Guild Wars 2

If you agree, please leave a comment on the tread and hopefully Anet will take a look.

Pistols on engi have one of the lowest DPS among all weapons in the game, in both straight damage and condition damage they feel like they are lacking and altho some might disagree because of the variety of damaging conditions, the DPS is actually lower than a staff mesmer, not to mention that both poison and burning become less effective when running in team as they stack on duration and not intensity.

players tend to overlook this because of the possibility of running dual sigils or using a shield and this has lead people to believe that engineers have no DPS or to permanently lock into a kit such bomb kit or flame thrower for the duration of the fight

at 4,000 Attack ( Bloodlust + Candy ) and 104% Crit Damage

Pistol avg 1,150’s with auto attack and bleeds are around 53 per tick and higest damage recorded was 4,700 with poison dart volley.

Rifle 3,000+ with auto attack and highest damage; 12k with jump shot(landing)

so yea, if you agree with the need of a balance please leave a comment even if its just “1” and maybe Anet will be kind enough to take a look idk about you but i would love to dual sigil and still be strong :P

Anet: “Sure thing. So we’ll just adjust rifle damage down to pistol levels. Anything else we can do for you?”

Seriously though, I agree with this. Pistols need to be brought up quite a bit. Right now P/S or P/P feels more like a kit to me. I swap to it to use cooldowns, and then swap back to a kit. When Pistol 2-3/5 are on cooldown, they hit like a wet noodle.

Grackleflint.4956:

Anet: “Sure thing. So we’ll just adjust rifle damage down to pistol levels. Anything else we can do for you?”

lol don’t scare me like that haha and i doubt they will, at 4,000 power 100%+ Critical damage warriors can hit 27k 100Blades and theif 15k backstabs so yeaa.. lol

This is a very delicate matter. I do think Pistol damage should increase but only by a very, very tiny amount. It’s a condi weapon that scales better with Power at the moment and that’s not so great.

That said, I do NOT want Explosive Shot to be where it was in the betas. The best Engineer builds did nothing but auto attack and use Elixirs because of how much damage Explosive Shot did.

This was very boring for the Engineer and more difficult than it should be to counter by players fighting the Engineer.

google.3709:

Grackleflint.4956:

Anet: “Sure thing. So we’ll just adjust rifle damage down to pistol levels. Anything else we can do for you?”

lol don’t scare me like that haha and i doubt they will, at 4,000 power 100%+ Critical damage warriors can hit 27k 100Blades and theif 15k backstabs so yeaa.. lol

Never underestimate a detached game developer.

Well, there has to be a weapon-profession combination that is the “least DPS” combination by virtue of the skills being so different, but I’ve always felt that the damage is drastically lower than what it should be. It is possible to get pretty good damage output out of pistols (as many people have demonstrated), but I feel like you need to specifically trait for it.

I think the complaints about pistol mostly apply to explosive shot, as static shot is a fairly useful skill as it is and poison dart volley can actually be a fair bit of burst damage.

There’s 3 particular things I’d think of changing:

1. I think one of the main improvements they could give it is having the bleed apply in the AoE burst. As it is now, only the target that is hit (or targets if using coated bullets) is affected by the bleed, and the collateral targets are only affected by the inherently paltry direct damage. This makes an odd scenario where the attack can scale much better off of power even though the pistol seems designed as a condition weapon.

2. I wouldn’t mind seeing the base bleed duration boosted up to 3 seconds but it’s a delicate matter, especially since we have a number of on-crit effects and condition damage scales with precision as a result of our firearms trait. Even still, it can be very difficult to stack your own bleeds with explosive shot unless you dump a lot into condition duration, on-crit effects, or use elixir U for quickness. If you compare our bleed stacking ability to every other class (except guardians since they normally don’t get bleed), we really need to work for it, whereas it can be fairly simple for something like a shortbow ranger or sword warrior to get 10+ bleed stacks consistently on targets with less specialized investment needed. I say this mostly out of personal experience, not hard facts, so take it for what you will. I suppose the balancing factor is that pistol provides a wider variety of conditions, but the bleed damage can end up being negligible in some circumstances.

