Jugglemonkey.8741

That's fair and I agree. I don't play thief to do support either. I just like rolling around ideas because theorycrafting. That's also fair. I can't really criticise when I have 4 DE builds in regular use saved in templates for specific enemies and circumstances xD Or sometimes you just want to stay at the backline doing lazy damage -- you need a build for that. Nobody said it has to be viable since we're talking about support here.That's true. I usually use a SA CS DE valkyrie rifle build and snipe scourges when I feel that way, but I can understand that.

i would run a DE thief with rifle and SA and X, where X is whatever you want, like such as DA or CD. Trickery isn’t really needed with it. I actually used to run DE, DA, CS on an all out glass rifle build in WvW. Was fun, does a ton of damage. This is a good comment, I have 4 DE builds in regular use and they all follow this logic. That said, the main reason I don't struggle with ini is because of M7 and cheap to cast skills like shadow strike into repeater or skirmishers shot, low costs plus the extra ini on full malice goes a long way. I only take trickery on my boon tank build, diviner armor and dura runes for 40% duration with S/D coupled with the boonsteal from bountiful theft, rending shade and absorption sigil plus the boons from lesser haste, rage/celerity sigils and M7 gives you a pretty solid answer to boon beasts and warriors, as well as anything that relies heavily on protection like holo and firebrand. It's not meta by any stretch but its a fun 1v1 build if you're looking for something other that the usual burst or go home type builds.

That's fair and I agree. I don't play thief to do support either. I just like rolling around ideas because theorycrafting. That's also fair. I can't really criticise when I have 4 DE builds in regular use saved in templates for specific enemies and circumstances xD

I still think that making the structure upgrades automatic is one of the worst decisions they made. Yes, it required a lot of coordination to get stuff flipped and upgraded, but that actually was a good thing in terms of the long term health and enjoyment of the game.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Malicious_Restoration combined with traited steal does basically the same thing. but yeah, not really worth comparing between classes for the most part, there's a lot of stuff that any one class has that would be outright broken on another.

If ppl dont like getting ganked , but enjoy the snooz vs snooz (zerg vs zerg) ? I don't understand what point you're making here?If they enjoy zerging, they're zerging, not sure how forcing a class on someone is needed for that. Immagine ... forcing roamers to play Elementalist + NecroAnd for the Zerg vs Zerg , ful of thiefs (150vs150) doing Naruto Wars !/dub /dubSome roamers do play ele, unfortunately half of them roam with a pocket firebrand and if I see that coming at me I'm not even going to bother trying. If I wanted to be bored to death I'd watch TV.

It's very quick if you're in a group, but much slower if solo. If you must make a change like this, simply making it so numbers don't influence the speed of the capture would be a better way to go about it. Even then, it's not going to achieve much beyond making it easier for a couple of warriors rotating from spawn to deny the zerg a cap. Frankly I'd sooner see stuff like bannering the lord come back. that led to some pretty interesting fights.

I've always seen thief support as killing the other guy faster than he can kill your friend. By all means go ahead and theorycraft, but honestly it's not why I play thief, nor what I'd expect from it.

