Guild Wars 2

I was doing the jumping puzzle and ended up fighting a thief in a 1v1. However this thief was different to any other thief I have ever faced. She would do (cond)damage for about 3-5 seconds and then stealth for about 3-5 seconds and repeat this over and over again. It was really annoying at how often this person was stealthing especially with the rendering issues.

How do you beat someone who is constantly stealthing?

Immobilization and movement to make it harder to hit Cloak and Dagger.

You wait for the thief nerfs.

You’re an Ele right? Try some AoEs and CCs and of course condition removals. One tips is don’t get rid of the conditions immediately. Try to get them when they’re at their worst.
Churning Earth, Signet of Earth, Evasive Arcana, Earthquake, Frost Aura, Frozen Burst, Glyph of Storms, could help slow her down. And long channeled skills like Arc Lightning could help keep track of her. Also try to find a location that gives you a terrain advantage. Vigorous Scepter or Arcane Energy could help too.

Play 10 times harder than them and hope they make a mistake.. and you don’t

They will be fixed eventually (has to happen), we just don’t know when.

Once it is fixed all the roflcopter fotm noobs will move on to some other class

Turn around and walk away? You’re an ele. They can’t kill you.

I assume you’re talking about P/D cond thief? Its a pretty strong build, probably won’t be killed off by anet any time soon either.

One weakness is stuff that prevents the C&Ds from going off, like aegis/blind. This will deduct the 6initiative even though the ability whiffs.
Another is aoe CC while stealthed(like most thieves) and I think shocking aura would also shut down sneak attacks after proccing on the 1st hit of 5.

Note that this build is extremely resistant to conditions and will generally be a hard fight for you no matter what.

Bunzy.8674:

I was doing the jumping puzzle and ended up fighting a thief in a 1v1. However this thief was different to any other thief I have ever faced. She would do (cond)damage for about 3-5 seconds and then stealth for about 3-5 seconds and repeat this over and over again. It was really annoying at how often this person was stealthing especially with the rendering issues.

How do you beat someone who is constantly stealthing?

AHAHAHAH! you found Atriese.

Good luck with countering it though, the best you can do is Aoe.

Avatara.1042:

You wait for the thief nerfs.

They wont be nerfing the stealth, they are nerfing backstab damage, which is why you will be seeing more of these builds in the future. Everyone kinda mucked themselves with the complaining about the high DPS, now they are just going to get messed up by condition and stealth builds which weren’t popular before but will be now!
MUAHAHAHAHHA!

AoE. People too often confuse stealth for invulnerability. Always have at least one weapon with a ground target or cone AoE effect, aim it vaguely in the direction of the thief, and go to town. swing wild with your auto-attack too, even if you can’t see them, you can hit them. You won’t see damage numbers but they do take damage.

Ohoni.6057:

AoE. People too often confuse stealth for invulnerability. Always have at least one weapon with a ground target or cone AoE effect, aim it vaguely in the direction of the thief, and go to town. swing wild with your auto-attack too, even if you can’t see them, you can hit them. You won’t see damage numbers but they do take damage.

I have killed so many thieves this way.

They are usually very predictable in where they move. Most times behind you and stay on top of you.

Toble.2968:

Avatara.1042:

You wait for the thief nerfs.

They wont be nerfing the stealth, they are nerfing backstab damage, which is why you will be seeing more of these builds in the future. Everyone kinda mucked themselves with the complaining about the high DPS, now they are just going to get messed up by condition and stealth builds which weren’t popular before but will be now!
MUAHAHAHAHHA!

STEALTH is what they need to nerf most.

Ohoni.6057:

AoE. People too often confuse stealth for invulnerability. Always have at least one weapon with a ground target or cone AoE effect, aim it vaguely in the direction of the thief, and go to town. swing wild with your auto-attack too, even if you can’t see them, you can hit them. You won’t see damage numbers but they do take damage.

Elementalists cannot weapon swap btw.

