Guild Wars 2

This is a 6:50 second fight, my elementalist against a random thief in WvW, the fight was really enjoyable but the culling needs to be fixed, also fraps started bugging(5:15-5:30) out then eventually cut out like…partial way through the fight. Yeah, there was more.

Basically fighting stealth abusing thiefs you’re fighting an invisible enemy 50% of the fight, who can attack while invisible, and disappear to disengage and full heal through passive regeneration. It makes finishing off this type of thief nearly impossible 1v1, I think a possible solution for Anet is a similar system to the one seen in TERA.

For example, If characters are taking a long time to render they should be replaced with very low res shadow figures of the character that take the characters place until the character model actually renders itself.

because while this issue effects all thiefs the most, it also affects everyone else, the entire zerg in WvW a completely un-rendered invisible armie can storm from nowhere to completely annihilate your whole group before they even render. or how about when you run through lions arch and see nobody unless you stand still in a spot for a long while? That’s all this lack of proper rendering and a lack of a lower res model replacing character until they fully render.

Hopefully Anet is listening to the community and can get this sorted out.

it’s not a nerf, i take it you didn’t watch or read anything, i also mentioned this culling/rendering problem doesn’t just affect thiefs. it affects everyone, especially in WvW. Also, have you ever ran into lions arch towards the mystic forge and seen nobody only to have people start popping in 15 seconds later? That’s all part of this issue.

I proposed a possible solution to it as well.

With or without rendering issues, just watching that fight looked annoying as kitten. Why you didn’t just leave after he ran 10 miles away the first time is beyond me. With that many escapes, you don’t do enough burst dmg by the time his heal comes up (every 30 seconds).

SugarSnap.5704:

With or without rendering issues, just watching that fight looked annoying as kitten. Why you didn’t just leave after he ran 10 miles away the first time is beyond me. With that many escapes, you don’t do enough burst dmg by the time his heal comes up (every 30 seconds).

i will never let my prey escape!

it depends, i could do the burst if i could see him(plus his heal doesn’t heal all his health, that’s passive out of combat regeneration), and the video was basically just to show the culling issues in action and I have to admit, it was a great fight regardless of the issues.

Aren’t Thieves meant to be 1-on-1 specialists?

As much as I hate being randomly paralyzed and kitty-slapped down to 0 health out of the blue, you have to admit that it makes sense in a game that’s meant to be played in a group.

Draco.2806:

Aren’t Thieves meant to be 1-on-1 specialists?

As much as I hate being randomly paralyzed and kitty-slapped down to 0 health out of the blue, you have to admit that it makes sense in a game that’s meant to be played in a group.

i don’t entirely mind it but it messes with mechanics in WvW, the perma-stealth thief can keep a supply camp from being captured by 4,5 even 6 people just by abusing this rendering issue.

Also when 40 people start rendering in on your already dead corpse(as well as your 20 teammates), there’s a problem.

but yeah, thiefs are supposed to be the best 1v1 specialists but they are 1v5 specialists at this point. Lol.

AnthonyZdravko.2051:

i don’t entirely mind it but it messes with mechanics in WvW, the perma-stealth thief can keep a supply camp from being captured by 4,5 even 6 people just by abusing this rendering issue.

Well, that’s a balance problem then. ANet are definitely aware of the rendering issues and are presumably working on them as we speak, so it’ll go away in a while.

“So does any class that beats you in PvP need to be nerfed?”

He’s not asking for a nerf to theifs, he’s saying that unstealthing benefits from a couple of seconds of being un-rendered artificially extending stealth time which is really a bug.

Draco.2806:

AnthonyZdravko.2051:

i don’t entirely mind it but it messes with mechanics in WvW, the perma-stealth thief can keep a supply camp from being captured by 4,5 even 6 people just by abusing this rendering issue.

Well, that’s a balance problem then. ANet are definitely aware of the rendering issues and are presumably working on them as we speak, so it’ll go away in a while.

Let’s hope so. ^-^

Aion had a decent solution to rendering huge amounts of players. It would basically turn off all player models and just show the name plate. To me that was a very acceptable solution and it worked well with fort sieges that involved hundreds of players.

^ This. I would like to see an option for this, at the very least it’s better than having people be completely invisible and untargetable.

Also to the OP, with a build like that you really could make use of the Earth Signet, should’ve just swapped to that while u were out of combat, he can’t use invis to save him from that, assuming he wasn’t managing infiltrator strikes very well, you could’ve gibbed him.

But yeah, stealth rendering is a massive issue, it happens in spvp too btw, occasionally. It’s actually quite stupid with thief builds based on Cloak and Daggering every 4-5 seconds, since if you aren’t rendered you’ll be pretty much invisible 100% of the fight.

