Guild Wars 2

Nerf pistolwhip ANET! You said you don’t want stunspamm in this game? Well there you go, spamming 3 for win, while having an OP port which goes horizontal and vertikal, which makes it impossible to escape AND having an immobilize on it??
PW build uses #3 the whole time, to evade and do dmg, maybe one or two spammed dazes as well, but that’s it and everybody rerolls it now, even bad thieves do a lot of serious damage with it. Even if you breakstun and you go out of range the pistolwhip still hits you for at least 5k?!

Huh? That stun is tiny and has a terribly obvious pre-cast to show you that it’s coming.

It is the easiest and quite hard hitting build to play in the current meta.
My suggestion would be to take the evade functionality away from the thief when pistolwhipping.

Thieves should have high damage skills but that should only come with high risk.
Currently Pistolwhip allows a thief to not only do high damage but with the evade are pretty much invulnerable to any damange during the skill. Thats like giving a warrior’s hundredbaldes stun and evade during the skill cast time…

Dahkeus.8243:

Huh? That stun is tiny and has a terribly obvious pre-cast to show you that it’s coming.

Tiny? lol ur stunned for the entire duration of pistol whip after which the thief just teleports away, then rinse repeat…

Pistol-whip isn’t a problem by itself, its only when its-precast and one of the million shadowsteps are used to get incredible cleave damage with no risk as you are evading 80% of the animation. Without all the shadowsteps available, pistol-whip is much more balanced.

It deals between 2 and 3 times the damage of blurred frenzy. (Not even mentioning the stun or no cd.. oh wait..)

SO much nonsense here… you are just raging cause you got killed by some thieves using S/P. Do u realize that pistol whip is a skill that root the thief (one of the squishiest class in game) in place while doing it, and that the stun is just 1/2 second, and the evade is also broken, so that he still takes some dmg. If u remove that little evade from it will be a suicide to even use that skill.
Then you say its spam 3 to win…. well, if ppl only need to spam 3 to kill you i only have to say learn to play!

ZilentNight.5089:

Dahkeus.8243:

Huh? That stun is tiny and has a terribly obvious pre-cast to show you that it’s coming.

Tiny? lol ur stunned for the entire duration of pistol whip after which the thief just teleports away, then rinse repeat…

Do me a favor…create a thief, go into the mists, then pistol whip a dummy.

After that, equip a sigil of paralyzation and do it again.

You’ll notice that the stun lasts 1/2 on an attack that’s about 1.5 seconds long and doesn’t noticeably change with a para sigil.

MTC.9536:

Well there you go, spamming 3 for win

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_of_spite

I’m gonna leave that here.

MTC.9536:

Even if you breakstun and you go out of range the pistolwhip still hits you for at least 5k?!

God, you must have a hard time finding either :

1) your F1 key
2) Flesh Wurm key
3) the Spectral Walk key

or even 4) the Spectral Walk return because you planned that the thief would teleport.

Also you are probably glass if you take that much damage while running away, which means you still have over 20k hp. Could be worse, and you deal 4-5k with your #1 Death Shroud so I fail to see how you can complain either way (condi or glass).

Basically, my understanding of your thread is : please make my class more op so I don’t have to get better to fight other strong classes. Funny.

EDIT : I dug a little and found this :

MTC.9536:

And I am rly scared looking at the dhuumfire change, a trait that was unblockable, not able to be blinded, and dodged now is all of it which will make it totally useless

Yay for passive op gameplay, right :’D. I fear my suspicions are confirmed.

ZilentNight.5089:

Tiny? lol ur stunned for the entire duration of pistol whip after which the thief just teleports away, then rinse repeat…

No, no you’re not. The skill lasts 1.5s, the stun lasts 0.5s.

@OP:

Damage and stun from PW is fine. It’s just a really easy to play spec. That’s more of the problem. That said, every class has their “easy” spec (well except ele)

decap engi, spirit ranger, mm necro, pu mesmer, bunker guardian, and s/p thief.

This thread is not constructive, prepare for impending deletion.

BryBry.8409:

This thread is not constructive, prepare for impending deletion.

Worse, it has degenerated into bickering! Double lock and more infractions for us all… (dissension is frowned upon, please assimilate your ideas.)

