Guild Wars 2

checked your post history. you play an Engineer.

let me give you a helpful hint: ELIXIR C

Konvoy.6245:

Also Metaphorm, what type of content are you interested in watching?

i really enjoy videos that show the full context of a fight. my favorite are lightly edited, lightly narrated videos of sPvP battlegrounds.

light editing meaning fast-forward through the truly uninteresting parts (running around the map, waiting on a point, waiting for respawn, etc.). no jump cuts. should be a continuous camera shot though.

light narration means possibly sub-titling some comments in if there’s something interesting to point out during the action. also maybe a voice-over intro and outro. no talking over the action though.

shannon,

Caltrops stacks bleeds VERY quickly on mobs in the area. approximately 1 stack per second for 14 seconds. if you have invested in condition damage on your gear then those bleed stacks end up being one of the largest sources of AoE damage available to the class.

you didn’t even mention the Elementalist on your team who was nuking EVEN HARDER than you were. seriously, you were the support damage in this situation it was that Ele who killed the whole team.

i agree, Pistol/Pistol is the weakest weapon set.

this was incredibly boring. not really possible to learn anything from this video.

this is a lag issue that only effects WvW. there are no Thief Stealth mechanics that allow for more than a single attack from stealth and every attack from Stealth prevents a Thief from re-entering Stealth with the “revealed” condition, which lasts for about 2 seconds.

Shooopa.5632:

You’re supposed to use it to inflict bleeding on enemies and then leave them die of it. I do however believe it would be much more useful if it also caused cripple too.

not necessary. Dagger+Dagger has Dancing Dagger, which can easily be used to apply that cripple. It does compete with Death Blossom for your initiative though. Even better then is to use Caltrops as one of your utility skills. This stacks EVEN MORE bleeds and applies a constant cripple. Death Blossom + Caltrops is one of the truly awesome combos in the game.

talking PvP here, not PvE. its purely a support weapon and in PvE the Thief is not a pure support class. so the question is more like: “how should I build a support Thief for PvP?”

its an interesting role actually. Thieves have amazing mobility and several abilities that are very good at area control. A support Thief is a very strong roamer and point capper in PvP and can be almost unkillable (able to escape any fight). You end up sacrificing ALOT of offensive power though. Support builds won’t really be getting any kills. The damage is all attrition based. you’ll have to rely on supporting team-mates to actually finish people off, you just make their job alot easier.

Here’s my build for Shortbow Support for PvP|

this has the full package of Venomous Aura stuff:

• Venomous Aura itself lets you apply venoms (and all their traited abilities) to up to 5 nearby allies automatically whenever you use a venom.
• the extra strike from Residual Venom applies through Venomous Aura, so all allies will gain 4 strikes of Skale and 4 Strikes of Ice Drake venom.
• the might from Venomous Strength applies through Venomous Aura, so all allies will gain 2 stacks of might whenever you apply Venom. you can apply 4 stacks to everyone near you in an instant with this build.
• the life leeching from Leeching Venoms applies through Venomous Aura, so all allies will gain up to 8 life draining strikes from your venom. this can actually lead to a very large amount of healing and this ends up being one of the strongest health recovery support builds in the game (for PvP purposes).

you’ve also got some good synergy with your Choking Gas shortbow shot. you’ll apply Weakness for 3 seconds with this (due to the poison condition) from your Lotus Poison trait so you can keep entire groups of enemies weakened with very little effort.

so your plan with this build is to roam around the map as much as possible and show up where the big group fights are occuring. Venom up your team and then stand back and wear people down with your Shortbow. you should come out on top easily due to the power of your Venomous Aura. just make sure you’re paying attention and going where your team needs you because this build doesn’t have any 1on1 power at all.

yeah, as far as i know this is working as intended. air-bursting roughly triples the damage dealt (if you time it right) but sacrifices the combo finisher.

one of my favorite tactics with Cluster Bomb is to shoot it at point-blank range into a combo field so you dont have to wait for its long arcing travel time to land, it just hits right away. you can blast finish alot of combos like that.

let me just re-iterate the weakness of Dagger Storm in dungeons. i’ll go over it in a bit more detail.

