On the subject of “why not just fix P/P so there’s no need for rifle?!”
I no longer have any confidence this is a realistically attainable goal. P/P has been butt for three years. For three years, it has been worse than Guard Scepter. It is the defining example of why any weapon (set) with a weak autoattack is itself weak – if the thing you spend 95% of your time doing is as completely, utterly, irrecoverably useless as Vital Shot is, your weapon is trash. They can’t get Body Shot right, either – they keep trying to make it some weird bass-ackwards awkward thing with a pointlessly short immobilize and some Vuln neither deep enough nor long enough to be useful – because, of course, if the immobilize was long enough to matter, or the vuln was big enough to matter, people’d spam the hell out of Body Shot.
P/P is why we’re never getting knockdowns on the initiative bar, ever. No, melee staff will not bring knockdowns. The only stun we have is Pistol Whip, and while Pistol Whip is superb in PvE, it’s also a slow stun that cannot, by nature, be rapidly spammed. We don’t have long dazes, either – Headshot is a great interrupt but it’s not much for control, simply because a 3-second daze would be overwhelmingly stupid when you can chain five of them back-to-back.
They’re married to Vital Shot being a condition AA while Unload, the big-damage skill, is a pure Power skill (another sign of an awful weapon set – mismatches between the requirements of the AA and the requirements of your big-punch skill). If they insist on retaining the too-short-to-work Bleed and the total lack of Power scaling on Body Shot, it needs to attack at least as fast as Crossfire does on the Ranger shortbow. That way sheer volume can at least sorta maybe halfway compensate for the fact that the bullet does five damage and the bleed does nine.
Seriously – an Earth sigil does more damage than Vital Shot. How is that a viable weapon? And Body Shot needs to be replaced altogether with something functional. What that functional is, I do not know, but Body Shot is pretty much completely pointless. 1s immobilize, 5-stack of Vuln for 3s…pretty much the only way to make that remotely useful is to fire it until your initiative runs dry, in order to spend your entire allotment of Init doing what one Bolas from a Warrior does.
The set’s been that way for three years, despite frequent calls of “this set is unusable, PLEASE do something with it ArenaNet?” And the Warrior doesn’t even use bolas anymore.
This is the weapon set we’re all supposed to be just perfectly happy to use instead of a rifle? Lemme ask you – would you run P/P Thief anywhere but Queensdale?
