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

Seems fine to me… its a good trade to loose the stun part but gain a faster skill, it keeps the evade so they are not just a sitting duck while performing pw.
They should think about it.

50% damage increase……..AND reduced ini cost…….. thats a huge nerf.

I think its spam of it that makes it dumb, needs cost increase more than anything else.

I have no clue why you think its a damage increase of 50%. There is no increase of the damage at all. The skill will be 33% shorter but the damage will remain the same. The ini reduction is because you lose the stun. Without the stun you can just walk out of the skill. Overall pw will be less spamable because you regain less ini if the skill only lasts for 2s instead of 3s.

A faster skill is also less powerful against blocks.

Please do the maths before complaining

Jekkt.6045:

I have no clue why you think its a damage increase of 50%. There is no increase of the damage at all. The skill will be 33% shorter but the damage will remain the same. The ini reduction is because you lose the stun. Without the stun you can just walk out of the skill. Overall pw will be less spamable because you regain less ini if the skill only lasts for 2s instead of 3s.

A faster skill is also less powerful against blocks.

Please do the maths before complaining

Oh my…. ……… ……… you win 10/10. good night.

And what about infiltrators strike?

The change to PW itself doesn’t seem bad, as you now can evade it more easily.
But there’s still infiltrators strike.
So you get a 1s Immobilize combined with a 2s PW. Making you probably eat 50% of the PW for sure.

If you remove the stun, the question is, will the PW start immediatly?
This would give the thief a even better evade on demand, as it doesn’t have a precast anymore.
S/P might turn into the “melee version” of shortbow.
Spam autoattack until enemy uses a strong skill, than evade the skill (and deal a lots of damage).

If + pw is working now aswell it wouldnt change much but to reliably land a pw after the removal of the stun would cost that extra ini.

I dont intend to make pw really hard to hit. It doesnt matter if you get “pistolwhiplocked” but i want players to be able to counterplay. Getting stunned every 2s is bad for counterplay. Immob allowes counterplay and inf strike is not that spammable in combination with pw.

And the spam auto till strong attack was always like that. You dont evade but you interrupt it.

As for how pw would work; like the mesmer sword #2. Maybe a 1/4 precast.

I like the idea personally. It would be kinda like mesmer sword 2, you still have ways to land it and it will still be a strong down cleave. You can use it defensively and offensively which is always good. You can still interrupt with headshot.

Would like to see it in practice though.

Definitely! Thats why ptr servers would be awesome

The only way that skill to be balanced its by removing his evade.
The skill it self dont say there is a evade on the skill so ANet just need to bug fix pistol whip. After that the skill is balanced.

I like this change. Anet pls

You cant remove the evade or the whole spec will just be dead. If i want to play a yolo stunlock build without evades i can go and play a m/s+ham warrior, mr silentnight warrior.

How about removing the option to port after the opponents player during the pistol whip effect with skills like steal, signet of shadow and even shadowstep?

So if I do this 5 times in a row on a down body I will do 20k+ damage while evading for 10s without a non evade frame…….. the stun makes pw less effective because you can land attacks as well as interrupt the attack during the stun frame…. without it this skill will become a stronger spamable version of blurred frenzy. Backpack.out

Teutos.8620:

How about removing the option to port after the opponents player during the pistol whip effect with skills like steal, signet of shadow and even shadowstep?

wont work as you can teleport before casting it and then just get it off.

Mike.4830:

So if I do this 5 times in a row on a down body I will do 20k+ damage while evading for 10s without a non evade frame…….. the stun makes pw less effective because you can land attacks as well as interrupt the attack during the stun frame…. without it this skill will become a stronger spamable version of blurred frenzy. Backpack.out

the vulnerable spot of pw isnt the window between the stun and the flurry but the aftercast. after the flurry the thief kinda “calms down” which is the aftercast. thats when s/p gets vulnerable and that time window will still remain.

and without the stun pw is less of a ress-killer as you can perm stun ressing people to death which wont be able without the stun: you either waste your ini on pw or on headshot.

Mike.4830:

So if I do this 5 times in a row on a down body I will do 20k+ damage while evading for 10s without a non evade frame…….. the stun makes pw less effective because you can land attacks as well as interrupt the attack during the stun frame…. without it this skill will become a stronger spamable version of blurred frenzy. Backpack.out

You really don’t understand

the vulnerable spot of pw isnt the window between the stun and the flurry but the aftercast. after the flurry the thief kinda “calms down” which is the aftercast. thats when s/p gets vulnerable and that time window will still remain.

and without the stun pw is less of a ress-killer as you can perm stun ressing people to death which wont be able without the stun: you either waste your ini on pw or on headshot.[/quote]
You really don’t understand do you? The only reason they are vulnerable is because there is a 1s frame between end of Pw and the beginning of the evade for the next one…. without the stun I can press 3 5times and evade consecutively for 10s port out wait a few then come back and do it again… that is beyond broken… please think before you make an irrational comment

Jekkt.6045:

You cant remove the evade or the whole spec will just be dead. If i want to play a yolo stunlock build without evades i can go and play a m/s+ham warrior, mr silentnight warrior.

You can, even because the evade is not intended i believe. A bug fix will bring the PW back in line.

i didnt make an irrational comment. the time window will still exist because the actual flurry takes 1,25 seconds and the whole skill is 2 seconds + human reaction + ping to cast the next skill.

Give it a short recharge.

Give all 2-5 thief skills short recharges. It doesn’t have to be 50 seconds like some elementalists skills. It can be something like 1-5 seconds.

That’ll make them susceptible to chilled, and less spammable.

Once that’s out of the way, split the skill into two: The pistol stun and the sword swings, each with individual initiative cost the stun would have a cost of 3. Then and make it so the swings stop if the first hit doesn’t hit stunned target, or increase the cost from 2 initiative to 4 for a total of 7 for the whole thing.

Now you can’t stun repeatedly, because you have to either use the swing or wait for the skill to reset back to the stun. That could take about 3 seconds. And the extra damage and evade have either increased cost or a condition for activation.

No

Why ?

Because the stun cast part of the skill is the actual 1/4 second window where you can actually try to setup a counter.

edit – said before me