Guild Wars 2

Breaking zergs. someone has to spearhead. and usually its done as a group obviously.

How its done with p/p, you lead with static shot, supply drop, and glue shot.
Supply drop will aoe stun, and land a net. This can also be delayed to drop into a firefield, or light field when your forces get to position, for the aoe might or ret. If you are running elixir gun, you may want to wait for this. Go in first, swap to elixir, for the aoe heal, and drop the supply drop into your light field. that giant aoe heal, stun, and ret is great at breaking a zerg. (runes of lyssa +boons on elite is fun too)

It is interesting to point out, p/p has more long range options then rifle really. rifle 1 is 1000, but everything else needs melee to function. even net shot wont land past 500.
Static provides a fairly long range option. And bouncing blind, allowing some level of advancement. (one static wont blind an entire raid of course) . Glue shot can be lead past targets to prevent evac. Again, this is something glueshot is better at then anything rifle or shield has. It can zone multiple people and prevent withdrawal.
Once in mid/melee range, p/p is capable of applying fairly competent aoe damage. Static bouncing from seige to seige attendant. blowtorch hitting both as well.
Without blowtorch, your damage is very suppar. that .915 scaling on a .5s cast is strongish…

Again, I would love more utility options to back p/p up. but, pistol offhand is fine.
(blowtorch getting +range from that trait would be nice.)

I’ve actually never had problems hitting people with nets at range, except in tight areas that it can be blocked (or hit someone else, which is kinda amusing). I think you do have to keep in mind its travel speed though. If they’re heading directly away from you, they will have moved out of its range by the time it gets there if you fire from a distance. I usually try to snag someone from the side, or use jump shot first (though if you don’t select the absolute fullest range it will probably lose ground instead with the delay).

Sometimes I wonder about making a class with nades, rifle & recharge, the cripple on immob trait, and a net turret… just to troll people. Frost grenade or rifle net first followed by the other, then toolbelt net, and finally drop a net turret on them. Maybe for added lol I can bring along a warrior or thief to finish them off quickly.

yes thats the problem. The net has a travel time. And in the time it takes to travel past a 500 range, the target will always have run out of max range, or moved out of the way, or dodged, etc. It only works reliably on targets within 500. Or stationary of course.
Since glue shot is ground target, you can lead your target, and thus actually land it at max range reliably. You could argue net shot is better at close range to do instant auto target fire.

And yeah, I have considered knockback turrets for wvw, just for the ranged kb. coupled with net turret, and net on belt, and rifle kb, net. Have not actually playtested that concept yet though, if someone else wants to.

I don’t think ‘makes it easier to stack all 4 conditions’ is ever going to be a positive factor in a dev decision to alter skills. They want players to experiment and try unique approaches, not stack the numbers even further in favour of the current fave approach.

Casia.4281:

yes thats the problem. The net has a travel time. And in the time it takes to travel past a 500 range, the target will always have run out of max range, or moved out of the way, or dodged, etc. It only works reliably on targets within 500. Or stationary of course.
Since glue shot is ground target, you can lead your target, and thus actually land it at max range reliably. You could argue net shot is better at close range to do instant auto target fire.

…sort of. Glue shot still has cast and travel time, the thing is because it’s ground targeting you can’t fire it unless it can hit the place you aim. But like you said, you need to lead with it, since they won’t be in the same place, and in order to be able to lead you have to be closer than its maximum range and aim beyond them. So in the end it suffers from the same thing as the net, just it still applies to empty ground if you miss, and it’s easier to tell what will happen before you fire it.

Well burns & roots are nice but we have other options for them.
I guess if I could choose anything to replace a pistol skill it would be some type of frost attack. Besides the nade we don’t really have alot of freeze options.
So something that freezes and is more on the offensive side to replace glue shot.
Like an ice ray shot that uses both pistols and is channeled.

We have so much utility we have too much utility.
I want more straight DPS.

I like the general feel of the offhand and as has been pointed out it allows for some diversity when choosing traits (you’re not forced to take 10 in explosives and/or take the FT, like you are with p/s if you want to compete).
The long cooldowns on the shield and the fact the reflect basically roots you (often making it a delayed death sentence really) makes it a lot less attractive in many situations.

That said the hit or miss nature of blowtorch can be annoying as heck (not so much a skill-fix as a bug fix I guess) and glueshot is underwhelming.
In many ways it is on par with or even better than netshot as you say Casia, but netshot is arguably one of the worst CC’s in game in it’s own right with how incredibly easy it is to miss/be avoided.
Couple that with a 24 sec cooldown on glue and it needs fixing.

Improving the range to at least 900 is not out of order and even a slightly lower cooldown (18-20 seconds traited?) wouldn’t be OP imo considering it does take some skill to land it.

Apart from that I feel the effective ranges for some moves could stand to be tweaked; 200 on blowtorch not to mention 100 to make full effect of blunderbuss, that’s less than melee for pete’s sake.
“Rifled barrels” should affect these skills imo: turning the effective range on blowtorch to ca. 300-750 and blunderbuss (I know it’s a pistol thread but it deserves a mention :p) to ca. 200-600.

yeah, and that also is largely my point. The mechanics are fine.
Traits like rifled barrels, and coated bullets only effected 1 or two skills is not.

The mechanics of blowtorch are really not fine. It just doesn’t fit with the other pistol skills AT ALL. It makes no sense to have a melee range burn on pistol 4.

If it was 900 range it would make plenty of sense: you pick shield for survivability or pistol for a 4th condition without having to spec for it. At 200 (effective) range it is totally out of place on pistols which are clearly a ranged weapon in general.

Offhand pistol works well for my flamethrower/elixir gun build, as I can forgo the burn on crit and use the points elsewhere (like in tools, because I like perma swiftness or I can use kit refinement for groups) and allows for a skirmisher type of play which I like. I can round up mobs or my opponents at range applying aoe confusion, blowtorch them as I get near, glue shot them in place, switch to elixir gun and aoe poison them all, switch to flamethrower and maintain burn on ALL of them, blind/knockback or switch back to elixir gun to leap back out of range as needed and switch back to pistols as they will be coming off cooldown if they are still kicking. Having the offhand pistol lets me apply aoe burn, confusion, and poison on top of each other and adds to my mobile type of play. Things melt fast when I stack all these up.

Sure, I could apply aoe burn with bombs, but then I sacrifice utility slots, of which two are already taken in my build, and the third is for stun breaker or group support/buffs or rocket boots for escaping to combo with the retreat back on elixir gun, allowing me to jump in and out of close range very quickly if needed.

But, my point is this, now that I’m done rambling; is that what one uses entirely comes down to build/spec/playstyle/situation. I think both shield and pistols could use some tweaks, personally.

I can see both sides of the argument, though I tend to agree that OH P4 is a little bit inconsistent with the pistol style. I’m a little bit surprised that it wasn’t a melee-range burn with a launchback similar to Elixir Gun 4. A small splash damage that burned nearby foes and launched the player backwards. I guess that’s also a little bit like rocket boots, but I still think it would make a bit more sense than it does right now.

I think glue shot is fine, tbh. Shield skills are great, but OH P4 could benefit from a bit of a rework.

Agreed. The offhand pistol skills are abyssmal. They simply do not combine well with the main hand skills.