Guild Wars 2

If you compare it with warrior’s Flurry and Hundred Blade, it’s obviously overpowered. If we are talking about balance here, you should either nerf Pistol Whip or Thief’s initiative regain, or buff all the melee channeling skills.

Regards.

Do you main Thief?

No, I main ele, but study thief as much as possible b/c they hard-counter me. I also play thief on the side because its just better.

When do you feel that Pistol Whip is unbalanced? (scenarios would be great)

Always

How does it feel unbalanced compared to other class mechanics?

It does everything: interrupts heals, high cleave damage, evades, extremely hard to punish. The only drawback is that it roots, similar to blurred frenzy and 100Blades. I tried PW when I started hearing S/P was stronger than S/D, and couldn’t figure out why because I was having a hard time landing my PW before getting killed. Then I saw how the pros play, which is just relying on any of million ports and understand that it takes all risk out of the skill. 100Blades is strong if its set up, but bad otherwise b/c it leaves you a sitting duck flapping at air. Blurred frenzy is slightly better b/c its an extra on-demand evade, high damage, and comes on a weapon-set that includes a natural setup (ILeap/swap). Pistol Whip is even better, because it also interrupts guaranteeing a certain amount of damage, and has no risk as you can just port during the evade/cleave.

What would you do to change Pistol Whip to better fit the class/game?

I would reduce the duration and damage quite a bit, or add a necessity for LOS for thief ports. Currently there is incredibly low risk in playing thief b/c I only enter into combat through ports, and don’t have to actually expose myself any in trying to close gaps.

Edit: Also, this is an excellent way to get feedback, and a great initiative on your part Allie. Thanks.

Reikou.7068:

phys.7689:

problem is theives need a lot one skill, because main and offhand often dont synergize well.
if pistol whip didnt stun, no one would get hit by it, if it doesnt do dmg, no one would use it over AA (to which its already close) if it didnt evade it would essentially kill the user.
and if it sucks, sword pistol doesnt serve much purpose.

If PW didn’t stun, it would be like Blurred Frenzy, and blurred frenzy hits things all the time.

I think the stun can’t be taken out, not only because you would have to rename the skill, but also because it helps distinguish S/P as more of a control weaponset than an evade weaponset like S/D.

This is why I think that making it only a stun, then giving it a blast finish for stealth could work.

The risk vs reward is pretty skewed. It stuns, does damage, and evades. I remember using this skill back in the day before quickness nerf and I don’t remember it having evade. Not really OP, but could use some “shaving” imo.

I think the problem (as a few others have stated) is simply the design of the class. Since the cool downs on skills are shared, you simply will spam your highest damage dealing skill until you come across a situation where you need the utility of some other skill. This is why PW and HS thieves spam the way that they do. This would be the same for any class that go this. Warriors would constantly spam hundred blades, Guardians Whirling Wrath, etc. Unfortunately I think that without redesigning the class, you are always going to be stuck with this problem. PW is the current complain, but if you nerf that then thieves will just stop using s/p and go back to d/p builds and spam backstabs and heartseekers. I think the shared CD thought was cool for thieves, but there are many flaws that we are now realizing with this system.

I have a thief at 80, and have done both wvw and spvp on him, and I do indeed use s/p. I mainly play guard over any other class, but I play them all. I think that the animation is easy for an experienced player to see and avoid, but it is harder for a less experienced player which is why I think you see a lot of the complaints that you see. So I personally don’t think it is OP, but it takes skill to avoid it, just like with warrior flurry or pinning arrow which is one of the reasons people are upset.

@Bazzoong.7145: you cannot move away if you got immobilized or stunned with basi venom, and even if you cleared those you probably ate full pw dmg thanks to haste. Try to move again, thief will just use steal, signet or 2 to port to you. Any half decent thief will make sure to lock you down on spot for long time and thanks to daze you can’t even use condi clean for immob.

Liewec.2896:

Magnus Heartseeker.7958:

I feel it does too much damage for the amount of utility it grants the thief. Spam 3, evade, and daze your opponent while doing good damage. It just seems like it does too much.

^this!

Do you main Thief?
nope, but i play as and against alot of thieves.

When do you feel that Pistol Whip is unbalanced? (scenarios would be great)
it is’nt really a scenario, its overall,
it is one skill that you can simply spam in any situation.
enemies about to down your ally? pistol whip stun to stop them!
downed guardian about to knock you back? pistol whip to evade the knock!
taking too much damage? Pistol whip!
need to deal alot of damage? Pistol whip!

How does it feel unbalanced compared to other class mechanics?
pretty unbalanced, thief is generally a high risk/high reward class that requires more skill than other classes, but spamming pistol whip shatters this theme, it is low risk, high reward and requires no skill atall.

