Guild Wars 2

Maaan… I just luv you guyzzz !

pukes

I was part of this guild (TAC) for a month or so while it was active. We were on Emhry Bay and was lots of fun. Knyx, who began it all, faded away from the game. All the TAC members I used to play with have joined different guilds now.

Good post and I tend to agree. I play a bunker thief and just now I was in a 1v1 with a bunker guardian while I was trying to cap a sentry point. After at least 5 minutes of back and forth we acknowledged that neither of use could beat the other and went our seperate ways. If I had been GC, I wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds.

I think that bunkers in WvW are underrated simply because they don’t have that flashy role that GC’s have. Secondly, while bunkers can be annoying because they live so long, I’m sure that it’s nowhere near as annoying as being burst down in a few seconds.

I logged in just to say well done. I hope that your post encourages more players to fight for their server in WvW (yes, I’m lazy).

Just been told that it’s a commander skill from the breakout event.

It would be nice if they could differentiate the graphic a bit to stop the confusion.

Still, any counters?

In WvW just now, there was what looked like a Shield of Absorbtion protecting some siege. However this shield persisted for the entirety of combat, which felt like over a minute. It prevented any projectiles from reaching the siege and their operators, and it also knocked you back when you came close.

As a result, a small force of two or three from Borlis Pass wielded godmode ballistas right outside our tower’s gate, which destroyed our larger counter force as we milled around the outside of the bubble unable to do anything.

Shield of Absorbtion is only supposed to last a few seconds, so…

Bug?
Exploit?
How to counter?

Cheers.

NP. It’s not hard to test. Find a dummy in the mists, turn auto attack off and count the bleeds after shooting it once.

Jayblah.4682:

Sarrow/Anyone,

How does one achieve a minimum of a 7-second Bleed tick with Pistol/Dagger? Can you list the bare minimum runes/gear/food required?

Thank you.

For pistol bleeds, every +25% will add one extra tick. At +100% condition/bleed duration you get four extra ticks, which takes pistol bleeds from four ticks to eight ticks.

To do this, in spvp you can do the following:
- Put points in Deadly Arts for up to 30% duration
- Use Sigils of Agony on your weapons (they are stackable) for up up to 20% duration
- Use a mix of Krait, Centaur and Afflicted armor runes for 45% duration

In WvW you can also use food (pizza) to buff you condition duration a further 40%

In my build I run with one Sigil of Agony (10%), the above armor runes (45%) and in WvW, a cheap 24% food buff. This brings me to slightly above 79% allowing 7-second bleeds on pistol with 4% wasted.

This is off the top of my head so sleight errors may be contained within.

As someone who mains thief and has since launch, I can say that HS is the one thing I agree needs changing.

While it is a very counterable skill for someone with the means, often HS is just too easy to use successfully. It kills noobs who can’t play, players with everything on CD and good players who simply got caught off-guard. While I think that all these players deserve to die, HS is still just too darn effective for the skill, time and initiative it takes to use. The damage, utility and effectiveness that HS brings far outweighs the three ini points and a single button press (or mash).

Glass thieves do need an effective execute, but HS in it’s current implementation still isn’t quite what it needs to be.

Giamonti.4186:

Yasha.5963:

nerva.7940:

Raytek.6193:

Blinding Powder: 3 second stealth 40 second CD
Cloak and Dagger: 3 second stealth, 6 initiative cost, requires melee range
Hide in Shadows: 3 second stealth, 30 second CD
Shadow Refuge: 10 second stealth, 60 second CD, requires the thief to sit inside it for the full 5 second duration

Which is these is OP again?

shadow refuge and CnD. thanks.

Far from a comprehensive list, here are some more to add:

Can also trait to add one second to stealth skills, trait to stealth on steal, can steal a stealth ability, can trait to stealth/blind when receiving more than 20% damage, HS through blackpowder (6 init-pistol skill) for free stealth, can use C&D on pets etc for stealth, heartseeker through smokescreen (30 sec cd) for stealth, shadow trap (30 sec CD), trait for stealth under 25% health (60 sec CD).

