Why is there a cooldown on Backstab?

If I use Steal and Hidden Thief to stealth behind someone and attempt to Backstab, and they are out of range, why do I lose any chance to do it? I feel like I should be able to spam my first attack and the Backstab should go off as soon as it possibly can -- I shouldn't lose the chance just because someone moved out of melee range when I hit the button. Considering Necros get to drop AoE literally all over the fucking map and I need to blow every dodge and Shadowstep to get out of it, it should be easier for me to land a fucking Backstab.

Welcome back to the QQ lol

@Auturgist.8256 said:...Who at ArenaNet hates the Thief class?All of them

stop spamming backstab. no it should not be easier to land. you can still onehit some builds with backstab with little counterplay out of permastealth. with that CD you can lucky predict and avoid that by moving around - with spammable backstab there would be 0 counterplay and therefor would probably require a nerf, for example 30% less damage.

We got a cd on backstab cause guardians thought it was op that we could break aegis and backstab again after about 1 second due to aftercast. Dodging is hard for them after all. Backstab and stealth skills in general did not need a cd. There was plenty of tell and plenty of counterplay before the nerf.

Imagine stabbing someone from the back, it will still take you a while to recover after trying to stab the air in front of you.

Take a kitchen knife and try stabbing air. You, me or any other pleb untrained in the art of stabbing could do a quick succession of at least 10 pretty strong stabs before there would be a need to take a small break. Just sayin.

@Ario.8964 said:We got a cd on backstab cause guardians thought it was op that we could break aegis and backstab again after about 1 second due to aftercast. Dodging is hard for them after all. Backstab and stealth skills in general did not need a cd. There was plenty of tell and plenty of counterplay before the nerf.

Don't backstab into a block then? There are other ways you can open that don't involve stealth backstabbing.

@martin.1653 said:Take a kitchen knife and try stabbing air. You, me or any other pleb untrained in the art of stabbing could do a quick succession of at least 10 pretty strong stabs before there would be a need to take a small break. Just sayin.

You'd be surprised how long it takes to recover from a swing that doesn't hit anything because you have to correct your momentum. Also worth pointing out that thieves do not wield kitchen knives, they wield a full sized double bladed dagger that is in excess of 12 inches in length.

Technically most of these daggers you talk about are short swords. Regarding the momentum after swing, you might want to check people practice medieval sword fighting. Overswing is very bad and generally swings are very controlled just for the purpose to prevent these recover times that could cost you the fight/life. Same if someone would train to be good at daggers and stabbing, missing would be part of the routine, and having long recovery times would be bad news. But that's off topic already...

@Crinn.7864 said:

@martin.1653 said:Take a kitchen knife and try stabbing air. You, me or any other pleb untrained in the art of stabbing could do a quick succession of at least 10 pretty strong stabs before there would be a need to take a small break. Just sayin.

Using that Logic then the same would need to be applied to every AA in game.. funny how that works.

@"yiksing.9432" said:Imagine stabbing someone from the back, it will still take you a while to recover after trying to stab the air in front of you.

That's not even an accurate analogy. Thief is a profession, thus Thief is a professional when it comes to backstabbing.

A better explanation is this. Due to the Thief's professionalism in backstabbing, they stop and take their time to refocus whenever they miss a backstab. Partially ridiculing themselves for missing an easy target which embeds doubt to the Thief is what the cooldown represents.

So as a Thief player, you need to know the difference between "stabbing" and "hacking". Sure you can spam your skill and try to hack your target or be a professional by making sure that you'll hit the target before "stabbing". Stabbing requires precision, hacking does not.

The one second added to backstab was added to all Stealth Skills cause of Shortbow.

The Projectile for Shortbow was slow enough that at max range you could get a second Immo projectile in the air before the first one landed, it also happened rarely if the client in stealth had lag. The CD was added to all Stealth Kills as a measure to counter this. As a result however you are punished heavy for missing

It used to be that the revealed mechanic acted as a soft CD on stealth skills, when you hit with one you wouldn't be able to again for another 3-4 seconds. When Deadeye came out, it came with an elite skill with 2 charges that removed revealed and immediately stealthed you again. With some self-applied quickness, this made it possible to very quickly chain together several stealth skills in a row, and some stealth skills went from being a solid bonus on engage to potentially oppressive when chained after themselves.

