Guild Wars 2

Hey guys,

Just wanted to talk about spammable stealth a bit. I don’t really have a goal to this post but I wanted to just give my opinion on spamming stealth. Before I say anything about it I just wanted to say that I main a thief. I have 2 level 80’s and they are both thieves. I would say I have about 3k+ hours on it, it’s pretty much the only thing I play because it’s my fav class and I have a lot of fun.

So back to spammable stealth. I feel like stealth promotes great reward for terrible gameplay. I feel like in order to beat someone you should have to do things like interrupt a heal, wait til the right second to burst, carefully use your cooldowns, anticipate what your opponent is going to do, /facepalm when you miss an important attack. I am not talking stealth in general, I am talking about spamming it.

As an example (I know d/d is in a tough spot right now, but when it was better) a d/d thief opens up with his combo and you can dodge it if yon anticipate it, I dodge, he sees me dodge stows his weapon before cnd is over and recasts it still landing it and stealthing, a skill shot. This kind of gameplay is awesome to me. He comes out of stealth and I know he’s gonna need to cnd to stealth so I see him casting it and dodge but he cancels again and then snags me with it and lands his backstab. If he’s got good timing he can restealth just leaving a split second window between CnDs, also a skill shot imo. These types of things should be rewarded.

I believe stealth is important and should be very strong in stealth centered builds but it being spammable is too easy, too high a reward and encourages players to play and win simply by abuse and not by making smart and skillful decisions.

So should they nerf stealth? No it needs something else, like a rework or something. Maybe a stealth that not as spammable but gives a HUGE buff on reveal. Something like (just literally off the top of my head, maybe this is terrible): “When revealed by landing an attack from behind, gain 2 seconds of shadow form” and shadow form would cloak you in shadows making you untargetable or and causing your next attack to siphon a large amount of hp. Again I don’t know if that even sounds good but just an example.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter. Thank you for reading this thread and feel free to add your thoughts whether good or bad, polite or rude.

> I feel like stealth promotes great reward for terrible gameplay.

You deal no or barely any damage in stealth, You can’t spam stealth in WvW. You can’t cap while being invisible in PvP. Spamming stealth is useless. If the enemy does, just go somewhere else.

> I feel like in order to beat someone you should have to do things like interrupt a heal, wait til the right second to burst, carefully use your cooldowns, anticipate what your opponent is going to do, /facepalm when you miss an important attack. I am not talking stealth in general, I am talking about spamming it.

GW2 is a casual game. How do you feel about Ranger LB spamming, Warrior Rampage Auto Attack spamming, D/D Ele repeating his rotation, Necro minion master, etc.? There’s nothing deep behind it mostly. Why should stealth be treated different?

Don’t forget that Anet added lots of passives or buffed passives in the last patch. Thus Anet doesn’t share that vision of yours, how game should be played.

MADAIR that paragraph with the example you gave felt like an action movie. Even as reading it, it did feel very fun and rewarding, and actually i was thinking about how they could improve or change the stealth mechanic, but still have no clue.

but FlawlezZ has a valid point, Anet made sure Stealth has drawback:
- Little to no damage
- Stealth is not really viable when you are trying to be a team player like capping,etc.

Maybe you are thinking about a high end meta gameplay that probably concerns very few thief players, and it is not in the interest of Anet. They already have a hard time doing class balances.

Think about the fact that if they make a change to our mechanics they will have to change to all the other classes to.

I am pretty sure, the HS spamming teef and the stealth spamming teef aren’t much of a challenge for you, and they will learn over time that spamming is never a solution. It’s part of the learning process.

IMHO, thief isn’t truly about stealth, it’s about mastering momentum. Just like you mentioned, deciding when you should go out all on your target and suceeding is the true rewarding experience.

MADAIR.1948:

snip

D/D thieves are very rare, they have been rare for now at least 1,5 years.
A D/D thief who can stow his weapons in midst of an attack is even rarer. So I don’t really get why you take this example-and why you add you want them to be rewarded.
A thief who can play like in your example has got perfect timing – and that as well is very rare.
A D/P thief though can “spam” stealth. But know what? I’m ok with that. As long as eles have got traits which stun you every time you attack, as long as guards kill with their burning damage alone, as long as mesmers can easily outstealth a thief and don’t have a red AOE circle revealing their position, as long as rangers just have to press 2 to get 12 stacks of bleeding and 10k raw damage into you (and so on) I’m fine with thieve’s stealth.

Kocoff.7582:

MADAIR that paragraph with the example you gave felt like an action movie. Even as reading it, it did feel very fun and rewarding

I think that is kind of the issue. Some people want “Brazilian Jiu-jitsu Online.” Basically, a tactical gameplay with high skill level. Unfortunately, with the nature of being an online computer game, that is far beyond our current technology.

Being able to interrupt an enemy heal or deadly skill is great, but you can’t base a game around it. You have to consider latency among other things. There has to be other methods to succeed. In fact, it makes me question how people think when they say Headshot should have a 1/4 – 1/2 second cast time… because doing so may make it impossible to skillfully interrupt anything but the longest of casting skills.

It’s not that I disagree with having “high-skill” gameplay, but that’s not really what this game was designed for. The balance for such is not there. In some places, there’s too much reward for not enough risk, and in others, not enough reward for too much risk.

At this point in time, I would not want the thief to lose ANY of its remaining defensive abilities. There’s simply too much damage and danger from the rest of the professions.

