Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone and thank you for reading!

As the title suggests, I just dinged 80 on my first gw2 char – a thief.

What should I be working towards right now? what build/ traits/ gear should I be aiming for and what should I get right now for karma/ badges?

I’m interested in both pvp (WvW) but also pve.

Than you!

I suggest that you watch some thief guides on youtube, and check comments for feedback on those builds. Also be sure to look at the dates to be sure they are still holding up.

Personally, I would always suggest aiming towards a full set of berserker so you can speedrun dungeons for gold. (A lot of people demand party members to use berserker ((zerk)) for dungeon runs) Other than that, follow Dulfy’s world boss timer, and do all of them once a day for a sure 4+ gold alone.
http://dulfy.net/2014/04/23/event-timer/
Another good way to earn money is to explore. Higher level areas such as cursed shore can give you quite a lot of money when you finish exploring. I just finished cursed shore today on my ranger and I earned almost 10g. I did cut down every tree I saw though, and tagged on every champ I came by. I was also lucky to get 40 Ancient woods from the explore chest I hope it helps!

Cheers guys, I appreciate the time you took to respond!

However, I am not new to MMOs so I am wondering if maybe you can give me some straight up things I need to look over now.

I did my due diligence (believe me) in learning skills, builds and the like..I used to raid hardcore in WoW so I pretty much know what progression means and how to get there.

My problem is I don’t know the intricacies of this game, of gw2 and I’m sure there are things you only learn after a while so what I’m trying right now is cut that time and ask people that did it already.

I bookmarked a lot of helpful websites, the boss timer one is among them.

To the point – what progression should I expect here? dungeons > raids (?!?) / world bosses > fractals? and if so, what set of gear is best? I’m guessing ascended but up until ascended, what the next best? zerk of the highest quality (I saw you have masterwork, exotic, etc)?

Ascended armor isn’t really needed in any pve content, they are only useful for high level fractals ( see agony resistance mechanics). Weapons are a bit less expensive and provide a pretty good dps gain ( around 5% iirc) but if you just leveled, focus on exotic gear, trinkets are pretty easy to get ascended with fractals, laurels from dailies and guild missions. For pve, the best gear set is berserker with scholar runes, i don’t think thieves should get a berserker/ assassin mix, you should check out the DnT theorycraft forum for min/max gear. As for www, i find myself comfortable with berserker, and i find thieves to be more efficient as burster in team play, but solo you could try a P/D condi build, it’s a kitteneese mode and even an average player can win pretty easily. Ultimately in all end game content, be it pve or www, thieves are imho more suited for direct damage and direct damage burst. The spec i’m playing on my thief right now for solo and small squad roaming is a trickery d/p build, 0/6/2/0/6, i’m waiting for the incoming patch to see if the build is nerfed though. For thief www gameplay, you could start by checking youtube videos, like yishis commentaries or I am mugi channel for instance. The thief subforum provides help as well.
Hope this was clear, if you have any questions, i’ll be glad to answer them.
edit: typo

Thieves don’t do as well in partial assassin as full berserker because they have access to critraising traits. You can get 79% critrate without assistance from any party members in full zerk alone. Any party fury will push you to 99%, and if a ranger spotter or banner of discipline in available you go way above 100%.

Critrate in excess of 100% is useless.

Zerk exotic is the mainstay of most people. Zerk ascended is very slightly better but very much more expensive.

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAsaVl8MpxpdOxwJsPNxLhsdmKb8bsuTCA-TVSBABUcKAoZ/hHeAAUq+jZKBvS5He6bW4IAAwBKIAACAf3mD9mD9mlCYjhVA-w

This is a possible build. Note however that the dagger mainhand is due to be buffed to have minor cleave (2 targets in front arc), so it’ll become more viable than today given its max dps against a single target is higher.

Pistol Whip’s evade is pretty much your main (only) lifeline in dungeons, as you have nearly zero heal, nearly zero toughness, the smallest hp pool of all, no invulnerability skills and limited dodge. Dagger mode may be problematic even postbuff against dungeon bosses given there’s basically no survivability for them aside from stealth, and stealth means you don’t get to attack.

Some successful thieves mix weapon sets – p/p unload for given ranged targets (SEp3 troop carrier for instance), d/d or d/p given certain weak but high HP bosses, and s/p for everything else. There’s a relatively large group of thieves that give the profession on the whole a bad reputation – you can identify them as the group that tend to use soldier/valkyrie gear with the pistol/pistol weapon set, who never switch to any other set in battles. They’re the ranger bearbow equivalent of the thief class.

WvW is a different story, stealths with backstabs are pretty much overpowered.

To summarise it really, thieves are an underpowered class with an overpowered stealth, making them ‘somewhat’ ok on the whole.

If talking about difficulty progression, champ trains are the easiest (commanding trains is slightly harder), then normal world boss trains off timer, then Dry Top commanding, then WvW zerging, then dungeons, then dungeon carrying (running with horrendous pugs) then WvW commanding (not normally done with thieves), then sPvP, then fractals. Good thieves can skip entire fractal portions for their party accelerating things greatly, but you’ll only generally meet people like that in flvl 40+. Most people can’t survive higher level FoTM in thieves and usually run in invuln-capable Elementalists, or passive defense-capable Warriors and Guardians.

