Guild Wars 2

Let’s take a look at Phase Retreat for instance, and how this single skill provides Staff Mesmers so much play, mostly in terms of defense, but for offense as well.

Now Imagine the mostly useless Body Shot was turned into a retreat skill that acted as a Combo Finisher: Leap, very similar to Phase Retreat (with some key differences posted down).

Body Shot is now called Retreating Shot (or whatever). It now costs 4i instead of 3 (with 3 it could get tricky to balance is my guess). It moves you back 450 units (same as heartseeker leap). It still has ½ second cast time, it’s not instant like Mesmer’s becouse it would be too strong having a semi-stunbreaker being spammable. It now provides 3 stacks of vulnerability (or none at all). You cast the shot and then you automatically retreat.

I recall thieves having some kind of leap back retreat like skill and it was changed to the great Black Powder we have today. This would be a retreat teleport like skill, with a brief cast time and being a combo finisher leap.

With Black Powder it would stealth you and blind your opponent. But it’s very very Initiative intensive unless you have the proper traits. So trait lines that provide heavy initiative regen such as Trickery and Acrobatics would come more into play. It would give Pistol/Pistol users some added (and much needed) ‘kiteability’, survivavility and alternative ways to pressure someone besides spamming Unload all day long until you run out of initiative.
It wouldn’t be as strong in WvW due to the current meta of heavy retaliation uptime (and even confusion), a current broken mechanic that has nothig to do with the Thief itself.

Also, it would give Pistol/Dagger users some ‘kiteability’ and maybe provide them with gameplay alternatives such as maybe being a medium range harrassing kiter instead of a lame, low skill cap, C&D+spam 1 all day long. To evade redundancy with the skill, Shadow Strike now blinds.

It’s a simple, fast and easy to implement change that would greatly improve the Pistol/Pistol set that is in most need of help right now, and it could provide some gameplay alternatives to Pistol/Dagger players (maybe if you want to combo that set with Sword/Pistol or Dagger/Pistol too!), what do you think?

Lulz I suggested similar, but yeah again stay away from Leap-Finisher.
P/P’s issue is not that it lacks stealth. Nor does it need expensive methods of obtaining it, when as it currently operates, it’s relatively starved for initiative to begin with vs other sets save for S/P.

But yeah it would improve a lot with having more mobility. That being said This + Shadowstrike + CnD creates a huge amount of redundency on the P/D set.
You can’t have all 3 exist in that state and not make it silly after-all, Shadow strike already fits the purpose of kiting, it is still neglected for Cnd+ 1 spam. Which is more or less Anet’s fault. Since if you look at the Shortbow Surprise Shot is barely stronger than the auto-attack but very effective regardless for what it offers you.
If you don’t address Cnd+1 being so linearly effective it still going to be what people fall back into. Otherwise they’d be using Shadow strike when they were in melee range.

This doesn’t apply to P/P and S/P because they don’t access stealth naturally, so Sneak attack is never degenerated into 5-1 play though if you give them steal it essentially does. Even looking at D/P that is somewhat of an issue where full linearity takes over.

I’m not sure how a retreat on pistol MH would be redundant on a set that does’t make use of Body Shot to begin with and barely uses Shadow Strike. If anything it would open up other set combos such as Pistol/Dagger+Dagger/Pistol or even Sword/Pistol. Shadow strike could be used as a clutch blind as I suggested. Also, 450 units of retreat is nothing to remark either, most of the main uses would be the leap or just a fast short disengage, you also need a target to use Shadow Strike, and it wouldn’t interfere at all with the harrassing C&D+1 spam of stealth bleeding thieves, if anything, it would give them another choise out of the boring repetitive playstyle they have currently and that’s always a win.

Imagine now you could choose to be a great kiter focusing on high ini regen and evasion with Pistol/dagger or going full close and personal focusing on condition and stealth. If you choose to be a kiter, you lose the stealth potential but you are now a long-medium range heavy kiter.

Although this is about Pistol/Pistol, where this change would greatly improve the set, if the set is overall too initiative demanding, just lower the initiave cost on one of the skills, maybe this ‘Retreating Shot’ or Unload would come to mind.

