ASP.8093

Simplest PvE rotation: Take Silent Scope and Maleficent Seven for easy Malice cycling (Silent Scope is a moderate DPS loss in hardcore groups but it's great solo, don't sweat it) Take Critical Strikes to boost your Ferocity a ton Take either Deadly Arts (more damage, just focus the traits that give +Power even if they're for the "wrong weapon") or Trickery Here's the actual rotation: Kneel Mark Target 3-3-3 your Malice (red dots) should be at 7/7, there'll be a sound/animation to remind you; you will also gain Initiative and a ton of boons — it is important not to burn this initiative quite yet! instead… go into Stealth (dodge with Silent Scope, or F2 skill, or use your elite, or use the new Shadow Advance combo) press 1 to fire off your Death's Judgement sneak attack now your Malice will reset to 0-1 3-3-3 and repeat You can get about 15k-20k solo with this without really optimizing your build for damage. They key things to learn are: • The cadence is always the same: 3 attacks, stealth, sneak attack, 3 attacks, stealth, sneak attack… • At the moment that M7 refills your Initiative, you need to be thinking "now I need to drop Malice!" *before* you use up all your new Initiative on more DPS skills. You never want Malice and Initiative to be low at the same time. • Learn the cooldowns of your stealth sources and prioritize them. Eventually, if you min/max hard, you will want to cut 1 or 2. • If you're using your auto-attacks (normal rifle 1 skills) more than one in a blue moon, you've messed up the resource flow.

Pierce on Rifle 2 and Death's Judgement is sufficient, imo. I refuse to look this gift horse in the mouth further.

I like the basic functionality itself (and being able to bind a "look behind you" key, as well), but I feel like having to master it in order to use "launch yourself backwards" skills more effectively kinda highlights a design problem with those skills.

It's pretty much just RP-walking.

You still have Shadow Arts from combo fields and weapon skills. (The Shadow Arts duration extension never affected smoke field stealth, by the way.) The biggest consequence of the Shadow Arts change is that you can no longer get ~7 sec stealth from your heal skill and you can't insta-stealth by tapping your Steal, which makes Shadow Arts D/P Daredevil quite a bit weaker. That matters a lot but the thing pushing Daredevil out of the meta was that Specter had similar high mobility with more teamfight presence, and Deadeye (formerly a really really dead spec in SPvP) can make exceptionally good use of the new Shadow Arts triggers using Silent Scope. Shadow Refuge and Blinding Powder are stronger in (Deadly Arts) Improvisation builds imo. But for a long time (like six months before the big rework), the main reason to play Shadow Arts Daredevil over Deadly Arts Daredevil was that all the Deception skills had inflated base cooldowns so you were forced to take Shadow Arts to reduce them back down to normal.

Okay, but if you body-block Rapid Fire directly at someone else you just die, so this seems like a reasonable alternative.

25%-speed movement isn't usable movement, though, you'll still be standing up or reaching for your dodge key every time you need to get out of anything.

In my experience? DJ tracks pretty well even above 1200 range — it's always got the benefit of the "improved projectile speed" like the other kneeling skills; the long wind-up time just means you have to worry about them blocking it with terrain. (If they dodge or use blocking skills, that's entirely fair: the whole point of that skill is to force the enemy to burn some resources to mitigate it.) ~~~ At the end of the day, the problem with Rifle in PvE is that Anet soaks your DPS too hard whenever you're not Kneeling, and the problem of Rifle in WvW/SPvP is that Anet wrecked Kneeling DPS completely so this incredibly high-risk move (in SPvP/WvW, where enemies will actually punish you for not moving) is straight-up all-risk/no-reward. To be honest, if they kept the planned DJ pierce effect and just upped the DPS of 3RB a bit in all game modes, there would be plenty of reason to love the class imo.

Not very often, because constant motion is usually the best play in WvW/SPvP. Usually you only Kneel when you want to cast Sniper's Cover, when you're spamming immob on an enemy that someone else is trying to kill (and nobody is pressuring you), or to use 3-Round Burst to try to get more damage on people who are going in and out of stealth kinda how like a ranger would use Rapid Fire. In all other cases, the Initiative cost and damage differences compared to PvE make it more desirable to use Rifle #2 standing (which does more damage than kneeling Rifle #2, and is far more cost-effective than either Rifle #3) instead. PvE: if your Rifle #2 standing does 3000 damage, Rifle #3 kneeling does like 12000 damage for just a little more initiative and quickly caps your Might WvW: if your Rifle #2 standing does 3000 damage, Rifle #3 kneeling does about 6000 for twice the cost and only gives a little Might (and Rifle #2 kneeling will only do the same damage as an auto-attack) However, the Death's Judgement range nerf matters quite a bit, imo. (Putting penetration on it helps a *ton* in small team fights, though. So there are some improvements in this patch as well.)

The main change I'd want to see is better Mark management during phased PvE bosses. I think the spec is already pretty fun in WvW, and for SPvP I mostly think Rifle standing #3 needs to be improved so it's not a dead skill. I'm fairly happy with it besides that. The alternatives you're proposing don't strike me as particularly necessary. 1500 range while Kneeling is plenty (1200 is too little). I don't actually have that many problems dealing with trash mobs in PvE.

Sounds like you're trying to stomp downs on a class that's way better at cleaving than stomping.

IME Holosmith doesn't hit as hard as Willbender, or spam as much CC (the elite CC is awesome but it's also got a bigger animation than Death's Judgement). I'm not saying it sucks, but, like, it's weird to single it out as a problematic class when Holo hasn't been top dog since the Grenade Barrage nerf.

