Guild Wars 2

Look I know that as we are currently built stealth is the key to our survival. I also know that what I am asking would be a major shift to the class. With that in mind I will go ahead.

Being a single target light armor melee burst class we are part of the norm for every fantasy mmo or game made. Also in every game with stealth it has been a mechanic of contension because people beleave that if they could just see us they would win the fight (weighed this is true or not is not the point it’s how they feel). So I would like to see stealth changed to more of a shadow meld type ability where we can be seen, just a outline or a shadowy figure, well in shadow meld we would gain protection and be untargatable (not unhittable). Of course this would also have to come with a change to some of our stealth traits and also a bump to our base survivability.

Again I know that this would be a huge change, but maiming a thief I would rather the person I killed know that “I” beat them and not some mechanic and I think it would remove what will forever be a balancing headache for Anet.

Just my thoughts, feel free to give a better ideas or expand upon mine. Anything really.

it would be interesting if stealth change into half transparent while invulnerable/cant be attacked, instead of completely turning invis and still be hit by channeling spells, and causing culling problem.

well untargetable won’t help you a lot since most of classes got aoe on autoattacks , if they presure at your position you will be dead in les then 3 seconds.
Thief will need more then protection, they need an form of regeneration or stability, and an direct knockback /stun if they are going to lose stealth.

Sure, remove my stealth.

Give us Thieves plate armor and crap tons of HP. Then we’ll talk.

Before you ask for an ability to be removed, do some math.

Crawford.4135:

Sure, remove my stealth.

Give us Thieves plate armor and crap tons of HP. Then we’ll talk.

Before you ask for an ability to be removed, do some math.

Yeah I don’t think you read more then the thread title.

The implementation in the OP would basically change stealth to how people think it works now, IE it would actually reduce incoming damage. It’d be far less effective against competent players though, since it’d entirely lose it deception meta in favor of being a flat defensive buff.

Honestly, it isn’t a terrible “solution”, even if it’d require a ton of rebalancing. The good thing about this suggestion is that it wouldn’t impact PvE or require a rebuild of the thief profession like many suggestions.

The problem with stealth in my opinion is that there is no way to make an informed decision about what to do against a stealthed player. You don’t know if they are coming to attack you, running away, what direction they are running, or what skills they are planning on using. The official response from Anet is that aoe counters stealth, but anyone who has played against a reasonably good thief in WvW can’t take this seriously. 99% of the time your aoe won’t be anywhere near where the thief is, and if it is, with the fastest speed in the game thieves can easily run out of it before taking damage. Meanwhile the thief knows exactly where you are, exactly what you are doing and can plan their attack to absolutely destroy you. My solution would be to make it so that when a thief enters stealth they can’t see anything also. All the terrain turns shadowy so they can see a basic outline of the land but they can’t see any players, npcs, or player abilities. This puts the thief and anyone they are attacking in the same position, but the thief is still able to use stealth as an escape mechanism as it should be. I honestly can’t see any reason why a person would complain about this. Since this game has been released, I’ve seen thieves posting on the forums how easy it is to guess where an invisible player will be and to attack or counter them, if this is true then it should be just as easy for them to set up their attacks from stealth without being able to see who they are attacking.

stealth is not only an escape mechanism. Your solution < when a thief enters stealth they can’t see anything also > will completely destroy the class.
Stealth will be no more an offensive skill (used to lead powerfull attacks) nor an escape skill (you stealth, go away and pop in front of an enemy zerg). This is stupid.

Stealth is fine as it is and it is what makes this class funny.

What about pve? Monsters don’t care if we are semi-transparent, it doesn’t make it harder for them to see us

Samhayn.2385:

Look I know that as we are currently built stealth is the key to our survival. I also know that what I am asking would be a major shift to the class. With that in mind I will go ahead.

Being a single target light armor melee burst class we are part of the norm for every fantasy mmo or game made. Also in every game with stealth it has been a mechanic of contension because people beleave that if they could just see us they would win the fight (weighed this is true or not is not the point it’s how they feel). So I would like to see stealth changed to more of a shadow meld type ability where we can be seen, just a outline or a shadowy figure, well in shadow meld we would gain protection and be untargatable (not unhittable). Of course this would also have to come with a change to some of our stealth traits and also a bump to our base survivability.

