Guild Wars 2

So I am a warrior and I would like to illicit the help of the thief forum because I think I just fought God in WvW. He would only be visible for about 5 secs at most and then go back into stealth. Watched him take out 3 people solo. He had a pistol in main hand and i didn’t see him swap. Can someone help me out with what kind of set up hes running and how one would go about countering it?

That’s a pistol dagger build. The best counter is to stay ranged. Knock him back, knock him down. If he’s getting up close, he’s going to use the skill “cloak and dagger” which basically is a skill that gives him stealth as he stabs someone. That’s his main stealth. If you can dodge it, he’s practically dead. I was experimenting versus a p/d thief. I was using only auto attack shortbow, and he was using P/D. I kept dodging his CnD’s and his only stealth was healing, and shadow refuge with the occasional lucky CnD.

It’s all about perfect timing. Make sure to pack condition cures.

If you’re a glass cannon warrior. Use rifle. If he gets up close(which is hard for a P/D thief to do with zero gap closers), knock him back. Continually walk back when firing. When he gets in melee range and is about to Cloak and dagger, dodge backwards. Switch to GS every now and then and use whirling greatsword away from him, to gain more distance. If you have any immobilize, use it!

Doomdesire.9365:

That’s a pistol dagger build. The best counter is to stay ranged. Knock him back, knock him down. If he’s getting up close, he’s going to use the skill “cloak and dagger” which basically is a skill that gives him stealth as he stabs someone. That’s his main stealth. If you can dodge it, he’s practically dead. I was experimenting versus a p/d thief. I was using only auto attack shortbow, and he was using P/D. I kept dodging his CnD’s and his only stealth was healing, and shadow refuge with the occasional lucky CnD.

It’s all about perfect timing. Make sure to pack condition cures.

If you’re a glass cannon warrior. Use rifle. If he gets up close(which is hard for a P/D thief to do with zero gap closers), knock him back. Continually walk back when firing. When he gets in melee range and is about to Cloak and dagger, dodge backwards. Switch to GS every now and then and use whirling greatsword away from him, to gain more distance. If you have any immobilize, use it!

Thanks for the advice!

Probably a similar setup to my own, and one that’s pretty popular in WvW.

Pistol/Dagger with a Shortbow Swap, carrion gear.

Traits:

0/0/30/20/20

This thief is extremely durable due to the limited initiative use from the cloak+dagger>Sneak attack attack chain. With the proper traits, this thief is capable of maintaining 10-14 stacks for 120+ damage bleeds on a target with the pistol alone, healing passively while in stealth, curing conditions while in stealth, and having enough initiative to swap to his shortbow and use infiltrator’s arrow to escape when things go south.

We excel at killing slower targets with limited amounts of condition removal, small Hp pools, or both. This makes us particularly effective versus damage-build warriors as the warrior class tends to have a very limited amount of condition removal.

counterplay

The P/D thief is extremely reliant on cloak+dagger stealthing. In order to keep up his DPS, he needs to successfully hit with cloak+dagger in order to trigger the two initiative return on stealth, as well as the majority of his survivability traits, which are all activated only when in stealth.

The build varies, in utilities, gear, and some trait selections from person to person, but the constant is that to survive and successfully kill things, the P/D thief needs to stealth often, and needs to trigger that stealth with a melee attack. The most effective counter for the P/D thief is countering cloak+dagger by blocking, evading, or knocking back the thief do it doesn’t hit. This causes the thief to waste six initiative on a failed stealth attempt. This prevents the thief from stealthing, cutting off his condition clears and stealth talents, and successfully countering this attack three times in a row will force the thief to either blow a cooldown for some initiative, or simply leave him without an opportunity to re-stealth or enough initiative to utilize any of his CC or gap-opening weapon skills.

I reccommend rolling a quick P/D thief in the mists and practicing the cloak and dagger>sneak attack chain on a dummy. You’ll learn the rythem of the common attack sequence pretty fast, and learn to recognize when a P/D is likely to swoop in to melee to C&D. This is the “tempo” of P/D and learning it is the first step to sucessfully countering him.

As a warrior with hundreds of hours played in wvw I rolled a thief just for that reason.

