Guild Wars 2

And still doing kitten amount of damage. What a surprise!

For the record, I play a lvl 80 P/D thief. I still see plenty of other thieves tearing it up with Pistol Whip + Haste. Can we stop with the crying now?

I’m switching to Sword/Daggers tonight. Going to see how well it can go without using flanking strike and focusing on C&D, Slash chain, Dancing daggers and inf strike, with second set of pistol/dagger for mobility.

The pistol whip nerf was unnecessary as quickness and traits were the main cause of the damage. It’s still going to kill people that are too thick to avoid t

Played S/D last night for a good 4-5 hours, was quite a lot of fun. Infiltrators → CD → Tactical strike for dat daze is really good.

I still see plenty of other thieves tearing it up with Pistol Whip + Haste. Can we stop with the crying now?

It’s still very strong.

FWIW, Thieves will always be a target of complaints due to things inherent to their archetype: stealth, movement, burst. It seems that some players just don’t want to learn how to counter us.

elithrar.7143:

FWIW, Thieves will always be a target of complaints due to things inherent to their archetype: stealth, movement, burst. It seems that some players just don’t want to learn how to counter us.

QFT
Thief/Rogue hate has been around since the beginning of MMORPGs. As long as I can remember it has always been the light armoured ranged players that complain too.

Do you really expect me to throw my expensive exotic swords away and switch builds because of nerf? 15% is a lot and I don’t think it was needed because decent players had a fair chance against the build. It requires one dodge to render most p/w thieves useless.

But yeah, thieves will always be hated. It seems that Anet listens to the majority. I’m wondering how far they will go. Because if they keep doing this, they just show that initiative is a flawed system that cannot be balanced.

Backstab is next, believe me.

IDarko.4709:

Do you really expect me to throw my expensive exotic swords away and switch builds because of nerf? 15% is a lot and I don’t think it was needed because decent players had a fair chance against the build. It requires one dodge to render most p/w thieves useless.

But yeah, thieves will always be hated. It seems that Anet listens to the majority. I’m wondering how far they will go. Because if they keep doing this, they just show that initiative is a flawed system that cannot be balanced.

Backstab is next, believe me.

Unless the thief is smart and using devour’s =D

Eliteseraph.4970:

And still doing kitten amount of damage. What a surprise!

For the record, I play a lvl 80 P/D thief. I still see plenty of other thieves tearing it up with Pistol Whip + Haste. Can we stop with the crying now?

haha is it bad if when I read that I saw, “I play a lvl 80 Paragon/Dervish Thief”

The DPS leaves much to be desired. I don’t PvP so this is only based on PvE. The thief is a glass canon who has been denied any real use of typical thief/rogue abilities like extended stealth (we get a few seconds only), good DPS, and/ or at least more survivability than they currently have. If I get more than one or two mobs on me at a time (even a level lower then me) it’s all I can do not to die and most likely will…again and again and again. Sucks the fun out of playing the class and the coin from my coffers for constant repairs. Seriously disappointed and will be even more so if they keep nerfing this class based solely on the boo-hoo-hoo’g of PvP’rs. Not everyone PvP’s nor uses that as their main source of game play.

Of course people are still going to use it. The problem wasn’t with the Pistol whip but with the haste. People are still going to haste and stack as much boons to Assassinate squishies too ignorant to counter it.

People People. Haste has one drawback to it. It uses all of the thiefs energy meaning they cant dodge after using haste. Pistol whip needed a damage nerf so ppl wouldnt always go for sword/pistol all the time but the real question is why they didnt nerf 100 blades from warriors.

Arcalas.9368:

People People. Haste has one drawback to it. It uses all of the thiefs energy meaning they cant dodge after using haste. Pistol whip needed a damage nerf so ppl wouldnt always go for sword/pistol all the time but the real question is why they didnt nerf 100 blades from warriors.

That’s obvious. The dude clearly doesn’t hide his favoritism towards warriors.

Eliteseraph.4970:

And still doing kitten amount of damage. What a surprise!

For the record, I play a lvl 80 P/D thief. I still see plenty of other thieves tearing it up with Pistol Whip + Haste. Can we stop with the crying now?

The nerf hit S/P Thieves in PVE FAR worse than it did PVP thieves using haste. PVE S/P thieves used the skill as their bread and butter skill for killing mobs, they didn’t use haste. Without haste, PW is worthless now.

Remember there are 2 sides to this game.

Of course pistol whip + haste is still wrecking people. That’s exactly why this was the wrong change to make lol.

unhasted PW → blah
PW + quickness → stronk!

100b → meh
100b + quickness → rilly stronk!

lol do you see what I see?

Yup, quickness is the culprit behind all of these multi hit skills being called OP

elithrar.7143:

I still see plenty of other thieves tearing it up with Pistol Whip + Haste. Can we stop with the crying now?

