Guild Wars 2

My partner and I both made characters a few months ago that we got to level 80 together and have been doing dungeons/fractals/wvw/world bosses with since. I levelled an Ele, she levelled a Guardian.

We’re not ‘bored’ of our classes but we’d like a little bit more versatility to keep things fresh. I already have an 80 warrior as well but she doesn’t have anything else. We’re looking for new classes to make together and I was wondering what the best choice for her would be and thought Thief would be a good shout.

My reasoning being:

1) She doesn’t have a Medium armour class yet so it’ll be ‘exciting’ for her to have a new style of armour.

2) Stealth seems to be very helpful in Fractals/Dungeons and seeing as I don’t run with thieves often it’d be nice to have a more frequent player using one.

3) She can get up close and personal but can also deal pretty decent damage with ranged weapons if she’s struggling to survive (correct me if I’m wrong).

The only reasons I can think of why she wouldn’t be great at playing is because they’re apparently pretty squishy and I’m worried she won’t really pick up on how to play the class (I’ve only briefly played a thief and found it a tad confusing at first).

So my question is, how difficult is it to play a thief? Do you need to cycle through a lot of skills or is most of it basic attacking? Is survivability a real issue? She’s a good player but not amazing yet, she can definitely play but she still doesn’t properly grasp what different skills do most of the time (mainly utlity skills and traits) so I wanted something as simple as possible without going down the boring warrior route.

Thanks in advance.

Hi Grimezy, sounds like you guys have a lot of fun together!

Thief is easy to learn, hard to master, so she should be fine to start her journey! Just keep in mind:
*Initiative Management
*Patience in Stealth (if stealth)
*Timing for Dodges

Our survival traits are in the Shadow Arts and Acrobatics line. People generally pick one or the other. The new grandmaster in SA may be a great group utility to help your whole group survive (or she can do venom share to make the group do more damage).

For maximum group utility, she should spend 6 in SA, and at least 2 in Trickery (thrill of the crime, or 4 points and also pick up bountiful theft). If she dipped 3 into trickery, she’d start with a larger initiative pool, as well.

Survivability is fine. Like any other class, pick either condi or physical damage and gear around that. As a new thief, start with more defense stats and slowly find your “sweet spot” of damage/protection. Survivability becomes an issue when you go Zerker before mastering thief.

Good luck!

If you guys want to spvp duel look me up in game and I’ll give some more pointers.

Pve is easy with black powder spam or jst constant back stabs survivability is a big issue and is very hard to getting use to compared to a war or guard. We gain survivabilty by either stealth or constant dodging basically. Theres not really cycling unless its jst a one trick pony build most situations depends on wht your facing. At first most ppl spam moves because theres no cd but you need to learn to keep your inti pool up and ready to use