Guild Wars 2

Yeah well I hear a lot about thief in pvp and whatnot, but i dont play a lot of pvp. I do like the thief however so I wanted to ask, whats the state of the thief in PvE? Dungeons, open world, fractals? Obviously you dont have to focus so much on cc and can focus more on damage, so wich weapon sets shine the most in thsi scenario?

Thieves are pretty good in PvE for damage. They aren’t exactly support other than stealth can assist with res or skipping. Thieves do some of the best damage in the game though and can be hard to kill in dungeons if played right.

There are going to be 2 parts to the post I’m about to make: The first part is a bit of complaining (I think it’s justified) and the second part is a few questions to experienced Thieves… take your pick.

Part 1:
In my experience, my Thief is on the floor almost instantly when enemies look at him. The typical response is “l2p noob lol,” but I’ve been playing him for a while and I’ve tried every build I can think of. I try to watch and dodge, but there’s a LOTTTTT of unavoidable splash damage in this game (much of it invisible/undodgeable). You take a couple of hits, you’re done.

That combines with the fact that melee for a Thief is very dangerous in this game… and thus I feel relegated to the very lackluster Shortbow or P/P. Sure, SB has a spammable blast finisher, but the projectile speeds are slow and it just doesn’t feel “Thiefy” at all. I detest it.

Long story short, there is no reason to play a Thief over a Warrior.

Part 2:
My question to experienced Thieves, then, is: Am I missing something? I’ve tried both Backstab builds and Sword/* AoE builds, and I seem to do little damage and die very quickly. I’ve read some guides, but I just don’t seem to be getting it right… unless the guides are all rose-colored hype.

Open world – Any class works since very few events (Tequatl maybe) have a high enough difficulty to make a difference. Thief is probably not the class to take for champ farming.
Dungeons – Fine. Can get everything done. Can use a variety of builds. Most groups won’t turn down one thief.
Fractals – Same as dungeons. More skill needed to hide thief weaknesses in high level fractals.

Heavy classes seem to deliver more for less and you need more in high end fractals. Speed runners like getting more reward for less work too.

i main a thief, and i spend my time mostly doing dungeons. I would say yes, thieves are perfectly viable in PvE. I’ve played quite a few classes, and optimized for dmg output, i’d say thieves are pretty much at the top (along with mesmers).

You are VERY squishy, tough. I run 48+ fractals regularly on my thief, and in my experience you really can’t go full berserker for this, nor should you want to. IMO you need to make some compromises for toughness, vitality and healing. Here are my stats/traits:
build: 25/30/0/15/0
armor: full zerker
runes: full divinity
weapons: zerker and/or assassin

trinkets (ascended)
rings: 1 zerker/1 knights
ammy: zerker (the one with 18 vit as well)
accessories: both zerker (18 vit each)
back: zerker

in terms of zerker stats (off the top of my head) i’ve got about 3.3K attack, 72% crit chance, 107% crit dmg bonus, but with 14k hp and some toughness for survivability.

TL;DR – thieves are great for PvE but need to make gear sacrifices to be viable (unlike warr)

my suggestion is to:
make a build with PVT gear, until you learn how to dodge properly.
with time, you go step by step into zerker gear, and put PVT aside
simple

playing thief is like driving a weelchair down a staircase while firering a uzi"
fun, rough ride & kamikaze