They could have easily implemented an interrupt on to fix the stomping issue since blinding powder already works that way.
Well we did get nerfed so people are a little touchy right now. While you may have noticed that our base intitiative regen got buffed (if you read the notes), all of our initiative regen traits were nerfed. S/X got a pretty decent nerf it the form a cast time addition to it making it very clunky to use. While a lot of people are saying that they buffed S/P’s pistol whip all they really did was fix what they broke when they changed how stun duration rounded. They reduced access to thief vigor as well meaning that thieves have actually necieved a nerf to survivability across the board through evasion. LS on S/D was nerfed a couple of months ago so it can’t make it through boon bunkers anymore. What’s left is increasing your suvivability through armor and and trinkets which doesn’t scale well with power thieves as we lack the cc to draw out fights or tip the tables to our advantage. That leaves condition damage which only requires one offensive stat. D/D condition builds only deal damage with bleeds on 1 attack while P/D has access to bleeds, immobilzation and torment while also applying vulnerability (cover condition) contantly in order to apply more bleeds making it the superior choice. They also gave us a healing venom and venoms synergize well with condition sets (better than power at least) so people could just be trying it out.
Tl; Dr: Popular thief builds got nerfed. People are using what’s left over.
Having played multiple classes, I don’t think thieves have the worst defense by a long shot. I think we have one of the best defenses.
What? I thought all 5 of your alts were thieves.
lol
Not to derail this thread that was supposed to be about IR too much more, but I don’t understand why you’d want a thief skelk venom over an engi with a healing turret. Healing turret (overcharge) provides 2520 base healing to allies + 650 from regen+ about 1200 more health if you blow it up in the water field it creates on a 460 radius. That’s about 4400 health on a 20 second cooldown (220ish HPS) and it cures conditions with no traits involved. Skale venom provides (for your teamates with VS, LV, and RV) 3225 from the kittens + 1625 from the leeching venoms which is about 4850 on a 36 second (traited) cooldown (134 HPS). It was a nice start in attempting to bring group utility to the thief, but it really needs a pretty drastic buff to start to compare with some similar skill other classes can bring.
These numbers were just for the group heal utility. Maybe they’ll buff it. All venoms really need a shorter CD base before I’ll consider taking them.
stop spreading misinformation nagymbear.
it is 5 initiative 3 for teleport and 2 for the return. there is no way to return without using infiltrators strike first.
As for “slotting stun breakers” what s/d thief doesn’t have shadow step/infiltrators signet set.. the only build that wouldn’t is s/d blind spam. (which uses stealth and shadow arts)a thief using just ONE round of IR stun break is like a warrior using skills 2 3 4 and maybe even 5 on their first weapon set…..
would a warrior do that? use 3 or 4 skills sacrificed to move a few hundred range away and drop 1 condi? i think not.
5 initiative for IR is alot. 5. thats 5/12 initiative for ONE move 200-600 range away. thats almost half of our attacks. using it 2x = 12 seconds to recover.
keep it in perspective nagymbear
First off, 1 initiative per second and 2 IRs are 10 seconds. And if a warrior uses all its weapon skills, you will totally not be on the same playing field 5 seconds later. Put that in perspective. Lets not play martyr here, nobody will be sad because thieves are cursed by this terrible plague called initiative system. And 200-600 range? Did they nerf range on IR? I thought it was up to 1200.
Initial jump range is 600. Return is 1200. Of course your opponent could just play smartly and walk the 600 units to where you ported from, negating the juke benefit of the ability entirely.
Such sneak!
Invis
Camoflage
Wow!
You’re going to get smokescreen and, dare I say it, P/P nerfed.
1) That is not hyperbole
“Not even close” is the hyperbole. That should have been obvious from context, but I’ll be painfully clear about this for you in the future.
2)Phase retreat exists so it’s not an imaginary situation.
Phase retreat is not a Thief skill. The imaginary situation that I was referencing, was the alternate reality where the developers implemented your suggestion. That did not happen. We only have pre-patch #2, and post-patch #2.
[…] not going to help your argument.
This is not a debate.
