Guild Wars 2

Hey Thieves!

I just made a new video showcasing some duels and a little bit of roaming. This video was a lot of fun to make, and shows challenging situations versus some really tough opponents. A friend and I managed to organize a couple of these dueling mobs in the evenings. It turned out to attract a lot of roamers that were having a hard time finding people to fight. The product was an amazing handful of friends that made for good practice against each other. I wanted to thank everyone in the video, as they were all a big challenge – I was downed an equal amount against everyone.

Happy hump day!

http://youtu.be/n8c3GXoi3Y4

Great team work!!

People arn’t saying your build is easy mode. Were saying it is a useless build. You’re easy to kill, and anyone could provide more damage and utility by just bringing a short bow.

messiah.1908:

i have w8ing for this comment -took you long
teach me #3 spam with s/d with no team support full zerk
teach me #2 d/d spam with no team support full zerk
teach me #5+2/1 d/p spam with no team support full zerk

You’re being delusional ;D The reason you didn’t use any utilities is because the players you fight are very new to the game — you can even see them keyboard turning.

hihey.1075:

I like the Thief forums.

People here are not delusional. Even if they speak the truth by saying that P/D is our best set for 1v1s, they also state that “downsides” of running said spec.

Meanwhile, in the Mesmer forums, everyone says “go PU you won’t regret that”.

I’ve stopped dueling PU mesmers and P/D thieves 3-4 months ago. Hope more and more people would start doing this.

Sometimes I wonder why p/d hasn’t gotten a nerf stick, but just about every other build has. I’m with you on the duels.. I just walk away from dired out thieves; they cant chase anything so its easy to walk away from. I throw up a little in my mouth every single time I have to fight one though~

Just beware that once you go P/D, no one will want to fight you and you will probably get bored quick even if they did.

I love the thief class, but I absolutely hate playing against condi p/d builds. I’m convinced you can become a pro with condition p/d at the age of 4.

If you see me in WvW and I’m walking the other way, it’s because I saw the condition food you’re using

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Calsifer.6079:

1.5k/2k hrs on thief. I’m alright I guess? No where near the best though.

more hours != more skill

^Like. It’s not hard to plateau in this game or any other mmorpg. Were not talking about low level assembly work here, were talking about builds that involve a combination of mastering 8 buttons. Shouldn’t take more than 500 hours, aka 62 eight hour working days O.O

You violated the rules of the thieves guild O.O

I wish you could edit that part out :/

Edit: @Domey, talking about the IS trick in the video.

Touched it XD

I’m under 30 hours on any kind of PvE content.

985 hours over 645 days. Do you guys literally afk in game!?

;-;

You set yourself up for bad karma when you started this thread :/

No one owns any build in this game. It’s so easy to re-trait, why would you even attempt to claim a build? I personally switch my builds almost two times a day trying out something different or quirky. The number of players heavily outnumbers the amount of possible viable variations of all builds in this game. So statistically speaking you could never trace the first time someone ever used a build. Documenting it also mean nothing in the game — I know a handful of thieves that used 2/0/0/6/6 before you or sizer, that don’t stream because they rather keep secrecy of their builds.

D/D is still the aggressive CnD, in your face with fast damage and combat. If you can’t land CnD often, practice first!

D/P has more utility, but imo if you’re interrupted during your rotations, you may have a hard time recovering.

^

Just play what you like and get good at that. Remember that putting on someone elses shoes does not make you good.

Also my eye twitches every single time someone says 2/0/0/6/6 is Sizers build.

This is the thing about out numbered fights, the enemies always look like they just started playing yesterday. I can’t even fathom why it would be so hard for that many people to take out two players. xD

Thank you Domey! I’ve never personally enjoyed outnumbered fights, win or lose. Your chances of survival are directly proportional to the skill level of the players you fight so its always a gamble. Guildwars does not have a class that could ever take down more than one equally skilled player at a time, otherwise everyone would roll that particular class. I’ve found that if I could down more than one person in a fight, those people I’m fighting have obliviously spent less time playing than I have. I much rather fight one person that can put up a fight or nearly down me.

It’s purely preference! Infil Signet is fantastic too, but sometimes I need to be defensive outside of a players reach, or to cover up versus a thief/warrior opener. I think both skills are threaded to the playstyle that one prefers. I prefer Blinding Powder for scenarios like an axe/gs warrior @5:01 in my video above, or a massive thief burst that I have no control over.

