Guild Wars 2

I play full rabid trapper, but I only run the grandmaster trait for traps. I sometimes miss ground targeting when assulting towers/keeps, but I’ve made the experience that melee classes will come to you anyway, and those that kite you, you won’t hit with traps at 600 range. I run a very similar build. I’d say you have to be a bit of a psycho to run this build in solo roaming. Even with dagger offhand it lacks in defensive utility. You’re best bet is to condi burst people before they can kill you. You can reach pertty high condition damage with rabid gear. I would switch out the geomancy runes for earth as well though. In my experience they bug out sometimes and don’t prokittenil I restart the game, and there go my corruption stacks. Also if you proc the earth sigil, thats a 9 seconds cooldown on your geomancy sigil. I have fun playing this build, when it works it melts people, when it doesn’t you die. High risk high reward (unlike most thieves lol).

Edit: My stats (with two stacks of bloodlust, 25 stacks of corruption, and consumables) as reference. 1 ascended amulet, rest is all exotics, with crest in trinkets.

Sensotix.4106:

Link to the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qltRZ3AqcA

The link leads to the ranger interview.

Littlefeather.8623:

…as a member of free society and consumer of a free market / economy…

As a human being I’m ambarassed that we live on the same planet.

Here’s my concern. Thieves could enjoy all the positives of both dagger and pistol offhand, and would have the chance to swap rather frequently. If they would run those sets as they are now, they would need to plan ahead, and would be kept in check by the weaponswap cooldown. If they had a 5 second weaponswap cooldown, there would be no control over what they can do. And all that initiative pool talk is nonsense. If you have problems with managing your initiative, you won’t benefit from the shorter weaponswap. If you can manage it, it would be a massive boost.

Daniel Lee.8164:

I see, so which means now if I get shortbow, I will get a completely whole set of skills to unlock from 1 – etc? Oh and also, can I add attributes at H ? Or it’s automated as I level up?

Stats are gained automatically as you level up. The only way of changing your stats is by equipping gear with different sets of stats.

I don’t think people enjoy it, they just farm karm/gold/world xp. We also had our fair share of getting roflstomped by zergs. Being outnumbered all the time is nothing new, and it won’t go away any time soon.

From level 11 I think you will have the option to equip 2 weaponsets, and you can switch between them in combat. You will get a cooldown on weaopnswap though. Shortbow is 2handed, so when I wrote sword/pistol shortbow, I meant s/p in one set and shortbow in the other. You can buy a cheap one from the Black lion trading post so you can unlock the skills with that too.

Thief is squishy in pve, so you need some skill for leveling. But when you get the hang of things, it will be easy. Keep a pistol for big guys you can’t deal with, standing in a blind field makes life a lot easier. And learn to use dodge/evades. Its crucial in this game, you can’t just stand around and hit stuff to death, unless you stand in a blind field of course.

You do realize that a lot of “little kids who want their free everything” was the target group for the thief class, right? Little kids who want to run around ganking people with little to no effort, and want to troll people. It has been made harder for thieves, yes. The problem of being pigeonholed into 2 builds is not thief specific.

I also found amusing that you said you found pvp and wvw boring and switched to pve. Thats some funny kitten right there.

Daniel Lee.8164:

Ahhh I get it, so right now I’m using Dagger and Dagger, my #3 skills is a skill that cause condition damage to monsters ? Oh and now I get it about the Caltrops utility skills, what you mean is I’ll get them eventually as I level up, yeah?

If you move your mouse over your #3 skill. You can see some useful info. The first line says how much direct damage it will deal. The second line says how much condition damage it will deal (the amount is included for 3 stacks of bleeding over 10 seconds). The third line indicates that you will evade. When you evade, you don’t get hit, so no direct damge if you time it right, and no conditions applied by targeted skills. The fourth line says its a whirl finisher. When you use a combo finisher together with a combo field you get some additional effects. You can find out more here http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo. So a skill may do many things.

