Jugglemonkey.8741

I always thought the druid having less tanky pets was wrong tbh, surely it would make more sense if soulbeast had the less tanky pets (so they can keep the higher damage damage, but if you focus the pets you can stop them merging) and druid has less personal damage than core but better pet skills? I dunno, might just be me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you're stupid at all. I just didn't recognise your name from the thief forums so it's generally better in that case to risk patronising you in order to be clear about what I mean, no offence intended or implied :) Ok, so lets look at cleansing on a staff thief then. For the sake of consistancy, I'm considering an acro staff daredevil using withdraw, roll for initiative and daggerstorm, and I'm considering all cooldowns as they stand in PvP. Pain response fully cleanses all damaging condis when hit under 75% health on a 40s cooldown. That plus withdraw removing torment three times a minute, shadowstep removing 3 condis on return once every 50s and signet of agility removing 3 every 30s would mean they are able to cleanse an average of 20.4 condis per minute even without EA. Only withdraw is torment specific, the others are any condi, so even without that you're looking at a full cleanse every 20 seconds give or take. which for a highly evasive +1 class (which shouldn't be fighting you toe to toe to start with) means they'd likely still have enough cleanses to wall your build if played correctly with a spike and retreat playstyle. So lets look at EA specifically. It allows you to cleanse 1 condi per second, as long as you evade an attack. This sounds good on paper but bear in mind that the cooldown limits the number of condis cleansed to 1 per evade, so how many evades a thief has is now relevant. The average ini cost of a staff evade is 4.5 ini (4 on debilitating arc and 5 on vault) so if we assume swipe (for kleptomaniac), upper hand and roll for initiative are always used/procced as soon as they come off cooldown and that slight of hand is used to give swipe a CD of 16.75 seconds, this means the thief gets 28.16 ini per minute from these sources plus the 60 ini regenerated naturally, giving 88.16 ini per minute. This at 4.5 ini per evade means you'd get 19.59 evades per minute if all you did was spam debilitating arc and vault. Roll for ini, withdraw and daggerstorm combined give you 5.5 evades a minute on average, bringing that total to 25.09 evades per minute. This means EA would cleanse 25 condis per minute if you did nothing but spam evades in AoE's. That sounds good compared to the 20 condis cleansed per minute from the other sources examined earlier as that brings your cleanses to a potential 45 per minute. This looks strong on paper, but this is working under the assumption that every possible dodge available to the daredevil is successfully evading an attack. So let's work out how many cleanses you'd have if the enemy only attacks in moments you can't dodge to land condis and then stows their weapons while they tick. This means you'd get no benefit from pain response (7.5 condis cleansed per minute) or EA (25 condis cleansed per minute), bringing your total condis cleansed per minute down to just 12.5 condis per minute, 3.3 of which is from withdraw, and the other two cleanses have 30s and 50s cooldowns respectively. So, lets look at a fight between a condi rev and a daredevil. If you have an 8-15 second gap between skills that can do something worthwhile, that means you can apply 4-7.5 meaningful attacks per minute, so averaging that at 6 attacks per minute for simplicity's sake gives you a meaningful attack every 10 seconds if I take you at your word. I'm assuming you are talking about weapon skills and traits here, so if you took my earlier suggestion of using on swap condi sigils to force cleanses, that would give you an additional 6 instant cast condi applications per minute from weapon swap for a total of 12 meaningful attacks per minute, or one every 6 seconds. In the same period, the daredevil can use withdraw three times, signet of agility twice and shadowstep once, for a total of 12.9 condis cleansed over 6 skills, 3 of which will only remove torment. This means that if you can survive the daredevil's attacks for long enough, he will be unable to sustain against your condis assuming you land your key skills and don't attack needlessly. Of course, what you said about AoE's is very relevant, and it may be the case that condi rev in particular is hard countered because of it's design, but I stand by my point that EA in and of itself is not OP. TLDR; The cleanses from EA are most significant in group fights with lots of AoE's to dodge through, and when people attack mindlessly. If you avoid attacking into evades in a 1v1 and focus only on skills that are easy to land in the space between evades, you ought to be able to outpace the daredevil's condi cleanse by a pretty significant margin. If you happen to run a build that only uses AoE's, that's when you're going to struggle. Edit; Say for instance we changed the purpose of EA completely, and made it cleanse 3 condis on a successful evade on a 10s cooldown. This would mean the skill would cleanse 18 condis per minute which is comparable to the 19 condis per minute we worked out that you'd cleanse if you spammed dodges with the current EA, but it would mean I wouldn't have to spam nearly as many evades to get that cleanse reliably (I'd only need 6 successful evades instead of 19), and it would actually drastically increase my chances of hard countering you as each of those 6 cleanses is now more likely to get your damaging condis instead of just the weakness, chill etc. So if you're looking simply to change the cooldowns without outright nerfing the skill into the floor, it would arguably work out in an even worse matchup for you than what you have with the current iteration of the trait. Is that really what you want?

