Guild Wars 2

Omerta.9820:

Any advice on fighting multiple mobs?

With a sword? Stay mobile, bunch them up so you’re hitting 3 with each auto attack, and use Signet of Malice so you get 3 heals per strike. There’s not really much to it once you’re able to avoid damage in melee range. Kiting (what you’re doing with P/P) is a good way to avoid damage, but fundamentally different from avoiding damage in melee range. With kiting you just have to keep mobs from closing with you while you shoot them, with sword you’ll have to learn how to move around the target to avoid attacks without breaking melee range.

hartmoore.9632:

if the signet player is not a burden to the team, i.e. dying all the time, poor dps, etc, then who cares

Absolutely, you can run dungeons in all blues with no trait points invested if you know what you’re doing. The level of optimization you want to set is all up to your group.

However, I’d definitely put ensuring your group mates are using a solid and helpful build above, say, making sure they’re not using Magic Find. If you’re optimizing then you should be looking at people’s terrible utilities before you start telling them to take off their pirate runes.

There’s already a nice long thread for this discussion: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/races/charr/Are-Charr-Really-Atheist .

It is mostly people trying to do anything they can to convince everyone else that pixelated beastpeople share whatever their particular flavor of real-life belief/nonbelief is, regardless of what lore supports.

Vv W.7821:

I have to agree with Tulisin on this one.

I don’t even necessarily disagree with the premise. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with increasing the rewards from WvW, but it needs to be presented as such straight-up.

If you’re really having trouble you can use S/P or D/P and just let the blind field (#5) do the work for you while you auto attack.

If you actually want to get anywhere as a thief, though, you’ll have to learn to avoid damage via mobility. In PvE, even against 3+ mobs, you should be taking very little damage just by constantly staying mobile with WASD movement and dodging to fill the gaps or get out of the way of telegraphed attacks.

Equipping a melee weapon and practicing movement until you take very little damage in PvE is going to be a lot more rewarding than spamming blind fields or kiting your way to 80, both in the sense that it’ll likely be more fun and in the sense that it’ll prepare you for life as a thief requiring you to not get hit.

The question then becomes: Are you using 25 arrow carts/flame rams in 40 minutes of WvW? Are you even using the 12 carts/rams per 40 minutes you claim you can buy via WvW?

So the real complaint isn’t so much “I can’t make enough money to support WvW via WvW”, but really “I can make more money doing other things, and I like money”.

Niim.9260:

Downed carries bads, bads love downed, forever be a contentious discussion.

Which is another way to say that downed state mitigates the raw effect of skill by allowing it to be combated with numbers.

When it comes to massive open-world PvP design, this is a good thing. The people who have a burning desire to see WvW become the realm of high-skill play as opposed to numbers-based play don’t understand what a terrible idea that is for WvW as a whole.

Although I will say that many of the people complaining about downed state aren’t the ones that are having their “superior skill” mitigated by it, they’re the people are are bad at manipulating the downed state. You can’t attempt to ignore an entire mechanic and then say “But really I’m skillful, this thing I’m bad at is just holding me back!”

Shizzlenit.7648:

The build is not that good…

This. D/P is inventive in how it works, and pulling off lots of stealth without C&D can be impressive, but it isn’t particularly overpowered. The only thing D/P can really pull off better than D/D is trolling around repeatedly stealthing without requiring a target, which isn’t exactly useful, and getting access to headshot, which isn’t easy to leverage when you’re blowing mountains of initiative on getting stealth from an expensive combo field.

Sigil of Strength is great if you’re actually synergizing with it, that means:

A) Using +boon duration of some sort. Acrobatics is a no-brainer here, but if you’re invested in multiple sources of Might (acrobatics dodges, sigil proc, steal proc from trickery) then it can be worthwhile to get some +20 % might duration rune sets. The more you push this particular kind of synergy, the more incentive there is to push it farther.

B) Using both condition damage and power-based damage. If you only use power then you’re only pulling 35 effective stat points per Might stack. Find a way to leverage condition damage (caltrops, venom, etc.)and the effective benefit per Might stack doubles to 70 stat points.

Sigil of Strength has more potential than traditional choices like Air/Fire, but if you aren’t actually using that potential it’ll likely disappoint you.

