New thief meta?

Hey guys! i main a thief and I am interested to know whether the DPS (staff DD) meta for fractals and raids for thief has been affected by the new balance patch. Also,which site would you suggest being the more up to date and best overall with regards to meta builds and guides?metabattle?

Nothing should be 100% up to date given the patch was yesterday.

That said I don’t foresee much changing other than a possible boost to Deadeye rifle and improved functionality for existing specs in raids due to the new stolen skills.

@saerni.2584 said:Nothing should be 100% up to date given the patch was yesterday.

That said I don’t foresee much changing other than a possible boost to Deadeye rifle and improved functionality for existing specs in raids due to the new stolen skills.

Do you think the buff for rifle will make a build able to replace the staff meta?

Probably not? I don’t raid but staff is cleave so outperforms a single target in a lot of ways.

That said, I think the entire idea of a raid meta is silly when a raid will be cleared easily either way and no one will be performing at maximum efficiency unless they really care about finishing a few seconds earlier.

Rifle dps has been increased substantially (PvE) after this last patch, in terms of single target damage it can compete with staff now. However as the above post mentions, the cleave from staff just feels a lot better than hitting 1 target at a time. I wouldn't be surprised to see a deadeye build coming out from SnowCrows in a few days.

@harris.7964 said:

@saerni.2584 said:Nothing should be 100% up to date given the patch was yesterday.

That said I don’t foresee much changing other than a possible boost to Deadeye rifle and improved functionality for existing specs in raids due to the new stolen skills.

Yyyyyeess and no.

I don't raid often, so I've probably got no authority compared to someone with like 400Li or some shit. I've taken the Rifle into raids already after this buff patch. I've noticed cases where the Rifle would be infinitely better than staff regardless of staff being able to output more raw DPS. And cases where taking rifle would be a bad idea.

Rifle has a number of advantages over the staff in my opinion. But also disadvantages.

The first is the rotation. The biggest problem with the DD rotation is there's a lot of movement involved in it, and it requires the use of your dodge. Players will miss strikes pretty damn often once the battle gets rolling and the boss starts shifting around, if not ever so slightly. Not to mention the added complexity of needing to manually target landing locations and keeping track of events happening around you. The rifle combats this by turning one of the weaknesses in the kit into a surprising advantage. You don't need to move around much, and in the event you do, a well timed dodge roll from anything (utils, heal, or endurance dodge) will reposition you into a more favorable place pretty quickly. Next, with the size of raid bosses, a rifle shot is pretty much guranteed to hit at all times. The hitboxes are massive, and while crouched the projectiles are very fast. A good deal of player error is removed here.

Second is target acquisition. There's a number of raid bosses where DPS needs to suddenly swap targets to burn something down. The problem here isn't relocating to chase a moving target, though it is a part of it. The main problem is that players often drop a lot of damage when they turn their cameras to see a new threat. (again, DD requires a lot of movement). Deadeye, as long as you have the boss targeted you will keep hitting. Finally, when you do swap targets, you don't need to actually move. You can quickly spin around and start hitting things that other players normally can not, if not with a decent amount of damage.

The third is bosses with burst phases. Keep Construct for instance will take an INSANE amount of damage from the deadeye alone thanks to M7 powered DJs.

Fourth, though now slightly changed after the patch is that the DE is able to provide support functions without suffering a massive loss in DPS. Most of the lower tiers are completely up to the player's choice on what they want to use.

Fifth, faster burst. The rifle is able to burn single things down in a much shorter time span than a Staff.

The disadvantages are...

Mobility. So most of the raid bosses do not move much at all. But this becomes a major problem when the tank is unable to keep still and feels the need to run around. Stronghold of the Faithful Escort will not prove a problem for mobility, but Sea of Souls may due to the player needing to keep up with the moving shield. Cairn, where people may argue that mobility is necessary isn't really so. You can stay near your druids and dish out tons of hurt no problems and at minimum risk of being teleported away. The shit it often sends at you can be easily dodged.

No Cleave: You have a line AOE, and that's pretty much it. It can only hit 5 things at a time and burns through your init fast. Unless you put a bursting rune (one that gives AOE explosions) on your gun... you ain't gonna be much help in sloth.

Latency and Action Delays: latency hits DE harder than a DD. This is because sometimes your command for Free Action may not go through. Or worse, the command gets completely ignored or overwritten due to you mass spamming your keys.

Failure to keep a rythm results in shit DPS: DD staff is fairly forgiving in that if you screwed up your init and blasted your cool downs. that's fine. You can just auto attack and wait. Unfortunately, doing that with Deadeye is pretty hurtful.

Damage Aura: you're gonna feel this the hardest if your Druid forgot about you. Or you did not get up to stack in with the melee fighters.

Rifle Deadeye is just barely reaching the same dps as staff Daredevil at ~30k (and both still below condi). so no dethroning in that regards. Thanks to its near-infinite dodges, Daredevil does it's full dps almost regardless of any movement or mechanics so long as it can stay in melee range of target, plus gets free 3+ target cleave. While almost the exact reverse is true for Deadeye, at 1500 range it should never have issues staying within dps range of the target, but loses out on significant amounts of dps any time it has to move or deal with mechanics, or switch targets.

So I foresee Staff Daredevil remaining the meta for power thief on the vast majority of fights, if just for it's ability to survive and deal with mechanics much easier. Maybe specific fights where you can't melee all the time but you don't have to move too much (Cairn comes to mind), Rifle will do better, but that's still a maybe.

Rifle DPS relies on being locked into one place at range. I don't see that as being realistic anywhere in raids.

And as others have said, even with all else being equal, staff cleaves and doesn't lose damage on the main target if there's an add running in front of it.

I see! And which site do you usually find the most up to date?metabattle?

@harris.7964 said:I see! And which site do you usually find the most up to date?metabattle?Yup. MetaBattle was just updated for the last patch the other day.