Guild Wars 2

Just wanted to take my time to thank ArenaNet for fixing last refuge (by giving us the option not to pick it)! It was about time.

Just surprised that no one has mentioned this since they released the preview balance changes.

Not sure if this has been mentioned here, but here are my two cents anyway. I think you do not go out of stealth -when you hit someone with aegis- for the same reason you do not go into stealth when hitting someone with aegis using cloak and dagger. You don’t actually cause any direct damage. However, let’s say they changed this, and you get the reveal debuff as soon as you hit someone with aegis or some other type of block, it only seems reasonable that you should be able to successfully cloak and dagger of it as well, regardless if you damage your opponent or not.

Sceinna.3561:

Increased revealed from 3s to 4s, this only affects the proper thiefs and not the type that burst you down in what seems one hit and runs off to only strike back like a minute later when all skills are off cooldown again.

The nerf affected me a great deal. I play a lot of fractals as a melee type with my thief. By the time I’m writing this, I have already reached level 49 using dagger-daggers exclusively. As a melee type, and a thief, I heavily rely on stealth as a way to compensate for the low base health and medium armor thief’s have at level 80. Stealth allows me to remain up close and even -to some extent- control, indirectly, who the mobs engage in my group. Needless to say, every time I go out of stealth I’m vulnerable. Assuming you’re fighting a bunch of mobs and they are all clumped up, as soon as you go out of stealth and you are close by, a few of those mobs will, most likely, target you and attack. With a little effort, I used to be able to manage (by that I mean tank or dodge) the series of attacks just fine before I could re-stealth again. This has now become exponentially harder, even though the reveal buff was only extended by 1 second. Basically, I have to tank and dodge damage for 4 seconds instead of 3. This is no easy task by any means at fractals level 40+. If anyone is familiar with the ascalonian fractal, I’m sure they will testify that, yes, one volley from the mages or knight will bring you down instantly, and tanking that is just not feasible.

In hindsight, I guess this is the fundamental difference between PvE and WvW or PvP. Npc’s will target and attack you the second you go out of stealth and they will keep doing so for the full duration of the reveal de-buff, until you can re-stealth again. In WvW it might take the player as much as a second or 2 before he/she is able to locate and attack you. Pre-patch, this, essentially, gave them less than a second to damage you, which is not merely enough time to bring you down.

I guess the basic idea with this nerf was to, simply, give players more time to react whenever a thief engages them. Unfortunately, this minor change was much more of a severe blow for the PvE thief than anything else.

I really dislike playing a long-range style and I would very much want to keep continue playing as a melee type thief in PvE, but, sad to say, with the recent patch, this just doesn’t seem like a viable option anymore.