PvE Deadeye Gameplay: Joys and Frustrations

[Iskarel.7240]

Who am I?

Iskarel. Thief enthusiast and benchmarker. Build/guide editor for Snow Crows website.
I often write articles for /r/GuildWars2 contextualizing the state of PvE Thief. It's currently 3AM.
I am Malice in Wonderland.
I tried to format this to make it comfortably readable for anyone with the time to invest into reading a thesis on Deadeye.

I've authored so many threads on /r/GuildWars2 to help contextualize PvE Thief for people who aren't as familiar with its facets.

tl;dr

The good!

 

• Many weapon options (repeat skills many times = every weapon set feels very distinct)
• Ranged damage with rifle, self-boons with Maleficent Seven, sacrificing damage for big CC

The bad!

• Bosses applying Revealed shut down Deadeye. Stop using Revealed, spend the time to recycle Turai Ossa's Veil Sight feature
• Deadeye getting a scratch and its rotation breaks
• Doesn't hold a candle to the burst of power builds like Vindicator/Soulbeast, but can't beat them on sustained damage either, very balanced game
• Pathological single-target focus with Deadeye's Mark system
• Rifle makes you slow crawl and needs more damage to warrant how niche it is
• Animation lock for days with dagger and staff
• Did you know you still have to move "behind" the Dragonvoid in Harvest Temple? non-defiant enemies still need to be flanked

Deadeye is Very Fun and has Great Variety

To all PvE Deadeye players who've embraced the pain and joy of Daggers and Rifle—I respect you all for sticking with this elite spec. Every time I meet another dedicated Deadeye, I geek out inside. I'm your fan, you're my people, I want you to sign my Predator rifle.

This elite spec causes me so much joy, but the arbitrary restrictions it suffers under cause me endless frustration.

I want to explain those frustrations to those who don't know, but before I get into those frustrations, I want to show some of my love for this spec.

Deadeye's PvE Builds

DPS Deadeye is viable (with some stretch of that term in a few areas) with variations of:

• Dagger/Dagger Power
• Dagger/Pistol Power (bench is outdated, does similar damage to Dagger/Dagger)
• Staff Power
• Rifle power (Shadow Flare, Premeditation/Mercy, Silent Scope)
• Dagger/Dagger Condition
•  Pistol/Dagger Condition
• soon, hopefully, Axe/Dagger Condition

It's a Thief elite spec that manages to productively swap between two weapon sets in the style familiar to all other professions (Elementalist Attunements and Engineer Kits are just another version of this idea): Rifle + Daggers, Rifle + Dagger/Pistol, Staff + Daggers.

Because each rotation repeats specific Initiative skills, they each have their own strong gameplay feel...So strong that it can drive people away. That is a feature, not a bug!

Here's a  list of some modern DPS Deadeye rotations, which doesn't include all the things I mentioned above. Most are performed by me, with the Shadow Flare / No-Mercy Rifle-Dagger rotation performed by Incera.

Dagger-Pistol Smoke Combo

Sometime last year I came up with the basic structure of a Dagger-Pistol Maleficent Seven rotation which utilizes the basic, familiar tech of "Black Powder → Heartseeker → Backstab", applied to endgame boon-uptime standards: with Quickness, each Black Powder smoke Field allows two Backstabs by fitting in 4 Heartseekers into the field's duration, while still respecting the time-out duration of Revealed. Incera refined the idea and performed a benchmark you can view here.

I've recorded gameplay on Keep Construct and Soulless Horror where I capitalize on Dagger-Pistol's damage and Defiance Break.

(The Soulless Horror PoV also includes some crit-chance misery where my Malice gets ruined because I was just 2.3% below the Critical Chance cap, thanks to wearing the wrong Amulet. I'm never kidding when I say Deadeye's rotation is fragile!)

Condition Builds

I'll admit I'm not fond of Dagger/Dagger condition as I find it less fun than Condition Daredevil's approach.
I LOVE Pistol-Dagger condition deadeye and have carried its torch forward since ANet tried to stamp it out in mid 2021. It's doing _okay_ right now, for a convalescent, benching over 37K with a high APM, very precise rotation that can easily send you flying off group into dangerous arena zones.

Scepter/Dagger could be fun, but it's ruined by low critical chance (more on that later...)

