Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, like most thieves I am running a backstab build, 0/30/30/10/0, and as far as gear goes I am in just rares and masterworks until I can afford the exotics. Currently have mixed Beserker/Ruby Orbs and Valkyrie/Beryl. I have about 39% crit(96% crit dmg), 2764 attack, 2170 armor, and 15k health. I’m sure if I had all exotics and food I would be running higher stats but I wanted to check all my options on gear before I buy/craft it all.

Anyways, I’m tired of being squishy and a one trick pony but I do not want to stray too far from backstab. Would it be viable to go Knights/Valkyrie set? I would like to know some good stats to stay in the fight longer and deal more backstabs with lesser crit damage compared to fewer backstabs crit’ing higher. Any advice is appreciated. With thieves having lowest health and pretty low armor/toughness I was trying to figure out if toughness is even worth picking up.

Are there any tanky builds out there that can deal good damage? Just looking for options right now besides glass cannon.

I’ve gone for P/T/V armor (from AC) to balance out some of our squishiness. This works well in 1v1 and 1v2, but you still cannot go up against more. than that. Still running berserker trinkets and weapons, which nets me 16k HP and ~2500 armor and with trait points, my attack is over 3100. The major hit is crit chance and damage which is only around 31% and 60% respectively.

Exotic thief 80, full berserker, ruby orbed for max dmg/crit dmg output, traits 10/30/30/0/0 and far from being squishy with barely 12khp :P It is all about playstyle with cloak and dagger, shadowstep, sactuary. Nobody is gonna survive when focus fired anyway. If they give thief same hp pool as necro, then you will see some serious QQing

I went Power/Con/vit and love it. I may not kill as fast anymore but i love the fact i take on more the one at a time and last forever in a battle.

Mjk.7562:

Exotic thief 80, full berserker, ruby orbed for max dmg/crit dmg output, traits 10/30/30/0/0 and far from being squishy with barely 12khp :P It is all about playstyle with cloak and dagger, shadowstep, sactuary. Nobody is gonna survive when focus fired anyway. If they give thief same hp pool as necro, then you will see some serious QQing

12K hp? so you have some points in vitality, right? Or you count in the WvW bonuses?

STRanger.5120:

Mjk.7562:

Exotic thief 80, full berserker, ruby orbed for max dmg/crit dmg output, traits 10/30/30/0/0 and far from being squishy with barely 12khp :P It is all about playstyle with cloak and dagger, shadowstep, sactuary. Nobody is gonna survive when focus fired anyway. If they give thief same hp pool as necro, then you will see some serious QQing

12K hp? so you have some points in vitality, right? Or you count in the WvW bonuses?

might be food.

I can’t comment too accurately on the efficacy of a more survivable backstab thief, but I can say there are a lot of builds designed to be able to survive much longer that are plenty of fun to play in W3.

S/P is amazing with shadowstep/infiltrator’s strike. You basically play as an assassin; find someone on the edges of the fight or at low HP, shadowstep or infil strike in, down him, shadow refuge for stomp, then teleport out.

You can do this in full zerker gear if you like, or toss in some VIT pieces. You’ll want mostly power/crit % though.

Another alternative is the currently totally broken and overpowered P/D condition damage/vit bunker spec, that relies heavily on stealth spam from shadow arts and c&d spam to abuse the culling mechanics in WvWvW. Most enemies won’t be able to see you for seconds after you come out of stealth, and you can literally fight 4-5 people with it no problem.

It kinda makes me feel like a jerk playing it though, knowing its a blatant abuse of the culling mechanic.

If you are running d/d or d/p or d/anything then you probably want to stay pretty much a glass cannon since you have stealth as your survival mechanic. If you want to be tanky so you can fight in the zerg, no build will really make you very useful, you need to just fight on the edges of the zerg and pick off stragglers. We have no 1200 range weapon so we are pretty much screwed in those long range zerg fights.
If you want a tankier build I suggest valkryie and going s/d with flanking strike/auto atacks being your main damage output.

TheAmpca.1753:

If you are running d/d or d/p or d/anything then you probably want to stay pretty much a glass cannon since you have stealth as your survival mechanic. If you want to be tanky so you can fight in the zerg, no build will really make you very useful, you need to just fight on the edges of the zerg and pick off stragglers. We have no 1200 range weapon so we are pretty much screwed in those long range zerg fights.
If you want a tankier build I suggest valkryie and going s/d with flanking strike/auto atacks being your main damage output.

Pistol whip spam with signet of malice combined with the signet traits in the crit line, haste, and init regen from acrobatics/init regen on steal trait from trickery + additional 3 init in trickery = invulnerable for quite some time.

It’s a lot of fun.

TheAmpca.1753:

If you are running d/d or d/p or d/anything then you probably want to stay pretty much a glass cannon since you have stealth as your survival mechanic. If you want to be tanky so you can fight in the zerg, no build will really make you very useful, you need to just fight on the edges of the zerg and pick off stragglers. We have no 1200 range weapon so we are pretty much screwed in those long range zerg fights.
If you want a tankier build I suggest valkryie and going s/d with flanking strike/auto atacks being your main damage output.

