Guild Wars 2

vespers.1759:

Teamkiller.4315:

If it makes you feel better, I can regale you with recent tales of my victories over thieves.

Two days ago, killed two thieves 2v1. Both level 80, not upleveled. WvW
About 30 minutes ago, go jumped on by a thief while I was at 30% health. Hey guess what, i won without even healing. Also lv 80 not upleveled in WvW.

I can give you all the anecdotes you want. They don’t constitute evidence any more than your anecdotes of you being killed evidences thieves being OP.

For the record I play guardian, and yes, there are plenty of thieves that outplay me. In my experience, people like you think thieves are OP and try to play one not realizing that everyone can kill uplevels really really easily. You guys become the type of people that I destroy above ^. Yes, I’ve been totally destroyed by every kind of thief build at least once, they are good players, I don’t cry OP. I’ve also destroyed every thief build at least once as well. They don’t go on the guardian forums crying about guardians being OP.

Sorry, I was extremely proud that I beat that thief at 30% hp and I needed to chest thump (altho he probably let his guard down thinking I’d be an easy kill at that point)

picture? no? then i don’t care.

fact is thieves can run glass canon and have more survivability than any other class along with the most damage. other classes get actively punished for running glass canon because they can’t go invis and run away to compensate for high dps. if a glass of any other class gets caught unawares they die. if a thief is surprised he stealths and skips away.

thieves could take a 50% dmg reduction and they’d still be amazing. if a thief doesn’t win in a 1v1 right now they must be really bad.

also play a glass canon ranger. it’s a glass canon thief without the canon or the defense from invis.

For some reason my response got deleted yesterday.

OK, I’ll summarize. No, no picture. However, you missed the point. It doesn’t matter if I made all that up, and it was fabricated. The point is that it was an anecdote and using stories to generalize is very bad. Here, wikipedia agrees with me

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

Ranger is probably the WORST class to go glass cannon vs a thief if you do not have traps, and traps do condition damage mostly, so you were better off going bunker/condition damage anyways. You picked the class that thieves counter the best when they do not use traps and you built a glass cannon at that, and you are…complaining? WHY?

You played the build that thieves counter, you should try the bunker trap build, that hard counters thieves. Counter? Meet counter, the game seems fine to me.

Also, let me give you a little insight to the classes in tier 3 of HP.

Guardian. 10.8k base HP. How does he survive? Combination of heavy armor, amazing healing, and continual use of defensive boons, especially protection, and area control.

Elementalist. 10.8k base HP. How does he survive? Combination of amazing healing, extreme mobility, and the ability to pump out a ton of boons as well.

Thief. 10.8k base HP. How does he survive? Stealth and high mobility.

Is it overpowered? Why don’t you put your words to the test and run into a group of 20 players with a GC thief. Do it 100 times for an accurate sample size and tell me how many times you run out alive.

vespers.1759:

Teamkiller.4315:

vespers.1759:

Dasorine.1964:

vespers.1759:

Dasorine.1964:

vespers.1759:

normal? yes. acceptable? no.

the thief class is just the worst thing ever. 8k hits, stealth every 3 seconds… it truly a class for scrubs.

no complaining on the forums because you died to someone is for scrubs, 8k is hardly the highest damage obtainable in a single button press in this game and stealth is easy to counter if you actually pay attention and learn patterns.

let me guess… you play a thief.

let me guess… you play a glass cannon build with no defense who got ambushed once by another glass cannon build who managed to kill you and because you think your the all glorious master of the game that any time you die due to your own build choice everything else must be wrong?

yes but my glass canon ranger does 1k dmg on it’s 1 and 2 skill… not 3-4k and 7k hearts + 8k backstab. i also have no defense whereas a thief can stealth every 3 seconds.

care to continue this debate? nothing you can say can defend the thief class.

Uhhh…yes I can. First of all, glass cannons are really…really…bad to play for a ranger solo. Glass cannon rangers just in general don’t work in pvp, especially not solo.

If you want to play a glass cannon “ranged” class, go warrior. Put on full zerker armor and you’ll be hitting 10-15k volleys and 20k killshots on crit. You can literally one-shot (I mean shot) thieves (and your glass cannon ranger) with that kind of build. How does that kind of damage suit you? Warriors wear heavy, so they have slightly more damage reduction, have 20% more health, and their utility options don’t suck compared to those of a glass cannon ranger.

I was a glass cannon ranger once. I got 2 shotted by thieves, but of course, you can read the long tl;dr I posted just a few posts above.

TL;DR thieves aren’t OP and you need to l2p. This is coming from one who subs a lv 2 thief ONLY for spvp.

i’ll summarize so the others can also have a laugh:

only thieves and warriors can run glass canon because warriors have killshot (IE: the most useless 1v1v skill ever). since every other class is outclassed by a glass canon thief they shouldn’t try and should go bunker and try to survive thief strikes without hoping to kill them.

Uh, no. I said certain classes don’t work well as glass cannons, especially not 1v1.

Actually, glass cannon ranger without traps is most likely the absolute worst choice you could pick against a glass cannon thief.

I’m not even joking here.

Also warriors with 2600 armor can one-shot GC thieves with eviscerate. They can get even more armor and still one-shot GC thieves with killshot (hit for 9k from a warrior on my 3.2k armor guard.)

Elintor.1839:

So like Hammer Warrior Vs Hammer Warrior? Because that may be the longest fight ever……

Have you ever done mace and shield guardian vs mace and shield guardian? Both have 3.5k armor + 20k health and are stacked on healing…

Iove.3902:

Outside of that, I’m guessing you’re just another masochistic, stereotypical D/D thief that thinks of himself/herself as a complete ninja- that is, until you find yourself Downed again.

Yup, a lot of those wannabes out there. There are some that are complete ninjas. But most fail and die. Really fast, cause GC don’t like armor or vitality. Nope, just HAVE to hit 20% more damage than that thief that is twice as survivable as you.

Karolis.4261:

Teamkiller.4315:

Irena.1062:

No, and it’s all because people called on Anet to nerf theif.

It’s kitten No one argued that thieves were OP in PvE. that’s insane, they’re one of the worse classes for it because NPCs have such high health compared to players. Only some outspoken people had complained thieves were OP in WvW (not even in sPVP). So A-Net nerfed their stealth in…PvE…but not WvW?

It’s really weird to be honest

Same thing happened to Guardian in the January patch. A-net nerfed the Guardians’ worst utilities (spirit weps). It’s just…mind blowing.

Oh wow when did this happen ? Nerfed stealth in pve BUT NOT IN WWW ?

