Question is as tittle poses. From what I’ve seen around the forums the dev’s have several balance changes in mind. But do you folks think we’ll have to wait a whole month for any balance changes?
Personally I feel as if the meta has been stale since that 4x D/D Cele team won ESL. Would really like to see at least one balancing patch between now and HoT.
Normally I’m one to think that the “thief is terrible” QQ I see on the forums is pretty exaggerated. But holy cow this skill seems super un-fun to play against. That 900 radius is just ridiculous. And the 30/20s cd doesn’t make it any better.
Even if this skill doesn’t make it into the meta (which I doubt it will in PvP). Pairing up against the few folks who occasionally choose to use it will be absolutely terrible. Any comp with 2+ thieves is already pretty sub-optimal. With this skill released any 2+ thief comp against a team with an engi’s is going to lead to a extremely annoying match.
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Not wanting to delve into other points mentioned. But I feel like this bullet point:
“why is p/p #3’s damage comparable to shortbow #2, despite the same range and p/p #3 costing an extra 2 initiative?”
Has the obvious answer of projectile speed.
I’ve thought of courtyard as a necessary evil.
If we didn’t have courtyard, everybody and their mother would be asking for a team deathmatch mode. Likely thinking how smart they are for suggesting such an obvious feature/map.
But now we do have it, and now nearly nobody wants it.
1. Give the thief the mesmer’s greatsword, including all animations and effects.
2. Potent Poison: Healing reduction of poisons increased to 66%, poison damage increased by 20%.
If it’s any bit reassuring: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/so-how-do-you-kill-ele/first#post5445425 (In case you haven’t seen it already).
0 – Anyone who’s hard focusing me, since I do no damage while dead.
1 – Thief
2 – Ranger
3 – Mesmer
4 – Guardian (Assuming DPS/Burn)
—-
Following really depends on who’s used what defenses, but if I had too…
5 – Ele
6 – Engi
7 – Warrior
8 – Necro
9 – Guardian (Assuming Bunker)
Feel like it’s too early to comment on Revenant.
Only feel like explaining #1 & #2. In a teamfight, if you don’t focus the enemy thief and he/she focuses you’ll quickly find yourself in the situation I described in #0. Similarly just letting the enemy thief live gives them free reign to burst down allies. On the other hand bursting down the enemy thief should be easy in a teamfight, unless they stealth for long periods of time just to avoid you – but this isn’t really a bad situation for you considering that you’ve just rendered the enemy thief useless. Same goes for ranger, in a teamfight you can’t afford to have a ranger hitting you down with Rapid Fire and Point Blank Shot for free. While on the other hand, with only one invuln they’re pretty easy to kill if you go for them.
Yea I definitely think thief is a high skillcap/floor class. Making mistakes. Missing Steal, double casting BP (Only happens really due to lag/input buffering with CC’s), or missing c&d are usually fatal for a thief. D/P and S/D are more forgiving as far as weaponsets go.
Also in agreement with the whole idea of assassins normally being weak/somewhat subpar. Kinda hard to balance a class designed around killing key targets quickly. On the other hand though there’s the idea that a thief should have more options than just an assassin build-wise. Which I think might not be being fulfilled to the maximum potential (Also think that might not be true for most classes though).
Also, I agree with Red’s comments about most classes and particularly so on the guardian. Guardian I think is a class that should only really be fought 1v1 if you have reason to believe they might have a few cooldowns down. Like if they just came from a fight or if you just caught them after one. Engi is also a matchup I personally have trouble with. I still think it’s possible to win a fight against them if you can manage to get off an initial burst. But otherwise it’s becomes increasingly in their favor as the fight progresses (The lack of initiative on the CS build I run might be the reason I feel this way though). Their heal on the other hand is actually pretty bad if you manage to dodge the knockdown (Animation is pretty long before the turret deploys). Also like I said earlier I think the role of the thief has drifted away from duels aswell. Not quite sure when I’d pin the shift for the class on though.
Thief’s could be better at 1v1’ing than any other class. But if thief was buffed to the point where it was better at 1v1’ing than any other class then as compensation it’d have to be nerfed in other area’s.
