Guild Wars 2

@ PyroAthiest: Okay, those are all good answers to my points, but it begs a new, different question. Why go all the way to 30 in Illusions for the key trait that shatter builds are built around? Why not go to 30 in either of your other two rows? Or 5 or 10 in some other row entirely? Seems like counting yourself as a shatter is somewhat wasted if you’re not using shattering and not trying to burst.

Granted, I know it let’s you proc emergency dazes with Shatter F4 and so on even if you don’t have any illusions out, etc. But still…

After looking closely at the build and comparing it with other popular “shatter tank” builds (0/20/20/0/30: Shattercat, 7Mirror, etc.), it seems like the fundamental difference is that you’re giving up the following key attributes of a shatter tank build by moving 20 points from the Dueling row into the Inspiration row. (0/0/20/20/30)

Giving up:

1. The ability to frequently generate extra clones for shatters by dodging
2. The ability to dodge more often
3. Roughly 10% less crit chance, making it harder to hit the magic 40% crit chance
4. 20% less crit damage, making your shatter bursts weaker.
5. A 3rd way to stealth (if you’re comparing against a 7Mirror Sword/Torch shatter tank).

Gaining:

1. Phantasms each have retaliation damage. (Not clones)
2. Phantasms each proc regen on nearby allies (doesn’t help you as much when you’re in staff mode) (Doesn’t work on clones).
3. An extra “automatic” condition cleanse as often as every 10 seconds depending on how close you can stay to your own phantasms. Possibly as long as every 20 seconds if you can’t stay close to your phantasms. (Clones won’t cleanse you.)
4. An extra 14 seconds of retaliation every 20 seconds from Sword 3 or Staff 2 through the Focus 4 Temporal Curtain. (Note that other shatter tank builds already have access to the X seconds of retaliation from using the F2 Shatter.)
5. Temporal curtain can reflect projectiles
6. Roughly 2K more health.
7. Larger heals.

My main concern here is how many of the “what you gain” benefits work only for your phantasms and not for your clones. My second concern is that in a shatter build of any sort, you are bursting your illusions very frequently, especially with the trait line that enables you to dodge more frequently and pump out clones to shatter with every dodge.

Not saying this is “bad” and I do intend to experiment with it, but on paper it seems like the survivability is roughly the same as for any of the other shatter tank builds (more health versus more decoys and more frequent/more powerful shatter burst). Sometimes the best defense is a strong damage burst. On the other hand, squeezing out an extra 200 vitality and bigger heals is certainly helpful in WvW.

Here is a good link to the OP’s build. You MUST copy and paste the TEXT of the link into a new browser tab. Don’t copy the link itself, because you’ll get the Anet obfuscated version if you do that. You can also get to his build with a non-obfuscated link by going to his video and looking at the extended description for the video. There’s a clean link there.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgUQNAW8dlwzSq3UzoGb9IhJF9G5nUA9lj6x2B/3B;T8AA1ytEaJ1StlSLqsMZJgymlLLZWrPGfsBB

Durzlla.6295:

shaktiboi.5194:

Chopps.5047:

Rangers have tons of combo finishers, stealth on knockdown, stealth on percent life damage, stealth from Juvenile Siamoth, as well as plenty of BLINDS and evades.

You lost legitimately to a good ranger BUT IT MUST BE CULLING! Lol, sorry, but you lost plain and simple

No. Sorry. All rangers have that can stealth are:

“Hide in Plain Sight”, which is on a 30-second CD.
Jaguar Pet’s special skill, which is also on a 30-second CD.

This guy was disappearing every 5-6 seconds, often for as long as 5 seconds at a time.

You forget: I play a L80 ranger.

Omg you clearly aren’t a good one then…

Siamoth, —-> forage —> feathers/tuft ---> stealth

Infiltrators runes (which are currently bugged to be CDless in PvE/dubs my ele friend stealthed at low health 6 times in the same fractal boss fight, which doesn’t take NEARLY as long as the CD would make it) —--> low health——> stealth

And as for his regen, that’s legit, I have a ranger build where I regen 1k health per second, it’s pretty fun to say the least….

And this entire post you have, sounds like BS, if you’re a lv 80 ranger main HOW THE kitten did you not notice what the guys pet was? You supposedly fought him for a long period of time and then -watch- him fight others for a long period of time yet don’t know what his pets are?

PS: d/d eles tend to call “hax” if anyone eats them because a lot of them seem to think d/d ele isn’t supposed to lose… Or at least that’s what I’ve discovered from sPvP

From the very first paragraph in the OP:

“He was definitely a ranger, probably with two canines given how they were functioning.”

As for the jaguar vs siamoth brainfart, I already explained that a few posts up from yours.

You guys do know that all Blind does in WvW is make the next attack miss, right? It doesn’t actually make the character who uses Blind disappear from sight.

Only “Stealth” and “Invisibility” effects make you disappear from sight of other players. The “Blind” effect simply makes attacks whiff, but you can still see the other player.

Relair.1843:

shaktiboi.5194:

Chopps.5047:

Rangers have tons of combo finishers, stealth on knockdown, stealth on percent life damage, stealth from Juvenile Siamoth, as well as plenty of BLINDS and evades.

You lost legitimately to a good ranger BUT IT MUST BE CULLING! Lol, sorry, but you lost plain and simple

No. Sorry. All rangers have that can stealth are:

“Hide in Plain Sight”, which is on a 30-second CD.
Jaguar Pet’s special skill, which is also on a 30-second CD.

