Elementalist Getting Main Hand Pistol in Expansion 4! Whats your ideas for how it could work?

[Infusion.7149]

It probably is going to be just elemental themed bullets (fire burning, water chill, air vuln, earth bleeding ) with high attack rate.  

Pistol makes it essentially a terrible WvW spec unless the skills are unblockable and AoE. More likely it just has piercing.

The differentiator would need to be low damage high attack rate compared to delayed attacks on scepter.

Edited June 28, 2023 by Infusion.7149

[TrollingDemigod.3041]

Fire Attunement:
- Fire PewPew - pewpew enemy for 0,5 damage, apply -0.5s burn.
- Fire PewPew on 6s cd - apply 10 burn stacks on yourself.
- Fire PewPew on 15s cd - your hdd burned from embarrassment.
Water Attunement:
- Water PewPew - pewpew enemy for 0,0001 damage, apply 1 vulnerability every 10minutes.
- Water PewPew on 20,75s cd - pewpew enemy and apply chill for -3s and don't deal damage.
- Water PewPew on 21s cd - your freezer stopped working.
Air Attunement:
- Air PewPew - bounce bullets between yourself and enemy, the last one to get hit will get confused (you'll always get last hit).
- Air PewPew on 10s cd - pewpew yourself in the head, get stunned for eternity.
- Air PewPew on 15s cd - your electricity bill costs 2k $ each day.
Earth Attunement:
- Earth PewPew - throw unpeeled potatoes at enemies, deal emotional damage.
- Earth PewPew on 12s cd - quickly pewpew 10 peanuts at enemy, all misses the target.
- Earth PewPew on 30s cd - your shoes get dirt on them without going outside.
Something like that I guess? Cooldowns ofc may be wrong, but I'm confident that rest is correct.

[Mediahead.3542]

21 hours ago, Serephen.3420 said:

Why does guardian get dual pistols and ele only get one though?🥲

Right? On the other hand, it means that if they do decide to make e-specs again after this, there might be less work involved should they make a dual-pistol spec.

[AlCapwnd.7834]

IMO it should have been Long Bow.

 

 

[CETheLucid.3964]

As long as it's

• Fast (pew, pew, pew, pew, pew)
• Explosive (couple of flashy elemental big bang explosion attacks for the deeps)
• Somewhat decent range (further than scepter, less than staff; maybe ~1000?)

I'll be thrilled. Love the concept.

[draxynnic.3719]

8 hours ago, Infusion.7149 said:

The differentiator would need to be low damage high attack rate compared to delayed attacks on scepter.

This is what I've been thinking myself. Ele ranged damage has been marked by a tendency to do big damage... eventually. Fields that rely on the enemy remaining inside, the lengthy ramp-up time on Arc Lightning, the Dragon's Tooth of Damocles, and so on. Elementalist could definitely do with having something a little... snappier.

[Serephen.3420]

6 hours ago, AlCapwnd.7834 said:

IMO it should have been Long Bow.

 

 

IMO yes I agree

[Fantasmer.1032]

On 6/27/2023 at 8:55 PM, Ruisenior.6342 said:

Another missed oportunity for something great, like how good longbow could have fit this class...

Next

they are wizards.. how about make them viable as wizards. prefer a change in staff to allow 1H or the like

[Razor.6392]

Absolute garbage. Out of all weapons this is the one that is the least-elements related thematically.

Rifle, greatsword, shortbow or longbow and even offhand sword are better choices.

 

 

[NonNonBiyori.1428]

I'm actually quite ecstatic that ele is getting pistol, accouple of MMos that I played in the past the mage casters had access to them, and it worked quite well, glad we're finally getting it.