It's to make your #3 skill do okay DPS instead of garbo DPS. Idk why that requires so much investment but that's the plan I guess.

Wait. What. Why? The Death's Judgement semi-pierce is kinda nice, given how landing DJ on your target is a big part of the Malice/Initiative resource loop. But what's the point of the rest of this, though? Movement tends to be pretty all-or-nothing in PvE — there are very, very few situations where crab-walking at 25% speed will get you out of danger. In exchange, you get absolutely screwed on range, which has pretty nasty implications for WvW/SPvP. (Where you're contending with longbow-users so enaging at above 1200 range is pretty normal.) Aesthetically, also, there was something nice about the slow wind-up kneeling cast of Death's Judgement. I'm begging you to just leave it alone.

I always figured the animation time was supposed to be the true cost of Kneeling. Guess Anet forgot. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I like these ideas. Kneel just blocking jumps is pretty useless — the intent to leave the Kneeling position is pretty clear, and it would make it easier to do a bunch of PvE bosses or get out of what's already a very high-risk/low-reward position in SPvP/WvW. For visual clarity, you could also try adding an additional animation to the skill bar itself (kinda like how various elite specs, revenant legends, &c. add background effects or other visual candy to the skill bar.)

I'm not enthusiastic about the specifics, but I do think it's the kernel of a good idea. The Daredevil elite finishing downs is pretty cool but it suffers from the problem that you have to preemptively "charge it up" to really get good value out of it.

Pretty sure you wanted Bounding Dodger, not Unhindered Combatant, for the Daredevil GM trait.

In my experience, the big thing here is that their barrier scales with outgoing damage. So this turns into kind of an all-or-nothing fight — they're hardest to kill if they're successfully trading damage with you. Rifle Deadeye can outpressure them or negate their attacks with Shadow Cover, Cele P/P can probably outlast a power build as well, or you can try to play in-and-out using Sword/Dagger (porting on them from behind some terrain so they just waste attacks when you port back out), but tbh I'm not sure what to do on D/P Daredevil, though. Usually their main defense is Shift Signet, so it pays to have Shadowstep or Infiltrator's Signet ready to port and finish them when they try to reposition or run away.

Try Mesmer. You can do group stealth, you have your own Stability and Invulns, you have powerful CC abilities. you can do Portal bombs. If you're tagged on Thief you're probably clouding, tbh.

If you're familiar with other MMOGs: • "Don't break auto attack chains" is this game's version of "insta-cast things while on GCD" • "Dodging" is this game's version of "ponderously walk in and out of the AOE circles like a turtle" • "Everyone (except, occasionally, the tank) stacking together" is this game's version of "everyone but the tank stack together"

Every time I check the forum, someone redefines "Play as you want" to mean something even more ridiculous than it did before. Today it's "if you picked something and didn't like it, you shouldn't just go pick a different thing you know you'll like more."

Deadeye can win lots of fights through attrition because M7 + Shadow Arts let you go to town with Skirmisher's Shot for damage and Death's Retreat to counter melee gap closers, basically just spam those skills as much as you want. (BQoBK is likely better than M7 in SPvP, but in WvW we can simply have our cake and eat it too by taking M7 and a Celerity sigil to combine burst and sustained DPS.) New Shadow Arts in particular makes fighting tankier builds more viable because your Silent Scope dodges will quickly give you more Initiative when you've "run dry" due to your opponent dodging or blocking too many shots. Stealth-stacking and Shadow Portal make thief the strongest defensive scout in WvW by far. You can spam up stealth to mask your Siege Disablers and then just port back inside your walls and do it again a minute later. Very reliably. This will buy you a lot more time to rally your team to come save the tower or keep. Being a top-tier solo roaming class with the best disengage potential makes thief the best choice for more offensive scouting, as well. (Defensive scouting is far more valuable than offensive scouting, usually. But you can be an "offensive scout" while basically just roaming, so it's considerably more fun most of the time.) You're a scout? Get with the times: traps help you!! Every time one of your traps catches a zerg or small group moving through some choke, great, you're already halfway to saving an objective. That's immense defensive value for very little work. And if you set them off while scouting into enemy territory all by yourself? You're doing your job, turning off the enemies' ability to see a larger group coming a few minutes later. A single dot on their map gives them very little information about where the rest of your team is, you can still 1v1 just fine while Marked (against anything other than an enemy Thief, pretty much), and between Warclaw and shadow steps you can easily juke a small group long enough for the Marked to wear off, if it's even still on you by the time they respond to their trap or sentry getting taken out at all.

Sounds like you have a handle on fighting and could use some more pointers on map awareness and team strategy. The typical role of a thief in SPvP is "roamer." (The other roles are usually called "duelist," "team fighter," and "support.") The builds on the site are defunct at this point, but I still find these guides to be useful: Rotation basics — https://www.godsofpvp.net/guides/rotations/rotation-basics-r6/ Overextending — https://www.godsofpvp.net/guides/rotations/overextending-r7/ Turning a game around — https://www.godsofpvp.net/guides/rotations/turning-a-game-around-r8/ Here's an hour-and-a-half-long video if you'd prefer to just watch a long video with some examples:

I really like Power Rifle Deadeye for vanilla PvE, tbh. It's very self-sufficient solo or in group events, with M7 you can use Shortbow Clusterbomb for tolerable cleaving in Open World (Mark a target in the middle of a "pack") when the pierce on your Rifle 2 won't cut it. For instanced stuff I just play Condi Specter (even now), though — it's like if P/D Daredevil had a 500% safer and easier rotation. All the situational Daredevil stuff would be fine if the overall benchmark was just slightly higher, imo — "top tier if you're perfect, mid tier if you're not" is a completely fine place for a build to be.