1) Fair enough
2) Mesmers use the same magic and have very similar mechanics. Simply because it is not a thief skill does not mean that the two aren’t comparable when looking at consistency within balance across the game. My point was that my suggestion was based on similar skills that already exist within the game which have not been changed and are not gamebreaking.
3) You contend that the change to sword was justified. I contend that it wasn’t (especially in the manner they did it). Debate follows as a cause of discussing your view of the matter.
2) Mesmer’s Staff 2 skill, Phase Retreat, has a 6 or 8 second cooldown depending on if the mesmer took the Staff CD reduction trait or not. Very different from thieves that could use their shadowstep/teleport 3 or 4 times back-to-back (depending on their initiative traits). Phase Retreat spawns a clone but it doesn’t cure a condition like the thief’s Sword 2. All things considered, even with the cast-time, Thief Sword 2 is still arguably quite good. Only difference is that some thieves don’t like that they can’t cheese spam their way out of stun moves now.
EVERY class has to deal with stuns in some form. Use a breaker or stop spamming dodge rolls and roll defensively… i.e. when you’re actually being attacked. If a move like Skull Crack is being telegraphed, instead of relying on a crutch like Sword 2, use your endurance tactically and save a dodge roll for when you’re in the warrior’s face. Sword 2 is meant to be a tool to control distance and assist sustainability by clearing a condition, not as a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for when you’re not paying attention to what your opponent is doing like you should be.
I still play my thief as a 0/30/30/0/10 P/P + D/D stealth backstabber. I never took the initiative traits or S/P or S/D to begin with. I rely on my quick reflexes to dodge slower attacks and gap control (like Shadowstep) to avoid faster attacks and deal damage at range if I’m fighting a meleer. I’m certainly not the best thief player ever (I’m much more experienced with my warrior and mesmer builds), but I certainly can at least put up a good fight. Personally, I didn’t really notice the changes for this patch because none of the changes really affected my build in the first place.
The difference is many of those classes have some form of stability or other mitigation. While stability is up the pkayer can tank theirvway through any number of chain stuns while the thief had to pay per stun. Also there was nothing stopping the opposing player from walking over to your cast point (only 600 units away) totally negating the skill’s utility as it did not actually break the stun, just moved you. If they wanted to improve counterplay they could have also displayed the return circle to the opponent like shadow step does. Had they also shortened the availability of the return, it would have also led to more counterplay as to maintain the return you’d have to port back to reset the return point more frequently, either taking pressure off your opponent or losing ground while capping a point.
I also play D/D thief and have since they removed the second steal from LS making it incapable of getting past the cover boons of a bunker. D/X has better burst and better wear down capabilities now through the buff to the poison on autoattack. S/X has lost a fair amount of its utility and it doesn’t have the burst to make up for it.
Doesn’t work because I kept my build pretty much to myself and it got nerfed anyways, probably because I killed or escaped exactly 1 Anet staff member in one single occasion in WvWvW and made him angry. Then a skill no one uses was nerfed.
So if you like something, not only do you need to keep it secret but you have to not use it at all.
what skill are you talking about? IR? But a ton of people uses that lol.
There’s a few but as for the more recent I’m referring to Shadow Trap.
I slotted shadow trap too in the 2 month period that it was good. We killed it. Sorry guys.
To be honest, that feels more like we’ve been dealt with by a used car salesman. They said they were going to nerf our skills by 50% so when they only nerfed it by 33% and 37.5% we felt like we got a deal. We still got handily nerfed.
That’s probably a frame of reference problem. Infinite vigor is a thing that’s bad for the game, and this was an attempt to deal with it. This “used car salesman” business is counter-productive.
If you want to complain, you should direct your laser at Guardians and (especially) Mesmers, who still have easy access to 100% Vigor uptime, and seem to have been completely overlooked with this pass.
I would rather not see other classes nerfed at this point as it makes the game more boring. Eles still also have access to permavigor within their adept tier which synergizes very well with their grandmaster trait as do guards (selfless daring) and mesmers (DE) now that I think about it. I want thief traits to synergize with each other better rather than taking away what other classes have. I actually think it should have been buffed also considering we don’t have the defensive boons the others have and even with 30% boon duration on the old base time, at best VR had about a 69% uptime, asuming you blew withdraw whenever it was off CD. (I know you might have gotten higher with SoM but you would have lost all the benefits of SoM by continually using the active)
1) That is not hyperbole
“Not even close” is the hyperbole. That should have been obvious from context, but I’ll be painfully clear about this for you in the future.