Avatara.1042:

STEALTH is what they need to nerf most.

I disagree. I don’t mind if a thief can stealth well and often. As has been said there are counters to it. I’d much rather have somone put conditions on me and go into stealth than one shot me any day.

Dont stand in thief’s caltrops and focus on removing conditions. To put a killing amount of bleed stacks condition thief has to spend all their initiative and it takes around 11 seconds to regenerate initiative from 0 to 15 while you can easily remove bleed stacks in water attunement.

I would assume you fought P/D thief since you mention conditions and going in stealth, its harder for D/D elementalist than backstab thiefs due to easy kite tools but still its a cake.

Use full healer build and just heal until he get bored and you are moral winner.

few things to remember.

Pistol/Dagger thieves

1. After three (unquickened) shots they can move in for a stealth stab, so when they roll into you for a Cloak and Dagger stab roll out, that will waste 6 initiative if you manage to dodge and they will be open for a SPIKE DAMAGE attack.

if they can’t time their Cloak and Dagger hits right they’re in a very bad position.

2. Things that Block/Evade/Blind before they cloak and dagger will destroy their chain and give you a few seconds open gap to dump a burst.

3. Cripple/chill/immob will greatly reduce the chance of them landing Cloak and Dagger as long as you keep moving.

hope this helps.

Yer it was a P/D thief, I think it would of been alot easier if I was using D/D however I was stuck using S/D which make things alot harder as I can’t just spam auto attack when they go stealth and get some hits in.

Thanks everyone for the information.

Avatara.1042:

Toble.2968:

Avatara.1042:

You wait for the thief nerfs.

They wont be nerfing the stealth, they are nerfing backstab damage, which is why you will be seeing more of these builds in the future. Everyone kinda mucked themselves with the complaining about the high DPS, now they are just going to get messed up by condition and stealth builds which weren’t popular before but will be now!
MUAHAHAHAHHA!

CULLING PROBLEMS is what they need to nerf most.

I agree with you whole heartedly.

Bunzy.8674:

Yer it was a P/D thief, I think it would of been alot easier if I was using D/D however I was stuck using S/D which make things alot harder as I can’t just spam auto attack when they go stealth and get some hits in.

Thanks everyone for the information.

You have plenty of Aoes on S/D If you plant them on yourself, the thief will die first, you have more health and more heals.

I play both Elementalist and thief BTW. Both level 80 fully geared characters.

Chin up mate. And don’t worry about Atriese, he doesn’t camp the puzzles THAT often. EHEHEHEHEH.

Apparently culling is going to be fixed next patch. Apparently. I don’t know what’s taken so long seeing as you can still see the effects at their feet from stealth/unstealth….

Anyway, this will probably be the next flavor of the month after backstab’s nerfed which has pretty much been confirmed to be happening.

It’s hard to fight the rendering bug (uh, I mean thieves, yeah, that’s it….) with scepter as most of your attacks require a target or are insanely slow animated GTAoE. Even though I like scepter a lot for the extra blast finishers and range, I’ve switched to mostly D/D these days to help deal with rendering jive.

Funny though that condition P/D is getting more popular. That was the build I came up with just screwing around back in beta and it’s surprisingly effective, but I get bored playing anything which has an optimal rotation that doesn’t use most of the available skillset (yay, I can press 5>1 over and over and over and over and over no matter who I’m fighting!).

To those suggesting aoe spam, yeah, that kinda works. Any good player will just walk away while you burn most of your big cooldowns though. Auto-attack spam? Yeah, there’s that, and there’s the thief dancing around somewhere at 900 range shooting you while you randomly run around hitting air. Trying to deal damage to something in an unknown location somewhere within a circle of 1800 diameter by spamming skills is basically relying on luck. “I can counter thieves with luck or if they are stupid enough to face-tank my most obvious aoes” is not a statement that indicates class balance working as intended.

Elementalists cannot weapon swap btw.

