Guild Wars 2

Just watched the video about the new thief changes. Having removed “Pistol Mastery”’s 10% increased pistol damage and made “Invigorating Precision” and “Ricochet” on the same line pretty much throws p/p thieves out of the game?

Also with daggers keeping their damage and the sword gaining a buff along with evade. Why didn’t Anet just remove pistols from thieves as a whole instead considering sword/dagger will now outscale p/p big time?

What’s peoples thoughts?

Maybe the damage bonus will be innate now? I know they didn’t mention anything like that during the AMA, but they did say there were in the numbers balancing phase of things, might decide a boost to Pistol’s damage is something that is needed.

Also, personally I’ve been using Invigorating Precision without Ricochet (or the damage bonus from pistol mastery either, now that I think of it) when running P/P for ages as a means to quickly recover at range when my health is low. Never been my main damage dealer outside of those few fights where meleeing is simply out of the question.

EDIT: You’ve also completely missed the new Ankle Shots, which on top of the old cripple on crit, increases pistol damage vs. Crippled foes.

yup, I agree….

“Invigorating Precision” and “Ricochet” are must haves for any dual pistol build.

On top of that you have to choose between “Uncatchable” “Shadow’s Embrace” and “Expeditious Dodger + Don’t Stop”

So yeah…. no stealth spamming, no extra healing, and if you want caltrops and swiftness on dodging, you forfeit your condition removal….

Bad build; build is bad.

Imo Ricochet should be moved down to Master, Ankle Shots to Adept and Signet changed and buffed to GM (something like adding “activating signets grants stealth”).

Is P/P really a thing?

Anyway that’s a bit of a close minded way to look at things. You have additional traits now and several other traits opened up which look very promising. The lost damage can easily be made up somewhere else.

Ricochet and Invigorating Precision in the same tier sucks, but I’m not expecting Invigorating Precision to stay as it is. It’s extremely powerful for PvE but we were never able to take it because it competed with Executioner. In the new lines we can freely take it at no damage loss which is just insane.

EDIT:
Oh one thing I forgot to mention. I’m immensely looking forward to trying a P/P condi build with Pressure Striking and Trappers Respite.

I found p/p pretty effective in WvW personally, IP + signet of malice + ricochet would heal about 4k – 8k per unload which meant you could sustain decently whilst tagging multiple players but with the changes, the healing drops to about 1k-3k

Bovan.9481:

Is P/P really a thing?

Anyway that’s a bit of a close minded way to look at things. You have additional traits now and several other traits opened up which look very promising. The lost damage can easily be made up somewhere else.

Ricochet and Invigorating Precision in the same tier sucks, but I’m not expecting Invigorating Precision to stay as it is. It’s extremely powerful for PvE but we were never able to take it because of competed with Executioner. In the new lines we can freely take it at no damage loss which is just too much.

EDIT:
Oh one thing I forgot to mention. I’m immensely looking forward to trying a P/P condi build with Pressure Striking and Trappers Respite.

I am SUPER casual with my thief. I go d/d and p/p. I pick traits that work with dual weapon skills. It’s probably horrible, but I enjoy it. I’m interested to see what trait lines will look like once they work on the numbers a bit more.

Bovan.9481:

Is P/P really a thing?

Anyway that’s a bit of a close minded way to look at things. You have additional traits now and several other traits opened up which look very promising. The lost damage can easily be made up somewhere else.

Ricochet and Invigorating Precision in the same tier sucks, but I’m not expecting Invigorating Precision to stay as it is. It’s extremely powerful for PvE but we were never able to take it because it competed with Executioner. In the new lines we can freely take it at no damage loss which is just insane.

EDIT:
Oh one thing I forgot to mention. I’m immensely looking forward to trying a P/P condi build with Pressure Striking and Trappers Respite.

if P P isnt a thing, its a sign they need to rework something. Every weapon set is supposed to be a thing

I think as big an issue is much lower access to fury in all builds. The Thief only has Thrill of the crime left for fury and unlike others that can get it off utilities the thief has one utility that grants fury (5 seconds on shadow trap).

P/P builds and especially those traiting IP and ricochet relied on a very high rate of crits. Furious Retaliation is gone and more importantly we used to get 300 precision and ferocity by traiting the CS line to help with that crit rate.

i think it going to be much harder to get a high crit rate with P/P and this will diminish the facility of ip/ricochet and unload combo.

