Guild Wars 2

This is a really convoluted buff to Thief, and a theoretical penalty to people who don’t manage initiative properly. It’s the worst kind of change, since it makes the good Thieves better, and the bad Thieves worse. Not a great idea.

Travlane.5948:

half of the thief community already rerolled if not much more.

Oh really? Can’t wait to see the source data for this one.

Depends on what you are doing. I play stealthless S/P, and need about 15-16k health and ~2400 Armor to function most of the time. I’m usually satisfied if I can keep from getting insta-blicked by a glass Thief, and take a couple of good hits in small group combat.

And people wonder why Leeching Venoms is limited to “per Strike” rather than “per attack”.

^ Mel’s and Lemongrass are a good answer to conditions if you are a profession that’s forced to stay in fights and tough it out. Thieves have our best condition removal in stealth, which is a disengage, and we also rely on having good damage to do work most of the time, so those runes/food sort of conflict with that goal.

Although you’ll see a Thief using Saffron-scented Poultry Soup on occasion, because it has really excellent synergy with Withdraw.

Before you folks throw down 60g for a set of Traveler’s, keep in mind that the next balance patch (whenever it lands) is going to contain the Ferocity change (for crit damage) and rune/sigil re-balancing. Trav’s might conceivably end up getting worse if they re-jigger the stat budget on it.

Assassin’s Retreat is a decent trait to take if you need overland movement speed on the cheap.

NinjaEd.3946:

Yes but this is long term sustain, this does nothing to deal with burst.

Please. Mug and Withdraw are both burst heals. Neither has any cast time whatsoever.

If a thief gets hit hard, they have to focus on recovery and direct skill use vs just passively recovering.

You mean something like Pain Response, perhaps? If you get “hit hard” as an Acrobatics Thief, PR procs and is ticking for at least 12s of 130 HP/S, and likely more.

Not to mention their HPS also has heavy armor into the mix, vastly improving it while our HPS can get hit harder. Naturally warrior should be able to soak up hits better but I feel anet made stealth a thief mechanic when in reality people CAN spec outside of it. Those that do however live with the fact that they cannot soak up hits and recover like an ele guard warrior or engi no matter what they try. When you get hit hard it hurts, stun breaker or not.

It’s a good thing that Thieves are kings of evasion; as everyone knows, it’s almost always better to evade a hit than to soak it with Armor.

frans.8092:

Be careful putting expensive runes on gear you buy with Karma or Badges as these can not be salvaged back!

Although you can Transmute, if you run into that situation.

Yasha.5963:

That’s what I was told in game as well, but I don’t see any builds on intothemists etc that use that set up- also my damage at the moment is pitiful- against warriors they just stand in my blind stupidly but I can barely out damage their HS. Although that could be because I just have exotic weapons and one exotic armor (rest is"fine") and no food/gems/runes etc. I don’t know how much of a difference those things make yet.

If you are wearing blue armor (AKA “fine”) withour food or runes, you are going to get your kitten handed to you in WvW no matter what mods you have. Might as well be wearing printed toilet paper. The stat advantage that rares/exotics have over you in terms of stat budget is pretty significant, so don’t read too much into your performance until you’re wearing something reasonable.

In terms of mods, PVT Soldier’s is OK, but you don’t want to wear a full suit unless you are intending to have a blue dorito over your head and leads blobs to victory. My suggestion would be to use no more than just regular armor for PVT, and put serious damage on your weapons and trinkets (where most of the stats come from). I personally prefer Knight’s armor, and others like Valkyrie’s, but Soldier’s is perfectly defensible. Trinkets will usually want to be Berserker’s, with some wiggle room for exceptions, unless you have a condition-based build.

There were winners and losers with the initiative change, and they still need to clean up some traits that are kinda lollerskates now, but overall it was a positive change for the class. Not sure that’s really disputable at this point, now that builds have had time to adjust.

On second thought, maybe we should just nerf Sword #3 on Shortbow instead. It’s been a while since they whacked that weapon, and the change to Choking Gas isn’t enough.

Why not both? In fact, let’s nerf Sword #3 on D/P, too, just because.

Black Teagan.9215:

1. Vigor is a good reason for BT, but the only one.
   In fact no reason, as long as the most class can get more/perma Vigor with only 5 traitpoints.
2. Two stealing boons are less. A mesmer can steal more and the boons run much longer.
3. BT have a areaeffect, that’s right, but it dont make it better, as long as the range keep so short.

