Guild Wars 2

Thief is borderline extinct. It is not that all our options are gone (d/p still is a little bit viable altho it has gotten an extra difficulty with the blind nerf) but the fact that our no1 spvp set (S/D) is now out of the window, has made thiefs as well as people playing other classes lose interest. Yesterday I was soloq’ing and it got real ugly. Befor the match even started i had some people saying, thief needs to reroll (i was the only thief). I had people saying, i am going afk if this thief doesn’t reroll. I had a guy rage quiting after he apparently had lost a fight and it was because the thiefs (we had 2) were too bad for teamfights (he solo pushed far). Please arenanet, i have spend all my hours in game on this thief and it is the only class i can say i have somewhat mastered in pvp. I do not have the time nor the motivation to start from scratch and mastering another class, so pretty please fix mine in stead of leaving it in the shadows (ironically) as other classes are getting buffed.

I still see thieves, but honestly, they’re all just some variation of a pure burst build because they know that if they can’t burst it to death, they’re dead. Don’t even bother going up against bunker oriented builds, it’ll just be a waste of time and an inevitable defeat unless they suck hardcore. They just kind of run around roaming, bursting down enemies, but it’s getting to a point where even other zerkers are too tanky to burst down quick enough.

In 8-9 months we will see more buffs to stuff like traps, and a couple of traits, obviously accompanied by more nerfs to stealth and dps.

If you wanna punish yourself playing this profession for another 8-9 months and see it get even worse, it’s your call.

Now days I play Gw2 and HS wile in queue for another game.
It is as good as solitaire…

Volrath.1473:

In 8-9 months we will see more buffs to stuff like traps, and a couple of traits, obviously accompanied by more nerfs to stealth and dps.

If you wanna punish yourself playing this profession for another 8-9 months and see it get even worse, it’s your call.

Now days I play Gw2 and HS wile in queue for another game.
It is as good as solitaire…

^^this

they will keep nerfing thieves for the sake of numbers untill people will stop RP assassin creed and reroll other classes (imo)

ironically the biggest buff to thieves would be when anet would finally leave class in peace

i would be happy if they fixed bugs though :/

Just before the patch, I found a team to try tpvp with, they don’t want thief anymore. I haven’t done any hotjoin recently so can’t tell how things are there. In wvw, I noticed a drop in thieves, I guess most are playing ranger now. The rest are P/D condi and at this point I am getting seriously rusty at fighting other power thieves.

Hmm am I the only one who still feels satisfied with the thief in tPvP?
I use D/P.

The only issue I have is HS feels very hit and miss lately (as in it literally wont hit in range),
so much so that I couple steal with shadowshot now.

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Just before the patch, I found a team to try tpvp with, they don’t want thief anymore.

That sort of happened to me as well, only I didn’t even get the chance to play it. The team I was on had a thief until the patch hit, then he went to play a different class so I took this chance and asked if I could play thief, the class I am most experienced with, and it was a no because “thieves are dropping out of the meta”. Sure we were going to be playing in the ToG but this was from a group of semi-casual non-elitists. Really upsets me because I have put a lot of effort into thief and ended up with nothing to show for it.

I recently changed my main back to a thief because I thought I missed it…. but now I don’t want to play anymore. I’m afraid to do tpvp or spvp now because I know I’m not welcome anywhere.

d/p trickery is fine (BESIDES AGGRAVATING BUGS ÖLJKAWgöejr#höljrztlökjhtzöljkölztukjföluzrkölrzköljkurzöljukölzukölj!!!!!!!!!!!), the problem is celestial amulet + might stacking allowing certain classes to be able to fill every role at the same time… they are not just pushing thieves out of meta but some other classes/builds (see guards) as well
i don’t think that thieves need buff in that sense (besides some QoL changes) more like celestial+ might stacking needs to go from pvp

oh and as side note, attempt to nerf BP caused me to use 2 BP instead of 1 when i stomp someone… /slowclap

welcome to the world of necro……..

