Guild Wars 2

In Guild Wars 2, like in other games, sometimes you can find happy coincidences, that while not intentional become part of standard play. Sheik needle cancelling in Smash 4 as an example from another game.

I’ve noticed ever since the specialization update the Hidden Thief trait allows you a brief window of opportunity to land a hit about a quarter second or less after you steal before the stealth triggers.

This allows options such as Steal into Mace Head Crack into Backstab and for reducing the damage window between landing a Heartseeker into Steal into Backstab.

I know the reason for the behavior implemented is to prevent steal from revealing you as this used to be a bug.

Therefore I have a very simple question, is this something that the Devs accept as tech or is this something that the devs view as needing fixed?

The obvious responses from the community are that players who view this is too strong will call it a bug, while players who think the options aren’t too strong will say it’s not a bug.

I’m just looking for the dev answer since I’ve become used to this and have been integrating it into my play more.

Maybe they’ll leave it. That’s a pretty small window and they’d probably introduce a bug into mug/HT interaction again if they reduce the window.

Here’s a screenshot displaying what I mean, you’ll notice the Skull Crack lands after the steal and I have just been stealthed with no revealed debuff since I timed the skill activations properly. If I had mistimed the skill activations I would have been punished with the reveal debuff.

Edit
Changed the screen shot, since the combat log didn’t get captured in the other one. The window actually might be closer to 150 milliseconds

Pretty sure this had been known for quite some time considering how long hidden killer has been around. I know a common/documented thing with d/p thieves running hidden killer is that instead of using bp → hs → steal for a guaranteed hs hit, they just use hs → steal (Since if you do the former combo with hidden killer you get revealed).