Thief Spear Auto-Attack Instantly Breaks Stealth

[Doggie.3184]

Auto-Attack breaking stealth is a long-running issue on Thief for all weapons but Spear is by far the worst culprit of this since with "Deadeye Mark" stealth I could at least look away from enemy first before casting to try to prevent it w/o turning off AA. With Quickness on and Auto-Attack toggled on; "Shattering Assault's" stealth is instantly broken by "Barbed Spear" the moment it procs. Please add some sort of small grace period to where regular Auto-Attacks don't automatically cause reveal and finally put this issue to rest. 🥺🙏

I'm not pressing 1 at all in the video to proc the reveals, it's just the Auto-Attack doing it.

 

[Spoon.3580]

I've also discovered this issue with spear. I'm playing Deadeye, and when I have quickness, "Shattering Assault" is followed by a single auto-attack which immediately breaks stealth. No further auto-attacks happen, just the one. The single auto-attack triggers if I have spear 1, 2, or 4 set to auto; it does not happen when spear 3 is set to auto. It seems to only occur when I have quickness.

I haven't tested for this problem with other weapons. My only work-around for now is to not have anything set to auto-attack.

[Nomad.4301]

Seconding this, as I've been encountering this. At the moment spear is basically kitten in DPS because with quickness you will literally throw off 1 AA AFTER entering stealth and THEN you character will STOP attacking entirely as if they were still stealthed.. Makes doing any sort of rotation on DE nearly impossible in a group with quickness. Never even noticed this until I actually went to the training room and tried to actually do a proper rotation, only to find it impossible atm (with quickness and Auto turned on).

[Strutter.2719]

Yes this is super annoying and has forced me to disable auto attack on spear, which was also necessary on axe with no fix forthcoming.

Perhaps share the love you gave to rangers with their stealth skills on spear having a revealed grace period? That would also massively help with a lot of encounters that cause revealed.

The spear is otherwise an amazing addition and really addresses the feedback feedback we gave for axe, so I absolutely love it and this one fix would make it my new favourite weapon on thief (particularly on daredevil)!

Edited August 25 by Strutter.2719

[Iskarel.7240]

 

Deadeye has its own unique sources of Stealth, so it never really needs to use Shattering Assault. You can refer to my build for Power Quickness Deadeye which is a very fast rotation that never needs to use Shattering Assault—since Deadeye is a specialized Stealth Attacker, my rotation has more Stealth sources than are needed for Stealth access (but note that the Stolen Skills deal fantastic DPS). That's comfortable because it makes the build more flexible.

However, Shattering Assault is bugged, and that unduly strains the non-Deadeye Thief builds—which are all very strong with Spear.

1. Spear 3 Finisher, Shattering Assault: This skill's aftercast is seemingly too short, and if you have Quickness then the game doesn't have enough time to prevent the player from leaking an auto-attack after gaining Stealth. You MUST disable auto-cast on skill 1 to make this skill usable while you have quickness. Furthermore, you cannot hold down 1 to buffer your Stealth Attack the way you can with _most_ Stealth sources on Thief (this behavior is shared with Shadow Gust). This is possibly also related to the too-short aftercast—when you gain Stealth, the skill ends, so holding down 1 inputs Barbed Spear, not the Stealth Attack Ashen Assault. The workaround for the player here is that we have to simply input nothing until the skill grants us Stealth, THEN push 1. If you have bad ping, then you just have to deal with this. One possibility is that this skill and others like it should simply grant Stealth earlier into their cast, rather than making the skill/aftercast last longer.

2. Stealth Attacks cannot be queued normally, because they are not available on your bar until you gain Stealth. The common work around is to simply hold down 1 while gaining Stealth.

3. There is some flawed behavior with gaining Quickness during the cast of Deadeye's Stolen Skills and Shadow Gust—the change in total casting time lets the game leak an autocast, and you Reveal yourself. This also happens with Shattering Assault now.

4. It's also possible to use a Deadeye Stolen skill while you have Quickness and then weapon swap during the aftercast. If you swap to a weapon with auto-cast enabled on skill 1, then you will leak a basic auto attack and reveal yourself. This actually gave me problems with a specific Power Quickness Deadeye rotation I designed earlier this year, where I'd build up Malice on Staff, use an F2 for Stealth, then weapon swap to Dagger for its powerful Stealth Attack. If I was too fast on the swap and not fast enough to input my Stealth attack to override the auto. You can see that in this log: Go to `Player Summary > Simple Rotation` and check the second line: `Steal Time → Weapon Swap → Double Strike → Malicious Backstab`.

5. Spear 1 Malicious Stealth Attack (Deadeye's Version) did not receive the same fix as the core version of the skill. The Malicious version has low input priority, so any other skill can interrupt it: including the basic skill 1, Barbed Spear. This skill strikes 6 times, and after you Reveal yourself with any strike, skill slot 1 flips back to Barbed Spear. If you push 1 again, because you have a habit of mashing inputs, then you will quickly end the Stealth Attack early. If you do that, besides losing damage, you also will not get the 4 Initiative nor apply damaging conditions—those are all on the final hit.

[Strutter.2719]

Bumping for visibility 

[Amarils.8916]

It kind of killed my fun with the spear to be honest i hope they fix the revealed on aa after using shattering assault.

[Weaux.5023]

I get this too. Was driving me nuts missing my stealth attack. Thanks for the clarification on what's going on - hopefully it's fixed soon.

 

[Strutter.2719]

Every patch I hope this gets fixed or we at least get a reply. They were so quick to make the change that broke this so I'm hoping the fix won't be long!

[Zugare.9032]

Hope this gets fixed as it makes playing this class super frustrating

[Fortunello.9853]

Hey look, literally what i was saying in the thief forum, without this fixed, spear is so obnoxious to use in any content that you have quickness, that its better not to touch it, it´s not reliable because of the lost of damage. Better have it fixed.

Edited September 10 by Fortunello.9853

[MKJO.8970]

Is the stealth attack fixed with the current change to Shattering Assault? I know it works great on Daredevil now, since you only use 3c for stealth - but how about Deadeye?

Beeing able to turn on auto attacks on Spear 1, whilst playing Daredevil, is a welcoming change.

I love the spear on Daredevil, the fantasy just fits. But is Spear Deadeye just doomed?