Guild Wars 2

get good at pop stun breaker. They use venom to stun you. If you get out of the stun with any stun breaker and get out of range they are toast. But you have to be fast with the stun breaker or you’ll be toast.

At higher end we are not oped. They lose to you in duel they need to l2p. At avg and lower skill level mesmer are oped.

I play both mesmer and thief. The best thing you can do to beat a mesmer is CnD his clones. Out stealth him. The mesmer is the one that’s usually at the back, the one that dodges, moves. That being said there are so many viable mesmer builds you really have to adjust your tactics depends on the one your are fighting.

number 1 tip. You will get better as you level up. Mesmer have the best traits of any class. You may fell under powered at 30 when you hit 80 you will feel rather overpowered

I run a combo of shatter an phantasm. To be honest 1 v X is all about movement. Either use a staff or get real good at blinking and portal.

It’s very hard to best a good thief without a staff. With your setup you have to be very good at timing your blurred frenzy , dodge and stealth to counter thief’s backstab and shadow step. It’s hard to do because your timing have to be near perfect .
Edit. Have you tried using a pistol instead of focus? The duelist is great thief counter because he hit the thief as soon as he comes visible .

In my experience a good 1 v 1 vs thief come down to which one of us time our stealth better. As a thief the KEY to beat mesmer is to CnD off the clones. The clones we make give a good thief unlimited target to stealth. When you do that you have time to pick out the real mesmer and attack him/her. Most mesmer builds lack heal so in the long term you will wear down the mesmer. I as a mesmer need to time my cc and burst in order to beat a thief who is good at cnd off my clones for me to do that I need to time my stealth so that I come out of stealth after the thief and hopefully catch the thief as he becomes visible to land my CC and burst.

you will be owned in WvW if you solo. Gear and traits make a huge difference. However if you stick with a zerg which most players do you’ll be just fine. .

As for balance, this game is very balanced at the high end but as Nerfedwar pointed out at avg skill level Mesmers have a huge advantage. Watch out for thieves though in WvW they will kill you pretty fast 1 v 1.

really if you just want to tag ppl for loot GS/Staff is the way to go. Drop a gs zerker then a chaos storm and phase retreat back or blink back. The problem with mesmer in zerg is that everyone want to you run both veil and portal as well we focus pull.

oZii.2864:

Mogar.9216:

Mesmer are oped. We are the only class other than thief that can get away with zerker gear. Sure at the highest skill level mesmer are maybe balanced vs other classes 1 v 1. But the fact is that you take 2 players of equal gear and equal skill outside of the top .1%. The one playing mesmer will win vs any other class other than thief. At the higher end skill level Mesmer is even better than thief.
Yes I play mesmer as main and I have geared 80 alts of both thief and Ele.

Edit: btw blurred frenzy + null field or arcane thief simply owns DD eles.

Your post highlights the problem with many nerf threads, or this is OP etc. Mesmers are not OP. Half the conversations about something being OP are about a specific build or builds anyway.

When someone says Ele is Op the first thing they think of is D/D bunker. If a mesmer is OP usually the first thing is Phantasm spec. If a thief is OP its usually d/p or any off hand dagger build. What about Staff Ele? Healing Mantra mesmer? P/P shortbow thief?

Its not about 1v1 seriously it just isn’t they are fun but people need to get it out of their heads for balance.

You said blurred frenzy, and null field, and thievery own a d/d ele. I can say churning earth and lightning flash owns a mesmer. All of those are easy to dodge outside of maybe blurred frenzy if it isnt setup routinely after iLeap. Also the only boon that a ele really cares about losing would be stability from armor of earth the rest are easy to get.

Anyway point is mesmers are fine they are not OP because they have probably the best 1v1 build in the game. 1v1 is some side meta the players came up with. The players always will find a way to duel if there is a means to do so. The players definitely did not balance the game around duels and didn’t care if it was balanced around duels when they started dueling. Now that more people duel people think it should be balanced around dueling a feature that is not officially supported in game.

Its like Oooh world record on lupicus kills. Ok cool there is no leader board for that and there isn’t any official statement on world records for lupi kills. If you go back say 3 months into the game all those threads for Worlds first legendary (insert name).

How do those people know they where first? They don’t they assumed it with no form of data to back it up at all. Made up achievements by players are just that made up and should be taken with a grain of salt.

