Guild Wars 2

Can’t make up my mind on this, as I love both, so chime in and give your opinion! I’d appreciate it.

On the one hand, an off-hand sword gives you a strong counter-attack+clone, and you have Fencer’s Finesse, which gives you stacking ferocity and a cooldown reduction… Pretty good.

On the other hand (well same hand, really), you have an off-hand pistol where you get Magic Bullet, a CC move that can hit up to 4 targets with different debilitations. It’s phantasms engage from a range, making them better at staying alive compared to the phantasmal swordman. You also get a trait with the pistol, but unless you’re running a condition build for the bleeds, it is otherwise completely reliant on interrupts to be worth anything, and the cast-time on the off-hand pistols can make interrupting targets a bit tricky. Pistol is also susceptible to reflects.

I like both, but Fencers Finesse often drags me in the swords direction, it just seems more reliable and safer than Duelist’s Discipline.

Which do you prefer?

It would probably be pretty useful to state which game mode you’re planning on using either one in.

PvE mostly, but I am honestly interested in opinions for both PvE and sPvP. I don’t do WvW though.

For PvE, I’d suggest Pistol. The reason being, you want 3 phantasms up at all times, and the pistol phantasm is stronger, but has longer cd. Meaning, when all 3 phantasms are up, they’ll do more dps than sword, which in turn trades damage for spammability. Also, sword phantasms are more vulnerable to AoE, since they tend to stay close to their target.
The stun is also useful for breakbars.

If you end up choosing sword regardless of what i said, then keep in mind to not use sword 4 if you have 3 phantasms up, as it will spawn a clone and overwrite one of your phantasms.

Side note: Does any1 know if you can cancel the aftercast of sword 4?

By far most of the time in PvE you won’t have time before a fight ends to get 3 phantasms up, so I’m not sure why that’s a concern of yours when choosing weapons. Sword offers more utility, and especially once you unlock Chronomancer you don’t need the extra CC from Pistol since gravity well and Shield5 more than take care of any CC you might need.

Pretty sure you can’t cancel the aftercast of Sword 4, but you should be able to delay the clone generation by jumping the same way you can for Shield 4

Havardmj.8570:

For PvE, I’d suggest Pistol. The reason being, you want 3 phantasms up at all times, and the pistol phantasm is stronger, but has longer cd. Meaning, when all 3 phantasms are up, they’ll do more dps than sword, which in turn trades damage for spammability. Also, sword phantasms are more vulnerable to AoE, since they tend to stay close to their target.
The stun is also useful for breakbars.

If you end up choosing sword regardless of what i said, then keep in mind to not use sword 4 if you have 3 phantasms up, as it will spawn a clone and overwrite one of your phantasms.

Side note: Does any1 know if you can cancel the aftercast of sword 4?

The sword phantasm deals less damage per attack than the pistol phantasm however it attacks a lot more often than the pistol phantasm which results in 3 sword phantasms having higher dps than 3 pistol phantasms (unless you take dueling for bleeds). Besides for most raid encounters and fractals the pull from focus is fantastic and it’s worth taking focus even though it’s phantasm deals the least amount out of the three. Also in raids your trying to keep up as many shield phantasms as possible for the alacrity anyways. For open world focus Pull focus phantasm and shattering after the phantasm attack offers some ok aoe damage.

PvE: Sword for power, Pistol for condi.

The old Pistol vs Sword debate used to be a thing back in the days when player companions (minions, summons, pets) didn’t have their 95% when un-targetted. That meant that you had to be careful when using Sword clones as they would likely die out to cleave or aoe damage. Thus, is cases like that you would take Pistol as your Phantasms had a much higher chance of survival.

However, now that Illusions are practically indestructible you can safely bring Sword clones to every fights without having to worry about them exploding….unless you’re a shatter build of sort.

If you’re a core Mesmer you can actually bring both Sword and Pistol for situations that don’t call for a Focus. Though for a Chrono, you’ll effectively never use that weapon since shield takes up one spot leaving Sword for damage or focus for reflects/mobs.