Guild Wars 2

So I had the most frustrating fight with a Dragonhunter about an hour ago. Thankfully, I recorded my fight.

Can you the pros out here point out what I did wrong, and how they deal with them as D/P?

I messed up a lot of obvious things, like making sure Aegis wasn’t up. I want to know more hints and tricks as to when to attack.

I appreciate the comments.

I really loved how she used the NPC guard as human shield. bruh

PS: I managed to get her later by basically dazing her to death, but that’s for another video.

you tried to fight a DH.

But if you want to know how to whin that fight. Run Impairing Daggers and Fist Flurry

From Stealth: Impairing daggers> Backstab>Steal>Fist Flurry

Impairing daggers will break through his initial agis, then the rest will Delete him. (of course that depends on you getting the drop on him)

Never start with steal because of their passive trap, always basi up and get a hit on him to trigger it – theres plenty of ways to do this. Stealth up and hit him once with basi, headshot him twice (once to get rid of aegis, second to hit him and procc the trap) or basi up and headshot.

Always walk into the trap to trigger it cus he gets stab from it – then you can steal safely onto him. Then it’s up to you to pressure him, keep blind up a lot here and try to bait out his F1 (the pull)

Basic tips

bluri.2653:

Never start with steal because of their passive trap, always basi up and get a hit on him to trigger it – theres plenty of ways to do this. Stealth up and hit him once with basi, headshot him twice (once to get rid of aegis, second to hit him and procc the trap) or basi up and headshot.

Always walk into the trap to trigger it cus he gets stab from it – then you can steal safely onto him. Then it’s up to you to pressure him, keep blind up a lot here and try to bait out his F1 (the pull)

Basic tips

I just noticed to Fragments of Faith Trap passive. Thanks a lot Sind, I appreciate.
And also hopefully interrupt that F2 too.

dont take your eyes/camera off the DH so you would know which trap was placed by the animation and where it was placed

for example you dont want to trigger the heal trap

I am also learning to play DP thief recently and here are my two cents.

You teleported (dagger3 steal) onto DH too much. You risk taking trap damage this way. You want to dodge to get rid of the traps first.

Then it is the heal trap that gets DH back to full HP several times. You want to aim to interrupt his heal trap and come in for the finishing blow. Otherwise, you don’t want to trigger heal trap like that. It is probably good time to go shortbow.

As Sind said, BV on engage, or headshot twice to proc the Aegis/(HD) FoF. Working around FoF pieces is one of the trickier aspects of the fight.

A lot of this fight came down to managing timers or potentially knowing what the DH does. Quite frankly, this DH was not particularly good and a combination of misplays on your end accumulated into the loss.

You fought way too aggressively when engaging and were too predictable on the OOC; for the most part, DH’s offensive-trap cooldowns are shorter than yours, so letting them heal is going to hurt you more than them in most cases. If you re-watch the video with cooldowns in mind, you’ll realize the player pretty much used everything on reset the majority of the fight, and you did a lot of engaging when running only one stunbreak without consideration for Maw. Towards the end of the fight he was deliberately baiting your engages by facing away from you, not chasing, etc., expecting that you were going to keep trying until you got the kill, which you did. Mind games can be especially important here; keep their timers in mind and stealth/re-position to a vantage point to see what they do. If they’re impatient, they’ll wander off traps without cooldowns up yet, letting you get free and relatively safe engages.

If and when you decide to hard engage, it’s almost always better to assume traps are laid and just dodge/teleport through them and stealth while keeping them in combat. Most of the damage taken came from you trying to DPS-race the DH while standing in traps. Even just a second when multiple traps are stacked is typically too long. For this, I also recommend taking BD when fighting DH since the low cooldown stunbreak and block negates a lot of what they’re able to do, since you can match F1 and all of their traps while negating the damage.

Watch 0:20 – 0:26 again. He dropped defensive cooldowns for Protection and it was very close to timing out. Had you waited another second or so, I think you would have killed him on that engage as he had nothing up and was slow to react on weapon skills.

