How to tackle enemies' evading attacks with weapon skills (and/or) utility skills

I noticed a few things that made me feel its a little bit unfair during fights. maybe I need to find an alternative or change my playstyle. Your suggestions are welcome

When I fight mesmers, thieves, elementalist in meele range few of my hard hitting skills are wasted often.When I switch to GS, my GS2, GS5, even GS4 is totally wasted and when I switch to Axe, my axe4, axe5 gets wasted atleast 50% ofmy encounters with the above said professionsthe skills enemies use often has evades attached to them and they easily spam them often. I'm not asking for a nerf to those professions... I believe those professions need those mechanics to survive the dps flying around... but the sad thing is, they get to spam it often and it feels a bit unfair to my profession coz, i either get to evade or attack not both at the same time and plz dont say sword3 can evade and deal an attack at the end... i feel sword3 doesn't connect most of the time... GS3 gets interrrupted at the beginning sometimes but not often

Thief spam Flanking strike and larcenous strike(costs 6 initiative but idk they keep spamming it on me) or deathblossom(4 initiative) while I channel my Axe5 and they get not even a scratch and same goes for daggerstorm... atleast dagger storm didn't irritate me so much coz I know I must get out of it and I try to avoid it... but when they use flank and larcenous strike, I get the feel that atleast I'll get a hit out of my 25 sec cooldown skill and I don't have to cancel it midway through but at the end, I endup losing health resulting in unnecessary heal skill usage that I might use it elsewhereMesmers(blurred frenzy mostly) and ele(burning run and water riptide) use evading attacks too

Maybe Thieves using flank strike, larcenous, roll for initiative, flank, larcenous, flank, larcenous rotation? idk but I feel like I need to counter these kinda evade attacks

When I use GS4, my counterkick gets wasted on an evading attack.

Right now, I try to use my evade skills against their evading attack skills or stick to my GS AA but I still get damaged severely ... like for instance GS3 while a mesmer uses their blurred frenzy or symmetry axe

Is using a grffon stance and blindly dodging the attacks help? coz it gives vigor on evading

Is using our lightning reflexes to tackle that a good idea?

and for some odd reason, my "protect me" 's taunt didn't seem to work on enemies doing the evading attack. maybe evades overcome condi like taunt? idk

Also I heard from someone we can avoid the counterkick someway if we want to... I tried stowing it but didn't work... he ends the block with the kick on first hit... maybe we should hold the key and not release it? I'll try it today... if that works, I'll try to use it

Btw, I use GS, Axe/Axe. Skills I can choose based on your suggestion but now, I run "Guard", "protect me" and (dolyak or LR)

TLDR:Whats the best thing to do when encountering an evading attack from enemy?1) Run away?2) Block? idk how effective blocks can be with ranger3) Evade or burn your dodges or use merged smokescale f2?4) Eat it?5) Something else?

also if someone has any video links for the GS AA stow evade with powerstab trick, please link it...

Hey man, pm me and I'll find a time I can stream for you and show you some gs tricks.

Hmm. If it's a thief, just try to evade when they evade, and stun / hit them JUST as their evade ends or something. It's kind of a mind game. If you see him blindly spamming evades, just wait a bit and THEN strike. If he's not blindly spamming then try to figure out when to strike. As for mesmers, yea they are a real problem that's for sure. But idk. I think you can overcome this with practice. Some of my friends beat me on their mesmers but I know they are really good players so I can probably overcome that hurdle eventually.

@Eurantien.4632 said:Hey man, pm me and I'll find a time I can stream for you and show you some gs tricks.

I will and... You can post the link here for others to improve their ranger playstyle too... =)