Guild Wars 2

I don’t know from experience, but I hear that using a pistol in the off-hand is THE best way to survive as a thief – especially in the early levels. The one time I tried this, it was indeed, much easier, but it was BORING.

Personally, I played D/D + SB coming up and it was just brutal – I died a LOT. I stuck with it, because I really enjoyed how cool D/D looks and it was more fun to play, even with the deaths.

Once I got to the level where I could pick a trait bonus and I got the one where every time you dodge it throws up caltrops, things got a lot easier. Between the evasion of Deathblossom and dodging + caltrops, I can basically dance around the battlefield and hardly ever get hit. One-on-one, no mob can touch me, and even against small groups I do okay, because both DB and caltrops do AoE and bleed damage.

Anyway, I’m sure there are other ways to do it, but that’s what works for me, and it’s a total blast.

I find this to be an interesting and fun complication. It forces you to think about what you are doing and consider carefully before you use an AoE. It makes combat more strategic and fun.

I do wish that certain abilities were smarter, though. I mainly play a D/D thief and my #4 ability is Dancing Dagger which bounces around and hits up to 3 (or is it 4) targets. To my mind, this ability is not an AoE and it should never bounce and hit a neutral opponent, but it does, and I find that annoying.

What’s the tankiest pet?
The best I have found so far is a bear, but I played WoW for years as a Hunter with a bear pet, so I want something else.

Mayama.1854:

mesmer > thief any day

edit: you hardly move around as elementalist? You must be the easiest freekill in any pvp scenario.

I don’t PvP.

My thief is my main and I am still dying a lot at lv 33. I struggled to get that far and some days have been downright painful playing my thief.

But that being said, it just seems to me that playing a thief is SO much more fun than the other classes.

Every so often, I get tired or frustrated, and I play something else for a while. But all of the other classes just seem so dull. With my Elementalist, I hardly have to move around at all. I just stand still and cast my spells. ‘yawn’.

Is it just me, or are thieves just more fun to play?
Are there any other classes that are as fun to play as a thief?

There’s a good thread about combos here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Combo-Fields-Learn-Them-Already-People/page/2#post273068

Or… it gets good once you get past the OP’s rage.

Without a doubt.
Just as good, if not better, than any other MMO out there and no monthly fee, just a one-time purchase. I have gotten far more than my money’s worth. And I bought the deluxe edition and also $50 worth of gems.

Okay, I ordered a Razer Naga. I hope it’s awesome.

Ahh, neat. I had no idea that was there.
I’m gonna go read those options more carefully the next time I play.

Yeah, changing your key binds it pretty much required for most MMOs. I can’t beleive that games are still defaulting A and D to turning instead of strafing. It’s just insane. Who uses keyboard to turn when Mouselook is so much easier?

I actually use all of the defaults with just a few small exceptions.
I changed A and D to Strafe Left / Right.
I changed ` to Z for weapon swapping and F1 to Q

This helped me immensely. There was just no way I could ever hope to find the F1 or ` buttons in the middle of a chaotic fight.

Hi all,

I’ve only been playing for a couple of weeks. My main it currently level 22. So I realize that I still have a lot more to experience in GW2.

But so far, I have never once participated in a group. I have not seen anyone mention groups, I’ve never been invited to a group, no one seems to even talk about groups.

The only time I ever hear groups even mentioned it for dungeons.

So, am I just left out, or is there really so little grouping going on?

I’m with Mrbig on this one.

Yes, Initiative has it’s ups and downs and not everyone likes it. It doesn’t fit everyone’s play style. But it is clearly useful, functional, and interesting to a lot of players.

Steal is just lame. I never use it and I suspect that hardly anyone else does, either.

nerva.7940”

the more advanced aspects of the game arent handed to you on a platter…it’s how it should be. the game asks of you to invest just a little bit of effort.

I’m not talking about “advanced” aspects. I’m talking about incredible simple and basic concepts like dynamic events, the inventory system (collections), gathering, crafting, discovery. I had to read up on pretty much everything.

and combos are not an “advanced” aspect of the game. They are an integral part of the game’s combat system. And they are not so much as mentioned in -game at all.

Maybe, as you suggest, the game developers chose to do it this way for a reason. But whether they did it intentionally or not, this game does not teach you how to play it, and that is going to hurt it in the long run, because many players don’t have the patience to learn it on their own.

