Guild Wars 2

Well, we can look at it in another way too. Longbow Ranger w/wo Sic’em will also tear a mesmer apart

That’s actually doable as a GS + Sw/T shatter running boomremove + Arcane Thievery. I just fought a (i’d say) quite good LB/GS ranger a few times and i think i was able to win:lose positively after getting used to the fight.

Currently, i find fighting D/D eles harder than thieves. Thieves i can burst if i get the timing right (except S/D, need to practice that more), but eles seem to outheal everything i do while having too many boons to remove and even high damage in Air/Fire (Lighting Flash + Burning Speed crits for for ~8-10k combined). That’s not saying eles are op, that’s just shatter being bad. Especially when everything is AoE and Sword #3 could as well not exist at all.

What i find even more funny is the power discrepancy between our builds. I just got destroyed by a power necro on shatter (like 100-0 in <1s as soon as i got feared). I specced into power PU for the first time ever while leaving everything as it was, just putting 6 points from Illusions into Chaos and i basically beat him by doing nothing but stealthing, casting illusions and blinking behind him whenever he got to close. Most of the time i didn’t even had to worry about dodging because random Aegis was doing all the work.

Something tells me the balance is just not right here.

Good thief will eat all but engineer and necro…

I would advise any shatter Mesmers reading this not to stress out, don’t take Chicaco Jack’s rather silly post too seriously. The strength of shortbow has nothing to do with trickery Thieves being “unpredictable”. It’s that there’s no substantial downside to using any of the five shortbow skills whenever you like. Cluster-bombing is always effective, even at point-blank (shatter doesn’t take any clone death traits). Poison is always effective. Evading is almost always effective (who knows what you might dodge). Arrow is a displacement which can wreck clone pathing or act as a z-axis port. The autoattack alone is pressure that has to be accounted for.

From the Mesmer’s perspective everything has to be countered at a grossly uneven opportunity cost. That is the advantage of shortbow, it has little to nothing to do with the Thief or the Mesmer’s behavior. Gimmicks like stealing mid-cluster bomb to proc fury or immobilizing from stealth are on the whole superfluous and even hurt the advantage of shortbow which is that the skills are cheap and almost devoid of situational use. It is by design, thanks to a select group of developers’ “vision” of structured PvP.

I have said this before and will say again: thieves are driving away other glass cannons.

Thief is by far the most common roaming profession in WvWvW. Surely many of them are running P/D condi build, but the D/D, D/P, S/D and S/P are still there as well. Many thieves have close to berserker gear (might be mixed with knights gear etc). Mesmers are the 2nd most common profession to use similar gear in WvWvW.

You won’t see that many elementalists, engineers or guardians running with berserker gear, because this would leave very little room for error. In other words: high risk, high reward.

Thief, thanks to its stealth, evades and shadowsteps, can be forgiving. Same is true for warrior, but with different reasons (high base health and armor, stances giving immunities, huge mobility to reset fights with ease). Of course players steer towards low risk + high reward. I also find bunker guardians very easy to play and they have always been part of tpvp and WvWvW meta.

If there would not be any thieves in the game, we would see a lot more other professions also going glass cannon. Now this is more or less thief sole role in this game. I am not advocating to delete thieves from the game, but clearly there is a big problem to have one profession with high access to evades, stealth and shadowsteps, yet have high burst at same time. If thief misses his burst, he can reset the fight and very soon try again and again. This is alleviated in WvWvW setting, where the map is much larger and it is not about contesting points. Stealth has no disadvantage there and hitting stealthed opponent with AoE requires more guessing. In tpvp AoE spamming professions like engineers can just blanket the circle, not so much true in WvWvW. Majority of roaming mesmers in WvWvW are also abusing stealth using Prismatic Understanding builds.

a t s e.9614:

Thief counters spvp meta mesmers because they are built to deal damage only with some group utilities.

If the mesmers uses CI/PU condi or a more defensive build , then its pretty easy for them to kill a thief.

Hardly. Thieves just counter that survivability by running 6 in SA and having superior sustainability with better burst. As a Mesmer main with a Thief as my main alt, there’s literally no Mesmer build that a Thief can’t counter with a superior spec. Condi PU is the closest you have, and a patient SA Thief will still win that battle of attrition.

Or you can just run S/D and counter everything in one spec.

Deniara Devious.3948:

I have said this before and will say again: thieves are driving away other glass cannons.

