Guild Wars 2

Pyroatheist.9031:

@ArmageddonAsh: Taking 20 points into inspiration unfortunately provides this build with nearly nothing. The 200 condition damage while in scepter pales in comparison to sharper images and deceptive evasion. By not taking these two traits you are cutting out both your clone generation AND a significant source of damage. Your only reliably rapid clone generation is now your scepter autoattack, which isn’t reliable at all. Therefor it also makes your clone-on-death traits pretty much useless.

I agree, although you also get a slight increase on the scepter block recharge – not worth it for what you lose. Perhaps it would be worth it for the other inspiration traits, but this build isn’t really lacking for regen…This build also relies more heavily on staff anyway. So you really lose out this way, since it really won’t significantly boost your dps, as you don’t sit in scepter.

I think if you really wanted that +200 condi-damage, it would make more sense to get it from illusions anyhow, as at least you could be getting a bit more confusion out of the build (from traits), and the 200 condi-damage would apply to all weapons. I’d recommend looking at another thread (the clone spammer build) for this sort of arrangement.

The clone-spammer build is a solid build, mind you. In comparison to the blackwater build, it trades a lot of survivability for slightly more dps and more frequent aoe confusion.
The blackwater build focuses on a combination of super-tanky/evasive survivability and solid condition damage. It needs 4-5 of the 7 major traits in the build left as they are to achieve this, which doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room with the trait distributions.
You really can’t move them around without giving up boons on stealth/lots of clones+damage/ready access to stealth, which are all central to the build.

The sad thing about this all, is this build shows a way to make the torch strong…and because of the locations of the traits, it’s probably the only way to really accomplish that.

Esta.9645:

Greetings! I’m a fairly new player leveling up my thief, who is level 47 now. Due to time constraints, I only have time to really focus on one character. The reason I chose a thief from the beginning was simply because the theme— I played an Assassin in guild wars 1 and I love the theme of it. I’ve visited this sub forum a time or two and always been greeted with doom and gloom about how terrible the thief profession is, but I always brushed it off as I seemed to do fine in PvE. Or so I thought until recently.

I was doing some hearts in Dredgehaunt Cliffs in a level 45 area, therefore I was down leveled. I was going around stabbing imps (I’m D/D currently) and taking them down at a reasonable rate, when suddenly a level 43 guardian runs up next to me and begins to pull 7 or 8 imps. He uses greatsword 2 (the whirling thing) and they all die. I was astounded— all this time I had thought guardians weren’t capable of any serious damage, after all, I thought thieves were the kings of dps! Alas, there was no way for me to keep up with the guardian. I always see a huge volume of guardians running around in the world, I see far more guardians than thieves. Perhaps there’s a reason for that?

So I come to ask you all this: Am I wasting my time leveling my thief, should I reroll guardian? Was it just a freak incident, or do guardians regularly outperform thieves at level 80? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: Added a few more details

They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Thieves are potentially the kings of single-target dps. And are very good at burst damage – that is damage that occurs before people can react. These are very useful in wvw, but generally not as useful in PvE. Thieves can also output respectable aoe damage with the shortbow and sword mainhand (I’d recommend sword/pistol while leveling in pve).

The other weird thing about thieves is their learning curve is all backwards…they are always squishy, but they don’t get the utilities/traits to avoid damage and reset battles, until higher levels. So at lower levels, it can be very frustrating to play. On top of this PvE is balanced against player skill by having monsters that hit slowly, but like trucks. For guardians this works great, but for thieves this means that we have to either learn to avoid getting hit, or get downed frequently.

In WvW, thieves are very popular, and a very solid profession. They are a lot of fun to play, and (IMO) can be versatile and useful in all situations. Others think that thieves are useless in a zerg (big group of players), but are great in small groups. Many believe that thieves absolutely suck at PvE (although having played one in high-end PvE, I disagree). There’s a recent post by a guardian who can’t figure out how to fight thieves in WvW…if you look through the forums, you’ll see posts like this every day for most professions.

Another important thing to learn in general, with thief, is that our survival (for most builds) comes with our ability to kill our opponent quickly. Having high toughness/vitality seems good when you’re dying all the time, so you may be tempted to get armor that focuses on these. What you wind up doing is making it so that fights that should take 10 seconds, take a minute. During that time, you’re getting hit for half as much, but get hit 6x as much. This is why many people recommend running full berzerker’s gear, especially in PvE. This will also get you used to avoiding damage, which is the most important skill for you to acquire as a thief. In WvW, toughness/vitality become more important, and there are ways to balance these…

BrunoBRS.5178:

bobross.5034:

Icarus.1728:

Yea, just ran into a thief going stealth through reveal timer, cleansing 9 conditions and gaining full health (from 10% left) from 1 C/D, and stealthing from S/D Cloak & Dagger with NOTHING anywhere near him. Oh, and some how hitting for 8-10k through 2k toughness and 1.2k healing build?!

What the hell?! New exploit I didn’t get the memo on? Oh, and he is 1 shoting Dolyaks, as well as full toughness/healing Guardians.

Come on… why don’t I get filled in on fun exploits like this?!

Did you try typing the secret code in the console?

^^vv<><>baSTART

the true thief secret.

NOOOOOO! Now everyone will be doing it! Just please don’t tell him how to get the Tanooki suit…

Wolfield.9812:

Got Moa’d today by another Mesmer who was loosing a 1v1 with me. Killed him in Moa form. Got called a hacker.

Had to chuckle.