The stealth “nerf” has to do with NPCs being on high alert after you’ve stealthed and immediately getting on your back once you exit it. In PVE, all you fight are these NPCs.

In WvW, you mostly fight other players, and nothing of this sort happens to you. Unless f course, you are taking supply camps or killling sentries by yourself, but imo wvw is about pvp

Its not OP, when anybody can roll out of it, or use stablity and walk out of it.
also the duration is short for the cool down that comes with it.

you can’t roll out of it…

As for using stability, well, duh? That’s what the stability boon is for. Also, line of warding is also 5 seconds, not to mention that RoW has a shorter cast time.

cough use judge’s intervention while channeling RoW cough

also being on a melee weapon, it has a activation time that makes mobile combat usage dull unless in PvE with mindless NPC or ikittenerg in WvW which even then its not very effective because of the above limits.

again, duh, and again, LoW has over twice the cast time, and only blocks, doesn’t trap.
Yet they both share the same cooldown.

I really hope you don’t think you can trap everyone. It needs to be able to be avoided. That WOULD be OP.

Ring of warding is excellent at defending. It’s a quick 5 second knockdown trap against foes without stability. Good for holding chokes.

Line of Warding was changed for a reason. This skill deserves change as well.

It was changed so you could use it on the move…? I don’t see how this translates to needing to make RoW ground targetable.

Irena.1062:

No, and it’s all because people called on Anet to nerf theif.

It’s kitten No one argued that thieves were OP in PvE. that’s insane, they’re one of the worse classes for it because NPCs have such high health compared to players. Only some outspoken people had complained thieves were OP in WvW (not even in sPVP). So A-Net nerfed their stealth in…PvE…but not WvW?

It’s really weird to be honest

Same thing happened to Guardian in the January patch. A-net nerfed the Guardians’ worst utilities (spirit weps). It’s just…mind blowing.

In my experience bad players playing a thief are pretty easy pretty easy prey. Some of them don’t realize that attacking from stealth BREAKS stealth. A lot of them don’t know how to stack stealth. In fact many of them don’t even realize that C&D is their main stealth weapon. I’ve had thieves open up with all their attacks out of stealth until they’re at 10% health before they stealth.

Those are bad players.

An OK thief player who can successfully pull off an instagib backstab hs hs combo isn’t any more dangerous than a mesmer who can create 6 illusions and mind wrack them all or a frenzy bullrush HB or shield bash eviscerate warrior or volley killshot warrior, or a 100 nade engi. This is just speaking from my personal experience tho.

Rayya.2591:

XZERO.3014:

for venoms i think a minor passive buff would be great.

An example: Basilisk Venom: Passive: Every 10 attacks you stun a foe for 1 second
Active: Instantly Stun for for 1.5 seconds
Ice Drake Venom: Passive: Every 10 attacks you recover from a condition
Active: Chilled for 1 second.

I think making them more like signets would give venoms more use, but plz idrc what you do with the venoms, just make them more practical, it feels like every thief build has to be a cookie cutter, and im a player who likes diversity, and feeling awesome with my unique builds.

your example is not good
Unload spam – number of attacks 8 – cast time 1.75 sec
3 x unload = 5.25 /2 (haste) 2.63 sec ( 2 times bas trigger ) roll for initiative spam 2 more unloads (2 sec stunned) , switch to D/D , use basilik (instant) 1.5 sec more stun, even the strongest bunker is dead

If he spams 5 unloads on me I just pop wall of reflection. If that’s on cooldown Ill pop retaliation. 40 attacks? I’m going to be dealing 15k damage in retaliation to you that you cannot avoid. And I haven’t even actually attacked yet. Good luck with that.

P.S. Other classes can you know…dodge. Or get into melee range where they will outdamage the unload. Or they can block, projectile counter, simply get out of 900 range and kite at 1200 range. Seriously I hope you’re not trying to argue unload is OP because the build that is associated with it, P/P, is absolutely horrendous.

vespers.1759:

Dasorine.1964:

vespers.1759:

Dasorine.1964:

vespers.1759:

normal? yes. acceptable? no.

the thief class is just the worst thing ever. 8k hits, stealth every 3 seconds… it truly a class for scrubs.

no complaining on the forums because you died to someone is for scrubs, 8k is hardly the highest damage obtainable in a single button press in this game and stealth is easy to counter if you actually pay attention and learn patterns.

let me guess… you play a thief.

let me guess… you play a glass cannon build with no defense who got ambushed once by another glass cannon build who managed to kill you and because you think your the all glorious master of the game that any time you die due to your own build choice everything else must be wrong?

yes but my glass canon ranger does 1k dmg on it’s 1 and 2 skill… not 3-4k and 7k hearts + 8k backstab. i also have no defense whereas a thief can stealth every 3 seconds.

care to continue this debate? nothing you can say can defend the thief class.

Uhhh…yes I can. First of all, glass cannons are really…really…bad to play for a ranger solo. Glass cannon rangers just in general don’t work in pvp, especially not solo.

If you want to play a glass cannon “ranged” class, go warrior. Put on full zerker armor and you’ll be hitting 10-15k volleys and 20k killshots on crit. You can literally one-shot (I mean shot) thieves (and your glass cannon ranger) with that kind of build. How does that kind of damage suit you? Warriors wear heavy, so they have slightly more damage reduction, have 20% more health, and their utility options don’t suck compared to those of a glass cannon ranger.

I was a glass cannon ranger once. I got 2 shotted by thieves, but of course, you can read the long tl;dr I posted just a few posts above.

TL;DR thieves aren’t OP and you need to l2p. This is coming from one who subs a lv 2 thief ONLY for spvp.

Nodrey.3948:

Evalakitten480:

Dear Tarnished Coast,

I am really glad that despite your efforts in getting me to consider ever moving to TC, that I decided against transferring to you guys when I was shopping around. You guys are kinda jerks. And I mean that in the sincerest way possible – I’m not even trolling. I am quite pleased with my new home on FA, and I REALLY enjoy being a part of [BT]. Even though you are extremely mean to my new friends, be it on the forums, or in whispers. I used to kind of like you in a friendly way, even though I respectfully declined joining your community, but now… now… after reading all your comments in this thread, and just witnessing what I have seen out there. Even the slightest bit of like is gone.

Sincerely,

Eva.

