Guild Wars 2

This week I started to see a thief build that is becoming more and more usual. They just jump around you throwing caltrops and stacking in less than 4s 15 stacks of bleeding. When you remove them he simply applies them again.
How can I counter it with an engi?

you step out of the aoe, and kill the kitten out of the thief.

Right after they Death Blossom or dodge hit the thief with a chill, cripple, immobilize or knockdown and stay at range if possible. For engineer I’m thinking grenade spam as a counter-area denial might work but I have a limited understanding of engineer’s kits.

Have condition removal, and don’t use it right away.

• Let the thief caltrops
• Let him Deathblossom 2-3times
• Move out of Caltrops while using your condi removal.

This way the thief will have low initiative and won’t be able to do another quick 20 bleed stack. DO NOT try to hit a Deathblossiming thief, he/she will evade all attacks at the time.

You can also counter dodge the thief, but I would suggest keep the dodges for after your use your condition removal.

by not hitting a deatblossoming thief i think hopeless means dont hit him while hes performing the attack, as it has evasion frames.

the build has been around for a while

I suggest making a thread for a nerf..

But you didn’t kuddos!

I’m just trying to understand how that build works. That AoE bleeding is driving me crazy.

sami.3801:

I’m just trying to understand how that build works. That AoE bleeding is driving me crazy.

Good step to imrove !!

just make sure you are out of the big AOE red circle. Carefully watch the thief, he is unkilable while in death blossom (evasive attack) but when he land, you have your small window of oportunity. Also if you use any AOE.. use it.. its a good counter

Flamethrower is really good for knocking them away when they land. It’s a bit tricky at first but you can get the hang of it.

Death Blossom by itself isn’t that good. What puts it over the top is stacking regular caltrops along with caltrops on dodge.

The key is to constantly dodge roll away from your target while on to of them to stack even more bleeds, which can do up to 4 short extra bleeds in a tiny area, which then also means you will have a ton of cripple stacking on you. Best bet is to stay on the move and if they blow like 3 LDB’s in a row a single cleanse will screw them.

P/D Thieves are the ones you should really be worried about, they can pretty much be unkillable and just maintain bleeds nonstop.

LDB thieves are much more vulnerable to condition dmg.

Alright. Everything boils down to positioning and the timing on your condition remover/s.
You have to decide if you want to try and dodge the first wave of bleeds or remove them and if he pops Caltraps I would suggest removing them once you’re out of that area.

If you only have one condition remove this is when it gets tricky, now you have to time your dodges well when the thief uses DB. Depending on the thiefs build he can do several things while low on initiative here, I myself use P/P and can still stack bleeds on my target, not as many unless I pop a stealth utility. Point being, the bleed damage from here on until he goes D/D is pretty low so here is when you should unload as much damage as possible imo.

He decides to come close to burn all initiative on DB again, time your dodges for when he’s spinning and if you’re really fast on any knockbacks you can try and time it when he lands to gain some distance, DB has a REALLY short leap so any distance will buy you time.

So basically, have a plan on when to do what, don’t use all your dodges and then remove conditions, that will just screw you over. Don’t stand in Caltraps and use any knock backs wisely. This build is meant to outlast its opponent. Play smart!

EDIT
You can watch my videos down below if you wanna see some bleeding action from my PoV and maybe you can learn a thing or two! The one linked here is a 9 min long PvP montage, in the beginning there’s a link to a shorter one where I duel a Guardian. Good duels!