Guild Wars 2

The Thief ability Cloak & Dagger can be repeatedly chained on Keep and Tower walls (both while being on top and inside) without triggering the Revealed debuff, stacking the Stealth duration as would otherwise not be the case. Using the Traits ‘Infusion of Shadow’, ‘Quick Recovery’ and ‘Patience’ this can be kept up indefinitely, allowing a Thief to remain within a hostile Tower / Keep without risking any detection or striking active targets such as guards or siege.

There is no instance where a connecting cast of Cloak & Dagger from active Stealth should not result in a Revealed debuff, as it constitutes a direct-target offensive ability. This works due to Keep & Tower walls being the only objects in WvW a player can target and hit, but not damage (thus not triggering Revealed).

It’s a bit odd that you’d suggest this as a viable way to deal with D/D when in fact you need 2-3 people coordinating their Immobilize or Interrupts to even begin dealing with a single Elementalist efficiently. One player on their own will not have enough Stun, Daze or Root abilities to tie the opponent down long enough to affect the engagement in any meaningful way.

Yes, you can dodge most of their channeled damage and knockbacks. Yes, you can interrupt their RTL, but this is a long shot from actually putting them at a disadvantage in a fight. You are now out of Endurance and with at least one Interrupt weapon or Utility skill on cooldown while the Elementalist is free to engage you.

This is the frustrating part for a player facing a D/D Elementalist, really; between Mist Form, Shocking Aura, Frost Aura, RTL and constant Regeneration there’s no way to actually pin them down and hit them for long enough to cause any threatening amount of damage unless you invest heavily into burst, which in turn leaves you as a vulnerable glass cannon that can simply be outlasted after the initial strike.

A coordinated, communicating group of people can easily deal with a single D/D, but the most common situations in WvW and enemies in the slew of recent Elementalist videos lack the cooperation necessary to achieve this. When you place a D/D Elementalist into a group of uncoordinated opponents, risk to themselves is almost completely negated which ultimately leads to the “OP” cries we have here now.

KoMe did not want to let Danelon go tonight. Fantastic work on that! Whoever that Charr by the Hylek campfire was, you’re awesome.

I like how everyone is commenting on this without actually having experienced it in-game. Being in combat reduces your overall movement speed by a set percentage, so it’s not like Thieves will suddenly be Ride The Lightning-zapping away from everything; it’s also still affected by Cripple and other slow effects.

If a Thief is already in a position to have enough stealth stacked to remove himself from a combat situation entirely, he would have been able to do so pre-patch as well.

A shout-out to Beyond Limits [BL] from FA with whom we established a spontaneous duel-match in the EB jumping puzzle, to which several others joined in. That was a lot of fun! I really wish there was an area in the game that allowed for such cross-server matches to happen regularly and safely.

After a bit of quick sPvP testing for anyone else wondering the same thing:

• The Lightning Strike (Air) and Flame Blast (Fire) both proc on Main Hand (Sword) auto attacks, so it’s not dependent on the weapon you have the Sigil on.

• They do share a CD of some sort, since I never got them both to proc at the same time. The internal CD seems to be 3 seconds, but I can’t confirm this for sure.

• Since it seems to calculate the activation of a Sigil of Air and Fire on a Crit separately (resulting in either a Flame Blast or a Lightning Strike, never exclusively one or the other), it’s probably safe to assume that you have a 30% chance of each to proc, increasing your overall proc rate.

This is good if you don’t care about which Sigil goes off when, but if you’re looking for consistency on only one effect, you’ll actually decrease your odds of that one going off in favor of the other. Since Air only deals around 50 more damage than Fire and has no AoE, it comes down to this:

• If you attack nothing but single targets, Air / Fire is worth it (since Air / Air doesn’t increase the proc chance) for the increased odds of getting either to go off.

• If in any scenario you are hitting more than one thing, you’d be reducing your potential damage with Air / Fire since you lose out on the Fire AoE damage proc completely if Air goes off until the CD resets.

Hope that helps others who are curious as well. Feel free to correct me on any of this if necessary.

Quick question, do the Sigil of Fire and Sigil of Air share an internal CD of any sort, or would it actually be beneficial to use them together in a Main Hand / Off Hand combination?

Also, would the Off Hand Sigil’s trigger depend on the type of attack used? Specifically for a Sword / Dagger Thief, would the OH Sigil only proc on Dancing Dagger and C&D critical hits?

Thanks in advance!

The trait “Hidden Killer” is supposed to provide a 100% Critical chance from Stealth with the first strike. However, the “buff” (a non-titled icon) wears off after a few seconds and does not reapply when Stealth is renewed. Thus, if you chain two Stealth skills or remain in a Shadow Refuge, you won’t crit on your un-Stealthing hit.

The following conditions cause it to expire:

• Cast Blinding Powder, then Hide In Shadows

• Cast Shadow Refuge and remain in it for the full duration

• C&D a target, then use Blinding Powder or HiS

Basically on anything that extends your Stealth duration, the resulting hit will not guarantee a Crit. A simple fix would either be extending the “buff” duration, or having it renew if a new Stealth skill is applied.