Good. Your hate and disgust gives me the fuel to slaughter more FA. I remember the days of FA ruining get togethers involving tonics and yaks. Join FA? pfft. I dont know why anyone would join such a server. Hate you enemy. Loathe your enemy. Plant flags on them as you pin them into the blood stained ground, and trod over them. I hope to see you on the battlefield. I’ll be the little Asura with the banner, shouting and crying out for more blood to be spilled.

We’re not all like that…

Stop generalizing everyone based off a few bad apples on the forums. Plenty of FA respect their opponents. Look, after today’s GvG, both RISE and RET (we’re wearing HG tags but we’re RET) did a synchronized line bow.

FINE here’s your godkitten score update

Good GvG’s today RISE! Groups like that usually slaughter half of an undisciplined army on the first run. You guys survived and struck back, and it hurt.

Btw, we were all running [HG] tags, but don’t worry we were [RET] :P.

(I was the hammer/staff guardian in half red and black human t3 cultural armor with draconic leggings and flame gauntlets)

Pretty bad.

I just killed one with one skill attack while retaliation and autoattacks took care of the rest.

I started at 30% hp.

No, it didn’t really require much skill either.

If it makes you feel better, I can regale you with recent tales of my victories over thieves.

Two days ago, killed two thieves 2v1. Both level 80, not upleveled. WvW
About 30 minutes ago, go jumped on by a thief while I was at 30% health. Hey guess what, i won without even healing. Also lv 80 not upleveled in WvW.

I can give you all the anecdotes you want. They don’t constitute evidence any more than your anecdotes of you being killed evidences thieves being OP.

For the record I play guardian, and yes, there are plenty of thieves that outplay me. In my experience, people like you think thieves are OP and try to play one not realizing that everyone can kill uplevels really really easily. You guys become the type of people that I destroy above ^. Yes, I’ve been totally destroyed by every kind of thief build at least once, they are good players, I don’t cry OP. I’ve also destroyed every thief build at least once as well. They don’t go on the guardian forums crying about guardians being OP.

Sorry, I was extremely proud that I beat that thief at 30% hp and I needed to chest thump (altho he probably let his guard down thinking I’d be an easy kill at that point)

Yes my bad haha, it is indeed impossible to achieve 2.5k toughness. I did mean armor.

Yes, I’ll admit that GC’s are viable roaming, but I was just referring to the fact that I would much prefer being with a more tanky player who hits almost as much so I do not have to pop stability to revive him all the time lest he becomes a rally for my foes.

In ZvZ unfortunately there’s very little in the realm of player skill that will save a GC THIEF. A more bunkery thief can survive because he’s not going to take a meteor shower that 2 shots him, he’s not going to go down to one combo from a fire ele trying to hit the zerg, he’s not going to go down in one hit to that GC warrior using a whirling not meant for him, he’s not going to get 5-6 shotted by a guardian spamming his staff’s 6oo range aoe autoattack twice per second. Instead, he’s going to be able to take a couple meteors and dodge, he’s going to tank the fire combo and force the ele to ride the lightning, he’s going to be able to tank the whirling attack and stealth. He’s going to be able to close the gap to the guardian and pressure him enough force a weapon change that stops buffing his allies to deal with you, who I might add, poses a much greater threat to all these foes than a GC who wastes his burst and must run away immediately afterwards or just die to AOE not even meant for them.

Sorry, while GC thief may be viable roaming, definitely not for ZvZ where you can’t avoid the onslaught of a kittenload of AOEs since you know, you have limited dodges and stealth doesn’t make you invulnerable.

Yeah I got 2 shotted by a full GC thief the first time I encountered them in a 1v1 situation on my ranger. I was walking back to my keep when boom 9k backstab 6k heartseeker. In all fairness, I was…you could say, a full glass cannon. absolutely no toughness and no vitality. (they were at base values). I suspected he was glass too, as shortly thereafter a guardian came and revived me. I watched as the thief tried to stomp me and half his health was obliterated by the Guardian’s whirling wrath. He then went down to 1 autoattack chain and I was revived by said guardian (a smart decision as he did not want me as a rally for the thief)

I opened my combat log. Oh, 9k backstab. Oh snap, 6k heartseeker. I looked up the abilities on gw2 wikia.

Oh, there’s this class called thief (seriously, at that point I didn’t know about half the professions lol. I had seen shadow refuge ONCE in Caudecus Manor). OK let’s see, they rely on stealth. How do they stealth? They can trait stealth on steal. OK, they can C&D. OK, they can use blinding powder. Right, there’s also a combo field + finisher that gives them stealth. OK, how long are these stealths? Right, they’re short. 3-4 seconds at most. He can pop a shadow refuge for 12 seconds but you have 4 seconds to knock him out of it. Right, now, what counters stealth? Well, if he attacks out of stealth he gets revealed and can’t stealth anymore. OK, fantastic.

Oh, and my glass cannon ranger? 15k health 2k armor, super squishy, met a DD elementalist on the field, took a 12k combo from the ele’s fire attunement. 7k from his churning earth. Met a warrior. Almost one-shotted with eviscerate. Met a mesmer, one-shotted by mind wrack. Met an engineer, one shotted by grenades. Met a guardian, killed myself cause I didn’t realize that I was getting retaliation damage and he was outhealing my damage. Decided not to go glass cannon, I died a lot.

I shelved my ranger for a couple months cause I liked Guardian more. From what I learned and from my friend showing me what thieves were about I went undefeated 1v1 against backstab thieves until my server moved up to tier 2 (and still I win the majority of fights against backstab thieves). Next encounter against a thief on my ranger? Well I built bunker and traps. Oh man, I lost, but did I put up a good fight. The thief was good, he had good control of shadowstep, knew that to escape me he needed to take some falling damage for his blinding powder on fall trait, and beat me after quite a long battle. But suffice to say, I had learned how to fight against thieves. I won a couple fights, lost a couple fights, against good players, against bad players. I learned, adapted, and now I’m at a position where I’m happy. I wouldn’t even say I’m a good trap ranger, seeing as I lose literally 100% of fights against OTHER trap rangers (Seriously, I’ve not won a single one of them).

This is just my story. Of course, I’m sure there are others, and most players I know don’t have particular problems against thieves.

crewthief.8649:

Niim.9260:

war.3790:

I can see all of these posts are written by scrubs from lower tiers.

a) WvW is not a place for Glass cannons, if you run a GC with any class you just revived the whole enemie team in Zerg v Zerg battles.
You can run GC, but only if you are like chasing yaks, ganking ppl who are alone trying to regroop, other than that, useless .
b) Perfect team would be :
5 Guardians
3 Mesmers
5 Elementalists
5 Warriors
2 Necros
All running PTV gear
(You can bring thieves or rangers if you need someone to afk on the treb )

We love running up against PTV zergs, you can kite them across the map without them being able to kill you. Group play is about synergy and glass cannon is acceptable if played right and the synergy from the group provides them the protection they need.

