Guild Wars 2

I was just curious if people with experience, preferably with both classes, could give me a cursory overview of the play experience of the two classes and their differences. I have one slot left ankittenrying to choose. By play experience, I mean general playstyle characterizations… active, repetitive, squishy, bursty, diverse… as well as some overall judgments as to where they stand, both alone and comparatively, in the different aspects of the game (general PvE, dungeons, WvW, SPvP, etc.). Other concerns about the state of the classes are certainly welcome. I’m not concerned with min-maxing as much as general experience, and am looking for something different than my Guardian main. As a minor point, I might like something that can be a bit more… proactive than my range-limited and less-mobile Guardian has been in WvW, and I imagine both Ranger and Thief could fill this goal.

Well I didn’t play Thief, because I do not like that class. They have something ’’cowardly’’ if you ask me, due to invisibility, few high hits, etc:P
Ranger I do play. In PvP I learned that they can be useful. But lots of rangerbuilds aren’t useful. In my opinion beast mastery for example, which I did not need. My standard build was main Longbow, and second weapon shortbow. You can do decent damage, but I died pretty fast as well. Mainly Thieves and Guardians are the problems for a ranger. In WvW a ranger wasnt necessarily needed in the very big battles, but in like 8 vs 8 they seem good.
I actually only PvPed with it, so cant tell you about dungeons. Till now I found ranger good fun, so you should try it.
Oh, and I heard that a ranger with a greatsword can do very high damage. I didnt test it myself, because I think a Ranger should be a Ranger, if you get my point:)

I have a lvl 80 ranger, but have done only PvE and a wee bit of WvW, no dungeons yet. I also started a Thief way back at launch, so can give a bit on that as well.

Thief
Really fun class, requiring a very tactical play style, lots of movement, burst, etc. Downside, it is very squishy, particularly at lower levels. Not great for solo PvE, in fact probably one of the worst classes for PvE, but better if you have a group to play with. You need to operate from the fringes of fights, striking at mobs already weakened and darting back to safety, and repeat.

From what I read, Thief class is great in PvP and WvW.

Ranger
One of the best class for solo PvE. I solo’ed in every map zone, including Orr. You have a lot of weapon choices and some versatility in builds, but there are still major problems with some ranger utilities, like spirits and pet mechanics.. This class also requires a tactical play style, and lots of movement, particularly if you like using bows.

The thing with rangers is that they can do a lot, but do not excel at one thing. In PvE this is not a problem, but in PvP, this is the worst class of lot. In WvW, it really depends on your play style.

I hope to take my ranger into dungeons very soon.

Hope this helps!

A PvE-only experience here. But for this just know that my Ranger is at lvl 80 and my two Thiefs are 16 and 20, the former being a soon-to-be empty slot and the second one is – so far – basically a … Chef.
For solo pveing, I find them way too squishy and way too much depending on kiting mobs. Mind you, I understand – as said above – that Thiefs can be especially tricky at lower levels, but however it just translated into frustation for me and an overall feeling of being useless.
My Ranger pyromaniacal Trapper, on the other hand… I like this guy He does not really live up to the name ‘Ranger’, though, as my (mostly Long-) bow is almost an auxiliary weapon in addition to Sword/Torch, but this alone should give you a hint how ‘proactively’ versatile the class can be. Here is another good word to describe the Ranger: Nonchalance.

Lvl 80 ranger. I use shortbow/longbow and traps.

Open world pve. I do pretty well solo or grouped. I use a bear and arctodus pets. Easy to tag things in dynamic events with traps and barrage. With the exception of the new zone, if I aggro more than one thing, it is not necessarily a death sentence.

In dungeons, pets are a nuisance. They won’t stayed stowed if you take damage or enter combat. You can put them on passive but if you move, they move, and they tend to move way out in front of you and step on blossoms or aggro mobs. I can function in dungeons, but it takes a lot of work to manage the pet. The pet is a problem in the dredge fractal so I put him on passive. The pet was gaining aggro and making it not possible to drag the golem to the lava. Because I have to keep my pet passive for some fights, this means I do less damage. In the swamp fractal, I play crowd control for spiders and drakes so there is the trade off.

WvW again is ok. During a seige, I will run up, hit entangle, throw my traps on the wall and then barrage. That is fun. Some people do not know how to get out of entangle and will stand there and die. I try and stay at range during big fights and pick out people that are lower health. I use wolf pets for the fear. It has saved me from being stomped before. Not every time, but when it works, you really feel like you pulled off a miracle!

For pvp, I do surprisingly well. I didn’t at the beginning. It is a whole different mindset and way to fight since the fights are usually 2v1 or 2v2. They can be bigger but… I can beat some thieves and not others. To be fair, I can say that about pretty much every class now that I think about it. It just takes practice to get better at it.

I can’t comment much on thief except it is fun to play to about lvl 10 which is where mine currently is. I like her, she is fun, but I guess I don’t like her as much as my ranger. I never did anything with her other than pve.

For the record, all of the people saying that Thief is hard to play in PvE at the lower levels aren’t giving the full picture. If you’re running an Off-Hand Pistol on a Thief, then soloing Standard and Veteran mobs of most types shouldn’t be an issue due to the AoE Blind field created by Pistol #5 (which constantly reapplies the buff to anything in that black cloud).

