Guild Wars 2

I have been playing thief for little over a year now. In that time I have also leveled a guardian, necromancer, and warrior to 80. Over half of my total time in WvW and all my time in SPvP have been on my thief. And I’ve done just about every possible combination with thief builds at one time or another, so I’m well versed on the ins and outs of thief traits.

I’ve tried to give roaming a try in WvW as I’m not used to 1v1+, and it seems I just get stomped by everything in a 1v1 except for vs. other thieves and anyone who tries to break commitment to our fight. I’ve had best luck with playing the zerker build, d/p and d/d, and having blackpowder, shadowstep or roll for initiative, and assassin’s signet with thieves guild elite.

My gear is all exotic except for ascended dagger, rings, trinket, and earrings.

If anyone can give me suggestions on how to roam better, or link videos that could help, or critique my choice in equipment I would be greatly appreciative.

Well I’m not sure how many people have responded on a thief vs thief perspective but here I go. I have no problem guessing where the thief is going when in stealth, especially when auto attack can still do damage in a wide range for just about every melee character. If you have problems fighting a thief, play as a thief and get used to the meta. The only thing i have agreed with on this page was that refuge could shave off a few seconds (especially when stealth applications stack), and that initiative could have its regen time shaved down as well.

In the case of balance 1 smart thief is good vs 1 opponent, maybe 2, but a thief in a zerg is very underpowered when considering how much more able other classes are. With a cap on backstab damage, and the removal of mug doing damage, and next to no group utility what else do you people want? The removal of thieves? Its bad enough to have the lowest health pool, and low toughness, but everyone and their mother complains about them being able to do damage. You want a thief to lose stealth? Cool. Take away the high damage of a warrior, the toughness of a guardian, the variability of elementalists, or any other niche that a class has. Hell, lets all play engineers.

I’ve played almost nothing but thief for months and I’ve tried every combination of weapon sets. I run S/D and D/P in sPvP, which works really well for me. Since S/D has a good amount of range with its melee (including being able to hit things in back of you), and has a shadowstep and cloak and dagger this build is the best for mobility. If you think that’s not enough then using shadowstep as a main utility will help.

Shortbow would probably fit your play style best and will help in big group fights (while nothing else will), but D/P will work as well once you get used to it. P/P has little option of mobility but offers the most raw damage. S/D has alright damage and a pretty good slow.

If you don’t want ranged and want more raw damage, then D/D will help finish targets but you’ll lack range. You can go with P/P but you’ll lack mobility while swapped to this set. S/D if timed well can confuse people in PvP and escape npcs, so you can do without range unless you’re in some sPvP maps.

Best bet is to stay away from conditions and go for damage/crit damage. Ambush trap is actually pretty powerful. If you have thieves guild out at the same time 1v1 fights become a joke as your odds of winning go up tremendously. Shadow refuge is always good, assassins signets helps with damage, etc. Stay away from the other traps for the most part and you can neglect venoms save for basilisk.

That’s a general overview of what you can expect, I’m sure the other posts here cover about everything else.

Best way to do it is to focus on your own borderlands first, and either wait for off peak hours to go to another map or wait for your map to change at the end of the week if it does. Eternal battleground may be tricky but it’s best to not stay on the road.

Well no need for this to go on any longer Swinsk summed it up perfectly. +1 to you good sir.

RedSpectrum.1975:

ok then 10/30/30/0/0 i would go in depth but i dont know them by hand

My full armor set is the valkyrie set with the duelist skin.
Main weapon usage belongs to the dual daggers, as for what the secondary is depends on where I am:
Dungeon/pvpwvw
I use shortbow as it has aoe but also has great escape potential. Trick shot is also useful

pve: P/P because i wish it were better for other people and had synergy with D/D but you cant have everything apparently, and it just feels kitten.

