Guild Wars 2

With unload I can hit a heavy golem for 11,500 in about 6 seconds.

I enjoy plus one-ing a fight and using unload.

Is there an even more powerful weapon set for a plus-1 burst that is easy to land?

Any other weapon set is better for +1ing fights, and every other set will get you to fights faster. p/p is a underperforming disjointed weapon set that is bad at bursting, sustained damage and mobility and survivability, there is no real reason to use it other than if you really like the dual pistol look.

Thief bursts are generally easy to land and you can burst frequently (d/d with cloak & dagger backstab, d/p with black powder heartseeker in to backstab, s/p with pistolwhip ect..) and it is all better that p/p.

P/P is not a DPS/Burst set, it’s a support set. It has Bleed (auto), Imob/Vuln (body shot), Daze (head shot), Blind (blk powder) and damage support (unload).

You can build a hybrid to maximize the damage output, but it will still fall short in comparison to other sets.

All I think when I meed a P/P Thief in 1v1 with my warrior is “Free kill!”. Seriously.

D/D, D/P, S/D on the other hand all make me sweat. P/D not so much, as I’ve got quite a lot of condi cleanse.

As Foste says, there is not really any good reason to use it. It’s never more than okay at any one thing and in reaching that level you sacrifice all ability to do anything else at all with it, including basic maneuverability.

It’s unreal how little they’ve done to fix it in over 2 years.

There good reasons to use p/p. There are better choices for 1v1. While there are times it advantageous in a 1v1 it works much better in groups.

The only advantage P/P has is nobody uses it. So when paired with the right sigils, traits, and tactics, you can catch people off guard and sometimes in full on panic mode when you engage them.

Odyssey.2613:

The only advantage P/P has is nobody uses it. So when paired with the right sigils, traits, and tactics, you can catch people off guard and sometimes in full on panic mode when you engage them.

Yes, I trait for stealth and power. My main goal is mobility to steal points, but when I can +1 a fight I am effective in drilling the enemy fast. And then I am on my way again to steal points.

It’s only other use really lies in a bunker healing power spec which focuses on keeping constant blind pressure, securing stomps, and interrupting big skills with head shot repeatedly, and using a combination of venoms and brief stealths for better sustain while not losing the point while reinforcements come in.

It works surprisingly well, though I think its success also stems from the lack of knowledge on how to deal with it as someone mentioned above. I’d not recommend using P/P as a DPS set in any format on any build outside of as an alternate swap during some higher level pug fracals. Medi guard usually just holds points better and is overall more useful to the team.

I’m not any kind of good WvW player. But, I run P/P 100% of the time. I’ve got 4k+ kills. It’s a great DPS add on. When I run with 10 to 15 man groups (or larger, but counter zergs of similar size limit my usefulness), I can burn down anyone, absolutely anyone, who gets into trouble with the rest of my group. If you can’t get out of range, if you get downed while the rest of the group moves forward, if you are stalled, delayed, crippled, or slowed, I will burn you down. With ricochet, high crit, and crit triggered abilites, I can do some real damage, most of which no one realizes until their builds don’t function quite like they think they will.

I’ve watched groups notice I’m a thief, see I’m P/P, discount me, and then die in a fire while I burned them down with their focus on someone else.

Black Frog.9274:

I’m not any kind of good WvW player. But, I run P/P 100% of the time. I’ve got 4k+ kills. It’s a great DPS add on. When I run with 10 to 15 man groups (or larger, but counter zergs of similar size limit my usefulness), I can burn down anyone, absolutely anyone, who gets into trouble with the rest of my group. If you can’t get out of range, if you get downed while the rest of the group moves forward, if you are stalled, delayed, crippled, or slowed, I will burn you down. With ricochet, high crit, and crit triggered abilites, I can do some real damage, most of which no one realizes until their builds don’t function quite like they think they will.

I’ve watched groups notice I’m a thief, see I’m P/P, discount me, and then die in a fire while I burned them down with their focus on someone else.

Problem with this is you might as well just take a ranger and do the whole dps-while-they’re-busy thing much better, or a signet mugger d/d and do the whole burst-while-they-ignore-me also much better.

P/P is in the nasty spot where ranger longbow used to be (and should still be), where you can’t give it real dps without making it braindead easy because it basically hinges on doing one thing.

