Guild Wars 2

I always enjoyed using sw/p in pvp and it feels pretty strong with pulmonary impact, however I often find it suffers set backs from really simple fixes.

At first I thought that pistol whip needs an evade frame, but after playing it a bit I learned the biggest flaw is that pistol whip roots you in place, often causing you to waste 5 initiative completely or have only half of the skill hit.

On top of that the auto attacks are a bit too slow.

What do you guys think is stopping this weapon from being useful?

Imo exactly that. Pistol whip is great if they don’t move, else its a waste (aside from seeing an enemy ressing an ally, then its a god send). A condi cleanse with a shadowstep is very useful. Auto is pretty slow as well. If Auto was a bit faster and pistol whip didn’t root you then it would be par with dagger.

Pistol whip has an evade frame, it’s not on the tooltip though. You know, because that would be helpful lol xD

I honestly think S/P is in a good place, it’s just outshone by dagger in the roles thief is expected to fill. S/P is a strong set when used with bound, pulmonary impact and acro/DD/Trickery, the main issue is that the bulk of your damage will come from interrupts and dodges instead of the sword 1-3 skills, so why not take a dagger and get access to backstab for the engage? It’s a really nice set for duelling tho, my favourite actually, the mobility and stunlock can really mess up some classes.

Thinking about it, it makes me wonder if S/P isn’t where it should be and D/P is overtuned like most of the meta is. Depends on your PoV really.

Then again, thief isn’t meta, so do whatever the hell you want and if someone complains, reroll warrior

do remember you can weapon stow pistol whip for as many reset you need to land it.

i personally think s/p is one of strongest play style you can choose. but where it fall short is auto attack is to slow for thief def and single target stun are just not how pvp work anymore.

to improve s/p none of weapon skill are bad it would need something like “Ricochet” or trait that globally boost thief control in a fight. or just more stuff like “bandit defense” something that just globally pushes thief defense that does not use initiative.

It roots you in place and it is not as versatile as dp or sd.

What’s holding S/P back is the .75s wind up for the stun. This is the only skill that has a shorter CC than its cast time in the whole game.

If the cast time was .25 seconds, S/P would be competitive instantly.

The weaponset is just too 1-dimensional for PvP. This is why it’s always either been a cheesy overpowered set or useless.

The reason it’s currently in the latter of those two options was because the initiative cost of pistol whip was increased along with the HoT power creep that it hasn’t been able to keep up with.

The movement lock does make this skill a bit clunky, but it’s a skill that packs in so many high reward aspects (evade + stun + burst + cleave), it needs to have drawbacks like this to keep it in check.

And fixing this weapon is a nightmare of cans of worms that you open any time you change anything. It’s so hard to change any dual wielding set without breaking another.

Reduced passive procs or evade frames starting just before the stun portion would likely be enough. As it is, the set gets ruined by the multitude of passive CC effects which proc on the first impact but don’t miss, causing the thief to take a 6 init self-inflicted CC with no evade or defenses attached to it, and very low reliability.

S/P is one of the hardest hitting attacks in the thief weapon sets and in the game for that matter. We have a couple in our guild that are flat lethal using the weaponset. It isn’t uncommon for us to run one condi with one S/P thief and gank for hours without dying.

The key to the weaponset is priming with Steal and using copious BV to setup opponents. About the only class that is lethal to the S/P variants are high mobility stealth D/P thieves.

Unload hits harder than PW and is cheaper on init, sorry to say.

Staff provides better combo burst and D/P is more reliable in sustained pressure.

Powercreep is just super real.

Unload is 808 (3.2) on a single target with a might buff.

Pistol Whip is 1,215 (3.303) with a stun, evasion and cleaves (3 targets).

Both cost 5 init and Pistol Whip has a much higher damage potential. Pistol Whip is beastly but takes more skill to setup than Unload spam. Unload doesn’t root the attack which is nice and tracks players through stealth. Still PW can easily hit for a full third more damage and against multiple targets PW DPS shoots through the roof.

Tip, leave a player down as bait and when someone goes for the rez PW the hell out of both players.