Guild Wars 2

I cannot think of a better solution which would please all crowds from the most disgrunted to the most “elitist” thief out there.
There must be something which force tactical decisions on the average thief player, the idea of failing to kill the target should be something to strongly consider and have appropiate counter-measures in that regard.
Right now the 3s debuff is simply not enough for the target, who did manage to avoid the burst, to retaliate accordingly and punish the thief who failed the attack.
It’s time for the thief class to fully realize the importance of toughness and the consequence of not having any, a 10s debuff should be more than enough to “punish” the average thief, the skilled ones should still be able to avoid dmg for that 10s…after all they’re skilled right?!
The increase in debuff timer would solve any culling and lag problems too , really Anet what are you waiting for?

10s seems painfully long, but.. given how absurdly long of a stealth they can acquire from a few moments in a shadow refuge, it seems balanced. At least from shadow refuge’s viewpoint. Every other stealth is far too short for a 10s revealed state.

In my opinion it should be included in the skill shadow refuge.
Giving the user a debuff that makes them unable to use stealth again for 10 seconds

lol if they give 10s for restealth, I demand they remove thief from game and replace it with a flying unicorn with lazorbeams and machine guns + bacon + apache helicopter and nuclear bombs

cuz Firetruck
thats what it is

The could change it so you always get “revealed” when stealth ends or after any attack (even if you miss).

Numot.3965:

The could change it so you always get “revealed” when stealth ends or after any attack (even if you miss).

I have to totally agree on this one. One stealth should only allow one Backstab attempt so if you do hit (meaning if you just spam Backstab in the air it shouldn’t reveal you) a target and miss because of blind, invulnerable or block, you should be revealed.
The current system makes it extremely hard to avoid a Backstab with your invulnerabilities or blocks because the thief just won’t appear after 3+ Backstab fails.

IMHO, they should make reveal bound to a specific skill, but increase it to 15+ Seconds (this would only matter for C’n’D afaik, cuz all other stealth-skills have longer Cooldowns anyways).

This would make it possible to chain stealth-attacks in a fast manner, but would force the Thief to fire off his Utilities and therefore make some sort of a decision with a certain drawback, if he wants to play very aggressively.

You could chain stealth-bound-attacks faster, but you would have to use more than just C’n’D and if you were overaggressive, you would’ve used up 1-2 utilities and weren’t able to go back into stealth.

The biggest Problem is C’n’D IMHO – it’s way too easy to get into stealth with this skill and it needs a much bigger drawback, Cooldown, Initiative-cost.

If you just want to make it a global reveal, sth. between 5 and 10 seconds would probably be sufficient, but Backstab needs at least a 20% DMG-nerf anyways. ^^’

Arheundel.6451:

I cannot think of a better solution which would please all crowds from the most disgrunted to the most “elitist” thief out there.
There must be something which force tactical decisions on the average thief player, the idea of failing to kill the target should be something to strongly consider and have appropiate counter-measures in that regard.
Right now the 3s debuff is simply not enough for the target, who did manage to avoid the burst, to retaliate accordingly and punish the thief who failed the attack.
It’s time for the thief class to fully realize the importance of toughness and the consequence of not having any, a 10s debuff should be more than enough to “punish” the average thief, the skilled ones should still be able to avoid dmg for that 10s…after all they’re skilled right?!
The increase in debuff timer would solve any culling and lag problems too , really Anet what are you waiting for?

How about they fix culling first. ( though if your still having a problem with this it may be your PC, after the latest fix the did back in november (?) I havent had an issue with them rendering in spvp).
Buff other specs for the theif like poisons, or traps
Then increase the revealed debuff to 5 seconds.

Steal needs to act like a normal que’d power.
The problem with steal is that you can use it to clip animations as if it were an arcane wave, another skill that can be used simultaniously with others.

Basically, to use steal, the power animation for what ever you precast needs to complete itself, then steal fires off.

