Guild Wars 2

I haven’t had the chance to test my builds with the added second to revealed yet, but I’ve speculated that the change will barely affect me besides taking a little more damage before landing another CnD/using another BP + HS combo and requiring me to add another few attacks to my rotation.

While speculating I tried to think about and understand just how exactly this change affects actual balance in PvP. Half-decent to highly skilled players could already deal with Thieves perfectly well and the build that actually gets the most complaints from newer and less skilled players (25/30/0/0/15, D/D BS or some variant of) wasn’t even slightly affected.

So considering these two things, my question is, how exactly did the stealth change actually “balance” PvP? The only things that I can see so far is that it severely nerfed a lot of PvE builds and added a few attacks to rotations in both PvE/PvP. Neither of these things appear to me to have made the Thief any more “balanced”; and the Thief wasn’t even imbalanced before the patch.

Could this nerf have been just another way for Anet to temporarily appease the masses?

NOTE: I don’t want this discussion to devolve into a cesspool of Thief-hate. Any posts that attempt to do so will just be reported. Thank you for not being “that guy”.

Can’t speak for SPvP but as far as WvW goes it did basically nothing. Breaking Hidden Killer on the other hand..

You can still permastealth, you just get punished more for attacking from it, if you know what you are doing this shouldn’t really effect you that much in PvP, just like decent permastealth thieves could backstab and buy a few sec of time before going back to permastealth to heal pre patch.

Oh dear stealth, why did you leave me, we had such fun times being invisible.

You were always there for me, keeping me safe when i fought against greater numbers and bad odds.

I was rushing into battle with a big grin knowing that a battle against 5 was in my favor.

Now it is no more.

Reveal debuff is 4 seconds and there is no culling, makes it alot harder to fight against more than 2 people.

Its a sad day for all lonely thieves out there.

In my oppinion it didnt change anything but make the viable and not cheesy / cheap builds useless or at the very least a lot weaker.

Let me summarize:

Chaining CnD perfectly to pseudo-remain in stealth? Still possible although this was the target of the changes to Revealed.
Hopping in and out of stealth as fast as possible just to benefit from certain traits and to pull of the respective slot 1 stealth-skills? Not possible anymore although this clearly wasnt meant to be blocked. Sure, one can just adapt to the extra second, but then its still a massive nerf to everything related to entering and leaving stealth and thus making a lot of thief builds a lot weaker – unjustified.

In the end i think this will even increase the cheap steal-mug-CnD-backstab-and-then-heartseeker-until-sunrise-players, just because spamming heartseeker now doesnt have any rivalry DPS options and is indeed the most effective which it should´nt be. Congrats, ArenaNet – not to sound like a kitten, but whatever you intended to fix, you misses your target royally. At least if your target was not to make thieves even more unwanted in PvE groups or pidgeon-holed into a one-button-spam to maximize DPS if we want to DPS.

Jathra.9327:

Can’t speak for SPvP but as far as WvW goes it did basically nothing. Breaking Hidden Killer on the other hand..

You can still permastealth, you just get punished more for attacking from it, if you know what you are doing this shouldn’t really effect you that much in PvP, just like decent permastealth thieves could backstab and buy a few sec of time before going back to permastealth to heal pre patch.

I still don’t understand why people refer to chaining CnD as permastealth when it’s no where near permanent and requires constantly hitting a target every 4 seconds without fail and without running out of initiative to achieve… not to mention this won’t actually kill anyone who is slightly competent.

Incurafy.6329:

Jathra.9327:

Can’t speak for SPvP but as far as WvW goes it did basically nothing. Breaking Hidden Killer on the other hand..

You can still permastealth, you just get punished more for attacking from it, if you know what you are doing this shouldn’t really effect you that much in PvP, just like decent permastealth thieves could backstab and buy a few sec of time before going back to permastealth to heal pre patch.

I still don’t understand why people refer to chaining CnD as permastealth when it’s no where near permanent and requires constantly hitting a target every 4 seconds without fail and without running out of initiative to achieve… not to mention this won’t actually kill anyone who is slightly competent.

I don’t know either really that’s just what I always heard it called lol.

No as the thief is still the best duelist in spvp

It does absolutely nothing whatsoever. The original Revealed change WOULD have changed the balancing act, but the last minute shift to this braindead solution did nothing but encourage sPvP Thieves to gravitate to burst builds even more, while other stealth setups remain fairly viable. I don’t play WvW enough to judge on that.

warriors and thieves have the exact opposite problems, lol