Guild Wars 2

Sounds like you met one or two guardians who refused to switch. Like the poster above me, some things that are reflectable aren’t extremely obvious, so if you kindly pointed it out I’m sure 99% of us would oblige you.

Why do obvious QQ whining threads like this get 70+ replies in 20 hours whilst all the constructive threads in the forum go mostly unnoticed?

If we put in half as much time into the community as we do feeding the trolls I think this forum would be a much better place.

Thieves are one of the easiest classes to play poorly, and one of the hardest to play well.

We already are viable in zergs with D/D + SB condition. P/D #1 needs work but at it’s core it’s a single target weapon set. Gotta adapt a bit.

Jzl.8715:

The (nearly) facts are, thief is harder to play well, it can be good in dungeons, most pve thieves aren’t good and the general attitude is negative towards thieves.

So unless you are willing to put a lot of effort into knowing the dungeons and profession, you should go with something much easier to pickup and embraced by others. And even if you are a good thief you have to be willing to put up with people looking down on your class in general. You’d really have to be the gunslinger type really enjoy a thief in PvE.

I’d agree w/ that. The reason everyone wants 4 zerk warriors + mesmer for CoF P1 isn’t because it’s the optimal combo (protip: it’s already been proven that it’s not), it’s because 3 of the 4 warriors can be braindead morons who don’t even have to dodge and you’ll still hit near optimum speeds.

Thieves are harder to play, and certainly harder to play well, than any other melee class.

Don’t worry, with everyone doing a mad dash to P/D builds you’ll probably see less HS spam

I think any of the “on swap” sigils could have a place in a P/D + SB set.

Energy – Free dodge
Geomancy – Bleeds
Hyrdo – Chill
Doom – Poison
Battle – More condition damage & power (good for Carrion based builds?)
Leeching – Free hp

You could make a case for any of them, imo.

Exhaustion is already in the game, it’s called: running out of initiative. We are a spamming class. It’s called burst for a reason.

If you are under 25% against a power/crit thief, you SHOULD be getting HS spammed. It’s our best form of damage @ that hp level. Don’t blame them for using the most optimal skill for the occasion.

Travlane.5948:

zach….use sneak attack in shadow refuge…not daggerstorm. its almost guaranteed 10-12 hits before it ends or whatever. daggerstorm is only gonna hit that much if you have 10 people around.

and be careful u are goign to get alot of trolls now. everytime i see a p/d post i see the same few coming in here hating on it. “noob build” “no effectivity” “horrible” " you suck" :P show a video and ull see.

Trav, you are a bit behind the times. Condi builds have been the new meta for a while (long before you made your “best WvW post”). The forums lag behind the “next big thing” type of builds, usually by quite a while. The recent P/D #3 buff just forced the issue. If anything, we all agree that P/D and D/D condi builds have a place, everyone just has different opinions about the armor.

Personally, I wouldn’t use rabid armor. I’d split it between carrion/shaman/apoth. For trinkets, the ascended unnamed/rabid are probably the best pure condition build items we have access to, with only 18 wasted stats in precision.

Still, build looks fun!

Lookin’ good. I know conditions are the new meta, but D/D is still completely viable

Rabid is the berseker equiv of a condition build, which I can’t really recommend.

How about a mix of shaman/apoth/carrion with undead runes? Undead runes encourage stacking toughness, which synergizes nicely with tuning crystals.

In WvW, condi damage > duration because of all the condition removals available to players. Note: If they aren’t running any form of condi removal, it doesn’t matter anyways since you’ll own them

Single best source of duration increase is food, so use that. If you really need more you can give up minimal stats and get a giver’s weapon or two, but the precision is really a wasted stat on those weapons.

That was awesome. I can’t personally say I’ve ever ran in to 5 bad mesmers, all at the same time, on Tier 1. They literally all just exploded, lol.

Next to SoM/DS combo, SB is our next best bet in a zerg. I suppose you could make an argument for sword #2 popping in and out, but I think SB trumps that.

Well the first thing you need to understand is that every thief who posts on this forums is the best in the world, and only their opinion matters. Everyone else is usually wrong, a noob, or both.

Now that you’ve got an idea how the culture is, I’ll offer some suggestions.

It appears you want to go with a power/crit build. 3 soldier/3 zerk armor, all zerker trinkets, valk/soldier/zerk weapons are the standard setup. 10/30/30 or 0/30/30/x/x is pretty normal for D/D, D/P style.

Coming from another class with far more mitigation/forgiveness, if I were you I’d err on the side of caution and take more soldier pieces at the start. You can buy them with karma and swap them out easily enough with CoF zerk pieces as you get better.