2)Phase retreat exists so it’s not an imaginary situation.
Phase retreat is not a Thief skill. The imaginary situation that I was referencing, was the alternate reality where the developers implemented your suggestion. That did not happen. We only have pre-patch #2, and post-patch #2.
[…] not going to help your argument.
This is not a debate.
1) Fair enough
2) Mesmers use the same magic and have very similar mechanics. Simply because it is not a thief skill does not mean that the two aren’t comparable when looking at consistency within balance across the game. My point was that my suggestion was based on similar skills that already exist within the game which have not been changed and are not gamebreaking.
3) You contend that the change to sword was justified. I contend that it wasn’t (especially in the manner they did it). Debate follows as a cause of discussing your view of the matter.
Not even close though as the stun lasts 3 seconds (more with sigils).
Nonsense. Your hyperbole is rejected. Being able to create space was a big advantage, even if it doesn’t break the stun or stuff the entire duration. You put nothing on cooldown, here. That’s a powerful counter.
Reducing the range or reducing the availability of the window (or both) would have allowed for counterplay without nerfing the evasive capability of the weapon.
I don’t care about imaginary situations. There are only two that exist in reality: Sword #2 pre-patch, and Sword #2 post-patch.
1) That is not hyperbole, that is the actual skill: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Skull_Crack
2)Phase retreat exists so it’s not an imaginary situation. It’s (now even more easily) traitable to a 6 second cool down. The old sword #2 actually had more counterplay as an enemy who knew how to fight you could fight on top of your original IS location only 600 units away whereas phase retreat teleports you directly away with no need to set up a location ahead of the fight.
Swap (the mesmer sword rollover skill) has less available uptime and has a true stunbreak on it and ia hardly OP. It’s what allows mesmers to stay in close combat in addition to their stunbreaks and other tricks.
Calling my arguments straw men and offering false dilemmas is not going to help your argument.
It was the change they made during the last bug fixing patch where they reference 0 damage skills now putting you in combat. I think they specifically mentioned tainted shackles in the bullet point.
Edit: see October 15th general balance part of the patch
(edited by Maugetarr.6823)
I mean, they did reverse the Trickster / Flanking Strikes change.
You can’t say they changed nothing at all when they actually did.
They also rolled back some of the Vigor duration nerf. The original drop was 50% to both BT and VR.
To be honest, that feels more like we’ve been dealt with by a used car salesman. They said they were going to nerf our skills by 50% so when they only nerfed it by 33% and 37.5% we felt like we got a deal. We still got handily nerfed.
When we mentioned that dancing dagger was not matching the stated duration they also fixed the tooltip for us. . .
It’s not so much collaborative development as it is “hey, we’re going to do this. Don’t make ascended versions of this weapon if you don’t like it.” At least we’re getting fair warnings now.
When did they nerf Backstab? The rest of what you said is correct, but that never happened to my knowledge
Probably meant Assassins Signet which was pretty much used for backstabs.
Since they keep pushing venomshare I thought I would give an Idea to change it slightly and perhaps improve it. I don’t really care for venoms in their current for because staff necro and nade engis can produce most of if not more of the same condions with much shorter CDs and AoE effects. Right now venoms are too much one and done and are pretty lackluster if not traited heavily for. Some have suggested making them like mantras, but I’d rather not copy a buffing mechanic that already exists, instead I’d like them to be a single target debuff.
*This debuff would get applied to the opponent upon hitting them (block and dodges still work against it) and apply the current condition
*It would work like a warrior’s impale ability which is a non-condition debuff
*Venoms would get pulses on their target equal to the number of charges they currently (-1 since 1 was applied on hit) have and pulse every 3 seconds.
- Pulses would be capped at 10 of each type per target (to account for venom share).
*On the pulse they would apply the condition that they currently do on hit.