What you folks are discussing is the idea of an archetype. In your mind the “thief” or thieves in general should be a class/profession that excel at 1v1’s or duels (Talking about the idea of a thief both in and out of Guild Wars here). I agree that archetype-wise a thief should be somewhat good at 1v1 fights. But the duelist role/archetype/fantasy fuel is filled by the role of the mesmer. In my eyes mesmer’s are the class that are archetype-wise designed to fill the role of a duelist (They even have a trait line named dueling).
Conceptually/archetype wise I don’t think the thief should be the master of 1v1’s. I think they should be good at assassinating as thieves are commonly related to assassins (In my mind at least. Dunno in Fire Emblem thieves become assassins). I also think they should be good at laying heavy condition’s/poisons. The latter role isn’t really filled in my opinion. But the whole idea of a thief as an assassin is relatively met – at least for me.
Again though, the thief shouldn’t be better in 1v1’s than any other class in my book. If any class had to have that tittle it should be mesmers (Because again, they’re the duelist class with a duelist traitline. Not thieves).
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The thief 1v1 is (hopefully) a 50/50 matchup. But yea I do agree that it can be a lot of fun.
Also regarding mesmers. It is largely a toin coss on who hits who first. But I want to add to that by noting how important contesting is in the mesmer matchup. Literally just wildly flailing autos can swing the fight in your favor. Of course guessing where’d they go after they stealthed would be a better alternative. I feel like a simple “where would I go if I just stealthed from there” goes a long way. Esp since as a class with a lot of access to stealth we have experience to make these predictions better (Same goes for thief v. thief).
Agree with the necro analysis too. I think another thing that has to be considered for 1v1’s is that realistically in an actual fight both you and you’re opponent may have some cooldowns down. Sometimes it’s not really a matter of who’s better or not. Sometimes the deciding factor of a fight can be that one of you may have, for one reason or another, just used up one of your utilities in an prior to the fight.
Also, @Ebony. I’m considering a relatively high skill level for all classes here. Like I said I practice in dueling rooms. So I’m not making my observations from a few fights with several mechanical mistakes. But that aside I’m having a hard time following your reasoning here. You say a good {insert class here} will wait and save their burst/CC/condi’s for until after I’ve used up all my stunbreaks/dodges/condi clears. I say sure a good player will be aware of my defensive utilities – just as I am aware of theirs. But, that being said, why would I waste all my defensive utilities when they’re saving all their burst/CC/condi’s?
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So lemme preface this by saying that: I’m someone who goes to dueling rooms a lot. I’m not the best thief in the world. And most of the statements I’m about to make are from the perspective of a CS d/p thief (For those of you who haven’t run a CS build. Relative to the meta SA build I have: ~1.3x more dps, much less initative, much less condi clear/stealth, and generally speaking much less sustain).
So then, I’ve noticed that many folks seem to think thief is, for the lack of a better word, trash when it comes to PvP. Particularly in the aspect that thieves are seemingly incapable of 1v1’ing any other class. I wanted to throw in my thoughts on this topic as someone who practices 1v1’ing a decent amount.
First off though, talking about 1v1’s in general. Personally I think that half the time, irregardless of class, you shouldn’t be going for 1v1’s. A rule of thumb I’ve heard is that if it takes you more than 15-20 seconds to down someone you’re better off going elsewhere (In a 20s fight you recoup half of your lost points by stomping your enemy, and then break even if you hold the point for more than 10s). Realistically this makes sense. If the enemy team has an ele who’s capped and holding far, you don’t want your ele going far to 1v1’ing the enemy ele for the 2-3 minutes minimum those 1v1’s normally take to finish (With no guarantee that your ele ends up the victor). That’s 2-3 minutes where the enemy team would be gaining free points for holding, and 2-3 minutes for another person to come by, +1, and make the once 1v1 a 2v1. But these sorts of events aren’t exclusive to thieves only, they can happen for all classes.
Warrior
In my opinion, the thief actually has a very good advantage in the matchup against warriors. BP -> Whirling Axe can be casted on reaction reaction against Bladetrail/Rush to deal heavy damage for free to the warrior. Endure pain is easily kiteable for its duration. Same goes for rampage unless you get knocked down early without a stunbreak. Shadowstep can stunbreak the first of any stuns/knockdowns a warrior has, and then Shadow Return will render any knockdown/stun the warrior manages to land thereafter for the next 10 seconds useless (Which is a pretty big deal considering most of the warriors knockdown’s/stuns are done consecutively/within a short period of time of each other). Lastly, off-meta rifle or longbow builds are easily countered by Whirling Axe (With longbow requiring axe to be used at a point blank range, and rifle at a medium/far range). Overall I’d say that the warrior-thief matchup averages around 7/3 in favor of the thief. At least for pre-berserker warrior that is. But that is just my rating. Dunno, how would you folks rate the matchup against warriors?
