Guild Wars 2

Volrath.1473:

do NOT bring pistols into PvP!

ppl with /laugh on your corpse

I did, and I was the one laughing

Trimsic.4392:

May be they first rolled a warrior, then tried a thief, and never came back to a warrior again. Who knows ?

They left us too bro. As far as I know we have never had a dev main a thief, and that sucks. As far as we can see in our forum, the devs want us to only roam and be backstabbing insta-gibbers, it’s really the only good thing we have left :/

Godmoney.2048:

Hmm, with 1530 condi damage it’kittenting for about 4500, and a additional 4500 if they run.

I feel it hits pretty hard all things considered. I am really liking it I got to say, but I need a couple more days with it to really have a valid opinion.

It does seem to scale very well with condi damage almost so much so I think scepter now requires condi gear to be worth while

As a thief this frightens me. A glass thief will have 13k hp. A thief that doesn’t move equals dead thief. This condition probably hit thieves hardest (not complaining!) because we rely 90% on evading damage. If you were to hit me whit that condition you would take about 50% of my health, glad I have some condition removal! :p

Agreed. They should have waited to release this game until it was out of beta.

P/P can work pretty well, and it’s challenging to play! I assume you use signet of malice for this build, right? Also, try looking at having Shadow Refuge (free sneak attack) and unload through it to regenerate hp. The latest buff to SoM and Body Shot made it work even better imo ^^

Actually, one of my guildies came up with a pretty decent and competitive build. I don’t remember it exactly, but if you send me an in-game mail I’ll try to respond as soon as I get home! I remember testing it out and it worked pretty good in tournaments, and I guess it will work pretty good in PvE too. I gotta say, people were caught off guard the moment they realized I was using dual pistols. Now when they have it a minor buff and buffed SoM too I guess it will work out even better

This sounds so awesome ;p

Or just remove larcenous strike and make flanking strike what it was. The only thing we wanted to change was the bugged animation that often sent you in the wrong direction. The new pathing is perfect, too bad they had to mess with a weapon set that was working properly…

Enjoyluck.2618:

its nice for full trapper build. If you trait you port on some one with thiefs guild/ He has 15 stacks of invulnability you get 10 might fury and he is knockdown snared and poisoned. You back stab him and profit??? However if you are unlucky you port in zerg :P

Which is also the reason you get stealth from that trap too. When you arrive you have 5 seconds to either run away or engage.

rossidis.1923:

oiiiio, apart from your heal, is there a combo to enter stealth with sword pistol?

No. It’s the only melee set that doesn’t have access to stealth, so you’ll have to bring stealth from a utility slot (if you need it).

And the way this game is balanced feels like this:
Dev 1: hey, they complain about this being too strong, we should double it’s cost/cool down and half it’s damage.
Dev 2: sounds awesome! Forget all the calculation, lets just do this!
Dev 1: They didn’t complain about this, but it’s pretty much all they do in a fight (read cluster bomb nerf), so we should definitely make it useless.
Dev 2: awesome! This sounds like a good patch. We’re so going to be the next esport.

I mean. Some times it feels as if they do it this way…

Looks interesting. Gonna test this out as soon as I’m back from vacation! For more AoE (and a ton of both physical and condition damage) you could swap D/P for short bow. Just a thought.

Yes it does. At least it did one month ago when I tried it. First I didn’t understand why I was constantly getting revealed, but then it hit me as I luckily saw that bolt hit at the same time as I got revealed. In other words, if you’re playing stealth thief, don’t use it

Epic.3950:

I read this crap and 90% of it was fixes for bugged, abused and OP skills. MMMMMHH stack dat stealth on dat wall! and seriously basilisk venom is now BREAKABLE. OH kittenIN BOY I though thieves were allowed to stun you for 3+ seconds if specced and you cant do kitten all about it. Its a themed stun nothing less nothing more you are not some privileged private school student

Did you read the original post? He didn’t post this to start a discussion of wether we are OP or not. He just wanted to have a complete list of all the patch fixes and/or nerfs that has affected us negatively. So gtfo of our forum.