Thief is by far the most common roaming profession in WvWvW. Surely many of them are running P/D condi build, but the D/D, D/P, S/D and S/P are still there as well. Many thieves have close to berserker gear (might be mixed with knights gear etc). Mesmers are the 2nd most common profession to use similar gear in WvWvW.

You won’t see that many elementalists, engineers or guardians running with berserker gear, because this would leave very little room for error. In other words: high risk, high reward.

Thief, thanks to its stealth, evades and shadowsteps, can be forgiving. Same is true for warrior, but with different reasons (high base health and armor, stances giving immunities, huge mobility to reset fights with ease). Of course players steer towards low risk + high reward. I also find bunker guardians very easy to play and they have always been part of tpvp and WvWvW meta.

If there would not be any thieves in the game, we would see a lot more other professions also going glass cannon. Now this is more or less thief sole role in this game. I am not advocating to delete thieves from the game, but clearly there is a big problem to have one profession with high access to evades, stealth and shadowsteps, yet have high burst at same time. If thief misses his burst, he can reset the fight and very soon try again and again. This is alleviated in WvWvW setting, where the map is much larger and it is not about contesting points. Stealth has no disadvantage there and hitting stealthed opponent with AoE requires more guessing. In tpvp AoE spamming professions like engineers can just blanket the circle, not so much true in WvWvW. Majority of roaming mesmers in WvWvW are also abusing stealth using Prismatic Understanding builds.

Crazy zerker engi http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ifH9qMo_KX8

Jackums.3496:

a t s e.9614:

Thief counters spvp meta mesmers because they are built to deal damage only with some group utilities.

If the mesmers uses CI/PU condi or a more defensive build , then its pretty easy for them to kill a thief.

Hardly. Thieves just counter that survivability by running 6 in SA and having superior sustainability with better burst. As a Mesmer main with a Thief as my main alt, there’s literally no Mesmer build that a Thief can’t counter with a superior spec. Condi PU is the closest you have, and a patient SA Thief will still win that battle of attrition.

Or you can just run S/D and counter everything in one spec.

Countering S/D is all about playing into their evade frames, and letting them spam them. The after cast is unavoidable, and locking a s/d thief for only a few seconds is often enough to kill them or send them on their way to hiding.

The thing is that Thieves literally need no setup for their burst damage. Always starts with an Elite that let them deal free damage for 1,5 seconds, then use AAs that deal a lot of DMG, then or continue spamming dodge or go back to invis to prepare for more constant spike damage without any effort. And yeah, they can restart fights as they wish with all the blinks and stuff.

Mesmers at the other hand need to heavily setup do deal damage. They can’t just jump and explode someone, because first they need to land some buggy skils, set up their clone perfectly and wish that they don’t bug with the terrain or get killed with one blow from some random ele on water, then perfectly time their dodges/panic skills, time their daze and shatter, and it all in the only 3s window after the thief almost killed them by pressing 2 buttons.

For Mesmer, is try to burst or get bursted, and as much as I hate to complain about a certain class more than learning how to counter it, I only see the Mesmer’s playerskill counting here in the end…

shimmerless.4560:

The strength of shortbow has nothing to do with trickery Thieves being “unpredictable”.

You haven’t played a good thief if you don’t think thieves inherent ability, their fundamental strength in a fight, is to be unpredictable.

shimmerless.4560:

It’s that there’s no substantial downside to using any of the five shortbow skills whenever you like.

I am really tired of this gross oversimplification of thief weaponsets. Especially weaponsets like shortbow. I get it, you get stomped because you don’t know when the thief has screwed up to take advantage of it – many players are like this. All this is is just more senseless whining though, and it’s not productive at all. I would say more, but people who whine like this clearly have made up their mind so it would be like talking to a brick wall.

I agree: thieves aren’t especially unpredictable. I think they are pretty hard to read at times, but overall every thief build pretty much has a singular gameplan.

My particular complaint is that, for a mesmer:

• Even if you know exactly where a hidden thief is gonna show up, you have fairly little you can do to punish them. Because you have few area attacks with low damage and long cooldowns, a rather low-damaging melee weapon, and your bursts skills pretty much all require targets.
• Even if you’re personally good at working around an evasion-oriented thief’s evade frames, your phantasms won’t be. (It’s the same trap as the ranger, really: by offloading the class’ damage output onto pets, you’re basically giving anyone who can master basic PvE monster fighting a huge leg up against them. In a way, turret engies have it better because they can count on their turrets not to move around.) And cleaves wipe out clones so fast.

inhearth.2038:

The thing is that Thieves literally need no setup for their burst damage. Always starts with an Elite that let them deal free damage for 1,5 seconds, then use AAs that deal a lot of DMG, then or continue spamming dodge or go back to invis to prepare for more constant spike damage without any effort. And yeah, they can restart fights as they wish with all the blinks and stuff.

