Guild Wars 2

pricer.5091:

MakeitNeil.4561:

Well now, you need to put initiative gain in your traits. There is a trait to stealth and gain 2 initiative from it. Then you can gain initiative every 2 secs with another trait. ANd there are a bunch of other triats to gain initiative. There are even 2 utilities for it. After that you just use P/D and go Black Powder—-> Hartseeker for stealth. You then hearseeker three times in each black powder. Keep that up and they won’t know where you will black powder next and it will be impossible to find you. You never have to leave stealth if you don’t want to.

This entire paragraph highlights quite obviously that you know nothing at all about the problem you are attempting to highlight.

And if you are a thief who geared majorly for toughness…trust me, your heals are abysmal.

Trust me. If you ever see Durzo Blint in a tournament, you will, indeed, know that I know exactly what I’m talking about. I heal, stealth, and remove conditions more than imaginable. I use a zerker ammy, in which I can still survive versus a phantasmal Mesmer; and, at the same time, I will throw four thieves your way.

Wont ever happen, as I hate sPvP……nice to see you read the Night Angel books though

Edit: just trying to work out the 4 thieves bit and you must be using ambush, thieves guild and ….probably…merciful ambush in trickery line then?

Fair play…all seems a bit over-complicated, but each to their own I guess

my mesmer never did 20k damage with shattering… just saying

Amadan.9451:

my mesmer never did 20k damage with shattering… just saying

You don’t shatter for 20k damage. You use phantasms and sword.

I don’t know of some of the other professions, but the example on Thief is biased as it’s not valid in a battle situation. As you said you were testing healing potential, but the thing is that for the Thief to reach those numbers, he needs to ONLY AND EXCLUSIVELY use stealth and you need your target to never realize you’re around as the tricks for perma-stealth can be countered. There is no way you simply stay in stealth for a fight, it means you’re simply not going to even attemp to scratch the target. What’s the purposse of not attacking and healing a lot? Using spectator mode wouldn’t be more efficent than that as your target won’t notice you?

That you gave it fanfare makes it even more biased given how it’s not even a valid example.

In a regular fight the Thief is going to heal much less than that, and IDK why you didn’t test some other professions with far more defensive skills to make the HP they recover even more important. And probably your test group used Cleric’s gear to achieve those max potential heals, which on a Thief simply won’t work as it will make him useless for any task.

I don’t even use the condition removal on stealth and healing on stealth traits so this isn’t me defending my playstyle, I’m just taking credit from those tests as they don’t contemplate real fight situations, at least in this case.

TheOneNOnlyGeneralBama.9586:

Doomdesire.9365:

Numbers look high, but it doesn’t correlate with in game combat. As it stands, guardians and eles are still, by far, the tankiest.

Engis can only heal that high through the use of spamming healing bombs for ~400 hp each, which is quickly negated by any profession specced in power, and thieves have to stay in stealth the entire duration of the fight. Guardians can remain tanky while being on the offensive, so can eles, which is why you will usually see a guardian/ele beat most engis and thieves(assuming the thief decides to stay)

I think most people will know by now that thieves are one of the worst tanking classes, which is why they get stealth, and engi’s would probably be in the middle.

IMO

Guardian D/D ele
BM ranger
Necro
Engi
Warr
Thief
Mesmer

You don’t even remotely know what you talking about , everything you said was anecdotal evidence..makes me wonder have you even played GW2 before.

Instead of turning to childlike insults, why don’t you actually try to prove me wrong? No class can tank like a D/D ELE, Guardian, or BM ranger whilst doing enough damage to kill other tanks.

Lighter.5631:

Doomdesire.9365:

Lighter.5631:

Zacchary.6183:

Problem is the moment you stop you have 12s before stealth disappears. I’ve already tried it as a thief and i’ve already watched 3 thieves attempt to break 12s for 20+ minutes straight. I even helped them with my own black powders and Shadow Refuges.

Never did it get more than 12s. Just wanted to give you a heads up.

i just log on my 19 matches played and read all the traits and click them and use dp combo as a newb thief like me i managed a 1 min+ stealth i can go on for ever like this if i want, also i managed a 15 sec stack with blinding powder and SR. like that guy said you don’t need to stack over an amount of secs to be perm stealth

The problem with that is against an enemy with half a brain, all they need to do is stand in your BP. Then you won’t be able to get more than 4s otherwise you will snag the enemy going through your BP, as he is standing in it.

even if you snag your enemy with HS you still get the stealth. no?

You don’t. The first Heartseeker through BP combo can hit a player and still give stealth. Any hits beyond that results in revealed.

Okay so let me explain why it’s ineffective to try to permanently stealth and how it’s unusable in all situations except pve.

Note that the current stealth cap is 14 seconds and infusion of shadow is needed to attempt to achieve permanent stealth.

