Guild Wars 2

The Stealth mechanic at the moment is defined around 100% Invisibility. I would like to present my case as to why Stealth would be a better mechanic without it, and suggest how it could be removed without a necessitating complete rework of any mechanics surrounding Stealth.

As we have all seen by now, Stealth is one of the major contributors to Thief QQ in the forums. The sheer amount of negativity surrounding the mechanic in the forums is astounding, and this forces ANet’s hand to repeatedly nerf Stealth to the sad state it’s in today. 100% Invisibility is the reason for most of this negativity, and understandably it is not exactly fun to play against something you can’t see at all for a significant percentage of the fight, balance considerations aside, this alone is true even from the perspective of a Thief player such as myself.

The biggest issue with Stealth, however, is not how others perceive it, but rather the fact that Stealth in itself is mostly a liability for Thieves in the sPvP conquest meta, because Thieves cannot contest points while Stealth is active. This is why a large majority of Thief builds based around Stealth are doomed to be unviable in sPvP, because they cannot contribute effectively to the single most important mechanic to winning games in high-level play. This is again, a direct consequence of the 100% Invisibility aspect of Stealth, because by any measure, to be able to contest points while remaining completely unseen is not fun or fair to play against.

Now that we have laid out why Stealth would be better off without 100% Invisibility, let’s move on to the how:

First and foremost, 100% Invisibility to enemies needs to go. Make a player in Stealth look the same to enemies as they currently do to allies. Keep the name tags removed, and make enemies have to work reasonably harder to see where a Stealthed player is, but not have to guess for it as they do in the status quo. A player in Stealth should still be untargettable by single target skills that require targetting, because without this, Stealth would be completely worthless as a defensive mechanic for classes or builds that have no traits to augment it.

Secondly, allow Stealthed players to contest points, because without 100% Invisibility, there will be plenty of reasonable counterplay options available against a player contesting a point in Stealth. This will immediately improve build variety for Thieves, because Stealth related builds that have been doomed to a lifetime of unviability can now be experimented with. Allowing point contention will also undoubtedly open up many additional non-roamer roles for Thief players in teams, further disrupting the stale sPvP meta. The possibilities are exciting indeed.

Additionally, a passive movement speed increase in Stealth may also be necessary to counteract the loss of 100% Invisibility, for the purpose of facilitating escapes and positioning-based Stealth mechanics like Backstab that would become much more difficult to pull off after the change. I would recommend integrating the +50% movement speed trait for Thieves into the Stealth mechanic itself, which effectively makes a Stealthed player able to move at the same speed in-combat as an out-of-combat player with Swiftness (out-of-combat movement is also capped at this speed AFAIK). The exactly value of this speed increase needs to be experimented with but I feel some degree of improvement to mobility will be required to maintain balance.

Last but not least, AIs need to treat Stealthed players as they always have (as if they were still completely invisible). Without this, Stealth would loose all utility in anything other than PvP.

TL;DR: Stealth as a mechanic would be in a much better state if 100% Invisibility was removed, and allowing point contention in Stealth would improve build variety overall for all classes that make use of Stealth. These changes should also help make Stealth just generally less un-fun to play against, which is definitely an important consideration for new players and player skill progression overall.

Feel free to point out any balance considerations that I may have missed or leave any other constructive feedback.

You are talking about the removal of stealth and instead replacing it with a slightly harder to see version. I am not a fan of the idea at all.

A person who is stealthed should not be seen, that is the point of being “stealthed”.

What I disagree with is continually disappearing after engagement. Should have kept it more like daoc, where once the fight was on its very difficult to stealth again.

style.6173:

You are talking about the removal of stealth and instead replacing it with a slightly harder to see version. I am not a fan of the idea at all.

I would consider the ability to contest points in Stealth to be much more crucial to build viability than being completely invisible. The passive movement speed buff suggested should help with escapes and positioning, and target dropping/un-targetability will stay as a defensive mechanic. PvE will also be completely unaffected.

Could you be a bit more specific as to what aspect of these changes you’re not a fan of?

Kilger.5490:

A person who is stealthed should not be seen, that is the point of being “stealthed”.

What I disagree with is continually disappearing after engagement. Should have kept it more like daoc, where once the fight was on its very difficult to stealth again.

