Guild Wars 2

Yep. Still get the QQ, especially in hotjoin. It’s either complaining or heavily jumping on my body when 2 or 3 guys pin me down. Oddly enough…. it seems like I get more complaints playing D/D 5/0/0/3/6.

Mbelch.9028:

Lettuce.2945:

LightningBlaze.4913:

I’m surprised nobody has asked you “what’s your build” or did I miss that post? I guess at this stage of the game it is obvious to everyone. Queueage got boring quickly mate. Blade and Soul or Skyforge are the only 2 mmorpg so far that can possibly replace gw2 … if they get released in na. Anyways, nice videos Nex but i were you i would show everyone different type of builds, weapon sets and playstyles. Bunker specs are fun but too easy to perform well as an ele. Most of the time it will be one sided. With more high risk builds it requires much more player’ skills to do just as great even on 1v1. I believe that’s what the community see a lot less.

He runs a similar build to mine when he goes bunker and I had a conversation with him about it like a couple weeks back. He has lower over all stats but it still works for him. I run 2.3k power, 24-25k hp with vit stacks, 38% crit rate, 188% crit dmg, 2.5k armor, 688 condi dmg, and 712 healing power. He runs a mixture of gears like me, I just rounded it out more. The stats I mentioned is with food fyi.

Been running both d/d and d/f in wvw. It’s neat. Anyways, season’s almost over. Expect to see you transferring soon Nex. By the way, nice use of dodging backwards behind enemy’s attack range. It puts their skills on cd. Most players don’t realize this. Nice one mate. And how’s your thumb pad so far? :P

The orb weaver is amazing. I’m still having issues with my attunement swapping, but I’m getting used to it again. See my screwups there at the end of the video which got me killed? Yeah you can thank my new keypad lol.

Also yeah. I like the awesome things you can do with jump dodges. Especially repositioning.

About my gears, yep I’m just below you in attack stats, just above you in some others. I don’t run quite as much toughness.

The orb weaver is an excellent piece of hardware for this game. I don’t know how you set yours up, but having 16-19 being the F1-F4 and 20 being normal weapon swapping works extremely well for me.
11-15 (resting position)= weapon skills
6-10=Utility skills
1-5=Targeting and other random stuff
Joystick for movement (I used to play on consoles a lot more. Old habits die hard)
Thumb-flapthingy=Call target
Thumb button=select called target

Dodge/jump/interact on mouse.

Anyway, that setup (usually) keeps me away from mis-clicks.

This seems to happen lately on all my classes/skills that cause a large amount of fast movement. I.E staff ele’s burning retreat, engi magnet, scorpion wire, steal, shadowstep etc. cause the thing being moved to rubberband (be it you or the target).

@CalamityO: the second half only disappointed me slightly because I kept comparing it to the first half. SAO II (GGO really) is really good so far imo. Just wish I didn’t have to wait each week for the next episode.

@Sins: yeah but too many people would have died! They still have the castle anyway and could always flashback to the 70ish floors they didn’t show.

Back to topic!

It would be really nice to have floors with hard mobs in permanent order (like the toxic tower instead of fractals) about the size of the Halloween maze or perhaps a little smaller, and then an instanced hard boss on each floor.

It would be permanent content that would just be continually added on to without being too much work (although I have no idea how long it takes the devs to build a map like the maze, but that seemed like a simple format to work within)

Played against this build in hotjoin as a D/P thief. It’s super annoying from the perspective of someone who carries a single condi clear on a 50 second cd. One weakness I found though is that if I waited for the focus cleanse (4) I could immobilize the ele and interrupt the heal (depending on the heal) and it pretty much killed them every time. It was hard to force the ele into a corner to blow the cleanse (and invuln), but the 6-9 second immobilize caused him to rage quit eventually.

Very hard to counter though.

Not saying it’s necessarily bad or UP now, but for the effort that you have to put into keeping your thief alive now, you could be much more effective on another class while dealing your damage in an AoE fashion instead of single target.

I.E. the reward stayed about the same while the risk was increased (not even including shadowstep bugs) because other classes were buffed around them.

Can you guys make this happen next?
As a hardcore dungeon?
Please?

(Sword Art Online for those who don’t recognize the floating castle)

A popular (at least temporarily) build that arose after the change to ferocity used 0/6/5/3/0 with strength runes (not added into link) for good might stacking from the SA and PoI from acro. You should be able to maintain 10 stacks of might easily IIRC.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAoYVlsMpyplOx7J8PNhQBt9pDQB4NDPovVA-T1TBABWqGQg7P8wDAgSVIi4IAclykuUacjKIYpEqSVCwTfwiKBX4QAkjqCAcCACAgAcz2MASoFau5Nv5Nv5NLFggKjA-w

Zero Day.2594:

Maugetarr.6823:

I will be more explicit with my jokes in the future.

