Guild Wars 2

The Dark Assassin Z.8740:

Emnity and what do you use to set? I use the rune of superior scholar and arms I put 5% damage.
About whether use: 25 (Deadly Arts) 30 (critical strike) 5 (acrobatics) 10 (trickery)
Deadly Arts: Mug, dagger training
Critical Strike: Strike Side, signet of power, Execuneer
Trickery: Thrill of crime.
My skills are Hide in Shadows, Shadowstep, Haste and Basilisk Venom.

in this setting that I never got used to do 16k crit is really impossible

I’m assuming you left assassin’s signet out because you thought it was obvious. If you really want you can take more signets for more might stacks. The biggest hits are also reliant on your target being somewhat squishy themselves.

Pretty much what they said. Exploit the heck out of your superior mobility. With S/D I usually Steal to close, C&D->Tactical Strike as an opener. Use the opportunity Tactical Strike gives you to throw a sword combo to get them crippled/weakened, then dodge out as they come out of daze. Let them burn off their weakened heal (if you took poison-on-steal) and counter-attack trying to close with you (dodge caltrops help), IF back in, re-daze, and finish the fight. Don’t let them get any huge telegraphed combos off on you and don’t burn a bunch of cooldowns while they’re invincible and you’ll be fine.

Most of the problems thieves have with warriors seems to be either getting ambushed and destroyed by an unanticipated combo, or trying to do a high-burst opener and getting it completely negated by a warrior damage immunity skill.

edamber.1549:

Not sure, didn’t check the combat log, looked like Whirlwind wrath. I’m running with 800 toughness, that might be the problem.

That and the fact that you tried to straight burst someone who was likely very high toughness. Really doesn’t have to do much with the professions involved.

P/D doesn’t have unload, but P/D relies more on condition damage over power so this isn’t a big loss. It’d be nice for Unload to be able to carry a high-power P/P setup, but it is just mediocre, not amazing, at what it does. You can definitely make P/P work, but it isn’t hard to see why it isn’t a popular choice.

Minx.7521:

you don’t have to be a sitting duck. you can be a moving duck! run in circles or somethin backstab’s hard because 1) meelee 2) have to stab in back :P

You forgot the fact that untraited stealth movement is slow, so once the initial closer is dodged the thief likely won’t catch up for a backstab unless they drop stealth or use a shadowstep of some kind (which has an accompanying graphical indicator, even if the thief is stealthed. When people lose track of the thief due to stealth they tend to think that means the thief could be anywhere superfast, when generally thief mobility is greatly lowered during stealth.

It is easy for someone who has played a thief to say “Just read their movement and anticipate their likely location to kill them in stealth”, but after practice you really can usually figure out where the thief is or where they’re headed based on the situation. Stealth is far from invulnerability, especially in obvious situations like a thief stealthing for a stomp/revive (they’re next to the downed guy), using shadow’s refuge (the vast majority of the time they’re still standing in it), heading through an obvious chokepoint (just AE the chokepoint), or closing on you (they’re going to be somewhere between where you saw them last and exactly where you are). It is a good thief’s job to make themselves harder to read, but many thieves are getting away with terrible and predictable behavior because people just throw up their hands when they lose their target and start picking their nose.

They’re in the same stat tier, edamber, WvW exotics are only “alot worse”(sic) than TP-bought crafted exotics because of the way you value stats, not because of some intrinsic difference.

Those who find the WvW stat combination valuable are actually quite frustrated that it isn’t available on the TP, and I’ve heard many people say they’d be willing to pay >10g a piece to just buy the stuff instead of having to farm badges.

Daendur.2357:

thieves are vicious kittens and that’s why people complain.
But c’mon they are thieves … otherwise ANET should have done musketeers for a fair and honorable duelist.

I have no problems with people ignoring playstyles outside of the ones they enjoy, that is kind of the point of having malleable professions that can work many different ways. It doesn’t make you a bad thief to only play one way.

The only point at which it becomes an issue is when people seek to narrow the profession to conform to their favored combat doctrine or try to convince those ignorant of the myriad of options that “my way is the only way to play a thief”. Generalizations like “thieves are glass cannons” as opposed to “I play my thief as a glass cannon” are defeatist and detrimental to the community, doubly so if community->developer feedback becomes overly focused on the shortcomings of the profession in one particular playstyle.

