Guild Wars 2

Hello Thieves,
I’m slowly learning Mesmer, and on of the biggest problems I have in PvP is thieves. I understand I am squishy and you guys burst. So I ask, what do you suggest to do? I have a hard time predicting when a theif is gonna stab me in the back so I kinda wildly dodge and move. So how do Mesmers tend to beat you?

P.S. I try to play a shatter build, so it’s power based.

If you’re a glassy shatter build, then your best bet is to be super fast on your burst and to get the jump on the thief before they can react. Fights between glassy thieves and glassy burst mesmers tend to end very quickly and the winner is generally the one who is the fastest to land the burst. That’s my experience at least.

We need your build to help you.

It depends a lot of what traits, weapons and utilities you are using.

I got sigil of the privater(parrot thing)
Weapons, Sword and pistol/ Staff(used to use greatsword, but staff works better)
Build is 4/4/0/0/6,
Utilitys are, Ether feast, bink, mirror images, arcane thievery, and mass invis or moa.

You want to throw in another stun breaker in there like decoy. Arcane thievery wont help you against a thief.

If you are fighting a d/p thief you want to unload your burst when he puts down the smoke field before he heartseekers through it to gain stealth. You also want to use mass invis/decoy/torch when he goes into stealth so that he can not get the jump on you.

a good s/d thief will be unbeatable for you.. thief is simply better than mesmer assuming both are using zerker and assuming equal skill

The main reason for this is a thief will always have more gap closers than you have gap creators. He will always be able to disengage from you due to superior mobility as well. Sword and shortbow are also very good against clones due to cleaving thus lowering your shatter dmg and he will be able to gain easy still with offhand dagger using cnd against clones/phantasms.

Thief has advamtage over mesmer in pvp. Doesnt mean mesmers are not viable or bad class, Thief is just its natural counter.

If you’re facing a D/P thief, you ether want to try and land an interrupt into a spike right before they enter stealth, or you want to: camp out near your clones, try to get them to front stab you, and then follow-up with a shatter. If you camp near your clones, the spike time is reduced significantly. it also helps to know that the period of attacks your clones will use is roughly around 3 seconds, so if the thief is going in and out of stealth frequently, then you can bet he will be punished for revealing himself as your clones/phantasms will most likely insta-attack.

The biggest problem you’re going to have is if the thief gets wise and starts using shortbow. It will wreck your clones, and their evasion 3 skill will pretty much make your pistol phantasm attack useless. 1 dodge roll + a disabling shot will negate virtually all damage from your pistol phantasm. proper use of poison via steal and shortbow 4 will make healing a pain for you. and the biggest source of direct damage on the shortbow is a nice jucy clusterbomb to the face. usually it’s paired up with a stealth attack via shortbow to immob you or a port via steal or infiltrator signet. You can use staff to time a port right when they try and clusterbomb you. You can also use diversion to interrupt it. proper use of blur is absolutely necessary. try to save your port via sword 3 to dodge attacks.

the biggest strength to mesmer in a fight is the ability to swing the fight into their favor. try to always be using your defensive structure as part of your offense.

in general, “this guy:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nADHVzc9y8g” gives good general tips.

Jake.1430:

I have a hard time predicting when a theif is gonna stab me in the back so I kinda wildly dodge and move.

This is your first problem right here. Dodging gives your position away and as a Thief I will know exactly who to backstab.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Jake.1430:

I have a hard time predicting when a theif is gonna stab me in the back so I kinda wildly dodge and move.

This is your first problem right here. Dodging gives your position away and as a Thief I will know exactly who to backstab.

You can survive against newer thieves by pretending to be a clone, but more experienced players will be able to tab target you or simply recognize you by boons. I agree that you shouldn’t be totally obvious by dodging recklessly, but don’t risk too much trying to look clone-like either. =P

Dahkeus.8243:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Jake.1430:

I have a hard time predicting when a theif is gonna stab me in the back so I kinda wildly dodge and move.

This is your first problem right here. Dodging gives your position away and as a Thief I will know exactly who to backstab.

You can survive against newer thieves by pretending to be a clone, but more experienced players will be able to tab target you or simply recognize you by boons. I agree that you shouldn’t be totally obvious by dodging recklessly, but don’t risk too much trying to look clone-like either. =P

I say take baby steps. If you can fool them by pretending to be a clone, then you just saved yourself some important cooldowns. Otherwise, I would recommend stealth or stay with your team and forget about going off alone.