[Gorani.7205]

Initial thoughts...
1. Why Pistol? Aesthetically my least favourite thing they could have added (next to Rifle).
2. Pistol sound like it should be a ranged weapon, but then it has to be an alternative to Scepter (which is pretty good right now)
3. What if Pistol is a 1200 range weapon on Ele? Will it be a more single target focused Staff alternative?
4. Don't make Pistol a cumbersome range hybrid, like Hammer, please.
5. Hmm... looks like I will be playing Tempest till I'll die of old age.
6. Legendary Weapon Pistol? Quip silly gun? No! How much does that Ebon Vanguard Crossbow skin cost in statuettes? 🙂

[asterix.9614]

I was genuinely hoping to play a mage with elemental bullets 🙂

[Mauti.3520]

From a PvE perspective I could  imagine a somewhat boon support-ish weapon that improves the self-sufficiency of solo Elementalist gameplay while also giving an overall improvement to Heal Support builds. - Although PvP players would probably riot once Catalysts get their hands on such a thing. 😅

Looking at the Elementalist kit in PvE the only thing that feels really missing to me is a (mainhand) weapon that works well with boon support builds, in particular Heal Support.

Heal Tempest for example most of the time wants to play Warhorn, but the mainhand options -Dagger and Scepter- feel really bad in PvE. The only good part on dagger for PvE is the Water 2+3 and to a much lesser degree Air 2+3, the rest is just damage that is bad. Scepter became instantly bad once Water Trident was changed. It's a fantastic weapon, but not for Heal Support.

We kinda have Staff and Staff has it's own niche, but it's more Weapon for WvW (Support and Zerg DPS) and PvP (Support) and it's in general weird. A weird weapon.

Looking at the Weapons Beta, seeing how even Weaver Sword works better on Heal Tempest and even better on Heal Catalyst in conjunction with Warhorn than the other core options, brings me to the conclusion that a support-ish MH weapon could be needed indeed.

Either way, I am excited for the Pistol and looking forward to it in the 2nd Update of the Addon. Anyway I started blasting.

 

 

 

[Serephen.3420]

7 hours ago, Mauti.3520 said:

From a PvE perspective I could  imagine a somewhat boon support-ish weapon that improves the self-sufficiency of solo Elementalist gameplay while also giving an overall improvement to Heal Support builds. - Although PvP players would probably riot once Catalysts get their hands on such a thing. 😅

Looking at the Elementalist kit in PvE the only thing that feels really missing to me is a (mainhand) weapon that works well with boon support builds, in particular Heal Support.

Heal Tempest for example most of the time wants to play Warhorn, but the mainhand options -Dagger and Scepter- feel really bad in PvE. The only good part on dagger for PvE is the Water 2+3 and to a much lesser degree Air 2+3, the rest is just damage that is bad. Scepter became instantly bad once Water Trident was changed. It's a fantastic weapon, but not for Heal Support.

We kinda have Staff and Staff has it's own niche, but it's more Weapon for WvW (Support and Zerg DPS) and PvP (Support) and it's in general weird. A weird weapon.

Looking at the Weapons Beta, seeing how even Weaver Sword works better on Heal Tempest and even better on Heal Catalyst in conjunction with Warhorn than the other core options, brings me to the conclusion that a support-ish MH weapon could be needed indeed.

Either way, I am excited for the Pistol and looking forward to it in the 2nd Update of the Addon. Anyway I started blasting.

 

 

 

Pistol is a rather bizarre option to think of regarding support weapons. We still needva ranged offhand as well. I would have liked pistol more as an offhand honestly. Pairing it with scepter could look quite nice.

I still would have loved the possibilities Longbow could have opened up in comparison to staff. 

[Khalisto.5780]

I hope to walk to my enemy and hit it with the pistol in the head in earth attunement

[TheDetective.8172]

On 6/27/2023 at 8:41 PM, Eekasqueak.7850 said:

Yes and Pistol would be 8 more on top if it's both main and off hand.

It’s only main hand. 

[Ghostkat.9580]

On 6/27/2023 at 6:55 PM, Ruisenior.6342 said:

Another missed oportunity for something great, like how good longbow main-hand focus could have fit this class...

Next

Fixed that for you. 😉

Seriously, though, the only reason why anyone keeps asking for longbow is because of community rhetoric due to staff and scepter being very outdated, therefore the lack of a decent ranged option made talk of longbow and rifle attractive. This does not fix the problem, it just side-steps it. Staff and scepter would still be unappealing for those who want to have an exciting mage power fantasy.

