Guild Wars 2

I love P/P aesthetics and I would love to continue using it, I even made a PvP Tutorial during early betas (you can see some traits aren’t there anymore, and Signet of Shadows used to paralyze the target, and some tips are a bit outdated but it shows how P/P works):

The main problem with P/P is that at the end it’s BORING and lacks a lot of utility, mainly being 33333333333333333333333333333333333.

Body Shot (damage+potential damage increase)/initiative isn’t worth the initiative when compared to unload.

Black Powder is great with melee sets, but in P/P you need to move a huge lot. Because of limited access to Stealth and building for Berserker to make Unload worth it, you will need to move a huge lot, so standing in a combo field isn’t viable.

Finally, while Headshot is useful for some moments if you have good reflexes, most times you will prefer to dodge any big attack, and outdmage any heal so you don’t lose poential.

Vital Shot doesn’t synergize with Unload at all, and you have poor access to Sneak Attack (which doesn’t synergize with Unload anyway).

Here are some sugestions I would make so P/P becomes a bit more versatile:

- Make Body Shot an spread shot, each of them applying 1 vulnerability (for a max of 5 vulnerability like the current one) and while each separate shot would be less damaging than current BS, 4 or 5 of them would do enough damage to invest your initiative on it instead of Unload if you’re in close range. Being a multi hit would make it synergize with the same traits you picked for Unload (making the technical cost of the skill 2 as it will return 1 initiative most times), and being a close range skill, you might want to build for snares and give Black Powder an use to snare, pop the smoke field and start throwing bullets to your opponent chest while he can’t hit you.

- Another possible change that I’ve already commented in other threads: Black Powder gives a very short stealth on use (not pulsing, only at use so it doesn’t stacks) that ends if you leave the Smoke Field (like leaving Shadow Refuge, but this one is much smaller). This would allow you to use Sneak Attack more often on P/P, allowing for some bunkering in smoke while throwing bleeds, the chance to opt for direct damage for Vitality opponents or conditions for Toughness ones, making this set more versatile. Aditionally, because it limits your movement, Sword and Dagger won’t have any benefit of this as they need to get their opponents back and they would lose stealth in the process, and as BP is fine with those weapons, it’s the same but also has utility with P/P making it worth the 6 initiative on any set.

Aditionally, Steal needs something like a return Shadow Step (like other Shadow Steps have) because it’s a set that suffers a lot if they catch you, so your profession mechanic hurts you more than it helps you.

An alternative change that would involve a set overhaul, would be to make Body Shot the main attack instead of Vital Shot (in fact Body Shot was the main attack during early stances of development), make Headshot the Stealth Skill (the theme fits more and it offers some nice control options when going stealthy), place Sneak Attack on the second slot, and some mobility based skill on the 4th slot. This way if you want to build for bleeding you don’t need to build for stealth too, the main attack still synergizes with Unload spam and you would have some extra movement utility in 4th.

P/P is still horrid.

Damage from unload is sill very easily mitigated with dodge… and with that channel time it gives your opponent a long time to be able to mitigate. Every video I’ve seen with P/P thieves showing off is always vs people that apparently haven’t figured out that there is a dodge in this game.

It is very easy to use though… and in WvW it’s decent ranged damage for zerging (where things can get more confusing and people may miss that your unloading on them). Head shot is good for trolling stompers as well.

P/P isn’t supposed to be better than your melee because you’re a melee class.

The Shortbow for example is throttled back by travel time on its abilities and its medium-range (900).

ComeAndSee.1356:

P/P isn’t supposed to be better than your melee because you’re a melee class.

This is not a thing in GW2.

ComeAndSee.1356:

P/P isn’t supposed to be better than your melee because you’re a melee class.

Stopped reading right here. Classes in this game are thematic, not gamist. There is no such thing as “melee class” or “ranged class”, thankfully, because that’s an incredibly stupid and overly-simplistic class design paradigm.

