Guild Wars 2

Heya. I was wondering if you guys thought if there were any good P/D builds that wasnt so centered on conditional damage. I know that theres always gonna be some considering the bleeds and whatnot, but I really love the playstyle of P/D. My buddies say its really only good for conditional damage and (considering that I have no real interest in sPvP) that its not really that great due to a condition cap. I rarely play solo, so it may be a problem with everyone stacking conditions on my target. Is there some sort of Hybrid build or even crit build that utilizes P/D well?

It is possible and I pulled that off aswell, but your damage will be kinda low still.

Just as base Idea:
Try to get rampager gear and stack your critchance up with it. You can also toss in some charrion pieces if you want abit more HP.

Due to the high crit chance you can utilize a sigil of air of fire pretty good, which will boost your damage with every sneak attack. Since you fire 5 bullets with every sneak attack, you have 5 times the chance that one crits and everyone of them has a chance to trigger your sigil of fire/air when it is off cooldown. The Cooldown of the sigil is about 5 seconds, revealed time is 3 seconds and you stay abit longer in stealth to regen HP and wait for the sigil cooldown to reset.

You should put 30 points into Shadow Arts for that and maybe some points in Acrobatics aswell to get some vitality and be able to dodge more.
The remaining points should be distributed according to the traits you choose.

Using full burst equipment and traits with P/D works surprisingly well as a matter of fact.

A non-crit Sneak Attack still does damage equal to a non-crit Backstab. The direct damage (modified by crit) of a Sneak Attack is equal to the direct damage of a Frontstab. Your Cloak and Dagger is still completely direct damage based.

You’ll still want to keep a main-hand Dagger when you need a pure burst of instant burst damage though.

Thanks for the good info fellas.

Id imagine the full on GC working fairly well considering that you can never really get ganged up on with P/D. Its pretty hard to die. And as soon as anything threatening gets near…CnD or 3 away. Full Rampager seems perfect for this type of playstyle/build! Whittle them down then stab em hard with D/D. Just gotta level up to 80. xD

Also, Steal looks like something amazing to invest traits in, but would it be too detouring to do so considering what Im trying to do?

you can do it but it is terrible in my opinion, I have tried it with scholar runes etc all kinds of different way but its lackluster. You can always try anything if you like try it and see if you like it. If I was to save you some gold and time I would not recommend it.

The problem in my opinion revolves around the auto attack. Also if you don’t go condi and say you go full rabid or whatever else your looking at around 12-14k hp. Do you really want to have that little HP when you can’t get a cloak and dagger off and your spamming vital shot with its slow fire rate at 1 per second when dagger or sword would attack faster and put out much more damage.

This is ust my opinion and I have tried this with P/D and in the end I felt condition > damage with P/D. The way thief is made you basically want to try to maximize as much damage as possible when your revealed P/D is last on the totem pole. A damage bow build would probably be better with offhand dagger as the other set.

I always laugh when I run into direct damage P/D thieves cause its so crap.

I always look at the worse possible scenario when it comes to a build not best case. When you are fighting someone competent and can’t get a cloak and dagger vital shot is the last thing I want to have to rely on.

Take from my post what you will I tried this full glass, scholar runes, heavy crit anyway I could to make it work best I found was 10,10,30,0,20. Mugged in DA, 10% damage increase from Pistols in critical and then the normal. With around 15k HP eagle runes was what I found to be the best to make up for lack of crit chance.

What P/D excels at is that while your instealth if the bleeds arent wiped your enemy is still dying even when you arent attack, with direct damage you want to maintain uptime on target as much as you can so thats less time in stealth. Also if you find yourself as I did waiting on cloak and dagger and mugged combo for your burst then I started to think why not take another dagger for double damage in 1 strike as opposed to 5 sneak attack damage that about 3 of the bullets can be dodge on average

@oZii I see. What type of build would you suggest with P/D then? Im not entirely sure I understand condition damage specs entirely. Probably because my friends dislike of them. xD

Rynn.3041:

@oZii I see. What type of build would you suggest with P/D then? Im not entirely sure I understand condition damage specs entirely. Probably because my friends dislike of them. xD

Condition damage build run caltrops with it and things will die much faster. I run 0/0/30/20/20 when I go condition damage 3x krait runes 3x afflicted plus veggie pizza.

I havr ran a P/D – P/P build before purely created out of curiosity.

sneak attavcks hit for 5k on average, and unload about 7-8k on average.

I ran with 20/30/0/0/20 for the dual skill damage and crit chance traits and bouncing bullets in tricks.

I liked the p/d skill 3 as the crit hits for about 3.5-4.5k.

