Suggestion for countering permastealth thieves/dead-eyes.

[AliamRationem.5172]

3 hours ago, Exzen.2976 said:

There is plenty of evidence and isn't just People losing to thieves and qqing. Some people posting here are good players with lots of experience and some of us are perfectly capable of killing most thieves. Even if a thief dies, it doesn't mean that permastealth is fair. 

 

Also when People do post actual evidence they get nasty comments from People in the thread.

 

You just disagree with or ignore "evidence" and then produce your own "evidence" based on your own experience - which is just as biased as mine is.

 

Thieves are dominant in smallscale/roaming in WvW, which you dismiss because its not something you care about. There's a whole section to it in metabattle and there are still plenty of people in wvw that enjoy smallscale/roaming. If you check the meta on roaming, thieves do dominate it. Fact. 

 

You are entitled to your own opinion (as we all are), but statements like yours above, where you dismiss everyone else's and try and position it as fact, is completely unfair.

 

You definitely get the feeling listening to this argument go in circles that both sides know stealth is a broken mechanic in competitive play.  Yet one side wants to defend it while claiming that it's actually useless and they never use it (What? Do all thieves run sword?  Where are you guys?  I so rarely see you out there!). 

 

Then they say things like "Well, if you want to get rid of stealth then thief needs to be able to defend itself in the open."  To which I say, "Absolutely!"  That's how it should have been from the start.  Stealth should never be at-will.  It should be restricted to cooldowns and no class should be without a viable counter to it.  But this game was designed from the start without any of that.  What can you do?  

[DeceiverX.8361]

22 minutes ago, Exzen.2976 said:

I agree with you completely. The point of the video is that it is carried so hard by shadow arts and stealth. Not saying they are good players and the build and gameplay are beyond stupid. But you shouldn't be able to win a 1v3 regardless of how bad the players are without a mainhand weapon.

 

Not saying Thief needs a nerf all round. I only have an issue with permastealth, not thief in general, which I have said a few times here. I also don't have an issue with short duration stealth for misdirection and repositioning. It's when it is able to be infinitely or near infinitely stacked it becomes an issue.

 

It would be great to see more diversity on thief at the expense of permastealth.

 

Which is absolutely fine by me, though not what the other guy was talking about, and is only somewhat tangential to the OH Dagger comments; the only reason this works is because of initiative, not because of SA or stacked stealth; many professions get a ton of their utility and damage from OH weapons, but need the MH strictly for pressure because otherwise the gap between skills is too big and enemy sustain will overpower it.  If you gave Rev or ranger or Engi or ele an initiative system, it'd have the same effects when leveraged into its more sustain or burst-driven builds when provided its inherent sustain as well.  SA makes it possible since there isn't much of that inherent sustain for thief, but the lethality of the build isn't caused by it; that's solely initiative and enemies playing poorly as to not prevent CnD from landing, since otherwise it'll run out of resources.

 

The OH dagger thing demonstrates stacked stealth makes things easy and more forgiving than thief has any right to be, but I wouldn't use it as a slam-dunk argument for decrying stealth when it's only tangentially related and is really primarily due to the initiative system when combined with clueless enemies. 

Edited September 10, 2021 by DeceiverX.8361

[Exzen.2976]

33 minutes ago, DeceiverX.8361 said:

The OH dagger thing demonstrates stacked stealth makes things easy and more forgiving than thief has any right to be,

This.

 

Initiative allows you to spam the skill, sure, but the issue is the fact that it's constantly in stealth and shadow arts gives it even more defence allows it to survive. It definitely fails without SA.

 

Anyway, your points are reasonable and I don't particularly have any argument with anything else you've stated.

 

Yeah, it's not a slam dunk, but if there was a clear slam dunk, there wouldn't be a lengthy debate on this is guess. 

