Blinding powder + heartseeker stealth

[Les.4872]

Is it just me or is it no longer possible to look at the ground during heartseeker to make the heartseeker jump range smaller for fast stealthing in blinding powder? Before most attack would be aimed in the direction the camera is facing but now i feel like anet did something in the lastest patch so that the attacks are only aimed straight.

[Grissman.2845]

General

Barrier: The application of the barrier effect no longer resets the delay or decay of existing barriers. Barrier no longer decays over time; each application now disappears after 5 seconds, and all skills that grant barrier now give 15% more barrier.

Movement Skills: Camera facing no longer reduces the travel distance of these skills.

Interrupts and Defiance: Skills, traits, and sigils that have bonus effects when interrupting foes will now activate when used against foes with defiance bars as though they had been interrupted. Note that this does not require a creature's defiance bar to be active, just that the creature be using a skill when an interrupt effect is applied. To prevent abuse against bosses with long attack windups, a 3-second cooldown between activations of these skills has been added to skills without existing cooldowns. This cooldown is only applied when interrupting foes with defiance bars.

They "fixed" it in the latest patch.

[Les.4872]

Urghhhh. There was nothing to fix. It was a cool mechanic. Granted you can still stealth 4 times into blinding powder but it's annoying now. WHY DOES ANET DO THE THINGS THEY DO!?

[blarghhrrkblah.3412]

It's an unintuitive mechanic (despite being in the game since the beginning). It did come bundled with the staff 2 change, which makes life considerably easier in PvE, so maybe that had something to do with it. Personally, I don't care much that it's gone.

[Cynz.9437]

Preventing thieves and eles from using camera for said combo was more important to Anet than addressing scourges/fb/mirage in pvp/wvw.

[Volrath.1473]

just do it against a wall or a rock or something

[AikijinX.6258]

You can still perform the 4 HS thru BP, it just takes alittle more practice.

[NuhDah.9812]

@blarghhrrkblah.3412 said:It's an unintuitive mechanic (despite being in the game since the beginning). It did come bundled with the staff 2 change, which makes life considerably easier in PvE, so maybe that had something to do with it. Personally, I don't care much that it's gone.

It is an unintuitive mechanic for people who don't actually care about how to make the best of the profession and don't care about checking how other people do it to improve themselves. It's like you can't find this thing all over the place just doing a little search, and yeah it takes some practice at the beginning to get the hang on it, but shouldn't those who practice and those with knowledge be rewarded anyways?

As for pve, I'm saying this again, DP - which was the build that benefited from it the most, was far for being the optimal build for most of the pve content anyways, so I'm not sure how bringing up pve in this case makes it better. It was a system that worked nice with the pvp side of the game, but they feel like breaking again at least a bit of the few viable pvp options of thief in any balance patch. Cause thief without a nerf doesn't go well on game update sheets.

@"AikijinX.6258" said:You can still perform the 4 HS thru BP, it just takes alittle more practice.

More like raise the annoyance bar few points, cause all this did was making it more annoying to pull off along with messing up people with a bit higher ping or lower fps. rip playing thief "because it's fun to play". They managed to kill that concept too. Not to mention this has less to do with the fact that you can or cannot jump 4 times throughyour BP and more to do with the positioning and timing capability that system mechanic was offering you.

[Les.4872]

@blarghhrrkblah.3412 said:It's an unintuitive mechanic (despite being in the game since the beginning). It did come bundled with the staff 2 change, which makes life considerably easier in PvE, so maybe that had something to do with it. Personally, I don't care much that it's gone.

Gonna assume you don't pvp much. It wasn't an unintuitive mechanic. it was a useful and flexible mechanic that allowed you to play with the range of the heartseeker. Staff 2 was a good change but heartseeker change was unnecessary and stupid considering it has been there since launch.

[AikijinX.6258]

@NuhDah.9812 said:

@blarghhrrkblah.3412 said:It's an unintuitive mechanic (despite being in the game since the beginning). It did come bundled with the staff 2 change, which makes life considerably easier in PvE, so maybe that had something to do with it. Personally, I don't care much that it's gone.

It is an unintuitive mechanic for people who don't actually care about how to make the best of the profession and don't care about checking how other people do it to improve themselves. It's like you can't find this thing all over the place just doing a little search, and yeah it takes some practice at the beginning to get the hang on it, but shouldn't those who practice and those with knowledge be rewarded anyways?

