Guild Wars 2

As I’ve never played a thief before, I was wondering if there is a viable P/P build that I can use with some sort of melee as the alternate? I’ve seen some YouTube videos but have no really idea of this play style even works.

Can you all provide me some guidance/suggestions please?

P/P is more of a situational weapon set imo. If you want the safety of ranged combat and can afford to sacrifice the extra evades and mobility of shortbow for slightly higher single target damage, then P/P is your best option. In just about every other area, P/P falls short.

If you’re looking to build around it though i’d go with at least 10 in critical strikes for pistol mastery and 20 in acrobatics for quick recovery. As P/P really just involves spamming unload whenever you can, the faster you regenerate initiative the better. You should probably go with the full 30 in critical strikes for all the extra damage it gives and another 5 in acrobatic for +10% damage while your endurance isn’t full. Although you may want to consider what your alternative melee weapon set is going to be when allocating the rest of your trait points.

For gear you can get away with full zerker or some valkyrie. If you need to take less damage, P/P probably isn’t the best weapon set for that situation anyway.

its ok for the pve side but not so usefull in pvp.
D/D: burst your target while staying defensive at the same time, run away whenever you want. Efficient initative usage.
SB: Put massive aoe, run away whenever you want. Efficient initative usage.
P/P: Either do nice dmg or nice CC you can’t do it both at the same time. Cannot run whenever you want you have to stay in your blinding pool if you want to survive. Inefficient initative usage. You’ll always find yourself hungry for initatives.
P/D – S/P – S/D: really kittened up after the nerfs and updates.
D/P: meh (personaly i’d never use this over D/D)

Honestly, if you want to do PvE, stay away from P/P. It’s probably the worst thief spec, and among the worst in the game.

- No AoE.
- No mobility.
- Your only source of real dps and defensive tool share a resource.
- Primary attack is bugged and doing much less damage than it should. Has not and will not ever be fixed.
- Spec uses a condition based main attack and a pure dps ‘special’ attack, making it impossible to specialize.

If you want a ranged thief, just save yourself a lot of drama and go SB.

Here’s a suggestion – avoid P/P.

All 3 MH Pistol skills are bad (Vital Shot, Body Shot) to so-so (Unload). Head Shot is also meh, and Black Powder is great but you get more mileage out of it with something else as your MH so your Initiative isn’t constantly drained frantically spamming the dual skill to manage barely adequate single-target DPS.

Due to the reasons listed in the post above, It really is one of the worst sets in the game even when looking at all professions. At the very least, it needs to be boycotted until they fix Vital Shot to do an appreciable amount of DPS so that you can afford to be more flexible with your Initiative.

I’ve had P/P since I first tried it out back in the early lvls and loved it since.
Yer it’s currently bit buggy n needs sorting out compared to the other weapons, but can be just as good when looked into well.
Tbh though, if you want a full damage thief.. d/d is better tbf… but tbh as well.. full damage thief isnt gonna do well in higher lvl fractals imho.
So im p/p built with more survivability – so yer less dps but then i live longer and can do better in the long term
For example.. 20 in prec – 60% on crit to cripple for 3 secs with a 10 sec cooldown.. very useful with melee bosses..

Each weapon for a thief needs the right traits and stats.. Plus with p/p you can always switch to Dagger/pistol if melee is needed.

Overall i would say look at what you prefer to play – melee or range.. thief has both.. look into each of their utilities and traits. you can build around everything
I would say put 15 into the last trait.. 5= 3 init from steal and 15= 3 init extra .. especially with p/p those 3 extra init are golden..