lioka qiao, on 11 January 2013 - 06:09 PM, said:
My point in countering a mechanic like this is that it doesn't matter who you put it on or how expensive it is. It is a hard counter to thieves and groups will stack it to counter thieves with it as much as possible. In a big zerg vs zerg fight thieves will lose viability thanks to this mechanic. Zergs will invariably drop the ward or trap or whatever how it works and no thief will be able to get to melee range much less avoid the onslaught of weapon shots spammed at him. To an extent mesmers will lose some capability too but thankfully they have their clones to fall back on.
In sPvP you would have to choose classes which carry the best version of the skill that drops the revealed zones or otherwise die against thieves. Eventually everyone carries some form of the revealed condition and thieves lose the ability to compete in any pvp.
The only reason these abilities worked in world of warcraft is because of how stealth worked: Taking damage would drop stealth and players could see the stealthed rogue would be revealed if he was in front of his enemy. Additionally stealth was also easily accessible as a toggled ability and had infinite duration.
My point is that ANET cannot introduce a hard counter to a class in this game. If they introduce a revealing mechanic that breaks stealth as a castable aoe or trap then they have to make changes to stealth itself and make it more easily accessed by thieves. If they introduce revealed like this and leave stealth as it is it destroys a thief's viability in pvp.
A more balanced countermeasure is to bring in one of the aspects of wow's stealth: make it such that taking damage in stealth reveals the stealthed player.
Making it expensive is going to mean that players who have it are going to be weaker if they're not facing stealth-users. There's going to be a point at which taking more on the odd chance of facing heavy stealth just isn't going to be worth it. If stealth is prevalent in a game mode, then more people will take countermeasures, until stealth becomes less attractive. If stealth-users have been driven out of a game mode due to too many countermeasures, groups using heavy countermeasures will rarely get use out of them and be at a disadvantage, pushing them to use less countermeasures until stealth becomes viable again. The system becomes self-correcting until it settles into the equilibrium where players feel they're taking an acceptable balance between risking facing stealth-users without having countermeasures, or risking being weighed down by countermeasures that are pointless in the battle.
If the end result is, as you claim, that the countermeasures are so prevalent that stealth play becomes impossible, than either that's showing that stealth is just so broken that people feel they MUST have countermeasures, or ArenaNet made the countermeasures too good. However, introducing countermeasures means that ArenaNet can have another means of balancing stealth - if stealth is too prevalent they can increase the strength of the countermeasures, if it is being pushed out, they can make the countermeasures weaker. The thing is, at the moment, stealth is pretty much a hard counter to pretty much any attempt to take a thief down that can't do so with area effects within a second or so. (Plus, it's not just a matter of punishing thieves in PvP - I'd love to be able to force those dratted skelks out of invisibility occasionally in PvE too.) Furthermore, in cases of zergs and the like where there probably are going to be countermeasures - who says that you HAVE to go melee? I'd regard having at least one ranged weapon as pretty much essential in WvWvW, and you can always hang back and shoot and reserve melee weapons for jumping targets of opportunity where the risk is worth it. That's the way I've played with a flipping
guardian, after all, and while I'd concede that thief ranged weapons aren't the best in the game for PvP, I would contend that they're better for PvP than a guardian's.
Damage dropping thieves out of stealth is, I think, actually too strong of a countermeasure.
Hitting a stealthed thief isn't hard, it's hitting them hard enough with blind-fired AoEs to drop them. If any area damage effect becomes a countermeasure, then it would suddenly become much too easy - rangers, necromancers and other thieves could just scatter a few marks and traps around, characters with cheap area effects like staff guardians and some engineer kits could simply blast the area around them, and even a fortuitously placed dual-purpose field such as a symbol, well, or chaos storm might catch an unlucky thief - and that's just assuming that the thief has so far escaped detection, rather than the other side having a recently known position to blast. You'd go from the current situation where stealth is pretty much a guaranteed escape to one where it becomes pretty much useless as soon as the enemy knows roughly where you are. Instead of a situation where some or any professions
may have a hard counter (which they still need to catch the stealth-user in to work) and where ArenaNet can indirectly control the availability of countermeasures by balancing said countermeasures, you'd have one where every staff guardian, staff necromancer, or flamethrower engineer becomes a hard counter, not to mention a whole bunch of PvE enemies. And that's assuming that condition damage doesn't count as damage, or stealth-users would
really be kittened. One thing to keep in mind with the WoW method, as I understand it, is that rogues there are really only expected to use stealth to get into a favourable position to start a fight, or to attempt to get out of it - they're not intended to use stealth
during a fight like GW2 thieves are.
Seriously, as someone who's so far WvW'd exclusively as a staff+melee set guardian, I would
love for your counterproposal to be implemented. As someone who actually cares about thieves remaining useful albeit not as untouchable as they can be now, however, I think my proposal is actually fairer to thieves.
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