Guild Wars 2

So it’s no secret that Engineer is a complex profession. Adding kits made for wide access to lots of powerful skills. A current metabattle build lists 48 steps in the rotation of a perfectly parsed condition engineer. The profession suffers from a high barrier of entry due to this. Part of the problem engineer suffers from that other professions don’t, is that their weapon skills are less desirable than kit skills almost universally. Offhand pistol is used for the burning in condi builds, rifle is used for the jump slam, and shield is used for a blast finisher. In just about every case, you want to rapidly swap kits to blow out all your damage cooldowns with reckless abandon… Because unlike most professions, your spammable attacks are trash rather than sustainable rotation filler. A kitless engineer is a crippled engineer in many respects. Even the absolutely powerful HGH trait usually benefits more from taking along a kit in place of a third elixir. And some kits are not useful entirely on their own. Grenades, Bombs, and Mortar work well, but they all benefit from the Explosives trait line, which almost entirely caters to those three kits instead of being the general damage trait line that it’d be for most professions.

But, those are broad issues. broad issues just tend to wind up causing a thread full of complaints. I’d like a thread where we come up with specific fixes and QoL improvements to one of engineer’s least loved aspects: the main hand pistol.

Keep in mind, the follwing is all napkin math, and doesn’t account for Crit Chance, Crit Damage, Toughness, or a weapon’s Base Damage.

Some conclusions I’ve drawn…

1. Pistol 1 is pretty bad as a condi attack, and marginal at best as a power attack. (Not really an earth-shattering observation.)

Unfortunately though, Pistol 1 is less than the sum of its parts, and suffers from all the changes than have happened to GW2 over its lifetime. For example, pistol can no longer be traited to pierce targets. But pistol was balanced around that a long time ago, before Traits 2.0. So now Pistol 1 and 2 are adversely affected by the loss of that trait in a multi-target environment. Especially Pistol 2, which has a wild spread that makes it unreliable compared to Fan of Fire or Poison Volley.

2. In most situations, (due to Pistol 1’s small AoE) Engi Pistol 1 is worse than Thief Pistol 1 in every aspect. (Which also needs some love.)

Pistol 1’s AoE is tiny, so it often hits just one target, and without weapon swapping, Pistol Engineers are rather disadvantaged in single-target fights. This is because everything is weighted towards a proper AoE, but only had it’s full effect on one target. The bleed doesn’t hit all in the AoE, and the size of the AoE makes even slightly spread out targets difficult to hit.

3. The rest of Engi Pistol is fun and awesome, even with the occasional frustration with random spread on Pistol 2.

Engineer pistol is really a fun visual grab-bag of effects. And it does something that no other weapon does: Spam a wide smattering of conditions. It’s like having Quip at level 1, seriously… It’s chaotic and silly, but fits perfectly with the engineer theme… It’s just a shame that Pistol 1 is so underwhelming.

4. Engi Pistol is a melee weapon than can do chip damage at range.

Pistol 2 and 4 incentivize being super-close to a target. Despite being 900 range for 1-3, Pistol is best used at melee range. The two attacks that can effectively be used at 900 range are the two lowest damage attacks. I believe it needs to be recognized and embraced as a shorter range weapon.

Potential Pistol 1 Fixes to incentivize condition damage.

A: Make the Bleed apply in the AoE: AoE Bleed was removed during a time when Pistol could be traited for Piercing, allowing it to AoE around every target it passed through, getting mad value in tightly packed groups. Which was AWESOME! But also kinda broken. Pistol 1 got nerfed to kitten as a result so that the pierce could stay a trait. Now with Traits 2.0, pierce is gone, and Pistol 1 could apply bleed in an AoE again without giving hordes of enemies nightmares.

B: Make the Bleed 3 seconds by default: Condition damage requires a lot of investment to make work. The pistol trait is a great start to that though. But at best, that gives us 4 seconds of bleed on a hit. You know what that is? Thief pistol’s base effect, with slightly less power contribution. And thief pistol 1 is generally regarded as kitten. 3 seconds still makes it weaker than thief pistol 1 to compensate for the AoE… But full condition duration would give us something better than thief pistol 1. It’d give us 956.565 DPS for pistol 1 in Condi gear, compared to 948.84 DPS in Power gear, allowing it to be better in a condition build, which is the intent behind pistol’s design.

C: Alternatively – Retool Pistol 1 to be modeled after Ele’s Stone Shards: Low power coefficient, higher bleed potential. Pistol is meant as a multiple condition damage weapon, able to apply 3-4 conditions simultaneously in an area. Pistol 1 is the only attack that does not embrace that right now. And it’s easily seen as Thief Pistol 1’s inferior in every way. Making it more condition focused instead of a clunky hybrid power/condi attack will distinguish it from Thief’s pistol 1 further than its tiny AoE. If it’s made more condition-focused, it’ll gel better with it’s fellow weapon skills, and help keep a wide pool of damage conditions on a target simultaneously.

