Guild Wars 2

Although a lot of people say thief is extremely easy and ‘black and white to play’, for me personally that hasn’t been the case at all. Today I just crossed over 400 hours spent on my thief and I feel like I’m just beginning to get the hang of only part of the thieves weapon set combinations.

One thing I feel like thief is different than other classes is that you really have to approach each encounter differently.

My other main which is a necro (500 hours) feels way easier to play and I don’t have a problem using any weapon combination on it. In fact, my approach to any other class is extremely linear on necro: apply soft CCs (chill, cripple, etc), kite, if they are on top of me apply fear, reapply chill/blinds etc, all while using either power or condi based pressure. On my necro, I feel like if I accidentally use an attack at a wrong time, it probably won’t matter. On my thief, I feel like if I blow a pistol-whip or black powder by accident, I’ll probably die.

In addition, I find thief movement patterns are more interesting than on my necro. If I’m fighting an ele, I’m gonna try and stick right on top of them and not allow them to reset the fight with heals. If I’m fighting a warrior, I’ll be trying to confuse them by dodging and shadowstepping until their big damage or CC skills are on cooldown. I just can’t really say the same for my necro.

What do you guys think? Was thief easy for you to learn? Do you feel like it’s easier or harder than other classes?

Thief is one of the harder classes in my opinion. I played necromancer before it got cool (as in buffed to god status in pvp)and quit since now its the skilless faceroll class of pvp.
I’d even go as far to say thakittens harder than water/arcane ele, and harder than mesmer (summoning phantasms doesnt require as much skill kittenter builds though). The only class more difficult than the thief in my opinion is engineer.

I agree that playing thief necessitates various approaches depending on enemy profession and build. Admittedly, learning thief skilles is not as complicated as learning all the skills and combinations engineers or elementalists can offer, but on the same level as all the other professions. However, the thief requires the player to be very good in observing and apprehending the situation and react accordingly with good timing.

As you say, misplacing any skill puts you in a disadvantage, whereas on other classes, this doesn’t seem to be the case much. And I think thief is the only class, where movement, placement and distance to your opponent play such a big role.

In this way, thief is really exciting. What I really enjoy are encounters with classes that switch between melee weapons and ranged weapons during the fight. And depending on my opponent’s weapon type, I change strategy. I can’t say that I do this with my guardian or my engineer.

My opinion on this is kind of slanted, because the first class I really leveled up was the Engineer, and because of that pretty much everything is simple by comparison, except for Elementalists. However, I would put thieves at around 3rd or 4th in the difficulty scale, both in how to play and how to play well.

While leveling up the hardest part about the thief is figuring out that blinds are an excellent defense. Whether you run an off-hand pistol, or an off-hand dagger with Cloaked in Shadow, eventually you’ll find that blinds render the squishyness moot and most encounters become quite easy. Afterward, for anything that can’t be blind you kite and range it.

This leads to what I call the “mediocre thief” syndrome. Blind in melee + kite with range once that fails means that as a thief you can get through nearly everything in the game. However, you won’t be too stellar at it. There are many classes (warrior, guardian, ranger, necromancer) that encourage “lazy play” wherein their bulk or their class mechanics encourage more spammy and straightforward tactics, and this works because those classes are built for those straightforward tactics. If you do this on a thief and just throw blinds everywhere, you do worse than these simpler classes, but you’ll survive. However, it is here that players reach a skill “valley” that they can’t climb out of because they lack the gumption to try harder.

The first step out of that valley is learning to use skill evades and weapon evades, and this is a level that many players won’t achieve. Using skill evades requires you watch for patterns, tells, timing, and has an inherent risk to the tactic due to skill delay and server lag. You’ll require a certain amount of knowledge about the game before this can be achieved. But, once you get these skill evades, thief performance climbs. Instead of running around shooting every champion with the shortbow, suddenly you are right next to the axe warriror, flipping around and meleeing champion bosses in a beautiful display of acrobatics and cunning. You become the “tank” even though you are in pure berserker gear and have only 11k health.

PVP experiences a similar issue, but with different mechanics. Instead of blinds, the main thing that enables thieves yet holds them back is stealth. Stealth in the game is pretty powerful, making for a great offensive and defensive utility at the same time. Because of this, many players will latch on to stealth and use it wholly as their defense while they creep up and then try to burst someonedown. Like in PVE, this “works” in the sense that you can do a mediocre job in PVP by abusing the stealth + burst mechanic, however you won’t truly excel. The biggest problem being that people will learn your tactics really quickly, and once they can predict obvious movements that ambush strategy doesn’t work anymore.

The hill here is learning to use everything the thief has. But most importantly, movement skills. The defensive aspect of stealth combined with movement skills allows for a thief to quickly engage and disengage when it is appropriate, instead of “whenever stealth ends” like the noobish builds do. With this, the ability to predict a thief goes down the drain, and the thief can maintain control over the fight, so long as they can nimbly avoid the opponent while still maintaining an offense. Combine this with skill dodges for evasion, as well as interrupts to stop heals and skills, and you’ll end up with a player who is nigh invincible given any 1 vs. 1 circumstance.

