Guild Wars 2

Last night i finally got around a good looking outfit for my thief, and although I m far from good with the class (judging purely by the leveling process), I want to feast my eyes on my looks without sitting my kitten all the time in LA. Long story short, I want a PvE build!
I ve got 7/8 classes and for most of them it was easy to pick up a viable build and learn the ways around it – maybe change it a bit -, despite being primarily PvP oriented. Daphoenix’s elementalist and Minion master necro are good examples of these.

For thieves however aside from the cries and whims of people, of which I m already fed enough for 2013, it proved to be a challenge to find a PvE guide. Very few are not focused on PvP, and I would not imagine thieves to be just as easy or viable in a dungeon, without the proper build.

Since there isn’t a sticky devoted to this part of the thief – that I know of – , be neighborly and post whatever you, who main this profession, know of.

My personal taste lies with the sword, and is far from any stealth techniques, but you are welcome to post these builds too, so that others who are interested may find what they are looking for.

Please refrain from expressing your personal opinion of how kittenty thieves are in PvE. I ve read it more times than I can count already, and I trust after leveling and playing 7 characters for the past 8-9 months, I can found my way around things. There is no will from my side to be competitive. Just effective.

My main is a PvE Thief. I use a Sword in my main hand and I only use stealth as a beneficial side effect or for situational use. It sounds like my build might cover what you’re looking for, so see the link below.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/thief/?7.0|c.1n.h15.a.1n.h15|5.1n.h19|1n.7i.1n.7i.1n.7i.1n.7i.1n.7i.1n.7i|1n.64.1n.64.1n.64.1n.64.1n.64.8g.67|u48c.a6.u19c.0

The character is designed as an AoE buffing build. It really won’t come together until 70th level since you really need 30 pts in Deadly Arts for soloing / grouping and 30 pts in Shadow Arts for the AoE buffs. Based on my personal gear build, I threw the remaining points in Critical Strikes to help my crit rate.

1) Utility slot: Shadow’s Refuge is a situational power that is mostly use for group play. Normally I will have this power replaced with Signet of Shadows for soloing or Ice Drake Venom for grouping.

2) Elite slot: Basilisk Venom is only used for grouping and its value only shows after you’ve hit 70th level. For soloing or against a few buggy Champion mobs who are immune to Basilisk’s effects, I will normally run Thieves Guild. Dagger Storm is a good situational power for farming since it lets you damage a lot of trash mobs in a short amount of time, but it’s not a power that I primarily use.

3) Food: Omnomberry Pie is my food of choice. Between the food and the dual Superior Sigil of Blood on my melee set, you’ll be constantly healing from crits. When combined with the constant healing from Leeching Venoms, it makes for a very stable build.

4) Disclaimer: Be warned that this is a fragile build. When you’re using #3 Pistol Whip or #5 Black Powder, having a lower health pool isn’t as much of a big deal when you see all of the various healing sources that you have access to. Yet the danger of this build is dealing with condition damage. Conditions will eat you alive, so they need to be dealt with immediately. Spamming the Sword #2 can slowly remove them. Otherwise your heal (Hide in Shadows) and your end game armor runes (Superior Runes of Lyssa) are your main sources of condition removal.

The thing with this class is that it has a higher learning curve in PvE than other classes, simply do to its squish factor and wanting to play in melee range. Get good here and you’ll be playing all other classes better.

Sword Builds..
I like running these with Sword/Dagger, first two work with Sword/Pistol also.
25/30/0/15/0, Sorta Glass Cannon but has a bit of Vitality and extra Dodges.
0/30/0/25/15, An extra 5% damage from behind the target.
0/30/15/25/0, I use this for some healing while CnD>Tactical Strike
0/30/25/15/0, This is for stacking Might on Stealth and Dodge

Sword/Dagger has a lot of tools to work with, Tactical Strike with 6x Rune of the Mesmer increases your daze duration equal your Revealed debuff. Not a total ‘daze lock’ but you can hamper your target pretty well. You have on demand condition removal, cripple, stealth and the new Flanking/Larcenous strikes are actually quite good now. Sword Auto does good damage and Larcenous Strike hits pretty hard. Not gonna match single target damage that D/D does but your toolbelt is bigger.

Sword/Pistol isn’t bad, less tools but you get Evasion with Pistol Whip or blinding field with Black Powder which is admittedly pretty nice.

As a follow up to my original post, I wanted to mention some things about my build.

1) You’re a tanky character. Having that high of a Toughness score, using the built-in evasion of Pistol Whip, and the constant heals means that you can basically off-tank. During large Group Events, you’ll be capable of tanking a Champion trash mob. At the Jormag event, I’m usually tanking one of the x2 Champion trash mobs.

