Guild Wars 2

Cosmic Teapot.9162:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi-8NymXOtU

I like how the Warrior popped frenzy just when the burst started.

Druitt.7629:

sorrow.2364:

Warriors can easily get that amount of HP, armor and attack while having also heavy armor (better damage reduction).

You make it sound as if there are actually different qualities of armor. As far as I can tell, Heavy Armor simply has higher armor values. So if a cloth-wearer and a plate-wearer both have 10,000 armor and 2,000 toughness, they are have exactly the same mitigation.

Or was this just a typo?

But, while having the same toughness, and bonus toughness cap is the same across all professions, not counting traits (in which Necromancers are inferiors anyway), Warriors still have an extra damage reduction of about 200 toughness compared to clothies. I’ve read somewhere it is 9%+ extra damage reduction on 1800 toughness (900 bonus toughness).
Plus, warriors have access to shield, which is another toughness booster.

HyDraLiNsK.2470:

Look dude I never said the trait was god like or that you needed to have it. The argument was that the OP said it would never proc because we don’t have enough multiple target abilities which is absurd. I agree 100% our traits need work but if you’re going to complain complain legitimately. And minor traits are just that, Minor. They are secondary traits which are meant to be a little tiny “bonus” if you will. Not something that is supposed to dramatically impact your character.

Frankly, I’d be more upset that a ranger’s major trait slot is wasted by that than I would be the fact it’s a minor for a necro.

Actually, having those kind of things as a Minor trait is far worse than having as a Major trait, because if they were a Major, you aren’t forced to pick that trait you don’t want, you don’t need or is completely worthless.
Actually, most Minor traits are incredibly useful as many other professions put points just to get that Minor trait. We have also good minor trait, like Furious Demise, Last Gasp and other professions have way better minor traits, like Inspired Virtue (Virtues), Zephyr’s Speed (Air Magic), Arcane Fury (Arcana), Illusionists Celerity (Illusions), Vengeful Images (Inspiration) and that are only one of the few I’ve found.

What about Necromancers?
T1 minor traits:
Parastic Bond: doesn’t work. Also if it worked, it would be worthless anyway.
Barbed Precision: as I said.
Reanimator: lol
Full of Life: the only trait which is worth something. Quite sad reading its effect and comparing it to others
Gluttony: Doesn’t work.

Enjoy the Necromancer panorama.

HyDraLiNsK.2470:

66% to bleed on crits.
Trait precision.
Drop 2 wells fighting a mob of 5 enemies.
5 pulses x 2 wells x 5 enemies = 10 chances to crit and cause bleed and when it does proc it causes bleed on 5 enemies at once.

Yeah, it really is a learn your class issue IMO. Necro is an AoE beast so to say we don’t have any options really to hit multiple targets is asinine.

Drop 2 wells, morph to DS and use the ‘4’ skill. Massive damage, massive AoE, and massive bleed chance.

Yep.
1 stack of bleeding for 1s on a 66% chance on critical. I can’t live without that trait.
Only Ranger have a similiar trash, but it isn’t Minor, so they can chose to not bring that trait.

Sheobix.8796:

I’m only going to address your “lack of defensibility” statement.
My necro has 3000 armor. 28k hp, and 3400 attack. There are a good portion of endgame warriors that don’t even have that. What are you talking about, not being able to defend? we have daze, immobilize, two fears, and a chill if you go d/horn + staff. plus, in DS, your armor still protects you. if you’re running berserkers with no points in death magic, you’re going to die 5x faster than i will. Period. i don’t even have to press any buttons or combos to prove that.

Warriors can easily get that amount of HP, armor and attack while having also heavy armor (better damage reduction). All professions can get similiar stats without counting HP, but they still have better defenses as I’ve listed.

Daze is only 2 second from warhorn. Immobilization hasn’t actually any defensive capability. Fears are much more of interrupts rather than defensive skills. Chill and snares aren’t that worty in a game in which every profession run with at least one ranged weapon and melee weapons are filled with leaps and movement skills. That would have made sense in Guild Wars, but in Guild Wars 2, snares are worth almost nothing.
Other professions have access to multiple CC skills at the same time which isn’t only the 1s fear. Take Mesmers, for instance. They have a bunch of CC skills, while still having visual confusion and invulnerability.

Mega Skeleton.8259:

@Kiriakulos
Yeah, well I’m sure Arms would rather have Barbed Precision over their 5 pointer (33% chance to bleed on crit). Also 2% damage per condition is legit if it works as 2% per stack, not by type. But I suspect it’s type of debuff, which is still a solid damage increase in groups.

Why would a warrior prefer to have a trait which gives you 1s of bleeding on a 66% chance on critical while Sigil of Earth gives you 60% chance to inflict 6s of bleeding on critical?

Also, 2% damage per conditions works by single condition, not stacks.
Sad thing that it boosts direct damage and all the high-damage weapon set of Necromancer inflict at max 4 conditions (Axe/x), which gives 8% damage boost which can easily become less once a condition ends. Only Vulnerability is mantainable by Axe autoattack.

Warrior have 10% damage boost only tied to bleeding. Sword autoattack inflicts 8s of bleeding untraited. Rifle autoattack inflicts 6s of bleeding. You have always at least 1 bleed stack on your foe, that means granted 10% damage boost.
I’d happily change Target the Weak for that trait. I’d also give them Reanimator, Gluttony, Parastic Bond and Barbed Precision, also if ending with empty trait slots, if needed.

Druitt.7629:

You get similar complaints in other professions. Elementalists complain basically the opposite: it’s stupid to break the traits up into elements when the Elementalist is meant to swap attunements, which makes 30 Arcana an absolute requirement.

Actually, as Elementalist that makes sense because not every trait of the Elementalist are tied to the specific attunement in and, basically, all attunements are still good without the need of heavy traiting in. You can still get defensive utility when switching to Earth also when you put no trait points in that traitline, also you can still get healing when switching to water magic, probably not that much, but you have. You have access to all the traitline capability by base, but you can of course spec into a specific magic. As Necromancer, you have to put trait points in 3 different traitlines to get one weapon or just one utility set effective, which is quite disheartening when you want to make any balanced or more versatile build.

Druitt.7629:

Personally, I think the Scepter MH is more damage than Axe, and Scepter/Dagger seems fairly strong to me.

I was talking about raw damage. By the way, other professions are still better at stacking conditions up.

Druitt.7629:

You can’t just write off Death Shroud because “the profession itself has no way to mitigate damage”. Death Shroud is the unique core of the profession. It may not be a great mechanism, but it’s not like it’s something separate… cut

The point is that stacking HP over and over isn’t enough to get enough defensive capability. Actually, mesmers have a lot of visual confusion thanks to clones, making most the time an hard to kill target. Plus, they have access to tons of invulnerability (Distortion), something that Necromancers have no access at all. Their defensive capability is all linked to Death Shroud, which is situational and not enough at all.

Also many other professions have no problem with conditions if the correctly built into. AoE blinds of the necros is just Deadly Swarm (which isn’t actually AoE) and WoD, both on a relative enough recharge time. Not enough at all to mitigate the damage. Obviously I don’t take into account Plague which is another topic.