*Leeching venoms would activate on pulse as well.
In this way, thieves would have a unique mechanic in venoms and a single condi clear wouldn’t nullify all of your utilities. Thematically it would be like specialized toxins slowly wearing down their target. The only downside I can see to this is leeching venoms might not activate as quickly, but would act more like the new mesmer healsig (per venom). You also have the potential to miss the whole stack (since it’s applied as a single debuff) so it’s all or nothing (higher risk/reward suited well to thieves)
Change hard to catch to break stun and refill endurance so it might be close to on par with mirror of anguish(new 60s CD), reapers defense(new 60s CD), or tempest defense (new 25s CD).
The ability to teleport out of harm’s way while being stunned was wrong. You can still do that while being immobilized, just sayin.
Well gosh, they better nerf hard to catch then.
Well, agreed on that last point. I don’t see that sword offers any advantage D/X. S/P was never my cup of tea and the nerf to IR just makes sword less appealing overall. We’ll see what happens; maybe it’ll be another 4 seconds reveal where it seemed virtually all thieves disappeared from WvW because they became very awkward and non-fluid. Hope for a revert. I can’t see atm what they could possibly nerf anymore at least.
What I meant was if the split were to happen, then you could Whip>IS(to immobilize them)>flurry and hopefully land more hits, not cancel PW and then cast the full PW again(its current form). I meant it would be similar to a mesmer setup where they often use swap>blurred frenzy to make sure more of the hits land.
Upset with the nerf to vigorous recovery. I have 30% boon duration and can’t make it up to the old base value. It was nice that they rolled Quick recovery into our base regen, but I no longer see a reason to trait more than 15 into acrobatics. Opportunist nerf kept this an overall neutral change and just let me put 5 points somewhere else and rewards less aggressive play. Overall I think the nerfs exceeded the gains. I don’t want to go through changes to S/X as I already left that set; someone else still using it can cover those changes.
Well the way I see it going is interrupt this key ability, pocket the flurry then pop it an another key ability, or IS into them and then flurry (similar to a mesmer setup). I mean, if this works for you that’s great, but don’t prefer this playstyle (not bad or good, just doesn’t fit me).
Shadow return was wrong.
Until they split it (as they mentioned in the balance preview thread) I don’t think I’ll use it. I like front loaded evades that can be used in reaction to a key attack, and this just hopes to possibly evade key attacks due to the windup. Alright as an aggressive attack I guess, but I like using my weapon evades/blinds more defensively.
A stunbreak every 8 seconds then, huh? The juke would have only prevented 1 or 2 hits if they had reduced the range and would not have even broken the stun. Again this would have put it just on par with mesmers, hardly making us the unequivocal masters of shadowstepping.
A stunbreak every time you want to get out of being smashed in the face by Crack, yes. It’s not the only counter-measure, but it’s the one that most closely reflects what you want Sword #2 to do.
Evading the stun with Sword #2 is nearly as bad as just breaking it.
Not even close though as the stun lasts 3 seconds (more with sigils). Reducing the range or reducing the availability of the window (or both) would have allowed for counterplay without nerfing the evasive capability of the weapon. It’s not as if phase retreat or swap on mesmer weapon skills break counterplay. If fact the production of clones cause the hit to still occur using the warrior to lose the passive benefits of storing adrenaline. My point is that at worst the skill should have been brought in line with similar skills.
If you still try to play 10/30/0/30/0 S/D + SB then you may as well continue taking Vigorous Recovery, Pain Response, and Quick Recovery. Nothing has changed that makes other traits better.
Making good traits bad doesn’t make mediocre traits better.
actually venoms are trash.
Actually they aren’t. See I can do that, too.
Then you better follow up with your reasoning for that statement as he did after the single sentence you quoted.
As I mentioned and you ignored, the new skull crack has a high chance of interrupting this now.
And as I said, that’s what your stun-breaker is for. It’s nonsense for Sword #2 to negate this forever as long as initiative holds out. Why shouldn’t we have to burn a cooldown to get away from the Warrior profession mechanic?
