Guild Wars 2

yea I know what you mean about venom heals being maybe a waste but each trigger for me is just over 500 hp gained. so in a tight spot I can trigger all my venoms heal up a fair bit (maybe like 3.5-4.5k) then withdraw. its not optimal damage wise but the survivability balances it out I believe. and the venoms and sword immobilise and daze make u an awesome pain in the bum to fight.

I played p/d before but wanted something more “in your face” . never tried it with healing power though. Could be fun :-)

I play thief because its an awesome profession. theres not much you cant do as a thief.

withdraw/spider venom/devourer venom/shadow step/basilisk venom.

skill build? sorry im not sure what your asking for but I hope this answers your questions.

traits:
20/0/30/20/0
I use might on venom, venom recharge, lose a condition every 3 seconds in stealth, leeching venoms, venom share, vigor on heal and the 10 seconds of regeneration under 75% health.

I use dwayna runes.
zerker weapons.
sapphire trinkets (I think)
4 clerics armor and 2 precision vit and healing power armor pieces.
I sit at 14.1k health 2.7ish armor and 2.7 attack
unbuffed 15% crit chance
1200ish healing power.
and I think thats everything?

I know my comment regarding thieves being only good for dps isnt strictly true but that thats where all the complaints and QQ are coming from.
I have also played a P/D conditions thief too so I have tried alot of different thimgs/ traits and gear set ups with thief.
This current build is the most fun ive had playing thief.

I have made a post previously about whether healing power was worth investing in.
the answer is yes!
I feel that many thieves just go for raw dps (glass cannon was my last build) so people believe that dps is all the thief is good at.
I have recently geared my thief to be fully exotic in clerics armor and sapphire? trinkets.
my build leeches health when triggering venoms and uses S/D and SB.
I use withdraw (and vigor on heal trait) spider venom devourer venom and basilisk venom. I have close to endless dodges, alot of shut down and disrupting tactics and I found that using zerk weapons I actually still got a hell of a lot of kills.
more than on my glass thief.
I believe that I am a very annoying person to fight as I dont have any access to stealth other than CnD and people really struggle to get me down. if I get in trouble I use me bow 5 and shadow step to run away in clear sight, heal up then run back in again.
I have had alot of success playing this build in wvw and as I say I have (despite my damage stats taking a hit) picked up lots of kills!

if anyone wants to try a tanky (annoying as hell) thief I would definitely advise doing so.

I have ran cof path 1 with glass back stab thief. alot of fun

its actually more like 12 seconds stealth isnt it?

I havr ran a P/D – P/P build before purely created out of curiosity.

sneak attavcks hit for 5k on average, and unload about 7-8k on average.

I ran with 20/30/0/0/20 for the dual skill damage and crit chance traits and bouncing bullets in tricks.

I liked the p/d skill 3 as the crit hits for about 3.5-4.5k.

I would steal, use the skill stated above then switch and unload, not much lived if you crit enough.

my armor is valk with ruby orbs, everything else is zerk. its good fun in pve definitely worth a try.
wouldn’t advise it for wvw tho. spvp had some relative success too

I personally have been having alot of fun (and literally no trouble) rolling the easy dungeons (ac, CoF and CoE) as a glass backstab thief. I can see why people would say That glass thieves have no place in a dungeon but I really loved it. and the spike damage was very useful.
I rolled with D/D for spike damage and SB for the aoe and dodge on 3.
traits were 25/30/0/0/15 and all based around extra damage .
alot of fun.

Thanks popeurban I will check that out now :-)

I ended up buying my thief the gear tonight due to my impatience, going from glass cannon thief to a clerics thief is a huge change in pace (obviously) but its a completely different play style, I now have almost constant regeneration because of traits and my dwayna runes, this coupled with leeching venoms was insane survivability I didnt think thief was capable of (literally face tanking group events) I will be testing this in WvW at reset. my heal ‘hide in shadows’ gives me 18s of regeneration.
the only draw back is the damage. but that wouldnt be my role whilst fighting. I would be shutting the enemy down with venoms and stuns from sword whilst others damaged, so im ok with that.

