Jugglemonkey.8741

Think you might have goofed the build link there. Clicking on it opens Gmail?

Yep, it's a build that's been floating around in some form since the Heart of Thorns expansion, it's quite effective as long as your opponent is aggressive. The point where you're going to find it painful is when you run into an opponent that understands that if they force you to chase them that they have the advantage (your offensive mobility compared to a daredevil running D/P dash is quite low), and if they aren't aggressively spamming skills at you so your evades cleanse you they can time ranged condi application to the end of your dodges to chip you down without triggering your traits. You'll be having more success on it at the moment as you run into a player running this build once in a blue moon, and especially in outnumbered situations people tend to be more aggressive than they should. Not criticising, it's just important to know the limits of a build so you know what to avoid. A good deadeye, condi thief (if they time pistol 2 for the end of your dodges to force you to eat condis) condi immob druid or anything with a lot of immob and a brain to use it well will give you a lot of trouble. Shortbow used to be a good offhand for your daggers before choking gas got bumped up to 6 ini, as impaling lotus is a projectile finisher and choking gas used to spam daze as long as the target had more than 4-5 poison stacks (I forget, was a long time ago now). The main advantage to taking it now would be for downed pressure, choking gas and auto spam will stack poison, bleed and torment on the downed and the guy ressing if you take the torment on interrupt trait. Not much use in a duel but something to be aware of if you're roaming solo. Depending on how much you're weapon swapping in a fight, taking celerity sigil on shortbow/P/D with impact strike (daredevil elite skill) is also a fun way to secure a kill, as the quickness will ensure that the evade from instant reflexes lasts for the duration of the skill, effectively giving you an invuln stomp (not perfect, as some skills will interrupt evade, and the evade runs out a hair before the end of the skill, but I've stomped peeps in the middle of their zerg doing this). Costs you your dagger storm and a sigil slot on your offhand but you can use it every 30s, so again it's a tradeoff. Also bear in mind that escapist's fortitude has a 1s internal cooldown, so in WvW for a 4s evade the most healing you'll get is 4x150=600 in full trailblazer. The bulk of your healing will be coming from assassin's reward. If you take the signet heal that can be significantly higher because of the bouncing daggers from daggerstorm, but not taking withdraw in WvW for the immob break is usually unwise.

The thing about the meta is that you have to know the purpose that the build was made for. Most meta PvP thief builds aren't duellists, they are +1 builds. Sure, you can duel on it if the other guy doesn't know how to shut you down, but it's primary role is to move between points and to chunk something that's already fighting an ally, either downing it outright or forcing it to burn enough cooldowns that your ally can kill it after you leave. So in that sense it's not surprising that you lost to a tempest, a spec that is typically played as a duellist/support role and that packs a LOT of projectile hate. Thinking about this is important as thief typically has next to no sustain, so you have to control the flow of a fight or you will lose. The other problem with the meta is that everything gets balanced around those builds. I'm not loving the game at the moment as a lot of my off meta builds have recently been patched out of existence through trait and skill reworks. So yeah, you can be more effective in individual matchups by playing off meta, but be prepared to change your build completely after a patch.

I was a male sylvari thief main for nearly 10 years before changing to male charr. Any race can work tbh, my sylvari I was told looked more like a warrior than a thief and my charr looks goofy, I have a fairly silly sense of humor tho so the /surprised etc emotes on male char just fit my personality better. I actually found I was using outfits more often than not on my sylvari which is one of the reasons I wanted to change. Edit: First pic below is my current look, second more armoured looks is a look I've had since vanilla on various charr characters. Like I say, just gotta find something you like and roll with it. https://imgur.com/a/fhmG5mU

For sure, knowing people's builds would help. I've long said that if you're a bad player for bringing a roaming build to a zerg fight, you're also bad for doing the opposite. People keep on taking their group builds into small scale/1v1 and wonder why they get steamrolled tho, you can't balance a class around other people's poor decisions. I don't mind stealth being debated. Honestly I'd be fine with it not existing at all, if things were properly balanced to compensated for the loss. What I have an issue with is the inherent motte-and-bailey fallacy where people say that stealth gameplay is degenerate from the perspective of the one fighting it (which is something I actually agree with), and then using that as justification to propose ONLY thief nerfs. By all means, change how stealth works to make it a healthier mechanic, or rework/remove it entirely. I'd just appreciate it if people stopped using it as a springboard for their personal vendetta and treat all classes that utilise stealth tactics the same way.