S/P (or S/D) + SB. Plenty of points in acro and trickery, requisite mug and lotus. P/V/T armor w/ Divinity Runes, Knights jewelry w/Rubys. Endurance food, and energy sigils for lots of endurance.

Swap weapons a lot to take advantage of endurance boosts. Stay in stealth when you can and spam your choking gas (it does both poison and weakness) this is your anti-zerg mode. Choking gas does not break stealth. I like to use a stealth approach, teleport behind the main line into the squishies/ranged, and drop shadow refuge. Stay in the refuge and spam your choking gas and get as many people poisoned and weakened. If they try to focus you down, shadowstep away. If they are aware enough to aoe your refuge you’ll have to modify your strat a bit, but the goal here is to disrupt their aoe damage so your boys can push them back (controlling the downed state of the battle).

This will cause confusion and help your team because now their ranged AoE will be disrupted. They either have to move out of the poison/weakness impacting their ability to focus their fire or try to ignore the multiple stacks of poison/weakness that they get by not being aware enough to move out of the red circle that has mysteriously formed beneath them. You will have enough vit/toughness and dodges to make yourself extremely difficult to take down. If they are wasting time trying to get you down, then you’ve done your job.

Teleport out and heal up a bit. Always stay mobile and use your stealth to create confusion and escapes.

Thief is super squishy, but isn’t that why we have stealth and a bazillion shadowsteps?

Use daggerstorm with haste and signet of malice. It’s funny.

There are a couple of options but only one of those is really viable imo.

Knight will give you power/tough/vit which will give you around 20k hp and a really nice amount of toughness but you won’t kill anything.

A nice combination of Berserker/Valkyrie can net you around 15k hp and if traited for it 300 extra toughness. I used it for a while and realized that even though I had 3-4k more hp it took longer for me to kill people and thus I took more damage.

Cond/Power/Vit is the only real viable setup for damage dealing AND surviving. Especially because the builds often have +300 Vit/Toughness in it.

By now I have 3 full Exotic sets for my Thief of which I only use 2. I have a full Berserker set with divinity runes. Full Carrion set with mainly +duration runes. And then I have a mix of Valkyrie and Knight because I wanted to see if I could make my berserker set more beefy. Which it did but you don’t get any actual survivability out of it because it also takes a lot longer to kill someone.

Then again, don’t play WvW if you really want to enjoy playing a beefy thief. It’s horribly unbalanced in many many ways. Mesmers are insanely powerful and backstab thieves still wtfpwn your face if they get a jump on you (CnD => Steal => Backstab => HS => HS => HS => HS => HS => HS). It’s by far the gayest way to play a thief in WvW but 99% of them simply are like that in WvW.

Knight is not P/T/V in wvwvw. Only dungeon gear and wvw badge gear gives that.

I posted a build that is viable in pve and wvw with 1 set of gear. You lose some damage, but I down people regularly. I was plying with a guard and we dropped people 2v4 without much trouble. Retreating and stealthing is still absolutely necessary for survival even with heavy p/t/v stats on a thief, though. We just don’t have the utility to stand head to head without using our thief mechanics.

neclon.4510:

Knight is not P/T/V in wvwvw. Only dungeon gear and wvw badge gear gives that.

I posted a build that is viable in pve and wvw with 1 set of gear. You lose some damage, but I down people regularly. I was plying with a guard and we dropped people 2v4 without much trouble. Retreating and stealthing is still absolutely necessary for survival even with heavy p/t/v stats on a thief, though. We just don’t have the utility to stand head to head without using our thief mechanics.

actually, you can get all armor pieces (sans pants) with karma in Orr temples in P/T/V loadout, you do still have to get badge jewelry though

Use more power/toughness/vitality gear, you can kill GC’s/lowbies just as quick, with the added bonus of living a decent burst. Try aiming for something around 50% Crit and 50% Crit damage, put the rest into toughness and vitality.

Bluebird.1890:

TheAmpca.1753:

If you are running d/d or d/p or d/anything then you probably want to stay pretty much a glass cannon since you have stealth as your survival mechanic. If you want to be tanky so you can fight in the zerg, no build will really make you very useful, you need to just fight on the edges of the zerg and pick off stragglers. We have no 1200 range weapon so we are pretty much screwed in those long range zerg fights.
If you want a tankier build I suggest valkryie and going s/d with flanking strike/auto atacks being your main damage output.

Pistol whip spam with signet of malice combined with the signet traits in the crit line, haste, and init regen from acrobatics/init regen on steal trait from trickery + additional 3 init in trickery = invulnerable for quite some time.

It’s a lot of fun.

True but when you have a entire zerg focusing you down you still don’t last long. I’m a S/P thief and I enjoy it but in WvW your best bet in a zerg setting it to SB until someone is out of position (switch to S/P) then #2 in, pop haste and spam #3. When its unsafe simply use #2 again to retreat and start relying on the SB again.

PW is amazing in WvW but only in the proper circumstance. Until that circumstance happens you should be using cluster bombs as often as possible to create panic, confusion and ultimately force someone in the enemy zerg out of position.

Doing this strategy with proper execution I’ve achieved 90+ badges in a day on a their 8 server (GoM while totally out numbered by BP and their silly alliance with AR).