Guild Wars 2

Let’s be clear, if the game offered the option of "rescuing a village that will stay rescued, then you would NEVER rescue that village. Someone else would have rescued it before you, and you would only be able to come upon it after the fact when it was safe and boring.

Hoarders for the win!

You’ll get one every day, it’s hardly a huge deal if you “waste” one of them.

Yeah, I didn’t used to use this one much, because it’s no real help in combat, but once I hit 80 and spent a lot of time just blind running from point to point and doing jumping puzzles, I started using this one (the Thief version that gives you stealth) most of the time, swapping it back in for Might only in areas where I intended to stop and fight against serious enemies. It really makes running around a lot easier when you can fall much further without dying, and also fall further without faceplanting.

I barely WvW at all, but I was able to knock out all 50 kills last Saturday afternoon. Just use a lot of AoEs in big melees. It can take a while sometimes, but it’s totally doable. I wouldn’t recommend trying to hunt down stragglers in one on one scenarios, just figure out an often contested fort on your side to camp at, preferable behind an arrow cart, or follow an assault team around and just drop AoEs on their enemies to. . . share in their victories.

Oh, and btw, I did this on the Borderlands of my server’s strongest enemy, the one that was crushing us. I think it’s actually easier to get kills in areas where you’re on your back foot, because the enemies come to you and expect to win. Maybe they will, but you can get a bunch of kills before they do, and then get a bunch more when your team retakes the position. Also when you die fighting over the base nearest your home portal, running back takes almost no time at all, compared to having to restart from the center fortress.

I do not PvP ever so will never get it so will just have to be happy with doing the daily.

There’s no real reason for this attitude. You don’t have to enjoy PvP, kitten, I don’t enjoy trying to find 15 different types of things every day, but I do it. In this game, if you can play PvE, you can do just fine in WvW, and yeah, you’ll probably die quite a bit, and sometimes that’s not fun, but you shouldn’t die way too much, but the waypoints are free and the profit margins on WvW are good enough that even after repairs you should come out ahead, so just chill out and do the work.

I’d thought it was on Halloween (the 31st), but now I hear they are saying it’s the 28th instead? Will we have to be playing on the 28th to see that, or does it stay active through the 31st? I have a party the 28th so if I’m able to log it on it’ll either be very early or very late in the day, certainly not during “prime time”.

Yeah, I’ll wait until the end of the event before transmuting it, but it’s good to hear that you can because it looks a lot better than my current “nothing” backpiece. I even shoved my level 20 Ele through that crypt to get one before the event ended.

Another thing you didn’t list was that there are these black and green doors that appear at various points on the map (all in Kryta, near as I can tell), that you can “open.” I’ve done this three times, one time an easy Candy Corn monster came out, one time it just dropped a small loot bag you could pick up, and another time it started an event where I had to fight off constantly spawning skeletons for about a minute or so. All these things drop Halloween loot.

Also, you can give candy corns to costumed kids in LA and they will give you loot bags in return. No clue if giving them larger amounts of candy gives larger rewards.

Ooooh! Can we please get Signet of the Hunt upgraded from the sad 10% speed buff to the lovely 25% buff that my Thief enjoys?

Ooooooooooh. Yeah, I got into here today. It’s weird though, because there’s this whole other thing that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. If you go into the Shark Pool, and swim away from the exit, there is a small hole in the rocks, just big enough to swim through. This puts you in another wide underwater cave, and you can dive down a couple hundred feet, then across for a bit, and then up again, but from there there doesn’t seem to be any exits. That whole area is under water, but doesn’t seem to go anywhere, have any enemies, or have any prizes. Odd.

Same here, blew three corns, she never showed up visibly, and while there was sometimes an “investigate” prompt on the ground, it only popped up a message telling me I wasn’t doing something right. I suspect part of the problem was the dozens of people in the area, especially since a costume brawl was happening right next to her.

They want you to buy keys, the drop rate will never increase. And chests have a decent chance of containing another key in them (not always mind you).

I had good luck in beta, opening several chest in a row off a single key, but I’ve had terrible luck since launch, no keys in any of the chest I opened, and I already burned through all the keys I have, getting mostly tonics and temp buffs.

