Guild Wars 2

Hey guys. So i’ve recently come back to the game, and i’m considering rolling a thief since my elementalist is starting to feel a little stale. I’m really drawn to the mobility, stealth and damage that the thief has. I played around with one once upon a time but never ended up levelling him to 80. I play mostly pve (a lot of solo play) with a decent amount of pvp too, and I really want to focus on raids once I gear my characters up.

So my question is: would a thief be worth playing in pve, or should I just forget about it stick with my beloved elementalist? DD looks really appealing but is it any better than the base thief in regard to pve? Thanks!

Hello Adele !

and now you are rolling in a thief
answer is no Thief is bottom tier class atm you better switch
but if you really want to thief that bad
I’d say go for it! simple

Thief is not in a great spot atm, so it’s gonna take some time to get it to work. When you do, it’s a great experience. I still love it. The main thing the DD spec adds are evades, making you less reliant on stealth. Staff in pve is pretty good though, has some nice damage.

If you want a change, just try it and have fun!

Thanks for the replies. I really like how playing a thief feels, and that’s probably more important than anything else, so I might level one anyway and hope thief gets some love soon.

Hello caerulean, thief is not in a sweet spot atm, not for his dmg but for the poor utility and unique buffs he can give to the raid.
BUT… if u know how to play a thief is completely viable even if not meta. The only difficult things is find ppl that have an open mind to understand the simple equation: skill > class
Find a nice guild like that and u will have tons of fun. fight against those that throw prejudices at our beloved profession.

Quoting myself from a previous thread ;D

EazyPanda.6419:

Hi and welcome to the thief class. Always nice to see players trying out the thief, I hope you’ll find something to love about our class, because unfortunately, we are in a bad spot in basically all game modes. We deal mediocre damage, bring nothing to parties besides blinds, stealth and some CC, and die easily.

Thief’s playstyle is much faster compared to other classes. It is one of the more difficult classes to play. But unlike Engineers and Elementalists, which is difficult to play because of the sheer amount of skills they have to juggle, the difficulty in playing the thief is the extremely low amount of survivability we have, and lack of access to boons. We rely on active damage mitigation, which means dodges, blinds, stealth, general mobility etc. Which is why thief has more of a ‘twitch’ playstyle, compared to other classes.

We do not have cooldowns on our weapons skills, and rely on initiative instead. You can look at it as the ‘Mana’ we have for skills.
This is a double edged sword, as even thoug you are able to pretty much spam powerful skills without cooldown, once we run out of initiative, we will not have access to any of out weapon skills besides auto attack, unlike other class where they can just swap weapon sets/attunements/kits and have a whole new bar of skills to use.
This is why one of the first things new thief players will have to learn is initiative management.

As for builds, build vary greatly from different game modes. In PvE, damage king, while for PvP/WvW, we need more survivability and stunbreaks.
Check out metabattle for general “optimised” builds for each game mode. But no reason to not try out every different traits and skill we have, and coming up with your own builds. You will find your own preferred skills as you play, and will develop your own playstyle.

For example, personally I will use Withdraw for almost every situation. I never use Signet of Malice and Hide in Shadows, simply because i prefer Withdraw. Are the other heal skills bad per se? No, they are extremely strong in different situations, but I’m just stubbornly in love with withdraw.

In any case, try to have fun with thief.
And good luck, you’ll need it.

Oh and join the [TEEF] guild, we’ll be happy to give out any advice we can in game~