They cannot, but they can element swap, and if you have a weapon combo that does not include at least 2-3 untargetted AoEs somewhere in there then you’re doing something wrong.

Yer it was a P/D thief, I think it would of been alot easier if I was using D/D however I was stuck using S/D which make things alot harder as I can’t just spam auto attack when they go stealth and get some hits in.

If you’re an Ele with that selection, the instant they stealth activate either Dragon’s Tooth, Shatter Stone, Ring of Fire, Frost Aura, Updraft, Earthquake, or Churning Earth. These all have useful effects that will damage and/or throw off any lurking Thieves. You might also want to try Glyph of Storms, Arcane Wave, or Arcane Shield as utilities.

Yeah, there’s that, and there’s the thief dancing around somewhere at 900 range shooting you while you randomly run around hitting air.

If the Thief is shooting at you then he’s not stealthed. Shooting breaks stealth.

Trying to deal damage to something in an unknown location somewhere within a circle of 1800 diameter by spamming skills is basically relying on luck. “I can counter thieves with luck or if they are stupid enough to face-tank my most obvious aoes” is not a statement that indicates class balance working as intended.

The balance to this is that Thieves need to remain in melee range if they want to maintain Stealth for any length of time, so they will either be visible, or within 600-900 distance most of the time.

Ohoni.6057:

Yeah, there’s that, and there’s the thief dancing around somewhere at 900 range shooting you while you randomly run around hitting air.

If the Thief is shooting at you then he’s not stealthed. Shooting breaks stealth.

Shooting breaks stealth? Who knew? (didn’t read the part where I said I’ve played thief since beta?)

The issue isn’t stealth, it’s rendering delay. On the thief’s screen, he’s visable as soon as he starts shooting. On his opponent’s screen, however, the thief model will take a few extra seconds to load. It’s entirely possible to (ab)use this period of time to juke to a random side and pop in for a quick C&D without taking much damage.

By contrast, all of the elementalist’s aoes are quite obvious/easy to dodge, on long cooldowns, and he is visible to the thief the entire fight.

(Also: Strawman = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawman_argument
look under Structure 2-2 for why this applies)

Arlandino.7513:

Play 10 times harder than them and hope they make a mistake.. and you don’t

They will be fixed eventually (has to happen), we just don’t know when.

Once it is fixed all the roflcopter fotm noobs will move on to some other class

Smashing your keys harder and screaming in vent doesn’t mean you play harder. Go play TPvP maybe you’ll learn a thing or two.

Ohoni.6057:

AoE. People too often confuse stealth for invulnerability. Always have at least one weapon with a ground target or cone AoE effect, aim it vaguely in the direction of the thief, and go to town. swing wild with your auto-attack too, even if you can’t see them, you can hit them. You won’t see damage numbers but they do take damage.

Most likely because it takes 3 seconds for the theif to actually appear when coming out of stealth

Thrashbarg.9820:

It’s hard to fight the rendering bug (uh, I mean thieves, yeah, that’s it….) with scepter as most of your attacks require a target or are insanely slow animated GTAoE. Even though I like scepter a lot for the extra blast finishers and range, I’ve switched to mostly D/D these days to help deal with rendering jive.

Funny though that condition P/D is getting more popular. That was the build I came up with just screwing around back in beta and it’s surprisingly effective, but I get bored playing anything which has an optimal rotation that doesn’t use most of the available skillset (yay, I can press 5>1 over and over and over and over and over no matter who I’m fighting!).

To those suggesting aoe spam, yeah, that kinda works. Any good player will just walk away while you burn most of your big cooldowns though. Auto-attack spam? Yeah, there’s that, and there’s the thief dancing around somewhere at 900 range shooting you while you randomly run around hitting air. Trying to deal damage to something in an unknown location somewhere within a circle of 1800 diameter by spamming skills is basically relying on luck. “I can counter thieves with luck or if they are stupid enough to face-tank my most obvious aoes” is not a statement that indicates class balance working as intended.

This is the truth of the build. A good player is almost untouchable.