As I said before, there is no point to have 3 life bars and no way to protect your beloved HPs.

I honestly don’t get the point of taking elementalists into that answer.

Druitt.7629:

Yes, broken AI can’t be overrated. Agreed, it’s a game-breaking issue for Minion-based Necros. At least Necros have Elites that may be useful. Elementalists have one (10-point) Elite that’s useful, and two (10- and 30-point) that are absolutely useless. Especially the 30-pointer, Tornado. Have you actually ever seen an Elementalist pop Tornado? Tornado makes Lich Form look OP.

Actually Fiery Greatsword isn’t that bad. Tornado, also, is just the same as Lich Form, except the fact that it has bunch of CC, blindness at the cost of low range.

Druitt.7629:

Elementalists have Tornado as their top Elite. Tornado functions much like Plague Form except with none of its benefits or abilities. Plague Form can actually be quite useful. (Again, depends on whether you’re talking PvP or PvE.)

PvP of course. There is not so much point to talk about balance in a non-competitive gamemode.

Druitt.7629:

I can’t recall AoE teleports for “most” professions. Spectral Walk is a nice bit of mobility: it’s an inverse Blink but it also ignores all LOS and terrain requirements, which most teleports do not. (Thieves also have their inverse Blink which seems to operate similarly, but is more useful if you have a target and less useful if you do not.) Warhorn 5 also gives swiftness combined with repeated AoE cripple.) Underwater, … cut

You talked about underwater, in which Necro are quite good, but it’s underwater, come on. It is about 5% of the fights if not less.

Swiftness isn’t mobility. Mobility are skills like Ride the Lightning, Blink, Lightning Flash, Burning Speed and so on. Skills that make the player hard to target, to catch and gives him great advantage with way faster movements. Necromancers have only Spectral Walk, which is only 6 seconds of recall time, not enough by far (I can’t even jump down in WvWvW dropping wells on the zerg without getting Spectral Walk finished before I dropped all the wells). Excluding that skill, they are static as statues, by far subpar compared to any other profession.

Necros have low intrinsic defensive capability, probably none have noticed because of the trend to build with high toughness with conditions (by far the only really viable build at the moment), but once you leave the toughness out of your equipment, you are most likely dead in few seconds, while other professions have tools to survive also with low toughness.

I’ve played 350 hours on my Necro and 500 hours on all my character and I partially disagree with you.

Of course, Necromancer isn’t that broken to be unplayable, but it is by far on the weak side.

I’ll list you some reason because I think Necromancers are worse than other professions:

1. Horrible traitline design: All the traitlines seems like a strange hybrid between all the possible specs a Necromancer can play, forcing you to use more than a single traitline to focus on a specific skill type or weapon. Take, for instance, Spectral skills. Trait which interacts with Spectral skills are split between Curses (major) and Soul Reaping.
Trait which interacts with Minions are split between Death Magic, Spite and Blood Magic. Trait which interacts with wells are split between Curses and Blood Magic. And so on. This is a clear disadvantage to the when you try to build less specific.
Minor traits, also are a clear mess. Most of them are useless, others don’t work at all and they are of course tied to a specific build (see Death Magic). Plus, we have Precision and Critical Damage split in two traitlines, which, added to the all disadvantages I’ve listed, make the Necromancer trait design the worse in the game.

2. Weak damage: compared to other professions, the Necromancer raw damage is subpar. Our damage weapons are Axe and Dagger MH, both are extremely weak in damage compared to other profession’s damage weapons.

3. Lack of real defensive capability: all professions in this game have intrinsic defensive capability tied to profession mechanic. Necromancer is the only profession who hasn’t that. The only compensation is Death Shroud which isn’t enough if the profession itself has no way to mitigate the damage. Stacking HP on HP is not enough if the damage you take is always all and the maximum. Warrior has high armor and damage reduction skills, Guardian has ton of boons, Engineer the same, Thief has amazing mobility and stealth, Ranger has lots of evades and defensive skills, Elementalists have tons of boons, blocks, invulnerability and mobility, Mesmers have clones, a bit of stealth and teleports and Necromancers? They have only Death Shroud, which is a very situational additional HP pool available only if you have enough LF.

4. Minion AI: this problem is underrated. When putting point into Death Magic you are implicitly forced to deal with the stupid Minion AI, because of how that traitline is designed. Plus, 1/4 of the utility skills and an Elite rely on minions, which means that if those utility doesn’t work, you are actually losing a whole traitline, 4 utilities and an Elite.

5. Transformation Elites: this is also a great problem. Transformations are actually the worse elites in the game because they completely throw out all your skill bar, giving you no access to heal, utilities and death shroud. While Plague Form gives you great survivability, Lich Form is an “I want to die” button. Plus, they actually destroy any minion you have and also all the spectral boons.

6. Horrible Mobility: I’m of course not talking about swiftness, which isn’t mobility. I’m talking about skills which instantly gives you a positional advantage. While other professions have a discrete amount of mobility (most have access to an AoE teleport, others have access to tons of gap closers etc.) our mobility is tied to the quite bad Dark Path skill which is only an offensive mobility, unwanted in most cases. When you add this to the already said low defensive capability of Necromancers, than you have the picture clear.

Einlanzer.1627:

I actually didn’t forget to take it into account, I just didn’t fully elaborate on it. In my opinion, Stealth is currently inadequate compared to the danger-avoidance and damage-mitigation mechanics of other professions (including health pools and armor level). It doesn’t last very long, there aren’t really enough ways to achieve it, and most importantly it’s buggy.

It’s actually very common that I’ll use Hide in Shadows to try to dump aggro and it just plain doesn’t work. Any attacks coming at me will still hit me and as soon as I come out of it in 3 seconds mobs go right back to wailing on me even if they’re taking damage from other sources. And don’t get me started on how useless our Downed State is in PvE, it’s both very difficult to get a rally and very difficult to escape death. When I’m downed, I die roughly 75% of the time, compared to probably 25% of the time on my warrior. It’s frustrating to say the least.

I feel like anyone that tries to argue that thieves aren’t a bit on the weak side in PvE is just being prideful and not being honest with themselves. Sure, if you know what you’re doing you can make it work and can even make it work pretty well, but that doesn’t change anything as far as baseline class evaluations go.

You’re right about the fact that Stealth sometimes doesn’t work, but I really don’t feel that thieves are on the weak side in PvE.
They just need to be played differently as you usually play other profession or other MMO.
Thieves have to be played very mobile, kiting all the damage, popping in and out of stealth and dealing short, fast burst before starting the kiting again. It isn’t a statement I’ve put outside of nowhere, it is just what’s behind the profession concept and the only possible way to be effective in PvE and in PvP.
Actually, thieves have some of the best PvE skills around, like Cluster Bomb, Black Powder or Caltrops and they also have all the tools to survive long enough to kill a decent aggro of mobs.
Of course, you can’t stand still tanking the damage as a thief. If you play like that, it is quite obvious you are getting frustrated very fast.

About the downed state, it is something shared with most the professions. Warriors have the Vengeance and Sweet Revenge combo which should be looked into in PvE side because of its amazing effectiveness, but other professions are in the same boat.

