Guild Wars 2

I know Rangers got at least one stealth bugfix to one of their traits (a good one too), so be on the lookout here as well and post if you see any.

See other threads. P/P is kittened primarily by a slower-than-intended rate of fire (leading to poor DPS) on the #1 skill and a lack of useful utility on other skills.

Shortbow is a great go-to for ranged aoe and useful utilities.

While the OP is exaggerating, I have to say that I don’t understand why I see so many thieves running P/P myself when it very clearly has subpar damage and subpar utility.

You see these threads pop up from time to time, and they usually devolve into flamefest back-and-forth about whether pets should be ‘required’ or ‘optional’ for the class.

Primarily, you see a lot of, frankly, simple-minded comments about how pets are the “ranger mechanic” and as such an option to play a ranger without them shouldn’t be considered.

Here’s my two cents:

Firstly, pets may be a unique ranger mechanic, but they are not the only defining characteristic of the class. On a more holistic level, rangers are wilderness themed hunters, survivalists, scavengers, ambushers, roamers, archers, etc. You get the idea, there are many, many things that go into the “ranger” archetype, and pets are only one of those things. Removing the pet does not suddenly change the archetype, they are still a thematically unique class, so telling someone to “play a warrior or a thief” instead is pretty silly.

Secondly, the class mechanic, while it does help define the class, in many cases is much more passive. As an example, consider the warrior’s adrenaline. Warriors get special attacks from their buildup of adrenaline, and that operates as their “class mechanic”. However, you are not required to use those adrenaline attacks to be effective, and there are in fact multiple traits that help you gain benefits for not using your adrenaline. Other class mechanics may play a larger role (again, depending on the class), but in most cases it’s something very thematically integral to the classes’ unique powers, while the pet is just one of a kit of tools at the Ranger’s disposal. I.e. an elementalist without affinities/attunements is no longer an elementalist, but a ranger without a pet is still a ranger.

So, in conclusion, asking for Rangers to be playable without a pet is not unreasonable. There are many people out there who would like to play a ranger-themed character without being forced to micromanage a pet all the time (it’s also a visual annoyance at times). It would be very easy to, without significantly altering the current version of the Ranger, allow the ability to stow your pet indefinitely while adding a few traits that give you some benefit when your pet is stowed. It’s not even necessary that a ranger without a pet be as ‘optimal’ as a ranger with a pet, but it should be playable.

There is nothing whatsoever unreasonable about that request, and anyone who acts like there is is just being petulant and single-minded.

Yeah, frankly, when the game has as many unaddressed issues as it has (and, I’m sorry, but the November event was a mess, people were not really happy about it), new content is not nearly as exciting as it would be otherwise. I know there are different teams doing the different activities, but still, they need to get it together and fix all the broken crap in the game before they keep hyping new content.

DesertRose.2031:

The question is: Is the time listed in the tool tip mean to specify the attack rate and not just the activation time?

No, it specifies only the activation time, not the overall recast. The problem with this is that the recast varies from weapon to weapon with the power of the skills seems to be based on activation speed, not taking into account recovery time , so the activation speed gives you very little real indication of what the attack speed is.

The Mesmer’ s Greatsword has no recovery time, so the 11/4 activation speed is exactly how fast the recast is. In the case of the Elementalist’s Staff, the recast on each of the #1s is about 1.4 seconds, slower than the Mesmer’s greatsword, even though the activation speed on the skills shows to be much faster. Additionally, the recast for Water, Air, and Earth should be faster than they recast for Fire, even though they actually aren’t.

There is something off about the GCD/attack animations and how they play with auto-attack #1 skills. This needs to be thoroughly investigated and fixed.

Blacksarevok.8104:

Also, this has made wonder if the reason why Vital Shot does less damage than Bleeding Shot is to account for pistols getting two sigils.

Even if this is true, it doesn’t really compensate for the difference that exists.

More than anything, I want answers on what gives with the recovery speed on autoattacks and why it varies so greatly from weapon to weapon, making activation speed a poor predictor of how fast an attack is and making the skills much harder to compare and balance on paper. It really doesn’t make any sense.

Also, it doesn’t make any sense that you killed golems twice as fast with P/D when you said that Rifles held bleed stacks better, because the Rifle’s front-end damage is higher as well. If this claim is true, it leads me to assume your Pistol was higher level/quality than your rifle.

Gintoki.6405:

personally id love to see a buff to it, as it can seem abit lack luster, but actually bleeds on thief… super easy

heres a nice combo…

cloak and dagger steal or any stealth skill,

walk onto point, throw cantrips, do some dodges for extra cantrips if they are immobile or point defending, distance, sneak atk… i play tpvp with condition dmg thief, one thing i love doing is taking out bunker guardians before they get to points, or taking out the nooby 100b warrior with a single caltrop.. just had a final where i had 40sec of cripple on a warrior and was just lol’ing sohard. personally i use 3c 15% bleed duration runes, and can extremely quickly get 20 stacks of bleeding on anyone.. the auto atk isnt the main source, neither is it particularly great but its ok as a gap filler between ur other combos. consider using poison field clusterbomb combo.

That actually is part of the problem. Thieves get great condition abilities otherwise (I would almost argue that Caltrops are too good, they stack 2 bleeds per tick, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re bugged and it’s only supposed to be 1). Caltrops alone is good enough to make a condition oriented weapon not even worth using because Vital Shot is terribad in comparison.