1. Vs. a Single Target: Dagger Storm will actually deal less damage then your auto-attack
2. Vs. Multiple Targets: Dagger Storm has the potential to be worthwhile as an AoE attack. Caltrops, Death Blossom, and Cluster Bomb all do more damage though. They’re also safer. Dagger Storm has only one advantage here, which is that it doesn’t take initiative.
3. Defensively: while you are immune to knockdowns and will deflect single-target projectile attacks aimed at you (generally this is only arrows and bullets type stuff, many ranged attacks are not projectiles) you still take full damage from melee and AoE. this ends up being making you alot MORE vulnerable while spinning in dagger storm because you cannot dodge out of the way and you cannot use any of your defensive skills to jump back or go into stealth or whatever. you are much more likely to get yourself killed while spinning in Daggerstorm then you are while using normal attacks
4. 90 Second Cooldown: not a very important distinction in dungeons. you have alot of control over when encounters occur. unlike PvP, where the action is constant and a shorter cooldown really does imply using a skill twice as frequently, in PvE you get to use your elite skill at least once in every fight that matters. My opinion is that 1 activation of Thieves Guild is alot better than 1 activation of dagger storm, and likely is better than 2 activations.

Bleed and Poison is not mitigated in the slightest by toughness. condition damage is an extremely potent way of killing high toughness enemies.

Guardians have some good ways to remove conditions (if they’ve built for that anyway) so i would recommend using some “filler” conditions to make it hard for the guardian to get rid of your damage stacks. its pretty easy to get some cripple, weakness, and blind applied frequently in addition to your bleed and poison. keeping the conditions coming heavy will make it really hard for even a Guardian to get them all removed.

Warriors have almost no ways of removing conditions and are truly truly weak to bleeding and poison damage.

I wouldn’t recommend Daggerstorm in most builds. It does have a cool combo with Shadow Refuge though. Spinning in a dark field creates draining bolts and is a good way to wipe lots of weak enemies at once as you can drain-tank them.

But for Dungeons its useless. you don’t find large amounts of weak enemies and drain-tanking in a Dark field doesn’t matter (the drains aren’t enough to keep you alive). What happens when you Daggerstorm in a dungeon is you severely nerf your own DPS for 8 seconds (daggerstorm has lower damage output than using regular attacks) to produce an 8 second whirl finisher.

If you’ve got a better whirl finisher (Death Blossom) then there is no reason to have Daggerstorm. it sucks. the damage is low. it makes you vulnerable (to everything but direct projectiles) and denies your ability to maneuver or use utility skills for 8 freakin seconds.

For PvE i’d recommend either Basilisk Venom (if you have Venomous Aura) or Thieve’s Guild (in general the best elite skill) or even a racial skill. Daggerstorm is good for solo PvE but bad for group PvE like dungeons or DE’s.

ryston.7640:

The rate of recharge was not meant to compare to other classes weapon skills. It was meant to compare to other classes teleport utility skills, which vary with low end being mesmers blink.

Oh also, the idea that its a shared resource is sort of negated by the existence of the utility slot skill thats comparable to every other class.

why would you compare a Thief’s weapon skills to another class’s utility skills? thats an apples/oranges comparison and doesn’t prove anything.

your reasoning is just falling apart here. it doesn’t make any sense. the initiative system is a key part of the balance of Thief weapon skills. we are talking about WEAPON SKILLS like Infiltrator’s Arrow and Cloak and Dagger. initiative is part of the balance of those skills. i pointed out that you seem to have an incredibly misinformed understanding of how initiative works. apparently you still do.

is this yet another post from a low-level thief who still hasn’t figured out how to solo PvE?

yes, its slightly more complicated than playing a warrior or guardian. if you prefer those more straightforward playstyles, then by all means go and play that class instead.

