Guild Wars 2

It may just be my WvW bracket, or me not paying much attention, but it seems to me a lot of thieves tend to not make creative use of their utilities in WvW. to solve this, I want to use this thread for that purpose. I’ll start off with some of my Ideas, but I would love for everyone to join in.

Shadow Refuge-not just for running away

I rarely see anyone using the group stealth aspect of shadow refuge, but it can prove amazingly useful, during keep/tower defense, ranged enemy siege such as catapults/arrow carts/ballista and even trebs are placed right behind the enemy line, often grouped up. with proper use of shadow refuge, you can stealth a group from inside your keep/near the enemy lines and sneak up on the siege equipment and its defenders. with 5 people, you can create an AoE storm that can kill the siege and its operators/ some defenders, and even possibly run away without dieing. of course, this also works to get in the middle of an enemy group and attack with the element of surprise.

your mobility-use it.

with the mobility/invisibility we have, we can easily run supply to besieged locations. combine shadow refuge, blinding powder and shadow step as utilities with a shorbow, and you can stealth/teleport out of a location, pick up supply at a camp, and bring it back in without getting caught, allowing you to draw in supplies from nearby locations, assuming they aren’t all captured. you can also keep in sight of an enemy zerg and make sure your side knows what it is doing, with little fear of getting yourself killed.

These two are all I can think off at the moment, so please add your own, and hopefully we will see a rise in thieves making creative use of their abilities, making people hate us even more.

Used shadow refuge to stealth down AoE specialists when we saw a zerg capping a sentry point. They all bunched up waiting for points inside that little circle when suddenly 3 wild daggerstorm thiefs and some 100b warriors backed up by empowering guardians unstealthed among them.

You can use the wild animals to your advantage. Aggro them and stealth away to see them attack nearby enemy players!

Here’s a stealth tip:

Shoot cluster bombs into your Smoke Screen combo field to make AoE stealth blast finishers, sStacking AoE stealth as long as you don’t hit an enemy. Also, if you trait to get 2 initiative back on stealth, the Cluster Bomb shot costs 1 Initiative.

Fun fact: Two thieves doing this smoke screen trick wisely with Shadow Refuge and Blinding Powder can keep a Dolyak invis permanently.

Shadow Refuge is extremely reliable. Prevent’s downed teammates from imminent finish, stealth for quite a while, with the healing in stealth trait, it can heal as much as hide in shadows, just over a lengthy period of time.

Shadow Refuge is indeed probably the best ability for teamwork and roaming solo, whereas I find the venom’s increasingly less attractive as they’re often blocked. I just love pulling of Ambush and Thieves guild together in small and solo fights and the surprise confusion it induces as well as hefty DPS when I start looking like a Mesmer with 3 buddies. Thieves guild again is the best Elite I think although the 3 min cool down is probably deservedly long. In big fights mind you I switch to Basilisk which is nice when it works and helps with Stomps and a cool down that enables it to be used more repeatedly.

Elmuerto.9840:

Shadow Refuge is indeed probably the best ability for teamwork and roaming solo, whereas I find the venom’s increasingly less attractive as they’re often blocked. I just love pulling of Ambush and Thieves guild together in small and solo fights and the surprise confusion it induces as well as hefty DPS when I start looking like a Mesmer with 3 buddies. Thieves guild again is the best Elite I think although the 3 min cool down is probably deservedly long. In big fights mind you I switch to Basilisk which is nice when it works and helps with Stomps and a cool down that enables it to be used more repeatedly.

I don’t agree 100% with your elite choices. Daggerstorm is by far the best elite to use vs a zerg.

Jefzor.7145:

I don’t agree 100% with your elite choices. Daggerstorm is by far the best elite to use vs a zerg.

daggerstorm+signet of malice into 4+ people, watch as they flail about, dying while trying to hurt you, since most people in WvW wont strip stability and interrupt it.

Scorpion wire, great skill to take out certain people. Especially when you’re in a party and can call the target before pulling.

