In the previous balance patch the P/D skill 3 (Shadow Strike) was split and the stacks of Torment increased in sPvP only. Many of the previously split skills were merged in this patch. Was it an intentional decision to not merge Shadow Strike for balance reasons or was it that more testing was required?
Also, can you comment on the previous change adding in a cool down on Stealth Attacks? This was never explained, and one question that is more pressing than the “why” is whether or not the team is satisfied with the cooldown and open to making changes to this in the future.
(edited by saerni.2584)
Some utilities are more useful than others but the ones that are the most useful haven’t changed that much.
Shadowstep is a solid skill to take. Most of the heals can be useful depending on your build. Elite-wise I would recommend basi-venom for breakbars or the HoT elite because both can do a lot of breakbar damage (basi will do more if you share it with your allies, which you should be doing).
Other than that more generic overview I can’t recommend specific utilities unless I know what kind of build you are running (weaponset and traitlines).
Shortbow is generally a good utility weapon or a good weapon for combo field with poison (weakness or poison projectiles).
P/D works well with that because it is a strong ranged option for condi.
I should clarify, I think they may increase the unblockable aspect of basi venom. They may also move it to another skill but that seems less likely. The elite venom is basically a way to get in some solid attacks and unblockable helps make that happen.
Unblockable attacks are necessary given the amount of invulnerability and block spam. An example is how they gave warrior unblockable for six seconds on a signet. They increased the number of stacks on basi to two but that would have made the skill especially OP with sharing made baseline. Think about it, 10 stacks of interrupting stone shared among you and four others with unblockable attached. Both the stun and the unblockable aspect are very strong. But the stun is the primary concern as far as balance and sharing.
I think that basi venom could grant a separate “venom” that applies unblockable to the next set of attacks separate from the stun venom. Essentially, the unblockable effect would be like an “after affect” that continues after the main venom is consumed. This could be increased to two or more without the same risk of the stun lock that increasing the base stacks of the venom does.
Or they could reduce the ability of other classes to chain blocks together… :P
Things I can see happening regarding thief:
(1) sPvP change to Shadow Strike migrated to WvW and PvE
(2) Adjustments to Sword/Dagger 1/2/3
(3) Adjustments to basi venom with regards to unblockable
(4) Nerfs to thief endurance regen to reduce perma evade builds
It might work, but I’m not sure how useful the boon duration is outside of P/P builds.
You might want to swap out daze on steal for confusion on steal. The lower cooldown is only about 5 seconds and the damage loss can be significant. Further, the stun can proc “on stun” effects on your opponents, especially taunts.
I’d consider going P/P or P/D on the offhand if you want something offense in that slot. That will also further increase your condition coverage and give you ranged pressure. Stealth from offhand dagger may be harder to pull off in one sense, but it takes less initiative and works well for a close range build that dodges a lot.
Well a block can be bypassed with unblockable so evasion would be a buff. Two seconds of evasion on such a low timer would probably generate even more complaints about perma-evade thiefs as well.
Jski, you can’t balance a game around the presumption of lag. Lag at that level also hurts power so your argument fails as a anti-condi argument on its’ face. Nerf lag 2017? No arguments from anyone.
And just because you can’t choose what you clear doesn’t mean bringing less than adequate cleanse is the fault of your opponent. You are responsible for your build out.
No it uses yours. The damage increase shows up on your combat log. The increase does not appear to vary depending on whether or not the person with the venoms on them is condi based or not.
Ranged damage and kiting. Just don’t stand underneath them and they do no damage. If they are trying to take a point and you are standing off point shooting them they will go down fairly quickly.
No, the build I use is in my signature. All my builds are theorycrafted by me and may or may not reflect the thinking of the builds on websites like metabattle.
Your logic basically is that any buff to any condition ability will be overpowered because you view conditions as overpowered with Dire armor. So you would oppose any condition based buff on any class on principle, is what I’m taking away from you. I don’t, however, agree that conditions are overpowered due to armor.
