Guild Wars 2

Berengar.6951:

Vital shot and Engi pistol auto attack both need buffs bad. Vital shot is better than the engi one at least.

No, it’s not.

Engy one is built to be part of a condition build, and the rest of the Engineer Pistol (and /Pistol) skills support that.

Vital Shot is split between condition (P/D) and direct damage (P/P), and does a mediocre job at both.

MyCondolences.8172:

Ricochet

Pistol shots have a chance to bounce to an additional target.

Miscellaneous effect.png Trigger chance: 50%
Miscellaneous effect.png Maximum additional bounces: 3

Piercing would be a lot better than an RNG effect, even if you have to work harder on positioning.

phys.7689:

so a pistol/dagger thief has more torments, stealth bleeds, imobs cripples
so a dagger dagger thief has more cloak and dagger, bleeds and evasions
so a sword dagger thief is gaining more initiative while dancing around
so a sword pistol theif is gaining more initiative while dancing around/stunning players

so a venom sharing build isnt giving up all the positional shadow steps and only pressing 1 because he got no ini

Yeah i get that it MAY slightly effect people doing a max dps rotation versus a mob that is never a threat to them and so they never do anything but attack, but i dont think that one playstyle should be the one which forces all others to have crappy ini gains. In fact i would hope they improve thier AI to where thats never the right answer for a fight.

how do you realistically propose they give all the builds which actually need more ini regen ini, without increasing the 80 you are used to, to 120 ini?

Note the weaponset you didn’t mention. The one that’s not the Thief “universal offhand” (Shortbow).

You know, the one that’s only used for one very initiative-heavy attack, that’s outperformed by shortbow and all the melee options?

Yeah, Pistol/Pistol.

Considering how Pistol/Pistol was originally mentioned as “underperforming” by the Devs back in May, and here we are in December with no useful changes to it, I’d rather not nerf the hell out of P/P just to achieve a tangential nerf on the sets you mentioned.

They need to look at the reasons why people take 30 points in Critical Strikes (and end up getting 15 points along the way), and why people were taking the initiative-buffing traits (hint: It’s because most of the others are situational or outright bad).

But instead they’re just changing stuff along one axis of adjustment without really looking at any of the others.

The change to Opportunist is going to make this more apparent, as P/P relied on it to gain enough Initiative for consistent Unloads. Since crit/power-based P/P can’t rely on the auto-attack to do anything approaching comparable damage.

The buff to base Initiative regen isn’t enough to make up for the increase in Opportunist’s ICD, making P/P fall even farther behind most every setup on Thief (and in the game, really).

Mr. Peters,

How are P/P Thieves (moreso in PvE, but that’s mainly because almost no one runs P/P in any form of PvP) supposed to benefit from these changes, again?

The Pistol Mainhand auto-attack is so weak as to be pretty much unusable with the primary stat-build (crits and power) for using P/P’s only good attack (Unload).

Most P/P builds now have to trait into every Initiative-boosting trait and make heavy use of Opportunist to be able to sustain their only damaging attack.

They won’t be able to do that after this.

Should we just give up on Pistol/Pistol entirely?

I know P/P isn’t popular or very good, but it’s literally the only reason I made a Thief as opposed to any other class. That’s likely an extreme edge case in the playerbase, but it’s why I’m bothering to ask.