Leveling a thief? Need help.
Personally, Id recommend avoiding stealth based skills for leveling. While its one of the more viable options due to survivability and damage output with dagger, it’ll limit your thiefy playstyle which, at least for me, is about the dodges. From there it’s just up to how you want to play. Sword pistol is a good way to go for sure, especially if you aren’t using stealth, other than that I’d recommend shortbow. Getting used to how to use shortbow is important, as its the most versatile aspects of thief. It does less damage than the others, but will let you get a feel for kiting, actively using your camera effectively (Assuming you are relatively knew), will let you fight more monsters more reliably, and its our main means of conveyance. As far utilities, you’ll probably want the all the signets early on, just because they are easy and clear to use, noting that signet of malice is probably our best pve heal if you are good about maintaining dps. Outside that, shadowstep, withdrawl, ambush trap, caltrops(if you are using signet of malice and want to facetank 10mobs), and smokescreen all are good early pickups. Scorpion wire and the other traps also make for fun pickups, while less practical than the forementioned. You’ll probably want to avoid the poisons, as they are pretty reliant on condi builds or being ~level 80. As far as traits, acrobatics is a good one to start out with, as it has most of the nonstealth based survivability (outside daredevil) while offering more dodges, which is good as learning to properly dodge is massive on thief. Other than that, Crit strikes, deadly arts, and trickery all offer good directions to go in for utility and/or damage. Deadly arts and trickery probably will offer you more than crit strikes in terms of learning and fun. Crit strikes is the way to go if you want straight damage and plan to play a zerk build, but once again you dont really need that much extra damage while leveling, especially if you already are running zerk stats and keeping up on your gear while leveling.
Overall, i’d def recommend the dodgey oriented route, as it’s, in my opinion, way more fun than pretending to be sneaky, and will likely prove to be more educational. Don’t get me wrong, learning to use stealth is MASSIVE, but it doesn’t teach you anything to use it against mobs that don’t respond to you going into stealth. Besides, you can dress up as a ninja and be doing flips and somersaults. (PS learn to jumpdodge)
Hope this helps!.
December 1st : http://i.imgur.com/x7PIK1N.gifv
Point is we aren’t lying when we say that everything you need is Sword/Pistol
Pistol 5# makes you pretty much immune to anything except ranged damage.
And that last one can be overcome by wise use of terrain.
Its true that builds are often listed as lvl 80. The catch is that builds in a general way matter nothing until that level.
That said:
1- Grind becomes easier as soon you have access to Pistol 5# Blind field.
2- Together with Pistol, you can use Dagger for DPS or Sword for hitting a higher number of enemys at the same time.
3 – For ranged damage you can use either shortbow or Double pistol as far as grinding goes. P/P has more damage potential to single targets but Shortbow has poison fields, extra dodges, AOE damage and infinite shadow steps
When training, start with either Trickery or Critical Strikes. Once you have both you can go with Deadly Arts once you have enough level to use 3 lines.
For utility skills, I would start with Signet Line and then move to Deception or Tricks depending of your preferences.
Thanks much to you both for pointing me in the right direction. I’ll explore those options. It was mostly for the levely part of the game. Once 80 I’ll try to see how and what I want to do most but just wanted a good push in the right direction.
Thanks again!