Guild Wars 2

Is it just me or did we really get shafted with the bleed duration and attack speed of the primary attack on pistols? It seems pretty insane that the only way to make pistol 1 worthwhile is to stack condition duration which is primarily from the grenades/bombs (explosives)line. Even then, it’s a 3 sec bleed which is average at best.

We need the 30 pt firearm trait “Napalm Specialist” to also add bleeding in there. I believe that this addition makes sense as the pistol’s primary trait line is firearms.

Explosive Shot used to be fantastic during the Betas, however it was stupidly powerful with the trait Coated Bullets. It essentially allowed engineers to stack bleeds like mad.

Honestly, I’ve never gotten over the severity of the nerf to Explosive Shot, however I do somewhat understand why it needed to be done. I do believe it was too sever – and limited pistol to more of an auxiliary than an actual weapon.

The 0.8 attack (equal to that of the rifle) however is inexcusable.

It got hit so bad back in the days and they never undid the overnerf. Even the explosion sucks, it doesnt do bleed damage its just power damage :/

Penguin.5197:

It got hit so bad back in the days and they never undid the overnerf. Even the explosion sucks, it doesnt do bleed damage its just power damage :/

That’s the main thing I think that needs to be changed. The AoE should apply bleeds in that AoE, not just to the target(s) directly hit by the attack. I’m also pretty sure the attack speed is slower than stated, although I haven’t explicitly tested that. It may just have a longer than expected after-cast delay.

Though it was previously possible in the betas to get 20+ bleed stacks by yourself in a few seconds on a target, but that was back when people were still figuring out how to play and didn’t bother that much with condition counters. Quickness has also been modified, which was how those 20+ stacks were achieved.

I believe they do want to keep it relatively weak simply because the pistols allow access to a wide variety of conditions. Allowing for high bleed potential alongside those other conditions without bringing in utilities or traits could lead to too much condition ability for too little investment.

The damage of explosive shot can get more impressive with coated bullets and 50% condition duration, especially if you’re using an HGH build, but other builds can get shafted how weak it is. In particular, if you want to make a defensive/support build, explosive shot doesn’t do more than tickle people.

But I think if they just had the AoE apply a bleed instead of the actual hit, that would make explosive shot a lot better than it is without putting it way over the top. The tooltip has always implied that anyways.

@Yamsandjams:
I mentioned Pistol 1 in my thread regarding Engineer’s mainhand weapon choices. Hopefully the discussion around Pistol 1 can continue as it comprises fully 1 third of our weapon choices – they may as well be good weapons if we’re going to be stuck with so few for the foreseeable future.

Anyway, I would like to just mention that I don’t believe that adding AOE Bleed to Pistol 1 is the solution. If anything, it would mark a return to the Coated Bullets madness and you can bet that the cries for nerf would be swiftly inbound.

I believe that a global improvement to the Pistol’s sustained direct damage and condition pressure would be simply to remove the 0.3+ second aftercast introduced after the nerfs.

Right now Pistol 1 fires only once every 0.8 seconds – as slowly as the Rifle, without the Power scaling, and with the nerf, with the ability to only stack 2-3 bleeds on target without Quickness and Condition duration – utterly useless.

Removing the aftercast would improve Pistol’s 1v1 and 1vX potential – and it would still only be with Condition Duration% that we would be able to stack up anything more than 5 bleeds, as we have no direct +Bleed Duration traits.