Guild Wars 2

I don’t know. My own Thief is pretty much a non-stealth build using S/P and SB. Ethically speaking, I don’t have issues with my using an anti-stealth trap against a stealth spamming Thief that is harassing us. But having said that, I would consider it wasteful to use it against a single opponent. If I was up against 2-3 stealth characters in a roaming WvW group, then it would be worth the effort to throw down the trap. Otherwise I’d just suck it up if I couldn’t outsmart a single stealthy Thief.

In every circumstance that I’ve ever seen, any AoE effect that states “allies” also includes the caster of that effect.

Why don’t more people run a VA spec?

1) For a fully devoted trait spec, the only real choices you have are about which T1 Shadow Arts trait you want and which T1 trait you want outside of Deadly Arts and Shadow Arts.

2) You have to devote 2-3 Utility slots and your Elite slot for Venom powers. That leaves very little room for choices. Many Thief players consider certain Utility powers to be vital, yet there isn’t room for them in a VA spec.

3) People play Thief because they want to be a dps machine. The VA spec is more about AoE support, which inherently goes against how most of the Thief class is structured. VA players had to specifically choose Thief because they wanted to play this spec, which means that they will be rare.

4) There is a bad reputation about the limited AoE range. Even though the AoE circle is now visible when you activate a Venom power (which allows adjustments before you cast the next Venom power), people want the buffs to have at least a 600 range. It bothers them when they are forced to stay close to other people / NPCs / pets to make the spec effective.

5) People play a VA spec for the massive debuffing potential, while also being able to grant AoE damage and healing. In the current dungeon scene, poeple would prefer to run glass cannon Berserker gear builds which intentionally ignore debuffing in favor of raw dps.

My main character is a VA Thief who runs around in Knight gear. I’m tough enough to tank Champion trash adds while other people hit on the mob. While my dps output is respectable, it is nothing to brag about. To date, I’ve never encountered another VA Thief in my light population server of Fergusson’s Crossing. But all things considered, this is still my favorite character amongst the x5 characters.

So true. The AoE effects from the destroyer mob types aren’t that big of a deal to my Warrior who uses their Signet & traits for constant health regeneration. If I had originally taken my defensive Hammer Warrior on that arc, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. Yet I took my Thief who is built around AoE control effects that can’t deal with destroyers very well. I was like a paper tiger and was getting constantly shredded into tissue paper.

Depending on your class and specific character spec, this arc is a nightmare. Just ask for help and someone should be able to help you stomp through this thing. It’s really a shame. I love the skritt story line and the much later appearance of your aided race (aka skritt in this case) has some really funny moments with the skritt NPCs.

PvE, PvP, or WvW? That can really change the answer.

For PvE, I prefer S/P. Beyond the difference between the special moves of the weapons, the Sword has a longer melee arc than the Dagger for auto attacking. When fighting multiple opponents, I find that the Sword is the better way to go. (I also like how high the Sword’s auto attack damage is, even though it swings a bit slower than the Dagger.)

Yeah, pretty much. They could have been needed back in the beginning of the game when the supply was so low that people would buy things off of the vendors instead of the BLTC. But at this point, they just exist to let new players know what kinds of weapons are available. Also they are yet another way to sell off your trash items.

FYI. Watch the Balthazar thread in the Dynamic Events forum. People update it when they’ve cleared that temple. (There are similar threads for other Orr temples.)

From what I understand, people add sigils that increase the duration of Daze for a S/D weapon set in order to create a lock down. Beyond that, you might want another crit proc sigil for this weapon set. Something like the Sigil of Generousity could be a good fit since you should have a decent crit rate and condition removal that debuffs your opponent.

Since you’re talking about transmuting a non-Precursor / non-Legendary weapon, it’s really not a big deal. Those are the only weapons that have issues with the transmutation process since you’re wanting to use them for future upgrades. Your example of Foefire weapons will work just fine, assuming that you’re not moving that graphic over to one of the weapon categories listed above.

Just last night, I finished my new off-hand weapon from the Mystic Forge. It’s one of those purple ghostly weapons that uses of x250 Ectos and other things. The moment that I got it back from the MF, I used a Fine transmutation stone and I was done. There’s really nothing to worry about.

Yup. That who quest arc is pretty much a death machine.

1) For the stage about the destroyer crab eggs, you really have to find a long range attack to kill them before you enter their spawn radius. I know that it’s annoying, but you really don’t want to try and melee them unless you want to constantly die. This was something that I learned the hard way.

2) The general difficulty of this arc seems to assume that you’re probably in Rare (aka Yellow) gear that’s around your current level. If you’re not in something that hard core, then you’d going to have issues.

