I’m not sure how you will beat any halfway decent thief with staff, it has all the weaknesses of D/F against thief and the only upside is a bit more CC that you will never get off when fighting a good thief.
Have you read the guide?
See, first of all, it isn’t of essence to try chasing the thief around with your mouse to land your fields on them.
If you’re a thief and you’re fighting a staffie (or any other class) if you want to win, you’ll eventually have to come out of hiding to deal damage, no matter how good you are. A good staff elementalist will recognise that chasing you is pointless and will instead wait for these moments where you try to attack. In these moments, a good staffie is able to neutralise your damage and return heavy damage while temporarily keeping you from running away. In short: the staffie is making you pay for the damage you want to deal. Combine that with the fact that thieves have very little access to stunbreakers and you have a succesfull strategy.
Please don’t say “a bit more cc”. The staff has waaay more effective cc’s than the D/F could ever dream of.
As a thief, if you never get cc’ed by a staff ele, it isn’t because you’re a decent player, but because the staffie you’re fighting is REALLY, REALLY new in it!No, you’re missing the point, it’s not whether you can hit the thief with your CC, it’s whether you can even cast it. A proficient thief will be able to headshot almost all your skills with cast times with the exception of maybe unsteady ground. Furthermore, everytime a thief initiates on you, he will either have basi, and/or shadowshot. So, in order to land your CC, you’ll need to clear the blind with your slow kitten attacks and then CC.
No, i’m not missing your point, i’m trying to tell you that it’s invalid.
You don’t seem to understand.1) When you interrupt some1 it means that you put the skill that he/she was using on a 5 sec. cooldown.
2) I’m guessing with “almost all your skills” you mean my defensive skills, because i primarily use my long casting offensive skills to lure out interrupts against a thief, so when you interrupt these you’re doing me a favor.
3)The only situation where interrupting me gives you an upper hand in a fight is when you open up on me, in that moment, you can’t interupt all my skills because you’ll be too busy trying to do something more useful/resourceful. And even if you did try it, not only would you be wasting a good opportunity, but it won’t be anough, i have more skills of the same type than your headshots can handle. And i’m not even including utility skills. So the ultimate way to make good of your headshot, is to headshot me once and then follow up with burst before i can use another, but similar, skill.
So i can fill up the 5 seconds window by trying to use another countering/cc’ing skill. Therefore it’s impossible for “a proficient thief” to keep headshotting almost all my skills with cast time in an effective way.4) You talk about blind like it’s stability, i don’t know about the hard cc’s of other classes or weapon sets, but last time i checked, my wall (=unsteady ground) and my static fields are NOT AFFECTED by blind! these are only and exclusively ineffective against stability, which, guess what, the thief virtually has NO access to! Plus the amount of cc skills on the elementalist that are effected by blind is quite marginal. So, no.. I do NOT need to clear the blind with my “slow ‘kitten’ attacks and then CC”!
So your argument on shadowshot is invalid.5) Now, about basi, first notice the cooldown (=40s).
I have multiple ways to counter this, one more effective than the other.
My most effective one is tempest defence trait (in air line; has a 25sec cd) and of course the usual utility stun breakers. You can understand that i won’t be using these if not necessary and even if you already procced the tempest defence trait, I’ll always have a skill ready to counter.
These skills are not slow casting, in fact, if you knew the staff well, you’d know that it’s the offensive skills in general that are slow casting, the defensive ones have a decent to no cast time!I know the staffs alleged weaknesses, not only because it’s all that ever gets whined about!
Everytime a thief interrupts, they do around 3k unmitigatable damage. Staff ele’s shortest cast time is unstable ground at 1/4s, everything else is at 3/4s. That is simple to interrupt. I’m not sure you realise how much this disrupts a class. Have you ever duelled any proficient thieves? Ever?