Offhand dagger doesn’t really need stronger condition clear; you already have CnD + a 10 point investment into Shadow Arts. That’s two conditions right there, one if you break stealth early.
We also have access to Poultry soup (either the condition clear on heal, or the reduced duration version), aside from the things you mentioned, which does help with a Withdraw-based build.
I do like the Headshot idea, even if it doesn’t make a whole lot of thematic sense, since it rewards timing.
EDIT: regarding the patch, they haven’t even posted the proposed list of changes yet. Patch is still a ways out. Probably March?
^ No, you just have to make the Necro run out of health before you do. Build some health and healing if you want to endure damaging conditions that are covered up by garbage ones, or adjust your build to include more no-stealth omni condition removal, like soup/Lyssa/SS/SoA.
I don’t understand the idea that anything short of completely countering this game’s best condition-applying profession is an inadequate result. ArenaNet DOES have a responsibility to make the Necromancer viable, too, you know, and the chance to win can’t just be “hope for Thief to make a critical mistake”.
Nope. I don’t want variable costs for my skills. I have enough things to keep track of in combat as it is.
^ I didn’t mention Swiftness as anything but for an argument against boon duration. Your build does not need Swiftness access, because you have tactical access with Dodger, and you can slot SoS for overland travel. Boon duration does basically nothing for Vigor: you only get an extra half-second. The only thing you lose is Might duration, which you already have a lot of.
I brought up Shortbow because it’s the only other source of potential boon duration use: boons from Combo fields use the duration of the finisher. So your Might stacks from fire fields would last an extra 2 seconds with the 10% from Acrobatics. But you don’t use a Shortbow, so even this advantage of boon duration is something you don’t benefit from.
tl;dr: dropping 10 from Acrobatics only loses you 10% Might duration, Pockets, minor damage from Fluid Strikes and 1000 health. IMO you should compare that against your potential gains from DA, which would include 100 Power, 10% condition duration, Lotus Poison, and a Master trait (which could be Mug, QV, or even Potent Poison).
Noobs may cry
But still they die
When they are griefed
By a stealthy Thief
Burma Shave.
Unfortunately Anet doesn’t really want us to play w/o stealth though so it’ll never really feel complete.
Feels OK to me. You suddenly have all of these open utility slots that you can use for stunbreakers, conditions clear, mobility, whatever.
Of course, if you screw up, you die, but that’s how it should be in the first place.
Play without stealth and see how you feel. I don’t have a single stealth utility/skill on my bar — not even Shadow Refuge — the only way for me to stealth is to combo Black Powder → Cluster Bomb.
It may not be risky enough for you (we have enough mobility to disengage fights, still), but might be a different enough look to keep you interested.
Northern Shiverpeaks? boo hiss
Are you talking about WvW, or PvP? For S/D, I’d recommend checking out this guy and his build. Has an interesting take on it.
About Sleight of Hand in general, it’s incredibly powerful with Bountiful Theft, and I run 30 Trickery even though I don’t have any damaging conditions in my build whatsoever.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I always have trouble deciding what to pick as my underwater elite.
Just a note that you can’t have two Ascended items of the same type as they are Unique. […] For your Dire+Rabid accessories and rings.
He’s not running dupes, FYI: rings and accessories are split between offensive and defensive infusions. Those are technically different items even though they have the same stats. I do the same thing with my accessories, i.e. I have Althea’s Ashes and Magister’s Field Journal.
^ You’ll want to play a Warrior, then. That fits your criteria better than the other professions.
The opinion of this Thief is that you should not go past 20 points in Acrobatics, and instead should consider going 15-20 down DA. Reasoning:
- You have no access to Weakness in this build, but two sources of Poison.
- Dodges are the enemy of every venom Thief, because misses eat a venom proc. Weakness cuts down on how much an enemy can evade.
- You aren’t getting much out of Fluid Strikes, because even with high stacks of Might, you have no
ferocitycrit damage and very low Precision. - +100 Power and 10% condition duration is nothing to shake a stick at.
- While 10% boon duration hurts, you still have plenty of Might duration, and that’s the only thing boon duration helps in your build. You have poor Swiftness access and it only gives you an extra half second of Vigor. You don’t even have a spammable Blast finisher for fields in this build.
Also worth noting HiS: I know from experience that having to rely on CnD for stealth can be annoying, so this gives you condi clear for damaging conditions as well as stealth/regen, and you get plenty of Might from it. Better burst Might than Withdraw, worse for a prolonged battle.
