Guild Wars 2

I don’t play thief, and I need a bit of help.

I was dueling a thief the other day in an empty sPvP map and he was blinding me continually on his autoattack, I think. (As a CC warr, that hurts a lot.) I’ve checked the thief skills on the wiki, and it doesn’t seem like this is possible. Is there a trait that does this? Or is there a utility that allows applying blind on every attack?

Thanks in advance.

P.S. He was using Pistol MH, not sure OH.

There are a few potential builds and causes for this:

1) Pistol off-hand gives Black Powder on the 5 skill (that’s the little aoe circle centered on the thief). It pulses with blind every second for a few seconds.
2) Dagger/Pistol thieves use Black Powder to stealth (since it’s a dark field, they heartseeker through it for stealth). Sometimes when fighting melee classes, they will sit in the black powder and wait for the meleers to come to them (and get blinded). Dagger/Pistol’s 3 attack makes them shoot you – blinding you, then teleport to you. D/P thieves often use this as a gap closer (or heartseeker, depending on enemy distance / health)

3)Pistol/Pistol thieves can drop black powder and then their auto-attacks / unloads, which are projectile combo-finishers, cause blind as well.

4)Thieves with dagger offhand (including pistol/dagger thieves – you’d know if it was this, because you’d have died from bleeding), often take a trait that causes aoe blind when the thief enters stealth.

Depending on which one it was there are different counters. But basically – if you don’t want to be blinded stay out of the aoe circle, or (if dagger off-hand) don’t get hit by cloak and dagger – slow animation of the dagger going across the chest (avoiding this attack will help a lot vs stealth builds with dagger off-hand).

If you are fighting against Pistol/Pistol, then blind is really their only defense – since they don’t have much mobility or access to stealth (aside from utilities and alternate weapon-sets). This weapon-set is good at a few things, but generally underperforms other thief weapons, so try to avoid the blinds, and put on the pressure and you should be good.

He probly had the blind on stealth trait. Which is very powerful especially with the buff to blinds.

P/D and the trait for blind on stealth.

Pistol shot 2 is a 100% finisher so blinds when fired through a smoke field. It can be mistaken for an auto-attack.

A sword thief can attack from stealth, either blinding from the front or dazing from behind.

Smokescreens, signet of shadows, and blinding powder can also all blind.

Channelled attacks or multi-shot attacks are good when blinded as the first shot will clear the blindness and the rest have a chance to hit.

bobross.5034:

3)Pistol/Pistol thieves can drop black powder and then their auto-attacks / unloads, which are projectile combo-finishers, cause blind as well.

Ah yes, this must have been it. Also, I’m quite a good player, this was after the match ended (sPvP arena so when the 15 mins finished) we just afk autoattacked each other and he got a blind on me every second or so. But thanks for the counters anyway

Thanks for responses, everyone else

glad to help – and yeah, not really something to be feared – the blinds hurt, but that black powder doesn’t last long, and it eats up a lot of initiative. Basically, if they’re doing that, they’re not unloading….or they’re not doing it for long.

Keep in mind off hand pistol #5, black powder, also fires a shot that blinds the target so even if you’re not standing in the area of effect, you can be blinded.

on the 3rd aa chain, you get blinded
it’s a recent buff