Guild Wars 2

I will hold a few posts for me to update and work on this guide! Since I’m working full-time it will take some time to get it done, but I’ll hopefully have it completed during the week.

After reading and replying to a ton of posts in these forums about the Thief’s place in the different parts of the game and its mechanics, I figured there should be a guide for new thieves to read and learn the basics of the Thief profession.

I got the inspiration for creating such a guide from the Guardian forums and the guide created by Eveningstar. That guide helped me a lot when I started with my Guardian, and it saved the Guardian forum for a ton of questions from my side regarding builds, weapons, traits and skills.

This guide will probably remind you of Eveningstar’s guide since that’s where I got my inspiration for writing this guide from. You’ll find some similarities in how the guide is built and formatted, so I think he deserve some credit

So, you’re new to the Thief and want to learn the basics of the profession? Then this guide could be the thing for you. This is my first attempt to create a comprehensive guide, but I’ll do my best to not dishonor my fellow thieves.

This guide will attempt to do the following:

• Introduce new players to the basics of their new class
• Let you decide if the Thief is something for you or not
• Talk about the different weapon sets and their uses
• Take a look at the different skills at our disposal
• A brief overview of the traits
• Crush some of the mysteries, myths and rumors regarding the Thief

Good reasons to play a Thief:

• You like to play with other peoples feelings (tears will be shed when you hit someone for 20k)
• You enjoy the challenge of being squishy and therefore have to actively avoid damage
• You want to wait in the shadows for the right time to attack
• You enjoy solo roaming
• You prefer tiny weapons
• You like having a good overview of every situation
• You like the idea of combining several conditions (traits, sigils, etc) to increase your damage at the right moment

Bad reasons to play a Thief:

• You want to crush skulls from the front lines
• You want to lead an army of men head-first into combat
• You hate evading
• You think the Thief is OP and want to one shot people in WvW
• You think stealth means invincibility

So what is a Thief? What do we do and what’s our role? Well. The Thief is a deceptive class designed to assassinate others. We rely on stealth, shadowsteps, blinds, evades and burst damage to survive and kill our enemies. We excel in 1v1 situations and are one of the few professions able to run full berserker in all the different game modes. Our survivability doesn’t come from armor or health, those are very limited resources for a Thief – we rely on actively avoiding damage to survive. In the right hands we’re one of the deadliest professions in this game. Good thieves never die – which is true. If you know how to engage and disengage you’ll be nearly impossible to kill. I’ll talk more about our place in the different game modes later in this guide.

• Melee to Medium Range: Against few opponents we excel with melee weapons. Our damage output can be insane if timed right. We have limited ranged alternatives as our longest ranged attack is 900.

• Mitigating Damage: We need to actively avoid damage. Our low health pool and low armor won’t help against that Kill Shot – you’ll have to evade it or have him miss his target.

• Versatility: We excel with power/crit builds, but we can certainly run condition builds too. We change a lot between ranged and melee, invisible and visible, here and there – everywhere. A Thief select his fights. If we doesn’t want to attack, we can simply disengage and wait for the right moment.

Things to know about the Thief: Conditions/Boons, Stealth, Shadowsteps and Initiative

Conditions/Boons:

We have access to the following boons:

• Might
• Fury
• Swiftness
• Vigor
• Stability
• Regeneration

And the following conditions:

• Cripple
• Weakness
• Vulnerability
• Blind
• Bleed
• Poison
• Torment
• Immobilize
• Chilled

We use our boons to temporarily boost ourself for the next few seconds of deadly rain over our enemy. The most used boons are Might, Fury, Swiftness and Vigor. Conditions isn’t exactly the Thief’s strongest sided, but some of them are really important to use at the right moment! We use offensive conditions that weaken our enemy or give us the edge in a fight. These types of conditions are blinds, immobilizes, cripple, weakness and vulnerability.

Stealth:

This is the main reason I chose the Thief in my first beta event. We can be invisible for a few seconds at the time (possible to stack it, but more on that later). This means that we use it both for offense and defense. We have tons of ways to access stealth, but we’ll get more details on that later.

Shadowstep:

Shadowstepping are essential in some Thief builds. A shadowstep is a “teleport” with a return. We usually cleanse conditions when we shadowstep, but we use it mainly for traveling longer distances instantly. This is used just as much offensively as defensively.

Initiative:

Initiative is the Thief’s resource for weapon skills. We have no cool downs on our weapon skills – we have initiative. This allows us to spam attacks when needed, but we must be careful about never running out of it. Initiative is a shared resource between weapon sets. This means that if I run out of initiative with my daggers, I can’t change to shortbow and have new initiative. Respect this resource and learn how to manage it and you’re far ahed of many other thieves.

Combos:
A Thief has access to every single combo finisher in the game, and we can spam them, abuse them! Our best finisher are built in with a high damage attack that’s ranged and in one of our best weapons: the shortbow. Learn all the combo fields and finishers in the game, and you will be an even greater Thief! Seriously, this is a must!

Weapons

We have access to the following weapons:

Main Hand

• Sword
• Dagger
• Pistol

Off- Hand

• Pistol
• Dagger

Two Handed

• Shortbow

Underwater

• Spear
• Harpoon Gun

Always, and I’ll repeat myself here, always have every single weapon combination available in your inventory! You need to switch them out in between encounters, and you don’t want to find yourself in need of a shortbow and not having it available in your inventory.

I will now give you a brief explanation of every weapon combination available to us.

_Dagger / Dagger

1. Double Strike / Wild Strike / Lotus Strike: Really fast auto attack chain that deals a nice amount of damage, gives you 10 endurance back and applies poison to your target.
   Backstab: Press 1 from stealth. The damage from this attack is insane if you hit from the back! A stab in the front of your enemy will deal 50% of the backstab damage. Requires you to be in stealth to use. This is the bread and butter of all stealth based builds wielding dagger in main hand.
2. Heartseeker: Leap finisher and crazy ammounts of damage when your enemy is below 25% hp. Use this most as a finisher to finish enemies off or to activate a combo field. If needed it can be used to travel a bit faster, so it can also be used defensively.
3. Death Blossom: You evade for a short amount of time while doing a flip over your target. You apply bleeds but deal little direct damage. This is most used in condition builds, but can be very viable as a defense mechanism.
4. Dancing Dagger: You throw a dagger that cripples your foe and can hit up to 4 targets. The damage isn’t the best, but you use this mainly for crowd control.
5. Cloak and Dagger: The damage from this skill can be pretty decent. On top of that you’re giving your enemy 3 stacks of vulnerability and entering stealth for 3 seconds. This is also a part of the main rotation in any stealth based build with dagger off-hand.

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