It’s pretty easy to tell which class are overpowered. Read the other class boards and count the number of posts about “how do I beat xxx class” . Read the thief and mesmer boards and the count the number of “how do I beat xxxx class” posts. Deep down most mesmers ad thieves know we have a good thing going here. Just like most DD ele pre heal and rtl nerf know they had a good thing going (I was one of those).
As for blurred frenzy vs DD eles. The reason it owns DD eles is because all their attacks are short ranged so you don’t have to try to land franzy on them they will come to you. DD ele is strong in healing but their healing is mostly regen, Frenzy does so much spiked damage you force them to play D. Strip their regen right after that and follow with a shatter they are toast 9/10 times. Once again this applies to 90% of the eles. Good ones won’t be caught in a frenzy. This sort of goes to what I am saying the game is balanced in the top end but it really should be balanced for the 99% players not the top 1%.

I mean how many times you run into a really good engi, yet they exist . The really good ones are god like but I would hardlyt call engis op. Same goes with guardians 19 out of 20 guardians are easy kills then the 1 out of 20 will lay a beat down on just about every one. The thing with mesmers and thieves is that even the bad ones are not easy to kill.

Ansau.7326:

Mogar.9216:

Rasterranger.8417:

if mesmer is balanced at high skill level what is the problem? if arena net were to balance around average skill level it would pretty much be a death for this game to ever be an e-sport.

Problem is you can’t get to high skill level without going through low and mid skill levels. The game isn’t good enough to make people put up with getting completely owned for day and days just to get better. Why is it fair for Thieves and Mesmers to enjoy the game right away where all other classes have to suffer at the early stages?

Because the game have never been and will never be developed around 1vs1… And sorry, but most people aren’t owned day by day in PvP. I’ve seen a lot of people with engineers, eles, and guardians who owns fights.

1vs1 is a small part of this game, which is bigger than designers thought it would be cause players do 1vs1 in WvW.

Mesmer and Thieve aren’t just good at 1 v 1. They are great in small groups and in the case of mesmer great in zergs too. There are other classes that’s oped in zergs like staff eles but they are very weak in other areas. Mesmers and Thieves are the only 2 classes that can have the SAME build and be good at every aspect of the game. DD eles to some degree are like that but not quite as good (they can pull out a staff and zerg pretty good) and they have 1 build. Thieves and Mesmers not only does everything well they can do it with different builds and weapons sets too.

Rasterranger.8417:

if mesmer is balanced at high skill level what is the problem? if arena net were to balance around average skill level it would pretty much be a death for this game to ever be an e-sport.

Problem is you can’t get to high skill level without going through low and mid skill levels. The game isn’t good enough to make people put up with getting completely owned for day and days just to get better. Why is it fair for Thieves and Mesmers to enjoy the game right away where all other classes have to suffer at the early stages?

Mesmer are oped. We are the only class other than thief that can get away with zerker gear. Sure at the highest skill level mesmer are maybe balanced vs other classes 1 v 1. But the fact is that you take 2 players of equal gear and equal skill outside of the top .1%. The one playing mesmer will win vs any other class other than thief. At the higher end skill level Mesmer is even better than thief.
Yes I play mesmer as main and I have geared 80 alts of both thief and Ele.

Edit: btw blurred frenzy + null field or arcane thief simply owns DD eles.

FinalPatriot.8034:

Mogar.9216:

I run GS/Staff . Tried all kinds of other sets in the end I just can’t get away from GS staff. I run a balanced build
10,20,20,15,5
Traits are pretty much no brainier. 20 mind wreck, dodge for clone, faster cool down on staff skills and remove condion on heal.
I beat pretty much every thing when I’m on. The only class I really have to work to beat are phantasm mesmers. The key is timing vs noobs you can pretty much bust them with just GS. Vs tougher guys I start with burst then slowly wear them down with staff. When they are lowish I steal their boon and shatter + gs zerker burst. You must be very good at using your stealth and staff 2 to confuse people as to where you are and be good at timing sta kitten as well. As I said when I’m on I beat everything, but when I’m off it’s pretty bad. I love this build because I can do everything IF I’m skilled .

I may toy around with this some as I got crushed by another mesmer using the staff and sword+sword. Granted I pretty much suck at this class still but she really did give me a brutal beating.