Karl the great frowns upon us, all hope is lost.

Uhtameit.2413:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_of_spite

I’m gonna leave that here.

God, you must have a hard time finding either :

1) your F1 key
2) Flesh Wurm key
3) the Spectral Walk key

or even 4) the Spectral Walk return because you planned that the thief would teleport.

Also you are probably glass if you take that much damage while running away, which means you still have over 20k hp. Could be worse, and you deal 4-5k with your #1 Death Shroud so I fail to see how you can complain either way (condi or glass).

Basically, my understanding of your thread is : please make my class more op so I don’t have to get better to fight other strong classes. Funny.

EDIT : I dug a little and found this :

Yay for passive op gameplay, right :’D. I fear my suspicions are confirmed.

No, no you’re not. The skill lasts 1.5s, the stun lasts 0.5s.

Signet of spite does only work squishies like thief and mesmer who doesn’t have a lot of condi removal, and if they have lyssa still up they get rid of everything.

You don’t get it, stunbreaks don’t really help that much against pistolwhip. So you just used spectralwalk or armor, what the thief does is just run up to you and pistolwhip again, or if you got too far away (f.e flesh wurm) he has has 4 teleports, 3 of them which are instant casts and he can start casting the pistol whip even before the teleport. And if he uses Infiltrator’s Strike as an opener with basi, or even without your stunbreak doesn’t do anything. You are still immobilized for 1 second. And does stability help you? No, good thieves (don’t really know if there are any out there anymore, since everyone is just spamming that 3 brainlessly) wait for your stability and then use their steal to take it away.

Try to even hit 1 of those Death Shroud #1’s to that 3 spammer, if the cast time would be instant you might have a chance, but there is simply too many evasion frames. What can slightly help you is that instant fear on death shroud, since you can time it just when the pistol whip ends, or just before the evasion frames start. But you hit 1 fear, what then? If the thief is fast enough, he ports to you before you get the next fear with your staff and you are already stunned.

Even if the stun lasts only 0.5seconds, you will soon enough run out of endurance and stunbreaks, since he can simply cast that 3 100 times in a row if he wants. So you are stunned for the 0.5 seconds and you don’t have endurance, even if you had swiftness you won’t be able to get away from the pistolwhip soon enough, so it will most likely hit for almost the full damage. And that is if you don’t have the immobilize, in which case you will eat the whole pistolwhip.

What the problem with the pistolwhip is the evasion frames and the low initiative cost. They need to reduce the evasion frames and increase the initiative cost. I’m not saying take the whole evasion away, just reduce it. It’s simply ridiculous that the thief has 4 ports, 3 which are instant and 2 doesn’t even need aiming, and he can’t use them even while casting pistolwhip.

It is just so sad that the game is full of these people who simply run the lowest skill required builds just to beat other people in the game. You simply can’t really find a team without a warrior nowadays, which is just a broken class. Usually 2 warriors, sometimes even 3. Then there is spirit ranger, which requires you to only use autoattack on your shortbow and sometimes faceroll on your keyboard so your spirits use their skills. And now the pistolwhippers are beginning to show up. There are already quite a few found in team arena, which really makes me not want to play the game at all with the warriors included. But have you ever been in soloq lately? I did a few matches and it was just full of these thieves. I had one match, where the enemy team had 3 pistolwhip thieves, and our team had 1.

But then again I don’t know why I’m writing this post, since even if the Anet would read it, it would seriously take more than 6 months to fix these little things. I just don’t get what Anet is doing. How long has it been since the last “huge” PvP patch? It was December the 10th, when they introduced the new healing skills and brought a few, mostly useless class changes, and I’m sure they referred that patch being a huge PvP patch. So it has been almost 3 months since the last patch, and we won’t be seeing a new balance patch in at least 2 months (let’s be serious here). And when it comes does it fix anything the community wanted? Doubt it. Ohh how I would want to write about warriors as well, but I just cba.

S/P is right now the best thief spec possible, it completely outshine any other build.

It has massive cleave, high evasion uptime, stunlocks, safe to play, teleports, blind field, interrupts.

Before, when the stun did not covered the entire PW casting time, other weapon sets were valid alternatives, but right now, not so much.