Thanks I love fighting other thieves… I try not to do anything fancy against them. Ill normally save all my init for Infiltrator’s Strike and CnD and just slice them to death while they spend time dodging. You’ll notice the first thief popped SR twice. Thieves hate the constant pressure.

The build is a standard 2/6/6 that relies on high critical percentage for lifesteal, damage, and init regen. Before you try running it…*if have not mastered landing CnD*, the build won’t work for you :/ The build is not dodgy like the common sister 2/0/6/0/6 builds. You have to utilize CnD to keep your opponent blind – so play it like you would a D/D build. It will do less damage for obvious reasons, but you have a gap closer/escape, root, daze, cripple, boon rip, and extra blind over any D/D build that keeps you in control of the fight.

Here is a link: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-c;4VwkZ06-FOVd0;9;49TT;02;005A35A;4JB0;3m9fgm9fgBBGvF6k1S;1VOVTWYXcYi3o_61V-70HV8aNX8a;9;9;9;9;9;4VTk3Q

You can swap out the runes to whatever your heart desires. I use travelers because I spend more time running around than I do actually fighting people – it’s a convenience factor. If I was pressed for a hard duel, I would use runes of the pack for more precision/power + fury. The food and sigils are my favorite mixture because you have a potential life steal every second, with another life steal every 5 seconds. Makes for very easy kiting when you pop in and out with Infiltrator’s Strike.

I was just testing it to see if it at least adds more evade time, but it doesn’t.

So basically they added more back-dodging distance but didn’t make it during the leap itself. Maybe they were trying to make the distance greater, but didn’t factor the speed of the move itself?

+1 Swords.

I run a 2/6/6 sword build that is played just like D/D. I used to use D/D as primary for close to a year, but the mobility, evade, and cleaving hits has me stuck to S/D. I have a gap closer, root, evade, stripper, and I can choose whether your dazed or stunned

I’m taking notes — Never knew people disliked fighting the classes above. I hope to run into them in WvW

None. ~flex~

But seriously — Any good mesmers, or p/d condition thieves. I have a love/hate relationship for both. Going up against a conditioned veteran using p/d condi makes for a very hard fight.

Selfless pitty-bump — Video had to be re-uploaded due to a copywrite song. Lost all the views and comments

Working on a new video Thanks for the support!

http://youtu.be/vSs5JtsCKCc

kitten every build i know is ruined now!

#MissingTheDaysOfSR15SecondsOfUnrevealedBackstabs

Wait wait… so you’re saying if I damage anyone in stealth, Ill be revealed?

Wat — but what if you heartseeker in a smoke field, but then switch to a short bow and cluster bomb someone…

Great video!

Just curious… does the copyright bit at the end help versus youtube pulling videos down due to mis-use of music? Only asking because I got a copyright strike for using music

Those statistics are very depressing.

^like

It seems to always be the people in great situations whom has no sympathy for others. I’m no good at statistics but I’d say there was a 100% chance of you complaining if you were in the shoes of people whom ran 100’s without anything to show for it, Adinay.

LordByron.8369:

If you ask to get fractal weapons from level 10, you are asking too much,

Despite what dev says nobody dropped a single fractal weapon before fractured under level 20.

To get some real chances you had to play 48.

They lowered the minimum level and also broken the loot table so you get them at level 30-39 more easily.

At least don t ask to ruin the only non gold/gem related skins because you want them without putting any effort.

I also want a legendary without the map achievement…. but i cannot have it.
I didn t ask it to give the gift of exploration when you complete your home city…(i won t even talk about the precursor..)-

They only have to fix level 40-50 loot tables and fractal drop will be fine.

It’s less about whining and more about the philosophy behind getting a a fractal weapon. Anet has tried extremely hard to make this game less about the grind, and they have done a fantastic job — up until the fractals.

The fractals are hard, and they are time consuming with very little reward. After a personal level of 10 you have seen all of the types of fractals. You run the same thing over and over only to have a 1g reward, with a massive RnG drop rate of several other types of items.

Lets face it, a system purely based on luck is just lazy development. As seen from other posts, some people have numerous skins already while others whom has run 300+ fractals have seen little or none.

