Guild Wars 2

I main thief, playing a s/p , sh build without stealth

PW is imbalanced because the evade on flurry is bugged, it Need to be blurr to get worked right.
The damage is ok after all theese sword nerfs.

split the skill into 2 skills
1 Close-range stun and 1 flurry attack
separating means give more Option to ingame combat for thief with only 12 initiative …. and build viability

by the way , why are we talking about PW again? John Peter already promised us the separating idea of this skill

The all in one is the main problem with PW, a skill that produces stun (very good combo with steal or Infiltrator’s signet to bypass cast time) and full evade with very good damage, spammable and without CD.

In a trickery build with very low Steal CD + daze this is very powerful, it’s better to split the skill in two phases with +1 cost of initiative and remove stun from the spell.

And you need to add a LoS to Infiltrator’s Strike.

Lordrosicky.5813:

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

Warriors make warriors look bad.

Allie, THIS IS A SERIOUS POST

This guy obviously is either a troll or has some vendetta against thieves. As seen by his previous post, he thinks that anyone with a different opinion than him is a noob. He’s obviously never played a thief or is just angry that thief right now is one of the only classes that can somewhat counter his hambow warrior.
Please don’t listen to people like this. This game has already been messed up enough because Anet has in the past.

Arkantos.7460:

I main thief, playing a s/p , sh build without stealth

PW is imbalanced because the evade on flurry is bugged, it Need to be blurr to get worked right.
The damage is ok after all theese sword nerfs.

split the skill into 2 skills
1 Close-range stun and 1 flurry attack
separating means give more Option to ingame combat for thief with only 12 initiative …. and build viability

by the way , why are we talking about PW again? John Peter already promised us the separating idea of this skill

Pistol whip is just the tip of the iceberg. The problem is the fact they reduced all thief cool downs by 33% last patch. When thief was already single handedly responsible for knocking any other berserker roamer class out of the meta due to the s/d thief build which was hardly nerfed at all. It was utter madness. The work of mad people who really really must have no idea.

This game have ZERO skill because of power creep. It is all just SPAM SPAM SPAM. Spam attacks, spam evades, spam invulnerabilities. Everything is such a joke and all they do is continue the power creep. Literally that is all they have done since dhuumfire – power creep. Result = a dead pvp game.

Lordrosicky.5813:

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

We must not be playing the same game…

Shield bash for a stun twice as long, hundred blades, with opportunist in the crit trait line that also happens to reduce its 8 sec CD by 20% AND gives might…all while have three times the health and armor glass specced.

I don’t know about other thief players, but i’d be happy to trade 1.5sec of evade for 3x my health and armor and my init recharge in my crit line.

The warrior right now has higher burst and sustained damage than the class that is supposed to trade burst for frailty. It has a better Pistol Whip than thieves, and doesn’t even need a pistol.

Haha, this forum is way too funny. There’s been countless threads about HS, Spirit Rangers, Hambow, MM Necros, Skyhammer in YoloQ and the likes, but none of these got a topic like this.

I main a thief, been using PW since beta.
It has seen some indirect nerfs but I do like the skill a lot in the current state.

I have been wondering why this weapon set has both headshot stun, and PW daze.
Of course PW wouldn’t hit a wet sock without the daze. But when this set was created, could ’t they come up with something totally different?

How to improve Pistol Whip?
Make the skill harder to land, so that you have to master the skill in order to be effective. A higher skill cap, not like a random person pressing 3.
Dividing the skill into 2 parts would increase the skill cap for a bit. Also decrease the damage done in the beginning and increase the damage done in the end. (Like the Heartseeker change). So players get punished less in the beginning, and more by not moving out of the cleave in time.

Infiltrator’s strike affecting PW
IS is usefull for PW to land. However the immobilize combined with the stun can be too hard for. some players. I would suggest to decrease the Immobilization duration or change it to cripple, and give Shadows return a 0s cast.

AcidicVision.5498:

Lordrosicky.5813:

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

We must not be playing the same game…

Shield bash for a stun twice as long, hundred blades, with opportunist in the crit trait line that also happens to reduce its 8 sec CD by 20% AND gives might…all while have three times the health and armor glass specced.

I don’t know about other thief players, but i’d be happy to trade 1.5sec of evade for 3x my health and armor and my init recharge in my crit line.

The warrior right now has higher burst and sustained damage than the class that is supposed to trade burst for frailty. It has a better Pistol Whip than thieves, and doesn’t even need a pistol.

If your thief is frail then you are not playing it right. In fact a thief is probably harder to kill than a bunker guardian that specs for full defense. That is the problem. Massive damage. Most CC in the game (spammable on at most kitten CD). Most mobility. Highest damage. Stealth. By far the most evasion.

Thief is so broken it is unbelievable. In solo q every game is decided by who has better thieves. You cant do kitten on any other classes. The fact this thread even needed to be made is a joke seen as the OPness is so obvious THAT ANYONE who actually plays the game should see it.

I suck atm at this game but there are thieves who really are alot worse than me and they can dominate right now. The game is unplayable

PW is really easy to avoid and interrupt because of the extremely long (.5-.666s windup) people make the mistake of trying to keep their distance on pw when they should really be camping their shadowstep return points. This is a player skill issue, not a balance problem, good players dont eat full pw.

Sure you are going to eat a pistol whip if they land basi or use 2 into steal daze during the windup but other than that it is very easy to avoid, and if they do a 2 3 combo to immob then just rupt them and laugh as they are dazed and eat a full damage burst.

1. pistol whip is a mesmer on steroids. No cool down, easy to replenish initiative. Evades all attacks.

2. Pistol Whip does not mention EVADE!

3. Basic instructions: Continuously Press pistol whip until your target dies. You will not surfer any physical damage. To further excel in pistol whipping, apply a venom that stones your target, chills them, or immobilizes them. Any secondary affect that keeps your target from running from you as you evade every single attack is your key to being the victor (every time).

Please keep in mind that pistol whipping has a side effect of ignorance. A slice of god mode as much as your initiative can supply will surely get to your head.

Indeed no where close to a caliber of skill.
_____________

This is an easy fix.

Pistol Whip: SHADOW STEP to target, STUNning them, and LASHing out with your sword. skill does not evade.