its strange to assume that there is some inherent deficiency with the Thief class though just because you haven’t figured out how to play it properly yet. trust me when i say it though: there is no deficiency.

i’m able to kill single opponents in PvE without taking a single point of damage. i’m able to kill 5 level 80 regular mobs at the same time while only taking minimal damage. i’m able to solo 3 veterans at the same time. i’m able to solo champions certain champions (if there won’t be any adds later in the fight, which is kinda rare actually, so usually can’t do this). and i don’t doubt that other players can do similar things. and i don’t doubt that other players on other classes can also do similar things. i don’t think there’s anything special about what i’m doing or the class i’m playing. i think that any player that has learned how to play their class can get results like this.

so either keep practicing until you learn what you’re doing, or just quit and play a class you like better instead. there’s nothing wrong with that.

but its weird to ask “what advantage?”. what’s really behind that question? there’s no “advantage” to any class. they all just do what they do. if you learn how to play a class you’ll find all kinds of advantages, tactics, build strategies, and effective techniques. so go and play and learn them. its not like you click an “advantage” button. you just keep playing until you know the answer to that question.

Caltrops is pretty good against Mesmers. the bleed stacks will poof their illusions pretty quickly.

make sure you pay attention to Confusion debuffs too, btw. Thief is a very fast attack class so Confusion can kill you outright. don’t attack while confused. its a good time to stealth and wait it out.

Wolfe’s point is a good one. don’t misinterpet him.

he is saying that good, fun, balanced game mechanics take precedence over other concerns (such as “lore”, or some notion of fantasy realism). he is also saying that WvW is not balanced, which is true. PvE and sPvP are balanced (or should be anyway).

if there are balance issues related to Stealth examine how they effect PvE and sPvP. balancing for WvW is totally impossible and isn’t even attempted by ArenaNet anyway.

i kinda agree that only Backstab and Pistol Whip builds are good at solo killing. I do frequently play a Venomous Aura shortbow build though and use it entirely for map control instead of for actually killing players. Its one of the best builds in the game (out of any class) for supporting team vs. team engagements and taking control of map points.

the damage on this build is low and attrition based though so you do have to run away from solo fights. all of your kills will come in group fights when you are supporting a more offensively built class.

as per title,

it is POINTLESS to make assumptions about class or game balance because something happened in WvW. this is the one environment in the game where outgearing your opponent is possible. this is the one environment in the game where a player can have World buffs (the orbs of power) that are totally unrelated to their class and make them fight like supermen.

if you are going to make a post trying to argue something about class mechanics DO NOT REFERENCE WvW. it is not a balanced environment. intentionally. WvW is intentionally not balanced. anything you say about class balance as a result of something that happened in WvW is basically a bogus claim.

post screen shots please.

please clarify all of the details of your dancing dagger hitting for 7.5K.

were you playing WvW? if so, what is the relative gear difference between yourself and your opponents? do you have Orbs of Powers?

basically what i’m saying is Dancing Dagger is NOT actually a high damage skill. if you go and play sPvP you will notice that it does 600-800 damage, not 6000 damage.

here’s some more explanation on the initiative cost thing, since that was just a particularly egregious piece of misinformation from ryston.

Initiative recharges at the rate of 1.67 seconds per point of initiative. Therefore a skill that costs 6 initiative is the equivalent of a 10 second cooldown on another class. HARDLY the shortest of any class in the game. 6 and 8 second cooldowns are common on weapon skills, 10 seconds would be right in the middle of the road.

but initiative is not directly comparable to other cooldowns since it is a shared resource. imagine if another class had a skill worded like this “10 second cooldown. when you use this skill add 10 seconds to the cooldown of your other abilities that are recharging.” do you still think initiative is a small cost?

here is the build i use in PvE|

I like this build alot because it provides excellent damage on both single targets and AoE while also providing some pretty useful group support.

