Guild Wars 2

Stealth has historically been ridiculously powerful in GW2 as a whole and this is also true of most MMOs, however in other games stealth was usually balanced by having a cooldown and typically not attainable in combat without popping a significant cooldown.

However, this isn’t the case with smoke fields in conjunction with blast finishers and leaps. Not only is it incredibly powerful on an individual level of having an incredibly low cd on-demand stealth, but very strong on a teamplay level being almost on par with SR when teams regularly run comps with a myriad of blast finishers from d/d eles, shoutbow warriors, hammer mediguards, etc. Smoke fields allow for stealth openers and team stealth movement around the map with virtually no cooldown while keeping SR off cooldown for combat utility.

Personally I think smoke field interactions with leaps and blast finishers granting stealth to be leaning on overpowered. In team environments it effectively grants teams all the power of stealth openers and movement without using the ability designed as the aoe stealth ability making SR even more powerful than it was before the reign of D/P thieves where SR was the 1 minute cooldown cost of utilizing stealth to mask movements around the map since now SR can be used exclusively in-combat utility. Smoke fields such as they are remove the risk reward factor from choosing to use SR to mask your teams movement or keep it for the in-combat utility.

Also on a separate but related note, why exactly is blinding powder a blast finisher?

So what are some other thoughts on the subject?

Don’t care.

Thieves are somewhat predictable and not OP themselves.

I would love if they made a more natural counter to stealth, maybe through a trait (fire fields on traited ele or chaos fields on traited mesmers cause revealed) or natural addition (all light fields give revealed). Heck, even something like traps being able to cause revealed aoe would add a good amount of counterplay.

They could also reduce the duration of stealth from blasts, but that is less interesting imo.

It would be nice if thieves got more reliable survivability elsewhere so stealth would stop being the only thing that allows for any degree of middleground for new thieves and provide more diversity for the profession as a whole while giving room for anet to effectively turn stealth into an optional tool instead of a requirement to survive.

I don’t expect it to reduce the amount of complaint threads though since it seems few outside of the thief community understand that applying too many hardcounters to stealth will break it. So w/e.

This didn’t seem like a “thief OP, nerf thief” thread. It was more talking about stealth mechanics, especially in terms of team-stealth to prepare for an instagib. If you talk about changes to blasting smoke fields (and not leap finishers), which is very rarely used by thief for stealth. Other changes such as giving classes that struggle vs. thief (or even not) a capability to give revealed just raises the skill cap overall and gives more reason to use previously ignored skills. They started down this path when they put revealed on sic ‘em and utility goggles, but haven’t really revisited it since then.

As a mechanic, stealth in this game is OP and forces so many other OP mechanics to exist (see: instant bursts such as fresh-air eles). Toning it down slightly is a good step, especially for builds that thief has so-long pushed out of the meta.

Also, yolo, thief’s other survivability mechanic is “evade spam,” as seen in the popular s/d builds of the early cele meta.

This post wreaks of misinformation and ignorance of a mechanic. Since this is the PvP forum I’m assuming your bad experiences here stemmed from conquest. Where in a conquest map, you’re complaints about teams stacking stealth is either unwarranted or a result of lack of map awareness. If any team chooses this tactic, which is a very poor tactic in sPvP, then they would most likely be doing it from somewhere you see them already. The counterplay here is AoE and general knowledge that there are now stealthed enemies coming to your point.

If they’re stacking from somewhere out of sight in a conquest map, the likelihood that the stealth lasts long enough to come as any sort of surprise attack is extremely likely. And in the very few places the out of sight distance is short enough to be able to actually pop out on a point (behind keep in forest), it wouldn’t really make a difference as if they just showed up like normal…

How successful is a team going to be if they have enough people in one spot just to stack stealth, leaving the other points open to decap/capture? This type of tactic (which I’ve never even seen in sPvP) might work for some gimmicky kills, but definitely won’t win you the match.

BlackBeard.2873:

This didn’t seem like a “thief OP, nerf thief” thread. It was more talking about stealth mechanics. Especially if you talk about changes to blasting smoke fields (and not leap finishers), which is very rarely used by thief for stealth.

Also, yolo, thief’s other survivability mechanic is “evade spam,” as seen in the popular s/d builds of the early cele meta.

Evade spam works in the hands of a decent player but even that can fail. Players eventually go back to stealth or use stealth in conjunction because that is where all of thief’s survivability (and their burst damage) is.

Hence why I said “it’d be nice…”

That’s also most likely one of the reasons why Anet stopped putting revealed at those 3 skills. If everyone gets access to revealed then there is no point in playing a thief unless you are a RPer or like being near worthless because your life is tied to stealth.

Hey negativity. When someone is in stealth, they can’t cap points. The more stealth the better.

yolo swaggins.2570:

BlackBeard.2873:

This didn’t seem like a “thief OP, nerf thief” thread. It was more talking about stealth mechanics. Especially if you talk about changes to blasting smoke fields (and not leap finishers), which is very rarely used by thief for stealth.

Also, yolo, thief’s other survivability mechanic is “evade spam,” as seen in the popular s/d builds of the early cele meta.

Evade spam works in the hands of a decent player but even that can fail. Players eventually go back to stealth or use stealth in conjunction because that is where all of thief’s survivability (and their burst damage) is.

Hence why I said “it’d be nice…”

That’s also most likely one of the reasons why Anet stopped putting revealed at those 3 skills. If everyone gets access to revealed then there is no point in playing a thief unless you are a RPer or like being near worthless because your life is tied to stealth.