I think the real question is what does the other 50% of the PvP population, that only Allie knows about, think of this skill? As we have seen in the past, in regard to the Trollhammer map, their opinion is weighted the heaviest, so it’d be nice to hear their view. :P

I have to agree wtih Lordrosicky: pistol whip is just tip of the iceberg.

As an elementalist player (with no thief alt), my main issue with this skill is how cheap it feels like. The combination of doing way too much at the same time, having no cooldown and lasting too long removes any kind of counterplay.

Generally, due to the nature of initiative, key thieves’ skills need to be re-designed so that they’re harder to pull off successfully, and have situationally more drawbacks.

Perhaps the evade should be slightly lower and a (higher) aftercast should exist to punish PW spamming (by making it easier for your opponent to counter-play it) and to reward when the skill is well-timed. It comes at the risk of making the skill more clumsy, but alternatively, an aftercast can be substituted for a second, less defensive skill button, effectively acchieving the same while adding more options/ depth to the thief itself. Perhaps a slightly initiative cost on top of it to make it less spammable (which, again, can also be acchieved through a second skill).

Because I don’t play a thief, I have a hard time suggesting anything more specific than this.

Pistol Whip is definitely not the only troublesome skill in thief’s kitten nal, and most of them suffer from the same problem: doing too much, too often. The initiative system has a negative effect on all those skills, but increasing their cost is not always the best thing. More drawbacks, situational uses, reliance on other skills and more skill chains/sequences can prevent the “lack of a cooldown” from being too much of a problem.

How about:

1. They take away the stun completely.

or

2. Make it a 2 step process.

and to compensate and at the same time address the evade time:

Make the whole channel half the time but the same damage/amount of hits. That would make the evade frames shorter, keep the damage and make it more bursty but also make it not effected by any quickness skills. This would also make less skilled spammy thieves waste their initiative if someone were to simply walk away and perhaps reward more skilled thieves by having to better time their evades for it. Also addressing how the current ini regen wouldn’t be as effective if the whole skill was more quickly executed. (This is assuming the stun is not included or if is a 2 step process the frenzy slashing part would be the half channel time)

Let’s also remove stability and aegis from lyssa runes, thank you.

The problem with Pistol-Whip is that there is no risk and a TON of rewards.
jump in do a load of damage (evade in while your doing it) and dodge heal-dodge-dodge-switch shortbow- evade- evade – evade – dodge out

The possible solutions I see for this is:

- the most useful solution I see is making skills that evade/invul use initiative so it can’t be spammed in any way. this also creates a risk to attacking.
this fixes issues in dodging for a lot of annoying stuff. like rangers, s/d thiefs.
adding initiative usage to any skill creates a risk to use it and will make the player recuired to track their initiative more and not just spam everything in the hope to dodge/evade.

- remove the immobilize in the skill.

- make the charge up longer and a lot more visual.

- remove the critical haste on it so it doesn’t do 50k damage in 4seconds

the damage on it is fine if you do the above. standing in it while not CC’d is pretty stupid if the thief has no haste.
would be nice if you nerfed it without killing it. there is some nice tactical play to this build together with your team, like pulling them together as a mesmer and the jumping on them all with a pistol-whip.

Main: Ranger.

I feel PW is unbalanced when playing a power ranger. When playing a power ranger one must go lb/gs 30/30/x/x/x zerker to dish out enough damage to kill any sustained opponent fast enough. This also requires LB/GS so you don’t lose out on DPS when swapping to s/x. When encounter a s/p thief you either get hit with a pw with a bow out and you cannot do anything besides try to dodge it, you cannot stealth off the thief, knock the thief back, or have your pet interrupt them, you just have to eat it. 1 pistol whip will drop you more than 50% hp guaranteed. The other option is to get hit with PW while in GS. With GS you can either swoop as they stun you hoping the animation clunkily throws you out of the way of the damage after getting hit by the stun or you have to block with GS 4, which is the worst option. GS 4 is the only true defensive skill on GS but by blocking the PW’s quarter second stun you get forced into a 1 second self-animation-stun that allows the thief to get the full DPS portion of the PW off and a second PW as well leaving you 100-0’d by your own weapons. As a ranger you are pew pewing from 1500 range and can’t really see what the thief has, then he PW -> steal and is on top of you with a stun. If it procs quickness from the trait you don’t have enough time to react to stunbreak (and even if you do a large chunk of your hp will be gone, so much that you will for sure lose the fight).

On another note, it feels really imbalanced in that in a team fight (s/p and s/d) thievse can just train with immunity (through the evades on their 3 skills) any DPS class which effectively limits a huge portion of zerker classes.

However, I feel this skill is completely balanced against sustainy classes like warrior, tanky condi ranger, engi, etc.

I think this skill could be better changed if it gave damage immunity like signet of stone (traited) or endure pain but not evades, that way condis, stealths, and CC could still be landed.

Wow, some of you have a really hard time keeping on track here. Focus on the PW.

Anyway, as I said in my earlier post, just remove the evade and the skill is fine.

The very simplest answer is that a stun, big burst and evade for the duration of an attack all on one button press is bad design.

Remove one of the 3 and PW will be fine.

My suggestion is to remove the evade frames and that way thieves are not invulnerable while bursting.

eleshazar.6902:

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.

It’s fine to compare it to blurred Frenzy. However, mesmers are less tanky due to having fewer defensive abilities, less stealth, less access to blinds and teleports and wear light armor.

So pistol whip is like Blurred Frenzy, except Pistol Whip does more damage, stuns, has no cooldown and thieves have better damage and survivability than Mesmers.

So…yeah, it’s OP.

Lordrosicky.5813:

I suck atm at this game but there are thieves who really are alot worse than me and they can dominate right now. The game is unplayable

My advice to you is maybe then get better before weighing in on balance issues? The thief has low barrier to entry gimmicks that any player can get comfortable with and score some points. The same as warriors.

But when a player knows how to handle those gimmicks, the thief just dies. And dies. And dies. The skill cap to be useful and survive once your gimmicks no longer work is a lot steeper than most of the other professions.

Most of the anger here is from people that just cant or won’t adapt to beat the gimmick so they want the game changed for them instead.

