Guild Wars 2

Dual pistol thief used to be so much fun in all game types, until it had the kitten nerfed out of it. Pistol thief needs to be buffed so it sees some use in the current meta. I think the major change that needs to happen is to see the return of ricochet.

Leave your thoughts below on the changes you think need to be made to make pistol/pistol viable again.

I think the fantasy for Pistol is focused single target damage, I think that’s why they removed Ricochet. We have Longbow for AoE and multi-target.

Although I do agree P/P is pretty sad and can use some major buffs in PvP. I don’t think the problem is the P/P skill though, which is Unload, that seems pretty fine for a burst attack. I think the Culprit is just Pistol 1&2. The #1 does garbage damage, because you’re going to be focusing on Unload you’re going for power and the bleed is insignificant. The 1sec immobilize on #2 is fairly pitiful and you’re better off using the initiative on another unload, five stacks of three seconds of vulnerability is a joke.

I think the fantasy is “use body shot to root them and make then vulnerable and then unload!” It sounds nice on paper but it’s just functionally inferior to unloading twice though.

Esquilax.3491:

I think the fantasy for Pistol is focused single target damage, I think that’s why they removed Ricochet. We have Longbow for AoE and multi-target.

Although I do agree P/P is pretty sad and can use some major buffs in PvP. I don’t think the problem is the P/P skill though, which is Unload, that seems pretty fine for a burst attack. I think the Culprit is just Pistol 1&2. The #1 does garbage damage, because you’re going to be focusing on Unload you’re going for power and the bleed is insignificant. The 1sec immobilize on #2 is fairly pitiful and you’re better off using the initiative on another unload, five stacks of three seconds of vulnerability is a joke.

I think the fantasy is “use body shot to root them and make then vulnerable and then unload!” It sounds nice on paper but it’s just functionally inferior to unloading twice though.

I do agree with what you are saying. The auto damage is pretty sad, both for condi and direct damage and the 3 seconds of 5 vuln on Body Shot just isn’t long enough for it to be that useful.

I think that 5 vuln for 5 seconds would be more useful, or even 3 vuln for 10 seconds for example, just something that allows you to stack decent amounts of vuln for long enough for it to obviously increase your damage.

I also think that Unload is fine, but it’s really the only good skill on PP apart from Black Powder (in some scenarios). If you look at what makes all the best weapon sets in the game viable and widely used, it’s because all of the skills see use (apart from Hammer on Guardian) and imo this is why PP sees very little to no use.

i post other thread to whole thief builds improvement

for p/p you need some unbloackable ability as too much atm flying around
skills #2 need duration increase. immobilize 3 sec (as most class got decrease trait or immunity) and vulnerability need to be 5 sec

It’s not fun, or clever. And it gets made fun of all the time.

uh well, p/p is way better than it was when I last played

but, let’s see. p/p is the only set with no mobility. and steal takes you to your target, which isn’t helpful when you’re ranged. I’d normally say that’s fine, and just play up the no mobility, high damage even more, but that doesn’t seem fitting for a thief. If I were to revamp p/p, I guess I’d power up the disables. Hmm…

Make body shot faster. That’s what I’d do. Decrease the damage ratio to 0.35 and initiative cost to 3, and make it twice as fast. A 1 second immobilize isn’t very useful when it takes you 0.7 seconds to use it.

edit: somehow I didn’t realize bound was a leap finisher. This means p/p has access to stealth. That’s amazing. And the damage on bound is before the stealth too. p/p is so much better than before

[From a vanilla Thief gunslinger, solo PvE PoV.]

1 Change the class name from ‘Thief’ to ‘Rogue’ or something. Won’t happen but words have power, and I’m pretty sure that we wouldn’t have got the relentless kicking we constantly endure if we weren’t called ‘Thieves’… anyway….

2 Draw a big, fat line between PvE (solo and group, since both things don’t fundamentally clash) and PvP (which does fundamentally clash with how a Thief should actually work, given that there’s another human on the receiving end). Get them sorted in that order, and don’t be afraid to have skills that work very differently in each.

