Guild Wars 2

We all know how thief is compared to other classes in PvP (Terrible.)

So I wanted to ask everyone how you feel about thief compared to other classes as far as PvE is concerned?

I feel as though thief is also lackluster in PvE compared to other classes.

-We lack multiple ways of condition clearing.
- HP is TOO kitten LOW.
-Cant think of anything else.

How do you guys feel?

Thieves are pretty good in PVE.

*Best class for blind spam, giving them high defensive utility for the whole group.
*Access to projectile destruction and reflection.
*Best blast finisher in the game.
*Very high single target damage. Best in the game last I checked.
*A lot of access to disables and defiance stripping/bar breaking skills.
*Group swiftness, fury, and vigor. The group vigor is quite rare.
*Spammable evades. This makes them great at meleeing otherwise difficult bosses.
*High self healing.
*Boon Removal, either a bit or a lot depending on the build.
*Good access to weakness.
*Best access to stealth. This means a lot, regarding skipping to aggro management.
*Though currently not used too much due to how rarely enemies heal themselves, they have good access to poison.
*Their spammable shadowsteps means they can bypass a lot of area effects.
*Spammable condition cleanse.
*On condi specs, decent at might and vulnerability.
*Low cooldowns means power builds can run 3 signets + one utility, and the team doesn’t suffer from it.
*Capable of spamming every combo finisher in the game.

All in all, no one is going to look at you and go “ew, a thief. reroll to a real class plz!”. As for their flaws…

*Weak ranged game. Don’t have far range or that much damage at it.
*Mediocre Combo Fields. Smoke fields are a mixed bag, because while blasting stealth in them is an effective tactic, it can mess things up when one overrides a fire field.
*Melee builds are bad at self-buffing, having little to no access to might or vulnerability.
*Requires being beside or behind enemies to do the best damage. With stealth this isn’t always a problem, but it isn’t uncommon for damage to be kitten by a twisty enemy.

Other than the range game, I wouldn’t call those much of a deficiency.

Yes blinds, group stealth, pulls, swiftness…all helpful in a group situation.

people keep saying blinds, but in most cases how often does a blind field stay on the ground before it’s over-written by a guardian / ele / etc?

Pistol 5, Blinding Powder, Signet of Shadows.

They all blind.

problem seems to be behind the keyboard.

They’re good for blind field (pulsing on mobs) and group stealth for skipping trash. They are also quite good at stripping the break bar off of champions, and have solid if unspectacular DPS (roughly on par with Guardian).

They certainly aren’t the PvE superstars that Ele/Warrior/Guard are, but are a reasonable class to round out a group.

rogerwilko.6895:

people keep saying blinds, but in most cases how often does a blind field stay on the ground before it’s over-written by a guardian / ele / etc?

Guardian blind is limited. It’s super efficient against trash mobs that die quickly, but try to blinds a big group of enemies at the Ascalon Fractal 50 and you’ll find that you group will get hit a couple of times before the first one die and you can keep the blind coming.

Elementalist have a long duration long cooldown blind. It’s powerful for big fight, but not that useful when you have some quick successive fight. Glyph of storm is also better in air for the vulnerability. Remember that Warrior don’t put as much vulnerability as they used to and Thief, Elementalist and Warrior all lost their 30% condition duration from traits (not sure about Ele). So it’s harder to get max vulnerability early in a fight without the glyph of storm in air.

On the other end, Thief have a decent balance with a 30sec CD blind field (half the CD of Glyph and 2 second duration less), while D/P allow you almost a perma blind field for short to medium duration fight.

In brief, Elementalist is better for big fight but otherwise it’s a waste of vulnerability. Guardian is only good against large quantity of trash, while Thief can fill almost all situation. Usually, the best is when they all work together to support each other and almost have the right tools for different situation.

The specialisation wasn’t kind to the thief tho. Where everybody was buffed a lot by the patch (Guardian when from 8-9k to 12-14k in dps), the thief didn’t move a lot in the DPS department. He lost a lot of damage modifier and wasn’t buff by the additional stats from gear (he already had 300 power, precision and ferocity from trait).

But even if it’s dps isn’t nearly as impressive as it used to be against single target, the thief still have a lot of support/utilities to bring to a team.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Thieves are pretty good in PVE.

