Guild Wars 2

Since the day I got GW2 I’ve been using pistols, I love them.

P/P gives me good single target burst damage, stuns, black power…it’s just a solid weapon set. P/D is the same, very, very solid skill set however they both suffer from a useless ability: Body Shot.

Between its high initiative cost, it’s long cast time and its low damage the stacking of vulnerability is almost never worth it, just because to get any meaningful stacks it means I had to blow all my initiative and because of the long casting time I don’t even get to profit off of my stacked vulnerability.

Something needs to change so the ability is worth while and to me, because of how the thief operates off of initiative I’d like to see Body Shot become a secondary attack ability that doesn’t use initiative.

Essentially it would work just like vital shot except the trade-off would be lower damage and instead of bleed it would apply 1 stack of vulnerability for 5 seconds.

Or simply getting it to stack multiple instances of vulnerability would work.

Jiminy.8340:

Or simply getting it to stack multiple instances of vulnerability would work.

It already does, it stacks 5 vulnerability. Problem is that it takes forever to cast and takes tons of initiative.

But you can’t speed it up without making it too powerful because of how much a single shot stacks…

Give it a poison.

Ah! I was thinking of Sundering Strikes for some reason. It’s woeful.

Inflicting weakness in addition would be handy.

Make it apply cripple w/ the same cast time/initiative cost. P/P is now closer to becoming viable.

You can only keep black powder on for so long from a Thief/Warrior from killing you.

inflicting vuln on a target benefits everybody.

Bong.6238:

Make it apply cripple w/ the same cast time/initiative cost. P/P is now closer to becoming viable.

You can only keep black powder on for so long from a Thief/Warrior from killing you.

I agree with this. Make it a cripple with a small amount of damage. Speed up unload slightly also. I think it should have a blast effect also. P/P needs a way to get into stealth like so many other specs have. I have to rely on utility skills to get into stealth. The only problem then is a unload centered spec is already so initiative heavy that I don’t think I could spare the Blinding Powder + Body Shot to get into stealth. Maybe a better change would be to make it so BP causes stealth for 3 seconds if you have the 60% chance to cripple with pistols once every 10 seconds trait.

Senate, nobody cares that it benefits everyone. It is a waste to use it unless maybe you are fighting a boss mob, even then other classes have easier and better ways to stack vulnerability for longer periods.

Whatever changes you propose to pistol #2 need to play well with both P/P and P/D set-ups. Putting a cripple on pistol #2 is a poor suggestion for that reason – P/D already has a strong cripple in dagger #4.

My favorite suggestion is to make pistol #2 a blast finisher with a small AoE, as that gives pistol some needed utility while playing well with both off-hand options.

P/D doesnt even need a help here. Even without Body Shot P/D has already had all the tools it needed. In term of survival, damage out put and team support, P/D blows P/P away.

What they really need to do now is giving P/P more play styles and they also need to fix Ankle Shot to last 3sec as description states instead of 1sec cripple with 10sec CD.

IMO, Body Shot should get poison or doing more damage from the side or has something to do with movement.

Since Thieves lack the ability to attack beyond 900 range reliably, how about extending the range of Body Shot to 1200?

Guys, let’s not forget that this skill is absolutely fantastic when you have a group of 10 or more (Like with most champion and dragon fights). If you just stand there spamming bodyshot, then you’re amplifying other players’ damage far more than if you spend the damage on attacking normally.

Manta.7962:

Guys, let’s not forget that this skill is absolutely fantastic when you have a group of 10 or more (Like with most champion and dragon fights). If you just stand there spamming bodyshot, then you’re amplifying other players’ damage far more than if you spend the damage on attacking normally.

I’ve tried it in dungeons and we actually did better when I stopped using the ability.
But then again that was 5 people, not 10…

BabelFish.7234:

I’ve tried it in dungeons and we actually did better when I stopped using the ability.
But then again that was 5 people, not 10…

If you were able to keep up 25 vulerability with this skill, then having 4 allies would just break even on DPS. You can’t stack it that high with body shot alone so hence it’s not a good dungeon skill, (I’d rather use that trait that inflicts vulnerability when you crit and spam unload). Part of the problem is that vulnerability is a decidedly weak condition, considering that its GW1 counterpart, cracked armour, raised damage against a target by 41% (Multiplied it by the square root of 2 to be more precise) meaning that it was better than even 25 stacks of vulnerability is now and a dead easy to inflict.

Against a champion or dragon fight the optimal strategy is to right click on the monster then get up and eat a sandwich.

With less sarcasm, those big 10+ player fights are the easiest encounters in the entire game, and there’s 0 reason to build for them. There might be a very narrow window in the number of players where pushing Body Shot actually increases damage done (since with few players it costs you damage, with lots of players the mob will be capped at 25 vulnerability anyway), but even there all you’re really doing is moving yourself down the DPS ladder and raising your chances of getting a silver or bronze medal, in exchange for an utterly trivial increase in kill time.

So, realistically, stop trying hard in those encounters and just AFK autoattack while making a sandwich or watching cat videos on the internet.