I’ve gone on Moa offensives before too…they usually don’t expect it. IMO Moa is only really effective as mediocre CC when you already have an advantage. It can certainly cement the advantage or panic a novice player, but otherwise it really is not that good. Mass Invis is really a solid elite, and never leaves my bar except in PvE or golem rushes for Time Warp.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Something to note here. If you are planning to use this in pve, NEVER use rampagers.

Phantasm builds will stack up massive amounts of bleeds. On paper, this is great. Your damage is increased significantly, and this is good, right?

Wrong. In rampagers, your bleeds will probably hit for around 90ish a tick. In rampagers, you’ll easily stack up 15-20 bleeds with duelists or wardens. However, if you have another condition built person in your party, you just nuked their damage.

A full condie spec can hit bleeds for 130-140 per tick. They will also usually be able to stack up 15-20 bleeds, generally due to duration. However, your phantasms stack up those bleeds because of rapid application, not duration. What this means is that your weaker bleeds will be overwriting the strong bleeds from your condie built person, significantly reducing their damage.

Tl;dr: Rampagers is a hybrid, and that means weaker bleeds than full condies. You will take away damage from full condie builds in your team by using rampagers, lowering your overall party dps.

So the real issue here is not the rampager’s gear per-se, it is taking the trait: sharper images in a phantasm build that doesn’t focus exclusively on condi-damage. And I suppose taking +condi-duration gear if that’s part of the build.

The same issues that you describe would occur with an otherwise identical build running berserker’s gear, except that the bleeds would be even weaker. Since the condition damage has nothing to do with whether bleeds get applied, but rather critical chance/precision do that. I suppose rampagers does have slightly better precision, so critical chance is slightly higher, but by the same logic, the best way to be a necro friendly mesmer would be to avoid precision (or the sharper images trait) entirely.

I think the point of limited conditions is important when playing any condition build in pve (whatever profession). Because whether your condi-damage is great or not, you and another player may be competing for limited bleed stacks. Two condi-necros shouldn’t run with eachother in the same dungeon, even if they both have optimal builds, because they will wind up getting the combined dps of 1.5 players. The rampager mesmer runs into the same problem…but so does a full condition-spec mesmer. Because of this, I think it’s important when running a condition build in PvE, to be mindful of other players, and announce this early on. If others are also running conditions, you should be flexible, either changing your build to accommodate, or graciously leaving the group, so that you don’t wind up with a 1hr CoF run. So the issue is not that rampagers is a hybrid build, it is that running rampagers requires you to take a condition focused build to optimize damage, which makes you a condition build…and then you have to have the same consideration as other condition-players.

Vs. World bosses, well 1-2 condi-builds would be useful, but beyond that it’s just making the fight tougher for everyone, so pure power dps is more useful…sad but true.

I think it’s more complicated than that…
Ryuujin’s answer certainly is true for PvE…although there is one issue-assuming you go with a zerker build, but you still have traits/weapons that cause conditions, then you still run into the issue of overwriting other’s conditions. The difference is that, rather than overwrite them with suboptimal conditions, you’re overwriting them with mediocre conditions. So to really play nice in PVE, the important thing would be to play in a way that results in few conditions – don’t use staff when playing with a necro. Don’t take traits that allow your clones/phantasms to cause bleeds…which means no dueling… Basically as a mesmer, it is hard to do this.

Either way, I just carry around several sets of armor anyway, so if you already have zerker’s, there’s nothing wrong with trying rampagers and just swapping out if you’re grouped with a necro. The same build should work with both sets.

I do think a zerker set makes sense as a first step – though honestly I don’t run either rampager or zerker gear on my mesmer…since I like to roam in wvw, and like to play a tankier build…I’m almost always using rabid. clerics or p/v/t. I’m not going for max dps of course.

In PvP/WvW you rarely get 25 stacks of bleeds on a single opponent for long, and if you do, they’re in pretty big trouble, whether you’re overwriting a necro’s bleeds or not. Poison and fire are potentially a different story, but they stack duration anyway…right?

Personally, I’m excited about this celestial gear. I think mesmers, more than other professions are in a great place to take advantage of them. Almost all stats benefit almost every mesmer build.

is it celestial gear?

Icarus.1728:

Yea, just ran into a thief going stealth through reveal timer, cleansing 9 conditions and gaining full health (from 10% left) from 1 C/D, and stealthing from S/D Cloak & Dagger with NOTHING anywhere near him. Oh, and some how hitting for 8-10k through 2k toughness and 1.2k healing build?!

What the hell?! New exploit I didn’t get the memo on? Oh, and he is 1 shoting Dolyaks, as well as full toughness/healing Guardians.

Come on… why don’t I get filled in on fun exploits like this?!

Did you try typing the secret code in the console?

Cactus.2710:

DanH.5879:

Heienkatso.9628:

They usually win me 90% of the time if they know what they are doing.

they are winning you ? omg, that is terrible
but hey, maybe you can win at poker online ?

OT: the usual l2p mixed with “thief is OP again”
answer 1: you can ask a-net support for tips ? (make a ticket)
answer2: request MORE thief nerfs via ticketing system as above

What kind of jerk reply is that??? The OP asked an honest question without complaining at all. He just wanted some tips on how to play better. I’d much rather see that kind of post on these forums than your chicken kitten one.

I totally agree. Plenty of people come on here to complain/hate, so it’s understandable that DanH might make that assumption, and then decide not to read the post. That’s a perfectly viable strategy for dealing with haters…then again, if you don’t read the post, maybe you shouldn’t respond to it. And you certainly shouldn’t respond with unfounded insults.