Let’s not get carried away with semantics.

However, I would welcome any discussion on why you think these changes wouldn’t be better for the Thief profession and the game as a whole.

I’m being 100% serious when I say this.

Anyone that complains about stealth being over powered needs to seriously think about how they are playing the game. Not being able to see someone, does not make them invincible.

As a thief, I am downing other thieves all the time(When they are in stealth), and will sometimes get downed myself while in stealth. If you pay attention to player movements, and work on improving your movements, you will have 0 problems with stealth.

That being said, if they want to change stealth, I want them to buff our stats to be in-line with other classes(like warriors).

19k health in full zerker gear, yes plz.

We would also need ways to increase our mitigation, like guaranteed blocks(like most non-stealth class have). We would need real condition removal skills, and a complete rework of our stealth abilities.

DANGRYdan.8392:

I’m being 100% serious when I say this.

Anyone that complains about stealth being over powered needs to seriously think about how they are playing the game. Not being able to see someone, does not make them invincible.

As a thief, I am downing other thieves all the time(When they are in stealth), and will sometimes get downed myself while in stealth. If you pay attention to player movements, and work on improving your movements, you will have 0 problems with stealth.

I’m not sure where you’re getting the vibe that this is a complaint (I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you read the post, or at least the TL;DR).

This suggestion is aimed at improving build variety in sPvP as the primary objective, and making Stealth based builds viable in the conquest meta. A secondary, and purely coincidental benefit to these changes will hopefully be less negativity in the forums to force ANet to continue nerfing Stealth into oblivion, as they are clearly planning to do despite its sorry state in sPvP.

In other words, would you like to be completely invisible while Stealthed and allow enemies to completely dictate when you can and cannot stealth through random Revealed applications? Or would you rather give up the complete invisibility and gain the ability to contest points and move faster passively? Because at this rate we will eventually be going down the former path.

Kaon.7192:

DANGRYdan.8392:

I’m being 100% serious when I say this.

Anyone that complains about stealth being over powered needs to seriously think about how they are playing the game. Not being able to see someone, does not make them invincible.

As a thief, I am downing other thieves all the time(When they are in stealth), and will sometimes get downed myself while in stealth. If you pay attention to player movements, and work on improving your movements, you will have 0 problems with stealth.

I’m not sure where you’re getting the vibe that this is a complaint (I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you read the post, or at least the TL;DR).

This suggestion is aimed at improving build variety in sPvP as the primary objective, and making Stealth based builds viable in the conquest meta. A secondary, and purely coincidental benefit to these changes will hopefully be less negativity in the forums to force ANet to continue nerfing Stealth into oblivion, as they are clearly planning to do despite its sorry state in sPvP.

In other words, would you like to be completely invisible while Stealthed and allow enemies to completely dictate when you can and cannot stealth through random Revealed applications? Or would you rather give up the complete invisibility and gain the ability to contest points and move faster passively? Because at this rate we will eventually be going down the former path.

Refer to edits I made, and may not have been updated when you replied.

Basically I’m saying that if they change stealth, they need to change a lot of other things, a LOT, to balance the class out.

I agree that perma stealth and the scrubs who rely on this crutch are holding back our class. Not sure that this is the right solution, but I agree with your intent. I don’t need to rely on perma stealth to win, and the challenge makes this game much more fun.

Remove the training wheels!

I think the more fundamental problem with Stealth is that it is too beneficial to the Thief to the point that many builds evolve around “spaming” stealth.

Stealth heals, improves Initiative, blinds, removes conditions and sets powerful attacks (like Backstab and Sneak Attack)

Stealth isn’t a tactical choice or a defensive move, it’s something you want to use as much as possible.

I think it would be more interesting if Stealth actually consumed Initiative (with abilities being significantly cheaper) and so forced players to chose between offense and defense in any given moment.

Kaon.7192:

Let’s not get carried away with semantics.

However, I would welcome any discussion on why you think these changes wouldn’t be better for the Thief profession and the game as a whole.

Its not getting carried away. Since the beginning of rpgs, if someone is successfully stealthed, they are completely unseen and effectively invisible. Its the one-sided nature of the ability.