In tPvP sword/pistol thieves are waaaaaaayyyy less common than they are in hot join, and there are fewer all the time. If it was so OP, why wouldn’t it be dominant in organized play? Because sword/pistol is not viable and Pistol Whip leaves the Thief much too vulnerable on a stun break or evade. In fact, there isn’t a single cookie cutter Thief meta in tPvP right now. But signet of spite/epi Necros, shatter/sword Mesmers, Diamond skin Eles, and Engi bunkers are gaining more and more traction.

You dont nerf an entire class or skill because a sub-group’s (PvP) sub-group’s (hot join/solo queue players), sub-group’s (that use the forums), sub-group (and cant seem to figure out pistol whip) refuse to step it up.

1. It does 2-3 times the damage of a Blurred Frenzy so don’t make that comparison.
2. If you split it then you will have Thieves using the stun part out of combat and just blurr porting for instant damage – the cast of the stun is the ONLY thing which lets you see it coming.
3. It can be used 5 times in a row with the basic 10/30/0/0/30 setup <- this is unacceptable.
4. kitten SBOW!!!!

AcidicVision.5498:

Lordrosicky.5813:

I suck atm at this game but there are thieves who really are alot worse than me and they can dominate right now. The game is unplayable

My advice to you is maybe then get better before weighing in on balance issues? The thief has low barrier to entry gimmicks that any player can get comfortable with and score some points. The same as warriors.

But when a player knows how to handle those gimmicks, the thief just dies. And dies. And dies. The skill cap to be useful and survive once your gimmicks no longer work is a lot steeper than most of the other professions.

Most of the anger here is from people that just cant or won’t adapt to beat the gimmick so they want the game changed for them instead.

In tPvP sword/pistol thieves are waaaaaaayyyy less common than they are in hot join, and there are fewer all the time. If it was so OP, why wouldn’t it be dominant in organized play? Because sword/pistol is not viable and Pistol Whip leaves the Thief much too vulnerable on a stun break or evade. In fact, there isn’t a single cookie cutter Thief meta in tPvP right now. But signet of spite/epi Necros, shatter/sword Mesmers, Diamond skin Eles, and Engi bunkers are gaining more and more traction.

You dont nerf an entire class or skill because a sub-group’s (PvP) sub-group’s (hot join/solo queue players), sub-group (that use the forums), refuse to step it up.

Ummm, play upper level solo queue or tPvP and then say that again. Sure, there are still a good number of Caed wanna be’s running his d/p spec, but a lot have moved onto S/P.

AcidicVision.5498:

Lordrosicky.5813:

I suck atm at this game but there are thieves who really are alot worse than me and they can dominate right now. The game is unplayable

My advice to you is maybe then get better before weighing in on balance issues? The thief has low barrier to entry gimmicks that any player can get comfortable with and score some points. The same as warriors.

But when a player knows how to handle those gimmicks, the thief just dies. And dies. And dies. The skill cap to be useful and survive once your gimmicks no longer work is a lot steeper than most of the other professions.

Most of the anger here is from people that just cant or won’t adapt to beat the gimmick so they want the game changed for them instead.

In tPvP sword/pistol thieves are waaaaaaayyyy less common than they are in hot join, and there are fewer all the time. If it was so OP, why wouldn’t it be dominant in organized play? Because sword/pistol is not viable and Pistol Whip leaves the Thief much too vulnerable on a stun break or evade. In fact, there isn’t a single cookie cutter Thief meta in tPvP right now. But signet of spite/epi Necros, shatter/sword Mesmers, Diamond skin Eles, and Engi bunkers are gaining more and more traction.

You dont nerf an entire class or skill because a sub-group’s (PvP) sub-group’s (hot join/solo queue players), sub-group’s (that use the forums), sub-group (and cant seem to figure out pistol whip) refuse to step it up.

It is dominant in organized play. You aren’t ranked on either solo or team leaderboards for NA.

Luto.1938:

I play a thief and the problem that I see from most abilities being “OP” stems from the way the class is designed with initiative. The class is designed to spam one ability several times. We (thieves) generally only have one good damage dealing weapon ability and with no cool downs on our weapon skills it leads to spamming.

I can see two ways to fix the spamming problem. The first involving adding more abilities to each weapon set that deal damage. I understand that there are great utility weapon skills to be used, but when we want to deal damage it’s typically one ability being used and spammed because that’s we’ve got to use. The second idea is a little more involved and requires a lot of class restructuring. Get rid of initiative… make the class operate on cool downs like all the other classes. The only problem I see in idea #2 is that in doing so you’d have to also implement idea #1….

As for PW… maybe get rid of the evade and leave the rest alone. A thief that uses PW is rooted and therefore vulnerable. Removing the evade makes it a risk to use the skill and will provoke more thought before using it / spamming it.

The problem with initiative as it is right now is that if one skill is even a bit stronger than the rest, such as pistol whip, will lead to it being spammed as it will result in being more effective than it using a combination of other skills. And you know, no one likes being beaten by the spamming of one skill, it feels cheesy. Now, Anets philosophy with thieves is designed to be able to use the same skill multiple times, and is no way going to change now, but being able to spam a skill multiple times should only be more effective in like 20% of the time when compared to using a different combination of skills. Imo, reward thieves by who do a chain of different skills as opposed to just one skill. Like skill b has an extra effect if used after skill a and skill c has an extra damage if followed by skill c.

So for like pistol whip, you could maybe take away x from it to make it a little less effective if spammed but if used after another certain skill, it could regain x+something else.

S/P is very near to my heart and I feel that the time has come to see S/P takes its true place as the thief’s defensive melee set, no different than a warrior using mace/shield or a guardian using mace/focus, etc. To me a sword/pistol thief should be the ultimate duelist, trouncing enemies by parrying, riposting, anticipating and counterattacking.

Do you main Thief?
I play a S/P + SB venom share thief in spvp as well as running a 60% ascended venom share thief in PVE. I consider it my second best character/second main. I desperately want to run a defensive thief built around hanging in there and socking it out with leeching venoms and eroding my enemy’s offense.

When do you feel that Pistol Whip is unbalanced? (scenarios would be great)
The issue is that the damage scales with offensive stats but the defense is universal. A berserker turns the temporary invulnerability into a much larger return, meanwhile take a not glass thief into consideration. For a tanky built thief pistol whip is a critical DAMAGE MITIGATION skill. The problem is this skill is too rewarding for glass thieves.

How does it feel unbalanced compared to other class mechanics?
The problem is that it has no cooldown. The ability to deliver almost your entire offensive payload with no danger.