Granted if your a scrub, regardless of tier, then everyone in PTV might make the most sense for you.

^This

Alot of classes have built-in survivability. Glass cannon CAN be perfectly viable depending on class and player skill. As a caveat, there are certain classes that absolutely kitten themselves running glass cannon, but Mesmers and Thieves, in the right players hands, are totally viable.

In general a thief that builds for about 2.5-2.6k toughness can still hit a kittenload of damage. (you can watch Yishis’ videos, and his build). He can still hit those 5k backstabs on bunker guardians, still drop lowbies with a single backstab, and still 2 shot glass cannons. I would much rather prefer a thief with 2.5k-2.6k toughness and 17k hp in my party than a full GC thief, while hitting only maybe 20% lower. And I’d rather fight a GC thief than a bunkery thief because I can drop half a GCs thief’s with one attack from my hammer that is both AOE and recharges every 4 seconds whereas a toughness thief? Well let’s just say he’ll be using his utilities a LOT less than a GC thief.

But yes, you can be GC and “survivable” but…not really…especially not ikittenvZ where you have meteor showers dropping everywhere because you know 10 staff eles.

Yup, it’s pretty awesome and we’re all looking forward to it! Just hoping it won’t cause SMC style lag for small fights :P

Sunspots.9861:

Great fights in TCBL just now. Props to [BT] [RET]. Ready for more chess?

Psh, you forgot about Kaineng

realdealduel.9708:

Would be to over powered but ring of warding and judge’s intervention works wonders

^yup. Channel Ring of warding and have an enemy selected. Right before it finishes use JI. Most of the times they’ll dodge backwards right into the ring and get knocked down. hehe.

PiNK was out in force today at TCBL Bay! So was Kaineng!

Epic fight there. Wiping TC, getting wiped by Kaineng, and then being dead and watching Kaineng get wiped by TC…lol. THIS IS THE TRUE SPIRIT OF BATTLE

I think the fight there is still going. Nice defense.

Thrashbarg.9820:

My ideal 20 person team would be any 20 people who are familiar and comfortable with the build and class they are playing. Ideally their builds would not be totally glassy. Other than that, I believe a mixed group of any professions can accomplish awesome things as long as the players themselves are fluent with their skills.

Your ideal band might be drum/guitar/bass/singer but I think great music can be made with any combo of instruments played by skilled musicians. The same thing applies to this game.

Teamkiller.4315:

style.6173:

Sorry engi and thief. You don’t bring enough value to the table in a 20v20 matchup.

I could agree with engis maybe, but really? Thief doesn’t bring stuff to the matchup?!?

-Theives can build for toughness and still hit like a truck. You can be almost as tanky as my guardian and still land 6k backstabs on non-bunkers. That way, you’re not a rally for the enemy team.

-On top of that they have cluster bomb, which is a deadly aoe skill on its own, but it is also the *most spammable blast finisher in the game. For an on demand water field area healing or fire field area might nothing, and I mean NOTHING, works better than cluster bomb. It makes the pre-fight might stack a whole lot quicker for your team. And there have been times where we didn’t even have enough blast finishers to go around. With a shortbow thief this will never be a problem.
-Shadow refuge is amazing for rezzing, provides a bit of healing and gives the thief’s most powerful weapon: stealth, to non-noobs who know to stay inside the shadow refuge for 4 seconds and not attack to stealth themselves. Actually once it goes down your allies just have to know to go inside (it can be up for 3 seconds, and you enter the last second and will still get the last 8 seconds of stealth). Amazing for an on-demand flank.
-Speaking of giving stealth to teammates, thieves also are one of the only sources of smoke fields and can easy stack blast finishers to stealth their team.
-Daggerstorm is one of the few skills that hit over the 5 man AOE cap causing both bleeding and cripple, invaluable skills against a zerg (not to mention reflecting projectiles.) and is very very effective to open with on an enemy zerg.
-A well timed blinding powder from my neighborhood friendly thief has saved our entire party’s kittens multiple times. It doesn’t give as long of a stealth as shadow refuge but it’s just about instant cast. Thieves can trait blinding powder on falling which is frigging awesome for those “drop from up high pushes.”
-Black powder will protect high value targets on your team from melee classes while providing smoke field for you or your friends to blast
-Did you know one of the smoke fields can block trebuchet and catapult shots? No lie
-Venom sharing is…OK I’m getting too far ahead of myself lol.

TL;DR you don’t know how much support thieves can give. They can give a kitten ton and still hit like a truck.

I generally agree with the above except a couple of points.

1) In a group of 20 situation, a banner warrior has as good or better blast finishing capability then a thief. Every banner is a bundle weapon anyone can pick up. The #5 skill drops the banner and acts as a blast finisher. The cooldown is per player, not per banner, so that’s a continuous stream of blasts with just a couple banners. As a side benefit, the #3 skill on banners can quickly stack aoe swiftness as well. Thief blast output is comparable, but eventually drains initiative unless traited a certain way.

2) Engineers also have smoke fields. They are quite viable in several ways, but not going into that here. Suffice to say, I disagree with the statement that engineers are useless.

(I’m also under the impression that dagger storm is capped at 5 targets, but like other continuous pulsing aoes it hits a random 5 each pulse, which looks like a lot of numbers all over the place. The reflect effect isn’t capped, and there’s usually a bunch of dumb people shooting the spinning thief, greatly adding to the “holy crap numbers everywhere!” effect of this skill.)

1) Ah I see, sorry about that. I noticed a 10 second cooldown on the banner 5 skill haha so that’s what I assumed.

2) That’s probably true actually.

Alright, I made the change today from 10 in radiance to 10 in virtues. I have 500 less HP and 3% less critical damage but around the same stats in everything else (also lost 100 condition damage but who cares about that lol) I switched out my third utility Shield of Avenger for Hallowed Ground. I notice that after SyG wears off me and my group get put under a lot of well…er…you could say…control effects…so Hallowed Ground is pretty useful to have. Not to mention it gives a TON of personal healing, as much as the empower + AH heal.

Sword shield is a bit of a fire ice kind of situation. See the sword is used mainly against single targets, whereas the shield is used mostly in group situations.

You could if you wanted to dabble in a “jack of all trades” kind of build

style.6173:

Teamkiller.4315:

style.6173:

Sorry engi and thief. You don’t bring enough value to the table in a 20v20 matchup.

