Guild Wars 2

I found the thief’s damage in pve to be quite lackluster to be honest. My warrior did more damage and had an easier time at every stage of pve. Also, Warriors are much tankier.
Most people will tell you that the thiefs defense is good dodging – well, last time I checked Warriors could dodge too.
Overall I thonk the thief’s damage does in no way compensate for it being squishy as hell.
Just to give you an example:
As a lvl 70 thief in straits of devastation in full lvl 70 blue equip a PINK MOA can bring you down to 10% health before it dies if you only autoattack it.
Warrior doing the same will hardly take a scratch because your healing signet can reg against the moas damage with ease.

Lokheit.7943:

The thief is a VERY UNDERATED support profession, many thief players are guilt for this as they insist on going 100% dps so other players see us like that, when this is the wrong way to play. We’re Thieves, not Assassins, we can do our share of damage (but contrary to popular opinion, there are professions much better than us at this), Thieves in role games bring a lot of support and intangibles to the table, and we have enough utilities to bring that. At least I like to play supportive, I enjoy it, I keep helping the team in many different areas and I feel like I’m doing a lot more than when I build just for damage. Plus, the feeling of resurrecting so many teamates all the time while playing as a really fragile profession, is great for your self steem xD

This so much. After realising my damage was at best en par with most other dedicated dps classes I tried support. Shadows refuge really is THAT good. Many people will love you when you help them cap a commune typ skillchallenge with ease or ress them in the middle of a bunch of mobs.
Throw in some aoe cripple and blind and you got a lot of damage mitigation for your entire team.

Indeed I have seen many guardians using theire racial elite, most common is human with hounds of balthazar which I would take myself if my guardian wasn’t a norn and there racial elite transformation suck even more than any profession elite ever could.

On step might even be to introduce an ammo system to tomes because I find the duration to be too short and just keep spamming stuff instead of tactical usage.

Greatsword might be a nice addition, but hammer would actually fit better. Anyone remembers Necromancer Munne in gw1 pre-searing catacombs ? I really liked the idea of a caster profession wielding heavy melee type weapons. And the necro absolutely fits it with being the ‘brutal’ caster – same reason why axe fits the necro theme perfectly.

And as it stands were have less weapons to chose from than other professions.
Warrior is the biggest offender, getting 3 mainhand, 5 offhand and 4 twohanded wepons.
But other classes have more than we too. Guardian gets 3 mh, 3 oh and 3 twohanded weapons.
Ele and engi have less ‘real’ weapons because they have attunement, kits and summond weapons so that’s fine.
Necro only has: 3 mh, 3 oh and 1 twohanded weapon. sure, we have DS but that only gives 4 skills which is less than a twohanded weapon. Our skillcount is only equal to other classes because of some useless chains they put in there.
Necro could use a new 2handed weapon, my vote is on hammer or on greatsword.

Sad thing is games are moving away from pet classes because it’s hard to do them right. Especially the Necro, that generally has more dynamic minion behaviour and not a single static pet like the ranger.
Necro in gw2 borders on severely underpowert, at least the minion aspect (which I consider to be the may draw for the necro class, everything alse is just “mage with a shadow theme” for me). Minions are not duarable enough to reliably tank for you. And since gw2 is not designt around “facetanking” and minions cannot evade they are ususally killed in 2-3 hits come endgame. Ranger at least get their bears with tons of health and generaly have more controle over them.
I recommend waiting a bit for Anet to fix necros when the first big class reworks are comming around (and some classes are in dire need of one) and make minions more viable. As I said, minions are hard to balance and probalby the part Anet didn’t care about when rushing the necro out for release.

For the meantime I can strongly suggest a warrior. It might not hit your need for a magic-based class but it simply has the easiest and most enjoyable leveling experience. You will literally feel weak with any class after playing a warrior in pve.

Totally support that idea. Never really understood why the elites of the guardian completely change my skills. Biggest problem is, that all other professions have a “go to” elite that can be used in almost all situations and always has a positive effect. Warrior got their signet of rage – you pop it and get some sweet buffs, nothing to think about.
Guardian elites are all way to situanional. There rarely is a time I want to use Tome of Wrath against a veteran because it takes away all my utilities and barely inproves my offense. Sure, I can use renewed focus for some minor damage prevention and to regain my virtues but virtues shine more in a group environment, which I consinder to be situational.

Guardians should get a good, solo-play supporting elite. An elite spirit weapon would be great. Just to get an idea:

Greatsword of Might [Elite]cast: 2s, ; cd: 90s
Summon a powerful spirit greatsword (20s) to cleave and burn your foes with powerful area attacks for (1s of burning per hit).
– Command: creates a powerful bladestorm at the spirit greatswords location. This destroys the greatsword.

This would be an elite you could use in every battle and it would always have a positive effect on your damage output.
Situanional elites that are powerful under specific circumstances are great because they require thinking, but giving every class a slightly less powerful but generally more “splashable” elite would be great.

Also, Elite should help define a build. All other classes get an elite that shares a skillclass with there utilities and is therefore effected by traits. An ele that like summond wepons can go for an elite weapon, thief that like venoms can go for an elite venom and so on. Guardian get no elite consecration or elite spirit weapon giving their elite the feeling of being “just kind of thrown in there because glowy books are cool”.

Why shouldn’t guardians be able to deal good, reliable damage at max range? If warriors want to play support healing, they can do that by taking shout healing and taking healing power gear, bam, support healer build.
Guardians could do the same with ranged damage if we at least had the option to do so, but scepter is clearly lacking in that department. You can stack as much power, crit and crit damage as you want if your projectiles never hit the enemy, and that is just one aspect why scepter is not really good.

I see your point but what you are asking for is a complete change of mechanics for some spells.
The point of ground targeting is, that you have to anticipate where your target will be when the spell goes off. With your proposed chang targets would at least get one tick of damage from spells like smite, because it would always be cast at the point where your target is standing.

Many skills that look promising on paper turn out to be very bad once you realise the numbers are just way to low. like the necro trait ‘vampiric’ that let’s your skills drain life. Once you realise it is only like 2 health per skill on low levels it looks pretty worthless.
I Think this lack of detailed information prevents really strategic build design. How should I be able to make decisions for skills, if I don’t even know how they scale with my stats ?! ‘altruistic healing’ on the guardian looks solid and one might think about building healing power on gear to make it better. What a shame it scales on a factor of 0.001 making healing power do basically nothing for this trait.
ANet has to revamp all the tooltips a give the players way more information if they want to get anywhere near the point of guildwars being taken serious as an esport.

Shurimpu.2048:

That would be cool, but imbalanced. Races are balanced around the fact that all racial skills pretty much suck.

Sure racials are supposed to be worse then class elites, but other racial elites are a least decent. I actually found the charr warband or the hounds of balth to be quite usefull for dmg and for distraction. The Charrzooka deals some decent dmg.
The Norn transformations are actually worse than an empty eliteslot because they hinder your movement in battle and remove half of your skills.

I like the OPs suggestion of tying the forms to class-roles, makes them looked more focused and not just a random bunch of “claw, scratch and howling stuff”