Guild Wars 2

Thief has 3 unique skills that most people never see, since they only appear when you don’t have an offhand weapon, these are the ‘light’ skills (meaning light offhand). These unique skills are functional, but they only serve as training wheels until the thief gains another weapon to put into the offhand. These skills are the following:

Dagger – Twisting Fangs: <4> Spin in place, hitting nearby foes. Each his causes bleeding.

Sword – Stab: <4> Stab your foe.

Pistol – <5> Blast your foe with rapid fire from your pistol. 5 shots.

These skills, while technically usable, are downright bad, and this is intentional, since every class dual wields, there should be no reason for the thief to not dual wield, right? Well thief has an intriguing and unique system apart from every other class; Initiative. With the Initiative system, as opposed to Cooldowns, thief is punished less than other classes for having less weapon skills.

I’m very interested in the possibility of a new breed of single handed thieves, and all that would be required would be to increase the viability of these 3 skills. One of the main complaints about the Thief class is the lack of weapon selections, if the above skills were taken seriously, this would add 3 more viable weapon sets to the thieves arsenal.

In my opinion, this just seems like an easy and effective way to implement a lot more depth and customization to the class. I’d personally like to add my ideas here about what each skill should be, but I don’t think that’s my decision, I’d mostly just like to see these 3 skills buffed so I can finally enjoy an mmo where I’m not punished for NOT dual wielding.

I don’t like this at all, why would you want to make them viable? Surely having 3 abilities instead of 1 is a better choice.

The light skills are just “fillers” till you get an off hand weapon.

Yup. The single hand 3rd skill is just filler for new players that’ll help you get used to the more “advanced” ones.

Twisting Fangs is a noob version of Death Blossom
Repeater is a noob version of Unload
Stab is a noob version of Flanking strike

They are fine as it is.

It would be interesting, especially if they round out 4 and 5. Just imagining.

The problem with that is that you would lose the extra stats you get from the offhand weapon as well, which mean to achieve any sort of real usefulness they would have to be INSANELY more powerful, leaving the 1 and 2 skills on your weapon useless by comparison, since those cant be buffed to the same extend as those can be used by dual wielders too

GummiBear.2756:

The problem with that is that you would lose the extra stats you get from the offhand weapon as well, which mean to achieve any sort of real usefulness they would have to be INSANELY more powerful, leaving the 1 and 2 skills on your weapon useless by comparison, since those cant be buffed to the same extend as those can be used by dual wielders too

The skills wouldn’t need to be “INSANELY more powerful” like you say, they’d just really need to be “not rubbish”. As long as the 3 skills filled some sort of niche that the dual wielding skills don’t fill, then they’d have their own use without being more powerful than other skills. For example, if the sword’s light skill reduced Steal’s cooldown when you struck someone with it, then a sword thief would have a unique steal focused style. These skills don’t need to be more powerful to be useful, they just need to be different.

these skills are just filler for characters still below level 6 or whatever. there’s no point to them. why waste any time even thinking about making these skills into a thing? do you honestly want to play with only 3 weapon skills on your skill bar?

Maybe just for the fun of the trait,here is my idea: ANet could make if you use only one weapon and thus left with only 3 skills,player to be able to choose from ANY third skill from any combination.Like 1 dagger with BS,HS,and Pistol Whip.Omg that would be so OP….

What they really need to do is, across all professions, make wielding a single weapon viable.

This means, if you have a Sword and nothing in the off-hand, you should get 5 skills, not 3.

Obviously, this should not apply for “off-hand only” weapons, such as Focus, Shield, Torch.

DrakeWurrum.6049:

What they really need to do is, across all professions, make wielding a single weapon viable.

This means, if you have a Sword and nothing in the off-hand, you should get 5 skills, not 3.

thats a far more interesting suggestion. however, it does start to seriously encroach on the territory of 2-handers. i mean, isn’t the whole point of 2-handers that its a single weapon that has 5 skill slots associated with it?