Guild Wars 2

I made a post about this the other day, but I think the problem is a little clearer to me now and I wanted to use a more attention-grabbing topic and follow it with a more succinct post.

People complain about Pistols a lot, justifiably, because they’re weak. Arguments on what the problem is often center around Body Shot and the general lack of utility on P/P. While those are valid concerns, I promise you that is not where the crux of the problem lies.

That would be Vital Shot. Vital Shot has a 1/2 second activation, indicating it’s supposed to be faster than the warrior’s Bleeding Shot at 3/4 second. A faster rate of fire would justify its short duration bleeds, reduced range, and low upfront damage. However, that’s only the case on paper. In practice, the recovery means that the actual recast on both is roughly .8 – .9 seconds.

In effect, this means that it’s very likely that Vital Shot is weaker than the designers intended and probably believe it to be, because I believe they calculated and balanced various skills on their activation timers, not taking into account recovery times with auto-attack and how they effectively negate the speed difference.

I also think this affects some other #1 skills such as the Ranger’s and Warrior’s Longbow, as the activation timer is 3/4 second but the actual recast is over a second, meaning it likely fires more slowly than the designers assumed when balancing its math, and is therefore weaker than the shortbow and the rifle respectively (the former has effectively no recast and the latter has a comparitively appropriate recast). It also likely negatively impacts the Engineer’s pistol, which, despite its different role is generally considered to be weaker than the rifle.

I think in general, this GCD. But Vital shot is broken.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Global-cooldown-or-wrong-tooltip/first#post849415

Marduh.4603:

I think in general, this GCD. But Vital shot is broken.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Global-cooldown-or-wrong-tooltip/first#post849415

It may be the GCD, but I’m not sure. Longbows also fire more slowly than they should, but not Rifles, and most melee attacks are much faster.

The rifle #1 for warriors and engis has an activation of 3/4 second and the recast is roughly .85; a bit slower than the activation speed but not hugely significantly, which is why rifles feel like solid weapons to those classes.

The longbow #1 for warriors and rangers also has a 3/4 activation speed, but the recast is significantly slower than with rifles, about 1.2. Unsurprisingly, rangers and warriors both complain about their longbow #1 attacks being weak.

The same is true for pistols. The activation speed is 1/2 second, but the recast is almost identical to rifles, about .8, while the damage, range, and conditions are all significantly weaker. Whaddya know? There’s a pretty strong consensus that pistols are weaker than they should be for both thieves and engineers.

Whatever is causing it, it needs to be looked at and fixed.

I’m going to go off on a very slight tangent, but it bugs me that everyone in this game uses Body Shot… well, wrong.

The simple logic is that Body Shot isn’t worth using the initiative for because the overall damage increase for you isn’t better than what you’d get using Vital Shot or Unload. While that isn’t wrong, the true scenario where Body Shot starts to pull ahead is in a group and its’ multiplicative increase of everyone’s damage. Your personal DPS will suffer, but the speed at which an enemy dies when everyone hitting it is doing +15% more damage isn’t something that should be disregarded.

I would hope that if they look at Vital Shot they also look at Unload. Right now Unload does less damage than just using Vital Shot while simultaneously requiring initiative to use. The only reason its’ still viable is because power builds do better damage with it than they would with Vital Shot. If Vital Shot is fixed then something Unload does would need to be buffed in order to still remain even slightly viable.

Just a heads up, I’m sure the Mod will be here shortly to close this thread and point you to the ignore- I mean, ‘Feedback’ thread.

Archtus.6971:

Just a heads up, I’m sure the Mod will be here shortly to close this thread and point you to the ignore- I mean, ‘Feedback’ thread.

The thing about this though is that it isn’t really a thief problem, it’s a problem with teh design of the weapons affecting numerous professions. I just posted about it on the bug board. Hopefully it will get some attention. They need to fix this kind of thing before they start changing other skills around.

Einlanzer.1627:

Archtus.6971:

Just a heads up, I’m sure the Mod will be here shortly to close this thread and point you to the ignore- I mean, ‘Feedback’ thread.

The thing about this though is that it isn’t really a thief problem, it’s a problem with teh design of the weapons affecting numerous professions. I just posted about it on the bug board. Hopefully it will get some attention. They need to fix this kind of thing before they start changing other skills around.

I agree with you.