Guild Wars 2

Okay so I LOVE me some WvW and all I hear on the threads in the WvW forums is thief rage… Imo mesmers can stealth like thieves (not for as long) Much higher burst damage if running a shatter build and we can stealth an entire zerg w/in a 1200 radius… But we get no rage? I love fighting thieves because yeah they can stealth but we stealth and drop a clone they fight the clone we annihilate them. I avoid zergs in WvW because I think that is a dumb way to play it. I have a lot of people that enjoy doing 5 man parties on specific tasks. But the main reason for this post. MESMERS how do you feel about fighting thieves in WvW? I think its fun and challenging and if I die. Then they did good. If I kill them. I did good.

Overall good thiefs given me some of the longest and most challangching fights in wvwvw on my roaming runs. I have the deepest respect both for good burst dmg and condition dmg thiefs.

Still as the class tend to draw alot of bad tiefs alot of them is just insta kills and dont offer alot of challange.

A wvwvw thief guide btw,

/Osicat

But you don’t have any huge complaints like OMG thieves are Op and need nerfed into oblivion right?

jportell.2197:

But you don’t have any huge complaints like OMG thieves are Op and need nerfed into oblivion right?

Hells, no. I dig Thief for the same reason I love my Mesmer – both are sneaky, tactical headscrew MASTERS. Both classes have the same problem, as well – a stereotyped build-spec that ends up gettin them bad press. For Mesmer, it’s shatter (which I don’t hate, I was heavy shatter for a while …). For Thief, it’s the instagib BS/mug/HS glassy build.

I’d say Thieves give me my best fights, tbh – we’re too busy trying to out-troll one another.

Also, we Mesmers get a FRACKLOAD of rage. Honestly, us/Thief/dual-dagger Ele are prolly at the top of most folks’ craplist.

Pretty much, no class is OP at the moment. If you have trouble with a class, it’s because you need to improve.

At least, that’s my thinking. I hear bad things about engies and I don’t see many anymore, so I guess they’re the loners that this doesn’t apply to, if what I hear is right.

Thieves can be problematic even for Mesmers because if you are for example set up to run with a zerg rather than roam you won’t necessarily have the utility equipped to deal with thieves (especially good ones) as efficiently (as Osicat beautifully demonstrates).

One mistake and they can kill you out of nowhere, mostly when caught off guard that they become a real issue (which is usually how thieves like to play). Running into a thief without the right utillity/build is no fun but it can be dealt with (Unless they do that one-shot kill out of nowhere routine).

The real problem isn’t just the seemingly endless stealth. It’s the ability to disengage a fight which is really annoying and it’s hard for mesmers to keep up with our lack of speed or for us to get away with short duration stealth (I have the same issue with warriors, they are easy to beat as a mesmer but when they start running… forget it).

That said despite running a power/heal mantra build at the moment the mantra of pain x3 makes for VERY nice burst damage and the ability to use heals, damage and condition removal while stunned is amazing.

I will have to try it versus thieves more often to see how viable it actually is to run a mantra build versus thieves or whether I just happen to have run into a couple of bad ones but I had some success going versus thieves with mantras. It’s very much about bursting down the thief before he can stealth and recover.

Thieves wont expect mantra builds on mesmers so the surprise helps.

Alright, I’m completely unqualified to respond since I don’t play either mesmer or thief, and I have only limited wvw experience. But I’m about to make wvw my focus in the game, and I’ve been reading up a little on the complaints about thieves.

I think there are at least two reasons why thieves get more rage than mesmers. The first is that thieves are perceived (rightly?) as being an “easymode” class, whereas mesmers are perceived (rightly?) as requiring a lot of skill to play well. It’s funny. I don’t think people mind getting owned in pvp if they think that the other player deserves the win, if they won based on superior skill. I think people hate thieves because they’re perceived as being too easy to play, a two-button class.

Second, there’s an interesting discussion going on over at Taugrim’s blog about the effects of movement speed on wvw pvp. (Here’s the link: http://taugrim.com/2012/12/19/character-movement-differentials-in-guild-wars-2-wvw/#comments) The gist of it is that the risk/reward calculations for thieves may be out of whack because they can run down other classes too easily and then outrun them if they’re losing. I think this contributes to rage against them, but not mesmers, in wvw pvp. If I get jumped by a mesmer in wvw, then they can’t back out (as easily) if they’re losing. If they win, they win. If they lose, they lose. But with thieves…. They can always run off if they’re losing. Conversely, if I don’t feel like sparring, I have a shot of outrunning a mesmer, but a thief can always chase me down. I don’t know if I think this is a big problem for wvw pvp, but I do think it contributes to the public perception of thieves as being an unfair (more annoying?) class for wvw pvp.