D/D is the way to go for the standard backstab opener because dagger mainhand offers backstab while dagger offhand offers C&D to get into stealth on demand in melee range. You won’t be using LDB much in a heavy power/crit setup though, unless you really need the AE/evade.

As far as giving feedback when you hit a stealthed thief, sword strikes + signet of malice has been invaluable for me in stealth thief hunting on many occasions. Wide-range no-init attacks that will cripple the already slow-moving thief and give me healing when I hit them are a great way to track a moving stealthed target. It might be worth looking into if your profession has any similar “on-hit” skills or traits that would allow you to quickly ascertain when you’ve landed an attack.

Lets go over a couple situations:
1. The thief stomps with stealth and quickness. This is pretty much unavoidable, but means the thief has probably burned a powerful combat asset (haste) and is now extremely vulnerable (no endurance) once that stealth drops. The thief’s defensive attributes don’t matter much in this case because he’s not sticking around for more than a second to stomp. The counter to this lies in not getting downed in the first place, and ensuring your team-mates kill the vulnerable thief shortly after you die. No viable complaint here.
2. The thief stomps with stealth (no quickness) and is glassy. This means a fragile character that relies heavily on movement and deception to stay alive is guaranteed to be standing in a small space unable to move for several seconds. Unless you are 1v1, this thief should be dead in very short order. The only reason this thief shouldn’t die either before he gets the stomp off or a second after is improper reading of the thief’s actions. Go swing your sword above your downed buddy’s head and a downed thief will appear in short order. No viable complaint here.
3. The thief stomps with stealth and brought enough defense to actually survive standing in one place for a few seconds. This is no different from a stability stomp. If you bring the defense to hold up against assault and the means to remain uninterrupted (stealth stomp can still be interrupted by AE, unlike stability), you’ve brought the tools to the field to do the job and should be rewarded with a good chance of accomplishing that. No viable complaint here.

Most people complaining about stealth stomps are either doing 1v1, (in which case they don’t matter, since if you’re downed first there’s about a bajillion ways any profession should be able to risklessly dispatch you), have their teammates to blame for not killing the obvious stealthstomper, or are up against someone who honed their toolset specifically to this role in order to require a solid counter to stop it (#3, you have to work to kill the defensive thief).

ColdSpyder – Two of the most commonly used and viable gap closers are Infiltrator’s Strike and Steal itself, one of which always does damage, the other of which is very commonly traited to do so. I wouldn’t say it is correct, then, to say “aside from heartseeker strike, they don’t do damage.” Furthermore, “swiftness” isn’t broken, swiftness is a runspeed increase, you’re thinking of quickness.

Seto.4917:

Hi guys,
…
If i choose guardain, it’s because i expect to have a lot of survivability, helping other teammates with supporting skills and heal.
…
If i choose a Ranger is because i want mass damage from distance and so on…
…
I choose thief ‘cause i like glass cannon, goes around with stealth backstabbing people with the aid of venoms. But when i’m exposed i’m vulnerable and easy killable.

While it is perfectly fine for you to have concepts in mind when building a particular profession, the simple fact is that GW2 doesn’t work that way. Guardians are not high survivability healers, rangers are not long-ranger mass damagers, thieves are not glass cannon backstab specialists.

They can all be built that way, yes, but restricting each profession to one particular playstyle just because you have some preconceived archetypes in your head ignores the fact that every profession can be built a multitude of ways. I might prefer to play a highly offense-based Guardian that uses movement-placed control abilities to get the enemy where I want them and cut them down with burning melee weapons, Jedi Knight style. I might prefer a trap-heavy melee ranger that lures opponents into a favorably conditioned battlefield and destroys them with a greatsword. I definitely prefer a sword-using duelist thief that openly closes with multiple opponents to engage in toe-to-toe melee combat, utilizing evade, interrupts, and battlefield control to create a dangerous melee presence instead of jumping in and out of combat.

These are more than gimmicky “fun” builds in GW2, they’re all completely viable playstyles. By ignoring every option except the ones presented by your initial impression of each profession’s archetype you’re missing out on the majority of what GW2 skill customization has to offer.

Other classes don’t have “similar tools” unless they have stealth, which only one other profession realistically does. Block, evasion, and temporarily invulnerability are defensive countermeasures, but none of them are in the same league as stealth for completely removing the ability to target the incoming threat or outgoing target.

