Unload skill needs change.

This reflects the opinion of the person who played the game at the very start. Then there was a long break and now i am back. I looked at the forum and what people think about the game with two pistols. Most reviews relate to spam Unload and critics of brainless and monotonous gameplay. Basically, I agree, but I want to express my proposal.

First, the division of skills in PvP and PvE in terms of initiative points, I consider a bad move. It makes a lot of difference and spoils the experience of playing PvP and PvE. Impressions from the battle, planning expenditure initiatives should be the same regardless of the game mode.

Secondly, now the whole game is built on spam 3, since this ability is the most effective way to kill the enemy. It is rarely necessary to immobilize or interrupt the enemy, since it is still faster to press several times 3 and he will die. Or not, but then you will not have the initiative for anything else.

I propose to reduce the damage, cast time, the required amount of initiative by 30-50% and remove the return of the initiative after all hits, since with a low cost of skill it is unnecessary. Make instead of 8 bullets 4 or 5. As well as level the cost of skills for PvP and PvE. Reduce damage in PvP, but do not change the cost.

Unloaddamage - ~100 (reduced by 33%)cost - 4 (no Initiative recovery after all hits)cast time - 3/4 secnumber of bullets - 4

I think this will make the gameplay more interesting, since it will be possible to more flexibly combine control and damage.

What do you think about that? Any hope for change?

P.S. And bring Ricochet back.

I stopped reading after you said the skill split is a bad idea. It is not. It is probably one of the most important things they did for the health of the game across game modes. They can change skills now agnostic of game mode. If one skill becomes too good in either they can tweak it and not affect the mode where it is fine. How can you remotely think that is was a bad decision?

Too bad you stopped reading. I did not say that separation is bad. I said that cost split is bad. And I proposed to reduce the damage in the PVP, and not to increase the cost.

honestly i doubt you could balance this skill properly. personally i would make it bullet spread (fire in a cone)

This doesn't really solve any of the issues with the kit, and if anything, encourages mashing 3 even more than now.

P/P's issues are the excess of block powercreep from the expansion and the fact skills 1, 2 (less so now, but still meh), 4, and 5 lack synergy with its only major way it kills people, which is via unload.

Unload is overtuned for what it should be only because without it being that way the kit would have zero value anywhere at all.

Sadly binary design and rock-paper-scissors balance is what ANet seems to want for most of the classes these days. P/P will pretty much always suck or be overly-good for how simple it is, just by nature of the kit having no synergy and having all its eggs in one basket with an insane repeated damage threat at range.

@derd.6413 said:honestly i doubt you could balance this skill properly. personally i would make it bullet spread (fire in a cone)

Dual Pistols is a burst weapon set. So, as it stands, it's pretty balanced given how many abilities other professions have to mitigate damage, or to close the gap.

If balance really is needed, then you can do a swap after the full volley lands.

Coup De Grace: After landing the full volley of Unload, unload swaps to this skill. This skill fires a single hard hitting bullet that launches the foe back.

Changes you proposed will NOT help. It's just a nerf. 50% less shots, 33% less damage and no initiative recovery with a very generous 20% initiative requirement decrease. Are you crazy, or what? Don't reduce the effectiveness of the only skill the dual pistols are used for. You do realize that prolonging the time of the fight by nerfing the only proper damage ability you have won't make the game any more interesting, right?

Instead of just working on Unload, it would be nice if developers changed the way Vital Shot works. It's supposed to be an auto-attack, but as it stands right now, dual pistols auto-attack is Unload. If you nerf the Unload, by say, increasing it's initiative cost/reducing initative returns, you need to have some ability to rely on while initative is regenerating. Vital Shot in it's current state is not only inefficient, it's also very unsatisfying to use. Weak and slow. What if the Vital Shot changed depending on the amount of pistols you have equiped. So instead of the Vital Shot you get a "Super-Duper-XX-MEGA-Hunter-Seeking-Bullets-of-the-Void-Act-II-Turbo" if you have 2 pistols equipped?

Body Shot is pretty much useless in PvE, you said it yourself. You don't need to immobilize normal enemies because they die too quickly to your Unload, while champs don't give a smack about it and you have Head Shot for control anyway. Instead of making Unload so weak that you have to immobilize the enemies since you have to wait a minute till they die from your nerfed shots, Body Shot could be replaced with something actually useful and new. Or you could jut give it some kind of utility/supportive quality. Say, you reduce the damage of the Unload by 10%, but you make it so that it get's 15% increased damage on top of 5 stacks of vulnerability if used on the enemy that was hit by a Body Shot.

Don't pay too much attention to numbers, I'm just giving you ideas.

