ASP.8093

This is why most Deadeyes end up running Dagger/Pistol for their other set. (The teleport-and-blind portion of Shadow Shot is unblockable so you can use it to engage or chase even if the opponent has projectile blocks up.)

There is a small benefit to how it's implemented, though: gives you Malice ticks when you use it to get out of melee. Occasionally comes in handy if you're playing an M7 build and you'd end up Initiative-starved otherwise.

They changed that recently, now you get a Raptor if you own the expansion at all: (From the wiki)

I am waiting for literally anyone lamenting the cruel death of Meld With Shadows to acknowledge that you can still do perma-stealth in PvE. I just want to see one person say, "Yes, I am aware that you can still do perma-stealth in PvE. I have personally attempted it and it was not difficult."

If you're experimenting with D/P Daredevil, try it with the Deadly Arts line to get Improvisation. That used to be an inferior build back when they jacked all the Deception skill cooldowns up, but now that they're back to normal again (since you can't take Hidden Thief to reduce them), you can do a lot with a build that constantly recharges its utilities and gets to double-dip stolen skills.

Do not use Shadow Arts for perma-stealth in PvE! You do not NEED Shadow Arts for perma-stealth in PvE. True perpetual perma-stealth is there if you want it, and you can do it easily with just a standard Crit Strikes Rifle open-world build. Don't even have to take Shadow Refuge or anything super trashy like that. (And, one more time: if you were used to using Smoke as your main stealth source, the amount of stealth you get from comboing hasn't changed! It's only Silent Scope and Stealth from thief skills that are affected by the Meld With Shadows changes.) SPvP: This is the first time we've seen Deadeyes in top-tier Monthly Automated Tournament teams in… uhhh, years? The faster Initiative gain built into new SA is hugely beneficial to SPvP Deadeye builds because you can put out a lot more burst or damage pressure. Even the horrible Specter nerf is probably good for Deadeye, metagame-wise, right now. WvW: Look, everyone has their own playstyle preferences. If you hate the more aggressive in-and-out approach that the designers are favoring, that's fine. But people still roam on Deadeye, they still kill other roamers and small groups on Deadeye, &c. &c. I, personally, haven't had any trouble adapting. New SA is great if you're fighting Condi/Cele builds on Deadeye, you can shake off a lot of conditions very quickly and the extra initiative does actually help you avoid running dry against builds that spam lots of short invulns and blocks; you can practically farm Cele Harbingers. In my experience, Rifle SA also works fine for aggressive engagement against other bursty power builds, because I can usually get an extra Death's Retreat in somewhere to save my bacon against builds with lots of gap closers. Rifle Deadeye is absolutely still a top-notch roaming build. P.S. If you need more tools for getting away when a "havoc group" tries to 10v1 you with superspeed and mounts now that it's harder to just stack stealth in WvW, just juke 'em with Shadow Portal. (Aristocracy P/P Daredevil works great, too! Great example of how new Shadow Arts is still very powerful and exploitable!)

The runes are mostly for the tank gimmick, they give you perma-(self)-Alacrity without taking the group Alac trait, and basically double your passive healing due to how the traits triggers. For the group-healer build it really doesn't matter that much. There's a very similar build on Metabattle (still in the "need more testing" category) using Runes of the Traveler, by the way — https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Mechanist_-_Util_Alac_Mech