It is considered generally bad game design to punish players without giving them proper feedback, which is why so many FPS have adopted obvious trails for sniping weapons and “kill cams” to demonstrate to the dead player who their killer was and where they were attacking from. Dying quickly to a powerful combo can be frustrating, but dying quickly to a powerful combo that was impossible to see coming is far more frustrating. It gives the victim a feeling of futility and doesn’t promote properly learning how to expect, avoid, and counter those tactics. sPvP does a better job than WvW at giving information on who killed you and how, and it mitigates the frustration of those engagements.

Regardless of whether stealth is balanced or not, counterable or not, low-feedback deaths have always received heavy backlash in gaming, and it won’t stop here. A WvW death log might help alleviate some of these issues.

Something nobody else has noted: Take Hide in Shadows as your underwater healing skill, then jump in the water and pop it. This will often throw enemies off your trail quickly and provide another healing/stealth opportunity while you’re running away. You can also have Roll for Initiative on your underwater set and quickly jump in, turn around, and roll back for some extra speed. Exploit the heck out of the fact that jumping into the water changes all of your healing/utility cooldowns.

Hellkaiser, you’re vastly underestimating how powerful an insta-full endurance bar is with the right setup. It absolutely offers more than some of the traditionally powerful utilities on activation while offering a passive benefit between those periods. The multiplicative effect of dodges with dodge-affecting traits makes SoAgility one of the most synergistic utilities thieves have.

1. Take dodgetrops (10 points in trickery)
2. Take Power of Inertia and Feline Grace (15 points in acrobatics)
3. Use Signet of Malice
4. Eat level 80 dodge-boosting food (might on dodge, increased endurance regen). Optional, but makes this go from “pretty neat combo” to godly.

Now suddenly you can tap Agility and then triple-tap your dodge key for:
1. Three dodges worth of invulnerability/movement, you get 2 dodges worth of endurance back, and each of those you use refunds you another third of a dodge. Couple that with your boosted regen over that period and you can chain it thrice with more coming swiftly after that.
2. 6 stacks of might, duration depending on your runes and how deep into acrobatics you are, but even in the short term that means 210 power and condition damage. You’re probably at 12 total stacks if you just dodged prior to activating your signet, and remember you can get 5 more if you took the might-on-signet trait.
3. >6s of swiftness, again, depending on your boon duration boost.
4. You’ve laid 3 caltrops fields, each causing bleed and cripple once per second for four seconds.
5. Signet of Malice heals you for >100 hp per second per target per field. 100 hp doesn’t sound like much, but if you lay this combo down on a group you’re looking at thousands of hp/second healed while you’re mostly invulnerable rolling around.
6. And it still counts as a condition removal for you and your buddies.

Signet of Agility is highly underrated, and easily in the same tier as things like caltrops and shadow refuge. It is a passive damage boost that, on activation, provides an incredible boost to both offensive and defensive strength.

If it makes you feel any better: thief underwater combat is incredibly un-fun, so he’s hating life as much as you are. TBH, it was a mistake as a whole to have the underwater section of Raid on the Capricorn. Underwater combat is gimmicky, unbalanced, and unfun for many professions.

Bwillb’s answers are the most correct. The only point of contention I’d have is that Signet of Malice isn’t actually worse than any other heal skill for burst healing, completely ignoring the passive, it is above Hide in Shadows and below Withdraw in healing-per-second. Stin, Daggerstorm isn’t anywhere near 180 seconds for cooldown.

If you’re having major problems with a daggerstorming thief it is actually relatively effective to just wade in and hit them hard with melee. It won’t be too easy to keep up since you’ll likely be crippled, but forcing a dodge will make them prematurely end their elite. A S/x thief itself is a great counter to a highly mobile thief and will at least force them off-field if not lock them down.

PsionicDingo: SB’s high skill cap comes from the fact that a skilled player can use it to:

1. Do very solid power-based damage with the main attack.
2. Have incredible targeted mobility with #5.
3. Spam #2 into combo fields to do chain AE buffs/conditions better than anyone.
4. Poison/weaken large groups and possibly heal themselves very well with Signet of Malice in the process with #4
5. Evade/cripple on demand with #3.

