Guild Wars 2

Why dont you whine on the following

Permament Blind (Pistol Offhand No 5 of Thief) which provides Shadow Combo field
Permament Disable (Pistol Offhand No 4 of Thief)
4 Second Daze (Sword Mainhand 1 Attack while in stealth)

I see people whining about Pistol Whip due to the fact you see PW as top damage. This is due to the fact that PW is the only damaging skill on Sword/Pistol Set.

A bad thief will just spam pistol whip. Most of them are so bad that they use Devourer Venom instead of using Sword skill number 2 for immoblize. Spamming Pistol Whip eats up all your initative and leaves you fodder for anyone if you miss it (which is frankly quite easy to dodge)

If you see good thief streaming like Lowell, you will see how he uses Steal to remove Boons, Blinding Power to provide support for his team, interput key skills and stomps with Headshot. Thats just using S/P. Shortbow offers more Combofield and Finishers.

Example is a Thief using Blast Arrow on a Healing Spring. AoE Heal for everyone in your team.

Please think before you whine.

PS. People should try out rangers more. They counter thiefs without even trying. While Rangers do need some fixing on bugged skills, they are no as bad as people say in spvp

Edit: Glass Cannon Thiefs have 14k HP and 800 Toughness. These make them really squishy and easy to instagib. You dont even have to focus them at all, aoe will do the work. I saw many times my pet doing 8000 damage on a thief

you can’t come here speaking that truth, while in weeks everyone hated thieves to death…
..don’t suggest bad players all the good things a good thief can do.
or they will be better at playing it

“Some thiefs are so bad they’ll use devouring venom over Ability 2.”

Ever thought that Devouring Venom and Mug share a similiar CD?

Well,

There is a reason why people whine about pistol whip and not the other stuff.

Your “permanent blind” has a very small area effect. So in 1v1, where people are moving, you don’t really get that much blind out of it to be worth of initiative dump in most of the cases (still can help when focused).
Your "permanent disable " does closely no damage. Don’t get me wrong. Having disable without a cooldown is amazing in the hands of experienced player. In most cases again not worth it. Usually its more important to do damage than to lock down a single target as most fights take place as 1v1/2v2.
Your 4 Second Daze is actually 2 sec daze. (so not that op)

Now your pistol whip. Main thing people complain about is devourer venom + quickness + pistol whip. It means in a couple of seconds you will get hit by nuke of about 8-18k damage depending on your toughness and thieves build. Immobilize from venom is long enough to ensure landing of the 2nd pistol whip while quickness is active.

So the problem here is that you will get multiple short stuns and multiple short immobilizes. It means you have to have perfect timing (which most guys who whine about pistol whip will never get) to avoid the burst with condi + stun removal or you will eat it all. If stun/condi removals would give you 1 sec immunity to stuns/condis it would be no problem. Then you could use your ability and just roll away. Right now if you use it a millisec too early you are still screwed.

Another issue with having good thief on other side is that you HAVE TO save your defensive cooldowns only for him, as if you use them while fighting someone else, there is good chance you will insta die in the following minute. :>

Also the pistol whip thief i run had 45 sec cd on quickness. So it meant i could do the “goodbye to you” combo every 45 sec.

Now i’m sad that you left out the best sword pistol ability of them all! xD
Infiltrators strike is my personal favorite. It was my “i can break your every knockback/stun until i have some initiative” move, when i still played a thief.

For all of you that has paid attention to what devs has been posting, you know well that they’ve changed this from the data they’ve been monitoring. PW does hit hard, there are tpvp premades that contains thieves specifically for PW as part of their team strategy. Now that it’s down 15%, it’s on par with other high damage attacks.

15% dmg nerf just made non-hasted pistol whip pretty much nonviable.

Autoattack does more damage than pistol whip and doesnt lock your movement or cost any initative. I’m not sure what they tried to achieve with 15% damage reduction since damage was never the problem, haste is the problem.

Time to either completely drop pistol whip or go haste.

i’m still trying to wrap my head around why they nerfed pistol whip damage and didn’t look at the root problem — quickness.

also, from a damage perspective, they thought pistol whip deserved a damage nerf more than backstab? if devs were on top of the meta, they would know that backstab is just way more OP. steal w/ stealth talent, backstab, heartseeker — almost guaranteed kill, and this all happens in a split second before the opponent can even react. and no, a signet is not needed so the once-every-40-sec argument is a moot point.