I could agree with engis maybe, but really? Thief doesn’t bring stuff to the matchup?!?

-Theives can build for toughness and still hit like a truck. You can be almost as tanky as my guardian and still land 6k backstabs on non-bunkers. That way, you’re not a rally for the enemy team.

-On top of that they have cluster bomb, which is a deadly aoe skill on its own, but it is also the *most spammable blast finisher in the game. For an on demand water field area healing or fire field area might nothing, and I mean NOTHING, works better than cluster bomb. It makes the pre-fight might stack a whole lot quicker for your team. And there have been times where we didn’t even have enough blast finishers to go around. With a shortbow thief this will never be a problem.
-Shadow refuge is amazing for rezzing, provides a bit of healing and gives the thief’s most powerful weapon: stealth, to non-noobs who know to stay inside the shadow refuge for 4 seconds and not attack to stealth themselves. Actually once it goes down your allies just have to know to go inside (it can be up for 3 seconds, and you enter the last second and will still get the last 8 seconds of stealth). Amazing for an on-demand flank.
-Speaking of giving stealth to teammates, thieves also are one of the only sources of smoke fields and can easy stack blast finishers to stealth their team.
-Daggerstorm is one of the few skills that hit over the 5 man AOE cap causing both bleeding and cripple, invaluable skills against a zerg (not to mention reflecting projectiles.) and is very very effective to open with on an enemy zerg.
-A well timed blinding powder from my neighborhood friendly thief has saved our entire party’s kittens multiple times. It doesn’t give as long of a stealth as shadow refuge but it’s just about instant cast. Thieves can trait blinding powder on falling which is frigging awesome for those “drop from up high pushes.”
-Black powder will protect high value targets on your team from melee classes while providing smoke field for you or your friends to blast
-Did you know one of the smoke fields can block trebuchet and catapult shots? No lie
-Venom sharing is…OK I’m getting too far ahead of myself lol.

TL;DR you don’t know how much support thieves can give. They can give a kitten ton and still hit like a truck.

If this was a 5v5 then yes, thieves would be great. 20v20, other classes are simply better. The support skills you mentioned are limited to 5 people as well (except dagger storm as you mentioned). To make the skills viable, you’d need at least 4 thieves in the 20. Given the limit of 20, other classes make better choices.

IIRC the only guardian skills that aren’t limited to five people are the projectile counters. All their other boon shares are limited to five as well.

Source: I play guardian and have tried out a build using every sort of utility except spirit weapons.

Here ya go

15 Characterz

Usagi.4835:

Teamkiller.4315:

Yeah it’s pretty amazing how fast TC can organize a defense of their own BL.

I remember coming to TCBL that was completely red and fortified like 2 days ago with probably 30 or so people. Most of these guys were RET too. We finished taking the first tower in less than a minute and moved on hills. They managed to field a group just as large as ours within a minute of seeing their first tower turn red.

I was like holy wtfpickle.

Actually, I think it might have been on reset or last week, but I remember seeing EVERYTHING in FABL fortified and upgraded, including camps, and boy, was I annoyed lol.

Hmm, I wasn’t here during the last reset or this one, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that.

I’m absolutely positive it was this within the past few days. The people that came weren’t really part of an organized guild or anything. They were a mix of guilds.

Btw, your hills defense was successful, if that rings a bell

Yeah it’s pretty amazing how fast TC can organize a defense of their own BL.

I remember coming to TCBL that was completely red and fortified like 2 days ago with probably 30 or so people. Most of these guys were RET too. We finished taking the first tower in less than a minute and moved on hills. They managed to field a group just as large as ours within a minute of seeing their first tower turn red.

I was like holy wtfpickle.

style.6173:

Sorry engi and thief. You don’t bring enough value to the table in a 20v20 matchup.

I could agree with engis maybe, but really? Thief doesn’t bring stuff to the matchup?!?

-Theives can build for toughness and still hit like a truck. You can be almost as tanky as my guardian and still land 6k backstabs on non-bunkers. That way, you’re not a rally for the enemy team.

-On top of that they have cluster bomb, which is a deadly aoe skill on its own, but it is also the *most spammable blast finisher in the game. For an on demand water field area healing or fire field area might nothing, and I mean NOTHING, works better than cluster bomb. It makes the pre-fight might stack a whole lot quicker for your team. And there have been times where we didn’t even have enough blast finishers to go around. With a shortbow thief this will never be a problem.
-Shadow refuge is amazing for rezzing, provides a bit of healing and gives the thief’s most powerful weapon: stealth, to non-noobs who know to stay inside the shadow refuge for 4 seconds and not attack to stealth themselves. Actually once it goes down your allies just have to know to go inside (it can be up for 3 seconds, and you enter the last second and will still get the last 8 seconds of stealth). Amazing for an on-demand flank.
-Speaking of giving stealth to teammates, thieves also are one of the only sources of smoke fields and can easy stack blast finishers to stealth their team.
-Daggerstorm is one of the few skills that hit over the 5 man AOE cap causing both bleeding and cripple, invaluable skills against a zerg (not to mention reflecting projectiles.) and is very very effective to open with on an enemy zerg.
-A well timed blinding powder from my neighborhood friendly thief has saved our entire party’s kittens multiple times. It doesn’t give as long of a stealth as shadow refuge but it’s just about instant cast. Thieves can trait blinding powder on falling which is frigging awesome for those “drop from up high pushes.”
-Black powder will protect high value targets on your team from melee classes while providing smoke field for you or your friends to blast
-Did you know one of the smoke fields can block trebuchet and catapult shots? No lie
-Venom sharing is…OK I’m getting too far ahead of myself lol.

TL;DR you don’t know how much support thieves can give. They can give a kitten ton and still hit like a truck.

Azaruil.3406:

^ Confusion really isn’t that hard to stack up. My friend and I generally get 10 stacks of confusion on an enemy quite quickly. That is 2 of us playing our engineers.

Oh, oops :P

I was talking more about mesmer though haha.

Raf.1078:

Teamkiller.4315:

Raf.1078:

Magiofdeath.2745:

I was wondering how TC got an 8k lead. I was also wondering why Kain BL was left alone last night from TC but TC BL and FA BL was all red. Hmmm, coincidental? I’m not saying there was 2v1, I’m just calling out factual observation just looking at the maps last night.

Well there is no conspiracy or anything like that…as you seem to imply. It is a 3 server match up. At any given time there is likely to be intermittant 2 v 1. Like having both KN & FA zergs in TCBL perhaps? That never happens…right?

