Guild Wars 2

Many classes have utility skills in there weapons, but actually do a lot of damage, i’m wondering why Thieves have all these amazing venoms that immobilize/poison/snare and all that, but then we have weapon shots that specifically do the same thing, making our utility like venoms worthless.

For example:

Pistols: Head Shot, VERY VERY VERY Low Damage, but also dazes.

Should it not be, Very Very High Damage, but then you can use a venom to make it daze? wouldn’t that add better synergy with our weapon slots and not pigeon hole us into using 3/3/3/3/3, or 2/2/2/2/2/2… ?

Wouldn’t it be better if we had specific attacks that could trigger a venom? and not all of our attacks could?

Head Shot would be much better of an attack if it was “High Damage”, “Also applies a Venom.”.

Initiative is the reason behind this design. Our bars have typically less hard hitting attacks than other classes, but more reliable/higher stacking utility. This is because the design of initiative is specifically to allow us to use the same damaging ability for massive damage, or choose to use that initiative defensively or supportively on our better weapon based utility.

The utility on many of the skills isn’t enough for the tradeoff to make it worth it in a lot of cases, but the design is pretty obvious when viewing the skill bars. If other classes had bars like you’rs they’d be simply unable to output decent damage at all due to cooldowns. Their decision making is more about when to use a skill for its damage OR utility, but waste the cooldown, wheras our decision is whether to use our global “cooldown” initiative mechanic for damage or utility.

You think head shot is a bad pistol ability? Remember “body shot?”

You probably forgot it existed. It is criminally awful.

Dagger 2: Heartseeker – new PvP’rs drown in their own tears over it.
Sword 2: Infiltrator’s Strike – best thief skill in the game.
Pistol 2: Body Shot – useless, absolute worse thief skill in the game. Worse than Last Refuge trait and underwater combat combined.

The problem is that many of these utilites are useless when it really counts – against bosses/unshakable mobs. The effect is that we have 2, sometimes 3, effective weapon skills on harder fights.

Having utility abilities on our weapons allows us to be more free with our ability skill bar.

With the exception of specific spike builds that require the stacking of venoms or haste for example. We really do not require any of our utility skills. They are merely quality of life improvements. Take shadow refuge and signet of shadows for example. Neither are required for any build yet both are taken by many thieves just because they make our life easier. We are lucky in that we can do this. And it is thanks to the utility in our weapons. I don’t believe any other class in the game can count themselves as being so lucky.

Yes utility in weapeons does make us intresting indeed. The innitiative management is most important thing for a good thief, in between damage and utility. Since cuz some of our damage comes from our utility. Stealth, blinds, gives us openings to run or attack anew with element of surprise. We do not need to pack all of it in utilitys.

It has some weakness too though. Since thief is ussualy more reliable on 1 type of attack (physical burst, bleeds and so on) we are ussualy countered harder by specific builds(bunkers, condition necros and so on).