Guild Wars 2

I’m getting wrecked by scrappers on the regular…just wondering if there’s any method or tips I should be adhering to when going up against one in spvp. I’m running S/D DA/TRICK/DD with marauder and pack runes.

Most other classes I can handle/beat or it’s at least a close fight when I lose, but most scrappers end me fairly quickly without losing more than 20% of their hp.

How are you guys dealing with them?

You dont. I mean: maybe there are certain builds capable of dealing with them but…couldnt imagine how. The problems to consider:
1. They have access to retaliation. Hit them with high power and you just keep killing yourself. Even on a condi build the selfdmg is mostly enough to counter your passive heals. And you cant evade it either.
2. They have access to conditions and conditionremoval.
3. They have great defensive skills without sacrificing damage and good healing.
4. They can still put out nice amounts of damage, even without trying
5. Good cc and good access to stability, making them hard to counter with cc.
6. They can either reveal or simply outstealth you
Im running d/d sage and most scrappers mean to play on time. I can keep them busy for a while, but if noone saves me, I have to leave the point.

But lets analyse their possible weaknesses:
Boonstrip to get rid of mostly retaliation and protection. I believe their main boon access is through one particular elixir, so initially stealing those boons could be beneficial.
In general i had most success while using staff. It allows you to stay away from your enemy (their autoattack is fairly strong) and still land quick hits for high damage. Also you can use it inside a stealth gyro with a fairly high chance of hitting the near-death scrapper and kill it.
Quite a couple of damage as well as healing comes from a perk, that procs on critical hits, so the less hits they score the better. Stealth might be an option.

Personally I see them>thieves in a similar position as guards. They simply hardcounter us, not much we can do about it. Also scrappers are probably one of the most powerful classes in the current game, one of the few that regulary win 2v1s.
Thankfully, as cheesy as the class might seem, they are not exactly easy to play. I’ve tried. there are a lot of scrappers with a mere semi-optimal understanding of their class, those you may still beat, the really good scrappers however, you may not.
Unless of course some admireable thief figured a way out. I’d really like to hear that too ^^

edit2: put the ’edit in the wrong place. Edit: one more tip: If you somehow manage to get them to the 25% percent threshhold, the next hit will likely decide the fight. They are now on auto evade, as soon as they get back out of it, their healing skill has auto-recharged and they are ready to start over. So make sure you have a hard hitting skill to finish what youve begun, land it in perfect timing as they become vulnerable again and get rid of any remaining steathgyros.

Hello mate,

Scrapper has a good counter to everything thief can offer in solid 1v1, but you can kill/outplay them sometimes.
First of all scrapper takes at least 3 “rounds”: slick shoes+ elixir s proc, gyro, by the time you going to finish him, these 3 will be on cd, unless you’re fighting newbie scrapper

To start chopping him, I recommend to CC him first, to proc protection (from protection injection), then proceed to steal it with steal (this trait has 5 sec ICD), but beware of good scrappers, they may block right after daze.
After you stole protection you may chop face, as engi can’t stand this damage. When fight is closing to 50% engi’s hp mark, he’ll use his heal first time, you may try to interrupt 1/2 sec cast, but it is close to impossible.
Then on 25% hp there goes s proc. The best way to deal with it is to time heartseeker to its end, because it will onehit them, because if you fail to do so, they will most likely heal for full.

Fight vs engi is silly and gimmick.
Basically, engi has 5 skills to avoid/counerplay: #2, 3, 4, 5 on hammer, #4 elixir gun + slick shoes.
Once they used their first rotation of hammer block and hammer evade you may try to take initiative of the fight, but his amount of safe buttons summed with offensive capabilities on short cooldowns leaves you close to no space for mistakes, and even then it is not a guaranteed win.

Thanks for the responses, fellas. Guess I have to recalibrate my expectations when playing vs scrapper. I was unaware of their hard-counter to thief (I thought one hard-counter, being DH, was enough).

You +1 someone that is fighting a Scrapper, that should do it :^)

In my experience I found that staff is better then s/d or d/p dealing with scrappers. AA, #3 #4 is what I mainly use vs a scrapper.

walk away, that is how

given same skill level no scrapper should ever lose to a thief in 1v1 – too much sustain and too much dmg not to mention hardcounter

I agree with the answers above. I believe DH and scrappers are the current hard counters to our class. Sometimes I wonder if scrapper mechanics weren’t even tailored specifically towards killing thieves, considering how much sustain they possess without loosing a certain burst potential that is sufficient to kill most thieves.
Generally I’ll try to test the opposing scrapper, to see if he’s a really bad and thus a potential prey, but more often than else I simply disengage, because I find it uselessly frustrating to fight a guy for 10 min that can down me nearly the instant I do my first mistake. Better, strategically more useful fights gotta be found elsewhere.

