Guild Wars 2

Right now i’m using the metabattle D+P/SB build and I’m finding that I have a lot of struggle surviving. It seems like 1v1ing guardians is absolutely impossible and I can’t 1v2 to defend or distract on a point and survive at all. I just get way too many conditions way too fast. I frequently finding myself escaping only to die conditions soon after and bleed out in the middle of enemy territory. I run shadowstep and withdraw but typically use withdraw in combat and don’t have it to save myself afterwards. Any advice for a noob?

Get another class.

Thieves are one thing: annoying. They’re annoying to fight and play against, incredibly so. But they’re easy to swat down and generally, in higher tiers, having a thief is a loss.

edit: Thieves have no real place in GW2. They’re so different from the rest of the classes that balancing the is going to be too hard because of how ridiculously spammy they are.

Guardians counter thieves. Thieves aren’t meant for fighting equal or outnumbered fights (WvW is the exception). Your role as a thief is to quickly decap points and +1 fights. +1 means you outnumber the enemy in a fight by 1 player. And when you get to a fight, don’t just sit in the middle of it taking damage. Thief is made to burst, run, burst, run etc. That’s why it’s so unfun to fight. Nobody likes fighting someone who hits you and then runs away, but that’s how thief is made. In a fight, stay at range and use SB skills or interrupt important skills with Pistol 4. When you see someone at low hp (like 25%, maybe 50% even), jump in and burst down that target. There are many skills that teleport you to the target. The most burst will come from Pistol 5 – Dagger 2 for stealth – Steal during the jump – Backstab and burst with AAs, making sure to interrupt any healing attempts. If your target is still alive, get to safety and be ready to jump back in at the right opportunity.

That’s thief. You run around decapping points (or full capping if you don’t need to +1 a fight), and +1ing fights. On maps like Forest, you have an additional role of stealing Beast kills.

This sounds easy, but it’s not. If you have good teammates, +1ing fights will be easier, but if you have bad teammates, there won’t be any opportunities to jump into fights because they’ll never have an enemy at low enough hp.

Zintrothen.1056:

Guardians counter thieves. Thieves aren’t meant for fighting equal or outnumbered fights (WvW is the exception). Your role as a thief is to quickly decap points and +1 fights. +1 means you outnumber the enemy in a fight by 1 player. And when you get to a fight, don’t just sit in the middle of it taking damage. Thief is made to burst, run, burst, run etc. That’s why it’s so unfun to fight. Nobody likes fighting someone who hits you and then runs away, but that’s how thief is made. In a fight, stay at range and use SB skills or interrupt important skills with Pistol 4. When you see someone at low hp (like 25%, maybe 50% even), jump in and burst down that target. There are many skills that teleport you to the target. The most burst will come from Pistol 5 – Dagger 2 for stealth – Steal during the jump – Backstab and burst with AAs, making sure to interrupt any healing attempts. If your target is still alive, get to safety and be ready to jump back in at the right opportunity.

That’s thief. You run around decapping points (or full capping if you don’t need to +1 a fight), and +1ing fights. On maps like Forest, you have an additional role of stealing Beast kills.

This sounds easy, but it’s not. If you have good teammates, +1ing fights will be easier, but if you have bad teammates, there won’t be any opportunities to jump into fights because they’ll never have an enemy at low enough hp.

Thank you for the very detailed answer. That was incredibly helpful!

edit: ItsAOcean beat me lol

Since you are new(once you are better, those rules obviously don’t apply as much):
- do not engage even fights (1v1, 2v2 etc.) – you will lose, period. Anet designed the class around dying in 1v1 encounters – you supposed to +1 only (if anyone on any class besides necro/ele dies to equially skilled thief – they should uninstall)
- do not engage big fights – you will die to aoe/passives w/o anyone actually targeting you
- go for decaps (empty points)
- go for outnumbered fights (2v1, 3v2 etc.)
- try to steal beast while enemy is killing it
- train enemy thief if they are not better than you are (if they are better – avoid them)
- i personally run generosity sigils, withdraw, shadowstep, agi signet, improvisation for condis (mainly because i do end up in 1v1 and 1v2 a lot, but it is different subject)
- Sindrener (pro league player) has good guides and commented stream – might wanna watch his stuff if you want to learn more about thief ( https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/PvP-Thief/first#post6321953 )

If you want more than running away from anyone, either duel other classes a lot(there are dueling servers in HJ list), play other classes so you learn their mechanics or…. reroll. Thief atm requires too much effort and experience to be even tiny bit effective in matches. It is worst class to jump into pvp with in current meta.

thief is trash in pvp, unless u are a pro. if pro it is still medicore. Change class. There is no pvp thief build in metabattle bro, because its weak.

