Guild Wars 2

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but one of the common complaints I see about Shortbow is it’s damage. Oh, but then the utility is just out of sight and makes up for it’s lack of damage, and I can agree with that. However, how would you feel about the idea of taking away the multiple hits from the autoattack and increasing it’s damage as a one target hit instead?

FIX THE THIEVES ANET…..

2K crit and bounces 2 times on a nice attack speed? Seems very weak to me :/

shortbow skills present a good combination of damage and utility for a melee-focused class, of course all other classes have access to better ranged weapons but i’d rather see some new long-range weapon introduced to thief rather than rework shortbow

also whenever i want to do some chill pve shortbow auto attack does awesome job tagging as many mobs as possible for me :]

The shortbow is mostly garbage except for its one awesome teleport skill. What it is lacking is the True Shot skill from the guardian. How the thief missed out on a big shot on one of their weapon sets is sort of astounding to me.

It is the best weapon a thief has for the current pirate ship meta in WvW and remains a solid way to “build stacks”. I would not remove its “bounce” for this reason.

I would suggest increasing the damage a bit on SB #2 and increasing the duration of the bleed. Also, I would increase the duration of the poison field by a few second for #4. Other than that it is fine.

Lexander.4579:

shortbow skills present a good combination of damage and utility for a melee-focused class, of course all other classes have access to better ranged weapons but i’d rather see some new long-range weapon introduced to thief rather than rework shortbow

also whenever i want to do some chill pve shortbow auto attack does awesome job tagging as many mobs as possible for me :]

scrapper hammer and dh LB say hi

They actually switched Longbow damage to P/P I think, True Shot being Unload even though it’s not the same stuff. I hope next Elite Spec will give us Rifle, not only because Thief needs better ranged weapon but also the fact that it makes more sense than anything else and is easier to do.

Not sure if this game will survive another expansion – so sure give me rifle – that’ll make everything better!

shortbow damage is over decent. the only thing that i would change is fix #3 movement and aftercast. thats all

Ok then, on a serious note: Poison has been nerfed too much; either buff it again or make it cost less initative, the speed in which clusterbombs travel if not on point is too slow, #3 is unreliable.
ETA: Never felt as if the auto wasn’t doing enough, but then again, to me autoattacks are nothing special in general although they often are, which is wrong in my opinion, kind of.

Straegen.2938:

The shortbow is mostly garbage except for its one awesome teleport skill. What it is lacking is the True Shot skill from the guardian. How the thief missed out on a big shot on one of their weapon sets is sort of astounding to me.

It is the best weapon a thief has for the current pirate ship meta in WvW and remains a solid way to “build stacks”. I would not remove its “bounce” for this reason.

Well I wouldn’t say it’s mostly garbage, but I think this post has a good point. I didn’t think about the tagging aspect and how much it’d be missed, so yeah, I agree scrapping the bounce hit wouldn’t be good. Perhaps having a True Shot of sorts would be good in this case. What would it replace though? 2 is good for blasting fields. 3 is an okay evade, sort of. 5 is a good teleport. Only one I can think of that could be replaced is 4, the poison shot.

Judging from the other posts, maybe it’s just me, but I hate when I need to switch to short bow and then I’m stuck with it for 10 seconds when still in a fight.

It’s meant to be a utility weapon, people.

It’s like complaining staff on guardian is a bad weapon. It isn’t. The purpose is AOE tagging and support/utility. Shortbow is literally the same thing.

Single-target DPS/burst for ranged is P/P.

Thief absolutely DOES NOT want or need a huge nuke on a ranged weapon, particularly a single-hit one. Gun Flame wars and TS DH’s are bad enough. We don’t need to be doing the same thing from stealth.

