Slash and Dodge with Guild Wars 2 Thief

Author: jorado | Posted: 24.08.2012

The Thief is one of the eight professions available on the upcoming Guild Wars 2. They can equip weapons very varied from dagger to guns. Just like the other seven professions, thief abilities change depending on weapons. So, the different weapons will affect play style and abilities to execute more and more combo attack skills, which is the vital part of guild wars 2 thief.

The Thief utilizes two resource pools for its abilities, initiative and mana. While mana works exactly like it does with every other class, initiative polls are part of what makes the Thief unique. Initiative is a highly limited resource, maxing out at ten, and abilities will burn one to five based on their potency, and it takes ten seconds to get your entire pool back. One of the most important factor for guild wars 2 thief is to manage this very limited resource to match the chosen weapons.

With a dagger, the Thief plays a lot like a traditional rogue class. You spend much of your time creeping around the battlefield in stealth, only to unleash a series of back stabs on an opponent. The Thief's ability to remain unseen and to assassinate its target will certainly be the deciding factor in battles.

With swords in hand, the Thief takes on more of a defensive posture, as he vaults himself forwards and backwards from combat. Because the Thief cannot take a lot of punishment, the mobility provided by two swords allows the player to deal damage you never expected before from the profession like this, while simultaneously enabling them to dodge attacks.

On the other hand, a Thief with gun mixes a ranged play style with powerful bursts of damage. This sort of Thief utilizes abilities like barrage, which can snipe at foes from afar. Guns also enable the Thief with mobility to get distance from its target when needed. Although this mobility is not as agile as with swords, it is exactly what you would expect for a ranged class.

Finally there is the bow; likely the highest skill weapon a Thief can utilize. Keep in mind that a button-mashing approach simply won't work with a bow, because it requires player to consider the order of attack to adapht with the changing situations. On the other hand, the bow enables a plethora of strong AOE based attacks and even includes the ability to teleport. Since there is no auto-lock functionality, the Thief has to manually target areas of attack and teleport. It may sound difficult to do effectively; it is a devastatingly powerful way to swing the tide of battle if the Thief can execute it properly.

A Thief wouldn't live up to his name if he couldn't steal, and anyone playing this profession will be doing plenty of that. No matter what weapon the Thief is holding, it can steal from enemy NPCs or players. These stolen items are not for financial benefit, but to work as abilities which can be used in combat. For example, if you steal an egg from a creature, you can either eat it or throw it. If you steal from a creature defined by a particular status effect, then you can often take control of that status effect in combat.

Overall, the large amount of movement involved in playing the Thief means that it is a highly skill based profession which feels less like playing an MMORPG and more like an action title. While the Thief may not be as intuitive as some of the other classes, it is certainly one of the most potent of the eight professions

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