Is DP THAT bad? My Findings Thus Far...

So first off I've been lurking like a bad smell for years, and I finally came back to Freedom and the game very recently after about.... 10 months off.

I came back because Going Rogue, the graphics adjustments and most of all Dual Pistols which I remember begging for years ago.

So I come on the forum, I find little to very little info on Dual Pistols, and about 75% of it is very negative.

I have to ask... Is it that bad?

I have been trying to solo my way through some of the great storylines surrounding the 'Resistance' missions. The missions are a lot of fun, and bring me back to some good ol' comic book collecting days.

Dual Pistols LOOKS fantastic. And I've never,ever made it to 50 with a blaster and I think this could be the guy. Of course I'm only level 19 as I write this, but what's up with all the negativity?

I think if you are making a toon built purely around uber build quality you aren't even going to go the Blaster route. I levelled to 50 fastest with a Brute, and then probably a Scrapper. So I'm not sure why some of you are ragging on the build efficiency thing.

My secondary is Energy which I think goes well with the DP because of some soft controls, and the fact I wanted to stack up on the Primary Powers.

Dual Pistols:

Specifically this is what I'm finding:

- Contrary to advice, there is good reason to bounce between ammo types...except acid.

- I believe if you're soloing a lot like I am right now, clearly you MUST stick to generic
rounds and reap the full benefits of knockback. It saves my **** over and over again.

- I'd leave swap ammo til much later if you're crunched for power selections. I have experimented with minions and lieutenants over, and over. There is almost zero need for swap ammo pre-level 20.

- Elite bosses... forget it. Pull out your scrapper. I don't have a brazillion influence, and am an everyday type of player. The fact is without any form of control, I have only beat one of the two Elite Bosses I've met in the game.

- Swap Ammo Specifically: Isn't kicking **** like I hoped. I can see the secondary working, but it is so weak, it is questionable. The dot is ok, until you remove it. As mentioned before I am getting nearly no literal difference in damage types at pre level 20. The ice is 'fun' but the slow function is nominal, so I say go with fire rounds in groups, and go with nothing solo.

- The graphics are really fun. The devs really did a bang up job with the moves. It sceams of Tetragammatron 'gun-kata' or even the Matrix mixed with some John Woo. THIS is why I play it. It just looks so damn good. I think the first time I smoked a peon with Executioner, I wet myself.

- I think MOST of the negativity about this set is two fold:
1. Why should a WHOLE power be dedicated to making a secondary effect that is already present in other set selections inherently? The effect truly isn't significant enough to warrant a full power selection. That is to say, I believe swap ammo should be inherent to DP.

2. The animations, while super cool, are like watching Saturday Night Fever. If you miss, your toon will gleefully thrust, and pose in all directions while getting pummeled.

Those IMHO are the two biggest negatives. But I am still enjoying the toon, but admittedly I haven't teamed much with him as I always prefer to learn a new power type on a solo basis vs many different enemy types.

I think a patch can only help, but in the meantime I can't understand why I see SO few DP players? I'm really having fun with it.

I found DP very meh........

It looks great and yet as a blaster my job is to provide large amounts of orange numbers. I found it very lacking in overall damage as its not an AOE specialty like Fire and not a single target terror like Ice, its vanilla.

I found personally using the Ice ammo was my normal choice as the slows do help.

You need to remember that most of the active people on the Forums tend to be Min/Max types. Dual Pistols is not an ideal Min/Max set, so there are a lot of complaints. It is not high damage. It doesn't have strong secondary effects. It lacks Aim to further boost its damage.

But . . . Dual Pistols is fun and flashy. The nuke doesn't drain your endurance, so you can keep on fighting. It fits certain concepts, but some people wanted a less "flashy" set, so those folks are on the negative bandwagon, too.

DP should pair nicely with the Energy secondary, as Boost Range should be wonderful with that set. (I have an Arch/Energy at 50.)

To show how un-Min/Max I went with my DP Blaster, mine is DP/Devices, which is widely proclaimed to be a crappy pairing. No Build Up. I don't care. It is fun and flashy, and Devices lets me do things differently than other Blasters. I even use -- gasp -- TIME BOMB. Once I came up with a concept I found amusing, I started up this character and I have had fun with him. He looks like a skunk, kind of, and is named, "Pepe LePewPew." He is currently at level 43.

So, the bottom line is . . . don't worry about the stuff from the Min/Max people on the forums. Yes, they are right that Dual Pistols lags a bit behind other sets in some ways. But if you find it to be fun, then enjoy yourself.