3 Look at how other games (and the likes of John Woo flicks) deal with the pistol gunslinger archetype, and make us that. ‘Fast and hard to hit’ is a good start.

3a I dig the whole ‘we live by our wits and skill’ thing, but we’re playing a game; where things beyond our control can nuke us, however well we play. Lag, latency, ‘invalid’ pathing, simply not being able to see the target and what it’s doing, dat camera etc.

In view of that, give us a bit of a passive survivability and mobility buffer.

3b Baseline +~15% movement speed buff, that stacks with all other movement speed buffs.

3c Baseline auto cleanse of movement-impairing conditions every ~10 seconds.

3d Downed skills get a bit of a buff to give us a bit more chance of getting back up; in line with other classes’ downed skills.

3e I’d honestly give us another passive survivability buffer in addition (similar to the Guardian’s passive buffs… maybe we can swap them for some of our stealth, ranged attacking power and traps…). :P

4 Upon equipping two pistols, Steal becomes Reload. Same CD, 1-2 second cast time (that can’t be interrupted, and you can freely move/dodge etc; just not use any attacking skills).

This restores some initiative, which is its main purpose. It should also do ‘some other things’, which I’ll leave open for discussion. Evade? Regen? Condi-cleanse? Gives allies Vigor or something?

You’d have to rework/reword some of the stealing traits to accommodate Reload, but it’s one of the few places I can see where there is a space to add a fundamental P/P change that won’t also affect P/x and x/P users… the only other space being Unload which I think should be left as is.

5 Make Vital Shot fire ~ half-again as fast. It’d still be a pretty garbage AA compared to most classes’ but it’d be a start. This opens up options for increased build-diversity (bleed stacking), that you wouldn’t get if you kept its current RoF but buffed its damage (again).

6 I almost never use skills 2, 4 or 5, in the content I tend to play. It seems odd that I’ve played other MMOs where I had 30-40 skill buttons and I regularly used them all in normal play; but here I only have five… and I don’t even use three of those….

I’d really like to, just for a bit of variety but they’re all competing with Unload for initiative, compounded by wanting the increased damage output from Lead Attacks [please don’t nerf either as a ‘solution’!].

Skills 4 and 5 tend be those MMO skills (in the content I play) that you just don’t need (and are better off not using) against most mobs; but at precisely the point that they actually would be useful, against challenging mobs… those mobs are immune to those skills….

I read plenty of comments that the skills are good as is for other content, so fair enough – but it would be nice if they were a bit more relevant across all types of content.

Skill 2 costs way too much initiative and is uselessly ‘neither fish nor fowl’. I’d go for buffing the Immobilise duration, speeding up its cast/projectile speed, and reduce its initiative cost myself. I’d be happy to lose the Vulnerability for that, but others may well disagree – fair enough.

All that said, of my >20 chars, my gunslinger ‘Thief’ (former rogue, Snaff Prize winning genius, and officer and gentlewoman… who just happens to fight with pistols, or a rapier and pistol… not so much a thief…) is the only char who I really enjoy playing; however demoralising it can sometimes be.

And I’ve been checking out some other MMOs, to see if any of them have got pistol gunslinger right [the ones I previously played didn’t]; and one thing that GW2 has got basically right is the run ‘n’ gun fun aspect of the archetype.

Been Playing almost year now and thief is definitely a class ? enjoy and the reason i started a thief was duo pistol fun. I don’t mean that i don’t enjoy daggers and swords but honestly been reading all over the forums and there is an obvious demand for it. Please Anet make us happy this x-mas

If anything, I think #2 and #4 have to be changed.
PP skill #2 is trying to do too much with mechanics that don’t benefit from it. The only interesting aspect of this skill is that it interrupts movement based skills, but see below for the crux on that matter.
PP skill #4 is an interrupt in a game where blind is superior, so it’s essentially constant upkeep what with the 5s cooldown on interrupted skills as opposed to a full cooldown on missed skills… So in essence it’s competing with #5 where #5 has far greater synergy with other skills.
Really got no suggestions on how to tweak #2, and #4. But just wanted to say something.