Sigils are usually force/accuracy/fire/lightning in this type of build. For money, just slap some Ruby orbs in there (though divinity is best), or Ogre.

That’s more than enough to get you started.

There are 1vX videos showing any class taking on superior numbers. That’s an anecdotal argument, and a poor one at that.

People want to take their all zerker PvE gear (braindead CoF warriors, I’m talking to you) into WvW and faceroll. Well, you are in for a rude awakening. More often than not your next stop is to QQ on the forums.

Players at the highest level of any class can simply dominate everyone else. That’s the point. Skill is rewarded. It’s also a fact that some classes cater more to 1v1 (at the highest level, again) than others.

The thieves you are referring to are roamers or small group style. Zerker thieves get absolutely crushed in any kind of zerg unless they pick off the scraps at the very fringe. And, venomshare notwithstanding, offer little to no group utility in most of the standard builds.

TL;DR; L2P your class.

Travlane.5948:

wish.1027:

Travlane.5948:

rather you act like a lil brat with no education

You should work on your spelling and sentence structure if you’re going to talk down to others about how they have no education. It will make people not instantly label you as a moron when they see it. This is honestly the point in the thread where you lost all credibility with me. I completely ignored your button clicking and bad playstyle, but this? Now I have to respond to this thread.

Travlane.5948:

ive mastered D/P ….D/D ….D/D evade….P/D bleed (variations) and S/D(variations)

If you really mastered Thief, why do I and others notice the following:

- Clicking;
- Bad build;
- Trying to stealth with revealed on;
- Lots of CnD in thin air lol.

Seriously, you look like a guy I would down in 3 seconds every time I found you.

ur right about spelling etc. but im on a tablet. im a larger man with rather larger hands. plus i dont like clicking backspace backspace backspace just to fix one letter. but yeah ur right technically.

side note about clicking: i dueled an ele last nite…one of the better ones ive seen at that. i said did you see that? (i CND…heard the sound of it clicking….and no invis) he said ya wierd…. anyway….ever since this last patch ive been getting wierd lag. its not horrible lag unless zergs are around…..but lag where you are just a little off and its not responding right. here lemme show you what i mean.

http://youtu.be/TWyWVZxA4mM

duel with an ele last nite. rather good one. notice the CNDs …they dont match up on my screen either. plus some hit and dont pop. or thats how they show on my screen. have had several other theives tell me the same.

I see some good play from you here, but it’s worth pointing out that the only reason you won both of those fights was because of Thieves Guild, which really has nothing to do with your build whatsoever. You could call it a “play to a draw until my elite is ready again” build and I think that would accurately describe what happened.

Not that it’s a bad thing, but it is what it is.

The only bug here is that the encounter doesn’t reset if you wipe.

The spider’s damage can be reflected, but not he recluses that spawn. If you wipe there ends up being a ton of recluses on the far side of the tree that are very hard to kill and ruin any further attempts at reflect stacking since their projectiles are NOT reflected in any manner.

Wiping should despawn any recluses that were spawned, similar to how anet fixed (or tried to fix) wiping on Cliffside at the arm seals.

AeroJavi.1687:

Ok, so it hasn’t been “acknowledged”. It has been reported, or pointed out, but not “acknowledged”.
So what we actually have is one backpiece totally different to the other ones, for which Arenanet gave an ascension recipe, but not an infusion recipe.
That, my friend, is not a bug!

Only because I find your useless bambling amusing:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sclerite_Karka_Shell_

Click on the second anomaly, see where it takes you. GG. Now seriously stop bothering me, I’m trying to fix an obvious inconsistency.

AeroJavi.1687:

purgatoryz.6038:

After upgrading it to ascended, you still cannot create an infused version with +5 native AR. This has been widely acknowledged as a bug, as it’s currently the only item with this behavior.

I’d find it hard to believe that anet purposefully made it so you can’t infuse the only apothecary ascended back item in the game. Bug?

If it has been “widely acknowledged as a bug”, can’t be that “anet purposefully made it so you can’t infuse the only apothecary ascended back item in the game”. Has to be one or the other, pal. You’re talking nonsense.

A bug can be widely acknowledged by players and completely ignored by anet at the same time. It’s not mutually exclusive. Thanks for the troll post but move along please.

After upgrading it to ascended, you still cannot create an infused version with +5 native AR. This has been widely acknowledged as a bug (edit: by players, including the offical gw2 wiki), as it’s currently the only item with this behavior.