Epic.3950:

Jinks.2057:

Play a thief to 80 and WvW with em.

After failing miserably multiple times come back and apologize.

Thieves are not ezmode and people who’ve masteted other classes have stated they needed a mentor upon playing one.

I know this for a fact because I’ve done it on multiple occassions.

Funny you say that. I got a troll guild called naked hookers united. Needless to say we are naked thieves at level 10 or so that just run around half synergizing our builds to make peoples days as bad as possible. but hell guess what at least we dont wear armor to counter our OPness

So, you’re a guild of 12 year olds who find it funny to zergball the map with naked female thieves and kill solo up leveled roamers. Your mothers must be so proud of you.

But seriously. Set your naked lvl 10 thief against any of my lvl 5 naked professions and I would eat you for breakfast

Epic.3950:

Craig.2403:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Why-thief-is-NOT-op/first#post2280144

I pretty much outlined every way to counter a thief just to prove that thieves were not OP with this post, only to find that… wait for it… NERF HAMMER! /Sigh. Anyways, hopefully this will at least help you deal with us better, and someone can be happy.

lol ranger thief and mesmer. bandwagon OP class much? what next delete ranger go get guard and complain he doesnt have enough sustain or DPS?

Wtf is this? You’re currently just jumping around all threads bashing people for playing thief. Time to grow up man.

I do also mean that for those changes to be implemented (that is after all what we are getting complaints about) we should be buffed slightly to compensate for that.

Blocking should reveal the thief yes. So should being attacked while in stealth. The debuff should also be applied even though the thief doesn’t attack from stealth. That’s my opinion at least.

And that’s how to use it properly. If it works as in the tooltip now, then holy kitten I’m happy!!

That sounds like a horrible bug that got fixed. Weird it isn’t in the patch note though.

I’ve been using this trap on and off for months now. What they did to it is just great for me ;D

But yes, shadow stepping is so bugged in this game that it’s laughable. The trap works great some places in WvW and is now beautiful as an escape utility. In sPvP with a roaming build it’s just pure love. A good thief can easily hold two points using this trap. I just hope they fix shadow step so that we can rely on it to actually work when we drop it…

Zenith.7301:

Geiir.7603:

Zenith.7301:

I love how it’s always thieves who say stealth is so easy to counter. Tell you what, let’s trade. I’ll give you death shroud and 7k more hp and you can give me stealth and teleports and a 4-7k stealth opener and see how well that works for you.

And we say it because it’s true. Just go and make a thief and see how easy thief is…. I destroy thieves on all my other professions. It rarely happens that a stealth thief beats me, because I know what he’s going to do when he enter stealth – and I anticipate his moves and destroy him.

So go on. Make me a video where you show us how awesome you are on a thief, since it’s obviously so easy to play.

I have a thief, don’t try this crap on me.

Whenever I want easy, risk free kills, I go roam in WvW with mine.

And do what? Kill up leveled and under geared players? I agree that stealth in its current state is cheesy and it’s way too easy to just run away with it. I have countless times (even in this thread) given my ideas on how to improve stealth to make it more fair and logical. Just read a bit back and you’ll find it.

Pyriall: I could do that, so I’ll do it as soon as I get my computer upgraded (which is pretty soon). I’ve considered making a YouTube series of how to counter thieves. Have been discussing it with my guild and we are probably going to do it. So no problem. I’ll show you how easy it is to anticipate a thiefs more net in stealth and how weak it is (unless you’re fighting a good thief).

rossidis.1923:

thanks mate, i added you, i checked that wiki, i dont really understand what im reading

at the moment im using noxxic for guides, it says how to combo on it so i assume thats what youre getting at there

but it doesnt have a traits guide for leveling D/P
any idea where i can find one you agree with?

It show every combo field and finisher, but you’ll get to that later.

For starting I would focus on getting power and some vitality. Precision and critical damage doesn’t really help until at least lvl 40.