This guy was disappearing every 5-6 seconds, often for as long as 5 seconds at a time.

You forget: I play a L80 ranger.

You do know the siamoth pet gives you 2 different stealths right? As well as infiltrator runes as someone already said. And the trait to stealth when incapacitated. Its conceivable that a ranger could have a stealth every 20-25seconds. Not saying this guy isnt hacking or something but if in the heat of battle you thought it was more frequent than it was that might be an explanation. Hit troll unguent then siamoth stealth, come back full health. Repeat with hide in plain sight next time he got knocked down or something. Then do the trolls/siamoth stealth again. Then if you almost kill him the runes would kick in for more stealth, etc. Could even switch to one of the other pigs that could forage an extra heal and a short invuln buff to make it seem even more hax-ish.

Okay, I’ll say it again. The guy was vanishing literally every 5-6 seconds. Not perception error in the heat of battle. As I lay there dead with my partner, we watched him for another minute and a half while two other people from our side continued to try to take him down. Every 5-6 seconds. I was timing it calmly while dead.

Siamoth pet? The forage results are random and he can forage only on a 40-second cooldown. Yes, I mixed up Siamoth with Jaguar above, since i use neither regularly. So: every 40 seconds, you have a 66% chance of getting a stealth effect when you use the Siamoth’s special effect.

Look, I’m not the only one here who has reported seeing non-theif characters somehow vanishing from sight (and losing target lock ala stealth) roughly every 5-6 seconds. I figured it was just culling from a skill like Hornet Sting and came here to check. I appreciate the well-intended “rangers have lots of ways to stealth” but that’s not a legit stealth from legit ranger skills I was seeing. It’s really that simple. It’s either culling from from normal ranger skill (like Hornet Sting) or it’s a hack. Pure and simple. Unless Anet goofed in a recent patch and in fact those two spy kit consumables are actually working in WvW right now.

Chopps.5047:

Rangers have tons of combo finishers, stealth on knockdown, stealth on percent life damage, stealth from Juvenile Siamoth, as well as plenty of BLINDS and evades.

You lost legitimately to a good ranger BUT IT MUST BE CULLING! Lol, sorry, but you lost plain and simple

No. Sorry. All rangers have that can stealth are:

“Hide in Plain Sight”, which is on a 30-second CD.
Jaguar Pet’s special skill, which is also on a 30-second CD.

This guy was disappearing every 5-6 seconds, often for as long as 5 seconds at a time.

You forget: I play a L80 ranger.

Sol.4310:

Sounds like it was a thief, remember there are runes that summon pets. Or even better it was 2 guys and one was using potions to turn into a pet. And they tricked ya

No, sorry. Thief cannot wield GS (nor sword/torch), and the certainly cannot display signature GS “wings”, etc.

Edit: Dulfy’s guide says this potion and its similar “Legion spy kit” are not usable in sPvP or WvW. So that’s not it. Unless somebody figured out a hack that turns off the flag that should prevent these from being used in dubs? Or unless Dulfy is wrong? Or perhaps at one point they were unusable, but a more recent patch made them usable in Dubs (whether intended by Anet or not).

Brett.4305:

Can “Order of Whispers Spy Kit” Soulbound consumable work in WvW and/or PvP ?
I have two dozen and use them in PvE to break aggro but I never take my ranger PvP.

If there’s no CD on successive use of these, then perhaps that is a legit way to achieve what I saw. They supposedly provide stealth for 3s and Confusion to targets within 120 range for 3s.

I did see some confusion symbols appearing but being a mesmer, most of the time I’m the one causing them.

For 16c apiece, this could be a useful weapon in one’s arsenal, if it truly works in dubs and if it has no cooldown. That’s 1.6s for 10x of them. 1.6g for 100x of them. Too price for some folks, but for others, thats a reasonable expense to walk around with roughly ~100 of these at any given time.

Of course, you’d have to resize your inventory window as small as possible to make it possible to click one when you need it…

Rengaru.4730:

The followup skill of Hornet Sting (Monarch’s Leap) is a leap finisher.
If there was a Thief or Engineer around he could have used smoke fields to stealth.

But it seems a little strange from what you’ve described, even if you consider that.

It was definitely just one person.

Maguuma vs Borlis Pass vs I can’t remember, lol.

This afternoon me and my partner and two other people were chasing down a ranger in dubs. He was definitely a ranger, probably with two canines given how they were functioning. He was using Greatsword and Sword/Torch.

First, he was constantly healing to full despite massive incoming burst damage. I’m a GS/Staff mesmer in all Knight’s gear, and my partner is a Power D/D Necro with seriously high damage output and siphoning.

Second, he was regularly disappearing and reappearing, causing us to lose target lock (and often relock on his pet). I’m talking every 6-ish seconds, he’s just not there for about 3-4 seconds. And then he’s back, and he’s moved position.

Usually he’d come back with full health. It was insane; I’ve never seen anything like it.