My reason is that, in WvW, I could make a condition-crit build that sacrifices the durability of a Dire build in exchange for additional damage. Part of the reason I haven’t is because I like spending money on other characters, fashion, etc. Another, primary reason is because many people in WvW don’t build cleanses into their builds either through specializations or through utilities. This means I don’t need to sacrifice my durability to compensate against many opponents. The abundance of cleanse makes the problem more acute because condi burst had to be increased to compensate. Also, in WvW you often are fighting in larger scale battles where the extra HP/armor lets you live. So the incentives of the mode and the choices of the players in it are what drive me to use the armor I do. I’m not going to argue further about Dire/TB because that is not the point of the thread.
The truth is that Shadow Strike’s 2 stacks of torment were never that impressive. Even against a moving target the damage wasn’t significant (unlike Shadow Shot, which has both decent damage and teleport/blind built in and is unblockable). It didn’t really require cleansing by an opponent even when stacked multiple times. The change in sPvP made it independently useful (against a target that actually had cleanse as opposed to only against a target without cleanse).
Condi thief can work quite well. Consider throwing in some HP trinkets (Dire-Rabid) and weapons for more survivability.
There are D/D and D/P condi builds, which can use Dagger Training to create significant poison damage, and P/D builds which have the greatest variety of base condition access and have the advantage of providing pressure from range.
In PvE venomshare, which is what I use in all game modes, is quite viable because the share radius doesn’t matter when everyone is beating on a mob together. You can easily get bursts of DPS from sharing poison that will be impressive in their own right.
Going to have to disagree with you for a couple of reasons.
Right now a single application in WvW is around 2500 maximum damage. Doubling that does not make it overpowered because (1) cleanse, (2) the ability to evade, (3) the ability to block. I should note that is with full corruption stacks, food, etc (using my build that does a lot more than just torment). Compare that to 4k in sPvP with full corruption stacks. So doubling it in WvW means 1k more damage compared to sPvP. That wouldn’t be overpowered given the stat inflation in WvW generally.
Skill intensive is relative. It isn’t particularly harder or easier than most other skills in this game. You don’t like condi builds but that doesn’t make them less skillful than power builds.
Here is the change for those who are unfamilar:
- Shadow Strike: The amount of torment applied by this ability has been increased from 2 stacks to 4 stacks in PvP only.
I wanted to write feedback for this change and decided that posting it in the sPvP forum was the most appropriate. First, because the sPvP group is the one that decided to test changes independent of the game-wide balance team. Second, because unless the game-wide team adopts these changes based on feedback from the sPvP balance group it will likely remain a sPvP only version of the skill. I would like this skill change to be adopted game-wide.
How I envision this skill being used is as a punishment for an opponent getting into melee range without taking defensive precautions to avoid being outmaneuvered. It is an ability that should provide medium damage because it should make the person attacking them somewhat reconsider chasing in the first place—whether or not getting into melee range without some defensive skill or evade is a good idea.
Prior to this change using this ability was not an effective source of damage. Even if you managed to hit a person three times in rapid succession—not easy given that it teleports you backwards and is a short range melee attack—the total stacks of torment that could be applied was only six. This made it an inefficient use of resources for the amount of initiative required to achieve it. It was also relatively unremarkable damage.
After this change, the damage has become more like the ideal of the skill in sPvP. The total damage done isn’t unreasonable but it does make a noticeable difference. Whereas before the DPS potential of repeated use (against a target that is melee only) was around 1k, the new DPS potential is more like 2k. This assumes 3 applications, with 6/12 stacks of torment respectively, so the actual in game experience is far different with cleanses and the lower likelihood of achieving 3 such hits in rapid succession. (Side note that this relies on the Deadshot Amulet that was also introduced in the patch).
My experience in WvW suggests that it would not be overpowered if this change was applied to the skill there as well. In PvE there is similarly no real concern (less efficient to kite most mobs around than just shoot them from range).
So because the build lacks interrupts it is categorically inferior at higher level play? If that is the only criteria for a build then yes, the set does suffer and I can’t argue otherwise.
I would argue that interrupts are better on paper. Certainly if you can interrupt the enemy at precisely the right moments then on demand interrupt is important. But stability and projectile hate are a major concern in practical application—and besides that timing the interrupt as well.