In other words, even with a condition build, you’re better off running caltrops and D/D for the long duration bleeds on Death Blossom and higher front-end damage. That’s sad.

Biggest issue is nearly every Waypoint in Malchor’s Leap stays contested 90% of the time. They need to make a couple of waypoints stay stable, otherwise I have no problems with the zones other than the respawn and DE timers being too quick for the amount of people in them, which needs to be adjusted at this point, and the
rewards need to be worth hanging around.

Otherwise, I like how they did Orr.

I’ve posted this on a variety of other boards, but I felt it was appropriate here because it seems to disproportionately affect more ranged-oriented classes.

There is an issue with erratic attacks speeds on certain weapons across professions, in particular most ranged weapons (the only ones that seem about right are Rifles and Shortbows for rangers). The thief’s and engineer’s pistol, the ranger’s and warrior’s longbow, and staffs and scepters for various classes all have some glitches with their rates of fire for their #1 skills.

For instance, have you ever noticed that in most situations Fire just feels more effective on the Staff than other elements? Here’s your reason why: The Air, Earth, and Water #1 skills are supposed to have a faster recast than the Fire #1 (3/4 sec. vs 1 sec) but they actually don’t. This means that they are all weaker than Fire #1 when that isn’t intended.

There are examples like that all over the place, such as Thief Pistol’s Vital Shot being only very marginally faster than Warrior Rifle’s Bleeding Shot due to an arbitrary difference in recovery speed while being substantially weaker.

Has anyone done any testing or data gathering of this kind of stuff? I feel it’s one of the major reasons why some classes feel weaker than others, at least in PvE.

Krathalos.3461:

The fact that you consider Rifle warrior a viable condition build is proof enough that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Rifle is terrible for conditions. It has one ability that can apply it, not counting the bleed on crit sigil/traits (which really shouldn’t be factored in at all).

Thief’s pistol is perfectly fine. P/D is already a great weapon set for conditions. You’re trying to buff the auto attack without realizing that it would cause balance issues in combination with the stealth attack. THAT is why our auto attack isn’t on par with other ones that cause bleed. We also have stealth attack which can apply 5 stacks of bleed no problem.

Pistol is perfectly okay, if not stronger than okay, for conditions.

Rifle condition build warrior vs. Pistol condition build thief: the rifle warrior would lose every encounter, no questions asked.

Seriously the only thing that would put thief behind on condition builds is the lack of a trait that allows us to put on a condition on crit (like, for example, how Mesmers’ illusions, Rangers, Necro, and Warriors can apply bleed on crit).

Edit: Forgot to add that the entire reason rifle warrior even has a bleed on AA is so they could split the damage between pure raw damage and condition damage. Having more raw damage on rifle’s auto attack would make it far more powerful, whereas adding bleed and reducing the base damage will balance it out on burst builds. Also so that it synergizes with the 25 point minor trait in Arms path.

No.
No.
No.
No.
No.

Even with Sneak Attack, the thief’s pistol cannot sustain bleed stacks as well as warrior’s rifle can, period. The only reason you think Pistols are good for conditions is probably because of things like Caltrops, which gives Thieves better condition offense than warriors get in general. This does not mean that pistols are good, and it’s very, very obvious if you play both classes and have a brain that rifles are superior.

Just like it’s also obvious (again, assuming you have a brain) that the bug with pistols isn’t their tooltip, it’s their actual rate of fire. Why is this obvious? There are a few reasons:

1.) It’s just intuitive given common sense and the base stats for each that Pistols were intended to shoot more rapidly than rifles.

2.) The recast is not identical between rifles and pistols, pistols are actually very slightly faster, just not nearly as much faster as the tooltip would indicate. If you were correct, then Vital Shot would have the exact same recast as Bleeding Shot and it would have a longer duration bleed. Instead, Vital Shot has a faster activation speed but a slower recovery time than Bleeding Shot, leading to only a marginal difference in rate of fire (<10%) and a significant difference in overall output (>25%), when it’s clearly intended to be the opposite.

3.) The issue is not isolated to Vital Shot. The Ele staff for example, the #1s for Air, Earth, and Water are all supposed to be faster than the #1 for Fire, but they aren’t. That’s why Fire feels stronger and you see Eles disproportionately running it. Meanwhile, the Mesmer greatsword #1 shows a 1 1/2 sec activation speed and has exactly that long of a recast because there’s no recovery period and the recast is seamless. It’s like that because they fixed it. Originally it shot more slowly due to animations issues.

4.) The game is riddled with bugs and design issues, the devs and testers have their hands full trying to address critical issues. There is neither precedent nor evidence that this is ‘working as intended’, so making that assumption in the face of all the contradicting evidence and erratic behavior/power of weapons is folly.

Try again.

I’d be ok with the difficulty if there was a good enough reason enough to go there that there were actually other players in the zone.

This is really the fault of two things: FotM and lack of DEs.

S/P, D/D, SB. Everything else is mediocre to bad.

You will want Caltrops and probably Ambush Trap. Everything else is peripheral

Anything new going on here? I’m going to try to spend some more time looking at the numbers this weekend and seeing what all I can get to the bottom of.