Lokheit.7943:

The main problem with P/P is that at the end it’s BORING and lacks a lot of utility, mainly being 33333333333333333333333333333333333.

Yes, this is a side effect of Vital Shot being broken and Body Shot being overly situational. Those are the two things that need fixing.

And Black Powder/Head Shot really need to do atleast 450 damage.

I play with a P/P build and I don’t do bad with it, however I’m not saying the gameplay is overly good because the damage can be tone up just a bit. Even when I tried using the berserkers amulet in pvp I still got the same damage results as if I was using the knights amulet. So I scrapped the berserkers amulet and stayed with knights amulet mixing it up with the rampager jewel. I now have over 50% crit rating and have +20k hp for survivability because playing in Spvp or any pvp zone you’ll expect to be ambushed by zergs. I don’t spam unload unless it is necessary depending on the fight or if I am with my group. I usually C.M.A using the 5 skill button to get the blind aura to survive a lot of assaults like the 100blades warriors and believe me when they miss their combo you’ll see them running until it’s back up. If you want to play with P/P I recommend you use the sigil of force for extra 5% damage which can stack with executioner trait and the 10% extra damage with pistol trait. Use any pvp runes that will give you a extra damage % boost like eagle or wurn. This will make p/p gameplay worth while to play.

Lokheit.7943:

A large writeup on P/P

The problem is that this completely destroys P/D

Every single overhaul proposal to P/P tends to forget that mainhand pistol is used in two specs, and that one of them is a condition spec, specifically reliant on stealth attacks.

Dagger mainhand has both viable power and condition builds on a single weapon based solely on utilizing either stealth or dual attacks. Why can’t we get there with pistol? Condition dagger builds are best served by heavy use of the dual attack, while power builds are best served by heavy use of the stealth/auto, while the other utilities are useful to either build type. Similarly, pistol should be in the exact opposite camp.

I like the idea of black powder being a “mini refuge” This allows versatility to condition builds, and adds utility all around. Could take offhand pistol or dagger for a ranged condition build, could benefit from stealth traits organically.

Headshot is fine where it is, any adjustment should be to base damage or initiative cost. Its one of the very few on-demand-any-time interrupts in the game, and is powerful enough in that mold.

Body shot needs an additional condition useful to either build type. Vuln is useful only to crit builds, and crit builds can’t use it due to the burst/dump playstyle crit-P/P revolves around. We’ll get to its P/P interactions in a sec, but for viability on condition based P/P or P/D how about just making it apply 3 seconds of weakness in addition to the vulnerability? This allows it to be used to defensively, which is where any kind of pistol build can benefit from it.

Unload, plain and simple, needs either a cheaper initiative cost, or an additional effect. How about “Returns 50% of its initiative if target is crippled, vulnerable, weakened, or blinded”? Wow, now you’ve got interesting things going on. You’ve got a solid reason to rotate in body shot. You’ve got a solid reason to use abilities other than unload. You’ve got 100% DPS uptime in group fights, and you have an unique hybrid control/damage spec that while less overall DPS than other ranged equivalents, excels at consistently debilitating the target while delivering that DPS to compensate for its lack of hard gap openers. You don’t need to worry about the base damage of vital shot, and it can keep its bleed utility in condition/stealth builds.

With the right use of traits in a 10/30/0/0/30 build you can get off at least 9 unloads in a row…but P/P could still use a little love when compared to rifle warriors IMO.

edit: Actually I just tested it and it is almost unlimited unloads. You just have a quick heal or roll for initiative in there between some of them.

I did some testing on Mists Golems to try out all of our weapon loadouts. My method was to collect data on ‘time to kill’ a group of 3 golems, Heavy>Med>Light. I took multiple runs at the group testing specs that I could use in Fractals optimized for each particular weapon loadout.

My best guess at damage output is D/D Backstab>P/P>S/D>D/D Conditions>others. Didn’t test Shortbow because I was looking simply at single target and SB would jump and it is my default secondary weapon.

