Guild Wars 2

Just tested this out in spvp with a thief using Sleight of Hand and Basilisk Venom, and it seems that a target which is afflicted with both a stun and daze can still use stun breakers but are still stunned afterwards. For example, popping Mist form during the stun and daze but still unable to move.

Also, daze allows you to use all instant cast utility skills, which applies to all stun breaker. Daze currently only affects all weapon skills and all utilities with a cast time. Not sure if this was a bug, but to my understanding of daze I thought you weren’t supposed to be able to cast any skills at all. So a stun and daze combo should have prevented a target from stun breaking.

Not sure if this is actually two bugs.

Now the question is why would you run a build that goes into the Shadow Arts tree to run this build. The only situation to use the Shadow Arts tree is to run a sustained damage build that relies heavily on stealth.

For this dagger/pistol build we’re discussing, the only place this build would be effective would be in WvW . This is because pve gear allows you to get 100+% additional crit damage(this is 250+% from base damage), and with hidden killer traits this would allow for good burst and sustained damaged. Your Backstabs would hit for the same amount as a regular burst combo in spvp. The other perk to this build would be to escape from a zerg using the near permanent stealth achieved using the second method, though it could be argued that infiltrator’s arrow would let you escape easier since most people would’ve used one of the listed counters the d/p stealth method.

This build is also not effective in Spvp because you don’t have good burst or sustained pressure from Backstabs because you don’t have the extra stats from wvw. Also, if you try to fight on the point, you’ll most likely be melted by aoe even with your 2280 armor(berserker amulet with SA traits). There are only 2 things which kill in Spvp, high burst or high sustained damage. This build doesn’t offer either, so that’s why it’s a bad build which doesn’t offer much. There are virtually no situations where the permanent stealth would help you because even if you stealthed up to someone, your burst is terrible because you don’t have enough points in deadly arts for the additional power and +% damage. It also can’t be used to bunker a point because stealth doesn’t keep a point contested. Anyone can still use this build to shadow refuge and get shadowstep stomps in a team fight but all thieves can do this for the most par. So apart from that you’ll be useless to your team in the terms of kill potential and bunkering.

Finally, you’re not using this build in pve because you’re trying to kill stuff and staying in stealth permanently is counter productive unless you’re trying to avoid some mechanic like lighting the fires in the snow blind fractal

TL;DR: There’s no situations where permanent stealth would be beneficial in SPvP and WvW and anyone attempting to do so can be destroyed easily.

Okay so let me explain why it’s ineffective to try to permanently stealth and how it’s unusable in all situations except pve.

Note that the current stealth cap is 14 seconds and infusion of shadow is needed to attempt to achieve permanent stealth.

There’s only one way to achieve a more than 10 seconds of stealth using d/p and that’s by using a flat wall and flat ground. You would use a Black Powder which lasts 4 seconds, then mash out 5 Heartseekers since each would take 3/4 of a second and can also be queued. So that would 15/4 seconds which is 3.75 seconds. This is also assuming Heartseeker doesn’t bug because of the wall and ground, which causes your Heartseeker to go off in a random direction.

Another way to achieve a decent sized stealth time which can be chained into one of the combo again before stealth ends is to do that combo in the middle of the field and try to jump through using Heartseeker 3 times. The reason it is only 3 is because latency in the game which is currently about 150+ms and camera spin time (or by using about face)which is about 100ms totals up to be above 250 ms. Since Black powder only lasts 4 seconds and the total time to Heartseeker and spin around would take above 1 second (1000ms), this would only allow 3 Heartseekers. It is possible to do 4 but is unreliable because of the latency.

Since Meld in Shadows does not affect stealth combos, none of these Heartseekers would get the bonus stealth. In the first case, we can assume there is no skill delay because of the queue system so the total stealth time would be (3s * 5) – 3.75s = 11.25 seconds of stealth up time. You would then try to do this method again, the second method, or a stealth utility to achieve permanent stealth. However, this method is not reliable since this specific wall and floor requirement is very uncommon.

The second case is the case most dagger/pistol thieves would find themselves in since there are few walls that allow the first case. Since each Heartseeker would take 1 second in most cases because of the latency and turn time, the total stealth time would be (3s * 3) – (3s * 1)= 6 seconds of stealth.

There are two weaknesses with these two methods: first is aoe on the Black powder, second is if your enemy stands in your Black powder because even if you don’t have a target, the Heartseeker hitbox trajectory through Black powder will hit that target and give you a revealed debuff. These two things make permanent stealth unreliable in combat and will put a stop to your permanent stealth really easily. These two weaknesses eliminate any actual combat use for permanent stealth.

The only out of combat use could be using permanent stealth with Fleet Shadow(50% movement increase). The problem with this is that Fleet Shadow is bugged so you’re running at 33%. Thus it’d be probably faster to Heartseeker spam or Infiltrator’s arrow across a map.

Still open at Jade Quarry @ 6:53pm pst.

Just logged back in, finally out of the map. Guess it timed out.

Portal stone didn’t work.

Both teams are currently stuck on a completed Battle of Khylo map. Any help would be nice.

Edit: We currently can’t port back to the Heart of the Mists, and logging out or switching characters puts us back in the map.

Edit 2: Trying to go into WvW kicks us back into the tournament game.

Edit 3: Guesting didn’t work, and joining a friend didn’t work either.

Still stuck in there dueling.

So having been a WoW player before, have you ever gone up against a person in full conquest gear with a T2 weapon while you were in PVE gear with zero resilience? It was pretty ugly because the person in conquest gear would almost 2 shot you.

If you wanted to grind the gear to eliminate this gear deficit you would then need to grind for honour gear then to conquest gear which would take about 10 weeks at the minimum weekly conquest (not accounting if you got over 1500 MMR to increase this). After this, you would finally need to grind to 2200 MMR for a weapon. Do you know how long this actually takes for just wanting to be competitive in PVP?

So what you’re proposing is implementing a gear deficit which people would have to grind, rather than the current system where you’re put on equal footing in terms of gear and there’s only a cosmetic grind. I for one am fine with the current system because we aren’t instantly killing people that aren’t in equal gear.