Guild Wars 2

My main is a 80 Thief, my alt is an 80 mesmer (currently benched because of the illusion nerf).

First thing to survive thief burst in WvW: Level to 80 and get decent gear. Squashing lowbies is my main occupation when I WvW with my thief. When I see the green arrow besides the name I know that my chances to down or kill the player, even when I have to jump in a zerg, are quite good. You can’t and shouldn’t expect to survive a 1on1 against any level 80 character when you are level 40.

Second thing: Combat awareness and reaction time. If you are roaming alone you should see the thief before he starts his combo. Very few if any thieves will start combat from stealth as it always costs initiative or a CD to enter stealth which could easily be used to deal damage or escape the fight. So if you don’t see the thief before he attacks you you did something wrong.
In Zerg situations this is of course not always possible as there are many players around and a thief could more easily run into you stealthed. Here quick reactions are the key. Due to the culling problem it’s often hard to see when a Thief coming from stealth attacks you, you have to rely on the damage indicators. When big numbers float up, dodge or blink away.

From personal experience as a thief I don’t like attacking mesmers. Keeping track of clones and illusions is annoying (again, if you are 80 it’s harder to track you because that green arrow is gone). You always should have a possibility to stealth (I slot Decoy on my Mesmer). Produce some clones, stealth and try to get into an advantageous position. Stack conditions as most burst thieves won’t have many options to clear them. Cripple or daze takes away most of a thiefs mobility and gives you time to deal damage.

Well, underleveled alts in WvW are mostly cannon fodder. I too play WvW with my alts but I expect to be destroyed in basically any matchup with an 80 character because that’s just how it’s gonna be if they aren’t a horribad player.

On my thief if I see the green arrow on an enemy there is my attack priority

I usually play Tanks in MMOs but as there is no clear holy trinity in GW2 and Guardian, the closest there is to a tank class, didn’t excite me much I gravitated to my second love: Assassin style classes. Ergo thief.

I personally play D/D or D/P combined with Shortbow in WvW. Shortbow really is the secondary weapon to use, there is absolutely no excuse not to bring it to WvW. Clusterbomb is the only strong AoE we have and, especially with a glass cannon build, can hit for insane numbers. Additionally Infiltrator’s Arrow is one of the best escape tools we have. So bring your bow, period.

In melee I personally prefer the stealth/backstab gameplay. I tried S/D and while the autoattack hits really hard and the additional shadowstep is nice Flanking Strike is quite useless and all in all it felt more like an attrition build. Yes I have to admit that I like the big crit numbers

I like both D/D and D/P. The pistol offhand gives you a lot more utility with Headshot as an quick interrupt and Black Powder for easy stealthing (combo with heartseeker even when no enemy is near) and protection. Additionally Shadow Shot is a decent gap closer and would be great if it wouldn’t root you for a short time after using it, allowing the enemy to get away again.
D/D has the amazing Dancing Dagger and with Cloak and Dagger you pay 3 less initiative for your stealth. I personally use both sets and switch occasionally.

For my Traits I run a 20/30/0/20/0 Build combined with Valkerie Armor. This gives me some degree of survivability which in WvW is needed imo. There are just too many AoEs flying around that I would be comfortable using a pure berserker setup.

Webley.1295:

Azure.8670:

thats how im rolling now

If you had scorpion wire… this build would be complete

Scorpion Wire is nice to have in siege situations but not very good anywhere else. I occasionally put it on my bar but in most WvW situations the skills Azure uses are golden.

I use Valkerie armor combined with beserker weapons and knights trinkets. The trinkets aren’t exotic yet though

You will not see the insane damage numbers most people cry about in this forum but with currently 45% crit and about 65 crit damage (should try to get some more…) I can land 6-8k Backstabs on cloth wearers depending on the amount of toughness they stack.

I prefer it for the additional survivability. I mostly play WvW and with my current gear I’m at 15750 health and about 2100 armor (iirc).

Well, one french, one german and one english speaking server. I don’t think we will have much of a flamewar here

MrSilver.5269:

The one skill that I really have my eyes on is hard catch. I’m not experienced enough with the thief to know if going that deep into acrobatics will completely kitten you.

For those of you with experience, how does an acrobatics build play out?

