Guild Wars 2

Hi Thieves

So i’m nearing level 80 and really excited about the dungeons, WvW events and so forth.

I have noticed however, my build currently incorporates the shortbow and D/D with glass-cannon traits. When i’m killing jormag, tequatl or the shatterer (or other bosses for that matter) i’m stuck using the shortbow which hardly does any damage on single targets. I attempt to use “2” but it hardly lands especially with the dragons moving their feet.

I was thinking dual pistols would be much more favourable with due the the number “3” unload.

What do you guys use? I’m thinking about buying a pair and swap to them just for bosses but it seems that would just be troublesome and perhaps costly.

From a general standpoint, ranged is usually favored for boss fights. Even with how kittened P/P is, it will usually outperform melee builds damage wise on bosses simply because it doesn’t have to dance in and out of melee range. If you are going to do a lot of bosses (both world and dungeon) I suggest having a pair of pistols handy.

Yeah, that’s what i was thinking :/ Shortbow really does do pitiful damage whilst daggers require you to be in close range which really doesn’t help when i have a squishy build and the bosses do relatively high damage.

Most of the dungeon bosses and trash mobs can be meleed so I strongly disagree with Blacksarevok. The damage from pistols doesn’t compare to d/d. When your target hits 50% and even 25% the difference becomes enormous. I agree that you should carry two pistols for certain situations but don’t always pick the easier ranged option because your dps will be a lot lower for no real reason.

Do u guys use shortbow ONLY for tagging events? Or…when should i be using it?

Burn.5401:

Most of the dungeon bosses and trash mobs can be meleed so I strongly disagree with Blacksarevok. The damage from pistols doesn’t compare to d/d. When your target hits 50% and even 25% the difference becomes enormous. I agree that you should carry two pistols for certain situations but don’t always pick the easier ranged option because your dps will be a lot lower for no real reason.

Although you are right about trash, he wasn’t really referring that, and I would say that almost half of the explorable bosses shaft melee Thieves due to either survivability issues or movement. But yeah, I’m not suggesting he should always be using pistols, but he should certainly have them in his bags because there will be situations where they will be his best option.

TakaEagle.9486:

Do u guys use shortbow ONLY for tagging events? Or…when should i be using it?

Tagging, AoE, kiting….shortbow is arguably our best weapon set. It’s not very useful for single target dps, but it’s amazing in basically every other situation. Shortbow has always been my secondary weapon, and I switch between D/D and P/P as my primary.

Depends a lot on the boss, TBH. There are some fractal bosses are are very very friendly to P/P. D/D and S/x are also good options depending on the boss. S/D can be a great way to strip boons, and S/P can allow you to stand in one place and hit PW to evade painful melee-range abilities.

How, exactly, does s/d strip boons?

Keep with shortbow, try placing your Poison Field in front of your allies projectiles and take out the smaller creatures all around you.

I recently switched to S/D (instead of D/D) on melee heavy boss battles. The auto attack chain hits pretty hard and gives great weakness uptime. If you can get the boss to stand still flanking strike is pretty decent (boon removal is just gravy). Shadow return is awesome for getting in/out of melee range if you anticipate big hits (wink wink Kohler in AC) as well as removing pesky conditions like long duration poisons, etc. This allows you to swop out utilities since you pretty much have condition removal on demand. And ofc if you can get the CC stacks down on the boss the stealth+daze is pretty cool too.

neclon.4510:

How, exactly, does s/d strip boons?

It’s one of Flanking Strike’s special attributes. That and one of its strikes is Unblockable.

Anyways, P/P is good for straight damage on a boss, but I find Shortbow superior combos and condition damage.

SB’s gotta be by far Thief’s most versatile weapon.

godmoney.6025:

Shadow return is awesome for getting in/out of melee range if you anticipate big hits

This is an underappreciated aspect of S/x in a boss fight, IS/Shadow Return is excellent in maintaining melee uptime. For instance, against the ice elemental mid-boss in the snow fractal using IS from a campfire will allow you to close with the boss, then double-tap 2 to get rid of frostbite and return to the fight. Similarly, if you get thrown around by the boss’ blizzard ability, a quick Shadow Return will get you back where you need to be.

I actually use my main P/D setup for all single target encounters, bosses included. In this manner I get to utilize the same synergies between CnD>Sneak attack with signet of malice and my condition damage setup.

Obviously, I run dungeons groups that aren’t already loaded to the hilt with bleed users so this keeps that damage, and the damage from my caltrops viable.

“but PopeUrban, is it safe?”

