Guild Wars 2

Lets talk thieves, so how are you all building your thieves? Pls discuss your thief builds, strategies, stat stacking here.

I have a level 80 thief and currently i am going sword pistol with him, in pve and pvp both. Also I found that in pve Signet of Malic works exceptionally well with swords, as swords can hit upto 3 targets at once and the heal on hit effect adds up. Signet of Malice give you an amazing standing power against big groups of mobs. The more you can hit in a swing the better. A pistol whip with signet of malice that hits 2 or more enemies can give a tremendous amount of heal back to you. At times you take on waves of mobs and stay at full health.

But I am going with this build because I want to build a melee dps with some standing power against mobs to keep more squishy members of the group safe. Sorta like semi tank / dps. Stats that I am stacking right now are Power, Toughness and Vitality. Although I am thinking of switching Vitality out for Healing Power, because Healing Power affects Signet of Malice, but I dont know about scaling values and how well Signet of Malice scales with Healing Power. Does anyone have any idea about this?

Also , please feel free to discuss your builds here. And i’ll appreciate if you have any advice or suggestion for me to improve my build.

Thanks

for me, personally, i went with LOTS AND LOTS of condition damage stacking and a slight reliance on caltrops

generally what happens is in pve, the monsters walk into the caltrops and immediately get hit with 9-20 stacks of bleed and cripple, after which most die very quickly

in pvp, people get sucked into the caltrops with scorpion wire or i just use caltrops right on them which cripples them allowing me to quickly stack more bleeds and poisons onto them

actual players won’t stay on the caltrops for long since people roll out of the caltrops but the movement restriction helps greatly, especially against meleers

EDIT: i forgot to mention, i use dual daggers for death blossom (lets you evade attacks while attacking and inflicts 3 stacks of bleed on every target you hit) and a short bow (lots of spammable aoe and a poison field)

hmm…yes i tried something similar as well but instance runs , specially some of the instance bosses in explore mode, are very difficult to deal with this kind of build or may be it was just me.

Seems viable to me in non instance situations and for pvp. In pve (for melee thief) it seems to me, no matter how perfect anyone is you still can’t dodge all attacks, you may dodge 8/10 but you may get hit twice and where each hit could one shot you without toughness or vitality.

Anyway, no word on healing power scaling? I sure would like to know how well healing power scale with signet of malice. If someone knows it and can post it, i’ll appreciate it.

Also please we need more ideas for thief builds to help ourselves and fellow players so dont be shy and share with us what you have doing with your thieves.

I generally use Sword/Pistol as well. Excellent for PvE thanks to the sword’s REALLY wide hit range (It hits like, everything 180 degrees in front of you). And the two interrupts are hilariously effective against most mobs. Alternatively, I also switch to Dual Pistols as it does quite a bit of consistent damage, and is pretty good for boss events. If you’ve got a ton of +condition, think about using a venom as one of your utility skills to stack the conditions even more.

One thing you might want to look into getting is the auto-caltrops on dodge trait. It frees up one of your utility slots, and mobs just walk into them when you’re kiting.

Shadow refuge is pretty awesome to have. When the heat is too much, just drop a refuge and stop attacking. The stealth only breaks after a pretty long time, or if you use an attack. This is exceptionally useful when there’s a downed player in a fight: Drop a shadow refuge on him/her, then move to revive. You’ll be stealthed while reviving him, and if he isn’t bled out, you can usually get him back up before your stealth breaks. Oh, and one more fun thing: Drop a shadow refuge on a chest, and you can open it without attracting the attention of the veteran creatures usually guarding it.