Guild Wars 2

I know some classes has a skill that turns condi dmg to a boons but as a thief, how to avoid condi damage?

Your main one is to learn tells of damaging attacks and to dodge them.

Thieves Condi removal is either Withdraw or Hide in Shadows heal skill, Signet of Agility, Roll For Initiative, Shadow Step-Return, or trained to sync with other utilities (Shadows Embrace, Trickster, Guarded Initiation, Escapists Absolution, Unhidered Combatant)

So it’s not like Thieves have no Condi removal, just sometimes it’s situational or has to be timed right.

Sigil of generosity and dodge.

Because you’re a nice guy who loves giving those condi’s back to sender right ?

In general terms there are two ways to handle condition damage.

1) Vitality increases your health which allows you to take more damage before you die. Tougness and armour won’t help because conditions ignore armour.

2) Even better are condition removal skills which either simply end conditions early or add extra effects like passing them on to enemies or converting them to boons.

All professions have a range of condition removal skills: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition#Skills_that_remove_conditions

It’s worth making sure you have access to at least one, and which one’s are best will depend on your build.

wow, thanks for amazing answers guys

If you own HOT, try using dash as your ‘elite’ trait, evades remove condi and use withdraw, i play s/d thief and rarely die to condi damage – but thats in pvp and wvw, i rarely play open world content.

To outright avoid the damage watch for the tells and dodge.

That said you will get conditions on you and contrary to conventional wisdom the thief now has ample condition cleanses. More importantly many of those cleanses are specific to certain Conditions which makes removal of the damging ones much more efficient.

PR in the Acro line as example will remove up to 4 damaging conditions meaning weakness , cripple, slow and the like can not act as covers for the same.

Two of our heals have targetted condition cleanses so while Withdraw might only get rid of torment as a damaging condition ,in removing those other three using escapists or some other generic cleanse like shadowstep will be less likely to need to remove those 4 conditions when it required.

So keep them off with the dodges but use your cleanses wisely. IE if you got chill and cripple on you along with burning and poison do NOT use Shadowstep if you traited for unhindered. Use dodge then shadowstep.

As well the meta likes to focus on “everything does damage” and I would not rely on those meta builds. The thief can pump out plenty of damge so if in WvW do not get focused on the consumables or sigils that add more. Dying to conditions does not help your ability to inflict damage if you decided you wanted that air sigil or +100 power food.

In My S/D build I in fact use trickery line with trickster. RFI and SW work wonderfully with the build as designed so those both give an additional cleanse. Having plenty of power I use the food that removes condition on heal so my withdraw removes 6 guaranteed every 14 seconds. (if i take escapists I can remove up to another condition on a withdraw but use PI from DD line instead)

Escapist’s Absolution + Unhindered Combatant can clear 85% of what a normal 1v1 throws at you.

I generally would recommend having both a trait based condition removal and a utility removal. Ideally, when combined, they should together result in having mobility impairment removal (such as taking withdraw as your heal) and damaging condition removal (such as taking Trickster to augment withdraw).

honest answer is know your match up it very hard to con up a thief if you know what your looking for.

Dying is the best way to clear condis

sry don’t have anything to add to the things said before…. Maybe be aware of skill animations and avoid them in the first place ( better said than done ).