While you likely talk PvP and i from a WvW perspective , I found staff/PP is about the best chance I got with my builds. The build premised on boon thefts and interrupts with sigils. I always have to watch for their Thunderclap as that tends to get me in trouble.

I looked at my own scrapper and played him a while to try to see what would be a weakness against a thief. There not many if any that a thief can regularily take advantage of unless the scrapper traited with low condition cleanses and you have a condition thief. There just so many automated passives that kick in that anytime a thief gets the upper hand one of these will trigger and you have to start again.

I tend to find them harder to deal with than DH.

I won’t explain better than those above me, so I won’t bother. Only add that it is possible. (And 2/3 of my most played classes are thief and engie) I’ve been taken down on my engie to good thieves (almost always have the upper hand though) and I’ve killed some scrappers on my thief with good positioning and mobility.

However, in pvp this is a team game, so you don’t have to worry about who you can 1v1 on a thief. It can be frustrating to be at a disavantage against a lot of meta builds 1v1, but you can zoom around the map and “finish” a lot of fights. Very useful in a game. The initial clash can be tricky though.

Only class that can reliably kill Scrapper is Druid. Other than that, it just out does every other class. A necro probably could too tho but idk.

The DH is easy fodder to Bv, scrapper are harder but if you can get the right window they die all the same.

Thieves perform poorly against bunker Tempests, Celementalists, trapper DH, most Scrappers, bunker Druids, most Revs, Mesmers and Chronomancers. Even some zerk based Warriors are a problem as they can “accidentally” down a thief just spamming skills or nuke them from long range with Gun Flame.

The prime targets are wounded players, zerg builds, other thieves, kiteable necros/reapers and the other base classes not inlcuding Mesmers. They are also solid as +1.

Basically if you encounter an enemy of equal skill in an even matchup, the thief is often at a sizable disadvantage. Their biggest asset is running away.

Realistically, either bring more thiefs, or find out where the scrapper lives, go to thier house and hit thier CPU with a super soaker. (But get close, thief only has 900 range)

Straegen.2938:

Thieves perform poorly against bunker Tempests, Celementalists, trapper DH, most Scrappers, bunker Druids, most Revs, Mesmers and Chronomancers. Even some zerk based Warriors are a problem as they can “accidentally” down a thief just spamming skills or nuke them from long range with Gun Flame.

The prime targets are wounded players, zerg builds, other thieves, kiteable necros/reapers and the other base classes not inlcuding Mesmers. They are also solid as +1.

Basically if you encounter an enemy of equal skill in an even matchup, the thief is often at a sizable disadvantage. Their biggest asset is running away.

Sorry, i know this thread is meant to discuss scrappers, but since the original discussion is basically finished: i cant leave this standing like that.
You point of view is unfortunately very popular and still the way many thieves play their class (might even be the most effective way, i dont care)
We do not perform poorly against eles and druids, we just cant kill them. They cant kill us either.
Mesmers and warriors are simply prey, both classes are in a very bad spot right now, both classes are outright countered by thieves. While a skilled mesmer might down you with an unexpected burst, if youre loosing fights to warriors youre doing it plain wrong.
The last time I lost against a warrior i was wounded, on full cd and ignored a long chargeup rifle skill that i could have dodged easily.
Revs are the same as necros: they may win, they mostly dont.
Ofc thats just personal opinion but we are in a more than fair spot regarding 1v1. We just have to work twice as hard as everybody else and cant afford a single mistake but then again: thats why we play thief.

I wholly agree with Asrat. I don’t have much issue with most classes other than the unfortunate step I take into a DH trap (learning to handle these kittens and recognize their patterns lately, which helps immensely) or the aforementioned scrapper. People love to wig out and blame other things when they get beat simply because they don’t want to adapt or actually figure out why they failed. The thief forum is saturated with these types of complaints…it’s gross.

In WvW, I generally find I can at least survive and kite a Scrapper and possibly even spike them through their many defences if I play very well. It’s really tough though and requires you to make little to no mistakes.

