Guild Wars 2

I go with a 0/30/30/10/0 Full Beserker, <my personal playstyle> I also fight sword/dagger/shortbow so I can teleport on to mobs have an ondemand stealth CnD and overall have an extreamly quick kill pace.

With the thief Your gonna have to learn how to actively play defensively rather than it be a passive part of combat. I really like the 30 in shadow tree for 3 awesom traits that work well to gether to help survivability Shadows Embrace (condition removal when you stealth) Cloaked in shadows (blinds targets when you stealth, Very helpfull against some of the bigger Mobs) and Shadows Rejuvination.

I will digress though that Underwater will always be an issue for thiefs no matter what build and thats weapon limition and skill limition no other class in the game has more skills that Can’t be used underwater infact the thief only has one elite, and theres no reason the other elites can’t be used. and you have absolutely none of your stealth skills accept your heal.

The only thing I can suggest for underwater is to learn how that spear operates and learn to time the evade moves and ondemand Blocks on it.

Oh and atleast a minimum get yellow gear for your level even if that means taking a dredgefull look at the TP for it.

The most survivable build in my experience is 0/0/30/20/20, focusing on condition damage, toughness and healing power.

Shadow’s rejuvenation, shadow’s embrace and shadow protector will add a lot to your survivability with great self healing and condition removal while in stealth. Dagger dagger will give you death blossom for evading attacks and applying attacks, and with those traits CnD will give on demand healing and condition removal a long with stealth when ever you need it.

Relying on conditions to deal damage comes with the obvious drawbacks however and thieve’s underwater skills are notably lacking in applying conditions.

I would say x/x/x/30/30 with shortbow as your 2nd weapon high indicative regen + 3skill from bow = profit with unlimited dodges

10/30/30/0/0

High burst, awesome HP regen while stealthed.
Higher toughness than your typical burst build, and with the might stacks from SA’s 25 point minor, you typically hover around 4-6 stacks of Might.

Ohh wow Elowin you just wasted soem serious gold. In order to reset your traits you talk to your trainer and instead of clicking on the “Show me your Manuals” response you click on the green arrow that points to the left under that response thats says I’d like to retrain my traits.

Death blossom alone doesn’t do that much damage, but combine with caltrops and the trait to drop caltrops when you dodge and you can do respectable damage. With gear to extend bleed duration you can get 8-10 stacks of bleeding just from the caltrop utility skill. You could also slot a geomancy sigil to apply bleeding to enemies around you when you swap weapons as well. With these 3 sources you can apply 25 stacks of bleeding fairly quickly to multiple foes.

Condition damage will always be behind a glass cannon build but by focussing on it instead you can invest in toughness and healing power to increase your survivability rather than power, precision and critical damage as a glass cannon build would have too.

Another benefit of this is that all those abilities are aoe and caltrops will continue to do damage while in stealth. I generally pull as many mobs as i can, spam DB and caltrops and stealth or kite.

0/0/30/25/15 Regen/End/Heal on Hit/

Knights/Valk

Signet of Malice (the regen heal)
Mango Pies
Mainetenance Oil

Also, if you just want to try out some of these builds i recommend going to the sPVP area. You’re more limited in what you can choose from but you can make the basics of any build in PVP. There are training dummies to test out single target damage against targets with different armor values or a bunch of training dummies to test out your aoe damage. You can also find a lord (mini boss) with 2 casters and 2 melee defending him to try builds out against NPCs that fight back :P

I like my 30/20/20 build. For surviverablity, its hard to beat imo. Stats should be Tough/Cond > Vital > Precision > Healing > Power

I use undead runes (6 of 6, for the tough to condition, its great)

I can solo champs (some of them, not all), but it does take a while. My bleads hit for 110 or more and i can stack 20 fast, then maintain about 9-14. When fighting more than 2 or 3, i can SB them and get around 10 stacks on each with SB, and 15-20 if I drop caltrops also, then maintain around 7.