If they fixed the Conjured Weapon system and let you element-swap the frost bow, you'd likely have a better longbow than getting a new two-handed one, much like how Conjure Lightning Hammer is just a better overall package than Cata's hammer. If we could element-swap that hammer, even if they kept the animations for all 5 weaponskills the same, it'd be great. Just make it a toggle instead of on a 30-second timer, and ditch the duplicate since it causes a lot of rotation problems, and you're pretty much set.

Sadly, pistol feels to me to be as unimaginative in concept as bow and rifle. We have flamethrowers, super soakers and tesla guns. Zelda has different elementally-tipped arrows. We've seen that all before in games and it's pretty basic and boring. Take for example, the water element. Water 1 - it squirts water. Water 2 - It sprays a mist. Water 3 - it shoots ice. There's your solid, liquid and gas forms of water. I'm pretty sure that's the reason why it's main-hand only, instead of off-hand, so the dev team doesn't have to think too hard about a whole set of 5 moves per element on a firearm. Could they do something like "shoots an AoE puddle on the ground that heals allies/chills enemies,"? Sure, but off-hand Focus, Dagger and now Warhorn have that sort of thing covered in spades, so what would be the point of getting off-hand pistol other than a slightly clumsier version of stuff we already have? Seems like a waste of development resources.

Now then, if we're talking what would have been appropriate for the expansion - and considering all of the Focus skins that look like knuckles in other MMOs, plus the martial artist cosmetics we keep getting - then Element Monk would have been the ideal thing to get. And no, before you go saying "nah it would be Guardian," read up on your GW1 lore. Cynn marrying Mhenlo introduces Elemental powers into the Monk order, and unlike Catalyst, we have two element-wielding martial artists in the game: Master Stonefist and Officer Aimi (the latter uses fire).

It's also more in line with what would be expected in a Far East Asian setting, as usually the five-element diagram originating in Taoism as Wu Xing (but used in Japan and Korea as well) is typically associated with two things: Far Eastern holistic medicine, and the martial arts.

For fire, you're looking at something like this:

Note that Flame Wall (Fire Focus 4) is used at the start of the fight and he does a combo finisher through it at the 48 second mark. Fire Shield (Fire Focus 5) is used at the 1:46 mark and its Transmute Fire form is used earlier at the 1:07 mark. Just to highlight some examples of how off-hand focus already works for a martial arts class.

For a projectile, Ryu's Hanto Hadouken variant from his guest appearance in the fighting game Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid has him firing a phoenix that travels out and then comes back to hit a second time, instead of a typical fireball.
https://imgur.com/DKzTovK

This is basically Fire Scepter 3's projectile visual effect so it's already in the game, just to highlight how low-cost it would be to put this together. If you're looking to break rules and make the Water stance less of the go-to for healing, you could leverage the phoenix here and do exactly what Fire Scepter 3 does, healing you when the phoenix returns for a percentage of the outgoing damage that was done, or something of that nature. Then you can use this as an excuse to revamp Scepter so those who want the Wizard/Mage power fantasy can have a better Scepter to work with.

For Water, and especially if they wanted this to feel like more of a Summoner with the Celestials, you're looking at something like BDO's Mystic Awakening, and then you'd have a Phoenix on the Fire one. Note the dragon that comes out when certain moves are performed:

Speaking of water dragons. You can take the Saint Seiya approach with pretty much all of the Celestials and Guild Wars 2's armour cosmetics and have something that feels like a blend of Summoner, Elementalist and Martial Artist all in one. Case and point:

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/saintseiya/images/1/1d/Tech-Shiryu-RozansRisingDragon.jpg

This trailer alone doesn't even show all of the water-themed moves available in the game on this thing, but for an auto-attack combo and the 2 and 3 skills, it has more than enough to pick from.

