It's taken me years to come anywhere close to liking the thief. Compared to every other class I always felt like I did far too little damage for how impossibly squishy it was regardless of what I ran. This has caused me to try and delete the thief for another character numerous times through my GW2 life, that is until I finally had at least one of each class. At that point I decided "Eh, may as well" and slogged through leveling it primarily with dual dagger. And I died. A lot. Way more than I ever have on any other class. I tried PvE builds from meta battle but can't seem to quite do the stats correctly as I'm just buying Exotics from the TP for the most part instead of going full ascended and in such they don't seem to offer quite what I need, not to mention they're all specifically focused on damage, leaving me rather vulnerable, as they're raid builds and that's the only PVE that sort of site really cares about. I made this character specifically in anticipation of the Deadeye. so I saved up hero points and fully unlocked it day one. Unfortunately, I've found the same problems I had before have carried over. I don't do enough damage to most Veterans or higher and can't avoid getting hit enough to stay up long enough to kill them without some delaying tactics to allow for heals. Not all Veterans are this way, mind, just most I've run into in POF. So with all that in mind I'm looking for a build that has a lot of survivability and does a lot of damage. I'm not talking top of the charts, but enough to generally solo veterans, elites, and maybe even champs with the adds they often come with/spawn. This means, in general, I'm going to need AOE and a fair deal of it, something I find the thief lacks in spades. Yet with enough single target damage and re-targeting I can see it being viable against small groups of four or less, though I fully admit to not knowing at all as my expertise, despite lots of reading and looking at builds on metabattle, is highly lacking. I've found or figured out great builds that generally suit my needs for most of the other classes, yet thief still feels so impossibly lacking. Rifle feels like it attacks too slow and it feels really restricted with having to kneel to put out the best damage and d/d, while better feeling, generally still tends to get two shot by things like those veteran+ awakened canids due to having to be in melee range and me not being able to take a hit. So, again, not looking for super DPS, but respectable damage combined with respectable survivability. If needed I'll even grind to get Daredevil, though I'm really going to miss the mark from Deadeye, yet if it means I might actually get some damaging aoe attacks it may be worth it. Thanks for your time and patience for reading this and thanks for any suggestions you put my way that aren't "Just do X class, instead" because that is not an answer.