Well I’ll be honest with you. Its not AS safe as going P/P for white damage and crit because you do need to be in melee range to CnD. However, you only need to be in melee range for a split second to land it, and only need to land it every 3 seconds. I like to further safen it up because I also AoE blind on hit, and despite all reductions (including dredge immunity) that blind when timed correctly will make the enemy whiff one hit. That one whiff is usually all I end up needing to pull off the CnD and be back out of melee range stacking bleeds and collecting 600hp with sneak attack.

“but PopeUrban, isn’t the rest of pistol trash?”

Subjective. The only “trash” skill in terms of group PvE boss fights on the bar is body shot, and even then, its only a “trash” skill if I’m trying to use it to increase my own DPS. There do in fact arise situations where it is simply not same to approach a boss in melee at all. In those situations I use body shot to stack 25 vulns on the target in order to multiplicatively increase the DPS of my party to compensate for the bleeds I’m not stacking. The P/D double attack is a nice (cheap) little gap opener that’s perfect for fleeing PBAoE charge up abilities, and 1 is used from stealth as my primary source of bleeds and thus DPS. The other two skills on the bar are from dagger, and both are still pretty stong in most situations. Dancing dagger is a reliable multitarget cripple (that, again, syngergizes strongly with signet of malice) and 5 is the infamous CnD. Any ability that grants stealth is a good ability in a boss fight. it means you can control your own aggro, and in my case its integral to my DPS.

“Actually, this P/D/Malice build for PvE sounds pretty hard.”

Well I don’t think it’s HARD really. Going full on melee thief or glass cannon warrior against bosses is hard. It’s definately harder than pure ranged damage I guess.

“Well what’s the catch?”

P/D’s only functional means of DPS (and it is a lot of it) is bleeds. This means that it doesn’t synergize well with several similar bleed-reliant builds, as once you hit the stack limit of 25 the oldest bleeds are getting pushed out of the bottom of the stack as new bleeds are being put on the top. Usually this means that 2x heavy bleeders are all a party can support, as adding more will effectively lower the damage output of all three bleeders. In addition, despite SoM’s ability to do fun stuff like using caltrops, cluster bomb, and dagger storm to turn add waves in to free 100% heals, you are still a thief, and your build still requires you to get pretty close to some pretty big sources of damage. This means your small HP pool can often cause you to spend long periods of a fight at sub-par dps if you screw up and take a big hit as it’s simply not safe to approach for a CnD when you’re down to a sliver of health, and due to the way signet of malice operates, you have no really solid on demand healing. This can be compensated for somewhat by tossing a sneak attack out of a shadow refuge to double up on the heal (SoM+Lifeleech combo), and then popping the active from SoM, but you’re effectively using two cooldowns and needing to actually hit a target to get the same healing as popping Hide in Shadows would have given you at the push of a single button, and you’re effectively losing your sustain for 15 seconds.

“So do you think I should really use P/D/Malice in dungeons and fractals?”

Well I like it, obviously, but your experiences may vary. I’ll say that P/D/M is very good at rewarding skillful play, and allows one to pull off some seriously crazy stunts when played well. For instance, we finished the traps portion of AC explorable 2 with a four man party, where three players ran the front and mid traps, and all I did was tank gravelings. I also like the end boss of the grawl fractal because the add spawn timing pretty much always allow me to reflect-tank for one or another salf-healing downed teammate while simultaneously clearing most of the wave and healing myself to full. Oh, and then I go drop shadow refuge on anyone else who manages to get themselves horribly burned in the process and res them as well, like any other thief.

However, P/D/M is also very good at punishing mistakes. For instance, missing a caltrops drop is a massive amount of wasted damage, and more importantly is often totally screwing over your team’s CC and in the case of some melee bosses, your very ability to survive parts of the encounter while still dealing damage. Improperly timing a CnD is missed damage, AND you just took a massive chunk of damage, AND you’re not very good at recovering massive chunks of HP quickly, and therefore you lose even more DPS while recovering from that damage.

Its a double edged sword. When played well, and in the right circumstances it’s stupidly, laughably, awesomely effective. When played poorly, and in the wrong circumstances, it’s painfully, awfully, horribly unable to fix any mistakes you’re making.

For world events just use a shortbow. You’re basically guaranteed to succeed and your individual contribution hardly matters, so just spam AoE to maximize mob tagging for XP and drops.

