900 range is only one part of the massive complains about Backstab Thieves, the other is that it’s too survivable for a glass cannon.

Even if the Backstab combo fails a Thief has up to 9-13 Initiative, 1-2 utility skills, 0-1 elite skills and their healing skill left; that’s hardly making a Thief such an easy kill as so many Thief players proclaim.

[One With Air] does work however it makes you 5% faster after 10 seconds and 10% faster after 20 seconds which is pointless because [Zephyr’s Speed] already makes you 10% faster; so, unless you stay attuned to Air for 30+ seconds that trait does absolutely nothing.

I’ve posted this thread here instead of in the suggestion sub-forum because it’s about a specific feature of a specific profession so I think it’s better placed in that profession’s sub-forum.

First off I consider making pets more responsive to F2 and F3 commands and more consistent hits against moving targets bug fixes so I’ll ignore them here.
This is a collage of various suggestions to improve Ranger pets that are independent of each other, some may contradict each other, some may be redundant if others would be implemented so please keep that in mind if you read the suggestions.

F2 pet weapon bar
Pressing F2 replaces your first 5 skills with the attacks of your pet. Skill #1-#3 are the pet family skills (the ones your pet uses on its own currently), Skill #4 is the F2 skill. Skill #5 is a shared between all pets and functions like a dodge; your pet cannot attack but become immune to attacks for ~2 seconds (just like a dodge roll of a player character but the pet stays stationary). You can enable and disable the AI use of skills #1-#3 just as you can enable and disable auto attack on your own weapon bars. Pressing F2 again will activate skill #4 and closes the pet weapon bar, and switch weapon just closes it.
What would this suggestion offer?
Players who don’t want to micro their pet would hardly be hampered by this; instead of pressing F2 once they simply have to press it twice to command their pet using their F2 skill. But players who want to micro their pet have the option to manually use every single skill of their pet, and it offers a much needed dodge to pets so that the can compete against some of the bosses.

Consistent Follow Me
If you have commanded your pet to follow you (F3) it stays close and always directly in front of you (or directly behind you) and not slightly to the side.
What would this suggestion offer?
By moving or turning around you could ensure that your pet moves out of AoEs, currently it’s luck-based if you can convince your pet to move out of AoEs.

F3 Dodge Roll
Calling your pet back makes it immune to attacks for ~2 seconds but it cannot attack during that time period and has a 10-20 seconds cooldown (for comparison, without additional endurance regeneration a player character can dodge every 10 seconds). The cooldown is shown on the F3 icon just like the cooldowns of skills but you can still call your pet back, it just doesn’t get the immunity.
What would this suggestion offer?
By quickly pressing F3 and F1 you can tell your pet to evade bosses’ big attacks.

Follow Me Dodge
If you have commanded your pet to follow you (F3) and it’s close to you (300-600 range) a dodge roll from the Ranger itself offers invulnerability to the pet, too.
What would this suggestion offer?
If you dodge an AoE successfully your pet does evade it, too.

Pretty much every profession has minor or major issues and may be subpar in either solo PvE, dungeons or sPvP; however some options or even entire professions being subpar in certain game modes doesn’t break the game but a single OP option does.
Therefor it’s more important to bring that OP stuff in line than fixing subpar options.

If you want to play a sniper try out a Warrior with a Rifle, their skill set with it resembles a sniper quite well.

bow.6179:

So then you don’t have a problem with bs itself but with steal? I can see that. Possibly shorten the range of steal or require a longer cd.

The problem with Steal is more that it can be used simultaneously with other skills with can potentially allows for huge spike damage. Making it impossible to use Steal during the activation of others skills and giving it a short aftercast delay would lengthen the spike from ~1 second to 2-3 seconds, giving the other player the chance to avoid the combo.
Range isn’t much of a problem imo, and a longer CD would hurt other builds and didn’t actually solves the issue because it doesn’t prohibits those combos, just making playing and playing against a Thief more boring.

bow.6179:

Next they complain that a thief snuck up behind them and backstabbed them so backstab must be op.

Hardly anyone complains about Backstab itself, most people complain about the Backstab build, you know the build that allows Thieves to teleport right next to you from 900 range, deal damage equal to half of your hitpoints to outright killing you in 1 second while still having good mobility and survivability.

