Guild Wars 2

tl;dr: Make dual wielding pistols mean something by being able to activate attacks simultaneously, or make Skill 3 a modifier for more dual attacks. Or thirdly, involve both weapons in an autoattack chain.

What seems immediately off when playing with dual pistols in GW2? it’s that even though you wield two guns, for your basic attack you only ever shoot with your right one. No variety with a shot here and there from the left hand (presumably while the thief magically reloads his first gun), nope, the second gun is just a dead weight 80% of the time.
The autoattack is also weak unless heavily specced towards conditions, it and Skill 2 are also somewhat slow. Why doesn’t the thief use both hands, instead of waiting for each attack to finish?
My suggestion is to make Skill 2 usable simultaneously with Skill 1, and vice versa. Skill 1 and 2 would represent your right and left hand respectively so to say. You could fire your vulnerability at the same time as your dishing out your bleeds, it would make for a faster gameplay in a traditionally slow set.
Essentially the thief could combine 1+2 and make his very own “burst” in addition to Skill 3.

This is the basic principle. Now we can build upon that.

What if we extend that to Skills 4 and 5 as well? It would be harder to balance, but we have a precedence with Ele Scepter Air (i.e. there you can already combine your autoattack with little “bursts”/blind). If we, for illustrative purposes, just run with current skill functions, that would mean you could combine Skill 2+4 for a daze and vulnerability stack simultaneously.

A second closely related idea is that Skill 3, traditionally thief dual skill, would cease being a skill by itself and instead become a modifier. For example, if used like Skill 1+3, the attack executed would be traditional Unload. (If you’re already autoattacking, that would mean you could just press 3 like usual)
If Skill 2 is a spike-preparing skill with it’s vulnerability, 2+3 would become a spike damage skill against a single target (without the vulnerability) with a cool dual attack animation.
4+3 would be maybe a stun. 5+3 would be a blast finisher that blinds and stealths everyone, but doesn’t produce a combo field. Those should be a thematically close skills, but not automatically just a stronger version.
(This is building on the current skill functions again only for illustrative purposes, not suggestions for skill combos by themselves)
The difference to my first idea is that those skills would be entirely new instances, not plain combinations of existing ones, and the combos of my first idea don’t rely on being pressed simultaneously, instead being “fluid” in their application window.

Personally, I favor Idea 1 by a small margin if Skill 2 get’s changed to be more than a slow-activating vulnerability applier. If Skill 1 would get turned into a chain skill, where every segment has a different effect/cond, that would raise the value of timing your +2 combo additionally.

In any case, both ideas would bring speed into this slow set and it would create extremely interesting, multifaceted gameplay in this most underused weapon combination thief has.

Another idea I had is to leave everything else as is but make the autoattack of each thief set a combination of the two weapons, with the second chain skill being that of the offhand weapon. E.g. in D/P you would attack first with your daggers, then your pistol for ranged damage, then again with your final Lotus Strike.

This would also have the implication of making the P/P autoattack a chain, and the second part of which you would attack with your left pistol. Looks cool and would certainly solve the P/P looking boring issue, but also would have tangible gameplay effects.

As always this idea is public domain.

Good Idea, Pistols should be faster and more visual appealing!
Shooting from only 1 Pistol like 90% of the time is boring!
You have my vote!

But this is how this game works – you have right and left hand. First 2 abilities use right hand, and 2 last left hand. Middle ability is dual wield, or also right hand for other classes. There is no need for changing that. If you want to revolutionize P/P, just fix its dual wield and #2 skill, which has almost no use under any circumstances.

My suggestion would be simple – allow us to choose weapon skills like utilities, so we won’t have LDB in power/crit build, and unload in condi. Animations of these skills would be the same, just change their attack types and names. That’s all.

I have just a general issue with how duel wielding works in GW2. While it is true that you are going to use your dominate hand/weapon to do more hits and your non-dominant to defend, you still alternate hits on occasion. To make duel wielding more immersive and realistic, I feel they need to take a look at some “real life fighting” (boxing, mixed martial arts, etc) and use it as a model. While it is not realistic to always do lead-offhand-dual (old assassin rotation), it’s equally not realistic to only use your main hand either, especially with guns. It just feels…unnatural.

