Guild Wars 2

Mysticjedi.6053:

Thank you. Very helpful post. I do fight in WvW and have been doing pretty well. Yesterday, faced a thief that shot, went stealth, came out and shot. I thought I could take him, but had never actually fought one 1v1 and got pwned. Thanks again for the information.

What you’re describing here is a Pistol / Dagger thief, one of the most annoying builds to fight. As I stated in the above post, these guys are not like your average D/D burst spec. They rely on stealth very heavily both for their offense (bleeds) and defense. Deny them as much stealth as you can by blocking and dodging CnD when they try to get close to you. Having a focus offhand can help when you want to get into melee range and fake them out.

That’s if you really want to fight them, which is a long, drawn out ordeal. In reality, you can just run away and they aren’t much threat, As Danicco pointed out.

For pretty much any non-bleed thief, you can use stability to counter the initial backstab combo (or just stunbreak their Basilisk Venom), then proceed to let them kill themselves on your Retal provided you have good sustainability. Just make sure you dodge or block the CnD attempts when they get close. Protection does help if they do land some burst. Usually once they are at about half health and know they can’t kill you they will run or pop Shadow Refuge. If they’ve popped it, you can use your shield 5 or GS 5 to knock them out of it and pretty much ensure their death as they now have a 4s reveal debuff. If those aren’t available, DPS the area using AoE and your number 1 melee skills. When your chain animation is completing, you are hitting the thief. Also, CC in general is very effective against thieves (except maybe S/D thieves), because most tend to run glass cannon and run maybe 1 stun breaker, sometimes none.

Bleed thieves are a real pain. These guys typically run D/D and spam deathblossom, or P/D and spam 1, or both. They also almost always have caltrops, stay out of the red circle!! If they are running DB, force them to blow their initiative by dodgeing away from the DB and out of the caltrops. Sigils of energy really help here. Once they have used DB about 3 times, they are likely out of initiative. Take this time to CC and do as much damage as possible.

For P/D, the key is to dodge the CnD, as sneak attack is their primary damage source along with caltrops. If the thief gets close to you, he is probably going for a CnD. Blocking or dodging this makes them blow half of their initiative. If you hit about 8 or 9 stacks of bleeds, it’s time to use a cleanse. Smite condition, Pure of Voice, and Absolute Resolution help a lot here.

Special mention goes to D/P thieves, who use the Black Powder for both stealth and blind. Stay out of the blind puddle and force them to move out of it or use the leap finisher for stealth. If they stealth repeatedly, keep turning as wildly as possible and spamming an auto-attack melee. Turning and moving constantly helps prevent receiving the full backstab damage.

Guardian has a lot of options, but I would first start by asking you:

1. Is this for PvE? PvP? WvW?
2. Do you tend to play with a group, or solo?
3. What do you primarily want to focus on: Offense, Sustainability, Group Support?
4. Have you researched any builds yet? There’s lots of good ones out there. There’s one very good one for PvE (AH Hammer build) that is stickied right on the front page.

EDIT: Keep in mind that number 3 is obivously not mutually exclusive, but still you want to kind of pick a direction and go from there.

For PvE, I wouldn’t take the sword. Shield or Focus offhand are always nice to have though. I prefer the Mace, as I run with cleric’s gear and the regen symbol + auto attack heal really helps quite a bit. Also protector’s strike is pretty good AoE damage and can block a big hit from a champ.

But to answer your question, go GS. All of GS’s skills are useful in just about any mode, it’s probably the most versatile weapon we have.

The exception might be if you were running Right Hand Strength and going for a very offensive build.

That norn looks awesome! Makes me wish I had a norn Guard instead of a Charr

I was running a 0/0/10/30/30 for a while and it works just fine in PvE, but I found 0/0/30/20/20 better for me in PvP / WvW.

Instead of AH, I take Monk’s Focus. Really depends on how supporty you want to be, but I just like burst heal a bit better. Neither scale well with Healing Power, but Selfless daring scales insanely well at a roughly 1:1 ratio. So you can have 2k heals on meditations + ~1.5k heals on dodge. For utils, I take Smite Condition, Judge’s Intervention, and last one is a tossup. Sometimes a third Meditation, usually Stand Your Ground. If you really like control, you can run the spirit hammer, which is nice for small group battles or 1v1s.

Kharel Arhew.1437:

There’s really not much of any way you can perform effectively in most scenarios as a team healer. The best we can really do as Guardians is to alternate between staff 4 and healing via dodge rolls (preferably with permanent vigor to increase dodge frequency); perhaps with VoR traited to apply to allies as well.

