Iskarel.7240

BTW, here's a great example of the pain caused by boss Reveal (phase 2 Sabir) and then by Malice's unhealthy dependence on Critical Chance (Weakness in phase 3):

I wrote an extensive analysis of the state of DPS Deadeye in the current meta. There's a lot of work that could be done for this elite spec to help dredge it out of its massively-underplayed status in Endgame PvE (Raids, Strikes, Fractals).

I'm well aware of Axe's problems, a colleague of mine documented them all here:

Who am I? Iskarel. Thief enthusiast and benchmarker. Build/guide editor for Snow Crows website. I often write articles for /r/GuildWars2 contextualizing the state of PvE Thief. It's currently 3AM. I am Malice in Wonderland. I tried to format this to make it comfortably readable for anyone with the time to invest into reading a thesis on Deadeye. I've authored so many threads on /r/GuildWars2 to help contextualize PvE Thief for people who aren't as familiar with its facets. tl;dr The good! Many weapon options (repeat skills many times = every weapon set feels very distinct) Ranged damage with rifle, self-boons with Maleficent Seven, sacrificing damage for big CC The bad! Bosses applying Revealed shut down Deadeye. Stop using Revealed, spend the time to recycle Turai Ossa's Veil Sight feature Deadeye getting a scratch and its rotation breaks Doesn't hold a candle to the burst of power builds like Vindicator/Soulbeast, but can't beat them on sustained damage either, very balanced game Pathological single-target focus with Deadeye's Mark system Rifle makes you slow crawl and needs more damage to warrant how niche it is Animation lock for days with dagger and staff Did you know you still have to move "behind" the Dragonvoid in Harvest Temple? non-defiant enemies still need to be flanked Deadeye is Very Fun and has Great Variety To all PvE Deadeye players who've embraced the pain and joy of Daggers and Rifle—I respect you all for sticking with this elite spec. Every time I meet another dedicated Deadeye, I geek out inside. I'm your fan, you're my people, I want you to sign my Predator rifle. This elite spec causes me so much joy, but the arbitrary restrictions it suffers under cause me endless frustration. I want to explain those frustrations to those who don't know, but before I get into those frustrations, I want to show some of my love for this spec. Deadeye's PvE Builds DPS Deadeye is viable (with some stretch of that term in a few areas) with variations of: Dagger/Dagger Power Dagger/Pistol Power (bench is outdated, does similar damage to Dagger/Dagger) Staff Power Rifle power (Shadow Flare, Premeditation/Mercy, Silent Scope) Dagger/Dagger Condition Pistol/Dagger Condition soon, hopefully, Axe/Dagger Condition It's a Thief elite spec that manages to productively swap between two weapon sets in the style familiar to all other professions (Elementalist Attunements and Engineer Kits are just another version of this idea): Rifle + Daggers, Rifle + Dagger/Pistol, Staff + Daggers. Because each rotation repeats specific Initiative skills, they each have their own strong gameplay feel...So strong that it can drive people away. That is a feature, not a bug! Here's a list of some modern DPS Deadeye rotations, which doesn't include all the things I mentioned above. Most are performed by me, with the Shadow Flare / No-Mercy Rifle-Dagger rotation performed by Incera. Dagger-Pistol Smoke Combo Sometime last year I came up with the basic structure of a Dagger-Pistol Maleficent Seven rotation which utilizes the basic, familiar tech of "Black Powder → Heartseeker → Backstab", applied to endgame boon-uptime standards: with Quickness, each Black Powder smoke Field allows two Backstabs by fitting in 4 Heartseekers into the field's duration, while still respecting the time-out duration of Revealed. Incera refined the idea and performed a benchmark you can view here. I've recorded gameplay on Keep Construct and Soulless Horror where I capitalize on Dagger-Pistol's damage and Defiance Break. (The Soulless Horror PoV also includes some crit-chance misery where my Malice gets ruined because I was just 2.3% below the Critical Chance cap, thanks to wearing the wrong Amulet. I'm never kidding when I say Deadeye's rotation is fragile!) Condition Builds I'll admit I'm not fond of Dagger/Dagger condition as I find it less fun than Condition Daredevil's approach. I LOVE Pistol-Dagger condition deadeye and have carried its torch forward since ANet tried to stamp it out in mid 2021. It's doing _okay_ right now, for a convalescent, benching over 37K with a high APM, very precise rotation that can easily send you flying off group into dangerous arena zones. Scepter/Dagger could be fun, but it's ruined by low critical chance (more on that later...) Staff Builds I invented two Staff rotations for Maleficent Seven deadeye: Staff + Daggers and Staff only. They're fun, but incredibly impractical thanks to the animation lock on Weakening Charge. You can also use Staff for Quickness Deadeye if you want more cleave and