Guild Wars 2

So my lvl 80 necro went to WvWvW and got slaughtered by a thief… again and again and again.. she was cutting me off from getting to garrison and wow was it completely hopeless…

So I wrote it down the last fight, and this is what my combat log showed

5941 steal
1091 double strike
1091 double strike
3936 heartseeker
6606 heartseeker
8655 heartseeker
- 91 life leech – that’s from my bleed, she stepped on my Mark of Blood
1008 double strike
3204 wild strike
3027 lotus strike

and that’s it, I’m dead….. the whole fight lasted less than two seconds from the first hit to the last hit… i couldn’t move the whole time but it’s not like I could have done anything.

again and again and again…. and I logged off…

exploit? hack? do they call this balance?

I have absolutely no idea, but this is BS

Although I do feel as though there’s a large disparity between classes, I feel like you didn’t take advantage of any necromancer utilities to counter your opponent.

Well of Darkness, Death Shroud + fear, Staff + fear, Spectral Armor, pet knockdown, offhand dagger blind, pet blind, pet sacrifice teleport, any variety of chills (for whatever good they may do), and dagger immobilize to name a few.

If you’re still struggling, perhaps try a tankier build until you become more accustom to the necromancer tools.

This isn’t even that bad as far as thieves go. A backstab build will do that damage in 2 attacks right out of stealth and you’ll have no chance for recourse.

That class is ridiculously overbalanced. Look at their traits if you want to cry.

I have 20 points in the +toughness….
15 in the +vitality one….

I laid down my marks, she rolled over them and was on me in an instant… and then, in just over a second, I was dead.

…I wasn’t trying to win a fight, I was just trying to run away

Don’t put all your marks on the same spot, a lot of people do this. Im also guessing your gear is pretty terrible if he was doing that amount of damage with HS.

This isnt just necros having this problem. I play a lot of WvW and I see every profession being taken out by a thief with ease. They will even run into a big group take someone down within a few seconds and run out.

That’s a lot of burst to deal with. My suggestion would be to have tried and changing tactics against the Thief.

Plague Signet – Stun break

One of the most challenging things about the Necro is they have an uphill battle vs thieves and warriors due to cast times on many abilities.

I’ve played around with the 400 toughness while channeling but opted instead for more DPS.

Full glass cannon thief probably has the lowest defense in this game. They will try to take you by surprise, but if they fail, you should CC and eat them with ease. They will slaughter anybody who is confused and not expecting what is comming.
High risk – high reward.

But also, you got probably outgeared and the thief had some orb buffs.

PS: glass cannon thieves don’t use any stuns, just clear damage.

Well even if you could have managed your skills better, let’s face it without an almost full DS bar to absorb their burst you are pretty much dead and even if you succeed in put him in a difficult situation they will probably reset the fight and get away alive. The best things is : they can fear you too and longer than you can
Just to be clear we are speaking good Thieves here. Bad ones are pretty easy to kill.

I would advise you to break his stun with spectral armor, dodge him, I play double dagger so usually I will lock him with my #3, put my two damage wells under him, as soon as the lock break I will knock him down with the Flesh Golem ability, use the #5 to put some vulnerability on him and use a full #1 cycle and eventually switch to axe for finishing using the #5 if he tries to get away. If you see him coming he will probably jump on you just after his stealth, so whatever weapon you carry you can already precast an AOE centered on yourself most of the time it will hit the target. I like to use the cripple from the axe (#3 )
This is my approach to the thief, I’m far from being a very good PvP player but this had the best results so far. Hope it will help you!

If you were trying to run away the first thing you should have done after initiation is DS + fear, then run and drop a reaper’s mark in your path, and a chillblains if they catch up. If you get stunlocked and can’t do anything about it, it’s GG anyway.

Heartseeker is 450 range gap closer with no CD and 3 initiative cost. If anyone thinks they’ll actually escape a thief L O L

Dagins.5163:

Full glass cannon thief probably has the lowest defense in this game. They will try to take you by surprise, but if they fail, you should CC and eat them with ease. They will slaughter anybody who is confused and not expecting what is comming.
High risk – high reward.

Thief is the fifth class I have played (for a reasonable length of time) and I don’t buy this lowest defense line, sure medium armour and lowest tier of HP and lots of melee, at the same time huge mobility, stealth, lots of ways to avoid damage – multipe blinds, evade on death blossom, teleports etc and then when you add the damage output onto the equation… my thief is nowhere near as squishy as some make out and in 1v1 situation it is simply hugely survivable.

Furthermore with the high damage, you can afford to build in some surviability and still be able to put out damage that the likes of necros can only dream of.

Doing what someone described above of going into a group is high risk, waiting for individuals making their way back is all reward, very little risk with a class that can escape from combat so easily.