Dualwielding weapons on thieves works differently than other classes. Main hand and off hand wepons only have fixed skills on 1, 2 and 4, 5 on your hotbar. 3 is determined by their combination. For other classes #3 skill would be determined by the main hand weapon. So your dagger, dagger #3 skill will be different than dagger, pistol #3. Skills 1-5 are weapon skills, #6 is your heal skill, skills 7-9 are your utility skills. You will unlock these by leveling up, and the skill points you get by beating skill challanges, and leveling you can spend on utility skills. Than you can choose which utility skill to use on your 7-9 skills. Caltrops is an area of effect skill (AoE) which poisons and bleeds monsters, and dagger, dagger #3 also deals bleeding. So you can apply lots of damaging conditions with these. The higher your condition damage stat, the more damage you deal with bleeding and poison. Poison has lower damage than a few stacks of bleeds, its main advantage is that it reduces healing. Most monsters won’t heal, but scalks regenerate, so its great against them. Poison only stacks in duration though, not like bleed where you can have more bleeds at the same type.

Edit: Sorry, caltrops don’t apply poison, only cripple.

Weapons can deal direct damage and/or condition damage. The damage included under the dagger auto attack for example is an indication of how much direct damage you will deal. This is modified by the power you have, and by crit damage. Condition damage raises damage dealt by bleeding, poison, burning, torment and confusion. D/D can be good single target damage if you use the backstab attack (i.e. your autoattack changes when in stealth, this is ture for all weapons on thief). If you stand behind the mobs this is nice damage, but there are restrictions to using stealth. If you attack when in stealth, you get a debuff which doesn’t allow you to stealth for another 3 seconds. So you can stealth with dagger #5, get behind mob and hit #1. If you go contition damage, your best bet is getting caltrops as a utility skill, and using d/d #3 to stack bleeds (25 max).

You can view stats of your character by pressing H (as in Hero), or clicking on the icon in the upper left corner that looks like a sword and shield.

I mostly used power stats. At lower levels your crit chance and crit damage won’t be that great, so you get more out of power. Most PvE content is trivialized when you get to know the tells (visual indication of using some special skills) of mobs. Sword/pistol and shortbow are great for leveling. Mobs attack slowly, so you can just stand in the blind field applied by pitsol #5 and use sword autoattack to kill most mob types out of water. As opposed to dagger, swords cleaves (you can damage up to 3 mobs in a frontal cone range). You can also go all condition damage, but thief weapons don’t have that many sources of condition damage.

I forgot to mention, if you go the condi route, you can have accesories, rings and backpiece for karma as well. Not sure which temple it comes from. If you go all rabid, you can reach 2k condi damage. That is 140+ bleeds. That hurts a lot. But trapper is a bit of a psycho build. You need to condi burst people down before they can kill you. It just melts people, even regen warriors (if you survive their stun/hb combo). With full rabid, consumables and corruption stacks I’m sitting at 2k toughness, precision, condition damage. I only have 1 ascended, my amulet, everything else is only exotic.

Seems to me that a 5 second cooldown on weaponswap wouldn’t make thief more flexible, only more powerful. You should be able to run around with s/x d/x as is. Thieves have one of the best mobility, have access to evades, dodges, blinds, teleports, stealth, high damage. They don’t need to be stronger. Its other classes that need a toning down. Thieves and rangers are great at certain scenarios, and bad at others. This is what other classes/builds need as well.

If for nothing else, you should try spvp for trying out gears and builds. Its totally free, and although you can reach higher or more varied stats in wvw and pve, you can try out the mood of builds like beast master, trapper, glass cannon, spirit ranger on AI oppontents, or during a hotjoin. There is nothing to lose there, even if you don’t enjoy the gametype much.