^ I don’t think it’ll work as well as planned due to invisibility. Most thieves pop in and out of stealth during their moments of “relaxation”.

I more often have spotted them first or saw them coming. At which point gg.

Rarely while in the middle of somthing do I get 2 shoted, most of the ones who do try to gank me always end up a bit more survivabillity in their builds, and that’s gg easy. :p

The only thing that bothers me is how they can just run. Male a B-line to the closest keep or tower and hide with denying your kill the moment the fight isn’t in their favor. (So their initial burst missed)

Sometimes you catch them but before the update they’d just alt -f4 when downed. I get their thiefs but that kind of cowardice is appalling. Esp when they start the fight!

Daishi.6027:

I more often have spotted them first or saw them coming. At which point gg.

Rarely while in the middle of somthing do I get 2 shoted, most of the ones who do try to gank me always end up a bit more survivabillity in their builds, and that’s gg easy. :p

The only thing that bothers me is how they can just run. Male a B-line to the closest keep or tower and hide with denying your kill the moment the fight isn’t in their favor. (So their initial burst missed)

Sometimes you catch them but before the update they’d just alt -f4 when downed. I get their thiefs but that kind of cowardice is appalling. Esp when they start the fight!

This is pretty much what I meant and the only problem I have with thieves is the ability to disengage and run for it denying you the kill when you have the upper hand. Really annoying. That or the ones that surprise you out of nowhere and kill you before you can react while distracted fighting someone else.

But yea as I said the mantra build I think it was probably just luck but still curious to find out how well it goes versus thieves, I think it was mostly the surprise of bursts of damage on the thief that they can’t negate that helped me win. We’ll see…

jportell.2197:

Imo mesmers can stealth like thieves (not for as long) Much higher burst damage if running a shatter build and we can stealth an entire zerg w/in a 1200 radius… But we get no rage?

We would have to make a super specific build/weapon/utility set to take advantage of stealth and even then its not really an ideal situation.
To get the benefit of speed and stealth you’d have to run something like S/T – S/F, which limits some of your off hand skills already. Most Mesmer stealths including the elite are so short you’d have to chain them with really specific timing to stay invisible, and a lot of them such as Mass invis and Veil give off major clues as to where you are, as does temporal curtain. A Thief can just go in and out without much need to worry about these sorts of things, other than that dome type stealth they use.
They can stealth and move around quickly with ease and be still in stealth when they have moved completely out of your range.
As a Mes, once you attack, your out of stealth, trying to get back in quickly cuts you off from your attacks again so your not gaining anything other than time to reposition yourself for a next attack or to regain health, at which point your opponent could have already fully healed.
Could work for sneaking up on people, cant see it being as effective as a normal shatter/phant build for actual fights.

Which is where the Thieves come into play, they have a style of play that makes it really easy to stealth around and sneak up and do massive amounts of damage and flee before you can react. It shouldn’t be so simple, it certainly wouldn’t be that simple for us.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some amazing Theifs around, I’ve witnessed videos where one Theif solo’d large groups by himself with P/D, he stealthed but he used his full range of skills which goes to show Thiefs can be more than one trick ponies. Its just most are the two button kind that couldn’t run another build if they had it handed to them on a plate.

The fact that more and more people roll Thieves now because they think they can be OP stealth ninjas makes it easier for us, theres way more skill-less Thiefs than there has ever been! Most of them ninja up on me and try to kill me and I can just stand there and lol at them as I mass spawn and shatter clones the moment they come out of Stealth.

There are 3 things wrong in the OP:
1) Mesmers don’t burst for higher than thieves normally. Right now there is a bug/exploit which causes MW to do more damage than it should but even then the damage is about the same as a mug->BS->CnD combo (possibly quicker, that depends on the reflexes (or if there is a macro involved)).
2) Mass invisibility only affects 5 people, not a zerg.
3) There have been a ton of calls for mesmer nerfs but after a dev posted that they will be nerfed (hopefully just the exploit) it’s calmed down a bit.