:| Man, I lost touch with these forums…

Nah, it’s my bad. The meme is “<insert multiple bad things going wrong>, but <insert minor thing which doesn’t offset first things>, so at least I got that goin for me.” It’s a sarcastic “look on the bright side.” My sense of humor does not carry well into typed format apparently.

Zero Day.2594:

Maugetarr.6823:

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Delta Blues.8507:

Yesterday I decided to get back to D/D thief for a while (WvW) and just wow… At first everything seemed right.. then i met a warrior who landed a stun on me, I ss away and i got rubberbanded right back. Then I was immobilized and tryed a cnd+steal while immob to get to stealth up and steal just went on cd without doing anything. Then I took an eviscerate to the face for 9k+ (running with 2,6k armor) and that was it.

It really feels like D/D is not getting you anywere. I haven’t played it for months and CnD feels so telegraphed and slow it’s quite sad really. I think that it would be enough to half it’s cast time to make it viable tbh

The class would be in a lot better spot if the bugs were fixed. No amount of buffs can compensate for skills that fail that often.

Steal, kittened up teleports, stealth bugs (tho rare in comparison to the previous 2), weird FS pathing – I though I’d just learn to use skill 3 after the patch only to find that FS either ignores a target or when it visually hits, it doesn’t register the hit to turn into LS (no blocks/invul etc).

At least there’s this:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Steal-Bug-Making-thief-unplayable/page/3#post4425479

No time line on a fix, but at least there’s recognition that the original fix didn’t fix it.

….so we got that going for is which is nice.

Yup… it’s “nice” of them for fixing a mistake that they made on a skill that used to work better. This is one way to look at it. Don’t mind it that it’s taking them a couple of days… It’s just nice that they’re fixing it after breaking it more.

Maybe the place I used to work at was too strict or maybe I was just being too h.a.r.d. (censored? really?) on my self… If I accidentally ruined a functionality after deploying my code, I would fix it within 5-20 minutes of discovery that I broke it. I guess I was “nice” that way – No, actually I didn’t want to seem like a kitten up – and it was embarrassing as it is to ruin something working, but every passing minute knowing that it was still broken because of me was agonizing.

But yeah, it’s nice of them.

I will be more explicit with my jokes in the future.

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Delta Blues.8507:

Yesterday I decided to get back to D/D thief for a while (WvW) and just wow… At first everything seemed right.. then i met a warrior who landed a stun on me, I ss away and i got rubberbanded right back. Then I was immobilized and tryed a cnd+steal while immob to get to stealth up and steal just went on cd without doing anything. Then I took an eviscerate to the face for 9k+ (running with 2,6k armor) and that was it.

It really feels like D/D is not getting you anywere. I haven’t played it for months and CnD feels so telegraphed and slow it’s quite sad really. I think that it would be enough to half it’s cast time to make it viable tbh

The class would be in a lot better spot if the bugs were fixed. No amount of buffs can compensate for skills that fail that often.

Steal, kittened up teleports, stealth bugs (tho rare in comparison to the previous 2), weird FS pathing – I though I’d just learn to use skill 3 after the patch only to find that FS either ignores a target or when it visually hits, it doesn’t register the hit to turn into LS (no blocks/invul etc).

At least there’s this:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Steal-Bug-Making-thief-unplayable/page/3#post4425479

No time line on a fix, but at least there’s recognition that the original fix didn’t fix it.

….so we got that going for us which is nice.

Have you tried it with D/D? It seems like the stealth from that and needle trap and trip wire would synergize well.

Runewolf.8456:

it should just add vulnerability as well as bleed. That way it synergises with Cloak n Dagger and back stab.

That won’t fix the clunkiness of the forced movement and the evade frames though, although it would be a start into pushing it into more of a utility role.

Well, I’ve really only messed around with this in hotjoin, but so far it’s been a blast.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAoYVl0MpyplOx2J8PNBNBt9w7QI8OMfpMaFAA-TpRBABRcEACc/B+OEAL8AAIrMAAnAAA

D/D not viable in high end PvP you say? You’re probably right, but since the patch D/P doesn’t have quite the birst it needs to finish people off, nor quite the sustain that it had before. The shortening up of certain skills, while slightly more dodgeable, had made interrupting those skills much more dificult, especially when AI wanders into the path of of headshot. I haven’t played as an D/D thief since the patch, but from the perspective of my ele, they can be largely ignored unless there’s 1 or 2 other people distracting you.