If “low-skill” tactics like spamming stealth can’t be effective in a “high-skill” environment, I don’t understand what the problem is. It’s like trying to remove the ability to use the “4-move checkmate” from chess.

When stealth-spamming allows a thief to effectively engage and defeat a bunker-build on point at the higher-tiers, then you’d have reason to start being concerned. Though I would say that is still fine. When it allows a thief to engage and defeat two bunkers on point, then that’s more of a reason to seek changes.

But really, why make the thief so weak when other professions are so strong? Unless they completely change the way stealth works, it does very little offensively. It’s a defensive mechanic. It allows the thief to fight a war of attrition.

Whatever the case, it’s not a game based on 1v1. It’s a team game. Thieves die quickly in team fights… especially if they have to be close enough to poke somebody to gain stealth.

I’d like the thief to be stronger while not in stealth. I want more survivability. And any buffs to stealth or non-stealth are great. But I think there would be a lot of tears if the thief gets buffs without nerfs… or even buffs with nerfs. I’m fine with tears… unless they’re mine :-P

Just wanted to reply to the quotes about no damage. The fights just a little while ago went like this….black powder, black powder, black powder, shadow refuge, blinding powder, Backstab (8.7k), I shadow step, he steals+ plus heartseeker (interupt 2k + 7.5k) I’m down, his improv procc’d from steal and he pops refuge ontop of me and stomps me. Vs the mesmer…stealth, chime sounds….10 secs pass by…hmmm guess he’s not gonna figh-BOOM downed. So while I agree that in pvp you can’t cap, when I’m harrassing a point and you can do 18k in about 1.2 seconds and down me…I have to disagree heavily. Yes they do no damage in stealth, technically anyway, it sure seemed like the mesmer did…I pretty much drop dead in a split second and if they fail it’s back into to stealth they go.

THIS IS NOT THE CASE EVERYTIME, sometimes I outplay them but even when I win it’s very exasperating. Thanks for the feedback. I agree with most of the stuff you guys said.

Also some of these spec’s excel at assassinating high priority targets and also can share boons from stealth. For instance if I run the d/p meta and I hidden thief stealth super-steal into the fight my allies around me are granted might, swiftness, fury, 2 stolen boons and vigor, I guess thats a slight boost to the team, maybe not. And no the thief profession is not all about stealth.

@ Jana, pretty sure I stated that the d/d is not that great and used to be better but that it was just an example. Thank you for your input. And regarding all those other classes passives, yeah I feel the same way but the stealth just happens to be what was on my mind.

Also at the sametime I don’t expect a change, I was mostly expressing what I think about the topic. Again feel free to give feedback whether good, bad, polite or rude.

MADAIR.1948:

Just wanted to reply to the quotes about no damage. The fights just a little while ago went like this….black powder, black powder, black powder, shadow refuge, blinding powder, Backstab (8.7k), I shadow step, he steals+ plus heartseeker (interupt 2k + 7.5k) I’m down, his improv procc’d from steal and he pops refuge ontop of me and stomps me. Vs the mesmer…stealth, chime sounds….10 secs pass by…hmmm guess he’s not gonna figh-BOOM downed. So while I agree that in pvp you can’t cap, when I’m harrassing a point and you can do 18k in about 1.2 seconds and down me…I have to disagree heavily. Yes they do no damage in stealth, technically anyway, it sure seemed like the mesmer did…I pretty much drop dead in a split second and if they fail it’s back into to stealth they go.

I think the issue there is that it was one stealth class versus another. If one thief stealths, the best counter for the other thief is to stealth also. Again, stealth is the thief’s main defensive tool. If a thief doesn’t use stealth against another thief, he’s at a severe disadvantage… simply because the offensive thief can hit so hard and the defensive thief is so squishy.

I run D/P and S/D. When I fight thieves, I usually start out with D/P stealth. If the initial clash goes against me, I may switch to S/D and use evasion and immobilization to my advantage, hopefully, throwing them off their game. I’m not great with D/P, so I assume they’ll have the advantage if I use the same. Sometimes, I win, sometimes, I lose. But I think fighting a fellow thief is probably the most fun… because it’s like a mix between a high-speed chess match and a hand of Texas Hold’em poker… because I can’t see what he’s doing most of the time :-P

But I would think a thief being able to spam stealth versus a non-stealth profession is somewhat needed… with some professions being extremely lethal. High skill is great, but without solid basics to rely on (skilled stealth vs. spammed stealth), some fights can get way out of hand in today’s game.

D/D isn’t a thing in PvP, and hasn’t been. It’s not because D/P is OP. It’s because D/D is underpowered.

D/P beats D/D, which it looks like is what the complaint is in this thread.

If you look cross class, D/P doesn’t deal enough damage to 1v1 any meta build in any reasonable amount of time.

The thread is pointing out something unfair between D/D and D/P, but it calls for nerfs to the meta D/P build. It’d be better to buff D/D than to weaken thief more in the current meta.

Stealth definitely provides an advantage over those who aren’t stealthed, but many builds have more than enough compensation for not having stealth. D/D thief simply lacks that tradeoff, but a build like D/D ele have lots of healing and damage mitigation, or a build like warrior has multiple invulns and condi immunities and high mobility, and so on with other professions.

Lol at that comment about Jiu jitsu. I actually take BJJ, so maybe it’s making me want everything to be to that kind of standard. I suppose I’m expecting a bit much from a casual game.