Guild Wars 2

I have also experienced this. Also, didn’t steal work as a gap closer even if you weren’t in range? I know within a certain distance, using steal when out of range made you teleport closer but not TO the target. This doesn’t seem to work anymore.

For some reason I was an exception to the rule.

I was using a SATA 3 HDD drive and recently upgraded to a Samsung 840 EVO SSD and installed my Windows OS GW2 on that instead. My load times were about 20-25 seconds for lions arch on the HDD and are about the same using the SSD… so…

The SSD is fine. Ran benchmarks and the speeds are good, so I guess I just had a really fast HDD lol. It also didn’t appear to make a major difference in how fast Battlefield 4 loads.

I personally didn’t see any benefit except that windows loads faster on startup, lol.

theoretical.9862:

For the past couple days, I’ve been experiencing a ton of lag. Not FPS lag, but internet lag. As far as I can tell, my connection to other sites is fine, but GW2 seems to lag a lot nevertheless. Even load screens take ages sometimes. I am getting disconnected whenever the lag becomes too extreme. It worked perfectly just a few days before, and this problem has only just started occurring. Is there anything at all I can do about it?

There’s not much you can do about it unfortunately. I went through a very lengthy discussion with ANET reps and after insisting it was not on my end and providing evidence to back it up they finally told me they submitted it to their network engineers but told me that there was no guarantee that they would hear anything back.

It has been about a week since then and I still have the issue. It may NOT technically be on ANET’s end either, but if not it is definitely either their ISP or one of the geographical hops right before hitting their walls.

If it is the latter, I suppose we just have to wait and hope whoever manages that realizes it’s broken sooner rather than later.

I personally don’t work on my gaming PC anyways so I don’t really care (and I know full well) that I don’t know how to type lol. Mashing doesn’t happen on purpose, but when I hit a skill I want it to work. I tried all that “let me see how light I can press this and still have it register” BS and it just doesn’t cut it for me in game. I press keys with conviction! :-P

sirsquishy.8531:

I figure for the first couple weeks Ill be bottoming out, and since I use voice activation on TS3, its going to be interesting. But, it shouldn’t be that big of an issue after a while.

But I am split between Browns (for the Bump Feel) vs the Blues (no Bump) as AFAIK that is the main difference. They seem to use the same pressure to articulate the key press, just that with browns you can predict when you’d bottom out, where with the blues you need to pay more attention.

Looks like the CM TK’s are going for about 80-99 Bucks, while the Corsairs are 129~.

Difference is the Onboard Storage for the Corsair for their ‘programmable Modes’ like they do with the gaming mice (really nice feature BTW!!). I kind of want the ability to save keyboard modes (FPS, MMO, work, Macro) that would change the Lit Keys on the keyboards (and brightness levels). Other then Corsair I don’t see any other manufacturer doing that.

And I’m having a hard time finding a MX Brown keyboard with a blue BackLight. Seems CM, Corsair, and logitech match the MX Color Code to their Back Light, which is why I am leaning more towards the MX Blues right now.

Blues actually have a substantial feedback feel (more than the browns), but also have a loud “click”. You might be thinking of the reds which are just linear all the way through until they bottom out. They feel mushy and nonexistent.

Also, FYI I can confirm that the Corsair K70 with Brown switches has a Blue backlight, however it DOESN’T have any macro software or onboard macro recording.

I have the Corsair K70 with MX Browns. I do like them a lot but the feedback “bump” is pretty minimal. It does feel weird at first but you get used to it. I would prefer the bump to be more prominent such as the blue but I didn’t want the clicky sound. If you don’t mind the loud clicking and you want a substantial “I’m pressing a button” feeling get the blues. The browns are still a bit loud because they bottom out easy for me, but that can be remedied with O rings which I actually plan on getting for mine at some point.

