Guild Wars 2

Good day.
I’ve recently leveled a thief, i also have a 80 guardian that i’ve been playing for a while, so i’m familiar with most dungeons.
The thing that bothers me, is how do i provide almost 24/7 stealth for the group when skipping many mobs, like in caudecus ?
I am trying to chain shadow refuge with smoke screen+cluster bombs, but the latter gives me 8 sec stealth at most ( and sometimes doesn’t give stealth at all for some reason), and i have to spam the bombs a lot, while i’ve seen thieves used smoke screen without spamming much and giving ~12 sec of invis to the party (not sr).
Maybe you can give me some tips on how to chain it properly, i tried to look for videos that showcase exactly this, but couldn’t find any.
Thank you in advance.

The easiest way is going to be help from the SA traits. Take the “Deception skills recharge quicker” from the 1st tier and “Regain init while in stealth” from the last tier.

My rotation usually starts off smoke screen + cluster bomb. Your problem with it not giving stealth sometimes could be 2 things. You really need to make sure you aim the center of the green ground effect circle right over the smoke screen line. Being off just a little bit won’t register. Sucks having the combo field so narrow and awkward. The other reason could possibly be you’re pressing 2 for the next cluster bomb a tad too early and exploding the shot before it hits the ground. Wait until you see the big AoE Stealth combo text before pressing 2 again. You will be able to get 6 shots off.

If you want, you can use Blinding Powder in sync with the last clusterbomb shot. Not only does it add AoE stealth on it’s own but it is also a blast finisher so you’ll get even more. After that, start moving as a party and if you need prolonged stealth still, stop and group up for a SR. By the time SR itself starts running out, Smoke screen should be about ready to go again and you’ll have full init to go another 6 shots into it. That should be enough time to get through whatever you need too.

If you reaaaally need more, use x/P-5 and blast that smoke field with clusterbomb. You’ll be able to do it 3 times.

2 things to watch out for though of course. Make sure you’re not near an enemy when you’re using clusterbomb because the damage will reveal you. Also, x/P-5 fires a 900 range shot that does damage so make sure you don’t have any enemies targeted or auto-targeting on otherwise it, too, will reveal you.

Hope it helps! Just practices around in LA until you get the hang of it. It’s really easy once you do and with the traits and D/P, you won’t even need SR for perma aoe stealth ;] GL!

Just something to keep in mind, from what I can tell, you can only have a max of 5 stacks of stealth at a time. So that’s 15 seconds without Shadow Arts, and 20 seconds with. Sadly, I could not stack it any higher even with a perma-stealthing build for myself alone.