P/P feels like its damage is low but what I saw was a kill rate of .5 seconds longer than D/D Backstab across the group on average.

Not saying that my method is completely accurate or that it directly simulates encounters but I feel it gave me good relative damage output table. Also, unload spam isn’t the most engaging play style so…

/shrug

Blood~

PopeUrban.2578:

Unload, plain and simple, needs either a cheaper initiative cost, or an additional effect. How about “Returns 50% of its initiative if target is crippled, vulnerable, weakened, or blinded”? Wow, now you’ve got interesting things going on. You’ve got a solid reason to rotate in body shot. You’ve got a solid reason to use abilities other than unload. You’ve got 100% DPS uptime in group fights, and you have an unique hybrid control/damage spec that while less overall DPS than other ranged equivalents, excels at consistently debilitating the target while delivering that DPS to compensate for its lack of hard gap openers. You don’t need to worry about the base damage of vital shot, and it can keep its bleed utility in condition/stealth builds.

This is the best suggestion I read here.

Unload is fine. It needs a bit more trait support, but that’s really it; it’s a perfectly fine finisher that converts initiative directly into damage. Pulling the cooldown off Sundering Strikes, fixing Ankle Shots to actually last 3 seconds, and moving the dual skill boosters from 5% to 10% (all of which are perfectly reasonable changes) is more than enough to make Unload an incredibly sexy beast for anyone going all-in on Unload.

The hard part is what to do with Body Shot. It’s difficult because you want it to have interesting use cases with both P/P and P/D, and most of the low hanging fruit is already taken by other skills. Sticking a snare on it would make it redundant with Dancing Dagger on P/D, for instance, while making it a big damage skill conflicts with Unload on P/P. On top of that there just aren’t a whole lot of animations available – just the normal shot that’s used for the auto-attack, and a chain firing animation used for Sneak Attack.

There are a bunch of different directions you can go with the skill if you’re able to re-theme the skill – as an explosive blast, a toxic shot, a shotgun blast, and so forth – all of which could be interesting and weapon defining. Without changing the theme, however, the best I think you can do is to make this a fast attack (quarter second activation) that applies weakness (and vulnerability) – give it a bit of damage to make up for the initiative lost, and make the duration on the weakness long enough to make it both disruptive and a cover condition, and I think you have something with some value.

Ensign.2189:

Unload is fine. It needs a bit more trait support, but that’s really it; it’s a perfectly fine finisher that converts initiative directly into damage. Pulling the cooldown off Sundering Strikes, fixing Ankle Shots to actually last 3 seconds, and moving the dual skill boosters from 5% to 10% (all of which are perfectly reasonable changes) is more than enough to make Unload an incredibly sexy beast for anyone going all-in on Unload.

The hard part is what to do with Body Shot. It’s difficult because you want it to have interesting use cases with both P/P and P/D, and most of the low hanging fruit is already taken by other skills. Sticking a snare on it would make it redundant with Dancing Dagger on P/D, for instance, while making it a big damage skill conflicts with Unload on P/P. On top of that there just aren’t a whole lot of animations available – just the normal shot that’s used for the auto-attack, and a chain firing animation used for Sneak Attack.

There are a bunch of different directions you can go with the skill if you’re able to re-theme the skill – as an explosive blast, a toxic shot, a shotgun blast, and so forth – all of which could be interesting and weapon defining. Without changing the theme, however, the best I think you can do is to make this a fast attack (quarter second activation) that applies weakness (and vulnerability) – give it a bit of damage to make up for the initiative lost, and make the duration on the weakness long enough to make it both disruptive and a cover condition, and I think you have something with some value.

Unload is not fine, it does 40% less damage then volley, its easilly the most dodged skill in the game, and it does crap for damage, it shouldn’t be worth 5 initiative, in fact its not.

It needs a 25% damage upgrade, a range increase, and its initiative cost lowered to 4.

Hello all, just going to offer my 2 cents and hope a Dev reads it and hopefully many of you agree with my suggestions.