It’s a completely different story against DH though as they can prevent you from kiting AND deny you a melee burst with little to no effort on the DHs part.

I recommend looking for Chronos and Warriors instead

Asrat.2645:

Straegen.2938:

Thieves perform poorly against bunker Tempests, Celementalists, trapper DH, most Scrappers, bunker Druids, most Revs, Mesmers and Chronomancers. Even some zerk based Warriors are a problem as they can “accidentally” down a thief just spamming skills or nuke them from long range with Gun Flame.

The prime targets are wounded players, zerg builds, other thieves, kiteable necros/reapers and the other base classes not inlcuding Mesmers. They are also solid as +1.

Basically if you encounter an enemy of equal skill in an even matchup, the thief is often at a sizable disadvantage. Their biggest asset is running away.

Sorry, i know this thread is meant to discuss scrappers, but since the original discussion is basically finished: i cant leave this standing like that.
You point of view is unfortunately very popular and still the way many thieves play their class (might even be the most effective way, i dont care)
We do not perform poorly against eles and druids, we just cant kill them. They cant kill us either.
Mesmers and warriors are simply prey, both classes are in a very bad spot right now, both classes are outright countered by thieves. While a skilled mesmer might down you with an unexpected burst, if youre loosing fights to warriors youre doing it plain wrong.
The last time I lost against a warrior i was wounded, on full cd and ignored a long chargeup rifle skill that i could have dodged easily.
Revs are the same as necros: they may win, they mostly dont.
Ofc thats just personal opinion but we are in a more than fair spot regarding 1v1. We just have to work twice as hard as everybody else and cant afford a single mistake but then again: thats why we play thief.

Actually I disagree regarding elementalist. I remember before the bunker gutting almost winning a long duel against an elementalist on a point when I was a marauder power rev with sword/sword. I had to overcome their stability, time interrupts just right against heals, use UA at the proper moments, and weapon swap (with chill but ele has a trait where dodge cleanses it) at the proper moments, usually when all my other stuff is on CD. Then a necro +1’ed and I lost. :(

Meanwhile thieves have stealth and an on demand interrupt with staff (stealth only, so dagger/pistol is a good secondary choice) or sword/dagger. You can unload some sick damage with stealth after a knockback with stealth, just don’t waste all your initiative (but still use staff 2 for some weakness application) since autoattack still does decent damage. Impact Strike is also good for when they’re low as long as finishing blow doesn’t land when they’re invulnerable and preferably even when they aren’t downed and crits and non-crits wills screw up your estimations of when to use the skill too.

Asrat.2645:

We do not perform poorly against eles and druids, we just cant kill them. They cant kill us either.

Skill being relatively equal, basically any build that doesn’t have to target their short range damage and has heavy spike is a problem for a thief. Any class that has heavy sustain is a problem for a thief. Any build that is bunker with decent AoE or cleave… yep… is a problem.

We can argue till the cows come home which build would win over another build. In my experience the best players driving the classes I mentioned will park a thief, run them off or a thief will attempt to tie them up until they can outnumber their opponent most of the time. A thieves method of attack is very limited and at the higher end those guys have seen ALL the tricks.

1. use Basilisk Venom/Headshot/Impact Strike
2. use Steal with Bountiful Theft
3. make sure they’re poisoned
4. pressure and attempt to prevent Healing Turret
5. wait out Elixir S, time a heavy damage skill to hit directly after it wears off or get ready to inflict CC to prevent Healing Turret

with all of engineer’s heavy CC and damage pressure through Hammer (which is really overpowered right now) you have to play evasively by hitting and then kiting.

- if you evade all abilitys, even then you gonna be pressured hard by on ground shlt and retal, be caucious with that.
- you have to time venom/impact strike/bandit-kick cleanly, no kitteng up with wasting them in stabi or getting insta stunbreaked.
- apply all your damage after these CCs hit.
- use steal to interrupt hammer2 or hammer3(this needs a lot of practice) this can ensure you dont miss steals to random dodge etc.
- if you do this for a decent amount of time with 0errors engi gonna die.
- if engi is running paladin amulet duel is inposible(if engi is not handicapped).

d/p cs/trick/shawdow arts and autoatack for the win.

Urejt.5648:

d/p cs/trick/shawdow arts and autoatack for the win.

and die to perma retal~