As for battle approach, i try to run toward them and steal when able, which leads to a backstab. the rest of a fight will revolve around me evading sparingly while CnD and backstabbing trying to sparingly use HiS and SR. When fighting another thief, in WvW, when they go in stealth, i try to CnD off of the little things so that I can save my main stealth utilities for when I really need them. and when times get desperate when they go into stealth and I have nothing left, Dagger Storm as a last resort option. Lately if I get caught in a 1v1 in WvW and they put up a good fight, I’ll give them a bow. Though it seems female toons’ bows have an insulting behaviour to them…

Is that what you wanted?

Pretty much. Thanks for the contribution, as well as everyone else so far.

RedSpectrum.1975:

well in a way, isnt everyone’s thief there own i mean no two look the same :p

I meant how do you play thief. What do you do to make it special instead of just spamming cloak and dagger, or using signets, etc. Or just tricks that you think many other thieves could benefit from learning.

As an example I’ll include my spvp build.

Standard glass cannon traits, infiltrator signets, valkyrie gem inside of berserker’s amulet.
Sword/pistol and shortbow.

Utilities: shadow refuge, ambush, scorpion wire, thieves guild.

Process:

This usually turns around a fight for me as I do play GC. After taking too many hits I’ll refuge and use thieves guild. Then I back up and place and ambush trap, then scorpion wire my target through the trap. This creates 3 thieves (1 ranged, 1 melee, and one random from ambush)

Going into stealth enables me to root my target for a bit with either sneak attack from sword or shortbow. The damage from thieves is good enough to down GC builds with one additional backstab. If the enemy is tougher I’ll abuse shadow return and flanking strike and dance around both in and out of stealth. With the extra dps it really helps to focus down bunker builds as well.

In group fights, shortbow may be better to use, just for the better spread of damage. Having 3 more bodies on screen gives a good advantage. However, if the other team has strong AOE, don’t count on your thieves being around for their full duration.

Other than that, play to the thieves strengths and be fast.

Strong 1v1 with most classes. Helps me hold a capture point easily, high mobility, great damage.

Not the greatest group utility, and has trouble being effective vs mesmers and thieves, and arguably rangers. Cannot work underwater.

I’ve been playing thief since launch, and as a frequent browser of the thief forums I want to know how players have really made this class their own. I’m asking players to submit any odd builds, utility setups, and combos made up that work in either wvw or spvp or pve (note which one each build is specific to.)

Submit clips of how the combo works or describe how it should. Include what advantages or disadvantages if any.

Good to know that I’m not the only one with this problem. Disappointed to know that it is a problem. I was fighting against a guildy in sPvP and he kept attacking me through stealth (mesmer). I thought it was just him but rangers, necromancers, and eles were doing the same thing after i was already in stealth. And it wasn’t just CD stealth it was in refuge duration as well :/

it wont be a AAA esport until they flush out the details a bit. I don’t mean just mechanics wise. How are you supposed to spectate matches? How many actual viable ways are there to build a character? Are classes really balanced to warrant fair gameplay? Are there dedicated teams for sPvP?

Further more there are no sponsors for GW2, no spectators who care to see it because of such. Nobody can actually win tangible cash from a tourney so Anet themselves are not trying to get the populace interested in it.

Its kitten at best. First comes balances to spvp (which can be isolated from wvw or pve changes btw). Then comes hosting tournaments with their own money or player pot percentages offered as rewards (50% total pot for 1st, 20% for second, cast back for 3rd). Entries would be maybe $10 or a few gems to buy in to start off. Players will then form dedicated parties. Then Anet can find sponsors who would like to get in on it. Congradulations you have yourself an esport. That is so long as a population can spectate and watch matches from a different computer like LoL spectating.

Architect phoning in. But joking aside.

EB is good as is. It be cool to have a rotating borderlands map with no changes in keep locations. For example if one week we get a map where the water on the map is actually lava. Or if structure rotations are your thing have a tower in the center of the lake where underwater combat would/could be implemented.