Krathalos.3461:

Einlanzer.1627:

Krathalos.3461:

The auto attack and the stealth attack are the only two abilities that aren’t crap on main hand pistol. Why would you want to change the auto attack?

Edit: To the poster above me, all arrows shot have slightly more range than stated (as they start to lose distance, they are still able to make contact). It’s not that the Pistol has less range – it’s that the Shortbow has slightly more range than stated.

You are objectively wrong. The #1 attack is far crappier than it should be. Try playing a rifle warrior and come back and make this argument.

Rifle warrior isn’t viable as a condition damage weapon. Pistol main hand is, very much so.

I really don’t see the comparison between the two, either.

The auto attack isn’t as good as the stealth attack, but it’s great nonetheless. It’s a consistent bleed with decent duration. It’s terrible on DPS builds, obviously, but you shouldn’t be using Pistol if you’re using a DPS build.

I’m sorry, but once again flat-out, unequivocally wrong. The warrior’s rifle (and every other condition weapon in the game) is far better at stacking and maintaining bleeds than the Thief’s Pistol is, and determining this isn’t a matter of complicated, detailed analytics. It’s a matter of spending 5 minutes casually playing each one.

Here, I’ll lay it out for you:
The Pistol (baseline) has about a .8 recast, and the bleed lasts 4 seconds
The Rifle (baseline) has about a .85 recast, and the bleed lasts 6 seconds.

Therefore, Vital Shot can only maintain 5 stacks of bleed at best, you occasionally briefly get more from a sneak attack, and often dip below from doing anything else at all.

The Rifle pretty consistently maintains about 8. The front-end damage is also slightly higher, the range is greater, and they still get huge boosts to power from Volley and especially the Adrenaline shot that does mega damage (far more damage than Unload).

It’s also very intuitively obvious that this is all because Vital Shot is ‘bugged’ and doesn’t autoattack as quicly as it was intended to. The same problem affects the #1 skills on various ranged weapons across professions. Not trying to be rude, but you very clearly don’t understand much about what you’re talking about.

Yeah, it doesn’t take masterful analytical skills to see that Venoms just have a terrible implementation. I like them conceptually, but their mechanics need a total overhaul.

Level scaling is one of the best innovations of this game. You are in the minority.

However, I do agree that it doesn’t go far enough in making lower level zones enticing to higher level characters.

Shlamorel.8714:

mrstealth.6701:

Staff
Fire skill 1 – 21-22 attacks – 5966 damage
Earth skill 1 – 21-22 attacks – 3885

I have no idea how this wiki information can even be accurate.

I’m looking at my auto-attack tooltips right now as I type this and the fire auto-attack is listed as having a 1 second cast time, while the Earth (and air and water) auto-attacks all have a 3/4 of a second cast time.

I don’t see how the fire and earth attunements can have the same amount of auto-attacks in a 30 second window when the tooltips themselves have a 25% difference in cast time.

If I’m reading anything wrong here please fill me in.

P.S. I realize you’re copy and pasting data from wiki – I’m not shooting you, the messenger

The wiki shows the difference you are talking about. This is exactly the problem we are highlighting, the activation speeds of the weapons represent functionally useless data and there’s some design issue making the firing speed on ranged weapons really erratic in comparison to the supposed activation speeds. This is why a lot of ranged weapons in the game feel weaker than they should be.

So, basically, Earth, Air and Water autoattacks are supposed to be faster than fire autoattacks with the staff, but they aren’t, which is probably a major component of why you see people running fire way more often than any of the others.

Krathalos.3461:

The auto attack and the stealth attack are the only two abilities that aren’t crap on main hand pistol. Why would you want to change the auto attack?

Edit: To the poster above me, all arrows shot have slightly more range than stated (as they start to lose distance, they are still able to make contact). It’s not that the Pistol has less range – it’s that the Shortbow has slightly more range than stated.

You are objectively wrong. The #1 attack is far crappier than it should be. Try playing a rifle warrior and come back and make this argument.

Hermes.7014:

It’s not just the attack speed of Vital Shot that needs to be fixed. Also the range of pistols is not 900 as specified, it’s even shorter than that!

The description of both Trick Shot for Short Bow and Vital Shot for Pistol (the auto-attacks) specifies range 900.

Now if you want, you can try this out.
Go to the shooting range in Lion’s Arch near the Dungeon Armor vendors, then equip a Short Bow and put yourself at max range and shoot to see how far the arrows go t hit the target. Now, switch to Pistol and try shooting from the same distance which should be 900 and see what happens…

Pistols’ effective range is actually roughly 700, hence the range in Pistol skills description is a lie.

I never realized this, but now that you point it out it’s obvious in hindsight, there have been a number of times where I’ve been trying to shoot something and it’s acted like I was too far away and I was like “really?”

That’s insane, why has this not been addressed yet?

mrstealth.6701:

I just did some rough testing of guardian scepter, thief pistol, and warrior rifle slot 1 attacks. It’s not 100% accurate, but counting the number of attacks in x time frame (I used 30 seconds) gives enough information to determine how the three relate to each other.
Scepter and pistol were close to equal, each getting in 34-35 attacks before time ran out. The scepter listed activation time is 1/4, while the pistol is 1/2 second. There is a clear difference in the cooldowns of these two weapons. Given their activation times, if the cooldowns were the same the scepter would be hitting many more times in the 30 second window.

