Guild Wars 2

Engineer pistols Q-skill needs to be more like Thief pistol Q-skill.
Why?
Cuz the thiefs deals damage which Explosive shot doesn’t and the bleed stacks last longer for the thief. I love Engi and i think it needs to be this way.
Explosive shot is just not that good

Unlike the thief we have a bazillion kits, tools, turrets and mad future gadgets at our disposal to make up for that…
Use them.

5 kits.
5 Turrets.
5 Gadgets.

Turrets are bad.

Lets not get ahead of ourselves here.

I’m not in favour of copying someone else, but pistols do need a buff.

Their bleeding component is terrible, and their direct damage component is terrible, and the AoE is hardly anything to brag about so…

Buff them up indeed.

what? thieves have utility skills as well. and a weapon swap.

The weak bleed is only justifiably if the bleed is applied aoe. its not. the weak direct damage is justified by the aoe hit.

Balancing the pistol for engineer could be tricky since we’re the only class that has the pis/shield combo and the shield can provide some great utility and control. Thieves may have a harder hitting pistol, but may not have access to an offhand that can provide the utility of our shield. Due to this, our pistol dmg is lackluster to make up for the potential utility/control of the shield. Unfortunately, this makes dual pistol for us rather weak since the dmg from blowtorch and utility of glue shot just don’t compare.

Basically, if we were to buff pistol, we better have a kitten good reason other than “x class’s pistol does more dmg than ours.” Either we’d be forced a longer CD on our shield abilties, or we could see offhand pistol buffed (this would address the concern of pistols being weak for us, without strengthening pis/shield). Although, this is assuming Engineer is on level with all the other professions.
I wouldn’t mind just seeing our pistol being buffed, but that’s due to my bias as an Engineer.

Pistol needs a small buff, but i think there are like 30 of these threads… arenanet probably will adress this, since it is an suggestion suggested by everyone, even people who dont play engineer or use different weapons.

Either we’d be forced a longer CD on our shield abilties in my opinion only reason pistol/shield works is because 99% of the time its combined with bombkit or grenade kit… in my honest opinion a p/s not using kits has the same problems as dual pistol

It could be confirmation bias, but I’ve been doing fine using just pistol/shield, battering ram, elixir S, elixir B, supply drop, med kit/elixir h in sPvP.

I wish they would fix the pistol animations. I have two guns, but I only fire out of one – for every skill, ever. Looks totally kittarded.

what in the world is a “Q-skill”???

I assume Q-skill = skill #1.

On the topic, doesn’t explosive shot do AoE bleeding vs vital shot which is single target. The AoE is small but it does play into the balance. In addition, engineers can trait pistols to pierce while thieves only get a trait that provides 5% chance to bounce to another target. I think the balance overall is pretty good.

why is it a Q skill though?

Well pistol 1 does need a buff though. Compare it with grenade kit #2. 2s bleed vs 12s bleed. Even untraited you get better bleed stacking with grenade than pistol atm.

The same is true of elixir gun #1, its not as good as grenade #2 but it outshines pistol 1 at the moment.

I’d like to see the bleed duration stay the same but have the damage on pistol 1 increased. Maybe a better power scaling.

Doing so could open up power builds on the pistol. With a heavy power build the #3 will already do about ~4k which is nice, and with the pierce from traits it can be nice AoE.

Upping pistol 1 to maybe a max of 1.2-1.4k on crit in a crit / power build could open up more spec’ing options.

No Mel, its not AoE bleeding.

Its a single target bleed.

Its essentially:

4s single target bleed+alright direct damage
vs
2s single target bleed+low direct damage AoE

Ah that skews things a bit. I think the bleed should probably be AoE or bumped to maybe 3s (4s maybe too high). The piercing trait can still make up for the base weakness a bit, especially since a decent group will get a pretty multiple from the AoE of the clumped pierced targets.

Well at 1100 condition damage it is about 100-105 a tic. at 2 second bleed that is 200-210 damage. Add that to the base physical damage, and it doesn’t even compare to the rifle damage, and that is if you use the rifle with out changing any stats from a condition build.

Now if you take it a step further and compare a pure condition build of the pistol #1 to that of a pure power or crit/crit damage build, the difference between the two becomes ridiculously apparent.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t fire bullets from my other gun because it’s built to shoot fire instead.

I’d love to see Poison Dart Volley un-nerfed so it actually hits beyond point-blank range. That one change would make the pistols a totally solid mid-range weapon. Wouldn’t hurt if they also fixed Explosive Shot to splash the bleed like it says it does, maybe tack on another second of bleed or so.

Engineer pistol auto attack has to be the weakest in the game out of any weapon. With the shortest bleed.

Warrior rifle 6 sec
Warrior sword 8 sec
Ranger shortbow 3 sec but double the attack speed
Elementalist scepter 6 sec
Mesmer staff 7 sec
Necro scepter 4 sec

It doesn’t look as bad as it is until you start to account for how stacking condi duration effects it. Warrior rifle can get up to 12 seconds per shot with traits and gear.

Bleed can be AOE if u take pistol pieces

punny.9210:

Bleed can be AOE if u take pistol pieces

But the explosion doesn’t cause bleeding like it says. “explodes bleeding nearby targets”

It only explodes for damage.