Guild Wars 2

Good afternoon/morning forumite. I am new to the thief class, and am still coming to grips with their playstyle, mechanics and gear set-up. This afternoon, when WvW’ing, an SBI Sylvari thief with dual incinerators singlehandedly took out both myself (a thief) and my friend (an elementalist) without too much trouble (being Yak’s benders ourselves). Even though I landed a few good back-stabs, she did not appear to take much damage, as supposed to her own back-stabs that essentially 100 to zero’ed me. I was wondering what you guys think she could have been wearing (in terms of gear) as she took less damage than me (me being in full zerker) but dished out more? Sorry if this is very little information to go on!

Hey there

I run soldiers head/chest/legs and zerker shoulders/gloves/boots (Look up posts on the forums by Wish, great advice ) with valkyrie weapons, as it gives pretty comparable damage to full zerker but your survivability is FAR better. I’d hazard a guess that they were doing something similar.

The problem with zerkers is that the main thing you gain over using soldier/valkyrie is the precision, since the power is the same for all pieces. So once you get your crit chance to about 50% after food then add fury, there’s no real benefit to adding more zerkers since most of your hits will crit anyways. As these crits will hit the same sort of numbers due to the identical power, you might as well pump that extra precision into some sort of defensive stat.

Plus, since power stacks better than crit damage for your typical thief build, the extra vit/toughness from soldiers will give more power from sharpening stones, which makes up for the loss of crit damage (to a point, obviously you won’t get the same dps from pure soldiers and pure zerk :P ).

Say we can both crit on a backstab for 7k. My D/D build has around 20k health after guard defence stacks (overkill I know), pure zerk will have around 12k generally. I can take 2 backstabs and still be standing, you can’t. This also doesn’t take armour into account, if they stack toughness then your backstab might do 4k whilst theirs does 8-9k. If your buddy is zerk too, you can see how they have an advantage.

They prob also had 30 in shadow arts, so were gaining approx 330 health per sec when they were in stealth. As long as you play carefully, a tanker thief can run rings around people :P

Sorry about the incoherent rant, I hope that helps in some way :P