You can finish the 70+ maps for some Exotic stuff as map completion rewards, you might get lucky there. If you have enough karma (ca. 240k) you can by exotic armor for karma, you have access to power/vitality/toughness, and condition damage/toughness/perception. But you do need the temples unlocked, might take some time depending on the server. These might be useful for mixing matching gear, and are useful for condition or power builds. Your amulet you can buy for 30 laurels. That is 10 daily and 1 monthly achievment. I’d recommend either berserker (power/perception/crit damage) or rabid (condition damage/toughness/perception)stats there. Those two will fit for most builds if you can live with not having the best in slot items. Rings and amulets are more expensive, and bear in mind, you cannot equip 2 of the exact same rings/amulets you can buy for laurels. You can however play with what type of slot it has (i.e. offensive, defensive, utility).

And of course you can craft things as well. Level 400 mats used to be obtainable easy in wvw, but that is of the past. You should be able to craft some lvl80 exotics with some money investment if you did gather mats along the way. I recommend saving the black lion salvage kits for 70+ yellow gear to obtain some ectoplasm for these, as all lvl80 gear needs that, and its not the cheapest material.

There are some cheap runes/sigils/consumables as well. E.g. you don’t necessarily need lvl80 attunement crystals/sharpening stones at first. Undead runes are one of the cheapest and work nice with rabid gear on condi builds. Or you can go with citadel runes for a power build, might be some others out there that are better too.

evilapprentice.6379:

I feel it makes sense for the thief – since Init is shared between weaponsets, it would give the thief some flexibility without being broken.

How would it give flexibility to thieves? You would still be bound by initiative, and the fact that you can only have 2 weaponsets.

Seras.5702:

And it might open up more weapon set combos, as opposed to the x/x + SB that nearly everyone runs.

Sooo… following your logic, people use SB on thief because of the weapon swap cooldown? Does not compute.

I dunno… then you would need to go 30 into BM to get anything out of signets. Don’t think it would be a change for the better. They could be both master traits instead of grandmaster though.

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

There are 3 problems. First of all it’s absolutely no fun getting blobbed to death and that’s all we’ve seen in the last few weeks.

Personally this is what kept me away. Another thing that has been bothering me is people not helping each other. And I don’t mean not stacking on a commander. Things like having 2 guys with you, and as soon as your opponent is also getting 2 guys to back them up friendlies just disappear from the back of you and watch from 1500 distance as you get hacked down. It just infuriates me so bad. You don’t get ressed anymore either. And I don’t mean in the middle of the fight. People just run witht the blob, and thats that. Totally destroys any feelings of comeradary.

The two builds I’ve been running lately are pvt/knight lb/gs, and full rabid undead runes a/d, s/t, I’d say they are both good for roaming, but unless you go super bunker 3 competent players focusing you should mean certain death anyways.

Chopps.5047:

What if…

“Thief steal skill now steals the ranger pet and reduces damage coefficients on the theif in proportion to ranger coefficients”

Ahahaha

lol

Fade.7658:

Implementing Sic’ Em as stated, in an attempt to address a certain build(s) could punish other builds that aren’t in need of that sort of balance.

Totally agree!!! That would be like nerfing all pet damage for rangers just because one build needs a nerf.

Cyhann.2609:

nagymbear.5280:

Eodwen.2613:

Maugetarr.6823:

Burnfall.9573:

…

…

In other words your issue is l2P spare us the drama.

BS, I levelled my thief to 80, got him exotics, running around in wvw with s/p sb, not a stealth based build, still think its op.

What? How is S/P OP, would you please show me your build?

By IT I meant thief in wvw, should’ve put it better I guess.

5 seconds is a lot when you are a thief and you’re trying to stay alive. I think it will be the standard 3 seconds, and it will be given to the thief on activation, not on hit. But with ANet you never know.

bllius.9027:

and start making those Predator sounds…

or maybe the Jaws theme

I’d wait with laughing at thieves. You never know…

Shemsu.8721:

The issue is not how many rangers will run this, but rather that this is a way to start putting this in the game, which indicates they are going to continue adding such abilities to other classes.

