80’s: Sylvari Necromancer (Main). Human: Thief, Warrior (PvP Main), Engineer. Charr Guardian
Leveling.
Thief leveling is more time consuming, I wouldn’t say harder. Start doing more hearts, story quests earlier and go exploring more often.
As a thief you really have to keep updating your armor, which will cost a lot of coin sadly. Otherwise you will end up doing too little damage with too little survivability to finish tough quests or face more than one enemy. I also suggest, if you haven’t already, using sigil of bloodlust even at low levels, to increase your power, usually they come at about 1 silver or so.
I don’t know about elementalist, I didn’t have much fun leveling as one because of their awful damage with staff, and squishiness with daggers, but yeah warrior is quite good at pve, but to counter that, warrior is really bad at pvp, compared to thief.
The best option I’ve found is to focus on condition damage while kiting to avoid hits, and use the crap out of stealth to give you some breathing room while the bleeds/poison tick away.
This works with D/D, P/D, P/P, and SB.
I ended up using the shortbow a lot more than any other weapons, cuz I just couldn’t stay alive against multiple monsters otherwise. But it’s really boring to run around clusterbombing.
I forgot, Caltrops is pretty much mandatory to survive against a group of enemies as well, unless you use P/D very specifically and can spam Dancing Dagger.
Yes, the Thief levelling is somewhat harder than with some other classes, but S/P and Signet of Malice is the way to go (even after nerf), it gives solid blindness spam and aoe cone damage, which heals pretty rapidly if getting hit (more mobs, more healing). This weapon set solved pretty much all of my previous leveling problems, I was stacking power/crit mainly (crit first for the initiative regen on crit trait).
#ELEtism 4ever
Blindness spam with an offhand pistol, and a shortbow is the way to go.
I forgot, Caltrops is pretty much mandatory to survive against a group of enemies as well, unless you use P/D very specifically and can spam Dancing Dagger.
The formula to this 9perma-cripple) is kite and every 4 auto attacks you throw a DD. It keeps the enemy infini-crippled.
Thief leveling is EASY.
It’s as easy as leveling Sword+Focus/Greatsword Guardian. (which is REALLY easy)
Most enemies attack so slowly that you can exploit spam-able blinds and literally never take damage. You can spec and gear for Power/Crit/CritDmg and plow through mobs (even veterans) extremely quickly without ever taking damage while only using a couple of buttons.
For example:
If you’re facing a single mob at a time, use Dagger/Pistol; Hit #3 to teleport to a mob and blind them, let your auto attack chain finish once, hit 3 to blind them again, auto attack chain, hit 3 again…. etc.
Most mobs attack so slowly that you can keep Blind on them for every single attack and you’ll take literally 0 damage.
If you get an add, stop using #3 and switch to #5 instead to blind both of them.
If you’re in a dense area where you regularly get 3+ mobs on you at a time, switch to sword/pistol and use nothing but #5 and auto attack.
It doesn’t work in PvP or against champions, but for leveling, it’s SUPER effective.
Just build for Crit/CritDmg/Power and pick up major traits that up your kill speed as you go such as {Furious Retaliation}, {Critical Haste}, {Executioner}, {Sundering Strikes}, {Dagger Training}, {Combined Training}, {Assassin’s Retreat}.
Use [Hide in Shadows] as your heal so you can remove any damaging conditions, and the rest of your utility skills really don’t matter. I just use 3 Signets(power, precision, runspeed) to increase my killspeed and [Thieves Guild] as my Ultimate to plow through even difficult-to-solo storyline quests.
I think It’s MUCH easier to level this way than with a condition build or trying to kite.
(edited by phor.7952)
One issue with thieves is that being a medium armor class with low health and no built in aggro-avoidance for solo play like pets or above average healing , they are very weak at the baseline. However, they have a number of really good traits and utilities that can make a huge difference as you rise in level, so it should get less difficult the higher level you get. That’s not to say it’s ever easy per se, I still die more often on my thief than i do on my other toons (in part because of a near-useless downed set that rarely results in either being able to rally or escape the fight), but it does get less ridiculous.
I did notice that at low levels thieves are very noticeably harder to play than most other professions, I was laughing hysterically about how faceroll the Guardian I just started leveling was in comparison.
Perhaps I’m ignorant because my Thief is the only character I’ve really put any PvE time into (I have alts but mostly just do SPvP with them), but PvE has been easy as heck with my Thief.
I’m in my low 20s, and been building for crit and damage. I use dual daggers 90% of the time, and use the shortbow for quick-travelling and occasions where I need to get out of dodge or hit from afar.
Basically, this is how fights go for me:
Single mob: Cloak & Dagger, backstab, autoattack combo, heart seeker. The end.
(The C&C/backstab and autoattack order is interchangeable, obviously.)
Multiple mobs: Pretty much the same as above, except may throw in a Death Blossom or two, and will use my other Stealth skills for more backstabs.
Mobs go down hilariously fast with this method. I’m always watching other people have drawn out fights while I just cleave through stuff and keep going.
The above of course doesn’t even factor in when I use Steal, which just makes the kill that much faster usually.
My crit chance is over 50% (not including the 7% bonus for being on the sides/rear). I can kill your average mob in around 5 seconds.
If you get into trouble, just dodge, stealth/heal, switch to bow and teleport, etc.
I can’t stand the short bow for actual primary combat, as it does SUCH low damage, but I like the teleport for travel.
I dabbled with pistol + dagger last night, and again it was hilariously easy. Bleed em a few times, use rapid shot skill, if they get close either use the stab/teleport or just throw a dagger. I literally don’t even get hit with this method, it just doesn’t kill as insanely fast as my daggers so I don’t bother.
I have a Guardian friend who dies way more often than me, does way less damage, and travels at half my speed.
Am I just not aware of the ease and awesomeness of other classes in PvE?
(edited by calidus.4381)
At lowlvl my guardian was best.. But due to my mobility on my thief he quickly advanced passed my guardian.