I see the guardian sounds like it may have potential, im trying to create a new build for my thief as I have full eexotic carrion and a mix of exotic valk and zerk gear giving me the variation on burst and DoT when I fancy the change, I want to create a tanky leechy build on one of my toons but was really hoping to do this on my thief. I may have to play around with builds on my other toons too just to investigate where the build/gear will be most eeffective.

comeandsee – ok thats interesting, do you happen to know if it’s any better with guardian or necro (random I know but theyre my other toons)

and as a result of stacking healing power I was worried about how my other stats (attack mainly) would suffer. I got a fair few kills in spvp but eventually ill be taking this build to WvW so want to have decent damage too.
I will have to look for a good balanced gear combination.
thanks for the advice darxio

is there any other techniques/builds that dont necessarily use the signet of malice and tricks to proc it?
I am going to try the above techniques for sure but was hoping to find some more fun/interesting ways to heal during fighting, I dont mind kiting as a thief but dont want to depend on it as I am a very annoying ’in your face’ kind of player.

anything else you guys think ive overlooked? traits, skills etc?

and of course if u can knock them out of refuge. the above comment is for if ur knockback doesn’t work

I have caught out a fair few thieves that drop refuge at low health by spamming attacks in their refuge, if u auto attack and see it enter the second part of its rotation u are hitting him and if u continue to hit him and hes not moving hes probably downed. continue to punch them till u grt xp. bosh dead thief. happens more often than u might think, I have been downed in refuge before but the players generally run off elsewhere to find u leaving u free to res.
hope this was slightly helpful at least.

didn’t even think about using the signet heal that sounds very effective thank you I will try it out :-) nice use of dagger storm too. will also get the sigil to stack healing take it for a spin :-) thanks again.

I myself dont play a bad thief.
ive seen lots of thieves die in videos on YouTube, and my advice to u is play a thief in wvw then if that’s where ur issue is. but in spvp and wvw the same counters work. u just may not always catch the thief when things dont go his way.

I was playing around with a healing leeching venom build earlier and had some good success in spvp.
the traits used were 20/0/30/20/0
I went for might on venom. venom recharge. venom skills steal health. venom share and a couple traits to give regen and vigor.
This was very fun to play but hoping that the thief community can help me with ideas on other build variations?
I maxed out healing power and monk runes..
I found with this build I was very tanky in comparison to my normal set up. was fighting 3 playrrs at one point for roughly 5 minutes with limited stealth usef as withdraw was my heal and all utilies were venoms, i held them off and made a nuisance of myself until help arrived and we ended up winning the point.
went for sword/dagger snd shortbow .

ny ideas would be appreciated :-)

playing the classes u have trouble fighting will help u learn to counter them… top tip

sorry I see what you’re trying to do here, but why would anybody upload a video of poor game play? I die lots as a thief (mostly with the zerg fighting), but I kill lots too.

game play of thief vs thief would be more interesting.

and anyone who is reading this and thinks thieves cant die or are easy to play, create one and appreciate the skill involved (in playing one well)

I have (off the top of my head)
2909 attack
2990 armor
15.5k hp
50% crit chance
20 % crit damage
alot of fun to play in WvW, pve is a doddle.
full knights exotic armor and trinkets, zerker weapons, hammer and GS.

thats funny for a second there I thought you said remove death shroud.
tjis thread is pointless. .. and annoying. you obviously areny a good necro. L2P.

a necro with blood is power (no added condition duration) will give u a good test. 30 seconds of bleed should be easy enough to work with.
ky first experience with save yourselves in WvW was interesting. .. used it for the swiftness and regen., drew about 3 different conditions to myself from the mini zeg I was with and this resulted in a very close call! ha lesson learnt.