Staff Builds

I invented two Staff rotations for Maleficent Seven deadeye: Staff + Daggers and Staff only. They're fun, but incredibly impractical thanks to the animation lock on Weakening Charge.

You can also use Staff for Quickness Deadeye if you want more cleave and don't want to navigate Stealth/Revealed with Dagger/Dagger.

Quickness Builds

I'm less than thrilled with the state of Quickness Deadeye, but I was very vindicated to see Deadeye's boon identity finally blossom into a viable boon support build. Yes, ANet has been stapling Quickness/Alacrity onto builds over the years, but Deadeye 100% had this one coming. ANet thought so 5 years ago (when the role of a "boon support" was quite different):

Quote

We've touched nearly every trait in the Deadeye line in order to better define different types of deadeye playstyles and reduce the conflicts between them. Here's a quick example of a new trait that is aimed at improving Fire for Effect boon-sharing builds while also providing a meaningful damage bonus.

Premeditation: Gain +180 concentration and increase your strike damage by 1% for each unique boon on you.

Source

Heal Quickness Deadeye isn't real and it can't hurt me. I'm sorry, I have standards of living (tough talk for a Deadeye enthusiast), and Heal Quick Deadeye isn't cooked yet.

The Positives of Deadeye

 
Positive: CC Monster

Or CC griefer. It really depends on your goals...

Deadeye can be set up to do exceptional amounts of sustained Defiance Break, e.g. staff and sword-pistol. These are extreme examples which give up a lot of personal DPS to provide that much Crowd Control (the utility choices, cast time, rune/sigil options, animation lock on staff, burning out all Initiative, and of course the damage output of those weapons themselves).

Having strong CC output is an interesting prospect, and it pairs with builds with weak CC output. This is a compelling strength, but it is not enough to make Deadeye a shoe-in for squad comp—because CC can come from everyone.

Examples of actual high-value features:

• When a Daredevil/Vindicator needs Vigor to perform optimally, they can't scrutinize every single build to provide some uptime. That boon is far more restricted.
• DPS builds which can provide group healing at low cost (Thief has some access to this with Skelk Venom! ... but Deadeye likes Hide in Shadows as a stealth source and Signet of Malice for upkeep-healing)
• DPS builds which have great personal luxuries, such as Stability or Barrier or Range, can leverage those strengths to push themselves to new limits. Deadeye has Maleficent Seven boons, but they're not build-defining, and Rifle range which has many more limitations than the likes of Virtuoso, Specter, or Scourge.

A build that makes sacrifices to provide excellent CC is a group service, one that becomes less valuable the more CC your group can already do without asking for drastic sacrifices from one specific build.

Positive: Ranged Damage

Rifle Deadeye does good ranged damage. We move slow while Kneeling, but that's not always a deal breaker—when you don't have full melee uptime, but the boss (and your regular-speed allies) don't kitten off to another area of the arena.

Most of its damage is transmitted without damage attrition. A lot of builds people think of as "ranged builds" have some damage attrition—but a lot less than a melee build! ANet actually spoiled this with the rework to Shadow Flare, turning it into a melee-range skill—I'll elaborate on that further, but bear in mind you lose 50% of that slot skill's damage at range.

Ranged DPS is a compelling strength, but the reduced movement speed makes it hard to really capitalize on it. Where a build like Scourge/Virtuoso allows players who lack encounter knowledge to perform better, Rifle Deadeye asks you to already have deep knowledge of the encounter so you know exactly where you should stand within about a 1-second tolerance—you can't get out of dangerous effects with much less warning than that!

Positive: Self Boons

Maleficent Seven grants 6 boons to the player, which are mostly all "staple" boons. If a Deadeye sees benefit from its self-generated Might, then its nearby allies don't have might. The damage the Deadeye deals with Might does not nearly make up for that group DPS loss.

• Protection here is KEY. I'll explain later that even a lightly-injured Deadeye becomes far less effective. We need this damage reduction just to be baseline effective.

• Regeneration might as well not be here lol. You have no healing power, so this barely heals you, and it will not make the difference between 90%/75% HP.

• Vigor is a nice luxury, and is essential to the Silent Scope Rifle rotation. Ideally we won't dodge so much that we actually need this Vigor, but better than needing and not having!

