Guild Wars 2

Thief has been my main since forever. I’ve done everything and anything with it.

And I’ve always seen it as a profession with the main purpose of being good at pvp or p(layer)k(ill)-ing.
In pve stealth sucks, most of the time mobs don’t disjoint attacks so they’ll hit you anyway, even when stealth goes full duration and what not. It doesn’t disjoint channeling, projectiles, nothing. It flat out sucks. It doesn’t break aggro (anymore) for good and for bad so basically you taunt enemies back at you. In high fractals they’re good because of how broken some things are (dredge) but besides that, you need to trait heavily in damage, thus making your health worth a mosquito’s. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made it work, and it’s not as bad as it sounds, but the class mechanics (steal so you get bashed in the face, shadowstep that don’t generaly disconnect channels/projectiles, ect) are broken and this is extremely unfun.
For PVP they’re a 0 mistake class. You can trait heavily into defensive so that your damage doesn’t mean squat, and then your task is to be annoying mosquito that prevents enemies from capping. Initiative is quite unforgivable, especially when half of your skills deal no real damage all the while all the other classes blow off rotations that deal exponentially more damage and what seems near endlessly.
For WvW they’re great for avoiding zergs but…that’s it. With the introduction of dire gear and crit nerf, it’s all too hard to play.

Thief still “works” I still manage to kill mini zergs of mindless people and the like, but a mesmer or an engi could do that with much more ease. 1v1 not the best, team support it lacks, zerging it sucks, pvp zerging sucks more, lack of cleanse, lack of hp, lack of damage (unless traiting almost obligatorly on Crit strikes).

They seem to lack everywhere but, yet, having to play with much more skill than other people is stressing.

you arent wrong thief class is not as great as it should be in pvp , like it says on the wiki thief excel at one on one combat here is the link to the wiki : http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Thief

Disambig icon.png This article is about the Thief profession. For the summoned Thief ally, see Thief (summon).

“

Experts at stealth and surprise, thieves can move through the shadows, vanish into thin air, or steal items from their opponents and use them as weapons. Thieves practice an agile, acrobatic fighting style, which can make them very hard to hit.

— GuildWars2.com Thief

Thieves are expert in the shadow arts. They utilize stealth and shadowsteps to surprise and to get close to their target. They’re deadly in one-on-one combat using their agility, acrobatic fighting style, and the ability to steal to overcome their enemies. They have an affinity for setting traps and using venom. As an adventurer profession, thieves wear medium armor.

But i still see very good thieves beating all every1 in dueling rooms in the pvp browser . i often see thieves doing 1vX in wvw and win so they arent bad but it is very hard to be a Good thief most thieves are average but the good ones are very hard to beat. Sure they arent as good as they use to be because all the ppl saying thief is to op , stealth is op , thief this ,thief that , blah blah blah it goes on for hours so of course anet is gonna nerf them.But the ppl who complain about other class sometimes dont realize that its not only the class but also the one playing it that makes the difference

Anyways i do think thief needs a little buff ( little one) hopefully anet will do something about it

thieves are in a great spot right now, are you kidding me? in PvE thieves have the highest dps outside of eles when running a good build, WvW thieves that run SA are some of the most annoying roamers that exist, and every high level tPvP match has at least 1 thief thanks to their unparalleled out of combat mobility and ability to end fights quickly with high burst. When played at a high skill level, thief is one of the best classes.

DatPieGuy.6540:

thieves are in a great spot right now, are you kidding me? in PvE thieves have the highest dps outside of eles when running a good build, WvW thieves that run SA are some of the most annoying roamers that exist, and every high level tPvP match has at least 1 thief thanks to their unparalleled out of combat mobility and ability to end fights quickly with high burst. When played at a high skill level, thief is one of the best classes.

