DeceiverX.8361

Needs to be posted on the ele forums where so many are absolutely insistent the class as a whole has zero chance to beat DE. Nice play, though.

CS/Tr/DrD with berserker gear on D/D with Assassin's Signet and Signet of Shadows is theoretically the best you can do in the shortest amount of time. That said, it's a horrible build and still won't burst most small-scale oriented builds unless you're lucky, and there's no real form of escape or "to not be seen." Your combo gets absorbed, and you die. This will force you into strictly a 1v1/gank position only, and only against certain builds. Your goals of not being seen and delivering OHKO hits are contradictory. All variants of the thief currently have to pester for several attacks to down pretty much everyone except maybe the squishiest of eles and other thieves. I'm not really sure why you mention wanting to play P/D condi. It has no relevance in a decision of playing power/burst. You'll have to have a duplicate set of every piece of equipment to play both builds and there's just no wiggle room. If you want actual efficacy on a burst spec, play D/P Daredevil or SA DE like everyone else, because those are pretty much the only power builds on thief that don't outright suck, and are arguably fairly OP in good hands. Race doesn't matter in this game. They all have identical ranges and hitboxes. Likely you're just stepping closer when playing an Asura due to its relative size.

>it is INCREDIBLY easy to wreck unprepared/prepared people on deadeye, and its moderately easy to wreck prepared people on daredevil. Yeah I'm sorry but you very clearly have no idea what you're writing. D/P DrD is the hard fight and DE is often downright weak into ele due to your reflect/crit immune access and sustain beyond the initial combo. Thief is straight-up carried by Daredevil more than anything else. I literally have 1v2'ed Deadeyes on my reaper of all things, which has enough projectile denial to deal with rifle for the most part. It's only fairly menacing when terrain is heavily abused and is played quite well. Half the time it consists of camping earth/earth shield and laughing at the fact that they can't deal meaningful damage since almost all if it comes from easily-blocked crits with tons of negation. You'll just grind them down or can walk away from the fight if they continue to try and kill you. Unless you're playing zerk staff, there are ample ways to burst them down pretty easily and sustain through most of their damage on an offtank roaming build on S/F Weaver. You have to either learn their patterns and just counterburst accordingly, and/or know when to get ready to deny their damage by sustaining correctly and whittling them down. Like superspeed engineer or soulbeast, they can run away and reset if they really want, but that's not exactly them "winning" either. Is it easy for them to reset? Yes. Is it good design? No. But the class is hardly an unstoppable killing machine. Maybe you should post your build and preferred style of play and let people help you fix it.

> @"RedShark.9548" said: > > > @"Psycoprophet.8107" said: > > > @"Lan Deathrider.5910" said: > > > > @"Fat Disgrace.4275" said: > > > > > @"Lan Deathrider.5910" said: > > > > > > @"RedShark.9548" said: > > > > > > Is bandits defense still a thing? Last time i seriously played gw2 pretty much every thief ran that kitten op skill with low cd, stunbreak, block and knockdown. > > > > > > > > > > > > Impossible to lockdown when that thing is on 16s cd > > > > > > > > > > I honestly never encounter it, and I fight a lot of thieves in WvW. Its all shadowsteps and Assassin's Signet. > > > > > > > > Theres a lot of them using it now, that or roll for ini. > > > > > > Hmm not the ones I've fought recently. It's a great skill to be honest and I wish warrior had it instead. > > > > I don't get how its great lol, I rarely see thieves using it cuz the 1 1/4 length block. If it was 3 secs or so similar to Ranger or shield block maybe. I'd way rather have bandits defense work like shield block or rangers gs skill where u can block for a duration instead of having to block right as the damage is occurring. Knock downs great but I think most thieves would give it up for a longer block duration or a block like rangers with push back, even with loss of the stunbreak. > > If it was longer then it would be absolutely busted, its already stacked with different mechanics, id rather have this on warrior shield than the 3s duration. > > Against smart player you dont even use the full 3sec. A good enemy will stop attacking or use unblockables after a single hit wull get thrown into the block. > > Bandits defense has/had (not sure if they changed it) shorter cd than warrior shield 5,while having a much more versatile use. > > Its absolutely stacked, how can you not see the use of it? It's crazy powerful in a vacuum and would especially be so on most other classes, but historically for thief it wasn't always amazing just because when you really think about it, it's a low cooldown stunbreak and very little else in the greater context of the class. At best it's 1-2 initiative recovered during its duration and can be used to avoid a major nuke. It otherwise doesn't stop most CC's and halts stealth/reset efforts as a utility slot since it doesn't offer any mobility. Does this buy the thief space or time to reset? No. Does it buy it a weapon swap/skill use? No. It's why BP and Shadowstep have always had so much historical use and precedence. The last spot has some contention now and a lot of those skills have undergone nerfs, so it's being played a bit more now, but not because of any amazing new power, and it did phase out of previous builds entirely. People running it now mostly do so because so many of the other stunbreak options on core have been nerfed so aggressively (RFI cooldown nearly doubled and ISignet basically made worthless in WvW with the ambient creature removal and the global increase for WvW/PvP) or because a lot of players find they have to stay in melee more often now anyways with the shortbow changes. Much like giving a warrior a blind/smoke field, it can be independently strong in some regards, but mostly not super busted by virtue of the fact it doesn't have a ton of innate synergy. Really this thread comes down to the fact the warrior has difficulty with meta D/P Daredevil, which is honestly the case for most professions just because of how much control the build has over a duel and how Shadow Shot's already-insane damage was not reduced in February because ANet knows the class would bu trash without it. Otherwise if equipping other weapons or trait lines, the thief as a whole is mostly very much even or even hard-countered by warrior.