Now, all of these are pretty obvious assets of the shortbow, but the initiative management and timing required to utilize them all fully is only present in very high-level play. The nuance of these abilities means they’re strong in anyone’s hands, but a particularly skilled player can make them incredible. Thus, a high skill cap.

Redscope.6215:

Yewkon.5802:

If you chase me, all by yourself, far away from your group… well, now you’re in my house and I live in a house of pain.

but.. that’s what thieves do.. we pick off over-extenders and the slow members of the herd

…
So in other words, thieves are meant to win 1v1s?
…

The key words are “chase” and “far away from your group”, this makes combat all about mobility. I wouldn’t say “thieves are meant to win 1v1” is entirely correct, but “thieves are meant to win in mobility” certainly is. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll kill your opponent, or even get them down, but it does mean a thief likely won’t be downed themselves in this situation, since anything they can’t win against they can certainly escape from.

Whether this is balanced is debatable. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with thieves having the most mobility, but it may be too available to thieves that aren’t actually putting any focus towards it. A thief running heavy acrobatics, “Uncatchable”, and multiple mobility utilities should certainly be king of movement, but a thief simply running SoS and a shortbow swap gets much of that benefit without really losing anything for it.

Any profession can stack offense like crazy and down people in a few seconds, what makes thieves different is a thief’s mobility means they can choose their fights much more easily. The ability to engage targets of opportunity and stealth/leave against poor odds mitigates a glass cannon setup far more than any other profession is able to. The solution to this? Not sure. Design direction and profession ambiance support thieves having high-mobility and lots of stealth, but perhaps it was a poor design decision to place both of those within the same class.

I’d like to hear your justification for shortbow reworks, Lan. It is simultaneously extremely powerful and malleable in the right situation while being generally boring to use and weak outside of those situations. It has great synergy and generally balanced initiative costs for what it does. It is easy to use at a basic level while having probably the highest skill cap of any thief weapon for advanced play. Shortbow seems to be the perfect weapon, if somewhat slow/boring just due to projectile travel time.

Both professions are extremely viable in all types of PvE. You shouldn’t be put off by all-signet warriors any more than you should be put off by opener combo thieves. Those aren’t the only ways to play either profession.

For comparison: The thief is going to be innately more squishy (just due to armor/base HP differences) but should be more mobile. In open-world PvE where defense doesn’t really matter much the detriments of the thief are far outweighed by the benefits. Easy access to run speed and stealth makes exploring and traveling a breeze.

Elsewhere, they can both play support, they can both play glass cannon, they can both play heavily survivable. Thief may require more action on your part due to the higher mobility, but mobility allows you to increase your capabilities via action instead of stat points, which can be very rewarding. Warriors bring more mass-event utility via banners that boost everyone, whereas thief utility is usually limited to their group. Thieves, however, have some excellent methods for tagging mass-mob events.

Tricky.6983:

“One of the key points I make in the post is that condition damage is mostly worthless for PvE dungeons.”

why are you saying Condition dmg thief is no good for PVE dungeons?

Condition damage can be viable for dungeons, but not so much in a pickup group. Bleed stacks are hardcapped so if you have multiple people trying to use heavy-condition builds you’re going to hit a point where their effectiveness is heavily diminished. Conditions also don’t benefit from vulnerability, which is a major damage boost against long-lasting group targets for power-based setups.

You can mitigate a lot of this via group coordination though. If you’re building a guild group from scratch, just figure out who is bringing bleeds, poison, burn, etc. It isn’t impossible to make condition damage viable, it just takes more effort.

Knyx.5926:

You also realize divinity does not add to condition damage right? lol…

And yet it both increases the condition damage in my stats window and makes my actual conditions do more damage in combat. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rune_of_Divinity

I’m going to stop here, as I’m not really sure you play GW2 anymore. You’re free to use whatever build you find viable to accomplish whatever goal you’ve set for yourself, but trying to realign the profession as a whole and narrow its viable options to more closely match your own preferences is not going to be beneficial to the profession or the game in the long run.

You might want to try SoM healing on caltrops again though, very effective.

To the OP’s assertion: Pretty much, yes.

Most professions utilize most of the abilities on their bar regularly and hone their role by traiting and gearing towards it. Since thieves can use one ability over and over, thieves can hone their role through weapon ability use. When the role is doing damage, you’ll see a lot of spamming one ability. Other professions see this and believe that the problem is that particular skill is too powerful when really that particular skill is, by design, “the damage skill”. While thieves “damage skills” or “control skills” (looking at you, chain-daze headshot) might seem overpowered on their own, the entire skillset is meant to be roughly equitable with other professions’ weapon sets.

