Guild Wars 2

Been playing thief sense GW2 first released, and I am used to the thief being unable to shadowstep across gaps in the world. And while I have always wanted the theif to be able to just skip across gaps, and climb walls in world vs world, I can understand the balancing issue. Plus people might be a little ticked when a thief suddenly appears out of no where and ganks them. (Even if for some reason mesmers have teleportation abilities that lets them cross gaps….)

But… there is a serious problem after returning to this game from some time of inactivity when I noticed that the thief cant shadow step over a tiny little step that’s in the path. Seriously? That’s gotten me killed plenty of times. Why the hell is it called a shadow step if it’s no longer a teleportation… but basically the thief walking across a short path really fast?

A single pixel rise can cause any teleport to not work. Anet messed up a while ago.

Not sure what you’re going through, but the shadow step mechanic is much, much better than at release.

And yea, it’s frustrating to run into glitches with shadowstepping, but it’s pretty much an inherently glitchy mechanic in every MMO out there, so there’s no sense getting all up in arms about it. The issue is with how terrains are built, not necessarily the shadow step mechanic itself.

Ahhhh, fond frustrations of WoW’s blink.

Anomaly.7612:

Ahhhh, fond frustrations of WoW’s blink.

Yea, it took them years to “fix” that and it was still never truly fixed.

Hell mix any of our Shadowsteps and try to dodge while using Unhindered Combatant you immob yourself it a blast in pvp and WvW

The problem with shadowstep is that the character’kittenbox is locked at the ground level which makes it difficult to calculate the distance from point A to point B. The lazy way is to assume that the ground surface is constantly flat, thus in theory shadowstep will always work. However, the ground surface is more than just a visual effect. Unlike grass, pebbles and bumps have an actual geometry that usually interfere with shadowstep — not to mention, there are so many invisible walls. The reason for this is to prevent the Thief from shadowstepping through the world and fall forever and get stuck.

To overcome this problem, ArenaNet needs to make a decision on how much time they are willing to spend on this because the solution is time consuming. The most simple fix is based on the idea to take the location of the target’kittenbox to insure that the Thief will not travel off world, then convert the Thief’kittenbox to be either intangible so it won’t interfere with any other objects or as a projectile which travels above ground, then teleport the Thief to the target’s location. However, this will violate the shadowstep rule that a path needs to be valid . A valid path is a path the Thief can travel on foot without jumping.

A projectile doesn’t care if it is travelling between cliffs, so the projectile idea will not work. Intangibility will not work either since it will allow Thief to shadowstep through walls.

The main culprit of this problem is that when a path is already validated, it is overridden by “no through wall” restriction. It shouldn’t be this way. It should be that when a path is validated, the Thief is intangible when shadowstepping.

EDIT: typo