Clarifications
Stealth is a defensive means of mitigating damage by becoming untargetable. Stealth grants neither invulnerability nor stability. Note skills with long warm up times that are activated while the target is visible and then gains stealth during that time are not interrupted and target as normal. Subsequent attempts to target (or generally know where the player is) are nullified for the duration of said stealth, thereby mitigating direct damage by up to 100% depending on how well the attacking player can predict the position of an invisible target.
Just wanna throw this in there. Some attack need a target to active, not everything is melee sweeping auto attack or ground targetable. Also stealth provides(spec provided) a lot of condition removal, tons of healing over time, and in the case of say my Mesmer boons.
If stealth didn’t provide so much outside of its targeting issues and gaining the stealther position I think we would have a whole new conversation.
Imagine no healing and free offensive conditions removal in some way. Or even a penalty for healing.
I hope one day a mmo comes around without a pure invisible mechanic for stealth. It only brings headaches for both user and victim.
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Incorrect
You are associating the things the Thief can do when activating or while being stealthed to the stealth effect itself. Stealth does not inherently cure conditions nor provide healing.
Stealth can provide healing if traited for it, Shadow Refuge also heals you while activated.
Exactly. A Thief trait and a Thief skill that trigger when entering or while being stealthed. These are not mechanics of Stealth itself they are mechanics of the class.
Weapons don’t do damage unless you push the buttons ether. Reguardless reading everything is probably a good idea beforehand.
Thieves have no stealth that only provides invisibility. Damage, blinds, healing, teleport are tied to it aswell. The only pure invisibility only stealth abilities I can think of off the top of my head is vale and mass invisibility. They do however provide for multiple player stealth. So arguing stealth as a sole mechanic wouldn’t make sense with out factoring in its built in advantages that when combained sometimes provides too much.
This thinking exemplifies the common placed ignorance of the mechanics that lie at the root of most of the stealth nerfing arguments. Any class can gain stealth from blasting a smoke field. Stealth does not blind targets, that is a mechanic of smoke fields. When a class such as an Engineer gains stealth it does not heal nor remove conditions, because those are mechanics specifically related to thieves, not Stealth.
Stealth is not a thief class mechanic, stealth is a general game mechanic.
That’s just irrelevant schemantics though.
You continue to miss the mechanical differences.
Remove the thief from the game, and stealth is still present. The problem is not, has never been, nor ever will be the Stealth mechanic. It is, has been, and always will be (since ANet seems happy to leave it broken) the Thief mechanics. Creating this paramount distinction targets not stealth as the source of the problem, but the thief class itself and its plethora of petty no-skill-required troll mechanics.
I think it’s actually both stealth and thief mechanics. Stealth has no counter and thief can spam it. If stealth had many reliable counters, spamming of it wouldn’t be an issue. Similarly, if stealth couldn’t be spammed, it wouldn’t matter that much that it has no real counters.
Simple fix: add a neutral area with no wvw objectives where people can duel and gvg. I don’t think you can fix it any otherway. People aren’t going to stop playing gvg.
Clarifications
Stealth is a defensive means of mitigating damage by becoming untargetable. Stealth grants neither invulnerability nor stability. Note skills with long warm up times that are activated while the target is visible and then gains stealth during that time are not interrupted and target as normal. Subsequent attempts to target (or generally know where the player is) are nullified for the duration of said stealth, thereby mitigating direct damage by up to 100% depending on how well the attacking player can predict the position of an invisible target.
Just wanna throw this in there. Some attack need a target to active, not everything is melee sweeping auto attack or ground targetable. Also stealth provides(spec provided) a lot of condition removal, tons of healing over time, and in the case of say my Mesmer boons.
If stealth didn’t provide so much outside of its targeting issues and gaining the stealther position I think we would have a whole new conversation.
Imagine no healing and free offensive conditions removal in some way. Or even a penalty for healing.
I hope one day a mmo comes around without a pure invisible mechanic for stealth. It only brings headaches for both user and victim.
.
Incorrect
You are associating the things the Thief can do when activating or while being stealthed to the stealth effect itself. Stealth does not inherently cure conditions nor provide healing.
Stealth can provide healing if traited for it, Shadow Refuge also heals you while activated.
Exactly. A Thief trait and a Thief skill that trigger when entering or while being stealthed. These are not mechanics of Stealth itself they are mechanics of the class.