But so what? Its part of the game dynamics. If we can use an unsuspecting KN or FA
zerg to accomplish our purposes, then we go for it.

Man up and keep fighting…or not…as you prefer. The score on Friday will tell the story and then we’ll do it all over again.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Remember that T2 will be stable for quite some time. SoS is not likely to move up and SoR isn’t like to move down (they’re losing and gaining points in t1 and t3 respectively)

We are stuck with each other!

And its okay! This is one of best matches I’ve played to date. Forum Trolling aside, there are not 3 servers so closely matched.

But lets be honest here. I don’t care about lovin ya, FA. But I don’t mind fightin n trollin with ya, lol.

Lololol I agree I like the tier as well.

I said Shhhhhhhhhhh because someone had said “don’t feed the trolls” and…you were feeding one of our trolls

selan.8354:

Teamkiller.4315:

I would love to have 25 stacks of retaliation

laughs manically

Seriously could you imagine? 9k damage to enemy that hits you lolololololololololololol. No one would ever complain about support engineers being overpowered again

hahaha now imagine 9k retaliation dmg 4 to 5 k confusion, plus 5 k crit from shatercat trying to doge and recieving 1k confusion dmg per tick +1 daggerstorm…..

If this is a balance issue there’s a difference lol.

1) Confusion is hard to stack. It’s REALLY hard to stack up. The maximum amount of stacks I’ve seen on me at any given time was 8 (did around 2-3k per skill use), and it went down to a more reasonable 2 or 3 within a couple seconds. The point is, confusion duration is extremely short, while retaliation duration is often easy to make long.

2) Ripping boons is far more difficult than cleansing conditions

3) Confusion has a very short uptime

4) Confusion does 1/2 the damage of retaliation. Both can be increased by power and condition damage respectively, but Confusion will always do far less damage than retaliation.

5) Confusion only procs damage on skill use. Retaliation procs damage on EACH HIT. Confusion would only do one proc to a warrior using whirling axes, whereas retaliation would do 15 procs. For reference, let’s say they’re used against a mesmer with 1000 condition damage as opposed to a guardian with 1000 extra power. The warrior would be hit for 5-6k in retaliation against the guardian whereas the he would take maybe 200-300 damage in confusion. Even off of 8 stacks (which again, is extremely difficult to keep up or even attain in the first place), the warrior would only take like 2-3k. That’s if the mesmer is speccing into confusion.

Even worse, if it’s zerg vs zerg, the warrior would instagib himself if the guardian provided aoe retaliation to himself, whereas a mesmer that stacks confusion on 5 people wouldn’t…you know, anyways…

Granted, confusion does proc off of utilities and skills that cause condition damage not direct damage which retal won’t proc off of, but still.

6) They can’t burst shatter you like that if they’re try to stack confuses on you, btw. You can’t have confusion stacking and super damaging mind wrack at once. Confusion stacks most easily with a glamour build, which is a support build, not a burst build.

I play Guardian (RET guild, btw, nice to see some PRO here)

I can’t tell if you’re serious lol.

that would be overpowered. If they allowed the circle to be ground targetable I’d lobby for a massive increase in cooldown and cast time. Possibly doubled if it was given the same range as line of warding has.

I play guardian, by the way

Raf.1078:

Magiofdeath.2745:

I was wondering how TC got an 8k lead. I was also wondering why Kain BL was left alone last night from TC but TC BL and FA BL was all red. Hmmm, coincidental? I’m not saying there was 2v1, I’m just calling out factual observation just looking at the maps last night.

Well there is no conspiracy or anything like that…as you seem to imply. It is a 3 server match up. At any given time there is likely to be intermittant 2 v 1. Like having both KN & FA zergs in TCBL perhaps? That never happens…right?

But so what? Its part of the game dynamics. If we can use an unsuspecting KN or FA
zerg to accomplish our purposes, then we go for it.

Man up and keep fighting…or not…as you prefer. The score on Friday will tell the story and then we’ll do it all over again.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Remember that T2 will be stable for quite some time. SoS is not likely to move up and SoR isn’t like to move down (they’re losing and gaining points in t1 and t3 respectively)

We are stuck with each other!

I would love to have 25 stacks of retaliation

laughs manically

Seriously could you imagine? 9k damage to enemy that hits you lolololololololololololol. No one would ever complain about support engineers being overpowered again

Harbinger.9645:

Could you imagine 20 shatter mesmers though…that would be a sight.

Yeah, but they would kinda get countered by thieves really…really…hard…lol. The thieves stack stealth using smoke fields + cluster bomb before the battle, and proceed to own the mesmers really hard.

Necros would also kill them, as well as trap rangers. Or even rifle warriors really.

Harrish.8743:

Haldunius.7864:

You guys are only in T2 because you . . absorbed some of CD after they broke up in T3 in addition to other transfers you’ve received.

Not to quibble, but I believe we had two medium-sized guilds join us from CD when it broke up — or half of what you picked up just last week from SoS.

If we admit you guys are way better than us and that your 0-8 record is just a fluke, can we get back to a more friendlier thread? I imagine a lot of people on both servers are cringing at this point (and my guess is Kaineng has had the good sense to completely abandon this mess by now).

You don’t need to. Haldunius is just a troll like Tallius, he responded to Tallius’ narcissistic post with his own narcissistic post.

Just ignore them, and we can get back to being a friendly thread and maybe Kaineng will come back here

Aytrix.4059:

Teamkiller.4315:

Aytrix.4059:

Pretty classless posts from the TCers here. Seems they are so quick to label others as trolls but then turn a blind eye to their own trolling. Eh, is what the internet is I guess.

Look at the post right above yours. A TC’er is calling out the TC troll who was thumping his chest about the history of matches between TC and FA.

My post is directed at TCers who point the finger at FA as the sole reason the thread isn’t as “nice” as they like. 1 TCer calling out their own trolls is a start, but I’d think a server that is all about “playing nice” would speak out more about their own classless posters.

That’s true, people do get defensive when accused however. I haven’t seen much classnessless from the majority of posters here on any servers, it’s mainly just a few that post a lot (like Sunspots or Haldunius, and tbh I haven’t seen any from Kain, but maybe that’s just me)

And we have our own classless posters who like to brag about “destroying TC on the field”. While I can say that I’ve rolled TC groups more often than Vice Versa, I’m pretty sure it has something to do with me being in a fantastic WvW guild. Even then, we’ve been wiped by TC before, and I’ve seen commanderless PUGs or other PUGs following commanders who don’t really know what they’re doing get wiped by TC very often.