Oh look even more stealth skills, looks like you were lying you dumbkitten. Stop trying to justify a broken class more nerfs are on the way so be prepared to go back to your 1600 wow team

There are quite a few stealth skills, yes. The poster you are referring to mentioned the main ones however. But in a solid stealth build, you wouldn’t even take all these, only three:
Hide in Shadows – heal (30 sec CD)
Shadow Refuge – utility slot (60 sec CD)
Cloak and Dagger – weapon utility (6 ini)
Sure you could take more, but you would be gimping yourself.

On topic, stealth-based thieves are my favourite class to fight against. I love the cat and mouse game they play. It is a gameplay experience that you cannot get fighting any other class. Predicting their movement and getting to know each individuals’ playstyle during the fight makes for a battle of wits and attrition. Good mesmers offer similar gameplay. It’s a cerebral battle. You need to play smart.

So much more fun than playing ‘Kite the dumb warrior who thinks the best way to counter you is to keep running at you over and over again while crippled’

Neither link works for me :S

I do like the fact that trait lines make you think hard to bring together a great build. You really have to weigh up your options about what you can and can’t take. This is good because you won’t be able to fit everything you want in one build.

However this idea sometimes gets taken a bit too far. Having the +5% shortbow damage in the stealth/healing tree for example when SB has no intrinsic way to enter stealth is just stupid. It’s 20 points in too. Waste of a potentially useful trait as I don’t see anyone wasting 20 points for that. The deadly arts tree doesn’t do anything for me either.

I guess it’s good in theory, but needs tweaks. I know other professions feel the same way.

Yes, my tests a few months ago found the same: the cap is at 100% which allows an 8-tick bleed on pistol. For practical purposes, I’ve currently settled on a 7-tick bleed.

This thread made me laugh out loud. Lets also make all other classes abilities get interrupted on damage. This would make every damaging skill from every class double as an interrupt ability. It would be great. There would be no Zerg to speak of because everyone would be always interrupting each other. Combat would come down to who can get their spell off fastest and interrupt their opponent first.

kitten OP just needs to play a thief for 5 minutes in the mists to know that this is a ridiculous and completely untenable request.

Shortbow – ranged AoE + mobility
Pistol/Pistol – ranged single target DPS + utility
Pistol/Dagger – ranged single target kite
Dagger/Dagger – melee single target burst or melee AoE bleed
Dagger/Pistol – melee burst + utility
Sword/Dagger – melee burst/constant DPS control
Sword/Pistol – melee burst/constant DPS + utility

This is my take on what each weapon set should bring to the battlefield. Whether they successfully achieve that or not, you decide. Looking at this list, there seem to be a few options missing:

Ranged single target burst – rifle would fit nicely here. Perhaps P/P is intended to achieve this niche currently, however it’s more constant DPS at the moment. PP also doesn’t have much range to speak of and no solid way to create distance or kite bar utilities..

Melee mobility + utility – staff or fists would fit perfectly here. Idea is to have several ways to evade through clever movement while also being able to support your team through things such as blind, daze, creating fields, etc. A defensive weaponset built to last and support. Damage would be low or mostly condition with a few ways to access boons.

This just happened. Xer’s name’s Mournn and I play thief on Ehmry Bay.

Was stealthing in and out trying to down a Yak’s Bend treb. There was a hammer warrior and a few others trying to counter me. He knocks me back and then suddenly I die. My combat log shows I got hit by an enemy treb, so since there are trebs all over the place firing at our keep I think nothing of it, though I was surprised by how sudden it all happens since I didn’t see it go down. I put it down to lag.

I’m sitting there, staring at my corpse thinking this all through and also about how the hammer warrior’s probably laughing on team chat right now, when suddenly I start healing up. I looked around for a stealthed ally but there’s no one. I’m on the edge of a cliff pretty far removed from most of the melee so I’d be surprised if someone noticed me die, but I start healing up nonetheless as if I’m being ressed. I’m wondering what’s going to happen when I hit full health and when I do, I pop up like I’m legitimately ressed, my greyscale death screen is colourful again and I’m alive once more.

I type /shrug to the warrior, who hits me for six off the cliff and I die proper. Fair enough I think.

Confused.

This just happened. Xer’s name’s Mournn and I play thief on Ehmry Bay.