^ Which is why I said “as long as you can protect your Might stacks”. That plus the lack of burst damage is a weakness of the build.
Although the worst case scenario is still OK for the condi Thief here, since you have strong base condition damage, and weaponsets that allow you to keep throwing out bleeds and torment. Not winning isn’t quite the same as losing.
Impossible to answer this unless you tell us how you play your Thief, but Guardian is a good alt choice. You’ll already be used to the health pool of a G, but now you’ll have an extra ~130 Armor to play with and a lot of easy group support. Several good builds available.
Bonus point: afterwards, you’ll really appreciate how much mobility that a Thief has.
I was wondering how long it would take for someone here to figure this out. Noble’s runes are one of the best-kept secrets for a condition Thief.
One of my roaming partners uses a close cousin to this build you’ve come up with, and has been running it for a few months now. Same base of Dire + Noble’s, with P/D and D/D, though he made some different trait decisions (less Acro, more DA) and mixes in a little Carrion.
IMO, this build was one of the few Thief setups that got a straight-up upgrade from the Dec 10th patch, since it lets you get away from Trickery. It’s pretty strong so long as you can protect your Might stacks.
Again: healing power is not appropriate for the OP, because he is 25/30/x/x/x.
But it’s not a worthless stat for Thief as a whole, you just have to be in the right spec for it. While the individual ratios are not great, making a judgment on HP by looking at ratios without looking at time/stacking is like buying a car just based on its color.
Anyone in 30 Shadow Arts who uses Rejuv and Leeching Venoms will want to think real hard about adding a piece or two of Apothecary’s or Cleric’s to their build. Both traits have poor individual ratios, but can be activated quite frequently.
Likewise, anyone with 30 Acrobatics who has Pain Response and uses SoM and Assassin’s Reward stands to benefit from a piece or two of Cleric’s, or the new Zealot’s affix. None of those abilities have high ratios, but an Acro Thief has high Regen uptime from PR, and constant small heals from AR and SoM.
You don’t need to 1) be as good as a Guardian, 2) give healing to allies, or 3) stuff your entire set full of Healing Power gear in order to make the stat worthwhile for your personal situation.
What are your goals? Can’t answer “best” without knowing how you define success.
Don’t touch Healing Power as a Thief. It’s a nigh useless stats if you’re only healing yourself and scales very poorly.
Watch those blanket statements. It’s not that useful for the OP’s 25/30/x/x/x build, due to traits, but other Thief specs can leverage Healing Power pretty effectively.
Precision always feels a bit overrated imo, especially considering how much effective Crit-chance you can get from traits and Fury. I think 50% basic Crit-chance is good enough for any build but that’s not based on any objective data.
Just to add to this: it’s generally true that Power or Ferocity Crit Damage is a better investment than Precision from a raw damage perspective, but if you have an on-crit build and/or use Practiced Tolerance, that changes the calculus a bit. A standard S/P build with Sundering Strikes and Critical Haste can never have enough crit chance, for example, and Practiced Tolerance can net you an easy 1500+ bonus health, which is not bad for an Adept skill. That’s before even getting into upcoming Sigil changes.
750+ hours makes you a career thief? I’m done lol, I don’t even know what to respond to that with, I’ll leave you to your silence.
Far be it from me to judge your overly convenient reasons for refusing to respond to people, but playing 1.6 hours a day since release on Thief is pretty much a career Thief (I checked: I’m actually at 831 hours now). I do have a day job, you know.
I think your super power is being hell bent on making sure everyone just runs your build in wvw and forget about reality.
It’s a good thing that just because you think something, doesn’t make it so.
In reality, I encourage people to play whatever they like in WvW. Thieves can go for wombo-combo backstabs, condition based P/D or D/D, venomshare, Acrobatic S/P or S/D, or whatever they like. I have played most of them. Unlike PvP, WvW is a mode for everyone, where even weird builds can work pretty well.
Sorry if you prefer a game mode with explosive stat combinations and consumables.
Indeed, it’s very unfortunate that I prefer the game mode where I get to do all of the customization that this game was predicated on. Truly, I have no taste in the eyes of mankind.
Sorry, but you’re no “career thief”
So… what have I spent 750+ hours on? Is my life a lie?
