Guild Wars 2

I want to capitalize on what a Thief does that other classes don’t do as well so I can benefit a group more and highlight my strengths as a Thief.

I’m curious as far as design goes, what we can do to improve on, and create a niche for thief, so I can understand my role more, but what can a Thief do in PvP that other professions can’t? What are some good reasons that I should be brought to a group over X profession?

Thanks!

Stealth res and interrupting stompers are on the top reasons I find. The most used builds utilize Trickery whether it’s S/P or D/P, as the traited Steal can bypass Stability by ripping the boon off first.

Tachii.3506:

Stealth res and interrupting stompers are on the top reasons I find. The most used builds utilize Trickery whether it’s S/P or D/P, as the traited Steal can bypass Stability by ripping the boon off first.

Nice! I’ll have to use that trick when people are trying to stomp.

3 sec res what kitten is that. 3 sec still get stomped

The primary role of a thief is to kill/zone out priority targets around a node – usually targets that provide large aoe damage from a distance. Necromancer, and engies fit this category easily. In general, I would say S/D is better at zoning people out of a fight than D/P backstab.

As a corollary, they are also great at counter-spiking anyone who is getting severely trained. One example of this is an engie vs necro fight. Condi nuke necro WILL win against an engie since it’s the biggest hard counter in the game. However, you can have your thief jump the necro if the necro decides to grow some balls and starts training your engie.

They can force uneven fights with their burst damage – the most effective spec for this is D/P backstab burst. As an example, if two people are assaulting your home defender at home, and the defender was able to bring one of the attackers down to half health, you can easily kill that assaulter through the help of executioner. This forces the fight into a 2v1 very quickly.

They can also do quick decaps – not even full cap – at far. At best this helps snowball the fight into your favor (if you have 2 nodes already). At least it forces a player at mid to go back and re-cap. This “force” generally allows your aoe squishy heroes at mid to be a bit more liberal. A necromancer can switch to scepter/dagger for example (900 range instead of 1200 from staff) and lay down the pain train. In order for this to work, though, you have to pay attention to who has died recently (as most players won’t go back to home to re-cap if someone is about to spawn) and keep a head count on where all the enemies are on the map. If you push far to decap and they have a home defender on the node, then it’s bad news bears for you. You have potentially wasted time, in this case, and at worst your team might be wiping at mid. Another problematic case would be if their home defender is midway to mid, sees you decapping far, then goes after your own home node since he knows he won’t be able to go back in time.

In short, Thieves thrive best when people arn’t paying attention to them.

One example on how a team might use thieves in their team comp is 55 hp monks. They like to avoid large teamfights as much as possible, as they feel forcing large teamfights are too random to be a reliable strat. Instead, they pit up their bunkers against anyone who tries to do this to them, and let shad and misha run around and make plays. Thieves are very mobile, but with portal mesmers and thieves can dominate the map very easily. The power of portal is to be able to out-rotate your enemy. It takes teamwork to pull off, but is very effective.

There’s a few viable concepts

1. Glass cannon
2. Evade tank
3. Ranged Hybrid DPS

You can mix each of these somewhat if you want, and there’s multiple weapon sets to achieve 1 and 2. The third is Pistol/Dagger exclusively.

I’m surprised nobody has yet mentioned the large amount of AoE poison that can be placed over points, and then optionally blasted for Weakness. Personally I’ve found this element to be a rather excellent one in our repertoire.

Highest mobility and escapability, excellent for back-capping, claiming buffs and stealing npc kills (dagger-mainhand). And getting from C to A quickly to help home bunker turn 1v2 to 2v1.

On demand poison that creates great pressure on nodes, decent ranged aoe and blast finisher from clusterbomb.

Taking out other dangerous glass-cannons quickly, having that staff ele stand on high ground spamming insane AoE will destroy any team, or that powermancer in lichform.

With pistol off-hand and 30 trickery, on demand interrupts.

Dagger-mainhand has the best ability for executing low-health players, It’s the best class for ensuring a quick and clean kill on a specific target in team fights.

Cons:
- Weak to condispam.
- Weak to AoE and passive dmg.
- Lack of unblockable abilities.
- Stealth is one of our strongest mechanics and a lot of the class is balanced around that, stealth will get nodes uncontested or even capped if someone avoids our dmg from stealth.

Anomaly.7612:

I want to capitalize on what a Thief does that other classes don’t do as well so I can benefit a group more and highlight my strengths as a Thief.

Here you go