Its a very strong build for surviving, health on every dmg, and double regen in stealth is great.

I rarely down in dungeons, and when i do its generally because I am either rezzing someone in a circle or just not paying attention.

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mckMzc9coFnMooFnMo9MxGGcmqMaVc

edit: forgot to mention, with might on dodge and might on stealth, you can usually have around 10-14 stacks of might through the whole fight, which helps with overall dmg output. p/d doesnt hit hard (like 400-600 a shot without crits), but its not bad.

This is the build I run with for a very general purpose build …

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYQQNAqYVlcmKP3ey5E+5EB3Dnq0m6p4rotTxVlPA;TUAgyCusKYswMAA

All Carrion gear. Works very well in all situations (pvp, wvw, pve) and is practically un-killable in world exploration. Signet of Shadows and Short Bow make world exploration a breeze. Shadow Refuge means you can trip just about any node without a huge fight. I can solo many champions (but not all) with this build reliably and AoE farm very effectively.

Oh, by the way, you can win 90% of underwater fights by just going in a circle and dodging (or use Harpoon/3) to get away from charging mobs.

PVE: playing the thief every which way i can i only found one viable build. (where even in Exotics I wasn’t dieing to some op team of mobs in Orr)

Link is here

The way it’s setup now is for sword pistol combos. I ignore using #2 and #4 abilities as they tend to be useless. I time between the traited quickness boon, the sigil of rage on my sword, and if both are down and I need a boost for larger beasts I use Haste. Everything tends to die very quickly with this build.

When needing to be ranged I switch to pistols with similar results. My second pistol (that replaces the sword when i switch) also has a sigil of rage on it for speed. If I have time before a battle I switch out two things for the pistols. I change Trickster to Ricochet and I change my Tripwire to Blinding Powder or Smoke Screen depending on the type of mobs I will be fighting.

It makes for smooth sailing now.

It however makes me sad that the other trait builds and weapon combos for this profession are not as harmonious or well thought out as this one is.

Elowin.9078:

[Edited]

No one mentioned Pistol Whip? Sounds like I should invest in better daggers and move back to them and the bow?

So totally up all six entries into Traits gives me 10 / 60 / 150 / 105 / 85. So far I have assigned nn / nn / 30 / 20 / 10 with 10 points undecided…

30 Shadow’s Embrace / Cloaked in Shadow / Shadow’s Rejuvenation
20 Descent of Shadows / Fleet of Foot — Does Descent of Shadows include getting knocked down by foe or only when knocked off ledge?
10 Uncatchable

If I put nothing into the first two traits am I still being effective offensively with Death Blossom and Caltrops?

I tested Descent of Shadows during beta and I felt like I was wasting a trait slot, to be honest. Unless you’re taking a lot of needless falling damage (intentionally) to exploit a free Stealth mechanic, it’s really not worth it. You’d most likely get far more mileage out of Power of Inertia (Might on dodge roll) / Fleet with either Assassin’s Reward/Quick Recovery. However to directly answer your question Descent of Shadow’s will proc whenever you take falling damage (observing the internal cooldown of course), regardless of why/what caused you to take it.

I’d recommend the last 10 points into Trickery for Bountiful and the extra +3 to your initiative pool. Especially if you’re not taking Quick Recovery.

For WvW:

10/0/30/30/0
Mug
Stealth Re-gen, Stealth Con removal, Stealth Healing
50% fall dmg, Pain response, Hard to Catch

P/D & Shortbow

All armor P/V/T and the rest of gear is P/V/ConDmg

Heal in Shadows, Shadowstep, Shadow Refuge, Scorp Wire and Thevies guild.

I swap scorp wire with Sig of Shadows for when running around as soon as I get close to combat, put scorp back on.

I am pretty convinced this build can’t be beat 1 on 1. At best a good bunker build can stalemate you. It’s really good at taking on many poor players at once.