I have both a thief and a mesmer at lvl80, I’d say the thief has an easier time over all to fight people in WvW but mesmers bring more to the team. As a mesmer I find thieves quite easy to fight as long as I’m not caught unaware with the wrong skills slotted, as a thief I generally don’t go for mesmers in a power build since attacking a clone with e.g. CnD means wasted 6 initiative (cond builds are easier since Death Blossom takes out clones and gives bleeding to the real msmer)

I don’t think thief is that hard, just have to keep them at distance, knowing their moves, know when to dodge etc. When you know this, you can take almost any thief, and also I keep moving if I lose him/her out of sight. To lure them out, and so I can cast Chaos storm and then I can get him/her to fall back and I can then easily stun him/her, and then finish him/her off.

If you don’t feel safe you can run in a larger group, til you know the basis of a thief’s moves. Cause in a group you can get rezzed if downed, and shorter battles vs a thief.

“How do mesmers feel about thieves?”

FOTM re-rolling cowardly Heartseeker spamming free kills.

You’ll occasionally run into a good player, but most are very, very bad.

From all classes and builds, thieves give me the most trouble.

Even if they are bad players and thus unable to beat me, they can always escape from me.
At the same time, I cannot escape from them.

I often manage to escape from a whole zerg, but I cannot escape from a single thief who knows what he is doing. I’m not exaggerating here.

As a condition mesmer my only hope is to blow them up with confusion stacks. Works fine against stupid ones. Doesn’t work against smart ones.

Worst of all are the Death Blossom condition thieves. I created one myself to see how this works, and it made me cry when I compared it to my condition mesmer. All the thief has to do is to press Dagger/Dagger #3 Death Blossom three times in a row and that’s 9 bleedings on every target around. 9 bleedings is more than my mesmer usually manages to put on a single target, and that’s with a lot of work and rack up time. A thief dishes out way more condition damage than my mesmer can even dream of, and all he has to do is press “3, 3, 3”. On top of that, they are evading while using their #3 attack, and usually they dodge roll away and go into stealth after finishing. Please tell me how on earth do you attack them? I simply can’t.

I forgot to mention they can increase the bleed duration up to >20 seconds. Compare that to the 5 second bleedings from my staff clones or from Sharper Images. Lousy 5 seconds and nothing on earth can increase their duration.

To drive things into crazyness, a thief can use the Caltrops utility skill and stack up to 25 bleedings (AoE of course). Now that’s insane!

There is another thing I want to add to the list:
They are the hardest and most annoying class to stomp when downed, while at the same time you cannot counter their stealth stomps once you are downed.

Even without the stealth culling issues, thieves are not balanced. Not at all.

So long as I am not caught unaware, I find thieves generally easy to deal with. I actually find d/d elems more problematic.

@Snoxx: As I posted earlier, from playing both a mesmer and a (condition) thief at lvl 80 I’d say that a d/d cond. thief might very well be the most difficult class for a mesmer to fight. They’re not that great against some classes (e.g. eles or necros) but can put some serious hurt on mesmers. If you’ve got arcane thievery though, you can be nice and return that bleed (and poison quite often) stack to the thief and perhaps pick up a vigor from him Having Null field is also useful both for keeping bleeds of you and for keeping vigor (which lets cond thieves dodge to avoid damage as well as apply caltrops on dodge with a trait) off thieves.

DB can’t really be spammed that often though after the first chain. Normally I’d say a thief might open with either Infiltrator arrow to get close or a poison field from the longbow (if already close enough). Next is two Death Blossoms, followed by steal (often with mug) and a third DB. At this point the thief will most likely be out of initiative (alrhough be careful if he uses Roll for initiative (a backwards roll) since that means he gets a bit of init back).

@Rainu:
I know you can’t spam Death Blossom because you run out of initiative. I also know Null Field helps. But hey, the good thieves just reset the fight and try again if I don’t die on the first try. Next try is probably without Caltrops and without Null Field because of cooldowns. Well, the thief doesn’t need Caltrops (it’s just the icing on the cake) but without Null Field ready my chances are close to zero.

Arcane Thievery might work, thanks for the idea. But I have an important question: Does it work vs evading targets? Can they evade my Arcane Thievery?

btw, the also feared D/D Elementalists are just “annoying” for my condition bunker build. They have great mobility and survivability, but they do WAY LESS damage than any thief out there. D/D Eles simply fail to kill me due to lack of damage. They try it for a while until they realize it’s a pointless waste of time and zoom away.

I actually don’t know if Arcane thievery can be evaded. I’d guess so if it’s used mid DB or dodge but can’t say I’ve checked.

