Guild Wars 2

I would love this, with some proper balance changes it could add some new useful tricks/combos and increase skillcap further.

Swagginator.3246:

because the 20k backstab is bullkitten in spvp. only if you are fully buffed you can dish out those damages in WvW. and that’s saying he isn’t tanky in any form.

in spvp you do by average like 8-9 k dmg.
if you happen to buff yourselves with signet trait and on a cloth like elementalist, you may deal around 13k BS, put 4-5k cloak and dagger and it’s a one-shot since we’re talking spvp.
but that’s super rare and you will find yourself succeding with what you wanted after like 10 attempts failing the 9 other attempts just ending up dying. if you don’t backstab, you’re dead, you’ll end up thinking thieves are only good at capping with shortbow, which isn’t entirely true.

Not fully 20k though.

Infiltrator’s arrow is faster to cast, and covers the range of 2 heartseekers with same cost. And you lose about 20-40% of the promised distance by its cast time and also dependent on latency or server lag

Heartseeker has longer cast time, halts movement and benefits from swiftness (but also is affected by slow and immobilize), it also doesn’t require precise targeting and has higher success rate since it isn’t a shadow step.

Normally they are both quite equal.
With swiftness heartseeker wins.
With haste infiltrator’s arrow wins, since the distance of HS is shortened by haste.
While in stealth infiltrator’s arrow wins.
While in stealth with “+50%” movement speed heartseeker wins.
While crippled/frozen/immobilized infiltrator’s arrow wins.

Max mobility and chaseability taking that there are targets available would be:
D/P + S/x, Withdrawal, Roll for Initiative, Infiltrator’s signet, Shadow Step, respective traits to reduce cooldowns, long range steal, long duration swiftness on demand.

SoLeciTO.3490:

how do you cancel shadow return?

Interesting. I suppose it can be canceled with a dodge or possibly by sheathing weapons mid cast.

^Can be canceled both ways but will however not remove the return spot nor reset the skill to the first in chain.

Depends how far you are willing to traverse into the land of glass.

Some loosely given numbers based on my experience, all results were experienced while having Executioner traited instead of Hidden killer:

I’d say 6.5k is the average backstab for a balanced build (30 crit and 30 shadow arts).
If you go more glassy you can get up to 9k average.
Even more glassy you can get up to 12k average (30 deadly arts and 30 crit).

that’s quite hilarious.

Shadowsteps have always had identity issues on whether it should be a teleport or a rubberband.

But it seems after last patch it became worse (haven’t tested it myself) and also there
are and were a few bugs with steal, heartseeker+steal wouldn’t land heartseeker for instance, so might be the same with CnD+steal.

Yep, landing a damaging attack while in stealth reveals you. No matter if the attack is cast in or out of stealth.

There are ways to take advantage of this and there ways that harm you.

One thing that has happened for all thieves with the first minor trait in SA is the trait Last Refuge having its proc in the middle of Cloak and Dagger (or other stuff like AA) cast time causing the cloak and dagger hit to reveal you.

Some basic ways to use it to an advantage:
Clusterbomb>BS>Steal
Surprise Shot>Surprise Shot
Surprise shot>wpn swp>Sneak Attack

With some distance the projectile spends more time in the air without landing and dealing dmg, allowing additional attacks or stealth attacks while in stealth.

Jayden Ennok.3687:

I also hate rangers but for their use of knockback in pve.

+111111111

Sad thing is, all rangers are like that. Ranging from PBS when people are pushing with their high dps melee skills, to using Hunter’s Shot just to stand around in stealth til it wears off.

depending on situations.

PvE / PvP: Smokebomb>Start heal>shadow step away while healing. If you get to high ground GG.
PvP/PvE: Smokebomb>Teleport away>tap 1 like mad and if you have enough distance you may throw Venomous Knife twice.
PvP: Prevent Stomp

Esplen.3940:

Actually, you can have half-percentile stats. The number will be rounded down in the equipment menu, but it won’t mean you don’t have that critical chance…

Source? Never seen it tested so I was assuming the game engine is as limited as the UI.

