Guild Wars 2

uhhhhhhhh… you need 30 points in CS. x/30/30/x/0 is fine but I prefer 10/30/0/0/30 for more damage and more utility (at the loss of a little survivability from dumping shadow arts completely).

In case you don’t know, when you’re running the trickery build I mentioned you can steal without anything targeted and you’ll get something like 15 seconds of swiftness on a 21 sec cooldown so you move pretty quickly with that and infiltrator arrows/heart seekers.

GL HF

Master of Timespace.2548:

d/p is 100 times easier to pick up than d/d. Running d/d well takes a relatively good overall knowledge about the defensive and offensive skills many professions have so that you don’t try to c&d at the wrong moment. There is also no automatic blind spam in d/d to safe your kitten .
With d/p all you need to learn is to press two buttons in a row. You don’t even need to learn the camera trick anymore.

People only using 2 buttons on d/p are both bad and missing out on a lot of potential with the kit. That being said, most I see only know those two buttons exist

D/D is a lot easier to take outnumbered fights. Seems like you’re trying to brag about your skill more than giving unbiased statements. D/D is quite easy; watching a few Yishis videos is enough to pick up the rotations and movements….

They’re both easy and effective but I’ll never go back to d/d unless they substantially improve its mobility. Honestly, it is cheap to buy an extra weapon and even cheaper to re-trait so why not play both and decide for yourself?

10/30/0/0/30 or go home :P

Considering the only meaningful thief change makes the class even more gimmicky (improv) I hope these notes are fake. Mostly now I’m just bored and I want new builds to play. I want S/D to be as viable as S/P and hell… let’s make P/D tourney viable finally.

Bads like complaining about BP… I think that’s all that really needs to be said here.

I mostly see cheesy exploitations of the improv change, I’m really not a fan of a change like this. Bad players will try to stack more burst together for an all or nothing approach, and top players might have to stop taking basilisk venom to keep the odds of regenerating utilities at 100% so they can time steal to suit situational needs. BUT…. lyssa is thief meta (need BV to use it) so who knows at this point.

Nothing to bring s/d back here =/

D/P is overpowered in WvW imo, but try running that build in high level team queues and you’ll find it’s crap. The only reason that build works in WvW is that you don’t have an area you’re forced to stay in. I’m not a fan of builds that rely heavily on stealth though.

In spvp I find s/p pretty faceroll easy but I can see how it’d be more challenging in WvW.

I run Ogre but Lyssa is a valid replacement. IMO you stay out of the middle of the fight so you don’t need the extra condition clear. The extra damage from ogre makes it better for this burst set.

All depends on your style. I get 17k in s/d and 15.5k on d/p in spvp. Something in that range is nice for wvw except you’ll want more toughness than what you can get in spvp. My d/p thief has about 15k hp and 2100-2200 armor in wvw. That’s on a trickery build.

Sorry but in my opinion this build is complete cheese. I’m not a fan of anything that requires a 1 time burst to go through to be successful.

You stand on the grass below the ramp going up to mid and infiltrator arrow to a specific spot on the ledge above and you jump after you fire the arrow. If you’ve positioned yourself right, and clicked the right spot, you’ll teleport up on the ledge and have a good spot to fire cluster bombs from. It takes a lot of practice to get consistent at it though. I only ever do it when I run d/p, when I’m using s/d I’d rather be down in the fight anyways.

To make it even harder, you stand in slightly different spots depending on if you’re doing it from the left or right side I don’t have a video handy to show you and I’m on NA so that’s all I can do unfortunately.

Frans you can jump dodge by pressing both keys manually, that’s how I do it and I’m still improving but I get it 80% of the time now. It’s almost the same time but you press jump before dodge. S/D works fine I still use it to great effect in high rank team/solo queues. If you’re still running dual signet try dropping the signet of agility for shadow step I swear by it!

Trickery d/p is better than s/d in my estimation but s/d is good enough that if you like it there is no reason not to play it still.