As for pve, I'm saying this again, DP - which was the build that benefited from it the most, was far for being the optimal build for most of the pve content anyways, so I'm not sure how bringing up pve in this case makes it better. It was a system that worked nice with the pvp side of the game, but they feel like breaking again at least a bit of the few viable pvp options of thief in any balance patch. Cause thief without a nerf doesn't go well on game update sheets.

@"AikijinX.6258" said:You can still perform the 4 HS thru BP, it just takes alittle more practice.

More like raise the annoyance bar few points, cause all this did was making it more annoying to pull off along with messing up people with a bit higher ping or lower fps. rip playing thief "because it's fun to play". They managed to kill that concept too. Not to mention this has less to do with the fact that you can or cannot jump 4 times throughyour BP and more to do with the positioning and timing capability that system mechanic was offering you.

If you know the 10second perma stealth HS+ Bound trick, or 13second stealth shortbow clusterbomb+ Bound trick, you still should be in good standing in terms of stealth acquisition. Yes this change sucks, and was unnecessary, but this was most likely to combat perma stealth play style, so pretty much you will counter yourself, if you miss a BP, and will better aid for other classes to combat D/P perma's.

But i do agree, it was rather unnecessary

[NuhDah.9812]

@AikijinX.6258 said:

@NuhDah.9812 said:

@blarghhrrkblah.3412 said:It's an unintuitive mechanic (despite being in the game since the beginning). It did come bundled with the staff 2 change, which makes life considerably easier in PvE, so maybe that had something to do with it. Personally, I don't care much that it's gone.

It is an unintuitive mechanic for people who don't actually care about how to make the best of the profession and don't care about checking how other people do it to improve themselves. It's like you can't find this thing all over the place just doing a little search, and yeah it takes some practice at the beginning to get the hang on it, but shouldn't those who practice and those with knowledge be rewarded anyways?

As for pve, I'm saying this again, DP - which was the build that benefited from it the most, was far for being the optimal build for most of the pve content anyways, so I'm not sure how bringing up pve in this case makes it better. It was a system that worked nice with the pvp side of the game, but they feel like breaking again at least a bit of the few viable pvp options of thief in any balance patch. Cause thief without a nerf doesn't go well on game update sheets.

@AikijinX.6258 said:You can still perform the 4 HS thru BP, it just takes alittle more practice.

More like raise the annoyance bar few points, cause all this did was making it more annoying to pull off along with messing up people with a bit higher ping or lower fps. rip playing thief "because it's fun to play". They managed to kill that concept too. Not to mention this has less to do with the fact that you can or cannot jump 4 times throughyour BP and more to do with the positioning and timing capability that system mechanic was offering you.

If you know the 10second perma stealth HS+ Bound trick, or 13second stealth shortbow clusterbomb+ Bound trick, you still should be in good standing in terms of stealth acquisition. Yes this change sucks, and was unnecessary, but this was most likely to combat perma stealth play style, so pretty much you will counter yourself, if you miss a BP, and will better aid for other classes to combat D/P perma's.

But i do agree, it was rather unnecessary

Man, I saw one of your recent videos, you do wonders with you sd builds, props mate. I would have loved to see the fights in normal speed, but the music was cool too so speeding them up a bit was fine to keep the pace clean.

Now to answer your post, I usually don't play bound so what you said doesn't really apply to to me, but I wasn't complaining about there not being any solutions to get 4-5 leaps and blasts into BP, it just sucks that they make the thief play style more clunky, especially when it wasn't even an issue. Also I liked the system in itself, for me it felt like it offered more control on what you can do in a way that it only added to the game's combat (other classes used this too). I mean you can know abilities and traits by reading tooltips, but if the game offers more things you can use without explaining it to you strait forward and lets you explore all sort of ways for timing stuff and positioning more efficiently, without breaking the game, for me this only adds to a game. That being said obvious bugs that break the game should be fixed, but stuff like this that only gives you a bit of nuance to what you can do, some flavor to movement, was really fine.

[blarghhrrkblah.3412]

@Les.4872 said:

@blarghhrrkblah.3412 said:It's an unintuitive mechanic (despite being in the game since the beginning). It did come bundled with the staff 2 change, which makes life considerably easier in PvE, so maybe that had something to do with it. Personally, I don't care much that it's gone.

Gonna assume you don't pvp much. It wasn't an unintuitive mechanic. it was a useful and flexible mechanic that allowed you to play with the range of the heartseeker. Staff 2 was a good change but heartseeker change was unnecessary and stupid considering it has been there since launch.

