Guild Wars 2

Einlanzer.1627:

Please, only Vital Shot and Unload represent significant enough sources of damage to warrant consideration, and condition damage affects Vital Shot’s total damage output significantly more than power does (or at least it would if it was working as intended). Unload benefits only from power, but again, due to the initiative cost it is intended to supplement Vital Shot, not the other way around.

Well, this is something I have not experienced. I experimented with the Mists’ Heavy Golem only using Skill #1 Vital Shot. With Carrion / Rampager jewel it took far longer to bring it down vs Berserker. About ~5s difference in how quickly they go down.

I also question the notion that P/P is slanted towards a condition build. I mean look at Rifle Warriors. Their Skill #1 Bleeding Shot does even more bleed damage for longer (just looking at the tooltip). I have yet to come across any Rifle Warrior build guide urging players to spec for condition damage.

Anyway, that’s just my observation(s).

How about starting off with increasing attack speed for pistols and see if that makes them perform well enough.

Einlanzer.1627:

Tulisin, you realize that Pistol is supposed to be a condition weapon, right? And P/P is hybridized, but it’s still supposed to be skewed toward condition in the same way that D/D is a a hybrid set skewed toward Power. While P/P does and should benefit from Power, it does not need to be fully optimal with a Power only build. I don’t believe that was ever the intention behind it.

Why then does Unload not add bleeding? Why do you think Pistol is skewed towards condition damage if The only (damage) condition it offers is bleed from it’s #1, Vital Shot and Sneak Attack. Pistols don’t seem intended to be skewed towards condition damage.

ensoriki.5789:

Power and condition duration benefit P/P the most.
The bleeding on Vital shot gets stronger by just increasing it’s kittening duration.

How so? It’s 4 seconds bleeding, to get any benefits duration has to be increased to 5 seocnds, or a 25% increase. To get that increase you have to spec into Deadly Arts and/or very specific Runes and Sigils. Condition Damage has no ‘breakpoints’ and is therefore easier to increase.

I think it’s pretty obvious that Einlanzer has never played warrior. The fact that he thinks most of its damage comes from condition damage, when it is so obviously a burst ranged weapon, is proof enough that he has no idea what he’s talking about.

Pistol/Pistol will never be viable as a condition set up because it will have to compete with Pistol/Dagger, which, unless they super buff Vital Shot to the point where the stealth attack becomes useless, will always outclass it in this regard.

Apparently, he also knows what developers intended.

If they’re going to buff P/P, I’d like to see it become more of a burst range weapon. Pistol/Dagger is our range condition set up, with Short bow benefiting from both (with Power the better choice for it). Making Pistol/Pistol a condition set up would just make either P/D or P/P useless.

December 14th Nerf The Pistols And Backstab

SpaceCowboy.1398:

Einlanzer.1627:

Please, only Vital Shot and Unload represent significant enough sources of damage to warrant consideration, and condition damage affects Vital Shot’s total damage output significantly more than power does (or at least it would if it was working as intended). Unload benefits only from power, but again, due to the initiative cost it is intended to supplement Vital Shot, not the other way around.

Well, this is something I have not experienced. I experimented with the Mists’ Heavy Golem only using Skill #1 Vital Shot. With Carrion / Rampager jewel it took far longer to bring it down vs Berserker. About ~5s difference in how quickly they go down.

I also question the notion that P/P is slanted towards a condition build. I mean look at Rifle Warriors. Their Skill #1 Bleeding Shot does even more bleed damage for longer (just looking at the tooltip). I have yet to come across any Rifle Warrior build guide urging players to spec for condition damage.

Anyway, that’s just my observation(s).

You’re missing the point I’m trying to make. It is not that Pistols currently function as condition primary, in fact P/P currently works much better (but still not amazingly) as a power set. I’m not arguing that you should go spec condition for P/P, I’m arguing that it’s supposed to be more viable with condition damage than it is. The reason Pistols feel weak offensively is primarily because Vital Shot is broken, and secondarily because of overly-situational utility and weak traits. This is the case regardless of your build.

I would bet anything that the intent was for Vital Shot to be about as good of a bleed skill as Bleeding Shot is. The reason why it’s pretty clear is because the activation speed for Vital Shot is 50% faster (even though the actual rate of fire is nearly identical) while the bleed duration is 50% longer on Bleeding Shot. In addition to firing as slowly as the rifle (meaning bleed stacks are fail), the damage and range are also lower, meaning that Vital Shot is altogether dramatically inferior to Bleeding Shot, which is almost certainly not intended, and is also almost certainly because no one noticed that Vital Shot fires more slowly than it was intended to.