You don’t since the animation is BROKEN. Roll a thief and smash your hands on the keyboard. You will get kills. Baddies are abound with that class. Get used to it since ANET isn’t going to do anything about it.

So backstab is getting nerfed in a couple of days and already people are crying about condition damage thieves? Priceless.

Please oh please ruin this game with constant cries for nerfs because you don’t know how to deal with something. Because asking for a change is easier than adapting..

Same.4687:

So backstab is getting nerfed in a couple of days and already people are crying about condition damage thieves? Priceless.

Please oh please ruin this game with constant cries for nerfs because you don’t know how to deal with something. Because asking for a change is easier than adapting..

Wow, adapt to instakill. Spoken like a true believer. I have a post and video that shows me getting hit for 28K in three seconds. That class needs a huge nerf. Maybe then the good players will look good and the bad will look bad. At the current state of things, the bad players look great and the good players look like gods. Something needs done.

I don’t know Elementalists (at all!) so can only give you suggestions as a player of a thief and the things I do to combat another thief.

If your going to drop AOE’s drop them on yourself a second or two after the thief goes into stealth. For a P/D thief, there is no backstab, so it doesn’t matter if you move or not, their shots are going to hit you regardless. The AOE is only there to damage them as they come in for a CnD strike.

If they do come in for a CnD, blinding/dodging are your best bets. Dodging isn’t as hard as it seems as the CnD animation takes some time to execute.

If you haven’t seen them for 3 seconds, then they are coming in for a CnD to remain stealthed (probably waiting on cooldowns to reset or bleeds to do their work). Dodge. Tab-target madly throughout the whole time.

Really, those are the main show-stoppers for a bleed-condition build. Not being able to get back into stealth easily (and therefore get hit while they is -should be are, but ‘are’ and then ‘targeted’ gets kittened- targeted).

In between all that, try to heal and drop condition dmg.

They’re a PITA to combat, but as a result, are infinitely more satisfying to kill. Make sure you jump up and down and laugh at them if you kill them. Also, whisper them and laugh some more, tell them to roll a real class etc. Treat us all as the same person for the purpose of building motivation to dislike them

swilkers.5938:

Wow, adapt to instakill. Spoken like a true believer. I have a post and video that shows me getting hit for 28K in three seconds. That class needs a huge nerf. Maybe then the good players will look good and the bad will look bad. At the current state of things, the bad players look great and the good players look like gods. Something needs done.

You’re hilarious.

Thief’s burst is already getting nerfed. Stop complaining. You’ll still die to them.

This thread is about condition damage builds. The thief section is where your kind flock (the complainers), so I’d suggest going there if you want to complain about burst builds.

If you’re getting instakilled by condition damage builds, there’s something else wrong.

I’ll tell you a class that really has problems with that build: Necro. If I were to put it into fighting game terms, it would probably be a 7-3 matchup.

d/d thief is probably 3-7, the opposite way, and the pistol whip build is probably 4.5-5.5 in favor of the Necro… mainly relying on whether the necro has life force and/or cooldowns.

celeron.3469:

I’ll tell you a class that really has problems with that build: Necro. If I were to put it into fighting game terms, it would probably be a 7-3 matchup.

d/d thief is probably 3-7, the opposite way, and the pistol whip build is probably 4.5-5.5 in favor of the Necro… mainly relying on whether the necro has life force and/or cooldowns.

I’m assuming this is a troll post because…just lol. If you say necro> thief, either you’re doing something wrong as a thief, or you’re playing as a necro against horrible thieves.
Life force or no, necro damage will never (in the current state of the game) compare to thief damage, and necro survivability against a proper thief is a joke, as is most classes. Now if you’re soley talking about the condition thief vs a necro, then yeah I’d say sometimes the necro has advantage but thats because not only do we deal with tons of conditions, we also have tons of way of getting rid of them or benefiting from having them on us.

