Guild Wars 2

So I have played Necro, Mesmer, Guardian, Thief, Warrior and Ranger in s/t pvp, with the most time going to necro, mesmer and ranger. Out of all I find Mesmer the best at dealing with glass cannon thieves to the point it is almost easy and laughable.

I use Taugrim’s Legion build with sword/pistol + GS.

This might be common knowledge but with how many complaints you see about PW or HS spamming thieves it seems like some still have trouble.

To start off, if you see a thief running towards you switch to your GS (you want GS first so you can get the #4 phantasam out and be in sword 2nd for #2 as you’ll see).

90% of thieves open with steal as a gap closer. So to counter this try to gauge steal distance and right before they get in range pop stealth to generate a clone and use GS4 to get your 1st phantasam out. If they are bad they will waste steal on your clone, if not, no biggie. While still stealthed get off GS2 for vuln and swap to sword/pistol immediately and pop #4 for your duelist.

At this point you are out of stealth and they are either beginning to attack or stealth’d to prep an attack. If they stay unstealth and beging to haste/spam pop pistol 5 to stun then blink away letting your phantasams to continue to dps. When they stealth just continue moving around and as soon as you start to take damage IMMEDIATELY hit sword 2 to blow them up and lol at your immunity. Dodge away, swap to GS, #4, for another big damage dump. At this point your stealth/blink are back up and it’s game over. As soon as wep swap CD is up switch back to sword/pistol and save your #2/#5 for a last ditch stealth assault if they have managed to survive that long.

With this general strategy I can destroy most thieves 1v1 without even the need to pop a heal. The glassier they are the easier the fight.

My problem with thieves is that I cannot see them to target them ever in wvwvw.. For the most part, Im assuming Im getting hit by range at first.. then after death, I check combat log and sure enough it was an invis thief ( due to culling Im sure)