Guild Wars 2

Right now I’m debating which build would be best for thief. Currently I’m running a critical damage-driven thief with berserker’s armor and eagle runes (x1 bersker dag; x1 rampager dag). With high critical damage your attacks can deal devastating critical hits (i have 59% crit chance) but with condition damage you can really harrass enemies with the high dps, at the cost of effective crit dmg.

I was considering rolling x2 armor sets, x1 bersker, x1 rampager, so I got both options available, but keep full eagle runes on both sets to maintain some decent crit damage.

What would be the better build, high critical damage or high condition damage?

General Stats:
2,000(ish) power
-341 condition dmg

2,000(ish) precision
-59% crit chance
-66 crit dmg

P.S: Would anyone suggest rolling berserker armor with sup runes of the thief? Would this balance out the the two stats yet still maintain high critical damage? I was thinking about this as well but don’t know the best combo.

Crit is better right now, but condition damage is supposed to get a tweak in a future patch.

What type of content are we talking about? WvW, sPvP, PvE, Dungeons?

That said, Condition Damage really doesn’t have much going for it currently, especially not on Thieves. It just pales next to the damage increase offered by the Crit-based builds.

I tried running a thief with d/d-shortbow and presicion-condamage-toughness on ever piece of armor and accessories. Well, long story short, don’t repeat my mistake. Costed me like 10 gold and a crapload of dungeon tokens to learn that con-damage for thieves was useless.

Conditions (especially damaging ones) are hard to stack as a thief. Also, each class (thieves too) have ways of removing those conditions (some even turn them into boons). So go for crit% and crit damage.

not sure where you guys are getting this information that condition damage is bad.. D/D stack conditions like crazy in pvp, and if they pop a condition removal.. guess what you you just stack them again, and stealth and watch the bleed out….

P/D builds love condition damage as all their damage is from sneak attack which stack bleeds fast, and venom’s, with my gear in wvw on a level 80 my bleeds tick for 111 and venoms in the area of 300, they pop condition removal, i C/D and stack the bleeds right back up as i dont have to use any initiative to get stacks up, and they have blown heal/condition removal.. and with 30 sec venoms, i can stack conditions like crazy.

dont listen to people who say that crit and crit damage is the only way to go.. there are tons of guides and videos of conditions builds destroying people, infact i hardly ever lose to a crit thief, and i can stealth more than they can and heal lalot more than they can.. and they have no toughness, while im sitting at 1800 toughness and 1400 condition damage.

Necos are the only problem i have.. but even they cant kill me as im popping in out of stealth with C/D and healing off venoms, and once i get them to burn the removal, they go down like any other class..

i dont think it’s a meaningful difference, but due to the synergy that a solid crit chance gives with sigils, i have leaned slightly toward critical and some boosted critical damage to capitalize on that, with a great amount of +con dmg as well. i can do that with rampagers, divinity runes, and the right trait points mix. around 250 +heal, 800 condition, 1600-1800 precision, and around +40% critical damage has been very nice with my signet of malice builds. this way i can’t be hard countered/useless and my damage is solid and not sacrificed just to get durability

Deathpope.6253:

not sure where you guys are getting this information that condition damage is bad.. D/D stack conditions like crazy in pvp, and if they pop a condition removal.. guess what you you just stack them again, and stealth and watch the bleed out….

It’s not bad, it’s just not as good. Even with a condition-heavy build, +crit damage is a better stat than +condition damage.

Not to mention other classes do condition damage twice as good as theives.

I’ve got to agree with deathpope. I’ve played both and crit builds are bursty but incredibly boring and very squishy. You have a low health pool, no toughness, and pretty much have 2 abilities that, if they miss, you’re screwed. Anything more than a 1v1 and you soak damage faster than a sponge in a bathtub. I like to see big numbers as much as the next thief but its just lacks any kind of longevity. I will agree that conditions can be purged, and thats a risk that a burst build doesnt have. Youre not going to ‘purge’ a 6k heartseeker crit.

That all said, I prefer to steal to get in close, drop caltrops, slap 2 LDB’s and vanish into stealth and watch you die while I heal up/cleanse myself from the ether. To be totally honest, I am regularly in the top 3 of any match and literally the only specs that give me any kind of trouble are pistol whip thieves/hundred blade haste monkey wars and any kind of guardian. Seeing as 1 and 2 will no-doubt be nerfed at some point, I’d say a condition spec is fairly solid.

I’m with Revel. I don’t have any trouble at all in sPvP w/ D/D conditions.

For me, I would use condition damage more on the sPVP environment whereas use crit on WvWvW.

Though my crit build is more of a hybrid crit+toughness since i just cap my crit to like 45-50% and use toughness + vitality armor sets.