don't want to navigate Stealth/Revealed with Dagger/Dagger. Quickness Builds I'm less than thrilled with the state of Quickness Deadeye, but I was very vindicated to see Deadeye's boon identity finally blossom into a viable boon support build. Yes, ANet has been stapling Quickness/Alacrity onto builds over the years, but Deadeye 100% had this one coming. ANet thought so 5 years ago (when the role of a "boon support" was quite different): Heal Quickness Deadeye isn't real and it can't hurt me. I'm sorry, I have standards of living (tough talk for a Deadeye enthusiast), and Heal Quick Deadeye isn't cooked yet. The Positives of Deadeye Positive: CC Monster Or CC griefer. It really depends on your goals... Deadeye can be set up to do exceptional amounts of sustained Defiance Break, e.g. staff and sword-pistol. These are extreme examples which give up a lot of personal DPS to provide that much Crowd Control (the utility choices, cast time, rune/sigil options, animation lock on staff, burning out all Initiative, and of course the damage output of those weapons themselves). Having strong CC output is an interesting prospect, and it pairs with builds with weak CC output. This is a compelling strength, but it is not enough to make Deadeye a shoe-in for squad comp—because CC can come from everyone. Examples of actual high-value features: When a Daredevil/Vindicator needs Vigor to perform optimally, they can't scrutinize every single build to provide some uptime. That boon is far more restricted. DPS builds which can provide group healing at low cost (Thief has some access to this with Skelk Venom! ... but Deadeye likes Hide in Shadows as a stealth source and Signet of Malice for upkeep-healing) DPS builds which have great personal luxuries, such as Stability or Barrier or Range, can leverage those strengths to push themselves to new limits. Deadeye has Maleficent Seven boons, but they're not build-defining, and Rifle range which has many more limitations than the likes of Virtuoso, Specter, or Scourge. A build that makes sacrifices to provide excellent CC is a group service, one that becomes less valuable the more CC your group can already do without asking for drastic sacrifices from one specific build. Positive: Ranged Damage Rifle Deadeye does good ranged damage. We move slow while Kneeling, but that's not always a deal breaker—when you don't have full melee uptime, but the boss (and your regular-speed allies) don't kitten off to another area of the arena. Most of its damage is transmitted without damage attrition. A lot of builds people think of as "ranged builds" have some damage attrition—but a lot less than a melee build! ANet actually spoiled this with the rework to Shadow Flare, turning it into a melee-range skill—I'll elaborate on that further, but bear in mind you lose 50% of that slot skill's damage at range. Ranged DPS is a compelling strength, but the reduced movement speed makes it hard to really capitalize on it. Where a build like Scourge/Virtuoso allows players who lack encounter knowledge to perform better, Rifle Deadeye asks you to already have deep knowledge of the encounter so you know exactly where you should stand within about a 1-second tolerance—you can't get out of dangerous effects with much less warning than that! Positive: Self Boons Maleficent Seven grants 6 boons to the player, which are mostly all "staple" boons. If a Deadeye sees benefit from its self-generated Might, then its nearby allies don't have might. The damage the Deadeye deals with Might does not nearly make up for that group DPS loss. Protection here is KEY. I'll explain later that even a lightly-injured Deadeye becomes far less effective. We need this damage reduction just to be baseline effective. Regeneration might as well not be here lol. You have no healing power, so this barely heals you, and it will not make the difference between 90%/75% HP. Vigor is a nice luxury, and is essential to the Silent Scope Rifle rotation. Ideally we won't dodge so much that we actually need this Vigor, but better than needing and not having! Fury is already covered by traits in Critical Strikes so um... Lastly, Swiftness. This is a weird one. If you're playing a melee build than the swiftness helps you guarantee you can close distance with the enemy at good speed. If using Rifle...This might not do anything. I say might, because there's some bizarre oversight/glitch related to character model and Rifle movement speed. With certain character creation settings, different Deadeyes move at different speeds while Kneeling. The faster Deadeyes move as if they already had Swiftness. Swiftness normalizes this difference, so you'll never notice it when playing Maleficent Seven. Maleficent Seven guarantees Deadeye will have at least 6 boons, which translates to 6% Strike damage from Premeditation. Or 0% more damage when using Silent Scope, where the Vigor actually comes in handy... Why Deadeye is Suffering In a somewhat arbitrary descending order of frustration. Negative: Bosses Revealing Players