Let’s take the worst case scenario and assume you have done 300 fractals with an average of 45 minutes per run. That’s 9 full days, 24 hours, of running the same grind based fractals attempting to achieve a 5% chance at getting a skin that you may want in particular. To make it more realistic, assuming you dedicate 4 hours towards fractals per day, you’re looking at 56 days to have a 5% chance at a skin that you want.

We can keep doing the math for better cases where someone gets a skin within 50 fractal runs, or even 20 fractal runs… but I hope you see the point here.

I made this post because I recently saw someone using a fractal weapon and I loved the swinging effect they have. It encouraged me to try and run fractals to try and get one… So I leveled my fractals to 10+ as soon as I could.

So far I have done fractals for two weeks without a single weapon skin dropping. After reading all of you posts about how several people have done hundreds and not gotten anything, I am not giving up on fractals. What a joke~

Thanks for expressing yourselves! I hope they make some kind of vending system for them because this is just plain insane. Whichever developer thought of making them this rare is completely insane — especially for something with zero benefit. I refuse to slave away hours of my time, so fractals — never again.

Please make them easier to get Pretty please with sugar on top… Or let us choose which ones we would like to get

It may seem like a simple task but learning to land CnD is not straight forward — absolutely takes practice. Unlike other skills in guildwars where you press a button and expect an auto target to happen, CnD does not work like this. You HAVE to face the opponent the split second that the CnD animation swings, and this is not auto targeted for you. Since it’s not instant you have to plan a second ahead of time before you press it and make sure you’re facing the opponent. If it doesn’t land then recovering for it may vary… But just keep practicing and try watching a few P/D related videos on youtube. Any video would do, but pay attention to how they all use CnD.

Elementalists are not a straight forward fight for a thief! They can be very tricky and are on par with thieves when it comes to zipping around and dodging attacks. I always have trouble with a good elementalist

The thief situation may be a matter of proper gear. You shouldn’t have been hit with such high numbers unless you’re under leveled, or do not have toughness. I recommend dire gear and a 2/0/6/0/6 build for maximum defense. Regardless of gear, when fighting another thief, it comes down to whom has the element of surprise, and how fast the players react to that surprise. You’ll build stronger innate reactions over time A good counter to thieves opening up on you is to use Blinding Powder or withdraw.

Remember: The awesome part about being P/D is your positioning can really confuse your opponent. When you’re stealth, try and pop up from really unintuitive positions. This makes the player have to re-adjust themselves and give you control over the fight.

Thank you, and anytime! See you out there!

^This.

Ever since the patch happened, I have never run into a D/P thief in WvW. Pre-patch it was all about D/P, it seemed like 90% of the thieves were running it. I’m going to refer to this as the D/P syndrome from now on — it seems that so many people ran it, but likewise were getting sick of it and encountering every other D/P thief as well, that they were looking for any build that would take them the hell away from D/P.

BAM

Patch happened, and it gave everyone a “reason” to drop mainhand daggers(even though D/X still seem great) for something new and refreshing.

@Amonatory, I agree. How did people come about idolizing a few folks? We got plenty of thieves that could give them a run for their money.

Wanted to also note that if you do a quick calculation on the radius of SA, and the radius of a skill like updraft, you’ll see that you have a 56% chance of landing the updraft.

If you want to increase your chances of landing one, trick the thief: pretend to cleave one side of the SA circle, and the quickly move to the other and use your skill.

Shadow Refuge is not complex skill. It grants the thief lots of stealth, and some health(I also want to mention that no one takes shadow rejuvenation over other traits in SA). If at any point the thief leaves that circle during shadow refuge, or is pushed out, they lose all of their stealth immediately. Hammer Warriors and p/s Engineers are notorious for SA denial. Other classes can negate the healing effect by using a skill that cleaves.

Most of the people I have dueled aggressively cleave(lightening whip) at me while I’m under SA, like anyone should do. It applies pressure and negates the healing effects which is most likely why the thief is using SA to begin with. Cleaving or using AoE does not mean you will magically kill the thief while hes in SA, it will however deplete an ability to regain health, and make them cycle through their utilities faster(which is good news for you once they use up all their cooldowns).