What would you do to change Pistol Whip to better fit the class/game?
i have several different ideas:
1. change the stun to a daze and remove the evade, this means it must be combined with other skills to get the damage off (just like warrior 100b), it also removes the cheese of a high damage skill that makes you immune to damage.
or
2.make the first hit apply vulnerability/confusion, remove the evade from the second part and allow it to be used on the move.
or
simply lower the damage or increase the cost

note: attack skills should never make the attacker immune to damage, a player should be deciding to either attack or play defensive, skills that deal damage while blocking are extremely cheesy and ofcourse they will be spammed.

I don’t think you can compare this to warrior (or guardian) channeled melee skills. Warrior especially is tankier (even in it’s zerk form [yes my warrior is a zerk]), and can take hits while channeling their attack. A zerker thief would never be able to get off a single PW. Compare it instead to the mesmer blurred frenzy. Mesmers are a little tankier (mid tier health) but they have an evade all throughout that skill. Just no stun.

Anastasis.7258:

If you compare it with warrior’s Flurry and Hundred Blade, it’s obviously overpowered. If we are talking about balance here, you should either nerf Pistol Whip or Thief’s initiative regain, or buff all the melee channeling skills.

Regards.

If we are talking about balance here, why are Hundred Blade and Flurry even brought up? Hundred blade is a terrible ability to begin with and flurry is more for condi specs… Two completely different skills for a completely different class. Honestly, who let this guy in here?

Grim.4795:

IMHO the problem with PW is three fold:
1) Its a quick access to a stun at a moments notice to interrupt every and any skill needed to by a thief – coupled with their seemingly infinite shadow steps – could land every time if played correctly.
2) It’s amazing defensive qualities. When i manage to apply pressure to thief running with S/P they just press their 3 skill allowing themselves to evade until their defensive CD are up again (not to mention the DMG they are doing at the same time – or the fact they can just stealth and reset over and over until they feel confident they finally have the advantage and can win).
3) The damage it deals itself. The skill deals a metric kitten ton of DMG and due to the initiative thieves rely on that just got buffed, can be spammed like there is no tomorrow not allowing players to re-act (because it stuns), fight back (they are evading) or even dodge (the sword 2’s immob is easy to land allowing the combo to rarely miss). Not only all of this, but even professions with ‘the same’ skill or similar do not gain half of the dmg PW has, like mesmer for example. Their sword MH #2 allows them to be invul, but doesn’t even do a third of the DMG PW is capable of or stuns.

This is how i feel, not stating it as a fact, but please read it and consider mine and the other poster’s experiences with this truly un-balanced skill.

Below i attacthed an image of my combat log of a fight i had with a thief. I was on my mesmer running with staff, blink and decoy. The fight lasted roughly 5-15sec in which the thief started off in stealth (couldn’t summon my clones/phantasms) then he opened with a steal and PW combo, i used blink to get away and stun break, he used a shadow step and continued the dmg, i then used staff #2 to get farther away, he used another shadow step, i then used my F4 shatter, but PW outlasted it and i died due to the overload of DMG without a way to fight back even though im rank 40+ and have a thorough understanding of the game and shouldn’t meet an opponent i can’t seem to land a hit on. I added this picture not to QQ about how OP of a skill PW is, but i believe in order to get my point across an example cant do any harm.
Thanks for reading.

Basically you did it wrong as wrong as you can do it: Decoy, dodge backwards: Steal and 1st PW wasted clones up to soak damage thief loses target and you got time to get 1st phantasm while he is rooted by his own skil, you can swap weapon and get 2nd phantasm here if you want, when you come out of inv he will use infiltrators signet or sword 2 and PW you counter with blurred frenzy then dodge, if he now blows everything useing infiltrators signet or respectively sword 2 and PW you blink. 0 damage taken phants and clones up each of his moves countered.

If he`d used S/D I`d understand your troubles but S/P….

eleshazar.6902:

I think the problem (as a few others have stated) is simply the design of the class. Since the cool downs on skills are shared, you simply will spam your highest damage dealing skill until you come across a situation where you need the utility of some other skill.

I think this makes balance more difficult, but it doesn’t make it impossible.

D/P, for instance, is probably one of the most well-rounded weaponsets.

When skills are designed like Unload, where the damage comes from a straight button press, then it does promote spamming. However, when you make the damage situational, such as from backstab (requiring stealth), HS (requiring low HP), etc., then it makes gameplay much more engaging and well-rounded.

The problem with Pistol Whip is that the situational condition and damage ability are tied into a single button press (stun → damage).

My name is Ventari and here comes my constructive feedback
The problem with pistolwhip especially for necro and other classes who don’t really have many skills to disengage or the access to stability is that either the immoblize hits you after the port or the stun, and without swiftness or anything else you eat at least 3-5k dmg while running out of the damage. I think the port shouldn’t be vertical AND horizontal, because that ruins the advantage of a good positiniong in this game. Furthermore it takes away the ability to disengage with "blink, flash or wurm which is a big issue. To my mind the immobilize on the port should be removed because then it is possible to counterplay the then incoming pistolwhip.
The skill as it is, is kind of ok, but the port is a big problem. To sum it up, PW is ok but a bit onesided to be played, but I see the main issue in the port.
And I appreciate that some devs really seem to care at least..!