I would suggest if there is a bestbuy near you they should have the Logitech G710 and the Razer one out on display. The razer has blues, the logitech has browns but it has O rings on it from the factory but you can at least get the feel for them.

eljudner.8495:

Posted earlier regarding my high latency these last few days (400-500 at it’s worst). Made a petition to Arenanet, and used the GuildWars2 diagnostic tool to gather information about my connection.

Quote : “…According to this report, your connection is suffering from packet loss…”
and …“Because the loss of data is happening prior to it reaching our game servers, you will need to contact your Internet Service Provider for assistance”…

I would follow up with them… I was using Ping Plotter to post my results and it was actually falsely showing massive packet loss to 3 hops on the way to GW2 servers. The reason I know this is false is because it shows the packet loss ALL day long, yet the game does not lag until some random point at night. Also, I ran a continuous ping in CMD in windows, and let it run for a couple hours to 3 of the hops that reported massive packet loss (70%+). Finally I stopped it and out of 3hrs, I had dropped a total of 5 packets on all 3 hops combined.

You must have a bag on that character that prevents items from being moved. Like a “safe” pack or something. Check the bag that these “collectibles” are in.

From the wiki:

Invisible Bags/Safe Boxes — Items in these bags can be sold neither to merchants nor at the Black Lion Trading Company. They do not move when inventory is sorted. Using ‘Deposit Collectibles’ will not affect items inside invisible bags.

I have extreme lag at random multiple hour long windows during the night. It is not all day long. However I am not in Norway. I am on East Coast USA and play on Fort Aspenwood.

For those in the USA experiencing recent lag for the past month or so: I have been working for about a week or so with ANET though forwarding them various ping/tracert results and timestamped graphs explaining the issues/when they happen/and what the tracerts report during those times, and they have been awesome with both providing information in return and hearing what I have to say as well.

I know a lot of people are giving ANET flak for not doing anything about this but let me tell you based on the info we have traded back and forth there is no obvious cause or solution.

Geiir.7603:

BFMV
I believe I said that I doesn’t want it to stack using weapon skills and combos, which means that it should be able to stack using utilities. I wrote that too

Sir Kaboomski
Yes. Everyone can build tanky and survive. Thieves need to be able to stay alive, and we have a ton of tools to do so. The problem is that we are able to go full berserker and still be able to run from every single fight we want to. All of us agree that any good thief will rarely die? Is that because there’s no good players on other professions, or is it because we have a mechanic that give us the ability to disengage at will? I believe the latter, because 9/10 thieves I see are horrible players that doesn’t know how to do anything – yet these guys survive because they can just chain stealth with bp+hs and gtfo.

Warriors can also run away (usain bolt reference in the wvw forums….), and people complain about them too. Guess they’ll get their nerf in a few patches… I honestly think it’s unfair that we can survive, even after we blew all our utilities, heals and elites away, just because we can chain bp+hs. There’s absolutely no risk but a high reward for doing so, and that’s wrong.

Chaining with utility skills is another story, because you’re sacrificing those utility slots to be able to do so. That’s why I think that’s fine.

Maugetarr

But what you don’t understand is a backstab build needs an on-demand access to stealth without blowing utilities. Being able to backstab ONLY when blinding powder/shadow refuge is off cooldown would be completely unacceptable and there would be no point in the build. Not to mention that people can ping pong you out of shadow refuge anyways so it would be pointless to set up a backstab using SR.

Also, saying that we can go full zerk and disengage at will is also incorrect. We have extremely low HP, and chances are if we try to disengage by stealthing, we get channeled (something you mentioned in your OP) and die anyways.

Look at something like a full zerk power/deathshroud necro. I got rolled by one last night because all he had to do was lich form and then 1,1,1,1, 6k hit every time. Necro is at the top tier HP pool in the game plus they get deathshroud to cushion them with about +70% HP on top of what they already have. They suck, and I suck at fighting them, and it sucks that their 1,1,1,1 still channels when I stealth, and that life transfer can AOE me while stealthed anyways (but we all know AOE works anyway and it is intended), so I can not usually escape from them and I’m not a full glass build, but you can’t win em all.

