Guild Wars 2

This is something I’ve been theorycrafting lately. It uses the idea of low health, but high toughness and healing power for sustain (With toughness increasing the value of your heals). And uses condi’s to apply pressure. The build at the moment is…

Weapons: p/d & sb
Trinket: Settler’s ( +1200 Toughness, +900 Healing Power, +900 Condition Damage)
Runes/Sigils: Krait Runes, Corruption/Agony for p/d, & Venom/Agony for sb
Traits: DA/SA/Trick (2/3/1, 3/2/2, 1/2/2 – respectively)
Utility Skills: Signet of Malice, Caltrops/Blinding Powder/SR, Dagger Storm
Build Constructor: [Link]

Notable facts:

• You have 11.6k total hp. SR heals for 2.6k (Not including the 383 heal/second of Shadow Rejuvenation) and Mug heals for 2.5k. That means both of these skills heal for slightly less than 25% of your total hp.
• Shadow’s Rejuvenation heals 9.9% of your total hp every 3 seconds while in stealth. You also gain one initiative and clear one condition every 3 seconds from these traits.
• Caltrops proc Signet of Malice when applied and caltrops pulse every second. If two enemies stand in your caltrops for 3 seconds you will heal 9% of your total hp (You are traited to drop caltrops that last for 3 seconds on dodge).
• Choking Gas (sb 4) also procs Signet of Malice for each of its four pulses and the initial hit. Making it possible to heal 7.6% of your total hp per target per cast of Choking Gas (sb 4 only costs 4 initiative).
• You have 2200 toughness, this makes your 11.6k hp equivalent to 25.5k hp against physical damage. Except it’s much easier to heal 11.6k than it is to heal 25.5k (It’s also much easier to burn through with conditions. But more on that later).

Playstyle

Playstyle focuses around providing on point disruption. Drop caltrops and poison fields on or near points to punish fighting on points. Prioritize sustain over damage, using stealth for healing/condi clear. Try to not activate your signet unless you get below 30% and try to save steal for when you’re around 75%. Use p/d for 1v1 or 2v1 situations, but at the same time consider using sb if you feel the poison would help you more. You will want to be near the center of the fight as much as possible to optimize SoM’s healing and act as somewhat of a damage sink for your team. Also try not to waste all your initiative on sb 5 getting to the fight, as you are very useless without initiative compared to a d/p or s/d thief. Dagger Storm should be used as an on-demand whirl finisher, preferably in your own poison fields. Dagger Storm puts you at risk when casting it, so don’t be afraid to cancel it if you are low or in a bad spot. Especially if whatever field you were whirling in has died.

Problems

This build is very immobile and has very little chase potential. It is also very weak against stuns/knockdowns/snares whenever steal or blinding powder are on cooldown. Having very little actual hp also makes it very susceptible to conditions, and this build features no on-demand condi clear other than Shadow’s Embrace and Trickster. This build also lacks objective control such as securing neutral monsters or taking down base doors. Lastly it struggles against meta builds like d/d ele or cele necro in 1v1 situations (Not so much in group situations).

Variations

• Drop Krait Runes for Runes of the Undead, and drop Sigils of Agony for Sigils of Bursting/Corruption/Frailty. Provides more damage per tick and sustain at the cost of fewer ticks. Recommended against comps with a lot of condi clear, which are quite prevalent in the current meta (Note that keeping Sigils of Agony will not add any additional bleed ticks).

So what do you guys think? The main reason I’m sharing this build is because I like the idea of using the Settler’s trinket on thief and haven’t heard of many people doing this before. I’m surprised how well it actually works on thief. To be honest I think an s/d variant might actually be better for the Settler’s amulet, but I haven’t played s/d in forever so I’m reluctant to try that out (I know [Teef] had an s/d condi build out there before that worked pretty well. Lots of thoughts here drawn from that build actually). Any of you folks use/tried Settler’s on thief?

In regards to the build itself, the only change I’m really considering is the first one. I think withdraw might outheal signet of malice and a little more condi clear could be nice. Surprisingly though I haven’t needed that much more condi clear as far as current testing goes (except against d/d eles). I dunno I’m still pretty new to this build so I’m not sure what’s optimal yet. If anyone tries out this build or another Settler’s thief build I’d like to know what they think though.

My first and only question is: Why are you trying to fit a square peg in a round hole?

swinsk.6410:

My first and only question is: Why are you trying to fit a square peg in a round hole?

Because we only have square pegs to use.

I’ve tried similar builds in the past. My only reasonable success was running some traps and devourer venom to keep people in the caltrops while I stacked more bleeds with db. Any one with common sense won’t stand in caltrops long enough for it to do more than tickle. I do like the idea of a low HP, high toughness and healing power build with SoM though. Just wish more of our options actually worked well.

Bunker Thief can lose everypoint cuz he heals with invis

I don’t think thief can play bunker in this meta… you won’t beat anybody and you aren’t taking advantage of thiefs perk… that is being stealthy and mobile…

Why play a subpar build? thieves gotta be the worst possible choice for a bunker build…you can’t hold points lol.

Your better off supporting your team with your quick mobilty by decapping and ambushing a target in team fights than disengaging quickly and continuing to decap around the map.

Condi and bunker are two bad PvP combinations on thief.

Th fact this thread was creates makes me:

Ye the stealth decaping is a problem. Also I know this build is far from optimal or viable. I normally play a meta +1 & decap d/p thief (Hell lets be honest here, anything with d/d isn’t going to be viable in even a midly competitive scene).