Rissou.7213:

You guys are plain wrong, sneak attack has good damage for a power/crit build.

Test P/P Unload vs P/D Sneak attack vs D/D Backstab vs SB Cluster bomb:

Sneak attack crit for around 4k. Range with stealth.

Unload crit for around 6k. Range with no stealth.

Cluster bomb crit for around 4k. Range with no stealth.

Backstab crit for around 6k. Melee with stealth

Seems to be in a pretty good state, damage wise with range and stealth on demand.

All of these numbers are useless without examining the time and resources required to execute each attack and the time until they can be executed again. If we just lined up all the damage numbers that could be done by pressing a button then some skills would look very favorable indeed.

Back stab, for instance, can be executed a lot quicker in the right situations, leaving time for an entire extra strike of something else during the same timeframe as a sneak attack.

I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with Sneak Attack, but you can’t meaningfully compare damage like you have.

Adaneshade.2409:

Would still call anyone capable of using it to max potential pretty skilled, wouldn’t you? Same could be said for S/D, but i find it easier, personally, due to easier access to stealth.

I would call anyone capable of using any weapon set on any profession to the max potential more than “pretty skilled”. The difference in thief weapons is that some have really low floors, but they’ve all got pretty high ceilings.

Adaneshade.2409:

Yeah, never stated those stats were in sPvP.

Doesn’t really matter if it is in sPvP, even in WvW maintaining a 25 stack is highly situational.

Not to mention that bringing the sigil stacks into the equation creates more opportunity cost for the crit rate.

Adaneshade.2409:

S/P (for PvE, and PvP if your’e really pro)

You don’t need to be pro to use S/P in PvP, you just need to pretty much ignore Pistol Whip unless you’re using quickness with it. S/P gets you the desirable pistol off-hand with the solid mobility and auto attack damage of sword main hand.

Adaneshade.2409:

fully stacked precision sigil on weapon

There you go. Max-stacking a precision sigil will pull another 11 % and make it doable. Of course, you’re running this in WvW so…

Ensign.2189:

Wasabee.5031:

I still can’t see how could you get up to 59% crit chance with all of those power/tough/vit gears?

Your 6 armor slots only contain a bit over 30% of your native stat bonuses from gear. When you’re getting crit from every other source available it’s not hard to push it up that far at all.

Even when I run some Rampager equipment (precision mainstat), I usually hit about 58 % with full Critical Strikes line and Signet of Agility running. 59 % is pretty far up there without using armor stats. I don’t believe it unless they’re running full mainstat precision Ascended accessories. 59 % requires almost 1,200 bonus precision, and even emerald orichalcum neck slots only give 90~.

Adaneshade.2409:

S/D is CAPABLE of being miles better than D/D can ever be. The problem is, it’s an extremely high skill cap weapon set so there are few of us who can play it to it’s full potential.

It does have a high skill cap, but even played towards the upper end of that cap I think you underestimate D/D in comparison. I hardly ever use D/D myself, but just because most people run it as “C&D->Steal->Backstab->lulz” doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a lot of potential. Particularly the use of Heartseeker as a pure movement ability requires a good amount of skill/timing.

Volrath.1473:

urdriel.8496:

Raise time between invis, now you have a 5 sec debuff, change it to 7-8 sec, thief fixed.

Fist, the “reveled” condition lasts 3 seconds not 5 (whitch shows how much you know about the thief profession) and second if this condition cd is to be increased then the thieves base HP and thoughness need to me raised as well since stealth is the thieves main defense.

No it isn’t, but I agree that if revealed is going to increase from 3 seconds then thieves will need to be overhauled with offense/defense retuned to suit the new duration.

I don’t think that people like urdriel suggesting these changes really understand how they’d affect thief build dynamics. A revealed duration increase would weaken more conservative options like using stealth offensively to daze or apply conditions as with sword and pistol main-hands, respectively. As a result, more thieves would be pushed into backstab “assassin” style play wherein being able to repeatedly stealth isn’t as important as simply downing your target in 2-3 seconds.

ComeAndSee.1356:

They very likely added culling because of the issues with SWTOR’s failed Ilum.

Ilum was supposed to be a massive PvP map, but it ran horribly even on the most powerful computers when you had 80 players rendered on your screen. Also, you couldn’t turn off titles and stuff so it clogged up the screen.

