Guild Wars 2

Hello, my name is inflambio and i play my thief since headstart.
I have a little bit over 1500 hours of thief playtime and im active for about half a year in the pvp scene with a current rank of 45.

In my gw2 time i played every possible (and serious) thief spec. I started as a d/d thief switched to d/p, s/d and after the announcement of the s/d nerf i play s/p (before it became “meta”).

S/p is currently very strong because it allowes you to lock your enemy down while evading and dealing decent damage. The stun is effective against classes with no stability like necro or other thieves and less effective but still decent against classes with a good amount of stability uptime.

Thief took many nerfs since headstart and simply nerfing pistol whip to the ground wont do the job as people would just move on with one viable build less, create a new “meta build” and the complaining would start again cuz teef.

There are 3 ways to change PW.
Remove the evade, the stun or split the skill.
Removing the evade would kill the spec, and splitting would cause more button mashing for the bigger part of the sp players.

So lets remove the stun. Not just the stun itself but also that first hit.
The damage of the first hit would be distributed to the 8 flurry slashes.

With the new ini regeneration rate of 1/s a thief can regenerate 3 ini per pw (pre cast 0.75s and pw 2.2s = ~3seconds, data taken from the wiki) which is a regeneration of 3/5 pw per pw cast.

After removing the stun on pw the ini cost should be reduced from 5 to 4. Without the casting time and the stun the duration of the flurry would be about 1.5seconds. Lets round it up to 2. Thats 1/2 pw regeneration per pistol whip, less than 3/5

Last but not least: make any weapon skill you cast cancel pistol whip. Without the stun on the first hit you cant “lucky stun” an opponent when he tries to cast his heal. With said canceling and a good reaction time you could still prevent that heal with headshot which would be another ini loss for the thief than just simply casting another pw and would involve a bit more skillful playing.

Those 3 changes would be less punishing for stabilityless classes but would allow a thief to do faster bursts because of the shorter pw duration which can be counterplayed.

Tldr:
- remove the stun part. Just flurry. Damage will stay the same. Skill duration from 3s to 2s.
- Ini cost down to 4. Overall less ini regen per pistol whip.
- other weapons cancel pw to allow headshot in midpistolwhip for that interrupt.

Thanks for your time and post constructive feedback if you want to

Not sure about the reduction of the skill duration (I think there should be some kind of wind-up phase even without the stun) and thus the reduction of ini investment.

What I think would work is if the stun was replaced by cripple application for the normal duration of the skill or a short-term immobilize if the first wind-up connects (I hate immobilizes, so let’s just ignore the latter). Most players already walk or dodge out after the stun wore off, so slowing them down while pistol-whipping seems just as reasonable to ensure some damage without leaving it be a 3-in-1 skill (damage, control & (self-)support → lowering the control aspect → … → profit!).

Removing the first part of the skill woulf allow for more combinations than just spamming 3. Is + pw for example. Or the already existing port + pw. And there would still be a wind up. The whole flurry duration is about 1,5s with the according 0.5s pre or aftercast.

They just need to bug fix the skill. PW doesn’t have a evade on his description, so it should not be there. (Or maybe ANet just need to update the description).
If the evade should not be in the skill, then ANet just need to bugfix the skill and the skill is balanced.

do you seriously think that the evade is a bug which is in the game for 1,5 years? when stuff like fury on instinctual response gets patched after a short time? but yes they should update the description to include the 1,2s evade window.

remove stun and it will be balanced.

Jekkt.6045:

do you seriously think that the evade is a bug which is in the game for 1,5 years? when stuff like fury on instinctual response gets patched after a short time? but yes they should update the description to include the 1,2s evade window.

If its a bug then they just need to fix it.
Building Momentum for warrior as been giving half endurance each time they use a burst skill since the beginning i believe so i’m not suprised to see other bugs in the game that time as well.

If its not a bug then they need to update the skill description and then balance it for what a single skill can do. As you said removing the stun could be the solution.

I think that would actually be pretty good for a couple of reasons.

1. You’re rooted, so “spamming” it isn’t effective on its own.
2. Since you’re using a sword, it ties REALLY nicely with Infiltrator’s strike, to be similar to the Mesmer sword chain (immobilize→flurry).
3. stun on a thief just seems out of place.

+1 for removing the stun and its corresponding hit. Since you can’t spam IR for a constant immobilize (it has a split skill in front of it and gets rather expensive if used with PW over and over), it would remain balanced as in it wouldn’t get stronger or weaker, just require a higher skilled set up rather than quickness and spam 3.

S/P is a mindless 3 spamming weaponset that needs to be toned down. If it was actually more active in the play style it would be OK

Unfortunately you just hit 3 a few times and let the game do the work

Steal and infiltrator’s signet should cancel PW.

I ask for this just out of spite, actually I think S/P is a joke and is no problem whatsoever for anyone with half a brain and a semi-decent build, but the more mindless builds get removed the better.

If you got problems with PW your build is probably bad, that’s what you get for copy-pasting the “meta”.

I actually think the opposite. I personally think the stun is fine and the evade is to much for the thief on this skill.

Thinking of the stun as a means of allowing the skill to hit but still leaves enough room for play feels more balanced.

I’ve never had an issue against this skill. It’s extremely easy to beat due to how predictable it is. I actually switched my S/P thief to P/P because unload/ranged attacks net me a much more reliable combo than spamming 3 and hoping they don’t have any kind of means of dealing with it.

I agree with keeping the stun and removing the evade.

Daishi.6027:

I actually think the opposite. I personally think the stun is fine and the evade is to much for the thief on this skill.

Thinking of the stun as a means of allowing the skill to hit but still leaves enough room for play feels more balanced.

But remove the Evade and you might as well delete the entire skill. It would become completely useless. Thieves can’t afford to channel a melee attack, stationary, for even 2 seconds. It makes them far too susceptible to damage.

Pistol Whip doesn’t deal more single target damage than Backstab, an instant attack from stealth that allows you to retain your mobility.

The stun is the only excessive part and also makes Headshot redundant. It should be the only thing considered for the cutting board. Otherwise you might as well design a new skill.

+1. Just remove the stun or morph it in to a different slowing condition that doesn’t prevent escape. It’ll be fine then.

What i like the stun on my engi keeps my Protection injection up so i take 33% less damage why not just make it a daze instead of a stun ? 1 sec daze or something that way you can react after? Oh to add cant they just rework the complete evade and make it grant protection for 3 sec? so if you dont hit them with the skill at least if your attacked during the time you wont take as much