I think it is good to know that there are counters (pseudo-counters really).

But, my problem with help like this is the following:

What if he didn’t take Spectral Armor? What if he wasn’t dagger spec? What if he had lich instead of golem? Should we really be forced into one build merely to avoid being blown up in just a few seconds by a thief?

Let’s assume for a moment that he does have a stun breaker (a good build would imo)… it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume it was on CD since it has a heinous 60 second CD.

Moreover, I find on my thief that stuns don’t really allow someone to get away from me. Between steal, HSS, my bow, and improved move speed signet I don’t really feel like anything gets away.
I initiate. One of us dies, or I get away with stealth.

Moreover, look at the damage he took? What is the Necromancer’s take for such a large give? It clearly isn’t tank. It isn’t power. It isn’t large damage output. It is a larger health pool (which clearly doesn’t stop the burst in this game).

Also, let’s not forget that anything this Necro tried to do… that thief was still holding onto a 3 second fear.

Used to have that problem in spvp until I realised they suffer a lot from CC.

I’ll say this tough their damage is ridiculous and then if they think you stand a chance they pop the ’’Iwin’’ riddiculous button called Thieve’s Guild.

Some further thoughts….

I said I had 15 in the +vitality line… I had 20.
20 in toughness
30 in condition damage.

I think that is a fairly standard condition-build

my gear is level 80 karma blues and greens from Orr and World pvp…

as for dropping marks, I was strafing and dropping them in her path, one at a time, but she is running at 25% and I’m running at 10% so she had no problem going around them and catching up to me; so whatever I dropped to scare her off is now on cooldown.

When I dropped the chilling one right on her, she rolled after me, and i assume, cleansed off the chill, and touched the mark of blood that I made when I rolled.

Now assuming everything went right and she’s feared.. so what?

my bleeds tic for, I dunno, lets say 90-100 per tic
my staff attack is 400ish
I had dagger on swap; that hits for 200-400

she’s just gonna heartseeker again
I need another 20ish seconds to be able to fear again
lich form is just another 1.5 seconds worth of damage she needs to do

seriously… there is nothing in the bag-of-tricks that is going to change anything here

The PvP aspect of this game has me worried. I was a huge fan of GW and it was mainly because of the PvP, it was just so fun, I remember I could use quite a wide variety of builds, experiment and still be able to compete if I had the skill to more often than not. However when I read threads about PvP like this it seems absolutely broken and the PvE doesn’t even seem that great either, really ending up pretty disappointed overall; especially since I’m strongly against being forced to play few select builds just so you can fight against otherwise certain death.

=/ I hope my experience in PvP ends up being better or this game won’t last long.

DS allows us to live through the initial burst, because it really is a second health pool. The problem is then that they can reset the fight, and do it again, and we can’t soak another opener.

So then the fight becomes “thief opens for the second time, necro has no defenses, necro explodes.”

There are a few things they could do to fix this.

• They could give us a cooldown to restore all of our Life Force. Sure, it’d be mandatory for PvP, but it’d give us an out.
• They could give us a way to stack up our conditions without requiring more uptime than we’ll ever have. Example: Making Blood is Power apply, say, ten or fifteen stacks of bleed to a target for less time rather than just two for nearly a minute.
• They could pull some of the insane penalties off of what few defensive options we do have. The whole “eat a pile of negative conditions on a long cooldown to do something nifty” is great, but does effing work when the rest of the professions can do the same thing on half the cooldown without the penalty. Yeah, I get that we’re supposed to transfer them, but by the time we actually manage to do that we’re dead.

Hmm…instantly jacked by a thief, you say?

It seems to me that you simply haven’t mastered death shroud yet.

Phydeaux.8534:

DS allows us to live through the initial burst, because it really is a second health pool. The problem is then that they can reset the fight, and do it again, and we can’t soak another opener.

So then the fight becomes “thief opens for the second time, necro has no defenses, necro explodes.”

There are a few things they could do to fix this.

• They could give us a cooldown to restore all of our Life Force. Sure, it’d be mandatory for PvP, but it’d give us an out.
• They could give us a way to stack up our conditions without requiring more uptime than we’ll ever have. Example: Making Blood is Power apply, say, ten or fifteen stacks of bleed to a target for less time rather than just two for nearly a minute.
• They could pull some of the insane penalties off of what few defensive options we do have. The whole “eat a pile of negative conditions on a long cooldown to do something nifty” is great, but does effing work when the rest of the professions can do the same thing on half the cooldown without the penalty. Yeah, I get that we’re supposed to transfer them, but by the time we actually manage to do that we’re dead.

I would love to see a passive life force gain while out of combat. If DS is our defense than we need to be able to go into it consistently.