*Best class for blind spam, giving them high defensive utility for the whole group.
*Access to projectile destruction and reflection.
*Best blast finisher in the game.
*Very high single target damage. Best in the game last I checked.
*A lot of access to disables and defiance stripping/bar breaking skills.
*Group swiftness, fury, and vigor. The group vigor is quite rare.
*Spammable evades. This makes them great at meleeing otherwise difficult bosses.
*High self healing.
*Boon Removal, either a bit or a lot depending on the build.
*Good access to weakness.
*Best access to stealth. This means a lot, regarding skipping to aggro management.
*Though currently not used too much due to how rarely enemies heal themselves, they have good access to poison.
*Their spammable shadowsteps means they can bypass a lot of area effects.
*Spammable condition cleanse.
*On condi specs, decent at might and vulnerability.
*Low cooldowns means power builds can run 3 signets + one utility, and the team doesn’t suffer from it.
*Capable of spamming every combo finisher in the game.

All in all, no one is going to look at you and go “ew, a thief. reroll to a real class plz!”. As for their flaws…

*Weak ranged game. Don’t have far range or that much damage at it.
*Mediocre Combo Fields. Smoke fields are a mixed bag, because while blasting stealth in them is an effective tactic, it can mess things up when one overrides a fire field.
*Melee builds are bad at self-buffing, having little to no access to might or vulnerability.
*Requires being beside or behind enemies to do the best damage. With stealth this isn’t always a problem, but it isn’t uncommon for damage to be kitten by a twisty enemy.

Other than the range game, I wouldn’t call those much of a deficiency.

Thief doesn’t have highest dps, I don’t know what is ranking but Sinister engi has best and staff ele has second best.

Also, where does thief have condition cleanse? I can only remember Shadow’s Embrace in Shadow Arts but nobody uses that thing in pve, maybe for Snowblind campfire soloing but nowhere else really.

Petoox.6570:

Thief doesn’t have highest dps, I don’t know what is ranking but Sinister engi has best and staff ele has second best.

Also, where does thief have condition cleanse? I can only remember Shadow’s Embrace in Shadow Arts but nobody uses that thing in pve, maybe for Snowblind campfire soloing but nowhere else really.

Infiltrators Strike + Infiltrators Return removes one condition each use. Spam as needed.

Outside of Sword, Hide in Shadows takes care of most damaging conditions. Withdraw and Roll for Initiative takes care of most disabling conditions. Signet of Agility is a single group cleanse, but sometimes all you need to remove is one condition. Shadowstep + Shadow Return is a stunbreaker that removes 3 of any condition.

Also, reading comprehension is a must. I said single target damage. Ele and Engi are great against groups, whereas the thief is only middling at groups. But against any one enemy, and those backstabs + heartseekers really tear through their health.

Thaddeus.4891:

The specialisation wasn’t kind to the thief tho. Where everybody was buffed a lot by the patch (Guardian when from 8-9k to 12-14k in dps), the thief didn’t move a lot in the DPS department. He lost a lot of damage modifier and wasn’t buff by the additional stats from gear (he already had 300 power, precision and ferocity from trait).

This is something that I’m actually wondering about. While the standard thief build didn’t allocate more stats, the thief didn’t walk away empty handed. With the loss of 5% from dagger training and 5% on dual skills came 1% per initiative with leading strikes. We’ve still got exposed weakness and executioner.

Of particular note is the new critical strikes line. Without it, my full zerker + scholar thief has 50% self fury uptime and 216% crit damage (effectively a 1.74 modifier off of a scaled 64% crit chance). But with critical strikes, I have full fury uptime with several other crit changes totaling to around 87% crit chance and 245% crit damage. This comes to a 2.26 modifier effectively being a 30% increase in damage overall. Also include Ferocious Strikes, which is 10% on crit above 50% health (which I’ve calculated as a 4.35% damage mod).

In total? 35.4% increase in damage from taking critical strikes. So really, I’d like to see where the numbers that say thieves are the same come from.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Also, reading comprehension is a must. I said single target damage. Ele and Engi are great against groups, whereas the thief is only middling at groups. But against any one enemy, and those backstabs + heartseekers really tear through their health.

Both engy and ele have substantially higher single target DPS than a D/D thief. Berserker engineer and staff elementalist both deal roughly 20% more DPS than the best possible thief rotation, while a Sinister engineer, in a sufficiently long fight, will deal roughly 40% more DPS.

D/D thief is roughly on par with guardian when it comes to damage, ahead of warriors, necromancers, and power rangers but behind mesmers and condition rangers.

Ensign.2189:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Also, reading comprehension is a must. I said single target damage. Ele and Engi are great against groups, whereas the thief is only middling at groups. But against any one enemy, and those backstabs + heartseekers really tear through their health.