Those videos where you see a thief surviving 5+ people smashing at his shadow refuge — did the thief recover after all of that and magically start stomping more players? Or did that thief run away like a little kitten because they took too much damage while they were in stealth

@phaeris, Here is a tip about SR. When a thief uses SR, and you know that they will be within a small circle for a period of time… what do you think you should do with your AoE skills? I hardly use SR around elementalists for this very reason. If I’m close to being down, the last thing I want to do is contain myself to a small area. This may also surprise you but SR heals for about 3-5k. Every ele that I have dueled was always on top of my shadow refuge making its less efficient than it is.

Don’t just stand there and /shrug once they go into SR. It’s VERY predictable

Take some time to go out into the wild or pvp to practice on some mobs before you throw yourself out there. Also remember that thieves utilize combo fields A LOT, so try googling that and see all the different skill combinations that you can use.

As a thief you’ll need to understand stealth mechanics first and foremost. Experiment with what you can and cannot do with it. Play some games in town like see how long you can keep stealth up total. Use blinding powder, shadow refuge, and use a shortbow’s cluster bomb in a smoke field to produce more stealth.

Next, the attacks. Cloak and dagger(CnD) has a delay time of actually casting when you press it — know that cloak and dagger is not instant. Mess around with cloak and dagger and try to hit monsters with it in all scenarios. It’s not straight forward, and can take a little practice. I would practice using cloak and dagger without actually targeting the monster, you will find that useful in any sort of WvW situation.

Now the main combination. Because Cloak and dagger has a delay in cast time, normally thieves press CnD, then steal half a second afterwards. This teleports them to the enemy and instantaneously hits them with CnD. Here is a solid rotation to practice, and you will be mainly using this rotation:

CnD -> Steal -> Sneak Attack -> Shadow Strike

After your shadow strike you will stack a lot of conditions on your enemy. After that combination of moves, it up to you to keep your distance with Shadow Strike whenever your enemy approaches, or to use CnD -> Sneak Attack -> Shadow Strike again. When steal is up, do the main rotation again. If you’re in trouble, throw up a shadow refuge.

Those are the basic mechanics. Make sure you have a full dire set with perplexity runes — or something similar. Also use the 2/0/6/0/6 build. You want to use steal as much as possible, and heal within stealth.

:)

@Yam, thanks hahaha! Completely missed that… ack.

@RedThirteen, be sure to get good with that build that you’re playing first! It’s much easier to master P/D before you move on to S/D

Also — http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/24u4um/thief_put_together_a_fun_sd_wvw_video_and_a_short/

I’ll be sure to make some other short vids soon

Thanks Lolzie! We had some fun times! I’m sure we’ll run into each other soon… I’m on more in the evenings

Hey Thieves! Here is another roaming video I put together after a few days of collection. I’m using a modified S/D build that focuses on high crit, and hitting hard. I managed to find a build that fits my play style, which is really similar to D/D mechanics; keeping players blind and confused. I prefer it to other S/D builds because I can stay engaged for long periods of time, not worry about condition bombs, and I can pack a hefty punch.

My goals for the video was to get the players to notice me before I engage(and no switching to P/D). Sometimes I throw myself in front of people to get attacked first, so I can practice getting out of bad situations making for longer and technical fights – my favorite. Between my last video and this one, I’m starting to get really comfortable being at very low hp. I’m finding players start to do irrational things when they see me with ~30% hp. So, I’m learning to take advantage of them, i.g. players seem to automatically assume a thief is in trouble when they throw a shadow refuge… I’ve started to look at shadow refuge as a sort of player magnet ?

“Harley, what happened to Power P/D??”
-I still run it… It’s on my offhand I recently tried S/D and really loved the technical movements that you have to pull off – Feels more thiefish. I’ll be using both though!

http://youtu.be/vSs5JtsCKCc

Looking forward to putting together some more videos!

I like the diversity, it’s a great looking build! Looks like it would be super fun to use for 1v1’s!

Your main attack is also your main method of healing… You may find it easier to act like a normal power P/D in a fight, and when you’re having trouble or running low on health, drop all those venoms to heal and apply pressure Or even drop all those venoms WHILE you’re inside of the shadow refuge for even more leech.

I’m gripping onto my traveler’s — I still love them It’s convenient, and I’m not losing any fights because of it.

Thanks for the link! And to think I was being innovative…

Seems like there can be a lot more room for a leeching build after the patch. Specifically ones that don’t make people use a venom in place of a utility skill, and to fully take advantage of sigil of blood now.