3. Poison dart volley should just focus on a single target. I’m sorry, but whoever thought it was a good idea to have them shoot in some sort of spread fashion spent a little too much time with skritt. It just adds needless annoyance to the attack with no benefit whatsoever. The fact that it can hit a cluster is not beneficial because each individual dart does not do much on its own, it interferes with your burst on single targets, and you don’t have a good sense of control over your attack (although that seems to be a theme with the engineer, with all the RNG stuff going on). If this was some sort of “balancing” effect, then I don’t understand it, especially since the ability is nowhere near powerful enough to warrant any kind of balancing.

Additionally, I’m not sure that the pistol actually fires at its stated 1/2 second firing rate. It appears to be 3/4 like the rifle and elixir gun, although I haven’t sat down to test this. Might just be in my head.

Most of the time I use elixir gun for single target scenarios because tranquilizing dart does more direct damage, more bleed damage, and applies weakness, at what appears to be the same rate of fire (although the pistol says it fires faster, I still don’t think it actually does). I switch to using explosive shot if I need to hit a cluster or I need my shield out for extra durability, but otherwise there’s no point in me using it since it’s inferior to tranquilizing dart. Coated bullets could perhaps make it more applicable since you can double strike a single target, but that’s about it.

Yamsandjams.3267:

Additionally, I’m not sure that the pistol actually fires at its stated 1/2 second firing rate. It appears to be 3/4 like the rifle and elixir gun, although I haven’t sat down to test this. Might just be in my head.

Pistol fires every 0.8s, which is the same as the rifle, the tooltip is wrong for both of them. For the rifle, it hardly matters, but the pistol seems to be balanced around 0.5s fire rate and that’s a big part of the reason it’s such a terrible weapon.

It also scales too poorly with condition damage to be a good hybrid (or full condition) weapon, it actually gains more damage from power (especially with coated bullets). But… if you’re stacking power, the rifle is even better still, making the pistol redundant.

Shame because I like the shield offhand, but it’s just not worth it.

Pistol is very much an aoe weapon. Almost every kit is aoe based. My biggest gripe is that engi is really really bad on single target which makes it a weak boss.

Underwater it is pretty much the best profession in the game. Go figure.

i was just thinking about this morning.

Engi Pistol 1st attack vs Thief Pistol 1st attack:
Both are bleed focused attacks, but Thief does a little more damage while Engineer has aoe.

I concluded that they are balanced. However the “aoe for damage” makes engineers attack less desirable. In general Pistols are the weakest weapon in the game being the only single hand range weapon. Theres a reason we dont see many thief’s with focus on pistols.

In conclusion i think all pistols should receive a damage boost

gkaare.8576:

That said, I do NOT want Explosive Shot to be where it was in the betas. The best Engineer builds did nothing but auto attack and use Elixirs because of how much damage Explosive Shot did.

This was very boring for the Engineer and more difficult than it should be to counter by players fighting the Engineer.

With all the complaints about Engineers being “weak” and “underpowered”, maybe Anet should bring this back again.

Or, even better yet, have the auto-attack with both Explosive and Ricochet Shot-like properties, like the thief’s shortbow.

It’s not as straightforward as saying “pistols have the lowest dps”. It depends greatly on what situation you are judging.
Furthermore, the issue of low dps is only clear for p1, the other abilities hit pretty hard in my opinion and since they are somewhat hybrid you can have decent direct damage while all the conditions (4 damaging conditions in a weapon combo, no one else has that as far as I know) tick away which is pretty good ranged dps. Roughly estimating I’d say I do (in wvw/pve) about 2k damage per second with spikes of up 4-5k dmg when confusion kicks, having the advantage of range.
My damage sources aren’t only the pistols, elixirs do had alot of damage as well with the constant 300-400 retaliation hits and perma fury/10+ stacks of might, but I’d still say it’s fairly good even without those.

anyway, I agree that pistol dps is low for it’s #1 skil in a 1v1 situation, the rest.. not so much.

