Guild Wars 2

Blast finishers in lightning fields give 10s of swiftness. You probably saw a video from the beta when it used to give 30s, or you saw someone hitting multiple blast finishers in the same field.

Let me preface this by saying that this is a graphical bug and as such may depend on a player’s specific hardware. You might not get this bug, but I know many people do because they mention it. Problem is most people don’t know what it is, they are just describing the symptom. Many of these people don’t even realize what is happening or that they have encountered a bug.

What they see: A thief stealths and starts attacking him, kills them while still in stealth and never comes out of stealth, or they only flicker into view for a fraction of a second from time to time.

What’s wrong with this? It’s not possible, or it shouldn’t be. Stealth applies a debuff called revealed that prevents consecutive stealths for about 3 seconds.

What’s actually happening is that the thief isn’t technically stealthed, but the game isn’t bothering to redraw him for 2-3 seconds. His stealth dropped when he first hits someone, and everything looks kosher on his screen. It’s a graphical bug but it can have a huge impact on PvP since you can’t see animations or judge positioning.

It’s not specific to thieves, it’s just most obvious with them because they have more stealth skills and chain them together enough that it can make them appear to be permanently invisible. It can occur with anyone or anything that is in stealth.