Ranger
Ranger is a class I feel is either 6/4 in favor of the thief or 7/3 in favor of the ranger depending on who gets the first hit. Healing Seed gives condi clear and leap/blast heal finishers that work pretty well against the ranger and off-meta condi rangers. Signet of stone can be easily stalled for it’s duration with either SR or Shadowstep. And the momentum loss from taunt (Assuming you didn’t have a stunbreak for it) is only really gamechanging if the ranger managed to get in the first hit/burst. I also feel like it’s pretty easy to guess/dodge a trap ranger’s traps, but I run Signet of Agility so I’m likely biased here.
Ele
The 1v1 matchup for DD Cele ele’s. DD Marauder ele’s I feel are perfectly capable of being 1v1’d by a thief. Ride the Lightning is highly choreographed and can be easily dodged. Burning speed is easy to outmaneuver if you haven’t been playing super aggressive/in their face. And Ice Shard Stab is good whenever they’ve rotated out of water or into air/fire. Staff/scepter ele’s are also definitely 1v1’able with thieves. For builds other than DD Cele I’d say the matchup is pretty even if not slightly in the thief’s favor.
Guardian
For DPS and Burn guards I’d say the matchup is 8/2 & 7/3 in the guardians favor respectively. These classes certainly deal a large about of burst damage. But they are also very squishy once their defenses are down. The biggest problem with these classes is that you usually have to steal to get momentum to lower their hp to the point where they’ll have to use Renewed Focus. But at the same time you need to save your steal to interrupt Renewed Focus, or else they’ll retain momentum from finishing it. These classes are certainly still killable though since they’re so squishy.
I could go on with engis, necros, and mesmers. I feel like those matchups are similar to the rangers to where getting the first hit/burst is important. But I’d rather not make this wall of text any bigger and save those discussions for another thread/later. Still, I guess at the end of the day I wanted to say that, in my opinion, a lot of these matchups are do-able? I see a lot of thief class weakness complaints but not a lot of matchup specific discussion. Curious what classes ya’ll feel have the worst matchup, and what matchups you feel the thief is strong at.
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I think you made a mistake in your build. You’re running trickster without any tricks. Unless you’re running it for the flanking strikes proc that is…
Oh didn’t know that included health. Thanks.
So I just noticed my health went from ~16k to ~15k since the last patch. I double checked all my items and they’re the same. Stat bonus are the same too. So I guess that means my base health got nerfed?
Anyone else experience/notice this? To give the exact numbers my hp went from 16,255 (I memorized it because of the 255, don’t judge me >_<) to 15,335 (what my hp currently reads as).
If you go to the pvp browser (Big norn with a quaggan next to it) then you can find some rooms named 1v1 dueling or something like that. Those are good for practicing combos, learning matchups, and finding others that’ll likely help you learn the class.
I don’t think many folks think it’s bad, it’s just hard to play around and combo field since the area is so small.
Maybe if throw gunk did something like the following: “Initial target becomes Slimed (5s), and leaves behind a trail of gunk while moving.” That way if you hit someone it’s very easy to actually get the combo field off (And more than one condi from the gunk). Also gives players a reason to dodge the gunk.
I’m normally the guy that says he likes to 1v1 and that practicing in dueling rooms is a great way to learn matchups. But I gotta say, the necro’s are a class you should really avoid, and only go for in teamfight situations.
First off, in an actual fight it’s not enough to just down a class. You have to be able to stomp them. A downed dps necro (Which is likely the only type of necro you’ll be able to down solo in a timely manner) can easily hit for 5k or even 7k health from life leech alone. Meaning that not only do you have to win fight, but you have to win by a large margin/save resources for stomping or risk getting downed after. The downed mirror match heavily favors the necro. So much so that unless the necro is below 20% hp when downed he’ll likely be able to beat a freshly downed thief.