It’s still very strong.

FWIW, Thieves will always be a target of complaints due to things inherent to their archetype: stealth, movement, burst. It seems that some players just don’t want to learn how to counter us.

its always the same, denying welps always defend their stuff cause they dont want to learn how to play

roll a guardian, spec him into tank and get 2k toughness. I come with my thief and show you how quickly your tank dies when you get hit by 8k crits =D PROTIP: it does take me a second to kill you.

Backstabs have 0% absolutely nothing to do with pistol whip. Please stop using examples of backstab thieves as justification for pistol whip being nerfed.

Oh ok…

Wait a second. PW’s potency is due to another ability!

Can we stop pretending they nerfed the right ability?

he was talking about thiefs not about pw thiefs thus I picked an answer that suits him fine

Still ripping with my super executioner build, only haste procs (sigil of rage and critical haste), silly damage like 6-8000 per pistol whip executed. when it procs i actually kill people. rest of the time i just pressure them severely while being really resilient and reviving teammates or pulling off stealth finishes

aNet is just trying to get rid of the thief class imo.

I personally think haste is more of an issue then PW was. I think quickness in all classes is OP, more so in a class with initiative. The speed increase greatly reduces your ability to counter those moves, specially with a stun/interrupt from the ability or provided by another ability before hand.

They either need to slow it down, or imo just add a 15% damage reduction to anyone under the effect of quickness. I prefer this over them individually nerfing each thief ability to the point that we all have to use haste to keep competitive.

Niim.9260:

I personally think haste is more of an issue then PW was. I think quickness in all classes is OP, more so in a class with initiative. The speed increase greatly reduces your ability to counter those moves, specially with a stun/interrupt from the ability or provided by another ability before hand.

They either need to slow it down, or imo just add a 15% damage reduction to anyone under the effect of quickness. I prefer this over them individually nerfing each thief ability to the point that we all have to use haste to keep competitive.

Well said.Even more like 25% reduction while in haste/frenzy.If any thief(or warrior in that matter) manages to develop skills to use PW(or 100b in that matter) in a regular gameplay,not just once per minute,he doesn’t deserve to be punished for other skills imbalance.

I don’t mind really. As a thief, I can avoid a PW with simply one shadow step. Then I just bleed them to death
But yeah, I’m glad they’re still using PW. The nerf was not supposed to stop everyone from using PW, it was just supposed to decrease output damage.
No one should ignore a skill once it gets nerfed. Although I don’t like PW as a whole, I respect it as a skill.

Yes, that’s exactly what I said would happen before I even tested the change. Haste +PW is still OP, PW without haste is useless.

like any other classes who use damage skills + haste. nerf haste please.

I have been PW’d maybe twice since the nerf, and neither time killed me. Though it didn’t before the nerf either.

Quickness is easily the most broken mechanic in the game, and rather than nerfing every other skill that has good synergy with it they should probably nerf (remove, in my opinion) quickness.

If they really have trouble with good implementation for IAS boosts they can look around at other games that do them well… like the game Guild Wars for example!

Turtles All The Way Down.5608:

Quickness is easily the most broken mechanic in the game, and rather than nerfing every other skill that has good synergy with it they should probably nerf (remove, in my opinion) quickness.

If they really have trouble with good implementation for IAS boosts they can look around at other games that do them well… like the game Guild Wars for example!

This i agree.Lot’s of good warriors(for example) use 100 blades very smart,and between Shield Bash,Bolas ,Bulls Charge,Kick and even Rush they manage to pull a great gameplay that doesn’t rely/need Frenzy.It will be unfair 100 blades to be nerfed
because of Frenzy.Same goes for Pistol Whip.It already got nerfed w/o guilt,regardless that the real problem was Haste.

Regardless, 100b won’t get nerfed cause a certain someone feels that warrior is in a good place right now.

Quickness should really get hit hard or be taken off the map entirely.

As an amusing side note, I’m doing some quick damage trials based on a claim that Sword Auto-Attack now does more DPS than Pistol Whip in an unhasted circumstance. The results of those trials? IT’S TRUE! This begs a question which often applies in philosophy, politics, ethics, and other fields: Were the intentions consistent with the results?

Q:What was the intention of the 15% damage reduction applied to Pistol Whip?
A:Ostensibly, the developers felt that Pistol Whip was resulting in “one-button” play (or two-three button play) which consisted mainly of spamming pistol whip to do massive DPS to kill while being put into an evade state that makes it hard for people to kill us (thus creating an imbalance in the risk of using pistol whip (being stationary) against the reward (good damage, evade state, stun). It’s worth noting here that the drawback of using pistol whip is that you can’t move without interrupting it.

