Guild Wars 2

Just wondered what peoples opinions are.

Do you think Thief will be a requirement on high level teams this season?

Nope.
A few might try but we’re still not out of the bunker meta.

The buff dindt entirely remake our profession, there are still…issues that have been there before. But for now: thief is a viable pick for direct combat, a 50% winrate should be possible even in the highest tiers, even in the past season there have been thieves claiming a top player could overcome every opponent.
Also the common +1 is still effective. no matter what others say, we still are the fastets profession and I have seen thieves carrying their team just by denying fair fights.
So yes: there might not be a thief on every team, they might not be your first choice in a lot of scenarios, but we will have our place, especially considering the huge fanbase this profession has.
Also: if you play a couple of matches, you will encounter 2.3 necros on every team. Thieves are one of the classes that can deal with them relatively good.

No. Absolutely nothing on a thief is required and most would say it is one of the weakest links on a team.

I cant say that I like having two thieves on my team, but I see no weakness in having one. We can add to fights, we will not just die and get finished, ruining a teamfight.
Enemies without a thief will either have to sacrifice players to defend points they should hold secure or have to deal with occasionally uncaps or even caps, costing vital points.
A good thief is far from beeing a weakness and who else would you pick? Scrappper, druid and reaper probably have their place secure. Revenant, elementalist and thief are competing for the last two spots. Most people would likely choose the rev too, but with already two bunkers on the team and a lot of people considering the ele underpowered, the thief is just as good a choice as the ele, if not more so.
(Warriors are not open for discussion, i cant think of any role for the mesmer, that the thief could not perform better, and guards might be a good way for idiots to kill idiots, but they havent been seen much on pro teams last season if I remember right, i doubt the nerf has changed that)

Asrat.2645:

(guards might be a good way for idiots to kill idiots, but they havent been seen much on pro teams last season if I remember right, i doubt the nerf has changed that)

Traps got nerfed, but only fairly lightly, and other aspects got buffed. If anything, at the level I play at, guardian feels stronger than it did before, if only because it does fairly well against the other professions that are common.

Mind you, I don’t play at the professional level. Still, I think it’s reasonable to say that at the very least guardian hasn’t grown substantially weaker compared to the meta.

draxynnic.3719:

Asrat.2645:

(guards might be a good way for idiots to kill idiots, but they havent been seen much on pro teams last season if I remember right, i doubt the nerf has changed that)

Traps got nerfed, but only fairly lightly, and other aspects got buffed. If anything, at the level I play at, guardian feels stronger than it did before, if only because it does fairly well against the other professions that are common.

Mind you, I don’t play at the professional level. Still, I think it’s reasonable to say that at the very least guardian hasn’t grown substantially weaker compared to the meta.

Good to know. I realize there good guardian players out there, but I believe guardian does not offer a whole lot of tools to play around with. Sure you got traps, cc, boons, healing…but in the end of the day it seems to me your enemies will either die as you hit them…or they wont. It seems like it is easy to counterplay a guard (unless you are a thief) simply since you know exactly what kinds of tools he can use and how you can avoid them.
I also know the strenghts of a ranger or a scrapper, but i cant do much about them. Same applies to thieves. For example: you know they can just appear out of nowhere, down you and ress your opponent, but you cant change it. Its not like you could avoid 1v1s or not use important cooldowns just in case a thief shows up.

Actually there was something similar when facing thne old bunkerguards: you could either attack them and waste all your dps on a hard target, or you could not attack them and have them ress their team again and again. Does anyone actually still play bunkergaurd? Does the build even work anymore?

I don’t think exactly the same build works, but if you look past the fashion for traps, you can get some pretty good sustain by combining the dragonhunter physical virtues with the stuff that kept guardian alive before. The build I typically run is a marauder meditrapper build, and I can usually hold my own against two opponents for at least long enough that my team has an opportunity to exploit the situation (by coming in and helping or at least exploiting the situation). A more bunkery build would probably do well (it’s just that some other builds might do it better).

You’re probably right in that guardians can’t do as much to secure a kill as some of the others, but if you build for it and you know what you’re doing I think there is the potential to negate some of the things that makes the others dangerous, whether on your own behalf or in a teamfight. I’m not sure if that will be enough to get it to see play in the next season, but if one of the current secure picks gets taken down I could see guardian stepping up to the plate for the one after.

Certainly, I’d be willing to take a guardian against anything 1v1 and I’ll give outnumbered fights a go depending on the circumstances – I’ve never felt that I needed to avoid a particular opponent because I just didn’t stand a chance against them with guardian, while I have felt that way with some other professions. Biggest trouble I’ve had recently was an engineer that was using a lot of knockbacks and blowouts to keep me from claiming point or finishing them off, but adding some more stability to my build would have helped there… and in the meantime, they didn’t have the point either.

(Previous disclaimer still applies, of course: I don’t play at a professional level. Guardian is probably the profession I’m most skilled at, though – I’ve been doing well with necro as well, but I don’t attribute that to my own skill…)

There’s classes that do a thief’s job almost as good as a thief does while providing more support for the team in situations where extra support is needed.
That said, I think we’re likely to see thieves in top-tier play because of the fact that they’re having a rule against Class-Stacking. So you could percieve the thief as meta, while it’d simply be picked because it’s not the worst option out there.

In normal play though, Thief can really shine under the condition that the rest of your team is actually able of playing with a thief on their team (no Necro’s, please don’t push far and leave a thief to full-cap mid…).

So all in all, Thief could certainly be percieved as “Meta”, whatever it’s suposed to mean by your standards.

The thing about the DH is that it is an easy class to play so the scrub level is high. Once you get past the typical scrubby players, there are some DH players that are absolutely devastating. It is a difficult class as an opponent to manage given equal skill and while it may not typically be as “bunker” as the current top dogs in the right hands bringing one down can feel near impossible without help.

@Straegen: Yes, that seems like a fair analysis. A lot of dragonhunters melt if you can avoid getting killed by the traps, but for the good ones traps are just another tool and they can hold their ground without them.