Guild Wars 2

I may have said this here already. These threads blend together a bit…

On a warrior, I hesitate to rush into a group of 10 enemies. Because I’m durable but I can only take so many hits, you know?

On a thief, I take a second to size up the situation and make sure the right skill is on my bar, then I charge in confidently and carve them all up into little monster-bits as they lurch about helplessly through clouds of smoke.

Consequently, I prefer the thief. (Warriors are still cool, though. I don’t want you to feel judged. )

StygSec.7163:

What does ‘kitten’ mean in the context of the thread?

The forum automatically changes profanity to ‘kitten’.

TheGuy.3568:

I never meant it cant be done what I am saying is that the build that does it will rely on caltrops.

You know those god-statue skill points in Orr, with a bunch of enemies? A few of them gave me a lot of trouble as a warrior. On my thief, a bit of positional cleverness is enough to just roll through ’em.

Now, I’m a better thief player than I am a warrior player, and my thief has better gear. Both those factors certainly contribute to my improved performance. But it’s also because thieves have better active defense than warriors, and active defense scales much better than passive defense does.

Pure crit build. No Caltrops, ever. I think the only time I’ve equipped Caltrops on my bar was for running past dungeon mobs.

This isn’t a bug so much as a quirk of the siege-weapon interface. (Arguably there is a bug to be fixed here: the message you get is rather confusing.)

You have to hold down the fire key to use a treb. When you do, you’ll see a charge-up bar pop up. The longer you charge, the further the shot goes.

If you just tap it, the game interprets this as trying to shoot the treb right at the ground in front of it, which is an invalid target.

“Harder”?

Thief does start slow until you get the right traits — a lot like a mesmer — and really punishes bad builds (and, by extension, mucking around with a build trying to find a good one).

However, you can get through most of PvE by learning how to corral mobs together (takes about 5 minutes to master — they all pretty much have the same positional behavior, so the strategy really won’t change much from mob to mob) and then hitting 5 every couple of seconds while you autoattack them to death.

TheGuy.3568:

In dungeons thieves are not my favorite class to have around. Honestly its due to a lack of support and weak Aoe outside short bow. Thief doesn’t suck but its also one of the classes that brings the least to the table.

Smoke Screen is — situationally — one of the best party-defense abilities in the game.
Thieves are better at ripping Unshakeable stacks off of bosses than any other profession. Which allows the other characters in the group to actually use their strong long-cooldown CC skills in a boss fight.
Black Powder is massively powerful against anything that’s not a boss or champion (or, okay, Dredge).

I don’t assume any ol’ thief will actually do this stuff in a dungeon group. But the tools are there for people who want to use them.

Dagger Storm’s reflection effect slaughters ranged mobs in PvE.
Thieves’ Guild puts a fair amount of pressure on opponents in small-group PvP.
These really aren’t bad skills.

Shooopa.5632:

All the thief’s more useful skills devour initiative which makes your only reliable way of handling most enemies a burst at the start and then kiting them with bleeds.

The thief’s most useful skills devour initiative, sure. Therefore, you should trait for massive initiative gain. Opportunist. Quick Recovery. Maybe even Infiltrator’s Signet, since a stunbreaker is very nice but you’ll spend a lot of fights without activating it. Et voila, tons of initiative! This is all without taking pigeonholing traits like Signet Usage.

Scootabuser.4915:

Sword Pistol, Dress like a pirate and get pirate runes.

YARRRR!!

Your character shouts “For Great Justice” instead of “YARRR,” which isn’t nearly as cool.
Also the parrot is insane and flies around aggroing everything.

Or so I’m told, at least. I can’t test Pirate runes in the Mists (since it’s a Magic Find rune) and I’m not about to spend money on the awful things.

Asum.4960:

And as we see, with the Thief having so few crit traits, and the few ones even having cooldowns, Thief is probably the class with the least synergy with crits.

Have you forgotten about Opportunist?

Asum.4960:

This makes totally sense.. when we compare Pistol Whip and Unload with Hundred Blades then.. wait wut!?

And thieves have fewer hit points than warriors. Classes aren’t designed around making each trait, skill, and stat individually equivalent. Look at the whole class, not individual little tidbits like this.

Would a better vulnerability-spreading trait break thieves? I don’t think so. But it’s really pointless to play “Warrior gets this, thieves get that” to prove it, instead of talking about how the classes behave as a whole.

Daggers have a higher attack rate than Sword. Cooldowns on the crit procs seem like an attempt to balance the two weapons.
Also this has an effect on Pistol Whip and Unload.

rogerwilko.6895:

It always takes courage to admit you made a bad choice and that you need to change your mind, but it is the only thing to do. It takes even more courage to try to convince others that they made bad choices and need to accept the sunk costs, but that’s something you sometimes have to do.

Here’s a stupid simile for you.

Playing thief is like driving stick. It’s not harder than driving an automatic in any significant way (unlike, say, flying a plane or driving a tank, which are objectively more difficult than driving a car), but it is different.
Some people don’t know how to drive a manual car. Some people just don’t like to. There are other cars for those people (who are the majority of modern drivers, really).
If you go try to convince other people that manual transmissions are bad, though, maybe you should learn how to shift first. Otherwise you really are just embarrassing yourself. That’s arrogance, not courage.

…

Want to be good as a thief? (Or a warrior, for that matter.)

Grab a melee weapon. Go out to Queensdale. Aggro an ettin. Try to kill it, without taking any damage, using only your autoattack, dodging, and free movement. Once you get good at this, grab more than one at a time. All other melee skill starts with this.

