Guild Wars 2

painful to read, but i think you’re asking for PVE builds?

This build focuses on bleed stacking via Death Blossom. I recently helped a guildie with this build. He was having trouble at level 60 and was leveling very slowly. Within 10 minutes of trying this build, he was sold and has since gotten 80 in no time.

Get 15 points into trickery for the extra initiative and initiative return on steal. Other trait lines are less crucial but I recommend 15 into acrobatics after trickery.

For your utilities you need caltrops, hide in shadows, roll for initiative, and 1 more of your choice.

1. Pull mobs so they are grouped together. If there is a ranged mob AND melee mobs, bring the melee mobs to the ranged one.
2. Drop caltrops
3. Use deathblossom three times
4. use steal
5. use item that you stole
6. death blossom again
7. roll for ini
8. do more death blossoms
9. hide in shadows
Alternate weapon: short bow. You can switch to it and kite any time after you stack your bleeds.

You can use other moves if you wish after the initial death blossom stacks bleeds, however, with the evasion added to DB, it’s pretty good. With this tactic, you can fight 5 things your own level at once.

Crafting: i didn’t do any crafting. i personally think this is a time AND money sink. I made enough money just by selling all materials to buy all my exotics in a week at 80.

Armor: anything with condition is nice, but just equip the best item you can as you get them. When you hit a major level landmark (40, 50, 60) etc, look for yellow items on the trader that you can afford. I would recommend at least getting good daggers every 10 levels or so.

Hey Elowin,

I’m glad to see that you are still enjoying the game and exploring the world.
One major tip (if you have not done this already) is to get thieves guild. it’s a lvl 30 elite skill that will help you out tremendously for taking down the monsters that hit hard and have a lot of health. the two thieves u summon will tank lots of dmg for you and allow you to burst your enemy down without getting killing in a couple shots as you mentioned.

on top of that, i would say sword/pistol is still the best option for your lvl at the moment. since you don’t have too much trait points to support the dagger/dagger death blossom build yet. so the raw attack power of the sword/pistol #3 skill will help you get through these trouble times of having small amount of trait points.

so the sword/pistol #3 skill should be able to allow you to kill 2-3 monsters at a time at your lvl and leave you with a small amount of hp left after bursting them down. when that is done, just let your hp regen before you rush into another group of monsters. As for elites, you will need to use the thieves guild skill to get some tanking support so you can hack away with your #3 skill.

Use Ambush trap. It boosts damage greatly as long as your thief doesn’t die instantly. He can also hold aggro.

Are they the same items? Identical in level and slot?

Gloves to gloves. Boots to boots. I’d like to see a screenshot of what you are talking about because I don’t think I really understand.

Identical items (Same level, same prefix, same suffix) are always going to be better in green than blue.

You can have similarly named items, with identical looks, but different levels.

Elowin

Q. I’m always running out of ‘initiative’. How does one deal with this fact of life since faster recovery is not possible?

It’s normal, that you run out of initiative when using weapon skills. Other classes have cooldowns, but thieves have “energy”, so you can chain same ability many times in a row to burst down an opponent. If you look at traits, there are some perks, which give you back initiative under some conditions, for example:
- while activating a signet (Precision),
- while entering stealth (Shadow arts),
- attacking with first weapon skill (Trickery),
- passive initiative regeneration or while swapping weapons in combat (Acrobatics).
Still, they are pretty much optional, and you don’t have to take them at all costs.

PS: you don’t need to delete your posts every time it’s answered. Some other people might need help and read it.

Thieves have low armor and health pool, but their defense is great when it comes to evasion and sort of active damage mitigation.

If you find yourself squishy and dying too easy from mobs, try to get pistol off hand and sword main hand, and use 5th skill – black powder. When mobs stand in this tiny smoke cloud, they miss all the time, dealing zero damage to anybody. Also, 3rd skill in this weapon combination is very useful – pistol whip – because it deals very high damage, and while channeling these blade swings, you evade every attack in front of you.