You can Shadow Shot dodge through Shield of Absorption (0:40) since it’s unblockable, and the knockback should not send you out of the radius.

The 1:00 engage was a great example of getting in between his cooldowns, but you lingered too long as ToF was coming off cooldown – the rest of his traps were unusable still and were casted on the ready for the final part of the fight.

The misplays at 1:26 were really what did you in.
You probably already saw the major error at 1:26 in that you let him OOC heal fully while you were still 2/3, and, as said, he used his traps immediately off cooldown; at 0:08 he placed Maw at the start of the fight which hit you and almost killed you in conjunction with other traps, and surely enough 75s later it was placed again when you were facing away from him resetting. For this I recommend always keeping an eye on your enemy when doing a hard reset. Dodge without directional input sends you towards the camera, and you can bind a “rear view” to the keyboard via the options interface to keep an eye on what’s happening behind you. Knowing there had been traps placed, odds are you might not have engaged as aggressively.

The MH sword and shortbow are also great tools to use against DH’s who have deployed traps when you lack a stunbreak. While the thief has been able to camp one weapon set for a long time for combat, this is no longer the case with a lot of elite specs, especially the DH. For shortbow, get just outside of trap radii, cast IArrow behind the DH, and immediately dodge into the traps to trigger them. If done correctly, you’ll trigger the traps and immediately teleport away behind the DH before the majority of the damage from them is dealt, since the shot has a projectile component, and being behind them also negates the ability to F1 or use longbow skills to CC you and deal damage. IArrow’s projectile if shot will still teleport you even if CC’ed by the likes of Maw so that you don’t get blown up without an out. For sword, pre-casting IS and then timing the pre-cast of IR into a dodge + steal or other gap close will allow you to teleport in, evade, and teleport out with no animation lock frames, triggering traps and disengaging without taking damage, either.

There are also some positional and general play tips you can improve with that I noticed with this fight; you consistently came from the same directions (and as such were not that tricky to keep track of), you didn’t really keep track of your opponent’s boons or buffs/debuffs, and didn’t really utilize interruption or combo-hit effects taking advantage of projectile flight durations to negate aegis and get more oomph from your engages.

Since I can’t seem to edit the above post, your speed is quite good, however that’s no longer enough with HoT since so many abilities and skills no longer have cast times or animations associated to them. Work on your timer management a little bit and I think you’ll be in a much better spot against nearly everything.

I actually didn’t see you ever switching to a second weapon set, and to harass the DH and make her leave the traps area and reduce her healing you could have used the poison field from SB, while evading with 3 if she was switching to longbow on you.

I’m not sure if the DH was actually bating you on her traps or she was just chilling knowing she’s pretty safe with the over-inflated trap build. I mean the play wasn’t at that level on her side to think she was actually thinking of baiting actions out of other players. So you kind of suicide on a counter build.

That being said I sort of liked the passing of your game and if you follow the tips the people above told you about you might do better next encounters. On the same note there are(or were, not sure after the recent changes if that is still a thing) a sort of trapper druids who can mess with d/p thief sort of the same way it didn’t matter how skilled/fast they were.

1. DeceiverX, that’s a lot to take in! I ll keep those tips in mind, and in practice for later.
The Infiltrator’s Arrow trick … I have got to try this one. Thanks for the help!

2.NuhDah, I think I was heated and too excited to use SB. But then again that was your entire point. Gotta remain calm and collected. Thank you.

If you are burst geared/traited, then I recommend opening without basilisk venom. Pop aegis with headshot from stealth, backstab, auto until they start casting f3, THEN basilisk.

biggest thing you should count when in that match up is dragon maw timer because you dodge threw all the other traps but dragon maw with out shadow step is gg.

Right off you got hit by the stacked traps too many times. As soon as they light up, dodge out and reset before they take effect. Your pressure was solid between traps.