Conversely, The Secret World’s open FactionVFactionVFaction PvP zone runs pretty great, likely as a result of their decision to implement “uniforms” that reduce the amount of data to be sent to which uniform and which faction.

Niacin.4926:

So, Jumping puzzles. I, for one, hate pvp. And I’m no big fan on the jumping puzzles, but I think they are ok. Therefor doing a pvp jumping puzzle is no ideal situation for me.

Stop right here.
If it isn’t fun for you, don’t do it. The end.

But you still want the rewards, right? I’m sure you do.

So you’ve got two choices, either do the stuff (PvP) anyways to get the reward (a legendary) you want, or don’t get the reward.

“Legendaries require PvP and I don’t wanna” is absolutely no different from “legendaries require exploration/crafting/dungeons and I don’t wanna”.

Webley.1295:

look at it this way

would you use backstab on a condition thief

well why would you use sneak attack on a crit thief then?

Exactly why I’d like to see backstab have some condition synergy.

Main problem I see with 30/20/0/0/20 is you’re running 20 in crit strikes for a condition-based build.

Which is why a lot of thieves just run pure offense and use evasion/blind/dodge for survivability. But, yeah, sure, Pow/Prec/Vit is a viable set.

Sansarah.3076:

You shouldn’t have to kill someone twice within 5 seconds tbh.

If you didn’t actually kill them, they aren’t dead, if your problem is with people getting back up from the dead then your problem isn’t with the downed state and you are getting double loot from it anyways.

Xsorus.2507:

You seen a lot of classes soloing large groups of people that are either A. Elementalist or B. Thief..

Now ask yourself, why do you see those 2 classes as the ones able to solo large groups of people? Could it be because they have methods of stomping people with extreme ease.

Stealth stomping in 3v1 is a death sentence for a thief unless the people they’re fighting are really really bad. Stealth stomp is not hard to counter unless you’re literally AFK and fighting by having your cat sleep on your keyboard.

People win 3+v1 because they know how to control a fight and keep downed people downed.

That aside, the downed state is another issue where people think that WvW should be their high-skill playground where they can use skill to pull off victories against 300/400 % numbers. Skill is a force multiplier, but not to that degree, and the fact that GW2 combat mechanics support numbers over talent is a good thing for WvW and the game as a whole. As much as people scream about the zerg and wanting to consistently go 10v50 and win, I don’t think they realize how barren and terrible WvW would become if that was actually the case.

Mordina.3529:

Seriously, ive lost count on how many lvl 10 and 20 daylies ive done … doing 10 daylies to BUY one ring is not a fix to your problem……..

Well, apparently you’ve done less than 10 since the patch.

“Each daily gives you 10 % of a ring no matter what” is about as clear cut of a “fix” to RNG as you can ask for.

krixis.9538:

isnt pvp about being able to survive and take lower dmg. and most decent pvpers will use alot of toughness and grind people down.

Don’t think you’ve been keeping up with how a lot of thieves operate in PvP. While bunkering is certainly viable, it isn’t really the route most thieves take.

Pretty much anything with lots of crit, lots of hit volume, and Signet of Malice+Omnomberry Pie can face-tank things. Omnomberry pie is pretty broken without a cooldown. Death Blossom works, as Webley pointed out, but most people use Pistol Whip from S/P since it also grants access to a blind field which completely trivializes “tanking” anything sub-boss.

Catalyst.8075:

Does it? How do you stealth with a torch? How is that thief like?

Stealth is not an innate thief attribute, just something you can choose to use. Saying torches wouldn’t work with stealth is like saying “Torches? But how could you apply venom with it?”

muylaetrix.2096:

the first time your computer learns about a character, it probably needs to be told more stuff like the skins and dyes, but that data only has to be send once.

I’m not sure about this. What if one of those people swaps weapons or armor? Not to mention just how much stuff actually has to be sent to describe a character. Even if it is just a string of IDs you’re looking at at least 7/8 variables for weapons/armor, another 18 for each dye field of each of the six pieces of armor, then dozens to describe racial characteristics (height, build, color, eye color, presence of horns, length of horns, etc.).

