Guild Wars 2

Okay, so, I’m trying to play at least one of each class in the game, so I have a good understanding of how they all work, but I’m a bit confused on the thief and his “light” weapons skills (i.e., the third skill slot ability you get when you have nothing equipped in your off hand).

The thief is the only profession that has these, but I quite honestly am at a loss as to why they are even in the game. They are interesting — the dagger offhand is a quite nice AoE bleed — but i can’t even begin to think that they might be considered to be a viable option to having a second weapon of some sort equipped. Yet there they are.

So, what am I missing here? It’s such a singularly odd mechanic that I can’t help but assume that there’s just plain something I’m missing here. i even went through to see if there was some sort of clever trait combo that might make them worthwhile, but if so, I’m still missing it.

Thanks in advance,
Steve M

No, they are simply placeholders….Every other class in the game gets 1-3 main hand and 4-5 off hand. For the thief, 3 is a combo of main and off hand. They couldn’t just give us 2 abilities without an offhand equipped for purposes in the starter area.

You aren’t missing anything, they’re skills solely intended for the first hour or so of play before you’ve gathered weapons.

If they want to at some point implement a set of empty-hand skills for #4/5 and a statted piece of gear to go in the “empty hand” slot, then they could return to these skills and tune them up to be competitive.

The point of one weapon skills is because using a single weapon your base attack is higher. However the skill set isn’t tuned enough for them to be useful at higher levels.
Personally I’d love for viable one weapon builds, dagger twisting fangs need an evade or projectile spin, stab needs a bleed, and the rapid fire of the pistol needs to be much faster, like the thief was smacking the hammer with his or her hand to make it unload quicker.

Garo.5304:

The point of one weapon skills is because using a single weapon your base attack is higher

You get your average weapon damage when you are dual wielding, so this is technically true but totally useless. Since the largest gap with 80 exotics is between daggers at 981 and pistols at 1029 using just the pistol instead of the combo yields an entire 24 higher max weapon damage (and way way lower minimum weapon damage). Your average range goes from about 950 – 1005 when using a pistol and a dagger to 876 – 1029 if you’re using just a pistol. Incidentally, these bring the exact same average (952.5 weapon damage). So you’ve gained zero actual average damage in return for 24 max damage…

…which is negated several times over by the 90 power (equal value per-point to weapon damage) that other weapon could bring to the table, completely ignoring the other two stats it could bring.

There’s no point to it.