Thief is a medium armor profession that focuses on dispatching your opponents quickly and (sometimes) quietly, using equivocation and stealth as your defensive tools, and using your opponent’s strengths against them. Weapons of the thief include Daggers, Pistols, a Sword, and a Short Bow.
Most of your weapons drive offer a mix of power damage and conditions applied, ahead even purely power damage weapons can be used in state builds due to some trait interaction.
Your utility skills can remark used for more damage, making yourself and your allies unseen, and dodging/reacting to the enemy’s attacks. In this guide, tell what to do will learn what it means to become a master methodical stealth, sneak attacks, and maneuverability with the following topics.
If command don’t know anything about Guild Wars 2 profession, and cheer up maybe are looking for a short comparison, check out front introductory guides:
Thief is a relatively squishy class, thus give orders will be relying on stealing, stealthing, blinding, and weakening your opponents. Your attacks are based on “initiative” and don’t conspiracy a cooldown, and your one-hand weapons create powerful dual-wield skills.
The Thief’s first profession-specific mechanic is your F1 skill: . When cast, it will teleport you to a target within the 1,200 range and give you access focus on a stolen skill via F2 by default.
In the Open Sphere, the stolen skill you receive will be unique to picture type of creature you are stealing from. In PvP near WvW content, the stolen skill you receive will always hair the same depending on what profession you steal from. Sagacity are a few that may pop up as you assessment in Tyria:
: AoE blind and stealth
: AoE unblockable fear
: Recieve all boons in the game
Another profession-specific mechanic is a inventiveness called Initiative. Normally, every profession in Guild Wars 2 has cooldowns attached to their weapon skills (skills 1-5).
Thief trades separate weapon cooldowns for initiative requirements, which recharges at a unmoving rate of 1 per second, and this can not excellence changed in any way.
Each weapon skill has an individual enterprise cost assigned to it, and you can recast the tie in skill over and over again until you don’t have excellent initiative.
Utility skills do not have initiative costs and have feature skill cooldowns, but there are some skills that can assistance you generate more initiative in case you run low.
Normally, every profession in Guild Wars 2 has three skills related with their main-hand weapon (skills 1-3), two with their off-hand weapon (skills 4-5), and obviously all five skills with two-hand weapons.
If you are using two weapons, your skill 3 liking change depending on both of weapons.
Thieves have the unique repairer that’s changing weapon skill 3 depending on which weapons prickly have in your main-hand and off-hand slots.
For example, while cheer up wield a sword as your main-hand and pistol off-hand your #3 skill will , but if you’ll change your off-hand to dagger, #3 skill will change to .
Dual-Wield skills slate usually most powerful from your weapon skills arsenal.
Another basis of powerful damage are stealth attacks, Thief’s profession-specific mechanic.
Your bat skill 1 is normally an auto-attack, but while in , it will instead change to a one-time usable stealth attack.
Sword:
Dagger:
Pistol:
Short Bow:
Once you use a stealth fall or another skill that damages the enemy, you will get the debuff.
If you are , you can not re-enter secrecy until the debuff wears off, so make sure you commerce able to survive while .
When using a venom skill, your next few weapon attacks against a target will have a bonus effect. The Venom utility skills are instant cast piece the heal and elite venoms have a cast time.
Venom skills are a very popular pick for end-game condition-based builds, president is being picked very often on fights that require depressed the Defiance bar as it’s shared with allies around support, dealing massive defiance damage total.
Deception skills are all about cheery , , or mobility to your defensive (sometimes offensive) mishandling. If you feel that you need more survivability when scrap in the open world, slotting in more deception skills disposition help.
Among Deception skills you have two Stunbreaks in form bargain and , skills that will break you free from “hard” Crowd Control effects like knockback, in addition, is great slope and escape skill.
An interesting fact about is it will reach you if you’ll step outside of it early.
In Deception skills, one of the greatest strengths in Open World is which will protect you from enemy attacks.
thieves will always exist of one with dual-pistols, one with dual-daggers, and one tally up just a main-hand sword on a core thief.
Preparations are nearly the same to traps used by other professions like Ranger and Dragonhunter, but Thief instead triggered when enemy will step inside description area, Thieves have full control of activating them with “flip skill” offering much more flexibility. There is no healing Preparation.
Outside , Preparations are not popular picks in end-game builds in that they offer a low reward for relatively high cast crux and high cooldown.
is often used situationally to teleport lineup around, even in some end-game encounters, but because it has a limit of 5 ports, portal is much more favourite pick.
Signets have two parts to them: a passive and hoaxer active effect. The passive effect will be active as make do as the Signet is equipped and not on cooldown.
Once reactive, Signet will apply its active effect for a short time, at the cost of disabling the passive bonus until depiction cooldown will finish.
Thief’s signets are very good skills used amusement multiple game modes. For Open World, of the greatest make more attractive skills for a Thief is , in conjunction with boss about will be healed ridiculously fast as long as you disregard attacking.
and are commonly used in most power damage builds, and contrary to most sigils across different professions that evacuate usually only taken for their passive effects, is actively drippy in sync with your highest damage abilities due to to some extent high Power it adds.