I just hope that they increase the drop rate on the keys, because in almost two months of playing and across six characters I’ve accumulated about three dozen chests, but only a half-dozen keys.

that’s what i usually use it for, but when you want to get out of it and backstab, it wears out instantly, so what i do is switch to my pistol and fire, at least i didn’t waste a stealth attack.

I never really try for a stealth attack with it anyways. If I’m not healing from within the refuge, then what I typically do is either switch to the bow and start firing, or use Dancing Daggers. Since SR is a Dark Field, it procs Lifesteal, which can help with the healing.

at least on WvW, you see a big red AoE and the house/shack thing when an enemy pops one.

I’ve never seen that, but if true, that’s stupid and should be fixed. Put it in the suggestion box.

Some missions are designed to rely on having NPC backup. In these missions the encounters are balanced around you having one, two, sometimes ten or more NPC buddies running around with you to draw agro and chip in on damage. Without these NPCs around, the encounters are practically impossible for most builds. This is great, _when it works. _

The problem is that sometimes things go wrong and this stops working. Most often, the NPCs die or get lost to you somehow, and suddenly you have to face down a Champion boss or swarm of enemies with no back-up. There needs to be better redundancy on these sorts of things. I think most importantly, if you die and revive at a checkpoint, all your NPC buddies should revive with you, or at least have their corpses transported to the checkpoint so you can revive them. Also, any time a cutscene plays, your NPC buddies should be teleported to predetermined “safe zones” within the room, to ensure that they’re never locked out of an area.

My specific case here involves some minor non-story spoilers to the high level mission “Ossuary of Unquiet Dead,” so I’m spoiler tagging it:

other people on the other team dont see the house icon, or least I never have. This is also fantastic for getting commune points and rich veins in pve setups without having to fight champ mobs etc.

Yeah, if you’re on the opposing team you won’t see any graphics for Shadow Refuge at all, you’ll just see a bunch of people vanishing. Now, a smart player who’s paying close attention could probably figure out what happened in a mass PvP situation, but it’s better than nothing.

If you’re in a situation where your bleeds are getting overwritten then you aren’t really necessary to the situation anyways. They do need to fix the bleed caps and the way poison stacks though, and they’ve already claimed to be looking into those situations. In the meantime, I’m having a lot of fun.

Yeah it’s really more of a “Hide” than a “Stealth”. The best possible use of all that stealth is to heal people. If someone’s downed, drop a Refuge on them, get to Rezzing them, and you should have plenty of time to do so while being fully stealthed.

Just look at Dagger/Dagger…. Stacking Condition damage wastes Damage from your 1,2,3,4,5 and your stealth skill.

That’s why it works best for Thieves. With most classes you have cooldowns, so if you only proc conditions on your 1 and 3 attacks, you use those, and then are left twiddling your thumbs until they come off cooldown, or wasting time with non-condition attacks. With the Thief, you can spam whichever attacks benefit you most, so instead of having to wait five to ten seconds between Death Blossoms (which is likely what it would be as an Elementalist ability), you can spam it as fast as it can go until you run out of Initiative, refill and repeat, and while you’re tapped out you can just avoid the enemy.

I like Condition build. You can’t play it like a Power build though, you can’t just stand around trading blows, you need to be very mobile, laying damage and then rolling away and avoiding taking any yourself. It probably doesn’t work in PvP being condition negation is too easy, but in PvE it works great.

I still love my thief. If you don’t, and if WvW is your focus, you might want to try a support Thief build. Focus on healing and Power, use Shortbow to lay poison fields and throw cluster bombs, drop Shadow Refuge, traps, and blind/anti-range fields to defend your fellow players. That might give you something fun and beneficial to do in WvW.

When Guild Wars 2 came out I wanted to play a thief in PvP.

Sounds like you didn’t want to play a Thief in GW2 then, because you can’t do any of those things in GW2.

Those abilities you listed sounded like a lot of fun for thieves, a lot of nuisance for everyone else, including the devs.

