Guild Wars 2

Hey guys. Long time player here, quit about two years ago, came back recently with HoT. Primarily played a Thief here, specifically pistol/pistol sword/pistol combo.

As a disclaimer I am by no means a pro; I’ve done a kitten ton of WvW, mostly as a scout/roamer, a lot of sPvP, and a great deal of early dungeons/roam. However, it’s not like I am some sort of a renowned genius come down from the sky to give you stone tablets on how to make Thief work. However, I’ve always had ideas on improving the class that I am frankly surprised nobody at Anet considered over the course of the years.

Since literally day one, there has been a lot of discussion about how Thieves, particularly p/p had no real defined role. They can do good damage, and they have extremely limited utility in terms of group stealth (this is very limited, other than letting your group bypass some fights). Honestly, that’s about it. P/P builds have to usually sacrifice even that in order to achieve something.

In my opinion, in order to fix p/p and the Thief class in general, we have to look at their role and give them some actual utility. I believe this can be done without any actual major changes, either to the class or the code — all the necessary components are already there, especially after the recent skill tree redesign, they just need to have senseless restrictions removed.

First on P/P. There are several inherent components to this weapon combo that combine to make it needlessly stunted.

1. Unload. This is the primary damage move on P/P. In my personal opinion, Unload’s damage/initiative ratio is perfectly fine. I’ve never had trouble killing people with Unload in group encounters, and I’ve had decent success in duels and small fights with it, too. It is a very powerful damage skill, but the problem is that other classes have comparable DPS/burst damage tools that are not as obvious, telegraphed, and have additional utility.

Here are the primary ways to fix Unload:

a) Change 20% Finisher chance to 100%. This change alone will instantly add a role to P/P: debuff stacking. With this, Unload becomes the best way in the game to combo finishers with fields on a single target, and this doesn’t seem like a bad role for a Thief to have. It’s something that encourages teamplay and positional awareness (you want to find fields to throw Unload through) In addition, it will give some of our other skills and utilities, such as Throw Gunk from Stealing, an actual use.

This isn’t exactly unprecedented. In fact, almost every other multi-hit Finisher in the game is already 100% chance. Unload has always been treated differently since the game release, for no good reason.

b) Give Unload a slight pushback. Self-explanatory. Unload doesn’t last very long and can’t be reasonably sustained beyond the 4th barrage, but there is no reason it can’t offer slight pushback with every hit against targets that don’t have stability, to give you some semblance of field control. If that has potential to Interrupt targets using channels, then even better.

Honestly, these two changes, or even the primary change, will do a lot to give P/P actual utility. But there are two other skills we need to look at with Pistol mainhand.

2. Body Shot. This skill has always been utter crap. They buffed it, but in all the wrong ways. It’s still crap. It is very initiative-heavy, offers little value, and for some reason roots for 1 second now?

a) Decrease initiative cost to either 1 or 2. Body Shot should be a cheap utility attack, which means it should not have the opportunity cost of a kitten Headshot, which actually does damage and dazes.

b) Increase cooldown to 2s. Remove the silly root thing. Make it extend duration of debuffs by 2s per shot. Again, if p/p thief’s secondary role is debuff stacking, then Body Shot should be there to help you upkeep these debuffs. In raids and dungeons, a Thief with Body Shot in rotation should significantly increase the duration of everything on their target. This effectively extends your bleeds and poisons in PvP by another tick, too.

3. Pistol 1. Pistol 1 has always been terrible, for no adequate reason. I think the primary thing that we need to look at here is that it only utilizes one pistol in a p/p combo. Ideally, p/p should simply shoot twice as fast (or have two attacks with each pistol) when auto attacking with pistol 1. Problem solved, make it twice as powerful.

This all strictly applied to p/p as a spec. In my opinion, it is very fun with Daredevil, but still not really viable due to lack of utility. The changes proposed above, while minor, would actually do a lot to make P/P an attractive option in other mediums.

Here are some thoughts on Thief in general:

1. Infiltrator’s Signet has always been pretty crappy. Why not make it regenerate initiative every 3s instead of 10? That would actually let people use it without crying inside.

2. Thief as a class needs more ways to regenerate initiative. We can start by removing internal cooldown from skills such as Upper Hand and fixing Infiltrator’s Signet, but in general Thief needs to be able to do something to actually allow it to renew its rotation faster. Pistol 1 would be a good candidate for initiative generation, as well as every stealth attack in general.

TLDR: Another rant by a p/p scrub.

Unload, I feel is perfectly fine. It does not need a 100% projectile finisher because it would simply need a damage nerf then for all the combo’ing you can do with it, and because the only other two multi-hitting weapon skills that do a projectile finisher (Ranger’s Rapid Fire and Warrior’s Volley) are the exact same way, a 20% projectile finisher. So Unload is fine. A pushback would also cause a nerf in damage simply because it could knock enemies back.

Body Shot is also MOSTLY fine for its cost. 5 stacks of 3s Vulnerability and 1 second of Immobilize aren’t bad at all (though I wish we could up both of those by a single second each).

Pistol 1 is fine because then EVERY dual-wielding weapon set on every class should do an autoattack with both weapons in hand. So no.

