Guild Wars 2

(This makes sure D/D/Shortbow do not benefit, since they are BOTH fine and need no changes atm.)

Pistol Mastery:
Grant Might on critical hits with Pistol or Spear-gun.
Pistol and Spear-gun skills cost 1 less initiative.

(This is due to pistol skills being low damage, Pistol skills do not have high burst, however they do have “ok” dps, this will make Pistol skills easier to use and have a higher damage rating, letting us use other skills besides “UNLOAD”.)

Yes, this may make “Pistol Whip” a little hard, but with its low damage and self roots its not that hard to dodge, this is mainly for P/P, D/P, P/D. (Pistol Whip does less damage then the Auto-attack Chain now.)

[This is kind of like what Warriors get, forceful great-sword.]

Critical Haste, change to critical strikes.
Critical Chance with Sword Skills is increased by 15%.
(This makes swords have the higher DPS they deserve to have over Dagger/Dagger.)

[This is kind of like what Guardians get.]
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(I’m not sure many use this trait because of how random it is, but feel free to comment below, I need to go.)

(To be honest, this might be a little much towards “Pistol Whip”, so I think the Pistol Mastery may only effect pistol-only traits.)

I just really want pistols to be useful again, and I will do whatever I can to make them fun.

Not a bad suggestion for pistols, especially since might will benefit both power and condition pistol configurations.

The problem with the sword suggestion is that sword skills already have great DPS compared to D/D. Autoattack is about the same vs. 1 target with S/x providing cripple/weaken and D/x providing endurance/poison/hit volume. Upon moving to 2 okittengets the S/x auto attack not only blows away D/x auto attack, but also pretty much any other skill D/x brings to the table. IF is a utility ability that isn’t particularly used for damage. Flanking Strike has its own issues, but is on-paper higher damage than even a max-strength Heartseeker. Low damage is not a problem S/x has.

The other problem is that Critical Haste as-is is somewhat beneficial to many builds and promotes diversity, whereas replacing it with something that only applies to swords would reduce the amount of synergies.

D/D has horrible DPS, DPS is Damage Per Second, D/D has “High Burst Damage” but horrible damage per second.

In 10 seconds D/D can dish or more damage then any other weapon slot in the game.
Over 30 minute fight, a NECROMANCER almost doubles the damage we do, a warrior almost does 4 times as much damage, this is why thieves are so horrible in PVE.

The sword 15% critical chance would help thieves with there lack of fury buffs other classes get, to help the thieves average DPS in PVE, since we have very poor DPS but high burst damage, we honestly need the critical chance to balance out the damage, or sword skills need to add some fury.

The idea is to help Swords and Pistols without helping daggers.

The problem with swords is they don’t critical enough for one, daggers critical and bring more things to the table like poison/endurance gain, swords are mostly damaging abilities, but they have the same critical? Swords should get a critical advantage over daggers automatically, but you can’t really do this without changing traits around.

Swords do get a critrate advantage in the form of AE attacks. Double/triple the hit volume, double/triple the crits.

You seem to be trying to get these weapons balanced around some kind of >20 minute single-target PvE engagement, but those don’t even exist in GW2. Thieves already have good PvE DPS in situations wherein such a thing matters.

Tulisin.6945:

Swords do get a critrate advantage in the form of AE attacks. Double/triple the hit volume, double/triple the crits.

You seem to be trying to get these weapons balanced around some kind of >20 minute single-target PvE engagement, but those don’t even exist in GW2. Thieves already have good PvE DPS in situations wherein such a thing matters.

Well, 8-14 minutes.

We don’t actually do that good of PVE damage… but thats just me playing my warrior who does almost 4 times the damage of my thief.

How does AOEs make you critical better, that does not make a lint of sense…

The warrior’s axe has roughly a 25% DPS advantage on thief dagger auto DPS (neglecting gear and traits). You don’t really serve anyone well with ridiculous hyperbole about a 4x damage differential.

Thieves have to wait for there initiative to recharge to reuse them, Warriors 100b has a 6 second recast, plus they can switch weapons, like axes and keep using all their abilities, thieves can only spam one ability, then wait for int to recharge, then spam that 1 ability again.

Axes/Greatsword Skills do alot more damage then thieves skills.

Axes hit every target around the axe (its an aoe weapon.), daggers only hit one target.
Axe has higher autoattack damage then dagger.
Axe, you can use all abilities, then switch to greatsword and use all abilities, then go back to axe and have the next abilities up again.

this comes out to be about 4 times more damage, even more so the longer the fight is.

I have both classes, there is no comparison to a warrior and thief in pve, in pve a thief is useless for damage compared to a warrior, they are only good for one thing, spamming blind, and thats useless against bosses.

Warriors have better traits to increase damage of there weapons, and a higher critical chance just for being a warrior, they also get traits to increase there critical chance by 37% forever, no matter what the situation is.

I’m going to keep this very simple because this thread is already way too saturated in idiotic exaggeration.

All with exotic weapons and no power, which we might as well skip because all classes scale the same and it lets me read numbers off the wiki:

Thief’s sword autoattack deals 269/269/437 in an AoE over 2.5 seconds, for a clean average of 390 DPS. I’ll use this as the gold standard.

Warrior’s axe autoattack deals 252/538/858 in an AoE over 3.6 seconds, for an average of 457.7- DPS.

This represents a 17% DPS increase over the Thief’s sword attack.

Warrior’s Greatsword is a bit more complicated, since the weapon is extremely reliant upon vulnerability stacks and might stacks to be effective. Beating on an elite mob with 2600 armor, you should be able to maintain roughly 5 stacks of might and 10 stacks of vulnerability on a 3 autoattack chain + hundred blades on recharge – or some combination thereof. That chain, taking the might and vulnerability into account, would deal 5570 damage over about 13.65 seconds, or about 490 DPS – slightly better than a 25% DPS bonus over the thief’s sword autoattacks.

Traits end up being a wash; thieves have several 10% damage boosts and executioner for 20% damage under 50%, while warriors get a comparable variety of situational damage boosts and boosts for individual weapons.

The end result is that warriors deal roughly 25% more sustained DPS than a thief will, assuming both have comparable gear and damage specs.

Ensign

The end result is that warriors deal roughly 25% more sustained DPS than a thief will, assuming both have comparable gear and damage specs.

When comparing warrior auto attack + 1 burst attack on CD to thief auto attack… so the question then becomes why the thief is standing around at max initiative all day. Also don’t forget that steal may offer essentially “free” damage every <45 seconds depending on traits, since it doesn’t interrupt an existing rotation.

If there is a gap, it is smaller than 25 % in practice. I do appreciate you bringing numbers to the table, thank you.

From a balance perspective, however, I doubt thief sword auto attacks will ever match axe auto attacks simply because of the extra conditions thief AA brings to the table. Perma AE cripple/weakness is no joke, even against resistant targets.

i think for Pistol, they should just change ricochet to piercing bullets

I used sword for comparison because at least in the case of S/P you don’t actually get higher damage from using your weapon skills over simply auto-attacking; everything you have provides utility but none of it gives additional damage, which makes the max DPS comparison simple.

Dagger, and particularly Dagger/Dagger, are a whole lot more complicated to compare, since the auto-attack damage is lower than sword, and unlike the other weapons mentioned is not AoE, but also has four different skills that deal increased damage over the basic attack that are all useful situationally.