In PVE? No… it doesn’t match that dps that warrior and elementalist do. I tried full-full-full damage with scholar and 5(ot 6)/6/0/0/15(or 10) and it’s mediocre at best. Might on signets, regular 11k crits but can’t survive anything nor does it bring ANY support to the team and you sacrfice EVERYTHING to deal damage. I find more balanced spec mroe fun since you can do high melee uptime. And it’s fractals (and not all of them) I’m talking about, other content besides can be easily solo’d.
Good thieves can beat anything, sure, but take for example. I take on a fight with an axe/shield + longbow warrior. He has sustain for days, and I have to dodgde/blind almost every single attack and on top of that he can fight on top of the tiny blackpowder like no problem. I can beat him by outplaying him by x2 times skill or more. But he recieves every attack and basically I see him just blowing his rotation at thin air where as I have to calculate my resources very carefully and make no mistake.
Same goes for engis, mesmers, necros, some easier to beat than others but it just seems that they have TOO much at their disposal and we have next to nothing.
We have high CD stun breaks that barely have any sideeffect that’ll make you survive the afterpart. He have low stats. Low damage on weapons overall. No boons, lack of conditions, ect ect.
The thief has too little on its own.
Take an untraited class of any other kind and most likely the thief will get owned, big time. The only advantage thief has is the bigger use of mechanical skill with shadow step, and extra dodges but is that enough to compensate for the lack of everything else?

Wow, looking through the most annoying class’ forum and seeing this pathetic post about how “bad” and “nodmg” it is makes me cringe so hard.

Gtfo, seriously.

U right, thieves in this game are terrible

PvE thief damage is good. Learn how to play your class. The thief I do team arenas with is pretty solid also.

It’s definitely a player issue.

Arcade Fire.4895:

PvE thief damage is good. Learn how to play your class. The thief I do team arenas with is pretty solid also.

It’s definitely a player issue.

The damage is okay. The team utility not top best but certainly niche.
On pvp, the thief is okay, it blows up to any sort of focus and has many hard counters but with the hard condi meta it’s quite a nightmare, the thief having little condi removal.
Only viable spec I’ve played that actually doesn’t let the enemy cap for free is the 30 acro and maybe 30 trickery or Crit strikes, depending. But even then, CC is the worst enemy due to high CD stunbreakers and that’s very abundant in condition builds.
I said it’s playable, but certainly very punishing and not mistake friendly, unlike other classes.
My point is that the thief class feels very crippled, and it has been nerfed to feel that way.
Take for example the short bow. The evade nerf, posion cloud nerf, weakness on poison nerf, inf arrow nerf, range nerf, speed nerf.
The same goes with sword. And ironically they’re the best weapons for pvp. Yet they still work, but much, much weaker.
And in a game mode focused on staying on a node, it’s probably the worst class to do so.

What I think is most funny about the poison cloud nerf is that at 900 range, a thief can no longer blast his own ranged combo field due to the slow projectile speed of cluster bomb.

The profession is high-risk high-reward at the moment. I think it feels relatively underpowered just because a lot of the other professions have a lot going for them in regards of low-risk high-reward builds.

The only adjustments I could see would be:

Hide in Shadows: Also removes torment (skill not updated with torment implementation)
and either:
-Signets of Power combined with Signet Use into Master Slot
-Some kind of extra condition removal for all builds via either a new mechanic or some form of passive effect.

That being said, I believe D/P as a weapon set is quite silly in general, and could possibly be toned down.

Hammer/hard CC builds need some adjustments as well to decrease the amount of time they can keep foes locked down or the gaps they can close.

cptn skyz.8706:

Anyways i do think thief needs a little buff ( little one) hopefully anet will do something about it

What? There’s no whatsoever constructive criticism about your post how the profession is broken or what might be the issue about the mechanics or not. You just want a buff for really no reason. Thieves seems to be in a great position in PvP right now and talking about PvE as if it were hard content is not really worth discussing.

Face it everyone, there’s no holy trinity in this game but there’s a meta trinity and that’s warriors, guardians and elementalist. All other professions is just an extra DPS spot and sure thieves are a great tool for speed dungeons. They just put down shadow refugee and then you skip all content. But regarding DPS they’re just as viable as a DPS-specced engi, ranger, necro or mesmer. If you beg to differ and don’t agree, then tell me again why you need buff?

Thief is a really steep learning curve but it’s a solid one with mechanics that are not really broken. Try that with a mesmer instead, it’s even more steeper of a learning curve but right now it’s relying on broken phantasms(main source of DPS) and nerfs to the DPS they already had a hard time maintaining than other classes.

Sorry but this is just a QQ thread.

Thief class needs a fix. Right now this class is playing with 4skills since Dancing Dagger is simply useless. The 4th skills when you have pistol as secondary weapon is also useless. I don’t see anyone using them because they’re not worth neither a click.

really? skill/stomp interruption worth nothing?

