Guild Wars 2

Relevant Reading Material: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Teef-Stacking-vs-Walling-conditions/first

Conditions that power builds can use and their benefit

• Cripple – makes targets easier to hit and chase.
• Poison – keeps healing to a minimum
• Weakness – Keeps damage to a minimum
• Blind – same thing.

• Thieves can provide these 4 conditions near liberally. It makes them just as deadly as damaging conditions because the duration and liberal application of a condition can suck just as bad as a potent one, just in a different way. See reading material.

How to hybrid properly

• When designing a hybrid build, choose a dominant damage type and focus on applying it. Proper ratio for damage focus is 60:40 to 80:20. For example, main source of damage is direct and crits but runes sigils and a few traits increase the duration of cripple to maximize its effect.
• Sinister and Carrion are best stats for hybrids.
• The effectiveness of Conditions can be maximized through damage, duration and uptime. Maximizing all of these will maximize the conditions you apply. Build accordingly.
• Condition duration is vastly more important on a power build than condition damage. Again, long lasting durations can kill as much as damaging durations.
• Stacking and uptime can make up for lack of duration.
• In pve and WvW, Givers with malice sigil and specific condition duration +20% sigils will give 50% duration to your conditions. Poison and Bleed duration can be doubled using giver weapons with Venom/Agony and malice sigils, Orr/Krait runes. For other conditions, Nightmare runes helps.
• Best source of Cripple thieves have are Caltrops and Uncatchable.
• Best source of Poison thieves have is Choking Gas, Needle Trap and Spider Venom. Can also use CG for weakness.

I really like this post … informative and helps thieves out who need it, but I’d like to add something to this if you do not mind and if you do … well I’m sorry! T_T

I run a hybrid build and I want to add that a mixture of celestial and carrion can also work very well for a hybrid setup, I recently switched some of my armor to carrion (the lesser pieces) and weapons to carrion, then swapped out my infusions for different ones. I was previously running full celestial but due to trait changes lacking stats, that no longer works.

I didn’t know how well it would perform in WvW but it actually feels very strong and has multiple options that are as simple as changing some traits and middle utility slot.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAoYVlsMhunYbTw0Jw/EHIFFvBCgFw/C3w8pfyTYxA-TlCFABN8AAaUVF/UCSpaFAcCAE4QAYlyva2fAO9BKfEACAgAsz6sO3ZghO0hO0hO025R35OP6OLFwiCrA-w

IE: If you are going against a necro with heavy condition return, then taking mug with revealed training and Blinding Powder / Ambush Trap / Assassin’s signet / Haste (etc etc) can be beneficial compared to running even more condition sources via traps so you nuke yourself less from condi return. (Another benefit to being hybrid and not full condition damage, you will not be completely hard countered from plague signet and it’s ridiculously stupid short cooldown)

This also helps vs classes who have a lot more condition clear, so on and so forth. But I find in many situations it’s actually really … really good as it is, but the point is there are options to change up vs would be weaknesses with the change of two traits and one utility.

Also, sigil of leeching is open to change, you could use blood – rage – or whatever suits your fancy. I just enjoy having that added bit of sustain and near-gauranteed burst on a backstab so long as it lands, which on a double (or in an ideal situation triple trapped) target 10 (or 15) vulnerability and 10 (or 15) might … backstab crits clear 7k + leeching which pushes roughly 8k and then sigil of air pushes that up to about 9k, which is really good damage considering the added condi pressure the build has.

Not to mention plenty of health and armor so you don’t explode and even comes with a little bonus healing to help sustain slightly more and play a bit more aggressive. The healing also affects sigil of blood so, that’s part of why I mentioned it.

Bah, sorry for the lengthy rant …

So I have been playing P/P and I love it (even with Ricochet removed), and I find your post one of the few informative ones on here. Just a question, should I seriously think Carrion/Giver with a P/P build or should i stick to Assasins/Berserker? Would it make that big a difference on the auto attack?

p/p is a power weaponset. You could probably go zerker with carrion trinkets and use krait runes to make bleeds last longer. As for weapons, giver definitely.

good post man, i’m really up to try a condi build for thief….using the build editor i made that one….you think it might work for roamming(solo or small group) what do you think?
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZQQNAqaVlsMhSnY3TwtJw/EHIFFvBCgFw/C3w8pfyTYxA-TlSAAB+oijBHBAZ0HI9pAQNlgbpcDgHAAXKJCS9ge2fIAACA38m38m38mlCYRRWA-w