For d/d bunker eles (have a lvl80 of them too :p): As you said, they usually do so little damage that the can be ignored. As a condition build your direct damage will kost likely be too low to outdamage their healing and they have condition removals coming out the nose (all utility skills remove conditions with the most common bunker build and they remove conds by switching to water 9s CD and have 1 or 2 additional removals while in water). If you really want to kill one I’d probably recommend using some low priority conditions and focusing on having enough to force him into water. As soon as he leaves water you’ve got 9 second to try to take him down as much as possible before he’s got access to his more annoying heals again, remember that bleeds will still tick even if he turns into mist but you will need more than one type on him since turning into mist removes one condition stack. Generally though, I’d recommend not fighting them alone using conditions since a bunker ele that knows what he’s doing will almost always keep some condition removal available.

Decoy + Mirror Image + Mind Wrack

Pew, pew..

^and the thief thought he was killing you hahah. Shatter builds with A COUPLE stealth skills and thief is dead… 1v1. I have gotten owned by thieves that ganked me while I was soloing a supply camp. But all my skills were in cool down and i think my health wasnt full. But seriously thieves have 12,000 HP… THEY need the stealth to even hold a candle to any class. Just the other thing that is out of our hands.

they are less annoying than trying to reply to a thread in these forums… am i the only one thats perpetually kicked back to the general forum page when trying to post? rolls eyes

aaaaaaaaanyways

i only dislike fighting them because they eventually just run away
with my build it takes me awhile to kill people, but i last a good while.. but if a thief doesnt kill u or die right off, they take off… or so /ive/ found

i like to focuswall run at them, get to where i think theyll make a move, hit decoy, blink behind them, mirror images, rush them from behind

its funny.

We better be careful. Pretty soon people are going to be calling for us to get nerfed. Shhhh… I wish people would just like the game with the class they enjoy the most.

Gubrz.7283:

i like to focuswall run at them, get to where i think theyll make a move, hit decoy, blink behind them, mirror images, rush them from behind

its funny.

I think using blink 1st before decoy + mirror image + mind wrack is better. Using decoy 1st makes your 1 clone far behind and by chance not get your target. But if thats works for you well. its good.

I’d guess Decoy is for the stealth so the thief won’t do a dodge or evade. The leap/swap with sword2 after blink should also work if the thief hasn’t got something to remove the immobilize (and you will be summoning the mirror images point blank for an instant burst with MW preferrably while you’re using Blurred Frenzy)

Xuthus.8103:

Gubrz.7283:

i like to focuswall run at them, get to where i think theyll make a move, hit decoy, blink behind them, mirror images, rush them from behind

its funny.

I think using blink 1st before decoy + mirror image + mind wrack is better. Using decoy 1st makes your 1 clone far behind and by chance not get your target. But if thats works for you well. its good.

i like it cause they waste their initiative on him while me and my 2 buddies rush him from the rear!

oh, im also not super shatter man, im more survive a long while irritating people until backup arrives or they get annoyed and leave… lol

if i were shattery, then id pref your ideas X/R

Okay so is it safe to say that mesmers arent busy blowing up the WvW forum kittening about thieves?

jportell.2197:

Okay so is it safe to say that mesmers arent busy blowing up the WvW forum kittening about thieves?

no more than anyone else who hates their silliness

the BUGS is what has me annoyed.. an easily powerful class gets turned into TOO powerful

oh, i also hate their aoe stealth vs ours

id trade them any day…

anyone who tries to make the mesmer one sound better is just blinded by the fact its an “elite” rolls eyes

oh, and their run buff

im sure theres 3 other things, but im sure you can just guess what they are, so when i eventually think of them, i wont edit and drive u nuts…

Gubrz.7283:

jportell.2197:

Okay so is it safe to say that mesmers arent busy blowing up the WvW forum kittening about thieves?

no more than anyone else who hates their silliness

the BUGS is what has me annoyed.. an easily powerful class gets turned into TOO powerful

oh, i also hate their aoe stealth vs ours

id trade them any day…

anyone who tries to make the mesmer one sound better is just blinded by the fact its an “elite” rolls eyes

oh, and their run buff

im sure theres 3 other things, but im sure you can just guess what they are, so when i eventually think of them, i wont edit and drive u nuts…

No please I am enjoying the feed back. this is more constructive than the WvW thief rage. But I am glad to see that us as a class feel we can deal with the “thief” problem effectively.