Maskaganda.2043:

It’s not as straightforward as saying “pistols have the lowest dps”. It depends greatly on what situation you are judging.

that is true, but in any situation rifle is better since shots pierce by default so if positioned corrected you can hit the same amount of targets as pistols without being locked onto a trait and making 2 to 3 times more damage

also, if you’re set up for damage you will be hitting AoE 800-1,000 Crits with up to 4 bleeds at 52dmg per tick, or if you’re set up for condition you will be doing 300-500dmg AoE and applying bleeds only to the first target it hits.

Pistol DPS will be stuck somewhere around 900-1,200 which is really low, and yes dart volley can be a strong source of damage, but when compared to other skills like the auto attack, blunderbus, or jump shot, it is greatly under powered

I also think the pistol1 could use some help. While I understand that some people like power or condition only weapons I do like the combination of both and this also gives us more build variations (but balance wise it could turn out to be worse than pure weaponsets).

One way could be to change the P1 to single target only but let it always hit twice (or with a 20 point trait in FA ?).
Yes, I know this would change the playstyle of the pistol only users so this would be a hard and difficult change BUT we have so much aoe right now so this could be a good single target addition.
Again, this is just a suggestion so it could be to harsh. Discuss

Oh on a side note: Maskaganda, I would love to see all your vids but half of them are blocked here since youtube and GEMA have a license war on media stuff. Is there a way you could upload them with other music or no music at all? (Sad, I know because I enjoyed the music in the video I could watch.) Thanks!

Eremus.4506:

Yes, I know this would change the playstyle of the pistol only users so this would be a hard and difficult change BUT we have so much aoe right now so this could be a good single target addition.
Again, this is just a suggestion so it could be to harsh. Discuss

I actually like the sound of your idea, making pistol a little more single target and as for the play style.. well, is there really a play style with pistol besides pressing 1 then 2 ? volley doesnt offer any type of advantage that would be worth saving the cool down (same with blow torch ), and the single target aspect might help make glue shot ( #5 p/p) somewhat more reliable.

1. Pistols fire as slowly as rifles which nerfs their direct dps overall
2. The conditions of bleed and poison behave completely different on my condition built engineer then they do on my burst damage thief (yeah you heard right, the burst damage thief with 0 bonuses to condi damage does more condi damage per tick)
3. And the only ability that’s used by the Charr Engineers doesn’t create conditions or gain the ability to pierce even when traited, which is the toolbelt ability Hidden Pistols

Pistols should be buffed a tiny little bit, yes. As it is now, autoattack 1 is useless and I never even use it, switching back to a kit after using skills 2 and 3.

EDIT: In general, I think a lot of the engineer’s weapon damages could be buffed. I mean, Flamethrower anyone?

Eremus.4506:

Oh on a side note: Maskaganda, I would love to see all your vids but half of them are blocked here since youtube and GEMA have a license war on media stuff. Is there a way you could upload them with other music or no music at all? (Sad, I know because I enjoyed the music in the video I could watch.) Thanks!

I can probably just upload them to my dropbox or something else, just tell me which ones give you issues and I’ll try, if you don’t mind downloading the whole thing. Isn’t there a way to bypass gema? thought there was.

sorry about the offtopic, go on :p

Is GEMA a germany thing? I googled it up fast and it seems.

Man that sucks if they block youtube!

I think the pistol #1 damage, is really average, but overal if you buff it, it can be dangerous with the HGH build. This build is already really strong in tPvP, so It’s going to be hard to buff it without making it too much!

Even buffed with an HGH build the damage is extremely meager on Explosive Shot. I mean the bleed has a base of two seconds. A mere two, which even if it manages to tick three times in a high condi-dmg build it’s going to be only 400 damage. It’s better then nothing, especially considering it can often trigger our procs, but it’s easily the worst auto-attack in the game by a fair margin.

It’s not explosive shot that makes the build strong anyway. Mask’s Pistol and Pots build is strong because of the procs, Burning, and the elixir utilities. He basically has an answer to most build’s offensive techniques whether it’s conditions or burst built into his utilities. He’s also just a whole lot better at the game then most, which is especially important in WvW. Minimizing the use of Explosive Shot is key in most situations for optimizing DPS. I mean, throwing yourself a single Might stack is often better then actually shooting and in most cases applying damage is much better then stacking boons when it comes to DPS optimization.