Are you using a zerker staff though?

pvt armor, all zerker Jewelry , Zerker GS and Rampager Staff. Trick of beating Sword/Sword is time your staff 2 when they use blurred frenzy on you. When they CC you they charge in for blurred frenzy, staff 2 blink away and shatter. He will be rooted in place because of frenzy and your clones should shatter on him more or less right as the frenzy ends. In general trick of beat another mesmer and thieves are well timed stealth. My build has more healing than most other mesmer builds even if I screw up I can just stealth and run away regen then try again.

I run GS/Staff . Tried all kinds of other sets in the end I just can’t get away from GS staff. I run a balanced build
10,20,20,15,5
Traits are pretty much no brainier. 20 mind wreck, dodge for clone, faster cool down on staff skills and remove condion on heal.
I beat pretty much every thing when I’m on. The only class I really have to work to beat are phantasm mesmers. The key is timing vs noobs you can pretty much bust them with just GS. Vs tougher guys I start with burst then slowly wear them down with staff. When they are lowish I steal their boon and shatter + gs zerker burst. You must be very good at using your stealth and staff 2 to confuse people as to where you are and be good at timing sta kitten as well. As I said when I’m on I beat everything, but when I’m off it’s pretty bad. I love this build because I can do everything IF I’m skilled .

@OP
Mogar.9216’s reply is the kind of reply from NON-THIEVES, is a very good example, that kitten es off a lot of people here in the Thieves forum.

>>>>>>>>>>
lol I have a fully geared 80 thief as well as fully geared 80 mesmer. I enjoy both classes and I have no problem with either in wvw. But at the same time I also realize that both classes are extremely overpowered, I beat 90% of the people because how oped stealth is. You sir just have your head in the sand thinking you are wining purely because of skill. BTW my third toon is an Ele, they are oped too but not as much as thieves and mesmers.

Counter to stealth is well timed dodge and counter to thief running is well timed stun. However you need near perfect timing for both . That means any skill lag will screw it up. On the other hand thieves does not require perfect timing to use stealth as a tool.
Stealth is by far the most powerful skill in game in the hands of not just thief but also mesmers.

Volrath.1473:

Imo the problem here is NOT the thief community, we get along just fine and if you search a bit you will find that every question has been answered and help has been given.

The problem is the NON thieves that come here to cry out for nerfs and insulting us for outplaying them. Obviously we will reply in the same manner as we were spoken to.

lol It’s funny how every oped class in every mmo think they are out playing the rest of the player base . Bright Wizard in WAR, Warlocks in WoW, Sorcs in SWtoR the list goes on and on.

it last for 1 hr and with map so small people will just drop them in areas of high traffic and camp those spots.

MaXi.3642:

whats wrong with it? when a guy with 0 games played defeat world champion in box, he become a new champion, is that wrong? here if you defeat much better players than you are, you gain more rating and become better rated fast, works good imo

You realize in the real world I can’t just walk up to a world champ in ANY sport and demand a title shot. Number 1 ranking is earned in every sport by fighting your way up the ladder. Otherwise the world champ title would have no meaning.

lioka qiao.8734:

You guys really need to learn to play thieves before you come rushing to this forum screaming for nerfs. Get one to 80 and go into WvW and figure out how to play it. At the same time watch how other players counter you. What you successfully died to is what you need to do to counter thieves.

Quick hints for all you thief haters out there:
- Knockback and immobilize are a thief’s worst enemy.

You know that good thieves use sword and shadow step like crazy. Knockback and immobilize only work on noobs.

Niim.9260:

In my opinion the overall issue with thieves, and why we continue to see these kinds of threads, is that they are extremely good at killing bad players as the skill cap for fighting a thief is higher then that of playing the basic thief.

Nothing about WvW encourages people to play better. No incentive to learn their class or to learn other classes. The vast majority of the players in WvW spend most of their night following a taco, stacking when told, blasting and dropping combo fields when told, running gear and abilities they were told to run.

Their play is dismal and it creates an environment where even bad thieves can be successful.

I agree with your post however I roam solo 99% of the time I would say more than 50% of the roamers are thieves. Thieves are good in the hands of a bad player and they are god like in the hands of a good player. And if you get 2-3 thieves together they work even better as a group. Add a mesmer in the mix you have a mini killing machine that’s nearly untouchable. What is comes down to is that stealth is way too oped in this game. I know cause I play both memer and thief.
I find it funny how thieves post here saying l2p, theves are not oped. The fact is you are either lying or you are a bad thief. heed your own advise if you truely belive thieves are not OP.
One last point if you think thieves have no roll in a zerg you are crazy. Take your short bow out and learn to spam cluster bomb between auto attack.

