Guild Wars 2

My Thief currently uses Shortbow (and D/D or S/D), and I was wondering if there were any builds that would make SB more viable. Its autoattack, for example, certainly does less than other bows used by other classes, in my opinion. I find myself using skills 1, 2, and 4 most of the time. Since my toon is only level 40 right now, I only have Critical Strikes chosen so far in my build. Also currently have equipped the sigils that increase power, precision, and movement speed (I am a PvE’r at heart and focus primarily on Personal Story/Living Story and world exploration. I do not play WvW or PvP.).

What do the rest of you think of Shortbow, and how do you make it stack up to other bows in the game?

Moyayuki.3619:

What do the rest of you think of Shortbow

SB is the best utility weapon the Thief has. Best mobility in the game, AoE poison, evades, ranged AA with 2 bounces and spammable AoE with blast finishers.

I think it is more then viable. I don’t think they had a ranged blast finisher in mind to be used as a fast long range attack, would also like to have a a bit more poison pulse on #4 and longer cripple on #3. The aa is pretty strong too, can crit up to 2K.

I love my SB…it’s got great utility and the AA bounces. I do wish we could get the range back, or at least let us trait it to over 1,000. Not having a long range attack hurts in PvE a bit.

So far, Critical Strikes specialization, with the vulnerability and fury added on crits, seems to help make the SB do more damage, but I still find it pretty weak, especially after playing Ranger for so long. Does its damage get better with time, and with more specializations added to a build?

There are only 2 things lacking from shortbow; 1) Projectile Speed and 2) Projectile Range

Shortbow projectile used to home to the target thus its speed is non-issue and it used to have 1200 range. Removing the homing and reducing the range without compensation just made shortbow lacking in many circumstances, but it is still the best skirmishing weapon set the Thief can have only because P/P is still horrible.

Outside of mobility, on a condi build the SB is marginal. On a power build, the SB is near worthless.

If only it was 1200 range

It’s already good. If you’re in it and know someone is running Nightmare Runes you can autoattack them from a distance so you trigger the fear without getting your real burst passively interrupted.

There are two problems with the Shortbow.

1. The Shortbow shares an initiative pool with your actual combat weapon. This makes it difficult to jump into a melee fight, burst with all your ability (use all of your initiative), then swap to your Shortbow to escape.

Why is that a problem? Because today’s defenses are too strong and too passive for a Thief to break through without fully committing to a maximum burst, and even that is a gamble. So the Thief must choose between possible victory and ability of escape.

2. The Shortbow is a utility weapon, not a lethal weapon. However, the Thief still gets locked into using a Shortbow for 10 seconds when it swaps to it for utility purposes. Doing so drastically reduces the Thief’s combat effectiveness… especially for a power Thief.

Basically, it is like a less effective self-Moa spell. You become pretty useless in combat, but at least you can run around and evade better than the bird.

Possible solutions the these problems? Simple…

1. Make the Shortbow an “F3” profession skill with a 1-second cooldown. This will give the Thief access to a true second combat weapon.

2. Since the Thief has a single initiative pool for both weapon sets, remove the cooldown from swapping weapons, or give it a 1 second cooldown like Engineer kits. This will allow the Thief to use a utility weapon only when utility is needed, but will be free to use a combat weapon whenever it needs to do so.

3. Give each weapon set a separate initiative pool so swapping weapons will give an actual benefit instead of punishing the Thief by only locking it into that set for 10 seconds with an already depleted initiative pool.

In other words, the Shortbow doesn’t necessarily need to be improved. But the way the Thief accesses and uses the Shortbow does need to be improved.

I will say if they simply rolled back Cluster Bomb to how it was at release, that would go a long ways towards making the SB more usable as a combat weapon. That used to be the most efficient way for a thief to clear a camp before the slowed the projectile down so much it borders on mostly useless now.

Thief needs so many changes to bring this class back on its right path..

I can nearly fulls agree here with Kageseigi, except for the change of Shortbow to F3.
Shortbow needs to stay a full integrated combat weapon that needs to be equipped to use it, not a utility skill…

Thieves should have no delays at all in weapon swapping and all weapons should provide their own initiative pools.
Reduce therefore the passive regeneration speed of initiative and add more functions within weapon skills and traits with that players can significantly increase that passive initiative regeneration. Precision should also affect the thief more than other classes by affectign either the initiative regeneration or the initiative costs of weapon skills, because so more precisly you can attack and make usage of your endurance, so better you use your stamina to perform initiative skills in combat and more oftenly because so more precily you know your limits of your own body and stamina, so more effectively can a thief make usage of his initiative.
That way would it add alls more build diversity with thieves going rather for alot precision to be able to attack fatser and more oftenly with much faster regenreration initiative to perform alot more oftenly and quicker the higher costing initiative skills in return for havign therefore lesser DPS due to focusing lesser on power and gainign instead DPS from beign able to make faster usage of the intiative skills and running not so quickly out of initiative, than a pure power build.

However, these changes mentioned here would be only a small droplet of water onto a burning hot stone.
Theres way more to do to bring the thief back in line by getting finally rit of lots of useless traits and utility skills , makign room for better traits/utilties through merging those that we currently have.
Alot of things that are currently traits or utilities should be better baselined more or less to give thw thief more build diversity and to cut off the dependence of cdertain trait lines just to get specific mandatory traits to be even at all kind of viable for this game and competitive compared to other classes.

But all these improvements would mean nothing, as long anet keeps on ignoring to rebalance the whole combat system and to start finalyl rebalancing all parts of that system and not only cherry picking the standard mechanics out of it, while leaving all the other parts of it for years untouched completely that play also a huge role in the ovrall game balance for all classes!!

This games combat system could be by this far already so much petter, of ANet would stop ignoring its potentials to be improved and would involve also finally in the class balancing process all aspects of the game other than only skills and traits.

Combat and Class balancing consists out of FAR MORE, than only these two things….