I dunno about anyone else but when I played a kitten ton of S/P thief the easiest and probably most broken aspect was the auto-facing it did as it prepped for PW. Simply by pressing 3 it would face you in the EXACT direction of the enemy then all you had to do was shadowstep to them in some way. This means you don’t even have to know where your enemy is to get a successful PW off so long as you had them targeted.

Removing the auto-facing it does would be a great nerf imo. Especially considering you don’t even need to know where your enemy is to use any of the shadowsteps.

On a side note I think the immobilization on IS is too long.

There is nothing wrong with pistol whip. It has already been nerfed into the ground by several reactionary patches. The result is that instead of players ever learning how to deal with thieves they just come scream en masse on the forums and wait for the next one.

There is a very obvious startup to be avoided; if you get hit, a CC can be used to break and that leaves the thief rooted; if you cant break the CC the stun is shorter than the attack duration and you can just dodge to avoid it if it’s being spammed.

A pistol whip spamming thief is essentially a still target. A thief can infiltrate in and use pw, then infiltrate out for a relatively safe short burst. Or it can spam pistol whip maybe three times depending on the situation and essentially be stuck in place. But the thief can’t do both.

After you have seen (or used) the skill a handful of times you can also recognize the recovery frames and punish after the evasion. There is absolutely zero difference between how you would treat a thief mid pistol whip and how you would treat a mesmer mid blurred frenzy. A thief can’t just cancel pistol whip evasion into pistol whip evasion to avoid punishment because of the start up frames. When you see it, stuff it.

I main a thief and since launch I have switched from Sword/Pistol in sPvP to Dagger/Dagger because Sword/Pistol and pistol whip is no longer effective in tPvP and solo queue in most instances. It was the thief meta for so long, and so many people are familiar with it that it, gets shut down hard outside of hotjoin zerg-fest glory farming.

Mesmers have blurred Frenzy and more than double the base health of a thief. Warriors get hundred blades, top tier base hp and toughness. In exchange thieves get evasion on their duel skills, damage that is directly proportional to how easy they are to murder and some tools to gtfo when their setups botch. What does it matter that a thief can use the same rooting skill a max of three times, under perfect conditions when every profession has the ability to evade, break, and punish across the board?

The thief is in a good place right now and I really thing its time for the forum community to learn to deal with it rather than pass on yet another nerf and ask thief players to react instead. The way the meta has evolved since launch is that builds have evolved in response to buffs to other professions. Thief meta has evolved in response to their own nerfs. And every time that happens, players here get up in arms again over the new thief flavor of the month, because that’s been working.

GW players had to figure out Iway, ranger spiking and air/shadow spikes and there was just as much if not more crying out for devs to make a change. I have all confidence the GW2 players can figure out initiative and pistol whip.

Vile.5678:

I dunno about anyone else but when I played a kitten ton of S/P thief the easiest and probably most broken aspect was the auto-facing it did as it prepped for PW. Simply by pressing 3 it would face you in the EXACT direction of the enemy then all you had to do was shadowstep to them in some way. This means you don’t even have to know where your enemy is to get a successful PW off so long as you had them targeted.

Removing the auto-facing it does would be a great nerf imo. Especially considering you don’t even need to know where your enemy is to use any of the shadowsteps.

On a side note I think the immobilization on IS is too long.

Nice! Pistol Whip has an immob…no wonder!

I do main thief, and I feel PW is incredibly way to rewarding for the low amount of risk you need to put in for the damage.

Changes that would need to be made, just to nerf this skill would hurt the entire class, like nerf initiative, or changing bountiful theft. But, I would rather see PW split into two different skills, and slow the attacks down of PW. This wouldn’t actually directly nerf its damage, but would slow down the rate of which damage could be applied to a stunned, or immobed target.

The stun, once it lands, then you can use the flurry part of the skill. If the stun never lands (if the skill were to be split) you won’t be able to use the flurry part of PW.

When do you feel that Pistol Whip is unbalanced? (scenarios would be great)

A thief running S/P is a nearly unstoppable training machine. If it finds a squishy it is going to keep focusing it (ele/mes) until it begs for peels. And when those peels don’t work, and the ele or mes go down, PW cleave will kill anyone trying to res or, make them back of their teammates downed body. A guardian can’t knock them off because of the evade.With boon steal, the thief and can steal stab, and daze the rez and keep spamming PW.

How does it feel unbalanced compared to other class mechanics?

When you compare it to a skill like Hundred blades, or Blurred Frenzy, both of these skills have high risks. The mesmer is a incredibly glassy class and can be bursted out of blurred frenzy if they don’t have distortion (the same can be done to the thief) . A warrior can have their hundred blades interrupted, and if they go in a warrior knows they are committing to their burst. And the thief has so many outs they never have to commit to anything, just on sword alone.