Main Weapon Set is Dagger/Dagger. Secondary Weapon is Shortbow.

equipment selection is a mix of Carrion (power/vitality/cond damage) and Rampager (power/precision/cond damage). breakdown is like this:

Head: Rampager
Shoulders: Rampager
Body: Carrion
Gloves: Rampager
Legs: Carrion
Boots: Rampager
Amulet: Carrion
Earrings: 1 Carrion, 1 Rampager
Rings: 1 Carrion, 1 Rampager

my unbuffed crit rate (at level 80) is about 33%. my unbuffed condition damage is about 900. my unbuffed health is about 16000. toughness is a bit low though so the build can’t take frequent hits, it just has enough health to not get 2 shotted. you still have to play carefully. DPS is very high as your power stat is boosted by everything and you’ve enhanced both your condition damage and crit rate. some will argue that it is more efficient to use Berserker over Rampager and focus entirely on crits, but I find condition damage necessary for good AoE with a Thief so I think its very worthwhile.

explanation of build playstyle:

• main single target damage dealing comes from Cloak and Dagger + Backstab. the backstab automatically crits due to Hidden Killer trait, so this actually becomes a very serious damage source. It is also extremely useful for the group because Cloak and Dagger applies 3 stacks of Vulnerability and the Cloaked in Shadow trait causes your Stealth to trigger an AoE blind, so you do alot to control the enemy you are fighting against by stealthing over and over again like this.
• main AoE tactic is to drop caltrops and then spam either Death Blossom or shortbow attacks (chocking gas and cluster bomb), depending on whether or not its safe to be near what you’re AoEing. Death Blossom does more DPS so its preferred when available.
• party support is provided in several different ways here. have already mentioned the blind spam that comes from using Cloak and Dagger (with Cloaked in Shadows) repeatedly. thats a big help. this build also has a huge amount of movement control over the enemy with Caltrops and Dancing Dagger to cripple and Scorpion Wire to pull (into a caltrops field usually). Finally, Shadow Refuge is just a must have for any Thief going into a dungeon. its a combo field, a reviving safe spot, a heal skill, and an oh-kitten button.

every time i try to make Pistol/Dagger work in PvE i end up abandoning it in under an hour of playtesting out in the wild.

P/D just has really low damage, and its all single target. What the weapon set excels in is being REALLY slippery and hard to catch (with both a jump-back and a stealth skill on the weapon bar) while providing ranged harrassment. its an attrition build that has alot of merit in PvP. in PvE i see no reason to use this. none of the advantages of this weapon set matter at all in PvE.

maybe you should leave game design to game designers. you seem to not even be particularly well informed about what you are criticizing. you have no ground to stand on for suggesting changes.

14K backstabs are highly irregular. The usual damage for this skill is 6k on a crit.

For a 14K crit to occur you’d have to have two things happening at the same time to double its damage. First of all, the Thief would have to have activated Assassin’s Signet to get +50% on the next strike. Second of all the Engineer would have to be debuffed with Frenzy from Elixir U, causing damage recieved to be increased by 50%

so what you’re looking at is a Thief blowing two different 45 second cooldowns at the same time the Engineer was debuffed from using his own burst damage cooldown.

under normal circumstances the damage dealt in these 2 seconds would not have been 20k. it would have been more like this

2K from Cloak and Dagger
4K from Mug
6K from Backstab

the instant burst is like 12K damage, which is still very high, but is not instant death, its just like, a bit more than half of your life total.

Devildoc.6721:

The one thing I don’t like about that idea is, it’s still melee focused, ranged thieves don’t want to shadowstep to melee range of the target, especially when that target does melee range aoe that 1 shots a thief.

you’re right, Steal is definitely melee focused because it is a gap closer. i’m not sure i view this as a problem though. Thief is not a ranged class. Like all classes it has ranged weapons, but this is not a class designed for ranged damage dealing in the way that an Elementalist or Ranger is. Thief is a melee class with ranged support options, not the other way around.

Thief playstyle involves dancing back and forth between melee range and medium range. There are quite a few “jump back” abilities (such as Withdraw, Roll for Initiative, Shadow Strike, Disabling Shot). A big part of the Thief playstyle involves closing in and then rapdily withdrawing. I don’t think Steal needs an adjustment based on this.

