Guild Wars 2

Good thieves are fun to have, but it’s nothing you can’t substitute for a warrior that will do more damage at less risk.

I feel that a Sword/dagger thief is very viable though. Maybe even survive better a warrior in a few instances. For example I can see a sword/dagger thief soloing the slave driver in COF P1 but I think it is much harder for a warrior to solo esp a GS warrior. In general, warriors are better (snow fractal elemental comes to mind and warriors can use the 2 spy kits in the first part).

seems funny to realize that the guardian is buffer, tanker and healer (3 in 1 class )…
care to discuss a bit about this ? (and it actually has some dps too)
a new holy trinity anyone ???

guardian has also best crowd control skills in game… (pve)

LordByron.8369:

guardian has also best crowd control skills in game… (pve)

Guardian has best reflection access.

Best CC is engineer and ele. The guardian cc you talk about, nobody wants because knocking a group back or dividing mobs is undesirable when you want to bunch them up and aoe them down.

An ele can pull with earth shield, has 2 knockdowns, aoe cripple/chill, aoe blind on dagger/dagger. With Powerful Auras you also give your group aoe stun defense (very useful in ascalon and drege fractal) and chill to help light armor kite away.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Binding_Blade

Zenith.7301:

LordByron.8369:

guardian has also best crowd control skills in game… (pve)

Guardian has best reflection access.

Best CC is engineer and ele. The guardian cc you talk about, nobody wants because knocking a group back or dividing mobs is undesirable when you want to bunch them up and aoe them down.

An ele can pull with earth shield, has 2 knockdowns, aoe cripple/chill, aoe blind on dagger/dagger. With Powerful Auras you also give your group aoe stun defense (very useful in ascalon and drege fractal) and chill to help light armor kite away.

yes if only ele had 4 hands..
2 for daggers and 2 for a staff

D/D has some decent CC on long CD paired with attunements CD…..(but no reflects)
Staff has 1 decent C/C (water 4) on long CD and 1 reflection skill that needs a grandmaster trait to be good?

And even so wouldn t be comparable to guardians because ele cannot pull enemies.

LordByron.8369:

Zenith.7301:

LordByron.8369:

guardian has also best crowd control skills in game… (pve)

Guardian has best reflection access.

Best CC is engineer and ele. The guardian cc you talk about, nobody wants because knocking a group back or dividing mobs is undesirable when you want to bunch them up and aoe them down.

An ele can pull with earth shield, has 2 knockdowns, aoe cripple/chill, aoe blind on dagger/dagger. With Powerful Auras you also give your group aoe stun defense (very useful in ascalon and drege fractal) and chill to help light armor kite away.

yes if only ele had 4 hands..
2 for daggers and 2 for a staff

D/D has some decent CC on long CD paired with attunements CD…..(but no reflects)
Staff has 1 decent C/C (water 4) on long CD and 1 reflection skill that needs a grandmaster trait to be good?

And even so wouldn t be comparable to guardians because ele cannot pull enemies.

DD CC:

Updraft, EarthQuake, AoE Shocking Aura, AoE chill Freezing Burst, chill with Frost Aura, aoe cripple with Ring of Stone, aoe cripple with churning earth. AoE blind with Glyph of Storm in earth attunement.

Staff CC:

Gust, Static Field, Shockwave, Frozen Ground, and Unsteady Ground. Powerful Auras gives a magnetic aura to your group that also applies swiftness and fury with Zephyr’s boons. And btw, the fury from Zephyr’s Boon is pretty much the longest group fury buff available.

You talk about grandmaster traits, but then don’t consider that Guardian CC is tied to weapons or utility. So, you either remove useful guardian shouts or wall of reflection to accommodate Sanctuary, or you switch to subpar weapons like the shield or hammer for CC when you could be running greatsword and offhand focus/torch instead.

my smoothest fotm run that includes grawl at 30+ consist of 4 mesmer + 1 guardian!
should be bad.. but surprisingly not!
the other teams that finish fotm lv 80 before the maw roadblock at guru consist of 3 guardians + 1 warrior + 1 mesmer..
wonder if that says something..

i wonder if this is a lp2 issue as usual, or there are some real unbalance among different classes?

like 5 thieves party will mostly hug the ground and spend 50%+ of the time resing one another, but a 5 guardian party can just face tank the boss….
not to mention permanent of all buffs protection/stability etc.
permanent Wall of Reflection = boss suicide even with the lol (which is no really lol…) dmg of the guardian party

but hey, the thief party can perma stealth reseting the boss whenever they need
yet we are still considered OP and must be nerfed further.
/end of sarcams

you know that balancing it in wvw, you killed it in pve, yes?
no one listens or cares
at least pop a message box whenever you create a thief mentioning that that class is only for wvw and pvp

other classes might need a bit of tuning as well.

Zenith.7301:

….DD….

Staff CC:

Gust,
Most opponent are immune to this

Static Field,
Should we even discuss how bad this is in pve? as the Whole staff air attunement in general.