I haven’t tried the skill yet but, coming from a WvW perspective, there are just too many movement impairing effects flying around for Hard to Catch to go off in the best moment. Combined with the hefty 60 second CD I’d say it’s not worth it.
15 Points in Vit for the amazing Feline Grace or 20 for Quick Recovery on the other hand are almost mandatory imo.

In the more controlled sPvP environment Hard to catch might be worthwhile, dunno.

Cripple/Chill works wonders. While we have gap closers those typically cost initiative (Heartseeker, Infiltrator Strike) or are on a hefty cooldown. Most thieves will have a way to remove those conditions but will need to burn a 50/60 second cooldown to do it. The only quick remover is Withdraw with a 15 second CD but nearly every thief slots Hide in Shadows as the heal skill simply because the stealth is so much more effective than curing movement conditions.

So, try to cripple us as soon as possible. All our gap closers have a 900 or below range, if you are able to apply it before we can steal to your location you can hamper us greatly.

Also be ready to dodge. The second you see your health drop just dodge. If you are quick enough you will just eat the Mug and the CnD/Backstab will miss leaving the thief with low initiative.

Also to counter the rendering issues plagueing stealth: Learn to look out for the puff of smoke we leave behind when exiting stealth. Even if you can’t see the thief yet, after that puff appears you can target him. Also stealth does in no way shape or form protect against damage/skills/whatever. If we stealth near you strike at the air in the general direction we disappeared at.

We will see how this plays out. I have never seen the outlandishly high numbers the whiners complain about, even in WvW when attacking underleveled players my highest backstab was about 8k. Granted, I’m not fully exotic as of yet but at the moment I don’t feel that a nerf is justified.
The change to Assassins Signet was a good one imo so I will withhold my judgement until the changes appear in the patchnotes.

As a condition damage style of play isn’t really fun for me personally if the nerf is to harsh I will probably switch over to my Mesmer, which hit 70 yesterday, or I’ll just go Warrior for the lulz.

Thar iz german zerg anywhäre?

Seriously though, I had a lot of fun on the weekend, mostly playing SFRs borderland. Kodash met SFR multiple times already and it always was a fun and close fight. And more often than not watching your tactics is a joy.

As we don’t have much of a night coverage I guess in the long run Riverside will win this matchup. The whole weekend they mostly dominated EB while not putting up that much of a fight in the borderlands.

Still, nice meeting you guys again

Yes, while I like the utility D/P brings Shadow Shot rooting yourself for a short time just makes it worthless as a gap closer. One of the reasons I’m currently using D/D again.

As there are a number of different playstyles available for the thief I will just add my build and weapon loadout for reference. I’m traited 20/30/0/20/0 and usually running D/D or D/P in combination with the shortbow.

As I’m traited for burst I usually adopt an get in, try to kill one person, get out tactic. This works decently enough in zerg situations where it is possible to pick of stragglers who stray to far from the pack. I do the occasional Shadowstep → Daggerstorm but by now enough people know how to counter it so it’s rather situational.
When defending a Keep the Shortbows Clusterbomb does decent AoE damage but the slow firing speed from the walls limits its usefulness. I still mostly spam it while being on the lookout for single enemies I can take out by jumping them from the tower.

Enemies that are not worth engaging 1on1 are well played Mesmers (I usually attack them and if it goes south I escape, Mesmers are not good at giving chase), bunker build Warriors/Guardians (if my autoattack crits are lower than 1000 I just gtfo) and Thieves (any decent one will just escape if they start to lose).

In fights versus small groups my performance is vastly different depending on the skill of the enemies. If they know what they are doing it’s very hard to do any real damage but against clueless enemies I have won multiple 1vs2 or 1vs3 situations. The biggest problem I have is killing downed enemies, as we are quite squishy just standing there while their friends are beating me is just not good at all. Shadow Refuge can help of course but any decent enemy will just spam massive AoE in the circle.

There is no permastealth as a thief. The issue still is the game not rendering enemies for a few seconds when they come out of stealth.

If you fight a thief watch them closely after the go into stealth. A few seconds later you should see a grey cloud of smoke appearing somewhere, thats the thief coming out of stealth. The player himself will not be visible until a few seconds later but as soon as that puff of smoke appears you can target him.

Also stealth itself does not protect from anything. AoE, cripple, damage etc. everything will still hit if the thief is in range.