Weapons don’t do damage unless you push the buttons ether. Reguardless reading everything is probably a good idea beforehand.
Thieves have no stealth that only provides invisibility. Damage, blinds, healing, teleport are tied to it aswell. The only pure invisibility only stealth abilities I can think of off the top of my head is vale and mass invisibility. They do however provide for multiple player stealth. So arguing stealth as a sole mechanic wouldn’t make sense with out factoring in its built in advantages that when combained sometimes provides too much.
This thinking exemplifies the common placed ignorance of the mechanics that lie at the root of most of the stealth nerfing arguments. Any class can gain stealth from blasting a smoke field. Stealth does not blind targets, that is a mechanic of smoke fields. When a class such as an Engineer gains stealth it does not heal nor remove conditions, because those are mechanics specifically related to thieves, not Stealth.
Stealth is not a thief class mechanic, stealth is a general game mechanic.
lol depth. All these bosses are gimmicks similiar to those that you find in popular platformer games. They have zero AI whatsoever. This game needs a duel feature because when you are fighting an opponent who actually thinks, the fight can have depth.
Stop comparing thief stealth to Mesmer. Mesmers have clones and invulns to hide behind. Thieves only have stealth unless you play evade thief which doesn’t work out so well in wvw and similarly you only have one form of defense. Spvp is better for those.
Works very well by the way, and you also have blinds and teleports. Evade thief has always some access to stealth, too.
How many noobs here . If you cant kill a thief , is because you are noob . I have a guardian and a thief , and being awareness of how thiefs play , most of the times i defeat thiefs with my guardian . Remove the stealth? Are you joking? With 14k of hp?
The shame is that GW always always listen the criers , and thief will be nerfed ( again) , and kitten . What about warriors killing only pressing 2? What about mesmers with so many ilusions that you dont know what the hell you have to target , and moa skill? What about necros that can last more than plate classes ? Stop crying and learn to play .
Think you are just afraid that you’d need to l2p if they’d nerf your little crutch.
yes thief is in the top tied with warriors but usually the thief doesnt reset. hes right there in range and just biding time. just sayin :P
This kind of behavior is exactly what separates someone who just runs away with norn leopard elite and a thief. Thief can just move away enough for the cls to recharge, and then come back, and repeat this till the world ends if necessary.
And the person with snowleopard only runs when he suddenly becomes vastly outnumbered, otherwise he wins. And when he suddenly becomes vastly outnumbered, hes not going to go back into the large group… so 3 minutes is more than fine. Thieves who need to constantly reset fights when not greatly outnumbered are just pathetic.
many d/p [players go invis 10 secs at a time to heal up. :P i run p/d currently ankitten ever invis more than 1.5 seconds.
Yes, it’s the ridiculous d/p crap I’m talking about. I run p/d too, and you can’t sit in stealths because if you do, you can’t put enough pressure on the opponents with the somewhat low damage of that build.
And the person with snowleopard only runs when he suddenly becomes vastly outnumbered, otherwise he wins.
If he needs the snowleopard to escape, his opponent can probably escape from him too though. This isn’t true when fighting thieves .
What a kittenty match up so far. Ag isn’t any more interesting at all to fight against than say Fort Ranik (actually ag is a lot blobbier). Servers have become so homogenized.
ps. the amount of and other corny smiles in this thread make me puke.
:)
and only a ding dong would entertain that and stand there waiting. go on to more important stuff. if they were smart like that then the person invis would be at the disadvantage :P oh well. some people never learn
yes thief is in the top tied with warriors but usually the thief doesnt reset. hes right there in range and just biding time. just sayin :P
This kind of behavior is exactly what separates someone who just runs away with norn leopard elite and a thief. Thief can just move away enough for the cls to recharge, and then come back, and repeat this till the world ends if necessary.
It’s not Rock Paper Scissors. It’s Get Out of Jail Free.
This is exactly my problem with stealth in this game in and the thief in general. This shouldn’t be a thing.
if u say something like this….its fine if u feel this….but tell us the consequence….. :P
dont just say he can leave combat and it makes me grumpy bumpy :< lol
what does it change as far as game tactics go or how does it give one side an advantage. last time i checked 1 v 1 doesnt change anything. and last time i checked group play does. also if i remember right thieves dont really play well with others so the consequently dont really change much of the flow of the game. they might get roamers out n about but then again why is that person roaming? there are plenty of peopleto run with :P
But then why are you complaining about the basilisk venom in the other topic? Why even play a thief? Just roll a guard and run in a zerg if that’s all that matters in this game…
see thats the definition of an elite. its supposed to be strong than other skills but also have the same cooldown to power ratio (making it a longer total cooldown) now basilisk venom is just useless. it ONLY forces people to use their stunbreak first rather than later. no real change. might get 1 free hit from it like CND but not bs.
also 4.25 sec really is a lil OP….. a thief can kill anyone in 5 secs if he is full zerk. not that it matters bc thieves can only do that roaming.
