Guild Wars 2

Greetings! I’m a fairly new player leveling up my thief, who is level 47 now. Due to time constraints, I only have time to really focus on one character. The reason I chose a thief from the beginning was simply because the theme— I played an Assassin in guild wars 1 and I love the theme of it. I’ve visited this sub forum a time or two and always been greeted with doom and gloom about how terrible the thief profession is, but I always brushed it off as I seemed to do fine in PvE. Or so I thought until recently.

I was doing some hearts in Dredgehaunt Cliffs in a level 45 area, therefore I was down leveled. I was going around stabbing imps (I’m D/D currently) and taking them down at a reasonable rate, when suddenly a level 43 guardian runs up next to me and begins to pull 7 or 8 imps. He uses greatsword 2 (the whirling thing) and they all die. I was astounded— all this time I had thought guardians weren’t capable of any serious damage, after all, I thought thieves were the kings of dps! Alas, there was no way for me to keep up with the guardian. I always see a huge volume of guardians running around in the world, I see far more guardians than thieves. Perhaps there’s a reason for that?

So I come to ask you all this: Am I wasting my time leveling my thief, should I reroll guardian? Was it just a freak incident, or do guardians regularly outperform thieves at level 80? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: Added a few more details

Esta.9645:

Greetings! I’m a fairly new player leveling up my thief, who is level 47 now. Due to time constraints, I only have time to really focus on one character. The reason I chose a thief from the beginning was simply because the theme— I played an Assassin in guild wars 1 and I love the theme of it. I’ve visited this sub forum a time or two and always been greeted with doom and gloom about how terrible the thief profession is, but I always brushed it off as I seemed to do fine in PvE. Or so I thought until recently.

I was doing some hearts in Dredgehaunt Cliffs in a level 45 area, therefore I was down leveled. I was going around stabbing imps (I’m D/D currently) and taking them down at a reasonable rate, when suddenly a level 43 guardian runs up next to me and begins to pull 7 or 8 imps. He uses greatsword 2 (the whirling thing) and they all die. I was astounded— all this time I had thought guardians weren’t capable of any serious damage, after all, I thought thieves were the kings of dps! Alas, there was no way for me to keep up with the guardian. I always see a huge volume of guardians running around in the world, I see far more guardians than thieves. Perhaps there’s a reason for that?

So I come to ask you all this: Am I wasting my time leveling my thief, should I reroll guardian? Was it just a freak incident, or do guardians regularly outperform thieves at level 80? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: Added a few more details

They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Thieves are potentially the kings of single-target dps. And are very good at burst damage – that is damage that occurs before people can react. These are very useful in wvw, but generally not as useful in PvE. Thieves can also output respectable aoe damage with the shortbow and sword mainhand (I’d recommend sword/pistol while leveling in pve).

The other weird thing about thieves is their learning curve is all backwards…they are always squishy, but they don’t get the utilities/traits to avoid damage and reset battles, until higher levels. So at lower levels, it can be very frustrating to play. On top of this PvE is balanced against player skill by having monsters that hit slowly, but like trucks. For guardians this works great, but for thieves this means that we have to either learn to avoid getting hit, or get downed frequently.

In WvW, thieves are very popular, and a very solid profession. They are a lot of fun to play, and (IMO) can be versatile and useful in all situations. Others think that thieves are useless in a zerg (big group of players), but are great in small groups. Many believe that thieves absolutely suck at PvE (although having played one in high-end PvE, I disagree). There’s a recent post by a guardian who can’t figure out how to fight thieves in WvW…if you look through the forums, you’ll see posts like this every day for most professions.

Another important thing to learn in general, with thief, is that our survival (for most builds) comes with our ability to kill our opponent quickly. Having high toughness/vitality seems good when you’re dying all the time, so you may be tempted to get armor that focuses on these. What you wind up doing is making it so that fights that should take 10 seconds, take a minute. During that time, you’re getting hit for half as much, but get hit 6x as much. This is why many people recommend running full berzerker’s gear, especially in PvE. This will also get you used to avoiding damage, which is the most important skill for you to acquire as a thief. In WvW, toughness/vitality become more important, and there are ways to balance these…

I do a consta-dodge d/d bleed build. It works better for me in PvE than s/p.

If the Guardian was level 80 and you are level 47 he will out DPS you generally.

Guardian is probably both the best and easiest class to play as in open world and dungeon pve. You have lots of support and healing you can share with your allies as well as decent mob clearing abilities (such as greatsword 2).

However, I wouldn’t really recommend leveling with dual daggers since the only multitarget attacks they have are on #3 and #4 and it’s relatively weak except for condition builds.

