At the moment, the build people seem to complain the most about are burst builds, like the shattercat Mesmer, and the backstab thief build. Before I launch into a proposal on how I would change stealth, I would like to state my philosophy behind glass cannons.
Glass cannons are high risk, high reward builds. They get in, either do the job, or get decimated. There should always be a way to counter a GC burst, and once it’s countered, the GC shouldn’t have very many get out of jail cards to get away with. Essentially, if the burst is countered, the GC should be in very hot water.
An example of this would be the frenzy -HB warrior. It hits hard, it hits fast, but its counterable. Once its countered, the warriors down 2 utilities and can be killed extremely fast.
The problem I see with thiefs isn’t that their burst is too great, it one shots people like a HB warrior. There are 2 differences. One is which the speed it comes out at. This can be countered by having good reaction times, practicing, and experience. You can also take advantage of back stabs back facing requirement and dodge the cloak and dagger, or kite the thief around.
Now that we have established that the burst can be countered, where is the problem? The problem lies with how easily the thief can get away. The burst requires 6 initiative, out of potentially 15, and no utilities, unless one were to augment the burst using assassin’s signet. If the burst gets countered, the thief could then easily slip away into the shadows, coming back for a second try.
The root of the thiefs escapability is stealth, and to a lesser degree, shadow steps. As stealth is one of the 2 main components of thiefs survivability, I propose this.
1. Add one trait, maybe in place of last refuge, or some other not so useful trait in a defensive line, that gives protection for the duration of the stealth. You could also work it into the stealth mechanic itself.
2. Rework stealth so that upon being hit you are revealed slightly, one hit would do almost nothing, 2 would be a very faint outline, 3 would be like allied stealth vision, something along those lines. We might also have to let stealth break channels, otherwise rapid fire could just instantly reveal where a thief is.
Now why do I think this is a good idea? It retains the flavor of the class, while rewarding skill and compensates survivability. We can’t simply remove stealth or thiefs will be too squishy. It rewards skills by letting good players hit where they think a thief is and be rewarded. The reveal would let them be able to hunt the thief down easier, but a well played thief could still avoid getting hit during the stealth and get away safely.
The thief would still need to be countered, which will be as hard as it is right now, but once countered, the thief wouldn’t be able to slip out so easily, especially not with more utility skills like shadowstep.
The change would also be easier to balance as we could alter the amount of transparency that each hit would reveal, thus nerfing or buffing stealth without making any drastic changes.
Tl;dr: There is no tl;dr, I feel that every part of my wall of text is essential to my reasoning, and that omitting any part of it would be a disservice to everyone that reads the forums. (Boy that went on for longer then I thought it would, and yes I know I’m contradicting myself by writing a tl;dr)
