Guild Wars 2

Thieves. We all know em. We all kinda love em in our own little way. The problem however is their usefulness.

Personally, I’ve made my main class to play as a thief. This class as I came to realize, was not meant to be that easy to play. Nevertheless, all us die hard thief fans played it continuously, adapting to every change that net threw at us.

I would like to point out however that as thieves, we rarely hit a button on our skill bar without reason.

You need to dodge that killing blow? Done.
You need to stealth a downed ally? Done.

Thieves have always been looked up to for our mobility and the stealth capabilities. Not to mention the damage we could put out in a matter of seconds in hard to win scenarios.

However now, we are frowned upon. Our skills are not necessary to complete raids unless we run massive amounts of dps. Condi is also viable however is frowned upon outside of anywhere but raids.

As a community we have been thrown some very nice buffs to our class. The auto attack? Beautiful. I enjoy being able to slow down slightly when fighting Mordrem in the jungle. However, other buffs such as the ones made to Acro are not so beautiful.

How many builds out there actually use Acrobatics in their traits?

I’ll pull up Metabattle here and see a whopping 0 builds that actually use Acro.

http://metabattle.com/wiki/MetaBattle_Wiki

None of our builds are focused on our survivability. They focus on the fact we can push out high amounts of damage. They forget that with no trinkets or armour or weapons effecting our vitality we have a total of 12,577 health at level 80. Some things in Magma have torn through that amount, in the same time it takes me to chew through Ascalonian Catacombs.

As much as the class is loved for it’s massive damage, we do not have the capabilities to survive unless we use things that go against current Meta’s.

Anet, as much as I love them, seems to misunderstand that Meta is something that is forced upon some people.

Personally I have seen people out there who even on casual runs will enforce a meta. Be it dungeon, or raid, or just screwing around.

Truthfully, I wanted to share my perspective on the thief class as a whole. It’s not bad but it could be much better.

Thank you all for reading this post and if you bothered to get this far without exclaiming at my thought patterns, then an extra big thank you to you.

The meta mentality is cancer. Don’t blame Anet for not fully adhering to it; blame them for their bad design choices or their lack of action when things need changing.

I’d say the main problem with thief is that we don’t have a clear role anymore, especially in raid environments. Stealth is crap in pve, and where it isn’t, it is exploited rampantly or provided from another class more effectively, and our mobility doesn’t fit well into encounter designs, particularly in larger scale. Maybe if we had any raid dps support, say boon spread or some ‘unique’ raid buff, we’d have a reason other than dps and interrupts to bring us. Why mesmers got alacrity (aside from it thematically making sense) and not thief still perplexes me, seeings how we have kitten for group support if the group isn’t faltering.

I’d say the main problem is all the bugs. I really would. I’d enjoy sigil of paralyzation, mesmer runes, correctly function scorpion wire and impairing dagger, more valid pathways, no more sticks after a DD dodge, etc etc. I’d really enjoy any of these.

Demonic.9852:

They forget that with no trinkets or armour or weapons effecting our vitality we have a total of 12,577 health at level 80.

Oh man, you have 12,577 hp at 80? You’re lucky; I only have 11,645 hp at level 80 on my thief, with full ascended and legendaries.

Silverbolt.2301:

Demonic.9852:

They forget that with no trinkets or armour or weapons effecting our vitality we have a total of 12,577 health at level 80.

Oh man, you have 12,577 hp at 80? You’re lucky; I only have 11,645 hp at level 80 on my thief, with full ascended and legendaries.

He is probably including the WvW bonus.

