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Is Power S/D Roaming a thing? Advice?


BoxHat.1824

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looking to get back into WvW roaming, mainly focused on taking camps but not being afraid to fight fights if they come up. looking through Metabattle (shudder) the only builds i see are D/P DD and Staff DD. im not really a fan of the aesthetic or the unfairness of perma stealth D/P builds so i have been looking at other options.

I have been trying staff DD all day, and while it seems to be fine for taking camps, i find it almost impossible to fight with, landing vault is nearly impossible and if i dont vault i get burst to pieces because of not evading. Following this i thought perhaps Sword would be a better option with its built in immobilize and gapcloser, but i can see a build for it. Does it still work? how should i build it?I expect i would run trickery and deadly arts, but for a third line should it be Acro foir sword trait or DD for condi cleanse on evade and perma swiftness with Grandmaster 2?

Any help or advice would be great, or if someone could point me to and up to date guide :) thanks in advance

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yes s/d power still works and is a lot of fun to play.i would recommend to run acro over dd.you will have perma swiftness with just acro aswell and also the synergies between da/acro/trickery regarding the utility of your steal are amazing while unhindered combatant in the dd line and its exhaustion can be problematic for this build.

it is a pretty good allround build for roaming.you get enough burst to quickly kill squishies.a lot of boon steals and evades.with sword 2 a great tool for repositioning which needs some awareness of your surroundings other than repositioning due to stealth but other than stealth you can line of sight the enemy in one button click or just get yourself quick at places where your enemy cant follow you easily.mug, improvisation, swindler's equilibrium, thrill of the crime, bountiful theft and sleight of hand altogether in just one build

all these things are great to be prepared for almost every situation in roaming.

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I'm running S/D rifle deadeye with SA trickery deadeye atm, works well for this build too. Slightly different approach to core S/D, but malicious tactical strike with the 40% endurance food means you have loads of dodges, and the boons from M7, Totc and bountiful theft are pretty substantial (perma fury, vigor, swiftness, high protection uptime with 10-25 might stacks regularly) as long as you manage your malice well.

I was running acro over S/A but with the food and sneak attack plus perma vigor I'm not really missing it atm.

Core S/D is probably stronger in experienced hands, I find rifle can give you a very different approach to a lot of fights and that's more valuable than what I get from shortbow atm.

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@Jugglemonkey.8741 said:I'm running S/D rifle deadeye with SA trickery deadeye atm, works well for this build too. Slightly different approach to core S/D, but malicious tactical strike with the 40% endurance food means you have loads of dodges, and the boons from M7, Totc and bountiful theft are pretty substantial (perma fury, vigor, swiftness, high protection uptime with 10-25 might stacks regularly) as long as you manage your malice well.

I was running acro over S/A but with the food and sneak attack plus perma vigor I'm not really missing it atm.

Core S/D is probably stronger in experienced hands, I find rifle can give you a very different approach to a lot of fights and that's more valuable than what I get from shortbow atm.

This sounds really fun, how do you manage out of combat swiftness and taking camps?

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@"Ustaf.2953" said:looking to get back into WvW roaming, mainly focused on taking camps but not being afraid to fight fights if they come up. looking through Metabattle (shudder) the only builds i see are D/P DD and Staff DD. im not really a fan of the aesthetic or the unfairness of perma stealth D/P builds so i have been looking at other options.

I have been trying staff DD all day, and while it seems to be fine for taking camps, i find it almost impossible to fight with, landing vault is nearly impossible and if i dont vault i get burst to pieces because of not evading. Following this i thought perhaps Sword would be a better option with its built in immobilize and gapcloser, but i can see a build for it. Does it still work? how should i build it?I expect i would run trickery and deadly arts, but for a third line should it be Acro foir sword trait or DD for condi cleanse on evade and perma swiftness with Grandmaster 2?

Any help or advice would be great, or if someone could point me to and up to date guide :) thanks in advance

S/D has always been more manageable than D/P even more so that Cloak and Dagger is now cheaper to use. However S/D is more a tactical set than a burst set, meaning it lacks a finishing move. D/P has access to both Heartseeker and Backstab to finish any target. By comparing the set's Malicious attack, you can fairly see that S/D is more about tactical gameplay giving it a lot of access to evasion. Larcenous Strike can hit hard but that if you can keep your target boonless, so it is unreliable most of the time in terms of a finishing move. You have to be really creative to set up your target so your LS will hit a boonless target.