Both engy and ele have substantially higher single target DPS than a D/D thief. Berserker engineer and staff elementalist both deal roughly 20% more DPS than the best possible thief rotation, while a Sinister engineer, in a sufficiently long fight, will deal roughly 40% more DPS.

D/D thief is roughly on par with guardian when it comes to damage, ahead of warriors, necromancers, and power rangers but behind mesmers and condition rangers.

I do want to know what the source of these numbers is. Especially if it ranks memsers as higher DPS, since the high phantasm death rate makes that only true in the most select of circumstances. Also, if we assume enough time for conditions, then pre-cast venomshare thief is higher damage than berserker thief.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I do want to know what the source of these numbers is.

Death and Taxes 30 second and 60 second max burn calculations.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Especially if it ranks memsers as higher DPS, since the high phantasm death rate makes that only true in the most select of circumstances.

Power phantasm mesmer is on par with thief in a 30s burn and superior in a 60s burn, with the (unrealistic) assumption that phantasms are not killed, but also the (unrealistic) assumption that there is 0 damage being dealt by reflects – which is the primary reason to run power mesmer. Essentially, in fights where you would want a mesmer at all it substantially outperforms everything except the first warrior, engineers, and elementalists in terms of damage.

Staff condition clone builds follow a similar damage curve, are still superior in longer (45s+) burns, and are much more resilient against clone death. It is an excellent dungeon DPS build that I am surprised we do not see more of.

Mesmer is inferior to thief in very short (15s) encounters, since it takes too much time to set up pets.

It is a bit of a stretch to say that thief underperforms mesmer however, the two are roughly on par in the middle tier.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Also, if we assume enough time for conditions, then pre-cast venomshare thief is higher damage than berserker thief.

Pre-cast venomshare thief is roughly 2/3 of the damage of a D/D power backstab build over a 30s window, and not much better over a shorter window since the conditions have no time to do any work. It is a sub-necromancer level build.

Basically, the timeframe in which the thief is a top damage dealer is in fights that last less than 5 seconds. In fights that last longer than 5 seconds, thief starts to fall off very quickly while other classes either keep up their damage (elementalist) or catch up. In any fight with a non-trivial duration, thief is unspectacular as a damage dealer.

A link would’ve been nice. On venom thieves, that I am not so sure about.. Someone else did the numbers on venomshare thieves, and assuming doublecast the venomshare build has higher overall burst and equivalent sustained damage as the zerker build. This is assuming a standard sized target without linecasting (10 icebow hits).

I can answer the condi mesmer question for you. The staff projectiles bounce, and as such they are unreliable in a group environment. When solo, the projectiles hit the enemies twice. But, add in team members, and it is possible for winds of chaos to bounce to another team member instead of to another enemy. This leads to the condi spec being unreliable in terms of damage output, being randomly cut in half in certain circumstances. Likewise, the buildup for winds of chaos to do damage is really slow, making it so even in the puggest of pugs you’ll find enemies dead before it can build. The third and final issue is that the offensive power of the build doesn’t scale up against multiple targets. Sword + Focus hits multiple enemies easily, as do the mantras. But those darned bouncing orbs have a finite amount of power, and multiple targets means dividing that damage among enemies instead of multiplying it.

EDIT: A bit more. Here is a graph from metabattle that compared the numbers of the condi thief to others. At the 15 second mark it surpasses everything that isn’t Elementalist. The frostbow graph isn’t as kind, only surpassing Guardian at the 18 second mark.

With these numbers, I do have to admit that thief is no longer the single target king. Tis a shame, since I liked holding that title. Though it does make me wonder where we stand PVE balance wise if the class, skills, and tactics that are best for single target damage are identical to multiple target damage.

regarding the venom share build, I followed it a bit on metabattle, but then it was removed from ‘testing’ and it did not make it to workable builds.

from my limited experience, I would not spec for it because I always pug for dungeons (the easy short ones) and I don’t want to not be able to kill ‘structures’ or non-monsters (again, I am not sure if it’s a valid argument or not)…

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is something that I’m actually wondering about. While the standard thief build didn’t allocate more stats, the thief didn’t walk away empty handed. With the loss of 5% from dagger training and 5% on dual skills came 1% per initiative with leading strikes. We’ve still got exposed weakness and executioner.

