Guild Wars 2

Geiir.7603:

During weekends I see a lot of thieves, on weekdays I am usually the only one though!

Had a match yesterday with 5 thieves vs 4 thieves and a guardian. Felt like we played hide and seek. :p

Had something similar yesterday, I was trying rabid engi in hotjoin and these same 4 thieves kept joining my team. It was such pain to play with them, cos usually 2-3 of them jumped a cc warr duo, died to cc, and didn’t roam and cap at all.

Xhean.3452:

alot of posts sounds like you think you have to pick 5 venoms… actually venoms is at it’s peak when it comes to GvG or to some degree WvW assist parties that focuses single targets outside the main group and since you in that case use TS communication and is in a party with the others in your assist team you get together, share venom (immob and stun) and then just wreck one guy at a time giving your meleeball less things freecasting them from the side. With those 2 venoms you still got room for SR and shadowstep for much needed escape

So far every time I see a venom share thief vid, it’s all venoms, yeah there might be vids with less venoms but I just haven’t seen them yet. Maybe that’s cos people who put 6pts in a single trait line want to make full use of venoms?

Lamuness.3570:

S/D makes me wish I rolled a human for my thief It’s really hard to gauge distance when you’re an Asuran thief, swinging the wobbly halloween sword.

Always takes me a while to get used to estimating distances when I switch to my asura or norn thief from my human thief, and I played norns only for over a year. Humans OP!

0/6/2/0/6 for shadow embrace, slightly lower burst but you won’t melt to single burn on you. Trickery builds are more common in pvp, majority wvw thieves have 6SA.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

The first thing I thought when I switched from GW1 to GW2 was: Oh, we can jump now! That means I can take a vantage point with my ranged weapon…. and I was wrong. Monsters go invulnerable if they can’t reach you. Which defeats the purpose of having a ranged weapon to begin with. That is stupid. I think they should fix that first and fore most.

I think it’s stupid to expect to pew pew mobs from a place they can’t reach you. The fact that Anet considers it to be an exploit in cases when you can dmg mob but they can’t dmg you due to your positioning, tells me that generally a player is expected to play actively and use his skills to counter mobs. That’s a good thing.

messiah.1908:

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Even in dire, thief survivability in zerg sucks since he has to give up utilities for venoms to buff 4 others. Considering how fast condis are cleansed in zerg, I don’t see how venom share thief is any good in comparison to the usual zerg classes. Maybe my view is affected by my dislike of venom share gameplay. It’s passive as kitten, the only engaging part is when you try to not die without your utilities.

Anet should rename Venom Share to Walking Venom Dispenser.

you forget this

use immobilizer venom on 4 other members
than catch some melee and attack him
the group cant cleanse 3*4=12 times in 2 sec so you probably will catch him and kill him
so make it now with chill also and you probably catch 3-5 enemies which give your group the advantag

Too bad a player can’t control on which hits he uses the venom charges so currently your group uses all immob on the guy in 2s unless they just stand around and time the applications, which obviously doesn’t happen on the scale to effectively utilise all possible applications. Just to remind you, immob is condi and can be cleansed at once.

few people focusing 1 person, they always have the advantage. If you compare group vs group, 1 guard in enemy team completely counters whole venom share build without sacrificing that much while the thief has utilities on cooldown and mediocre dmg output.

Even in dire, thief survivability in zerg sucks since he has to give up utilities for venoms to buff 4 others. Considering how fast condis are cleansed in zerg, I don’t see how venom share thief is any good in comparison to the usual zerg classes. Maybe my view is affected by my dislike of venom share gameplay. It’s passive as kitten, the only engaging part is when you try to not die without your utilities.

Anet should rename Venom Share to Walking Venom Dispenser.

Skilled engi is very nice in dungeons but the player will likely get carpal really quickly.

In order of my preference:

Thief – since that’s all I play 90% of the time
Guard – when feeling mentaly challenged that day or when I see the party is full of nubs, it’s amazing how well a guard can keep even complete scrubs alive.
Ele – got asura ele to lvl 80 few days ago and man, it’s fun to play but with nooby party, it’s such a pita in dungeons, gets 1 shot even more often than a thief and in some dungeons, ele seems to get all the agro – 3-4 snipers in CM hitting me at once and completely ignoring rest of the party.. normal.