Survivability is not a problem. Unhindered combatant, driven fortitude, escapist absolution, invigorating precision, assassins reward, black powder. Some of them viable in pve, some in pvp, some in both + several more i dont want to list.
For pve you can easily run a full zerker thief without dying as long as youre awake, just sacrifice some traits for it. Unless you want to play meta ofc, but i dont see why anyone would want to play thief pve meta unless youre in a perfect group where dmg is all that counts.
But thats just my opinion tho. I do not die in pve unless its actually my fault, pvp is more tricky but even there you can always just run of and cap some other point.
The damage has been more of a problem, we should be top tier, if not the best, its simply the classes’ concept. Theyve tried to adress that issue, I cant yet judge if they were successfull.
Oh. And the acrobatics: thats the whole point. the traitline was useless, they were trying to change that. I liked it before, I like it now. for pvp at least, wouldnt take it into a fractal.

What buff? You can’t have 50% movement speed in stealth anymore. If anything shadow arts got buffed. Too bad, I really liked having vigor upon dodging and that movement speed at the same time at least in PvE.

Agemnon.4608:

What buff? You can’t have 50% movement speed in stealth anymore. If anything shadow arts got buffed. Too bad, I really liked having vigor upon dodging and that movement speed at the same time at least in PvE.

It got moved to Hidden Thief.

yolo swaggins.2570:

Agemnon.4608:

What buff? You can’t have 50% movement speed in stealth anymore. If anything shadow arts got buffed. Too bad, I really liked having vigor upon dodging and that movement speed at the same time at least in PvE.

It got moved to Hidden Thief.

It is much a much better fit in SA as well.

babazhook.6805:

yolo swaggins.2570:

Agemnon.4608:

What buff? You can’t have 50% movement speed in stealth anymore. If anything shadow arts got buffed. Too bad, I really liked having vigor upon dodging and that movement speed at the same time at least in PvE.

It got moved to Hidden Thief.

It is much a much better fit in SA as well.

It was the only logical choice.

Asrat.2645:

Theyve tried to adress that issue, I cant yet judge if they were successfull.

They were NOT. There’s still zero incentive to take a thief over anything else into raids…except for pity. You feel bad for that individual who only has a thief geared?…well, take pity on them and carry them through.

yolo swaggins.2570:

babazhook.6805:

yolo swaggins.2570:

Agemnon.4608:

What buff? You can’t have 50% movement speed in stealth anymore. If anything shadow arts got buffed. Too bad, I really liked having vigor upon dodging and that movement speed at the same time at least in PvE.

It got moved to Hidden Thief.

It is much a much better fit in SA as well.

It was the only logical choice.

How do you figure that? Acro was subpar as it was and now it’s even worse without that trait. Now there’s really no reason to take acro over shadow arts since now that it only really offers vigor on dodge. I mean it’s good but shadow arts just offers so much more. All they did was redistribute one of the only good traits in acro to shadow arts.

Acro had one of the best concepts for boons since you actually have to earn your vigor by dodging but the traitline was good before the patch due to the extra stealth speed but now it’s just bad. I think every class’s boon generation through traits needs to have the same active play concept.

Agemnon.4608:

yolo swaggins.2570:

babazhook.6805:

yolo swaggins.2570:

Agemnon.4608:

What buff? You can’t have 50% movement speed in stealth anymore. If anything shadow arts got buffed. Too bad, I really liked having vigor upon dodging and that movement speed at the same time at least in PvE.

It got moved to Hidden Thief.

It is much a much better fit in SA as well.

It was the only logical choice.

How do you figure that? Acro was subpar as it was and now it’s even worse without that trait. Now there’s really no reason to take acro over shadow arts since now that it only really offers vigor on dodge. I mean it’s good but shadow arts just offers so much more. All they did was redistribute one of the only good traits in acro to shadow arts.

Acro had one of the best concepts for boons since you actually have to earn your vigor by dodging but the traitline was good before the patch due to the extra stealth speed but now it’s just bad. I think every class’s boon generation through traits needs to have the same active play concept.

There is a reason to take acro. Hard to Catch and Don’t Stop. Hard to catch is a free stun break and endurance gain that doesn’t require user input. Don’t Stop removes the thief-exclusive hard countering aspect of immobilize, cripple and chilled and turns them into inconveniences. Maybe the only reason why that trait was was the only good one was because you were trying to use an evasion line in a stealth build?