So, I levelled a Thief

I made a Thief a looong time ago and until last month his main purpose was to hang out in Metrica Province (he is asura) and complete dailies.  Metrica is great for kill variety at the Thaumanova Reactor, underwater and ambient slayer in Loch Jezt and cheap gathering around Artergon Waypoint.  I just played him for larks.

Señor Teatime (Mr. was taken)

Initially I didn't really enjoy the class.  The profession mechanics for Thief in GW2 are Initiative, Stealth and Steal and none of them really blew my skirt up.  Stolen abilities are often just flat damage and Stealth seems to last next to no time. However, Initiative is interesting.  When combined with the versatility provided by Dual Wield not having cooldowns on your weapon skills becomes very powerful.

Thief Utility Skills, though, aren't all that and tend to have long cooldowns for otherwise modest effects.  I guess this is a result of the need to balance the spammable weapon skills.  Venoms are a particular head scratcher, 40 second cooldown to apply several stacks of conditions that don't stack? I have to assume they have PvP in mind for that.  I mean Poison as a DoT is not great, it's the debuff to healing that makes it powerful but PvE mobs don't heal.

Prior to Thief my most played classes were Guardian, Engineer and Necromancer and I had a big problem with survivability starting out as a footpad.  Fighting even two mobs was 50/50.  I took to the internet and found this.  In the early days it was tough to find advice for levelling builds as most people we're still focused on perfecting a level 80 build.  This, however, was great advice. I became all but unkillable.  At least in Metrica Province.

Then disaster struck.  The Great Trait Rethink happened (in April) and suddenly I had 1 Minor trait on my level 30 Thief as opposed to 2 Minors and a 2 Majors.

The "Great" Trait Rethink

That sucked a lot of the fun out of the build I was running and Thief became tedious again overnight.  I started farming dailies on my Guardian, who, although only level 40ish, wasn't quite as reliant on Traits for fun.

Then, abruptly, at some point in early May, I decided to properly level Thief.  I'd decided to complete Brisban Wildlands on him (possibly inspired by the Season 2 teaser?) but I'd also started levelling weaponsmith and was creating Rare weapons for my alts to grow into.  Suddenly, I just felt inspired and in a little over a month he's now happily sat at 80.  In the process I levelled Cooking to 400 in less than 30 minutes (see here) and levelled so quickly from 60 to 80 it wasn't even worth buying new gear.

Hwo would my 80 build look?  Well, I'd always wanted to stay a condi Thief, I liked the bleed stacking from Death Blossom, so I read around for some build inspiration.  I had a good look at some builds using pistol but didn't really get on with it.  Maybe it was too much like Engy?  Finally I settled on a Dagger/Dagger (natch) and a Shortbow.  I'd recently tried and loved Koroshi's roaming Engy build, and thought it would be fun to do some sort of sustain/survivability PvE build.  I found this (Apothecary gear?!) and adapted it to my play style and end up with this!

I have some nice dagger skins

It's great in PvE I seem to be hard to kill (TM) and there are some neat switches you can make to Major traits without a full respec (bit of an old school concern).  I doubt it will be much use in Dungeons or WvW, but since I don't do Dungeons or WvW for more than a few hours a month it shouldn't be a concern!  Also, apparently, 3k toughness is the sweet spot.  Who knew? (This guy)

I think Orr will be the acid test for this little chap.