Guild Wars 2

Love the changes to flanking strike! Making our skills have combo’s and secondary effect will go a long way to improve the thief, I feel we are too reliant on spamming ‘1’ button for everything.

Not an awful idea – could be used to add some skill and unpredictability to thief, and in addition fix some under performing skills. The below suggestions are just off the top of my head, so forgive me if they’re poor/op/whatevs.

PW – 2 init – Perform the stun swing from the current PW Skill. If it connects, for 3-5s you can use a secondary skill “Thrash” – 1 Init, isn’t consumed on use (IE, you can keep hitting thrash for the duration), does something interesting (More damage, some condition per hit, I don’t know)

Shadow shot – just split up the teleport and the damaging swing

Shadow stab – P/D needs some help before we discuss this.

Unload – 3 init on activation – takes 3 quick shots at your opponent, each shot that hits puts a “Hit” debuff on them for 5s. Chains to overloaded shot – 3 init, .5s cast time (or something like that) does X damage plus a bonus for each stack of the “Hit” Debuff.

Death Blossom – Honestly no good ideas here – evade leap to target for 3 init -> chains to dagger spin, spins around hitting all targets in X radius for 3 bleeds, 3 init?

evilapprentice.6379:

Not an awful idea – could be used to add some skill and unpredictability to thief, and in addition fix some under performing skills. The below suggestions are just off the top of my head, so forgive me if they’re poor/op/whatevs.

PW – 2 init – Perform the stun swing from the current PW Skill. If it connects, for 3-5s you can use a secondary skill “Thrash” – 1 Init, isn’t consumed on use (IE, you can keep hitting thrash for the duration), does something interesting (More damage, some condition per hit, I don’t know)

Shadow shot – just split up the teleport and the damaging swing

Shadow stab – P/D needs some help before we discuss this.

Unload – 3 init on activation – takes 3 quick shots at your opponent, each shot that hits puts a “Hit” debuff on them for 5s. Chains to overloaded shot – 3 init, .5s cast time (or something like that) does X damage plus a bonus for each stack of the “Hit” Debuff.

Death Blossom – Honestly no good ideas here – evade leap to target for 3 init -> chains to dagger spin, spins around hitting all targets in X radius for 3 bleeds, 3 init?

AMAZING IDEAS.

For unload you should do an evade and flip, Lara Croft style, in whatever direction you are going (or backwards if stationary like the regular evade).

I was thinking about this myself. I really like the change they did to flanking strike and it made the dual skills feel a lot more unique. There is a lot of potential in doing this.

Pistol Whip- This is something I honestly can’t think of something for.

Shadow Shot- Fire a blinding shot, that marks an opponent.
Shadowstep to the marked opponent and strike your target. Range 5000 (only the teleport has to range)

This would just give a lil more control to the d/p and allow for less stun breaks to be slotted as you can just port away to your marked target. Although you would still be stunned. (much like how steal currently works)

Shadow Stab- Stab you foe, poisoning them for 3 seconds and shadowstep backwards
Shoot your foe with a burning bullet inflicting 3 seconds of burning

P/D might as well be our condition weapon set giving it access to burning and poison would go a long way to making it more viable.

Unload: 5 Init- Unload your pistols (same as is)
1 Init- Overcharge your pistols and fire a charged shot for massive damage.(Similar to a backstab) Puts unload on a 5 sec CD. Blast finisher. (refreshes back to unload after 2 seconds or so)

This would give unload builds a lil more depth, and give them higher burst at the cost of sustained damage. Also gives body shot a purpose (although that skill is still terrible) as landing a “backstab” on a 25 vuln enemy hurts like hell.

Death Blossom- 5 Init: Do an evasive leap over foes striking three foes, each hit causes bleeding
1 Init: do another leap inflicting poison and cripple for each hit 1 sec each hit.

These are just some rough ideas and may need number balancing or what not, but i really like the idea of changing all dual skills to be like flanking.

The entire point of initiative is the ability to spam attacks. Flanking strike’s update was a QoL more than anything, the skill was nearly unusable for its intended effect before. Now you can reliably flank and boon strip with it.

The only other dual attack I can think of that would benefit from chaining would be P/D. Currently it’s a melee range escape that you have to hit with (often meaning you have to actually get closer than you were to land it) This is an attack that, by its very nature, you already can’t spam, and is actually made harder to use by the one button= 2 hits behavior. Splitting it would make it fit better with the set as you could pop the setup, then C&D, then sneak attack, then shadowstep, in addition to blowing the shadowstep early if you whiff a C&D. If it was split to have the first attack set up, and the second attack back-step it would give a lot more utility and allow the set to play fluidly without relying on two attacks almost exclusively.

