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Smoke screen is amazing


foste.3098

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With the update smoke screen is now a 240 radius, 7 second duration smoke field that pulses blindness each second to enemies that are in the circle, basically making it a utility skill version of 2013 black powder.Seriously the damage mitigation this thing offers is superb and the combo potential is also high, my favorite being with staff; it gives staff access to hook strike as well as having insane synergy with punishing strikes and weakening charge as both those throw out more blinds on top of the pulsing blinds of the field meaning even fast attacks will fail to hit you, i had a revenant miss his entire aa chain because i was aa'ing him within the smoke field.It is a simple skill and i think ppl will sleep on it because beforehand it was not any good and because the new and shiny thief portal is getting all the attention.

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Smoke Field and Deadeye stupid good.

Considering almost all Rifle skills are projectile finishers, yu basically keep a dude perma blinded.

Shame, it's not exactly the Assassins Creed Smoke screen I would love which visually blinds the enemy as well but that would be too powerful.

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@Documental.5946 said:Not to sound like a hater as I just got done with a 5 hour campaign of WvW ^^

But I wasn't aware thieves needed even more access to stealth...

It's not about the stealth, the major thing is that it pulses blind in a 240 radius circle each second making melee attacking the thief in it extremely difficult and it block projectiles meaning the thief is more or less damage immune for 7 seconds baring really fast attacks or if the opponent has resistance.I am just happy that there are enough good utility skills now that you actually have choices and trade offs to make.

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@Documental.5946 said:

It's not about the stealth, the major thing is that it pulses blind in a 240 radius circle each second making melee attacking the thief in it extremely difficult and it block projectiles meaning the thief is more or less damage immune for 7 seconds baring really fast attacks or if the opponent has resistance.I am just happy that there are enough good utility skills now that you actually have choices and trade offs to make.

Oh no I'm aware. It's what makes this rather frustrating. Thief now has stealth and blind in such abundance and often from the same source it can be extremely taxing trying to even land a single hit on them. Honestly how am I suppose to deal with thieves unless I'm playing Ranger, Dragonhunter, or Spellbreaker? Nobody else really seems to have an adequate amount of tools to properly deal with some of these builds I've seen. Most of the kills I did get was because I was able to 'mind-game' some aoe attacks on them.

Scrapper had this potential as well, and I'm not gonna say they probably weren't a little too good at it, but I think I'm starting to understand some of the frustration Anet gets on this forum. They seemingly decided to both buff stealth and nerf anti-stealth in the same patch... I'm shocked Cloaked in Shadow didn't get an icd.

Eh, honnestly you can still add holosmith too the list of counters too.

That makes 4 classes with counterbuilds to thief and 4 classes that thief has a good matchup against. Sounds pretty good to me

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Scourge and mirage, condi-speced, are still a hassle to deal with for thief even when you take the right condi cleanse.

And if you have a thief condi build, weaver can perform really well as they have so much cleanse. Of course ele is otherwise really not an issue for power spike thief.

If you focus a lot on stealth and blind, you loose some access to stunbreaks, so thief becomes vulnerable, especially with a low HP pool, to being stun-locked/CC, which certain specs can do really well.

To be honest when I didn't play thief, I had only low to medium problem dealing stealthy-thiefy. People always complain about stealth mechanics, and yes it can lead to really nasty combos, but you can equip yourself to deal with that. Just the same way that if the meta is condi oriented, bring some condi cleanse!! Yes, you might reduce your DMG option, but won't die to condi in silly ways.

When your biggest fear is gimmicky/nasty stealth build, bring some blocks, defensive skills, CC, AoE skills/utilities, traps, a bit more vitality/toughness, or unlockables to go through the thief like a knife in warm butter.Most my fight against decent Rev ends up very quickly. Either he dies really fast, either I'm downed instantly too.

Also, it's still uneasy as a thief to go solo into a massive AoE cluster-mess which is what is favored in the current state of the game.And a very high DMG oriented thief is super fragile/goes down really fast if you read their game. Plus most thief are actually not so great.

Being fragile thief relays on blinds and stealth and shadowsteps as its core mechanisms to avoid dmg. But most of them are active gameplay, require planing/thinking for a thief to be able to survive decently, unlike the passive sustain of some other classes. Fast attack overcome blinds, and while stealth you're not being attacked, AND it requires good positioning by the thief to avoid AoE or even melee random attacks. I can't remember how often, in my early days I'd be downed while trying to stealth away from a fight.Melee Thief drops smokefield in your face, well, just dodge out, AA to clean the blind, and restart you DMG rotation.