Rifle was a bit slower, only getting 30-31 attacks in 30 seconds. With it’s 3/4 second activation, the cooldown must be significantly shorter to retain this fire rate.

As for the damage comparisons, I went for the most simple option of taking the stats listed on wiki and multiplying damage+condition damage by the number of shots. For rifle this was approx. 12,200; pistol was 10,336; scepter was 6720. There are some huge differences here, but as someone mentioned above, you cannot compare weapons based on a single skill. The other skills have widely varying DPS that has to be taken into account. Scepter #2 skill deals over 1600 damage to multiple targets with a 6 second cooldown, while rifle slot 2 does 135 damage (+cripple) with a 10 second cooldown. That damage difference actually makes the combined DPS of slots 1 and 2 rather close to equal for scepter (guardian) and rifle (warrior). The thief’s lack of cooldown and reliance on a regenerating resource makes this type of comparison rather difficult, so I left it out of this portion.

I do still think that the skill descriptions vs the actual timing need to be looked at, if only to make the descriptions more accurately reflect actual speeds. Accurate listed times and a game-wide standard cooldown would make on-paper comparions much easier to do, and with greater accuracy versus having to measure and determine varying cooldowns.

Thanks for the data, interesting stuff. I would still bet almost everything that I own that the activation speeds are meant to follow the recast more closely than they do (if not identically), and the difference in the number of shots per 30 seconds should be greater between the three weapons. I also think it’s the primary reason for the DPS difference between the three weapons you tested.

As for the #2 skill on the scepter, it is not as spectacular as you implied (the damage is spread out and it will never do that much to a single target). The fact is that what you provided is, proportionally speaking, a rough estimate of the type of sustained damage these weapons will do in a protracted fight, especially fighting from a distance like intended by the weapon. So the rifle has significantly higher DPS than the pistol, and both have dramatically higher than the scepter.

As for the Thief’s pistol, here’s the real problem with it. The lack of cooldowns and reliance on initiative mans that you can push the Pistol’s DPS up to get close to the Rifle’s, ONLY by stacking power (even though it’s a condition weapon) and continually dumping all of your Initiative to spam Unload, which removes any utility potentially provided by the set. The warrior does not need to do that to get maximal amount of damage and utility from their rifle, and it correctly benefits decently from both condition and power.

In short, it is clear to me that the pistol and the scepter are both weaker than they are intended to be, and it’s because some issue is significantly impairing their firing speed. The Pistol should be noticeably faster than the rifle and the scepter should be noticeably faster than the pistol, and that isn’t the case.

I totally agree that this cooldown/animation issue needs to be seriously investigated and at the very least some light needs to be shed on what’s up with the misleading activation speeds, etc.

Longbows have some pretty great utility in group environments, but I believe they suffer from the same firing speed bug that plagues a lot of ranged weapons (excluding rifles for some reason) across professions. Namely, the #1 skill has a painfully slow recast for the damage it does, leading to subpar DPS in generalized combat situations.

Unfortunately, just like with the Ranger and Pistols on the Thief, it’s only useful in niche situations and is very suboptimal generally speaking. I hope this bug/design issue gets addressed soon.

CMF.5461:

Something that has been brought up on the Guardian boards a few times is that while our ranged attack has a 1/4s attack refresh, it is in actuality closer to 1 1/4 second attack refresh.

Many of our chain attacks seems to be more aligned to a 1s attack tempo regardless of what the tool tip says.

So fast attacking weapons that strike faster than 1s get tied to a 1s interval which affects the perceived effectiveness that you would think it would have via the tool tips.

Yes, and to be honest I think this even duped the designers. I am pretty sure that when skills were being mathematically balanced early on, they were balanced around their activation speeds in a vacuum based on a single cast, not taking into account any recovery/recast delays that slow down the rate of fire artificially for non-chain attacks.

What makes the least sense to me is that Rifle attacks are fairly well synchronized with their expected activation speed, but nothing else is.

Rifles have a 3/4 second activation and a .8 recast
Pistols have 1/2 second activation but a .8 recast
Longbows have a 3/4 sec activation with a 1.2 recast
Scepters and Staffs vary across professions but tend to take a ful .5 – 1 second longer than their activation timers would suggest to recast.

I would stake my life that it was a design oversight with the way animations and skill responsiveness work, and that is the singular reason those weapon sets are so often complained about on the profession boards.

Vermillion Hawk.9037:

Well Staves and Scepters are a whole other ballpark as their attacks can cause markedly different effects from profession to profession.

In regards to the basic attack speed, yes, it’s roughly the same between pistols andrifles for the primary attack. What makes pistols and other ranged weapons better is the skill diversity they bring to the table. The primary attack isn’t that important overall.

No, not really. Any weapon set’s #1 skill sets the baseline sustained damage potential of that set, with the other skills serving a tactical or supplementary role, and this is exactly how it is with melee weapons as well, and skills are no more diverse among ranged weapons than they are among melee weapons. In particular, t’s a huge problem that the Pistol fires at the same speed as the rifle, because it isn’t supposed to. If what you were saying was true, Rifles would fire more slowly than Pistols to compensate for being a lot stronger, and they don’t. This makes it clear to me that there’s some unintended design issue with the way recasting works on non-chain attacks.