Okay, this suggestion is a little goofy — it's trying to do a lot all at once, so there are gonna be certain situations where you'll want to switch a skill or trait for greater efficiency. Mecha Heal Tank for open world &c.: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PegAoqlNw6YuMPWKWqTvRVA-zxIY1ohvMSIBKtAceAA-e You're providing Alacrity, a bunch of Might, and tolerable tanking/DPS potential yourself. Personal DPS is maybe like 8k-10k, mostly from Burning. Try to use Blowtorch and whatever feels good in Flamethrower. There's a lot of Kits here but you don't have to use all the skills. Spam Medkit stuff to keep people alive, Mortar and Elixir Gun 5 are both extra heals and you can just ignore the other skills most of the time. Note that your heal output isn't going to be *amazing,* but I think the goal is to help your allies sustain rather than overheal so hard you end up completely hard-carrying them through basic PvE. You'll do fine even if you don't know what half your skills do. The build above is slotting Sanctuary Rune so you can swap to the full tank version with just a skills+traits template change (same gear template): Immortal Mecha Tank • Medkit, Elixir Gun, Mortar Kit -> Mechanist Signets • Firearms 113 -> Firearms 121 • Alchemy 332 -> 233 • Mecha 222 -> Mecha 223 • Gear stays the same http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PegAoqlxy6YuMYWMWySuRdA-zxIY1ohvMSIBKtAceAA-e Now you're turning on the full Sanctuary Runes feedback loop, so you're got very high self-Alacrity, self-Stab, and self-Might, as well as tons of passive self-healing. Your mech is constantly getting healed and buffed as well. You can mostly stay on Flamethrower for Stability and just switch out every once in a while to spew out Blowtorch if it's ready (or any other Pistol skills you like). About 10k personal DPS, can solo pretty much all the HoT bosses and such. Easy-mode "rotation." Use your Signet to heal the mech or yourself whenever you want (its passive won't stop ticking); save your elite to res your mech if you mess something up. This is a pretty established solo build (I think Lord Hizen first posted it) that can also tank for the group but doesn't do very much support.

Yeah. Replace the whole line. Rename it if you need to. I feel like as long as there's one decent Vigor-related thing and one decent Sword-related thing in there, nobody will complain about replacing the rest with whatever. (Totally pie-in-the-sky i-know-it's-not-gonna-happen idea: a trait that increases the target cap on most of your attack skills. Imagine simultaneously backstabbing three stacked-up mobs, or being able to hit 5 targets with Sword autos. That's not super useful for boss fights but it would certainly be a fun toy for open-world players.)

I recommend redoing the math with ~42% boon duration. Full Ritualist gear caps you at 42% and support Specters don't usually take +BoonDuration food or weapon sigils because they're still trying to keep their personal DPS fairly high. I'm not saying you're wrong, mind you — just trying to get a more realistic picture of what gear people have.

Been a while since I've seen many of them, but my recollection is Power Herald has: 1. Good burst potential 2. Good mobility — or great mobility, if you really really know what you're doing — 3. Limited stability/stun-breaks 4. One really good "oh !$!@!" button from the Glint heal (after that, you're mostly relying on mobility to reset the fight some) 5. Passable sustained DPS, but not exceedingly high 6. No ranger pressure to speak of That's a build that's good at fighting other glass-cannon specs but seems like it would struggle a bit if lots of players are donning full Cele gear and playing builds with lots of CC. I suspect some Herald players have also shifted to Willbender because it's also got burst, CC, and mobility but with easier-to-use escape skills and a decent amount of sustain.

You can still chain tons of stealth with Deadeye in PvE, because the baseline stealth durations on Silent Scope and most of your skills are longer than they are in SPvP/WvW. 3 seconds per dodge, 3 seconds per smoke field finisher. Shadow Meld, Hide in Shadows, Blinding Powder (use it with a smoke field for best value), and Signet of Agility (more dodges) also help. I don't recommend Shadow Refuge unless you need to stick in one place for a while, it's kinda counterproductive if you're trying to optimize for running around. Save at least one charge of Shadow Meld in case you mess up with your leaps/blasts and get Revealed. You may find that the current version of Shadow Arts isn't very useful if you're just chaining stealth for long duration instead of ducking in and out of stealth to trigger the traits. EDIT: Here, try this. Just fill in the gaps with whatever you want. This is sufficient to upkeep stealth permanently in PvE, with some room for error. Max out finishers during Smoke Screen. You can probably get away with Shortbow instead of D/P if you want (Kneel->Cover->swap weapons->blast blast blast), just gotta be careful blasting; I prefer Dagger/Pistol combo easy mode tho. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PawAQhrlFgByuYm4C4RA-e

The old Meld With Shadows never, ever affected stealth duration from combo fields. 😎

Because it matters whether you're trying to do dungeon skips, or looking at Shadow Arts as a defensive toolkit for fighting hard enemies, or just dithering around, or whatever. About two months ago there was a thread where the guy making this kind of complaint just wanted 100% stealth uptime it for *harvesting nodes* and also he was allergic to smoke fields for some reason. That's very different from, say, "hey, how do I speedrun Caduceus Manor with the Shadow Arts changes" or whatever.