After he nickel and dimed down me and my partner who were trying furiously to burst him down before he had a chance to poof again, we sat there dead and watched him repeat on two other scrappers from our side who went through what we did. One of them was a D/D Ele using all the standard tactics. I don’t know what the other player was. At one point, after the Ele had spent more than 3 minutes trying to nail the guy (who is still miraculously at full health most of the time and not running away from the Ele: just disappearing and reappearing a lot) the Ele said “hax”, which is what got me wondering…

I’ve never seen anything like the teleport farmers or similar hacks in dubs, but maybe I’ve just been lucky? I looked up the one tool that the bots seem to be using for teleport harvesting, and it advertises a “god mode” and an “invisibility”.

But assuming he/she wasn’t hacking, the only thing I could think of was that maybe Hornet Sting is known to cause culling issues? That’s usable about every 6 seconds, so it might fight, but I could swear I saw him/her disappearing even when using GS moves so I dunno. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Oh, one other thing. I play an 80 ranger in PvE, and I use SB + Axe/Torch in that context. I know how torch works inside out and why you’d have one. That ranger defintely was using sword/torch as one of his weapon sets, but he never, ever once laid down a torch4 or torch5. I would know exactly what they’d look like.

Another guild event tonight. Four of us, all level 80, running around in Malchor’s Leap and Straits of Devestation looking for orichalcum nodes and ancient wood nodes. Killing everything our path, constantly roaming, never staying in one spot.

This time I was rocking my pure MF warrior. All Explorers armor, all Opal jewelry, 5x Runes of Pirate, 1x Rune of Traveler, Peach Tarts. That’s +104 MF total.

Four of us, 90 minutes, and ZERO yellow drops for any of us. Not one single yellow.

I keep posting reports like this and they are the same every single time. Since Nov. 15 when you instituted the code that finally put a dent in the overland bot farming groups, the drop rate has gone through the toilet.

Really, now that Colin has not addressed this issue even obliquely in his big blog entry today, will someone PLEASE come here and say something about this situation? It’s terrible.

You wonder why Orr is empty? Because the return on time is TERRIBLE. It used to be fine before Nov 15. A group like mine, doing an event like this for 90 minutes, and we’d EACH walk away with 2-4 yellows guaranteed. Even that was stingy, but at least it made the time investment worth it.

Aproposs Of Fire.4056:

ANet post about 30 minutes ago:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Where-s-the-Scavenger-Hunt-post/1190541

ColinJohanson.2394:

Hey guys,

Just a quick update on where the whole scavenger hunt system stands since I know that’s a topic many of you have brought up recently. We’re not currently actively working on building any sort of legendary precursor scavenger hunt, this is something we want to do in the future and we’re in the midst of designing how this would function, but no one is actively building this feature and you should not expect in the Jan/Feb/March releases at this point.

We are however working on expanding reward systems to make them more re-rewarding across all parts of the game, making the open world more rewarding, and adding new ways you can earn precursors as rewards via new reward systems taking advantage of our open persistent world.

Some of these additions will come as early as the January release, and will get covered in more detail in the next week or two as well release all the details about this release once testing has signed off it’s all ready to go in January. (we’ll also provide a high level summary of our goals with reward systems, etc. in our 2013 blog post, which should be out next week)

Unfortunately, this new system they’re talking about has zero to do with the matter at hand in this thread. It’s a new system for a different thing. It’s not addressing the concerns of this thread at all.

Last night me and two other guildmates went to Cursed Shore for some ori/ancient hunting. All three of us rocking around +75 MF each from Pirate/Traveler Runes + Peach Tart buffs plus Karka Earrings, etc.

Three of us, 90 minutes, sweeping through Cursed shore looking for ori or ancient nodes, killing EVERYTHING in our path. Stopping to do any DEs we run across, even trying (unsuccessfully) to liberate a cathedral with maybe 3-4 other players who happened along. We easily killed more than 250+ enemies during that 90 minutes.

Among the three of us, we got ONE yellow in total. Not one each: one TOTAL. Maybe three greens each. That’s it.

Before the Lost Shores event, we could do the exact same thing and walk away with 3-4 yellows each. Consistently. Night after night.

You fixed the bots to some degree, but you nerfed all of us legitimate players in the process. I cannot believe you don’t have the data to prove/see/understand this and identify the root cause. It’s plain as day to my entire guild. To many people. There is an exact correlation between the disappearance of the overland bots back around the Lost Shores time frame and the nerfing of drop rates for all of us. The fact that you do not dialog with us on this issue is incredibly frustrating and disheartening.

What’s really ironic is that you haven’t really stopped botting and gold farming at all. They just use a teleport hack that is easily found and widely available. We see these bots appear at a node we’re pulling up to ALL THE TIME. You haven’t stopped the farmers; you’ve only penalized and demoralized your legitimate player base.

My spouse just proclaimed that “there’s no longer any point in soloing in this game” and she’s walking away from all playtime except for group events or possibly duoing with me to level up alts that haven’t hit 80 yet.

Why this sudden proclamation from someone who has 6 levels 80s, more than 1000+ hours in /age, and has from launch until now averaged 4 hours per day or more?

Because she went into Brigid’s Overlook this morning, one of her true dependable spots to feel like she’s making progress, and after getting one yellow and two greens within 15 minutes, the drops literally stopped. Not just bumped down to white trash with the occasional blues (like in so many other places), but literally everything stopped dropping.

For those who don’t know, Brigid’s Overlook requires a wee bit of work to get into, and it used to be a consistent source for jewelry components. You could farm the golems there for 30 minutes (about all you can take before getting bored and needing to move on) and walk away with a fair number of gem shards (and lower variants). You also stood a good chance of seeing greens on a regular basis, and about 2 yellows per hour.