What of course that would be op as HELL. I thought you meant something like “stun your foe and knock down 4 nearby foes for 1/4 seconds”.
They have only three “stuns”: scorpion wire, basilisk venom and pistol whip. Scorpion wire is very clumsy as anyone who has tried it is aware of. It’s really not even a stun, just a short pull. Pistol whip requires you to use a weapon set with no stealth. Bone crack can only be stolen from mobs and doesn’t count.
bone crack is from guardians :P obv u dont play thief. pets and mobs too but those are random.
So yeah, thieves dont have many stuns. Dazes and interrupts yes, but thats entirely differend game element.
if u gave this to a person who NEVER played the game and ask them to pick out the elite….
Because what new players think tells a lot. I wonder who were all those wammos running back in gw1.
i know there is a diff. i look at it as an interupt. could care less about the 1 sec immob. doesnt change much…..its the skill activating that really is devastating…both of which do the job.
would u think 4 1/4 sec KD for AOE on basilisk venom for longer time is ok?
I quess that could be fine, it wouldn’t make it overpowered and would maybe give more team utility to the skill.
the point about a new player is he would be unbiased…..not pick what he was told the elite is. wow did u really miss that point?
Then why didn’t you just say “unbiased” instead of “new”? Anyhow, if I would have to choose between trip wire, scorpion wire and basilisk venom, I would take basilisk venom hands down. Though I still prefer the sylvari racial Take Root xD.
i know there is a diff. i look at it as an interupt. could care less about the 1 sec immob.
They have only three “stuns”: scorpion wire, basilisk venom and pistol whip. Scorpion wire is very unreliable as anyone who has tried it is aware of. It’s really not even a stun, just a short pull. Pistol whip requires you to use a weapon set with no stealth. Bone crack can only be stolen randomly from mobs (and some pets?) and so doesn’t count.
So yeah, thieves dont have many stuns. Dazes and interrupts yes, but thats entirely differend game element.
if u gave this to a person who NEVER played the game and ask them to pick out the elite….
Because what new players think tells a lot. I wonder who were all those wammos running back in gw1.
thief is losing a fight => resets and comes back in under 30 seconds => repeat. (I do this all the time and I don’t seem to be alone :P)
norn is losing a fight => resets but doesn’t come back in a while. Or if he does*, he can’t reset again.
Let me make this a little clearer since it’ll be the second time I say it, if a 3 minute timer is to long for you, maybe you should look into adjusting your playstyle, because youre not very good. lol
Well it is long enough for my opponents to get away, dolyak to slip away, camp to be flipped and most importantly, long enough for my opponents skills to come out of cl xD.
That’s just some random garpage someone wrote to the wikipedia. For gods sake, unless if you are complete newbie to the game, you know that most elite skills are pure trash.
yes alot of elite skills are kind of garbage. but not in the sense they are weak. in the sense they dont flow into a build. look at the books on guardian…nobody uses them but they are actually REALLY strong. almost all elite skills (80-90% or more maybe) are stronger than most regular skills.
Nobody uses them but they are REALLY strong? What nonsense is that? They just LOOK strong, but in practice are trash. I’m pretty sure lots of warriors, rangers, guards and even mesmers would use basilisk venom if they could. I know I would.
es shadow refuge is. but stealth is a primary thief mechanic and mesmers kind of have a slight touch of it. wouldnt make sense to give mesmers alot of stealth. i get ur point but basilisk venom is arguably the worst stun in the game. read the post above this and compare them. basilisk has no dmg. longest cast in game. longest recharge (besides supply crate)….AND its an elite. the rest are regular utilities.
Exact same thing here as with the shadow refuge. Thief by design, is not meant to have powerful stuns.
That’s just some random garpage someone wrote to the wikipedia. For gods sake, unless if you are complete newbie to the game, you know that most elite skills are pure trash. This isn’t unique problem to thief.
