Noodle Ant.1605

part of this might actually be because warhorn may be too strong. note that entire especs were nerfed to accommodate this weapon

the weapon has crappy autoattacks and expects you to dump all your dmg skills on a singular trash mob to kill it. even then, the condis from the weapon are the low stack/long duration type, so even after dumping a bunch of damage skills on a full dps build, mobs from eod onwards will probably only be half dead and theres very little you can do to speed it up (use crappy autos? stack more long duration condis?)

for pve, id make a consideration for pulling healing back in line. its gotten to the point where glasscannons are allowed to completely facetank older t4 fractals while newer group content struggles to threaten players outside of cheap mechanics that delete players 100-0 out of the blue (if players arent bursted down, theyll just go back to 100% hp within seconds at any time) excessive healing allows players to casually sit in fire and do their golem dps rotations without a hitch. theres little need to break from rotations to play defensively to prevent oneself from dying, or stopping dps to res others (because those now rarely exist). nerfing healing either means players will have less opportunities to go full golem dps mode, or players will have to run more healers to retain the current amount of healing, both reducing overall dps

the issue with going straight for a healer build is that, unless you opt for a generalised/hybrid setup like celestial stats, it will only really be relevant with allies. this is particularly evident for a set like harriers, which makes for a glassy healer with very limited capability to simply progress through content (i.e. just kill things) by itself you can still attempt to play as a healer only if you can manage to find other players to assist you (or you can view it as you assisting them). you should look for hero point trains for example to help you get the required hero points, and you can join big meta events with lots of people (that you can heal) in order to gradually make some money to complete the rest of your gear on the other hand, i would think that the other players were only just advising you to have an alternative set that can progress through content by itself. it doesnt have to be a fully kitted meta dps build, just something you can run in the case that theres nobody to heal (or in the case of instanced content - when there is already a healer, but then you could just find another group)

they slipped in this change in the nov 28 (2023) patch: wording is a bit weird but this change applies to skills like necro shrouds, tempest overloads, mesmer shatters… (which previously benefitted from 2h wep strength) but not skills directly tied with the weapon used like stealth attacks, ambushes, bursts(?)…

it wouldnt have touched condi alac tempest which was also out of line with pistol and wouldve required a ~10% shave regardless to get the numbers they wanted, because the build only has 60% transcendent tempest uptime

pistol deals 10% more dps than its next alternatives (hammer, dagger) on condi tempest pistol only deals around 4% more dps than its next alternatives (scepter, dagger) on condi weaver pistol has no notable advantage over scepter for condi core/catalyst maybe except for an amusing interaction on core where it replaces crappy autos with dodge rolls (proccing evasive arcana) and condi quick catalyst because pistol breaks out of the fire-only pitfall of scepter (dagger also works but is a notably weaker option) now if you play condi tempest with anything other than pistol, youll barely do any more than condi catalyst camping fire scepter, while pistol still makes it equal with condi weaver, who also has to take pistol or else it loses

wildfire will usually be able to hit up to 10 times (traited). thats 3 * 10 burning vs ring of fire 2 * 4 (using base durations) dust storm is the trippy skill but even without the multihit gimmick on larger targets it should be able to hit 3 times baseline, making it 2 * 10 * 3 bleed vs churning earth 10 * 8 dust storm hitting more times (usually twice as much) is one factor, but another is that offhand daggers cds dont really fit as well into rotations as warhorn does. you could easily do 2 ring of fire in place of every 1 wildfire (ring of fire still loses significantly) but then you can really only do 1 churning earth in place of 1 dust storm without delaying the rest of the rotation. so dagger would lose overall even on the smallest of hitboxes offhand dagger is still technically the better option if the target(s) dont stay in aoes, however

a healer that does its job properly already significantly contributes to dps by allowing players to focus less on staying alive and more on doing dps (more uptime) if a player dies/downs/backs off/plays defensively when they otherwise wouldnt/shouldnt, youre already making dps losses that devalue the dps youre supposedly gaining. sure, no one mightve outright died, but was it because they had to play differently to support your job (instead of you supporting their job)?