Whaaat? Thief is one of the best profs for 1vs1. You can kill your opponents really fast with right build. I’m not talking about high rated, but in solo queue Thief is very strong. Survivability is great: you have many escape options not just stealth. If you die a lot, take Shadow Arts + Deception skills: will help you survive and use SB more often. You are not a Warrior, you have to move and dodge a lot.
Warrior and Necro both have about 70% more base health then Thief but they have weaker survivability than Thief and i’m not kidding. Blind, dodge and Stealth are your best friends.
You can also try p/p + sb, if you have trouble fighting in melee range. P/P burst dmg is very high and a lot of fun. You can kill DHs with double pistols.
And as mentioned above avoid fighting as melee when you see too many red circles on the floor

Sifu.9745:

Whaaat? Thief is one of the best profs for 1vs1. You can kill your opponents really fast with right build. I’m not talking about high rated, but in solo queue Thief is very strong. Survivability is great: you have many escape options not just stealth. If you die a lot, take Shadow Arts + Deception skills: will help you survive and use SB more often. You are not a Warrior, you have to move and dodge a lot.
Warrior and Necro both have about 70% more base health then Thief but they have weaker survivability than Thief and i’m not kidding. Blind, dodge and Stealth are your best friends.
You can also try p/p + sb, if you have trouble fighting in melee range. P/P burst dmg is very high and a lot of fun. You can kill DHs with double pistols.
And as mentioned above avoid fighting as melee when you see too many red circles on the floor

Do not listen to this fella.

Sifu.9745:

Whaaat? Thief is one of the best profs for 1vs1. You can kill your opponents really fast with right build. I’m not talking about high rated, but in solo queue Thief is very strong. Survivability is great: you have many escape options not just stealth. If you die a lot, take Shadow Arts + Deception skills: will help you survive and use SB more often. You are not a Warrior, you have to move and dodge a lot.
Warrior and Necro both have about 70% more base health then Thief but they have weaker survivability than Thief and i’m not kidding. Blind, dodge and Stealth are your best friends.
You can also try p/p + sb, if you have trouble fighting in melee range. P/P burst dmg is very high and a lot of fun. You can kill DHs with double pistols.
And as mentioned above avoid fighting as melee when you see too many red circles on the floor

just LoL i wonder what kind of opponents you are facing

The key with thief is not to get hit. With multiple blinks, stealth, and shadowsteps you go in do 10k dmg in a burst, go back out, heal up and go back in. The opponent should never get a hit on you and they will die after 2-3 rounds of this.

Warriors, rangers, and guardians counter thief pretty hard because they have out of control regen, invuln, and burst. Do not 1v1 these classes.

Necros and eles are free kills, pretty much impossible to lose to these classes

mesmer, revs and engineers depend a lot on the people playing them. You can probably beat them but it may not be worth the time. Your time would be better spent +1’ing a fight or decapping something.

first of all, you shouldn’t be running the metabattle build at all. it’s terrible for these reasons:

• Dash – vastly inferior to Bound in every way imaginable. everything Dash does can be done by something else or just straight up doesn’t need to be done.
• D/P – this weaponset has no place in the current meta at all. the ICD on Backstab has made a skill that was already hard enough to land basically worthless most of the time. you also have to rely heavily on Impacting Disruptions to have damage comparable to Staff which is bad because everyone has ridiculous amounts of stability, reflects, and blocks nowadays and it also means you can’t take Escapist’s Absolution which cripples you versus reaper/beserker/chronomancer (and even if you do take EA, D/P has no weapon evades to fully utilize it like Staff does). the only major redeeming qualities of D/P in 2016 is that you can Black Powder -> Bound, which the metabattle build wouldnt even let you do, Shadowshot, and MAYBE the auto chain.
• Shortbow – this weapon has been meta simply for the fact that you can teleport around with it. other than Infiltrator’s Arrow SB is probably tied with D/D for most useless weaponset in a fight- it has no damage to speak of and can’t kite anything.
• Deadly Arts – simply put, the sustain you get from going into Acrobatics over Deadly Arts ridiculously outvalues the relatively slight damage increase you get from DA.

Staff + Acro/TR/DD is the only truly viable Thief build in my opinion. with it you can 1v1 almost anything (on point too), and can also contribute greatly to teamfights with Staff’s AoE cleave and Acro’s sustainitive mechanics.