I’d find it hard to believe that anet purposefully made it so you can’t infuse the only apothecary ascended back item in the game. Bug?

I agree that CoF is probably fine. I generally avoid it as it’s unchallenging, even with the speed groups. There’s a few key timing things…and that’s about it. They make it sound like it’s solving differential calculus, though.

I think being “good” at CoF is like being really good at tic tac toe.

25/30/0/0/25 would be the GG DPs build of all time.

It’s not their fault the dungeons are so ridiculously easy that’s it’s just a simple DPS race. The only player who really needs to know what they are doing is the mesmer.

You could swap a thief in for one of the warriors, or make a case for a guardian, and lose little to no time. The problem with the meta is that it’s self reinforcing and people are generally too ignorant to think even a little outside the box.

Half of these warriors are brain dead zombies who are generally terrible at the game. If they want to farm P1 over and over, it’s not really going to affect me one way or the other.

My favorite CoFP1 run was with 3 warriors, a mesmer, and me (thief). We got to the boulders and the mesmer DCed. After a wait we decided to replace him. The warriors were fuming when I invited a non-mesmer guildie just to finish the run. They’d rather have waited 5 minutes for the “optimal” group rather than just finish it. I kid you not, ALL three of them died trying to navigate the rolling boulders. One of them just quit. They didn’t even know the game mechanics enough to dodge or move properly, so used to being carried.

TL;DR: There are plenty of fish in the sea. If you don’t like them, don’t group with them.

Name: Cloakysmurf

Profession: Thief

Gear: Armor is 3 soldier / 3 zerk w/ divinity. Weapons are zerk/soldier. Trinkets are all zerk ascended.

Experience: None w/ Arah, completed story and at least one path on everything else though.

Time: GMT-6 mornings/evenings

Why: I love the idea of challenging yourself with some of the hardest content available, all the while grouping up with similarly competitive minded people who aren’t complete jerks. A rarity indeed

wish.1027:

(This is the math to determine how much precision I should gain if divinity runes arent counted towards the stats used by master maintenance oils to figure out how much precision they should give)
(1556 – 60) * .06 = 89.76
(1279 – 60) * .04 = 48.76
89+48= 137
That doesn’t come out right as Im gaining 139 precision, not 137. So I still dont know…

What if the divinity runes aren’t added like you figured above, but the oils round those numbers instead of truncating? That would make 90 + 49 = 139?

It’s quite possible there’s several “rounding” routines in their code and that they aren’t all equal.

Berengar.6951:

if you want crit damage in your build, your trinkets is the 1st place you should have it.

Not quite true. Ruby orbs > * in terms of stat tradeoff.

With ascended gear crit damage is always preferable, with exotics it varies per piece.

See this post:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/18q7oe/not_all_slots_are_created_equal_dos_and_donts_of/

Basically, if you want crit damage, start @ the top and work your way down.

Sarej.3802:

Roaming, for the most part. I’ll use my Guardian for zerg.

Not that I wouldn’t like to be able to be versatile on my Thief though but I’d rather not sacrifice roaming viability for zerg viability.

Purgatory, or anyone else for that matter, what sigils would you suggest for d/p and d/d or p/d?

What would you suggest aside from Divinity runes? Are they necessary because they’re about 10g a pop.

If you aren’t using Divinity, go with Wurm or Ruby Orbs imo. They aren’t necessary, but with 40 useful stats per rune it’s better than any alternative from a min/max perspective.

Don’t run P/D with that gear, it’s pretty pitiful unless specced for condi.

There’s a rumor going around that the flame blast from the fire sigils are proccing revealed. Given their high cost anyways I’m guessing you’d rather avoid them? You can’t go wrong with pairing force/accuracy. Since I occasionally run P/P, I like to have a sigil of strength on a pistol (for those unloads and stacking might in PvE), with accuracy on the other.

Grab a bloodlust for your shortbow (go for a major rune, it’s super cheap and only 30% less power) and load up on coyotes (or w/e mob is close to your BL gate) before heading out for that extra DPS.

Protip when buying expensive stuff on the TP: Never outright buy them, just put in an offer (maybe 1cp higher than the closest one) and acquire the item that way. I think I bought 6 divinitys for 7g50s a pop just last week. With the liquidity you’d be surprised how fast it’ll fill.

I see you’ve got D/D equipped. What if the food was using your other weapon set when calculating the 4% and 6%? I have no idea why it would do that, though.

Or, the food is missing a slot when figuring those numbers out, maybe it’s not counting the second dagger? Again, no idea why it would do that.