It was fine before the expansions but the powercreep phased out the assassination and need of periphery in the old glassy DPS in front-to-back teamfighting like in old metas. With the boonball and so much defense on so much ranged/AoE DPS it's hard to really actually route/flank anyone or make meaningful burst attempts. Unfortunately the thief just can't be given the damage or support capability enough to support a zerg so long as it has the stealth and evasion/mobility it does in smaller fights on D/P DE/DrD. It'd just become way too OP for anything otherwise.

It's fine. Boon spam letting people instantly recover their lost stacks or simply just having too many other effective boons permanently is a way more significant part of the problem.

With Roaming/Havoc dead in most scenes as a method to PPT, it'd fail miserably due to the obvious consolidation it encourages, which means we're probably nearing its release with EoD.

> @"Jski.6180" said: > > @"DeceiverX.8361" said: > > > @"Jski.6180" said: > > > It needs to stop coving over movement speed effects. The endless means of immunity to cripal and chill is not good for the game. > > > > It doesn't cover over them. The superspeed buff itself boosts mobility to the in-combat movespeed cap by brute force due to how much it provides. > > We don't actually see the effects a true 100% bonus would have because OOC is capped at what swiftness offers and the in-combat movespeed maximum is just a lower number threshold. > > > > Only way to make it less potent is hit the numbers, and I completely agree with OP that speed rune is also utterly broken and provides way too much for how easy it is to get permanent swiftness. > > > > Swiftness - or the 33% number it provides such as traited SotL and the likes, should be the best you can get for pure landspeed. > > > > > @"Dawdler.8521" said: > > > Guess who this will hurt the most? > > > > > > Hint: its not the zerg. > > > > Good. The disparity in smallscale that this effect and RoS produces is honestly way bigger than in zerg play where so much harass happens at range, anyways. Any build lacking a ton of mobility and swiftness uptime is absolutely crippled in viability as it stands because of these effects being so prominent in-combat. > > Does not grant any movement speed increase while backpedaling or strafing. > Only provides the 100% increase to movement speed while in combat. Outside of combat it provides the same 33% increase to movement speed as Swiftness. > Makes target ignore chill and cripple movement slowing effects. > Superspeed does not stack duration and new application will remove the old one even if it is longer duration. > Affects Siege Golem in World vs World. > > From wiki. Weird, I'd just looked prior to posting and didn't see mentioning of it, however, the math does check out thinking about it in hindsight. Either way, I still support its removal.

> @"DoomNexus.5324" said: > > @"Ragazm.6018" said: > > Basically i got lose strikes where i got -16 -15 and then i got "win" strikes where i got +12 +13. > Yea, so your rating is higher than your/the opponent's team average. Don't see the problem with the numbers. The low population just forces the MM to match guys together with too much deviation. It's garbage but we can't change it... Gaining +0 when winning is actually a thing btw. This. MMR algorithms are weighed with gains/losses based on your opponents' likelihood of winning based on a collective history of who beat who. If you lost to people you're expected to lose against (they consistently beat people who you lost to previously for example), then you will lose less for losing to them, because it means you're performing exactly as expected. In VERY big games with a ton of games played, this can even result in -0/+0 losses/gains if the game thinks you're exactly where you're supposed to be with a near-perfect assumption. However, if you beat them, you also gain more because the algorithm is now adjusting for your play being better than theirs despite you being predicted to lose. When you start, you usually have big gains because the system makes the assumption you're new, not very good, and volatile. So the more people play and the closer the matchup, the less you gain. What's happening to the OP is the system thinks they're better than they are, so they gain less for winning and lose more for losing. At the perfect mark, this will even out to 0 on win/loss, however the sPvP community is quite small where these numbers can fluctuate on the daily.

> @"Jski.6180" said: > It needs to stop coving over movement speed effects. The endless means of immunity to cripal and chill is not good for the game. It doesn't cover over them. The superspeed buff itself boosts mobility to the in-combat movespeed cap by brute force due to how much it provides. We don't actually see the effects a true 100% bonus would have because OOC is capped at what swiftness offers and the in-combat movespeed maximum is just a lower number threshold. Only way to make it less potent is hit the numbers, and I completely agree with OP that speed rune is also utterly broken and provides way too much for how easy it is to get permanent swiftness. Swiftness - or the 33% number it provides such as traited SotL and the likes, should be the best you can get for pure landspeed. > @"Dawdler.8521" said: > Guess who this will hurt the most? > > Hint: its not the zerg. Good. The disparity in smallscale that this effect and RoS produces is honestly way bigger than in zerg play where so much harass happens at range, anyways. Any build lacking a ton of mobility and swiftness uptime is absolutely crippled in viability as it stands because of these effects being so prominent in-combat.