Celestial might stack is indeed bad for the game, giving too much survivability for the amount of pressure it can put out. Although i do not agree with guardians being pushed out of the meta. Bunker will likely alwasy stay a good option (altho some teams are starting to try and run without one, finally) and i’m seeing a lot of burst medi guards (basically thiefs hard counter) popping up with the focussed renewal = medi buff. These kind of builds have so many reset/cleanse/stunbreak buttons coupled with high dps. Good thing the mobility sux, the one thing thief still has.

I still play my thief in soloq – having a blast! Actually ended up in a match last night with five thieves against two rangers, a warrior and two guardians. No one had ever believed we could do it, but we won because of timed bursts and superior mobility for back capping.

But yes, I do see a decrease in thieves…

Regarding celestial builds, maybe Anet will introduce more play against boons in general in the future (I would certainly be for that playing a ranger), but I kind of like the idea of celestial builds that might have more options available then a zerker build that needs to land its hopefully difficult burst. A celestial build should also need skill to either keep up decent might or to stay alive (maybe even both).

Speaking of celestial, has anyone looked at that for thieves? Although they are not in pvp yet, I was thinking of making a build for the evade runes. I don’t have a celestial set yet though and won’t have the time to grind one out.

Yishis ran a celestial p/d build in WvW. Just check out his latest video to find it ^^

That celestial build was complete trash.

Personally, I think thief still works. I have played almost nothing but D/P since release, and it IS still viable, despite the tele bugs that ARE STILL HAPPENING. I won’t reroll to another class (especially since I have 3k+ hours on thief and don’t find the others interesting) but I see completely what people are talking about. We get buffs to traits that no one uses, and nerfs constantly. I would quit this class, and this game, but I truly love GW2 and after seeing the buffs to mesmers with the latest patch, (a class that has had just as many nerfs as thieves since day 1) it gives me hope that Anet could fix thieves. All we need are devs that play something other than warrior, and for Anet to actually listen to what people on the forums say, as it seems like nothing we do ever makes a difference.

TL;DR: Thief is still viable, Anet (might) fix the bugs we have; have hope.

This build is still quite viable, as long as you ignore the teleport/steal bugs.
And use projectiles or a whirl in Blinding Powder.

Excuse me for not playing SoloQ, I’m still a bit rusty on Thief.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qIZiYxsTXOA

Too much stock in the cries of solo queuers. Try this scenario (one of many):

Solo queue match on Nifelhel. The ranger immediately says "no thiefs please, thiefs reroll." I refuse given a) the attitude, b) the fact he said it marked him as a noob, c) on my thief I can play better and do more, d) our composition was fine. Our warrior goes to capture close, I see two crossers and slow them down with immobilises and cripples so he gets the cap, and then we win the 2v2. I can’t remember what happened at mid then, but at some point we did capture both close and mid. I anticipate incoming to close, so I go there to help the warrior, as is my role. The ranger followed and arrived a bit later. We secured close, and while they were on respawn, the ranger and I took Svanir. One of the enemy pushes close again, and the other guy on our team who’s class I forgot, was behind him, evidently having followed him from mid leaving the guardian alone. I check the map, and the guardian is in a 1v2, which may become a 1v3 with their respawns. So I go mid, but the ranger runs back to close to make close a 3v1 on a point we already own.

I arrive at mid and the guardian is downed with no hope of being revived. Fortunately one of them had the sense to pull off close to help mid. Mid becomes a 2v4, meaning their close point holder has finally left it, making it a free-cap. Now we still have close, and mid, but losing mid. If I pull off to far we lose mid for sure, and I’ll only get a decap because being outnumbered, I’d be followed. My speed would only net a decap. If I stay, we have a chance of keeping the cap until help comes from two of the 3 now at close (warrior, ranger, respawned guardian). Then, I would be able to disengage for a decap or full cap on far. Instead, the warrior runs to far and decaps it, and we lost mid with no idea what the guardian and ranger were doing. I respawn and leave base immediately entering a 2v2 where the ranger and guardian are fighting off point, and the enemy has far and mid captured. I get destroyed by the guardian’s burst during the necro’s fear chains, and respawn again 15 seconds later. They are still fighting off point. This time I manage to get past, and decap mid. This act pulled the enemy back to mid, which in turn pulled my allies to mid after them.

