Guild Wars 2

I didn’t know they were condi specced walking into the match…

I normally run without cleanses and do just fine. But two condi-heavy players, coordinating proved to be a bit much. I promise that when I snagged those guys one on one, they landed no shatter condi burst and the fights were equal.

Thanks for calling me out (even though I mentioned the lack of cleanse to kick myself on purpose). In the meantime, this thread was about PU…

Loxsus.3841:

The other elites could use to have their cooldowns reduced a bit for the mesmers. I think timewarp could be on a similar cooldown. Moa has a passive now which isn’t the worst while the active is pretty backbreaking.

As long as Feel My Wrath! exists in its current state, there is ZERO justification for Time Warp having a cooldown over 60 seconds.

Time Warp can be substantially better than Feel My Wrath though. I think a more sensible cd would be maybe around 120, maybe 100. Traited it’ll provide pulsing 12 seconds of slow in a very large area and 11 seconds of quickness, not factoring in boon and condition duration. With boonsharing you can push that quickness up a litte as well as give teammates 6 seconds of resistance upon creation, making it a very good elite skill for turning a fight around. Boosting the dps of everyone on point while simultaneously weakening all enemies and crippling condi classes for 3-6 seconds is pretty nice. It’s also quite possible they’re balancing it in preparation for Chronomancer who will likely have ways to extend quickness/slow or combine them with alacrity. 60 second Time Warp seems excessive though. 20% uptime on Slow in a huge AoE is nothing to scoff at and something I’d much rather have than 10 seconds of fury, so I’d say that’s a little too strong.

Veil is a lie. It is 3 seconds base with 6 seconds on PU. My proof is that I place the curtain and immediately walk through, then it runs out before my stealth does when I have PU on.
PU was fine back in the day when it applied defensive boons with might and swift, and gave one extra second of stealth, now, it’s just kittened. Anet ruined things that were good and made them ugly.

Henrik.7560:

Veil is a lie. It is 3 seconds base with 6 seconds on PU. My proof is that I place the curtain and immediately walk through, then it runs out before my stealth does when I have PU on.
PU was fine back in the day when it applied defensive boons with might and swift, and gave one extra second of stealth, now, it’s just kittened. Anet ruined things that were good and made them ugly.

Besides the Zerg apications if using veil with pu pre patch placing curtain then running over it again. This is the same thing.

Henrik.7560:

Veil is a lie. It is 3 seconds base with 6 seconds on PU. My proof is that I place the curtain and immediately walk through, then it runs out before my stealth does when I have PU on.
PU was fine back in the day when it applied defensive boons with might and swift, and gave one extra second of stealth, now, it’s just kittened. Anet ruined things that were good and made them ugly.

Prior to the patch, I don’t I’d ever seen anyone running PU anywhere except WvW roaming. I’d hardly call a trait that is almost never worthwhile over its other options in any gamemode “fine”. Even if they rolled it back to just the original 3 boons and +1 second, Veil and Mass Invis would still need to be looked at due to very diminishing returns.

I’ll simply put it this way, why does ranger pet reveals you if they hit, and you don’t get revealed when illusions hit you? That is just not justified. First step would be, removing stealth from all classes that are not thief OR Trapper runes. Mesmer should get mirror/mimic mechanics where they simply swap between clones, and ofc illusions are not killable only shatter-able. Amen.

Firelysm.4967:

I’ll simply put it this way, why does ranger pet reveals you if they hit, and you don’t get revealed when illusions hit you? That is just not justified. First step would be, removing stealth from all classes that are not thief OR Trapper runes. Mesmer should get mirror/mimic mechanics where they simply swap between clones, and ofc illusions are not killable only shatter-able. Amen.

… I need to login to my ranger to check but I don’t think your pet DOES reveal you? I’m not 100% on this but when I get a chance (unless someone else can) I’ll check.

Firelysm.4967:

I’ll simply put it this way, why does ranger pet reveals you if they hit, and you don’t get revealed when illusions hit you? That is just not justified. First step would be, removing stealth from all classes that are not thief OR Trapper runes. Mesmer should get mirror/mimic mechanics where they simply swap between clones, and ofc illusions are not killable only shatter-able. Amen.