It will be much better as a condition type weapon which does not fit with IP all that well.

I was extremely bummed to find out that IP and Ricochet has been taken out. Especially after the nice buff we saw to IP not that long ago. P/P was already a build that wasn’t played by the vast majority of thieves so it’s sad to see fun playtyle options taken away from us.

Why not just take IP completely out as a selectable trait and incorporate it onto Unload. Give it a 10% heal and call it a day. I don’t know, just a thought.

WTH? I didn’t even notice that. Why don’t they give the ricochet binus to the pistol without a trait? That would be a nice buff, instead of nerfing a build that already is bad. I really begin to hate the new system and I hope HoT is still far away.

Good thought on Ricochet simply being built in to the functionality of the pistol. That easily gets my vote. It’s been said a lot of times on these forums, the pistol set needs a lot of help on being made more ‘attractive’ for players to want to use it. This would , IMO help seal the deal. We can all certainly agree that Ricochet is not a Grandmaster trait and really has no business being in that tier. Devs?

Bovan.9481:

Is P/P really a thing?

Dual Pistol is attractive in and of itself. There’s a segment in any MMO atttracted to it if for no other reason than the non Guild Wars 2 Media it reminds players of. Hell, I love seeing a bunch of enemies somewhere and feeling like I’m about to go all John Woo on them… even if the reality might in fact be something else entirely.

Personally I wish they’d given Dual Pistols to any other class because I feel like the majority of the balancing issues come down to the fact that theives get stealth… and these guys have hit a wall balancing single target ranged damage against a class that can vanish.

They seem to have been happy with P/P for quite some time now, so I wouldn’t anticipate the class being improved in HoT as sad as that may be. In my opinion P/P is just a niche build they’ll allow people to play while they focus balancing around burst/stealth melee builds. If they wanted it to be more it would have come up at least once in a developer comment by now as an issue they’d like to address.

P/P was always a very awkward setup as thief pistols are condition based but unload is power based.

I would recommend changing unload to some sort of condition damage as well (or at least moving portion of damage to condition), and waiting for what hopefully will be a long range specialization.

I’m entirely against making ricochet baseline. It’s not something i use when running P/P.

Also, yes P/P is a thing, its sub-optimal but its still a thing.

where are people seeing these videos of classes from? care to link to some of them?

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/ready-up-core-specializations-summary/

At the very bottom is a video

MrQuillen.3014:

Bovan.9481:

Is P/P really a thing?

Dual Pistol is attractive in and of itself. There’s a segment in any MMO atttracted to it if for no other reason than the non Guild Wars 2 Media it reminds players of. Hell, I love seeing a bunch of enemies somewhere and feeling like I’m about to go all John Woo on them… even if the reality might in fact be something else entirely.

Personally I wish they’d given Dual Pistols to any other class because I feel like the majority of the balancing issues come down to the fact that theives get stealth… and these guys have hit a wall balancing single target ranged damage against a class that can vanish.

They seem to have been happy with P/P for quite some time now, so I wouldn’t anticipate the class being improved in HoT as sad as that may be. In my opinion P/P is just a niche build they’ll allow people to play while they focus balancing around burst/stealth melee builds. If they wanted it to be more it would have come up at least once in a developer comment by now as an issue they’d like to address.

nah,it has little to do with stealth.

they just have problems balancing the weapon set due to dual weapons.

basically the AA and the 5 skill dont do much for the set.

the AA is a slow bleed, while unload is powerbased
smoke field around yourself is ok, but with pistol you are usually at mid range, and the combo field of smoke is blind, but you already did a blind field, and only 20% will blind.

soo lets say a trait would fix it.
unload does more dmg to bleeding foes.
unload causes pushback (recast 1 second) to blinded foes.

I made a second thief character just to run pistol/pistol/pistol/pistol with quick hands and warrior runes for constant swapping for constant pew-pew. He’s the unsneakiest thief of all time. He does very well.

I had to choose between Ricochet or Invigorating Precision and I always chose Ricochet.

misterdevious.6482:

I made a second thief character just to run pistol/pistol/pistol/pistol with quick hands and warrior runes for constant swapping for constant pew-pew. He’s the unsneakiest thief of all time. He does very well.

I had to choose between Ricochet or Invigorating Precision and I always chose Ricochet.