I would steal, use the skill stated above then switch and unload, not much lived if you crit enough.

my armor is valk with ruby orbs, everything else is zerk. its good fun in pve definitely worth a try.
wouldn’t advise it for wvw tho. spvp had some relative success too

what people forget about p/d as a non condition build is that they think all the damage comes from the auto attack, but they forget that if your in full berserker, cnd still hurts. whenever i run full berserker, i can still pull off numbers close to a backstab. i see numbers like 5k each on mug cnd and 4k sneak attack and 1k auto attacks.

non condition p/d is what i call the lazy backstab build also, all you have to do is land the cnd, and you dont have to position yourself to the backside because sneak is ranged and after that you dont have to be in melee range to auto.

Also imo dont go rampager, focus on the damage or dont at all.

I’ve been playing around with a power P/D build, with S/D as my other set. Vital shot does hit for ~1K, but you can usually add in the 4 stacks or more of bleeds per second, so that 1K vital shot is more like 1.2K – 1.3K.

Add in Sigil of Air, and that’s another 1K-2K every 5 seconds or so, which is another effective 200 damage per second, if you break it down that way.

Throw in Omnomberry Pie for additional healing (sadly it doesn’t actually steal health, i.e. do damage), and it’s not as horrible as it might seem. (I see typically at least 3 heals from Sneak Attack from the pie, and couple it with healing in the Shadow Arts tree, and healing is pretty good)

It’s still not optimal if all you’re after is damage, but it is a fun build.

@Loading and Fade Did you fellas do a build similar to Bull Zooker? Despite oZii’s points, Im more or less looking at the bleeds as sort of an added bonus to my damage instead of focusing on them. I like seeing big numbers, but I also like being safe, so trading a chunk of damage for the range and utility the P/D brings is A-Ok with me.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAqYVlcmKOHdy9E+JFx2DgKUeypwoI1rAZ1KQTA;T4A5TCnkOpeS5EFOGcE4YxxhjEnFEDLmFA

Here is my super kitten build I theorycrafted, but Im pretty positive I made it too…meh. Not sure. I put in Sigil of Fire instead of Air due to the AoE being more useful in PvE and took Daggerstorm instead of Thieves Guild for the awesome Shadow Refuge combo (or whatever my Ele friend puts down).

I also really love Steal and tried to make it integral to the build, but Im not sure if Im just making the build worse by doing so. Thoughts?

Thanks for the meaty helpful posts everyone.

Lemme say this before I mention a build, with the pistols damage if its not crit it is lacking even with all the power u can get IMO, so I feel like having high crit is a must, even without crit damage

I’m at work ATM so I’m not gonna open up a calculator, but off the top of my , I usually run a build that’s 30 critical strikes with side strike, pistol mastery, and executioner, 30 in shadow arts cloaked in shadow, shadow infusion, and rejuvenation, the last ten w/e u want but I usually got for mug or the speed increase in stealth.

The gears I’m either all berserker with rubies or if I want to be more tanky I have pvt armor and berserker everything else

And for food like someone mentioned before, omnom berry ghost is great with this build combined with SoM, I use it with full berserker gear, and when I have my pvt gear I use I think curry butternut squash? Forgot the name but it adds the precision and 10% crit damage

I estimate P/D has better returns with focus on condition damage (becasue of sneak attack) but if you want to use other sets besides P/D (and SB) going power/crit looks like a good alternative. With normal levels of crit chance Sneak Attack is almost guaranteed to have at least one crit in it’s 5 shots. Choices in condition damage gear are also rather poor.

I focused on the direct damage. The condition damage is just a bonus, and does add up.

This is my exact build and gearing. The only thing the site doesn’t list is utilities. I run Hide in Shadows, Shadow Refuge, Signet of Shadows, and either Blinding Powder or Infiltrator’s Signet, depending on what’s going on.

It also doesn’t have an accurate spot for Sigil of Bloodlust. That’s an extra 250 power that isn’t reflected on the sheet.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/thief/?7|c.1g.h14.8.1g.h1|a.1g.h14.8.1g.h1|1c.a7.1c.a7.1c.a7.1c.a7.1c.a7.1c.a7|2v.d14.2v.d14.3v.d1e.1n.67.1n.67.2s.d1e|0.u56b.u35b.a6.0|55.7|e

How can u guys stand wvw with no condition removal?
im only 20 in shadow arts, but I think shadow embrace is like the best tallent in the entire tree, this is while having sword main hand for more removal..

I use S/D if I need to remove conditions. I generally roam with S/D, and use either P/D, or SB as my offset.

you can try an celestial build
6 x divinity runes + karka accesory + 2 celestial rings +celestial amulet -248 to all stats /36% critical damage
carrion /knight armor
valk weapons –
would be an balance betwen all stats

khadorian.6417:

How can u guys stand wvw with no condition removal?
im only 20 in shadow arts, but I think shadow embrace is like the best tallent in the entire tree, this is while having sword main hand for more removal..

If u go 30 to pick up rejuvenation, u can usually heal through conditions especially if u have shadow infusion and good with CnDing