You can’t, and you won’t.

I get what you’re saying to some degree, but any changes to stealth to “fix” it for the benefit of people that are sad because they don’t automatically get a bag will just kitten us over even more. Thieves, due to their low HP/armor, are supposed to be evasive. There are tactics to fighting every class. If you expect to just facetank a thief without moving or CC’ing them then chances are you aren’t going to win (unless you are a power necro lol, or a really high burst build). Just like my thief build can’t insta-kill or facetank anyone (except the elementalists from TUNE lol) ;P

Honestly the only things I agree with you on are 3 and 4.. 3 being actually broken one and 4 just being stupid.

Other than that, you can’t “mindlessly” use stealth and win at anything so I don’t know why so many people have this impression. It’s been covered before that stealth is our primary defence.

Look at the guardians that build tank.. they have 2 methods of healing themselves, one of which is a constant “invulnerability” until the heal pops, and the other is a constant block while healing. Thief can’t even interrupt it. They’re a pain in the kitten to fight but does anyone go “waah perma protection/perma heal/perma block”?

Thief doesn’t get that, or even stability… we have stealth. It either needs to stack or the durations need to increase.

D/P is also not broken. It needs a weaponset ability to stealth because if it had none there would be no point in having a mainhand dagger if you needed to use utilities to stealth (backstab would be a nonexistent part of the build).

sirsquishy.8531:

When you start to lag, ingame type \ip in your chat box.

Do a traceroute to that ip address output. You will visually see what hops are affecting your lag.

If it was anet’s side, everyone would be having issues. And I currently am not having any Lag issues.

I have been doing this for days and I can visually see which hops are affecting my ping.. Want to know which one is first? The first one labeled NCSOFT CORPORATION (hop 11), supplied by VERIZON BUSINESS.

Followed by hop 12, 13, and 14 (14 being the destination IP)… also labeled NCSOFT CORPORATION, also supplied by VERIZON BUSINESS.

So all I can say is if it isn’t on their end, it sure as hell is closer to them than it is to me.

Also, like I said, after the server crashes last night when all the traffic got dumped off the NCSOFT IP’s my lag stopped, and then it steadily rose after a few minutes (presumably after more users reconnected back to the game).. literally nothing in my traceroute EVER gives high ping except for what’s behind NCSOFT’s walls.

Someone suggesting a buff… I think I almost just cried out of happiness… lol!

I don’t know if it should have no cooldown at all though, I would say since weapon swap isn’t a thief-specific mechanic it doesn’t really make sense to make cooldown completely non-existent. I would however support a 5 second cooldown instead of 10. But then all the warriors would be all “waah why can thief swap weapon as fast as me!!!”. ;-P

Anyone who comes in intending to yell “OP!”… seriously, just let it go, let us relish the moment that we have someone asking for a buff for once!

I was pinging 165-180ms again to the servers, and server crashed again just now. When it came back up I am pinging normal 70ms.

So every time traffic gets dumped off their servers my ping is what it should be.

Ironic that there’s a ton of other posts within the past 30 minutes talking of the disconnect as well. Must be my ISP’s fault lol.

It wasn’t teamspeak that went down, it was Guild Wars 2… the people I was chatting with on teamspeak also said “hey did the game just crash for you guys?”. Once we logged back on, everyone in map chat was talking about it.

I think that having a ping trace going to NCSoft’s servers and literally watching the trace reflect exactly what was happening in front of my eyes is pretty evident.

As soon as the server came back on line (minimal traffic ON THEIR END), my ping was normal (what I used to ping a month ago before this kitten started).

My ISP has absolutely nothing to do with their inbound traffic.

Random update: Was playing guild wars tonight and while running Ping Plotter, the whole server set went down at around 11:09PM eastern time.. Everyone I was on Teamspeak with DC’ed.

