As a sword/dagger user in most situations I simply don’t use flanking strike that much. S/D’s strength lies heavily in being initiative efficient and fighting groups anyways. I wouldn’t mind seeing flanking strike change for the better, but S/D is still a competitive weapon without it. The other weapon setups seem to revolve around the dual skill so much that people don’t know what to do when it isn’t key to effectiveness here.
I don’t understand the hate that sword/dagger gets.
C&D is both an offensive and defensive ability. Defensive in that your target loses focus on you and you get a chance to reposition under stealth, offensive in that thieves attacking from stealth are given stronger and wider offensive opportunities. Sword has enough gap closing ability that getting in range for C&D is not an issue, and 2-second daze when attacking from stealth makes the ability to drop in and out of stealth even more potent. Dancing Dagger’s raw offensive power is also underappreciated. Flanking Strike isn’t S/D’s burst ability, Dancing Dagger is.
The problem is that most people tend to consider a 1v1 scenario where S/D can’t truly shine while it is easily our best weapon setup in multi-target situations. Sword/Dagger has to be built differently than other weapons and doesn’t lend itself well to just jumping over from, say, D/D and giving it a go.
Stop trying to force every weapon set into a template and consider them as a whole and you’ll appreciate sword/dagger for the amount of control and offensive strength it has.
+Healing works best for me, but I run signet of malice and assassin’s reward.
Just don’t take two crafts that require fine materials and you should be fine. The real bottlenecking comes when you need to find enough fine mats in a given tier for two crafts.
Sword/Dagger – This setup is a defensive one that is capable of moderate dps. The Dagger offhand gives you a 50% snare and the ever important stealth. Allowing you to catch your target with ease and make sure his friends dont get the res off.
People severely underestimate this combo. Sword regular attack is fairly impressive on its own and easily becomes the strongest regular attack on multiple targets. S/D is also the only setup that allows you to easily and repeatedly utilize sword’s 2-second daze from stealth attack. AE on every attack means pushing high hit/crit volume and getting more out of anything that works “on hit” or “on crit”. Since you don’t have to rely on expensive bursty initiative abilities to do damage you can benefit heavily from trait trees that reward you for banked initiative. Dancing Dagger also earns only a little quip from you about the 50 % snare, but people forget that this ability puts out twice the damage of a max-strength Heartseeker any time it is allowed to bounce, it is well worth using even in melee on anything but a single target.