She’s spent as much as an hour at a time in there in the past, with NO decline in drop rate.

Today, it was clearly apparent that anti-farming code had kicked in within 15 minutes, and she was getting zilch for the hard work of keeping up with the Veteran respawn rate in there as a solo player.

Again, Anet, are you trying to encourage people to buy 50g for $10 and 100g for $20 from Chinese farming outfits? If so, keep up the horrible work.

If not, then get your best people looking at this problem because you are killing the game for many of us.

Here’s what I wonder: Does your DR code somehow flag multiple accounts playing from the same source IP address as potential farming bots? And therefore kick in some DR code against those accounts?

A pattern I see in these threads is that spouses who play GW2 together or households with multiple accounts seem to be the ones reporting a noticable decrease in drop rates across the board.

One other thing I’ve noticed as a distinct drop in just the past 4 weeks: I used to be able to salvage 10 yellow level 80 items with a BLACK LION salvage kit and average 2 ectos per item. That means I’d get, on average, 20 ectos per 10 items salvaged.

Lately? The return rate is more like 11-12 ectos. That’s making me want to stop buying Black Lion salvage kits.

Honestly, if you want to keep the demand for Chinese gold sellers down, you need to increase the drop rate both of yellows and of ectos when salvaged. The temptation to pay $20 for roughly 100 gold is pretty kitten high when the best exchange rate you can get in the honest way is 1.5 gold per 100 gems, and when the effectively drop rate on sellable ectos is so kitten low these past two months.

whipplerama.3692:

Sligh.2789:

IMHO, play the game instead of farming the hell out of one area, you will be rewarded.

If only.

Leamas.5803:

This seems to help some, but not others. I’ve never been much of a farmer as I don’t do well with a great deal of repetition. However, even moving around zones, doing random events, killing everything, deer, spiders, rats, rabbits, etc, I still get mostly vendor junk. Other than a few events I like, which I might do a couple times if I happen to be in the area, the only time I usually repeat events is if the event failed, which should not trigger DR IMO. I’ve said this a number of times…I’ll take the bots back any day over the current state of the loot system/TP.

Exactly. For the past two and a half months, I have done nothing but map completion on several characters. I clear a map, and move on to the next. No dawdling, no farming. Since I’m usually solo, I get a good amount of kills doing hearts, de’s, vets, champs, whatever. My drops are abysmal, all the time. Across three 80’s and one almost 80, and about 900+ hours since bwe1, I have yet to see an exotic or lodestone drop. Hell, I’ve only had one core drop. I’m lucky if I see 2 dyes a week. Seeing a green drop these days gets me excited. I wish I was kidding.

When I was leveling my 80’s, my bags would need to be emptied multiple times while on the same map. Now, I can get through several maps without needing to see a vendor. The difference is huge. My spouse, also doing map completion the past two months, has noticed a loot nerf in general, but still receives drops better and more often than I. He can’t even believe how awful my drops have been for so long. In fact, when I first noticed & mentioned this issue to him back in November, he had no idea what I was talking about. So whatever the problem ( and there IS a problem) it’s affecting everyone differently. And it makes no sense.

I’ve dealt with it all this time, but I grow weary. Knowing that while I’m playing and getting not much of anything, plenty of people have no issue and are raking in the mats, the exotics, and gold. And I fall further and further behind. It makes me sad, I wanted this game to be all that.

Right now I feel like I can ignore the game as long as they ignore there’s a problem. The steam sale was awesome.

This. This is EXACTLY the experience of myself and my spouse. We are fairly frequent gamers logging at least 2-6 hours per day in the game. She has 6 level 80 characters by now. I have 4 and nearly a 5th. We rotate our characters, we roll through different zones. We don’t spend too much time in any one zone or any one area within a zone. Maybe we’ll linger for about 20 minutes at the Hyleks in Cursed Shore because we’re always low on Powerful Venom Sacs, but seriously, that’s the longest we stay in any one spot. Mostly we’re just combining the landscape looking for Oricalchum and Ancient Wood nodes, killing EVERYTHING in our path, and stopping to join every nearby dynamic event.

Which is exactly how randomly you want us to play, correct? This is not farming: this is just running around the world, constantly moving, and playing the game as designed.

And we get total kitten for yellow drops. Seriously, we can run for 3 hours straight and not get one single yellow drop. Exotic drops? Please: it never happens. Our bags will not fill completely, not even close to it, with even vendor trash.

It doesn’t matter whether we run around in Cursed Shore or Frostgorge or some lower level zone. There is some DR code affecting us globally, across all characters, regardless of where we are. It’s obvious. The drop rate has been especially kitten for us like this in a hugely noticeable fashion for at least the past 6-8 weeks. Before that it was MUCH better.

I am seriously disappointed that I cannot get into toypocalypse with a 5-person premade of my own guildmates. FAIL. Please fix this.

Sylvanwood.2746:

One solution is to drag one of the gravelings from the room outside into the room and let it kill Detha. After reviving Detha, path 2 should progress as normal.

Unfortunately, this does not always work.

And, um (making fun of the folks who say “just kill all the mobs, you lazy kittens!”), if you actually kill all the gravelings and jellies before bringing Detha into that room, you have nothing you can drag to her to even attempt this workaround.

