Guild Wars 2

Yesterday, backstab was bugged to reveal the thief if they used it. This was something that a lot of PvPers were hoping would happen. Few questions

1. If you played a D/P thief during this time, did the reveal feel fair?
2. If you played against a D/P, did the reveal make the build feel more fair?
3. Would you want this applied to all stealth attacks (Backstab, Surprise Shot, etc) if they are used (aka, hitting air = reveal)?
4. Would you want this applied to all stealth attacks if blocks, blinds, evades and invulns caused you to be revealed, but not hitting nothing?
5. Would you want this applied to all attacks that miss in stealth?

1. Yes and not fair
2. Nope was face roll to kill em
3. No
4. No
5. No

I get what you’re doing here but right now is not the time. I understand that anet is trying to change things around and these “bugs” are actually trials.

Please do everyone who understands balance a favor and don’t ever suggest this without compensation being proposed 1st.

Thank you for everything that you do.

this would destroy the class

1. I haven’t played Thief post-patch.
2. Not in current situation.
3. Yes, but only if they would compesate it to Thieves.
4. ^
5. ^

Fix the server lag in PvP (more so in WvW) and then we can talk. I can’t count how many times someone has appear to be right in front of me, but in reality was several hundred units away. I play with 60-70ish ping and sit around 55fps while in combat, so I doubt it is only me that experiences this.

Let’s see… I made a list of changes I’d do to Stealth to make it more tactical and less spammy somewhere…

There it was.

• The more damage your hits do, the longer revealed should last. A revealing hit for very little damage should last less than now, a revealed from a massive critical should last more than now. Instead 3s in PvE and WvW and 4 in sPvP, it’ll be something like 1-7s for all modes. Since WvW and PvE have more stats and higher damage numbers, there won’t be any need to have different rules.
• If you attack someone in melee range, if the attack fails for whatever reason, you should still get revealed for minimum duration (1s), but you still need to be in range to hit; simply attacking the air won’t reveal you, you’ll need to get a message such as “Blocked”, “Missed”, “Invulnerable”, “Evaded”, etc to get revealed. If an attack fails because they move out of range you still won’t be revealed.
• If you fire a projectile, even if that hits nothing, as long as there someone with a character facing where the projectile is coming from, you should get revealed for minimum duration. This won’t be about the camera, but character positioning. If a player sees the projectile because of camera orientation, if the character is not facing that direction and has line of sight to the thief, the thief won’t be revealed. Thief and target must be in such positions that they could hit each other with straight projectiles for this revealed to happen.
• Being revealed repeatedly within a short time against the same target should result in revealed lasting more and more up to a cap when hitting that target. So stealth is used strategically, to gain combat advantage and to disengage, not to constantly attack-stealth-attack-stealth. Taking longer breaks between Revealeds would bring back Revealed to its normal duration. This could be done with an effect the target gets called something like “Catching up” or “Learning patterns”: “This foe is learning your movements, and it’s getting harder to hide from them after attacking.” For example, each stack could last 10 seconds and increase Revealed duration against the target by 3%, up to 30%.
• If someone is channeling a targeted skill on you (e.g.: Mesmer greatsword 1, elementalist scepter air 1, necromancer axe 3, etc.), or activating a targeted skill on you (e.g. Flamestrike, phantasm skills), and you go into stealth mid-activation, the channel should get canceled, and the rest of the skill fail without triggering an ‘interrupt’. Other channeled skills like melee cleaves such as Hundred Blades, projectiles like Rapid Fire or ‘lock on’ sttacks like Dragon’s Tooth would keep firing, but the targeting won’t follow the cloaked target like now and keep firing in place, re-orientable with the camera, as if the skill was activated with no target.
• Player skills that reveal like “Sick’em” and “Analize” would get their revealed durations lowered on average to compensate a bit, since with these changes revealed would be a bit more troublesome and may last longer on average.
• Being damaged in melee range should make hit flashes visible only to the attacker, but not their allies. This partial visibility would be less clear an noticeable than the translucency seen by the thief’s allies. Because of this, approaching enemies from behind under stealth will be much safer, and having your back to a wall may be useful cloaked enemies.

So…
1.2: It was more fair when the attack was in range. Not so much when hitting air. It added risk when attacking, but when hitting air it was just annoying and forced you to retreat before retrying the attack.
3. Not exactly this, but what I mentioned back there. More risk to the attacks, but not always revealing and not always for the total duration. This bug as it is is too much, and won’t do.
4. Same as 3.
5. Same as 4.