Just an idea.
I think it would be interesting if skill 2, and 4, had that mechanic where they do subtley different effects depending on whether a) the target was performing an action or not… or b) the target is already under an effect, such as a condition.

eg. If the target is already under the effects of vulnerability pistol #2 won’t do the immobilize effect, it will add more stacks of vulnerability and it will also return initiative.

I think allowing p/p to fire both pistols with #1 and increasing finisher chance on unload to let p/p stack conditions would be nice. There was also a suggestion to make #5 into a dark field to give Thieves better sustain with lifesteals, especially with boosted Unload.

Korochun.5862:

There was also a suggestion to make #5 into a dark field

and give up stealth??

Back ? Pistol / Pistol was never a thing, you can’t bring back something that was never actually any good.

It is simple. P/P needs an AoE component or a mobility component. Right now it is lacking either making it a relatively useless weapon set. In a dream world, Unload would bounce between 3 targets and P/P would have a short range teleport.

Range. It needs range. I gave up the game after the nerfs. I’d come back for range.

Besides the very small field at your feet that can blind more than one enemy thief pistol is the only truly single target ranged weapon in the game. None of the attacks deal damage to more than one target at a time. Every other ranged weapon in the game can potentially pierce, bounce, or has some kind of AoE hit.

Personally I wouldn’t have removed ricochet until I had something else to replace it, but I guess anet doesn’t mind replacing something that works with nothing that doesn’t and being glacially slow with the rework they promised.

Here’s the P/P Daredevil build ive been working on in PvP

Dunno, I’m starting to think that it’d be easier, and more characterful, to fix ‘slinger by making it a subset of Warrior. I’ll RP that the increased armour and HP represents my ability to dance and dodge around enemy attacks.

Change Crack Shot to include pistols and give it a movement speed buff, and let ‘slingers keep wearing their medium armour skins… job’s a good ’un.

the problem with p/p atm even if they buff the dmg and range and i dont know what…
too many class got block reflec atm.. just one aura sharing ele and you r useless
it cant handle guards sw/f LB
it cant handle ele d/f shout and aura
it cant handle bunker builds

so atm useless even though we got some little dmg buff

p/p needs additional mobility or gap openers. The damage is actually decent now.

Body shot needs to be cheaper and have a longer immob, and the base damage on the auto needs increased It’s not that efficient a bleed source for condition builds anyway, so condi builds getting a slight damage buff on the auto wouldn’t really change much.

Honestly though, gunslinger needs to be an elite spec, it needs to replace steal with a disengage style ability, add a 900 range rifle with a heavy single target condition set, and have traits roughly designed around pistol/rife buffs, ranged utility, and support focused “powderbomb” ranged aoe utility skills so it can build in to either a solid 1200 range power or condi dps build using core utils, or a solid 900 range build with a lot of support utility with trait buffed powderbombs. I’m thinking non-DPS grenade-like abilities like throwable blind fields, an aoe version of smoke wall, a ranged aoe 5s immob, and an elite “reload” that simply refreshes all init and the f1.

Since its an elite spec and wouldn’t work with daredevil, I think they could get away with such an elite without creating too overpowered melee builds that utilize it.

I did put this up,

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/What-I-ve-been-running-in-PvP-P-P-O/first#

PopeUrban.2578:

p/p needs additional mobility or gap openers. The damage is actually decent now.

Body shot needs to be cheaper and have a longer immob, and the base damage on the auto needs increased It’s not that efficient a bleed source for condition builds anyway, so condi builds getting a slight damage buff on the auto wouldn’t really change much.

Honestly though, gunslinger needs to be an elite spec, it needs to replace steal with a disengage style ability, add a 900 range rifle with a heavy single target condition set, and have traits roughly designed around pistol/rife buffs, ranged utility, and support focused “powderbomb” ranged aoe utility skills so it can build in to either a solid 1200 range power or condi dps build using core utils, or a solid 900 range build with a lot of support utility with trait buffed powderbombs. I’m thinking non-DPS grenade-like abilities like throwable blind fields, an aoe version of smoke wall, a ranged aoe 5s immob, and an elite “reload” that simply refreshes all init and the f1.