You don’t know that caltrops heals via SoM? One of the thief’s most unique and powerful combinations.There’s a difference between “no condition damage” and no condition damage on your equipment. You need 10 points in Trickery for uncatchable, and should be running 175-350 condition damage from Might stacks for a total of 275-450 condition damage. Add in another 60 from divinity runes for 335-510 condition damage. If you decide you want to push it higher with accessories or something that is certainly viable while maintaining heavy defensive stats.

Endurance gain from mainhand attack is a small amount, but it has a multiplicative effect on the number of dodges you can do when combined with other bonuses. Remember that acrobatics refunds about a third of a dodge’s worth of endurance per dodge, meaning the more you dodge, the more bonus dodges you get. D/D might not be the best weapon setup for a build like this in every situation, but it is certainly viable.

Blazer Hellsing.9184:

There is no sense of contribution in WvW, just a massive zerg with no skill.

Too bad there are no alternatives for a highly mobile and deadly profession to make a difference aside from butting heads in a giant group.

Loosifah.4739:

For any of your complaining about the nerfs to the thief; try rolling a class like Elementalist who’s supposed to have massive damage for the trade off of having the LOWEST armor and health in the game.

Enough said.

GW2 isn’t quite that simplified in class roles. “High damage for survivability loss” is a trait of fire attunement, but not so much of earth attunement or the profession as a whole.

That healing per second is not only attainable through daggerstorm, since you can easily have >4 caltrops fields up at once in the same location. What dagger/dagger provides in this particular setup is endurance regen on mainhand attack and LDB for additional evasion on demand. 25 stacks of bleeding even without heavy condition damage is 1500-1800/second, more than enough to force people to retreat or attempt to drop conditions, which is why this is battlefield control instead of an attempt to kill massive groups of people. Furthermore, even with zero +condition damage on your gear itself, you’re getting +100 for grabbing dodgetrops as a trait, 200 – 300 from might, and possibly 60 from divinity runes (I favor those even for defensive stats).

There’s nothing wrong with ignoring the viability of thief setups that aren’t simple engage-and-destroy solutions up to the point where you request the profession be realigned to those specific doctrines. Liking a specific playstyle over another doesn’t make you a bad thief, or even an immalleable one, but that doesn’t mean only your playstyle should continue to exist.

Dee Jay.2460:

Aside from glass-cannon build in sPvP I’d never recommend using more than half Berserker gear.

Caveat for this is open-world PvE once you’ve learned to dodge. You’ll want some survivability for dungeons, but most PvE AI is so terrible that you’re far better off stacking heavy offense and killing mobs in a few seconds without letting them hit you much than stacking survivability and making fights take longer. My PvE effectiveness went way up as I ditched more defense for offense.

As far as the OP: A handful of vitality does not survivability make. Vitality on your accessories might make you stand up better against random AE/target of opportunity damage, but it won’t do much when someone built like you (another glass cannon) decides you need to die. There’s not really anything wrong with that, it is a viable counter, but accessory vitality alone doesn’t suddenly make you survivable. You are right in your assertion that people who do zero defensive stats and die to “accidental” (bouncing shortbow projectiles, siege hits) damage might want to throw some in somewhere though.

>To get signet of malice to heal well outside of spvp and on things other then just dagger storm you have to stack some healing power not just acro.

Healing power doesn’t do much for Signet of Malice, so I wouldn’t recommend it. The power of Signet of Malice is getting >20 ticks of 110 hp/s, not sacrificing all of your gear to push it to 150 hp/s. You don’t need to push condition damage to get 25 stacks of bleed, most of them are coming from caltrops, not daggerstorm. While stacking heavy condition damage would make the setup more deadly, stacking tank stats supplements your dodge/evasion to ensure you can get back out after pushing everyone back. Permaswiftness is a doubly useful asset simply because so many thieves are used to SoS that they’ll lose the combat effectiveness conferred by a more useful utility skill in favor of it.

You can be effective and useful in combat without being focused on on single-target damage, even with daggers. The perceived lack of playstyle options for thieves is borne of the thief playerbase only really wanting to focus on one or two roles. That is fine, some roles are more popular than others, but it isn’t a reason to realign the profession based on one or two preferred playstyles.

