Guild Wars 2

Stealth is a Mechanic in this game, currently Thieves, Mesmers, Rangers and Engineers (50% of the professions) can utilise this mechanic in their favour. While less extreme on the Latter 3 professions listed, stealth can really mess up your day.

The professions have skills to fight of stealth, and generally laying down AOE or Auto Attacking with your weapons will still hit a thief if they would hit him when not invis. Some weapon sets, however, have a much harder time dealing with classes that stealth. Now before you say weapon swap I’ll point out that I am an Elementalist, there is no weapon swap. Taking the Elementalist as an example, inparticular Secpter Main Hand. The skills this weapon has have long CDs or an extra component to reduce that cd, but make the skill harder to land. For example, Dragons Tooth: This ability has nice damage output, but can’t hit an invisible thief. Contrary there is Pheonix, a nice ability, reasonable damage but has a 40 sec cd making it a 1 timer when its not already on cd.

Now you may be thinking, just auto attack. While auto attack works well on some weapons (D/D ele, Melee weapons on most classes) it does not work at all well with ranged weapons. From my time playing Elementalist, Ranger and Warrior, the ranged weapons in this game go downwards by default, requiring a camera angle change to get the skills to go forward. In addition there are some skills that do not work at all without a target, these include beam type skills and effect on target type skill. Beam: Elementalist Scepter Air auto attack, Mesmer Great Sword auto attack. Effect on Target: Elementalist Scepter Fire auto attack. This makes it auto attacking hard and in some cases impossible.

Personally I believe each weapon set should have similar tools to deal with stealth. I would like to see an increase in the default projectile height so that when using a projectile weapon it will go forward its full distance, not forward and down into the ground. I would also like to request so work done on beam type skills so that they can also work without a target. This would make fighting stealthing classes easier to fight when not using melee weapons, especially to the classes that do not have weapon swap build in (mainly Elementalists and Engineers). Currently sustain thieves can stealth off, heal to full and come back. They only way to fight off this kind of thief is to apply pressure out of stealth and when they do stealth. Not being able to hit as stealthed foe (due to not having the capability that you would have on a melee set) is very annoying, punishes ranged players and is not fun for anyone except the stealth abusers.

Feel free to further discuss ideas around this topic,
Slasher

I agree – it has always bugged me that auto-attacking without a target always shoots projectiles into the ground unless your move your camera around :P

Your fix makes sense to me. Doesn’t require any game-breaking changes, just a simple redirect of projectile skills should do it. +1

im a ranger using shortbow/longbow, when some1 stealths the only thing i can do is longbow barrage thats it, why cant my pet sniff out the stealthed player? or my nr1 bow skills should be able to change into some short of “slash with your bow” skill to just swing around and pray to hit something

Stealth needs 2 simple changes in my opinion

1. Give reveal debuff if the attack is blocked/blinded/dodged
2. Show damage numbers(at least direct numbers) to reward and kinda give the other play an idea of where the stealthed player might be

two simple changes that don’t buff /nerf anyone, but simply allow for counter plays.

google.3709:

Stealth needs 2 simple changes in my opinion

1. Give reveal debuff if the attack is blocked/blinded/dodged
2. Show damage numbers(at least direct numbers) to reward and kinda give the other play an idea of where the stealthed player might be

two simple changes that don’t buff /nerf anyone, but simply allow for counter plays.

I agree with this and was going to add #1 to my post, but that was kind of off topic for the weapon skills hitting the ground.

The amount of times I sit still, waiting for water to come of cd (for shatterstone) and see “Invulnerable” 6 times above my head makes me think, why is that class so mindless. If the foe is invulnerable that is something that you need to account for, not just spam backstab till it hits. It should unstealth you. While daggers this kind of makes sense (being silent and all) shooting someone from stealth and not unstealthing, is very stealthy :p