So that leaves us (me at least) with D/D. Not because it’s the best option, but because it’s still the fun option.

All the utilities are gap closers, and it has the ability to deal with what seems like the endless CC flying around right now. I know scopion wire is buggy at times, but when you pull someone off the point the satisfaction makes up for it.

So relax, have some fun, don’t worry about HS + Steal not working because of whatever movement skill/distance bug messes with it, because CnD still works wonders with steal and inf sig.

Other great utilities for this particular build include smokescreen, blinding powder, SR, daggerstorm, and devourer venom (the usual suspects).

mompen.7952:

flavor of the month

flavor of the 6 months ;p

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Cynz.9437:

Stooperdale.3560:

I was just thinking the other day that I hadn’t seen a thief in high level fractals for a while. Loads of heavies, smattering of everything else, and no thieves at all.

Is ascended armor now locking people down to heavy classes? I made ascended armor for my warrior and took him to 50 but I’m not going to make a set of medium ascended too, even though it would interesting to try my thief at 40+.

i got kicked from group the moment i joined on my thief, didn’t even get to enter the instance…. been doing lv 49-50 for year now….

reasoning according to the group: no thieves

since there is no instance owner anymore, can’t actually make own party w/o risking to get kicked for playing the class :/

Thieves often got kicked on join even before the patch cos 1. Lack of obvious group support 2. Squishiness. A lot of about thief class is active so a mistake often leads to being 1 shot in pve. This makes new players on thief a nightmare in dungeons so people rather kick them then have to deal with that. Group support for most people means boons, boons and more boons.

I used to occasionally run story mode dungeons for newbs on my thief, it was always pain. It took ages, especially with very low lvl toons in party and I often had to finish the boss myself cos everyone died.

Made a guard a week ago, I could carry the group already at lvl 30 in ac story, with 15-25 might stacks even lowbs can burn through mobs like they are nothing, add other tasty boons and you can see why thieves are considered a selfish class in group support.

I guess Anet intended thieves to provide group support via conditions rather than boons but other classes can apply them too. I’d like to see Anet to give us the option to buff party with offensive boons, for example Furious Retaliation could give fury to me and to allies too. Or a new trait with x% change to gain and share might with allies on a crit or crit with sword equipped. Or share might with allies when using Signets of Power (with cooldown so we wouldn’t give 20 stacks to everyone in 1s).

Haha.

Had a similar experience. Used to love taking my thief into dungeons. Made an ele, leveled it, and now thats pretty much all I run in dungeons because by the time a fight is over, there’s about 12-15 stacks of might on everyone from me plus about a minute of fury. Changing trinkets to celestial and traiting defensively can really help to carry newer players too with the aoe heals.

Idea for a change to assassin’s equilibrium:
During a dodge roll, gain stability.
On successful evasion, gain 1/2 second stability (no ICD, so it scales with the number of people you’re fighting)

Reason: tired of getting pulled/interrupted by guards & eles during a roll. This would help thieves to be able to stick to bunkers better and rewards thieves against heavy AI-CC classes like turret engis (and almost anything is better than the current trait).

I think the best idea I saw for it was a while ago where someone suggested making it similar to warrior’s GS whirlwind attack. That way it could offer some great evasion, some needed mobility, and increasr the skill cap as it would be a skill shot rather than locking you into an animation that gets you stunned/killed. If it had the evasiveness of WW, I dont think the damage even needs a buff, it would just be a useful utility skill at that point.

(Sorry I can’t remember who originally suggested making it into WW)

evilapprentice.6379:

It’s not as if thief is unplayable, it’s just obviously the inferior choice at the moment.

The absolute only thing thief does better than other classes at the moment is mobility. While they’re still the best, other classes can come close, and considering the current plethora of weaknesses in thief setups, the slightly better mobility isn’t that important anymore.

How useful is a class that can get to a fight quick and then struggle to contribute? How useful is a class that can teleport into combat quickly, but then can’t defend themselves in said combat? Here’s a hint Anet, not very much.

Pretty much this.

I’ve been on my D/F (and staff) ele for the past couple of days, and I have to say, the only thing that thief really feels ok at now is bursting me down if I was already at half health, fighting someone else. Even then, it was only really dangerous if I was locked out of earth for invulnerability and condi-cleansing.

The condi uptime and burst is really high right now. Ranger and mesmer burst is also pretty high right now. I worry about about a stream of arrows coming in for 4-7 k now much more than the thief desperately trying to stay in close combat with me with all the gap creators/walls on my staff.