Could bring back orbs without the log out glitch and its effect give a stat boost instead of raw damage. Instead of pedestals that the orb has to be on a flag would spawn in the middle of the map where there’s a few minutes to get in and the teams duke it out for the buff. Have the buff reset every couple of hours.

An underworld theme would be cool, just like caverns made to look like rogues quarry and giant bases built into the area would be the keeps and towers.

There’s a lot of ways to spin it but we’ll never see a new wvw map :/

Well I browsed enough to retort to the ridiculous demands in this thread. I’ll post my response in order of ridiculousness.

1. Remove stealth – …are you kidding me? Lowest health pool, bad toughness, and shadowstep being the only escape means thief would be garbage tier over night. How about they losing the ability to use daggers?

2. increase stealth cool down – Could be viable if done right, but don’t nerf the class because people are kitten about cloak and dagger

3. Being able to interrupting stealth – Stealth is easy to get around unless the thief blows a dodge and your meta game is terrible.

4. No healing or removal of conditions in stealth – I can see where that comes from, but if heal doesn’t remove conditions then the thief essentially has no condition removal like almost EVERY OTHER CLASS. Shadows refuge and similar utilities heal in stealth if the player traits it. Same thing with movement speed.

5. Nerf damage – The reason people get roflstomped in pvp is because if you see a thief with d/d he is 98% likely a crit build. Until thieves’ condition damage, or condition damage in general, is improved upon that’s pretty much the only viable option of damage.

now that the top 5 stupid suggestions are over I’m going to give you pointers on how to catch a thief. O.K. kiddies put on your listening ears because I want people to pay attention to improve their meta game.

1. Crowd control – every class has a chill, cripple, snare, root, or other form of immobilization. Stealth is broken for 5 seconds so get ready to use it. the only options for escape is steal and shadowstep (if on the toolbar). forcing a thief to use it on your terms is a lot better than using it on his. Both are a minute cooldown by the way.

2. When you see the blue glow interrupt because its a heal. This should go for all classes.

3. Dots- More dots. Heal is the only thing a thief has that can break condition damage (that will be on the toolbar anyway). So there’s a thousand or 2 damage even if you’re not a condition build, or hundreds in the case of bleed.

4. Dodge – CD stealth lasts for 4 seconds, dodge away when you see the thief leave, count to 2.5 then dodge again and he’ll get out of stealth without landing the backstab.

5. Knockback and prevention methods- warriors, elementalists, and guardians especially can prevent a thief from landing that pesky backstab by pounding/bubble shielding around the ground around them, which will damage and throw the thief back. Mesmers can use desception ( and I know its BS but mesmers can target thief through stealth [ANET fix that plz]), nerco’s fear, and engies have a netgun, so refer to step 1.

No reason for all the complaining because people cant wise up and take advantage of the obvious faults in an opposing class.

Edit: splng erros

Dee Jay.2460:

I see what you mean but I’ve never had a huge problem with it. I just end up throwing away many of my stolen items once I sense my Steal might be up again.

Hah. A true thief is one with the stealth

Your friend needs to learn how to be mobile as well. In a game where everyone can move and attack its especially important for thief to remain literally one step ahead of whatever he’s in combat with.

With a daggers build he needs to assess whats going on and stealth out with cloak and dagger when he starts taking damage. That way he can get as much damage as possible before taking too much. (Pro tip: thieves have one of the worst defense health pools in the game, don’t let the medium armor fool you) shadow refuge, Assassin’s signet and either scorpion wire or skale venom is what i like to use as abilities.

With a pistols build the only options for stealth are blinding powder (which i recommend with pistols), shadow refuge, and of course hide and shadows (the only heal thieves need) With pistols typically you want to stealth when someone gets close, then run out of range, or trade a few blows from behind and reset with another stealth. However, blinding powder and unload make a very effective combo as it blinds enemies for pretty much the duration of the attack.

Mixed dagger/pistol are good crowd controls with either snares and stealth or blinds and interrupts, but lack a bit on damage when compared to the prior 2 builds.