P/D builds for instance.

It’s about time this problem was fixed. It’s been long enough now.

As for the rendering issue I experienced this myself doing some regular WvW fights, not only with thieves, when I basically ran into large group of enemies not knowing they are there. They rendered a while later and when I realised they presence it was already too late. Died several times due to this.

Thieves are very annoying, I agree. But they are far more annoying in sPvP than in WvW. In WvW you just dont want to be caught alone by one, staying in group makes this issue lot less painful.

Not a Thief problem. It happens with every profession.

Still needs a fix though.

It sort of is a theif problem because they rely on not being seen to survive. They can benefit the most out of this, profs that don’t exploit stealth don’t really benefit from this at all.

Although I don’t think it’s a big deal, spvp isn’t affected by this and that’s the only place where a 1v1 will count for anything.

Waar Kijk Je Naar.8713:

Not a Thief problem. It happens with every profession.

Still needs a fix though.

It happens way more often with thief (and mesmer) because of stealth.

This happens in spvp too.

Knote.2904:

Waar Kijk Je Naar.8713:

Not a Thief problem. It happens with every profession.

Still needs a fix though.

It happens way more often with thief (and mesmer) because of stealth.

This happens in spvp too.

Never seen it happen in sPvP :-/

disappear to disengage and full heal through passive regeneration

Well if he does that that means you’ll also be a 100% health once he engages again.

And rendering problems don’t happen only to thieves although I admit thieves get better usage out of it.

Btw I don’t like to judge gameplay very often but that thief you’re fighting sucks kitten

Else he was just doing that to annoy you.

Difference between a thief being unkillable and say a bunker, is that the thief can do that and be glass cannon.

Fighting thieves in a nutshell…

You can also be unkillable. Don’t leave LA, there you’re unkillable.

Agenteusa.6380:

You can also be unkillable. Don’t leave LA, there you’re unkillable.

I don’t know if you’re saying that because you can’t PvP in Lions Arch or because rendering there is particularly bad and the place looks empty if you’re running around until you stand still for at least 10 seconds due to rendering.

@Knote – It depends, i’m starting to see more and more of these types of thieves single handedly supply camp defending/camping against 5-6 people just by stealth spamming invisibility, I remember one video of a particularly good thief with 3x orb buff repeatedly stealthing and insta-downing single players and finishing them while still stealthed. Was pretty hilarious to watch him pick off everyone in the group 1 by 1.

I’m not calling for a nerf, this is just me asking for the game to be the way it was intended and giving an example of a possible solution and as someone else stated, if not for the shadow idea I presented at least showing the nameplates would be good enough.

Well you may not be calling for nerfs/changes but I am. Fighting thieves is the definition of anti-fun, PvPing against a thief is the least interactive thing in the game, and playing one the least intuitive. I mean look at this, you are clearly ten times the PvPer that this thief is and you still can’t bring him down simply because of the terrible design flaws inherent to his class.

Most of my experiences fighting thieves consists of them using stealth and try to kill me, upon realizing they can’t they just stealth back up and run away.

Well rendering issues aside, that perma stealth thing is an issue. How do you fight an enemy you can’t see? That is not skilled nor fair combat. Most games with stealth didn’t even have that many ways to stealth mid combat and the ones that did had them on long CD’s as major oh crap buttons (i.e. 2 and 3 minute cooldowns). This perma stealth thing is just total crap. Fix thieves so they can only stealth once every few fights if they’re in combat. And make it so they can be unstealthed any time they take damage. The other player needs to have a chance to actually kill them. The Ele in the OP would have bursted down that thief pretty quickly had he actually been able to find him.

Leiloni.7951:

Well rendering issues aside, that perma stealth thing is an issue.

But rendering issues aside, there is no ‘perma-stealth’.

Lowest base health in the game kids, please remember that and whilst our stealth does offer an advantage from the looks of this that thief was perfectly skilled and a match for the OP and without stealth would have been hammered to pieces, how often was the thief on the backfoot here until stealth? without it he’d have been massacred and that’s NOT a pure indication of fact that it was “skill” based so the assumption of “you’re ten times the pvper the thief is” is a complete fallacy
no offense op you’re really very good I just think the complete bias against thieves is insane despite the rendering issues

“Fix thieves so they can only stealth once every few fights if they’re in combat. And make it so they can be unstealthed any time they take damage. The other player needs to have a chance to actually kill them. The Ele in the OP would have bursted down that thief pretty quickly had he actually been able to find him.”

