A reflection on stealth classes

[nocturnalguest]

IMO anathema/agile escape - that is something that truly should be reworked into something which wouldnt be a fight-resetting cheat, but a combat tool.

Possible solutions:
1. Remove stagger entirely, leaving the leap intact (the most adequate solution IMO, opens up tactical variety for the skill's usage as well, as in leaping away from an enemy's confusing movements without triggering immunity) <<- this one is actually a relatively elegant solution
2. Place a debuff, after that leap, which would prevent casting stealth for like 15 sec (vanish, as something which needs to be specced into would still need to work...would be on CD tho if WH plays seriously and used vanish to use 2nd out-of-stealth opener already)
3. At the very least making AE/Anathema a defendable skill would partially improve things and this backleap would no longer be as cheaty as it is now.

Not a game designer myself, so im pretty sure some significantly more elegant and not super-nerfy solutions may be thought of, yet my point is the following - having an ultimate "Well, i lost the fight but im not letting my opponent kill me regardless" mechanism doesnt sound right. It really is like using alt+f4 with no consequences at all.

Well, those are already quite elegant solutions and something serious to discuss imo. Thanks for providing more value into thread. Its always nice then more people join the talk and come up with ideas based on skilled experience.

However lemme question those a bit and explain what i think:

1. While its not very nerfy, but you then cut out very viable option to lessen the pressure in highly organised gameplay (guys, dont please start with "6v6 is irrelevant" yet, but i mean 6v6 mostly and oRvR group roaming a bit ) on your team that WE/WH can provide. In situations when your team is being highly pressured you can stagger one dps and kite out a bit, try to disrupt enemy team movement and recover from pressure. That is very proactive gameplay, requires coordination from team (so nobody touch staggered enemy) and imo stagger+leap on mdps is pretty fun design. You can use it same way in group roaming and you can disrupt enemy nasty plans, e.g. tank aoe punt from bridge/into lava, dps zealot WoI drop and do many other interesting things with it.
Losing fun concepts is not an option i believe, we already have alot of things gutted out of the game. This way you leave selfish option for WE/WH to reposition a bit and thats it.
As for solo environment, you mention 3 parts of any solo encounter "skill", "gear" and "luck" - im not regular solo roamer and never was, i sometimes did it for tiny bit of my playtime on many classes and recently just dont it but according to my observation and experience in it, its a bit of overexaggeration for OPness in those abilities, fights are not static, even tho WE/WH can choose fights from stealth and approach you, you are not standing still, you move around so they are not fully guaranteed to pick a fight in their most desired terrain spot, they also dont control your movement and aim to score a kill on you, not just check how their burst will look like like on dummy. So their inner thinking process is always evaluating chances and decide to either continue or disengage, while their enemy knows for sure they have good escape options and if fight favors their enemy then enemy focus to prevent their disengage, trying to trick them into bad spots, keep dots on them, predict where they may hide and also there are many spots where they are limited by obstacles in their escape options, there are dps healers and rdps roamers that dont care so much of range. Another good sign of stagger+leap not being universal cheat tool is their deaths on killboard. They all die, even in duels. Dont get me wrong, i dont deny they, if very wish so, can disengage from any duel, its just im saying they just cant always do it. So its mostly two components of mentioned by you, skill and luck.
Lets also not forget that WE/WH apply KD and fight could be over before immunity expires.