Perma-Vigor is being nerfed next balance patch for those remaining three professions that still have it cheaply. Thieves will have perma-Vigor via this trait and Vigorous Recovery. BT is only getting better relative to the other Vigor options, not worse.

Mesmers can steal more boons, sure, but they have to:

• give up a utility slot for it,
• have a cast time on the move,
• put up with a recharge that’s twice as long,
• only use the boons for themselves, since they aren’t shared.

You’re comparing apples to oranges here. BT doesn’t function as Thief condition removal, and AC doesn’t provide party support.

NinjaEd.3946:

BT is nice but if the idea was to play dirty and steal boons from enemies and share with allies, why is it so limited?

Because it’s already super-powerful. Are you kidding me? How many other abilities in this game strip boons and copy them to four other people? The trait is already powerful enough to be worthy of a GM slot; imagine what would happen if they boosted the radius or the boon duration.

Viking Jorun.5413:

The healing portion of Mug, I find, is greatly under appreciated.

This is largely because people don’t appreciate Healing Power on Thief in general.

Lots of folks will pooh-pooh the ratios, but don’t bother to look at what happens when you add HP to a build that has Mug, AR, SoM/Withdraw, and heavy access to Regeneration. Spoilers: it’s a kitten-load of sustain.

Lyssa is a good choice; it gives you lots of good stuff, including an answer to condition bombs. I am praying it doesn’t get nerfed in the rune balance patch.

Hopefully you’re invested in Acrobatics with that build.

Keep in mind that the next balance patch, whenever it comes out, is going to have a both 1) the change to crit damage, and 2) the results of the rune/sigil rework.

You may want to just use Ruby Orbs for the time being, before committing any substantial amount of cash.

I know that it’s popular to call 30 DA “garbage”, but Residual Venoms is actually pretty good for Basilisk Venom. It neatly takes care of the Aegis situation, and also punishes people who blow their stunbreaker too early (you’ll just re-apply the stun).

Black Teagan.9215:

Bountiful Theft isn’t so good, how you wrote it. […] This trait is too weak to be useful and a shame for the thief class.

I am always conflicted when I see someone ragging on Bountiful Theft.

I want to correct them, because BT has a really fast recharge, gives the stolen boons to nearby allies (nobody EVER seems to realize this), also gives Vigor (again, to allies as well), and makes Sleight of Hand a nearly-unstoppable interrupt. But I also want to keep it quiet, because BT with 30 Trickery is borderline overpowered, and the longer ANet fails to notice it, the better it is for the class.

This thread makes me feel bad for ArenaNet. They have to balance the game for everyone, including the people who don’t understand that they are not the target audience for things like Merciful Ambush.

I think that the problems with Acrobatics are overblown, and the people who say we are reliant on stealth have never tried to play without it (spoilers: it’s possible), but the #1 and #2 things I’d like to see done to this line are:

1. Confusion added to Pain Response.
2. Torment, Chilled added to Fleet of Foot, with a reduced ICD (5-7 seconds instead of 10).

That way, you give Acrobatics some better condition removal, and an interesting choice for Master tier.

EDIT: I think I’d also give Fleet of Foot a passive reduction to Immobilize duration. It’s probably silly/impossible to allow you to remove it with a dodge, since Immob prevents dodge to begin with.

I run with a Thief when I duo, and it works out very well. My setup is high-mobility S/P power-based, and he is P/D condition based. We cover the weaknesses in each other’s builds pretty effectively, can handle a lot of different looks.

You can get more utility from another class, but stacking stealths is fun, and playing alongside a class that you already know the ins and outs of does help considerably when it comes to coordination.

Thighum.7295:

I think it might be manageable if the torment portion was for a very short duration like 2 seconds. This would give ok-good damage (depending if the target stopped moving) with enough stacks, but make it difficult to continually stack (initiative cost + short duration), while still pressuring the target to not move to reduce the damage.

That’d be fine with me; I just don’t like the prospect of giving a P/D Thief the ability to kite and constantly punish people for both moving and closing, without a cooldown. It needs to be constained by something other than init, because they have quite a bit of it these days. A short duration might do it, since the potential damage would be limited.

NinjaEd.3946:

Keep in mind the #3 on p/d isn’t spammable technically.

Tell that to someone who said that it was, please.