A stunbreak every 8 seconds then, huh? The juke would have only prevented 1 or 2 hits if they had reduced the range and would not have even broken the stun. Again this would have put it just on par with mesmers, hardly making us the unequivocal masters of shadowstepping.
1)What is the skill for then if not escaping?
2)True 1/4 sec and instant stuns aren’t plentiful, but 1/2 sec stuns are common almost as dangerous and they can lead to even stronger CCs
3)Have you even tried using IR? Pre and post patch? Can you honestly say adding this cast time hasn’t truly removed a large chunk of its applications?2) Name one. Warriors have a 0.75s stun, which you should be able to avoid unless you are on dial-up and/or have slow reaction time. And if either of those things are true, use a proper stun-breaker.
As I mentioned and you ignored, the new skull crack has a high chance of interrupting this now.
There were many other suggestions as to how to increase counterplay without neutering the playstyle over the past month 2 of the most prominent of which were decreasing the return range and decreasing the available time of the rollover skill. This may have left the skill on par with mesmer staff and sword.
Sounds as though you could use some practice with strategic venom use and/or mixing and matching for situational uses.
Isn’t the point of vs to use it on the stack to give them to the most possible allies? That would seem to be counter to using them strategicslly because the situation that calls for their use and the situation where you can give them to a fair number of teamates will rarely coincide.
Hidden Killer trait received a buff to now deal 100% critical hit chance.
Executioner trait receive a buff to deal 20% more damage and increased the threshold to 50%.Wow!
Infusion of Shadows also received a buff that returns 2 Initiatives.
Why were these even included in the notes? So other classes think we got huge buffs?
As for the init. regen, I can tell its been buffed while spamming p/w in lions arch. We’ll have to see what its like in combat though.
Testing on targets you can’t crit on though? With the nerf to opportunist, pistol whip got a neutral change (at best)
But don’t you see?! You just poisoned like 6 guys, chilled like 4, and gained some life! That’s definitely worth giving up all of your utilities for 36 seconds!
(Only slightly less effective than untraited : http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Grenade_Kit; and for the cheap price of 60 trait points and all utilities!)
Venoms are “there”!!!
(edited by Maugetarr.6823)
Lulz, what on earth are you expecting to interrupt a 0.25 cast time on reaction? Are you fighting Jesus? It’s four times faster than HiS.
As in its much less effective to use it relatively. Lets use the new skullcrack as an example. By the time you include the time to recognize the animation, your time to react to it, and any associated latency along the way, skull crack will likely interrupt the cast time of this skill.
Your overall rate depended on a couple of things in combat, namely opportunist and quick recovery. Both of those received nerfs so if you had a high enough crit chance you might have seen a neutral or maybe even negative change.
Really happy that they stuck to their guns on the cheese specs. Underwhelmed by the initiative performance. Worse than was led to believe.
Really? Gosh! If only just one thief somewhere had mentioned how flat of a change and a cap on high crit thieves this was, you might have been expecting it.
yeah, dont get the point of your build.
Your neglecting most of your dps for a few boons and no real boost in survivability. You also trade your utility slots for a low healing power regeneration. Only useful aspect i can see of this build is near perm vigor up keep but the radius of that is worse then that of venom share and since it activates on steal, only people at melee range will benefit.Sorry i dont see how that build is at all helpful for party members.
With the exception of vigor, venom share provides everything this build offers but better, aswell as additional heals and more dps.
Well using the heal + stealing it has high might and fury uptime, and can steal and share + boons, and still has some cc with pistol offhand. It also has pretty high regen uptime along with high wall uptimes, but fair enough assessment as I wouldn’t play this or venomshare (both are not my style). If I wanted AoE condis and large group healing it would be with a grenade/bomb engi.
(The idea though is that it’s at least using things that are fairly unique to the thief rather than something another class could easily replicate with their weapon skills)
(edited by Maugetarr.6823)
@Maugetarr, what kind of build are you talking about? physical or condition.
Also i’d be interested in seeing this build and what it has to offer. I dont understand what your saying tbh.