Don’t underestimate the dmg increase from buffs/stacks/ascended gear.

On my main account, I pamper my thieves, they got everything I spend any gold on. I fill up 20 slot bag with just asc weps/spare asc armour, and I got both guard stacks in WvW. With all buffs/stacks on, I hit 8-10k (no might stacking or assassin signet) on average, ultra tanky heavies a bit less, and squishies often for 10k+, when stars align it’s 13k+. Would be higher with some might stacks on.

In comparison, thief on my other account is a poor guy that has only exotics and yeah I’ll get him bloodlust sigil soon :P, no guard stacks either. Backstabs are 4-5k on heavies, 5-6k on squishier targets and if lucky I get 7k on some upscaled player.

Same traits, same stat distribution (zerker) but one has all buffs possible vs exotic with food/stones only.

OP, if channeled skills wouldn’t track through stealth, ranged players would never kill a thief.

To improve your survivability against rangers, watch out for the cc and dodge/evade it – saves your stunbreak for the real kitten moments. Most rangers are very predictable and I’ve seen even some silver/gold ranks go through all lb skills while I was in dagger storm (I even got stealthed from reflected hunter’s shot).

I get the most kick out of annoying others by being a major pita when flipping/holding supply camps that are on enemy’s third of the map. Camps are open and more important than sentries so enemy players usually try their best to protect/take them back. There are no walls to protect me (or them) so fights happen and even though I eventually die, the fights are fun and I don’t have to chase people running into their towers.

Immob stacking is fine, the fact that immob is buggy and won’t let me use skills (even those that should cleanse it like Withdraw), isn’t fine.

atm:
1. sylvari thief
2. human male thief
3. asura thief

I’d prefer devourer as an elite.

kaikalii.4198:

I can do it with D/D, D/P, P/P, even without using weapons at all, but I can’t seem to do it without dying when I run S/D. Fighting actual people, I have no problem, but that many veterans just overwhelms me when I don’t have stealth.

If you don’t have stealth as S/D, how you do stealth up as D/D?

Thou shall not use knockback if any fellow players are nearby, otherwise log out and uninstall gw2.

Remember your bear with sweet memories.

Xae Isareth.1364:

I don’t really see a balancing issue in this really. To get the longer duration, you have to give up something else.

This.

To get 100% duration, the player gives up a lot especially for boon duration. The only arguable point is (WvW wise) that +% condi duration food gives a lot more than other +% condi duration items, making higher (not 100%) condi duration achievable with little investment. You can get +50% condi duration just with consumables.

Halasimir.8063:

Thanks for the replies guys;) between the two of them I think I’ll stay with thief another thing guys, I recently read that engineers gain more and more on popularity as roamers. are they really that strong and would be better to create one instead of a thief? From what I know thief is a pretty squishy if compared to engi.

Need your help once again friends ;p

Engies are certainly very strong but thief still has the best disengage abilities in the game due to stealth. However, if you’d like to try a class that is useful in every game mode and versatile as well, engies are perfect. Once in a while I roam with my engi in wvw, and although I have both power and condi sets for him, I mostly use power since I like big numbers. Zerker engies have awesome burst and still good survivability in a fight but thieves can run away better :P

If you’d go with condi build, then only other condi builds would give you problems.

Assassins don’t leave pink butterflies over enemy’s dead body.

Geiir.7603:

Evalia.7103:

Woaden.9425:

I’ve met a few great charr thieves in my day, and while it’s true that larger models ‘telegraph’ their moves,, it’s not really much of a disadvantage.

The main reason for that is, other than the asura player who purposefully chooses the smallest model in order to exploit the animation/tell system, we’re all basically in the same boat. Seeing a human do the big windmill loopdeeloop with their arm to apply basilisk or hide in shadows is essentially just as telegraphed as a charr.

To avoid this, you just apply those things from within stealth, which you should be doing as a general rule of thumb anyhow!

