Guild Wars 2

Hi guys!

Let me first introduce myself;

I’m a Slovenian player from the Gandara (EU) realm. I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 for a while now, trying to find a proper profession for me. I thought Elementalist was the one, but realised it wasn’t so once I got it to 80.

Now I went back to trying different professions out with different weapons in sPvP and general low level PvE content, and I realised, thief was the one I want to run.

However I am still quite new to the game (the stats, the builds, the mechanics, etc..) so I am really asking for your help, opinions and reviews regarding the thief profession.

What I am going to focus on is WvW, since 90% of my online time is spent in WvW.

I’ve already figured out a decent build I’ve set up in sPvP, which is a dual dagger / shortbow stealth biased build, but I’m really sure you guys could come up with a better one.

I’d also politely ask if any of you would be so kind to explain the numbers to me;

Which stats I should choose gear-wise, why I should choose them, how is +300 Power different from +300 Precision, etc…

I am only really interested in level 80 content, as I am very likely to powerlevel the thief to 80 via crafting, as I’ve quite some spare money left on my Elementalist which I’m not using anyways.

I am really grateful for your time and effort in order to help me out.

If there is any way I can help you out back, please let me know.

Thanks in advance, Westside of Gandara.

Bring Up My Post

- Still require suggestions :/

First off, I wouldn’t really recommend leveling a thief solely thru crafting. You can do whatever you want, but the reason is there is a lot of timing, skill mechanics, and combat skills you will not learn while leveling that will have to be learned after you hit 80. I leveled my thief with a mix of pve and wvw (running with a zerg only). You won’t be a lot of help to your team in wvw as an upleveled, but you aren’t a whole lot of help as a full 80 thief either so no big worries =)

It depends on what you want to do in wvw to decide on a build. The thief can do a few things well. Roaming is one of them. After the patch, I’m not really sure yet how things will shake out but D/D wasn’t terrible before, but not that strong either. You must have great timing on your cloak and dagger skill because all your damage basically comes from backstab. If you miss one, you are behind the 8-ball. I’d recommend d/p power build for roaming, p/d condi is good also because people are not as prepared for it. The build for d/p is usually X/30/30/X/X where you can place the last 10 (two points now) wherever you want. Deadly arts gives you mug with some utility on steal, acrobatics some hp and utility, and trickery gives you more dmg from behind, or thrill of the crime. I use 0/30/30/10/0 because of the falling reduction, run speed in stealth, or might on dodge. I think the normal p/d build is 10/0/30/0/30. Not all that sure about it though. You can probably find p/d build info on the thief forum. You have to be good with your cloak and dagger for p/d to be effective also.

As a roaming thief, things that will help your server are flipping camps, attacking keeps to make the enemy waypoint contested, scouting for a commander, and other general havok. Kill noobs

In a zerg, our effectiveness is not as apparent, but there are things that you can do. If you have other 80’s like warriors or guardians, you might wanna bring them since WXP is account bound now, there isn’t really a reason I can think of to bring a thief to a zerg over them if they are available. If you are like me and thief is the only 80, then nevermind. A thief has a very good blast finisher on the shortbow, cluster bomb. You can spam blast finishers on several useful combo fields for nice area effects, mostly fire and lightning fields (might and swiftness respectively). Maybe you can stack a lot of might for your party. Do these when the zerg stacks before a fight. Blasting a smoke field gives area stealth but I don’t see this happen all that much in a zerg.

During fights, cluster bomb is also good for aoe dmg, especially if you detonate it over a group of enemies. Helps you tag a lot of targets and does decent dmg. Choking gas is also good if you can land it where a lot of enemies are because it poisons a lot of people. You can also keep your other weaponset to a burst set up so you can switch to it to burst down an enemy that has made it to the back line to all the squishies. S/P isnt a bad choice, because you can infiltrators strike and pistol whip for quick burst, cleave damage (sword hits more than one person), and headshot against stomps.

As for gear, in a zerg I usually go a little tankier. I used to use soldiers on head, chest and legs, valks on the rest of the armor, zerk weaps, and a mix of zerk and cavalier trinkets. Got around 2500 armor, 16k hp and still pretty high crit dmg. Not sure what to use post-patch. I probably won’t change for a while. For traits, you can go a little more support. I always use 30 in critical strikes for damage. trickery has some nice support with the stealing traits, but you would probably only use steal to gap close to someone that has broken thru the front lines. You can use the upgraded steal skill without a target to grant swiftness, might and fury to the part as well.

There are venomshare builds that are probably good for zergs but I’ve never tried them.

Power is the best damage stat from everything I’ve read. It makes your attacks hit for more damage. The more power you have, the more damage you will do. Precision increases your chance to critical hit, which means that your hits will do 1.5 times their normal damage (or more from ferocity). The hits have a red blood spot behind the numbers when the combat text scrolls. Ferocity dictates how much bonus critical hit damage you cause on a critical hit. So if you have an additional 50% bonus to crit damage from ferocity, your hits will do 200% normal damage. All of this is on the wiki under “damage”. I’ve always built the thief for power>ferocity>precision.