Of particular note is the new critical strikes line. Without it, my full zerker + scholar thief has 50% self fury uptime and 216% crit damage (effectively a 1.74 modifier off of a scaled 64% crit chance). But with critical strikes, I have full fury uptime with several other crit changes totaling to around 87% crit chance and 245% crit damage. This comes to a 2.26 modifier effectively being a 30% increase in damage overall. Also include Ferocious Strikes, which is 10% on crit above 50% health (which I’ve calculated as a 4.35% damage mod).

In total? 35.4% increase in damage from taking critical strikes. So really, I’d like to see where the numbers that say thieves are the same come from.

Well if you compare meta build now to the meta build before. Some of the lost i’ll calculate are still there, but the meta build use something else.

Lost
Dagger Training : 5% damage
Side Strike : 7% Crit chance
Flanking Strike : 5% damage
Sundering Strike : Vulnerability on crits
Improvisation : 10% damage on bundle (Icebow)
Opportunist : Crits give you initiative
First Strike : 10% damage while over 6 initiatives

Gain
Flanking Strike : Gain Haste
Leads Attack : 1% damage per initiative
Ferocious Strike : 10% Critical damage
Practiced Tolerance : 10% Precision into Ferocity
Flawless Strike : 7% Critical damage
No Quarter : +250 Ferocity

So basically, we lost a bunch of damage modifier (lost 3, gain 1) and a bit of precision, while gaining a bunch of buff to critical damage. I’m not sure the total increase in dps we got. But profession like Guardian, Engineer, Ranger and Warrior got buff by more, closing the gap a little. I’m not saying that Thief is bad now, or have bad dps. But it lost it’s statue of best single target in the game.

koSTEEZ.2041:

We all know how thief is compared to other classes in PvP (Terrible.)

So I wanted to ask everyone how you feel about thief compared to other classes as far as PvE is concerned?

I feel as though thief is also lackluster in PvE compared to other classes.

-We lack multiple ways of condition clearing.
- HP is TOO kitten LOW.
-Cant think of anything else.

How do you guys feel?

Lol, are you really serious?!

Thief is in a tier of its own with elementalist for PvE.

Thief is best for skips with the lowest cool down on any smoke field.
Thief can refill the endurance of all allies (signet of agility).
Thief is a beast for removing defiance.
Thief can drop a shadow refuge to rez people if **** hits the fan.
Great ability to keep up swiftness and fury for skips and fights.
50% vigor uptime for allies and self.
Good vulnerability stacker (sundering strikes trait).
Smoke screen as a projectile block.
Scorpion wire is a good pull on a low cool down.
Permanent fury on self (No Quarter trait).
Blinds for hard hitting trash (Looking at you Arah and fractal 50 mobs).

If anyone says a thief is bad for PvE they’re either an idiot or a liar.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Someone else did the numbers on venomshare thieves, and assuming doublecast the venomshare build has higher overall burst and equivalent sustained damage as the zerker build.

Interesting. I’m not so concerned about the doublecast venomshare version (if you can count out when you are going to engage 25 seconds in advance reliably you are working way harder at this than I ever will), but the ‘standard’ version is pretty much spot on with generic D/D backstab rotations, which is a much better condition rotation than was there last time I looked at that sheet. Will have to investigate, thanks for the heads up.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

At the 15 second mark it surpasses everything that isn’t Elementalist.

Well, everything on that chart – engineer isn’t on there, though it puts out comparable to better numbers to the elementalist. Condition ranger isn’t on there (though you can probably find a chart for it elsewhere); it is similarly above the thief / guardian line.

Still, good to know there’s a venomshare thief rotation that’s on par with, and occasionally surpasses, backstab rotations. Variety!

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Though it does make me wonder where we stand PVE balance wise if the class, skills, and tactics that are best for single target damage are identical to multiple target damage.

Basically in the same spot guardian is, with different (and more niche) utility. You bring a thief along for a 2nd projectile absorb, stealth, blinds, and defiance stripping, all of which are very useful to a team. If all you care about is maximum deeps, you can’t beat Warrior + 4 elementalists/engineers; fortunately content isn’t so faceroll that you don’t want any control effects.

Engineer comes into mind. Just to note that this isn’t saying it’s just simply BETTER in all regards but definitely worth contemplating about if you’re having second thoughts about thief. I do apologize for the long post.

Below is a comparison to most of the goodies people have posted in this thread.

-Near spammable blinds, less capable but still with Bomb kit and Mortar Kit it’s pretty sufficient enough.

-Perma Vigor on top of natural 50%+ endurance regen through traits.

-CC master so defiance removal is on par with thief, if not better since you waste dps on thief.