For instance bosses it really depends on the quality of your group. If you have a strong team comp and/or good players you should be in melee against pretty much everything. A weak comp or weak players? You’re going to be forced into ranged against a ton of bosses. Even so, pistol is comically bad as a ranged weapon; if you aren’t specced for at least some condition damage I wouldn’t even bother looking at it, and even if you are you get so much more from the bow that it’s hardly a contest.

Keep a pistol in your pack for bad groups fighting specific bosses (they’re nice for Lupicus, for instance), but 95+% of the time you’ll forget they’re even there and are right to do so – they’re that bad.

My wife and I duo a lot (about 90% of our game time is together) She plays a Guardian, and I play a Thief.

I am almost always using D/D because of her traits and skills as a Guardian I get a huge benefit from being in melee range, unfortunatly due to the wackyness of GW2 mob aggro, I usually end up getting the attention of the mobs. This does not matter most of the time as mobs are generally dead within seconds … even veterans just seem to fall over when we get near them now that we are in our 40s. The problem lies with bosses, specifically [Group Event] bosses.

I can usually dance around the [Group Event] bosses for a while as a D/D Thief, but once I start taking some AoE damage, or my health just gets wittled down I usually jump back (Roll for Initiative FTW) swap out to P/P and start to Unload.

This usually results in the boss chasing me around while my wife hits the thing in the back with her mace for a while until I feel safe enough to switch back to D/D (which does a ton more damage) and get the bleed stacks back up to ~20 (Death Blossom+Caltrops+Uncatchable).

So to make a long story even longer: P/P works for me because kiting with a Shortbow just seems to clunky, as I am kiting a boss that can do ~50% of my health in a single hit, I do not like to stop and aim a ground targetted AoE … I would rather keep moving and spam the instant cast skills that a Pistol has. Granted I may do less damage, but overall I feel I do even more beacuse I land more attacks.

More talented people may prefer Shortbows, but for those of us that cant aim a ground targetted AoE while side strafing away from a boss, P/P seems the way to go.

Ensign.2189:

Even so, pistol is comically bad as a ranged weapon; if you aren’t specced for at least some condition damage I wouldn’t even bother looking at it, and even if you are you get so much more from the bow that it’s hardly a contest.

Shortbow is simply incapable of outdamaging P/D on a single target over time in a condition spec. Shortbow has a wonderful burst, even specced for condition it’s a stupidly good burst of 25 stacks of 3s bleed(if you use it as a melee weapon), but that burst doesn’t last the entire length of a boss fight, uses all of your initiative, takes for bloody ever in melee range, and the time spent recovering initiative actually results in less overall damage than using P/D sustainable bleed chains. The auto has no attached condition, and thus that makes its damage extremely sub-par in a longterm fight like a dungeon boss for such builds.

Basically, what shortbow offers to a condition spec is the bleeds from cluster bomb, and a poison field. This is great assuming you can land those bleeds, but due to the way cluster bomb functions you have to be in pretty much melee range for several seconds straight to stack them high enough to compete with the stacking P/D can output with a lot less risk, and while not running out of initiative.

That said, shortbow is very good at trash clears, and my aformentioned P/D/M build basically runs shortbow whenever there are two mobs close enough to both take a nice little spam of cluster bombs. Heck, that’s a given for pretty much any thief build. However, when I need to bring the pain on a single target, or the mobs are just too spread out for shortbow cluster spam to work (which is pretty often in some instances) P/D solidly outperforms the shortbow every time.

I personally just tank bosses with S/P…….Built with soldier/knight hybrid setup, nothing aside from the spirit scream in AC can one shot me that I’ve found……

Short bow provides 100% uptime on Weakness and the most spammable blast finisher in the game. Those two things are more than enough to cover and difference in damage between short bow and pistol in a dungeon encounter.

I only consider pistol optimal for fights that are so lethal that no one can get into melee range (which wastes the blast finisher spam), which is a list that shrinks the stronger your group is.

I use Sword/Dagger and Short bow for PvE.

Short Bow gives you a spammable Poison combo field (and, assuming you have 15 points in DA, permanent Weakness). It also has the most spammable Blast finisher, as stated above. The 3 ability is also a low cost dodge, even usable while immobilized. The short bow is just an all around great weapon, to be honest.

Sword/Dagger gives you melee AoE, a reliable Daze for PvE, and permanent weakness as well. Flanking Strike is also great in PvE. It’s not unreliable, like it is in PvP, since monsters generally aren’t running around all the time. Sword/Pistol is also a great choice, since you get Black Powder with it.

