Guild Wars 2

Like most thieves, I run power D/P, SB: DA/TR/DD.

I’m wondering if kiting some melee-centric builds might be viable.

(This is all in the context of WvW roaming.)

Its not bad for an utility weapon, but i would like if the AA would be as fast and accurate like the ranger longbow (or at least the shortbow). At the moment people can easily sidestep it and sometimes when people run away from you but still in range, the time the projectile would hit them they are already out of its range.

So yes kiting a warrior, revenant (while not in shiro but somtimes even if they are in it you can just time SB #5 when you see the tp), guardian when they change to sword or gs, etc. is easy with it.

Easy to kite with, but it depends on what you’re fighting in respects to how bad the damage is for the most part.

Squishy melee builds can be fought off with relative ease from all the evasion and movement. You’ll whittle them down, but the skill loadout is there and enables it. Ranged builds will give you trouble, since the outgoing damage isn’t quite there.

Tanks or durable builds OTOH like frontline warrior, scrapper, or support aura ele will pretty much sustain infinitely against the lower damage the weapon has.

I stopped using my SB entirely because the damage is not good. It became a weapon that I was only using when I wasn’t in combat, for the teleports. Now that mobility (at least in my build) is so good, I find in most cases it is an obsolete weapon choice. Everything about the SB is too slow. Maybe if they increased the speed of the attacks I would take another look at it.

Post HoT you’re not going to come close to killing anything built to fight 1v1 with a short bow. Think of it like Guardian staff – you take it for utility not combat prowess.

Blaqatak.1395:

Like most thieves, I run power D/P, SB: DA/TR/DD.

I’m wondering if kiting some melee-centric builds might be viable.

(This is all in the context of WvW roaming.)

You can kite a bit with it, sure. But that kind of goes against what the thief is supposed to do, which is hit hard and get out. You’ll just harass the opponent until their buddies show up, then you have to run or die.

I sometimes open with SB 4 to nerf the enemy’s healing, but immediately switch to my melee set after.

As a damage weapon, SB only shines in group fights in WvW, where even the auto attack deals good damage by bouncing between 3 enemies.

SB is a weapon to soften up a target before you go in for your burst. It’s a wonderful weapon against mesmers since it destroys their illusions while damaging the mesmer before you engage them in melee, and you can use the shortbow to force some melee classes like warrior to burn their cooldowns to close the distance and then you can burst them while their mobility is down.

You basically harass them to get them under like 80% health and then go in for your burst to make it hard for them to recover as Executioner kicks in.

i use to run a zerging melee short bow build just basically spam choking gas take whirl dodge trait easy to kill people with venom share xD probably even more effective now that you do not have to take venom share anymore.

The only thing that needs to be done with SB is to unnerf #2 ability in PvP

I don’t know about power, but that poisonn field is great on DD. Drop it then Lotus through it to apply poison on top of your other condi’s

It has the worst single target DPS of any weapon on the thief. It actually has one of the worst single target DPS attacks of any weapon in the game. Most attacks at this level apply a condition or swing faster. I cannot think of a single AA attack that is worse. It does get slightly better with multiple targets thanks to the bounce but the damage is so weak they never notice.

It basically has two uses… mobility and AoE poison field. Everything else about the weapon just sucks but that is sort of how the thief is built. Few weapons perform reasonably well or better on the thief.