Guild Wars 2

I play a heavy burst/backstab thief, build here , and I read somewhere that vitality and toughness will be essential in Fractals 10+. I’m having some difficulty finding gear that suits my playstyle, ideally precision, toughness, vitality. I was thinking about working on getting the Orrian Reward Armor as it is power, precision, toughness, but I’m not sure that will give me enough survivablity for the higher lvl dungeons. Advice?

I switched from D/D-SB to P/P-SB after fotm 13. I kept having to gimp my damage by adding more and more vitality/toughness. When I switched to pistols I switched to more glass (0 30 30 10 0, all berserker armor and trinkets except karka and solor/lunar rings. With lifesteal food and the sheer volume of attacks, it’s much easier to glassify myself in fotm and any dungeon really.

You “can” get further with D/D but you will eventually hit a brick wall where it’s futile to try to melee in fotm effectively.

This probably isn’t the advice you were looking for – just figured I’d give some input from a former D/D thief (for pve anyway – I still D/D in WvW).

Xenth has a point. While Pistol/Pistol is extremely boring and doesn’t offer many Conditions or Utilities it does put out respectable damage and allows you to get away with a lot more offensive gear.

If you want to melee however a full glass-cannon isn’t viable, not even with Omnomberry Pie.

You already have 20 points in Shadow Arts and Acrobatics so that’s a decent base-line of survivability.

Stat wise Vitality is better for Thieves than Toughness as a high HP pool will help you survive more often than lots of armor.

So that leaves Valkyrie gear, which offers Power, Crit-Damage and Vitality. The upside is that all stats are useful, especially with Power being your best DPS stat. The downside is that you won’t have a lot of Precision, which again can be somewhat mitigated by the Hidden Killer trait.

You could also get Soldier gear with Power, Toughness, Vitality…but again, you will find yourself with little Precision. Knights gear can be viable too, but the low amount of Power makes it rather unattractive.

Essentially is all comes down to a matter of personal taste in mixing
Valkyrie’s – Power, Crit-Damage, Vitality
Soldier’s – Power, Toughness, Vitality
Knight’s – Toughness, Precision, Power
Berserker’s – Power, Crit-Damage, Precision

My general advice would be:
1. Get Crit-Damage from Jewels whenever you can (it’s more effective that way)
2. Aim for at least 16.000 HP if you want to melee
3. Switch traits constantly
4. Carry around at least 1 Sword and 1 Pistol to switch weapon-sets according to your current Fractal.

I chose Valkyrie for it’s Power, Crit, and VITALITY.

Hidden Killer is definitely a good idea if you want to use a weapon other than dagger in your offhand to keep backstab very menacing to enemies.

And for Thieves, you’ll want more HP over toughness as if you didn’t end the fight fast then you’ll probably want to high-tail it out of there.

I primarily use Carrion gear, but I’m a heavy condition/bleed thief, not a backstab/bust thief.

No stay burst. just replace about half your armor with valk. get the berserker ascended rings. and valk exotic earings and amulet. if you get around 15k hp you will be fine for higher fractals the main point of the hp is not tank boss hits but to survive conditions and trash mobs. you can also use the trait that convert 5% precision to bit for a free boost of hp.

I personally use the 5% precision to bit cause with my gear I have around 64% crit chances with signet around 68 with food around 70%+ and if there is a fury giver in the party around 90+ so no need to get past 65% crit chance in my opinion.