Mrbig.8019:

The trick there would be to reduce stolen items effectiveness.

Current items are way too powerful, and from a balance perspective, since the thief has so small weapon choice ( aka: it’s predictable), having multiple slots to use our stolen items with more fluidity will make the thief much, MUCH more interesting.

Put a small shared CD to avoid big stolen items bursts and problem solved.

Of course Steal would also need a fairly softened CD ( 25 secs ), softened damage on Mug, and cunning reducing the F2-F4 pockets shared CD instead of reducing Steal CD.

Voilà.

this is a direction i’d feel pretty happy about. a shorter cooldown Steal would make sense for an item-storing implementation since you’d want to have more opportunities to steal items to store. 25 seconds or 30 seconds sounds pretty reasonable. i’ve frequently played builds with 30 points in Trickery and the 34 second cooldown on Steal from that is a noticeable difference.

and as you say, all of the Trait abilities that are linked to Steal would have to be rebalanced based on a shorter cooldown. just time normalized basically. Mug damage is the only one that obviously should be affected by this. It would still be a good Trait even if its damage was reduced by 20% (to make up for shorter CD).

the reason i like the idea of stored items so much is that it adds alot of strategic dimension to the class. the idea of saving a good stolen item for later is very appealing. i think it would be fun and bring out alot of player choice and meaningful decision making, which are all good things for the game.

as far as balancing the actual stolen skills themselves, besides time normalizing the damage output on them (going from something based on 45 second CD to something based on 30 second CD, probably a 20-25% reduction of effect), i don’t think any of them are really out of line right now.

condition damage does, de facto scale with weapon strength and power simply because nearly every way of applying damaging conditions is on a weapon attack. the only noteworthy exception would be the Caltrops utility skill.

the scaling from weapon damage and power for an attack like Vital Shot (pistol autoattack) or Death Blossom applies linearly, just as it does for any other damaging attack.

regarding healing through a condition or removing a condition: yes, this is possible, and it is part of the balancing of the game. don’t forget that conditions represent a source of damage that cannot be mitigated through any defensive stats (armor or toughness), cannot be evaded, and cannot be outranged.

ok master Martym. have fun on your Warrior. bye.

i don’t understand this kind of thinking.

player comes into the game with an UNCOMPROMISING SET IN STONE vision of what a class should be? why do people even play games if this is how they feel?

I come to a game wanting to play the game itself, not cross my fingers and hope a developer magically guessed what I wanted and made that for me. I play the game for what it is, not what it isn’t.

Why do people do something else? Why do you only set yourself up for dissapointment by demanding that YOUR vision be satisfied or else its not even fun. Its like you don’t actually know how to have fun. Its like you’ve confused the idea of personal wish fulfilment with fun. these are two different things. I play a game to play a game. To enjoy the game for what it is. To have fun with it as it is. I don’t go to a game expecting personal wish fulfilment.

this is the community discussion forum, not the game manual.

please try to find a tutorial and maybe use wiki.guildwars2.com for some basic game systems information.

there aren’t any problems with Death Blossom. its one of the best skills the Thief has, regardless of build.

For a condition damage build it is probably your primary spam damage dealer and it deals HUUUUGE damage per initiative. it is the most initiative efficient damage dealer of any skill for any build of Thief.

For crit build the damage output won’t be particularly high but you get to seriously take advantage of the fact that this skill instantly strikes every target around you 3 times (while evading no less). this is nearly guaranteed to cause multiple crits to occur and proc your various crit and attack trigger abilities.

http://xkcd.com/1112/

there are a few classes that only have F1 actually. not all of the class mechanics need multiple buttons.

Warriors just have the single F1 button to make their burst attack. the rest of the class mechanic is managed more passively through things related to accumulating Adrenaline.

