Yeah, I kinda wish they would swap Condition Damage and Power between Trickery and Deadly Arts. Everything would feel a lot cleaner and easier to build around.
Good day!
I’ve been messing around with the Thief profession, and I like it. Alot! However, I am still relatively new (also new to the whole assassin characters in general). I’m thinking that I would like to go with a dagger/dagger main set, with a shortbow offhand. My logic is that I can get close and personal with the dagger/dagger set, and also pick off/distance myself with the shortbow or stealth skills. I’ve been reading through the wikis, various guilds and forum posts. However, I am still very confused on how to approach the build. My main concern is survivability. But I guess that what dodging, stealth and add healing bonuses to armor are for? What would be the staple build for this kind of approach that I could read up on? There are so many it seems (very daunting lol).
Edit: I’m more concerned with PvE, than I am PvP or WvW.
Good, you didnt get sucked into thinking a condition or venom build is viable. Thats great man.
Run a 25-30-0-15-0 build for max zerk with a little survive based on active mitigation. Spam backstab when you can and switch to heart seeker at 25%. Use sb on anyfights with more than 1 mob, cluster bomb is you bread and butter spam it like crazy and throw in poison fields for good measure. Always wait a wile before attacking a boss so you dont over aggro and die. When kitten hits the fan in meele range and you out of healing dont obe afraid to switch to shortbow and take it easy untill you got a heal on cd and some hp.
Does anyone else smell… cheese?
:P
Anyways, I run S/P P/P Knight in PvE/WvW, and it works very well. Really steady damage, lots of survive, lots of cleave with intelligent choices.
IDK but I definitely starting smelling some Limburger when I saw you use P/P. Theres bundles you can find in the open world that will do you better than that.
I don’t know what you mean by five-digit Backstabs? Again everyone, thanks for the information. This is a great community. I didn’t expect this many replies lolll.
10,000+ damage. People building just to sneak up on another person in WvW to insta-kill them then flee.
Good for nothing except making video montages that get everyone ranting about how “OP” Thieves are.
Instantly killing anyone is a bad thing? Sure it is lol….
Sounds like your just mad. 1st off you need to know who you can and can’t instakill with a rotation. Guardians are easiest (remember to not be a turboscrub and probe aegis off b4 u blow ur load) necros and mesmers would be among the hardest. Taking out a support like a guardian completely out of a fight before it even really starts is HUGE. Not to mention if you go a sr lined up you can not only escape the front/back lines but most ppl will pull their attention to you mitigating alot of damage off your buddies. Then you switch to sb and go to town till your cd’s are off and your rotation is ready to go.
This is how you should play a stealth class in any game, thats why I always laugh at bunker/condition thief’s. You entire job in life is to pick up weak people in the back lines and get out of town, although thanks to anets policy on the trinity it is less true in this game perhaps.
It’s bad because you’ll die if anyone sneezes on you, so you can’t do a thing once you blow your initial ambush and utilities on someone.
In PvE you’ll also have to constantly be rezzed by teammates as stray AoEs gib you instantly.
I don’t know what you mean by five-digit Backstabs? Again everyone, thanks for the information. This is a great community. I didn’t expect this many replies lolll.
10,000+ damage. People building just to sneak up on another person in WvW to insta-kill them then flee.
Good for nothing except making video montages that get everyone ranting about how “OP” Thieves are.
Shadow Arts is a great trait line, as long as you’re using either X/D or D/P.
Deadly Arts is the crappy one. The second and third minor traits are decent, but the major traits are hands down the worst selection in the game. Every last one of them is terrible. Unless you focus on Venoms and have Venomous Aura from Shadow Arts, in which case a few of them are mediocre.
It’s worse than Trickery if you want condition damage, and worse than Critical Strikes if you want direct damage.
You’re better off skipping over it in favor of extra defense or utility from another trait line.
The only people who take it are either running a Venom Share build, or trying to min-max the hell out of their offense for useless five-digit Backstabs.
Traits are the main problem that venoms have currently. Venom traits should be removed, not added. Venoms will never be useful to a majority of thieves when they’re balanced around taking every venom trait and building around them. I’d rather see malleable and useful venoms that every thief can integrate into their playstyle than a single viable venom build that loads up on them while everyone else ignores them.
I’m with you on this. The problem with Venoms is that they’re all balanced around the assumption you’ll have every related trait, which on top of it all are split between two separate branches.
You’re all missing a very basic point which the OP himself made; he makes a lot of money, and therefore buying the legendaries with real money, however expensive, was actually MORE practical. He could have spent months grinding it out in game, or he could spend hours earning the cash to buy them.
If he had instead spent that time in game when he could have been working, the amount of money he would have lost would melt your brain.
