Guild Wars 2

Greetings! I have a broad question regarding the sword on the thief— how is the damage? It always seems to take me significantly longer to kill mobs in the open world when I’m using my thief’s sword as opposed to when I’m playing my ranger and using a S/W build. Is this the case for other thieves as well? The impression I got from reading the ranger forums is that thief damage should be superior at the cost of survivability, yet my ranger does greater damage and has a much easier time surviving

You need to be a bit more specific with the Sword.

Sword/Pistol
Sword/Dagger

S/P is very powerful once you understand the GroundLock feature (glues the player ot the ground until animation stops) and teleporting. S/P is can be very difficult for some, that’s why many Thieves do not play it.

I have played S/P since release, but ArenaNet continues to nerf viable aspects of S/P to tame the Dagger thieves while never thinking “Oh yea, we forgot 1% of the players play S/P. Oh well they’re get over it”.

In all honesty, just do what all the other thieves do: use a Dagger — because ArenaNet isn’t done screwing S/P players. I joke not when I say: they do not care about S/P setup because it is the “1% Build” in the game. There for no time will be invested into the setup, or even given a second thought.

Sword/Pistol. How we love you so, but your creators didn’t love you back…..enough.
Sword/Pistol. You are a dead build, brushed off like dust on a shelf, never to be found again

Crawford.4135:

You need to be a bit more specific with the Sword.

Sword/Pistol
Sword/Dagger

S/P is very powerful once you understand the GroundLock feature (glues the player ot the ground until animation stops) and teleporting. S/P is can be very difficult for some, that’s why many Thieves do not play it.

I have played S/P since release, but ArenaNet continues to nerf viable aspects of S/P to tame the Dagger thieves while never thinking “Oh yea, we forgot 1% of the players play S/P. Oh well they’re get over it”.

In all honesty, just do what all the other thieves do: use a Dagger — because ArenaNet isn’t done screwing S/P players. I joke not when I say: they do not care about S/P setup because it is the “1% Build” in the game. There for no time will be invested into the setup, or even given a second thought.

Sword/Pistol. How we love you so, but your creators didn’t love you back…..enough.
Sword/Pistol. You are a dead build, brushed off like dust on a shelf, never to be found again

Quoted For Truth. You sir are one of my new favorite posters. We should be best friends.

Comparing sword on a thief to a sword on a ranger is silly.
Sword is atm a rangers highest DPS weapon they can have whereas for thief sword is definitely not the highest DPS weapon.

It’s like comparing a potato on a stick to a steel mace, you’re gonna have a bad time.
I’m not denying a thief’s effectiveness with sword (I run S/D on my thief and refuse to go D/D) but it still isn’t the highest damage weapon available. It is the best AoE damage since the auto is AoE and hits pretty hard.

I still run S/P in WvW but I admit that dagger builds seem to be overall better.

Anyway, on topic: Rangers sword auto does more damage. Thief sword isn’t designed for pure single target damage but for utility and cleave.