They recently nerfed critical damage in the patch, but they also buffed sigils and runes so its hard to say how everything will play out.

So I know that was a lot of text. I didn’t realize how long it was. But I think it could help you on your way, if you can stand to read it all.

To stealth on a D/P build, you first cast 5 – black powder, then cast 2-heartseeker to leap from the black powder field. You can also hop through the field, or leap into the field to achieve this. You can heartseeker multiple times through this smoke field to stack 3 seconds of stealth each time. Also, if you are fighting, if you 5-2, you stealth AFTER the heartseeker does damage so you don’t have to worry about being revealed until after you deal damage again.

Be careful of people that can interrupt skills, because if your heartseeker leap combo gets interrupted, you lose a lot of initiative and will be in trouble.

So… before you jump ahead of yourself for making a thief specifically for WvW and dump all the gold into plvling…

Figure out what you want to do in WvW…
If you want to only roam, then thief is for you. If you want to be useful in a zerg, thief really isn’t for you, there are better profs for this (guard, warrior, even the others). If you want to roam, zerg, and do w/e else your heart possibly desires, roll a warrior.

Up to this Tuesday, WvW gear stats kind of fall into three categories. You can go pure glass cannon 25/30/x/x/x, with full zerker gear, to land those “MAAASSSIVE” backstabs. Or you can go mixed zerker/knights/soldiers, the build still revolving around d/d and backstabing/stealthing (probably the one you made). Those two options are for pure physical damage. The other option is a p/d condi build, relies on conditions (whether it’s bleed or confusion from preplex (nerfed)), this gear is usually dire stats and builds might look like x/x/N/M/x (where N and M are your major trait line allocations). Damage is done through conditions and allows you to become tanky.

With the Tuesday’s patch (10% nerf to Crit Damage, which some claim effected their crits for more than 10%) there’s been some from the full glass cannons guys, some saying they’re switching to condi builds.

It’s good that you’re experimenting in sPvP though, I find, that even in hotjoin, people on average are more skilled (with what they play) than those in WvW. Though builds slightly… but the skill of your opponents going from sPvP to WvW will be dropping.

Just my two cents, and a free bump.

(PS. to convert from “old” build numbers like 25/30/x/x/x into “new” build numbers… divide by 5… so 25/30/x/x/x → 5/6/x/x/x …)

Thank you so much Traxal! You’ve been very helpful with all the information, I seriously cannot thank you enough.

Thanks to you also Zero Day, also picked some new stuff from your reply!

And yeah, I was looking forward to building a roamer, I already have an ele for zerging.

Glad it helped some.

Be careful with a pure backstab, hidden killer D/D type build. I’ve seen a lot of comments that the ferocity patch really hurt this build because it is typically stacked with crit damage and the dps loss is a lot higher.

The “10% damage nerf” that was advertised was for a balanced zerker build that got it’s dps from crits and non crits inside and outside of stealth. Hidden killer builds used to stack crit damage at the expense of precision and 90% of the damage came out of stealth, which was 100% crit chance.

When all your damage comes from crits inside stealth, it is easy to see why hidden killer backstab players are claiming they lost 30% dmg because most of those builds went from around +100% crit damage to around +70% with ferocity.

Whether you go power or condi (as Zero day said, condi looks stronger now), make sure you bring some form of condi clear because there will be more condi in wvw. Shadow arts is the best condi clear thieves have (at least 2 trait points). Could maybe work out something with the condi clear sigils.

like everyone else, speaking from a person who suffers altoholism, ill note that while i was still searching for the proff for me, i had a thief level like 70 something, and so it remained for a LONG time, then one day while i was bored i was like, ill just get this to 80, havent looked back since, thief is so much fun, but, it comes at a pretty steep learning curve, i would advise AGAINST plvling it via crafting, think of it as swinging in the major leagues when you just picked up a bat for the first time.

also like its been stated before, you should learn the different timings, and attack ranges, specially if your going dagger dagger, as a thief in your face cries CnD to the rooftops, a tip, you can be running into an enemy, and hit the CnD, then turn whilst still inside the enemy and still get your CnD off, practice telestomping, what your teles can and cant do, practice black powdering things often, practice circle strafing, learn big telegraphs and practice dodging at all levels of endurance regen. also practice what you can and cant take, like for instance a burst skill from a hammer, you need to dodge those priority over a knock back skill. also practice running, and hiding……for cereal……go play hide and seek in wvw whilst under leveled so you can understand routes, tricks like decent of shadows to get a free stealth and such. thief is just bursting with tricks and stuff, but most of all, have fun with it.