Ah yes, let's ruin the gameplay integrity of a game mode and queue other people out of their map's content so people can get their legendaries faster on multiple accounts. No. Legendaries aren't meant to be grinded out, and this would be like if ANet added map queues to PvE zones instead of creating instances megaservers. It actively denies people content that they want to play. The game mode is also team-based PvP and I know for a fact trying to fight in PvP boxed up means the per-character skill is extremely low making you actually a downright liability due to PPK if someone or some people engage to fight or stop a cap. Because honestly, you're going to die on a lot of those characters very easily. Honestly I think it's dumb ANet put the GoB into the game as a requirement for legendaries because it gets so many people bringing PvE ideology into the competitive modes. They should have just let WvW players actually get the legendaries rather than sitting on an endless dump supply of GoB and no collections/pres/gold/loot to actually afford to unlock them.

I only play necro for Reaper. I still preferred it as it was prior to the SR/R reworks with SoS on 7s shroud cooldown and better shroud mobility, but it's easily the spec I enjoy most as of today. Simple, but with great depth of gameplay, and most importantly, a lot of damage with committed engages. I find core and scourge absolutely incredibly boring for long-term play. Especially Scourge. Thief, then ranger, then warrior. Thief is my former main with thousands of hours over reaper and the class I enjoy most when my preferred styles are even somewhat viable, but I dislike Daredevil, D/P, and SA because I dislike running from fights and chipping away at people slowly (I'd rather just blow them up and focus on surviving at a disadvantage and then repeat the process), so it's basically no fun these days if I want to win at anything except cannibalizing other thieves that I can't catch on my reaper. Ranger's alright but soulbeast feels like a dumbed-down thief for its DPS builds, and its superior boon build is a rotation-based snooze-fest which is why I hate engi and ele. I'd put warrior which has my most PvP wins across all classes above ranger if the builds I enjoy were viable like HF GS wombo combo or S/S condi parry. It's just too dependent on shield and chaining defenses right now that I don't really enjoy aesthetically and from a playstyle perspective. I like to be aggressive as hell on the field. Probably mesmer, guard, and rev next, though I'm not particularly good at any of them due to lack of practice hours, and nothing about them really stands out as "awesome." I used to play S/S mesmer and warrior a fair amount years ago, but the riposte builds just don't deal the damage or provide the defenses they need to in order to succeed in the modern powercreeped game. It's a middle-ground between rotation-heavy gameplay from the below classes and the above, which is why I'm indifferent. Ele, then Engi dead last, and by a lot. I absolutely suck on both of them, hate rotational play patterns, dislike the theme and patterns of both, and am fine never seriously touching these professions ever again as they are after my initial attempts at playing them. I get some people like these play patterns, but I just don't enjoy them at all, and am almost always looking to find ways to NOT play them as intended, which usually results in me dying. They're very strong classes, but I'd rather go play another game than play them, and I'd rather focus on what my enemy is doing than a rotation that I have to uphold.

Kinda defeats the purpose of stealth though considering the summon AI simply follows the player around. You can already track other players in stealth by their minis.

Depends heavily on the context of the fight. Since the nerfs to Sap which used to be my favorite just for its damage alone, I generally favor Tuft and Seed the most since I don't run DA to really make use of Plasma anymore. Seed is damned good since it's a leap finisher heal which you can spam HS in + condition cleanse. Axe is my go-to if there's a soulbeast around since it reflects, which is pretty frequently. It's also a safe stomp on a warrior in a duel you down them since it'll reflect their hammer downed skill. The fear's okay for duels into core necro or scourge sometimes, but a good reaper can counter it, and in group engagements/supported damage dealer scenarios it's often useless since there's so much shared stab. I prefer MHC because it's fast enough to interrupt with in brief windows of an enemy lacking stab. Since I play power, gunk is useless (but amazing for condi P/D) and I only use it for down stomps like guard, ranger, and warrior since it applies blind after a few ticks. Since I play D/D Ice Shard is pointless since honestly, if they use a mobility skill, they're getting away regardless.

Warrior for me. The fun builds like S/S and HF wombo GS all suck. Also my ele, which I'm mostly using to collect anniversary gifts because it turns out I get bored as hell playing rotation-based anything. > @"KrHome.1920" said: > Thief - I grinded every crafting discipline to 500. > > I don't play it anymore, because I don't like the niche ANet pushes this class into (hit, run and hide). > > If once ever crafting becomes accountwide (personally I doubt it since you can level up characters with it) this will be the day I finally delete my thief. Even as a longtime main I can't help but feel this a lot, and it's why I switched to Reaper. Something that can focus on offense and not need turtle strats.