Ping Plotter was still running and showed that as soon as the servers came back up, my ping was normal to the NCSoft IP addresses and after a couple minutes my ping steadily rose, and now everyone on Map chat is complaining of lag.

This absolutely proves that the issue is traffic being generated on THEIR end, not mine.

I would love to be able to prove who’s side this is on, be it anet or my own.. but… I’m not a network expert.. any tips for wireshark? I’ve got it running and other than seeing transmissions while running Ping Plotter, seeing inbound and outbound to my IP, I can’t tell what’s actually “bad” and whether it’s on my side or theirs..

I would submit a ticket about this… as I was also told it must be on my end because the issue isn’t affecting everybody. My ISP says it’s ANET, ANET says it’s my ISP, so…

Sergiu.3698:

I agree with the fact that Black powder is overpowered.

You guys forget the fact , that when a thief uses Black powder he aint sitting there just so you can smack him outside of the circle.Its powder down, heartseeker and a surprise inside your back and repeat.

Thief is my main and i play DD all the time, but even so DP is like noobish mode for Wvw, .Most of the times you are immune against mellees, you pop down a black powder and u blind them , and boom u get easy stealth after.You dont have to worry if hes gonna finish you as u can simply play inside the powder for few secs.

On the other hand, you can simply kitten out and stealth yourself outside of battle and come back by smacking a backstab and repeat,thing wich is done by most of the DP’s.The difference with DD and Dp , is that on DD your target missses 1 attack and not like on DP wich uses all 4 seconds, as they can pop it right when they are in danger.
Not to mention that you can change 1 trait from shadows , as you dont need to blind when u get into stealth.

Even so , just the quaggans are playing DP in WvW, so give them a balloon.

From the wiki:

Blinded: character’s next attack will have 100% chance to miss. Blindness is removed after the condition’s time runs out, or after an outgoing attack that would have been successful if not for the blind. Characters will have a dark purple cloud over a white cross mark covering their heads. The affected characters screen will also dim.

Most people think that if you have blind, you are blind for the complete duration no matter what. This is technically false. You are only blind until your first attack misses. If you stand IN the smoke field you will get re-blinded when the field pulses again. Also, a thief standing in a smoke field can still be hit 100% of the time by ranged attacks.

I know it seems ridiculous, but guys it IS called “kill shot” not “mostly dead after shot”.

I did that once… not that many, but here’s what happened: I ranked up when we capped a camp… I didn’t open the chest, instead I realized I had a stack of liquid WXP, so I used them and gained one more rank aaand… I only got the one chest lol.

I think it’s a bug.

They had me send a diag, but the problem is their diag doesn’t work properly. My router doesn’t ping back, so “hop 1” which would be my router appears as if it “times out”. (You can see this in the screenshot I posted). This has no effect on connectivity. Why is this a problem? Well, because Guild Wars 2 runs the diag, sees hop 1 timing out and goes “welp, kitten all done logging now” and literally stops attempting to trace to the server after the first hop.

This is inaccurate as you can also see from the same computer using Ping Plotter (the program I used to get the screenshot in my post above), I absolutely AM able to trace to the destination IP AND connect to the game, it’s just extremely laggy.

And this is why I suspect many people are being told that “it’s your ISP”. I sent the info to ANET as they requested and I know they are going to tell me it’s on my end so that’s why I sent them actual complete traces using Ping Plotter as well.

Also, last night I left a ping trace running and my latency to NCSoft went from 170ms down to normal at approximately 1:40 AM Eastern Time. Bear in mind the computer running the ping trace was doing nothing but idling, with no extra programs, and for at least 2 hours of trace time including the final minutes where the ping dropped to normal was the ONLY device on my network.

Not that high for me but still, I’m getting around 2%-12% packet loss to all the NCSofts.. it fluctuates.

Getting packet loss from those NCSoft IP’s now… nice..