But anyway your idea is similiar to daoc, when close enough (very close) your enemy would see a transparent outline as described and could target you in a limited fashion. The distance at which you disappeared completely was determined by your stealth skill. This allowed people to hone in and attempt to engage a stealther even while stealthed, a much better system.

Kilger.5490:

Kaon.7192:

Let’s not get carried away with semantics.

However, I would welcome any discussion on why you think these changes wouldn’t be better for the Thief profession and the game as a whole.

Its not getting carried away. Since the beginning of rpgs, if someone is successfully stealthed, they are completely unseen and effectively invisible. Its the one-sided nature of the ability.

But anyway your idea is similiar to daoc, when close enough (very close) your enemy would see a transparent outline as described and could target you in a limited fashion. The distance at which you disappeared completely was determined by your stealth skill. This allowed people to hone in and attempt to engage a stealther even while stealthed, a much better system.

So the DAOC system is refered to as Stealth despite the fact that you can be conditionally seen while it’s active, is it not?

What I’m trying to say is that reasonable people can disagree about semantics, but we shouldn’t let that get in the way of the more important discussion of the underlying mechanics.

I do agree that the DAOC system sounds reasonable.

However I don’t think the two systems can be reasonably compared, as in DAOC you have a single (few?) long duration Stealth available, whereas in GW2 you have only extremely short duration Stealths available (asides from perma-Stealth D/P which does not match the way Stealth is intended to work in this game and needs to be removed). Changing the GW2 system to match the DAOC one would be extremely laborious and have massive balance complications, to the point that it is simply not feasible this far into release.

Agreed, but there is a permastealth mechanic in this game that far too many people are too happy to abuse. Eliminate that possibility and people will like thieves.

Kaon.7192:

So the DAOC system is refered to as Stealth despite the fact that you can be conditionally seen while it’s active, is it not?

Haha nice try, but its because their stealth has failed at that close distance. I’ve discussed this many times over the years, at least for the person in question. There is a bit of duality there however.

I dont see them changing stealth that drastically at this point. They seem to like playing with “revealed” more than anything.

Kilger.5490:

Kaon.7192:

So the DAOC system is refered to as Stealth despite the fact that you can be conditionally seen while it’s active, is it not?

Haha nice try, but its because their stealth has failed at that close distance. I’ve discussed this many times over the years, at least for the person in question. There is a bit of duality there however.

I dont see them changing stealth that drastically at this point. They seem to like playing with “revealed” more than anything.

Same here. Giving ways to counter stealth through utilities (i.e. Sic ’Em) would probably be better than reworking the whole mechanic entirely, especially since a lot of balancing considerations for the thief include the nature of the current mechanic.

One thing I would wish the would change is the chain stealthing though. Constantly blinking in and out of stealth on things that make no effort to evade, or even doing it off object (i.e. seige and turrets) is, IMO, a bit dumb. I liked the idea they had way back when about the revealed debuff being applied to you everytime you destealth, but they decided that wasn’t a good idea for some reason. I think stealth stacking is fine since you’re electing not to attack in order to keep stealthed, but immediately restealthing after destealthing is silly, especially since the thief can time it so they are only out of stealth for a fraction of a second. That goes for mesmers too, FYI. But perhaps if they put in more stealth counter utilities then that would remove the need to prevent chain stealthing.

Nobody would have trouble with seeing a transparent player, if you are, you need to check your eyes. Might as well remove stealth.

Stealth’s only viable use as a defense is being invisible.

Before they fixed nametags, clones were a completely usedless defense for mesmers for the same reason. Clones are only useful defensively when they are working effectively, as in, they’re actually possibly mistaken for the real thing.

Stealth is in a similar boat. Your proposed changes would result in ZERO backstabs happenning, and stealthed thieves getting focused and eliminated 100% of the time. Despite all of stealth’s useful traits, those traits would be null and void if you made this change for a single reason:

Thieves can not both attack and remain stealthed. Anyone can attack the thief while stealthed. All you’d be doing is making people hold off on hitting a cooldown while following the thief to exactly wherever stealth would end, then bursting him down all at once, the same way people deal with shield warriors. You wait for blocks to end, then you burst.

actually thieves CAN attack and remain stealthed. I’ve done it many times.