Necro>Thief

Nay of the Ether.8913:

I’m assuming this is a troll post because…just lol. If you say necro> thief, either you’re doing something wrong as a thief, or you’re playing as a necro against horrible thieves.
Life force or no, necro damage will never (in the current state of the game) compare to thief damage, and necro survivability against a proper thief is a joke, as is most classes. Now if you’re soley talking about the condition thief vs a necro, then yeah I’d say sometimes the necro has advantage but thats because not only do we deal with tons of conditions, we also have tons of way of getting rid of them or benefiting from having them on us.

Necro doesn’t need good damage to beat a thief. You just have to outlast them. D/D is much easier to outlast than you think: chillx3, fearx2, a couple dodge rolls, thieves don’t have infinite initiative. They have damage yeah, but only if you get hit by it. This will become more apparent whenever ANet fixes culling. A necro can pretty easily survive their quickness burst through interrupts. In WvW, a necro has a ton of survivability. I don’t sPvP so I can’t speak for that.

If you want an example of how hard it is for a pistol whip build to kill me is: it takes about 42 pistol whips to down me when I don’t have any cooldowns to break out of it. That guy got so lucky with his procs. Now compare that to what I said about the matchup for a D/D thief.

Also you’re reading what I said backwards about P/D thief, those wreck a necro. The other builds aren’t really worth all the crying they get (though pistol whip is pretty kitten .

If you want to talk about it more, my account name is right over there, just hit me up in game. I assume you’re a necro as well, I’m willing to help you out if you want.

I have came to the conclusion that my thief, i only use it in spvp. That being said I refuse to be a profession that everyone hate’s in wvw, plus it got old fast. I almost felt bad, it’s like i found a cheat code or something. I like a challenge, I rather play a mesmer and be more useful for a more organized bigger group using ports and berserker to take out siege.

Like most people say the best thing is aoe which i would have to agree and a lot of dodging. The more time on your hands the better your off. Iv had thiefs just run away after a 5 min 1v1 being a mesmer vs super stealthy thief = no one will win.

I do not have experience with ele vs thief, though. But when i was a thief only a handful of ele was able to kill me and i think they just had better gear or was just lucky.

The moral of the story is Thief is once again one of them profession’s everyone complain’s about. It seem’s stealth ability theme profession’s no one know’s how to handle them. That’s why in pvp they are alway’s the first one everyone want’s to be in pvp based game’s. All mmo’s have this kind of class for the most part as you all know.

@ celeron I was mainly referring to spvp I don’t do wvw much anymore, and the playstyle between the two is vastly different. Yeah in wvw it’s a lot easier to manage a slippery thief as long as he’s not perimiter walking on zerg fights and picking people off.

Shadow Gathering.5649:

What we need is a counter to cloak, but there simply is not one.

Of course it is extremely unlikely that Anet will give us a new skill that reveals nearby cloaked foes.

Some conditions could reveal the position of stealthed enemies. For example, if the enemy is burning, even if he stealths, you would still see the flames. If he was poisoned, you’d see a faint green cloud. If he was bleeding, you’d see drops of blood appear on the ground.

I think whining about thieves has become a ritual here. You got outplayed, sorry the thief played smart, especially considering he’s using a bleed build.

I do agree that thieves need a backstab nerf, but nerfing stealth is not the way to go.

swilkers.5938:

Same.4687:

So backstab is getting nerfed in a couple of days and already people are crying about condition damage thieves? Priceless.

Please oh please ruin this game with constant cries for nerfs because you don’t know how to deal with something. Because asking for a change is easier than adapting..

Wow, adapt to instakill. Spoken like a true believer. I have a post and video that shows me getting hit for 28K in three seconds. That class needs a huge nerf. Maybe then the good players will look good and the bad will look bad. At the current state of things, the bad players look great and the good players look like gods. Something needs done.

Dude what are you crying about? Backstab is getting nerfed already along with other Thief skills according to rumors. People should look at how a thief works, roll one, go to heart of the mist and mess around. It’s how I learned to deal with D/D Ele’s, Condition (bleed) necro’s and whatever seems to kill me easily. I ask the person what build he/she is using, look it up and test it.