I still think it’s really interesting however, how much sustain you can get by using settler’s amulet (Tbh, I was thinking of naming the thread “Settler’s amulet on thief.” Probably should’ve done so). Haven’t really worked out the offensive side of the build. But the defensive core of SA with toughness & healing power should be able to be transferred into other builds. Dunno, at the moment I’m trying to use this build to provide a number’s advantage by sustaining in 2v1 situations. (Which obviously builds like d/d ele and cele necro will do better, since they can actually hold points while sustaining). And also trying to be a damage sink/revive bot in teamfights. Since people still try and focus me down in teamfights expecting me to be a squishy thief. At least initially at least (Just like how some dps guardians stack burns to fake being burn guardians to try and draw out condi clears).

@swinsk: That’s unfortunate. You should go see a doctor about that blown mind of yours.

Would you not get more healing by dropping hidden theif, taking Leeching venoms and using Spider venom instead of caltrops? This is 3K healing every 40 seconds and does not need an enemy to stand in a field. It will also kick in another 1k heal off basi.

Hrm that’s an interesting idea. I’ll try that out. Been trying to add poison into the build to make it more offensive anywho (largely by dropping acro for da). The change would also let me drop the sigil of bursting for sigil of venom (I realized bursting only adds a measly ~70 condition damage anyway).

Edit: AH actually the stealth on hidden thief is pretty vital as far as sustain/condi clear goes. I’ll still try venoms out but not sure how well it’ll work out.

Midi.8359:

Hrm that’s an interesting idea. I’ll try that out. Been trying to add poison into the build to make it more offensive anywho (largely by dropping acro for da). The change would also let me drop the sigil of bursting for sigil of venom (I realized bursting only adds a measly ~70 condition damage anyway).

Edit: AH actually the stealth on hidden thief is pretty vital as far as sustain/condi clear goes. I’ll still try venoms out but not sure how well it’ll work out.

The stealth on steal will clear 2 conditions every 21 seconds. You could choose to use a purity sigil and get the same amount of cleanse. Now instead of Krait you can use a runeset that offers poison duration. Now there a couple of Poison duration type runes that offer an interesting alternative on that sixth rune set. Runes of the afflicted could work here with no sacrifice to condition damage.

Another interesting thought is to go with Heal runes relying on the high base condition duration of the dagger set on bleeds or use Antitoxin for extra might or lower durations applied to oneself.. I really think you should consider the fact that bleed duration d/d is so high as a base and see if another runeset can leverage that for more sustain or poison damage given the full duration potential of bleeds will rarely last before a cleanse when d/d the main source of bleed.

Just as an example. If you fight more 1v1 in PVp i am thinking withdraw will offer more healing than will SOM as that single target will not generate enough on attack procs. If you then use Adventurer you can generate more endurance for a needed dodge which could then proc more unctachable caltrops.

That or use scavenger/undead runes which will boost condition damage yet more and offer more toughness or a couple more heal sources. (undead will add 100 tougness and 170 more condition damage)

So I’ve been messing around with this build a lot more. Actually starting to get pretty good results with it. Made a few tweaks and changed the playstyle to a point disruption one that focuses on droping poison fields with the shortbow. Like Zodryn said, people aren’t going to be stupid enough to just stand in your caltrops. But when you drop caltrops and poison fields on points (Noting that they have the same radius as a capture point) things start to get a little less binary for your enemies. Icing on the cake being that sb 4 has the same interaction with SoM as caltrops does, meaning that you heal for each of the four pulses of choking gas + the initial hit (That’s 7.6% of your total hp healed per target per choking gas, and choking gas only costs 4 init).

I’ll update the original post with the changes/tweaks to the build later. First though I want to respond to babaz’s suggestions.

So in my opinion this isn’t really a 1v1 or +1 build. Withdraw would definitely provides more sustain in 1v1s, but just isn’t better in the 2v2/2v3/3v3/etc fighting situations this build was designed for with all its aoe’s and whatnot. That being said I actually changed the now “offhand” d/d into p/d for more reliable single target damage in the 1v1 and 2v1 matchups (Death blossom being really unreliable, and d/d just lacking too much mobility without any support from utilities.). But again 2v1 and 1v1’ing is something a d/p thief will outperform a condition thief in any day (In terms of speed at least). This build wants to stick to on-point teamfighting.

Also I did try out spider venom. It was a bit too high risk/mediocre reward for me. Since the venom’s can be dodged/blocked and is on a 40s cooldown, I found myself loosing at least half of skill’s utility on average since I can’t reliably set up for the next 6 attacks/hits (Unlike baslisk venom which only requires you to set up for one hit to become effective). Dunno, I also didn’t like spider venom is since it’s more of a single target burst skill which is something d/p thieves already excel at.

As far as runes go I did try out going for more sustainable options but felt like I lost too much offensive pressure by doing so. Afflicted doesn’t grant another tick of poison so it isn’t worth it imo. Undead runes might actually be a viable alternative as they round off bleed ticks quite nicely and do provide more damage per tick/provide options for alternative sigils (You can’t get more bleed ticks by using agony sigils if you use runes of the undead, so it’s pointless to use them).

Edit:

Build changes

• d/d -> p/d
• Acro -> DA (2/3/1)
• Bursting/Agony & Energy/Corruption -> Corruption/Agony & Venom/Agony
• Basilisk Venom -> Dagger Storm (More aoe/whirl finisher on sb 4 or other fields)
• Bountiful Theft -> Trickster
• Updated Playstyle section

A kinda cool but hard to pull of combo I didn’t mention in the Playstyle section is that you can sb 4 -> weapon swap & stealth -> unload for 5 stacks of poison and bleeding since unload is a 100% projectile finisher. Also another nice trick is that you can body shot someone to snare them inside your caltrops.