Traits can’t be swapped in combat, and you can’t know what build you’re up against until you are up close to see their weapon which means you’ll be in combat unless your enemy is just terribly new.
You can overcome some of these personal problems with experience and practice.
pvp
I don’t care about PvP. You can ask one of the other ten people who play, if you need advice on how to play your profession in a mode with different rules and missing functionality.
Multi use skills don’t necessarily solve multiple issues.
What they do is allow you to react to more than one situation with the same build. Shadowstep has a stunbreaker for that Warrior stun chain, condi cleanse for battling a Necromancer, and/or a long-range teleport for chasing or escaping. It is the bee’s knees if you’re trying to make a build that’s pretty good for a lot of things.
Ss definitly helps and its almost chipped into every build I run for the sake of flexibility but it isnt clearing conditions as efficiently as shadow’s embrace or even PR.
I feel like everyone has a superpower. Yours appears to be the ability to state obvious things while countering something that nobody actually said. I’d prefer to have x-ray vision, personally.
Leeching Venoms is a valid point, especially for venom Thieves that are specced to share. Spider has more hits (AKA chances to proc LV) than any of the other options.
(edited by Interceptor.2653)
This isn’t about builds, this is about people saying ridiculous things. You said that “[Thieves] lack heavy condition clearing”, which is demonstrably false. We have tons of access to condition clear. I listed basically all of them, and your objections were all of the “butbutbut my damage/build!” variety, as opposed to actual reasons that Thieves can’t run those clears.
So the solution is run full condi clearing?
The solution to your particular problem — which is something else entirely — would be to add some flexibility to your build. You can do this through:
- Slottable traits, which can be swapped on the fly,
- Food, which takes two seconds to switch (even in combat), and
- Multi-use skills that solve more than one problem (like Shadowstep, which is condi/stunbreak/mobility all in one).
That’s it. I can show you where the toilet paper is, but you have to handle it from there.
^ Even one stack of Vulnerability from Sundering Strikes is worthwhile to your group, as has been mentioned several times in this thread. Surely D/D can maintain this.
Career Thief since beta. Never been kicked out of a dungeon/fractal/whatever group, ever.
I don’t really like the condition options for Thief. You either have P/D or D/D (or both), and they each have problems. P/D needs stealth in order to make the pressure game work (and CnD is notoriously tricky to land), and D/D is super-predictable (AKA counterable) in addition to lacking Torment access. And if you combine both to cover the weaknesses of each, now you can’t use a Shortbow, which is a huge negative in my opinion.
More power to the people that do it, but it isn’t for me.
Thank you all, maybe my internet is not suitable for the 25/30/x/x/x builds…
Intercepters build does interest me though as I see you dont even have mug and still do decent dps.. maybe i can give it a try
I sometimes run with Mug. It depends on whether I am alone or not, usually. If I’m roaming with someone who has good damage, I’ll run 10 DA for the poison-on-Steal and Mug. I use Knight’s armor with mostly Zerker trinkets (Soldier’s here and there).
Build is not suitable for things like dungeons, IMO: this is just something I use in WvW. The damage drop-off compared to full glass is too severe to justify for killing brainless monsters that are easy to dodge. I keep a zerker suit for that, and run the 25/30/whatever build.
I used to be able to maintain 10 stacks on my own when it was 10s (base) duration, 33% proc chance with 1s ICD. Such a massive DPS loss.
There are no prizes for “maintaining” stacks. It’s not like balancing a spinning plate on your forehead; Vulnerability only increases damage, it does nothing else. No achievements at stake.
Your party is suffering the whole time that you’re ramming up against the limits of the ICD. After three seconds of combat, you’re still the Little Engine that Could under the old system, with a couple of applications of Vulnerability. Under the new hotness, you’ve already got a few by this point with more on the way.
Time is money when you are DPS’ing.
It’s not like Necromancers have a Well on their Elite, though.
You have to use a utility to get a stunbreaker on a venom Thief. On the bright side, you can slot a venom into your Elite skill. Your choices for breakers:
- Haste (Quickness)
- Shadowstep (teleport, condition removal, double stunbreaker)
- Roll for Init (evade, init gain)
- Infiltrator’s Signet (passive init regen, gap-closer)
- Shadow Trap/Pursuit (hard to use effectively as a breaker, but might fit your style)
Pick your fave.
