Guild Wars 2

Here’s what I think Arenanet is doing.

They are in the process of fixing stealth. They claimed to have fixed some of the culling when thieves become visible. If it proves to still be an issue (uh, it is), they’ll perform more changes.

Sedriel.7321:

A friend and I were in PvP and we came across a single Thief. We spent an entire hr fighting this guy, dieing once or twice and running back before the other one died. A whole kittening hr. No matter what we did he was constantly invisible and not taking any dmg. If we ever did any dmg to him he was stealth and appear with full health again. We fought him under water and above ground all over the freaking map and we couldn’t do one kitten thing to him.

At one point another 3 people joined the fight and we still couldn’t kill him. He effortlessly evaded every single attack and was invisible more than he was ever visible. If one of us went down he would also be invisible for the entire time he was finishing us and there was no way we could defend against this either. Our CC did absolutely nothing and it was all that we could to do take 1/4 of his HP off before he disappeared and came back with it all healed up.

Hate to call anyone bad but if you are getting beat 2v1 by a thief underwater then you really really need to go play some more pve or something to learn your class. Thieves have the worst underwater balance on any class and I have 4 lvl 80s and 2 70 atm. For 1 all the elite skills are unusable but basilik venom. and two only 1 stealth is possable works underwater which is the heal.

Moddo.7105:

Sedriel.7321:

A friend and I were in PvP and we came across a single Thief. We spent an entire hr fighting this guy, dieing once or twice and running back before the other one died. A whole kittening hr. No matter what we did he was constantly invisible and not taking any dmg. If we ever did any dmg to him he was stealth and appear with full health again. We fought him under water and above ground all over the freaking map and we couldn’t do one kitten thing to him.

At one point another 3 people joined the fight and we still couldn’t kill him. He effortlessly evaded every single attack and was invisible more than he was ever visible. If one of us went down he would also be invisible for the entire time he was finishing us and there was no way we could defend against this either. Our CC did absolutely nothing and it was all that we could to do take 1/4 of his HP off before he disappeared and came back with it all healed up.

Hate to call anyone bad but if you are getting beat 2v1 by a thief underwater then you really really need to go play some more pve or something to learn your class. Thieves have the worst underwater balance on any class and I have 4 lvl 80s and 2 70 atm. For 1 all the elite skills are unusable but basilik venom. and two only 1 stealth is possable works underwater which is the heal.

when we were atking him underwater he was unhitable for about 5 -10 full seconds where very single atk was ‘evade, evade, evade’. Underwatter was the closest we got to kill him by sink/float locking him but as soon as those were all on CD he hit some crazy skill that shot him half a mile down the river and it was inpossible to catch up to him while he healed. then he turned around to kick our butts some more.

To actually kill thieves, you actually have to NOT listen to what everybody on these forums are saying.

“That is to play a bunker against a thief in WvW”

You might call me crazy but why do i say this?

Because bunker and survivalbility based builds in WvW exactly leads to what you the OP experience against thieves. Many people hitting thieves for an hour without killing them. Many times have i have to somewhat seem like “clean up the mess” on my guardian because it seems that i am the only person on the whole map which could actually kill a thief.

Now to give reasons why bunker is bad against thieves in WvW

1. This isnt Spvp, thieves are free to disengage you whenever they feel like it, they arent forced to stand in a small circle

2. Bunker builds lack the damage to kill any thief whether they are glass cannon or not because you hit like……well you dont hit for much

3. This leads to thieves basically being invincible against you because you as a bunker, would slowly chip away at the thieves health> which leads to them stealthing away > and reganking you when their cooldowns are back up

To summarize: Bunker in WvW = cant ever kill a thief and opens up the way for thieves to grief you over and over again forever

Now to back up my claim with some personal experience:

I could never finish off a thief when i spec for survivability on my guardian:
what pretty much happens is what you the OP has described,
They dont really kill me, but i dont kill them either, they stealth when they get low and go off to regank me later or just pick on some squishy guy

Now that i spec pure-offensively

I lol burst them and they die in 5 seconds
many times they stealth, i hit my aoes like biding blade, spin and i find a dead thief next to me 5 seconds later

Why you failed to kill a single thief with 5 people is because all those 5 people arent glass cannons themselves, a real glass cannon can easily down a thief in a few seconds

Seriously, they just need to put a perminant 20 second timer upon LEAVING stealth, no traits to lower it, it prevents reuse of stealth.

NO ONE can dissapear whent hey are enguaged in melee combat. The entire rpemise of the thief having these skills is completely rediculous. The idea of temp stealth in combat is likewise rediculous. Upon entering combat a thief should be visible at all times. Event he mesmer’s bag of tricks gives them no more than 3 sec of stealth and atleast they can claim to have magic as for how they get that. A thief stealthing after entering combat makes no sense.

The entire class should have been designed around evades not stealth.

Sedriel.7321:

There were us 2 eles on him the whole time and we were trying to root/daze him together. We were on vent synchronizing our attacks and everything but we couldn’t do a kitten thing to him while he stealthed and whittled us down. We tried the CC route and it did nothing to him at all. He even effortlessly avoided all dmg the other 3 or 4 pple that showed up to try to take him down as well.

