Guild Wars 2

So, after dealing with the learning curve of playing the thief (it took me a while to learn that there ARE ways to manage squishiness with mobility, it requires a certain level of skill and understanding. Yea yea, well, it wasn’t that obvious to ME when I just started playing!) I finally worked my way up to lvl 80. Made it there on a condi thief build going 0/0/30/20/20, run mostly dungeons and PvE, going d/d and SB.

That was fun, but I’m a little bored with the build and am looking for something new. Especially in dungeon situations, I always feel like I’m usually the weakest of the 5, doing the pesky things like stealth rezz and keeping up the bleeds, while my teammates do the heavy lifting. It feels meh.

Recently I just did a complete 180 and re-distributed my stats to 0/30/30/10/0, going d/p (cuz at this point, d/d again? blech) and sb (we got no other reliable AoE’s ranged or otherwise…) and focus on some combo of power/prec/crit damage and power/prec/toughness.

I’m allergic to the words “glass cannon” but I’m having trouble bursting down people with backstabs. It’s doing anywhere from 1.5k to 2.5k on backstabs which isn’t really killing things as fast as I hoped. I know I can go full into berserker gear to solve this issue, but again, back to the allergies with glass cannon…

note: Im using the blinding powder + HS to stealth, I find it much more reliable than CnD since I don’t need to hit anything to stealth. It’s absurdly initiative heavy though so I’m having second thoughts…

Can anyone tell me what I’m doing wrong? My gear is awful at the moment since I just switched builds today, but before I fully commit I’d like to get an idea of what works, berserker gear vs knights gear vs valkyrie gear, or some combo of the above? What about the trinkets, should I spec more on vit/toughness or put more power/prec/crit into those?

Lastly, is there any other options to go burst thief besides d/p or d/d? I really like the S/P set but I’m not sure how that build works in terms of where the burst damage is coming from (besides pw).

well if your looking for burst damage you sort of want to be putting a good amount of +crit damage/chance stuff on plus a decent amount of power, you can find a sweat spot between pure glass cannon burst (full zerker for non condi) and pure defensive, but that all comes down to personal preference, where do YOU draw the line at whats good enough burst and whats good enough survival, it will basically come down to experimentation.

Shame your feeling your not contributing as much with a condi thief, I know I tend to do too much dps as condi in fractals and end up having to kite bosses around that are locked on to me permanently, I blame caltrops!

The biggest problem with condi thief in dungeons, in my experience, is when you have another class that can rack up bleeds and in some cases do it faster/better than we can (i.e. rangers and necros). Then its like, well, kitten #8230; now what? Uhh… poison!!! Let me poison the boss and kite!!! Ok I’m doing next to no damage, but whatever, poison!!!

I know for a fact that I don’t have fast enough reflexes to make a full zerker thief survive so at least SOME degree of defense is vital for me. I know it’s a preference thing (most things are) but I was hoping to get some ideas from other people who play the build to see what works for them, and then use that as a control when I experiment.

Currently I’m debating between a full knight’s armor vs a full valkyrie armor.

Unfortunately thats a problem for all condition based builds in the game and something I hope anet solves at some point, more than 1 condition build will generally lower the effectiveness of all of them.

Though I’d argue that thieves are possibly one of the faster bleed appliers, caltrops + db = 25 stacks in a matter of seconds, not seen any others really reach that in such a short time.

If you are in a team with another condition builder it means you can shift to a more support style, maintaining stacks of bleeds, keeping poison up (small damage but some times the heal decrease is well worth it) and helping with other things.

Thieves can be amazing supporters, even just shadow refuge allows you to both manage agro on the entire team (drop it down on a squishies that have unwanted agro or such) as well as being a great heal (heal ticks in it and life steal range procs), not to mention all the other impressive utilities we have you can switch between and you can do all that while still maintaining a large portion of your damage by reapplying conditions now and then (or just dropping caltrops)

Throw in that you can also switch to heartseeker to do some impressive burst damage when mobs get low there is still lots you can do, but enough about condition build and onto the rest.

Problem with going full valkyries is that you won’t have that much crit rate (if you have no precision beyond base you only have a 4% rate), which makes all that +crit damage less useful.

On the flip side the knights armour you’ll score plenty of crits which will still do decent damage because crits are still a boost (specially with 30% damage boost from crit trait), but they wont do as much as they could otherwise, but would probably be your best starting point.

Regarding crit rate of valkyrie armor, I’m using the trait where I get full 100% crit coming off of stealth so I’m not really worried about crit RATE but moreso crit damage. That being said so far I used only knight’s armor to experiment, loving the toughness, not loving the damage output so far…