Guild Wars 2

Hi! Just wanted to know if ill have trouble finding raid group with my thief and if we are valuable in most of raid group

I do not have overly much experience in raids, but from what i figured:
-We deal the second highest dps, the top dps is also quite hard to pull of, so for many teams we might be the best dd.
-Theoretically we can take the tank role, but I dont think its easy.

Generally you can say, that we bring damage but nothing else and we are very reliant on our teams boons to do our job.
So my personal opinion: Thief does add to the team and can prove valuable, but only if both the team and the thief know what they are doing.
Unfortunately there are a lot of bad thieves out there. Pug thieves are a risk, even in fractals, probably more so in raids. So if I was organizing a raid, i’d be wary of thieves too to be honest.

It is also in general not easy to fing pug raid groups, you might wanna join an lfg guild.
Your chances should also increase drastically, if you can offer an alternative class, not even because the weakness of thief, more due to flexibility.
Most hardcore guilds want their recruits to have at least two classes mastered and geared, and there is a reason for that.

Alright thanks for advice! Getting pretty good on power scrapper is it a thing in raid too?

I rly dont think so. Engi features too much conditiondamage to be doing anything else.
But in the beginning, due to uncommon and expensive gear and complex rotations, there were engis getting paid to join raid groups as condamagedealer, should still be a good build to find a group.

Thief is the least valuable class in a raid; I’ve never thought ‘this comp really needs a thief’. That said their DPS is fine, and if everything else is already covered I don’t mind a thief as filler for the last roster spot.

Furthermore a thief has very little ability to carry; you provide nothing to the team beyond adequate DPS, so in contrast to say a druid or mesmer where a top tier player makes a huge difference, the difference between an adequate thief and a great thief is very small.

I think that unless you are a known commodity to an established raiding group you’re going to have a lot of trouble finding raid groups that can actually clear the bosses. You’re basically looking to get into that last ‘we just need a DPS’ spot once all the important roles are filled. Groups that have everything else down solid are likely to have a long friends list of people they can invite as a DPS filler, and groups that don’t have the rest down solid, or that invite a thief before filling those roles, is more likely than not going to be wiping on VG over and over.

This thread makes me sad.

Welcome to how us Necros and rangers felt during the all time high of elitism in dungeons. My best advice is go re-roll a useful class.

Thieves aren’t welcome in raids. Roll a warrior for dps with more survivability.

Thiefs are, sadly, not welcomed. It’s harder for them to find a raid group, it used to be a class more fit for pvp and WvW, and in some dungeons they have no problem bc their stealth is useful… But now they lack dps and their is health is laughable, they also can’t do the condition damage necro/reaper does, so raids would rather have warriors when mobility is already taken care of.

I frequently find the group saying “alright, we’ve got everything covered. let’s get an ele or thief”

also, if squishiness is an “issue”, thief dps is high enough that you could probably run half marauder and invigorating precision (or just full marauder and zerker+valk trinkets) and still do higher dps than most classes

Lol if you’re ever looking for a thief look me up. I’ve yet to be allowed to be in a raid because they’d rather have ANY other class.

Just watched WoodenPotatoes guide to the new raid. He says that thief works rather nicely and played it himself as well. Altho he did say that once you got the raid down you can move to something else, but for learning encounters thief is nice since your highest damage is just AA and you can concentrate on the raid mechanics more. Thief also has reflect in AA and it seems that reflects are needed in the Slothasor fight.

Here is the link to the video when he mentions thiefs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVxxkhEEI1Y&feature=youtu.be&t=610

Of course ele has better reflects and damage so yeah… But I think ele is a tad bit harder to play than auto attacking thief. And as someone mentioned, there isn’t much difference between a subpar thief and a good thief since all you do is aa, this said, isn’t thief a safer choice in pugs?

Wait – what?

Do not take offence, but maybe you wanna check your skill tooltips (you don’t even need to do the math) before assuming AA is the thief’s highest damage output and base all your reasoning on that. ><

No, AA doesn’t have the highest DPS. And yes, the difference between a good thief and a bad one is abyssal, in therms of survivability, or, apparently, in therms of DPS.

Sir Mad.1092:

Wait – what?