Its simple…
Dagger:
Autotatack (no nerfed, directly… )
HS: Nerfed
Dancing Dagged: Nerfed to the ground (50% dmg)
CnD: Nerfed

Pistol:
No nerfs here (directly)

Sword
Autoatack (no nerfed, directly)
infiltrator strike (nerfed)
infiltrators return (totally nerfed 2 times , removed stun breaker, and added casting time)

Shortbow
autoatack (no nerfed, directly)
cluster bomb (nerfed, 2 times, range and dmg)
evade shot(nerfed)
poison field (nerfed, 2 times, 1 “weakness on poison” trait, 2nd poison duration)
infiltrator arror (nerfed)

Dual skills:

Pistol Whip: Nerfed, -15% dmg and 1 ini cost.
Larcerous strike: Nerfed, 1 ini cost, and 1 less boon stealed.

And the worst is… QQs still here…

girien.1209:

Its simple…
Dagger:
Autotatack (no nerfed, directly… )
HS: Nerfed
Dancing Dagged: Nerfed to the ground (50% dmg)
CnD: Nerfed

Pistol:
No nerfs here (directly)

Sword
Autoatack (no nerfed, directly)
infiltrator strike (nerfed)
infiltrators return (totally nerfed 2 times , removed stun breaker, and added casting time)

Shortbow
autoatack (no nerfed, directly)
cluster bomb (nerfed, 2 times, range and dmg)
evade shot(nerfed)
poison field (nerfed, 2 times, 1 “weakness on poison” trait, 2nd poison duration)
infiltrator arror (nerfed)

Dual skills:

Pistol Whip: Nerfed, -15% dmg and 1 ini cost.
Larcerous strike: Nerfed, 1 ini cost, and 1 less boon stealed.

And the worst is… QQs still here…

You forgot they did nerf shortbow auto. It is now very unreliable for hitting moving targets at range.

girien.1209:

Its simple…
Dagger:
Autotatack (no nerfed, directly… )
HS: Nerfed
Dancing Dagged: Nerfed to the ground (50% dmg)
CnD: Nerfed

Pistol:
No nerfs here (directly)

Sword
Autoatack (no nerfed, directly)
infiltrator strike (nerfed)
infiltrators return (totally nerfed 2 times , removed stun breaker, and added casting time)

Shortbow
autoatack (no nerfed, directly)
cluster bomb (nerfed, 2 times, range and dmg)
evade shot(nerfed)
poison field (nerfed, 2 times, 1 “weakness on poison” trait, 2nd poison duration)
infiltrator arror (nerfed)

Dual skills:

Pistol Whip: Nerfed, -15% dmg and 1 ini cost.
Larcerous strike: Nerfed, 1 ini cost, and 1 less boon stealed.

And the worst is… QQs still here…

That’s what I’m talking about….
Some skills are so nerfed they aren’t worth the ini cost. Dancing dagger was sucky because it had a very slow speed yet that wasn’t fixed. Deathblossom still sucks for power specs. CnD wasn’t un-nerfed after the nerf of mug. Inf strike wasn’t un-nerfed after a double (I could swear the return was 1 ini) …even triple maybe. Larc strike was simply focused on anti-bunker which was the whole idea of a thief but it got nerf so it didn’t counter bunkers so well (logic??). Shortbow was fine, 100% fine, nobody complained about it, yet it got bombarded down.
And worst of all, they touched all the nerfs so much but the bugs are still there. Very often I end up stuck with shortbow, no way to move. Only way to fix it is to cast 3 again but it may as well be a pitfall. I more often than not get revealed out of thin air. The return with infinate range was fun, sure, but it got super nerfed to have what it has now. Why is it so hard to get decent-like skills. Like headshot being 3 ini. Most of the time when fighting d/p thieves it costs me more ini to interrupt them than it is for them to cast.
The class is nerfed an unfixed on quality aspects that promote big plays and instead it pushes people to depend so much on backstab only and auto attacking with shortbow.

Dunno if CnD needs a buff. It’s got a pretty nice ratio to be honest, and it can be used to maintain permanent stealth if you don’t stab.

Dancing dagger needs tweaks. The damage before the nerf was indeed way too high (two targets next to each other before the nerf would have each dancing dagger cast deal more than mug + cnd + stab combined), however simply the effect is just no good. Cripple access is great, it’s just the projectile speed is too slow and the initiative cost too high for what it does overall.

Death Lotus is fair. I don’t really think it needs any changes aside from maybe some frame reworks and the casting time adjusted so that the dodge portion actually works well enough to use (currently you’re evasive for only a small portion of the skill use, making you incapable of moving your character while taking damage and unable to adjust positioning).