And before people say the coefficients are too high on those skills, and that the thief’s could be lower; they’re not even close to what would be allowable. We have so many ways to stack damage modifiers. Unload can do more damage than most ranger’s RF’s, even when they build for nuking with RF, yet it has less than 2/3 of the damage coefficient. Any kind of single-hit ranged burst without an obvious tell is a huge problem, and since we have stealth access, the tell would need to force the revealed debuff during casts, which hurts the gameplay of the set more and makes the set more gimmicky rather than fluid and functional across all skills.

We’re in power-creep wars 2 right now. There’s no reason to request for silly changes/buffs to cohesive weapons just because the new FoTM elites are broken beyond all comparison. I can understand requesting the next elite spec to feature a longbow/rifle due to our lack of 1200 range options. We don’t need more potency at 900, though, and shortbow doesn’t need a re-design just because it’s not 100-0’ing people in one skill at range.

Any kind of long-ranged damage or burst coming from the thief is going to have to be playing heavily with the Revealed mechanic as to enable counterplay if balance is going to be even remotely considered. It’s ranged damage or stealth. Pick one.

The DPS is very decent when it bounces, other than that, it’s not meant to be your main DPS tool anyways. Shortbow has a very high utility potential and that should be respected.

DeceiverX.8361:

It’s meant to be a utility weapon, people.

It’s like complaining staff on guardian is a bad weapon. It isn’t. The purpose is AOE tagging and support/utility. Shortbow is literally the same thing.

Single-target DPS/burst for ranged is P/P.

Thief absolutely DOES NOT want or need a huge nuke on a ranged weapon, particularly a single-hit one. Gun Flame wars and TS DH’s are bad enough. We don’t need to be doing the same thing from stealth.

And before people say the coefficients are too high on those skills, and that the thief’s could be lower; they’re not even close to what would be allowable. We have so many ways to stack damage modifiers. Unload can do more damage than most ranger’s RF’s, even when they build for nuking with RF, yet it has less than 2/3 of the damage coefficient. Any kind of single-hit ranged burst without an obvious tell is a huge problem, and since we have stealth access, the tell would need to force the revealed debuff during casts, which hurts the gameplay of the set more and makes the set more gimmicky rather than fluid and functional across all skills.

We’re in power-creep wars 2 right now. There’s no reason to request for silly changes/buffs to cohesive weapons just because the new FoTM elites are broken beyond all comparison. I can understand requesting the next elite spec to feature a longbow/rifle due to our lack of 1200 range options. We don’t need more potency at 900, though, and shortbow doesn’t need a re-design just because it’s not 100-0’ing people in one skill at range.

Any kind of long-ranged damage or burst coming from the thief is going to have to be playing heavily with the Revealed mechanic as to enable counterplay if balance is going to be even remotely considered. It’s ranged damage or stealth. Pick one.

Let’s not compare class weapon sets with class weapon sets. I think that makes a poor argument, and besides that, I also personally hate being stuck with the Guardian staff when switching to it too. It’s one of the reasons 9 times out of 10 I don’t run with it.

No, the shortbow doesn’t need a huge overhaul at all. I’d just like to see something else on it besides utility.

As far as the power creep goes, I don’t see that going away anytime soon. If some skillsets are going to compete with power creep wars2, then there needs to be something done. Yeah, that’s a slipper slope, but I think GW2 has already been sliding down it.

You also have a very good point about being stealthed and using the skill, but we also have several skills that have high damage already from stealth. However, I can see the point. What about changing the stealth attack that’s on Shortbow in this case?

The problem with the powercreep is that anet added MOAR DAMAGE!!! (last patch “uuh bunker meta, we need MOAR DAMAGE!!”)
We already had enough damage in game. Reason why most classes survive this is insane sustain which thief is lacking – once you mess up your sustain you’re instantly dead – that goes for nearly every class. So I’d say – the answer isn’t MOAR DAMAGE – lets see when anet gets that – I’m taking bets.

The autoattack on both Shortbow and Pistol are a problem. They are weak enough that both sets are only situationally usable due to their poor sustained DPS. Shortbow for utility, P/P for burst.

