Guild Wars 2

I don’t play an Engineer, but I posted something on the Thief board I thought would be appropriate here to generate discussion about.

I play a warrior and a thief. The warrior’s rifle and the thief’s pistol have very similar play-styles, however most people consider the warrior’s rifle to be pretty decent while the thief’s pistol is very noticeably underpowered.

So, I started analyzing them very closely and here’s what I uncovered. The rifle’s #1 has an activation time of 3/4 second and the Pistol has an activation time of 1/2 second. The rifle does far more damage upfront, with greater range and significantly better bleed duration. However, the pistol is much faster. On paper.

In practice, there’s either a bug with the activation timer or a design issue with the way the skills interact with the animations that makes the pistol’s rate of fire not significantly faster than the rifle’s like it’s supposed to be. The consequence is that MH Pistol is very weak on the thief, doing subpar damage and only stacking up to 5 bleeds from a range no further than 900 yards, while the warrior’s rifle can do great damage and stack up to 8 bleeds from a range of 1200 yards.

I suspect this is an issue that affects Engineers as well. While I realize that unlike with pistols/rifles for thiefs/warriors, the pistol and rifle have different roles for the Engineer, I also get the vibe there’s a pretty decent consensus that rifles are generally better. If this is the case, here’s your answer why: Pistol skills were balanced around the assumption they have a much faster rate of fire than the Rifle when in actuality they don’t.

Does anyone else have any input?

yeah.

Tooltip isn’t quite accurate.
As far as I can tell. both rifle and pistal have a .8 or .85s recast.

If the cast time variance is supposed to explain why pistols inherently do less damage.
876-1029 for pistol, and 986-1205 for a rifle.
Well they don’t attack faster.

Consider tooltip has changed as well. Pistol1 for engi said 3/4s originally. But was changed to .5 shortly after times were added and p1’s base coeff was nerfed.

If this is a bug on the tooltip numbers vs actual speed that should be on another board.

I’m not sure why you’re comparing two different classes with different 1h and 2h weapons.

Now, if you bothered to test it with engineer pistol and rifle you might have an argument. Except that engineer’s pistol comes with a bleed that can easily end up more damage than rifle if built for it. Both come with different utilities, so it should come down to personal style of gameplay. And most engineers don’t spend a lot of time in their weapon in the first place.

Tsubaki.2508:

If this is a bug on the tooltip numbers vs actual speed that should be on another board.

I’m not sure why you’re comparing two different classes with different 1h and 2h weapons.

Now, if you bothered to test it with engineer pistol and rifle you might have an argument. Except that engineer’s pistol comes with a bleed that can easily end up more damage than rifle if built for it. Both come with different utilities, so it should come down to personal style of gameplay. And most engineers don’t spend a lot of time in their weapon in the first place.

Try re-reading what was stated.

Well there are a lot of balance issues to be honest…for example dual pistols can each use seperate runes, while a Rifle can only use 1…Maybe the current attack rates and dmg per weapon type is to compensate this…Side note, if ur using dual pistols on a thief for anything other then Unload…ur doing it wrong =/

For engineers the biggest difference comes from the fact that rifle is much more naked power based, while pistol has a larger condition damage portion.

So I’m not sure if our pistols are ‘calculated on wrong fire rates’.
This could be the case, but not sure if isn’t just the power versus condition damage issue.

The tooltip tells you the activation time which means until you fire off the skill, not how long the entire animation of the skill is; that’s e.g. why the Ranger’s Longbow shows 0.75 in it’s tooltip but in reality shots only every 1.25 seconds.

Kimbald.2697:

For engineers the biggest difference comes from the fact that rifle is much more naked power based, while pistol has a larger condition damage portion.

So I’m not sure if our pistols are ‘calculated on wrong fire rates’.
This could be the case, but not sure if isn’t just the power versus condition damage issue.

Not really. This has NOTHING to do with skill coeffs. or skills at all.
Rifle 1 is a .65 skill coef.
Pistol 1 is a .35 skill coef.

THAT is balanced for rifle1’s piercing and pistol 1’s bleed. (sortof.. not really. p1 is still up)

But on TOP of that, pistol’s simply have less raw damage.
Again, at exotics.
876-1029 pistols vs 986-1205 rifle.

If this was simply a skill coeff issue, then with coated bullets dealing x2 damage, pistol1 would outdamage rifle 1. as .35×2=.7, while rifle 1 is .65.
But…
skill*weapon*power/armor=damage.
.35*952*2000/2600=256×2=513 (decimals hidden)
.65*1095*2000/2600=548

Pistol 1 double hitting STILL does less damage then rifle 1. (and I didnt even trait rifle for +10% damage)(Bleed is only applied once.) Rifles raw damage is scaling it higher.
1095 average is 15% higher then pistols 952 average damage.
This is effectively the same issue as with kits. Which are 920 average damage.