I don’t understand why would you even use this signet. I use Signet of Dom. The stun has won so many fights for me it’s unreal.

you kinda miss the point of WvW. Hardcore players don’t zerg t4 and below is far better place for roamers than t1..t3. I know because I was in every tier. T1-t3 are just zerg balls boring wvw.

hot join is a joke. real tpvp is much more balanced. Mesmer is very good at owning newbs .

playing for fun yes. play to relax? If I wanted to relax I go watch a tv show or drink some beer and shot the kitten with my friends. Very few games are designed for relax even golf. Most people I know are more kitten off on golf course than off. The problem with GW2 isn’t that you don’t need grind, the problem is that it isn’t fun. From Spvp to zerg ball WvW to Ftom. The game isn’t bad but it isn’t great fun either so it’s just a big ‘meh’.

spvp is fail not because class weren’t balanced it failed because it’s boring. I’m not sure in what world do they think it’s fun to just take a beating as long as you can is fun.

I agree with OP 100%.

The Eternal Grace.3157:

I will admit, heartseeker can be very powerful when people know how to properly get their target below 50% or 25% quickly and use it. But ok, so they steal in, use their stolen ability, auto-attack a few times, they’re below 50%, so now they spam heartseeker 3 or 4 times, ok, you’re down. Now maybe they stealth and stomp. Wow, you died quick. Ok, well now what is the thief going to do? No steal, no stealth, little initiative…hmm…seems to me another class can now take them down very easily.

Plus, if a class who knows what they’re doing against a thief like this, they can counter it, leaving the thief next to useless without their steal or initiative.

What do you mean no stealth? Blind powder , heal 1 all stealth options . You get in stealth and get init back cure whatever condition you have and rdy to go again. I’m not saying there is no counter to thief. But lets be honest thief class have very low skill floor it really is easy to pick up and be effective. Also thief class may have the highest skill ceiling as well which makes them amazing in a skilled players hands. It’s by far the best class for small scale wvw with mesmer not far behind.

The Eternal Grace.3157:

Rezzet.3614:

if you dont stop spoiling the overpowered classes you wont be able to balance them because players rely on the broken class’s power rather than skill.

take thief for example and point me one that doesnt spam heartseeker and who can blame them the darn skill hits for up to 4k damage even on bunker builds and has no cooldown .

Heartseeker is really not overpowered. Yes, you can spam it, if you have the initiative required to spam it. In order to have the initiative, you basically have to get your target down the less than 50% in order to make the skill do anything worth it, below 25% if you want to be most efficient. So to be fair, if a thief can get a target down to less than 50% or 25% health without using any initiative, they kinda deserve to beat you down with that last burst from heartseeker.

Edit: Not to mention the fact that it IS single target damage as well…it’s not like it’s AoEing every enemy.

You are trying too hard to defend the class. You either open with a backstab from stealth if target is close or a steal if they are far. If you backstab target is around 50% already. If you steal pre nerf you just took a few k from steal follow with cnd = target below 50%. Fact is if you land your opener your target is blow 50% then spam heartseeker away. if you missed then you just stealth away and try land your opener again.

Centaur runes + blink makes mesmer one of the fastest class around. You just can’t have it both ways.

remove downed state and up the ae limit to 20 and your zerg problem will be solved . This allows a smaller but better played force to wipe a much larger zerg.

Edit also the solution isn’t making keep easier to take. Right now there is no way and no pt defending vs a larger zerg. Due to the fact that you can’t thin their numbers. Defending keep is all or nothing. You can either wipe the attacking force or you won’t be able to kill a single one

I think it’s a good thing. Melee tank should not be CCed and that’s the way DAoC had it and it was not oped.

Kincaidia.3192:

Hitting the pet doesn’t matter. Ranger pets are bugged underwater in that the pet, even if killed, can (doesn’t always) continue to rez even after killed. Add in the heal that comes from being on the surface of the water, and presto, unkillable ranger.

I know because I’ve been it =) 3 vs 1, and they eventually gave up.

Ye I learned that the hard way. Fought a ranger for a good 5 mins downed him and the pet but the pet still rezed him and I just gave up.

