Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, Rand x Althor here, i thought it might be a good idea to discuss the current state of the thief. Below i have outlined my opinion on the thief in some different areas of the game. Please feel free to comment on them if you agree or disagree, and please post your own opinion of the state of the thief. Are we OP, UP, just right? Well give us a write up explaining why!

PVE
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How is the thief in PVE? Well, i would have to say the thief is in a pretty decent spot overall in pve. PVE can be split further into 2 main parts: dungeons, and open world. Thief does very well in open world pve. Short bow and sword/pistol allow you to be a god walking amonst mere mortals. You can tag lots of mobs with shortbow or facetank veterans or champions using your blinding powder fields. For dungeons we are often wanted for our blast finishers and our amazing single target dps. If you have a teammate that can drop water or fire fields your whole team can benefit greatly from a thief using a shortbow to clusterbomb the fields for team buffs/heals. The dagger on thief can put out some amazing dps for a single target while poisoning and possibly weakening your foe. Because dungeon bosses have very high hp, heartseeker becomes one of the best skills in the game. The 25% portion of health that is so important for heartseeker is large enough for you to outdps almost any other class (especially if you take the executioner trait). You can trait to give out fury, might, and swiftness for your team on steal which is a nice bonus when killing those pesky bosses. One of the best utilities a thief brings to dungeons is shadow refuge. It allows you to stealth res teammates and skip content that isnt rewarding to the party.

WVW
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WvW seems to be a major focus for thieves. Anybody who has solo roamed in WvW knows that thieves are by far the most common roamers. Thieves have many good dueling specs, can fight 1vX if the thief is very skilled, and most importantly have amazing mobility and escapability. Some of the most common thief builds in wvw are stealth backstab builds. Many thieves run dagger/dagger or dagger/pistol with an emphasis on stealthing as much and as long as possible. Recently i have seen pistol/dagger bleed thieves start to pop up more frequently and sword/pistol is once again becoming more popular. Why do you guys think this is? I know pistol/dagger has gotten a couple of small buffs recently, but with the current condi meta, everybody seems to be running condi cleanses in abundance, so i’m not really sure why people would start switching to pistol/dagger now.

SPVP
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Hotjoin pvp. In my opinion, engis, necros, and thieves are in the best place for getting glory and rank points. Engis can easily spec to be very mobile and have lots of condi/power aoe they can use to tag enemies and get to points easily. Necros are very strong right now with their aoe condi attacks and can easily change the tide of a zerg fight on point. Many playeres in hotjoin pvp are new to the pvp scene and a lof of these new players struggle with deception based classses like thieves and mesmers. The class mechanics (especially stealth) make it hard to keep a target on the thief or mesmer, which can be detrimental to new payers. A decent thief can easily get 8-10 kills in a hotjoin match and is mobile enough to cap points as well. This can make thief seem OP to newer players, or to players who have never touched tournament pvp.

TPVP
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In TPVP thief is doing pretty well. After the major balance patch about a month ago thieves have been appearing on tournament teams again. The most popular builds by far are glass cannon backstab builds (usually dagger/pistol for the utility) and the sword/dagger evasive boonsteal builds like the one made popular by jumper (which still hit like a truck). After the large patch steal got quite a few buffs and pistol whip’s aftercast changed, and some players (including myself) have started to use it in tourney play again (although i admit i rarely see other thieves using it). I think sword/dagger and sword/pistol currently make great farpoint assaulters as the current meta has a spirit ranger on the enemies home point. The cleaves from sword can easily kill a spirit ranger if the spirits are clumped on top of the player. Infiltrator’s strike’s shadow return can also be very helpful against the skullcrack hundred blades warrior (if you dont have a stunbreak off CD) and it can help clear a condi or two (im looking at you burning).

Conclusion
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Overall I think thief is in a pretty good place. We aren’t underpowered in any areas of the game, and we aren’t over the top in any parts of the game either. We are pigeon-holed into a few specific builds if you are wanting to be effective, but what class isn’t? If you want a fun balanced class consider the thief.