I don’t even think ranger is OP at this point, I think everything around thief got buffed, leaving it behind.

I have had the same issue. Maybe it’s something with how they decided to fix teleports so that you no longer get stuck in the ground.

A fun alternative to that one.

Less precision, less crit damage, but high fury uptime, and higher base power.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZEQNAoYVl0Mp0pVOxrJ0PNRLhsVIvf3eu2PCcA-TlCEwA23fol6OOVawVJIhTBATlZsUJoj+AAPAgHHBASBIoyI-w

You’d be surprised by how many people you kill between panic strike and devourer venom.

Well, last night I ended up going back to D/D in pvp. BPS is still ok, but autoattacks end up plowing through it and Mesmer clones and ranger pets kept intercepting headshot and shadowshot, so D/D with Traveler Runes, Daggerstorm, Devourer venom, smokescreen, and inf sig ended up with about the same level of success.

Look on the bright side: our options were expanded because there is no clear cut “better” options anymore. Everything is about the same level of mediocrity. (sarc if it wasn’t clear)

evilapprentice.6379:

NinjaEd.3946:

VA isn’t an issue, its the baseline of the venoms that really don’t have much going for them.

Yes, the baseline venoms are the problem.

Why haven’t baseline venoms been buffed?

VENOMOUS AURA.

You do understand that the issue is this – It’s extremely hard (probably approaching impossible) to design a Venom utility that is strong enough to be worth taking on it’s own WITHOUT it becoming ridiculously OP when you have the option of spreading that skill onto 5 other players/AI’s.

That is the heart of the issue – Anet cannot design venoms worth taking on their own when they have to be balanced with the possibility of that effect being applied 5 more times in mind.

They have to take sharing into consideration with mantras and Aura’s as well, the thing is though there aren’t nearly as many traits that can all be taken simultaneously which turns the sharing into an overwhelming force if they were to be buffed at all. That’s why I thought that moving the traits so they interfered with each other would allow them to address them better for both group and solo play.

Lifestealer.4910:

Thief should get revealed after failing a stealth attack, you kitten up?.. you should be punished for it. Right now everyone and their mother runs p/d condi thief in wvw because its so forgiving, you can keep failing stealth attacks, you can also get out of any situation. This isn’t even a warrior vs thief debate as both classes are highly forgiving, it isn’t one or the other.

So the idea is to punish the other builds because the ranged easy-to-land one is too forgiving. So wouldn’t more people move to P/D since it would be much more likely to hit, doesn’t require positional setup, and allows you to build tankier for more survival out of stealth since you’ll be revealed much more often?

While we’re on nerfing/buffing abilities based on other classes with no respect to surrounding mechanics or abilities, let’s boost the damage of backstab since it only has a 2.4 multiplier as opposed to a 3.0 multiplier. Also giving it a 300 range leap seems fair. While we’re at it, lets boost dagger autoattack #3 to the necromancer dagger AA #3 (1.2 vs. thief’s paltry .85).

You know what, let’s lock out all but one class just so everyone is working on the same platform.

And then lock out all traits, because if there were different traits, there would still be imbalance looking at the traits in a vacuum.

And weapons.

and armor

(don’t forget runes too)

Ahhh… sweet, sweet uniformity.

Stooperdale.3560:

But you’re still doing it all backwards, starting from the maximum effect from traits and and then working backwards to get what the venoms should look like. This will always fail as it leaves venoms weak in every other situation.

The venom utilities themselves need to work first as balanced utilities on their own merit. Venom traits then need balancing against other traits. It’s not complicated when you look at it like that.

I did not think that the changes I proposed left venoms in a particularly weak state, even if you didn’t trait for them whatsoever. Where else do you think they could be buffed in addition to or instead of these suggestions?

evilapprentice.6379:

NinjaEd.3946:

You can’t just throw things onto venoms and say “here are thou holy grail”, venoms aren’t meant for condition builds and their meant to be played as a somewhat invested build and not an extra utility. Unless they plan to add more skills (prolly 2016) they are meant for utility atm.

Well then they did a particularly terrible job at it. Considering how many traits you need to sink into Venoms to make them even halfway viable (which is a godawful return on all those traits you’re dedicating solely to venoms), and the things you have to sacrifice just to use a venom build (variety, stun breakers…or you know you could let your 5 major traits go to waste by taking a non venom utility), what we actually get when fully invested is absolute garbage.

Also ice drake doesn’t make sense stun breaking, it makes more sense to scrap this venom because it conflicts with devourer venom and is impossible to balance. There is no way to buff ice drake without making it OP because of how quickly condi duration + venomous aura would make it, and it sucks as it is now. Best they try something new for it.

