Guild Wars 2

As a thief, how do you counter a d/p thief ?

10 in SA, even so Your going to be blinded alot. Bring a D/P of Your own and do the same to him.

You don’t unless they’re stupid. You can survive, you just won’t kill him. That’s thief in general though.

If you’re building specifically to counter D/P? I’d say it’s the same for us as it is for any other class: bring your CC.
S/P gives you two stuns/dazes, add in Devourer and Basilisk venom and you’ve got four. You’ve got blinding powder too, so predict his bursts to just sit in your blind field and there’s not much he can do to you. Just some ideas.

You can reach them standing outside the circle, a couple ways you can counter D/P.

Start at 1:40

My ideal weapon set for dealing with them is probably D/P and S/P. One of the strongest counters to D/P is interrupting their heartseeker through black powder, causing them to waste a lot of initiative and prevent them from stealthing. They avoid most damage through being in stealth or blinds so if you can CC them, such as sword 2 or stealth attack with short bow, and you can land most for attacks. Just be cautious not to stand in the black powder if you’re in melee range, although pistol whip can still deal most of it’s damage here. Scorpion can also be used to close gaps or pull thieves out of black powder, but it’s not something i would normally run with.

Using black powder or predicting their movement and using pistolwhip can be used to avoid their backstabs as well.

a d/p build has great initiative regen to compensate the cost of the combo, so if you try to conter it with d/p without a specific build, you’ll fail.
basilisk is ok, but it gives you just 1.5s and it’s almost impossible to kill a thief in 1.5s
devourer is just an immobilize and won’t counter the combo… he’ll stealth and (with IV) remove immobilize
pistol off hand could be a good idea… not for the smoke field but for the interrupt. but i think stealth will trigger even if HS is interrupted, because it triggers when you cast it and not when it lands.
maybe scoprion wire + tripwire + basilisk ?

s/d it’s a good option, tnx mathias

Outplay them.

As a D/P tpvp player, I can and have beat every type of thief that is seen in tourney, including other D/P thieves. It just comes down to playing better than them. There isn’t a set thief build that is guaranteed to work.

There are some good tips here though. Some more…

Learn to anticipate backstabs and dodge appropriately, imagine where you would be if you were the stealthed thief, and have an internal timer in your head of when they might pop out.

If you are running a sword build, make liberal use of infiltrator’s. Good S/D thieves that jump around and have an evade heavy build are among the tougher ones for me to fight.

If you are D/P vs D/P, either a little extra in SA or some form of initiative regen can give you an edge in a drawn out fight. You can outsustain a 25/30/0/0/15 if you dodge their big hits and are running something like 10/30/30/0/0 or 10/30/10/20/0.

I would highly suggest going into a custom duel server and just practicing against a willing D/P thief over and over. I’d even help you out myself if you want it and I’m available.

quite doable, use CC (slow / root), use your stealth often, when he uses black powder you know that a heat seeker is coming your way so dodge it and even know he is stealthed you know exactly were he landed (the place you were standing before dodging so if you have a dagger off hand, use CnD on the place were he is and you will land it 90% of the times, he’s stealth will end before yours.

this is just some tips i don’t mesmerize my rotation or anything like that i play according to what my opponent does, but in general the above works really well.

Volrath.1473:

quite doable, use CC (slow / root), use your stealth often, when he uses black powder you know that a heat seeker is coming your way so dodge it and even know he is stealthed you know exactly were he landed (the place you were standing before dodging so if you have a dagger off hand, use CnD on the place were he is and you will land it 90% of the times, he’s stealth will end before yours.

this is just some tips i don’t mesmerize my rotation or anything like that i play according to what my opponent does, but in general the above works really well.

If you dodge towards the field you also prevent them from quickly turning around and reapplying it, potentially revealing them if your sat there after CnD and they try it anyway

Daendur.2357:

but i think stealth will trigger even if HS is interrupted, because it triggers when you cast it and not when it lands.

I think the stealth is triggered when it lands, otherwise you’d enter stealth when it’s activated and break stealth when the heart seeker lands. Interrupting heartseeker will waste the initiative spent on both the black powder and heartseeker.

yeap….stay close and almost in the black powder shot…only for like 1.5 secs max tho….then dodge away to avoid bs.