Guild Wars 2

I recently came back to my thief: warrior is too boring and easy to play.

I’ve been wondering, how do you guys manage the all stack in the corner meta with your thief? I can survive well when not stacking in almost full berserker gear, but when people want to stack, that happens very often, I’m guaranteed to get downed. I even manage to die on AC spider queen boss. When facing Kholer, no matter how fast I am stunbreaking out of his spin attack I die in a split second. I play S/P so I should have some pretty decent evasion uptime, but it seems bosses always manage to hit me in between evasion frames. Also, I have a very hard time dodging manually because when stacking I can’t see anything (think about COE stacking spots). I feel disappointed because I wanted to go back to thief badly and now I can’t play it because of the kittening stack meta.

How do you guys handle stacking on thief?

When stacking vs Spider in AC make sure you have someone who is bringing condition cleanse for the group. If I die on spider it’s because one of two things. We didn’t clear conditions or someone moved and caused the spider to do it’s ranged poison attack.

When stacking and you need to dodge, dodge into the wall so you don’t actually move anywhere. (You may need to press and hold the movement key in the direction of the wall or else you will by default evade backwards)

Its called pistol whip and black powder

Black Powder meets Unshakable. Black Powder loses. And, and I already said, I already spam PW to survive.

I already dodge towards the wall, I think the problem is the lack of cleanse.

Well it depends a lot on your group. If your group sucks and/or lacks dps you will probably be the first to go down. On spider queen everything should be alright if no one breaks the stack and moves the boss, but that applies to most of encounters. Always carrying signet of agility on your bar helps a lot for those bleeds. On kholer in most cases dodging as soon as he starts spinning should keep you alive and any damage taken should be healed up pretty fast with signet of malice+ pistol whip on kholer and his spawned trash. CoE has by far he easiest boss encounters imo, its very easy to evade alphas aoe (p2 and3 ) with pistol whip without actual dodges. Using signet of shadows blind to avoid initial trash wolfs oneshot jumps also helps.
The worst part running dungeons with thief is current “Only warrior” meta. After filtering out all “only warrior” lfg posts and ending up kicked on daily basis from freaking CoF pug central before even entering just because of being thief can get inside your head pretty fast (at least it does for me).

I don’t have much of a problem with surviving stacking, stacks like spider, i use S/P with SoM and caltrops. The thing is not to spam PW like crazy, i only use it when i have aggro and when she uses the web attack. BV can buy you that extra precious second if needed.

Against Kholer, well either he dies or i do, nothing can be done about it. Unless someone puts up timely reflects. I hate stacking on this guy with pugs, i prefer to fight him normally on pugs. While i do have the timing of his scorpion wire, i do bring RfI as a “Oh Kitten!”-button. Also i have it bound to E.

Alpha stacking is easy to dodge, i find bringing SoM, SoA and caltrops can deal with the burning and rock spikes. While saving your dodges only for the red circle.