1v1 easy np (i sound like bragging….. and i hate people that brag) but if i’m busy on a nec and thief comes and spam his crap on me that’s a problem. Phase Retreat is awesome on thiefs, my fav staff skill lately lol.

The only thing I dislike about thieves in WvW (besides the stealth-culling issue) is how easy they can run away from mesmers. I’ve only died on my mesmer to a thief in a 1v1 once in WvW but there have been countless times when they have managed to escape so I couldn’t kill them. If there were more d/d condition thieves we might have a bit more problem (Death blossom both evades and kills clones) but luckily most seem to be the fotm BS build

uh, thieves… did u know that there are thieves describing their profession as utterly underpowered?

Personally I have been backstabed to death by thieves quite a lot. First I didn’t know that build, then I lacked the reaction time to use one of my 3 stun breakers Now they get me mostly, when I have wasted my utilities on smth or somebody else.

They are not OP, they are not UP. They are fine, from my perspective. I tried to rebuild the feared BS glass cannon thieve build in the heart of the mists. It worked, but it’s boring to me…

I think it should be possible for thieves to deal with an unprepared foe in seconds and I think it should be possible to counter this. And it is. So it’s mostly fine. And that they disengage a fight easily is not that much of a concern to me, for it is not my goal in WvW to win 1v1s against thieves. I want to get camps, towers and keeps. I want to take them and I want to hold them. Let them run, those cowards. They’ll come back and run again :P

Easy mode. It’s not till recently have been having a little bit of trouble with bunker sword guardians

Fay.2735:

Daishi.6027:

I more often have spotted them first or saw them coming. At which point gg.

Rarely while in the middle of somthing do I get 2 shoted, most of the ones who do try to gank me always end up a bit more survivabillity in their builds, and that’s gg easy. :p

The only thing that bothers me is how they can just run. Male a B-line to the closest keep or tower and hide with denying your kill the moment the fight isn’t in their favor. (So their initial burst missed)

Sometimes you catch them but before the update they’d just alt -f4 when downed. I get their thiefs but that kind of cowardice is appalling. Esp when they start the fight!

This is pretty much what I meant and the only problem I have with thieves is the ability to disengage and run for it denying you the kill when you have the upper hand. Really annoying. That or the ones that surprise you out of nowhere and kill you before you can react while distracted fighting someone else.

Ironically, that’s how I play in sPvP on my Mesmer. Decoy is a great stunbreaker for PvP.

Rainu.6871:

There are 3 things wrong in the OP:
1) Mesmers don’t burst for higher than thieves normally. Right now there is a bug/exploit which causes MW to do more damage than it should but even then the damage is about the same as a mug->BS->CnD combo (possibly quicker, that depends on the reflexes (or if there is a macro involved)).
2) Mass invisibility only affects 5 people, not a zerg.
3) There have been a ton of calls for mesmer nerfs but after a dev posted that they will be nerfed (hopefully just the exploit) it’s calmed down a bit.

I have both a thief and a mesmer at lvl80, I’d say the thief has an easier time over all to fight people in WvW but mesmers bring more to the team. As a mesmer I find thieves quite easy to fight as long as I’m not caught unaware with the wrong skills slotted, as a thief I generally don’t go for mesmers in a power build since attacking a clone with e.g. CnD means wasted 6 initiative (cond builds are easier since Death Blossom takes out clones and gives bleeding to the real msmer)

On point 3, which bug/exploit? Are you referring to the Shattered Strength trait? I’ve always had extremely high burst when shattering all 4 (myself included)…haven’t noticed anything much higher than normal. In fact, most opponents are dead before I can really make full use of that trait.

Yea what is bugged with mind wrack? I haven’t noticed anything significantly different yet.

The might stacking was not meant to make it to public release apparently, though after a mind wrack thieves tend to kill what’s left of them selves on confusion anyway. Mesmers used to be the one class thieves feared.

Leo Paul.1659:

Yea what is bugged with mind wrack? I haven’t noticed anything significantly different yet.

Apparently if you press f3 with 3 illusions up (and possibly other shatters) and then generate 3 more clones and press f1 before the first 3 make it to their Target and shatter, MW calculates all 6 illusions into its damage. Huge bursts aRe generated. Haven’t tested this myself, but I’ve seen the screenshots.

Biggest issue: Fights are way too short, either they burst you in 1 sec or you burst them in 2.

Miku Lawrence.6329:

Biggest issue: Fights are way too short, either they burst you in 1 sec or you burst them in 2.

Or they turn tail and run for 20.