Maybe I'm missing something... but why is MM Reaper being called good?... No mobility or utility really and it depends on you either standing still trying to out-stat-check it or just not having cleave or CC. It's easymode but I've never really seen an appeal.

> @"Patkus.9178" said: > > @"DeceiverX.8361" said: > > > @"Antycypator.9874" said: > > > D/D is fine, but I would take some damage from Cloak and Dagger, and transfer it to AA chain. > > > > So... remove the last vestiges of any reason to ever take D/D over D/P, ever? > > > > D/D sucks because ANet removed all the damage amp from the core thief in general and put it in the DrD and DE trait lines. Took the fangs mostly from core and generally speaking, hit D/x's sustained damage hard with the overall AA nerfs and removal of damage from CS in favor of EW for PvE. > > > > It's funny seeing the difference of opinion because PvE players say it's fine when it's atrociously bad in the PvP modes and is absolutely and totally eclipsed by D/P in every way now, with those two traitlines/builds having anti-synergy with D/D itself. It's viable in PvE which is good enough. PvP... it's dumpster-tier bad. One of the weakest builds/kits in the entire game. > > > > Here's your D/D rework/fix, as suggested on repeat, for years: It needs one skill change pretty much to at least be PvP-usable. > > > @"DeceiverX.8361" said: > > > Death Blossom needs a rework. Fixed-distance dash evade 600 units with half duration currently, bleeds single-target in larger stacks at the end of the movement so that it won't reveal if used as defense while in stealth (like it currently does which actively works against power D/D). Can't be spammed this way for damage since you'll always be moving away and then dealing the damage, and encourages better spacing and non-spam by condi builds, while providing better mobility and fixes a lot of problems with escapees and disengage potential with power builds, and gets synergy with CnD for the condi variant. > > >Drop the cost to 4 due to slightly higher dependence on CnD for optimized damage and lack of spammable PbAoE damage, since it no longer becomes a viable damage source like FS nor a true disengage like IS/IR on S/D, and this can keep condi playing in the same style as power by having it use CnD to reposition/gain distance, and strike again for the fixed-distance strike. > > > With this, condi D/D now requires more skill and active initiative management, and now you've got a consistent performer across power/condi and D/D actually has some synergy and value across its skills for both builds. Power gets buffed in mobility and sustain which it desperately needs. > > See you did your homework. Interesting idea although I am not a big fan of the Death Blossom rework as I don't think it'd be useable in PvE (and I am a fan of power builds, so bleed is meh). Maybe some kind of spin move would work (spin in place for idk about 0.5s, do damage and get a small evade)? Would work in PvE as cleave as well as work in PvP because I'm guessing you could use it after porting to your enemy? > > PoE had an interesting skill called Blade Flury or something like that. Channel and get dmg reduction (maybe block) and if you block/get hit you do more damage. PvE's weaknesses are more or less that they removed damage modifiers from the thief as a whole and cut the AA by 30% a few years ago. All they have to do is bring back some of the CS traitline's damage and the kit goes back to being plenty strong in PvE and makes CS as a whole more viable in the PvP modes as it's usually on the weaker end due to a total lack of usable utility. Currently, my understanding is D/D is overall decent in PvE as a whole and if it needs anything, it's not that much, but most players suffer because executing to get those numbers is rather difficult. One of the fundamental things to consider is that D/D is weak in the PvP modes solely because of its design, which the only fix they can make without reworking pretty much every single weapon skill on thief, is to rework DB to have synergy with the rest of the kit and class itself. For PvE, it's mostly a DPS race where there's either no diversity because the meta simply can't evolve thanks to static encounter design, or the case where the people playing ignore the meta and the encounters are designed to allow small losses/variance, anyways. In the former case, people only care about numbers, and in the latter, they don't care at all. In the PvP modes, both need to be taken into serious consideration.

> @"Antycypator.9874" said: > D/D is fine, but I would take some damage from Cloak and Dagger, and transfer it to AA chain. So... remove the last vestiges of any reason to ever take D/D over D/P, ever? D/D sucks because ANet removed all the damage amp from the core thief in general and put it in the DrD and DE trait lines. Took the fangs mostly from core and generally speaking, hit D/x's sustained damage hard with the overall AA nerfs and removal of damage from CS in favor of EW for PvE. It's funny seeing the difference of opinion because PvE players say it's fine when it's atrociously bad in the PvP modes and is absolutely and totally eclipsed by D/P in every way now, with those two traitlines/builds having anti-synergy with D/D itself. It's viable in PvE which is good enough. PvP... it's dumpster-tier bad. One of the weakest builds/kits in the entire game. Here's your D/D rework/fix, as suggested on repeat, for years: It needs one skill change pretty much to at least be PvP-usable. > @"DeceiverX.8361" said: > Death Blossom needs a rework. Fixed-distance dash evade 600 units with half duration currently, bleeds single-target in larger stacks at the end of the movement so that it won't reveal if used as defense while in stealth (like it currently does which actively works against power D/D). Can't be spammed this way for damage since you'll always be moving away and then dealing the damage, and encourages better spacing and non-spam by condi builds, while providing better mobility and fixes a lot of problems with escapees and disengage potential with power builds, and gets synergy with CnD for the condi variant. >Drop the cost to 4 due to slightly higher dependence on CnD for optimized damage and lack of spammable PbAoE damage, since it no longer becomes a viable damage source like FS nor a true disengage like IS/IR on S/D, and this can keep condi playing in the same style as power by having it use CnD to reposition/gain distance, and strike again for the fixed-distance strike. > With this, condi D/D now requires more skill and active initiative management, and now you've got a consistent performer across power/condi and D/D actually has some synergy and value across its skills for both builds. Power gets buffed in mobility and sustain which it desperately needs.

