Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone. I started at launch and played up until the toxic castle event at the lake/liberation of Lion’s Arch back in the day. I used to WvW a lot, a little bit of SPvP on the side.

Thief was always my favorite class, really dug the style and abilities: stabbing people is fun.

What do I need to know and look out for most coming back after all this time? I pretty much missed all of Heart of Thorns/Elite Spec stuff.

Start with HoT and learn the new HoT mechanics. Lots of people run those builds even if you are on Core you want to know a bit about them.

D/P is still solid choice for thief/Daredevil but you have plenty of choices depending on what you want to do play style wise.

I was always a dagger/pistol fan, yeah. Though I could never make up my mind about double dagger or pistol/dagger for my swap.

Has anything really changed for us or have old skills continued to go into disuse?

I’d say some are less used but others are more used.

I run P/D as a condition set for example, using venoms. Venoms now are shared as baseline and some have a reduced cooldown so are much better than before.

Signet of agility was buffed and now is a strong cleanse. Overall the build variety went up (although the same elite skills tend to not be used).

HoT brought a large number of useful utilities, however, so that could be clouding my judgment slightly.

So I played a bit last night, fixed some camera issues (thank god there’s action camera in this game), played about with spec and did a quick Fractal to see if i could remember what I was supposed to do.

I was slow, I was terrible…but I think I’m vaguely remembering how to play, which is nice.

I miss old specs…i used to go like 20/30/15/10/15 or something (can’t remember exactly) and I miss being able to do that. Now I can’t decide if Mug is worth it over proccing poison on dagger attacks.

Help, what’s the meta for non-daredevil right now? (i’m going to try it, but not spending money on HoT yet)

Closest to “meta” is going Trickery, Deadly Arts and Acrobatics. Acro is basically baby Daredevil and that will perform decently with sustain through evade and ready cleanse.

Meta is over rated however so you might consider dropping DA for CS depending on your stat selection, runes and sigils.

I built for precision and power, i liked Acrobatics for the extra dodge and all that. If there’s no meta to speak of, that’s actually a good thing. I like being able to do what I want and not feel as though i’m missing something that’s “better.”

Gonna take me a while to get back into the swing, and since i am relearning anyway, thoguht i’d take the opportunity to cleanse some bad habits. here’s hoping, and thanks.

If you have problems, like “keep dying to x” just come back with your builds details and we can brainstorm improvements. And I agree that"meta" restricts people far more than it should.

Well, for what it’s worth, this is what i’m running as best i recall.

My initial advice:

Drop HiS, Signet, and TG. Use signet of agility instead and withdraw. Use basi venom for more consistent cc. Trait for cooldown reduction on withdraw. Use acro over either cs or da.

I can help more in game in about three hours.

Appreciate that, thanks. Though I probably won’t be on much today. I’ll mess about with it some more. I remember liking acrobatics before anyway.

Alright, feel free to message me if we are on at the same time.