Since its an elite spec and wouldn’t work with daredevil, I think they could get away with such an elite without creating too overpowered melee builds that utilize it.

We certainly see eye to eye on how the ’slinger should play/feel, but I disagree with the approach to fixing the core class being to push the problem to the right with elites.

Your char should thematically play/feel like that archetype as you play the actual game; not something that doesn’t throughout until you slog your way to 80, then buy an expansion, then have to do a potentially unfun grind to fully unlock the elite, and only then can your ’slinger play/feel like a ’slinger.

That’s why all my suggestions totally ignore Daredevil: It shouldn’t be necessary, and the journey itself should be fun – not an unfun means to the end of reaching the alleged fun of the endgame.

The main problem here is that there isn’t much space that you can use to alter P/P without affecting P/x or x/P. Having some Rogue thematic stuff baseline for ‘Thief’ adds some design/balancing elbow room (and is fair, compared to other classes).

If 3 gets any better, it’ll just end up being nerfed; so I’d be wary of improving that.

Which leaves only Steal → Reload, upon equipping two pistols, as the last bit of space. I’m sure that there’s no reason why only an elite would be able to do this?

Give P/P a slide attack that knocks down.
And then another attack that flips over a target while firing downward onto them.
Then I can make Dante from DmC.

I’d love a slow-mo sideways dive, hosing, while doves fly about everywhere.

And an Equilibrium-style, shoot all the things, spinning AoE. Ahh, Bullet Ballet: How I miss thee! [4:53.]

I’m still going to stick with my suggestion for P/P 1,2, &3.

1) Raise the multiplier of the #1 skill to 0.75 and have it apply 6 seconds of vuln. That means the auto-sustained damage comes out to 0.915mult/sec and results in a constant 7 vuln.

2) Make #2 apply 2 stacks of poison (6 sec) since its both a damage and utility condi. That will let P/D still be viable and synergize with the DA poison trait (this rounds out P/D to applying vuln, poison, bleeding, and torment consistently). Possibly adding boon destruction in addition may also make it useful.

3) Change #3 to a 4 shot backwards evasion (300 units with a matrix style roll) with a 2.0 multipler (0.5 per shot). That lets you stay at range, giving you the evasion the set needs, maintains burst, and limits spam due to the incresed distance. Note that a large chunck of damage from the set has been moved to the autos so you’re not losing anything, but instead gaining situationally useful utility like the rest of our successful sets. The evasion should be 0.5 seconds with a total skill time of 0.75 seconds to allow for counterplay.

I don’t agree with suggestions that reduce the number of hits in Unload. I found that the best (and most characterful and fun) approach is to drop each enemy extremely fast with (ideally, for the vast majority of mobs) a single Unload each. [And in low level areas, dropping two or three enemies with just one Unload, if you line the shot up right… who needs Piercing?!]

This requires lots of hits to work properly, since it involves lots of ‘on crit, 50% chance to…’ procs, and priming the target with early hits and then benefiting from those priming effects with later hits – all in the one Unload (ie minimal unit time and minimal Initiative cost). I’ll give a detailed breakdown at the bottom of the post.

This approach also allows a bonus to survivability, as it opens up one of the few spaces where you can add some survivability gear without tanking your damage output, and can actually increase it.

Sure, for power builds, full Zerk gives pretty close to the optimal ratio of Pow, Prec and Fer. But if you have lots of ‘on crit, % chance of…’ potential damage in your build, then your damage output can increase by adding Prec, even at the expense of some Pow and Fer. Your damage can increase by switching some Zerk pieces to Mara, which gives you some Vit in the bargain.

For all of the above to work as reliably as it needs to (given how squishy we are, with no AoE), it simply requires as many hits as possible in the shortest amount of time; the eight we already have with Unload seeming to be exactly the right number IME.

Just for anyone who’s interested, my (especially opening) Unload needs to do all this, to reliably do what I want it to do:-

1 Take enemy to <90% health to get Fury and then +250 Fer.

2 Then crit, with a subsequent hit, to extend Fury’s duration.

3 Proc Sigil of Air (50% chance on crit).

4 Proc Sigil of Fire (50% chance on crit).

5 Apply a Condition (either 50% or 60% chance on crit, depending upon whether I’m using Sundering Strikes or Ankle Shots).