Kelliak.9152:

I don’t get why no one accounts for the many ranged mobs in Orr. .-.

Try one or more of these easy strategies.
Dagger Storm.
Charge in and hit Black Powder.
Charge into one group, hit Black Powder to blind them, pop Smoke Screen between that group and the other cluster that’s attacking you, kill the near group, charge the other group and Black Powder them.

I’m telling you: this class gives you all of the tools you need to negate damage. You just have to apply them.

Are you swinging your weapon all the time?

I run into this problem underwater (where Basilisk Venom is the only elite) a lot. I’ll activate Basilisk Weapon, then tap-tap “1” as I’m closing in on my target, just to try to get an early hit in. And the first time I attack nothing, it seems to clear the venom even though I haven’t hit anything.

Einlanzer.1627:

Thieves really need better tools for escaping or mitigating damage.

I switched to thief specifically because it has some of the best tools for this stuff.
Escaping: Withdraw + Vigorous Recovery + Feline Grace for endless dodging; Disabling Shot or Escape; Infiltrator’s Arrow, Ink Shot, Shadowstep
Mitigating damage: Black Powder, Death Blossom (not as good as Black Powder, but them’s the breaks with daggers), Smoke Screen and Dagger Storm, basically every Spear attack

Kelliak.9152:

I got this game for a more interactive combat system, not to wish I had cruise control as I cut my way through thousands of Orrians screaming, “Death. Good!” Ho, ho, ho…. indeed, death is preferable to the thief profession.

When you’re bored, pull more guys. “GET WILD!”
1v1-ing trash mobs is never that exciting for any class. And I don’t think it really should be challenging, for any class; it’s just a thing to do while you’re half-asleep or chatting with your guild or whatever. It’s basically social downtime.

…

Thief does have some problems with variety, on account of venoms, mainhand pistol, and most traps all being weak. It’s a good class for people who like having a small set of tools to apply precisely, and not as great for folks who want a big grab-bag of options to manage in every fight (try Elementalist or Engineer if you really want to dive into that aspect of the game whole-hog). The core gameplay is positioning and timing, with only a small set of skills.

The way I see it, thieves are great for the most optimal strategy in the PvE game (big-damage builds with lots of active mitigation), and bad at executing a bunch of mediocre strategies that there’s no reason to bother pursuing anyway.

Einlanzer.1627:

2. Stealth and debuff timers/durations are balanced for PvP, making them inadequate for PvE where longer durations are needed to provide reliable utility and the ability to escape danger and mitigate damage. It’s especially important for the thief class because of how squishy they are and how they have no mechanic like pets to help them avoid or transfer aggro.

I do think stealth isn’t the best thing to be doing in PvE. But I’m not sure I’d call it underpowered per se.

Longer-duration stealth would be… I dunno, not the right direction to go. Three-four seconds of stealth is actually a long time to get away if you supplement it with dodging, Withdraw, and shadowsteps. Based on my experience with other games, I think being able to really run around stealthed would be pretty awful.

Sometimes, when I’m lazy and don’t want to fight random veterans next to a rich ore vein or a skill point commune thingy, I’ll equip Shadow Refuge and get the whole thing while hidden. That feels like plenty of stealth to me.

I didn’t like the downed state much while I was leveling, too. Maxing out Zerk gear magnified my damage so much that it suddenly became very easy to rally, though.

…

I think Jack is absolutely right about “Get wild.” GET WILD! Seriously! A bit of cleverness, a bit of confidence, and some unrelenting aggression will get you super-far in this game.

Have you tried Smoke Screen and Dagger Storm? Smoke Screen blocks all enemy projectiles going through it. It’s really quite amazing.

Pragmatist.1349:

And more even, but honestly most of those specs are broken, for now dungeon pve thieves are better off going for the standard power crit damage builds, thats where we have the most to offer.

That’s not a thief thing. I was talking to an experienced Guardian buddy from my guild. He said, “I have a Zerk set and a Cleric set. I almost never put on the Cleric set in dungeons, and when I do, it doesn’t actually add any survivability.”
Active defense is an order of magnitude better than passive defense. Active defense comes from using your skills and traits, not your gear. Good gear, meanwhile, can double or triple your damage.

Someone had to explain this to me repeatedly before I really, truly understood it. Getting it has allowed me to actually learn things while playing GW2, and made the game a much more enjoyable experience:
GW2 is about dealing damage and avoiding it. Actually getting hit is almost always a losing proposition. All of the worthwhile defense in the game is active.

Every class does better with active defense. What makes thief great for PvE is that it’s easy to pile on both damage and active defense. You have so much dodging, you have spammable blindness, you have amazing projectile defense — while still being able to play a character with something like 100 crit damage, 3000 attack power, and several +% damage multipliers from traits, with great single- and muli- targeted attack skills and no cooldowns getting in your way.

Leveling with Sword/Pistol was definitely a bit repetitive. Then I crafted some Zerk gear (which also allowed me to spend less time leveling), learned how to Smoke Screen, and got good enough at dodging not to rely on Black Powder (the Dredge are great training for this). Now playing a thief is an absolutely awesome experience. Trash fights are over before they can get stale; big pulls and dynamic events give me lots of opportunity for satisfying positional tactical play; I contribute massively to every group event and dungeon. PvE thief isn’t about evading/blind-spamming one target to death; it’s about pulling 10 guys and butchering them like you’re a ninja murdergod from some action movie.

Maybe the playstyle’s not for you. That’s why the game has classes to begin with. But is the thief weak, bad at PvE, or poorly designed? Absolutely not. Not even a little.