3) Then the quest stage after the destroyer eggs gets even more painful. Expect to be zerged with destroyer mobs and their AoE effects. Your NPC helpers will be quickly slaughtered off in areas that you can’t easily reach to revive them. Then you’ll be expected to solo your way through the trash mob hordes and the eventually Champion destroyer crab at the end. There was a LOT of swearing, deaths, and gear bills by the time that I was done.

4) The general difficulty has always seemed really off for this quest arc when compared to the content before and after this point. While some character builds don’t have any issues, other builds just get slaughtered in there.

5) As a general word of advice, take someone with you. Ask your guild for help or go into Lion’s Arch and beg for assistance. You’ll likely find someone who remembers just how painful this quest arc was. I’m always happy to squish this arc with one of my geared out 80th characters. (Disclaimer: When the game launched, it would bug out the quest series if you ran it with another character who chose the skritt arc in the past. Make sure that the person helping you never went through the skritt content on the character that they are using.)

Best of luck to you. If you ever need help, don’t be afraid to send me a PM. Assuming that you’re on the NA server cluster, I’d be happy to watch your back for that quest arc.

Thief has many play styles. Your average build seems to focus around a highly mobile character that is a glass cannon and it usually relies on stealth mechanics. (This is often what people talk about when they think of Thief is PvP / WvW.) Having said that, you can really do a lot of different things with the class if you refuse to be locked into group think.

If you’re looking for an easy PvE leveling build, I’d recommend Sword/Pistol & Shortbow. Sword #1 will be your highest dps output and it has a longer melee reach than a Dagger. Sword #2 is your leap into melee and a source of condition removal. Combo #3 had its damage nerfed a long time ago, but doing slightly under your high Sword auto attack in exchange for a stun and evasion while you’re channeling the attack can be really powerful. Pistol #4 is a ranged daze for interrupting mob scripts. Pistol #5 creates an AoE Blind cloud around you and this will constantly re-apply Blind to mobs within that cloud.

Between spamming Pistol Whip (Combo #3) and Black Powder (Pistol #5), you can cut your way through mobs of melee combatants. While ranged mobs can give you issues, you would still have a Sword #2 pseudo-leap and your Steal pseudo-leap to quickly close into melee range. All things considered, S/P is considered to be the most “easy mode” way of leveling a Thief.

Beyond that, pick your spec and gear. For example, my main character is a Venomous Aura spec Thief who runs around in Knight gear. It’s a tanky build with a high self-healing rate and it provides AoE buffs that proc extra dps on mobs while healing the buff recepients (including yourself). My play style of holding an area of territory and being able to tank a Champion trash mob are considered freakish by the Thief community, but it’s still a viable spec. (People tend to get freaked out when a character build requires x60 Trait points, x2-3 Utility slots, and sometime even your Elite slot in order to be effective.)

If you decide that you want to play a Guardian or Necro, then more power to you. I just want to make sure that you understand that the Thief mechanics can be manipulated to support some radically different character builds and play styles.

Hmm… If you haven’t already submitted a ticket to ArenaNet, then I’d suggest that you do so. Something is definitely odd about that situation.

So you’ll have high health, decent +Power, and high +Condition damage. With that high of a health pool, you might be able to just ignore conditions as you attack and heal with the Signet. However your lack of condition removal still gives me issues. You won’t have much that you can do to counter incoming effects, which is something that I always consider to be a requirement. I realize that not everyone feels this way, but that’s where I stand on the matter.

Hmm… I’ve not used those before. Do the ravens count like pets or as an ability under your control (similar to a Ranger’s warhorn)? Assuming it’s under your control, it could be usefull. My only worry is dealing with condition damage, since you wouldn’t be having access through either your heal or armor runes.

1) Please edit your link. It doesn’t seem to be working.

2) Usually +Power is better. Any of the shared copies of Spider’s Venom use the recipient’s +Condition stats, so there is little point to focus on it yourself unless that’s your devoted build (which isn’t a typical choice for Venomous Aura).

3) It depends on your +stats. If you’re running some type of gear that lacks +Vitality, then definitely take HiS since conditions will eat your alive. SoM can be nice in certain situations, but you’ll be dealing with incoming damage spikes and you’ll want to heal yourself up ASAP. I’d also assume that you’ll often use Basilisk Venom, which tends to have more synergy with HiS than you would find with SoM.

4) Depending on whether you use Basilisk Venom as a pre-cast or mid battle, Superior Runes of Lyssa is another condition removal option. I use both HiS and Lyssa on my S/P Thief (which is mainly for PvE). Just remember that there is an unmentioned 50 second cool down on the proc from using an Elite ability.

