Guild Wars 2

Whenever I try to launch GW2 from the game client, it won’t launch to the character selection screen. The game client keeps running in task manager, but won’t launch past there. I’ve already tried deleting files and having the client download them again, but that didn’t work. Is there anything that I can do short of a clean install that will fix the problem?

Alright Eldain, if you really feel that Thieves are that op then you should start a thief, level it to 80 and try it out yourself. Rather than complain here on the forums, why not learn how to play a thief and the play styles that we use? You’d be better off as a player and you’d be a lot more productive than whining to us on the forums. Actually learning how to counter us would solve the problem and you’d improve immensely.

It’s already been explained that the Thief that killed you was probably geared towards a glass cannon build. That means that they have lower Vit and Toughness. Thus they are easier to kill than someone who is geared for more survivability. Don’t start about stealth. It’s not necessarily a get out of jail free card and we aren’t invincible while in it. If you spec properly, you should be able to deal with the average thief.

But please, stop the rage. You’re getting nowhere by doing this here. Time to open your mind and learn about the Thief rather than adding to the ignorance and rage. I’d like to direct you to the opinions of someone who did what I’m recommending you to do now. I’m sure some people on the Thief forums will remember this:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Warriors-Perspective-on-Thief

Please, learn from this guy^. He was smart enough to learn the ins and outs of Thieves and now he’s better off for it.

I started GW1 in Cantha and it is what got me hooked on the series. It was by far my favorite of the original games, especially in terms of lore and the environment. It would be a real waste to let all of that awesome work go to waste.

It’s already been said, but I agree that the asian cultures deserve to be recognized in GW2. They were a part of the original, so why should they be left out now?

Mostly I just want this for the giant turtles. Let’s face facts, the turtles were pretty awesome.

uzu.7351:

“So what has changed with the thief? Is the thief still viable in PvE or should I roll a different class? If it is, what builds are still going to work well?”

rlly? you didnt even bother reading the thread titles?)

Obviously I’ve read other thread titles and through some of the threads. However, I don’t really like reading through posts of people QQing at ANet about how broken the thief is. That’s been there since the start of the game, through every patch. All I want is clear feedback with solid reasoning behind it. I’ve spent enough time on this forum to be able to tell when people are just rage posting for the most part.

Over the past month I decided to take a break from the game. Not enough really interested me to stay active in-game. However, with the recent update to the living story, I now want to get back into the game. My main is a max lvl thief and I was wondering what the state of the game is for us. Since the patch I’ve seen a lot of people arguing on the forums about the ‘nerfs’ to the thief and it’s current state.

As someone who has only dabbled in other classes and only really plays a thief, I want to know honestly what the current state of the thief is. I generally play D/D and SB, going for SA, AC and CS trait lines. Also, I only play PvE.

So what has changed with the thief? Is the thief still viable in PvE or should I roll a different class? If it is, what builds are still going to work well?

Thanks guys

First off, it’s important to understand that the thief plays differently than any other class. Between stealth and no recharge time for our weapon skills there’s nothing similar to a thief in terms of play style. If you’re not too much invested in your thief I’d recommend going and trying other classes to see if thief is really the class you want to play.

With the indirect nerfs to PvE from balance issues in WvW and sPvP, we run into issues with our builds relatively often. Then there’s the issue of your specific play style. So since you’re new to GW2 and since you really like to dish out condition damage, there are other classes that can tailor to that need similarly to the thief that may be easier to play (in my short time playing other classes, the mesmer and necro were about the same as a thief for dishing out condition dmg).

I feel obliged to ask, what level are you and how much time have you sunk into your thief? Have you played other classes and for how much time? Without this and knowing the class mechanics, I can’t really offer you advice. If you want a build then it’s important to know more about your play style, whether you’d prefer to be survivable or if you’d want to be more damage oriented. If you’re really gunning for a thief then there are numerous thief builds you can find on the forums, youtube and through a simple search that would be good starting points. Just make sure you know what you’re getting into with the thief, because we are significantly squishier later in the game in comparison to the start.

If you want to get into dungeons, first I would say make sure you know how to use stealth effectively. The thief is one of the squishiest classes in the game (arguably the squishiest) and can go down easily unless you’re making full use of our mechanics. I would recommend staying in the back line and focusing mostly on ranged damage to start until you really know the bosses and environments. For a ranged weapon, I’d recommend SB for aoe damage spam, initiative dodge (Disabling Shot) and poison field. Also, there are a lot of mobs that attack in groups, so going P/P isn’t always very efficient.

I’ll keep saying it, stealth is one of our main advantages. The ability to cut aggro in the middle of a fight and stealth downed teammates make us great for team play and for survivability. To make the most out of this, check out builds that make heavy use of Shadow Arts and Acrobatics. Acrobatics I can’t go without anymore, since at 15 points you gain an extra dodge. For survivability, these two trait lines are the best for you.

I wouldn’t recommend going full damage, mainly because one hit can easily take out half our health. Then there’s the fact that we are in the lowest base health pool in the game. Basically without V/T gear or mostly stealth builds we can go down a lot.

TL:DR, know the dungeon, try playing around with Shadow Arts and Acrobatics for better survivability, ranged roles are going to work best until you’ve learned the different bosses, take a SB

Hope this helps.

So right now I play on Borlis Pass, while it’s alright for getting dailies done, it would be great to get onto a more active server. I am level 80 and want to get more into the endgame content. While dungeons are a lot of fun, right now it seems like you either have to be in an organized guild or lucky enough to find a pug to be able to do most dungeons on this server, especially with FotM.