Hmm. Chicken or Egg? Robert, are you reading this? How about a different fix than the one you’re mulling over, which is to simply lock the door to the turret room until after the oozes are all killed. What if you do that and we still run into this extremely common bug?

Just adding my two bits that I strongly dislike and am very disappointed by “time pressure” jumping puzzles. That’s not fun, nor creative. You forget that many MMOers play MMOs because they don’t have twitch reflexes in the first place. And you also forget that lag makes such puzzles essentially impossible for some people.

Please stop making jumping puzzles like these.

ZeroArmada.9426:

This seemed to be the ONLY thing missing, but we couldn’t hit it no matter what we did. Or am I wrong?

That thing in the screenshot is not smashable.

My group just got the achievement a few minutes ago. 3 of us got a visual notification; 2 of us didn’t. But when we looked in our Achievement log, we did have the achievement. Maybe check your log?

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Thanks for reporting those issues. Detha’s problem is certainly involved with the oozes and her scripting, and I will go in again to to try and tighten that up a bit. I’m considering just making it so that the gate won’t open until the oozes are dead because it sounds like problems are caused when trying to skip that mob.

This would effectively increase the time for an AC #2 run by 5-10 minutes or more, and potentially incur additional repair costs for players who can’t avoid the scavenger pounces (in the hallway just before the stairs up to the oozes). These are just trash mob encounters. Remember, most players after the first time just want to complete the run as fast as possible, get their 60 tokens and 26 silver, and head to the next, different exp path they plan to farm in that session.

Is there no other way to fix this bug with Detha?

I have not purchased a single black lion key, nor any Gemstore chest from any event. And I never will.

Did I buy the Halloween minipet pack? Yep. You bet.
Did I buy the Halloween, Consortium, or now Winter chests! Nope. See above.

Would I have purchased several lost shores minipet packs to have some to trade in the Mystic forge for a more rare lost shores pet? Yep, you betcha.

Would I have purchased several Halloween weapon skins (permanent ones)? Yep, you betcha.

Would I have purchased several winters day festive minipet packs to get all of them plus the baby quaggan? Yep, you betcha.

So right now, Anet has already lost oh, say, at least 20-40 dollars in revenue that I would have gladly handed them. Do they really have enough “whales” who will buy lottery scratch-off tickets to make up for all the rational players like myself who see those scratch-off tickets as a total ripoff for zero value, and a waste of good money?

BTW if you want to stop groups from skipping trash mobs/encounters, the answer is dirt simple: all mobs (not just the lieuts) should have a noticeably high chance to drop yellow items (level 70+) and to drop 5 dungeon tokens. Ectos and tokens—lots of them—are the only incentive that will work 100% across the board. If each member of te group has a chance to score on average 5 yellow weapons to salvage (or sell) and 20-30 extra dungeon tokens just by killing everything in sight, well, then and only then will you have groups actually choosing to kill everything in sight and not trying to clear their 60 guaranteed tokens and 26 silver as fast as possible so they can move on to the next exp path.

People will skip as many mobs as possible, your scripts should assume this. Ifmyou can’t fix the scripts to deal with this, then make the rewards FAR better for dealing with all the trash.

The goal for most exp path dungeon groups is the 60 tokens and the silver payout at the end. That’s it. Everything that can be skipped, will,be skipped because even the small incremental reward update you did for the likes of Kohler, etc. are still kitten and not worth the time.

For AC Path 2 specifically, it’s common strategy for most groups to stop fighting in the spike trap room at the very moment that the big brood mother dies, and the entire group runs past the chest, up the ramp to the left (leashing all remaining gravelings), across the top of the center where Kholer is, and fight the small patrol at the north of Kohler.

Then the group runs past the gravelings, up the stairs, past the oozes, and tries to get the gravelings and oozes to leash and/or fight each other, staying to the left of the big room as they enter. After it’s clear that the oozes and gravelings will no longer be an issue, the group walks Detha towards the orange slice and hopes that she will start the turret stuff.

And she rarely does, unless you were able to kill the Breeder on the very first try in the spike trap room. If you have to try a second time, you’re kittened and Detha will probably not start the turrets.

Osculim.2983:

Hi folks so i have a couple of classes at lvl80 now and are planning on my next class to level and yes i like the whole questing to 80 experience. I was looking at the thief as my next one but have a question. Are they fun ? what sort of builds do you guys run and how do they perform in dungeons

thanx in advance

They are a fun class, IMO, because they require more skill to build and play successfully. There is more risk involved than say, with a mesmer or warrior or guardian or ranger. Learn to love D/D and SB for your weapon sets. Experiment with S/P instead of D/D (players tend to fall into the D/D camp or the S/P camp).

Once you get the hang of the class, I think you’ll find that fighting is very fluid and engaging.

Tips:

1. Always trait for 15 points in the top row (Lotus Poison) so that your dagger 1 and SB 4 skills will perma-weaken your target.

2. Always trait for 15 points of baseline initiative and +1 initiative on crit. Avoid the 7% chance to gain 1 initiative on weapon’s #1 autoattack, though, because that’s not very much initiative +regen in reality.

3. Steal as often as possible, and get Roll for Initiative as soon as possible and always keep that one on your bar regardless of what you’re doing.

4. Death Blossom is uber. Learn to love it.

5. Always save enough initiative for Heartseeker spam when the target hits 30% health, and never use Heartseeker until then.

