Teleports and targetted teleports could use some tweaking

I saw a post earlier today that brought a good point, some teleports ignore LoS and/or have verticality that far exceeds its range if we were to walk the distance from the casting position to the place they are teleported to.

Guardians also ignore LoS with judge intervention, Rev's shiro teleport ignore LoS and has 2 unblockable attacks to boot it off. Both ignore LoS and verticality, can set up big bursts from the safety of a couple of walls in some maps, and even hide it by positioning behind a wall and under/over the target to make it harder to see and click on them. S/D Thieves are certainly the worst offenders with skills like Sword 2 (and sword 3 is a support killer with unblockable attacks that do high damage, have no CD and steal 2 boons, effectively leaving eles and guardians who already have lowest hp, well, naked). Targetted teleports are also rough, with mesmer's jaunt, blink and staff #2 backwards, theives with SB and shadowstep and the OP eles with flash lighting which can also ignore verticality in certain maps.

I would say the main strength of these classes is their ability to +1 in maps with lots verticality, which is why people end up picking maps like Capricorn, Foefire and Forest more often than other maps, because thieves and mesmers can simply juke people around, with the worst maps being Temple and Kyhlo. Coliseum can also be rough with them teleporting from mid to the ledges, but i think the long distances in general is more of a deterrent for people with low access to swiftness like necros or guardians, but the map is really nice and fun so I see it picked often.

Honestly i just want to see targeted teleports not be able to go vertically unless the walking distance there is 1200 units (like the teleport range), so that in maps like Coliseum you dont have a thief using SB/mesmers using blink or jaunt from mid to the side points via the little ledges on the side. If a target has CTRL + T mark on them and you press T in Kyhlo while not being able to click them, you can potentially teleport to them from the lower level.

Now, Im not saying these things make the classes OP or anything of the sort, but in certain maps, it gives them a significant advantage that makes certain maps significantly less desirable to play on, which I think was some of the reasons why Kyhlo was recently changed due to how difficult to transverse it was for classes without teleports vs classes with teleports. i would argue one of the main reasons as to why these classes are so good at +1 and meta based on ranked and AT (https://metabattle.com/wiki/Conquest) is due to their high mobility and unpredictability.

Teleports should act as abridged walking, not a mean to completley bypass verticality and LoS.

Yeah?... Well, that's just like your opinion, man...

LOS-ignoring shadowsteps/blinks/teleports are broken, but likely aren't possible or very difficult to fix due to limitations with the game/engine. My guess is it would lead to a host of new bugs such as teleports failing because of small rocks on the ground et cetera. But it would be interesting to see them try it.

@NuhDah.9812 said:Yeah?... Well, that's just like your opinion, man...

Yeah, well, like pretty much everything that isnt empirically proven or isnt an objective measure. But, if in your opinion, you think something else can be done, or not done, I would appreciate your thoughts on the matter, after all, I do value everyone's opinion even if I may or not agree with it, as long as they back it up with sound reasons and without personal attacks.

LOS-Ignoring shadowsteps on Rev are it's only way to surprise somebody, since Rev is a roamer they need some sort of act of surprise, so if you'd remove los-ignoring shadowsteps, you'd have to give stealth to rev in order to compensate for its lack of surprise.

Also can I just note that it would be buggy as hell? for example: sword 3 on rev requires LOS, the smallers ramp or elevation in terrain between you and the target make the skill fail. This would mean that shadowsteps would just fail 90% of the time

@"Snellibee.2761" said:LOS-Ignoring shadowsteps on Rev are it's only way to surprise somebody, since Rev is a roamer they need some sort of act of surprise, so if you'd remove los-ignoring shadowsteps, you'd have to give stealth to rev in order to compensate for its lack of surprise.

Also can I just note that it would be buggy as hell? for example: sword 3 on rev requires LOS, the smallers ramp or elevation in terrain between you and the target make the skill fail. This would mean that shadowsteps would just fail 90% of the time

I agree with the buggy part, but thats more on the engine than on balance, and thats something that should be fixed regardless, because as it is, teleports are already buggy as heck and it should not be the norm, nor taken into account when doing balancing.

Revenants are not a surprise class, thats thieves. Revenants should not "rely" on surprise, thats not their class flavor nor their intended design (not that anyone really knows what it is, I dont even think Anet itself knows either). Likewise, guardians are not a "surprise" class either. In order to provide clarity in PvP, surprises have to be kept to lowest minimum, with the only outliers being thieves (which is one I disagree with, as shown in multiple successful PvP games that have gone extensive ways to make stealth a not so one-side mechanic, like old 3 seconds out of stealth broken evelynn in LoL, or the recently nerfed akali, or rogues in old WoW, or how well sombra was handled in OW, etc etc, but thats another discussion). We need clarity and fair play, not relying on engine limitations and poor design gimmicks to have classes as strong.