Do not take offence, but maybe you wanna check your skill tooltips (you don’t even need to do the math) before assuming AA is the thief’s highest damage output and base all your reasoning on that. ><

No, AA doesn’t have the highest DPS. And yes, the difference between a good thief and a bad one is abyssal, in therms of survivability, or, apparently, in therms of DPS.

Well that is what metabattle says (all hail metabattle). With quickness AA should be the highest dps. Without quicness there is just couple of Weakening Charges and AA.

Rotation Staff with Quickness
1. Dodge into Target to get Bounding Dodger and Staff Master

2. Fist Flurry or Staff Strike -> Staff Bash -> Punishing Strikes
? Repeat until Endurance is almost full

3. Repeat from step 1

And here is a no updraft Gorseval kill with pretty much just AA.

Sir Mad.1092:

Wait – what?

Do not take offence, but maybe you wanna check your skill tooltips (you don’t even need to do the math) before assuming AA is the thief’s highest damage output and base all your reasoning on that. ><

No, AA doesn’t have the highest DPS. And yes, the difference between a good thief and a bad one is abyssal, in therms of survivability, or, apparently, in therms of DPS.

If you have quickness (assuming you’re using staff here) then AA is higher DPS than every other staff skill, and you should only dodge to keep endurance below full. This is because all the staff’s other skills (not staff 4), as well as bound, are movement abilities and are thus unaffected by quickness, so the AA essentially gets a 50% DPS boost over them. The AA also comes with a free whirl finisher and projectile reflect for a little extra damage.
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I am actually really confused by all the people saying that thief is bad in raids. Their DPS is super high, probably the best in the game against a moving target (ele loses some damage when the boss moves out of Dagger 3 while thief loses nothing if a boss moves). They’re also a lot easier to play than elementalist, which is really the class they’re competing against for spots in raid groups.

I guess I don’t pug raids often, but we use thief all the time for every boss besides sloth. Thief tank is easy as kitten against VG (whoever said it’s hard was wrong, it is absurdly easy) and can keep up OK damage. DPS is great against gors, DPS is great against sab and you have shadowstep to run bombs. It’s kinda mediocre against sloth, but it’s great against bandit trio for mobility + break bar on mortar launchers. I know we had one for our matthias kill last week as well, though I believe it was just for general DPS with some break bar action. We did our clear at reset last night, and I think we wound up with like 4 thieves for sabetha? At least 3 for sure. Granted we let people play what they want for the most part and probably would bring like 0-1 for a speed run, but it goes to show that thief isn’t bad for the raids at all.

I guess maybe people are stuck on ele being the toppest DPS or something, but thief isn’t far behind and does have several advantages over ele (better quick CC, shadowstep better than blink, free whirl+reflect in rotation, easier to play adequately, DPS doesn’t decrease against a moving target).

I mean yeah you don’t ever need a thief in a group because they have no group buffs (only fight I would always bring one is bandit trio), so maybe in that sense they are the least desirable? But it isn’t like they’re unusable or even remotely bad, and I think the negativity towards them in this thread is misleading.

Don’t get me started on metabattle.

Yeah, indeed, if you’re using a staff, you have only 3 real attack skills – AA, #2, and #5 – and the last 2 are not affected by quickness. But the video about Gorseval speaks for itself: check the combat log – indeed, the guy is not mindlessly spamming #2 and #5 till he runs out of initiative, but it’s not a Fire Elemental fight where you spam 1 either:

- You have to micromanage your endurance bar to never keep it full (and heck, it refills fast when you use initiative) and yet save it when needed.
- You have to pay attention to your buffs to see what rotation you must use depending on whether you have quickness or not, and carefully chose between a Charge and Vault.

It’s a lot about the UI in a game that pretends not to be about the UI, on top of the real fight.

I mean… Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s the most difficult job, but when you add to the mix the combat mechanics and the paper armor, that’s a lot of things to pay attention to, and I’m not convinced at all thieves are the easiest profession and there’s almost no difference between a bad thief and a good thief. And for that matter, I don’t think the bad reputation thieves have comes from nowhere – yeah, there are a lot of bad thieves out there (and just to be clear, I’m not sure I consider myself a good thief).