6 Then, with subsequent hits, benefiting from #5 by getting +10% increased damage (Exposed Weakness; and another +10% against that target if using Ankle Shots).

7 Take the target to <50% health.

8 Then, with subsequent hits, benefit from #7 by getting +20% increased damage.

Eight hits seems to be able to do all that very reliably. Four wouldn’t have a prayer.

AsurasRCute.4136:

I don’t agree with suggestions that reduce the number of hits in Unload. I found that the best (and most characterful and fun) approach is to drop each enemy extremely fast with (ideally, for the vast majority of mobs) a single Unload each. [And in low level areas, dropping two or three enemies with just one Unload, if you line the shot up right… who needs Piercing?!]

This requires lots of hits to work properly, since it involves lots of ‘on crit, 50% chance to…’ procs, and priming the target with early hits and then benefiting from those priming effects with later hits – all in the one Unload (ie minimal unit time and minimal Initiative cost). I’ll give a detailed breakdown at the bottom of the post.

This approach also allows a bonus to survivability, as it opens up one of the few spaces where you can add some survivability gear without tanking your damage output, and can actually increase it.

Sure, for power builds, full Zerk gives pretty close to the optimal ratio of Pow, Prec and Fer. But if you have lots of ‘on crit, % chance of…’ potential damage in your build, then your damage output can increase by adding Prec, even at the expense of some Pow and Fer. Your damage can increase by switching some Zerk pieces to Mara, which gives you some Vit in the bargain.

For all of the above to work as reliably as it needs to (given how squishy we are, with no AoE), it simply requires as many hits as possible in the shortest amount of time; the eight we already have with Unload seeming to be exactly the right number IME.

Just for anyone who’s interested, my (especially opening) Unload needs to do all this, to reliably do what I want it to do:-

1 Take enemy to <90% health to get Fury and then +250 Fer.

2 Then crit, with a subsequent hit, to extend Fury’s duration.

3 Proc Sigil of Air (50% chance on crit).

4 Proc Sigil of Fire (50% chance on crit).

5 Apply a Condition (either 50% or 60% chance on crit, depending upon whether I’m using Sundering Strikes or Ankle Shots).

6 Then, with subsequent hits, benefiting from #5 by getting +10% increased damage (Exposed Weakness; and another +10% against that target if using Ankle Shots).

7 Take the target to <50% health.

8 Then, with subsequent hits, benefit from #7 by getting +20% increased damage.

Eight hits seems to be able to do all that very reliably. Four wouldn’t have a prayer.

Well, the current effective CD to Unload is 5 seconds due to the initiative recharge and an effective channel time of 1.75 seconds including the aftercast iirc. So in 5 seconds you can fit 8 hits plus 4 autos for an effective 12 shots at an effective 4.92 multiplier total (.98 mult/sec). With changing it to a 4 shot 0.75 second channel you can effectively fit 9 shots in that timeframe at resulting in a 5.25 multiplier (1.05 mult/sec) meaning its a 7% DPS boost before we get into sigil/trait procs for this 5 second period.

Let’s assume all zerk gear and no precision on the runes, resulting in a 50% crit chance without fury. This means each sigil has a 25% chance to proc per hit. In this 5 second period the 9 shots results in a 0.5% chance of not proccing either and an 85% chance to proc both. If we assume that it takes 3 shots to proc fury initially in this timeframe that mean 6 shots have a 35% chance to proc the sigils. This results in a 0.1% chance of proccing neither and a 92% chance of proccing both.

Ankle shots has a 30% chance of triggering without fury and a 42% chance with fury per shot. This results in 1.3% chance of not proccing in the 9 shots (assuming the 3rd shot triggers fury). Overall this results in a 90.7% chance of proccing Ankle Shots and both sigils.