If a thief uses heartseeker into a smokefield as an escape, he usually has low HP, or low initiatives, therefore won't hit you in the next few seconds until he resplenish either one or both of them.Those high DMG deadeye are super weak... 1-3 well placed hit and they die. Get one of your guy to focus him while you are minding your business. Have reflect! Can't tell how often deadeye almost killed themselves on reflected ranged attacks, often a single hit was then necessary to deal with the guy/girl.

Anyways... I recognize it's not super easy, but one cannot expect to just brutally facetank everything. Equip yourself for builds that you fear the most. :-)

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I've personally always saw Smoke Screen as a low-key busted skill if you looked at what it did. It was basically an overpowered version of Black Powder with a 25 second cooldown and projectile deflection to boot. The only issue with it was the fact it was a line on the ground, so there was no practical use for it (in PvP).

Now that it's a ring, I immediately knew it was going to see some use. It's a very strong skill. I don't doubt that ANet is going to increase the cooldown on it very soon to be more in line with the Necromancer's Well of Darkness. I say this because Well of Darkness functions similarly without the benefit of projectile deflection and being on a 35 second cooldown (although it can be traited for protection and life siphon so there's that).

EDIT: Specified things that seemed too vague.

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@AsiraasiB.7165 said:Naw been playing with smoke screen.. Its the best... Most thieves have 3 stunbreaks pluz ports and passive.. Try it

Most thieves don't have 3 stunbreaks. Most run Shadow Step which is two technically but share a cooldown and maybe Acro, Roll for Initiative, Bandits or Blinding Powder. I have tried it and find it doesn't fill any holes in any of the builds I run. I also haven't found many thieves running it either.

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@Straegen.2938 said:

@AsiraasiB.7165 said:Naw been playing with smoke screen.. Its the best... Most thieves have 3 stunbreaks pluz ports and passive.. Try it

Most thieves don't have 3 stunbreaks. Most run Shadow Step which is two technically but share a cooldown and maybe Acro, Roll for Initiative, Bandits or Blinding Powder. I have tried it and find it doesn't fill any holes in any of the builds I run. I also haven't found many thieves running it either.

I run rfi shadowstep and daggerstorm or acro guess thats just me..

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@Documental.5946 said:

It's not about the stealth, the major thing is that it pulses blind in a 240 radius circle each second making melee attacking the thief in it extremely difficult and it block projectiles meaning the thief is more or less damage immune for 7 seconds baring really fast attacks or if the opponent has resistance.I am just happy that there are enough good utility skills now that you actually have choices and trade offs to make.

Oh no I'm aware. It's what makes this rather frustrating. Thief now has stealth and blind in such abundance and often from the same source it can be extremely taxing trying to even land a single hit on them. Honestly how am I suppose to deal with thieves unless I'm playing Ranger, Dragonhunter, or Spellbreaker? Nobody else really seems to have an adequate amount of tools to properly deal with some of these builds I've seen. Most of the kills I did get was because I was able to 'mind-game' some aoe attacks on them.

Scrapper had this potential as well, and I'm not gonna say they probably weren't a little too good at it, but I think I'm starting to understand some of the frustration Anet gets on this forum. They seemingly decided to both buff stealth and nerf anti-stealth in the same patch... I'm shocked Cloaked in Shadow didn't get an icd.

Stealth already provides a disadvantage in WvW around the mark towers you have to give up quite a bit of positioning for it. That and if you stay in stealth too long it ends up costing you pressure and the enemy getting all their abilities off cooldown. Simply trying to put AoEs down and using AA and an occasional dodge allows for some counterplay against it as well. The thing about the blind field is the thief can use it to keep the pressure up or just stealth again to gap close but the ideal thing to do in the situation if you are not the thief is to run back even with the 50% movement speed in stealth that thief isn't gonna catch up to land his backstab without wasting ports that could potentially cost the thief a stun break/DPS you just have to play positioning with a SA thief kite back to towers keep moving don't be a sitting duck. Anyways that's all I wanted to share is the things SA thieves will struggle with when faced against.

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Just got round to playing this recently and it's actually really, really good. With SA for the cooldown reduction trait and adventurer runes you can just about permastealth off dodges, heals and using death's retreat through smoke screen, which means I can ditch D/P entirely and take S/x without losing any stealth uptime which is brilliant. The projectile block is obviously amazing. I used to run binding shadow, shadowstep and RFI but I think smoke screen is actually more useful than binding shadow for matchups you don't expect to oneshot with the knockdown, since rending shade now provides AoE fear which means with an absorption sigil you still get the hard cc and boonsteal. Really impressed with it tbh.

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