I’d also argue that the difference between taking just Bountiful Theft and taking both is significant. BT is 3 boons every 20-24 seconds. Rending Shade is 2 boons every 4-10 seconds. Let’s just assume the numbers are 21 and 10 respectively. So BT is 7 seconds per boon and RS is 5 seconds per boon. Now let’s look at a period of 21 seconds and 35 seconds. For the first the split is 3 boons for BT and 4 for RS. In the second the split is 3 boons for BT and 7 for RS (because steal is still on cooldown).
Three boons stolen in 35 seconds is barely going to have an impact. Taken together, however, the boon stealing is 10 total. This is effectively a 200% increase in boon stripping.
On the subject of immobilize: the number 1 target for Body Shot is necro/reaper. They don’t do well when they can’t dodge or otherwise move. Having the ability to repeat it multiple times means that targets in general have difficulty completely cleansing and moving out of the kill zone. It isn’t a primary skill but it does provide extra utility. Just as the interrupts are not the only point of having a D/P thief.
So viable depends on the player then? I mean, I expect someone with the muscle memory for a particular weapon set to do much better than one who just picked it up.
And I do enjoy P/D because landing the CnD requires skill, the positioning and dealing with projectile hate is a challenge, and the reward of running condi is that it can be effective if you learn to manage your opponents cleanses. It has a high learning curve for that reason but that doesn’t make it less viable than in other cases.
I would say that starting out expecting a 60-70% win rate on an unfamiliar weapon set in unranked (a gloriously terrible place if teammates are trying to learn to play rev or some other class for the first time) is probably unreasonable. And going against top players with an unfamiliar set is also not likely to result in much headway.
To me viable means that the set performs well as compared to others of it’s type. In the case of P/D that means it compares favorably against D/P condi and D/D condi builds. I think P/D is superior to both because it has greater condi access, can kite melee builds, and if played well has better access to Rending Shade which provides a needed boonstrip against a meta that likes boons quite a bit.
P/D is more of a “support” thief build in that it can help bring down targets by striping boons and providing on demand immobilize. The condi it brings to a fight can spike down a focused target, especially if the venoms are shared with team mates.
Shorter duration high damage condis benefit far more from duration than lower damage longer duration condis.
Cleanse will matter relatively more for longer duration condis. Of course this can be mitigated by knowing what the cleanse method your opponent is using is or knowing that you can use enough cover condi to mitigate their cleanse.
How do you define viable?
Looks like an effective build. Too bad you are in EU, would probably enjoy dueling you a bit :p
I run P/D and consider it “viable.” That said, there are arguments both for and against how optimal it can be in various situations.
In sPvP I’ve found that team comp can matter quite a bit. This is because I play a venom burst build to make the condi effective. In a team situation I need the others to be able to stand closer together so I can venomshare. There is nothing more deadly that three+ players focusing an enemy with basi, spider, and skale. The condi spike is enormous and with basi adds in unblockable as well for the initial strike. Stagger the attacks and consecutive basi will shut down anything they are trying to do.
If your entire team dies instantly to enemy focus then you will be much less effective. But that can be said of any thief. Your entire team dies—try to decap with a DH chasing you down because you’re the only target left.
My build is in the videos linked in my sig.
Congratulations on making it to Gold and good luck getting to Platinum.
I’d like to point out that builds perform better in the hands of mechanically skilled players. An upper division player is more likely to stick with the build types that have worked for them to get to where they are. Any changes they make are going to be smaller and not as drastic as switching to an unfamiliar weapon set. So I welcome newer people to learn to play P/D or more experienced players on alts rather than merely relying on “no one plays this in legendary.” Which is to say, as one might expect, most players do not play anything in legendary at all.
I agree that other thieves can be dangerous to P/D. But that holds relatively true for D/P and the like. If they are on PI then they are less dangerous because their cleanse is much more limited. But if they take EA then you are forced to learn how to burst and hold your attacks long enough for their health to melt. Or you can trick them into wasting their dodges and then load them up before repeating as needed to kill them over time.