Of course, it was all my fault. We lost mid because I am bad. The ranger points out that I don’t know what I’m talking about when I point out that he should have come to mid instead of going to fight 3v1 on a point we already own, and calls me bad when I state that he was fighting 2v2 off point. The warrior declared that he was doing the thief’s job by running to far, implying that I’m not doing it. See, the way I saw it, I couldn’t decap far because I was doing his job. While he was our close defender, he pulled off, and should have then moved to mid (with the guardian, or the guardian and ranger come mid) to allow me to decap as he rightly pointed out is my job.

We did win after I got the fight back onto the mid point instead of off-point, and managed to get two or three sneaky decaps on far. Of course, it was still my fault.

The point? They don’t know what they are talking about. The ranger was obviously suffering from 2BC syndrome (only 2 brain cells, 1 lost and the other looking for it). The warrior got his role muddled up, but he’s a thief main so I didn’t say anything about it. The guardian and other guy seemed to know what they were doing, if you excuse the guardian fighting off point for a minute in the middle of the match.

The ranger was not qualified to have a valid opinion on team compositions and what is or isn’t a good class/build in a given situation. The thief gets blamed for trying to multi-role out of necessity resulting from the actions of his allies, because if they make a call, they think it’s the right one, which means if something goes wrong it must be someone else’s fault, and it’s very easy to jump on the thief-hate-wagon. It’s easier to blame than to think, "maybe he’s not doing his job because we’re not letting him".

What to do? Play your class, enjoy the game the best you can (when it’s not bugging out or lag-freezing every 30 seconds). There will always be haters because people will always complain, moan, focus on negativity when it’s there, and create it when there’s none to focus on. And very importantly, there will always be stupid people. "People are stupid" is an often repeated phrase with good reason. Realise what they are, cease to care what they think, and play.

I think ANET messed up big time introducing the D/P thief mechanic in the beginning.
They made it possible just for this one class to stealth on-demand while blinding and any decent d/p thief can choose to get away and never die at any given point. Which makes the whole thing just too unbalanced because having a class that you simply cannot kill will never be balanced.

Of course that’s more of an issue in wvw where you get costantly ganked by d/p thieves that most times you can simply run away from, because unless they’re overcommitted you aren’t going to take them down. in PvP there’s objectives and all that and being able to run away all the time is not really going to help your team.

The problem is that you can’t really fix this problem without either deleting this build from the game or nerfing to oblivion stealth for thieves which will annichilate almost the whole profession (we have already seen D/D thief gone thanks to this)

Imho the bp field + hs stealth mechanic is just plain idiotic to see in a game. And i’m not complaining about ppl playing D/P, because it’s kind of the only really competetive thing out there, just saying that ANET should have thought of something better.

Because i don’t know you but every time I go out roaming in WvW i’m always chased by 2 freaking d/p thieves everywhere I go and while it might not be gamebreaking it sure is annoying as kitten

Delta Blues.8507:

…
while it might not be gamebreaking it sure is annoying as kitten

And that’s all thieves are.

(WvW)

On a higher level of course, these ganks do prevent (couple of) people getting to the main zerg/force – so the zerg/force loses some reinforcement. If I had to guess the lose is negliable to the main zerg/force. So they’re wasting your and their own time. Thiefs are also used as scouts, since they suck in a zerg and since their good at 1v1 and trolling. Scouts can be invaluable, depending on the information (not intellegence) the scout provides and the decisions/actions made by the commander (this is intellegence) based on the information. Again, if I had to guess, only a few commanders and scouts synergize well enough to make it worth while to scout – majority of the time they’re sent off to stand on a tower and pee down the wall trying to write their names. So yeah waste of time. (Waste of time, and little or no reward (dont say “but it’s FUN”)) Not to mention other classes can scout too, just thief is the one that doesnt fit into the zerg so hence they’re “scouts” – their mobility does help.

