Personally I can’t live without 15 acrobatics just because dodging is the best thing this game offers. Completely avoiding damage is amazing and those 15 points let you dodge a lot more.
Other than that I went for straight up damage because I feel condition damage builds are completely useless in WvW. You’ll hardly be of use in zergs or tower/keep defense because you can’t stack bleeds properly without dying.
Pistol whip is a kitten joke in WvW and everyone that uses it should be laughed at. The only way you kill anything competent with that spec is with haste, and if you really want to wait for that cooldown to kill one target you’re a waste of a WvW slot.
Pistol/Pistol is weak in PvE. It’s viable, and I use it just because I’m too lazy to switch traits everytime, but you won’t kill things very fast. Daggers do more damage. It works great for bosses though.
Shortbow is good for everything as long as it involves more than one target. Or in rare cases to apply long duration posion to counter heals.
I run with 20 Acrobatics for dodging and init regen, but other than that I went all-out power/prec/critdmg and I do fine everywhere in PvE. Don’t worry about it too much. Go for the traits you like and then pick your gear depending on where you want to take the build.
Don’t worry about stats, you’ll probably end up wearing crafted gear, dungeons gear or karma gear before you waste gold on any of the faction sets, which are so expensive it’s dumb. Just go for looks or story. Go with the story that interests you the most, or if you wanna play with your wife, go ahead and pick vigil.
Very viable, it’s what I use mostly in WvW. I have a lot of success with it. I die maybe once or twice per evening (4-5 hours) of Eternal Battlegrounds.
Shortbow – extra kiting, escaping, pretending you’re a cannon, trick shot is great against classes with pets or to hit people by bouncing off downed targets
P/P – Only used for 1, 3 and 4. You can interrupt certain AOEs or just prevent someone from using skills while your team kills them or simply stacks some bleeds and then burst them with 4-5k dmg Unloads. More bleed stacking if you stealth with utility skills.
Why are you having problems being in 900 range of anything considering you generally blow all your initiative ASAP and you can dodge A LOT. We’re easily fast enough to get into that range. We don’t need 1200.
And lol at you if you die to a rifle/longbow warrior. I don’t even know how you can die to one.
And another group of bad players that somehow manage to carry 0 stun breaks. If one of you was competent enough to do so (or simply didn’t stack up in 1 square meter of land…) you could’ve interrupted him, his haste would be wasted and his endurance/initiative would be mostly gone. Easy kill.
4) remember when a thief use his pistol wipe ability he have no dodge after that.
You can break the channel on PW and cancel the attack, thus stopping the self root. PW only will prevent dodge if used with Haste as well.
Uhm… you don’t use pistol whip on a warrior if you don’t have haste up. It does subpar damage to high armor targets and you’re pretty much asking him to use hundred blades.
P/P is pretty much just lol. You either auto attack or you hit Unload. 2 is never used in PvP, 4 is hardly ever used, only to interrupt something that you can’t dodge out of or that troubles your team. 5 is too bloody expensive to bother using in PvP. You need initiative to stay mobile or to do damage, not to sit still with ranged weapons.
You obviously don’t know how to rock these. In a condition build double pistiols is amazing. And Black Powder is one of the best skills around. A Pulsing AoE Blind thats combo field is executed by every other skill in p/p to inflict blind. Meaning ranged blinds by shooting from within blackpowder. And Daze, if you dont love this ability. Doing it wrong. Unload is the only move i dont really care for. (If it dealt more dmg with more stacks of Bleed..) With Bleeds stacking to 7 or 8 through auto attack your target is ready to have some caltrops dropped on him and blossomed until 20+ stacks in short order. P/P is great.
I’ve yet to see payers stupid enough to bother sitting in Black Powder’s tiny circle. And if you want to shoot through it you’re making yourself horribly stationary/predictable. And 7-8 bleeds? More like 5-6 on average due to the slow firing speed. That’s as much as P/D applies with 5→1. Shortbow applies 6 stacks with 6 initiative and allies you to kite instead of some silly blind.
Bursting > stacking condition damage in the average WvW fight. PvE is 10 times as easy with D/D or shortbow. sPvP is something I don’t care about. 4-5k per Unload is still good enough to kill almost everything. Daze? What are you even using this on? Stopping players from finishing allies? lol. It doesn’t stop anyone from moving and a dead target uses less skills than one that’s dazed for 0.5s. Interrupting is only good for a handful of channeled skills.
Just let us use Torch/Sword offhand and fix the current specs, IMO. Rifle/Longbow are meh. We fire too slow; it wouldn’t come close to shortbow in mobility/AOE/con dmg, P/P is the spec meant for single target, P/D for kiting/con dmg/stealth. We don’t need 1200 range.
P/P is pretty much just lol. You either auto attack or you hit Unload. 2 is never used in PvP, 4 is hardly ever used, only to interrupt something that you can’t dodge out of or that troubles your team. 5 is too bloody expensive to bother using in PvP. You need initiative to stay mobile or to do damage, not to sit still with ranged weapons.
Use something with a shield to take care of elites/haste. Get the cleansing heal to make sure you don’t bleed to death.
If they’re dodging a lot then they specced into vitality and you’re more than likely going to lose; it counters non-burst melee specs HARD. If you’re specced that far into defensive traits/skills, you’re someone that can help your team by diving in and pissing off everything in range. You’re not going to win 1v1s against anything with mobility unless you have toughness/healing power + heal on shout.