Was stealthing in and out trying to down a Yak’s Bend treb. There was a hammer warrior and a few others trying to counter me. He knocks me back and then suddenly I die. My combat log shows I got hit by an enemy treb, so since there are trebs all over the place firing at our keep I think nothing of it, though I was surprised by how sudden it all happens since I didn’t see it go down. I put it down to lag.

I’m sitting there, staring at my corpse thinking this all through and also about how the hammer warrior’s probably laughing on team chat right now, when suddenly I start healing up. I looked around for a stealthed ally but there’s no one. I’m on the edge of a cliff pretty far removed from most of the melee so I’d be surprised if someone noticed me die, but I start healing up nonetheless as if I’m being ressed. I’m wondering what’s going to happen when I hit full health and when I do, I pop up like I’m legitimately ressed, my greyscale death screen is colourful again and I’m alive once more.

I type /shrug to the warrior, who hits me off the cliff and I die proper. Fair enough I think.

Confused.

First up, I get where you’re coming from. It’s frustrating to constantly ‘almost’ kill a thief, only for the thief to get away. Multiply this frustration by the number of people chasing the thief and then square it by the number of people the thief downed along the way. However, as a thief player since launch I will also make a few other points:

1. Thieves must also blow cooldowns to escape. Shadow Refuge, Blinding Powder, Hide in Shadows are all skills with CDs. Even Infiltrator’s Arrow and Heartseeker have a CD based on your current inititive and how much you have specced into ini regen.

2. Thieves do not have a swiftness signet. Swiftness is one of the few boons thieves get, but only by dodge-rolling and then it only lasts for the very short time of 2 seconds. The signet you are talking about grants perma 25% movespeed. As a result, other classes such as engies or eles who can gain long duration swiftness often outmatch thief movespeed when ini is low. In fact I’ll be upfront here and say that there are ele builds that outright surpass the thief in terms of speed and escapability. Multiple dashes with low CDs, outstanding access to long-duration swiftness, AoE knockdowns – good D/D eles are mobile, scary and able to tackle/escape large groups when done right as you should know. Good eles troll me as well by constantly using lightning rush to get away with 10% health, only to switch to water and heal to full before reengaging. If thief had unsurpassed mobility with no CDs, this wouldn’t be so.

3. An interesting idea to make HS/Inf Arrow require a target. I can see this making sense with HS since it was clearly designed as a damage skill, but the non-damaging Inf Arrow was clearly designed specifically for mobility as a blind+escape mechanism. Also Inf Arrow shortcuts to accessible ledges wouldn’t work if it required target, changing thieves from great roamer to poor roamer.

4. Not all thieves can escape like this, just like not all eles can. Some very viable thief builds simply don’t use stealth. They are rare, but they are some players’ preference. Other players don’t use Shortbow as a weapon. However if a thief chooses to spend skillpoints to improve their escapability, I don’t see a problem with that. A bigger ini pool, faster ini regen, more stealth skills, longer stealth duration, more toughness etc etc… all this means means less damage for the thief.

5. At the end of the day, if a thief can’t be caught and killed the problem lies with you and your group. I’m not saying L2P OMG you can’t kill a single thief – I know how hard we can be to pin down – but if you let a thief troll 8 of you into chasing him, he’s wasting your time and benefiting his team, whether it be in WvW or SPvP. If you just keep driving the thief away, but otherwise ignore him, you will then be wasting HIS time and you will be benefiting your own team instead.

Finally,

The difference is that I can use a net turret to completely stop them while thieves can stealth so that it does nothing.

Wouldn’t a well-specced greatsword warrior just use a dash skill to break immobilize?

So in short I get your frustration. I feel it too in some matchups even playing a thief. However at the end of the day if a good player of whatever class trolls you into wasting your time in pvp, I’m sorry, but they’ve gotten the better of you.

I love how thieves can use skills over again if they choose. This brings alternative and interesting gameplay opportunities to pvp.

I love how thieves are so slippery. The 3sec stealth mechanic on such a squishy class works well because it rewards skillful play without giving the thief any sort of invulnerable ability, which would contradict the class type. Infultrator’s arrow also works here. Well done!

Although heartseeker can be countered, I feel that the effort/reward curve is too shallow. It’s just so easy to spam this ability because it deals decent damage and also tracks your target as they move. I suppose that it’s too spammable. Either raise the initiative cost to reduce spamming or drastically lower the damage at higher levels of HP.