I can keep going for all of the elements, but you get the point. If you look at fighting games and the sheer variety of move possibilities they have, then something like this can get very exciting.

As much of a staple as elemental powers are in martial arts fiction coming out of Far East Asia, sadly most games coming out of the region haven't been able to crack how to get the element-swapping right, or make various other missteps due to a variety of reasons, including many Far East Asian games being very low in budget. There's been a high demand for a decent martial artist class in games for quite a long time that can swap between elemental stances, and it just so happens GW2 is the only game currently on the market that has figured out the element-swapping in a game with more action-y combat than Final Fantasy XIV's more rigid global cooldown system. That being said, many Monk mains have jumped ship from that game because they simplified the gameplay into the ground and removed its elemental stance-dancing, and for years they haven't been able to do Monk justice. Many Summoner mains have also left and I've encountered quite a few of both in this game.

It really felt like a huge letdown when Catalyst was announced during the Lunar New Year event, which has an activity called Dragon Ball (a direct reference to the popular franchise of the same name), when the Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero movie was right around the corner and was pushed back to just after EoD's release. It's like all the stars had aligned for ANet to knock this one out of the park while the competition with more money is struggling to pull it off, and what we got instead was a big swing and a miss trying to be different for different's sake. For a game that really needs to broaden its player base significantly more, that was a big, big misstep to me.

Meanwhile, putting martial arts moves onto Guardian because Guardian has GW1 Monk-like abilities doesn't make much sense when GW1's story sets up a future for element monks, we have them in EoD already, it's a good reference to the idea of dual-classing (without trying to shove homages to popular builds into a game with a very different combat system... *cough* Spellbreaker *cough cough* Untamed *cough*), it's marketable and would have immediately caught the eye of players ANet is trying to attract from other games. You're more likely to scare off FFXIV players when they see you've merged together Monk and Samurai, something Monk mains hated about sharing Striking gear because it's one of the things that shackled them back and inhibited rotation diversity.

Also, I'm 98% sure whoever designed "Whirling Light" on Guardian looked at footage of Ryu and Ken's "tatsumaki senpukyaku" (literally "tornado whirlwind leg") from Street Fighter and said "that spinning kick looks cool, let's copy that," but didn't realize that in English it's called the Hurricane/Tornado Kick and is already aspected to air. Also, it's a move from a fictionalized Japanese martial art, not a Korean one like Taekwondo, Taekkyon, Subac or Yongmudo.

Whoops.

Yet another reason why these specializations shouldn't be designed by a committee of several people, since that's how we get too many cooks in the kitchen (especially if they don't really know from this stuff). They should be handled by one person with a focused creative vision. Whirling Light would make more sense if it was a 360-degree weapon slash anyway, considering the art for the Willbender elite spec, so they could just move the tatsu animation to where it rightfully belongs, recycle a few other things from elsewhere already in the game, put it all in one place, and you're looking at a proper Far East Asian-themed elite spec that's 90% done out of the can and can be slapped together quickly and on the cheap and still be quite serviceable, even if the animations could still use a bit more love to feel unique.

Weebs get this stuff. For all Mighty Teapot kept explaining "weebs, come save our game," to be honest, the kinds of decisions that led to Catalyst's creation, or even stuff like a longbow-using Elementalist in a Far East Asian expansion (that would be more appropriate on Thief for various reasons) alienate that very demographic. The thinking is very shallow, along the lines of "well, it COULD be good," or "I saw it in Zelda, so there," without thinking it through terribly well.

The result is that we now have a "Catalyst" that doesn't "catalyze" anything, whereas we could have just used the Wu Xing elements (again, also used in Korea) to have cycles of creation and destruction and actual elemental catalyzing, but I guess the only person who did their actual research on Far East Asian culture was Maclaine Deimer.

It's really not hard to figure out how to put this together, but you just need to be enough of an anime fan, specifically shounen stuff, to know these things. This kind of thing is also SUPER popular in Latin America, so it's an easy way to broaden the player base into other regions outside of just North America, Europe and Far East Asia.