While its easy to theorycraft a whole bunch of responses, ( bulls rush, HB/whirl combo him and get lucky, falling back forcing them to shortbow after you blowing intiative and try to burst them down before they get another 6 for c&d. ) Fact is none will work, every single scenario relys on the warrior getting incredibly lucky, and the thief screwing up royally or being far too agressive. The P/D spec is pure attrition, they cant kill you quickly but you have no hope of killing them,

your best spec to fight them is a gimmick spec that almost no warrior would use, longbow – sword/warhorn with mending and shake it off to clear as many of the higher stacked bleeds as possible, bolas to help set up a longbow 3 burst and Stomp to counter their shadow refuge. (if you can successfully stomp them out of shadow refuge you might even win the fight.) The longbows ability to drop decent aoe at range is convenient when you’re just guessing where the thief is, and the blind is key to avoid easy cloak and daggers.

If you get lucky the thief will take too much damage and be forced to reset the fight, which takes as much as 30 seconds giving you time to get away or call in friends.

Yeah I kind of agree that although there are ways to hurt him, it relies on the Thief making mistakes as much as it does on the Warrior.

People tell you to dodge the Cloak and Dagger attack which is fair enough, but incredibly hard to do in a WvW environment. It becomes a non-issue once there are other targets around you (even mobs and critters) and he can use them to Stealth as well.

So in theory, yes, try to dodge his Cloak and Dagger if you can but far more importantly, try to CC and stun the Thief nd put him under a lot of pressure.

I’d think a Hammer and Rifle would give you the best shot, the Hammer for all the stuns and CC and the rifle for the range damage and pressure.

Just be aware of the “Blind of Stealth” trait many Thieves run with as it could ruin a crucial attack. So keep spaming.

As others have said, thats a P/D, probably with him condition damage. It’s a great counter to warrior (bleeds/poison ignore armor). I’d say equip some “givers” stuff or anything else you can do to drop condition damage.

Also, blind/daze the crap out of him to stop him from getting his stealth off from the dagger offhand (he has to be in melee range to do it, tho he will likely steal/cnd to jump into melee and dodge back out).

Make sure to swing even if you can’t see him. I agree rifle is a good counter, but keep in mind he’s also ranged, and will have probably 2 to 3 stealths OTHER than his dagger offhand stealth, so you will have to wait it out and he will likely run away if the odds turn in your favor.

I have both a Thief and Warrior so I can see the fight from both perspective.

As a matter of fact, the Thief will die in 3 hits if you land them.
The trick is to keep moving toward him and never stop swinging at the most logical direction, while using Whirling Attack (GS 3) to both dodge Sneak Shot and halve his life.
HB also has a wide range so don’t be afraid to HB when you think he’s in that spot.
Hammer does this best tho; Earthshaker is pretty good for AoE stomping a Thief.

Yes, condition Thieves are pretty hard to counter as a Warrior since condition damage bypasses your armor and Endure pain/Defy pain completely.

As for killing 3 people on his own, I kill 5 at a time in WvW on my Warrior (Earthsaker+frenzied HB+WA = 30k AoE dmg) so that’s not really indicator of anything.

Dee Jay.2460:

Yeah I kind of agree that although there are ways to hurt him, it relies on the Thief making mistakes as much as it does on the Warrior.

People tell you to dodge the Cloak and Dagger attack which is fair enough, but incredibly hard to do in a WvW environment. It becomes a non-issue once there are other targets around you (even mobs and critters) and he can use them to Stealth as well.

So in theory, yes, try to dodge his Cloak and Dagger if you can but far more importantly, try to CC and stun the Thief nd put him under a lot of pressure.

I’d think a Hammer and Rifle would give you the best shot, the Hammer for all the stuns and CC and the rifle for the range damage and pressure.

Just be aware of the “Blind of Stealth” trait many Thieves run with as it could ruin a crucial attack. So keep spaming.

Unfortunately Dee Jay is pretty much right. I played P/D for a while and warriors were definitely my easiest matchup since they can do almost nothing about all the bleeds you stack.

Your best bet is to play keep away with them, and hit them as hard as you can with your rifle and only purge the bleeds when you get 8+. That means if they get in close range, dodge their CnD and knock them back if you can. That also stops caltrops, which will completely murder you.

If I recall correctly, there is a youtube video that reveleals a powerful elementalist pvp exploit. I quess you could try to apply that on a warrior. Don’t know what else you can do about this problem.