I guess all the bad thieves’ QQ about PW created a new monster.

Amplifier.1704:

Uhtameit.2413:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_of_spite

I’m gonna leave that here.

God, you must have a hard time finding either :

1) your F1 key
2) Flesh Wurm key
3) the Spectral Walk key

or even 4) the Spectral Walk return because you planned that the thief would teleport.

Also you are probably glass if you take that much damage while running away, which means you still have over 20k hp. Could be worse, and you deal 4-5k with your #1 Death Shroud so I fail to see how you can complain either way (condi or glass).

Basically, my understanding of your thread is : please make my class more op so I don’t have to get better to fight other strong classes. Funny.

EDIT : I dug a little and found this :

Yay for passive op gameplay, right :’D. I fear my suspicions are confirmed.

No, no you’re not. The skill lasts 1.5s, the stun lasts 0.5s.

Signet of spite does only work squishies like thief and mesmer who doesn’t have a lot of condi removal, and if they have lyssa still up they get rid of everything.

You don’t get it, stunbreaks don’t really help that much against pistolwhip. So you just used spectralwalk or armor, what the thief does is just run up to you and pistolwhip again, or if you got too far away (f.e flesh wurm) he has has 4 teleports, 3 of them which are instant casts and he can start casting the pistol whip even before the teleport. And if he uses Infiltrator’s Strike as an opener with basi, or even without your stunbreak doesn’t do anything. You are still immobilized for 1 second. And does stability help you? No, good thieves (don’t really know if there are any out there anymore, since everyone is just spamming that 3 brainlessly) wait for your stability and then use their steal to take it away.

Try to even hit 1 of those Death Shroud #1’s to that 3 spammer, if the cast time would be instant you might have a chance, but there is simply too many evasion frames. What can slightly help you is that instant fear on death shroud, since you can time it just when the pistol whip ends, or just before the evasion frames start. But you hit 1 fear, what then? If the thief is fast enough, he ports to you before you get the next fear with your staff and you are already stunned.

Even if the stun lasts only 0.5seconds, you will soon enough run out of endurance and stunbreaks, since he can simply cast that 3 100 times in a row if he wants. So you are stunned for the 0.5 seconds and you don’t have endurance, even if you had swiftness you won’t be able to get away from the pistolwhip soon enough, so it will most likely hit for almost the full damage. And that is if you don’t have the immobilize, in which case you will eat the whole pistolwhip.

What the problem with the pistolwhip is the evasion frames and the low initiative cost. They need to reduce the evasion frames and increase the initiative cost. I’m not saying take the whole evasion away, just reduce it. It’s simply ridiculous that the thief has 4 ports, 3 which are instant and 2 doesn’t even need aiming, and he can’t use them even while casting pistolwhip.

It is just so sad that the game is full of these people who simply run the lowest skill required builds just to beat other people in the game. You simply can’t really find a team without a warrior nowadays, which is just a broken class. Usually 2 warriors, sometimes even 3. Then there is spirit ranger, which requires you to only use autoattack on your shortbow and sometimes faceroll on your keyboard so your spirits use their skills. And now the pistolwhippers are beginning to show up. There are already quite a few found in team arena, which really makes me not want to play the game at all with the warriors included. But have you ever been in soloq lately? I did a few matches and it was just full of these thieves. I had one match, where the enemy team had 3 pistolwhip thieves, and our team had 1.

But then again I don’t know why I’m writing this post, since even if the Anet would read it, it would seriously take more than 6 months to fix these little things. I just don’t get what Anet is doing. How long has it been since the last “huge” PvP patch? It was December the 10th, when they introduced the new healing skills and brought a few, mostly useless class changes, and I’m sure they referred that patch being a huge PvP patch. So it has been almost 3 months since the last patch, and we won’t be seeing a new balance patch in at least 2 months (let’s be serious here). And when it comes does it fix anything the community wanted? Doubt it. Ohh how I would want to write about warriors as well, but I just cba.

true words

The initiative regen buff made trickery S/P thieves incredibly strong, I’m surprised it took this long for people to realize it.

I enjoyed reading such a thoughtful answer

Amplifier.1704:

Signet of spite does only work squishies like thief and mesmer who doesn’t have a lot of condi removal, and if they have lyssa still up they get rid of everything.