It is Sizer…. he went into wvw for the first time ever like a week or so ago and people went crazy over it. It was entertaining for a while but he’s more fun to watch in spvp. Be careful though… today he was on d/p so the bandwagon might swing the other way shortly!

Edit: http://www.twitch.tv/sizer2654

I thought this was an obvious joke thread. I’ve been killed by p/p thieves before when I was low on health and out of cooldowns and it annoyed me so much I focused them the rest of the match. P/P is not a good weapon set and easily counter-able.

:D Burnfall… I wonder if he has a random word generator that puts his posts together. Otherwise kitten that’s a lot of wasted time!

It is really sad seeing matches ending by the timer rather than reaching 500 =/

Just go in to team queue. Use your head. I don’t play skyhammer any more and it is glorious.

dominoeffect.4216:

With a non stealth build like 10/30/0/30/0, how do you approach encounters vs other thieves? Mainly d/x thieves that stealth for the majority of the time

You stand just outside of the black powder and hit them until they stealth. Then you usually have more than enough evades to survive w/o getting backstabbed. Tons of dodges, flanking strike w/o a target selected, and shortbow #3 to make him miss until the stealth ends. At low skill levels d/p destroys s/d but at high skill levels they are about even.

After evading through the first stealth you should have LS ready to go. Time it right and cast it along with steal/mug to take a big chunk of his health. You can also use infiltrator’s return mid way into their stealth phase to juke them successfully.

Thief is more fun unless you like pressing 1 and not much else

JK, Rangers you know I love you!

Use lyssa to negate condition bombs. You can also run with shadow step instead of sig of agility to get a fast 3 condi clear as well. S/D doesn’t work with trickery imo, stick with 10/30/0/30/0 unless you like playing a more stealthed based build (meh, not recommended).

I think this would be fun to experiment with. Anet, make it happen please

Missing for me as well. Wolves were better because of how the howl sound carried so far.

I gotta say Phantaram, I’m disapointed in your lack of understanding of s/d. S/D is barely keeping its head above water in the current meta. So many builds either beat or hold their own against it.

What you’re really upset about is how bad Elementalists still are. Watching Helseth’s stream and hearing him yell at you asking if you were in downstate before the fight even started says it all dude. Focus your energy on something positive and make suggestions on how to make ele’s viable rather than making another build un-viable. When you’re wrong you’re wrong no matter your status.

AOE is already too strong. Focus on nerfing pet specs instead of making AOE even more important/overpowered.

Stealthing downed players isn’t a problem at all in this game. bhagwad is just raging because he lost a 1v2. You just want it dumbed down to suit your personal desires.

Yeah, I just started queuing again and I’m going solo into team queue. I’ve had a few games that we lost (470 vs 500 and 499 vs 500) where my team was pug and the opponents were premade, but all in all it’s been a lot of fun. It’s quite possible to get into the top 1000 even going in solo.

I like d/p over s/p. S/P lacks the burst that d/p has and I think staying in short bow is better most the time anyways. Trickery builds really are shortbow builds and the other weapon set should be something that compliments it. D/P’s burst fits perfectly with that. Another benefit of d/p is you won’t feel your mind turning to mush like when playing s/p

I’ve always left auto attack on personally. Never saw a reason to turn it off with how I play.

I get a kick out of seeing Mr. Big do a cheesy 180 deg change of opinion. Before Dec 10th he played S/D and thought it was fair and was very against any nerf. After the 10th he went to s/p (which is the new easy mode thief build) and he now calls s/d evade spam cheese.

The truth is, S/D is still viable but you have to actually be good to play it. I don’t think S/P is OP but it has the skill floor of a fricken hambow warrior…. People are delusional if they think it is a skillful set. D/P is still a skillful set and I’m here claiming that S/D has finally become one as well. From the start, S/P has been a weapon set without a purpose, sword and pistol don’t have synergy like our other sets.

These cry threads are really sad. Balance will never be perfect, but it’s not that bad. If you’re having big issues it means you’re not playing well enough. Now that you know where the real issue is, go fix it dude!