I know it’s not a popular sentiment, but I really think they should simply change it so the bleed is 4s base duration in exchange for removing the AoE part. Call it Shrapnel Shot and let Coated Bullets give back the AoE explosion. When I’m figuring out ways to output maximum DPS, I shouldn’t be so severely punished for having to rely on auto-attacking.

*Increases bleed duration to 7 second base. (Traited for 9 seconds)
*Add a 1 second burn to the -explosion- of the shot, not the bullet itself. (For AoE purposes)
*Allow the explosion of the attack to be treated as an Explosion for synergy in the Explosives traitline.
*Coated Bullets also increases the damage done by Pistol attacks by 10%.
*Do nothing to the base damage of the explosion/bullet.

There, now a fully functioning condition damage weapon.

Our Warrior cousins get an 8 second bleed (Traited for 14 seconds) on an attack that hits 3 other enemies(x2); with a 1200 range attack that comes with a 6 second bleed (Traited for 10 seconds).

Our Necromancer cousins get a 5 second bleed(Traited for 9 seconds) at 900 range.

@Aristio

Man if they ever get those change down, Pistol would be so OP ahahah.

Man burn is like the strongest condition around, if we can apply it each auto attack it would hurt a looot.

Yeah that might be a bit much, in the build I’m running Explosive Shot would change from about 400 condition damage to nearly 2000 condition damage. A 7s base bleed is extremely high, and a Warrior’s Rifle shouldn’t be used as a comparison here since the rest of their Rifle options lack condition damage.

Don’t see the problem with making pistol an actual threat. Rifle still beats it out in burst and still rocks its CC. What do you do when your 2-5 are on cooldown? Our Pistol Auto-attacks are pitiful and needs to be a decent amount of pressure. We can get 3-4 stacks of bleed now, if lucky. Even a 6 second base would be great.

that is some crazy wishful thinking there aristio :p 1 second increase on the bleed would be enough. maybe a 20% increase in direct damage. no more than that.

I’m in the firm belief that Engineer’s are masochist and/or like being the underdog. Having a strong weapon is nothing to shy away from. Oh, and fix Poison Dart Volley. It’s like they got Michael J. Fox to do that animation.

google.3709:

If you agree, please leave a comment on the tread and hopefully Anet will take a look.

Pistols on engi have one of the lowest DPS among all weapons in the game, in both straight damage and condition damage they feel like they are lacking and altho some might disagree because of the variety of damaging conditions, the DPS is actually lower than a staff mesmer, not to mention that both poison and burning become less effective when running in team as they stack on duration and not intensity.

players tend to overlook this because of the possibility of running dual sigils or using a shield and this has lead people to believe that engineers have no DPS or to permanently lock into a kit such bomb kit or flame thrower for the duration of the fight

at 4,000 Attack ( Bloodlust + Candy ) and 104% Crit Damage

Pistol avg 1,150’s with auto attack and bleeds are around 53 per tick and higest damage recorded was 4,700 with poison dart volley.

Rifle 3,000+ with auto attack and highest damage; 12k with jump shot(landing)

so yea, if you agree with the need of a balance please leave a comment even if its just “1” and maybe Anet will be kind enough to take a look idk about you but i would love to dual sigil and still be strong :P

I’m not arguing that your conclusion isn’t correct, it may or may not be. But your test is clearly biased toward the Rifle. What you’re actually saying is, “Rifle hits hardest with a lot of power,” not what I believe you intend to say which is “Pistol damage is clearly behind Rifle, even given a best case scenario.”

If you want to do it right, parse all damage over a set period of time utilizing the best stat allocation for each weapon. Each weapon needs optimal conditions to determine if one is clearly behind the other.

You also have to account for the entirety of the weapon, I don’t think any weapon is balanced only around its auto-attacks. Since Mesmer staff was brought up, I’ll use that as a perfect example. Staff is abysmal damage by itself. But once you add in two clones adding conditions of their own, and a Phantasm which hits pretty hard, the weapon can hold its own – but you need all of what it offers working together. Similarly, all of what the pistol offers (including potential offhand weapons) have to be considered if you’re going to compare it to Rifle.