MH Pistol is by far the worst weapon for thiefs simply because the DPS is horrendous, and even though it’s intended to be a condition weapon, the only way to make it halfway viable is to stack power and spam Unload, which erases any potential utility it might have due to the Initiative sink. It is very clearly not working as intended.

There’s also a dramatic difference in the recast time of Longbows and Rifles (1.2 sec. and .8 sec), leading to the latter being objectively stronger than the former, since #1s on Longbows are not any stronger to compensate for the attack speed difference. This is largely why there’s a fairly strong consensus that warriors are better ranged fighters than rangers.

The firing speed issue with ranged weapons? I’ve been all over the profession boards posting about it. It’s really very obvious…

Rifles have a 3/4 second activation speed, and roughly a .8 recast on their #1 skills, which is about appropriate. Consequently, rifles feel pretty strong to professions that use it.

All other ranged weapons (with the possible exception of Shortbow, which is in the middle somewhere) – Pistols, Longbows, Staffs, Scepters, all either have the same activation speed but slower recast as the rifle, or have a faster activation speed but the same recast.

Because of an issue with the rate of fire of their #1 skill, the following weapon sets are all noticeably weaker than they should be; it’s either a bug with the activation or a design issue with animations or the GCD:

Thief – MH Pistol
Engineer – MH Pistol
Ranger – Longbow
Warrior – Longbow

I haven’t extensively tested Staffs and Scepters yet, but I strongly suspect they are affected as well. Anyone have any thoughts or insight on this?

Fixing Longbow #1 firing speed should be top priority, it is currently slower than it’s supposed to be for both rangers and warriors. So are pistols.

Stiv.1820:

Einlanzer.1627:

Stiv.1820:

But that 1 skill applies a bleed every time it hits. It’s a really really awesome skill and meant for bleed builds. Sneak attack is amazing as well.

Yes, it is meant for bleed builds, but no, it isn’t awesome at all. Try playing a Rifle warrior then come back and see if you still think it’s amazing. Vital Shot barely manages to stack 5 bleeds while doing pitiful direct damage. The Warrior’s rifle stacks 8-9 bleeds, does more direct damage, and has a range of 1200 yards.

The difference in power, bleed duration, and range all favoring the rifle is because the pistol is supposed to fire faster (and consequently stack the same number of bleeds), but it doesn’t due to a bug or design oversight. This is pretty much the entire reason why you see so many complaints about Pistols being weak.

Pistol’s on their own are’t weak, it’s just P/P that kind of sucks with unload having no bleeds. Offhand pistol is good and so is main hand (well pistol#2 does suck) but Warriors don’t have stealth. I’m all for buffing my class but I can’t imagine Pistol#1 getting a buff because of how functionally useful it is currently.

Maybe I haven’t run into enough bleed rifle warriors or they aren’t effective against Thieves with lots of condition removal because I haven’t noticed them.

Nay. Pistol off-hand is fine because it’s utilitarian, but Pistol main hand is not fine regardless of your OH, and it will not be fine until they fix Vital Shot. You man think you’re doing great damage with it, but trust me, you aren’t.

People complain about Body Shot, but Body Shot is not the major problem with MH Pistols; it’s a utility skill not a damage skill. The problem with MH Pistol is that it does wretched DPS because Vital Shot fires at roughly 60-70% the speed it’s supposed to, failing to stack enough bleeds OR do enough direct damage to give the set decent sustained damage, which is why Unload spamming is the only semi-viable (and still quite sup-optimal) way to play it.

Rangers’ problems:

Some utilities are weak
Pets are too weak defensively and comprise too much of your offense.
Longbow is bugged

Stiv.1820:

But that 1 skill applies a bleed every time it hits. It’s a really really awesome skill and meant for bleed builds. Sneak attack is amazing as well.

Yes, it is meant for bleed builds, but no, it isn’t awesome at all. Try playing a Rifle warrior then come back and see if you still think it’s amazing. Vital Shot barely manages to stack 5 bleeds while doing pitiful direct damage. The Warrior’s rifle stacks 8-9 bleeds, does more direct damage, and has a range of 1200 yards.

The difference in power, bleed duration, and range all favoring the rifle is because the pistol is supposed to fire faster (and consequently stack the same number of bleeds), but it doesn’t due to a bug or design oversight. This is pretty much the entire reason why you see so many complaints about Pistols being weak.

The idea is that guns in GW2 are fairly primitive. When you assume the firearm technology is primitive rather than modern era, with guns such as the Arquebus or flintlock, they definitely have their drawbacks relative to bows.

1. they’re more dangerous to the user.
2. higher skill floor, but a lower skill ceiling
3. they are time consuming to fire and reload
4. they are loud as hell
5. they are cumbersome to carry and harder to maintain

In-game, there’s an unintended design issue affecting ranged weapons. Pistols and Longbows both fire more slowly than intended. The Longbow and Rifle are supposed to be equivalent while the Pistol is supposed to be faster than both. In actuality, the Pistol and Rifle are equivalent while the Longbow is slower than both. This means that across professions Longbows and Pistols are weaker than they are supposed to be while Rifles are exactly where they’re supposed to be.

I’m pretty sure it affects other ranged weapons as well, but I haven’t looked as closely so I can’t confirm.