It’s really annoying that stealth heavy thieves can’t cap points efficiently and therefore are unviable in sPvP. But as you say, allowing a 100% stealthed player to cap a point would be very unfair.

Reducing the stealth degree to less than 100% is arguable. I don’t think that players would have a problem detecting a transparent target sneaking close around them. This would be a major nerf to the back stab mechanic. Increasing the movement speed by 50% might be a solution, but I think rather not.

It is not the right place to bring in my own suggestion, but I will do so nevertheless:
I think stealth associated traits that give benefits to the thief should be nerfed, whereas stealth non-associated traits that can increase thief survivability and damage output should be buffed.

Sanduskel.1850:

actually thieves CAN attack and remain stealthed. I’ve done it many times.

Permastealth trolling is an obvious exception to the rule, and something we’ve been saying should be addressed for a long time on these forums… yet somehow it still exists.

It’s fun though! Just like perplexity runes and Warrior WTFregen builds, enjoy it while it lasts because it’s broken and headed for nerf city.

PopeUrban.2578:

Sanduskel.1850:

actually thieves CAN attack and remain stealthed. I’ve done it many times.

Permastealth trolling is an obvious exception to the rule, and something we’ve been saying should be addressed for a long time on these forums… yet somehow it still exists.

It’s fun though! Just like perplexity runes and Warrior WTFregen builds, enjoy it while it lasts because it’s broken and headed for nerf city.

The only possible way to do that is CnD chaining and, as said multipple times allready, If someone fails at stopping thief from doing that he deserves to be CnD’ed to death. 1234 block, dodge, cc.

If you guys wouldn’t always divert from the topic, it would be much appreciated.

This thread is to discuss OPs proposal on how to fix/enhance stealth and specifically his idea.

If you want to discuss something else, please do it in another thread.

Stealth QQ should be disregarded. There is always a stealth QQ in any game that has a stealth class.

However, the infiltrator strike abusing is getting ridiculous.

PopeUrban.2578:

Stealth’s only viable use as a defense is being invisible.

I’m going to have to disagree with the first statement.

Being completely invisible is definitely one of the defensive aspects of Stealth. However, Stealth has a separate defensive mechanic that I believe is much more important defensively, which is target dropping and targetting immunity.

Being invisible is an almost insurmountable defensive mechanic against new players that are inexperienced in fighting against Thieves.

However, at higher levels of play, most enemies will be able to read your positioning in Stealth so well that it really makes little difference whether or not you appear completely invisible to them, through things like cleaving chain attacks, AoE + boon procs, traps, channels, and just general thinking-like-a-Thief-ness. I’m sure most of us here in these forums have either had similar experiences when fighting against other good players or have done it to other Thieves ourselves, or both.

Target drop and targetting immunity, however, are much more reliable defensive mechanics, that some of us may take for granted when using Stealth. While in Stealth, target drop and targeting immunity guarantees that an entire categorization of single-targetted skills cannot be used on you from any enemy, so you can safely focus on avoiding the remaining classes of skills, namely cleaves, ground targetted AoE, and long channels that existed on you before you Stealthed.

Stealth in its current state is clearly disproportionately powerful against new players. ANet has been responding to this, and likely will continue to respond to this through nerfs in ways that inevitably make competitive play involving Stealth based builds even more unviable than they already are. Stealth, in the way it is now, will simply continue to receive nerfs, and never buffs, because of how much trouble 100% invisibility gives new players, despite it’s sorry state in competitve sPvP.

Removing 100% invisibility will lower the skill floor required to deal with Stealth, making life less frustrating for newer players, while strategies for dealing with Stealth at higher levels remains essentially unchanged, but as a result of these changes we will gain access to a whole repertoire of viable builds for competitive sPvP.

I feel Stealth without 100% Invisibility, but with the ability to contest points, will be a better baseline for the Stealth mechanic, and allow for more even-handed balance tweaks that open up the possibility of buffs in to Stealth in other much-needed aspects.

PopeUrban.2578:

Before they fixed nametags, clones were a completely usedless defense for mesmers for the same reason. Clones are only useful defensively when they are working effectively, as in, they’re actually possibly mistaken for the real thing.