I don’t care about the stunbreaker nor teleporting while stunned.
But the cast time severely ruined the skill, pretty much changed the whole set,
from a set balanced across all skills (except 4) into a set with most of its weight on #3.

I remember I used pretty much all weapon skills to take down my opponents, even Dancing Dagger which I often regretted using !

Combos like CnD>Tactical Strike could be used often in order to unload an AA chain, then teleport out with 2 before getting slamdunkdafunk’d.

Infiltrator’s Return could be used to instantly get out of kitten (AoE) before getting rek’d.

and ofc FS>LS times when it was useful, could be against slow and telegraphed attacks, and when there were any specific boons to be stolen.

After the nerf I felt pretty much left with #2 to enter combat, #3 spam and some auto attack chains, ofc some cnds to stealth and reposition/escape. Haven’t tried it after #3 got nerfed into the ground as well.

This is just a visual graph of the direction I felt the nerf threw the set, it’s not based on percentage, just a visual comparison of usefulness and usage from my PoV.
(I used to play 10/30/0/0/30, and I felt competitive with quite minimal dodging by using all weapon skills, positioning etc. together)

No matter how I turn this, it all depends.

Build, runes, sigils, desired stats, if you want to be well setup while progressing for ascended, or if you want a perfect end result.

After they took out Critical Damage as a stat and changed it to Ferocity, they pretty much removed “soft” optimizing. What’s left is “hard” optimizing; obtaining the right number of precision and ferocity.

Q: whaat?
@: every 21 precision is 1% crit chance, if you have 20 precision and therefor lack 1 it gets rounded down to 0% and becomes a loss of 20 stats. And every 15 ferocity is 1% crit dmg, if you have 14 ferocity, same thing, a loss of a 14 stats.

Base precision: 926, 4%
Base ferocity: 0, 150%

if what I wrote above matters.
press Start+R, type “calc” without quotes.
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/

Worst case scenario: you lose 34 stats in total.

If it doesn’t matter, well you can do just like all other thieves and go with full valkyrie armor set, 1x valkyrie+zerk ring, 1x cavalier accessory and rest berserkers.

Get a dire set and get a taste of immortality and enjoy how everything will fall before thee, engineer and necro alike.

Afterall the game is balanced around going 1v3 if you are using condi builds, and that’s just fine. But dare not be strong in 1v1 with a power build, don’t you just dare !!!

Personally I stopped playing a while ago, not because thieves got nerfed, but because I don’t enjoy the current AoE spam, AI-clog, no-brain meta. Thieves are so fragile in sPvP that they get killed even without being the one the opponent tries to kill, lovely…

Viable yes, it’s just not optimal when with hardcore PvE heroes.

5/6/0/0/3 Single Target
4/6/0/0/4 with ricco for more AoE
3/6/0/0/5 other experimental build

The traits match quite well with S/P, gear full berserk, utilities whatever you need to use (smokescreen, SR, Signet of Agility, Shadow Step for quick condi removal, Assassins signet for increasing dmg), signet of malice or withdraw as heal. For max dmg, switch out CS:4 for signets of power and go full signet.

Something to keep in mind:
Rotation: 3…3…..3….3….3…. your goal should be to stay above 6 initiative and below 15.
Spamming unload til you run out of initiative ofc gives more burst, but that doesn’t really make initiative regen faster, in the long run you will use unload just as much if you use it calmly as you would if you spammed it, but using it calmly lets you have the extra damage bonus and hence more dps and less burst.

ens.9854:

It is hilarious that they gave it to engi of all professions, rather than one that actually needed help vs thief

this.

moi.4398:

Impact.2780:

I feel they should have made it turn over to larcenous strike when the attack is blocked. Semantically speaking, a block is still technically a hit, just not where you intended to hit.

With that logic you should be revealed when your backstab get block right ?

Seeing the word logic mentioned, how come backstab isn’t unblockable? Does people with blocks have an extra invisible shield and an extra pair of strong arms, and eyes that escape consciousness granting them visions of the unknown? In order to allow them to protect their golden butts?

After studying behavioral patterns of the balance team for quite some time, it’s just a matter of time until we have reveal on block as well, might even be before they decide to fix the steal bug.

