Guild Wars 2

Yes, this is kinda embarrassing. I mean, whenever I am experimenting with new classes and/or new builds, I go and fight the trainings NPC’s and stuff in the mists. And usually I find out how to beat them pretty fast… in some exceptions, it takes a few tries more. But even if I lose first, I bring them down quite a bit. Until today.

So I was trying with my D/D-Ele. When I got to the Thief NPC, I felt quite helpless. This lady (female NPC) just stands in the Black Powder field, shoots at me, spams Unload, shoots at me, spams Unload… and if not, then a Dagger Storm is incoming, either from inside Black Powder, or from inside Shadow Refugee. For some reason, all those projectiles really hurt, I can’t dodge them all and I also barely can scratch her due to that blind-field and all the pressure on me. I also can’t get her out of that field reliably, and I can’t outheal the damage I get. All I can do is trying to survive for a while.

Now I do know that those NPC’s are far more powerful than normal players to make up for the lack of a brain (just look at the ridiculous strength of their downed 1 skill for example… or the ability to stomp a nearby player while being downed themself)… but, seriously? Is the “I’m just an NPC-buff” in this particular case just bad luck if you’re a D/D-ele or was it more my lack of experience with it? If it’s the latter one… how do you counter that?

I frequently kill the thief at 95-100% hp full, and haven’t an issue fighting two or three npcs at once as D/D.

I can’t tell you what you’re not doing as I don’t exactly know. It might be that you don’t know how to fight the mechanisms she employs or perhaps your familiarity with the class isn’t all too great yet.

I only am writing to tell you it is possible, just keep at it.

Hm okay, I’ll just have to try again I guess. Of course I could try to attack her from range with the FGS, but I feel like using an elite to beat a simple NPC would be like cheating.

That being said, I don’t really know yet how I can do this, being limited to close-combat. I hardly have enough range to attack her while being outside of the blind-field, and the closer I am, the faster my HP drops because her aim with that almost constant Unload is quite good.

But yeah; I’ll keep trying, now that I know it has to be possible somehow. Maybe it was also because it was late already, who knows. I’ll see. ^^

Edit: Thanks for the reply.

No problem.

Combat some of her moves. These double in duels with real thieves. Knock her out of blinding powder with air 5. Weaken them so they don’t do too much damage. No reason to stay in close range during dagger storm.

You can dodge 50%+ of an unload if you begin your dodge no less than 1 hit into it.

One beautiful thing about our skills even in melee range; they all have a longer range than any other class melee wise.

So abuse lightning whip, and that blinding powder won’t hinder you too much.

Hm yeah, I managed to kill her multiple times today. Must really have been because I already was tired. Still, I need to pay much more attention to everything than with other classes. Who knows; maybe playing Ele will improve my almost non-existent multitasking-skills.

I’m still wondering if I should use Ele for PvE-only or if I should also bring it to WvW sometimes. Thing is, I don’t really want to have to get two different sets of equipment, but this would be kinda mandatory if I want to play both, I guess. Well, I’ll see.