Not as unsneaky as my thief. I go d/d and p/p. I never use dagger 5. None of my utilities have stealth. The only time I do stealth is because I’m bad and have the fall damage trait.

Ralanost.8913:

misterdevious.6482:

I made a second thief character just to run pistol/pistol/pistol/pistol with quick hands and warrior runes for constant swapping for constant pew-pew. He’s the unsneakiest thief of all time. He does very well.

I had to choose between Ricochet or Invigorating Precision and I always chose Ricochet.

Not as unsneaky as my thief. I go d/d and p/p. I never use dagger 5. None of my utilities have stealth. The only time I do stealth is because I’m bad and have the fall damage trait.

Can’t let that ground see you, confuse the crap out of that grass.

Leave it to A-net to nerf a fun but completely underpowered build.

Turk.5460:

Ralanost.8913:

misterdevious.6482:

I made a second thief character just to run pistol/pistol/pistol/pistol with quick hands and warrior runes for constant swapping for constant pew-pew. He’s the unsneakiest thief of all time. He does very well.

I had to choose between Ricochet or Invigorating Precision and I always chose Ricochet.

Not as unsneaky as my thief. I go d/d and p/p. I never use dagger 5. None of my utilities have stealth. The only time I do stealth is because I’m bad and have the fall damage trait.

Can’t let that ground see you, confuse the crap out of that grass.

You, sir/madam, get a +1.

rickysway.2460:

Just watched the video about the new thief changes. Having removed “Pistol Mastery”’s 10% increased pistol damage and made “Invigorating Precision” and “Ricochet” on the same line pretty much throws p/p thieves out of the game?

Also with daggers keeping their damage and the sword gaining a buff along with evade. Why didn’t Anet just remove pistols from thieves as a whole instead considering sword/dagger will now outscale p/p big time?

What’s peoples thoughts?

Because watching ballets bounce is one of the most enjoyable and satisfying things you can do as a thief in PVE?
Because one shotting mobs with one usage of P/P 3 is one of the most en-thrilling experience?

I don’t really see how P/P would work anymore after changes unless they rework the pistol skills themselves~ which still needs done either way but even more now. IP + Ricochet was really the only reason I liked it and I don’t see any other buffs that would improve it enough to make up for the loss.

Rip P/P…I’m already cursed by using P / P, will now leave the group to not play with me.

Oh I forgot they removed Opportunist as well didn’t they? That was another trait P/P was highly dependent on since Vital Shot serves no use. Did they merge it into anything~ like the Thief itself or have any ini reduce plans? ;o

I’ve been playing my thief a bit more since I think dual pistols is fun. I’m running 26006 for Invigorating Precision with Ricochet and Hastened Replenishment.

Given the speculation that thieves may get a Rifle for their elite specialization, why can’t we consider that these traits may move to that line?

rickysway.2460:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/ready-up-core-specializations-summary/

At the very bottom is a video

Just watched the video, they didn’t really justify the choice of putting ricochet and invigorating precision in the same section aside from “we feel like it makes sense”.

My thought is, they aren’t really aware of the type of builds pistol users really rely on.
If they did some research about that, I would’ve expected them to at least adress the IP+ricochet type of build and justify how they can still be viable even with one of the two traits removed.

I guess it’s normal, they have to deal with all of the classes, they wouldn’t see the end if they had to neatpick on every single build for every classes.

But I think, for that reason, we have to make them aware that having to choose between invigorating precision and ricochet is a real bad decision.

I really just use P/P causally. I feel it doesn’t really need those traits to be effective. Stealth-Move Away-Unload-Cripple-Bleed-Escape. They are dead.

thunderfall.8095:

I really just use P/P causally. I feel it doesn’t really need those traits to be effective. Stealth-Move Away-Unload-Cripple-Bleed-Escape. They are dead.

When you use stealth as a mechanism invigorating precision isn’t even a problem for you. Obviously that build decision doesn’t concern you.
Also it’s a mistake to use unload if you’re stealthed. Number 1 deals a good amount of damage while adding a stack of bleed and uses zero initiative. So the scenario you described wasn’t really p/p material

Some use pistols as a CC AND a healing tool while not relying on stealth.
But with the trait rework, it kinda feels like it’s not worth sacrificing a whole traitline to just have one of the two aspects, making the pistols look bad in comparison to other weapons.

number 3 as healing + cc ability, was the only thing that could barely make p/p compete with shortbows.