D/P, D/D, P/P, and S/B already have perfectly usable and fluid dual attacks that would be clunky and broken if you added a timing flip.

PopeUrban.2578:

The entire point of initiative is the ability to spam attacks.

I disagree, the ability to spam a single ability is a side effect of having initiative as a resource instead of cooldowns, but the “entire point” is the ability to effectively employ any tool you have for a given situation. This gives thieves adaptability. The problem is that since there will always be one tool that is optimal for any given situation, thieves can simply hammer on that one skill depending on what they need to do.

PopeUrban.2578:

D/P, D/D, P/P, and S/B already have perfectly usable and fluid dual attacks that would be clunky and broken if you added a timing flip.

P/P’s dual skill may be fluid, but it is a pretty weak skill, more than any other skill it would benefit from making it less chainable and more of an active damage tool instead of a spammable mediocre DPS sustainer. If by S/B you meant S/P, it is another example of a skill that is fluid, but it isn’t particularly good. I think Pistol Whip’s weakness would be more appropriately solved by adding a 2-3 second burn to the initial shot though.

Tulisin.6945:

PopeUrban.2578:

The entire point of initiative is the ability to spam attacks.

I disagree, the ability to spam a single ability is a side effect of having initiative as a resource instead of cooldowns, but the “entire point” is the ability to effectively employ any tool you have for a given situation. This gives thieves adaptability. The problem is that since there will always be one tool that is optimal for any given situation, thieves can simply hammer on that one skill depending on what they need to do.

PopeUrban.2578:

D/P, D/D, P/P, and S/B already have perfectly usable and fluid dual attacks that would be clunky and broken if you added a timing flip.

P/P’s dual skill may be fluid, but it is a pretty weak skill, more than any other skill it would benefit from making it less chainable and more of an active damage tool instead of a spammable mediocre DPS sustainer. If by S/B you meant S/P, it is another example of a skill that is fluid, but it isn’t particularly good. I think Pistol Whip’s weakness would be more appropriately solved by adding a 2-3 second burn to the initial shot though.

The ability to spam attacks. Not the necessity to do so. I’m not claiming all is hunky dory across all weapon sets, or that P/P (and P/D for that matter) Don’t have massive issues. They do. My point is that flip skills effectively lock out the option of chaining an attack, and while they’re a no brainer decision on a cooldown system, they actively create additional opportunity costs in the initiative system when its entire intent is to not have them. There are exceptions for balance or usability, but juggling flips shouldn’t be the norm when dealing with init. That’s all I’m saying.

PopeUrban.2578:

Tulisin.6945:

PopeUrban.2578:

The entire point of initiative is the ability to spam attacks.

I disagree, the ability to spam a single ability is a side effect of having initiative as a resource instead of cooldowns, but the “entire point” is the ability to effectively employ any tool you have for a given situation. This gives thieves adaptability. The problem is that since there will always be one tool that is optimal for any given situation, thieves can simply hammer on that one skill depending on what they need to do.

PopeUrban.2578:

D/P, D/D, P/P, and S/B already have perfectly usable and fluid dual attacks that would be clunky and broken if you added a timing flip.

P/P’s dual skill may be fluid, but it is a pretty weak skill, more than any other skill it would benefit from making it less chainable and more of an active damage tool instead of a spammable mediocre DPS sustainer. If by S/B you meant S/P, it is another example of a skill that is fluid, but it isn’t particularly good. I think Pistol Whip’s weakness would be more appropriately solved by adding a 2-3 second burn to the initial shot though.

The ability to spam attacks. Not the necessity to do so. I’m not claiming all is hunky dory across all weapon sets, or that P/P (and P/D for that matter) Don’t have massive issues. They do. My point is that flip skills effectively lock out the option of chaining an attack, and while they’re a no brainer decision on a cooldown system, they actively create additional opportunity costs in the initiative system when its entire intent is to not have them. There are exceptions for balance or usability, but juggling flips shouldn’t be the norm when dealing with init. That’s all I’m saying.

Point taken, but I believe the S/D fix is a poor example of what a split skill should be. Flanking Strike front-loads all of the cost and puts all of the benefit on the second hit, effectively making continuing the attack a no-brainer. There’s really few situations where you’d just want to use the initial attack on FS. A more effective use of skill splits is something like IS and Cluster Bomb, where both the opening skill and the completed two-activation combo have legitimate cost and use depending on the situation. Skill splits should create tactical options, not merely put a pause in the action of the skill.