It’s moments like this that make me smile as a FC resident. After a server gets knocked down to T8, FC and ET still have far more in common with each other and relish the chance to take on new opponents. The enemy of my enemy is my… friend?

Great job FC and ET. Though I’m still PvE grinding for the last of the gear that I need after taking a 3 month break, I plan on starting to hit to WvW again. Seeing these kinds of upsets really do encourage people in the T8 servers to give WvW another try.

As a Thief, just know that Black Powder does nothing to stop a Young Karka’s tail bullets. Blind or not, the mob will still aim properly at you and every shot will hit you (regardless of the theoretical miss that Blind should cause). I think that our Smoke Screen anti-projectile wall stops them, but I can’t remember since I avoid that trash heap of a zone. The duration of the tail bullets is even long enough that you’d be partially hit before or after a Pistol Whip.

Like other have said, range is probably your best bet. Beyond that, you need to dps spike them down and you have to find some way to lock them down. The daze from the combo attack of S/D might be enough to pull this off. It’s something that I’ve thought about for my own future experiments. Otherwise the Young Karka are just a pain. Even with 2k Toughness on my tanky Thief, those bullets shots just tear through me since I lack +Vitality on my gear.

Nope. You’re stuck forever. Short of picking a different order on an alt or deleting your current character to recreate it up until the Order decision, you’re stuck with your current one.

1) Use your Bank. If you deposit items into your bank, you could take them out on the alt character and use them (assuming that they aren’t Character Bound to your main character).

2) Mail things to a guild member, then have them mailed to your alt. This is how I can get the weapons that I wanted whenever I start a new alt and I’m stuck in the beginning instances.

If you’re still in the thinking stage, I would suggest making a test character that is designed to melee. Asura have a unique dodging animation and they have a unique jumping fighting style for many of their melee attacks with larger weapons. Test drive an Asura Warrior with a 2-hander (or whatever you were looking at) and watch the animations. It shouldn’t take long for you to decide if you like the unique asura animations or if you hate them. This should help you choose the class that would work best for you.

Rayya.2591:

Rafahil.2857:

ShadowLordX.5148:

Lyssa runes can also be gotten for karma + transmutation stones.

Wait what? Please explain.

+savage kits
fixed for you
buy armor 42000 karma -trnsmutate rune to an rare armor + savage

You really don’t need to use the Salvage step if you don’t want to. When you use a Fine transmutation stone, you could move the Lyssa rune from the karma armor and then just pick all of your original armor’s +stats and appearance.

Though if you wanted to store the Lyssa runes for future use (or to sell), then the salvaging step is the way to go.

The drop rates on Dyes is just all over the place. Some people will say that you need to farm the lvl 1-15 zones and you’ll see tons of drops. Other people get none in the lower level zones and will say that you need a farming set of gear that is full of +% Magic Find. Truth be told, they’re both right and wrong. Drop rates for these things are just all over the place, so you might get x4 in one serious night of farming and then you might not see one for days.

My suggestion would to be go somewhere where you can hit large numbers of mobs. This could be in Cursed Shore using AoE effects or it could be in the lower level zones. That choice is really up to you. (My vote would be for Cursed Shore since you could also sell the high end crafting components that are dropped from your mob kills. Selling many of those would give you enough money to buy an Unidentified Dye.)

Or on another note, you could join the players who like to farm CoF (Path #1) for cash. It would probably be more cost efficient to just farm cash and then buy up all of the dyes that you need.

If you’re talking solo dps without anyone else’s involvement (including Thieves Guild pets), then yes. Signet of Malice is probably give a bit more dps when compared to Leeching Venoms. However that also means that you’d be sacrificing the AoE dps output and the AoE healing output of your Venoms. For just the self-healing, the Leeching Venoms procs are more than worth it. At 80th level, it’s healing +385 Health per proc (assuming 30 pts in Shadow Arts).

Engineers get stuck with Supply Crate. Thief has some viable options. I’m not experienced beyond Warrior, Thief, and Engineer.

Mistfire Wolf and racial elite skills are often the only real choice that people get. There are times that I take Mistfire Wolf because it’s the only thing that is useful in a specific character build.

Correct. As long as both gear pieces are 79th or below, the Basic stones will work. It’s only when at least one of the gear pieces is 80th that you’ll need the Fine stones.

Hmm… Well your healing output is just based off of your +stats from Shadow Arts traits, so that would still be effective. However Toughness is a multiplier that is applied to the original armor score of the gear that you are wearing. Therefore you’re going to get a lot more mileage out of Exotic armor score values then you would with Rare armor scores.

Beyond that, you’d have slightly lower health since my Critical Strikes trait is giving 5% of your Precision as health. Your crit rate would be slightly lower, so your crit-based heals wouldn’t proc as often. The damage value for Leeching Venom is based on your Power score, so that would also be lower. Also your standard damage output will be naturally lower.