I also recommend taking P/P to complement Staff. It might sound odd, but P/P with Acro can properly kite anything including Dragonhunter. Staff and P/P cover each others weaknesses very well.

best part of this season has been switching from SB to P/P and cheesing Dragonhunters to death and getting hatewhispers about you being a “p/p spam noob” as if they’re not playing the most detrimental build to this game since D/D celestial ele.

If you wanna play D/P which is fine I would greatly recommend to watch @sindrener, he’s one of the best if not the best thief in the game playing that build, not only his skills are amazing he also comments every step he does which is really good if you want to learn.

https://www.twitch.tv/sindrenerr This is his twitch.

Press “esc”
Click “Log out”
Select “Character Select”
Play any other class.

If you insist on learning in PvP how to play thief then start by saying “Home, you guys team fight better mid” then after capping home, +1 mid or take far if it was left empty, constantly play decaps and +1 through the game. If you can’t +1 quick enough, get out of there and decap something.

The only thief people want on their teams, is good thieves. Good thieves are rare because it requires active thinking and active playstyle with little room for mistakes to be effective, you also need a good frame rate and little lag as possible. Slightest screen freeze and you will die.

add more hp, add more def

Don’t get hit ;D

Edit: In all seriousness though as a thief it’s not your job to fight on point especially not against a guardian. Your job is to decap open points, pick off weak opponents, and +1 your teammates. Basically you never want to take a fair fight.

u gotta to switch to revenant to survive

Immpossible did make many 1v2 for minutes with thief.

He do that in timing when to go on point so they don’t cap it and juke out to get chase around, to go back on point.

If you can do that on thief, you can do that on anything else.

Work on Juking skills.

For the thief 1v1 comment, it’s false. In the past 4 years, many thieves where beast in 1v1. I can name Caed, Toker, Snuggle, Tron…

1v1 with thief is the harder skill ceiling you get for 1v1, but it’s possible to win most of your 1v1 with a thief. I’ve seen Snuggle in 2015 being Kill of the Hill for hours.

To others saying thieves should not be on even fights (1v1, 2v2, 4v4). Usually, having a thief on even fights is better than being -1 and losing it. Thief should be first to rotate out of team fights when it’s +1. (err, when the first is down but not stomp, to decap/ca side points, before leaving he poison arrows the body)

Good thief know to position themselves near their support toon and use the body of the support (druids, scrapper, ele) to body block their attacker. Since they have great evage and TP, they can enter a fight and exit in 5 sec… (not enough to get killed from aoe, but you know… not more longer)

Those 5 sec thief in team fight are game changer. It’s when you see 3 or 4 bodies on the floor… I guess Dagger auto-attack is OP for that.

This season meta, Immpossible and Topher both shows to me, it is possible to do all that and more.

But… if you wanna faceroll with thief… sorry, change class.

It’s all about where you are, where you go (not too long) and using your peelz from support properly. So, yeah… a thief without a good support is bad. Same thief with awesome support is King.

a good thief is viable and a pair of thiefs that play together can be a nemesis to fight. I have great success when playing with competent thiefs. Yes it depends on team composition and players. Last time we were ele + scrapper + guard + 2x thief and won all till some departed into RL….

Jourdelune.7456:

1v1 with thief is the harder skill ceiling you get for 1v1, but it’s possible to win most of your 1v1 with a thief. I’ve seen Snuggle in 2015 being Kill of the Hill for hours.

That’s the problem, we aren’t in 2015 anymore. I used to love playing D/D thief, even made the legendary dagger. We could 1v1 even 1v2 in pvp but now it’s a bit of a joke to be honest.

Things like: on Shadow arts we have ‘Cloaked in Shadow’ which applies a blind on stealth. Now it used to be that we trait’d this with Cloak and Dagger and pre-cast it into a steal so when it hit we would get stealth with a blind ready for a back stab.

But some Muppet has put some really crap Master traits into that line now. For example: Life siphon on activating a venom with reduced cool down (wouldn’t put venoms on this trait line, better in deadly arts as it synergises with Dagger training and Potent Poison), heal an ally on stealth application (fine, but good luck ressing on point, even with stealth). And to my mind the biggest offender: stealing grants you stealth… that’s right folks stealing grants you stealth, this would totaly mess up your cloak and dagger chain, as it would reveal you after the cloak and dagger hits nullifying your backstab and it’s in the same trait line.

Tringsh.2380:

Jourdelune.7456:

1v1 with thief is the harder skill ceiling you get for 1v1, but it’s possible to win most of your 1v1 with a thief. I’ve seen Snuggle in 2015 being Kill of the Hill for hours.