As a thief this is how I tend to analyze the cost-benefit of decap/fullcap:
I will full cap if my team is fully or mostly sustaining the mid fight. I’m not in a rush if they aren’t dying and my full cap will put more pressure on them and divide their team as much as possible.
I will just decap if my team needs help at mid. As mentioned there is no point in full capping just to lose the point a little bit later. Even if they recap it 20 seconds later that is a decent chunk of points. Repeat that a few times and you will have a good lead.
I will not decap if my team needs a +1 at home more than the few points they gain from keeping the point. This often happens when I don’t trust my team to +1 home because the mid fight hasn’t gone well and I’m better able to cross the map to help.
I will also decap as I can when most/entire team wipes at mid. This is usually where the largest problems occur. If my team can’t sustain long enough for me to perform a simple decap then I will have a problem decapping because their mid fighters will come to me.
My final thought is more generic but worth mentioning I think: sometimes we get outplayed. For example, there was a DH I fought pre-season who for a while during this season was top 5 in the NA leaderboard (with a lot of games played). He was extraordinary. He was fighting 1v3 and just not dying. He was using every bit of terrain and utility skills. He was solo holding my team’s home while rotating back to mid as needed. The rest of his team did well enough but he was their mvp by far. I couldn’t properly decap because his play freed up enough teammates to stop any decap from happening.
I’m mostly happy with the state of thieves. I’m much less happy with powercreep in general. There are now a lot of things which block or mitigate damage passively. This has required even more powercreep to counter (in the form of unblockable attacks or temporary unblockable skills). The “counter the counter” balance system is nice on paper but produces a lot of problems when some classes can’t counter and all the base abilities have been buffed to compensate for the counter-counters.
For example, I fought many guardians before HoT and was able to kill them. Sometimes a tough fight but I usually managed to handle them in a relatively reasonable period of time. DH is another issue. DH is not overpowered but it does over perform in this meta because it benefited from a lot of the powercreep.
Two suggestions:
I rarely see people swap into class stacks. Often the issue is where you see 4 people start out of the gate as a stacked set. I think 90% of players would happy to have a soft anti-stacking mechanism as long as it didn’t extend queues by that much. Queues are pretty quick at the moment, and you could always adjust the anti-stacking matchmaker to allow more stacking if the queue times got too long.
Another issue is the worry that top players will continue to be those with fewer matches played. 10 matches is required to place and people with 12 or 13 matches can end up much higher than if they kept playing. I’d suggest that a player with under 20 matches should have a -700 decay type rating that disappears after you reach 20 matches. Since “effective MMR” doesn’t actually change who you are matched up with this won’t place you with worse players, but it will prevent last minute padding of the leaderboard. I’d also implement a -200 decay for under 30 matches. That way, you have placed (10 matches), tested your rating (20 matches), and finally had an opportunity to climb or fall (30 matches).
Boonstrip will open up some gaps though. So many warriors only use resistance to avoid condi. Once it runs out/pieces are stripped they lose a lot of hp.
Baba, you had mentioned in the other thread about condi about me swapping one rune to Earth from Torment so I wanted to respond and this seemed a decent thread to continue along those lines.
In HotM testing, the Earth sigil does result in 2-3 stacks of extra bleed (most of the time 3). Three stacks of bleed on this build is about 250-300 extra DPS compared to about 147? ish DPS on torment. I’m going to do some additional tests in actual combat in spvp matches, but I forgot to switch during my “work off my skill rating decay matches” that I did today, so I’ll be testing that out tomorrow.
My thoughts after some reflection are similar to my thoughts on condi duration in a sense. While cover conditions are important to prevent cleanse, much of condi damage is actually applied between cleanses. While a covering condition does help prevent a cleanse from eliminating all of the damage, most major cleanses when taken eliminate substantively the bulk of the condition damage. Another spike is required, or at least new applications of base condi, in order to realize any substantive damage. For that reason a lot of the damage is actually whatever is applied in a burst. I think it is possible, given that reasoning, that the Earth sigil’s extra DPS over the torment sigil is more significant over the course of a match.