Afterall, thieves hardcounters needs to be even stronger ! Since med guardians doesn’t already kill thieves in a couple of seconds.

S/D is versatile and easy to perform well with, however D/P feels more rewarding when played properly.

During my days on S/D I could stick around good in team fights and I had great mobility. It’s pretty much a mobile, anti-thief (6 trickery), team fighter with great sustain, while D/P is more fast-paced. D/P has to turn the fights the first moments it enters combat or provide pressure with SB when needed. If it can’t turn the fight quickly, it’s often better off going elsewhere, which most thieves don’t realize.

I highly doubt A-net will provide you with a personal answer.

However, I watched the livestream when this trait was implemented.
Thieves have since long been yearning for access to stability and this was anet’s way of providing them with it. They intended it to be a skillful trait for one to pick up, experienced players are able to predict combat on a higher level than less experienced players. So this trait was meant to provide these skilled players a way to access stability if they can predict CC is coming.

Personal opinions: To me D/P and D/D starts feeling ineffective if you spend more than 3 points in acro line, making 6 out of the question. S/P and P/P lacks stealth on demand, making them rely on longer cooldowns in order to use stealth for this trait, and also in order for P/P to be effective it needs to put points in lines more rewarding in terms of damage. What’s left is S/D and P/D, P/D can have some good benefit from picking up this trait however it’s either a sacrifice in damage or most of their survival.
And well, S/D has access to limitless dodges if played properly.

Conclusion: This trait is incompatible with its current location and it’s function is somewhat incompatible with thief. Picking up this trait is like drinking a cup of hot tea on sunny day.

Once upon a time, thieves who timed backstab until stealth wore off were able to restealth and backstab again, Anet frowned upon this and made backstabs always cause revealed, but however they didn’t make backstab always benefit from hidden killer.

From how I understood the combat engine, it filters what effects should be taken in account the moment a combat ability is successfully executed, for instance you can’t evade a critical hit, because the critical hit occurs something like 2ms after the attack lands. (something abusing this: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Incendiary_Powder )

tl;dr: The moment backstab is successfully executed it checks if hidden killer is active.

Helly.2597:

Lastly, thieves in general are one of the last (one could argue the last) class where you will find players roaming on full zerker builds in wvw still.

I’ve fought plenty of roamers who have been full zerk warriors and mesmers, even engineers although their zerk builds are inferior to their condi builds.

In zergs most ranged damage-dealers are often also full zerk because they can with their 1200+ range.

Tripwire is quite funny to use sometimes, good to catch someone off guard in 1v1.
Shadow Trap, I swap this one for shadow refuge sometimes.
Ambush Trap, I use it sometimes with venomshare builds.
Needle Trap, let’s you lock someone down unloading plenty of damage, can be useful with a S/P or P/P build.

However traps are unreliable, lacks versatility, also weak if the opponent predicts them. They have no place in competitive play, and are limited only to 1v1’s and WvW roaming for some variation.

“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” – Charles Darwin

The following fits GW2 quite good, since so many buffs/nerfs appear to come out of nowhere, like it was just as RNG as the loot system. <3

“Survivors aren’t always the strongest; sometimes they’re the smartest, but more often simply the luckiest.” – Carrie Ryan

Flanking Strike is really easy to dodge and not rewarding to dodge, LS is slightly harder to dodge, but more rewarding to dodge.

Now you get the reward of both by dodging flanking strike.

You can ofc Flanking Strike from distance and teleport to target the moment it is about to connect. Weapon skills dependent on utilizes, gg.

But on the other hand, it will be possible to spam flanking strikes under the condition that it fails to land. Although it has a slight aftercast, it might end up similar to disabling shot, and get nerfed again.

P/P and P/D lacks mobility, that’s the main reason most people will choose SB over it.

in sPvP, SB will allow you to use shortcuts across the map and also get to high ground with ease. The ranged aoe and poison field provides nice pressure on clusters.

P/D is quite condition oriented and you can become nearly immortal with it if you pick up dire armor and create condition build, many people have done and still do this, so it’s not something new. For powerbuilds #3 and #5 causes quite good pressure, making the set really useful as an off-set, especially when fighting 1v2 or 1v3 against melee builds of all sorts.

