Guild Wars 2

Hi, Im new to GW and playing thief for now. Im going for a dag/dag and pist/pist build. Im kinda confusing about what traits thief needs? vital? precision? or power?

And when it comes to equipment, should I choose to add like precision or vital to my clothes and weapons?

get dagger. spam 2, collect bags.

eladox.3457:

get dagger. spam 2, collect bags.

Yeah, totally. Spam 2.

Fall off a cliff/ledge. Don’t heal. Don’t backstab. Just spam 2. I take it the little theif bad touched you?

Now, more seriously.

I’ve not too much experience yet. I’m at level 26 and so far I’ve gotten 10 trait points into shadow arts. (Toughness/healing). I felt my thief was a little squishy, so I’ve tried to up his resilience a bit more. This is just testing mind you. I guess it all depends on what sort of build you’re looking for. At the moment I’m content with the shadow arts skills, but may delve into deadly arts eventually.

For weapon stats, again it depends on all what you’re looking for, I would assume. I use a mixture of stats- toughness, crit, power, etc. I have more power on my weapons for the dps boost, and precision so I can crit harder. My third best stat is toughness- although, I’m not too sure how that feels atm.

Read over this page, to give yourself an idea on what you may like in the trait department.

hthttp://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_thief_traits

insights from a 26 thief. impressive.

You have a lot of versatility as to how to build your characters. It all depends on how you like to play them.

I’ve been playing as a thief (level 52 now) and I focus on precision > power > vitality/toughness traits. I like to play thief as more of a DPS type with a slight touch of survivability. I still don’t think I’m all that squishy though, as I can kite and can abuse stealth to get out of tight situations (plus I can jump back into the fight with a backstab from stealth :P).

The best thing I could tell you is to just go with your gut to start off. As you play further into the game, spec into traits or stats on gear as you feel it is needed. If you’re taking a lot of damage or getting downed often, then consider getting more vitality or toughness, etc.

The Thief is knid of tough to pin down initially. I’m playing a level 66 Thief currently and have found that Dagger/Dagger and Shortbow are a good combo to have for your weapons. With the Daggers just keep evading if you are having issues with survicability. Your 3 skill is a great thing to use, if you’re in an area that isn’t too precarious in terms of falling. It throws out 3 stacks of bleed and you evade each time you do it. Once somthing gets below 33% health, then yes you do want to spam 2. Your damage goes way up on that skill at that point. Shortbow is also good for kiting and hitting multiple targets. If it is an event, or just an area with a lot of people running around, the bow will help with making sure you get maximum credit for kills and damage. If you have any other questions don’t hesistate to ask. I was really considering dropping the class until recently when I finally got a handle on it.

estrimple.7498:

The Thief is knid of tough to pin down initially. I’m playing a level 66 Thief currently and have found that Dagger/Dagger and Shortbow are a good combo to have for your weapons. With the Daggers just keep evading if you are having issues with survicability. Your 3 skill is a great thing to use, if you’re in an area that isn’t too precarious in terms of falling. It throws out 3 stacks of bleed and you evade each time you do it. Once somthing gets below 33% health, then yes you do want to spam 2. Your damage goes way up on that skill at that point. Shortbow is also good for kiting and hitting multiple targets. If it is an event, or just an area with a lot of people running around, the bow will help with making sure you get maximum credit for kills and damage. If you have any other questions don’t hesistate to ask. I was really considering dropping the class until recently when I finally got a handle on it.

spam 2 as every says is heartseaker?

and yeah im lvl 18 so far and somehow i like to go with dag/dag and short bow also. short bow does help me a lot with AoE and dag/dag handle the rest. I tend to keep pistol/pistol if i want to 1 vs 1 mostly. most of my weapons stats are vital/healing and precision. my health base is now 1690-1900 (depends on the weapons that i use). I can solo 1vs1 quite well so might stick with it until 20.

Iono if toughness will do thief any wonders, since thief armor is quite weak. Therefore it kinda a waste to add stats about toughness to armor and weapon, what do u think?

Is there any traits to help keep initiative longer and use it less? Also how do u get a better thief equipment? by crafting? how do u get a higher lvl crafting for equipment?

Find a good condition build, if you can’t find one I will give you mine.