2) You’re a debuffing machine. Through traits and gear, you’re at +40% Condition Duration and you’re generating a lot of Weakness through Spider’s Venom and Skale Venom. When you’ve got extra people to share your debuffs with, it means that you’re permanently locking a Champion down with Weakness and you’ll often be debuffing other areas. The AoE version of Ice Drake Venom is especially entertaining on Champions.

3) You’re an aggro magnet. This character build pretty much hits every single factor for determining aggro. You’re almost always in melee range, you’ve got high Toughness, you’re debuffing like mad, and you’ve got a respectable dps output. While other characters can take aggro from you, this character build will often be a target. If you don’t enjoy that kind of thing, you’ll want to definitely tweak the gear build.

4) As a general FYI, the Venom powers in the Utility slots are instant cast powers. This means that you can cast them as you’re starting a Pistol Whip #3 and can even cast a 2nd one in the middle of that Pistol Whip. If you need to quickly deal out Venom procs, Pistol Whip is your main source of delivery.

5) One odd quirk of the Venomous Aura buff sharing is how it affects Spider’s Venom. Based on multiple player tests, it seems that a shared SV buff uses the recepient’s +Condition scores. This means that even though your own +Condition values are non-existant, other players can still get a decent damage output from this skill. (Your whole point of using SV is for the Leeching Venom and Lotus Poision trait procs. Though the healing debuff from the Poison stacking is also nice.)

6) You’ll be extremely rare. Most PvE Thief players won’t use a Venomous Aura build. This means that you’ll end up standing out when you’re at a Group Event and your contributions will make a difference.

Wise,

Definitely an interesting build. I believe the 2x Sigil of Blood don’t stack, you may be better off going with Sigil of Accuracy on your off hand. IIRC on crit sigils share cooldowns.

Also, what do you see for autoattack damage with sword? Seems your crit dmg and effective power is pretty low but your toughness and effective health are nice. Master Maintenance Oil or Superior Sharpening Stones would give you a good boost.

I rarely if ever see a venom share setup.

Blood~

Bloodgruve.6038:

I rarely if ever see a venom share setup.

Blood~

basically you sacrifice almost everything to be viable (30DA+30SA) for 300 share range with pugs? no way ! + all utilities+elite lost to venoms

no crits, no viable bunker via stealth&regen+ini spam, limited condition removal

BUT some are kitten and refuse to give us 600 share range to be useful
instead they give us +~30 more power to them, not bad, but it’s NOT what it is needed !

Bloodgruve.6038:

Definitely an interesting build. I believe the 2x Sigil of Blood don’t stack, you may be better off going with Sigil of Accuracy on your off hand. IIRC on crit sigils share cooldowns.

Sigh. Once again, the Wiki edit bandits strike again. First they remove the 50 second recast timer note off of the Superior Sigil of Lyssa entry. Now I see that they’ve removed the entire section about how you can stack x2 percentage proc sigils together for a combined effect.

Unless ArenaNet snuck through these changes in a patch that I didn’t notice, the combined effect of x2 Superior Blood combines to a 54% proc chance with a single cool down. (With dimishing returns, you’re getting +30% from Sigil #1 and +24% from Sigil #2.) While I would never use this on a long cool down sigil, Blood’s low cool down makes it more than worth it. I’ll happily give up the effective use of my 2nd sigil slot in order to make make the original Blood sigil that effective.

Bloodgruve.6038:

Also, what do you see for autoattack damage with sword? Seems your crit dmg and effective power is pretty low but your toughness and effective health are nice. Master Maintenance Oil or Superior Sharpening Stones would give you a good boost.

My auto attack damage is all over the place. Due to how the Venomous Aura build works, I’m generating anywhere between x2 Might stacks and x8 Might stacks at a given time. Also my damage numbers are constantly getting altered due to the Leeching Venom procs. When I get home from work, I’ll take a look and try to post some average values.

DanH.5879:

BUT some are kitten and refuse to give us 600 share range to be useful
instead they give us +~30 more power to them, not bad, but it’s NOT what it is needed !

It all depends. When I’m killing a god priest or some Champion trash mob at a large group event, there tends to be enough players and pets in melee that you’re still hitting your target cap with our existing range. Even in Fractal runs, a mostly melee oriented group will be in range to get your buffs. The only time that the build ends up going to waste is when you’re stuck in an instanced dungeon with people who want to ranged combat and spread out all over the place.

I’d still love to have our Venomous Aura AoE range increased. It would really make my life easier. However now that we can see a visible AoE ring around ourselves when we cast a Venom power, it’s easier to adjust around and hit more targets with the following Venom buffs.