Having said all of that, Rare gear is still pretty cheap to buy. If you wanted to get a general idea about how the character spec plays, using a full set of Rare gear would be a smart way to test drive the build. After some thought, I’d agree that you should try it out with Rare gear first. Then if you love the build, it should be easy to slowly upgrade it to Exotic.

On a personal note, I’m slowly converting my jewelry slots over to Ascended pieces. I’ve ended up choosing the pieces that use Precision as their favored stat in the Power/Precision/Toughness build. At this point, the slight loss of Toughness has not been that noticable and the slight increase in my crit rate has been nice.

1) I like to off-tank. Debuffing and off-tanking on “thief” characters is my signature build in MMOs. This character was the closest spiritual successor that I could come up with for my old EQ2 Brigand. As a result, I needed a defensive stat to make that possible.

2) Through running a high Toughness, you’ve got enough damage mitigation to make your Leeching Venom and crit-based heals effective. You can get hit by a Champion and lose half of your low health pool, but it can be instantly restored within 1-2 Venom skills. Or if you’re really in trouble, the Hide in Shadows heal will restore about 66% of your health pool. The ability to take abuse and keep kicking is very attractive to me.

3) I find that your average instanced dungeon group has about x2 melee characters (other than myself). Usually these are Thief, Guardian, or Warrior characters. It is my observation that this is sufficient for my buff sharing. Or if we’re all being force to ranged combat and we’re sticking close to each other, then this is also sufficient. The issue is when you’re dealing with Guardians who are trying to ranged combat, Rangers who aren’t using their pets, and various ranged casters who aren’t bothering to help revive each other. These situations tend to have people so spread out that their own AoE effects can’t even reach their fellow group members. In my personal opinion, these groups are inherently disfunctional and it’s not really your fault that your Venomous Aura build isn’t working since this is an abnormal situation.

4) This is the character that I’ll normally take to open world Group Events. I relish the chance to lock down some big and scary Champion mob. Melandru is one of my favorite punching bags and I love to interrupt his transformation script through AoE Basilisk buffing. This build will keep your fellow players alive through your debuffing and your ability to help heal them through Leeching Venom / Venomous Aura. It will let you turn the tide by changing the flow of action on the battlefield. However it won’t let you just dance in and save the day by dealing out massive amounts of spike damage. Champions are endurance fights, which is what this character build excells at.

DanH.5879:

BUT some are kitten and refuse to give us 600 share range to be useful
instead they give us +~30 more power to them, not bad, but it’s NOT what it is needed !

It all depends. When I’m killing a god priest or some Champion trash mob at a large group event, there tends to be enough players and pets in melee that you’re still hitting your target cap with our existing range. Even in Fractal runs, a mostly melee oriented group will be in range to get your buffs. The only time that the build ends up going to waste is when you’re stuck in an instanced dungeon with people who want to ranged combat and spread out all over the place.

I’d still love to have our Venomous Aura AoE range increased. It would really make my life easier. However now that we can see a visible AoE ring around ourselves when we cast a Venom power, it’s easier to adjust around and hit more targets with the following Venom buffs.

Bloodgruve.6038:

Definitely an interesting build. I believe the 2x Sigil of Blood don’t stack, you may be better off going with Sigil of Accuracy on your off hand. IIRC on crit sigils share cooldowns.

Sigh. Once again, the Wiki edit bandits strike again. First they remove the 50 second recast timer note off of the Superior Sigil of Lyssa entry. Now I see that they’ve removed the entire section about how you can stack x2 percentage proc sigils together for a combined effect.

Unless ArenaNet snuck through these changes in a patch that I didn’t notice, the combined effect of x2 Superior Blood combines to a 54% proc chance with a single cool down. (With dimishing returns, you’re getting +30% from Sigil #1 and +24% from Sigil #2.) While I would never use this on a long cool down sigil, Blood’s low cool down makes it more than worth it. I’ll happily give up the effective use of my 2nd sigil slot in order to make make the original Blood sigil that effective.

Bloodgruve.6038:

Also, what do you see for autoattack damage with sword? Seems your crit dmg and effective power is pretty low but your toughness and effective health are nice. Master Maintenance Oil or Superior Sharpening Stones would give you a good boost.

My auto attack damage is all over the place. Due to how the Venomous Aura build works, I’m generating anywhere between x2 Might stacks and x8 Might stacks at a given time. Also my damage numbers are constantly getting altered due to the Leeching Venom procs. When I get home from work, I’ll take a look and try to post some average values.

As a follow up to my original post, I wanted to mention some things about my build.