Changing back to the topic, PI being so powerful is actually a boon for me because a lot of thieves I run into in PvP, unlike in WvW, take PI over EA and that makes my life much easier. Catch a thief, load them up with conditions, and wait a few seconds for them to die is much harder against good thieves (who take other cleanses as well) than keep autoattacking and watch their HP melt.
Look at my signature for the P/D build I use. Only change from that vid is taking both Rending Shade and confusion on steal.
Not sure what you are talking about Rocky…thief vitality toughness has been low for a long time game wide.
Also there is more condi cleanse but that cleanse relies on what I’ll call the “HoT mechanic” in that all of them rely on continuous attacks. DD for example relies on evade, which requires an attack to avoid. Ele can have on hit condi cleanse over 75% hp. DH, with plenty of blocks can clear condi on block. The HoT mechanic requires players to stop attacking long enough to overcome it. There is counter play in some sense—although I agree it can be exceptionally strong taken with other traditional clears.
But, and this is a big but, condi cleanse does not pose the biggest challenge for P/D. Rather, projectile hate from certain classes/builds is what makes using the set difficult to use. It takes more knowledge of individual classes to know when it is safe and effective to attack. It’s not l2p so much as l2counter and that makes it sometimes feel far less rewarding compared to power D/P or other melee set.
Venoms can be loaded onto any attack. That makes them quite a bit different from ID. Venoms are also more single target spike damage than good AoE, although you are right about WvW bags.
What weapons are you using now? What kind of combat do you enjoy on other characters?
There are fun, and none glassy, options for most weapons in both gamemodes. I’d say “anything” that will work for WvW will work in PvE. You won’t be maxing out in PvE with your WvW build, but you will be more than effective regardless.
Some players have a toxic attitude about how other people should play the game. If you are on thief they will know what you are running, roughly, so they will feel more empowered to complain about it imo.
They make sense if you play something like what I play.
That isn’t a problem exclusive to P/D though. And a condi spike at the right time can be very effective +1 again all kinds of DH, and pistol at least has range pressure compared to other options.
It’s worth testing…but the torment covers the bleeds so in practice it might be a wash depending on the cleansing situation.
I’m visiting family for a few more days so I’ll have to test it when I get back.
This version that I’ve been testing in PvP and which uses the Deadshot Amulet (much more glassy than I run in WvW) and the latest iteration of my boontheft variation (before RS came out I was running Cloaked in Shadow both for the vertical mobility advantage in WvW and the AoE blind against multiple opponents in WvW).
In WvW I use trailblazer’s and dire with dire/rabid trinkets to achieve a mix of small crit chance and sustainability. In PvP the amulets are much less tanky and taking a defensive approach can be less useful for a thief (less sustain ele/druid/dh on point fighting in wvw and the thief’s ultimate stats scale better—my wvw Sneak Attack does nearly 6k for example). The crit on Deadshot makes Sigil of Torment work quite well to add additional damage more consistently as a cover condition.
A fight against a warrior for me depends on whether Adrenal Health is active. I can easily outdo the healing but it adds time to the fight. Pulsing resistance also adds to the fight because I need to get another steal or sneak attack off to strip it.
If I come into a fight where the warrior is mostly full HP and doesn’t notice me/doesn’t have his cooldown ready for his stance…I can 90-0 him in roughly 5-10 seconds. It also helps to have a partner in the attack, if I can venom share to someone who is already beating on him (usually I time it to share all three venoms at the same time) then he will die in under 3 seconds. I try not to solo warriors if I can so this is the more common +1 scenario (where the warrior is sustaining against a couple of my teammates and I run in and suddenly the warrior is dead. The same works well against a guardian with the right timing because it will burst his hp down before he can use a big cleanse.
Running venoms should force you to always be sharing venoms and calling targets. As long as your teamwork is good, a venom thief can be highly effective. Note that in a 3 v x situation a venom share to both teammates, rare though that can be, will have 18 stacks of poison and 12 stacks of torment. If your team is 4 v xing that becomes 24 and 16, which should be enough to burst anyone down.