Seriously though, Condition bleed/poison thieves in PVP are amazing, winning 1v1’s and 1v2’s like nothing :P

Build for traits, not for stats. Stats come from gear. In the early levels the stats from traits help a lot, but late game they are a drop in the bucket.

I go all Dps and use my maneuverability as my survivability. Also, spamming 2 is good but id start off with 5/1 backstab it helps in the beginning of a battle.

Lol. People who say “spam 2” have no clue how 2 works. Neither do they have clue about how to get a lot of bags. Heh.

As far as weapons I use sword/dagger and bow for my alternative set.

I focus on power/precision for burst and dps.

Edit: I totally went on a rave below, so I decided to answer you question more specifically up here. Power increases your base damage and counters other’s armor and toughness, ideally, this is on every piece of gear you have. Precision increases your chance to critically hit. This is a far weaker stat than other games, because crits in GW2 are only 150% instead of 200%, so prioritize this after Power. You’ll also occasionally see Critical Damage on gear, but it’s usually a mere 1%. This is TOTAL GARBAGE. You can get 30% just from traits, making crits deal 180% damage. Don’t waste spots on your gear getting Crit Damage unless you find rare pieces, because I’ve seen them give up to 6%, which is not garbage.
In terms of defense, your base health is awful as a thief, while your armor is okay as long as you keep your gear up to date with your level. Also, you should get toughness from the Shadow Arts tree, because that tree is simply the best tree in the forest.

Therefore, your ideal gear has Power, Precision, and Vitality.

If you like d/d and p/p then you’ll want a crit build. The 1 attack on pistol IS a bleed, but the direct damage component is good enough, and you’ll be using Leaping Death Blossom simply for an evade when you have no endurance left, or if you can hit 3-5 people with it, because that’s the only AOE in your build. Your primary attack for p/p is Unload, use Body Shot only when you’re in a group to help everyone’s damage (if you’re alone, there’s no point to dealing 5% extra damage on your next Unload when you could simply Unload twice). Clearly Headshot is simply an interrupt, and P/P 5 skill is AMAZING; the smoke field blinds enemies EACH SECOND they stand in it and you can shoot through it to blind people outside the field. OR you can switch to D/D and Heartseeker through the smoke field to gain stealth!
Daggers are where your real damage will come from. Your rotation is Cloak and Dagger, Backstab, do a 1 combo while your revealed debuff goes away, and repeat! Once they get below 33% health, spam 2 baby aaaaaaaaaawwwwwwww yeeeeeeah.

The number one piece of advice I can give any thief is BUILD VITALITY YOU FOOLS. Thieves have the lowest base health in the game and you must compensate for that. Don’t worry much about it or feel slighted, because your base DAMAGE is off the charts. I’m level 80 enjoying (most of the) explorable mode dungeons (curse you horrible balance (in some dungeons)) I use a 0 30 20 20 0 build, so 40 points in defensive trees and a mere 30 in offensive. I do WAY more damage than anyone else in our 5 man group. I also use D/D P/P and Shortbow depending on the fight. There’s a trait in Shadow Arts that causes AoE blind whenever you stealth, making D/D, which is normally a ballsy proposition, a total breeze!

For utilities I recommend Hide in Shadows for the healing skill, the precision signet for crit chance and condition removal, Smoke screen because it’s just retardedly good (back the boss into a corner and block him in with it kitten), and then Shadow Refuge for when things go badly (great for reviving people and shooting through for Lifesteal, Unload baby!) For the elite, Dagger Storm totally wins on style points, but there are too few situations where that trumps over Thieves Guild.
Oh yeah, in case you didn’t notice, there are two condition removals in this build. EVERY build should have at least 2 if you plan on doing dungeons or PvP.

Personally I’ve run Pistol/Dagger-Dagger/pistol all the way up to 80.

The idea was to take the conditions/pressure ranger that was so successful in GW1 and transition that build concept to a theif. I’ve been pretty happy with the results!

This is a white damage/conditions build focused on versatility that works well in both PvP and PvE.

Traits:
20-0-10-10-30
Utilities:
Spider Venom-Shadow Refuge-ShadowStep-Daggerstorm.

