Guild Wars 2

I’ve recently fallen in love with playing my thief. It’s the last profession that I’ve started playing regularly and learning it well and have been having a lot of fun to the point hat I think I want to make it my new dungeon/fractal/raiding character but I have a question about some builds.

I understand from the builds online that if I want to go for a staff build (which I have the most fun with), I should load up on zerk gear. I’m wondering if I could get away with using ascended marauder gear, though. I get that I won’t be min/maxing at that point but I’m thinking a lot about functionality as well as the fun I can have with it. I’d probably have a much more comfortable time learning raids and continuing to get used to my thief if I can have a little forgiveness in my build with the extra vitality (until now, I’ve used exotic zerk gear).

What do you guys think? Am I going to end up somewhat crippled if I use ascended marauder’s for now? Would it be even worse than exotic zerk? I’m wanting to ask because I won’t have enough mats right now to make both ascended sets. I appreciate any help or opinions you can give to help me out!

I wouldn’t go with full marauders gear, but you can certainly run a zerker/marauder mix or even zerker/valkyrie. If you run Crit-Strikes (which you should for optimal dps), you just have to reach 60% cirt chance. In a raid environment (and with SoA) this will push you to a 100% crit chance. Once you have reached that threshold, you basically want to max Power and Ferocity.

Personally, I run Zerker Weapons and Trinkets with Marauder’s Armor, since I occasionally also roam in WvW and can’t be kitten d to craft another set of armor specifically for that. Although full zerker is optimal for raid DPS, the loss of running this setup isn’t THAT significant.

For dungeons and open world – where everything melts in seconds anyway – you can even run Invigorating Precision. Paired with SoM you basically are immortal unless the boss has some sort of 1-shot mechanic.

Thanks so much for such a detailed response!

It’s really good to know that I should definitely be watching my crit chance to be at least 60% which really makes perfect sense when I hear it. Considering that I am focusing mostly on getting into team content of high end fractals and raids, that’s a good bit of info to keep in mind.

I’m thinking that I will at least try Marauders Armour for now, then. I am already running exotic zerk gear on everything and have no issues with dungeons or open world but, as you say, things just tend to melt anyway.

I hope I won’t have a lot of issues with getting into groups using at least some of the Marauders stuff but it’s better that I do that and try to stay alive a little longer to learn the mechanics than to lay there dead in full zerk right off the bat. (At least for fractals, anyway. It seems raids are much less forgiving where you dodge or you die haha)

Cheers again @BikelsGone!

You are very welcome. For reaching crit-chance thresholds with any classes you essentially just have to keep the following in mind, if in a raid setup:

Spotter (7%) + Banner (8%) + Fury (20%) = 35% crit chance overall.

now when you are a thief and run crit-strikes you get an extra 5% from Keen Observer, meaning that you just have to reach 60% on your own.