Thief: claw vs dagger

You've asking about the merits of Night Lord (Assassin) vs. Shadower (Bandit)?

I'd recommend taking a look at What class you should pick, as well as the older but still generally pretty good All classes review.

It's not so much that one is better than the other, they just do different things well.

Also, do the HP Challenges. Don't worry about "washing" your first character.

 

yeah, NLs are too op. shads are good for farming, and they also do really well at endgame bosses like auf and pb. nls are basically great in every boss, so i would say its a better job.
things you might wanna consider before you choose:
1. what kind of content you wanna do? maybe if you like farming, auf and pink bean, you will be happy on shad. shad is fine in other bosses too, but worse than NL in terms of dpm thats usually what matters.
2. how do you like to play? i think playing as shad requires more attention since you need to hit close to the target, but has a higher survivability cuz of better shadow shifter and meso guard
3. how buff dependent you wanna be? shad is basically independent of other ppl's buff, while NLs REQUIRE SE to deal good damage

 

Is this your first char? Shadower generally farms better, I know people who started their first NL char and weren't scuffed that much, but there's this disadvantage of farming, besides needing SE for boss when doing solo

 

If you just want to play a thief in general and are mostly curious about early jobs claws typically outperform daggers. Claws have better attack scalings (claws need less attack to do the same damage as daggers do) but daggers can also take advantage of shields with attack on them. The main attack that claws use, Lucky 7, has a different damage calculation that uses luck rather than just attack range making it significantly stronger than double stab despite the buffs to the skill on this server. Plus they can do damage from range. One downside to that is that if monsters are too close though they won’t be able to use their attacks while daggers can always attack from melee (obviously lol). Daggers do have the shortest attack range of all melee weapons, but that isn’t really that significant in the big picture.

As you level assassins get access to critical throw which makes them the strongest 2nd job class by far. Unfortunately they don’t have much variety (and their gear is quite expensive since the class is so good) because they don’t get a new attack skill until 3rd job. If you like the idea of doing melee attacks instead of ranged attacks bandits get new attacks during every new job. It’s common for bandits to use claws and lucky 7 for their entire first job and the early parts of their 2nd job. No matter which choice you make both thieves are very strong.