Thus all stealth skills were given a 1 second CD to partially space out how much you can spam them. It also had the secondary effect (mostly for the melee ones) of making sure you actually time when you swing instead of just spamming the button waiting for a hit to connect.

It sounds to me like the problem is with that Deadeye skill and not with the Stealth and Revealed mechanics as they were beforehand.

@Auturgist.8256 said:It sounds to me like the problem is with that Deadeye skill and not with the Stealth and Revealed mechanics as they were beforehand.

That is pretty much correct, but adding a homogeneous solution to all stealth skills across all situations that happened to also slightly raise the skill cap and the annoyance factor (to the player) was the route that Anet took.

Anyways, just wanted to answer with why it's there from a game mechanics perspective, since the conversation seemed to be devolving into how to actually stab literal people.

@Crinn.7864 said:

@martin.1653 said:Take a kitchen knife and try stabbing air. You, me or any other pleb untrained in the art of stabbing could do a quick succession of at least 10 pretty strong stabs before there would be a need to take a small break. Just sayin.

I fight (with daggers) for recreation, and this is complete nonsense, just sayin'. The most effective of such daggers would be stilettos or rondells and those are extremely light for people trained in martial combat - usually under a third of a pound. Big fat bladed slashing things aren't honestly even daggers, and in knife fighting, the animation and aftercast are absolutely stupidly slow compared to what would be expected on a real battlefield. If you swing a dagger with your full weight where you're recoiling, you're dagger-fighting wrong no matter how you look at it, because anything more than quick controlled strikes with one mandates you're attempting to pin your foe to the ground.

The ICD probably exists because of the shortbow reasoning mentioned above, as well as the interaction of Aegis and D/P spamming backstab It's not a good justification and likely a problem from stacked stealth. In the guardian matchup, a D/P thief could quickly puncture multiple applications of aegis despite perfect play from the guardian, and just re-stealth again and try another several times. The ICD is oppressive on D/D because it's all the kit has, especially in stealth, but it makes tons of sense for D/P.

@Aplier.7829 said:It used to be that the revealed mechanic acted as a soft CD on stealth skills, when you hit with one you wouldn't be able to again for another 3-4 seconds. When Deadeye came out, it came with an elite skill with 2 charges that removed revealed and immediately stealthed you again. With some self-applied quickness, this made it possible to very quickly chain together several stealth skills in a row, and some stealth skills went from being a solid bonus on engage to potentially oppressive when chained after themselves.

Thus all stealth skills were given a 1 second CD to partially space out how much you can spam them. It also had the secondary effect (mostly for the melee ones) of making sure you actually time when you swing instead of just spamming the button waiting for a hit to connect.

you make it sound like the cd was introduced because of DE, but the cd was there long before DE. and the elite has a too long cast to become oppressive stealth attack spamming.

@MUDse.7623 said:

@Aplier.7829 said:It used to be that the revealed mechanic acted as a soft CD on stealth skills, when you hit with one you wouldn't be able to again for another 3-4 seconds. When Deadeye came out, it came with an elite skill with 2 charges that removed revealed and immediately stealthed you again. With some self-applied quickness, this made it possible to very quickly chain together several stealth skills in a row, and some stealth skills went from being a solid bonus on engage to potentially oppressive when chained after themselves.

Thus all stealth skills were given a 1 second CD to partially space out how much you can spam them. It also had the secondary effect (mostly for the melee ones) of making sure you actually time when you swing instead of just spamming the button waiting for a hit to connect.

You are correct. For some reason the dates got mixed up in my head and it felt like the change was a lot sooner than it really was.

@Crinn.7864 said:

@Ario.8964 said:We got a cd on backstab cause guardians thought it was op that we could break aegis and backstab again after about 1 second due to aftercast. Dodging is hard for them after all. Backstab and stealth skills in general did not need a cd. There was plenty of tell and plenty of counterplay before the nerf.