They are thinking about giving Steal a casting time and/or an aftercast delay, so your suggestion is pretty much spot-on.

They’ve already stated they will focus on Steal, mainly the possibility to hit with Steal, Cloak and Dagger and Backstab within about one second.

Giving the same profession huge spike damage and invisibility and/or great mobility always leads to disaster; I don’t know why they even tried.
Everyone who looks at the Backstab build objectively will agree it’s OP; killing characters who didn’t explicitly speced into survivability in ~1 second is insane, and even if the target survives the combo the Thief is far from beaten; with 9-13 Initiative, up to 2 utility skills and the healing skill left it is hardly an easy target.

They said they are thinking about giving Steal a cast time and an aftercast delay; both changes wouldn’t matter in PvE but would lengthen the backstab combo to give other players a chance to avoid it.

Druitt.7629:

2. When you use a Blast Finisher in a Water Field, how much does it heal for? Something related to the Field’s originating spell and the player doing the detonation?

Don’t know the exact formula for the healing amount but I know that it only depends on the stats from the character who finished the combo, the stats from the combo starter are irrelevant.

Try Offhand Dagger and the two traits in Shadow Arts which gives you +2 Initiative and AoE Blind on stealth.

sorrow.2364:

Want some suggestions?

- Backstab should get a maximum of 6k damage critical on a squishy glass cannon build.
- Heartseeker should have the leap removed.
- Stealth debuff should last longer.
- Stealth should last way longer if traited, less if untraited.
- There should be given some clue of where the thief is if you succed to hit him while stealthed (like a sparkle or a sound).
- Mug should have reduced damage.
- Hide in Shadows should have less stealth duration compared to other skills
- Basilisk Venom should have 2 seconds stone duration
- Cloak and Dagger should cost 2 more initiative.
- Death Blossom should have removed (or reduced to 3-4 seconds) bleeding effect and increased damage
- Fear from Necromancer Steal should last 1 and 1/2 seconds and cast faster.
- Unload should inflict bleeding
- The dagger autoattack damage should be decreased

Than you guys can enjoy mastering your profession without getting easy wins.
I would reroll thief if those changes are applied, right now I feel playing a thief like cheating.

Most of these suggestions are quite good or at least a solid basis for a discussion.
Basically the base strength of the Thief’s burst, mobility and frequency of stealth need to be reduced but with sufficient trait points investment you can make them one or two of them really powerful.

Oh look, yet another “Thieves are UP”-thread from Daecollo.

It’s not like perma-Blind and an extremely spam-able blast finisher is any good, no…

Aretas.8370:

From the official site:
Elementalists are multi-faceted spellcasters that channel elemental forces, making fire, air, earth, and water do their bidding. What they lack in physical toughness, they make up in versatility and the ability to inflict massive damage in a single attack.

If we are not meant to have massive damage in a single attack, please give us back our HP pool and toughness.

Remember that according to that description “lack in physical toughness” is not only compensated by “the ability to inflict massive damage in a single attack” (and btw, that wording implies that Eles don’t have good DPS) but also with “versatility”. Sure, give Eles more toughness but remove all skills expect the fire ones and see how far you can get.
Also I would say that up to 5*8k+ damage with a single attack (note that the description doesn’t state that the damage is instantaneously) qualifies as “massive damage”, but maybe that’s just me…

It appears to be bugged and doesn’t active before you’re down to ~10% health instead of 25%. If you lost that last 10% health in a single hit the shield won’t activate.

Aiglos.2907:

Baah! Lost my ability to quote again

Just make a non-sense post like “I want to quote, quote, quote!”, for some reason you have to post in a thread first to be able to quote others and edit and delete your own posts; just delete your non-sense post then and quote the post you want to.

Keep in mind that the GW1 ele had a significant overhaul just recently. One I think was reducing armour on monsters to make ele spells more effective. The other was a redesign of the exhaustion mechanic. So obviously, they thought that the ele was flawed in such a way that they had to massively overhaul it. Or… they just wanted to make it more interesting? Ah well.

You’re right, I forgot that the extra armor mobs get in HM was removed so Eles don’t perform even worse damage-wise.
Back when I was active SF Ele was the best build damage-wise, did that update brought forth any Ele builds that exceed it’s damage by 200%-300%? If not you would be still better off with another melee if you want damage.
But in those specialized farm builds with one or two designated tanks Eles do great as spikers.

