Guild Wars 2

NOTE: This is about PvE.

So the verdict seems to be that P/P is among the worst PvE weapon sets in the game. And it’s a real pity, because the idea of an agile, twin pistol wielding gun fighter is an extremely iconic and attractive one.

There seem to be 5 major problems with P/P:

1) Damage Is Too Low.

SB does more damage than anything outside of Unload. And most of it is AOE. This is partially a product of 2)

2) Dual Damage Types.

For some reason, the 1) primary attack is condition focussed and the major dps attack 3) is normal damage.

3) 3 Useless skills.

Body and Headshot are both barely even worth using, due to the way thief resources work (all skills share a resource). Black Powder is a strong defensive tool, but is so initiative heavy that it means you will be doing barely anything besides autoattacking.

4) No Mobility.

None of the P/P skills give any form of movement whatsoever. One, the primary damage skill, is actually a channel!

On a class this focussed on mitigation through mobility, it’s a dealbreaker.

5) No AoE.

P/P is one of the only weapon sets ingame that is single target only. With the multi-mob nature of PvE, this is a massive problem.

So – some possible solutions.

> Make 1) normal damage, buff numbers.

> Reduce the initiative cost of Unload and let it stack Vulnerability, similarly to Body Shot.

>Reduce the initiative cost of Blackpowder for P/P, but give it a cooldown.

> Replace Body Shot with a Shot that allows the thief to leap backwards, firing shots that cripple multiple targets. Give it an initiative cost to reflect this.

> Adjust headshot to also reduce the damage output of an enemy target significantly.

> Make Ricochet unlock earlier, and buff it significantly to compete with SB.

> Increase Unload firing rate and projectiles fired, decrease damage accordingly (for better interaction with SOM).

Thoughts? Any more suggestions?

By reworking skill 1 to deal normal damage instead of bleeding, you nerf P/D, a more fun and interesting set than P/P.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

By reworking skill 1 to deal normal damage instead of bleeding, you nerf P/D, a more fun and interesting set than P/P.

Your opinion. I much prefer P/P. Who are you to say that one set is objectively more interesting than another?

It could be kept as a bleed for P/D.

P/P and P/D definitely do both need to be reconciled to deal the same damage type. Considering the Pistol trait is inside Critical Strikes, I would lean toward making P/D direct damage.
Unfortunately, either way people are going to have their builds royally screwed over and be forced to completely re-gear.

Grimwolf.7163:

P/P and P/D definitely do both need to be reconciled to deal the same damage type. Considering the Pistol trait is inside Critical Strikes, I would lean toward making P/D direct damage.
Unfortunately, either way people are going to have their builds royally screwed over and be forced to completely re-gear.

Or keep P/D as a bleed, and make it direct damage for P/P only. It’s not an elegant solution, but really, dual guns are so poorly designed that I can’t think of any other realistic way to handle it.

(EDIT: why on earth would a combination of ‘P/P’ and ‘is so’ be censored?)

Improve unload’s damage to 1350ish and make it pierce.

Starbird.4029:

> Replace Body Shot with a Shot that allows the thief to leap backwards, firing shots that cripple multiple targets. Give it an initiative cost to reflect this.

I will often run P/P, I like it because it fires a bit faster than the SB which makes it harder to dodge. Plus, I really enjoy the blinding combo field. That being said I do wish that there was a skill like the one mentioned above, it would give more versatility, and I would feel a lot more useful to my team while using P/P.

Good suggestion.

I think it would be more beneficial to replace Headshot instead of body shot with the evasive skill in order to not conflict with the evasion gained from the P/D dual skill.

The skill name would be backfire. The way I propose the skill should work is by shooting out a small smokey cloud and evading backward as if the gun backfired. This could be a leap finisher, or possibly just blind the target.

Also I think adding something extra to unload or reducing the initiative cost by one would be helpful. Adding vulnerability (as suggested) could work, but also as an alternative: the last shot could light the target on fire (I’m not in favor of this), or something such as a one second immobolize or cripple.

Also just buffing the auto attack slightly could suffice.

P/P damage is not as bad as u think but u have to go full zerker and have all the pistol +% damage traits just to see worth your wild, but the set up does need some changes.

Vital shot is fine as far as damage is concerned but its rate of fire needs to be increased just a little.

The trait called Ricochet needs its chances increased to about like 35 or 40 percent.