Other methods of support we excel at, however: we can provide a huge variety of boons for tremendous durations, and Guardians have the best AoE condition removal access in the game (at least in my opinion).

Kharel is right. Our support doesn’t usually come in the form of party heals. We have just about the easiest access to almost every boon in the game with just shouts + virtues that can spread party wide, as well as excellent group condition cleansing (Save Yourselves, light fields, etc.) Sometimes, it’s much more important to have protection, regen, aegis, and stability than just a straight heal. These go a long way to mitigating damage in the first place.

That’s not to say heals don’t matter, after all, how are you going to keep yourself alive? High armor ratings only go so far, you need good sustain to keep supporting your team in really rough situations and that is why I tend to reserve my healing abilities for myself, as you will likely draw more aggro than almost everyone else in your party anyways. If someone else gets healed from my dodge, VoR, more power to them, but I likely needed it much more.

I use a guardian with full cleric’s gear (Healing Power, Power, Toughness), and it works quite well even in PvP. However, you’re not really a healbot for your party, and shouldn’t be standing back trying to heal your allies constantly. You’ll want to be pretty aggressive as with just about any other build.

I like to take Monk’s Focus with Smite Condition and Judge’s Intervention. Last util I will swap out as necessary, but usually go with Stand Your Ground. Each meditation you cast will heal for about 2k, and your dodge rolls up to 1.5k depending on your healing power stat.

Another option would be Altruistic Healing + Hammer / Mace, this works well in dungeons especially when your team needs to stack. In order to get the most out of altruistic healing though, you’ll want a decent crit rate to proc Empowering Might. It’s not necessary but I’ve never seen an AH build without it I guess.

Almost any combination works for PvE / Dungeons. I know some Guardians really like full berserker’s gear for dungeons. I personally prefer either Knight’s or Cleric’s, and was surprised recently how amazing cleric’s is for support. Full healing your team mid-fight without blowing an elite is pretty boss.

What I would do: If you like DPS, but want to play support, get knights and mix in some berserker trinkets until you feel comfortable with your damage output vs your survivability. If you have a hammer as a weapon and trait into symbols + might on crit + AH you’ll be getting some decent heals and can support your team with Protection + Retal and whatever other boons you may get from your shouts.

Almost any class played by a smart / experienced person could kill me. That being said, D/D Eles, and Guardians in general gave me a lot of trouble 90% of the time.

I prefer D/P, as all the weapon skills on it are useful in pretty much every fight. Shadow shot recently got buffed and works great, Headshot is amazing for interrupting heals, and Black Powder can completely shut down melee classes, as well as give you a free opening into stealth via Heartseeker.

Don’t spec full glass cannon (in hot join) unless you really enjoy blowing up noobs every 40 seconds or so, and then having to run for the hills.

Make sure you take plenty of Shadow Arts. Our most important traits are in this line, and make you a much better skirmisher rather than a plain spiker, even when running zerker jewels. I personally use 30 SA on every build that I make, it’s that crucial to me. Good traits: Infusion of Shadow (a must with D/P), Shadow’s Embrace, Cloaked In Shadow, Shadow Protector, Shadow’s Rejuv. The master tier trait is one your will likely struggle with the most, just pick the one that suits the enemies you encounter the best.

Also, LOL to that guardian. Oh, he put down an SR right next to the enemy, better swipe around completely outside outside the circle, doubt he’s going for a stomp or anything.

Nice thing about crafting though is that it gains you levels ridiculously fast, so if getting to 80 quickly is a priority I would definitely consider it.

Constantine.7812:

i see many ppl crying about how thief is weak. its other way around. this is the only character in pvp who can jump in the middle of 20 ppl laugh and disappear. Anet its time to do something about it. i mean boom boom stealth boom boom stealth AND boom boom stealth is not the way….going stealth every 2 seconds while doing huge dmg thats just wrong. everytime i meet thief i feel like an epic fool cuz im chasing ghost. i have nothing against other classes but fighting vs invisible player is not fun to me at all.
to all future posts from ppl playing thief like `lol you are bad` etc. guys, piece. i wouldnt mind if anet would make it up to you by making some skill(s) stronger, but this epic spamable stealth is just too much and i see these thieves making fools out of 5-10 ppl more and more.

What class / build do you play that you are unable to kill a thief in stealth? Just curious.

I always just crafted my weapons and armor, and bought jewelry. Until you get up to exotics, it’s pretty cheap to do this even if you have to buy some mats to do it.

Just make sure you keep up with the latest gear, I did it every 15 levels when I could craft the next Masterwork (green) tier. Rares typically aren’t worth it, and you can worry about Exotics once you hit 80.