Oh my god lol…

Please… make……. make it stop!!…….

It was cold last winter too…

Now you guys are just unintentionally trolling eachother.. XD

TheGuy.3568:

lol

It is like the bold text at the top that says,“My main goal is that I wanted to illustrate the scope of change that would have to happen to truly nerf stealth and still leave thief functional.” is skipped with impunity

No, not skipped, but I still interpreted it as a “well guys if we REALLY want stealth nerfed this is how they should do it!” thing.

I know you have “thief” in your sig, but so have others who still WANT nerfs.. I didn’t look into your history, soo.. there’s just been so many "halp plz nerf " threads I got trigger happy on you lol. Again, my mistake. :-P

This is known as “ghosting”. It is a hardware issue with your keyboard. As Feirlista said, you need to look for a keyboard that advertises “anti-ghosting”. I trust mechanical keyboards more than membrane for anti ghosting.

The Corsair K70 for example is expensive, but it offers complete anti-ghosting and I have never had an issue. It offers what is called “N-Key RO (or Rollover)” which means no combination should cause ghosting. Some keyboards have a certain total number of simultaneous keypresses before ghosting will happen. You don’t NEED N-Key RO.. just look for one that allows a reasonable amount of simultaneous presses without ghosting. Something like 10 would be ok.

I have been having the same issue and it has only been recently. I have had guild wars 2 over a year now and only over the past 20-30 days have I had this issue.

Traceroutes show ping is acceptable until hitting the first NCSoft IP, then it skyrockets.

Interestingly enough for me the issue seems to stop at around 12:00AM or 1:00AM Eastern Standard Time and then at some point during the morning it starts up again. I am also on the East Coast.

See the image attached. The last 4 IP’s are all NCSoft according to WHOIS.

I personally even cleared my wireless device list and then used MAC Address blocking to only allow my 1 PC and the ping was still high until after midnight.

I was also on with my ISP that told me they see no problems on my end.

If your point is: To nerf stealth, you must make Thieves into Warriors then ok, I get it.

Hell of a way to go about it while making it look like you’re pitching a theory-crafted revamp proposal though. I’ve read too many similarly formatted “revamp proposals” to think this was anything other than that. I don’t think even your first paragraph makes it clear that this ISN’T one of those.

I misread your intent. I do apologize.

If you are coming here asking for nerfs.. even if you are a thief, obviously you have had issues with one or more thieves using some sort of tactic to either beat you or cause you to otherwise simply “not win”.

Though I believe this should apply to any class, it seems more people come here calling “waaah nerfff!!” than anywhere else so I would like to suggest this.

Stop feeling like you are entitled to victory.

PvP/WvW is not a single player game, and you are not the main hero.

The problem I have with the GW2 community is this sick addiction to attempting to rationalize why thieves “need” nerfs. Seriously, this thread is the equivalent of “reroll a regen warrior”. Revealed 10 sec? Stealth no longer than 3 sec? Just remove stealth then.

Thieves were designed as high DPS/low survivability BECAUSE of stealth, and our class has already been kittened with a million times. Thieves are not face-tankers and they should NEVER be changed to be. If the idea was to be just some other high dps melee class, not only would warrior do it better, but we wouldn’t be called “thief”. We aren’t designed to be some kitten samurai gangster charging faces and swinging like morons.

Time and time and time and time again all this stuff has to be repeated to people.

Get over it or go play a different game.

Also, I seem to have discovered that the game server IP’s ping normal past 1AM eastern time.. No idea why, but it’d be nice if they fixed their bandwith issue. Having to wait until 1AM to play Guild Wars 2 is unacceptable. I have a thing called a job.

Mosharn.8357:

im not saying thieves are hard to kill or anything. But when all else fails they start the evade spam.

So what you’re saying is when all else fails they hit 3, 3, 3, aaand… what? They get away???

Lately I have been getting some pretty massive lag constantly in Guild Wars 2. I have run ping/speed tests and my internet is fine. I can play Battlefield 4 fine as well.

