The other issue with the addon is that there are situations where avoiding it is impossible. For example, one of my favorite things to do is to sneak onto the alliance boats and stealth at the crates, ready to gank unsuspecting players.
I can’t do that anymore because, when I cross continents on the boat (after the loading screen), the game casts my stealth animation again and broadcasts my location to everybody on the boat. It is like the game is sounding an alarm to all of the players on the boat that an enemy is on there. That is anything but being a sneaking ability. It was a massive oversight by the developers to put stealth in the combat log!
However, just like in vanilla, if they have the Spy add-on or are watching their combat log, they’ll notice a rogue stealthed near them and will be put on alert.
“The Spy addon scans the combat log for actions performed by enemy players and announces their presence when they are detected. By warning you about nearby enemy players you can prepare for possible PvP combat. If an enemy player is detected Spy will attempt to determine their class, race and level based on the ability that was used. It will then sound an alert and add the enemy player to the Nearby List. Spy can be configured to announce enemy player encounters and share data with other Spy users in your party, raid or guild.”
Here are some advantages.
Edit: I was not trying to quote you Celldweller, sorry, was trying to quote Alsoria.
But all world PvP is about is exploiting advantages. Most PvP players roll horde because of the PvP-focused racials and the overpopulation… Many PvP players won’t 1v1 a target of equal level of the opposing faction at full health, they’ll either wait until they have backup, or until that person is engaged with a mob… Most PvP players actively search out lower level targets because they don’t want to deal with targets of their own level.
It certainly sounds like this when the functionality of the addon is being grossly misunderstood, overestimated, and conflated with things it simply does not, and could not, ever do.
Luckily for you, Spy does not actually let anyone see through stealth, which is what the eyeball icon above “detector” mobs in PvE does.
Spy also does not allow you to target a stealthed individual.
Spy does not show you how far away a stealthed individual is.
Spy does not show you the direction which a stealthed individual may or may not be approaching from.
What spy does do, is reads: “X player has used stealth” in your combat log, and prints it on your screen.
What the above also means, is that Spy will not display a Stealth warning, if an already stealthed target enters your draw range.
Spy is not a magic bullet. It is not the end-all be all replacement for situational awareness, and it certainly does not make the rogue class “obsolete” like some whiners here would have you believe.
It’s not hard to wait a few minutes for someone’s guard to go down and then get your opener anyway. Sorry ganking someone now takes a bit more prep than simply riding up to them and stealthing from 2 feet away.
There are so many broke situations that this addon causes. I can’t tell you how many times I stealth before entering a building (think BRD area in Blackrock mountain), think entering a cave out in the open world, etc. and people know I’m there BECAUSE THEY SEE THROUGH THE WALLS with the addon. It really destroys the fun out of sneaking into a city or area.
A large part of the skill of playing a rogue in vanilla was picking good spots to stealth where enemies could not visibly see you and sneaking in. Now, that part is gone.
On the other player end, there is no skill in sitting in a building when you get an alert on your screen alerting you to a rogue’s presence. Where’s the skill in that? It makes the game easy mode.
Not particularly no. If you have to create an extreme scenario that circumvents the entire gear acquisition loop to something that reads the Combat Log, then it makes it really hard to treat your complaint as worthwhile.
It isn’t useful to reduce the entire argument down to “it existed, but it wasn’t popular, now it is, and I find it and its popularity bad, fix it” and you just fill in whatever “it” you like, as you did with your example.
Combat Log range is 200 yards.
Not really. A circle with radius of 200 yards covers a tremendous number of grid squares.
So if I was in a building and someone not in stealth approached would spy tell me there was an enemy nearby or does an action have to be performed for it to pick players up?
