Are these Thief bugs?
1. Expeditious Dodger stacks. Go through a temporal curtain and then dodge, you’ll notice it stacks. Temporal curtain is the skill that doesnt stack (otherwise people could just walk back and forth through it for massive swiftness uptime) So yes it is by design that the mesmer wall buffs dont stack (veil works the same way)
2. Dont spam the autoattack button, make sure autoattack is turned off. and sometimes deselect your target before stealing for stealth, this will prevent most of the issues. If you think dagger is bad, try it with main hand pistol, its even more glitchy.
I would say its not exactly by design, but not entirely a bug. its just how the mechanics interact
Turning off autoattack on your primary ability is not a solution. See: ranger sword ability
As far as I am aware, stealing does not initiate auto attacks per the patch, but it does not cancel them either. I’ve read discussions where your automatic backstab could be the auto attacks animation finishing if you steal while an animation is still going.
2. Hidden Thief (2s of stealth when stealing) doesn’t stop attacking if I’m just auto-attacking (first attack slot with daggers) unless I let my toon finish all 4 attacks of the chain. It’ll just continue to auto-attack a backstab from in front and pull me out of stealth immediately.
Keep in mind that the 3rd swing in most melee weapons are flashy, meaning it has casting time. If you activate Steal during that time, you will trigger stealth before the swing hits. This is also true with projectiles (bullets from pistol, bouncing arrows and daggers, etc.) that if you activate stealth before the damage is dealt, you will be kicked out of stealth.
Steal doesn’t activate auto-attack and it stops auto-attacks when you steal. However, in the case of the dagger, the attacks are happening so fast that it is sometimes hard to identify whether Steal stopped the auto-attack or not.
Full set of 5 unique skills for both dual-wield weapon sets: P/P and D/D – Make it happen
PvE – DD/CS/AC – If that didn’t work, roll a Reaper or Revenant.