You can ss to them and reuse #3 but thats a cooldown, so not all that effective. Our primary DoT is bleeds, torment is just a small cover up.

It’s almost like adding Torment to a repeatable ranged ability would add a bunch of power to P/D Condition builds. Someone should mention that in this thread somewhere.

If you’re already 20 points into Trickery, another 10 points is usually defensible. Lead Attacks is useful to all power-based builds, and your GM trait either gives you a nearly-unblockable interrupt (Bountiful Theft will strip Stability so that the Daze hits) with another drop in Steal recast, or some pretty decent init regain with HR if you’re rocking Withdraw as your heal.

I like the Dancing Dagger idea in theory, but do you really want to give P/D another ability with Torment? At least now they have to stick you in melee range or give up a utility, this would be Torment at range.

^ If you just hit level 80, you have exactly one extra trait point over what you just had at level 79. The biggest improvement is going to be from upgrading your gear: going from rare to exotic across the board gives you nearly 300 points worth of extra stat budget between major/minor. Trait stat bonuses are good for uncommon or unique things, like boon duration or Steal recharge, but the Condition damage from 30 Trickery is completely dwarfed by the stat bonuses from even a full set of blues.

To the point about CS — which provides NO uncommon stats — you’re still better off fixing your gear before you gobble up the entire line and give up useful traits elsewhere in an attempt to get damage into your build. Switching to ‘zerkers from a non-crit build is better than anything you’ll get out of CS.

As it should be; I haven’t been past 10 CS since prior to the December 10th patch. Unless you really need a Grandmaster trait or you’re running an on-crit build that wants Critical Haste, there’s not a whole lot of reason to go past 10 points in the line, even in a Power build. CS has 4-5 pretty strong Adept traits, but there’s a drop-off after that in terms of return.

Everyone and their mother is speccing 30 Trickery now, even in builds where the +300 Condition Damage is completely wasted, and that’s not any kind of accident.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

CS has a nice initiation stats thanks to Keen Observer and First Strikes, which are bonuses that helps bringing down any target from 100% to 50% HP that can trigger Executioner and Furious Retaliation in a first few attacks. That’s why probably it is viewed as mandatory.

CS is nice. It is not “mandatory” unless you’re in a max-DPS build, owing to the fact that we only have two traitlines with significant direct damage in them. People wildly overestimate how much the stat bonuses actually help in PvE/WvW.

Where does this “CS is mandatory for damage” baloney come from? The entire line only gives you ~14-15% crit chance and 30 crit damage; that’s basically ascended Berserker trinkets without the Power.

If you’re in WvW, the majority of your offensive power is coming from food and gear, not the stat bonuses on traits. Executioner is really good in terms of slottable traits, but everything else in the CS line is either replaceable or shrug-worthy.

I’m sort of inclined towards the Inquest stuff from CoE in terms of looks.

If you are soloing groups in PvE, and don’t care how fast you kill, I’d suggest a Death Blossom based D/D build with Caltrops. You have long-duration bleeds, AOE capability, and limited auto-evade. With Signet of Malice as your heal, you’ll have quite a bit of sustain. Dire and Apothecary’s are good choices for armor mods (I’d mix and match: a mono set of either is not ideal).

JakobGW.5730:

4. I run with around 40% critical chance, which is, according to the golden ratio table, still a tad high for my critical damage.

I don’t suppose that this golden table takes Sundering Strikes or Practiced Tolerance into account? There are non-tripod reasons to itemize for Precision.

stinkypants.8419:

How is this build geared and played? Seems interesting…

Party comp is the deciding factor, not the Thief. You can shoehorn any number of things, but I personally think it works well with D/D + Shortbow, as a condition build (#3 and #5 on main are your friends). The main weapon combo is negotiable, but you really need a Shortbow if you are trying to provide some party support.

DA gives you Venomous Might (which you also apply to your allies with sharing) and Quick Venoms. Shadow Arts gives Embrace, Leeching Venoms (see above: also applied to allies), and Venomous Aura. Trickery is for Thrill and BT, so that you’re applying Swiftness/Might/Fury/Vigor and ripping/spreading boons.

Because you are using a lot of venoms, you are really constrained for things like condition removal and healing, which is why you need a group to prop up that aspect. Like a Shout-based Guardian, or something.

Dire is strong, and I think Apothecary is also useful in pieces. Not something I’d ever recommend to a random Thief, though.