Even if you do manage to down them Death Shroud makes it very likely that the fight will take too long to be worth the investment. Generally speaking if that necro already has the point it’s not worth fighting on since you won’t be getting the decap anytime soon. Plus the longer the fight goes on the more likely the necro will get friends over and then you’ll be in a 1v2 situation or worse. The only redeeming factor to fighting necro’s is that they have no invulns/stealth/mobility. So you can get a lot of mileage out of just using your basic autos.
Learning the timing for Death Shroud’s Life Blast and the Lich’s Deathly Claws should help a bit. Both of those skills make a loud sound when cast and are fired at very noticeable intervals so they’re somewhat easy to dodge. If you see a necro using plague form switch to ranged and kite him, plague form has no gapclosers/mobility so it’s pretty easy to kite.
If implemented, a dps guardian would easily override the burning stacks an ele or burn guard could apply. Not supported. We did away with this mechanic before for reasons above.
A better solution would be to just reduce the stacking ratio of burn. But re-implementing a condi cap after we just removed one doesn’t make sense.
Same, a lot of losses lately with a lot of odd teammates (Read as: afk).
Worst part is that it all started with a warrior that announced in map chat that he was going to afk b/c we had two eles… Like a bad omen or somthing.
Also steel has a point. None of the players I’m getting matched with are new/f2p. I am definately not getting matched with the folks I normally do though (I get matched with the same people often enough that I can normally recognize at least one name per game. If not two or more).
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Interesting point. I would hope that it’s 5 unless you’ve traited into the elite spec in which case I could see it being 6.
In the end though speculating isn’t going to accomplish much though since we’ll be able to find out for sure in four days… Unless a dev wants to come in and clarify this before then that is (Would save the players a lot of random trials to try and notice the difference between 16.7% and 20%).
I don’t see how adding a 1.1 damage multiplier to the already weak condi spec’s of a thief is strong. If anything it’d bring it to baseline at best.
Perplexity runes don’t exist in pvp, I think the idea of using them in WvW/PvE is cool though (Same feelings extend towards trapper runes).
Still think the idea of having potent poison give 50/66% healing reduction to poisons would be an interesting one. Would give the thief a very interesting niche to fill.
I could see changing the damage multiplier on poison from 10% -> 25%. Problem with stacking poisons is that they get their main dps from denying heals. Upping the dps multiplier for those willing to trait into poison over improvisation seems fair.
I don’t think there’s a single player out there that thinks Dagger Training is strong. I’ve tried really hard to make it work myself, but it’s just completely outclassed by Mug.
Edit: Actually just had a thought. What if instead of upping the damage multiplier for poisons, they dropped the damage multiplier altogether and upped the heal reduction? Something like a 50% or 66% heal reduction would be interesting and quiet strong in the current PvP meta. An alternative would be to drop the duration multiplier and boost the current poison damage multiplier. That would make the trait more exclusive to condi-builds and boost the damage for folks using poison for PvE content.
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Those duels by Kronos were very nice. I think he might use the same camera/movement setup I do. That is, moving the camera by holding mouse two down and walking forward by holding both down, using side mouse buttons for side movement. It’s good since it frees up your left hand for skills, but bad because it doesn’t let you walk backwards (I don’t think I saw him walking backwards at all).
Toker also has a stream if you didn’t already know it. I think he’s been active lately: http://www.twitch.tv/magictoker
I don’t think it takes a full project lifecycle to change the number of fire stacks from 3 to 2 or 1. It is should be more than feasible to do balance changes before they become obsolete (Esp. because the meta is going to get stale anyway without balance changes).
I don’t like this change. Lowers the number of available comps and really does nothing but hide class balancing issues. If 4/5 eles are the best comp at the moment then limiting the number of possible ele’s to 3 isn’t going to fix the fact that ele’s are broken. It’s just going to encourage teams that ran 4 ele comps to now run 3 ele comps.
I definitely got the whole “each trait is rated individually” vibe from reading the SoT. Not sure how much I agree with that approach. Personally I feel like it makes more sense to rate traits considering the entire traitline, and more importantly the traits that trait is competing with in the same tier. Since realistically that’s the scenario a player is going to be in when he/she chooses his/her traits. Like for instance Bewildering Ambush gets a mark for the mere fact that you have to choose it over Sleight of Hand. Similarly, like others have said in this thread, I would give most Acro traits marks for the mere fact that you have to spec into Acro for them (Because realistically a player has to choose to spec Acro over SA/DA/CS/Trick before he/she can use any traits in Acro).