The problem is not that they only have 1 skill, the problem is that the recast for that one skill is much slower than it’s supposed to be, making the #1 skills of most ranged weapons for most professions garbage. The same is true of Longbows, Staffs and Scepters, and it’s even true of the Thief’s Shortbow (not for the ranger though, since they removed its activation timer and GCD).

Strangely, Rifles are the only ranged weapon that fire at or near the rate seemingly intended. It isn’t surprising that Warriors or Engineers with a Rifle are typically considered the strongest ranged builds in the game.

Shadowscamp.8065:

Rifle bleeds are slightly lackluster, mainly because the autoattack chain is a little slow. That coupled with the fact that nothing else on the rifle does condition damage means that condition damage gear is slightly wasted if you’re using a rifle.

If you want a condition build, try sword/shield/longbow or sword/sword/longbow with condition traits. Swords are the warrior’s bleed weapon (you can stack a lot with flurry and impale is non-removable, I think) and longbow does some good burning damage. Otherwise, if you want to run a rifle and another weapon other than a mainhand sword, then I think you should probably forego condition damage stats and go for more power/prec/critdmg with some toughness/vitality somewhere in there. Sigils of Earth don’t really make up for a weapon set that is not focused around conditions.

God if you think the warrior’s rifle is lackluster, you should try a Pistol thief. There’s something wrong with the ranged weapons in this game.

I’m going to throw this out there and see how people respond:

I am almost certain that all ranged weapons except rifles and maybe shortbows have a design flaw that causes their #1 skills to auto-attack more slowly than was intended across professions. There are numerous complaints about Pistols on the Thief board, Longbows on the Ranger board, Scepters and Staffs on the mage boards, and if you pay attention you’ll notice that your #1 skills are very slow relative to their activation speeds and their damage potential.

Bluntly, it ruins those sets, and in the case of the Elementalist and Ranger in particular it cripples the entire profession.

If you’re looking to make the most of SoM, make sure you a.) boost your compassion, and b.) use S/P as Pistol Whip against multiple mobs = tons of returned health, and c.) throw a lot of Caltrops.

Thieves are certainly mediocre in PvE due to survivability issues, but certain skills and traits make a dramatic difference, such as Caltrops.

Good luck! I would not encourage anyone to run with P/P though. MH Pistol does significantly less DPS than it is supposed to because of an issue with Vital Shot’s attack speed, which forces you to stack power and rely on Unload spam to do anything worthwhile. This in turn destroys the utility of the set as it leaves you with no initiative to spend tactically.

It’s just altogether borked right now, but I’m optimistic it’ll be addressed soon.

I feel like the AMA did a lot to alleviate my concerns for the time being, I currently feel cautiously optimistic and do continue to keep playing.

Warrior. That is all.

The Longbow has its niche uses, but frankly the Rifle is better. I submitted a bug on an issue I believe is currently affecting ranged weapons, most prominently Longbows and Pistols, where the autocast speed on the #1 skill is slower than intended. You’ll notice across professions that #1 skills on Longbows and Pistols are weaker than they should be, and you can even calculate out the recast relative to the activation speed. It’s a very small difference for rifles but very pronounced for Pistols and Longbows. I do not believe this is intended.

Ensign.2189:

All-in Unload spamming delivering damage on par with the ranger’s shortbow autoattacks is not acceptable damage; quite the opposite. The ranger still gets to use all their weapon utility skills while dealing that damage – the thief has zero utility from his weapon when forced into Unload spam just to deal acceptable damage. That’s just the initiative system, and it does not work when you have to choose between dealing damage and providing utility.

Vital Shot needs to deal good damage on its own, and Unload should fill a role as a finisher or burst skill. That model works. The current pistol model of putting all the damage on Unload, with a crappy auto and pathetic damage utilities, just doesn’t work. The weapon needs a total overhaul.

Thank you, I’m glad I’m not the only one who gets that Vital Shot is 95% of the problem with Pistols, and is obviously not working as intended.

I would also like to add:

6. Fix the rate of fire issues for ranged weapons, rifle is the only one that seems right.

Blacksarevok.8104:

Well all I can say is I’ll be chuckling when in the future we see in the patch notes “Vital Shot: This attacks tooltip has been properly updated to reflect it’s attack speed.”

All that would prove is that the QA/development folks aren’t very competent.

Tulisin.6945:

Look, Blacksarevok gets your point, Einlanzer, at this point you’re just going in circles about semantics and intent. The fact is, unless you’re under NDA, you can only speculate as to developer intent. You can use analysis to back up that speculation, but it is still speculation.

No, he quite obviously doesn’t. And false, the developer intent could not be any clearer. This argument is altogether ridiculous.

Blacksarevok.8104:

Tulisin.6945:

Blacksarevok.8104:

And I don’t know where you’ve been, but all ranged sets perform mediocre in the damage department. Even Unload spam in it’s current incarnation can put out competitive numbers to Ranger Shortbow or Warrior Rifle. Just go and test it yourself. Why do you think P/P didn’t receive any damage buffs this past patch? The issue with P/P is, and has always been, it’s lack of diversity. It’s a one-trick pony. Kits like Warrior Rifle are better because they have better utility and better on-demand burst, but the actually sustained damage is similar.