Venoms skills in general are very lackluster. only spider venom and drake’s venom are worth taking at all. Venoms require full traiting to be useful in pvp, and even then they can be wasted by enemies blocking/dodging or moving behind an object. I realise that venom sharing is a powerful ability (potentially), but the sharing range is very small, resulting in inefficiency. In my opinion venoms would be more balanced of they provided greater power to the thief, but reduced (half) power to allies.

Most traps are useless in pvp. There’s no reason to get them as they only effect a single target, compared with ranger traps, which have a better shape. The thief trap and the teleport trap are good, niche abilities for certain builds (venom sharing and point defending/roaming), but the other traps need more power + area effect to be of any use.

Thieves need more variety in weapon sets. They get pigeon-holed into ‘spamming’ certain skills or skill rotations, but only because a few skills are viable within some of the wepaon sets. Take a condition damage build. DD – Dealth’s Blossom is your only damage skill. P/D – auto attack and cloak and dagger are you only damage skills. Power/crit builds would tend not to waste initiative on Death’s Blossom, limiting the thief’s arsenal.

DesertRose.2031:

For those damage numbers the target needs to have only around 1k armor, even a guy in full Berserker gear will only take up to around 15k damage.

Glass thieves and eles have around 10K hp. Nuff said.

shaolin.9716:

In my experience if you build your warrior to be able to global someone in a single HB then it means you built your warrior fully glass canon and he’ll be extremely fragile, and always in the open so you end up being globaled more than you global others.

Compared to other classes, warrior glasscannon is all cannon no glass. Over 2k armor and over 21k hp as glass?

Pffft…

Ah I see. Yeah I have fast cast ground targeting enabled as well – it was the fraps no cursor that tricked me. Thanks for the reply.

Loved the jump shots ports! Also when fighting the dagger thief and you ported onto the wall he was like wtf?….crap! As cluster bombs started raining down.

Nice video. If everyone used inf arrow like that though there would be more than a few tears. A matter of time I suppose.

Tell me, how do you inf arrow with such accuracy without maneuvering your cursor on your target? Whenever I try this I miss my intended target.

Practice?

Zauric.2981:

The fact that it is being mentioned over D/D LDB + caltrop spam is amusing in my eyes, as that applies the bleeds faster and as an aoe, and actually has a point presence due to not relying on stealth.

I’ll also add that the bleeds inflicted by Death’s Blossom are twice as long than pistol bleeds (4.5 seconds vs almost 10 seconds I believe, though feel free to correct me with the exact numbers)

Also, people have expressed how they feel the pistol auto attack is overpowered. Lets break it down with your typical low power, 4% crit chance bleed build:

There are two components, the physical damage and the bleed damage.
Physical Damage is significantly less than 1000. In my playtime with the build I most frequently got around 700 damage.
You apply 5 stacks of bleeds which, if stacking bleed duration runes, sigils and food, may tick 7-8 times (my build does 7 but lets go with 8 as that’s the cap for P/D.) Lets also say that each tick hits for 110 damage (Mine range from 100-120).

So that’s 700 physical damage
and 4100 bleed damage (5×8×110)
= 5100 damage per sneak attack

That sounds like a lot right?

Wrong. This damage is spread out over around 10 seconds (8 seconds for the bleeds + a few seconds for the sneak attack itself). Also don’t forget that by far the largest portion of this damage can be instantly cleansed to zero. Finally (almost exclusively for PvE), there’s the bleed cap.

So I think it’s fair to say that a single sneak attack will dish out between 700-5100 damage over 10 seconds. Compared to a 5000-10,000+ backstab (I’ve never tried the build, I only hear about it…constantly) which supplies instant damage, I’d say it’s a more than fair tradeoff for P/D’s range advantage.

Finally, the OP made the point that any build spamming the same 2-3 skills was evidence that those skills were over-powered. Well, we appreciate that you are an experienced necro, but you mentioned that you had never fought a P/D thief yourself, only making that judgement by watching the posted video. I encourage you to roll a thief and check out the P/D weapon set. Not only does initiative encourage a ‘spamming’ playstyle, as others have mentioned, but most weapon sets (P/D included) only have one or two skills that grant efficient damage for bleed-based condition builds. With P/D it’s the auto attack (1) and the stealth attack (1 from stealth) that grants bleeding. That’s it. That’s why a good P/D thief has a 11151115 attack pattern. It uses the only three skills that supply the condition damage he built for.