The question I have is if you were coordinating that well, how did you ever get stomped? That build will have no quickness, you have mist form on death so you can run to your friend for a quick revive and he stacks AoE’s on you to seal the deal. If I am fighting two ele’s that know what they are doing, the only way I kill them is by downing them enough times that they auto-die. Against good ele’s that would take a hellishly long time.

The problem with these conversations is that as much as I would like to discuss and see what the issue is, the thread quickly becomes full of outlandish and plain silly statements by people that are either trolling or just honestly have no clue what they are talking about.

There is no class in the game that has not given me a challenging fight 1v1. There is no class in the game that is an easy kill. I can get stomped in a 1v1 and the next minute I could easily 1v6 people if there wasnt a downed system. The difference between the two situations is the players driving the toons I am fighting. How prepared are they for 1v1, do they know their class, and equally important do they know my class? If you want to kill this thief, then go to your class forums and work out what the problem is, because the d/d build with rapidly changing attunements, using regen healing, is pretty much a direct counter to this build. The fights last forever and generally comes down to who makes a mistake first, specially with timing of elites.

Safe hunting.

Wah, wahh, <insert class here> needs to be nerfed.

Why not take the opposite approach?

Thief invis is a problem. Give other classes (nice thread in the Ranger forum on this) the ability to intermittently detect invis? Give the ability to Ranger pets since animals are not as dependent on their eyes as us bipedals (woulda said humans, but gotta figure in Norn, Asura, & Charr)?

thief is not an OP class , thief is a strong class.

What we need is to buff other or give them counters to thief powers.

I feel like shadow refuge is way too overpowered, theifs should only be invisible inside the given area, and shadow refuge needs a WAY higher cooldown then only 60 seconds, maybe 90 seconds like the portal nerf that was given to mesmers…

Two thieves held a group of 20+ off at a supply camp by stealthing. Even when we killed one, another would run from spawn and contest the area. Despite AOE’ing every piece of ground, it still took us a good 10 minutes to take the camp that we had cleared in about 30 seconds. The group was not organized enough to stack on top of each other, but that shouldn’t matter. One player shouldn’t be able to put the brakes on 20+ people. There needs to be a way, be that a skill from a profession, a mechanic change (perhaps you cannot contest a capture point while stealthed), or a new piece of siege that reveals stealthed units around it. This thief problem leads to horrible imbalance in WvW. This requires little teamwork to have a huge effect on the game, and isn’t that fun for the thief, or the 20 players frustrated trying to kill him.

Ceeps.3185:

Two thieves held a group of 20+ off at a supply camp by stealthing. Even when we killed one, another would run from spawn and contest the area. Despite AOE’ing every piece of ground, it still took us a good 10 minutes to take the camp that we had cleared in about 30 seconds. The group was not organized enough to stack on top of each other, but that shouldn’t matter. One player shouldn’t be able to put the brakes on 20+ people. There needs to be a way, be that a skill from a profession, a mechanic change (perhaps you cannot contest a capture point while stealthed), or a new piece of siege that reveals stealthed units around it. This thief problem leads to horrible imbalance in WvW. This requires little teamwork to have a huge effect on the game, and isn’t that fun for the thief, or the 20 players frustrated trying to kill him.

yup like i said , much more useful than nerfing them would be give other classes at one way each to find them.

Ceeps.3185:

Two thieves held a group of 20+ off at a supply camp by stealthing. Even when we killed one, another would run from spawn and contest the area. Despite AOE’ing every piece of ground, it still took us a good 10 minutes to take the camp that we had cleared in about 30 seconds. The group was not organized enough to stack on top of each other, but that shouldn’t matter. One player shouldn’t be able to put the brakes on 20+ people. There needs to be a way, be that a skill from a profession, a mechanic change (perhaps you cannot contest a capture point while stealthed), or a new piece of siege that reveals stealthed units around it. This thief problem leads to horrible imbalance in WvW. This requires little teamwork to have a huge effect on the game, and isn’t that fun for the thief, or the 20 players frustrated trying to kill him.

Simple fix:
Stealthed players only slow down capturing by 80% instead of stopping it entirely.
problem solved.

The only way I found to defeat a stealth-focused Thief is to simply not fight him on even ground. You can’t win that unless you’re a Guardian IMO.

Bring 2-3 friends, root him, overpower him.

I love it how many people cry above thieves. I’m wondering how many of these thief-nerf-criers are elementalists or Mesmers. On my Guardian or my Mesmer, it’s a complete faceroll fighting them. In sPVP, might as well go AFK. In WvWvW, I have to put forth some effort. I do understand that chasing one player for an hour is stupid (not foolish, STUPID). In WvWvW, one needs to know when to cut their losses and move on. If one cannot let a target go (especially one with stealth), then time is wasted and stories can be embellished.

To be honest friend, I think lots of this is a skill and understanding issue. To follow a single character around for an hour, that’s bad. To have two elementalists chaining CC on a class with more evades than attacks, it’s bound to fail. On top of it, your posts so far are indirect, vague, seem to be skirting questions, and your answer to the query about understanding the thief was “how is this relevant”. Sun Tzu said (paraphrased) “Know your enemy”. You seem to have no idea what the thief does, yet you are calling for nerfs because you can’t kill it? That is bad form.

Thieves are fine. Play a Guardian or Mesmer, quit crying.

-Hate

Hi,

Thanks for your suggestion & contribution.

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