Guild Wars 2

I’ved been playing this dual pistol thief up to L27 now. I know it is the worst build for a thief but I am having fun with it. However, I’m wondering how to balance my + stats on gear.

Right now the way I have it set up is that I have a lot in crit percent. I think I’m about 73% crit chance without green arrow. I have done this for 2 reasons. One is that one pistol has a 10% chance to cause AOE fire on crit. The other reason is that I am doing mostly medium range with cutting lose with the unload skill. So since I’m trying to avoid close range as much as possible I though a good strategy was to inflict as much damage as possible before they close in. Then use ducking and dodge. For multiple mobs I set a trap first. I am also using signet of shadow for speed so I can run a loop while my initiative reloads.

I’ve also loded a fair amount of + into vitality since I’m pretty soft. I went for this over toughness because it seems I get a lot of conditions thrown on me and I need the health to stay alive while evading/running.

My main question is should I sacrifice more toughness for power so my crits cause more damage? Over all I’m really not sure what the best balance should be. Crits seem important because of the play style and lack of basic thief stealth skills. The 10% fire damage does seem to go off quite a bit especially using unload. It has gotten me out of a bind several times.

For some reason I ignored power because I was looking at it wrong. It seemed kind of odd that I would need power for pistols since I’m not throwing the bullets

So how would you balance the other stats out keeping in mind having crit % as high as possible?

I’m still not sure if I should skimp more on toughness for more power in order to max out damage on incomings.

Right now my traits are
0 – Deadly arts
10 – Critical strikes For pistol mastery
0 – Shadow Arts
0 – Acrobatics
6 or 7 in Trickery so I can get caltrops on dodge

Any thoughts on stat balance are appreciated. Once again I realize my build pretty much defeats the purpose of rolling a thief but I’m having fun with it PvE soloing and have actually gotten rather good at timing and dodging. I’m not planing to take the build into a party, PvP, or WvW.

Thanks!

You’re following the right mentality when it comes to approaching vitality vs. toughness. Since I’m rather nubbish with my thief, I’d suggest you keep experimenting.

Follow my train of thought here: My Guardian runs less toughness than most guides recommend simply because I’m comfortable with my setup and can use him effectively. My elementalist on the other hand is more tanky than most non D/D builds out there since I’m still training my hands to dance on the keyboard and have less room for error. Generally the balance between offense/defense should fall where you feel comfortable, not strictly what some guides (or peoples’ opinions) state.

Guides are a good baseline to begin experimenting and even though most are for 80s you can roughly approximate their play-styles for lower levels as you work your way up. Thieves tend to be more of a full out damage machine (power/crit/critdmg) in what I’ve seen where you use stealth to flee or gain some breathing room. Mine’s also specced as such.

The road to 80 is your chance to experiment cheaply, take advantage of the opportunity and do it.

ExTribble.7108:

You’re following the right mentality when it comes to approaching vitality vs. toughness. Since I’m rather nubbish with my thief, I’d suggest you keep experimenting.

Follow my train of thought here: My Guardian runs less toughness than most guides recommend simply because I’m comfortable with my setup and can use him effectively. My elementalist on the other hand is more tanky than most non D/D builds out there since I’m still training my hands to dance on the keyboard and have less room for error. Generally the balance between offense/defense should fall where you feel comfortable, not strictly what some guides (or peoples’ opinions) state.

Guides are a good baseline to begin experimenting and even though most are for 80s you can roughly approximate their play-styles for lower levels as you work your way up. Thieves tend to be more of a full out damage machine (power/crit/critdmg) in what I’ve seen where you use stealth to flee or gain some breathing room. Mine’s also specced as such.

The road to 80 is your chance to experiment cheaply, take advantage of the opportunity and do it.

Thank you for your well thought out response to my message. I agree with the vitality over toughness and have gone that route as far as survivability. I still have a few significant +toughness, mostly in upgrade slots. So I am kind of wondering if I might shift a small portion of that to power to get the best out of my high crti percentage.

I suppose since I’m so new that I have not gotten it in my mind that this is the time to experiment. I keep forgetting that, unlike other MMOs I have played, most good items my level are relatively inexpensive and highly available.

I’ll play around with a lot of things including traits and skills. I also keep forgetting at my level it isn’t much to retrait. Who knows? With a lot of tinkering and patience maybe I’ll develop the first viable p/p/sb build

if your just doing open world stuff just maximize your dps. Those are easy anyway.

if you are doing dungeon and using pistol only, I say still go for dps and maybe some defense.

For me I just go for dps gear and trait into defense.