• Fury is already covered by traits in Critical Strikes so um...

• Lastly, Swiftness. This is a weird one. If you're playing a melee build than the swiftness helps you guarantee you can close distance with the enemy at good speed. If using Rifle...This might not do anything. I say might, because there's some bizarre oversight/glitch related to character model and Rifle movement speed. With certain character creation settings, different Deadeyes move at different speeds while Kneeling. The faster Deadeyes move as if they already had Swiftness. Swiftness normalizes this difference, so you'll never notice it when playing Maleficent Seven.

• Maleficent Seven guarantees Deadeye will have at least 6 boons, which translates to 6% Strike damage from Premeditation. Or 0% more damage when using Silent Scope, where the Vigor actually comes in handy...

Why Deadeye is Suffering

In a somewhat arbitrary descending order of frustration.

Negative: Bosses Revealing Players

Disclaimer: I am not saying stealth should be useless in all endgame scenarios, just the ones where ANet is already revealing the player. I see you, HTCM Mass Invis enjoyers, Fractal/Dungeon skip enjoyers. You're fine.

Many raids apply Revealed to players when targeted by the boss or some mechanics, which prevents the player from entering Stealth. This is not just the player with the highest toughness!

• If you get fixated by Samarog, you are permanently revealed until the fixation ends.
• If you get fixated by a Phantasm at Keep Construct and it winds up its attack to bonk you, you get Revealed for ~20 seconds.
• If the fixated tank jumps the shockwave at Samarog or Twin Largos Kenut and you are on the ground, then the boss can panic-swap its fixation from the in-the-air tank to you, applying Revealed!
• If you land on Sabir's 2nd/3rd phase platform first, you get pulsing Revealed for 15 seconds.
• If the Soul Feast in the Celestial Observatory Strike mission targets you, you can get revealed for ~20 seconds.

Do you realize how INSANE it is that encounters keep incorporating mechanics that completely shut down one of this game's elite specs?

You'll note some of these predate Deadeye's Path of Fire release. Some are after. Some are from months ago...

There is a better way: Veil Sight.

Turai Ossa in the Queen's Gauntlet festival challenge has a special effect that allows the boss to ignore player stealth, without Revealing the player.

This is what we need for the bosses in instanced content.

Encounters need to stop incorporating Revealed.

Nothing else in game has such an arbitrary, bad-practice shut down like this.

Some areas of effect and boss movement are explicitly designed to disadvantage melee attacks. This is not the same. There is zero reason to ever confiscate Stealth access from a Deadeye in PvE.

I understand that if a boss can't interact with a Stealthed player who has the enemy fixate, then the boss will just stand there doing nothing (we saw this on the release of Old Lion's Court). I do not want to cheese enemies. I want the bosses to see through Stealth so they don't lock down AND Deadeye can have fun.

Negative: Keen Observer/Malice Critical Chance reliance

Deadeye has an unhealthy reliance on Critical Chance to generate points of Malice. This is problematic:

Keen Observer grants 15% critical chance when the Thief is above 75% HP. It is trivially easy to take a small amount of damage in a raid and drop below this threshold, but have a healer think you don't need a burst heal. Without the Critical Chance, Malice is not guaranteed. Without guaranteed Malice, Maleficent Seven rotations fall apart. DPS builds are supposed to do damage and have fun doing it. This problem is particularly egregious for Initiative skills that only have a single damage packet—notably, daggers. Nothing else in game is as damage-averse as Dagger Deadeye—nothing in Elementalist even comes close to this sensitivity.

Condition builds, which cannot afford to max out their critical chance to begin with, strongly prefer Initiative skills with multiple hits. This is why Scepter-Dagger Condition Deadeye never got off the ground, while Scepter-Dagger Condition Specter is doing well.

It must be recognized that ANet has taken steps to alleviate some of this strain:

• Keen Observer used to punish the player for dropping below 90% HP, not 75%. Good change, not good enough.
• Malicious Intent now grants 2 Malice after you Stealth attack or use Deadeye's Mark. That's significant because it means you only need 5 Malice to reach 7. You'll use 3 Initiative skills to get there, and if one of them fails to Crit, you're still okay. It's a damage loss to not crit, but the rotation doesn't fall apart! Best of all, if you get to 6 Malice before Cloak & Dagger, you know you'll hit 7 Malice no matter what—no gambling, you can queue straight from Cloak & Dagger into Backstab.

