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Marked simply isn't a big deal. It prevents you from chaining stealth and that's it. You can still use it momentarily, and you get your sneak attacks and all the benefits of Shadow Arts. The short-duration Reveal from pew-pew rangers is a lot more damaging to thieves than fighting while Marked. Also, you can just, like, kill the sentries.

Please note that the Oct. 4 shroud nerf hasn't changed "what's the best thief build for instanced pve?" The DPS benchmarks and the rotation basically stay the same. After this patch, you'll have about 10k shroud in Viper gear and about 19k shroud in Ritualist gear (assuming you have a level 10 Jade Bot core); this impacts the group healing from Consume Shadows and also means you shouldn't try to tank hits in shroud, but as long as you can stay in shroud for like 6-8 seconds I don't think it significantly impacts your rotation. Also, Well of Bounty gives a guaranteed ~7 sec Stability now, you should keep that in mind for certain situations like the Mordremoth-smash-smash segment of Harvest Temple.

Other classes have shadowsteps and fast movement abilities, too. This is something thieves excel at but they also have to make heavy use of these abilities *during* the fight. Unless you're fighting someone who is playing very carefully with Shadow Portal, you do have real opportunities to catch them. Especially now that more people are playing Deadeye and Specter than full-mobility Daredevils with Shortbows. What happens quite often is that people just don't bother, though. They don't chase at all, they never learn how Shadowstep (thief's most powerful and practical teleport button) works and don't track the enemy thief's resource usage at all, they don't know how to idenitfy no-port spots (even though that will also save them from guardian, revenant, and mesmer bursts), they just instantly freeze when an enemy goes into stealth, &c.

In instanced PvE, the two strongest builds tend to be: • Condition Specter (example) • Condition Alac Specter (example) Both can keep up their damage outside of melee range, they have good "condi burst" and CC in groups thanks to venoms, a little bit of healing/barrier to make your healer's job easier, and both bench really well in PUGs. I recommend starting with the pure DPS version because it's easier to get Viper gear and the rotation is a little smoother since you don't have to cast any wells. Also there are a lot of Alacrity Mechanists around right now. Alac Specter is still very good, though — and very survivable because you'll end up with like 28k health. If you want a Power-based build for instanced PvE, you can also try: • Power Staff Daredevil (example) This is a very standard DPS build with great burst damage and decent CC, but it's really really reliant on group boon support for Quickness and Might to perform at a reasonable level. Because it's Daredevil you sometimes get to Steal really powerful abilities from bosses in raids. This build also has great cleave so you can use it for open world stuff if you just change a few traits for better self-sustain. All of these thief builds are pretty easy to use and tend to have very simple rotations. (I, personally, really enjoy that.) There are other viable builds as well, but I'm focusing on the ones the community considers top-tier for instanced group content.

Are you talking about PvE strictly? Instanced content or solo?

The main problem with Deadeye in PvE is that Mark/Malice interacts really poorly with multi-part bosses and boss phases sometimes. Change those mechanics and it's fine, just good consistent single-target-oriented high DPS. The other problem is that you get a ton of your DPS from Premeditation, which means Rifle builds are forced to do absurd stuff for stealth instead of just enjoying the versatility and convenience of Silent Scope.

Thief doesn't do support, area damage, or hard CC very well (Specter has opened up some options on these fronts but it's still not the top dog in these categories). The flexibility of Initiative is offset by the way thief weapon skills are typically designed with more "purity of purpose" than other class'. Head Shot just being a quick single-target daze instead of an area attack or a hard stun, for example. Playing thief gives you great flexibility in offense, defense, and mobility, but you pay for all that with the same resource — meaning playing safely reduces your ability to burst or control other players. Also, Initiative is a single resource across all your weapons. So you can't do what other classes do and unleash a whole fresh set of abilities just by hitting that ~ key.