If I were building to be primarily Shortbow, I wouldn’t go Condition. Since I’m mainly D/D though, with SB as my side weapon, the conditions it’s capable of are still quite good. It helps to have the traits that have bonus effects on poisons. I also have an Earth Sigil on it, which can proc bleeds off of regular crit attacks, and Spider Venom, which can drop poison doses via the auto-attack. Poison doesn’t stack for effect, but it does stack in duration, so applying multiple sources of Poison can be quite useful.

Are you using only 3? If you time your attacks correctly it’s very easy to predict the best moment to use 3, while doing damage with other attacks instead of always waiting.

Like I said, against one enemy 3 works fine, it’s boring, but it works. I was able to fight a single Thrall, time my blocks to catch his attacks, and by the time my counterattack finished he was ready to take another swing and I was able to block that, repeat about five or six times and he was dead. Against two enemies the second one’s attack lands the exact second that the first one is blocked, there’s nothing to be done about that.

And 5 works perfectly fine for me, I’ve defeated groups of 3 to 4 with it never receiving a hit. It evades everything while it’s up (that said, if you want to spam it, you must invest on initiative management, the good part of 3 over 5 is that you don’t need any ini. management).

That is completely out of synch with my experience. It’s like we’re playing two completely different games. I swear to you that I have taken hits right in the middle of a “5” sequence, as if I were just standing still and waiting for them. I was fighting Orrians in Malachor’s Leap, mostly Krait and Thralls. They were totally 100% landing hits on my during the middle of the 5 animation.

Ok, I definitely don’t like spear. If you’re only against one enemy, using 3 repeatedly works fine. Horribly dull, but fine. Against two enemies it’s worthless, because I block one and the other one hits me in the face, and by the time I get one of them down to 50% HP, I’m dead. 5 never works, it does so-so damage but leaves me completely vulnerable for several seconds. It claims to “evade” but it evades nothing.

I had this same issue. I was able to get past it by spamming F while running back and forth against the door, and presumably at some point it worked. It seems a bit similar to how melee attacks often don’t work against destructible objects when standing still, but do deal damage while running around it. I think the game gives you positional benefit of the doubt while in motion.

If there are too many of them (you can do well in a 1 vs 2 or even 3), you can always use the Speargun and swim in circles. Use some venoms if you want to add conditions to the mix (and I don’t get how the harpoon is low in conditions for the OP? It has bleeding, poison and cripple, terrestial sets doesn’t have more conditions than that).

The problem is, the poison attack is hard to hit with, because they basically have to choose to swim straight along the line you leave (if they ever get poisoned at all then they may get poisoned for 1-2 seconds), and the auto-attack adds bleeds far too slowly. They tend to wear off before you get a significant number rolling. I can apply tons more poison and bleeds using dual daggers than I can using harpoon. Death Blossom adds three stacks of 10s bleed to multiple targets at once, Piercing Shot adds only one stack of 4s bleed to one target (more if you can get them in a straight line, but that’s much harder to manage).

I can drop about 12 bleeds on an enemy within the first few seconds of combat, while Evading, but in the water it takes twice as long to max out at around 6-8 stacks. You can also use Venoms with Death Blossom or Dancing Dagger to effect tons of enemies with poison, while Harpoon has no solid AoEs to hit multiple enemies with a single attack.

That’s why I would prefer they change the poison into a spherical AoE, and give an additional Bleed effect.

As for Spear, I’ll give it a second chance, but I just wasn’t as lucky with it, and I suspect it’s because of the lack of Power. If more of the attacks generated Bleed effects it might be more viable with my stats.

Use a spear, spam 3 and 5. We are frankly incredibly OP in water, at least in pve.

Is that effective against multiple opponents and in a non-Power build? When I’ve used these abilities in the past, I always took a lot more damage than using ranged attacks, and did very little damage in return.

I love my Thief, on land. In the water though, I really hate my Thief. It just doesn’t seem to work for me. I’m condition specced, and the only condition I can seem to drop is with the harpoon auto and the backpedal move. I don’t like to use Spear because melee seems especially squishy in the water and for a Con build most of the attacks do very little damage (except that one where you block, that does ok damage, but not as much as I take trying to use it). Keep in mind that I’m talking PvE only here, I’m not worried about an sPvP build or anything.