That said, they don’t necessarily have to change anything about the skills themselves, just the animations. Many auto attack (1) skills are actually multiple skills, it would not be a bad thing to adjust the animations to make use of both hands, rather than just the main hand. For guns, no it’s not multiple skills, but they could just as easily reuse the animation from skill 3. but at a slower pace, to make skill 1 a little more realistic.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

it’s equally not realistic to only use your main hand either, especially with guns. It just feels…unnatural.

Yeah, but, this is a game, lots of things are unrealistic. The proper way to use a handgun is with two hands. Try holding a gun in each hand and firing them in turn. For starters, you’ll have atrocious accuracy, and you possibly won’t even be able to fire them as fast a single handgun if you can’t manage the recoil.

As far as P/P goes, I think the #2 pistol skill still needs something done with it. I understand that the purpose is to lob a nice chunk of vulnerability on the target for coordinated damage, but I never see it being used for that. In fact, I rarely see it used at all. I’ve used it sparingly… I’ll sometimes pop 2 on a guy that is at somewhat low health and then use unload, which is then doing an additional 20% damage on top of the 20% from executioner, but I generally don’t use it otherwise.

You could use it in a condi-specced build to improve your direct damage, but the time you spend applying that means less bleeds, torment, and poison, so it seems a bit counterproductive.

I think unload is fine for the most part as it can do decent damage and is nice for proccing on-crit effects or projectile finishers, but the kind of playstyle it demands will leave you vulnerable. I found p/p works best when you have allies backing you up and you can just wail on the enemies from range, although I’ve managed to do decently solo as well. P/p also starts to suck heavily against tanky retaliation builds, but I guess everything will need to have weaknesses.

I haven’t tried p/p with the ricochet trait yet, but I haven’t been motivated to alter the p/p build I use yet. Might try it just for testing though. I used to know a guy who used it with the assassin’s signet for constant healing, but I haven’t tried that out either.

I think the main thing that is perhaps keeping p/p away from the limelight is the inability to play jack-in-the-box like s/d or various perma-stealth builds can. You then may have to build your stats for more survivability, which subtracts from your overall damage, and there you go.

Yamsandjams.3267:

Yeah, but, this is a game, lots of things are unrealistic. The proper way to use a handgun is with two hands. Try holding a gun in each hand and firing them in turn. For starters, you’ll have atrocious accuracy, and you possibly won’t even be able to fire them as fast a single handgun if you can’t manage the recoil.

True, but we don’t need quite that level of realism. You need movie-level of realism, to create immersiveness. Just the way duel wielding works at the moment, its not immersive… to me anyway. I’m sure for others, it doesn’t matter.

As far as P/P goes, I think the #2 pistol skill still needs something done with it. I understand that the purpose is to lob a nice chunk of vulnerability on the target for coordinated damage, but I never see it being used for that. In fact, I rarely see it used at all. I’ve used it sparingly… I’ll sometimes pop 2 on a guy that is at somewhat low health and then use unload, which is then doing an additional 20% damage on top of the 20% from executioner, but I generally don’t use it otherwise.

You could use it in a condi-specced build to improve your direct damage, but the time you spend applying that means less bleeds, torment, and poison, so it seems a bit counterproductive.

I think unload is fine for the most part as it can do decent damage and is nice for proccing on-crit effects or projectile finishers, but the kind of playstyle it demands will leave you vulnerable. I found p/p works best when you have allies backing you up and you can just wail on the enemies from range, although I’ve managed to do decently solo as well. P/p also starts to suck heavily against tanky retaliation builds, but I guess everything will need to have weaknesses.

I haven’t tried p/p with the ricochet trait yet, but I haven’t been motivated to alter the p/p build I use yet. Might try it just for testing though. I used to know a guy who used it with the assassin’s signet for constant healing, but I haven’t tried that out either.

I think the main thing that is perhaps keeping p/p away from the limelight is the inability to play jack-in-the-box like s/d or various perma-stealth builds can. You then may have to build your stats for more survivability, which subtracts from your overall damage, and there you go.

I’m so-so on pistol skill 2. I tend to run with my husband, who’s paired character is a guardian. I like to hit 2, as he jumps in on the foe, and then hit 3 to stack the damage with him. Works decently for us, but since I’m not traited and still learning (only a lvl 60), my damage and effectiveness is extremely sub par. (Actually popping into the thief forum was wholly intended to help me understand the various traits better)

Edit: Should prob mention that I’m basically just a pve player…which has an effect on how I view things…