Also note: if you're below 75% HP, you're below 90% HP, so you lose 7% Critical Damage from Twin Fangs. That's already enough to drop a 43K bench down to to 40.2.

Contrast all this with Power Scrapper, which generates such an obscene amount of personal barrier via the MINOR TRAIT Impact Savant that its lax health modifiers are never in any danger

To wit: Scrapper's Glass Cannon loses 10% damage if the player drops below 75% HP, which is less of a loss than Keen Observer explained below. Big Boomer only asks you to have more HP than your target and grants you an obscene 15% damage—that modifier becomes easier and easier to maintain the longer the fight goes on. Both are trivial for Scrapper which has two health bars due to all the Barrier you constantly generate just by dealing damage to enemies—scaling with the number of enemies you hit!

Unlike Reaper's "two health bar" meme, Scrapper is equally performant at full barrier and empty barrier—it will deal 100% damage in either scenario. A Reaper with 100% life force and 0% life force loses a HUGE amount of damage. Don't mistake them as the same.

If Scrapper "needs" this Barrier to preserve its health modifier, then the game is improperly balanced until Scrapper does reasonably less damage than both Power Holosmith (which lacks that insane Barrier, but has the very same health modifier requirements as Scrapper) and Power Deadeye (which also has no Barrier and suffers massively when it drops below the Keen Observer threshold: more in a later section)

Negative: F1 Deadeye's Mark clashes with encounter design

Importantly, some fights have multiple hitboxes for the same enemy, or never refund Deadeye's Mark despite "killing" an enemy.

For the former: Conjured Amalgamate has 2 hitboxes. The first is active at the very start of the phase so if you're too fast, you'll uselessly mark that hitbox then be unable to hit it, and thus unable to be a Deadeye. This first hitbox is later the head: CA lowers its head if the Sword/Shield collection and burn phase took too long. The second hitbox is the "body", which you attack during the collection phase.

For the latter: the hands on CA never "die" they just deplete to 100 then leave the arena. When they do so, your F1 Mark is not refunded. This is also the basic case for the Dragonvoid in the Harvest Temple strike mission—when you defeat each "version", your Mark is not refunded, but the fight marches on.

Beyond those extreme examples, you marry yourself to your target via the Mark mechanic, which does not play well with various well-meaning encounter designs. Deadeye's attacks provide very little cleave to deal with other enemies, making you heavily reliant on other people picking up your slack, while you do...the same damage as them on the main target, with current profession balance.

You can take Mercy to alleviate this target-swapping problem, but that does not play well with using Rifle, as the weapon either (A) needs you to fill your slot skills with Stealth sources, and you can't keep it fed indefinitely that way, or (B) take Silent Scope trait, which is a considerable DPS loss. People stop playing builds when they only do 38K even if they have CC. How about 38K with slow crawling speed, no CC slotted, and all the other downsides described in this thread?

When playing Deadeye you always need to pay attention to the length of time you spend in a phase and know whether you need to bring Mercy. This is similar to "skill saving" on other builds—if the Deadeye is not set up to place their Mark on the new target, they forsake a huge damage modifier AND can't generate Malice, resorting to auto attacks. (examples include Gorseval and its ghosts, Sabetha and her champions, Keep Construct and its phantasms, Deimos and Saul, Conjured Amalgamate and its hands, and Twin Largos Nikare and Kenut).

The most ridiculous example is Drakkar.

Deadeye can only mark one enemy, so any encounter which rapidly swaps between targets makes Deadeye pathetic. This is parodied spectacularly with the Bjora Marches world boss Drakkar, which is made up of 17 separate boss props, sharing a health pool. Once one part of the boss' attack sequence concludes, the boss prop phases out of the fight, but Deadeye's Mark is not refunded to the player.

Do I need Deadeye to be viable on Drakkar? No. I just need you to understand how INSANE this can get.