> @"Justine.6351" said: > It is the safest and easiest camp to approach and it always has a waypoint nearby which is also the map starting point for the home server. You don't even need some fancy high mobility elite roaming build to defend it. You just walk north past the waypoint while invulnerable and boom, there you are, north camp. Any home defender can defend it on pretty much any build. Also because its so easy to get to its a camp you don't have to win to defend just by yourself as you can count on more allies showing up to defend it, just stall. Another item is that its super far away from enemy spawns so if you kill them they are gone for a measurable amount of time. They arn't just graveyarding it and in fact you can graveyard defend it yourself as a home defender. Having the two little doorways for entrances and even walkways above them is just icing on the cake. > > Truly a superb home defender favored camp and a testament to the original alpine borderland developer's rvr experience. This is honestly the real answer. It's the fastest, easiest way to win a fight. In terms of PPT, map control, or content longevity... there are all better places to be, but you can pretty much immediately guarantee a win if it's contested and a quick retake if it's lost.

> @"Tridentuk.1625" said: > @DeceiverX.8361 > So just overrall map awareness is the best weapon at hand in general. That's going to take me some time but it's good to get the clarification. > > I'm probably at the stage where there's a bit too much unfamiliar info flying at me in a game to utilise this fully, but I'll definitiely keep it in mind and work on it thanks, and also like you say at the early stage I'm at matches are very volatile. > > I think what I got from this for my bracket is that if nub lobbies are squabbling mid it can be good to full cap side nodes where possible, but if I notice my team is going fairly even it'll can be advantageous to add my weight after I have nothing to do. However like I say overrall map awareness is king and that "it depends" on a variety of factors. > > What about if my team loses teamfights? I mean I know those will generally end in losses but maybe I can grab the occasional win if I know the right plays. Yeah, the decision-making is a bit nuanced and developing situational awareness and being able to answer questions like "How long will it take me to traverse to X point from Y location?" among others like resources/cooldowns, shadowstep distances, gauging ally and enemy strengths and weaknesses, etc. really just comes more or less from practice and slowly learning. While +1 then decap is the best general advice in its simplest form, this is mostly just an overall statement of how to have the most impact on the map assuming things are generally going as expected in the sPvP meta. I can get where the idea comes from because there's a lot of mobility in the game right now, so the old/prior manta of "decap above all else" has been squandered a bit because the enemy team can pretty quickly match your point rotation if they're playing a more standard game. Since lower ranks are more volatile in how teams as a whole play, making assumptions about how to win a more structured approach is going to be less useful across every game, and the formula will possibly not work as well. Vollun's advice is good on the general for people who might have developed mechanical skill and might be stuck grinding in silver/gold where standardized play starts to be more prominent, but it breaks down when both you and the other players in the match are newer and overall learning how to execute plays rather than the overall macro. As you get better and start being able to cannibalize other thieves easily to deny their map presence in the games where they exist, and climb into the middle tiers where the blob mid isn't as common and can possibly just out-duel worse players on side nodes to carry fullcap wins, his advice will really start kicking in and making a lot more sense in its general simplicity. When your team starts losing teamfights, it still really depends on a few things. If there's a gross lack of coordination (I.E. just infinitely running into multi-enemy defended nodes one at a time over and over where the enemy is split 3-2 defending two points), and your team is consistently instantly dying in these scenarios as to never gain any kind of even ground again, sometimes these are just lost matches; 4 of 5 members of your team are then definitively substantially worse players, and unless you are individually so good or the enemy so bad to allow you to 1v2/1v3 on-point at far and hold the sidenodes, the nature of team games just has the cards fall that way. That said, what CAN be winnable in a team rallying and losing the 4v4/5v3 mid is to +1 the mid fight to give them the necessary foothold and just try and decap when necessary, assuming you can win the 5v4 mid and your team capable of holding long enough for you to decap quickly and re-join the fray. If the enemy team isn't decapping home, you can mid->home fullcap->mid and maybe salvage the foothold if the enemy team keeps its 3/2 or 3/1 split. If the enemy team doesn't commit at least 4 to mid or send home to decap, they're lose the game, letting you also decap their far and keep the 5v5 split decap going enough to possibly gain a point advantage. If the enemy thief is worse than you, it can be just enough to carry your team with a close victory, but if they're better than you AND the core teamfighters are superior, the enemy thief will match the roams and either kill you during the decap phase or help their team win the 5v5 easier during your rotations, and well, it's 5 players all playing better at each role. Sometimes it just happens that way and the best you can do is to keep improving. So sometimes developing map awareness can come at the cost of lost matchups, but it's often still better than simply running and gunning for fights which you may or may not win. This is especially volatile if you're still grasping the gameplay mechanics of the classes while new, and entirely likely your allies are doing the same. Even the most well-informed new player of the current game-state can be completely blindsided by another player opting for a wildly off-meta build by their opponent for no other reason than lack of familiarity, and if their mechanics aren't up to snuff to deal with whatever curveballs may be thrown, they'll lose. So yeah, TL;DR, map awareness is the big thing to start carrying worse teams, but there's still a need for some degree of raw play mechanics to perform better than the other thief to not get beat at your own game, and if you add the ingredients together when in the middle ranks, Vollun's advice and the priority for +1'ing/rotating makes a lot more sense in terms of how the game is played today at that level and beyond. Don't worry too much about winning while new so much as improving your overall knowledge and ability to execute your plans, and you'll be all set for the long term.