Shockwave
Slow and bad 1 target….

Frozen Ground,
This is the main CC spell for staff really good.

and Unsteady Ground
>___________> really?

Listing elementalist skills that resemble crowd control on paper just prove that you possibly never played an elementalist.

What you wrote on D/D ele is even worse….
Expecially the glyph part …….
D/D has some nice C/C i already said this, not comparable to guardian for sure.
Mostly because being circled around a light class that dies to a sneeze means something….expecially since the 5 target aoe nerf.
As i said many times is not that Mob are balanced like players…you can t reset your health as in PvP in PvE.

Powerful Auras gives a magnetic aura to your group that also applies swiftness and fury with Zephyr’s boons.

cool so now i ’ll waste many traits just to give my only AURA with staff to party for 3 seconds….while being trash…

You know that staff Attacks are so slow that you have huge issues hitting mobile targets like mossman for example?

Its used on D/D oi know that the new leit motif is to consider other classes builds lik 30/30/30/30/30 with 3-4 weaponsets at once, but playing the class tells you how things really are:

I.E.: after 2 major nerfs STAFF is just a bad weaponset in pve….can be used but you can find most classes being mopre effective with half the effort and MUCH less situational as staff is.

You talk about grandmaster traits, but then don’t consider that Guardian CC is tied to weapons or utility.

Yes because guardian can switch weapon in battle, elementalist can switch traits in battle….

I talk about guardian because i play with them and know exactly what to expect…

But without discussing thinks everybody knows i’d say GW2LFG sums the situation up about ELE vs Guardians

P.S. thief in PvE has lot of issues also…
If he get stealthed mobs resets -.- <====

If you think cripple is not useful against the ascalonian grtoups, and that immobilizing a charging warrior so he doesn’t 2 shot people in your frontline is not good, I don’t know what to tell you.

The ele weapons have problems. Water attunement non-heal abilities are weak and a problem. But control is not one of them. Air staff doesn’t suck because it has no CC — it sucks because it does no damage to make up for the fact that Fireball hits higher and is aoe while lightning bolt is limited. Damage and applicability (Dragon Tooth, Eruption, Shatterstone) are the problem with ele skills, not utility or CC.

just play the staff ele….try it….

You’ll see
If non GC your damage is almost near 0…..
Any mobile boss will evade your Attacks easily or at least reduce their effectiveness
Most vets are immune to you CC spells
Your casting speed is too slow, paired with long CD, attunement locking and reduced time of effect.

And your examples are not even good…in ascalon warriors are not to be “crippled”.
Despite your example tells me you never tried what you say, i see a flaw even how you face the encounter.

You just lure warriors into npc and “roll” to evade them…i saw once an ele putting an eath 4 in front with no use….not to mention at 30 warriors are not even the problem….

ReeferKeeper.1865:

The way I see it, and I see this for many dungeons not just fotm. A lot of thieves go glass cannon builds for high dps while they still don’t know how to dodge / predict the enemies.

That being said same thing could go for any class, but thieves generally have a lot lower stock survivability stats ( yes I said stats not skills/utilities) which makes them die uber fast with not a lot of forgiveness for errors.

Thieves are very valuable if the thief knows his class and how to help. Sadly many don’t.

Completly agree with you, after 300h play with my thief I have to say that thiefs isnt useless.
Thiefs have insane amounts of damage, as they have lots of +% dmg traits, they scale so well with berserker builds, making them one of the best damage dealers in the game wile also they offer this benefits to the party:

• Weakness: With 15 points in deadly arts, thiefs can apply weakness to its target every time they poison him. Now think that dagger autoattack poisons in its 3rd attack, and shortbow has a poison field. With this two things, thiefs are able to keep weakness 100% uptime on his targets (greatly reducing enemy damage output)

• Blind spam: With offhand pistol, thiefs can keep most bosses blinded a lot of time, this works like guardian’s aegis, but boss side. This makes thiefs really OP in certain bosses, spamming weakness and blinds make thiefs one of the best clases to mitigate boss damage output.

• Spameable Blast Finisher: Cluster Bomb is probably one of the most OP skills in game, with a cost of only 3 initiative points (cheaper than other useless skills) it can be used to spam blast finisher in combo fields, who is in my opinion, the best finisher.
  Cluster bomb+poison field: AOE weakness in an insane area. (SBow has both)
  Cluster bomb+ethereal field: Chaos armor for everyone
  Cluster bomb+fire field: 3 charges of AOE might for 20sec, now spam it!

And this are only some of the amazing efects that a thief can provide to a party (and even more if u consider the multiple uses of shadow refuge or smoke screen)
In my opinion, thiefs are so usefull in partys, the problem is that they provide pasive benefits which no one notices. While guardian gives buffs and animations that everyone see, thiefs provides debuffs that no one knows.

