Hello Fellow Aincradians, Your textbook wackjob back around again to introduce something we've been working on for a bit now. Up until this point, Stealth has felt like a lot of mechanical legwork and a huge amount of SP to use for something that was less reliable and functionally equal to charge. This felt a little obtuse and our goals were to make stealth more readily usable. So we've attacked this problem on a few different fronts:

New Standard Post Actions:
Now anyone and everyone 'can' stealth or detect someone in stealth. Creatures and Players have eyes, and anyone can crouch. The following will be added to Standard Post Actions:

Entering Stealth (Roll LD + Stealth Rating)
Active Stealth Detection (Roll LD + Stealth Detection)

You might ask, what is the point of stealth/hiding with this change? Well, without those skills your LD modifier is +0. So you can do it, but you wont be very good. Keep in mind that armor penalties from armor skills still apply.

Stealth still has the following conditionals:
- Can still be targeted/hit by AOE, as these do not need a direct target
- If the target with the highest hate is in stealth, and the mob cannot use an AOE easily it will instead target the next highest hate.
- Cannot be targeted directly by single target effects.

Vanish Rework
Given how obtuse it felt, stealth is never used more then once in longer fights because its too hard to pull off at best and a wasted turn at worst. This change makes stealth much more readily available to those that actually invest into it fully.

Old Version

[Rank 4 Hiding Mod] Vanish
Cost: 6 SP
Active: Post/Free Action
Energy Cost: 5 EN
Cooldown: 3 Turns
Effect: Allows the use of a post action to re-enter stealth while in combat. Should the player with this mod get a killing blow on an enemy (from any damage sources owned by the player, including DoTs, Thorns, etc.), Vanish may be activated as a free action on their next turn if it is off cooldown. Vanish's cooldown starts upon exiting stealth.
Description: After having used stealth skills for some time, you have become silent, and now can move so silently that enemies can lose perception of you.

New Version

[Rank 4 Hiding Mod] Vanish
Cost: 6 SP
Active: Post/Free Action
Energy Cost: 5 EN
Cooldown: 3 Turns
Effect: Allows the user to make an attempt to enter stealth as a free action instead of a post action. if successful, the user is now concealed.
Description: After having used stealth skills for some time, you have become silent, and now can move so silently that enemies can lose perception of you.

With this change, Vanish now effectively works like charge but better. A fair trade off for the extra slot cost and SP allocation. Its a little less reliable but not exceedingly so now.

Stealth Maintenance Rework:
Moving on to the pain in the butt it was to keep stealth active, far too often it seemed that players would succeed on the first attempt and then botch this roll. Which is an unfun waste of a turn, and adds a lot of extra book keeping for no reward.

From this point forward the following has been changed:
- Maintaining stealth no longer requires a roll unless a post action is performed.
- When attacking, stealth will immediately be broken after the attack is made.
- Otherwise, when performing a post action (First Aid, Leadership, Purify etc.) you will need to make a maintenance stealth roll to maintain stealth.

This will hopefully this will erase the constant problem of entering stealth as a post/free action -> Getting to your next turn -> Failing the roll and dropping out of stealth and getting no benefit.

Stealth Detection Rework:
We've found that stealth is either really really good, or really bad. This is because most mobs have a flat Stealth Detection of 9 in most cases, which encourages a fire and forget mentality. We want Stealth to be a build choice, not a free take for an unreliable source of extra damage. In the coming days, some our more ruthless enemies will see a change in their effective detection ratings to offset the positive changes above. This will make it harder to just 'splash' stealth for free, while making true stealth based characters much better at it. Likewise in addition to the standard post action changes above, if a player is the only available target (solo party) and the entity cannot target them, it can use its post action to attempt to detect them like a player would.

Over the coming days, MOBS with an accuracy will see an equal amount of detection added to them. Likewise, MOBS that have evasion and utilize stealth mechanics will see their Stealth Rating adjusted accordingly.

Quick Change Rework:
Wow how does this relate to stealth? Well, we don't want to harm existing QC builds that utilize stealth and we find that by making these changes to vanish we very well could. So we intend to transition Quick Change to allow them still to be used on the same turn, while also making Quick Change more effective in other areas. This is done by changing the type of free action QC is, it now competes with [Switch] which makes narrative sense (Your distracted with your menus)

► Quick Change
Cost: 8 SP
Active: Free Action (System)
Cooldown: 3 Turns
Effect: Allows the user to instantly equip, unequip, or swap any equipment in their battle-ready inventory.  All active and temporary buffs and conditions granted to the player by the unequipped item are immediately lost, unless the new item carries the same enhancement (e.g. Keen, Heavy Momentum, Risky, etc.)  
Description: You’ve become acquainted with your equipment and have learned to navigate through your battle-ready inventory with great ease.

New Enhancements:
Now to the specialization, all the above changes set up for making stealth easier in some areas and harder in others. This is the final nail in the hybrid coffin, making Stealth more of a niche choice if you want perfect uptime. By introducing some previous quest/event item effects as a standard enhancement:

► Sneaky
Cost: 1 Slot
Cap: 3 Slot
Effect: Gain +(1 per slot) Stealth Rating
Applicable to: Trinkets, Jewelry

► Insightful
Cost: 1 Slot
Cap: 3 Slot
Effect: Gain +(1 per slot) Stealth Detection
Applicable to: Trinkets, Jewelry

Now we have an answer to stealthing mobs, and now when a player wants to be the best at stealth, they need to invest some gear into it as well.