I’m simply raising awareness for ways to deal with thieves, many of these things are useful beyond the context of thief, but I’m focusing specifically on how to counter thief. The purpose of raising awareness is twofold, newer PvPers could always use help, and the more obvious it becomes on how to deal with a thief the more likely it is to see nerfs to certain things.
Assumption: hit and run playstyle for thief
Defensive autoprocs:
- Tempest Defense (Air Magic)
- Eye for an Eye (Retribution)
- Mirror of Anguish (Chaos)
- Shared Anguish (Wilderness Survival)
- Nightmare Rune (Tier 6).
These hard counter Basilisk Venom and Steal burst attempts, which is where most of the opportunity for thief to impact a fight comes from. **Note that Share Anguish doesn’t counter a burst attempt while using basilisk venom.
Phase Traversal:
This Revenant skill combined with how revenant works in general makes thief less useful in filling a spot on a team, but it also hard counters the “run” part of hit and run.
Unrelenting Assault:
This Revenant skill removes most of you defensive options, you can’t stealth, teleport, bandit’s defense, or blind. You have to perform 3 skills with evade frames to counter it completely or land an interupt during its activation. The result of being targeted by unrelenting assault is that you often have lost so many defensive tools you must retreat to your team. You usually can’t retreat to OOC by yourself because of Phase Traversal.
Surge of the Mist:
This is a great skill to counter thieves with, because you can use it as a no tell heavy damaging CC from melee. Simply swap from sword immediately into staff and activate, if you’re in melee it becomes humanly impossible to react to a swap into this skill, a thief would have to predict the use of this. The main benefit of this skill vs thief is that it does heavy damage combined with CC and it happens very fast, by the time they can stun break they have taken half the skills damage. If they use shadow step they get minimum value out of it, because they already take the damage.
Team Fighting (3v3+):
This is a weak point for thief, if using staff or stealth you get some staying power, but you lack ways to support your allies beyond trying to throw out weakness, blinds, and maybe endurance if you use signet of agility. The longer a fight goes on the more the disadvantage to your team, because you as a thief lack sustain/healing, and have to play hit an run when pressured. This means your team is more likely to be attritioned down by the enemy playing slightly safe. Also once, shadow step has been used a thief essentially becomes a burden on a team fight, because of the risk of being CC locked to death.
Sustain Area Control Builds utilizing a 2 point strat:
Builds which were meant to hold points 1v1 do very well vs a thief, they outsustain the damage. That said, thieves can easily outrotate them usually. Playing a 2 point strat though only gives 2 options to fight at. The effectiveness of this strat partly falls back to the thief’s weakness in team fights, but this strategy is effective enough that it warrants it’s own attention. Using portal will help this stratgey, and mitigate a thief’s overall impact even more.
Watch thief with a Revenant:
Because Revenant has Phase Traversal and so many damage immunity options via blocks, evades, invulns, you can give Revenant the job of Thief hunting. In 2v2+ play normally, and keep an eye out for when a thief is pressured to the point they have few defensive options remaining. Dive in with phase traversal and pressure until he goes down, even if you’d be out of position in a team fight to accomplish this that probably only matters if your only defensive options are blocks and the enemy has unblockable CC available, but if you have the glint heal available you should be fine regardless of the situation. If you can’t kill the thief, remember to work your way back to your team while using your invulns/evades/blocks.
Combo Break Thief:
Much of thief’s damage comes in bursts, because they have to play hit and run. Because of this CC is more effective vs thief than other professions. You interrupt their burst combos and you relieve yourself of lots of pressure. You can also break their combo’s with purely defensive skills, but even a 1 second daze is enough to throw off their damage drastically. This is why the defensive autoprocs are listed above.
Norn Guardian – Aurora Lustyr (Lv 80)
Mia A Shadows Glow – Human Thief (Lv 80)
