Guild Wars 2

If you didn’t spec for damage at all and purely built for sustain, what abilities, amulets, sigils, and traits would you specialize in?

Yes I know a thief that doesn’t do damage is a bad idea, but I think this thought experiment might be helpful to me. How well can a thief sustain if they put everything into it.

I don’t know about THE ultimate build. Using the same Exuberance Runes with Marauders gear and zerk trinkets, I sometimes switch to staff and take acro/trick/dd and have Upper Hand and Staff master together and use Bounding Dodger. Most of it the build can change it up a bit but those three traits seemed to be what I needed to have the build feed itself.

If I wanted to live as long as possible, I might try something like Plz don’t kill me. High defensive stats, High stealth uptime, high self-healing, plentiful condition removal, high boon uptime, defensive modifiers… Pretty much everything you might want in a build designed to not die.

Here’s another build that is built for both sustain and damage. Its designed to return 15% of all your damage (because you have 100% crit chance) to health, along with Signet of Malice and staff’s multihit/aoe nature. I use this concept on my P/P-Staff thief to solo facetank camps in wvw. As long as you can attack, you can outheal a lot of things. I would absolutely run something like this in a pug pve group
100% Crit Sustain

if you talking about living forever being near impossible to kill that be trailblazer D D lol.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAoYVn0MBFmiFOBuNBkmiFZCbeDGCLhebh2wHSbPNFCAA-TVyCQBoUJIDOBAhbhhj9IAqn+gKq8DAHBgltPQBV/hUAQM2C-w

You people are completely missing what OP is asking. No damage, only sustain.
So this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQFAWl8MhSnY3TwzJQ/EL4EWXdJHUEmfgVwO42BIA0gA-T1BBQBWT5nx0BEgLAAAeAAIT9nVqEkf7PQKAWFZB-w
Basically, you hit like wet noodle but heal like a mofo. Pretty much everything heals you. Smack someone – heal, smack someone with critical – heal even more, evade – heal..
Option is also D/D for faster attacks (thus faster heals) and access to stealth with CnD.
As a bonus you can’t get one hit due to stats on gear. Well, most of the time anyway.

Since you mention amulet in there, instead of Nomad armour you’d use Paladin amulet for sPvP. Idea is same (possibly even more healing cause of high crit chance), but you’re more easily mowed down due to lower vitality and toughness.

Try this. it can still do good damage.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAoYVl8MhenYTTwoJw/ELPFF3ROABwc4f+rf3RlkXAA-TlSDAB2pDQS1d4TbQkqEIxjAAgjAgWK/EUJoDnAAn3fgUASL2C-w

Huge heals per death blossom. load up venoms for more. keep in mind there a high uptime of regen which clicks over 300 per sec when heals stacked. 560+ on driven fortitude.

Lotus training dodges can heal for around 600 off a dodge from the SOM and if you fight more than one enemy SOM feeds back more heals.

When all cylinders hit a single deathblossom can bring in well over 4k in heals.

Scrapper.

If you play pvp, staying in the spawn area is the most sustainy thing you will ever do.

Cobrakon.3108:

If you didn’t spec for damage at all and purely built for sustain, what abilities, amulets, sigils, and traits would you specialize in?

Yes I know a thief that doesn’t do damage is a bad idea, but I think this thought experiment might be helpful to me. How well can a thief sustain if they put everything into it.

The best sustain to aim for is Vitality and Healing Power which both compliments either Evade or Stealth builds.

Since you’ve mentioned amulet, I presume you’re talking about PvP.

Here’s a build that will be hard to take down and with zero damage (other than the base stats): http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQJAoYn0MBlPhdPBGmC0PhlhCbe/9/OgdflRQKgLAMBqAA-TJxNABAs/AyPAAYLD05JAAA

If you don’t select a DD grand master, I suppose you can make a perma evade build with no vulnerability frames in the dodges and still having 3 of them.

Google “medic thief: no one left behind”. Someone uploaded it a while ago…