So, after we have realized that the OP doesn’t want to discuss about the thief mobility compared to warriors, what is the real point of this topic?

Do he want to say that thieves mobility is underpowered and needs to be buffed?
Do he want to say that warriors mobility is overpowered and needs to be nerfed (remove Rush on GS, maybe)?
In both cases, I think that this topic is an absurd in itself.

Einlanzer.1627:

My two cents: Classes were obviously designed to have roughly the same offensive potential. Broken PvP builds rooted in the initiative system aside (which are not working as intended), this includes the Thief. This does not consider PvE, where the thief is not notably offensively stronger than any other class.

With that out of the way, the mechanical differences between the profession are primarily in their defenses and their utility (which mobility is dependent on). Thief mobility through utility is above average, but not stellar, and certainly not good enough to compensate for their terrible defense. That is why people constantly complain about dying too much and feeling too weak in PvE.

The only way thief even feels viable in PvE is because of a couple of arguably overpowered skills such as Caltrops, which makes the efficacy of the Thief overly-reliant on player skill compared to other classes (except maybe the elementalist). While the devs are working on bringing certain builds in line for PvP, I hope they give some attention to some of the PvE issues the classes face.

I would argue that it was a mistake to attempt to balance the armor types through class abilities rather than within the armor categories instead. Why do the medium and light armor classes not have higher movement speed and/or endurance regeneration, for example?

You forgot to take into account Stealth, which is the second compensation for thieves to their low health and it is actually very good in PvE.
Every profession which does not wear heavy armor has good way to overcome the damage reduction lack (with some exceptions).

Engineers have tons of boon, none complained about their survivability.
Rangers have quite good mobility, evades, range and some damage mitigation skills.
Thieves have amazing mobility and stealth (which means also tons of heals when traited).
Mesmers have clones and phantasms.
Elementalists have mobility, boons and healing.
Necromancers have Death Shroud, high health pool (they would have also healing if Blood Magic was worth mentioning).

Warriors have? Some blocking skills and endure pain. That’s why they have also high health pool.
Guardians have? Tons of boon and healing. That’s why they have low health.

I would agree that Guardians are a bit over average, but Warriors definitely aren’t.

Asum.4960:

Aw gawd.
Dodging is NOT mobility, it’s damage mitigation.
Slowly i realise why people are having problems with burst Thieves.

I realise that mobility is not only closing gaps, but also moving over the battlefield.
In fact my point was: Mobility isn’t only moving around the battlefield, it’s ALSO closing gaps.

And if you take the average, the Thief is exactly that, average.

Dodging is the base mobility given to any profession.
If dodging don’t move your character faster than walking, then you’ll be right, but since it does, dodging is mobility. Also damage mitigation, of course, but also mobility.

Thief isn’t the average. Almost every weapon set of thief gives a movement/teleport skill. They have an above average set of utility movement skills. They have also the cheapest access to teleports among all professions, which is the best form of mobility in the game.
How can you say they are average?

Asum.4960:

I’m sick of the argument “Thieves have great mobility, since their mobility moves are spammable”.
Outside of theory, thats just not happening.

So you close the gap with 2 Infiltrator Arrows to a enemy player.. and then?
You are out of Initative, done. Now you can’t run away with your “great mobility” (since reminder: you are out of Initiative), nor can you fight (since reminder: you are out of Initiative).
The enemy can now freely chop you down, great job Mr. Mobile.

While other classes can use their mobility moves and then fight to their fullest potential, since they are balanced around using specific skills in specific situations, and then having them on CD.

So a Thief CAN have great mobility, but then he has absolutely zero offense, besides his auto attack.
Or a Thief has great combat moves (stealthing, high burst dmg), but barely any mobility but long CD (~40s) Utility skills.

So over all, how is that great mobility?

A Thief can only do one thing at a time, since his skills have a shared Coold Downs, based on a ressource system called Initiative.

So either a Thief has great mobility, but can’t do anything with it, or great offensive abilities (high bursts), but thats it – or you take a overall look on the profession, and realise that Thieves are pretty crappy at everything if you take the average.

I can’t believe that such a luckluster profession is still called OP by some people.

Thieves are situational. Yes, they can be incredible good at something, but only if they put all their ressources in it – but then just change the situation by playing skillful, and you get a free kill on a silver plate.

So please stop believing a Thief can have a) great mobility, close a gap with a few Heartseeker or Infiltrator Arrows, and then b) kill somebody.
It’s either a or b. And if theres a gap to close, the Thief can’t effectively do anything in the first place. He can’t kill the enemy because there is a gap that has to be closed first (obvously). And while he can close the gap, he then couldn’t do anything afterwards, so whats the point?

Other classes on the other hand can effectively clode gaps AND then fight to their fullest potential. (I realise that I’m repeating myself at this point, but i kinda feels it’s necessary).

So who has the better Mobility after all?

The class with useless “great mobility”, or
the class with effectively used “average mobility”?

Escaping is another topic since we talk about combat, fighting, closing gaps, and not a run away contest.
Having the tools to close a gap and killing your enemy is more valuable than just being able to run away from your enemy anyway. I guess thats obvious.

You started from a wrong incipit.
Exactly, which thief uses 2 Infiltrator’s Arrow to close a gap?
Do thieves regenerate initiative? Have them also traits other than skills?

The Arcrobatic traitline is absolutely awesome, it allow the thief who specs into to use a dodge almost every second and dodging is mobility. You didn’t took this into account.
Infiltrator’s Strike is on 3 initiative. It is more than enough to close a gap and leaves you with 9 initative, same as Heartseeker.

Mobility, also, not only means close a gap, but moving on the battlefield faster than others gaining positional advantage.
So escaping, roll backwards, dodges and so on are into the general definition of mobility.

Stin.9781:

Thiefs has best in combat mobility, thats true.

The other part is that out of combat that movbility way more limited then elementalist with air spec for movement.

Out of combat thief has: Cons
1. No swiftness exept 2 seconds on dodge or 10 seconds on steal(both cant be kept for too long.
2. Sword/X has no movement out of combat at all.
3. Infilrtators arrow drain so much innitiative, if you encounter somebody you wont be able to do basicly anything.

Pros
1. Can shadow step 3000 range using utility + Infilrtators arrow.
2. Heartseeker is pretty effective with swiftness( yet look above cant rly get reliable swiftness when solo)
3. Signet of shadows 25% movement increase can do job of swiftness if we are willing to sacrifise utility slot just for movement.(its active isnt worth the notice)
4. Our movement skill Shadowstep is also condition stun/condition removal, so if we run away from something its very usefull.

Well, most the time a combination of shadowstep, signet of shadows and dodgeroll swiftness can do quite good its job, but anyway I don’t see out of combat mobility as a real issue, or, at least, I don’t think that it is what’s the op meant before leaving the argument he started.

Shizzlenit.7648:

“Defensive capability =/= survivability”

I’m confused =/

Defensive capability = ability to mitigate or avoid the damage (protection, easy access to dodges and evade etc), not tied to toughness or vitality, which are available to all professions.
Survivability = ability to survive a specific amount of damage thanks to the build features (es: high toughness and vitality), tied to the specific build you’re running

BabelFish.7234:

“I am talking about weapon sets, to me there is no doubt that thieves are the most mobile utilizing utilities and weapon sets together.”