And yet I do. I kill more than I die and my weakest situations are the ones that are most out of control with the most fast movement and repositioning and pure 1v1’s (though i recently took down a guardian and a warrior 1v1).

If they were to improve the range of the pistols, I would be in a good place.

Those of you who live in min/max land need to come down to earth. Play one character, for better or worse, and do your best. That’s a real challenge.

I use p/p too in WvW. Again one on one unless you face someone not very accomplished it not a great set. In the situations described it is devastating. The damage output over a short period of time is greater then that ranger simply because if dodged blocked with that first unload you can spam 4 more right after it PLUS get those ricochets. (If downed those ricochets will provide lots of rallies)

I have swapped unloads against a ranger with his rapid fire and the ranger tends to lose unless he can get back out of range,

Signet mugger? Great for single target burst but in a fluid environment where people are moving rapidly around the battlefield not as easy to pull off that burst.

The fact is when you are at the periphery of one of those battles moving around and selecting targets to unload on you ARE overlooked. You do have to keep moving around. If one or more of the enemy decides to focus on you then you are in trouble.

Crit triggered abilities are key. Unload with high crit rate means those abilities will trigger on every use of the skill. I look forward to the changes to IP. This will generate a whole lot of health each time used when coupled with omnomberry ghost or blood sigils.

My p/p build is built around 100% crit. I can afford to not have as much power (due to all the assassin’s armor) because my crit damage is above 200%, so everything I do is twice the damage anyway. Every attack counts towards IP (which makes the buff even better for me), and with ricochet, I can tag tons of people easily. Its really satisfying to have every unload heal you for 2-4k.

I’m not going to say the build is mathematically better than anything else, but I will say, after trying every other kind of thief, p/p is what I find most fun.

Black Frog.9274:

I’m not any kind of good WvW player. But, I run P/P 100% of the time. I’ve got 4k+ kills. It’s a great DPS add on. When I run with 10 to 15 man groups (or larger, but counter zergs of similar size limit my usefulness), I can burn down anyone, absolutely anyone, who gets into trouble with the rest of my group. If you can’t get out of range, if you get downed while the rest of the group moves forward, if you are stalled, delayed, crippled, or slowed, I will burn you down. With ricochet, high crit, and crit triggered abilites, I can do some real damage, most of which no one realizes until their builds don’t function quite like they think they will.

I’ve watched groups notice I’m a thief, see I’m P/P, discount me, and then die in a fire while I burned them down with their focus on someone else.

I played P/P in WvW for some 2-3 months and yes in some situations P/P can be really nice but most of these situations rely on you not being focused. That’s why in team fights, P/P seems fine. I found some classes/builds really easy to kill with P/P (in small group fights or 1 vs 1) until they remembered that I run P/P (I am in T9 so everyone knows everyone) and equipped reflect.

I actually have a suspicion that P/P may work best with a crit/condi build granting extra bleeds. It may sacrifice a bit of Unload’s burst but it stands to gain a lot from having less reliance on Unload for sustained DPS. I’m going to try to work up a build and see how it goes.

Still, I don’t think the set is particularly competitive no matter what you do. It’s obviously intended to be weaker than melee sets and lacks the utility of SB and P/D. Both of its damage sources (Vital Shot and Unload) are under-tuned and attempting to maximize damage is always going to lock you out of even basic utility. Unload itself is a perfect example of this – it does less damage than most other dual skills AND is an Initiative hog AND is channeled.

P/P condi funtions better as a perplexity/interrupt build over on-crit effects simply because headshot stacking perplexity constantly offers a lot more damage than a bleed or torment every few seconds with a skill that doesn’t skill.

That said, I believe the most usable P/P build in WvW is an initiative regeneration/dodge thief. It draws out fights but makes them a lot more favorable to win. For blobbing, your ranger is going to end up better off; each auto-attack will probably end up hitting similar to half of an unload.

I tried a condi/crit build with p/p and while the extra bleed damage was welcome I found it just not enough coming of the AA to make up for the loss of power in the unload. You have little access to other conditions so any bleeds you stack easily cleansed.

I then went further into that build adding a bit more condi damage (so it was 2050 power base 800 condi before stacks) but again without condition duration one was hard pressed to stack up bleeds.