-5 stacks of stealth with about 5s of downtime in between from my personal tests. Sadly no where near Thiefs perma group stealthing capability but if the engi can swap out a utility for the Elixir S(tool kit gives 6s stealth with 32s cd) after a stealth rotation, then easily about 35sec of stealth without downtime.

- Not ideal to stealth and res but does have ‘Toss Elixir R’ that aoe res players at 87s cd.

- No aoe swiftness but has personal perma swiftness. Forge will have access to lightning field if rumor is correct though.

- Perma fury. More access to crit chance augmenting traits.

- Better vuln stacker(capable of solo full stack but with foods and etc since we lost +30% cond duration.. kitten you anet).

-Has RNG skill that casts Wall of reflect or Smoke Screen for 12s traited every 32s. Overall better reflection if traited with turret reflection trait, although tiresome.

-More or less same blast finishing capability and more.

-Better single and aoe DPS but requires more button mashing. Bit of a toss with this one.

-Group vigor share on par or better with HGH builds.

-Magnetic pull(while jumping) for unbugged 1200 range pull.

-Elixir S offers 3.75s evade on 48s traited. Shield has 2 blocks. Tool kit has 3s block. Not very comparable but still I’d say it’s plenty of dmg mitigation. Thief’s S/P pistol whip is kinda the king of evading while destroying enemies though so I’m salty about that.

-High group healing with Healing turret combo or Mortar’s water field. Capable of upto 8-9 blasts so that’s over 10k aoe heal, though with a bit of downtime. Thief’s SoM and Invigorating precision + S/P pistol whip = pretty godkitten good survival and ensures 100% hp while spamming it. Personally I do prefer thief’s survival, it promotes damaging more so you can live more. But in some circumstances where that’s not possible, engi wins hands down(World bosses, few instances of fractals..)

-Better self and group aoe condition removal and conversion thorugh elixir gun, elixir C and elixirs(HGH trait).

-Good access to weakness but not ideal. Elixir gun’s AA and poison field blasts.

-Better poison application.

- 2 or 3 movement skills but of course nothing on par with Thief’s shadowstep skills. With Daredevil spec they can leap like an kitten all day and put engi’s rifle leap to shame(should be the go to profession for JP’s possibly even more than mesmers).

- Better condition dps thanks to hax burn.

- Better team synergies and helpful utilities.. arguably most diverse and best.

- Also has access to all combo finishers.
————————————

AND MORE!

-Fire/Water/SoManykittening fields
-Great for might stacking
-Great for water blasting
-So many knockbacks it wins the Troll award of the year
-Unshameful 1500 range attack
-Flamethrower! Who doesn’t like FT’s? But honestly speaking Thief’s shortbow is better for aoe tagging and just the best weapon in general.
-Better access to chills but I think I’m grasping for straws at this point.

Downside :
-Has turrets but not really significant, AI sucks and it’s stationary and can be crit/conditioned. Huge disappointment.
-Jack-of-trade profession means not ideally best at anything.
-Do you like carpel tunnel syndrome? Good! Get some!
-Do you have arthritis? Would you like some?
-Can you play like a pianist?

Although to be honest once you play Engi you just use what ever rotation fits you best and stop worrying about how to maximize your potential whether it is DPS or group utility. Best way to be of use to your mates is feeling calm and relaxed and slowly learning the rotations and more often as muscle memory.

As for Thief, the one thing that they lack is group utility. It’s not like they don’t have them, but it’s quite sub-par compared to others and of course, pales when compared to Engineer.

Wanna know what I think about the current thief situation? I’m leaving it as my go to main character and will be focusing on Revenant/Engi/Mesmer in the future.

Revenant has 5s blind every 2s with ventari tablet traited as well as 2s protection. Spammable. Also has nice access to dodges with Shiro legends(personal test showed a dodge every 3s without vigor). We’ll see about dps but it’s something to think about if you like those things.

Engineer and Mesmer has less capable stealthing than Thief but still very viable in their own right. But they have better group utilities.

So that’s my take. Personally I just don’t want to use Thief anymore. It(or Karl) has let me down enough. ‘On-evade’ traits is a final nail in the coffin for me. This is of course very subjective to each his her own but I’m not having any of that. Nuh uh.

TL:DR Thief is good in its own right but nowadays there are other choices of professions that you can shop around for that, after calculated contemplation will make you wonder if Thief is really worth it in PvE/PvP/WvW. Of course nothing beats personal experience so try around a bit.