Guild Wars 2

Hey I was a Mesmer main and now I switched over to Thief and was playing with a D/P 2/6/0/0/6 build in sPvP, I do pretty well against most opponents as long as I time my skills right but Mesmers are incredibly hard to fight effectively for me, even though I know the skill rotations of the Mesmer like the back of my hand.

All advise I can give you is focus on hit and run tactics. You already know Mesmer if you’ve had it as a main to the fullest, with a zerker thief (assuming since you have dagger/pistol) you can’t sit around for too long or they can lead you into a trap.

Quite amusing to read this after going through some threads on mesmer forums about thieves facerolling 24/7.

OP, just give it more practice and you’ll get better at running away from mesmers.

A well-played mesmer that doesn’t do a single mistake is a quite even fight for a D/P thief, the mesmer even have the fight tipped in his favor.

A mesmer that is poorly played against thieves is killed by being aggressive. Always gapclose in, keep pressure, keep blinds up and land backstabs. This will often cause these ones to panic and die quite quickly, and in the middle of their panic; alt+tab to open up google chrome and enter https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief to start a new topic, often the panic will wear off and they’ll cancel the topic before creating it.

Some things to keep in mind based on my experience with both classes:
Fighting skilled mesmers takes more patience, landing backstabs on meatshielding clones will make you completely waste your BP>HS combo and often lead to your death. If they enter stealth it will usually take ~1.5 – 2 seconds and you get immobilized, moa’d or stunned for 50 years and caught in a shatter combo which instantly kills you, learning the timing to dodge this will be invaluable. If you are forced to shadow refuge, make it safe; consume ectoplasm gives you a short stability and a 10s aegis, or create a good distance between you and the mesmer (with shadowstep if needed), or use SR in a corner and hug it. Zerker phantasm is your worst enemy, if the zerker phantasm lands its first spin as soon as you enter the fight you have pretty much already lost. Blind is hard for mesmers to deal with quickly so keeping a good blind uptime with Shadow Shot and Blackpowder will be helpful, many thieves doesn’t care about landing the blind from BP, but you really should. Stealth also pretty much locks them out from hurting you (beware of clones tracking through stealth though). While fighting outside stealth also try keeping pressure on phantasms. Also headshot and steal is good to prevent mass invis and their heals. And as always, don’t fight predictable, I often stealth for no reason, to just stand and look at how my opponent tries to counter me and blowing cds.