Guild Wars 2

A couple questions about this trait. I know it works with the autoattack skill but does it proc the explosion damage for each enemy it passes thru? Also for Static Shot this skill normally bounces 4 times. With coated bullets does it bounce 4 times for each person it hits. I tried to test it but haven’t had much luck in the chaos of pvp to see where the shots are going. All I know is that I hit a static shot on a minion master necro and all hell broke loose and my sigil of minor corruption hit 25 stacks almost immediately.

yes the explosion will proc for every npc the direct shot hits. if 3 targets are clumped up, and your shot pierces all 3. then all 3 will be hit by 3 explosions.

Coated bullets does not effect static shot.

too bad pistols dont scale well with power.

Coated Bullets only affects the first two skills.

Clumped targets WILL take exponentially more damage since each one explodes to hit the others, but you’ll only cause one stack of bleeding per target.

CptCosmic.3156:

too bad pistols dont scale well with power.

The worst part is that this is heavily understating it.

im a full gear rampage had to use pistol sadly the damage is way so low my rifle does 800 to 1k crit damage while my pistol does 380 max crit damage the bleeding damage is quite low now enough burst damage

Why, specifically, don’t they scale well with power? Is it because of a low base damage? I guess I just never fully understood this (though I have accepted it as fact, I have no idea why lol)

Brutus Tarsi.1283:

Why, specifically, don’t they scale well with power? Is it because of a low base damage? I guess I just never fully understood this (though I have accepted it as fact, I have no idea why lol)

Because power isn’t a linear thing.

It is arbitrary in most cases. Abilities have scaling modifiers, and that determines how well power scales.

And its not linear. One skill could scale 0.5, 1.1, 2.5, 0.2 with power. Its all arbitrary.

Brutus Tarsi.1283:

Why, specifically, don’t they scale well with power? Is it because of a low base damage? I guess I just never fully understood this (though I have accepted it as fact, I have no idea why lol)

Combination of yes.

Damage is formulated as:
Power/916*weapon damage*skill coeff.

This is important, as the Attack stat listed on your character sheet is meaningless, and lies. Its says damage is power+weapon damage. That is a lie. its power times weapon damage.
This means, power is more powerful, the higher your base weapon damage is.
A level 45 white weapon that has lets say 250 base damage vs a level 80 exotic with 1205. 2000 power will give a 545.8 damage boost for that 250 damage weapon, while 2000 power will give 2631 damage boost for that 1205 damage one.
This is meaningful, as rifles are 1205 damage, and pistols are 1025. 180 damage difference, or 17.5%. Rifles deal 17.5% more damage then pistols just naturally.
This a serious problem because they have the same attack speeds and cooldowns as well. They both fire at 1attack/.75s. If pistols were .75s and rifles were 1s, then the raw damage variance would make sense. but again, they don’t.

Skill coeff. now you might say, but its possible the skill coeffs will make up for that imbalance! well, they dont.
explosive shot is .131 coeff.
static .131/hit
venom .131/hit(x5 .655 over2s, or .3275/s).
Blow torch is .1075/hit. (x3 .3225)
Obviously these have conditions that are supposed to balance them out. But conditions just don’t scale like DD does.

Rifle
1- .208
3- .513 close, .3208 far
4. .3208
5. .2885 jump, .577 land

War volley with rifle, as its very similar to engi p volley.
.96 over 2s

So, you have pistols doing 17.5% less damage then rifles in the first place, then look at the war volley, doing .96 coeff vs engi volley doing .655. 47% more. Venom is not THAT strong to justify war volley doing what ends up being nearly double the damage.
2000 power poison dart would deal 1465. 2000 power war volley would deal 2526.
Factor in crit and the variance just gets higher. an extra 75% of 2526 is more then 75% of 1465.

Pistols cost more. You have to buy 2 of them, at the same price as 1 rifle. Why is this?
Imagine crafting 2 legendary Quips. just wow.

coglin.1496:

CptCosmic.3156:

too bad pistols dont scale well with power.

The worst part is that this is heavily understating it.

Uh, why should they scale well with power?

Power is universally useful, but it isn’t supposed to be the universally desirable stat. There are a lot of stat combinations on gear that emphasize other options.

The Firearms trait line that has Coated Bullets gives you Precision and Condition damage. Getting all the gun skills doesn’t force you to take Power as a stat, and nothing about the Explosives line that does give Power encourages high pistol use.

Now if you want burst damage with pistols, you can go 10/30/0/30/0, choose Incindiary Powder in Explosives, take Elixir U, and burn down an enemy rather quickly while still having decent survivability. Or you can run 0/30/0/10/30 and be quite a mobile damage dealer with the right gadgets.

Every option does not need to be a glass cannon power-stacking build.

Why are they naturally weaker? what reason is there for them to inherently do less damage?