Stealth is in a similar boat. Your proposed changes would result in ZERO backstabs happenning, and stealthed thieves getting focused and eliminated 100% of the time. Despite all of stealth’s useful traits, those traits would be null and void if you made this change for a single reason:

Thieves can not both attack and remain stealthed. Anyone can attack the thief while stealthed. All you’d be doing is making people hold off on hitting a cooldown while following the thief to exactly wherever stealth would end, then bursting him down all at once, the same way people deal with shield warriors. You wait for blocks to end, then you burst.

As for these other points:

An important consideration is that clones do not make the actual Mesmer immune to targetting, whereas my proposed changes to Stealth will keep this important defensive aspect of Stealth.

The fact that Backstabs will become more difficult to pull off is definitely true. However, the proposed 50% extra movement speed should help towards alleviating the handicap of being visible. Remember, Backstab has a rather generous arc that includes much of the sides of an enemy as well. In melee range, if you have superior movement speed and have melee assist turned off like every Thief should, it’s rather easy to quickly sway to the side and land a full-strength “Backstab”. It even opens up the opportunity for feints like strafing sideways and make your enemy expose his back TO you by moving in the opposite direction immediately after and making use of the superior movement speed.

Also if movement speed boosts aren’t enough, there is plenty of other trivial ways to tweak abilities like Backstab to make it more viable in a visible setting. For instance, normalizing the Facestab damage coefficient to be much higher than it currently is, but still below a Backstab, so that Backstabbing becomes a more subtle boost to damage. There is also the possibility to add some kind of utility effect to stabbing someone from the front, such as a condition application, CC or AoE effect, which opens up more interesting play decisions in the Thief’s playbook. This way Facestab will actually be situationally more desirable than a Backstab. As an example, if we give Facestab a damaging condition like Burning (I know it doesn’t exactly make sense to burn someone face-stabbing them, just an example), suddenly D/D condition builds will have a new condi to apply and will become that much more viable as a result.

These kinds of tweaks and slight buffs will actually become possible once the stigma of the 100% invisibility wears off as a result of these changes. Personally I’m very excited to see where Thieves can end up with it implemented.

Yamsandjams.3267:

Kilger.5490:

Kaon.7192:

So the DAOC system is refered to as Stealth despite the fact that you can be conditionally seen while it’s active, is it not?

Haha nice try, but its because their stealth has failed at that close distance. I’ve discussed this many times over the years, at least for the person in question. There is a bit of duality there however.

I dont see them changing stealth that drastically at this point. They seem to like playing with “revealed” more than anything.

Same here. Giving ways to counter stealth through utilities (i.e. Sic ’Em) would probably be better than reworking the whole mechanic entirely, especially since a lot of balancing considerations for the thief include the nature of the current mechanic.

In my humble opinion, this is ABSOLUTELY the wrong way to deal with Stealth for the reasons outlined here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Counter-Invisibility-not-Stealth/

TL;DR: existence of hard counters makes the mechanic completely unreliable and thus unviable in competitive settings, where Stealth is already plenty unviable

Youkay.5294:

It is not the right place to bring in my own suggestion, but I will do so nevertheless:
I think stealth associated traits that give benefits to the thief should be nerfed, whereas stealth non-associated traits that can increase thief survivability and damage output should be buffed.

You’re saying to make Stealth based builds even worse than they currently are? I’m not sure exactly how this would solve the very real problem that Stealth based builds are completely unviable in competitive play.

Sorry if I seem to be singling out some people here, but please realize that I only respond because your points have merit, and appreciate the honest discussion you guys bring.

Please keep this up. Thanks!

Easy Fix – Reworked Revealed
A global debuff that you gain upon ENTERING stealth, equal to double the stealths duration. It prevents you from gaining any additional stealth time. Thus it’s purpose to prevent additional stealth from being stacked immediately upon exiting from the prior form of stealth.

Example: Thief uses Hide in Shadows, gains 3s of stealth, 6s of revealed. Once his 3s stealth is over, he’ll still have 3s of revealed and thus cant immediately restealth.

This would effectively hard-cap all thief combat stealth at 50% uptime.

This may seem like a Nerf (and directly, yes, it is) but it opens the doors for many other possibilities.
Such as a non-combat form of extended stealth.
Or the ability for last refuge to become a bonus rather than a liability IE it removes Revealed when it triggers.