My build after many hours of trial and error:

15 – I
20 – VI III
0
20 – III VII
15 – V

There is one other element to the picture that nobody has mentioned yet. You need enough base health to survive a big one-hit that you didn’t foresee, or fumbled your dodge timing, or in some rare cases, you get yanked in by an unavoidable pull from the boss or whatever.

In such cases, if you’re running with only 12000 health, you will be insta-downed from that one shot. If you’re running with 16000 to 17000 health, you’ll survive many such big hits that would otherwise have downed you outright.

So my modification to the above sentiments are:

1. You need enough vitality to have 16000 to 17000 HP as a baseline (at level 80).
2. After achieving #1, the preceding rules of thumb apply. And IMO the specific rule that applies is “more toughness at this point, because each additional point of toughness makes your heals relatively more powerful”.

I guess what I’m getting at is that the mechanics observation that “toughness doesn’t help against condition damage” is potentially misleading, as some posters above have tried to explain.

All that really counts is having enough baseline vitality to: A) Survive one-hits that would otherwise down you outright, and B) Give you enough time to react to heavy condition damage (via condition removal and/or running away from the source of the conditions). After you’ve achieved that baseline amount of vitality, from that point onward more toughness helps you far more than more vitality. It’s really that simple.

Warriors, for example, have such a high natural HP pool that they universally choose to focus on as much toughness as possible (assuming they understand the mechanics correctly). With Thieves, Guardians, and other classes that have incredibly low base HP pools, it’s a different story: they have to tweak their gear to ensure a baseline HP of ideally 17000 or slightly over, and only then add as much additional toughness as possible.

And on a different tangent, back to the OP, I disagree with the finding that Sword auto-attack is clearly better. Everyone using D/D will attack exactly as shown in the top spot in your findings chart: Dagger 1 switching to HS spam at 30%. In plain terms, that means perma-weaken + 7% higher crit rate while you micro-position during Dagger 1 spam, followed by serious beatdown once they’re at 30%. HS spam is cheap and you’d be stupid NOT to use it at 30%.

Deepsky.6083:

Krathalos.3461:

Sword main hand is our best melee PvE option, hands down. If you’re built for it, S/P can be a good support weapon. Otherwise, S/D can keep you alive while still dealing good damage. Flanking Strike is unreliable in PvP, but in PvE, it’s a hard hitting dodge ability with no cool down.

Before the recent nerf, S/D was also considered to be one of our best duelist builds, since it could keep the enemy daze-locked if done perfectly, while providing utility.

Thinking Infiltrator’s Strike is bad is just silly, though. It’s quite possibly one of the best skills in the game, and it has no cooldown to boot. I don’t think it even matters for the Break Stun to work (it seems to work on knockdowns, but nothing else for me). It’s still a 5 initiative cost, 600 range distance closer that can also be used as a 1200 range return back to where you used it. It also removes a condition upon return.

I mean seriously, if anyone thinks it’s bad, all I can really think is that you are. It’s like a mini Shadowstep, which is our best utility skill.

I actually just laugh at DPS thieves in PvE whenever they use D/D. All they can do is help on one enemy. That’s more of a hindrance than anything. I’d much rather have someone in my party who can deal AoE damage and actually contribute more than just DPS. Sword – with either Pistol or Dagger offhand – can contribute this with DPS.

You guys are comparing PvP for weapon combinations. Fact of the matter is some will be better in PvP than in PvE, and that is definitely the case with Dagger and Sword.

there’s a skill called death blossom

This. With your traits set up to maximize your initiative regen rate and to start with a baseline 15 initiative, you can usually do 4 Death Blossoms in a row before you need to use either Steal or RFI to refresh more initiative.

A D/D thief traited to 15 in the top row can be 100% perma-weakening the boss with Dagger 1 chain (and thereby probably sitting on max or near-max initiative), and when adds come can simply spin off 3-4 DBs in a row, tagging all the adds (and the boss) with 9-12 bleed stacks, then steal back to the boss and resume the perma-weaken spam. And Death Blossom is a hugely wide AOE. And it heals you for a ton if you’re built to heal on attack. DB does 3 hits per mob, so how many potenial self-heals is that at 100+ per heal?

Finally, RFI is nearly as useful as Infiltrator’s Strike for getting out of trouble. It’s easy to goof your IS and not really get as far away as you need to. RFI is 100% reliable and will move you very far away from the target and the center of the fight. It will also 100% reliably stun-break, which IS is not reliable at doing. Need condition removal? Put a superior signet of Purity on your off-hand dagger. Fixed. Now you effectively have automatic single-condition removal every 10 seconds.

Laugh at that.

Now, I’m not saying S/x is “bad”. But you’re waisting utility on it. D/D gives you just as much AOE potential if not more because Death Blossom is fire-and-forget on all the adds other than your main target, and it’s easy to refresh the DB bleed stacks occasionally. The main reason for D/D, in my opinion, is the perma-weaken from your dagger #1 chain. That is priceless in ALL situations. Perma-weaken effectively you are giving yourself a +25% damage lead in the damage race. That’s huge. And AFAIK, only thieves have this ability to perma-weaken. No other class does.

I’ll note that my warrior uses Axe/x in much the same way that a thief would use S/x. With enough micro-positioning during battle it’s pretty easy to keep a cluster of foes within your 180 cone. The difference is that Axe 2 and Axe 3 are both very useful utility skills, whereas Thieve’s Sword 2 and Sword 3 are crap. Okay, I’ll grant that some people like Sword 2, but I find it unreliable and too expensive, and it hampers true mobility. It’s a one-trick pony. I’d rather have full control over my own movement and positioning rather than being anchored to an invisible rubber-band point.