The main thing when playing them with your build is to be patient. Dodge out and use shortbow during their burst. It took me a while using d/p to get used to it because I was used to blinding powder tanking guards for me. They’re like some thief builds that once the burst misses they’re not a threat anymore.

S/D makes them look foolish if you like that weapon set.

Thief will be fine stop worrying…

Amaterasu.6280:

I believe that would truly bring out the good thieves vs the bad ones.

You know it is already extremely obvious which ones are bad right? Thief is probably more polarized between good and bad than any other class.

Kurr you’re way off about s/d. They fixed that weapon set by splitting #3 into 2 parts! Most of us have no issue using it and now we’re not left with a skill that is sure to miss the 2nd hit while leaving us totally open to counter attacks. The subsequent nerfs like dropping the boons stolen were really questionable but not the initial decision to split them up.

I’m not sure about splitting pw up but I’m willing to see what it looks like. Currently it is next to impossible to get a full pw to hit but what if you waste the initial stun then sword #2 to immobilize them before the 2nd part?

I think pw doesn’t suffer from the same issues as FS / LS so I’m less confident that anet will get it right. Time will tell.

I’ve seen people use d/p as the offhand for p/d but it was usually to stack stealth when in trouble. I’m sure you can make it work but shortbow is f’ing awesome and i’d never give it up on any build.

Heads up though, use carrion or dire…. rabid isn’t good for condi thieves like it is for engineers or necros. Good Luck!

DJ stop trying to cause problems. It’s already been said too many times, there are multiple ways to counter bp:

Go ranged
Stand at the edge of the circle and still hit the thief
Use a fast attack like pistol whip to mostly negate the blind (it reapplies pretty slowly)
warrior stance
engineer condi immunity at 25%
ele condi immunity at 90%

OR OR OR get this….. stand outside of the bp and wait for the thief come to you. You can contest every single point in spvp while also staying out of BP’s radius, all the while letting your cd’s come off cooldown. So what again is the problem? Good players don’t have problems with this and they laugh at the idea that it grants ~90% melee damage reduction. Think man!

For pve: pve is easy mode boring so who cares if you have a strong skill there? They already scaled bosses so that blind has reduced effectiveness anyways.

In summary: BP gives 100% melee damage reduction against heartseeker spammers and guardians/warriors that stand in the middle of the BP the entire time without knowing that it’s blinding them.

Cheers!

2 ways to use DB on d/d

1: equip all carrion, spam 3333333333 – profit.
2: equip zerker and forget your 3 key even exists – profit.

I need more cowbell!

See if you like running pistol/dagger. Stack power and condition damage gear, use caltrops too. It’s pretty safe… you cloak and dagger, move away a bit, sneak attack for 5 bleed stacks, then auto attack twice, then cloak and dagger again to repeat the process. You’re either at range or stealthed the whole time so you don’t get hit often. Get 30 points into shadow arts as soon as you can to get shadow rejuv…. that helps a lot with surviving.

Once you get the rhythm down you’ll be unkillable in pve. With more practice you can go to direct damage builds and being fully geared at lvl 80 helps a lot too.

He made the original post then never commented again. This is trolling people. Everyone knows you can hit a thief standing in BP by standing on the edge and fast attacks like pistol whip mostly ignore it anyways since it only pulses about once per second.

Just let this trollpost die off.

Cool story. Use your mobility to get out and backcap instead of giving the enemy team 5 points and save the rest of us some forum clutter next time. Just use one z axis infiltrator arrow and all the other professions will be complaining about not killing us…

Short Bow – You’re welcome

FYI the devs don’t think stealth needs to be nerfed (or they haven’t shown that yet). All they wanted last patch was to make it so you can’t remain in stealth permanently without using utilities to secure it.

30 into acro is still great for s/d. The cast time on IR means our survivability dropped, going 25/30/0/15/0 would just drop it further without giving enough dps to compensate properly. That being said, I’ve ran with assassins reward (after wasting time with the kitten skill hard to catch) and it’s decent. However, quick pockets is right there and the utility it gives is better than the healing from AR. Extra initiative for porting or evading, another cluster bomb available, better chance of infiltrator’s arrow being available when you need to bail in a hurry… etc.

Assassin’s reward needs to be a viable option over quick pockets and right now it’s lacking. More healing or adding condition removal would be cool.

VJ wants this to stay about s/p in the meta so…. S/P is roughly as effective as d/p in the current meta but it’s much easier to achieve the same success because just like warrior it is extremely easy to use. Within a few hours I felt roughly as effective playing s/p as I am after months upon months of the same d/p build (and I came up with it without any help from some chest thumping kid).

VJ have you been in the top 100 on either leaderboard?

Arganthium.5638:

Excalibur.9748:

s/d still works fine but it’s not godmode anymore so people think it’s trash… funny huh?

If you put a pro on a trash spec, it can appear to be fine….

I feel like a lot of the people that I’ve seen still playing S/D are the hardcore players that would stick with the weaponset no matter what.

For example, I still play S/D in sPvP. I think I’ve seen Hype playing S/D in sPvP (if he plays the little asura that I think he plays, then I can tell you he’s definitely a dedicated or at least good S/D player as well, if I can call myself a decent S/D player)… In fact, Hype is the only other person I see consistently playing S/D in sPvP. I see a bunch of scrubs running around with it and getting completely wiped, some decently respectable players who can use the weaponset to put him/herself on par with the average warrior, but there are very few people that are still getting good results with it. The result has been that only the very small percentage of people that can use the weapon set effectively are continuing to play it, which has led to the common delusion that S/D is in a “fine” place at the moment.

If you took an average player and placed him on an S/D build, no matter how good the build would be, that player would very likely be completely annihilated by his opponents. It’s turned from a meta spec to a “pet” weaponset that only those of us who absolutely love Sword/Dagger still use with any great frequency.

I’m not sure if it was me but my thief is an asura. Say hi next time you see me

Viking Jorun.5413:

Hype.8032:

d/p is superior to s/p but s/p is a lololol press 3 build so you get the obvious types gravitating towards it. Both builds have the same shortbow action but d/p has more reliable spikes and chases better. Then again, it takes more skill.

You’d be completely wrong, and your assumption that sword is for spiking shows your inferior knowledge about the class. Sword is designed as a sustained damage weapon, while dagger is a burst damage weapon, meaning that sword builds are made to stay in the fight and keep pressure, while dagger is a get-in-get-out spike weapon meant to quickly take down already pressured opponents.

Secondly, D/P has far to much reward for its very little risk, while S/P, S/D, and D/D are balanced to the point where a skilled player will shine when using these, and many top-tier PvPers stray from D/P due to its low skill ceiling and inability to hold a point.

D/P in WvW, however, is extremely good due to its high access to stealth on demand without the necessity of an enemy to gain it from, ala CnD. In this facet you would be correct, but this is a PvP discussion. I’m sure you’re trolling by telling experienced players that D/P requires far more skill than S/P, S/D, D/D, and even P/P. It’s laughable, really.

EDIT: Also, anyone running S/P who mindlessly spams 3 is going to die very, very quickly. Maybe you should try something other than your canned D/P build to expand your horizons.

You do realize that shortbow is a better weapon for sustained damage than s/p right? In both d/p and s/p kits you should be using shortbow most the time. You keep the same damage while maintaining more defense. So, what do you want from a switch? Burst is the answer. D/P is the superior set for burst and it’s our highest skill cap weapon along with shortbow. Step away from perma stealthing in wvw and learn more about this class dude!

You sound foolish saying s/p doesn’t revolve around pistol whip… watch magictoker play, that’s his bread and butter and you’ll often see him hit it 3 times in a row with no other skills inbetween. YOUR inferior knowledge betrays you.

Cheers!

Good troll. /wave byeeee

d/p is superior to s/p but s/p is a lololol press 3 build so you get the obvious types gravitating towards it. Both builds have the same shortbow action but d/p has more reliable spikes and chases better. Then again, it takes more skill.

Nice troll attempt OP, cute!