What would you do to change Pistol Whip to better fit the class/game?
I would reduce the power coefficient and increase the base damage so that tanky built thieves could utilize pistol whip as a damage mitigation skill but not a damage dealer with invulnerability.

In general I believe S/P needs to be reevaluated. It needs to stop being so hybridized between damage, control, mobility and recovery. It should reduce focus on damage and mobility and become the flagship weapon set for thieves who want to fight it out like roughhousing brigands, who fight dirty and in your face. The theme of a S/P user should be “ATTACK THE ENEMY’S OFFENSE.”

1 skills: These are IMHO almost flawless. This is exactly what a tanky/control based duelist needs, AOE cleave control and weakness to reduce incoming damage and limit enemy mobility options.

Stealth skill: This should stay weak. Stealth access should not natively exist in this set, and should actively be discouraged to reward the infighting mindset. I recommend changing the CC effect to a lengthy chill as a way to further erode enemy offensive potential, making stealth a niche counterpick which is effective vs specific enemies.

2nd skill, Harrier’s Strike (rename): This move used to be too strong due to the disengage. I say get rid of the disengage entirely. Remove the followup skill. What this skill needs to do is allow the thief to enter into infight range, keep the short range teleport. It also needs to act as a way to cure conditions. Instead give this skill a condition convert on hit if successfully landed, converting one condition into a boon. This maintains the theme of attacking the enemy offense. Is the enemy’s offense entirely based on kiting you while spamming conditions? Stick to them and cure yourself while doing minor damage.

3 skill: Completely drop the CC on this move. That should belong to head shot. Cut the animation startup time (no pistol whip just flurry) and maybe even extend the evasion. Make this a pure evasion/stand your ground skill. It has AMAZING synergy with signet of malice as it can generate a lot of health. It also has synergy with leeching venoms as a rapid healer. These are key utilities for tanky thief types. Drop the damage coefficient on this move and raise the base damage. Make it do less than auto attack chains.

4th skill, Head Shot: If head shot interrupts a skill it should apply some kind of bonus effect. The intention should be to reward successful interrupts. Perhaps lengthy vulnerability stacks. It may be worth expanding the CC duration as this is now the ONLY hard CC in the set.

5th skill, Black Powder: It represents the ultimate in thief style dirty fighting. You literally lay claim to an area and make it your own, any enemy foolish enough to fight you inside of it should lose horribly. This is no different than fighting a guardian in their symbols or consecrations.

That is what S/P should be, the ultimate defensive infighter who can stick to anyone and ideally survive. This would help open bunker style roles to thief and give them new niches to explore without letting glass builds maximize payload delivery.

This also is a wonderful set up for PVE. Black powder is your go to tank style for hordes of weaker monsters that can be blinded. Meanwhile when fighting massive champions you could actively engage in the fight by using the third skill to evade, or escaping red circles only to reengage immediately with 2.

Please Anet. I love this set. Not all of us are running zerker glass thieves who want to dodge while killing. Some of us run cleric thieves, and this set is critical to tanking as a thief.

Initiative is broken above all else. Focusing one thief ability will push thieves into playing a different weapon set. Thief has more ways to close the gap on classes that require distance to even stand a chance.

So my question is, is pistol whip really the problem or being unable to escape the inevitable the problem?

I personally main ele and to a great extent, you can’t avoid dying unless you land a burst combo on the run.

It’s not a L2P issue for other classes, we only have a couple of dodges for abilities that only have soft cool downs which makes them spammable resulting in the inevitable eating a pistol whip, heart seeker spam, whatever the case may be.

Look at the class as a whole and not a single ability.

I don’t have any feedback but I’d like to thank Allie for starting this thread, we appreciate it when the balance team is open to feedback.

Even dagger/pistol is too strong now.

It has everything to do with the initiative regen buff.

I think pistol whip is more or less fine in the competitive scene. Meaning it’s a low skill cap build that is rarely seen (if ever) in high-end pvp. I don’t know anyone in the top 200 running pistol whip, at least not in NA. I think I K is the really only successful high-end top 100 pw thief NA.

I think the problem with PW is that it’s a gimmicky mechanic that gives a squishy class invuln frames to spam high burst damage back to back. As such a bad PW thief can kill a very good non-PW glassy class (ele, mes, thieves, bad necros etc etc). So as a thief who has invested thousands of hours into your class and spec, if you die to a person who is just picking up PW for the first time and won by 3-spam teleporting because you ate a basi when your stunbreak was on cd then you kind of feel crappy.

Any glass class without a stunbreak will be roasted by PW unless you are truly advanced in your respective class.

One more thing I would like to mention. The great thing about classes like thief and ele is that you can counter burst. Basically if a class goes in to burst you you can usually interrupt their burst and counter it with your own. This is extremely difficult to do with the nature of PW since it’s a burst that evades and any good PW thief will be able to mitigate the few fractions of a second that they’re vulnerable.

But a thief can only land 6 instant stun pistol whips a min if they waste their stun breaks and get obstructed on the steal, and even then the stun is removed after 3k damage is done so they can dodge out of the other 6 hits, so at a max that is 18k damage a min and for 50 of those seconds they will have to use pw without a blink or hide, and even if they hide that still leaves 30 seconds to gib them. There is tons of counter play to pw people just dont take the time to think about it.

Not to mention that if they use all 6 teleports a min to land pw stun then they are giving up their only stun breaks.

Lux.7169:

I think pistol whip is more or less fine in the competitive scene. Meaning it’s a low skill cap build that is rarely seen (if ever) in high-end pvp. I don’t know anyone in the top 200 running pistol whip, at least not in NA. I think I K is the really only successful high-end top 100 pw thief NA.

I think the problem with PW is that it’s a gimmicky mechanic that gives a squishy class invuln frames to spam high burst damage back to back. As such a bad PW thief can kill a very good non-PW glassy class (ele, mes, thieves, bad necros etc etc). So as a thief who has invested thousands of hours into your class and spec, if you die to a person who is just picking up PW for the first time and won by 3-spam teleporting because you ate a basi when your stunbreak was on cd then you kind of feel crappy.

Any glass class without a stunbreak will be roasted by PW unless you are truly advanced in your respective class.