^ I don’t know if Bountiful Theft is better than Venomshare in terms of party support, but VS is not mutually exclusive with BT in any case. Shadow Arts does all the heavy lifting in VS, so you can run a 20/0/30/0/20 build as long as you’re getting some extra condition removal from another source.

Just as a reminder — since it seems that everyone here is a lone wolf — Bountiful Theft gives the boons nearby allies as well. That’s probably a consideration for the trait’s functionality as-is. Thieves with friends can really multiply the effectiveness of the boons that are stolen.

You can make S/D work in PvE/WvW, but it will be a kittenallenging to do so. I’d suggest looking at this video for some idea on what you need to do (this is an S/D gameplay video that also has a full build spelled out).

^ Use the LFG tool. It’s shared between all servers; i.e. you can play with anyone from your region.

S/D limited-stealth is the gold standard for “shows off player’s ability”. Anyone who can make it work, has a lot of opportunities to show off some good skills.

Doesn’t matter if it’s a meta build.

Azawrath.7304:

2150 power/ 80% crit/ 55% crit dmg??? What build do you run? Sounds like full glass to me. Which just makes me think that you have trait points in Shadow Arts to survive a condi necro, or you are in the upper tiers of WvW and you just mostly face sucky players.

Not full glass. I run 0/10/0/30/30, Knight’s Armor, Lyssa runes, saffron soup, zerker/soldier trinkets, triple signet, Withdraw. I have very high Fury uptime, is why I added the crit rate in. No stealth, no SA. S/P + SB.

Pushing #0 clears all conditions, #6 heals movement + one extra, SoA heals another one, IS/IR good in a pinch. Lots of evades built-in to avoid power-based damage. Pain Response is useful for Regen and some condi clear. Assassin’s Reward gives a slow tick of health alongside Regen. Pushing signets gives me 13s of 5 stacks of Might for burst power.

A good necro is a tough fight, but a winnable one. When I lose, it was my fault. That’s how it should be. Necros can’t really disengage anyway, whereas I can backflip out of sight if I goof.

Make sure to keep your gear up to date: level appropriate blues at minimum. Are you married to D/D + Shortbow? Sword/Pistol is more of a “lunchpail” spec for open world and instanced content in PvE, since it has built-in defenses.

Pandeh.5248:

Alright, that*s a pretty nice trait on the steal indeed. As for the traits that have per interval in stealth. Does it proc instantly and then for example the initiative; 1 Initiative Interval 10 Seconds. Does that mean I get 1 initiative instantly when I enter stealth?

Depends on the trait. Shadow’s Embrace works on-stealth, but Patience has a delay before it works (a few seconds, iirc). But Patience is terrible, so save yourself the trouble and don’t use it until they make it useful. Infusion of Shadow is better, even post-nerf.

I don’t personally like Caltrops on dodge, but some swear by it. I find that Thrill of the Crime is a more useful Adept trait for Trickery, just because Fury is so powerful. You might like the caltrops for the Malice synergy, though. Definitely consider getting Feline Grace if you’re going to go for “on dodge” stuff, so that you can use it more often.

You can’t really use Steal on KD as an evade, but you can use it to change position, which might be useful. Use stunbreakers to counter knockdowns: Infiltrator’s Signet, Haste, Shadowstep, whatever. As you get higher level, you can put 30 points into Trickery, which lets you do the neat trick of interrupting the person who knocked you down (Daze on Steal), but that’s not super useful for PvE.

Nice thing about Sword in addition to the evades/blind, is that it Cleaves, AKA you can hit up to three targets in front of you. Very useful for mobs of trash.

Those signets are fine for solo PvE. You may want to slot Caltrops and combine it with Signet of Malice as your heal, they synergize extremely well with each other. Depending on your comfort level, you may or may not want to use Shadow Refuge in case you need to bail out of a fight or sneak past something.

Shadows Arts and Acrobatics are your defensive lines. You’ll probably want to trait one or the other heavily, but not both. Your damage is going to come from Deadly Arts and/or Critical Strikes. Trickery has a place as a Steal-enhancer and extra initiative line.

I’d suggest running Sword/Pistol with a Shortbow backup, throw 30 into Critical Strikes (get Executioner as your Grandmaster trait), and build off of that. You’ll have 20 points to spend from there. 15 into Acrobatics is a good choice for Feline Grace. You can handle anything PvE can throw at you with a foundation like that, due to weapon evades on Pistol Whip and Blind from black Powder.