When are you running Shadow Arts in PvE?

Yeah, it's really strong *if you can get a ton of stealth access from somewhere else.* Overall that can be rough for Dagger/Pistol Daredevil since so much of that build relied on getting like 6+ seconds of stealth from Hide in Shadows — now that Deception skill base cooldowns are fixed there's room to try Improvisation D/P Daredevil builds, though. New Shadow Arts is really, really good when you can spam short-duration stealth, like on Rifle Deadeye or Cele Smoke-Leap Daredevil. (People who believe the main purpose of Deadeye is to run away will yet at me for posting that.)

A proliferation of narrow counters makes for a very frustrating experience in play. It massively devalues all of these defenses because you can quite easily find that your defenses are completely mismatched to what your attacker is doing. Stability is very powerful in this game right now, but it's got three strong counters: 1. Boon removal 2. Stack stripping using cheap 3. Immobilize It's very easy to rebalance just by reducing the number of stacks certain skills give out, or reducing the duration of triggered Stability traits. The thing you're proposing feels like a nightmare.

I like that. "Make Sword/X good for solo pve (maybe even group PvE)" would be a pretty good niche for Acrobatics, imo. It's already kinda oriented in that direction, just not enough to make it worth taking over the other options imo.

I feel like utilities like "apply a bunch of conditions to the enemy" or "apply a bunch of boons to your party" are always gonna be used on cooldown in PvE, that's sorta how the game works: cast damaging skills off cooldown for peak DPS, spam boons for 100% uptime on all the boons you can get (with a rare "just in time" application of Aegis, Protection, or Stability). The whole "just cast all your skills as fast as you can to trigger your one support trait that applies Quickness/Alac" is also a design problem that basically every spec has. With the possible exception of Firebrand. Firebrand. 😕

Thief needs a ranged spec for PvE, and a "bunker buster" that can deal with tanky builds in SPvP/WvW. Deadeye fills those roles pretty well. The big Deadeye rework about a year after PoF made sure that Rifle sneak attacks were easy to see, and the current Malice mechanic makes it more interactive than old-style one-hit Backstab builds from before the global competitive damage nerf. Warrior rifle was always a thing that existed in the context of the Warrior's role as a "master of many weapons" or whatever. You might as well go, "Why does anyone get a Greatsword!? That's stealing from Warriors!"

I suspect it's basically impossible to make Acro good because the Daredevil trait line already fills the role of "Acro but good," and if you had two Good Acro lines, everyone would get incredibly mad at thieves for dodging too much or whatever. My nightmare is what if Acro becomes kinda-sorta-good and then there's one great build that uses it, so Anet nerfs some other trait line (Trickery, e.g.) because of its mad synergy in that build, and then we're actually left with worse stuff than we started with. Better that Acro stays bad and we all just completely ignore it, I suppose.

You don't have to repeat yourself whenever someone clarifies something. Your previous post is still there and people can just look at it.

They didn't change it, that "April 30, 2013" note is just an added label to all stealth attacks. The mechanic was always "thief #1 skill changes to a more powerful attack when you are in stealth." The actual functional changes over the years were: • Stealth attacks cause Revealed when they hit • Stealth attacks get a 1 sec cooldown • The "competitive damage split" and then tweaking the numbers up and down in various game modes

Not sure how the same five people posting the same complaint to every active thread on the subforum is meaningfully "offering feedback." /shrug I hate the shroud nerf, too, and I wish the situation were different, but it doesn't change any of the following: • Condi (Alac) Specter's still the best thief for typical group instances at pretty much all levels of execution (and Staff Daredevil is the best non-Specter alternative) • DPS benchmarks are about the same as before • The rotation is still the same — I've tried it both on the golem and in real instanced stuff, with the passive shroud loss there's still ample room to do the 3x Grasping Shadows loop with either build (and, idk, i feel like if a fresh player only managed to pull off the shorter 2x Grasping Shadows sequence, it's not the end of the world) kthxbye

Correct. Learn to play instead of crying.