Guild Wars 2

So I been shelving my thief for quite a long time, being quite in love with necro, but I figured it was time to revisit her and get some more in-depth experience with this class. I’m not a hardcore pvp’er but I’ve done a bit and what I have done was on my thief and ranger mostly so I’m not totally new to the class. I’m pretty bored with pvp though and mostly stick to pve these days. I’ve been trying to get into more dungeons with my thief but coming from a heavy attrition class like necro (well sort of lol…Anet says it is anyway) I’m finding it hard to find a good role for me on the thief for dungeons. It seems like I spend more time just hopping in, slapping on a few hits then kiting forever and stealthing constantly to survive ( I don’t mind utilizing stealth a lot, just seems I spend more time doing that than fighting) or just resigning to using a ranged weapon every boss fight, which is unendingly boring for me. Are there any tips or builds people would recommend? I know of the more popular ones, but I do like the look and feel of the venom builds, even though I know most people hate them. Any advice on that? I want to bring something to my parties that will make people like having me around rather than dreading bringing me along. Constructive thoughts are appreciated. Don’t really care to see anything about “l2p” or “broken class” . I’ve seen plenty of successful thieves in dungeons so I know it can be done.

If you want to be supportive, your best bet right now is to go blind-heavy and/or venom-heavy. 30/0/30/0/10 with all venom-related traits and Thrill of the Crime is nice, or you could go for the blind-on-stealth route or off-hand Pistol for Black Powder.

Venom builds are definitely viable, but you just have to be prepared to not be dealing crazy DPS while using a build centred around them.

I haven’t had a lot of time to test my current build (GPU died soon after the patch hit), but I ran 0/30/25/15/0 with S/D, PTV armor, Berserker accessories and Orrian Truffle and Meat Stew/Maintenance Oil. The SA and Acro trees boosted damage through Might stacking (dodge and stealth) along with the food that also increased endurance regen, and I had a Sigil of Paralysation to increase my daze time while using C+D as frequently as possible to blind all nearby foes. It’s not directly a support build, instead focusing on incapacitating enemies so your team has a generally easier time dealing with them. In fights with a bunch of silvers, knocking one totally out-of-commission while blinding others nearby on regular intervals was great.

Alternatively, you could run any sort of build you please with 15 Deadly Arts and optionally Dagger main-hand, with a Shortbow somewhere. Lotus Strike and Choking Gas are huge sources of weakness to drastically reduce damage taken by your team. One of the best conditions we deal, and you could also couple the weakness-on-poison trait with Spider Venom to give out even more weakness, not just with Skale Venom. A venom-share build does this by default.

Those sound promising, looking at my trait tree right now and it seems like more along the lines I was looking for. Question though, would it be viable to run a venom sharing build with a s/p with shortbow for ranged? I really like that setup and was hoping it would work well with a venom build. It doesn’t fare so well with lots of stealth anyway, it seems like the shadowstep timing s more key to it (for me anyway) and I kind of like that challenge.

Absolutely. S/P has good access to emergency blind and daze control (although they are rather initiative-heavy), and PW is great for spreading venoms in pbAoE for yourself. Since stealth isn’t a focus, it complements the build rather well.

If you were interested in what I was running, too – http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/thief/?7.0|c.1c.hd.8.1c.h17|5.1g.h17|1c.a4.1c.a4.1c.a4.1c.a4.1c.a4.1c.a4|2s.0.2s.0.3s.0.3s.0.2s.0.3s.0|0.u63b.p56.f2.0|1b.7|57.5c.5b.5g.5v|e

shadow refuge, for when things go bad
scorpion wire for pulls
last skill is your own choice.

thieves role in pve groups is simple, do as much damage as you can, be it from pistols, bows or daggers.

when things go bad people start dying, drop shadow refuge and rez them.

Yeah shadow refuge is always on my bar in dungeons, and heavy initiative use is the major weakness of s/p that I noticed too, but with careful timing I think I can live with it. I saw a few traits I might can work in to deal with managing it more effeciently too. I was headed on the right track, good to get some constructive feedback from people with a lot more experience in the class than me, much appreciated. I’m sure I’ll have more questions down the road though lol.

Oh what heal would you recommend? HiS is the obvious choice, but I’m wondering if one of the other heals would serve this build better. I had considered signet of malice but I just don’t think I’ll be doing enough consistent hits to maintain constant healing, so that leaves withdraw, which seems promising but I don’t have much experience using it. I’m thinking it’s a toss between HiS or withdraw depending on what the encounter will be. Obviously stealth will be more advantageous in certain situations. Thoughts?

SoM is only really effective if you go in to bleed builds (each tick heals you) or haste + PW, and both of those aren’t as effective as they used to be. I strongly suggest avoiding it for now. Between HiS and Withdraw, there’s nothing stopping you from switching between them off CD, since both are great. Bearing in mind that HiS removes damaging conditions and Withdraw unroots, they can be more useful in different situations depending. For example, against Icebrood Wolves, they adore large pounces and cripples, so Withdraw would be a better solution, especially on the lower CD. HiS would come in more useful against enemies like Dredge who love to fight from range, so the stealth can remove some aggro temporarily to help you recover further and remove the bleeds. It’s just situational, really.

Oh I wasn’t aware sig of malice healed off of condition ticks. And yeah I was leaning more towards withdraw for the majority of the fights because it seems going s/p I run into more problems when I’m rooted than just getting other conditions. Very good point on the ranged attackers, I’ll definitely keep these in mind ty. Sorry for all the questions, but knowledge is power so they say. I like to get a good grip on it while I craft my builds so I can be as efficient as possible :P

Ask away, with a melted GPU I’ll be here all day :P

Each time that caltrops inflicts bleeding over the duration it heals with signet of malice. This still works quite well though in the right fight (dregde) even if you’ve got no supporting traits at all.

I find that my effectiveness of my heavily dps traited/geared thief during fights where most of the incoming damage isn’t telegraphed is fairly reliant on the competence/makeup of my team, much more so than my other 4 level 80 classes. If you’ve got a bunch of good players and a guardian who can keep himself and the rest of you alive in melee, you can really rip things apart. If your team is all too squishy/terrible to hang it in melee, then you’re gonna have a real bad time when you go in there with a couple daggers as the only melee target for mobs to hit, without anybody giving you protection/aegis/regen/vigor/etc. And that leads to shortbow kiting at low health, because your two dodges are not gonna be enough to bear the brunt of all enemy attacks.

Against non-champions you can tank things quite well if you switch to S/P though, which I do for some encounters. I rummage through my bags to change out weapons based on what’s coming up quite a lot as a thief, which isn’t something I need to do on other characters.

i do massive damages and never have any troubles helping my team

I go 10-30-20-0-10

If you want to see that build in action just youtube me
http://www.youtube.com/my_videos?o=U