Please note that i am not an expert thief, or a pro player. I am just someone who is passionate about the thief class and would like to see some community opinions on our class.

think you highlight the bright points well. but i also think you forgot to keep the big picture in perspective.

I’ve switched from my d/d condition build to a high mobility s/p build in favor of initiative regen and Assassin’s Reward to allow me to abuse Shadow Return when facing condition-heavy opponents. I’m actually quite shacked that thieves are just now getting to conditions and sacrificing stun breaks due to the counter-meta being CC-heavy. It’s quite awkward to say, but the direction of the meta is shifting from conditions to CC, and the counter to CC is high mobility with an abundance of stun breaks. So s/p is a transition from the counter-meta to the counter-counter-meta, if you follow.

Travlane.5948:

think you highlight the bright points well. but i also think you forgot to keep the big picture in perspective.

I agree. You bring up some great points about Thief PVE, and I like that you’re not all gloom and doom like most posts are on that subject.

However, the state of Thief PVE is, in fact, abysmal. We can’t do anything that a Warrior can’t do much better. Warrior DPS is completely through the roof and needs to be nerfed, but that’s a separate point. Outside the 2-3 things you mentioned, our group utility is non-existent. Combine that with the tendency for the Thief to faceplant on the ground every ten seconds and, well, almost any other class is better at PVE than the Thief.

By the way, don’t forget the rather pitiful state of Pistol/Pistol.

To be fair, warrior is way ahead of everyone else in PvE after the healing signet buff in particular. But thief could stand to be buffed a bit for PvE. Need more mitigation, sustain. Damage I would say is fine though. Could also use more group utility.

Pawstruck.9708:

Travlane.5948:

think you highlight the bright points well. but i also think you forgot to keep the big picture in perspective.

I agree. You bring up some great points about Thief PVE, and I like that you’re not all gloom and doom like most posts are on that subject.

However, the state of Thief PVE is, in fact, abysmal. We can’t do anything that a Warrior can’t do much better. Warrior DPS is completely through the roof and needs to be nerfed, but that’s a separate point. Outside the 2-3 things you mentioned, our group utility is non-existent. Combine that with the tendency for the Thief to faceplant on the ground every ten seconds and, well, almost any other class is better at PVE than the Thief.

By the way, don’t forget the rather pitiful state of Pistol/Pistol.

I’ll admit i tend to be a little too optimistic, but i still think the points in my post stand. We definitely do struggle with certain parts of pve, and everybody can agree that p/p needs some major love. Its just a very confused weaponset (condi? power?). I don’t spend as much time in pve as i do in the other parts of the game, so i’m by no means an exper there (i have like fractal level 9 right now), but i do think thieves are better than they get credit for in pve. Thieves do, in fact, have better dps on a single target than a warrior does (so do eles if the target can be pulled up against a wall), but a warrior brings very good buffs for the entire team. I ran COE with my pvp friends the other day and we ran it with 1 ranger, 2 thieves, 1 engi, and a warrior the engi would drop a fire field for us and between the engi’s blast finishers and the thieves using clusterbomb we would all have 25 stacks of might before every boss fight and could finish it before the fight ended (plus 2x thrill of the crime and for great justice meant easy perma fury). Another example is the record COF run. The group consisted of 1 ranger, 1 mesmer, 2 thieves, and a warrior. Thieves are slowly starting to be accepted into dungeons more, and i think its because the player base is starting to realize a thief can bring more to a fight than one might expect. Pve content can be very kitten a glass thief at first, but after you learn the mechanics you can put out insane damage while using evades to avoid being hit (if you are hit you’ll probaly drop though). I dont know if thieves are viable in high level fractals, but i would assume they are okay even if they are suboptimal.

Regarding WvW and P/D rise. You need to keep in mind that most players in WvW are not very good at PvP outside of following a zerg and pveing champions & veteran npcs P/D offers very good mobility / evasion against melee classes, 95% of players in WvW have no clue how to deny CnD and usually spam evade even before you actually attack them (that if they notice you first) etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone made a video with P/P sitting in BPs and chain killing some peeps w/e.