The Deluge attack does decent damage, but since I’m condition-based it doesn’t do a ton of it, Escape sometimes works, but often enough doesn’t deal any damage because it seems really finicky whether the poison actually gets applied. When I have a lot of room, I find it easy enough to use ink shot to infini-kite enemies, firing it, crippling them, and then auto-attacking a bit before teleporting way behind them, and then turning around and repeating, but this tactic is useless when in an enclosed area, or one with too many enemies around to be teleporting all over the place.

I’m also hugely disappointed in the available underwater Utility abilities. I can’t use Ambush, I can’t use Shadow Refuge, I can’t use Thieves Guild (why the kitten not?), and I’m certainly not picking up Basilisk just to have something to put there.

I just feel really weak when my Thief is wet. Here are a few ideas I had:

1. Change Escape from being a “drag line” AoE poison, to being a PBAoE poison. You dash backwards, but leave a spherical cloud where you activate it, about the size of a Shortbow poison field. Maybe less, so long as it hits anything that was close to you when you active it, that’s fine by me.

2. Make Disabling Shot like the Ranger SB Crippling Shot, only without the pet. Make it so that the direct damage is lower, but that it applies 2-3 stacks of bleeding.

3. Allow Thieves’ Guild to work underwater, and maybe some underwater version of Needle Trap, like how a lot of the Engineer’s moves are adapted into floating mines and stuff.

Those are my suggestions, please list any that you think would help, as well as offer any suggestions as to things I may totally be missing.

That’s great to know (although at least some developers must have the ability to get any item they want, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to test the game properly).

Being able to summon an item just to test out a specific bug or whatever is a completely different thing then being able to summon items for your own characters personal use. The former is WORK, the developers probably don’t have any fun with that and there’s no reason whatsoever to insinuate that they don’t feel the same feelings as any normal player when it comes to what they do for FUN.

I searched the area for several minutes, checked back at where you first grab it, held ctrl to highlight interactables, etc. It either vanished completely or it fell under the world or something because it was nowhere to be found. Never had an enemy stuck in the terrain though, bummer there.

Anyways, I replayed the level (which was actually tricky because I couldn’t find any way to exit the zone short of logging out), and this time I “CTF ran” the orb to the appropriate pedestal before fighting the enemies in the area, just to make sure that didn’t happen again. I also managed the mission with fewer downings than the first time, but my Thief is just not cut out for underwater combat.

I got as far as the above-water portion of the mission (after numerous deaths because water battles suck), and beat the Necromancer and got the orb or whatever you get, which changes your moves. But then I had to fight some enemies, and when I used “Steal,” the orb power-up vanished. Without this, I could not unlock the door to the next area, which completely prevented me from continuing onwards. Please make the orbs into an actual object, rather than a weapon-replace that might flake out like this.

I find S/D is way more effective than S/P if you want to kill multiple mobs at the same time. For me, Dancing Dagger is better than Pistol whip.

First, it does decent dmg against up to 4 targets. It works best on 2 targets though because it bounces twice on each target (the best case happens with x2 3+k crit + 1.5k from lightning strike on each target at the same time).

Yeah, I didn’t use Dancing Dagger a lot until high levels, but it’s really great. It does awesome damage against two enemies, and also if you have Venoms up it can drop it on up to four enemies per use. In a purely selfish sense, it’s great for “tagging” a bunch of enemies in a mass battle event.

I’m Condition-built so it’s not my best primary attack, but I think it’d be devastating if I was power-overloaded and facing two opponents or more.

Maybe, if they decide to make the class stealthy, survivable and with actual DPS that doesn’t require a math major to discover how to make it work, I bring her out again. It’s a sad sad day.

Ok, play something else. Why should we care what class you play? I’ve played rogues in dozens of other games and the GW2 Thief is my absolute favorite one yet. If you don’t enjoy the class, that’s fine, there are seven others.