If you're not bothered about having the absolute max kill speed and just want an easy time vs champions and veterans (single target), try this;http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PawAQxrlNwAZbsO2JW2P/vKA-zVRYDBZIG1c5nSTSgwEBZqAaZI4nDQA7h3SVmRA-w Rotation; mark > rifle2 x4 > dodge > death's judgement > repeat. In more detail, you use spotter's shot/skirmisher's shot (rifle 2) to build malice to full which gives boons and ini back (maleficent seven, deadeye grandmaster trait), stealth with either dodge roll, mark (the shadow arts trait hidden thief gives stealth on mark), withdraw (the shadow arts trait concealing restoration gives stealth on heal) or stolen skill (the stolen skill grants stealth as long as you have 5 or more malice) and use death's judgement to dump malice and do damage. Healing; Invigorating precision (critical grandmaster trait) heals you for 20% of your crit damage as long as you have fury, which you will from spotter's shot (kneeling rifle 2) and as long as you keep building and spending malice properly as described above. Vampirism runes heal you whenever you kill something, useful if that champ has trash mobs you need to deal with. I also like scholar runes and adventurer runes but vampirism is probably the easiest to use effectively if you're learning the class. Breakbars; Rending shade (shadow arts grandmaster, applies fear around your char when hitting a stealth attack vs a foe with no boons, requires short range tho), smoke screen (utility, applies blind on AoE) combined with pistol whip (sword pistol 3), headshot (pistol 4), basilisk venom (elite, can be shared to allies if you have them) and malicious tactical strike (sword sneak attack) give you loads of ways to break a breakbar when you need it, while also keeping protection off your target (rending shade). Cleansing; death's retreat (standing rifle 4), the return on sword 2 and the return on shadowstep all clear conditions, and are excellent kiting tools. If you find conditions are still an issue, swap hidden thief for shadow's embrace in shadow arts. You lose the stealth on mark and have a longer cooldown on smoke screen and shadowstep, but you get condis cleansed every time you enter stealth. Antitoxin runes also work nicely with this setup, but honestly are a bit overkill if you try not to get hit with condis in the first place. Damage reduction; you have 33% reduced damage while revealed, which when you get comfortable with the build is basically all the time you're revealed using rifle 2. You also get 5s of protection from getting full malice; this is one of the reasons it's important to keep dumping malice efficiently. You can extend that duration to near permanent by changing your rings to diviner stats, your runes to fireworks and by taking a sigil of bounty over a sigil of bloodlust; this makes you more squishy in terms of actual health, but gives you 7 seconds of protection per malice buildup, so you might find managing boons easier this way. Damage avoidance; you have 1500 range on rifle, plus permanent projectile block from sniper's cover (kneeling rifle 4) and smoke screen. Smoke screen is also a pulsing smoke field, so between that and the smoke field from black powder (pistol 5) you have a ton of blind vs enemies without break bars. You have built in evades from withdraw and roll for initiative (heal and utility skills), plus pistol whip (sword pistol 3) is also an evade despite the tooltop not listing it; the initial stun does not evade, but the flurry does. Adventurer runes work nicely with withdraw for an extra evade's worth of endurance on your heal, but you can also regenerate your endurance quickly with malicious tactical strike (sword sneak attack) so you may find them redundant. Play with both, they're not expensive compared to scholar although that is obviously the best DPS choice. ^ copied from another topic. If you prefer condi, this is my current roaming build for WvW;http://gw2skills.net/editor/?Pa1AQpjlFwAZbsOmJO2OrvKA-zVZYMhJGEIZUj+KlMLgcjgeTgiDBvPAirHu/BJAuRVA-wI can pretty comfortably solo anything with this, and can 1vX pretty well. The combination of tormenting runes, leeching venoms and shadow siphoning means even if you only use stealth to dump malice you're going to be healing around 2k health per sneak attack, which with the toughness and additional regen in stealth plus the regen boon from M7 is pretty sweet. For breakbars just swap shadow's rejuvenation to rending shade, that plus the blinds will drop a break bar while solo pretty much by itself if you focus on using malice efficiently. If you like hybrid, swap the trailblazer for viper and the rabid for carrion, you'll be much squishier but you'll get pretty good power damage in return.

Nothing but positives as far as I can see. Couple of bugs, but as a concept it's great. I'm a build monkey tho, so I would think that. Edit; the only downside I can think of is that getting additional build slots is character specific, not account specific. Feels a bit like being milked for cash, that.