[Eekasqueak.7850]

That post is me explaining why it's only main hand. 

Edit: oops that was meant to be a reply to the person who quoted me. 

Edited July 3, 2023 by Eekasqueak.7850

[ippy.9048]

of couse we are getting "REI-GUN" (sprit gun)

 

[draxynnic.3719]

15 hours ago, Ghostkat.9580 said:

Now then, if we're talking what would have been appropriate for the expansion - and considering all of the Focus skins that look like knuckles in other MMOs, plus the martial artist cosmetics we keep getting - then Element Monk would have been the ideal thing to get. And no, before you go saying "nah it would be Guardian," read up on your GW1 lore. Cynn marrying Mhenlo introduces Elemental powers into the Monk order, and unlike Catalyst, we have two element-wielding martial artists in the game: Master Stonefist and Officer Aimi (the latter uses fire).

If a character marrying another character of a different profession meant the professions merged, we'd have one mega-profession by now. Plus, GW1 Monks were more what other games would call priests than martial artists. If you wanted an elementalist martial arts theme out of the current fluff, it would be better to look at the Zephyrites.

I have a feeling that dagger is already supposed to have a degree of that elemental martial artist feel, it was just back when they implemented melee elementalist as short-ranged spells rather than deciding that they could get away with simplifying elementalist elite specialisation skill design by making most of the utility skills self-buffs and most of the weapon skills "swing sword/hammer with a particle effect". With Weaver and sword already in play, let alone Catalyst, I'm really not all that excited at the prospect of what you've shown because it would ultimately be yet another meleementalist "hit the enemy with a weapon that has a particle effect" concept, except that this time the weapon would be a fist. Elementalist already has enough of those. 

Regardless of whether staff and sceptre are good weapons or not, the 'favours ranged' elementalist profession currently has more melee weapons than ranged weapons. The next weapon should, therefore, be a ranged weapon even if staff gets fixed simply to provide greater diversity of options. Pistol, rifle, either type of bow - all of them could be good or bad depending on how they're implemented. A full unarmed martial artist profession, though, doesn't seem to be something that ArenaNet is likely to do, as seen with willbender and daredevil - both of which use weapons that are sometimes associated with spiritual martial arts disciplines and utility skills that involve punches and kicks. So the closest ArenaNet is likely to get to the sort of thing you want would probably be something similar - elemental-infused unarmed combat moves on utilities, and a suitable weapon or weapons (maybe maces with skins inspired by bar maces? Or just default to daggers - if some future expansion introduces new core skills, I could see dagger/dagger with martial arts themed utilities being pretty close to what you're asking for). In the medium term, though, I think elementalist needs more ranged options first.

[cyberzombie.7348]

My guess it would work like engineer's pistols, but with more focus on elements. 

That or you throw your pistols like a boomerang from Ty the Tasmanian Tiger.

[TheGoblinKing.1582]

I just want the pistol to be off=hand as well so i can weaver sword with pistol 😞 very sad that its just main hand very very very sad actually as I'm a full melee ele 😞 

[Szatko.8132]

On 6/28/2023 at 12:03 AM, Knighthonor.4061 said:

Elementalist Getting Main Hand Pistol in Expansion 4! Whats your ideas for how it could work?

I guess it's gonna be a semi-ranged power/support weapon with cone shaped burst skills. Like a shotgun 😛 

Edited August 2, 2023 by Szatko.8132

[RazieL.5684]

idk how broken the pistol has to be to even compete with scepter, with the glaring flaw that it will have mostly projectiles, while scepter doesn't...

[Zephyrus.9680]

I don't like scepter, I assume pistol will be similar. Mid-range mostly single target and projectile attacks as if we need more of what we already had. Also thematically out of place. Pistol is mechanical. Elementalist is magic. Would have preferred longbow or greatsword.

From a WvW context, elementalist needs another big AoE and/or long range weapon besides staff. Not another roaming set option when there's already like 15 other choices. 

All the issues we previously pointed out with hammer happened so I have no positive expectations about pistol either.  Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised for a change.