Pistol Whip

Dual Wield. Pistol-whip your foe, stunning them, then slash repeatedly with your sword. — In-game description

Pistol Whip

Profession

Thief (skill list)

Weapon

Main hand sword
Off hand pistol

Type

Dual Wield

Activ. type

Channeled

Game link

API

13031

“

0.75¾  

5

6

 

Pistol Whip

Dual Wield. Pistol-whip your foe, stunning them, then slash repeatedly with your sword.

 Initial Damage: 271 (0.74)^?

 Initial Damage: 4 (0.01)^?

 Damage (4x): 1,468 (4.0)^?

 Damage (4x): 880 (2.4)^?

 Stun: 0.75¾ seconds

 Stun: 0.5½ seconds

 Defiance Break: 100

 Range: 130

— In-game description

Related traits

Deadly Arts

• Deadly Ambition — Inflict poison when striking a foe with a dual wield attack. Gain increased condition damage. Applies poison once per attack use.

Acrobatics

• Feline Grace — Gain vigor upon successfully evading an attack.
• Swindler's Equilibrium — Gain power and additional power when while wielding a sword or underwater spear. Successfully evading an attack while wielding a sword or underwater spear recharges Steal.
• Assassin's Reward — Heal yourself whenever you use a skill that uses initiative. Heal yourself for each point of initiative spent.
• Upper Hand — Gain initiative when you dodge, and gain initiative and regeneration when you evade an attack. Evading can only trigger this trait once per interval.

Trickery

• Pressure Striking — Enemies you interrupt are inflicted with torment. This trait can only affect enemies with defiance bars once per interval.
• Lead Attacks — Increases all damage dealt per initiative spent. Steal gains reduced recharge time.

Daredevil

• Escapist's Fortitude — Gain health when you successfully evade an attack. Remove a condition whenever you evade an attack.
• Impacting Disruption — Enemies that you interrupt suffer a pulmonary impact. This trait can only affect enemies with defiance bars once per interval.

Notes

Anomalies:

• This skill's evasion effect is not listed in the skill facts.
• For the purposes of any "on skill use" effects such as confusion, this skill counts as two separate skills.

• The attack is two-phased:
  • The opening hit is a single-target stun (Movement will not interrupt this part).
  • You will then Evade and cleave 4 times (Moving now will cancel the skill). The evasion window lasts for ~1.25 seconds.
• The sword cleave will not execute in midair. If the pistol swing finishes while airborne, the thief will not start swinging their sword until they reach the ground again.

Version history

For a detailed skill history, see here.

Patch	Changes
June 25, 2024	Increased the initial power coefficient from 0.37 to 0.74 in PvE only. Increased the flurry power coefficient from 0.79 to 1.0 in PvE only.
February 28, 2022	End of Dragons release: (Undocumented) Added tooltip fact Defiance Break.
July 07, 2020	Increased flurry hit power coefficient from 0.53 to 0.6 in PvP and WvW. Icons for daze and stun are now displayed in light purple in skill and trait tooltips.
February 25, 2020	Competitive content update: Competitive split: Reduced initial hit power coefficient from 0.37 to 0.01. Reduced stun duration from 0.75 seconds to 0.5 seconds. Reduced flurry hit power coefficients from 0.79 to 0.53. Increased initiative cost from 5 to 6.
August 09, 2017	Fixed a bug that was causing this skill to show an incorrect number of hits when traited with Swindler's Equilibrium.
August 08, 2017	Path of Fire pre-patch: Increased the stun duration to 0.75 seconds. Added an additional warning effect to Warmup. Reduced the number of flurry hits from 8 to 4, to match the animation. Flurry damage has been increased by 100% to compensate.
February 23, 2016	Fixed a bug that caused this ability to display incorrect damage values in PvP. The initial strike of this ability has been combined between PvP and PvE (dealing the PvE damage values) and will no longer deal increased damage to crippled enemies.
June 23, 2015	Specialization update: All skills categorized as dual-wield have received a 5% damage increase.
April 15, 2014	This skill has been split between PvP and PvE. It will now cost 6 initiative in PvP, while maintaining a 5 initiative cost in PvE. Updated the skill facts to show the bonus damage from Combined Training. Added an evasion skill fact.
December 10, 2013	Reduced the aftercast on the first half of this skill by .25 seconds.
June 25, 2013	Decreased the time between the stun and the sword flurry.
October 07, 2012	Reduced damage by 15%
August 28, 2012	Game release: Pistol Whip has been added to the game.

Trivia

• Pistol-whipping is the act of using a handgun as a blunt weapon.
• At some point the PvP version of this skill was removed without any mention in the game update notes.