There you go, you’ve found the issue; VENOMOUS AURA

It’s unfortunate that you don’t like the suggestions here, but there’s really no way around the fact that Venomous Aura is the culprit behind how worthless venoms currently are – however it’s changed, it is the thing that needs to be changed.

Venomous Aura is a major contributer to the problem, but it doesn’t just boil down to it. If VA were the only venom trait, I think it would be arguable that they could buff the base of venoms without needing to touch the trait at all. It would be similar to ele aura sharing or mantras at that point. The problem comes in though when you consider that 5 traits can be taken simultaneously including RV (a 25-66% boost to normal venom durations, 100% to BV if you don’t use both strikes instantly), QV, PV, and LV on top of the sharing. That’s just too much when all combined to give it a buff, which is why I thought moving 2 of them to exclude the taking of all 5 would be an effective way to ensure being able to buff the base of venoms without having to nerf any of the individual traits. Now instead of

Mediocre/UP utilies + 5 traits (12 trait points) + all utility slots = Marginal Utility at the expense of individual damage & Survivability

You get

Decent utilities + 3 (of 5) traits = Good Support + Individual survivability (stunbreaks) & Damage + 8 spare trait points.

IIRC they moved some mantra traits around to try to make more builda able to access their effects better. I think that could be done here.

PS: Not picking on you evilapprentice, just wanted to add to what you had.

Hey, at least we’re getting somewhere with discussion!

@evilapprentice: I like the general lines of your idea, but I have to agree a little with Sir Vincent. If we took something like spider venom, how exactly would we share a weaker version of poison? Maybe just not as long poison duration? Having venomous aura create an entirely different effect though could be the direction to go in though. Maybe upon activation you drop a combo field instead, say radius 240, 4-5 second duration.

Ice Drake-Ice combo field
Spider-poison combo field
Basilisk-ethereal
Skelk-smoke (or dark)
Scale-water

I’d still want to see the base buffed, but we’re moving in different directions at least.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Maugetarr.6823:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Idea for a Venom Rework: DELETE VENOMOUS AURA

Except that won’t happen (as you can see by all of our latest buffs), so we can keep throwing ideas at them until something sticks that makes venoms useful by themselves without being overwhelming with Venomous Aura.

The point is. To ever have any meaningful rework for venom, venomous aura needs to be deleted.

So instead of making suggestions to rework venoms, it is my belief that for every update they make for venom that we should respond with “DELETE VENOMOUS AURA”. Basically, instead of throwing ideas, we should only throw one idea, that is “DELETE VENOMOUS AURA”

Ok, here’s the thing: they won’t. So, assuming that it will be here for the duration of the existence of the game, how about commenting the other ideas here about the reduction in CD or the boosting of some effects. You know, addressing the ideas presented with constructive criticism (and you can even look at those as if venomous aura didn’t exist ).

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Idea for a Venom Rework: DELETE VENOMOUS AURA

Except that won’t happen (as you can see by all of our latest buffs), so we can keep throwing ideas at them until something sticks that makes venoms useful by themselves without being overwhelming with Venomous Aura.

Runes of the Traveler are still my favorite. I know you get minimal stat increases, but the boost to utility with the condi duration, boon duration, and run speed increases are pretty nice for thieves.

Here’s an idea for re-balancing venoms to make them useful by themselves while limiting their potential to be OP.

First of all, switch Revealed Training with Venomous Aura. The second would be to move Leeching Venoms into the DA master Tier, switching it for improvisation. The reasons for this is 2 fold. First of all, by making thief choose between venom traits it allows you to buff the base while limiting their potential to become exponentially more powerful. With these combinations, you could trait to either have an extra strike of venoms, or share them, and make a similar choice between quick and leeching venoms. Thus going into the power tree would allow for either a group build or a selfish build (and even some variety within those). The other reason for moving revealed training to the SA tree, is that it would help the brawling ability of SA thieves, especially since sic ’em is getting a buff in duration and analyse is getting the ability to reveal, the thief suddenly becoming more dangerous in combat when their defenses are locked out would go a long way towards helping those builds.

Now that the venoms only have the potential of taking 3 traits at a time instead of 5 traits, their base effects can be buffed slightly.

Across the board- Reduce Cooldowns to 30 seconds.

Spider Venom-Totally underwhelming right now. Add 1 (5sec) bleed per strike as well. Traiting into the power/condi-duration line, you would be able to get 7.5-10 seconds of bleeding from these depending on game mode. It’s now actually threatening offensively without just being a redundant skill (we have so many sources of poison).