Narkodx.1472:

The main reason for this is a thief will always have more gap closers than you have gap creators.

QFT. This is somewhat true with d/p as well, but in that case you can use clones to block shadow shot spam. This is also the biggest reason all zerk vs zerk match ups are skewed in thiefs favor… They can simply bypass whatever defense you are using over and over.

If you want to have any chance at all, you have to make SURE your CC lands at all costs… Thiefs run at most 2 stunbreak (be aware that shadowstep can be used twice) and signet is usually used offensively anyhow. Staff chaos circle thing is also very strong, and condi spam in general (weakness etc)

+1 for vashury’s videos, I found them useful in learning to deal with shatter mesmers as a thief, so I’m sure they’ll help you too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3fUhFuUP-E

The mesmers that I have trouble with are generally the ones that time their stuns/dazes with phantasm attacks, immob as they shatter, or who generally just chain stun me as these things will make it much harder for me to avoid the burst. You’ve got the pistol stun, sword immob, signet stun/daze, and greatsword knockback, these will all be a royal pain if you can get them off.

It’s all about gaining the initiative really. You need to be controlling the fight so I’m always on the back foot, and that’s what I’ll be trying to do to you. It’s normally a bit easier for the thief because of the greater mobility, once I get some damage in I can still stay on top of you, so you need to get that burst in quick and don’t let up.

nobody can beat thieves because they have the advantage to choose when to fight …..

Thank you all for your help.
Seems what I need to do it be faster with burst, have more control over the fights, more stun breaks or daze/stuns. And overall more skill, seeing as the fight is in the theives favor.

Depends on the thief you fight. They all play differently but all have weaknesses if you locate them.

D/D- can cnd off your clones, so its difficult to determine where they are. However they also are heavily punished if they miss the cnd. A blind or 2, some cripple and stay away from them. If they resort to only blasting your clones while you kite them you’re golden but if you let them get ahead of that it will end quickly for you.

D/p- Depends if they’re using high stealth up time. If not, it’s just about evading the backstab which is much easier than CnD because they kind of give away their position with the leap. Either interrupt the leap and just focus on surviving to let your clones nuke them or if the leap gets through dodge and face the location they landed while straffing. This will keep your front on them to lower their heavy hit and waste their effort to spike you (frontstab don’t do that much). On d/p I often see Mesmer’s bounce around with teleport and stealth since they are constantly blinded or guessing but the clones don’t face that trouble.

P/D- same deal as d/d. Their access to stealth which leads into their strong attack (sneak attack) is what will end up killing you. Their bleed duration isn’t that strong so its all about a rapid application and with richochet it makes your clones a paper defense. Unless they have BV you can usually spot the first bullet trail, let it hit you atleast once and dodge the rest (hard to time, often you’ll soak up 2-3). The goal is to again lower their burst (of bleeds in this case). Don’t approach one without caution because they can just hit 3 and put out even more damage. A swap with blurred frenzy wastes that effort as do shatters.

P/p- Just point and laugh

S/X- its all about playing into their open spots. On s/d its the 2nd part of their evade (that doesn’t evade), on s/p its while they are readying pw which roots them once the first part is executed. They do have escape methods still so don’t just throw everything and hope one will connect, save some sort of cc that’s fast acting and prepare your burst once you see that it has. You can’t escape from these guys and you can’t really chase them too well but the time they spend near you slashing away is the time you get to trap them.

Sb- not really there for damage, just let them run or use terrain to block their efforts.

Jake.1430:

Thank you all for your help.
Seems what I need to do it be faster with burst, have more control over the fights, more stun breaks or daze/stuns. And overall more skill, seeing as the fight is in the theives favor.

Thank you for taking the time to ask for help, rather than just calling for nerfs like most non-thieves on this forum do. It’s quite refreshing ^^

At WvW you still can 1shot thief with shatter.
At sPvP you have zero chances vs same skilled or little bit less skilled thief. You can try to disagree with it, but is the fact. The only way you can kill thief 1×1 is Moa it and hope he will not use evade at this moment. But even that doesn’t grant you 100% sucses, because many peoply know how to break off combat at moa form

You don’t.

There are also some 1v1 servers with some really good guys dueling on them.
Just check them out sometimes. With a little luck, you’ll be able to spectate some mesmer vs. thief action.