Mesmers at the other hand need to heavily setup do deal damage. They can’t just jump and explode someone, because first they need to land some buggy skils, set up their clone perfectly and wish that they don’t bug with the terrain or get killed with one blow from some random ele on water, then perfectly time their dodges/panic skills, time their daze and shatter, and it all in the only 3s window after the thief almost killed them by pressing 2 buttons.

For Mesmer, is try to burst or get bursted, and as much as I hate to complain about a certain class more than learning how to counter it, I only see the Mesmer’s playerskill counting here in the end…

I dont really disagree with you, but the thing about player skill being the “only” thing that count… Its definetly not true in the current broken state of many, many Mesmer skills.

I dont play Thief all that much but I have been doing world exploration and Thieves should consider themselves lucky their combat teleport work ~95% of the time (shadow shot) while the Mesmer is lucky to have a 20% success rate of illusionary leap. People that only play Thieves have no idea what ignorant bliss they play with.

Chicago Jack.5647:

shimmerless.4560:

The strength of shortbow has nothing to do with trickery Thieves being “unpredictable”.

You haven’t played a good thief if you don’t think thieves inherent ability, their fundamental strength in a fight, is to be unpredictable.

shimmerless.4560:

It’s that there’s no substantial downside to using any of the five shortbow skills whenever you like.

I am really tired of this gross oversimplification of thief weaponsets. Especially weaponsets like shortbow. I get it, you get stomped because you don’t know when the thief has screwed up to take advantage of it – many players are like this. All this is is just more senseless whining though, and it’s not productive at all. I would say more, but people who whine like this clearly have made up their mind so it would be like talking to a brick wall.

Perhaps you aren’t confident enough in your own arguments? I stated my reasoning quite clearly and all this above amounts to is a sputtering collection of ad hominems.

If you don’t understand what I mean, let me revisit what I said. When it comes to Thief/Mesmer engagements, shortbow has no situational downsides from the perspective of the Thief/Mesmer engage. Say if a Mesmer phase retreats away from a D/x Ele’s Frozen Burst, you can say it was an even trade, perhaps one slightly in favor of the Mesmer, but it is situational. The skill has a moderate cooldown and it is tied to a more defensive attunement (where the skill itself is an aggressive lockdown).

When a Thief uses shortbow against a tourney Mesmer, there are almost no trades that aren’t overwhelmingly in the Thief’s favor. A Mesmer has to respond to the bouncing auto, he has to respond to every single cluster bomb, she can whiff dozens of high-value skills into the evasive shot (which was mercifully given an aftercast recently). To trade unfavorably against a Mesmer in shortbow you really have to be going out of your way to fail.

The audience I was addressing was other shatter Mesmers, in any case. Your original post was a gross oversimplification of my own class in that you seemed to reason the Mesmer’s weakness was to the oh-so-spontaneous mind games and creative combos practiced by Trickery Thieves. I am easing Mesmers’ fears and telling them not to stress out so much because none of that nonsense has any bearing on why Trickery is difficult to deal with in this particular instance.

NinjaEd.3946:

Jackums.3496:

a t s e.9614:

Thief counters spvp meta mesmers because they are built to deal damage only with some group utilities.

If the mesmers uses CI/PU condi or a more defensive build , then its pretty easy for them to kill a thief.

Hardly. Thieves just counter that survivability by running 6 in SA and having superior sustainability with better burst. As a Mesmer main with a Thief as my main alt, there’s literally no Mesmer build that a Thief can’t counter with a superior spec. Condi PU is the closest you have, and a patient SA Thief will still win that battle of attrition.

Or you can just run S/D and counter everything in one spec.

Countering S/D is all about playing into their evade frames, and letting them spam them. The after cast is unavoidable, and locking a s/d thief for only a few seconds is often enough to kill them or send them on their way to hiding.

I know, I main S/D on my Thief.

You’re under-estimating the damage output of the set in combination with its evades. As a Mesmer, you have to put in twice the effort just to get off a well-timed interrupt (which conveniently is more difficult when the Thief has easy access to Consume Plasma), whereas the Thief needs only use a single stun-break or evade to counter the entirety of your damage, and then return with 4-6k auto attacks and a 5k CnD.

The only profession/build that I have difficulty fighting on my S/D Thief is Terror Necro and condi Engi. The rare skilled P/D Thief can be an issue, too.