I play my thief with the following traits, armed with as much berserkers gear as i can (most important attribute = +% crit damage)
10 deadly arts(for mug)
30 critical strikes (signet of power/practiced tolerance, side strikes, executioner)
20 shadow arts (hidden thief + your choice)
last 10 points are up to you. i put them into trickery for thrill of the crime
one thing I have learnt is not to trait based on what stats you want. i.e. just because you feel bursty doesn’t mean that you need to really invest into deadly arts, and no amount of investing into shadow arts is going to make you tough enough to survive high incoming damage. just choose the trait ‘specials’ according to how you want to play your thief. which is why i explain the choices i made above
the traits chosen are primarily used to do the following
steal in (gives you stealth and does about 3k damage on a crit)
activate assasin signet
backstab (>5k on a crit)
whatever you want to do from here is freeplay. you can conserve your initiative to just 1 him to death, or you can 2 him. if theres a few other enemies around you can spam 4. the dancing dagger is actually a pretty underrated skill but it is crazy good as an burst ‘aoe’. i can deal up to 7k damage on EACH target with a full initiative bar just spamming 4.
i also need to mention that when you steal in (and are stealthed), activation of the signet immediately autoattacks your backstab, so you don’t have to 1 yourself. whether this is intended or not, its worth noting so you get your timings right. IMO it makes things easier
slot skills
refuge is the most important skill you can have in WvW. although the tooltip says it lasts for 6 seconds, it actually does so for 10 seconds. 10 seconds of cloak + heal + lifesteal combo for all your teammates is invaluable. i find myself using it a lot to set up a cloaking field for ressing ppl during sieges
ulti = spin. extremely useful as an oh kitten button, and if the enemy doesn’t know better and continues to shoot you, they are in for some serious trouble.
hide in shadows for survivability
signet of shadows for the speed buff (i never actiavte it)
in zerg vs zerg, you can either try to do some flanking (d/d) and kill softies (rangers are my favourite) who are not with the zerg, or if you wanna do frontal, go with the shortbow and just spam 1 (hitting 3 targets for 1.5k each) . 2 isn’t worth spamming that much because the projectile takes too long to travel. you can use 4 to support your zerg for combos.
if your zerg is rushing in, spam 2 on yourself. your projectile explodes almost instantaneously so you can do massive aoe.