Also, the OP is obviously writing in English as a 2nd (3rd/4th?) language. There is no need to insult that. It’s impressive, even if there are some minor grammatical errors…how many languages do you speak, Dan H?

the only fix both of these need is longer duration on confusion. Confusion as it is now is nearly useless…run up against someone with melandru runes -even with +duration food/gear, and you may as well just breath on them. Against others, its a difficult setup for maybe 1-2k damage. If confusion durations were doubled for both of these weapons they would really go a long way towards making confusion based builds a viable option. It already does damage that is on par with bleeding (unless someone is spamming skills)…so why not make confusion last like bleeding does…or at least better than stuns/fear does?

I normally don’t like comparing classes, but considering necros have such great access to fear, and can do great damage with it, while also providing a hard CC, I think it’s fair. Confusion is meant to be a soft dillemma / CC condition, but as it stands, it’s not…it’s just a little bit of bonus damage, and a condition that the opponent mostly ignores. It doesn’t even really register unless they have like 20+ stacks, and as a mesmer that is tough to accomplish (post blinding beffudlement nerf). Making the duration decent means that the opponent would be forced to recognize when confusion was being applied and adjust accordingly (start cleansing/running away). I don’t mind if it takes a while to get to a dangerous level of it, or if it just winds up being something that you keep on at moderate levels to maintain pressure throughout a fight. I also don’t think it’s a problem to slowly buff individual confusion skill durations – like the torch phantasm – just buff his duration, so the easy counterplay is destroy him early…which is easy. It’s not like it would all of a sudden be powerful enough that everyone would be playing it, it’d just be strong enough to form a foundation for a condition/pressure build.

Rafahil.2857:

Ok how about we change Shadowtrap into a venom that when used on an enemy you basically tag him and can teleport to him like shadowtrap does?

hehe…not a bad idea for a venom, but I don’t think anyone is asking for this. Shadowtrap as it is, is really nice. It’s just buggy and glitchy and inconsistent. It either saves us, or kills us.

I guess everyone will just have to switch to s/p now?

Jinks.2057:

Im still waiting for to attempt that retribution with less than 10.

If you want smaller scale fights, all you have to do is roam in a smaller group/alone.
If you see a big 20+ group, you run away. If you see them running toward you, you run perpendicularly. Assuming they’re an organized group with an objective, they won’t waste their time pursuing one or two roamers.

I do a lot of solo-small group roaming and I find myself going up against larger numbers fairly frequently as well. Obviously it’s going to be less often for me than for you…especially in a popular place like battlegrounds. Anyhow, I think you mischaracterize TC as people who relly solely on numbers. It’s WvW, and numbers fluctuate. Mismatched fights happen. That’s the nature of the beast. If all you want is duels, there are ways to get those in WvW, or you can always try pvp.

I think the best thing that EB can do about it, is what they have done…stick to one BL if possible, and try to ensure that you have a numbers advantage -or at least roughly even numbers there. As far as Db…I’ve been confused. I helped take their garrison today with virtually no resistance, just after having taken hills with no resistance. Then I go to EBBL and find a 20-30 man db zerg running around…what are you guys trying to achieve?

the fix for the return ability is more complicated than just making it work like portal. In wvw, it creates a serious issue if thieves are able to leave a shadow trap in a keep, then port back (even with a time limit). At that point they can res a fallen mesmer and portal a zerg back into a keep that they just lost / failed to attack.

I think the way portaling works right now is fair, and thieves can still achieve this goal with permastealth within a keep, but at least an observant opponent can detect it. The shadow-trap option would completely break this.

So then what if it works like portal but will not cross a wall? That sounds fair, except what if you are outside a keep, and just happen to move in such a way that the keep wall is between you and the shadow trap…well then how does it count? I think these are the sorts of tough pathing issues that the devs are working on. I think the fundamental code needs to separate locations into neutral/ours and theirs. And the limitation on shadow-return should be that it does not take you from “neutral/ours” and deposit you in “theirs” but otherwise, all locations are fair. If attempting to go from neutral to theirs, it should deposit you as close as possible to theirs within neutral territory. Anyhow, that’s what I’d like to see…not sure how easy it is to code that.

I think the protection part on staff 4 is a clear nerf. the other stuff seems like it nerfs the defensive potential vs a larger group, but I’m not sure if it significantly impacts its offensive potential. Not like I was seeing hordes of mesmers exploiting this anyway. But I don’t know if it’ll significantly impact my play. I guess I’ll see…if staff starts making me feel squishy I guess I’ll know.

suit yourself, but the survivability and stealth make this ideal for portal bombing. And as I mentioned, the sigil of stamina helps make sure you get some loot bags out of it.

I play a thief and a mesmer. Just dueled a few thieves today as mesmer, won one, left the other as a draw (perma-stealth – kept going into stealth and running away from my slow self). I really love when thieves attack me, so lately I’ve been trying to bait them by running by them as if unaware. Or standing still when they go into stealth. As others have mentioned, they are not nearly as OP’d as people claim. even with my one ground targetted aoe in my current build, I really don’t feel like I have much to fear from them…then again my build is fairly tanky. Still…

When I’m playing thief, I have a few sets of armor, but find that zerker armor is really helpful. I can even run in zergs with it, with the right build (30 in shadow arts). The trick is quick reflexes and not getting caught for long in enemy aoes. I like using shortbow in initial zerg vs zerg approaches for the aoe conditions/damage. Then I swap to p/p or d/p and tab around for low health guys that I can help get down and out. I’m certainly less survivable in a zerg than my mesmer, but it’s honestly not bad. Thieves do play a role in zergs for their spammable blast finishers and direct damage…it just requires care that you don’t end up a free rally for the opponents.