I mean, if your build hinged on condition damage, why waste initiative on anything else, right? Where Dancing Dagger (4 initiative or one third of a regular thief’s ini bar) is supreme damage in a crit build, it might only hit for say 600-800 in a condition build. With D/D, the only bleed damage given is from Death’s Blossom (3), hence the spam of that skill.

TLDR:
Pistol stealth attack is not OP
Spamming a skill is not evidence that the skill is overpowered

Stealth is fine IMO. It costs half our normal ini bar to cloak and dagger. They already nerfed it with the 3 second debuff. Best wait until the rendering is fixed before any changes here.

A nice thought, however it would be underpowered for backstab thieves who would end up draining all their ini getting into position for a backstab. On the flip side it would be overpowered for ranged thieves who would only need to tap it to trigger a stealth attack. Can you imagined chained stuns with the shortbow or chained unloads with the pistol every 3 seconds while only spending 1 ini instead of the usual 6 to re-enter stealth?

Also, would our abilities like shadow refuge also drain our ini? No thanks.

The reason P/D thieves go 1115 is because most (by far) of their damage comes from their stealth attack. As P/D I can sit there in range firing off SLOW AS auto attacks with zero power/crit damage an get few short lasting bleed stacks. P/D needs stealth to do any threatening damage whatsoever. Even as it is, P/D is a bunker build that takes a while to kill many classes, especially classes like eles with several condition cleansers. As it is, any class that can kite/block/dodge the cloak and daggers (these will be obvious since its the only melee move they’ll do) completely counters most of their damage. Waste their ini by doing this twice and they’re relying completely on abilities. Also P/D is countered by superior ranged damage.

The issue is certainly a thorny one since C&D is such a keystone to so many builds. Liked the video anyway dude. Thank you for initiating this discussion so constructively. You have my respect.

azuzephyr.7280:

Kirito.8796:

lol the condition build is so much more OP than bs/gc thief, yet no one complains about it aha. I honestly feel bad using this spec

We do, it’s just hard to get heard in a room full of people shouting the same thing.

I wish I could main a shortbow on my thief, but why bother asking for nice things for bow when everyone rolls dodge to win bleedspec or baby’s first-instagib/no consequence stealth and dagger. All the melee specs for thief tear pvp up, this is so kitten because not only does it make playing pvp less fun on my other classes, but it’s the reason that shortbow will forever be left as nothing more than Infiltrator’s arrow.

Every single skill on shortbow is fantastic. Even the auto-attack is great. You can play defensively or aggressively, melee ranged combat with cluster spam or attack from a distance with autos. Why can’t you main sb?

“Please, jump on our forums and tell us your perspective on the state of thieves.”

No, inf arrow doesn’t reveal you if you’re in open ground. What reveals you is the blind if you try to inf arrow over/past an enemy.

“I’m going to roll a ranger as my main.”

“Being moa’d for 10 seconds is the best fun I’ve had in a video game! They should double the duration right away!”

I’ve had a bug happen several times now where you appear NOT to be stealthed but you actually are. It’s debilitating because when you try to cloak and dagger, of course you go ahead and reveal yourself. You quickly realise what happened and try to cloak and dagger again only to find that you have your 3 second stealth immunity up.

Died more than a few times because of this.

Assassin’s Reward gives back health for each initiative used. With my build I get around 80hp for each initiative used. So for 4-ini skill I get 4×80hp. Cloak and Dagger, which is a 6-ini skill, only gives back 5×80hp. At some point the ini cost of Cloak and Dagger skill was obviously increased and not reflected in this trait.