Balancing condition damage with skill coeff. That does not explain why they just do less all around. Tell that to a p/p thief, who also has to deal with pistols doing less damage inherently then rifle warriors, and p/p thief IS A direct damage build.

incind powder is terrible.
My current build for p/p is:
10 explosives. expose the weak.
20 firearms. hair trigger/infused
0
30 alch. hgh, 409, invigorating speed.
10 tools. kit refinement. (static and speedy kits are also REALLY good. tough choice)

P/p is a melee weaponset. Volley, blowtorch all but require it. Glueshot’s travel time does too, and its purpose is to keep targets close, not keep them away. Explosive shot and static as well, favor being up in melee, so that you can get targets stacked on top of each other to bounce/explode.
exploit the weak gives that cripple to let you stay on targets. You could drop these 10 points though, inventions, or 20 tools isnt bad idea. 20 tools would let you get speedy kits or static. And 25% toobelt recharge is way way better then drop a bomb on dodge.kitten think about this. elixir R ready to go every time you hit 25%.
20 in firearms. shocking probably. coated bullets is disappointing admittedly. The more I play a glass cannon grenade build, the less I can justify coated bullets. The piercing on explosive shot is nice, but just not enough. It runs cross purpose. it effectively only scales with the direct damage hit. since the skills innate bleed does not proc aoe, nor does incendiary powder afor mentioned. only sharpshooter bleed does. Which is nice… but not enough to justify coated bullets.
+range on pistol. another shocker. heres the thing, as I just noted p/p is melee basically. Giving it extra range does nothing for it. glue shot, blowtorch, an venom shot gain nothing from this. 2 of which literally aren’t effected, and venom just misses too much with that extra range. Explosive shot and static do, and again, nice… but +swiftness on crits, and vigor on swiftness..
The only counter to glass cannon power scaling is dodge. And the only way to make condition damage viable is having high survival. So swiftness, dodge, and vigor is core.
30 alch goes without saying. Only note is invigorating speed instead of elixir CD as we want that vigor.
10 tools. kit refinement. super elixir on swap to elixir gun. no targeting, nothing. just drops on the ground for a free heal, cond removal field, and light combo. Unlimited targets. Huge in mass wvw. Aoe ret with blast combo.

p/p, elixir H, elixir gun, elixir B, elixir R, supply drop for skills.
Mostly goes without saying. B give nice buffs, traited, vigor/mightx2, swiftness, and cleanses. R breaks stun and cleanses, and refills dodge roll. Throw R cleanes, and self reses. And if you get resets toolbelt cds with 20 in tools, should always be up to self res.
lots and lots of dodge rolls. Between vigor, R refill, toolbelt recharging end. Double super elixir. having that heal, and toolbelt regen helps with not having shorter CD heal on elixir H.
Remember the elixir gun scales well with the same crit/tough/cond gear that is ideal for p/p. In fact it out damages pistol 1.

This is particularly true if you gear for +cond duration. rune for 50% +duration. 15% 2piece/15%2 piece/10% 2 piece, and 10% explosives. (note if you don’t go 10 explosives, youll need go get that elsewhere. Sigil?)
4s bleed on elixir 1. Will be 6s bleed
while 2s bleed on pistol 1 will be 3s. with 50%. (which is why 50% is the breakpoint, anything less and p1 will not gain any damage)

“Every option does not need to be a glass cannon power-stacking build.”
It does when glass cannon power stacking completely outclasses everything else due to scaling…

well …. either buff pistol base damage or give us back 4 sec bleed
maybe increase the firing rate so we can STACK

My vote would be for an increase in firing rate…. Seems odd to have rifles and pistols on the same firing rate

They need to take a look at Pistols yeah… And u know arenanet doesnt like to make changes untill people learn their classes.. But here you can yust calculate it using facts and numbers that it is kinda failed

Casia.4281:

Why are they naturally weaker?

The answer to this is 2 parts. 1, the shot is an AoE splash explosion on contact and will do multiple explosions with multiple enemy contact with coated bullets. 2, as a base attack, it has a bleed stack attached too it. With bleed damage, and AoE damage, it isn’t reasonable that it would scale any where near rifles auto attack with the same amount of power.

EvilZombie.6801:

well …. either buff pistol base damage or give us back 4 sec bleed
maybe increase the firing rate so we can STACK

they just need to increase the duration of explosive shots bleed.

2 seconds is hilariously low. if you do anything else, but auto-attack, you’ll lose stacks of it. simply using the “3” ability has a potential for you to lose a stack on the bleed because of distance/travel time between you and a mob.

if i recall. it was at 4 at one point in the beta but I could be wrong.

We need to get back to 4, arenanet was right at the start, but they started doubting themselfs to much… dont do that arenanet

I wish they’d get around to fixing explosive shot so it does what it says. I think it’s a mere 2 seconds because it’s supposed to splash the bleeding, but it doesn’t do that, it only splashes the damage. Better fire rate would be nice too.

it is not broke. They are more likely to alter what it says in the tip then to alter the ability.

altering the tooltip doesnt mean its suddenly usefull…

it needs a small buff (not even that big) but it really needs one. Yust saying they should look at it, since its better to test out changes for more balancing as soon as possible to get everything right quicker..

i hoped they would already have done that in the beta’s, but they were more busy with normal bugs then the pvp balance at that time