One more thing I would like to mention. The great thing about classes like thief and ele is that you can counter burst. Basically if a class goes in to burst you you can usually interrupt their burst and counter it with your own. This is extremely difficult to do with the nature of PW since it’s a burst that evades and any good PW thief will be able to mitigate the few fractions of a second that they’re vulnerable.

Magic Toker, Shad, and Sizer all run S/P now.

Also, to those who say PW is not spammable:

With 15 initiative you can press it 6 times in a row before you run out of initiative if you let the cast go for its full length (delivering all swings).

With the evades this is a HUGE evade uptime WHILE doing tons of damage.

infantrydiv.1620:

Lux.7169:

I think pistol whip is more or less fine in the competitive scene. Meaning it’s a low skill cap build that is rarely seen (if ever) in high-end pvp. I don’t know anyone in the top 200 running pistol whip, at least not in NA. I think I K is the really only successful high-end top 100 pw thief NA.

I think the problem with PW is that it’s a gimmicky mechanic that gives a squishy class invuln frames to spam high burst damage back to back. As such a bad PW thief can kill a very good non-PW glassy class (ele, mes, thieves, bad necros etc etc). So as a thief who has invested thousands of hours into your class and spec, if you die to a person who is just picking up PW for the first time and won by 3-spam teleporting because you ate a basi when your stunbreak was on cd then you kind of feel crappy.

Any glass class without a stunbreak will be roasted by PW unless you are truly advanced in your respective class.

One more thing I would like to mention. The great thing about classes like thief and ele is that you can counter burst. Basically if a class goes in to burst you you can usually interrupt their burst and counter it with your own. This is extremely difficult to do with the nature of PW since it’s a burst that evades and any good PW thief will be able to mitigate the few fractions of a second that they’re vulnerable.

Magic Toker, Shad, and Sizer all run S/P now.

Aren’t shad and sizer EU? And I honestly haven’t seen toker in weeks and I have been extremely active recently.

Yup, toker hasn’t team Q’d since 2/25 and he’s decayed off top 1k solo Q

Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen google on his PW thief in at least a month, maybe longer. Last two times I have seen him he was not even thief.

So… no one in NA currently running PW at a top tier level?

Not saying it’s impossible because clearly it is since I’ve seen sizer streaming with it before, but just pointing out that it’s not prominent in the high-end competitive scene on NA.

Allie please realise that %90 of people posting in this thread are bad and/or hotjoin players that have no idea what their talking in about.

PW is fine, if you focus nerfs on PW alone thiefs will just go back to perma evade S/D cheese, or perma stealth d/p cheese. The problem is the trickery tree and the initiative regen of thiefs overall which PW happens to benefit from both the most.

Atleast PW can be countered by retaliation, unlike S/D which still has no counter.

dimyzuka.7051:

Allie please realise that %90 of people posting in this thread are bad and/or hotjoin players that have no idea what their talking in about.

PW is fine, if you focus nerfs on PW alone thiefs will just go back to perma evade S/D cheese, or perma stealth d/p cheese. The problem is the trickery tree and the initiative regen of thiefs overall. Atleast PW can be countered by retaliation, unlike S/D which still has no counter.

I hope you realize how bad you just made yourself look. I can’t name ANY top thief in solo or team queue that runs a permastealth d/p build. It is a liability for a team.

Stay focused on PW. It doesn’t need a lot of changes. It just needs the evade removed. That won’t impact top players that much but will raise the skill cap a bit. That’s a good thing.

style.6173:

dimyzuka.7051:

Allie please realise that %90 of people posting in this thread are bad and/or hotjoin players that have no idea what their talking in about.

PW is fine, if you focus nerfs on PW alone thiefs will just go back to perma evade S/D cheese, or perma stealth d/p cheese. The problem is the trickery tree and the initiative regen of thiefs overall. Atleast PW can be countered by retaliation, unlike S/D which still has no counter.

I hope you realize how bad you just made yourself look. I can’t name ANY top thief in solo or team queue that runs a permastealth d/p build. It is a liability for a team.

Stay focused on PW. It doesn’t need a lot of changes. It just needs the evade removed. That won’t impact top players that much but will raise the skill cap a bit. That’s a good thing.

If the evade is removed then the skill is useless, you cant have a channeled skill on the squishiest class in the game that roots you without some form of defence. Everyone in this thread is acting like they are taking 8k per pw at all times but that is actually impossible against anyone half decent. Most pw do 3-5k tops because people get out of the way.

style.6173:

dimyzuka.7051:

Allie please realise that %90 of people posting in this thread are bad and/or hotjoin players that have no idea what their talking in about.

PW is fine, if you focus nerfs on PW alone thiefs will just go back to perma evade S/D cheese, or perma stealth d/p cheese. The problem is the trickery tree and the initiative regen of thiefs overall. Atleast PW can be countered by retaliation, unlike S/D which still has no counter.

I hope you realize how bad you just made yourself look. I can’t name ANY top thief in solo or team queue that runs a permastealth d/p build. It is a liability for a team.

Stay focused on PW. It doesn’t need a lot of changes. It just needs the evade removed. That won’t impact top players that much but will raise the skill cap a bit. That’s a good thing.

That’s because you dont play at high level, Caed, Xii Xii, Lux, infact in NA d/p is the premiere build amongst the top players. You wouldn’t know this because you’re a WvW and hotjoin hero.

Zirith.6429:

If the evade is removed then the skill is useless, you cant have a channeled skill on the squishiest class in the game that roots you without some form of defence. Everyone in this thread is acting like they are taking 8k per pw at all times but that is actually impossible against anyone half decent. Most pw do 3-5k tops because people get out of the way.

This doesnt even touch on the fact that is you remove the evade frames, unless the skill is separated from the PvE version, you completely destroy the weapon set for PvE.

Thedenofsin.7340:

Allie Murdock.8152:

Hey everyone,

I’ve been seeing a lot of threads pop up with varying feedback about this skill. I’d appreciate it if you guys could toss some feedback in this thread about the skill, and try to be as concise as possible.

Also, try to answer these questions:

• Do you main Thief?
• When do you feel that Pistol Whip is unbalanced? (scenarios would be great)
  • How does it feel unbalanced compared to other class mechanics?
• What would you do to change Pistol Whip to better fit the class/game?

Additionally, if you feel Pistol Whip is exactly what it needs to be, I would like you to say so in this thread.

This thread is for me personally so I can properly communicate to the designers how you guys feel about it.