Good for you, ignoring comments which dictate someone’s opinion.
Have a nice life, I certainly won’t be contributing to it any longer.

“Every S/x weapon set has better mobility than any warrior in this world, without counting any utility or steal itself.”

If it is your way of discussing about something, I don’t see the point of making this thread.
If you wanted to enforce your opinion and nothing else, you should have sent an email to ArenaNet telling them your surely founded opinion or talked to yourself in front of a mirror, not opening a topic in a public forum and then avoiding any form of argument.

Ichishi.9613:

sorrow what are you trying to say?
are you trying to say necros arent op? yes, they are not (in some cases)
are you trying to say thieves are op? yes, they are (in some cases)
are you trying to say that thieves are > necros all day long? no. Even in one-on-one, that should not exist in this game, an equally high skilled necro can and will outperform any thief.

I just disagreed about the fact that Necros are the hardest to counter in high skill level.
Of course a skilled Necro will kill an unskilled Thief, but a skilled Thief against a skilled Necro, the Necro has no chaces at all due to what I said.

BabelFish.7234:

Whatever dude, you can continue to get uppity and I’ll continue eating cheesies and not feeding you your drama fill of the day.

You made a clearly unfounded and non-sense statement and now you’re trying to give it a reason with weak arguments, in order to make the thieves look like the weak one and warriors as the op who needs a nerf. And there you are with that sentence whose clear scope is to avoid to answer my reasoning.

Well done.

Every S/x weapon set has better mobility than any warrior in this world, without counting any utility or steal itself.

BabelFish.7234:

Half of what you mentioned has nothing to do with mobility -.-
And no, it wasn’t.
GS offers the Warrior amazing mobility which at the very least is on par with the Thief.
I haven’t even mentioned Elementals and how they can be just as mobile too.

Only the shadow art trait has nothing to do with mobility, but that was an answer to the guy who said that warriors have a trait which removes immobilize.

So, if you are not exaggerating, you have no objective view, because it is clear that thieves mobility isn’t comparable to the mobility of any profession in the game.

Bluebird.1890:

Sorrow:

Whirlwind attack has about the range of an Infil arrow. Bladetrail has a double cripple on it, and it can hit a ridiculous amount of targets. Rush is basically the distance of a shadowstep.

And with Mobile Strikes, the movement abilities remove all movement impairment.

So, yes, they have some ridiculous mobility.

Whirlwind attack has half the range of Infiltrator’s Arrow.
Bladetrail isn’t a movement skill.
Rush doesn’t give you the ability to get back after you rushed and have also a pretty high travel time compared to thieves’ teleports.

Infiltrator’s Strike and Shadowstep remove conditions and don’t need any trait.
Withdraw and Roll for Initiative remove all mobility impairment conditions.
A Tier 1 Shadow Art trait remove a condition each time you go into stealth (actually 2 if you stay into stealth for 3 seconds).

Plus, don’t forget that all the skills I mentioned before are SPAMMABLE, or at least they are always available. As a Warrior, you can’t use Rush or Whirlwind on demand as you can with Infiltrator’s Strike as a thief.

So thieves have far more mobility than warriors, also defensive mobility rather than offensive.

BabelFish.7234:

I’m just surprised that thieves who are supposed to have the greatest mobility don’t.

This is a clear exaggeration.

Exactly, where is the mobility on the warrior’s greatsword?
So you consider Rush or Whirlwind Attack better mobility skills compared to Steal, Infiltrator’s Arrow, Disabling Shot, Infiltrator’s Strike, Heartseeker, Death Blossom, Flanking Strike and Shadow Shot & Strike?
Better you reroll warrior then.

Kurow.6973:

Did you actually watch the video?

PS: I find it hilarious that you complain about thief damage in WvW, yet here you made a mockery of someone obviously outplaying others, by stating they’re fighting upleveled players. Hypocrite much?

Yes, I watched the video and I only saw the warrior getting few damage and dealing few damage from mostly upleveled players while his guildies did all the job. Obviously if you just look at the warrior rushing in the zerg and getting out alive (mostly) while playing a build with full toughness and vitality and then thinking warrior have great defensive capability, of course you’ll end up with such sentences.
Every profession can have great survivability when building with max toughness and vitality, but I wasn’t talking about survivability, but defensive capability.
Warriors have almost no defensive capability, which is compensated by the high armor and high health.

Please, tell me where I complained about Thieves damage in WvWvW. Seriously. I’ve never took into account WvWvW in any post I made.

Kurow.6973:

False! I play a necro…and I can tell you they can last a lot longer than thieves if played right.

Power necros can also deal A TON of AoE damage really fast, especially with #4 DS. They’re near invulnerable with plagueform as well, dishing out constant conditions.

No evades? Wut? Seriously?

I’m getting the feeling that you just troll thief forum in the hopes of pushing out unnecessary nerfs on other classes, and don’t actually play any of the classes you try talk about.

PS: There’s some easy ways to leave a fight as necro. One of them in specific requires you to be skilled with DS.

Of course you outlast any thief, they usually build as glass cannon.. lol

Power Necros can deal a ton of AoE damage? Do you really play necro or you came here just to say some random things passing them off as truth?

Life Transfer deals max 4k damage on a 40s recharge and 3s and an half casting time. Ton of AoE damage, you say? Just try it out.
Plague form push max 2 stack of bleeds, pretty worthless. It is only useful to survive against multiple people and then getting killed after it ends.

I never called in this topic for any nerf against thieves. Just read my posts and stop acting like a troll. I was just answering to some folks who said Warriors are OP and Thieves are UP.

Please, tell me the super-effective way to leave the fight as a Necro without letting the guy you are fighting chasing and killing you.

Shizzlenit.7648:

Yes because hes totaly not tanking 10-20 people here and actually survives.

I responded to someone saying that the warrior has the LEAST (lol) defensive capabilities in the game, show me another class doing what the warrior does in the video. Ill wait.

Defensive capability =/= survivability

Defensive capability is the ability to mitigate the damage via skills or traits, warriors haven’t this, that’s why they have heavy armor and high vitality.
He was running full toughness and vitality, with orbs and buffs and he still deals almost no damage and gets killed by a group of upleveled folks which barely targeted him, since they were more focused on the thief who dealt the actual damage.

Ichishi.9613:

Sorry, what I meant by necro’s power is not the power stat build but just the danger of the skills.
No other class can change battlefield (as in a given moment of time, not overall) as much as necros do, and surviving in a rapidly changing environment is what most of those “op” thieves cannot do.
In tPvP, a thief without a heavy investment into defense is eaten alive by almost anything.

That is untrue.
A thief has all the tools to leave the fight alive before getting killed, which is something Necro hasn’t.
Once you engaged a fight as a Necro, there is absolutely no way to leave that fight without killing everyone or getting killed and, because of the unviability of power builds, Necros always run conditions which is well known they are slow killers.
Overall, when playing a Necro it is just a matter of surviving long enough (quite long actually), which is hard considering the actual metagame of heavy damage builds and instant bursts. Plus, Necromancers have weak stunbreakers on a long cooldown. The only way to mitigate the damage is via Death Shroud (which is hard to build and easy to drain), then, once life force is over, you are only a clothy defenseless dead meat with more hp than normal. No damage mitigation, no damage avoiding skills, no evades, nothing.

