Guild Wars 2

The problems with P/P (and to a lesser extent P/D) are so obvious that it’s astonishing to me not only that it hasn’t been addressed by devs/patches, but that it isn’t cried about all over the forums.

Everyone knows that Ricochet is too weak in relation to the Piercing available elsewhere (it should be a 50% chance to bounce to one extra target, and a 25% chance to bounce to a second).

Everyone also knows that Body Shot is way too situational to be considered good (it should have a short Burn effect and/or just do greater direct damage).

Everyone knows that the lack of Stealth is an annoyance, although personally I’m ok with this since they can’t revolve everything around stealth.

But, what people really should be screaming about is Vital Shot. The primary problem afflicting P/P especially (the above problems are more peripheral) is that Vital Shot does lousy DPS (it fires too slowly for both its direct damage and its bleed duration), especially with power/crit builds, which you’re likely to be using with P/P. Why is this such a big deal? Allow me to elaborate.

The Thief’s unique resource mechanic means that you get a certain amount of “free” DPS, which comes solely from the #1 skill, while every other skill shares the same resource. For other sets, the #1 skill represents a significant enough portion of your DPS capabilities that you can approach the other skills tactically, bandying around them as the situation demands, gaining momentary supplements to your DPS or providing you with some useful or fun boon or utility.

With P/P however, what happens is that your #1 skill does such poor DPS on its own that in order to even be marginally effective you are forced to try to compensate by dumping all Initiative into the only other damage-primary skill, Unload, which, apart from being extremely dull and tedious, keeps you in constant state of resource starvation. This means that, not only does the sustained DPS of P/P suffer as you cannot maintain Unload spamming forever, but because your skills all share the same resource you are prevented from being able to properly make use of the various utilities the set offers all while doing only mediocre damage from a maximum of 900 yards.

Why does this not get talked about more often?

Because the only p/x are condition (generally), the ones who arent have said stuff, even some of the condi’s say it.

I noticed its underwhelming display within 2 days of starting my thief.
I hate it. I want to love p/x like i love d or s/x and brobow.

Its just impossible except in novel situations.

I concur, something needs to be done.

Everyone hang up your pistols. Sb and sb, trickery and shadowsteps zerg juking til mobility is on the chopping block!

I started GW2 with the hopes of leveling and enjoying all aspects of the game as a dual pistols gunslinger. After being told to ‘l2p’ by a lot of people, being threatened with being kicked from groups if I didn’t use a different weapon set and being killed endlessly by mobs that my Guardian could just roll over 3 levels below me, I shelved her.

When P/P is made better, I may come back.

It needs a more reliable AOE and either better mobility tools or more tankiness.

Starbird.4029:

I started GW2 with the hopes of leveling and enjoying all aspects of the game as a dual pistols gunslinger. After being told to ‘l2p’ by a lot of people, being threatened with being kicked from groups if I didn’t use a different weapon set and being killed endlessly by mobs that my Guardian could just roll over 3 levels below me, I shelved her.

When P/P is made better, I may come back.

It needs a more reliable AOE and either better mobility tools or more tankiness.

No, it really just needs for Vital Shot to do the DPS it’s supposed to and allow you the freedom to use the other skills more tactically rather than having to constantly Initiative dump just to get halfway decent (not terrific) damage values.

Here’s how it works:

Thieves ask reasonable skill modification request – to at least not have the skill tooltip outright lie to us. Thieves get nothing.

Some other profession waltzes in with their sob story about WvW Thief spiking them to death in 5 second. Thieves get nerfed to &$%.

The problem with p/x was adressed by the thieves comunity since the release of the game. Then, one day, Anet say “yea, we wanna give someting to pistol/pistol” 1 month later Ricochet was incresed from 5% to 20% and Pistol Mastery from 5% to 10%. Was so disapointing to the comunity that everybody just leave the pistol in its sheath and forget about it so anet never ever mock us again.