Now for the movement problems that u might have is pointless cuz u have two extra dodges (one of them heals u and the other gives u more initiative) and u should be at max range of your attacks or close to it so u have time to dodge things that might be in the way or things that might be on its way to u. Yes u can do some nice tricks with black powder and steal but just be ready to dodge or move out of melee. One last thing for this edit ive done to my post is that poisons and the trait that gives u might with poisons works wonders for pistols damage.

I kept brining this up here, until I finally realized that discrepancy between listed and actual behavior is actually a bug (At least it would be in the software company where I work).
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Thief-Vital-Shot-and-Trick-Shot-Cast-Time/first

1.) Agree with ZenonSeth, the first thing they should do is fix the bug with Pistol’s #1 cast time.

2.) I’ve heard that Pistol Mastery (plus 10% damage to pistols) is bugged and doesn’t affect Unload?! I still have yet to confirm this for myself, but if it is true then that needs to be fixed as well.

3.) Thieves mitigate damage via Stealth and/or Mobility, P/P gives you nothing for this. Unless you consider Black Powder damage mitigation. Perhaps Pistol Mastery makes Pistol #1 a 100% projectile finisher, then Black Powder would be more useful? Otherwise, we need access to Stealth or Mobility.

4.) Since Pistol #1 adds a bleed, might be nice to see a minor trait, similar to Engineers and Warriors, that give +DMG or +CRIT% to bleeding targets.

5.) Could make Headshot more rewarding if it added a condition or extra dmg for actually interrupting a skill? So, hitting a target just dazes them, but if interrupt they get daze + confusion, maybe?

6.) Shortbow and P/D are just much more exciting sets, because the combo fields they generate do something great with their respective #2 skills. It would be great to see something like this in P/P. What I’m not sure?

Anyway, those are my thoughts. A little short on solutions, sorry.

No offense, it’s a nice critique, but all of these suggestions just dance around the fact that P/P has one particular problem that is disproportionately significant – Vital Shot.

Vital Shot represents your “free” DPS, and it’s much lousier than an autoattack should be. So is Trick Shot for that matter.

Due largely to very sluggish rate of fire for its offensive specs, Vital Shot struggles way more than it should (especially with Unloading frequently) to maintain an appreciable number of bleed stacks and does terrible direct damage on top of that. If they fixed that, you’d see a vast improvement to the usability of P/P because it would enable you to get by without needing to frantically dump all your initiative constantly into Unload and you’d be able to make use of the other utilities while also maintaining more consistent DPS.

Now, there are definitely other things that need some work too, such as Ricochet, but Vital Shot is without question the most significant single problem with P/P (and it’s honestly not great for P/D either).

After playing a lot of SB for a bit, I also think that P/P’s initiative costs are entirely out of whack.

With 25 stack of bloodlust and landing a crit you can hit people for 1400-2200 with short bow auto-attack as burst thief.

Cluster bomb even hurts bunkers…

P/P is prob weakest set thief has IMO.

Why not just make unload drop a fire field at your feet? With all those shot something’s bound to catch fire. This way it does condition damage in addition to physical.

And is P/P good in PvP/WvW? I see a lot of these p/p threads but they all focus on PvE. I’m just curious as I’ve never tried P/P for anything and the image of a cowboy with 2 pistols is stuck in my head now.

Atherakhia.4086:

Why not just make unload drop a fire field at your feet? With all those shot something’s bound to catch fire. This way it does condition damage in addition to physical.

And is P/P good in PvP/WvW? I see a lot of these p/p threads but they all focus on PvE. I’m just curious as I’ve never tried P/P for anything and the image of a cowboy with 2 pistols is stuck in my head now.

This doesn’t fix the core issue with the set – that the autoattack’s (free) damage is too poor to rely on even for short periods, meaning you have to constantly dump all your initiative on Unload to do significant damage, meaning you get zero utility while your sustained DPS is barely mediocre, all at less maximum range than most ranged weapons and with atrocious defenses.

It’s really very laughable how bad it is and that it’s been 8 months since launch.

It’s worth looking at pistol/dagger at the same time I think. If both pistol/pistol and pistol/dagger are poor then changes are needed to 1 and 2 skills. Also pistol/pistol needs to keep a separate function from pistol/dagger that has kiting capability on skill 4 and mobility on skill 3. The pistol skills 4 and 5 seem ok with the melee sets so probably don’t need a fix. Pistol/pistol seems to only have a role as a high single target dps but it just doesn’t deliver that so unload seems to be the failing skill.

