Guild Wars 2

I ran into one a thief in pvp that just kept attacking me while he was stealthed and there was not anything I could do since I do not have AOE. I’ve been trying to do this myself but I keep reappearing after I attack. Is there a certain sequence of moves or traits that make thieves stay invisible? I can’t figure it out how to do it. Thanks in advance.

You can’t stay perma-stealthed and you definitely cannot attack more than once while stealthed. What you saw is the result of an issue with “player culling” in WvW where players (and in some cases, entire zergs) are not rendering properly or in time thus resulting in what appears to be invisible players who can attack while stealthed.

Do a forum search for “player culling” and you’ll find PLENTY of information on it. Hope I helped.

There’s actually a consumable that you can use in WvW, which gives you 10 seconds of invisibility at the cost of being able to move, it has no cooldown.

You can purchase this from ?? ( I don’t know ) for ( IIRC ) around 14-24 karma per.
he could have been popping one and instantly backstab + pop another.

My friend even bought a bunch of rock consumable, and kd’d someone 12 times in a row for lulz.

This is dumb and broken.

^LOL reminds me of my pure energy Gale elementalist from GW1 I used to troll with. 2s KDs constantly it was so funny.

there’s a build that lets you stealth in combat every 5-10 seconds or so isn’t there?
Fought a thief that went into stealth 4 or 5 times during our fight. Kinda un-balanced IMO but oh well.

Well, if you want to be all about stealth, you can take Hide in Shadows (30s CD) as your heal, Blinding Powder (60s CD), Dark Refuge (60s CD) and a dagger off-hand for the Cloak & Dagger skill. That would allow the thief to stealth often during a fight, and can even be traited to reduce the cooldown on BP and DR to 48s – but all that is balanced by having only one other skill (and the elite skill) available.

Oh, there’s also the Shadow Trap, but in my opinion, that’s highly situational.

It is possible to stay stealthed almost all the time, but you are not able to do much damage in the meantime as well. It would help to know what weapons your thief-attacker was using and how much damage he did. Also if it was in WvW or in sPVP – because apparently charecter culling issue affects stealthed players in WvW, making them appear later than they actually come out of stealth.

If you use the traits that gives initiative when stealthing you can use cloak and dagger wait 3 seconds use it again and keep doing it infinitely being perma stealthed an still doing damage. Also if you wait till the end of the stealth and backstab right at the end you don’t get the revealed debuff so you can just stealth straight away. (This is probably a bug that needs fixing.) but to be honest its a really boring play-style. i tried it once and its basically just cloak and dagger wait 3 seconds cloak and dagger, just repeat till their half HP then cloak and dagger wait 2 1/2 seconds backstab cloak and dagger.

Geogaddie.8193:

If you use the traits that gives initiative when stealthing you can use cloak and dagger wait 3 seconds use it again and keep doing it infinitely being perma stealthed an still doing damage. Also if you wait till the end of the stealth and backstab right at the end you don’t get the revealed debuff so you can just stealth straight away. (This is probably a bug that needs fixing.) but to be honest its a really boring play-style. i tried it once and its basically just cloak and dagger wait 3 seconds cloak and dagger, just repeat till their half HP then cloak and dagger wait 2 1/2 seconds backstab cloak and dagger.

Thanks for this, I was wondering the same thing last night. Was playing in spvp against a thief that stealthed several times without actually fully coming out of stealth. I saw the dark whirl when it was about to come out of stealth and then it was gone. I played a thief in spvp for a while and knew all the stealth skills so I couldn’t figure out what was going on.

I thought it had something to do with cloak and dagger, but that skill uses a lot of intiative and I recall having to be really close to get it to work, so I was kind of perplexed.

Mongrels.6897:

It is possible to stay stealthed almost all the time, but you are not able to do much damage in the meantime as well. It would help to know what weapons your thief-attacker was using and how much damage he did. Also if it was in WvW or in sPVP – because apparently charecter culling issue affects stealthed players in WvW, making them appear later than they actually come out of stealth.

Not having played thief yet I am unsure, but I’m almost positive he was using dual daggers. As for damage I remember a couple of 5k crits. This was in WvW. I had about 1.4k toughness at the time. It was quite frustrating that he went so many times in stealth. I also noticed he had 2 sigils running, sigil of speed was one, but I dunno the other one so at least 2 utilities were used in sigils. It sounds more like what Geogaddie was posting. At least the fight played a lot like what he described.
" i tried it once and its basically just cloak and dagger wait 3 seconds cloak and dagger, just repeat till their half HP then cloak and dagger wait 2 1/2 seconds backstab cloak and dagger." (from Geogaddie)

Quite nasty in 1v1 xD

Just edited this to say that i am pretty sure it was not char culling it was only me and him for miles and I could see him coming before he went into stealth.

Did a search for player culling and I see how it works now. Basically lag can cause player models to take a while to be redrawn after stealthing. So player culling+multiple stealth build=attacking while invisible.

Thanks everyone for your help. But now that I know how it works, I’d feel as if I’d be exploiting if I tried that. I’m going to go for the unfair 1v1 experience the developer’s intended by creating a moa mesmer, lol.