Einlanzer.1627:

meaning that Vital Shot is altogether dramatically inferior to Bleeding Shot, which is almost certainly not intended

You’ve still never offered compelling evidence for this statement other than “I feel it in my bones” and “game developers always zero-sum things nicely like that”.

Tulisin, you must be insane. Einlanzer is best pals with the developers. He knows everything they intended to do. He doesn’t need to provide proof (that I’ve asked for multiple times in other threads and been ignored each time). He simply needs to state something, and you have to believe him because he knows exactly what was intended for this game.

If p/p was suppose to be a condition weapon then why does its traits go into crit?

LittleRaven.7319:

If p/p was suppose to be a condition weapon then why does its traits go into crit?

If Sword was intended to be one of our 3 available main hand weapons (and remember, thieves have the least weaponset options in the game), why doesn’t it get a trait at all?
Who designed Last Refuge? Its poorly designed and usually ends up ensuring a thief’s death rather then helping them survive.
Why does Hard to catch leave us CC’d after the shadowstep (I’ve never used this, but these are the reports I’ve read).
How does Richochet Even exist? 5% bounce chance on pistol shots AND its a Second Tier Trait?

The designers are human, and make mistakes. Furthermore, there are only so many trait slots, some things might have ended up where they were via process of elimination. Claiming that the placement of the trait is a sign of intent from the developers is ludicrous at best.

Kratholos, Tulisin, you can be snarky all you want but it doesn’t make you right. While I can’t claim to know anything with absolute certainty, there’s a helpful little thing we can deploy here called “deductive logic” to make informed guesses that have a certain probability of being correct without having to have full ‘proof’. That’s how science works and progresses and how discoveries are made.

Evidence #1 (primary) – the activation speed for Vital Shot is 1/2 second, while the activation speed for Bleeding shot is 2/3 second. This would imply that Vital Shot would fire 50% faster with no recovery time (many weapons currently do not have one, such as Mesmer Greatsword), and with the same recovery time you could estimate about a 25-35% difference. Bleeding shot’s bleed duration just so happens to also be 50% longer (4 seconds vs 6 seconds). The reality is that the pistol has slower recovery relative to activation than the rifle, making the two fire at almost exactly the same rate despite it being intuitively obvious that pistols should fire faster.

Evidence#2 (supporting) – all of the damage and effects specs for Vital Shot are significantly lower than for Bleeding Shot. Due to having little signficant difference in damage from other sources, P/P flat-out underperforms in DPS compared to the rifle (and many other sets), which can be observed through testing. In addition to stacking fewer bleeds AND doing less upfront damage in general, it has shorter range, which would imply it should be the opposite.

Rational deduction – the specs for the two skills were balanced on paper, with an observational oversight as to Vital Shot’s actual recast. It is intended to be significantly (though not necessarily 50%) faster than Bleeding Shot to compensate for the reduced damage, reduced range, and reduced bleed duration. It is likely no coincidence that virtually every bleed stacker #1 can maintain 8-9 bleeds on a target over time while Vital Shot can barely maintain 5.

It really couldn’t be more elementary. Either I’m right and it’s a design oversight, or you’re right and the designers are just plain stupid and/or intended for P/P to be weaker on every level than the warrior’s rifle (which it closely mirrors in application). I’m inclined to lean toward the former assumption.

If P/P is changed to be strict con damage set ill be mad

Ichishi.9613:

If P/P is changed to be strict con damage set ill be mad

I will too; I don’t think it will be.

Here is a simple and effective solution. Make body shot a targetable blast that does DMG and 2 stacks of vulnerability. This will create stealth viability for p/p which allows for condition damage viability without touching unload which could make a great finisher.

imo PP should be direct damage, single target builds focus. We have plenty of condition damage options already, and SB is the great AoE weapon. I am hoping they will give pistol 2 some added utility (not more damage, else it will just compete with unload), like a short 1.5 sec cripple. That plus vuln would make it a real option in certain circumstances. Also i think unload needs to either channel faster or do a bit more damage, to increase the build’s burst capacity.

Honestly, they should just move the vulnerability from #2 to #3 (give a stack of vulnerability per hit, adjust as needed) and put a new skill in the #2 slot. Body Shot and Unload are in this terrible place where you’ll only ever use one or the other, whichever one does the most damage, since there’s no utility and minimal situational usage to either skill.