Shadow Strike isn’t a projectile, and the block/invuln issue isn’t unique to condi. Also, with basi-venom the first burst is unblockable.
Resistance also isn’t much of a barrier as long as you bring some boonstripping. At a certain point the counters aren’t impossible to overcome.
Well I agree that his condi clear wasn’t exceptional. The main thing that wrecked the condi thief was a lack of closing ability. Most of their attacks were wastes of initiative.
Against this guy using P/D you would have projectile hate, but you could probably spike torment on him with Shadow Strike and with venoms he would die quite quickly enough. Another would be using D/P and just interrupting him for torment and spiking condis through a few other abilities. Probably a hybrid with carrion would be most effective in that case.
Ah yeah that was it.
Ok, now I can provide some feedback.
That thief lacked mobility enough that he basically just ran around and avoided a number of attacks.
The ele was condi cleansing repeatedly. Not sure why you think he wasn’t? Condis fully disappeared from his bar multiple times. I suspect, not being an ele, that he was traited to clear condi when he applied regeneration? Or he is using another clear method I’m not familiar with.
For some reason I’m not seeing the video you want me to when I click on the link. No D/D condi anywhere in sight. What date was it recorded?
That link isn’t working for me.
One possible idea for resistance is make it like stability. You get stacks of it and it prevents a condi application per stack.
This way it acts like a pre-emptive clear and doesn’t provide immunity. It would also lessen the impact of boonstripping/corruption (although the boonstripping builds would be more efficient at clearing it).
Another option would be to make resistance a boon that prevents application rather than immunity to all conditions that are currently on the person. Complete immunity, despite the corruptable/strippable nature of a regular boon, frustrates people who find their damage and cc completely negated until resistance runs out. If we keep “immunity” then it should be application and not an “oh I messed up button.” Traditional condi clears can handle the after the fact side of it.
Of course, we can also make resistance a condi duration reduction which is still a strong thing to have access to. There are just so many good options for making resistance effective and interesting with counter-play. It might take a major balance patch to be addressed though given the substance of the change being at the design level and not in the more simple duration/stacks/effectiveness side that the spvp team has been able to implement for their mode.
Another option against warrior is P/D condi.
You can reliably boonstrip with Rending Shade + Bountiful Theft and that will often get rid of the resistance they are relying on.
Also you can use Shadow Strike to kite them, and once resistance is stolen/on cooldown they will find it impossible to keep you in melee range.
Finally, emkelly is correct that many warriors will just let you stack high damage conditions and then, as they inevitably lose their resistance, they will quickly start to die. Or you can just boonstrip their resistance, which is probably their only anti-condi ability, and watch them flail.
Maybe but that is an issue for the balance team not your average player who won’t be close to rank 100.
I think there are marginal situations in which builds or types of builds are more or less effective. I know that is a fairly generic statement but I think it can be readily applied to a few cases.
One is the invulnerable warrior or engineer. A condi burst can overcome the sustain that invulnerability offers. As I mentioned, it may be faster to kill with condi than power for this reason (the sustained condi DPS outdoes the power DPS).
Another situation is more psychological. A person is taking a lot of condi damage and has confusion. They see another person start to rapid fire them. They know they need to block and face a dilemma. Do they use a skill to block the damage and take confusion damage? Or do they eat the rapid fire? It becomes a lose-lose where the choices they have become less meaningful and more paralyzing.
And I don’t necessarily disagree that condi thief could use a buff to be made more accessible to more people and more competitive. I would disagree that, given the impact player experience with a build has on performance, marginal differences between condi and power make condi always a wrong choice regardless of weapon set. As I mentioned, D/D may have serious design level limitations in high level play. But D/D isn’t, imo, the optimal choice for condi anyways, so I raise the alternative choices to say “condi can be useful and impactful.”
Staff, when played by a decent staff user is so good at dishing out damage and avoiding taking it. Shortbow really works well with condi builds but brings a lot less utility to power imo.
As an aside, when I see people raging in teamchat telling people to quit the game I report them.
Toxic is toxic.
If they can’t kill you who is trolling whom?