As a charr thief: Battle roar on auto-attack

Jump in front of a group attacking the gate, use caltrops, retreat (if needed with shadowstep)

Smokescreen in front of your group when enemy/ally uses daggerstorm or other long-during ranged attack

Shadow refuge on the ranged allies, gives them lifesteal

With S/P+SB I tend to find the best way to go is pepper the enemy with CB and once someone is out of position switch to S/P, shadow step in, Pistol Whip them down. When backup comes shadow return back and lol and there’s now more people out of position and your zerg kills them too to make this more effective I use Haste because its by far the best utility for a thief provided they can mitigate its drawback with SoA, Infiltrator’s Arrow, Shadow Return or any number of stealth skills.

best strategy’s in WvW :
-hide near enemy’s spawn point, and wait for the first low lvl
kill him and /dance
-add knockdown traps on Jumping puzzle
- run in jumping puzzle with caltrops /dodge
-run near enemy’s keeps /towers and hit dors to mark them
-watch when the 2 other sides fight / do dagger storm betwen the zergs and go away
-leave yak’s

Rayya.2591:

best strategy’s in WvW :
-hide near enemy’s spawn point, and wait for the first low lvl
kill him and /dance

-run near enemy’s keeps /towers and hit dors to mark them

Loled at first one
And don’t we all do the second one? If there was a stolen item with “cow kitten” in it, I’d drop it in front of the door as well

Gungnir Grimm.7123:

Jefzor.7145:

I don’t agree 100% with your elite choices. Daggerstorm is by far the best elite to use vs a zerg.

daggerstorm+signet of malice into 4+ people, watch as they flail about, dying while trying to hurt you, since most people in WvW wont strip stability and interrupt it.

Man… Just do that in a good group. You will die in seconds (if you render, most of the time you survive because you do not render which is why you think that it is awesome good). Daggerstorm is good against the newbies zerg though especially those range attackers who just attack you and not change to melee or just dodge away.

Just played a HUGE WvWvW session today GoM and we were vs BP+AR (and their unholy alliance).

As a thief I managed to rack in well over 100 kills today. Now what did it mostly for me were these tips.

1) defend with the short bow and only use cluster bombs from the ramparts. Cluster bombs will deal 1.5k damage to the bunker builds and 4-6k damage to anyone else. It literally makes you a walking ballista. If you target those who go down not only do you do your side a massive, massive service but you’ll rake in the kills (and therefore badges).

2) Whatever weapon set you use as your secondary make sure you’re engaging when its risk free. If you’re running S/P this means you don’t go “ kitten I has a pistol whip. I press 33333333.” This means when you see someone out of position you get in, you mess them up and if you can, you finish the job…if not let the beefy guardians do the last bit of work.

3) form a gank team of 5 people and go take supply camps and cut off the reinforcements that trickle into the battles (the dead will have to eventually res and run back so kill them while they do it!). If you notice X server camping the EB jumping puzzle that is a massive opportunity to farm badges as well.

4) If your server has a defendable position that funnels the enemy get on siege equipment and start blasting away.

Unfortunately the Thief utilities in WvWvW aren’t overly good beyond shadow refuge, its more about the general goal and weapon set.

BlackDeath.8106:

Gungnir Grimm.7123:

Jefzor.7145:

I don’t agree 100% with your elite choices. Daggerstorm is by far the best elite to use vs a zerg.

daggerstorm+signet of malice into 4+ people, watch as they flail about, dying while trying to hurt you, since most people in WvW wont strip stability and interrupt it.

Man… Just do that in a good group. You will die in seconds (if you render, most of the time you survive because you do not render which is why you think that it is awesome good). Daggerstorm is good against the newbies zerg though especially those range attackers who just attack you and not change to melee or just dodge away.

I know you will die in seconds, if they strip stability and knock you down, scatter and drop AoE from range, or use another counter to it. the problem is, in WvW when people group up they tend to lose a lot of their common sense, making it actually work more than it fails. but yeah, if I see a group mostly from 1 guild, or that seems organized, I will switch to thieves guild, or be a lot smarter with dagger storm use. and I will not use signet of malice.

edit: lets not get horribly off topic arguing this. something tells me we can go back and forth on this forever.