Thief sword hits multiple targets very hard and is good for open world levelling. It definitely hits harder than guardian greatsword.

Thief shortbow also has powerful AoE on clusterbomb, which you can just spam at your feet as the mobs come to you, killing them faster than a guardian could.

I’d say a thief will almost always have more heavy damage skills available than a guardian.

Ultimately it comes down to which class you enjoy more, but in general:

Thief success relies upon:

-an active playstyle
-dodging/evades, stealth
-landing big hits like Backstab, pistol whip, clusterbomb, heartseeker

Guardian success relies upon:

-Staying coated in boons; and
-Hacking at stuff until it dies

Esta.9645:

So I come to ask you all this: Am I wasting my time leveling my thief, should I reroll guardian? Was it just a freak incident, or do guardians regularly outperform thieves at level 80? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: Added a few more details

for PvE you are wasting your time if you don’t have quick reflexes, since you are downed in 1 hit sometimes
for WvW it’s worth it if you like roaming, beein a sheep in the zerg, no, thief is not good

infantrydiv.1620:

If the Guardian was level 80 and you are level 47 he will out DPS you generally.

This.

As GW1 player I can never resist visiting the raptor nest when I am in Bloodtide Coast, it takes about 10 seconds to round them up and 7 to cluster-bomb them into the past.

Recipe for success for a thief:
Quick reaction time
Ability to flow in and out of range of targets at will
Knowing the movesets of all your enemies
Having a good sense of your environment
Ability to out-maneuver your enemy
Heavy damage
Always utilizing stealth attacks
Knowing the ins and outs of fields and finishers
Using weapon skills to negate damage instead of just endurance
Resource management

Recipe for success with a Guardian:
Own a mouse
Own a keyboard

Obviously a GOOD guard will be doing a lot more than that but succeeding with a guard is significantly easier than with a thief (but also significantly more boring).

Thank you all so much for the replies. I’ve decided to change up my playstyle and weapon sets (I think I’ll try S/P instead of D/D) and just become a better player. I really love the feel of the thief, I just find the guardian too dull and easy to play. I believe the problems lies more with myself, and less with the profession. Though, as many of you have said, a guard is definitely easier to just pick up and play than a thief is.

Once again, thank you all for your suggestions! I’ll incorporate them into my play style and keep stabbing away as a thief.

I have 500+hrs on both my Guard and my Thief. They are on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of playstyle in most cases. Guard has so much going for it when looking at PvE and Dungeons. Guard has good damage, good survivabilty and built in team support even if you’re running a Zerker GC build. DPS is comparable to thief unless you’re running a full backstab D/D build and can pull it off consistently. If you get good at dodges and proactive with damage mitigation thief can do a lot of things too but they’re so much ‘squisher’ than Guards. Thief is more fun for me but I have a hard time passing up the tools of the guardian. If you have time for one character and want to run dungeons I’d suggest running a guardian first. It saddens me to say it but this is my experience. Especially if you want to run pugs, guard will be your best bet. WvW/PvP on the other hand is where thief has some strengths.

Thief definitely has its place though and if you like the class keep going. It does have support and you can help get your party past a lot of troublesome or time consuming content.

GL
Blood~

I am D/D Lev 22 thief and was having problems in pve until i bought better weps (greens), hence the D/D. I was using S/P(Blues) and having problems and since you can’t overlevel to beat down lower content it kinda sucked before I bought the weps. Now I can go into an area lev 25-26 at Lev 22 and have no problem.

I will have to try the S/P with better weps too. I do like the attacks you get with D/D though. Do your attacks ever change or is it a set attack 1-5 buttons?

Efficiency, reliability, and effectiveness in PvE all goes to Guardian.

But they aren’t a cool as Thieves.

Only after hours and hours of playing Thief you can be efficient, reliable, and effective — it’s perfect since this usually filters out bad players from tainting our profession.

Go with thief if you like a challenge and are bothered with learning the ins and outs of every mechanic in PvE. Also if you are the type that is not so easily effected by the mainstream school of though and attitudes. Thief is not the most huggy lovable profession easily embraced by every random person you come across, you might even come across some discrimination once a while. But the class has it’s merits and you could pleasantly surprise other people if you are very good at it, some people like that feeling, if you know what I’m talking about.

I have a warrior and decked the char out with all the glittering gears, but a lot of the times I used it solely to make people happy. I still like playing on my thief a lot more. But there is also one thing I have to admit which is despite I love my thief I actually don’t enjoy running into thieves in random group. Most just don’t do thieves justice at least in terms of PvE And by PvE I’d assume you are talking about dungeons, since general open world I don’t think any class matters and leveling is only a small portion of your playtime on a char in the long run anyway.