EDIT: I want to pitch another idea into my post. Increasing the cast time, or giving PW’s stun a more obvious tell. Something that shows the thief is about to use the skill, almost about as flashy as basilisk venom.

Bazzoong.7145:

Grim.4795:

snip

Basically you did it wrong as wrong as you can do it: Decoy, dodge backwards: Steal and 1st PW wasted clones up to soak damage thief loses target and you got time to get 1st phantasm while he is rooted by his own skil, you can swap weapon and get 2nd phantasm here if you want, when you come out of inv he will use infiltrators signet or sword 2 and PW you counter with blurred frenzy then dodge, if he now blows everything useing infiltrators signet or respectively sword 2 and PW you blink. 0 damage taken phants and clones up each of his moves countered.

If he`d used S/D I`d understand your troubles but S/P….

What you said sounds logical and makes it sound like if you die to Pistol whip, it’s sometimes a L2P issue and not a scrub wtf OP build…
GTFO of the forums!

thief shaving inc

I main Ele and any thief build is op to me. They can do everything better and faster.

PW does to much for what it is worth. It is too spammable. Evades, Daze or stun, and good damage on top of the thief ability to teleport wherever he pleases whenever he wants. Imagine if Ele could burning speed everywhere and it dazed or stuned on hit or if the fire trail hit you and also evaded everything and had 1 second recast time. Would you use anything else?

Please tell me how do you expect someone to play a squishy mage class and kite their opponent, if most dps classes can insta teleport or leap to them. Thief has better mobility and teleports and z-axis ports on shorter cooldowns. Access to Lyssa Runes is also what makes the thief op vs other burst classes. They have shorter elites and can use this almost every engagement.

If you do manage to land some damage on a good thief, they will just reset the fight and now all your 40+ second cooldowns you used on your first engagement are down and the thief has everything back and ready to go full throttle again.

Split the skills and give their teleports longer cooldowns

Anyway sorry for the rant just tired of this meta. Nothing but PW thief, MM necros, Spirit Rangers, Healing Sig warriors( not just hambow), PU Mesmers, Decap Engi. It is boring and you have left it alone for too long. FIX IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pyriall.5027:

Vile.5678:

I dunno about anyone else but when I played a kitten ton of S/P thief the easiest and probably most broken aspect was the auto-facing it did as it prepped for PW. Simply by pressing 3 it would face you in the EXACT direction of the enemy then all you had to do was shadowstep to them in some way. This means you don’t even have to know where your enemy is to get a successful PW off so long as you had them targeted.

Removing the auto-facing it does would be a great nerf imo. Especially considering you don’t even need to know where your enemy is to use any of the shadowsteps.

On a side note I think the immobilization on IS is too long.

Nice! Pistol Whip has an immob…no wonder!

Probably confused with what it’s commonly comboed with, Sword2, which does immob iirc…

Pistol Whip is fine it self although when you guys do uncalled things such as adding immobilize stacking and buffing initiative regen for no apparent reason then things like this will happen. Please stop trying to buff stuff with little rational and if thats a problem there are a fair amount of players that know whats wrong with the game. PS if the initiative buff was a way of compensating for the shadow arts nerf, then you guys really did not think it through because you just buffed (trickery) to a whole new height and that is why you see every thief running that #meta.

cyyrix.6105:

Allie Murdock.8152:

How does it feel unbalanced compared to other class mechanics?

Blurred Frenzy:

• CD: hard 12s
• Stun: none
• Evade: 2.5s
• Damage Coefficient: 2.4

Pistol Whip:

• CD: soft 5s (5 initiative x 1 init/s = 5s)
• Stun: 0.5s
• Evade: 1.5s
• Damage Coefficient: 3.14 (30% more damage)

I don’t main thief, but I do troll around spvp with a PW spec.

This is just bs…. comparing to skills from total different classes…. its like saying:

Steal: blink+interrupt if traited+low damage
Mesmer F1:GRT damage! remove buffs/cond if traited
F2:Confusion remove buffs/cond if traited
F3: interrupt! remove buffs/cond if traited
F4: Invul for up to 4 sec!! plus traited bonuses!!!

so… nerf mesmer skill class buff steal? hell no! totally diff classes and skill you can compare skill from different classes, they are not supposed to be the same

I main theif but play several other classes. My thoughts on PW are that it’s strong, perhaps OP in certain situations, but not nearly as OP as people on the forum make out.

Conceptually, I like PW and S/P by extension – I like having a spec that has access to a stun, daze and persistent blind field. It’s a very rounded set (whether it’s too rounded I’m not too sure) with good potential to be useful in team fights. This isn’t really the case with other specs such as D/D or S/D which are more 1v1 orientated.

