Guild Wars 2

Sorry, 2/0/0/6/6 s/d is not OP in this meta. I’m still not happy with the meta though. That spec shouldn’t be a viable damage dealer and neither should a lot of the other profession’s meta builds. There should be a place for the 2/6/0/0/6 thief but right now the extra damage isn’t enough to justify it. Why lose half your defense for ~20% more offense?

So… I’d say we need the dual sigil procs nerfed back to how it used to be. Some of these new rune sets like strength and pirate should be scaled back also because the powercreep they created is pretty destructive for the game.

Even an average MM will easily beat a d/p thief that insists on spending most of the fight in d/p rather than shortbow. What this post tells me is that your friend was even worse than you are. D/P is not any more gimmicky than any other weapon set for all the professions.

Seriously…. how the hell did a MM lose to a bad d/p thief? Even if the guy was afk he still had a reasonable chance of winning….

Off topic but people talking about strength runes are behind the meta…. there are birds everywhere right now haha.

Try 2/6/0/0/6, more damage and more utility (allows you more control over the fight) than the spec you’re running. Find some ways to get a little gold and re-gear more tanky until your reflexes speed up enough.

Lux since you don’t understand I’ll explain. The CS trait line lost 10% crit damage from this patch. To compensate, Anet BUFFED beserker’s amulet by adding 10% there to keep the total the same. 2/6/x/x/x builds kept the same crit chance while builds not using CS got an overall 10% increase in crit damage. That along with runes of strength/pirate, dual sigil procs, and more might on enemy players (that you can now steal from with higher efficiency) is what made this build more viable. Oh, did i forget that conditions are a lot less prevalent now?

So, in the past you were running lyssa (crappy dps) with 2/6/0/6/0 and now you’re running strength/pirate with 2/0/0/6/6. With the above changes a difference in dps between those builds isn’t even noticeable. Sure, you can still run 2/6/0/6/0 today and have even higher dps but in my experience it’s not worth losing the utility of the trickery line.

Arg, for your health and happiness I’d say just drop it man. The opinions of a bunch of random people doesn’t mean kitten. You know what you did and how much effort you expended to prove out this build. The changes in the April patch did a whole lot to change things around but the basics of this build remain the same as they were a year back when you were getting laughed at for it.

I, as one of the few that actually read the forums, said to myself during ToL, “Hey, Sizer’s running Arganthium’s build”. But I’m some random too so my thoughts don’t matter either right?

Cheers

This is a troll post.
Stop feeding the troll.

Arg I’ve always given you credit for this build However, I maintain that it only became a good build after the april patch changed the game enough to make it viable.

I steal the stability as a thief but yeah…. it’s a symptom of a greater issue. Anet made it so that the only viable builds are cheesy bullkitten.

Unfortunately d/p is a bit underpowered these days. You can play it and be successful, but there are better specs out there. Thx for putting the effort out to make the guide. It’s bound to help someone.

Thieves NEED strength runes to be relevant…. any nerf to this runeset should come with a thief buff. I agree that we should have more rune diversity though.

Dumb suggestion, d/p needs stealth from black powder. D/P is already UP in spvp, go away please….

I thought I was rubberbanding too! This can’t be the new normal for this skill… Come on anet… fix all these bugs or revert back to a stable verison of the game…..

Hey dude!

In my opinion, 10/30/0/0/30 is still superior in nearly every situation. Better damage, better initiative regen, and better health. All your build has is panic strike so you have to be extremely coordinated to make that advantage be worth it.

Either way, it’s nice to see people still thinking and coming up with different builds. Take care!

D/P kind of died off this patch. At least in NA you’ll see quite a few of them but that set’s effectiveness has diminished certainly. What I’m really surprised with is how s/p died off completely. None of the nerfs could be attributed to it. It really shows how fickle the community is. S/D is about as strong as it’s been in recent months and most the thieves used it in ToL so there you go….

Thieves already move across the map fast enough w/o centaur runes. I’d rather stick with divinity/ogre/stength runes to optimize my build. I still have centaur runes on my mesmer though

No one else really cares what your character looks like so decide if you want to minimize your animations or not. I liked the idea of a small sneaky assassin so I went with asura but I was also keen on maximizing my advantage.

lol I can’t say succinctly enough how bad this idea is. Please go away.

This kind of protest doesn’t hurt anyone but your teammates. Stop being a little kitten and play the kittening map. Don’t solo queue if you don’t want to play it. Team queue doesn’t have it and you can play it solo with good results anyways. Posts like this might get to Anet eventually but intentionally sabotaging your team will get you banned before it actually forces Anet to get rid of the map.

Solstice.1097:

im just surprised the title isn’t “WAkittenkitten”

+1 for the laugh

Mrbig.8019:

I mean, cmon….

