Guild Wars 2

Thief fail builts and me (a tragic story in 3 acts)

ACT I – OHH LOOK IMATHIEF

You see, I play GW2 almost solely for WvW these days. As I said many times, the quest-less PVE of GW2 is simply not my thing. Like at all. I do PVE sometimes, but rarely.

So, when I played my first char, a Warrior to max through PVE, I felt I had seen enough of GW2 PVE. I began to play WVW and really like it. The dynamics! The thrill! The adventure!! What’s not to like! So, again and again, I had this experience you guys prolly know: I was regularly kitten d and gangbanged by THIEVES.

You know the drill. You walk some lonely road to find the zerg, and BLAMMO, some Thief kills you. Hell, I haven often enough seen Thieves keep 4-5 people busy for hours! It’s both super annoying, but of course I was fascinated by the idea! So I shook my fist into the Tyrian sky and yelled, I CAN DO THAT TOO, ha!

So I rolled a thief and began to level him!

ACT II – TREADMILL LEVELLING

Levelling again was a chore for me, mostly disliking the PVE, and WvW levelling was… slow. Not much to see in this act, I made it up mostly for the dramatic effect. I mostly stuck to a survival built here, knowing I was weak in low levels, so I stuck with Zerg groups while levelling in WvW and as I said, it was an entire defensive survival built. Nothing to show off. Until I finally reached level 80! YEY ME! Now you all wait and see how I all gank yousa!

ACT III – OR SO I THOUGHT

Now see, this is where the woe (and questions) come. I read MANY built guides, I watched dozens of Youtube videos with advises. And I went to what was said to be the classic gank built, 0-30-30-10-0, all based on prolonging sneak and doing mucho damage from stealth, with Dagger and Pistol. You know the drill: spamming black powder and heartseeker.

Only – that it DOESNT THE FRACK WORK!

God. I swear I never ever died so much. I tried. I really tried. No matter how many times I kissed the mud, I always ran back over and over. The really bad time came, when out of curiosity I tried lv 80 mobs with that built. HELL DID I SUCK. As in the history of Tyria! As in the frigging history of sucking!! It wasn’t pretty. Until some guildmate told me, hey you know why they rule in 1 VS 1? They have the expensive uber gear, and you casual gamer DON’T. Ha ha.

What a farce. What a letdown. Yeah, I hear you say, serves you right trying to be a ganker! But seriously. It’s in the game. So even being victim, I never complained. It’s part of the package. It’s war. shrug But… kitten ation! I am so kitten ed at my sheer inability! How can they DO this?

So I come back, sobbing myself into sleep, wondering what to do? Any advise besides “go and farm uber gear”, because… I dont do dungeon grinds. Sorry. But, repetitive grinding the same OVER AND OVER is not my thing.

Advise pls.

:(

lol… practice dude. Thief is not easy as people make it seem, if you make a mistake as a thief you are 99% going to die, i have both a warrior and thief and I can tell you warrior is the most stupid noob class, you can make 100 mistakes and still tank the opponent and then turn around and perma stun dps them, I mean you can even rally yourself back to life kill your opponent and then die… it is freking stupid… lmfao

30-30-10 or 0-20-30-20-0 are the 2 good dp builds imo. Focus on backstabs and staying alive and eventually you will start to get better. Just dont expect to win any one vs one fights for the first few days playing this build as you have to know when you can fight and when you have to reset (which you will learn as you play thief more).

Maybe watch yishis videos on youtube he is a good dp thief player.

Just get a 6-pack of perplexity…

Peow peow.2189:

lol… practice dude. Thief is not easy as people make it seem, if you make a mistake as a thief you are 99% going to die, i have both a warrior and thief and I can tell you warrior is the most stupid noob class, you can make 100 mistakes and still tank the opponent and then turn around and perma stun dps them, I mean you can even rally yourself back to life kill your opponent and then die… it is freking stupid… lmfao

30-30-10 or 0-20-30-20-0 are the 2 good dp builds imo. Focus on backstabs and staying alive and eventually you will start to get better. Just dont expect to win any one vs one fights for the first few days playing this build as you have to know when you can fight and when you have to reset (which you will learn as you play thief more).

Maybe watch yishis videos on youtube he is a good dp thief player.

Sounds to me you re just a pretty bad(ass)l warrior that jumped on the bandwagon train afer the new meta.You should have rolled with a war in roaming and spvp for the past year but you were rolling on thief before you little bugger didn’t you? heeeee

Hello, first of all your message made me lol so thanks

Your story is very much like mine except i started with a guardian not a warrior. Anyways.

I’m not a very skilled player myself and seriously thief is hard to play. Of the 3 characters i play the most (thief, warrior and guardian) it is from far the hardest to play well with. One mistake and you’re gone. Sure excellent players never make mistakes but we’re not all excellent.

So i’m asking you : Did you consider trying a condition build ?

It’s a lot easier to play. I would advice trying a pistol/dagger build. I like 5-0-30-15-20 but you could go 0-0-30-20-20 as well. It’s very defensive, you have to be patient and keep on applying bleeds to your opponent. Apply torment with pistol skill 3 and poisons when you steal if you go 5-0-30-15-20. I also use the perplexity runes for the extra condition damage and it applies confusion to your opponent every 10 seconds.
The guardians are nearly impossible to kill, you have to be careful with stunlock warriors (shadowstep is great here). Manage your dodges carefully (you got 3 dodges instead of 2 if you go 15 or 20 in acrobatics).

I’m not ashamed to admit i abuse stealth (shadow refuge, blinding powder and cloak in shadows are always on my bar + there is the dagger 5 skill). I only die when i’m very careless, i have tons of options to disengage with bow 5 and shadowstep (which i love it gives you great mobility and cleanses conditions). For an average player like me it’s perfect. I win 50% of the fights and when i lose i nearly always manage to run away.

I figured with this build i easily kill average players (but you have to be patient as there is no dps burst). I link using the 1500 distance stealing trait as it helps a lot when you chase runners.

In zerg vs zerg situation i will use daggerstorm to mark people (lot of bags) and then chase elems that are staying at a distance from the main line (they provide a lot of useful combos especially the water combo so it’s nice to get them down fast).

For gear, it’s pretty easy to be full exo if you’re patient and save your precious gold carefully. What i do is i do my dailies in pve, mining things like platinium/iron some sorts of wood and sell them. This + gold from the WvW leveling chests is enough to get you 1-3 gold a day (depending on play time). It’s not too bad if you don’t farm pve imo. After a few weeks you can gear.

For the moment i use full Power-Condition-Vitality armor-weapons-trinkets but i’m saving for Condition-Vitality-Toughness armor (called Errol’s armor) which is quite expensive (about 30 gold for the full set) but will increase survivability even more.

That’s it i hope it helps.

Check my build here:
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-c;4RwkZ0J5JOVd0;9;5TT9;202B47A5;9;8Q0lTNA36;2VhVlWqXv21475-F-870H;0VNX8a;9;9;9;7777777kkz

And my char showing the stats:
http://i61.photobucket.com/albums/h49/Elikal/gw006_zpsa5316e85.jpg