Guild Wars 2

I started about 2 1/2 months ago, leveled a thief to 80, and had what I expect is a pretty typical transition into HoT: I died. A LOT! Fast forward a few weeks and I’m able to handle pretty much anything the jungle throws at me.

My goal here is to share what worked for me so that other new players may benefit. Also, if any established players would like to offer alternative perspectives, critique my build/explanation, etc. Please feel free!

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQRAoa6an8lCFOhFmCOOBkmiFYCTLBEAyAephFVbYOEeCbhA-TRSDQBvQ9HAYybgnEgEcABlgH4JB8ElD9QJHP2fAE6PIDg+YA-e

D/P primary, with P/P for ranged backup
DD/DA/Tr
Full berserker, pack runes, sigils of air/draining
Heal: Channeled Vigor
Utility 1: Signet of Agility
Utility 2: Bandit’s Defense
Utility 3: Assassin’s Signet
Elite: Impact Strike
(Situational: Dagger Storm for area effect damage and projectile reflect.)

Strengths: Extensive use of interrupts to prevent incoming damage, strong burst damage, excellent mobility and evasion.

Weaknesses: No area effect damage, low health, low armor.

Basic Strategy: Use shadow shot to shadowstep to targets and apply blind and begin your auto-attack chain. Use head shot as needed to score interrupts. You can also interrupt with steal, bandit’s defense, and impact strike. Scoring an interrupt applies torment with pressure striking, pulmonary impact with impacting disruption, as well as stealing life with sigil of draining. It’s a lot of damage and will take enemies down fast!

If you can time your interrupts well, you should be able to shadowstep in, burst down most non-veteran enemies in just a few seconds while taking little/no damage in return, and dodge/shadowstep away to avoid other enemies/projectiles closing on you.

On the defensive side, you have three large endurance refills (steal, channeled vigor, signet of agility) plus smaller refills on physical skill and auto-attack usage. Running unhindered combat you can dodge endlessly, cover ground faster than any enemy you encounter, and you can only be locked down with stuns/knockdowns – and you have a short cooldown stun break plus block (bandit’s defense) to counter those!

For healing, channeled vigor is extremely powerful and has a rather short cooldown, mug is a great heal on demand as well, your successful evades heal you, and if you can unlock sigils of draining even your interrupts will heal you!

Example scenario: A coztic shadowleaper and coztic bladedancer in close proximity.

This was a no-win situation when I first reached the jungle, but this build gives me all the tools I need to win that fight handily!

Begin by either shadow shot on the bladedancer (shadowleapers evade ranged attacks) or simply dodge into melee range to engage the shadow leaper. Use impacting strike to score a 2 second daze on the leaper that will prevent it from using skills (and you will likely score an interrupt as well!). You can attempt to follow up the attack chain for this skill. If you succeed, the shadow leaper should be dead. But if you didn’t shadow shot the blade dancer first, it will probably try to stun you and rip your face off. Use bandit’s defense to break stun, use the counter after you block to finish the leaper and then either go for an interrupt or apply blind with shadow shot and take the bladedancer down (although dodging away and swapping to p/p will take them down almost as quickly and with less risk!).

If they evade away from you, start dodging to avoid the powerful arrow attacks they will send flying at you. But keep in mind that you want to close distance with shadow leapers in the process (shadow shot is unreliable as a gap closer on leapers) and create distance between you and the blade dancer.

If you slip up and they take you down to low health, dodge away, refill your health and endurance with channeled vigor, and shadowstep back into the fray! You can do it again to cover the heal cooldown with the block from bandit’s defense and the refill from signet of agility, too! Basically, you can do this all day long and only die if they take your health down before you can react!

Plan B: You can dodge up to about 8 times continuously with this build and unhindered combat is a long dodge. Run away and live to fight another day! Nothing can catch you!

Apologies for the lengthy post! I hope some of it helps. And I look forward to hearing other strategies that work for running around solo as a thief in open world HoT!

This looks really good, but torment on interrupt is really only good if you’re condi, so no real need to take that. You’d be better off with bountiful theft for the vigor, or trickster and using withdraw heal. Brawler’s tenacity is alright since you’re using a lot of physical skills, but if you’re finding that you’re still taking too much damage, you can always swap to weakening strikes and your survivability will go up a lot more. If you’re still dying a lot, I’d recommend some Valk gear, but you should be fine with zerkers.

Instead of P/P, you can always run Shortbow for some AoE, or even staff. I kinda feel like the new weps were designed for the new maps as staff gives a LOT of AoE out, profectile reflect on AA, a ton of evades, weakness on demand as well as blindness in a line to hit multi-target. And Vault is just so good. You can even run bound if you’re using staff and get a ton of evades out of it with channeled vigor, but just be sure to use staff mastery along with it.

I raid with my guild and hardly die when using staff with bound as there’s just so many evades. Also, bound and black powder gives on demand stealth with very little initiative cost. All things you can try, but your build looks pretty great!