I was wondering which server, if there is one, would be best to switch to for a player who mostly PvE’s. I really like this game, but without a more active server where I can really get into the stuff I want to do, it’s starting to get a little boring.

lexieternity.7468:

Hi guys. Hope you can answer my question.

So I’ve been playing thief on and off now and I can’t help but notice how squishy they can get. Now, I’ve tried respeccing traits and read a couple of threads here and found this:

• Dodging is your best friend
• Don’t spend trait points on vitality, since it’s a losing proposition
• Focus all your traits on achieving maximum damage output
• D/D is used for condition damage builds.

I’m currently at level 19 and focusing on D/D. Prior to reading the threads, I originally had focused on putting all my trait points on Power and a little bit on Shadow Arts thinking that it’ll help me a little bit on survivability. With that said, I have these questions:

• Should I focus on Power and Condition damage since i’m using D/D? What skills would be useful for this build?
• How do you effectively use dodge and the dagger skills to avoid taking too many hits? This is crucial for me since I don’t play with thief players a lot and therefore I can’t observe how they do this.

Many thanks for the help in advance.

Hey, I may not be the right person to give advice, but I’ll try my best.

In terms of stats, I would recommend going for power and condition damage. Since you’re playing a d/d thief, you NEED the condition damage. Daggers are a heavy condition set, so milking the extra condition damage for all it’s worth will really help you out. Power is good if you want immediate damage output, rather than damage over time.

It’s really up to you to figure out which you want more of, or if you focus on them equally. At level 19, it’s kind of hard to tell you what exactly to go for, since you haven’t really found your play style (at least I’ll go ahead and assume).

In terms of traits, if you want to focus on dodging then go into the acrobatics line. It gives plenty of traits that are focused around dodging. At 15 points into acrobatics you get a trait that gives back almost half of an endurance bar every time you dodge. This lets you dodge much more than other classes since you are constantly getting back endurance. I personally can’t go without it.

For a d/d build, go for deadly arts for sure because it boosts condition damage and power. It’s a must if you want to focus on damage.

As for other lines, Trickery is good if you want to focus on stealing and getting more initiative back from it. Critical strikes is really popular as it helps boost your damage output even more through lots of criticals. It also provides skills that are specifically for dagger builds, making it useful. Initially I also went into shadow arts as well, but I found that it was almost useless to me unless I wanted to go support (kind of a boring role for a thief). It just wasn’t as beneficial as other lines.

I would recommend looking at the “post your thief build” thread to get a better idea of how other people are playing and get some ideas for yourself as to how you want to play.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the feed back guys. Have a couple of questions though.

@Dee Jay.2460, do you find that you’re getting enough initiative back with your build? The main reason that I went into trickery was to get the 3 extra base initiative because I wasn’t getting enough back. At least that’s what I found. It also gives a lot of benefits to stealing and just makes it a better class ability. Base stealing I find is pretty underwhelming.

To clarify my build, for the most part I switch between Daggerstorm and Thieves Guild, Daggerstorm for when there are a lot of mobs, Thieves Guild for single target dropping. I do similar things with my other skills, taking caltrops when I need to do group damage. I get that both are fairly situational and at the end of the day you have to adapt your skills for given situations.

Lastly, if I were to pull out of Trickery entirely then what would the return be like for initiative? I know that there are other traits that will restore initiative in other lines, but is it worth the trade off considering that I would be losing the stealing benefits?

Right now I’m at level 5 in the Fractals dungeon and I have noticed the significant passive dmg on some levels. I also have noticed that I’m dropping a lot more than in other dungeons where I could easily avoid dmg by sitting in the back and avoiding major attacks. More base defence is going to be a given. Agony is going to force some toughness concentration once I get there, if not just to avoid it initially.

About going 30 points into a trait line, I take it that Critical Strikes is the way to go? I understand that it gives a lot of extra dmg output, but what are the best traits to be using with it? I see about 80% of thief builds posted (might be an exaggeration) going high into Critical Strikes, but the basic traits just don’t really seem too beneficial. I have a hard time convincing myself to go into Critical strikes when I barely use my d/d set while there are several traits that are mainly focused on daggers and pistols. Given that I use a shortbow, what would work best in this line?

So I’ve been playing a thief in PvE since launch and I’ve been having a hard time trying to figure out what kind of stats I should be going after for my gear. I know that power, precision and condition damage are great for dps, but I want to find stats that will help my play style.

My Build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAoYVlcmaPXcS4E+JFxmidqT/DkVTBNxZ/hrC

The build is focused on using might to buff my dps and I’m able to doge much more often. I really like being able to dodge multiple times if I need to, while still being able to dodge again soon after and has kept me from dying several times. On the other hand, I get killed really fast when I do get hit, because my toughness is pretty low.

I tend to sit in the back and use my shortbow more because of this and it isn’t the best dps in the game (despite it being a versatile weapon). I know there’s probably something I can do to improve this, but I don’t know what. It would be good to have gear that would go with the d/d set so I could go into melee to adapt to the situation. Right now I feel like I’m stuck at range, pew pewing my bow when it might be better to go melee.

Right now I’m sitting at 13, 155 health, pretty low for a thief I know. Other stats:
Power 2092
Precision 1814
Toughness 944
Vitality 1152

I know if I want to go purely into one role I should go for all dps or all defense, but which would be better to go for?