Disclaimer: I am not saying stealth should be useless in all endgame scenarios, just the ones where ANet is already revealing the player. I see you, HTCM Mass Invis enjoyers, Fractal/Dungeon skip enjoyers. You're fine. Many raids apply Revealed to players when targeted by the boss or some mechanics, which prevents the player from entering Stealth. This is not just the player with the highest toughness! If you get fixated by Samarog, you are permanently revealed until the fixation ends. If you get fixated by a Phantasm at Keep Construct and it winds up its attack to bonk you, you get Revealed for ~20 seconds. If the fixated tank jumps the shockwave at Samarog or Twin Largos Kenut and you are on the ground, then the boss can panic-swap its fixation from the in-the-air tank to you, applying Revealed! If you land on Sabir's 2nd/3rd phase platform first, you get pulsing Revealed for 15 seconds. If the Soul Feast in the Celestial Observatory Strike mission targets you, you can get revealed for ~20 seconds. Do you realize how INSANE it is that encounters keep incorporating mechanics that completely shut down one of this game's elite specs? You'll note some of these predate Deadeye's Path of Fire release. Some are after. Some are from months ago... There is a better way: Veil Sight. Turai Ossa in the Queen's Gauntlet festival challenge has a special effect that allows the boss to ignore player stealth, without Revealing the player. This is what we need for the bosses in instanced content. Encounters need to stop incorporating Revealed. Nothing else in game has such an arbitrary, bad-practice shut down like this. Some areas of effect and boss movement are explicitly designed to disadvantage melee attacks. This is not the same. There is zero reason to ever confiscate Stealth access from a Deadeye in PvE. I understand that if a boss can't interact with a Stealthed player who has the enemy fixate, then the boss will just stand there doing nothing (we saw this on the release of Old Lion's Court). I do not want to cheese enemies. I want the bosses to see through Stealth so they don't lock down AND Deadeye can have fun. Negative: Keen Observer/Malice Critical Chance reliance Deadeye has an unhealthy reliance on Critical Chance to generate points of Malice. This is problematic: Keen Observer grants 15% critical chance when the Thief is above 75% HP. It is trivially easy to take a small amount of damage in a raid and drop below this threshold, but have a healer think you don't need a burst heal. Without the Critical Chance, Malice is not guaranteed. Without guaranteed Malice, Maleficent Seven rotations fall apart. DPS builds are supposed to do damage and have fun doing it. This problem is particularly egregious for Initiative skills that only have a single damage packet—notably, daggers. Nothing else in game is as damage-averse as Dagger Deadeye—nothing in Elementalist even comes close to this sensitivity. Condition builds, which cannot afford to max out their critical chance to begin with, strongly prefer Initiative skills with multiple hits. This is why Scepter-Dagger Condition Deadeye never got off the ground, while Scepter-Dagger Condition Specter is doing well. It must be recognized that ANet has taken steps to alleviate some of this strain: Keen Observer used to punish the player for dropping below 90% HP, not 75%. Good change, not good enough. Malicious Intent now grants 2 Malice after you Stealth attack or use Deadeye's Mark. That's significant because it means you only need 5 Malice to reach 7. You'll use 3 Initiative skills to get there, and if one of them fails to Crit, you're still okay. It's a damage loss to not crit, but the rotation doesn't fall apart! Best of all, if you get to 6 Malice before Cloak & Dagger, you know you'll hit 7 Malice no matter what—no gambling, you can queue straight from Cloak & Dagger into Backstab. Also note: if you're below 75% HP, you're below 90% HP, so you lose 7% Critical Damage from Twin Fangs. That's already enough to drop a 43K bench down to to 40.2. Contrast all this with Power Scrapper, which generates such an obscene amount of personal barrier via the MINOR TRAIT Impact Savant that its lax health modifiers are never in any danger To wit: Scrapper's Glass Cannon loses 10% damage if the player drops below 75% HP, which is less of a loss than Keen Observer explained below. Big Boomer only asks you to have more HP than your target and grants you an obscene 15% damage—that modifier becomes easier and easier to maintain the longer the fight goes on. Both are trivial for Scrapper which has two health bars due to all the Barrier you constantly generate just by dealing damage to enemies—scaling with the number of enemies you hit! Unlike Reaper's "two health bar" meme, Scrapper is equally performant at full barrier and empty barrier—it will deal 100% damage in either scenario. A Reaper with 100% life force and 0% life force loses a HUGE amount of damage. Don't mistake them as the same. If Scrapper "needs" this Barrier to preserve its health