Guild Wars 2

I fought a permastealth thief using s/d but I thought perma stealth was only possible with p/d. what was this thief doing to keep up stealth?

There is no such thing. He may have used several stealth abilities in a row.

Cloak and dagger, hide in shadows, blinding powder, shadow refuge, blinding tuft, hidden thief, instinctual response, descent of shadows etc.

Also several thieves can still manage permastealth.

But you say you fought him… if he attacks, he’s revealed. That’s not very permanent. Perhaps you’re confused about the whole concept of permastealth.

What you could do before it was fixed, was getting more initiative back than you used for the stealth combo. This specific issue has been fixed, but a thief can still stealth a lot – he just can’t do it permanently and run across the map invisible (alone that is).

The thief was clearly using blinding powder and shadow refuge, but would gain stealth on immobilize and could maintain it seemingly indefinitely. At one point he was running with an engi, which could have helped with blast finishers, but for a long time i was 1v1ing them and they appeared to be able to permastealth out of combat.

There is no trait for thieves to go stealth on immob. He was probably using blinding powder everytime you immobilized him. Also engis have a smoke field on bombkit #4 with a TON of blast finishers. I imagine an engi and thief together could stay stealthed pretty much indefinitely.

Every time I see the term “permastealth”… I lose faith in the gaming community…
Q.Q

Perma perma perma perma perma perma perma perma…
Evrything in this game seems to be perma

Domey.9804:

Perma perma perma perma perma perma perma perma…
Evrything in this game seems to be perma

like perma-attack (auto-attack)

SA 20 (Patience) gain 1 initiative every 3 seconds you remain in stealth.
Infiltrato’rs signet (1 ini every 10 seconds)
Acrobatics 20 (Quick Recovery) gain 1 initiative every 10 seconds.

D/p #5 + #2 over and over. Perma stealth is still alive, you just have to look kitten while doing it. Also throw in blinding powder on #5 d/p and you get 7 seconds right there incase you get low. I’ve messed around and its easy to maintain assuming no one is around to step in your HS range and reveal themselves.

As far as s/d doing it, I don’t think so. If they have deception skills 20% quicker (SA trait) still no. They can’t spam stealth, so I don’t know what exactly it is you saw but it sure wasn’t a s/d perma stealth-er.

That is not Perma Stealth, that is using every Stealth utility a thief has including cloak and dagger and the uptime isn’t so ‘Perma’ anyway but with that extra Second uptime thanks to Meld in Shadows I would still generally think anyone who runs that sort of build is more of a troll build.
Unless you run a Dagger Main-hand it’s pretty harmless without Backstab.

Building up might stacks through lots of stealth is nice though. Easy to get the 25 stacks for a backstab with signets.