First things first, thank you for the responses. i m eager to see the results, although I have a question need answering first. Why knight’s gear and not a combination of berserker and something else? Hoarding gold to buy a T3 for my asura guardian and with the diminishing returns being a bit over the edge – which means it takes at least a couple of weeks for a full set from SE – I find it a bit uneasing to add a 3rd or 4th one to the list of characters I need knights on.

Wiser with Age.3714:

The only time that the build ends up going to waste is when you’re stuck in an instanced dungeon with people who want to ranged combat and spread out all over the place.

Which is mostly the case in groups where members have little to no experience of each other’s gameplay, prior to the dungeon, which practically eliminates co-ordination.

However, as I said, I m not in the competitive stage of PvE – if it exists rather than being an illusion of the commoners, who disregard skill and enjoyment aka. “COF P1 4 WARRIORS 1 MESMER GEARCHECK” – so the role the build fulfills doesn’t have to be the one thse people reserve for thieves.

1) I like to off-tank. Debuffing and off-tanking on “thief” characters is my signature build in MMOs. This character was the closest spiritual successor that I could come up with for my old EQ2 Brigand. As a result, I needed a defensive stat to make that possible.

2) Through running a high Toughness, you’ve got enough damage mitigation to make your Leeching Venom and crit-based heals effective. You can get hit by a Champion and lose half of your low health pool, but it can be instantly restored within 1-2 Venom skills. Or if you’re really in trouble, the Hide in Shadows heal will restore about 66% of your health pool. The ability to take abuse and keep kicking is very attractive to me.

3) I find that your average instanced dungeon group has about x2 melee characters (other than myself). Usually these are Thief, Guardian, or Warrior characters. It is my observation that this is sufficient for my buff sharing. Or if we’re all being force to ranged combat and we’re sticking close to each other, then this is also sufficient. The issue is when you’re dealing with Guardians who are trying to ranged combat, Rangers who aren’t using their pets, and various ranged casters who aren’t bothering to help revive each other. These situations tend to have people so spread out that their own AoE effects can’t even reach their fellow group members. In my personal opinion, these groups are inherently disfunctional and it’s not really your fault that your Venomous Aura build isn’t working since this is an abnormal situation.

4) This is the character that I’ll normally take to open world Group Events. I relish the chance to lock down some big and scary Champion mob. Melandru is one of my favorite punching bags and I love to interrupt his transformation script through AoE Basilisk buffing. This build will keep your fellow players alive through your debuffing and your ability to help heal them through Leeching Venom / Venomous Aura. It will let you turn the tide by changing the flow of action on the battlefield. However it won’t let you just dance in and save the day by dealing out massive amounts of spike damage. Champions are endurance fights, which is what this character build excells at.

Are there any caps in stats, required? Will it work well if I get rare gear and not exotic for example?

Hmm… Well your healing output is just based off of your +stats from Shadow Arts traits, so that would still be effective. However Toughness is a multiplier that is applied to the original armor score of the gear that you are wearing. Therefore you’re going to get a lot more mileage out of Exotic armor score values then you would with Rare armor scores.

Beyond that, you’d have slightly lower health since my Critical Strikes trait is giving 5% of your Precision as health. Your crit rate would be slightly lower, so your crit-based heals wouldn’t proc as often. The damage value for Leeching Venom is based on your Power score, so that would also be lower. Also your standard damage output will be naturally lower.

Having said all of that, Rare gear is still pretty cheap to buy. If you wanted to get a general idea about how the character spec plays, using a full set of Rare gear would be a smart way to test drive the build. After some thought, I’d agree that you should try it out with Rare gear first. Then if you love the build, it should be easy to slowly upgrade it to Exotic.

On a personal note, I’m slowly converting my jewelry slots over to Ascended pieces. I’ve ended up choosing the pieces that use Precision as their favored stat in the Power/Precision/Toughness build. At this point, the slight loss of Toughness has not been that noticable and the slight increase in my crit rate has been nice.

I’m one of those guys who likes to see big numbers so I run a lot of Zerker. I back it up with Valks and Soldiers to a comfortable level. We’re not totally devoid of support but we’re not real strong in that aspect so I’ve decided to bring as much DPS as I can. One trait I can’t get away from is Acrobatics 15. The extra dodges help a ton with survivability. Shortbow can throw AoE Weakness which is good support and it does quite good with Signet of Malice, Sigil of Blood and Omnomberry Pie if you’re crit is high. Personally never been a fan of Venoms in PvE but they’re not for everyone, just cant get over the long cooldowns for such an important part of the build.

Blood~

Wise – very interesting build. Thanks for sharing!