I would avoid backstabs in personal missions. Backstab thief is hard under even the best circumstances, and a one on one fight is the worst. If you’re going dagger/dagger, load up the conditions and run around in circles as he bleeds out a bit, then repeat. You want him bleeding while you’re healing. If you have a short bow, load up poison fields and cluster bombs, picking away.

In this mission, Tonn went out to set a bomb and I was told to stay with the detonator. After fighting off some Krait I was told to push the detonator and blow the charges, but I wanted to make sure that Tonn was ok, so I swam out and talked to him. He wasn’t anywhere near the explosion, only about 1/3 of the way to the ship, and was fine when I talked to him. I then went back and blew the detonator and he turned up dead. Why was he not safe where he was, and why could I not ask him to follow me back?

I lucked into Midnight Ice early with my thief and it looks awesome, but of course it only works with a cool pallet so the highlights are shades of teal. Midnight Rust is also a decent mahogany brown that works well on my Ranger.

Part of the problem is inconsistency, that colors that look great on leathers or cloth might look horrid on scale, even within armor sets there are inconsistency, like Midnight Ice looks like a shiny dark teal on the leather jacket, but pretty much solid black on the Anonymity Hood.

If they want us to not spam the 1 attack as much then the not-1 moved need to be on shorter timers. Beh, I guess there are other weapons that a Ranger can use, but it’s a real bummer that the Ranger class won’t be able to use Shortbows anymore and still be effective. You’d think if they would get one weapon combo right with Ranger, it would be the bow.

The whole point of Dungeon armour was that you get rewarded for putting your effort into it, not that you bartered some currency in one form or another from other players to achieve it.

The whole idea of this is that you’d have to put in the same effort regardless. This would in no way cheapen effort. All it would do is give you options. If, for example, you really wanted one dungeon’s armor set, but didn’t want to grind at that single dungeon dozens of times, you could instead run each dungeon a couple of times, and then convert all those different tokens into the ones for the gear you want. Or maybe you really enjoy one dungeon, but don’t care for the gear type it offers. This would allow you to run the dungeon that you enjoy, and get the reward that you want for it.

You’d still have to do the same amount of work, you would just get to choose which job you wanted to do that work at.

it would also give players the ability to “manipulate” the market as some more-skilled/more-organized players can go for the harder dungeons and set prices at a much higher rate than others.

I don’t see how players could significantly manipulate the market. It’s supply and demand. If only a few players are running a given dungeon and offering the tokens on the market then the prices of those would go up, as they should. If a ton of people are farming a given dungeon and flooding the market with tokens for it, then the price would fall, as they should. How would you alter that dynamic in an artificial manner?

Recently Robert Hrouda noted that ANet did not want to have universal dungeon tokens (which could be spent on any dungeon gear you wanted rather than being specific to a single dungeon), in part because this would lead to players farming the easiest possible dungeon to farm, rather than working on the more difficult ones. I think I have a way to temper that player reaction.

I’m going to make a suggestion that would be ridiculous if you guys weren’t already halfway there. Have a player-based token exchange system. Do it like the gold/gems exchange mechanism, but for dungeon tokens. Make it so that if a player has a bunch of tokens from dungeon X, and they need a bunch of tokens from dungeon Y, they can trade them in via the BLTC. But since, as you point out, people might find ways to grind some dungeons easier than others, there would be a commodity exchange rate, such that the tokens that are in easy supply would swamp the exchange, and tokens that nobody went for would be more rare, and therefore the exchange rate would skew towards those.

So that way, if Dungeon X was ground like mad and people were dumping thousands of those tokens onto the market, while Dungeon Y was very hard and almost nobody was offering tokens, then you might need to chip in dozens of X tokens to get any Y tokens. This would discourage people from grinding Dungeon X, since while it might be faster the tokens they received would be of lesser value, while they would be encouraged to work Dungeon Y, since despite the time and difficulty involved, the return on the tokens would be worth the costs.

Not only would this give players a lot more flexibility and allow them to offload tokens that they don’t need, but it would also give ANet good feedback as to which dungeons are easiest to grind, and which tokens are less desirable to the community.