Ogre runes are really nice for a Power-focused S/D build, and the Rock Dog hasn’t given me away in Stealth yet since he’s mostly off doing his own thing and chewing on some poor Invader’s legs. The downside is that they’re a little over 2g each, with the 4% 6-set damage boost being a bit mediocre.

Jamais vu.5284:

The toughness viewed in isolation is, but I have a reasonably high amount of HP for a thief (16k) and play cautiously, porting in/out, using rupts/blind/weaken, etc., unlike someone speccing full glass cannon solely focused on outputting burst damage.

Vitality exists to mitigate Condition Damage. Toughness exists to mitigate burst damage. You could have 23k HP and would still eat Backstabs like that since none of the damage is being reduced at all. The key to WvW is finding a Vit / Toughness balance that lets you survive an ambush like that while still suiting your playstyle (or grow a liking to WP rezzing, which isn’t much fun). Once you’re specced & geared to escape from a glass cannon getting the jump on you, you’re set for most other situations too, so it’s a great goal line marker in terms of setup efficiency.

ITT glass cannons dying to glass cannons

Krathalos.3461:

I’m actually kind of confused as to how your CnD only hit for 460. Are you a P/D build? Hell, even then, that’s kinda low.

I run a 0/0/30/30/10 Condition build with P/D for WvW. Toughness / Precision / Condition gear; my regular attacks do no damage but I can almost instantly stack up 15 Bleeds that tick for 115 each. It’s amusing to see enemies go “ha ha this Thief does no dama- OH WHAT”. Good fun.

Coffeebot.3921:

Based on the image name (BwEda.png), it’s probably a bug from back in the BwE as GW2 release screenshots are default names as gwXXX.jpg eg. gw020.jpg which implies that it’s the 20th SS you have taken.

Imgur renames your files; the screenshot was from 10 minutes previous to the original posting date.

Kurow.6973:

The only logic reasoning to this, that I can think of, is you got hit by 2 thieves…and just didn’t see the other one because of culling issues.

I think this is the most likely explanation. The proximity and timing of the two Backstabs with no additional follow-up attacks still puzzles me, but who knows!

It’s because you have 6 of them in your PvP gear, which it counts in your total Rune number (but doesn’t actually apply the respective effect).

Eduardo.4675:

It was a ninja patch from anet: due to many ppl complaining that thieves have very little in the way of dmg, they made the thieves guild melee thief use backstab after scorpion wire.

Even though I can’t tell if this is supposed to be sarcastic or not, there was no Thieve’s Guild elite skill in use, and it would’ve read Yak’s Bend Beast as a damage source instead.

bettadenu.5483:

Is it possible you got hit by two Thieves?

I never saw another enemy in the field neither when the Backstab(s) hit, nor when I was running away a few seconds later. I’m fairly certain both hits were from the same player.

Heya! Just got hit by this, and am wondering how they pulled it off:

http://i.imgur.com/BwEda.png

Both hit within the span of one second of each other, so it wasn’t re-stealthing after Revealed wore off. It was a single Thief, and to the best of my awareness using Backstab triggers the Revealed debuff, which means you can’t instantly re-stealth and re-Backstab, so how do you chain two in a row?

Thanks for the heads up!

It’s a simple request, but one that would make sorting things a bit easier; give Invisible Bag slots in your inventory a light blue shade in the square to instantly differentiate them from the regular slots. This would be helpful for all of us using the Hidden Bag view. Can be toggled if it’s not desired by the user.

This is fantastic and really goes to show that ANet is listening to its players. The changes are nothing but positive on 1920×1080.

Does anyone else have the issue of skills such as the Heal and Elite not responding at all in a completely unpredictable manner? You’ll push the key, the button flashes but the skill never fires, even if you keep mashing it over and over again. Usually 10 seconds later it’ll start working again, but by that time you’re most likely dead.

This seems to be unrelated to a setting (PvP, WvW, PvE) or current number of players / enemies / entities. I’ve had it happen in both large groups and 1-on-1 encounters. What’s frustrating is that there’s no way to reliably see it coming, so you’ll be down to a sliver of health, push your heal key and it will never start casting / channeling.

As most Charr players already know, you can change from a quadruped run (with your weapons stowed) to a bipedal one (with your weapons drawn). In the options menu exists a keybind option to manually draw / stow your weapons, but outside of combat it only lasts around 15 seconds before they’re put away again.

I would like to propose the option (perhaps a checkbox) of having your manually drawn weapons remain that way until you put them away again using the same key. This would not affect the current mechanics, and would be a nice way for Charr players to choose one walking visual over the other. What do you think?

Same issue here. It’ll drop to 20-30 in WvW over time, but visiting a Vista bumps it back up to 70-80.

i5 2500k (stock speeds)
Nvidia 560Ti (306.02 drivers)
8GB DDR3 – RAM
Windows 7 64-bit