I don’t personally run S/P in spite of all this because I find it lacks the depth that D/P has, and something I don’t think non theif mains always appreciate, is that it is very reliant on certain skills to actually be useful. In isolation PW, I think, is fairly lacklustre – without any gap closing skills no decent player will get PW’d unless they’re out of cool downs or extremely unlucky. If they do get hit, and the thief has steal, infiltrators signet, and basilisk (or really any 2 of the 3 up, not to mention shadowstep if you really want to go there), it’s basically GG. I think the synergy with these skills is probably a bit too much given these are pretty much staple skills. With these skills it allows PW to be reliably spammed, which is when it becomes OP. Another similar scenario is when someone is ressing, if you’ve got a PW thief sitting on you, more than likely you’ll fail the res, and often you’ll go down too. Without these skills and circumstances though, PW itself is pretty mediocre.

I think the real issue with PW is that it dominates classes / builds with few or long cool down stunbreaks (ele). It’s partly a problem with overall class balance that PW is performing so well. That said, I think PW could be brought in line by removing the evade – although this only allows better peeling, the damage taken by classes with infrequent access to stunbreaks would still be the same. Or personally, I think the damage should be spread over a longer period with the total damage kept the same, and the evade duration kept the same or shortened. This would allow better mitigation of the damage in general once the stun has worn off. You could lower the stun duration alternatively but it’d reduce the teamfight potential of the set.

I’m not pro, but those are my thoughts

Vile.5678:

On a side note I think the immobilization on IS is too long.

The immobilization duration is both less than the cast time of the skill and 1/3 of the duration of attack frames.

It is one of the shortest stuns in the entire game.

Unless you are talking about the root on the thief for using the skill. We are stuck in place for nearly two seconds. That is quite a long time. I wouldn’t say “too long”, more like just long enough since there are staggered evades. The skill wind down is usually where the thief will get destroyed. Especially if she tries to use the skill again.

The problem (imo) is that its not only OP, even if by a little bit, its totally annoying and frustrating to see “evade evade evade” while some moron is spamming a stun/dmg on you.

funny how all ppl that argument for pw always compare to blurred frenzy or hundred blades.

1. both cant spammed
2. both need a precasted amount of skills to successfull get the dmg of and for right positioning

the problem is the initive system on thief. the longer the fight goes (with or without reseting) the more it favours the thief. its against the complete class philosophie of anet. s/p has do many dangerous moves u need to dodge or evade to block a following pw without shutting down a potential pw, cause it has the needed “lock” in the dmg part. u need to dodge is, steal, signet & pw. just to much to successfull and reliable counter pw-spam or getting any reliable advantage through positioning and so on (remember the other classes has cooldowns).

another problem s/p is stricktly related to 10/30/0/0/30 build. in the trickery line arent many good traits, so picked traits are relative clear and easy. that leads to the fact, that any boon-related defense gets shut down.

so pw without synergie isnt that of a op-skills. but if u add shadow-steps (steal, signet,…) and devour venom (instant) or basilisk venom and trickery related traits (boonsteal, daze on steal, fury, might and swiftness) to it. it grows out of control and then the skill alone brings to much to the table suddenly. so pw without any other things is balanced.

tl;dr
it has a good amount of dmg, self root and short stun. but the used build has to many ways to negate the negative affects of pw and the possible defense of the target.

summary:
u cant fix pw if u just lock at the skill alone. throught the spammy nature of the thief (ini.) u cant place burst req. (and to be honest defense mechanics) on the weaponskills. sad, anet hasnt figoured it out yet.

Main thief.

I think Pistolwhip is more broken (doesn’t work well with GW2’s mechanics) than “unbalanced.”

If I could change PW, I’d remove the second-part (the slashing and evade) of PW altogether.

Instead make PW a two part skill. First part, a stun, and the second part a singlestrike akin to Larcenous strike. No evade, no root, no slashing.

So, I don’t know if I main any particular class. I pretty much play everything at this point.

My thoughts on PW…
1. The damage output is fine. No problems there.
2. What needs to change is that the skill needs to lose either the stun or the evade. Having both is the problem.
3. It is further an issue because of sword #2. Essentially, you can teleport to a target which immobilizes them. Do a pistol whip which stuns them and then evade all attacks while doing the pistol whip. Afterwards, teleport away, run around a bit for your initiative to refresh, and then do it again. Pretty low skill required for maximum benefit.

Personally, I’d be happy just seeing the evade removed.

Pyriall.5027:

Vile.5678:

I dunno about anyone else but when I played a kitten ton of S/P thief the easiest and probably most broken aspect was the auto-facing it did as it prepped for PW. Simply by pressing 3 it would face you in the EXACT direction of the enemy then all you had to do was shadowstep to them in some way. This means you don’t even have to know where your enemy is to get a successful PW off so long as you had them targeted.

Removing the auto-facing it does would be a great nerf imo. Especially considering you don’t even need to know where your enemy is to use any of the shadowsteps.

On a side note I think the immobilization on IS is too long.

Nice! Pistol Whip has an immob…no wonder!

