Guild Wars 2

Today, for the first time I dueled a Pistol/Dagger thief. The fight lasted for 5+ minutes and ended in a stalemate. It was so hard for each of us to get the other down because I had my constant heals and he had his constant stealths. I tried spamming aoe but he wasnt glass cannon making aoe spam quite ineffective. I tried keeping my distance to avoid his cloak and dagger, but that made it easy for him to kite me.

Im not a pro but I say I am pretty decent at pvp and I generally have no problem winning duels against other classes. Any advice?

You can’t really “beat” a competent thief with offhand dagger if they don’t want to be defeated.

Luckily they can’t contest points while stealthed so in the end they aren’t really accomplishing anything other than being annoying if they can’t kill you.

Speaking honestly you cant really beat it per se. This build vs DD ele should actually end in a tie. Most of the dps from that build comes from sneak attack bleeds and depending on how much stealth he has it will be near impossible to properly CC him. Your best shot is to cc him with magnetic grasp and go wild. Dots wont do much half those builds have remove dot in stealth and heal in stealth.

I once dueled another thief using P/D and he sent me a tell after I won asking how I did it and I explained and he told me, “Wow that’s so annoying.”

The best advice I have is close the gap and unload on him. Most of those builds lack toughness but have a ton of hp so your big hits will still hit big. All thieves don’t have to commit. That’s the beauty and pain of the class like ourselves and mesmer they can just run. In a thief case you just don’t know the direction.

The trick to beating a P/D thief is avoiding the cloak and dagger. If they can’t spam stealth, they mostly just end up hitting you with a basic pistol attack which isn’t much of a threat.

With something like a D/D thief, it’s hard to avoid because they’re in melee the entire time so you don’t know when it’s coming. A P/D thief on the other hand tries to stay at range to avoid your damage, so the only time they get close to you is to use cloak and dagger. So when you see a p/d thief trying to get into melee range, don’t let them because they’re trying to land the CnD. CnD uses a huge amount of their initiative, so they can’t spam it. If you dodge it 1-2 times, they are vulnerable and have no initiative to use non-stealth attacks. Because a P/D has virtually no burst without stealth, it is OK for you to save your endurance for dodge rolling the CnD.

Obviously it’s difficult staying out of melee range as a D/D ele as that’s exactly where you usually want to be, but it can be done. The range of your spells is short, but still bigger than melee range. For instance, when you use burning speed to close the gap, don’t sit there running through your combo. Immediately do a dodge roll (or just back away if they don’t seem that fast) and then use drake’s breath. The idea is to stay on top of them, but just barely out of reach. This is especially important as the 3 skill for a P/D thief allows them to shadowstep away from you, so you will virtually never land your perfect combo anyway, meaning you aren’t missing out on potential dps.

It won’t go perfectly against a decent thief. You will almost certainly have a long fight where the thief lands at least a couple CnDs, but as long as you focus on avoiding them, you will have a very good chance.

autoduck.2837:

Today, for the first time I dueled a Pistol/Dagger thief. The fight lasted for 5+ minutes and ended in a stalemate. It was so hard for each of us to get the other down because I had my constant heals and he had his constant stealths. I tried spamming aoe but he wasnt glass cannon making aoe spam quite ineffective. I tried keeping my distance to avoid his cloak and dagger, but that made it easy for him to kite me.

Im not a pro but I say I am pretty decent at pvp and I generally have no problem winning duels against other classes. Any advice?

If this happened in WvW, just RTL out and just leave. It is a waste of time because in the long run, you will lose. There is absolutely nothing you can do vs a good p/d thief. You can’t keep your distance because he will continue to pew pew you. You can’t go into melee range because he will just CnD you. You’re basically kittened. (I lied, if you’re super glass cannon and get the jump on him/her first, then maybe….)

While a Secpter/Focus or even Secpter/Dagger works very well agaisnt p/d thieves, you’re kittened because you cannot weapon swap. Inherent limitation of our class mechanic.

Most fights against P/D just ends up in a draw, bow to each other and walk away. Dueled some recently during a guild event, first fight was about 6 minues until the map reset, last fight we were going at it for more than ten minutes until the map reset as well. We just lol’d in guild channel and called it a tie.

Vs good players of any class you fight to a draw. That is my personal experience.

First post on forums for me… Yay!

I play as a recently converted P/D thief. I also have a very hard time killing good D/D ele’s. I haven’t got full exotic yet but I ran into one of you guys playing on ferguson’s crossing yesterday and man she came close to killing me twice. I ended up having to drag her into the keep npc’s to kill her… She was probably really ticked off at that, but it was her fault for following me.

I was actually gonna post in here asking how I can kill you guys lol.

Sifu.6527:

autoduck.2837:

Today, for the first time I dueled a Pistol/Dagger thief. The fight lasted for 5+ minutes and ended in a stalemate. It was so hard for each of us to get the other down because I had my constant heals and he had his constant stealths. I tried spamming aoe but he wasnt glass cannon making aoe spam quite ineffective. I tried keeping my distance to avoid his cloak and dagger, but that made it easy for him to kite me.

Im not a pro but I say I am pretty decent at pvp and I generally have no problem winning duels against other classes. Any advice?

If this happened in WvW, just RTL out and just leave. It is a waste of time because in the long run, you will lose. There is absolutely nothing you can do vs a good p/d thief. You can’t keep your distance because he will continue to pew pew you. You can’t go into melee range because he will just CnD you. You’re basically kittened. (I lied, if you’re super glass cannon and get the jump on him/her first, then maybe….)

While a Secpter/Focus or even Secpter/Dagger works very well agaisnt p/d thieves, you’re kittened because you cannot weapon swap. Inherent limitation of our class mechanic.

Hence why ele needs weapon swap

That would make eles op for 40 obvious reasons.

So ele are already OP because they have 20 skills where other classes only have 10?
Or maybe the number of skills isn’t what makes something OP.

You should have a look into the different options an ele has. If I were referring solely to the number of skills I would’ve left out the obvious.
Weapon Swap would give eles access to massive CC, blind, heal, combo field+finishers, invuln and trait procs. This is what I mean by obvious.