Guild Wars 2

^^^
Pretty much how I play. Only difference is that instead of hide in shadows, I will use blinding powder or scorpion wire, depending on the situation.

People tend to forget that this game is about damage PREVENTION. Especially as a thief. We are squishy as anything else out there with low hp so you can’t expect to walk into a fight and not get manhandled if you dont have any damage prevention on your bar. And for thieves, damage prevention = stealth. I would NEVER step foot in WvW without shadow refuge.

Small tip for shadow refuge, is after 3 or 4 seconds, it becomes invisible to enemies, the circle goes away on the ground and the icon disappears, so if your standing in it stealthed, no one will know your there unless they AOE that area and see the damage. Also, watch your stealth buff while your invisible. I’ve found that as soon as it starts blinking, you can run out of the safe house circle and you WONT break invis. This is how I escape all my close calls. I’ll pop shadow refuge, run around the circle dodging enemy attacks until they run away (out of sight, out of mind I guess lol) and then when the stealth buff starts blinking, I run away, healing if need be.

I’m only in yellow gear / orange weapons and green jewelry but I fair quite well out in WvW. With ~65% crit chance and 79% crit damage my backstabs can crit for up to 9k and my heartseekers will hit for up to 6k on low health victims. I mostly see myself as “The finisher” when it comes to group fights, stand back and maybe use a bow or dancing dagger until someone runs to the back of the pack (aka is low on health) I’ll hit blinding powder and stealth into the big group, shadowstep to him, backstab and heartseeker him until he goes down, then if need be, I will use my heal to stealth again and use that time to finish him, then run back to the pack. Rinse and Repeat. I find this style of play to be super fun and very effective. We have stealth for a reason, use it!

Instead of complaining about the HoD night time’s domination, and saying that we suck because our group of randoms who are lucky enough to get into WvW during primetime can’t hold their own against a full guild of organized people, start recruiting night time guilds OR maybe start talking to guilds and alliances on the opposing servers and make a ‘mega-server’ like HoD and then come for us.

SBI is starting to get their crap together and are really becoming a force to be concerned with. Maybe some of you whiners and complainers should join SBI and bring some Aussie/Asian guilds with you to combat HoD’s night force. Jade Quarry has a ton of people from Reddit, just go make a thread and gauge interest on transferring to take us down.
Use some of that legendary tactics, organization and skill everyone keeps bragging about and put together a server with the numbers capable of matching HoD.

Queues in HoD seem to be coming down somewhat. (Probably due to MoP, Borderlands/Torchlight. We are still having the problem of essentially random queue pops though. I’ll queue up an hour after my friend and I’ll get in before him etc.

But you guys are right, getting all of your friends/guildies/team in at the same time REALLY IS better than having random people running around WvW, which is basically what HoD has at primetime. A whole guild can queue up and maybe a few will get in after hours sitting in the queue.

So far I’m liking the crit chance / crit dmg build. I’m in green coral jewelry (so no crit dmg) and about half yellow half orange berserker gear with orange weapons (dd/sb) with dd I’m rocking 57% crit chance and like 74% crit dmg. That’s before my 25 stacks of precision rune. My utilities are blinding powder / safe refuge / 25% run speed signet. I really like this build because I just do sooo much damage. In wvw my short bow cluster shot hits for like 4k + bleeds so if I lay down a poison and spam cluster shot I do some good damage to people on walls. You have to be smart though since you are pretty squishy. I have about 15k health (precision to vitality trait) but I go down pretty fast. With all the stealthy however it’s pretty fun to be the hit & run assassin or the “finisher” with heartseeker. I’ve heartseekered people for 5-6k before which pretty much drops anyone with low health. 2 shotting Elems are always fun with a 9k backstab and a 5k heartseeker.

For dungeons I swap my off hand with p/p for a lot of fights, and stay ranged when mob is above 50% health. Once it drops below though I swap to dd and go in to burn it down. And for aoe fights I obviously just keep the short bow out. With the high crit chance / dmg no matter what weapon I’m using I do decent damage (pp unload hits for 2-4k usually) but dagger dagger is definitely where it shines