Well, there probably a number of builds you could take. This one for example is pretty popular now in WvW:

It’s a very good survival build, but lacks a lot of the punch of 30 Critical Strikes (-20% crit damage, no 100% crit chance from stealth).

As of today, I’m running this build:

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-c3RV-FCRw-_0I5V-kd0;9;5TT9;225B45A5;3INV4-NV0G3G3G3G35Bd

Similar, but the lack of quick recovery means less usage of Black Powder which you may or may not like. The obvious upside is that landing backstabs is much more deadly, so you shouldn’t need to jump into stealth as much. As for elites, I swap these around frequently depending on my situation, as they are all quite good.

I also take Cloaked in Shadow instead of Shadow’s Embrace. A tough call, but Cloaked in Shadow definitely helps as you can often get 2 blinds for the price of one even from a distance, and keeps you safer longer when landing your BS.

General Rotation:

Open in shortbow, wear them down. If it’s a 1v1, I’ll usually jump strait away to D/P then…

Black Powder -> HS -> Backstab -> #1 Auto

If it’s a melee class, open with Steal + Black Powder and auto attack them for a bit before they realize they can’t hit you, then proceed to the usual BS rotation.

Once they are low-ish health, if they are squishy just HS them once and they are likely dead. If they are tanky, watch for the heal and interrupt it via Headshot.

If they run, and you can’t seem to catch up to land a solid backstab, you can blow your steal + BS, or Infil. Signet + Backstab to land it. Alternatively if you really need to catch up without a backstab, and the above utils are down, you can use the new and improved shadow shot.

Edit: For PvE, I run Valk Armor, Berserker everything else.

Most classes can be picked up and played easily even when not very experienced, but to do well / be exceptional obviously it’s going to take some experience / practice.

The exception to this rule is probably engineers. They not only have a lot of buttons to press, but require a lot of situational awareness and what to do when with your kits.

If I had to pick classes that can roll noobs easily in hotjoin, it’d be a toss up between mesmers or thieves, with thieves being easier in terms of number of buttons pressed. Just keep in mind that when you fight more experienced players, they are likely going to rock your world if you’re not super-familiar with their class and your own.

Well for starters, I wouldn’t try a typical Basilisk → Mug + CnD → Backstab combo on him unless he’s preoccupied with someone else.

Reason is, all it takes to shut this down is for him to cast Blinding Powder, before your burst and you miss the whole combo, and are now likely going to get counter backstabbed.

Instead, I’d swap to shortbow, and try to wear him down by kiting as much as possible. When he uses BP → Heartseeker, he’s likely going for a backstab. If he’s done this twice, he’s likely not going to be able to use BP after coming out of stealth, so this is when I would swap to D/D, ready up Bask venom, turn and swipe behind you with your auto-attack. Once you catch him, that’s when you should try to burst him down.

I think the key is not opening with your burst, but instead try to make him waste is init as much as possible, which is very easy to do even with high init recovery. Also, if he specs for Quick Recovery, he either has much less burst damage due to a lack of the Critical Strikes tree, or has no heal in stealth. If he does have full Critical Strikes + Hidden Killer, he probably can’t afford to miss or mess up the combo without blowing his utils. He can’t have it all, so try to read what he’s doing and adapt as fast as possible.

In a PvE situation, especially if you’re any kind of direct damage build, a shortbow as an alt weapon has some great utility. The auto-attack alone, Trick Shot, makes it very valuable in group events, and in dungeons where melee is too dangerous. Plus, you have access to the most spammable blast finisher in the game: Cluster Bomb, which works amazingly well with any field but especially fire and water.

As stated above, a pistol offhand on one of your weapon sets + either Dagger or Sword as main works amazingly well in just about any scenario. Black Powder is one our best skills, and can completely shut down an enemy trying to melee you via perma-blind. Can also be used as a leap finisher via heartseeker for on-demand stealth. Shadow Shot, Pistol Whip, and Headshot are also all great skills that are again important in just about any scenario.

Lastly, when it comes to traits, DON’T neglect Shadow Arts. It’s got some of our most important traits that definitely make the difference between life and death in bad situations, pretty much regardless of what style of build you are running. Acrobatics is another line that is overlooked often, and shouldn’t be.

PS: When it comes to damage mitigation, Thieves tend to rely much more on active defenses such as dodging, blind, shadowsteps, interrupts, etc. rather than passive defenses like Aegis, high health, or high toughness / armor. Basically, if you can avoid a hit by not being there in the first place, do it. You’ll have to pay attention as often times in dungeons, you can’t afford to take even 2 solid hits from some mobs depending on your build. Make sure to utilize your weapon skills correctly, as many have built in evades / blinds that can save you. If you can survive well, you may find yourself being a surprisingly good team medic, as stealth res is very powerful and can sometimes help carry a bad / mediocre group.