When you start Tpvp you start with 0 life force. This becomes a problem. It means that a Bunker Necro is already at a disadvantage starting the game. All Necro’s have to stand back and build Life force before really getting into a fight. And before any one says just use spectral armor, why should a Necro have to use what would be their only stun break at the start of a fight?

Geoff.6397:

Well even if you could have managed your skills better, let’s face it without an almost full DS bar to absorb their burst you are pretty much dead and even if you succeed in put him in a difficult situation they will probably reset the fight and get away alive. The best things is : they can fear you too and longer than you can
Just to be clear we are speaking good Thieves here. Bad ones are pretty easy to kill.

I would advise you to break his stun with spectral armor, dodge him, I play double dagger so usually I will lock him with my #3, put my two damage wells under him, as soon as the lock break I will knock him down with the Flesh Golem ability, use the #5 to put some vulnerability on him and use a full #1 cycle and eventually switch to axe for finishing using the #5 if he tries to get away. If you see him coming he will probably jump on you just after his stealth, so whatever weapon you carry you can already precast an AOE centered on yourself most of the time it will hit the target. I like to use the cripple from the axe (#3 )
This is my approach to the thief, I’m far from being a very good PvP player but this had the best results so far. Hope it will help you!

All that work and all the theif has to do is spam heartseeker, seems balanced to me :\

I feel your pain OP, literally as that has happened to me before.

Those who say run away, you cannot run away from a thief with their arrow teleport.

And if just by chance you stop their combo (immediate DS then fear) they will stealth, run away a moment and then come back for you.

Anet has a serious problem with what they consider “balanced”

My eyes are on the 9/24 patch update to see whether Anet realizes that PVP balance is not at eSport level yet.

There is no Thief build out there that could possibly beat a good necromancer 1on1.
Your log looks like you went afk when the thief engaged. Pop DS, dodge, fear … Use plague form when he pops thief guild. You can still blind, fear with mark, and chill.

Cls.9346:

There is no Thief build out there that could possibly beat a good necromancer 1on1.
Your log looks like you went afk when the thief engaged. Pop DS, dodge, fear … Use plague form when he pops thief guild. You can still blind, fear with mark, and chill.

What game are you playing? Can i play it as well? There is so much wrong with what you said its not even funny. You said nothing of builds witch change how a Prof performs and changes who has the upper hand. And i am not even talking about weather the Necro is UP or not. Just saying this about any Prof is a flat out lie. Spec with in Prof do in fact have counters in other Prof and specs.

Still thiefs have no counterspec to certain condition specs. Especially heartseeker thiefs cant do kitten. Talking about spvp with equal gears of course.

Cls.9346:

Still thiefs have no counterspec to certain condition specs. Especially heartseeker thiefs cant do kitten. Talking about spvp with equal gears of course.

Good Thiefs don’t run heartseeker builds. While i don’t normally have a problem with Thiefs, i thought i would show this image. So keep in mind that i am dead. My normal Toughness is 1830, and i have 20k+ health. Took me out in no time. Not complaining, i am sure it was a glasscannon build but man i wish necro’s could get anywhere near that damage.

no matter how many ppl tell you do “oh mh, you died because you did not use DS” or “you did not use fear!” or some other thing they consider useful, 1v1, against a mediocre thief, in sPvP or in WvWvW you are dead in 4-5s no matter what cc/ds/bla bla you use. If the thief knows what he`s doing you have zero chance.
That is my opinion.

rogerwilko.6895:

no matter how many ppl tell you do “oh mh, you died because you did not use DS” or “you did not use fear!” or some other thing they consider useful, 1v1, against a mediocre thief, in sPvP or in WvWvW you are dead in 4-5s no matter what cc/ds/bla bla you use. If the thief knows what he`s doing you have zero chance.
That is my opinion.

Ya its kind of hard to use DS if you have no Life force. and a good Thief will just make you burn DS than disengage and start again 4 sec latter. And now you have no defense and are an easy kill.

I don’t doubt YOU are getting owned, i said good necromancers win. Anyway from what i can tell from the pic you didnt dodge during unload, its pretty easy to see. If you show me a vid I could tell you what you were doing wrong.

@roger nice opinion. Still wrong though..

Cls.9346:

I don’t doubt YOU are getting owned, i said good necromancers win. Anyway from what i can tell from the pic you didnt dodge during unload, its pretty easy to see. If you show me a vid I could tell you what you were doing wrong.

That’s a cute jab at his skill level. But it does nothing to forward the discussion, and you have no good evidence to make a claim about his skill level; your speculative opinion on what he could have/should have done is not sufficient when we don’t have a video to analyze.