Orion the Cursed.1206:

i was just thinking about this morning.

Engi Pistol 1st attack vs Thief Pistol 1st attack:
Both are bleed focused attacks, but Thief does a little more damage while Engineer has aoe.

I concluded that they are balanced. However the “aoe for damage” makes engineers attack less desirable. In general Pistols are the weakest weapon in the game being the only single hand range weapon. Theres a reason we dont see many thief’s with focus on pistols.

In conclusion i think all pistols should receive a damage boost

Not too important but the thief bleed is twice as long so it’s condition damage for bleeds is double the engineers pistol auto attack.

P/P needs more condition damage and absolutely not another ounce of direct damage. The weapons/kits for the engineer are already a bunch of jumbled damage and has no specialization.

I would say that the secondary effect (the AoE) from pistol #1 needs to cause a bleed. That would greatly increase the effectiveness of Pistols. Secondly, the need to make it so the pistol gives two stacks of bleed vs. one, even if it means sacrificing the damage that it has.

For those that complain that the P/P direct damage is low doesn’t understand that the weapon was never really meant to scale as well with direct damage……it has condition damage written all over it in big black ink.

My suggestion is to remove the bleed off Rifle skills for more direct damage.

now i know im not running any power gear but 130 auto attacks with pistol make me sad =/ atleast my bleeds are ticking for 120.

edit: i could go with more bleed stacking..

Goloith.6349:

For those that complain that the P/P direct damage is low doesn’t understand that the weapon was never really meant to scale as well with direct damage……it has condition damage written all over it in big black ink.

My suggestion is to remove the bleed off Rifle skills for more direct damage.

that’s true but.. conditions like poison/burning which increase on duration rather than intensity tend to be much less effective while on a group, negating any damage you could have possible done, guardian and ele can spam burning much more easier and you will never see a tick of poison with a necro or ranger on your team, so you’re stuck dealing 150-300 damage hits and up to 4 stacks of bleeds! which is virtually no damage when facing bosses, this is why people have prejudice against engi on their teams

ps: Blunderbuss used to be like that, but it was nerfed several times, and even after nerf ,the skill is still glitching, at the same attack & critical Dmg, a theif or warrior will easily double the damage

Sororita.3465:

now i know im not running any power gear but 130 auto attacks with pistol make me sad =/ atleast my bleeds are ticking for 120.

edit: i could go with more bleed stacking..

Ikr, its a really low damage output and if you’re facing a boss, something like this won’t be enough to even tickle it and it doesnt help if other people in group have conditions as well because then you’re damage will be greatly undercut you will be stuck dealing 150dmg for an entire boss fight

There is 1 thing people tend to forget, explosive shot, dart and even the trait incendiary powder are all single target, so in big fights or boss fights, you’re DPS with pistol will be greatly under anyone else in your team

I insist on thread because i would like to be able to dual sigils as well as take advantage of shield and still be useful to my team, pistols might not seem as underpowered on sPvP but for WvW/PvE they are lacking alot

google.3709:

There is 1 thing people tend to forget, explosive shot, dart and even the trait incendiary powder are all single target, so in big fights or boss fights, you’re DPS with pistol will be greatly under anyone else in your team

I insist on thread because i would like to be able to dual sigils as well as take advantage of shield and still be useful to my team, pistols might not seem as underpowered on sPvP but for WvW/PvE they are lacking alot

You need to take coated bullets if you want to main pistol, which makes the first two aoe. Incendiary is a dueling trait it’s still good for boss fights. Pistol benefits from both sides when you stack might which is why HGH pistol builds work.

Based on the developer profession post I think we’ll see buffs to EG and FT before any increased to the pistol. In kit builds it’s still good for the non auto abilities.

Well, it locks you into traits limiting you play style, and even at 2 explosions make the damage is very circumstantial

let me ask everyone this; does pistil feel a weapon or more of a tool kit to you?

Feels like a kit. I don’t want to spam #1, so I swap to pistols to use cooldowns, and then swap to something else. That feels like kit use to me.

Grackleflint.4956:

Feels like a kit. I don’t want to spam #1, so I swap to pistols to use cooldowns, and then swap to something else. That feels like kit use to me.