Shizzlenit.7648:

Wait… what?

Least defensive capability in the game? Man you have some HW to do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBJ3lUCB5I0

So man, what do you want to prove with that video? That a group of lv80 players with x Orbs of Powers and x food buffs can defeat a minizerg of upleveled people in WvWvW who actualy has also no clue on how to target enemies?
People should stop to post WvWvW footages to prove something or at least have to watch closely the video they post as a proof.
This just makes you hilarious.

Ichishi.9613:

I rolled a necro after extensive thief play. Because at equally high skill levels, necros are the hardest counter to almost anything i can bring to spvp.
With only ways for thief to deal damage is either short melee bursts or sustained condition damage necros are the only class that bring countering both to the top.
The ability of necros to punish any hostility entering a certain area (marks, wells) counters 9 out of 10 tries for melee burst while the ability to manipulate conditions and natural high health + death shroud counters the last option.
Both necros and thieves have a lot of work to be done on them, but do note: thieves have never shined in spvp with and without fixes and don’t look like they will be ever able to without really major changes. While as necros are close to being solid top-tier both in terms of skill required and raw power of builds even with ridiculous list of bugs and missing features.

I disagree in some points.
Necro have absolutely no viable power build with the exception of well bomber, which, anyway, is subpar when compared to other power build because of it needs to use all your utility slots and the elite to be effective, while most other professions can just rely on their weapon skills to deal decent damage, something Necromancers can’t do due to the really low damage of their weapon sets (see Axe, Focus or Dagger itself without taking into account the autoattack).

Plus, their traitlines lack of any form of synergy to make any power build viable.
Most the damage booster traits are weak, on highest tier or too situational, the whole power traitline completely sucks because of a bunch of useless and non-working traits, plus they have the plague to have Critical Damage and Precision split in two different traitlines, whose traitlines are absolutely not focused neither on criticals or damage.
Just take a look on the list of the traits and see which trait you would pick for a power build, than take a look to the list of not-working traits.

So, in my opinion, Necromancers need the most help in terms of burst builds, in order to not to be tied to the boring well bomber, and to the whole traits disposition/effects.

Never felt that warriors were a problem.
Quickness is broken and it is obvious to everyone. It is mostly a sure kill skill on a 40s+ cooldown and, most impontant, isn’t available to every profession, which is worse than quickness itself.

Well, I don’t know if it’s me or not, but I see that quickness heartseeker spamming is growing up popular again.

Well, I can’t talk about other professions because I didn’t played them so deep to know the viable builds, but as far I know Necromancer has way less build variety than thief.
Conditionmancer and wells are the only viable spec, every other is just unviable. Death Magic and Blood Magic traitline are a mess and not worth a single point spent into.

Thieves can be incredibly good “bunkers” when putting points in both Shadow Arts and Arcrobatics. A 0/20/30/20/0 or a 0/0/30/20/20 thief can easily hold 2+ people on a point for a consistent amount of time popping in and out of stealth when you need heals and dodging to mitigate the damage you take and hold the point.

So, in my opinion, the build variety on the thief side isn’t that bad compared to other professions.

Regarding build variety, it is clear that some builds outperform the others. That’s why you see just 2 kind of builds as roamers and 2 kind as bunkers. If all builds performed all the same, there is no reason to stick to just one build.

Mrbig.8019:

but i agree there are viable builds aside the common ones.

the point is that viable =/= competitive.

You can play as a bunker thief with S/D+ pow-tuf-vit gear or cleric gear and be an indestructible bunker, but stealth doesn’t prevent capping so a thief will NEVER be a viable bunker , because stealth is too important for a bunker thief.

A blind thief, currently, will never be a good roamer because it deals less burst damage than D/D while not providing any relevant support in order to take a D/P thief over another proff.

Current “competitive” builds offer tons of versatility, and they SHOULD NEVER nerf them on non-competitive builds level, because it would simply reduce the amount of versatility the professions can offer.

The nerf on OH dagger and TS really removed 90% of thief balanced/dps builds, without compensating, leading to extrmely polarized gameplay.

I can’t understand how could someone be in favor of it.

Competitive is the thin difference between viable and “there is something way better around”, which is exactly what I’m talking about.

While a guardian can outlast every other profession when speccing as tank, none is going to bring another profession other than guardian in their team to play that role. So, despite the fact that bunker thief is viable (not speccing into Shadow Arts but into Arcobatic/unlimited dodges), people will never get a thief over a guardian in their team because it isn’t “competitive” (read: because there is something better around).

Once guardian’s tank capability will be put inline, probably people will start looking for a valid alternative. Probably there will be more variety or probably we’ll end up on another “must have” profession which still outperform every bunker in the game, which need to be toned down also, until every profession can play tank as effective as every other profession do, according to what ArenaNet originally intended. This is how balance works in my opinion.

Tulisin.6945:

sorrow.2364:

No bouncing skill deal as much damage as DD used to deal
…
Now it still deals more damage than the average bouncing skill.

So are we arbitrarily comparing DD to non-thief skills due to a shared attribute (bouncing) or for your “average bouncing skill” comparison are you merely comparing DD, shortbow auto attack, and downed-state auto attack?

Either way it is a largely meaningless statement. It is like saying that “sneak attack applies more bleeds than the average bleed-applying skill”, “Choking Gas applies a longer poison than the average poison skill”, or “Pistol Whip does more damage than the average evade skill”. You can’t pick an arbitrary attribute of a weapon skill and then compare it to other professions in a vacuum.

Bouncing skill are a specific skill type when talking about damage, because they can potentially deal its damage 2 times on the same target in a short period of time, that’s why most bouncing skill have very low damage.
Dancing Dagger was the only exception to this rule and you’ve seen what happened.
That’s why comparing bouncing skills in terms of damage makes sense, as makes sense comparing the damage of two channeled skills with its channel time.

Kurow.6973:

Too bad they have to play a glass cannon to be good enough for that damage, and are FORCED to equip a shortbow at all times in PvP, if they want those teleport chances…and even then, are limited by initiative.

Stealth is NOT a free get out of combat card…unless you’re fighting lazy people who don’t put in the effort to predict your moves and chase you to finish you off.

Amazing mobility and stealth does NOTHING for you when your survivability is kitten, because you won’t be able to kill anything with kitten damage just with mobility and stealth (especially the way stealth is designed in GW2). Your logic is flawed.

PS: I hope you complain as much, if not more about warriors than thieves, because they have higher survivability, with higher burst. I have a warrior I play…and I can say, without a doubt, that it’s ridiculously “OP”.

I can’t believe you completely misunderstood my post.

No thief is forced to play as a glass cannon, there are bunch of builds which relies on heavy toughness and vitality, while dealing good damage (see P/D). The fact that most people build as glass cannon doesn’t mean that all thieves are forced to build as a glass cannon.