Jeebus H christ, your answer would not solve a thing sorry. First of all only stealth every few fights? ok so what do thieves get back in terms of survival? did you even consider that thieves would need compensation?
De-stealth on damage? how many aoe’s are in this game, how many invisible traps etc etc, aside from the rendering issues stealth is a couple of seconds bar stacks from shadow refuge and they have to sit inside that lovely radius while it stacks so feel free to firestorm the pants outta that area and it’s guaranteed you will STILL deal damage.

They’re INVISIBLE not INVULNERABLE

What makes your response more incredulous, is the fact you freely admit the ele could burst the thief down without stealth pretty easily.

Pot, this is kettle.

Its why I don’t WvW. After my first time seeing or NOT seeing other players, I gave up. I just don’t have the tolerance for it. Seriously, it shouldn’t even be released with out something this basic working. WvW should be in beta until they fix this issue. Can’t even call it a feature as far as I’m concerned. Maybe for those that haven’t play other MMOs where this isn’t an issue, its cool just to fight lots of people at once. For me, I’ve done it and theres NOTHING new here to see, so its just not fun at all.

Perhaps it’d be better if they made a “generic” model for unloaded characters like they do with hostile fighters?

Hellkaiser.6025:

Lowest base health in the game kids, please remember that and whilst our stealth does offer an advantage from the looks of this that thief was perfectly skilled and a match for the OP and without stealth would have been hammered to pieces, how often was the thief on the backfoot here until stealth? without it he’d have been massacred and that’s NOT a pure indication of fact that it was “skill” based so the assumption of “you’re ten times the pvper the thief is” is a complete fallacy
no offense op you’re really very good I just think the complete bias against thieves is insane despite the rendering issues

“Fix thieves so they can only stealth once every few fights if they’re in combat. And make it so they can be unstealthed any time they take damage. The other player needs to have a chance to actually kill them. The Ele in the OP would have bursted down that thief pretty quickly had he actually been able to find him.”

Jeebus H christ, your answer would not solve a thing sorry. First of all only stealth every few fights? ok so what do thieves get back in terms of survival? did you even consider that thieves would need compensation?
De-stealth on damage? how many aoe’s are in this game, how many invisible traps etc etc, aside from the rendering issues stealth is a couple of seconds bar stacks from shadow refuge and they have to sit inside that lovely radius while it stacks so feel free to firestorm the pants outta that area and it’s guaranteed you will STILL deal damage.

They’re INVISIBLE not INVULNERABLE

What makes your response more incredulous, is the fact you freely admit the ele could burst the thief down without stealth pretty easily.

Pot, this is kettle.

Have you seen the video in the OP? There’s 7 minutes of a fight going on in the video and even more not recorded. The Thief just kept disappearing, healing up, and coming back to try again. The Ele couldn’t get in more than a few hits before the Thief stealthed. That’s OP. And to top it off the rendering issues kicked in every time the Thief came out of stealth, giving him a few free hits on the Ele.

That Ele spent god only knows how much time chasing around a Thief that could not be seen and was forced to waste skills to try to pop him out of stealth. How are you supposed to fight and defend against an enemy you can’t see? I’m sorry but that’s seriously broken.

Do what other games did and give Thieves some other defense that doesn’t make them invisible for over half the fight. Starting a fight in stealth is one thing, but once you get in that first hit, you should not be able to go back into stealth mid-combat more than every 2-5 minutes as a big oh crap button.

Also that argument about lowest base HP is a total joke. Ele’s also have the lowest base HP and even LOWER armor values than a Thief does. Ele’s are the squishiest class in the game and the OP does quite well.

Thieves and builds like that are just broken and bad. And any class that relies so heavily on one mechanic to function properly as a class is clearly broken which is not Thieves’ fault, it’s ANet’s fault.

This clearly needs to be fixed. I don’t get why people are saying its fine and saying such rubbish as don’t leave LA if you don’t want to be killed. What’s that got to do with the issue?!?

Morgoth.4573:

This clearly needs to be fixed. I don’t get why people are saying its fine and saying such rubbish as don’t leave LA if you don’t want to be killed. What’s that got to do with the issue?!?

Theres always going to be some people that defend an obviously broken mechanic because its working for them.

Theres no logical reason it should be considered ok so to defend it the arguments youre going to see arent going to be logical.

Thiefs are best able to exploit the broken rendering. It’s not their fault, but they can easily remain stealthed through an entire fight. Ridiculous.

Easy temporary fix – lengthen the re stealth time enough to offset the rendering issue.

How this is culling when there is only 2 of you ?

As i recall from the AMA of devs culling was supposed to happen only in overpopulated areas at same time (like in LA at Event times) when server-player rendering start slowing due to huge numbers (not like in your video 2 chars to render).

So you basically telling me that culling happens on 2 chars populated area ?

I find this hard to understand really.

Because their culling system is completely broken obviously.