2. This one looks very interesting but i believe it has to be modeled somehow in different encounters to choose proper numbers for debuff. You dont cut out anything, but rather introduce additional restriction. They will be able to stagger+leap+vanish but not permastealth again is a good thing. Briefly thinking of it i wasnt able to figure any super hard noes for such suggestion. However the biggest question here is debuff time. They need their out-of-stealth opener to reengage and if then they are limited into only short vanish but short vanish wont get them out of troubles to properly reengage so they will have to keep disengaging and gotta have 15 seconds of "downtime" before they can fully open and burst again (outside of balanced city fights everything will be over already, they will have to disengage and then go in again without stealth, they need some form of compensation for it in their capability to do dmg then), it could turn out to be way big punishment in group play i guess. Lets pick sl/wl/choppa as examples, those pop immunity and go out of reach by approx ~30-40ft and check if they are fine or not, if not then disengage further in circles dancing around enemy to keep at least dots or bit of cleaving (you cant just stop dpsing and go out in sunshine, you have to keep dmg flowing), while WL can also just jump away somewhere being very mobile.
I believe the biggest issue with this one is that its incredibly hard to balance around different game environments. 15 seconds could be too long for group play and too short for solo, so we restrict them in all others environments but solo for nothing pretty much.
How to balance their engage&disengage in group play? Should they have same "downtime" as slayer/choppa, considering those still dance around battlefield and mostly limited with getting rage back up (if they even drop it for disengage, it depends on encounter) but technically still focus to do dmg on a move? Should they be mobile as e.g. WL because they are very squishy in group play and have only selfdefense utilities to keep up?

3. Lets start with a fact that those were initially defendable in RoR (and generally considered huge lackluster in defendable state by many), it was changed back in like ~2017 or something. Logic and reasoning was that skills that do no damage should be undefendable. I dont recall pros&cons, there has been discussion about that back in a day and it was won by keeping it undefendable.
I personally believe that its better to give them some big hit or even better a very nasty delayed dot like BB/WoP/Cleft in Twain that will blow after 7-10 seconds but make this skill defendable. This will bring RNG factor in, so they will be way more careful with disengages but also open up tons of options for other gameplay modes in terms of using this stagger offensively. Dmg on dot or hit has to be incredibly high to justify immunity, decision making if you wanna keep stagger up or break it to lay out delayed dmg but you wont be able to KD. Brings alot of chaos into gameplay i guess. I dont know, could be fun if numbers are well thought out. Its also very easy to f*** up here, just like it was with dmg on shield healers on 3rd proc nightmare resurrection in 6v6 then people were able to kill thru guard in chch (nothing as stupid as to bruteforce a kill in 6v6 with no counter play, literally just dps race and luck of who gets to roll more crits).
Incredibly hard to balance numbers here and just doing it defendable is too nerfy imo. We've been there already, forum will be full of tears just like back then.

[Faction69]

For the over-simplified stealth class-playing individuals that happen to read this, I'll save your time: you just have to read the next line.
"someone is bitter that they died to a WE"

NOW, TO THE MATTER IN HAND:
TLDR:

WEs (and WHs to a lesser degree) need adjustments. Way too tanky and self supporting with no downsides nor sacrifices for a class that choose their fights and then disappear if they don't like the outcome.

At a sociological level, the possibility of no accountability and total impunity leads to an infestation of this extra cheese abomination and total frustration for people who manage to ALMOST win a fight vs them before the WE decides she isnt interested in dying and vanishes.

At the very least remove the vanish+speed+target loss stupidity that wasn't present nor needed in the original version of the game. One of the reasons that roaming is almost dead is that people who are brave or original enough to not play a stealth class will feel constantly cheated of their deserved win by a stupidly over-pampered class godmode state.


ABOUT THE INCOMING DPS PATCH
I don't have any hopes that I can realisticly expect to materialize, but I feel that I would like to express them, just for the record.

I see some problems at various levels regarding the current state of stealth classes in this game.

AT "ARCHETYPE" LEVEL:

At some point the devs will have to decide if they want Witch Elves (and WHs to a lesser degree) to be healers, tanks or dps.

Right now they are all three in one. OK, I am clearly exaggerating here, but there is something to it. The amount of self heal + absorb that a WE can do is already very high as dps go. Objectively. The fact that they don't have to spend any points in weapon skill as they do huge amounts of corporeal damage, (with some of the skills even ignoring toughness) plus spammable 100% armor ignore skill means they can build incredibly tanky without losing much damage power.

OK, you can say the same thing about some other classes, such as magus, SM, chosen, AM/shaman, all very good classes for roaming.