Had you switched to Bound, you would have won that fight IMO.

Had you switched your off hand weapon-set to PP, you would have destroyed that trap sitter.

Don’t get locked into a single variant of a build. One of our strongest abilities is to reset, dial in and blow em up.

P/P with bound is DH destroyer. You have great Stealth uptime and u can make with it great dmg pressure on DH. Due distance u don’t have to walk into traps. You only have to watch that u don’t get pulled. And like with D/P don’t use basi in your first strike.

Grebcol.5984:

P/P with bound is DH destroyer. You have great Stealth uptime and u can make with it great dmg pressure on DH. Due distance u don’t have to walk into traps. You only have to watch that u don’t get pulled. And like with D/P don’t use basi in your first strike.

deppends if DH is using shield and SW soa the thief will need to get in close, and that means get trapped, and that DH was not doimg that much damadge with traps.

That dh gameplay looks so braindead..The guy just stands there,no dodge not even once..Its stupid how people can win by this kind of gameplay,Just pop ze traps and stand still…Oh man.

Caedmon.6798:

That dh gameplay looks so braindead..The guy just stands there,no dodge not even once..Its stupid how people can win by this kind of gameplay,Just pop ze traps and stand still…Oh man.

That’s true. What’s even more frustrating if losing to braindead, inactive build. Gotta keep improving!

Caedmon.6798:

That dh gameplay looks so braindead..The guy just stands there,no dodge not even once..Its stupid how people can win by this kind of gameplay,Just pop ze traps and stand still…Oh man.

Guardians are a heavy armour class with the least mobility in the game.

They have few teleports, no evasion utility or weapon skills and little to no access to Vigor.

They are built around area control and holding ground through all of their weapons, traits and utilities. That is the class concept.

What exactly do you expect in a fight with them you complete oaf?

Guardians are designed to be immobile and control an area, they are not a light footed evasion class like a Thief.

You want brainless? How about a 1200 range teleport that automatically puts you behind your target in stealth to perform what would be a skill based attack in any other RPG.

Ezrael.6859:

Caedmon.6798:

That dh gameplay looks so braindead..The guy just stands there,no dodge not even once..Its stupid how people can win by this kind of gameplay,Just pop ze traps and stand still…Oh man.

Guardians are a heavy armour class with the least mobility in the game.

They have few teleports, no evasion utility or weapon skills and little to no access to Vigor.

They are built around area control and holding ground through all of their weapons, traits and utilities. That is the class concept.

What exactly do you expect in a fight with them you complete oaf?

Guardians are designed to be immobile and control an area, they are not a light footed evasion class like a Thief.

You want brainless? How about a 1200 range teleport that automatically puts you behind your target in stealth to perform what would be a skill based attack in any other RPG.

First, You are woefully misinformed about what a guardian was designed to do. Guardian’s were designed as front-line support. They were never designed and never worked as area control or holding ground in anything. They were built to charge in with the warriors providing them with boons, healing, and dishing out their own damage. they needed heavy armor for this, but have lower health pools to balance their massive access to boons. Your understanding about guardian’s and what they are supposed to be has obviously been tainted by HoT Specializations.

Dragon hunters are back line damage dealers made to hold a point. I don’t like DH (or any elite spec really) because they are horribly designed in general, and a DH pretty much hard counters any thief build except P/P. Yes you can win against a DH as a thief, but the edge will always be with the DH assuming the thief cannot run away, reset, and come back with a better setup.

Just a few more points here. First, You neglected to mention that a DH’s teleport is on an extremely short cooldown and is widely accepted to be one of the best weapon skills in the game.
Second, DH is a brainless class to play. In WVW it’s a little less brainless, because your opponents are not forced to step into your traps on a point. But it’s still very brainless. Third, did you seriously try and say that a steal>backstab is brainless? You sir have no idea what you are talking about. Steal is on a base 30 second cooldown, does 0 damage untraited, and does not put us in stealth untraited. on top of that steal does not put us behind you, we have to do that on our own or steal from behind or to the side.