I have also tried running GW2 with the -diag command, but I just don’t understand the file enough to know what it is telling me… I play on Fort Aspenwood and I would love to know what I ping to whatever IP I need to check to see why my game lags so bad.

I have never had problems before like this with this game and I just do not know where to start. What can I do to get this fixed? I can’t even PVE lol..

[EDIT]
Ran a pingtest to numerous servers in TX (which is where I believe ANET’s servers are) and I get about 60-80 ping to different cities..

Ran a trace to a few IP’s listed in the Diag file (ANET’S servers) and I get a round trip ping of 170ms or higher to every one of them.

On ANET’s end then???

Personally I don’t like my weapons to have eyes, or flesh, or bones, or goopy barf dripping off them.. perhaps there isn’t so much demand for them lol.

I don’t see many people with them either come to think of it.. shrug

caveman.5840:

it would be great if people though of ways to improve there class instead of nerfing the thief to the ground 24/7 think of something positive and grow than . something
negative just because u got killed . think what is missing from your class it is all ways the negatives don’t take from the game grow it+++++ .

I actually thought of this a few minutes ago haha.. we should create a thief buff thread where anyone can post ANY desired buff! Much like this thread… it should be nothing off limits! BRING ON THE BUFFS PEOPLE! IT’S TIME TO GIVE PEOPLE SOMETHING TO REALLY QQ ABOUT!

Impact… your post is awesome! XD

Seriously though… I literally “lol” every time someone posts threads like these because people get this impression that these skills or “techniques” are so godlike when really if you play thief, or play your own class well, you realize that your perception is severely off.

SB 3 doesn’t even help you get out of range of someone chasing you. If you spam it 3+ times you will still be EASILY catchable, and also have 0 initiative to do much else other than autoattack.

If you’re so sad about people getting away from you and not letting you get a bag… let me just get on my warrior and RUSH + BULLS RUSH + WHIRL + SAVAGE LEAP + WARHORN [REPEAT] while I wave at you and yell “trolololololo” because I can and because I can cover FAR more distance doing that than I ever could hope to by “spamming” SB 3.

Instead of blowing your cooldowns on someone spamming 3, how bout you just wait till they use it 3 or 4 times and are out of initiative?

@ caveman… he was being sarcastic lol…

Oghier.7419:

Mosharn.8357:

spamable. It costs 4 init

Criticizing a weapon skill as ‘spammable’ simply describes how the class mechanics are designed. Thieves are limited by initative, not cooldowns. Four initiative is not trivial.

If a thief does blow all his initiative by ‘spamming’ SB3 three or four times, he now has no initiative, and therefore has access to no weapon skills other than auto-attack. Initiative does not regenerate as quickly in the game as it does in your imagination. Also note that every thief initiative regen trait was nerfed on 12/10.

^^This^^

Now please… Go away..

Axelwarrior.9084:

Even if they are channeled, she didn’t start the attack until 1 or 2 seconds after I went into stealth. Therefore, I was stealthed before she started channeling the attack, so it shouldn’t have been aimed at me.

I have posted about this before.. the fact that the channel attack can still lock on AFTER you are stealthed is my main gripe with this.. It’s BS, and needs to go away. Especially love how they can “track” you in full duration of stealth as they will turn to face you as long as the skill is still firing off.

I do not consider it working as intended at all.. I consider it a bug that will never be fixed because they observed and decided it is a positive thing. That or it’s too hard to figure out how to fix without screwing the rest of the game. Just so happens we get the shortest end of the stick… (sigh) If anything they need to get rid of the tracking.. Have the skill still fire, but drop the illogical unrealistic magic “aimbot” you all of a sudden get allowing you to trace an invisible person.

Dustfinger.9510:

Why can’t Anet implement that when you’re near a thief you press F to loot and the thief dies/disappears/game exits. A serious feature that’s lacking in this game.