That’s the problem, we aren’t in 2015 anymore. I used to love playing D/D thief, even made the legendary dagger. We could 1v1 even 1v2 in pvp but now it’s a bit of a joke to be honest.

Things like: on Shadow arts we have ‘Cloaked in Shadow’ which applies a blind on stealth. Now it used to be that we trait’d this with Cloak and Dagger and pre-cast it into a steal so when it hit we would get stealth with a blind ready for a back stab.

But some Muppet has put some really crap Master traits into that line now. For example: Life siphon on activating a venom with reduced cool down (wouldn’t put venoms on this trait line, better in deadly arts as it synergises with Dagger training and Potent Poison), heal an ally on stealth application (fine, but good luck ressing on point, even with stealth). And to my mind the biggest offender: stealing grants you stealth… that’s right folks stealing grants you stealth, this would totaly mess up your cloak and dagger chain, as it would reveal you after the cloak and dagger hits nullifying your backstab and it’s in the same trait line.

Well, just yesterday I did seen a thief that win his 1v1 versus everything, including DH.

Cpt Cuddle? Not sure. Immpossible thief did this in between season 3 and 4 at high MMR. Valun did it too. It’s not impossible to make it, but you need to know proper timing and use perfect blinds/evade/cc to make it happen.

It requires the most knowledge on other classes animations/skills to make that. But it’s possible.

But yeah, it’s harder for players with less than 500 games, to play thief versus one with 10k games.

Avoid 1 v 1s, especially with guardians. Even good thieves avoid 1 v 1s when they can. Your job as thief is to decap points and to come in on fights when they are almost over and clean up low HP enemies. D/P 3 is your best friend for this. I’ve been having tons of fun with my thief in unranked but I can’t see myself getting too far with it in ranked (though I’m sure it is possible)

Alex Shatter.7956:

Avoid 1 v 1s

Depends on your spec and weapon set. If you play condi D/D + P/D (or SB) you can 1v1 almost every class and your survivability is very good. I can kill Warriors (Rifle ones excluded) so easily with D/D, no way to kill them with D/P power build, Guardians are tougher but doable. Sometimes i can even 1vs2 lol, if both of my opponents fight in melee range only. Only profession who makes me real trouble is Druid and condi engie sometimes. I mostly play with Sage’s Amulet, DA, Trickery and Acrobatics for better survivability and nice healing for every initiative spent.
I have no idea why condi thief is not in a meta lol.

Oh, and i’m talking about unranked arenas, are you ok with that, you elitists? I guess op have in mind unranked arenas too.

If you are just starting on thief I’d honestly recommend a Valkyrie staff build, simply because it’s gives a margin for error and is a great introduction to thief. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQJAWVn0MBNOhVOBmOBkmiFYCzLNcGaDaJgAQGY+DOCbhA-TZRBQBjpMAAuAAa4IA8gHBAA3fAA

Metabattle thief is a terrible build for new thieves because it requires you to have intricate knowledge of all of your abilities and combinations in order to accomplish anything at all.

High Level
Thief = Burden

I Played evade spam thief both power condition and yes pistol whip thief. In my opinion thief is actually more balance in the higher tiers. It is the lower tiers where thief is under-powered because players are not ready to dodge DH burst where they can get 1 shot. A good thief can win every fight on skill alone. I would say Acrobatics has become a mandatory line as well as daredevil. The other two are up to the player. 33% of my ranked games were thief. It didn’t stop me from climbing.

xeonage.1253:

High Level
Me = Burden

fix’d

Sifu.9745:

Alex Shatter.7956:

Avoid 1 v 1s

Depends on your spec and weapon set. If you play condi D/D + P/D (or SB) you can 1v1 almost every class and your survivability is very good. I can kill Warriors (Rifle ones excluded) so easily with D/D, no way to kill them with D/P power build, Guardians are tougher but doable. Sometimes i can even 1vs2 lol, if both of my opponents fight in melee range only. Only profession who makes me real trouble is Druid and condi engie sometimes. I mostly play with Sage’s Amulet, DA, Trickery and Acrobatics for better survivability and nice healing for every initiative spent.
I have no idea why condi thief is not in a meta lol.

Oh, and i’m talking about unranked arenas, are you ok with that, you elitists? I guess op have in mind unranked arenas too.

I play thief more than year and wondering how stupid your speech is. Try ranked games after Sapphire.
I think you are new to pvp and MM que you in same skilled teams. Well, I’m agree, at start Thief looks powerful, but when you climb up to skilled players, you are trash. Thief is hardest pvp class atm, it need brain and reaction. sometimes i end up without single kill but win. (Stealing points) THIEF ISNT 1v1 class in pvp, and never will be.