I spend most of my time in PvP, so I'm well aware of how useful it was. The reason I call it unintuitive is because I think the mechanic existed as a result of how the camera interacted with skills, rather than it being intended by the devs to behave how it did. It has nothing to do with how useful it was or whether or not the change was necessary.

[NuhDah.9812]

intuition:the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning;a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.

I guess what you wanted to say was you think is "unintentional". In a way it's possible devs didn't intended to make it work like that, or they just want right now to remove "wildcards" from the combat system to make their work easier, but I sort of doubt it the former. I wouldn't want to presume they weren't aware of how the physics engine they implemented themselves worked. And yeah, it was useful, skillful and fun to play. It's removal didn't make the game more intuitive, but less fun. Good job!

[Jinks.2057]

Needless change that makes the game worse now that it's gone.

Decreasing the control of a players character is always a bad thing

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

@Jinks.2057 said:Needless change that makes the game worse now that it's gone.

Decreasing the control of a players character is always a bad thing

Not when the class is balanced around having bizarre and counter-intuitive design choices explicitly stated nowhere. I'd rather have thieves be buffed and have consistent controls than have thieves be dependent on an obscure movement tech known by very few people.

[Jinks.2057]

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

@Jinks.2057 said:Needless change that makes the game worse now that it's gone.

Decreasing the control of a players character is always a bad thing

Not when the class is balanced around having bizarre and counter-intuitive design choices explicitly stated nowhere. I'd rather have thieves be buffed and have consistent controls than have thieves be dependent on an obscure movement tech known by very few people.

They aren't buffing thieves mate and the movement technique isn't know by only a few ppl. It's well known for years now

[NuhDah.9812]

@Jinks.2057 said:

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

@Jinks.2057 said:Needless change that makes the game worse now that it's gone.

Decreasing the control of a players character is always a bad thing

Not when the class is balanced around having bizarre and counter-intuitive design choices explicitly stated nowhere. I'd rather have thieves be buffed and have consistent controls than have thieves be dependent on an obscure movement tech known by very few people.

They aren't buffing thieves mate and the movement technique isn't know by only a few ppl. It's well known for years now

I like how you tied both your statements to "It's well known for years now" lol. Exactly as you said, they never buff thief, or when they do there's a nerf in other places which usually make it worse. The only way they "buffed" thief in the last few years was by nerfing out of control stuff from the other professions. So getting buffs to thief sounds very nice in theory, but as you can see, they only did buff deadeye and did nothing in the place that was affected by the change.

Also @Blood Red Arachnid.2493, the only people who probably didn't know about the mechanic are probably new people and totally ignorant people aka people who didn't care anyways or never used it and didn't care anyways. This mechanic was not existent only for thief it applied to every leap from every profession in the game, so even if you didn't play thief if you cared about how your profession plays you were aware of this mechanic. And as I said before "intuition" has nothing to do with the mechanic, awareness does. But I guess there are people who's intuition only resumes to reading skill tooltips.

[Menyus.4610]

Its not just the 4 leap into the BP, but the fact that you can no longer stealth in groupfights at points because of the long leap you will reveal yourself constantly , this is an unnecesarry and hard nerf for thieves again, they added the stealth skill cd which killed the fast peace of theives, then they removed sword 2 travel, then with pof they introduced more reveal skills to fk all the other traits expect DeadEye, and i almost forget they gave to our biggest counter a reveal on the skill which already were fking us in every scenario(DH spear) this is just another proof that the balance team does not understand their game mechanic.

[Alatar.7364]

I suggest you try to do Heartseeker in the Black Powder instead... =D

[KrHome.1920]

@"NuhDah.9812" said:This mechanic was not existent only for thief it applied to every leap from every profession in the game, so even if you didn't play thief if you cared about how your profession plays you were aware of this mechanic. And as I said before "intuition" has nothing to do with the mechanic, awareness does. But I guess there are people who's intuition only resumes to reading skill tooltips.You call it mechanic.

The devs call it exploitation of unintended skill behavior... and fixed it.

[MUDse.7623]

i play deadeye without trickery so dont have enough initative for 4th leap but its annoying that you cover a larger area so you have to be very careful not to get revealed by it, but now it works even better standing stealthed in enemy thieves black powder..i feel now like i have a lot less control about my movement wich is annoying and will take some time to get used to.