Edited September 10, 2021 by Exzen.2976

[shrew.3059]

2 hours ago, subversiontwo.7501 said:

Perhaps a bit of a lefthanded comparison, but I've made similar remarks for large scale balance between range and melee in the past or why the EotM map is a bad map. I dislike a range-leaning meta because it translates into less content (mediated through defensive behaviours or where risk is not aptly rewarded) and more exclusive content (range have roles in melee metas, not mirrored the other way around). If a smaller scale meta is dominated by invisibility in setups, avoidance and escapability resulting in less overall aggression and kills it ultimately leads to less overall content and fewer players attempting to create it. For example, Thief-Thief combat can be fun with agressive players having the tools to counter themselves but can also be incredibly boring with no one taking the initiative.

 

This is basically what I was looking for. It’s an interesting perspective and requires some thought about what sort of meta works best for providing content at all skill ranges. I’ll put some thought into what the implications are for Stealth, but it does answer my question satisfactorily. Thanks!

 

For those tuning in late who are curious what just happened, here’s a summary (apologies if I misunderstood your argument):

 

1. Permastealth is broken.

2. Why?

3. It encourages a small scale meta that skews towards defensive behaviour, which leads to less content for everyone.

 

This last point is something concrete we can actually talk about and debate (i.e., if this is the case, is it bad if it is the case, how can we fix it if it is the case and is bad). It is also important to note that this is not necessarily an argument about Stealth but an argument about the sort of meta we want to have to generate the most entertaining content possible. Maybe that involves nerfing/changing Stealth, but maybe it involves nerfing/changing other things as well. Maybe there are other solutions.

 

P.S. I’m less convinced by the “tool for abuse” argument because a lot of mechanics can be used for that (pulls and pushes for example) and the game can’t be balanced around the bad apples in this case.

[shrew.3059]

2 hours ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

You definitely get the feeling listening to this argument go in circles that both sides know stealth is a broken mechanic in competitive play.  Yet one side wants to defend it while claiming that it's actually useless and they never use it (What? Do all thieves run sword?  Where are you guys?  I so rarely see you out there!). 

 

Assuming your interlocutor is bad faith defending a thing they know is wrong is a good way to stalemate a discussion. It’s fine to assume it, but you’ll never understand the people you are talking to if you don’t leave room for reasonable people to disagree.

[AliamRationem.5172]

26 minutes ago, shrew.3059 said:

 

Assuming your interlocutor is bad faith defending a thing they know is wrong is a good way to stalemate a discussion. It’s fine to assume it, but you’ll never understand the people you are talking to if you don’t leave room for reasonable people to disagree.

 

Sorry, but this isn't a new debate and its been going nowhere for years. Is what it is.

[Xhieron.2168]

I'm not going to pretend to have anywhere near the experience or mastery of some of the people in this thread (much less in this years-old debate), but as a thief fan (i.e., mained it in HOT, got away from it in POF because I'm not a huge fan of Deadeye, might well main again in EOD), with the benefit of several years' hindsight I feel like the game would be better if stealth (and, by extension, de-targeting in general) didn't exist at all. I suspected it was a bad idea when they announced it a decade ago, and it's basically been an ongoing point of contention ever since.

I know I'm not alone in suggesting that what many of us coming from GW1 envisioned with the Thief class was basically a direct successor to the Assassin--a primarily single-target-oriented class with the potential for extremely high damage spikes; huge, instantaneous mobility; and comparative frailty in exchange. Stealth wasn't part of the equation because it wasn't part of Guild Wars in 2011. The Thief certainly fulfills that character fantasy, but it also immediately accumulated a lot of extra baggage before the game had even launched.

Rivaled only by Mesmer in its ability to generate huge volumes of sheer hair-pulling frustration (with essentially the same mechanical structure), the Thief takes the already un-fun case of being on the receiving end of a nasty damage spike and does away with counterplay by preventing the target from making any meaningful decisions about the encounter--when to fight, how long to fight, where, with which cooldowns, and even whether to fight at all are all dictated by the Thief player. And some of this control exists elsewhere in the hands of any character that can out-kite her opponent. But in all other cases the opponent at least knows she's there.