I don’t get what is wrong with giving players a tool against stealth. There are tools against stuns, conditions even boons. I really don’t see how this will result in less interesting, more boring fights. I remember J. Sharp talking about active condi removal regarding rangers. He said he’d like to see more active play, where you try to force your opponent to use his cleansing, sort of a mind game. Thieves will still have evades, dodges, blinds, teleports to defend themselves for 3-4 seconds, and sic’em is on a 40s cooldown untraited, so I don’t see the problem here.

I wasn’t talking about having problems killing thieves. Most thieves automatically presume that the only reason people see a problem with the thief class is that they can’t kill them. Some of the nerfs make perfect sense. Look at the warrior stolen skill. I only play since early this year, and only since the summer do I play my thief, but to think that that skill had evades just blows my mind. And a spammable stunbreak? Cloak and dagger, mug, assasin’s signet, basilisk venom… those nerfs also make perfect sense. You talk about skillful play. Landing cloak and dagger and backstab might take some skill (probably not after the old basilisk venom), I’ll give you that, but when other players can be killed in 1-3 seconds that doesn’t only remove skill, it also removes play. You no longer can stack stealth on wvw walls with cloak and dagger, sounds reasonable for me. Quickness nerf… not even thief specific. Shadow return has no longer infinite range… infinite range… You really need to be in love with the thief class to see these as changes aimed at making thieves unplayable. Some skills became useless I’ll give you that, and thieves are forced into certain builds, but so are other professions.

I currently run a build with similar stats than Erro, but I went with pvt armor knight trinkets and valkyrie weapons. I do change piercing arrows and eagle eye around. I think my setup may be less expensive to acquire, but its pretty much the same. 2k+ toughness with 20k hp and 2k+ power is really good.

Maugetarr.6823:

Sanduskel.1850:

that’s fine. it’s your opinion. alll i can say is that i do fine on my thief without perma stealth.

It doesn’t only affect perma stealth though.

The only problem with it may be hide in shadows which does too much in one skill. It may be a hard counter to that, but I still think only a small fraction of rangers will run sicem.

Stx.4857:

What sucks is this game has followed the same path as every other MMO in the sense that players just hate stealthers.

It doesn’t matter if that warrior over there has more health, more armor, better heals, more frontloaded damage, more stuns…

HE SNEAKED UP ON ME NERRF!!!

I think stealth is just a symptom. What people really hate are ganking trolls, and a stealth class just happens to be the best tool for them. And whether you admit it or not, stealth in itself is really powerful. Add some teleport and it quickly becomes op. I am a bad player, but even I can kill people with a thief, or get away from almost everyone if I pay attention. What does that say to you about the class?

Zacchary.6183:

nagymbear.5280:

Zacchary.6183:

Burnfall.9573:

As a ranger, I’m very Excited that we will finally be given the Priveledge of standing up to the Tyrant: Thief.

The Resistance will Never Cease!

Until we see the day of

Victory!!

Rangers,

Once and for All

Let us Unite and Honor our Fallen Brothers

You still die to d/d conditions.

I bet my dad could totally beat your dad. Na-na-naaaaaahhhh! Na-na-naaaaaahhhh! Na-na-naaaaaahhhh!

Your mom goes to college!

You’re a chicken!

aspirine.6852:

No not really, the problem with thiefs is not when you have seen them. The problem is that thery are so weak now, that they(atleast on my wvw servers) prey on those who just fought and have the skills on cooldown and low health. You cannot get any lamer than that.

