Guild Wars 2

Withdraw: The healing values of this skill have been increased by 10%.

Did this buff actually make it in-game this time?

The June’s +10% is still missing though.

P/P with Ricochet.

DeceiverX.8361:

Not true. CS on a given hit will hit harder than what DA offers when the target is above 50% health in all circumstances. Mug is what makes DA have competitive damage above 50%, and DA exceeds CS only when the target is lower than the damage due to Executioner. You’re bursting for the same damage only because Mug is allowing for it to happen.

In addition, in any given fights, the target is above 50% longer than they are at lower than 50%, thus CS grants a better benefit than DA. However, against a bunker, this target happen to last longer below 50% than they are at above 50%, thus DA grants better benefit than CS. Since Thief is not supposed to engage any bunker, it’s not ideal to take DA.

Jana.6831:

@Deceiver:
I can’t get past the “A third of thieves I see in wvw are power D/D” – can’t get that out of my head.
The differences between NA and EU are few btw (I started on NA). I either have been on every EU server or fought every EU server there is. On one server (bronze) we were ~20 thieves who didn’t play D/P (most of them have quit this game after Hot), the rest of the server was rangers, bet they still are or maybe Dragonhunter now. I know most of the thieves on my servers and I meet a lot of thieves while roaming as few run with zergs. Still D/D has been very rare = I don’t can’t believe you.
Because even if the differences between the regions were that big, I would’ve seen tons of D/D videos on youtube and/or on this forum.

lol, that statement can also mean that there are only 3 Thieves in WvW and one of them happen to use power D/D. In my experience, that’s almost accurate since most of the time, I feel like I’m the only Thief around. Does that mean the 100% of Thieves in WvW is using power D/D then since I’m the only Thief using power D/D?

DeceiverX.8361:

That’s the beauty of initiative and not having things like very-important cooldown reduction or important utility for specific weapons tied to our traits as other classes do. Trickery is pretty much “necessary” because it’s pretty much the best trait line in it of itself for a variety of reasons and has immense synergy with pretty much every build. I have vouched for better trait-utility and initiative management spread over more trait lines for some time, and this is more or less what the thief really needed than AA damage buffs.

Trickery is staple because it has very-important cooldown reduction contrary to your belief. It has CDR for Steal and for weapon skills. Even though Thief uses Initiatives, any initiative gains from any trait is equal to 1s CDR. So a low CD Steal that grants 2 init per Steal IS a CDR for the Thief’s weapon skills.

Dahkeus.8243:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Dahkeus.8243:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Dahkeus.8243:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Dahkeus.8243:

As for Venom Share, I’d say it’s viable to some extent. When you start getting to the higher leagues, however, it won’t work as well. Good players will know to focus venom thieves and since you have to load your utility bar with with venoms and offensive tools, you just don’t have the escape potential that something like a D/P thief would. However, until you get focused, it’ll feel godlike with all the immobs and condis that you can share.

^this. If your team is willing to take that risk, then the build is fine. IMO, you’re sacrificing a lot of good traits and utility skills just to make Venom share work.

Holy crap…did we just agree on something? =P

Yeah, I think we did.

This must mean that venoms will turn out to be OP/meta and we’ll both be wrong, haha!

They’ve been trying to make this venom to work and it will never happen unless they redesign all venoms.

Yea, it’s not a true patch unless it’s got a useless buff to venoms, lol.

Get rid of the venom path, make all venom shareable without needing to trait to anything so that they can finally delete Venom Aura and add a new useful trait in its place. I rather see a shadowstep path in SA than venom path. But that’s just me.

Dahkeus.8243:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Dahkeus.8243:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Dahkeus.8243:

As for Venom Share, I’d say it’s viable to some extent. When you start getting to the higher leagues, however, it won’t work as well. Good players will know to focus venom thieves and since you have to load your utility bar with with venoms and offensive tools, you just don’t have the escape potential that something like a D/P thief would. However, until you get focused, it’ll feel godlike with all the immobs and condis that you can share.

^this. If your team is willing to take that risk, then the build is fine. IMO, you’re sacrificing a lot of good traits and utility skills just to make Venom share work.

Holy crap…did we just agree on something? =P

Yeah, I think we did.

This must mean that venoms will turn out to be OP/meta and we’ll both be wrong, haha!

They’ve been trying to make this venom to work and it will never happen unless they redesign all venoms.

Dahkeus.8243:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Dahkeus.8243:

As for Venom Share, I’d say it’s viable to some extent. When you start getting to the higher leagues, however, it won’t work as well. Good players will know to focus venom thieves and since you have to load your utility bar with with venoms and offensive tools, you just don’t have the escape potential that something like a D/P thief would. However, until you get focused, it’ll feel godlike with all the immobs and condis that you can share.

^this. If your team is willing to take that risk, then the build is fine. IMO, you’re sacrificing a lot of good traits and utility skills just to make Venom share work.

Holy crap…did we just agree on something? =P

Yeah, I think we did.

Dahkeus.8243:

As for Venom Share, I’d say it’s viable to some extent. When you start getting to the higher leagues, however, it won’t work as well. Good players will know to focus venom thieves and since you have to load your utility bar with with venoms and offensive tools, you just don’t have the escape potential that something like a D/P thief would. However, until you get focused, it’ll feel godlike with all the immobs and condis that you can share.

^this. If your team is willing to take that risk, then the build is fine. IMO, you’re sacrificing a lot of good traits and utility skills just to make Venom share work.

Sadrien.3470:

The main skill in this game is not reaction, it’s not trait knowledge, it’s not even minmaxing math. It’s adaptation. The ability to quickly see all the possible directions your fight can take and as soon as it starts taking that path to react to what the situation is about to be, not to what it is at the moment and to use every advantage in terrain etc in order to make the fight take the course you want. This is, to a lesser extent, possible in pve but it is so static that there is no adaptation required in your fight manipulation.

How do you adapt without reaction?
How do you adapt without knowledge?

And if you want to prove pvp players aren’t more skilled why did my pug yoloque team beat a full DnT guild team who were in voice coms? Obviously they were not able to adapt to the situation they were in properly, unlike pvp players. In short, they lack the most essential skill of plasticity in their actions making their gameplay predictable and therefore easy to counter. This is not something often used in pve, so who can blame them.

Your example can mean many things;
1) PvP players are more skilled because a PUG beat a pre-made PvP team.
2) PvP players aren’t more skilled because a pre-made PvP team on a voice chat lost to a riff-raff PUG team.
3) The pre-made team was trying to adapt, switching up tactics on the fly that they have not practiced and failed big time.
4) The pre-made team was trying a new strategy, using professions they weren’t good at and failed.
5) The pre-made team was throwing the game to rig the matchmaking.
6) One of the pre-made team’s member spilled a hot coffee on their lap.

So on and so forth.

xx manda xx.3954:

Full Disclosure: I’m 100% new to this game. I also bought the expansion because I like it thus far that much.

Anyway, I’m looking into leveling a thief and am wondering the best way to go about it.

First of all, Thief is not anywhere close to other professions. Thief’s defense mechanism relies on evades and stealth. So it’s best to get used to utilizing these features.

Start practicing shadowstepping. Learn which skills you can activate using Steal at the same time. Also learn the limitation and glitches.

Then learn the limitation of stealth. Get familiar with the Revelead debuff.

Next, learn to dodge the Thief way. In other professions, dodging is not as important since they have access to other buffs that mitigate damage. Thief has a low HP pool and wears a leather armor, thus the Thief cannot afford to get hit by big damage skills. Small damage are ok, but not the big damage.

Lastly and the most important, learn how to budget your Initiative pool. There’s no optimal ways to budget Initiatives since it relies on each player’s playstyle — so you’ll have to figure out how to spent these.

Other than those, the rest (i.e. armor, rune, etc.) is just like any other professions.

Thief has reveal — albeit it is self-inflicted

GenoGar.5497:

That analogy with the 3 starving children with 1 fat one… it’s more like 3 starving children cannibalizing the 1 fat one. So now you have 3 somewhat nourished but still miserable children and 1 dead one. Is the problem that the one kid was fat and got chocolate? No, it’s because the kitten parent isn’t feeding their dam kids (ANet, hello). You should be happy that one kid is actually relatively successful rather than being spiteful you don’t get chocolate.

That’s a horrible interpretation of the analogy used here.

Basically, the fat kid is standing in front of the parents blocking their view so the parent’s attention is on the fat kid, while the rest of the children are out of sight, thus the parents are not seeing that the rest of the children are malnourished.

Jana is not saying that the other kids should eat the fat kid (that’s just your sick mind talking), rather she’s saying that the fat kid needs a diet and the other children needs more food. In the end, all the children’s weight will be the ideal one. No one is eating anyone, for goodness sake.

Cynz.9437:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Cynz.9437:

…and THIS^^ is why Jana and you are wrong. You talk from wvw view. Game is not balanced around wvw and never will be (besides some absurd exploits and such).

This is where you’re wrong.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Balance itself is an iterative process and our work will be ongoing. We’re taking a hard look at the ways players are experiencing content across the game (raids, fractals, open world, PvP, and WvW) and we’ll be making adjustments accordingly.

Don’t want to offend anyone but it is fact that majority of players wvw wouldn’t last a second in pvp vs half decent opponents. It is ridicilously wrong trying to balance spells around killing rather unskilled unexperienced players from wvw.

I think the opposite is actually what’s happening. A PvP player is the inexperienced players in WvW who get stomped within a second because they have no idea what they’re doing and not aware that the big boulder falling on their head will one shot them. Also these are the inexperienced players who stands on fire, volley of arrows, and poisoned cow carcasses. PvP players simply have no idea on how WvW works.

However, WvW players are more experienced when it comes to PvP because not only they have to think about 5 enemy players, they also have to think about the whole zerg, so 5 enemies are nothing compare to zerg.

But who knows who’s right or wrong? In my experience, PvP players are bad WvW players.

.. and i had opposite experience. I used to be wvw player, i joined really good roaming guild back then and one of their rule was to practice in pvp weekly to improve our skill level. They really got me into pvp and i did become much better player thanks to pvp and had much easier times kill people in wvw.

So you practice in PvP as a form of WvW tutorial phase because you’re not good enough to play in WvW. Sure you became better in PvP, but WvW is more than just PvP.

Surely, a pvp player that came to wvw for the first time would be surprised by all the food buffs and cheese crap people run there but it would take 1 death for a decent one to figure out what he is fighting.