Also just my opinion. But I felt those ratings were pretty void of PvP considerations. I suppose you pooled a wide mass of players so there must have been some PvP input in there. But that is just my opinion nonetheless (I suggested the whole splitting PvE/WvW/PvP thing after the first SoT for this reason).
All it takes is for one person to shout “HEY DEV WHY DO YOU SUCK” to
wreck the whole thing.Get banned from the chat.
The guild leader of [Teef] is pretty chill, I think he’d be able to moderate the discussion. It’d be cool if Karl showed up for some class discussion, but at the same time I could imagine him being busy with other things. Probably would be more likely to happen if you folks tried to schedule it around when he’d be available, assuming he’s interested that is. Not sure if you’ve already sent him a PM or whatnot, but that’d probably be a good way to figure out if he is.
Just wondering if anyone else experiences this. In PvP, sometimes whenever I kill an opponent while a downed ally is nearby, my ally doesn’t rally. It occurs very rarely, although I’m certain I’ve had it happen a few times even when my ally was very close to the killed opponent.
Can say from experience that warriors can crit from 9k/10k on cleaves if they trait for it.
DA gives a +10% damage increase too from exposed weakness. So I wouldn’t really recommend dropping that. For more competitive play I would honestly recommend dropping Crit Strikes for SA, and dropping executioner for improvisation. Although that’s a much harder build to use properly than Crit Strikes (Gotta really know how to use stolen skills and also account for possible improvisation procs).
As a Crit/DA/Trick user myself I’d say the build is heavily focused around +1’ing. More so than regular SA/DA/Trick thieves as you’ve opted for extra damage in an attempt to finish fights faster/with a higher rate of success. It also likes to try and 1v1 a bit more than a regular SA thief since the added damage can help end fights that’d be too prolonged with a regular SA thief’s damage output. As far as condi’s go however I’d definitely say the build is lacking in condi clear, but not so much that you should be getting wrecked by it. I think learning how to use the sb offensively and avoid unnecessary condi’s that you can helps in that area. Tbh, I dunno how to properly describe the matchup against condi’s, since I feel like I don’t really have too much trouble against them myself. You should be going in and out of fights often enough to where they can’t really stack condi’s on you for a sustained period of time. If they burst apply multiple condi’s on you then you have shadowstep and if they burst stack a single condi on you then you have Signet of Agility. It also helps that a lot of condi-applying classes can be pretty squishy if you manage to hit them at the right time during their rotations.
I think a bigger reason why people run SA over CS is the stealth on rev/steal, stealth duration, and initiative gain. Honestly with CS sometimes you can be starved for initiative if you’ve been fighting for even a moderate period of time. Also if you screw up with a CS build then you’re much more likely dead than if you screw up with a SA build (lack of initiative, lack of stealth duration, and lack of condi clear are all contributing factors to this).
Dunno, I suppose you can run SA/Crit/Trick if it suits your playstyle. But personally I prefer running CS with executioner and exposed weakness to “double down” in your investments (I guess, using the same way of thinking earlier, not running DA gives you a -30% decrease in dps against enemies under 50% that have at least one condition applied to them).
Edit: Also I wanna say I agree with what naphack has to say. I was just pointing out the fury as it is particularly relevant when choosing to run the CS traitline or not.
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Thing is you take a damage hit by not running trickery. Lead attacks gives a 1-15% damage increase based on initiative. Last time I did the math running crit strikes gives a slightly greater than ~1.3x damage multiplication on targets over 50% hp vs not running crit strikes. That damage multiplication drops to 1.2x once your targets gets below 50% (Again, 1.2x relative to a build not running crit strikes. At this point executioner can kick in, but executioner would kick in even if you weren’t running crit strikes). Assuming you average around 8 initiative while fighting, that means running crit strikes only gives a ~1.22x/1.12x damage multiplication compared to running trickery.
Now you have to ask yourself, is a ~1.22x/1.12x damage multiplier worth not running Trickery? Well what do you lose from not running trickery? You don’t get 10s of fury/swiftness on steal. That swiftness synergies pretty well with the pack runes you’ve chosen to run. Crit strikes itself doesn’t really offer a good way to access fury despite it’s reliance on it (By the looks of it now you’re relying on your opponent being at 90%+ hp for unrelenting strikes to proc or pack runes to give you fury). And of course you don’t get the +3 initiative overall, +2 initiative on steal, or 35% cdr on steal.