That is nothing new unfortunately. That is on of the main sources of thief hatred, as thieves are VERY effective at that. I’m looking at you Heartseeker >:/

Prysin.8542:

We are still recruiting, however, like previously mentioned, we are looking to build a stronger guild, that while aimed towards rangers, take things a bit more serious

Unfortunately changing server is not an option for me right now, and as my main priority is wvw and I don’t see you guys all coming to Ring of Fire, I won’t be able to join you. However, should you gather enough people to run an all ranger guild group, please, please record it and post here. I would be so interested to see that happen, no chance on my server…

I think that bloodlust should be renamed to home advantage. Every server should get 50 to all stats on their own BL until another server gets 3 points in mid, when it is stripped, and there is no more advantage anymore… untill the owner of the BL gets 3 points in mid of course. May be simpler from programming point of view than making the buff scale off current player numbers. Noone should get 100/150 to all stats ever.

Stice.5204:

nagymbear.5280:

Sic’em was mainly utilized by beastmaster builds, and those with perma regen already could deal with thieves in the first place.

Well, I often “deal with” thieves in my beastmaster build by just stalemating with them since I cannot prevent them from escaping or resetting the fight as many times as they feel like. It’s a frustrating and time-consuming exercise in waiting/hoping for the thief to make a mistake.

Using Sic ‘em to reduce the thief’s condition removal and initiative regen could make an actual kill significantly more likely.

The problem I have with it is that Sic ’em is still really not very good against any other enemy for a variety of reasons.

I tried playing a BM in wvw with an eagle, ran into a rifle engie, he circled for a good 2-3 minutes until I got bored of that. And before anyone says I should’ve cc-d him I tried with all I could, but it was as effective as trying to stop a hummer with rain.

If you can have a stalemate on your BM against really good thieves, thats as good as you can get. Other builds will have the damage, but due to the thief resetting the fight all the time won’t have enough survivability. I think another skill should give reveal instead of sic’em. A trap would make more sense, and traps can be utilised by many builds even without traiting for it.

Kolly.9872:

nagymbear.5280:

Eodwen.2613:

Maugetarr.6823:

Burnfall.9573:

…

…

In other words your issue is l2P spare us the drama.

BS, I levelled my thief to 80, got him exotics, running around in wvw with s/p sb, not a stealth based build, still think its op. If you look at most of those nerfs and are completly being honest (or if you played other profs as well apart from thief), you will see that most of those nerfs were deserved, some I even would call fixes.

The thief shouldn’t be fixed on WvW. How many tPvP did you played with your S\P thief?
Stealth is UP in tPvP, it’s even counterproductive. Thieves are now left with evasion only as a damage mitigation against heavy CC classes that can do the same amount of dmg mindlessy spamming all AoE skills.
Before it was Backstab, now people cry for evasion.. what’s next? Blind spam of course, till the thief will be left with the only autoattack.
I hear everyone crying and calling for nerfs but no one actually asking to balance what the thief badly lacks: staying power on the node.

I think it says a lot about pvp that most professions are forced into 1 build to be effective at high end play (that is my impression at least). I didn’t play much spvp on my thief, when I did I played a venom p/d thief with shamans trinket and jewel. I don’t like spvp so I don’t play it. Thieves got some nerfs I cannot understand i.e. revealed duration in wvw and pvp should be exchanged, but every class got hit by nerfs. Not all the thief hate comes from a l2p issue. Thief may lack staying power, rangers may lack burst, necros might lack mobility. SPvP is a different kind of game, and I’m all for splitting skills having played most time on my ranger. They hop from being OP to useless to being OP again in pvp, while in wvw they pretty much took a big dive.

Zacchary.6183:

Burnfall.9573:

As a ranger, I’m very Excited that we will finally be given the Priveledge of standing up to the Tyrant: Thief.

The Resistance will Never Cease!

Until we see the day of

Victory!!

Rangers,

Once and for All

Let us Unite and Honor our Fallen Brothers

You still die to d/d conditions.

I bet my dad could totally beat your dad. Na-na-naaaaaahhhh! Na-na-naaaaaahhhh! Na-na-naaaaaahhhh!

That is not true, longbow did become better. Not the basic damage, but the dps did. It was a high price we paid for it though.