Deepsky.6083:

Krathalos.3461:

Sword main hand is our best melee PvE option, hands down. If you’re built for it, S/P can be a good support weapon. Otherwise, S/D can keep you alive while still dealing good damage. Flanking Strike is unreliable in PvP, but in PvE, it’s a hard hitting dodge ability with no cool down.

Before the recent nerf, S/D was also considered to be one of our best duelist builds, since it could keep the enemy daze-locked if done perfectly, while providing utility.

Thinking Infiltrator’s Strike is bad is just silly, though. It’s quite possibly one of the best skills in the game, and it has no cooldown to boot. I don’t think it even matters for the Break Stun to work (it seems to work on knockdowns, but nothing else for me). It’s still a 5 initiative cost, 600 range distance closer that can also be used as a 1200 range return back to where you used it. It also removes a condition upon return.

I mean seriously, if anyone thinks it’s bad, all I can really think is that you are. It’s like a mini Shadowstep, which is our best utility skill.

I actually just laugh at DPS thieves in PvE whenever they use D/D. All they can do is help on one enemy. That’s more of a hindrance than anything. I’d much rather have someone in my party who can deal AoE damage and actually contribute more than just DPS. Sword – with either Pistol or Dagger offhand – can contribute this with DPS.

You guys are comparing PvP for weapon combinations. Fact of the matter is some will be better in PvP than in PvE, and that is definitely the case with Dagger and Sword.

there’s a skill called death blossom

This. With your traits set up to maximize your initiative regen rate and to start with a baseline 15 initiative, you can usually do 4 Death Blossoms in a row before you need to use either Steal or RFI to refresh more initiative.

A D/D thief traited to 15 in the top row can be 100% perma-weakening the boss with Dagger 1 chain (and thereby probably sitting on max or near-max initiative), and when adds come can simply spin off 3-4 DBs in a row, tagging all the adds (and the boss) with 9-12 bleed stacks, then steal back to the boss and resume the perma-weaken spam. And Death Blossom is a hugely wide AOE. And it heals you for a ton if you’re built to heal on attack. DB does 3 hits per mob, so how many potenial self-heals is that at 100+ per heal? And on top of all that, you EVADE EVERYTHING while you’re lawn-mowering around with DB.

Laugh at that.

Assuming you’ve geared/built yourself with enough base HP so that you can survive a big one-hit and dodge/RFI away to fix yourself up (Around 16000-17000 health), then I’ve had great luck with D/D and Shortbow as my two weapon sets for Boss fights. Oh, and you must have 15 points in the top line for Lotus Poison to get the “poison also applies weakness” trait.

Start from ranged and drop the poison field with shortbow while running in. Then use steal to get in melee range and death blossom a few times to get some bleed stacks. If the boss isn’t mad at you, stay behind him and autoattack with dagger 1 to keep him poisoned and weakened. Know when to dodge/RFI away to avoid PBAOE. Just jink in and out trying to keep as much poison/weakness on him with either Dagger 1 or Bow 4. Steal as often as possible. Death Blossom periodically to keep some bleed stacks on. Run away when you get in trouble. Shadow Refuge is of course very useful both for yourself and teammates.

Halagaz.6085:

You should be able to begin and finish them whenever you feel like it, i play mmo since 1998 and im’ from the old school. I don’t see why you should put a quantity of time. We used to be able to go into a dungeon, party in our way deep inside and leavev when we feel like it, it was the good time i guess.

This is ideal for me too. Asheron’s Call 1, for example. The dungeons were just “there”. You got in as deep as you could manage and for as long as you wanted. The deeper in you got, the more chance of good loot. Have to go suddenly? No problem.

Failing that ideal case, then 20-30 minutes MAX. And no more than 45 minutes to “learn” a dungeon.

Best. MMO. Ever. Thank you, Anet.

(Although I really truly despise aspects of your cash shop; as I’m sure most players do. I will never buy anything that is a gamble, like Black Lion Keys, Consortium Chests, Mini Packs, etc. But I’ll gladly throw money at you if you offer me compelling things to buy. I already have thrown a lot of money at you for truly useful things such as BL Salvage kits, Transmutation Stones, extra inventory slots, extra bank slots, etc. How about you sell me a permanent Black Lion Trader outright? I’d pay for that. And so on.

Truly, your visionary in charge of the cash shop is IMO doing your more harm than good. I know pricing science is tricksy stuff—I work in pricing science—but really some of the cash shop stuff seems penny wise and pound foolish. And greedy. Are you running segmentation models to understand your segments’ buying behavior? More importantly, is some person other than the one in charge of the Cash Shop running those analyses? Who watches the watcher here?)

AKGator.9175:

If you put runes on armor or sigils on weapons they become account bound. I’m not sure that’s the case every time but I have seen it a lot.

Nope, that’s what happened. Thanks.

No one else has encountered this same problem?

I just crafted 6 rare level 80 weapons after the makeover kits patch today, and they all act account bound. Can’t email them and can’t put them in guild bank.

Ritualist.5380:

I’ll probably be flamed for this, but it must be said Imo. The problem is skipping mobs, but not in an appropriate manner. There are groups in AC exp that even skip Kholer (not sure why you’d wanna do that to begin with).