A rather cool looking solution would be for unload to continue shooting even while dodging. Less cool might be any dodge during unload to cost zero endurance. Something different might be a trait for “unload applies a random venom once every X seconds”

Stooperdale.3560:

Pistol/pistol seems to only have a role as a high single target dps but it just doesn’t deliver that so unload seems to be the failing skill.

It’s easy to assume that at first, but see above: The biggest failure is on the part of Vital Shot. Because of the thief’s resource mechanics, it is imperative that the #1 skill provide an appreciable amount of DPS, which allows you to use your Initiative in a freelance way based on circumstances. If you need a momentary boost in DPS, use Unload, if you need to protect yourself for a moment, use Black Powder, etc.

P/P’s major problem is that Unload is both significantly stronger than Vital Shot AND benefits from different stats. This pigeonholes the player into building power/crit for maximum efficiency, which widens the gap between the two even more. This in turn forces you to play P/P in such a way that you’re constantly dumping all your Initiative into Unload in a frantic attempt to prevent reliance on Vital Shot from instantly cratering your DPS. This also means you are left with no resources to use elsewhere, leaving you with perpetually crippled mobility and utility at a max range of 900 yards.

In a nutshell, the inequality between Unload and Vital Shot screws up the entire set, and the blame is really more on the latter. I don’t think it needs to be direct damage only, it just needs to be better. It needs to fire faster so it can both do more direct damage and maintain more bleed stacks.

Keep in mind, if they do anything to pistol skills, it has to fly across the thief board. There is no separating main hand - dual skill - off hand here. They can’t do something just for P/P except tweak the dual skill. If they change the other 4 skills, it’d overhaul P/x and x/P as well.

Only way to fix unload is to make it do something like burn people and make it an aoe. When it bounces from the trait, it should burn people again or something.

Daecollo.9578:

Only way to fix unload is to make it do something like burn people and make it an aoe. When it bounces from the trait, it should burn people again or something.

They don’t need to do anything to Unload, they need to fix Vital Shot and Ricochet. That would do wonders for the set.

Would be nice if they could integrate some form of evasion and strong mobility into the P/P set. We do need a viable alternative to shortbow.

WyldKat.4712:

Keep in mind, if they do anything to pistol skills, it has to fly across the thief board. There is no separating main hand – dual skill – off hand here. They can’t do something just for P/P except tweak the dual skill. If they change the other 4 skills, it’d overhaul P/x and x/P as well.

Why?

@OP: Headshot is extremely useful as an interrupt. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve saved teammates by interrupting an enemy stomp via Headshot.

Body shot, on the other hand… (or vuln in general, for that matter)

I haven’t played thief very long but i belive the first thing we need to think is what role do we want P/P to have.
The role i believe could work for this set is a survival sustained dps. How? Here we go:

1) Increase the healing from signet of Malice from about 100 to about 150 without healing power. This will help on the set survivability.
2) Make Unload do a 3/4s evasion animation and change the channel time to 1s. This will give both survivability, increased dps and mobility.
3) Make Bodyshot give 10 stacks of vulnerability with some increased damage and increase the initiative cost to 4. This will help setting up combos and will make this a less spammy set, because bodyshot + Unload will cost 9 initiative.
4) Remove or reduce the ICD for the Opportunist trait. This trait has pretty good synergy with the set and if we can proc it at least 2 times with each unload it will help.

Notice that i haven’t suggested anything that will give stealth to this set because it doesn’t need to. If we can get the survivability with dodges and healing it will be good enough.

It would be nice to see some other effect for pistol #2
vulnerability is just increased damage. Rather dull, and it doesn’t actually help much unless you are fighting a pve boss or something because of the damage you lose from it’s casting time.
What if it’s damage,initiative cost, and casting time were majorly lowered but the condition would remain the same? It would be a great setup for a burst, people will have time to react to the burst that is about to come, and the skill might see some more common usage. Vulnerability needs a spotlight anyway rather than a passive damage increase for a couple skills..
Just throwing an idea around.

Some decent ideas here, apparently we are getting buffed in next patch so keep em coming and keep this visible!

Gamblit.5041:

P/P is fine in PvE – It has massive single target damage with a lot of mobility( acrobatic tree for dodge + Black Powder for Blind).