Agreed, yet you can plan to put it after he’s used the rune (either he wishes to use his venom or you’ve pressured him enough, which isn’t that hard if you open him).

Well, sure, stunbreaks don’t help a lot, but the OP claimed he still took 5k from the pistolwhip after using a stun breaker : my point is that he’s not very reactive. On the plus side, if you use spectral walk or armor and go into Death Shroud the thief is basically healing you.

I agree that the #1 of Death Shroud would be useless against a thief, but what are we discussing? a 1v1 situation? because 1v1s are not exactly balanced at the moment (I used to main ele). If we are talking about a 5v5, then the necro has plenty of time to get help.

On the other hand, if the necro is hybrid power/condi, he can use his life blast for 3k

It is just so sad that the game is full of these people who simply run the lowest skill required builds just to beat other people in the game. You simply can’t really find a team without a warrior nowadays, which is just a broken class. Usually 2 warriors, sometimes even 3. Then there is spirit ranger, which requires you to only use autoattack on your shortbow and sometimes faceroll on your keyboard so your spirits use their skills. And now the pistolwhippers are beginning to show up.

I agree fully, we just have to wait and see (the patch will be soon™). In my opinion pistolwhip is probably the least worse of the builds you mentioned (in terms of skill and/or fun).

Amplifier.1704:

But then again I don’t know why I’m writing this post, since even if the Anet would read it, it would seriously take more than 6 months to fix these little things. I just don’t get what Anet is doing

Giving what the majority wants : more pve. Given that they are here to make money, I see two possibilities :

1) They are incompetent, the PvP was released unfinished and they don’t care much about finishing it, despite their claim that they want it to be an eSport.

2) They play the WoW strategy : they want people to get frustrated so that they can enjoy it to the fullest when they get their nice gameplay back afterwards.

Amplifier.1704:

And when it comes does it fix anything the community wanted? Doubt it.

All we can do is hope – which is, ironically, what they expect us to do.

sorrow.2364:

Before, when the stun did not covered the entire PW casting time, other weapon sets were valid alternatives, but right now, not so much.

Again, the stun lasts 0.5s, the skill lasts 1.5s. Try it for yourself. We’d see far more complaints if the stun actually covered the entire PW duration.

it’s the combo of the immob+the stun that usually gets a full PW off,

PW needs to be nerfed into the ground, but I’d settle for a nerf to stealth, and evades, more than anything thieves are just a useless 14k hp that are not fun to play with or against

ZilentNight.5089:

My suggestion would be to take the evade functionality away from the thief when pistolwhipping.

Laughed for a good 15-30 seconds.

Uhtameit.2413:

MTC.9536:

Well there you go, spamming 3 for win

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_of_spite

I’m gonna leave that here.

MTC.9536:

Even if you breakstun and you go out of range the pistolwhip still hits you for at least 5k?!

God, you must have a hard time finding either :

1) your F1 key
2) Flesh Wurm key
3) the Spectral Walk key

or even 4) the Spectral Walk return because you planned that the thief would teleport.

Also you are probably glass if you take that much damage while running away, which means you still have over 20k hp. Could be worse, and you deal 4-5k with your #1 Death Shroud so I fail to see how you can complain either way (condi or glass).

Basically, my understanding of your thread is : please make my class more op so I don’t have to get better to fight other strong classes. Funny.

EDIT : I dug a little and found this :

MTC.9536:

And I am rly scared looking at the dhuumfire change, a trait that was unblockable, not able to be blinded, and dodged now is all of it which will make it totally useless

Yay for passive op gameplay, right :’D. I fear my suspicions are confirmed.

ZilentNight.5089:

Tiny? lol ur stunned for the entire duration of pistol whip after which the thief just teleports away, then rinse repeat…

No, no you’re not. The skill lasts 1.5s, the stun lasts 0.5s.

Dude PW is hard counter to all necros, dont be smart.
And the topic isnt dumbfire, which btw no1 liked or wanted, but thief s/p. Try posting a good idea, since now its 3-3-3-2 wait and reapeat. But if u take shadowsteps away u break thief.

1) How about removing the stun? cz if u remove the evades its all back to s/d which isnt much different. A fast animation and evades, but forcing u to take the immobilize utility and teleport to get dmg off.