modifier, then the game is improperly balanced until Scrapper does reasonably less damage than both Power Holosmith (which lacks that insane Barrier, but has the very same health modifier requirements as Scrapper) and Power Deadeye (which also has no Barrier and suffers massively when it drops below the Keen Observer threshold: more in a later section) Negative: F1 Deadeye's Mark clashes with encounter design Importantly, some fights have multiple hitboxes for the same enemy, or never refund Deadeye's Mark despite "killing" an enemy. For the former: Conjured Amalgamate has 2 hitboxes. The first is active at the very start of the phase so if you're too fast, you'll uselessly mark that hitbox then be unable to hit it, and thus unable to be a Deadeye. This first hitbox is later the head: CA lowers its head if the Sword/Shield collection and burn phase took too long. The second hitbox is the "body", which you attack during the collection phase. For the latter: the hands on CA never "die" they just deplete to 100 then leave the arena. When they do so, your F1 Mark is not refunded. This is also the basic case for the Dragonvoid in the Harvest Temple strike mission—when you defeat each "version", your Mark is not refunded, but the fight marches on. Beyond those extreme examples, you marry yourself to your target via the Mark mechanic, which does not play well with various well-meaning encounter designs. Deadeye's attacks provide very little cleave to deal with other enemies, making you heavily reliant on other people picking up your slack, while you do...the same damage as them on the main target, with current profession balance. You can take Mercy to alleviate this target-swapping problem, but that does not play well with using Rifle, as the weapon either (A) needs you to fill your slot skills with Stealth sources, and you can't keep it fed indefinitely that way, or (B) take Silent Scope trait, which is a considerable DPS loss. People stop playing builds when they only do 38K even if they have CC. How about 38K with slow crawling speed, no CC slotted, and all the other downsides described in this thread? When playing Deadeye you always need to pay attention to the length of time you spend in a phase and know whether you need to bring Mercy. This is similar to "skill saving" on other builds—if the Deadeye is not set up to place their Mark on the new target, they forsake a huge damage modifier AND can't generate Malice, resorting to auto attacks. (examples include Gorseval and its ghosts, Sabetha and her champions, Keep Construct and its phantasms, Deimos and Saul, Conjured Amalgamate and its hands, and Twin Largos Nikare and Kenut). The most ridiculous example is Drakkar. Deadeye can only mark one enemy, so any encounter which rapidly swaps between targets makes Deadeye pathetic. This is parodied spectacularly with the Bjora Marches world boss Drakkar, which is made up of 17 separate boss props, sharing a health pool. Once one part of the boss' attack sequence concludes, the boss prop phases out of the fight, but Deadeye's Mark is not refunded to the player. Do I need Deadeye to be viable on Drakkar? No. I just need you to understand how INSANE this can get. Negative: Lack of Burst Damage Properly "bursty" power DPS builds generally have the ability to throw out multiple overlapping packets of damage (e.g. Frost Trap and One Wolf Pack on Power Soulbeast), enormous damage modifiers (Sic 'Em on Soulbeast), and lots of high damage abilities to string together before resorting to low damage filler (cooldown skills vs auto attacks). (Power Bladesworn is a noticeable counterexample with one enormous hit buffed with modifiers, but it's important to note that it only gets that damage at the start of a fight when it has a colossal 25% damage modifier in the Warrior's Cunning trait). Maleficent Seven Deadeye loops through its Malice every 3-4 seconds. It doesn't have room for any of its skills to be "bursty", otherwise it'd have truly insane damage (look at the Condition Axe build in beta). Some Rifle configurations physically have NO filler. If you take Quickness away from Silent Scope Rifle Deadeye, there is no adjustment they can make to the rotation to mitigate some of that loss. They can only do the same thing they were planning, just much slower. This is in contrast to builds with many skills to push, where you'll skip lower priority skills in favor of the harder hitting cooldown skills. Deadeye does not have enormous, short-duration damage modifiers. All it has is Assassin's Signet, which is ~9% damage boost for just five seconds. Contrast that with Dragonhunter's Big Game Hunter (a 20% damage modifier for 12 seconds) or Soulbeast's Sic 'Em (a 25% damage modifier for 10 seconds). Beyond that, all we have is Shadow Flare, which only provides a bit of overlapping damage. The skill used to have a 3.6 coefficient over 5.5 seconds, but now has a 2.0 coefficient over ~0.5 seconds. The cooldown was reduced so we cast it more often. Shadow Swap (half of the skill's 2.0 coefficent) only