1) You’re a tanky character. Having that high of a Toughness score, using the built-in evasion of Pistol Whip, and the constant heals means that you can basically off-tank. During large Group Events, you’ll be capable of tanking a Champion trash mob. At the Jormag event, I’m usually tanking one of the x2 Champion trash mobs.

2) You’re a debuffing machine. Through traits and gear, you’re at +40% Condition Duration and you’re generating a lot of Weakness through Spider’s Venom and Skale Venom. When you’ve got extra people to share your debuffs with, it means that you’re permanently locking a Champion down with Weakness and you’ll often be debuffing other areas. The AoE version of Ice Drake Venom is especially entertaining on Champions.

3) You’re an aggro magnet. This character build pretty much hits every single factor for determining aggro. You’re almost always in melee range, you’ve got high Toughness, you’re debuffing like mad, and you’ve got a respectable dps output. While other characters can take aggro from you, this character build will often be a target. If you don’t enjoy that kind of thing, you’ll want to definitely tweak the gear build.

4) As a general FYI, the Venom powers in the Utility slots are instant cast powers. This means that you can cast them as you’re starting a Pistol Whip #3 and can even cast a 2nd one in the middle of that Pistol Whip. If you need to quickly deal out Venom procs, Pistol Whip is your main source of delivery.

5) One odd quirk of the Venomous Aura buff sharing is how it affects Spider’s Venom. Based on multiple player tests, it seems that a shared SV buff uses the recepient’s +Condition scores. This means that even though your own +Condition values are non-existant, other players can still get a decent damage output from this skill. (Your whole point of using SV is for the Leeching Venom and Lotus Poision trait procs. Though the healing debuff from the Poison stacking is also nice.)

6) You’ll be extremely rare. Most PvE Thief players won’t use a Venomous Aura build. This means that you’ll end up standing out when you’re at a Group Event and your contributions will make a difference.

There are running threads in the Dynamic Events forum for this very subject. People update them when their server has cleared a specific temple. They will stayed cleared for about 2-3 hours at a time. If you check the forums about once an hour, you should get lucky sooner or later. Once you have a target server, just use the Guesting system to head over there and buy your karma items.

For the P/V/T set, you’ll be wanting to follow the Melandru and Grenth threads. Grenth will cover your Feet armor slot and all x6 of your jewelry slots. Then for your Leg, Chest, Shoulder, and Hand armor slots, you’ll be wanting to visit Melandru. In order to get a helm with those stats, you’ll have to buy it from a dungeon vendor (like AC) or a WvW vendor (for WvW tokens and gold).

My main is a PvE Thief. I use a Sword in my main hand and I only use stealth as a beneficial side effect or for situational use. It sounds like my build might cover what you’re looking for, so see the link below.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/thief/?7.0|c.1n.h15.a.1n.h15|5.1n.h19|1n.7i.1n.7i.1n.7i.1n.7i.1n.7i.1n.7i|1n.64.1n.64.1n.64.1n.64.1n.64.8g.67|u48c.a6.u19c.0

The character is designed as an AoE buffing build. It really won’t come together until 70th level since you really need 30 pts in Deadly Arts for soloing / grouping and 30 pts in Shadow Arts for the AoE buffs. Based on my personal gear build, I threw the remaining points in Critical Strikes to help my crit rate.

1) Utility slot: Shadow’s Refuge is a situational power that is mostly use for group play. Normally I will have this power replaced with Signet of Shadows for soloing or Ice Drake Venom for grouping.

2) Elite slot: Basilisk Venom is only used for grouping and its value only shows after you’ve hit 70th level. For soloing or against a few buggy Champion mobs who are immune to Basilisk’s effects, I will normally run Thieves Guild. Dagger Storm is a good situational power for farming since it lets you damage a lot of trash mobs in a short amount of time, but it’s not a power that I primarily use.

3) Food: Omnomberry Pie is my food of choice. Between the food and the dual Superior Sigil of Blood on my melee set, you’ll be constantly healing from crits. When combined with the constant healing from Leeching Venoms, it makes for a very stable build.

4) Disclaimer: Be warned that this is a fragile build. When you’re using #3 Pistol Whip or #5 Black Powder, having a lower health pool isn’t as much of a big deal when you see all of the various healing sources that you have access to. Yet the danger of this build is dealing with condition damage. Conditions will eat you alive, so they need to be dealt with immediately. Spamming the Sword #2 can slowly remove them. Otherwise your heal (Hide in Shadows) and your end game armor runes (Superior Runes of Lyssa) are your main sources of condition removal.