D: Traits Serrated Steel and Incendiary Powder: Right now, these both increase Bleeding and Burning durations by 33%. Currently, these are actually very detrimental to Pistol 1 and 4, because the commonly used +40% Condition Duration food buff sees much less effect on those two conditions, but is still needed to make the poison and confusion conditions threatening. But we’ve seen bonuses to the damage conditions deal, such as guardian’s bonus burning damage. So why not here? Say +30% Bleeding damage, and +15% burning damage as just a quick estimate. 15% burn damage is working very well for the guardian, and 30% bleeding damage shouldn’t be OP because let’s face it, bleeding damage is entirely insignificant.

Possible buffs to Pistol 2

A: Give it piercing. The other spread attacks (Fan of Fire, Poison Volley, Splitblade) can all be given piercing, and it’s a fantastic boon. Pistol 2 would still be inconsistent, but at least it’d be able to AoE a bit more consistently.

Or…

Take away Pistol 1’s AoE, and shorten Pistol 2’s Poison duration. AND MAKE THEM BOUNCE.

Once upon a time Pistol #1 was supposed to be classified as an explosion. If this were true I think it would fix it. You could get the extra chance for bleed on proc and all the other goodies that explosions can get through traits.

They also said Coated Bullets would be baseline grumble…..

Classifying Pistol 1 as an explosion would be interesting, but it’d require any pistol user to spec into Explosive to make Pistol worthwhile. A warrior’s greatsword is still rather good without it’s traits, but the traits that synergize with greatsword make it fantastic.

Pistol needs to be worthwhile out of the gate, so that its traits aren’t a fix, but rather an actual enhancement.

That being said, explosive synergy on the pistol would be really great. It wouldn’t be stepping on Grenade Kit’s toes, because kit would add the conditions better, but it’d be a more versatile alternative, with Pistol and Shield offhands, and a much easier time for those who can’t stand button-mashing.

For Coated Bullets… It’d be nice to see it become baseline, but I feel like Pierce is the band-aid they used to make ranged weapons more desirable in a multi-target environment. That’s why I propose bounce instead of pierce. It fits in with the silly chaos of the engineer better.

Perhaps a revised pistol trait? Move Pinpoint Distribution to a Minor (with a small nerf to reflect it’s placement.) and make a more interesting Pistol trait than Chemical Rounds. Like…

Alchemic Munitions
Firearms Master Trait
Pistol Attacks recharge faster, have enhanced effects, and get new names maybe.
1 – Flak Shot: Radius 240, and bleed is applied to all hit targets.
2 – Acidic Volley: Pierces.
3 – Sonic Round: Adds an extra stack of confusion.
4 – Napalm Spray: No longer has range drop-off.
5 – Cryo Bullet: Now an Ice field, and applies 1s Chill instead of cripple.
20% reduced Recharge.

I don’t know how much I agree with some of those points…

1) You would not be required to use explosives traits. For one thing many builds use Explosives anyways, and for another pistols serve their purpose as is. Which brings me to…

2) Pistols should in no way ever be compared to Warrior Greatsword. Engis have kits and are balanced around kits. Weapon skills have always been little more than utilities, you rarely need to auto attack with them. Is this a core issue of the Engi? That’s for each player to decide. I think if you answer “yes” then this profession’s mechanics just aren’t for you and that’s okay…

3) Pistol already has a bounce, I’d like to be able to damage to a tightly grouped pack of enemies or be able to pierce through Ranger/Necro/Ele minions to actually hit them in sPvP. I don’t think pierce is a band aid fix at all, it’s something ranged weapons have because there’s too much AI in this game to block projectiles without it.

4) We’re talking about pistols not being good enough but you propose a nerf to the second best pistol trait and removing the best one entirely? This doesn’t make sense to me.

5) That proposed trait is just bonkers, sorry. That’s way too much even for a GM trait, and Cryo Bullet could be seen as a nerf.

I don’t mean to say pistol doesn’t need a buff, at least main hand. Offhand is good now. I just don’t agree with some of your method of doing it. I would make Coated Bullets (pierce) baseline and then make all enemies hit by the auto attack (including explosion) bleed. I would make the auto attack an “explosion”. That alone fixes it IMO, and 2 out of 3 of those things (pierce, explosion) were at one point planned to be implemented. Maybe it will take the next big balance patch or some sort of feedback after Elite Spec is announced to get word on what happened with those plans, if they’re just not implemented yet or if they were scrapped. I would at least like to know.

i disagree with OP

anyway just baseline Coated Bullets and increase the range to 1050

1) I compared Pistol to Greatsword only in the respect of trait design. My point was that a weapon’s trait should enhance a weapon, rather than make a weapon merely worth considering compared to a baseline weapon. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of Pistol 1 being an explosive, but something needs to be done to it’s baseline effect otherwise you’re essentially investing 2 trait lines into making a single attack on your weapon better.

2) Engineer is balanced around kits… So all builds must include kits. That’s not good game design. And telling people to just play another profession is a terrible line of thought. You just told people that they shouldn’t touch 1/8th of the game. I’m not proposing that kits be nerfed, or even that a build should exist that’s better than high-APM-kit-‘splosion. I’m proposing that engineer should be balanced with or without kits.