1. I don’t play thief
2. It was very unfair
3. No
4. Yes
5. Yes

It would be a change for skillful play, but I highly doubt the Thief players on this game want a skillful class. Otherwise they would have asked for this change a long time ago like the pros did before they left.

It would be nice, like the adrenaline loss on miss (which a lot of Thieves cried to have done), but I doubt with this community of Thieves that this will ever happen and actually stay. Even though both promote skillful play and make the game more fun in a pvp setting. There would also be no need for compensation as this should have been standard since launch.

I don’t know if it would massively nerf thief or just require a new playstyle, because I rarely play this class.
But really like the idea. It forces you to pay attention that you do get that one stealthy hit you wanna get. That’s the philosophy of stealth attacks. Also it would require a certain amount of skill then.

And anyways…if I block how could I not recognise the enemy? ^^

If it is possible with the playstyle I’d definitly appreciate it. But maybe only if it is evaded. If the skill misses I would say that you hardly actually recognise the enemy. Maybe you could just reveal him for 0.5 seconds and let the stealth go on normally after that.

GW2 – where a long begged for fix for broken mechanic turns out to be a bug.

The Gates Assassin.9827:

Yesterday, backstab was bugged to reveal the thief if they used it. This was something that a lot of PvPers were hoping would happen. Few questions

1. If you played a D/P thief during this time, did the reveal feel fair?
2. If you played against a D/P, did the reveal make the build feel more fair?
3. Would you want this applied to all stealth attacks (Backstab, Surprise Shot, etc) if they are used (aka, hitting air = reveal)?
4. Would you want this applied to all stealth attacks if blocks, blinds, evades and invulns caused you to be revealed, but not hitting nothing?
5. Would you want this applied to all attacks that miss in stealth?

1. No
2. No
3. All or nothing, incosistency is wrong
4. This could be better but that’s not the point tbh.

Listen, problem is not being able or not to backstab the air.

problem is stealth camping, with all the passive benefits it adds

Even more since high level tPvP has became , since D/P thief came back into meta, a stealth camping game to explode the unlucky guy at the time.

Stealth stacking should be capped to something like 6-8 secs MAX and thief should get revealed regardless of a hit as soon as it ends.

That would balance shadow art and even team arena matches.

The Gates Assassin.9827:

Yesterday, backstab was bugged to reveal the thief if they used it. This was something that a lot of PvPers were hoping would happen. Few questions

1. If you played a D/P thief during this time, did the reveal feel fair?
2. If you played against a D/P, did the reveal make the build feel more fair?
3. Would you want this applied to all stealth attacks (Backstab, Surprise Shot, etc) if they are used (aka, hitting air = reveal)?
4. Would you want this applied to all stealth attacks if blocks, blinds, evades and invulns caused you to be revealed, but not hitting nothing?
5. Would you want this applied to all attacks that miss in stealth?

1. Yes, the reveal didn’t bother me; I don’t mindlessly swing
2. No, not really. It didn’t really change anything, bad players got screwed by it, good players were competent
3. When you say all stealth attacks, is this exclusively regarding Thieves? If so, No. Any class with stealth/invis mechanics should deal with this as well. Otherwise, what’s a thief? The clumsy guy that reveals themselves when they miss, while rangers, mesmers, etc. can miss all they want and stay hidden?
4. No

Making these changes isn’t going to alter a scrub’s view of a thief. They’ll still suck harder than a heavy duty vacuum cleaner, then they’ll come on here seemingly triggered by some sort of gaming PTSD and complain about more game mechanics.

The Gates Assassin.9827:

Yesterday, backstab was bugged to reveal the thief if they used it. This was something that a lot of PvPers were hoping would happen. Few questions

1. If you played a D/P thief during this time, did the reveal feel fair?
2. If you played against a D/P, did the reveal make the build feel more fair?
3. Would you want this applied to all stealth attacks (Backstab, Surprise Shot, etc) if they are used (aka, hitting air = reveal)?
4. Would you want this applied to all stealth attacks if blocks, blinds, evades and invulns caused you to be revealed, but not hitting nothing?
5. Would you want this applied to all attacks that miss in stealth?

1. No: BS is already not worth using most of the time due to set up/positional requirements; the revealed bug just made me not use BS at all unless enemy was standing afk on point :|

2. Idk. I can’t say much about it, played thief only yesterday; i think some classes would like it, but some classes (see guards) already counter thieves hard and reveal like this would just leave no chance for thieves vs any class with blocks/invul/blinds etc.

3. No. Stealth attack as name states already require stealth which already comes at relative high costs (including opportunity costs). If revealed on hitting air would be a thing those spells will be never used. Might as well just delete them and change thief mechanics completely. It would be similar as saying, if engi missed his attack then all his kits should go on 4-6 sec CD.

