Guild Wars 2

Not for a while. You’ll see the proposed changes in a thread somewhere long before you see them in the patch notes, in all likelihood. I get the impression that some of the stuff still has a lot of testing to go through, and is subject to change.

EDIT: fyi, they originally announced the Pistol Whip split before the Dec 10th patch. The reason it didn’t go into that one, was that there wasn’t time to make it a reality. Aftercast change was much easier to do.

I’m with Viking Jorun on this one; I run a pretty similar build, and my experiences are the same: when you go all-in for mobility on Thief, you really make Warriors look a little silly by comparison, even though it does require some creativity and situational awareness.

Impact.2780:

Fourth, you listed skills which would use all of a player’s utility slots and their healing slot, and include the use of a trait which requires investing at least 10 trait points into Trickery. This is a very specific and restricting requirement for any player who wishes to maintain their own play style and/or build. While the high mobility warrior build is a reality, it’s bad practice to offer a whole build adjustment to handle one specific build available to one class as a solution.

Builds are about choices. A mobility-focused Warrior is making some choices, too: I don’t find them nearly as dangerous as the stun-based ones, personally. The things that they bring to the table are easier to deal with.

Shadow Arts and deep Acrobatics don’t work all that well together. You really want to pick a lane; either run with venoms, or use SoM/AR. Leeching is limited to one activation per strike, but SoM wants lots of hits, and these two aims usually conflict with each other because of your available skills.

What’s a “Gurdian”?

Dee Jay.2460:

Looks like my prediction was spot-on.

You definitely called it. I regret that I have but a single +1 to give.

This thread has quietly become legendary; I think it should be referenced in a sticky post for posterity. Sundering Strikes is even better than I thought it was, and I was already on the SS bandwagon to begin with.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Crit-damage-Ferocity-Other-Changes/first#post3510432

^ Relevancy link.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Your logic and reason shuns the whole trait line — heck the whole Thief profession.

This just underscores the fact that you just don’t understand the logic at all, despite your claims to the contrary. Sundering Strikes can at least be shown to give an overall better result than Mug in a party where the Thief is providing some of the Vulnerability stacks. In what universe does this swap mean that a Thief shouldn’t take Executioner? I am not putting words in your mouth, this was literally your interpretation of the logic.

You frankly just don’t get it.

There’s no need for a Thief to build “party-friendly” […]

Except when there is! How often do perfect party comps happen? What if there are no dedicated sources of Vulnerability available? Thief is now able to provide some medium-weight Vulnerability to their party, which emphatically was not the case with the old, busted trait that was hamstrung by an ICD. This is a strategic option that did not exist before for Thief. It’s gravy: nice if you can use it, not a big deal if you can’t.

Like people have been trying to point out to you, it’s perfectly legitimate to slot something else if you find yourself not in need of SS.

Put down the shovel and stop digging.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

I guess it’s news to you that you don’t have to take a GM trait in the GM slot…oh wait, forgot the spoiler…

You guess wrong, then. But please continue this line of thought to its logical conclusion: what “party-friendly” trait are you slotting into GM Critical Strikes in place of Executioner or Hidden Killer?

I can’t wait to hear this.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

… while keeping 7 stacks of Vuln for 30s using PW considering that PW costs 5 init on use and the Thief only have 12 (base) init bar.

So, is Mug now losing 10-to-1 instead of 30-to-1? His example had a gigantic margin of victory, you know.

And if you follow their logic, you shouldn’t take Executioner (or Hidden Killer) either because it’s such a “selfish” trait. Think of the party!

Which just goes to show that you don’t understand the logic at all. Sundering Strikes sits opposed to Mug in the Adept slot. What party-friendly Grandmaster trait in CS is a Thief missing out on if they take Executioner or HK?

Ichishi.9613:

mug is crucial for staying over 90% for scholars on small damage you can’t bother to dodge. And 10% from scholar is a freaking lot of damage

Such selfishness in this thread.

For you, sure. For the party? Not really. Even if you are doing a quarter of the party’s DPS (more than your fair share), 100% Scholar downtime only represents 2.5% of the total lost by falling underneath. Sundering Strikes could easily cover for the gap, since it benefits five people instead of one.