So… problem with P/P?
•Poor Damage with 1
•No use for Headshot and little for blinding powder (to much Ini to use, not a good investment)
•Body Shot is only useful when you have a team and it’s a boss.
•Little to no synergy with utilities except for Signets (which IMHO are NEVER a good idea for ANY thief at level 80, terrible, possibly only the Power one being acceptable). Poisons, and Deceptions. (You will almost never have aggro so traps don’t work, you will never be able to use some tricks and deceptions) leaving you only with deceptions that don’t offer much benefit in certain cases
• Majority of the PISTOL SPECIFIC traits do NOT offer any extra significant boost in DPS and by choosing them, you gimp yourself out of extra DPS for your second set and/or creates a primary set out of the P/P which is not ideal at all.

Conclusion: Only good from this is the 3-4K damage I get from spamming unload, making it a max of 9-12K in the same amount of time I would have done 12k-24k with daggers+ removing conditions, healing, and enjoying being all stealthy and crap.

Start reading from here on down, it’s the most important!

Solution-
I propose to the community of thieves that we come up with a viable solution to these problems then forward it to the “Feeback thread” and hope the Dev’s implement this or at least see that P/P is truly UP.

Specific Pistol Suggestions
•Modify the 2 on P/P to give 8 stacks of Vuln or increase it’s duration or make the animation faster. All of which end up doing the same. Maybe even add the Cripple affect
•Make 1 faster (it’s only viable w/ Haste/Quickness and only for a short period).
•Make it so there’s more synergy between D/D and P/P (Because honestly, those two are always aimed at raw power; precision and Crit Dmg+ supports that and therefor making it an obvious choice to use them both), right now P/P does not feel like it was aiming to be a good D/D, somewhere between Condition (which are way to short to begin with) and DPS.
•Replace 4 to a better CC Skill
•Replace/Modify 5 because it’s not useful at all. The only time I SEE it used is as up close to a mob, being dropped and giving pure blind to the enemy and stealth to the Melee classes (which only thieves take advantage of). That pure blind doesn’t even help due to the mobs ability to AOE or other moves that are 100% hit if you don’t dodge.
•Make unload faster or give it the ability to move while using it.
• Make it so the natural objects we steal give some sort of aid to range such as boons (Fury or Might, etc.) or Raw Damage (Such as scale which gives poison and bleed, but more damage wise because we don’t benefit AS much from conditions)

Overall Class suggestions
•Make it so we can use something else besides signets and poisons underwater (or at least our elite)
•Give us a more stable or easy-to-proc Fury (not constant fury, but just being able to bring it up every now and then, like Thrill of Crime)
• Increase our ability to crit? I don’t really know if it’s just me that can’t get above a 60% Crit Rate w/o using Fury.

I posted this here so I could get some feeback from you fellow theives before I go to the devs asking for a bunch of probable non-ideal changes.

Volley does ~40% more damage than Unload but has a ~30% longer channel time, giving it a base DPS advantage of ~10% over Unload.

It also cannot be used back to back to back like Unload, which is a substantial disadvantage from a damage compression standpoint.

As I said, Unload is fine, and tweaks to appropriate traits will be more than sufficient to fine-tune the skill’s power level.

You take Body shot and turn it into a ground targeted Dark Field that inflicts aoe dmg and vulnerability every pulse. Change the vulnerability to reflect the change. Field 3s duration size of Black Powder or slightly larger.
-Dark Field support (blind/healing)
-Aoe dmg
-Aoe vulnerability team support.
-Area denial.

You give Vital shot about a 5% dmg increase on what it has now, it’s about 50(?) or so dmg short at the upper end of the spectrum per shot. hitting 2 much ~950’s when it should be 1k. Trick shot is 1k to every target it hits 2k to 1 target if it bounces. VS should at the least hit 1k crit flat before including the bleed.

Aberrant.6749:

P/P is still horrid.