Ensign.2189:

Body Shot and Unload are in this terrible place where you’ll only ever use one or the other, whichever one does the most damage, since there’s no utility and minimal situational usage to either skill.

The catch here is that Body Shot technically has a place where the thief is running a heavily defensive/utility based build and the damage granted to the group via Vulnerability is actually better than the DPS the thief could otherwise bring to the table themselves. The problem is that nobody actually plays a thief like that, even viable support thief builds like venom share and combat medic tend to have enough offense to make Body Shot a bad tradeoff.

Tulisin.6945:

The catch here is that Body Shot technically has a place where the thief is running a heavily defensive/utility based build and the damage granted to the group via Vulnerability is actually better than the DPS the thief could otherwise bring to the table themselves.

Absolutely. Basically, for any given set of stats, there’s a critical party size – above that limit, you use Body Shot exclusively; below that limit, you use Unload exclusively.

There’s essentially no team composition where you use both Body Shot and Unload (technically, there’s a slight benefit to be gained right on the edge where you switch from Body Shot to Unload once your target is low enough, but the difference in output is small and the boundary hard enough to compute that it hardly matters).

In practice, Body Shot is ‘dump initiative into more normal damage’, and Unload is ‘dump initiative into more normal damage’, guaranteeing you’ll always have at least one dead skill on your bar.

Hence why I suggest just dumping the Vulnerability onto Unload and making a brand new skill for #2, preferably a blast finisher.

Maybe Body Shot could be simply changed into a “spammable projectile combo”? Just reduce it’s initiative cost to 1 or 2 and up the damage to similar levels as a power based autoattack.

Everything gets nerfed, our underwater abilities get buffed.

There are only 2 improvements I’d like to see to Pistols:

1. I’d like to see an improvement to either the duration of the bleeding on Vital Shot, or increase its rate of fire, so that more stacks can be maintained. As a condition damage thief I like PP but feel the bleed stacks are a little lacking unless you have access to regular stealth. As I don’t use stealth very much I mainly use PP for the CC and Vulnerability when grouping, so damage wise it is not as strong for me as DD or SB is. If the bleeding was improved in some way I would be very happy indeed .

2. I’d like to see the % chance on the Ricochet trait increased. I feel that the 5% chance for pistol shots to bounce is just way too low. I would be much happier if it was in the range of 20-30%. I really like the idea of giving pistols the chance to do AoE damage, but this trait in it’s current state is just not worth it.

All other aspects of the Pistol are ok in my opinion. I think the damage is fine, though I would not complain if we got a small increase in Unload damage. I personaly do not think Body Shot, Head Shot and Blinding powder need changing too much, they seem pretty functional and useful to me.

Ensign.2189:

Tulisin.6945:

The catch here is that Body Shot technically has a place where the thief is running a heavily defensive/utility based build and the damage granted to the group via Vulnerability is actually better than the DPS the thief could otherwise bring to the table themselves.

Absolutely. Basically, for any given set of stats, there’s a critical party size – above that limit, you use Body Shot exclusively; below that limit, you use Unload exclusively.

There’s essentially no team composition where you use both Body Shot and Unload (technically, there’s a slight benefit to be gained right on the edge where you switch from Body Shot to Unload once your target is low enough, but the difference in output is small and the boundary hard enough to compute that it hardly matters).

In practice, Body Shot is ‘dump initiative into more normal damage’, and Unload is ‘dump initiative into more normal damage’, guaranteeing you’ll always have at least one dead skill on your bar.

Hence why I suggest just dumping the Vulnerability onto Unload and making a brand new skill for #2, preferably a blast finisher.

While I like the idea.
I don’t think putting some area stealth is P/P’s cure. Projectile block/reflection would be nice, even if like Infiltrator’s it was part of a chained deal.

ensoriki.5789:

I don’t think putting some area stealth is P/P’s cure. Projectile block/reflection would be nice, even if like Infiltrator’s it was part of a chained deal.

It’s less about the AoE stealth and more about pistol not being massively inferior to Cluster Bomb in a team environment. Making use of combo fields is a big deal, one of the biggest strengths of a thief in a dungeon environment, and pistol (main hand) may as well not exist as far as that is concerned.

yeah I’m not expecting any buffs, even though pistol is easily the worst main hand

reikken.4961:

yeah I’m not expecting any buffs, even though pistol is easily the worst main hand

They already stated that its damage is low and they are buffing it.

I hope they buff Repeater. So i can run around with just 1 pistol being James Bond.

I’m not gonna get my hopes up, today patch might do nothing for thief and maybe fix bugs and that’s it. So keep you expectation down.