The last one is the biggest deal here. You’ve already traited to mug, apply poison, and stealth for 3s on steal. Lowering the cd on steal as you know gives you all of those things you’ve already traited for more often. The biggest benefit to running trickery isn’t just all the things it offers on steal. It’s the fact that it offers all those things PLUS makes it to where you can get them more often.
Anywho, as a personal verdict I’d say that it isn’t worth running CS over Trick. The dealbreaker being that you lose the 10s of fury on steal that Trick offers. While CS really benefits from having fury, and running it isn’t worth it unless you know you’ll have a 100% fury uptime. That being said you’re good to go if you get a pack rune proc, but imo that’s too unreliable to justify running crit strikes. Personally I’m a crit strikes thief myself, but I drop SA instead of trickery for it (Also swap out BP for Signet of Agility, since I don’t clear condi’s on stealth).
I don’t see why they shouldn’t. Dagger training is ridiculously weak right now and making it apply on any dagger toss would make it slightly better (Still unviable mind you, but better at the very least).
I think Dagger training needs a duration and/or proc chance increase, plus it should apply to thrown daggers as well.
That’s all they had to do before with heartseeker and bp though. It’s still possible to stealth multiple times using the same smoke field. You just have to be more careful about it. Like aiming so there isn’t anyone in your leap path. Or aiming from the edge of bp out so you won’t hit anyone in the middle of the bp. Leap finisher’s aren’t particularly picky, just have to barely graze the field anywhere in your leap and you’ll get the stealth.
Honestly if the new thief can sustain on points then not running sb could definitely be viable.
Also the reveal on hit thing is something we’ve had to deal with in heartseeker. Dodging in SR will be a bigger problem though. Assuming that the build needs stealth that is.
sb is actually very good for frontlining in PvP. With SoM you’ll heal per pulse of sb 4 (You get five ticks in total including the first hit). Plus with Lotus Training you get a whirl finisher on dodge, so when you dodge in your poison fields you can get caltrops + poison bolts + thrown daggers that bleed/torment/cripple.
I feel like burning needs to be tuned down a bit. But more so other condi’s need to be brought up to at least half it’s level. Only condi that compares to burning right now is confusion.
If this is a thing I’d say get it on vid, submit a bug report, and it should get fixed shortly.
Best thing to do would probably be d/p 3 a few times on a dummy, show damage logs. Then have an Ele/Thief or Guardian burst might on you, repeat the same steps above, and then post a bug report if the damage hasn’t changed.
Problem with that would be that sometimes you actually aren’t ready at the start of a fight. Like you see that you were thrown in courtyard or have a bad comp and want to swap chars/respec or something.
What wolfey said would work as well. I dunno, realistically speaking I’d like to think people wouldn’t ready up and then afk some ~500 times just to earn a title. I mean you can’t do other stuff when the match is going on. And you can’t exactly grind PvP matches while afk’ing.
How come?
If you’re willing to say something is a bad idea you might as well say why. Just saying something is a bad idea isn’t very useful.
I mean yeah. People complain about how nobody uses ready up. This would get more people to use it, and then we might get more matches where everybody on both team’s actually Ready’s Up.
Hardly going to break anything if it gets implemented.
Because why not.
Small achievement at 15. Medium at 500. Large at 1000.
Maybe at 500, give the tittle minuteman or something.
Also, since I don’t want to make another thread for this. Right now if you check the “mute GW2 when tabbed out” box you still can hear the match found horn when tabbed, but can’t hear the “hold onto your points, seize theirs” or “the match starts soon” announcements when tabbed. Would be nice if we could hear those announcements too when tabbed.
Not really sure if you would call it a counter, but the warrior/thief 1v1 matchup is highly in favor of the thief in my opinion. Thing is though is that in the time it takes a thief to go through all of a warrior’s invulns + rampage you’d have wasted too much time for it to be worth it or a warrior could get a friend by then.
If we’re talking about Conquest, a thief should never engage anyone in 1v1 but thieves and mesmers.
Again, never said they should. Just that they win the matchup against warriors if they do.
I disagree with the whole idea of “never engage in 1v1’s” anywho. But that’s a discussion for a different thread (Would put it closer to 90% of the time myself).