Ok. It's very doable with enough practice. For example, Shadow Arts Deadeye absolutely demolishes melee-heavy builds, many glass-cannon builds, and a lot of condi spammers. The new changes have been pretty good for that because the faster cleansing and extra initiative gain makes it easier to pick apart the stupid tanky Trailblazer/Celestial type builds that a lot of "roamer"/"havoc" type players are playing. The key to doing 1v2 or 1v3 on thief is to split people up, using stealth and ports for misdirection. It doesn't take a lot — people botch mobility skills or get stuck on terrain all the time. Bring Shadow Portal if you want to go into 1vX situations a lot. Having a one-touch 2000+ range escape means you can play way more aggressively with your other utilities (like using Shadowstep to secure a stomp). Your goal in 1vX shouldn't be a total wipe, it should be to bring down as many as you can while you're still alive and bail out after you exhaust your resources.

Anet, plz put a tiny violin in the gem shop.

You want mega-Toughness and lots of sustain on a Power build? Best way to get that is with Cavalier gear + automatic crits to cancel out the lack of Precision. Here's an example with Bladesworn (similar or possibly identical to a Lord Hizen build): http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PKgAcqllyuYqMMmLOyKaxMA-zRIYX08XGNmAlWAqMAA-e • Almost all of your damage is concentrated into Dragon Slash, with a secondary burst from your pistol offhand (using Vision sigil for guaranteed crits). • Dragon Slash also heals you massively (use Shake It Off to make sure you don't miss due to Blindness). • Utilities &c. are focused on generating flow to power your big attack. • Passive traits are focused on Might generation, Stability, and sustain. Berserker-gear Bladesworn will, of course, kill stuff faster, but this setup does let you tank almost all bosses very easily after you've had a bit of practice using your Aegis and timing your attacks.

Passive defense to soak trash mobs vs. passive defense to actually clear hard content are two very different things. There was a time when you could kill the afk revs by giving them Might stacks since it would cause their self-inflicted Torment to exceed their passive healing.

• Take Basilisk Venom and pop it when you're in a group to get huge breakbar damage. • Spam Headshot. • Take a healing skill or stun break utility that also applies stealth (Hide in Shadows or Blinding Powder), if you don't need it to survive you can use it to set up your staff sneak attack. • If you're in Pistol/Pistol but you can swap weapons, put down Black Powder and use your Bounding Dodge to gain stealth, then swap to staff and execute the sneak attack. • EMP Charge from IBS-mastery Waystations works great in open world. • Termite Shovels, Metal Bars, &c. still work in open world.

Harb has multiple gap closers.

Because "balance hotfixes" are often really, REALLY knee-jerk and ill-advised. Hitting every single interesting new strategy that players discover with a nerf-bat immediately is dispiriting and bad for the metagame.

Again, • Most open-world PvE builds, including thief builds, only take 5-15 seconds to clear out a small handful of basic mobs. Across all players, both casual and hardcore, "i'll just kill all the mobs real fast" build is by far the most common "solo harvesting" build. • Silent Scope still provides an absurdly generous 3 seconds of Stealth per dodge roll in PvE. • You can still do a whole circuit of winterberries without fighting anything, without taking Shadow Arts at all. • Shadow Refuge and combo fields are still there for you if you need long-duration stealth to harvest rich nodes, just as they were before. • It is not "incompetent" or "unprofessional" that the designers don't care about your one bespoke pacifist harvesting build. Nah. Most editions of Dungeons & Dragons only have two kinds of classes: "you cast spells — here's a big list of spells, go find all the good ones, egghead" and "you don't cast spells — just say 'i attack' every turn and if you're real nice we might give you a special ability you can invoke sometimes." That's it! Those are the two kinds of class mechanics at play! It was very easy to switch to any class once you understood (1) how to make your numbers go up, (2) the action economy, (3) all the complicated stuff involved in getting good value out of a spell (any spell). A lot of players didn't like how D&D4 baked a lot of tactical complexity into the foundational game system itself — it's basically unplayable without a battle map because of how hard the system emphasizes positioning and movement — rather than leaving it as something the game master creates and adjust during the encounter design process. It was a lot harder for groups to play it "their way," which was a major problem for a game that trades on being everyone's game that you're supposed to kinda just hammer into the shape that appeals to you most. One consequence of that design is that the classes had very defined team roles and specific tactics you had to figure out to play them usefully. (It's a bit like GW2 PvP in the sense that it wasn't enough to just grab a "good build" for your class and go, you have to understand what a "roamer" or "duelist" or "teamfighter" is supposed to do with their build.) You had a lot of players struggling with "my fighter's abilities don't do anything!?" (because the group doesn't want to do full minis-and-battlegrid hour-long battle scenes, or because the GM is still leaning on the D&D3-style "enemies stay focused on the fighter just because" playstyle) or "my wizard doesn't do enough damage!?" (because the wizard isn't supposed to do the most damage anymore). If you're looking at D&D4 and you don't like it, that's cool, whatever (I played a bunch of D&D and I think all of D&D sucks now, just like I think the EQ/WoW style MMOG model is fundamentally tedious and unsatisfying). But if you think the problem is that the class design is too homogenous because of the AW/E/D stat blocks, I honestly think you haven't been paying attention to how any part of D&D4 really works — or how D&D3/PF, D&D5, or OD&D/AD&D are designed.

