Guild Wars 2

Initialise let’s do some more thief duels, I have incin now C:

matty.4907:

Xom.9264:

dreztina.4820:

Darek.1836:

lol 2 guardians much better
no offense but reminds me of how PAXA thought they were so awesome because they brought 2-3 guards for 5 mans. and yeah Yarr is guilty of it too at times.

What choice is there? When BS wanted to do some equal numbered fights, aside from a couple guardians, every single person they brought was a condi spam build. When this is what guilds are bringing to fights, there really isn’t much choice.

Sorry you did not enjoy the fights I used to lose all the time the first few weeks I faced people at the windmill duel area also, you get better with practice.

The majority are not condi ‘spam’ as a necro Im the only pure condi person, the mes is hybrid the rest are direct damage or hybrid leaning power. Even you’re a hybrid spec as an ele burning etc…

Yes, hybrid…. 1200 condi damage hybrids.

Saying all you guys don’t run bunker condition is like saying the new PvE event isn’t taking numbers away from WvW. It’s just completely facetious.

The fun days of glassy builds are over. WvW was so much more fun when people ran glassy, you either wiped the kitten out of a group or you got wiped hard. Bunker condi meta is effectively slowing down combat, the devs thought it was too bursty and that’s exactly what they were trying to do. I liked it bursty but that’s just my opinion. To each his own.

Sorry, are you in this guild? Did you join recently and I didn’t notice? No you kittening didn’t so stop making sweeping statements about an entire guild of players that you haven’t talked to.

Every single character I have runs a direct damage build focused on crit damage, none of them have above 200 condition damage, even my engineer. I beat a dagger pistol thief with two legendaries last time I was on my engineer, running an Hgh elixir build with grenade kit and 0 cond damage.

15 in acro AND vigor on heal is going overboard, you don’t need that many dodges in PvE. When you’re dodging you’re not doing damage, and even hard bosses don’t require you to dodge 4-5 times in 10 seconds.

Power of inertia would be better if you want to keep 15 in acro for feline grace, otherwise putting 15 into trickery would give you more dps, either taking thrill of the crime if you’re party doesn’t have much access to fury, or flanking strikes.

If you’re finding yourself not being able to do cloak and dagger – backstab rotations often enough because of low initiative you could take 10 in shadow arts for infusion of shadow.

Also, Rune of the eagle doesn’t give as much of a damage increase as 6 ruby orbs. Rune of the scholar would be optimal if you’re confident in maintaining your health, otherwise go with ruby orbs.

EDIT: Not sure why you need signet of shadows, unless you’re trash mob running, and even then there should be other party members giving you swiftness. Signet of agility would be better, 9% passive crit chance increase, removes a condition for all party members on activation, AND regenerates your endurance and ALL party member’s endurance if they’re nearby to you, all on a 24 sec cool down.

Would it be overpowered if dancing dagger applied immob for 1 sec on first hit, then cripple on any bouncing hits? It would make it a lot more viable as a chasing skill, if you spammed it, you could at best immob one target for about 5 secs, the same as a warriors longbow 5 skill or throw bolas skill, but you would use all your initiative in the process, making it equivalent to a skill with a longer cool down.

I feel like it would make it a skill that would have some useful applications.

I think Bas may have meant Yishis has moved on to playing engineer

Xom.9264:

Harbinger.8637:

Jakare.6807:

How does I roam good

Well you already have a thief so you’re on the right track! Only attack lowbies, and if you meet any zerg that could be a challenge let Xomox die and just run.

You’ll be the scourge of the plains in no time!

Fixed

Xomox is plague form sponge. I do gud deeps.

1) D/D and S/D
2) 0/30/30/10/0
3) WvW

dreztina.4820:

Petezahut.3068:

dreztina.4820:

Any roamers out tonight?

what is roaming friend?

If you have to ask…

How does I roam good

I don’t see what removing damage from some skills would do to promote more ‘skill based’ play, other than encourage people to run one shot builds.

