Guild Wars 2

I have a long history of playing StarCraft and in that game, stealth for the Terran Ghost is an energy based ability. You stay in stealth as long as you have the energy reserves to sustain it.

Suppose stealth was an ability actively toggled by the user as an F2 skill, as opposed to being a buff gained by abilities. Instead of having a fixed duration, stealth drains your initiative (1 second per tick of initiative, cost can be decreased with traits). The more initiative you have, the longer you can stay in stealth. Breaking stealth with an attack gives you a damage bonus that can be increased via traits, and reactivating the stealth ability has a fixed cooldown that can be reduced via traits, something like Tactical Cloak from Mass Effect.

Something like this would of course, be a radical overhaul that would require redesigning many of the thief’s abilities. I’m just interested in it from a theoretical perspective.

interesting. would have to reallocate minimum number of starting intiative to something higher i think tho.

Travlane.5948:

interesting. would have to reallocate minimum number of starting intiative to something higher i think tho.

or a second resource for stealth..

TheKillerAngel.3596:

I have a long history of playing StarCraft and in that game, stealth for the Terran Ghost is an energy based ability. You stay in stealth as long as you have the energy reserves to sustain it.

Suppose stealth was an ability actively toggled by the user as an F2 skill, as opposed to being a buff gained by abilities. Instead of having a fixed duration, stealth drains your initiative (1 second per tick of initiative, cost can be decreased with traits). The more initiative you have, the longer you can stay in stealth. Breaking stealth with an attack gives you a damage bonus that can be increased via traits, and reactivating the stealth ability has a fixed cooldown that can be reduced via traits, something like Tactical Cloak from Mass Effect.

Something like this would of course, be a radical overhaul that would require redesigning many of the thief’s abilities. I’m just interested in it from a theoretical perspective.

could be interesting, though honestly I’d rather have the WoW rogue stealth model, at least in pve. its currently gimmicky and nearly useless in pve, it doesn’t even stop things attacking you 90% of the time.

This actually sounds pretty interesting, gotta tell you. We’d need a larger initiative pool/base regeneration in order for this to work, though.

You’d have to put in a new resource for it, you’d also have to rescale all the stealth attacks and such if the stealth comes longer/harder to pop in and out of.

You’d possibly also have to start going towards a more hard counterable build if the durations become too much etc etc.

It wouldn’t be a simple swap over and would require a lot of rethinking of the thief as a whole

Too similar to the necromancer mechanic IMO.

Is the reason for the change because you feel stealth is too powerful? Or because you feel the mechanics of it are too clunky?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with stealth in this game. It’s quite a fragile mechanic with too many ways to enter it. I’d rather it be made more reliable but make the ways to re-enter it much more limited.

Atherakhia.4086:

Too similar to the necromancer mechanic IMO.

Is the reason for the change because you feel stealth is too powerful? Or because you feel the mechanics of it are too clunky?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with stealth in this game. It’s quite a fragile mechanic with too many ways to enter it. I’d rather it be made more reliable but make the ways to re-enter it much more limited.

Unfortunately thats not how they designed the thief, unlike other games where you can only get 1 big stealth attack off per fight they decided they wanted to allow thieves to be able to reuse their stealth attacks (and thus make actual stealth builds) in combat so you get thieves popping in and out of stealth many times a battle.

The trade off being weaker stealth attacks (backstab is the thieves highest damage skill and its way lower than other single target damage dealers hits) and of course a more fragile character (no press a button, evade all attacks for 5 second buttons and such other thieves get to make up for lack of restealthing) technically stealth is a bit less fragile as it doesn’t break on hits but other games often allow hits taken while stealthed to do less damage and of course the aforementioned having actual defenses.

Personally I quite like this style stealth, multiple attacks during combat meaning if I build to use stealth attacks its not unusable for 99% of a battle however many people seem to be unable to handle this slightly different way of stealth and of course we pay a lot for being able to do this.

This would work very well.

But first CnD would have to be redone, which seems as probable as a venom or traps revision.

Resetting fights would be even easier for thieves much to the dismay of the QQ’ers who started this nerf craze for that very reason. Instead of having to re-enter melee or lay down an aoe to stealth before he blows his utilities, he can now stealth anywhere and stay stealthed for longer. He can withdraw, stealth, and los to regen when OoC, or thief can LOS, stealth, then backstab. Additionally, dodging a CnD means thief loses 6 initiative; dodging a backstab means thief just mashes the “1” key again (not everybody has blocking). Remember, missing a backstab still leaves you in stealth.

Thief also now has 4 extra initiative if he backstabs a fraction of a sec after entering stealth, so now thieves have more initiative for extra hs when bursting.
This idea is probably a step in the right direction due to it’d nullify the cnd chain tactic and places a hard upper limit to continuous effective stealth time. However, skilled thieves would make shorter work of other people regardless, even moreso now that conditions for entering stealth would be entirely under thief’s control.

Lastly this would create interesting balance issues. Stealth as an f2 skill, any weapon set has access to abundant stealth. P/p, sb, s/p can stealth just as well as d/d thieves. QQ’ers would have a field day claiming that shortbow permastunz and eventually people would be saying that f2 stealth + sb gives thieves knockback. (we know how these “super geniuses” act). Ofc Anet will now nerf thieves because they think forum QQ’ers are now posting on forums instead of buying gems when QQ’ers would just be trolling forums regardless. The former is a valid deduction since history proves as much.

interesting comments . but thieves have had about what? 19nerfs since open date? need to fix the defense before reworking class mechanics. but interesting ideas……would help alot not having to use intiative to go invis although cnd is good dmg….although so so so slow. thieves i believe should have a faster attack with sword and with pistol autos.