Got bored last night and tried some various life leeching builds in WvW using D/D, S/D, and P/D with 2/6/6 traits and zerker gear. The idea was to retain a high crit% with decently high damage to trigger leeching as much as possible. The builds all revolved around a mixture of the following:

-Sigil of Blood (453 hp/2 second cd)
-Omnomberry Pie (325hp/1 second cd)
-Signet of Malice (133 hp on attack)
-Invigorating Precision( 5% of damage converted to hp)

So assuming you’re constantly hitting a target, you’re looking at 800-1100 hp every 1-2 seconds. It’s even better if you are fighting someone around npc’s/mobs because the leeching triggers even more(S/D cleaving).

It was for kittens and giggles but it turns out that using the above combination let me face tank quite a few people with ease. I don’t remember running into any skilled players so I wouldn’t run wild with it, but I’m just posting in light of how narrow our builds have become. Has anyone run something similar and successful?

I think I may have the video up within a week. If you’re curious about P/D thieves, you can learn off any P/D video there is. The tactics between condition P/D and power P/D are for the most part the same:

CnD → Steal → Sneak Attack → Shadow Strike → kite and keep distance while you pew pew.

If you go the perplexity route with dire armor(2/0/6/0/6), you’re guaranteed a solid build that is extremely hard to kill. I’ll go so far as to say that if you have good practice, nothing should be able to kill you on a condi P/D… The talk here is about power P/D though. The differences are to break out of the usual meta and create something to surprise people — to throw them off guard and confuse them. Condi P/D will kill someone slowly. Power P/D has more spiking potential with quicker kills, but require a little more attention to details.

Hey Oscuro! I noticed you play power p/d from the other thread you commented in. That’s awesome! I have never met another power p/d player in game and it’s little talked about on the forums… I’ve been tweaking and having fun with power p/d since late last year, and have been advocating for it ever since. I shot a little video a couple months ago as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjmS_k70VkU

I remember going through trial and error and tried something very similar to your build — some DA investment. It was pretty good at spiking damage against unsuspecting foes, but it failed when dueling veteran players. Players that were able to put up a fight longer than 30 seconds would eventually eat my health away and I had little to no ability to reset the fight as needed. I ended up settling on 2/6/6 for more survivability at the cost of very little lose in power damage. If you test the difference between going 2/6/6 or 5/6/3, the damage is very minimal. With shadow rejuvenation on your team, you can then start taking on more than 1 skill person at a time

On the side note, that was the idea pre-patch… I’m working on something with very similar traits, but otherwise different in technique. The build takes advantage of 2/6/6, while fully incorporating D/D offhand. It will utilize the best parts between P/D and D/D. It’s been an extreme success so far… putting together another fun video :]

P/P works, just not as well.

Given you have keen timing and an excess amount of time spent on thieves… you’ll eventually kill someone.

I see your point, and it’s worth experimenting with. Without equating, it seems like the additional crit damage coupled with additional crit% down the CS lane on average does more damage than a raw power build. Were looking on at a ~50% static chance without additional traits, which means you will hit ~200%, half of the time. Add in some precision based foods with and you’ll be dripping in gold.

I’m struggling to remember which hybrid DA builds you’re referring too.

Update: Just did a quick test on CS versus DA lane. Using normal white attacks from a pistol which applies a weak bleed condition on Red Oozes. Stripped gear… both lanes traited to maximize damage, no other trait lanes were used.

6 in DA: Killed two oozes with 36 hits total = 25062 damage.
=696dps

6 in CS: Killed two oozes with 30 hits total = 23959 damage.
=798dps

Try this out: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-c;4VwkZ06-FOVd0;9;49TT;02;040A35A;4LJV6-F04m9fgm9fgBBGgF6-6-N_schVlWYXv2147a630S70HV8-NX8a;15;9;9;9;9;9;0V8k3o

While I don’t prefer P/P, on fun occasions in guild duels I’ve had very good success rates with that build. It’s not as effective and the killing time is longer than most other thief builds(P/P is simply inferior at the moment). With a proper mix of black powder to kitten off melee, and sneak attacks + unload, you can eat through d/p thieves pretty easily. Any other class can lead to a longer but pretty fun duel

*I wouldn’t bank on ANY p/p build, but hopefully there are more buffs for p/p soon!