If a necro lays down all their marks all at once on someone, all they need to do is dodge roll through them and maybe use one condi clear and they’ve just negated all of the possible utility and damage that those marks would have dealt out. Most necros don’t spam all their staff skills just because they provide damage on a low cool down, the same way most thieves don’t use 4 signets with a signet of power build, blow them all at once and spam heartseeker, even though on paper it provides high damage and heartseeker is cheap on initiative.

The game is already skill based, but currently revolves heavily around burst damage because of what builds are currently possible. Anet obviously wanted to avoid people making builds that were purely utility based or purely support based, as classes would be pigeon holed into having a fully specialised role and not doing anything else, if they were the most effective at it.

A skill like the necro’s chillblain when used effectively and not spammed is one of the worst skills to face playing as a d/d thief, as having my movement impaired while my utility skills are on cooldown can cause me to get heavily focused and have no way to prevent it. A good necro would know this and would wait until I’ve burned my shadow step utilities and am about to try for a cloak and dagger, and would use a chill skill to counter that. I even make a point of using withdraw as my heal skill all the time now, specifically as a counter for movement impairing skills, even though it leaves me with very little condition removal options for damaging conds like bleeds. That’s the trade off I make because I know the hardest people to face aren’t the ones that use all their skills immediately off cool down, they understand when and where to use skills to their maximum effectiveness.

Something like line of warding is already a really strong skill in small scale fights or GvG matches, it can interrupt rezzes, can stop groups stacking/balling up and all charging you at the same time, or can be put down on top of you as a pseudo knockdown trap when you’re expecting a melee burst like a hammer warrior or dagger thief.

If like you said, this game had fewer damage skills and more utility skills that give you positioning advantages, there would be less overall risk in a fight as the only skills that you’d need to worry about avoiding/negating would be the damage skills, and if you know that your opponent has already used their 1-2 skills that do damage, you don’t have to worry about them countering your attack. What’s the use of gaining a positional advantage if you don’t have any damaging attacks to use. All it would take would be one dodge roll and a block or invuln and you’ve blown your only damaging attacks, leaving you with just utility skills. Then what would most likely happen is the meta would become everyone running full zerker gear, using all of their utility skills to set up a one-shot attack.

I’ve been using d/p set up with 4 gambits, and I’ve found it to be more reliable than s/p pistol whip spam.

Kill time is usually 35 seconds, traits are 25/30/0/0/15, taking mug, dagger training, furious retal, critical haste, executioner and thrill of the crime. Using assassins signet, infiltrators signet and signet of agility but agility can be swapped out for smokescreen if you’re having trouble keeping black powder on him. Signet of malice for heal, basi venom for elite. Candied dragon roll is good for extra life steal food, or otherwise any damage boosting food.

Keep in mind that his kill shot will not be absorbed by smokescreen, he has to be blinded.

Rotation is activate basi venom as you’re going in, Shadow shot, steal for buffs, one auto attack rotation, black powder, two auto attack rotations, black powder, usually at this point he teleports (if not just drop another black powder and auto attack), infiltrators signet and black powder, 2-3 heartseekers.

You will still get hit by about half the shots of his volley as the black powder doesn’t pulse fast enough to continually blind his shots, but if youre getting too low health, consider taking smokescreen as this will absorb the volley shots.

Get a zerker d/p set, watch some speed run videos of deadeye (one of the tier 3 bosses in the queen’s gauntlet) and farm the living daylights out of it while you still can. I got my kills down to 25-30 seconds, earnings about 30 silver (after ticket costs) each time. Made 100 gold for about 6-7 hours farming. It’s the best solo farm possible right now and it won’t be around for long.

The sword 2 skill shadow return is still very strong, it can still be used while stunned, it just doesn’t remove the stun effect. So you need to be intelligent about where you’ve placed your return point. Having the increased initiative cost of larcenous strike has just stopped the ‘spam 3 to win’ players. The total init cost is now 5, which is still less than cloak and dagger or black powder, which seems fair.

Nyx Xox.3540:

Hey does Darxio still play on ET? I remember him back when he commanded on kain T8 days. meeeep. Also S> Ajax to the highest bidder, place your bids NOW

He doesn’t care for me much since I’m a female guild leader and I have a bad mouth? huehue He renamed my guild Cream N Barbies HAHAHA To which Kaineng server has now made my theme song, Barbie girl. LOL Anyway send in your bids guys, he comes with brownies too (:

I already own all rights to Ajax as I paid for his commander tag, just for the hilarity of seeing in ET map chat

“WTF IS AJAX DOING WITH A BLUE DORITO”

But then he left.