Agnima.3714:

Signet of Shadows is a passive 25% movement speed increase that is on anytime you are NOT in combat, people saying that its made specifically for pvp to chase people down are wrong because if you are in combat and getting hit you are not moving 25% faster until you go out of combat again.

Not entirely correct. The 25 % does indeed stay effective in combat, but your base combat speed is still lower than your base out-of-combat speed. If you’re chasing or being chased by someone with no runspeed modifiers and you’re using one of these signets you will either close or create space. The flipside being that anyone who is actually invested into swiftness will be able to catch you or get away from you.

LOCO.1785:

Yes, let’s remove a core part of combat because it is annoying to some people.

/sarcasm

Pretty much this. Downed state stops being so annoying when you stop considering it an add-on to how things “should” work. Downed state is an organic part of GW2 combat, and the way you fight should always take it into account.

You can no more cherry pick out the downed state from GW2 combat than you can make the complaint that “siege ruins WvW and everything would be better without it because other game did it like that”.

Using overwhelming numbers to keep up allies, fighting near NPCs so you can rally off of them, “special” stomps (stability, mist, stealth, quickness, etc) are all part of the downed state meta that is supposed to develop around this part of GW2 combat. They aren’t extraneous novelties, they’re how the game is built and supposed to work.

I’d much rather torch offhand be the thief’s next weapon before the much-clamored-for rifle. It’d be an excellent opportunity to give thieves access to burning as well as a fire combo field (for Mightspam with cluster bomb).

Pretty sure none of the stealth utilities even function under water, so you’re left with stealth-on-heal and possibly trait-based stealth for falling below a certain % of life or stealing (which is buggy enough on land, let alone in the water).

Under water combat is just bad.

Garo.5304:

The point of one weapon skills is because using a single weapon your base attack is higher

You get your average weapon damage when you are dual wielding, so this is technically true but totally useless. Since the largest gap with 80 exotics is between daggers at 981 and pistols at 1029 using just the pistol instead of the combo yields an entire 24 higher max weapon damage (and way way lower minimum weapon damage). Your average range goes from about 950 – 1005 when using a pistol and a dagger to 876 – 1029 if you’re using just a pistol. Incidentally, these bring the exact same average (952.5 weapon damage). So you’ve gained zero actual average damage in return for 24 max damage…

…which is negated several times over by the 90 power (equal value per-point to weapon damage) that other weapon could bring to the table, completely ignoring the other two stats it could bring.

There’s no point to it.

You aren’t missing anything, they’re skills solely intended for the first hour or so of play before you’ve gathered weapons.

If they want to at some point implement a set of empty-hand skills for #4/5 and a statted piece of gear to go in the “empty hand” slot, then they could return to these skills and tune them up to be competitive.

Noid.2871:

You (try to) balance for a glass thief to get killed if they fail once-badly or twice-barely. That means the thief has the option of gearing for vit/tough and then surviving even a bad fail. It also means that the soldier warrior is in no immediate danger of dying to anything, not contributing enough dps, and probably bored out of their mind. And finally it means that a glass warrior can’t go afk during bossfights anymore, but won’t get oneshotted either, and hopefully can stay engaged in melee for extended periods of time, even if they’re not dodging perfectly.

Of course, that’s the theory.

Which is all well and good, but it means the glass warrior and glass thief are doing roughly the same thing but the thief has to dodge stuff and the warrior doesn’t. Professions have different innate defenses, but are all on an even playing field offensively.

SoggyFrog.4170:

I think Snowpea has tapped into what my worry is (I was writing my first reply): instead of having to work at your escape/chasing options, this is a switch you can just flick on.

You can’t flick it on in combat since you can’t switch utilities in combat. If you’ve left combat then you can just waypoint or really do whatever you want. If people want to sacrifice combat power for sub-swiftness speed as a chasing/escape option, more power to them. People really interested in chasing/escaping will catch/escape from these signet users since they’ll be using swiftness.

As has been discussed before, if people are willing to sacrifice looking awesome and unique in WvW then making character models more uniform would reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent to describe each character you encounter.

The problem with supply camps from a defensive point of view is that there is really no manpower-efficient way to defend them. You have to leave 2/3 people standing around doing nothing at every camp if you don’t want 1-5 people to come ninja them in 1~ minute. The defense is forced to use two or three times the manpower of the offense if they want to maintain these points. However, this is only a “problem” from the defensive standpoint.