Well I prefer a mix of both, I run valk armor and berserker’s everything else. This gives me enough health to take some hard hits / conditions but still keeps my spike damage pretty high, and sustained DPS is also pretty good.

As for how much health, it kind of depends how you trait into acrobatics and runes and whatnot, but on average you’ll be looking at about 15k health with valk armor, zerker everything else. Keep in mind that with increased precision, the Practiced Tolerance trait gives you about an extra 1k health boost which is pretty nice.

As for valk trinkets vs. valk armor, I’m not 100% sure on this, but this calculator should be able to help you out:

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/

I think it’s usually pretty up to date in terms of PvE gear and how they affect your stats.

It can go either way on both classes, but I’d say I’d prefer fighting rangers. I haven’t seen too many run trap builds in WvW, and overall that is the real killer for thieves. I have had tough fights with rangers, but overall I’d say it was because they were tanky + evasive, and couldn’t exactly kill me either.

If all things being equal, warriors can easily rip thieves apart. I’ve only run into a few who really know what they are doing, but they are definitely out there. Typically, the high burst warriors who play intelligently enough to feint their charges / burst are very dangerous for most thieves. Add to that warriors have excellent melee damage, higher than thieves even, and stealth isn’t much of an asset if the warrior knows where the thief is heading.

Typically a thief relies on putting the enemy on the defensive as fast as possible, but the warrior has the tools and DPS to easily turn the tables on the thief, if nothing else with endure pain which forces thieves to back off for a second.

Yishis, big fan here! I’ve learned a lot by watching your videos, although I play a lot more PvP than WvW. I’ve noticed that in PvP, this is quite a bit harder to pull off for a variety of reasons, but mainly because of the stat cap as someone else mentioned. Still good though!

It’s weird, but watching these videos make it look a lot easier than it is. I think it takes a fellow thief to really appreciate the subtle things that you’re doing in some of these fights, as it’s often the difference between life and death. Stuff like that I’m still trying to pick up on.

Two questions though, does have Signet of Shadows help gain you more successful CnDs? Or is it just because you’re always covering long distances in WvW?

Also, do you think Fleet Shadow is worth it? Or if I didn’t want to take Descent of Shadows, is Thrill of the Crime the next best bet? I’ve been using that in PvP and it seems to help a lot.

Haha, looked at his posts, this one is gold:

runeblade.7514:

Warriors: PvE gods
Guardians: PvE support gods.
Thief: WvW gods. You don’t even need to be skilled to take down 5 other players. If you’re skilled, you can even take down a zerg if you want to.

You heard it here first. You completely succeeded in a 1v5? LOL SCRUB! killed 30 in a zerg? You’re kind of ok I guess.

Yes, you can know what you will steal from other players in PvP / WvW: Stealing from engi gives you gunk, warrior a whirling axe, mesmers an ecto all-boon buff, etc. Enemies in PvE are slightly random I think, and even still it’d be hard to track across every new map.

Also, even if you’re level 15, you can jump in sPvP and get a better feel for the class with all traits and skills unlocked. No need to wait to 80 to learn how to Thief effectively.

Mehlkee.6804:

Sprawl.3891:

anyone love how they made it seem like they added a solo queue system, but really just added a button to queue yourself solo only to play vs premades like usual.

Strong developer troll is strong.

Jericho.4521:

For those of you upset with the patch, what were you hoping for with regards to class balance? I’m not saying I agree or disagree with the patch, I’m just genuinely curious.

Some actual balancing, weak skills to be buffed. Some overpowered skill to be nerfed so there can actually be variety among the little remaining pvp base. Hey long shot is long right, they don’t see $$ signs so expect Spvp to wreak until the next expansion right?

I think they should have gone a bit further with buffing the weak stuff so we could see some more variety. Which skills do you think are too powerful though?

Maugetarr.6823:

Bloodgruve.6038:

‘Using stealth no longer resets NPC aggression tables.’

I thought we were already quite squishy, how is this going to effect us in dungeons?

Blood~

I’m hoping this means that as soon as you stealth the mobs don’t run away and start healing. Nothing as frustrating as trying to res someone in a dungeon in SR losing aggro completely while the boss heals to full when you had <10% left.

Same. I’m really afraid it means that stealth doesn’t lose enemy aggro at all though now, and we’ll be attacked in stealth. Could be a nail in the coffin for thieves in dungeons.

For those of you upset with the patch, what were you hoping for with regards to class balance? I’m not saying I agree or disagree with the patch, I’m just genuinely curious.

Really, all of our melee weapon sets are very good with Power, it kind of comes down to your own preference of playstyle.

