Guild Wars 2

Recently purchased game and have been playing with both a sylvari ranger and a charr thief. Have both to about level 15 but for some reason my thief seems much more fragile than my ranger…is there something that i’m missing for survival abilities here? Mainly using 2 daggers right now with healing signet and building for precision/crits but overall go down many more times than my ranger…Any suggestions here, or is simply a matter of leveling more?

It’s basically an issues with levels. Thieves are unusually reliant on their utilities/traits to effectively fight. Thieves at low levels are both fragile and don’t have the proper gear to tear kitten up yet.

At the same time though, I find it incredibly an incredibly satisfying experience to level up a thief. You actually feel like the PvE environment poses a threat to you, and that you need to adapt and work to overcome these challenges. As opposed to a warrior, where I have had no trouble at all mashing my face into the keyboard and emerging from combat with 95% of my health left.

Don’t even both with optimizing builds until you reach at LEAST level 75. You’re just going to replace that gear soon anyway, and virtually any build can work in PvE if you’re smart about your dodges/ability usage.

If you want to stay in close combat with the thief, try a pistol offhand. This will lay down a nice little blind field with 5 that will somewhat make up for the small health pool and low armor. While dagger is great for single target damage, the sword is much better for taking on groups. If you jump into combat with 2 it allows for a temporary root ( very helpful when playing a support role withothers). 2 also allows you to leave combat,break stun, and cure a condition which is extremely powerful when it comes to survivability. S/D vs S/P boils down to preference. Try out both.

Eh, PvE poses what kind of threat? I’m solo’d loads of champions and abnormally large groups of regular mobs as a D/D condition thief during my levelling period. Granted, that only started after I got Caltrops and Roll for Initiative. But that should be really fast.

Death Blossom + Caltrops = PvE lulz.

Caltrops doesn’t seem to suffer from the 5-target AoE limit, so you can kite massive amounts of mobs across it. Combine it with the evade from Death Blossom and it’s truly lolworthy how easy it is. Instant 10-15 bleed stacks on everything in sight. Low on intiative? Roll for Initiative! And just death blossom away again. Now either the mobs are (nearly) dead or Caltrops is off colldown.

And the higher you get, the easier it gets. After ~level 30, you should pretty much have everything you need. Anything you get after that is just an awesomeberry on top of the awesomecake.

But it is true that the thief suffers a lot harder from getting hit than most other classes. This is why you shouldn’t get hit as a thief. Melee mobs, regardless whether it is a regular, veteran or champion, rarely even hit me anymore.

So yeah, it takes a bit more practice than for example a ranger or a warrior to play. But in the end, the D/D Thief can be so much more powerful then either in PvE. Simply because the damage intake should be very low to non-existant.

That being said, it doesn’t hurt to stack some vit/toughness for those pesky ranged mobs or when you do get into trouble somehow. During my levelling process, I generally went Precision (or power but thats rare during the levelling process)/Condition Damage on my 6 gear slots + 2 accesory slots and Vit/Tough stacking on the remaining 4 accesory slots.

As a side-note; The Thief is the only class I can reliably kill the wintersday mobs from the mysterious presents regardless of the type of mob it spawns. All my other classes can kill the Skritt, but the rest are a pain in the…