Deadeye still needs those damn usability improvements...

... among other things.

My main problem to be honest is with Death's Retreat, and Kneel/Free Action.

Death's Retreat apparently fails immediately if you do not have line of sight between two locations. Which is ABSOLUTELY STUPID.This basically means that you -can- teleport onto cliffs... but you need to be within a sweet spot to correctly land on the cliff. If line of sight is not there, intuitively it should just move you as close to the obstruction, right? Well it doesn't! I get that shadow step has been plagued by Line of sight and valid paths for balance reasons, but this is the Rifle's freaking escape tool. It needs to be way more consistent than that. Oh and here's a fun fact! The Death's Retreat does not have a permissive property for the line of sight check! What is the permissive property? If you were to use a LoS test from one location to the other location, and it succeeds, logically it'd also mean that if you were standing in the targeted location, you'd see the starting location. That doesn't work with deadeye. You can be on a cliff and end up in a spot where the LOS is concidered to be broken. But you can not return to that previous spot by using the same skill.

Kneel and Free Action are both major parts of the kit. And there has been plenty of players complaining about how long it takes to kneel down, but that's not what I am going to talk about. I'm going to talk about prioritization. These skills are critical to the rifle on Deadeye. They absolutely need to take priority if a player uses it mid action. The weapon seems to do this for kneel, freely cancling channeled abilities to kneel the player on the spot. But it doesn't behave the same for Free Action.

And finally... a strong indicator on the UI for when the deadeye is knelt.

Some suggestions for improvements.

Remove the Death's Retreat requirement for a Line of Sight check. Or adjust the algorithm to be more forgiving about where and how it is used while maintaining the thief's terrain advantage over other classes.

Give Free Action the ability to immediately cancel channeled skills to stand the player up so he can escape. Allow the jump command, to forcefully remove the thief from kneeling without actually causing him to jump. Color the knelt skills UI emblems blue, or purple so it is more clear to the player that they are currently crouched.

I would have to agree with you. My main complaint with Deadeye, is the fact that once you are kneeling, the only way to get out of that is by hitting 5 again. I would love it if anet made a quality of life improvement to allow other movements to get you out of that kneel state. Either by pressing any movement key, dodge rolling, or using your heal. While to me, it wasn't as big of an issue in PvE scenarios, in WvW and sPvP it became a real problem. Alot of the time, atleast in WvW, I would die because I either assumed I was not kneeling, or because I naturally tried to either dodge away from an enemy or move on my own. As far as Death's Retreat goes, I would also agree. I would like some restrictions to be removed for pathing issues, because I had several instances in WvW where I would try to escape, to just end up using initiative, and going no where. Where as other times, I would just magically be able to teleport up a cliff. After Anet made the change to pathing with teleport skills, it really hurt alot of thieves. The one thing thieves need to rely on staying alive. The only action that is still mostly able to instant teleport you to a target, regardless of terrain is Steal. So hopefully in the coming months, or sooner, Anet takes a look at Deadeye, and hopefully makes a quality of life improvement to the Kneel function of Deadeye.

@HunterXIV.4283 said:I would have to agree with you. My main complaint with Deadeye, is the fact that once you are kneeling, the only way to get out of that is by hitting 5 again. I would love it if anet made a quality of life improvement to allow other movements to get you out of that kneel state. Either by pressing any movement key, dodge rolling, or using your heal.

why is it harder to press 5 again (or bind it to another key) than pressing Dodge or Movement? Its literally just one button, no complicated mechanics involved.I actually like that you can roll around while kneeling

@LazerusKI.7485 said:

@HunterXIV.4283 said:I would have to agree with you. My main complaint with Deadeye, is the fact that once you are kneeling, the only way to get out of that is by hitting 5 again. I would love it if anet made a quality of life improvement to allow other movements to get you out of that kneel state. Either by pressing any movement key, dodge rolling, or using your heal.

Because some people have preferences. And some people forget or accidently press 5. Having a movement designated to break out of it simply makes it easier for people who forgot about it.

Right now, my biggest problem is that the rifle won't automatically turn and fire at an enemy if you aren't kneeling. If you're standing up and targeting an enemy behind you, instead of turning around to shoot that enemy when mashing the weapon skills you'll just get an error message and stay facing away from them.

While kneeling, you do turn around and pew pew, but while standing, GW2 has always been like that, where you need to be facing your target, or close too, to fire at it (Atleast while moving / kiting). Also, pressing 5 isn't hard, I agree, and it will just take getting used too. Being new to rifle, and how it plays, I keep fat fingering 5 and 6, where as 6 being my heal keybind. While I know that is a user error on my part, it will just take time. Maybe if anet added an option, in the options window or something similar to "Disable double tap to dodge roll", could work for kneeling. Being able to cancel kneel via basic movement keys, WASD, Jump, or even dodge roll would be a nice quality of life improvement, at least I think it would. I know several people I've talked too have had the same similar complaints I have with kneeling.