The most basic piece of advice that I can give you is fight with a clear head. Try to suppress the panic you may feel when an enemy jumps you, or when they begin to fight back. If you fight feeling flustered or panicked you will:

- Go for the closest target instead of the correct one
- Blows all your utilities prematurely instead of using them when needed
- Spam skills and waste initiative instead of using your skills intelligently
- Attack! Attack! Attack! instead of playing defensively when needed, like waiting out your stealth and restealthing, ducking behind objects or making the choice to quit the fight altogether
- In short, playing like an idiot instead of playing smart

A good, practical method to help develop intelligent play is to feel out your opponent first. Don’t play balls to the wall aggressive all the time with the same rotations because your opponent will know what to expect it if he’s awake and thinking. Start with your shortbow/pistol and ping him a few times to see how he reacts. Don’t necessarily play to win, just play to see what he does so you can practice some counterplays. You will die at first but you will be okay with that because you’re not playing to win, you know you’re just practicing.

Also, as several posters said, know your opponent. This means more then simply knowing which class you’re facing (though any knowledge is better than none) as classes can have a huge variety of setups. For example if I see a hammer warrior I’ll know to kite him with ranged weapons because I don’t wish to be caught in melee and cc-locked. I’ll also be getting ready to dodge his leap attempts. If I see a greatsword warrior I’ll be watching for 100 blades or Bull’s Charge and getting ready to dodge/use my anti-cc. Those players reading this, learning and anticipating these moves take time and practice ‘on the job’. You won’t be able to learn or even improve very much by reading about it – think of this as getting a bit of background reading done before you dive in again. You need this hands on practice to get to the state you want where you find yourself making judgements in combat ‘by feel,’ as another poster mentioned. Intellectual judgements take too much time, especially when playing a twitchy, bursty thief. To do this effectively you also must know YOUR class inside out. The best way to do this and learn your own traits and skills is to try on a variety of builds and see what feels right for you.

Another simple way to improve is to learn the boon symbols. In combat you want to be constantly glancing up to read the boons on your target (you can do this because now you’re playing smart). Obviously when Aegis/Protection/Retaliation is up, you’ll be saving your big hitters or going in for the steal to claim them for yourself if you have traited far enough into Trickery to snatch them away. Likewise, when an offensive boon is up, like Fury, play with that extra bit of caution because your opponent will want to be playing aggressively then.

Finally, don’t try to learn everything at once. Choose ONE area where you want to improve and keep at it until you feel that you’ve made some good progress and can use your one piece of knowledge/skill effectively without trying too hard. It might take a day or a week. When you’ve got it, stay aware and move on.

Nice ideas, jump. A venom system that adds more options can only be a good thing. I especially like your suggestion of attacking an enemy with poisons running on him and your attacks consuming those poisons for damage, however this would be a challenge to juggle for the 99% of players who have auto-attacking turned on and wish to see the venoms run their full course.

Rather than attacking the target, I would suggest that a seperate ability should consume the venom for physical damage. After immediately after applying the venom, perhaps the venom skill on your utility bar could change into a consume venom toggle to give thieves that option between a sustained DoT with debuffs and immediate physical burst.

As others have said, the weakest areas of thieves are as follows:

Specialisations:
Poisons – too cleansable and blockable, they can be wasted by an enemy dodging or dropping line of sight, they take up valuable utility slots, they must be deeply traited to be any good yet can be instantly nullified, half the venoms are severely lacking in usefulness.

Traps – only single target focussed and the trigger area is too small so can be easily avoided. Shadow Trap and Ambush Trap have their uses, mainly because they don’t need to deal damage and merely have to trigger to work, but the others are worse than ineffective.

Weapon Sets:
Body Shot will only be used by a person pressing the wrong key. Changing to cc or condition may give it a niche.
Pistol/Pistol has no much-needed manuverability
Flanking Strike is unreliable as others have said.

Underwater combat needs major balancing in many areas. For example too many traits not working, not enough ways to deal condition damage, not enough ways to enter stealth..etc

The tooltip says that regeneration is a boon that stacks in duration.

The 5 seconds of regeneration given from the trait “Shadow Protection” does not stack with the 4.5 seconds of regeneration given from the heal “Hide in Shadows”.

^^

No thanks. This is a very literal interpretation of the ability and would serve no use in a pvp environment.

Dacromir.6207:

There’s a problem with this. A big problem.

It changes venoms from something that you use to something that you have. Think about it.

Right now, using a venom gives you a guaranteed, immediate effect. If I have devourer venom on my skill bar and I need an immobilize, I use it. I get an immobilize. There was skill and timing involved. You can just spam venoms, but (with the exception of spider venom) that’s not as effective as timing it right. Using venoms requires a thought.