Elite is a type of a bonus skill in this game. The name is misleading. It doesn’t mean that the skill is necessarily strictly better than utility skills. Thief doesnt have many stuns by design and I quess that’s the reason basilisk venom isn’t that strong.
And besides, it’s still thousands times better than dagger storm… Against any decent player that skill is only going to get you killed.
Bane signet has an after cast though, as does say signet of domination. There is no after cast when stunning via basilisk venom.
Also, elite skills are generally weaker than utility skills (no clue why). Shadow Refuge for example is a lot more powerful than the mesmer elite Mass Invisibility.
I have norn warrior and can tell from experience that it’s not as viable as the many options thief has. Basically because of the long cl and because you have to sacrifice the good elite signet for it. That signet is very important for most warrior builds.
As a thief I also hardly ever have to WP to get out of a fight. For any x/d spec it’s enough to just find a mob to chain stealth from.
What you have to give up to run it doesnt actually matter. Its the best skill in the game for running from fights. Some classes just dont need skills like that, like Warrior and Thief. Its ridiculously OP for some classes though, like Guardian, who dont have the ability to run from 5-6 people the way warriors or thieves do.
I also wasnt trying to imply that you had to WP, I just wanted to point out that the dash actually breaks combat, that it puts you far enough away that you could WP. Sorry for the confusion there.
The difference between a leopard norn and a thief is following:
thief is losing a fight => resets and comes back in under 30 seconds => repeat. (I do this all the time and I don’t seem to be alone :P)
norn is losing a fight => resets but doesn’t come back in a while. Or if he does*, he can’t reset again.
*Since he had to use the leopard form in the first place, it’s unlikely he has enough mobility to catch you anyway.
It would be ridiculously overpowered if it was unbreakable. It is currently fairly strong elite that is basically always useful: it’s not too situational like most elites out there.
So do you think we can expect a buff in the next patches?
Of all classes, thief has BY FAR the best escape abilities,
I disagree, anyone playing a norn has the best escape option in the game. Snow leopard form racial elite. Hit it, stealth (#5), then use the 1600 range dash (hold down #4) and youre out of combat and they have no idea where you are and you can WP away.
I have norn warrior and can tell from experience that it’s not as viable as the many options thief has. Basically because of the long cl and because you have to sacrifice the good elite signet for it. That signet is very important for most warrior builds.
It is still a very good skill of course, but it’s very long cl really limits its use.
Also, as a thief you don’t need to wp. Basically any mob group suffices as a good place to hide if you are x/d, and if you are d/p, you only need some space to chain your combo.
Thiefs can be explained by a simple sentence- Low risk high reward.
And thats about it.
fixed it for you
In what way in hell thiefs have low risk?
Of all classes, thief has BY FAR the best escape abilities, at least if you run any of the popular specs such as d/d, p/d, s/d or d/p. Only s/p might be differend but hardly anyone runs that.
If you feel very vulnerable as a thief, you are probably not using a very good build.
So the correct saying would be:
thief is low risk, low reward
since there is no rewards for soloing WvW :P
Unless if you run short bow thief and just spam #4 in zergs, then thief becomes
low risk, high reward
xD
Against a d/p thief? I find the nearest mob and spam cloack and dagger. “Hey look, I can perma stealth too!”
If he persists, then we farm mobs together!
The game does feel shallow at some aspects. There isn’t much build variation currently (their “variety” patch only made things worse…), and all the spvp & wvw maps are about as plain as they can get. It wouldn’t be difficult at all to make some really curious WvW maps that would still work*, but the deveplovers seem to lack imagination or resources.
The fights itself, especially duels, can be fairly exciting and really fun though. I just wish there were more builds and more customization.
What action game isn’t rather simple?
Arma series, DCS series. Star Citizen certainly will not be once it’s released. I quess those examples are little extreme, but anyhow.
*Hell, take any pve map, add some forts there, and make people fight for them. Do not make another symmetrical, over designed map. That fits for spvp, but not for world pvp.
But I onry haz 15-17k HP as not entirely GC and full GC Warriors are tanky and can do 1200 range backstab damage w/o needing stealth or flanking and 1shot meh. I dun need nerfed our squishyness is enough sacrifice.
Didn’t catch a screen of the 17k crit Kill Shot. :<
Thief isn’t the only class that get’s downed by warrior specced for f1… Thief ehp isn’t significally lower than that of a guard, only 10% or so, thieves just tend to play a glass spec more often.