One more thing I tried…I happen to have sigil of stamina on my torch. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sigil_of_Stamina

In regular fights this isn’t great, but in zerg v zerg fights, when things are going in your favor: once you start downing people, you get so many free dodge-rolls from this, which only help to improve both survivability and aoe tags. It also helps keep the pressure on, by dropping aoe bleeds and cripples everywhere, meanwhile it’s a good way to get loot bags as a mesmer, which tends to be difficult in big fights without things like feedback.

Whelp, we discovered the counter to ninja ballistaing the wall at Hills….single arrowcart. Thanks for the lesson, DB.

already had the equipment for it from a similar condition build on my mesmer, so I gave this a shot in wvw today. It has amazing survivability! All that stealth and prismatic makes me very tanky, and able to break target lock when needed.

I survived a 1v10 for about 5 minutes (running away…slowly). In 1v1s – 1v3s I felt confident, but did find myself occasionally unable to finish opponents, usually leading to them running away. In small group battles, I was the most survivable member of my groups, and felt like I was addding solid pressure. In zerg v zerg, I was able to cloak and run straight into the enemy zerg, dropping clones everywhere. I felt confident in my ability to get out as needed, and break target lock as needed. I felt like I was doing enough aoe damage to get my loot bags, but the main value I was bringing my team was as a diversion…getting parts of the enemy zerg to pay attention to me (as out of position as I was) more than my zerg.

The real weakness of this build is lack of swiftness…so maybe some runes for that would be beneficial, otherwise I am loving it for survivability and solid pressure.

really don’t see an issue here. I solo roam with mass invis….one extra source of invis is great. I really don’t see the need to change these. Comparing to other classes is also silly. As the OP mentioned he is only concerned with elites that help with solo-roaming. He does not want to be a team player, and wants to be selfish only. Well Mass Invis is a bit overpriced for personal invisibility, but it works well, and its a nice backup for clone, veil and torch. It also works well in just about any solo-oriented mesmer build at the very least as an escape tool. Other professions don’t even get one elite that they really like. For example, a lot of engies actually take their racial elites instead.

Speaking of…mesmers get phantasm buffs that happen to apply to pets summoned with elites. So if you really want a buffed up phantasm, why not just play a race with a pet elite…of course, see how long you last in a group with your egocentric playstyle…people will be telling you to go roll a ranger in no time.

One more thing….mesmers have a lot of access to invisibility, but not like thieves. And they shouldn’t have the same access as thieves. For thieves it is their core mechanic. For mesmers it’s a side trick. So something that may be trivial for thieves should require more from a mesmer when it deals with stealth.

I’d take a look at the master build thread (stickied). Osicat has some great instructional videos that show several techniques for shattering and mobility. They are sort of advanced, but it teaches you some of what is possible. I’d take a look at each and get a sense of what you want – disposable aoe damage – then go with shatter. Amazing duelist, go with phantasm. Party support – look at the chaos maestro thread for ideas. Once you get a sense for what is out there, you can start to decide what to go with.

If you are a brand new mesmer – and going the pve route. You will also have a tough time of it until lvl 40 or so. I’d do a search for lvling guides and advice, though honestly, until lvl 40, mesmer feels underpowered….it all changes later.

keenlam.4753:

Wow, guys, thank you all for your great contribution. This thread has just gotten hot again. I see everyone has their own version of the build, all are interesting takes.

@Soryuju: Duel IX (Duelist’s Discipline) sounds nice especially when i want to make my iDuelist become a killing machine. Will try it out soon.

@Trigr: watched your vid, great combo. I knew there must have been someone before me thought about the idea and tried to make a good build out of it. Will try swapping Phantasmal Haste out for Illusionary Elasticity (for the staff version of my build)

@bobross: I like your thinking. 5 mesmers run this build and you have yourself an army of 15 suicide condi-bombers on the field. That’s gotta hurt the other team.

but it’s more than that…the sigil refills energy everytime something dies. If all 5 are doing aoe conditions, after they kill an opponent (or random monster), they can each immediately throw down 2 more clones (plus whatever is off cooldown). Since the damage is all aoe – there is probably another enemy near death, which then means another two dodges each…as you can see, it has the potential to turn into a sort of aoe machine gun.

great fights in ebay bl tonight. Some of the best (non-reset) wvwing I’ve had in the last few weeks. Ebay, I love that you guys stick together in one BL and are able to field a big zerg. It is great to have these massive 3 way battles. Dragonbrand, as always, are very worthy opponents. And the lootbags! Anyway, I hope you’ve all enjoyed my lootbags (I stock mine with extra honor badges). Looking forward to the rest of this week!

I’ve played around with this a bit too…tried one similar to your second one, but with clerics gear instead of pvt. On mine, I run clerics armor and zerker trinkets, gives a good amount of survivability and crit chance/damage.

Two recommendations:
Pain response (acrobatics – – is actually very respectable now, especially if you have some points in healing, its nearly 50% uptime on regen when you need it (that is when taking damage) and free condition clears every 30 seconds. I believe it`ll keep you up better than assassins reward.

for the second build, putting that extra 10 into trickery instead of deadly arts can give you thrill of the crime. Reduces steal cooldowns and gives you fury about half the time. If you take furious retaliation, you will have solid amounts of fury coming in. This has the added benefit of giving you solid swiftness uptime without wasting dodges.

