Twilight Tempest.7584

You have my heartfelt sympathies.

Is getting away not a form of avoidance? Both are ways of not engaging. The only difference is whether one managed not to enter combat (avoidance), or did, and got out of it (got away). My story hasn't changed. Nice try though. I suppose the top player in the game has literally never been surprised or caught off guard, ever in all their play time. And certainly has never been beaten. /s

Nope. A half-decent Herald can still deal with a CC-build, even if that's just to get away. Moa + CC doesn't care if you're the top player in the game. It'll still disconnect your keyboard in a heartbeat.

I doubt that. Thief isn't the only glassy thing out there, though it may seem like it given how out of control Cele-builds are. Except, as I keep saying, ordinary CC-builds can and should be anticipated and prepped for, even if that simply means avoiding them. Especially if you play something vulnerable to CC. In contrast, there's really no planning for having your keyboard effectively disabled for three plus seconds out of the blue. That is a problem specific to Moa + CC, and the argument of this thread. Can't say I'm surprised tbh. Few who have spent any serious time on thief would say things about it as you did. But you're not alone. I'd bet money that the vast majority of people who complain about thief (and there are many) have not played it themselves, significantly. Thief became an "accidental" main of mine when I set out to understand it better after struggling with it on other classes. After many hours on it, I'm back to other mains mostly, and am not very worried about thieves at all. There are rare, good thief players who would beat me no matter what, but there's no shame in losing to better players.

So what you're saying is, people complaining about stealthy thieves in 2024 play like NPCs. Edit: Drop a confused face if you play like an NPC ↘️

There was a lot of chatter about the Magnet/Pull before and after you arrived, and I went along with it. So I agree that an auto-CC removal when Moa'd wouldn't help much here. Some way of breaking stuns while Moa'd is the answer.

Or perhaps no one has tried it on you yet. It is rare after all. But there is a first time for everything. TDS means 9 out of 10 forum warriors are simply incapable of talking about the subject at hand without getting caught up on Thief. Class is completely irrelevant. This topic would be a fraction of its length had I been on my Herald like the one you described. Wrong is wrong, unfair is unfair, unhealthy is unhealthy. To illustrate the point, consider: Is crime committed against a criminal legal? People may have less sympathy, but it doesn't change the fact of crime. May your good fortune hold up. If the day does come, I suppose you'll take it on the chin. Then you are allowing engagements you are ill-equipped or prepared for. I'll repeat that stun breaks alone are not the only way to handle CC-builds. That's an awful lot of thief-envy for someone who doesn't suffer TDS. 🤔 It's all about tradeoffs. I guarantee you there are nice things your build can do that my thief can't. We pick our poison.

You are correct. Engi used Static Shock after Moa. Others here have been focused on Magnet by saying things like: "Just dodge the Pull," or "You know you can stun break during the Pull, right?" or "Magnet is so useless every time I use it, especially on thieves, they just Shadowstep away." And I've been responding to them accordingly. Even updated the OP with the emphasis on Magnet in mind. So yeah, plenty of us have been focused on the wrong CC, probably because it is the opener and the most visible. Throughout, I have been saying "CC + Moa" to mean any time you're both CC'd and Moa'd (including by Mesmers), but I get that it may be misleading if one assumes it connotes a specific sequence. Will use Moa + CC going forward. 🙂 On a side note, if you look at the cool down counters on the skill bar frame by frame, they never go off cool down. In the first clip, Static Shock was applied while there was still 0.2-0.3 seconds on the Pull effect. Seamless pre-casting and CC layering. The Magnet + Moa + Static Shock all go off and hit in under a second. Besides Quickness, there may have been use of a macro. If that's so, this may be a case for macros not being allowed, as they make possible interactions Anet may never have intended. Regardless, all that was needed for a chance at counterplay was a single stun break after the Static Shock. Adding a stun break to the Moa skill bar may be the only remedy if Anet were inclined to address this. But I'm sure it won't be, so this is all just academic. Alternatively, I thought about making it so that any stun breaks the player has slotted in their utility bar remain available, but only the stun break effect works when Moa'd, nothing else (something like Shadowstep would afford one stun break, nothing more). That way, Moa + CC still gives the user some extra mileage beyond ordinary CC-chaining (which is countered by stun break utilities in full force), and players still have means to build for high-CC encounters, including this one, as they see fit.

Thanks for testing and reporting back. I've always agreed it's niche, but even then, I just don't think total skill bar lockout is fair when the player normally has stun breaks. I'll have to fiddle with it as well.