@Fortus.6175 said:

@"Snellibee.2761" said:LOS-Ignoring shadowsteps on Rev are it's only way to surprise somebody, since Rev is a roamer they need some sort of act of surprise, so if you'd remove los-ignoring shadowsteps, you'd have to give stealth to rev in order to compensate for its lack of surprise.

Also can I just note that it would be buggy as hell? for example: sword 3 on rev requires LOS, the smallers ramp or elevation in terrain between you and the target make the skill fail. This would mean that shadowsteps would just fail 90% of the time

You see surprise as not rev's class flavor nor intended design - but really you can't dictate how a class should be, you just don't have the right to say "that's how a class should be, ANet change it". IMO rev's teleport is pretty fitting given the legend (Shiro the legendary assassin) - and I think that IS ANet's intended design.

I don't think they need fixing. They are powerful, indeed, and some maps favor them quite a lot. But while they give strong mobility and burst possibilities, the costs can always be adjusted accordingly - and right now, I don't feel like this is game breaking.

By the way, since you took this from incisorr, I think, he likes to forget mesmer has these with Illusionary Ambush and axe 3 (and potentially Mirage Advance, which usually isn't taken though) as well. He is a side noder complaining about +1s, which is kind of natural, but his bias is just ridiculous. :wink:

@Fortus.6175 said:

@"Snellibee.2761" said:LOS-Ignoring shadowsteps on Rev are it's only way to surprise somebody, since Rev is a roamer they need some sort of act of surprise, so if you'd remove los-ignoring shadowsteps, you'd have to give stealth to rev in order to compensate for its lack of surprise.

Also can I just note that it would be buggy as hell? for example: sword 3 on rev requires LOS, the smallers ramp or elevation in terrain between you and the target make the skill fail. This would mean that shadowsteps would just fail 90% of the time

I actually do think Revenant is a surprise class, considering the lack of sustain and high damage indicates a Revenants way to go is to jump somebody and try to kill said target asap because you won't be able to sustain a duel.

You could see Revenant as a boom and zoom class. You go in and if you didn't kill the target fast enough you have to get out. but iwthout LOS-ignoring shadowsteps enemies would be able to get onto no path spots before the Revenant is able to get a jump on the enemy.

@Fortus.6175 said:

@NuhDah.9812 said:Yeah?... Well, that's just like your opinion, man...

There's nothing to argue about this, it's just your personal opinion that ports should function like that, a very subjective view of the the game, it has nothing to do with balance or any overall benefit to the gameplay, you just voiced what you would like to see, without thinking how much would that damage the gameplay of the professions that use ports, platforming for defensive purposes and the team strategies that are used based on the ability to vertically port. Not to mention that your implementation would basically make ports pretty much same thing as leaps, but with faster animation and without leap combo. If there is something they should fix about shadowsteps they should fix the issues they already have since stuff like infiltration arrow using initiative and not porting you away, or steal getting obstructed in melee range without anything between you and the enemy, are bugging out since forever and haven't yet been fixed.

Oh, and yeah, that funny The Big Lebowski reference...

Every map favours a certain playstle...

Verticle maps favour mobility.Small maps favours AoE.Large maps favour range.

knowing this, would it be fair to remove the advantages of playing a mobility class in a verticle map?If they did, I would also expect them to make every point the size of Foefire Mid, reduce the larger map sizes and expand on the smaller ones.

@"Fortus.6175" said:Teleports should act as abridged walking, not a mean to completley bypass verticality and LoS.

That's exactly what they are though aside from a few exceptions like Portal and Shadow Trap. That's what the navigation mesh is and "no valid path." Whenever you try to use a shadowstep the game checks to see whether you could have walked here manually and if you can't it won't let you port.

It's not impossible to balance shadowsteps. Let's say that blink had a 60 second cooldown or a 1 second activtion time (for interrupting); at that point it wouldn't be a must-have anymore. Same goes for other shadowsteps.

There is also the fact that conquest allows Z-axis port spots to not be completely broken because the player has to give up the point to use it.

How to make thief even more irrelevant 101

None of you people probably know how Guild Wars 1 had such an issue with the "shadowstep" skill type that (all of which were only direct-to-target in that game), that they were all nerfed at one point by giving them each a 0.75s global aftercast on all skills if they resolved. It's funny how the people who made GW2 didn't think that restoring shadowsteps to the old levels would just magically go over well considering how do many of them in GW2 also inflict damage and/or lead into exactly the same thing which called for their nerf in GW1: rapid and lethal PBAoE/melee-range spam.

The path that the TPs take to get to a vertical point has no bearing on the fairness of the skill's TP range. That's simply a game mechanic. Otherwise the max-distance targetting circle for targetted TPs would stop at the base of a cliff, rather than allow you to move it up towards the edge. If the skill's range says 1000, and the ledge you are TPing to is less than 1000 units vertical/horizontal/diagonally away from you, then what's the problem?

This sounds like a "my class that has X advantages doesn't have the Y advantage that another class has. Give the Y advantage to me, or remove the Y advantage, even though the other class does not have my X advantage."