Guild Wars 2

The stealth mechanic of this game is something that bothered me from the start of the game, especially in WvW. Stealth allows players to break off as a target, and lag prevents stealthed players from reappearing immediately after coming out of stealth. As a warrior, I find it hard to deal with Thieves and mesmers considering the facts. The only option for me to fight them is to swing a melee weapon to see if the chain pulls through, but it’s hardly an effective counter against the stealth mechanic.

I propose that more professions get access to a revealed debuff. As it currently stands, Rangers have “Sic ’em” and Engineers have “Analyze”, allowing an effective counter against the stealth mechanic for a tradeoff against more favored WvW oriented skills.

Please consider adding the ‘revealed’ effect to the following utility skills:

Warrior: On my mark
Guardian: Sword of justice – Command
Elementalist: Arcane blast
Necromancer: Shadow fiend – Haunt
Thief: Signet of shadows
Mesmer: Arcane Thievery

The skills I chose were what I thought is currently underused in WvW and PVP, anything giving the revealed effect would be appreciated. This allows all professions a counter against a mechanic which I believe needs a rework.

I think this change might be acceptable, but only if they reworked Thieves to be less reliant on the stealth mechanic. With the Acrobatics trait line getting nerfed in the recent patch, Thieves are more dependent upon stealth as their primary means of damage “mitigation” than ever (it’s still possible to hit them in stealth). Giving everyone ready access to revealed without any other changes would just be a direct nerf and do little to improve game balance or build variety for Thieves. Although stealth suffers from limited counterplay, Thieves are currently in a place where a major nerf to stealth (in the form of added counterplay) would just break the class in competitive settings and remove one of their major tools for disengaging.

Mesmers would likely be less impacted by your proposal, since most of their builds don’t really rely entirely on stealth for survivability. However, that’s not to say that they wouldn’t be affected at all, and I think all of the professions with access to skills that grant stealth would need to be looked at before implementing the change.