Guild Wars 2

Hi, I’m a Mesmer (yeah, one of THOSE dirty people), and my first character in GW2 (post-beta) was a Thief. I got my Thief to about 65ish before quitting, but somewhere between when I quit the Thief and now also crafted 10 levels, so I’m level 77 (65 + 10 = 77, right?) and have very little idea on how the Thief works.

Now, I would say that I learned how to play a Thief while leveling up, but that’s a lie since I was just spamming 3 with D/D. I want to play a PvE Thief (ew, one of those, but not be a CoF P1 PvE’er).

My current build, thanks to research off of Jumper.9482’s build is found on this link here.

Here’s some reasoning before you bash everything:

The reason why I have a Cavalier and Celestial ascended ring with everything else Berserker exotic is because I have those 2 sitting in my bank along with other excess rings. For the armor, I grabbed Knight legs and chest because they give 14.4 stats per critical damage as opposed to the “standard” 12 found on shoulders/gloves/shoes.

Dagger/Pistol was because I wanted a build that would be able to burst a single-target down (I was definitely thinking about going Sword/Dagger or Sword/Pistol). My thoughts were to go Dagger/Pistol + Sword/Dagger, but then I realized I wouldn’t have range and in most dungeons that’s a big no-no, so I swapped to Pistol/Pistol as my secondary set (only uses 1 pistol for offhand, but gw2skills doesn’t know that).

Foods are just some foods lying around in excess.

Runes can be changed up, I just slapped Lyssa in the build editor because I wasn’t sure.

Traits, I wasn’t sure what to put on my Master Critical Strikes trait, so I just went with Precision—>Vitality since I will most likely be taking hits. Also, the last 5 points in Acrobatics might get switched over to Trickery, but I’m not entirely sure.

Lastly, and I know this is kinda jumping around in the opposite order one would think, Signet of Shadows will most likely be replaced with any utility based on what’s needed (Blinding Powder, Shadow’s Refuge, Smokescreen, Haste, Shadowstep).

Any help or tip is greatly appreciated. Also, my behind is ready to be torn open, so let the bashing begin.

Nobody has anything to say?

Pretty much the entire thief community has moved away from heavy burst due to the tanky condition meta that the burst thief just can’t beat. You might want to look into P/D.

P.S. I may just be saying this because I don’t condone players who create a thief just to do stupid high bursts in very specific situations. Try something else out. If you’d like to do large numbers roll a warrior or swap your mesmer build to a phantasm burst build.

I know what you mean and where you’re coming from, however I’ve, on my Mesmer, ran pretty much anything you can think of. I just wanted a change of pace and realized I had a high-level Thief, which I had never gotten around to coming back to (I have 95% of my playtime on my Mesmer, nearing 2000 hours).

And I was playing around with a P/D condition build right before coming to the forums, but I’m not too interested in PvP (WvW or tPvP) because, again, I can hit those high numbers with my Mesmer, or just be a safe condition factory.

What I didn’t like about the P/D build was it felt slow to me. It could be I just wasn’t properly comboing but, in PvE, the damage is either too fast or too slow. With my current D/P setup, I can constantly barrage the enemy with attacks (none of them are super high numbers, mostly because I’m still wearing random greens) and escaping then running back in is manageable, even in a 1v1 against a Vet/Champ (although a Champ will just use a signature move and stomp me, in most cases).