Guild Wars 2

Hey Forums, I have just made my first thief on guild wars because I finally hit level 80 and got full exotics on my main but I have NO idea about how this class works at all! I looked at the trait tree and skills and didn’t understand the half of it… (My main is a guardian). What I do know is only what I’ve heard from fellow guild members and friends and from what I’ve gathered I think I might know what type of build I want to roll, or at least start with to get use to the class. If you guys could help me out I’d very much appreciate it ^.^. So anyways, what I find will be most important to me on my thief is very good survivability. I also like conditions more than I like DPS, and I really wanna be able to hold mobs in PvE and be able to stand my own in dungeons. So basically what I think I’m looking for is a nice survivable PvE/Dungeon thief… If anyone knows a good build for me I’d love for you to post it so I can check it out, like I said I don’t know anything about the class yet so any tips would be nice as well! Thanks so much for reading and hopefully helping me out

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mckMzc9cMFCLoMFMLof0xfaVmcVMc

I just read your post and made that Build up in literally 1 minute, so don’t expect it to be fleshed out, i rather did it to give you a raw idea of what you could do.

My thoughts behind it:

Deadly Arts:
Main reason i went into Dealy Arts is Lotus Poison.
The reason for that is your Shortbow Poison field, which allows you to apply Weakness permanently to groups of foe’s with this Trait.

Shadow Arts:
Shadow Arts provides you with a sustained Con removal, constant Regen buff (and Regen for your teammates with Shadow Refugee for group support), Initiative gain and a good ressource of Might stacks, while also pushing your Toughness and Healing Power.

Acrobatics:
Acrobatics provides you with further Might stacks, while also giving you access to Feline Grace, which will let you dodge much more, plus providing great Synergy with Traits in the Trickery and Acrobatics line.

Trickery:
For the Caltrops on Dodge.

As Gear you might go for Con dmg/Toughness/Healing Power with some Vitality here and there.

What you could do with this build would be constant CnD + Pistol stealth attack for bleed stacking on singletargets (+weakness from Steal) and Caltrops/Poison field spam for massive AoE bleed/cripple/poison/weakness for larger Groups.

But as much as you try, pure mechanical good survive ability can’t be achieved as Thief due to extremely low base HP, mid range armor and bad access to buffs.
You can’t get much more defensive than with this build if you still want to do anything besides surviving (and that still worse than most other classes could).
Your best bet as Thief is to not get hit, if you are pure glass or pure defensive doesn’t really matter as Thief.
The main difference between a glass and a non glass Thief is the damage they deal.

But if your party hasn’t more than 1 other Condition damager, you should be good with a build like this (since P/D Con Thief is pretty OP compared to other Thief builds like BS imo).