As for the topic, I think that d/p is the only build that clearly needs a nerf.
OP clearly just wants to delete party invitation for some other personal reasons he is not stating. Like I have said 3 times now, it is possible to achieve the same “blue dot on map” effect via a popular 3rd party addon.
Blobbing is both very easy to do and also the most effective tactic. So of course its looked down on when even a monkey could pull it off.
You just spam #1 and roll through everything, of course it kitten es people off.
Can someone explain to me why blobbing is such a shameful thing to do? If it’s because it promote “easy play” or “no skill,” so to speak, then by that logic, is it also shameful to be wearing full exotics? Or use siege weapons? Or use hotkeys? Maybe we should be all keyboard turning since using mouse to turn makes it “too easy.” Someone please enlighten me!
Yeah, you would just use a radio.
[…]
Say, there are spies in Eve online too, but there are also methods to deal with them.
You kinda dont understand this is a GAME and not REAL LIFE. You can controll it and make it fair and fun for everyone.
And i dont care if you can deal with spies in Eve online. You don’t have any options to deal with them in Guild Wars 2. Grouping reveals the EXACT position whereas with voip they can only pass on APPROXIMATE positions.
You can use third party progarm to see the exact position on map anyway. gw2mov or something. Or you could stream video. Nothing you can do about it since you can’t remove the spy from your team here in gw2.
Immoblize shouldn’t stop dodge rolling…
Plain and simple…
Conditions shouldn’t be hard CC… cleansing isn’t even remotely made for that…
The cleansing Anet threw in this game implies that condition removal isn’t necessary to make a playable spec (the one good condi removal trait in most classes… sacrificing a utility slot just for one cleanse every 60~ seconds)…
Long duration immobilize… and fear…. both are not necessarily OP, but don’t fallow that model… at all…
Same thing with dps conditions…
These silent “competetive” fights are ridiculous. Its completely realistic to be able to speak to your opponent.
It maybe realistic in real life to speak to your opponent, but i doubt you can group up in real life and have an interface of them inside your brain and chat with them via text and press m to see where they are.
Yeah, you would just use a radio.
If the fun of 50 players gets spoiled because 1 guy is a jerk and leads the enemy zerg into you to wipe you, it is not acceptable !
But it is not the fault of the invite party feature. In fact, it’s just a fundamental design flaw of WvW: you are automatically assumed to be ally of a given world. Say, there are spies in Eve online too, but there are also methods to deal with them.
If you remove the party invites, you’d have to add some other mean of communication . The people I play against aren’t my enemies, they are just my opponents in a game and I want to talk to the people that I play with. I have made many good friends from the opposing servers thanks to this party invite freature. In fact, think I have more WvW friends from other servers than my own.
Removing this feature would make the already very shallow WvW experience even more monotonic and mindless.
Also, trolls keep trolling anyway and this party invite feature isn’t even a very good trolling tool. They could achieve the same effect using a VOIP or video streaming anyway. Hell, they could even use a third party addon such as gw2mov.
It is indeed quite shallow and there aren’t that many differend builds. Hopefully they’ll add new skills soon enough.
And then you’ll have whole population using THE NEW skills, and after 2 months they are not so new anymore so once again crowd will go back to square one.
Problem is that people expect too much from pve environment. You are not up against computer that beat Kasparov, you are facing an algorithm. A piece of code that says “go to player, use skill this and that, repeat”, basicly…i oversimplified it but its end result in most cases.
Go to wvw or spvp where you are challenged by other players that are able to adapt and answer to your actions. There you can see true potential of dynamic, actiony combat gw2 has.
I’m actually talking from pvp/wvw perspective. The number of viable builds is low in WvW and plain null in spvp. And even the “differend” builds aren’t actually that differend.
Take for example mesmer, they have essentially two builds: shatter and phantasm. Sure, there are slightly differend shatter builds and slightly differend phant builds, but in practice these play almost exactly the same way. In fact, even phant and shatter aren’t THAT differend from each other. At least not differend enough to keep me excited.
It’s not like in gw1 where you had creative builds that truly varied from each other.
For example, bunny thumber, spear ranger and melandrus shot ranger were three popular ranger builds that were not only creative combos, but were also completly differend from each other.
I do agree that the combat itself is fairly fun, but the build variation and customization is what I find very lacking.
to fight against than say Fort Ranik (actually ag is a lot blobbier). Servers have become so homogenized.
.