Guild Wars 2

any tips on fighting agaisnt thiefs?

I hear they underpowered after nerf, but I still get 3 shotted. I dont know how to deal with them in WvW.

you must be very glassy if you are getting 3 shotted, Try getting some toughness into your gear.

Even with high toughness, most thieves are glassy and with backstab they will still hit hard. Every thief builds on stealth, so you’re going to want some AOE to deal with that. Grenades and bombs work really well. Bombs more so because the glue bomb + pistol glue shot will keep them in one place long enough to remind them why you don’t mess with a guy strapped with explosives

Timing is everything though. Cloak and dagger is their bread and butter. If they hit you and stealth, start timing. You will be attacked within the next 2 – 3 seconds and most likely they will try to get behind you, so anticipate that (ie: dodge backwards, not forwards or sideways). Just before you do that, put down your glue to immobilize them and then burst them as best you can.

If your build doesn’t have AOE, then I think you’re in for one hell of a time. You’re going to need to rely on your dodges and hope he makes enough mistakes for you to take him out.

Drop supply crate on them. GG

Stock up on a Boon Build and/or Vitality with Precision & plenty of CCs-usually, I can get opened up on by a Thief, brought down to 30% HP and still win depending on if they play it way too much and are God-Like at it, or if they’re just good ;D

Or just use a Toughness build, they usually work ;3

I’ve noticed that Thieves hate dealing with Turrets, of all things.

Also, if you get three-shotted by them (and it is entirely possible, they might just be spamming Heartseeker), try taking the AED – they appear, use it, and they’ll either back off to time it out, or they’ll burst you down anyway and be low on Initiative.

They are going to get the opening that’s just how it goes. After that it comes down to blocking or blinding the Cloak and Dagger that you KNOW is coming. Gearshield it or use the shield 5 skill either works great, if you can stop the cloak and dagger you will beat 95% of thieves, its all about anticipating it, because they need to land it effectively to keep stealth up. If your running shield offhand try and anticipate their heal and use the sheild throw to block it, if they use shadow refuge double tap shield 4 to knock them out. I find pistol shield just rocks for taking on thieves as it really disrupts some of their main abilities. Goodluck

P.s if you see them coming off in the distance and they use basilisk venom, go ahead and throw up gear shield as most will use steal to close on you and then set you up for a steal/ cloak and dagger backstab combo, gearshield or dodge the inital steal and it messes up their whole momentum.

zaragoz.6351:

They are going to get the opening that’s just how it goes.

Not necessarily! Thief goes stealth to open, you can blast your smoke field a few times for a longer stealth. Then open on THEM from stealth. That…usually surprises them, heheh.

Occasionally, they’ll shadow refuge on you because they don’t know how to react to the fact that you’re still in stealth while they’re not. When that happens, dump some bombs or grenades into the SR and then shield 4 them out if you have it.

But that’s for somewhat scripted scenarios like set duels. I’ll assume you’re talking about WvW and dagger/x builds since you’re getting burst hard—for average engineer builds, the best strategy is to keep cc on them (rifle builds do well with this) or to bait them into getting behind you so you can land a lot of bombs/nades (condition builds do well with this). Turrets are good vs. thieves as well.

Slick shoes. Ultimate win. Thieves love to attack from behind so dropping an aoe knockdown behind you ruins them.

One other trick I’ve been using vs thieves that has been quite helpful, they almost always try to get behind you and hit you, so what I do when I am using rifle is use rifle 5 and target behind me while I’m running forward. When the timing is right you’ll hit them when you leap, hit them when you land, and you’ll be standing in back of them, instead of them standing in back of you.

Be better than them.

Trick is to use lots of knockbacks aoe and conditions. A trick I use is to drop big ole bomb and stand on it so the thief doesn’t see it and then drop glue bomb. So when they get close they get immobilized then knocked back. I then use rifle 5 to jump and land on them and follow with rifle 3 then rifle 4 to knock em back again. They should be pretty low by now drop a supply crate on em and use rifle 2 to immobilize them again after your supply crate net turret ends.

Beating them is easy, killing them is the hard part. Which is part of the reason I now run Flamethrower. Air Blast their shadow refuge and you’re left with a low health headless chicken that can’t re-stealth itself again for 3 seconds.

Condition + toughness sPvP builds work well against thiefs. Stunbreaker, vigor are also your friends.

I use a 3 kit build based on power with toolkit, bombs and elixir gun. Thief are weak on condition so when i disappear i drop bomb 5 ,3 , or 2 around me and keep moving and when disappear i use elixir gun for putting condi on them . Using then shield and toolkit 4 it is difficult but u can block backstab if luck. I play in mists but i suppose the same things works even in wvw. It is not simple but it can works

You net shot, big O’ bomb, jump shot, glue bomb then bombombombombombombomb and when you get good you can do that to 5 thieves at a time since they like to travel in packs now and all get in one nice little red ring of stealthed corpses!

Pretty much same thing you do to the stupid NPC skelks…

The biggest reason most people tend to lose about thieves is usually because they just don’t understand the mechanics. One of the major people make when fighting thieves is to forget that they can still dps the thief while stealthed. If I had a dollar for every time I used Shadow’s Refuge and watched enemies just walk around, not knowing what to do, I’d be a rich man.

Here are some general tips that should help you out:

- If you use the tool kit, save your block for after a thief stealths to prevent backstabs.
– Save your big burst abilities to use after you drop your supply crate. Having your weapon skills off cooldown on your bomb kit will allow you to get a lot of damage in.
– Save your shield knock back for when a thief uses Shadow’s Refuge. If a thief leaves SR before the edges disappear, they will be de-stealthed and hit with the revealed debuff. If you don’t get the knock back, just continually drop AoE in the area to keep up pressure.
– When the thief gets into the downed state, don’t bother trying to stomp since they will port and then stealth. Instead, keep up dps pressure and keep poison up. Blinds will also prevent them from hitting an enemy and potentially rallying.
– Big AoEs are best when you can get a snare on the thief first. Thieves are very mobile, so you’ll rarely catch them with something like a Big ‘ol Bomb unless they’re immobilized or stunned.

additional to the above mentioned, overcharged shot into the middle of SR works great, the chances to actually kick them out are low, but if it works, they de-stealth immediately and you can cc / nade them to death.
also toolkit pull and flamethrower push work wonders