Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, I bought GW2 when it first came out, but never really played it until a week or so ago and I’ve been trying to decide which profession best fits my play-style by leveling several of them up to 20-30.

So far, I absolutely love the thief. I play a rogue in WoW, so I guess the stealthy class is just in my nature. But after doing a little bit of research on this forum, I’ve come across a lot of negative posts about the thief in end game material, making it sound nearly useless unless you’re WvW roaming (which I will be doing) but I’d like to be able to participate in some ranked PvP and even some PvE at times. Will the thief be viable in all of these aspects of the game, or should I consider rolling something else? Leaving the thief out to dry because ANet won’t take care of them will sure hurt, but I don’t want to feel totally useless when I hit level 80, either.

Any and all comments and/or advice is welcome!

If nothing else. thief is very fun, but it’s not fun because of power. it’s fun because of the sense of accomplishment when you gank someone

Okay, hear me out on this one.

Contrary to forum attitude, Thief is still okay to play despite all nerfs and unwarranted change to stealth attacks.

PVE wise, you are still one of the strongest single target bursters out there and you will naturally hit very hard without any form of buffs. What you won’t do is however is effectively provide boons for your team mates outside of stealth, boon strip and fury. If provided boons, you will eat through a boss like a blender.

WvW, perfectly fine, in fact most non thief roamers either laugh at you for being an easy kill or hate your guts for how effective you are at being near untouchable whilst hitting like a truck.

PVP right now, it’s not a pleasant scene for a thief. The amount of DH due to meta basically makes the class very difficult to play, even in +1 situations. It’s a heck lot of fun but, sPVP right now is High risk, mediocre reward.

If you do wanna play this class seriously, just don’t give up at it. Despite the current state of the class and game, there are STILL people whining that thieves are op.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Roaming-Only-Dragonhunter-can-stop-thieves/page/2#post6289899

^ this. This definitely.

Thief is viable in most roles just not practical or optimal in many. It is also not the only stealth class. Druids, Mesmer/Chrono and Scrapper all have fine stealth capabilities and have more universal appeal across the various game modes.

Oddly I find a thief is less effective when using stealth at least in WvW and sPvP.

Well I’m glad to finally see some positive words about the thief. I was beginning to think it was pointless to level him. I think I’ll stick with it, then. Worst case scenario, I hit 80 and wait for a buff from ANet and level my ranger in the meantime.

How are thieves 1v1? I know when I first bought the game and started playing, all I did was PvP and I felt unstoppable against any profession with my thief in a single target combat situation. Get into a group fight, however, and it almost always spelled disaster for me. Is this still the case, or have we gotten weaker 1v1?

1v1 is arguably harder with the nerf to stealth attacks, it’s really class matchup now and game knowledge on the class/ build your opponent is running. Personally I find duelling to be fine in Wvw, its really a skill thing in the end. You lose some, you win some, and if you get ganked, good luck to whomever is trying to catch you.

Just look out for dragon hunters though, they take a lot of patience and baiting to beat alone. You’ll lose most of your fights against them unless you outplay the crap out of them.

As far as 1v1 in PvP, its still feasible but don’t expect your backstabs to get insta kills like they used to. Since the traitline replaced, amulet/rune changes, and elite traits came in, certain builds and combat styles aren’t as viable as they used to be.

1v1 mostly depends on knowing your own opponent. A lot of newer players will spam abilities. Spamming abilities without knowing what your opponent can do can get you killed pretty quickly. Thief has lower HP than most classes so that can be a problem for survivability against classes with more innate tank. Control the fight and you can win. Also, know your combo fields that you can interact with. Ranger healing seed provides a water field. Blast finishers in that field will heal and projectile finishers will provide regeneration.

One good option for learning is to go into Heart of the Mists. You can select all traits/different stats (amulets)/sigils and runes. You can also practice against class NPCs that, while not “good” will give you an idea of some of your rotations, etc. My advice for dragonhunter is to use as many stuns as you can. P/P is one option because of the range potential and because of the pistol 4 stun. You need to interrupt their heals. The giant leap forward is a strong heal/cleanse and worth interrupting. S/P is also a good anti-DH weaponset. Also, in general, you should learn how to use each stolen skill effectively against the class you are stealing from. It is usually free damage/free buffs that can move the fight in your favor.

I would also consider getting Heart of Thorns. Daredevil is a very important traitline to enhancing thief survivability and overall damage. The new zones are fun and promote thief style gameplay, i.e. know your opponent, because lots of creatures have unique mechanics to learn. The story is also better than original GW2 by a mile.

