Guild Wars 2

Hello Everyone!

You guys may or may not know me, I’m E L U S I V E from Tarnished Coast. For the past month and a half I’ve been working on an advanced thief guide, aiming to focus on high level fractals and somewhat counter-intuitive tricks and tips that many thieves may not know.

I’m pleased to announce that as of today my site, GW2Thief.net is online and ready to be viewed!

Due to final exams and the start of a new semester, I was unable to complete the Builds section of the guide – I have already written about the same amount as the fractals page for builds – but there is just so much to cover and I wouldn’t want to rush it out. I feel that there is already many, many resources online for builds and to jump into that audience without something truly polished would be pretty foolish.

That being said, I’m going to continue working on it and I hope to have it completed soon. I will post an update thread to let you guys know.

If you have any comments or constructive criticism please post it in this thread or send me a message, This is my first real website I’ve created and I’d love to know what you guys think of the layout and aesthetics – in addition to the content. If you disagree with something, let me know! and if you feel that I’ve left something out please don’t hesitate to share with me, This project has been – and always will be – open to the community’s input.
Thank you all for your support and I hope you guys enjoy & appreciate what I’ve thrown together!

Cheers,

E L U S I V E [GC], Tarnished Coast

Very nice!

Some great tips for new thieves. I like the way it is laid out.

One suggestion for you, and this is just me nitpicking, It would be nice if under your tips and tricks section, there were categories with a headline. Something like:

Stealth
– Entering stealth
blah blah blah
– Perma Stealth
blah blah blah

Stomp Tips
– Blind Stomp
blah blah blah
– Shadowstep Stomp
blah blah blah

I feel like this will make it much more organized.

Anyways, great work so far, I’m looking forward to that builds page!

Thanks for the feedback, Jrunyon!
That does sound much more organized – Its probably something I’ll look into doing when I have the time.
cheers!

Thanks a lot for the guide ! Been hoping you will release it soon ever since you posted your first post about it on reddit.

I like the design a lot – it is easy to read, simple and elegant. Looking forward to reading the updates.

Good luck with the studies!

Good stuff. I’ll try to get some people to check this out.

Very nice website indeed, a lot of great tips on Fractals.

I like that steal trick, I didnt know, dbl tapping it. Ice Shard will be used more often now.

Much like the c&d + steal opener you can also use heart seeker + steal, it has the same effect but it’s a heart seeker, I like to use this a lot to get that last little bit of hp on my enemy when they are on the run, it’s a great finisher.

gonna have so much anti thief hate now :P at the same respect it should help teach people how to defend against thieves a lil too

@ Kubetz – Thank you for the feedback! I’m glad youve enjoyed it!

@Tempest Darqmane – yes! share it with all of your friends :P The more the merrier!

@Sir Vincent III – Thank you, I’m glad you found the fractals section helpful

@Redspectrum – The double tap is very handy especially with the ice shard. Wish we could throw those things like we can with the scales and gunk :P

Oh my, the ice shard trick worked I used it on a mesmer after I took out these two eles. Oh this stolen skill will be of use to me now >:D

Great tips on fractals. I’m a tad disappointed that 90% of the weapon suggestions involve p/p, which I didn’t think a lot of us ran. Mind posting your current gear when you run p/p fracs?

Its a very good guide for certain builds, but not in any way a comprehensive thief site.

For instance:

• Evasion – Several Thief attacks include an evasion component, using these attacks in place of a dodge can effectively starve your target of endurance, especially if your build has access to weakness through the deadly arts line. Built and played properly, an evasion based thief using double daggers or sword/dagger can evade over 70% of all incoming damage from a single PvP source, and 100% of all damage from many PvE sources while still outputting damage, and do so for minutes at a time and in some cases permanently

• Condition cover – If playing a condition thief, it is important to find methods to add additional conditions after your bleeds are applied, as most condition removal tools function on a LIFO implementation, removing the most recently applied conditions. Using stolen items or conditions avaliable from your weapons skills can go a long way toward ensuring your bleeds continue to stack and tick on your target.

