Guild Wars 2

Under what circumstances would you use body shot (p2)?

Does anyone use it to stack Vuln or as a physical projectile finisher?

This mostly for WvW.

I’m mostly asking to see if I am missing something I should be doing.

Body Shot is really that bad and because initiative lets you choose, you can ignore it. You will do better saving ini for other things. Maybe in some world event… but even then it isn’t that big of a vuln applier compared to specialist builds from other professions and as there is a cap of 25 and in those situations the cap is quickly reached you won’t do anything with it.

Just ignore it until they revamp that useless skill. Specially in a P/D setup.

There really aren’t any circumstances under which you would use it.

First of all, it hardly scales any better with power than does the autoattack. Its skill-specific coefficient, I believe, is 0.5, meaning that a +1 increase in power increases damage by a mere 0.5. In other words, with 3000 power, you would be dealing 600 damage, which, in all honesty, isn’t that impressive. So, it can’t really be used for pure damage output.

So what about the vuln, then? At 5 stacks for 6 seconds, that’s okay, right? Well, assuming you lay down 2000 DPS as a base (which is pretty high, but let’s just assume that), then your overall DPS is going to increase by 5%, or 100 damage. In other words, this attack, assuming high DPS, basically gives you an increased 600 damage over the period of 6 seconds. In other words, assuming that you can get high levels of DPS, this skill becomes decent; essentially, with 2000 base DPS (from yourself and allies), this skill deals its base damage plus an extra 600 damage per turn. However, realize that 2000 is probably somewhat unrealistically high (unless you’re running P/P burst).

Really, it all varies based on your build. The higher your other damage output, the better the skill becomes.

Thank you, this is what I had concluded as well. Is there a view as to why they have a skill that no one ever uses included in the weapon set?

You would rather stack the bleed with no-initiative 1 than spend initiative on 2.

Does this escape the mods or is it working as intended?

Skill 3, whilst not typically used, does have some situational use I think but 2 seems to be not useful.

The skill does provide some team support, being a vuln-applying skill. It would be useful in dungeons against bosses, where everybody is focusing their fire and far more than 2k DPS is being dealt.

Initiative is a hard thing to deal with when balancing. As you can spam things you have to be careful so you don’t make something that when spammed is too exploitable, but sometimes an specific concept is pure garbage when it has to be toned down to avoid spamming.

Something I’ve posted several times is to change it so it has some synergy with Black Powder in P/P to make that set viable, and in the process could be useful for P/D sets. I will link one of those times as I’ve written it many times and it’s a bit long.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Change-body-shot/first#post2009008

It has very limited utility. However, it is a 100% projectile finisher. You note that you are interested in WvW. Even in small group fights, there are often a lot of fields lying around.

Otherwise, it’s a waste of initiative.

WvW, only if I was out of range for a C&D, knew I wasn’t catching up to my target soon, was going to get the 100% projectile finisher, and was at full initiative. Then I might Body Shot.

Maybe use it on supply camp Supervisors when I had a few friends and we’re trying to burn him down ASAP. Otherwise, it’s meh.