The build I'm seeing has no runes, I'm guessing you'd use tormenting to boost your torment duration to synergise with malicious sneak attack and the interrupts from choking gas? It seems odd that you'd not use interrupt sigils like draining if you're aiming for torment application through interrupts, you have an unblockable AoE daze in choking gas that's pretty spammable. Between tormenting runes and a draining sigil you'd get a ton of sustain on that shortbow with pressure striking traited. I'd also echo what Saerni said about crit chance, you'd get a lot more mileage out of thrill of the crime in terms of malice generation since you're not regenerating enough endurance to really make use of the caltrops. Maybe if you changed the sigils on shortbow to stamina and draining you'd have enough endurance to make better use of the caltrops than with the duration sigils?

That's great n all but that doesn't work at a camp, or say let's say this 1v1 happens inside an objective that the other guy can solo. That was not the question, it was only asked about 1v1s. Also why care about objectives when winning is meaningless? And thief and mesmer can solo camps n stuff aswell. If a single. Guy is trying to solo a camp and you engage on him he has to fight you and the guards and is in a pretty big disadvantage. I dunno, the ability to leave an impromptu 1v1 doesn't really make the class the best 1v1 fighter, and while build templates certainly make thief much better for 1v1's that's not the question either. Understanding the question as which class has a build with the least changes needed to it for individual 1v1's, I'd probably have to say warrior ATM.

It was worse before the nerf, it used to do close to double the damage it does now.

By that logic, bomb kit should make him explode and overheating should cook him (crispy fried asura anyone? Order now and get a free Charr-grill steak!) If op is getting that literal than my Scorpion Wire should always pull my target to me instead of having to blow utilities to keep me from jet skiing off of cliffs or into blobs. It would be wild to have a Realistic week event though.Alternatively, it would pull you to your target, depending on which char had eaten more pies.

By that logic, bomb kit should make him explode and overheating should cook him (crispy fried asura anyone? Order now and get a free Charr-grill steak!)

More options is always good, and my warrior (mara/zerk/cavalier) and rev (diviner/zerk/knight/cavalier) would prob appreciate that. I feel like I'd have to use a lot of demolishers to get the same bonus I currently get from a few pieces of knights and cavalier though.

Im actually a shade under 2k at the moment, but in 2-3 play sessions I won't be. Solo roaming thief since 2013, guildless for at least 2 years of that.

This thread reminds me about an argument I got into with a friend over the meaning of the word viable as used by the community. Viable, to me, is a measure of the ability of something to do a specific job. If condi build X can so the same job as condi build Y, and using either build results in a win, then both builds are viable. To him, a build being viable meant it was the best possible tool for that job. There is truth in both of our positions. He is right in that we both acknowledge a problem the game has at the moment is that the best possible build for a role often so far outstrips it's competitors that it becomes the only viable build. In group play, there is no support build that can match firebrand, there is no AoE boonstrip build that can match scourge etc, and if you try a comp that uses support classes other than firebrands you're probably going to get roflstomped by the other group. This leads players to insist on only the best because nothing else can actually compete, and that creates a meta where balance and build diversity are mutually exclusive; you're only balancing the best builds for a role against each other, and other builds get left by the wayside. The OP, if I understand him right, is saying that there needs to be more options for the same roles, so multiple support builds on other classes being able to do a firebrand's job equally as well as said firebrand. This build diversity certainly leads to a more interesting meta, if it's done right. This would work for PvE where the main things you need are damage, some ability to not die and to be able to remove break bars, but it's debatable whether you can achieve that in competitive environments when you have a class system where each class has inherent strengths. This might be a reason that MMO's tend to have poor PvP scenes in general.

See it as a challenge, OP; it might be frustrating losing to three people solo, but the salt level is amazing if you manage to kill them.

I love how the OP's second to last discussion is titled "Can we get a couple of reasonable, minor changes to some abilities?" and then he comes out with this.