I played in WvW and never used food buffs or whatnot, and I’ve fought other players, who are quite good in their profession, who also don’t bother with food buffs. The fact is, these buffs are just a supplement just in case that your regular build is not doing the job.

Yes, 1 death from the zerg, 1 death from the boulder, 1 death from the Arrow cart, 1 death from the guards, 1 death from the cow poison,…you get the point. If the PvP player has to die from a Supply Dolyak to figure things out, then that’s just sad.

Cynz.9437:

…and THIS^^ is why Jana and you are wrong. You talk from wvw view. Game is not balanced around wvw and never will be (besides some absurd exploits and such).

This is where you’re wrong.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Balance itself is an iterative process and our work will be ongoing. We’re taking a hard look at the ways players are experiencing content across the game (raids, fractals, open world, PvP, and WvW) and we’ll be making adjustments accordingly.

Don’t want to offend anyone but it is fact that majority of players wvw wouldn’t last a second in pvp vs half decent opponents. It is ridicilously wrong trying to balance spells around killing rather unskilled unexperienced players from wvw.

I think the opposite is actually what’s happening. A PvP player is the inexperienced players in WvW who get stomped within a second because they have no idea what they’re doing and not aware that the big boulder falling on their head will one shot them. Also these are the inexperienced players who stands on fire, volley of arrows, and poisoned cow carcasses. PvP players simply have no idea on how WvW works.

However, WvW players are more experienced when it comes to PvP because not only they have to think about 5 enemy players, they also have to think about the whole zerg, so 5 enemies are nothing compare to zerg.

But who knows who’s right or wrong? In my experience, PvP players are bad WvW players.

babazhook.6805:

I am not sure how many will take that passive Invuln buff. While I myself not over fond of such passives, I will likely stick to pain response on my s/d thief. Something that kicks in once every 40 seconds will likely not save me in any case and I would hate to die to burning and poison because I got 10 stacks of each on me and rather then pain response kicking In I evade the next few attacks

That passive is trash compared to Revenant’s UA of 2s evade on a 12s cooldown. If I want more evade, I’d rather take Vigorous, Trickster and Withdraw. Thief didn’t need passive evasion, I would assume that by now every Thief knows how to evade attacks. What the Thief need are Protection and Stability or even Resistance.

@messiah.1908

Now do the same test but this time with CS 221 and popping signets as soon as the might buff wears off. Roughly a 90% might uptime.

Cynz.9437:

Inb4 anet nerfs half of other traits and spells as… compromise~

Of course.

It’s easy to see that by increasing the attack speed on Sword that the AA 3rd strike will have the Cripple effect nerfed. Dagger will have the Endurance gain and Poison application from AA nerfed also. And lastly, the Vulnerability application from Staff AA will also get hit by the nerf bat.

Then their reason will be that they don’t intend to have the condition application to have such a high frequency without a cost. So to balance the frequency of these conditions, their duration will also be nerfed proportionate to the attack speed increase.

I’m really hoping that I’m wrong.

Cynz.9437:

Jana.6831:

Cynz.9437:

Let’s nerf best designed weapon set for the sake of weaker one? Because thieves clearly need more nerfs? Are you trying to force EVERYONE into staff?
Ask for d/d buffs, suggest rework. There is way to make that set more interesting w/o butchering other sets or make them too strong.

So, you have got 5 children and all of them need to be ideal weight – some are underweight and the one who needs to lose weight has got a chocolate bar, but all have to get the same food (on top of that).
You can either nerf one and then buff all or you can only have one that shines while all other are subpar – that’s my reasoning for this thread.

ETA: By saying: “No, lets not nerf our only viable set!” we remain having only one viable set as the others have to get their stuff from traits to which D/P also has got access to. Thief is pretty much dead anyway and I guess everybody knows, so why not kill it completely and start new?

Are you seriously implying d/p is fat kid with chocolate bar? Really, focus your hate crusade again other classes and for d/d and not against fellow thieves. Nerfing d/p won’t change anything for your beloved d/d it will just force everyone into staff or simply make very few thieves that left to completely quit this class/game.

If you actually think devs would suddenly get an urge to buff d/d because of d/p nerf you really don’t know them well.

Take s/d as an example in its glory day. It got nerfed couple times, you think it helped acro line or sp? No. We all know what happend afterwards.

Yeah it was a bad analogy for her. A better analogy is that D/P is this big tree overshadowing the D/D sapling longing for sunlight. In order for the D/D sampling to grow, D/P needs to have its branches trimmed here and there to allow some sunshine for the D/D sapling. This doesn’t mean to cut down the D/P tree by its trunk or cut off all its branches and leaves, but to simply trim (nerf) it so it share the sunlight with other samplings it overshadowing.

EDIT: too much typos

Tholor.1479:

If you create a new character that is thief and you read the description, it is wrong. Let me show you, “Thieves are adept at the art of stealth. The utilize surprise and shadow to get close to their enemies, and they’re deadly in one-on-one combat. They have an affinity for setting traps and going where they were never meant to go.”
(Everything wrong is in bold)

So for a thief, you must attack to go in stealth with most stealth related skills like cloak & dagger. Stealth is used to escape combat and re-position as thief so the description saying they use stealth to get close to their enemies is wrong. Also going where they were not meant to go is wrong also. Stealth is limited to 3-5 seconds and is useless in this game due to all the nerfs. Hopefully they change the description so people are not fooled to play thief like I was recently. It sickens me that ArenaNet is so cruel to thieves and stealth in their games.

The utilize surprise and shadow to get close to their enemies

This is not talking about stealth rather shadowstep.

going where they were never meant to go

This phrase is rather vague and could mean anything really, but this could also be associated with shadowstep.

Proven.2854:

Wait, you want to increase the diversity of Shadow Arts by taking out one of the diversity traits of Shadow Arts, Venomous Aura? What you want is more traits like Venomous Aura that provides alternatives to pure stealth styles but still complement using stealth.

That would pigeon hole builds to build around stealth. What I propose if to replace VA with something about shadowstep to give non-stealth build a choice in SA trait line. Va will then function like any other party sharing skills other professions have.

DeceiverX.8361:

Rejuv isn’t part of the D/P play style. It’s a cornerstone to SA as a whole because it’s one of the few actually good ( and I mean absolutely amazing) traits the line has. Yes, D/P has some initiative concerns, but in the scope of the incoming changes and the nature of Daredevil, it needs just as much initiative to gain stealth as D/D, except it can do so out of range, out of combat, and simply, it can always gain the stealth.

The difference is, D/D has a survivability built into the weapon set which they are less inclined to go on stealth. D/P, on the other, has a nerfed, and an unreliable source of blind, BP and no access to evade within the weapon set, thus SA and Rejuv is a perfect fit for D/P because D/P has no other defensive capability other than the nerfed BP.

D/D isn’t an option unless you play conditions. CnD is so objectively bad in the current state of the game through invuln and blind spamming (not even including blocks because let’s just assume the thief can overcome a CnD via BV) that it’s not even worth the initiative to cast; better run Blinding Powder or Smoke Screen for the reliable stealth.

Well, yes, this set has a major problem of its own. However, if the SA trait line offers a shadowstep trait like “Shadow Leash”, D/D and other melee weapons can be as aggressive as D/P. CnD would not be too unreliable if it comes with a shadowstep ability.

And crit strikes has use for anything not used for crits? Is Acrobatics useful for a stealth-based or crit style of play? CS/Acro/SA cover different bases and handle diversity through picking a line and then allow for customization tweaks within it. That’s the purpose of trait lines; they revolve around a common theme and style, and there are some different options within.

Acro is not like SA. Thief’s main abilities are Stealth and Shadowstep, however lately it is focusing too much on evasion. So naturally, SA should provide traits for both stealth and shadowstep rather than making it a stealth exclusive. Acrobatics is an odd traitline that was newly introduced to GW2. GW1 Assassin, for which most of the Thief’s trait lines comes from, doesn’t even have Acrobatics. So yeah, it’s an odd traitline that the Devs are trying to fit into the Thief profession.

Should some of these options overlap? Certainly. But only to the extent of basic concepts, like curing a condition through different means, or enabling more damage or different types of utility. We already have a huge issue where Trickery and even DD are considered “mandatory” for basic functionality. The trait lines are this way because there is too much variety and too many objectively good things in these trait lines. DD and Trickery can be traited and built in many different ways with a very distinct style in each one. Almost all of them are high-performance and offer a lot of completeness to the thief. Putting strictly more styles into one trait line will not help the thief but ultimately cut diversity even more, or result in the same exact identity crisis we have now. Yes, we need some overlap, but simply adding better/more effects to trait lines way out of their element in style of play won’t help resolve the weapon identity or trait identity crises we have. If this occurs for all trait lines, then the ones with the best stacking potential will simply be selected, and D/P will pretty much remain the chosen set because its weapon skills are unanimously the best the thief has on a given set.

DD stole a lot of traits that would improve the Core traits and most of them would have improved Acrobatics.

- Weakening Strike obviously belongs in CS and can easily replace Flawless Strikes.
- Extra dodge, Driven Fortitude, Escapist absolution, Endurance Thief, and Dash are all good for Acrobatics. They can then trash Fleet of Shadow, Guarded, Swindler, and Upper Hand then add those abilities from DD.

And the fact that all these traits are in DD is the root of the Acrobatics problem, that’s why DD seems to be a big partner of Trick. If these traits are given to Acro, the Core specs will be more diversified. Even more so when partnered with a shadowstep SA traits — such Thief will be both elusive and evasive, a completely new playstyle.

I can say now that as a D/D player, I would never take the proposed suggestion over Rejuv if I was intending to play so aggressively. I’d instead just run Rejuv and play D/P because it would be objectively superior. D/P, and SA as a whole have synergy together due to capitalizing on high stealth uptime. D/D is much more aggressive in nature and focuses on bursts of stealth for short durations while in melee combat. If I want to be aggressive, I’m going to go in with a bang or pick a trait line concept that rewards aggressive play – like Crit Strikes or DA – rather than bunker stealth as per what SA pushes for with intermittent periods of non-stealth. Teleporting follow-up is better on a short cooldown for D/P because it could BP + leap = (3s) -> Leash-Backstab for free -> disengage BP -> leap (3s) and do it again without ever needing to use initiative for Shadow Shot, whereas to gain stealth on D/D, you’d need to sustain for that re-stealth or disengage and sit around doing nothing for several seconds waiting on a free gap close. Plus, then if the target does teleport after the free leash, D/D gets screwed and D/P can just Shadow Shot to double-up on closing the gap. Actually, I’d argue this buffs D/P even more than D/D or any variant, because it could just universally double-up on gap-closing to a point where it’d be next to impossible to escape D/P, making it offensively and defensively superior to D/D.