/15 oneshots

You made a reference to South Park. Very clever, very clever.

Obsidia.5127:

Thief is like this at the moment. Play S/D or nothing.

Balance was better before the AMAZING FEETCHA PATCH.

I’m absolutely destroying with s/p and it’s easier than s/d or d/p. I do wish d/p was favored in this last patch as it’s still my favorite…

Pollution.8703:

Bhawb.7408:

It is a very simple MMR based system. You start off at a certain MMR, probably around the middle. Your team has an MMR, and the enemy team has an MMR. Whoever wins gains MMR according to what the team MMRs said “should” have happened (equal MMR = 50% chance to win every game), and essentially your MMR is continuously changed with every game, trying to find that perfect number where every game you play in has an exactly 50% chance of you winning against a team of equal rating.

The reason some people get high so fast is that ANet has an MMR system that has very wide swings on wins/losses. In a game like LoL, you only gain or lose like 10 MMR (average MMR is around 1200 in that game), but here it seems like you can gain hundreds per game. So if you get a lucky win streak you can gain massive rating very quickly.

Thanks for the answer. So the guy in my initial post just went on a 6-8 game win streak. Seems kinda lame to me as that makes movement up and down the ladder far more susceptible to luck.

He went on a win streak but his team still had to beat some highly ranked comps to end up that high. I had an even luckier streak to end up something like 8-3 but I was only in the 400’s or so upon being ranked for the first time.

That being said, it should take a lot more than 11 games to get such a high rank.

OFC it should be removed. Anet knows this but they refuse. They also know it isn’t a good map, let’s not be so delusional to think they actually think it is great. Rather, they spent a lot of man-hours making it and they can’t bring themselves to shelve it.

Since it isn’t going away I wish they’d spend a few more hours to clean it up so that it becomes a good/decent map. Revise the hammer to fire faster but make it dodge-able. Remove all the small glass panels and only have the 2 large panels on each side. This might be enough to make the map reasonable.

BTW, Coloxeus do you spend much time in spvp now days? I’ve only seen you a few times when I’ve been playing.

Coloxeus.3480:

Sheppy.9306:

This game has got so lame, i mean the 2-0-0-6-6 build is sound but that really shows you where this game is going. The class that is supposed to be about insane burst damage now has to go into the acrobatics trait line rather than the critical strikes traitline. Even thieves are on their way to becoming partial bunkers along with the other 4 metas in the group. Sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo BORING to play as and against. My team has pretty much decided to stop playing this game and look for another one as when we hit around the rank 300 mark we hit this constant bunker meta.

I highly recommend sticking to the D/P 2-6-0-0-6 build its way more fun.

i agree burst is more fun but in some situation D/P can’t or hard to compete against other condi bunker like decap engies in high tier tpvp

Yeah guys, I’m getting tired of s/d. That build is still at a disadvantage against warriors and other thieves and that drives me crazy. D/P really doesn’t feel equipped to handle this meta either. Too much cleave in team fights to ever switch from shortbow and you’ll still lose several 1v1’s on side points anyways.

I’ve always hated s/p but it’s actually fun using a build that everyone dropped even though it’s just as effective. Sure pistolwhip costs just a little bit more but the sigil/rune change makes up for it imo. It’s still extremely easy and I feel dirty even using it but sometimes I want to use an easy mode build like everyone else in this game.

I think we’re lucky that we have several different weaponsets/playstyles that are viable. D/P just needs a slight buff to get it back to even with the rest of the meta sets.

And finally, I realize this has just about nothing to do with the OP :P

I have about a 90% success rate stomping other thieves on the first try. A lot of times I can even manually aim shadow step in time if they port where I expect it. I have to say though, my all time favorite stomps are when I juke ele’s to use mistform right as I start the stomp and porting right at the end matches with their mistform ending and they die instantly

100% agree…………………………………….

People talking about playing this build months ago aren’t grasping the changes of the most recent patch. Going 30 points into CS only gives 20% crit damage rather than 30, ferocity runes increased dps substantially, and the sigil change made burst better with fire/air combo. THOSE changes are what made this build viable. Before the patch this was a low damage troll build. Post patch it’s a medium damage build that wades through the AOE spam of this meta a bit better than our other builds.

It looks like Arganthium created 10/0/0/30/30 before its time

typing /sit is faster to get out of it….

Sword builds use it to increase burst damage. D/P uses side strike instead because it gives a better chance to crit on your backstab (pretty important for overall dps). All builds use practiced tolerance as the first choice in the tree.