From an overall game design standpoint, it isn’t a bad thing to make it really inefficient to defend the cheapest and weakest points, it gives the attackers the advantage on supply camp fights whereas the defenders get the advantage in almost every other situation.

Fourth.5603:

I think what you are forgetting is that by equipping this signet, you are essentially giving up a skill slot for increased speed…

This. You trade combat effectiveness for the lazyman’s “mount” signet, especially since most professions can run perma-swiftness if they really desire mobility.

Namu.5712:

Crit damage = your burst
Cond damage = steady damage over time provided you keep stacks up.

Not really, it all depends on how you use them. You can burst conditions by stacking condition damage and short-term-high-damage conditions as opposed to duration. You can also use crits to support long-term damage, especially via procs. There’s no need to railroad damage types into specific viable timeframes.

The question at hand when choosing between crits and conditions is how much power you’re using. Crits play nice with power, condition damage doesn’t.

sorrow.2364:

Tulisin.6945:

Actually go and test it in-game, you’ll quickly see that sword auto is superior to Unload in DPS while being more granular, initiative free, hitting 3 targets, and applying conditions. What Unload has on sword auto attack is range, no reliance on landing the chain, and single-target hit volume.

Actually, it isn’t.
Plus, Sword has no specific damage booster compared to pistol, that means that at best, you are doing 10% more damage compared to sword.
The sword autoattack is much slower compared to unload, while the damage is only just a bit less. Also, Unload is much more reliable compared to sword autoattack due to long range. While you can easily get a miss with sword autoattack due to its melee range, you are going to get a miss to Unload only due to LoS or out of range, which are way less frequent compared to autoattack misses (kiting is enough to avoid damage).

Again: there is nothing to argue about. The DPS is in fact higher on Unload, you can’t argue about math.

You can’t just apply math when, in practice, auto attack puts out more DPS and consequently puts down targets faster.

And, as someone else noted, “pistols have a 10 % damage trait” doesn’t mean anything if pistol skills have significantly less base DPS.

Mufa.1326:

Tulisin.6945:

3. In the situation noted, sword/anything would serve you better than P/P, thanks to Infiltrator’s Strike. P/P does have situational uses, but they’re rather limited, and thanks to recent changes to make P/P at all competitive you have to take pistol-specific traits. Dumping two or more traits specifically into pistols makes P/P a very poor choice for “situational swap weapon”.

One of the main problems with Unload in specific is that Pistol Whip does what Unload does (huge hit volume) so much better. There are certain buffs that could be made to thief traits to make Unload much more attractive, like removing the 1 second CD from the vuln-on-crit trait. The problem is that these same buffs would affect Pistol Whip even more than Unload. I’d like to see Unload be revamped as a whole into something less focused on hit volume.

Answer: That is not true. S/anything is not better than p/p in situation I noted.
Remember: You want to dump ur initiative in order to finish off enemy at low health while your movement is impaired in one or more ways (let us say you are rooted/slowed).

If you go with s/anything:
you do infiltrator strike which costs 3 ini i think. Then let us say you do pw, your pw will hit unless oponent clears root and dodges fast. But even if it hits, you will manage only small dmg before he is free from both root and stun to dodge away with you doing almost no dmg.
Now, you are still slowed (only one second passed), did not do any dmg, 1 sec passed and you burned 8 ini.
If you want to close on him again, you will have to do shadow return (4 ini?) and again infi strike (3 ini?)…..so essentially no spike there, you will just be burning your initiative (i counted 18 ini there) for no dmg and even now you just have him rooted for one sec.

With p/p: you simply unload multiple times (probably about 3 times). With one dodge he may mitigate part of the dmg of one unload but he will eat two more. So in this situation (slowed and unable to close gap need to deliver finishing spike), p/p does much better than s/anything.

The problem here is that you’re saying you’re movement impaired and P/P is at a huge disadvantage because P/P is innately the lowest-mobility set thieves get. S/x would allow you to IF in and use auto attack for superior damage to Unload (while crippling to even the movement field), while P/P would quickly leave you unable to dictate range, even if you did want to dump a bunch of initiative into doing less DPS than sword would do.

You’re assuming P/P is a good choice when mobility is low, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth, especially when other professions can still do damage at >900 range while keeping you completely impotent due to P/P’s weak mobility.

