Guild Wars 2

S/D and/or D/P thieves. S/D seems to be easier, even though both are just really annoying to deal with. Unblockable 2 boon removed gets really stupid when that’s pretty much how Guardians survive most times. I can sort of track a thief with my GS, but it’s only up for so long, and I can only see the particle flying towards them. Not like I have a stun to stop them from moving, and my Hammers ring of Warding just gets ported over. I’d pop my Gs symbol, but once again, the boon removal that’s freakin unblockable. Meanwhile I’m gettin stunned every few seconds, blinded half the time, and every time I get the thief to low health, stealth, comes back full health. Seriously? Yes, it’s half anger, but half annoyance, like how the hell do you deal with that crap?

If I’m running with my zerg set, I don’t do very well because my weapons are not well suited for 1v1.

If I’m running small group or planning to skirmish, I like mace/mace and hammer but I have been running axe/axe with sword/warhorn. This is on a warrior, shout heal. 0/10/30/30/0 because I don’t trait for small ops. Been thinking about axe/mace. Double mace and hammer can mostly stun lock them that they leave after getting knocked around. Axe does enough damage(untraited) that they also give up and run. My warrior is typically tanky and can take a burst very well.

I think hammer is a bit too slow for 1v1 so people tend to dodge them. Zergs don’t because of all the stuff going on but 1v1 it is easy to tell so you need a mace to get that first lock.

meep.2601:

easy – you make lots of posts complaining about them being op, and then anet buffs them a bunch of patches in a row, and then i’m not sure what happens after that

Not sure where I said they were op. Mind showing me where?

If I’m running with my zerg set, I don’t do very well because my weapons are not well suited for 1v1.

If I’m running small group or planning to skirmish, I like mace/mace and hammer but I have been running axe/axe with sword/warhorn. This is on a warrior, shout heal. 0/10/30/30/0 because I don’t trait for small ops. Been thinking about axe/mace. Double mace and hammer can mostly stun lock them that they leave after getting knocked around. Axe does enough damage(untraited) that they also give up and run. My warrior is typically tanky and can take a burst very well.

I think hammer is a bit too slow for 1v1 so people tend to dodge them. Zergs don’t because of all the stuff going on but 1v1 it is easy to tell so you need a mace to get that first lock.

So what about from a Guardian standpoint? I’ve beaten thieves before, but honestly, I don’t think they were that good.

Kaizz.7306:

meep.2601:

easy – you make lots of posts complaining about them being op, and then anet buffs them a bunch of patches in a row, and then i’m not sure what happens after that

Not sure where I said they were op. Mind showing me where?

If I’m running with my zerg set, I don’t do very well because my weapons are not well suited for 1v1.

If I’m running small group or planning to skirmish, I like mace/mace and hammer but I have been running axe/axe with sword/warhorn. This is on a warrior, shout heal. 0/10/30/30/0 because I don’t trait for small ops. Been thinking about axe/mace. Double mace and hammer can mostly stun lock them that they leave after getting knocked around. Axe does enough damage(untraited) that they also give up and run. My warrior is typically tanky and can take a burst very well.

I think hammer is a bit too slow for 1v1 so people tend to dodge them. Zergs don’t because of all the stuff going on but 1v1 it is easy to tell so you need a mace to get that first lock.

So what about from a Guardian standpoint? I’ve beaten thieves before, but honestly, I don’t think they were that good.

I only have a thief and warrior.

I played the thief when I started, had a really great name that just fit the profession. I like some things about the class, mostly though I’m not impressed and I also like to push into the zerg and thief doesn’t hold up well when I do that. I did learn quite a lot about the profession and how other players reacted though and I can reasonable predict what thieves will be doing. Good ones are hard but any good player is going to be hard.

Typically, I head for the waters if I can… Jump into the ocean and kill the thief underwater.

Post a video of you fighting a thief and I will tell you what you’re doing wrong.

