Guild Wars 2

Hi just like my title states I am trying to decide on either playing a thief or ele. After the patch I am just curious which is better for pve for doing fractals, farming, and some WvW.

I wanna play a more melee role not sure how well ele does that compared to thief. I like thief except I started one and their survivability at low lvls is very poor. That or I am just playing wrong lol.

Ele I enjoy as well but I don’t like switching elements every 10 secs gets really annoying.

I’ve been thief all the way and I enjoy them.

There’s nothing wrong with their survavility, just evade attacks and make yourself in stealth. But as thief, the best defense is offense. So you should relay on crit damage, precission and power.

If you don’t like attunment swapping, don’t play ele- that’s all you’ll be doing. Thief and ele are both squishy so that will be an issue whichever you choose. Ele daggers are not true melee (just close range) so it sounds like thief is the way to go for you.

After playing my Elementalist for 1500 hours, and my Thief for 1000 hours, I can say that I definitely prefer Elementalists. First of all, Elementalists can basically be a melee class while using the D/D build, which gives them survivability and very decent damage. Thieves can also use D/D but lack the survivability that Elementalists have. Especially after the latest patch, I found I am dying more and more frequently on my Thief.

Thief

Been playing thieves since their unveiling at pax east 2011 and i love em

Once you are fully geared in exotics / ascended….there is so little difference in playability between any of the classes that it doesnt matter what you roll or what stats and traits you use.

Every single class is equally unimpressive and could be played sufficiently well to do “OK” by a monkey with poor vision wearing boxing gloves.

The game is after all, “dress up your toon and dye your armor based” and therefore has more in common with Barbie than with a skill based MMO.

They’re both pretty awesome. The Ele has better control over the battlefield, but the Thief has much more damage and is a better roamer.

Both are pretty weak in open-world PvE, to be honest, especially early. There are a few tricks you can pull to make things easier, but really you just have to grit your teeth and bear it through to the middle levels.

That said, when I was going for World Completion, I chose to do it on my thief. Shortbow 5 and Signet of Shadows together make map travel really quick and Shadow Refuge makes capping skillpoints and other such things substantially quicker. Oh, and Dagger Storm is a godmode button in most PvE scenarios if you have Signet of Malice slotted. The projectile reflection combined with the multitude of hits to proc your signet lets you rip through vast numbers of foes, then stealth and run away to reset the fight if things get tough.

The Ele has an extremely rough time of things early, but I find Glyph of Lesser Elementals and Glyph of Elementals to really help make leveling easier. Also, traiting heavily into Water and Arcane. If you don’t like attunement-swapping, you may want to consider dropping your Ele for now since their design is focused very firmly on attunement-swapping.