But I don’t think that’s even his point. I think his point was that the necro gets nowhere close to the numbers of the thief, and that this dichotomy is a fundamental issue that may merit analysis. It’s very easy to say “oh well you should have dodged _______ ,” but I would suggest that there is a significant issue when any class possesses a “dodge this or you lose” skill.

Magzillas.4865
Thank you,

Cls.9346
Dodge? you have no idea the context of that shot. You didn’t know that i just came off of a fight, or that most of my abilities were on CD or that i had no endurance. The fact that you needed to make a jab at my skill shows your character, and your inability to reason.

The point of the was to show that even with all the toughness that i had a Thief could still get a 6k backstab. About twice what any Necro crit could ever be, even on a squishy.

I have already stated that I normally don’t have problems with Thiefs 1v1. In fact I have very little problem 1v1 most Prof’s.

So you usually win your 1on1 but when you come off a fight a thief can kill you kinda fast. Whats the problem again ? A glasscannon thief has like 14k life and dies if anything kittenin looks at him. 6k backstab is not even 30% of your life and you probably didnt even have protection.

Srsly the only thing that wrong with necro are the broken/bugged traits and maybe the unwhelming power scaling for some skills, everything else, and especially getting owned by thiefs, are just playerskill issues. (From a pvp perspective)

Edit:
Oh about the necros dont do as much damage as thiefs thing … lol
Because Thiefs can also tank 3 ppl on point for 20 seconds, offer a high amount of group utility and never die against any full defense stuff ?

@Cls.9346
You really seem to have a reading comprehensions problem. I never said him killing me was a problem. Again for the slow. I was just pointing out that Necro’s can’t get anywhere near that kind of damage output.

Already replied to that BS with “lol” and a hint for the slow why thats BS.

Prove it or admit your lying. Show a video of you doing that in tpvp. Eng and Guardian can both do that and do more damage at the same time.

oh and how would i get Protection? We have very few skills that give that boon. Or you have to trait for it. And before you say spectral armor, oh ya 5 sec of protection over 90 sec yay.

lol and if you show a video of a Necro just going to into plague form i am going to laugh.

Oh and editing you post after some one else posts…

Quite simply, the best way I’ve found to deal with theives is don’t let them get the first strike – be prepared. If any burst profession catches you offguard, or you’ve got your back to them running, they’re going to abosolutely wreck you. Use your CC and slap them, they’ll go down easily. High damage comes at low survivability.

Thieves are like rogues in wow. I KNOW ITS A WOW COMPARISION, But expect to have them strike you first.

Rogues in WoW get perma stealth. They don’t here.

I haven’t had any problems with thieves yet, they’re definitely annoying but I haven’t been killed by one 1 vs 1 yet, warrior on the other hand has killed me many times with that frigging hundred blades crap (and the volley rifle attack).

Karther.7481:

Rogues in WoW get perma stealth. They don’t here.

They kinda do. Because of how they are rendered you don’t see them for 1-2 sec after they come out of stealth. I have seen Perma stealth.

Its the difference of playing one and playing vs one. Take the Mesmer down ability, on the mesmer’s screen they show up at the same time as the clone. But on everyone else’s screen it takes 1-2 sec. Its the same for Thief’s

Angry Flying Squirrel.3041:

Prove it or admit your lying. Show a video of you doing that in tpvp. Eng and Guardian can both do that and do more damage at the same time.

oh and how would i get Protection? We have very few skills that give that boon. Or you have to trait for it. And before you say spectral armor, oh ya 5 sec of protection over 90 sec yay.

lol and if you show a video of a Necro just going to into plague form i am going to laugh.

Oh and editing you post after some one else posts…

oh man stop posting on the forums and actually do some tpvp. Both Guardian and Engi as full tank do a lot LESS damage than any necro that uses conditions. Also both professions lose 1v1 again if specced full def. Anyway feel free to bring any character that you think can take a point against me and we’ll see.

Cls.9346:

Angry Flying Squirrel.3041:

Prove it or admit your lying. Show a video of you doing that in tpvp. Eng and Guardian can both do that and do more damage at the same time.

oh and how would i get Protection? We have very few skills that give that boon. Or you have to trait for it. And before you say spectral armor, oh ya 5 sec of protection over 90 sec yay.

lol and if you show a video of a Necro just going to into plague form i am going to laugh.

Oh and editing you post after some one else posts…

oh man stop posting on the forums and actually do some tpvp. Both Guardian and Engi as full tank do a lot LESS damage than any necro that uses conditions. Also both professions lose 1v1 again if specced full def. Anyway feel free to bring any character that you think can take a point against me and we’ll see.

So in other words you have no proof. So you were lying. Good to know. Ok so nothing you say has any meaning.

Also sense you seem to be bad at reading. I never said that Eng or Guardian going full tank out damaged a Condition Necro. More proof you like to lie.