While this is generally true it isn’t even P/P’s skills that make it worse than, say, ranger shortbow or warrior rifle, it is that the initiative system creates a shared resource pool between damage and utility, whereas the cooldown system means a weapon can bring both to the table. So while a thief can put out “competitive numbers”, doing so means pouring all of their initiative into damage and leaving very little for utility. It isn’t that the skills aren’t diverse, P/P actually has a pretty diverse set of skills (perhaps missing a token AE option), it is that thieves can’t properly utilize utility unless the utility is bundled onto their damage skills or they can do initiative-efficient damage, neither of which is true of P/P.

I suppose that’s true, but that seems to me to be more of a flaw with the resource system itself. I mean, what could they do to counter that? The only thing I can think of would be to put CD’s on our abilities while increasing the damage, but that would kinda take the point out of having initiative.

What seems to work well are specs that utilize stealth attacks as their main abilities. D/D backstab, P/D Sneak attack, and the former S/D TS all usually had ini to work with because of the stealth ICD. Maybe they could implement a similar system for all the kits? Alternatively, I guess they could always put more emphasis on traits like First Strikes, rewarding us for pooling initiative so that we have enough to spend on situational abilities. This was something that was used in ToR extensively, and I actually enjoyed from a damage-dealing standpoint.

The fix is very simple and has already been covered. Buff Vital Shot’s attack speed so that you aren’t forced to over-rely on Initiative dumps to Unload to maintain any significant DPS. This is what I’ve been saying all along. You’ll notice that neither shortbows nor the melee weapons have this problem to nearly the same degree, there’s a pretty obvious reason why – their initiative-free #1 skills do appreciable damage, which allows you to utilize your Initiative tactically.

Tulisin.6945:

Blacksarevok.8104:

And I don’t know where you’ve been, but all ranged sets perform mediocre in the damage department. Even Unload spam in it’s current incarnation can put out competitive numbers to Ranger Shortbow or Warrior Rifle. Just go and test it yourself. Why do you think P/P didn’t receive any damage buffs this past patch? The issue with P/P is, and has always been, it’s lack of diversity. It’s a one-trick pony. Kits like Warrior Rifle are better because they have better utility and better on-demand burst, but the actually sustained damage is similar.

While this is generally true it isn’t even P/P’s skills that make it worse than, say, ranger shortbow or warrior rifle, it is that the initiative system creates a shared resource pool between damage and utility, whereas the cooldown system means a weapon can bring both to the table. So while a thief can put out “competitive numbers”, doing so means pouring all of their initiative into damage and leaving very little for utility. It isn’t that the skills aren’t diverse, P/P actually has a pretty diverse set of skills (perhaps missing a token AE option), it is that thieves can’t properly utilize utility unless the utility is bundled onto their damage skills or they can do initiative-efficient damage, neither of which is true of P/P.

Right, and the reason why it’s a particularly large problem for P/P is because Vital Shot should be the primary source of damage, which would allow you to spend your Initiative tactically, but it isn’t, forcing you to dump all your Initiative into Unload to maintain what is still rather poor sustained damage.

Blacksarevok.8104:

Einlanzer.1627:

Blacksarevok.8104:

If you logic was correct, then every single weapon kit would only have abilities that benefit from one stat type. If D/D was intended to only stack pwr/crit, then DB would deal pure direct damage and no bleeds. If Warrior Rifle was intended to only stack condition damage, then Killshot and Volley would both do less direct damage and apply bleeds or some kind of condition. It is fairly obvious that developers intended most weapon kits to be able to be played in different fashions. Whether or not said playstyles are viable is another story, but to say that a weapon set is supposed to stack a certain stat based SOLELY on what the number #1 skill does is contradictory to what is actually happening in the game even outside of P/P.

Man, I’m trying hard not to be rude, but you struggle with reading comprehension don’t you? None of this even remotely resembles any statement I have ever attempted to make, and you pretty much just wrote a full paragraph arguing against a strawman.

I’ll break it down as simply as I can: P/P is a terrible set. The reason why it’s a terrible set is because it’s intended to do good DPS through a combination of bleed stacking via Vital Shot and tactical Unloads, benefiting from both Power and Condition building. Instead, Vital Shot is so weak that you get little return from condition building and therefore in order to make P/P even kind of work you have to build for power and focus exclusively on spamming unload. Even doing that, you only reach mediocrity, not anything great. Not working as intended. And it’s entirely because of Vital Shot, everything else that may or not be wrong with the set is tertiary.

You said that a kits #1 attack directly reflects how the kit should played. You are saying that because D/D’s #1 attack utilizes direct damage that D/D is clearly intended to be a power-based kit. You said that because P/P’s #1 attack utilizes bleeds, it’s clearly intended to be a condition damage-based kit. I simply pointed out that assuming that is contradictory to how these kits, among loads of others, are actually being played in game.

And I don’t know where you’ve been, but all ranged sets perform mediocre in the damage department. Even Unload spam in it’s current incarnation can put out competitive numbers to Ranger Shortbow or Warrior Rifle. Just go and test it yourself. Why do you think P/P didn’t receive any damage buffs this past patch? The issue with P/P is, and has always been, it’s lack of diversity. It’s a one-trick pony. Kits like Warrior Rifle are better because they have better utility and better on-demand burst, but the actually sustained damage is similar.