You are not forced to have a shortbow in order to have high mobility.
You have always a gap closer (steal) in all your builds, you can use S/x to have access to Infiltrator’s Strike which is a gap closer, a gap gainer, a stunbreak and a condition removal. You can pick also P/D or D/P, both have a mobility dual skill. Shadowstep gives also most thieves high mobility, Withdraw heals you and gives you positional advantage, same as Roll for Initiative.

Stealth IS a free get out of the combat card. Once you get in stealth, just one dodge is enough to get out of the melee range and your enemy has absolutely no clue of where you headed to because you are… invisible. They can keeping swinging the air at random, but if you aren’t stupid enough to get hit by those swings, you are most likely out of the fight.

Amazing mobility and stealth does a lot and can easily compensate low survivability (which, by the way, isn’t that bad when speccing into). Have you ever specced into Shadow Arts or Arcrobatics? The first one has the potential to clean you up and healing you each time you go into stealth, while the second one gives you the chance have most likely infinite dodges. Do you think that those mechanics gives low survivability? Of course not.
Every profession can spec into glass cannon, having very low survivability and good damage, but no profession is capable to deal the damage thief deal in that amount of time and as hard to counter. Just try to build as glass cannon with a Mesmer, a Necro, an Elementalist or also a Warrior.
You’ll die just as fast as you die with your thief but the damage and the bursts you make are far harder to realize and can be easily dodged or avoided.

Regarding Warriors, it looks like that most thieves have a sort of hate against that profession.
Warriors have the least defensive capability in the game. Their defensive traitlines give almost no defensive capability other than increasing their toughness a bit, which is by the way not enough to mitigate the damage. Once you build as a glass cannon with a warrior, you have no way to avoid the hits other than dodging or probably using one of the high-recharge damage-cancelling skills like endure pain or shield stance, which are more of a burst cancelling other than damage mitigation. Once you strike a glass cannon warrior with substained damage, they will die in a couple of hits, probably more than what a thief requires to be downed, but of course they’ won’t vanish in stealth or kite your damage once they are on low health. When saying that warriors are OP, you should consider also those facts.
In most cases:
Damage avoiding > damage mitigation

Frizz.6704:

So my main is a Necro, I am rank 35 and have over 800 hrs played. I came to the conclusion that thieves were far too OP and most certainly needed a nerf. The main reason was backstab hitting for 8k (sometimes), and then only a few more hits and I was down. The second reason was heartseeker having a gap closer, and big damage dealer, all in one. With that I decided to make an alt as a thief to mainly learn their weaknesses etc.

Having played a thief for a little bit here is my perspective. Also, please bare in mind that I am a bit of a noob when it comes to thieves, however I would still say I am pretty decent. So here is what I learned. Just how thieves are a Necro’s worst class (well maybe Mesmers then thieves), I found that Guardians and Warriors were my worst class as a thief. But in general I realised that thieves are super super super squishy and if you can’t kill someone quickly you are more than likely dead yourself if you can’t slip away. Not to mention you can’t really enter into the zerg fight as even AOE’s will hurt. This doesn’t help the reputation of the thief however, because it means thieves are always on the outskirts ganking people giving them that OP rep. I feel the dmg does need to be pretty high to compensate for the lack of survivability. What I learn’t with my Necro is to make them waste there initiative and then they are toast, or they will run away, which is fine since they won’t be bothering me anymore to achieve my objective. The longer you drag the fight out the less likely they will win. I always knew this I guess I just didn’t realise the extent of it.

So that is my two cents. I think thieves, in good hands (not mine), are probably slightly OP, but certainly not to the extent that a lot of people think they are. I think that thieves should be that ‘hard to hit’ class, the slippery class, because they can’t take much of a hit. But maybe their dmg on backstab etc could be toned down a little. Certainly the bad players that spam HS also give thieves a really bad rep.

It is not about the squishy part.
High damage isn’t a compensation of low survivability, amazing mobility and stealth is.
Compensating the lack of defensive capability raising offensive ability makes no sense at all in terms of balance and ArenaNet knows it, that’s why thieves have cheap stealth access, which means in most cases a free ticket to leave the fight and heal up, plus an unspecified amounts of teleports which can give you an incredibly positioning advantage.

Justifying the outstanding bursts of thieves with their squishyness is the worse mistake you can make while evaluating the thief state.

Yashino.5713:

above average?
im not trying to defend a class but lol above average to all?
stealth is all a thief have, take away stealth, what does that make them?

thief might has easy time kill glass cannon classes, but if you put some toughness to your gears, what can they do to you, but run away after failed to kill you

I was saying not about effectiveness, but about build variety.
Most professions have less than 3 build viable.

Mrbig.8019:

Wrong.

balance comes ONLY on tPvP basis. For WvWvW and PvE there’s a whole another balance, skills can be split.

In tPvP, the thief has very short uses for power/crit builds, now they’re almost all reduced to D/D + shortbow as a glass cannon, basically no different from a warrior, forced into that dumb GS hundred blades bullkitten to be highly competitive.

This is not promoting build diversity.

This is not symptom of a good meta.

And saying that other builds can still be viable is just false advertising and misinformation spreading.

Ask to current “top tier” players how viable is any other thief builds aside condition P/D with/without venoms or D/D burst, and have a good laugh.

Seems like that you didn’t get my point.
I said that there are outstanding build in terms of effectiveness that people abuse in order to be “competitive” in specific game modes. Those builds mainly exploits some insanely high capability in a specific sector (ex: bunker guardians), so people feel forced to use that build in order to be competitive because, if you use some other build, you aren’t performing in your full potential.
It isn’t that other builds are unviable, it is just that few builds are outstanding and they need to be put in-line for balance sake. Actually, other thief specs aren’t horrible or unusable, they are just not worth using because there is another spec who outstand in its role. That’s why you don’t see any burst guardian or tank thief, despite the fact that those builds are possible.

DD and CnD were utility, probably they weren’t meant to dealt that kind of damage, so, after all, both nerfs were fair.
No bouncing skill deal as much damage as DD used to deal, so, considering that it can be used more time in a row, you clearly see that DD needed an huge nerf.

Now it still deals more damage than the average bouncing skill.

Yashino.5713:

let’s see
1. DD+SB (viable)
2. DD+PP(only newbs use, once you’re get used to the game, almost no one use this build)
3. DD+SD(hardly see anyone use it cuz it’s “almost impossible to use both” due to initiatives thief has
4. DD+DD(uber dumb)
5. DD+SP(same reason as above)
6. SD+SB (viable)
7. SD+PP(same as 2)
8. SD+SD(uber dumb)
9. SD+SP(dumb)
10. SP+SB(viable)
11. SP+PP(same as 2 and 7)
13. SP+SP(uber dumb)
14. PD + SB (never seen this build)
15. PD + SP (never seen this build)
16. PD + DP(never seen this build)
17. PD + SD(same as 11)
18. PD + PD (uber dumb)

i narrowed down all the builds for you
only THREE builds a decent thief would roll.
1. DD + SB
2. SD + SB
3. SP + SB
tell me how thief have viable of builds pls?