But in sPvP, its survival and even damage relies too much on stealth making it a weak choice compared to other options.

A well-played mesmer that doesn’t do a single mistake is a quite even fight for a D/P thief, the mesmer even have the fight tipped in his favor.

A mesmer that is poorly played against thieves is killed by being aggressive. Always gapclose in, keep pressure, keep blinds up and land backstabs. This will often cause these ones to panic and die quite quickly, and in the middle of their panic; alt+tab to open up google chrome and enter https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief to start a new topic, often the panic will wear off and they’ll cancel the topic before creating it.

Some things to keep in mind based on my experience with both classes:
Fighting skilled mesmers takes more patience, landing backstabs on meatshielding clones will make you completely waste your BP>HS combo and often lead to your death. If they enter stealth it will usually take ~1.5 – 2 seconds and you get immobilized, moa’d or stunned for 50 years and caught in a shatter combo which instantly kills you, learning the timing to dodge this will be invaluable. If you are forced to shadow refuge, make it safe; consume ectoplasm gives you a short stability and a 10s aegis, or create a good distance between you and the mesmer (with shadowstep if needed), or use SR in a corner and hug it. Zerker phantasm is your worst enemy, if the zerker phantasm lands its first spin as soon as you enter the fight you have pretty much already lost. Blind is hard for mesmers to deal with quickly so keeping a good blind uptime with Shadow Shot and Blackpowder will be helpful, many thieves doesn’t care about landing the blind from BP, but you really should. Stealth also pretty much locks them out from hurting you (beware of clones tracking through stealth though). While fighting outside stealth also try keeping pressure on phantasms. Also headshot and steal is good to prevent mass invis and their heals. And as always, don’t fight predictable, I often stealth for no reason, to just stand and look at how my opponent tries to counter me and blowing cds.

It’s drawing near !

S/D 2/0/0/6/6 is no doubt strong, especially for spvp and tpvp, it can do a bit of everything, though it wont have high burst.

If you really wanna be jack of all trades pick up a P/D + SB build, x/x/6/x/6
You’ll have high defense against conditions, against physical damage, high mobility, high pressure, high burst, high sustain. I was using Sigil of Geomancy, Sigil of Doom, Rune of the Krait, Bewildering Ambush and Caltrops along with Cluster Bomb allowing me to cause some neat pressure even outside stealth along with shortbow, however you have to be careful with weapon swaps while in stealth, and also be careful with stealth usage, since stealth results in decaps or loss of contesting progress.

TrOtskY.5927:

Personally as a zerker guard, bunker guard and roaming d/p thief I would much prefer to fight you over the s/d builds that are extremely difficult to take down at the moment (these fights stalemate 90% of the time for me), and I would still prefer to fight any thief build over a well set up turret engi 1v1 on a point, or a PU mesmer or a Necro MM.

One of the most difficult 1v1’s for D/D and P/D thieves so I’m not wondering why.

However I find P/D as one of the easiest thief builds to learn, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a high skill ceiling though, it’s just easy to do relatively well with in fights, even when outnumbered, being really good at P/D makes you pretty much a god mode troll unless you fight outnumbered against hardcounters.

For s/tPvP the sort of control builds thieves can come up with are not really good and useful.

However it’s quite fun in WvW with something like 2/0/6/0/6 and S/D.
This build focuses around landing tactical strike from behind, which along with blind on stealth gives your opponent little time to fight back before you can restealth, the vigor from the trickery line along with the extra initiative makes it quite dodgy out of stealth too, and ofc SoH for an extra interrupt. But yeah, it however can’t fully lock down opponents like mesmers and warriors can, even AoE.

Trickery 6 – Sleight of Hand
S/P – #3
x/P – #4
S/x – Stealth #1 from behind
Basilisk Venom
Tripwire

Immobilize and going behind through Devourer Venom, DA 6 – Panic Strike or Infiltrator’s Strike, also P/x 2.

Depends on what your team needs.

S/D if you need to engage in fights more, D/P if you need to provide spike dmg and interrupts. Both have high mobility to utilize.