For gear I’m using Carrion armor with bleed duration/condition duration runes and a focus on vit/toughness/condition damage jewelry.

The primary single target damage of this build relies of bleed stacks from the pistol’s sneak attack, enabled through the stealth granted by cloak and dagger. On single targets this allows you to keep up around 12 stacks of bleeding on a target constantly with more than enough initiative gain from traits to keep the chain running for a very long time. In addition the multi-hit nature of the sneak attacks makes the build extremely combo friendly, meaning you can stack bleeds/fire/whatever with field effects from other classes like a champ.

The traits from shadow arts and acrobatics grant an extra bleed/cripple from dodge/trops (which I use offensively as part of my attack chain when I don’t need to conserve endurance) as well as self-stacking might buffs which push the damage very nicely.

Unlike some theif builds, this build is made for adaptation, as it relies of maintaining a high pool of usable initiative at all times, so that when that single target fight turns in to a multitarget fight you can pop venom (which also grants even more might and weakens targets with the traits from deadly arts) and dump your whole stack of initiative on dancing daggers to put a long cripple/poison on the new targets, allowing you to flee or keep focusing down the most dangerous ranged target. Steal is key with this build as it becomes a single button that provides a massive debuff/condition stack on the target as well as an interrupt.

Playing defensively you’ve also got enough initiative to keep distance from the target with a combination of footwork and shadow shot, and between the lifesteal from shadow refuge, and the condition removal from hide in shadows and shadowstep you’ve got an insane amount of survivability.

It is a difficult build to play as it requires a mix of ranges, ground targeted skills, and knowing how to properly time steal and dodge-trops to be most effective, but when played properly you’ll find yourself dancing around the battlefield crippling, bleeding, and poisoning things and then just walking away while everything falls to the ground while you’re looting and mining.

You don’t need Vitality at all, you wont get enough to survive pretty much anything at Caps and in WvW its a joke.

You are FAR better going full out Crit Damage over Vitality, that extra 400-500dmg a crit will do FAR better than whatever couple thousand health will get you.

I have a 52% Crit Rate with 80% Crit Damage, I can do over 5k dmg in WvW/PvE (depending on class/champ/elite/etc) for my Heartseekers, when you can spam 3-4 of them when a person is below 50% they’re dead by a thief.

If you struggle then I guess go get VIT but 13k HP is plenty more than I need to survive.

For weapons, whatever you feel like, I always keep a Dagger/Dagger combo as I have 2 fantastic daggers, I think switch between Bow or Pistol/Dagger depending on the activity.

Premium.4075:

You don’t need Vitality at all, you wont get enough to survive pretty much anything at Caps and in WvW its a joke.

You are FAR better going full out Crit Damage over Vitality, that extra 400-500dmg a crit will do FAR better than whatever couple thousand health will get you.

I have a 52% Crit Rate with 80% Crit Damage, I can do over 5k dmg in WvW/PvE (depending on class/champ/elite/etc) for my Heartseekers, when you can spam 3-4 of them when a person is below 50% they’re dead by a thief.

If you struggle then I guess go get VIT but 13k HP is plenty more than I need to survive.

For weapons, whatever you feel like, I always keep a Dagger/Dagger combo as I have 2 fantastic daggers, I think switch between Bow or Pistol/Dagger depending on the activity.

I tend to agree with this. I have vit on my gear, but its mostly because it’s part of the package of stats that comes with power/condition damage gear. Played properly a theif is avoiding damage through use of shadowstepping and stealth enough that soaking hits isn’t super important. If you’re skilling acrobataics/shadow arts you should be doing it for the traits rather than the stats.

How come i dont see more people using sword/pistol, the mobility you get from 2 is great, plus pistol whip does ridiculous damage if your crit is high enough.

I’ve been using shortbow and sword pistol on my thief (lvl 26). I really enjoy pistol whip (interrupt + good damage & low initiative cost) and the #2 skill (shadowstep in/shadowstep out). The 4 and 5 skills are helpful, too, with daze (interrupt) and smoke something, which is like a 3ish second AOE blind.

I’m not sure what I want to do with my gear yet. I’m probably going to drop some precision and get a little more toughness/vit. I’m a little squishy when I actually get hit.