Guild Wars 2

My son and I rolled thieves, but i’m more of a ranged dps type person. Both our characters are in their teens and I’m not super excited about melee from a WvW perspective. We’ll be doing a mix of WvW/PvE, and PvE wise, feels totally fine. but prefer ranged for WvW. Is p/p any good for WvW? Would I be better off rolling an ele?

Im kind of a nerd i’ve logged about 500 hours on my thief. From my experience, two thieves is a really squishy combination. There’s a lot of good combos you can make with a thief, a tanky or CC heavy class would really support the damage a thief can do. Some classes I’ve partied with that are good wvw buddies are a tanky condition ranger with entangle, or a staff ele, or a semi-tanky staff necro which can take the focus of the enemy’s damage, apply weakness and chill to everyone while your son goes around and DPS people down. This combo is good for small groups, but if you’re in a mob, usually the bigger mob wins. But typically thieves can’t take much hits, so expect to kill the enemy really fast, or be prepared to take hits for your son lol.

With the Thief constantly popping into stealth, the enemy will definitely be focusing more on you first in many circumstances, so I would say that you should avoid anything that can’t take some hits.
I would also recommend something with lots of combo fields, because the Thief is loaded to hell with great combo finishers.
D/D has Heart Seeker, Death Blossom and Dancing Dagger, P/D has possibly the strongest combo finisher in the entire game with Sneak Attack, Shortbow has Cluster Bomb, and P/P has Unload.

Guardian complements thief nicely, but lacks ranged options.
2 thieves works well for wvw, but isn’t as good in pve (dungeons).

If you want ranged DPS, make a warrior or an elementalist. Ele is particularly nice for wPvP walls with it’s ranged AE options and it can be an amazing tank. Actually, I could probably make a case for running two mixed classes instead of a pair of the same class. GW2 seems to greatly favor diversity in groups.

BTW, Jefzor has it right about Guardian: great melee, pathetic ranged. They’re fun, but if you want ranged combat, it’s not the class for you.

Mesmer would be my choice for mobility/stealth synergy. Mesmer is the only other profession that has viable stealth, and if you both take some stealth synergy you’ll be one of the only class combos able to benefit from eachother in that way beyond the simple stealth mechanics. Mesmer clones are also great at distracting enemies to allow the thief to get in more rear-arc attacks.

You get viable ranged combat, and no armor competition as well. The latter is something people don’t always consider when building a duo team, but not having to compete over gear is very helpful when something nice drops.