You do a dungeon the first time for exploration, fun, achievement. If you do it again after that, your only reason is farming for tokens and 26s. If you can clear an explorable path in 15-30 minutes and gain 60 tokens, why on earth would you consciously double that time (and potentially increased repair costs) for so little gain? Especially when Kohler is such a terrible fight with bad mechanics to begin with? There’s challenging; and then there’s cheap. Kohler is cheap: not challenging. I’m not going to rehash why, because that argument has been done to death already by the player base.

So why bother with trash mobs and terrible, unfun minibosses like Kohler for a mere 3 extra tokens and “up to” 4s? Not worth the time. In that same amount of time, you could have cleared a different exp path for another 60 tokens and 26s.

It’s that simple.

After spending one morning trying three times with more than a dozen other players to get Arah unlocked, I must agree. Especially with the draw of the new fractals, there just isn’t enough critical mass of players to keep most of the cathedrals and Arah unlocked and unconstested except possibly during primetime evening hours. And quite often not even then except for some very small time windows.

My guild finds common time for dungeon runs more often on weekend mornings USA time. We’ll probably never get to do Arah to finish even our story modes, let alone actually farm it for tokens/gear.

Rangers and necros were already less-favored classes for dungeons (in the minds of most PUGs and many static groups) because of pet issues and because necro dark fields are overall less useful than fire/water/light fields, and not many players understand the consequences of field overwrites.

But this change from the November 15 patch notes has gone largely unnoticed, IMO. I’m here to bring more visibility to this change and hopefully spur some discussion:

Many skills, items, and traits were applying healing to an infinite amount of targets and have now been limited to 5 targets.

What this means in plain language is this quote taken from another forum poster here in another context from a Warrior forum thread. In that thread, someone asked the random question whether anyone else had noticed that not all party members were being healed by shout heals.

The limiting of healing was actually directly aimed at WvW because aoe dps was limited to 5 at a time which allowed tightly stacked groups to completely out heal aoe damage from an equal amount of people and even more than equal amount. It gave stacking on otp of one another the advantage of render issues and relative invulnerability.

All aoes damage, heal, boon or otherwise should now apply to only 5 things at a time. Things can consist of human players, pets and other npcs and are determined entirely by proximity to the casting point.

To kick off the discussion, I have one observation and one question (to Anet):

1. This change will really hurt the desirability of ranger and necros even more once it’s widely noticed by the player pop.

2. Why on earth isn’t this change constrained to affect only the PvP environment? Nobody was “abusing” AOE heals/effects in this manner in general PvE.

Warskull.3096:

Actually the graveling burrows were finally fixed. It took about 2.5 months but they finally fixed them. Melee can actually hit them while standing still.

However, there are so many problem with dungeons right now. Currently 5 paths are genuinely bugged. CoE 1, SE 1/2, and Arah 1/2. Three of these bugs are flat out run enders. SE can be powered through, although it isn’t worth your time.

Other paths vary from poorly designed to very poorly designed. A big part of the reason people shouted no end game was because so many of the dungeons were broken and so many people end up just repeating AC as a result over and over.

AC 2 (Detha) is also consistently bugged with a brick wall progress stopper: if you don’t kill the breeder in the spike trap room on the first try, you are hosed and just wasted X amount of time. Detha will not start the turret repair sequence if you fail to ace the Breeder encounter on the first attempt.

Yep. Still skipping Kohler because that measly reward is not worth the time and stress dealing with him.

Just tried AC 2 (Detha) with a guild group. Only 3 of us got the Bag of Wondrous Goods for killing the Spider Queen.

And Detha still bugs out if the Breeder isn’t killed in the spike traps on the first try. Seriously, we’re at at 70% failure rate due to Detha bugging out and failing to start the turret room if you do not ace the Breeder-trap kill on the very first attempt. We’re going to stop even attempting this path any more until we hear that this bug is squashed.

Agreed. No point in going there unless you need/want passionfruit.

Yes. With at least a 254-char comment to describe your LFG status, and ability to filter by dungeon, etc.

Even as a level 24 I got two level 80 exotic items: the earring and the 20-slot bag, and they’re account-bound so I got two very nice prizes I can give to one of my 80s.

Diviner.7405:

JungleNin.8379:

shaktiboi.5194:

Name one melee-centric class that doesn’t have at least a 900 ranged option or two or three.

If you get confused, stop hitting and kite until the confusion wears off.

You’re welcome.

Thief.

Lol, owned

Lol, not. P/P = 900 range plus full time blindness. SB = 900 range and full-time weakness with Lotus Poison trait. And scorpion wire = 1200 range if two drakes are too close together and you want to split pull one without social-aggroing the other.

JungleNin.8379:

shaktiboi.5194:

Name one melee-centric class that doesn’t have at least a 900 ranged option or two or three.

If you get confused, stop hitting and kite until the confusion wears off.

You’re welcome.

Thief.

Nonsense. I play a thief as one of my 80 mains, both for soloing in Orr and for dungeon running. Pistols have 900 range and Scorpion Wire has 1200 range. I had no problem fighting reef drakes solo with my thief.

Name one melee-centric class that doesn’t have at least a 900 ranged option or two or three.

If you get confused, stop hitting and kite until the confusion wears off.

You’re welcome.