I said IS as in infiltrator’s strike. /rolls eyes

The problem with pistolwhip is that it’s a melee spec without the risk that comes with it. The evade on the skill itself take away possible counterplays your opponent SHOULD be able to pull off. In any game, melee is a risky playstyle that compensate DOWNTIMES in higer damaging pressure (you shouldn’t be able to be IN all the time as melee but should have “windows of opportunity” instead). With pistolwhip you have the cc, the damage and the evades, all in one button. Add now lyssa runes, spammable ports in and out, withdraw, a 21 seconds cooldown steal to remove stability and stealth and there you have it, a spec without, in theory, any counter play. Just luck dodges, pretty much.

What to change imo ? Split the pw skill in 2 toggled phases. First the daze, and then the flurry skill, with initiative costs split. Remove the evades from pistowhip, and increase its damage to make up for it. Increase pistolwhip’s initiative cost by 1 (maybe more). Remove withdraw from pvp. Nerf lyssa runes in some way. No thief should have access to stability by himself. Make sword number 2 work like steal, with line of sight requirement to land the immob and the damage. Nerf trickery : No more decreased steal cooldown. That’s about it.

I wish to add one thing: If it comes to initiative recovery the latest changes to the recovery mechanics actually have weakend PW. Due to the fact that passive regeneration has been increased but recovery of initiative by crits has been drastically reduced, before the change PW was essentially free of inititive cost if you would land 2 or more crits since with this by the time it was over you`d have all of your initiative back.

Crit builds like the builds relying on PW effectively have less initiative now, while non crit builds have more now, this was one of the best changes made to the thief proffession so far the 1st step away from being pidgeonholed into crit strikes traits which made initiative management a no brainer.

main thief 1500 hours

nerf pistol whip and you will break the whole weaponset:
remove the stun and you will be forced to use immobs like the venom,
remove the evade and you will get facesmashed while you’re rooted,
nerf the damage and, meh, its already low compared to before…

when i play s/p a lot of people start flaming and tell me to “gtfo 333333333”
the problem with the whole 333333333333 thing is that there’s no other skill worth to be used if there’s no special situation calling for #4 or #5.

AcidicVision.5498:

Vile.5678:

On a side note I think the immobilization on IS is too long.

The immobilization duration is both less than the cast time of the skill and 1/3 of the duration of attack frames.

It is one of the shortest stuns in the entire game.

Unless you are talking about the root on the thief for using the skill. We are stuck in place for nearly two seconds. That is quite a long time. I wouldn’t say “too long”, more like just long enough since there are staggered evades. The skill wind down is usually where the thief will get destroyed. Especially if she tries to use the skill again.

IS = INFILTRATOR’S STRIKE

Reikou.7068:

Main thief.

I think Pistolwhip is more broken (doesn’t work well with GW2’s mechanics) than “unbalanced.”

If I could change PW, I’d remove the second-part (the slashing and evade) of PW altogether.

Instead make PW a two part skill. First part, a stun, and the second part a singlestrike akin to Larcenous strike. No evade, no root, no slashing.

That removes just about every bit of damage from the entire weapon set. The damage would need to be so high on that one hit, to be consistent with other dual skills and keep s/p a viable option, that it would be infinitely worse than PW. Then traited for crit? You would be looking at backstab meta all over again with the benefit of headshot in the back pocket.

What people fail to see in general is that the startup, duration, root, traits, and init cost work in the targets favor. Start up allows for avoidance, duration allows for stun break and recovery, root allows for punish, traits to get that extra init make the thief squishier, init cost locks out head shot and black powder after set up.

THIS IS A SERIOUS POST

Allie,

The problem is when you do this you attract non-pvpers or new-pvpers to the thread and they give feedback which is horrendus. Please search the already made thread by MTC for feedback on the skill. This thread will simply be full of thiefs who have no idea about balance whatsoever. You cannot take newbies views into consideration when balancing just like the fed wouldn’t take my views into account when deciding how to manage the economy. Really please please please just take the feedback from the good players in the other thread and don’t listen to this thread.

Threads like this being listened to is the reason we are in such a mess right now.

On topic:

The problem isn’t only PW but is basically everything to do with the thief. Its initiative regen is so absurd right now that it can just spam skills. Evade thief is still a major issue to. I would revert the initiative change AND nerf withdraw so have a cast time before it heals and dodges backwards.

Thief would still be very strong after these changes. I promise that. As thief is inherently strong. Please don’t listen to the newbs AGAIN and kitten up the game AGAIN (or even worse).

S/X weaponset were pretty hard nerfed last big patch.. Everyone included devs; should be aware of that. Touching anything on thief right now would be very big joke. This topic is unwise, weird and funny towards one conquest game mode where thief is mish mash meat.

I do not main Thief but I do play one. I main Mesmer.