What tips the balance so heavily in WEs' favor (and WHs' to a lesser degree) is the fact that they exist in a different, superior universe, reserved for stealth classes alone, where they can decide when, where, how and whether they want to engage in a fight, and, even more importantly, they can disengage if they don't like an outcome that would be inevitable for all classes except for them.

That's why
AT A "SOCIOLOGICAL" LEVEL

The fact that playing a WE means that, if you are not severelly mentally handicapped, you can kill almost anything without breaking a sweat and you don't have to die, like ever, is a temptation that is really hard to resist for most people. And that has consequences for the class balance and population distribution in the game.

Of course there are people who like a support role, or who just want to contribute to their realm and don't mind sacrificing themselves for the greater good etc. But many players, maybe most people, look for a game experience that allows them to kill as much as they can and dying as unfrequently as possible. Many players try to join organized warbands where they can be relatively safe and have greater odds to kill and not die. Or at least die less than in a pug context.

Others, with a hungrier ego, want to shine individually without having to obey orders or be accountable to any higher team structure, and choose the classes that are best suited to oppress stragglers and randoms.

At the top of this marginal food chain are the stealth classes. The zero accountability and extreme killing power with total impunity has an irresistible attraction.

Many things have happened throughout the years that have enhanced this situation for the stealth classes.

At some point WEs got ranged KD

At some point ppl dying in RvR didnt teleport to besieged keep, so they had to keep trying to get to rez range from walls and were now free kills for gankers.

At some point stealth classes got yet another disengagement tool: elixir of shadows/sanctified oil. As if the stun wasn't enough.

While the general tendency of latest patches have been toward more coordination and synergy, depriving solos of some valuable tools of self survival (BG/IB self heal ability for example), stealth classes have retained their amazing survival tools. The toning down of self heal bullets/kisses and the witchbrew change to rely on str have proved vastly insufficient.

I have talked to many people who like to try their hand at solo/duo roaming exp and don't even try to fight WEs anymore, because even if they, with a lot of careful speccing, fighting skill, gear grinding, etc, manage to survive the always unequal start of the fight and somehow miraculously turn the tables and get the upper hand, the WE or WH will just decide theyre not interested in dying and will vanish.
This has been th situation for many years, but it builds up to a point where many people are really fed up with it.

Please give WE back the crit tactic, make them pure dps, increase their damage so that very few will survive their jump, like it was at the beginning of the game, but once they have commited to a fight the WE/WH chose, let them face the consequences. The stun is more than enough. Vanish+speed+lose target midfight is an abomination. Tanky self healing dps that can escape whenever they want is an abomination.

I agree that WE/WH shouldn't have effective tank or regen specs. But your solution to remove their only gap closer when they have no slow is just very dumb. The result of that would be that any class can turn around and stun, slow, etc a WH/WE, walk away, and then they can literally never catch back up again.

[Shogun4138]

For the over-simplified stealth class-playing individuals that happen to read this, I'll save your time: you just have to read the next line.
"someone is bitter that they died to a WE"

NOW, TO THE MATTER IN HAND:
TLDR:

WEs (and WHs to a lesser degree) need adjustments. Way too tanky and self supporting with no downsides nor sacrifices for a class that choose their fights and then disappear if they don't like the outcome.

At a sociological level, the possibility of no accountability and total impunity leads to an infestation of this extra cheese abomination and total frustration for people who manage to ALMOST win a fight vs them before the WE decides she isnt interested in dying and vanishes.

At the very least remove the vanish+speed+target loss stupidity that wasn't present nor needed in the original version of the game. One of the reasons that roaming is almost dead is that people who are brave or original enough to not play a stealth class will feel constantly cheated of their deserved win by a stupidly over-pampered class godmode state.


ABOUT THE INCOMING DPS PATCH
I don't have any hopes that I can realisticly expect to materialize, but I feel that I would like to express them, just for the record.