It's an anomaly. More importantly, it's a crutch. On the shoulders of Stealth hangs every nerf, every weakness, every tradeoff, the basis for every good or bad change the class has seen over the entire lifespan of the game and the basis for every period of long silence, essentially without exception. So great is its impact that it's impossible for me to conclude other than that Stealth holds the class back from being allowed to branch out and fundamentally defines the boundaries within which the class must always live and operate.

And the solution is to bite the bullet and break the wheel. It's not a solution that will be implemented or considered; I'm just shouting into the void here. But there are only about fifty skills and traits that would need to be explicitly changed to excise the kitten.  Thief would need significant additional work (so would Mesmer, but that's beside the point). But I honestly don't know what a good alternative is, with one camp advocating continual and repeated nerfs to the thief's access to stealth, rightly or otherwise (oft disguised as thinly veiled "suggestions for improvement" and fooling no one) and the other camp contending with equal validity that the crutch is the only thing keeping its user upright. If you make significant changes but leave the mechanic in place, the class must still be designed around it. If you do nothing, it remains in limbo, the complaints continue to pile up like they have for nine years, and the thief players will continue to daydream about doing anything other than roaming and side-noding. No, it just needs to go. Cast the albatross from around the profession's neck and fill the resulting gaps with tools to allow thief players to be stealthy without depending on literal invisibility.

But then I don't know what I'm talking about.

[kash.9213]

7 hours ago, Xhieron.2168 said:

I'm not going to pretend to have anywhere near the experience or mastery of some of the people in this thread (much less in this years-old debate), but as a thief fan (i.e., mained it in HOT, got away from it in POF because I'm not a huge fan of Deadeye, might well main again in EOD), with the benefit of several years' hindsight I feel like the game would be better if stealth (and, by extension, de-targeting in general) didn't exist at all. I suspected it was a bad idea when they announced it a decade ago, and it's basically been an ongoing point of contention ever since.

I know I'm not alone in suggesting that what many of us coming from GW1 envisioned with the Thief class was basically a direct successor to the Assassin--a primarily single-target-oriented class with the potential for extremely high damage spikes; huge, instantaneous mobility; and comparative frailty in exchange. Stealth wasn't part of the equation because it wasn't part of Guild Wars in 2011. The Thief certainly fulfills that character fantasy, but it also immediately accumulated a lot of extra baggage before the game had even launched.

Rivaled only by Mesmer in its ability to generate huge volumes of sheer hair-pulling frustration (with essentially the same mechanical structure), the Thief takes the already un-fun case of being on the receiving end of a nasty damage spike and does away with counterplay by preventing the target from making any meaningful decisions about the encounter--when to fight, how long to fight, where, with which cooldowns, and even whether to fight at all are all dictated by the Thief player. And some of this control exists elsewhere in the hands of any character that can out-kite her opponent. But in all other cases the opponent at least knows she's there.

It's an anomaly. More importantly, it's a crutch. On the shoulders of Stealth hangs every nerf, every weakness, every tradeoff, the basis for every good or bad change the class has seen over the entire lifespan of the game and the basis for every period of long silence, essentially without exception. So great is its impact that it's impossible for me to conclude other than that Stealth holds the class back from being allowed to branch out and fundamentally defines the boundaries within which the class must always live and operate.

And the solution is to bite the bullet and break the wheel. It's not a solution that will be implemented or considered; I'm just shouting into the void here. But there are only about fifty skills and traits that would need to be explicitly changed to excise the kitten.  Thief would need significant additional work (so would Mesmer, but that's beside the point). But I honestly don't know what a good alternative is, with one camp advocating continual and repeated nerfs to the thief's access to stealth, rightly or otherwise (oft disguised as thinly veiled "suggestions for improvement" and fooling no one) and the other camp contending with equal validity that the crutch is the only thing keeping its user upright. If you make significant changes but leave the mechanic in place, the class must still be designed around it. If you do nothing, it remains in limbo, the complaints continue to pile up like they have for nine years, and the thief players will continue to daydream about doing anything other than roaming and side-noding. No, it just needs to go. Cast the albatross from around the profession's neck and fill the resulting gaps with tools to allow thief players to be stealthy without depending on literal invisibility.

But then I don't know what I'm talking about.