Thief is very viable in PvE. I say this because a while back I ran a number of fractals. One fractal, Mai Trin, my entire party except for me fully died. I used my stealth and evade in order to res my entire party back to life so we didn’t have to reset. Our group utility is that we can do that sort of support better than other classes. I’ve also commanded in Dragons Stand (Heart of Thorns) and been a primary target caller for the tower events (thief is the fastest class in the game if built that way). If you want to do something and aren’t sure how, just ask here or message me in game.

The Gearhead.2301:

How are thieves 1v1? I know when I first bought the game and started playing, all I did was PvP and I felt unstoppable against any profession with my thief in a single target combat situation. Get into a group fight, however, and it almost always spelled disaster for me. Is this still the case, or have we gotten weaker 1v1?

Against skilled players, the thief is probably the worst 1v1 class for winning but the best for not losing. It sounds strange but skilled players know all the tricks and rotations with few exceptions. Generally a thief either gets a good matchup or runs. If you are really good, you can “out-skill” your opponent but know that a thief starts a fight ready to sprint when it turns and goes in at a disadvantage class wise.

Thanks for all the info, guys! You’ve renewed my hope in my thief, I think I’ll stick it out to 80 and beyond. And I know thief isn’t the easiest profession to play, but it’s so much fun, and I’ve got enough mmo experience that I’m hoping I’ll be pretty decent at it. I was good even the game first released, but I understand now that the play style for a thief has changed. No more one shot back stabs hopefully we eventually get our burst back, but until then, I’ll give the new viable builds a shot

Oh and also, I do have HoT and will be going the Dare Devil route.

Daredevil is essential in order to compete with the power creep unfortunately.

You can still technically do one shots :^)

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAoaVnsMBNOhlOBemC8PhFfCbOAuAjgeFhlQUYLA8aOTA-TlCEQBE4BAwk9HlTtRfwFVSAgjAgBOBAP4QAEIlgNRJi/U/hUARM0C-w

Outside of being a gimmick, I do not recommend this Trait and utility set up. This is purely for deleting bad/ unaware players. The gear set up is fine for a power build. If you don’t have access to marauders yet, just mix n match valkyrie/ zerker. Needs fast fingers and ensure you have 25 bloodlust stacks for maximum effect.

General set up will be like this,

Basilisk venom -> Black powder+ Heartseeker x2 for stealth -> Assassin’s signet for +15% damage procc and 5 might stacks-> Impairing daggers+ heartseeker+steal at the same time (needs to be done under 1.5 seconds in that order)->auto until dead.

Only shadowshot if safe to do so.

If they didn’t die and managed to heal, gtfo.

Your heal can be used both offensively and defensively in this case, either for a extra backstab or breathing space for cooldowns.

Do not spam backstab in stealth, the 1 scd from the recent nerf is equivalent to a 1 second daze if you miss.

For a even more yolo set up, replace shadowstep with infiltrator’s signet and use that as your engage instead of steal. That will give you 10 stacks of might with assassin’s but leave you absolutely no room for error.

EDIT: Dagger+pistol or the shortbow can be swapped out for Dagger+dagger. Just use to your preference.

The Gearhead.2301:

Well I’m glad to finally see some positive words about the thief. I was beginning to think it was pointless to level him. I think I’ll stick with it, then. Worst case scenario, I hit 80 and wait for a buff from ANet and level my ranger in the meantime.

How are thieves 1v1? I know when I first bought the game and started playing, all I did was PvP and I felt unstoppable against any profession with my thief in a single target combat situation. Get into a group fight, however, and it almost always spelled disaster for me. Is this still the case, or have we gotten weaker 1v1?

FYI, never use the forums as a litmus test for how a class is doing. In general (and this is true everywhere, from consumer reviews of products to how people feel their favorite (pick something) team is doing), those who are happy with it don’t say anything, and those who have an issue will make sure everyone knows it. Just how people are.

bearshaman.3421:

The Gearhead.2301:

Well I’m glad to finally see some positive words about the thief. I was beginning to think it was pointless to level him. I think I’ll stick with it, then. Worst case scenario, I hit 80 and wait for a buff from ANet and level my ranger in the meantime.

How are thieves 1v1? I know when I first bought the game and started playing, all I did was PvP and I felt unstoppable against any profession with my thief in a single target combat situation. Get into a group fight, however, and it almost always spelled disaster for me. Is this still the case, or have we gotten weaker 1v1?

FYI, never use the forums as a litmus test for how a class is doing. In general (and this is true everywhere, from consumer reviews of products to how people feel their favorite (pick something) team is doing), those who are happy with it don’t say anything, and those who have an issue will make sure everyone knows it. Just how people are.

the reason he wanted feedback was because its a major timesink. you cannot know the potential of a class until its fully geared at lvl 80 and doing high lvl content.

sophiewhite.3149:

bearshaman.3421:

The Gearhead.2301:

Well I’m glad to finally see some positive words about the thief. I was beginning to think it was pointless to level him. I think I’ll stick with it, then. Worst case scenario, I hit 80 and wait for a buff from ANet and level my ranger in the meantime.