This is your personal opinion, I’m not arguing about opinions, starting from the fact that you dumped all the P/P sets.

By the way, 3 viable builds are still above average among all professions.

1. Reanimator
2. Reanimator
3. Parastic bond

I think that it doesn’t need any description.

Dardamaniac.1295:

How Ranger got more than one viable spec?
And yes there are some other specs for every prof but just for 8v8 zergs..just check the QP and the big teams and tell me how many Bunker Guardians and how many GS Guardians you will find..

Saying this you just supported my argument.
There are many bunker guardians because that build is overperforming compared to others, so people use that build because of this, but it doesn’t mean that GS Guardians are bad or unviable, it is just that another damage build, probably BS, is overperforming compared to any burst-oriented build, so people prefer that build over anything else.
Once the overperforming build will be put on par with the others, you’ll see that more specs will grow up.
Just look at what the little, indirect, backstab nerf did, there are many other builds running around now, like P/D thieves, despite the fact that those builds were untouched.

Mrbig.8019:

Don’t start this discussion if you are going to be so dismissive, because you can’t absolutely know if i have/have not tried all those builds i mentioned.

I was an alpha tester, i had plenty of time ( more than 80% of people playing the game currently) to discover the best builds around, but some people could still say " it doesn’t matter if you’re not skilled enough to understand them" ( even without knowing how skilled i am).

I had 200+ victories on tourneys with my team ( which left long ago, waiting for a freaking ladder), but it doesn’t matter because some people could still argue "tourneys victories are worthless, since you just slaughtered pugs with a premade ( and they’re actually quite right) "

I have no QPs, due to not having a team anyore, and due to not having any desire in finding it, due to current state of PvP.
But even if i was one of those top tier players, some people could still argue that QPs leaderboard is simply a joke based upon farming mathces more than really being skilled ( and i strongely agree).

So, avoid those comments saying things like " i don’t think you have played all the builds and bla bla bla", because i have.

Most probably more than you.

But it doesn’t matter.

My primary builds was a S/D+ shortbow till the nerf, a 10-30-30 one, or rather, probably, the strongest build a thief could ever make.

Now that build, just like any S/D build, is totally crushed to absymal damage, where your main damage combo ( C&D + tactical strike) has been totally slaughtered.

With this set you would usually cripple your target with DD in order to land autoattacks and C&D easier, also dealing very good damage.

Now you can’t.

S/D damage has been halved, and now you can’t effectively pick up on bunkers anymore, since it was S/D primary purpose, while also being (maybe) the most effective 1vs1 build.

Now it’s not able not to deal with bunkers ( since they can outlast you pretty easily, due to halved damage and shorter daze on TS) and it’s also not as effective as it was before as a 1vs1 build.

S/D is not viable anymore at tourney level.

S/P may be viable, but it’s subpar to ele on roaming, and a S/P thief is ALL about roaming. It can still be used in some comps, but it’s overall a very gimmicky set up.

P/D condition based is our strongest build by far, currently. S/D builds were the only ones able to match up with condition based thief builds.

P/P is totally worthless. Anyone bringing this set in place of the shortbow should never put a step at tourneys.

There’re so many shortcuts for map control at foefire and especially on khylo ( teleporting to the clocktower with a sinlge skill+ teleport on the roof, two of the main reasons why the thief is even more important then the mesmer/ele stuff on treb) that without a shortbow you’re nothing more than an hinderance to your team.

Now you can believe whatever you want, keep on playing S/D if you want it so badly, as long as you don’t complain as soon as you put a step in paid tourneys against competitive teams, and the first wells necro destroys your convinctions about S/D viability.

You don’t need to post your curriculum vitae, since by my side, you could say you are the best tPvP player in the whole world, but to me those are only words said by a random guy on a forum without any backup.

If you say that those build are not viable, my obvious conclusion is that either you didn’t played them or you have no clue of the average build situation on other professions.

S/D is good against bunkers as long as FS retain its boon removal. To be honest, I didn’t played that build as a daze spammer and I never felt that my first damage output was CnD+Tactical Strike, so, to me, that build is still viable.

How S/P is inferior to eles roamers? The worse thief with a shortbow still is a better roamer than an ele.

Also, don’t forget that Guild Wars 2 isn’t tPvP, but there is more. Arguing about balance only around tPvP is a no-sense, because people actually play also sPvP, WvWvW and PvE. Shortbow is a must in tPvP, but probably P/P is better in WvWvW, sPvP or PvE. If it isn’t worth using in tPvP, it doesn’t mean that it globally sucks.

Dardamaniac.1295:

Hey guys heres a fellow Ranger talking.I think i can feel you.Theres no point to just nerf something (BS) but you must improv other features to make more builds viable.
Im sick and tired of seeing “shortbow-d/d BS power” thiefs in pvp..
So i say dont nerf the BS dmg if you wont Buff Pistols.
Its the same and the same thing over and over again
Necro——>cond. dmg
Thiefs——->burst with BS
Engi————>Support-bunkers
Guardians——>Super Bunkers
Warriors———>pretty much everything
Mesmers———>op in 1v1,roamers,dmg,Moa
Ele——->Bunkers(they got nerfed too but still good imo)
Rangers——>Bring some traps and cond dmg cause we cant find a Necro or GTFO

Ive heard before release that every prof here can do anything but as every mmo eventually there are 1-2 builds viable for every prof

Your point is invalid.
This isn’t about that just one build is viable, it is just that one build is overperforming compared to others, so everyone runs it.

Thieves have bunch of other builds, but since D/D deals insane damage and is extremely easy to use, everyone use it. There are some pro thieves which stay away from that spec, but it isn’t the only viable option.

It is the same with almost every other profession you listed, they have more than one viable spec, but people stick with one because the ease to use or because its effectiveness, with some exceptions obviously (Eles and Necro, for instance)

STRanger.5120:

Well, it fits maybe your build/playstyle, but generally the SB is far better ranged option because of it´s utility. A lot of ppl doesn´t run S/D, so they don´t need ranged burst, that´s the place for SB.
It´s really the matter of preference/playstyle, but P/P is really not used as much as the SB, for a reason

Yes, because as I said before, people prefer to stick with D/D because of its burst capability and ease to use, so P/P doesn’t fit well with P/P because it needs another weapon set which gives mobility to the player (→ Shortbow), to compensate the lack of D/D.

Since S/X has no problems with mobility, you can sacrifice SB to have a more bursty set which is P/P.
Anyway, it feels like an exaggeration to say that P/P is unviable, because it isn’t. Probably it is unviable and not worth using if your 1st weapon set is D/D, but it doesn’t mean that it is unviable by itself.

STRanger.5120:

I have no other option than agree with that, P/P is really probably the weakest weapon set available for Thief. If you use it for finishing low HP enemies, a simple backstab would do wonders for you
Maybe it´s now usable against mesmers, as another topic says, but that´s all I suppose…

You would be right if Dancing Daggers wasn’t nerfed.
Actually, Unload can deal pretty decent damage and can be cast 2 times in a row AND is ranged, which is a really good parameter.
Shortbow hasn’t the same dps as P/P has, so it isn’t a good weapon choice to finish off targets.