Here we go again. 😑 You assume the risk of getting CC-locked by not running enough (or any!) stun breaks. Every profession has access to several. Nor does one need Blinding Powder (which isn't even a meta utility but one I have never let go of precisely because I play defensively) -level of utility to respond to chain-CC. It's what you do after breaking stun that matters. Be it using any number of active defenses, mobility, or fighting back. You can prepare for CC-builds, which we all know exist, in greater frequency than the meme Moa builds. But there is nothing to be done if you get hit by the CC + Moa combo. Why is it so difficult for people to grasp that being able to do something (the case with chain CCs so long as you have at least one stun break) is better than being able to do nothing (the case with CC + Moa)? All I'm saying is the latter should not be a situation that exists. Let's just replace your skill bar with bird skills, but while we're at it, let's just give you access to no skills! If I wanted to talk about this, I would have made a thread about this. But there would be no need because plenty already exist. For the umpteenth time, I play multiple classes in WvW, and thief hasn't been my most frequent in a while. It just happened to be what I was on at that moment, and I wasn't even doing any of the "unhealthy" stuff you lamented. I know Thief Derangement Syndrome is endemic, but please get over it. There are two things I know with certainty on this: The vast majority of people complaining about thieves haven't really played thief. And if they did, they'd very quickly stop complaining once they realize it's not as all-powerful as they think. I know this because I too was there.

It sounds like you went straight to replying after viewing the clip rather than reading what has already been addressed. From the first page: ^ Basically, I think we can all agree that we can never see every direction at the same time, no matter how much we're looking. Bad luck combined with sound execution on the engi's part, really. I wouldn't touch Magnet. It has legitimate uses elsewhere. And nerfing the range and unblockable wouldn't necessarily prevent the nasty CC + Moa interaction thanks to stealth, quickness, pre-casting, and possible macros. The real problem is the unhealthy interaction of CC + Moa. It's the one and only way I know of to totally disable the skill bar, stun breaks be damned. Suggestions that would address this are either: Moa auto-removes any existing control effects when it transforms the player, or Moa gets a stun break in its skill bar. The goal is to give the target at least a chance to do something besides lie helplessly on their back for three seconds. The circumstances may well be stacked against them, but a chance is better than no chance. Do I get any credit for not outright asking that the combo in question be gutted? This discussion does serve two purposes: (1) bringing awareness to an unhealthy skill interaction, and (2) revealing how deep the thief hatred runs. A 10/10 social experiment would be showing the same clip with any class besides thief and comparing the forum response. It would be like night and day.

Sounds like fun. 🙂

With 1,200 unblockable range, quickness, stealth, possible macros, and good-old-fashioned positioning (approaching distracted targets from behind), none of that really matters. Anyway, the montage vids someone posted earlier, while not necessarily representative of real-life success rates, suggests it isn't as avoidable as you say.

500 millisecond pull. Reduced by average ping (~100 milliseconds for me). Forget render lag because I don't have a way to measure it. At most 400 milliseconds or four tenths of a second to react to something by surprise. Yeah, totally 100% a skill issue. 😑 GW2 isn't a competitive FPS or fighting game where lightning-fast reflexes are expected. If this is the skill standard in this game, I wonder how many are truly "skilled".

Indeed, I make it a point to carry multiple stun breaks on all my builds. Usually at least two. In this case, three. People have been saying in this discussion how bad CC-spam is. So it seems wise to prepare for it by carrying multiple stun breaks and knowing what to do after using them. At least one can build and prepare for ordinary CC-spam. CC + Moa however, is pretty much a death sentence, even if uncommon. On that, we agree. I don't expect Anet to do anything about it. At this point, I'm just responding to people who say something worth responding to. Except that stun breaking followed by using skills is possible there. That's why we have build and equipment templates. Switch to a useful build for everything else. Yes, but it requires 0.5 second surprise reaction time. Never mind latency and render lag. Some cheese stinks more than other cheese. I'd say making a target's keyboard pointless in half a second takes the cheesecake for worst of the worst. -- Someone on these forums once said something along the lines of: If there was a combination of keys that if pressed in just the right sequence with the right timing, instantly downed your opponent, and there would be nothing they could effectively do to prevent it, would it be fair? No matter how uncommon or supposedly difficult to pull off, should something like that even exist? That is the question posed by this topic. Another way of looking at it is: Cheats, hacks, and exploits in this game are fairly uncommon. They're often esoteric and difficult to execute. They have little to no effect on most players. Yet no one likes cheating or thinks it has any place in the game. While the CC + Moa combo may not exactly be a cheat, the effect feels awfully close to one. Put aside your hatred for thief, your love for engis, and the temptation of whataboutism. And simply ask yourself whether you would ever want to be on the receiving end of what happened in the clips, no matter what the circumstances. Does it really have a place in the game?