It is my great pleasure to inform you that the thief as a profession has more skill in it’s little finger than your DH has in it’s entire spec. Go back to the DH thread and troll some other player, because the thieves here will eat you alive.

Ezrael.6859:

Caedmon.6798:

That dh gameplay looks so braindead..The guy just stands there,no dodge not even once..Its stupid how people can win by this kind of gameplay,Just pop ze traps and stand still…Oh man.

Guardians are a heavy armour class with the least mobility in the game.

They have few teleports, no evasion utility or weapon skills and little to no access to Vigor.

They are built around area control and holding ground through all of their weapons, traits and utilities. That is the class concept.

What exactly do you expect in a fight with them you complete oaf?

Guardians are designed to be immobile and control an area, they are not a light footed evasion class like a Thief.

You want brainless? How about a 1200 range teleport that automatically puts you behind your target in stealth to perform what would be a skill based attack in any other RPG.

Yeah Ezrael, I don’t know what profession you play, but I guarantee you Thief isn’t as easy as make it describe it. Can’t backstab Steal you way to victory I can tell you that. Guardians have 45 sec CD teleport, so that’s relative mobile.
If anything Necro are the least mobile of them all.

Ezrael.6859:

Guardians are a heavy armour class with the least mobility in the game.

DH can spec for tons of leaps and ports. It is way more mobile than a Revenant (esp. since Phase Traversal was nerfed to 35 energy cost). Greatsword Warrior is more mobile than both of them.

I once fought a pretty tanky Sword/Focus + GS + Medi Port + Virtue Leap DH who could disengage like there’s no tomorrow using ambient creatures in WvW. That dude was uncatchable while repositioning himself in a 1v1 for most classes.

Ezrael.6859:

Caedmon.6798:

That dh gameplay looks so braindead..The guy just stands there,no dodge not even once..Its stupid how people can win by this kind of gameplay,Just pop ze traps and stand still…Oh man.

Guardians are a heavy armour class with the least mobility in the game.

They have few teleports, no evasion utility or weapon skills and little to no access to Vigor.

They are built around area control and holding ground through all of their weapons, traits and utilities. That is the class concept.

What exactly do you expect in a fight with them you complete oaf?

Guardians are designed to be immobile and control an area, they are not a light footed evasion class like a Thief.

You want brainless? How about a 1200 range teleport that automatically puts you behind your target in stealth to perform what would be a skill based attack in any other RPG.

You should honestly re-read my comment where i’m talking about That particular Dh.Where ive seen dh’s that do play different,that do dodge…You complete oaf,i expect people not be able to win a fight by just standing still and dropping the bombs and the blocks in the same kittening spot without the need to even move,cus oh my god such skillfull gameplay !

emkelly.2371:

Ezrael.6859:

Guardians are a heavy armour class with the least mobility in the game.

They have few teleports, no evasion utility or weapon skills and little to no access to Vigor.

They are built around area control and holding ground through all of their weapons, traits and utilities. That is the class concept.

What exactly do you expect in a fight with them you complete oaf?

Guardians are designed to be immobile and control an area, they are not a light footed evasion class like a Thief.

You want brainless? How about a 1200 range teleport that automatically puts you behind your target in stealth to perform what would be a skill based attack in any other RPG.

First, You are woefully misinformed about what a guardian was designed to do. Guardian’s were designed as front-line support. They were never designed and never worked as area control or holding ground in anything. They were built to charge in with the warriors providing them with boons, healing, and dishing out their own damage. they needed heavy armor for this, but have lower health pools to balance their massive access to boons. Your understanding about guardian’s and what they are supposed to be has obviously been tainted by HoT Specializations.

