Guild Wars 2

Purple Miku.7032:

robertul.3679:

Well why are eles loved? I mean they only bring sheer dps and offensive boons like might and fury.

instant 25 vuln for short encounters

I want to know, how does one do that?

lightning storm

EcoRI.9273:

Lorgus.6148:

EcoRI.9273:

Stealth to skip content, otherwise they are garbage in dungeons.

I wouldn’t call defiant stripping, above-average damage, blinds on trash, blast finishers and projectile absorb to be “garbage”

If Stealth is removed from the game,

This argument makes no sense, do you realize that? You’re a bad troll.

Jerus.4350:

robertul.3679:

A lot of people seem to forget that stealthing from a thief perspective is mostly “press 5 and let the group blast”. It’s more of a team effort really.

God I wish most of the time taht was all I had to do, only with good players.

Even with good players, the good thief still has to blast on their Black Powder twice with short bow and even use Blinding Powder on top of it if stealth duration is not enough. In fact, good thieves need to watch out for their group’s stealth duration at all times and know which spots are safe to refresh and where to path the mobs.

Fhaeris.9237:

EcoRI.9273:

Lorgus.6148:

EcoRI.9273:

Stealth to skip content, otherwise they are garbage in dungeons.

I wouldn’t call defiant stripping, above-average damage, blinds on trash, blast finishers and projectile absorb to be “garbage”

If Stealth is removed from the game,

This argument makes no sense, do you realize that? You’re a bad troll.

I use hyberpoles alot.
Thief = stealth, and when players who optimize their play consider which class they want to be into their group for dungeons, they don’t really consider the thief’s defiance stripping ability, their blinds or whatever that was mentioned. Most of the secondary kits mentioned do not speed up a dungeon path and are not necessary what so ever for a optimized meta group(2eles 1 guardian 1 warrior 1 thief) that actually use up to date dungeon strategies. Thief’s ability to Stealth >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> (blinds,headshot,dps)

Defiance stripping – Most bosses die before you can even remove all the defiance for a second shot at CC. And even if you can do so for some bosses, it is not optimal play. When a thief is using headshot, they are losing out on all their DPS for a good 5seconds or even longer if they don’t pick up an icebow after headshotting.

Blinds – You bring thieves to stealth skip trashmob, if you are fighting trashmobs, you are doing something suboptimally.

Projectile Absorption – Guardian has it covered.

while shadow refuge is useful, very often I replace a main thief in our party with my engineer which almost compensates during skips.

a thief is good for many reasons stated before and stealth isnt the only one its liked in runs

Technically if stealth wasn’t needed anywhere at all I’d probably take 4 eles 1 warrior in every dungeon

fishball.7204:

Technically if stealth wasn’t needed anywhere at all I’d probably take 4 eles 1 warrior in every dungeon

I’ve seen you guys wipe on daily dungeon tours. What’s optimal DPS in theory isn’t always ideal if it makes the margin of error too small. Having a thief or engie to blindspam trash or stack stealth is always nice.
, or a guardian to spam protection or something.

That said, I’m not always convinced thief is necessarily super helpful outside of certain stealth skips and certain fights where you really need blind on a long duration, or if you wanna Frostbow sploit like a nerd. Otherwise the AOEs on Smoke Screen and Black Powder aren’t great; Engie tends to have better blindspam range even if they can’t keep it up as long as thief does, and they can also stealth with reasonbale success on top of all the might and vuln crap they do.

fishball.7204:

Technically if stealth wasn’t needed anywhere at all I’d probably take 4 eles 1 warrior in every dungeon

it is already like this in quite few dungeons
lately i actually saw plenty of groups that wanted only wars and eles and no thieves :/

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

I’ve seen you guys wipe on daily dungeon tours. What’s optimal DPS in theory isn’t always ideal if it makes the margin of error too small. Having a thief or engie to blindspam trash or stack stealth is always nice.
, or a guardian to spam protection or something.