4. No. If it did happen then other classes would have to lose some access to blinds/blocks/invul to balance it out, which obviously won’t happen.

5. No. It would just make thieves obsolete. Because stealth builds would be extremely unrewarding which would case everyone go sd evade build, except acro got nerfed pretty hard so thieves would be new eles of 2012.

The truth is, yes stealth is irritating to deal with because best counter to it is to use brain while majority of players just want to mash face on keyboard and collect points. As long as thieves use stealth as main class mechanic people won’t stop complain untill class is completely unviable or deleted.

- Thieves with common conquest builds can’t 1v1 most classes nowdays (given same skill level).
- Stacking thieves in team causes your chances of losing match grow exponentially with every additional thief.
- It is fine to run mediocre ele, it is fine to run mediocre engi but thief on your team HAS to be amazing to have any impact on the match.

If thieves and stealth were as “OP” as people claim, then above 3 points wouldn’t be reality.

The Gates Assassin.9827:

Yesterday, backstab was bugged to reveal the thief if they used it. This was something that a lot of PvPers were hoping would happen. Few questions

1. If you played a D/P thief during this time, did the reveal feel fair?
2. If you played against a D/P, did the reveal make the build feel more fair?
3. Would you want this applied to all stealth attacks (Backstab, Surprise Shot, etc) if they are used (aka, hitting air = reveal)?
4. Would you want this applied to all stealth attacks if blocks, blinds, evades and invulns caused you to be revealed, but not hitting nothing?
5. Would you want this applied to all attacks that miss in stealth?

1 – Yes*. I thought it was fine, and didn’t really notice it. One reason was that the reveal wouldn’t actually take you out of stealth, so it only mattered if I whiffed a backstab as stealth was ending. *However, being unstealthed + revealed when you miss a backstab would be unfair.

2 – I also played against D/P thieves, both as a D/P thief myself, and as an interrupt mesmer. I thought the debuff was fair, but not a huge game-changer because, again, the debuff doesn’t actually take you out of stealth. I had many instances where I’d evade/blind 1-2 backstab attempts and the thief would stay stealthed the whole time. But once the stealth wore off, there’d be a 1-2s window where he couldn’t restealth with blinding powder or refuge.

3 – No.

4 – No.

5 – Kind of, but only if the attack is dodged/blocked/blinded/invulned or otherwise negated by your opponent. I don’t think hitting air should cause any penalties. Thief should still be able to shortbow5 w/o breaking stealth, for example, or stack stealth w/ heartseeker & clusterbomb.

Also, there should not be a revealed debuff when you get destealthed due to a evade/blind/block/etc. Being taken out of stealth is enough of a penalty.

As a side note, mesmer phantasm summons should also count as an attack, given how much damage they can do now and how much stealth uptime mesmers can maintain. (A mesmer can currently camp stealth almost 100% and just summon phantasms for damage. Not at all effective against decent opponents, but still terrible gameplay.)

Professions are not problematic. Builds are.

How many thieves you’ve seen that use no stealth at all?

Many people seem to have asked for it.
I don’t see a reason why he should not be allowed to ask for more feedback by the community.

MithranArkanere.8957:

How many thieves you’ve seen that use no stealth at all?

I ran a no stealth build yesterday. The TEEF guild was supposed to have a big no-stealth event, but the whisper system seemed to be broken.

Running a sword/dagger and shortbow set, the only times I went into stealth were when I was stomping and when someone activated my Shadow Trap (which took the place of Shadow Refuge).

With Deadly Arts, Critical Strikes, and Trickery, I was pretty lethal. The new haste makes it so much deadlier.

If you allow this to happen, then remove the revealed mechanic altogether.

Here’s the suggestion I made yesterday- to have a missed backstab lower the amount of remaining stealth by 1 second. Revealed is way too punishing if the thief is up against players who arm’t just going to stand around when he stealths.

1. Did not play it.
2. Played against it, felt fair only if they actually missed (dodged, invuln, aegis)
3/4/5. Yes, if it is fair. Melee skills should be from actually missing in melee range (dodged, invuln, aegis, maybe if really close such as <50) range skills should on all whether hit or miss. At this time save randomly moving/waiting for stealth to run out/randomly dodging/flailing around I feel (have always felt since launch) that there is little counterplay to attacking from stealth. There needs to be some form of compensation though such as a very short reveal timer, no reveal but a loss of stealth or a refund of initiative.

I would love to see stealth become something tactical to use and have some form of counterplay