Hey, read the posts and i must say since taking my points and reposting 25 in condition running 30 on crit and 15 in trickery ive been so much more effetive than pooling into acrobatics and shadow arts that i had before to support the in and out high crit thief. I got the build off a guy on a forum cant remember what but his base was the same as the guys saying about condition dmg here. Go in hit the with a good crit to start do x2 LDB’s back out and let them bleed down. Once your cycled on skills get back in there finish them off with heartseeker or if you need LDB’s again and back outs. This has worked for me in WvWvW / sPvP / and in PvE. Oh and shortbow in sPvP is awesome with good condition. just using Suprise shot to cripple then choking gas to condition them with poisons skills added to the mix when possible and using disabling shot to keep your distance. Takes them down so quick. But remember whatever build your still going to be a squishy no matter what. So try to make sure that you build a thief that can hit hard place bleeds but never stand still, this isnt like other mmo’s you have to be really clever thats why we are “thieves” GL to you all you fellow thieves in game

Shadowborn

My take is that condition builds are a very poor choice for “MAX DPS BURST PEW PEW”.

The bottom line is this:

1. Power x crit damage scales with 3 stats: power, precision, crit damage. Cubic.

2. Condition x prec scales primarily linearly with condition damage. The precision piece getting you a few more bleeds or whatnot is relatively minor. Also note that Rampagers gear has cdmg as a secondary stat. So there’s some inherent de-synergy here.

What I’ve noticed that work pretty well are:

1. Carrion. Two linear scaling stats: power and cdmg. The difference here is that the cdmg scaling is heavy, the power scaling is good. Bonus that you get Vit as a secondary. I see this as excellent sustained damage with some hybrid-ish stat spread. Normally in a cdmg build, you end up with a lot of buttons on your weapon that do piddly direct damage. The power scaling on Carrion rectifies this by a pretty good degree — to the point that the abilities may not be critting for 5k, but they are hitting for a solid 2k+. And, you are getting a full investment into condition damage.

2. Plain condition damage. This allows for heavy defensive hybridization. As the above poster mentioned — acrobatics and shadow arts. Condition damage simply does not take much stat/trait investment in general compared to fully-invested BARZARKAR. As such, it seems very compatible with more defensive builds.

Crit damage is currently better for a few reasons.

As explained in the post above, condition damage only scales linearly while crit damage gets multiplied. It’s a huge oversight in the stat designs and hopefully they fix it.

Condition damage needs to last it’s full duration to do damage. I always have some form of condition removal and most good players will as well. It is so easy to completely negate a condition specced classes damage by having it. Even if reapplied I’ve already got ~5 seconds of doing full damage to them while they have wasted cooldowns and need them to come back up. Even with a 13.8k health pool I’ve never had a condition spec kill me, it’s always DD.

On crit procs offer more damage/variety than anything that has synergy with conditions. I actually run with the sigil of rage and when that thing procs whatever I am hitting drops, it’s even better when I get to spike the enemy in half the time :P. You can apply another bleed, do more single target damage, do AOE damage, etc. The condition duration ones just don’t offer that much more damage. If your DB bleeds are ticking for 100 per stack per second, that’s only 300 extra damage(1s*3 stacks*100). Even if you use 2 of them it’s 600 extra damage. Where the sigil of air will proc every 5s doing 1k+. I’ve also heard that % damage increases do not impact conditions so even sigil of force won’t increase condition damage.

Don’t get me wrong, a condition specced thief can do alright. However with crit damage you do more damage faster, have better sigil options, won’t have your damage completely negated, and don’t really have to worry about the perils of extended fights(running out of escapes/heals or more enemies showing up).

Team Deathpope here. P/D & D/D bleeding out and outlasting ftw. Debating trying to get 50% bleed duration for 2x more ticks on Vital for more melting. Best part about it is you can be stealth half the time healing and still doing dmg with bleeds.

I have been having this same question for a while now and this thread is much appreciated. All the information here has been very helpful. I am not yet lev 80, I have just reached 73 last night. I have been flipping between these two builds (although not properly tested yet since I am not lev 80) and still can not decide. For my playstyle, which is mostly WvWvW and group PVE, I am starting to lean towards the +cond. build. Even though I lack the instant bust of +crit build, I can apply sustaining damage to a group of people at once. Caltrops are an AOE and Death Blossom is as well. Plus, I do have a bit more toughness to get out of the mess alive (maybe 50% of the time!) and can use my area stealth to rez allies.

That being said, the insta-power the +crit build gives is hard to resist. I know there is a sticky thread at the top for posting builds and set-ups, which I have read thoroughly and taken many great ideas from, but I could use more specific advice based on my playstyle. What are some good set-ups for a support role thief?