I doubt that since D/P relies on stealth and Rejuv for defensive purposes. D/D has evade, D/P has only a nerfed blind AoE. “Shadow Leash” will not be exclusive to D/D rather it will be a good pick for non-stealth builds like S/P, P/P and S/B. If you build D/P or D/D to rely on stealth, then of course SR is the right pick, otherwise SA has something to offer for non-stealth.

Passive VA is too strong. The build is already very scary in the right hands for fight-based builds rather than point-sustain ones (you see this in WvW a ton and saw it in courtyard in the past). Again, AOE sharing with attached sustain and sustain from leeching venoms is just too much from how safe the build would be and how much damage it would contribute. Maybe if they made the venoms apply damage based on the condition damage of the person applied as it used to be, but this really shuts down condi venoms hard, which I think is a more fun and interesting builds to play as and against. Passive stealth-sharing-sustain-DPS out of one trait line seems like too much, which is why I raised the concern about it above. The split to DA is to make people commit for such a build, but my concern about its strength and safety of play still stands. Particularly since BV is being made to make the next incoming attacks unblockable.

I really don’t see the reasoning behind the fear of making VA innate to venom when other professions have something far worst (i.e. Banner, Spirits, Virtue of Justice, etc.) Keep in mind that Venom has an insane long cooldown of 32s (if VA is innate and CDR is baseline). Virtue of Justice, for example, is on a 25s CD untraited and even nastier when traited with extended burning on a 21s CD. Banner of Might has a passive 6 stacks of might for everyone. And so on. So yeah, I don’t see why innate VA it perceived to be “too strong”.

Jana.6831:

They did even before June and replaced SA with trickery – but yeah, they likely took SE. Has initiative regen always been in SA? I really should’ve made screenshots of the old traits.

The init regen on SR was added during the shuffling as a compensation to the deletion of the trait that grants initiative on stealth (can’t remember the name. ArenaNet is erasing my memory of it.)

Edit: Infusion of Shadow — I remember!

Bojoo.7819:

Other problem is Sleight of Hand and its 20% faster recharge on steal. I never understood that 20% faster recharge. Solution would be to put steal on 25 second recharge without Trickery and 20 second recharge with Trickery with Lead Attacks. Bewildering Ambush wouldn’t be OP with shorter cd, it still would 5 stacks of confusion for 5 seconds when traited. 5 stacks for 5 seconds on 20 second cd is nothing to write home about next to classes literally spamming confusion stacks but its still useful trait for condi thief.

Any traits that improves the Thief’s main mechanic will always be desirable. May it be Steal CDR, init regen or increase man init, that trait line will be mandatory — it just so happen that all those features are in the same trait line.

The problem is not that Trickery has many good traits, rather other trait lines has too many trash traits. If CS, SA or Acro triggers an ability competitive to the likes of Mug and Thrill when using steal, then they would also be desirable, thus it’s quite obvious why DA and Trick are the best picks — and by extension DD since it grants a bar of endurance on steal.

Next up is Steal. Call me crazy, but Steal should steal boon (1) when untraited with Trickery. I don’t know how it should change Bountiful Theft.

BT doesn’t actually steal boon, rather it strips and copy the boon. The only real boon steal is from S/D. IMO, the introduction of boon steal is a result of a bad decision from ArenaNet. I don’t believe that Steal or Thief as a whole should be able to steal boon. Such feature should be reserved and restricted to Mesmers. If Thief would ever steal boon, then it should be Elite spec driven, like making Thief an Arcane Thief using an off-hand Focus, but the Core Thief should be restricted in stealing tangible obejects (i.e. Axe, Seed, etc.)

Also worth mention here is boon stealing effect. If you remove by stealing multiple stacks of same boon you should get every stack you stole on same duration.

To be honest, ArenaNet should abandon this path for the Core Thief and keep it an Elite spec if they are to give Thief a boon steal effects.

Last thing i want to touch up are stolen skills. Some of them are just embarrassing. Revenant…Engi…who stands in gunk???

Nobody. With P/P, your projectile finish it to apply confusion sanme when used with whirl. You leap finish it to apply chaos armor. I love chaos armor on my condi D/D Thief.

Jana.6831:

Cynz.9437:

Let’s nerf best designed weapon set for the sake of weaker one? Because thieves clearly need more nerfs? Are you trying to force EVERYONE into staff?
Ask for d/d buffs, suggest rework. There is way to make that set more interesting w/o butchering other sets or make them too strong.

So, you have got 5 children and all of them need to be ideal weight – some are underweight and the one who needs to lose weight has got a chocolate bar, but all have to get the same food (on top of that).
You can either nerf one and then buff all or you can only have one that shines while all other are subpar – that’s my reasoning for this thread.

Nerfing the child is like saying, starve the overweight child so in his moment of malnourishment the rest of the children will be well nourished while they all reach the ideal weight. That’s just cruel and perhaps a bad analogy. :/

Dahkeus.8243:

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Necromancer gets more corruption, thief should get more boon steal (ofc not to crazy, will be op otherwise, not on auto attack for sure). On Steal would be fine (1 boon steal by default).

Nah, I think it’s fair that mesmers continue to have the better boon strip.

They should differentiate the Thief’s steal and Mesmer’s steal. Thief should only steal tangible objects (i.e. Axe, Seeds, etc) while Mesmer should only steal intangible objects like boons — Thief shouldn’t be able to steal boons. I think that was a bad decision in their part and now it’s a mess. If they want Thief to steal boons, they should give them off-hand Focus and make them an Arcane Thief — otherwise, it’s not making any sense why Thief is better or should be better than Mesmer in stealing boon.

DeceiverX.8361:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

DeceiverX.8361:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Shadow Arts is more than just stealth, they can add traits that takes advantage of shadow step. D/P’s advantage over other melee weapon set is its ability to stick to the target. What if we get a trait that grants shadow step on our attacks every 3s?

I’m going to ignore the balance concern with 3s teleports because it’s very, very, very overpowered. What makes D/P strong is Shadow Shot, and basically giving out one for free so rapidly is a huge balance concern.

Numbers are tweakable.

Thing is, this would just still be used by D/P, and still make D/P even better than it is now, on the principle is basically saves D/P four initiative to engage for a backstab. Other weapon sets would still require additional setup, despite the free teleport being “nice”.

But you have to look at what D/P has to sacrifice to get this. D/P will have to give S.Rejuv for this…which I don’t believe will be a good tradeoff. Thus as I’ve mentioned, this trait will be appealing to non-stealth builds.

The only way to fix other weapons is through the other weapons themselves. No adjustments to traits, unless awkwardly specific, would do anything, in which case, those traits are either front-loaded and accelerate one set too much, or are strictly worse, making the set even worse than it was before due to stacking extra dependencies.

“Fixing” the weapon skills will not create diversity. SA will always be a stealth trait line unless they stop making it so.

SA is meant for stealthy play almost exclusively. Don’t like/use stealth? Don’t play SA.

The diversity goal is tossed out the window and the 3 traits I listed above will always be picked no matter what. Why pick Venom Aura if SA is stealth exclusive? Why pick “Stealth Survivor” over S. Rejuv? Why pick Leeching venom over Shadow Protector?

Shadow Arts should not be stealth exclusive. It should give traits for both stealth and non-stealth builds. As of right now, the only non-stealth build going SA is venom share — which is out of place since venom has no correlation with Shadow Arts…it is more of a Deadly Arts than Shadow Arts. Shadow Art should support both stealth and shadowstep for non-stealth.

Despite D/P sacrificing Rejuv, so does every other thief using the ability. D/P already has the best synergy with the SA line as a whole. Okay, so maybe this trait can let D/D hard engage, but it still has stealth access reliability problems which D/P doesn’t, and D/P’s weapon set abilities are innately still better while not in stealth, which is what really matters if playing a stealth-based build, unless you’re never actually leaving stealth to begin with.

If D/P is willing to play without stealth and sacrificing Rejuv, then that would be a bad decision to pick D/P in the first place — might as well use D/D and S/D if that would be the case. The fact of the matter is, Rejuv is part of the D/P play style so it’s very unlikely that players who run D/P will pick “Shadow Leash” over Rejuv.

SA will only be “required” (it isn’t so much anymore with DD) so long as D/P is the best weapon set and trait lines like CS and Acro are bad, as well as if the concepts behind the styles of play behind sheer +1 against a lot of pressure-based builds are hard-countered aggressively.

It’s not so much about CS and Acro being bad, rather SA has nothing to offer non-stealth other than venom share. That is the main issue. So to open build diversity with SA, it needs to also give something to non-stealth and get rid of the venom traits and make Venom Aura innate to venom.

DA/Tr/DD and DA/SA/Tr are considered the best because Trickery is a required trait line that even builds using CS and Acro need, DD is just power-creep on every trait line and offers similar utility capacity to SA except with more evasion and damage, and DA provides a lot of much-needed damage and control to compensate and round-off the other lines. Putting more power in SA and more dependency here will not resolve build diversity on a greater level – all it does is let the same trait lines function slightly differently, and frankly, the meta will evolve to favor one of these builds in the end, anyways, leaving not only other trait lines, but traits within those lines as being unnecessary, leading to the same potential diversity we basically have now, except on the same weapons and trait lines.

It’s not putting more power to SA, rather giving it traits that it can offer to non-stealth. If SA can offer traits that improve a non-stealth playstyle centered on shadowstep, then it has something to give to a more aggressive build that dislike hiding in shadows. SA should be competing with Acro in regards of elusiveness. Giving Thief a way to shadowstep in combat is no different than giving them evasion.

I would be okay with changing DA to include poison and venom builds, but I fear it might make the trait line too strong. I think ANet’s balance ideology here was to offset venomshare with stealth, because team-wide venom application scaling with the thief’s condition damage where the thief never needs to engage in combat/be seen is kind of broken as a concept.

My idea about Venom Aura is to give it to each venom skill. Much like Warrior’s Banner, Thief’s venom will be automatically shared when activated. No need to jam the trait into DA. Leeching Venom, on the other hand, can replace Trappers Respite.

Jana.6831:

D/P never picked CiS – they don’t need it. They go for hidden thief which makes more sense for them anyway. It’s only P/D and D/D who might have picked CiS and who needed it.