Skale Venom-With the reduced CD, probably fine as is. Maybe make it transfer a condition per charge.

Ice Drake Venom-Add a stunbreak. This ability is far outclassed by devourer venom right now. Allow it to be a stunbreak that so that it lets you create room in between you and your target after you use it.

Devourer Venom-Would be fine as is, especially with the reduced cooldown

Basilisk Venom-Would be fine as is (a 1.5 second stun with a 1 second cast time on a 30 second CD)

Skelk Venom-Might finally be worth slotting with the reduced CD since it’s fairly high risk high reward.

Possible New Builds

6/2/0/0/6 Venom-Boon Share (a support build finally) (DeadlyArts:VS, QV, VA; CritStrikes: PT; Trick: TotC, BT, SoH)

6/2/0/0/6 Single Target Assassin (DeadlyArts:Mug, LV, RV; CritStrikes: FR; Trick: TotC,BT,SoH)

The above 2 show the ability to either go support or roaming with venoms after the change)

0/5/6/3/0 Might Stacking Brawler (CritStrikes: SoP,SU; ShadowArts:SE,CiS,RT; Acro:PoI) (similar to current builds, but you might be able to put on some cavalier gear with the power increase)

The point is, with the reduced CD’s and the stunbreak, venoms become useable by themselves while not becoming overwhelming when traited.

At best, this might put them into the range of the utility of mantras.

Feedback is welcome.

It’s always good to play multiple classes. Thief and ele are tied for fun for me, followed by mesmer, followed by a random grouping of of the rest.

D/F 6/0/2/0/6 is really fun as an ele.

Dirame.8521:

Daze +immob = make-shift stun anyway so… Sleight of Hand, devourer’s venom, have fun.

SSSSHHHHHHHHUUUSH! Stop telling people about it.

NinjaEd.3946:

NinjaEd’s ideas

I like the change to ambush

I’m not crazy about the shadow ward. Not because of the reveal, but because I think it will run into the same niche play that the current shadow trap has (i.e. not really used)

Mark of the Blade is cool, but it could use a shorter distance and a longer rollover time I think. Maybe 30s CD, 15 sec rollover, 900 range, without the damage though. Perhaps just a shorter CD (25s) for that rollover time if everything else is unchanged. Great framework for working with though.

Forgiven Greed would be pretty awesome for a S/D trickery build. Decent team support with a decent tradeoff.

Traits are good.

Yeah, I guess those could be considered passive. The idea was to give thief coubterplayable control, designed to push the other player into a corner. I get your point though. At least we can agree that traps are underwhelming at best right now.

I think traps could be redesigned into mark/hexes/promises (not the necro kind of mark). A single target black-border debuff that disappears based on time or a condition being fulfilled. All of these would be something like a .5-.75 cast time, range 600-900, and have an animation that puts a little thingy over the opponents head like signet of vampirism does for necros right now.

Ambush-Simply calls up a thief which has the same stats as the current one but will only attack the designated target and disappears at he end of 30 seconds, the opponent being killed, or it being killed (I know it’s pretty much a mesmer clone, but that’s what ambush already is)

Needle Trap-Lasts for 15 seconds. At the beginning of an opponents heal, it poisons and cripples them.

Shadow Trap-Lasts for 20 seconds. Triggers rollover to shadow pursuit. Stunbreak, stealth, shadowstep to your target. Gain fury and might for 5 seconds

Tripwire-Lasts 7.5 seconds-Target becomes knocked down for 2 seconds on attempted dodge roll.

They could make an elite one too if they’re working on new elites

Shadow Shroud-Boons on target have -100% duration for 5 seconds (so it would cancel out the base but +boon %’s would still work.

In any case, traps in their current form are lackluster. In my many hours playing this game I have literally run across about 5 people using thief traps.

(some of the inspiration
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Assassin%27s_Promise
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Scorpion_Wire
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Siphon_Strength
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Shadow_Shroud)

Edit: What I mean by black border debuff. An ability that can be removed like a condition or boon:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stealth
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Impale_
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Revealed
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_of_vampirism (activated)

Leolas.6273:

When this comes live now then thiefes will be freekill for mesmers.Anet man WTF is wrong with you.