First, what weapon sets do you like using? If you can’t make up your mind, jump in the mists and test some out, preferably in real matches. It’s not WvW, but it will give you an idea of what the skills are capable of.

Heal and utils are also a matter of preference, though I would shy away from traps as they are a bit buggy at the moment. Utils I have ran / run on a regular basis: Shadow Refuge, Blinding Powder, Shadowstep, Infil. Signet, Signet of Shadows, Assassin’s Signet. I tend to swap these around a lot, especially depending on whether im in a dungeon, PvE, or PvP.

Elites are all pretty good. For dungeons / PvE, Dagger Storm is king. It’s also quite good in WvW, but better for multiple enemies. Basilisk Venom and Thieves Guild are more PvP skills, again your preference. The venom is better for a burst build, while Thieves Guild is probably better for sustained damage, something like S/D for instance.

When it comes to traits, choose them based on what you really like / think you need. Don’t just go down a line for the stats. That said, I’m not a fan of the Deadly Arts tree, nor the Trickery tree. I tend to swap between either 0/30/30/10/0, or 0/10/30/30/0.

If you are going into Critical Strikes I like to go for Hidden Killer if I’m using a mainhand dagger, or just Side Strike if I pump the other 20 in Acro. DON’T ignore Shadow Arts and Acrobatics. Some of our most powerful / important traits are here.

In Shadow Arts, I like these traits: Infusion of Shadow (a must IMO), Shadow’s Embrace, Cloaked in Shadow, Shadow Protector, and Shadow’s Rejuv. The middle trait is probably the one you will struggle with the most, as Cloaked in Shadow and Shadow’s Embrace are tough contenders. Swap them out as necessary. In general, for dungeons with heavy conditions, SE is more important.

For Acro, I usually go for at least Fleet Shadow. It’s not as important in PvE, but in WvW or PvP, it makes landing Backstabs / Tac strikes so much easier. Also handy for quick getaways. If you go 30 Acro, Assassin’s Reward and Quick Recovery are great choices, and a must IMO for Dagger/Pistol.

Now for gear… I like to run berserkers everything or berserkers almost-everything. Valkyire or Knights are solid choices if you want to run a mix. I’ll have for example, Valk Armor, Zerker weapons and trinkets. PVT isn’t too bad either depending on your food choices, but if you are any sort of direct damage build, Power is the most important stat.

Good luck!

Come to the forums and cry about it. Make the argument that stealth is overpowered, burst is OP, or both, and beg for nerfs.

As evidence, I would take misleading screenshots of damage done to myself that didn’t have any other context, and then post videos of random thieves on youtube killing complete idiots in WvW to prove my point.

Anyone who disagrees with me would obviously just be telling me to L2P, and since that obviously can’t be the case, I would attack them personally (they are challenging my manhood!)

But seriously, I’d ask for help, be open for advice. Try to get gameplay of it, maybe make a thief myself and really try to understand what I could do differently.

Zelulose.8695:

It’s really sad. Perma stealth is made able by the trait for initiative gain during stealth using d/p with skill 5(black powder) and skill 2 (heart seeker) this allows constant backstabbing and perma stealth while heartseeker can damage the enemy while putting you in stealth. When you add regen during stealth and Condi remove every three seconds from other traits its way op. Literally they can never die and will kill you if you can. Plz fix Anet

Lol, let me get this straight:

Thieves spec for max burst → OMG BACKSTAB NOOB .0001s REACTION TIME NERFNAO

Thieves spec into Shadow Arts / Acro trying to break away from burst → OMG THEY ARE UNKILLABLE!

Against any enemy who has a thief / knows how thief plays, the thief is at a huge disadvantage. Sure, a thief can recover health in stealth, maybe clear a condition or two, but during stealth they can’t attack lest they break stealth, all the while the enemy is recovering and getting skills of CD, ressing teammates, etc.

Also, with this build, you are no longer a mega-burster, meaning you’ll need to duck in and out of the fray to survive for much longer than it would take you otherwise. It allows you to make some more mistakes, at the cost of a fairly hefty damage loss which, again, a smart player will take advantage of.

One final tip: These D/P thieves….When they go in stealth, where do you think they will go? 99% of the time, they are headed right for your back. Fear bomb, knockback, AoE, or just Melee DPS behind you while turning rapidly. It’ll make it almost impossible for them to land a backstab, and when they do it’ll likely be for half damage while getting smacked in the face. If you see you auto-attack animation completing, congratulations you’re hitting the thief. Most thieves can survive only about 2 – 3 full autoattack chains even with high health against another power-based char. Oh, and don’t stand in the black powder.