Not directly related to the OP talking about the raw variance in 1 handers vs 2 handers.
But, I strongly disagree with the P1 nerf. It was originally, .4 at launch. (had a longer bleed prelaunch)

Just to reiterate, I think this is something that affects both Thiefs and Engineers.

Based on pretty thorough analysis, I am strongly inclined to think that the dev team has based their calculations on what a single Pistol shot should do on the pretense that the rate of fire is significantly impacted by the difference in activation time (1/2 sec. vs 3/4 sec.) when it isn’t. The actual recast time is roughly the same (.8 – .9) due to the recovery speed.

This is why MH pistol feels weak for both Thieves and Engineers compared to other options. They need to either tweak the recovery time, or remove the activation time altogether and let them fire as quickly as the Ranger’s shortbow, further tweaking coeffs. where necessary.

Einlanzer.1627:

Just to reiterate, I think this is something that affects both Thiefs and Engineers.

Based on pretty thorough analysis, I am strongly inclined to think that the dev team has based their calculations on what a single Pistol shot should do on the pretense that the rate of fire is significantly impacted by the difference in activation time (1/2 sec. vs 3/4 sec.) when it isn’t. The actual recast time is roughly the same (.8 – .9) due to the recovery speed.

This is why MH pistol feels weak for both Thieves and Engineers compared to other options. They need to either tweak the recovery time, or remove the activation time altogether and let them fire as quickly as the Ranger’s shortbow, further tweaking coeffs. where necessary.

Starting looking closer, and I can find no real sense to weapon damages. I don’t really understand why they are different at all.
Attack time is not tied to weapon type.

Rifle: 986-1205=1095 ave +/-109
Staff: 985-1111=1048 av +/-63
Hammer: 985-1111=1048 av +/-63
Greatsword: 995-1100=1047 av +/- 53
long bow: 920-1080=1000 av +/- 80
Short bow: 905-1000=952 av +/-48
Kit: 872-969=920 av +/-48

Axe: 857-1048= 952av +/-95
Pistol: 876-1029=952av +/-76
Sword: 905-1000=952 av +/-48
Dagger: 924-981=952 av +/-28

Torch: 789-926=857av +/-68
Etc.

If you can find some sense in there. please tell me. For a game that wants to have a competitive pvp, why do some weapons just have better scaling?
If supposed to be “perfect imbalance”, then there needs to be some stronger counterpoints. Grenades do for obvious reasons.

Notice for thieves, all of their weapons have 952 average damage.

The delay is actually something engis suffer too. Our pistol cast times are almost the same as for rifles and I’m sorry but any delay breaks dps up pretty badly for a device that does 1/3rd the rifle damage.

The slower the shots the lower the dps.

I hope the fix this for adventurer classes soon.

Grenades need bigger explosion radius so do bombs, #1 #2 nades are horrendous yet still have AOE targeting and button spam, Mines are almost always missed even by giants especially the defensive mines like when one reaches 25%, bombs now with the new improved smaller explosion zones are worthless, someone should get a vet in any war where grenades/mines/bombs were used heavily to explain to them how explosives really work.

Yeah, I defiantly think pistol should deal more steady dps then rifle. As it stands now rifle is the best at everything except maybe condition build but kits are even better. They need to increase the attack speed of the pistol #1 at the very least. There needs to be a reason to use pistol over rifle. Even if rifle remains the best burst. Pistol should deal more steady damage through auto attack and condtions. I think that would suit the weapon well.

I doubt they will buff Grenades by giving them a larger explosion radius unless they reduced the damage. As we know, they are very powerful. Making them harder to dodge will only solidify their spot as the most effective engineer build.

What I would like them to do with Grenades:

As we know what makes Grenades out of hand are two traits. Grenadier and Steel-Packed Powder. There are few ways to fix this. I think its important when making changes to a skill to retain the reason why players use the skill. Unlike what they did with the Throw Mines… Now no one uses it. They could have easily change the toolkit skill to 20% chance of blast finisher instead of removing it completely. Anyways, how i would fix Grenades, I would make them more usable but in exchange take away some abuse cases.

1) I would increase the radius of Grenades 2-3x
2) Change Grenadier to 25% faster and +50% damage
3) Change it to throw only 1 Grenade

This removes the case of easily stacking 25 stacks of vunerability and other abuse cases with on hit procs. Its more of a traditional Grenade in this sense. Probably would have to make them slower as the radius would probably cover 2 dodge rolls.

Just an idea I had floating around.