:(

I don’t think damage numbers will show up on your screen until your target is out of stealth but your auto attack will go to the next attack in the chain.

Would a viable option be to swap the trait effect of ‘concealed defeat’ with the effects of ‘last refuge’, so instead of stealthing when below 25%hp you instead drop a smokescreen, and when downed you stealth for 3 secs if you’ve picked up the ‘concealed defeat’ trait, instead of dropping a smokescreen. Especially as a blind/projectile absorb is unlikely to save you when you’re in downed state.

OP, You’re looking at this the wrong way, I’ll try and explain why. Sorry this may end up long.

This game’s combat system is designed to promote active damage avoidance, not damage mitigation. This is why every character has the ability to dodge. Every character also has the ability to build for high burst damage.

Heartseeker, cloak and dagger, and backstab are all skills with a high base damage value. They are designed to be burst damage attacks. They will scale very high with other damage boosting traits, stats and boons. Regardless of your stats, they will hit hard. As burst skills, they are supposed to be avoided, not absorbed.

This isn’t the kind of game where you can turn yourself into a tank. You showed a video of you standing in one place, doing no dodges, attacks, or damage mitigation skills, taking damage from 4 attackers at once for about 20 seconds, without even any use of protection boon. This is impressive by itself, and yet you’re complaining about taking too much damage.

The protection boon on a character with base level of toughness, i.e. no added toughness stats, would provide as much, if not more damage reduction than your 3500+ toughness stats.

The toughness stat provides diminishing returns on how much damage mitigation it provides the higher you stack it. I had a quick look for a thread that goes into detail on it and found this from October 2012.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/Toughness-Power-theory-numbers

Going on to the heartseeker skill, and why it’s damage should not be nerfed.

When a thief puts all of their initiative into using multiple heartseeker’s, they are locking themselves into a 1 second obvious animation that gives them no evasion frames, and if queued up (by pressing 2 multiple times), the chain will continue, locking the thief into the multiple heartseeker animations until the thief runs out of initiative, regardless of if they try to dodge roll or use another weapon skill midway through. Basically, spamming heartseeker makes a thief vulnerable.

Here are some ways that your warrior can avoid a heartseeker spamming thief and leave them with no initiative (which means no access to weapon skills besides auto attack):

Dodge roll, dodge roll again, use whirlwind attack away from the thief, then use rush, again away from the direction of the thief.

Use shield block, then if necessary use endure pain. Watch repeated 0’s pop up.

Use throw bolas skill. Watch thief stand in one place, stuck in the heartseeker animation. If necessary, follow up with pin down if you have a longbow.

Chain stun/daze/knockdown attacks, or if you want to troll them, wait until they have just started the animation or heartseeker and interrupt it with a stun attack. The thief will still have spent initiative.

Use cripple skills, such as blade trail on GS, or throw axe on axe mainhand, and proceed to kite.

Hope this helps in some way.

Gcostanza.2086:

Bllade.1029:

I’m not interested in playing Guardian Wars personally.

BS runs Guardians galore. Yeah that is one exciting fight.

Last GvG we had, 17 of us showed up, this was a monumental turn out for us, it was literally 95% of our guild. We had 3 guardians.

Averaelas.1876:

Your entire server is a PvE server … some of your guilds are pushing WvW harder, like BS. But your name says it all. You’re BSing. Stop trying to talk big against us.

Jscull.2514:

King, I gotta say after the forum battles we have had, you’re preaching the good word from the old school book now. Impressive man, you have def come full circle.

Even flipflop is beginning to see the light. This is a win for the old schoolers!

Now if we can get 1 of the 2-3 people making up the entire Anet wvw team to see the light, the game could someday maybe eventually migrate into some relatively competitive!

You’re late, Paxa. You’ve been mentioned like 6 times already

breh.5987:

In the end they have consistently beaten you in roaming. They should have left it at that and just enjoyed your whine about numbers. What you believe in guild roaming differs from mine, but of course it would because you’ve been beaten over and over in that area. One win does not dictate superiority. Especially after you guys threw a fit after that win.