A pet peeve of mine is when ppl treat the entire playerbase of either RP/concept players, or Min/Maxers. There's sometimes a 3rd group who play, "just to have fun," as if the min/maxers aren't having fun. Most of us, however, are in the middle somewhere (tho I'll freely admit I'm closer to the min/max end of the spectrum), and trust me, it's not just pure min/max'ers that find sets like DP pretty meh. There are plenty of us who will play for concept, but still want a very effective set. About half the time, I'll find a set combo I want to play, and form a concept around it, where other times, I just want a tough guy w/a bat (say, WM/WP brute). Either way, I'll try to maximize my effectiveness as much as possible w/what I got, but if the combo it truly weak, I'll likely abandon it.

I wrote a kinda lengthy diatribe about my currently active blasters and the reasons I don't play the other sets atm, but here's what it all boils down to: At the end of the day, I have fun playing blasters by cutting down swaths of mobs in quick order, and if I feel my blaster isn't doing a good job of that, I won't be having fun, so I won't play it. I don't have fun playing DP blasters because I don't think their kill rate is high enough for me, esp in comparison to other blasters. End of story.

Oh, and if you think DP blasters are rare, how many Son blasters do you see out there?

I've been playing dp/dev, and /dev provides a great deal of very effective backup to fill in the gaps in dp.

You have an interesting point about swap ammo. I'd been ignoring the secondary effects (-defense is pretty insignificant to me, I always have 95% to hit), but I'm wondering whether the -res in piercing and executioner's shot might not pay off.

I'll play DP when normal animations are made for it. I'm sorry all my concepts for DP aren't martial artists or crazy carnival workers.

Well I guess that puts me in the category of 'martial artist' because carnie folk creep me out.

So I see more than myself find the set fun and cool enough to stick it out. That's great. I do agree the forum is almost... bullied by min-max types that have no room for concept. While I am not a 'concept' player, I think there is a middle line as has been mentioned above.

Conversely I have played pure power Blaster builds and been so bored.... I just can't make it last. I need to be 'entertained' by the set and I guess 'entertained' means different things to different folks.

I have never been a min/max person - I do however like to figure out what a set is good at.

Fire is good at AoE loving. Ice is good at Single target damage and slows. Energy is great at Knockback and single target.

DP is...........vanilla. It does nothing well and nothing badly. It just is a flashy gun waving mixture of average. I am from the old John Wayne - "The Shootist" school of guns - fast and flashy doesn't win a fight, shooting the other guy dead does. It seems more like a New Years celebration in Tijuana than a viable style.

Just my personal viewpoint. If this makes you feel "bullied" then don't post on a forum. Because you get other viewpoints when you do that.

I don't particularly care for posting on internet forums but the repeatedly poor analysis of dual pistols on this forum has inspired an exception. I find its comparison with fire blast particularly interesting because fire is typically held to be the "average" blaster set, when in fact it sacrifices having a single trick up its sleeve in exchange for fireball and blaze. If we compare dual pistols to, for example, energy blast, it wins by a mile in either single target or aoe.

With a modest amount of recharge, assuming most high performance blasters will focus largely on softcapping ranged defense, the average fire blaster ought to be chaining flares -> blast -> flares -> blaze. DS of 6.8 in 4.67 seconds.

With comparable recharge, dp lacks a smooth single target chain assuming one skips the total stinker that is executioner's shot. Great animation, garbage power. I typically find myself chaining pistols -> dual wield -> pistols -> piercing -> pistols -> dual wield -> pistols -> bullet rain. DS of 11.2 in 12.24 seconds, clearly inferior to fire which has done about 18 DS in the same time frame.

What this obviously ignores is that about half of dp's animation time here was devoted to aoe powers. If you are, to pick an incredibly unlikely example, targeting the boss in the middle of a x8 spawn, suddenly you've more than doubled your damage, as bullet rain will likely have hit at least ten targets and it takes virtually no effort to ensure piercing rounds hits two.

But wait, you say, surely the fire blaster in the same situation would mix in aoes of his own. Without a substantial boost to recharge, fireball is not going to replace one of the flares in the chain I entertained above, leaving you with, at best, flares -> blast -> flares -> blaze -> fireball. That's fine and dandy, hardly any loss in st dps and a great gain in aoe, but add any aoe on top of that and it goes down the toilet. Fire breath can best be described as glacial, slower than any of dp's staple aoes and in my opinion not a good fit with the rest of the set which otherwise lacks powers that require you to set up a cone. Rain of fire is great but recharges rather slowly for what it does and is unlikely to apply its full dps to a normal spawn in my experience, though the bosses may eat it all.