I was actually thinking about the weapon sets that would normally pick it — S/D and D/D, but yes you’re right, D/P don’t need it.

DeceiverX.8361:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Shadow Arts is more than just stealth, they can add traits that takes advantage of shadow step. D/P’s advantage over other melee weapon set is its ability to stick to the target. What if we get a trait that grants shadow step on our attacks every 3s?

I’m going to ignore the balance concern with 3s teleports because it’s very, very, very overpowered. What makes D/P strong is Shadow Shot, and basically giving out one for free so rapidly is a huge balance concern.

Numbers are tweakable.

Thing is, this would just still be used by D/P, and still make D/P even better than it is now, on the principle is basically saves D/P four initiative to engage for a backstab. Other weapon sets would still require additional setup, despite the free teleport being “nice”.

But you have to look at what D/P has to sacrifice to get this. D/P will have to give S.Rejuv for this…which I don’t believe will be a good tradeoff. Thus as I’ve mentioned, this trait will be appealing to non-stealth builds.

The only way to fix other weapons is through the other weapons themselves. No adjustments to traits, unless awkwardly specific, would do anything, in which case, those traits are either front-loaded and accelerate one set too much, or are strictly worse, making the set even worse than it was before due to stacking extra dependencies.

“Fixing” the weapon skills will not create diversity. SA will always be a stealth trait line unless they stop making it so.

SA is meant for stealthy play almost exclusively. Don’t like/use stealth? Don’t play SA.

The diversity goal is tossed out the window and the 3 traits I listed above will always be picked no matter what. Why pick Venom Aura if SA is stealth exclusive? Why pick “Stealth Survivor” over S. Rejuv? Why pick Leeching venom over Shadow Protector?

Shadow Arts should not be stealth exclusive. It should give traits for both stealth and non-stealth builds. As of right now, the only non-stealth build going SA is venom share — which is out of place since venom has no correlation with Shadow Arts…it is more of a Deadly Arts than Shadow Arts. Shadow Art should support both stealth and shadowstep for non-stealth.

I am not a big fan of Marauder since it prioritizes precision over power and ferocity. High Precision is nothing if the Thief has mediocre Power and Ferocity. Seeing that you already employ some Soldier trinkets, changing it from Marauder to Berserker will give you more damage output. If you don’t mind the stats from Marauder, then the build as-is is fine but with one minor change — I would take Staff Mastery over Escapist Absolution only because this build already have Withdraw and Shadowstep.

DeceiverX.8361:

I don’t know if I agree with preparedness as baseline. If I had to change trickery, I’d reduce the base cooldown on steal to about 25 seconds and remove the cooldown reduction on Sleight of Hand, with the line when traited resulting in a 20s Cooldown.

The Steal CDR shouldn’t be exclusive to Trick. This is the kind of game design that limits diversity. It is obvious that a 20s Steal is a must have so make it available to any build, not just with Trick. Just like te Steal CDR, preparedness shouldn’t be exclusive to Trick.

I’d instead also put Kleptomaniac as baseline. This gives the thief better sustained combat potential with initiative if waiting to use steal, rather than using it almost entirely as an engage.

I totally agree.

With these changes, CiS + S.Embrace S.Protector + S.Rejuv will still be the pick no matter what, which means these changes failed to offer diversity.

If the goal is diversity, trash traits like Last Refuge, Concealed Defeat, and Hidden Thief needs to be deleted and make Venom Aura as an innate ability of venoms — reduced cooldown and party share.

Shadow Arts is more than just stealth, they can add traits that takes advantage of shadow step. D/P’s advantage over other melee weapon set is its ability to stick to the target. What if we get a trait that grants shadow step on our attacks every 3s?

Example; Shadow Leash — Your next attack while in combat has shadow step. 3s ICD. (this ability will teleport the Thief before the attack hits)

This trait will grant other melee weapons an ability to close the gap. It’s not as good as D/P but it’s good enough trait to compete in a GM slot if Venom Aura would go away and become an innate venom ability.

Another trait that would be better than Last Refuge is Shadow Form. This will grant the Thief invulnerability for 2s when their health drops to 25%. The Thief in this form will neither receive or deal damage. This does not stealth the Thief, just making them intangible.

These traits will definitely open up other none stealth-based builds.

Edit: typo

messiah.1908:

sasoriaka.6348:

Listen here children.

I have done the math (integrals) and here is a rather useful information:

At 200% ferocity, adding 1% critical hit chance will increase on average 0.69% overall damage.

The more precision you have, the less overall damage you will gain from gaining precision.
Example: + 1% critical hit chance at 40% will give more overall damage than + 1% at 75%.

Example of application: superior sigil of accuracy (+ 7% crit chance) has on average 4,2% increased overall damage. Therefore, superior sigil of force (+ 5% damage) is better on average. If you are under 40% critical hit chance, accuracy is better.

Also, the more ferocity you have, the more precision will be valuable.

Other uselful piece of knowledge. At 50% crticial hit chance, adding 1% at ferocity will add 0.30% overall damage.

Conclusion: power > precision >>> ferocity.

the conclusion is already known. the problem is this
DA gives 10% dmg to target with condition and 20% dmg to target below 50% hp
CS gives about 40% crit dmg to target above 50% hp and 30% below 50% hp
now with DA build having in average 77% crit chance and CS having in average 95% crit chance who is doing more dmg in average

When DA used to also grant upto 300 power, it is way better than CS and those dmg boost looks good and very effective, but not anymore. Hitting a crit boosts the dmg by at least 50% due to crit damage. Since the Power level for both DA and CS are now the same ever since DA lost that Power advantage, it comes down to which trait line can crit more often and which trait line significantly increases crit damage. The 30% damage boost from DA is not enough to compete to the amount of crit damage boosts that CS is getting.

The Ferocity difference already put CS 30% damage boost ahead of DA. That’s not even including all the conditional crit dmg bonus and might stacks that CS get in combat. I’ve personally used to run DA and based on my experience, CS has higher damage output.

babazhook.6805:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Fleet Shadow changed to Instant Reflex (gain evasion for 2s when struck below the health threshold –50%, 40s CD).

This is still inferior to Vigorous Recovery or Pain Response. However, it can trigger the “on evade” traits so it’s not too bad — but still inferior to VR.

Upper Hand – Changed to give regeneration when you evade an attack (in addition to the initiative gain). Cooldown also reduced from 3s to 2s.

This change is actually nice, but the fact that it’s competing with Assassin’s Reward and Don’t Stop, it’s still not a good pick. If I want heal, I’d go for AR. The initiative gain is not that great even with a reduced ICD. If they really want this to be desirable, they should apply the ICD on regen but allow 1 initiative per evade without ICD. If that would be the case, I’d definitely take it for my P/P build.

Withdraw healing has been increased by 10%.

Is this a 10% on top of the 10% we should have received before, or this is just a bug fix?

Pretty lame to add it as a “balance chang”e seeing that they didn’t change this skill at all from the time when it should have received the 10%.

If this is a 10% on top of the 10%, then I’ll applaud this change

Autoattack damage for sword not changed but the frequency has increased. Overall damage increased by about 30%.

I hope that this change applied to after-cast delay.

Black Powder has its aftercast removed.

Very nice. +1

Dagger autoattack damage increased.

By how much?

Bandit’s Defense, you can now block for the full duration of 1.5s.

Does this mean the KD triggers for every block? Still, the animation of the KD needs to be faster.

Staff got some damage increase as well.

Meh.

Disagree on your take on vigorous recovery. Any taking the Acro line will have pretty well full time Vigor meaning Vigorous recovery redundant. This vigor coming off feline grace. My current builds that use Acro take pain response and still have full time vigor or near to it.

I agree about the redundancy if the build takes Channeled Vigor. I’m thinking about a build when DD is no longer the only Elite spec. If all we’ll have is Acrobatics and some new Elite that is not as evasive as DD, then this new trait is inferior as I’ve stated. With DD currently, I agree with you, but that wouldn’t be the case when DD phase out or the build is purely Core traits. VR is more reliable on triggering Vigor than FG since FG relies on evades, precise human reflexes, and acceptable network latency. Evading with Withdraw can trigger both VR and FG. Seeing that Withdraw is now getting its 10% heal buff, I personally be using Withdraw instead of Channeled Vigor.

Upper hand giving regen and INI gain is very usable over Assassins reward. It not predicated on spending INI for the heal.

This will greatly enhance d/d Condition builds and S/d builds S/d will be using the AA attacks more (as well as S/p) meaning they can build around having full time Regen /vigor with supplemental INI gain off Upper hand.

I can see taking IP in the CS line along with the new Upper hand and evade trait. Regen uptime will be high in a CS DD Acro build using staff. With the sheer number of evades this would mean full time vigor and close to full time regen with the build fueling ongoing INI and endurance.

I like the regen on Upper Hand. The problem with this trait is the ICD. Judging by the ICD, the regen will probably only last 1s-2s and without Healing Power and multiple stacks, this regen will be pathetically weak. Compare this to Driven Fortitude where DF heals for ~450 with 1s ICD, it will take 4 stacks of regen for 1s to get that much healing from a single evade. Not to mention DF is a minor Master trait and Upper Hand is a major GM. Once DD phase out and we no longer have access to DF using another Elite spec, UH as an alternative is not a reasonable choice. They need to go back to the drawing board on this.

P/P would be ill served by Upper hand as there no evades inhrent in the weapon set. it my opinion that to fully leverage this trait the weapons with inherent evades are best suited.

It’s only beneficial to my P/P build if this trait has no ICD on the initiative gain, thus if I evaded 3 times in a single dodge it should give me 3 initiatives. Netting 1 initiative per dodge is not a reasonable trait to pick for a GM slot. Even though P/P has no inherent evade on the weapon set, dodge and Withdraw are good enough.

Fleet Shadow changed to Instant Reflex (gain evasion for 2s when struck below the health threshold –50%, 40s CD).

This is still inferior to Vigorous Recovery or Pain Response. However, it can trigger the “on evade” traits so it’s not too bad — but still inferior to VR.

Upper Hand – Changed to give regeneration when you evade an attack (in addition to the initiative gain). Cooldown also reduced from 3s to 2s.

This change is actually nice, but the fact that it’s competing with Assassin’s Reward and Don’t Stop, it’s still not a good pick. If I want heal, I’d go for AR. The initiative gain is not that great even with a reduced ICD. If they really want this to be desirable, they should apply the ICD on regen but allow 1 initiative per evade without ICD. If that would be the case, I’d definitely take it for my P/P build.