And on BS I can attest to all of you being cowards. I’ve been in smaller zergs where you have been chased back into your spawn.

Where is this even coming from? What are you basing this on? Care to show any vids of us being beaten over and over?

One of the first things that I put on this thread that got pancakes so riled up was when we encountered a group of around 12 VS when we were roaming with about 8-9 people, and ended up completely face rolling them. None of us even went down. This wasn’t even the first time, I just found it so funny this time that I had to post something, how with less numbers, and most of us in zerker gear, we could face roll a “Tier 1 Zerg buster guild” who we expected to be super tight, coordinated and hard as hell to penetrate.

This is after we’d had already had 2 10v10 GvG matches with VS which were such face roll wipes I was thinking there was some kind of lag problem that was affecting VS’ gameplay. That was the only reason I could come up with as to why we won so easily. We weren’t even in TS for those fights, we were typing in guild chat whilst fighting.

Then quantum puts up a video of a few of us + some pugs fighting an SF spawn camp primarily lead by VS. We could have just sat in the invulnerable spot and waited for some nubs to get too close to the legendary defenders, but we didn’t, we fought you guys anyway. Even though there was almost no chance of finishing any of you because of how clustered up you were.

How does any of this constitute cowardice? Or repeatedly losing in a roaming situation? Or being beaten over and over?

When I’m done compressing this kittenedly large video of the fights last night (91gb… for 30 mins footage… wtf…) hopefully you guys can look over your own gameplay and work out where you’re going wrong. Because if you look at it on paper we should not have won this fights, but we did, with ease.

Insane Pancakez.9182:

@ that J guy or w/e your name is from BS:

I hope you had fun killing about 10 of us two times tonight. You enjoy those 5 ish loot bags you get from 20 kills. I’ll enjoy getting my 100+ a night actually doing something progressive on my server. Again, if killing a group of us all running the type of builds we have makes you feel good, then you’re a pretty bad player. God forbid what you’ll do if your number two key ever breaks in the middle of a fight. All that smashing on it, and it’ll be gone before you know it.

Just out of interest, what are these ‘type of builds’ that you guys have? Seeing as we’ve been so forthcoming with our bunker, small man, healing builds… with our one guard that’s bunker… yeah…

You said you promote ‘team synergy’? Why in the picture you put up, where you’re in a large group on group fight, have you used literally one skill besides auto attack? One of your party members has 8 conditions on them, and you have 2 low cool down shouts on your skill bar that are off cool down? Or have you not heard of soldier runes and pure of voice trait? I guess removing four conditions every 24 secs isn’t enough ‘team synergy’ for you. Better take more signets, can’t get better than that 10% damage reduction just for your character. I mean 10% damage reduction?? On one person???! That thing is op!!!!1!!one!!!

Sorry to quote something from ages ago but I’m sitting at work with nothing better to do.

Defektive.7283:

FYI: Right now the top NA thiefs are: Jumper, Caed, Steb, Luci, Cruuk.

I randomly ended up in some duels with Caed in WvW last week as my server was facing Anvil Rock, and he played much tighter than the thief that you’re fighting in the vid.

He was running a zerk-heavy d/p spec, would usually start the fight with a very fast basilisk venom heartseeker through black powder to backstab, forcing you to burn your stability/stun break, then either shadowstep away to burn off your stability, or if it was down use repeated headshots combined with auto attack to keep you locked out of using your heal or skills.

Black powder is very dangerous for melee warriors as the blind pulse is faster than most of our attacks, so you could start an earthshaker and get blinded before you land it.

I try and make use of berserker stance when I’m facing a d/p thief so that I’m guaranteed 8 secs of not being affected by blind, always stay moving, and always keep auto attacking, even if you’re just hitting the air. If your auto attack goes to the next attack in the chain then you know where the thief is and can try and aoe the area or use some kind of cc attack.

LOL xom

you’re actually one of the very few larger guild we have to play carefully when fighting

I’ll remember to be more careful next time

Sororita.3465:

curry butternut squash soup and superior sharpening stones !
also bloodlust stacks.

