Guild Wars 2

I’m attempting to ask for all professions, but I’ll start with thief. I constantly get killed by thieves extremely easily, and due to lack of self-confidence, I just assume I’m horrible at the game, but my friends say I’m not. Anyway. Why do thieves do such high damage, while being able to avoid an extreme amount of damage, especially with daredevil. To me, as a non-thief player as it just isn’t my style, I feel thief when (quote-unquote) “Played well” can kill anything while avoiding everything. Almost permanent evasion, a lot of stealth and extremely high damage and health recovery. I mainly noticed this at the end of a pvp match where I (on my necro, which isn’t a Meta build, but still does good damage) fought a thief, who attacked me for a small amount of damage while I was looking at the end-game thing.

But anyway we fought, and even though I have Ok healing and tankiness, while dealing damage, Anyway back to the point. THey were at full health almost the entire time, while whittling me down constantly. Since thief is all about evasion and high damage, Why exactly is THIS evasive? Like, I think they use.. Sword main hand, pistol off-hand. the when you interrupt pulmonary impact trait, and the block. I don’t know if it’s just me, but… Aswell as being too evasive in my opinion. Does anyone else think Thieves have “too much” ability to avoid damage, they have a block, multiple stunbreaks that also remove conditions ( Shadowstep and Roll for Initiative for Example), lots of evasion with 3 dodge bars, sword/pstil skill 3 they can spam because initiative ( I don’t get why rev’s skills have a CD if they cost energy), and of course, blinds and abusing the F2 (using the steal item, which for me was fear).

tl:dr – Overall I feel thieves are too “strong” in that they can deal Lots of damage while avoiding or mitigating almost everything people can do. Am I missing something?

1: Daredevil has too much access to evasion. You get about 15 dodges over 30 seconds(with SoA, CV etc) I think. That is way too much.
I’d love to see that lowered, but only if they either also decrease other power creep or instead boost our alternative defense mechanic named stealth.

2:We were already basically a strong counter class to the necro. No boons to corrupt, instant cleanse of chill, and the fact that a lot of your high-damage skills are easy to evade. (especially reaper shroud skills)
But your description seems unlikely. Usually we decide a fight by: dealing some damage, running away. You cant chase us and we have much stronger healing potential. So as soon as we are back to high health we come back and damage you again. Shroud is to be outkited. Time is on our side.
So you should always loose the fight against a good thief, but the thief should have quite a couple of near-death experiences. If you didnt damage them at all, you just spammed your skills instead of baiting and predicting dodges.
There are always small time windows at the end of a dodge when you can attack us. Thats is when you try to land your high damage skills. Of course some skills are so telegraphed only a leg-amputated donkey thief couldnt evade them.
The mnetality is extremely important. I found it almost impossible to fight mesmers. Its still extremely hard, but It has become significantly easier since I started to see them as mortal beings.
General tips:
If they have a pistol, dont use your healing skill in a scenario it can be interrupted
Dont try to burn all your skills at once in an attempt to finish us, we will disengage, return and you are on cd.
If you managed to stack a good amount of condition, stop attacking. The thief might have escapists absolution.
Manage your shroud carefully. If you use it on low health to prevent death, you have lost. We can just disengage, and either you wait until it runs out, or you turn it off and are easy prey.

The thief you faced played a very specific build. There is a counter to all builds and this is no different. Pistol Whip is very expensive. It costs him 6 initiative to spend and he is rooted while doing the animation. He can port while casting with steal or infiltrator signet. He can also cancel the animation if he misses but the initiative doesn’t get refunded. With initiative regen, he can do 3 PW in a row(maybe 4 with Upper Hand procs). To counter this, you must kite him, run, whatever to make him miss and burn his initiative. You probably made this mistake in trying to go toe to toe with him. It’s common to do so in shroud. PW also has a built in evade frames(not entire duration) and while you’re trying to hit him, his evades are procing regen/health from Upper Hand/Invigorating Precision/Signet of Malice.

The first portion of PW has a very clear and slow tell that you can easily dodge or kite. The stun itself is very short (1/2 sec so no need to waste stunbreak even if you eat a few swings) but it will proc Pulmonary Impact if you’re casting. What makes PW so deceiving is that it’s 8 attacks when it shows 4. 8 attacks of Invigorating Precision/SOM, plus the evade if you’re attacking him, and he’ll always be topped off in health. Don’t sit in the whipping cone.

It probably seemed like he was spamming PW, but only noobs do that. It’s the equivalent of vault spamming. Playing S/P trains to you manage your initiative and he probably did 2 in a row at most, throwing in auto-attacks, dodges, etc in between. Since you don’t have any ports(except Wurm), he is able to literally run up to you and cast PW at his discretion. If Pulmonary is procing, then he doesn’t have Escapist Absolution(condi clense on dodge). Stay in staff and bomb marks. He has Infiltrator’s Return but it costs 5 initiative(total) to cure 1 condi so I’m guessing he’s using utility skills to clense.

It’s a fun but the root and high cost of pw made me shelve it as a “once in a while” build. My tip is, when you seen the sword swinging, don’t attack. Try to minimize seeing “evaded” by learning the tells.

Daredevil has too much access to evasion. You get about 15 dodges over 30 seconds

That’s a bit misleading. You can only achieve that if you are using SoA twice in that time period, and assumes ideal spacing of dodges and endurance gains. Here’s a better way to characterize it.

1 dodge / 10 seconds naturally (.1)
2 / 30 from SoA (.0667)
1.6 / 16 from CV (.1)
1 / 30 from Steal (.0333)

So 0.3 per second or one dodge every 3.33 seconds. You can get a bit more from other sources, but those are the big ones.

Comparatively, another class with no endurance modifiers at all gets one dodge every 10s. So a DD that uses all three skills when they are off cooldown has three times as many dodges as the worst case for other classes. However, the other class likely has block, invuln, protection, resistance, etc. Also, it is very unlikely that you will always use all of those skills off cooldown. I’d say a dodge every 4 or 5 seconds is more realistic.

Remember that prior to the vigor nerf, our dodges cost 35 with feline grace and with vigor it would only take 3.5s to get a dodge. That was without even using SoA. The vigor and FG nerf killed S/D and Acro. I don’t think we have too much evasion now. We have a lot, but we need it unless Anets seriously tones down other elite specs.

Edit to answer OP, lockdown is your friend. If you’re on necro, immob or chill will bait dodges, some good pressure can bait shadowstep, which may be his only stunbreak. After that, fear will give you the opportunities you need to really lay into him.

I actually imply double use of cv (due to cooldown) and also imply the use of Brawlers tenacity and a ~50% vigor uptime.
But the number was in fact an approximation I did a few days ago while wandering outside, not having access to the actual numbers.