Never mind that your party members (like the local Guardian) are helping you take care of incidental damage, too. It’s not like you’ll never have the Scholar’s benefit ever; surely you have it part of the time.

Excalibur.9748:

WTH dude, why would you report it, I just wanna know how many thieves quit after the Dec.10 path, and why. It’s a tally for informational purpose only.

I didn’t report your thread. I clicked on it, and thought it was sad that people who stopped playing would still come here, but that’s about it.

Such a weird build. You’d have more success if you committed to either direct damage or conditions, but as long as you’re having fun, YOLO.

Generally I don’t like Celestial on Thief, except for 2-3 pieces of Armor for crit damage advantages, because it’s hard to leverage all stats simultaneously. We are not Elementalists.

Excalibur.9748:

They deleted my legit quit thread in like 30 minutes. Looks like they’re pretty efficient when it comes to damage control.

Yeah, they are pretty good at deleting things that are against the rules that you need to agree to in order to post here. That’s partially because there are people like me who take advantage of the easy reporting tool that they provide.

TheGuy.3568:

IMHO I think they wont change it much. Given the heavy financial investment in ascended gear and weapons if they nerf it too much they are in for the type of kitten storm that only comes once in a while. They have nerfed many builds but in all honestly PvE meta has stayed Zerker so no one complained heavily. If they nerf it into the ground the money spent on the gear grind they promised us would not be in this game might lead to some legit quit threads.

The way I see it given the commendation, gold, fractal infusions, etc there is only so much they can do with out doing more harm then good.

This is fair, but we’ve been here before, remember: gear with magic find. ANet has it within their power to allow people to re-stat their Ascended gear to adjust to changes made to something like crit damage.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Defensible? You said that you can stack Vul 4-5 stacks but when I told you that the duration is crap against Unshakable mob, you go on ad hom mode by saying it’s a personal problem. lol.

It is a personal problem. There are four other people in your party that can benefit from your burst of vulnerability stacks, and any S/P Thief with a pulse can either 1) fit in an autoattack chain or 2) keep spamming PW to augment damage and keep putting on stacks.

What is constraining about a 3+ second window? Are the rest of your DPS off in a corner picking their noses?

You don’t even see how dishonest you are, I’m just being kind to even discuss something with you.

I agree that it’s kind of you to keep discrediting yourself by picking losing fights with me.

EDIT: In addition, everyone knows that 3s duration in practice is really only 1s due to lag and skill pre-cast/after cast delay.

Spoiler alert, the rest of your party isn’t subject to your pre/aftercasts.

Didn’t take Miss Cleo to see that this one would end the same way as all the others: someone challenges your viewpoint, but instead of defending it or responding to valid rebuttals, you just dance the dinosaur.

Sundering Strikes went from something that was not really worth an Adept slot, to something that’s actually defensible as a pick over Mug. That’s the reality that we exist in.

Maugetarr.6823:

I am interested in hearing some high-level balance direction roadmap discussion since I think the changes to vigor were the opposite way they should have gone with thieves during the last patch. Hearing their future goals and thought process will be….. intriguing.

Those two things are related, honestly. Active defenses are the core of the “problem” with zerker dominance, and high Vigor access just makes that worse.

evilapprentice.6379:

I’m worried by how many posts I had to scroll through until someone said this.

This is usually when I would say “you must be new here”, but I know that you aren’t.

Impact.2780:

They could:

• Nerf base critical damage down from +50%.
• Cap critical damage at +150% i.e +100% from gear/traits.
• Cap critical damage at +100% i.e +50% from gear/traits.

These are all likely. I’d add one more, diminished returns on crit damage past a certain threshold. More fair than a hard cap.

• Critical hits reduce the effectiveness of another stat for a few seconds, the extent of which is determined by the difference between a normal hit and the critical hit, in an attempt to get players to build up those stats more. This would impact precision as well as critical damage and therefore berserker gear.
• Critical hits provide a condition damage modifier either for you or the target, increasing damage you deal or the target takes from conditions. This would increase the effectiveness of condition damage and possibly promote rampagers.