Eodwen.2613:

Maugetarr.6823:

Burnfall.9573:

…

…

In other words your issue is l2P spare us the drama.

BS, I levelled my thief to 80, got him exotics, running around in wvw with s/p sb, not a stealth based build, still think its op. If you look at most of those nerfs and are completly being honest (or if you played other profs as well apart from thief), you will see that most of those nerfs were deserved, some I even would call fixes.

Sic’em was mainly utilized by beastmaster builds, and those with perma regen already could deal with thieves in the first place. The change fits perfectly to the thematic of the skill, but other than that I don’t see it getting that much use. Or it will skew the thief meta towards s/p teleport thieves. There will be so much qq about that. Most players will go from raging for not seeing the thief to raging for seeing it but not being able to kill it.

Ghostwolf.9863:

- I’m sorry that we can’t affort to stay in melee range and must rely on hit and run.
- I’m sorry that we can’t affort to be locked down.
- I’m sorry that stealth builds became less viable in sPvP and we are forced to play perma dodge S/D or S/P.
- I’m sorry that we have spammable leap and blast finisher and a smoke field.
- I’m sorry for all the staff elementalists, mesmers, rangers and warriors who have been too glassy, how can I ever forgive myself for this.
- I’m sorry that it just takes 2 mistakes and sometimes even 1 and I die and I’m sorry for trying to be perfect and accepted by the world by not making mistakes, but it seems to have the opposite effect.
- I’m sorry for loving this class.
- I’m also sorry for being able to counter downed skills.
- And I’m sorry for trolling groups and zergs a lot, using mobility/stealth builds with low damage.

I’m sorry, but this is the only thing funny in this thread. Just lol. Sadly this is pretty much the average thief opinion.

UnknownRH.4592:

Shemsu.8721:

Terrahero.9358:

Revealed on an ability that requires a visible target is no more a counter to Stealth then Stun or Daze is.
It might last a bit longer, but we dont know that yet.

As it stands there is still nothing to actively track a Thief in stealth or pull him out if it, and that is what i consider an actual counter to Stealth.

actively track a thief in stealth? what is the point of stealth then?

They just want a thief served with a hot platter to them!!!

Just chill man, he wasn’t suggesting anything. Thieves are almost worst than rangers on the forums… wow.

Other classes are forced into certain builds if they want to win too, just sayin’.

I’d imagine that you can’t use this skill if your pet is dead. So possible ways of countering this “counter” is ccing the pet, dodging, evading, teleporting, blinding, running in circles, killing it. And for those that want an obvious animation for a shout, rangers already have a shout with cast time, I think the only class that has one too. How about giving steal an obvious animation too, as you can stealth with it.

The only times I actually stayed in my healing spring the whole duration was when I wasn’t at risk to begin with. Quicker condi clear is nice in theory, but I’ve been hacked to death being immobilized standing in a healing spring, so I don’t think it will make much of a difference there. I also didn’t run Vigorous renewal. I guess it sucks for some people, it doesn’t concern me to be honest.

Lumn.2951:

Sturgeon general the armoured fish. He was such a beast he could res people on land.

:) epic

I call my riverdrake “Eddie Lizzard”, and my wolf “I’m with stupid” cause of his disillusioned facial expression I called my Jag “Kitty goes boom”

If you press “K” you can see the kinds of pets you can tame. You will be able to tame pets around the world that have Juvenile in their name and they are green, so you cannot attack them. Just walk up to them and press “F”. If you want to know where to find a specific pet you can check the GW2 wiki. Exploring and finding them is fun, but world map completion takes some time.

You could try Paundro’s build. Its high pet damage, survivable, and uses sword/dagger. I’m sure he’ll be happy to link it. We just need to summon him.

Ia! Ia! Paundro fhtagn!

Edit: I’m currently running this build, although it doesn’t have high pet damage and sword/dagger, its pretty survivable with nice damage.

Seisyll.5914:

I wonder how ANet would screw up that.