a lot can be done just by buffing autoattacks (and some #2/3 skills). outside of condi scepter fire and power sword autos, ele has some exceptionally bad autoattacks, which means many attunements on weapons simply arent worth staying in (fire also tends to have the least bad auto). it also heavily encourages mindless attunement cycling which is completely fine for 1-2 weapons/especs, but isnt what ele has really been about buffing autos also helps address the issue of dps plummeting when visiting “utility” attunements and being locked out of damage attunements, while lowering the skill floor (particularly if players are role playing and not using fire) without significantly affecting the ceiling a lot of other weapon skills are in need of coefficient updates. the issue seems to be that they arent used in the meta builds/rotations and therefore rarely see buffs, which is annoying for ele since it has a rather huge skillset and build options that all need to be updated with increasing powercreep

a large part of this is because SotO let all ele especs use sword/warhorn power dagger and scepter are individually weaker than staff, but had warhorn to compensate on tempest. the issue was that there was hardly any attention given to power tempest for long time, meaning most of these weapons were left to rot power dagger and scepter didnt work on weaver because dual attunements. staff got buffs that made it somewhat competitive with sword/dagger for a short time (but people were too absorbed with condi staff because ele condi in general benched higher than power at the time) but then weaver got slammed when it got access to warhorn. staff was not compensated power hammer without catalyst spheres was really only around the same level as power dagger/scepter/staff. however, catalyst was reliant on sphere damage, so staff was out due to its low hit-rate. power dagger was an actual thing on catalyst and people managed to use scepter to some success. then spheres got slammed and hammer buffed while dagger/scepter were forgotten pistol sets a false precedent that should only be applied to future weapons and is not an excuse to cover up the fact that they forgot to keep these weapons up to date

pistol kind of just lacks impact it can do big dps on hp sponges, but the majority of the game revolves more around trash mobs and bosses that like to phase. using pistol here feels like tickling the enemy to death autos are basically tickle skills. you shoot the enemy with a single #2 or #3 skill (and maybe some autos), but the enemy hardly looks like its dying faster. consuming bullets feels like nothing has happened the burning on fire skills (#2 and initial hit on #3) can probably be folded in pve. setting an enemy on fire for 15s is wacky, but it feels like slow cooking them when you really want to kill them. this might allow pistol to stack condis a little faster raging ricochets bonus is basically useless until you stack enough condis and even annoyingly relies on condi output outside of the weapon to be fully effective. shattering stones bonus requires tickling the enemy 3 additional times. something uninspiring such as creating a flame burst would make the consumed bullet feel like it actually did something while also helping pistol with its ramping issues i dont think changing autos to burst fire changes much when they do so little in the first place. piercing pebble might as well have the ele get on the ground and throw dirt like ranger downstate

in most cases (e.g. power/condi dps), this is a bit counterproductive because itll just force ele to use twice as many skills to match the same role on other classes with no guaranteed benefit. it doesnt really matter whether the build uses 1/2/3/all attunements; at the end of the day, itll be normalised against other builds of the same role. the extra skills pressed would then have no real value in the case of healing, ele could simply use a weapon that spreads healing skills across more attunements (and or less water-centric healing traits). a heal focused weapon would be terrible because itd likely only have the same heal capability as a guardian staff for example, except with key skills scattered across all attunements that would need to be filled with random non-dps garbage skills, or each skill will do individually little with the expectation that the ele uses all of them

im sure theyll fix pistol in time but id rather they stick new ideas to new weapons (plenty more to come… supposedly) rather than have a monkeys paw moment itd probably be fine if ele had more weapons to begin with but we dont

while these points are valid, i feel like this puts too much blame on utility skills its not rare for many dps builds to feature powerful utility/elite skills that never leave the skillbar. its not fair to strip condi ele all 4/4 of them and pretend every other build still do great with 0 dps utility/elite skills. even then, eles condi weapons skills arent actually all that weak and have similar numbers to other classes. some offhand skills can actually be considered overpowered (but require enemies to sit in strange-shaped aoes, which is an actual issue) pistol suffers from being a bleed-based, long duration/low stack count condi weapon. it has to shoot the enemy a lot of times with non-autos before the dmg starts to roll in, which makes it painful for trash mob usage. this is on top of having to manage the bullet mechanic, which obviously isnt for all players pistols predecessors, dagger and scepter, at least could stack up some decent burn stacks in a short time and were also straightforward to play (with the exception of dagger dashes)