Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone!

For starters I want to say that I am placing this thread in the Thief thread since this seems the best place for my targeted audience. Everyone who is whining on the Thief and about all the stealth stuff comes to this particular bit of the forum anyway!

Without further ado I am a lvl 80 thief, have logged around 2050 hours on it and can say I main it intensely. Yet every time I log on and see the Thief forum it is filled with requests of nerfing the profession into the ground and of people with full glasscannon builds getting hit for high amounts of damage. To the latter I say: IT’S YOUR OWN DARN FAULT! :P

But how to fight Thieves who ‘permanently’ stealth?

To know this is to know there are 2 kinds of thieves who have easy acces to stealth via their weapons and thus enabling to ‘perma stealth’. These weaponsets are the Dagger/Dagger (of which skill 5, 6 initiative cost gives stealth in melee range) and the Dagger/Pistol (of which a combination of skill 5 and skill 2 give stealth, a hefty cost of 6 + 3 initiative to pull that off).

A Thief in WvW usually has Shadow Refuge on him aswell and sometimes Black Powder (instant stealth smokebomb).

Dagger/Dagger
The main damage of these stealth builds usually come from the skill Backstab which requires you to atleast be close to your enemy. If you get hit by a Cloak and Dagger and the Thief stealths. All hope is not lost. He has 3 seconds to hit you before the stealth wears off. Use this to your advantage! The Thief will want to hit you, so if you make it hard for them to position themselves behind you, this will reduce damage. If you count to 2 or try to anticipate when the Thief might strike, dodge the complete attack. This will render the Thief without stealth (if he was slow) or atleast with 1 second of stealth left.

Only use your dodges for making sure he cannot stealth or hit you with the tremendous painfully backstab. Don’t expect a flawless fight. You will get hit and getting hit by certain attacks is part of a strategy to take them down.
If a Thief spams heartseeker while you are on full health. You can allow yourself to be hit by some of them. His initiative will be low and the blows will be fairly weak. This can be used to draw the Thief in a nasty trap of your own. Be clever with your own positioning since the Thief is a primarily position focussed profession. Screw up their board and they are bound to run.

An example of how I killed a Thief from Piken Square yesterday.
I was youtubing a bit for some metal but had vision on my hp bar. I saw it quickly downed to 50% health. I was in my venomshare build and had D/D active. I used my stealth heal followed by basilisk venom. The other Thief didn’t hit me with his cloak and dagger so was visible. I threw a dagger (Dagger offhand skill 4) to turn him into stone. I had a second and a half to close in and use my own cloak and dagger to prolong the stun (trait residual venom). I succesfully connected with cloak and dagger and proceded with a backstab on my stoned (huehue) victim. I activated my Drake venom for chill after my backstab. I knew the thief was going to stealth or try to so I had to keep him near me. As the stun wore off he used cloak and dagger, I got hit BUT I knew where he was. I turned a bit to my left and used cloak and dagger and backed off. The other Thief was dumbfounded and tried to beckon me over with /laugh. I whipped out my shortbow and started shooting. The other Thief used cloak and dagger + steal combo for instant stealth. I could see the animation for cloak and dagger and barely managed to dodge it. I knew now that the other thief either had half initiative or almost none. This was my time to strike. Basilisk venom was recharged again, I activated it and threw a dagger > cloak and dagger > backstab > followed by the drake venom > heartseekers and a win.

With the fight above I want to make clear that positioning and anticipation is key. If a warrior was in my same situation, use your blocks or defensive skills to negate or mitigate some of the damage. Wear him down. The same advice goes to other professions!

Dagger/Pistol
This is a much harder setup to beat if you are primarily focussed on melee damage. This kind of Thief doesn’t really need backstab to kill you. If you stand in the black powder smoke field…well…that’s not really smart :P If you do decide not to stand in the smoke field, the Thief may use heartseeker (a leap finisher) to go into stealth via their smoke field. Try to stay at a distance of a few seconds walking. This will make sure the Thief has to pull off some awkward movement to connect. usually this will fail and the Thief becomes visible.
Again positioning is the key in this fight. Backstabs are a one trick pony. Facestabs don’t do as much damage, they still hurt but not as much. Anticipate the movement and try to imagine where they might be headed.

One of the thumb rules is that if you are too much trouble, Thieves will usually run off into the great wide beyond. If you are intent on killing a stealthing Thief, prepare to anticipate a lot and get hurt. If you can draw the Thief in by letting him hit you, you know where he will be aproximately (drooling at the sight of your bare back, yes i am looking at you, all you scandelously clad female characters roleplayed by men! :P). Use this to your advantage and prepare some cripple/chill/immobilize/blocks.