This is partially true about evade spam (+ports that ignore LOS), in that all evasion skills have very small windows of unavoidable vulnerability. It still does give some strong defensive mechanics (complete mitigation).

I also don’t think that stopping at those 3 skills is the best approach. I agree you can’t have every auto-attack and low-CD utility causing revealed. The builds that need the most help, arguably, are zerker builds for engie, mesmer, ranger, and ele to keep up with thieves. Giving these builds access to alternative utilities (or traits that deviate from the normal allotments) that cause revealed not only help with their “thief problem,” but can also give powerful defensive capabilities to prevent instagibs at the start of matches (as has become quite popular). Imagine putting revealed on null-field. Mesmers still probably don’t have a great fight with thieves, but the matchup evens out a bit more. Something aoe like that also makes it very interesting for wvw and other game-modes.

This is also a relevant topic to bring up, as perma and high-stealth builds have a very high likelihood of becoming a problem in strong-hold. I think you are going to see a lot of the cancer that plagues wvw roaming pop up and infinite amounts of qq about builds such as p/d thief, PU mesmer, and trapper ranger (when they implement trap runes).

Turk.5460:

This post wreaks of misinformation and ignorance of a mechanic. Since this is the PvP forum I’m assuming your bad experiences here stemmed from conquest. Where in a conquest map, you’re complaints about teams stacking stealth is either unwarranted or a result of lack of map awareness. If any team chooses this tactic, which is a very poor tactic in sPvP, then they would most likely be doing it from somewhere you see them already. The counterplay here is AoE and general knowledge that there are now stealthed enemies coming to your point.

If they’re stacking from somewhere out of sight in a conquest map, the likelihood that the stealth lasts long enough to come as any sort of surprise attack is extremely likely. And in the very few places the out of sight distance is short enough to be able to actually pop out on a point (behind keep in forest), it wouldn’t really make a difference as if they just showed up like normal…

How successful is a team going to be if they have enough people in one spot just to stack stealth, leaving the other points open to decap/capture? This type of tactic (which I’ve never even seen in sPvP) might work for some gimmicky kills, but definitely won’t win you the match.

Yeah, it’s a very poor tactic used by top teams in every tournament. What noobs all the top teams in the world are for using it. Maybe you should give them some tips on how to play.

Black powder lasts a mere 4s yet if used in conjunction with blinding powder and shortbow 2, the thief alone can grant 8s of aoe stealth, add literally any other blast finisher to the mix from even just 1 other person and it has the same effect kitten for 10s of stealth.

Stealth openers and movements around the map have always been an incredibly strong aspect of teamplay and the fact that lately stealth openers and stealthing movements around the map are coming from an ability that doesn’t even have a cooldown probably warrants a second look.

On another note, you probably shouldn’t call other people’s posts ignorant and full of misinformation then admit that you’ve never seen the mechanic in question ever used.

I completely agree with the OP, as seen in the last WTS how a well coordinated stealth play between 2 berserker amulet players (in that case d/p thief and hammer meditation guardian) can instantly kitten out a target from stealth with little counter play —- which is really just awareness and random dodges lel (and recently rune of vampirism but do you really call this a counter?).

That being said, nerfing smoke fields would really hurt d/p thiefs so I would either suggest a “compensation” for thiefs for losing a stealth on demand or just changing blast on smoke field to something less impactful (I honestly have no idea what..)

This is silly. d/p 5 is good k. Discuss that skill then.

I wish there was a viable smoke field on engi…

So that leaves… Well…

Also sorry but every class has weapon sets to combat stealth. If you learn how to deal with stealth on ‘your’ class it might be a more immediate solution for you?

Stealth plays actually add something to the game when used in a team scenario. Why would you remove them? I’ve seen even TCG fudge them if they’re not on their A game…

Phaeton.9582:

This is silly. d/p 5 is good k. Discuss that skill then.

I wish there was a viable smoke field on engi…

So that leaves… Well…

some of us weirdos do quite well with bombkit

Phaeton.9582:

Also sorry but every class has weapon sets to combat stealth. If you learn how to deal with stealth on ‘your’ class it might be a more immediate solution for you?

Stealth plays actually add something to the game when used in a team scenario. Why would you remove them? I’ve seen even TCG fudge them if they’re not on their A game…

Wildly swinging at air and spamming aoes is not a reasonable counterplay to stealth. Watch the stealth movements in the recent ESL or the WTS tournament. You can even see some top tier players just doing it in random spvp matches.

The reason why SR is anywhere near balanced is because there’s a solid representation of where it is but you aren’t going to have vision of every player at all points in the game which is why SR’s stealth opener is so strong but incurs the penalty of a 1 min cooldown meaning it won’t reliably be available for its in-combat utility for rezzing.

The cooldown penalty isn’t in play with smoke fields like black powder. Best case scenario they use blinding powder for a 40s cd if the thief is the only one with a blast finisher.

There’s obviously no denying this adds another aspect to teamplay but is this really balanced? What can you do to stop a thief+whatever class from smoke field stealthing out of los and bursting someone down instantly to gain the upper hand in a team fight stemming from an ability that has no cooldown.

Like I’ve said before, SR accomplishes this at the cost of a 1min cooldown, smoke fields like black powder eliminate the risk reward factor of incurring significant cooldowns.

Stealth has always lacked solid counterplay in this game. Reveal mechanics are few and far between and are often attached to abilities that are generally weak and not worth using over other common staple utilities. Smoke field stealthing, especially in the case of aoe stealthing, is an abuse of an already powerful mechanic.