Irapi.5937:

Just started commanding a week ago on my thief, and I don’t see the problem, unless you want to play as a massive steamroll zerg, which is quite boring imo. A proper group that knows how to communicate can have anything as a commander, and thief is not excluded. We can step out of the battle to command on demand, we mass stealth and we can stay in a just overtaken tower/keep with permastealth to recap it. But to be honest, class is a fraction of what really matters as a commander. The player is what matters.

The OP asked about commanding a 50+ zerg. That 50+zerg will be going up against other huge zergs, and although apparently some commanders pride themselves on commanding from the side or back-lines. It still seems to be the norm that a commander is leading the front-lines. With that in mind, there is no way that a thief can fulfill this function better than other professions.

nice tips.

Infiltrator signet – not only does it have a nice passive – it also teleports you toward your target without interrupting your current channel. EVEN if it is out of range. This means it can be chained with steals to increase gap closings.

Infiltrator’s strike will also tp you toward your target (though it does interrupt channels). So it can be chained with infiltrator signet as well.

Steal will only tp you if your target is in range, so it should always be the last in a group of gap closers. If your target isn’t in range, steal gets a 4 second cooldown

With the new 15k steal range trait, you can gap close around 3k in a second or so: infiltrator signet – 900, infiltrator strike 600, steal 1500. Ere on the side of caution here, as you do not want to underestimate the distance.

I have only ever seen one thief commander.

The primary goal of a commander should always be: stay alive. While this is certainly something that thieves can excel at, it creates a problem for commanders, because thieves don’t have easy access to massive heals or boons that help keep you alive without being mobile and stealthy. Mobility is a problem, because you need your zerg to be able to follow you, so you can’t be too mobile, or you confuse the zerg. Stealth is an issue because a good zerg tries to stack on the commander, and aoe will still hit you, stealth or no.

So a good commander is one that can facetank, and wade into the midst of a battle. Guardians do this well, but so do Elementalists and mesmers. They have enough damage mitigation and heals to get past all the damage and cc that they would otherwise be taking. Having tried to play a tanky thief, I know that this is just not possible on the thief. Tanky buys you a very small amount of time as a thief, but at some point, you still need to pull out and reset, which again does not work for a commander.

Looking forward to a good match vs DB. Ehmry, haven’t gone against you guys, but I’m guessing you will be outmanned. You might try what Maguuma was doing – fielding their entire server in one borderland. It’s not great for the points, but at least it makes for big fun battles for you guys, with relatively even numbers. Just a suggestion. Here’s to a good week!

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Look ar Arcing Arrow or Kill shot. If the warrior gets the skills of, damage is done. end of the line, end of the story. No way back then. And our heals certainly won’t keep us up long. Why should condition damage be any different? These listed warrior skills easely can do 4-16k depending on build. Condition damage just scares ppl because of the amount of small numbers popping on their heads.

Everything is fine. Dhuumfire could use a slight tweak down (or change, i think burning modifier is quite high, and however you wanna balance it, it might be to strong, giving it 3 bleed stacks might be better). Mesmer could use a small condition clearing boost. (I repeat SMALL), lik 25 sec cooldown effect to clear 1 condition, in adept trait, or utility. And ranger could use a bigger condition clearing boost. Ofc dont overdue it, but Ranger need more reliable condition removal. (The Brown bear underwater skill, should be there on ground level too, it would solve a lot of problems).

So the skills you compare this to are single target slow attacks that are easily telegraphed and hard to land, because just moving makes them miss. Any differences between those and the necro combos described as OP’d?

vicious.5683:

flow.6043:

albotelho.2931:

I dont care… I do not use Terror… but I love dhuumfire!

I have played Necro as my main for a very long time, this patch did not made us OP, but helped a lot for conditionmancers, at least for me… I am having a lot of fun bleeding and burning people down… torment is cool but it is far from OP, we have it in one skill only and the damage is not that great.

This is like saying: Thieves are not OP because I, as a thief, don’t use stealth.

This whole discussion is about the combo burning/terror, so if you only use Dhuumfire then yeah.. the patch didn’t make you OP.

then you are saying that terror it’s the problem?

no, he’s saying the combination of all of them easily available in one build is the problem. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Its a combined dps issue, coupled with a lack of counterplay issue. CC can be countered by any profession, so can conditions. The combination of long cc and high dps conditions in a big stack is not something that is easily counterable by most professions. Many professions would have to build specifically to counter it, and even then, would have a mediocre counter to it.

So it’s not a single skill/trait issue. If you’re not running that specific build, you probably don’t see it. It’s only when you combine them all together that people start complaining and that nerf stick rears its ugly head.

Travlane.5948:

bobross.5034:

RogueTigeR.3160:

the thing about the trap is thou… it is just that… “a trap”…which requires an enemy to trip it… unlike a mesmer portal… idk if a nerf is needed for such a mechanic….and yes…there already is a distance limit on it.

try using the skill, and read the changes that they made to it. You don’t need an enemy to trip it anymore…in fact it is way better when no-one trips it, so you can use it as a free escape, just like the pre-nerf shadowstep. Seeing as how they nerfed shadowstep, the OP is just anticipating a similar nerf for shadow trap…unfortunately in addition to occasionally giving amazing results, it also breaks fairly consistently, which is why the OP is complaining, and I wholeheartedly agree. It may be a bit overpowered, although honestly, it is more limited than pre-nerf shadowstep, so I think it is acceptable that it is more powerful….maybe make the max range 3k instead of 10k, and then fix the teleport so it works always. I don’t know how they would address keep walls and such, because that is still a potential issue if they fixed the pathing so it worked as described.

pre nerf shadowstep?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shadowstep

shadowstep / shadowreturn

used to have an infinite range on shadowreturn, so you could go all the way back to wherever you were when you cast it…You could actually tp so far that you’d get a loading screen. The issue then, as it is now is that weird pathing issues can cause you to occasionally teleport barely any distance at all. So it could save your life, or not….it was always a gamble.