Again I know that this would be a huge change, but maiming a thief I would rather the person I killed know that “I” beat them and not some mechanic and I think it would remove what will forever be a balancing headache for Anet.

Just my thoughts, feel free to give a better ideas or expand upon mine. Anything really.

What? Ok so we would have a outline and take 33% less damage so they would have to AOE but they couldn’t target us. So your suggestion is to make us have a outline so people can see us because people want to see us.

Stealth is fine your suggestion is just to appease people whining which if they took your suggestion people would still whine. The balance is in the damage no stealth.

Thief burst class ? since when ? Let me remind you that there are many thief builds that dont relly on burst. Thief is stealth ( not burst ) class. Remove/change stealth ? Might as well delete thief class alltogether then and give warrior thief weapon sets. And then you will see how long warrior with their plater armor and health pool + thief weapon sets ( and initiative system) will live in any encounter. He wont.

Waffler.1257:

The problem with stealth in my opinion is that there is no way to make an informed decision about what to do against a stealthed player. You don’t know if they are coming to attack you, running away, what direction they are running, or what skills they are planning on using. The official response from Anet is that aoe counters stealth, but anyone who has played against a reasonably good thief in WvW can’t take this seriously. 99% of the time your aoe won’t be anywhere near where the thief is, and if it is, with the fastest speed in the game thieves can easily run out of it before taking damage. Meanwhile the thief knows exactly where you are, exactly what you are doing and can plan their attack to absolutely destroy you. My solution would be to make it so that when a thief enters stealth they can’t see anything also. All the terrain turns shadowy so they can see a basic outline of the land but they can’t see any players, npcs, or player abilities. This puts the thief and anyone they are attacking in the same position, but the thief is still able to use stealth as an escape mechanism as it should be. I honestly can’t see any reason why a person would complain about this. Since this game has been released, I’ve seen thieves posting on the forums how easy it is to guess where an invisible player will be and to attack or counter them, if this is true then it should be just as easy for them to set up their attacks from stealth without being able to see who they are attacking.

This suggestion will entirely ruin every stealth specced class and this is why:
1) Knowing where a stealthed person went to is 1 thing, knowing where a non-stealthed person will go to as a reaction of the first person going stealthed is different. They’ll be shocked and not move, or they will immediately run for it, or they will run around swinging their sword trying to hit you, or whatever
2) Sneak shot is a targetted skill, won’t work anymore
3) Backstab is a one-point attack, you’ll have to spam it constantly to actually hit the one point your target is at blindly. Chances are you aren’t hitting him in the back
4) Same goes for the sword daze skill whose name I’ve forgotten

Your suggestion will makes stealthing only useful for escaping. But experienced player who knows how stealthed persons run, will still be able to attack us despite our inability to fight back.

So no, I don’t think your solution will help anything.

No.

Not being able to land back positionals due to people just able to see/avoid he positioning would remove both Sword and Dagger. They would have to add more combat stuns to land positional. Basically would remove the class or turn it into the WoW Rouge which is what I think most of the QQers want.

Ehh I was just throwing out a suggestion. Because I have been playing mmos a long time and the thief type class in so many games I have learned to trust my gut on stuff and right now it’s telling me we are going to get hit with changes that very well may cripple the class. The reason that this is going to happen is that even with all the stupid bugs and abilities we have to deal with and need corrected people will always hate on the stealth class because they “feel” like we are cheating and as long as this game is being made for everyone to enjoy the devs will eventually be influenced by the mass amount of negativity that is thrown at our class, they are not immune to it and will eventually say “man all this complaining about thief, may e there is something too it that we haven’t seen” I have seen it happen to often to tell myself it won’t this time.

Stealth (imo) is more of a buff like assassins signet. It just leads into another attack (or sets up backstab) and i rarely see anyone using stealth effectively to “get away”. key word being “effectively” since most other classes can spam AOE damage like woah and knock you right back out.
My experience is based on WvW and spvp, i do not focus on PVE much.