It’s extremely hard for any class to beat a good thief 1v1. I’m a terrible thief player and it still takes at least 3 coordinated players working together to pin me down.

If you’re not running a very specific 1v1 build it’s even harder. Not sure what that would be for a guardian anyway, but it’s generally about stacking toughness and burst abilities with hard CC if possible, a tall order for most classes.

The best option, as crappy as it is, is to build as tanky as you can and try not to move around solo. Yup, fun, I know…..

My engineer deals with them pretty well, with toolkit and bombs and elixer gun. They generally either leave after the first pull>prybar>concussion bomb combo or HS spam themselves to death on confusion and gear shield. Just depends on their awareness and skill.

Evasion thieves are worse than stealth thieves, thank kittens that hasn’t become more mainstream.

Kaizz.7306:

meep.2601:

easy – you make lots of posts complaining about them being op, and then anet buffs them a bunch of patches in a row, and then i’m not sure what happens after that

Not sure where I said they were op. Mind showing me where?

sure – your entire post

Usually I just walk away. Most of the time a thief can’t burst me down and can’t put up the sustained damage either. But I can’t ever catch them (perma stealth), so I wave and walk away.

Very few ever chase me.

Waffler.1257:

Post a video of you fighting a thief and I will tell you what you’re doing wrong.

Until the OP actually does this I’m going to ignore him as he so richly deserves. Annoying does not equal overpowered, and annoying does not warrant nerfs.

Thieves hit hard and fast and they have excellent manouverability. With my engineer I stay put because there’s no point outrunning or chasing. Drop a supply kit if possible and keep up pressure with flamethrower. Basically I try to be too tough and too powerful to take down, and when initiative is gone they sometimes give up. Sometimes. I just had a thief back off and salute me in the os jp because he couldn’t take me down. I didn’t kill him either but it felt like a bit of a win.

You can’t kill a competent thief 1v1 or a good thief with less than 3v1. All you can do is survive until they run out of resources and give up.

Luckily, most of the people who play thief are insanely bad and don’t carry escape skills (but my damages!!!!111!!one!1!). One stun/immob and they’ll be downed.

Contrary to the non-sense they post on the guardian forums about how easy it is to beat thieves, I have found guardians to be easy pickings for my thief, and when i play my guard I usually just rage quit.

Every inch of game design gives massive advantages to burst thieves.

Fortunately for me, my entire server has given up, and just become a giant zergball.

When someone calls out “thieves attacking camp” I just ignore them. The people that respond will trickle in, a few at a time, like lambs to the slaughter.

It’s better not to care. The devs sure don’t.

Ezeriel.9574:

It’s better not to care. The devs sure don’t.

^^

(and yeah, some random bs for the char count)

Play necro or cond engy and watch the dumb thieves melt and the smart thieves run from you 24/7.

Ezeriel.9574:

Contrary to the non-sense they post on the guardian forums about how easy it is to beat thieves, I have found guardians to be easy pickings for my thief, and when i play my guard I usually just rage quit.

Maybe you should try a new build? I generally pick apart guardians on my thief as well, but Ive never had much problems with thieves on my guardian, even Yishis ran from me. /pro

I mostly just spam laugh at them, specially D/P ‘pvping with training wheels’ thieves.

You don’t. Stealth in GW2 is a broken mechanic, unless you design your build around dealing with.

It’s just another reason to play ESO when it comes out.

oxide.8324:

Play necro or cond engy and watch the dumb thieves melt and the smart thieves run from you 24/7.

This. Fear spike works great as the thief can’t use their skills against you. In my zerg support builds, I just try to run into more people in hopes they can save me with sheer numbers.

CC thieves, then burst them down. If they have dagger mainhand and you see them stealth and you think they are coming at you, stand in some AOE.

easy…. stuns and aoe. a thief can only hurt you if you can’t make contact.