On a more serious note, the games sound does lag and sometimes cuts out entirely depending on what's going on in the map, I remember roaming in the first couple of years on the game and knowing the zerg was close because all the music had stopped and the dodge noises were lagging. When it works, it's a really necessary part of the tell and is well done, but it's not reliable because the servers aren't reliable.

What does ur cat main? I bet whatever it is it's a charr I would have thought it would be human. It's always amused me thinking of people pretending to be cats online, only for cats to pretend to be humans, and it would explain some of the salty whispers (whiskers?). I could see that lol My cat is on the other computer, playing ESOM'aiq prefers to adventure alone. Others just get in the way. And they talk, talk, talk.

Depends how much people have played. I still roam solo 95% of the time so that means outnumbered, and if I see a wall down on a tower or keep I'm definitely going to sneak in and try to cap it or kill any players in it. That said, stuff like the thief portal is pretty dumb, and there's dumb stuff on every class now that just makes playing feel like you're being slapped by trout wielding circus clowns over and over again. Sooner or later you get tired of smelling like fish, and go somewhere else with more culinary variety. I made myself hungry now, dammit.

It's almost like this exact thread has been made every year since the game came out. Spooky that.

It has that sound like you pulled and released a door spring stopper when the mark is cast. I always think of an old microwave when the malice is full, they just went BING. Dropping a freshly microwaved hot pocket directly into someone's lap does sound pretty malicious tbh. Imagine getting stab at the back with it. MBS.It's seriously OP, but only affects characters that are sat in chairs.

What does ur cat main? I bet whatever it is it's a charr I would have thought it would be human. It's always amused me thinking of people pretending to be cats online, only for cats to pretend to be humans, and it would explain some of the salty whispers (whiskers?).

It has that sound like you pulled and released a door spring stopper when the mark is cast. I always think of an old microwave when the malice is full, they just went BING. Dropping a freshly microwaved hot pocket directly into someone's lap does sound pretty malicious tbh.

Maybe it would be better to instead of capping persistant AoE's, just remove persistant AoE's, and rework them all as single application AoE skills with the few exceptions having long cooldowns like meteor shower. You could balance it so the damage etc was comparable, but then the game wouldn't have to keep track of a billion red circles ticking for 5s each.

I'm assuming so. I doubt the trait is much of a problem in PvP. Honestly it's not much of a problem in WvW either, it's pretty strong when combined with antitoxin runes vs people who spam skills but honestly if you're doing that you're sacrificing something else like poison duration or a power rune to do it, which seems fair. Yeah, L2P on the Daredevils that you're fighting in WvW probably. Ignore completely all the facts mentioned which in a perfect world would still be a loss. Whether I land perfectly everything without proccing a single evade is still a loss. Good on me. Out of interest OP, are you playing shiro on your condi rev? One of the best ways to land condi a daredevil is to use ports and instant cast skills like weapon swap to target their vulnerable frames (like the end of dodges). If you set up your sigils and skills properly you can get a reasonable condi bomb without burning your main cooldowns, which can very much help you to force their cleanses early and tip the fight your way. Rev can get 4 on swap sigils to proc every 10 seconds (by swapping legend to proc the current set, then swapping weapon to proc the next, just make sure to delay the key presses slightly to get both sets proccing). I don't know what sigils you run currently, but I'm assuming you're running something like grieving gear with tormenting runes so with roiling mists added you should have a decent amount of crit chance. I'd consider equipping a combo like doom, geomancy, torment and blight, which would give you 5 poison, 3 bleed, and 2 torment stacks, not massive durations but enough to chunk the thief and force something like signet of agility. Using shiro to port into the daredevil as they finish an evade, legend swapping then weapon swapping to proc all these sigils and then immediately following with staff 5 or sword 4 will give you a fast spike that has a pretty good shot at landing if you time it well. You can do the same thing when they daze you with steal, you can weapon swap at any time and legend swap is a stunbreak, so take advantage of the fact that most thieves don't dodge when they're bursting to land the swap sigils and follow with a hard CC. Other than that, try to avoid using AoE's as they are easy to trigger the cleanse off of EA, instead use single target skills if possible.

You get about 50% overall damage reduction vs your marked target from the combination of protection from M7, flickering shadows and iron sights, and smoke screen covers you beautifully if you are forced into melee vs warriors and soulbeasts. If you're taking those traits, it's a better option to take some diviner gear for the extra duration on protection with either durability or fireworks runes than say cavaliers for the extra toughness imo. Earth runes are an interesting middle ground, tho.

Sigil of vision be much easier to exploit. Or combine. I generally run marauder gear with vision on D/P for deadeye for that reason. With mara you get close to max crit chance on rifle after fury and bqobk anyways, and that crit chance means I can use no quarter to improve my spike by precasting spotter's shot before DJ (makes up for most of the loss of power and crit from marauder vs valk) and it means I can use invigorating precision vs tower lords without having to respec every time. It just works better this way now mounts mostly deny you the instagib malicious backstab opportunities imo.