Please listen to this man.

I like a guy with his own ideas so props for that, but venoms won’t ever be changed to a no-skill chance effect. They just won’t. It would be poor design.

IMO anet should buff venoms for the thief while nerfing venom sharing so that shared venoms have half the effects. Half the damage. Half the lifesteal. Half the duration. You get the picture.

Spider Venom should have more upfront damage with a more gradual trailing off effect, thereby promoting quicker use of condition removal abilities as a counter.

Drake’s Venom should have the duration doubled.

Devourer’s Venom is fine.

Skale Venom needs a complete change into something else. A 3-5 charge blind perhaps, or maybe a defensive option like a damage debuff on the target.

I think that the Basalisk Venom’s cast time is fine as it is, though it needs a way to differentiate itself from Devourer’s. Maybe a +% damage buff for the attacker on that target. It’s low cooldown (for an ultimate) makes up for the fact that it’s underwhelming.

Venoms DO need a buff however, for the following reasons:
1: They use valuable utility slots and this is highly detrimental to the survivability and flexibility of the thief
2: Their effects are very underwhelming (with the one exception) unless speccing into venoms and condition damage
3: Committing to a venom build requires a number of venoms to be on your bar for decent return on your investment, exaggerating the problems outlined in #1
4: Your venoms can be cleansed by all classes, netting you zero returns
5: Your venoms will be wasted if your enemy is halfway decent, through enemies blocking, being out of range, dodging or moving out of line of sight, also netting you zero returns

I’m running a P/D condition build too, but most of my damage comes from my bleeds not my venom. In WvW, which is 99% of what I do, I feel that I can only allow 1 or 2 utility slots for poisons. Currently, I only run Spider Venom, which unlike bleeds, cannot be so easily reapplied if cleansed. I’m also questioning my traits since having only 1 poison utility is inefficient for Leeching Venoms.

So focussing on bleeds. Got rid of Devourers for Caltrops, which gives P/D some much needed AoE. I think it’s telling when, even in a full condition build, poisons are passed over.

lol

/characters

I love WvW for the very fact that it can be anything you want.

Wanna seige?
Zerg?
Defend. I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunities.
Run with a small group to cap supply? Done.
Kill stragglers? Yup.

Here are some things you haven’t mentioned:

Puzzle pvp: Small scale, awesome pvp environment with obstacles, water and darkness – had a great 1v1 with another player in the pitch black after we both dropped our torches. All I could see was his tag. Fun times.

Waylay rezzers: Position yourself to kill the rezzers as they run back to the main fight. You can hold up quite a number of people and make them forget about their main objective if you have a sturdy kiting class.

Artillery: I hate doing this during long seiges, but some people apparently dig this role.

Supply defence: Set up artillery with a small group inside a defensible supply area within enemy territory and watch the larger enemy mill about unable to engage while you keep giving them bloody noses.

And when you are on either side of a siege, be creative. Go out of combat for a moment and swap out your skillset. Don’t feel like you have to sit on the battlements as a warrior with your rifle doing spitball damage to single targets.

Most of all I like to challenge myself and get better at my class.

etc, etc

Cloak and Dagger is fine IMO. I play in Australia with a bit of latency and I hit it 9/10 in pvp.

Precasting C/D with steal is a strat I would be sorry to lose. Intentional or not, it adds that extra layer of complexity and synergy, which helps to make the thief the fun and flexible class that it is.

Great idea, Knyx. I’m an 80 thief and a lone operator on Fergusson’s Crossing. I’m diggin the casual, low commitment vibe here and if that’s how it plays out it sounds awesome. In WvW I kinda just like to waylay enemy parties and stalk about the place doing my own thing. If this guild holds a bunch of like-minded thieves who don’t care if I run solo or with a group then I’m in.

Server: I’d vote for Fergs out of loyalty. They have instant queues and the matchups have been fun and challenging the last few weeks with no server dominating, but I wouldn’t be distraught if it were elsewhere.

Guildname: I love the [SIN] tag, but doesn’t really go with poison IMO. Assas[SIN] is the choice for me.