The most annoying characters to me are purposefully ultrasmall afro asuras, I just know they are going to be bad news on sight.

I’m playing smallest size asura. You should try it sometime. I also have biggest sized charr.
The difference is not even that much in visibility. It’s how it feels. Charr feels like a slug. Asura feels like some hyper-mobile rocket.

This is so true! After playing Asura for a few years everything else feel so slow… I have a Charr thief though, and she looks amazing!

Too bad armour doesn’t look that good on charrs, I made a female charr thief a while ago and she is so hilariously clunky and weird, I decided to keep her (charr test run).

Leo, coming from a big thief family, but herself a guardian, she found backstabbing fellow WvW’ers with her flashy greatsword rather difficult. So now she devotes all her time to stealing hearts (read cookies) of all beautifulf ladies in Tyria. Filthy conman (uhh ohh con-woman), Leo hides her true herself under a bear helmet and protective skills only a guardian can offer.

Success rate 100%

Alexa Waltari

Look at how venoms are used currently, a condi build will use them upfront in the fight and hope the target doesn’t have burst condi cleanse. Power builds rarely use venoms even though they would certainly benefit from using them (not in their current format tho).

3 of out of 4 utility venoms are for control, only 1 has a high dmging condition (torment).

As a thief that wants to use some additional control in my power build, what do I get?

1 use of control condition every 45seconds, even with the proposed reduced cd, it’s still way too long cd. The insta cast allows for good timing but it’s still on long cd. Compare this to sigils that gives same condis:

Ice drake venom 3 × 1s/45s cd VS ice sigil 2s/10s cd, hydromancy 2s/9s cd
Skale venom 3 × 5s/45s cd VS sigil of torment aoe 5s/5s cd
Spider venom 5 × 6s/45s cd VS doom sigil 6s/9s cd
Devourer venom 2 × 2s/45s cd – no immob sigil

So if I want to use the venoms, I get the desired effect once every 45seconds and while I can control when venoms are applied, with sigils I can get the condition far more frequently.Some even allow for partial control for when I can apply them (wep swap).

Frequent application for control condis with short duration is far superior to possibly long duration with long application cooldown. Don’t forget the target will eventually cleane condis on him.

If I expect my target to heal soon, why would I want to use all poison applications on him all at once cos if you want to keep some of the applications for later, you can’t attack LOL.

In my ideal gw2 world where venoms are useful, they work SAME WAY AS MANTRAS.

It has been suggested many times but Anet is too busy fixing venoms their way.

BobbyT.7192:

Zero Day.2594:

D: It is sad though… ever since the dawn of power rangers… there has been less thief QQ on forums. I miss that.

well that’s because thieves have been hit with the nerf hammer almost every single update since launch, not only is there not much to QQ about but also you don’t see many of them as you use too, most move on, like to the ranger for example.

A lot of people still think thief is OP, they usually see someone that has been playing thief since launch and assume, everyone can do that well. Even now I see these gems in map chat.

Sword and dagger builds are played differently and each benefits more from certain traits. However, not everyone runs around with shortbow as secondary so it’s a good idea to try different traits for whatever weapon sets you pick.

mango.9267:

Solori.6025:

Dragon rank really means nothing now.

What makes this sad is that people lost to a thief with no weapons…
especially that necro that stood in all of your traps and AoE’s…

I honestly feel like a pro watching these people play.

Well, yeah, high PvP rank doesn’t really mean you’re good at roaming or dueling, since PvP is about rotating quickly, having good map awareness, and holding points. However, having a high PvP rank does show that you’re at least somewhat competent at fighting other people.

That said, I feared the necro into the caltrops, and then scorpion wired him into the needle trap, making it easy for me to dodge on top of him. It wasn’t actually his stupidity that killed him there.

It’s people who ignore condis on target and underestimate how strong control condis are that think the target was dumb.

No wonder I find necro so boring I can’t lvl mine past lvl 20 (bday scroll). Yes it’d be OP but soooo fun to corrupt 25 stacks of might into (they should really change it into) bleeds

You just stacked enough might to nuke me with 1 hit? Hahah, bleed so fast you can’t even cleanse it.

nekretaal.6485:

Again, the low ranking servers have players but they have two problems.