Damage from unload is sill very easily mitigated with dodge… and with that channel time it gives your opponent a long time to be able to mitigate. Every video I’ve seen with P/P thieves showing off is always vs people that apparently haven’t figured out that there is a dodge in this game.

You could say that about any channelling skill in the game…

I find in WvW people don’t dodge as much as they should… particularly in large zergs where there is a lot going on.

I’m using D/D for melee and then P/P for ranged and swapping in the shortbow for keep defence/offence.

Vital Shot has a 0.4 ratio and 4 second bleed on a ~0.88 second refire.
Bleeding Shot has a 0.4 ratio and a 6 second bleed on a ~0.96 second refire.

Rifles do ~15% more base damage than Pistols.

I think Vital Shot wants to fire around 10% faster – that is, a 0.80 second refire or so instead of a 0.88 – and that’s all. The power ratio and bleed duration are right where they should be.

Ensign.2189:

Vital Shot has a 0.4 ratio and 4 second bleed on a ~0.88 second refire.
Bleeding Shot has a 0.4 ratio and a 6 second bleed on a ~0.96 second refire.

Rifles do ~15% more base damage than Pistols.

I think Vital Shot wants to fire around 10% faster – that is, a 0.80 second refire or so instead of a 0.88 – and that’s all. The power ratio and bleed duration are right where they should be.

A 10% boost in rate of fire, I believe, would not be enough to maintain more than 5 bleed stacks, which I believe is the primary issue afflicting both P/P and P/D. I think the refire for Vital Shot should be more like .65, which would allow it to maintain 7-8 stacks like other bleeding autoattacks. Sneak Attack helps a bit here, but I would argue that P/P should actually do slightly more damage than the Warrior Rifle (as opposed to equivalent damage), on account of the following:

1. Weaker/less defensive utility
2. Shorter range
3. Thieves are very squishy

And I believe pretty strongly that that was actually the original intent, and that the entire reason it’s as weak as it is is due to the Vital Shot animation bug.

Einlanzer.1627:

Ensign.2189:

Vital Shot has a 0.4 ratio and 4 second bleed on a ~0.88 second refire.
Bleeding Shot has a 0.4 ratio and a 6 second bleed on a ~0.96 second refire.

Rifles do ~15% more base damage than Pistols.

I think Vital Shot wants to fire around 10% faster – that is, a 0.80 second refire or so instead of a 0.88 – and that’s all. The power ratio and bleed duration are right where they should be.

A 10% boost in rate of fire, I believe, would not be enough to maintain more than 5 bleed stacks, which I believe is the primary issue afflicting both P/P and P/D. I think the refire for Vital Shot should be more like .6, which would allow it to maintain 7-8 stacks like other bleeding autoattacks. Sneak Attack helps a bit here, but I would argue that P/P should actually do slightly more damage than the Warrior Rifle (as opposed to equivalent damage), on account of the following:

1. Weaker/less defensive utility
2. Shorter range
3. Thieves are very squishy

And I believe P/P doing slightly more damage than Warrior Rifle was actually the original intention.

Well, the Rifle Refire rate is 8.(something?) the Pistol Refire Rate was meant to be 5.(something.).

None of the bleeding autoattacks maintain 7-8 stacks on their own. Rifle warrior comes the closest at 6¼ stacks; ranger shortbow is just a bit above 5½ stacks on its own. Anything you’re seeing higher than that comes from the use of other skills, equipment, or condition duration buffs.

The rifle doesn’t get full benefit of that higher bleed stack, however, because the rest of the weapon does not benefit from condition damage at all; as a power specced skill, it is roughly on par with a 0.8 refire / 0.4 ratio / 4s bleed pistol shot.

I think you can justify pushing the refire down to 0.75 (keeping the 0.4/4s) if you really wanted to push the power of the auto-attack (which I don’t, I’d rather push the power of Unload / Sneak Attack). Anything more than that is too much; at a 0.65 refire the pistol auto would be a much better, unconditional version of a shortbow ranger auto – with a kit that can burst on top as well.