Guild Wars 2

Does anyone actually use pistols primarily these days? I’m still leveling my engineer and am currently trying to use 3 kits (flamethrower, grenades, and healing) as needed and training/gearing for condition damage, carrying dual pistols for their numerous conditions (cripple, immobilize, poison, blind, bleed) . However, it seems that grenades are my best damage source – would it make sense for me to switch to rifle/power, then? I apologize if these are stupid questions in advance.

I’m currently using dual pistols – it’s weird, but I’m actually killing things faster with an Explosives/Inventions/Tools+Dual Pistol build than I was with E/I/T+Rifle.

If you’re mainly using Grenades for damage, I’d suggest going into Explosives, of course – that’s where all the Grenade traits are. Other than that, I don’t really have any suggestions.

If you are using grenades, you also need to use p/p or p/s to try to make up for the 30% damage reduction. ie, you need to run two sigils, which you cannot do by using a rifle.

What was the latest math on the current best combo? I think it was +5% damage on the off hand, and sigil of battle on the main, with swapping to get six stacks of might.

To answer the title: While leveling I used p/p & bomb kit. (Now in WvW&sPvP I use P/S with bomb & toolkit.)

To answer your actual question: while leveling I found that in the levels 1-15 condition damage is OP, set things on fire and everything dies. Later on during lvl 40-60 I found that pure damage was helping me more, I switched to rifle/static discharge and everything died quickly again. During lvls 60-80 I switched back to my trusted P/P+bomb kit and never looked back :p

So depending on your level, it can make sense to switch to rifle/power for a while yes.

PS: I don’t have any hard proof, it’s just my leveling experience.

Currently using P/P with full Elixirs and HGH.

It’s not bad, really. With Fast-Acting Elixirs, Elixir U can be used more often and I can dish out some good damage with conditions. Using all Elixirs (H, U, B and R), together with Toss Elixirs I can get some good stacks of Might. I’m using it for PvE, and I can switch easily to a flamethrower build just by switching a few traits between battles.

My old build used Elixir Gun for healing but I have dished it. Now I’m stil debating if it’s worth of a skill slot for the survivability of Acid Bomb. Coated Bullets is godly for killing many enemies (such as in DEs), but that doesn’t mean a trait equivalent to Rifle Mod for the pistol wouldn’t make me a happy panda.

The feeling I get is that we mostly detroy small groups of enemies but don’t have that advantage against single opponents (such as bosses). It could be argued that this is coutnerbalanced by the efficiency of conditions over time, though. So we either pierce all the trash with our pistol bullets, or we get an advantage out of our conditions over time against mobs.

Either way, I’m not having such a bad time. I’m getting downed more usually than I was when I had Elixir Gun, but having Elixir U makes a great difference in DPS. I suggest this build for farming events, too, because hey, you’ll just get loot from pretty much every mob that spawns in the DEs, thanks to Coated Bullets and the Flamethrower if you are into that.