A popular d/p build is 0/30/30/10/0, but that won’t work until level 40 earliest. My tip would be to go for 15 in deadly arts for the extra damage, chose Mug as your trait since it heals and deal nice damage. Also you need 10 in shadow arts asap and choose infusion of shadow, you really need that extra initiative in this weapon set.

Always have a shortbow with you when exploring, the teleport is brilliant for that!

Basic rotation will be drop Black Powder, auto attack 3-4 times, heartseek, backstab. Repeat

Zenith.7301:

I love how it’s always thieves who say stealth is so easy to counter. Tell you what, let’s trade. I’ll give you death shroud and 7k more hp and you can give me stealth and teleports and a 4-7k stealth opener and see how well that works for you.

And we say it because it’s true. Just go and make a thief and see how easy thief is…. I destroy thieves on all my other professions. It rarely happens that a stealth thief beats me, because I know what he’s going to do when he enter stealth – and I anticipate his moves and destroy him.

So go on. Make me a video where you show us how awesome you are on a thief, since it’s obviously so easy to play.

What made S/P weak was the fact that pistol whip got nerfed to be just as strong as the AA chain. Now I hope that’s change a tiny bit at least. But as the others have said, it was never destroyed for PvE. In sPvP it’s another answer. I’ve used it for a long time and it’s been working fine, now it will hopefully work better

Now I’m really getting sick of how Anet devs destroy us bit by bit. Every single patch we have been hit hard by the nerf bat. Those few so called buffs we get are the ones we never have asked for or buffs that’s just pure bullkitten (just look at body shot). We got larcenous strike, which we never asked for. We just wanted the animation on flanking strike to be more accurate.

What happened to short bow? When did players complain about it? It’s our only ranged weapon that was viable. I have never heard a single player cry about it being OP, what they cry about is stealth – and we, the thief community, have had tons of viable ideas of how to fix this. If only a dev would show up and have a discussion with us and hear us this could have been fixed months ago. But the short bow; first you mess up trick shot, and now you completely destroy our only ability to participate in Zergs and sieges by messing with cluster bomb.

You wanted to add torment to our skills, but you put it on a venom – that nobody uses. You didn’t change our condition builds one bit. Even mesmers got a much more deadly implementation of torment than we did! And again, nobody ever asked for this.

Sword/Dagger. In an earlier patch you have us larcenous strike, which nobody asked for. The result – tons of S/D boon stealers that again make people cry. Instead of understanding that you made a mistake by adding this ability you just nerfed it. What about just make flanking strike what it once was, just keep the new and reliable animation – which was exactly what we wanted – not larcenous strike.

Death Blossom. What’s the logic? The only place I’ve seen this ability used for conditions is in sPvP hot joins. The use? Just to troll people. It was weak and nobody used it. Why make it even more useless?

What I’m really saying is this. I’m sick of getting hit by the nerf bat for no reason. You just smack us and then give us no reason for why you did it. How about show up here and actually listen to the more experienced thieves and take their ideas to the drawing board? They have lots of experience and lots of good ideas on how to improve the class without making it stronger. I’ve seen ideas to fix the stealth QQ that was amazing and would heighten the thief skill level. Please try to have an honest discussion with us and at least give us some sort of reasoning for why you’re messing with things no one wanted or ever complained about.

Wait, a dev in the thief forum? What kind of sorcery is this?

When they said they wanted to make other weapons more mobile I didn’t realize they would completely destroy the short bow. NO ONE HAS EVER CONPLAINED ABOUT THE kittenING SHORT BOW!! Wtf Anet!?

First they kitten up trick shot, and now they destroyed our ability to use the short bow in WvW Zergs or sieges. What’s next? Cut the range on infiltrators Arrow in half, remove the blast finisher on Cluster Bomb, make trick shot hit only one target and cut the poison field in half?

No one have asked for these changes, so wtf is up? And when will a dev show up in our forum and give us some sort of explanation to this bullkitten?