Negative: Lack of Burst Damage

Properly "bursty" power DPS builds generally have the ability to throw out multiple overlapping packets of damage (e.g. Frost Trap and One Wolf Pack on Power Soulbeast), enormous damage modifiers (Sic 'Em on Soulbeast), and lots of high damage abilities to string together before resorting to low damage filler (cooldown skills vs auto attacks). (Power Bladesworn is a noticeable counterexample with one enormous hit buffed with modifiers, but it's important to note that it only gets that damage at the start of a fight when it has a colossal 25% damage modifier in the Warrior's Cunning trait).

Maleficent Seven Deadeye loops through its Malice every 3-4 seconds. It doesn't have room for any of its skills to be "bursty", otherwise it'd have truly insane damage (look at the Condition Axe build in beta). Some Rifle configurations physically have NO filler. If you take Quickness away from Silent Scope Rifle Deadeye, there is no adjustment they can make to the rotation to mitigate some of that loss. They can only do the same thing they were planning, just much slower. This is in contrast to builds with many skills to push, where you'll skip lower priority skills in favor of the harder hitting cooldown skills.

Deadeye does not have enormous, short-duration damage modifiers. All it has is Assassin's Signet, which is ~9% damage boost for just five seconds. Contrast that with Dragonhunter's Big Game Hunter (a 20% damage modifier for 12 seconds) or Soulbeast's Sic 'Em (a 25% damage modifier for 10 seconds).

Beyond that, all we have is

• Shadow Flare, which only provides a bit of overlapping damage. The skill used to have a 3.6 coefficient over 5.5 seconds, but now has a 2.0 coefficient over ~0.5 seconds. The cooldown was reduced so we cast it more often. Shadow Swap (half of the skill's 2.0 coefficent) only strikes enemies at the orb's destination. If we use the skill at range, it will only strike once! It's a good skill in melee range, but cannot carry the rest of Deadeye's kit.
• Thieves Guild also can't carry us. It's another layered damage source, but their damage output is anemic. In fact did you know if the summoned Guild Deadeye is not looking at your enemy when you start attacking, it will just stand there like a lemon and do nothing?

Deadeye does not NEED to have burst damage, mind you. It can shine as a sustained damage build...but not when builds like Soulbeast and Power Vindicator have far superior burst and similar (or better!) sustain.

You have to consider that when looking at golem benchmarks, DPS builds have no downtime to recover cooldowns that they can use in a burst. Because Deadeye is setup for endurance, not burst, it performs well on a golem (where none of these other downsides harry it), but falls behind superior burst power builds in real encounters.

I'd love for all benchmarks to represent burst in some way, but I have no doubt I'd find it virtually impossible to get players to agree on which metric to use, because "first numbers" on Golem benchmarks (when the Golem hits 80% HP) are extremely volatile (and golem benchmarks do not align with the best actions you can take for a short-duration burst window). These first numbers are even worse metrics for balance than the end numbers (which already aren't good in isolation—they're merely diagnostic to assess damage while also considering all other features, like I'm doing in this thread).

I don't have a solution on my end here, even as someone who (A) provides benchmark and (B) works as a content editor for Snow Crows, and oversees builds and their benchmarks.

Negative: Rifle's downsides

Kneeling with a Rifle slows movement to roleplay-walk speed. Deadeye can transmit most of its damage profile out to 1,500 range when using Rifle, although it only has sustained damage without burst—momentary spread mechanics do NOT favor a Deadeye as the player can neither quickly move, nor capitalize on the spread by applying a burst of damage while melee builds deal zero. You just keep doing the same damage you were doing, giving you at best a slight lead over other builds.

The damage is weaker than many modern melee builds, it has a fragile "lifespan" for its rotation, and Three Round Burst cannot pierce through targets.

Death's Judgment always deals full damage to the Marked target, but suffers three damage penalties when damaging pierced-through enemies. The coefficient is reduced by approx. 50%, you lose the 70% damage bonus derived from Malice, and the 15% Damage modifier from the Iron Sight trait. In total then, a pierced-through target takes only 25% of the damage that the Marked target takes!

I mentioned earlier that the highest DPS option for Rifle asks that you commit your slot skills to Stealth sources. That means Rifle deadeye can struggle to provide Defiance Break in encounters. The work around is to use Rifle less (take Dagger/Dagger for when you run out of Stealth, or Dagger/Pistol as a hybrid DPS-CC weapon set), or make Rifle weaker (take Silent Scope).

That's compelling balance in theory, but Rifle Deadeye just doesn't do quite enough damage to make that trade worthwhile.