Pistol whip is SOOOOOOOO broken. Easily the most broken thing. If this isn’t fixed in the balance patch then OMG. We need to know from anet that they are aware of how OP it is.

We miss state of the game where jon sharp would come and tell us what they were thinking in general terms about what was op

Thief is just a terrible, terrible class. Given how slow ANet is to make changes to this game, tournaments need to start banning certain builds.

Well, if it at least required some skill, I could maybe accept it, but it is the pinnacle of Anet’s Cheese Pumping Program. It’s there because someone in Balance thought ‘yolo why not lololo’.

In all seriousness, the skill is broken and everyone using it should be ashamed just as every decap engie should.

That’s it.

pistol whip is so stupid, even more stupid than the s/d at its best. This stupid build made so many terrible players who were nothing before look good.

i can’t seriously understand all this hate.

S/P thieves are hard coutnered by reta in a ridicolous way, stay still for the whole duration and ( above all) can be COUNTERED unlike S/D thieves.

Thieves can now be focused again without wasting all your stuff into random infinite dodges, i would say thieves are now one of the best targets to focus, especially since PW animation has a wide open space at the end of it.

And even if you can’t do it, S/P thieves have 2 dodges, like all other classes.

when i read this thread than i have to ask _ what is not broken?^^

Mrbig.8019:

And even if you can’t do it, S/P thieves have 2 dodges, like all other classes.

Yeah for sure.

If the class playing this weren’t teleporting around, and doesn’t immobilize the target when shadowstep towards, I would disagree with this.

It just need to change stun to daze.

Phantaram.1265:

Mrbig.8019:

And even if you can’t do it, S/P thieves have 2 dodges, like all other classes.

Yeah for sure.

But it’s true.

50 % vigor uptime if steal connects.

what may be OP is the fact tha now PW can be spammed due to faster ini regen.

Cmon phanta, no one used S/P from PW damage nerf for a reason, now it’s suddenly OP ?

Mrbig.8019:

now it’s suddenly OP ?

Yes.

15 characters.

leman.7682:

Mrbig.8019:

now it’s suddenly OP ?

Yes.

15 characters.

And why ?

15/chars

Has there ever been a single thief meta build that hasn’t been widely whined about? Looking at the past thief meta builds, I guess not. This alone makes some players posting in here look like complete hypocrites. I’m not saying it isn’t strong, borderline OP, but still…

I guess there would be less of them if there wasn’t this complete bunker meta. S/P is sort of the only weaponset that can reliably pressure or kill something in this meta. It’s ironic that this increasing bunker play of other classes, particulary Warriors, Guardians, Rangers & Engis is now thrown right back at their face.

Step down from all tank teams and you’ll probably see more variety in thief builds.

Stun + high damage + all evade it’s too much for one skill.

Devs says They have (maybe) the intention to split in 2 phases pw skill (like fs/ls) and can be good, but i think stun or full evade needs to go

And pls, add a little cast time to sigil of agility like elisir r for engi, to avoid the super thief chain evade.

S/P is not better than D/P, a well played D/P thief is still better than S/P. Oh and they use the same build…

Split the skill it would make it, functionally, a better skill.

Ixl Super Ixl.7258:

pistol whip is so stupid, even more stupid than the s/d at its best. This stupid build made so many terrible players who were nothing before look good.

Welcome to GW2. Every profession has one of these builds.

Pistol whip so OP!

Oh hey… my character can move and stuff… whoa this is cool! What? You mean the thief is rooted for the whole attack? Wow that actually kinda sucks…. Oh jeez and they are really squishy? Maybe this whole thief OP thing isn’t as good as it seemed…

I omnom thieves on my medi guard (usually) <3

I refuse to play s/p because of how boringly simple it is. It needs to require more skill… I really felt bad when playing it. I think this kit either needs the damage, evade time, and overall animation time reduced or the initiative cost increased. If the duration of PW was reduced it’d be less impactful to be hit by one and the overall evasion time would be reduced some. That being said, sword and pistol don’t mesh well together… the whole kit really does need to be redesigned.

These forums are a joke. It is so OP. Warrior is a minor issue compared to this. It really is the most broken thing I have ever seen in this game.