• The many uses of Shadow Refuge – In addition to its stealth and passive healing, Shadow refuge is the only non-necromancer dark field in the game. Thieves have several attacks with a 100% projectile combo chance that will interact with this field for bonus damage in the form of life stealing, the most notable of these being dancing dagger as it proces the life steal for each hit, giving you four activations when used against two or more targets. The initiative system will allow you to cast these skill multiple times, for multiple combo activations accounting for a potentially substantial situational heal. If using D/D, a 100% whirl finisher, you can leverage the combo field to create multiple instances of leeching bolts by dropping your refuge on a tight clump of enemies, also creating a fairly significant heal.

• In addition opponents in PvP are hard wired to assume any thief that drops a shadow refuge is standing in that shadow refuge. Use this against them. Stealth and drop a shadow refuge in the opposite direction of your retreat and you’ll often get a much better running start!

• Finally, you may want to note that dropping SR on a downed ally, even if you’re not helping to rez them will grant the stealth, but more importantly will heal them consistantly over time, and can not be interrupted once cast. This is a big deal in all modes of play as you have the ability to greatly assist a rez while continuing to fight.

• Downed state Sneak Attack – Your #1 downed skill has a stealth attack that does a larger amount of damage and applies poison + bleeding. If playing a condition thief this can be instrumental in securing a rally for yourself on a weakened opponent in close fights by covering bleeds already ticking on the target as well as debuffing their healing.

• Signet of Malice and Runes of the Mad King When used together, this heal/rune combination turns any of your thief elites in to a rather potent heal. Most useful on evasion focused builds with high hit volumes like D/D bleed or S/P pistolwhip, Signet of Malice synergizes with the birds summoned by the rune, effectively turning your thief elite in to a very good heal in addition to its other effects. Most notable are daggerstorm in large groups of enemies as the hit count of daggerstorm is very high, and is then followed by the birds allowing you to finish, escape, or reposition while still being healed, or Basilisk venom, as its low 45 second cooldown syncs perfectly with the rune and automatically activates the petrification effect on the first bird hit. Very useful in single target encounters like 1v1 fights in PvP or bosses in PvE

Great site! Just added to my favorites…

@Purgatoryz – The reason behind sticking with P/P for most boss encounters is because at high levels you cannot be in melee range – you’ll spend a lot of time dodging and will not do much damage. P/P has higher dps than shortbow when dealing single target damage, therefore it is the preferred choice for fractals. Its not a weaponset I prefer by any means – but its the best tool we have.

My build is absolutely not optimized for p/p play – i run valkyrie/divinity with ascended celestial and zerker backpiece. Ive found that popping in and out of stealth and utilizing the pistol stealth attack to trigger combofields is as effective as it gets. YMMV but when it comes to ranged weapons, shortbow is for multi target/blast finisher while p/p is the higher dps single target alternative.

Hopefully that clears up my decisions a bit.

Hey logic, great guide, v informative.. Quick question, what do u mean when u say sos can pull? Thx

Hey logic, a little thing you could add is to use autorun together with your sweet mouse to get fine circles around your foes, this on some mobs can stop them from doing damage to you, meanwhile redcusing at almost all the rest. this is special effective on dagger mainhand which is the most used weapon for thief. so if you add that with dodges you can play realy evasive reach good crowd control and add good damage, of course all proffesions can use this but thief benefit most cuz dagger has such short range.

Great job. Excellent website.

Thanks for posting! It’s great to see talented players stepping forth to share some great stuff with the rest of us.

@ PopeUrban – I plan on going over things like evasion builds and condition cover as well as mad king runes + elite when i release the Builds Page. As of now I dont have an ETA but I am working on it between classes and work. Thank you for reminding me about the downed sneak attack – i had forgotten about the poison aspect of it Cheers

new nerf:
malice signet receives 1 second CD on the passive healing

@Big Tower – What i think you’re describing is circle-strafing and I feel like thats more of a general tip, not something thats thief-specific.

lol p/p and sb, one of those ranger-wannabes in fractals.

And please don’t use the word “you” when talking about not being able to melee bosses in high levels , it misleadingly suggests that it’s an universal fact.