Withdraw healing has been increased by 10%.

Is this a 10% on top of the 10% we should have received before, or this is just a bug fix?

Pretty lame to add it as a “balance chang”e seeing that they didn’t change this skill at all from the time when it should have received the 10%.

If this is a 10% on top of the 10%, then I’ll applaud this change

Autoattack damage for sword not changed but the frequency has increased. Overall damage increased by about 30%.

I hope that this change applied to after-cast delay.

Black Powder has its aftercast removed.

Very nice. +1

Dagger autoattack damage increased.

By how much?

Bandit’s Defense, you can now block for the full duration of 1.5s.

Does this mean the KD triggers for every block? Still, the animation of the KD needs to be faster.

Staff got some damage increase as well.

Meh.

Geiir.7603:

Or create new sets. Let D/D have one set of 5 abilities and let P/D have a completely different one.

I made a case about this idea before and I even added it to my signature. If I held my breath, I would be dead.

AikijinX.6258:

All I can say is. Brothers and Sisters, our time is now.

Jana.6831:

So, let us all be unviable so they finally work on the rest of thief and not just assume that everybody plays D/P anyway and the other weaponsets don’t need care.

Sound strategy.

Impact.2780:

Ah, so you’re saying you’ve blown this all up because I did not say “these figures are estimates”

My point is that you’re denying jumping to a conclusion.

Well I suppose I shot myself in the foot. I almost mentioned it in anticipation of this empty response, but thought “no, he’ll know why.” It’s a low duration of weakness in a meta where everything has condition immunity, removal and duration reduction. It’d only be remotely useful in smaller fights. Ideally you’d have the weakness up when you’re not evading, which you use your initiative for. If you’re using your initiative to land weakness instead for when you’re not evading which you aren’t when applying it with this skill, you are not pressuring as much as you could be. The exception might be when you can hit three times with it, which can’t be achieved often.

Well that is not the point is it? You made so many false claims about weakness and now you’re trying to cover it up.

Again you’re jumping on something without thinking it through. You have to use initiative with weakening charge and can’t rely on it applying a good enough duration when you want it to.

This is unreliable. That is unreliable. That is basically the only defense you have. Calling something unreliable is getting old fast.

The traits in DA and DD would apply it on-hit, meaning it can’t be dodged, except for DA if they dodge steal, but that’s something the player has to work on being able to land, since it’s so important that it does land.

Correction. It applies on crit for DD and it applies on poison in DA. Another blunder.

Regardless of the reason for choosing it, the point is he did. The damage reduction is also only effective while weakness is applied, which is not something to rely on, as I have just covered. It seems you’d rather ignore it, along with a lot of other things previously stated, so you can keep going. I’m not even going to credit the next point with a response.

Yes, yes. Every skills and every traits are unreliable. I get it. They are so unreliable that none of them really matter. Heck, what DPS? It’s unreliable.

I do disagree with CS being better than DA. I’ve made no attempt to hide that.

But DA is unreliable. Dying is more reliable than actually trying to deal high DPS.

Signets of power: later accounted for and did not change the order of highest DPS average in the calculation. Continuing to focus on it being originally overlooked does not achieve anything.

Really? 5 stacks of might? 10 stacks of might? —- made no difference?

Probably because SoP is so unreliable.

I did not account for haste because such a gimmick is unaccountable for. Despite everything I’ve said to support that, if you wish to continue insisting leaving it out is a problem, then the only thing you achieve is making me question your ability to see sense.

Dismissing something and calling it a gimmick to make a DA build looks good is what it comes down to.

I considered weakening charge, I just didn’t think it warranted an explanation. Sorry for overestimating you.

Then why make false statements suchs as, “I said taking havoc mastery reduces survivability because there is no longer that weakness application.”

Either you’re lying now saying that you’ve considered it, or you’re lying when you made that quoted statement. Either way, you’re been making dishonest statements.

I did not fail to see why weakening strikes was picked. You jumped to that without enough evidence to support it.

Really? Here I quote, “He must have a reason for choosing weakening strikes over havoc mastery”

Then acknowledging the pick, instead you’re alluding that there might be some mysterious other reason than the obvious.

I only focused on the weakness application because the secondary effect relies on weakness, so targeting the weakness also affected the secondary effect. Why do I need to explain this. It’s ironic you still talk of flaws while even your list contains one of your own…

But that was not your reasoning. Here again I quote, " I said taking havoc mastery reduces survivability because there is no longer that weakness application."

Even without the WS trait, weakness is a condition that causes a 50% fumble which is survivability for the Thief. The notion that taking HM reduces survivability is what’s wrong here. More damage means target is on defense, less attacks coming from the target, in a sense more damage is survivability.

I acknowledge D/P doesn’t damage while in stealth.. That is so obvious that I shouldn’t need to type it out for you. Even if it weren’t obvious it doesn’t need to be stated because it doesn’t affect the DA staff vs. CS staff discussion. Really man, could you grasp for straws any harder? Also, technically staff doesn’t damage while evading. The evade frame ends right before the hit lands.

But this is about the reliability to RT. If the build has to go DA D/P just so the Thief can take RT over FS, you have to consider the fact that such transition has a cost. So even if you can convince someone that RT is more reliable than FS, the fact of the matter is D/P is not a good source of high DPS. Which makes the ever mention of RT irrelevant. Why even bring up RT if you’re not willing to accept that it comes with a DA D/P baggage? And that it has no value, whatsoever, to DA Staff? It might be reliable in your opinion, but it’s useless.

- Failed to acknowledge that vault does more damage than backstab…? This focusing on D/P again to appear to strengthen a debate between two different trait lines for staff only. You’re rendering me speechless. All I can do is stare and think “wow…”

This stems out of the idea that RT is more reliable. I’m simply exploring the idea that if I were to change this build, I would have to accept the poor damage of Backstab compare to Vault. Again, RT might reliable to you, but it has no value in terms of DPS. If Staff has an easy access to stealth, I would have agreed with you.

- I did not fail to understand the numbers, I interpreted them in the context of the discussion so they would not be completely pointless, making the assumption that you didn’t intend for them to be pointless. Regardless of how I looked at them, they brought nothing, as I have already said. Another case of ignoring something so you can keep going.

I’m not the one who’s ignoring the value of Haste, or the 2 signets on the skill bar that each can grant 5 stacks of Might.

Keep throwing that word around if you want. It doesn’t make them true, or make yours any less real.

Intentionally omitting something in your calculation only solidifies that word.

Impact.2780:

Oh my good God man you must be desperate to bring this down to semantics. There are two types of combo. The obvious one, which is a combination of skills, interrupted or not. Then there is a combo which creates a combo effect, which you could call a “GW2 combo.”

A combo is a combo only if each part works hand in hand with each other. Sequencing the use of skills are hardly a combo.

In boxing, I can jab and uppercut whenever I want to. It only becomes a combo when I use the jab to open up for a big uppercut. I cannot use uppercut to open up for a jab, if I do that combination, it is not considered a combo. You may argue with the technicality of the term, but that’s just being pathetic.

Yet you’re arguing about it. If after playing GW2 for so long did not teach you what a combo is, then this is indeed pointless and ridiculous.

Yes I’m arguing it, unfortunately. I argue the point out of necessity, because you initiated it, and I’m replying to you. Once again after throwing around the word “flaw,” you’re “attacking the arguer,” trying to undermine my reasoning by belittling me by being deliberately obtuse in order to argue over something as trivial as semantics. I mean come on, who do you think you’re fooling?[/quote]

I initiated it? You quickly forget that you claimed to see a combo where there isn’t.

They don’t need to predict for something that is telegraphed and or when the attacker acquires quickness.

No, no. Once again your argument is focusing on one side. If you assume the thief will know when to burst – a point made from experience – then you must afford that same experience to the opponent(s). An experienced player will not blow all their defensive skills early or together. They would know to hold at least something useful back in anticipation. Then, even if they did use their last defensive ability, haste is a gimmick. You like to forget this. You can’t always control – especially with AoE – when not to activate it. The chances are it’s been passively activated already without intention, forcing you to try and make use of it earlier than you say a “thief who has played this long” would.

You assume that the player who spec’d for Flanking Strikes has no knowledge on when or how to use it. Only those who doesn’t know much about the trait who keeps away from it.

Steal does not interrupt “any” defensive skills. It cannot interrupt a block, instant evade, invulnerability, dodge, or instant cast knockbacks, all of which are plentiful at present.

If that is the case, then why even bother taking Sleight of Hands if there are plenty of uninterruptable defensive skills? The CDR will also mean nothing.

The fact is, SoH applies daze, which prevents the target from using any skills.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Assuming that the burst was mitigated, it doesn’t mean that CS will suddenly lose all DPS capability. Also the fact that you’re using D/P in your argument conveniently ignores the flaw of that weapon set, that it does no DPS while in stealth. Without stealth D/P dies in seconds even when spec’d with Weakening Strikes.

Putting words in my mouth I see. You had it right earlier when you translated my point. Now you’re back to seeming not to get it. I did not say CS loses all DPS capability after some damage is mitigated. That’s absurd.

Nor did I use D/P. In fact I only mentioned D/P when referring to revealed training to state that even that is more reliable than flanking strikes and that I did not even see revealed training fit to be included for the D/P part in the calculations. I used it to make a point against flanking strikes. No where did I state I was “using D/P” against arguing a point about mitigation affecting CS. That makes absolutely no sense. Something you obviously forgot to consider when jumping to the conclusion in order to use that word “flaw,” again…

What in the world are you reading? Nowhere did I accuse you of saying something you didn’t say. You’re being so defensive now. You’re seeing an attack where there is none.

You went all the trouble of calculating D/P’s damage output. If that is irrelevant, then we can just ignore anything to do with D/P…because really, it’s just a distraction, a red herring.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

DA has less staying power than CS. Even more so if DA uses D/P which going in stealth means less DPS. Even without weakness, this CS build forces the target into a defensive position meaning there will be no DPS coming from the target to worry about. This CS build uses Withdraw instead of Channeled Vigor shows that it has, in fact, a lot of survivability. Staying power is provided by the Staff which D/P lacks.

You’re again focusing on D/P to strengthen an argument where D/P was not involved.

I’m getting rid of the notion that RT is more reliable than FS proving that DA is even weaker with D/P even if you claim that RT is more reliable. Why would you even compare RT to FS is beyond me, when the two has nothing in common or were they even interchangeable.

