What are some ways Pistol/Pistol can be made favorable?

[Fluffball]

I remember having s/p on for the Blizzard fractal boss by accident, and daze/interrupts don't affect them. He still continued his Frostbite attack even though I dazed him without Defiant up, and it clearly said "Interrupted." But that boss was all "whateva, honey badger don't give a ****."

I ran in to him twice today and he was interrupted just fine. If there is any defiance up, you need to chop through it before it actually interrupts, even though it will say interrupt every time. My guess is you either didn't look till your daze chopped through it, or someone CCed him right before you tried to interrupt.

[shawn]

We are looking into this. I actually think P/P has a lot of utility. Blind field, daze, vuln stacking. However damage is a bit low. We are making some headway here in the 12/14 build so be patient for one more week.
-Jon Peters

I don't think he quite got that the offhand skills aren't as much of a problem as the dual pistol kit as a whole. Vuln stacking is great in theory, but two Body Shots and an Unload is straight up worse than two Unloads. Of course you could say that if affects all sources of damage.. for five seconds. lol. Placebo effect is strong with that skill.

Some replies to Jon:

Here’s the thing:

Say VS gets tuned up, and becomes a more viable way to do mixed-type damage for free, that doesn’t help power-based P/P at all. Either the “fixed” VS is better than Unload DPS-wise (like all of the other auto attacks) and you’re better off just running condition damage (and consequently most likely just using P/D), or the fixed VS is still worse than Unload and people continue to spam Unload for mediocre damage. Literally the only thing boosting VS would do for P/P is boost a utility-heavy thief where you spam VS with +condition gear for your DPS and conserve your initiative to burn on #2/4/5 skills. Not a popular build, and not really that good at what it does. That is just the unfortunate truth of how the initiative system makes all thief skills in direct competition.

VS is a bad skill, but fixing it won’t fix P/P.

2:1 odds that we get no changes of any substance. If there are changes of any substance, I’d take 1:3 that the changes are a net nerf to pistol main-hand (mostly likely by re-working sneak attack).

I believe that A.Net massively overestimates Vulnerability, and that pistol #2 will still be terrible after the next patch. I do not expect #4 to be touched (though they have an issue of not having damage on utility skills in general), nor do I expect changes to #5 (despite being a melee skill that doesn’t play terribly well with MH Pistol). Neither of the latter are bad, just highly situational for P/P.

I’d expect tweaks to #1 and #3, which may or may not be enough to make MH Pistol viable as a high damage, low utility set. I’d bet that A.Net is afraid of giving Pistol the damage it would need to make up for its lack of utility, and that they don’t have the resources to rework any skills, so you’re probably looking at something strictly worse than a rifle Warrior post patch as well.

I would be very happy to see the sorts of reworks necessary to make this a viable set, and I think A.Net is capable of doing it, it’s simply a matter of priority – and I do not think this is a high enough priority.

[Fluffball]

Shawn it looks like you've already made up your mind that a constant 20% damage increase to any allies in the area is useless. Also the blind works on both melee and ranged attacks, but hey, let's keep calling it melee only. And interrupts "don't work" according to you, except, well they do work. Not sure what else can be said in this thread.

Edit: Meh, what the hell. I guess people are always going to want to use P/P in general solo PvE. If that's the case and the devs want to boost it, they need to lengthen the bleeding on VS and bump the damage from Unload. Two different build options and you can pick the one that fits with your weapon swap/traits/utlities. VS won't do more damage if you're not specced for it and vice versa.

[Xunlai Agent]

I wish I had seen this thread earlier. I am so glad ensign is still around to offer his criticism though Arenanet's response is sadly predictable. Vulnerability does not in any way justify the current state of the weaponset and I fail to see why anybody would run a pistol in their main-hand. Mentioning Daze and Blind makes no sense when analyzing the viability of a MH pistol because those are the OH pistol skills.