Guild Wars 2

I’ve played pistol/pistol thief for probably a hundred+ hours now across PvE (including dungeons)/PvP/WvWvW and I don’t think it needs a buff that much. Unload is an incredibly useful skill; with the right traits and gear, you’re looking at 4.5-6k damage per use of it, and if you use Haste and have Preparedness, you can get 3 uses of it out of one Haste. It’s one of the (best/only) ranged burst damage skills thieves have, and if you’re using a venom build you can apply all your stacks of venoms in one skill.

There are some good suggestions in this thread, but I don’t think removing bleed from Vital Shot is that great an idea; being able to constantly apply bleed and continually whittle away at an enemy’s health while waiting for initiative recharge or utility cooldown is pretty handy, though vulnerability could be an interesting replacement.

I use Body Shot very rarely; the time it takes to actually shoot and the initiative cost usually mean it’s not worth it to use compared to other skills. I do sometimes use it on Veteran Supervisors when they need to have vulnerability stacked on them. I think it could use a reworking of some sort, perhaps adding a cripple also.

Unload is, as I said above, pretty great and my bread-and-butter. You can move while you use it, cancel it easily, and it does quite a good bit of damage. With the best Venom traits and using 3 utility Venoms and Basilisk Venom, you quickly apply a ton of conditions at once and can follow it up with 1-2 more Unload uses. It’s also got 900 range, which is pretty great for such a high-damage skill. No changes needed here, I don’t think.

Head Shot is situationally useful, but much like Body Shot, I usually go for another skill. There are perks to the skill, and in WvWvW it’s very handy for stopping Veteran Guards from using their healing skill (it’s also good for hitting a fleeing player), but it needs to have an extra effect to make it worth the time to shoot/initiative cost.

Black Powder is actually pretty darn useful in PvE; you can use it to take on enemies that aren’t necessarily TOO tough for you, but that might do too much damage at once to be easily manageable, since if you get in close and hit it, you get the initial blinding and then each subsequent Vital Shot adds to it. I don’t think adding stealth to this skill would be balanced, but since pistol has zero mobility skills, perhaps adding 2 or so seconds of swiftness for you and allies that pass through the field could be a neat tweak.

Great thread overall though.