No problem! Just add me in-game if you need more advice. I’m back home on my computer around the 8th of July, so I won’t be able to do much before then though… You could also just send me a pm here on the forum ^^

Here is btw all the combo fields and finishers in the game:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo

WonderfulCT.6278:

I had an explanation written but I hate proof reading so I’m redoing it and making it simpler.

I recommend engineer. Thieves suck unless you make them good. Engineers are good unless you make them suck.

You’ll get used to thieves if you play them long enough.

Both can hold their own but engineers can do it better imo.

If you plan to play a dagger mainhand build on thief plan on being very easy to kill.

Thieves have better dps but less support, and CC skills.

I’m biased but you know what, when thieves randomly throw down SR and get other thieves revealed it really kitten es me off. Stop throwing down SR! Use blinding power!

Engineer is a strong choice, but the support and damage the short bow can add is pretty strong. Dagger thieves usually go with berserker, so yes most of them die fast…

I completely agree on your statement regarding SR! Smoke screen is much better (and hilarious to use against engineers).

Enmity.3428:

All you need to do is roll a Mesmer, Guardian or Thief and you’ll dominate PvP.

When did you last play sPvP? Hot join and you’ll see lot of thieves that jump around never capping anything – tons of noobs. Go tourneys and you will rarely see a thief. Guardians are a nice and versatile class. Mesmers again are fun for noobs because they feel they can own everything with their clones…. There’s not many good mesmers out there, but I truly respect those who have mastered the class.

You’re complaining about stealth in the sPvP forum? Stealth is useless in PvP because we can’t cap a point while in stealth. Therefore we are a liability to our team the second we stealth.

On the other hand, stealth need some fix. My ideas are simple:

• Make any physical attack reveal the thief.
• Apply revealed debuff even if the thief doesn’t attack from stealth.
• Make it impossible for stealth to stack
• Break channeled attacks if the thief stealth and move away from where his enemy where aiming.

There. Pretty much solve most of the problem people whine about regarding stealth. Btw; stealth is so ridiculously easy to counter that it isn’t even funny. Learn the mechanic and enjoy all the free kills you’ll get from hot-joins and WvW.

I figured it was nice with the extra hp, so I did the same a long time ago. I kept the eagle runes just to add critical damage, since that’s really important in a build that focuses around critical hits. I’ve done some theory crafting and I figured you rarely need more than 50% critical chance. Thieves hit so fast and with the skill that gives you 100% crit chance from stealth you have your most important skill covered. Keep the critical damage high and your hp on a level you feel comfortable with

The idea about getting rid of Last Refuge – Yes please!!

But seriously, there’s nothing wrong with IoS. The problem is that we can stack stealth and stealth not giving us the revealed debuff wether we attack from stealth or not. That would fix a lot of the whine about thieves and it would also force is thieves to heighten our skill level and not just stealth all the time..

I’ve mained a thief since beta, and I usually play the rouge type of class in each game. I gave the engineer a try, but it wasn’t really my cup of tea, so I would definitely choose the Thief.

We rely on mobility and being everywhere but nowhere at the same time. We need to simply avoid getting hit, because we can’t take many hits before we die. You have to always be on your toes, jumping around blinding, interrupting, evading, shadow stepping and disappearing into the shadows – or you will die. I love the play style, which is probably the reason I never play any other class for more than a few hours before I’m back on my thief.

Our roaming capabilities are unparalleled. Passive speed boost, lots of swiftness and quite a few shadow steps make us the roaming king. Our love for deception make us very hard to catch, and even more difficult to see. We can enter and leave fights as we please, and we can hit like a truck.

Yes. You will get used to it, but it requires lots of practice. Your hands will get used to the quick tapping and you’ll learn it sooner or later.

Btw; welcome to the Thief!

First of all, welcome to the thief! We’re not OP, just hard to counter a good thief unless you know what you’re doing.

If you’re going with d/p you should get 10 in shadow arts asap. You need those extra initiative upon going stealth. Drop black powder on each encounter (combo field) and auto attack 3-4 times, then do a heartseeker through the field to get stealth, move behind target and backstab. Repeat. It’s an easy opening to understanding the thief.

