Few of you might have see a thief hold a supply camp for like 10 minutes on their own and not sure why, I thought I would just briefly go over how its done and how it can be countered (Unfortunately you will need more man power than the thief has, probably a team of 5 to make it quick)
Usually to pull this off perfectly with minimal risk, the thief would need 30 points in both shadow arts and acrobatics, this gives mobility , longer stealth, and a lot more initiative regeneration.
Traits you want are those that gives 2 intiative on stealth, move 33% faster in stealth, regeneration 2 initiative every 10 second, remove condition in stealth, regenerate health in stealth, regenerate initiative in stealth and gain vigor upon healing, this gives you crazy amounts of survivibility and sneakiness.
Weapons: Dagger Main/Pistol Offhand
Settings: Must turn auto targetting off in you options
Skills: Get withdrawal for healing (yup not hide in shadows), shadow refuge, roll for initiative, signet of agility or shadows
How to carry it out:
This is all you have to do, cast black powder with your 5th gun skill and do heart seeker with your 2nd dagger skill, HS will only cost 1 initiative because it counts as a skill that will give you stealth due to its leap finisher effect, so you can jump in and out 3 times to stack the stealth up. I think there is a new limit to allows stealth to only stack to 15 seconds maximum, but thats more than enough in most cases.
With auto targetting off so you don't accidently leap towards a player.
Withdraw and roll for intitiative are used while you are in stealth, this makes it hard to track where you are currently even if they catch your ring of black powder or shadow refuge
How to counter:
If I was doing this myself I actually don't see how anyone can get to me, I've done similar things in WvW naked and was not killed either. Your best bet would be if the thief is not really skilled, they might not be using withdraw and roll for initiative, usually without these two the thief will have to pick a certain spot to land his black powder (Certain supply camps have structures for you to hide behind while you cast black powder), so if you can find those key spots you can place someone there to AoE the area..etc
Or just sent another thief that's capable of doing the same maneveurs to go in and carry out the same stealth play, turns into a game of endurace to see which thief wants to back off first :S
With a team of dedicated thieves you can easily cap anywhere you want from keeps to castles as well, unless Anet decides to nerf thieves for being as sneaky as this.
» Edited on: 2012-11-13 17:28:34