PW, for instance, might do well with a 2/3 split, 2 initiative to fire your pistol for a stunning shot that applies a 2 second burn, and 3 initiative to flail your sword around while evading. This gives the option to use PW as a pure interrupt but prevents it from being a spammable interrupt. It also allows you to “pocket” a quick evade for use without the current PW’s wind-up to the invulnerability frames. By splitting the attacks, you open up a huge realm of tactical options depending on if and when you choose to activate the second skill. This makes the strength of initiative shine by effectively creating additional tools that can be selected for a given situation.

Unload is more difficult to split simply because it is so bland. It has no utility, applies no boons or conditions, and would require much more of a rework to be turned into a worthwhile skill pair. Perhaps something like a mark/blast combo wherein 2 initiative would cripple a target and apply a large number of vulnerability stacks (5+) and 3 initiative would do a fast-projectile (very hard to evade) AE blast finishing attack for a significant amount of damage at the cost of removing the applied conditions. In this configuration, it’d prevent cheap spammable vulnerability/cripple, but provide those conditions to P/P, at the same time it’d allow P/P #3 to actually generate burst DPS and give P/P some utility/AE via blast finishers.

You know, making unload a 100% combo finisher on every shot could very well be just the shot in the arm it needs. Or how about this: Unload functions as a 100% combo finisher on allied and enemy combo fields.

That’d be an interesting dynamic.

Consider that you’ve got access to multiple smoke fields and a pretty long dark field in SR (I use SR and dancing dagger as a panic heal sometimes, it works pretty well) not to mention stuff like thrown gunk, prot tree, etc. from steal plus whatever your allies are using and the poison field from shortbow (OMG, a reason to swap weapons for thieves) it could turn it in to a potentially powerful support set with some tweaks like condition traits for pistols.

Daecollo.9578:

Love the changes to flanking strike! Making our skills have combo’s and secondary effect will go a long way to improve the thief, I feel we are too reliant on spamming ‘1’ button for everything.

The Flurry on Pistol Whip needs to activate on hit instead of auto activating regardless of hit or miss.

Its annoying to have to break it’s stun by smashing the keyboard.

I’d have to agree with pope about the flip system and initiative, it is fairly counter productive when you try to combine having a system designed for free flexible utilization of your tools and a system where your tools are strictly ordered and forced into patterns.

Flanking strike is rather an exception mostly because its not a new flip skill, its essentially exactly what it was before its still 2 hits, its still an evade then a hit, they’ve tweaked the rotation so the boon effects on the second strike, increased its effectiveness and sped up and made the whole move more reliable but while the flip skill is nice due to the way this particular skill functioned anyway I doubt it would be all that different if it wasn’t a flip skill.

The suggestion from this thread is to add additional effects to the skills that didn’t have them by putting flip skills, essentially locking you from utilizing their particular core effect (the one your currently actually using it for) until you do something you may not want to do. Which at least in the builds I use would actually be damaging at base.

Ideally for introducing new skills to weapon sets they could really do with having weapon skill customization options, the frame works already basically there with the unlocking the skills and the skills page. Eventually I dare say they will introduce such systems allowing you to choose which particular dual skill you want (hmm should I take pistol whip or should I take “slashyshooty” which of these would work best) but flip skills on weapons in the initiative system could be disastrous.

However Im all for more flip utilities, bring on the scorpion wire flip “reel in” allowing me to reel myself to the ending location of the clearly failed scorpion wire!

Dasorine.1964:

(hmm should I take pistol whip or should I take “slashyshooty” which of these would work best)

• SlashyShooty
  The One In the Middle, SharpyThing/ The One That Makes Bullets
  Cut your opponent with a sharp thing, makin’ him slow and junk, then do that one where you get blurry and like kuh-bam a couple times on the no-look direction to hit multiple dudes. Sometimes it makes hearts over other dude’s heads when you use it.

PopeUrban.2578:

Dasorine.1964:

(hmm should I take pistol whip or should I take “slashyshooty” which of these would work best)

• SlashyShooty
  The One In the Middle, SharpyThing/ The One That Makes Bullets
  Cut your opponent with a sharp thing, makin’ him slow and junk, then do that one where you get blurry and like kuh-bam a couple times on the no-look direction to hit multiple dudes. Sometimes it makes hearts over other dude’s heads when you use it.

precisely, a good alternative! :P