Guild Wars 2

Pistol whip + haste has an insane damage if you apply 2 pistolwhips on the enemie. Yes it’s a stun lock, but everyone can break a stun :\ Without haste I feel that pistol whip has such slow animations, I don’t know how Anet did it but when you stun there’s a delay between the stun and the slices, when it starts slicing the enemie is already running because of such delay between 2 animations.
You can go in and out with the 2nd skill, which yea works often for stun breaking, remove a condition, etc.
Has more CC than d/p.
D/P: Lets you use heartseeker which is perfect to finish off enemies. Lets you use stealth a lot more and the burst of backstab.
So.. Tell me your opinion guys, I would love to see some feedback from Pro thieves :b

Cheers.

It depends on the environment. You rarely see S/P in WvW. It is mostly used for PVE leveling,.

D/P or its evil twin P/D are much better for pvp activities

I use sword and pistol exclusively for PVE. With a complimentary spec, initiative lost during a missed pistol whip isn’t hard to recover. Just learn to play with the timings of the ability.

Let me preface by say that, though I’ve tried S/P before, it wasn’t for me so I didn’t play it long.

It’s a bit off topic for me to say, but the S/P is great for the combo of Infil Striking in to a group, Blinding Powder, stunlock one while others are panic swinging, and shadow return. It’s also good to pull someone to you and try to pistol whip burst. Lots of great stuff all around to stand toe to toe with others and frustrate them.

I can speak as someone who has run across a few in WvW (glad to see less D/D, though the ones I see now, I’m nervous of :p).

It is indeed easy to stunbreak (at least with my S/D, but I typically run with 2 stunbreaks on my utility slots as well, and dodge out of.

It is at least hard to fight them as well, it’s just, they run out of initiative to blinding powder before I run out of initiative to CnD, since I’m not trying to do it while blinded and just saving up my ini :p. We spend a lot of timing looking at each other menacingly through his BP while we both have melee weapons, heh.

In those fights, I wish I was a D/P offhand, so I could duck out of their BP and wait to time a headshot before swapping S/D again and Steal/Mug/CnD/Blinding and then Dazing them.

If I ever wait it out and Mug/CnD/Daze to the Face, they they dodge away and pop a stealth and dissappear from my life :p

Played a lot of 1v1 matches last night against a S/P with my D/P and I’d have to say they are roughly equivalent. I think I won more matches against him, but not by a huge margin and they lasted quite a while with one of us having to make a mistake for the other to kill us. He played it very well though, often interrupting the leaps through the BPS with headshot, effectively stopping the stealth. What made it harder to deal with was when he traded out shadowstep for blinding powder. The 1-1/2 second daze was an excellent starter with TS>autoattack>IS>(haste) PW>PW>headshot (to stop any retaliation/blinding/evasion). The only way I was able to deal with that setup was multiple stunbreaks. A hard setup to counter especially if the person knows what they’re doing.

Honestly a good thief will do just as good with D/D, D/P, P/D, S/D, and probably even S/P

The problem S/P is that you get no stealth skills aside from utilities/traits

I use D/P pretty much exclusively these days, and once dueled a S/P thief in sPvP. We were pretty much evenly matched, similar to what Maugetarr described. One of us would die if we made a mistake, but otherwise there was no clear “x beats y” scenario.

Also, I don’t see why someone couldn’t run both D/P and S/P. They might compliment each other fairly well. You can either open with S/P if you know they are vulnerable to stuns / dazes, and then use your dagger to finish them. Swapping to S/P later in the fight can be useful when multiple enemies show up, especially if someone is attempting to rez your downed target, as you can put quite a bit of pressure on both enemies and possibly kill the rezzer in the same go.

That setup would probably require as much init regen as you could possibly throw at it though, so you’ll be looking at somewhat reduced DPS.

I run D/P and S/P (off-weapon) especially if I see alot of mesmers/engineers on other team. They work greatly together, I find the Sword does better over dmg in my play style than running SB. I do not do WvW, and i dont zerg in hPVP

Your positioning matters more in S/P when you can’t stealth out projectiles as readily is how I feel. At least when I’m fighting D/PS everything is about how well I’m aware of my placement. If he stealths how long I think I have before warping away. Dodging BP so he doesn’t get off HS. Not getting stuck in bp since even if we both use it he gets stealth from it where as I do not. Can’t afford misses my 2 and 3 are more expensive. Can’t chill in PW he will time it or even spam Back stab till I’m out. On a flip side S/P can abuse terrain to insane levels juking more than a running back. Abusing terrain you can commit to nothing and be a threat.

ensoriki.5789:

Your positioning matters more in S/P when you can’t stealth out projectiles as readily is how I feel. At least when I’m fighting D/PS everything is about how well I’m aware of my placement. If he stealths how long I think I have before warping away. Dodging BP so he doesn’t get off HS. Not getting stuck in bp since even if we both use it he gets stealth from it where as I do not. Can’t afford misses my 2 and 3 are more expensive. Can’t chill in PW he will time it or even spam Back stab till I’m out. On a flip side S/P can abuse terrain to insane levels juking more than a running back. Abusing terrain you can commit to nothing and be a threat.

SS (#3) works extremely well at chasing, it will teleport you right to the target abusing terrain just as easily…I typically use this against S/D and S/P thieves as once they return, they typically have the feeling of being ok for a few secs

Doomdesire.9365:

Honestly a good thief will do just as good with D/D, D/P, P/D, S/D, and probably even S/P

The problem S/P is that you get no stealth skills aside from utilities/traits

If dueling, I’d run D/D S/P.

S/P has black powder, great vs. melee, and you can HS through it with D/D (for stealth) if they’re range-heavy and you can’t land a CnD.

rylark.3418:

Pistol whip + haste has an insane damage if you apply 2 pistolwhips on the enemie. Yes it’s a stun lock, but everyone can break a stun :\ Without haste I feel that pistol whip has such slow animations, I don’t know how Anet did it but when you stun there’s a delay between the stun and the slices, when it starts slicing the enemie is already running because of such delay between 2 animations.
You can go in and out with the 2nd skill, which yea works often for stun breaking, remove a condition, etc.
Has more CC than d/p.
D/P: Lets you use heartseeker which is perfect to finish off enemies. Lets you use stealth a lot more and the burst of backstab.
So.. Tell me your opinion guys, I would love to see some feedback from Pro thieves :b

Cheers.

I played S/P thief for like 4 months and love it. That builds allows me to PVE and WvW roam pretty well, soloing camps. etc but you can’t handle a 1v3 situation with that build.

I switched to D/P like 3 weeks ago and it’s just amazing. I can still play a very good PVE and my WvW improves to godlike mode, can even handle an 1v4 situation killing 1~2 guys and running alive lol

If i had to choice which build is better i had to say D/P exceeds S/P in all aspects of the game but need better player skills to be played.

I found pistolwhip to be bad in wvw, people tend to dodge out of it, and it also roots you in place.

Getting haste so its usable once each minute is just not worth it in the long run, maybe if the haste was a signet and affected by the traits I would consider it.

I switched to sword dagger and is much happier.

d/p in spvp with blind/stealth setup is amazing
your foe is mostly blinded, can land a single hit + the combo of Hs trough BP gives an extra stealth , so an extra backstab
+ if you have have shadow protecter trait up, u basicly have regen on hp non stop since it gives u the possibilty to go in stealth each 3-4 seconds (including utility skills ofcourse)