Edit: Another TC’er calling out Tallis’ trolling ^

Isle of Janthir
Lives on In Fort Aspenwood
As brethren we fight!

yes. I’d also like to mention my corpse hasn’t been danced on or laughed at or otherwise emoted at very often (if at all). It helps that I joined RET so my deaths are much more rare but I’d like to compliment TC and Kain’s good etiquette on the field.

Aytrix.4059:

Pretty classless posts from the TCers here. Seems they are so quick to label others as trolls but then turn a blind eye to their own trolling. Eh, is what the internet is I guess.

Look at the post right above yours. A TC’er is calling out the TC troll who was thumping his chest about the history of matches between TC and FA.

Magiofdeath.2745:

I was wondering how TC got an 8k lead. I was also wondering why Kain BL was left alone last night from TC but TC BL and FA BL was all red. Hmmm, coincidental? I’m not saying there was 2v1, I’m just calling out factual observation just looking at the maps last night.

Most likely. I’ll explain a few things (for context, I am a fort aspenwoody and I wvw with our server very frequently):

If Server 1 is focusing Server 2, it’s bad for Server 3 to focus Server 1. Why? because they’ll draw the ire of Server 1, and Server 2 is most likely smart enough to know that in order to get more points, you have to be on the delivering side of the 2 v 1.

Hence, whichever server is getting focused by another (Kain focuses FA, TC focuses FA) the server that isn’t focusing or getting focused…is likely to attack the server getting focused (i.e. other server focuses FA).

Here’s another fact:

FA is second place.
Kaineng is first place
TC is third place.

This was true in terms of points this round up until very very recently. Now, TC (formerly third) knows they cannot beat Kaineng. So what will they do? They’re pretty close in points to FA, so they’re going to play smartly for second place.

What about Kaineng? Well, they are already first, so they want to enlarge the gap between them and the second place server. Why would it make sense attacking the third place server, drawing their ire, and possibly getting double teamed and losing many points off their lead?

The point is, the second place server is very likely to get double teamed if the third place server is close in points to them.

and for those whining FA above, do not complain (I checked this morning and around 1PM EST Kaineng borderlands was half red, TC borderlands was half green, and FABL was almost completely blue. Wanna call double team again?). In case you are wondering, I am in Fort Aspenwood right now. I came here from Isle of Janthir and the last week where were in T3, FA did NOTHING but focus down Isle of Janthir because you wanted to play for second. Hence, you double teamed the second place team, because you wanted to play for second. Now that TC does this, you are crying like little babies.

It’s smart playing.

Anyways, for those who aren’t trolls/whiners/babies, I had a great time in FA BL this morning. It was fun defending both our northern towers from Kaineng. Props to you for nice fights, and for stopping our Bay Backcap against TC the first time around.

Edit: First sentence of second paragraph typo

you could do an entirely thief guardian portal bomb. 16 thieves, 4 guardians. Guardians will cycle pop sanctuary/wall of reflection and ring of warding and empower while 12 thieves use daggerstorm, then 4 thieves.

Then warriors come and clean up whoever’s left.

What I also really want to see is an entirely guardian push using tome of wrath.

Gaudrath.6725:

Another option is to add a “faerie fire” or tracking type of skill, which would prevent the thief from stealthing for x seconds if they are hit with it while in combat, or maybe cause the thief to leave glowing footprint marks behind while in stealth, which would become visible only if within a certain radius from the player doing the tracking.

This would not destroy stealth gameplay, but it would make it more difficult to get away for thieves, especially if they attack larger groups (hence higher chances that they will get hit by one of the above skills). The inconvenience of not being able to easily stealth and disengage would be compensated by the fact that someone would have to slot a utility skill specifically designed to counter thieves, and otherwise useless in combat, so not everyone would be running around with a “thief radar”.

This is a pretty good idea, but instead of a new utility skill (that is useless for anything else) why not add it to your current weapon skills. For example it could be warrior rifle and longbow that have a tag on a thief in stealth, put on one of their longer CD weapon skills, and only lasts for a very short time. You would put it on two weapons so no class ever feels like it’s FORCED to run that weapon.

And in return, you would have to buff thieves to compensate for this. Sorry, just how it is.

30 in Valor + Altruistic Healing grandmaster trait is pretty standard

^ trait is our best, hands down.

I think, every class should have a skill that follows thief into stealth.

Oh wait, autoattack chaining.

Channeled skills like rapid fire and volley do it. Binding blade does it as well. Mesmer pets attack when the thief exits stealth automatically. So do spirit weapons and engineer turrets. Rangers have traps. Necromancers have marks and their own pets. Elementalists have extreme mobility as well as a ton of unblockable aoe.

I think I covered just about every class there. No, these actually AREN’T the limits of what other classes can use to hard counter a burst thief attacking from stealth but these are options. I only listed a few. You can try to list the rest.

Squibbles.8724:

Though, at some point someone actually brought in an omega golem, lol.

Gah I was so kitten off at the guy who brought the golem lol. The Omega was OURS (I’m on FA server) and he wasted like half its health just…doing nothing with it really. He was upleveled too.

Yep yep good fights all around. ^We definitely had more than 20 because not all my allies were culling for me at once (means 25+). I daresay we had more than TC and Kain defending.

By the way, somebody queued cannons at Stonemist so when the upgrade was mostly done and I was like “WE SHALL BE SAVED” it was a huge letdown to not have our walls repaired but instead…cannons?!?

5) The wait two seconds part is misleading. A lot of stealths have different times. It can be traited for 1 second longer, so the backstab could come anytime between 1 and 3 seconds. Thieves can simply waited till after you dodged before attempting the backstab. Or they could do other things, like spamming their autoattack on you till you’re at 50% health and followup with heartseeker. the point is, you expect US to expect all thieves behave like a robot and do this at certain times, try to guess your timing. Um, no.

WvW allows stealth to excel much more noticably…

You’re preaching to the choir buddy. Check my posting history, I’ve defended thieves as not being OP from day 1 of when I joined the forums. What I’m arguing is your silly choice to say “I won a 1v7 with a thief. Those players were bad except for the competent commander. I killed them all tho. Thieves aren’t OP, I’m just good.” We could do without the inflated egos.

You want to give people advice or support your argument? Why don’t you regale us with a story about how another class destroyed you in a 1v1 fair situation and how other people can emulate it without it being superbly lucky of him or doing something very obscure. But of course, that would make you look bad (I noticed that in your first post all the mentions of you losing or possibly losing have something to do with being outnumbered, in which case the vast majority of players would automatically lose on other classes)

I’m trying to point out how the majority of the playerbase is relatively terrible.