As long as the reduction in damage also includes conditions, I'd be happy to see that. Otherwise I'm playing condi deadeye for the week lol

If people could guest in WvW, there would be nothing stopping guilds abandoning their server for a week or more if they want to dog pile on a particular guild in another matchup for the fun of it. Or, trolling their own server and joining the opposition. It would be unbelievably broken, and honestly if you don't play for a year, you should expect some adjustments to be necessary to enable you to play with your friends when you come back.

The one I gave was a power build, it's generally more efficient to run power on thief in PvE. You still have around 21k health, roughly 50% damage reduction and you heal both by damaging and by killing stuff, so it's not squishy by any means.

If you're not bothered about kill speed and just want an easy time vs champions and veterans (single target), try this;http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PawAQxrlNwAZbsO2JW2P/vKA-zVRYDBZIG1c5nSTSgwEBZqAaZI4nDQA7h3SVmRA-w It's similar to the build I use while soloing keep and tower lords in WvW, so it ought to be able to solo anything in PvE if played right. I have no idea how much you know about deadeye so I've written this assuming you know nothing for the sake of completeness, forgive me if it's patronising by explaining stuff you know. 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. If you do that, consider swapping twin fangs for assassin's fury in critical strikes for basically perma 25 might. 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. With the amount of health, CC and healing you get from this, the build is practically bomb proof if you just focus on building and spending malice with death's judgement, and try not to get hit by stupid stuff. Hope this helps :)

I'd be overjoyed to be proved wrong tho.

It speaks volumes about a class when you don't grow bored of it after years upon years. Great build variety, flexible and innovative skillset. Feels distinctively different from every other class due to initiative and and how the traits work in tandem yet offer a lot of combinations. That's a good explanation of it, I call it Street Fighter for how tactile and personal thieves I see across different servers get with their builds over time. A good steady core build might be my favorite thing to fight against in game and maybe most frustrating, Deadeye is perfect for that mood, and Daredevil with the right keybinds feels like hooking up to the game Matrix style. Like the rest of the game I suppose it all funnels at higher tiers wherever you're at but there's still players keeping the Thief elastic across each game build. Pretty much all of what you've both said. I love coming up with builds and experimenting with trait combinations, and Kash is the only person who seems to run close to what I do for my go to duelling build. For me the introduction of build templates has been amazing as there's 3-4 builds I swap between on a regular basis while roaming, each suited for different opponents and situations and generally not meta builds. It was amazing playing an interrupt based shortbow condi thief in HoT when people hadn't worked out how strong it was, for instance. Sure, build X is always going to be most effective given parameters Y and in those situations the meta is what it is for a reason, but variety is the spice of life. I respect people that can play certain builds for 4 years solid in PvP and get super proficient at it, there's a guildless D/P dash thief roaming on desolation that kicks my ass every time I fight him, but I'm not one of those kinds of people haha.

Anything and everything. For close to two years my thief was my only char.

The key thing to remember that they only cleanse a condi on a successful evade, so they actually have to dodge something not just spam evade skills. If you condi bomb them and then stow your weapons they'll be forced to use cooldowns to cleanse, which will put much more pressure on them in a fight. The issue is that in group fights it scales much better because there's always a couple of people that mindlessly spam skills, but in that respect it's no different to spellbreaker's full counter. If you play more intelligently, you can play around the skill pretty easily.

I still think they should put in a thing that if you get downed twice in 60s you instadie the second time, skipping downed state. That would reward focus fire while also allowing for more powerful revive skills.

I'm guessing you mean for condi S/D daredevil? Needs a little more context.

You do realize their last entry was over... 11 months ago right? We are about 28 days away from the 1 year anniversary of any official update. Yes, but now they are preparing to actually start work on it...and they have told us that's progress. I mean, Rome wasn't built in a day (so I'm told), so this seems like a good thing. We just have to overlook that it took them almost 2 years to prepare to start working on the thing they announced. They really should stop announcing stuff they're not currently/only just started working on. I mean, I know no news is just as bad sometimes, but hype turns sour fast if you're not careful. At this point you can’t even call it hype... Maybe for the first year... Oh yeah, in not defending the timescale at all here, whatever damage might have been done has been done by this point.

You do realize their last entry was over... 11 months ago right? We are about 28 days away from the 1 year anniversary of any official update. Yes, but now they are preparing to actually start work on it...and they have told us that's progress. I mean, Rome wasn't built in a day (so I'm told), so this seems like a good thing. We just have to overlook that it took them almost 2 years to prepare to start working on the thing they announced.They really should stop announcing stuff they're not currently/only just started working on. I mean, I know no news is just as bad sometimes, but hype turns sour fast if you're not careful.