Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone, I was wondering if the thief is good/viable for things like PvE (dungeons and fractals), PvP, and WvW. I heard that thieves are only good for their Dagger/Pistol build. Is this true or can they use other build effectively too? Also I was wondering how effective the shortbow is as a ranged weapon.

Lytro.9305:

Hey everyone, I was wondering if the thief is good/viable for things like PvE (dungeons and fractals), PvP, and WvW. I heard that thieves are only good for their Dagger/Pistol build. Is this true or can they use other build effectively too? Also I was wondering how effective the shortbow is as a ranged weapon.

If you play Dagger/Pistol, you are potentially good to go for PVP.

Shortbow is the only generally. effective ranged weapon for Thief, currently. Pistol is niche.

Other builds are weak/ineffective for PVP.

None of this matters in PVE.

D/P for pvp right now, S/P is generally where you wanna go for PVE, imo. Skill 3 on S/P deals out tons of damage and cleaves a bunch of enemies if stacking and skill 5 on pistol lets you blind all enemies in your aoe which helps a lot in stacking sometimes. I, personally, like to run a venom share S/P build for Fractals and Dungeons. Skelk Venom, Skale Venom, and Basilisk Venom for venom skills and Shadowstep+Shadow Refuge for stun break and saving teammates. Short Bow secondary weapon.

PVP: Viable? Yes. Mostly decapping and stealing objectives or +1’ing a fight.Good? If you’re good on your toes.
WVW: Viable? Yes, for roaming mostly. Good? If you like roaming.
PVE: Viable? Absolutely, if you’re good on your toes. Good? Meh, others can contribute more but you’re not a crutch if you know thief well.

Overall: Thief is most certainly viable, but in comparison (at this point in time) to other professions and the roles they can fill, they aren’t really good unless you go that extra mile to really master them.

As addendum to WvW viability, it’s amazing as periphery in blobs. Being able to instantly kill a heavy-DPS back-line ele, necro, or ranger can frankly change the entire outcome of a fight based upon one good play. This is especially useful in pirate ship using effects like Shadowstep which can bait enemies or let you spike someone as a leading engage to return/stunbreak back to safety and bait enemy cooldowns. Even doing so on an enemy commander (and possibly dying if need be) to blow important CD’s can lead to much bigger trades than 1 for 1 due to a disorganization of the enemy grouping. You just better be sure you’re playing with a sword on one of your weapon combinations, even if it means dropping shortbow.

pvp – I dislike the whole conquest system and how it affects thief so I rarely play pvp with my thief.

wvw – thief is excellent here, especially in smaller scale. In massive fights you either camp bow and risk dying really fast or stay outside the centre of fight and snipe squishy targets (my ele hates thieves in these fights). Be aware that after the recent trait change, all classes have huge burst potential now and as thief has the lowest HP, it’s easy to die fast.

pve – thief is one of the classes that are generally required for dungeons for their high dps and stealth (for skips). If you are new to the class or dungeons, I don’t recommend thief, your experience could be very painful. You need to know the fights to avoid dmg (thief defence is active) and you need to know individual dungeons where to stealth up the group and path mobs.

If you are new to dungeons, it might be easier for you to do first few runs with easy to play class like warrior, once you know what to do there, thief is a lot easier to play. Or you could ask experienced thief player to show you.