The main problem we see with a universal token system, is that players will find the easiest dungeons they can do within the DR system’s influence range, and just do them over and over.

I’m going to make a suggestion that would be ridiculous if you guys weren’t already halfway there. Have a player-based token exchange system. Do it like the gold/gems exchange mechanism, but for dungeon tokens. Make it so that if a player has a bunch of tokens from dungeon X, and they need a bunch of tokens from dungeon Y, they can trade them via the BLTC. But since, as you point out, people might find ways to grind some dungeons easier than others, there would be a commodity exchange rate, such that the tokens that are in easy supply would swamp the exchange, and tokens that nobody went for would be more rare, and therefore the exchange rate would skew towards those.

So that way, if Dungeon X was ground like mad and people were dumping thousands of those tokens onto the market, while Dungeon Y was very hard and almost nobody was offering tokens, then you might need to chip in dozens of X tokens to get any Y tokens.

Not only would this give player a lot more flexibility and allow them to offload tokens that they don’t need, but it would also give you good feedback as to which dungeons are easiest to grind, and which tokens are less desirable to the community.

Btw, the wiki didn’t have any damage listed for the Mug trait, so I tested it in the Mists area, and it seemed to do around 1300 damage to Heavy Golems, 2000 to Light, which was slightly higher than doing a backstab from the front side, or doing the final hit of the auto-attack combo.

Oh, and btw, about progression, I listed my level 80 build, but of course I didn’t start there. From 1-40, I built myself to be 10 Trickery, 10 Acro, and 10 Deadly, in that order. Then when I hit 40 I dumped 20 into Acro and 10 into Trickery, then put the next 10 into Trickery, then the next 10 into Deadly. The Deadly abilities are cool, but I found the mobility and Initiative from the other trees to be more vital. Then once I hit 60 I dumped 25 into Acro, 20 into Trickery, 5 into Deadly, and then from 60-80 I dumped the rest of my points into Deadly.

People may disagree, but I just didn’t find Trickery’s “+1% damage per ini” to be useful since I typically have minimal ini levels during combat, and none of the Grandmaster slotted skills seemed incredible to me, while the Acro and Deadly Grandmaster passives mean that if I dodge into combat and use DB on an enemy, every subsequent hit does 20% more damage (hopefully, not 100% sure that’s been tested to stack).

Oh, and one other passing mention, Ambush. This was my goto skill for quite a while, because it’s just so very cool. I switched to Spider Venom because I think the added Condition damage is worth it on my build, but Ambush is highly useful. It drops a “line” field that if any enemy touches it, a buddy thief will spawn next to you. This guy is great, he does decent damage, distracts enemies to split agro, the trick is to drop it directly on top of an enemy, rather than to try and “lure” them onto it.

@Ohoni Thanks for your reply. I don’t think I have trouble killing stuff but I do die a bit even though I can kill stuff 2-3 levels above me (or was last night at least) I do run out of initiative but I think it because of using death blossum a tad too much.

I am not very good at running around in circles killing stuff to avoid hits either, it’s not my forte hence I don’t do a lot of PvP and haven’t done in any MMO I have played in last 10-15 yrs.

Ok, well then let’s see what your options are. If you die too much, you could raise your defensive stats, but in my limited experience with that, even a maxed defense thief is no heavy tank, so it isn’t worth it, but anyone who has more experience with that might disagree. I think the best defense for Thieves is dodging, and several traits in Acro, and elsewhere, are great for upping your dodge options, making sure it’s almost always available. Some people use dodge only as an escape from big hits, going “wait for it, wait for it, DODGE!” right before the attack lands. You can try this, but with an Dagger Acro Thief it isn’t really necessary, you can just dodge whenever and wherever, avoiding attacks you don’t even see coming. I think mobility is very important for thieves. Other builds, as I understand, make good use of shadow steps and teleports to move around, but I think the important part is to not be where the enemy is hitting.

You don’t need to constantly circle the target like with some classes. I find it most effective to just keep flipping over their heads, switching back and forth, maybe backing up a bit as I go. I used to have the trait that dropped Caltrops when I did this, but I don’t know, it didn’t seem to do as much damage or land as reliably as I liked (did look cool though).

