Guild Wars 2

I am considering making a thief (or furthering the progression of my level 8 thief).

How much do thieves rely on weapon swapping? I know it is in the game, I dislike it, but I know a lot of builds are based around the fact that you can swap weapons. I’m thinking about making a thief and using dual daggers, or at least a dagger, and I’m wondering how much I’ll need to conform for the meta. Looking at PvP mainly, but I’ll need to PvE to level up.

What are some distinct things about being a thief? Other than stealth. I’m pretty new to the game, I currently have a 60ish warrior who I’m enjoying.

Dodging around, stealth and shadow stepping are pretty awesome staples of the thief. You really only swap when you need a skill from the other weapon as you are able to spam skills with the thief.

You could probably avoid swapping with the thief more than other classes but cutting off half of you options will be more efficient though.

weapon swapping is useful because there are many powerful sigils that get triggered when you swap weapon. if you really want to stick to the same weapon set, you can equip a dagger in your mainhand of the first set, and place the other dagger in the offhand slot of the second set. the game will combine them all the time, and when you swap weapons, you keep the same weapons but benefit from the mechanical weapon swaps.

not sure if that made sense.

other alternative is to keep a shortbow as second set because of the utility ot provides (mainly spammable blast finishers and spammable shadowstepping)

I guess it depends entirely on what situation you’re in. In general sPvP terms it’s pretty much mandatory that Thieves have a Shortbow equipped because of the mobility it allows, and Thieves need to be able to use that mobility to get around the map quickly enough so as to be an effective decapper and +1.

If you’re talking in actual combat then again it’s situational. Are we reliant on weapon swapping in every engagement? Not really. You’ll have many fights where you’ll never swap away from your offensive set, whether that be D/P or S/D or the like. Personally I swap to Shortbow often against full melee builds, particularly Warriors, because it allows me to keep up ranged damage pressure and poison application to counter their constant rejen whilst also allowing me to avoid damage through kiting, recover and set up my next burst with my D/P set. You might also want to use it to spam poison fields against downed enemies so as to slow down rezzes, and for blast finishers and decent-ish AoE damage from SB #2. And then there’s the fact that it’s nice to have a ranged option for abit of safety and chasing power without needing the initative for gap closers. Generally though it’s very situational and you have to learn at what times it’s appropriate to swap weapons with Thieves, especially considering both our weapon sets share the same initiative pool.

Now you might also go down the route of having 2 offensive sets, such as D/P + S/D, P/P + D/P, etc, in which case you’ll likely swap weapons alot more often. But for most Thief builds, they use Shortbow as their second set.

I started playing Engineer only to learn that a lot of my time would be spent switching through various kits in order to combine effects and make combos. The idea was a little daunting, and completely against my preferred set up where I focus exclusively on a weapon, or type of attack.

On my warrior, I discovered that a popular build involved mainly using the greatsword, but also switching to the hammer on occasion. I’m not sure how much the builds utilize the hammer, but I’m pretty sure that a lot of warrior builds rely on weapon swapping. Especially with the Discipline specialization which improves upon the feature.

I simply dislike the mechanic and am hoping to avoid it. I like the thief I used (up to level and I mained a Rogue and WoW, so I’m pretty sure the thief will be a class I will enjoy. I just wanted to learn about how their weapons work.

Equipping a dagger in my main hand on my primary set and offhand on my secondary set is an interesting way to get around weapon swapping, while still benefiting from the perks. It sounds like the shortbow is useful more as a utility than as a weapon, in which case that might work really well for me.

In either case, you guys have given me reason to believe I won’t be disappointed if I invest my time in a thief, thank you very much.

On thief, it’s hard to be disappointed after you get the hang of it. Getting there can be rough though so don’t give up. Put in tons of practice and thief will be your favorite class due to the fast paced gameplay and the cool style the class takes.

As for weapon swapping, thief uses it a good amount but isn’t really dependent on it. Like I run a d/d shortbow build for dueling and pvp but a majority of my time is spent on d/d. With a build that uses shortbow you have your main offensive set and your recovery set (which is shortbow). Your recovery set is used to be highly mobile on the map and to allow you to recover some cd’s and hp in combat after you’ve bursted or lost a ton of cd’s. Outside of that you are able to be fully functional while staying in your main offensive set for the rest of the time. So yes, it is possible to play with minimal weapon swapping on thief but at times it can get difficult depending on what you’re fighting/where you are.

2 reasons to swap weapons for thief: use bow 5 and stop using bow 5

Unlike most classes, Thief doesn’t rely on swapping the 1-5 bar for DPS. This is because the thief’s weapon skills all share a single resource, initiative.

One of the primary resons most classes rely on hotbar swapping is that Anet decided to balance the game primarily around cooldowns. Thus, when you can swap to a second set of cooldowns, it means not doing so seriously cuts your damage.

Thief’s Initiative is basically a no cooldown mana system. For all they like to talk about revnant’s energy, thief initiative works more like GW1 energy than any other class.

The only reason to swap weapons on thief is if you have decided to use swap sigils, or if you need the utility.

While most classes equip weapons (or kits, or attunements) based on their total combat synergy, in general thieves rely on a single weapon set, and consider their swap a utility or situational tool.

Shortbos is super popular for this reason. It’s often not a grat primary weapon, but it has a ranged shadowstep, better AoE than most theif weapons, and is the thief’s longest default range weapon. Since thieves generally only swap for situational utility rather than DPS, Shortbow fills that spot nicely for most thief builds.