Another option will be to go with sword main hand for the AoE damage (keep in mind that the dagger has more single target damage), also here drop black powder while you can.

The AI in this game attack so slow that it will actually get blinded in between each hit. You don’t even have to dodge.

Just start with that and experiment from there. I would recommend you to learn the combo fields and finishers as they play a huge role in the thiefs later game. Remember that the thief has little health and armor, so we stay alive by avoiding damage (stealth, blind, evade, interrupt and shadow step).

Good luck!

If this is true, then we will get screwed over by Last Refuge 33% more often…

If you’re fighting a single mob then go with D/P. for multiple foes I would use S/P. drop the blind field and just auto attack. Most of the mobs attack so slow that they get blinded between each attack. That’s the easiest way, but also pretty boring – and takes a lot of time.

But as an answer to your question; no. It’s not noob friendly. It takes time to understand, especially if you’re headed to the Mists.

I’ve been saying the same thing for months. What they could do to fix 90% of the complaints about thief would have been to just make it impossible for stealth to stack and give us the revealed debuff every time we leave stealth – even if we don’t attack.

I do disagree with you that we’re useless in PvE, because we do bring good AoE with our short bow. We can weaken, poison and bleed our foes pretty good with it and at the same time utilize every combo field we see and deal pretty high physical damage with trick shot and cluster bomb. Melee is more difficult and will require the thief to have a decent level of understanding of both the dungeon and the class. We’re squishy but we can avoid most damage with countless evades, shadow steps and blinds. On top of this we are great for reviving our group. I’m usually the last man standing, and surviving, in my groups – as well as the main damage dealer and combo field abuser.

In sPvP we can deal nice AoE damage and deal with bunkers. A good thief is welcome in any PvP group because of our abilities to move quickly between points and ambushing our foe.

WvW. Well. We work mainly as supply runners and stopping dolyaks or other supply runners. Other than that I would say there isn’t much we can do ..

The worst thing ever is wasting a backstab on a clone

Have fought some good mesmers in my time and the worst as a bursts thief is to realize that the mesmer just dodged away leaving a clone behind. This reveals the thief for 4 seconds (3 in WvW) and that is a huge problem for a glassy thief.

Winds.3087:

Thieves have many teleports too and they have passive speed boost.

We have one out of combat teleport (unless we have a short bow), which again isn’t even a teleport, it’s a shadow step. And that often get stuck in air or just a small rock in the terrain.

As others have said, mesmers and thieves are close to each other in in-combat mobility unless the thief traits into its Acrobatics tree it doesn’t have that much swiftness. The thiefs main strength is to hunt down our enemies, therefore we have a ton of shadow steps that we can use in-combat

Did you die from bleeding or by power? If it was from bleeds then it was probably a p/d thief. Probably something like a 20/0/30/20/0 build with health regen and stacking bleeds from stealth. Pets are free stealths with dagger off-hand yes.

In a duel you’re supposed to survive and kill your opponent, if SR can help you achieve that then it’s ok.

I find it a little cheap, but we are thieves after all – we are not supposed to play fair

I agree that we feel slow and that it’s kind of boring to bring runes and focus to get those speed buffs, but I disagree that we should get a passive speed buff. Other professions have to give up utility slots to have a passive speed buff, while mesmers have it built into their weapon sets, in addition to different teleports.

I main a thief, but my Mesmer feel just as acrobatic as he does. Staff #2 and focus with runes of air is pretty powerful to use in a mobile roamer build. One more thing is that mesmers can give their speed buff to an entire Zerg, no one else can do that.

Since you say a glass thief I would guess it was either a Dagger/Dagger or Dagger/Pistol thief. The latter would be more dangerous in its current state.

If I understood you right you are new to sPvP and was playing hot-join, which in turn mean tons of burst thieves following burst guides from YouTube. Therefore I’ll give you an answer to counter those thieves. It would btw help a lot if you could say what weapon sets he was using.