Shortbow is useful for condition damage builds (and arguably the only way its “effective”) and any most other builds. But like pistol no option to stealth.

As for traits, i would recommend learning stealth with the shadow arts and trickery tree, not the most damage, but have to learn how to crawl before you can stealth… or something like that.

Awesomeness of the dagger/shortbow combow.

roll thieves guild and dagger storm. how effective do you think thieves guild is in mass combat?

Well gentlemen it’s time for plan B. See you all when the issue is fixed, i’ll be on minecraft.

had that error, went on to an alt and it worked. Then tried again and went to the alt again, just can’t get on for now.

Yea bought some stuff and didn’t get it, but money was spent. Game is currently down so hopefully they’re doing something good.

Well, given the rankings of the past 4 weeks of November (since Nov 2nd), I’ll give DR 2 weeks until we change tiers. Unfortunately this seems to have as much to do as DR winning aa much as it does with GoM being dominated. From what I gather in the GoM WvW posts, they don’t have much of a chance of improving.

@Mosharn

I’m curious, how big do you think our guild is?

@sirenic

If i knew my guild leader was dancing on a battlefield, directing forces w/ pom poms, I’d have joined pro sooner.

@thenoobler

This is a legitimate claim, although it was an exploit coordinated amongst those thieves, not the whole guild I’m sure.

@ NealCafffrey

There we go again with the unsportsmanlike conduct. Apparently you’re not at the level where you can play the game without abusing the system, but one day you’ll get there I have faith.

On a different note, good going for Ferg catching up in potential points, proving that saturday was an off day for them.

I was just in WvW and we struggled to capture a supply camp because there were 3 thieves chaining stealth skills and not leaving the circle. While they’re stealth in the circle we can’t capture the camp, and when they come out of stealth nobody can see them because of rendering issues, then someone gets backstabbed and the process repeats. We had about 20 people using AoEs everywhere, but couldn’t catch them. The thieves kept that up for about 8 minutes before a huge group came up and forced us out of what should have been our supply camp. Such broken BM tactics is able to prevent players from capping camps, possibly bay keeps , and definitely the castle. An easy fix to this would be to restrict node capping and defending while in stealth like how other games do, otherwise I’ll expect to get nothing done in WvW until their model shows up immediately when stealth is over

@NealCaffrey.6450

That moment when you realize that your unsportsmanlike banter shames your guild and makes you look like a king amongst pricks.

There are no more than 30 of us on and in WvW on a good day and on peak hours, so to siege everything at once like JQ or Blackgate can is impossible. We did have one of our best commanders transfer to another server, and another start his own guild (which doesn’t WvW).

Maybe you’re missing something as to how WvW works; points are points. And while the majority of DR’s guilds are fighting it out in EB, that leaves us, randoms, or fragments of guilds to fight in a given BL. So to fight for a garrison for 2 hours, when we can go on another map and cap four times as many points instead, sounds like a good idea doesn’t it?

Guilds adapt to each others strengths and weaknesses, I know you know that. We can’t be everywhere, so we make due with what we have. That being said, I haven’t been on when pro wasn’t able to take a keep or garrison, no matter how long it took. Deflate your ego and stop hating.

It seems that it has been downhill for ET since the mass exodus of guilds.

I’ve been on Devona’s Rest since game launch, save for 2 weeks where i was on Eberon Terrace. Recently coming back and with the addition of [PRO] to the server, and the activity of Kain’s guilds i was shocked with how competitive the servers have gotten.
With how much arguing between Kain and Devona’s going on I can honestly say we are two of the fiercest servers in this game.

Ironic because of the early days where we were trounced by Borlis Pass every other week and the only way we held off defeat was working together half the time. Lets just agree that when we get the chance (and we will) we go after Borlis Pass like in the early days and turn this ferocity on them for a while.

Until then, thanks to everyone in WvW on all sides for making the game enjoyable and active.