Postpatch: P/P Thief viable in PVE?
Don’t know about PvE, but in PvP it’s awesome! Spam Unload all day long!
I’ve had plenty of Success with Dual pistols in PvE, just don’t play quite as aggressively. Hang back, pick your targets, and bring them down. Unload is superb, and I love using headshot to interrupt at just the right moment.
They have certainly increased the incentive to bring pistols on your thief with this patch!
Author of Lock & Key, The Thief Profession Blog at Guild Wars Insider
Pistols remain underpowered because updating the traits did nothing address the core issues with them, which remain untouched and not commented on after 4 months.
For most builds, the DPS of Pistols is very significantly lower than it should be because Vital Shot is much slower than was almost certainly intended, causing it to stack a pathetic number of bleeds and do terrible upfront damage, destroying the set’s viability with Condition builds. Secondarily, Body Shot is overly situational and only very rarely worth using over other skills.
Generally speaking, Pistols should be doing a full 25% more DPS than they actually do, and the trait updates did virtually nothing to impact that. Pistols can function relatively well offensively only with maximized Unload spam builds (power/crit/initiative), in which case they reach decent damage by zeroing out dependence on Vital Shot to sustain any baseline DPS while bursting, but at the cost of being an Initiative hog and rendering every other skill in the set mostly non-usable to maintain good damage (and being boring as hell IMO).
In short, for Pistols to be truly a decent choice, Vital Shot needs a very significant buff to either its power/bleed duration or its rate of fire, and Body Shot needs to be retooled to be more generally useful.
(edited by Einlanzer.1627)
The use of P/P has had no change for me.
The main reason being the fact that I simply DO NOT use either of the 2 traits. P/P still remains underwhelming compared to any other weapon set.
We should NOT have to be forced to trait specific traits to try make a weapon somewhat viable. Traits are supposed to give it a little enhanced backbone…not be a requirement.
The “buff”, if you can even call it that, to P/P this patch was nothing but disappointment for me.
What do you mean by viable? There isn’t a weapon set in the game that’s so bad that you won’t be able to complete all the game’s content with it.
P/P is a very weak ranged set. 100% uptime on Unload, in theory, would put out damage on par with Crossfire, the Ranger’s Shortbow auto-attack. Looking strictly at the auto-attack, the Pistol is about 25% weaker than comparable weapons available to other classes.
You wouldn’t ever choose to run P/P Thief in a competitive environment.
P/D is viable in a competitive environment due to the strength of Sneak Attack; it provides a quick stack of conditions in between lurking in stealth, creating a reasonably strong platform for whittling down an opponent. Sneak Attack, in effect, is the only redeeming quality of the pistol, and if you’re not going to take advantage of it don’t bother.
The updates in the previous patch didn’t change anything of any import regarding pistols; they’re essentially the same now as they have been the entire live history of the game.
On the plus side, they are incredibly stylish, even if they’re one of the weakest sets in the game.
What do you mean by viable?
This.
“PvE” is a wide range of stuff.
Events: P/P works fine for doing events, but any weapon set works fine for doing events, including empty-offhand lolsetups. However, even with Ricochet P/P still has arguably the worst AE capability of any setup except D/P, so in the vast majority of events where you’re going to be fighting swarms of weak mobs, P/P is going to be one of the least effective choices. For single-target events (kill-the-champion, mostly), P/P will do fine but the amount of people usually focused on that enemy during these event types will mean the damage-for-safety trade-off you make with P/P isn’t really necessary.
Open-world killing/gathering: Again, you can do this with any set, but again P/P is one of the worst with no organic stealth, no organic movement abilities, weak AE (with trait), etc. The upside being that you can govern the amount of enemies you’re engaging here so you can pull one at a time to focus on P/P’s strengths (burning down one target at range), the downside being that “focusing on P/P’s strengths” will leave you killing one mob about as fast as anyone else kills a group of mobs with AE.
Dungeons: P/P actually shines in some boss fights that are single target and heavily favor range. Not really worth using outside of those fights though, for the same reasons P/P isn’t that great in the open world.
s/tPvP not PvE.
