Guild Wars 2

I hadn’t played in a long time, and recently decided to check GW2 again.

The first thing I noticed was that stealth is now almost completely useless against NPCs. They continue to track, shoot and hit me even if I stealth for 3 or 4 seconds (and change direction during the stealth). It seems to take at least 5 seconds of stealth to make them stop shooting / chasing and, even then, they “automagically” know where I am, even if there is no LoS between their position and the place where I unstealthed.

This was definitely not the case about one year ago.

I tested it with all kinds of creatures, and I have no lag, so that’s not the issue. My character does become cloaked, but the mobs simply ignore it.

Is this a recent bug, or has Arena Net decided to make stealth PvP only (maybe the mobs complained) ?

That’s odd. When I use stealth on my Ranger, the mobs always turn their attention to someone else, or turn back to yellow. I don’t seem to have a problem with my Thief, either, but I play it a bit less.

I’ve found that if the attacker is in mid-attack when I stealth as a ranger, I still get hit. The same goes for me when I attack with say my Rapid Fire skill. If I half-way get the first shot (of 10) off, then all the shots will find the stealth enemy – NPC or player.

A channeled skill tracking a stealthed opponent has been there since day one. As to enemies holding aggro on you while stealthed, that was part of a change to prevent them from healing to full the moment you entered stealth — thus, in a solo fight, you can use stealth to gain a brief pause in the fight to recover, without losing your progress in said fight.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

That’s odd. When I use stealth on my Ranger, the mobs always turn their attention to someone else, or turn back to yellow. I don’t seem to have a problem with my Thief, either, but I play it a bit less.

Turning their attention to someone else is hard when there’s no one else around. And I seriously doubt any aggroed creature “turns back to yellow” before it resets completely (lots of creatures are never yellow anyway).

I just checked this again, and I even see some creatures tracking (and firing) for the entire duration of shadow refuge, while my character is (visually) stealthed. It’s as if stealth is just a graphic effect now, with no influence on the AI.

Yamagawa.5941:

As to enemies holding aggro on you while stealthed, that was part of a change to prevent them from healing to full the moment you entered stealth

That didn’t even happen in beta, and it certainly didn’t happen in the months after release. If you stealthed, the enemy would hang around for a while (5 seconds at least, possibly more), and then started healing about 10% per second, while heading back to its original position. If you hit it again, it would stop healing.

They never “healed to full the moment you entered stealth”.

Yamagawa.5941:

A channeled skill tracking a stealthed opponent has been there since day one.

Actually, it was changed (about 9 or 10 months ago, IIRC), by a patch that aimed to fix issues with thieves appearing cloaked for longer than they should in PvP and WvW.

A consequence of that patch (in PvE) was that mobs continue to track and attack players for several seconds after they cloak. Before that, if you cloaked, the mob would stop tracking you almost immediately, and the next attacks would fail (or, at least, would be aimed at the place where you were when you cloaked, they didn’t keep “following” you).

Apparently, one of the recent patches made this even worse (I haven’t played thief lately, so I haven’t checked, but that’s what some friends tell me).

I could understand letting players’ attacks track enemies for a second or two after they cloak (due to lag, the attacker won’t see you cloak exactly when you do, so it makes sense to let the shots track for a bit longer), but mob AI is running on the server, and should stop tracking you as soon as you cloak. Naturally, AoE attacks would still hit, and so would normal volleys, if you just stay in the same place, but they definitely shouldn’t keep tracking you while you’re cloaked. It just feels fake and “cheaty”.