The only question then is if the legendaries are actually worth it for ANYONE, with a market value of ~$3000
There’s no reason that any intelligent person SHOULD believe them.
I agree, but I lost hope in Anet a long time ago. While I enjoy the WvW portion of the game, the rest of it leaves me entirely bored. WvW isn’t even all that great. DAoC still does it better after all these years.
I’m actually the other way around. I had fun making it to level 80, but saw WvW as the only real end-game content since I don’t care about dungeons. After getting to 80 and trying WvW, I kinda hate it. Too much time wasted just running from place to place due to a complete absence of waypoints, and you can’t do much of anything without organizing a group beforehand.
Without an organized group you can either spend 20 minutes “roaming” until you find something you can actually do, only to get beat down by 3+ people that randomly wander by and sending you to the other side of the map. Or you can wait around doing nothing until you manage to find some random allied zerg you can follow around, which isn’t fun anyway.
I actually really enjoy SPvP, but the problem is that nothing you do outside SPvP has any impact at all on it. You can’t even at least carry over equipment skins.
Every other class uses proper teleports, even on skills that are functionally very similar to the Thief shadowsteps.
I’m really starting to think they should just make all the Thief shadowsteps function as legit teleports, limited only by line of sight.
Who gives a crap about a Thief cheesing a jumping puzzle once every minute or so, or Stealing on top of a keep wall if you get lucky and some idiot stands too close to the edge, just to get slaughtered by everyone inside.
At least in regard to puzzles, Mesmers, Engineers and Necromancers can already cheat at them to some extent.
The most divisive (read: hated) minor trait in the game will soon trigger more often…
Thanks ANet.
“Thanks ANet”? Do you really not have any idea just how spectacularly unlikely it is that those “leaked” patch notes are real?
Hey, man. I heard this guy say the Illuminati is going to place the Hamburgler as the new president in 2016, who will then work to instate an Autocracy wherein the old and feeble are ground into meat patties to be sold over seas at the new restaurant chain, McSoylent.
I really don’t understand why Thieves would get Torment either. It doesn’t fill any particular need, and it’ll just lead to even more complaints about the class.
Mesmers are even worse though. Confusion stacks on a condition mesmer are bad enough, but if they can now stack Torment on top of it, you’ll be left unable to effectively move OR use abilities without taking heavy damage. So… just sit there doing literally nothing ’till a condition cleanser comes up?
Well, Deadly Arts, on top of dealing with poisons, has a lot of garbage traits. They could replace one of them with a new one that does something like reduce the duration of Poison, Weakness and maybe Bleeding by ~33-50%.
The Thieves are just handled rather poorly in general. Take Venoms for example.
Like you said, they’re terrible because they have to be balanced around the possibility that you can share them with several teammates.
A skill cannot be balanced around the assumption that you WILL have an optional trait; especially a 30 point one at the top of an indirectly related path like Shadow Arts.
If the trait is THAT strong, you need to either remove the trait or make it base-line.
Base-line Venomous Aura would go a long way toward making the Thief a less selfish class, anyway.
And then look at Cloak and Dagger and Black Powder.
Stealth did not originally have Revealed, and no ability was created with that effect in mind. As a result, many are broken in various ways and sometimes even detrimental. Like Last Refuge.
Revealed was only created because Cloak and Dagger and Black Powder specifically allowed Stealth to be spammed to hell.
If you don’t have either X/D or D/P, Stealth is total crap. You’ll have VERY little access to it, and you’ll be hamstrung by Revealed in certain circumstances anyway.
The intelligent approach here would have been to never introduce Revealed, and instead replace those two skills and perhaps reduce the recharge on various Stealth granting utilities and traits.
Without Cloak and Dagger or Black Powder, Blinding Powder alone could easily have a 15 second recharge.
You’re completely ignoring my point; MOST attacks in this game deal “AoE”. At least with traits.
Even the Thief’s Dagger, which may be one of the most single-target focused sets in the game, has “AoE” on two out of five attacks.
The rest are just one or two attacks randomly interspersed among a mass of “AoE” attacks.
Most melee attacks cleave, and most ranged attacks, if they are not naturally some form of AoE, have access to traits that add either ricochet or piercing to all their attacks.
I’m all for a turret buff, but you guys play too much Warcraft; AoE attacks are not a clearly defined and distinct thing in this game. We have cleaving melee attacks and piercing ranged attacks.
Assuming they even have the means to add a defense against AoE attacks specifically, you still have other issues.
Don’t include the piercing/cleaving attacks, and the change does very little.
Include them, and it will take effect with such regularity that you may as well just increase their defense against everything.
I will say we want there to be play with the traps, but placing the traps while in stealth has very little counter to it, so we will be evaluating whether we would like to change this implementation. Thanks to everyone for you feedback and concerns.
Hugh
Their solution to traps; make them unusable in Stealth.
