Guild Wars 2

When the stealth attack goes on the 1 second cooldown, flip it over to the regular auto attack, then flip it back after 1 second. Being unable to deal ANY damage without spending initiative is bad design.

I think the better choice is not having the cooldown be so long. 1 second is a long chunk of time to take out of your total time in stealth. I think a better length of time is 1/2 second. I would decrease the cooldown down in combination with an increase in damage of some stealth attacks to make them more viable.

Another option would be to change the “penalty” for failure to a reduction in the time left on stealth buff. So I’m in stealth and spam bs I quickly leave stealth. Make it maybe a 0.25 second reduction per cast. This rewards accurate strikes and punishes flailing around.

The better idea would be to remove the Cooldown completely, there is absolutely no reason for it, no other class is effected by a cd and locked out of their Auto attacks while stealthed, especially since it takes more resources for Thieves to enter stealth to even get their Stealth attacks.

Did they ever give an explanation for the addition of that cooldown in the first place?

No

/15 chars.

The working theory is that it was a workaround for some issue with Rending Shade trait introduced at the same time. That is purely speculative though.

The ICD was completely unnecessary otherwise especially since thief attacks are single target and the thief isn’t exactly king of the world these days.

pretty sure it was to nerf double stealth proc from short bow with rendering strike. other weapon set just got short end of the stick with it lol.

If a stealth attack is blocked/evaded or misses, does it break stealth? If not I think it was because you could spam it through 1 hit defenses like aegis and blind.

Lahmia.2193:

If a stealth attack is blocked/evaded or misses, does it break stealth? If not I think it was because you could spam it through 1 hit defenses like aegis and blind.

The problem is the ICD doesn’t take into account the long pre-aftercast animations on major skills like backstab itself, which some weapon sets like D/D power are extremely dependent on.

It also simply puts the entire #1 skill, including AA, on ICD on top of the cast animation. A lot of non-thief players don’t realize the pre-post cast animations for Backstab total almost .75s per stab attempt. The ICD puts it on almost a 2s cooldown. With revealed, that’s longer than True Shot and CoR, which are both ranged and have higher coefficients, the latter also being an AoE. You’re locked into either waiting out the duration of stealth in most cases since at absolute best you can get two attempts, or not using the best burst/damage option at that moment in time. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, except in the current game-state, landing a backstab is both sub-optimal for the thief to do, and in many respects, overly-punished for even trying.

Since they also nerfed BV, consistency for bypassing Aegis etc. also got dropped massively. Again back to the D/D argument you’ll see many people making, CnD no longer lands from BV’s nerf with mug procc’ing BV and thus passive deflection, and Backstab no longer lands if perchance CnD is used with BV over mug because passive aegis and blind is all over the game. Most counter-CC and single-hit negations come from passives when being CC’ed. BV’ed mug procs FoF or any other such passive causing CnD to whiff. Okay, remove Mug (DA, a “required” traitline on the thief) from the equation, but then you have it still being procc’ed before CnD because of SoH (Trickery, also a hard requirement trait line), which forces daze on steal and offers what used to be baseline steal cooldown reduction (AKA, a requirement). So now you remove two of the best traits on the thief to do what? BV a non-reduced cooldown steal/CnD chain without Mug, just to get a backstab? But now you’ve popped FoF or the passives via the BV on CnD. And backstab can’t land from the ICD.

Staff and OH pistol builds were honestly the least-impacted by this change overall, which is kind of stupid since those are the strictly better builds on the thief at the moment and OH dagger is widely considered underpowered for the sole reason of the overwhelming amount of hit-negation in the game.

It’s just so much better to play a dominant set like D/P which can just BP -> HS -> BV -> Steal/Mug -> Shadow Shot (unblockable blind to prevent retaliatory passives )-> AA chain/Shadow Shot again, since it pumps out better burst with no dependencies and no punishment on failure.

If they wanted to get rid of all passive effects and make those single-shot negations only last a second or so in order to keep the ICD, fine. but as it currently is, some sets/builds are just totally unplayable in the current state of the game due to this change.

If they are worried about rending shade proccing multiple times… Just remove the CD from stealth skills and add one to the trait itself. That way you don’t detrimentally affect thieves’ core playstyle, and still make the new trait balanced.

DeceiverX.8361

The problem is the ICD doesn’t take into account the long pre-aftercast animations on major skills like backstab itself, which some weapon sets like D/D power are extremely dependent on.

It also simply puts the entire #1 skill, including AA, on ICD on top of the cast animation. A lot of non-thief players don’t realize the pre-post cast animations for Backstab total almost .75s per stab attempt. The ICD puts it on almost a 2s cooldown. With revealed, that’s longer than True Shot and CoR, which are both ranged and have higher coefficients, the latter also being an AoE. You’re locked into either waiting out the duration of stealth in most cases since at absolute best you can get two attempts, or not using the best burst/damage option at that moment in time. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, except in the current game-state, landing a backstab is both sub-optimal for the thief to do, and in many respects, overly-punished for even trying.

Since they also nerfed BV, consistency for bypassing Aegis etc. also got dropped massively. Again back to the D/D argument you’ll see many people making, CnD no longer lands from BV’s nerf with mug procc’ing BV and thus passive deflection, and Backstab no longer lands if perchance CnD is used with BV over mug because passive aegis and blind is all over the game. Most counter-CC and single-hit negations come from passives when being CC’ed. BV’ed mug procs FoF or any other such passive causing CnD to whiff. Okay, remove Mug (DA, a “required” traitline on the thief) from the equation, but then you have it still being procc’ed before CnD because of SoH (Trickery, also a hard requirement trait line), which forces daze on steal and offers what used to be baseline steal cooldown reduction (AKA, a requirement). So now you remove two of the best traits on the thief to do what? BV a non-reduced cooldown steal/CnD chain without Mug, just to get a backstab? But now you’ve popped FoF or the passives via the BV on CnD. And backstab can’t land from the ICD.

