Guild Wars 2

Hey Forums, I’ve recently posted a few thief posts as I have started my second account after maxing out my main in exotics. I’ve gotten to level 14 on it, and I just feel so under powered…. I can probably say I get downed in a fight if I have more than 2 enemies on me and I’ve tried every weapon combo.. Is this just from being so low and not having traits yet or am I doing it wrong? The thief is such a popular class IMO so idek how this class is played if I AM doing it right…. Help please?

signet of malice + caltrops + sword / pistol (pistol whip) or dagger/dagger (leaping death blossom) makes solo pve leveling a breaze

His thief is level 14 and Caltrops is Tier 2

Yes, thief is not easy in PvP. My main is a thief and died many times, while the necromancer I started recently is currently level 14, did all her story at the exact recommended level and she hasn’t died once, never even get downed.

Need alot of kiting

I didn’t have any issues with my thief and I wasn’t even paying attention to the stats on my gear or really the benefits of traits.

I was super squishy, but I used stealth a lot and if I ever had a group of mobs on me I would just change to shortbow and kite.

Although what Kajin suggested sounds like a great build for PVE.

I also have a necromancer and leveling him was way easier. If I ever leveled a thief again I would probably do a P/D Condition build as mobs would never really touch you because of C&D.

It helps to know when your enemy is about to strike and dodge them. I do D/D and the 3 skill is amazing for groups. The thief is all about not playing fair. This saying, don’t feel bad about going invisable and striking, then invis agian and repeat.

The “thief is OP” bit is really just a misconception. Our best ally is confusing the opponent as to where we actually are. This does not work vs mobs. Thief will be the most challenging experience in PvE you will have; but it’ll make you a stronger player, just stick with it and good luck ^.^

Thieves generally offer high burst damage with stealth for an escape, which makes the profession quite easy and effective in PvP, but these attributes aren’t particularly useful in PvE content, where high sustained damage and damage mitigation skills are far more useful.

The profession isn’t very forgiving in PvE. You have low hp, low armour and very few skills to mitigate damage and handle conditions. As said, use sword/pistol for the 5 ability on the pistol to blind enemies around you and auto attack. Also grab caltrops as soon as possible as these make it much easier to deal with a group of enemies. You can also use dagger/dagger to spam death blossom until you’re out of initiative then just keep your distance while your bleeds kill everything.

Signet of malice can be better for group fights, but I prefer hide in shadow for the condition removal, stealth and more reliable healing. Also worth noting is the 2nd ability on the sword, which can be used to remove condition when needed.

Sword or dagger in MH and pistol in OH, hit #5 then attack until blind has worn off, repeat for ever and ever and ever… use some initiative gaining utilities and traits if you feel the need.

It’s boring but so (Verb
(in Christian belief) (of God) condemn (a person) to suffer eternal punishment in hell) effective. (Censorship is bad)

Thief wasn’t hard to level. Mesmer is way harder for PVE. Clones get instakilled.

On my thief, I went dagger dagger death blossom and caltrops. You literally put 12+ stacks of bleeds on an entire mob. And then you can run away and wait for them to die or reapply the bleeds. It’s pretty simple. Every other weapon set is inferior for low level thief gameplay. Especially the single target ones.

This is also ones of the most fun build and beats blind, 1 spam of sword pistol.

Theif…Can be tricky to start up but once you get used to it then it becomes decent to solo with.

My thief did the personal story at ~1-2 levels below the recommended level without trouble and for the 20-30 arc ended up finishing the entire thing at level 25 (4 levels below recommended)

Some things I noticed:

At low levels, Signets are amazing (The power one gives like 20ish Power at level 20, which is more than an entire set of Power gear at that level) I ran with 3 Signets until I got Shadow Refuge (Still run 2 Signets + Shadow Refuge (The Movespeed and the Initiative gain ones))

Kiting is your friend, most tricky enemies I dealt with via Death Blossom (D/D #3) to evade their attacks and apply bleed and then kited them around while waiting for initiative to regen.