MORE Thief WvW nerfs likely underway.
I desperately hope they actually plan to do something like upping the placement to 20 seconds.
Yeah, the problems with the stealth trap were painfully obvious, but the supply trap looked bad as well. And apparently it is.
Neither of these should EVER have been introduced.
Well it requires quite a bit of group coordination, not only because of the small radius, but also because at least two of the venoms do not stack with multiple applications.
Then there’s the fact that all venoms are utilitarian and not terribly useful in PvE compared to raw damage, since all NPCs are dumb as dirt and just chase someone around swinging once every few seconds.
Then there’s also the fact that, between 5 people, you’ll easily have most conditions up on them at almost all times anyway.
so what u saying is it is possible that it will get more nerfed in the upcoming patches :S
It took a massive nerf in WvW just yesterday.
The people claiming Thieves are OP don’t have any idea what they’re talking about. They just don’t like Thieves because they can flee fights and harass people with Stealth.
Whether or not you should play one depends on personal preference.
I find it fun because of the mobility, the high skill cap and it’s fun to trick and manipulate people with Stealth/Shadowsteps.
Thieves though are extremely soft when actually hit, and despite both this and their nature as a burst class they do not generally have great damage.
Initiative is also insanely restrictive despite its intended purpose. Not only will you use skills less frequently than any other class, but you also get little if any use out of weapon swapping.
It’s not like the damage is as bad as an Engineer/Necromancer/Guardian, but the Thief has neither the staying power nor the versatility of such classes.
Well, technically, I think once you have enough Toughness that Healing Power would actually start to be more beneficial, regardless of how much healing you have Vitality would then become a better attribute for overall survival.
Especially with Signet of Malice, since it generally provides a pretty massive amount of wasted over-heal.
And then there’s the fact that the Thief has so little base Health, making Vitality, which already provides the most raw defense, even more effective on the Thief than most other classes.
Thanks guys! How do you do it with steal? :x I am new to stealing so haven’t really tested if it breaks animations.
The only time you would use steal to stomp is on a thief, if it is ready to use, press it the second they shadow step, and youll blink to them without stopping the stomp, and a tuft of hair as a trophy for your accomplishments
You can also use it on Mesmers and, if you have great timing and they were dumb enough to blow Mist Form immediately, Elementalists.
For the love of God, I’ve said it many times already, and I wish they would just do it; make Stealth refresh instead of stack, and always apply Revealed after leaving it.
No more sneaking around or fleeing fights without retaliation.
Everything is fine now, and they can stop nerfing the hell out of us every single tiny little patch!
…What the hell were they thinking? Remove Stealth for a full 30 seconds on basically EVERYONE within 1200 YARDS? And the trap stays in place for a full HOUR?
Those things will be EVERYWHERE around any keeps or camps or… basically anything important.
If you gave Feline Grace as an innate trait, that would make thieves way too OP, and if you removed the heavy armor on warriors/guardians, they would be too useless. The way things are its fine. They don’t have to make things 100% balanced, every profession got its ups and downs.
- Rangers have more evasion than thieves, far better healing, higher HP, access to Protection, etc. and they’re not OP. Felinge Grace being a class passive wouldn’t make Thieves OP at all, it would fit with the squishy but evasive theme of the class.
- Warriors/Guardians have base armor of 2127, Thieves and other medium armor users have 1980. That’s a difference of only 147 armor before any toughness on gear. Armor makes little difference in survivability in this game, and armor type even less. It’s all about evasion, Protection, Aegis and healing.
No one has more evasion than Thieves with at least 15 points in Acrobatics. Rangers do have much easier access to high evasion though.
The reason is that Feline Grace stacks with Vigor. The +50% regeneration traits do not.
I’m not your nanny, and I’m not going to waste a bunch of time posting specific math to help you better understand a very basic misunderstanding you have.
I told you what you’re doing wrong. If you don’t feel like believing me, then don’t.
I think the real task for Thiefs is Fractals lvl 20+, in my opinion they are harder then any other dungeons and top Pve thing. As warrior I was with some thiefs and it was fine. and good with the degear part.
That all follows a basic lack of knowledge on the function and purpose of each attribute, though. Toughness improves self healing far more effectively than Healing Power.
I’m more amazed at how anet has had no issues with gambling laws. Call it a gear/gold sink if you will, but throw in the ability to use real money to purchase items and gold, add all the underage players and we’re gonna have a brand new generation of gambling addicts by next patch.
Regardless of how stupid it may be, I’m pretty sure gambling laws only apply if you have a chance to win back real money.
The law really hasn’t caught up with the internet, somehow.
Other than fighting a boss, I typically carry Dagger Storm.
What makes this worthy of an Elite slot is Venom Aura. In a coordinated party or group, you can literally freeze someone in place until they die.
