Guild Wars 2

I’ve recently gotten my thief to level 80, after just playing it in pvp for a long time.
I run full zerk and am extremely comfortable with staying alive with d/d, my problem is to do with dungeons where we stack on a spot to deal with enemies. I keep dying on the stack due to not having enough room for evading, I do evade against the walls etc without much luck either. Anyone have any tips for this ?

Not sure if it is gonna help much , since i am not doing PvE at all but maybe if you use D/P for blind could help

I’ve been considering doing this but just wanted to get some opinions on this, I’ve tried using blinding powder and popping signet of shadows for the blind without much effect, but this might just be due to not sustaining the blind for long enough.

Staying alive on a stack is extremely difficult for a thief with full zerkers because the only defense you have is going to be the pistol blind aoe. Also if you look at the blind skill you will see that it only ticks 4 times while it is down. So if the enemy is attacking fast, then they will still hit you in between blind procs

You really shouldn’t limit yourself to one weapon set, especially not as a Berserker.

Use Sword + Pistol in situations where you need to stack. Pistol Whip spam will help keep you alive and often deal more damage than Backstab spam.

Offhand pistol works well on a tight group of veterans and normal mobs. It can be perfect defense for your group. Smokescreen is good too and works cuts out some ranged attacks as the mobs come in. The blind on stealth trait can work but this is the perfect situation for smoke.

The other option is to stand off from the group, sometimes peeling off after a pull, so you are not standing in the middle of aoe and channeled attacks. You can still be very close or even in behind the mobs in melee. You can still use caltrops or even traps. The import part is that the mobs are still grouped together and easy to kill. You’ll probably have better visibility this way too.

Remember that if you drift off the stack and get killed by the fight mechanics, which can happen in AC, then you’ve got to take the blame. Sometimes to learn the fights you’ve got to find out what bad things happen when you don’t follow tactics.

I will try all these things out been waiting for anet to fix pistol whip though since the stun is horrible at the moment, but I think the evades should work nicely with the stun and smoke. But thanks to all for the recommendations.

Use signet of malice, and either PW or on trash packs use shortbow, you will heal yourself like a pro and it does good aoe (by the time you cast e.g. a 10K PW, you can cast 2×5K cluster bomb, which is also a blast finisher). It depends on your build as well though, posters here will consider my 0/30/10/20/10 build lame, although uber builds initiative-starve while I spam cluster bombs and other weapon skills all day long. I don’t do speedruns though, because I don’t give a kitten about a few minutes. I only go on guild runs anyway.

For dungeon trash, I use sword/pistol for the AE damage, the frequent evading from pistol whip, and the AE blinds from pistol #5. When used properly even in full dps gear you should be able to survive.

Now bosses are a different story. A lot of times in dungeons you are asked to stack up against a wall and burn down a boss(or champion), and since you cannot effectively blind them, that leaves you with evades, which at best will only be active half the time, leaving a big window for you to get 1 shot.

I don’t really have any tricks for success here. I just try to stick with my backstab rotation and hope that my frequent stealthing keeps aggro off me, and hope that the guardians do a good job of sharing aegis/protection(like they should if you are using the stack strategy).

Part of the reason for the stack is so that the team can easily res people as they go down… people made good suggestions here but you’ll be up in 2 sec after going down anyways.