Last night they changed the downed camera to preform better, but a unexpected sideffect was to completely kitten the thief in PVP. The way it used to work is you would get downed, you would flash away to max distance, and by the time they got around to tracking you down and killing you, you would smoke bomb, they would say ‘its not worth the effort’ and back off, or kill you when you came back.
But your no longer able to zoom out, which means your no longer able flash to max distance with ease, the amount of thief I have just executed because they didn’t flash far enough away, or they just didn’t and got executed because they didn’t have enough time to angle their camera to the appropriate angle to flash away.
There are a lot of debates about this, like maybe they didn’t intend thieves to be able to get away that easily, or maybe this was supposed to raise the skill cap, but mesmers have essentially the same ability but your not required to target it at all, I would be fine with this skill if it just randomly teleported you far enough away to not get executed, or they allowed a camera that was more zoomed out.
Which leads to another problem with the downed camera and the thief having a targeted ability, the amount of times the downed camera has ‘got caught on something’ and clipped so close to my body that I can’t physically target far enough away to actually accomplish anything.
All in all something either needs to be done with the thief down skills, maybe change the order of the smoke bomb so you can use that the second you go down, and then when the flash becomes useable you have had enough time to get your camera to the correct place, or perhaps change it to being a non-targeted ability, or just change the camera to not actually change its position when you go down (perhaps an option in your settings). This would greatly improve upon the thieves down state and the frustration inherent with it.