Shadow trap can also give you that loading screen sometimes…then again, sometimes it just gets you killed.

sorrow.2364:

Craig.2403:

Nobody wants anyone to whine about anything, it helps no one. What we want is intelligent comments. Here’s an example:
instead of the classic “thief is op, it facerolls everyone,” a simple “thief’s use of initiative is op because it allows the spamming of high damage moves, and this coupled with many teleports allows the thief to survive any encounter. It should be fixed by putting skills on cool downs, preventing the huge damage that thieves can put out. This would make them use skills intelligently, as opposed to just spamming one move then running.”
This would be much more constructive, as it allows for us to clearly see why the person thinks the class is op, and a possible fix. It also allows us to come back and reply with intelligent comments as well, such as, “the initiative system is simply a way to put skills on a global cool down, which means that the thief has to be smart about how much he spams, so that he doesn’t overextend, and put his escape moves on cooldown. A thief has to be much smarter about using his skills, because using a damage move may prevent an escape move shortly after if it is needed.”
This then allows for a constructive argument over whether the thief is actually op given the two opposing sides. However, if you come at us with simply “thief is op please nerf,” we have no way of knowing why you think thief is op, and can’t help you in any way.
P.S. These arguments were as an example only. They are not intended to start any discussions or claim it is a problem at all.

I’ve done this a lot of times when the thief was OP.
I spent pages and pages of topics trying to explaining my reasoning, but it all goes down like arguing with a wall (with obviously some exceptions).

Last time I opened a thief-is-OP-like topic it was about Flanking Strike+Larcenous Strike being too cheap.
I spent about 3 pages arguing with the whole thief community trying to explain why the new FS was way too cheap but I’ve only lost time and get insulted.
Still, last patch, ArenaNet nerfed LS increasing its initiative cost.

People in this forum don’t want a mature reasoning, they just don’t want to be nerfed, regardless if the nerf is fair and needed or not. This mentality leaves no room to any argument, just because they’ll always try to grasp at some straws to avoid any nerf.

I think you’ve gone way off-topic here. The OP is complaining about thief players complaining about other classes (like you complain about the theif) on other profession forums. Now you’re complaining about thief players complaining about you complaining about thieves being overpowered.

This is not an anti-nerf/anti-patch thread, and people here are reacting to being blanketly called a bunch of whiners, with no justification.

Sorrow, I know that you play the thief and you wanted larcenous strike nerfed, and it got nerfed, and thats fine…whatever. But why are you trying to make enemies of the thief community here by attacking them, when no-one was attacking you?

Edit: just read a few other posts…seems some people did attack you a bit. Ah well, lets stay on topic people. Thieves be whining! yay or nay!?

RogueTigeR.3160:

the thing about the trap is thou… it is just that… “a trap”…which requires an enemy to trip it… unlike a mesmer portal… idk if a nerf is needed for such a mechanic….and yes…there already is a distance limit on it.

try using the skill, and read the changes that they made to it. You don’t need an enemy to trip it anymore…in fact it is way better when no-one trips it, so you can use it as a free escape, just like the pre-nerf shadowstep. Seeing as how they nerfed shadowstep, the OP is just anticipating a similar nerf for shadow trap…unfortunately in addition to occasionally giving amazing results, it also breaks fairly consistently, which is why the OP is complaining, and I wholeheartedly agree. It may be a bit overpowered, although honestly, it is more limited than pre-nerf shadowstep, so I think it is acceptable that it is more powerful….maybe make the max range 3k instead of 10k, and then fix the teleport so it works always. I don’t know how they would address keep walls and such, because that is still a potential issue if they fixed the pathing so it worked as described.

I recently played CM in a group with 2 thieves 2 guardians and a mesmer, and discovered that this is an amazing combo for that dungeon. 2 thieves means the party can literally skip half the stuff, much more than you skip in a regular run by running through it. Thief gap-closers make those long hallways full of traps easy to get through. They do great damage too, and the 2 guardians give stability so those annoying shotguns don’t knock you down. The mesmer rounds this out nicely.
I’m sure other group compositions work great too, and I’m not going to become a smug purist about CM runs now just because I had a few good runs with that group, but I’m just highlighting that thieves can be completely awesome in pve.

Also – my build is somewhat tanky, because I use it for wvw too, and it does fine. It’s just a matter of finding the right balance. Zerker gear is certainly fine as well -and as people pointed out, probably optimal for dungeons.

Hey all, just wanted to throw this in there….you know there is a sigil that refils your energy when someone dies….So that’s two free clones. So what would happen if, say 5 tanky mesmers were rolling around in a zerg with this build?

It is possible to make a build that takes advantage of clone death (which is distinct from shatters):

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/condition-build-The-Clone-Spammer/first#post2325197

The build basically focuses on using traits that take effect on clone death, most of those inflict some sort of condition, and with the build I just linked, it’s possible to cause your clones to inflict bleeds and conditions on dodge rolls. It’s a fun build to play, so I’d recommend it, though it takes a second to get started doing real damage in a battle, it’s the sort of build that can really cause havoc in a small group.