If there’s nobody near me I’ll teleport to the back line so people can res me safely or I can potentially get myself back up. I’m not going to wait for the small chance that an engineer or necro is going to res me using this method. The only time I don’t move is if people already are trying to res or if I’m going to be able to rally my way out.
i hav 30 power 30 crit spec why burst class kill me??? :’(
If anyone is bad enough to whine about CnD+Steal then by all means, “fix” it. They’ll realize they’re bad when they die to Steal+CnD the “normal” way just the same.
If you think open world counters to thief don’t exist you’re one of the most ignorant people around, haha. Even a bad engineer player is challenging if they throw turrets down and turtle in one spot.
^lol cause people like to whine when their glass cannon builds gets owned in a 1v1 versus a class that will get the jump on you unless you’re a mesmer.
I rue the day warriors, guardians and engineers learn how to play this game trying to win 1v1s.
For one, your build won’t function well at WvW, dungeons AND solo PvE. Second, signet of malice is generally more useful than everything else in PvE unelss you’re exploring/farming. It’s useless in WvW and you should run Withdraw or HiS.
The karma set with toughness/precision/condition damage sounds like it’d fit you best. More crits to make use of Critical Strikes traits and some durability.
Assassin’s reward is pretty bad in PvP compared to initiative regen or removing cripple on dodge.
sPvP uses a different gear/trait set and I can’t be bothered with it.
As if cluster bomb doesn’t allow you to function as a kitten cannon. If there’s anything thieves are during siege defense it’s lethal. Much more dangerous than those horrid rangers and elementalists and their 600-800 dmg/tick AOEs.
Thieves would honestly be bloody OP if pistols/shortbow got 1200 range.
We do, however, need more weapon diversity… we have the least amount of sets of all. And harpoon gun already has 1200 range, so something else should have the same.
I’m running around in all screenshots with mobs that aren’t glued to eachother. So yes, some miss.
And I used infiltrator’s arrow beforehand to limit the amount of initiative I had so I could only fire one or two, because the combat log ends up being a huge mess otherwise.
@Vexus
I’m ingame right now and just tested it to make sure. Everything in my post is accurate. Max – 5 targets. 3 hits per target (assuming they hit).
No offense, but Dagger/Pistol achieves the same and is probably easier and does more damage. 15 points into Deadly Arts will make sure your target is constantly weakened and you can use #3 for blinds, for much cheaper than Black Powder. It’s only one blind instead of multiple, but with a Signet of Malice and constant weakness it’ll easily keep you alive. And D/P still has access to Black powder if you really like it…
Only downside is the lack of AOE, but I’d use shortbow or D/D for that anyways.
1. Cluster Bomb has always had a target cap
2. You detonate cluster bomb when it’s close to the ground, so you hit the same target 3 times instead of 1, which means you apply 3 stacks of bleed instead of 1.
3. The damage hasn’t been nerfed. Either you hit 5 targets for 3k each or you hit 5 targets 3 times for 1k each, assuming you know when to detonate. And no, if you aim properly all mobs will be hit 3 times.
You just said that Pistol/Pistol suggestions are bad and said there’s plenty reason to use it in WvW, but then went on to say how much Pistol/Pistol sucks…
But anyway, as long as it’s known that Pistol/Pistol sucks then whatever. I don’t care if they use those exact suggestions but Pistol/Pistol does suck unfortunately. I love the aesthetics of it at least.
I actually don’t mind Black Powder though. The issue I do have with Unload is that projectiles are only a 20% chance for combo finisher. There’s no good reason for it not to be 100% chance. This would alone would make Unload not suck because for 12 (ALL [Black Powder & Unload)) of your initiative you get to apply Blind 8 separate times. I don’t see how that’s overpowered to completely use all of your initiative for something like that. Unload should be 100% chance for projectiles.
I meant that the suggestions he made are bad. He also said that there’s no reason to ever take P/P… which is wrong. There’s plenty of reasons to use it because it’s capable of single target burst which is great for WvW.
Pistol/Pistol suggestions are bad. And there’s plenty of reason to use it in WvW.
is fine, it’s pretty much just a filler that stacks some bleeds before you burst something
is useless because it can’t be combined with Unload, only good for supporting others… which nobody does
needs a damage boost. It doesn’t need any other utility, it’s our single target burst… it’s just horrible weak for a skill that costs this much, is easily avoided and is blocked by every pet/clone/mob/turret/rock/grass that gets in the way.
in pvp is only good for interrupting, doesnt stop anyone from moving and it prevents you from doing damage. IMO this should be a stun, not a daze.
is useless in pvp, you don’t want to waste that much initiative for a skill that’s mostly effective if surrounded by enemies… which means death as P/P. And this skill wouldn’t save you.
is fine
needs to be changed, too expensive for a useless skill
needs a slight damage increase because even with full pwr/prc/crtdmg and traits into deadly arts/critical strikes (gun/dual skill dmg etc) it does bad damage. (4-5k on light armor, takes 3-4 to kill something which means 8-10 seconds if they don’t dodge half of it.
is okay but would be better if it was a stun, either way an acceptable interrupt
just needs to be changed somehow, no point in ever using this. D/P is better off hitting #3, P/P should be switching to another weapon set to RUN ASAP.
Depends on your spec. If you recieve a lot of heals from wherever, toughness is worth more. If you only have your own heal and you don’t use anything else that heals, vitality is better. What gives the most effective heals nobody knows yet, as far as I know.
CnD is never going to be that cheap. Especially with the +2 init on stealth trait… you’d be invisible constantly, lol. You’d regen more initiative than you’d use.
I don’t even know how you can die to one.