Necromancers also just have the single F1 button, to go into Death Shroud mode. similar to Warriors burst attack, the rest of the mechanic is managed more passively through things related to accumulating Life Force.

and similarly the Thief also just has the single F1 button to Steal, with the rest of the interactions with the class mechanic occurring passively with the Traits to make Steal do extra stuff.
————————
edit: idea for actually using F2-F4

one of the better suggestions I’ve read from other posters on this forum is to have the extra slots act as storage for stolen item/abilities. For example F1 would always be the steal button, and it would deposit a stolen skill in the next available storage slot. you’d press F2, F3, or F4 to use the stolen item stored in that slot.

from a design perspective i feel like that would be an elegant and flavorful use of the other F buttons. i do think it would be kinda overpowered though.

can i offer another suggestion to help deal with team size balance issues in pvp?

only ever add players to games in pairs. If a game has 10 players on it, and an 11th tries to enter the game, make him wait until a 12th also enters. #11 and #12 are then dropped into the game together, on opposite teams.

Flanking Strike would be downright good if it didn’t screw up where it moved you to so much. When you get a really tightly controlled situation with it, like 1on1 vs. a mob in PvE you can see just how awesome it is in principle. It does gigantic damage and responds quickly enough that you can easily avoid getting hit at all.

If the skill worked that well all the time I think Sword+Dagger would be pretty popular. It just doesn’t work that well very much. Usually terrain issues are to blame. Sometimes its because the enemy is moving in an unpredictable way (e.g. all the time in PvP). but in any case usually you’re lucky if the attack is even able to do damage, let alone put you in a good spot when completing. Its just dysfunctional in PvP.

i spent some time the other day trying to come up with something that works well for me for a Dagger+Dagger build.

Build at this link|

my playstyle takes advantage of both alot of critical hits AND alot of bleeding/poison condition damage so accomodating this required some blending of gear sets.

The first thing I decided was that I wanted to hit 16000 base health no matter what so this required using some vitality pieces on the larger equipment slots (body, legs, amulet). For Vitality equipment the only good choices for a Thief are Carrion (power, vitality, cond dmg) or Valkyrie (power, vitality, crit dmg). I went with Carrion here as getting my bleed ticks up to a good number is very important to me.

The next thing I decided was that I wanted my critical hit rate to be at minimum 33% unbuffed. Its possible to get much higher by really stacking Precision (i’ve been as high as 53% unbuffed) but for my own purposes I decided 33% was enough. For Precision gear the choices are Knight (power, precision, toughness), Berserker (Power, Precision, Crit Dmg), and Rampager (power, precision, cond dmg). I chose Rampager as this one is the only offensive stat set with Condition Damage and it also has the highest precision compared to the other choices.

Here is the final mix I came up with:

Head: Rampager
Shoulders: Rampager
Body: Carrion
Gloves: Rampager
Legs: Carrion
Boots: Rampager
Amulet: Carrion
L. Ring: Carrion
R. Ring: Rampager
L. Earring: Carrion
R. Earring: Rampager

Mainhand Weapon: Carrion Dagger
Offhand Weapon: Carrion Dagger
Swap Weapon: Rampager Shortbow

Thief is not weak in PvE. your problem is probably related to your own gear/stats more than anything else. when was the last time you updated your equipment? if you’re using gear thats 10 levels out of date you’re gonna have a hard time.

hi AshleySegovia,

thanks for your response. my gameadvisor report is attached to this message

why did you use the Question format for your post? what’s the question?

edit:

you want some advice on how to play? your only level 12. my advice is play more. the game isn’t super hard but it has at least a bit of learning curve

thanks for the advice. i’ll try some of this stuff.

this is the only time this error has occured though. i’ve been able to see every other cinematic in the game. i wonder what it is with this particulary one?

As per title. Here is a description of the scenario

1. Enter instance for personal story quest Source of Orr. able to play through this instance to completion including killing the Sovereign Eye.

2. Cinematic begins playing after Traherne completes the ritual. The first approximately 10 seconds of the cinematic plays normally.

3. Cinematic reaches one particular frame, about 10 seconds in, and then immediately crashes my entire computer. The last thing I see on my screen is a green vine/tree thing rapidly growing out of the artesian spring waters.