Here are my thoughts on P/P thief… My main is a fully ranged near-glass cannon warrior…I picked up my thief again after the patch came out… he was lvl 36, I got him up to 39 yesterday… VERY glass cannon here, planning on being 25/30/0/0/15 when all is set and done… my rifle warrior seems to outdamage and outsurvive the thief…
bleeding shot on the warrior is stronger dmg than vital shot on the thief… it also has more powerful/longer bleed bleed… it in theory should be a slower rate of attack but it certainly does not feel like it… I think ANet’s idea was that warrior’s autoattack will be slower but more powerful and the thief will make up for the weaker attack in attack speed… but with the animation of vital shot taking longer than intended, it loses its edge…
volley vs unload… volley is definitely stronger… nearly 50% stronger… it takes slightly longer to fire, but not 50% longer… therefore it still ends up being a stronger overall skill… the bug FINALLY got fixed for it to correctly have an 8-second cooldown… thieves regenerate the cost of unload in 7 2/3 seconds… so the “cooldowns” are largely the same starting at 0 initiative… the benefit of unload is that its spammable… initially, we can do 3 unloads by the time the warrior can get his second started on his second… so… good that its spammable… bad that its still weaker
Another thing going for the warrior is the 5 second on-demand cripple with Aimed Shot on an 8 sec cooldown… so warrior has like 63% cripple uptime with the rifle opposed to the thief trait of only 3-sec cripple with 10 sec cooldown with the Ankle Shots trait (1.if you actually use it and 2. if you are willing to give up a number of other awesome traits in its place like faster signet recharge, +5% crit chance on dual skills, haste every 30 seconds)
The one thing that does make up for that is a really nice cripple on dodge for the thief
4 and 5 skills… I still give the edge to the warrior… yes, the daze interrupt for thief is really nice and black powder is a nice “oh crap” “melee” skill… but both those skills use initiative… which you might not have if you are spamming unload… for warrior, rifle butt is on a short 12 sec cooldown and brutal shot gives a nice boost to your volley and killshot (5% dmg boost)… again on a nice 12 sec cooldown… the skills might be tied in usefulness, but what makes the warrior win out is that using those skills doesn’t take away from your offensive output while the thief skills do… I would strongly prefer for those skills to be on a cooldown…
warrior has less +%dmg from traits but higher base dmg of rifle almost negates that… still its nice to have higher +%dmg for pistols I guess…
and now comes the kicker… warrior has much better hp and armor… and therefore has much higher survivability as a glass cannon than a thief… in addition… killshot on the warrior is AMAZING… I guess steal with mug traited is also nice for a melee thief but is completely useless for ranged thief…
even if you somehow manage to make the argument that burst ability of unload makes up for cooldowns on rifle warrior, killshot, higher hp and armor make warrior a much better ranged option
In addition lets not forget that rifle is 1200 range while pistol is only 900, rifle also pierces while pistols have essentially no AOE capability and warrior longbow wipes the floor with thief shortbow… if shortbow had its own initiative, it would be one thing, but shared initiative between the two makes the second weapon a purely situational option while the warrior longbow is actually a very viable damage source…
all in all, ranged warrior in my opinion is still much better than ranged thief… vital shot and the initiative system runs ranged thieves into the ground… to fix the thief, vital shot would need to be either faster or more powerful and we would need an independent bar of initiative for each weapon set so switching to another weapon set would actually make sense besides wanting to get some unreliable AOE damage if there is even initiative present…
snipped for brevity
This is precisely what I’ve been saying for weeks. The design intent becomes very apparent when you play a rifle warrior and a pistol thief back-to-back. It also becomes very apparent (especially considering the difference in activation speed) that Vital Shot is supposed to fire much faster than Bleeding Shot due to lower upfront damage, shorter bleed duration, and reduced range but in actuality does not, or if it does only very marginally so.
I would argue it’s very likely that the P/P set for Thieves is supposed to slightly outdo the Rifle for warriors in DPS due to the reduced range of the set and the much weaker defense of the thief, but in actuality does substantially lower DPS while also having weaker utility AND trait support. Something is seriously amiss, and majority of the problem IMO lies with Vital Shot, which should do a full 30-50% more damage than it does mostly through bleed stacking. That is why this patch failed utterly to do much to improve the set and why I’m losing confidence in the designers’ ability to locate and correct issues.
(edited by Einlanzer.1627)
I’m be cautious about any straight comparisons of DPS between a Warrior and other classes, since the Warrior seems to out-DPS every other class in the game by 20% or so regardless of the situation. If Rifle is 20% stronger than the Thief’s P/P at dealing damage, that would be about par for the course, since Axe or Greatsword out-damage the Thief’s daggers or sword by 20% or so as well. Of course, if Rifle was only 20% stronger than P/P, then P/P would be a much better weapon set than it is now; it’s closer to 50% stronger at current numbers.