Tbh there isn't much point arguing with thief haters. They will justify their tears by saying that stealth is degenerate, then when it's pointed out that engi, ranger and mesmer also have stealth they just complain that thief is a special case because it's designed around it, despite thief not having close to the same one shot burst potential as the other classes. Would people complain about mesmer stealth if thief didn't exist? You can't have your cake and eat it. Stealth is either an issue on everything or it's not an issue at all. Propose changes to ALL stealth on ALL classes because the stealth mechanic itself is degenerate or just admit that you hate thieves and move on already. By the way: nerfing thief stealth access without compensating that by increasing sustain or damage in other areas will just result in MORE of the "run away and wait for cooldowns" behaviour that you find so degenerate. Think about it.

You're not wrong, but I have a feeling that guild wars 3 will come out before that happens.

Did... Did you just say that because thief has initiative, shroud needs to be kept weak? That would be like me saying that necro shroud needs a nerf because it also has skills with cooldowns it can rely on instead. If that sounds daft, we're on the same page.

I've been advocating for critical strikes to give either unblockable or ignore armor for a while now, it's the perfect line to put it in as taking CS for unblockable and trickery for stability/protection strip would force you to either play core or not take shadow arts. Unblockable is obviously strong, ignore armor would be a way of increasing a thief's damage to a tank build without enabling the instagibbing of a zerker build any harder than we already do.

True. Short of reverting a couple expac's worth of changes tho, it's hard to see how we can pin the limbs back on the dying guy lol

What if poison/demon queen relic also reduced barrier application? AFAIK it currently doesn't do this, and given barriers are affected by healing power it would make sense that they're also affected by healing reduction. It also has counterplay unlike the current situation by forcing the support to prioritise cleansing poison, while punishing supports that just spam mindlessly. Edit: just read that barrier isn't affected by outgoing healing modifiers. Might be that this idea is also a can of worms lol xD

See, I don't like this argument because while it's true thief is the stealth archetype, it's not the only class that has stealth. Ranger, engi and mesmer all have stealth, they have decent mobility, decent tankiness when built for it and critically they can all build to one shot people with much higher damage than thief cranks out these days. So what's the difference? Frankly I don't have a problem with this either.

It's too glassy for the present state of the game, for sure. In HoT daredevil was considered unplayable in sPvP on release (I remember people saying reroll or they'll go AFK for that match, it was genuinely that bad) but by the time PoF was released it was considered one of the strongest builds in the meta. Nothing changed with daredevil in this time, in fact it was repeatedly nerfed, but when every other elite spec was nerfed to the same level daredevil found it's place again. At present we have not one expac but two expac's worth of power creep that hasn't been balanced down yet. There's a good chance that specter would be in the right place if the rest of the specs weren't still doing crazy stuff, but at the moment it feels weak because of that. We also have been balanced around one build (D/P daredevil) for so many years that most other options on thief are borderline unplayable. Basically one of two things needs to happen: Either bring all specs down to the old baseline, or accept that this present level is the new baseline and bring thief up in line with it.

I get what you're saying, and I've said myself that a spec should have at best meta damage, mobility or sustain, a combo of two of these but not all three in one build. This argument would have held more weight before willbender and basically all the EoD specs were a thing though. Now that virtually any class seems to have mobility comparable to base thief while retaining their classes' sustain and damage, thief players are starting to wonder why we can't have better damage and sustain too.

Tbh the reason I chose the 25% movement speed was partially that it's always been a pet peeve of mine that we don't have a trait for it and 7/9 other professions do, partially that it would help core thief, and partially it's so innocuous that basically nobody could argue it was too much. The fact that it's a no brainer change makes it much more likely to happen because there are no balance implications whatsoever for a dev to think about. I'm more than happy to hear suggestions for something else tho, just try to keep power creep out of it etc.