Because Steal is such an easy and available closer, many thieves use shadowstep as a retreat option where they engage with Steal and then SS to get out of a sticky situation. I think the condition removal on return points to the intent to use shadowstep as a closer, then drop all of the conditions you’ve accrued in combat when you use return to escape. The same method is used with Infiltrator’s Strike, but since IF is an obvious closing attack people actually use it to do so.

Try using SS to close and you’ll realize that it works great in that role. The issue isn’t so much with the design and intent with SS as it is with the fact that nobody actually uses SS like that because Steal works better.

Knyx.5926:

Well we have to agree to disagree there then. There is no viability in building around tank stats and going dagger/dagger. So that nullifies your logic and that is only one example

If you take signet of malice and acrobatics, tank stats + d/d actually offers the highest dodge rate in the game, allowing you to produce more caltrops (thereby bleed, healing, and cripple either highly focused or in a large area). You’ll also be invulnerable for long periods of time due to chained dodges/evades and constant malice heals. This is, by far, the best way to cripple an entire zerg that exists in GW2. A defensive D/D thief is a large-scale battlefield control asset. Fun side-fact is that being able to maintain >8 stacks of might and permaswiftness (thereby allowing you to drop SoS for something useful) means your damage is solid, even without stacking heavy power, which combined with dancing dagger means you can chase and burst down stragglers. Add daggerstorm and you can pretty easily push entire zergs off of gates as you 25-stack bleed the area while invincible.

JKlol, daggers are only good for stacking power and stack-babbin’ people to death.

“The builds the weapon set is built around” is the flaw in your logic here. Weapon sets aren’t created around playstyles, playstyles are created with what weapon sets offer. Streamline weapon sets towards specific playstyles and you’ve reduced the malleability of the class.

Asum.4960:

Otherwise ArenaNet wouldn’t have designed them in the way they are.

They aren’t designed the way you think they are, and your “class archetypes” are gross oversimplifications. You’re taking the same stance as OP, only in the conservative sense of “I want thieves to be a shallow and focused profession, just in my way and not yours”. You’ve found a playstyle you enjoy with your necro and a playstyle you enjoy with your thief, and that is great, but they aren’t the only viable playstyles for each profession.

As a longtime S/D user, autoattack has always been pretty amazing, but make sure you discipline yourself to get off the third strike whenever possible. More autoattack = less initiative burnt on regular engagement damage = more for dancing dagger spam when the time is right.

Knyx.5926:

I think dual skills should be the staple of each weapon combination. All the other abilities should have a way to streamline and create fluidity with said dual skill.

Thereby diminishing the options available to thieves, since thieves can currently choose to do anything from building heavily into their dual skill to completely ignoring it and everything in-between. The way things are set up now seems chaotic and unorganized, but all that really matters is that it is effective despite that. I’m all for Flanking Strike tweaks, for instance, but there doesn’t need to be a push to make dual skills the heart of thief effectiveness.

Greyblue – I hear a lot about “oh, this build can solo camps and dolyaks”, are many thieves having issues in these areas? Yes, you can permastealth to kill NPCs, but most of them (dolyaks in particular) attack so slowly you can literally hold strafe and spam 1 until they die and you’ll take no damage. For most camps you can hit Daggerstorm and get a sammich then come back and finish the claim NPC, even the more upgraded camps are simply a matter of shooting your shortbow at the crowd for a couple minutes.

Seems like a ton of effort to go through to “assassinate” NPCs that most professions (including thieves) can just go burn/AE down without much risk.

Most people just use SoS because they’ve gotten used to it and hate running around without it. It synergizes well with some high-mobility and/or signet-benefit setups, but most thieves are running it out of laziness. The active isn’t that good, and the passive does absolutely nothing any time you’ve got swiftness.

Devildoc – Thieves aren’t “lacking in swiftness” unless you want to compare every profession to the ones that can get permaswiftness for no effort. Thieves can run permaswiftness too if they want (especially when food is available), but more importantly can get swiftness on demand easily when they need it.

SoS is a crutch, and I think more thieves will come to realize that as time goes on. If you want to use it for running long distances you can and should switch it in/out, but when it comes to actual battle I’ll take a more useful utility skill any day of the week, especially since I can do something like burn Signet of Agility for >6s swiftness when I really need it along with the host of other benefits that utility offers compared to SoS.