I’d be ok with being able to aim the Withdraw as long as I’m not forced into ground targeting with it. The main appeal for me is it’s instant cast time, which has saved my rear-end more times than I can count.

Well the really high level fractals might be a different story, but for the most part thieves are perfectly ok in dungeons provided you don’t suck completely. The basic arguments against taking thieves for dungeons fall under these categories usually:

1. Thieves are perceived as having no group utility.
2. Thieves are all squishy, backstab based burst and die constantly.

Number 1 is not completely true, especially depending on how the thief is built. My guild calls me the team medic, usually because I’m the last one up and save us from party wipes via stealth / blinds. Venom sharing builds, while not very popular, can be used to great effect if you’re on a communicative team now that they’ve seen a nice buff, and thieves can also provide heavy DPS, which is important in and of itself.

Whether or not thieves are not as useful in comparison with other classes is open for debate, and honestly I don’t care because all of the dungeons save fractals can be ran with just about any comp with ease.

Number 2 is likely based on biases against thieves both justified and unjustified. Justified, because there ARE a lot of terribad thieves out there who spend the majority of fights on the ground because they can’t spec / play properly (lol wats a dodge?!11). Unjustified obviously as well, because many of these thieves give good ones a bad name. Unlike a tank guardian for example, a thief’s survivability mostly comes from his reflexes in dodgeing and active damage mitigation (not saying Guard’s don’t take skill, they just play differently), and plenty of PUG thieves haven’t figured it out yet.

Edit: Forgot to add, I’ve also never had a problem being kicked or someone complaining I was in the dungeon party, ever. If you do encounter this and you feel it’s unjustified, get in a guild with non-idiots and run with them.

Daendur.2357:

haste is too random. i think precision, force, air and fire are better.

In short, I agree with this poster completely. Having an alt weapon with bloodlust isn’t a bad idea though.

However, quickness proc I’ve found was only really good with mainhand sword, since you have more mobility via Infil. Strike and it’s range isn’t affected by haste. With daggers, it can be rather disorienting to proc it in the middle of a chain or during a HS if you need to close the gap, it also drastically decreases HS’s leap range.

For daggers, Fire or Air + Force / Accuracy is probably best. I prefer Force + Air, just my 2 cents.

vespers.1759:

you mean you don’t think this is balanced? HOW DARE YOU?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7OYniHrGqE

LOL, I watched the first 30 – 45 seconds and closed it. A thief sure looks OP when fighting clueless wvw zergers who are not even trying to fight back / heal. “Oh a thief backstabbed me! Now he’s DPSing me! Better keep running and not even pop mah heal, maybe he’ll just get bored and run off.”

Are you guys seriously afraid of fighting these kinds of thieves?

It never fails, in every one of these threads there is someone claiming thief stealth stomps are OP. Thieves really have almost no access to stability, and all stealth does is prevent single target skills from hitting you. In a team fight, all it requires is that someone on the other team use one of their knockbacks / interrupts / fears / or just DPS the guy on the ground with cleave / melee. Also, rangers can daze thieves even when stealthed when they are down, even in a 1v1. I don’t know how stealth can even be considered in the same league as an invuln / stability / quickness stomp.

If it is just a 1v1 scenario with no chance of team help, there isn’t too much that’s going to help anyways, as every class has some way of securing a stomp.

I almost never used to get trash talked when I played my Necro or Ele.

You want some guaranteed rage though? Kill anyone as a thief. Build / spec / weapon, doesn’t matter. If you kill them in 1v1, chances are likely you will get hate tells.

So I guess to answer the topic: Any class if I’m on my thief, but especially warriors for some reason.

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

Ozx.5683:

Actually it would be 48 seconds until its back up and you wouldnt have to stall that long because you have two of them available for use. Using it while low on life right before you get killed will allow you to actually revive yourself most of the time

They only survive because I’m not around. When thieves use SR just before they are about to die, it only takes one good earth shaker to down them. Then I swing until my attack animation changes and that is where they are.

I love it when thieves shadow refuge. Makes them easy targets.

Seriously, this. SR against a smart enemy is usually suicide. Plenty of thieves are already considering SR to be more and more of a risk in actual combat. and don’t even slot it. I hear people always say: “Just dodge around in it and you’re invincible!” This is assuming the thief has dodges left, and besides, 3 – 4 seconds can feel like an eternity when trying to avoid getting smacked in the face in a relatively tiny bubble, especially when you’re at low health and desperately need to get away. One wrong slide out of the bubble and you’re toast.

If a thief uses shadowstep to gain distance then cast, well now he’s likely blown his only stunbreak, and can’t use it for a res assist (which is also pitifully bad against enemies who know to smack the downed body).