Black Powder is a smoke field. And it's very good, since stealth, but the problem is the lack of variety of combos dual pistols have. All finishers are "Projectile" type. There is next to no synergy between pistol abilities. Giving pistol a leap or a blast finisher would be too powerful, but Smoke FIeld could provide some kind of buffs to pistol abilities, for example.

Don't just plan out a nerf and then claim that you have a solution for a problem. It doesn't make the game more fun or interesting. There is a difference between you having to WAIT longer till your enemies die because you deal less damage and you having to use different abilities to be efficient.

TL;DR - instead of nuking the only damage source of the weapon set from the orbit, give players alternatives.

Edit - fixed typos.

The reason why P/P players only use unload is because there's nothing else to use. Imagine A-Net rendering all D/X skills except weapon skill 1 useless, would you guys start suggesting that they need to nerf dagger 1 too because "D/X players are only using skill 1"?

The fact that it has such a high initiative cost for no reason is also rather problematic. Not only is the overall DPS outside of soloplay (and even then) far to low to justify such high costs but it also achieves the opposite of what some people hope such high costs would accomplish. Why would a P/P player use anything but unload if using weapon skill X does more harm than good? E.g. many mobs have break bars and are vulnerable to the players attacks once these bars are broken but why should a P/P thief even bother with breaking them if you don't have enough initiative left to properly attack once the bar is broken? P/P has its basic attack compete with other skills for the same resource, D/X would be completely unplayable if they would add a relatively similar initiative cost to dagger 1. The main reason why P/P is even remotely playable (in PvE) is because of the fact that the pistol is a ranged weapon.

@Leo Schrodingers Cat.2497 said:Dual Pistols is a burst weapon set.

Absolutely not, P/P as a weapon set is mostly based on building up and sustaining damage. If you want ranged burst damage then rifle would be the way to go.

@"Misquesh.9504" said:Instead of just working on Unload, it would be nice if developers changed the way Vital Shot works. It's supposed to be an auto-attack, but as it stands right now, dual pistols auto-attack is Unload. If you nerf the Unload, by say, increasing it's initiative cost/reducing initative returns, you need to have some ability to rely on while initative is regenerating. Vital Shot in it's current state is not only inefficient, it's also very unsatisfying to use. Weak and slow. What if the Vital Shot changed depending on the amount of pistols you have equiped. So instead of the Vital Shot you get a "Super-Duper-XX-MEGA-Hunter-Seeking-Bullets-of-the-Void-Act-II-Turbo" if you have 2 pistols equipped?

TBH they should replace vital shot with unload if you equip 2 pistols, like you said gameplay wise unload already fills the role of a basic attack and using both pistols for it is more fitting for the theme of the weapon set anyways. This way they could use the 3d weapon slot to give the set some much needed utility.

It hard to fix p/p without unduly affecting other sets. That said if the intent to rely on skills oher then unload those other skills have to provide more. Doing this without breaking other sets can be problematic.

Perhaps one could.

Increase the velocity on #2 by 50 percent for the projectile. It too slow and many times avoided for that reason. Increase the duration of vuln to 10 seconds. This can give an alternative of Vuln building at cheaper cost with a more reliable strike.

Increase the power damge of #1 auto by 30 percent.

Ideally one can preserve ini By rotating between #2 nd #1 while still outputting decent damage and saving unload as the burst for a finish. From the perspective of an enemy one can not just dodge the unload anymore and shrug off the other attacks as the #2 , #1 rotation could also deal much more damage which can be even more reliable with the immob on #2.

@babazhook.6805 said:It hard to fix p/p without unduly affecting other sets.

Not really, they just need to base the number of dual skills on the overall synergy of the weapon skills in question. This way other weapon sets would be completely unaffected. If the original weapon skills of a weapon combo already have a high amount of synergy then one dual skill might be sufficient (e.g. D/P), if not then more than one might be nessesary.

@babazhook.6805 said:Perhaps one could.

Increase the velocity on #2 by 50 percent for the projectile. It too slow and many times avoided for that reason. Increase the duration of vuln to 10 seconds. This can give an alternative of Vuln building at cheaper cost with a more reliable strike.

Increase the power damge of #1 auto by 30 percent.

Ideally one can preserve ini By rotating between #2 nd #1 while still outputting decent damage and saving unload as the burst for a finish. From the perspective of an enemy one can not just dodge the unload anymore and shrug off the other attacks as the #2 , #1 rotation could also deal much more damage which can be even more reliable with the immob on #2.

I don't think that focussing another 2 weapon skills on something that's already covered in similar ways through other means does the weapon set any good, like I said they should just make unload the dual skill replacement for 1 and focus 2 and 3 more on utility e.g. an engage / disengage skill for 2 and some small scale AoE for 3.