Guild Wars 2

I posted in the thief forum to focus on their input as well but how about from my fellow engis!!

I am sitting at still never having been able to beat a Condi Mes or Condi Thief in a 1v1!!

The stealth (especially the thief) is so hard to counter. I played my own condi thief for a past couple days to get an idea of its weaknesses. Build was Koroshi’s Immortal thief build. Dire Gear with HP regen, Init regen, Condi cleanse with 50% increase in movement. Basically I could out cleanse and out apply conditions on anyone. I only died once in a 1v1 and that was to a Stealth->Back Stab thief. I had a little trouble hear and there with heavy Condi Cleansing builds but could always disengage and get away. Otherwise, with the Dire Thief you just totally smoke people while jumping around twiddling your thumbs in stealth while they slowly die a painful death. Its a nice build but holy kitten How do you beat it on an engi? Full Melandru Runes/Lemongrass combo?

What are your strategies to beating this Super Powerful Dire Beast?

Only option is to prevent the cnd with well timed blinds, dodges and knock backs. This is hard in wvw if they stealth off of animals, walls ect.
Also, most only run two gap closers so they can be kited, leaving them the only option of spamming 1.

Turret build are quite good counter. You can move much far awy but also they cant come close so..:-)

You can’t kite a smart one, they’ll just immob you with pistol 2. As for turrets, a free CnD is a bad thing.

Use your reflect from shield 4. A thief only is revealed on attack when they deal direct damage. That means you can bait them into CnDing off of you, wait a second for them to get a tick of shadow rejuv off as most do, then pop 4 and let them stack 6 bleeds on themselves. A reflect counts the damage as yours and scales with your prec/crit damage/condi damage, and the projectile is meaty so it’ll cover up their second attempt to unload on you and they’ll normally dodge after stacking 9 bleeds on themselves. Use this wisely, mid fight, to help finish them. I find dire thieves to be pretty easy by this point, personally. Good luck.