For posted thief builds I’d like to see more people say “these are my three battle utility skills, I of course swap in SoS for traveling distance”.

Knyx.5926:

@Blazer It doesn’t have those options because the weapon sets do not make sense with the dual skills, they are mixed in sets where they shouldn’t be. This is why we have weapon sets, and they should be choices for specific builds. Saying thief is fine as it is just sounds like a HS/PW spammer that builds on relying on haste…

Look, I get it. Not all the weapon skills in any particular weapon set follow a specific theme and it means you can’t get a 100 % streamlined min/max setup. Here’s the problem with your logic following that-

All of the thief weapon setups are currently at least somewhat viable despite that, and most of them are quite powerful.

It might look like poor design to you, coming from most games where each skill option is unique and steamlined towards a certain playstyle, but it works well the way it is.

The thief is not a weak profession, nor does it lack for playstyle options. There’s enough condition damage options and power options to play either way effectively, not just as a gimmick. There are viable ranged and melee options, slow and mobile options, glassy and survivable options. When I encounter a thief in the wild I cannot immediately counter them, even if I know what weapons they’re using, until I ascertain exactly what kind of playstyle they’ve chosen to pursue. This creates depth, something that game developers struggle oh so very hard to create.

What you’re asking for in the OP may seem a logical focusing of the profession, but the end result will be severely diminishing the many viable options already available and making the thief into a shallow profession that is easily countered before any move is made. I get asking for a major profession revamp when what is currently in place just doesn’t work, but thieves are already effective in every area of the game and not just with a few specific builds, but dozens of unique and effective setups running along several combat doctrines.

As for the whole “their balance decisions in reducing thief burst will render thieves inevitably useless”, stop buying into the nerftrain hype. Even _if_high-damage <3 second burst setups get weakened there will still be many other ways to viably play a thief and win in all parts of GW2 because the class isn’t shallow and streamlined towards a single playstyle. Personally, my playstyle has been unaffected by any of the changes so far.

tl;dr – GW2 gets away with not having extremely focused and exclusive build types and it works, where is the real need to change it?

If you get used to never ever standing still and using dodge against telegraphed attacks you’ll find that you won’t really take much damage in PvE because mobs in general have terrible aim. Aside from that, loading up on AE and fighting multiple mobs at once can be very rewarding once you’ve learned how to mitigate most of the danger with mobility.

Cris Croix.2370:

Tulisin.6945:

Racial skills aren’t only elites, Nefarious, there are several worthwhile racial utility skills. Sylvari Seed turret, for instance, offers thieves the ability to get event credit while not present, something that non-Sylvari thieves simply can’t do.

Charr offers an extra trap-type skill, the fastest-cooldown trap in the game in fact, and great for thieves already investing in a trap/condition builds. Charr also get Battle Roar, which is unlike any thief utility skill and offers direct group buffs with a large range.

The intent is for race choice to not be unbalancing, but in actuality there are some skills with considering.

You may be right that these skills exist, but they are in no way, shape, or form comparable to the utilities provided to the thief class. Many of the thief unique abilities are too good to pass up, or are better forms of racials. Battle Roar may be the only racial that provides something that thieves don’t already have access to in one shape or another, but is it worth replacing a different utility skill with? There are already too many amazing and irreplaceable thief-only utilities to choose from, so why would you even consider taking racial utilities into account?

Have you ever actually used Shrapnel Mine as a trap thief? It stands up fairly well to standard thief traps, especially if you’re pushing traps already.

And Seed Turret still offers completely unique capabilities to a thief that simply are not available in any way from standard utility skills.

I’m having a hard time believing there are tons of thieves out there getting the most out of their amazing thief utility skills when I see so many builds with Signet of Shadows for simple convenience.

People might wish that race didn’t matter, but it does.

Executioner is nice, but the real reason I push to 30 in Critical Strikes is that both the stats it offers scale off of eachother. If you don’t put heavy points into both, you weaken them both as a whole.

Critical Haste is awesome, but completely unreliable. In PvE you can figure out how often it goes off and, over time, how many more mobs it helps you kill in a given time period, but in PvP fights are much more short and brutal where you either come out on top quickly or end up dead. In these situations if it doesn’t proc it is completely wasted and if it does it could win the fight for you. Personally, I’d take something more reliable.