How are thieves 1v1? I know when I first bought the game and started playing, all I did was PvP and I felt unstoppable against any profession with my thief in a single target combat situation. Get into a group fight, however, and it almost always spelled disaster for me. Is this still the case, or have we gotten weaker 1v1?

FYI, never use the forums as a litmus test for how a class is doing. In general (and this is true everywhere, from consumer reviews of products to how people feel their favorite (pick something) team is doing), those who are happy with it don’t say anything, and those who have an issue will make sure everyone knows it. Just how people are.

the reason he wanted feedback was because its a major timesink. you cannot know the potential of a class until its fully geared at lvl 80 and doing high lvl content.

I get that. I wasn’t referring to feedback. I was referring to the fact that 80% of what you find is people QQ over something in a non-constructive fashion, and the other 20% is actual useful feedback. I was basically saying don’t base your opinion on the 80%.

Oh I know that I’m more likely to see the cons of a class on the forums than the pros, that’s why I made my own post. It was an attempt to find some positive feedback about the class that I enjoy playing before I just threw it away and leveled my ranger or necro instead. I’ll still level those two and probably rev as well, but I think thief deserves to be first and thanks to the positive feedback that I received here, I’ll be leveling my Sylvari thief to 80 and gearing him. Thanks guys!

If you want to play thief in pvp:
1. prepare to have half of pvp community on blocklist
2. be better than everyone else in match

Why do you say that, Cynz?

The Gearhead.2301:

Why do you say that, Cynz?

1. Because community is like this:
- on forums they cry thieves are OP and demand nerfs, so devs nerf the class, over and over and over again.
- you go in match – people tell you to reroll, over and over and over again. If you don’t do it, flaming, harassing and them afking is pretty much guaranteed. This been like this for 4 seasons now. God forbid, you actually end up with 2 thieves on team – the tantrum, oh dear~
- you win match? people might actually say something nice
- you lose match? your whole team gonna blame you. It is ALWAYS thieves fault that match is lost. Always.

2. Thief is only profession designed around active defense and offense. Rest of the professions are pretty much on auto-pilot.
Anet also envisioned thief as decap/+1 pet and in their vision thief shouldn’t be able to stand a chance in 1v1 situation vs other classes because they are roamers and would be too OP (devs logic, not mine). This means that to be effective on thief you need to be really good.
Normally, if enemy is bad, you may defeat them. However if you meet enemy that is half-decent and plays non-thief class you might have very low chance to kill them by yourself.

Now why it is a problem? Matchmaking is designed to keep you at 50% winrate, artificially. Meaning, that once you played plenty of games and won a lot of games, you will be forced to carry games which means you will get team of potatoes pretty much every second match and will end up in 1v1, 1v2, 1v3 situations all the time in attempt to defend your points, while your entire team is either getting spawn camped or chases 1 guy on roads (prime example, see screentshot: had 4 potatoes on my team literary afking at mid whole match while i was constantly alone on side points fighting off enemies).

It wouldn’t be that bad, if you played any bruiser class (engi, dh, druid), however thief is designed around losing pretty much every 1v1 encounter so you have to be better than your enemies, because you have to overcome devs crappy design and win fights anyway.

You won’t be able to always win fights, so you HAVE to be the decap god. You have to have your eyes always on map and always better rotation than enemy.

Lastly you need to be better than your teammates and make up for their potato mistakes.

As other mentioned however, winning games and knowing you carried your team or just won 1v1 fight vs one of the broken builds makes you feel really really really good (usually followed with hate whispers from your enemy and your teammates asking to team up lel).

P.S.This is however my experience so far (maybe other have better) and i have been playing this game for years, been top 100 on non-farm LB and legend in all 3 seasons (grinding diamond atm), so it is not just HJ stuff.

Well, bring the hate then, I suppose. It’s so odd that people hate this profession so much. When I played at the launch of the game, thieves seemed unstoppable 1v1 if you knew what you were doing and had a decent build. Hopefully ANet finds a way to balance the professions out one of these days. Either way, thief is kitten and so much fun to play. I’ll enjoy it regardless.

The Gearhead.2301:

Well I’m glad to finally see some positive words about the thief. I was beginning to think it was pointless to level him. I think I’ll stick with it, then. Worst case scenario, I hit 80 and wait for a buff from ANet and level my ranger in the meantime.

How are thieves 1v1? I know when I first bought the game and started playing, all I did was PvP and I felt unstoppable against any profession with my thief in a single target combat situation. Get into a group fight, however, and it almost always spelled disaster for me. Is this still the case, or have we gotten weaker 1v1?