3) Pistol 1 with pierce was what got Pistol 1 nerfed into the ground in the first place. I don’t disagree that adding pierce to Pistol 1 and 2 would be great. I’m just saying that piercing explosions are what got Pistol 1 onto the short train to Sadville in the first place.

4) Just spitballing ideas on that one. I found that selecting traits to move in that line is pretty tough to do, as they’re well placed. Juggernaut is a bit odd there, but it goes so well with Pinpoint Distribution and Heavy Armor Exploit. And speaking of Pistol’s best trait… Really, shouldn’t it be baseline at least partially? Especially on Pistol 1?

5) You’re right… It is bonkers… And yet not overpowered. That’s how bad Pistol has it right now.

Wasdclick.1764:

1) I compared Pistol to Greatsword only in the respect of trait design. My point was that a weapon’s trait should enhance a weapon, rather than make a weapon merely worth considering compared to a baseline weapon. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of Pistol 1 being an explosive, but something needs to be done to it’s baseline effect otherwise you’re essentially investing 2 trait lines into making a single attack on your weapon better.

2) Engineer is balanced around kits… So all builds must include kits. That’s not good game design. And telling people to just play another profession is a terrible line of thought. You just told people that they shouldn’t touch 1/8th of the game. I’m not proposing that kits be nerfed, or even that a build should exist that’s better than high-APM-kit-‘splosion. I’m proposing that engineer should be balanced with or without kits.

3) Pistol 1 with pierce was what got Pistol 1 nerfed into the ground in the first place. I don’t disagree that adding pierce to Pistol 1 and 2 would be great. I’m just saying that piercing explosions are what got Pistol 1 onto the short train to Sadville in the first place.

4) Just spitballing ideas on that one. I found that selecting traits to move in that line is pretty tough to do, as they’re well placed. Juggernaut is a bit odd there, but it goes so well with Pinpoint Distribution and Heavy Armor Exploit. And speaking of Pistol’s best trait… Really, shouldn’t it be baseline at least partially? Especially on Pistol 1?

5) You’re right… It is bonkers… And yet not overpowered. That’s how bad Pistol has it right now.

1) I’m confused, on one hand we need to enhance the pistol without traits but on the other hand baseline changes aren’t enough? Maybe I’m misunderstanding.

2) Slow down with the strawman there, tiger. I only said what is reality I didn’t make it that way. For better or worse Engis are balanced around using kits. If you don’t use them you’re going to have a bad time. These things are facts. This is why every once in awhile someone posts a build without kits and say how they had fun but ultimately it’s just a gimmicky build that doesn’t last because they’re bored with kits like most of us are. Of course Engi should be balanced with or without kits but it’s not that easy. We’ve been saying for 3 years to balance with or without kits but it hasn’t happened yet and I doubt it ever will. It would require massive nerfs to kits to bring them in line with our other utilities, or massive buffs to other utilities which would make the Engi OP. Kits are elemental attunements with no cooldown, for that reason they’ve sort of painted themselves into a corner when it comes to balancing the Engineer. If someone feels strongly otherwise then maybe they would have more fun with another profession because this one has those issues with kits that are likely here to stay.

3) This is not what resulted in “nerfing the pistol into the ground”, which is also confusing because it suggests at one point they were really good? Piercing pistol shots only exploded when it reached maximum range, it never exploded on multiple targets. In fact this was a main complaint of that trait while it existed.

4) I’m with you, pistol needs some love in the trait department. I wouldn’t want to blow up Firearms to do it though.

5) If that’s how you really feel we’ll have to agree to disagree.

Adamantium.3682:

3) This is not what resulted in “nerfing the pistol into the ground”, which is also confusing because it suggests at one point they were really good?

At release of the game (and in the beta tests before it) the pistol auto attack, named Explosive Shot, was much more powerfull than it is now. The bleed durration was 4 sec baseline and the damage was nearly on par with rifle. They quickly nerfed it after release because pistol HgH was to good when nobody knew how to build properly.

Adamantium.3682:

Piercing pistol shots only exploded when it reached maximum range, it never exploded on multiple targets. In fact this was a main complaint of that trait while it existed.

It exploded on every hit, I remember testing it at a high-enemy-density area (In my case the husks under red fort in silverwaste) and I got 18 hits with with a singel bullet from Fragmented Shot.

If it only exploded on the end then with 5 targets all stacked ontop of eachother I would only get 10 hits (5 pierces and 5 targets from the last explotion), Even if it only exploded on the first target and the end I would not be able to bypass 15 hits. Since I managed to hit 18 times with a singel bullets (I counted the combat log, had auto attack off and made sure the log was empty before I shot), we can conclude that it explodes on every hit.

There is a possibility that they had a hidden PvP-PvE seperation of the trait effect, but I find that hard to belive.

Only way to fix pistol 1 is to have togheter explosion and pierce. That way it would become decent but still behind many other AA. Bleed duration might be good, since bleeding these days hits like wet noddle…