This made me lol.

Shrike.3154:

Can we nerf the dagger pistol perma stealth rubbish?

Don’t know about every other non thief out there, but these thieves that can solo a bunch of people and win, due to perma stealth is bull ****, so over fighting them, I just walk away now, as it takes to many resources to down just one of these pugs.

Perma stealth is extremely annoying, and needs to be stopped, there is serious balance issues when 1 toon cant take on 5 and win, class match ups should be even and balance better.

I don’t know how many times I need to say it… Do not use the term “perma-stealth” when speaking about said thief winning any form of combat. “Perma-stealth” is not achievable in combat whatsoever. You can stealth repeatedly yes.. after waiting for the “revealed” debuff to wear off, but it’s barely even possible to get a stomp on anyone in a group of 5 unless literally nobody is paying attention and doesn’t think to res the downed guy. Some thief did not go and kill 5 people 1 by 1 by 1 while being completely invisible.

Even stealth stomping doesn’t work well because we don’t get stability, so you can still use a knockback on the body and we will go flying. Even 2 people ressing 1 guy will res him faster than the stomp will finish. We could DPS him down, sure… but we wouldn’t be stealthed if so. Besides that’s 3 guys, what are the other 2 doing at this time?

Bottom line: “Perma-stealth” was never and still isn’t possible while being in combat.. Also, the nerf to infusion of shadows already nerfed attainable stealth DURATION using BP+HS combo and still retaining ample initiative, and also nerfed the ability for large amounts of OUT OF COMBAT stealth without having to use utility skills (which was what ANET saw as the actual problem, and which was what the term “perma-stealth” ACTUALLY referred to).

People need to stop throwing around bandwagoner terms without actually knowing how things work.

The point is heartseeker spamming actually winning fights is the minority, not the majority. Sure it might be effective against some squishy builds but you can’t blame heartseeker for that. Squishy builds are called squishy for a reason. Heartseeker isn’t the only thing that can blow them away. As said, not every hit will be 6k either especially not the first couple of hits.

I run half zerk armor and half soldier’s armor on my thief 0/30/30/10/0, with everything else zerk and like I said, I still don’t often go down to HS spammers (perhaps due to the extra toughness I have) plus I save shadowstep for defensive usage which allows me to get out if I have a spammer on my butt.

I know I’ve got killed by HS spammers a couple of times, (twice in the last 6 months of WvW that I can remember) but it’s always been a full glass signet/might backstab thief that takes 40-50% of my HP in one backstab sequence and then HS’s me down the rest of the way (about 2-3 hits downs me after that but you can see them repeatedly mash HS even after I’m downed lol). But it’s because those thief builds just open with the initial BACKSTAB hit so fast if you aren’t paying attention you have a very small window to react. The reason I got downed was because I sat there going “what the hell just hit me” instead of knowing it was a thief that used the steal/CND/stealth/BS combo. Now I know so it happens less often.

BUT that type of thief build can get obliterated by a couple good hits from me, not running full glass. I don’t see a lot of people running it because it’s so squishy.

Sanduskel.1850:

Lol, as someone who has used it, perma stealth is alive and well, trust me. It’s even easier now with improved initiative regeneration.

Definitely not easier. If you do not trait any init regen other than infusion of shadows, you now absolutely MUST have all your utility skills rotated in to maintain “perma-stealth” which I believe was ANET’s desire.

NinjaEd.3946:

Maybe for each consecutive cast, it cost 1 initiative more, and this counter resets if HS isn’t casted for 4 seconds or something. Maintain it’s intended purpose as a leap finisher/gap closer/finisher, while dealing with the fools who think they are actually doing good when they spam #2 on a ele who is 20% health.

First of all, an ele with 20% health would require probably 1 heartseeker to down, which is not spam.