Xolo.3580:

With non-exotic gear, some vit/toughness, and specced in toughness/heal 20p + using the crit/hp conversion trait, I did 2 story mode dungeons today on my fresh 80 Thief. I got oneshot or close to it on many occasions when using D/P, no matter the blind spam. If I didn’t dodge half a second after incoming dmg I was often immediately downed, forcing me to switch to P/P or Short Bow to do mediocre but relatively safe DPS most of the time. IMO melees are totally screwed in this game compared to ranged damage dealers. It’s absurd how easily and quickly you die in STORY mode dungeons with a build that has not the best, but some defense nonetheless. If melees should not dare entering new dungeons without bringing 50% more life and armor than normal, then the frustrations many have are justified.

1. That is how dungeons are built. There are some attacks that absolutely everyone has to dodge every time, regardless of gear or skill setup.
2. Having subpar gear for your level and getting downleveled for a lower-level explorable can actually be detrimental.
3. You’re capitalizing STORY like it is a big deal that storymode had difficult parts, but many story modes are harder than some of their explorable paths.
4. You aren’t a “melee”, and nobody else is strictly “a ranged damage dealer”, you’re whatever you choose to be at the moment. If you choose to be inflexible in flexible content, expect to be punished for it. Because the game is built so that professions aren’t highly restricted in engagement range it is perfectly viable to build content that punishes a certain engagement range.

Try putting some points into acrobatics, it isn’t too difficult to avoid the vast majority of dungeon damage by movement and dodges.

Racial skills aren’t only elites, Nefarious, there are several worthwhile racial utility skills. Sylvari Seed turret, for instance, offers thieves the ability to get event credit while not present, something that non-Sylvari thieves simply can’t do.

Charr offers an extra trap-type skill, the fastest-cooldown trap in the game in fact, and great for thieves already investing in a trap/condition builds. Charr also get Battle Roar, which is unlike any thief utility skill and offers direct group buffs with a large range.

The intent is for race choice to not be unbalancing, but in actuality there are some skills with considering.

Sounds like he brought a hardcounter to condition damage. If you absolutely must defeat him with condition damage then you’ll have to bring enough condition removal to combat both his conditions and your own that he throws back at you. This isn’t really realistic while expecting to remain competitive with him in other aspects.

Might help if you posted your setup though, instead of just giving a general idea.

Signet of Shadows is cool for running around or exploring, but people get attached to it while leveling up and refuse to ever let it leave their bar. You’ve got swiftness-on-dodge and you don’t have a signet-heavy build, get rid of SoS. You’ll have to work a little harder to get around, but the in-combat advantage of SoS, especially when it does nothing for you after you dodge, isn’t worth the utility slot. The sooner you break the habit, the better.

As far as engaging multiple targets and killing them without dying, that is more on them than you. Two equally geared/skilled players should never lose to one in an open field. You might be able to get one of them downed, but the other’s failure to interrupt your finisher is just that, a failure on their part, either in action or in not bringing tools to cover their buddy.

What Stx said is why I wish thieves had a burn option. Bleeds are great but heavily countered by condition removal since you need several stacks to do good damage and only one condition removal to get rid of them. Burn tends to do less potential damage, but you need only reapply it once removed instead of building it up.

First class with torch mainhand, maybe?

SockpuppetSamurai.9210:

stop traiting glass cannon and expect to survive!

I don’t believe this is entirely correct either. Gearing and traiting heavily towards offense is extremely effective in open-world PvE where the vast majority of damage can be avoided by simply not standing still and killing all of your targets in a few seconds. I found my PvE effectiveness went way up when I ditched toughness/vit gear in favor of berserker/rampager.

The trick here is that you can still trait towards offense without going 30/30/x/x/x.

Since you aren’t running heavy trickery you won’t be stealing incredibly often anyways. Fury is nice, but if you’re relying on it to keep your crit rate where you need to be, you’re in trouble. Fury from steal is a boost, not something you can keep up. Only time I’d actually encourage relying on having consistent fury would be a situation where you’ve got both heavy boon duration and heavy trickery, allowing quick steals and long fury. That said, if you really want fury and aren’t doing sPvP, you can roll Charr and get it as a utility skill.