Thanks!

Allie,

The root cause is the Balance Team did a flat buff to thief regen several months ago. This made many abilities much more spammable than before.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that a spammable aoe ability that evades, stuns and does damage is overpowered.

The right answer would be to go back and tune down thief regen. They didn’t need the buff at all, considering they were all alone in the top roamer spot before the buff.

Given the balance team’s pattern of fixing their mistakes with band-aids, I’d recommend they increase the cost of pistol whip from 5 to 8 initiative.

I don’t play a thief. I play one of those classes that isn’t viable in the Meta because of thieves. (pick any one)

And the fact that you don’t play thief is why you don’t understand the change to initiative. The change to initiative was an overall nerf to pistol whip when the thief has a decent crit chance. The nerf to opportunist more than makes up for the increase in base regen. A lot of people should read the Dec 10th patch notes again because the amount of misinformation about initiative changes is amazing.

I’m glad the devs are actually asking for people to state if they main thief or not. That being said, I main thief and I think the whole pistolwhip animation is too long. I think it should be shortened up (side effect of this is reduced damage and evasion but no reduction in cost). That’d fix the balance issue with it imo.

But even beyond balance, sword and pistol don’t have any synergy. Besides stomping or getting perma blind from the stolen warrior ability, PW is always better than black powder.

S/P is incredibly boring to play and to play against. The only thing worse than missing PW and sitting there swinging uselessly is being forced to play against someone interrupting more than half your skills. To achieve balance PW only needs to be nerfed a little bit but the problem is much deeper than that.

Thanks for reading.

Lux.7169:

infantrydiv.1620:

Lux.7169:

I think pistol whip is more or less fine in the competitive scene. Meaning it’s a low skill cap build that is rarely seen (if ever) in high-end pvp. I don’t know anyone in the top 200 running pistol whip, at least not in NA. I think I K is the really only successful high-end top 100 pw thief NA.

I think the problem with PW is that it’s a gimmicky mechanic that gives a squishy class invuln frames to spam high burst damage back to back. As such a bad PW thief can kill a very good non-PW glassy class (ele, mes, thieves, bad necros etc etc). So as a thief who has invested thousands of hours into your class and spec, if you die to a person who is just picking up PW for the first time and won by 3-spam teleporting because you ate a basi when your stunbreak was on cd then you kind of feel crappy.

Any glass class without a stunbreak will be roasted by PW unless you are truly advanced in your respective class.

One more thing I would like to mention. The great thing about classes like thief and ele is that you can counter burst. Basically if a class goes in to burst you you can usually interrupt their burst and counter it with your own. This is extremely difficult to do with the nature of PW since it’s a burst that evades and any good PW thief will be able to mitigate the few fractions of a second that they’re vulnerable.

Magic Toker, Shad, and Sizer all run S/P now.

Aren’t shad and sizer EU? And I honestly haven’t seen toker in weeks and I have been extremely active recently.

Yup, toker hasn’t team Q’d since 2/25 and he’s decayed off top 1k solo Q

Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen google on his PW thief in at least a month, maybe longer. Last two times I have seen him he was not even thief.

So… no one in NA currently running PW at a top tier level?

Not saying it’s impossible because clearly it is since I’ve seen sizer streaming with it before, but just pointing out that it’s not prominent in the high-end competitive scene on NA.

Why does it matter which server side people are playing it? These EU teams have beaten all the best NA teams. And these threads are primarily coming from EU players I believe because the spec is spreading fast in EU solo queue.

This is the only thief spec I’ve ever taken issue with because you are literally evading while doing massive damage.

In NA, I’ve seen Ozielol run pistol whip. I don’t really know who is left in the competitive NA scene other than vVv and Disney Channel

infantrydiv.1620:

Lux.7169:

infantrydiv.1620:

Lux.7169:

I think pistol whip is more or less fine in the competitive scene. Meaning it’s a low skill cap build that is rarely seen (if ever) in high-end pvp. I don’t know anyone in the top 200 running pistol whip, at least not in NA. I think I K is the really only successful high-end top 100 pw thief NA.

I think the problem with PW is that it’s a gimmicky mechanic that gives a squishy class invuln frames to spam high burst damage back to back. As such a bad PW thief can kill a very good non-PW glassy class (ele, mes, thieves, bad necros etc etc). So as a thief who has invested thousands of hours into your class and spec, if you die to a person who is just picking up PW for the first time and won by 3-spam teleporting because you ate a basi when your stunbreak was on cd then you kind of feel crappy.

Any glass class without a stunbreak will be roasted by PW unless you are truly advanced in your respective class.

One more thing I would like to mention. The great thing about classes like thief and ele is that you can counter burst. Basically if a class goes in to burst you you can usually interrupt their burst and counter it with your own. This is extremely difficult to do with the nature of PW since it’s a burst that evades and any good PW thief will be able to mitigate the few fractions of a second that they’re vulnerable.

Magic Toker, Shad, and Sizer all run S/P now.

Aren’t shad and sizer EU? And I honestly haven’t seen toker in weeks and I have been extremely active recently.

Yup, toker hasn’t team Q’d since 2/25 and he’s decayed off top 1k solo Q

Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen google on his PW thief in at least a month, maybe longer. Last two times I have seen him he was not even thief.

So… no one in NA currently running PW at a top tier level?

Not saying it’s impossible because clearly it is since I’ve seen sizer streaming with it before, but just pointing out that it’s not prominent in the high-end competitive scene on NA.

Why does it matter which server side people are playing it? These EU teams have beaten all the best NA teams. And these threads are primarily coming from EU players I believe because the spec is spreading fast in EU solo queue.

This is the only thief spec I’ve ever taken issue with because you are literally evading while doing massive damage.

In NA, I’ve seen Ozielol run pistol whip. I don’t really know who is left in the competitive NA scene other than vVv and Disney Channel

The only reason I differentiated between EU and NA is because I have no experience in EU at all. I don’t know how they play. I know they’ve out-performed NA in every major tournament which is why I said it’s definitely possible to be a top tier PW thief.

What’s with the hostility? I never said it was unviable in high-tier play. You seem really offended that I differentiated between NA and EU and when I pointed out that the ONLY two thieves you mentioned haven’t played PW in weeks you got aggressive.