I zealots defense with my crit guardian on thieves trying to close the distance (ofc only for scaring them away). Works well until you run into that one thief with 25 stacks of blood lust with the highest tier consumables being used, poking at you with their short bow and disengaging when you so much as look at them.

I also just slap down a symbol of wrath and beyblade in it for part 2 of a d/p thieves combo (if you survived part 1). I’ve yet to see a D/P thief not run into it, but lots normally escape.

It’s the player personality really. I was once fighting a thief with my tanky mark necro. After going around for about 10 min, I use /e to tell him that we can’t kill each other and I have to go. (Because I have a thief too and I know the fight will take forever since his best burst can only down 1/3 of my hp…)

So I back away, but he won’t let go and chase me half map before I decide to logout and kill myself (I couldn’t get out of combat ‘cause he kept hitting me but really not much hp lost…). Some thief players has this sort of ego that they think they can kill everything (Maybe elite thief but not this guy), and end up being trolls wasting people’s time.

Use a knockback, run, and ignore. Rinse and repeat.

Those Guardians saying they can beat thieves easily have never played competent Larcenous Strike thieves.

Actually i have some great fraps i should upload of thieves being annoying, like 1 thief seriously followed us(2 Guardians taking camps) for 5-10 minutes hitting us then stealthing, dood just wouldnt let go.

Chorazin.4107:

Those Guardians saying they can beat thieves easily have never played competent Larcenous Strike thieves.

Actually i have some great fraps i should upload of thieves being annoying, like 1 thief seriously followed us(2 Guardians taking camps) for 5-10 minutes hitting us then stealthing, dood just wouldnt let go.

Persistent thieves like that are kind of annoying… fortunately, those are few and far between…

Make a tanky build and just run away to do your own thing.

It is not possible to kill thief 1v1. Either you die or the thief escapes only to return 30 seconds later.

The thief feels like he is winning – even if he is not killing you – if he manages to hold your attention by hit&run tactic. I tend to agree as he is keeping you from playing for your team.

oxide.8324:

Play necro or cond engy and watch the dumb thieves melt and the smart thieves run from you 24/7.

Except they dont.

Thieves have very good anti-condition. Hide in Shadows (basic heal) gives Stealth for 3seconds, Regeneration and removes burning, bleeding and poison. So you think you loaded him up with a ton of condition damage when he poofs of? Nope, theyre all gone.

And then there is Shadow’s Embrace, an adept level trait (so it takes 10points to get) which removes 1 conditions every 3sec while in Stealth. It triggers immediatly when the Thief enters stealth. So whenever he stealths, he loses 1 conditions. Combined with Hide in Shadows this lets the Thiefs basic heal remove as much as 4 conditions. And before the stealth ends, he will have removed a 5th.

So even if, as lets say an Engineer, you land a Blowtorch (cone AoE) on a Thief in stealth, and you get that fat burn on him. It will tick at most 3x, under ideal circumstances. It might just get removed before it even ticks once, passively. And thats the hardest hitting conditions you can muster.

So the idea that conditions counter Thieves is simply not true. Conditions dont work any better on Thieves then they do on other professions, infact they are worst since its much harder to apply conditions to something you cannot see and Thieves have excellent (passive) condition removal.

Immobilize is not nearly as great a condition against Thieves as people think. Because if they use a skill that stealths them or already are in stealth (unless they have a lot of different conditions on them already) it will cleanse Immobilize. Which is a condition afterall.
Meaning Thieves are also one of the harder professions to actually pin down with this condition. And then we havent even started mentioning the skills and abilities he has to get him out.

