Guild Wars 2

I have been in wvw a lot and I cannot say how many times i have fought a thief who stealths on me every few seconds and when they are low on health they just stealth again and escape, and there is nothing I can do about it. It has annoyed me pretty hard there is no good counter against stealth, so I propose a new skill should be added for the engineer class: Thermal goggles (gadget skill). With thermal vision, it would make sense to be able to spot invisible enemies and it seems like a natural skill for the engineer. The effect could be something along the line of “When activated you can see and target stealth enemies for seven seconds”

Any thoughts on this idea?

Eh, too much of a hard counter for my taste.

Technically this would only work if stealth only effects visible wavelengths.

And no… for one thing, if there’s a stealth counter it shouldn’t be class specific. For another thing, you’re an engineer. You have a lot of AoE options already, and even some things (BOB, the frisbee mine, flamethrower’s air jet thing, the oil slick) for area knockback (or knockdown, for the last one). Just use those, or an evade. You can still hit a thief when he’s stealthed.

Plus, at the moment there’s a stupid bug making stealth last longer (the game takes some time to load them again after they de-stealth), but I’m told that’s going to be fixed soon anyway. Without that it’s not so much of an issue, because they should break stealth the moment they attack and be unable to enter it again for a few seconds.

That bug is soooo much fun tbh, makes cloaking device our second best trait after grenadier. Someone in enemy zerg immobilizes you in wvw (this is practically guaranteed), and even after it wears off, you can wade through the entire enemy zerg for 5-10 seconds w/o getting noticed.

Also useful in spvp, as immobilizes are quite common there as well.

This is a problem in any game where stealth is available for one class and not all the others. It is inherently imbalanced. Either stealth is undetectable and overpowered, or it’s detectable and a useless gimmick.

It’s really silly that every class should have to devote an entire skill slot or trait slot to avoiding thief stealth. We don’t have a whole lot of skill and trait slots to play with. This is the other problem with stealth— do you give yourself any available options and kitten yourself against every non-thief, or do you not take it and give yourself a harder time against thieves. In the end, most of the time it’s just not worth taking “Thief specific” counter skills.

Furthermore, it’s unfair on a class when other classes have abilities to hard-counter their main mechanic. There are no guardian skills that prevent Engineers from using Kits. No skill to stop Elementalists switching attunements, no hard-pet counters or sure-fire ways to dispell death shroud. We can hate on stealth as much as we please, but without it Thieves would be nothing but a piece of soggy cardboard in PvP.

It’s part of the game, and the best we can hope for is an eventual fix for the rendering issues.

Part of the theme of a Thief is to be slippery and uncatchable.
They already removed long-term stealth, so please don’t try to ruin short-stealth too.

If they’re using stealth to escape, that means they didn’t use it to fight you, that’s why they couldn’t go toe-to-toe with you.

That is a victory in itself, so accept the win gracefully.

Ashes.6418:

This is a problem in any game where stealth is available for one class and not all the others. It is inherently imbalanced. Either stealth is undetectable and overpowered, or it’s detectable and a useless gimmick.

Based on what I said above, this is untrue.

In GW2, stealth only lasts 2 to 5 seconds per cast and limited by cooldowns and initiative, which is a good balance.

It’s only unbalanced when you have stealth mechanics that let you sit around for over a minute without being detected.

The issue expressed by the OP isn’t a matter of it being overpowered – It’s a matter of frustration towards other players being slippery.

All I read in the OP is,
“I cannot kill a profession with the lowest armor and lowest Hp, so I am here demanding a special skill dedicated to countering the only defense they have”

WvW is not about the kill either way, it is about taking the keep.
You ask if we have any thoughts, yes, I think you should read some of the threads popping up as of late in which battling a thief is discussed.

DreamOfACure.4382:

In GW2, stealth only lasts 2 to 5 seconds per cast and limited by cooldowns and initiative, which is a good balance.

The above should be true, but it isn’t. Odds are, unless you’re on the least populated bracket, you’ve seen (or more aptly, not seen) hordes of ‘invisible’ enemies in wvw. I’m not going to go into detail on that subject, there are tons of details on the general and WvW subforums about the phenomenon. Sufficient to say, under certain conditions the server doesn’t tell your client to render players, and only informs your client that your character is taking damage, or shows you damage numbers from AoE on targets that your client hasn’t rendered.

Why is this relevant?
For whatever reason, after going invisible, and then coming out of invisibility, the server does not inform enemy clients that they need to render your character for a certain time. In practice, this means after leaving invis, you have 5-10 seconds (sometimes more) of added invis.

So what is initially 2-5 seconds of invis ends up being 7-15 seconds of invis for all intents and purposes. Moreover, during the additional time the invisible character can attack you, backstab you, etc. and unless you have aoe, there isn’t a kittenhing you can do about it. This also happens in spvp, but less often, and usually the render delay is lower.

The good news is engineers can abuse this too thanks to cloaking device. Someone immobilizes you (quite common in wvw and spvp), after it wears off (or you break it), you can spam nades, stomp, drop bombs, etc. If you haven’t been rendered. Quite hilarious in wvw tbh. It’s quite awesome to see the entire enemy zerg ignore you while you are among them bursting someone down.

misread post. Like, totally deleted…

“Plus, at the moment there’s a stupid bug making stealth last longer (the game takes some time to load them again after they de-stealth), but I’m told that’s going to be fixed soon anyway. Without that it’s not so much of an issue, because they should break stealth the moment they attack and be unable to enter it again for a few seconds.”

Thanks everyone who gave their thoughts in this thread without being an kitten Even though thieves are the ones who stealth the most other professions also have stealth who it couldve worked on.
But like LameFox said, a bug is influencing stealth more than it should and that is most likely why it is a big issue into which I had put a lot of thought into about. I hope that bug gets fixed soon.

And disregard this thread now people lol