Stealth and non-telegraphed, instant burst damage.
Guess what, dire condition perplex thief doesn’t mind traps. They dish our all their condition from afar and overwhelm you with bleed, poison, confusion, and torment while able to run away from any fight.
dire perplex thieves are nothing special. If anything, they are quite a lot easier then most other thief builds because people feel invincible with that setup, yet they are very easy to deal with.
While it is not THE most affordable counter, a SB bleed stack setup vs dire perplex, with Sigil of Generosity on the SB will completely demolish the thief as you will randomly send back ALL of one condition every 10 sec.
The most important thing of all is to set up your ranger CORRECTLY. This is where most of you do things wrong. You run glass power or a copy pasta condi setup, which works against enemies worse then you, but struggle vs similar skill and loses vs greater skill. Reason for this is that with the exception of a few players on these forums, almost NONE of you who complain show any sort of customization or tweaks.
Why do i say you fail? Because most of you are NOT the creators of the build you are using, therefore MOST of you cannot copy the playstyle used by the original creator. This is what makes a build seem exceptional. A guy or gal on youtube who has spent time tuning his setup to his or her own playstyle, that build is optimized for them and the way they play, the way they make decisions (be it good or bad ones), and most notably, the way they react. Most of you are not going to be able to copy another person well enough to use their build 100%.
lol whatever you say man.
Anyway, I’ll talking about my experience in “WVW”, (stop mentioning ranked que bleh bleh bleh, condition thief hardly exist in PVP anyway)
Most physical burst thief are candies for my power ranger.
They tend to either do alot of damage but die fast, or not doing enough damage at all.
If they do alot of damage, they’ll usually die in one cc+burst. Even if they don’t die in one burst, we still have tools like lightning reflex, signet of stone to deal with them.
If they did get away from me, I’ll just switch out one of my skills to sick-em by the time they come back. Against a pure burst glass thief, so far I have a 99% chance of killing them when I put sick-em on them. Their main weakness is that they couldn’t deal damage while hiding/ evading, as oppose to their condition counterpart. If they does survive my burst, they usually hit like wet noodles and couldn’t kill me anyway.
As for condition thief, they can abuse the food (40% duration), abuse the gear set-up to become extremely tanky. (Condition thief only need one stat for their damage as oppose to burst thieves need 3 stats for their damage). They can easily go dire and be extremely tanky. Even Sick-em wouldn’t kill them, and they’ll be able to get away easily while surviving the burst, then come back later when my Sick-em is on CD. They can just spam their f1 and stealth 1 to cause endless bleeding, poison, high stack of confusion (if you don’t cleanse it you die), and torments WHILE evading, stealthing. I even saw one that spam the bleed trap proc on dodge and easily stack up 15~20 layers of bleed when you stand in the trap for just 2 seconds. If they’re losing, they can always easily reset the fight and come back after your big skills on CD. They have no weakness, no risk, and can get away from any situation, while killing classes more effectively with high duration conditions. Conditions will NEVER kill them because of Shadow Art, and it just gives them endless time to reset the battle at their will. The only reason they don’t exist in PVP is because there’s no dire gear, no perplexcity rune, and no food available in PVP.
Note that I do run empathetic bond on my ranger, and I sometimes do eat -40% condition duration food. But even under these conditions, they’re still 10 times tougher than any burst thief. I run those because basically there’s no way you’ll beat a condition thief if you run into them without at least these traits on you.
Lastly, I modified my own glassbow WvW ranger, testing and adjusting many times, and now it’s completely different from the ones from Meta-Battle. You can keep acting high and mighty, it doesn’t matter, but I find that you hardly “roam SOLO” in WvW. Funny thing in this forum is that people always tend to exclude themselves from the “bad players” category without providing any proof, and only bad-mouthing others.