I agree with the general sentiment here. I would like to see Pistol Whip turned into two skills, but I don’t trust ArenaNet to actually do it properly, so I’d prefer that they just leave it as-is.
Well i guess its realy depending if yes or not trickery is actualy usefull. I just dont happen to run it to begin with
I find it valuable. someday ANet will realize that Bountiful Theft + Daze on Steal is silly OP, but until that day, I will continue to use it. Since it also has Thrill of the Crime, that takes some of the sting out of losing damage from other lines.
You said im making bad choices in my build, when really its just choices.
I said that if you can’t find heavy condition removal on Thief, that you aren’t really looking for it.
Food swapping seems rather undecisive for a build […]
This is why I do better than other people; finding edges at the margins that others don’t take advantage of.
If I’m a power build and I want more damage and more condi clearing, I have to make a choice. I can’t get high spike damage and still clense myself of all DoT and be beefy with high mobility. it doesn’t work, no matter how one looks at it.
Who the heck are you arguing with? Nobody is saying any of this stuff. Builds are about choices; I’ve said it myself a hundred times.
i have 25 in acrobatics my question is why you run 30 for when you could put the 5 last elsewhere cept i guess that since you also run the 0 0 0 0 30 you kind of cant put them in crit strike or in deadly art without taking something useless
Since I also run 30 Trickery, I don’t like 15 in any other line more than I do the extra 500 health, 5% boon duration, and AR.
Opportunist is not good, so CS is out unless I really like 2.4% crit and +5 crit damage (and I do not).
Shadows Art is no good: I don’t use stealth. Slowed Pulse is the only thing I might care about, but it’s not good enough.
Deadly Arts is OK, but I don’t use Mug generally (sometimes I do, though). Lotus Poison is nice as the 15th point, but I already have a Weakness on Sword’s auto-attack chain, so it’s somewhat duplicative. This is the closest contender for 15 points, I guess, but giving up Prec/crit for Power is a side-grade at best in terms of damage.
Having no trait in the power line must be quite harmfull to your total damage.
I do alright. I have high Fury uptime, decent crit rate/damage, and the 10 points in CS gives access to Signets of Power, so I’ll slot that in for when I need some offense. I nearly always have Infiltrator’s Signet and Signet of Agility, so that’s 350 Power for 13s when I really need it badly.
When I am not overly concerned about conditions, I’ll use Power food. I carry about 5-6 different types of food around with me, so that I can adjust.
30 in acrobatics serve little use but allow for assasin reward initiative on swap or a little more vitality. I dont recall having initiative problem right now.
It also gives 30% boon duration, which is under-rated. I get three stacks of 26s Might for blasting Fire fields, for example, I have perma-Vigor, perma-Swiftness, and Lyssa’s #4 usually means I’m running around with a lot of boons just on general principle.
tl;dr, I can still blow up squishies, and against harder targets I do enough damage to apply pressure, so it’s good enough to win fights. Worthwhile investment for the condition removal.
I wonder how Travlane will justify his claims now
By undermining the video, of course.
I called it. Give me all your +1’s.
This is why your challenges go unresponded. Fortunately this wasn’t a waste of time, because 1) the response video was an enjoyable watch, 2) I learned something interesting about the Grenth fight, and 3) dem Legendaries.
You’re also talking about a rune set up, a food set up, and specific skills, basically leading to a build set up. Not everyone follows the same boat, some people actually go far into CS or SA and don’t use sword. Some people don’t use withdraw with lyssa or scented pultry soup, some don’t use BV. It’s not all lined up for all builds to have your version of “heavy condi clearing”.
Shadowstep is completely build-agnostic.
Lyssa and Signet of Agility are useful in all Precision-based builds.
Poultry Soup is usable by literally everyone, it just gets better with certain Heals.
I did not even mention Shadow’s Embrace or Pain Response, specifically because they are trait-reliant. SE in particular is extremely useful for a lot of Thief builds.
If you find yourself lacking condition removal on any Thief build, chances are you are making some poor decisions. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t use more (I’d like condi removal on AR, personally), but it does exist for those that open their eyes.
So in other words, when you say “we lack heavy condition clearing”, what you really meant was “I don’t like having to make hard choices in order to get condition clear”.
Because we have a ton of heavy condition clearing.
~2200-2300 armor 16-17k health. IMHO health is better for thief than heavy toughness investments. Why? Because condition damage ignores toughness, and we lack heavy condition clearing.