Dragon hunters are back line damage dealers made to hold a point. I don’t like DH (or any elite spec really) because they are horribly designed in general, and a DH pretty much hard counters any thief build except P/P. Yes you can win against a DH as a thief, but the edge will always be with the DH assuming the thief cannot run away, reset, and come back with a better setup.

Just a few more points here. First, You neglected to mention that a DH’s teleport is on an extremely short cooldown and is widely accepted to be one of the best weapon skills in the game.
Second, DH is a brainless class to play. In WVW it’s a little less brainless, because your opponents are not forced to step into your traps on a point. But it’s still very brainless. Third, did you seriously try and say that a steal>backstab is brainless? You sir have no idea what you are talking about. Steal is on a base 30 second cooldown, does 0 damage untraited, and does not put us in stealth untraited. on top of that steal does not put us behind you, we have to do that on our own or steal from behind or to the side.

It is my great pleasure to inform you that the thief as a profession has more skill in it’s little finger than your DH has in it’s entire spec. Go back to the DH thread and troll some other player, because the thieves here will eat you alive.

I’m sorry but both of these statements are just blatantly inaccurate.

DH has decent in-combat mobility access given wings, while their sustained mobility isn’t that amazing. They become fairly mobile if built around JI and run S/x or GS, but said mobility skills still have fairly long cooldowns relative to what else is in the game.

The guardian has always been a point-holder and a frontline profession. It’s just it was overshadowed by the hambow war and elementalist during the bunker meta and lacked the damage and mobility of other professions to justify being an absolute must-have (especially when profession duplication was allowed). It’s a staple in WvW because of the fact it can tank and invuln through damage without issue while providing good support and damage to keep everyone doing the same.

A good DH won’t run four or five traps in WvW (and won’t either at higher tiers in sPvP), and requires similar reactionary play to the thief because heavy armor means very little in this meta where damage reduction effects are constantly being stacked above 40-60% and most people play conditions, anyways.

The issue with DH is that it has a tremendously low skill floor and especially for average-skilled players punishes counterplay attempts on the build level due to the nature of its kit.

That being said, the Daredevil isn’t that much different in terms of raw difficulty; it just counters fewer things is all.

Caedmon.6798:

That dh gameplay looks so braindead..The guy just stands there,no dodge not even once..Its stupid how people can win by this kind of gameplay,Just pop ze traps and stand still…Oh man.

That is where the game has gone. Even a majority of thieves now rely on auto attack dagger spam to bring an opponent down. The amount of passive abilities the game has added is ridiculous.

The Dragonhunter seemed very new to the game and was basically just waiting for traps to come off cooldown instead of ever bothering to tab target you (hence no spear of justice or much use of longbow skills). That Dragonhunter could have killed you WAY earlier if they had just pressed a few different skills. But you essentially died because you reset the fight and started again without Shadowstep. Also a traited Dragon’s Maw can have a cooldown of just 60 seconds (which is pretty silly) so it’s possibly best practice to always save your Shadowstep for that one trap – you can dodge all the others.

Come to think of it, you could have probably won by just auto-attacking with shortbow and using choking gas to reduce healing. I’ve done that a few times.

That only works against pretty terrible DH’s, though.

What are the teleports that actually bypass DH’s Test of Faith?
I know Shadowstep fails… but what else?

They should work on the notion of teleport..

Is it disappearing from A and reapearing to B?
OR
Is it going to A to B at an alarming speed ?

If it’s the first one, then ArenaNet should allows those utility skills to not cause damage.

In terms of not taking the damage? There aren’t any last I checked. That’s why it’s essential to dodge during the teleport, which is why I recommend using shortbow to counter DH above.

Frankly, the nature of Shadowstep mechanics in GW2 is very inconsistent and varies on a per-skill level when interacting with other effects. For example, Static Field casted by an Ele has always interrupted these “teleports”, despite the fact that thief can steal/shadowstep through abilities like Spectral Wall and Line of Warding.

Overall, it’s pretty inconsistent and pretty much depends on accumulated knowledge of what works and when.