Infiltrator’s Signet did that once upon a time (if I remember correctly), and was considered too powerful because of how much spamming it enabled, resulting in a nerf to the 10s it has now. So no on the passive change. The active should be the thing changed IMO, because a simple shadowstep to the enemy really doesn’t warrant its use. Maybe if it gave 3s stealth upon use or made the next 5 attacks guaranteed crits it’d be useful.

Lastly, no, Initiative regen is fine as is unless you want to see the class nerfed once again, because the initiative regen was far stronger in the past than it is now, which resulted in numerous nerfs.

Basically, your ideas are not good ones and you should go back to the drawing board. Personally I think P/P just needs sustain, which would easily be fixable by changing the smoke field on Black Powder to a dark field, enabling leeching of health through the pistol attacks.

Yes to most things, no to 100% projectile finisher on eight shots.

people already cry because it does too much damage, imagine if we could condibomb at 900 range.

I’d feel spoiled.

I’m perfectly okay with decreasing the cost on body shot though. I dont use it because its slow, and too short dura on top of it costing as much as headshot.

Also, I think that auto damage is fine as is.

Basically, if I could skirt 1200 range so I didnt get kittening druid autod whenever I try to do damage, and had a reason to use body shot I’d be happy. everything else would just be icing.

Azure The Heartless.3261:

I’m perfectly okay with decreasing the cost on body shot though. I dont use it because its slow, and too short dura on top of it costing as much as headshot.

OH! That reminds me of a change they could do to Body Shot if not an ini cost drop, increase the speed of the projectile. That alone would at least make it able to hit things better.

That’s a lot of things that will cause more harm than good.

100% chance finisher is just broken. Push back is also broken since it can be used as an interrupt and being interrupted 8 times in a row per Unload is just…broken.

I completely disagree with your Body Shot proposition. The immobilize is great, why remove it? It seems like you want to make this weapon set useless. The vulnerability it the one that’s not necessary, but it is welcome to stay.

What P/P needs is for the after-cast delay to be removed from Vital Shot.

They’ve recently increased the damage output already and I feel that everything else is fine as it is. The extra dodge and Dash from Daredevil gave the build more survivability.

20% finisher on multi hit projectiles is the norm, not 100%.

Hope you have 24 stacks of stability over 4 seconds. Every 6 seconds hope you have 8 more.

Body Shot: Sure, maybe it costs a little too much initiative. However, drop the ini by one, not to one. Get some condition duration.

Vital Shoot is actually fine. It’s a hybrid AA, and therefore works beautifully with Carrion, Sinister, or especially Viper’s. With DD you can even have a hybrid Sneak Attacker now that stealth would be much easier to come by for P/P.

Ini regen: Thief was changed to regen once per second, which is a large buff to every Thief spec. Stacking all the ini regen options still gives you a lot of ini back over the course of a fight.

There’s lots of options for P/P right now. Condi, power, sustain, trap, interrupt, ect. It doesn’t need any of these changes.

Alot of Thief’s bleed attacks are 4s base (Vital Shot/Sneak Attack included), this should be bumped to 5s (Thief condi is garbage without pumping +condi duration, unlike other classes).

Body shot needs an overhaul. Either ini reduction, significantly buffing the vuln duration, or additional effects.

Black Powder should have its ini costs reduced by one, and Heartseeker upped by one to compensate for the d/p set.

Ricochet trait needs to be baked into Unload. Another neat thing that could be done to Unload is a directional evade leap (if holding a directional key while triggering the skill, for some John Wu style action)

Congratulations, on your essay, it will go unnoticed by no one tat matters and down to it, you just wasted time.

Why are you guys still playing thief? I officially quit playing gw2 today since I opened my 30th day daily login reward. Will come back once they fix our class.

Chao fail dev’s

Shogun.7401:

Why are you guys still playing thief? I officially quit playing gw2 today since I opened my 30th day daily login reward. Will come back once they fix our class.

Chao fail dev’s

I’d go for:-

1 Increase Vital Shot’s rate of fire by about half-again, but otherwise keep it as is.

2 If other goodies are bundled in with Unload, then cool – but not if that costs even a scrap of its current damage or costs more Initiative. Either immediately, or if the extra goodies will inevitably end up resulting in Unload nerfs down the line… which they will… sure as eggs is eggs.

So, to be safe, just keep it as is.

3 Reduce the Initiative costs on 2, 4 and 5, and I might start using them on my gunslinger. Increase projectile speed on 2; and I’d be happy to lose the Vulnerability if that reduces the Initiative cost.

I prefer to apply Vulnerability with my traits, where it doesn’t cost any precious Initiative… doubly so because I also have Lead Attacks slotted… triply so because I also get damage buffs for flanking, so benefit from opening with my most powerful attack (Unload) to the target’s flank, rather than priming the target with a less powerful attack to the flank, then the Unload having less effect because now the target is facing me.

Buffs to Thief in general that I’d like:-

4 Built-in movement speed increase of ~15% extra, which stacks with all other movement speed buffs.

5 Reduced CDs on downed skills 2 and 3, and 1 hitting a tiny bit harder; to put us a bit more on par with other classes, for whom downed doesn’t equal dead.

6 Auto movement-impairing Condition removal every 10 seconds or so.