Guild Wars 2

I am new to the thief class…I am getting one-shot by these traps, am I doing something wrong or are its supposed to be like that?

If you get hits by the traps you are usually dead. The best way is to dodge through them or trigger and shadowstep out.
Get some info, read about how the traps work, it will help you to understand how to minimize the damage if you get caught.
Dont try to fight inside the traps, you cant do it. Just trigger them, get out and wait.
Guardians are our hardcounter. They are hard to defeat without the traps, they only make it worse.
You should not try to fight a guard. You will only win if they are really, really bad.
If you want to fight them for whatever reason, you cant do it on point. Make them run, make them leave the comfort zone of where their traps lie.

Aaand when they have a longbow handy, even the kiting usually ends up with a dead thief. If they don’t make any serious mistakes.

There really isn’t a way to beat them if they know how to play. After some practice you’ll get used to what kills you (typically trap damage and True shot), and it’s really just a matter of not getting hit by these or mitigating them as much as possible while forcing cooldowns. If they royally screw up, you have a chance to punish them if their traps are off cooldown, but otherwise you’re pretty much SOL as there’s no real way for a thief to counter a DH. You effectively require Daredevil for this. Core thief stands even less of a chance due to reduced evasion spam.

What all of you said, completely.

I play core D/P thief, and I cannot kill a dragonhunter 1v1 in any way. When I evade traps, shadowstep out, they usually still end up taking half my health. And then the DH can just shoot with his bow when you kite, so it doesn’t really work.

Best advice against DH: ditch the fight, go help your team somewhere else, then beat the DH when you have friends to help you.

PS; DH traps deserve a nerf (thief and ranger traps do not even come close to it’s damage).

It’s a hard duel you should avoid most of the time.

But, if you really need to fight a DH on point in 1v1 (still, as I said, avoid it), I found that it’s better to break LoS and fight them with your short bow for most of the fight.

Cluster bomb may be super slow, but it shoots in an arc and deals AoE damage. It means you can shoot over most barriers surrounding the point, while the DH cannot hit you with his bow (straight lines shots). You can also get out quickly of your LoS, shoot a Cluster so that it hits the edge of the enemy, then quickly come back in.

If you’re able to grind through some of the health/blocks of the DH, and if you feel confident you can avoid the traps on the ground until he bites the dust, then you can switch to D/P, Shadowshot to him, dodge the traps, steal the next attack (with the daze trait), then CC lock him with Impact Strike combo.

But, really, you should avoid them as much as possible.

You just go somewhere the DH isn’t and let your team manage them.
DH literally lose to every other class in the game, so you shouldn’t be wasting your time as Thief fighting them.

If you know a spot is trapped, just dodge in and dodge out before it cages you.
And if a DH start targeting you, keep Shadow step ready for when he tries to use the Pull, he needs to chain you before doing that so it’s a pretty easy tell.

Drop your own Traps. Thief Traps > DH traps. Profit.

To be fair, rev hammer is fairly slow and obvious, so you should be able to dodge those without problems. Lack of experience shows here, you need to be able to dodge those heavy hitting ranged skills.

yes. thief is supossed to be a free kill in pvp

Revs are just generally overtuned right now. But in actuality they are one of the easier classes for us to fight against.
-Most rev players have no idea what they are doing. Maybe the op flavour attracts noobs, maybe the class is too young to generate a lot of pros, but most revs you meet outside the higher ranks die if you hit them.
-They have a couple of hard-hitting skills but if you know the animations and make sure to evade them, you have a pretty good chance.
They also have a lot of active and passively active defenses. You have to know, when to attack and when to no-get-hit
-Finally the stolen skill is extremely strong. I put some inital pressure on them until they start to use glint healing, move away, count to three and throw 2 essence saps on them. Thats usually enough to make them uncomfortable.
If im lucky I can interrupt soothing bastion with an improvised BV, and they are done.