Another reason why it is an Elite, not because of its power level, but it seems that Anet don’t want us using this with Dagger Storm.
Anet do this a lot in GW1. They place something as Elite because they don’t want it to be combined with another Elite skill by a single profession.
srrry….. what does this mean?
There are certain skill combination that Anet didn’t want a single profession to pull off on their own. I agree that BV is a utility skill in an Elite slot only because the combination of BV with other Elite skill will make it OP. Imagine if BV is not an Elite and was placed as one of the utility venoms, you can practically disable multiple targets on your own using BV+Dagger Storm.
In order to keep this skill in our skill library, they have to place BV in the same slot as DS so we can only pick one or the other, not both.
What…. You do know if you, say, Cluster Bomb with BV up, you aren’t going to petrify the entire group, right?
A bit of background on why a book and not just new slash commands.
Basically Eivene guessed most of it.
1) visual controls are just better than selling a bunch of slash commands with no tangible way to learn them and being limited by typing speed and accuracy.
2) We added the invite functionality.
3) It’s extendable … If it’s popular and we add more dances, more books don’t require a lot of command memorization.
Hopefully that clears some things up.
Just saying, it being an item that takes up space and I have to sort through my gear to find any time I want to use it, is the sole reason I decided against buying it.
I was about to when I still thought it was an item that was consumed to teach the slash commands.
Imagine if we had to haul around a bunch of items to wave, or do the regular dance or any of that.
I don’t know why people hate on Scorpion Wire so much. It should be better, certainly; it has too long a recharge and is too easily avoided. But it is still extremely useful in certain circumstances.
Yank people off keep walls in WvW to get slaughtered, yank people into the heart of your group or far off a point in SPvP.
Under more common circumstances you can either close a 1200 yard gap and stun your target for some burst, or stop a fleeing foe.
I can’t make it for 10am on Saturday. I don’t think I even get out of work that day until 11am PST.
I am so glad you got to be a part of this event. The amount of times you signed up and no one else showed up was awesome. You gave me the courage to keep asking for more thieves.
You made it sound like a eulogy XD
I’d still like to do more in the future.
This Saturday is a follow up to the amazing Thursday Event. You can check out the rules here: SOAC Tournament II
SOAC Held what could only be called the first real shoutcasted tournament and it went amazingly well. Check out this post Game Thread for how it went! WE had a great time with an incredible setup. This Saturday will be for those who want to go again or if you didn’t get to go and want to go.
Time: Saturday 10am PST GMT-8
Coach Nettle’s Thieves
Current Saturday NA Thief Signups
Grimwolf.7163
If you are unable to make the event please post here, or let zoose know ahead of time! Great work on Thursday guys
Dominated the Mesmers. That was definitely easier than it should have been.
Have these matches been recorded as well? I’d love to be able to watch the matches I participated in with commentary.
Stealth was useless with people flinging fireworks everywhere, blasting us all to hell whether they can see us or not XD
…And then fleeing while healing to full any time you spike someone low.
Okay so two big notes of news. We are asking people not to stream the events to help push people to the shoutcasters to give them a chance at practice. You can record it and put it up on youtube later.
Secondly we are going to be grabbing some of the top tournament guys to lend their name to the teams and coach (not play) the players, to talk strategy, specs, and general coaching.
A new post is coming soon that will state more as to why!
Out of curiosity… What is a Shoutcaster?
Essentially they act as an announcer for the event like on sports television.
Because they can’t.
The glassiest cannon in all Berserkertown could not kill a fellow glass cannon in 1-3 hits.
I don’t think you could kill an up-leveled level 2 in WvW in a single hit.
Okay so two big notes of news. We are asking people not to stream the events to help push people to the shoutcasters to give them a chance at practice. You can record it and put it up on youtube later.
Secondly we are going to be grabbing some of the top tournament guys to lend their name to the teams and coach (not play) the players, to talk strategy, specs, and general coaching.
A new post is coming soon that will state more as to why!
Because they can’t.
The glassiest cannon in all Berserkertown could not kill a fellow glass cannon in 1-3 hits.
I don’t think you could kill an up-leveled level 2 in WvW in a single hit.
d/p can stack stealth yes but he was saying that other single skills could do what shadow refuge can. d/p can do it “combining” two skills 1)black powder shot’s blind field 2)HS leap finisher. shadow refuge stacks stealth by itself. it stemmed from mesmers not being able to do what thieves do….but its bc of their mechanics….their skills arent made like thieves(SR). if a mesmer had 3-4 stealths on skill bar yes im sure it would stack.
I absolutely did NOT.
I even clarified that it makes literally no difference whether you do it with one skill or two. D/P will have both those skills regardless.
Shadow Refuge’s Stealth component is completely trivial by comparison, anyway.