Honestly, it sounds like you have an issue with daredevil evades more than you do cleanse on evades. There's a number of condition builds that can instantly spike high levels of conditions to delete a player, the thing with those builds is that they are more difficult to play than the AoE multi hit options versus enemies that have enough cleanse as you have to bait those cleanses before the big spike to make sure you do the damage. This is why I suggested using the on swap sigils, not just to do damage but also but to apply enough pressure to force cleanses before your main burst. I used to do the same thing on reaper, wait for the daredevil to engage and then use shroud to break the daze from steal, while also proccing weakening shroud alongside geomancy and hydromancy sigils (hydromancy for the bleed from deathly chill). Really, it's a lot more effective than you might think. It's interesting to me that you say that power daredevil dominates condition builds. I play deadeye pretty much exclusively in WvW at the moment, and the three DE builds I regularly swap between are an evade & boon rip focussed S/D rifle build, a glassy stealth focussed D/P rifle build, and a tanky condition P/D rifle build. Each build is useful for different opponents and situations, but I find that the condition build is the only one of the three that won't just get hard countered by a competent daredevil or core thief running the usual meta builds. The reason for this is because I build for condition duration, and have about 60% duration on poison and 70% duration on torment, and I also build with the aim of being able to kill an opponent that doesn't cleanse with one attack. This means two things; while I'm focussed on attrition as that's the strength of condition builds, I'm not dependant on a continuous assault, and every stack of damaging condi that they can't cleanse is dangerous because of the duration, for instance, the three stacks of poison from mark usually does enough damage to dismount someone by itself. This is why I value condis applied from weapon swap; they're almost impossible to avoid when used right being instant cast, they can force cleanses ready for my main burst, and even if the opponent cleanses my main burst I can follow up with the swap sigils as the condis from that have long enough duration to do significant damage if they don't get cleansed. The other thing to consider is the variety of damaging and cover conditions available to your build. If you're aiming to do all of your damage through a massive torment bomb, all I have to do as a thief is make sure I save withdraw until after you've landed that bomb. All your eggs are in one basket, which makes it easy to counter whether I trait EA or not. The way I've set up my condi build, P/D can apply bleed, torment, poison, immob, vulnerability and weakness from using body shot then sneak attack, and the damage from the first three is around 1-2k each for a 4-5k average tick. EA on it's own is not going to cleanse those condis fast enough before they do significant damage even if I'm attacking into evade, so if you're lacking cover condis for that 30 stacks of torment that might also be where you're struggling.

It's amazing how many people don't understand the difference between DPS and burst.

Some classes are just more self sufficient than others. Classes like guardian, necro, rev, ele are best seen as jigsaw pieces that need each other to complete the whole picture, where classes like thief and ranger are photographs, complete in their own right. You wouldn't expect a small photo to work well as a jigsaw piece, so why would a self sufficient class work any better in a group setting?

That is by design and that is what Thief in any Elite Spec suppose to do. You just happen to be using an inferior build that's played inefficiently that is easily taken apart by a Daredevil. I too have a Revenant and I've dabbled in making condition build works, but that's like cutting my legs off -- Revenant is not applying enough variety of conditions to make it work. A single cleanse can shut down your damage output because if it's not bleeding, it's torment -- that's it. The burning (elite skill only) and poison (10s ICD) are both restricted, they're not even worth taking. Wooden Potato made a Renegade power build that I started using with some tweaks. It is more effective in dealing damage than trying to make condition work -- it's just not gonna happen with the Revenant. You need to rethink your strategy. Just because Revenant can deal condition damage it doesn't necessarily mean they can run a full condition build. Your experience is already a proof that Revenant needs improvement in the condition damage department. The Revenant's dysfunction is not the Thief's problem. You can't fix Revenant's flat tire by poking holes in the Thief's tires. Learn to change tires. This is the reason I assumed the OP would be running grieving stats, since you'd then get decent power damage to prop up the condis. You are quite right if you're talking about pure condi builds like trailblazer tho.

Nice necro. On a more serious note, I actually don't mind the tracking in stealth. With the way the skill queue works it makes it easier to land a rifle burst on stuff like holo and ranger as they do their Zoidburg impression, and I'll take being more vulnerable to channel skills myself over passively buffing other classes which arguably shouldn't have had stealth access to begin with.