Guild Wars 2

So I leveled my Thief to 80 and started grabbing my hero points for my Daredevil traits. I ran to the jungle and got my butt handled like it was nothing, mind that I ran with Berserker Runes/Glass Cannon. Time passed and I got the hang of not dying that often, granted I still die a lot.

I ran to the trading post and I noticed there were new runes. I was curious about Rune of the Scrapper and Rune of the Daredevil. I’m leaning towards DD rune. Which is a better choice?

To migrate some damage should I just grab Knight’s or doesn’t even matter since DD are squishy as it is and just stick with Berserker’s?

If you just use Invigorating Precision instead of No Quarter in the Critical Strikes line, you’ll probably be fine staying full zerker gear with scholar runes. Yeah, it sucks to lose perma fury, but it makes maintaining the scholar bonus and survival completely trivial in the jungle.

I run with Trickery and Acro with my DD, trickery solely for the increased initiative pool really, and Acro for the initiative on evade and Hard to Catch for full endurance when stunned. I use Staff and P/P, since unload is pretty good now and having black powder is handy for when you want to skip stuff with Bounding Dodger trait. I use Soldiers armor and weapons with Captain’s ascended trinkets or use emerald trinkets if you can’t get the Captains stuff. I have Lyssa runes on my armor for the random boon on heal and the condi convert on elite skill use.

I can evade tank essentially with this build and rarely die. Even taking out packs of pocket raptors is a joke with all the dodges. I normally open with 3 bounding dodges, then vault 3 times, then because of the staff master trait where you get endurance back for each initiative point spent, I can get another dodge out, then use Channeled Vigor heal for another 2 more dodges. It can repeat for a while, but it’s not infinite evade. I also use the +40% endurance refill rate food (forgot the name, something truffle stew I think), so that might skew the number of dodges available for me to use. Having that Headshot on your pistol is also very handy for those many many break bars in the jungle and I run with Scorpion Wire, Fist Flurry, Bandits Defense, and Impact Strike as my utilities and elite skill. A pretty awesome combo is to use scorpion wire, then immediately start casting fist flurry, use the chain skill, then impact strike chain, then start doing the dodges and vault combo. It’s just super fun and very durable. I can post a link to my build later if you would like.

Here is the build I use: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZUQNAW6an8lCVmi1OBGmCkmiFqiyLE+gSoLCCgDYu63+xH-TFCFABLp8LF1fA4IAEz+DC8AA0Q3wCXEABVCSGgqxA-w

The build I use: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAW6an8lCNOhFOBGmCkmiFfCzrIUFiCbBgXzZaeAeAjgA-T1RBAB6pbALlfEt/AAXEgHeCAUq+jZKBBA-w

Instead of Valk weapons, I am using Marauder’s, but gw2skills doesn’t have that stat distribution yet. I have found that the damage most enemies deal is manageable as long as I can maintain weakness uptime on them (not difficult with staff). Otherwise, it’s just about knowing enemy animations and what skills you need to avoid (Itzel arrow super leap+evade, Mordrem Sniper ground line, Mushroom leaps/explosions, etc). If you get hit with the Itzel dagger stun combo, using the stunbreak on Bandit’s Defense usually works. Sometimes you get hit with the huge damage followup anyway, which is lame, but I’ve been mostly successful with BD. Use the staff blind often. I know it doesn’t sound very good, but it does a surprising amount of damage and sometimes hits up to 3 times for almost 6k crit damage (90% of the time just a 2k on crit though)…it could use a little range boost though, imo.

Note: if you need condition removal, change staff mastery to EA. I haven’t decided which one is better yet, but I feel like there isn’t that much condi spam in the jungle that EA is absolutely necessary.

I agree with Blarg on the active defense by knowing the animations of the jungle foes. I felt the same about EA as well, but I just love bouncing around a group of mobs with my current build and evading everything. I’m still learning to time the bounding dodges with vault as to not waste that 4s dmg boost since I noticed it doesn’t stack duration…

I also had a similar build to yours Blarg, but with all Assassins and Zerk gear with invigorating precision in place of no quarter for the upkeep on health. It was working, but I used it too early in my exploration of the jungle and those Itzel were destroying me, and I haven’t tried it again since. It was outputting some amazing damage with the 265%+ Crit dmg I had with it.