Your own Thief style is completely up to your weapons choices, trait choices, skill choices, and personal preference. My own Sword / Pistol character is basically a quasi-tank that will often lead the charge and will happily fight in the “stand your ground” horde of melee combatants who are beating up on an open world Champion mob. It’s possible to make a high damage mitigation build with low health that relies on constant self-healing to survive. Or you could go heavy health and no real damage mitigation. Stealth and mega burst could be your thing. Even a ranged condition dot spec is extremely viable.

The Thief class is whatever you want it to be.

I will attempt a comparison but by no mean a complete or unbiased one:

Range
====
Ranger > Thief.

You can trait ranger longbow to 1500 range. That is 300 further than many caster’s 1200 range. This is a huge plus in WvW battle.

The longest range for thief attack is 1200 (cluster bomb). All the other thief range attack is 900 distance.

DPS
===
Thief > Ranger

Thief boost high crit and high power if spec right. They kill things/player fast.

Ranger attack is more steady-streamed and lesser of burst-mode dps.

Toughness
===
Ranger > thief.

Thief dies easy in fight. So thief has to rely heavily on burst-mode dps to finish the enemies fast before he dies.

Ranger is tough. My ranger can basically stand in the arrow cart AOE fire taking only little dmg with each barrage (my ranger hp dmg is also mitigated by his passive heal signet).

Ranger pet like bear are tanky creature. They are tough and can self-heal and tank most veteran mobs out there for you.

AOE ability
====
Ranger > thief

Ranger has longbow skill num 5 AOE similar to arrow cart aoe while thief has cluster bomb AOE. The only reason why I feel ranger AOE is more superior than thief is because of its longer range (1500 for ranger 1200 for thief).

I WvW all the time. So this longer range AOE is a great help when hitting keep/tower defenses.

Survival-bility
=====
Thief > Ranger

Ranger can be tougher than thief but they cannot out-escape like a thief can. A thief can basically chain cast stealth ability to offer them at least 6 seconds of stealth which allow them to escape from the heat of the fire. Pursuing enemies will probably retreat when you are in stealth. However, for ranger, I find that enemies will pursue you all the way till they kill you no matter what it cost them. They will even down and kill you in front of legendary defender even though they knew they will get killed by the defender in return.

Enjoy-ability
====
I am a WvW person. So I enjoy Ranger more when I am looking for kills. However, when I am in the naughty mode of ‘disturbing’ enemies, I will play thief. For every 10 kills I got on my ranger, I probably only get 1 on my thief for the same length of game play. But that is my play style – range style. It may differ on other ppl’s thief char. Some thief are prolific killers on the battleground but they are also the one that I see who will get killed in return eventually.

My advice
===
If you have plenty of game time and patience, play a ranger char first. When you reach lvl 80, use your tank pet and go farm mobs and materials in the pve zone to earn gold. Farming is easier on ranger char than thief, especially taking on more than one mobs at a time. When you have enough gold, use it to buy 800 gems to buy another char slot which you can use to create a thief char later.

Wiser with Age.3714:

Your own Thief style is completely up to your weapons choices, trait choices, skill choices, and personal preference.

The Thief class is whatever you want it to be.

Completely agree. While I’ve played a Ranger and gone all the way to 80 with it, I find the Thief a much more interesting class.

Admittedly, my thief is only about 26th level at the moment, but I find the profession completely deadly in both ranged and melee combat.

I run with a sword/dagger combo for hand-to-hand and then switch out to pistol/pistol for ranged. Both these combinations, when utilized with dodging tactics and the right skills make the thief capable of being a fantastic profession to play.

I have both, my thief I’m working on for WvW as it’s a pain of a class to defend against if it’s played right (although for WvW I prefer my ele). My ranger is the first class I played since day one and is still my preferred PvE class. I run a longbow/sword-warhorn wep set with 2 traps and a skill I didn’t try until well after lvl 80, and that is quickening zephyr (which is an outstanding buff to your attack speed, especially with longbow, and of course my sword, which will now do around 5000 dmg points in the few seconds that zephyr is applied just on my main “1” attack). Also, the sword attacks has a leap in it, so it’s easy to stick to the target if they try to run.

Most of my leveling time on ranger was spent with a longbow/shortbow swapping back and forth, but once you learn how to use your melee weps correctly with this class, you probably wont go back to just bows.

Personally I think the ranger class is weak for PvP and WvW, but likely that is because I’m not playing it right. However, with the pet drawing NPC’s attention it’s a great class for PvE if you can’t get some friends to run with you and you have to go out and cap all those POI’s solo.

I’ve taken my time and played many classes (I haven’t even finished the story mode on any char yet with all 5 characters including two lvl 80’s and my ranger at about 93% map completion) and for solo PvE ranger seems to be pretty dominant.

SlimGenre.6417:

Most of my leveling time on ranger was spent with a longbow/shortbow swapping back and forth, but once you learn how to use your melee weps correctly with this class, you probably wont go back to just bows.

Agreed.

One note of caution, though: Playing the Ranger with a sword is a lot of fun, but doing so near a cliff is done at your own peril! Those of you who have done it know what I’m talking about.