Are Dual Pistols as weak as I think they are?

I just got back into the game and rolled a Kinetics/DP Defender to see how it would work out, and while I have only played the character up to level 21 I must say that I have been quite underwhelmed by the Pistols set's offensive capabilities. Particularly troubling are the long attack animations that root me in place for several seconds to have the same or less damage payoff as similar attacks from other sets that have cast times half as long.

Am I missing something that changes the balance later, or is the Dual Pistols set really as wimpy as it seems to be?

It's a set that was designed for AoE output. Leverage that. As with everything else, see how it feels with SOs next level.

My DP/Storm Cor is rather weak at the moment as well and she's level 19. Did you snag the Change Ammo power? The fire bullets help smooth it out some.

It feels underwhelming to start, yes. But so do many other sets. It is comparable in DPS to middle of the road blast sets. Compare it's performance to Archery before Rain of Arrows.

Hail of Bullets adds that really nice PBAoE nuke at the end, and the ability to swap effects is nice in certain situations. I admit, I was underwhelmed at first too, but once you get it fully slotted and set up, it's really fun to play.

Trudge is a pretty accurate word. I'm gonna be honest, when I hit 14 and realized that I wasn't going to get another single target attack until 18, I said to hell with it and powerleveled myself to 18. Things are better now that I have executioner's shot. Swap Ammo is planned for 22. I've skipped it so far as I enjoy the added knockback to go with gale.

Not too familiar with dual pistols for defenders. With blasters at least it's fun, and effective. Using fire ammo I can usually take out or nearly take out large groups of minions with just two attacks. Suppressive Fire is rather nice too. Plus you can stack it with either a hold or disorient power to affect bosses. Chem rounds will ignore the DR of many foes, as well as reduce the enemy's damage.

It's not a set to use if your expecting to quickly drop a boss. However it does some rather nice sustained damage. And the animations aren't as painfully long as some make them out to be. It appears that they are, but it's not as bad as the perception.

Cryo rounds are good for hellions. Most times though I'd personally stick with chem rounds or fire rounds. Chem will do slightly less damage, but improve your survivability. When teamed with another pistoleer one using cryo and the other chem is a nice combo.

Despite what you are likely to hear Dual Pistols does not really underperform. It's advantage is the choice of secondary effect. The ability to turn knockback on and off, for example, actually puts it somewhat ahead of Energy Blast from a practical standpoint because it doesn't knock enemies out of its own blast area. IMO it is one of the better Defender secondaries because it actually does debuffing well, and the crashless-ness of the nuke means a lot to several of the Defender primaries.

I only have two real issues with the set. And they are somewhat related.

The first is completely personal - I didn't want the over-the-top Gun-fu BS, but that's neither here nor there.

The second, actual game play issue is the cost of those animations. Dual Pistols pays a price in cast times to have a lot of those 'Kewl' animations... too much so, I believe. For a set that supposed to emulate being lightning quick, it is excruciatingly slow. I really don't see why my toon should be stuck in place for 5 seconds to unleash both his basic AoE attacks.

If you can handle the cast times in this set (and don't feel like beating your own brains out trying to watch it...) then this is a perfectly reasonable ranged attack set.

The secondary effects are nice, but if we're talking comparisons to other sets, other sets have secondary effects, too, and often better ones. It's as though DP's secondary effects are all just a bit lower than their equivalents in other set's -- i.e., we're paying in debuff strength for the ability to choose on the fly. Lethal bullets' defense debuff don't match Rad's, the DoT on fire bullets don't seem quite up to Fire Blast level, cryo bullet debuffs aren't quite as nice as ice or psi's. That leaves toxic, which is unique, but there are no toxic damage vulnerable critters in the entire game, so you're giving up damage.

Nevertheless, for defenders, dual pistols aren't the bottom of the barrel, but it's in the middle of the pack at best. That's because of duds like /elec and /AR that offer the same poor performance with less eye candy.

For blasters, DP compares better thanks to blasters' wider selection of crap primaries, and is quite likely a medium rather than low performing set. Again, this has less to do with Dual Pistols itself and more to do with sets that are even bigger duds.

No toxic vulnerable mobs true. However there are few I believe that actually resist it. Or it's lightly resisted when it is resisted at all. I was noticing chem rounds doing more damage vs freakshow tanks and other high resist mobs then my other ammo types.

Dual Pistols might be, overall, bottom tier as far as pure numbers go. But it's fun, it looks good, and still is more than effective enough that you will be pulling your weight on any team you're on (except those very few composed of opinionated min/maxers who only want what they see as the absolute best) or be faceplanting more than you will with any other set.

EDIT: Had a stray "won't" instead of "will" due to rewriting the post 4 or 5 times. :P

I'm going to say yes and no. It's a decent enough set but it is definitely weaker than several other blast sets. Personally my main issues are the awful animation times (especially on the AoEs) and the fact that Piercing Rounds only does resistance debuff with Lethal Ammo (which I consider an unnecessary inconvenience).

That being said I have a Corruptor and I enjoy the set anyway so make of that what you will.

I think the problem people have with Dual Pistols, is that it's an average set, and not top tier, and that it's a new set.

In other words, they aren't happy with it because it wasn't designed to be better then every other set hands down, but to be balanced.

I love my brick

I wouldn't keep trying to play it if I thought it had no hope of being fun. So far, dp/storm is working for me. DP/Rad was also working well for me but I already had a /rad and didn't want to repeat on my Cor combos.