No point traiting towards an endgame build, because retraiting is cheap and easy.

What kind of style do you prefer? Stealthing? Evasion? Conditions? Backstabs? Traits support a bunch of different ways to play.

Arganthium.5638:

Thoughts?

Hell no. Unintended consequences all over the place from nerfing several non-Sword builds in order to buff one set. If we ever get the cast time removed on IR, it won’t be at the expense of some innocent bystander.

And on another note, keep the editorializing out of balance suggestions.

Travlane.5948:

lyssa is a joke. well its a 1 time save per fight when u get loaded up with necro marks or engi condi bursts. but then its reapplied. so basically once every 45 secs u drop a few to several conditions with lyssa and BV…which pidgeonholes u already bc BV is the worst stun in game and not neccessarily the elite u always want to run….

Lyssa removes every condition. This is actually a somewhat uncommon ability in this game; you can count on one or two hands the number of skills that can do that, and some professions have no access to it outside of this runeset (like us, for instance).

It works best with BV in terms of recycle time, but Lyssa #6 also has really useful interaction with Dagger Storm: it doesn’t remove conditions or grant boons until the channel is over, giving you fine control over the effect in a bigger fight.

Lyssa isn’t a joke, it’s borderline OP. I hope that they forget about it when they do the balance pass on runes.

Arganthium.5638:

Lol, that’s true. Nothing more infuriating than seeing some idiot mindlessly spamming 3 on SB. It’s not like he’s doing anything useful, but there’s a burning hatred inside of you to kill him/her, and it’s ridiculously difficult to do so.

Do you have some sort of mind-reading device, then? I’d say it’s a fair bet that someone pushing SB#3 knows exactly what it does.

Azawrath.7304:

I might agree with you that the best defense is killing your enemy before the touch you.

That’s not what I said. You don’t need to burst down a Necro from 100 → 0, you just need to last longer than they do. I guarantee that you have more damage in your build than I do (typically I have ~2150 pow/80% crit/55% crit dmg), but I also run Withdraw with full Lyssa’s, so I have a chance of beating a Necro in a longer fight.

At the end of the day, Necromancers are supposed to be top tier condition-appliers, so it’s not really fair if someone can remove all of their power. You can take a chunk out of it, and try to heal through or survive the rest.

^ Is it an issue, though? In WvW at least, consider the effect it has on the snowballing of a large group fight when one person can effectively remove X people from a fight.

Rafahil.2857:

I’m not joking, but trust me when I say that the dual shortbow evasion thief with energy runes and the trait that gives initiative when you switch weapons is THE most annoying and even effective build there is. (pvp and wvw obviously) It’s the best troll build around and they will hate you for it.

Gotta love #3 skill on SB

+1 to this. I once combined this with Quick Pockets, Hastened Replenishment, Withdraw, RFI, Inf Signet, and Sig of Agility. Trolled on a half dozen guys at the edge of a big fight.

Still feel bad about it.

^ If you need cash to feed your altoholism, I suggest guesting over to IoJ at reset and jumping on the world boss train. Bring salvage kits.

I’ve noticed this as well, but I thought it was just because I wasn’t used to not using Long Reach as often as I used to.

carnivorous.1548:

1) Am I correct in understanding that you’re limited to Soldier, Rabid, or Magi gear if you want to buy Exotics with Karma?

Correct, aside from some trinkets and other meaningless exceptions.

2) If so, has anyone had any level of success with a PTV solo/roamer D/P or D/D Thief?

You’d probably be the first. PTV fits on us like a burlap sack at a ballroom dance.

3) If there is no useful Karma gear for me to purchase, and I’m very low on gold and Badges of Honor, does anyone have any tips on how to most effectively transfer Karma to gold? I have over 1m to play around with.

ANet has been pretty diligent about preventing people from doing this. You’re mostly out of luck.

4) If I’m out of luck regarding all of the above, is there any point in me trying to purchase Rare gear with Karma, to outfit a bursty zerker build? My hunch is that I need to hit Exotic to have enough burst to make the damage reward worth the squishiness risk.

You can get by with crafted rares (and exotic weapons). It’s cheap to gear it up for the most part, you’ll be able to experiment with different styles and find something that you like. By that time, maybe you have the badges for your desired set.