Now that cof p1 farm is gone and peeps are doing more paths of more dungeons am sure a thief will get back into the game, and those who know how to play and adapt to encounters, switching weapons etc, communicating with their team and so on and so forth, will stand out and become wanted in groups.
Can’t speak for fractals high levels as I didn’t bother with them (is the only game where I had no aim for high end pve content and epic gear, am using strictly exotic gear as I don’t like the lack of customization on ascendant gear etc).

P/P needs a drastic change, either make it a condi weapon or a power one, the mix doesn’t really work good at all since your first 2 attacks apply conditions (3 with stealth attack), your DW skill is a power attack, and 4&5 are utilities. Preferable would be to make Unload into a good bleed & burning (or torment) applier, so pistol mainhand remains the single target condi weapon, and D/D aoe version of it.

Very good thread!

WvW
We’re still the best roamers. A good thief will rarely die and can troll zergs or small roaming groups.

PvP
The fact that stealth doesn’t cap is a huge draw back for the thief. But luckily we have burst damage to compensate for that. We are really good far point assaulters, and the new rise of S/P is great! Did anyone say perma stun? Thief can do that.

PvE
There’s a misconception that thieves are useless or inferior to other classes for all PvE content. Not true. As the OP already said; S/P and shortbow makes us walking gods for general PvE content. In dungeons we are out dps’ed by warriors (who isn’t), but that doesn’t make us inferior… A lot of thieves that’s still new to the class will run full berserker and doesn’t know what to look for – these are the thieves that’s usually used as floor rags by the dungeon mobs and bosses. But take a look at more experienced thieves. A thief that really know his profession and his utilities, skills, traits and weapons. A thief with knowledge over these things can be a huge addition to any team!

Smoke screen can completely lock down ranged enemies and defend against melee enemies. It can also be used to stack stealth to skip certain parts of the dungeon, the same applies to shadow refuge. Did anyone need those boons gone from the boss or defiance stripped? No problem!

Thief needs serious improvement in large scale fights. Right now, in the MEGA BLOB meta, thieves are good for one thing, blasting. Even then with the sheer amount of people in these fights, you don’t really need a thief to blast. I rerolled as a guardian a long time ago because thief wasn’t worth it anymore.

Doomdesire.9365:

Thief needs serious improvement in large scale fights. Right now, in the MEGA BLOB meta, thieves are good for one thing, blasting. Even then with the sheer amount of people in these fights, you don’t really need a thief to blast. I rerolled as a guardian a long time ago because thief wasn’t worth it anymore.

The mega blob meta is just stupid, and I completely disagree with you. We’re a melee duelist profession – why should we be on par with other professions in WvW large scale combat. We are the best roamers, and we shouldn’t be the best at everything.

Things we can do:

• Cut off supply lines
• Run supply
• Flip camps and sentries
• Cut off reinforcements
• Deal with the ranged damage dealers in the back
• Assassinate the commander
• Troll blobs to distract them
• Troll people in general
• Kill other roamers
• Be mobile finishers (we have access to all of them)
• Revive fallen or downed allies
• Block off projectiles to shelter our allies

These are some of the things we can do. I think that professions should be balance different. Guardians should be, well, guardians that protect their allies while smashing skulls in the front lines. Warriors should be the main damage dealers and front line fighters, rallying their troops to victory. Thieves should be the ones assassinating key professions or players. Elementalists should be the ranged damage dealers. And so on, you get my point. We’re excellent roamers and assassins, why should we be better in blobs than we already are?

In PvE and dungeons I never feel like I have trouble surviving. I do think I’m forced into range with the shortbow a bit too often and it results in lower dps than another profession could provide though.

WvW has thief still being very strong. Not being forced to stay on a small circle is a big boon for us. Perma stealth and very high mobility makes the thief a very good profession here. Cluster bomb really shouldn’t have been dropped down to 900 range though.

I find your analysis of spvp/tpvp to be accurate. Once a player learns positioning and when to jump into the fray he becomes quite powerful. Sometimes I feel our base hp a bit low in this area though.

As a PvE Thief who often does dungeons I’m very happy with the current state of my class. Couldn’t ask for anything more.