Guild Wars 2

Hey folks,

After playing a guardian and a warrior to 80 I’ve decided to make a thief. ATM she is 66 and I’m enjoying my D/P setup and shortbow.

On my warrior I run shout heal with boon runes and can heal while I buff my team with 6 might stacks and fury for a long duration. (damage, survivability, boons)

On my guardian I mitigate damage with a hammer and aegis skills, mash f1 to apply burning to my team, and heal when I buff. (damage mitigation, survivability, boons)

On my thief I can mitigate damage with blind and Lotus Poison. I’d like to incorporate damage without sacrificing survivability. (damage, damage mitigation, survivability)

Here is my build at the moment, I’m not sure where to take it from here. The utility skills can be changed out and the trickery dropped completely if needed. I’m fond of the blinds from the pistol, the weakness from lotus poison and the initiative from Opportunist.

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mckzMc0zMonbToonbToff9Maocm

Any and all comments are welcome. Thanks in advance!

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mckzMc0zMMMxFMMMxvmp0x0fmRVsbV

All Carrion equipment.

This is the support build I’m using and it’s giving me amazing results. And despite being support oriented, I’m using it in PvP and WvW and I still win most fights so it doesn’t sacrifice damage potential.

Shadow Refuge is a great skill for any Thief. For a support Thief it’s a MUST.

It allows you to do a lot of amazing things like resurrecting with total impunity, making your party skip or rush hard parts of dungeons or save your life.

Venom Sharing is a bit tricky, you have to learn the distance as it’s very short (specially if you came from shouters), but they’re useful.

Your Spider Venom works as a 2K or more healing for anyone affected by it and thanks to Lotus it will reduce opponent damage to 75%, and Devourer Venom, while more situational, is useful too to stop a rushing horde as you will share it so many opponents will get paralisys, as well as granting the other benefits from Venoms.

I use Venomous Strength over Mug because both venoms give me 4*Might with a long duration, which affects my bleeds and is also shared to my teamates. Combined with the Might stacks you get from stealthing it will maintain around 10 Might stacks (max you can get by yourself without combos is 15 during 2 seconds before it drops again).

Thrill of Crime introduces you to the “fake steal” concept, which means stealing without a target to trigger the trait effect. This will give you and close allies swiftness. In combat you (and your allies) will benefit from the Fury it gives, and even without precision or critical damage investment, it will still increase your (non condition) damage by 10% which is great.

In dungeons and big group fights, it’s a good idea to switch to shortbow for a simple reason:

It’s the best Combo Finisher weapon in the whole game… by FAR.

You can drop 1 blast finisher per second (your second skill, as long as you don’t detonate it, and I would recommend to activate the option to drop AoEs where you mouse is, this way you skip the step of pressing the key again to place the green circle). And you will rarely waste all your initiative, specially with the 15 points thanks to 15 in Trickery.

If you have a Ranger or Elementalist droping Water Fields, you can heal for 1.2K per second anyone standing in the field. That’s right, 1.2k health per second in AoE. Thief is a very underrated support profession, mainly because how many perceive it as a squishy dps, but in fact it’s one of the best supporters in the game. I have done dungeons where you receive a lot of artillery barrages, and I stood with a Ranger over his Water Field outhealing the huge damage thrown at us without problems.

And not just Water Fields, there are a lot of cool effects from different fields (my other favorites are ethereal for chaos armor, guardians to keep retaliation on them and fire for 3*might).

If you are in a party that throws a lot of fields, just smile and start using Blast Finishers on anything with a circle shape that you see. Combo Fields are rarely exploited and are GREAT. I’ve been in a lot of dungeon runs doing this and people in my party usually says things like “wow, last time it took me twice the time to kill this boss!”, and I know it’s in great part because of how many Blast Finishers I was dropping to support my team.

Other tips I could give are to use 2 Body Shots before stealing, because you’re returning 3 initiatives (plus 1 in the total casting time) thanks to 5 points in Trickery, which means 10 Vulnerability for 2 initiative. But use Body Shot only under thar circumstance, otherwise it’s a waste. If an opponent is too strong to reach him for the Cloak and Dagger combo, or there are too many opponents, switch to Shortbow for the AoE damage, drop the poison field if you need to reduce their incomming damage, and keep activating any field you see.

Also, one good trick when you have Steal available is to start using Cloak and Dagger and use Steal in the mid of the animation, this way you’re instantly stealthed when teleporting to your target as Steal doesn’t interrupt your attack animation, this can be good to avoid getting hit when doing the 5-1-1-1 combo.

I love the Thieves Guild elite, they absorb a lot of atention and damage from you, deal decent damage, and are more targets for your venom sharing (as most times you won’t affect 5 party members anyway).

Learn the numerous tricks with Shadow Refuge (just remember you have to wait for it to finish to exit it without losing stealth), get used to the distances for venom sharing and remember you can fake steal to reach points faster.