The pistol offhand is actually holding you back a bit depending on the matchup. While its CC is nice, thieves are pretty slippery and you might just get killed. They’re also not targetable by it when they’re in stealth.

I suggest considering sword or focus offhand. The CC the focus provides can really screw up a thief’s combo/stab and also act a solid interrupt that affects stealthed thieves. Sword 4 is a fantastic skill which will nullify a stab, deal damage, and generate a clone for an edge on shatter for when the thief comes out of stealth next. A mid-leap swordsman will track a stealthing thief, too, so you can possibly better read his position.

Walker.3056:

Thief has advamtage over mesmer in pvp. Doesnt mean mesmers are not viable or bad class, Thief is just its natural counter.

Funny way of looking at this, the way I look at this is… It means your are playing a game as exciting as a game of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ … the game is either broken, or just badly designed.

Now yes, I do believe in counter play (for as far as certain skills go: aka, a block to counter a strike (at the base level)), and you may occasionally run into an entire counter build to your build (it should be rare though). But if it’s at the level where one class will always beat another class (no matter the build), then really, that last class is in dire need of buffs! given the other is not OP… even more so if it comes down to one skill, somewhat like Insidious Parasite on Necro and Assassins in GW1, I dunno, I had great fun as a Necro, but I doubt that can be considered ‘great counter play’, if all you have to do is cast that one skill on time… to render an entire profession useless, or better yet, get itself killed… by Grenth I miss curses

If a thief is fighting a equally skilled Mesmer, the Mesmer should always lose. The only way a Mesmer should beat a thief is if the Mesmer is more skilled or the thief made a huge mistake. If the thief makes no mistakes, you automatically lose. If you make a mistake, you most likely lose. Thief is just a insanely hard matchup for Mesmer and it doesn’t help that Mesmer is grossly underpowered atm (except for PU, which needs to give a boon every 2 seconds vs 1)

@arghore if the assassin had that on him, why didn’t he get that cleansed lol. Only terrible assassins would die to that. My blackout Mesmer on the other hand is a different story

Have you tried a torch as a defensive countermeasure? The stealth on that can give you the time to re-position and burst as well as blind 1 heartseeker that might be channeling as you enter stealth. F3 is also your friend, even against auto-attacks.

Bamf Joe is a great mesmer to watch in terms of play. In this video, he’s using your weaponset.

Good luck!

Hi Jake,

As someone also mentionened here, if the good is skilled he should never die to a mesmer unless he gets shutdown by immobilize, daze etc.

But when fighting thiefs, chaos storm and chaos armor is your best friend. The daze from chaos storm is worth gold if you are lucky to daze a stealth or heal and the chaos armor make them miss about 33 % of their attacks.

GS burst and shatter is also really effective, even though some specs can easily avoid it by dodging.

But really mesmers big weakness is condis and burst, so dont expect to win every fight.

Cheers

If you’re asking about D/P, stagger your burst. Mirror blade is obvious. Shatter at a different moment than when you mirror blade. If you choose to be unpredictable you can have an advantage vs D/P. Daze chain from cry of frustration, and invulnerable from distortion can assure you victory. Chaos storm and chaos armor will bide you time in between shatter attempts.

Vs S/D I can’t really say what the best way to handle them is as I rarely play as S/D, but if I were a Mesmer I would consider eating a flanking strike and shattering at the same time they damage me. You might also consider shattering when you see a larcenous strike.

Shockwave.1230:

Vs S/D I can’t really say what the best way to handle them is as I rarely play as S/D.

S/D is pretty much a no-go for a mesmer. It’s not as hard of a counter as necro is to engie, but its a REALLY hard matchup for the mesmer to take on. S/D is a terror at zoning and the additional ports they get + cleave + boonsteal + reliable damage is a nightmare for mesmers.

My other input above aside, my best advice to learn how to counterplay a thief is to actually play one. I know it might seem frustrating to go through, but that is genuinely the best advice I can give. Playing the class for a while and learning its ins and outs can give you a really good feel for what your opponent will do, where its weaknesses are, and what you can do to shut them down by capitalizing on those weaknesses. Thief isn’t so much choreographed on animations such as a hammer/greatsword warrior or other predictable things like rotations on an ele but a choreographed approach to situations. These reactions to situations are what you need to really understand how the thief plays, and ultimately no amount of advice from others can have you better understand it than getting in those situations yourself.

