How many ways to build a thief? For example, as a mesmer, one can build it as a PU, a phantams, a shatter, or an Interrupt mesmer; as an engineer, a toolkit, grende/bomb engineer; a necro, a MM, Well, etc. necro.
As a thief, what kinds of builds that are available? I know some people play a Venom build. And what else?
I have been leveling a thief on and off for a while and will soon reaching level 60. I enjoy it and have tried various combination of weapons and traits. So far it has been a bit random, experimenting at best. I now want to use various thief builds as a guideline trying to find something that I can work into my prefer play style. I do mostly PvE and occassionally WWW.
Oh My God, someone finally came here to ask instead of troll or QQ. There are a bit of builds. Power builds utilize Sword Dagger or Dagger dagger, even Dagger Pistol and Sword Pistol, so power builds for thieves are the most diverse Id say. Condi builds usally use PD or even DD albeit rarely, and yes Venom builds are usually PD based. But for most diversity go power. DD and DP are stealth builds, mainly DD with dagger off hand cloaking where DP has some stealthing but uses blinds fare more. Sword mainhand builds usually use less stealth. In fact there are Sword dagger builds that are all about evading which are very fun but not as powerful burst wise as Dagger mainhand due to backstab not being available. Sword Pistol if usually about control and channeled damage via pistol whip but once again, no stealth. Very few builds use Pistol Pistol but most builds use Shortbow as offhand
Nooooo, I am not trolling… or QQ…. I geniunely want to know.
Apart from Power-Condi diversity, what other ways to construct a build? I saw a roll-evade tank thief once on YouTube. It looked fun but other than trolling people in PvP, it does nothing else.
Recently I am using P/P again but don’t particular find anything unique about it – BUT I am still experimenting and keep my mind open still. In terms of ranged damage, is SB higher?
By the way, in terms of different builds, how traits point are generally spent? Just want to have a rough idea for different basic templates.
Any decent hybrid, support or control build for thief?
You seem to understand mesmer so I will take that as a base for comparison.
Mesmers have great synergy between traits in different trait lines, if youmake a mesmerbuild you usually fous on getting traits from different trait lines that support what you want to do, for example PU and reduced recharge on torch, or shatter skills with clones on dodge etc. You can create very distinct builds that way but you also have to do that so the number of builds is rather low.
Thieves have only very weak synergy between trait lines and traits, the traitlines stand more on their own, so basically you can combine more stuff but the effect is less distinct and has less synergy than in the case of mesmers. This allows for a very high varietly of builds but the variation is often very subtle, it can make huge difference in the gameplay though.
Basically you have a huge number of different builds that work, especially in wvw.
I usually base my game against “fellow thieves” on guessing if they run a uitility heavy build (30 points trickery) a crit build (30 points crit strikes) or a condition build (which usually is P/D, though not confined to that) or maybe a “hybrid” which combines any of those.
You seem to understand mesmer so I will take that as a base for comparison.
Mesmers have great synergy between traits in different trait lines, if youmake a mesmerbuild you usually fous on getting traits from different trait lines that support what you want to do, for example PU and reduced recharge on torch, or shatter skills with clones on dodge etc. You can create very distinct builds that way but you also have to do that so the number of builds is rather low.
Thieves have only very weak synergy between trait lines and traits, the traitlines stand more on their own, so basically you can combine more stuff but the effect is less distinct and has less synergy than in the case of mesmers. This allows for a very high varietly of builds but the variation is often very subtle, it can make huge difference in the gameplay though.
Basically you have a huge number of different builds that work, especially in wvw.
I usually base my game against “fellow thieves” on guessing if they run a uitility heavy build (30 points trickery) a crit build (30 points crit strikes) or a condition build (which usually is P/D, though not confined to that) or maybe a “hybrid” which combines any of those.
Oh I see! Thanks!
Yes, I play Mesmer as my main so I sort use that as a template for my thinking.
In that case, I will keep experimenting my thief until I work something out that suit me. I suppose thief in some ways are a bit more flexible than mesmer. But without a strong synergy between traitlines and possible builds, thief do not seem to be able to enhance their skills via picking suitable traits (like mesmers do).