Keiel.7489:

Arlandino.7513:

Play 10 times harder than them and hope they make a mistake.. and you don’t

They will be fixed eventually (has to happen), we just don’t know when.

Once it is fixed all the roflcopter fotm noobs will move on to some other class

Smashing your keys harder and screaming in vent doesn’t mean you play harder. Go play TPvP maybe you’ll learn a thing or two.

Nah, I am completely right. To beat anyone you have to play better than them. Thieves have a severe advantage over nearly all of the classes, requiring that much more skill from an opponent to be defeated. But then again, I see a Thief in your sig so I see you are nervous about your ezmode going away. You might want to grab a box of tissues.

edit: an update! Rolled a brand new thief, went straight to sPvP and proceeded to own the other team in my first match! 6 kills no deaths. dual daggers..preset build. I doubt the entire team I was fighting was so bad that this was possible. Definitely can’t say I’m any good with a Thief either, its just pure imbalance at its finest. Ah well, back to a real class.

Arlandino.7513:

Keiel.7489:

Arlandino.7513:

Play 10 times harder than them and hope they make a mistake.. and you don’t

They will be fixed eventually (has to happen), we just don’t know when.

Once it is fixed all the roflcopter fotm noobs will move on to some other class

Smashing your keys harder and screaming in vent doesn’t mean you play harder. Go play TPvP maybe you’ll learn a thing or two.

Nah, I am completely right. To beat anyone you have to play better than them. Thieves have a severe advantage over nearly all of the classes, requiring that much more skill from an opponent to be defeated. But then again, I see a Thief in your sig so I see you are nervous about your ezmode going away. You might want to grab a box of tissues.

edit: an update! Rolled a brand new thief, went straight to sPvP and proceeded to own the other team in my first match! 6 kills no deaths. dual daggers..preset build. I doubt the entire team I was fighting was so bad that this was possible. Definitely can’t say I’m any good with a Thief either, its just pure imbalance at its finest. Ah well, back to a real class.

lol…if you’re gonna claim you did this, you should be aware that the authenticity of you claim will be questioned. i.e. where’s the video?

The fact is, that people panic when the thief goes into stealth. They overreact and think the thief can be anywhere, when in fact they mostly cant (I say mostly as they could switch to shortbow and infiltrators strike or use a shadow step – which only takes them up to you anyway). Condition build thieves tend to be ranged – in which case you are not needing to worry about backstabs, so, the thief has hidden to avoid damage and/or to buy time on their cooldowns.

Use your heals early as its going to be a long fight without lost of thief bust damage. So it will probably come off cooldown before you are too low on health. AOE what you can and tab-target to mitigate the culling issue as much as possible.

Most of all tho – don’t panic. You get stunned, break it if you can otherwise just watch your heath bar. Sure, its going down, but is it dropping at a crazy rate? Probably not. Lock/Stun/Immobilize the thief if you can – they can still get into stealth, but that doesn’t let them move. I had a thief do this yesterday just after I’d immobilized him, so I dropped as much AOE on the spot he stealthed from. 15 seconds later he dropped back out of stealth, downed and almost dead

I am running a pistol dagger spec on my thief and imo it’s very powerful.
You can have decent survivability with 2,4k armor and 17k HP and still do good damage.
Also if specced like me he will remove conditions, gain regen and might each time he stealths and might with each dodge.

With this spec you will have to do very powerful aoe if you want that to deter him and I would not reccomend this. What you want to do is, as some people have said, keep moving and make him miss his cloak and dagger. Abilities that block cloak & dagger as well as cripple are my worst enemy.

Cloak and dagger will eat alot of initiative but he can be speced to regain on invis and on steal and also he most likely has other sneak skills to use too if he has too.

Only class to beat me in 1vs1 so far with this build is a good mesmer that beat me twice in a row.