strikes enemies at the orb's destination. If we use the skill at range, it will only strike once! It's a good skill in melee range, but cannot carry the rest of Deadeye's kit. Thieves Guild also can't carry us. It's another layered damage source, but their damage output is anemic. In fact did you know if the summoned Guild Deadeye is not looking at your enemy when you start attacking, it will just stand there like a lemon and do nothing? Deadeye does not NEED to have burst damage, mind you. It can shine as a sustained damage build...but not when builds like Soulbeast and Power Vindicator have far superior burst and similar (or better!) sustain. You have to consider that when looking at golem benchmarks, DPS builds have no downtime to recover cooldowns that they can use in a burst. Because Deadeye is setup for endurance, not burst, it performs well on a golem (where none of these other downsides harry it), but falls behind superior burst power builds in real encounters. I'd love for all benchmarks to represent burst in some way, but I have no doubt I'd find it virtually impossible to get players to agree on which metric to use, because "first numbers" on Golem benchmarks (when the Golem hits 80% HP) are extremely volatile (and golem benchmarks do not align with the best actions you can take for a short-duration burst window). These first numbers are even worse metrics for balance than the end numbers (which already aren't good in isolation—they're merely diagnostic to assess damage while also considering all other features, like I'm doing in this thread). I don't have a solution on my end here, even as someone who (A) provides benchmark and (B) works as a content editor for Snow Crows, and oversees builds and their benchmarks. Negative: Rifle's downsides Kneeling with a Rifle slows movement to roleplay-walk speed. Deadeye can transmit most of its damage profile out to 1,500 range when using Rifle, although it only has sustained damage without burst—momentary spread mechanics do NOT favor a Deadeye as the player can neither quickly move, nor capitalize on the spread by applying a burst of damage while melee builds deal zero. You just keep doing the same damage you were doing, giving you at best a slight lead over other builds. The damage is weaker than many modern melee builds, it has a fragile "lifespan" for its rotation, and Three Round Burst cannot pierce through targets. Death's Judgment always deals full damage to the Marked target, but suffers three damage penalties when damaging pierced-through enemies. The coefficient is reduced by approx. 50%, you lose the 70% damage bonus derived from Malice, and the 15% Damage modifier from the Iron Sight trait. In total then, a pierced-through target takes only 25% of the damage that the Marked target takes! I mentioned earlier that the highest DPS option for Rifle asks that you commit your slot skills to Stealth sources. That means Rifle deadeye can struggle to provide Defiance Break in encounters. The work around is to use Rifle less (take Dagger/Dagger for when you run out of Stealth, or Dagger/Pistol as a hybrid DPS-CC weapon set), or make Rifle weaker (take Silent Scope). That's compelling balance in theory, but Rifle Deadeye just doesn't do quite enough damage to make that trade worthwhile. Negative: Animation Locking I'm not asking for animation locks to be removed. I'm asking for them to factor into the build's power budget. The worst animation locking on Deadeye belongs to an off-meta option: Staff-Dagger. Have you ever suffered from animation lock with Staff on Daredevil because you queued Weakening Charge too many times? Imagine if the rotation had you do that 11 times in a row! More commonly, painful animation locking on Deadeye is from Dagger's Heartseeker skill. With Quickness, this is a 600ms animation lock you cast twice every ~4 seconds, totaling 1200ms. For reference, that's the same length of Death's Charge shroud skill used by Power Reaper. Imagine that length of animation, cast unceasingly, with a much larger DPS loss for not using it (Reaper using autos instead of Death's Charge is a MUCH smaller loss than Deadeye using Dancing Dagger instead of Heartseeker vs targets below 50%/25% HP). Negative: Flanking/Backstab vs Non-Defiant Prop Enemies You no longer need to Flank enemies for the Twin Fangs trait), nor stand Behind enemies for the Backstab skill Defiant enemies but not all enemies are defiant! Deimos at 10%, Conjured Amalgamate and its Hands, Adina's Hands, the Dragonvoid... The stated intention for the change vs Defiant enemies was to make these requirements "more reliable in endgame PvE content", but non-Defiant prop enemies are the least readable enemies we fight! It's not at all intuitive that Conjured Amalgamate is NOT facing the center of the platform (it's facing to the right, when viewing the platform from Zommoros) despite the boss visually facing the center. It's not at all intuitive that all the Hands during Cardinal Adina's fight are facing different directions. Thank you for reading!