There’s a list of issues at play here

A)Body shot – It’s currently worthless. It needs to change in a manner that makes it useful for P/P without stepping on the toes of anything in P/D. P/D is obviously a pretty dedicated conditions set – Pistol OH is pure utility, the autoattack is a condition ability, and the dual skill is an escape (its not designed to take advantage of condition OR Power/crit builds)

B)P/P in general – the set has no escapes, no access to stealth, and a very poor “identity”. Its AA and Dual skill are entirely at odds with one another, and Body shot being useless doesn’t help. So, in addition to Body shot needing to be changed for the better (while not being redundant for P/D), it also needs to give P/P direction – should body shot be a condition based move? If so, you’ll probably need to update Unload. Should it be a power/crit based move? If so, now 2 and 3 are in direct odds with your AA (which does poor direct damage even in a GC build). Should it be a utility? Even if you find a way to make the skill a utility that caters to both P/D and P/P without being redundant, you still have the issue of AA and Dual skill being mutually exclusive.

I’ve suggested making Body shot a small blast finisher that would give X seconds of swiftness to the thief for each target hit – while it doesn’t fix all the issues, I think it does a decent job. It’ll be useful in P/D (everyone likes swiftness), and it will be amazing for P/P – a defensive option via stealth and a speed boost for kiting (2 things P/P desperately need.) The defensive option doesn’t NEED to be stealth, but at the moment it seems the only viable option that doesn’t step on P/D’s functionality (since P/D already has a retreat skill AND a cripple).

It’s redundant because of this
2. Body shot – leap back 450 units and apply vulnerability. 4 initiative
3. Shadow strike – Warp back (600?) units. 4 initiative.
4. Crippling dagger – Cripple foe, bounces
5. Cloak and dagger enter stealth.
The redundancy is this, Body shot and shadow strike both want to remove you from an equation, but they nerfed Shadow strike (which also has it’s own very short activation time) to prevent excessive warping. You now have a skill doing somewhat what the old Shadow strike did, at the exact same cost.
In addition Crippling daggers own purposes for kiting, and then the decision on CnD vs Shadow strike already as your melee attack of choice.

I think your change to body shot would be great for P/P but it’s very redundant in P/D while Shadow strike exists.

If you’ve played P/D you know the damage output does not warrant what you are suggesting, in terms of “evasion kiter”. It’s damage comes from Cnd + 1 even making the body shot change would not prevent this reality brah.

You don’t need a target for Shadow strike, you need the dagger to hit, so 130 range.

@ Evil) Putting aside the Leap-finisher it’s not that his suggestion doesn’t work. It’s just that it’s redundant with Shadow strike. If you had this, then it makes sense to remove the warp from Shadow strike and then adjust it’s damage range or if it should apply condts accordingly. In addition just straight out as a change it doesn’t change P/D’s core objective of 5,1. Which it’s arguably a more frequent user of than any other /D set.

Imo if you’re going to have a jump back (not shadowstep) with unrestricted range unlike Shadow strike, than you go for a skill like Distracting shot. Where the distance isn’t much. 450 is honestly quite a lot. P/P really can’t take ini costs down anywhere though. Unload is strong enough to warrant the 5 ini cost, headshot as well for its cost. BP kind of can’t be cheaper either so long as D/P can leap through it.
So putting a 4 ini skill on P/P won’t help much with it’s reliance on Unload…
Lulz. Thief problems.

evilapprentice, a blast finisher would definetly work too, implementing that thematically would be tricky but doable. It would help with stealth with BP and then would gain some survivavility, and time to reposition, so indirect mobility as well (it wouldn’t interfere much with P/D also), but I honestly feel pistol needs some disengage movement without having to use Roll for Initiative or Withdraw. Or maybe a blind spam build being more effective.

ensoriki, by needing a target I meant your dagger strike has to land for it to work, I didn’t meant having to target something per say. It’s kind of the same though, non out of combat mobility was my focus with that.

Anything providing some evasion or stealth to double pistol would be of great help at this point, this set alone has a lot of potential, it just needs a little push.

EDIT: Now that I think of it, if Body Shot was made a blast finisher, it would make Pistol/Pistol and Pistol/Dagger thieves great backline supporters with their blast spaming on Ranger and Ele Watter fields, guardian light fields for some retal, and so on (don’t forget low CD on demand group stealth!!). They would become great at support all of a sudden. It would mimick cluster bomb but you’ll be applying some vulnerability at the same time, maybe even AoE with the Ricochet trait.

Let’s call it Charged Shot. You fire a high powered pistol shot the applies vulnerability to your foes. 3i. ½ cast time. 5 stacks of vulnerability. Combo Finisher: Blast (where you stand).

What would be cool is changing #2 pistol skill to Reload. Does no damage but cost 3 init to gain 5 init and create a mini-Smoke Screen for 2sec. The thief animation will show that the thief drops the magazine from the pistol and that creates the smoke screen. It will function like a 1sec channeled skill and can be done while moving.