Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, I am new to thief, just got mine to 80 today, and wondering what the best/ most effective build would be for fractals? Preferably for high lvls, (40+)

Thanks

a zerker warrior

a large bottle of motrin and some chips to snack on when you’re dead waiting for a ress

Well, now we have gotten the predictably pessimistic posts out of the way… -_-

Anyone?

(Props to the guy who made the super original warrior reference which I haven’t already seen a million times before on the ranger forums.)

You’d be best to take some kind of costume and provide entertainment for the party while they do all the useful stuff. They call me the jester…

Full Apothecary buld with 0 0 30 20 20 + food that stack might on dodge (keep up 12-14 stack from stealth and dodges) + caltroops on dodge and P/D set.
Woks if your group do not overstack bleeding.
That build will give you enough heal to survive almost everything and medium cond damage from bleed.

Riko.9214:

Full Apothecary buld with 0 0 30 20 20 + food that stack might on dodge (keep up 12-14 stack from stealth and dodges) + caltroops on dodge and P/D set.
Woks if your group do not overstack bleeding.
That build will give you enough heal to survive almost everything and medium cond damage from bleed.

Or just bring a Necromancer to do all of that, plus having more survivability + AoE.

Unfortunately cannot help you there matey as I do not PvE. Something along Venom Sharing builds I’d assume.

this guys has some great insight and skills – really changed my view of the pve thief

experience and proper planning and accepting that one weapon set does not fit every situation will serve you well. Just remember people that don’t play thief or even much pve won’t expect much so enjoy proving them wrong

For fractals? You can also give the Venom-Share build a try. 30/x/30/x/x where x is the other ten points.

Riko.9214:

Full Apothecary buld with 0 0 30 20 20 + food that stack might on dodge (keep up 12-14 stack from stealth and dodges) + caltroops on dodge and P/D set.
Woks if your group do not overstack bleeding.
That build will give you enough heal to survive almost everything and medium cond damage from bleed.

You won’t die and can rez everyone but the damage isn’t anything impressive. Full Apothe is also overkill, as 6 armor pieces alone are enough to turn you immortal. I’d suggest using Carrion weapons and trinkets.
I just go with Shadow Arts zerker/soldier D/D and blast everything nowadays though.

Any build is fine, as long as you’re comfortable and contributing. The important thing is that you know what you’re doing. Try not to pigeon-hole yourself in to one weapon set for everything.

I’ll have a video up soon-ish showing what I mean – as soon as Vegas stops being a nincompoop.

In my experience you sit at range and do pathetic damage with the SB, or roll the dice on knowing the exact mob animations (for dodging) and attempt to melee. The latter usually ends up with a thief on the ground waiting to be picked up.

We need 2x the skill of a warrior to even come close to their DPS…and they give more to the group.

Edit: I’ll throw out a real suggestion. I swap out all kinds of weapons depending on the fractal. S/P for the ascalonian captain to blind tank all the vets. D/D against single target bosses. Running valk armor, ruby orbs, mixed trinkets with 0/30/15/0/25. I like the 25 in trickery for extra init + 1% per init damage. You really do hit like a truck…if you can manage to stay up long enough to contribute.

I have played a thief for a long time in PvE, but not in fractals (leveled my warrior in there), but I used to play with a very good thief in the team when we were leveling.

As far as playstyle, I don’t think it really matters. One thing I think of thieves in fractals is it can contribute a lot to a successful run, but you can’t really carry a team. If you already have an abundance of projectile blocking/protection/aegis in the team, you can trait for purely dps oriented builds. The only thing I would advice against is probably main hand dagger or pistol, because I don’t really regard single target dps as important in the most of the harder encounters, and they are less evasive than a sword or shortbow.

As for traits, probably the only mandatory tree is 30 in Critical Strikes. Traits in the Critical Strikes line are very flexible, it also gives you decent damage boost even if you are more support oriented, and some initiative regen. For other trait lines:

• Deadly Arts for raw output, I don’t find any traits there very appealing though
• Shadow Art, maybe 10 if you really want to take advantage of Deception skill recharge, the most useful skills that a thief has (Stealth), Shadow Refuge, Blinding Powder, and Smoke Screen are all under Deception.
• Aerobatics are good for survival, but I don’t usually go beyond 15.
• Trickery is great if you want some serious initiative regain combined with Critical Strikes.

If you need something to start off, I’ll say try Sword/Pistol with Shortbow, it goes well with many builds, and trait 0/30/15/0/25. I like pistol more with sword because it’s blind is more reliable as opposed to blind on stealth which has the limitation of revealed, and it’s a smoke field. Not the best dps builds, but you can spam blind all day long with large initiative pool and rather quick refill rate, dodge nonstop. And with Sword you don’t really need to worry about condition removal as well, #2 skill is great skill, it’s like spam-able dodge, cond removal and gap closer all in one . I think it is a rather intuitive and easy to play thief build that highlights the strength of permanent blind and stealth, makes some of the more annoying encounters like arms seals and Rabsovich or Ascalon a lot easier.

Good luck with your thief, I played mine the most of my chars yet still enjoy it the most by far. It’s quick and demands a lot from your quick reflexes, survival basically relies on evasive skills, there isn’t any oh crap buttons to push, and you don’t really get a change for second thoughts. Have fun!

0/30/30/10/0 I can stay in melee longer then some other classes and do plenty of damage, CnD+BS = 10k damage. In some pugs I find myself rezzing other people constantly with SR which is bothersome, but very useful. Trash fights are all trivial with a good thief in the group as well.