I think your traits and stats might be a bit too spread out.

Stats: You have medium / high-ish power + crit, with very low armor as a trade off for some medium condition damage. If you want to go for direct damage, straight berserkers or zerkers mixed with Valk / Knights here and there works well, for condition damage I would go for Carrion everything. But either way, I’d spec for one or the other personally.

Traits: Again, spread too thin here. I’d drop trickery completely (unless you want to go full conditions) and instead go for Shadow Arts, Acrobatics, or both. Also, I tend to go less (or none) into Deadly Arts and more into Critical Strikes, as I feel like it gives more bang for your buck. With crit strikes, I’d either go 10, or 30. 20 is kind of a waste on it’s own.

Last thing: I personally don’t like condition damage for dungeons. Running more than 1 person using conditions and you tend to start stepping on each other’s DPS.

Looks pretty good. Here are some changes I might make:

1. Venoms: Spider, Ice Drake, Devourers, Basilisk: You do get less strikes out of it, but you already can get perma weakness via shortbows’ Choking Gas and the lotus poison trait, and if you have spider venom it will auto-inflict weakness as well. I’m not sure the vuln is worth it, as even stacking with lots of people it only lasts 5s and would have to stack in intensity.

2. You might want to swap P/V/T armor / weapons for Cleric’s gear, which will give you a nice boost to the healing power of leeching venoms.

Well, you can make up for lotus poison by using your Choking Gas → Cluster Bomb combo, which will cause weakness though not as effectively..

I personally can’t live without some points in SA, so I’m a bit biased. But I think you’re on the right track ditching Deadly Arts.

If you’re using either S/P or D/P, liberal use of Black Powder will make you nigh-invincible in melee range in PvE. I like to precast Steal + Black Powder, then you can just spam 1 until everything is dead (unless it’s a champion, then you’re going to have to play smart and dodge a lot).

D/D Conditions are also good, but make sure you pick up quick recovery, that helps a lot. Also adding Infiltrator’s signet means you should have plenty of regen to let you keep spamming those DBs. I’ve heard signet of malice is awesome with Caltrops + DB, but I’ve never really used it myself, mainly because if you run dungeons with any other condition classes, you’re going to be stepping on each other’s bleed stacks and won’t be doing a ton of damage in total.

Also, don’t neglect Shadow Arts and Acrobatics. There are some very important traits in here, major and minor. Oh, and a lot of the D/D burst builds you see aren’t really made for low – mid level PvE. They are typically designed for PvP if anything, but can work fine at high levels.

Could you post your most current build so we can get a better idea of your trait selection and gear stats?

To those complaining about stealth:

I understand the frustration. I think a lot of it comes from constant target-drop (which is especially annoying on mesmers), and the fact that there are still many people who don’t understand what a thief is trying to do or where he is going in stealth. I personally didn’t really understand it either until I played a thief myself.

Here is a very basic general guide that will help you most thieves out there:

1. If a thief is using a melee weapon and is not already on the defensive (about to die), 99% of the time, they are heading for your back. DO NOT turn and run. Good thieves will use steal, shadowstep, or Infil. Signet precasted with backstab (or Tac Strike) to land it on you with 0 risk to themselves. Instead, wait a second, then turn and use your number 1 chain while moving as erratically as possible. This makes it incredibly hard to land a solid backstab, and the thief will likely eat a LOT of damage in the process of trying to line you up.

2. If a thief pops Shadow Refuge, they are likely trying to heal up, get away, or both. At this point, if you know what you’re doing the thief is practically a free kill. No AoE? Walk up to the circle and spam 1. When you see your animation chain completing, you are hitting the thief! If a thief is already low health, it will usually only take 1 – 2 chains to drop them. If your chain is completing repeatedly, and they are still stealthed, they are likely already downed. Wait for them to appear or just kill them.

3. For melee thieves, CC is a sure way to victory. Most thieves have 1 or 0 stun breaks. Also, even soft CC hurts thieves A LOT. Cripple, chill, and immobilize, while curable, screws with a thief’s rhythm and forces them on the defensive early. If all you have is cripple, a melee thief is still easily kited. When they pop a stealth util, go in for melee autoattacks.

You don’t even need to spam AoE, although this works very well if you’re a trap ranger, necro with a staff, hammer warrior, GS guardian, whatever.

The key is simply knowing where they are likely going, which in almost all cases is right to your spine. Turning and smacking them completely ruins this plan. It sounds too simple to work, but I kill almost ALL the thieves I encounter while they are in stealth with simple auto-attacks. Nothing fancy required. I actually prefer when thieves stealth around me, because I treat it as a way to get free shots on them while they are not doing nearly as much DPS to me.