> @"Tridentuk.1625" said: > I've been watching a tonne of Vallun and the gist that I get is that you should be looking for +1s as the priority, and then looking for decaps as a 2nd option.. However, probably because I'm inexperienced only 20 games played, I have times where I just can't find a +1 so instead of doing nothing I want to full cap. > > Is this really that fundamentally wrong and should I just practice more on map awareness to find those +1s, are there circumstances where full capping is viable? > > ALSO because I'm playing with probably less skilled players there tends to be a lot of mobbing going on where my team runs around as a 4, or the other team does- especially around middle. Can someone give me a run down on the appropriate actions to take in these circumstances? I get the sense that it's a very exploitable meta I'm in but don't know the way to exploit if that makes sense. You've somewhat answered your own question which is good. Generally speaking, the advice of "what to do" comes more or less from a certain expected level of baseline competency from the two teams. A +1 is only really going to be effective when making something like a 3v2 or 2v1 to defend or help contest/win an offensive play by another team member. Possibly even a 3v1 if your team is struggling to gain a foothold. Basically, the higher-level mindset is not so much "always +1 and then always decap" to "Always ensure the other team isn't getting a foothold to win the map" It sounds obvious, but you need to think of this less as winning fights to secure points and holding but rather always keeping the enemy down a bit. In scenarios you describe like both sides sending the whole team for mid, whether or not you full cap is dependent on the rest of the map. If mid is a dead-even match and it's a neutral node and a 4v5, and you just came off a 1-1 tie prior to decapping, there's little reason to try and force the mid capture by making it a 5v5 unless you think your presence is enough to make the 5v5 winnable with a team wipe to take the point, or if your presence is enough to somehow sustain the point as neutral. This is rarely the case though, so odds are, you would gain way more points just capping far and *then* maybe trying to cap mid than immediately going mid and dealing with a squabble. This becomes especially volatile at lower ranks because to make the constant roaming strategy work, your team has to be good enough to go even with the enemy team without you. However, if you're being outplayed by another thief on the decap game who's also denying you the full capture because they're also consistently out-dueling you, and the enemy team is managing to barely hold mid in the 4v4 or it's constantly neutral (with a point-score at 1-2 or 0-1), you have to result to +1'ing mid to give your team a foothold, otherwise you're just bleeding out by the enemy thief and your fullcap will last little longer than a few seconds anyways when they come back. If you're consistently out-playing THEM though and mid is locked up in a 4v4 on a neutral point, and they're the only player coming to kill you, a full capture is much more valuable because while you can endlessly trade the 0-0 decap score, you can kill them, full cap the closest point, traverse the map during their respawn, and opt for a decap on their home and match where they go on spawn to leverage a permanent +1 node score. If they go to decap you kill them and the node stays yours. If they go to full cap the neutral node, you kill them and the other one is left open. This keeps the enemy team at a permanent 0-node position if mid stays neutral and tied score even if they take mid. The 2-1 lead is much less important than keeping a 1-0 lead, since a 1-0 lead is a guaranteed win over time, while 2-1 can let the enemies win if a lead was gotten earlier or they rally for a brief window. When teams start breaking apart and rotating will +1 start being a way more significant part of the game, but the underlying concept is is still the same; you go to where the fastest advantage in terms of nodes can be gained to keep the enemy team suppressed by supporting the footholds you have and trying to keep the enemy as weak as possible when the play can be made.

Respectable play, and a neat loadout. Though I wonder if opting more for the condi side of durability in Dire/TB is worthwhile in some outnumbered fighting. My troll P/unequip DE does a shocking amount of damage for how durable it is. I'm honestly surprised more people didn't punish as aggressively as they could have in the windows you were revealed since you are fairly glassy. I will say, that pug rev in the first fight is an absolute legend for surviving all that time on his own during your stealthing when fighting into that size of a group of Mag lol.

