tl;dr: Make dual wielding pistols mean something by being able to activate attacks simultaneously, or make Skill 3 a modifier for more dual attacks. Or thirdly, involve both weapons in an autoattack chain.
What seems immediately off when playing with dual pistols in GW2? it’s that even though you wield two guns, for your basic attack you only ever shoot with your right one. No variety with a shot here and there from the left hand (presumably while the thief magically reloads his first gun), nope, the second gun is just a dead weight 80% of the time.
The autoattack is also weak unless heavily specced towards conditions, it and Skill 2 are also somewhat slow. Why doesn’t the thief use both hands, instead of waiting for each attack to finish?
My suggestion is to make Skill 2 usable simultaneously with Skill 1, and vice versa. Skill 1 and 2 would represent your right and left hand respectively so to say. You could fire your vulnerability at the same time as your dishing out your bleeds, it would make for a faster gameplay in a traditionally slow set.
Essentially the thief could combine 1+2 and make his very own “burst” in addition to Skill 3.
This is the basic principle. Now we can build upon that.
What if we extend that to Skills 4 and 5 as well? It would be harder to balance, but we have a precedence with Ele Scepter Air (i.e. there you can already combine your autoattack with little “bursts”/blind). If we, for illustrative purposes, just run with current skill functions, that would mean you could combine Skill 2+4 for a daze and vulnerability stack simultaneously.
A second closely related idea is that Skill 3, traditionally thief dual skill, would cease being a skill by itself and instead become a modifier. For example, if used like Skill 1+3, the attack executed would be traditional Unload. (If you’re already autoattacking, that would mean you could just press 3 like usual)
If Skill 2 is a spike-preparing skill with it’s vulnerability, 2+3 would become a spike damage skill against a single target (without the vulnerability) with a cool dual attack animation.
4+3 would be maybe a stun. 5+3 would be a blast finisher that blinds and stealths everyone, but doesn’t produce a combo field. Those should be a thematically close skills, but not automatically just a stronger version.
(This is building on the current skill functions again only for illustrative purposes, not suggestions for skill combos by themselves)
The difference to my first idea is that those skills would be entirely new instances, not plain combinations of existing ones, and the combos of my first idea don’t rely on being pressed simultaneously, instead being “fluid” in their application window.
Personally, I favor Idea 1 by a small margin if Skill 2 get’s changed to be more than a slow-activating vulnerability applier. If Skill 1 would get turned into a chain skill, where every segment has a different effect/cond, that would raise the value of timing your +2 combo additionally.
In any case, both ideas would bring speed into this slow set and it would create extremely interesting, multifaceted gameplay in this most underused weapon combination thief has.