Scribbles.7493:

Thread in a nutshell:

Fad of the month thief goes to WvW expecting to melt faces in epic one on one battles. Instead finds groups of people fighting over structures, using defensive equipment where he can’t hit him. Thief gets mad and posts angry thread on the forums. The end.

Lol, does my thread sound angry? I was going more for lighthearted, but having destroyed 4 pieces of siege and snagged a few kills for the price of 5 minutes I was hardly mad. In fact now you mention it you sound a bit mad yourself. If you’re running around by yourself in WvW you deserve to die. And yes I roam solo looking for kills. I contribute to the war effort by stopping the rezzers running back to the battle, often distracting large groups for my server. I feel like I contribute more that way then as just another face in a zerg.

Forgive my facetious tone in the OP, but back to topic, I can’t personally understand why seige monkeys find this fun. One poster mentions badges, this I can understand. What about a monkey trebbing at a wall across the map all day? What about monkeys who won’t come of the wall even when they out number you 4-1? This I don’t get..

Also known as simianus artillerius , these fascinating creatures sit up safe in their towers and do nothing but ping you with artillery like it’s p00, while everyone else enjoys the battle.

I had a funny experience just now where, with nothing else to do, decided to roam around the enemy-occupied Stonemist Castle looking for kills and these Monkeys were tracking me everywhere I went. Since the map was fairly dead I thought to myself, who in the world could be bothered sitting with a cannon just in case an enemy happened to come past? Turns out there’s a whole other genus of WvW pvpers out there.

So I go over and take out the cannon, only to discover there were a few arrow carts and also a treb hidden behind the battlements. It took a while, but I take them out, snagging a few kills with Scorpion Wire while I’m there. I felt a bit bad, cause I actually like animals, but seriously, I still can’t figure out who in their right mind would gain any sort of satisfaction working artillery all afternoon. I thought bots, but then this one monkey kept running between a ballista and an arrowcart depending on my position, so we’re talking human players for the most part.

At first (before I killed them one by one) there were at least four of the little buggers working away up there. They didn’t try to jump me as a group, but hung around stupidly while I chipped away at their seige.

Have you experienced these odd creatures?

Grats from Fergs to Kaineng! This week was definately the most fun WvW to date with easily the most even competition for all three servers. I was defending against the final push for 2 or 3 hours and had a blast. Grats also to Devona’s who certainly pulled their weight this week.

What this week has reinforced however, is that numbers trumps all. In the vid you can see the Fergs defence is minimal. I’m not saying that Kaineng is bigger then FC as a server, but the fact is server size doesn’t matter if you can deploy a larger group at a time when your enemy has a mere few. I also saw this in previous weeks where FC rolled other servers and when Darkhaven rolled us. I wish WvW could be made more deeply strategic, but props for having the organisation to get the numbers when it mattered.

Grats again, was a fun victory to experience, even though I was playing on the other side.

I play a tanky dagger/pistol thief. I use stealth for aggression (sneak attack), to cause my enemies to drop target and to reposition. The repositioning can be for defensive or aggressive purposes. I suppose stealth is an ‘oh kitten’ button because its attached to a major heal, but there are other far more effective ways of escaping a bad situation that others have mentioned.

If you’re having trouble with enemy thieves escaping, remember to use your cc to secure the kill when you are confident that you can burst them down. If a thief is almost dead and just went into stealth it’s fairly easy to predict their flight path, follow and kill when they reappear 3-4 seconds later. Thieves can get hit during stealth, so just chase and swing your weapon/aoe/shoot/lay traps where they probably went. If a thief enters stealth after you just cc’d them, they’ll probably still be there taking damage, though many players dont realise this, however there are ways to move when cc’d. Snares can be extremely effective as they can be incredibly long lasting and movement/evasion is what most thieves rely upon for survivability.

Wrong thread, ignore

BishopX.6453:

name me a game where the thief class has not been overpowered at one point the best class hands down in the game.
name me a game where the bottom tier class has EVER at any point been the rogue class ?

Age of Conan. Awesome game. Played the assassin for two years and a large chunk of that we were on the bottom of the food chain by far. Lotus spec was the only way to go, and even then we had trouble killing anything. You heard me, a rogue having trouble killing. In mini-games and pvp, aside from good movement/poor opponents, knockback+your big 3 min ability was the only way to kill a squishy. Often even this wasn’t enough.