Otherwise, as people mentioned, you generally want to get to the max phantasm/clones possible, then either shatter, or build up phantasms.

Here are the main ways to do damage with clones (not phantasms – they do plenty damage by themselves).

Traits:
Domination-
Crippling Dissipation Clones cripple nearby foes when they are killed.

Dueling-
Sharper Images Illusions inflict bleeding on critical hits.
Confusing Combatants Your illusions cause 3 seconds of confusion when they are killed.

Chaos-
Debilitating Dissipation Clones apply a random condition to nearby foes when they are killed.

Many people will get a little bonus damage here and there from sharper images, but those other traits really require a specialized build to take full advantage of (since you’re usually shattering clones, or focusing on phantasms).

If you’ve been in wvw lately, in a tower/keep defense or offense, you’ve seen the marks on the wall.

Low mobility + high aoe damage at long range + good aoe cc at long range + good health pool may balance out ok in small skirmishes, and may make single roaming possible where it wasn’t before fot necros…that’s all fine.

(Low mobility + high aoe damage at long range + good aoe cc at long range + good health pool) x 30 players all doing it = walking death cloud.

in a 1v1 situation, you can counter with – why don’t you use stability / condition cleanse, etc? But in this situation, no one has that kind of condition cleanse that they can do anything about this. Mobility doesn’t help because the wells/marks on the necro zerg will kill any mobile classes instantly. Range doesn’t help because the necros range is just as good. Stacking doesn’t help because the cc destroys the stack. Stability helps a bit, but necros can easily turn those boons into conditions. Reflection/Retaliation don’t help at all.

On top of that, with all ground targeted and delayed activation (until someone steps on them), the necro zerg is relatively immune to the effects of server lag, compared to non-necro zerg members. So while they can lay their marks down, a guardian who is trying to wade through those marks may not be able to use the skill that would have saved him/her, due to skill lag.

Guilds in SoR were running this kind of group build before the buffs with excellent results. The drawback was that those same players had a pretty hard time in small skirmishes, so they needed to be part of a zerg to be effective. That is not the case anymore.

LordByron.8369:

Anuxdei.2175:

even this nerf is extremely deadly they will keep nerf us. they will stop when all kids be happy .
Conclusion :they will lost about 5k player (maybeeee) will gain much more and long years. Welcome to Online Games Strategies

actually no

What they didnt understand is they lose 20.000 PVE players 50 PvP players and gain maybe 75 pvp players in years …..

They think PvE is easy and pve players don t care of nerfs…its not so…..they hindered some pve professions so much to push many players away from the game.

Mostly because they render useless months of equipment without thinking twice….and obviously PvE players would never expect nerfs to things that would never deserve it pve Wyse.

They never thougt for a second that if 2 players are angry with lack of coeherence between pvp and pve, thousands are tired of nerfs without any purpose….

in short they should make a 100% split of pvp-pve-www
They should almost be different game…coherence is hurting more the game than helping it.

I play mesmer in both wvw and pve and I have to say, overall they got a nice buff. Yes focus pull was nerfed, but it got a MAJOR buff. You can now give your entire team 25 stacks of might with a focus pull and do lots of damage with it from interrupts and immobilize. It has seriously gotten like 10 times better, except for the speed. Really not something to be complaining about, especially from the pve side, where there is no counterplay to worry about.

Where focus is worse is as an untraited throwaway weapon in a build that otherwise doesn’t really call for it. What’s wrong with that? If that’s your build, maybe give the off-hand sword a try?

yup – and the conditions themselves don’t last long. Venoms can be marginally useful in a venom share build – where you use the trait that gives them to allies. Unfortunately they’re balanced with that in mind, so they’re only barely useful in that situation, and much less so in others.

The unfortunate thing with the thief is that you’re always balancing survivability and damage output. The venoms and traps don’t give enough utility to significantly contribute to either (for the most part), so you wind up using deceptions, tricks and signets much more.

Really nice extended siege of Maguuma BL’s bay tonight. Enjoyed defending it with TC. I also really liked Maguuma’s tactic of pulling out your main force, to encourage us to attack while sending a smaller team to try to take the lord’s room. Close one!

I never leave home without my trusty slingshot:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Slingshot_Skin

You could also try the new jade bow – kinda need luck to get it though.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Dragon%27s_Jade_Needler_Skin.jpg

Travlane.5948:

doenst ur dmg suck in this build? kitten prolly like at 25% crit rate and 10% crit dmg? also u dont need sigil of paralyzation …it wont add any. just the 33% is fine. or the 15% is fine by itself. many forum threads say y0ou onlyu need 1 as it rounds up 1 second total with either.

is that true…the sigil will round it up to 2 seconds of daze? That’s pretty sweet.

I ran a similar build as a d/d. the condition damage from trickery goes nicely with that set. With S/d – I feel like those stats are kinda wasted, though I get why you want to go that way.

I’d also suggest trying swapping one of the trickery traits for long reach, and then trying it in conjunction with your 2-skill and signet of infiltration for a quick 3k jump. It’s situational of course – and you may want to keep your regular setup most of the time, but for joining a battle, getting into a keep, or chasing a fleeing enemy, it is amazing.

I don’t even know – from having rarely tried it. What kind of damage do you get out of a death blossom (all hits included) in a full zerker build?