1. Most of their players play in prime time, and
2. People bandwagon and stop playing if they die a bunch of times or their server is way behind

Merging full-in-prime time servers with full in prime time servers is not a solution.

---

Here is a solution:

Split the day into blocks, run a separate ranking for each block of time. That way a broad competitive scene can develop for prime time.

They could put weight on the ppt system, the more players online, the more ppt would be added.

Currently my server is winning due to heavy nightcapping, I don’t think a handful of players should be able to hold 100% of all four maps and add a huge chunk to our score.

nirvana.8245:

I didn’t realise when I first came back. But EOTM has completely sucked a huge amount of players out of WvW. The rewards across the board are better. There is short term matches. There is regular karma trains to attract casuals. There are casuals that attract organized guilds to come farm. From the numbers I am personally seeing, if you count “EOTM” as a part of “WvW” than I honestly thing WvW actually has more players then ever. The problem is EOTM is just supposed to be a side show for when WvW map caps are reached…

It’s not just rewards, although they are main motivation for many players. When our server is heavily outnumbered and enemy zerg of 40-50 chases me, a single person around the map, then eotm doesn’t look that bad (fun wise). Regular WvW has many sides that are not fun at all – who wants to spend hours sitting in a tower to scout or refresh siege. Since eotm is short term, people just don’t worry about these things.

Arikyali.5804:

It’s a bump, so excuse me. I’m not a necro, I swear.

What if p/p 3 gave 1 stack of might for every shot fired? I know I’d drop sb swap like a hot potato and take p/p. What do you think? Maybe a bit too OP?

You take sb for the dmg? Still wouldn’t fix the problems with P/P.

xXBurningEmberXx.6085:

So before all the nerfs and stuff when thief was a good class, I was a d/d roamer. I would stalk people down and get my nice, solid backstab heartseeker combo, then finish them. Now, just like the rest of the average skill players, I am a p/d thief. Is it still possible to not have to lower my skill ceiling and put out a good amount of damage while surviving more than 2 seconds? I know that it’s impossible to win against a Ranger with d/d since their #2 kills me instantly, but is d/d viable against other classes?

If a ranger can insta down you with lb 2, you can do the same to him with backstab combo.

Some D/P thieves like the safe route and roll full cavalier.

Merging small servers together would do what exactly? People wouldn’t stop moving up tiers, the merged server would end up empty again sooner or later.

That bug is what makes immob so OP, can’t even use Withdraw on thief which is supposed to cleanse it.

Narkodx.1472:

Mahkno.7593:

Thanks for the quick and thorough feedback!

Yes, it’s a backstab-centered play style and I guess the only reason I was questioning was because I couldn’t figure out if critting air/fire all the time (well 70%) plus the damage from executioner in build A would make it the more powerful of the two.

Much appreciated.

No problem

One last thing you should consider -Strength Runes – In your high crit chance build it can give you a substantial boost to power/might

Stealth builds have good access to might from the 5th trait in Shadow Arts 2might per stealth entry
Crit Strikes you can also trait Signets of Power and with just one signet you get ~50% uptime on 5 might stacks
Also two points in acro can get you inertia of power for more might

Another thing to consider is high fury uptime for your lower crit chance build- Furious Retaliation in CS or two points in Trickery for Thrill of the Crime also gives you Fury

With strength runes I often get higher backstabs with 2/6/6/0/0 build than with 6/6/2/0/0, that’s if the fight last a bit longer and without using utilities for signet might stacking. 6/6/2 can’t stack might that well, has consitently high dmg but the survivability is a lot lower than 2/6/6.

Black Frog.9274:

@Arikyali

I’m not super knowledgeable about builds, but I have trouble seeing the real benefit of Shadow’s embrace. It’s one condition per 3 seconds and you rarely get more than 4 seconds of stealth. Combined with the cooldowns on the stealth skills, that’s not a whole lot of cleansing. I guess it works if you’re simultaneously running away, but if you’ve got multiple conditions and one of them is chill or cripple, it doesn’t seem like you’d be getting a lot out of the trait. I see it a lot in builds, so I’m guessing someone is finding a use for it, but I often wonder if people use it because there just so few cleanses for thieves.