Negative: Animation Locking

I'm not asking for animation locks to be removed. I'm asking for them to factor into the build's power budget.

The worst animation locking on Deadeye belongs to an off-meta option: Staff-Dagger.

Have you ever suffered from animation lock with Staff on Daredevil because you queued Weakening Charge too many times?

Imagine if the rotation had you do that 11 times in a row!

More commonly, painful animation locking on Deadeye is from Dagger's Heartseeker skill. With Quickness, this is a 600ms animation lock you cast twice every ~4 seconds, totaling 1200ms.

For reference, that's the same length of Death's Charge shroud skill used by Power Reaper. Imagine that length of animation, cast unceasingly, with a much larger DPS loss for not using it (Reaper using autos instead of Death's Charge is a MUCH smaller loss than Deadeye using Dancing Dagger instead of Heartseeker vs targets below 50%/25% HP).

Negative: Flanking/Backstab vs Non-Defiant Prop Enemies

You no longer need to  Flank enemies for the Twin Fangs trait), nor stand Behind enemies for the Backstab skill Defiant enemies but not all enemies are defiant! Deimos at 10%, Conjured Amalgamate and its Hands, Adina's Hands, the Dragonvoid...

The stated intention for the change vs Defiant enemies was to make these requirements "more reliable in endgame PvE content", but non-Defiant prop enemies are the least readable enemies we fight! It's not at all intuitive that Conjured Amalgamate is NOT facing the center of the platform (it's facing to the right, when viewing the platform from Zommoros) despite the boss visually facing the center. It's not at all intuitive that all the Hands during Cardinal Adina's fight are facing different directions.

Thank you for reading!

Edited January 17 by Iskarel.7240
updated SH PoV to a new one from current patch

[Asra.8746]

Thanks for the essay.

If you think that the balance team cares, you're very wrong.

Let me put that in the pile of "ain't nobody got time to read all that"...which is exactly what the ANet balance team will do (that's if they even come to this sub).

PS: Glancing through, I noticed you complained about Dragonvoid...I have good news for you; enjoy axes flying off to nowhere when axe is released. 🤡

Edited January 17 by Asra.8746

[Iskarel.7240]

2 minutes ago, Asra.8746 said:

Thanks for the essay.

If you think that the balance team cares, you're very wrong.

Let me put that in the pile of "ain't nobody got time to read all that"...which is exactly what the ANet balance team will do (that's if they even come to this sub).

PS: Glancing through, I noticed you complained about Dragonvoid...I have good news for you; enjoy axes flying off to nowhere when axe is released. 🤡

I'm well aware of Axe's problems, a colleague of mine documented them all here:

 

[ZeroTheRuler.7415]

@Iskarel.7240 theres some other issues with deadeye, but weren't mentioned.

1. You can't cast deadeyes mark on some meta bosses like Octovine or Maw of Nourys
2. You need to disable autoattack else it might cancel death's judgement if you have quickness on
3. Some environments mask over deadeyes malice UI indicators making them hard to see 

Edit: here is a better thread where auto attack is being discussed. Personally I think it's a bug even if everyone else says just turn auto attack off.

Edited January 17 by ZeroTheRuler.7415

[yakkin.7189]

9 hours ago, ZeroTheRuler.7415 said:

theres some other issues with deadeye, but weren't mentioned.

1. You can't cast deadeyes mark on some meta bosses like Octovine or Maw of Nourys
2. You need to disable autoattack else it might cancel death's judgement if you have quickness on
3. Some environments mask over deadeyes malice UI indicators making them hard to see 

Edit: here is a better thread where auto attack is being discussed. Personally I think it's a bug even if everyone else says just turn auto attack off.

1. and 3.  are annoying and you can find out more about them, and plenty of other bugs and issues, in this neat google doc. These issues should be adressed, but the underlying issues tackled in this post are more so focused on balancing aspects, with some game related ones like the issue with prop bosses, multipart bosses and phasing bosses.

Funny that you'd mention issues revolving around rifle auto attacks, but the forum you've linked doesn't actually tell the truth. There is one issue related to Rifle Auto Attacks and one issue related to stealth attacks in combination with Shadow Gust.

