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.

Here is a breakdown.
ELementalist.
Lowest hp, lowest armor and lowest dps and comes with few active defense on long CD.
Take 10 skills to kill something that others can do in 5 and for thieve in 3. except necro and new ranger.
switch to water to heal.
Great at zerg v zerg with staff and tornado and just watch the bags drop.

Thief.
High damage.
Lot of evade in skills
can spam skills.
Requires no thinking that even a cave man can play it.
Devs seem to love it.
Stealth.
great at trolling and ganking.

Sucks at ZvZ combat, tpvp etc.

Ordamus.1978:

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

You answered your own question right here. gL with your thief. They get better higher up.

If you don’t like swapping elements, you don’t want to go as an elementalist seeing as many of us swap every few seconds :p Eles also have similar survivability issues at low levels until you can build for it with gear/attribute points, but they’re also better at kting since their melee is actually 300 range.
Overall in pve I’m not really sure what would be better. Eles have better team support and aoe damage while thieves are much more single target damage unless you go with a condition spec. If you do go with condition spec, then they’re decent good aoe as well, but I haven’t actually played thief very far in pve.
In the end I’d agree with the above suggestion of thief since eles really need to swap skill lets non stop.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Thief-or-ele-for-pve-as-of-patch/first#post2301493

For future just extend your previous topic instead of doubling it.
Answering (AGAIN) everything in short:
Overall thief is better for PvE due mobility, high burst and along that decent survivability. For roaming WvW as well, even does decent in zerging if you’re fan of it.
About ele. I think you answered yourself as Omnitek said and confirmed that. Swapping attunements (nearly) as often as possible is beneficial.
Else sticking to one attunement (which is always fire) will lead to actions like this: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Y-U-no-projectile-block/first#post2304323

Now go on, roll a thief.

If you don’t like switching attunements frequently ele is probably not the right profession for you. The whole gameplay evolves around it which means there is no chance to avoid it.

If you like melee combat I would suggest a thief anyway. The majority of their gameplay is in melee range, for eles it’s only D/D. Their survivability is pretty good once you position yourself properly and use stealth well.

Both classes have terrible survivability at lower levels, but it gets (much) better with more skills and traits.

Fractals
General consensus is that outside of the big three classes (Guardian/Mesmer/Warrior), Ele and Thief are on par.

Farming
I’m gonna guess you mean farming in Dynamic Events, in which case pick an Ele to tag everything.

Melee
Pick Thief. More weapon sets to choose from, better damage, equally high survivability – everything is there. The only thing is that in sPvP stealth stops point capping.

WvW
Well this depends what you want to do. For zerging, you can choose both. Even though there is a certain stigma against Thieves, if you watch Red Guard’s videos (edit: a good large-scale WvW guild), you can see they use Dagger Storm a lot. Ele is also excellent in zergs with all the combo fields and area CC.

For WvW roaming….just pick a Thief. Ever wonder why >50% of roaming people are Thieves?

I tried to give an unbiased opinion. Both my Thief and Ele are at lv 80.

seriously, we are calling red guard the best wvw guild now? zerg vs zerg is about who gets off more blast finishers in water fields, who has more cleave/aoe/-save-yourself-stacking, and occaisionally mesmer stealth stacking. basically, whichever leader is a bigger snob about what classes he lets stand next to him wins, there is no skill or leadership in that and very little teamwork. monkeys could probably do it.

i’d take any small roaming wvw guild over red guard type guilds anyday.

OP: Ele’s are great, but if you dont like swapping attunements pick something else.

Revised this post for clarity:

The reason I used Red Guard as an example was to demonstrate that Thieves are viable in larger fights. It doesn’t matter whether you think it requires any skill, because if having a couple of Thieves in their zerg allows them to win all of their GvG fights, I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that Thieves do have a place in larger zergs.

The small roamer guilds may be more skilled individually, but that’s the problem – they only fight in small numbers. Everyone already knows Thieves are excellent in small fights, so I didn’t want to point that out again.

Yeesh, that’s a bit hard of a question.

From a PvE Dungeons perspective…

Have you… considered a Warrior or Guardian?

Thieves and Elementalists are kinda on par when it comes to dungeons… sorta. I would consider both to be Tier 2 Dungeon Classes (Tier 1 being Warrior, Guardian, Mesmer).

The advantage of a thief is that their normal trait and build specs do a lot of damage. Backstab thieves now do more damage than Warriors against single targets, making them pretty good for CoF farming.

Elementalists can take Conjure Lightning Hammer to do an absurd amount of damage (also more than Warriors when specced and traited fully glass) but they become the most fragile thing in the game. Thus, most Elementalists go with bunker specs with Water and Arcana, which leads to sorta low DPS.

In the end, if you really want to aim for dungeons and fractals, look to Warriors and Guardians first and foremost.

From a WvW perspective…

Thieves are good for roaming and ganking targets and protecting their allies with Stealth. Elementalists are good for staying in zergs with Staff and also roaming around. Both classes are probably among the most hated in WvW because they really annoy enemy players.

Either way though, and most importantly, if you dislike attunement swapping, stay away from the Elementalist. It’s the most important aspect of the class, and if you hate that, you shouldn’t play it.

A good elementalist doesn’t swap attunements every 10 seconds but every 3-4 seconds.
So either you learn to like it or you play thief.