…

“You all run healing and bunker builds”

curry butternut squash and sharpening stones

…

Moving on…

I use precision stacks and cond duration reduction food

Didnt get time to get my stacks before the VS fight though

Full zerk motha focaccia

Only ‘bunker’ stats I get is 200 toughness from traits and 179 toughness from my weap

Try running a guardian in your group that does something other than spam 1

It could save your life

YOOO VS

You need to get better at your stack and smack

Because BS just wiped you with half your numbers

:)

Hey VS, hope you enjoyed the fights with us tonight as much as we did. Highlights for me were the 10 BS v 15 VS wipe at the AR windmill, and the 10 minute fight at Redvale camp where 6 of us went against 15-20 or so of you guys. Glad to have you guys here

Hi, I’m from UK but play on an NA server in tier 8, in a 20-30 sized roaming guild. Most evenings there are 5-10 of us online, we WvW almost every evening. We’re mostly a collection of good solo/small group roamers who got sick of the clustered higher tiers and moved down to tier8 for more chance at small group skirmishes. Tier 8 pretty much provides the best circumstances for roaming at the moment, if you’re more into player vs player fighting than sieging objectives. Let me know if you’d be interested.

Shanks R Us.2489:

I’ll be on my engineer. Just look for that one tiny engi killing everyone.

Guess I’ll see you at fight night then. I’ll be the male thief in the white mask. Or the brown and gold male sylvari warrior.

Shanks R Us.2489:

Today was the first time I’ve had a chance to go out & roam for a decent while. Hope the people that ran into me had a fun time, I’m the black & gold asuran engineer with the tiger finisher. Was mostly in ET/SF BL.

Had a few decent fights, but for the most part it was either running into 1-2 every once in a great while or a zerg. Was hoping the lower tiers had more roaming, but I guess it’s just less overall players. Everyone should start roaming more, at this low of a tier (and with the current matchup victor basically decided), you might as well! You can only get better as a player.

Our guild usually roams on SF BL or EB, I’m often solo roaming on my thief or on my warr if I’m feeling reckless. We usually don’t bother with ET BL as we can’t be bothered to run all the way down from top spawn.

If anyone else from your guild is into roaming and small man skirmishes, let one of us know which BL you’ll be on one night and we’ll try and be on the same one.

Keep in mind that you’ve asked for critique, but what you have here is a tagging build for running in zergs. You have just over 11,000 health and one stun break which you need to click twice for it to work (as you’re not using fast cast ground targeting)
If someone focuses you, you’re very likely to die. The average d/d thief could take you down with one combo of basilisk venom – cloak and dagger – steal – backstab. On characters with low toughness this combo often hits for 4-5k on a critical hit with cloak and dagger, and 7-8k on backstab. That’s not even including mug damage, and already that’s your entire health gone.

Executioner is only worth taking if you’re using other attacks more often than backstab. Or if you’re running in zergs picking people off that are at low health. When you open on someone who’s at full health with a cloak and dagger steal combo (which with this build you can’t do, as I’ll explain in the next point) it’s unlikely that you’ll get them below 50% health unless they are very squishy, so you’re backstab, whih is your hardest hitting attack, won’t take advantage of the 20% extra damage, and it may not even critically hit.

Taking the 2 seconds of stealth on steal trait is a strange choice. It means that if you try to combine any attack with steal, such as cloak and dagger or heartseeker, you will be put into stealth first from steal and then instantly get the revealed debuff on the next attack. One of the main advantages of steal is that it is a teleport that doesn’t interrupt your current skill, so it can be combined with melee attacks to ensure that they hit. Your trait could be situationally useful for stealing to someone within 900 range and backstabbing straight away, but you could achieve more damage in the same time frame if you removed the trait, and started casting cloak and dagger – used steal halfway through the animation – then backstab.

Most people would opt to take infusion of shadow (gain 2 initiative when using a skill that stealths you) in almost any build that uses offhand dagger, especially a stealth heavy build. Initiative is the thief class equivalent of weapon skill cooldowns, so the more traits you have that provide initiative regen, the more often you can use your skills.