Too complicated, very hard to understand for normal players, unlikely.

Ichishi.9613:

I am amazed to realize that after everything that happened thief subforum has the most positive prognosis on crit damage nerf.

We have Hidden Killer. To some small extent, Thief is insulated from a change to one of the legs of the tripod, since we can technically load up on Power and Crit damage.

Naturally this depends on the nature of the change.

They’ll give it diminishing returns, and my medium-weight crit build will become secretly awesome.

You’ve got options. A few that come to mind:

1. Power-based food, to make up for the loss of Might stacks on dodge. Lots of choices here, with lots of secondary stats available.
2. Chicken soup (condition removal on heal, plus healing power), since it makes Withdraw a lot stronger.
3. Boon duration creams (also comes with MF). May seem weird, but it helps your Vigor/Fury/Might/Swiftness/Regen uptime.
4. Omnomberry Ghost/Pie: life leech on crit, plus precision.

I usually carry around 4-5 different foods with me in WvW, since I never know what I’ll need at the moment.

What’s the point of Rampager’s in your build? Without crit damage, your critical hits don’t really hit all that hard. You’re probably better off either committing to direct damage (zerker’s) or condition damage (Carrion or Dire), since we don’t really have a lot of on-crit effects that are useful to condition builds.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Here we go again. Just because you don’t know the purpose doesn’t make “long-lasting Vuln stacks isn’t very useful.” […] Even one stack of a long-lasting condition is useful — I’ll leave you to figure that out.

I asked you a direct question. You can either 1) answer it, or 2) refuse to answer it. There is no acceptable third option. Please either make your case, or stop wasting everyone’s time.

The ICD was never an issue

This is not a defensible point. It’s an issue when two activations can’t happen in the same 1s window, because now an activation is wasted. It’s an issue when you can’t cleave stacks into multiple targets, because duh.

You see that window it too short to capitalize on the damage bonus granted by Vulnerability.

Nope. Plenty of time to push buttons and hit damages. There are no restrictions on this condition: if it’s active, you get the benefits.

If you’re in a party, there are other professions that can apply it with better duration.

Not necessarily, and not without potential trade-offs in another area. Sundering Strikes does not need to be the optimal trait in an fantasy party configuration to be in the conversation for an actual player choosing to use it in a real life situation. That’s what this thread is about, remember.

Look at it this way, against a Champion with Unshakable buff, that 6s is only 3s — you can’t even take advantage of that ridiculous short window.

Maybe you can’t, but in my estimation that’s a personal problem.

What thief is ever going to have 6s/3s on Vulnerability, anyway? It’s not even possible, since you need to spec 10 DA to get SS in the first place, and 25 DA is pretty strong in general.

Looking pretty good, IMO. One thing: I know this is a Might build, but are you aware of the inefficiency of your food? Endurance regen can’t go past +100%, so you’re wasting that portion whenever you have Vigor from either VR or BT.

Aren’t you going to get ascended accessories? They are reasonably cheap if you have access to guild commendations. Your current loadout doesn’t lend itself to an ascended upgrade there, since there is no Soldier/Zerker or Cavalier/Zerker combo item. I’d build around those personally, since they have higher stat budgets than Exotic and you can add a WvW infusion.

I would recommend that you start by watching some videos on P/D roaming in WvW, since that’s the most likely thing that you’ll be doing with Apothecary gear. Once you have an idea of what the style is like, it’s just a matter of practicing your fundamentals by giving lots of bags to your enemies in the process of learning.

This is a pretty cool build. I run something similar, except using S/P instead.

You are starving for some Toughness, here. The cheapest place to get it will be in your accessories, since they are still exotic. Cavalier’s is worth looking into: you’ll give up some Power and all of the Precision, but maintain your crit damage and add 182 Toughness to your build. That’ll be a significant defensive upgrade for you, since right now you’re little better than glass. May want to try that, see how you like it, and then replace more pieces if you think you can deal with it.

I personally like to aim for around ~2400 Armor and 15-16k health.

^ Yeah, get gear with better damage on it. The only damaging stats you have on full Apoth is secondary condition damage; for PvE, the best way to leverage that is maybe a high-bleed build as either P/D or D/D, using things like Caltrops to help things along.

