Hey guys. Long time player here, quit about two years ago, came back recently with HoT. Primarily played a Thief here, specifically pistol/pistol sword/pistol combo.
As a disclaimer I am by no means a pro; I’ve done a kitten ton of WvW, mostly as a scout/roamer, a lot of sPvP, and a great deal of early dungeons/roam. However, it’s not like I am some sort of a renowned genius come down from the sky to give you stone tablets on how to make Thief work. However, I’ve always had ideas on improving the class that I am frankly surprised nobody at Anet considered over the course of the years.
Since literally day one, there has been a lot of discussion about how Thieves, particularly p/p had no real defined role. They can do good damage, and they have extremely limited utility in terms of group stealth (this is very limited, other than letting your group bypass some fights). Honestly, that’s about it. P/P builds have to usually sacrifice even that in order to achieve something.
In my opinion, in order to fix p/p and the Thief class in general, we have to look at their role and give them some actual utility. I believe this can be done without any actual major changes, either to the class or the code — all the necessary components are already there, especially after the recent skill tree redesign, they just need to have senseless restrictions removed.
First on P/P. There are several inherent components to this weapon combo that combine to make it needlessly stunted.
1. Unload. This is the primary damage move on P/P. In my personal opinion, Unload’s damage/initiative ratio is perfectly fine. I’ve never had trouble killing people with Unload in group encounters, and I’ve had decent success in duels and small fights with it, too. It is a very powerful damage skill, but the problem is that other classes have comparable DPS/burst damage tools that are not as obvious, telegraphed, and have additional utility.
Here are the primary ways to fix Unload:
a) Change 20% Finisher chance to 100%. This change alone will instantly add a role to P/P: debuff stacking. With this, Unload becomes the best way in the game to combo finishers with fields on a single target, and this doesn’t seem like a bad role for a Thief to have. It’s something that encourages teamplay and positional awareness (you want to find fields to throw Unload through) In addition, it will give some of our other skills and utilities, such as Throw Gunk from Stealing, an actual use.
This isn’t exactly unprecedented. In fact, almost every other multi-hit Finisher in the game is already 100% chance. Unload has always been treated differently since the game release, for no good reason.
b) Give Unload a slight pushback. Self-explanatory. Unload doesn’t last very long and can’t be reasonably sustained beyond the 4th barrage, but there is no reason it can’t offer slight pushback with every hit against targets that don’t have stability, to give you some semblance of field control. If that has potential to Interrupt targets using channels, then even better.
Honestly, these two changes, or even the primary change, will do a lot to give P/P actual utility. But there are two other skills we need to look at with Pistol mainhand.
2. Body Shot. This skill has always been utter crap. They buffed it, but in all the wrong ways. It’s still crap. It is very initiative-heavy, offers little value, and for some reason roots for 1 second now?
a) Decrease initiative cost to either 1 or 2. Body Shot should be a cheap utility attack, which means it should not have the opportunity cost of a kitten Headshot, which actually does damage and dazes.
b) Increase cooldown to 2s. Remove the silly root thing. Make it extend duration of debuffs by 2s per shot. Again, if p/p thief’s secondary role is debuff stacking, then Body Shot should be there to help you upkeep these debuffs. In raids and dungeons, a Thief with Body Shot in rotation should significantly increase the duration of everything on their target. This effectively extends your bleeds and poisons in PvP by another tick, too.
3. Pistol 1. Pistol 1 has always been terrible, for no adequate reason. I think the primary thing that we need to look at here is that it only utilizes one pistol in a p/p combo. Ideally, p/p should simply shoot twice as fast (or have two attacks with each pistol) when auto attacking with pistol 1. Problem solved, make it twice as powerful.
This all strictly applied to p/p as a spec. In my opinion, it is very fun with Daredevil, but still not really viable due to lack of utility. The changes proposed above, while minor, would actually do a lot to make P/P an attractive option in other mediums.
Here are some thoughts on Thief in general:
1. Infiltrator’s Signet has always been pretty crappy. Why not make it regenerate initiative every 3s instead of 10? That would actually let people use it without crying inside.
2. Thief as a class needs more ways to regenerate initiative. We can start by removing internal cooldown from skills such as Upper Hand and fixing Infiltrator’s Signet, but in general Thief needs to be able to do something to actually allow it to renew its rotation faster. Pistol 1 would be a good candidate for initiative generation, as well as every stealth attack in general.
TLDR: Another rant by a p/p scrub.