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fYEQRAoY6alUmSO3cy9E+JFx2jdKUeypgpJ1rAZ1KQTA;TABg1yqEUJpSVliKKkMIJQyikDJJSLGGVsTYeA

this is my build. I’m aiming it to be a mix of dps/support via regen/blinds/interrupts. CnD is easy aggro drop in d/d. p/p has easy access to interrupts. I have infiltrator’s signet mostly for the stun-breaker and if I go in a fight knowing there’s little to no stuns I’ll swap in Agility to help deal with group’s conditions or caltrops for bleed stacks. This build is extremely blind heavy and works quite well in a small-zerg buster in wvw. Maybe not the best build, especially not for damage, but it’s quite fun for me.

Also, I ALWAYS keep a SB on hand for blast-spams (Best heals in the game when paired with water-fields), slows, 100% weakness uptime to help with overwhelming odds or pesky bosses.

In general I go S/P + Shortbow for fractal/dungeon runs. Sword for the obvious aoe damage, sword #2 for free condition removal, Pistol whip for spamming down trash mobs. Shortbow is obvious. I also run high crit % with omnomberry ghosts so I can sustain myself as much as possible while spamming pistol whip.

in WvW I go D/D + Shortbow in a small scale zerg killnig group. Clusterbomb + Daggerstorm are your friend.

I carry all weapons with me at all times with both builds I made for my thief. really like pistol whipping and unloading bosses, but when they have low HP … heartseeking em really hurts em.

I honestly prefer D/P combo. This gives me the ability to basically blindlock the boss mob, even if I’m half way across the field. This makes it so a lot of attacks just miss. As long as you keep using Blackpowder whenever blind goes away and you remember to dodge, it usually works out fine. I prefer to use shortbow when I need to fall back and every time I can double tap my F1(and hope for a good steal xD) and then use V to dodge backwards and 3 to get out of direct damage area then continue on auto attack, throwing a poison every now and then. I love the auto attack for shortbow especially with bosses that spawn adds because the arrow hits up to 3 or 4 mobs which means you can pretty much shoot down all the adds.

If your looking for more damage, try going with P/P for a ranged weapon set but I personally don’t like P/P all that much(but that’s just me, to each their own play style). I love my bouncy arrows too much xD

hahawinner.5273:

I honestly prefer D/P combo. This gives me the ability to basically blindlock the boss mob, even if I’m half way across the field. This makes it so a lot of attacks just miss.

Now I’ve never given it a rigorous test, and I may be mistaken, but I was under the impression that blind being 10 % effective on bosses meant that only 10 % of their attacks would miss.

Tulisin.6945:

hahawinner.5273:

I honestly prefer D/P combo. This gives me the ability to basically blindlock the boss mob, even if I’m half way across the field. This makes it so a lot of attacks just miss.

Now I’ve never given it a rigorous test, and I may be mistaken, but I was under the impression that blind being 10 % effective on bosses meant that only 10 % of their attacks would miss.

In my experience, the reduction seems to be on the overall duration of the blind, this is similar to the way dredge mobs which are “immune” to blind used to still be blinded, but cut the blind duration to a fraction of a second, wherin the blind can still be employed to make them whiff an attack, but its application has to be timed very close to the attack because it only possesses 10% of its normal duration.

I’ll be honest that I haven’t paid attention to it recently and it could use some further testing as things may (like the dredge) have changed.

@PopeUrban: The dredge, as of now, can’t be blinded(unless its for a very short time) sadly but that’s just when you have to rely on movement rather than blind.
As far as the bosses missing and such when blind, their normal attacks(which would be our auto attacks) miss a lot of the time(not 100% of the time, which makes sense if you think about it) but their AoE attacks or stronger attacks seem to do the 10% thing Tulisin was taking about.

Assuming you’ve geared/built yourself with enough base HP so that you can survive a big one-hit and dodge/RFI away to fix yourself up (Around 16000-17000 health), then I’ve had great luck with D/D and Shortbow as my two weapon sets for Boss fights. Oh, and you must have 15 points in the top line for Lotus Poison to get the “poison also applies weakness” trait.

Start from ranged and drop the poison field with shortbow while running in. Then use steal to get in melee range and death blossom a few times to get some bleed stacks. If the boss isn’t mad at you, stay behind him and autoattack with dagger 1 to keep him poisoned and weakened. Know when to dodge/RFI away to avoid PBAOE. Just jink in and out trying to keep as much poison/weakness on him with either Dagger 1 or Bow 4. Steal as often as possible. Death Blossom periodically to keep some bleed stacks on. Run away when you get in trouble. Shadow Refuge is of course very useful both for yourself and teammates.