That seems to be a reasonable compromise in a pvp environment

Arheundel.6451:

I cannot think of a better solution which would please all crowds from the most disgrunted to the most “elitist” thief out there.
There must be something which force tactical decisions on the average thief player, the idea of failing to kill the target should be something to strongly consider and have appropiate counter-measures in that regard.
Right now the 3s debuff is simply not enough for the target, who did manage to avoid the burst, to retaliate accordingly and punish the thief who failed the attack.
It’s time for the thief class to fully realize the importance of toughness and the consequence of not having any, a 10s debuff should be more than enough to “punish” the average thief, the skilled ones should still be able to avoid dmg for that 10s…after all they’re skilled right?!
The increase in debuff timer would solve any culling and lag problems too , really Anet what are you waiting for?

Signed
/10 chars

There needs to be something to separate the terribly scrubby FOTM thieves that can spam stealth to get kills, apart from the good thieves, who make tactical decisions on when to strike, and when to use stealth. Currently, a thief fails his opener, on a player that was aware and dodged, and they can just run up and C+D/shadow refuge immediately to reset the fight or run away. If they are going to be bursting down players in 1.5 seconds, there needs to be some punishment and SOME drawback to that powerful set of skills.

Thieves are not culling correctly in SPVP and WvW, causing attacks to register revealed but not show the thief, thus the thief is visible for less than 3 seconds.

If thieves are going to be able to keep their burst from stealth (I don’t have a problem with that) then they need to finish the job visibly, and not rely on a crutch of just becoming invisible again seconds after you just wiped someone’s hp to 10%. 10 second revealed will force thieves to use stealth as a tactical decision of when to strike, thieves still have PLENTY of tricks up their sleeves, look at sword and dagger. This will force good thieves to bait players into their burst.

Great idea. I don’t care that thieves can stealth, and I don’t care that they can burst, but combining those two together with No punishment is a problem.

Aleth.9630:

Numot.3965:

The could change it so you always get “revealed” when stealth ends or after any attack (even if you miss).

I have to totally agree on this one. One stealth should only allow one Backstab attempt so if you do hit (meaning if you just spam Backstab in the air it shouldn’t reveal you) a target and miss because of blind, invulnerable or block, you should be revealed.
The current system makes it extremely hard to avoid a Backstab with your invulnerabilities or blocks because the thief just won’t appear after 3+ Backstab fails.

I have to disagree on one point here.
Why would you spam Backstab in the air? Hoping it would hit something somehow along the way? sounds scrubby to me.

Seriously, I don’t understand, in each and every game I have played so far, any, YES ANY skill used would break stealth. Unless it had some very specific tooltip indication.
Gw2 concept of stealth is very very very forgiving. Way to much imo.
You should be only able to move, dodge, and use F-abilities I give you that (stomp, revive, they re not skills after all).
Any other skill should present a risk. It means weapon skills, utility skills, heal skills and elites (Shadow refuge and Thieve’s guild? seriously? how lazy is that?)

About the reveal debuff himself.
Why not make the reveal debuff actually scale with the length of your stealth?
3 secs for most skills, 4 if you have stealth traited for the additionnal second, and yeah, 15 secs for shadow refuge.
50/50 reveal time, whatever the spec.

Edit: oh, and get revealed at the end of the stealth no matter what.

I think 7 seconds would be fair. The current timer would be fair if there were solid mechanics implemented to fight against stealth. As it stands now, stealth is completely unbalanced because there are little to no counters to it, even if you manage to hit them while stealthed it still doesn’t reveal them.

Something like an anti stealth field, some kind of ability that increases the cooldown on stealth (like daze) kind of ability is what we need.

In all honestly though, I would have absolutely no issue with stealth if they didn’t deal enough damage to kill the average player in seconds. But the truth is a majority of the time when the fight begins with the thief you literally have between 1-2 or 3 seconds to respond accordingly. or at least half your health or more will be gone from the use of 2 or 3 abilities. Then they disappear again.

Fighting a thief in spvp is like being in a target shooting contest and your blindfolded while your opponent is not. You can only take your blindfold off for 3 of the 10 shots you are allotted. While not only does your opponent not use a blindfold, he also gets 20 shots to your 10.