Agreed here. Although I love the fact that sPvP has no gear progression, it would be nice to get some sort of unique skins that you could use for PvE to show off a little.

I use D/P pretty much exclusively these days, and once dueled a S/P thief in sPvP. We were pretty much evenly matched, similar to what Maugetarr described. One of us would die if we made a mistake, but otherwise there was no clear “x beats y” scenario.

Also, I don’t see why someone couldn’t run both D/P and S/P. They might compliment each other fairly well. You can either open with S/P if you know they are vulnerable to stuns / dazes, and then use your dagger to finish them. Swapping to S/P later in the fight can be useful when multiple enemies show up, especially if someone is attempting to rez your downed target, as you can put quite a bit of pressure on both enemies and possibly kill the rezzer in the same go.

That setup would probably require as much init regen as you could possibly throw at it though, so you’ll be looking at somewhat reduced DPS.

I agree, it’s just too good not to take. Especially if you’re running D/P, which can cost 8 init to stealth without Infusion of Shadows.

I personally can’t play without Infusion of Shadows + Quick Recovery. I hate sitting on an empty init pool when your life depends on it.

After playing both, I prefer direct damage over conditions. Condition builds typically have a lot of survivability, but take forever to kill a single target.

Full on glass cannon isn’t that great either. I’m talking the typical 25/30/0/0/15 builds that I see most thieves run. The problem is that unless you are incredibly skilled, or your enemies are just complete idiots, there’s almost no way to survive a 2+v1 as you have very little ways of mitigating damage outside of blowing 1 target up before they can react and running away as fast as possible.

Basically, I’d go for a direct damage, but somewhat balanced build.

Blinka.9078:

frans.8092:

He didn’t use Unload
The first skill on the P/D has a stealth version Neak Attack which is very similar to unload, it does five rapid attacks and stacks up some bleeds.

Yes he did the first skill P/D but only a few times. The major times it was unload because i had no bleeds on me I payed attention to that D=. I know what you are saying but no it wasn’t that either. He could really attack while stealthed.

I wish i could remembered to take some SS.
It’s like the thief stealth fades out instead of simply appear instant. But that fade out non-targetable time was waaay too big on that particular thief + 2390489234 stealth skills no CD, no House and no melee.

I can’t explain more details than that, and its too late to check combat log now. Thats why I came to forum ^^.
Probably placing it in the thief section was a bad choice though.

If you are 100% sure he wasn’t meleeing, and was ONLY using P/P, it could have been hax. I still think we aren’t getting the full story though. P/D thieves can CnD off of pets, and other NPCs, and doesn’t have the most obvious animation in the world. Also, culling could be an issue in this as you were in WvW.

P/P still only has a few ways of stealth, none of which are on weapon skills and it’s unlikely a P/P thief would be running every stealth skill available. Blinding Powder, or Shadow Trap (which is pretty unreliable), and Steal (when traited) are the only other ways I can think of that a P/P could stealth if he wasn’t using Shadow Refuge and only ever used P/P.

Adaneshade.2409:

Beyondthelol.9504:

I swear that every person who defends the thiefs blatant overpoweredness does so because they themselves play a thief.

How about we have a new rule – if you play a thief you are not allowed to comment on if they are OP or not

Conversely, no one that QQs about them has ever actually played one seriously enough to really learn what the strengths and weaknesses are. Instead you get the mobile, bursty, tanky, regenerating, permastealth build posts where people insist on picking mutally exclusive traits and lumping into one “OP THIEF” thread.

Ah, yes the infamous 30/30/30/30/30 builds. To be fair, it happens to a lot of classes now. It tends to happen when people examine one specific situation where they either got “insta-gibbed” or just couldn’t kill some bunker profession and then it turns into, “what can I even do, look at all these options they have?!”

If you want to shoot your sides into orbit, go check out the mesmer subforum where someone was complaining about mesmers making 10+ clones and being invincible and blah blah blah.

I love when people genuinely want to learn, but some people are just more interested in making a scene than solving their problem and becoming stronger because of it.

I agree that it would probably grow the playerbase, which is incredibly important if they want the top tier paids to survive. Sacrifice hotjoins, frees, or both, add solo queue, then add some real incentives to PvP and I think we’ll see a LOT more people getting interested in jumping in a few games every night, as well as plenty who are interested in competing at the top level.

Yes, scorpion wire is great if you know you’re coming up into a group battle. Pick a dangerous target, call it out to your team and tear them to pieces after you pull them, always fun.

The bow works well for just general group-battles, but you can also sneak behind the zerg and pick off targets in melee range, forcing some players to turn their attention away from the front lines.