July 18 patch was supposed to nerf Specter's Shadestep Alacrity from 2-seconds to 1.25 seconds. This only went through for the Specter—they generate 1.25 seconds of personal Alac per Shroud skill used, but generate 2 seconds of Alacrity for allies. Here's a dps.report log showing 6.25 seconds of Alacrity on the Specter and 10 seconds of Alacrity on a Mesmer ally (with no traits or self generation/extension), after 5 casts of Haunt Shot. https://dps.report/Luqm-20230720-070620_golem

Updated version. Rotation unchanged, number accidentally inflated by ~300 DPS cause I put wrong conditions.

re: Rifle Deadeye Changes The "sniper" now has massively less range than Ranger longbow. This smacks of another nerf to PvE thief because the competitive modes exist. It's not a deal breaker but it is extremely frustrating. You're okay with Ranger longbow, as an arcing projectile, hitting at ranges of 1,800-2,000, but Rifle was already hard-locked to 1,500 range and is now limited to 1,200. Why? This makes repositioning unusually punishing for Deadeye compared to any other ranged build (especially Virtuoso). Deadeye barely has more damage than Virtuoso, less utility, and slower burst. This change doesn't make sense in a vacuum—if you want Deadeye to be harder to play than Virtuoso, then you should give it more damage or more group utility as a payoff (the only thing Deadeye does is give 50% Fury uptime, which Mesmer also does). You provided 25% movement time while kneeling (which may be too slow, have to see when patch is live) but you also made "hard repositioning" with unkneel-kneel more punishing by potentially delaying the rotation with 2 init cost vs 1. Why? What was the design goal here? You said: How does increased initiative cost on Kneel track with that? Good quality of life, but why doesn't Deadeye have a means of reliably providing itself with Stability and Aegis the way Bladesworn does? Deadeye is permanently restricted with reduced move speed, needing to flank (Thief has to Flank because of the Critical Strikes traitline, Bladesworn can CHOOSE to Flank if it takes Thief runes but Scholar and Eagle are also very potent choices—that is not the case with Thief, nothing comes close to Scholar), and staying above 90% HP (Keen Observer crit chance, Twin Fangs damage modifier, Scholar rune damage modifier), but your design holds that Bladesworn deserves aegis and stability, while Deadeye does not—Maleficent Seven only provides seriously redundant boons which your group should already be providing to the group because they're ALWAYS valuable. Aegis/Stability are needed to mitigate risky positioning/animation locks, which your design recognized for Bladesworn, but you continue to ignore Deadeye which has it even worse to begin with. 1. Death's Judgment already does less damage to un-marked targets! 1a. Death's Judgment per-Malice damage modifier only applies to the marked target! 1b. Iron Sight trait is 15% multiplicative damage only to the marked target If the upcoming design is FURTHER reducing the damage of Death's Judgment against un-marked targets, please do not go through with that. Besides being deeply unnecessary, it's very messy design. You just changed Quickness Catalyst's trait by removing the outgoing damage reduction, which was double-dipping as a penalty by being mutually exclusive with Empowered Empowerment grandmaster, but you're about to make the same mistake again. 2. Making Death's Judgment pierce is excellent Quality of Life except that Three Round Burst does not pierce, and Spotter's Shot does ~50% as much damage as Three Round Burst even before considering the 15% damage multiplier from Iron Sight. You do not penalize other professions with piercing projectiles in this way. If you're going to penalize Rifle Deadeye, then it would need to do even more damage than it does now to see more play. Why should players engage with your design that is needlessly punitive? You are layering frustration on top of the class fantasy AND class balance. Please make Three Round Burst pierce, or increase the damage coefficient of Spotter's Shot. If we can't build up Malice because other targets are body blocking us, then it doesn't matter that Death's Judgment can pierce. Malice and Initiative work hand-in-hand, and you've only addressed one side of this issue. 