I like how the camps are split with the thiefes on the one side being like " I don’t want to be part of a discussion" and the other side " sounds like a decent idea but you need to work on it"

Let me take statment on the later camp. The idea to change stealth to something that is not a 100% invisibility is nice. But the turn everything dark idea will just not work out in a open world game like GW2. But there need to be a change done becaus AoE as a counter mechanic does not work. Unless the thief is stupied and stands still after he goes in stealth you won’t hit him most of the time.

So what can you do about it. Well one option would be to make stealth gain visibility either over time or distance to enemy. Over time is pretty obvious. If you stay X amount in stealth you will be visibile for 90% after X more sec you are visible to 80% etc. A system like could work but with most of the stealth being only around 3 long it would not really make sense.

The fade on distance how ever could be the way to go.
First of all let me set it clear the fade in rage would be very small maybe double the melee range of a great sword (220 or so ) and even then you would be only like you a shadowly figure to the enemy.

Well let me just say that if stealth was entirely removed, that would be it for my thief. I do play games and quite avidly, but I’m not the type to be super dramatic about minor changes that are made to the game, and yes, they have ALL been relatively minor. A major change would be something like say, removing stealth? Something like this would totally eradicate the class and take away their compensation mechanism – having mobility & control over raw power, and high HP\armor, etc.

The one thing I can take solace in is that ANET would never make such a dramatic change to their game, even if stealth granted complete invulnerability. I know this because it has happened before: I’m a long time GW1 Player, and even though that game was different in many ways, there was shadow form. A skill that would render a player virtually invincible for a period of time. Was obviously never supposed to be in a MMO from day 1, but I bought GW1 a year after it’s release, and even by the time I had finished playing it still hadn’t lost it’s mighty tanking ability. Even now I don’t think it has.

This was in a game where professions could be cross-combined, and where there were hundreds and hundreds of skills! GW2 has neither of these attributes and much easier to balance because of it. So no, stealth won’t be totally removed any time soon, and I don’t believe it ever will be. Undoubtedly mechanics may be modified, possibly in a similar manor the OP has described. But whatever it is, ANET will please both crowds.

They may have made mistakes, but I’ve absolute faith ANET always have the best intentions.

I agree I don’t think they will change it. It’s a problem for people who aren’t “in the know” anyhow. Maybe it’s because I play a Thief but if I play another class I always bring stelath counters because It’s fun to kill Theive to me.

When I play Mesmer I always use /focus and sometimes greatsword because knockdowns and knockbacks are the true thief counter. If you know where they were, you know where they will be after a KB or focus pull. Same with Guardian. Shield#5 or GS#5 screw refuge and stealth along with a ton of other abilities. Everyone has counters some people use them the rest complain there are none.

I wouldn’t mind removing stealth and doing something more in line with what assassin’s had in GW1. Maybe have skill that currently stealth you apply an “evasive” state in which there is a % chance for abilities to miss you. Obviously that miss chance would have to be tweak in development to compensate for lack of stealth, while simultaneously not being completely OP. Abilities that previously required stealth to activate would simply be active while in this new evasive state.

Stealth is perfectly fine. Culling is already being sorted out and will not exist much longer.

I would like to see them remove the thief class all together and give me a kind of swashbuckler type class that deals with light armor but is more weapon focused and dabbles with evasive abilities and CC. Every MMO I have played from DAoC till now I have had a stealth class and it’s by far my favorite class to play but GW2 still needs to work on their outlook of what a thief is (along with that kitten culling issue) and come to the realization that “yeah we kittened up and we need to fix this.”

While I’m here, can we get guns range to 1200 or dual sword? Would love to see D/S combos where D/S gave a parry or deflect ability for the dual (attempt to parry next attack for 4 seconds and daze your target for 1 second while dealing damage).

Crawford.4135:

Sure, remove my stealth.

Give us Thieves plate armor and crap tons of HP. Then we’ll talk.

Before you ask for an ability to be removed, do some math.

use vitality stuff instead of power, and you will have more hp….

urdriel.8496:

Crawford.4135:

Sure, remove my stealth.

Give us Thieves plate armor and crap tons of HP. Then we’ll talk.

Before you ask for an ability to be removed, do some math.

use vitality stuff instead of power, and you will have more hp….

16.2k HP, and over 3100 armor rating on my thief. I win duels vs people in party to handicap stealth. It is not an absolute necessity to the thief class, only those foolish enough to go full out glass on it.