To the OP, you probably are looking for an SP build since you don’t want to rely on stealth. The offhand pistol gives you both interrupt and blind fields on demand, both of which are very helpful forms of mitigating damage. Again, since you don’t want to depend on stealth on for this, it makes the SP weapon set my first recommendation for you.

How you build and gear it from there depends on what you want to do in the game. As Blood posted, getting at least 15 into Acrobatics to help your dodges is good since you will be using them as one of your primary means of damage mitigation (along with blinds and movement). From there, I recommend getting 30 into Critical Strikes which will help you to bring good DPS because the best form of damage mitigation for a Thief is to kill the enemy before it can do much damage to you. After that, it is really up to what you want to do. More DPS or venom? Go into Deadly Arts. Trait dodging more? Go deeper into Acrobatics. Buff up steal? Go into Trickery.

For skills, Shadow Refuge almost never leaves my bar since it is expected that I bring this ability with me in dungeons. From there, there are a number of good options depending on your build goals (Sig of Agility, Sig of Shadows, Shadow step, Smoke screen, Blinding powder, …). All of our elites are useful, depending on the situation. As for armor, use as much Beserker stat items as you feel comfortable with and add in as much Soldiers, Cavaliers, or Knights stats items as you need to comfortably survive.

Personally, I still main a Thief and primary run an SP set up for PvE/dungeons and despite all the very annoying and un-understandable nerfs that the class seems to be receiving after each patch, I still find it a strong class and enjoy the play mechanics of it. In dungeons, I usually can “tank” (not that there really is anything like this in this game) longer than Guardians or Warriors in my party, and am often the last one standing in the party. Good luck!

Mpiftekis.1529:

However, as I said, I m not in the competitive stage of PvE – if it exists rather than being an illusion of the commoners, who disregard skill and enjoyment aka. “COF P1 4 WARRIORS 1 MESMER GEARCHECK” – so the role the build fulfills doesn’t have to be the one thse people reserve for thieves.

That mindset does exist, but I rarely see it for as much as it’s represented on the Dungeon forums. I’ve been unwelcomed for bringing my Thief and Ranger, and I was once colorfully told why: Dungeons are all about Direct Damage. Warriors output the most heavy damage in cleaving hits and banners support everyone constantly. The Mesmer has Time Warp to make this efficient and has reflect to do a lot of damage. If you’re not maximizing damage or utilizing reflect (poor mesmer), you’re wasting everyone’s time. And to that tend, you better be in ALL BERZERKERS because if not, you’re wasting potential and time. Really, as time is money. In the game. Cough. Joke about wasting time while playing a video game.

Of course, I run with other people who let me bring my S/D-D/P build or my melee ranger, and maybe it’s not as effective, maybe we waste time, but we have fun and that’s really all that I look for these days. My days of main tanking min/max tuned raids are done, it’s what I came to GW2.

Wiser with Age.3714:

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/thief/?7.0|c.1n.h15.a.1n.h15|5.1n.h19|1n.7i.1n.7i.1n.7i.1n.7i.1n.7i.1n.7i|1n.64.1n.64.1n.64.1n.64.1n.64.8g.67|u48c.a6.u19c.0

Bloodgruve.6038:

25/30/0/15/0, Sorta Glass Cannon but has a bit of Vitality and extra Dodges.

I somewhat checked these two already and the second one is a bit more than “sorta glass cannon” :P
As in “I will officially become the virgin for sacrifice” rather than a normal group member.

So far the venom build seems better in this regard. As I noticed my stats while in it, however, I decided to make 2 changes.

Trinkets + backpack are enough to sent my toughness up to 2700, which is more than I already ever had, and mind you I main d/d elementalist with zerkers and still survive in fractals 20-30.
In fear of becoming the target of the boss and because I want to do more damage I ll try keeping knights in trinkets, berserker armor and shortbow and magi melee weapon.
To that decision, having 11k hp also helped quite a bit :P

I also noticed that with this set-up (in a mix of greens, rares and 1 exotic amulet) I need signet of agility to maintain 50% crit chance which based on my imagination and prophet skills should be the minimum amount I need to have in order for all these proc heals to work.

I believe this build will work better to my needs but I have a question. You don’t specify utilities. Granted they are pretty much always on the change, but I m left with the impression that assassin’s and agility signets provide a better sustained dps than venoms. Am I correct in this?

If you’re talking solo dps without anyone else’s involvement (including Thieves Guild pets), then yes. Signet of Malice is probably give a bit more dps when compared to Leeching Venoms. However that also means that you’d be sacrificing the AoE dps output and the AoE healing output of your Venoms. For just the self-healing, the Leeching Venoms procs are more than worth it. At 80th level, it’s healing +385 Health per proc (assuming 30 pts in Shadow Arts).