Though people seem to focus too much on themselves in WvW (could it be… about World verus World? Nah! It’s totally about you vs some ganker)… so when they get anouyed by a thief, lose to a thief, or the thief gets away… they get angry/pissed off, possibly coming to this forums to complain, and it seems to them like it means the world having not killed that thief.

Personally, I found a very good use for my thief outside of WvW. They’re very good at running/teleporting from the TP to the Bank.

I feel like thief is a very hyper active game play style and if not pushing 5 buttons at the same time constantly you are doing it wrong. I personally have thousands of hours on thief and hundreds of pvp games on thief, and have leveled 3 thieves to 80 not that it means anything but I have plenty of experiences on my thief. Based on what I’ve experienced as a thief people expect me to tank. For example I’m roaming with a Guardian we encounter a couple enemy. The Guardian eventually complains that he gets targeted by everyone. However valid this complaint is, the game produces an environment where thief receives all the hate. I personally say the thief needs more ways to benefit the teammates rather than himself. Boon sharing was a step in the right direction. Then recently venoms became more team friendly. But boons and venoms is not what teams want from the thief. The teams want the thief to take on some of the damage and also to dish out a lot of the damage. The one thing stopping a thief from doing both of these is aoe pressure. The thief cannot survive against so many attacks because in order to dish out any damage he has to be zerker or some variation. My simple ideas to start out with is to take thief pre and after casts away. Or buff our defenses up particularly against aoe in some way shape or form.

Heres a simple fix for BP/HS spam.. give us condi removal instead of stealth and swap shadow shot out of bp to stealth/backstab mechanic… Simple solutions for s/d fixes…. get rid of the delay of infiltrator strike increase animation speed on cloak and dagger… make number 1 auto attk hit faster … maybe give us a buff that pierces through invuln on crit.. i mean anything to help the zerker meta… no pro thiefs want to play some cheesy condi build or kittened pp builds thats for nubs and scrubs… help the real thieves give us just enough to compete nothing more

Hey, engi here, just wanted to give my 2 cents about this issue.
The OP is entirely right.

I never played thief above lvl 26 because it always felt boring for me, but just from combating them the last 1.5y in wvw and pvp, I learned a lot about how to counter almost all builds I observed so far. But since I’m mainly a WvW player, I gonna stick to this content with the following.
It was awesome. As soon as I got the reveal, killing thieves became something I could do without even paying real attention to their builds. I’d simply walk in 1.2k range, reveal them and fire a s/d volley into their direction that dropped them mostly instantly. And if that were not enough, a few autohits later they would be subject to a stomp. At first it was just entertaining payback for all the sniped dollies by perma-stealth roaming thieves, but as it is currently, it simply became stale.
While the reveal does not really impact mesmers, which have still more than enough means to survive, thieves reached a point where the class is simply broken and not worth being considered as serious opponents anymore. If I come around a corner into a camp and spot a unlucky thief, he just runs away or tries as hard as possible to disengage. Usually I’d have to expect high burst dmg incoming, but thief players not even try that anymore. Nor would they at least try to take another camp or even go after a dolly (which they surely could since their mobility is superior to most other classes), but nope, they simply run, wp and are not be seen again for hours.

It has gone as far as thieves trying to run with big zergs now, orbiting them and hoping for single people to burst in the backline, but even that just results in them being revealed, coughed at and ultimately serving as rally bot for our own people.

Please a-net, give thieves a purpose again. As it is, thieves are completely useless, and absolutely underwhelming as opponents.