There’s only one way to achieve a more than 10 seconds of stealth using d/p and that’s by using a flat wall and flat ground. You would use a Black Powder which lasts 4 seconds, then mash out 5 Heartseekers since each would take 3/4 of a second and can also be queued. So that would 15/4 seconds which is 3.75 seconds. This is also assuming Heartseeker doesn’t bug because of the wall and ground, which causes your Heartseeker to go off in a random direction.

Another way to achieve a decent sized stealth time which can be chained into one of the combo again before stealth ends is to do that combo in the middle of the field and try to jump through using Heartseeker 3 times. The reason it is only 3 is because latency in the game which is currently about 150+ms and camera spin time (or by using about face)which is about 100ms totals up to be above 250 ms. Since Black powder only lasts 4 seconds and the total time to Heartseeker and spin around would take above 1 second (1000ms), this would only allow 3 Heartseekers. It is possible to do 4 but is unreliable because of the latency.

Since Meld in Shadows does not affect stealth combos, none of these Heartseekers would get the bonus stealth. In the first case, we can assume there is no skill delay because of the queue system so the total stealth time would be (3s * 5) – 3.75s = 11.25 seconds of stealth up time. You would then try to do this method again, the second method, or a stealth utility to achieve permanent stealth. However, this method is not reliable since this specific wall and floor requirement is very uncommon.

The second case is the case most dagger/pistol thieves would find themselves in since there are few walls that allow the first case. Since each Heartseeker would take 1 second in most cases because of the latency and turn time, the total stealth time would be (3s * 3) – (3s * 1)= 6 seconds of stealth.

There are two weaknesses with these two methods: first is aoe on the Black powder, second is if your enemy stands in your Black powder because even if you don’t have a target, the Heartseeker hitbox trajectory through Black powder will hit that target and give you a revealed debuff. These two things make permanent stealth unreliable in combat and will put a stop to your permanent stealth really easily. These two weaknesses eliminate any actual combat use for permanent stealth.

The only out of combat use could be using permanent stealth with Fleet Shadow(50% movement increase). The problem with this is that Fleet Shadow is bugged so you’re running at 33%. Thus it’d be probably faster to Heartseeker spam or Infiltrator’s arrow across a map.

Now the question is why would you run a build that goes into the Shadow Arts tree to run this build. The only situation to use the Shadow Arts tree is to run a sustained damage build that relies heavily on stealth.

For this dagger/pistol build we’re discussing, the only place this build would be effective would be in WvW . This is because pve gear allows you to get 100+% additional crit damage(this is 250+% from base damage), and with hidden killer traits this would allow for good burst and sustained damaged. Your Backstabs would hit for the same amount as a regular burst combo in spvp. The other perk to this build would be to escape from a zerg using the near permanent stealth achieved using the second method, though it could be argued that infiltrator’s arrow would let you escape easier since most people would’ve used one of the listed counters the d/p stealth method.

This build is also not effective in Spvp because you don’t have good burst or sustained pressure from Backstabs because you don’t have the extra stats from wvw. Also, if you try to fight on the point, you’ll most likely be melted by aoe even with your 2280 armor(berserker amulet with SA traits). There are only 2 things which kill in Spvp, high burst or high sustained damage. This build doesn’t offer either, so that’s why it’s a bad build which doesn’t offer much. There are virtually no situations where the permanent stealth would help you because even if you stealthed up to someone, your burst is terrible because you don’t have enough points in deadly arts for the additional power and +% damage. It also can’t be used to bunker a point because stealth doesn’t keep a point contested. Anyone can still use this build to shadow refuge and get shadowstep stomps in a team fight but all thieves can do this for the most par. So apart from that you’ll be useless to your team in the terms of kill potential and bunkering.

Finally, you’re not using this build in pve because you’re trying to kill stuff and staying in stealth permanently is counter productive unless you’re trying to avoid some mechanic like lighting the fires in the snow blind fractal

TL;DR: There’s no situations where permanent stealth would be beneficial in SPvP and WvW and anyone attempting to do so can be destroyed easily.

Mind giving us numbers and trait distributions? And, you know, healing power outside of traits? Because when I crunch the numbers for infinite stealthing healing, assuming you have infusion of shadow, shadow’s embrace (for the cond removal numbers you have), shadow rejuvenation, assassin’s reward, hide in shadows, only 300 healing power from traits, mango pie, and using initiative at about 1.5 per second (estimate) , I still come up way short at 44104 healing per minute. Unless my assassin’s reward numbers are too low, there’s definitely some lack of mention of significant healing power, which kinda makes an already kinda useless and annoying thief into an even more useless and annoying thief.