Well, initially just thrown together, something like this:
Group might, fury, swiftness, and vigor every 21 seconds (their calculation for steal recharge is wrong) 3 stacks of group might on your heal (every 15 seconds). You give regen when you stealth teammates. You can blast finish your BPS and smokescreen for group stealth and SR gives initial healing, regen, and life-leech (through projectile finishers). This is just a base, modify as you see fit.
Used to run D/D with same trait lines. It does its job well. Traveler runes do work perfectly for it. That extra trait slot it gives in place of signet of shadows is very valuable in wvw. If my lyssa runes build fails horribly here odds are I’m going back to D/D haha
Oh yeah, forgot to mention that. Traveller runes are my go to now for classes when I can afford them.
Used to go S/D but changed to D/D 0/30/20/20/0 after the LS nerf. After tomorrow if all the changes proposed get implemented I’ll go 0/30/25/15/0 pick up shadows embrace + cloaked in shadow from SA. PVT head/coat/pants, zerk everything else. Haven’t played sPvP in a while so I can’t really comment on it.
I’m going to maintain that you would probably be more effective speccing deception skills and then traiting master of deception. It only takes 10 skill points, you get an awesome wall on a 24 second cooldown, an AoE healing+stealthing darkfield on a 48 second cooldown (which they recently buffed the lifeleech in), and your choice of a couple of other skills. If you go D/P + SB you could take shadow protector and give group stealth + regen.
I don’t see the point in investing heavily across multiple trait lines to become less effective than a staff necro without bringing unique mechanics.
I also have the same complaint which I mentioned in the balance patch preview thread (the general one in game discussion). Its really frustrating to use a skill that’s meant to be used for evasion purposes and not have it activate till after you’ve been hit and then usually activate twice since you double tapped it in an effort to dodge the incoming attack (that has sent me over the edge against the new fractal bosses). Evasion skills/dodges need to interrupt current actions (@glaphen: even the ranger auto attack semi leap. It’s stupid that that still roots you a year after release).
S/x has been pummeled to the floor, so that dynamic mobility playstyle is out the window. It’s backstabs or bust, looks like.
I don’t play enough S/D to be an expert on it, so I have a question: How critical is that pseudo-stunbreak on IR when fighting any class that isn’t a stun-spamming warrior? I know it’s always useful, but I wonder how often it’s flat-out necessary to compete in a one-vs-one?
It can’t really be used as a juke anymore in close combat. I believe the number they said for the cast time was going to be a total of 320 or 360 ms meaning that with included ping (mine was 21 ms as of last night) you probably don’t have the reaction time to use it to dodge a 1/2 second skill using it and have a pretty narrow window for a 3/4 second skill (although 3/4 is manageable) also with the cast time I suspect you’ll be able to dodge cancel it now and you won’t be able to cast it at the end of say pistol whip, to get you out of where it rooted you meaning you have to soak damage or rely on dodging. It really just changes the dynamic of S/X playstyles.
Edit: I played S/D for quite a while in WvW where CnD and TS weren’t nerfed like in SPvP. The set played really well using every ability on the bar, but after the 3rd fix/nerf to it’s functionality (LS) I saw the direction it was going and also went to D/D.
(edited by Maugetarr.6823)
D/D blind and condi remove in stealth. Don’t backstab until they’re at about 50% health and low on DS. I know it’s probably not what you want to hear, but ducking in and out of stealth + autoattacking is a great way to wear them down till you decide to burst. Necros run out of dodges pretty quickly.
There are a couple of necro nerfs coming in on stuff like weakening shroud and staff #2 (the bleedy one).
So no condi clear with only 13k hp is going to melt at the first zerg you run across. You might consider investing more in health than in armor. Regen from your team and slowed pulse is fine, but it’ll really only cancel a couple of bleeds out. as MyCondolences mentioned, Assassin’s reward is getting moved up, so you might take Pain response instead as it will get you past 1 necro burst so you can move from the front-middle-ish to the back of the zerg while it’s on CD.
Edit: Also if your reflexes /internet speed is up to it you might go P/D + SB, steal in and IA out to put a little more pressure on your opponents since P/P will be pretty weak from a condition standpoint.
(edited by Maugetarr.6823)
Didn’t even pick up on this when I read it…..
Reward active play by making Hard to Catch easier to get……
Making assassins reward more effective….