I’d suggest watching the Dynamic Events forum. There are running threads for most of the major god temple locations. People post on the thread when their server has opened up a temple, which normally stays open for a couple of hours. If you check the DE forum about once an hour when you’re playing GW2, you should get lucky sooner or later. Through the Guesting system, you can travel to another server that has things cleared. Just remember that as a UK player, you’re probably on one of the EU servers. You can only Guest to other EU servers, so that does limit your options.

As to those specific temples, they’ve always been hard and Balthazar is notoriously buggy. To make things worse, the major patch last week buffed up the trash mob difficulty at the various god temples. From all of the various posts in a couple of the Dynamic Event complaint threads, the Grenth wraith mobs got super buffed and their AoE effects were constantly killing people in a single hit. It’s more than a little insane right now. While I still do see the Grenth thread being occasionally updated, a lot of people are having serious problems with clearing this temple.

A lot of what you’re asking for is subjective. But here’s a general crash course.

1) Sword/Pistol & Shortbow – This is an aggressive tank ‘n spank build. You’ll use Pistol #5 for creating AoE Blind clouds and Combined #3 for the frontal arc damage and free evasion. Most of your dps output comes from Sword #1. Unlike most builds, this is a non-stealth build. (I would personally consider this to be an easy leveling spec against any non-Champion mobs.)

2) Sword/Dagger & Shortbow – This is an aggressive mobile build. Due to the recent changes to Combined #3, it’s now a viable attack move and it steals x2 boons from enemy mobs. Dagger #5 gives you access to stealth, so character builds can wildly vary.

3) Pistol/Dagger & (Shortbow?) – This is your ranged dps build that focuses on killing mobs through condition damage dots. You’ll have to constantly move around the battlefield and will often use Dagger #5 for access to the Stealth Pistol #1 attack.

4) Dagger/Dagger & Shortbow – This is a highly mobile melee dps build that also focuses on dealing out condition damage dots. Once again, you’ve got stealth options through Dagger #5.

Here are some popular and key traits:

Mug (Deadly Arts 10) – Although this can’t crit anymore and its dps output was reduced, the trait also gives you a heal. As a backup ability for dps and healing, the trait isn’t a bad choice.

Shadow’s Embrace (Shadow Arts 10) – If you’re running a Dagger in your off-hand slot, then this trait will act as your main source of condition removal.

Expeditious Dodger (Acrobatics 5) – For most Thief builds, you’re constantly running all over the place and the temporary Swiftness is a game changer.

Uncatchable (Trickery 10) – This trait is one of the stable choices for condition builds. Even if you’re not running around that much, the free damage and Cripple on enemies is always useful.

Utility skills really depend on your trait and weapon choices. As a soloing player, take a look at our Signet powers. Smoke Screen is a situational power. The same goes for Shadow’s Refuge, though it becomes a staple power in group situations. Caltrops is often used to condition builds, which has great synergy with the Uncatchable trait.

You can build a Thief a lot of ways. For example, I run the S/P & SB set up while focusing on the Venom powers. This is an AoE buffing spec that pretty much needs Deadly Arts 30 / Shadow Arts 30 / ? 10. However my specific character doesn’t play like a traditional Thief and I’m really not the best person to give advice in that area.

Doggie.3184:

I’ve tried Spiked Armor in PvE on warrior and literally never noticed it proc anything so often wondered if mobs actually can ever crit.

One of my Warriors has the same ability and it does proc. However it doesn’t really start to proc very often until you have 2-4 upper level mobs beating on you at the same time. From what I’ve observed, the trait’s only PvE value is for dealing with fighting multiple high end mobs at the same time.

That’s a loaded question. What do you consider to be the prime factors for “competence”. Being able to spam Stealth skills? Dealing out insanely hit spikes of damage? Actually having multiple melee weapon set choices? Etc etc.

Stealth is being continually nerfed into the ground. Although the most recent patch reverted the increased Revealed debuff back to its original 3 seconds for PvE, WvW is continually getting new anti-Stealth options. Even for PvE, people question the value of Stealth since it no longer wipes off mob aggro. (If you’re not planning on a Stealth build, then these aspects don’t matter to you.)

ArenaNet is against spike damage. With the latest nerfs / changes to Mug, a Thief doesn’t have the same kind of alpha strike options that it used to use. People care about these changes for PvP and WvW. Yet for PvE, you could debate over just how much this has been affecting you.

The dual skill of Sword/Dagger got revised and buffed. People can actually hit with it now and it’s actually a useful skill. Between the built-in evasion of Sword/Pistol and the viability of Sword/Dagger, you’ve got melee choices.

Pistol/Pistol is still terrible. Shortbow’s attack #1 arrow no longer automatically hits moving targets, which has reduced its viability in WvW and PvP.

