Guild Wars 2

First of all: I love pistols. I love their style as well as their feeling.

But sadly, pistols outright suck. I think we can all agree that pistols on thief are one of the weakest weapon choices. Right now there are two ways you can use pistols. That’s P/D or X/P. You can try P/P – and when geared and traited correctly you can almost achieve a state where you are somewhat useful – but there are way better choices.

So what’s wrong with the pistol?
To determine what’s wrong, we first need to know what’s right, or what is considered balanced. A weaponset is only balanced when it is viable by itself, without the use of traits or utility skills. D/D for example is considered balanced. It has good damage, movement, some AoE (dancing dagger, death blossom) and control. Shortbow is also balanced, if not already on the verge to being OP. AoE damage everywhere. Good condition and burst damage, can also deal huge single target damage with cluster bomb and loads of movement. These weaponsets are viable without any traits or utility skills. They are only enhanced by them.
And then there is the pistol set. The only two decent skills that this set provides are Headshot and Black Powder, while the latter is rather situational. The set has low base damage, low condition damage (compared to death blossom or the sb, let alone other classes), no movement, no real defensive abilities and no AoE. In fact pistols on thief are the only weaponset ingame that does not have a single AoE damage skill. Not one. And it does not make up for it in higher damage.

Why does P/D work then?
P/D only works because it is being enhanced by the daggers skills. The constant stealth provided by CnD allows for constant use of the Sneak Attack, which in turn provides decent condition damage. In addition the perma stealth playstyle allows for great survivability. But again, this is only possible because of the dagger, not because of the pistol.

Why does X/P work?
It’s simple: the main focus here lies on the X and not on the pistol. The pistol is only a support aspect. It is a means to unlock the #3 skill and to get a little bit of extra control.

So what can be done?
Well, the pistols need to be viable on their own. They either need to have some AoE skills (or be able to become AoE, the 20% bounce chance from Ricochet right now is a joke), or they need a serious increase in damage to make up for lacking AoE and utility.

Frankly I would love to have a viable ranged alternative to the shortbow. Sure you can go for a P/P initiative regen build that relies on constantly spamming unload. But that is neither fun nor very useful. You give up all utility, all initiative and probably the second weaponset so you can spam unload to keep up a decent amount of damage, which comes by default when using other weaponsets. And P/D is not a ranged alternative, it’s an entire playstyle requiring you to go for condition damage. So it cannot be used as an alternative to shortbow.

On a side note: The lack of proper alternatives for the shortbow is probably also one of the reasons why people repeatedly keep asking for the rifle to become a thief weapon.

Could do with a new skill like

Bullet rain – Cone AoE damage that has a chance to apply a random condition or something.

I believe they can do 2 things to fix pistol. These are:

1) Bodyshot – Applies both vulnerability and cripple.

2) Pistol shots/skills pierce trait- gives it pseudo aoe. (instead of the god awful 20% bounce)

-Sneak Attack buffed with a cripple or weakness or vulnerability apply

-Body Shot given a low duration cripple or vulnerability or weakness

-Shadow Strike given one of the above

-Piercing shots for Sneak Attack or Body Shot via traits or baseline

-Baseline 20% bouncing shots to body shot or sneak attack, traited to higher %chance

The only viable fixes I can think of

slender.1482:

-Sneak Attack buffed with a cripple or weakness or vulnerability apply

-Body Shot given a low duration cripple or vulnerability or weakness

-Shadow Strike given one of the above

-Piercing shots for Sneak Attack or Body Shot via traits or baseline

-Baseline 20% bouncing shots to body shot or sneak attack, traited to higher %chance

The only viable fixes I can think of

Sigh, you’re leaving out the most critical fix needed and the single biggest reason that P/P underperforms.

Vital Shot – needs to fire faster and do more direct vs. condition damage. For thieves especially, a weak autoattack is a deathknell for any set. Shortbow needs the same fix.

Pistol/Pistol is a single target dps weapon with low utility, poor defense, and low dps. You can tinker with the utility and defense but it still needs higher single target dps.

Vital shot could just be 1/4 cast time if there not going to touch the dmg #s

Body shot should be given an AoE like the engi pistol auto-attack. That way they can solve it being weak and the weapon set lacking aoe. They could add movement to the set by making it shadow step 300 (dodge roll distance) backwards

Unload can be a stun breaker since P/P lacks defense and the skill costs as much initiative as Infiltrator’s Strike + Shadow Return. If it needs more defense just make it like blurred frenzy, where you evade all attacks.

And ricochet should always bounce on crit or have a higher chance overall, the only attacks someone might worry about bouncing are the offhand pistol skills and their initiative costs are too high to count on a 20%, especially when there are much better traits in that tree.

p/p base dmg as a whole should be buffed by at least 5%. weilding p/p shoul dhave a double attack animation. A double attack will let you apply bleeds just as fast as p/d due to the lack of access to cnd.

Vital shot is just a horrible skill design. You should take it off and put in a completely new skill w/ mobility and survivability w/ some CC and mediocre dmg. ie: Chains aoe immobolize enemies and evades back 600 range while unloading 5 rounds. Or something like that.

I only go p/p when running with the zerg. What’s missing from it would be some form of AoE other than the Ricochet thing. Right now I slot it with a fire sigil just to get that extra AoE that I’m missing.

*P.S. Some cool action movie animation on it wouldn’t hurt as well.

It’s an emblamatic problem with ANet’s decision to make ranged weapons as a whole low dps.

They’ve stated that they think ranged weapons/attacks inherently must do lower dps in order to offset the safety of not being in melee range, but plenty of MMOs out there have allowed ranged to have equal dps without being OP. This is accomplished by better enemy design in PvE (i.e. have enemies with threatening ranged attacks) and by giving melee plenty of gap closers in PvE (this already exists in PvP).

I really wish they would balance out ranged options in this game, because the melee is really too dominant in both PvE and PvP right now.

Dahkeus.8243:

It’s an emblamatic problem with ANet’s decision to make ranged weapons as a whole low dps.

They’ve stated that they think ranged weapons/attacks inherently must do lower dps in order to offset the safety of not being in melee range, but plenty of MMOs out there have allowed ranged to have equal dps without being OP. This is accomplished by better enemy design in PvE (i.e. have enemies with threatening ranged attacks) and by giving melee plenty of gap closers in PvE (this already exists in PvP).

I really wish they would balance out ranged options in this game, because the melee is really too dominant in both PvE and PvP right now.

It’s also poorly conceived due to the variability in how classes perform attrition-wise at various ranges.

Why, for example, should an Elementalist have nerfed ranged damage when they’re designed around being glassy and therefore much more difficult to survive in melee with than, say, a warrior? The only way this makes any sense is if the DPS is tuned in such a way that a ranged elementalist = a melee warrior, with a melee elementalist out-dpsing a melee warrior and a ranged warrior doing inferior DPS to a ranged elementalist. That is not how this game is designed, so the ranged < melee paradigm is fundamentally flawed.

Like you said, they need to find other ways to ‘nerf’ ranged.