As for Initiative management, you’ll never have enough, you’ll always run out at some point, but there are a lot of ways to make it better. In my build, I get +3 to my maximum from Trickery, which usually means a bonus Death Blossom at the start. I also get a +2 per 10 seconds from the Master-trait in Acro. Then when I’m on empty and need to take another shot, the adept trait from Trickery gives me 3 ini when I steal. I honestly almost never used steal from 1-40 or so, but once I started picking up a bunch of traits that kitted it out, I use it constantly. I just double-tap f1 to dump whatever effect it has and then do another DB.

If I’m really desperate, I use Roll for Initiative, which givekitten more to use, but I tend to leave it alone, because it’s best use is defensively. Any time you get locked down, knocked down, can’t get away, the enemy is going to seriously punish you for that if you let them. Roll is the get out of jail free card, canceling the CC effect and launching you out of the way. It’s your eject button from a bad situation. Refuse and Roll never leave my bar.

I really like having Shadow Refuge as a back-up heal, and keep in mind that not only does it stealth you (shedding agro), and give you some regen, but it also is a dark field, meaning if you start chucking Dancing Daggers (or other “projectile” attacks), it leeches additional life from the target.

If I’m in a fight and it’s going well, I take no real damage at all. If I do take more than 30-40% damage, I pop the heal and stealth, then re-engage. If I take 30-40% damage again and the heal isn’t back up yet, I drop Shadow Refuge, and either camp it out, or use Dancing daggers to re-enter the fight a bit (this doesn’t usually heal me to full, but it does take the edge off and slow the enemies down a bit). If I’m really feeling pressured, I drop the Thieves Guild, which tend to draw off agro until I can heal. If you’re really pressed don’t feel too bad about hiding behind terrain to avoid damage. Don’t forget that stealthing can drop agro from you if you’re a decent distance from where the enemy comes from.

Ok, I compared maps to the wiki and found my missing points. They were The Serpent Wind in Metrica, Aurora’s Remains in Brisban, and both Cubular Falls and Magmatic Conjury in Maelstrom, none of which are needed to get 100% map completion on those maps.

Would love any opinions people may have and whether I should change my traits to different trees or change my skills.

Well, I think the real question is, what are you doing wrong? What I mean is, what problems are you having that you think need to work better? Do you die too often? Do you take too long to kill things? Can you not complete various content that you think you should? Do you run out of Initiative too often? Which moves would you like to use (balance aside)? There are lots of different ways to build a Thief, so “fixing” it for you means knowing which way you’d like to build it.

Thieves Guild is my favorite elite in the game, it crushes Daggerstorm in all ways.

Anyways, I’ve gone a bit against conventional wisdom and am playing a Condtion build. I run DD/Shortbow, 25 / 0 / 0 /25 /20 Active Traits are Dagger Training /Mug, Power of Inertia/Quick Recovery, and Thrill of the Crime/Bountiful Theft.

Utilities are Spider Venom, Roll for Initiative, Shadow Refuge, and Thieves Guild, with the default heal.

The basic play for it is to bounce around the scene like a jumping bean. I dodge twice on the way in (my Endurance regen is fine for this, by the time I get close a third Dodge will be ready), which build Might stacks and lowers my endurance, which ups my damage. Then I DB as many enemies as I can hit, as many times as I can (usually three non-stop, then a cycle of 111, then another).

When I need more Initiative, I Steal, which Poisons the target, Weakens him (because he’s poisoned), does direct damage, gives me three initiative, gives me and my allies ten seconds of Might, Fury, Swiftness, Vigor, and potentially random buffs the enemy has, and I’m ready to go. Note that you can get all those buffs by stealing even without an enemy around (which means ten seconds of Swiftness every thirty seconds or so outside of combat), except for the Vigor, which requires that you hit an enemy. Also keep in mind that the passive Swiftness buff from Acro stacks with this one for time, so if you Dodge continuously you can keep it up for about 20 seconds straight (10+2+2. . .2. . . . .2. . . . +2).