I agree 100%. While I do love Static Shot, Poison Dart Volley, and maybe Blowtorch, Glue Shot and auto-attack are so very much lackluster. What’s with Glue Shot anyhow? It’s a 1 second immobilize, with a 1 second cripple. “OH IT’S AOE!!!” Yup, a very small one. The time it takes you to press 5, line up your attack with it’s GTAOE, with travel time, you could have probably run further in time than it will buy you. Oh, and bonus points if they dodge the attack.

Auto-attack: Change to my suggestions above
Poison Dart Volley: Another RNG hoping that all shots will hit. Just make it a straight line.
Static Shot: I would love for the Daze effect to come back, but it’s wishful thinking. Increase the stacks to 3 confusion per bounce.
Blowtorch: Not much to say, set things on fire.
Glue Shot: 2 Second Immobilize on application, 2 Second Cripple per “pulse” after.

/vote

I completely agree. #1 sucks. P/S, the only pistol skill I use is, confusion shot.
Poison volley needs some tweaking to, about half of the shots miss -.-’.

Aristio.2784:

Grackleflint.4956:

Feels like a kit. I don’t want to spam #1, so I swap to pistols to use cooldowns, and then swap to something else. That feels like kit use to me.

I agree 100%. While I do love Static Shot, Poison Dart Volley, and maybe Blowtorch, Glue Shot and auto-attack are so very much lackluster. What’s with Glue Shot anyhow? It’s a 1 second immobilize, with a 1 second cripple. “OH IT’S AOE!!!” Yup, a very small one. The time it takes you to press 5, line up your attack with it’s GTAOE, with travel time, you could have probably run further in time than it will buy you. Oh, and bonus points if they dodge the attack.

Auto-attack: Change to my suggestions above
Poison Dart Volley: Another RNG hoping that all shots will hit. Just make it a straight line.
Static Shot: I would love for the Daze effect to come back, but it’s wishful thinking. Increase the stacks to 3 confusion per bounce.
Blowtorch: Not much to say, set things on fire.
Glue Shot: 2 Second Immobilize on application, 2 Second Cripple per “pulse” after.

I completely agree with you. And especially on glue shot! God kitten glue shot get the heck out of here! You.. Are… So… Useless!

No to argue again, but Glue Shot is awesome.

Good escape mecanism, good CC during a team fight. This is an AoE immobilization, it’s really good. Good synergy with knee shot.

You guys have completely forgotten the identity of the pistol/pistol. THEY ARE CONDITION WEAPONS for the Engineer. There is no better choice to apply condition damage then with this setup so why change it? Why are people trying to destroy the identity of this weapon. If it needs a buff they need to increase the amount of bleeds to 2 stacks and call it good. Then it will have the almost instant damage that the other weapons have.

For the longest time I ran pistol/shield and it gave me the impression that our main hand weapons were garbage in comparison to our kits. I would just use #4 to set off combos and switch back to bombs.

Recently I’ve tried out riffle and now I actually use it (for the utilities), its not bad. I still think pistol/shield is garbage though

I don’t think buffing pistol #1 will make our pistol builds revolve around auto-attacking. Kit engineers need to have a reason to switch out of out kits. The way things are now I’d rather have a kit replace my main weapons and take another kit or stun-breaker in my utilities. So far I only see pistols/pistol-shield (I don’t run conditions) as this awkward weapon-set that gets in the way of my kits’ versatility.

Brett.4305:

Pistol conditions don’t kill fast enough when you solo, so we add power.
Pistol conditions (bleeds, poison) have a stack cap and will cause you to do less damage when others are stacking the same conditions you do. So we add power.
This is not a problem with pistols but with the way the game handles conditions.
Your conditions will not stack enough to make a difference against high HP mobs.
Consider activation time and projectile travel time when calculating condition duration, plus duration vs. intensity.
I play P/P the most and like the skills, but to me, the condi dmg is just gravy.
Pistols need to have a certain percentage of base damage added.
Having access to kits should have nothing to do with pistol base damage.

