New Player, with a question

[Ricasso.6018]

Hello everyone,

 

I am brand new to GW2. I've been reading as much as I can and trying to learn. I'm looking to level up the old fashioned way. I'm not great a PvP and I plan on sticking to running content, raids, and other PvE content. I'm a long time WoW player that wanted to try something new. I hear the community for GW2 is super knowledgeable and helpful so here I am.

 

I've looked at all the professions and I'm really interested in playing a Thief. Can I get some honest feedback from the Thief community about playing one? Is it enjoyable, useful in raids and fractals (I think that is what you call dungeons, not sure). What builds would you recommend (I'm still learning how builds work)? Your help is much appreciated.

[Kulvar.1239]

There's an ongoing balance issue with Thief.

Thief weapon skills consumes Initiative. It's what replaces cooldown for Thief weapon skills.

To balance these skills, ANet increase the cost more and more.

It's now at a point where a single skill can consume more than half your Initiative.

And you only get Initiative back at a rate of 1 per second.

[saerni.2584]

Welcome!

 

As a profession thief is actually in a pretty decent spot. Ignore whether other specs can do more damage in X situation and focus on the gameplay.

 

Thief is a profession that involves doing damage and avoiding taking hits in the first place. It has few active mitigation skills like blocks or skills that apply boons (buffs) that reduce damage taken when you do get hit. As a profession as a whole it has lower HP so if you build for pure damage you will have much less HP to survive and take hit.

 

Thief, because of the low hp and how it avoids rather than taking/blocking damage, can have a bit of a learning curve for newer players. You will want to try out all the weapons and combinations of weapons as you level up. At lower levels gear and build won’t matter as much. As you get higher and start to invest in exotic gear you can pick stats that suit your chosen build and test out more complete builds before you work on getting ascended gear, which is the top level of stats for gear you earn.

 

If you have questions about particular weapons those can be answered here. To start, I’d suggest you pick up a shortbow for your offhand. The mobility on the skill 5 is a core essential for thief and a solid utility choice to pair with a main weapon.

[NuhDah.9812]

> @"Ricasso.6018" said:

> Hello everyone,

>

> I am brand new to GW2. I've been reading as much as I can and trying to learn. I'm looking to level up the old fashioned way. I'm not great a PvP and I plan on sticking to running content, raids, and other PvE content. I'm a long time WoW player that wanted to try something new. I hear the community for GW2 is super knowledgeable and helpful so here I am.

>

> I've looked at all the professions and I'm really interested in playing a Thief. Can I get some honest feedback from the Thief community about playing one? Is it enjoyable, useful in raids and fractals (I think that is what you call dungeons, not sure). What builds would you recommend (I'm still learning how builds work)? Your help is much appreciated.

 

If you're going to level up a thief the old fashion way, my advise would be to try all the weapon sets and stick with what feels the most comfortable to you until you reach to having both elite specs completed. For this, you should also try the story dungeons together with other inexperienced players, to gauge what build actually feels better to you in case of a little more engaging content.

 

The ideea is you should have fun with the builds while you level up, caise if you want to optimise something about it, you'll have to do it probably after you get the elite specs and are experienced enough with thief. You'll probably need to adjust your play style to match that optimised version of thief, but I guess that's part of the experience too.

 

I'm not big with PVE, but personally I like going with staff + sb/pp with a power DrD build, which I'm pretty sure it's not the optimal stuff for the hard endgame pve content, but it's fairly successful for the easier tier of the fractals and open world stuff. But yeah, you firstly need to reach there and the best way to do this it's to have fun while getting 6ourself accustomed to the class and what you feel works best for you about thief.

[Dayra.7405]

Thief is a more extrem class than others (warrior, ranger, Necro are definitely easier to learn gw2). You do a lot damage, but you are dead quite fast (and likely often) as well. You need to play defense actively to survive (evade, blind your foe, become invisible in between, ...). This will give you a hard time to learn, but once you learned it, you are more than fine B)

 

[SlitheSlivier.1908]

It's definitely harder in every game mode than the other classes. I also think it's one of the most fun... you have to stay on your toes and find your dodges, attacks, etc right. Also stealth is fun.

To answer what hasnt been explained yet:

I don't do raid or fractals, but i believe if you are gonna do that with thief, generally you do it with staff because it does high damage per attack and is AoE so you can hit several enemies at once if they are clumped.

Now because your main defense is evasion and avoiding attacks, and because when evading you generally aren't attacking, your DPS will be a little lower than Meta builds of some other classes who just use armor to mitigate damage and continuously attack, even tho your bursts are decently high. This is where ArenaNet has messed up... they nerfed thief quite a bit so our DPS isn't as high anymore and you need quite a bit of bursts to kill someone in pvp.

It's still fun and more interactive. If that's what you like, then go for it. Don't get discouraged if you die a lot, you may just need to change your strategy.

[ASP.8093]

I just switched to Thief because it's got what I like about Mesmer: the feeling of "breaking the rules" (insta-cast shadowsteps, stealth, portals, evade frames boon stealing — there's just something immensely fun about Stealing a massively powerful ability from a raid boss), without quite the same level of wrist acrobatics involved (and, imo, a slightly better history in terms of class balancing). Daredevil, Deadeye, and some of the core trait reworks have really made Thieves a lot more fun and versatile than they were at release, imo.

 

It's both a demanding and forgiving class, ime, that rewards learning the "action" part of the "action MMOG" quite well.