And I dont need to l2p. I am rank 1 solo q eu. Rank 1 with best win % in EU with over a handful of games. So I dont need to l2p. Anet needs to learn to nerf this BS.

It is honestly something which I have never seen in this game before. It is the most broken thing ever.

From their balance preview post:

Thief:
Much like the engineer, we wanted to take this opportunity to tone-down excessive poison stacking through poison fields.
Choking Gas: Reduced the poison per pulse from 5 seconds to 3 seconds.

How is there no mention of this kittenty OP thief stuff. WTF. It kittening destroys necros in team fights. They jump you and healing is a right kitten. Impossible to heal unless the thief is really lacking intelligence

This is out of control…Even moreso since being given exposure on the forums everyone rushes to play this. I think this is even less risk and more reward than healing signet warrior.

All of the unreasonable things with nothing being done makes my faith in this game wane significantly. Most likely, because we are within 1-3 months of the next patch, nothing will be done about this spec and it will destroy the game just a little more for the next 9 months…Sigh.

BlackBeard.2873:

This is out of control…Even moreso since being given exposure on the forums everyone rushes to play this. I think this is even less risk and more reward than healing signet warrior.

All of the unreasonable things with nothing being done makes my faith in this game wane significantly. Most likely, because we are within 1-3 months of the next patch, nothing will be done about this spec and it will destroy the game just a little more for the next 9 months…Sigh.

If this spec isn’t fixed AT LATEST in the feature patch then you have to wonder whether they are capable enough to help this game grow

Rickster.8752:

If this spec isn’t fixed AT LATEST in the feature patch then you have to wonder whether they are capable enough to help this game grow

The good news is that a lot of new games are coming out that will be worth trying regardless. We can always enjoy them and give GW2 pvp the time it needs to get out of beta.

Almost nothing has changed with the pistol whip build and all of a sudden the community is up in arms about it.

The only buff it got was a tiny reduction to the aftercast. At the same time, it also got a nerf since sigil of para doesn’t round up stun durations to the nearest second on this skill anymore.

This is pretty much proof that sometimes the community just gets up in arms about some of the most random stuff.

It got meta coz everyone’s a caed/tokker copycat for NA and shad copycat for EU. And trickery is what makes it incredibly stupid. A 21 sec instant skill that dazes 100% guaranteed and removes stability as a priority. And lyssa runes. And whirl. And blackpowder. And infinite ports in/out. And 10000000 evades. Did I forget something ?

EDIT : Yes I forgot shadow refuge. Yipee !

It also got meta because “Water runs downhill” is the nice way to put it, and every player gravitates towards the easiest, most OP spec they could find.

Also, since last time it was played a lot, there was a HUGE buff to initiative, which is fueling so much of the incredibly OP things thieves can do.

“water runs downhill” or whatever, but it would be rather silly to deny the fact that S/P Trickery is indeed an incredibly effective build, both in theory and in practice.

Dahkeus.8243:

Huh? That stun is tiny and has a terribly obvious pre-cast to show you that it’s coming.

duration is not the only value of the stun. how about interrupt?

Reikou.7068:

“water runs downhill” or whatever, but it would be rather silly to deny the fact that S/P Trickery is indeed an incredibly effective build, both in theory and in practice.

I agree completely. My point is that it takes time, but players gravitate towards the cheesiest, no-skill, high-reward builds out there. If there is a build that has “press 1 button and win the game,” even if it was unfun for everyone else, a lot of people would play it because winning is more important to them than competing. They also get a false impression of their skill because using the same wombo-combo over and over yields great results at every level of play in gw2.

That is why pistolwhip is a problem now. It took some time for people to find out it was rediculously easy and OP, and once word got out, it all went downhill.

Mrbig.8019:

Phantaram.1265:

Mrbig.8019:

And even if you can’t do it, S/P thieves have 2 dodges, like all other classes.

Yeah for sure.

But it’s true.

50 % vigor uptime if steal connects.

what may be OP is the fact tha now PW can be spammed due to faster ini regen.

Cmon phanta, no one used S/P from PW damage nerf for a reason, now it’s suddenly OP ?

Hey, I was using PWhip and it was cool before stun-rounding were fixed!