In the post I made before this one, I explained how weakness is more for smaller fights such as 1v1s or 2v2s, and even then should be used more precisely than a passive on RNG can allow for. In a team fight its effectiveness is significantly reduced. Your argument also assumes that DA won’t put out sufficient pressure to force the same target(s) in the same scenario(s) into a defensive position, after we’ve discussed that CS’s -combo- with quickness will likely be avoided, mitigated, or failed. Both builds would be able to force the same target in the same scenario into a defensive position.

No. what you said was, and I quote, “I said taking havoc mastery reduces survivability because there is no longer that weakness application”

For which I responded the way I did.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The results are shown in categories, not in general terms. You’re jumping to a wrong conclusion. The figures clearly show what HM and Haste can do to the CS build and in the moment of burst, it can get upto 4600 DPS for the duration of Haste.

You accuse it to be a generalization even though it’s clearly that is not the case.

Generalisation or failing to see the values I provided were intended as estimates of an average* I said failing, because I assumed you would not deliberately attempt to offer that figure for the brief duration of haste for comparison to an average. If you did not intend it for comparison then there was even less point to it, especially after considering what I keep having to state about haste being a gimmick and why. If I assumed wrong – or as you’d rather put it, “jumped to the wrong conclusion,” – it was by a bad design on your part. You see, I had to interpret it the way I did for it to have any bearing on the discussion, which you obviously intended that it would.

The values I provided shows the average in different states. If you want to calculate the average in general term, then you would take the high point of the build, which is with HM, Haste, and Might stacks, and the low point for when those buff doesn’t apply. I didn’t do that for a reason.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Haste is more reliable than RT only because you can predict it’s CD status just by looking at the signet’s CD and can easily get into position with a single Bound. RT relies on stealth that Staff has no access on. The DA build has to use D/P to gain that bonus and if BP is interrupted, the DA build is SoL. This is why many D/P builds run away from fights when they are revealed or BP was interrupted…they have no staying power, thus they have significantly less DPS.

No staying power = less DPS
Going in stealth = less DPS
Running away =less DPS

So even if you’ve calculated with an assumption that DA D/P has better DPS, the fact remains that relying on stealth results in a very low DPS output.

There’s no point focusing on how easy it might be to position yourself. That bears no weight here.

It is easy to simply dismiss the fact that those who uses FS actually goes through training to familiarize themselves on their position and the FS CD.

Even if you do judge its cool down using signet cool downs, it’s not more reliable than revealed training for every reason I’ve already provided. You can’t always control when it goes off, even if you know it is ready. You can’t be sure to be in a position to use it, you may instead be defensive or escaping when it activates because of when and where you had to dodge. You may have been forced into shortbow and either stop damaging to wait for your swap – losing DPS – or keep going and have trick shot or combustive shot hit someone from the back or side and activate it. Furthermore, I can’t believe you’d -always- use a signet with haste. The enemy comp may necessitate saving them for their actual functions instead of to gain might and track the cool down of a passive trait.

Yes, of course. Every Thief is a mindless player who rolls their face on their keyboard whenever they play who waste their utility skill nonsensically.

You could either pick the worst of the players to make your point or you can actually give credit to players who knows what they’re doing. That’s up to you.

I’d rather assume that the Thief knows what they are doing to actually gauge the potential of the build rather than assume that they are incompetent and makes a lot of mistakes.

And again you’re trying to strengthen your arguments by saying you have to run D/P to use revealed training, missing completely the fact the comparison was staff vs. staff, and revealed training was used to in making a point of the unreliability of haste.

If that is the case, D/P is nothing but a red herring. DA Staff vs CS Staff already shows how CS Staff is far superior.

AikijinX.6258:

DeceiverX.8361:

the sober ninja.6539:

Daredevil just feels a little clunky compared to the smooth as butter old school thief, and I don’t like that you need to take these fancy new dodges as grandmaster traits just to be able to have 3 dodge rolls (which is really nice).

Funny you mention this. One of my guild members actually doesn’t slot the GM traits because he thinks the revealing nature of Bound and the over-shooting potential on Dash lead to excessive clunkiness in combat. I love Dash, but dislike overall the style of play DD brings with it, so I continue to run core thief.

I just believe core Thief has alot more damage potential to offer.

Well, yes and no. If you’re not going to use Staff (and Staff Mastery) or Physical Skills, then yes, it would be better to take all Core traits.

Impact.2780:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The statement you quoted shows that you’re arguing about something that is not there. “The Math is questionable if you follow the conversation” meaning the reasoning is flawed. All these things you’ve just posted has nothing to do with what the statement you quoted is addressing. The flaw in your reasoning is that you’ve left out key factors in your Math thus you’ve arrived at a conclusion not representative of your entire calculation, thus your estimates are hardly believable.

Not only are you making no sense, you clearly either skipped over what I said, or could not understand it at all. You’re still clinging to the idea that key factors are left out when all those that can be accounted for have been so, and that the conclusion of the calculation is the overall conclusion. No, it supports it. It is a part of it. It is not strong enough on its own to make a conclusion, this means even if you got it to say CS produces higher DPS, the conclusion would not shift to that without accompanied reasoning.

Key factors were indeed left out and you even admit to not including Signet of Power which is essential to the build. And you did made and jumped to a conclusion, many times, stating that DA has better DPS than CS — if that is not a conclusion you’ve jumped to, then by all means, I apologize for assuming that your not a conclusion is an actual conclusion even it is definitely a conclusion since you didn’t specify that your Math is inconclusive.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Sure you can argue that Haste is a gimmick and Weakness will result in less DPS if CS pick HM, but that’s the problem with your reasoning; you give the benefit of HM to DA even though it will suffer the same fate as CS if it didn’t take Weakening instead, yet you deny it from CS. That’s really pathetic. If you would apply HM to DA, you should also apply it to CS — your whole reasoning became questionable when you refused to do this. If HM is exclusive to DA, then sure, why not, apply it to DA only but that is not the case here.

Careful, you’re bordering on attacking the person instead of the reasoning. It’s not a problem with my reasoning but a problem of you focusing too much on finding flaws – what you want to see – than what is actually there. I said taking havoc mastery reduces survivability because there is no longer that weakness application.

What do you think Weakening Charge (Staff #2) is? Chopped liver?

Now if you think instead of accuse, you might realise that because I say this, it must not affect the DA build, and indeed DA has weakness application, in addition to minor healing from mug. Had you been more reasonable you might have correctly argued that the DA weakness is much less than DD’s if you take it, because staff unlike D/P can only apply poison with steal which has twice the cool down of the weakness application trait. To which, I would say yes, and mug is also offers a very small heal, but combined with the little weakness inbetween evade spams, it is a survival increase in a smaller fight. Neither have much affect on a team fight because of the ammount of active and passive condition cleansing, duration reduction, immunity, and cleansing combos used, and the fact that most of the time the thief is ignored unless he proves to be an easy target, until he appears vulnerable otherwise it’d likely result in a waste of resources.

This whole “reasoning” is based solely on a misconception that Staff has not access to weakness unless spec’d for DA. Weakening Charge says “Hi!”

Furthermore, the OP posted a build that he claimed was the best and dealt more damage with for building with critical strikes over deadly arts. He must have a reason for choosing weakening strikes over havoc mastery, and this is his thread we are replying to. So in build vs build – as I said before, if the builds consisted of one trait line only, you’d have a point – DA takes havoc mastery, and the OP who not only plays CS but is trying to proclaim his build the best and using damage out as his primary reason, has chosen weakening strikes. Whether I agree with this or not, I must respect his choice if I am to reply to his build and claims.

The OP obviously chose Weakening Strikes for the damage reduction, not so that he can apply weakness. You assumed wrong that he chose it so that he can apply weakness. It is fairly obvious that you have not run this build before thus your knowledge of what it can do is very limited that causes you to blunder in your reasonings.

He claims that it is the best. I personally can see why he think that it is even when you try to argue that it isn’t using DA. If you didn’t disagree with him, what’s the point of comparing it to DA build?

You shout flaw when you have many, seem to forget things at your own convenience, and keep coming back to pounce on trivial things which, had you given them some thought first, would not need me to come back and explain. It’s good practice to see both sides of an argument before you commit to making it.

Here are the flaws in your reasonings;
- You failed to account for Signet of Power
- You failed to account for Haste
- You failed to account for Weakening Charge arguing that CS has no source of weakness unless they spec for DA
- You failed to understand why the OP picked Weakening Strikes
- You failed to account for Trickster and Withdraw as a source of survivability
- You failed to acknowledge the fact that D/P has less DPS since it doesn’t have the same staying power as Staff
- You failed to acknowledge that when D/P stealth it does no damage while Staff can deal damage while evading
- You failed to acknowledge that Vault deals more damage than Backstab
- You failed to understand the numbers I’ve posted wrongfully accusing it as generalization when it clearly shows that they are categorized

It’s really hard to ignore if the flaws are this many.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

You might think that Haste is a gimmick but it is essential to this build to quickly bring the target below 50% HP. Leaving it out is just irresponsible.

Now this one made me laugh. Sorry, that’s not a nice thing to say; I suppose you just worded it poorly. Despite everything I have said on the haste matter, to say the build relies on it is an argument against its effectiveness. I don’t believe that is the case though – I don’t believe it “relies on it” – so I’m not going to “pounce” on it. Calling not factoring in something which can’t be factored in to a sufficient degree of accuracy “irresponsible,” or whatever you actually meant… Well there’s nothing really to say to that, is there. It’s just plain ludicrous.

Where did I say that the build “relies on it”? You’re jumping to another wrong conclusion again.

It is essential to quickly bring the target down since Haste removes the telegraph from skills like Vault. It is essential not because the build relies on it, rather to pre-emptively counter an interrupt by removing the window of opportunity.

It is in fact, ludicrous because you don’t even realize nor comprehend the purpose of it.

A combination of ’zerker and valk is better than marauder. Marauder has too much allocation on precision that is useless if your power and crit damage are low.

Spartacus.5243:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Impact.2780:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

You misunderstood, there is no combo here

Actually, you misunderstood.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

I would use Bound to position myself to be on the side or back to trigger Haste then use Inf Signet to trigger the 5 stacks of might. This will give me 6s of Fury and 5 stacks of might for 10s.

This is a combo. A combo is a combination or chain of skills. Bound, gain buffs, Infiltrator’s Signet, gain buff, attack with buffs. How you “attack with buffs” is irrelevant, but they are a chained, intended to make the most of those buffs.