To me the only profession that can be compared with thief is Ele.

A good Ele is very hard to kill and very hard to find this days in SPVP.

The problem is that most people just spam skills and do the rotation really wrong.

Is the same with thief, most of people make glass canon thief that IMO is the worst to PVP.

If you played GW1, Thief is the easiest to play since most of the mechanics in GW1 are brought into GW2 through the Thief profession.

The initiative resource is akin to the energy resource in GW1 so those who played GW1 knows how to budget this kind of resources, so the learning curve is not too bad. Survivability is also akin to Assassins in GW1 so the most important aspect of survivability is to limit the number of hits taken by being evasive.

I can understand if the Thief profession is harder to grasp for those who have not played GW1. And one thing missing in GW2 is an actual in-game profession trainer who guides players on what their profession is all about and to show them simple skill combinations to stimulate player creativity.

i say thief not a hard class to pick up be like oh yeah i need lots of practice on this to be good. it more like just need practice simple thing like zoning spacing your dodges out thinking how to spend meter properly. not like engir where you have like 5 billion set you have to thinking of swaping kit every 5 seconds LOL xD

Engineer prob hardest class but thief is hard to play really well.

Problem with thief at high level of play is that you are so squishy you can’t take any dps. You have to be aware at all times. Especially if the other team has an enemy thief. You have to know when to avoid damage and pull out and when to go on the offensive. To do that, you need skill and perfect timing of all your skills.

Necro is easy to play. Good timing makes for a better necro but any noob can pick one up and spam attacks and do well. A thief spamming hs will get destroyed.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

If you played GW1, Thief is the easiest to play since most of the mechanics in GW1 are brought into GW2 through the Thief profession.

The initiative resource is akin to the energy resource in GW1 so those who played GW1 knows how to budget this kind of resources, so the learning curve is not too bad. Survivability is also akin to Assassins in GW1 so the most important aspect of survivability is to limit the number of hits taken by being evasive.

I can understand if the Thief profession is harder to grasp for those who have not played GW1. And one thing missing in GW2 is an actual in-game profession trainer who guides players on what their profession is all about and to show them simple skill combinations to stimulate player creativity.

I agree. Transition from GW1 thief to GW2 thief is pretty nice. I picked up the GW2 thief immediately. But transition from GW1 ele and GW2 ele is not smooth at all. They’re like completely different classes.

It’s not that hard to learn how to play a thief half decent, but it has one of the highest skill ceilings in the game. There is no clear cut way on how to play in different situations, unlike with some (if not most other classes).

Which is why I like this class so much, more possibilities.

Thief has low skill floor high skill ceiling.

I bought the game 1 month ago to play as Thief, but at level 10-12 i gave up, found to hard to survive, even with a good damage. Then i switched to a Necro and faceroll every mob 2-5 level higher, but i got bored and started a Mesmer, hard class like thief, i leveled up her until level 47 then started a Guardian, another faceroll class, but i got bored too and came back to thief. Now he’s almost lvl 80 and its my main. After you get 4 Major Traits it starts to be more easy to play.

swinsk.6410:

Engineer prob hardest class but thief is hard to play really well.

I have to disagree with that because Engineer is the most easy and boring of all the profession. They are hardy and deals tons of single and AoE damage with access to multiple buffs and heals. They even have turrets to tank or dps for them.

the initiative system makes thief really easy to graps (low skill floor) but the very same initiative severely limits the facerolling tactics at some points in game (high ceiling).

Serious initiative management and proper decision making makes (at highest points) thief harder than “cooldown management classes” with an exceptions of some elementalist builds (I would say they are matched, though gameplay for them is not really comparable) and whole engineer class in its extreme (engi is THE skill ceiling of this game at this point, no discussion).

Fun thing is though, even not with highest skill ceiling, thief’s one is the best in terms of efficiency (solely due to the poor general balance in the game) – because where those elementalists and engineers quite literally “fill the gaps” in their weaknesses with high level of play, most of the time the going high on thief would means pushing one of it’s strengths to an extreme.
Its just a feature of the game where defense and offense don’t balance each other out – we are quite lucky that to be able to push our (for thieves, I mean) damage, to push our ability to survive rather than filling that gaps in our defenses and offense – that is why I consider thief to be if not the best – at least the most efficient profession in situations where game mechanics are not deliberately altered to decrease the efficiency of solely one profession.
Thieves were lucky to incorporate some of the gw1 features. Just like warriors were lucky to incorporate some of gw2 promises.

You know, I played thief so much that I made engi my main. And the moment ANET announced “all weapons for all professions” aka new skills – I deleted my old thief, together with gear, mats for legendaries, gold and guild – to start a new one.