Guild Wars 2

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have 8 characters, one of each class. 5 of them are 80, and I just finished all PvE maps with all of them yesterday. That’s 301 hearts x 5, so far, and altogether I have about 60 gold between them. That’s not really a whole lot, because buying mats to make exotics would make me go completely broke just to gear out one guy. That’s not an option for me, and I’m not exactly Wall Street 1% material. That’s why I’m a thief, but unfortunately I can’t literally steal my way to a rich life in the game, so…

The bottom line is, my thief is in berserker armor and weapons, from about a month ago when the trading post prices weren’t ridiculous. But I have rare jewelry on. Toughness with beryl gems in the slots, for now. I did this so I could survive Orr and the ludicrousness of that place, but I haven’t set foot in there in a few weeks, now. I’ve been running around with a sword/pistol and a shortbow. But you see, I want to start doing WvW, now, and from all I’ve been reading, sword/pistol in WvW is just too silly to consider. Dagger/dagger seems to be where it’s at, right? The ole’ backstab build that everyone has been complaining about. Or has it been nerfed into the ground? Either way, I need to make a decision, and I literally can’t afford to make a mistake. I have orichalcum and gems to make my exotic jewelry, and I have barely enough blood to make two exotic daggers. Trouble is, I don’t know what to do. Is glass cannon for me? I don’t really like dying, and how long until all my repair bills cause me to become a beggar in Lion’s Arch? Is there even a way to be sure, without going broke to find out?

Why don’t you experiment with various builds in the Mists? It’s free, and playing several games along with dueling random people can really help you figure out where you want to take your character.

It’s obviously not the same as WvW, but at least you can try out the various amulets and weapon sets. You’ll probably learn very quickly if a build works for you or not. Don’t just go with the flow, a lot of these copy / paste builds are really not all that good. You’ll likely need some more survivability if you are going to roam solo.

P.S.: Backstab still works, but I personally wouldn’t recommend using it. When you encounter (and you will..) smarter players, they’ll punish you hard for using it.

Well, if you don’t want to spend gold on something you may not need, I suggest you go to spvp and try few different builds before you take on WvW. When you find the one that suits you best, you’ll be ready to go. Besides, experience gained in spvp is priceless, as usually pvp players >>>>wvw players.

sword/pistol actually works great in WvW. the pistol whip nerf was painful, but not build breaking. knights armor, valkyrie accessories if you want more survivability, or you can go full berserker and still survive quite well as long as you know what you are doing. repair bills hardly matter in WvW as well, you will make more money than you lose unless you go upgrade crazy and never win a fight. and as people have said, mess around in the mists to find a basic idea of the setup you want to use.

I don’t care for the back stab. It is more of a build for roaming around, flipping camps and catching individual players running back to their zerg.

With a zerg, you can get a intagib on someone but it has a cool down and you are not likely to be doing much while waiting for that cool down. You can maybe harass the other players while you wait but you have to be careful. If the zerg has plenty of AOE or backed up by a arrow cart, you can take enough damage fast enough to die. If the zerg has a few player paying attention, you can also get CC and downed fast. I’ve seen warriors and guardians handle those types of situations far far better than a thief.

You won’t be repairing doors under fire. I’ve tried while waiting for reinforcements. Too much damage too fast and you get maybe 1 tick off of the repair. Any AOE on the wall will hurt you quite easily so it can be really difficult to use your short bow cluster bomb. You have to stand on the edge of the wall typically to make it useful because the range is real short so I get “out of range” even when I’m not targeting anyone so it can be difficult at best to be able to use that ability in the first place.

People are are also learning how to deal with the instagib. People have gotten out of mine and were fast enough to lock me down and have their way with me. People are learning how to deal with your one trick and counter that trick. Just not enough are learning fast enough or care to learn fast enough. I went after enough thieves to learn how to deal with that trick. You will die a few times but that is part of the learning curve. I’ve had to do that with a few classes.

In W3, I wanted to be more useful than just that one trick.

I’m full glass cannon. Everything about my thief is geared for all out damage. I love it. However if I let my guard down for any amount of time I will die for sure. If you need defensive gear to survive Orr then glass cannon is NOT for you. A ton of players are terrible and playing a glass cannon thief will wreck them but it just takes one good warrior, thief, mesmer, guardian, necromancer, ranger, engineer, or ele to kill you.

Now if your aiming to be a walking god in WvWvW in the art of trolling get full invader armor (Just Power, Toughness, Vitality). Put 30 into shadow arts and 20 into acrobatics. Take healing when in stealth and condition removal with speed in stealth as well. Nobody on gods green earth will be able to catch you and your going to heal through anything they can throw your way. Go with S/D and float in the zerg.

If you spec yourself right you can become the reincarnation of Steve Irwin kitten off everyone with constant CnD.

Sets that I know of to make building this way cheaper (not using gold) that I know of are AC, SoE, and Invader. I’m sure there are others but still you get the idea. As for repair it costs me about 1-2 silver every time I get killed. I usually can drop enough people to get full stacks of Blood Thirstier so I make 20~50 silver depending on my drops.

Good Luck!

As Professor Sensei.2941 said, if you need any defensive gear to survive in Orr then full glass cannon isn’t for you, however, you seem to be treating this like a case of “If I don’t make the right choice I’m screwed” which isn’t even close to true, it’ll just take some time to get the other materials… especially given the improved drop rate of T6 materials and the fact that Orichalcum and Ancient Wood are so easy to find.

Even though i think you should stay in spvp/ tpvp it is a good place to practice builds in.

go for the warrior mate, you can’t go wrong with it !

DanH.5879:

go for the warrior mate, you can’t go wrong with it !

I’ve seen plenty of warriors gone wrong…

I think you’re going about acquiring gear the wrong way if you’re that concerned with money.
I’ve never had close to 60g’s yet my thief and elementalist are both in full exotics.

I ran CoF and Arah a few times for my thief to get power/prec/crit dmg gear and stuck ruby orbs on everything because divinity runes are stupid expensive. Luckily, I have 400 jewelry so I was able to make each trinket for only the cost of ectos. (I farm ori a lot).
I paid 5g’s for a superior sigil of fire and my quiver cost around 30g’s in mats, but they weren’t exactly necessary.

For my ele, I ran AC for power/vit/toughness gear and CM for vit/healing/cnd damage daggers. The AC gear came with two of the superior monk runes I needed so the last four major/superior water ones were less than 1g. Again, I was able to craft my jewelry again for only the cost of the ectos.

tl;dr: Dude, just run dungeons. You earn tokens for the gear plus gold and loot.