As for other “solutions”: CnD is already quite initiative expensive at 6 points. To chain it for longer times you really have to trait for it. For example I tried to stop an enemy from capping a supply point in WvW this weekend. I don’t have the extra Initiative points from trickery as I run an 20/30/0/20/0 build but I have the 2 extra ini regen from acrobatics slotted. With this I could keep up being stealthed for a limited time, including one use of Shadow Refuge, but after the refuge ran out I quickly was out of initiative and quite dead shortly afterwards. All in all I perhaps delayed the capture by 30 seconds or so.
A thief engaging in active combat who uses other skills which cost initiative will have to time its attacks carefully to be able to CnD. That means either less Heartseeker/Dancing Dagger/Deathblossom or no restealth unless he burns a CD.

I have not tried “shotgun shortbow” yet. As I regularly see 4+k crits from clusterbomb when defending keeps I probably should just try it out. Something to do for the evening

Regarding Signet of Malice: I found the healing lackluster especially as I don’t have many AEs. Playing D/P I don’t have Death Blossom and while I have Dagger Storm slotted it’s more situational. That leaves Clusterbomb.

I don’t play sPvP so I only have WvW experience and I just feel very squishy there. I run a 20/30/0/20/0 build using Valkyrie armor and knight trinkets with Berserker weapons. I will not deny that I like the “get in, wreak havoc and get out” playstyle and it has it’s uses in zergfights because it enables you to pick of enemies in the back or at the sides who feel safe and aren’t watching their surroundings.

I personally play mostly D/P but the playstyle is quite similar to D/D with bursty, fast damage and stealth backstabs.

The last 2 days I tried S/D and it has quite a lot of stuff going for it but you have to adopt an entirely different style. The autoattack is a lot slower but hits harder, you don’t have backstab for the burst but can easily jump around during combat disorienting enemies (and possibly yourself).

Basically S/D gives you better AoE damage (because sword hits in a cone) and an excellent gap closer/stun breaker with Infiltrator Strike. Flanking Strike is lackluster as it bugs out often and tactical strike can be very helpful to disable your enemies but doesn’t hit that hard.
So you are basically trading burst damage for AoE damage and utility. I think the weapon set can be quite effective when used correctly, unfortunately so far I am far from mastering it

@Kyus: Unfortunately the thief class in generally doesn’t lend itself very well to long sustained fights. We are just to squishy to jump in the fray and stay there for very long. The exception probably is a condition damage build, which can heavily invest in toughness/vit without sacrificing much damage.
The whole stealth mechanics lend themselves to jump towards an enemy, try to do as much damage as possible and jump back out.

But yes, when fighting enemy zergs in WvW shortbow is king. At the moment there really is no excuse not to use it as a secondary weapon.

Such behaviour doesn’t seem to be widely used on EU servers. At least it hasn’t happened to me so far.

Personally I did a /bow after a nice 1on1 once but forgot to look behind me before I did it and was jumped by a small group of enemies coming from behind. Not my best moment I have to admit I won’t use stuff like teabagging/jumping/dancing on enemies, it’s kinda rude and not my style.

BroScientist.9875:

Man I’m level 33 and I’ve only got like 50 silver. I just found out by reading this thread that you could sell to other players via Trading Post. Before this I would just go to the nearest NPC merchant and sell all my stuff there. Is that how you guys make so much money? By selling to trading post?

Selling most stuff on the trading post is not recommended. Blue/green items often sell for their vendor value at maximum, even rares don’t sell with much profit most of the time.

I handle it the following way: I salvage white items for the materials, green and blue goes to NPC vendors (most of the time the vendor price is higher than the material price), with yellow items I check the value in the TP, if it’s worth selling there I put it up if not it goes to the NPC. Exotics are always worth putting up on the TP, most sell for a good deal more than their NPC price.

Additionally with 70+ rare/exotics if you have high quality salvage kits you can get Globs of Ectoplasm. Those are needed for crafting exotic equipment and sell well. So it might be advantageous to salvage the item instead of selling it.

About 7G 50S on my 80 Thief and perhaps 4G on my 57 Mesmer. Plus some mats in the bank, if I sold all of these I could probably add 10G or something for that stuff.

My Thief has exotic armor and an exotic weapon but is still in green/yellow trinkets, missing superior runes and a second exotic weapon.