[kash.9213]

@KrHome.1920 said:

@"NuhDah.9812" said:This mechanic was not existent only for thief it applied to every leap from every profession in the game, so even if you didn't play thief if you cared about how your profession plays you were aware of this mechanic. And as I said before "intuition" has nothing to do with the mechanic, awareness does. But I guess there are people who's intuition only resumes to reading skill tooltips.You call it mechanic.

The devs call it exploitation of unintended skill behavior... and fixed it.

More prep time for more stealth time, worked just fine and it wasn't an exploit and it didn't need to be fixed. You had a choice of what you wanted to do with stealth and the main difference of that choice for an enemy player was either, they're still going to attack you, or they're trying to bypass you. It's purely another straight up nerf where they pick some obscure reason that's hasn't been a thing since the beginning to say it needs to be fixed because thief.

[NuhDah.9812]

@KrHome.1920 said:

@"NuhDah.9812" said:This mechanic was not existent only for thief it applied to every leap from every profession in the game, so even if you didn't play thief if you cared about how your profession plays you were aware of this mechanic. And as I said before "intuition" has nothing to do with the mechanic, awareness does. But I guess there are people who's intuition only resumes to reading skill tooltips.You call it mechanic.

The devs call it exploitation of unintended skill behavior... and fixed it.

I actually view it as a mechanic since it was something added to the normal fixed length of an ability, it was either something that came with the physics design of the engine or added on purpose as a additional function of the leaps. Either way you look at it you can see it was an additional effect that wasn't taking away from the ability and was there since launch and adopted by everyone who knew about it and cared about how can using that might improve their combat ability. The fact that some people complained about it, or the devs didn't expect the behavior (in which case it would be pretty sad since they developed the game) and started calling it a bug at some point it's another issue. But in case the devs were aware of it it sure looks like something added on purpose, not a bug.

[NuhDah.9812]

@kash.9213 said:

@KrHome.1920 said:

@"NuhDah.9812" said:This mechanic was not existent only for thief it applied to every leap from every profession in the game, so even if you didn't play thief if you cared about how your profession plays you were aware of this mechanic. And as I said before "intuition" has nothing to do with the mechanic, awareness does. But I guess there are people who's intuition only resumes to reading skill tooltips.You call it mechanic.

The devs call it exploitation of unintended skill behavior... and fixed it.

More prep time for more stealth time, worked just fine and it wasn't an exploit and it didn't need to be fixed. You had a choice of what you wanted to do with stealth and the main difference of that choice for an enemy player was either, they're still going to attack you, or they're trying to bypass you. It's purely another straight up nerf where they pick some obscure reason that's hasn't been a thing since the beginning to say it needs to be fixed because thief.

They didn't actually said it was changed "because thief" and I wouldn't be surprised that this being a nerf to DP thief was just a "convenient" (the devs would want players to leave old specs for the new ones) side effect of some changes they did to remove "wildcards" from the system to have better control over the abilities. Though this is just a guess of mine, it might be what you said or it might be entirely something else.

[kash.9213]

@NuhDah.9812 said:

@kash.9213 said:

@KrHome.1920 said:

@NuhDah.9812 said:This mechanic was not existent only for thief it applied to every leap from every profession in the game, so even if you didn't play thief if you cared about how your profession plays you were aware of this mechanic. And as I said before "intuition" has nothing to do with the mechanic, awareness does. But I guess there are people who's intuition only resumes to reading skill tooltips.You call it mechanic.

The devs call it exploitation of unintended skill behavior... and fixed it.

More prep time for more stealth time, worked just fine and it wasn't an exploit and it didn't need to be fixed. You had a choice of what you wanted to do with stealth and the main difference of that choice for an enemy player was either, they're still going to attack you, or they're trying to bypass you. It's purely another straight up nerf where they pick some obscure reason that's hasn't been a thing since the beginning to say it needs to be fixed because thief.

They didn't actually said it was changed "because thief" and I wouldn't be surprised that this being a nerf to DP thief was just a "convenient" (the devs might hope players will stop playing dp DrD and will want to try DE) side effect of some changes that they did to remove "wildcards" from the system to have better control over the abilities. Though this is just a guess of mine, it might be what you said or it might be entirely something else.

That makes sense, I think I'm responding more to the other posts than the change. They sure do like to mess with thief player base creativity with their mechanics but if they want to normalize future development I hope they tackle some of our pathing issues early on.