I don't backstab into blocks, that would be silly. I'm just stating that was the argument that went into the nerf.

I'd have been fine with the cd on stealth skills if they didn't leave such a long after cast on all of the stealth skills (outside of sword ofc) or if they did it in a way that didn't hurt all the other setups for thief as much as it did and hit the real culprit which was d/p (heck, they could've just put on the cd for backstab when you have the d/p set equipped and the class would be doing much better). Right now sets that aren't D/P have incredibly clunky and poor interactions with their stealth skills due to not being able to stack long stealth times. Like deceiver said, the nerf was good for d/p because it allowed a playstyle of perma- stealth until you hit something with backstab. Other sets do not have this so they were 1) hit much harder by the nerf than d/p 2) now playing at an even lower level than d/p (except s/d because the meta build doesn't really have any stealth interaction or usage outside of dagger 5 (rarely used on s/d as almost any other skill is better for almost any situation) or thief steal.

@Aplier.7829 said:It used to be that the revealed mechanic acted as a soft CD on stealth skills, when you hit with one you wouldn't be able to again for another 3-4 seconds. When Deadeye came out, it came with an elite skill with 2 charges that removed revealed and immediately stealthed you again. With some self-applied quickness, this made it possible to very quickly chain together several stealth skills in a row, and some stealth skills went from being a solid bonus on engage to potentially oppressive when chained after themselves.

Thus all stealth skills were given a 1 second CD to partially space out how much you can spam them. It also had the secondary effect (mostly for the melee ones) of making sure you actually time when you swing instead of just spamming the button waiting for a hit to connect.

No, the Stealth attack CD was added long before PoF was ever launched, it was added shortly after HoT launch.

@Crinn.7864 said:

@Ario.8964 said:We got a cd on backstab cause guardians thought it was op that we could break aegis and backstab again after about 1 second due to aftercast. Dodging is hard for them after all. Backstab and stealth skills in general did not need a cd. There was plenty of tell and plenty of counterplay before the nerf.

So Stupid the bait and wait mechanics of this game.

@Crinn.7864 said:

@martin.1653 said:Take a kitchen knife and try stabbing air. You, me or any other pleb untrained in the art of stabbing could do a quick succession of at least 10 pretty strong stabs before there would be a need to take a small break. Just sayin.

First of all backstab isnt a swing, its a stab. The time it takes to correct the momentum of a stab with a dagger/knife is not very long. (both models are used in the game, both big and small. Trying to find any logic in most skins is stupid). A dagger have the point of balance very close to the guard or handle. That combined with the low weight of such a weapon makes the handling easy. (A dagger means a short blade with two edges as you pointed out, so the blade itself wont be very thick, and therefore quite light. There are a few weapons called a dagger which does not fit the theme, such as the rondell dagger whos sole purpose is to stab between the plates of later medieval armour. This dagger have no edge and have a triangular cross section. It is too very light.)

You might confuse knife/dagger handling with sabres/axes/khukuri/bowie(both are knifes but not made for stabbing and quite big, making it not fit the topic)/falchion which have the point of balance much closer to the tip of the blade, making it exelent for cutting and slicing, but requiring a lot more momentim to maneuver. Neither however will stab very well.

Also as a side note, using a straight bladed sword with the point of balance close to the guard is quite fast and easy to maneuver. Should you miss a swing or mid swing decide to change direction in order to parry an incoming blow, you can do this with ease. People tend to think that swords are clumpsy pieces of metal, requeiring great strength to maneuver, which is wrong.

Sorry for ranting, my inner nerd got triggered.

@Ario.8964 said:There was plenty of tell and plenty of counterplay before the nerf.

Sure. 1v1. In a quiet environment. As in: when duelling for Twitch, not in an realistic situation ever.

@Carighan.6758 said:

@Ario.8964 said:There was plenty of tell and plenty of counterplay before the nerf.

You're telling me if you suddenly saw an aegis disappear from you and you knew thief backstab didn't have a cd you wouldn't move around or dodge? Sounds more like a personal problem than a balance problem...