I probably wouldn’t use it if there were other reliable options. Even though Shadow Embrace is slow in removing multiple conditions (yeah couple of times it’s not fast enough to cleanse after condi bomb before I lose all my HP, from full to 0 in few seconds), it’s still the best condi removal available.

T raw.4658:

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Just after I killed 2 mesmers trying to take Klovan and was waiting for one of them to respawn. He tried to party up but I didn’t accept so he took the time to whisper me.

lulz on using my line

yeah yeah xD

If you don’t like stealth so much, you could try sigils for condi cleanse – generosity (on crit), purity (on hit) and sigil of cleansing (on wep swap), seeing you use double S/D, the last one could be good for you. But you’d lose your dmg/dodge potential you have with your current set up.

Just after I killed 2 mesmers trying to take Klovan and was waiting for one of them to respawn. He tried to party up but I didn’t accept so he took the time to whisper me.

Dagger offhand thief laughs at entangle, not only the ranger just wasted his elite on me, but he also provided an easy target for CnD!

Starsurfer.7209:

I like the substitution of power for condition damage, as there’s really no point in running thief runes in their current hybrid form. The addition of fury might bring some balance issues however… It might be more acceptable if you raised the cooldown on the Fury proc to 30 seconds. That would be the same cooldown as the CS trait “Furious Retaliation” and would help prevent fury stacking abuse.

Otherwise, a decent idea.

1. FR gives 10s of fury on 30s cd so, 5s of fury with same cooldown would be a bit too long for the runes. Personally I think this would work best with shorter fury and shorter cd, 2s/7cd. Too short to stack fury and the duration would need an aggressive playstyle, the thief would have to chose between making use of the fury proc or sitting at stealth gaining whatever stealth related benefits he traited for.

2. Anet gives kitten about making some upgrades a lot stronger than traits, for example https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Sigil-of-Incapacitation-vs-Ankle-Shots/first#post4458857

Faeyd.5094:

I hope not but I wonder if the OP is the same guy… I killed a tanky ranger yesterday and got a group invite to be confronted with a massive discourse about how stupidly OP backstab was.

I killed him with a condi burst though – just happened to have D/D out at the time.

Doesn’t really matter what wep set/build you use, I got accused of spamming backstab with P/P & SB.

Woaden.9425:

Jayden, Thanks! How are you liking Aurora Glade? I’m on the fence if I’m going to transfer back to SoS, or maybe TC. It’s a tough choice. Most of my thief friends are on SoS, most of my former [EP] raiding friends are on TC. I may just stick it out, marooned on maguuma, but not sure the fights will be stimulating enough in silver or below.

Lamuness, LOL thank you for pointing that out. I’ve changed the title.

It’s true that I often swap to D/D and take it all the way to the end for those sweet sweet HS. The only exception to that rule so far has been vs guardians, to stun lock them before their rotation comes back around. In what scenarios do you feel that closing with S/D is superior to D/D?

I eventually transferred away from SoS, had rather high ping on US servers. With transfer, I’d wait until the Season is over, people always transfer a lot around Seasons.

Silver or not, consider the times you mostly play gw2, even bronze servers have good fights but the prime time is a lot shorter the lower you go down the tiers.

DaMunky.6302:

Personally, I mostly use DS in WvW, like this:
1) Shadowstep into enemy zerg
2) Dagger Storm + Signet of Malice = healing + reflects = tagged everybody and I’m not dead!
3) Shadow Return, my zerg rolls over them.
4) PROFIT

So really for me it’s a gtf IN there button.

That’s how I zerg in silver-bronze, totally suicidal in gold but yeah, it’s amusing how much a zerker thief can survive in a zerg.

This guy wrote it best.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/What-is-your-favorite-skill-in-the-game/first#post4356288

Welcome back Kole. Very nice gameplay, makes your vids fun to watch.

pupi.2465:

I may need tranining, but whenever i encounter a condi teef (p/d), i always loose… I use Caeds power build, but can’t defeat p/d condi teefs.