I feel like you would suffer a lot in a 1v1 situation unless you were finishing someone off that was already low health. I mentioned earlier that if a thief opened on you with a burst combo you would very likely die in 3 moves. If you tried the same thing on a thief, you would have to steal (triggering mug damage and the 2 seconds of stealth), backstab, then heart seeker at least twice to kill them. In that time, 3-4 seconds ish, a semi-good thief would have already shadow stepped away and escaped. A good thief would have dodged/stealthed/shadow stepped, used a heal skill and is already opening on you.

If you want to run with large zergs, flip camps and tag enemies then run whatever build you want, but this is a paper build that would fall apart at the slightest pressure.

bobross.5034:

Just wondering; there’s that pistol trait in trickery…ever tried it, is it worth it under any circumstances? Those other trickery (steal-buffing) traits are just so good, I can’t imagine justifying it, even in a p/d build.

I could see it in a p/p build, but thats a lot of points to invest in stats that don’t help much.

I’m guessing you mean the ricochet trait (50% chance for pistol shots to ricochet to another target) in trickery? It could be viable if you’re using pistol/dagger in WvW and maximising the 3 second reveal duration to do a lot of sneak shots, but it’s debatable.

I can see why taking 1500 range steal with the daze interrupt and 20% extra cooldown would be useful for this pistol/dagger build (that the thread was originally focused on talking about), as you’d otherwise be limited to 900 range with your attacks and be without any gap closers.

I still think that dagger/pistol 0/20/30/20/0 is a hard counter to this build though, in a 1v1 situation. With the cleanse conditions every three seconds in stealth and heal ~350 every second in stealth, it almost completely mitigates the condition damage that a pistol/dagger build puts out, and the direct damage (i.e. non condition damage) from pistol/dagger isn’t enough to really put pressure on a dagger/pistol thief.

stefanplc.5234:

If you pick up the “reflective missiles” trait and you reflect all the shots from the Pistol Phantasm it will almost kill itself.

Thing with this is mesmers can pick up a 5 point minor trait that grants the retaliation buff to all phantasms, and if the Mesmer has high power, when you reflect all the phantasm bullets you can get hit for 2-3k just from the retal.

It’s usually less painful to just dodge roll towards one when they start shooting and hit it with auto attacks, you’ll at least only get 3-4 ticks of retal rather than upwards of 10.

Why not just eviscerate a white critter if you want pointless, meticulously set up large numbers

@VS

I was in 2-3 of the GvG fights we had on Saturday, what went wrong for you guys? You all mass invis’d at the start of each fight and by the time you had all rendered on my screen, 1/3rd of you were downed :/

I was on my thief trying to take people out from the sidelines and I remember seeing thieves on your team trying to stroll in face first with d/d?

I thought that the dredge try and destroy the bombs if you place them in stealth? Hence people not just using shadow refuge to place them. Or is it because you’re placing them just as you’re coming out of stealth that they’re not destroying them?

naphack.9346:

You are seriously calling what people here are trying to achieve here dps?

Just trying to get you to validate this statement. Please provide some kind of analysis as to how your build is serious dps and a backstab build isn’t.

I’ve never played a cond build, I’ve only played against them. I find them uninteresting and unchallenging.

So in a venom cond build, which either would be a d/d death blossom build, or p/d build, how are you planning to counter a burst d/d or d/p backstab build? Because you have no on demand blinds from your weaps, and taking a stun break leaves you with 2 slots for venoms; 3 if you want basilisk but as that’s not a damaging venom it won’t add anything to your dps.

I don’t see how the argument of “good opponents will just blind/stealth/dodge your attacks” doesn’t apply to you as well.

If I hit one 4k cnd and one 8k backstab every say 10 seconds, which accounts for an opponent dodging or blinding me on a couple of attempts, and don’t land any other hits AT ALL in those 10 seconds, that still gives me 12,000/10 = 1200 damage per second. Do your venoms tick for 1200 damage per second?

I’ve worked out one relatively successful way to burst a guardian as a dagger dagger thief, but it depends on them being predictable and only running one stun break.

