Guild Wars 2

Question: Does Modified Ammunition affect my damage when I’m equipped with a pistol/rifle, but using a kit? Or does it only affect damage of my pistol/rifle skills?

The specification would make no sense, since if you are not wielding a kit, you either wield a rifle or a pistol.

So to answer: It only effects your damage when you have the rifle or pistols in hand. While pistol skills help to maintain the conditions on the foe, rifle skills have more base damage to increase.

Yea, I’ve been playing around with this trait. They basically said “Haha, no AoE damage” so you basically have to drop conditions and then burst with it on your Rifle.

I guess in PvE you can use it a lot because it buffs per condition and then you can stack vulnerability and Rifle mods trait and that just makes the damage skyrocket.

But in PvP, unless you’re teamed up with a Necro, you’re never going to stack a lot of conditions on your own. People will evade some, or most of it and can cleanse a large amount of it too and this would reduce your burst potential by a bit.

Secondly, my question to Anet is; “How am I supposed to use this trait with a pistol?”

Dirame.8521:

Secondly, my question to Anet is; “How am I supposed to use this trait with a pistol?”

Coated bullets. With coated bullets, you can hit up to 5 enemies 5 times, resulting in 25 hits with every auto attack, which amounts to quite a bit of power damage. Only hard part is getting condis on all of them.

And getting them in a situation where all 5 mobs are close to each other. Glue shot helps. And since you are there already, Sitting Duck trait gives a 3rd condition (vulnerability) to the existing two (Immob and cripple).

The problem with all this is the effort required for a that flimsy 8% damage, with the explosive shot’s bleed giving the 4th condition.

lakdav.3694:

And getting them in a situation where all 5 mobs are close to each other. Glue shot helps. And since you are there already, Sitting Duck trait gives a 3rd condition (vulnerability) to the existing two (Immob and cripple).

The problem with all this is the effort required for a that flimsy 8% damage, with the explosive shot’s bleed giving the 4th condition.

When I was testing the trait, I used grenades to stack a few conditions then tried to use that to do a lot of damage with my Rifle.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Dirame.8521:

Secondly, my question to Anet is; “How am I supposed to use this trait with a pistol?”

Coated bullets. With coated bullets, you can hit up to 5 enemies 5 times, resulting in 25 hits with every auto attack, which amounts to quite a bit of power damage. Only hard part is getting condis on all of them.

Please show me a non-orchestrated video of this happening. Please, I really want to see it.

You see modified ammunition in SD builds sometimes. A rifle can apply immobilize through net shot, cripple through sitting duck, vulnerability through analyze, bleed through sharpshooter, and burning through incendiary powder. That’s 5 conditions for +10% damage to a build that can literally kill people in 3 seconds. It’s true some of them are crit procs, but you’ll have a decent amount of hits going in with a full SD burst attack and fairly high crit % (easily over 60%).

You can probably get it to work on pistol quite well with carrion gear since you can benefit from the direct damage and the wide condition variety. It’s never been one of my preferred traits, but I can see it’s usefulness.

Do I really need to show a video of orr events? Just go to the final phase of the grenth event, where all of the enemies pack tightly together, for the easiest and best example of coated bullets laying waste to enemies.

EDIT:

Here’s an example. It’s not peak conditions, since the golems don’t bunch up, but this is what it looks like. Only with more numbers:

It’s also not exactly rare to get a lot of enemy players bunched up for Coated Bullets spam if you’re part of an organized tower defense in WvW.

Stice.5204:

It’s also not exactly rare to get a lot of enemy players bunched up for Coated Bullets spam if you’re part of an organized tower defense in WvW.

But you’re shooting downward, not in a straigth line.