I.E. Making weapon evades more beneficial to spam…..That’ll definitely stop 3 spam, along with sword thieves not having an out on stun…..
The same sort of logic confused me when they nerfed the utility of S/D 3 instead of the damage. Instead of making thieves choose between utility attacks and damage, they made the damage redundant and the utility less effective so you had to spam 3 more to be effective……
As a warrior main, I agree that D/D thief no longer need nerf, in fact they could use a bit of buff. The P/D condition thief on the other hand, need serious nerfs: Almost perma stealth, almost perma blind, 3 k armor, ranged, ignore opponent armor, that’s just too much. I test it in PvP and have been murdering people without even trying.
Pro tip, condi thieves have been around forever.
As for your argument…
>Almost perma stealth
Same amount of stealth as d/d
>Almost perma Blind
A d/d thief can do this too
>ranged
Other classes can use ranged weapons, why is it op when a thief does it?
>Ignores armor
Again, this isn’t just a thief thing, all condi ignores armor.
>3k armor
Thank Anet for the introduction of dire gear, before it every condi thief ran carrion.So anyway, the reason why the number of condi thieves is on the rise is because post patch, mainhand sword and off hand pistol will be subpar. So we’re left with d/d and p/d.
Also, p/d set got 2 buffs a little while ago, making them a bit more effective.I have to disagree with your opinion about the blind and the ranged:
-P/D thief has more blind than DD, that’s obvious
-Do you realize that having an effective ranged build for a class that has high mobility and can stay invisible for a very long time is no different from giving them God mode ?
Since there is no real counter to stealth, they can easily keep the distance.
And if u manage to get close during their short period without stealth, they can blind you or just use their mobility to get away before keeping up their barely different from cheating routine.
Even if u somehow manage to catch and deal damage to them you will realize that they can take quite a few hit.
What even worse is that they have access to some sick conditions like torment (punish you heavily for trying to chase them ), poison (sry no healing allowed here ).
As mentioned above me, P/D is really only semi-ranged as they need to be in melee to stealth. I thought I would reiterate it. Dodge/block the CnD and they can’t do much against you. Their access to torment is also melee range.
Oh wow, why would you say that? What has happened since I’ve been gone!? I noticed that shortbow is now 900 range max for everything.
Tomorrows’ upcoming changes:
Passive regen boosted to 1 ini/sec vs .75 ini/sec (yay)
Opportunist nerfed (boo)
Vigorous Recovery nerfed (boo)
Quick Recovery nerfed (boo)
Bountiful Theft nerfed (boo)
Assassin’s Reward buffed, moved up to grandmaster trait (……yay?)
Hard to Catch moved to master trait (………)
Sword 2, added cast time on return (can no longer be used when stunned) (BOO)
Infusion of Shadow changed to only work upon entering stealth (no more chaining BPS) (needed-ish)And those are just the (proposed) changes coming tomorrow…
It’s been a long 5 months…. Welcome back (?)
dont forget the flanking strikes moving to master.
i am not sure, what the thief class will look in the future but it is being nerfed to the ground. i mean every other class can do better than what us.
ii only suggest:
daze on basilisk, more damage i guess. since the meta these days are pvt.more damage!
They mentioned not going through with the flanking strikes change which is why I didn’t mention it. They also said instead of nerfing our vigor access by 50% they were considering only nerfing it by 25% (Yay! …../sarcasm)
I never really relied on the perma stealth aspect of d/p. I enjoyed the versatility of bp. I’m gathering d/d is viable, what about s/d and s/p?
D/D (& D/P depending on your playstyle) is(are) going to be the most viable spec(s) after the patch. You weren’t here for the fixing of how stuns work either, so currently the stun from pistol whip wears off before the first hit from the flurry lands and the buff that FS/LS saw (don’t know if you were here for that) got changed to 1 boon steal on LS and LS got increased by 1 initiative (making the entire split skill cost 5 total and only steal 1 boon). I can’t remember when they changed what exactly, but Shadow return (on sword 2) is no longer a true stunbreak, and they fixed the range to match the tooltip. As it is, this will be further changed tomorrow to have a cast time as well.