All the dodge!
D/D Perma evade wreaked thief for me
All the dodge!
Standard D/P build makes for fairly interesting and decent gameplay and isn’t cheesy. Take Marauder to gain some HP.
With dash you got tons of mobility. With other spinny-jumpy-damage one you get more damage and easier stealth. Either works. Just preference. Most people take Dash with D/P.
D/P It’s mostly focused on single target, but if you get sorounded by mobs just pistol 5 to keep them blinded.
Staff is also strong, but then again it’s another evade build pretty much.
Power D/D isn’t bad either, it’s stealth focused so you gotta practice them backstabs and landing 5.
Runes all depend, Scholar is always good option (still expensive?). I took Traveler when I didn’t have access to swiftness. And even played Infiltration some time time, it’s cheap so you can test it out (gets you 12-13% damage on enemies lower than 50%, and is decent in combination with Executioner trait).
Exact traits and 6-10 skills would all depend on PvP or PvE
Staff works for PvE and to some (lesser, though that’s arguable) extent in PvP and WvW.
S/P can also do relatively well, especially if you got the Critical Strikes traitline for Invigorating Precision.
S/D is probably not your kind of set, given it tends to be low speed/damage.
Best thing you could do (in my opinion) would be to use the meta D/P build in PvP/WvW and use the same gear for Staff in PvE, only requiring some trait changes.
So pretty much like Martin mentioned above.
There’s also a pretty interesting Power D/D build for PvE, where you put Daggers in opposite Weaponslots so that you can run with Quick Pockets in Trickery to keep up your Initiative for constant CnD’s → Backstabs. It’s not too useful in PvP/WvW though.
All that said, you’ll just have to pull through when you step from condi (back) into power, simply because all power builds got less access to sustainable stats (just compare something like Dire, Carrion or Trailblazer to Berserker or Marauder sets…)
This is the build I run in PvE and it basically never dies. It also hits like a truck:
Use Staff for most mobs and Pistols when dealing with a particularly nasty melee hitter. Condi in some fights can be an issue but typically SoA, Shadow Step and Pain Response do the trick.
“Youre lips are movin and youre complaining about something thats wingeing.”
If you wanna run around in WvW flipping camps … Staff does the trick just great :p
I play the same build in Pve (Perma condi evade with sigil of stamina)
Lord is it amazing… I don’t see why you’d want to switch haha.
For SPVP i use a P/P build. It’s a variant of the D/P meta build…same everything except you’re using PP instead. I swap blinding powder for shadow trap though, i find it very useful for sneaky decapping…which makes up for the lack of stealth in the build.
Bounding Dodger/Vault Acro staff works the same as your D.D condi theif, spam dodge and one button, but being power you get to see nice big numbers
You can do like me,
I learned thief the hard way with berserker/assassin stats for a few weeks in pvp. Then I swaped back to usual builds, marauder stats and suddenly meta builds where incredibly tanky to me !