PVT chest/legs/helm, zerker shoulder/feet/gloves, divinity runes. PVT/zerker weapons, usually d/d sb or s/d d/p. All ascended zerk trinkets. Fire/accuracy/air/force/bloodlust sigils depending on the weapon. Always put the aoe ones on weapons that aoe, so bloodlust/fire on sword and sb.

With that gear you can bounce between PVE and WvW with no switching, sitting right at 50% crit chance before food/oils.

Though with gear so easy to attain, I keep an all Valk + lyssa set on hand when I go less stealthy.

Great vid, though Stompy is right, some of those players are superbad.

I see lyssa runes with 30 in trickery, and that sword auto attack is hitting for massive damage with the 1% damage per init (totally underrated trait). Guessing something like 0/30/10/0/30?

I know you don’t like FS/LS, but I think there’s a few times where you opted not to use it when you could have.

Post that build/gear!

Excellent video. Not sure apoth armor is the best choice but you are very skilled nonetheless.

Vanchatron.2306:

Thanks fellas, I have taken in every piece of advice you’ve given to me!

I guess one of my main questions right now is when should I melee and when should I range? Having just come from AR, the new dungeon, I was ranging the whole time I was there with my SB, due to the fact that I didn’t know when it’d be safe to move in and melee.

Is there a specific time I should be melee’ing and a specific time I should be ranging?

Ideally I’d love to melee 24/7 as a thief, although this just seems impossible. So when should I melee and when should I range?

Edit:

Always melee if the situation permits (read: most of the time with few exceptions). A thief that’s sitting at range every fight is pretty worthless. S/P is a great PvE combo because of the evades/blinds, and it got even better this last patch.

Once you get to a certain level, you can tell how “good” a thief is not by how much he gets downed but by how often he’s in melee range. I’d rather pick up a melee thief 3 times than have him sit away at range with a SB plunking for 1.2k per hit.

It’s certainly a change, and probably a good one. I’ve heard from a few different rangers/warriors that only melee weapon “hits” are clearing the blind now, and that their ranged weapons aren’t working to clear it even on a successful attack. Any truth to that?

wish.1027:

Fiddler.5174:

Your link is to a D/D S/D build. Not sure if that is intended or not.

Lol, I had the wrong one there, it’s fixed now though.

Fiddler.5174:

On a side not I learned something from your specs and I am changing my armor around a bit. Was pretty much the same armor but wrong slots filled. Have to get rid of my knights legs. NO P/V/T legs at karma vendor. Need more badges…
How do you feel about Ruby Orbs? I use 6 right now. Div runes are pretty expensive.

Orbs are 35 stats and 2 crit damage, Divinity runes are 40 useful stats (power, precision, toughness, vitality) and 2 crit damage. 40 is more than 35, Divinity wins. There were other sets posted by people in the thread if youre interested though, one with Soldiers armor and Ruby orbs for instance was just a little bit worse overall, just know that 35 cant beat 40. There was a 30/30/10 and 10/30/30 with Wurm runes also that werent horrible.

I get a lot of questions about this in game and half the thread posts seem to be about not using divinity runes, maybe I should make final builds for those also. I’ll do that now since Im doing nothing.

Go ahead and make those builds w/out divinity

Though I’ve basically resigned myself to farming the gold at this point!

Divinity is widely considered the best, but is stupid expensive.

For price, nothing beats berserker COF armor + beryl orbs (as opposed to crafted valk armor + ruby orbs).

What about the high condition damage you get from the might stacks? That’s why I’m saying a hybrid build might be better for this. Maybe P/D and D/D? That way you can sneak attack and death blossom, but also backstab utilizing both aspects?

Also, since the sigil of battle will stay on cooldown all the time (assuming you are always switching weapons) you either need to ditch them or ditch the sigils of strength. So we need a new sigil. Either way the calculations done above probably should be re-done.

Cool build. A few pieces of rampagers might take advantage of the conditions a bit more, especially if you run P/D and D/D (or S/D). All ramp armor w/ zerk trinkets might be a good way to go, especially for all of us that already are running 6/6 ascended berserker trinkets.

The sigils will run you 13-14g and are the most expensive (and arguably most important) part of the build. Still unsure which way I’d lean on weapons. Most of us have zerker weapons w/ sigils we don’t want to replace, so since we are buying new ones anyways maybe split the the 4 between zerk and rampagers?

Faeyd.5094:

Horrible to see the ridiculous gymnastics Caed has to do to get even meagre damage on them and how easy it is for them to unload huge damage on him.