Meanwhile, the new vuln on auto guarantees an extra 5% damage. The main strength of these changes thoughis that even without using unload in this 5 second period you could fit in 6 autos. With a 0.75 multiplier, and including the building vuln per shot starting from 0 you get an average of 0.92 mult/sec which is just under the current unload plus autoattack in the same time period for no initiative. This allows you to save initiative for the situationally useful skills on the rest of the set while providing strong ranged pressure. Overall I think that’s fair because the set gives up mobility from shortbow and is only 900 range compared to everyone elses 1200 ranged pressure.

Maugetarr: I’d certainly be up for us having higher sustained damage, mostly via our AA being less feeble; but not at the expense of the one thing that we have that makes us competitive and useful (at least in open world PvE) compared to other classes, and the one thing that actually does allow us to feel like our archetype, and therefore the one thing that the Devs got right: Our ability to choose to front-load high spike damage with Unload.

Your “current effective CD to Unload is 5 seconds”, that most of your argument is based on, only really applies to situations where we’re stood still (not recharging Ini as we’re doing something else anyway, like dodging or running for our lives) shooting an HP sack; which is something that we do a pretty small minority of the time.

At least IME, a better measure is that we can, when we need to, hit the target/s eight times in just under two seconds; or 16 times in just under four seconds; or 24 times in just under six seconds.

Examples where the short time-window is more relevant than the sustained ‘Unload once, VS until Ini has recharged, Unload…’:-

Three dangerous mobs are running at you, there are no more mobs around (so Ini will fully recharge before the next encounter), and here we are with no AoE – quickly give each an Unload and be on your merry way.

It’s better (quicker, safer and more convenient… and more fun) to insta-drop an Earth Elemental with two Unloads back to back before it gets its projectile reflect bubble up. Same with Vines, Wurms, anything that will burrow, block, cloak, fly, become immune, or call in reinforcements etc a few seconds into the encounter.

You see a Vile Thrasher winding up its spin attack, which will Torment a bunch of your fellow players stood in its path: Two Unloads, back to back, drop it fast! Same for other ‘Way too dangerous to be allowed to live long’ enemies like Mordrem Trolls (especially when Menders are healing them, where the healing will outpace our sustained damage, but not a second Unload) or Teragriffs.

Since the buff from Executioner is >> the Lead Attacks buff from having five more Ini, you kill the likes of Husks faster by hitting them with two Unloads up front (which takes them to <50% health), before switching to VS if you choose to even do the latter, depending on the specific situation.

With bosses with AoE death fields that have greater radius than our pistols have range, you can forget sustained damage since we die so quickly in the death field. But we can at least fire off an Unload or three before we have to gtfo and heal up (our Ini recharging as we do so).

Please forgive me if I’m missing something, but how would your suggestion work better in all of the above, than the Unload that we have already?

Well, I tend to think in terms of extended fights so stuff more like fractal bosses rather than open world mobs. However, if you want to think about it from more of a shot to shot basis, we can do that. The current channel time is listed as 1.5 seconds (I believe it’s about 1.75 with aftercast, but we’ll use 1.5 for sake of ease). Shot to shot of autos is 0.82 and my suggested length of the new unload is 0.75 seconds putting unload and 1 auto at the same length as the current unload. I believe the currently listed multiplier of 2.4 was before they updated the damage from the autos and Unload, so the current values are ~0.5 and ~3.0 respectively. Since my suggestion is to put unload at a 2.0 multiplier and it will have an overall multiplier of 2.75 in the same time frame as the 3.0 multiplier currently occurs. The tradeoff is that the sustained damage is much better making the set more useful in situations like where 2 unloads are insufficient to down an enemy (world bosses, PvP, etc.). Additionally, after stacking the vuln from the autos resulting in a stack of 7, the value of the new unload and sigle auto comes out to 2.94 reducing the difference in the current and new values.

Overall, the idea is to free up the set so it doesn’t become such an initiative sink to sustain damage, but still is capable of burst when needes. Moving damage from unload to the autos and then giving unload some utility instead accomplishes that.

P/P need ground targetable shadowstep on #2 so that you can reposition and thus decieve opeonents.