Yeah…no. Rangers pets do not reveal the ranger if they are stealthed and I don’t think they ever have, so no idea where you got that little gem. It doesn’t work that way with any summon as far as I know.

Necrotize.2974:

Firelysm.4967:

I’ll simply put it this way, why does ranger pet reveals you if they hit, and you don’t get revealed when illusions hit you? That is just not justified. First step would be, removing stealth from all classes that are not thief OR Trapper runes. Mesmer should get mirror/mimic mechanics where they simply swap between clones, and ofc illusions are not killable only shatter-able. Amen.

Yeah…no. Rangers pets do not reveal the ranger if they are stealthed and I don’t think they ever have, so no idea where you got that little gem. It doesn’t work that way with any summon as far as I know.

Thanks dude. Saved me from having to check. Never thought so either.

Forgive me if this has been suggested, but this thread has gotten long…and yet is still probably the appropriate thread.
Also, I’m not making the suggestion as a concession that I think PU is a big problem, I think we’ve still got more time before the meta settles enough (and Anet fixes enough of our bugs) to be comfortable saying how much counterplay there really is.

That said, regarding the idea that stealth in general is anti-fun for those without it:

What about a reverse Revealed?
When you first enter stealth, you gain a stack of Hidden.
Hidden decreases the likelihood of [penalty X]. Hidden weakens over time, and after [time y] goes away completely.

What is penalty X?
Interesting suggestions I’ve seen include a slight blur effect up close, a probability of being spotted proportionate to distance from the target (like stealth in WoW), being revealed more easily by more things, being revealed by creating illusions, etc.

That way, we can provide some level of counterplay to extreme stealth durations, while conserving the reasons stealth exists in the first place (combat-scale positioning, defensive utility for mesmers and thieves, something to keep pvpers on their toes).

It doesn’t punish low-duration stealth at all, and it doesn’t remove long-duration stealth.
Mesmers who rely on extremely long stealth (especially the full 50s you could get with a full spec) still get that stealth, but it becomes increasingly difficult to use that stealth to burst someone, as the risks grow up close the longer you wait, up to a certain point.

Many of the suggestions we’ve seen would be disastrous for thieves in general, and mesmers in high-tier pvp play.
Capping stealth is just bad design, as has been pointed out.

But a tapering Hidden buff allows total preservation of existing stealth mechanics that depend on it (backstab), continued value to PU, while still granting counterplay to the more extreme results of PU.

My personal favorite candidate for Penalty X is a blurring effect when a non-Hidden, but stealthed, player comes close to another player. The magnitude of the effect can be scaled with stacks of Hidden, reaching its most pronounced when Hidden fully expires. Furthermore, the range of vision of the effect can be scaled with Hidden as well.
By tuning the full extent of the blurring once Hidden has expired allows careful management of the potency of long-term stealth.
If Anet finds that longer stealth is countered too easily, they can just reduce the visibility of the blurring, or cut back on its range. And vice versa.
A clever player can still catch ambush people after long stealth, but if the ambushed player is also clever, they have a better chance to counter it. This wouldn’t work all that well without Hidden, because as has already been noted, high-tier pvpers will probably spot the blurring every kitten time, completely neutering stealth as a combat tactic.

Players spacing out their stealth instead of stacking it in order to refresh Hidden are creating exactly the opportunities for counterplay that we desire: moments when they are visible.

An additional possibility after Hidden runs out is a chance to be revealed (or at least unstealthed) when taking damage from an enemy.

The point is, Hidden allows many different ways to soften longer stealth without punishing shorter stealth, and allow relatively long stealth abilities like PU-Mass Invis and Shadow Refuge to be valuable without creating most of the problems we’re seeing from 30-50 second stealth cheese.
The very nature of it also pushes players away from the counter-productive mentality of camping in stealth in sPVP, as it rewards more up-front stealth play.

(To that point, I’d love to see the The Pledge reverted back to a flat 20% cdr, as the current mechanic encourages players to abuse PU as much as possible. It takes 13.3s of stealth to get 20% cdr on torch skills right now, which is getting pretty close to the 16s a lot of players are suggesting as a cap. In other words, The Pledge encourages stealth cheese, which exacerbates the PU issue)