I’m a noob at the game as well as to the thief class, so excuse me if i say something ignorant. Perhaps you should take what i will develop here as a perspective that may bring some different(or not) insights on the class. Hopefully, developers of the game read this as well and work towards improving it.
I chose to play Thief as my first char on the game… guess I though it would be cool. And I got to say, really, I have been through a hard time coping with the class features, specially at pvp, because it’s really very differently designed from other games I’ve played a stealthed class so far – for better or worse. I have virtually no experience with other classes yet, but from what i’ve been reading and from the encounters i have experienced with them as a thief, it seems thieves are in a very undeserved spot. This kind of frustrates me quite a lot because to me the thief is a profession that has so much potential to shine just as much as any other but the current design makes it a very crippled class at best (well, at least from what i think what a thief as a stealth class should be featured with). So, I’m hoping to provide some analysis onto how the class game-play could be “fixed” in a general way, not so much as fixing a specific trait or build.
First of all, based on my previous experience with other games, i thought thief stealth mechanics was going work a lot differently. I guess you’ll probably know the type of stealth mechanics that i mean, but i’ll say how i expected it to work anyway.
I thought stealth would be a permanent feature of the class and by that I mean the player could switch on/off at will (only when out of combat, off course) through a special ‘go into stealth’ ability. Once in combat, he would be able to use another ability to stealth again to disengage combat but that would have a relative long cooldown(1 to 2 mins or so), something similar to what shadow refuge is currently, but you would gain indefinite stealth as long you don’t re-engage combat (also, this ability would give no indication as where the thief is stealthed, which is another bad taste feature developers of this game have opted to implement — I can see the point of indication for team mates but definitely not for the enemy team players). Usually, under these stealth mechanics, if you get by any chance hit with any type of damage or AoE action while in this indefinite stealth mode, you would enter combat and become visible.
Well, GW2 surprised me on this like a thief should: you can pop in and out of stealth whenever you like regardless if you are in combat or not. This sounds like a nice feature (and it is) and i really liked it at first. I think the in combat system is working fine where it is now, but having no ability that allows you to go into stealth mode/leave stealth mode out of combat permanently is a major disadvantage. That really is major loss, because, to me, any game that wants to really implement a stealth class to its full and efficiently, that class OUGHT to be able to get into stealth for an indefinite amount of time until it gets into a combat state.
I ask myself what is the main purpose of a stealth class? To surprise, to catch the enemy off-guard. Playing a thief should ALWAYS be about a head start when initiating a combat. Well, you wont surprise anyone if you are spotted far away even if you can briefly stealth before getting near your target. Your enemy will be aware that an attack is bound to happen and that’s enough to break the class game-play because now he is expecting you and can do something about it.
I know, i know. You are probably thinking: “Well, you can get some decent amount of stealth by using smoke field, shadow refuge, other utilities and work around that”. Sure you can, but usually, this is expensive to do (costs a lot of initiative, time to do it) and the thief will be left short handed if you fail to get to the place you want to go in time for setting an ambush.
Take an example: If you want to sneak attack the enemy team home node right from the start, think, for instance, of the time you would lose somewhere blasting a smoke screen with your short bow with smoke screen at the beginning of a sPvP match. You end up losing precious seconds doing that, not to mention that at the end of it you usually wouldn’t have enough initiative to use infiltrator’s arrow to compensate for the time lost. To sum up, it’s really not an effective way to do what real solid out of combat stealth would enable the class to do. The way it now is, it’s clumsy, expensive and unreliable.