Guild Wars 2

But not in application. Sure when I play my Thief it is fun to spend 80% of the fight chain stealthing myself and being visible for the minimum 3 seconds after an attack… But it’s not fun for everyone else having to deal with it.

You can live in denial, or play a Thief and get defensive. But an opponent to a good Thief is a spectator in PvP. Notice I said a good Thief. Obviously not a HS spammer.

Mesmer is the same. You think saturating an already zerged battlefield in clones was a good idea? Maybe on paper. But once you put it in the game and realize there isn’t one Mesmer on the battlefield but actually a large chunk of them… chaos ensues. And they get stealth on top of that.

I’ve almost hit 1000 hours logged in game. And that is not AFKing in LA. I log out when I’m not playing. I think I’ve spent a good enough time in WvW and PvP to offer my opinion. It cheapens the experience for everyone playing against any of these classes.

Any system you put in place that makes the opponent a spectator and unable to participate in the fight turns people off. In that fight you are only entertaining 50% of the players. The same can be said about some of the terrible dungeon design. I guess you had a lapse on ideas for designing good boss encounters so you saturate it with knockdowns, stuns and fears preventing you from taking action for the majority of the fight until dead. And I always run with a 10s stability on my bar but some of these fights are just so cheesy with the CC spam it doesn’t even matter. Resulting in the most common strategy for non fractal dungeons. The WP zerg. Kudos for admitting it though in some of the livestreams and committing to redesign most of the fights and remove WP zerging.

A lot of this sounds whiny but GW2 is my favorite MMO. For a glimpse at my inner nerd. I was contracting in Iraq 2011. Most of the chances I got on the internet besides Facebooking family and friends was checking updates on the progress of GW2. I think it is a great game. But I also think there are a lot of cheesy systems in place where mechanics are being taken advantage of and even bad players can be considered good using them. (AOE spam being the obvious future nerf we’ve all been /facepalming about since launch.)

Obviously I don’t think Thieves or Mesmers should lose stealth all together. Maybe increase the “revealed” debuff time limit. Possibly making it appear as soon as they leave stealth rather than when they attack someone. And with the give and take design philosophy if you’ve built the Thief survivability on them being untargetable 80% of the fight maybe you could give them a 2x or 3x passive endurance regen. They retain survivability. Become more Thief-like being agile and whatnot. But gives the rest of us a chance to participate in the fight.

The point I’m trying to make is remove the cheese factor to some of the classes. I remember when I was reading the pre release hype. I read GW2 Thieves don’t have perma stealth like WoW. Don’t want that cheesy factor in our game. I would argue that a rogue in WoW is actually less cheap to fight because once they are out of stealth that’s it, other than a long cooldown combat stealth. I think you could mix the two and hit that perfect sweet spot. Give thieves a longer stealth going in to the fight. Maybe a 15 second stealth or 20 seconds to get them from safety to their target. Then once that first hit goes off they can’t stealth again. Other than maybe a utility button. But not using initiative. Then just give them more endurance or whatever would balance out the loss of chain stealth.

I know I got repetitive saying the same thing in more than one paragraph. Oh well. I hope everyone can find it in their heart to forgive me if they tackled this wall of text to this point. =D

I think you could of cut this post into 2 short paragraphs. One explaining why you are experienced enough to lay out the details of stealth, and the other saying just to increase the time between stealth.

Personally, 15-20 seconds would be too much. Many traits focus on the few seconds of stealth you get, and when you can only stealth for about 4 seconds (shadow arts trait) with the majority of stealth skills, you should be able to enter that somewhat often. I like the enter/exit of stealth concept, but it plays out poorly when it happens soo often. They could do 2 things (btw, I’m thief main since pre-release day 1, I know thief pvp, and pve and learned a fair amount of tricks to them to understand them)

1. Increase stealth debuff. Not to 15-20 seconds, but like 6 or 7 seconds. This gives non-stealth based professions a window of opportunity to strike the thief/mesmer while they are “vulnerable” and requests that they rely on dodge, evade, and mobility for a few seconds. I have fought a sword/pistol stealth thief and aside from him/her annoying me, they/I never died. It isn’t challeneging, its just the annoyance that takes away from a true duel that thieves are meant to excel at. Thieves don’t need to spam stealth, but a lot of ppl in pvp do so because of the current culling issue. But honestly, just lay down traps/AoE’s around escape paths and laugh as they get downed, it isn’t that hard to predict where a thief is about to go.

2. Increase stealth durations. Currently, only 1 skill allows for a semi-long stealth duration on thief (sticking with thief, as they are the center of stealth). Not suggesting 8 or 20 or perma stealth, thats not how thieves were designed. Not to mention if they get a longer stealth debuff it is only fair we get more options to a better stealth duration. 3-4 seconds isn’t that long especially when depending on traits/utility, some other professions get access to 5-6 seconds of no incoming direct damage…. Thieves can still be hit in stealth, its balanced whether people wana believe it or not.

NinjaEd.3946:

Thieves can still be hit in stealth, its balanced whether people wana believe it or not.

Thieves can’t be targeted in stealth and far too many skills require a target to activate — the only exception is ground targeted AoE skills. Some classes get a lot more of those than others do.

Aside for the couple stealth ideas I don’t agree with, everything else is pretty much true. Really kudos for this post. I agree that some classes , though it might look interesting on paper, are not really well implemented, specially on a pvp basis. I don’t even play pvp, these two classes are what are turning me off from it. Yes I know there’s ways to fight them, but comparatively speaking they are way too hard to hit, at least compared to other classes. Mesmer is still somewhat ok since it’s a light armor and medium HP, making it kinda squishy (unless built tanky), so once you get rid of the closes, they are pretty much done. But thieves are another story. You can’t directly target them, you need to use aoe, and some classes just don’t have enough.
I also agree with how making a player unable to act is a poor design choice. Yes, I can get an enemy one shotting me if it’s somewhat predictable or avoidable. But we all know there’s tons of mobs with knockdowns which will make you unable to act and kill you instantly unless you have a stun breaker or stability skill on your utilities, which might not always be the case. Even on the very first dungeon we get those scavengers. I’m pretty sure everyone knows what I’m talking about. And that’s not even a boss

You’re right I rambled A LOT. My main point I kept trying to stomp in the ground is there needs to be a longer reveal debuff. Even if there was no culling at all. 3 seconds… Factoring in we may need to tab target or click on them again to regain target whichever is faster. That leaves us almost no time to actually get off an attack considering every ability in the game has a short delay “cast time” before it actually fires off. There are very few instant cast abilities in this game.

Like I said if you are the opponent you spend a lot of time not playing the game. Only in short windows do you actually get to do something. And predicting a Thieves movement… How exactly do you do that when he can see you and you can’t see him? He just has to move wherever you’re not going. lol