Thief’s aren’t OP in any sense… The most popular build people QQ about is d/p perma stealth. This should be the easiest to beat but some people just can’t seem to understand, if you see the black powder then stand behind it revealing them when they go for the 2nd heartseeker. When they are revealed use channeled skills which still deal damage visible or not. Last but not least just use stuns. Every class has access to stuns and they are very effective for taking out any class really. Also for thiefs and cond removal, its not that good and many thiefs don’t even use shadow arts as it is a terrible trait line for most builds, and even if they do use it just stack lots of conditions since they can only remove one every 3 seconds which just so happens to be the duration of most stealth skills

I play D/F ele and all what i have to do against perma stealth thief is to take 20-40% of their health and then have a good timing to interupt them while they are starting to cast heal or a stealth, then kill them, or make them run away, since i can’t really chase with a focus :s

Stealth is stupid on gw2. Usually in other mmorpg, when you hit someone in stealth, he’s isn’t anymore in stealth, same if he had a damage over time skill on him.
The problem seem to be the dev who are playing them …

You know something is wrong when “Just run away.” keeps popping up (which is frankly the worst thing you can try to do to a thief). GW2’s idea of stealth was a bad idea from the start but now it’s approaching a year and Anet can’t abort now. Well why is is bad? Because in a fight, positioning is very important and being able to move unseen throws a monkey wrench in all that, not to mention GW2 stealth has zero drawbacks and it can be frequently accessed by a class with extreme burst and mobility that’s why(but please, defend that if you must).

Should players build their characters just to counter thieves? No, to me that indicates a problem. And personally, I don’t find it fun that while in a small group fight having someone slam me with backstab and then spam 2,2,2,2,2,2 while your group is attacking players they can keep track of.

I found thief much more fair when they added 1 more sec on reveal. You had time to target them and had a good chance to hit them once before they got invi again.

Sometime I wonder what Anet think with some class and how they think they are equal/fair. Every ability should have a way to counter it. I don’t know maybe a skill that temporary allow some class to see/break invisible or chance to reveal when you hit thems.

Invi spiking is another exemple… Spiking/downed state players is somewhat a big part of the WvW gameplay we like it or not… But the fact that some class has access to an ability that nullify all way that some class have to defend again it make no sense to me…

compared to spvp in wvw thieves are way more powerful because of trolling stealth

- they get insane pve food buffs and imba ascended gear which kind of breaks all balance there
- stealth is extremely powerful against almost any class not only because they can just escape but also because very many important skills need targets so you can keep sustaining your health for example, in many cases they dont even need to do much damge just wear you out. good example would be waiting necro DS to reach <10% so they can’t use it anymore. or prevent mesmer doing their clone tricks, stop warrior gaining adrenaline etc. etc. or just pull kittening op polar bears on you.
- They can invi stomp/revive and even kittening resurrect their dead buddy while you cannot see them, really… i mean really really…

in spvp they cant do these things so much since there’s only 1 gear no insane foods etc., timer, cap points, less space to run and overall people are build to fight them better in general.

it’s not that they’re insanely op i do kill all bad thieves and sometimes even good ones, but thief in general seems to be easymode pvp. personally i hate most of invisibility in wvw in general too, invizerg 50vs1 anyone? 1 more sec reveal was a bit better now you can at least try something.

With my Guardian I usually come out victorious against thieves. I have taken out 3 thieves at once, although they were rather lousy thieves, with only a camp supervisor to assist me. Larcenous strike thieves are not that difficult as long as you know the timings on a thief’s stealth mechanisms and can recognize which form of stealth he is using at any given moment. Using GS and switching to Staff #1 is a great way to have enough AOE for those stealth moments.

On occasion, against an adept thief, I will just log out my Guardian and bring in my own thief. I have found that thieves that are built for stealth absolutely hate going up against another thief and they eventually give up and leave the area.

There is no reason why a competent Guardian should not be able to take out an equally skilled thief. It does get more difficult going up against an exceptionally skilled thief but it is still possible to come out ahead. I dare say with my Guardian I have killed more thieves then I have been killed by thieves.

Sword+Torch/Greatsword as guard. You have a lot of blinds. You have great conditions. You have reasonable burst. You can escape and engage at will.