My advice is to start playing a thief in sPvP right now. Spend the next month or so focussing on PvP (everyone is automatically leveled to 80 in PvP, and gear is standardized for all players) and see how it goes.

You will get a broad spectrum of opinion here; what matters is how well you can play it, not how well someone else can play it. Good thief players can still wreck the enemy, but average thief players (i count myself among these) are a casualty waiting to happen.

The Gearhead.2301:

Well, bring the hate then, I suppose. It’s so odd that people hate this profession so much. When I played at the launch of the game, thieves seemed unstoppable 1v1 if you knew what you were doing and had a decent build. Hopefully ANet finds a way to balance the professions out one of these days. Either way, thief is kitten and so much fun to play. I’ll enjoy it regardless.

FYI Thief was way out of balance at launch. They were the troll class. The playing field is much, much changed since then.

Keep at it man, explore your builds.

I’m a thief main in every game i’ve ever played, and gw2 is definitely the hardest.

Everyone else has laid out the positives already, and i’m glad your going to stick with it, so two points:

1. Look at ACro as a sub for DD. I find the passive evades more useful than the active dodge+effect style of DD.

-and-

2. Inciting the other team to dedicate 2 or 3 people to games of “Hunt the ever-evading, vaugely armored Thief” in PvP or WvW can be so, so, much fun.

I played for quite a while before rolling a thief even though the profession fascinated me. They can definitely be challenging to play well in PvP and aren’t the strongest class by any means but they fill the niche of decapping and +1ing very well. Starting out you probably should avoid most 1v1s unless you know you can win ahead of time. I haven’t encountered any hate for playing a thief but most of my recent playtime with one has been in unranked trying to get the Capricorn meta achievement. Also, I have usually switched to another class if there are two thieves on the team as thieves really do not class stack well. I would say that sticking with unranked and hotjoin would be the best idea until you feel at least decent with a class. I played a ranked game with a bad thief the other night (couldn’t even down a named on Forest of Niflhel solo) and it was very frustrating.

The Gearhead.2301:

Hey guys, I bought GW2 when it first came out, but never really played it until a week or so ago and I’ve been trying to decide which profession best fits my play-style by leveling several of them up to 20-30.

So far, I absolutely love the thief. I play a rogue in WoW, so I guess the stealthy class is just in my nature. But after doing a little bit of research on this forum, I’ve come across a lot of negative posts about the thief in end game material, making it sound nearly useless unless you’re WvW roaming (which I will be doing) but I’d like to be able to participate in some ranked PvP and even some PvE at times. Will the thief be viable in all of these aspects of the game, or should I consider rolling something else? Leaving the thief out to dry because ANet won’t take care of them will sure hurt, but I don’t want to feel totally useless when I hit level 80, either.

Any and all comments and/or advice is welcome!

Forum posts tend to be biased toward negativity. The people who love, like, or are simply satisfied with the state of thief will be more inclined to play their thief than post about it. Many of us won’t end up on here unless we have a question or complaint.

Thanks for all the advice, guys. I understand that the thief isn’t an easy class to play, and that’s part of what makes it so fun. I feel constantly engaged in the game when playing thief, unlike some other professions. In most MMO’s, I tend to steer towards the more skill based classes as they award a feeling of accomplishment when you become good at it. I think I’ll do fairly well with the thief. I have played a little on spvp, but I made the mistake of using the same build that I used at launch and it didn’t work very well. I did ok on squishy opponents and great at decapping. However, I felt weak against players that weren’t complete trash. I’ll play around with some other builds and get it figured out, but I’m still loving the immersive gameplay of the thief

Just an update on my progress as a thief in case anyone is curious, I’ve been playing some spvp lately. I came up with a build on my own, not sure how close it is to “meta” as I haven’t looked at any other builds, but it is working incredibly well for me. It’s focused mainly on precision, just like my previous build, but has a decent amount of power and ferocity along with a small amount of vitality. I didn’t want to use the spammy condition build some thieves have been using as it seems very boring. I’ve played several matches with this build and have absolutely no trouble with 1v1’s anymore, unless it’s a DH or scrapper for some reason. They’re both very tough kills, but it does happen. I’ve been winning matches and ending on the top or near the top of the scoreboard.

Needless to say, my concern with the thief has been lifted. Not only do I tear through my enemy’s HP in no time flat, but I’m also very hard to take down due to the elusiveness and quickness of the Dare Devil. So, with that, thank you to those of you who encouraged me not to give up on the thief. It’s still a mean machine, regardless of the nerfs

Edit: if anyone is curious, I can get more details on the build I’m using. I’m open to any constructive criticism.

Share the build please,

Im also new to thief and always open to try new stuff :P