Guild Wars 2

Based on your experience and knowledge of the professions, who do you reckon could take on more foes (in PvE) between an elementalist and a thief?

It totally depends on how one is geared and traited and skilled. But considering that the ‘weakness’ of the thief is that it is rather single target orientated and that the weakness of the ele the survivability is, and considering that the weakness of the ele can easier be countered then the weakness of the thief I would say the ele is likely to win, but it really depends on the stats and the person playing the character.

both have great issues with bigger groups though.

Both are pretty good at taking out big groups of monsters. The Elementalist has a lot more AoE options, so will probably be more effective. They also get a lot of healing options to regenerate HP.
The Thief has less AoE, but if you trait into Acrobatics and bring the right utility you get tons of dodges, which you can use to burn down a group while avoiding most of the incoming damage.

If you’re in a party, both Eles and Thieves do well against groups of enemies. Thieves have evasion, stealth, sword’s melee AoE, and shortbow. Elementalists have AoEs galore.

Solo, I’d say Ele probably has an advantage in being able to CC the groups of enemies and then burn them down. Groups of mobs are possible with Thieves, but it will probably be a slower process, and relies more on the player’s skill at evasion.

It really depends on what you mean by “take on” and the specific class specs that you’re talking about. In the raw AoE damage department, an Elementalist (which is Staff spec?) will easily win. Yet a Thief running Sword/Pistol will be the king of melee tanking any non-Dredge / non-Champion mobs through the AoE Blind clouds from Pistol #5 and the strong damage output of frontal arc Sword #1.

It really depends on what you want to play. Do you like to play a ranged AoE game? Then I’d suggest Elementalist. Or do you like to play some kind of finesse melee character? Then I’d suggest Thief. However a Dagger/Dagger Elementalist is a bit like a Thief and some Thief specs are a bit non-Thief, so it’s not that easy to make broad judgements on either class until you start to talk about specific character builds.

I’d say Ele. Thieves survivability stems around being invisible (for the most part, yes, you can have pretty good vigor too). Sometimes this is troublesome and you’ll lose aggro/they might heal.

I think eles would have better survivability as long as you can stay mobile.