Is this normal?

Yes.

I don’t know what Caeds build is but I assume it has 6pts in tricks? Then try to interrupt their heals if they have hide in shadows.

2pts in SA for shadow embrace helps a lot and if you are in wvw, carry the -% condi duration food and use it for any difficult fight with condi build.

Most of them use their condi burst at the start so try to dodge that, condi cleanse if they get the burst on you. Vast majority of p/d thieves have same strategy, CnD and sneak attack so it’s all about denying them stealth via CnD and dodging sneak attack.

Also, learn what you need to cleanse, if your HP is not very low, don’t use your utilities to cleanse small stacks of bleeds from auto attack, just use CnD as much as you can for regular condi removal and keep utilties for high stacks/torment.

I don’t know if you were asking for advice on WvW or pvp, generally in pvp p/d condi thieves are not a problem. In Wvw dire makes them really tough to kill, at least you can negate the condi food with your -% food.

psizone.8437:

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Arguably, I’ve seen most devs (4) on FoW, tho that was months ago.

Vabbi is back to bottom so it was rather surprising to see FoW not being able to hold their own against us during prime hours.

Vabbi isn’t quite the bottom yet, your nightcapping crew was brutal over the weekend and you’ve overtaken BT, too!

Like I said, a lot of our players have flat out quit due to the population imbalance we’ve been facing.

On the dev front, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a dev on FoW (at least, they weren’t obvious) and I’m in WvW daily for hours.

You can check wvw matchup history, Vabbi has been 3rd in T9 for several weeks prior to the Season, during Seasons anything can happen.

Our nightcappers have been always known for superinflating the PPT, some like karma, some just want to beat the crap out of a gate of an empty tower.

Welcome to T9, we might be seeing each other for a while.

reinforever.8902:

Idk if it’s been lag, but I’ve been feeling really weak lately on my thief and not quite able to play him like I used to. Lag could have something to do with it, guildie of mine swears up and down they ninja nerfed thief dps.

It’s probably cos of all the problems with teleports.

Thief dmg – I think that’s simply a result of other classes improving and thief staying behind. A guildie asked me yesterday if warr axe was buffed, he didn’t remember hitting for up to 6k with axe aa in wvw before.

Arguably, I’ve seen most devs (4) on FoW, tho that was months ago.

Vabbi is back to bottom so it was rather surprising to see FoW not being able to hold their own against us during prime hours.

All these arguments about what counter what are rather amusing when almost every time I kill a high rank pvper on our scrubby T9 wvw server, they switch from S/D to D/P to counter my S/D.

reinforever.8902:

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Stealth and channeled skills – this one is not easy to change, think what a ranger/any ranged build could do against a thief that can stealth up anytime such as D/P. Any hard hitting skill on you? Just stealth up and that’s it. It’d be broken as hell.

yeah that’s the point, other classes have a kitten load of reflect, a bunch of blocks, even rangers themselves have immunity (12 seconds of it at that) from utility slots skills. Thief has one reflect and it’s on too long of a cooldown to consider a good defensive skill. d/p also requires quite a bit of initiative so it’s not like you can always just stealth up whenever especially when you take revealed debuff into play. would classes have to time their dmg a little smarter? yes. that’s quite alright considering rangers can just lolspam2 and not care if the target is stealth or not right now. like I said originally, stealth is meant to be our damage mitigation, but it does not work whatsoever against stuff like that. It’s bad enough that people can just blind swing and beat the crap out of you and place a bunch of aoe’s, we don’t need channeled skills hitting us in stealth too (unless it’s aimed and they have some good luck/instinct)

Rangers could always spam 2, except now it’s faster and most of them moved from “balanced” specs to full zerk so people die to rapid fire now. The reason why dropping channeled skills in stealth would be broken is, all those skills have cds, as a thief, all I’d have to do is count the cd so I’d have enough ini to stealth up. No lb ranger would kill me again.

Personally for me, it’s the channeled skill animation following me that gives me most problems, not the dmg, but the fact that the projectiles show my location as most of my survivability comes from positioning.