1. These honestly might be too strong. Buffing d/d DE because it's hard to maximize its damage in real fights is a risky proposition and not one I'm entirely on board with. Power Deadeye does not burst as hard as the likes of Bladesworn, Power Soulbeast, Power Virtuoso or even Power Holosmith on the current patch—and now Holosmith is set to have higher sustained DPS. The fact it doesn't burst as well wouldn't be a big deal if those builds didn't also do exceptionally high sustained damage. Dagger Deadeye currently does exceptionally high damage only to a SINGLE TARGET when the player has 180-degrees positioning (270-degrees "flanking" is insufficient for Thief Backstab, it has to be 180-degrees), when the player stays above 90% HP, and when the player correctly manages their stealth (Shadow Flare can reveal the player, other allies providing stealth can ruin your rotation e.g. Druid Celestial Shadow, any player blasting into a smoke field). Its golem benchmark is very good but the above-mentioned competitors also have very good sustained DPS. If anything, I think the burst AND sustained damage of Bladesworn and Soulbeast (in that order) are too high, and Bladesworn should NOT be competing with Deadeye on sustained damage. 2. The Dagger buffs in August 2022 already began to make Power Rifle obsolete. Rifle DPS will be MUCH further behind after these buffs because you made Rifle more comfortable but you left its damage low. For whatever reason, the design team still wants to restrict Deadeye's usability beneath the likes of Virtuoso and Bladesworn, but you're not compensating with more damage, and its self-buffs are largely irrelevant in group content. Please don't forget that Rifle and Dagger BOTH have unique playability problems (e.g. Rifle movement restriction, inability to pierce with Three Round burst; Dagger animation lock on Heartseeker and 180-degrees flanking and losing Malice generation if the player is blinded, weakened, or drops below 90% HP and loses crit chance) but they also share many issues (damage is already permanently reduced against unmarked targets, Deadeye's Mark F1 is stripped from the player upon downstate, many bosses going invulnerable/leaving the arena do not restore your F1 charge, etc.). Snow Crows' Thief channel has already written an extensively researched document on Thief's design and bugs, which we have provided to DoubleTap to forward to the design team. I don't want to waste everyone's time re-litigating too many old design points from that document, as it has been made available to ANet's design team and we have it pinned on the Snow Crows Help Desk Discord, Thief channel.

I've been reading through the thread replies, lots of viewpoints especially from PvP/WvW which is great. I do want to correct the calculations here on damage reduction. A few weeks ago someone on reddit must have been referencing your forum thread, because the figures are familiar. Generally: If you reduce damage by R%, and have H health pool, your effective health pool E is E = H / (1 - R) To make intuitive sense of this, imagine if you had 75% damage reduction. It would take x4 as much damage to deplete your pool, so when we divide by `1 - 0.75 = 0.25`, we get 1 / 0.25 = 4. Similarly if you were taking twice as much damage we'd divide your pool by 2. For PvE Necromancer we should generally factor in Soul Battery so the conversion ratio is 0.69 * 1.2 = 0.828. First off, let's assess base HP with Jade Bot and Reinforced Armor (19,212 + 2,350) * 1.05 = 22,182 Berserker Reaper Shroud pool is 22,182 * 0.828 = 18,367 Next let's say you only have the Shroud damage reduction of 33%, no Protection. You're taking 0.67 damage (1-0.33). To find the effective HP, divide your shroud pool by 0.67 18,367 / 0.67 = 27,413 Okay, so Reaper right now has ~27.4K effective shroud pool. Viper Specter has 14,615 similarly adjusted HP, which converts into 10,084 pool. If we assume 10 conditions on the target then we have 20% damage reduction from Strength of Shadows (as an aside, this is one of several reasons why Shadestep is a weak trait), so 10,084 / (1-0.2) ~= 12,605 Ritualist Specter has 27,975 HP, 19,303 shroud pool, and 24,128 effective.