I would also add reflect to unload or some uber buff like stab- aegis or something +swiftness

stealth #1 is to much like unload it should grant quickness and relocate you from your target since you want to have distance after steal…

Following this i would change p/d #3 to rooth with all the conidies with out shadow step working at range of 600-900.
Oh yeah i would love this mainhand pistole…

Maugetarr: Sure, I knew which types of fights you were thinking of; but then we have the eternal problem of ‘Why should I have to sacrifice my build, playstyle and fun for content that you prefer and I don’t particularly like? And vice versa, naturally?’

This is why I never envy Devs; honestly I can’t see any way out of this without some game mode skill separation. The only compromise I can see here is that we keep P/P as a core set for the open world stuff, pretty much as is but substantially buffed in some ways.

Since your suggestion mainly concerns the more elite type of content, it would maybe better fit a new Elite Specialisation? Carbine, rifle etc? Your proposal certainly feels more like archetypal (in games/media) carbine fighting than the archetypal (in games/media) dual-wield pistol hoser… that we pretty much have but with a few glaring things missing.

Cheers for the good chat anyway, whatever the actual balance result turns out to be.

AsurasRCute.4136:

PopeUrban.2578:

p/p needs additional mobility or gap openers. The damage is actually decent now.

Body shot needs to be cheaper and have a longer immob, and the base damage on the auto needs increased It’s not that efficient a bleed source for condition builds anyway, so condi builds getting a slight damage buff on the auto wouldn’t really change much.

Honestly though, gunslinger needs to be an elite spec, it needs to replace steal with a disengage style ability, add a 900 range rifle with a heavy single target condition set, and have traits roughly designed around pistol/rife buffs, ranged utility, and support focused “powderbomb” ranged aoe utility skills so it can build in to either a solid 1200 range power or condi dps build using core utils, or a solid 900 range build with a lot of support utility with trait buffed powderbombs. I’m thinking non-DPS grenade-like abilities like throwable blind fields, an aoe version of smoke wall, a ranged aoe 5s immob, and an elite “reload” that simply refreshes all init and the f1.

Since its an elite spec and wouldn’t work with daredevil, I think they could get away with such an elite without creating too overpowered melee builds that utilize it.

We certainly see eye to eye on how the ’slinger should play/feel, but I disagree with the approach to fixing the core class being to push the problem to the right with elites.

Your char should thematically play/feel like that archetype as you play the actual game; not something that doesn’t throughout until you slog your way to 80, then buy an expansion, then have to do a potentially unfun grind to fully unlock the elite, and only then can your ’slinger play/feel like a ’slinger.

That’s why all my suggestions totally ignore Daredevil: It shouldn’t be necessary, and the journey itself should be fun – not an unfun means to the end of reaching the alleged fun of the endgame.

The main problem here is that there isn’t much space that you can use to alter P/P without affecting P/x or x/P. Having some Rogue thematic stuff baseline for ‘Thief’ adds some design/balancing elbow room (and is fair, compared to other classes).

If 3 gets any better, it’ll just end up being nerfed; so I’d be wary of improving that.

Which leaves only Steal -> Reload, upon equipping two pistols, as the last bit of space. I’m sure that there’s no reason why only an elite would be able to do this?

I agree. The base class should feel like a watered down version of what you actually wanted to play. With the proposed body shot changes and the way unload damage works now, you’re still looking at a fully functional slinger. Does it have rifle access, gunpowder bombs, or the reload elite? No. But then again, daredevil is the “dodge thief” elite. You can (and many people did) play a very similar feeling build before investing in the elite, but the elite takes that playstyle and cranks it up to eleven.