I recently change from d/d to short-bow on swap. The only negative is not having a good counter to Dagger Storm. The shortbow is way better at everything else for swap though. Bombing a shadow refuge with pbaoe cluster bombs is way more effective than a couple deathblosoms since it still stacks 3 bleeds and probably does more dmg in WvW with a bigger aoe area. For escaping a bad situation while in combat, nothing can beat shortbow.

The Bleeder: 20/0/30/20/0 P/D

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-cR3V-BFSw-d0Y5VOkd0;9;4J-TJ-37;243519;2aoG6;2dZm9fRk01FI

Bleed and poison while maintaining max stealth up time and outlast them. You can change traits depending on solo or group!

I am borrowing a post I made a while back on a very similar topic. This is in response to the title of this thread, “Most Successful Survivable Solo Thief Build.” I did every part of my personal story solo (other than the last dungeon, obviously) with very little trouble. I am currently only at 51% map completion, but I have done all of the level 70+ zones solo as well. Ok, here goes:

Equip S/P or D/P. Find a mob (regular, vet, or even most champs), get in close, hit Black Powder and Caltrops for bleed, then just stand there and swing at it with AA until the blind wears. Then hit BP again and continue attacking. If you get bored you can finish it off with HS, but that is really just a waste of Initiative. Yes, you do have enough initiative to keep this up if you time it right and pick a few initiative-based traits (I forget their names, the one that gives +3 max initiative and +2 every ten seconds are nice).

Got a large group of mobs, including ranged attackers? Get up close to one of the ranged attackers, pull all the rest of the mobs in close with you, and begin the BP cycle. Throw in a Dagger Storm and the whole group is down by the time it’s over. You will generally finish off the entire group, no matter the size, and take 0 damage. I generally have Sig of Malice on so that even if a hit or two somehow slips through, I am fully healed again after a second or two.

I have recently discovered the power of increasing Crit . I currently have about 42 Crit chance and boy does it increase damage a lot! I added the trait that gives you haste on a Crit and also a superior rune of fire and stuff dies crazy fast.

I basically run my thief like a Perma-Sin from GW1. 0 damage taken, high AoE damage dealt = extremely efficient solo PvE character with very few deaths.

This build is great because you don’t have to rely on gimmicky stuff like dodges and stealth to survive. You pretty much just stand there and whack stuff that is Perma blind and can’t hit you at all. Anything you do to increase DPS like bleeds or condition damage or w/e is just a bonus. If you want a “successful survivable solo thief build,” this is it.

Condition builds have weaknesses against certain classes (necro and D/D elem for example) so while they may be have high survivability I wouldn’t consider them the most successful all-around.

Your best bet is trial and error.

I have changed my weapon sets and traits numerous times and it took me until a few weeks after hitting 80 to finally settle on what I wanted. Most thieves would probably disagree with my build as missing this or needing that but in the end it’s you playing and you need to build for the way you play.

Stiv.1820:

For WvW:

10/0/30/30/0
Mug
Stealth Re-gen, Stealth Con removal, Stealth Healing
50% fall dmg, Pain response, Hard to Catch

P/D & Shortbow

All armor P/V/T and the rest of gear is P/V/ConDmg

Heal in Shadows, Shadowstep, Shadow Refuge, Scorp Wire and Thevies guild.

I swap scorp wire with Sig of Shadows for when running around as soon as I get close to combat, put scorp back on.

I am pretty convinced this build can’t be beat 1 on 1. At best a good bunker build can stalemate you. It’s really good at taking on many poor players at once.

I recently change from d/d to short-bow on swap. The only negative is not having a good counter to Dagger Storm. The shortbow is way better at everything else for swap though. Bombing a shadow refuge with pbaoe cluster bombs is way more effective than a couple deathblosoms since it still stacks 3 bleeds and probably does more dmg in WvW with a bigger aoe area. For escaping a bad situation while in combat, nothing can beat shortbow.

I run a very similar build, but use S/D instead of pistol and knights jewelry instead of condition.

What " a 0/30/30/10/0"?