Guild Wars 2

Hello
I Have an 80 thief, and I love to use the shortbow and dual pistols because I don’t do dungeons so I can get away with it. Recently I have been thinking about using dual daggers because “Internet hype” says I am playing my Thief wrong. That being said, I don’t want to buy expensive armor and then regret buying the wrong type.

I am looking at the Nika and Aidan sets and I can’t make up my mind. Also any other armor I might want to consider? What would you do?

You want Power/precision/ferocity stats. Power being the main stat

Tl;DR: Just a bit more elaborate than Groks answer and be sure to carry Sword/Pistol around aswell or groups will be quite painful.

Berserker, like Grok said. You’ll get a lot of buffs from a group in group-content boosting your Critical Chance to 100% together with a generic Dual Dagger build and for solo it’s not much (if at all) worse than Assassin’s (Precision, Power, Ferocity.)

Nika’s armor is a good example. But be sure to check out if Berserker’s Emblazoned armor isn’t cheaper. If you just want to give the build a try, maybe start of with rare’s only, they’re easily salvaged to make most of their cost back.

Scholar Runes are generally recommended to boost the damage even more. The buff might be a bit difficult to maintain at first, but it should get easier in no-time. I don’t know any cheap alternatives for solo-play thieves.

Sigils of Force combined with Night/Slaying/Energy/Frailty/Strenght, whichever has your preferance.

Just a tiny warning. Double Daggers is the highest dps-option for thieves, hence it’s meta, since meta is dps dps dps, how-ever, be sure to carry around Sword/Pistol for multiple mobs without defience. Sword has a cleave (and a decent weakness uptime) on their auto-attack and Pistol 5 provides Blinds to keep yourself and groups alive. the cleave will also compensate a bit for damage lost. For solo-play D/D will likely be quite annoying vs groups aswell, damage and survivability-wise, so having a sword handy never hurts.

The OP says he doesn’t do dungeons so its a bit unclear what he’s asking for. People always say thief is one of the highest dps classes for bosses, but what they fail to mention is that it depends a lot whether you can backstab and also on the dps increase with heartseeker when the boss is below 25% health. For bosses which you stack in a corner for (which is basically most of them in dungeons) I notice its hard to backstab, so its less dps and S/P might be better then. But I am still unclear on whether S/P does more damage than say, a zerker war with GS (which is about 10k dps).

Been playing thief for a few months now and I’m still not sure whether D/D is the best option in this case, and what the dps of thief would be without it, using S/P auto and pistol whip instead. So thief might not always be best dps class for bosses, I might be wrong so please correct me if I am.

Sword Pistol. I didn’t even think of that. I will have to experiment before buying my new clothes. Thank you for your replies and advice any more advice is more than welcome.