Today, the long-awaited response from ANet was heard on the official forums. If some of you will remember my previous postings about Thieves and the inherent flaws of shadowstepping (as well as ways to improve them) - there was a lot of criticism met with some of my solutions.
One of these ideas for improving shadowstep (and thus our class mechanic 'Steal') was to allow it to ignore LoS requirements, allowing thieves to sneak into fortresses and keeps by attacking enemies up a wall or over a gap in order to engage the enemy - thus providing a crucially needed role for Thieves as a whole in WvW. However, this was considered by many to be 'OP' and 'gamebreaking' as it does something that ANet themselves did not intend, which was to let people into a keep to assault it without taking down gates and walls.
As of recent there have been many complaints about the possibility of an exploit with Mesmers, and their use of the skill Portal (entre/exit). It seems as though our clothy-compatriots have discovered a way to sneak into keeps without taking down gates/walls by using their portal skill! Considered by many to be blatant cheating, and a violation of game mechanics - there have been numerous posts on the official forums documenting the exploit with an appeal to ANet to respond. And respond they did.
When a user questioned what actions ArenaNet would be taking on the formerly considered game-breaking portal usage in WvW, arenanet responded saying;
"As we have stated, this is no exploit so far but another tactic that players can use in their gaming experience."
Simply put, ANet encourages the Mesmer portaling (gate ignoring) 'exploit' as actually a 'tactic', and therefore legitimate in use and legal. Not only does this mean that Mesmers can freely assault keeps with their team by allowing a trojan horse-like strategy to get them through the gates, but it means that any criticism about an individual character (in particular - a thief) - being able to assault a tower/keep from the inside, are completely illegitimate and unfounded! If a Mesmer can let an entire group into a keep without taking down walls, than it must be so, that an individual Thief (or group of organized Thieves) can do the very same with what is arguably a semi-functioning class mechanic.
Thieves need to be able to shadowstep up walls, to attack enemies in keeps and towers. They also need to be able to jump gaps, because thats just common sense for ninja-poofing.
EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that this response wasn't in fact to the use of render-induced-latency allowing Mesmer's to portal their parties past keep defenses. It is actually an approval of using the render-induced latency caused by mass invisibility + portal = laggy shitfest for enemy forces. Basically the amount of rendering needing to happen when players are invisible and portal a distance away are creating invisible zerg armies that are depending entirely on the lag generated by themselves. THIS is what ANet considers a legitimate strategy(?).
However, as pointed out in one of the posts I brought up this subject on, user Tyrestrian came up with the amazing idea that things like Thief infiltration/Mesmer portaling would be acceptable and non-game-breaking if they put a buff on keep/tower lords that made them invincible while the walls/gates were still up. This would allow Thieves to infiltrate and hurt the player-defenders and veteran NPC's (and siege weapons) without allowing a massive group of Thieves or portaled-players to simply knock-off the lord without defense. To that, I would say that siege weapons on top of siege walls would also need a buff for increased survivability to prevent them from being demolished instantaneously.
Sorry for the misunderstanding!
-LoreChief
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