Trickery gives you vigor, and a 20 sec cd daze that pierces stability through boonrip, the extra initiative adds to mobility and also the use of skills. 5/6/0/0/3 is quite close to 2/6/0/0/6, but that daze and boonrip with stability as highest priority adds a lot more counterplay than 4secs of weakness every 15+ sec does, while keeping quite close to same dmg as DA, and that vigor combined with Dagger autos let’s you dodge quite a lot too.

I sometimes swap some of the zerk or valk pieces to soldiers, especially if I’m about to 1v2 thieves, I use Scholar runes to make up for the dmg loss, and the added armor or health also makes the runeset a bit more useful. Landing a successful backstab usually deals high enough dmg against thieves anyways with any power set, but since it might be difficult to land against thieves being able to crit most attacks while being fairly tanky is handy (Zerk, Assassin and PvT mix.)

Otherwise wearing Zerk + Valk + Cavalier will provide you with more dmg on your backstabs and high defence at the same time, while wearing Soldier will make you tankier without losing too much precision.

Anything works for zerging since thieves aren’t really useful there anyways, but by going as glassy as possible your cluster bombs can at least hit the same dmg as 1 tick of staff eles meteor storm.

Scouting, well why not, although a scouting build has high enough mobility and escapability so you might as well run around naked, putting PvT on top of that, well..

As other people have stated here, GW2 requires a beast CPU.

Personally I have:
i5-3570k, 3.40GHz
GTX 660, 2gb (Slightly better than yours)
8gb 1666mhz DDR3

It was really good for the price range a while back when I bought it, GW2 runs really smooth on highest settings between 40-60 fps most of the time, only place I’m having trouble is in WvW if 2-3 huge zergs are in an area, but could possibly reach around 20 fps which is quite acceptable under these rare situations, if I wasn’t so lazy and bought some better cooling and overclocked the cpu.

I was about to buy one of the cheap AMD’s at first, but after seeing all reviews, tests and comparisons to intel. Intel is the real deal when it comes to gaming, while AMD seems to aim more for being a price efficient office/work cpu, but it can do games fairly well too.

Buy an i5-4670k or i5-4770k and a new mobo, this is worth every penny and will perform good in games for years, especially if you overclock.

I feel full zerk meditation guardians are probably one of the hardest 1v1’s as a P/D thief, but on the other hand I’ve never played it with full Dire. Although P/D thieves are way stronger against Necros and Engineers than other thief builds, good ones can still harm a P/D thief a lot by kiting them using cripple and chill, and eventually counter their Shadow Refuge with fear or knockbacks.

But yep, as others have said, P/D thieves are unlikely to provide much pressure if they have to chase you, P/D has no mobility skills and the rest of the weapon sets with mobility skills doesn’t have any skills to put condi pressure on a moving target.

if you don’t have any mobility skills on your weapon sets or utility bars you need to improve your roaming build. P/D thieves are unlikely to carry swiftness, if they run D/x or SB as offset they can travel 900 units per 6s, additional range by blowing utilities shadow step 50s cd (1100-1200), infiltrator’s signet 30s cd (900), Steal (900) likely at 27s cd. If they start blowing utilities trying to chase you and you were able to cause high pressure you’re likely to be able to kill them.

haha all this discussion on whether dodge jumping has its own animation or not.

By jumping the character elevates on the Y-axis, while the characters 3D model enters a specific animation, combining it with dodge just makes the dodge animation override the jumping animation not creating a new animation.

Macroing dodge and jump on the same button is not permitted, this covers everything.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Policy-3rd-Party-Programs-Multi-Boxing-Macros/first

I regularly jump+dodge, just took some practice to get the timing right.
It’s quite similar to performing a Guard Break or Jump Power Attack in Dark Souls 2, although those are slightly harder.

It’s fully unaffected by lag.

imo, all direct damage should be visible like normal when you hit a stealthed target and show up in combat log, I wanna see how this works out.

Besides that I find the minor trait Meld in Shadows quite messed up and creates extended periods of stealth + cleansing of 4 conditions in 8 seconds with shadow’s embrace, personally I would like to see meld in shadows with a 4sec icd. Same goes for prismatic understanding. After several weeks playing Deadly Arts, I tried to use the small stealth durations I had at my disposal for best effect, after that I felt Shadow Arts allowed me to play really sloppy.

