Guild Wars 2

Just a quick remark about thieves underwater combat….
Bluntly, I think the skills SUCK. I often run a condition spec and there is no way in hell you can stack anywhere near as much damage compared with being out of the water with the aoe power of skills such as caltrops and death blossom. Half the utilities are cut off underwater and even if you leave behind caltrops when you dodge on terrain, all of a sudden you cant excrete caltrops out your backside underwater….where’s the diversity gone????

The harpoon skill 1 and haste allows me to get 10 stacks of bleed MAX which dies out in 5 secs and taking off 5% of the enemies health…useless.

The other skills are nice for beserker spec but the bottom line is that ANET MUST MUST MUST buff the condition aspect behind thief combat underwater!

I love thief underwater. No one travels as fast underwater as you. Do 180 and you got Roll for Initiative / Withdraw that do 2x the distance. Speargun ‘unload’ hits for 8-12k. Spear #3 hits as much and is spammable. I wish Spear #4 would have the same fix as D/P #3

MUST MUST? They probably won’t do anything in a hurry. The spear and harpoon weapon skills are situationally too strong or situationally too weak. They are broken but workable, just like the rest of underwater combat.

I like thief harpoon gun skills underwater. I rarely lose a fight with them even though I rarely fight underwater to begin with.

Try other proffesions underwater skills before asking for buffs. Some of them don’t even do anything, I’m looking at you engineer.

Try using Grenades underwater as engineer, its pretty fantastic. Ele underwater are pretty poor though

WonderfulCT.6278:

I like thief harpoon gun skills underwater. I rarely lose a fight with them even though I rarely fight underwater to begin with.

Try other proffesions underwater skills before asking for buffs. Some of them don’t even do anything, I’m looking at you engineer.

Lol, perhaps you should try other professions underwaters kills before posting something like this.

Thief underwater skills are complete junk , and so are also the utils !

Well underwater is just ..well underwater who cares, I didn’t play a thief to play underwater. In sPvP it applies to one point in one match. In WvW it doesn’t apply at all. PvE..who knows probably not much. It’s a bit of a gimmick underwater fighting anyway. I don’t diggit.

I love the thief underwater, but not with a condition build :/

Skarpa.8203:

Try using Grenades underwater as engineer, its pretty fantastic. Ele underwater are pretty poor though

Yes, engineer underwater grenades are good if you have the grenadier grandmaster trait. Its only problem is bugged traits (short fuse doesn’t work, bug reported eons ago) and the slow speed of grenades (you don’t even need to dodge them, just swim away). They are more or less the only viable underwater option of the engineer and can put crazy condition pressure. Engineer’s harpoon gun is much weaker than the harpoon gun for other professions: ranger, thief and warrior all got better. My personal favorite is ranger’s harpoon gun: feeding frenzy is just wicked. With the eagle eye master trait rangers will have 1500 range underwater, plus their pet which can travel even further. To put it short: ranger is the best profession underwater. Difficult to kill, because the pet can keep the ranger alive for a very long time (just kill the pet, then the ranger dies).

Engineer’s harpoon gun projectiles travel slower than molasses. 1 s activation time for the auto attack, compared to 1/4 s what thieves have. The super slow firing rate makes the realistic damage output suck as well. Harpoon gun #5 net wall is a bad joke, but harpoon gun #3, retreating grapple is the only reason to use that weapon: it is an interrupt, because it is a pull skill.

To put it short: thief is not the best profession underwater, but not the worst. Try guardian if you want to see what sucking in underwater means. ;-)

PS. Condition heavy spec won’t work that well underwater for thieves. Bleed stacks are not that effective even if you wasted tons of points to condition damage as they will get cleansed off so easily. But you might spent points to get condition duration as that will make cripple, blind and poison last longer.

When i come to our utilities, thieves kinda get shafted under water, we can use venoms, signets and a few tricks. Very limited amount of stealth, and have no access to most of the skills we use on land.

That being said, the underwater weapons do keep them alive better then most, on demand evades, blocks, and lots of movements skills. at this time tho, underwater combat is just not interesting so i won’t worry about it too much.

Thief spear underwater is probably one of the top underwater weapons (even if it’s not the absolute number 1). Skill 5 alone gives you near permanent evade with strong single target damage for as long as you have intiative.

That being said, it heavily favors power builds, so I could see how it may look disappointing to a condition build.