Later once you have access to some initative regen traits (Critical Strikes 15, Shadow Arts 10, Acrobatics 20) then you can go for a safer way of dealing with things via Cloak and Dagger (Off-hand dagger #5) into Backstab (Dagger main-hand for Power build) or Sneak Attack (Pistol main-hand for Condition build)

Of course you can cheese it with Sword/Pistol using auto-attack and Black Powder which is effective (Except against Dredge) but incredibly boring.

My experience with leveling is that condition damage is amazing and physical damage is underwhelming. A thief can blow enemies up in a couple seconds in high damage exotics, but you’re not going to burst anything down in leveling blues; the difference in base weapon damage is too large, and you just cannot get enough crit to make it worthwhile. A somewhat tanky condition damage build is not very gear dependent, which makes it ideal for leveling up – I recommend it highly.

I’d suggest D/D and P/D for leveling – use Death Blossom spam on most mobs, and pull out the pistol to chip down anything you can’t handle in melee. Prioritize condition damage on all your gear. Trait into Trickery for the raw condition damage boost (which is a big, big deal at low level) and Shadow Arts for the improvements to stealth.

Caltrops is an amazing tool for bleeding out large numbers of foes and is the most powerful offensive utility skill available.

I wouldn’t bother swapping to a physical damage focused build until you’re at least into the 50s (3 stat gear), and even then only if you want to invest frequently in keeping your gear up to date – without at least rare quality weapons, you’re wasting your time.

There are 3 very big problems with Thieves in PvE that are particularly pronounced at low-medium levels and combine to make them one of the hardest classes to get to higher level with. Primarily, it revolves around Stealth being balanced for PvP and consequently being dramatically underpowered as a solo survival tool for PvE given the Thief’s defensive weakness and lack of damage avoidance/mitigation tools. In order of importance, the specific issues are:

1. They go down easily, and the downed state is so atrocious that it has to be an unintentional oversight. Good luck ever getting a rally OR being able to escape anything with it. I’ve found this one to be consistently infuriating while being a thief.

2. Stealth has a number of bugs and efficacy issues from not lasting long enough to not properly dumping aggro to not stopping incoming attacks. Because thieves are extremely squishy and this is their main survival/damage mitigation tool, these issues seriously hurt them and make them feel underpowered in solo play/PvE.

3. MH Pistol is weaker than it should be in terms of both damage output and utility. Because it’s one of only 2 distance-friendly weapons, this does major harm to Thief versatility.

Now, having said all that, there are a couple of tricks in the thief’s arsenal that help alleviate their PvE problems substantially. One of those is Caltrops, which is far and away their best solo survival-oriented utility and one of the best on any class (very arguably overpowered). They are incredibly useful even if you aren’t specced for condition, and even better if you are.

The other is Signet of Malice. Hide in Shadows is fine if you are using D/D (a recommended set-up with a condition spec), but if you enjoy something more like S/P (recommended for power) , the heal from SoM is much better than HiS and will allow you to fight multiple mobs much more easily.

At level 14, Death Blossom, death blossom, dodge, death blossom, dodge and run away for 3 seconds. Repeat this on 3-4 mobs every 20 seconds until you are level 80. It gets better when you get caltrops on dodge at level 20 with the 10 point trait.

Stack Condition gear.

I appreciate the information provided here. I bought the game a few weeks ago, and started playing a thief. It took me a few deaths to realize that I can’t just stand in front of mobs and spam my abilities. Now I’m working towards lvl 20 and I’m mostly comfortable with a D/D condition build.

I was happy to read that also others consider the thief to be squishy in PvE. I still get into trouble easily, mostly when I have bad engagements involving ranged mobs. In comparison, I feel that my elementalist has more upfront damage and gets away with slightly less kiting… but that’s only lvl 8 so far

Make sure and use your Cloak and Dagger (#5) if they’re up and in your face. It will give you some time to reposition, heal, backstab, or get out. You can also stack stealths if you need to. CnD then heal, you’ll be stealthed for a little longer if you get into something you can’t handle.

I don’t know if they changed this but I used to run around with mobs chasing behind me, camera zoomed out all the way and dropping cluster behind me. The arrow would fly behind me and drain the mobs hp. Boring but I could fight 4-5 adds of higher level with out taking any damage(as long as I was faster.)