It’s interesting, too, that this game is not charging a monthly fee. So once you buy the game, they have pretty much gotten all the money they are going to get from most players. Sure, some people will buy additional stuff, but those will be the hard-core gamers who invest a lot of time and energy in the game. So maybe they don’t care too much about holding on to casual players, since there’s no real profit it.

I’m not sure why you singled out combos here. This whole game does a horrible job of explaining extremely important key concepts to the players. There are a truly staggering number of things I had to learn here on the forums and in the manual that should have been discussed in a tutorial or something. I knew about this deficit when I bought the game. It has been mentioned in several reviews.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I put in the effort and learned a lot of stuff, and I think it’s a fun game. And you can’t beat the price.

But it’s not at all accessible to a casual player – even one who has played other MMOs, because this game is so different than other MMOs.

Oh. The “L” threw me off. There’s no “Leaping” on mine, it’s just “Death Blossom”.

Hm. I’ve gotten lots of those, but mostly at random. I wasn’t trying for any of ’em.
Well, at least that gives me some goals to shoot for where I can get some decent XP, as opposed to grinding.

I don’t think a lack of crafting is the problem. On my fist couple of characters, I didn’t know much about crafting, so I didn’t even have gathering equipment until much later. But on my most recent characters, I make sure to pick up gathering stuff as early as possible and gather everything I see so I can craft stuff.

Even so, my main is currently lv 18 and his tailoring and jewelcrafting are only in the 30-40 range. I am crafting everything I can and discovering stuff (which seems to give a big XP reward as well as a crafting level or 2), but it’s not really making a dent.

What exactly are Dailies? Maybe that’s the issue.

Hi. I’m looking for some advice or opinions on this.

I’ve seen a few posts here on the forums from people saying that they are doing everything – all the hearts and all the dynamic events that they happen to run into, plus exploring the entire map, some crafting, story missions, and some PvP and they still find they are not high enough level to keep playing.

I am personally experiencing this on every character I make.
With the exception of PvP, I do everything I can to experience the game and I am still coming up short.

By the time I get to level 14 or so, I end up with story missions and hearts that are level 15-17.

On my ranger, this was not a problem. My ranger was easily able to deal with mobs that are 1-3 level above me. But on my thief, it’s a serious problem and I am dying a LOT.

I’ve seen lots of replies that simply don’t beleive it. People say you can’t possibly be doing all that and still not keep up with the leveling curve, but I don’t know that those people are doing that I’m not, because it’s happened to me on every character so far.

One solution, of course, is to go to some other zone and do the level 12-14 missions there and catch up. But this doesn’t seem right to me. I shouldn’t have to do this, should I? The main reason I don’t want to do this is because I want to save those zones for other characters. I want to enjoy the Charr areas as a Charr when I create a Charr character, not spoil them by doing them with my Norn.

I’m sure someone will have the urge to say, “Hey… you said it yourself, you are not doing PvP. So do PvP and that will solve this problem.”

But is that really how the game should work? I don’t like PvP. But besides that, I don’t think it makes sense for the game to force you to do absolutely every tiny little but of content you can just to keep up. Does that seem right?

I’m not one of those people who say “Well, I’m playing this game the way I want to play it.” That’s a bad argument, I know. But should you really have to do EVERYTHING just to stay in the game?

Seems like a poor system if that’s the way it works.

So, am I missing something here?

Okay… so I’ve read through all the thief weapon abilities and skills and I still can’t figure out what LDB is.

I’ve been reading this thread and I noticed something I find interesting. It seems like all of the folks who are having a lot of trouble playing a thief have something in common. Like me, they are all trying to use D/D.

I use D/D and Shortbow, myself. I found myself getting slaughtered once I got to around lv 16. At that point, I couldn’t find any hearts around my level and I started moving into areas that are one level higher than me and I got eaten alive.

Of course, I try to soften up my opponts a little with Shortbow, but honestly I just don’t find this very satisfying.

After lots of trial and error, I was able to find a way to survive and win against a single mob. I was fighting Ettins and I would watch very carefully for their big wind-up and then do something to make sure I wasn’t there when it hit. Most often, I used Deathblossom so that by the time the bit hit came, I was behind the big brute. If I run out of initiative, there are other ways to avoid the hit, like double-tapping. But all of his is extremely dicey. If I miss just once, I’m down.