Some of us lack heavy condition clearing. Anyone who uses a Precision-based build can use Lyssa runes, and “remove all conditions and gain all boons” is about as heavy a condition clear as you’re going to get.
Withdraw + poultry soup is also a really strong condition clear if you can fit that heal into your build. Also, IS/IR hasn’t gone anywhere if you have a Sword, and anyone can slot Shadowstep or Signet of Agility. Reliable omni-condition clear is not necessarily limited to Shadow Arts.
I take it you are condition damage?
Power-based. I run S/P + SB, with 0/10/0/30/30 and Lyssa Runes.
So you are saying the hammer is slow? I’m not sure but that is the message I am getting from this..
Whoa dude, slow down. Don’t jump to conclusions. Let’s let this auto-attack chain marinate a little bit more first.
How much Toughness you need depends entirely on what you are doing, IMO. I need a moderate amount as a heavy Acrobatics Thief, because my primary survival mechanic is evasion. The ~2400 that I have is mostly so that I don’t get insta-blicked during evasion downtime, if I make a mistake, and to cut down in incidental damage in large fights.
On the other hand, P/D Thieves wearing full Dire can easily top 2900-3000+ Armor, which makes sense because they largely are tanking hits with their face, relying on stealth for healing, and fight via attrition.
It’s all about what you’re doing, and the risk that you find acceptable. It took me about a month and a half of roaming/zerging before I settled on my current mix (I used to have more health and less Armor).
I have about ~15,000-16,000 health and ~2400 Armor at any given moment, depending on various bonuses and whether or not I am using Practiced Tolerance (which, as mentioned above, is very good). The majority of my bonus health comes from 30 Acrobatics. Toughness comes from full Knight’s Armor and a couple defensive trinkets.
This is for WvW.
I wonder how Travlane will justify his claims now
By undermining the video, of course.
- Fight only lasted less than three minutes, not the seven minutes like the challenge.
- Thief didn’t pull every mob in the room like a
noobboss. - He used Thieves Guild, and the Necromancer obviously carried the end of the fight, so it wasn’t a solo.
That’s my guess, anyway. Was a nice video, wasn’t expecting the fight to be as straightforward/easy as it ended up being. Holy hell at the gear.
challenge still stands somebody go make a video of a thief tanking/attacking without reprieve the priest of grenth for 7 mins.
Why seven minutes? I don’t think that a Thief could last that long, but it’s not like you did either. I would have been impressed if you had kept your party alive against all odds, but once your party went down and you got focused, all you really did was refuse to die for 45 seconds while doing a little bit of damage in the process.
Straight-up zerker’s on Thief would not do it. There is too much incidental damage. And anyway, the bar for DPS is easy to clear, since you were hitting for low four-digit damage (which required Fury from someone, since you have no Precision whatsoever, and crit damage apparently only from Valor). I don’t know what the best build would be in terms of stats, but it definitely involves Healing Power to feed Signet of Malice and possibly AR.
What would that prove, anyway? I don’t think that Guardian is OP (disclaimer: I also play one). Maybe they will throw us a bone and some of their “nice things for Thieves” involve giving us more access to crit damage via our traits.
What did you expect? You’re running enough Cleric’s gear to start your own religion, and you have very modest damage as a result. You have a lot of Armor and green numbers, but were doing squat for DPS once your party members went down.
Ironically, your Thief might have had better luck here, since the mobs of enemies at Grenth make things like active evasion, blinds, and Signet of Malice a hell of a lot more useful than Aegis. Although this was a nice fight for Symbol of Faith, at least.
^ Correct. Unload and Pistol Whip are good with Signet of Malice. Especially Pistol Whip, because it cleaves and can hit three enemies at once (and each hit is another proc of SoM).
EDIT: although Ricochet does help with Unload.
You don’t need to use venoms to give people Might; you can just use Cluster Bomb to blast someone’s Fire field. And in any case, if your party is stacking Might, you should get over there anyway, since there is no downside.
Sometimes stacking is for boons, but sometimes it’s also to keep all of the monsters clustered together for people with AOEs and cleaves, as well as making it easier to pick someone up without having to move.
If someone is doing backflips over in a corner and being impossible to ress, as well as dragging trash everywhere, that will kitten off a lot of people. It’s particularly important in dungeons like CoE (for example) that people stay close together.
(edited by Interceptor.2653)
He probably wanted you stand on top of everyone else.