I see some problems at various levels regarding the current state of stealth classes in this game.

AT "ARCHETYPE" LEVEL:

At some point the devs will have to decide if they want Witch Elves (and WHs to a lesser degree) to be healers, tanks or dps.

Right now they are all three in one. OK, I am clearly exaggerating here, but there is something to it. The amount of self heal + absorb that a WE can do is already very high as dps go. Objectively. The fact that they don't have to spend any points in weapon skill as they do huge amounts of corporeal damage, (with some of the skills even ignoring toughness) plus spammable 100% armor ignore skill means they can build incredibly tanky without losing much damage power.

OK, you can say the same thing about some other classes, such as magus, SM, chosen, AM/shaman, all very good classes for roaming.

What tips the balance so heavily in WEs' favor (and WHs' to a lesser degree) is the fact that they exist in a different, superior universe, reserved for stealth classes alone, where they can decide when, where, how and whether they want to engage in a fight, and, even more importantly, they can disengage if they don't like an outcome that would be inevitable for all classes except for them.

That's why
AT A "SOCIOLOGICAL" LEVEL

The fact that playing a WE means that, if you are not severelly mentally handicapped, you can kill almost anything without breaking a sweat and you don't have to die, like ever, is a temptation that is really hard to resist for most people. And that has consequences for the class balance and population distribution in the game.

Of course there are people who like a support role, or who just want to contribute to their realm and don't mind sacrificing themselves for the greater good etc. But many players, maybe most people, look for a game experience that allows them to kill as much as they can and dying as unfrequently as possible. Many players try to join organized warbands where they can be relatively safe and have greater odds to kill and not die. Or at least die less than in a pug context.

Others, with a hungrier ego, want to shine individually without having to obey orders or be accountable to any higher team structure, and choose the classes that are best suited to oppress stragglers and randoms.

At the top of this marginal food chain are the stealth classes. The zero accountability and extreme killing power with total impunity has an irresistible attraction.

Many things have happened throughout the years that have enhanced this situation for the stealth classes.

At some point WEs got ranged KD

At some point ppl dying in RvR didnt teleport to besieged keep, so they had to keep trying to get to rez range from walls and were now free kills for gankers.

At some point stealth classes got yet another disengagement tool: elixir of shadows/sanctified oil. As if the stun wasn't enough.

While the general tendency of latest patches have been toward more coordination and synergy, depriving solos of some valuable tools of self survival (BG/IB self heal ability for example), stealth classes have retained their amazing survival tools. The toning down of self heal bullets/kisses and the witchbrew change to rely on str have proved vastly insufficient.

I have talked to many people who like to try their hand at solo/duo roaming exp and don't even try to fight WEs anymore, because even if they, with a lot of careful speccing, fighting skill, gear grinding, etc, manage to survive the always unequal start of the fight and somehow miraculously turn the tables and get the upper hand, the WE or WH will just decide theyre not interested in dying and will vanish.
This has been th situation for many years, but it builds up to a point where many people are really fed up with it.

Please give WE back the crit tactic, make them pure dps, increase their damage so that very few will survive their jump, like it was at the beginning of the game, but once they have commited to a fight the WE/WH chose, let them face the consequences. The stun is more than enough. Vanish+speed+lose target midfight is an abomination. Tanky self healing dps that can escape whenever they want is an abomination.

I agree that WE/WH shouldn't have effective tank or regen specs. But your solution to remove their only gap closer when they have no slow is just very dumb. The result of that would be that any class can turn around and stun, slow, etc a WH/WE, walk away, and then they can literally never catch back up again.

If someone cant spec their class in the same way as others because they are hard to beat then some other things have to be done.

If a healing class is heals, thats all they should do.
If said healing class goes dps, thats all they should be able to do.

Regen tanks should not exist. Range classes swapping to melee should not exist.

Honestly, imo, you have to spec your character out for what you want it to do. Healer killer, dps killer. Tank can opener. There is no one build for a class. Unless its just blob 3 button aoe.