Dungeons: P/P actually shines in some boss fights that are single target and heavily favor range. Not really worth using outside of those fights though, for the same reasons P/P isn’t that great in the open world.
I’d hesitate to say it ‘shines’ in those fights, given that it’s still weaker than the ranged options available to most other classes. Still, in fights where you’re realistically not going to melee (Lupicus), and there aren’t going to be other people in stationary melee at all (which makes the blast finisher less sexy), and no adds (no AoE opportunities), then P/P will outperform Short Bow, and you gain effectiveness by swapping to it.
(you would also gain effectiveness by swapping to an alt for that fight, but that’s a lot more time consuming and doesn’t work for Fractals).
Granted, that encompasses, oh, half a dozen monsters in the entire game, so it’s not exactly a priority – but those are some of the more difficult encounters, so you might as well keep a pair in your pack for those situations if you’re going to be facing them.
“Viable” is a sketchy word in this context since without cutting edge PvE content “optimal” performance isn’t really required.
Anything can work effectively and P/P is no exception.
But damage, or at least Unload spam was never really a problem for P/P. It’s just that everything else was rather lackluster.
Vital Shot is slow, Body Shot is nigh useless, and Black Power is more suited for melee than ranged.
Overall P/P always has, and always will pale in comparison to the Shortbow. But you can still get far with it.
Quick point about PvE: Even if you have NO WEAPON in the off hand its still viable, that’s how low the bar is set PvE wise. So…..
I’m be cautious about any straight comparisons of DPS between a Warrior and other classes, since the Warrior seems to out-DPS every other class in the game by 20% or so regardless of the situation. If Rifle is 20% stronger than the Thief’s P/P at dealing damage, that would be about par for the course, since Axe or Greatsword out-damage the Thief’s daggers or sword by 20% or so as well. Of course, if Rifle was only 20% stronger than P/P, then P/P would be a much better weapon set than it is now; it’s closer to 50% stronger at current numbers.
Dungeons: P/P actually shines in some boss fights that are single target and heavily favor range. Not really worth using outside of those fights though, for the same reasons P/P isn’t that great in the open world.
I’d hesitate to say it ‘shines’ in those fights, given that it’s still weaker than the ranged options available to most other classes. Still, in fights where you’re realistically not going to melee (Lupicus), and there aren’t going to be other people in stationary melee at all (which makes the blast finisher less sexy), and no adds (no AoE opportunities), then P/P will outperform Short Bow, and you gain effectiveness by swapping to it.
(you would also gain effectiveness by swapping to an alt for that fight, but that’s a lot more time consuming and doesn’t work for Fractals).
Granted, that encompasses, oh, half a dozen monsters in the entire game, so it’s not exactly a priority – but those are some of the more difficult encounters, so you might as well keep a pair in your pack for those situations if you’re going to be facing them.
So the issue that I have with this difference is that if we look at the post from JonathanSharp (a game designer) following the 12/14 patch notes they state that thief “Thieves are the masters of mobility, stealth and high single target damage. They can be very fragile if you counter their stealth with area of effects or large stacks of conditions, but they trade this fragility in order to have some of the highest burst damage in the game.”
now warriors “We want the Warrior to be capable of good melee damage in a sturdy body. They can still do some decent damage at range, but they aren’t as good at it as the Ranger (with their pet). They have a hard time taking enemy boons down, and instead, have to just go through them with raw force. They may have a hard time with enemy conditions, and may need to ask for ally help in order to keep themselves free of hampering conditions.”
from their point of view warrior should not do 20% more dmg in melee, and likely shouldn’t do 20% more at range either. This means that either they dont actually do this much more (you can not really tell in this game as we have no way to really accurately check dps) or we have a bit longer to wait until we reach the balance they are seeking.
from their point of view warrior should not do 20% more dmg in melee, and likely shouldn’t do 20% more at range either. This means that either they dont actually do this much more (you can not really tell in this game as we have no way to really accurately check dps) or we have a bit longer to wait until we reach the balance they are seeking.
They do, though, that’s the problem. The Warrior’s rifle is very noticeably superior in every way to the Thief’s pistol. Volley and Kill Shot outdamage Unload, Bleeding Shot outbleeds and outdamages Vital Shot even backed up by Sneak Attack, plus the rifle knockback, a cripple, and superior range, all while the Warrior possesses vastly superior health and defense.
It’s not even a contest. Something is obviously not working as intended.