Guild Wars 2

I only played GW2 in Beta and for about 2-3 weeks after release. I picked it back up last week, played every class in PvP and finally decided that Thief would be my main (mostly for lvling and getting nicer looking armor since I prefer PvP).

I hit 80 today thanks to having 45 tomes of knowledge accumulated from PvP in bank (PvE’s not my cup of tea, especially on the Thief). I however still do plan on playing some PvE and doing some dungeons with RL friends. I looked up the ideal stats and builds for PvE Thief. I fully geared myself in mostly berserker armor, (some of it lvl 78 exotic since it was a lot cheaper for not missing out on too many stats) and got ok exotic weapons (assassin’s daggers though, not berserker). I didn’t mess with sigils and runes yet but I read that Scholar’s is ideal.

I mostly got gear for transmog and went from 55g down to 8g. Now, I’m just wondering if I can expect to find specific or stronger gear in dungeons (or other PvE means) or if what I bought off the Trade Post is about as good or stronger than what I can get by doing PvE content myself. Should I just try to farm money and buy the best items I can or is it better to do dungeons to get better gear?

If PvE farming is better, is there any item or dungeon that I should focus on more than an other?

The only stronger gear in the game is ascended, and unless you are doing high level fractals it generally won’t fall from the sky. You can craft it, but to do that you have to buy the crafting materials, so it is basically the same as buying it from the TP. You can spend laurels to get ascended rings, amulets, and trinkets, though.

Otherwise, what you buy on the TP is as strong as it gets. Whether it is crafted, dropped from enemies, or bought from a vendor, level 80 exotic gear all have the same stats.

Well, there’s a few options:

if you wanna go the dungeon route, doing them nets you decent amounts of gold if you do each alternate path of each dungeon once per day. The rewards once you finish a path diminish each time you repeat the same path within the game reset time. You also get the bonus of gaining dungeon tokens to purchase specific gear from a vendor in lion’s arch but they’re no stronger than any other lvl80 exotic gear you’d get elsewhere. It’s mostly just about the skins. The only dungeons that offer token gear with berserker stats are CoF, CoE, and arah so i’d focus on those 3 if you wanna get gear with tokens.

You can also purchase exotic 80 armor from the various Temple’s for Karma. Each temple offers different stats. Keeper Jonez @ Cathedral of Silence has Berserker armor. If you have a lot of karma saved up, it’ll save you a good amount of money that you can spend on trinkets or weapons elsewhere.

If you make it to the end of the personal story stuff, you get access to the Silverwastes and that’s a pretty decent loot event map. The successful completion of the meta event gets you a good number of rares to sell as well as a bunch of crap loot to sell but it adds up pretty fast if you just want to buy your stuff on the TP.

It all really depends on what you feel like doing or what’s fun to you, whether it’s dungeons, event karma farming, etc.. The loot system for GW2 mostly revolves around getting stuff to sell to the TP to get $ instead of getting drops your character can actually use so that’s probably going to be the quickest route.

Ok, so I should invest extra gold to get berserker daggers to replace the assassin’s ones in that case I guess? They cost about 4g each but berserker ones were 8g each. I also didn’t mess with crafting, do I have to level it up to make anything that’s worth something or I should just forget about it?

Ascended (purple) equipment is the best tier in this game, you can get the rings etc. with laurels at the vendor weapons, armor and backback need to be crafted. Both has a very low drop chance from chests and bags.

There are only 2 places you would need that over exotic (orange) equipment currently n the game those are wvw roaming and high level fractals. Everywhere else exotic gear will do. You do not need to optimize the equipment except for those 2 sections of the game. However in wvw roaming you will need the best gear you can have if you really want to stand a chance. If you do fractals you will aquire the necessary stuff while progressing here.

If you want to go for ascended gear get the rings etc 1st, then craft the weapons, then aquire the armor bit by bit.

Currently the only kind of gear that really works for thief is berzerker and valkyrie gear (valkyrie is there to get you some more hp so you mix both). Weapons should be berzerker.

NeoSoul.4198:

Ok, so I should invest extra gold to get berserker daggers to replace the assassin’s ones in that case I guess? They cost about 4g each but berserker ones were 6g each. I also didn’t mess with crafting, do I have to level it up to make anything that’s worth something or I should just forget about it?

Assassin’s is fine. The Berserker stuff does a lil bit more DPS so it’s always considered the most optimal in the game as far as pure damage specs go for thief but assassin’s is a close 2nd. If your not overly obsessed with min/maxing damage builds, i wouldn’t worry about buying Berserker stuff to replace your assassin’s gear.

Crafting sucks at first since the stuff you’ll make is basically garbage to sell/salvage and it’s made just for the sake of leveling the discipline but once you get to 400 you can start crafting your own exotic 80 equipment. So yeah, it’ll take some time leveling up which, depending on how many mats and money you have, could take either 30 mins or 30 days. Just all depends what you’re working with before you start craft leveling. For now though, I’d say save crafting for another day when you have a decent amount of mats and $ and just focus on doing dungeons/events to make the $ to purchase on the TP.