Guild Wars 2

I currently have 3 armor and trinket sets on my thief. zerk, cleric, carrion. I find them all fun but am looking for something not 100% in one direction. I hope that makes sense.

any advice on gear/builds and weapon set ups?

I like the idea of pistol off hand and I enjoy sword mainhand. pistol whip is fun but what would you ‘more experienced’ thieves recommend?

I main a necro, and have 5 lvl 80’s so not new to the game.

it depends on what you want to do, S/P works great for WvW and PvE. as far as a more balanced gear, getting 30-40% crit chance with zerker then using Valkyrie or PVT gear can give you a good amount of survivability, with valk not giving up too much damage, and PVT gear making you much more resilient while maintaining decent damage. since a thief has somewhat plentiful acess to fury through Thrill of the Crime and Furious Retaliation, we can keep fury up enough for the crit chance loss to not matter that much. if you are going to use S/P outside of PvE, keep in mind it is based around control and mobility rather than the outright damage of the dagger main hand. one of my favorite WvW s/p builds is 10/30/0/15/15. you can move incredibly fast with a shorbow in your second slot, control and pressure opponents with S/P as your main weapons, and drop BP on downed opponents for easy stomps. also keep in mind steal and shadow step can be used while channeling PW to keep an enemy in range if necessary. also, PW should be used when you need the stun, evade, or the hit volume on top of damage, not just for raw damage since it can be moved out of and your auto attack chain does as much damage. as an example, is that warrior starting up 100 blades on your downed buddy? pre-cast PW then steal to the warrior for a nice damage spike and and interruption on that meanie. while headshot would work too, PW is nice in that it mixes the interrupt in with an evade and damage.

Thanks grimm. I used a s/p and p/p set up before, was alot of fun and hit some scary numbers. I also had a good dmg and surv build with that same set up. only difference now would be id take sb over p/p offhand set. maybe ill try that again.

Thanks grimm, ill look into gear combinations like you’ve mentioned.

thank you for your input. any advice d/p play grimm?

eh, I tend to avoid d/p myself. I just don’t find it that fun, so I will let someone else who actually uses it advise you on that one.