A combo is something that will not work when the order of sequence is interrupted, that is not the case here. An Example of a combo is BP+HS to gain stealth. If BP gets interrupted, there is no stealth. Bound and Inf Signet are not as volatile as this. Even if you interrupted Bound, the Thief will still get 10% damage boost.

Arguing over this little thing is not only pointless, but ridiculous. There is clearly a combo.

Yet you’re arguing about it. If after playing GW2 for so long did not teach you what a combo is, then this is indeed pointless and ridiculous.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

any skills are susceptible to interrupt and mitigation whether you’re running DA or CS.

Yeah… I’ll just quote myself.

Impact.2780:

While this is also true regardless of build you’re running, the point is if you build to have a telegraphed moment of high damage capability, that is the window the other players will use survival skills to mitigate it. Whereas if your damage is high throughout the fight, a period of mitigation won’t be as harmful, because you’re not dealing less damage during the other times in order to have had that “high damage moment”. Nevertheless, DA would still have higher DPS with no might than CS would with 5 stacks.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The fact that the damage output necessitates a response of any kind, may it be mitigation or interrupt, proves that this build can hurt — a lot. You’ve kinda proved that point in your response.

Yeah…. And I didn’t say DA didn’t hurt a lot either now did I? Speak to me of flaws, this is the “missing the point” flaw. You’d get the same defensive response with DA as well. Any damaging build in fact. The point is if a significant part of the DPS is concentrated to a small period, the loss of damage pressure will be huge when defensive skills are used in response for that period. The only difference is when they will be used, not whether they will be used.

Just because a burst can be mitigated or denied, doesn’t necessarily mean the target can predict when the burst will happen. You’re arguing that a flat DPS is better since a mitigation will have less effect assuming that a CS burst with Haste, Bound, HM, and 6 stacks of might can be predicted.

Any Thief who has played this long would know when to burst and when not to burst. With the example I’ve provided, using Inf Signet to engage instead of Steal reserves the Steal for interrupting any defensive skills the target is going to use.

Assuming that the burst was mitigated, it doesn’t mean that CS will suddenly lose all DPS capability. Also the fact that you’re using D/P in your argument conveniently ignores the flaw of that weapon set, that it does no DPS while in stealth. Without stealth D/P dies in seconds even when spec’d with Weakening Strikes.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

DA without 5 stacks of might and no way to maintain 100% Fury uptime is doubtful to have higher DPS than CS. I’ve used your Math and the result disagrees with you.

With 6 stacks of Might @ 50% uptime (5 from SoP and 1 from Rune), the effective Power of CS is 2315. The CS’s DPS goes to 2919 DPS. Factor in Havoc Mastery it’s 3123 DPS. Factor in Haste it’s 4379 DPS. Factor in both HM and Haste it’s 4685 DPS.

I don’t see how DA can remotely beat that.

I’ve said all I need to about fury for DA. In practice it can no better maintain 100% up-time alone than CS can, unless CS takes thrill of the crime as well, which will not result in the full benefit because these traits and runs granting fury can – and do – overlap and go on cool down together. I actually got 3014 DPS factoring in 6 stacks of might. You could indeed factor in havoc mastery, but that then factors in no ability to apply weakness, which results in less survivability, which results in less stay power and less damage in practice.

DA has less staying power than CS. Even more so if DA uses D/P which going in stealth means less DPS. Even without weakness, this CS build forces the target into a defensive position meaning there will be no DPS coming from the target to worry about. This CS build uses Withdraw instead of Channeled Vigor shows that it has, in fact, a lot of survivability. Staying power is provided by the Staff which D/P lacks.

That last figure is rich with flaws. DPS is damage over time. You have clearly fallen victim to the flaw of generalisation; you find it raises DPS in a short window, and then generalise that value to apply throughout all periods of combat. This is of course false. That, or you missed that the values I produced were averages, and that the value you gave with haste taken into account is far from an average.

The results are shown in categories, not in general terms. You’re jumping to a wrong conclusion. The figures clearly show what HM and Haste can do to the CS build and in the moment of burst, it can get upto 4600 DPS for the duration of Haste.

You accuse it to be a generalization even though it’s clearly that is not the case.

Not to mention, as already stated, haste is a gimmick, and is less reliable than revealed training with D/P which I didn’t deem reliable enough to factor into the calculation.

There’s also the fact I left unsaid that there is no tell for when it is ready to trigger again, so it won’t always be used to burst. It could activate when you’re escaping and not in a position to attack, or when you’re in shortbow, or simply not in a position to make use of it. So not only can it not be taken into account in an equation, but it is unreliable in practice. Like I said: gimmick.

Haste is more reliable than RT only because you can predict it’s CD status just by looking at the signet’s CD and can easily get into position with a single Bound. RT relies on stealth that Staff has no access on. The DA build has to use D/P to gain that bonus and if BP is interrupted, the DA build is SoL. This is why many D/P builds run away from fights when they are revealed or BP was interrupted…they have no staying power, thus they have significantly less DPS.

No staying power = less DPS
Going in stealth = less DPS
Running away =less DPS

So even if you’ve calculated with an assumption that DA D/P has better DPS, the fact remains that relying on stealth results in a very low DPS output.

also bruh didnt you notice i run 2 sigils. so that translates into 10 might stacks. just awaring you

Yes, but I use it as a way to gain 50% uptime of 5 stacks of might. If you use it in sequence, you get 20s of 5 stacks of might with only 4s window in between. 50% uptime is already generous even though the uptime is clearly higher than that.

You can surely pop the second signet for higher DPS to get 10 stacks of might, sure, but that might be too much for Impact to calculate.

Impact.2780:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

You misunderstood, there is no combo here

Actually, you misunderstood.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

I would use Bound to position myself to be on the side or back to trigger Haste then use Inf Signet to trigger the 5 stacks of might. This will give me 6s of Fury and 5 stacks of might for 10s.

This is a combo. A combo is a combination or chain of skills. Bound, gain buffs, Infiltrator’s Signet, gain buff, attack with buffs. How you “attack with buffs” is irrelevant, but they are a chained, intended to make the most of those buffs.

A combo is something that will not work when the order of sequence is interrupted, that is not the case here. An Example of a combo is BP+HS to gain stealth. If BP gets interrupted, there is no stealth. Bound and Inf Signet are not as volatile as this. Even if you interrupted Bound, the Thief will still get 10% damage boost.

Arguing over this little thing is not only pointless, but ridiculous. There is clearly a combo.

Yet you’re arguing about it. If after playing GW2 for so long did not teach you what a combo is, then this is indeed pointless and ridiculous.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

any skills are susceptible to interrupt and mitigation whether you’re running DA or CS.

Yeah… I’ll just quote myself.

Impact.2780:

While this is also true regardless of build you’re running, the point is if you build to have a telegraphed moment of high damage capability, that is the window the other players will use survival skills to mitigate it. Whereas if your damage is high throughout the fight, a period of mitigation won’t be as harmful, because you’re not dealing less damage during the other times in order to have had that “high damage moment”. Nevertheless, DA would still have higher DPS with no might than CS would with 5 stacks.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The fact that the damage output necessitates a response of any kind, may it be mitigation or interrupt, proves that this build can hurt — a lot. You’ve kinda proved that point in your response.

Yeah…. And I didn’t say DA didn’t hurt a lot either now did I? Speak to me of flaws, this is the “missing the point” flaw. You’d get the same defensive response with DA as well. Any damaging build in fact. The point is if a significant part of the DPS is concentrated to a small period, the loss of damage pressure will be huge when defensive skills are used in response for that period. The only difference is when they will be used, not whether they will be used.

Just because a burst can be mitigated or denied, doesn’t necessarily mean the target can predict when the burst will happen. You’re arguing that a flat DPS is better since a mitigation will have less effect assuming that a CS burst with Haste, Bound, HM, and 6 stacks of might can be predicted.

Any Thief who has played this long would know when to burst and when not to burst. With the example I’ve provided, using Inf Signet to engage instead of Steal reserves the Steal for interrupting any defensive skills the target is going to use.

Assuming that the burst was mitigated, it doesn’t mean that CS will suddenly lose all DPS capability. Also the fact that you’re using D/P in your argument conveniently ignores the flaw of that weapon set, that it does no DPS while in stealth. Without stealth D/P dies in seconds even when spec’d with Weakening Strikes.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

DA without 5 stacks of might and no way to maintain 100% Fury uptime is doubtful to have higher DPS than CS. I’ve used your Math and the result disagrees with you.

With 6 stacks of Might @ 50% uptime (5 from SoP and 1 from Rune), the effective Power of CS is 2315. The CS’s DPS goes to 2919 DPS. Factor in Havoc Mastery it’s 3123 DPS. Factor in Haste it’s 4379 DPS. Factor in both HM and Haste it’s 4685 DPS.

I don’t see how DA can remotely beat that.

I’ve said all I need to about fury for DA. In practice it can no better maintain 100% up-time alone than CS can, unless CS takes thrill of the crime as well, which will not result in the full benefit because these traits and runs granting fury can – and do – overlap and go on cool down together. I actually got 3014 DPS factoring in 6 stacks of might. You could indeed factor in havoc mastery, but that then factors in no ability to apply weakness, which results in less survivability, which results in less stay power and less damage in practice.

DA has less staying power than CS. Even more so if DA uses D/P which going in stealth means less DPS. Even without weakness, this CS build forces the target into a defensive position meaning there will be no DPS coming from the target to worry about. This CS build uses Withdraw instead of Channeled Vigor shows that it has, in fact, a lot of survivability. Staying power is provided by the Staff which D/P lacks.

That last figure is rich with flaws. DPS is damage over time. You have clearly fallen victim to the flaw of generalisation; you find it raises DPS in a short window, and then generalise that value to apply throughout all periods of combat. This is of course false. That, or you missed that the values I produced were averages, and that the value you gave with haste taken into account is far from an average.

The results are shown in categories, not in general terms. You’re jumping to a wrong conclusion. The figures clearly show what HM and Haste can do to the CS build and in the moment of burst, it can get upto 4600 DPS for the duration of Haste.

You accuse it to be a generalization even though it’s clearly that is not the case.

Not to mention, as already stated, haste is a gimmick, and is less reliable than revealed training with D/P which I didn’t deem reliable enough to factor into the calculation.

