Guild Wars 2

Hey , been fooling around with a brand new thief (level 10 at the moment)
and it seems like 90% of the Thief guides are out of date and theifs had few buffs and nerfs since most of them were written..

Can anyone please explain which weapons are Best used at the moment and which trait line i should go into for best leveling experience (From VERY low levels..as in level 10+)

Thanks in advance and sorry if there’s allready a similar topic , couldent find one with final answer

Nothing has really changed the past few months when it comes to leveling and PvE.
You can still go by the guides you find on the forum.
Writing down some options that I find good for leveling anyways.

Condition with Caltrops:
Pick up Caltrops as utility and place it in the center of your target,
caltrops on dodge from 10 trickery also grants you some additional bleeds when
enemies are chasing you.
Dagger Dagger. Death Blossom Spam.
Pistol Dagger. Cloak & Dagger> Sneak Attack > 2 Vital Shots > Cloak & Dagger and repeat.

D/D has high damage, great AoE, and doesn’t rely a lot on stealth, while P/D is single
target, semi-ranged and stealth based. P/D has superior survival, D/D has superior damage.

Power, Crit/Crit Dmg:
Sword Pistol (AoE), invest a bit on initiative pool/regen (infiltrators signet, quick recovery from acrobatics traitline 20, 15 trickery, 15 critical strikes.)
Blackpowder keeps you safe from attacks, pistolwhip attacks while dodging, you also
have access to a ranged interrupt.

Dagger Pistol (Single Target), invest on initiative pool like above, also aim for 30 Shadow Arts for the health regen trait, while at 10 points pick up 2 initiative on stealth. Blackpowder > Autoattack > heartseeker before the smoke field ends > Backstab from behind. Repeat. And Shadow Shot from range to bring you up to your enemy and save you some walking.

Shortbow, is also a good choice for leveling also it makes a good secondary weapon
for most builds. It mainly focuses around direct dmg with auto attack and clusterbomb, but also has decent condition dmg with spamming cluster bomb for
the shattering effect + the poison field, the mobility of infiltrators arrow is also worthwhile when traveling across the map, disabling shot gives you an additional evade.

Traits :
Offense:
Critical Strikes line if you are going for Direct dmg.
Deadly Arts & Critical Strikes for low survival and high direct dmg.
Trickery or Deadly arts are good choices for condition builds, Deadly Arts
for poison usage and condition duration. Trickery for caltrops on dodge and condition dmg. However the 3 extra initiative can be handy for many initiative based builds.

Defense:
Shadow Arts for stealth based builds, health regen while in stealth at 30 points.
Acrobatics, 15 points here returns 40% of the used endurance everytime you dodge.
for a non stealth builds acrobatics would be a bit more viable than Shadow Arts for making up the defense part.

For the early levels, I would definitely go Acro with S/P and SB. First of all, Acro scales up your health better than toughness does, which is a major plus- you want to get as much as you can from your shortage of resources at such low levels. Furthermore, Acro never gets bad; tons of builds love Acro, so it’s nice to get acquainted with the trait line early. Also, because S/P has absolutely zero stealth, it works well with Acro as opposed to SA.

When you can, grab 15 Trickery, and then just scale up your Acro as high as possible. Grab Quick Recovery for the extra initiative regeneration with Roll for Initiative and Infiltrator’s Signet, and then go get Assassin’s Reward later. After that, improve your traits as you like; you can always go higher up in trickery, go into DA- whatever you’d like.

Short bow is great for event farming which IMO is fastest way besides wvw to gain loot/gold/xp. lets u attack from a safe distance and hit/tag as many mobs as possible w/ the arrow bounce maximizing your xp you get from all those kills.

Shadow Arts is actually quite useful as a leveling thief…atleast it was for me….
can go w/ either stealth blinds or deception faster CD w/ 1st trait… and steal=stealth on 2nd… when u get 3rd go for more healing w/ stealth heal and keep 1st as heal or change 1st to deception cooldown if u hadnt picked that already. Stealthign has saved my life time and time again… if not only for the loss of agro, but also the health regen…

You can stealth soooo many ways to heal/lose attn of mobs:
1. BlackPowder+HeartSeeker 2. steal (ShadowArts Trait) 3 . Heal skill Hide in Shadows 4. Blinding Powder 5. Shadow Refuge 6. (if you do indeed go SB as a 2nd wep) Smoke Screen combo field then cluster bomb into field for area stealth… can stack the duration w/ upto 5 cluster bombs given base 12 initiative and duration of combo field. (you see why the cooldown on deception skills is uber important… if u use the 3 mentioned..powder/refuge/screen in total u cooldown 26 seconds faster…which is HUGE! lolz..)

my 2 cents from a fairly new thief that just did the newbie stuff … only started maybe 9-10 weeks ago..