I get excited seeing mesmers on the opposing side because we as thieves have a class advantage over them. Shortbow is >>> mesmers. Besides that, go glassy and they’ll panic after they lose half their health from your first port in. In spvp I can come in casting LS + mug + 1 autoattack and if both my sigils go off it’s probably around 10k damage nearly instantly.

You know you played thief too much when you look on the mesmer forum, see they have this same post about mesmers, and decide to ‘steal’ the idea and put it in the thief forums.

Strength or Ogre. Use hide in shadows as a heal to increase your condition cleansing in addition to shadow step. Lyssa is kitten now sorry….

You have to play 11 games of a specific type (solo/team) before you’re listed. After that if you log in while looking at the LB it’ll show your rank at the top.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

The complete and absolute lack of any form of risk versus reward on a Thief is the problem with the profession. The end.

Stealthing should not provide so many benefits while having 0 drawbacks. A Necromancer has to pick and choose when to use Death Shroud because while in it Life Force will drain. If used improperly this can result in a swift death. Thief however can readily use stealth as he or she pleases getting nothing but return from doing so with the only thing they need to think about being “do I want to be revealed now or after I’ve ported half way across the map.”

This is a thread in the spvp forum. Thieves use very limited stealth there because they can’t cap points while stealthed. Your whole argument is invalid and your assertion that thieves have no risk is childish at best.

This thread makes me smile. You even brought burnfall and phantaram out hahahaha. Thieves (not thiefs – please learn this) add complexity to a match. They have several hard counters as well. Basically your complaint has no merit. The fact that you got burnfall in here pretty much confirms it

Yeah pretty much. Thief is still viable in this meta but only top players can make it work. I’ve won plenty of games with myself and another good thief playing but more often than not the other thief is trash and we lose. When I see another thief I can switch to engi but then I have to trust that he’ll know how to move and decap/support the team correctly. Without that we’ll lose anyways so it’s lose/lose really.

Backstab is your autoattack when stealthed. Your normal attack is toggled into a powerful attack when you hit someone from behind while stealthed. You can get stealthed from the heal Hide in Shadows, from Cloak and Dagger on dagger offhand, from using heart seeker through black powder, from several utilities, etc etc..

To start out, try running dagger mainhand, pistol offhand with a shortbow for backup. I think the best newbie build for that is 2/6/6/0/0.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAoaVlsMpyplOx7J8PNBNBt9DGeE4uGlYGaFAA-TZRBwAReCA02fgcZAAHCgHnAAA

Cast #5 to get a small AOE circle beneath you that blinds anyone inside of it then heart seeker (#2) through it to gain stealth and try to backstab the opponent. Keep practicing that combo till you get good at it. A cool trick is to hit backstab while far away from someoen and quickly hit steal and the mug damage as well as the backstab damage will connect for a big hit.

When you get better you can try 2/6/0/0/6 with the same gear (except I’d use ogre runes instead). This build has a lot more damage/utility but it’s much less survivable.

Hope this helps.

A lot of thief builds needed lyssa to be viable but that runes are pure crap now. Better to go all out dps and hope you down the guy before you blow up.

Anyone mind sharing a thief build that gets uber strong with these runes? I sure don’t know any. If anything these runes are roughly on par with ogre for thieves so we didn’t get a buff from them. Balthazar engi’s and MM necros are far more toxic to this game than strength runes.

Tachii.3506:

Is the pistol whip balance to 6 init in sPvP noticeable?

Not really, just throw in a few more autoattacks than you did before to keep the regen matching your expenditure.

It’s a hard counter so it shouldn’t exist. Nerf the kittening trait like AR.

Tachii.3506:

S/D and D/P is still a solid choice, I guess. I no longer see D/D on par with these two though. Well in general I no longer see glass cannon builds to be viable anywhere. The risk is just too great now as opposed to the reward with the crit damage nerf.

I’ve played s/p post patch and it still wrecks but I hate it so much I always switch out of it. It’s just too boring even though it’s very effective.

Anyone who says MM’s don’t work against top players haven’t faced one as a thief. Literally the only way to win is to extend the fight several minutes and one by one pick off the minions with shortbow. It’s so far in the MM’s favor it is ridiculous. I really thought that trash build was getting nerfed at patch time but they seem even more prevalent than before =/

When the match is over nothing matters… who cares if they down/kill you? If you want to look at the score then look at the score dude…. not rocket science.

I’m ok with it as long as it is used to put the equally OP engineers in their place.

It is Anet’s fault for putting pve rewards in spvp. Plus putting a limit on the rewards in hotjoin practically shoves them into the queues before they’re ready.

P.S. I focus those with legendaries because it’s complete BS that anet didn’t retroactively give pvp players past a certain experience one as well.

This post is lol.

Let’s talk about nerfing Balthazar runes instead….