With that said, the build I personally use is having a lot of Vitality and converting that Vitality to Ferocity using the Wurm Rune. I'm currently using Valkyrie set, but if you can make it, Marauder is the best set. I'm currently using CS/Trk/DD taking Hidden Killer. To take advantage of Hidden Killer, I use stealth attack followed by FS/LS. If you timed this correctly and your target is boonless, LS will crit for big numbers.

This is roughly my build (I use Valkyrie instead of Marauder, but Marauder is prefered): http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQJAsYn8lCFOhFmCmOBkmiFiCbO/1/GgbZpRTAwLI8DKCA-jlRDQBAw8X+U/RI7PkO9AJU5X4UCSKgIGaB-w

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@Ustaf.2953 said:

@Jugglemonkey.8741 said:I'm running S/D rifle deadeye with SA trickery deadeye atm, works well for this build too. Slightly different approach to core S/D, but malicious tactical strike with the 40% endurance food means you have loads of dodges, and the boons from M7, Totc and bountiful theft are pretty substantial (perma fury, vigor, swiftness, high protection uptime with 10-25 might stacks regularly) as long as you manage your malice well.

I was running acro over S/A but with the food and sneak attack plus perma vigor I'm not really missing it atm.

Core S/D is probably stronger in experienced hands, I find rifle can give you a very different approach to a lot of fights and that's more valuable than what I get from shortbow atm.

This sounds really fun, how do you manage out of combat swiftness and taking camps?

Swiftness can be stacked by marking a deer or whatever then spamming standing 2 on rifle, between Totc, m7 and the 2 spam you'll get a minute of swiftness after doing this twice. Also mark and kill any critter as mark is refreshed after the kill, so even more boons. Other than that I use sword 2 and infiltrators signet on far off mobs for the shadowsteps, or I use rifle: dodge for stealth, turn camera 180 as you're dodging, hold back to turn your char, death's retreat, turn and run til stealth expires, kneel to reset stealth on dodge, dodge etc. It's a bit finicky at the start but you can move at the same speed as swiftness for a while doing that.

Camps I usually use rifle for, as you can mark for stealth, DJ, three round burst x2, that will kill most guards and be just in time to dodge for stealth and remark. That said you can just jump in the middle of them with s/d as well since the cleave is pretty good, as long as you're careful to manage your malice and mark each new target you'll not run out of dodges or ini, and will have perma boons. Go for the guys that pull you first, then the scouts and zealots, after that the others should be easy enough. You've also got SA, so take advantage of the stealth to reposition, cleanse and heal if you need to.

You can also run acro trick de, that works well enough too, and can easily get a ton of quickness from marking with be quick or be killed and swindler's equilibrium. I found that the main reason I lost was being gradually worn down while the enemy could sustain themselves, plus there's a ton of condi based roamers, hence my swap to SA. Strength, spellbreaker and durability runes work well on top of the usual scholar runes, I remember getting 9k larcenous strikes on warriors and revs with dura runes on old deadeye before the nerf because of the might stacking lol

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been runing s/d most of my thief game time but started to play it a lot more just before PoF came out. very fun build to play indeed and ofc it has its counters like ranged bust/dps and even tb scoruges can be annoying.

This is the build I run

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAsYVl0MhSnY5TwwJw/EHwElOBCgdznGnRb0LsQMRB-jFDEQB+TtCC8ICcoSFDcCEAkSQ4t/g70H0GNMA4AB0ElVJSVlHcEBCAgAcz2sNvZ28m38mv5Nv5Nv5N7628m38m38m38m38mlCY1hWA-w

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I love power S/D Core, it is very fun and super effective versus many builds. I wish I would run it more, but I keep going back to DA/Trick/DE Rifle as it seems more effective versus a wider variety of enemy builds. This is purely from a solo-roam 1v1 1vX perspective. I used to main S/D Daredevil, but unfortunately the nerf to UC was the breaking point that made core S/D more effective for me.

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