1 v 1 rangers all the time. I win most of them. I would say I’m 80% as tough as a good trap ranger. But I have stealth and ranger does not with stealth I win out in the end.

I don’t get the change to thieves. Not that is matters tbh, it was not really a nerf to start with. But really are thieves so badly off it warren their effect to roll back a minor nerf just to keep them happy?

confusion is way overpowered but they should have thrown us a bone along with the nerf.

Shatter is still very powerful. You just have to make people walk into your shatter rather than try to force the issue . I time my shatter when I think people are charging into me or kite them to where my clones are standing.

This is in a shell the biggest problem with WvW. There is only 1 mode zerg v zerg. When are server loses you lose players and therefore lose the zerg v zerg game. People like to have fun and it’s no fun on the side of smaller zerg v much larger one so people move.

Why is this a problem? well it’s obvious in a system where you have no way of keeping the underdogs playing you will at most keep 1/2 of the player base happy at any given time, the other 1/2 will move on . This is why system need to change to reward small man a bit more over zerging. So that you can still have fun when your server is completely out zerged . Perhaps some kind of wxp boost to the under dog, get rid of down state make defending a keep vs 2x your numbers possible .

Well I love Arcane Thieve. It’s a ele and guardian killer. Halfway into a fight wait till they blown their big cool downs steal their boon and burst. 9/10 times they don’t know what happened.

Edit also it’s great for fighting confusion mesmers and screw over rangers

I am just wondering if people still enjoy wvw. I find zerging boring so I don’t zerg. But since 95% of the people who wvw are zerging it stands to reason the health of the game really has nothing to do with people who roam. So do you zergers still love this game ? Is anet keeping you happy enough ?

Why does it matter to me? Well the more people zerg the more target for me to kill . So if you are happy then I’m happy as well.

I think you see less thieves because of the wxp patch made everyone zerg which means less target for thieves. In small man whatever is left of it it’s still thieve city. I’d say I see 2x thieves than rest classes combined. Rangers are making a bit of comeback and a lot less eles.

We are overpowered so are thieves.

They nerfed confusion in spvp I highly doubt they will have 3 different effects for the same thing as in 1 in spvp 1 in wvw and 1 in pve. The most logical and likely thing to happen is for confusion to get 50% nerf in wvw jut like spvp.

ye I think you are using wrong weapons . Mesmers owns faces in hot join pvp. It’s so easy I don’t even do it anymore.

From last night 2 hrs of roaming. Couple of good 2 v 3 fights.

just a vid of me in a zerg. 7 min zerg fight. I was solo , GS/Staff. I mainly just like to kill people from a distance. Not saying I’m great but as you can see I get a few kills and do get away in the end after our zerg get wiped.

Some footage from last night. Just to show that you can zerg as mesmer pretty effectively.

Nothing special just a big zerg in EB last night. Good zerg v zerg fight.

I have played DAoC for 6 years since it’s release. If you compare DAoC classic servers to GW2 it’s not even close. DAoC at it’s best had it all. Class balance was there . There was a very very active solo scene. You know who the soloers are , soloers respected each others fights. There was a unoffical solo zone where you can go and expect people to duel you straight up. People organized solo tournaments cross realms.

There was a very active group v group community. Groups dyed their armor to the same color so when you are out in the world roaming you know who they are from a mile away. Good groups fought each otther stright up 8 v 8 . Good groups took on zergs and sometimes ‘gasp’ win 8 v 50.

Zerg v zerg had more tactics. You can actually hold out in a keep vs 2x your numbers for hours if you did things right. The map was big enough you can actually nija a keep from the bigger zerg whe they are busy trying you take over your home land . Nija a keep actually matters because you cut off teleport of the other army there by cut off all reinforcements.

PvE grind? there was none, we leveled alts and friend from 1 to 50 in 6 hrs while killing people in RvR.

I can go on and on about how much classic Daoc server is better than GW2. But don’t get me wrong DAoC was very bad when it first came out. PvE grind at first was horrid, took me 3 month to level my first guy to 50. Class balance was horrid, stealthers were killing people from stealth and never left it. Aoe damage for some class was so over the top combined with unbreakable CC meant that 3 people can wipe a zerg of 100 in seconds. The thing is DAoC learned corrected all the mistakes as the game grown and at the end they had it more or less right in every way.

GW2 is still very new I hope over time it will become as good as DAoC .