D/D The burst will be fast, but will also leave the thief vulnerable after its initial burst. He probably used basilisk venom, break this stun!! If you get stoned by a thief he is probably going to drop his burst asap. Some better thieves will fake this, as someone else has already mentioned, and make you waste your stun breakers and invulnerability. When I play my Mesmer and meet thieves I try to anticipate their burst and go invulnerable when it drops.

Now it’s your time to burst! If he is glassy then he will die extremely fast. Just be sure to dodge his CnD (pretty easy to see its animation, just YouTube it) and you will do fine. Use knockback, stun and invulnerability and he will drop easily.

D/P These guys can be a real kitten to fight. The opening will be the same, just break stun and stay alive, after thakittens a completely new opponent to fight against. They can stealth by dropping black powder (combo field) and doing a heartseeker through it (leap finisher). They also have access to backstab, interrupt, gap closer, blind and a ton of damage. Played right these are way more dangerous than D/D thieves.

After the initial burst you will have to stay out of his blind fields. If you see him drop one he will probably do a heartseeker through it – INTERRUPT THIS! That will have him waste 9 of his 12 initiative, which pretty much equals dead thief in hot-joins. Other than that it’s just to fight a normal fight; burst him, avoid his bursts. The only thing that makes this build different is its ability to chain stealth and run away. If you have the thief low on hp and he drops a black powder, move inside it. If he try to chain stealth by doing a second heartseeker through it, he will reveal himself and you can finish him off. The other option is he running away for 3-4 seconds before you can spot him again.

For more tips on how to fight thieves, there’s a ton of explanations in the thief forum. We have a tendency to get asked a lot about how to kill us.

Hope this helped

Guardians have the ability to survive forever. They constantly heal, have a high up-keep on boons, cleanse conditions and have a good portion of damage – but their health pool is one of the lowest in the game. A good phantasm or shatter burst right after his boons have wearer out can kill him pretty fast.

Some bunker guardians are almost impossible to kill unless you have high damage to counter his heals. I’m not too familiar with mesmers (have a few hundred hours on one, but not my main), but what I have learnt from playing with my thief against a guardian is to just burst him down in between his boons. Guardians are good at keeping a high pressure on you, so the longer the fight lasts the more it moves in his favor.

As far as I understand, it will tick for more damage if the person with the condition is moving, which will be deadly to use against a thief, but a bit too strong (in my opinion) for a thief to have in it’s arsenal.

“Torment. This condition is designed to play around with movement, one of our fundamental combat mechanics. Enemies under Torment will take damage periodically; as they move, they’ll take even more damage. In looking to expand the condition diversity of thieves and mesmers, we decided to include Torment skills for those two professions as well.”

First if all, we didn’t need any more diversity in our condition builds, we needed a fix to those we already had. We slice n dice our enemies, causing bleeds and we coat our weapons with poisons to weaken them even more. This is how a thief should be in my opinion.

Now for the real reason I made this thread:
Giving the thief a condition that will actually punish our enemy for moving around, really? This condition fits a necromancer perfectly, but not a thief. To survive against a thief you’ll have to stay mobile, or it’s just way too easy. The thief is supposed to be the class that really need to stay mobile to have any chance of surviving – therefore should this condition be our enemy, not our friend.

How this sounds is like: pop a huge backstab, add some torment and vanish in stealth: now just watch your enemy die as they run around swinging their sword and trying to hit us and avoid a new backstab… Sounds like we’re going to get even more hate from the crowds now.

Instead of crying about retaliation in the forum, you could instead learn how to counter it. I rarely die against a retaliation build, and that’s because I’ve learnt how to counter it. If I start a channeling attack and I see retaliation pop up I’ll interrupt it immideately and try to break los or keep distance until I have a chance of fighting back or just run away – which is pretty easy as a thief.

This would really help in taking sPvP to the next level. As it is now it’s pretty lame and boring in the long run. This would fix a lot, and would at least make me enjoy PvP a lot more.