Break aegis with a projectile
Basilisk venom, cloak and dagger – steal – combo
At this point they will usually stun break to get out of basilisk and avoid backstab
If they have stability, wait in stealth for it to drop
Use mace crack stolen ability
Cloak and dagger – backstab
Auto attack

Usually by the time the stun effect from mace crack has ended they’re downed.

Osther.7416:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8gOXVFxIlY

You start attacking the thief at 0:16. At 0:31 you stop attacking to retreat and heal up. In 15 seconds you managed to do approx 66% of his health.

The warr starts attacking you at 0:26. At this point you have taken little to no damage from the thief, you are at about 90-95% health. At 0:31 you have lost 90% of your health and are forced to retreat to heal up.

All that you’ve just shown in this video is that a warrior can get you to 10%hp three times faster than you can get a thief to 33%hp.

Post something relevant please.

naphack.9346:

[rant=random]
You are seriously calling what people here are trying to achieve here dps?
dps stands for what? Damage per Spike?
[/rant]
It’s true, there may be a more reliable burst out there, but the max spike relies on luck
Well, personally, I don’t find these backstab builds all that fancy… I rather run around with my venom share cond build.
the 10/30/0/0/30 sounds interesting, tho. Gotta give that a try.

This is a thread about highest possible backstab damage. Your dps is going to largely depend on how much backstab will crit for. I can guarantee you a crit heavy backstab thief is going to have much higher damage per second than a “venom share cond build” thief.

Even if someone survives your first backstab combo, you should be doing your next cloak and dagger – backstab combo in 3 seconds once revealed has ended.

And good luck getting off any venoms when you’re in a basilisk stun getting hit for a 6k+2k+11k combo.

nahj.2870:

Probably something like this

Popping all of your signets along with Thrill of the Crime puts you at or near 25 stacks of might. Factor in +20% damage from Executioner, +10% from First Strikes, +10% from Exposed Weakness, +10% from Sigil of Night, +5% from Dagger Training and +10% from Scholar runes for a total of 65% extra damage on targets below half health. Throw in 25 bloodlust stacks, the 3 vulnerability stacks from Cloak and Dagger and however many stacks Sundering Strikes might give (5?) and the Sigil of Air proc and you should have a very hard hitting combo.

You didn’t factor in the 15% extra damage from assassins signet, it would actually be 80% extra damage, presuming the target is below 50% health and it’s night time.

You could use superior sigil of force on your offhand dagger as it stacks with superior sigil of night, so you’d get 15% extra damage total from weaps alone (at night time). It would give you a more reliable dps increase than relying on sigil of air proccing.

Thinking practically though, executioner is tricky to utilise with a backstab build. If you take the example of opening on someone with the combo of cloak and dagger – steal – backstab, then unless you get cloak and dagger + mug to do 50% of the target’s health, or you open on someone that’s already below 50% health, your backstab won’t have the 20% added damage from executioner. Hidden killer may be more effective if you’re using backstab for the majority of your damage.

Insane Pancakez.9182:

Tonight we ran about 18 players and got our kitten handed to us a few times by a 40-50 man zerg on ET. In that footage my guild was about 23 of us and we pretty much killed your zergs alone.

40-50 man zerg on ET

Aha. What.

Oozo.7856:

In M59 there were no PvE servers. It was full PvP outside of the cities and when you died all of your inventory, armor, and weapons could be looted.

It had guild halls which could be taken by enemy guilds. This was usually done by infiltration and betrayal. And if it was taken all of the stuff you had stored there was taken.

There was a player justice system. People who killed innocents turned red and could be killed with no consequences. People who killed innocents would also be haunted by revenants that would attack them randomly. Revenants were difficult to kill.

The innocents on the server could elect a “governer” (which was a player) and that player had the power to pardon people who turned red. The game had PK (player killer) and antiPK guilds. It had gulds that declared war on each other, infiltrated each other, and took guild halls. It had a political system. And that was decades ago.

I was in an antiPK guild, but also played PKers which I used to infiltrate and sabotage PK guilds. I actually created a different persona that “spoke” in a different way than my main character to fool the PK guilds. When I killed people I always returned their most valuable items. But, for a price… Dark Angel Feathers, which were needed to cast dark magic (Qor).