We’re supposed to be getting buffs in the mobility department, but they haven’t happened yet. Only time will tell if these theoretical changes will be actually useful.

As a Venomous Aura spec Thief, I can grant an AoE buff that lets the next x3 attacks of the affected people cause the Chill debuff. When I’m in Cursed Shore and we’re mobbing a Champion mob like the Priest of Melandru or a Champion Spider in the follow-up event, it has been my personal observation that our combined Chill spamming on that target has noticably reduced how often they can use their mega abilities. However I’m not about whether the Chill duration was effectively reduced due to the mob being a Champion. If so, then you’d have to use a lot of Chill effects to really make a difference.

Fergusson’s Crossing (NA) now up.

All of these classes play differently and have noticably different spec options. It’s basically impossible for us to give some kind of universal answer. If you’re really just looking for a CoF cookie cutter farming build, then you already know that you’re playing a Warrior or Mesmer in Berserker gear. Beyond that, you’ve given no other forms of useful information to aid us in making a suggestion.

General: All forms of Quickness were reduced from +100% Attack Speed down to +50% Attack Speed. For PvP / WvW, all damage done by Confusion and Retaliation now does only 50% of their PvE damage output.

Class: Turrets got some offensive buffs, but didn’t get helped much in the survivability side of things. The universally used trait of Kit Refinement got completely changed to the point of being essentially worthless for almost any build. Beyond that, there have been some minor buffs and nerfs which have been listed in the patch notes. Some of the Tool Belt skills were seriously affected for the weapon kit abilities, so take a good look at them.

For the most part, people are still using HGH elixer builds using the Grenade kit as the ultimate dps spec.

Zappa,

The reflex time aspect of “twitch” builds is usually based on a personal choice. Case in point, my Thief doesn’t play like a “real” Thief. I’m running S/P and using a Venomous Aura AoE buffing spec. Using Knight gear and healing on critical hits, Pistol Whip and / or Black Powder basically lets me melee a lot of the time with only occasional dodging. This build is a mostly anti-twitch build that also doesn’t use Stealth.

If you want to play some kind of nimble build that uses twitch reflexes to survive, then there are countless Thief builds available. Just remember that you don’t have to play that way if you don’t want to.

Greatsword is a build that focuses on raw physical damage through 100 Blades and it has some decent mobility options. Dual Sword builds tend to focus on dealing out tons of Bleed condition dots while using a mixture of mobility and damage prevention.

The real question is whether or not you like playing a condition damage build. If so, then running Dual Swords is an extremely viable option. Combine that with a Rifle and you’ll be quickly racking up the Bleed dots. However this kind of build isn’t what you would consider to be a typical build. It can be enjoyable, but most people won’t go this route.

While neither of my x2 Warriors use Dual Swords, I do run my Thief with a rarely used character build. As a Venomous Aura spec’ed main PvE character, I know exactly how it feels to not fit in with most players of your class. All things considered, I enjoy my Thief spec and I like the fact that I stand out as different. If you wouldn’t mind feeling the same way about your Dual Sword Warrior, then more power to you.

It really depends on what you want to do with the EG. For example, my EG character is wearing Cleric gear and uses a trait build of Explosives 20 / Firearms 20 / Inventions 30 and focuses on +Power & +Healing. The character is built to constantly run all over the battle field while switching back and forth between the EG and Rifle. While I do condition damage, that’s not the primary focus of the character. My rune choice is Rune of Altruism, which helps me act as an AoE dps buffing character.

You can really go either way. Some people focus on condition damage for the EG and others focus on raw physical damage. Both builds have their strengths and weaknesses. Also as a result, each build style values specific EQ abilities more than the other choices. While your personal EG build isn’t my personal choice, it does look like it should be a functional build.

Guardians are one of the default classes that people suggest. They wear Heavy armor and accept having less Health than a Warrior in exchange for self-healing and lots of good condition removal options. The greatest flaw of Guardian is that their ranged combat options are horrible. Though the projectile speed of their Scepter was slightly buffed in the past, it is still considered to be a joke by much of the Guardian community.

If you play a Guardian, then you’ll likely have a melee weapon set and will either use the Staff or a 2nd melee weapon set. (My personal suggestion would be the Staff since it still gives you some ranged options and it has some nice utility aspects.) Dps focused builds will often use a Greatsword. I’ve also seen people running Sword/Torch for dps builds. Other builds seem to use either the Hammer or Mace/(Shield or Symbol).

Guardians can be melee beat sticks or tanky support specs. It’s a highly self-sufficent class and a really strong choice. Also since it doesn’t really on doing a lot of condition damage, it doesn’t get penalized when participating in dynamics events that have many people all attacking the same target. (Condition classes run into issues in those situations due to how condition damage stacks and duration stacks work. In the end, condition builds are competing to see who can actually damage the mob and the loser won’t be getting a lot of the damage credit. This can lead to them having issues with getting a Gold ranking for event participation. Although ArenaNet may have fixed this reward issue during the three month break that I took from GW2.)