If you bottleneck them together, that Immob can keep 4-5 enemies locked down while you make them explode one-by-one. Both Spotter's and Skirmisher's Shot pierce, and they hit hard enough that you can take down lighter enemies with them pretty easily. After you clear the trash the 1v1 skills work great. You also have the option of just switching to Shortbow or Sword if you want more cleaving.

Note that the "mailing gold" limit isn't, like, "oh you'll get in trouble for sending more." The game just won't let you do it. I think what happens is the excess just sits in your mailbox but you can't claim it until the waiting period expires.

1v1ing in PvP can be tricky to learn because of the massive performance disparities between builds depending on their roles. Some builds are designed to be very hard to kill one-on-one but only wear you down gradually. Some builds have massive burst dps potential but crumble quickly without supports. Some builds spam a lot of CC and can easily fluster new players. A standard Dagger/Pistol Daredevil build is really focused on hit-and-run value over dueling potential. But Rifle Deadeye, Power Specter, and Condi Pistol/Dagger can all 1v1 pretty effectively while maintaining decent roaming and "+1" capability as well.

• Stealth on steal was rubbish for Deadeye, that's why all the builds were taking Shadow's Embrace instead. Shadow's Embrace is stronger now because you get rapid-fire cleansing when you need it. • Of all the thief builds, stealth on heal matters the least for Rifle Deadeye, since you have other sources of on-demand stealth. • You get 4 sec Superspeed every time you dodge with Rifle now. • Faster Leeching Venoms application makes up for no free healing in stealth. • You get more initiative by entering and exiting stealth now than you did by camping it. • You can still get a lot of stealth from combo fields if you know what you're doing. Stop playing Rifle/Rifle. New SA is overall better for any Deadeye build that's invested in actually playing the dang game. I am begging you all to just watch some Monthly AT clips and adapt a bit.

The thing you're proposing would create a constant drip of "I don't like this month's subscription freebie!!" and "I don't like the way this month's subscription freebie is unlocked!!" for the devs to deal with.

Everything you post is just about your incompetence, tho.

making it harder for the players to detect those issues won't solve anything take away the dps meters and it gets worse: now people will just stick to the "perfect" comp out of blind faith; with a meter i don't have to give a kitten what people are playing, i can see whether it's effective or not as they go since pugging content is getting easier and easier, we can perhaps conclude the community is mostly making the right choices a parsed encounter dps report is basically the only way for a player or their mentor to see what they're doing wrong with their rotations; nobody's ever given me crap when my dps is half of someone else's on some encounter in high-tier fractal pug groups, because no one even notices if you're correctly clearing the content

Almost all legos, including Aurora, are 90-95% PvE stuff. Please develop a sense of perspective.

New elite specializations provide new class mechanics.

Focus is really good for Mesmer in big WvW groups (where your main job is supplying lots of big nasty pulls to try to help your team land kills), and it's pretty strong for WvW Power necro and Elementalist roamers as well. In PvE… enh. Hmm. Used to be Mesmer, I think these days they don't use it much though.