People already pointed out that PW just does too much at once (Stun, Evade, Damage). The thing which personally bothers me the most when playing my Thief: There is almost no point of using Pistol#4 (range) when running S/P because you got Steal and Sword#2 to close the gap anyway and PW will always be the better choice. PW would be a lot less appealing to spamm if it was a short Daze (1/4s) and Head Shot was a Stun (1/2s). Spamming PW would be less efficient because your enemies are less likely to take the full damage.

Honestly I don’t see how the stun lasts long enough for the damage to be so detrimental that the skill is broken.

The only real problem I see with it, is that unless I’m mistaken, it still allows you to capture points in PvP, which doesn’t seem to stay consistent, if this is true, with skills like blurred frenzy to compare it to.

I don’t really main a Thief (I have an 80 I roam around with in WvW for a direct damage variant roamer), and I can definitely see where the “spam to win” opinion comes from, but I also think that it’s a hard skill to make changes to without hurting the weaponset too much.

Maybe some tweaking of aftercasts, and a more obvious wind up animation? (I think it’s pretty darn obvious, and very easy to anticipate a pistol whip).

I mean, it might be a bit of a forgiving weaponset due to the amount of evasion on pistol whip, but at least the weaponset itself promotes battles of positioning and anticipation, and overall is more fun from my perspective to play against than any sort of weapon setup that utilizes steath (D/P specifically).

Vile.5678:

IS = INFILTRATOR’S STRIKE

Oh! Your doubles is’es got me. I can totally see how that looks like a long time initially.

But, I mean, look at what will follow…
Pistol whip, which is half second stun after a 3/4 cast. Infiltrator strike > pistol whip would not even be possible to combo if you reduced the stun.

If you are using sword/dagger then flanking strike is a half second cast with larcenous follow up that is another half second. It would be really difficult to combo those and survive without a stun on Infiltrator’s.

I believe the stun was balanced over what is naturally supposed to follow and to allow for burst setups while still giving the target time to break. Minus that stun, you would never land a sword dual skill against a competent player.

Oh and btw, all the bundles are broken as hell. Especially whirl.

Lordrosicky.5813:

The problem isn’t only PW but is basically everything to do with the thief. Its initiative regen is so absurd right now that it can just spam skills. Evade thief is still a major issue to. I would revert the initiative change AND nerf withdraw so have a cast time before it heals and dodges backwards.

I do agree that initiative regen is way too high right now, especially combined with the 15-pt trait in trickery which gives a ton of starting init to burn through while it regens. The one thing I really dislike about balancing (esp w/o public test servers), is that when some changes are made, we are told “we aren’t sure what effect this will have, so we’ll just have to see how strong it is” but when a change is a mistake we almost never see any reverts. Instead, there will be ancillary changes that don’t address the key thing that created the problem in the first place.

BlackBeard.2873:

Lordrosicky.5813:

The problem isn’t only PW but is basically everything to do with the thief. Its initiative regen is so absurd right now that it can just spam skills. Evade thief is still a major issue to. I would revert the initiative change AND nerf withdraw so have a cast time before it heals and dodges backwards.

I do agree that initiative regen is way too high right now, especially combined with the 15-pt trait in trickery which gives a ton of starting init to burn through while it regens. The one thing I really dislike about balancing (esp w/o public test servers), is that when some changes are made, we are told “we aren’t sure what effect this will have, so we’ll just have to see how strong it is” but when a change is a mistake we almost never see any reverts. Instead, there will be ancillary changes that don’t address the key thing that created the problem in the first place.

Dude, I couldn’t agree more. I wish they were less stubborn. Most the problems in the game come from 1 or 2 changes which lead to power creep. If they just reversed these changes (like dhuumfire – then maybe things would be better)

Its not the pistol whip alone allie. Its the combination of lyssa runes, basilisk venom, steal, and black powder.

How do you counter a thief that has aegis, protection and stability, while standing in a blind field after the thief teleports at you from stealth at 1200 range and stuns you repeatedly, while he also evades everything?
Add devourer venom as well to the mix and there you go.

But the main offender here is lyssa runes really. Something must be done about them.

I play thief, a lot recently. It’s not my main by any means but I have some experience with them.

The only time I would consider PW OP is when you combine it with Venoms and Leeching Venom Trait. With high crit chance/damage I can pretty much spike most classes down to about ¼ of their hp with just 1 PW.

The only thing I would do to it is either take the evade out of it, or don’t make it a stun (which may not solve anything if people just use Basilisk Venom with it, and then it becomes the same as Blurred Frenzy from the Mesmer).

I believe the damage that it provides is fine, as it should be a high risk high reward skill. But with both a stun and an evade there isn’t much risk involved.

S/P is the same as warrior! but less hp and armor… There were 30 more topic about hambow opness and hs opness than PW… And ?? Justice is only point of view sadly.