Rakanishu.2980:

For the daggers, I’ll have to run some tests in PvP to compare sigil of strength (might) vs air to see what gives me the most damage. Don’t want two on-crit sigils of course. What about the health stealing one? Is that effective at all?

My quick and dirty advice: Don’t run Might(Sigil of Strength) unless you’re running Acrobatics. Might stacking is awesome when you synergize for it via traited boon duration (runes/food too, sometimes), but you’ll get more bang for your buck with Air otherwise.

Sigil of Blood (health steal) is actually pretty awesome if you’ve got the crit rate to keep it going. With a much shorter cooldown than Air it’ll actually compete in damage with some stat combinations. However, IIRC, Blood is a constant amount of damage while Air actually scales with power. The much shorter cooldown is also wasted if you don’t have the crit rate and hit volume to actually keep it going off every 2 seconds.

Jericho

Ranged thief is awesome … Pistol/Dagger

Does it really count as a ranged setup if your primary damage mechanism requires you to dip into melee to strike every 4/5 seconds? I guess this is the point at which we have to define range. S/D can do ranged damage about as well as P/D sans Sneak Attack (which is to say, very little at all).

reikken.4961:

Hm, I just checked with ranger and warrior. It looks like it’s normal for arcing projectile skills to have 300 more range than listed.

This is so you can use the arc to free-fire outside the locked tab-target range.

sorrow.2364:

Unload does less DPS than sword autoattack? Seriously?
Have you at least tried to do some math before coming to this conclusion?

Unload: 808 base damage on 1.75s channeling time. 808/1.75 = ~461
Sword autoattack chain: 975 damage on 2.52s channeling. 975/2.52 = ~386

There is nothing to argue about a clearly false statement.

Actually go and test it in-game, you’ll quickly see that sword auto is superior to Unload in DPS while being more granular, initiative free, hitting 3 targets, and applying conditions. What Unload has on sword auto attack is range, no reliance on landing the chain, and single-target hit volume.

Signets in groups can be used well, but this is extremely rare. Most thieves that run SoS, for instance, are merely running it for their own movement convenience and never touch the active. Assassin’s Signet is also hard to justify, as it is essentially just a DPS boost for the thief and not a very significant one. Something like Haste can be leveraged for group utility or to get through a rough patch, but AS isn’t really powerful enough to make a difference.

Signet of Agility is awesome, and can definitely feed into group synergy better than most thief utilities. This is another Signet that can be a sign of a terrible thief if they never activate it though .

Infiltrator’s Signet is sort of in-between, and really depends on how they leverage the extra initiative regen.

Signet of Malice is amazing with the right synergies and I’ve got nothing wrong with thieves using it.

In short, some thief signets are very good, but others (like AS) I can only really justify taking in a PvE setting if you’re running heavy signet synergy.

tl;dr – Malice, Agility good, others could be a sign of laziness, just take Shadow Refuge and useful group stuff instead.

I use a totally different weapon for on-kill stacks in PvE. Once I’ve stacked power or precision or MF I switch to a more combat oriented weapon. With a pair of on-kill sigils you can get your 25 stacks fairly quickly and not have to worry about an essentially useless sigil when you’re operating at 25 stacks.

Loading.4503:

Lemme just start off by saying, im pretty sure imam get bashed on by people already saying pistol is garbage, and imma just say………… “….ok”

There’s nothing wrong with P/D, mainly because P/D takes almost nothing from pistol.

That said, I wouldn’t go high-crit with P/D unless you were intending to run condition damage anyways and double-stack crits with a bleed-on-proc sigil. I’m sure it works for you, but most of P/D’s potential lies in the bleed stacks.

Cempa.5619:

You say Pistol is broken? Go tell Wild Bill that!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F8FcUCoyBQ

The full list of things that are good about pistol mainhand are as follows:
1. Sneak Attack from stealth.

The full list of thing that Wild Bill uses from pistol mainhand are as follows:
1. Sneak Attack from stealth.

P/D is rather good because P/D pretty much ignores everything Pistol has but what happens when you use auto attack after C&D. Furthermore, this thread was trying to demonstrate that P/P is good, and P/P doesn’t even get organic access to Sneak Attack.