Guild Wars 2

Im levling a thief to 80 with the thought of maybe making it my main. Normally I would focus strictly on PvP, but GW2 have kept my eyes open for PvE as well. Hopefully the aim would be WvW / tpvp on the long run, but with a mix of all.

My concern for the thief class is that I am forced to play with specific weapons in order to compete? I understand that this can be somewhat found in other classes too, but thief is squishy and excel in being offensive. I hope this broad question raises disagreement. For instance during levling I’ve found love with D/D or D/P, which I hope to use in PvP. If I were to go either of these, would the mechanics severerly hinder me vs certain type of geared/traited classes? Or would it be the opposite as long as I went for the right gear / trait?

And with this/these weapon choices in mind, which exotic set would I be best off with as an allrounder? Lets say for spike damage. How would my effectiveness be vs x class gear/trait. Obviously I cant beat everyone, I just seek insight if there are cases where I shouldnt have an equal standing 1v1 with my choices, or if there is a point where it is hard to compete due 1v2+.
What is your general take on this as long time playing thieves, with the latest updates in mind?

Thank you for taking time

Well the first thing you need to understand is that every thief who posts on this forums is the best in the world, and only their opinion matters. Everyone else is usually wrong, a noob, or both.

Now that you’ve got an idea how the culture is, I’ll offer some suggestions.

It appears you want to go with a power/crit build. 3 soldier/3 zerk armor, all zerker trinkets, valk/soldier/zerk weapons are the standard setup. 10/30/30 or 0/30/30/x/x is pretty normal for D/D, D/P style.

Coming from another class with far more mitigation/forgiveness, if I were you I’d err on the side of caution and take more soldier pieces at the start. You can buy them with karma and swap them out easily enough with CoF zerk pieces as you get better.

Sigils are usually force/accuracy/fire/lightning in this type of build. For money, just slap some Ruby orbs in there (though divinity is best), or Ogre.

That’s more than enough to get you started.

The answer is all over this forum :P

Let’s talk gear:
You mentioned the allrounder, so I will start from there.
Typically, for PvE and WvW, you want your critical damage bonus to come from certain slots, due to rounding issues(some items grant way more crit damage per attribute point than others).
Namely and most importantly, you want crit damage in your jewels(Trinket upgrade slots). As for the rest, the most flexible is probably a mix of berserkers gear and soldiers(again, stat point conversion to critical damage, there should be some threads about this issue, you typically get crit damage from the ones with good conversion values and stuff the rest with raw stats).

There are attributes besides soldiers and berserkers, but for allround builds, these don’t matter much. For example, a purely backstab based build will probably run full valkyries armor with cavalier’s, valk or berserk trinkets(slotted berserk or valk) to get the maximum amount of crit damage possible, but still hit like a wet noodle when out of stealth(and not having fury) due to having no precision whatsoever.
There are other stats, such as knights, but generally, these don’t matter much for thieves.

As for weapons, pretty much everyone runs berserkers and so do I.

Well PvE, WvW and tPvP are quite different to one another and different builds are more suited to one area than another. The d/p perma-stealth builds you might see in WvW for example are great because you can take your time and heal up when needed, but in tPvP you generally can’t be waiting around in stealth to heal while your opponents cap points.

If you’re going for a direct damage build for WvW or PvP then d/p and s/d are the two main weapon sets. s/d can strip opponents of their boons and give them to you, making them good against professions that have a lot of boons such as elementalists or guardians, and uses evades and high mobility as the main source of damage mitigation. S/D builds go with something like 0/30/0/30/10 for traits and beserker gear for pvp. Armor sets for wvw are a matter of preference.

d/p offers stealth and blinds for avoiding damage and uses heartseekers and backstabs for spike damage. Pistol off hand can be particularly effective in dealing with opponents using melee weapons due to the smoke field provided by black powder. D/P builds usually use 25/30/0/0/15 with zerker gear for pvp or 10/30/30/0/0 with zerker and possibly a mixture of soldier and valkyrie for wvw.

For PvE just about every weapon set has a use but d/d is often used against bosses as it offers the highest single target dps while s/p is often used to deal with trash mobs. 25/30/10/0/5 with d/d is the highest sustained dps build for thief I believe, but for PvE you can use just about anything.

Thanks for the tips! My thief is 80 now and I’ve just stepped into the WvW aspect. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p4IcEfwdD0&feature=youtu.be Not without flaws, but it’s been fun^^

I’m really liking my P/D condition build. I’m also thinking that it can serve as training wheels for thieves in WvW. Having mostly carrion gear, with a bit of rabid, and mostly defensive stats (0/0/30/20/20), it is very survivable. It also gets you used to landing CnDs in order to survive, but in a much more forgiving build.

I think this sort of build will set a newbie thief up for using a D/D, backstab build without having to die a lot. On the other hand, it requires completely different gear…so if you want to get right in with those backstabs, I’d follow others’ advice.

I try to use weapon sets and utility skills that shore up certain weaknesses. For example, sword is good to keep as a second weapon set if you don’t otherwise have condition removal. Shadow step is a useful utility skill both offensively and defensively – I find it helps mobility a great deal for builds that have little initiative regen.

Likewise some skills build synergy with certain traits. Smoke bomb is really useful when traited to 30 in shadow arts. With little or no shadow arts it is not so great.

bobross.5034:

I’m really liking my P/D condition build. I’m also thinking that it can serve as training wheels for thieves in WvW. Having mostly carrion gear, with a bit of rabid, and mostly defensive stats (0/0/30/20/20), it is very survivable. It also gets you used to landing CnDs in order to survive, but in a much more forgiving build.

I think this sort of build will set a newbie thief up for using a D/D, backstab build without having to die a lot. On the other hand, it requires completely different gear…so if you want to get right in with those backstabs, I’d follow others’ advice.

Do you know of any newer links to vids showcasing this? Switching gear is to me a bit extreme, would be nice to see actual footage of it. Other than that I find my setup in that vid more than viable, I just need to work on my own skill.

People who use smoke bomb and not shadowstep make baby Jesus cry. Seriously, you need to start using shadowstep and get use to it.

wish.1027:

People who use smoke bomb and not shadowstep make baby Jesus cry. Seriously, you need to start using shadowstep and get use to it.

That’s subjective. It really depends on your build.