Guild Wars 2

Hey there, I’m coming back from a long break and with so many things changed I wanted to get some doubts cleared before I choose what to play with.
I will be going mainly for Dungeons, Fractals, World Bosses.. maybe some WvW. I like high DPS and don’t really care if it’s melee or ranged. I’m deciding between Elementalist and Thief.. Which one has higher DPS in Dungeons? As far as I know Thief backstab build was kinda nerfed with the april patch right? and Ele was kinda buffed? Well I dunno thats why I’m asking for opinions.
So? Advice?

Elementalist has the highest DPS of any class in dungeons, but its difficult to learn and you can die easily if you don’t know what you’re doing, or if you’re in a kittenty PUG group with bad DPS/support. For DPS, every weaponset other than D/D is used depending on the content. Higher level fractals and arah are best with D/F for its mix or survival skills and might stacking ability. Easy dungeons are best done with S/F or S/D combined with lightning hammer. If there are other eles in the party already running one of those builds, staff ele is preferred, basically to just sit in fire and spam lava font hahaha, which actually gets the highest DPS of all the ele builds. There are a bunch of guides on the ele forums which explain trait set ups and gear and how to play and what not so definety check out the 3 guides at the top of the thread! Eles also get two very powerful toys all of those builds use, persisting flames and fiery greatsword, which let you blast fury from fire fields and take down any boss pushed against a wall in mere seconds.

As for thief, it also has really good DPS, and is almost as frail. They aren’t ideal for every dungeon, but many love them for their AoE stealth skills to let you skip past trash mobs (best for CM and Arah, the other dungeons and fractals don’t have as many trash skips), and smoke fields for blinds. I think someone posted that the optimal speedrun DPS group was 2 eles one on staff and one on a might stacking build, a warrior for tactics/strength banner, and then the other spots would be for ranger (for spotter/frost spirit) mesmer/guardian for support or reflects (and mesmer skips) or thief for general high DPS and the stealth skips that help make speedruns possible.

Ele. Thief is for 1v1 roaming.

The April patch basically lowered any DPS that used crit damage across the board, so everyone got a huge nerf. I don’t think Elementalists got any form of a noticeable buff in PvE. The only thing that caught my eye was an extra evade and an another blast finisher, which in the DPS scale of things, isn’t anything to faint over.

Staff ele I think is the highest DPS build/class at the moment, but its also an extremely boring build to play.

Ele is generally considered a better class, however, thieves uses combat mechanics which are very different to everyone else (a resource system with 0 CDs on weapon skills, basically the polar opposite of every other class), so it’s nice to play one from time to time to keep the game fresh.