> @"Yasai.3549" said: > > @"Jugglemonkey.8741" said: > > Exactly. If you bring a thief or ranger to a zerg situation, you get shouted down and told to reroll. Not sure why they are surprised when they get told to reroll after bringing a zerg build roaming, it's literally the same principle in reverse haha > > Oh boi, it's my ultimate pet peeve when some dude is yelling and raging in Team chat about this "unbeatable hacker who does so much damage camping the spawn area" and I come and find out that this dude is running full Zerker Zerg build and getting preyed on by a Roamer. > > **In fact, I think if anyone complains about another class in WvW subforum from now on has to reveal their build as a courtesy.** > It's really such a ridiculous claim about another class being GGOP when they themselves are playing what's essentially a wet ricepaper. > It's kind of ironic, because you've made it very apparent you're a former mirage main who's on multiple occasions rejected that MC is a bad mechanic and was impossible to balance. A bad player can play a good build and still suck, and a good player can play a bad build and still do well in various content spheres. People who act like this often embellish the truth quite a bit and would probably just say they're a thief main, and nobody would be able to call them out. It'd be wiser if we just reject nonsense and ask disillusioned people to post the proof of their claims for gameplay critique or fight analysis, or simply try to have them drop the attitude and help them become better players to overcome the issues initially. It's also an entirely different subject to talk about bad design versus something being overpowered. Most people acknowledge Sustained stealth, reduced visual clarity, overly-punishing effects like Ancient Seeds, gamebreaking things like boon-spamming firebrand, and virtually everything about Scourge and its management of large-scale boons are poorly-designed when considering the game's content sphere as a whole and for various reasons. Even if not nominally OP, something can be validly critiqued as bad design and more importantly, propose a well-founded change.

> @"Fat Disgrace.4275" said: > > @"Lan Deathrider.5910" said: > > > @"DeceiverX.8361" said: > > > > @"cyberzombie.7348" said: > > > > > @"VICBEAR.1529" said: > > > > > What is about Engineer, Warrior, Ranger, Mesmer etc? > > > > > Many classes can escape from fight but why is thief so big trouble? > > > > > > > > > > Just make topic "Please delete thief class" > > > > > > > > From personal experience, most other classes except for some rangers actually commit to escaping. It's more common to see roaming thieves **_(dash d/p daredevils specifically) _**to be cocky and just ooc, stack on stealth, then come right back to anyone with their back turned and run away again when they realize they're still in hot water. > > > > > > The part nobody else ****ing understands. > > > > > > It's not thief. It's D/P Daredevil. > > > All these people asking for nerfs should go play any other thief build. Anything besides D/P DrD pretty much gets splattered if it botches an engage and deals no damage except for maybe S/P into relatively bad foes who don't know how to punish it or are running bad builds. > > > > > > Thief has been balanced around D/P Daredevil existing because it's the worst offender of unhealthy designs, and ANet absolutely refuses to rework it because it'd require a huge class rework and I know they're too lazy to do so. > > > > > > When DE started eclipsing its bad design it actually got nipped in the bud and reworked properly. > > > > Dwayna help the poor thieves I've Bull's Charged with no Stunbreaks to recover from it... > > > > But there is a point to be made here. If D/P DD is the big problem then is it the D/P part or is it the DD part? I suspect it is the E-Spec driving the problem not the weapon spec. Not that the weapon spec itself isn't a problem, but is it as much a problem on Core or DE? No, and that is because of the DD dodge being a leap. Remove the leap finisher from the dodge and you may see DD become very balanced very quickly. Not that there are other things that could be done, but I suspect that would go a long ways by itself. > > I'd say its definitely daredevil. 3 dodges a side, lets just call it 2 like everyone else. It's a 450 range escape-evade that clears movement condis, and the whole line stacks -30% incoming dmg as well as giving weakness on enemy's after a successful evade and has a 15% dmg modifier. Who else wouldn't take daredevil lol Daredevil is definitely a major facet in making most thief builds viable, but we can see it's not a hard requirement per like what we saw from the pre-nerfed Acro S/D build and the pre-nerf CS core builds, too. Daredevil makes the thief universally stronger and absolutely MUCH easier to play than core and even reworked DE, but doesn't implicitly make the class overbearingly strong. Otherwise it'd have been required in metas past and would be self-sufficient with a number of options otherwise - particularly with Staff. Notice the absence of the staff for years, which was explicitly-designed to function with the spec. A good chunk of it is still D/P, which outside of the PI builds, has avoided most major nerfs and changes for a very long time. You can unequip DrD and still play DE and core remotely successfully in terms of combat power (DrD specifically is abusive in sPvP due to dash movement speed less than any provided combat potency), whereas you really can't unequip D/P and play even remotely at the level needed to out-fight most specs today when played fairly well.