With all due respect I’ve never played with you so don’t talk like you run dungeons with me daily lmao. My daily dungeon group only has 4 stable players and you’re not one of them.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

I’ve seen you guys wipe on daily dungeon tours.

I’ve had the pleasure of running with Asuna a while back, and as I recall there were no issues.

Also there’s no reason to bring personal attacks to a thread discussing class balance, let’s keep this civil guys.

Thanks to mobility nerf, thief is now good at running ahead of the group and triggering event dialogues!
Also if I recall correctly, their DPS now is kitten compared to other classes like Engie, and thief still the preferred class.

EcoRI.9273:

thief still the preferred class.

Well thats just because kitten is still the easiest of the three skipping classes

To add onto this, why bring a guard or a thief when you can have an engineer? the only thing you lose out on is aegis and unless you are in voice comms with eles in your party aegis isn’t all that great. The only skill that aegis benefits is the guardians personal refresh which lasts for an infinite amount of time, guaranteeing that you will not take a hit at least 1 time. However the other skills like retreat and the virtue of courage active are so short that it might actually wear off before you can use it effectively. It means to get value out of this skill you have to put yourself in harms way which is just stupid.

I still don’t see why anyone would take a thief in their party when all skips can be done with a smoke bomb and then having people use their own personal blocks or whatever to stay out of combat during the skip if it’s even necessary, it’s not like it would take much effort either. I just think people are stuck in the same mentality; if it works don’t fix it, but as we seen with the 5 hammer guards bug anything can work and you can still play that same comp today and have a very smooth run.

I LOVE Engi, so don’t get me wrong, you’re right when it comes to your general PUG, I can get the job done just fine, but that’s because a general PUG quite frankly is unreliable.

A Thief beats Engi out primarily in the more advanced tactics. Pathing enemies, doing that Mai trin stuff (pulled it off with 2X engi last night, that was cool, great group been a long time since I was in a group that organized, yay 3 man fractal 50s!) An Engi for example will struggle in Arah1 doing the pathing on the oozes/drakes. It can be done with very precise play and some help (consumables or mesmer) but it’s not ideal at all. A thief wins out in that regards.

For Guard, Aegis is HUGE, and it doesnt’ require some high level of organization, just a solid guard knowing when to Aegis. A great example is either Berserker in Molten Duo (final auto attack) or Captain Ashrym’s flame burst. Both hard hitting attacks you can negate and save a group that isn’t on top of dodging.

Again, kittening love Engi (I have 3 for a reason) but when you’re looking at optimal play they simply don’t replace guard/thief fully at all. In places where the two of those aren’t needed, absolutely, or in the case of stealth with a mesmer working with you, you’ll be solid. But, thief/guard still have a very solid presence and worth. Plus it’s easier.

I’d agree with ecori that the number one consideration is group stealth. When you need it, you’re options are limited to theif, engi, and mesmer.

Mesmer’s group stealth is somewhat limited and on long CDs. It requires some coordination to pull off effectively, but there have been some recent records (one was hotw1 I believe?) where the mesmer took the place of the thief. The mesmer does the skips with personal stealth and portals rather than steathing the whole group. For high levels of optimization this is great because you get the utility and stealth roles in a single package.

Engi is definenitely becoming more popular, and it’s an excellent class to take in pugs or low mans because it has access to might, vuln, and good personal damage. However, in a 5 man semi-organized group, things like might and vuln are provided by other classes.

So where does that leave the thief? As far as I know, a thief still has better burst, and does more damage with an icebow, than engi. Because of how much faster things die after the specialization patch, thief is probably still optimal for 5 man dungeon and fractal tours. From a record perspective, thieves are one of (if not the) fastest skipping classes in the game since the mobility nerf. Arah 1, 2 and 3 all have long skips which the thief can navigate incredibly quickly with the ability to teleport to targets through walls and blink forward to far – off mobs. There are also a few niche uses for shadow refuge, like when low manning the CoE p1 console.

4 month old posts guys, come on