Who is to say that the devs didn’t intend for VS to mainly utilized by P/D and that Unload spam was actually intended for P/P? You do also realize that P/D is already a very strong single target kit, and that increasing VS speed by 30-40% may make it overpowered? Hell, that could be the whole reason why VS speed is as it is currently.

Nope, I didn’t. Read between the lines.

In some cases (especially the Longbow), yes, because of the same issue, which is why it’s critical it gets looked at ASAP. Rifles are fine.

Nope, they didn’t, nope, it isn’t, and nope, it won’t. VS is terrible. Consequently, P/D over-relies on C&D to reach subpar damage and mediocre utility while P/P over-relies on Unload to reach mediocre damage and subpar utility. Neither of those is intended. A buff to Vital Shot would make P/anything feel like a viable weapon set for the first time in GW2 history.

Blacksarevok.8104:

If you logic was correct, then every single weapon kit would only have abilities that benefit from one stat type. If D/D was intended to only stack pwr/crit, then DB would deal pure direct damage and no bleeds. If Warrior Rifle was intended to only stack condition damage, then Killshot and Volley would both do less direct damage and apply bleeds or some kind of condition. It is fairly obvious that developers intended most weapon kits to be able to be played in different fashions. Whether or not said playstyles are viable is another story, but to say that a weapon set is supposed to stack a certain stat based SOLELY on what the number #1 skill does is contradictory to what is actually happening in the game even outside of P/P.

Man, I’m trying hard not to be rude, but you struggle with reading comprehension don’t you? None of this even remotely resembles any statement I have ever attempted to make, and you pretty much just wrote a full paragraph arguing against a strawman.

I’ll break it down as simply as I can: P/P is a terrible set. The reason why it’s a terrible set is because it’s intended to do good DPS through a combination of bleed stacking via Vital Shot and tactical Unloads, benefiting from both Power and Condition building. Instead, Vital Shot is so weak that you get little return from condition building and therefore in order to make P/P even kind of work you have to build for power and focus exclusively on spamming Unload. Even doing that, you only reach mediocrity because Vital Shot’s weakness still bottlenecks your sustained damage and you have to reserve all your Initiative for Unload, meaning the set is useless from a utilitarian perspective. Not working as intended. And it’s entirely because of Vital Shot, everything else that may or not be wrong with the set is tertiary.

Blacksarevok.8104:

Einlanzer.1627:

I’m not assuming anything, I’m using deductive logic. There’s a very big difference. MH Pistol is clearly intended as a condition weapon, just like the MH dagger is very clearly a power weapon. P/P and D/D are both hybrid sets due to the dual skills. They are both intended to benefit from condition damage and power builds.

Every other “bleed weapon” in the game has a #1 that is able to maintain stacks of 8 or 9 on autoattack. Vital Shot struggles to maintain 5, doing terrible upfront damage in the process. The weapon that the Thief’s P/P set most closely resembles is the Warrior’s Rifle. The #1 on the rifle does more upfront damage, has greater range, and a has a 2 second longer bleed duration, while the #1 on the Pistol has a faster rate of fire, except it actually doesn’t. The Rifle also has great upfront damage capability with Volley and the Adrenaline attack, while also having superior utility and range.

When you actually look at the data, the conclusion is intuitively obvious. Either you haven’t spent enough time looking at the data, or you have poor analytical skills. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former.

If MH dagger is clearly designed as a power weapon, then why is D/D bleeds still just as viable as D/D backstab? The issue here is that you think weapon sets are intended to solely fulfill one role based on their #1 attack, exactly how is that logical? As I said, if D/D was intended to be a pwr/crit kit, then why are just as many people playing D/D bleeds? If Warrior Rifle was intended to be a bleed build, then why is just as viable as a pwr/crit build?

And I feel like you are implying that I don’t think P/P doesn’t need buffs, which is not true. I agree that Warrior Rifle is better than P/P in most aspects, however VS under performing due to a proposed speed bug isn’t not the only reason for that under performance.

That is not the problem here, and I retract what I said earlier.

D/D bleeds are not as viable as D/D backstab, and even if it was that doesn’t change the fact that MH Dagger is designed as a Power weapon, the condition damage is supplementary. Why is that? DING DING DING, it’s because the #1 skill is bread&butter, initiative-free, AND immutable, while the #3 skill costs initiative and varies by set. In other words, the #1 skill of any weapon set represents the baseline usage of that weapon, while the other skills all provide tactical options to supplement it.

You can continue arguing all you want, but you I am very confident I know what I’m talking about. MH Pistol is a condition weapon, and due to a bug or design oversight it is a terrible one. The only saving grace of P/P is that you can stack power and focus on Unload for mediocre DPS instead of being forced to rely on Vital Shot for wretched DPS, which is still an inferior strategy because Unload costs initiative, while the bread and butter initiative-free #1 skill that is supposed to maintain decent sustained damage while being supplemented by other skills is completely broken by firing almost half as quickly as it’s supposed to.

I’m bumping this because it’s a very critical issue single-handedly breaking several weapon sets and needs some attention before changes to other skills are made.

To the OP: Engineers aren’t under-powered, Pistols are. There’s a problem afflicting Pistols that make their #1 skills have the same rate of fire as rifles when they’re designed to be faster.