If you were already interested in playing a Necro, then it would probably fit well with that group. (Though a Ranger could also work.)

1) A Necro is a condition heavy character for most of your weapon choices, which fits will with that group since you won’t be fighting with them over who can create their condition damage dots 1st. (There is a x25 stack limit for Bleed condition dots, so some builds fight over who can contribute to that cap before their excess dots are wasted. Also for other conditions like Poison and Burning, the person with the highest +condition damage always takes damage priority.)

2) Your main source of Darkness effects for the Combo Field system come from Necro, which will help to add some extra party healing through lifedrain effects.

3) Depending on your Thief player’s build, they may have problems with removing condition effects from themself. A Necro can a bit in the AoE condition removal department, which will have good synergy with the Guardian’s AoE condition removal.

4) Necro has a ton of Health points. You should be able to act as a bit of a damage sponge when your party needs it, though your low armor values will mean that you can’t take very much abuse from physical damage attacks.

Zorish,

There is an old saying. “It takes money to make money.” While this is certainly true when talking about people buying and selling on the BLTC auction system, it also applies to PvE. By the time that you hit 80th level, you’ll be dealing with content in the final zones of the continent of Orr. For these zones, life will become mucher easier once you’re in at least Rare gear. This costs money, but will help you earn money.

1) Once you kill a zone boss with a character who is lvl 40 or above, you’ll get a bonus reward chest. (This bonus chest is once per day on your account for each one of the bosses.) People who are desperately poor often farm all of the lvl 1-15 zone bosses and the dragon bosses. Between standard reward chest random loot and the guaranteed Rare gear piece from the bonus chest, you can make some decent money once you’re around 60+ in level.

2) Due to the influx of Rare items from the bonus chests, buying a full set of 80th Rare armor will actually be quite cheap. (It’s far cheaper to buy a set than it is to make one.) Even if your armor upgrade slots (aka Runes) don’t match, the gear’s armor value and +stat values are mor than worth it.

3) Your next goal is to buy an Exotic weapon for your primary weapon slots. Depending on the +stats that you want, a random 80th Exotic weapon will only cost 2 or 3 gold. With the income from the daily bonus chests, you can buy an Exotic every few days.

4) Now that you’re in a bare minimum set of gear, you’ll be in good shape to start running dungeons, farming open world content, and grinding for karma. Pick a gear set of +stats that you like and see if it is sold from one of the Orr karma merchants. If they do sell the +stats combination that you want, then each armor and jewelry slot item will cost you 42k in karma. Or if your chosen combination isn’t covered by a vendor, then you can make / buy them from the BLTC.

5) Selling Unidentified Dyes is good money. You should be able to sell them for 16 or 17 silver. If their value is too low, just save them and wait until the market is more favorable.

6) Selling raw crafting materials is always a good source of money.

7) Selling the Daily Reward coins is another good income source that people overlook. You should be able to get around 4 silver for each coin. (You only need these coins when you start to crafting high end appearance weapons and other special upgrades in the Mystic Forge.)

Open on Fergusson’s Crossing. Must have happened sometime within the last hour.

Your 1st example is correct. 25 + 50 + 90 = 165. This progression system is a reason to encourage people to use a full set of a specific rune.

In theory, ArenaNet’s early comment about Legendary weapons implied that they expect people to take 6 – 12 months to accomplish them. When people got full Legendary weapons within just a couple months of the game’s release, ArenaNet was really caught off guard. For some reason, they really expected everyone to be ultra casual about the process and not so aggressive about farming content.

To be honest, I really don’t know what ArenaNet was so surprised. They were caught with their pants down since Legendary weapons were likely supposed to be a large time sink. As a result of this, they started to nerf the available farming options as a reactive way of creating more artificial time sinks.

While I like many aspects of this game, there are times when I wonder about ArenaNet’s lack of ability to predict obvious reactions in their customer base. The Legendary weapon matter is just one of many in my mind. Like it or not, I don’t really expect ArenaNet to change their minds.

Account Bound will normally turned into Character Bound once they’ve been equiped for the 1st time. So if you purchased a Laurel item, then it would be eventually stuck on whichever character used it. Having said that, some people were asking about the Mystic Forge process of turning a “basic” item version into an “Infused” item version. When the new item is granted by the Mystic Forge, does it remain stuck on the current character or is it Account Bound? I never remember seeing an answer to that question, but I’m sure that you could find the thread if you use the Search feature on the website.