Guild Wars 2

Okay so you’re a thief in WvW heading to whatever point of interest to meet up with your comrades. Along the way a massive enemy zerg (Keep sieging big) comes over the hill and spots you and decides to pursue you. Anyone have any advice on how to survive this?

Run. x3 Infiltrator’s Arrow will outpace most anyone. Add to that your Signet of Shadows passive run buff and you should be good.

Failing that, stealth and hide behind something / pass through your pursuers and end up behind them running the other way.

Failing THAT, pop Shadow Trap and, when they set it off, run the other direction while stealthed.

Failing even THAT, turn a corner, pop Shadow Refuge and, once they pass by, run the other way.

You will be surprised how few WvWers look behind them…

There is basically no excuse for an aware Thief to be caught when trying to escape, save some REALLY bad luck. And having said that: Good Luck to you

I’ll have to try the first option. The group I ran into was way too large and spread out to get behind, and the general area didn’t provide many things to hide behind.

Hahaha…love your advices…and it actually happens to me and couple of my friends persuing a thief. He keeps disappearing and suddenly behind us, dropped 1 of our guy. Hide again…we were never able to find him lol.

I sincerely apologize

Hello! This happens to me several times in my video log of a solo WvW thief. Here’s a link to the build I use for solo WvW, with commentary. It’s changed slightly since I posted it, but the idea is fundamentally sound and has been very effective for me. Hope it helps!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfzA78xRCEGL2g92maC9TC3NK6eU7iMru

If you don’t want to watch all of that, basically just make sure you have Shadowstep on your bar, make sure you have Signet of Shadows for the run speed, and keep your shortbow out. Use infiltrators strike to get away. Instead of Shadow Refuge (as shown in the videos) you can use the +Precision signet to purge conditions in case they get cripple or immo on you. Also, use Withdraw as your heal, then whip your camera around (or use the about-face keybind) and activate it. It gives you about 3x a normal dodge away at super speed, and in the case of my build gives vigor, which lets you keep spamming roll dodge to keep moving at swiftness speed for as long as possible. Eventually, they should give up chasing.

It’s worth noting that elementalists that aren’t kitten should still be able to catch up to you (1200 range immobilize and chill, Ride the Lightning every 14 seconds, that blink skill they have) so just keep that in mind. Most of them are terrible, however, and will not keep up.

TL;DR – Shadowstep, Infiltrator’s Arrow, Signet of Shadows, Withdraw.

Something nobody else has noted: Take Hide in Shadows as your underwater healing skill, then jump in the water and pop it. This will often throw enemies off your trail quickly and provide another healing/stealth opportunity while you’re running away. You can also have Roll for Initiative on your underwater set and quickly jump in, turn around, and roll back for some extra speed. Exploit the heck out of the fact that jumping into the water changes all of your healing/utility cooldowns.

Tulisin.6945:

Exploit the heck out of the fact that jumping into the water changes all of your healing/utility cooldowns.

More often than not they don’t.

I’m not sure if they don’t do it at all, but if I use Roll for Initiative (60s CD) underwater for example, my Shadow Step for land combat (50 s CD) shares the 60s CD.

Super annoying when trying to escape over land → water → land (even more so since shadow step goes on a longer CD than it actually has because of Roll, and that without using it).