If you’re a masochist, there’s ‘raids’, but rather than being a full dungeon with a boss at the end it’s more like only having the raid boss at the end. The only two with sufficient difficulty to qualify as raids are Tequatl and Triple Trouble Wurm, of which there are easier roles (boat/hills defense on Teq, condition team on TT, keg/colour running on TT), harder roles (turret manning on Teq) and suicidal roles (melee Tequatl in zerg as thief, meleeing decapitated heads on TT timing Pistol Whip’s evade against the Wurm’s attacks – if you miss even one you not only get downed but generally fully die ). Those content is far, far easier on other classes.

Cross class, the thief does greater burst damage but lower dps (6856) than the best specced warriors (7846) on crittable targets due to their lack of vulnerability infliction – but warriors require time to build up their max potential (more so after the incoming adrenaline nerf), while thieves reach their max potential instantly. On uncrittable targets like the CoFp1 gate, the thief has the undisputable highest damage in the game behind only the Elementalist’s Fiery Greatsword Rush – a skill that can’t always be used.

Their roles are party stealther (for some dungeons), blind spammer, interrupt locker and sadly party tank at the moment, since for some odd reason thieves seem to draw all the aggro and then some from mobs, and they clear trash-champ mobs the fastest. Legendary class mobs usually last long enough for warriors to be a better choice for those.

Check out the Noob guild in the dungeons forum, if you want to run dungeons – that gives you a list of people willing to mentor at various skill levels, which is probably the quickest way to get up to speed.

Otherwise, look at gw2dungeons/the wiki/youtube for whichever dungeon you want to run. There isn’t a strict progression, there is a set of easy-ish, commonly run dungeons – Citadel of Flame P1 is the easiest, then look at CoF p2, Twilight Arbor Forward/Up, Ascalonian Catacombs. Rewards are daily, so it’s worth getting good at a path or two – the two CoF paths give you two gold and 120 dungeon tokens (which can go towards getting you full exotic zerk gear), and are doable in ~30 mins for both.

Exotic zerk gear and DnT build is ideal, but not required (unless you join specific groups). If you have a dps build and what gear you can afford you’ll probably be fine in
PuGs without requirements.

You can get groups using the lfg tool, but avoid any ones with requirements other than level 80 until you’re familiar with the dungeon. People are usually OK if you say you’re new at the start, and will sometimes tell you what you need to do at non-obvious steps, otherwise you can get through most sections by following the group.

Edit: lfg terms that aren’t obvious
exp = experienced – you know the dungeon path and your class well.
fz/zerk = full berserker – by which they generally mean DnT build or reasonable approximation, and full exotics with zerker stats and appropriate runes and sigils
3k AP+ = this one’s relatively obvious as more than 3000 Achievement Points, what is less obvious is why it is being asked for. AP are sometimes used as a general indicator of how long you’ve been playing the game, with the home that this will correspond to your skill and experience with dungeons.

What Hayashi said is spot on, except for the dagger survivability ( the aa refills endurance) and the thing about warrior. Thief dps is just well over, especially in this conjured meta.
Also, the signet heal with pistol whip spam or fgs is fun.

One thing I love about the thief is thematic. Many people who play it go for the mechanics. The stealthing, smoke screens etc. I completed world exploration on my thief some time back using rotations of different weapons and Sword/Dagger is an elegant combat style, although nowhere near as effective as Sword/pistol

You could also trait to gain stealth upon shadow step, which synergises with the flank and rear attacks of your main hand weapons. Sword grants a daze or a stun depending on where you hit your target, Dagger has the mighty backstab, etc etc Chaining stealth attacks to maximise on these skills requires good timing and watching your Revealed debuff.

Building around stealth can also be a thief’s lifeline. There are many traits that benefit from a defensive stand point.

In WvW, you could build towards a solo roamer thief which can be full zerk to make use of your PVE equipment but also gives you great scope to play with your build. You could have full Dire gear for condition damage, which is something that is normally useless for zerg fighting but for single target fighting can be very helpful. A good thief is hard to kill in wvw but they’re pretty much made of paper and go down like papier mache if they can’t burst down a target, so it’s quite challenging to play.

Multiplier of dagger mainhand on autos is 2.26/2.07 = 1.09/s, non cleave.
Multiplier of Heartseeker under perfect conditions is about 1.5/s, non cleave.
Multiplier of CnD+backstab rotations is about 3-3.5/s.
Multiplier of sword mainhand on autos is 1.15/s, cleave.
Multiplier of Pistol Whip on S/P is 1.5/s, cleave.

Between cleave type attacks a thief cannot ever match a warrior over the long term if fighting in a solo scenario, the diff is about 1k dps between a pistol whip/aa progression against a warr’s axe 2 mace 4 aa rotation with FGJ and Discbanner. It’s possible for thieves to be higher (about 9k-10k dps due to high initiative cost on CnD limiting its max power) on single targets when using CnD/backstab chaining, but this also has its own associated condition of being behind a target – in stacking situations (esp CoE alpha and SEp1), you will want to drop this for PW or risk compromising your group. In situations like CoFp1 or CMp3 on the other hand when stacking isn’t necessary, then D/D is much, much more useful – this being the reason why many of the better thieves carry both sets (and a third shortbow for stealthblasting/mightstacking/enforced-ranged targets). I’d advocate you learn how to use S/P first though then move to D/D only when you’re ready and know when it should be used from an ease of learning perspective, but you’ll eventually end up swapping weapons on the fly.

Everyone here has already given you all the advice I could offer, so I’ll give you a direct link to the [Noob] thread instead. Just click on the link in my siggy!

Really really good stuff, thank you for taking the time to post.

It seems I have a long road ahead of me to try and figure out what’s what and how to do things in gw2 which is why I got the game in the first place.

I’ll take a look over the [Noob] thread and see if I can get in on some runs.