If blocks and evades took thieves out of stealth, blocks and evades would be OP, thieves would have no way to counter passive 5y6m10d6h20m32s aegis from stealth.

But feef stil op, 1v2!! iven 1v3!!!! No oder glass can 1v2!!!!

Amusing vid though, and love how they made a ballista and an AC just for dealing with you. And well played !

Sneaky Turban.6823:

1. Thief: Revealed buff now lass 4 seconds instead of 3 (also applies to other classes but directed at thief)
2. sword auto attack damage is increased by 5%,
3. Bewildering Ambush now applies 3 stacks of confusion instead of 5
4. the condition chill now reduces initiative recharge rate by 66% (I think that’s what it usually is)

1. Thief would need a huge overhaul if stealth was touched. That 1 second is a matter of life and death in many situations for a stealth spamming thief, it also would desynch the rotation in PvE and lower dps. During those weeks they actually put it to 4s, the only remaining viable stealth builds were P/D and D/P.
2. Sword auto-attack damage is strong as it is, and increasing it would only make it more powerful where it already is powerful, while it still would be meaningless where it is meaningless. Thieves would still get roflstomped by zergs or groups if they try to go auto-cleave inside it.
3. I see no reason to tone this one down, and it would give thieves less reason to not pick sleight of hand.
4. Thieves have to be treated seperately compared to other classes when it comes to chill. First off they aren’t able to swap weaponsets, kits or attunements in order to gain 5 fresh cooldowns, secondly initiative governs the use of every weaponskill.
From my experience, chill is already a hard counter to thieves not having access to Withdraw the moment they get chilled.

edit: removed a lot of text from the chill part, due to a miscalculation I made while being tired.

Ofc it’s possible, just not suggested as shortbow grants thieves mobility and access to shortcuts around the maps, also ensuring a clean retreat since SB #5 isn’t affected by cripple, immobilize and chill, SB is superior for the type utility it brings, and the utility it brings is often what top tier thieves are after. Besides this it’s also able to cause some good pressure on crowded nodes, though S/D is viable for that as well.

Thief, Elite:
Assassin’s Mark – Inflict the target with x5 vulnerability (4s) every 2 seconds. 10s duration, 1s cast time, 600 range, 60s cd, unblockable.

Thief, Elite – Basilisk Venom
Penetrates Stability.

Thief, Trait, Deadly Arts, Master Tier.
Ambush – Attacks landing behind from stealth inflicts the target with Weakness and x3 Vulnerability for 5 seconds. 20s icd.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

Maugetarr.6823:

Iirc they increased the down state health a while back to encourage the play-counterplay options that shockwave mentioned. Before that, downstate was way more biased towards getting stomped.

My apoligies, i figured Hard revive would mean reviving someone manually( without skills) so battle standard etc are not taken into account.

I took the 3 second manual revive as a standard. Basicly i meant to point out the ability to revive an ally with a guardian while that person is being focused, poisoned and covered with conditions.

I do agree i like the change in general to be more in favor of reviving but the Heal-/Bunker Guardian can revive quite fast considering the downed mechanic of certain professions leave alot to consider.

Need I point out more?

It sure is annoying, but it’s one of their roles and responsibilities.

Some counterplay is to bring Corrupt Boon, CC, Blinds, Stability or Shadow Step along with Poison and some dmg to the fight, or simply full focus on the guardian if your team has an easier time countering battle standard, mass invis or shadow refuge (if the opponents brought them that is).

Nurf warrior.

Proof.

I don’t mind really, both classes are strong and balanced around the way they are.

But if it was added I suppose something like this would do. Although I would be really annoyed if I swapped sigils by pressing the weaponswap while using a kit, so I’d prefer if it was only usable while using P/x or Rifle, and a small cooldown on it everytime when leaving a kit.

Agreed, though while also bunkers zoobuilds should deal less dmg their summons should also benefit from toughness and vitality.

And traits that reduce incoming dmg for the spawns should be changed into reduction to AoE damage, making fights in more benefit for people who solely focus one of the spawns in order to cripple a part of a summoner build rather than for instance a staff ele destroying all spawns quickly and effortlessly with meteor shower.

