Guild Wars 2

I am SB/DD (level 33, 10cs/10sa) and I can only take two or three hits from a silver mob before I die (specifically Ascalon Catacombs). I’m decent at dodging, but after those two dodges, and using hide in shadows, it’s over. Melee combat? Forget it. I can barely get to the mob before my health is gone. Is this something I should get used to until reaching a higher level or am I not doing something that I should be? I really want to play thief but if there’s no way to avoid dying this much I’ll stay away from dungeons.

Dungeons … I’ve been dreading them. The biggest advantage to the Thief is her mobility; she can leap into and out of fights like no one else. She’s fast, slippery, and can flank the hell out of you. BUT, you put me in a hallway and I’m dead.

Thieves can excel at melee if they’ve got the room to move; they do great burst damage, they can move in and out of shadows very quickly, do extra damage from flanks and shadow attacks – against one person a melee Thief can tears stuff up … just hope that person doesn’t have any friends. (or you have a lot of room to move, you can take on a crowd of melee foes with with a thief, but you get a couple melee enemies and toss in a ranged foe and you’re not doing so well)

One thing to keep in mind is your Steal ability. Not only can it give you some great extra powers, but it will toss you right into melee range with your target, so you don’t have to charge up to them while they whittle you down with ranged attacks. (and if you get closed to a ranged enemy with your melee skills and, yeah, they’re done) Steal can be an easy power to forget about in the heat of battle, but I encourage you to keep it in mind; it can be a game changer.

Stealing from the spirits in AC gives you the Fear ability. Which is awesome to use as a CC.
Don’t always focus on increasing damage in a dungeon, throwing in blinds, weaknesses, stuns, etc and your own survivability in the mix is essential. This is what I feel is a common mistake people make when doing dungeons

Excellent advice, folks, it gives me hope. Steal is something that I haven’t really used given it’s awkward placement on the UI, but maybe I can change that hot-key to something more intuitive than the F1 key to make it easier to incorporate into my mob encounters. I don’t know why the function keys feel so wrong.

My PvE build tends to be as tanky as possible for AC explore mode (Had to switch out my heal skill for hide in shadows in Sorrow’s Embrace explore though, due to the insanity of the burning and posion.)

I very rarely take off Signet of Malice, as with the shortbow, it’ll proc heals three times due to the bounce.

I also use Sword/Pistol, once I’m in melee against swarms of Gravelings, Pistol Whip becomes my most useful heal skill, as I’ll hit multiple targets all around me, providing plenty of healing from Signet, I can also dodge for caltrops to evade/kite mobs.

In my final build I will also be using the sigils to heal on kill, and 30% chance to heal allies on my sword/pistol build. Essentially I play thief off-tank in Dungeons, as I’m either in a very static position and self-healing, or using evades and shortbow (With the +healing power sigil) to kite and heal up as much as possible.

The Blackpowder from Offhand-Pistol and the (3) of D/P are perfect for damage mitigation. My guildies were wondering if the boss we were fighting yesterday was bugged ‘cause it did almost no damage. I just constantly blinded him and interrupted the channeling of his AoE’s.

Use Scorpion Wire to pull single foes out of packs and kill them individually. As spore posted, use Shadow Shot for single foes and Black Powder for multiple foes to keep the blind up. Use Head Shot to interrupt casting.