I find all of these people that defend the stealth in this game to be amusing. Not one solid post of the counter to stealth… just a bunch of drivel that equates to “l2p”
Let’s examine the counters to stealth:
1) Swing melee (most ranged weapons don’t have combos) wildly in front of yourself. If part 2 triggers, continue to spam auto attack. All you need is the thief to nicely stand in your auto attack like mobs do in PvE, and you win!
2) Spam AOEs: Assuming the thief is color blind, he will not see the red ring and will continue to stand there until he dies admidst the fire. If you’re a necro with instant wells, hope the thief isn’t traited to drop all your conditions in seconds anyways. And even if all of that is not the case, this is still the obvious counter – generically attacking in an area less than that of a single dodge and guess against a plane a thief can reach in 2 seconds that you can cover less than 5% of is pretty much guaranteed success.
3) Play with pets – once the thief is visible again, it will tell you where he is. Yay! Oh wait… he’s back stabbing you or 2500+ units away?
4) Play as a mesmer – your clones seem to have an extra half second of targeting to shatter with. This very well may be what is needed to down a glass cannon thief. As long as the thief stealths when you’re on top of him instead of porting/dodging out of your shatter before stealthing, you have a solid chance! Assuming that ~50% of thieves make this mistake and never learn, this has to be considered a “counter”.
TL;DR – You get an uncounterable defense (as everything I listed are not counters – just crap that would only kill a thief that needs to L2P) that is brokenly compounded in WvW. You get a state with massive bonuses – fastest movement in the game, huge condition removal access, healing – all spammable. There is ZERO downsides to stealth. To build a thief without constant access to stealth is to comparatively kitten yourself – if you were to lose stealth completely, you lose GODMODE for a class that can only have measly access to the highest amount of dodges/evasion in the game on top of paltry spammable blinds, interrupts, and high DPS moves. It would suck to have to work to continue being one of the top WvW/PvP classes in the game. It amuses me to be told my non-stealth build sucks because people can actually see me and dodge my moves when I can dodge/blind every else’s moves much better.
Now for the constructive part of my post. I think the following changes need to be made to stealth and it’s traits:
- Add a slight transparency. Don’t care if it’s a struggle for eagles to see, but it has the character drawn so that fixes culling. Plus it gives a counter to those playing close attention… stealth gives plenty of advantages that it does not need ‘impossible to see/counter’ on top of its list.
- Change “Shadow’s Embrace” to only cure a condition AFTER 3 seconds. To take advantage of this powerful move, you actually need to stay stealthed.
- Change “Infusion of Shadow” to not trigger with Cloak and Dagger. Steal + HiS + powder + refuge already gives plenty of tools to make this a very useful trait. As it is, it’s a CnD spam win button.
- Swap “Fleet Shadow” and “Power Shots” between their trees and tiers. Fleet shadow should be a master trait as it is powerful. It should also rightly belong in the Shadow tree forcing a choice on the powers of stealth rather than making stealth so omni-powerful.
I’m curious as to whom will think such changes will break thieves. My thief is my favorite of all my 80s so far, and will become my main. It will still be my main no matter what they do to stealth.