Yukabacera.2307:

Mind giving us numbers and trait distributions? And, you know, healing power outside of traits? Because when I crunch the numbers for infinite stealthing healing, assuming you have infusion of shadow, shadow’s embrace (for the cond removal numbers you have), shadow rejuvenation, assassin’s reward, hide in shadows, only 300 healing power from traits, mango pie, and using initiative at about 1.5 per second (estimate) , I still come up way short at 44104 healing per minute. Unless my assassin’s reward numbers are too low, there’s definitely some lack of mention of significant healing power, which kinda makes an already kinda useless and annoying thief into an even more useless and annoying thief.

We maxed out the healing potential in each class to what we found its limit to be.

I’d like someone to test out this tanking build that I created after hours of theorycrafting to give warriors 20% uptime of protection, retal and aegis. People may have something to fear if it does indeed flesh out into a viable tanking build for warriors, and we may be added to this list. Thank you, Sentinel gear.

Mirta.5029:

Lighter.5631:

you can also scout in wvw without being seen ever for forever without perma stealth

oh and shame on you again, did you even try the technique to say that it can be used for scouting?

Okay. Film a video of staying close to the enemy team in an active WvW server without getting seen without stealth.
Point is: perma stealth was not supposed to be possible.

Yea, sure, go film one, let me see how that works out, bro.

Doomdesire.9365:

Lighter.5631:

Doomdesire.9365:

Lighter.5631:

Zacchary.6183:

Problem is the moment you stop you have 12s before stealth disappears. I’ve already tried it as a thief and i’ve already watched 3 thieves attempt to break 12s for 20+ minutes straight. I even helped them with my own black powders and Shadow Refuges.

Never did it get more than 12s. Just wanted to give you a heads up.

i just log on my 19 matches played and read all the traits and click them and use dp combo as a newb thief like me i managed a 1 min+ stealth i can go on for ever like this if i want, also i managed a 15 sec stack with blinding powder and SR. like that guy said you don’t need to stack over an amount of secs to be perm stealth

The problem with that is against an enemy with half a brain, all they need to do is stand in your BP. Then you won’t be able to get more than 4s otherwise you will snag the enemy going through your BP, as he is standing in it.

even if you snag your enemy with HS you still get the stealth. no?

You don’t. The first Heartseeker through BP combo can hit a player and still give stealth. Any hits beyond that results in revealed.

thats exactly what i meant…

MakeitNeil.4561:

All statistics stated have been researched and tested. Now, I know most of you guys never fought a good engi, a couple of you have fought a good ele, quite a few must have fought a good ranger, and all of you have fought an annoying thief. Well, here are the numbers me and my friends found when testing the healing and condition removal of these classes (keep in mind that we didn’t include skills that remove all conditions for it’s effect but assumed that it only removes 1 condition). With the engi we healed for about 55k health and have the ability to remove at least 20 conditions at the time, all in 1 minute. On the ele, we are able to heal around 60k health and remove at least 14 conditions at the same time, all in 1 minute. On the ranger… we were able to heal about 50k health and remove
at least 34 conditions. Now, ha ha ho, the thief…moment of silence…heals for 65k and removes 25 conditions. These thieves also have to ability to permanently stealth as they please. If they feel that they want to stealth for three minutes straight (no reveal)… they can start at any given time. Know that we didn’t include any elite skills and we only need at least 1 utility slot to achieve these healing capabilities on each class. Also, (besides the thief, though they can do this if they want to) the classes have approximately 3000 toughness and still enough damage to kill a bunker guardian, not completely useless. We might make a video to show this to forums. We also survived against three people in a three vs. one with all four character before (though we had to flak of course. The thief just killed them all one by one however). Anyway, what do you think guys? Gw2 went a little overboard on the whole “healing” idea. At least we have phantasm Mesmers to explode 20k damage in four seconds just to keep these guys in check, right?
Again what do you think about this awesome game where you don’t really die? I hated how you actually died in most MMOS. Don’t you like the whole immortal effect?
/sarcasm
Almost been a year now and I want your input.

-Signed by yours truely
Durzo Blint

Until you post the methodology used so that this can be recreated, it’s completely worthless and just sounds like someone making numbers up for the fun of it.

We look forward to you posting that!

MakeitNeil.4561:

We maxed out the healing potential in each class to what we found its limit to be.

Numbers.

Builds used – exact builds, traits and gear.

Proper, exact, data.

I’ll take this seriously once you provide the above. Vague, ultimately meaningless, statements such as the one quoted need not apply.

I didnt read it all, since its a wall of text. But i assume you are hating towards the thief, and therefor i have to say.

..AND the thief got found and 1 hitted by another guy

What I would like to say has already been said so I will reiterate two key points:

1. Tanking isn’t just about healing and removing conditions it’s about doing those two things while still being able to maintain dmg pressure.

2. We need to see the methodology used to be able to reproduce these results.