There are so many fricken ways to play a power build and you’d rather ruin the only and I mean the only weapon(s) that condition builds really have. The Power/Prec/Crit dmg builds already are OP compared to that of conditions and now your asking to buff them. Are you nuts? That’s why we need to stack 2 bleeds instead of one on #1 pistol. Then they need the AoE from #1 pistol inflict AoE bleed as well. ANET already knows they need to raise the condition stacking intensity, but for the sake of WvW 25 stacks of bleed is not going to readily happen. So when you have flamethrower, grenades, rifle, and even pistols (by mistake) already being overpowered (compared to condition) you’d beg for one more option to really lay down Direct DPS.

What do Pure condition builds have huh?

Just P/P.

Goloith.6349:

What do Pure condition builds have huh?

Just P/P.

In PvE, grenades can maintain 22+ stacks of bleeding, and can hit 25 with regular frequency. 30/30/x/x/x can beastmode condition damage, and swapping to rifle for blunderbuss does a lot more condition damage (even if short-lived) than several pistol autos will. Instead of running 10% more explosion damage in the first trait line, you run incendiary powder. And, yes, this does far more damage over time of the condition variety than pistol/pistol. It’s actually a little depressing that the engineer’s best damage build, both condition and raw, is grenades. And those stacks are pre-pizza.

But for PvP, yeah, pistols are your only decent option.

Edit: I just wanted to make a screenshot proving this claim, as I’m also gonna be using this with regards to removing the bleed cap limit (in PvE) in my future endeavors. I’m also using P/S in the screenshots for an extra sigil, I was testing out different setups – sigil of battle + earth, sigil of battle + agony, etcetera, merely trying to figure out the highest damage combination (going so far as to try out HGH grenade conditions, but I can’t break 14 stacks of might and 15 bleeds at the same time with all might runes, or 10 might 20 bleeds with bleed runes).

Nice pic man. Ya I’m pretty much a WvW kinda guy so don’t get me wrong grenades have their usefulness, but with P/P will out condition blunderbus pretty heavily in the long run.

I just find grenades to hard for hit and runs and solo one vs. several.

I just hope the buff pistol condition stacks so we benefit from having a great WvW weapon.

hehe, you might be overreacting a little, i don’t want Anet to create a new pistol. just to fix the current one.. it is true that it is the only condition weapon we have but hey.. we only have 2 to choose from lol and even so, their condition damage is really noneffective, specially on most groups because of the overlaps on poison/burning and the low count of bleeds

Tbh i think this has an easy fix that won’t change the weapon
1) increase the firing rate ( kinda like ranger’s short bow )
2) Allow it to scale properly with damage
3) dart volley to either shot on a straight line or all at the same time in a cone

Optional:
-Allow bullets to pierce or at least apply bleeding AoE and not just the first target( set a limit of 3 mobs )

-Fix Glue shot cause if anyone has played p/p they know it is the saddest #5 skill on the entire game next to flame thrower’s #5 ( and this is only a kit )

by fixing the firing rate they won’t even have to change bleeds duration and allowing to stack a few more bleeds without making it OP because it would require you to constantly hit the target, it would balance straight damage a little making it more viable and the weapon even more fun promoting players to stay on it longer instead of just hitting CD and out

Ya that would please both sides of the isle.
+1 for attack speed increase on #1 and personally I think damage builds would prefer that explosive shots aoe cause bleed because with the 25 point trait in Firearms they are now doing 5% damage increase to a bunch of people.

Fixing the fire rate on the pistol would be a good start.

I wouldn’t mind if P1 would apply more bleeds and would be our nr 1 condition weapon. But since they stated in this design philosophy that non-kit weapons should have less damage I’m affraid they will not give us another great aoe weapon.

Oh and Maskaganda, I can only watch the two roaming videos (2 & 4) but the rest ist blocked from youtube cause they can’t find an agreement with the gema. If somebody knows how i can watch the videos on youtube I would very much appreciate it.

the only problem i have with pistols are the #1 attack speed and bleed duration the bleeds aint all that strong either so i dont see any justification for the short duration next problem is the #2 im aiming at one target in particular for a reason i dont need my shots to fly all over the place what 1-2s of poison are gonna kill his nearby allies? i dont think so