Q:Did this change prevent this behavior?
A:Not really. Even after the change I’ve still killed lots of people in WvW using this strategy. It MIGHT convince me to try Sword/Dagger, since I really like Dancing Dagger and Cloak and Dagger as skills. However, when combined with Haste, the damage has been reduced by a negligible amount, but the continuous stunning while remaining nearly invincible has remained.

In my mind, the problem with Pistol Whip was never the damage. While I’ve certainly chained to nearly 10k before (not total glass), the fact that I can’t move and my opponents can means that under normal circumstances half of my hits will miss against people who are willing to move around (not skilled players, just players willing to move). The main issue is that when combined with haste, you have a near permanent stun, combined with near invincibility. These two things together make it very difficult for players of even moderate skill to actually do anything.

The fix? I think everyone in every forum ever has already suggested a complete rework or outright removal of the Quickness boon. For warriors, it makes semi-sturdy glass-cannon greatswords that one-shot players who don’t use stunbreaks to get away from Bull’s Charge. Thieves have the obvious Pistol Whip, Unload, Heartseeker, Death Blossom, and Daggerstorm (for wiping zergs when combined with guardians and terrible opponents who shoot you instead of switching to melee and killing you). Mesmers have the obvious make everyone else do everything twice as quickly. Conclusion? Change quickness (the broken mechanic) first, then tweak damage numbers.

One last thought: This change is probably going to make me try some new things (specifically sword/dagger). However, if I don’t find it to my liking, I’m probably just gonna become another generic D/D backstab thief. If the intent is to create greater build diversity in thieves, I suspect that current/former S/P thieves, myself included, will be more inclined to use the dagger shenanigans that everyone’s whining about right now, since it requires minimal finesse to make work. And who knows? Maybe I’ll end up using pistol whip again anyways, because I’ll find the evade state while doing good AoE damage to good to pass up. I’ll just have to remember to use my auto-attack when they aren’t fighting back. :)

“Video Link to Quick Analysis”: http://youtu.be/1lcLX0GO4SA
Link to Spreadsheet with Data vs Autoattack Damage.ods

I used the .ods data format. I know it’s compatible with OpenOffice. Hopefully MSOffice and other programs can handle it.

DON’T FORGET TO SCAN EVERYTHING YOU DOWNLOAD FOR VIRUSES. THIS IS THE INTERNET. DON’T TRUST ME OR ANYONE ELSE WITH ANYTHING YOU DOWNLOAD.

I suggest that the Pistol Whip damage be reverted back to the way it was, but then quickness should be changed from 2.0x to 1.5x or perhaps even 1.4x speed. That way, there is still a considerable boost in what you can do DPS wise, but it’s more competitively viable since it would be MUCH harder to chain Pistol Whips on a PvP target and the combo will be no longer spammable in the way that it is now when combined with Haste.

Kardis, I tried looking at your spreadsheet however it isn’t letting me view it (file not found). How much difference are we talking between Pistol Whip and auto-attack?

What’s that? I should include my exact results instead of being kitten and NOT including them? You have some crazy ideas Exodon. Let me see if I can use pastebin. I made this video twelve hours ago after staying awake for 30 hours straight, so I wasn’t thinking as coherently as I would have liked at the time. :)

http://pastebin.com/um0ktfG8

There you go, all of the data except the two flawed PW+Haste efforts.

Remember kids, sleep is your friend!

A nicer fix to Qickness would be to adjust it to each ability. For example with PW it should work only once as it does now, but you can spike 2 of em in such a sequence that you butcher whatever you are hitting.

And IMO PW needs to have the starting animation delay reduced.

I’m trying dagger/pistol atm, and am just.. really not liking it, mostly because I’m a Charr, and daggers just don’t look right on Charr.

I’m finding myself just using black powder and autoattacking now, as in pve at least, it’s more reliable than pistol whip for avoiding damage, and does more dps since the nerf.

The problem is it’s just not that fun.

Pistol whip was more fun, since I did take hits, and healed back up through signet of malice procs, and since I liked seeing the big numbers and combo attacks (long time fan of Tales of games and Star Ocean as well). Plus I was hitting at least 1 button every 2 seconds, now my actions are cut in half as I black powder once every 4s to keep up with the initiative cost, and just stand there autoattacking.

I’d prefer a more robust rotation while still having the option to use the skill multiple times in a short period of time, but all the damage of the set is weighted on pistol whip and autoattack.

Putting roughly 10% of the lost damage from pistol whip into infiltrator’s strike, and the other 5% into head shot, while giving it an interesting mechanic like a really big crit multiplier if used on targets under a threshold of HP would make rotations at least involve those 3 skills.

It has always bothered me that I’m using a pistol, yet my pistol skills do the lowest damage possible for my character to do.

I played Gangplank in League of Legends and it just felt better that a pirate wielding a sword and a pistol hit hard with his sword, but hit extra hard with his pistol, even if it had a cooldown and a cost.