Guild Wars 2

So, was originally planning to make this thread if/when I hit legendary as thief. But unfortunately only was only able to make it into t6 diamond >_<.

Anywho. Dunno if this combo is already well known, but I haven’t seen anyone else use it (Possibly because it’s a bad combo, hopefully that’s not the reason). So I wanted to share it here.

The combo works as follows. Use the first two hits of Impact Strike to knock your opponent midair. Immediately after connecting with Uppercut (2nd hit of Impact Strike). Stow your weapons. Then, while your opponent is midair, cast Fist Flurry. You should be able to get off all the hits of Fist Flurry, and possibly even Palm Strike before your opponent recovers from the knockup. The combo can be timed so that if they’re spamming a skill to use on wakeup you will interrupt that skill with Palm Strike, leading to two stacks of Pulmonary Impact if traited.

I’ve been using this combo with pretty good success. It allows for Impact Strike to be ran with Fist Flurry rather than Basilisk Venom. Also might just be the folks I’ve been paired against, but I think most people don’t expect Fist Flurry after Uppercut. As those in the know will typically expect Uppercut to be followed up by Finishing Blow. Which has a (relatively) huge 1.5s cast-to-attack time.

For those curious, this is the build I’ve been doing/running this combo with: [Link].

I have 20% physical skill CD traited since I use Impact Strike/Fist Flurry and the physical skill heal. Beyond that though, it’s just a standard d/p daredevil build with dash.

Hmm…so you’re sacrificing a utility slot and the ability to finish with Impact along with a 7% damage increase (by taking the phys cd trait) for this. Sounds like a pretty costly strategy for burst that’s easily countered by a stun break. Now, I doubt most people expect a thief to run fist flurry in the first place, but I would imagine that even if you nailed someone with this, they’d be make sure to break the stun next time.

Sounds fun though…and in this next meta, it probably stands more of a chance of working.

The 7% dps sacrifice is a personal choice and the combo works without it. I prefer the physical skill CD since it also lowers the CD on the heal I use. Also as far as just listing things goes it also grants 10 endurance on physical skill cast.

If I only used Fist Flurry for this combo then I agree that it’d be a waste of a slot. But for practical purposes I actually rely mostly on allied CC for getting the full combo off. That or just trying for all the hits whenever I know dodges/invulns have been blown. Getting off the full combo is about as hard as getting a full auto combo off (Not saying getting off a full auto combo is easy, but it’s definitely not impossible nor unlikely).

Stunbreaks can be a problem but that problem existed with people running Basilisk Venom. In some ways I’d say this is actually safer since you don’t have to commit to Fist Flurry if they stunbreak after the weapon stow. Of course they could stunbreak mid-Fist Flurry but then you’d likely get off at least 2-3 hits of Fist Flurry which is around Imparing Daggers in terms of DPS (2-3 hits is a 1/5-2/5 second reaction time from the first hit).

Also when I do use this combo it’s usually as an opener/on a medium-high hp target. In other words, scenario’s where Impact Strike will have little use as a kill-secure. Ideally this is something you could do after already using Impact Strike to interrupt a skill for Pulmonary Impact.