This. The ranger never pops his elite and could have easily won that match if he didn’t get bored in round 2.

Caed had to work so much harder to get damage compared to either of those players.

Hey guys, I’m looking to hear from some solid thieves as to how you have your key bindings setup. I’m trying to remove any tendencies in my technique (like always strafing left while hitting SB #2, etc) to be a bit more unpredictable in WvW/PvP.

A few possible questions:

1) Do you have back up on a key @ all? I know a lot of folks, myself included, just took it off the bar because you can spin and run faster than backing up.

2) Where’s your dodge key? Dodge is such a huge part of our game that it’s one of the most important keys we could bind. It should be on a key that’s reachable regardless of which direction you are strafing/moving or which skill/utility you are using.

3) Heavy on mouse buttons for skills or utilities? (Razer Naga or equiv.)

4) Key to move forward? Or do you use both mouse buttons to free up a finger on the left hand?

5) Anything else that’s “obvious” to a veteran player (especially a pvper) but might be missed by us noobs.

Also looking for a critique of my current setup:

Q – heal
W – skill 1 (spam autoattack)
E – skill 2
X – skill 3 (very easy to hit flanking strike/pistol whip or evade with SB)
C – skill 5
Z – skill 4
S – run forward (rarely used as I usually press both mouse buttons to run)
R – Autorun
A – Turn left
D – Turn right

Utilities are 1,2,3, with 4 on elite
F1 – Steal
Pickup – left shift
Alt – Nearest Target
Ctrl – Show stuff
Space – Jump
Clear target – mousewheel
Dodge – Thumb mouse button ( I think it’s 5 on my mouse )

So I centered the mapping around being able to repeatedly auto attack while moving in any direction, including forward via the both mouse buttons way.

Any critique? I don’t have the about face button mapped, nor can I find a good spot for it. I’m not exactly happy with where dodge is at either, as sometimes my thumb isn’t quick enough and/or smashing dodge screws up my movement w/ the mouse.

Thanks in advance!

Good combination of Soldier’s and Berserker armor/weapons, though this set is ridiculously expensive to obtain because of the divinity runes and fire sigils.

Asura’s Elite golems will block projectiles. Also the radiation field little well thingy that pops up will as well.

I don’t believe it’s a bug or a hack to do it that way either. A big, giant golem should eat up some projectiles for you

We have initiative and are supposed to be bursty. By definition the entire class is meant to spam abilities. If we weren’t supposed to spam we’d have cooldowns. Spamming done properly isn’t noobish, cheap, lame, or wrong. It’s what we are. Time to deal with it.

Wait, the OP said that he only kills doylaks and avoids fighting whilst trolling? Why do you need any survivability at all? Just troll them with shadow return on sword #2 with any gearset….

Run S/D → D/P for max trollage. Use sword 2 a few times, switch weapons, BP → HS to run away. Rinse repeat. Pretty boring if you aren’t going to actually fight anyone

Oldie but a goodie.

I know everyone craps on D/D, but this build is still really fun in sPvP. Nothing is more fun than seeing 10k+ backstab

Great tips on fractals. I’m a tad disappointed that 90% of the weapon suggestions involve p/p, which I didn’t think a lot of us ran. Mind posting your current gear when you run p/p fracs?

Sword auto-attack is awesome. Pair it with a dagger for WvW or a pistol for PvE. Go 30 in SA for WvW and 25 in trickery for PvE and you’ll hit like a truck. That extra 1% damage per initiative is great in PvE.

In my experience you sit at range and do pathetic damage with the SB, or roll the dice on knowing the exact mob animations (for dodging) and attempt to melee. The latter usually ends up with a thief on the ground waiting to be picked up.

We need 2x the skill of a warrior to even come close to their DPS…and they give more to the group.

Edit: I’ll throw out a real suggestion. I swap out all kinds of weapons depending on the fractal. S/P for the ascalonian captain to blind tank all the vets. D/D against single target bosses. Running valk armor, ruby orbs, mixed trinkets with 0/30/15/0/25. I like the 25 in trickery for extra init + 1% per init damage. You really do hit like a truck…if you can manage to stay up long enough to contribute.

I started using S/D a few weeks ago when I bought the game. Suck it hipsters, no one cares.

As a thief who was wearing a lot of berserker gear and likes to melee…ugh it was a rough time. Bring some condition removal so the constant burning doesn’t get ya.

I could have probably spammed SB from range but that’s pretty boring. Next time I’ll carry more vit/tough gear.

Seems to be stuck around 90% on Blackgate. How are we supposed to move the “Molten Alliance Strength” bar?