It’s just for the way thieves play (Largely +1’ing and decapping) you don’t really want to have two of them. It’s something great to have at one, but not so great at two (It’s not end of the world bad either, but just far from optimal).
A lot of thieves I see are more than willing to swap from a two thief comp. I personally don’t swap because at the moment I only play one character that’s a thief (Although, if we have two thieves and someone wants a swap then I swap out my build to one not designed for +1’ng and decaping).
Not really sure if you would call it a counter, but the warrior/thief 1v1 matchup is highly in favor of the thief in my opinion. Thing is though is that in the time it takes a thief to go through all of a warrior’s invulns + rampage you’d have wasted too much time for it to be worth it or a warrior could get a friend by then.
I agree with the nerfs too. Although iirc didn’t both of them get nerfed? Or was it really just fire.
I think some people run sigils of blood now as an alternative. I still run both air and fire personally.
Ye, drop cele for Marauder. That’s probably why you’re having such bad results. Thief gains little to nothing from the toughness/healing/condi of cele. Most classes that run cele anywho compensate for the low stats by their ability to stack might.
Also some more advice for that build in particular. Keep in mind that you clear condi’s and gain initiative in stealth. So if you’re stacked with conditions use steal (you’re traited to stealth on steal), black powder → heartseeker, blinding powder, or shadow refuge to clear your condi’s. You can also quickly use shadow step/shadow return to clear three conditions if you need to (Good against burst condi appliers). Also try to prod your enemies/get free hits in by using the sb. Not a lot of classes can heavily apply condi’s from afar. If you can force your opponent to swap to a ranged weapon by using sb, you can swap to d/p and quickly gapclose for an advantage. Honestly the meta d/p thief has enough condi clear to where it shouldn’t have a problem against burn guardians. But if you want even more condi clear you can equip a sigil of generosity on your sb.
Also against mesmers/engies/warriors keep in mind that Shadowstep functions as two stunbreaks. One on cast and one on return. You’ll want to get good at stunbreaking the instant you get dazed, snared, or knocked down. Most people follow up their stuns with burst, so you’ll gain a lot from stunbreaking as soon as possible (Mesmer’s in particular are traited to deal extra damage to you if you’re stunned/holding still. So if you get stunned by a mesmer you better be expecting a burst followup). Also try save shadow return for as long as possible so that you might be able to break another stun with it. Most classes that bring hard cc bring more than one, so you’ll want to save shadow return for as long as possible in case they use another hard cc on you.
Last suggestion I’d have is to not contest invulns. If you see a ranger’s who’s proc’d signet of stone, warrior who’s using endure pain, mesmer’s that has distortion, or engy that went mini then don’t fight them and try to disengage until it runs out. Black powder → Heartseeker x3 if you have to. Only invuln you can contest is a guardian’s meditation, since thrill of the crime let’s you daze through the stability.
1v1’s for a thief aren’t nearly bad enough to where it’s sound advice to run from and avoid every 1v1 scenario possible. Thieves can get a lot of momentum from unexpected initial bursts, in actual fights your opponents skills and stunbreaks can be on cd, and generally speaking there will be times where it’s better to try and 1v1 for 15-20 seconds rather than trying to force yourself to go for +1’s that aren’t there. Ye it might be your team’s fault if the optimal things for you to do at a given moment aren’t what your role is optimized for. But at the end of the day you’ll still have to do those things if you want to win.
You should post your build. Can’t really give a good answer without knowing that.
For #2 though I want to say that it helps to save your stunbreaks, if you run any, for until you actually get stunned/knocked down. Also try to contest stealth. Stealth doesn’t make you invulnerable. Landing a few hits off onto someone when they’re stealthed will help swing the match in your favor. Also, if you’re willing to, it’s good to practice 1v1’ing against those builds you’re having trouble with in dueling rooms.
Just tested it and I could proc basilisk (Managed to get it on my first try actually). I know for a fact you can use it on elites. I used to run Improvision + Thieves Guild as a cheese.
I would give revealed training 3s of stability on reveal (possibly keeping the 200 power). This is a trait that existed before the big trait change so I could see it coming back. Still won’t beat out panic strike for many builds, but on the other hand will help a lot of the non-meta builds that run revealed training.
Also I think most folks that use concealed defeat use it for the 20% cdr on deceptions. Agree that bp on down would be better, not sure about the F rating though.