Grenix.1576:

I think Anet does not want classes to be able to burst like that. Thiefs were named thiefs for a good reason, and not assasin like in gw1. Their whole class is centered around their specialty: stealing. Thats all fine and fun, but saying that a thief is supposed to be played like hit and run or join the kill sound all wrong to me. All classes should be able to win an “honarable” 1 on 1 battle and STAND their man. Thiefs are just being played as a troll class by most ppl and this is why they are hated. Most of the time i prefer actually NOT teaming up with thieves because all they do is roam and go for easykils in a map, and this makes them actually loose the match often.

Well that’s thieves task, easy kills and de-/capping far in situations where it can stall the game and buy time or force opponents to leave mid to recap their close. They work similar to Dragoons during the 17-19th century, they run quickly to fill out where they are needed and do various tasks.

They are not a bulletproof 1v1 class, and experienced thieves tend to avoid 1v1’s that can lead to outdrawn fights that might not even be possible to win, engineers with nearly any build will for instance always have the odds in their favor against thieves.

If your team composition needs something else like for instance a zerker staff ele or a power necro with lich form who can destroy a team quickly at mid that’s ofc better than picking up a thief.

Warrior
Thief
Guardian

All 3 are solid, thief and warrior offers more diversity while you might feel more limited as a guardian.

mainly (other weapon sets does also work)
Warrior – Rifle, GS, Axe/Axe
Thief – P/P, S/P, D/D
Guardian – GS, S/F

1. All 3 are solid choices for 1v1’s.
2. Thief and Warrior, due to mobility, escapability and sturdiness in combat.
3. Thief, followed by warrior, eles seem to do quite good in at least 1v2 with celestial, while 1v3 pressure them too much. It all depends on who and what you fight ofc.
4. All 3 are solid choices.
+ Thief is your main PvP class.

Sigmoid.7082:

Imagi.4561:

Ezeriel.9574:

And just the other day, the zerg I was in, couldn’t catch a thief in gari, and after 10 minutes of chasing him around, we just gave up, because the thirty of us clearly didn’t have the skill to catch him….

I’m inclined to agree that your zerg was unskilled, if thirty people couldn’t catch a single thief in ten minutes.

A single ranger woukd have solved this issue.

Or an engineer.

This is what I have on mind when I go to solve thief problems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1-YPLp3KqA

Waffler.1257:

A competent team in an even fight will always out rez cleave damage on a SR, but bads often don’t know how to rez each other so maybe that’s new information to you. If a warrior tries to stability warbanner, I will just corrupt boon/path of corruption/spinal shivers and interrupt regardless. Guess you didn’t think about that, but from your idiotic post it seems you don’t do very much thinking period. Lastly, I never said thieves were broken, I responded to a post of a person saying they weren’t good at reviving allies because I regularly play in a small group as a thief or with a thief ally so I know how good they are at preventing downed players from becoming defeated players. Overzealous kitten thief posts attacking anyone who suggests that the thief class is good at anything are just as stupid as the ignorant posts about thieves being OP at everything.

A competent team in an even fight will always prevent rez inside a SR, but badz often don’t know how to use knockbacks, poison, AoE damage and stuns, maybe that’s new information to you. If a thief tries SR ress, I will just magnetic shield>magnetic inversion, throw poison grenades on the refuge and drop a fire bomb and prevent the ress regardless. Lastly, I never said thieves are weak, I responded to a post claiming thieves are are OP and will take over WvW along with Warriors, I play thief regularly in all game modes and I know many situations where I have dropped shadow refuge on an ally and been standing and watching hoping that my teammates will ress him because the first I see when I drop the shadow refuge is Wells, Marks, Putrid Explosions, Bombs, Grenades, iWave, Hundred Blades, Earthshaker, Staggering Blow, Flurry, Meteor Shower, along with many other things that alone has to be avoided at all cost as a thief.

Like warbanner has counterplay if someone brings interrupts and boonremoval if needed, shadow refuge is countered by all forms of AoE; knockbacks, stuns, burn +poison for great effect, and other sources of high AoE damage.