Guild Wars 2

I was thinking a lot about main hand pistol lately, mainly because im close to finish HOPE. I want to share an idea and will try to explain with my horrible english. Bare with me .

First this; 1. Pistol is a range weapon 2. Thief has no cd so if we make one skill powerful, players will keep spamming it.

This is my idea simply: lower unload dmg and every unload will leave a mark on enemy player, this mark stacks up to 3. (While marks get pile up, their duration on enemy player decreases).

Big change comes with skill #2. (We need to change this garbage skill completely, its not fun and not useful at all.) skill #2 is now main dmg source of pistol now.

When you use #2 against an enemy who has 1 stack of “unload mark”, it just does low dmg and leaves vulnerability on target.
When you use #2 against an enemy who has 2 stack of “unload mark”, dmg gets bigger, animation changes a little (i’m thinking like 360 degree flip in the air while shooting, deadpool stlye:) ).
When you use #2 against an enemy who has 3 stack of “unload mark”, dmg gets bigger, animation gets more obvious (like crouching before jumping into air) and now its a leap finisher (but only if you can hit the enemy successfully, this way you cant spam it for stealth and you wont get revealed when you hit it.)

You can change necessary mark number, mark duration, initiative cost and dmg. But main idea is making main source of dmg dodgeable. This way we can balance it freely for pve and pvp because boss wont dodge but people can.

I dont know, maybe im talking nonsense here, but i know this; main hand pistol needs a complete rework.

The problem is that to balance that, it would need to be really weak with no marks on, and you said Unload is the only way to get them. Kinda leaving other weapon combos in the cold with this one.
Maybe even weaker than now, since that kind of skill rebalance tends generally to be unkind to Thieves.

I don’t get why we can’t just get a pistol rework from the ground up. Make mainhand pistol a strong shooting weapon, offhand pistol a skirmishing weapon that’s a slightly better version of what it is now, and give it a more interesting dual skill.

I made a suggestion here once before that Pistol skills would be really nice if they all worked sort of like how Black Powder Shot does already, with a ranged attack that is primary and a secondary point blank effect.

Give us some Gun Kata, ArenaNet! It would be awesome!

All they need to do is buff Vital Shot and rework Unload into a cone spray AoE to a.) give P/P the ability to hit multiple targets, which is critical for PvE, and b.) remove the over-reliance on Unload for basic DPS, which is the main thing that cripples the set’s general usability in any situation.

Balancing P/P is not rocket science, yet somehow we’ve gone 3 years with no appreciable adjustments that make any sense.

also, inb4 “buffing vital shot would make P/D overpowered”. No, it wouldn’t. P/D sucks too, just not as much as P/P, and a Vital Shot buff would not have as noticeable an impact on P/D as it would on P/P, because P/D is more condi-focused with better access to Stealth and relies on other skills to maintain damage pressure.