Guild Wars 2

[Attacks missed because of blind, and against blocked and invulnerable enemies should still reveal the thief. ]

There is a problem with this statement.
If a thief trait’s stealth, then each stealth skill they have will only stealth them for 3-4 seconds MAX, with shadow refuge offering them a longer stealth once every 60 seconds.

there are 3 total blocking weapon skills that last 2 seconds, 2 on a Mesmer and 1 on an engineer.

all of the utility skills that block last a minimum of 4 seconds

aegis " which blocks" lasts 20 seconds

blinds start at 3 seconds and go up.

the only invulnerable skill that might not last 3 seconds is the mezmer distortion.

The desire for a thief to lose stealth and gain revealed when they are blocked/miss/hit an invuln/blinded, is EXTEMELY not well thought out. It would degrade most of the use of stealth, a thief could never land a backstab.

Most thief stealth comes from 2 things, either they cloak and daggered someone,in which case you have already messed up since THAT IS THE SKILL YOU BLOCK!!!.
Or the thief used a pistol offhand to burn 9 out of their 12 total initiative to gain stealth and dash at you, AND YOU DID NOT HIT THEM WITH A STUN OR DAZE WHEN THEY DID THE EASY TELL OF BLINDING POWDER FIRST.

Look at your suggestion. It is an attempt to punish the thief for playing correctly.
You are trying to reward the warrior/ell/mezmer/guardian/ whoever, WHO HAS ALREADY MESSED UP BY LETTING THE THIEF STEALTH IN THE FIRST PLACE.

sorry for the caps.

What do you want to do in wvw, if all you want to do is roam and catch the other solo’ists then berserker is the way to go.

If you want to be a camp capturer/ scout then I’d suggest a little more hp than berserker so you have more chance for error or to run if a small group comes by to interrupt you,

for actualy running with a zerg I suggest sentinals armor and berzerkers trinkets with fully defenceive masteries. 0-0-30-30-10. I run this with sword/dagger and short bow, I can solo camps, run with any zerg and hug my commander half way through most fights with this build. I can’t always kill someone but I only ever die when I run into the 2 thieve’s +1 mezmer havoc groups.

to make a change to a weapon skill a few things need to be covered first.

The weapon set up as a whole has to be shown to be over-performing in some area.
this over-performance needs to be causing some problem in the game.
the skill in question is the ONLY reason this item set is over-performing.
The change can be made in a way that dos not totally break the weapon set in the other direction.

with this basis. you haven’t shown any information other than the claim that “pistol whip is strong”. This statement SHOULD BE TRUE SINCE IT TAKES INITIATIVE TO USE THIS SKILL. every skill that takes initiative on a thief needs to be stronger than the base auto attack in at least one way or another. be it giving a condition or just doing more damage. Pistol whip has a stun that does not last for the entirety of its own damage. that in itself is its limiter.

If, and only IF pistol whip was somehow breaking the game, a simpler fix would be to move some of the sword swings damage to the last 1 or 2 swings of the entire channel. this would keep the playstyle of the entire build complete and be a minor nerf to the skill itself while letting it keep the same total damage if it is fully channeled on a target.

The OP’s proposed change could never happen for a different reason. The skill is named pistol whip, not blurred frenzy. it is in the third slot of sword from having an offhand weapon making it a duo skill.

OP, where is the reason that your new skill “since that is what you are proposing” is a duo skill between a sword and a pistol, and not simply a skill with a sword?

I like the thoughts in the thread. I do feel you repeat your self a little in the second post.
The short version is this.
Because thieve’s have no a global cooldown instead of personal cooldowns for their skills, in every fight they get into they will use the most dps efficient skills they have and not use the others.

looking at the dagger main pistol off hand. we can see that they will focus on backstabbing, as the only other skill on the entire branch that does damage is their #3.
on the dagger; dagger item set they will again use back stabbing, this time because the only big single target damage skill they have aside from it is cloak and dagger, a skill that sets them up for a 0 initiative coster.

as to your post on stealth, there are realy only 2 ways that stealth could be built into the game. arenanet had the decision of making it incombat stealth or out of combat stealth.
In WOW, their thief type character has a long term stealth and I think only 1 incombat stealth trick, to offset this IT’S STATS LET IT HOLD ITS OWN IN 1V1 COMBAT WITH THE OTHER CLASSES. Because the thief has in combat stealth instead it’s ingame combat abilities are lower to where it can not hold its own vs other classes with most of its builds.

I realy like your viewing on initiative as thieve’s don’t so much spam skills as they try to use the most optimum options they have to win.

Unfortunately, for stealth to work in this game as an IN COMBAT version, combat vs the stealth classes(thief/mesmers) will always remain aggravating for some players. I don’t see any way to fix it without heavy rebuilds of both the thieve’s, mesmers, and probably ranger classes.