Elite specs exist to un-hybridize a given playstyle. The concept that a core spec should feel as specialized as taking an elite is a broken notion. The entire purpose of elite specs is forced specialization, as you can only ever take one at a time. That balance is what allows them to specialize in ways that would otherwise be broken (like reload or disengage on a daredevil)

In any case, despite anet’s best intentions, core specs by their very nature can never have more than one or two builds that are competitive with what an elite spec offers. P/P Thiekittenlinger should abolsutely feed like deathblossom thief>deathblossom daredevil. The core spec version cn do a decent job at it, but using the elite trades off potential hybridization (like taking SA just for vendomshare, CS for extra passive heals, etc.) to ratchet the specialized nature of the build up to eleven (in this case, evasion and condition damage)

P/P at base shouldn’t be comparable with an elite spec meant to take a baseline, middle of the road general thief and turn him in to a highly specialized ranged character. P/P with some additional wiggle room from an improved body shot to make up for its biggest issue (mobility) is still a really good build, even without baked in extra range of AoE. Would it be inferior to running a proposed gunslinger spec? absolutely. However gunslinger might not be a good option for a more hybridized build like p/d or d/p, which is where we should see the core class shine more.

Don’t take this as me saying base theif doesn’t need some improvements. It does.

However those improvements have to be made from the lens of elite specs being the sum of all future build enablers in the future, and not being wholly limited to just being useful with their granted weapons, but have interesting uses within the specs themselves.

P/P can be made “good enough” at base while still leaving plenty of room for a potential elite to make it more specialized. The difference between p/p with steal, and p/p with a disengage doesn’t seem like much… but consider what you’re potentially losing when you toss out steal. Certain traits are effectively without use, like anything that affects a target. Those may be important parts of a more midrange p/p build if we can get body shot in a place where it’s usable, where you’d see a slinger build much more focused on maintaining distance and using new utilities for a more defensive approach.

AsurasRCute.4136:

Maugetarr: Sure, I knew which types of fights you were thinking of; but then we have the eternal problem of ‘Why should I have to sacrifice my build, playstyle and fun for content that you prefer and I don’t particularly like? And vice versa, naturally?’

This is why I never envy Devs; honestly I can’t see any way out of this without some game mode skill separation. The only compromise I can see here is that we keep P/P as a core set for the open world stuff, pretty much as is but substantially buffed in some ways.

Since your suggestion mainly concerns the more elite type of content, it would maybe better fit a new Elite Specialisation? Carbine, rifle etc? Your proposal certainly feels more like archetypal (in games/media) carbine fighting than the archetypal (in games/media) dual-wield pistol hoser… that we pretty much have but with a few glaring things missing.

Cheers for the good chat anyway, whatever the actual balance result turns out to be.

That’s fine. I don’t mind agreeing to disagree on this one. It’s what I’d like to see done with pistols or rifle really. It would be great to have a competitive DPS ranged set in the core class, but honestly if they went with rifle, I wish they’d go more of an assault rifle style with low(ish) damage at 1200 getting stronger when getting closer to your target (think lifeblast). That would give us range but be balanced around higher risk higher reward play. 3 shot burst auto attacks would be neat.

deda.8302:

P/P need ground targetable shadowstep on #2 so that you can reposition and thus decieve opeonents.

Put phase retreat on pistol 2, 300 range teleport away from the target, and that’d be all you need.

If you remember it was like that on p/d #3 then they nerfed it so that you must hit before porting:(
Mini sb#5 on pistol 2 would be so awesome

The only thing I loved about the pistols was being able to keep a group at bay with AoE cc.

Now it’s long gone, and my pistols took the dust.
Purity of the weapon is a subjective view that I definitely don’t share with the devs. Ricochet should be brought back (range + bounce)

I’m getting the distinct impression that the pistol rework that was planned is literally never going to happen.

I have been seeing a LOT of pistol/pistol thieves running around as of late with a daredevil build. I gave it a shot and built a decent spec and i think people are just excited about burning up a quick 30k+ dmg burst using unload after unload. I used to play P/P before the trait changes and it was at least viable. I feel like now you get a single target burst and then have to wait a month to get some ini to do it again, but that’s it.

I was fighting wyvern matriarch the other day, and a P/P thief ACTUALLY gave me lip for using SB. When he got cornered in a pool of acid before dying, I made sure to wave to him from the other side since I was able to get out of it lol. Though not relevant, I had to share.

In all honesty though, I hope they do come back with a viable build for pistols. We used to have ricochet and opportunist traits, so hopefully they will give some sort of AoE and a better way of managing ini.