Guild Wars 2

I believe that there is a lot of room for improvements on the mainhand pistol and it’s traits so P/P can be more viable.

Offhand pistol IMO is just fine, however Black Powder’s radius could be larger.

Mainhand pistol improvements:

Vital Shot: There are several ways to buff Vital Shot. The biggest risk to improvement is damaging bleeding builds. The most efficient would be to make the attack faster and making it a two part shot.
Vital Shot- Consistent damage and bleed kept as it is
Quick Shot- A second attack that does less damage but adds a stack(or two) of vulnerability

Body Shot: The skill is horrible, the damage is too low. Two possible ways of improving it.
-Increasing the cast time to 3/4s and the damage to be majorly buffed or adding Weakness as well.
-Second option, changing the skill completely and renaming it Strafing Shot
Strafing Shot- The damage and vulnerability remains the same but the user does a sideways roll gaining evade for 3/4s and faces target at the end of the roll.

Shadow Strike(P/D): The skill needs to be altered to match the rest of the set up. The skill should do an additional shot after shadow stepping away. Each hit will add a bleed however while reducing its overall damage.

Unload(P/P): The skill needs to do two more shots but the channel time should remain the same. Bullets should be fired quicker and the last two should be made garunteed projectile finishers.

Trait improvement:

Pistol Master: 10% damage boost and all pistol skills cost 1 less initiative

Ankle Shot: Renamed to Shrapnel, critical hits have a 40% chance to cripple and bleed

Ricochet: Needs a rework or complete buff

Possible buffs-
-50% chance for bullet to bounce to an additional target
-Bullet bounces to additional target on critical hit

Possible Reworks-
-Exploding bullets: Bullets explode on collision doing AoE damage to enemies in a small 360 degree radius. Damage will be 75% of the damage done to main target. Will stack with Ankle Shot/Shrapnel

-Precise bullets: Bullets are given a 50% chance to pierce targets or garunteed to pierce on critical hit.

about skill 1….ud have to add them both togther or make it super fast or youd never get more than 2 stacks of bleed up :P too slow as is and if u add a vuln slot as a 2nd shot it would be 2x slower. i agree thosomething like that should/could be done! bounce ideas off each other guys.

Changing the autoattack will kill 90% of the Pistol mainhand thieves: P/D thieves. The buffs aren’t strong enough to attract a new community too. The only thing this would do is kill whatever pistol mainhand users we have left, aside from the extremely rare p/p thief.

Doomdesire.9365:

Changing the autoattack will kill 90% of the Pistol mainhand thieves: P/D thieves. The buffs aren’t strong enough to attract a new community too. The only thing this would do is kill whatever pistol mainhand users we have left, aside from the extremely rare p/p thief.

Not if the change is just a straight buff, which it badly needs.

P/D is better than P/P, but it still isn’t great. The main culprit behind problems with both is Vital Shot. The only reason P/D is better than P/P is because you can supplement Vital Shot’s atrocity with Caltrops and the Sneak Attack without frantically dumping initiative into a single DPS skill.

What Vital Shot needs is either an increased rate of fire (25-35%) or a buff to its direct damage without a nerf to its bleed. I would say the former makes more sense.

it really needs a dmg boost…..i mean look at d/d d/p s/p s/d they all have good to great dmg on auto attack. p/d is horrendous and can ONLY be played with bleed build bc it doesnt require dmg. cluster bomb……2 options….dmg and bleed. d/d dmg and poison my favorite…..s/d dmg and cripple/weakness which is eh so so

Bottom line being Vital Shot either needs a damage buff or a rate of fire increase. Or to fire twice, dealing damage twice like the warrior bow Auto-attack. One that does a bleed and one which doesn’t as not to overpower it.