Celestial isn't really useful on Specter. Its power/crit scaling is nothing special, we have no inflict bleeding when you critically hit trait (e.g. Mesmer Sharper Images, Necromancer Barbed Precision). The Healing Power scaling on Traversing Dusk is a pathetically low 0.1. You need 1,000 Healing Power just to increase the healing per shadowstep by 10%. Celestial is okay for a player who used a level 80 boost on Thief, though. It's a stepping-stone build IMO.

This is a hot button issue so I want to establish who I am. I use the name Iskarel on Discord. I'm a PvE Thief main who provides some of the benchmarks for Thief on the Snow Crows website. Nowadays I'm always reachable on the Snow Crows Help Desk discord. I'm an expert on Specter and Deadeye for instanced PvE—you can find my benchmarks here. I form my opinions on PvE Thief from actual play and in-depth research, which I discuss with a lot of talented, passionate players. tl;dr: Shadow Shroud's personal durability and group healing were deemed too potent, so what is Shadow Shroud supposed to do? Whatever design goal has been set for Shadow Shroud, it suffers in actual play. Shadow Shroud gets worn down very quickly in scenarios where you benefit from durability and group healing! Shadow Shroud is largely redundant with the rest of Thief's kit. It provides: Condition damage soft/hard Crowd Control effects modest amount of cleave Shadow Shrouds unique provisions are: Increased durability group healing/barrier via Consume Shadows single target healing Based on the Oct 3 patch: #1 was too powerful in PvP, and it was nerfed in every game mode. #2 was too powerful in PvE, but it was not targeted with a direct nerf Arena Net did not explicitly state #2, which is particularly vexing. I elaborate on this below. (Speculation: It’s possible that ANet CAN’T split Shroud scaling across game modes at this time. If anyone knows a time when Death Shroud or Reaper Shroud had different scaling in each mode, please let me know.) This leaves us with #3 which is apparently inoffensive to Specter's design goals. I don't think I need to elaborate on why single-target support is generally pointless in endgame PvE, so if that stance is inoffensive, skip the spoiler. Shadow Shroud prevents you from providing nearly any group support besides Consume Shadows! the heal from Traversing Dusk and Shadow Savior can't be triggered without access to a shadowstep you cannot provide Alacrity without access to your wells you cannot stealth your allies with Shadow Refuge or Blinding Powder (which have exceedingly long cooldowns in PvE!) you can place a Smoke field before entering shroud then blast it with Shroud 2, to provide Protection via Cover of Shadow, but why should thief have to jump through these hoops to provide a basic defensive boon provided by almost every other Healer build? Recognize that this trait provides only 2 seconds base duration of Protection! you cannot reactively projectile block with Seal Area/Smoke Screen Generally, the only thing unique to your shroud which helps your allies is avoid taking damage while you wait for Consume Shadows...and this gameplay loop was just nerfed. To the designers: What is shroud supposed to do? Elaboration on PvE Consume Shadows I think it's naive for any of us to say the Shadow Shroud nerf affecting PvE was only motivated by PvP. Consume Shadows on DPS Specter was unusually potent: it could provide substantial healing without investing into Healing Power* the trait was generally an inherent damage increase and did not compete with a offense-focused trait** *Specter is uniquely suited to exchange a modest amount of DPS for increased Vitality via Ritualist and Carrion gear. **This is a complicated topic. An in-depth discussion is beyond the scope of this thread, but I want to outline my argument.

The `out of energy` icon now appears over Specter F2 (Enter Shadow Shroud), as noted in the patch notes. This same icon is now missing from Thief's weapon skills, and skill input is no longer blocked when you lack initiative. This makes it harder to tell at a glance which skills are available to cast, and trying to cast such skills without enough initiative can block the auto-cast of skill 1. Lastly, the Stolen Skill UI for Core/Daredevil is missing until you Steal/Swipe from your target. This isn't a big deal but we're not sure if it's intentional. Link