But anyways: Hammer revs wont prove to be your biggest problem, its actually considered somewhat weak.
Sword revs are the most immediate danger and staff revs are the true evil.

In general: they dont counter us, we counter them. They are just so op they dont have to care. And they are perhaps the only class that can chase down a running thief, one of the reasons we hate to fight them.

SmokinBuda.1398:

Thanks for all your input.

Day 4 of my thief adventures…im still struggling against more or less all classes except other thieves and warriors.

Fighting a revenant I am pulling away to re-stealth after my opening took him to about 75%, he does a ranged attack that one-shot me as well…for some reason it felt like the 4 hammer bolts hit me on the same time as the “Coalescence of Ruin”

How are heavy armor classes able to him for so much on 1200 units range?
I mean a heavy armor class,hitting me for more on 1200 range,than I can hit in melee with all sorts of mumbo jumbo before I engage?
This is just wrong.

do yourself a favor .. just don’t play Thief. believe me it will save you from so much frustration and possibly from rage quitting. after 2years of maining Thief i really regret that i played it and fell in love with it. so.. don’t fall in love with it. maybe you can still find some class that you enjoy if it’s not too late ^^ … roll something like Scrapper and play easy mode without frustration.

Avoid Dragonhunters, the traps need another nerf still. Instant down for a thief. You can dodge through them, if you know in advance where they were set… if not you’re just dead. Toughness and Vitality won’t help you.

They dont need a nerf, sry. They deal a lot of damage but are easy to counter.
I said it before: if any other class had the traps, they would not prove a problem, its just because they are on our hardcounter.
Guards have a lot of their damage moved from weapon to utility skills, so if you nerfed the traps, you would have to buff the weapons to compensate.
I dont get why people play traphunter tho. The literally only thing you can kill with it is a thief. Even burning guard would be stronger if you have a reaper with you to bait cleanses.

DH are hard kills for a lot of classes, even the pro’s who claim they are easy. They do often participate in suck, against Engis, Necros and Rangers though, and these are all very common in Pvp; this is why they say they are weak. Against every other class meta they do have the insta-downing advantage.

As a thief though you can do a few things before game to help your odds. Make sure to have these skills equipped: Bandits Defense, Shadow step, Thieves Guild (is incredible for these kind of 1v1’s) and I would even consider swapping d/p for s/p if you are going to have to constantly fight them.
Overall you really want to make sure you are dragging the fight out as much as you can, if they are just camping home though -.-, there is no point in engaging them, not even a little. Leave them out of the match until their team starts screaming in map chat.

Thieves guild is kinda cheesy tho. You can argue using basi venom over impact strike but thieves guild for a conquest match is kind of a waste.

Nocta.5274:

Thieves guild is kinda cheesy tho. You can argue using basi venom over impact strike but thieves guild for a conquest match is kind of a waste.

This is true, but cheese balls is sometimes what the scenario calls for. As a counter for traps, it works incredibly well and it really helps keep pressure up until their utils are on CD. That way you can focus more on survival. Not to mention that they set off traps and can help distract.

I agree that in any standard match you wouldn’t use anything but impact strike or bassi venom, in matchup against 2 DH or more, especially if they don’t have a ranger, TG would probably be the best option. It might be the only logical way you are going to ever make that 1v1 on far. Don’t write it off because it’s not the exact meta or because it’s easy to avoid.

If i was to play against a two DHs, well, to be frank I would usually switch off thief to play something else.

but if you want to stick with thief against that, staff + basi venom is great at boosting your chances against them.

The only reliable way for a thief to down a DH is usually after their aegis is down and they’ve used their traps. If you’re unable to kill a guardian in a swift rotation, back down. In a prolonged kite-fest, a decent DH will always beat a decent Thief.

SmokinBuda.1398:

Furthermore it was an Asura, I dont know if you are able to see animations on Asuras on 1200 units range?

There is an options in Gameplay to set Standard Team Models so that all enemy models in pvp will be humans; that should solve your problem.