Guild Wars 2

Hi guys. Hope you can answer my question.

So I’ve been playing thief on and off now and I can’t help but notice how squishy they can get. Now, I’ve tried respeccing traits and read a couple of threads here and found this:

• Dodging is your best friend
• Don’t spend trait points on vitality, since it’s a losing proposition
• Focus all your traits on achieving maximum damage output
• D/D is used for condition damage builds.

I’m currently at level 19 and focusing on D/D. Prior to reading the threads, I originally had focused on putting all my trait points on Power and a little bit on Shadow Arts thinking that it’ll help me a little bit on survivability. With that said, I have these questions:

• Should I focus on Power and Condition damage since i’m using D/D? What skills would be useful for this build?
• How do you effectively use dodge and the dagger skills to avoid taking too many hits? This is crucial for me since I don’t play with thief players a lot and therefore I can’t observe how they do this.
• What kind of gear should I focus on? (+Power, +Prec, etc)?

Many thanks for the help in advance.

lexieternity.7468:

• Don’t spend trait points on vitality, since it’s a losing proposition

I wouldn’t take it just to boost Vitality, but the actual traits you get in Acrobatics are good, though. In particular, Feline Grace (15-point minor trait) and Quick Recovery (20-point major trait).

ASP.8093:

lexieternity.7468:

• Don’t spend trait points on vitality, since it’s a losing proposition

I wouldn’t take it just to boost Vitality, but the actual traits you get in Acrobatics are good, though. In particular, Feline Grace (15-point minor trait) and Quick Recovery (20-point major trait).

Right on the money. Acrobatics has some of the best traits thieves get, and oftentimes even running a heavily offensive build you’ll get more damage out of Acrobatic’s Might stacks than you will out of Deadly Art’s stat bonus.

lexieternity.7468:

Hi guys. Hope you can answer my question.

So I’ve been playing thief on and off now and I can’t help but notice how squishy they can get. Now, I’ve tried respeccing traits and read a couple of threads here and found this:

• Dodging is your best friend
• Don’t spend trait points on vitality, since it’s a losing proposition
• Focus all your traits on achieving maximum damage output
• D/D is used for condition damage builds.

I’m currently at level 19 and focusing on D/D. Prior to reading the threads, I originally had focused on putting all my trait points on Power and a little bit on Shadow Arts thinking that it’ll help me a little bit on survivability. With that said, I have these questions:

• Should I focus on Power and Condition damage since i’m using D/D? What skills would be useful for this build?
• How do you effectively use dodge and the dagger skills to avoid taking too many hits? This is crucial for me since I don’t play with thief players a lot and therefore I can’t observe how they do this.

Many thanks for the help in advance.

Hey, I may not be the right person to give advice, but I’ll try my best.

In terms of stats, I would recommend going for power and condition damage. Since you’re playing a d/d thief, you NEED the condition damage. Daggers are a heavy condition set, so milking the extra condition damage for all it’s worth will really help you out. Power is good if you want immediate damage output, rather than damage over time.

It’s really up to you to figure out which you want more of, or if you focus on them equally. At level 19, it’s kind of hard to tell you what exactly to go for, since you haven’t really found your play style (at least I’ll go ahead and assume).

In terms of traits, if you want to focus on dodging then go into the acrobatics line. It gives plenty of traits that are focused around dodging. At 15 points into acrobatics you get a trait that gives back almost half of an endurance bar every time you dodge. This lets you dodge much more than other classes since you are constantly getting back endurance. I personally can’t go without it.

For a d/d build, go for deadly arts for sure because it boosts condition damage and power. It’s a must if you want to focus on damage.

As for other lines, Trickery is good if you want to focus on stealing and getting more initiative back from it. Critical strikes is really popular as it helps boost your damage output even more through lots of criticals. It also provides skills that are specifically for dagger builds, making it useful. Initially I also went into shadow arts as well, but I found that it was almost useless to me unless I wanted to go support (kind of a boring role for a thief). It just wasn’t as beneficial as other lines.

I would recommend looking at the “post your thief build” thread to get a better idea of how other people are playing and get some ideas for yourself as to how you want to play.

Hope this helps.

I’ll be quite honest with you; sword/pistol is an amazing combination. Not only does it provide great offense, but also good defense. You evade all attacks while using pistol whip and Black Powder is amazing for handling large groups. Not to mention you sword attacks already hit three targets max inherintely. I really, really like sword/pistol for leveling.

Going for crits at early level is troublesome because you need all of Power + Precision + Crit Damage and you can’t get all three stats on low-level gear.

You can go all Power/Precision with Sword/Pistol because you just stand there not getting hit, anyway. It’s a really boring way to level, but it is dependable.