1. You probably think P/P has “massive” single target damage because Unload puts out big shiny numbers. Unfortunately, Unload (even if you can chain it forever) also does less DPS than dagger or sword auto attack, and less damage than SB auto attack against multiple targets. Why? Because Unload takes approximately forever to actually channel, so those big numbers don’t mean anything. P/P is, easily, the weakest DPS set available to thieves, surpassable with every other weapon combination at almost every timeframe (P/P beats out SB against a single target over time, but SB has actual burst).

2. Neither traiting Acrobatics nor using Black Powder constitute P/P having a mobility asset. The simple fact is that P/P is the only set without a weapon skill that provides some kind of mobility advantage. It can’t move you, it doesn’t provide an evade, it doesn’t even provide a speed advantage via cripple or swiftness. So, again, P/P is worse than every other set thieves get in the mobility realm.

The only really good things about P/P are the stealth attack and the support available on #4/5. The problem is, again, that these skills work so much better in pretty much any weapon set except P/P. Sneak Attack is much more accessible with P/D, and the #4/5 support-based weapon skills mesh much better with D/P or S/P since those weapon sets can actually do damage without guzzling initiative constantly (and use black powder effectively).

GuilguiS.2738:

1) Increase the healing from signet of Malice from about 100 to about 150 without healing power. This will help on the set survivability.

SoM already used to be about that powerful and it was nerfed because high hit volume can break it (particularly with AEs).

Tulisin.6945:

GuilguiS.2738:

1) Increase the healing from signet of Malice from about 100 to about 150 without healing power. This will help on the set survivability.

SoM already used to be about that powerful and it was nerfed because high hit volume can break it (particularly with AEs).

I doubt that even with an aoe buff, P/P will ever be like this. Just make it P/P only. Bingo

Tulisin.6945:

Gamblit.5041:

P/P is fine in PvE – It has massive single target damage with a lot of mobility( acrobatic tree for dodge + Black Powder for Blind).

1. You probably think P/P has “massive” single target damage because Unload puts out big shiny numbers. Unfortunately, Unload (even if you can chain it forever) also does less DPS than dagger or sword auto attack, and less damage than SB auto attack against multiple targets. Why? Because Unload takes approximately forever to actually channel, so those big numbers don’t mean anything. P/P is, easily, the weakest DPS set available to thieves, surpassable with every other weapon combination at almost every timeframe (P/P beats out SB against a single target over time, but SB has actual burst).

2. Neither traiting Acrobatics nor using Black Powder constitute P/P having a mobility asset. The simple fact is that P/P is the only set without a weapon skill that provides some kind of mobility advantage. It can’t move you, it doesn’t provide an evade, it doesn’t even provide a speed advantage via cripple or swiftness. So, again, P/P is worse than every other set thieves get in the mobility realm.

The only really good things about P/P are the stealth attack and the support available on #4/5. The problem is, again, that these skills work so much better in pretty much any weapon set except P/P. Sneak Attack is much more accessible with P/D, and the #4/5 support-based weapon skills mesh much better with D/P or S/P since those weapon sets can actually do damage without guzzling initiative constantly (and use black powder effectively).

Well said. I’m now using a shortbow and while powerful…I really wish I could be blasting away with my pistols.

Starbird.4029:

Some decent ideas here, apparently we are getting buffed in next patch so keep em coming and keep this visible!

I hope you are right, Starbird because dual pistols, man, just the image of it gives me chills. Unfortunately, that spec for me is underwhelming at best right now.

Problem with fixing Pistols is there is a chance to debuff P/D when boosting P/P. I have an idea that will help balance this issue.

Vital Shot: Becomes a two part attack
First Attack: Adds two bleeds/longer bleed
Second attack: Adds vulnerability

Body Shot: Increased to 1s cast- damage buffed, 5 stacks of vulnerability, Weakness
or replaced with
Strafing Shot: Sideways roll with evade, damage and vulnerability kept as it is

Unload: Same cast time, but fires faster and number of shots increased to 10. Each shot has an added chance to pierce.

Black Powder: Greater AoE and Smoke Field radius, duration increased to 5s or kept as it is and it blocks projectiles for 2s.

Ricochet: The trait needs to be completely changed. I suggest renaming to Precise Bullets, giving each shot a chance to pierce or for every critical hit to pierce.