@Hunter
For WvW, I run a 0/10/10/30/20 build, though in PvE I’ll run a more aggressive variant for more might-stacking (0/15/0/30/25). I have a hair over 1600 power base, and generally make a point of farming up Bloodlust stacks before I go out roaming, giving me around 1850 power. I enter a fight with a minimum of 4 might stacks, and within 5 seconds of entering combat I’ll have 12-15 (an amount I can sustain indefinitely), pushing me solidly above 2250 power. This lets me land Whirling Wrath for an easy 5k against a CC’d enemy, and Mighty Blow drops a nice crit of 3500 or so that’s much harder to avoid. Between the two (or sword/focus if I’m feeling particularly aggressive), I can land extremely painful burst damage. Sword/focus, in particular, can land a burst of 6-10k on unwary or CC’d opponents.
I have nearly 3k armor, high uptime on protection, and around 17k health, rendering direct damage from a single target fairly minimal. Sustain-wise, between VoR, regeneration, and dodgeroll healing, I end up with a bit under 490 healing/second average (reduced if I don’t dodgeroll every time I reach full endurance), not including my main heal, any heals applied by weapons, and VoR activation. Perma-retaliation means enemies have to think about hitting me, and rapid-hit skills pose nearly as much of a danger to the user as they do to me in many cases.
Fighting thieves, too, is as much a matter of practice and learning their tricks as anything. Most thief players rely on tricks available to the thief, rather than beating their opponent in a toe-to-toe fight. For every trick, though, there is a counter-trick or three available to the Guardian.
To list one: thieves love standing in blinding powder, which greatly reduces your DPS and makes landing direct hits with skills like Mighty Blow difficult or impossible to land. To counter, use Whirling Wrath, or drop target and use Mighty Blow in such a direction that you’ll land just outside the powder radius—Mighty Blow’s damage radius is slightly larger. Even better, follow this up with Ring of Warding: your opponent is now locked in a small area with you unless he burns an elite for stability or a shadowstep to escape. Or, just use Virtue of Justice and GS5 (without the pull), and step back out of range. If he shoots you with pistol mainhand, he’ll take as much damage from retaliation as he deals, plus he’ll have around 900-1000 damage/second ticking on him from burning and the chain DoT. If he has a dagger mainhand rather than pistol, stand back and laugh as he takes several thousand damage from the DoTs. If he uses heartseeker to leap out and stealth, yank his chain and Whirling Wrath to burst off enough health to make him reconsider approaching you (even if he’s in stealth), while using something with Aegis to counter the followup backstab if he does decide to continue the fight. If he’s using sword, he can try to teleport to you out of the blinding powder, but he’s just wasted initiative using blinding powder, has probably burned initiative using sword 2, and is now sitting next to you, out of stealth (a decidedly unhealthy place to be).