Mobility: Warrios and eles do it ALOT better
Dmg: again Warrios, eles and Mesmers do it alot better
condis: every single profession does it better
Bunker: LoL

whats there left for thieves?! AW YAH!! the NINJA NURSE!!!

Hi,

I think we need to break some untold ‘secrets’ here to see things clear. First of all: ANET is not trying to make this game awesomely/perfectly/fully functional or balanced. They dont care, not even a tiny bit. What they do care about is how the average player PERCEIVES the game’s current state. So – going back to the topic – if thieves are perceived to be OP by the average player, Anet will nerf them. And it does not matter if that perception is based on reality or not. Anet wont make a guide to noob/unskilled/casual/softcore (pick ur favorite) pvpers ’Here’s why thieves are not OP:… And here’s what you need to learn to counter them:…’ etc. They simply wont do that. Because those who dislike thieves wont even read it. If they do, they will still think that thieves are OP; and – here comes what ANET do not want, not even in their worst nightmares – they will lose interest in the game, as their egos get devasteted. They dont learn combat mechanics, let alone class-specific mechanics. Sometimes they dont even understand their own class machanics…

The whole idea behind GW2 was to cater for the ‘underdog population’ of WoW and similar games. You know, those guys who after years of playing still dont know how to make a dps/tank/etc. build, what stats to go for or how to beat that dead-simple boss that’s been out for more than a year now. Those who go to arena with the most ridiculous comps/gear etc. Those who are first to man the turrets on Teq, shooting random mobs instead of boss. I’m not judging these guys, they may be just way too young (5-8 years) to be able to understand things and focus. They may be mentally handicapped indeed – which is not something one jokes about. They may be extremely tired once hardcore gamers, now having a family and a job. There are many explanations where ‘noobs’ come from, but it does not really matter to us and its pointless to get mad at them.

What we need to understand is that Anet focuses on them mostly. Their money is totally same as yours, and as long as they can be convinced that playing this game is worth it Anet will care about them. Thats why there is no hardcore PvE content (so that elite players or guilds cant ‘outgear’ you and you wont feel like a sucker), thats why there are only 5-man dungeons (so that no organized, dedicated guild can leave others in the dust), thats why most world bosses can be killed by ‘111111111111111’, and thats why thieves will be even further nerfed – if the community still keeps complaining about their OPness.

Anet serves the menthal needs of players (feeling special, to be a hero, to be dominant) but it does not give a kitty about creating some perfectly ideal and balanced game where your achievents/skills/strengths/weaknesses are accurately reflected back by the game and you are rewarded accordingly. They avoid it like fire, as it would tell the average player that ‘you suck’ and ‘See that sword? Thats what you never gonna get, cuz getting it takes to be arena champion." They dont want that in today’s ego-based world. They want to make everyone feel special. And this is their most important goal, feeding hungry egos. Cause thats whats gonna keep player playing this game.

And all the ‘reasonable’ arguments coming from them serve to hide this fact. As the more intelligent and/or dedicated forum-posters/readers are the ones that ask questions about these things – they can not say ‘kitten your worries, this game is not for you’. So they will make it appear as a technical issue that they ‘trying to fix’ or ‘trying very hard to come up with a solution’. These things actually mean: ‘we could fix that in 5 seconds, but then little Jack will get his superhero warriror 1-shotted from now on until the end of time, and he’d be so sad he might even quit GW2’. Thats the bitter truth imho.

p.s.: Complaining about stealth is one fine example for this. The hate towards stealth is only psichological, not factual imho. If this average noob I’m talking about fights a warrior, and is about to kill him and sees ‘Blocked’ pop up on his screen he says ‘I almost killed him, but he used his shield… bad luck, but thats how warriors work’. But same thing when fighting a thief: ‘I almost killed him, but this cub of a kitten vanished! Thieves are so gay! They stealth when I want to kill them.’ So Anet is like: ‘And there goes your nerf, dear thieves…’

And finally, to add something constructive as well (which – for the above mentioned reasons – will be completely ignored): Buff stealth to oblivion (default blind on stealth, default dmg reduction, cannot be hit by AoE or melee cleave, default condi removal, etc.), but extend ‘revealed’ debuff to 15,25 or even 35 seconds. That way those who dislike it because its spammable and those who dislike it because it does not give them enough protection could both be satisfied.