Pretty sure if withdraw and lyssa runes didn’t exist in their current state, pw would be less strong.
That being said, pw suffers from the same bad design as the Flanking Strike+Larcenous Strike combo did and imo still does.
Both skills are not situational but simply a (much) better version of the auto attack chain: Comparable damage + much more utility.
Unload actually has that problem too, although it trades utility for more reliable and higher damage.
All those skills need work in so far that they need to be more specific.
S/D: decrease damage and increase interaction (remove/transfer) with boons or add interaction with conditions (?)
S/P: pw stun vs head shot daze -> pw stun part should be removed -> only the flurry part remains + either change the evade so that it only evades (or blocks) attacks from the front, or deals greatly reduced damage to downed people (so you cannot efficiently abuse it to cleave on downed people). Might as well just rework it completely, just don’t limit yourself to tweaking numbers because this is very unlikely to do trick.

edit: I main thief.

- I main Thief, d/p venom/power hybrid actually.

- As for scenarios, if you mean encounters, then of course it can be mostly broken during 1v1s.
Since this isn’t really relevant, i’d like to say instead that it’s especially broken against any class that rely on other means than /facetank to control an encounter.
The evade side of the skill negates any other defensive means than endure pain/block and such. Keep in mind that evading is the most powerfull defensive tool behind invulnerability. From my point of view : stand in black powder, 333 like a boss, evade the blinds .

- Compared to other classes, it’s right next to endure pain + berserker stance, and i support the other people in here who fear you’d be thinking about tweaking pistol whip before even thinking about toning down all the passive /facetanking that is plaguing pvp nowadays.
The difference lies mostly in movement, since fighting this spec requires clever movement and positionning, like against endure pain /zerk stance wars, a good S/P thief will hunt you using shadowsteps, while a good warrior will immobilize or cripple you in order to prevent you from stepping back waiting for the stances to fade.
But all in all it ends up the same, different means, same ending.
I could go on a lot more on the subject, i’ll just say that multitool offensive+defensive skills (all in one if you prefer, be it a built in skill spec or supported by passive buffs or traits behind)) requiring no active player management will always be detrimental for pvp.

- To tweak the skill i would either :

> Halve the sword strikes. On one hand the skill deals less damage and the evade frame is shorter, allowing for a better counter reaction before the next one comes.
On the other hand, the S/P thief gets to land another stun much faster, granted he manages his initiative properly (since the channel gets shorten, thats a few 0.x seconds less to recover initiative while being untouchable).

> Remove the evade frames, the second part of the skill would give the thief 1 second stability + protection instead. This way you allow direct counters while not making the thief a standing fleefleefleefleeflee sugar turret.

Please also consider that the set already has access to black powder. If the player running the spec truly needs to set a defense before attacking, the tools are there to be used. BP+shadowstep > land on your opponent’s feet, devour venom to fix him in the blind field and 33333333. You don’t need to make us invincible on top of that while doing so.

And please, pistol whip is not the only broken /facetank skill out there.

My probably not so perfect 2 cents ~
Thank you !

the skill is totally fine, warriors didn’t adopt yet to the movement of pistol whip thieves,…
if you think the skill is too overpowerd why don’t you make it how it was before?
Thrs only this spec for thief in tpvp left since the other two options got nerved
(s/d only 1boon / d/p initiative + stealth)sidenote: if u remove the ,,evade’’ from the skill thief won t be viewable in pve anymore and thr will be more qq thn in the pvp section

The problem with the skill is that its a cleave burst dmg/stun/evade on an easily spamable single button rotation. So truly the problem is the thief class mechanic, where they get these things on a single skill on the pretext that they’re easy to kill. Since the thief class mechanic is not going to be changed, Id sugest:

a) reducing the damage of the skill (again) so that it is no longer the main damage of the weapon set. Force the thief to atleast autoattack more the target.

or

b) reduce the amount of time the thief is evading while doing this skill, so that they cant do all of their damage while invulnerable (I mean, if the enemy is stunned, the thief shouldnt have to worry about the enemy hitting back. atleast make them think before using the skill…) then roll right after they finish and until they have enough initiative to start again.

Erzian.5218:

S/P: pw stun vs head shot daze -> pw stun part should be removed -> only the flurry part remains + either change the evade so that it only evades (or blocks) attacks from the front, or deals greatly reduced damage to downed people (so you cannot efficiently abuse it to cleave on downed people). Might as well just rework it completely, just don’t limit yourself to tweaking numbers because this is very unlikely to do trick.

edit: I main thief.

I don’t think the stun is all that bad in pistol whip… Pistol whip needs to have some sort of root if it is expected to do any sort of dmg at all. Maybe it’d be better if they broke the skill into two parts and had the first part of pistol whip shoot an Immob out (500 units or so) for .5s (same as stun) and the second part be the dmging/evade part. This way no one would have to worry about their skills being interrupted by it and it would give more reason to use Headshot in the build.

And I don’t know why you’d use it to cleave downed states when you have Choking Gas and Cluster Bomb in your second weapon set. Pistol whips dmg is already about the same as auto attack.

Be aware that shaving thief is not sufficient. Big nerfs are required as it makes even warrior look bad