Guild Wars 2

Bret.6940:

Your also not limited to just 1 weapon set. You could easily take p/p d/p and make up for the lack of stealth, or take shortbow and use it for the evades.

I can see you waiting good 3 seconds for stealth – swaping weapons, detargeting and casting two skills…. and then not able to do anything(ranged) regardless because you are stuck next 6 seconds on melee weapon.
As for SB, it is more or less the only option as we lack reliable movement and travel mechanics (=8s of stability and/or unlimited swiftness). And again – you just dont swap weapons in combat(only when dis/engaging), because you have utility on second set and thus it kills your next 9 seconds. I just dont see skills on secondary -utility- set as an in-combat option.

I would say ranged thieves really need some love from devs. I dont say it was intended to almost force thieves melee, but look at the state now when ricochet is removed. Skills:
1. Vital Shot. not great for condi, not great for power. Somewhere between and trait does not offer a way to shift the usage in desired way. Contrary to melee weapons the 1 skill can be hardly viewed as dangerous it is just a fill so that you dont stand there staring at your enemy. As suggested in first post, it needs a buff/trait to be at least comparable with melee dps.
2. Body Shot, “giving a reason to use body shot other than for giggles”- this is my favorite quote now. Like, why do we even have this skill? There are like 2 PvE encounters where it is usuable. Either make it CC or damage.
3. Unload misses the AoE from ricochet, especially with sPvP full of mesmers and pet spam builds. Alternatively, suggested cone/pierce would solve this.
4. Head shot, nice to have interrupt.
5. Black Powder, not ranged skill – used almost exclusively by melee specs for combo field.
To sum it up:
- skill 1 needs traits to shift between condi(+1 stack of bleed?)/power(like +50% dps?), — skill 2 needs to decide what it is intended for – I would personally like to see 3rd option, some kind of ranged stealth(for example leap finisher shot and evade backwards, similar to sb 3)
-skill 3 needs to be AoE

The OP is trolling, isnt he?
P/P completely is trash now. Why? Simply because of no ricochet AoE, noticed how “flood battlefield with minions”-type of builds became popular recently in sPvP? Very often you meet 3+ of those builds in enemy team,with nercos and mesmers spamming pets and illusions it is not rare to see 20+ targets in combat. All of them blocking your unloads.
Ricochet would be decent counter to this …but oh wait, it was “accidentally” removed. I am not fan of conspiratorial theories, but nerfing thieves survivability along with AoE potential on same patch as buffing mesmers proved disastrous for thieves in my opinion.
As for unload doing a little bit more damage, yes, it is true, on the other hand other classes received much greater buff to damage and you received survivability nerf. It is nice to see 4k/unload, totalling 12k burst damage, but dont forget for example lich does 9k with single auto-attack and has triple effective HP you do.
What ranged thief needs is AoE and range back along with reliable “ranged” stealth – so far we got only single skill on 40s cooldown.