A dp blaster focusing on aoe is most likely going to be "chaining" empty clips -> bullet rain -> empty -> piercing. With moderate global recharge this is of course a gappy chain but that's fine as you will be jumping around to line up the cones, which handily enough you have two of and spend most of your time with. If necessary though you have two aoes that work from an actual distance as opposed to one, meaning your time is going to be better spent both at long range and at mid range. A fire blaster forced to hang back due to melee danger or some such doesn't have much beyond fireball, flares and fire blast while the pistolero still has the entire "single target" chain which happens to be half aoe.

This already daunting wall of text aside, I haven't even mentioned suppressive fire or hail of bullets yet, to which fire blast has no answer at all. Suppressive fire is an excellent control for a blaster set, stackable with anything and slottable with some fantastic sets. Hail of bullets is, in my opinion, the best blaster tier 9, arguably besides rain of arrows. One thing fire blast certainly does not have is a way to wipe out every second spawn with two clicks and have half of its build up time left over to unload aoes onto the next spawn.

I'm not saying fire blast is garbage and nobody should use it for anything but raw single target dps, I'm just saying it isn't really very impressive on speed tfs compared to dp, "the bad set." The above is based on a purpled out fire/mm which now gathers dust because of a half as expensive dp/em.

On the topic of fun - what is fun AND effective with DP?

I'm one of those players that is somewhere between casual and min/max'er.

I really want a DP character - DP "feels fun" - but I can't ignore the "feeling" that I'm under-preforming. I'm dying to add one of these to my roster of regulars but every time I try a combination, I don't recapture the carnage of my Fire/MM or even my Eng/Eng.

I've tried DP/Force Field to 17, DP/Storm to 10 and I'm contemplating DP/Kinetics.

Advice?

It goes without saying that you will use incendiary ammo 100% of the time. It is conceivable to switch to standard ammo for soloing but a heavily ioed level 50 blaster is probably not going to have trouble with anything that would be fixed by occasional knockback.

Energy's single target chain is passable if you, for some reason, want to do the 40 foot dance with the caveat that you WILL knock whatever you're attacking, short of a triangled AV, further back into the spawn with every other attack. Its aoe on the other hand is absolutely pathetic. Empty clips hits harder than energy torrent, and bullet rain hits much harder than explosive blast. Further, as we are both well aware, explosive blast in particular has the charming side effect of scattering things out of energy torrent's cone and vice versa. Energy has no analogue to piercing rounds and no analogue to hail of bullets.

Hail of bullets: We are going to count this power because with moderate recharge, by which I mean ~90% in the power itself and ~50% global, it will be up every spawn or every second spawn, depending on whether you're running regular tfs or the new tfs. It very often hits substantially harder than rain of arrows and virtually always harder than full auto and is capable of going way up from there. Between BU, defiance and procs, it will regularly wipe out everything but bosses in a 25 foot radius. The only set that can compete with this is archery and rain of arrows often hits for only two of its three tics, as I understand it, hampering its effectiveness greatly. "Dangerous to use" would be relevant if you didn't have a load of defense and if, due to bizarre complaints, the devs hadn't caved and made it buff your defense for its duration.

I am not sure why anyone cares about the lack of aim. Frankly, it is a crap power. Its best use is what it says on the tin, boosting your tohit radically, but that doesn't come up very often. Between defiance and enhancement, aim should be boosting most attacks by something like 20%, at the cost of having taken the power and whatever slots you've given it. On the other hand, I could see wanting it as a place to stick rectified reticles so fair enough on that front, but dp is anything but lacking for esoteric set slotting options.

It is also interesting that you think stunning shot is better than suppressive fire, considering it has a longer animation and a trivially longer duration. Enhanced for mez, both of them will keep a lieutenant locked down for more than long enough to kill it just as part of an aoe chain. Suppressive fire, on the other hand, is better in a pinch because of the animation time and most importantly is actually a hold when using the only ammo type you'd ever actually use, thus stacking with holds from assault sets and ancillary pools.

Archery is a good set, of course, and remains underrated, but I would take bullets rain over explosive arrow and hail of bullets over rain of arrows any day of the week. Fistful is much better than empty clips but you can't have everything, eh?

I actually like many aspects of Dual Pistols. My complaints with the set are two:

1) Aesthetics. I'll admit this straight up. I did not want this 'Gun-fu' inanity we were inflicted with. It is incredibly silly looking (gun-fu only looks good with a lot of coordination with the enemies. Without that choreography, it's just silly posing.) and it does not fit with the concepts I wanted Dual Pistols for in the first place. I have to build a character to the aesthetics of the set, to make it seem right... and that just really annoys me.

2) Cast time. Outside of the Tier 1 and 2 blasts (which are standardized between all sets available to Blasters), Dual Pistols has only 2 powers that take under 2 seconds to animate - