I have no idea what purpose it serves to use Shadow Arts in a Sword/Pistol build. SA is a stealth-line, and you have no stealth access in this weapon set, so you’re limited to using utilities/healing.
We can help you build something that’s probably better, just be clear about what you are looking for. Traits are meant to be swapped anyway.
Trickery-based thieves still need to put points in Trickery. I know this seems like an obvious point, but builds are about choices, and Trickery has pretty limited options for offense/defense when compared to other places you could spec.
The worst thing about the init regen change was that it made several init-gain options obsolete. Infiltrator’s Signet is still OK because of the stunbreaker and shadowstep, but Patience is useless, Signet Use is sketchy, and Opportunist is a shadow of its former self. The slottable traits are the worst ones here, because at least with Opportunist it’s only an auto-minor.
Builds that are out of control (are there any? I haven’t seen one) can just be changed via some other lever. Init should probably be left alone.
^ Yes, that’s good. You have really strong and reliable condition removal now. A couple other tweaks you could make:
- Thrill of the Crime plus deep Acrobatics gives you basically perma-Swiftness, especially if you use turn-around + Withdraw to move around. You could replace Signet of Shadows with another utility skill if you wanted to.
- Sigil of Perception is a little weak. You already have enough crit chance in your build, so perhaps consider Bloodlust instead.
Other than that, the only thing I’d do is maybe tweak the accessories a bit to get more Toughness for soaking hits. Armor of 2080 is pretty squishy. Although if you’re comfortable with that, more power to you.
Saffron-scented Poultry Soup is also really good when combined with Withdraw for condition removal (Withdraw’s movement-based condis get removed first, so the food usually removes something nasty).
Quick Recovery is garbage. Use Pain Response.
How to escape the clutches of a P/D Perplexity Thief:
- Push your 180 button.
- Hold down W.
- There is no step #3.
They have no way to make you fight them.
Headshot would count, sure, but as soon as you go with an offhand pistol, you lose CnD and Death Blossom. Not a good trade in your condition build that only has a single stealth utility as it is.
Why use Perplexity? You don’t have any interrupts to trigger the #6 skill. I would either use Noble’s (requires dungeon runs to acquire) for Venomous Might and food synergy, or Altruism for party support via Might/Fury (buyable from TP, and super-cheap).
Celestial is a risk since we don’t know what will happen to the stat budget for those items in the post-Ferocity world. I personally think that Apothecary will be your best bet, since it is self synergistic (Healing Power and Toughness both at once), has secondary condition damage for you, and will help your party members with Leeching Venoms (which uses the recipient’s Power for damage, but YOUR healing power for the heal).
^ Also the basic utility from having Cripple/Weakness on the final hit of the AA chain. There’s a reason why the really skilled S/P players use AA a lot.
Pistol Whip does have some decent burst capability when you combine it with Might and Haste, though.
what is much of a small group spec?
currently im trying
25/30,0,0,15
Venomshare is a good small group spec, as I already mentioned.
Everything else has “sort of” support, like going deep Trickery for giving out Fury/Might/Swiftness/Vigor. Thief is mostly offensive when it comes to group synergy, as opposed to defensive like a Guardian.
Other builds will “work” in small groups, but you usually aren’t contributing anything other than your damage.
Traits depend on your weaponset and gear, and what you’re trying to accomplish.
A 0/30/30/0/10 build is fine if you just want to be a pain in the kitten while you are roaming around. You have damage, you have lots of stealth, and a little bit of Fury/init help from Trickery. That setup works well with D/P. Not much of a small group spec, though.
I kind of need a hybrid build for roaming, I went with what could kill up to 5 NPCs in this last patch to tweak the build.
Are you talking about clearing camps? You can do that with a high-condition build, so long as you have good bleed duration, Caltrops, and use Signet of Malice to stay alive. Dagger Storm helps a lot there if you need a little extra “push”.
Hybrid is just bad. Sure, get some Power to deal a little extra damage with your skills, but without the Power/CritDmg/CritChance tripod in effect, you aren’t a threat. There is no way to make it worthwhile. A specialist of either stripe will eat your lunch. Avoid spreading yourself too thin unless ANet makes it worthwhile to do.
Weapons: fine, but consider getting Bleed duration Sigil instead of condi damage.
Armor: it’s OK, but you may find advantage in mixing in some Dire gear as well. Rune would be better as Undead.
Food: Use Koi Cakes or Veggie Pizza.
Skills: Consider Signet of Malice instead of Withdraw.
I don’t know what to say about your Traits… you need to pick a lane. If you’re going to focus on condition damage and survival, you have a lot of wasted investments in Power-based bonuses. Also you are very weak to conditions. Lots of clean up required there.
If you are guaranteed to be running in a small group, you should look into builds that use Venomous Aura and Leeching Venoms.
^ The initiative change was a huge buff for a lot of builds. I don’t blame ArenaNet for avoiding this place.
No, because my life isn’t ruled by hyperbole, and I have a completely realistic expectation that Thief will always be at least OK-ish. The worst profession in this game is still playable in all modes.
This is a cool idea for a build. Always been a fan of Altruism runes for small groups.
You need new food, though: the endurance bonus from the stew does not stack with Vigor (which you have a ton of). I’d suggest Saffron-scented Poultry Soup, because you are extremely vulnerable to damaging conditions with this build. Either that, or move your points from DA into SA (so that CnD becomes your condi removal skill).
You can also go for a condition-style AOE method, which is strictly inferior to Sword/Pistol but works better against enemies like Dredge that ignore Blind.
Choose Signet of Malice as your heal, Caltrops on the Utility bar, Dagger/Dagger as your main weapon, and use Death Blossom to deal AOE damage while evading, healing, and sticking bleeds on enemies. Highly effective in open world PvE.
I’d use this page on the wiki as a starting point if I were you:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Steal/Creature
It has a list of what you get from what, and links to what the various skills do.
EDIT: I’ll give you one of my favorites, the Healing Seed from Rangers. It eats a condition and heals you, which everyone knows, but what some people don’t realize is that it’s a Water field. Stealing a Healing Seed from a Ranger, throwing it down, and then Blasting on it with Cluster Bomb is one of the funniest things ever.
(edited by Interceptor.2653)
Well then, maybe I’ll just give up and buy ruby orbs…
The monk’s aegis on elite was pretty tempting. But if healing power is as hopeless as you say it is, then I might as well get back to offensive runes.
Healing Power is not useless; NinjaEd just did a really lazy analysis. Didn’t use the actual stats from the runes, had wrong numbers for SoM, doesn’t account for frequency, etc.
Basically, in order to justify adding Healing Power deliberately as a Thief, you have to layer multiple sources on top of each other. While the ratios on things like SoM/Rejuv/ AR etc are pretty small, you can take advantage of them in rapid succession alongside each other. Withdraw also has a 15 second cooldown. Etc.
Not every build can leverage it. Acrobatics Thieves have a lot of Regen access, plus AR/Withdraw/Mug. Any venom-based build has Rejuv, Leeching. You might only have a couple things that use HP (don’t forget that Hide in Shadows uses it twice: once for the heal, again for the Regen effect), and that makes it less worthwhile.
It may come down to the boon duration; 15% is a lot. But maybe you don’t care about it in your build, if you aren’t heavy with Might/Fury/Vigor.
Altruism is also worthwhile if you run a low-CD heal like Withdraw and run in small groups, and Lyssa is very strong (has the same Aegis on elite, except for 5 seconds instead of 30, basically just as good in a real fight). Ruby Orbs are good and cheap (4% crit chance, 12% crit damage, 120 Power), but don’t overrate the effect that they have on your whole build. Does not take a lot of boons to replace what they give you.
Interesting build. Don’t you find yourself lacking in the damaging-condition-removal department, though? I am surprised that you aren’t running Pain Response, especially since you went 10 DA for Mug instead of 10 SA for Embrace.
It costs 6 initiative. Give me a lower cost or another effect if you’re going to take utility away from something that does laughable damage.
2. Methods of dealing with condi spam that are thief related (as in lyssa is not a solution, anyone can put that on)
This is a nonsense restriction. Here’s a list of non-Thief professions that have a 45-second Elite and 15-second Healing skill:
If you don’t see anyone listed there, that’s probably because they don’t exist. The low CDs on those two things — which are Thief related, thank you — are what make Lyssa and Poultry so good for us.
Evasion isn’t our specialty either, engi can evade for days, ranger can evade for days, Mesmer can evade for days. We get a small bonus to evasion over others, but its hardly noticeable when you take into consideration how nasty it is when their weapon makes contact with us.
This is just objectively wrong. We have weapon evades, perma-Vigor access, Feline Grace, and even a Signet that recharges endurance (because why not). Nobody is better at evasion than a Thief specced for it.
—————
Stop saying wrong things. You can make arguments about Thief bunkering without making kitten up in the process.
(edited by Interceptor.2653)
Depends on what you are doing. Anything from full glass (<2000 Armor) to WhatTheKitten Dire (3000+ Armor) is defensible.
Mostly you only see full glass on roamers, though. You simply cannot survive in medium-to-large group combat unless you have SOME Toughness to soak hits.
I feel like this sort of build is going to benefit from the upcoming sigil changes. Our native on-crit stuff isn’t great, but the removal of the shared ICD has the potential to be a significant event for gear like this.
Disabling Shot, nerf was not the way it had to be done. The evade frame, and cast time is what should have been changed. There is still little to no window of opportunity between evades. Now with proper initiative management, it can still be just as annoying. Just another case of Anet not knowing exactly how to balance a skill.
Yes, but now it will be no worse than it was on Dec 9th. The added cost makes it harder to keep going for longer periods of time, which is the only change that had to be made to bring it back to baseline. And now it will do more damage.
Again detonate cluster. Really? This was used to “shotgun” your feet, when the thief has someone behind them, or for downed cleave. 18% damage is ridiculous, nerfs like this seem like nerfs to compensate for players that don’t know how predict this kind of play, and avoid the damage.
It’s funny that you mention downed people, because they are totally screwed by the current behavior of Choking Gas. Max ticks of Shortbow #4 is basically a death sentence.
But to your point about Detonate Cluster, if you are hitting someone with all three projectiles, they have six bleeds now instead of three. Surely this compensates for the reduced damage (damage which you can still get by NOT detonating the Cluster, mind you).
I was not defending the changes, just pointing out that if you didn’t see people complaining about Shortbow, you weren’t listening in the right places. But as for a defense:
Detonate: now has a more defined role. Cluster Bomb is for raw damage, Detonate is for bleeding and AOE. I’m sort of confused why this change is controversial. Don’t blow up the bomb if you want damage.
Disabling Shot: got increased evade uptime after the Dec 10th change to init regen. This is not in dispute. They are increasing the cost to bring the evasion uptime more into line with what it was before, except we’re getting some extra damage on it in compensation. I don’t see how this is a problem unless you like getting free power for no cost whatsoever (which is what happened on Dec 10th).
Choking Gas: the poison length was a little ridiculous, especially with the plentiful access to condition duration in various Thief builds. At least take heart that they didn’t touch the duration of the field, which is the other part of the skill that’s secretly really good.
Range: they didn’t touch range this patch.
Main/Secondary weapon: Shortbow sits in exactly in the same spot after this patch as it did beforehand. It’s far and away our best utility weapon, which is why everyone and their mother carries one if they have any sense at all.
This is probably a net neutral patch for SB (Detonate change is good, Disabling is a side-grade, Choking Gas is a straight nerf), and at worst it’s only slightly negative.
Nobody is complaining about it
Bad news for you: people do complain about it. Disabling Shot has been a point of irritation for people ever since the initiative change in December, and Choking Gas is devastating with its current effect and the way the duration stacks.
There may be problems with Shortbow, that doesn’t make these changes indefensible. And that bit about “main weapon” is just nonsense. Regardless of what slot you stick a Shortbow in, it is far and away one of the most popularly used weapon types for this profession.
These leaks occur far too often and turn out to be accurate for the most part. I think this is probably the real deal.
Remember the “big things” we were promised? This is probably it or at least one of them (something else not mentioned here). It is intensely strong. So many possibilities when considering all the utility types we have.
If so, they are out of their kittened minds. The possibilities with a five-venoms build are strong enough that I probably wouldn’t even miss having a stunbreaker.
My goodness, the others are pretty strong too, even though we don’t have Elites/Heals to match everything. Signets would be quite powerful, to the point where you could build around activating Signet of Malice for the heal/effect and then getting it off cooldown immediately thereafter.
If they aren’t fake notes, I’ll hope that they just contain a “gotcha” somewhere that’s not immediately obvious.
No way those notes can be real. Five-venom builds are going to far too powerful with a free reset on Steal.
I’m sorry, this is a L2P issue. Last refuge isn’t broken, it does exactly what it was intended to do.
It’s not up to you. Devs have stated that they don’t like the way that it can occasionally punish players unintentionally.
^ There are undoubtedly Warrior builds that could “not die” to condition spec — maybe Hammer/Bow for some CC and range ability? — but a P/D Thief will just leave if they can’t win. We’re talking about a build that lives in stealth, here. Disengaging is a cinch.
not to play “point-counterpoint” with you but the build literally had half a dozen ways of dropping conditions. some thru utility. somethru adrenaline. some thru 2 traits. and all thru lyssa runes. p/d wouldntohave done much. need 7 stacks of bleed justto get inthe positive.
Warrior doesn’t have enough condition clear to deal with the rate that Thieves can re-apply, and your bleed estimate is just objectively wrong. Suppose we have a Thief with primary condition damage everywhere, using condi food/nourishment. That put you at ~1700 condition damage, which means that Healing Signet’s regen is completely negated by any of the following:
- three stacks of Bleeding (~382 damage per tick)
- Poison (~ 254 damage per tick plus 33% reduced healing)
- two stacks of Torment when moving (four without)
It’s trivial for a Thief to maintain any one of those, and in reality you are dealing with multiples. You can hang for a while, but eventually running negative sustain and burning condi cleanses will drain your health to the point where you’ll die to burst. Don’t forget that you’re taking damage from Sneak Attack and Shadow Strike, too.
This doesn’t even get into the realm of Perplexity runes, which is nightmare mode for Warriors to deal with, but easy for Thieves to take advantage of.
Warriors are too good, but not because of anything you proved in an experiment with some average-ish D/P backstabber. A competent P/D condition Thief would have beaten you up and taken your lunch money. That fight either ends with the Warrior 1) dying, or 2) running away.
They are scaling back Healing Signet some. That will help.
Maybe it’ll be a new medium armor skin that isn’t some kind of trenchcoat and/or stripper uniform.
Oh, yes I did. I played d/d burst, and I liked Engi’s Static Discharge better. Also tried s/d and s/p. Problem is, I felt naked without condition cleanse from shadow arts and thieves don’t have any other reliable way to deal with conditions. Yes you can shadow return, but that only cleanses one condition and that can be a problem when you have multiple conditions that “shield” the one you want to remove.
Nonsense. If you are S/x, try adding any of the following:
- Lyssa Runes with Basilisk Venom
- Saffron-scented Poultry soup + Withdraw
- Shadowstep
- Signet of Agility
- Pain Response (20 Acrobatics)
Those are ordered roughly from most to least effective for multiple conditions.
It is viable. There are a few ways to play, but a build with P/D and D/D, heavily invested in Shadow Arts, will go a long way. People are split between Dire or Carrion for gear, but both are effective in their own way.
Warriors are kid play with my P/D Condi build. And I recently got Perplexity Runes, with almost make me feel bad for them.
+1 to this. P/D isn’t great at taking down the Warriors that run (due to lack of chase in that build), but they definitely can’t beat you, and will lose eventually if they stay and fight.
One of my funniest memories in WvW is when I was running a Perplexity build, chilling out standing still and capping a sentry point. A Warrior came flying in from far off (from clipping range: almost had enough time to make a sandwich), and lit into me. After a couple of timely Interrupts, he was sitting on 13 stacks of Confusion, and basically killed himself.
A noob, to be sure, but I still chuckle every time I think of him charging down the hill Braveheart-style, thinking this Thief was easy meat.
Naw, even poison/blind doesn’t work because of warrior’s insane healing, Cleansing Ire, and Zerker Stance.
Oh please. Warrior healing (which is about to be ratcheted back, for those not paying attention to the devs) is significantly scaled back by our plentiful access to poison. Cleansing Ire only works if you connect, and Zerker Stance in this match-up is facing a class that can disengage at will.
There are countermeasures to poison/blind, but they are not some unassailable fortress of protection that makes those conditions “not work” for the purpose of winning against a Warrior.
As for weakness (mentioned elsewhere in this thread), thief doesn’t have nearly enough of it to be worth much. Cleansing Ire and Zerker stance, again, remove any weakness that you’ll apply as well.
Thieves without 15 DA or Sword are the only ones that have this problem, since they are forced to combo off of Choking Gas. Sword-users can re-apply Weakness at the end of the auto-attack chain (which means that if a Warrior removes it, you can put back on), and everyone else has Lotus Poison (suitable for Steal or Lotus Strike).
On my S/D build, when I play sPvP
This is a thread about fighting Warriors in WvW. Look at the OP’s stats. PvP is basically irrelevant to the point.
In WvW, it’s almost impossible to kill any warrior. You’d better have some great gear on you.
This is nonsense. I’m nowhere near the top 1% of Thieves, and I have plenty of Warrior takedowns. I can even kill those Benny Hill types that go Sword/Horn + GS and try to outrun everyone when it looks like they are going to lose.
WvW is full of people of all skill levels, so if you can’t take out a Warrior here and there, you either have a really wack build or you don’t play often enough.
We really need to see the numbers. It’s assumed that ANet is talking about max-damage nonsense dungeon builds, but we need to see what actually happens with Ferocity first. While the Celestial fallout will be considerable if left alone, maybe they will re-jigger the stat budget on that armor in order to compensate (after all, they are doing it for the PvP gear).
Fun fact: a 10% overall drop in damage has exactly the same impact on your DPS as when First Strikes isn’t active.
^ Since it stealths you when you aren’t necessarily expecting it to — like in the middle of an attack chain — that means you can be stuck with Revealed status (and thus unable to stealth) at a really bad moment. Revealed when you are at <25% health is usually a Bad Situation™.
It’s also annoying for other Thieves that you might be fighting with, because the Blinding Powder is a point-blank AOE that can catch them as well.
But yes for a minor trait it’s terrible (can’t swap it).
It’s not terrible, it’s just frustrating.
The best case for Last Refuge is actually very powerful for a minor trait, it’s just that the worst case feels really bad when it happens. The solution here is to either tweak the trait to curtail the bad stuff (both for yourself and for other nearby Thieves), or replace it with something else entirely that’s stealth-based (it would be a good place to put Patience).
weakness
Under-rated point of the thread. Don’t sleep on Weakness: it’s devastating to Power-based builds, and Warriors are no exception to this rule.
You’re limited to combos with Choking Gas if you are running D/D with the OP’s trait spec, but Lotus Poison is a great source of Weakness for 15 DA, and Weakness in the auto-attack chain is one of the things that makes Sword effective for fighting Warriors as well.
I’m not going to be dramatic but I agree it’s a problem.
Glad that there’s at least one person in this thread that can keep LR in perspective.
For everyone else here, please read this, thank you.
I wouldn’t mind this functionality, but the fact that we can stop it with weapon swap is enough for the time being. You won’t always have it available, and you won’t always want to switch, but that’s the trade-off for being able to cut the roll short.
I think that after the balance patch, when you can combine two on-swap Sigils at once (like Battle and Energy), this might become more of a thing.
The ICD on Furious Retal is 30 seconds. Fury stacks duration, so overlap isn’t a big deal in my opinion. Easier to make a build around Fury access than it is to decide what the impact of Side Strike is.
Another consideration is people who spec Acrobatics or itemize for boon duration: I get 13s from Furious Retaliation for example, not 10s.
You can’t get condition duration from crystals, only condition damage, precision or power. Condition duration comes from food.
Can’t get it cheaply, you mean. Toxic Focusing Crystals do add 10% condition duration.
PS: For clarification I’m currently assuming Crit-Damage will be roughly 20% lower than it currently is (10% overall damage nerf on a class with 50% crit-chance = 20% nerf to crit-damage).
I don’t know that this is a good assumption. The 10% figure given by ANet is for the “most extreme power DPS focused builds”, and 50% crit chance doesn’t qualify for one of those.
So what line of reasoning makes most sense to you? How will you go about your gear choices in the future, particularly in WvW?
Can’t make any decisions until I see what happens with Sigils and Runes in the same patch. The things I am watching for, though:
- what happens to the stat budget on Celestial-style gear
- if they are going to add gear with Ferocity as the “primary” stat (potentially a windfall for Hidden Killer)
Is there a link about this patch? Cant seem to find any info.
They put it in kind of a dumb place, and not stickied. Can find a thread on it here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Feature-Build-Balance-Preview/first#post3568077