Guild Wars 2

So, I just recently decided I wanted to play a thief (I usually main a warrior) because they seem like a lot of fun in WvW and PvP. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get the hang of getting behind enemy players; with all the glow and particle effects, it is difficult for me to tell what orientation the enemy player is in. I realize this might be a weird question, but are there any tips or tricks for getting myself behind my target?

Just two tips.

1) Remember that you can backstab even by flanking the enemy (no need to be exactly behind, just not in the 90° arc in front of the target);

2) Do it over and over, with experience you’ll learn how to position yourself quickly at least on the flank of the target.

;)

^What the guy above says, I think experience is the best way to get used to backstabbing. At first it might seem a little hard but you’ll get the hang of it fairly quickly. We all did.

When in solo, just be cautious and stay in stealth before you have the upper hand. If you’re not pressured and you don’t have to burst a target quickly, CnD off a mob/ bp-hs combo to regain stealth and position yourself better. In group settings, since you’ll have to burst quickly and continue to apply pressure if you want to win ( if fighting outnumbered you have to kill them fast otherwise the other guys in your group will have a hard time) just blow a cooldown, like infiltrator signet to go right on your target, leaving you some time to move around and backstab. When i first started playing thief i used the +50% movment speed while in stealth and found it useful for better repositioning.

^
Fleet Shadow is really, really good for landing your Backstabs.

Awesome advice everyone thank you so much!

Probably the easiest way to land a backstab is let go of all your movement keys (w,a,s,d) before you backstab because your character will automatically turn in their direction to backstab, you don’t need to 180 the character/camera yourself. So you can just run like half way through them (if you have melee attack assist off) and then backstab like that and it will always land.

If you’re using pistol dagger, you can just stealth then use shadowshot and then press backstab and interrupt the shaddow stab (the hit after the shot) with backstab.

Alternately you can use backstab + steal or backstab + infiltrator signet. If you press backstab first then those, your backstab will be past the “casting phase” and to the “hitting phase” the moment you shadow step behind them.

However, with the shadow shot or steal/infiltrator signet you need to make sure that when you shadow step you will be within the double “zone”. Advice for this is by kind of backing out a little and waiting. A lot of people use the “circle” method (running/spinning in circles) to avoid being backstabbed and by doing this it makes it easy to wait and shadowstep in for a backstab.

If you need to do a “finishing” an easy mode backstab for a finishing kill, you can do this, but you’ll burn a lot of cooldowns. Stealth then shadowstep (utility) behind them then do the backstab + steal/infiltrator signet but don’t hold down movement keys after you shadow step so you don’t have to turn your camera. I like to call it the blind backstab because you dont really see your enemy until after the backstab goes through. I generally dont recommend this unless you just wanna look cool or you need to deliver a killing hit because it burns so many cooldowns. It’s pretty much 100% success backstab in the back if you’re fast.

the blind backstab looks pretty cool though because if you do the autofacing backstab with some kind of shadow step, when it lands your camera will autoface behind you again. I feel like its the “aimbot” version of backstabbing.

It’s really just practice. You really just need to get the motion down and make it as fluid as possible. Additionally, the more time you give your enemy to react to you going into stealth, the more they’ll do to try and move their camera/rotate their character to prevent an easy stab.

I wouldn’t abide by the above advice because players can react differently to engages. Learning to turn will increase your stab reliability and will reduce the dependency on in-game systems or your opponent’s failures to take over.

To reduce volatility, it’s considered good practice (playing D/D) to use Basilisk Venom before entering combat, and pre-cast Cloak and Dagger (dagger offhand 5) and during the beginning of the animation steal into the enemy. The teleport will move you while casting, causing you to instantly land BV from the CnD (or mug first if you have it traited), stun your target, and stealth you in one fluid movement, allowing you a brief window to reposition and land the stab. The faster and more fluid you are, the more difficult it will be for your opponents to react to the CC, use a stunbreak, and dodge the damage on time.

D/P is much more difficult to land stabs for when engaging due to the lack of quick-stealth combo and is made more as an in-between defensive set for high stealth uptime without the need of hitting another player/entering combat.

Oishi.4358:

Probably the easiest way to land a backstab is let go of all your movement keys (w,a,s,d) before you backstab

I don’t know why, but I’ve always felt like my backstab combo goes off WAY quicker when you don’t touch your movment skills. To me, this just means thieves just need to position themselves better before the backstab to get the smoothest combo off. Win win.

DeceiverX.8361:

It’s really just practice. You really just need to get the motion down and make it as fluid as possible. Additionally, the more time you give your enemy to react to you going into stealth, the more they’ll do to try and move their camera/rotate their character to prevent an easy stab.

This is what i was referring to as the “circle method”, which they might not always run around in a circle but stated above in a different post, just getting past the frontal 180 is good enough.

DeceiverX.8361:

I wouldn’t abide by the above advice because players can react differently to engages. Learning to turn will increase your stab reliability and will reduce the dependency on in-game systems or your opponent’s failures to take over.

To reduce volatility, it’s considered good practice (playing D/D) to use Basilisk Venom before entering combat, and pre-cast Cloak and Dagger (dagger offhand 5) and during the beginning of the animation steal into the enemy. The teleport will move you while casting, causing you to instantly land BV from the CnD (or mug first if you have it traited), stun your target, and stealth you in one fluid movement, allowing you a brief window to reposition and land the stab. The faster and more fluid you are, the more difficult it will be for your opponents to react to the CC, use a stunbreak, and dodge the damage on time.

I agree that players will react to each situation different, but my statement on the “auto camera turn” was used in a method that I specifically stated “don’t do this unless… blah blah blah”. Furthermore, you address in the second paragraph that learning to “reposition” is crucial and I agree with this too. However, the way you mention positioning your character for a backstab seems to me is more about “setting up” the backstab. I never mentioned positioning because I thought the utility for auto-turn with a backstab is obvious which is: in the situation where backstab takes the longest to get behind your opponent AKA (relatively) in front of them OR eliminating the need to turn your camera should you get to the side of/behind them in stealth somehow without facing them (by you/them dodge rolling/leaping/etc…).

But I will provide an example of a use mentioned above: if you wanna talk about efficiency, let’s take your example above and assume you went into stealth in front of your opponent and need to reposition. Math tells us that the shortest distance between any two points is a straight line so running through your target will always be shorter than running around them. Even if you ran diagonally to his side, it would still be shorter to run straight through him than diagonally through him because all enemies appear to be “circular” (at least according to the targeting circle below their feet) so running the diagonal to the side would be the hypotenuse of a right triangle which is the longest side and running straight through him is the radius of the circle (one of the legs of the right triangle aka shorter sides). Either way, running the straight or diagonal through him is faster than strafing around him (the arc), and automatically turning your character for a backstab will be faster than manually turning your camera to backstab.

If your target has a brain, he will start attacking the air the moment you stealth and will easily understand what you’re doing if you run “through” him. You can even take more damage than what you do, if the enemy is zerky.
It works on noobs though, I’ll give you that.