Of course I know EU has beaten NA multiple times. Where did I say it mattered that EU or NA thieves mattered at all in this conversation? You’re assuming things and putting things in my mouth that I never said or even suggested.

Lux.7169:

infantrydiv.1620:

Lux.7169:

infantrydiv.1620:

Lux.7169:

I think pistol whip is more or less fine in the competitive scene. Meaning it’s a low skill cap build that is rarely seen (if ever) in high-end pvp. I don’t know anyone in the top 200 running pistol whip, at least not in NA. I think I K is the really only successful high-end top 100 pw thief NA.

I think the problem with PW is that it’s a gimmicky mechanic that gives a squishy class invuln frames to spam high burst damage back to back. As such a bad PW thief can kill a very good non-PW glassy class (ele, mes, thieves, bad necros etc etc). So as a thief who has invested thousands of hours into your class and spec, if you die to a person who is just picking up PW for the first time and won by 3-spam teleporting because you ate a basi when your stunbreak was on cd then you kind of feel crappy.

Any glass class without a stunbreak will be roasted by PW unless you are truly advanced in your respective class.

One more thing I would like to mention. The great thing about classes like thief and ele is that you can counter burst. Basically if a class goes in to burst you you can usually interrupt their burst and counter it with your own. This is extremely difficult to do with the nature of PW since it’s a burst that evades and any good PW thief will be able to mitigate the few fractions of a second that they’re vulnerable.

Magic Toker, Shad, and Sizer all run S/P now.

Aren’t shad and sizer EU? And I honestly haven’t seen toker in weeks and I have been extremely active recently.

Yup, toker hasn’t team Q’d since 2/25 and he’s decayed off top 1k solo Q

Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen google on his PW thief in at least a month, maybe longer. Last two times I have seen him he was not even thief.

So… no one in NA currently running PW at a top tier level?

Not saying it’s impossible because clearly it is since I’ve seen sizer streaming with it before, but just pointing out that it’s not prominent in the high-end competitive scene on NA.

Why does it matter which server side people are playing it? These EU teams have beaten all the best NA teams. And these threads are primarily coming from EU players I believe because the spec is spreading fast in EU solo queue.

This is the only thief spec I’ve ever taken issue with because you are literally evading while doing massive damage.

In NA, I’ve seen Ozielol run pistol whip. I don’t really know who is left in the competitive NA scene other than vVv and Disney Channel

The only reason I differentiated between EU and NA is because I have no experience in EU at all. I don’t know how they play. I know they’ve out-performed NA in every major tournament which is why I said it’s definitely possible to be a top tier PW thief.

What’s with the hostility? I never said it was unviable in high-tier play. You seem really offended that I differentiated between NA and EU and when I pointed out that the ONLY two thieves you mentioned haven’t played PW in weeks you got aggressive.

Of course I know EU has beaten NA multiple times. Where did I say it mattered that EU or NA thieves mattered at all in this conversation? You’re assuming things and putting things in my mouth that I never said or even suggested.

I can’t even see a speck of hostility in my post, sorry if it came across like that.

What I was responding to was: “I think pistol whip is more or less fine in the competitive scene. Meaning it’s a low skill cap build that is rarely seen (if ever) in high-end pvp”

I think it’s becoming increasingly common in high tier pvp and for the obvious reasons about the evade frames/ lack of risk involved.

I expect it soon to start transitioning from EU meta to NA :/

Thief is my second-most played profession.

The skill is clearly overpowered due to the fact that it has high damage, stuns, evades, and is relatively cheap and therefore easy to spam. It has too much for one skill.

Either remove the stun, evade, or increase its cost.

It’s too much reward for too little risk.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Hey everyone,

I’ve been seeing a lot of threads pop up with varying feedback about this skill. I’d appreciate it if you guys could toss some feedback in this thread about the skill, and try to be as concise as possible.

Also, try to answer these questions:

• Do you main Thief?
• When do you feel that Pistol Whip is unbalanced? (scenarios would be great)
  • How does it feel unbalanced compared to other class mechanics?
• What would you do to change Pistol Whip to better fit the class/game?

Additionally, if you feel Pistol Whip is exactly what it needs to be, I would like you to say so in this thread.

This thread is for me personally so I can properly communicate to the designers how you guys feel about it.

Thanks!

I thought about this for a while before deciding to respond to this. When I first started playing this game (when it was handed to me) I did in fact main a thief. I have sort of strayed from it since but I still return to my once-loved class from time-to-time to PvP/PvE/WvW or what have you.

What I’ve come to notice about the Pistol Whip ability is what everyone else has; thieves have decided that the only way to win a pvp fight (or the easiest) is to simply spam 3 and there they have it. This can work with Death Blossom, Pistol Whip, and Heartseeker. Pistol Whip is simply the strongest of the three attacks.

What I would do to remedy the situation:

First, I would change the mechanics of Pistol Whip, there are several options that could be viable to doing so. You could simply reduce the wish to spam it by increasing the initiative cost of Pistol Whip. Or, you could remove the ‘evade’ that comes with it, now they can’t spam it and not have to worry about getting hit. Lastly you could reduce the damage, but since thieves already do low damage in SPvP as is, I wouldn’t recommend it.

My personal choice would be to increase the cost of Pistol Whip to 6 initiative / 7 Initiative instead of it’s current 4. With four, they’re able to spam it at least three times (four times if they’ve specced into initiative regeneration) and dish out well over 15k damage in just a very short amount of time. Keep in mind they’re not able to be hit during the duration of the attack.

I think thieves are one of the coolest classes in the game. They can take a lot of skill to play, or they can take none whatsoever. But that goes with a lot of classes in the game, some players will always look for the easiest win possible, that requires the least out of them. I have found that I enjoy Guild Wars 2 more than other MMO’s simply because of the skill it requires to be very good in PvP (under most circumstances). Unlike other MMO’s, you can negate damage entirely with a dodge. With combo-finishers and AoE boons/heals and more, it makes the game extremely unique.

But now I’m babbling, I hope this helped to what you decide to do with Pistol Whip. Just my opinions!

Hype.8032:

Thedenofsin.7340:

Allie Murdock.8152:

Hey everyone,

I’ve been seeing a lot of threads pop up with varying feedback about this skill. I’d appreciate it if you guys could toss some feedback in this thread about the skill, and try to be as concise as possible.

