Guild Wars 2

Hello fellow mesmers,

this is not a whine-thread, I’m just looking for some usefull advice for fighting thiefs in tPvP 1vs1 or 1vs2. I’m running a classic shatter spec with 20/20/0/0/30 and generally have no problems fighting anything – only thiefs give me a hard time. And I don’t mean the long invis or blind, my problem is the constantly out-of-my-sight-jumping and teleporting that I loose my aim, have to turn around, choose him or her again and start attacking. This re-arranging costs precious seconds in which the thief has the advantage and can destroy me.

Any usefull advices how I can solve that problem? How are you dealing with “I’m-here-now-I’m-there”-thiefs?

Thanks in advance.

Shatter vs theirs is a bit tricky to begin with but disregarding that..

My general rule tends to be keep your distance whenever possible. The furthest a their can attack is about 900 to 1000 minus a steal to get close. At the initial burst do your best to negate it and save things like phase retreat or blink for later in the fight. With high mobility theirs they will often resort to hit and run tactics so if you can force them to dash out do your best to maintain pressure.

As far as losing targeting goes there isn’t a lot that can be done but you can also abuse the same tactic to avoid a burst or get off a heal. Tho keeping distance tends to prevent the their from being able to get behind you or out of your sight.. Minus a stealth sheep.

Vash (Vashury/Vash Bash, or something) has some videos with clips of them fighting thieves.

Meta thief vs Mesmer is a very tough matchup from the start, as thief can have nice protection uptime from “Consume Plasma”, lyssa proc, and boonstrip, as mesmers have natural access to protection.

Try to interrupt their stealthing. GS 5, staff 5, sword 3→f3 are all good ways to get semi-reliable interrupts on their attempts at stealthing, be it from Hide In Shadows, BP + HS, and GS 5 also works vs Shadow Refuge.

Naturally, its hard to completely shutdown their ability to stealth/restealth, on a basic shatter spec, so you have to be good with negating their main damage (backstab).

When they successfully stealth at 50-75%+ health, they’ll likely attempt a backstab quickly, so counting to 3 and then using blurred frenzy (you should definitely be using this as a mainly defensive tool verses thieves) or distortion to evade/invuln their backstab damage.

If they stealth at low health, they may try and regen/heal up for a bit and play defensively instead, which forces you to do the same since they can outstealth you.

Practice.

Spvp is a great place to fight a thief friend over and over again. When fighting in practice to learn go for quantity. Just keep dueling your friend over and over again even if you’re losing. Eventually things will “click”

You must break many eggs to make a good omelette. Failure is just the path towards success.

I can’t comment on tpvp because I don’t play it, so can only comment purely from a fighting perspective.

Is it targeting then that you’re struggling with? Even with the stealth, autotarget (and promote target) locks back onto them instantly on reappearing. If more than one enemy, it’s simply a case of hitting next target to switch to the other one (unless mesmer).

I do use combat mode – with a lot of settings both there and in game modified to allow it to function well with normal targeting and camera panning, which allows me the luxury of easily flicking around the camera so players trying to constantly go behind me and be sneaky will have a hard time. Just for the record this is not an “unfair advantage” given there are also disadvantages for using it (about face doesn’t work, have to constantly toggle on and off to ground target skills, freelook is much more awkward to use, and so on).

Trying to beat them at their own game (stealth and mobility) is most likely going to fail. Thieves have far better and more reliable access to stealth than mesmers, even if they choose to focus on other traits. Assuming you survive the initial burst more or less intact, I think the best strategy is to be highly agressive whenever they stealth. Even if the backstab does not connect properly (i.e. hit you in the back) it still does a lot of damage (and stabby thieves usually have 100% crit chance from stealth trait) so you want to force them out of stealth before they get a a chance to hit you. If they make a stealth field, toss some sort of annoying field on top of it (boon strip might be good to negate stealth healing?)

Mesmer also has pretty decent access to block, protection and aegis to deal with stealth thieves but the main problem is that a lot of the trait/skills that grant these boons cycle between them randomly, so it’s hard to use them reliably.