Guild Wars 2

I’ve talked to 6 different thieves that regularly use the reviveorb/hunter glitch to get past level 50 fractals. And they all use P/P in the same way I described. Shortbow works in dungeons, but not with a team, it’s not flexible enough.

I usually do 20/30/0/20/0, might try the build you posted though. I definitely see the potential in Fluid Strikes, but it’s more niche as well.

Actually I might just try 15/30/0/25/0, since I know I will be rolling with SB as my secondary and I love AoE weakness too much to give up.

Question for the op: worth to use body shot or stick to spamming unload? If its worth it, when would you use it?

Dee Jay.2460:

I’d still much rather have a Thief spaming Clusterbomb than a Thief spaming Unload. Both do similar damage but one is AoE and triggers combo fields….and the other is just damage.

Talk about a boring play-style too. You’re literally not bringing anything aside from damage. And the fact that you pigeon-hole yourself into a Single Weapon set and prefer utilities with little/no group support is a sign of a bad Thief.

Hope you’re kidding, CB spamming deals a ton less dmg than a proper UL build.

cesmode.4257:

Question for the op: worth to use body shot or stick to spamming unload? If its worth it, when would you use it?

Sometimes I use 1 or 2 body shots during the burn (timewarp + everyone pops highest damage abilities), but It’s hard to tell if it’s actually helping. Engis usually keep a good 10-15 vul up most of the time so I don’t bother with it.

Blacksarevok.8104:

I usually do 20/30/0/20/0, might try the build you posted though. I definitely see the potential in Fluid Strikes, but it’s more niche as well.

Actually I might just try 15/30/0/25/0, since I know I will be rolling with SB as my secondary and I love AoE weakness too much to give up.

Choking Gas + Cluster Bomb gives weakness as well.

Blacksarevok.8104:

I usually do 20/30/0/20/0, might try the build you posted though. I definitely see the potential in Fluid Strikes, but it’s more niche as well.

Actually I might just try 15/30/0/25/0, since I know I will be rolling with SB as my secondary and I love AoE weakness too much to give up.

I run 0/30/0/30/10. I find that 15 or 20 points into DA isn’t that attractive.

You can only use sundering strikes/mug at 10 points and combined training at 20 points with 150 or 200 power depending on how much points you trait.

sundering strikes isn’t bad if you do trait into DA, but I rather let an engineer inflict vulnerability if there is 1 in the party. Mug is dangerous to pull off in high lvl fractals as it sometimes gets you 1-shot if your timing is bad.

Serpert’s touch and Lotus poison aren’t very useful as well as pistol doesn’t inflict poison and I can just choking gas and clusterbomb for the same effect of lotus poison since after chocking gas, you will no doubt spam clusterbombs on trash mobs anyway.

However the 10 points in Trickery gets you Thrill of the crime, which gives fury, lets me maintain 100% crit chance for 13 secs (with 30 pts in acrobatics) with cooldown of 40secs.

That’s a 32.5% uptime of fury and if your team mates can provide fury to you as well, that’s even better.

The minor trait also gives you 3 initiative when you hit a crunch of getting initiative starved.

The thing about fury is that warriors already easily provide 100% fury up-time. If your not taking it for the initiative your better off with deadly arts.

cesmode.4257:

Question for the op: worth to use body shot or stick to spamming unload? If its worth it, when would you use it?

The math behind when you’d swap from one to the other is non-trivial, especially when you start taking procs and/or dodging into account. The frequent initiative procs from Unload are a particularly big deal.

I’ve run some Monte Carlo simulations with slightly different assumptions about usage, spec, and team composition, and it looks like Body Shot starts to surpass Unload when the rest of your team is dealing 2.2 to 2.8 times the normal damage your Unload spam would. You’re only likely to see that in a melee heavy group, which is not a situation where you’d think about running P/P.

Blacksarevok.8104:

Actually I might just try 15/30/0/25/0, since I know I will be rolling with SB as my secondary and I love AoE weakness too much to give up.

15/30/0/25/0 is very strong for the weakness on Short Bow. 10/30/0/30/0 is somewhat stronger for pure pistols (since you can run two pairs for the initiative on swap, or get the extra health on skill usage). 20/30/0/20/0 is not a good Pistol spec; Fluid Strikes is very strong against any legitimately difficult encounter, and Combined Training is a really weak use of a trait.

The 10/15 in Deadly Arts isn’t super strong, as much as 10/15 in Shadow Arts or Trickery are totally wasted in a Pistol build. Shadow Arts is not particularly attractive outside of a stealth focused build (which you have no good way of accessing), while Trickery is very melee/burst focused (again, irrelevant for Pistols). So you grab your 10 points in Deadly Arts not because it’s super sweet for you, but because 100 Power and Sundering Strikes (weak, but what can you do) are the only relevant things you can actually do with those points.