This is a self contradicting statement. The Majority of the playerbase will be average. They will be somewhere around the median. That’s kinda how statistics work. You could say the majority of the human population is stupid, but that’s equally untrue because the the majority of the human population is average, at ~100 IQ.

And to be honest, you need not point out that the majority of the playerbase is terrible to support why stealth isn’t OP. It does nothing for your argument. Nothing at all.

Don’t really care about your build because I won’t be able to know what you have equipped. For all I know you could just double stunbreak or condition cleanse my CCs with your shadowstep.

Also, there was only 3 or so at a time

Of course, because winning a 1v3 multiple also clearly supports your argument better than winning a 1v7 that your class isn’t OP and the mechanics are not?

While I was hit with CC, it wasn’t coordinated (random WvW low levels and pugs?) and taken advantage of. With the chaos of WvW combined with using line of sight to block range, stealth builds excel so well, there’s no fix for that sorry.

of course, because you need multiple people coordinating their crowd control cooldowns in order to defeat a single thief, that definitely supports your argument that stealth isn’t OP. Yes, to beat a thief you need X players all coordinating a specific skill to kill one guy. Not even kill really, just to pressure him and not die yourself. Yes, absolutely.

…solates the players who don’t understand staying together will win. .

Again, because you need multiple players to defeat a thief. That clearly supports your argument that stealth isn’t OP. Again, I’m being sarcastic. Again, no, I personally don’t think stealth is OP but I think you using this argument is as silly as bananas being eaten by snakes.

I don’t understand why …

I’ll answer why.

1) Culling. They can’t see you as you exit stealth because of rendering issues. A lot of players don’t realize they need to spam tab in order to target a thief that’s left stealth.

2) Lack of knowledge about the thief class. This is probably the killer; to play against MOST other classes you don’t really need to know the specifics of what they can do. To play against thief you need to know more about their class than you need to know about other classes, for instance. Not saying this is a bad thing, but rather it would explain why a lot of nubs don’t counter you EXACTLY how YOU think they should counter just because you’ve been on the receiving end of it. Unlike you, they lack experience, but they are being punished disproportionately by fighting an enemy they have absolutely no idea what to do against. If they were fighting against a warrior for example, it’d be a much different situation because they can actually damage the freakin’ warrior and the moves are all telegraphed pretty clearly.

For example, the first time I ever fought a thief was on my glass cannon ranger. I got downed 3 times and would have died horribly if a Guardian nearby wasn’t there to save me (impressively, he also killed the thief and revived me 3 times while doing so. I wasn’t much help, that is to say, almost none at all). This marked the FIRST time I did research on a class that I had not yet played. Why? Simply because I didn’t need to know how to beat a warrior as a ranger, or etc. But thief? Yes I did.

3) A lot of people don’t have on demand launches or fear effects equipped, and those that do often have pretty long cooldowns associated with it. I for one on my guardian do not possess them. Other than that, you can’t really do much to a thief who has shadow refuged other than spamming your autoattack.

4) Again, the reason they let your cloak and dagger hit them probably has something to do with the fact that they wasted their dodges earlier trying to avoid your earlier burst. Cloak and dagger + backstab combo can be spammed with impunity every few seconds. Even if a thief misses the C&D they can just try again instantly. Time to next C&D with 0 initiative? 7-8 Seconds untraited. That’s the cooldown of my shortest primary weapon skill on my guardian.

Hey, guess how often endurance refills? Half a bar every ten seconds. Lolol.

Cloak and Dagger also looks a lot like autoattack. It’s extremely hard to predict dagger moves like that because the dagger’s small and the thief hardly moves his body while executing it.

Samis.1750:

I like the idea of 10 in virtues but with a caveat. I guess a key question for you is, if you lose the signet cooldown and then keep the Signet heal or go with Shelter (which is nice with 2 blocks and a lower cooldown – my preferred choice without the signet trait), is your survivability satifactory? Might depend upon the type of fight. I have plenty of healing but low crit, so I don’t have the base numbere of dodges as you.

Yeah, it’s only a 5 second longer cooldown. Shelter heals me for around 5000 + 70+ every time I block an attack while using it (seeing as how one of the minor traits gives me might on block). I’m typically in the frontline or in the middle of a zerg so while using signet of resolve I take damage or I have to jump back behind friendly lines to use it. Shelter mitigates all that completely, although I will miss healing up from 20 to 70% health with one heal.

It’s also perfectly viable to keep signet of resolve, because I do not use it that often any how. A lot of my healing comes from the AH+Empower synergy.

No idea about Shield of the Avenger. Does it get clobbered by AE in WvW? You also already have WoR.

Not really, it actually is durable enough to last most of the time it’s summoned for, surprisingly enough. The reason for this is I pop it only when WoR is on cooldown, and both are usually popped when we are regrouping or taking heavy fire (which means a lot of my allies will be there to soak up the damage instead of the shield)

Not sure about the shout cooldown trait with only 1 shout. Why not grab 2-3 shouts and take the 30 point Pure of Voice instead of Battle Presence? With the AH trait, the shouts will heal yourself with each buff. I am uncertain how good Battle Presence is with 300 healing and without the 20 point virtue trait to go with it.

Most of the time I use larger symbols. It’s easier to get allies inside the symbol of swiftness/retaliation that way, and symbol of wrath has a larger aoe. Both will constantly reapply boons to allies standing in them, which I view as a second source of regen.

I trait the shout because we are in constant need of group stability, and 6 seconds off the cooldown is pretty amazing. I won’t pick up Save Yourselves for zvz because I will be picking up too many conditions and my condition removal is mostly passive.

I am inclined to agree with you regarding Tome of Courage with only 300 healing. But don’t underestimate Renewed Focus as an emergency button.

The way I really see it is like this: renewed focus isn’t worth it because it doesn’t add any group utility, and actually takes away from group utility because I am doing nothing those 3 seconds I’m invulnerable. Sure I recharge my virtues and I can pop them again all over, but compared to the tomes, especially wrath, I think it’s better to use that.

What I cannot survive is being focused down by most of the enemy zerg. This rarely happens, and even if it does, only 3 seconds of invulnerable will not save me.

Look for synergies and don’t spread yourself to thin. You can’t build for everything and you need to keep yourself alive as well.

Haha thanks. This build isn’t too good for dueling, no matter how I feel it should be. I mostly specialize in neutralizing projectiles and pushing the front line