The reason I am writing all of this, while I almost never post anything, is that I am absolutely tired of all the rants from the other professions about how ‘imbalanced’ the Thief is and that they are so broken OP and all other accusations. We prey on the unwary and mentally challenged :P If you do NOT know how to counter stealth we have a huge advantage. If you do know how to counter stealth it’s an annoyance to fight against them but they will be left dumbfounded when crushed into the ground with your well placed AoE’s and autoattacks.

So please stop crying for nerfs and try this out :P

TL:DR
Anticipate the movement of Thieves. Try to not get hit by key attacks like Cloak and Dagger, if that fails try to position yourself in a way that a Thief has to do a lot of effort to connect with backstab. When they are revealed (usually when you get backstabbed) dodge to evade their cloak and dagger and bash em!

So please don’t cry for more nerfs and call this profession imba broken etc. I want to keep playing this awesome profession and that it isn’t worthless in any aspect of the game. It’s pretty terrible in PvE at the moment when it comes to group play. No being massive DPS isn’t counted towards being a great group asset in my book, if that’s the only thing i can bring :P (yeah yeah venomshare, I know and I love that build)

Also, stay nice in this thread please!
If you have questions or anything, add Thorgar Shadebeast to your friendslist and whisper me when I am ingame or post in this thread!

Thorgar Shadebeast signing out!

Undeadkemea.4865:

[…]

You figured out some importent points and you’re basically right with many things you mentioned.
Nevertheless this is just another “how to deal with thieves”-instruction that looks good only in theory.

You forgot one thing: thieves are not bots. They learn from mistakes too. Most of them have been in all those situation dozens of times. They know that their potential victims will try to avoid their attacks and HOW they will do it.

Long story short: Every class can try to counter a thief, but a thief can counter all these attempts too. There are ways.
So in the end the Thief is always the one, who is one step ahead thanks to stealth.

most important point is to know when to use the skills. i think u left that out. in the d/d builds use a dodge/skills at roughly 2.5 secs after him using CND on you or after using black powder or hide in shadows. on DP you have about 6 seconds of invis if he stacks it so run run run when u see that little circle then turn around and run right back at it with a dodge around 4-5 secs after invis then maybe aoe ground ice/blind or w.e. or dodge again. there is nothing worse tha a thief wasting initiative. the only kittene to guess is when he uses shadow refuge but atleast you can do some mean kitten to him in that circle for 4 seconds. ok that said have fun.

Blankverse.4927:

Undeadkemea.4865:

[…]

Long story short: Every class can try to counter a thief, but a thief can counter all these attempts too. There are ways.
So in the end the Thief is always the one, who is one step ahead thanks to stealth.

This.

Oh look. Its blankverse ignoring thief advice again.

Zacchary.6183:

Oh look. Its blankverse ignoring thief advice again.

Is there something in my statement you don’t agree with?

PS. i’m not sure if you’re trolling me or you didn’t understand my intentions in the past, so i say it once again.
I started thief to learn how to counter them.
Since a few weeks i play almost only thief.
The only thing i learnt during that time is how to effectively kill other classes. Not how to counter thieves. Sad but true.
This is of course only my own private opinion, you may have yours.

@Travlane: Thank you for giving some extra information. Yes timing is important. I was prone to leave something out. Wrote it when I was at my college and had some time before my tests

@Blankverse: I am pleased to hear you are saying I am basically right with the points I mentioned. I thought so too and that’s kind of the reason I posted it :P
And indeed, Thieves are not bots. So is the warrior who uses to learn his shieldbash after a person used his dodges and other evades. Ofcourse we learn from mistakes and so should other people!
I wrote this so most people would get a grasp of what can happen with the D/D and D/P set instead of crapping their pants and sucking their thumb hoping for the Thief to leave them alone. Contradictionary to popular believe is that we have no immunity or whatever when we are in stealth. Immobilize us while we stealth and we are still in the same spot where you immobilized us. Vulnerable to the same attacks as before!!!

And one step ahead, yes stealth is supposed to give us an edge in combat, apart from the mobility on the sword. It’s the only thing we got going for ourselves. We use it to reposition ourselves. This thread is to show that you are not at a loss when fighting a Thief attempting to repositioning himself. You still have a good chance of hitting him or atleast evading some damage.
Also I am sorry that you don’t see a way to counter Thieves from personal experience but I think you actually do. You acknowledge my points so you admit that you know how a Thief works in a sense. Use that knowledge on your other professions and I think you will be fine!

@Xavi: Same goes to you what I said to Blankverse

I appreciate the time you took to read this or atleast the time you took to reply! Keep it coming!