Also, I sort of agree with the premise here, but I think the fix is not to make deathblossom more damaging, but to fix its evade – that is make it evade for a bigger portion of the animation. As it stands, it seems like it makes you safer, but in fact it locks you in a predictable location and leaves you a sitting duck for half a second. Vs a competent player, it is more of a liability than a safety-net. For a backstab focused d/d build, it should be a primarily defensive move, as well as a way to do some aoe damage. Having it be cheaper than CnD is a start in this direction, fixing the evade would be the next part.

No, the OP is right, thieves should stop whining…as should players in general. Go learn your class and figure it out. But I guess my question for the OP is, did you really need to come on to the thief forums to tell us that? You’re complaining about people demanding nerfs on other forums…well I read some other forums, and I see people of all professions doing that. Don’t those kinds of requests belong more in the threads themselves – rather than go into the thief forum, where we’re trying to share builds / defend ourselves from noob rangers / elementalists / mesmers / whatever, who still think that we’re overpowered because we don’t die when they breath on us (instead we take nearly fatal damage and then disappear).

MHE Tiger.4875:

It’s sad to see the people that respond with “dude…thief is so OP…you can stealth and we get downed by mobs”…..

Reading that actually lowers my IQ.

The Thief class is different than most other melee based and close up combat classes. And before anyone says “you have a shortbow and pistols”….please understand how ridiculously short the range is on those weapons.

That being said, Thieves are not OP. I have played a thief since the release of this game and still havent mastered it. And to the guy who thinks he makes correct positional changes has clearly never used D/D #5 (cloak and dagger) and tried to maneuver around to the back of your target before your stealth runs out….which by the way… is in 3 seconds. That requires quick reactions and good finger movement to get that dang camera angle rotated so you can make sure youre still pointed in the right daggum direction to land the backstab….

So yea, I’m gonna have to agree with the OP

had me scratching my head too…unable to decide how to respond…my top contenders were:
“wait your whole party is whiping all the time? Maybe you’re the problem?” And then that competing with…“have you ever played with a thief in pve?” they get 1-hitted all the time, stealth doesn’t even matter because the mobs seem to ignore it half the time anyway.

Hey all, not really a necro player here. As a mesmer/thief player, I’ve felt the nerf stick plenty of times, and I know it must be frustrating for you guys after just having been buffed into a respectable place to be facing a nerf.

That said, the new trend that I’m seeing in WvW is for whole zergs to have 50+% necros. It is a very powerful tactic, and all I see everywhere is aoe. The combination of spammable, fire and forget marks and wells makes necros lootbag dispensers in zergs. It also makes them hard to counter, since other classes are dealing with technical things like skill lag, but all the necros have to do is ground target in the general area of the opponents. Although stacking works to protect groups vs aoe, the first person to hit a group of marks gets all of the marks and becomes toast. I think that’s where the imbalance lies, as it has the potential to turn WvW into Necro v Necro if left unchecked. I wish ANet had fixed the glamour build by changing/limiting the way it affected large groups of people, but they didn’t…Similarly, I would hope that the nerf for Necros will be something specific to this zerg tactic, as I really don’t see any issues with necros in 1v1 or small group play right now.

I briefly experienced the glory of the mesmer glamour build before it got nerfed, and I see how it needed to be nerfed…at the same time, confusion as a whole got nerfed, which screwed up many, already mediocre builds.

I think ANet is really trying to make the necro class enjoyable, and I’m hopeful that they’ll continue to work towards making conditions as a whole more viable and playable, without being overpowered. I hope you all understand that this is a difficult balance to strike, and won’t be easy. And I hope that not too many of you non-flavor of the month players are negatively affected when those nerfs hit.

JDC.7461:

According to the most recent State of the Game, the nerf was introduced as an opportunity for “counterplay.” What counterplay is there for the Thief’s Scorpion Wire?

moving…that thing misses more than it hits, just like the thief shortbow.

Regarding the nerf overall, yes it sucks, but you guys may have missed the buff they gave it, you know the one where with the right trait, a good focus pull gives you (and your group – if you run signet of inspiration) 25 stacks of might and a few other boons.

There were actually some nice buffs scattered around this latest patch, and if you look closely, you’ll find that although certain builds may feel a bit nerfed, new variations are now possible that are as/more powerful.

Halo.8976:

I don’t have any problems with TC spawncamping us, since they can’t do it properly anyway.

I think our leadership for the most part discourages the practice, so you wind up with random groups of griefers and such carrying out the spawncamping if and when it happens.

I try to discourage it myself when I see it, especially since we’re outmanning you guys so much, spawncamping would be rubbing your noses in it and being sore winners.

Again, I’m not really complaining either, we broke through the spawncamp just fine. I’m just pointing out that Mags are doing it in force.

saiyr.3071:

Quoted from above (sweet username, by the way)

Also I love the “they need to check the scoreboard, sad” line. It’s like some people’s livelihood really depends on whether or not they’re winning.

Thanks for the compliment…and I think what they were referring to was the fact that Maguuma was out in force in their own borderlands, but had nothing in the other ones…so not a wise move from the perspective of maximizing server points.

I get that though, you’re not going to win the match as a whole, because we outnumber you by a lot, so may as well try to consolidate into one BL and make your own play experience fun. I’ve enjoyed this, by the way, makes for much more challenging fights, and I just queue up for whichever server seems to have an enemy to fight on it, and leave the rest.

I’m not a fan of the uneven matchups myself, and hopefully there will be some incentive from ANet to encourage guilds to migrate to lower population servers, so that we can all enjoy some balanced fights that are more about skill than numbers.