It’s the filtering effect thats been going on since launch. There were a lot of thieves what were capable of onesgotting people originally. Those builds were nerfed and people went to other classes, left, or adapted. Since then, many patches have similarly nerfed thieves in small areas (adding up to larger nerfs as a whole) and each time, there’s been a filtering leaving primarily only those who adapted remaining. This seems to me why you see such a bipolar population of thief players. When people complain now, it’s often preceded by “against good thieves” or when given advice, respond with “good thieves won’t die to that.” The reason for this is you never really run into an average thief anymore. Battles are often lopsided in one direction with either the thief dying easily or them killing the opponent easily (or running away I guess). Anyway, the point I’m meandering my way towards is there can’t be any mid-range buffs because those would be overwhelming in the higher tier thief player hands.

Venomshare is a great parallel to this example. Look at untraited venoms (baseline thief for analogy purposes). They are mediocre at best. Once you trait them though with 5 or so traits, they become decent (still not used widely though as it gives up too much). Base venoms can’t be buffed though without venomshare and other venom traits being toned down simultaneously (re: nerfed) or they would become op when traited.

Similarly, I have a feeling thar they can’t buff base thief because they are worried about increasing the skill cap when they lower the skill floor. There’s so much overhead on thief that the top players would become overwhelming for those of similar or lower skills. Go back and watch the latest class balance discussion where they gave their high level balance philosophies and they’ll mention the super-high skill cap that exists for the thief. When they balance that as a whole, they have to take that into account. For this reason you probably won’t see any significant buffs or nerfs (yes, I understand we still get nerfed, but nothing like we used to in the beginning). That’s why we see very small changes during the same patch where you see significant across the board changes to other classes (warriors, rangers, mesmers, etc). The double-edged sword of playing the class with the most potential, but not necessarily the most powerful class.

Tldr: Thieves aren’t receiving significant buffs because it would make good thieves too good.

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Sylvari males look cool until you see them run :/

I completely forgot to mention this. It also drove me crazy. Without trying to make too many tree puns, all the sylvari animations are stiff and non-fluid.

@silentnight warrior

The cleave will only be added to the autoattack chain, not backstab. It shouldn’t be any more powerful than Sword auto which cleaves up to 2 additional targets.

I got absolutely sick of sylvari quotes and ended up deleting my sylvari thief because of it. I now have a human and asura thief and both of their quotes are better (imo). If I were starting a thief over again though, I would go with the charr. They have cool animations and decent quotes. Asura would be my second recommendation.

You could be an ash legion spy too, so it fits in decently with the lore decently.

Quick couple of questions: The current multiplier on the FGS#4 hit is around a 1.0, isn’t _it? Wouldn’t that put the new hit at around 2.4 making it do similar damage to backstab or a level 2 eviscerate thus useful against players as an elite and not just a PvE speed run tool?

Really wish they would have made it use thief condi-duration rather than damage as others have mentioned. Something like a 6/x/6/x/x venomshare with duration food and runes in soldiers armor could have been an actual soft CC machine, especially since maximizing venoms already means 6 in both of those lines.

Could have been something like:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZMQNAoaVl0MpqpdNx0J8PNRMhwdqf986s2NWEA-TFiBABA8EAAc/hrU+Rp6PKqE8O9BScIAU4EAQKAxWGB-w

Spreading weakness and interrupts like crazy, or maybe an S/D version intended to just control through dazes, immobilizes, chills, siphoning, and boonrips. Thiefmancer?

I wouldn’t call ANet out of touch on this one, they just sort of picked the wrong side of it to extend into support.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

We’ll be covering mesmer and elementalist this week.

:D

Thank you for the quick and forward response! Can’t wait to see it!

Mark Katzbach.9084:

We will not be able to cram the last four into this friday’s skill bar. The segment for this week has already been edited and finalized, but the following skill bar has not yet been recorded, and there’s not enough time to record and edit the final segment to fit it into this friday.

Any hint on which will be discussed this Friday then?

unlucky.9285:

sick of thieves trying to justify the ini system by saying other classes can cast more skills per minute then they can. it means nothing

I can press 2 and hit you with a hard hitting skill
you can press 2 and hit me with a hard hitting skill
I cant press 2 but I can cast this weak aoe field
you can press 2 and hit me with a hard hitting skill
I still cant press 2 but I can cast this slow moving projectile blind
you can press 2 and hit me with a hard hitting skill
I can swap weapons and press 2 and hit you with a hard hitting skill
you can press 2 and hit me with a hard hitting skill
I cant press 2 but I can cast a boon rip that does low damage
you can press 2 and hit me with a hard hitting skill

you get the picture? now take cast times into account and it gets even worse.

I think I’ll expand on this one, but since I play more than just thief, I’ll refer to my additional classes by what they are to avoid confusion.