And just forget about fighting two mobs at once. It’s impossible with D/D.

Am I wrong? Or is a D/D thief just not a viable choice?

Interesting. I will have to try this. Thanks for the info.

Also… is it possible to use the same combo field for multiple finishers? Or does using a finisher remove the field?

So, for example, Choking Gas creates a poison field.
I use DeathBlossom which gives me a Whirl finisher that shoots poison darts.
Then I use HeartSeeker which is a Leap Finisher within the same field. Will that work?
Or would the Choking Gas be gone at that point?

So, let me see if I understand this correctly…
I play a thief. So if I user Choking Gas with my bow and then switch to dagger and do a Death Blossom, as long as the DB passes through the Choking Gas at some point, it will cause a combo. Is that right?
So by that rationale… it makes sense for me to shoot the Choking Gas fairly close to myself so that I DB through it, right?

Sadly, the pattern of negative posts upon the release of an MMO (or any game, really) is not limited to GW2. Pretty much every game release is the same. The forums are flooded with people who are unhappy or who didn’t get what they expected.

The reality is not that the game is bad, but the only people who are here posting on the forums are the ones who would rather be complaining. The ones who like the game are too busy playing to whine about it.

I haven’t gotten very far, but so far, I am enjoying this game a lot. My thief is loads of fun. I’m sure I will get bored with it eventually, but right now there is tons to do and lots of fun places to explore, so I’m having a blast.

And when you consider there is no monthly fee (like there is for most MMOs) I feel like I got more than my money’s worth for this experience.

Excellent post. I feel like I understand my thief’s place in the world a lot better after reading this.

Jayne, thanks for the follow-up.
Until I read this post yesterday and discovered #6, I was not aware of that button that moves everything into collections. That is totally awesome and freed up a huge amount of space in my vault.

But my question still stands regarding the vault not stacking items.

Someone above mention “compact” in regard to bags, but didn’t go into specifics.

I noticed that when I loot items into my personal bags, they are stacked correctly (copper ore just adds onto my existing stack of copper ore).

But this is not true of the bank. If I have copper ore in the bank and I add another one, it doesn’t stack unless I explicitly drag it into the right spot.

I expect that #6 on this list makes it a moot point, but is there a ‘compact’ option somewhere that makes things stack correctly?

Please forgive my noobness if this is a dumb question.

But I was just reading another thread and basic gist of it is that the Hearts are not the best source of XP in the game. In fact, they account for very little of your total XP. The best XP apparently comes from Dynamic Events.

But, in my experience so far, these only show up if I happen to be in the right place at the right time. Is that right?

Is there some other way to find them?

I’m sure there must be a web site or something where you can look them up, of course, but if you knew the locations, you would still not know when they are occurring – unless someone announced it in Map chat.

Am I missing something? Or am I supposed to just wander around a lot until I run into an event in progress?

Ang.2157:

There is more to do than going from heart to heart to level up.

Looking at Leveling Curve, a Journey Through Guild Wars 2.
http://www.gamebreaker.tv/mmorpg/myth-busting-queensdale

Thanks Ang. This is a really interesting article. I’ve been totally stuck in the mindset of using Waypoints and going directly to the hearts.

I have been doing lots of other stuff, too, but it was just starting to dawn on me that the hearts don’t really give you anywhere near enough XP and that I was missing something.

This is not your typical MMO and you are simply not supposed to play it like other MMOs and go from quest to quest. You are meant to wander around a bit and explore and experience.

If I am reading this article correctly, it’s basically saying that the REAL xp in this game comes from the Events that you just wander into accidentally. So it pays to just spend time meandering – which in most games is boring, but in GW2 is filled with interesting adventures.

When I get home tonight and play, I think I will have a whole different perspective.

I have often used the name Draziw in many RPGs going back to the 70s or 80s.

It’s an old Russian word that means “One who doesn’t like PvP”.

I’m kidding, of course. It’s just Wizard spelled backward.

Oh. Duh. I see it, now. It’s kinda covered by the shortcut key. Thanks.

Hi,

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, I’m a newb.

But I was just wondering if there is any way I can tell if Steal will reach my current target. For weapon attacks, there’s a little red bar under each one that tells me whether that attack is currently valid (if I am in range), but there is no such bar for Steal and I keep wasting it on mobs that are too far away.