As I dislike farming/grinding in general getting money for me has been very slow.

Well, there is rare WvW armor…

But joking aside: No you are not missing anything. If you don’t need/want any of the Orr armor sets and you don’t want a legendary there is basically no use for Karma after reaching level 80 anymore.

I really hope there will be more ways to spend Karma in future updates. At the moment it’s just gathering dust in my inventory…

@Croupier: Pretty much no. If you are a medium armor user you will be stuck in coats or skirtlike stuff until duelist armor is available (about level 60). And after duelist there is pretty much nothing else except racial armors, some of which are quite good to be honest. I especially like Sylvari t1, would love for a similar, not leafy looking human armor.

While I do not agree with the sentiment that the game needs more item progression in the endgame I wholeheartedly agree that we need more places to spend our Karma.

Regarding progression: I got to 80 with my Thief relatively fast. But as I dislike grinding in MMOs I just can’t stand doing endless amounts of events in Orr for the money I need to get a full exotic armor. I mostly play for the WvW and while I make money there its no where in line to what I need. By now I have crafted myself a full set of exotic armor and bought an exotic dagger, but still need trinkets and runes and while I was having fun in WvW the price for a superior divinity rune went up from ~2G to ~4G. So I really don’t see where that “2-3 days until BiS Gear” is coming from. Oh well, yesterday I crafted a magic find set and to the grinder I will go…

On the other hand: Karma. After hitting 80 there are basically 2 uses for it. Buying the 80 exotic Orr armor sets (which I didn’t do because I didn’t like the stats on them) and legendary weapons. So for me it just is a number in my inventory that steadily grows because I just have no use for it. And as it is character bound I can’t even use it for twinks. Although I applaud the addition of account bound karma items for the daily/monthly quests.

So in a nutshell: We need more ways to spend Karma. Give me the ability to buy skins with it, or a wider variety of items, anything. Pretty please?

Just a shout out to the Asura thief from RUIN (E-something) who whispered me yesterday evening in the Eternal Battlegrounds after I killed him with my Mesmer twink. Didn’t even know that was possible, but getting the account name through the report function seems to work.

If you happen to read this, just out of interest: What level were you? I saw the green arrow so can’t have been 80 but, as you correctly pointed out, it took me quite a while to kill you (my char being level 57 as it was) but at the same time your damage was also quite low. I just wanted to get this into perspective.

Playing mostly WvW I started out using D/D (I do like the stealth/burst gameplay) but switched over to D/P and loved it. A few days ago I went back to D/D for a time, just to test it, but D/P has me back now.

I really love the utility D/P gives you. It retains most of the strong points of D/D (Heartseeker and Backstab) while giving you a decent gap closer with Shadow Shot (although I hate that you stand still for a short time after using it, letting your enemy get away again) a nice interrupt with Headshot and the most reliable way to enter stealth (with Black Powder/Heartseeker combo).

Although stealth is initiative expensive with D/P I often found myself struggling to get stealthed with D/D. Enemies moving around, slight misses etc. With D/P it’s as simple as pressing two buttons, you don’t even need a target. So yeah, D/P all the way. Most fun weapon set for me.

Kirn.3129:

3) Sunday, Desolation BL, when you used both stealth tactic and distraction attack to get Garrison from us. That was a really good move.

That was a nice move, although we didn’t get to keep the Garrison for a long time. Between Desolation attacking from NW and you pushing up the water entrance our victory was shortlived but fun.

What I really hate about the state of WvW at the moment (besides the culling problems) are the hacks. The wide availability just makes these threads tedious and as a simple player you really don’t know if the tower which just turned red did so because of a fair fight or because somebody exploited it. I for one would like all hackers to burn in their version of hell and be banned from the game permanently.

Allegations and vitroil help no one. Please just keep up the good fight, report hackers and help your server in every (fair) way possible.

Please report all hackers, they really ruin the experience for everyone. And reading that the Seafarers Hacker transfered to Kodash and is responsible for us getting the orbs just diminishes everything we did this evening

We had a similar incident to the VII guy with some people from Seafarers today, the amount of hacks available for this game is appaling.

Having played Desolation Borderlands for most of the day I just want to give a thumbs up to OSC (I hope I remembered it correctly) from Seafarers. Impressive teamwork and a real pain in the kitten but fun fights