I dodge as often as possible, and there is very little time spent in a battle where I’m not either mid-Dodge or mid-DB. Remember that all the Might stacks buff the bleed and poison ticks considerably.

Roll is great for when I get stuck, or just need some extra Initiative. Shadow Refuge is great for when nearby people fall, or just to get some healing in when the main heal is down.

I almost never use Heart Seeker or Cloak and Dagger, but I do use Dancing Dagger when enemies are at a distance and grouped up. It is actually a quite devastating move when there are only two enemies, as it bounces between them hitting each twice.

I switch to bow for those giant clusterkitten events where you don’t want to get anywhere near the enemy, and I just drop poison fields and MIRV strikes. When I’m just traveling or doing jump puzzles, I swap Shadow Signet in for the Venom, and Power of Inertia for Descent of Shadows to take the edge off the fall damage. It’s saved my life more than once and makes travel a lot less scary.

Overall I find it a very useful build. I contribute well to events, and almost never die in combat

Are some of these needed locations not also on the list for each individual zone? I decided to go for the Maguuma one yesterday because I was fairly close, but ended up with only 161/165 after getting 100% on every necessary map. Are there just some points that aren’t needed for map completion but are needed for the achievement, or did they add a few points to places like Metrica or Brisban, which I haven’t really been in much since launch week?

It would be great if there was a button in the main UI (say, to the right of the elite skill slot) that I could click on to change my major traits out of combat. It could expand and have tooltips similarly to how you select slot skills.

Yeah, what I’d definitely like to see is to be able to “set” alternate decks of traits and Utilities that you can swap to as easy as hitting a key when not in combat. Like for example on my thief I want to have the movement buff utility and the fall damage trait when doing jump puzzles or traveling, but when in serious combat mode I want to swap those out for poison and +Might on dodge , and that’s always more hassle than it really needs to be.

Still, it’s a testament to how good this game is that we complain about such petty little concerns.

Considering there are a number of traits that encourage swapping pets, it seems extremely silly to me that one of the big traits actively discourages it. And the response is simply to “not use it”? Shouldn’t the response, instead, be to make it actually synergize with the rest of the trait tree?

I don’t mind too much that it discourages swapping, in the sense that it acts as a gambler, “do you want the buff, or do you want to swap,” there’s a fair mechanic there. It’s that the system penalizes you for forced swapping, like whenever you touch water, that makes the ability too finicky to use. My Thief stacks Condition based on kills, same mechanic, but it lasts the entire time I’m in the zone, even if I take a swim, and I can’t imagine bothering with it if it didn’t.

I also think it’s probably not positioned in the best tree, given that most of the other options in the tree encourage switching. It would probably be best put in one of the non-pet focused trees.

I do agree with Robert in the sense that “doctor, it hurts when I move my arm like this!” “well don’t move your arm like that.” Ok, fair cop, it’s good advice from one player to another as to how you should adapt to the system, and for now I too would suggest that you just never use that ability, but I do think ANew should do something on their end to make it more worthwhile, and maybe it never will be worth using inside Dungeons, maybe that won’t be what it’s for, not all abilities should be ideal for Dungeons, but it does need a better purpose than it currently has.

AI needs to DIE. Especially on fights like Giganticus – during Phase one we were nicely stacked together, but dumbo AI decided to go play traditional Main Tank, and had grubs spawn on her/him. Was really irritating that the AI was considered a “player” even though you have NO control over them.

True. The balance is that if enemies ignore him while he’s still capable of attacking, then you could cheese mobs that way. Perhaps the solution is to make it so that NPCs can attack mobs, but mos are immune to their damage, and do not agro on them in turn, until players start attacking that monster, so it essentially ignores the NPC until then, at which point they are allowed to contribute.

From my experience, not all traits are useful in all situations and areas. Finding the right ones that work well in respected areas is key to adaptation.

As it stands, the Master’s Bond trait is useful in pretty much no circumstances, since it not only resets on pet death, but also swapping, and even when you touch a bit of water. It doesn’t build up nearly fast enough to justify how quickly you can lose it all.