There wasn't WvW either. This was supposed to be a version of late game open world pvp but with a match structure. Stealth would have had more of a place in the actual game play of the mode as map obfuscation. Fighting stealth is mostly manageable but changes to thief tend to be knee jerk reactions that mostly just boil thief variation down to the problem itself, only making that problem slightly less potent by weakening the less problematic core of the class. I think even this page 10 alone covered some of that...

[crewthief.8649]

On 9/10/2021 at 3:57 AM, shrew.3059 said:

 

If we’re summarising the argument:

 

The Claim: Stealth is bad, overpowered, and/or has no counterplay.

 

Evidence offered to support this Claim: personal anecdotes of losing to Thieves or Thieves running away.

 

Evidence not offered to support this Claim: Thieves dominating any game mode such that they are overwhelmingly represented in that game mode, any effects of Thief/Stealth dominance of the game mode.

 

Without evidence that this is a widespread problem negatively affecting the way the game is played, it sounds like frustrated players who have lost to Thieves and are now trying to win via forums what they couldn’t win via gameplay. Even worse, some of the arguments aren’t even about losing to Thieves but Thieves disengaging, therefore escaping a kill.

 

I assure you, bad Thieves die all the time, good Thieves kill bad players of other professions. If Thieves keep beating you (or escaping you), get better because I find it hard to believe you are doing well against every other profession.

Pretty ironic that the guy you’re replying to has an account name that just so happens to be the exact same as the class mechanic of a class that literally dominates every game mode. Coincidence?

Edited September 12, 2021 by crewthief.8649

[shrew.3059]

12 hours ago, crewthief.8649 said:

Pretty ironic that the guy you’re replying to has an account name that just so happens to be the exact same as the class mechanic of a class that literally dominates every game mode. Coincidence?

 

“Other professions” are always the problem in PvE/PvP/WvW, haven’t you heard?

[Cynz.9437]

I am not going to quote previous posts since they got really long but i would like to answer to some points mentioned above.

 

Regarding stealth not being thief mechanics: yes, other classes have access to it but they do not rely on it to stay alive, they do not have the only viable defensive trait that heavily relies on stealth (acro got heavily nerfed because people didn't like fighting visible thieves, oh the irony) and they don't have highest attacks bound to stealth. When such class exist then i clearly don't know this game. Also, i think no other class should have gotten access to stealth outside of mesmers maybe.

The whole homogenization of the classes (let's give everyone everything with especs) is why metas got less and less fun imo. One again, nerfing stealth won't fix anything because thieves got NO ALTERNATIVE and reason for it are members of this very community crying bloody murder every time they got killed by a thief that wasn't even running stealth build.

Honestly, it is that simple:  (example from RL, right now at my place) say politicians want you to stop driving cars so they increase price of the fuel by 20%. Problem is, you live pretty far from your job and still need to drive there. E-car wouldn't be an alternative because the electricity network at your place cannot handle the load. You cannot move either because there are no free apartments left closer to your job. So now what? Will you stop driving car because fuel got more expensive? No. Because you got no alternative outside of quitting job all together. This is exactly what people ask here - we just want thieves to disappear from game. And if thieves did, what class will be on the line next? Rangers? And then? Why should anyone listen to posters making such entries? This is not constructive. Constructive would be a thread suggesting how to increase thief survival outside of stealth and deal decent damage w/o stealth attacks.

 

I also don't see how thief is supposedly dominating every game mode: in wvw you are only allowed to roam as thief, if you join zerg you get constantly kicked and get harassed on top of it. If anything wvw is dominated by guardians and necros, how about we delete those since we base such suggestions on supposed "domination" of a game mode? In PVE oh wonder guards/necros (depending on mode) and mesmers dominate raids/fractals. Not thieves. You won't find many thieves there nor most groups want one. In pvp you would want 1 thief on team if at all, frankly you would be better off with a rev. 2 thieves on team usually results in massive outcry, reporting and a loss. Nobody wants 2 thieves on team. SO WHERE AND HOW DOES THIEF DOMINATE EVERY GAME MODE IN THIS GAME?