My thief can press 2 and hit with a 1.0 multiplier (against A, B, &C) skill (since we’re just starting the fight)

My staff ele (A) build can cast lava font (3.2/4 hits multiplier)
My D/F ele (B) build can cast lightning aura (intant cast) and land lightning touch on the stunned thief
My Axe/Sh © warrior can Cyclone Axe (0.7 + vuln)

My thief (against A) presses 2 while getting hit by lava font and misses due to burning retreat
My thief (against B) is stunned
My thief (against C) presses 2 again for a pitiful amount of damage

My ele (A) attunes to earth and casts unsteady ground between himself and the thief
My ele (B) autoattacks with lightning whip and rolls backward
My warrior autoattacks

My Thief (against A) presses 2 and runs into the wall to be knocked down
My Thief (against B) stunbreaks
My Thief (against C) presses 2 again to deal less dps than the warrior auto chain

My ele (A) casts shockwave
My ele (B) casts gale
My warrior continues to autoattack

My thief (against A) is immobilized but presses 2 because we’re talking about the usefulness of repeating the same skill
My thief (against B) is knocked down
My thief (against C) presses 2 while losing the DPS race

My ele (A) casts eruption on top himself
My ele (B) attunes to fire and uses burning speed on the thief
My warrior finishes his auto chain which totals out at a 5.0 multiplier (1.5 on the last hit).

My thief (against A) decides that pressing 2 is getting him nowhere and steals to my ele, but is knocked down again upon crossing unsteady ground
My thief (against B) breaks stun again (shadow return)
My thief (against C) presses 2 again, my warrior is at about 2/3 health

My ele (A) attunes to water and puts an Ice spike over both of their heads
My ele (b) begins drakes breath
My warrior Shield bashes

My thief (against A) presses 2
My thief (against B) finally gets to press 2 again
My thief (against C) is stunned

My ele (A) casts geyser on top of eruption
My ele (B) finishes casting Drakes breath (thief will be downed from burning at this point if no condi clears)
My warrior eviscerates, rolls a 20, and the thief is down

My thief (against A) presses 2
My thief (against B) presses 2
My thief (against C) sulks in his downstate

My ele (A) casts Frozen ground while the thief eats the eruption and ice spike and the ele begins to heal to full from the geyser + blast finisher
My ele (B) casts flamewall on himself/thief, casts fireshield (instant cast), attunes to earth gaining protection and casts magnetic wave (instant cast) gaining might from his firefield and crippling the thief
My warrior © autoattacks the downed thief

My thief presses 2 expending the last of his initiative
My thief presses 2 missing the ele who dodge rolls along flamewall gaing more might from the earth evasive arcana
My thief presses alt F4

My ele (A) attunes to air and places a static field over my thief
My ele (B) attunes to water, and hits frozen burst putting him at (conservatively) 12 stacks of might (from the blast finishers and sigil of battle swaps) and chilling the thief
My warrior shrugs and runs to meet up with his comrades

My thief (against A) realizes he can’t down the ele by pressing 2 and runs away with shadowstep
My thief (against B) begins to run away at -66% speed having already used Shadowstep and shadow return

My ele (A) swaps back to fire and continues to nuke the point/wall with meteor shower
My ele (B) switches to air and begins autoattacking till the thief succumbs to direct and burning damage
My warrior begins telling his friends over TS about the 222 spamming thief who just attacked him

You need to get more creative with these scenarios

Razer Orbweaver (great for eles as well)

1-5= Various targeting and random options (tab targeting, stow weapons, interact/loot, etc.)
6-10= 6,7,8,9,0
11-15=1,2,3,4,5 (resting finger position row)
16-20=F1, F2, F3, F4, weapon swap
Joystick=Up, down, left, right (WASD, strafing only)
Button Below Joystick=Call target
Button Above Joystick=Select called target

Mouse for jump, dodge, camera

mompen.7952:

“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” – Stephen Hawking

I think S/D thieves are going to get more QQ after this change because of the higher evasion uptime. With a full bar of base initiative, you could chain 3 of these together now, so it’s probably going to lead to an increased aftercast down the road. Regardless of whether thieves see this as a buff or nerf, non-thieves are going to see FS>FS>FS instead of FS>Some attack(because honestly it seems most people don’t recognize thief animations)>FS>some attack. We’ll just see more perma-evasion threads in the class balance subforum.

http://dulfy.net/2014/08/08/gw2-ready-up-upcoming-warrior-and-thief-class-changes/

@Jake:

I found the video I want to link originally. This entire video is tips and tricks for playing S/P+Staff Shatter mes. You’ll be interested in about 2:50 onward. Again, credit goes to BAMF Joe.