If you just care about leveling up, Berserker’s is the way to go, with Sword/Pisol. I don’t think that PvE will be good training for WvW, though. For thieves, they are very different styles.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The difference is the base 10s duration that you can stretch longer with condition duration. It simply scales better even with the 1s ICD, which is negligible having 100% crit chance.

I didn’t ask what the difference was, I asked what the purpose was. Vulnerability has no secondary effects; it just increases direct damage. You want to get as many stacks as quickly as possible, because time spending build stacks is time when direct damage isn’t being amplified. A perfect snowflake situation with long-lasting Vuln stacks isn’t very useful when the mob is dead by the time you actually get there.

The old style SS was crippled by the ICD. That meant no cleave bonuses, and the low 33% proc rate even meant that 100% crit rate couldn’t even guarantee you’d activate the trait inside the window. At least now, when I slot SS and push S/P #3 with a high crit rate, my party can get a good 4-5 stacks for several seconds. It’s even burstable up to double digit stacks for short timeframes.

Sure, it’d be better if it was 8s instead of 6s, but that’s not on the table. Strictly comparing the old version to the new one, the rework is considerably better overall, to the point where reasonable people are actually using it. It’s nice that Deadly Arts now has more than one or two viable Adept traits.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The pre-Dec10 update was perfect with 33% chance and 10s duration.

Perfectly pointless to spec in, maybe. The 1s ICD killed the trait. What’s the purpose of a slow burn of Vulnerability stacks?

The new version at least allows you to get a lot of stacks out there quickly, which gives you something useful to do with it. SS is very good with Pistol Whip builds that have high crit chance; not just for the hit density, but also the cleave.

Impact.2780:

@Interceptor
Since you’re making a big deal about this guy’s terminology: you don’t get 2400 armour from gear. You get defense from gear. Armour is your defense and toughness combined.

I only made a medium-sized deal about it because it was a number from an argument where he got slapped down. Since he was wrong about the number in the first place, it’s clearly not relevant anymore.

But since you want to have a pedant-off, you get Defense from armor (but not trinkets), stats from everywhere, and Armor from the total of Toughness/Defense. Some of us like to say “gear” to refer to the whole thing, as a shorthand. Gear does not necessarily mean mono-armor, and I’d be surprised at anyone who used it that way.

Countering possible arguments in advance is a good reasoning technique. It shows you’ve evaluated possibilities to reach your conclusion, and presents it as a strong one. It doesn’t mean the person using the technique has selected a single person who will attempt to counter his logic and fail… it’s there to dismiss possible arguments before they can be made.

There’s nothing wrong with the generic technique. It does raise eyebrows, though, when your pre-counter has a pretty specific number in it, and references a vague “someone” rather than keeping the example impersonal.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

What makes you think I was talking about you?

Mostly the poor job that you did of disguising the passive-aggressiveness. At least make some cursory attempt to change the words around; there are more venoms on your skill bar than a 30/30/x/x/x P/D Thief.

I post toughness because it’s toughness NOT armor. But you’re right, it’s not 2400, I exaggerated, it’s actually 2200 toughness.

We’ll just have to take your word for it, since you didn’t actually cite anything in your weasel wording. Which somehow has an extremely specific number in it.

Sundering Strikes is indeed pretty solid now, and you’ll also want to take a look at Critical Haste and Practiced Tolerance. The patch on Dec 10th gave CS-heavy Thieves a few more advantages for having some Precision.

Whether you can stomach the trade-off is another thing entirely, but it’s a perfectly legitimate way to get some Vulnerability into a group with your Thief.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Someone will argue that actively dodging is an active play style […]
Someone will then argue that Acro build is supplemented with 2400 toughness from gear […]

Whew, someone is apparently still smarting over being exposed as a non-Acrobatics Thief, and losing an argument badly, if he’s bringing up WvW points in a thread that’s specifically about PvE. Things that apply in WvW (baiting cooldowns from people with a dodge style) don’t apply the same way in PvE against monster AI, obviously.