Secondly your last sentence is why I have a problem with people saying to change heartseeker because it is OP. It isn’t a question of whether the person spamming the heartseeker is bad. If you get heartseeker spammed and you’re the one that goes down, not only did you not win, but you, technically are the one who is “not good”. It’s been discussed before. There are plenty of counters to HS spam. Don’t panic, just keep your hands on the keyboard.

Hell, I’ve had guys HS spam me before WHILE using Quickness and still not take me down even below half HP..

Must just be interpretation/different techniques we have of the playstyle of D/P. Personally I use my autoattack in combat more often than heartseeker. I use the BP+HS to set up backstab as an opener and a finisher mostly. Shadow shot is saved for gap closing, and Headshot is saved for interrupting heals/mez mass invis/etc. I rarely switch to shortbow for porting away because it doesn’t ever work for me. Doesn’t go far enough, fast enough and you really have to have full initiative to make the most of it otherwise you’re still in range anyways.

That said, I ALWAYS have Shadowstep on my utility bar playing as 0/30/30/10/0 D/P thief. Really saves your butt when you DO get stuck in the CC lockdowns. Pretty much the only counter to CC that the build has.

Beating a dead horse..

BUT since I can’t resist, I will elaborate…

1.) “Perma-stealth” as it is so irritatingly called, already got nerfed.
2.) “Revealed” debuff lasts longer in sPvP and you can not pull off the BP + HS combo while IN combat as often as you can in something like WvW.
3.) Black Powder + HS combo is not Heartseeker spam.
4.) Getting hit by 2 heartseekers in a row is not Hearseeker spam.
5.) Heartseeker spam is not difficult to counter.
6.) Heartseeker spam works on people who don’t counter it.
7.) So does power/deathshroud lifeblast necro.
8.) Dancing Dagger isn’t used because it sucks, not because we have to press 4 instead of 2.

There was already a thread about this recently, and many thieves (myself included) just don’t use the “spam HS tactic” because we find it largely ineffective.

Arguments can be made from both sides.. In sPvP before, I literally got called a “heartseeker spammer” because I used heartseeker ONCE to finish a guy off who tried running at 20% HP..

I mean no offense to you whatsoever. I see what you are saying but the fact is thieves do not need more nerfs. Heartseeker spamming is a lame tactic that works but USUALLY only “works” if you let it. There are so many counters: Fear/Knockback/Immob/Blind/Chill<-ESPECIALLY chill that you can utilize to prevent getting killed by it. Then once the spammer is out of initiative they’re pretty EZ kills.

Even if Last Refuge used to drop Shadow Refuge, it wouldn’t work now because of the tripwire.. You’d drop a giant KILL ME sign in the middle of a battle and you’d HAVE to stand in it or you’d get revealed anyways. Either way you die.

With that said.. Last Refuge doesn’t USUALLY kill me, in fact it saves me many times, and that’s with me not giving a whole lot of thought into when it happens, but I play a build where I don’t AOE ankitten ot constantly in people’s faces so it’s different for me.

phaeris.7604:

I don’t understand where anet want thieves. They’re clearly not a support class, apart from venom share (a top tier trait), none of the thief abilities or weapon skills are group oriented.

The role of a thief is meant to be high single target damage and lots of escapes, this counters our very low hps/fragility. By nerfing stealth/vigor gain/introduction of abilities like sic em (really??? an ability designed specifically to negate thieves? Can we have an ability specifically to negate 30 clones or aoe condition spam??), they have eliminated this balance.

Now single target damage of pretty much every class is on par with the thief, yet they retain high armour/hp tables. I was up against a guardian who shredded my hitpoints with a few aoes, he didn’t even have to aim. To get the same damage i need to be in stealth and behind him.

None of our abilities really have utility, they’re just dps in another form. The only decent form of buff rip was nerfed into the ground.

The thief is great for killing up levels, or horrible players. Yet you go up against a well geared/played class of any other kind, chances are the effort you have to make as a thief will be 10x that of the other guy.

This whole post right here.