As other have said waiting for your Initiative to recharge is the same as other profession wait for their skills to recharge. If other profession can only use their auto attack they are neither powerhorses.
Why don’t you use the same tactic other professions utilize as well: Don’t fire off all your cooldowns against a single foe so you still can use some of your skills against the next foe?

FWB.1704:

How about in PvE only than, playing a DD thief in PvE isn’t terribly easy.

The differences between PvE and PvP should be as small as possible so its easy for players to cross to the other side.

Zenrei.6398:

No. Elementalists are a class that have a strong support function. Warriors do have some support functions as well but not intended to have as much as the Elementalist.

However, once you have made a full DPS build, there shouldn’t be any discrepancy on who is what. A DPS Ele should be similar to a DPS Warrior. If a glass cannon Warrior can drop crazy damage, so should a glass cannon Elementalist.

The problem is that a DPS Ele still has access to that above mentioned support while a DPS Warrior has virtually no support; if you would give them a comparable DPS the Ele would be OP.

TheWarKeeper.5374:

i have played Guild Wars 1 for more than 4 years so i had the chance to get to know the class pretty well, it was indeed powerfull with air magic and fire magic, inflicting indeed massive damage

Besides the time certain skills were OP Eles were never used as DPS in PvP, they pretty much only dealt damage when they assisted spikes.
In PvE the damage of the Elementalist was pathetic, even a full-out offensive Fire Ele did only about 1/5 the damage of a melee, and that melee could even bring strong group support at the same time; the gap got even bigger in high-level content because unlike most other profession Eles did hardly and armor-ignoring damage to bypass the increased armor of level 20+ mobs. Air was at least somewhat useful to blind mobs but when you found out the insane synergy between AP and Eruption and other earth AoE skills you wouldn’t go back to Air again either.
The GW1 Elementalist was already not your “average mage” because it excelled at support, not damage. And btw: By comparison a GW2 Ele deals a lot more damage than its GW1 counterpart.

The idea of the OP is pretty much already implemented with the Conjure Weapon skills; you kind of lock yourself into only having 5 weapon skills but ideally get more raw damage or more straight defensive so players who enjoy a more simple profession can still enjoy the Elementalist.

You should state if you’re looking for PvE or PvP advice.

Crunchy Gremlin.5798:

it may be that it works in different areas of the game. I have heard rumors that wvw/pvp/pve behave differently in regards to bugs.

The skills are split into PvE in PvP skills, W3 counts as PvE.
And yes, it can happen that only the PvP or PvE skill is bugged, an example for this is the Engineer’s Med Kit which works as intended in PvP but in PvE cannot be unequipped.

mjharrison.3209:

OP is probably a troll, but he does have a point – in GW1, Ele was a damage-focused profession, just like the mage archetype of every other fantasy MMO in existence.

If your definition of “damage-focused” is “dealing absolutely pathetic damage against level 20+ foes” maybe, but then you certainly have to call the GW2 Ele damage-focused because by comparison it deals much more damage than its GW1 counterpart.

DemonNinja.1602:

1. Make it a solo instance so players can see and not have to deal with 15 other Norn and Charr models.

This so much!
It simply sucks if you cannot see your own character and have to jump blindly.

garethh.3518:

That would be a horrible nerf to trap specs as they can’t get the solid survivability of the wilderness survival tree along with the trap traits (trap specs are condition dmg specs, condition dmg specs are made for the longer haul so need some good survivability or don’t work)
Trap specs are one of our few viable specs atm.

How so? I’m looking at the major Wilderness Survival traits and the only ones I see that increases your survivability are Shared Anguish, Vigorous Renewal, Hide in Plain Sight, Empathic Bond and Bark Skin, and none of them look overly impressive to me.

draxynnic.3719:

Incidentally, as a note: do “on swap” sigils actually work on elementalists?

Yes. However Sigils have an internal cooldown of 9 seconds.

Lingering Elements is great for Ele players that like to swap attunements a lot, it just needs to be fixed.
According to the wiki Vigorous Scepter increases endurance regeneration by only 25%, imo it should be 50%; it’s a master trait and only works with a single weapon.
I think Evasive Arcana will be nerfed enough when they remove the blast finisher on every dodge, not just the ones that triggers a spell.