Also, try to answer these questions:

• Do you main Thief?
• When do you feel that Pistol Whip is unbalanced? (scenarios would be great)
  • How does it feel unbalanced compared to other class mechanics?
• What would you do to change Pistol Whip to better fit the class/game?

Additionally, if you feel Pistol Whip is exactly what it needs to be, I would like you to say so in this thread.

This thread is for me personally so I can properly communicate to the designers how you guys feel about it.

Thanks!

Allie,

The root cause is the Balance Team did a flat buff to thief regen several months ago. This made many abilities much more spammable than before.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that a spammable aoe ability that evades, stuns and does damage is overpowered.

The right answer would be to go back and tune down thief regen. They didn’t need the buff at all, considering they were all alone in the top roamer spot before the buff.

Given the balance team’s pattern of fixing their mistakes with band-aids, I’d recommend they increase the cost of pistol whip from 5 to 8 initiative.

I don’t play a thief. I play one of those classes that isn’t viable in the Meta because of thieves. (pick any one)

And the fact that you don’t play thief is why you don’t understand the change to initiative. The change to initiative was an overall nerf to pistol whip when the thief has a decent crit chance. The nerf to opportunist more than makes up for the increase in base regen. A lot of people should read the Dec 10th patch notes again because the amount of misinformation about initiative changes is amazing.

I’m glad the devs are actually asking for people to state if they main thief or not. That being said, I main thief and I think the whole pistolwhip animation is too long. I think it should be shortened up (side effect of this is reduced damage and evasion but no reduction in cost). That’d fix the balance issue with it imo.

But even beyond balance, sword and pistol don’t have any synergy. Besides stomping or getting perma blind from the stolen warrior ability, PW is always better than black powder.

S/P is incredibly boring to play and to play against. The only thing worse than missing PW and sitting there swinging uselessly is being forced to play against someone interrupting more than half your skills. To achieve balance PW only needs to be nerfed a little bit but the problem is much deeper than that.

Thanks for reading.

Opportunist was 33% chance to proc right?
Overall nerf to just pistolwhip spam maaaybe, however the initiative change was a overall buff for thieves as a class and less RNGed(it had a 1sec cd still). If thieves only had 1 weapon set and only pistolwhip

And if my brain functions propperly:
In a 60sec fight you get 60 initive from regen+12 from opportunist(if it procs right when it resets every time) so 72 initative over a minute
Before you got 45 initative and 60 initative from opportunist so 105(if you somehow could constantly attack non stop for a full minute and it procced everytime cd was ready), but let’s say a more realistic amount of opportunist procs from a minute of pvp fighting 30 if you lucky with procs and you land on 75 initiative.

A dps nerf in a pve environment(i guess?) however in a pvp environment where there is a lot of time where you are not attacking by either evading, weapon swapping, kiting, being cced, reposition etc etc. It’s a buff/equal to before as PW, if you could reliable pull off a proc at least every 3sec(not very realistic in a normal tpvp situation tbh).
It was also a overall buff to D/P and other builds in general.

I’ve played thief since this time last year, prior to that I played warrior. I’m currently in the top 500 for Team Queue leaderboards and had to wait a while to post this without letting my personal bias or emotions get in the way.

When I first started thief, I played an S/P build. This was post-quickness nerf and it was no longer considered viable for nearly a year, up until the December balance patch when one after cast changed, guaranteeing two whole hits rather than one. Suddenly, there’s outrage on the forums and pistol whip is OP. I don’t necessarily play a glassy S/P build like most people and play the set more as it’s intended: as a sustained damage weapon, rather than burst.

To get to the point, I feel that people don’t know what they’re talking about, and here’s why: Back on the subject of Quickness, another change was made to the critical strikes traits that made critical haste far more reliable, and herein lies the issue, NOT in pistol whip itself (which is finally in a good place after being laughable for nearly a year). Now that Critical Haste has a 25% chance for 2 seconds of quickness on critical hits, pairing with pistol whip has a guaranteed chance to proc said trait, which is when the real burst and spamability comes in, coupled with rapid use of the thief’s teleportation skills. A thief can burst with pistol whip using this trait every 30 seconds.

I see a few options you could do to solve this without decimating the S/P set altogether:

• Nerf Critical Haste back down to a 10% chance to trigger on crit
• Make pistol whip only 4 attacks as it appears visually, rather than 9, decreasing it’s ability to proc Critical Haste (however, be sure to equalize the damage of the 4 attacks with the current 9 hits, or perhaps make Pistol Whip like Hundred Blades, and backload the damage so that it’s more punishing if a thief fails to get every hit off onto the opponent).
• Decrease the critical damage modifier on pistol whip, retaining it’s integrity on sustained damage builds while reducing its burst capability on glass cannon thieves.
• Reduce the quickness duration that Critical Haste gives from 2 seconds to 1. This will only allow the thief to finish his current pistol whip so that he cannot continue to spam it one to two more times (depending on time of proc during the first pistol whip), and rather is forced out of his “frenzy”, so to speak, and encourages skilled gameplay.

Take into note that S/P is an all-or-nothing set, and those running glass will find themselves dead after a failed rotation with nowhere to run and their initiative completely decimated. Against skilled players, the precast is easily visible (however, perhaps the precast for the stun itself should be slightly longer and more obvious), and a single dodge can ruin the entire rotation. It’s the sword equivalent of spamming Heartseeker, which many also complain about. I hope that you can see it from a slightly different perspective and do look at the consequences for whatever nerfs you decide to go with, because 90% of these suggestions would put the set right back where it started.

Thank you,
Glïnt

P.S. Take my signature into account for all balance requests, forever and always.

Not pistolwhip related really, but one of the best ideas i’ve seen for thieves in general with the broken initiative system:

Acandis.3250:

I think if they just made it so every consecutive cast of the same skill costs + 1 (Eg. Cast 3 heartseekers in a row will cost 3 + 4 + 5) it’d go a long way towards the blind spam of the same skill.

Would also be nice if chill affected initiative regeneration.

But hell, I’m only a player with top competitive background, leave it to the bright minds of the balance team to dig us out of this meta.

Spooko.5436:

How’s about you just play an Elemantalist in soloq`s for 4 hours. I am sure you will get a feel for the issue.

+1
Or maybe, just play the game in general xD

A easy way you could change to pistolwhip, make the first swing animation for the stun part A LOT more obvious.