Successful Builds

[Mhina.1827]

Hello,

I had a question about some fractal builds and sPvP builds. The frequency of conversation regarding builds and what's working doesn't seem very high, so I thought I'd try to ask for some updates.

-The main two builds I've seen for fractals are Condi DD and Staff Power DD. Are there any other successful builds for fractals besides these two? Is there any room for a Deadeye spec in fractals? Especially one that isn't tied to rifle?

-I pretty much only see D/P DD seriously recommended for sPvP, which feels fairly bad. With shortbow 5 costing 8 initiative, stealth burst no longer being terribly high, Vindicator feeling like everything thief probably should be (at least to me) with slightly less mobility makes me curious to the amount of success thief players are having in sPvP and if there are some high performing things outside of the decap bot that is D/P. I acknowledge that this could simply be a get good moment. 

- Of course, bonus builds for any other content not listed would be great for anyone else that may be seeking but not asking. 

Thanks!

[Bern.9613]

7 hours ago, Mhina.1827 said:

-I pretty much only see D/P DD seriously recommended for sPvP, which feels fairly bad. With shortbow 5 costing 8 initiative, stealth burst no longer being terribly high, Vindicator feeling like everything thief probably should be (at least to me) with slightly less mobility makes me curious to the amount of success thief players are having in sPvP and if there are some high performing things outside of the decap bot that is D/P. I acknowledge that this could simply be a get good moment. 

 

That's because thief was specifically targeted by ANet "balance team." Despite all the increases in initiative costs, power reductions, Josh Davis threw this little gem into the fray:

Shadow Arts has long been a source of frustrating gameplay, particularly in competitive PvP and WvW. This is partially due to the stealth generated by Concealing Restoration, Meld with Shadows, and Hidden Thief, which compounded with other Thief stealth sources to push stealth access to exceptional levels.

And it's been a downward spiral from there. So take speed runes, dash and go decap those points. That's all thief is good for now.

[Zacchary.6183]

5 hours ago, Bern.9613 said:

And it's been a downward spiral from there. So take speed runes, dash and go decap those points. That's all thief is good for now.

Very sad lol

[DeceiverX.8361]

I'm not going to speak for PvE because it's not my wheelhouse.  I would wager however that staff dominates melee in fractals because it's got the best melee AoE damage (Vault is superior to backstab, evades, and AoE's), and rifle is used in raids and the likes because DE offers immense incentives to use rifle which is already a safe ranged weapon, and provides a ton of boon coverage which helps the party as a whole.  Last I knew, D/D DE was the best raid build in terms of top-tier play with animation cancelling and so on, but requires a fair bit of skill on D/D and understanding of mechanics to make work and not die.

To know why there aren't other viable kits in the competitive modes requires explaining a fair bit of thief weapon set viability history.  TL;DR is the last paragraph.

D/P Shadow Arts builds kept the thief afloat for a decade by more or less a numerically-superior set of weapon skills paired with definitively the most utility for any given situation for a long time, paired with safe and non-interactive gameplay patterns via camping stealth at no real cost/reliance on anything other than weapon skills and SA, and made all of the other kits more or less redundant.  Because of thief's fragility, being untargetable is a great asset when trying ti +1 fights, and being invisible from sight on the map entirely offers huge strategic advantages wherein your opponents either burn skills to fight on even numbers and thus the thief can just gank safely and aggressively deal a ton of damage, or force combatants to not use everything they have out of the fear of being ganked at any given time, letting allies fight with more resources and secure wins on their own.  Paired with the historically very high mobility shortbow offered in both raw landspeed (when IArrow had a lower initiative cost), and the ability to shadowstep up sheer vertical terrain, the thief had effective dominance over the entire macro of the map and could act as strategic assets by immediately de-capping controlled-but-unmanned enemy nodes, and keeping the enemy team in a constant state of unease since thieves were more or less able to maintain permanent stealth and thus have a missing map presence.  A thief is visible on a far node, it decaps, disappears, and within a few seconds can be across the map +1'ing.

This is obviously really strong, and if buffed in stats, would make the thief running such a build (note this is D/P + SA + Shortbow) very overpowered.  In instances where the thief could become a good duelist, suddenly the person controlling the entire flow of the game by just decapping and ganking could then also remove players from nodes and full-cap on their own, effectively dominating all matches.  We saw a lot of this in the 2012/2013 version of SA which let thief also passively stack 500 power and deal massive damage by just camping stealth.  But, this role is admittedly hard to master, so ANet allowed it to exist and emphasized this as the thief's niche.