Chicago Jack.5647:

Shockwave.1230:

Vs S/D I can’t really say what the best way to handle them is as I rarely play as S/D.

S/D is pretty much a no-go for a mesmer. It’s not as hard of a counter as necro is to engie, but its a REALLY hard matchup for the mesmer to take on. S/D is a terror at zoning and the additional ports they get + cleave + boonsteal + reliable damage is a nightmare for mesmers.

Have to agree, only time i feel vulnerable against a mesmer with S/D is if my ports bugged out and I end up blowing a steal or inf. signet before the fight even starts. If the mes can stun me after that it’s a lot more tough.

As it’s PvP, you’re main threat will probably be S/x and, well, you’re going to have a bad time. My best advice against S/x Thieves as a shatter Mesmer is to try and dump your burst at specific moments either before or after the many evade frames usually in combination with an interrupt. Mirror Images is great for delivering some unpredictable burst and many Mesmers use Mantra of Distraction just to tackle S/x Thieves as it allows you to react to important interruptible attacks. Some S/x Thieves go a little crazy with their auto-attacks, allowing for greater chance of landing your burst, but sword cleave hurts a lot, so you don’t want to be in that for very long, unless you know it’s going to pay off.

It’s generally a pretty high level matchup for Mesmer, so you will of course lose often. But shatter is one of the last truly great high risk, high reward builds in the game, so keep on playing it. I also guarantee that the longer you spend on shatter the better you will become at the game

@Jake:

I found the video I want to link originally. This entire video is tips and tricks for playing S/P+Staff Shatter mes. You’ll be interested in about 2:50 onward. Again, credit goes to BAMF Joe.

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

@arghore if the assassin had that on him, why didn’t he get that cleansed lol. Only terrible assassins would die to that. My blackout Mesmer on the other hand is a different story

I don’t think it was ‘the meta’ for a Sin build at the time. Better Sin’s usually used an interrupt to prevent casting Parasite, but it did mean one had to sacrifice another skill to do so, and it relied heavily on landing it. Also, Necro’s were not really in the meta at all at the time (speaking random arena’s here btw). I think overall I only ever saw 2 other Necro’s run a similar build to mine… (though, the best counter I ever saw was slotting an elemental ‘tang’ or ‘blade’, as IP ran off of physical damage, I hardly ever saw that though. ‘luckely’ -> apparently this skill changed as it now says ‘attack’.)

Thing was that the build was almost entirely defensive, and most the damage came from stripping conditions from allies and send them to specific foes. This meant you had to have smart monks, that ran a build that didn’t have high condition clear. While taking out the non observant Sin with Parasite was okish, the most satisfying was taking out condi rangers. Their build ran off of a monk condi clear skill, that was also the only ‘spell’ on their deck, the build I ran had the Mesmer skill (dunno name – apparently Arcane Thievery) that copied a random spell from foe and disable it on their bar for X sec. So what happened was they stack a ton of conditions on me, I would target, steal their ’condi clear monk spell (as that was the only spell on their bar), and send back all the conditions, rinse and repeat until Ranger was dead, and yes it did happen that I was busy doing that while a Sin basically killed himself on me with Parasite.

On the other hand, seeing Mesmers were still very much part of the meta, if there was a curses dealing Monk on the other team, I was basically reduced to wanding :P … the build also didn’t do to well against interruption. Not so much that everything was easily interrupted, but due to there being no conditions around.

build (as I can’t find it on PvX) :
1. Defile Defences: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Defile_Defenses + wanding; only way to really do any damage in the build :o
2. Rip Enchantment: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Rip_Enchantment
3. Arcane Thievery: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Arcane_Thievery
4. Foul Feast: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Foul_Feast
5. Plague Signet: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Plague_Signet
6. Insidious Parasite: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Insidious_Parasite
7. Hexer’s Vigor: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Hexer%27s_Vigor
8. Resurrection Signet

alt: Web of Disruption: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Web_of_Disruption , usually for Rip Enchantments, Defile defences or Arcane Thievery. It wasn’t uncommon to see certain builds change during an evening of play, f/e the rangers did have a condi-clear in the ranger skills, so if they swap out the Monk one, I would have to respond with an interrupt…

I choose for Plague signet over Plague sending, due to being in RA, no 10% HP cost, and really, when do you ever find players bunched up in RA? :P

Ok sorry for this small intermezzo, where I just had to answer to this question… please do continue on topic … as this is all ancient history by now…