Guild Wars 2

I’m starting this after seeing how easy it was to hear the community and increase the versatility of the revenant by adding an extra main hand weapon, also an extra off hand weapon, plus a weapon swap button.

Ever since the early development days, back in gw2guru and the start of this official forum, something that all Thief players claimed that it was going to be a problem was the lack of versatility.

- The Thief has access to a total of 7 weapon combinations (S/D, S/P, D/D, D/P, P/D, P/P and Shortbow).

- The Thief benefit little from weapon swap (initiative is shared among all sets) so the secondary weapon has to be there mostly for utility (Shortbow in most cases).

- Even if we consider any weapon set viable as a complementary set, the Thief still has access only to 21 combinations of main set and secondary set (no repetitions, and eliminating cases where main and secondary sets are switched as they’re the same).

- This number pales to others, specially the Warrior and his 171 different combinations (171 to 21, I know the Warrior is supposed to be versatile, but woah). And even the Elementalist, with no weapon swap, has access to 20 different combinations thanks to its mechanic, and unlike the Thief that can only be effective with one at the same time because of initiative, it can freely switch between 4 of them when others are on cooldown.

- If you add an offhand Sword to the Thief repertory, the combination of weapons jumps to 10, which is still less than the Guardian (12) and the Ranger (11) and on par with the Necromancer (10) and the Mesmer (10).

The problem with being so handicaped in terms of versatility, is that the moment that a set is less effective in the metagame, your options are drastically reduced and most players of this profession will end up playing the same, which IMHO isn’t good for the game.

An offhand sword for the Thief makes a lot of sense (Mesmers can dual wield and Thieves that are supposed to be agile adventurers and even have dual wielding as a profession mechanic can’t, like for real?) and thanks to the dual skills you can craft something interesting to combine it with any set. I remember writting years ago an extensive skill list of viable combinations with our current weapon sets taking game balance into account (though some of those skills are now exactly or really close to what the Revenant got lol so would have to think a couple of different ones). It would be important that the OH Sword gets some way to throw shadow waves or any other ranged attack to combine with main hand pistol or you’re already killing some combinations by default.

I can totally get behind this. Thief should have off hand sword added baseline. If you need some inspiration for how it could work, just look at the Shiro spec… -_-

Firstly, we don’t need OH sword, we want OH sword. I’m not saying its bad to have OH sword, I just wanted to point out that OH sword is not essential and therefore not needed. But that’s just me being pedantic.

Secondly, I think part of the problem why we don’t have OH sword is because having MH dagger + OH sword is not aethetically fitting for a right handed character. While most of us could easily role play this down to being left handed or ambidextrous, I think the devs have been trying to avoid this kind of set up. The mesmer not being able to use MH pistol, I believe, is due to them being able to use OH sword. Personally I would be ok with MH dagger + OH sword, but I thought I would put this reasoning out there to indicate a possible reason behind us not getting OH sword.

I do not think we need OH sword, nor do I think we will get it in HoT, as I am convinced we will get staff. That said, I would be totally ok with OH sword, and we may well get OH sword at a later date with another elite spec.

To be honest, if my above reasoning is correct, I am surprised Anet hasn’t broken convention in this regard. They have made ranged hammers and greatwords, so why not have left handed/ambidextrous weapon combos?

I do agree that the thief needs more weapon skill variation, so lets hope the elite spec will improve that. My hope is, if the kit speculation is correct, we will get even more weapon skills to use with the elite spec, even though we only get one new weapon.

Well, I was talking about the need of it outside of the specs system.

It really could be any other OH weapon but sword just makes too much sense, even with a dagger if the OH sword is used defensively, so that’s why I say it in the title, but any other weapon could do the trick. We could even have a focus to act as an anti-beacon emiting shadows for example. Many solutions here.

All professions are getting an extra weapon with specializations, the Thief needs that extra OH weapon baseline in adition to anything he’s getting on the expansion (probably staff according to the leaks, which won’t increase versatility as you can’t combine it with other weapons) to be at the level of most professions in terms of build versatility, specially when many of our limited builds aren’t competitive right now, making the virtual versatility even lower.

i pray to god they give us offhand sword
they kittened eles so hard with warhorn. i feel so bad for them