Guild Wars 2

Vital shot needs a base damage buff. Really i love to play as pistol/dagger alot but the thing that makes me turn away from it is the damage Vital shot does. The bleed is fine just when out of initiative and being force to just auto attack vital shot doesnt add up much at all and with duel pistols spamming unload can be bad when u might have to use head shot to interrupt something and u dont have initiative to use it cuz u had to spam unload cuz thats the only skill that does the most damage out of all the skills pistols have and pistol/dagger u only have vital shot and dancing dagger everything else is utility and body shot needs some work too but i rather have a vital shot buff cuz i could work in some body shots with it atm but not as flashy.

Vital shot is awesome, venom share here. Cloak and dagger into sneak attack, suddenly burst venom dump and 5 stacks of bleeds, keep it going with normal vital shots till you run another CaD into sneakattack

Main hand pistol requires that you stack some condition damage, in my opinion. The bleed on vital shot is half the point.

I think going P/D requires you to trait and have skills to constantly pop into stealth to utilize sneak attack. with points into shadow arts you can make steal also give you stealth, gain 2 stacks of might every time you go into stealth, and put blind on nearby foes whenever you stealth. added with all the skills you have that can put you in stealth, you can dish out quite a bit of damage.

Vital Shot really needs condition damage to be great, and condition damage isn’t exactly a strong stat right now – but even so there really isn’t anything wrong with it. It’s more or less on par with Crossfire (Ranger) and Explosive Shot (Engineer); any weakness is simply its reliance on condition damage and 1 skills being underwhelming in general.

I thought you were going to complain about Pistol 2 (Body Shot) when I saw the topic, since it is by far the worst Thief weapon skill and something you only want to press when, say, you have 15 stacks of bleeding on someone and need a cover condition to fight removal. The only really strong suit of main hand pistol is Sneak Attack, so without the off-hand dagger for frequent stealth the weapon is kind of kittened. Shadow Strike is good for what it does, but in its current state P/D needs to pump a lot of its Initiative into Cloak and Dagger, making it more of an occasional utility skill than a workhorse; Unload is your P/P workhorse in theory, but has honestly been underwhelming ever since they neutered all the weapon procs with cooldowns.

Basically, I have a whole lot to complain about with Main Hand Pistol, but Vital Shot is not on that list.

haste and Vital shot is very effective. 10 -12 stack of bleeding in the duration of haste also your initiative come back in this time

PD is a stealth build. You should be using Sneak Attack a lot, which is much more powerful. Vital shot can’t be too powerful because it’s a ranged attack and so much easier and safer to use than dagger main hands Double Strike (it’s shocking how effective just running & dodging around with VS auto-attack against melee can be in PvP).

PD is a condition build, unlike DD. Don’t underestimate the bleeds. They bypass toughness and, while removable, are constantly getting applied.

PD has a lot of synergy with the Deadly Arts and Shadow Arts trait lines. It has much less synergy with Critical Strikes than the other popular builds.

They need to do something about Vital Shot because right now it’s part of the reason why P/P sucks so bad. P/D wants the bleed and P/P wants to get rid of it. Either they need to ditch the bleed on Vital Shot and buff its base damage, or add a bleed to Unload and make P/P another condition build.

I use P/P also, I’m builded durable+Condition. I I like P/P lots of tools to play with as a tanky player (daze/blind/debuff/bleed)

I feel like Unload should put some bleed stack also.
But a finisher mechanic ala hearthseeker could be interesting also.