It’s 1v1, so I don’t know where the culling issue is.

OP, you probably think you should have facerolled this thief. I think had it been any four of the five thieves you see roaming around wvwvw, you would have.

But you need to give this thief props. It’s not like he didn’t know how to play his spec accordingly.

Honestly I watched the whole video and I don’t see any rendering issue… He becomes visible pretty much right away everytime he hits you from stealth. You always get him targeted right away also, so even if he rendered half a second earlier I don’t see any difference in the outcome of that fight..

Part of where it LOOKS like he fails to render is not actually so, he is using a shadowstep after exiting stealth numerous times.

The part I do find funny though is it is actually YOU enabling him to stealth so often. Everytime he uses all his heal/util stealth options (3 total since he has shadow step as 1 util, hide in shadows, powder and refuge), YOU then go into melee range letting him stealth with cloak and dagger. I saw several times you almost had him dead, he had used all his stealths and then you went and charged into melee range and he CND’d on you. You would have beaten him in those moments if you just continued to range attack him.

Also more food for thought, that pet of yours gives him another stealth option via CND.

if u was condition spec he would of died before the 3rd stealth

but that was a good duel i think u could of won that 2 times in that video, he i see none for the thf he should of left u behind

Nothing more annoying than the 2 thiefs summons already hitting you while real thief still has to render.

and as u could see in that video yes stealthing was allot but the dmg put on the thf and the way his heal went down so quick, if any of them stealth’s got taken away he would of died far to easy and a boost would be needed for the thf class, idk what they could do to help thfs stay 1v1 and if good 1vmore solo classes but only thing i can think of is to un stack stealth, as a thf i stealth then use a different stealth so it last longer, they should make it so u have to come out of stealth and then reuse so the person you are fighting can see where u are every 3 seconds. i understand they fixed alittle now and u cant use for a little bit of time but as i got some stealths that last longer than the cd i can stack easy.. so i think this is the only way to help with keeping them less op but still very playable

yeah its very annoying and my main tac to fight but they easy to know what one is not the real one by there name being thf and no defender or invader/guild something something. not as op as mes summons but still very effective in a fight

I’m pretty sure this isn’t even a rendering issue. Considering his damage and how much damage you were doing, he’s using a stealth build. As you can see at 4:15, he loads in instantly.

Rendering is an issue, but not in this battle. This is just an issue of you playing against a build designed to do what he did in this battle and you having no idea how to counter it.

It’s not culling, it’s a rendering delay (likely due to several issues, but there will always be some delay as it takes time for the other player’s computer to tell the server his position as he exits stealth, then the server calls up his information and verifies it, sends it to your computer and your client calls up the necessary files, etc).

I’ve experienced it from both sides, and when playing my thief I can tell that no one can see me yet for a couple seconds after I can see my own character un-stealth. Timing stealth skills to hit right after revealed wears off you can blink in and out of view for less time than it’s possible to fire an auto-attack while spamming tab like crazy.

Most elementalist skills (even auto-attacks) either require a target to begin attacking, or are ground targeted with big red warning circles that appear long before any damage. A good thief abusing rendering delay can completely avoid most damage an elementalist can put out. I have fights like this all the time, because I really like playing elementalist more than thief. The difference is a thief can go full glass cannon and survive by completely avoiding damage, to have any chance my elementalist has to be very defensively built.

In a game with active dodging, no dedicated healers and visual oriented action combat, a perma-stealth ability set is too powerful. The best solution I can think of would be to increase the duration of the revealed condition after stealth (in WvW only if possible, it’s fine in PvE, and I don’t really know about sPvP) to account for the rendering delay.

I play a thief and currently find stealth to be overpowered in WvW.

Draco.2806:

Aren’t Thieves meant to be 1-on-1 specialists?

If you decide to play it that way, any profession is a 1-on-1 specialist, thieves no moreso than others. Most of situational effectiveness in GW2 is a result of skill selection and playstyle, not some sort of build-in profession aptitude for an environment.

Here is the topic of the first post by op.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Rendering-culling-in-WvW-and-thieves-in-a-nutshell/first#post600961

Why is there two posts? Whining on one wasn’t enough or something?

Way off topic here but I would have been fine playing the thief if there was no stealth at all as long as combo fields like smoke granted some kind of miss chance for those attacking from outside the field. I always considered the thief to be different to the invisible assassin concept, my interpretation of the thief would have had no stealth, but more abilities to mitigate hit chances. Things like weakening attacks, caltrops, blinding powder, smoke fields and evasion should have been the emphasis of the class, with backstab and sneak attack being positional, not stealth abilities. I’ve never liked thieves or rogues using poison or invisibility, these things always seemed to be more assassin and illusionist in nature to me…