RiskyChalice863 wrote: »

On paper, Essence Thief looks like such a good set for PvP, and, before I try to farm it, I’m just wondering if there’s a catch.

On paper, this set seems like it’s simultaneously a top tier damage set AND a top tier sustain set.

In terms of damage, you get a weapon damage boost and two stamina boosts, and then a 10% damage boost that I believe can have virtually 100% uptime theoretically.* There’s very few sets in the game with that much potential to increase your damage. Maybe New Moon Acolyte, but obviously that comes with a cost increase. Other sets like Shieldbreaker do not increase damage as much as Essence Thief can.

In terms of sustain, you theoretically can get 390 stamina per second from it (or 780 stamina recovery). That’s more than the most that Trappings of Invigoration’s five-piece could give you even if you procced it on cooldown (an unrealistic scenario that’d still only yield 252 stamina per second), and I think it’s way more recovery than Bone Pirate could ever give you. And the two max Stam pieces obviously help a bit with sustain as well.

The cherry on top is that you also can get 3900 healing every 10 seconds. This is obviously nice, though realistically if you compare it to other damage sets that buff weapon damage or stamina, this probably just makes up for the fact that your healing will otherwise be lower with this set.

Granted, I’ve seen videos of it and I understand that the set shoots out an essence in a random direction and therefore you might not always be able to get to it in the 5 seconds before it expires. But here’s the thing: Even if you only get it like 60-70% of the time, we’re still looking at a five-piece on the set that gives you: (1) as much or more overall damage as top-tier damage sets like Shieldbreaker—but with more burst potential; (2) similar sustain as the five-piece on a top-tier sustain set like Trappings of Invigoration; and (3) some fairly significant heals that should largely make up for the loss of healing compared to sets that pump weapon damage on their five-piece. It just seems to me like the five-piece on Essence Thief is incredibly strong, even when you factor in that you won’t always get the essence. And while the rest of the set’s bonuses aren’t perfect (max stam probably isn’t as good as weapon damage), two stam bonuses and one weapon damage bonus is definitely not bad.

So am I missing something or is Essence Thief just really good?


* The set reads to me like a pool is created, you have 5 seconds to pick it up, and then 10 seconds after the pool was created, you can create another one. If that’s right, then essentially 100% uptime is possible even if you’re not picking the essence up immediately. For instance, if you create an essence and then pick it up 3 seconds later, I read the skill as saying that you can create another essence 7 seconds after you picked the last one up (because that would be 10 seconds after the last one was actually created). So you’d have 3 seconds to pick up your next essence before the effect of the first one wears off. That would mean that you could maintain 100% uptime on the ability as long as you didn’t take longer than the previous time to pick the essence up. Naturally, sometimes you would take longer to pick it up than the last time but the potential uptime seems like it’s pretty close to 100%.

xinecallaw wrote: »

I tested out this set on my tank just to see if the sustain assistance was worth it, and in vet dungeons, particularly DLC's the set proved worthless because the damn things would almost always spawn away from you and you cant get it because it would turn the boss towards other players or be in an aoe that you need to stay out of. In pvp, this could be mitigated with a speed build and the fact that you want to stay constantly moving in pvp.