Guild Wars 2

Does anyone have any suggestions on beating, or even just surviving, against a pistol whip thief? I can’t seem to stay ahead of them for long enough with the numerous gap closers they have, and I can’t burst them down due to the perma-evade (I play a shatter mesmer).

bump. Anyone? I am curious with this too.

Shatter mes is a really hard matchup against pistol whip. You sorta have to outplay instacast skills…which is really hard.

Normal infiltrator strikes —> pistol whip combos can be easily avoided with blurred frenzy, but the tough one is pistol whip + shadowstep or steal. Those are hard. You have to either bait out the steal earlier (and then keep a thought about the cooldown of it) or predict that opener and be ready to dodge it, as it’s an instant interrupt + damage.

Overall, it’s not a friendly matchup. Something to keep in mind is that you can interrupt pistol whip between the time of the stun and the hits with something like diversion. That can sometimes give you enough time to do a counterattack.

So this is pretty easy actually.

Most PW thieves have the Critical Haste trait, this means you want to avoid PW as much as possbile. Dodge it, block the stun, blind the stun, use other active defenses. What you want to do ideally is get critical haste to trigger from something other than Pistol Whip, then when you see Quickness on the thief create distance. After the quickness expires you have 28 seconds until the trait is off cooldown, which is plenty of time to down a thief.

Aside from dealing with the Critical Haste trait, you want to look out for PW wind-ups from range, because a thief can PW you still by teleporting.

If you do get hit by a non-quickness pistol whip, you can always immediately dodge out/walk out after the stun ends thereby reducing the damage by half.

The best positioning to use vs a PW thief as melee is max melee range, because it puts the thief in a position where they need to think hard about using their teleports to make pistol whip connect, because if they don’t they may miss a lot of damage or miss completely. PW is easy to side step at max melee range.

Sword thieves usually will build for evasion. That said you’ll want to keep up a constant stream of dps instead of a burst.

The burst openings you’ll want to look for are in both S/X 3 skills. For pistol whip it’s the wind-up, for S/D it’s Larcenous Strike which happens after flanking strike.

You’ll also want to keep track of when you’ve been immobilized and realize that means where the thief last was is where they can port back to. Keep this in mind and fight near that spot so they have one less skill to escape with.

Range dps is usually a low risk way of applying steady dps to a PW thief. Just be careful not to stay too far away otherwise they disengage fairly easily.

When you see basilisk venom be ready to evade/blind/block to kill the charge, because it will allow an entire PW to hit you.

If you keep all that in mind then the only way a PW thief will beat you is if they outplay you by evading your heavy damage and interrupting your heals w/ p4.