But the main problem thiefs are suffering, are something that arena.net must fix asap: BOSS MECHANICS MUST BE PREDICTABLE specially those that can instakill you. If you can’t predict boss skills, the game becomes an RNG fight instead of a skill fight.
Its so annoying to stay at melee range and see how an instant whirlwind kills you without any chance to dodge/avoid it. All bosses must have skill animations that let the player decide when, how and what to dodge

Cluster bomb + water field = AOE heal.

Thieves have many combo finishers, dont forget about leap, whirl and projectile. Also they have Shadow Refuge it allows to resurect even under boss feets.

Akiru.8065:

ReeferKeeper.1865:

The way I see it, and I see this for many dungeons not just fotm. A lot of thieves go glass cannon builds for high dps while they still don’t know how to dodge / predict the enemies.

That being said same thing could go for any class, but thieves generally have a lot lower stock survivability stats ( yes I said stats not skills/utilities) which makes them die uber fast with not a lot of forgiveness for errors.

Thieves are very valuable if the thief knows his class and how to help. Sadly many don’t.

Completly agree with you, after 300h play with my thief I have to say that thiefs isnt useless.
Thiefs have insane amounts of damage, as they have lots of +% dmg traits, they scale so well with berserker builds, making them one of the best damage dealers in the game wile also they offer this benefits to the party:

• Weakness: With 15 points in deadly arts, thiefs can apply weakness to its target every time they poison him. Now think that dagger autoattack poisons in its 3rd attack, and shortbow has a poison field. With this two things, thiefs are able to keep weakness 100% uptime on his targets (greatly reducing enemy damage output)

• Blind spam: With offhand pistol, thiefs can keep most bosses blinded a lot of time, this works like guardian’s aegis, but boss side. This makes thiefs really OP in certain bosses, spamming weakness and blinds make thiefs one of the best clases to mitigate boss damage output.

• Spameable Blast Finisher: Cluster Bomb is probably one of the most OP skills in game, with a cost of only 3 initiative points (cheaper than other useless skills) it can be used to spam blast finisher in combo fields, who is in my opinion, the best finisher.
  Cluster bomb+poison field: AOE weakness in an insane area. (SBow has both)
  Cluster bomb+ethereal field: Chaos armor for everyone
  Cluster bomb+fire field: 3 charges of AOE might for 20sec, now spam it!

And this are only some of the amazing efects that a thief can provide to a party (and even more if u consider the multiple uses of shadow refuge or smoke screen)
In my opinion, thiefs are so usefull in partys, the problem is that they provide pasive benefits which no one notices. While guardian gives buffs and animations that everyone see, thiefs provides debuffs that no one knows.

But the main problem thiefs are suffering, are something that arena.net must fix asap: BOSS MECHANICS MUST BE PREDICTABLE specially those that can instakill you. If you can’t predict boss skills, the game becomes an RNG fight instead of a skill fight.
Its so annoying to stay at melee range and see how an instant whirlwind kills you without any chance to dodge/avoid it. All bosses must have skill animations that let the player decide when, how and what to dodge

Blind is only 10% effective on bosses, so it is pretty much useless on bosses.

you try explain that to the mass of ppl and change their opinion.
p.s. note the poisons are quite weak, you need to go melee via dagger, so good luck staying alive too much. for shortbow – lol single target damage. (you can try spam cluster bomb and aoe poison if you have infinite ini…)
just fyi: every boss has: 10% blind effectiveness, and -50% on weakness and vulnerability durations.
basically nerf to the most things thief is good at, thanks.
ah yes, the bosses doesn’t heal so you may not say the -33% heal from poison is worth anything…
we have dancing dagger that cripples for ~2s for 4 ini, i remember now !
how about for every boss to have -50% duration on all conditions, just to troll the condition builds….
and more, the burst is practically worthless vs boss, you need to have constant dps.
how about the venom aura, where the range is 300 (shorter than HS really), and everyone in party either run like headless chickens or doing cantabrian circle, good luck applying to 2-3 of them .
about the bleeds: we can do so many stacks that, most of the time, you can’t have more than 2 of them in 1 party.
caltrops is a constant 8-10 …, add 2 LDB and you get 14-16. the other one can make 16 too ?? ofc no. (pop stealth and the 5 bleed stacks from pistol can’t go anywhere…)
also bleeding ticks do damage for every 1 sec, so having 16s and 3/4, you do only 16
the worst is when you have 1s and 3/4, 2s and 3/4 etc.
should i continue ?

i do not want us to be OP, but i don’t like to be thrown out of the party like trash…

LordByron.8369:

just play the staff ele….try it….

….

And your examples are not even good…in ascalon warriors are not to be “crippled”.
Despite your example tells me you never tried what you say, i see a flaw even how you face the encounter.

You just lure warriors into npc and “roll” to evade them…i saw once an ele putting an eath 4 in front with no use….not to mention at 30 warriors are not even the problem….

I don’t really know if that guy ever played against those AC warriors as an ele staff, or he would know how BS he is. In CoF path 3 (capture the point part), the mob ran through 2 eles earth #4, side by side. We tested that.