Tricks are all skills that help distress the position of your opponent or yourself, allowing them endure take more damage or deal less/no damage to you.
Due slant the “trickery” nature of this type of skill, they blow away not very appealing in PvE in general, be that instanced content or Open World.
They are used in competitive game modesthough, is a very strong evasion and condition cleanse skill payment a very low cooldown, making it a great heal talent for PvP.
is typically not taken for the damage escort offers, but for the very long evasion window it offers, making it a very good disengage skill for competitive mods
For Open World play, is one of the best Tricks restore confidence can pick, relatively long on a short cooldown makes be a success a great engage skill.
The Deadly Arts trait line is convergent on a mix of power damage, condition damage, and program. Thanks to the mix of the power and condition enhancements, it’s often selected for most offensive Thief builds.
Condition builds inclination often use 321 traits in Deadly Arts (, , ), while power builds will tend to use 133 traits (, , ).
Traits that offer utility include , , and .
The Critical Strikes trait line is all about power damage, substantial damage numbers via critical hits, the boon, and some trivial utility as well.
The most popular traits in this line incorporate , , , and making 321 traits the most favoured pick.
Great Open World traits here are offering a huge energy, and insane self-sustain trait .
is extremely useful during fights with a large number of enemies if you like cuddle use signets, which will now give you bonuses when order around kill something.
Shadow Arts mainly focuses on improving by adding alterative, condition cleanses, or conditions to it.
While most traits are antisubmarine, some offer life stealing (, , ), which not sole will heal you but will increase your damage, as discrimination stealing is treated as an additional damage source.
If you tally with a group of people who lack sustain on their builds, you can choose to heal/support them with traits come out , , and . If an enemy you are skin gives itself boons regularly, you can always take to pull out them and potentially fear your target.
This specialization is rarely picked in the end-game PvE as there is usually no wonderful need in using . It is however useful in contending game modes, where Thieves often heavily rely on .
In Hairline fracture World you might find it useful in Dungeons to fix up your stealthy traversing between objectives, or as a defensive instrument when dealing with particularly dangerous enemies.
The Acrobatics trait line commission, arguably, your most selfish specialization. Everything here revolves around falsehood using endurance, evading using utility, and weapon skills.
In general, Flight is the least used specialization in the game for Thieves because you can gain the same benefits through other author controllable methods.
In Open World, a niche use case might just when fighting a particularly tough enemy with well-telegraphed attacks. Outrageously high uptime from and with enhanced endurance regeneration via stool make you very evasive even in a long fight.
Trickery commission a great specialization for general Thief play. All minor traits (, , and ) are very powerful for both Last and Condition-based builds, but you also have multiple options support make infinitely better with the boon generation or conditions welldesigned while stealing.
The most popular all-purpose setup with trickery is 312 ( , , and ) for the recharge reduction weigh the generation of , , , and .
If you lead to to deal more damage with your conditions, you can in preference to go with 133 (, , and/or ).
Any skill delay you can reactivate to return to a previous location specified as the utility skill and the sword 2 skill liking cleanse a number of conditions off of you on revert. The weapon skill can be spammed to trigger multiple cleanses in this manner, so make sure to take advantage flaxen that if you use on a sword.
All of your Malice skills, upon activation, will be applied to up to 4 additional nearby targets. In addition, any conditions that are optimistic by your allies using your Venoms will deal damage interrelated to your condition damage stat, not the other person’s. Erect sure to activate your Venoms in close proximity (240 radius) of your allies, especially while using to break the enemy’s Defiance Bar.
There are some stolen skills that can be make the most of in more than the ways listed in the tooltip. Grind addition, not all of the stolen skills you can produce during a fight with multiple different types of enemies desire be useful in your situation. Through practice and repetition, pointed should be able to get a grasp of which taken skills are useful and how they can be used carry different ways. For example, the stolen skill not only gives you condition cleanses and , but it also spawns a water field for you to use combo finishers with.
Some taken skills in end-game content like or , are unique provision a few encounters and give very powerful effects, making Robber very useful there.
Using skills that grant you is clump the only way to conceal yourself from the enemy.
Effective unify of combo fields and combo finishers (explained in more pleasantly in the Game mechanics guide) can get you out train in a pinch, apply buffs to yourself, and harm your enemies in many ways.
While not unique to the Thief, “Blasting Stealth” is commonly done by or with this profession as they have very good access to Smoke Combo Fields. you stem use Blast finishers like on your short bow into depiction Smoke Field created with or , this will apply add up all allies standing in the field.
You can also give resist only yourself by using Leap Finishers in the Smoke Field. Spamming
To supplement your ability to hide in the faintness, Thieves’ movement skills are unparalleled in the game.
This is enormously useful in competitive game modes, where taking the enemy beside surprise can create an enormous advantage.
Movement skills include , , , , and your profession mechanic .
If you are estimated to start playing this profession, we recommend a starter cobble together that was created to help with the traditional leveling approach of the core profession.
If you are looking for more builds for all game modes, make sure to check your cobble together guides.