Stealth holds the thief class back just as much as it helps it.

KAon, your assesment of the value of targeting immunity is, in my opinion, completely off base.

So little of the damage in this game is applied via targeted means that simply being untargettable is a negligable defensive ability. You might have a leg to stand on the entering stealth chancelled channels or something, but it doesn’t.

I’m glad you think you’ve got a good idea here, but if you take a look at the feedback, you’ll find that many people have taken the time to point out the many things that are wrong with it. Chief among these is that without invisibility “stealth” is a complete misnomer. Using a mes clone and running straight at the target spamming auto would be a more reliable defense if your suggestion was implemented.

>Additionally, a passive movement speed increase in Stealth may also be necessary to counteract the loss of 100% Invisibility, for the purpose of facilitating escapes and positioning-based Stealth mechanics like Backstab that would become much more difficult to pull off after the change. I would recommend integrating the +50% movement speed trait for Thieves into the Stealth mechanic itself,

WWW d/p build already use this trait and its only 17% faster than swiftness. Great escape. Great chase mechanism.

>A player in Stealth should still be untargettable by single target skills that require targetting, because without this
Almost any singletarget skill can be triggered without actual target. Your “stealth” would counter only few skills.

So to conclude you want to remove the only reliable defensive ability from the class with no access to stuns, lifeleech, little armor, small hp pool and give him in exchange ability to contest points in pvp. You are funny.

Kaon.7192:

Yamsandjams.3267:

Kilger.5490:

Kaon.7192:

So the DAOC system is refered to as Stealth despite the fact that you can be conditionally seen while it’s active, is it not?

Haha nice try, but its because their stealth has failed at that close distance. I’ve discussed this many times over the years, at least for the person in question. There is a bit of duality there however.

I dont see them changing stealth that drastically at this point. They seem to like playing with “revealed” more than anything.

Same here. Giving ways to counter stealth through utilities (i.e. Sic ’Em) would probably be better than reworking the whole mechanic entirely, especially since a lot of balancing considerations for the thief include the nature of the current mechanic.

In my humble opinion, this is ABSOLUTELY the wrong way to deal with Stealth for the reasons outlined here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Counter-Invisibility-not-Stealth/

TL;DR: existence of hard counters makes the mechanic completely unreliable and thus unviable in competitive settings, where Stealth is already plenty unviable

every other class has hard counters and they aren’t unviable, lol. stealth is the opposite of unviable. wow.

Azraelle.1683:

>Additionally, a passive movement speed increase in Stealth may also be necessary to counteract the loss of 100% Invisibility, for the purpose of facilitating escapes and positioning-based Stealth mechanics like Backstab that would become much more difficult to pull off after the change. I would recommend integrating the +50% movement speed trait for Thieves into the Stealth mechanic itself,

WWW d/p build already use this trait and its only 17% faster than swiftness. Great escape. Great chase mechanism.

>A player in Stealth should still be untargettable by single target skills that require targetting, because without this
Almost any singletarget skill can be triggered without actual target. Your “stealth” would counter only few skills.

So to conclude you want to remove the only reliable defensive ability from the class with no access to stuns, lifeleech, little armor, small hp pool and give him in exchange ability to contest points in pvp. You are funny.

i play low to non stealth builds and do just fine. perma stealthers need to l2p.

Oh yeah, cut off all stealth builds and leave only one reliable s/d dodge spamming build.

Sanduskel.1850:

i play low to non stealth builds and do just fine. perma stealthers need to l2p.

Just because a build utilizes stealth does not automatically make it “permastealth.” Even Thieves who regularly run stealth builds disavow permastealth because it cheapens the whole mechanic—and, in many cases, the class.

That is a terrible idea. People QQ because they dont know what they are doing and just want to complain. With all the AOE in this game hitting the thief would be too easy. Stealth is not in the least but overpwered. Bad players complain about everything. Killing a stealth thief is already easier than it should be. Just spam AOE near u and the thief wont be able to atack with melee. Good players do this all the time and absolutely wreck stealth thieves… If anything stealth is underpowered

Thieves are low tier in sPvP due to burst mitigation but still remaining squishy as fk, they get melted even by bunkers.