Raijinn.9065:

Fighting a thief in spvp is like being in a target shooting contest and your blindfolded while your opponent is not. You can only take your blindfold off for 3 of the 10 shots you are allotted. While not only does your opponent not use a blindfold, he also gets 20 shots to your 10.

I will say this – fighting a thief is /far/ easier as an engineer utilizing a rifle, especially with grenade and/or toolkit. If you can land either magnet or overcharged shot, they’re probably going to die. Magnet is followed up with net shot, grenade barrage, blunderbuss, and.. well, overcharged shot. Overcharged shot is followed up with shrapnel grenade, freeze grenade, and, if you started with overcharged, Magnet into.. the aforementioned combo. Squeeze a prybar in if you can but there’s never enough time between disables to fit it in.

Grenades are also pretty great for hitting them when they stealth, although it’s admittedly a lot of prediction. If they cloak early, Gear Shield allows you to pretty much eat their backstab attempt (although lenient / lazy Anet coding doesn’t reveal them on blocks, which is infuriating) while you cap the point. I’m getting off the point though.

They have escaped from me several times with shadow refuge. I even didn’t realize I downed someone for a good 12 seconds (I kept attacking the spot, but gave up after ~5 seconds of attacking) after the downing. That’s not balanced at all.

tl;dr – thieves should be revealed for longer, and be revealed when they attack or are downed.

5s should be a good start to test longer revealed status.

Another option is to keep at 3s for the first stealth, but then increase to 6 and 9 for consecutive stealths.

Ten seconds is an absurdly long time. I would say increase it to four, or maybe five seconds if they really had to nerf it, but ten seconds is idiotic. That would absolutely destroy this class – like it or not, the thief was designed around using stealth, all weapons and builds need it to do damage, not just D/D or whatever burst build you lost against.

do not increase the revealed timer! it would break a lot of builds that are good but take a lot of skill. do not blame class mechanics on your inability to exploit that thieves are squishy. we need stealth to survive at all in paids. teams are really good at working together and the players a re good enough to force a thief to use his cds and then kill him. if he shadowrefuges just aoe it alot he will die unless he comes out before it ends. take shadow refuge as a time to go ahh thats where he is lets go kill him.

Arheundel.6451:

I cannot think of a better solution which would please all crowds from the most disgrunted to the most “elitist” thief out there.
There must be something which force tactical decisions on the average thief player, the idea of failing to kill the target should be something to strongly consider and have appropiate counter-measures in that regard.
Right now the 3s debuff is simply not enough for the target, who did manage to avoid the burst, to retaliate accordingly and punish the thief who failed the attack.
It’s time for the thief class to fully realize the importance of toughness and the consequence of not having any, a 10s debuff should be more than enough to “punish” the average thief, the skilled ones should still be able to avoid dmg for that 10s…after all they’re skilled right?!
The increase in debuff timer would solve any culling and lag problems too , really Anet what are you waiting for?

Nope keep it as it is balanced and fine. If your good you can punish a thief very easy. Perhaps look into refining your playing tactics before trying to nerf other players

ROLF 10 sec debuff… is this a troll post?

Zid.4196:

Another option is to keep at 3s for the first stealth, but then increase to 6 and 9 for consecutive stealths.

…this could possibly work, with the ‘counter’ resetting from every kill.

My main problem with stealth is culling and lack of revealing after launching any attack, not just ones that hit. I would even be mostly happy with revealing on blocked attacks while leaving evasion alone, but something would be nice. If there is no punishment for launching multiple failed attacks, then make stealth attacks cost initiative.

6-8 seconds would be ideal. with a mug nerf and culling fix, the thief would be fixed forever.

i would prefer : * each subsequent stealth within the next # seconds will increase the REVEALED debuff a further # seconds * stack # times

easy. +1 come to meeeeeeeeeee

Worst. Idea. Ever.

^No, the worst idea ever was to take out the downed phase.

Don’t play a thief, but… Second Worst Idea Ever.

IMO they should fire the designer who’s name rhymes with Harp and suddenly you find the most OP class in any game suddenly balanced to normal OP MMO standards, and not talentless, brainless, godmode button spam with insta escapes.