> @"Lan Deathrider.5910" said: > > @"DeceiverX.8361" said: > > > @"cyberzombie.7348" said: > > > > @"VICBEAR.1529" said: > > > > What is about Engineer, Warrior, Ranger, Mesmer etc? > > > > Many classes can escape from fight but why is thief so big trouble? > > > > > > > > Just make topic "Please delete thief class" > > > > > > From personal experience, most other classes except for some rangers actually commit to escaping. It's more common to see roaming thieves **_(dash d/p daredevils specifically) _**to be cocky and just ooc, stack on stealth, then come right back to anyone with their back turned and run away again when they realize they're still in hot water. > > > > The part nobody else ****ing understands. > > > > It's not thief. It's D/P Daredevil. > > All these people asking for nerfs should go play any other thief build. Anything besides D/P DrD pretty much gets splattered if it botches an engage and deals no damage except for maybe S/P into relatively bad foes who don't know how to punish it or are running bad builds. > > > > Thief has been balanced around D/P Daredevil existing because it's the worst offender of unhealthy designs, and ANet absolutely refuses to rework it because it'd require a huge class rework and I know they're too lazy to do so. > > > > When DE started eclipsing its bad design it actually got nipped in the bud and reworked properly. > > Dwayna help the poor thieves I've Bull's Charged with no Stunbreaks to recover from it... > > But there is a point to be made here. If D/P DD is the big problem then is it the D/P part or is it the DD part? I suspect it is the E-Spec driving the problem not the weapon spec. Not that the weapon spec itself isn't a problem, but is it as much a problem on Core or DE? No, and that is because of the DD dodge being a leap. Remove the leap finisher from the dodge and you may see DD become very balanced very quickly. Not that there are other things that could be done, but I suspect that would go a long ways by itself. It's really both in conjunction, but not for the reason you think. Contrary to the opinions of many, Bounding Dodge is actually rather mediocre and doesn't really contribute at all to D/P Daredevil's relative power. It's substantially more useful for P/P than D/P. And I'd still say Dash is better on P/P; BD is mostly a trap for gimmicky builds and the extra stealth is fairly easy to predict in a lot of cases and if outplayed, can be a huge liability since it'll self-reveal. Dash fulfills D/P's inherent counterplay more than anything else. D/P uniquely has the ability to access sustained OOC stealth over all other weapon sets on the thief, which is where the class has so much power from its engages. D/P can largely just wait out its opponent before making its first strike, giving it a strong opening burst. In conjunction with Shadow Shot, D/P gets sticking power and soft CC on top of that, which lets it punish enemy disengage attempts and continuously deal follow-up strikes which many other classes cannot out-maneuver. If the thief swaps shortbow to disengage, it cannot gain stealth again for the remainder of the swap cooldown, and if it tries to disengage with just D/P, it runs out of initiative trying to rapidly gain space, or just lets the opponent reset, too. Dash fixes both halves of this, letting thieves disengage into range safely while also not burning excess resources or precious weapon swap timers, giving it full control of spacing in combat. You can reliably bomb a thief using BD to gain stealth in a smoke field because you can see its starting dodge frames and trajectory, and if it's in melee range, the AoE is large enough where a second dodge will self-reveal. This means you can burn the ground and the thief will lose stealth in 3-4s, also predictable by the build it has based on traits noticeable in the first engage, such as with CiS, cleanses, etc. Dash provides counters to the innate counters of D/P by giving the class a safe disengage covering lots of ground while being basically immune to soft CC, while utilizing a wholly different resource from the initiative pool D/P depends on for its engages, enabling D/P to leverage control of both the engage AND the disengage safely, with speed which could otherwise only be met via burning resources which would impact its combat potential or ability to reset. It's a highlight of a number of the weaknesses various other kits on the thief have, and why we can also see P/D gaining popularity with Dash and not Lotus Training, because P/D is functionally the opposite; its damage and utility comes from its power of disengage on Shadow Strike/Repeater, and Dash gives it the ability to control the re-engage rather than having to depend on the opponent coming towards the thief or it burning teleport cooldowns etc. There's even further nuance to it, but it's not really specifically any one facet of either individually that breaks the thief. Recall D/P Deadeye, too; it provided immense safety and damage for D/P and *not* D/D because D/P can innately make up for the lack of Steal via Shadow Shot to control engages, and pre-rework deadeye was extremely safe for sustaining controlled stealth-disengages and maintaining stealth OOC with high-damage burst on pre-rework MBS. Shadow Shot is an overloaded skill, and rightfully should have been nerfed or reworked a long time ago alongside changes/reworks to the entire rest of the thief as a class to make it more potent in-combat or have to commit more to its engages, however it's really the combination of the broad utility D/P has along with its high damage and paired covering of its weaknesses thanks to the elite specs (and D/P's self-sufficiency making it able to mostly ignore tradeoff weaknesses of the elite specs such as waiting out exhaustion via OOC stealth or engage via weapon skills) that lets the thief seemingly always have control over a fight despite being very weak stat-wise. It's why the class is in such a desperate need for a rework; it's only strong because of very specific combinations and playstyles. As soon as that build and playstyle pattern is deviated from, the class becomes basically unusable in the modern powercreeped game.