I am in love with my guardian but I am aware of its limitations. sounds like you are envious of a few of the warriors skills/traits. maybe make a warrior and play to 80 then you’ll be a good judge of what is what regarding the 2 classes. if not, maybe guardian just isnt the right class for you. (please dont take that as an insult) but I play many 4 classes and am better at some than others. this could simply be the case. maybe its time to try something different.

yeah I agree. I didn’t mean a buff to staff, just the weapon set as axe and dagger are fast lf gain. staff isnt bad, it is VERY good when traited

I agree with vagelis. necro survivability = warrior survivability easily. if not een more survivable.

I agree, this is partly why I play axe focus/staff. without gluttony I still manage to build lf fairly consistently, of course there are spectral skills to turbo boost your lf generation but this does take away from your utility as a condition spec. I would like to see a buff regarding this issue also to make scepter/staff more viable.

I have a lvl 80 full exotic thieg too, im aware of their play style and in WvW agree they are not easy to kill. but pvp is different and I don’t feel threatened by them, just an annoyance.

life force is a drag sometimes specially when you have 0 going into a fresh fight but I dknt have too many issues generating life force fast so can get around that if im not against big burst builds.

you mean DS? I actually love the DS abilities (chill, fear, and huge crits on 1 and 4’s) the only gripe I have with necro is the mobility. other than that I think necros are great.

I agree condition necros have less use for DS than power/crit necros like myself however.

means the same as complaining.

I dont take videos when i play, I shouldn’t have to prove it, it was epic.

ive never 1v1 a necro as a necro myself, and it was so hard! conditions were getting transferred, consumed and removed left right and centre.

loved the fights.

played some spvp earlier as my necro (im usually the only necro on the map), and of the 8 on my team, 5 were necros. needless to say we won that round, playing against them the next round was also fun! (and educational)

after all the threads on here whingeing about necros being rubbish it was great to see them at full force wrecking guardians and mesmer alike (thieves as a necro are easy bait :P)

keep it up fellow necromancers!!

fair point, the main reason I like the PW for WvW is the interrupt and other pistol skills.
powder used offensively for stomping and interrupts used defensively to prevent stomping.
the cleave on sword is nice too.
backstab is just soo satisfying.
hence the PW backstab build I run :-)

I use both (just started testing to see how viable it is) but the 20% damage under 50% health is incredible when using big back stab damage. use sigil of intelligence on ur seconf weapon set and ur guaranteed the backstab crit so long as u dont miss!
generally hit them with pistol whip and AA to get to less than half health, weapon swap and blinding powder (dont waste ur 100% crit chance on CnD) and then backstab.
only issue I have with this layout js lack of range and utility. (escaping through means other than stealth is an issue)
played a couple hours with this layout last night and loved it.

I think that a buff will not come for pistol whip… However if it did come I would be forever in Anets debt!

I dont use utilities with pistol whip, and yes it is 50/50 as to whether the whole attack will land, but I play alot of pvp and wvw and I find the evade during the animation is a life saver at times. this of course is my opinion and i do value the auto attack, but in dangerous situations I use pistol whip alot to deal pbaoe and mitigate damage.

I love pistol whip, I activate it then steal (made possible because of cast time), stunning them and dealing between 4-7k damage while evading most of the damage coming my way during the animation. I use pistol whip all the time, great for interrupting heals, stomps and anything with a cast time. I feel vulnerable when using AA chain in comparison to when using pistol whip. even if the damage is similar I feel that pistol whip is eessential to my high survivability and damage output (even though im built fairly glassy).

p.s. i avoid underwater combat so cant comment on that area

the trait that cleanses a condition for every 3 seconds ur in stealth is incredible, I use deception utilities and shadow step also cleanses along with sword #2. I cleanse conditions easier on my thief then I do on my necro.

I love playing as a conditions thief. I use 0/0/30/20/20 poison blinding powder and caltrops. thieves guild imo is better than dagger storm for conditions as ur burst is low. thieves guild make a tremendous mess of things. without caltrps doen I can keep up 7-10 stacks of bleed and 45-60 secs of poison. fully carrion geared doing huge damage over time.
I should have mentioned I use P/D and SB. SB for the quick escape, reset then re-engage.