Thank god I’m not alone on this thought. If they want BS to have 1sec ICD if it misses, they should’ve taken the huge aftercast into account. Right now backstab is just a weaker, single target and melee true shot.
Since you also touched on the nerfed basi venom stacks, in my opinion Steal shouldn’t proc BV at all. With the meta trickery it should steal 3 boons, stability and aegies being prioritized. The boonsteal should happen before anything else, not Mug proccing BV before stability/aegis are removed and the whole transformation into stone doesn’t work.

The change of 2 BV stacks to one has completely messed up my reliability to precast BS and then stealing into the enemy as Mug procs BV into the stability/aegis and then the BS eventually misses aswell because it’s not unblockable anymore. The same applies to CnD.

Setting the boonsteal to No.1 priority of Steal would give the ability to use our damage we’re capable of doing to full potential.
I don’t want thiefs damage to be buffed, I want QoL changes so I can apply the damage I should/am able to do.

I reckon they’re tight lipped about it because it was necessary due to whatever elite spec they’re cooking up, but they don’t want to give that away yet. There’s literally no other reason why they wouldn’t justify the change, the same thing happened to acro before HoT, and the only reason we assume it was because of rending shade is simply timing and a lack of any other information.

Zappi.8307:

DeceiverX.8361

The problem is the ICD doesn’t take into account the long pre-aftercast animations on major skills like backstab itself, which some weapon sets like D/D power are extremely dependent on.

It also simply puts the entire #1 skill, including AA, on ICD on top of the cast animation. A lot of non-thief players don’t realize the pre-post cast animations for Backstab total almost .75s per stab attempt. The ICD puts it on almost a 2s cooldown. With revealed, that’s longer than True Shot and CoR, which are both ranged and have higher coefficients, the latter also being an AoE. You’re locked into either waiting out the duration of stealth in most cases since at absolute best you can get two attempts, or not using the best burst/damage option at that moment in time. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, except in the current game-state, landing a backstab is both sub-optimal for the thief to do, and in many respects, overly-punished for even trying.

Since they also nerfed BV, consistency for bypassing Aegis etc. also got dropped massively. Again back to the D/D argument you’ll see many people making, CnD no longer lands from BV’s nerf with mug procc’ing BV and thus passive deflection, and Backstab no longer lands if perchance CnD is used with BV over mug because passive aegis and blind is all over the game. Most counter-CC and single-hit negations come from passives when being CC’ed. BV’ed mug procs FoF or any other such passive causing CnD to whiff. Okay, remove Mug (DA, a “required” traitline on the thief) from the equation, but then you have it still being procc’ed before CnD because of SoH (Trickery, also a hard requirement trait line), which forces daze on steal and offers what used to be baseline steal cooldown reduction (AKA, a requirement). So now you remove two of the best traits on the thief to do what? BV a non-reduced cooldown steal/CnD chain without Mug, just to get a backstab? But now you’ve popped FoF or the passives via the BV on CnD. And backstab can’t land from the ICD.

Thank god I’m not alone on this thought. If they want BS to have 1sec ICD if it misses, they should’ve taken the huge aftercast into account. Right now backstab is just a weaker, single target and melee true shot.
Since you also touched on the nerfed basi venom stacks, in my opinion Steal shouldn’t proc BV at all. With the meta trickery it should steal 3 boons, stability and aegies being prioritized. The boonsteal should happen before anything else, not Mug proccing BV before stability/aegis are removed and the whole transformation into stone doesn’t work.

The change of 2 BV stacks to one has completely messed up my reliability to precast BS and then stealing into the enemy as Mug procs BV into the stability/aegis and then the BS eventually misses aswell because it’s not unblockable anymore. The same applies to CnD.

Setting the boonsteal to No.1 priority of Steal would give the ability to use our damage we’re capable of doing to full potential.
I don’t want thiefs damage to be buffed, I want QoL changes so I can apply the damage I should/am able to do.

Steal doesn’t proc BV innately. The damage element on Mug causes the proc to fire. If you switch out of DA or run another trait, you’ll get it for backstab.

The thing is, it’s not worth doing. Mug and Shadow Shot combined do basically the same damage as backstab, and don’t need to be applied from the back. Not to mention mug’s a heal and about the only good minor trait choice for power DA builds.

And of course, this only solves the problem for D/P, which can backstab on the BV attack. For D/D, you’ve still got the CnD dependency, and assuming you’re still traited out of Mug, which while BV might let that land, the backstab still won’t. So you’d have just been better off playing D/P with mug, anyways, since Shadow Shot does more damage than CnD alone.

In essence, what was a very functional grouping of skills ended up hurting diversity in ways which make no amount of sense, while effectively just not changing the relative efficacy of the already-dominant one (since Shadow Shot + AA is already faster burst than trying for the backstab and costs less initiative).

Nothing justifying destroying the basic class mechanic nothing….

There have been multiple posts on pvp forums from guards complaining that we can spam backstab to remove their aegis (like guards didn’t hardcounter thieves on first place heh) – here you go, no posts about it anymore . Scapegoat will be always scapegoat. Just another patch screaming at thief community: “Please uninstall, ty”.

Well, it doesn’t help much that Guard is Karl’s favorite class, and that he doesn’t play the thief.

This change is awful, honestly. I agree it makes you think your attacks twice, but in the time a foe evades and you catch up to him/her again, you are usually out of stealth. Been invisible for only 2-3 seconds is requirement enough for this attack. The cooldown is an overkill to an already weak class.