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Zerker gear for Living Story?


hihey.1075

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Hello!I am a returning GW2 player. I stopped playing several year ago and I am willing to begin anew by focusing exclusively on the Living Story - hopefully with one (or a couple) friend of mine.

What I ask you is simple: is it viable to use zerker gear for going through all of the Living Story content? The class I'd be playing is Thief, and I have full sets of zerker ascended gear and a mix of accessories (so I could increase some survival stats, if needed).To give more info, I was pretty proficient (at least from the PvP side of GW2) at the game (back in my "prime"), whereas my companion is a completely new player, so I'd be "somewhat" carrying him. However, I have absolutely no knowledge of the living story content.

Any input is welcome! If you have any suggested builds for Thief (which include gear) I'd be glad to know of them!

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For Open World and Story content, Marauder stats are usually the better choice. It is basically Berzerker's but with Vitality and even better Precision at the cost of some Power and Ferocity. On a Thief you end up with almost 17k HP and 51 % critical hit chance. Berzerker's leave you with 12k HP and 44 % critical hit chance.

Living Story content is a little heavier on crowd-control, so you want to have at least 1-2 stun-breakers. Conditions are rarely an issue. You should also have a melee and a ranged option (weapon sets), as certain encounters require you to switch. This is something you and your friend should have an eye on. If you want to assist/carry, Smoke Screen is great to shield allies. As Trickery is pretty much baseline in Thief builds nowadays, Thrill of Crime is a good choice and stealing should be used as a combat-starter, this gives both of you an easy start.

There are a lot of great builds which work for this kind of content. But if I post anything here that is non-meta, the entire topic will derail into yet another endless discussion and your question will not be answered :S. Good sources for builds which are accepted by a wide variety of players:

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Zerker thief can work just fine through all current story content.

While marauder stats are indeed a good deal safer without losing a ton of damage output, I find that thief has great sustain options from the Critical Strikes line - Critical strikes offer ways for you to boost how often you crit, how hard you crit, and let those same crits heal you for a portion of the damage you put out. A lot of solid synergy there.

This is a fairly safe daredevil build I use to hit hard while keeping up sustain. Honestly it doesn't fully play into some of thief's strengths (most notably, stealth attacks), but it hits pretty hard and daredevil in general offers a lot of defensive options. Staff 4 is a blind, your staff autoattack chain ends in a projectile reflect, and staff 5 infamously allows you to hit an area pretty hard while evading.

The heal signet allows you to spam a never-ending stream of healing to yourself as you rapidly strike enemies, the daredevil block is a block+stunbreak+cc counterattack, the precision sigil also provides you and your friend decent condition cleanse, the power sigil is always a solid choice just to hit harder, and the spinner elite is a great offense+defense mix and synergizes extremely well with the heal signet if you are under pressure.

On top of this, going with the Trickster line gives you more initiative, so you can spam longer sequences of attacks. Overall, this is far from an optimal build, but it hits hard enough, has all the important defensive utility (cleanse, block, stunbreak, blind, and of course evades), and above all else is just easy to play. If I need to carry someone in a fight as a thief, this is my go-to build.

Last note: I never really pvp as a thief, but I imagine this would be an awful pvp build. Check out metabattle or godsofpvp for pvp builds.

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Marauder's gear is usually superior on low-health classes like Thief. Just keep in mind due to their Critical Strikes trait line Thief can easily cap crit chance on Marauder, so you might want to throw some Valkyrie pieces in there if you go past 100% crit.

On my Deadeye I also run Wanderer's+Diviner's (still 6k autohits with Rifle).

Daredevil can get through any content without any defensive stats whatsoever by taking a full evasion build, food, etc. However its very stressful to play like that if you aren't experienced, its much different from the typical Thief stealth builds since you're always visible. I recommend practicing evasion tanking extensively before putting it into action in any serious fight.

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I agree with those saying Marauder is better if you're going in on a glass build.. and also a strong yes to having some kind of self sustain on your builds.Thieves actually have exceptional self healing capabilities imo.I have a Zealot's stat Daredevil that's focused on self healing sustain (Heals on crits, successful dodges and initiative spent) and I find it a lot of fun to play.It's really glassy but it's super easy to recover all my damage just by attacking and dodging but it can be really chaotic in a mass of players when you can't see crap XD

Glass builds are generally more than enough for open world and story content although you'll start to struggle a bit more in HoT as that expansion's open world content tends to still be pretty punishing to full glass zerk builds.. hence the benefits of Marauder's vitality.

You shouldn't have too much trouble though, not until you join big group events with lots of players and you get one shot by some of the big upscaled AoEs.But Res spam is a thing so you'll likely not be dying much even there.

Main thing you'll likely have trouble with is strong champ level creatures as fighting them with glassy builds either alone or with only 1-2 people is going to be a bit more challenging unless you're good with your character.This won't be a problem in the core world stuff but HoT onwards champs do tend to get tougher and have much better abilities than the core world weakling champs do.

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Marauder is a great choice, but it also depends on how comfortable you are. Thief is capable of healing rapidly on offense with the health return on crit from crit strikes. You can even double down on that with the healing signet. At the same time, they're very evasive and you can deal significant damage without providing much opportunity to be attacked in return with traits like bounding dodger and weapons like staff or pistols which either evade on attack or allow you to burst from range. The extra vitality might be wasted if you are constantly topping off your health between evades.

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Zerker is fine, it is story or OW so anything is fine really. You will need to be a bit more active with dodging but nothing hard. If you really have problems with low health pool go for some more tanky accessory which is easy to get in the living story.I never go with tanky stuff for story or OW because it just takes longer to kill and nothing is that hard that can't be solved with a defensive utility slot or trait or just dodge.

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