Why weren't the other weapons made better?  Well, most traits can be used by D/P because the kit has such a diverse and robust set of skills.  And ANet doesn't like to completely rework skills/entire weapons, though, because that requires animation efforts and with thief specifically, consideration for all of the weapon skills and dual wield skills.  Which it was leaked not too long ago that all this time there was active bias against the profession and a general unwillingness to learn it by the team in charge of profession balance and design, so they kept thief in check by keeping a tight handle on traits and utility skills almost solely with D/P SA in mind as the baseline for how well the entire class was allowed to perform.  Which is why when changes enabling kits like S/D came into play, they rapidly addressed those (or forgot about the impacts of making those changes in the first place, akin to no-cooldown-multiple-poison-on-imobilize allowing condi S/D to be busted).

How robust and strong were the skills on D/P in the PvP settings?  On more than one occasion some years ago when the sPvP scene was healthier, I have quite literally beaten players playing thief in the ~top 100 rating by using no other weapon skills than Shadow Shot and AA/Backstab paired with utility skills.  I've beaten people handily in the top 250 by more or less mashing 3 and just dodging when they weren't blinded (and the blind and teleport are unblockable, too).  People devoted entire Daredevil builds to PI when it was a strong interrupt because OH pistol also has an interrupt.  All of its skills are *still* good years later, with no real changes in design.  In a game where historically the pacing of combat was slower  (GS and Hammer warrior used to be viable if not strong at points, I had mild success on S/S mesmer, S/T ranger was a thing, etc.), a good player could hard stomp others using D/P' s strengths because of its good numbers and versatility.  Coming from primarily a power D/D player, the kit is/was wildly overloaded in comparison, with great utility and damage per initiative (all of its skills used to be comparatively the lowest initiative cost, too, although this was improved by mostly nerfing D/P than buffing other combinations).  The old weaoins have been mostly left to rot, aside from some minor skill/effect changes and initiative cost adjustments.

So ANet's strategy up until late 2022 was to keep listening to the stealth-carried folk who think camping stealth is good design (and also probably because nerfing SA in parts of the game's history would have left it with no functional role or identity when Mirage was oppressive in its mobility, for example), and subsequently nerfed other facets of core thief and mechanics which *could* be exploited by D/P SA for a few years and introduced a lot of mobility creep on other professions, which further repressed most of the remaining weapon combinations, utilities, and trait options from being usable in a competitive context.  D/D thief, for example, was less-mobile than engineer prior to the inclusion of Superspeed in SA with its recent rework, and suffers into metas which feature significant block/blind/invuln uptime as it depends on landing melee attacks to stay alive, with longer animations and lower damage throughput than D/P and Staff.

In sum, the weapons of thief outside of D/P and to some extent S/D and P/D are just not good in today's competitive game, and haven't been good in yesterday's game because the sensitivity of D/P SA builds prevented any adjustments to the class short of either making it OP or reworking all its weapons, which ANet had no interest in doing.

Edited January 28 by DeceiverX.8361

[Vidit.7108]

On 1/24/2023 at 6:43 PM, Mhina.1827 said:

-The main two builds I've seen for fractals are Condi DD and Staff Power DD. Are there any other successful builds for fractals besides these two? Is there any room for a Deadeye spec in fractals? Especially one that isn't tied to rifle?

At t2 or lower pretty much anything can work, at t3 there can be issues but that's still pretty open for nearly all thief dps builds.

In T4 and CMs
Power Double Dagger Deadeye and Condi Specter are generally fine, but might underperform those other builds. Keep in mind that some fractals have a bias toward power or condition damage where a build good at one fractal is then is then sometimes very bad in another. 
Any Deadeye build because of the malice and marking mechanic would probably do less damage than a Daredevil in fractals with lots of trash mobs, or that require changing the boss target. Condi Specter in that situation might do less because only shroud can aoe or cleave. Most power dps lose damage to a boss that moves around a lot and most condi don't. Condi Specter is really good in both normal and CM Sunqua Peak for example. CM LFG can sometimes be picky about which dps build you are using but most just looking for T4s probably won't notice on a typical day unless all three fractals are bad for your build.

If healer is a firebrand, Condi Alac Specter can be doable but requires encounter experience to not waste your wells. It can be frustrating to play it in some fractals though. 

[ASP.8093]

On 1/24/2023 at 9:43 PM, Mhina.1827 said:

-The main two builds I've seen for fractals are Condi DD and Staff Power DD. Are there any other successful builds for fractals besides these two? Is there any room for a Deadeye spec in fractals? Especially one that isn't tied to rifle?

If you look at Discretize, they still recommend Condi Specter (Alac or pure DPS): https://discretize.eu/builds/thief/condi-specter/ — as well as Power Staff Devil.

You can play Pistol/Dagger condi Deadeye as well, it was the go-to thief build due to its huge damage output before End of Dragons dropped, but its rotation is a huge pain in the butt in comparison to Specter (dicier resource management and a lot of forced movement).

 

I suspect Rifle or D/D Deadeye can probably do fine at this point as well, on account of the various buffs. But it's more situational since some bosses have *very* quick phases where you can barely do a full rotation.