There should be food that makes you see the semi-transparent shape of a stealthed player, so that you can target him. No other buffs just that. It means you would have to use special food just to get on semi-equal footing with the thief, and loose any other buffs you would get from normal food. All decent games offer counters to stealth, especially in PvP. Food seems the only way to implement it in GW2, since you can’t really add new skills, and blueprints are very hacky. An OP thief will kill you while you click on the blueprint.

Sure that would hit the thief, but only in WvW. You have to nerf classes based not on the average player, but on the top OP builds and players, and there thief is just over the top. Compare that to an engi where all the top damage dealing skills have to be ground targeted, and often miss because of that, while the thief can directly deal 5x more damage in 1 hit than my best shots, without having to worry about any thing, just press 22222.

Hi, guardian here.

I tend to win 1v1s vs thieves in about 6 out of 10 times, which means the run-of-the-mill stealth-and-hit varieties aren’t usually a problem with me.

I use a scepter/shield & hammer with a signet build (19k hp, 3.2k toughness, 3k attack w/ 15% dmg reduction). The trick is to make them pay to get near you, mainly by using scepter/shield and the Honor I trait (Aegis gives retaliation on removal).

Start by using scepter skill 2 (Smite – AOE) on yourself, so the thief will have to take damage when going in to hit. Smite ignores Blindness, so that’s the biggest thing in our favour.

Assuming you have aegis going into the fight, the thief’s first hit will be blocked and the subsequent ones will damage him 300+ per hit. Assuming your Smite gets half the hits in, you’ve dealt more than 5k damage to the thief already.

At this point, the thief will go into stealth to recover. You can spot which area he has gone into (they have telltale signs like smoke) – blast skill 4 (Shield of Judgement – cone blast), and that deals about 1k damage.

If they go into Shadow Refuge (big red circle on the ground), go into the middle of it and use skill 5 (Shield of Absorption), which pushes them out of stealth). I’ll then swap to my hammer and jump on them with Mighty Blow when they unstealth.

Most burst-y thieves should be down by now – if they aren’t, Smite has a 6s CD, so use it on yourself again and stand where he is. Use Skill 3 (Chains of Light) to force him to use a stun breaker.

If he attacks, pop “Stand Your Ground” for protection and more retaliation. At the end of it, pop Virtue of Courage for more aegis and retaliation, and of course, use Smite on yourself.

And if you find the attacks painful, use Renewed Focus to stay immune to the burst, then pop Virtue of Courage again, for even more aegis and retaliation.

The Shield skills should have cooled down, so try to blast them out of stealth once more.

By now, the thief is usually dead or running away. Don’t chase him – surviving an encounter with a thief is considered a win in anyone’s book.

Note: If your HP goes below half, use Signet of Resolve to heal or the Heartseeker is going to hurt.

Thieves always have the ability to escape before being killed. In general, what separates the good and bad thieves is that the bad ones will either wait too long before trying to escape or will escape, but will come back to the fight prematurely.

The funny thing is that Anet tries to nerf bunker builds as much as possible because they’re not fun to play against, but perma-stealth (which Anet clearly has no problem with) has exactly the same effect as a bunker build!

You can make thieves go away if you ball up in a zerg. Zergy zergy zergy zergy. Awesome!

Thief solution: I run with no less than 15 people at almost all times. We no fear thieves.

I don’t play my Guardian in PVP enough to be much help, but I don’t really have problems with them on my bursty Necro main. Drop Well of Darkness on myself when I see them stealth. When they appear, I burst the crap out of them while they’re blinded with Ax #2. If they keep their distance, I spam Life Blast at them for 6-7k per hit.

Once I start to kill them they can get away pretty easily, I don’t run too much that can pin a Thief down. But they rarely kill me, so that’s good enough for me. Let ’em run.

you don’t you either run to water or run to a tower and wait in there until he leaves or until you can make it to water.