Guild Wars 2

Alright, so I picked up thief a couple of weeks ago. I’m a ranger main, and after not particularly enjoying necro I thought I’d give thief a try. Turns out I quite enjoy it.

I primarly play wvw, though I’ll be hitting up map completion on the toon to deck it out in glorious legendary swag and once I’m a little better at what I’m doing I’ll sneak into pvp, too.

I have two questions. The first is the viability of thief in raids. I don’t raid a whole lot, but when I do I’m on either healy druid or condi ranger. I rarely see thieves doing raid content.

The second question, as the title suggests, I’m looking for good full damage burst zero-to-dead rotations. I see plenty of videos of thief players catching the opposition off guard and bursting them from full to nothing in a matter of a couple seconds.

As I’m new to the profession my build is fairly standard:
- Dagger/Pistol, Staff
- Marauders armor & weapons, zerk trinkets
- Air, Bloodlust, Generosity sigils, Pack runes
- Endurance regeneration food, power wrench
- Channeled Vigor, Shadowstep, Shadow Refuge, Infiltrator’s Signet, Basilisk Venom

I’m still experimenting with traitlines but so far I’m partial to Trickery, Critical Strikes and Daredevil. When running with others I’ll swap Critical Strikes for Shadow Arts, (I find I need that bit of extra sustain).

I’m pretty much willing to swap anything around. Thanks in advance.

~ Kovu

Use Pistol/Dagger as your main, with Sword/Dagger as offset.

Sigil of Karka Slaying on Pistol, Sigil of Concentration on dagger. Keep sword un-sigiled, as it will only weigh it down.

Use Apothecary stats on all armor/trinkets to get the most out of your venoms. This is important.

Rune of the Reaper so you can chill enemies when you shout at your computer screen.

The wombo combo in this build is Steal → Body Shot → /cower

GL;HF!!

Hi Jekkies,

Thanks for the reply. Just for some clarification is there an internal cooldown on rune of the reaper? If not that sounds super overpowered, I’m almost consistently shouting at my computer screen.

Also, that particular combo indeed sounds powerful, but also a little difficult to pull off. I don’t want to be bursted in the time it takes me for me hit ‘enter /cower enter’. Any advice on that front?

Thanks for the advice.

~ Kovu

If you’re not playing D/D condi or Staff, there is no real rotation on thief for the most part. Otherwise it’s just alternating Dodge and Death Blossom/Vault with the routine endurance refill and the likes. With the lack of cooldowns, you can’t just use everything when it’s available. You have your basic combos and skill knowledge, and the rest is just improvising play and acting accordingly. The more you know about the profession, the crazier stunts you can pull off when you need to. The 100-0 comes largely on the basis that they caught the opponent off-guard. A strict 100-0 when the opponent sees you coming, on a build that is capable of extensive 1v1, is better done on a mesmer, ranger, guardian, warrior, or scrapper.

Crit Strikes is a waste of a line. DA deals more burst damage in general, has fantastic utility, and provides a lot of power damage resistance from innate weakness on steal. Unless you PvE, there’s very little benefit to using CS, which deals only a very minute more damage than Daredevil itself. PvE usually runs CS/DA/DrD.

In general, the thief is boring in PvE, especially now. A majority of the damage comes from pressing 1 in D/D (power, since the weapon damage on dagger > pistol by a fractional amount and the other skills are not used) or staff. To match the HoT powercreep, ANet just buffed its AA’s since the class originally had zero place. It features very high personal damage but features no support/utility for the group, and at least prior to this past patch, ele did more, anyways. Might be about the same now.

SA’s a waste of a traitline as well these days, unless you play cancer ghost thief. Daredevil and Acro can provide great cleansing (prior to HoT the primary reason anyone took SA) and are just outright better lines in general. Signet of Agility’s recent buff also makes burst-cleansing no problem, so there’s even less of a dependency than before.

I don’t raid but the general opinion is that thief is decent in raid. It’s one of the best dps maker with an easy rotation, mainly auto attack on dagger mainhand. You also have a handful of dodges to make life easy.

As for WvW and wombo combo : you just need a zerker-valkyrie or marauder set. power food, you can go dagger/dagger DA/CS/TRI. the combo is pretty much cloak & dagger -> steal -> backstab -> AA with the passive of signet of strengh and agility That’s the most wombo you can get. Hard to land, big burst, not much escape.

Now a usual thief will have DA/TRI/DD and the burst will come from steal + AA on d/p for power. As for condi burst there are pros out there to answer you.

Don’t trust videos too much, they only show success and not the fails that are more common than you think….Ever seen a thief video with a tp back to home ?

Signet burst is ideally best-done with CS/DA/DrD as well in staff. A perfect attack against a glassy opponent can get a bit over a 30k vault, while Daredevil provides more escape and utility than what’s really gained from Tr.

D/D’s just a failure kit for power against reasonably good players running the meta unless you kit yourself out with tons of sustain (in which case your burst is over). Given the ICD on stealth attacks and poor performance on the rest of the kit, it’s pretty easy to get instantly countered by a passive and have no answers when playing signets. For burst, D/P is more consistent and much safer with better engage potential out of the stealth capabilities from two different leap finishers to use on BP.

SA works fine for p/d builds and in fact almost a necessity if you go that route. Indeed it one of the few old core builds you can still do well in . I do very well in WvW with it as it very survivable and great at ripping away boons. The build can do some great Condi bursts and going in and out of stealth ensures the Sneak attack off the AA always landing bleeds.

I prefer the SE cleanse to DD cleanse . Much more efficient and much more reliable. I have killed more thieves then I can count who relied on DD using EA. I find the DD line underwhelming for a condition build unless you play the DB d/d thief.

For Power builds I have yet to find something that really works well with SA . All of the others can be used to some extent dependent on build and weapon chosen. CS is rather niche but can be made to work quite well with staff if you take IP. The damage drop is there but the incoming heals can keep you going a long time.

P/P power can be quite useable but I found that much like a SB it not a standalone set. You really have to use it in conjunction with a solid set in the other hand. It my feeling this makes the old signet builds redundant. It just works so much better getting the might off the unload eevn as you do damage. The key is coupling it with some boon duration along with might on crit. In this way you use less overall INI for those might stacks and can have enough to switch off into another weapon that has stronger AA when short INI. I find the daredevil runes work great here as I can build might and maximize the chances of Crit while those might stacks running . I tend to use a sigil of intel on the off hand set so that when I do switch I can chain a number of attacks together that are guaranteed crits, dodge out and ensure the next a crit again.

D/p is the go to set for most. I am sort of meh on it myself, not because it does not work but because it just everywhere. That said if using as the pair to p/p above on swap you can get some huge hits off the Shadowshot followed by the AA and then dodge out HS in.

Unless you play a stealth build (again to p/d) you will need a lot of condition cleanse, more so each day it seems. I find that with the stealth SA build, I just get less conditions overall as you are harder to target with some of the big hitters. IE if hidden a mesmer has no where to send his clones for a shatter while if you were dodging they would run and shatter at your location.