I run S/D + P/P with 0/30/30/10/0 traits and berserker gear in s/tPvP. I usually S/D to pressure the enemy with substained damage and dazes, and switch to P/P to kite the enemy, interrupting their combo opener or high damage skills, and using Unload to finish them off. Actually, Unload is better than many other channeled skills, like the Necromancers’ one (Ghastly Claws or Life Siphon). It deals 808 damage on a bit less than two seconds casting time, which is really good considering its range and the fact that you can use it 2 or 3 times in a row, plus the damage is pumped up thanks to the bunch of damage boosters thief has in its traitlines.

Mrbig.8019:

Absolutely not.

Except P/D condition focused ( with/without venoms), other thief builds are inferior to any other competitive build of other classes.

In some niche comps, the backstab build can be used, but it’s largely inferior to an ele roamer.

I’m currently trying a D/P heavy acro build with air runes to understand if it’s viable, and i really hope it will, altough i find 1vs1 against certain classes to be hard as hell.

I don’t think you have really played any other build of other professions or you have at least tried all the builds you are claiming to be weak.

It is absolutely normal that 1vs1 against some builds is harder than the other, you can’t be a counter of everything.

Actually all the weapon sets of the thief are viable (probably D/P is the only set I didn’t find any use) and are effective.

S/D is extremely strong when built around stealth and raw damage (10/30/30). With the boon stripped on Flanking Strike and the accessible daze on Tactical Strike you can not only kill guardians easily, but you can also easily outlast any enemy thanks to the high mobility and high stealth accessibility.

P/P is a great support set, great to finish off targets on low health with Unload, but it is also quite good thanks to its utility. Don’t underrate headshot. In the right hands, it can be a very powerful skill.

S/P is viable, unless people say. The damage of PW is high, also the defensive capability of the whole build. Sword gives the build a pretty decent damage output thanks to autoattack, but also great mobility thanks to Infiltrator’s Strike.

Now if in your opinion D/D is superior over other specs, it is probably because it is focused more on the raw damage, bursts and it is the easiest set to play.. Since most people like bursts, they think that thief is all about that kind of playstyle, which is absolutely untrue, so they end up on conclusions that D/D is the only viable set and others are just junk.

fadeaway.2807:

I didn’t say viable, I said just as effective. That’s the problem, they’ve nerfed everything except 20k backstab bursts. (Well, they nerfed it a little…)
We’re pretty much forced into backstab builds nowadays because it’s head and shoulders above the rest of our options.

So the problem isn’t that other specs are weak, the problem is that backstab is too strong, which is a different thing.

There are bunch of viable specs.

P/D condition is good.
S/D is quite strong.
S/P is still good after the nerf.
P/P is viable despite what people say.
D/D bleedspam is also good.

alanis.6094:

Parasitic Bond doesn’t do anything, at all.

You’re right.
But at least Parastic Bond doesn’t play against you like Reanimator does (free rally to anyone!).

Don’t forget the vampiric trait which healed enemies. That was really hilarious.

All you read about both Ranger and Thief is wrong.
I’ve played both the profession to a decent level and I can say that Thief do quite well in PvE and Rangers are competitive in PvP as well.

To be honest, I find Ranger quite enjoyable both in s/tPvP, thanks to some sweet build with nice damage output coupled with the additional damage of your pet, and also in WvWvW, in which, in my opinion, the Ranger shines thanks to longbow and its insane range.

Thief, also, is quite good in every part of the game. In PvE thief actually do well, the point is that most people play the thief like it is a guardian or a warrior.
They don’t use shadowsteps, don’t stealth, don’t evade neither dodge damage, then, thanks to the not-so-tanky tendency of the thief, they fail hard and blame the profession to be weak in PvE, which is untrue.
In WvWvW they can do quite good with shortbow on the walls and they are great to burst down lonely guys, but also groups if you are enough skilled.
Nothing to say about s/tPvP because it is well-known that thieves perform extremely good in that part of the game.

Just choose the profession you like most.

Probably you walked into an AoE stealth skill like Shadow Refuge or Blinding Powder and than attacked a fraction of second after, giving you the revealed debuff without you noticing you went in stealth.

Devildoc.6721:

Do you seriously think patches with changes get pushed out that fast? They don’t put in a change in a week after they say they’re going to, it takes a few weeks, the November changes had been in works for a month or more.

Backstab is still on the agenda, they’re still looking at it.

1. You are assuming that they actually test a change like the CnD nerf for 1+ weeks.
2. You are assuming that they have decided to nerf the backstab combo after they posted that.

Too many assumption to be considered a proof.

Devildoc.6721:

sorrow.2364:

Devildoc.6721:

Not yet, but backstab nerf is in the works, the C&D nerf was just the first step. the nerfs are coming. I actually called the DD, Cluster Bomb, and C&D nerfs.. and I’m actually sad that I was right.

Have you got any proof in support of what you are saying or is that your apocalyptic view of ArenaNet plans?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Backstab-time-to-nerf/first

Look for the red post.

It was pre 15th November patch, so the nerf bat has already spoken on CnD.
Still waiting for proofs.

GeneralFreedom.2540:

Thief got nothing but nerfs and they seriously, really didn’t need them. I’m baffled as to WHY arenanet thought they should HALF a skills damage without adding any compensation.

This is a clear evidence that your point of view is completely spoilt.
Just read again the changelog of the 15th November patch.

Dancing Dagger was completely broken. It was able to deal 8k damage to 2 targets per cast, this means 24k damage if you use all your initiative, all this on a decent range.
How can you say that this skill was fine?

Kirshe.6872:

1) What is the ideal setup (build, skills, weapons) to have a leveling build where I can survive? Because I tried soloing a veterens and I get killed, but my warrior and guardian guildmates can kill the veteren without losing much hp.

2) How is the necromancer at endgame? I have known from reading other class forums on other mmorpgs, that almost everyone thinks that their class is underpowered. Is the necromancer underpowered, or is everyone whining?

3) Can I be a support necromancer? If the answer is yes, how?

4) How is WvWvW as a Necromancer, will I have a fair chance in a 1vs1?

5) Is it true that bleeds and other dots have a limit on them? If the answer is yes, why would the developers put such a restriction on a class that does alot of dots.

1) Every build does its job quite well. You just have to choose which is your playstyle.
If you prefer to play defensive, than Minion Master is the way. Else, you can build focusing on Death Shroud and the decent damage output of Life Blast or build around conditions.
The only advice I can give you is don’t focus that much on the vampiric concept because it isn’t worth that much.

Keep in mind, as said before, that Necromancers aren’t that good in bursting down mobs fast.

2) Most people whine, but the Necromancers are in a quite sad state, but this is mostly about PvP. In PvE Necromancers act quite good in endgame. Also, as said before, don’t expect any huge damage numbers.

3) Wells. I suggest you to spec into Death Magic and Blood Magic if you want to play support, but don’t expect to deal any damage.

4) You definitely have. But in WvWvW 1vs1 fights are always unfair, because equipments makes a great difference.

5) They have a restriction, but you won’t get that cap alone. Anyway every profession can build around bleeding in the same way, so this isn’t a Necromancer specific problem.