Sustained DPS approaches have never been competitive even in PvP, though. Burst for executions between heals in order to kill a bunker outright is frankly the only damage-oriented model which has worked.

The thing about the shortbow is that if it gets competitive DPS, there becomes little incentive to not use it if that DPS is buffed to a point where it can kill people substantially easier, or still entirely a situational weapon because the kit, as mentioned, it designed entirely for support.

Regarding everything else being power creeped so why not the thief… this isn’t the way to solve a problem. Making the problem worse doesn’t do anything but justify other sides of the scale (other classes) demand that they get more power because the scale tipped a little bit more out of their favor. It just becomes an arms race until the game is no longer playable. And we’re already very close there.

The OP stuff has to get nerfed, plain and simple. And the decisions of which weapons to bring and when to use them, should be designed to be as ambiguous and difficult of a decision as possible. Otherwise you end up with one single build dominating the others with no room for the others, design-wise, to take precedent. This is the case with D/P and shortbow already. We don’t need to even further ingrain alternate-weapon dominance.

short bow is strong what make it seem weak is thief ability to not effectively combo with it finishers. is same as staff problem.

Yeah you can say you get poison field combo with it but poison duration been nerf to the ground even if you run a 100% posion dur. only changing a 2 second posion to 4 second. honestly i think anet should think about buffing poison on physical projectile finisher to 4 seconds base line.

but second if combo a con thief with Mesmer you get 3 confusion 5s(10s if spec in to dur) on every auto pretty sick.

Personally I’d like a longer poison duration on choking gas and a “fan” effect of three arrows on the shortbow auto attack rather than a bounce.

DeceiverX.8361:

Sustained DPS approaches have never been competitive even in PvP, though. Burst for executions between heals in order to kill a bunker outright is frankly the only damage-oriented model which has worked.

The thing about the shortbow is that if it gets competitive DPS, there becomes little incentive to not use it if that DPS is buffed to a point where it can kill people substantially easier, or still entirely a situational weapon because the kit, as mentioned, it designed entirely for support.

Regarding everything else being power creeped so why not the thief… this isn’t the way to solve a problem. Making the problem worse doesn’t do anything but justify other sides of the scale (other classes) demand that they get more power because the scale tipped a little bit more out of their favor. It just becomes an arms race until the game is no longer playable. And we’re already very close there.

The OP stuff has to get nerfed, plain and simple. And the decisions of which weapons to bring and when to use them, should be designed to be as ambiguous and difficult of a decision as possible. Otherwise you end up with one single build dominating the others with no room for the others, design-wise, to take precedent. This is the case with D/P and shortbow already. We don’t need to even further ingrain alternate-weapon dominance.

1. Sustained DPS is really important for a weapon to be usable especially in PvE. Many ranged weapons in the game suffer with sustained DPS and therefore perform terribly in PvE outside of limited set switching for some burst or utility.

2. Power creep is a problem, but when you’re talking about most things being OP and only a handful of things coming up short, the only feasible solution is to buff the under-tuned things and then work on the systems behind the power creep.

You guys know that cluster bomb can score 7k crits easily right? Shortbow DPS is just barely behind P/P single target when built to do damage with the weapon set, so long as you place your cluster bombs wisely. With 5-target AOE, before staff it was the thief’s best trash pack tool and still might be if you consider the ranged flexibility.

The problem with P/P is that it lacks a pierce, bounce or AoE so a skilled player kites behind their pets, clones or other players and completely avoids the damage.

As for the shortbow, its damage is laughable and since ANet nerfed Cluster Bomb by slowing it to an easily avoidable completely unspammable skill the weapon is mianly for teleport and tagging. Choking Gas has some narrow applications but that is incidental IMO.

SB 1 is decent for providing some pressure in group fights, 5 is great for mobility. 2 is extremely slow, 3 is awkward, and 4 deals pitiful poison damage.