Compare that to the direction that MMOs have gone in today’s market. And ask yourself why that is. :P

WTF this M-59 game sounds awesome 0_0

The only thing I can think of that has that kind of level of PvP is Eve.

The guild system with infiltration and stuff sounds awesome, can’t believe a game called ‘Guild Wars’ has the barest, most basic and uninteresting interaction of ‘guilds’ i’ve seen in any game I’ve played.

There’s such a lack of punishment in GW2 that it results in zero encouragement to improve your own gameplay. Instead people just find the path of least resistance to getting what they want, which in WvW is

Numbers + Siege = loot bags and wxp

King Amadaeus.8619:

Best advice I could give people if you wanna keep WvW alive, stop scoreboard watching, stop coming to WvW to meet your PVE nubiness needs, bail your scary kitten out of those cozy towers and keeps, get off that NUBASS siege and come fight and learn to play your toon. That is one thing that I do agree with PAXA on…

Pretty much this. Use WvW for what it is, a massive roaming team deathmatch battleground. Learn your class, REALLY learn it, play it to it’s limits, put yourself in situations that actually have some kind of risk and actually push you to get better, because right now that’s basically the end game. Every time you lose a fight you should have learnt something. Every time you spam 1 on an AC in a tower, somewhere in the world a child dies.

Don’t forgo the best challenge that you can get in this game because you’d rather press 1 to win than face losing a fight and paying a few silver repair costs, you can make that money back just getting stacks off of coyote’s for kitten’s sake.

Euryon.9248:

Dear Mezmereyes (Sorrow’s Furnace, Guild GBD or very similar):

Yesterday in the EB JP, you met up with our party and joined us, promising our leader non-aggression in return for showing you how to get through part of the puzzle. She was out ahead of the rest of us at the time, and after she got you where you wanted to be, you promptly pushed her off the perch.

You then spent the next 45 minutes camped out in a safe place on high, using Focus #4 to knock off anyone who got within range of you.

We finally got enough ET people to flood the area such that you couldn’t get us all off, we got through and promptly killed you.

Note that no one died from those falls, so you weren’t getting any loot bags. The only possible benefit to you would have been some perverse pleasure at kitten ing people off for 45 minutes. This makes you a vile human being in my eyes, the lowest of the low, despicable beyond belief. Behind every toon you continued to grief for no reason whatsoever is a real person at a real computer wasting 45 minutes of his real life because you somehow get your jollies off other people’s misery.

You, sir, owe every person you griefed 45 minutes of their lives back.

I do not hold this against SF. In fact, we ended up running with a group from LORD who were perfectly nice and respectful. I’m not even holding it against your entire guild. However, know that any mesmer I see from GBD (or similar) will become target #1 immediately for me and everyone you griefed.

Griefing for loot bags is one thing. Griefing from a safe spot for no tangible reason is a different thing entirely. And partying with someone to get their help getting to the safe spot, and then turning around and griefing them is beyond the pale. I have never seen such despicable behavior before in GW2, and I hope never to see it again.

This is the funniest thing I’ve read all day. I know what I’ll be doing tonight! Look for the thief throwing dancing daggers at people in mid air

Skarloc.2569:

katz.8376:

watch out mentioning PAXA. they’ll know… they’ll come… they’ll trash the thread with their chest-thumping forum-warrioring ways! aeeiiii! run! hide!

You rang?

I think your guild image should the bat symbol ._.

This cracked me up, my death was a cause for celebration today, 4 people steam rolling me after half an hour of chasing was indeed an achievement.

I’m under the arrow cart.

Putting 30 into acrobatics is excessive for a d/p build, and assassins reward’s heal is mediocre, the self healing you get from shadows embrace is more than enough. I’d take 10 out of acro and put it into critical strikes for furious retaliation as you otherwise have no access to fury in this build.

Wtf… is this thread even…

You’re talking about 2-3 stat points of precision. Just put it into perspective, this is 0.14% critical chance, it isn’t worth wasting this much time over.

I understand you want to min max to the fullest extent, but you seem to be obsessing over essentially a 1% margin of critical chance. How does this affect you in a fight? That 1 extra hit in every 100 hits that would have otherwise been a critical, now might not be?