@teknobug: there are so many teams which contains bunker guardians as a part of their strategy…but i dont see them really nerfed, considering theyt want to look only at retaliation.

Quickness is not a problem at all. I don’t know what all of you are talking about when you say that they shouldn’t reduce damage but instead remove quickness. With quickness, there is a few seconds when thieves deal loads of damage. You prepare for these spikes. After it’s over, they have low damage, and that is the time a balanced class turns the tide of the fight.

I’d much rather play with the same mechanics as every other profession on my Thief, but some genius decided to make one class able to spam abilities and it just happened to be the only class I wanted to play. With such a terrible selection of weapons, low armor, low health and now we don’t have any damage to make up for it. We have little else left to do but headshot spam and kite. Might be fine for sPvP but it sucks for the rest of the game.

It’s such a shame that these little sPvP arenas affect so much more around it, the WvW, the PvE and the Dungeons all suffer because of this eSport pipedream.

no im not gonna sit here and talk about how it wasnt needed in pvp or how it wasnt enough.

rather what worries me is the PVE implications. I know that dungeons are the traditional fair and damage isnt paramount for them. I know S/P will still probably be able to solo fine. but it seems like a dangerous thing to tread.

yes thieves have no CD’s, and in pvp the ini system can seem unfair to people. but in PVE with damage spread out over longer periods of time a thieves damage evens out and tends to be around what other classes are (sometimes lower).

again i know that damage isnt all there is for endgame, but at what point is nerfing damage gonna hurt a classes pve performance too much? i dont have that answer, but hte PW change has me concerned about it.

but as far as pvp goes, either anet is feeling out thieves, or they really dont feel thieves are as OP as the forum goers feel. I just hope they dont nerf backstab in the same way (would create more problems with thief class then it would solve). and if you cant figure out why, you dont know thief

basically nerfing backstabs base damage would solve the too much burst issue, but would force thieves with dagger mainhand ever harder into more glass cannon like builds as the damage when not specced that way would be so underpar as to be not worth it. thus the only viable spec for dagger mainhand thieves would be glass cannon builds. this is why nerfs to traits and utility skills would be better imo.

Pistol Whip provides a stun + evade + damage. Now it still provides a stun + evade + damage, only less damage and that is good. It was simply too much you got out of a single skill.

The reason even haste pistol whip is so terrifying is that immobilize breakers are a lot less common than stun breakers. Professions like mesmer that don’t even need to take an utility skill have a hilariously easy time, builds with no instant condition removal/teleport/invicibility are powerless. The 1-second cast time stuff is too slow, obviously.

Honestly I feel that Pistol Whip shouldn’t exist, or if it does, as a quick (off with the cast time) weak invulnerability like Blurred Frenzy (BF hits for 3.5k or so with all-out offensive statbuild) and not as a giant burst. Make it a reliable punish for being stationary and counter to enemy bursts instead of a one-trick-pony.

“Quickness is not a problem at all. I don’t know what all of you are talking about when you say that they shouldn’t reduce damage but instead remove quickness.”

Don’t remove. Reduce speed increase, increase time. PW damage was not the issue it was the rate at which the damage could be delivered. The same with Warriors and Thousand Blades. This change, contrary to what people say, doesn’t make S/P immensely less viable. Or even Pistol Whip because it has other benefits (and only really one negative: the self root).

But…

It is the wrong nerf.

@Wolfe: Pistol Whip was honestly your worst choice in PvE anyways. Mobility or range is king in the land of bosses that do one shot KOs in melee range, which is a lot of them.

Pistol whip is just hundred blades with a stun, which if hundred blades also had would make it wildly op — but that’s the kick, right? So long as you can free to dodge an ability isn’t OP.

PW didn’t need a damage effect imo, just remove the stun so it can be dodged when used by idiots and the problem is solved.

@chrysalis, maybe so, but you cant state “oh well it was bad anyways” as justification. and if they take the same approach to other abilities this could turn into a pretty bad situation

I love fighting Thieves. So kittening squishy.

The only time that they ever actually hurt me is if I’m fighting someone else and get 2v1d or if they run up right after a kill and I have literally no cooldowns up or half HP.

didnt read the OPs apologist wall of text.

thiefs are OP. severe nerfs needed. that’s all.