Imagi.4561:

Sanduskel.1850:

i play low to non stealth builds and do just fine. perma stealthers need to l2p.

Just because a build utilizes stealth does not automatically make it “permastealth.” Even Thieves who regularly run stealth builds disavow permastealth because it cheapens the whole mechanic—and, in many cases, the class.

i am agreeing with you!

What?

I dont know why so many player have problem with stealth. Use AOE or spam you attack 1. A thief stealthed far from you is not a problem. Yea stealth give hp and iniziative regen, lose condiction and so? A stealthed, invisible thief cant do damage.

And about contested area … If a thief want CAP an area, do it without stealth. Simple.

Kaon.7192:

Yamsandjams.3267:

Kilger.5490:

Kaon.7192:

So the DAOC system is refered to as Stealth despite the fact that you can be conditionally seen while it’s active, is it not?

Haha nice try, but its because their stealth has failed at that close distance. I’ve discussed this many times over the years, at least for the person in question. There is a bit of duality there however.

I dont see them changing stealth that drastically at this point. They seem to like playing with “revealed” more than anything.

Same here. Giving ways to counter stealth through utilities (i.e. Sic ’Em) would probably be better than reworking the whole mechanic entirely, especially since a lot of balancing considerations for the thief include the nature of the current mechanic.

In my humble opinion, this is ABSOLUTELY the wrong way to deal with Stealth for the reasons outlined here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Counter-Invisibility-not-Stealth/

TL;DR: existence of hard counters makes the mechanic completely unreliable and thus unviable in competitive settings, where Stealth is already plenty unviable

I don’t think it would be too much of a problem so long as the revealed duration is short (i.e. 2-5 seconds). Not to mention that someone will have to make a specific choice to take the revealing ability instead of a different ability. For example, if a spirit ranger wants to detect stealth people, they have to throw away a spirit, so it might not be worth it for the spirit ranger to do that.

I think simply destealthing without revealing them would be a good compromise if such a compromise was needed, but that just goes back to chain stealthing. As such, the detection abilities would have to be much more prolific to be worthwhile. On the other hand creating abilities that apply revealed would mean they can be much more restrictive in things like cooldowns and availability, thus forcing a tradeoff.

Additionally, I’m not sure if they’ve actually release the information about how they’ll be implemented, but I think the way they’ll implement the abilities is that you have to use the ability on a targeted opponent. As such, you can’t knock them out of stealth, but rather prevent them from entering stealth. If they stealth before you use the ability on them, then you won’t be able to capitalize on it. We will have to wait and see how it all works out though.

Karolis.4261:

PopeUrban.2578:

Sanduskel.1850:

actually thieves CAN attack and remain stealthed. I’ve done it many times.

Permastealth trolling is an obvious exception to the rule, and something we’ve been saying should be addressed for a long time on these forums… yet somehow it still exists.

It’s fun though! Just like perplexity runes and Warrior WTFregen builds, enjoy it while it lasts because it’s broken and headed for nerf city.

The only possible way to do that is CnD chaining and, as said multipple times allready, If someone fails at stopping thief from doing that he deserves to be CnD’ed to death. 1234 block, dodge, cc.

Could you say that to my pet that can’t dodge please?

This forums seems to only be thinking about new players and Spvp. You are forgetting the people who spent hours learning how to fight thieves. Some even rolling their own to learn its weakness. It seems more like this is a get out of jail free card for new player and to let Spvp players be able to stealth.

I´d like pre-beta stealth. When a thief takes damage in stealth he “flickers” making him slightly visible. Taking too much damage removes stealth.

This flicker might just look like stealth looks to allies. With this someone could guess the thiefs position and hit there, see where the thief is heading and require the thief to move more strategically.

Blimm.5028:

I´d like pre-beta stealth. When a thief takes damage in stealth he “flickers” making him slightly visible. Taking too much damage removes stealth.

This flicker might just look like stealth looks to allies. With this someone could guess the thiefs position and hit there, see where the thief is heading and require the thief to move more strategically.

If that was the case then stealthing wood do nothing if a channeling attack was targeting you and would leave you in arguably a worse position than if you hadn’t stealthed. It’d make thieves dog food in larger group encounters.