There’s also the fact I left unsaid that there is no tell for when it is ready to trigger again, so it won’t always be used to burst. It could activate when you’re escaping and not in a position to attack, or when you’re in shortbow, or simply not in a position to make use of it. So not only can it not be taken into account in an equation, but it is unreliable in practice. Like I said: gimmick.

Haste is more reliable than RT only because you can predict it’s CD status just by looking at the signet’s CD and can easily get into position with a single Bound. RT relies on stealth that Staff has no access on. The DA build has to use D/P to gain that bonus and if BP is interrupted, the DA build is SoL. This is why many D/P builds run away from fights when they are revealed or BP was interrupted…they have no staying power, thus they have significantly less DPS.

No staying power = less DPS
Going in stealth = less DPS
Running away =less DPS

So even if you’ve calculated with an assumption that DA D/P has better DPS, the fact remains that relying on stealth results in a very low DPS output.

Impact.2780:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The Math is questionable if you follow the conversation.

Any calculation is questionable when its done off of estimated figures. The estimation, in this case, is mandatory because it can’t be accurately translated from practice. The only way to strengthen its credibility is with accompanied reasoning, of which I have provided plenty.

Yet still, there are some who make an appeal to ignorance and declare because it’s taking into account a broad range of possibilities and not a conclusion based on solid 100%-correct-for-every-individual-scenario-figures, that they can’t or won’t accept it, and their own conclusion, which they view as accurate because they do not even consider the vast number of variables, must be correct. Of course they don’t use this wording when they present their conclusion, but instead, offer words like “nah no wai u rong my way is best way yah kno bro.”

Then there are some which try to argue more intellectually, but instead of focus on the reasoning as a whole – because after all, conclusions are formed by a collaboration of multiple arguments – pick out a little thing from one single argument, challenge it, suddenly seeming to forget the numerous other contributing arguments and reasoning which cover and or account for it, even when that challenge itself is questionable.

Due to the nature, the challenges are just as questionable as the presented figures and assumptions. Just because something can be challenged doesn’t make it weaker than alternatives or immediately incorrect. Estimation and reason is how you pick the best values to work with, not pointing a figure and shouting “inaccurate!” Here, anything that isn’t a stat is “inaccurate.” If everything was accurate, it wouldn’t be an estimation now, would it? The best you can do in such cases, is reason some estimates, and then use them as if you were in a controlled scenario such as vs a single target that doesn’t move or use any skills, and starts with full health, in order to present some loose figures to go with more worded reasoning to back up your side of the argument.

Let’s go slow and explore that. There is no way to truly tell how long targets will remain above or below 50% health! The calculations uses half and half, but this is never going to be the case, is it? So you offer some words of reason for either side, such as:

• CS does more damage to targets above 50% health, and less damage to targets below 50% health, so they will have an easier job of healing back to that 50% threshold, especially when they burn more of their defensive abilities and receive more allied support the lower they get. They will likely spend most of their time above 50% health, making CS better.
• DA will have a harder time getting the target down below 50%, but if it saves a bit of burst until they are close to that threshold, dropping them below it will be easier. Besides, you also have allies. Once below 50% health, DA applies more damage and pressure, making it harder for the target to heal up past the 50% threshold. Once a target gets low, more players focus it, which will keep it below 50% health, making DA better for damage, and since the next threshold down is downed state, making DA better for getting kills. If the target does heal up, by that time another target will often be below the threshold, and a well coordinated target shift onto the unsuspecting player will drop them, still making DA better.
• If the DA thief is also D/P instead of staff, poison will be further reducing incoming healing by 33% when they try to heal up above 50% health. This not only keeps them below the threshold easier, but effectively denies the target health it would otherwise have to damage through, so while it has visibly smaller numbers and a smaller damage out stat at the end, it is because there was less health to get through, and it got the kills faster.

Again, the figures, which as previously stated were set in favour of the side that would fall short in order to strengthen the resulting conclusion that it fell short. The figures alone do not conclude because they are not accurate enough to, so picking on a small part of it is like trying to knock down a building by scratching at one brick – buildings don’t fall because one brick suffered some erosion. They are evidence for an argument leading to a conclusion. The accompanied reasoning to justify the figures as “good estimates” for use in the calculation is only an argument over the use of those figures. Attacking that only attempts to challenge some of the chosen figures. It does not undermine the result of the calculation, or challenge the conclusion. The accompanied points about things that can’t be factored in to an equation, which favoured DA, and should also be taken into account when interpreting the results which also favoured DA, are another part of the argument which were dismissed by one of those appeals to ignorance. Other than that, they are “suddenly forgotten.”

The statement you quoted shows that you’re arguing about something that is not there. “The Math is questionable if you follow the conversation” meaning the reasoning is flawed. All these things you’ve just posted has nothing to do with what the statement you quoted is addressing. The flaw in your reasoning is that you’ve left out key factors in your Math thus you’ve arrived at a conclusion not representative of your entire calculation, thus your estimates are hardly believable.

Sure you can argue that Haste is a gimmick and Weakness will result in less DPS if CS pick HM, but that’s the problem with your reasoning; you give the benefit of HM to DA even though it will suffer the same fate as CS if it didn’t take Weakening instead, yet you deny it from CS. That’s really pathetic. If you would apply HM to DA, you should also apply it to CS — your whole reasoning became questionable when you refused to do this. If HM is exclusive to DA, then sure, why not, apply it to DA only but that is not the case here.

You might think that Haste is a gimmick but it is essential to this build to quickly bring the target below 50% HP. Leaving it out is just irresponsible.

Impact.2780:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Impact.2780:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

snip

I’m hardly factoring in Trickery traits “to make DA look good.” If it looks good it’s because it is, and that is my point. I’m being realistic, build vs. build. DA build vs. CS build. Different trait lines work better with different trait options. You wouldn’t say “trait line A can’t compete with trait line B because even though it works better with trait C.1, the build for B uses C.2 so that is what must be taken with it, resulting in a less effective build,” and call is sound reasoning. Besides, give those same trickery traits to the CS build if you want, and you get more fury applications, sure, but those applications will often overlap, and are just as likely to be removed, corrupted and stolen as without the extra few seconds.

Haste is a gimmick, and hard to account for. Revealed training is not a gimmick but also hard to account for when seeking an average value for a simple comparison. Signets of Power I did miss.

If I’m using this build, I would use Bound to position myself to be on the side or back to trigger Haste then use Inf Signet to trigger the 5 stacks of might. This will give me 6s of Fury and 5 stacks of might for 10s. The DPS output of this initial engagement is already high because the Fury buff also gives me additional 250 Ferocity. My next Vault with all these buff will deal so much damage compare to what I’ll get with DA. Using Vault+Bound 3 times and finish off with Impact Strike will guarantee a kill.

I used to spec DA, but I can never get that kind of result with it, albeit I acknowledge that Executioner is very needed against bunkers.

Listing a skill chain and saying it’ll guarantee a kill is almost completely meaningless. You can’t assume the player won’t dodge or use defensive abilities to shut you down or nullify your damage while you pose a high threat, and then with the amount of AoE damage and crowd control going on, and the fact that that it’s a team game, you can’t expect to be allowed to freecast your combo anyway. Any half decent team fighter will see their ally being heavily focused, and lend some aid be it cc, supportive abilities, weakness to you, etc.

While this is also true regardless of build you’re running, the point is if you build to have a telegraphed moment of high damage capability, that is the window the other players will use survival skills to mitigate it. Whereas if your damage is high throughout the fight, a period of mitigation won’t be as harmful, because you’re not dealing less damage during the other times in order to have had that “high damage moment”. Nevertheless, DA would still have higher DPS with no might than CS would with 5 stacks.

You misunderstood, there is no combo here and any skills are susceptible to interrupt and mitigation whether you’re running DA or CS. You can do things in any order you want in this build. The fact that the damage output necessitates a response of any kind, may it be mitigation or interrupt, proves that this build can hurt — a lot. You’ve kinda proved that point in your response.

DA without 5 stacks of might and no way to maintain 100% Fury uptime is doubtful to have higher DPS than CS. I’ve used your Math and the result disagrees with you.

With 6 stacks of Might @ 50% uptime (5 from SoP and 1 from Rune), the effective Power of CS is 2315. The CS’s DPS goes to 2919 DPS. Factor in Havoc Mastery it’s 3123 DPS. Factor in Haste it’s 4379 DPS. Factor in both HM and Haste it’s 4685 DPS.

I don’t see how DA can remotely beat that.

Rukkor.8653:

I don’t even play ranked PVP, but I would just simply suggest that you take the mathematics into account here. That person kindly presented you with the math and you were like “lel staff op kittens sumthing gg”

The Math is questionable if you follow the conversation.

How does that provide anything to the conversation here?

What it provides is the fact that the calculation was flawed and that the build shown by the OP remains true to his claims.

The Math comparison of DA vs CS might favor DA only because there are many factor that were standardized to make the illustration less complex. The simple fact about the Fury uptime shows that the simplification of the Math favors DA on paper, but not in practice.

Ever since DA no longer offer Power, it became a trait line for condition builds regardless of how awesome Mug and Executioner are. In most cases, Improvisation is a better pick than Exec.

How does that progress your build or your play-style or anything else for that matter?

Unfortunately the Math failed to do so because of many facts that were not included in the calculation. If the calculation accounted for Signet of Power, CS blows DA out of the water when it comes to damage output. Nothing in DA that can grant 5 stacks of Might.

I recommend sitting down one day and trying to learn from others around you, especially those who play D/P or even Staff in high rank, and people who are kind enough to present mathematical evidence that CS is sub-par.

The problem is, even with the Math provided, it failed to prove that CS is sub-par other than jumping to a conclusion based solely on personal opinion.

Cirian.8917:

By separating power dagger and condi dagger with a trait, the full weapon bars would become useful. As it is, there are a few lame skills depending on whether you’ve gone power or condi and this is entirely fixable.

This idea has merit. I like it.

Ohoni.6057:

Your argument’s logic indicates that we should all just embrace a notion in which sPvP should allow PvE gear, food, ascendeds, etc. and not be decided by an amulet system because completion of core content should supercede class balance in a competitive game mode designed to reward skillful play at PvP over PvE success, because there exists some degree of power increase at specific content type based on prior completion of any other given content type, relevant or not.

Nope.

Elite specializations are game-wide and do not require the completion or investment of the expansion content. Therefore, they should not be innately superior to core specializations at non-expansion content.

I don’t see why not.

I’m really glad that ArenaNet doesn’t share your perspective.