The reason why it's recommended to disable auto attack on the Rifle Premed build, is so that you can properly queue other skills, in this case Three Round Burst.
If auto attack was enabled, you'd instead cancel the cast of Death's Judgment with any other skill input (since any skill on auto cast will be canceled by another skill used). Since Death's Judgment reveals at the start of the cast, you're screwed.

There is also another reason as to why you're preemptively revealing yourself, which has nothing to do with Rifle Autos and Auto Attack, but something to do with how Shadow Gust's Stealth application is slightly delayed and allows for an additional auto attack to happen inbetween its cast and the stealth application, thus revealing you.
Coincidentally enough, that issue is mostly resolved by enabling auto attack on your skills and not spamming said button.

Since I know you're also on the SC discord, and for anyone else interested in these explanations and theorycrafting alltogether, you can find Iskarel talking about the Queuing Issue here and about the Shadow Gust issue here. They're no bugs, but just consequences of how the queuing system works.

(Im)Properly Queuing your skills is usually the culprit of many issues have when it comes to DE, which are not exclusive to Rifle Premed Builds. These issues are also just part of the game, are logical once you dive deeper into the priority system and ultimately add to the complexity of the class. And after all, you can still do perfectly fine with autos enabled on Rifle.

What you might be referring to, sounds more like an issue with Steal Time as outlined by wipemop here.

Edited January 17 by yakkin.7189

[Mor The Thief.9135]

All I can say is I hope Anet sees this and actually do something about it... Thief probably has the most issues across its entirety when compared to other classes, not to mention one of its elite specs actually gets completely countered by BAD GAMEPLAY DESIGN.

[MorningGlow.5376]

Thank you!

At first i was a bit intimdated by the sheer amount of text, but i found it to be quite an enjoyable read. I really appreciate the tremendous amount of effort you put into this! In terms of content... i don't think there's much to add. You've done your research well. (Also: pointing out the negativ in a constructive, non-toxic manner, while also mentioning the good? Am i still in the forums?)

This deserves to be seen by A-net. Fingers are crossed.

Edited January 17 by MorningGlow.5376

[Iskarel.7240]

BTW, here's a great example of the pain caused by boss Reveal (phase 2 Sabir) and then by Malice's unhealthy dependence on Critical Chance (Weakness in phase 3):

 

[ZeroTheRuler.7415]

10 hours ago, yakkin.7189 said:

What you might be referring to, sounds more like an issue with Steal Time as outlined by wipemop here.

I will try and pop in more to the SC discord, just been super busy -_-'. It's always fun talking to everyone there.

Yeah, that's what I was referring to. Maybe I should have been more specific. I mainly use deadeye for WvW and I count attacks there so I don't queue extra attacks haha. I had thought it was because of the quickness, but maybe it's just stolen skills like Steal Time. For instance I press F2, 1 when DJ shows up and then sometimes a auto fires and hits before DJ goes off. I haven't queued anything else. Yes, a "auto" could have been queued in the system, however to me that seems more like a bug then anything else as it doesn't seem to happen for all stolen skills.

In any case the issues above, plus revealed, having to flank on non defiant encounters, and the length of deadeye's mark on phases are reasons I don't play DE in PvE much.

Edit: Steal Time and scepter's interaction with stealth attacks also seems weird. Malice doesn't always clear there as well.

Edited January 17 by ZeroTheRuler.7415

[FrancisN.9276]

I have read all that and I am not even an Anet's paid employee to do that. If someone is not doing their job right and the company is ok with it, then, I guess, as a customer, I should not be supporting them financially.

[Axelteas.7192]

What frustrates me the most when I play deadeye is that reaper can do more DPS just smashing the keyboard with his forehead.

[Antycypator.9874]

There's honestly only one thing that makes me feel worse as a Deadeye — I don't have any benefits for being a SINGLE TARGET damage dealer. We have two types of PvE fights:

1. When there's only one enemy (most likely champ, end-game boss etc) — Rifle and D/D Deadeye doesn't stand out against only one enemy, because everyone can do similar damage, or sometimes even higher dmg.

2. When there are many enemies — and every non-staff Deadeye is absolute garbage against many enemies at once, because you can burst only 1 enemy — this results in thief being actually low damage dealer. You smack 1 enemy for 60k, while e.g. power reaper smacks 5 enemies for 80k.