Guild Wars 2

This is where I’ve landed so far – questions/comments/feedback welcome:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYQQRAoa4YlYmiOXcS4E95Ex2jeuTe6pgsftTBXtKA-jwxAY/BRTQCNRIQJviox2GKiGruGT5SEVDA-e

First a couple disclaimers:
1) Not a WvW, PvP or Dungeon build. This is for running around killing world mobs, including vets/champs.
2) Built for extremely active playstyle – dodging, shadowstepping, weapon swapping and flanking like crazy. Full zerk, and damage mitigation is 100% active.

30 critical strikes is a no-brainer for damage output
15 in Trickery is mandatory to me for the initiative + fury.
15 in Acrobatics is mandatory to me for the endurance (almost 3 dodges in a row, with a 4th coming up quickly). Vigor-on-heal I’ll swap with might-on-dodge or 50% falling damage situationally, i.e. champ = vigor, trash = might, JP = falling. Combined with Withdraw, you can get almost 6 consecutive dodges.

The remaining 10 points I don’t really care where they go; I bumped up trickery/acro to 20 each because caltrops at 20 is great for battlefield control, and for the last 5 I figured extra vita/boon duration (fury/vigor uptime)/ini would be better than some % damage per ini (I burn ini like crazy in fights). I’ve also considered taking 10 in Shadow Arts for cheaper backstab, but found I don’t use backstab enough for it to make a difference.

I run around mostly with D/P and D/D, though I keep a shortbow in my pack for AOE burst in rare situations where 100 melee trash mobs are biting at my ankles. Caltrops really helps with that too. D/P is my main for spammable shadowstep/blind/AOE blind, and D/D occasionally for ridiculous burst using Cloak&dagger+backstab.

DP3 is especially useful with acrobatics 15 and withdraw, since you can literally be stabbing again as soon as you come out of the roll – it allows for very aggressive play. This is particularly useful against champions or groups of enemies, where you need to dodge frequent attacks and still want to keep DPS up. DP4 is also spammable, and good for interrupting big skills e.g. a golem’s laser beams. DP5 is strong vs. vets/silvers and big clusters of mobs, since they aren’t immune to perma-blind.

DD5/backstab is the highest DPS if a vet/champion is distracted by an NPC or other player, and also sometimes just fun for the 2-shot kill on trash. But I find that the lack of blinds and mobility tends to get me killed if I get DPS-greedy and stay on D/D for too long.

This build is obviously not optimized for max dungeon DPS, but it’s as high as you really need for world roaming and has extreme mobility, dodges and blinds which makes it great for just about anything a world map will throw at you.

A minor modification to improve dungeon DPS is to shift 5 points from Acrobatics to Trickery, and swap caltrops for flanking damage (net +20% damage modifier with flanking/high initiative).

I like your build. Usually though when I run something like 30/0/20/20 its with a sword mainhand.

Personally, when I am out doing stuff in open world, I prefer a more stealth oriented build. This helps with being able to pass by mobs, gather nodes with mobs nearby, or just escape danger in general.

Currently I am using 0/30/15/25/0. I like it because I can dodge a ton, and have two +10% damage traits, and I can maintain them due to the shadow arts V trait. I am not really attached to trickery, although I do sometimes miss fury.

I can kill champs pretty easy with this… just do a normal cloak and dagger, auto attack, backstab chain, and dodge when necessary. I use withdraw for healing because I have plenty of stealth from cloaks and utilities.

But back to your build, I like it, but I wouldn’t use a backstab build without 10 in shadow arts for the +2 initiative on cloak and dagger… that would drive me nuts.

I’m curious why you prefer mainhand sword for this trait setup?

I don’t really consider this a backstab build, as more than half the time I use D/P. I usually only switch to D/D when there’s 1-2 mobs left and they’re both blinded and already in melee range – so usually I only need enough for 1-2 backstabs.

I’ve actually switched my build to 0/30/0/15/25 for the extra damage, since in higher level maps the difference does matter somewhat. Sadly it means running a bit low on initiative (especially on D/D as you mentioned), but it’s worth the tradeoff since in the tougher/1 vs. many fights my usual tactic is to shadowstep in, burst a couple skills and dodge/withdraw back out before they can converge on me. At that point I’m looking to do max damage in a short time, and only need enough initiative for a couple big hits.