4. My system dies at this point. This is not a game client crash. This is a full system crash. The entire system simply halts and stops and then restarts as if a system reboot command had been given.

Some system information about my machine:
Windows 7
Gigabyte motherboard with intel z77 chipset
intel core i5 quad-core CPU running @ 3.4 ghz
8 GB of ram
nVidia Geforce GTX 560 ti GPU

have tested this with two different GPU driver versions. initially used nVidia driver 304.79. then updated to nVidia driver 306.23. exact same problem with each driver.

Sentinel VX.1392:

Epiditious Dodger Trait Bug
It gives me swiftness when dodging instead of evading.
This is a picture showing me randomly dodging and gained swiftness and notice caltrops also coming out since I’m using a trait for it.
http://i.imgur.com/AUyHR.jpg

not a bug, just a badly written tooltip. the trait graints swiftness when you dodge roll. that is correct behavior as far as i know.

why don’t you just try them both out and see what you like? both are viable. Berserker can produce some powerful direct attacks with a mainhand Sword or Dagger. Condition damage basically requires the use of Dagger+Dagger and Shortbow as your weapons so it has slightly less build flexibility, but it is still capable of significant damage.

on Death Blossom:

it is definitely a poor initiative dump for damage UNLESS you have 500+ condition damage on your gear. at that point it becomes efficient even against single targets, and SUPER efficient when you are able to AoE with it.

however, i do still recommend using this skill on a regular basis even if specced Power/Precision rather than Condition Damage. Not spamming it mind you. You spam it when its your primary damage source in a condition build. Just being clever about using it.

Death Blossom has 2 different characteristics that make it very valuable even for a Power/Precision gear setup. The first is that its a very potent evade. Its one of the only evade triggering skills in the game that seems to evade equally with the Dodge roll. it works against pretty much every attack, from every direction. Very unrestricted, so its good defensively. The second is that even though the damage it causes will be light it still immediately causes 3 strikes against every enemy near you. These strikes are a rich source of attack procs like the healing from Signet of Malice, or your various Crit triggers from weapon Sigils or traits in the Critical Strikes line.

So while its only suitable for initiative dump damage spam if you’re equipped with Cond Damage gear, Death Blossom still does alot of valuable work as a utility skill even if you’re not geared to make it do alot of damage.

you make alot of posts complaining about Thief. don’t you have anything better to do around here? maybe go play the game some more or something.

its not that meaningful to post a number without also posting your character level.

For example, in sPvP my Thief can equip and spec to have over 1200 condition damage.

the 500 you have might be alot if your character is level 60 or something, for example. but its certainly not alot for an exotics equipped level 80 character.

i agree that Head Shot and Black Powder are really good skills. however, i still prefer Dagger+Dagger. I think Death Blossom is absolutely outstanding no matter what you’re build (though its particularly awesome for condition damage build), but mostly I find it really hard to pass on Cloak and Dagger.

At first I was not that impessed by C+D, seeing it primarily as a way to try and backstab multiple times in a fight. It kinda works for that, but really thats not what its good at. No, its the amazing utility and enemy confusion that C+D creates that I’ve come to view as indispensable.

The more experienced I get with my Thief the more I come to appreciate the power that Stealth has in simply disorienting your opponents and making them fight inefficiently. Its so easy to win fights against disoriented opponents. I wouldn’t trade this in for anything.

not sure what the point of this post is.

are you asking for advice on how to fight against Backstab Thieves?

what do you want us to say exactly? yes, Thief does have effective single target burst damage. Sometimes you will die to it without knowing what hit you. Thats the point. Its not like we can do it back-to-back or against more than one target. Its a team game after all. Try relying on your teammates.

you’re trying to decide between Valkyrie vs. Berserker?

I’d recommend Valkyrie. Not dying is kind of important. Hopefully you’ve got enough Precision stuff on the rest of your gear that you don’t absolutely need the precision on your accessories as well. Vitality is always good though.