And it’s 2400 Armor from gear, not 2400 Toughness. Lord. At least get your terminology correct. Weasel wording should be infractable, really.

Yeah, I don’t understand why we can use our class mechanic to “take” something to help us in a fight. It should just steal gold from you instead.

This is my all-time favorite thing to do to Necromancers, especially near cliffs.

My second-favorite thing is to make their downed-state Fear whiff.

Shockwave.1230:

Is there a fallacy for someone claiming that because something falls under the potential realm of fallacy that the person claiming fallacy in fact falls under a fallacy themselves?

Added
If not it should be called the fallacy of fallacies

It would only be a fallacy if it was an argument. And I’d call it either the Pee Wee Herman Fallacy, or the Rule of He Who Smelt It.

Travlane.5948:

especially when my claim is pretty well known.

Argumentum ad populum. Epic.

This place would be a lot more boring if it weren’t for the fallacies, the playground insults, and the challenges to duels. Only on the Internet.

Travlane.5948:

u claimed thief was easier. its on you.

Nope. The original ridiculous assertion came from you:

Travlane.5948:

well tell me this. is there ANY other way you can go melee without dodging every second to stay alive? mm?

guardian can sit there in PVE and take on 7-8 enemys with just auto attack alone and neverhave to hit a heal button. thief can only do that with 1 enemy at a time.

are you SUUUUUUUUUUURE black powder shot is OP? really?!

Whether it’s ridiculous because of the restrictions instituted or the assumptions made, is an exercise for the reader, but you threw the grenade.

Your idea of a reasonable estimate is to treat the food as giving zero Power? I should have known better than to click on an optimization thread.

You don’t seem to have taken Mugi’s food into account in your calculations. The build editor does not give the +200 Power. If you throw even a Butternut Squash in there, the math changes.

^ Many schools of thought on that. My opinion is that you only need enough Vitality to avoid getting insta-blicked, since Toughness is better for sustaining yourself through longer battles in combination with healing.

I run full Knight’s armor (primary Toughness, secondary Precision and Power), and keep a couple defensive trinkets around for odd use when Berserker’s isn’t appropriate. I get most of my health from 30 Acrobatics (worth 3000 health) and Practiced Tolerance (when I have 10 CS, worth roughly 1400-1500 health).

FYI for those that aren’t aware of it, there are two kinds of PVT gear: Soldier’s and Sentinel’s. Soldier’s is primary Power, with minor Vitality/Toughness, and Sentinels is primary Vitality with secondary Power/Toughness. Important to keep in mind what you want your stat mix to be if you’re including either type. Ascended trinkets don’t have Sentinel’s.

I prefer Soldier’s, since it’s slightly more offensive and doesn’t mess with your Power balance.

Travlane.5948:

u show me a thief doing 10 mobs same time….. without using a corner to group them. ill show u a guard doing the same ones easy and so much faster. itll be embarassing.

… no scope, 180 degrees, upside-side down, Final Destination.

Nope. You show us a video of you failing to kill 10 mobs at once with Thief, and we can pick apart the various mistakes you make in the process, repeating until you’re able to succeed. It’ll be both fun and educational for everyone involved.

Funnily enough, I have actually done this vs. Dredge in the lower-level Fractals to carry a bad group of PUGs. Blinds would have been no good (obviously), so SoM-tanking with backflips and Stability saved the day.

Travlane.5948:

say it thief can handle 10 mobs as easily as guardian. ill wait.

Handle as easily and probably even kill them faster. D/D condition thieves in open world PvE are pretty silly, with all the bleed/stealth/evasion available. I realize that doesn’t jive with your idea of D/D as backstab-only, but such is reality.

Auesis.7301:

I think you should probably not emphasise a mistype. I’ve done that a few times even with 5k hours on my Thief. These things happen. People are human.

Don’t rag on him too much for it; he’s wrong, and thus doesn’t have much else to do except mock a midnight mis-type from someone who’s been in Elementalist mode all day. Grenth forbid that he admit that D/D Thieves can handle packs of mobs easily.

^ Death Blossom and Cantrips with Signet of Malice. Give us a difficult one.

It’s nice for stomps.