In order to do so you need some stealth for those sneak attacks. I supplemented with d/d as off weapon set and would load a few more bleeds using the DB off that set then flip back to PP but then both are competing for that INI.

The best runeset for this build was in fact adventurers as it offered both condi/power damage AND give extra dodges. Might stacking is welcome here as well and marjories chili or the might on dodge /crit foods work well.

To reflect that the reason I took IP and Omnomberry ghost. If they want to rely on reflect you will easily outheal those reflects. Take off IP and your health will drop rapidly.

wall o text inbound:

The only way to get bleeds on the P/P setup is #1 or the sigil. The cooldown on the sigil doesn’t dovetail well with Unload. I suspect that the designer’s intent for condi P/P was with poison and venomshare, which is a nice idea but functionally impractical in most WvW settings. The middle of the zerg is a bad place for thieves.

The perplexity build is deep into something I feel (and I suck btw) is way off the P/P Unload path. For 1v1 or PvP, maybe, but in general WvW, blinds and interrupts are useless in large scale combat and single target condi pressure is only good on the fringes of the swarm. Good luck reading telegraphed moves to interrupt in the middle of the swarm. And good luck blinding people who are spamming AAs en masse.

As mentioned, the bane of the P/P zerg thief is being focused or caught in wide scale AoE effects (where they put down AoEs side by side or slightly overlapping). I have been tweaking for months on end now, and I’ve been using Blinding Powder a lot when I realize I’m primaried. I then switch to S/B (my second set) and step away if I can. I’m also not quite as squishy as people think, so if they don’t stay focused, I can slip away. I really wish I was paired up with a guardian. I think that could work really well.

The whole P/P thief in WvW problem revolves around being within other characters’ range envelope while they can stay outside of yours. Squishy thieves can’t stay close in large scale combat, but they can’t stay far if they’re ranged. It’s kind of an irresolvable problem without a buff to range.

That brings me to Ricochet. I didn’t trait it before the range increase. It was nice and all, but staying alive was so much harder. I ran various builds, but 4 in acro really worked well for staying alive. In particular, fleet of foot is the P/P thief’s best friend. Being able to shrug off mobility limitations made exiting ranged AoEs much, much easier. The only thing I’m really using from the Trickery line is Ricochet and the 3 init. I like Thrill for the fury/speed, but the truth is I don’t need speed with acro’s bonus, and I’ve got pretty kitten high crit without fury (I don’t even factor it into my thinking; it’s just bonus crit. In reality, I need the speed more).

edit: corrected by much smarter person

Black Frog.9274:

At one of the champs, I watched my damage scale up in very large numbers, until the last hit of the 4th or 5th Unload hit for 31k!

I am ether miss reading this or you are monstrously confused on how channeling skills work.
The 31k crit at the end of your 5th unload was NOT the damage of a single bullet hit, but the sum of the damage all 5 unloads did; it appeared as a crit because the very last bullet was a crit and thus the whole sum of the damage is displayed as a crit.

If you have any doubts go to the spvp lobby and unload a bunch on a test golem and check your combat log, the damage of individual bullets is the same (give or take cos of the dmg range on pistol).

So in your case:
you did 31k TOTAL with 5 unloads, each unload hits 8 times so that’s 6.2k dmg per unload, or 775 dmg per bullet, average of course some hits were crits other were not but that’s the gist of it.

Recently there was a post about how ppl confuse the sum of the dmg of channeling skills (hundred blades, pistol whip, flamethrower auto attack, rapid fire, ect..) as doing absurd damage because, apparently, they think that the displayed damage that is ramping up is the damage per hit rather than the dmg the channeled skill has done in total.

Well that would explain it! I don’t keep combat notifications in my chat tabs, but I turned it on for this. It worked as you describe. You are right and I am wrong, and disappointed that my beloved P/P doesn’t have secret damage.

The tone of that last paragraph is a little peevish. As I mentioned, I never even noticed that the number went up until recently. I just mash butans. It is, apparently, hard for some people to believe in the possibility of confusion. How could anyone think that that the damage number displayed prominently in the middle of the screen each time you hit something doesn’t actually indicate per hit damage?

Thanks for the education, though.

That total damage got me the first times I used it as well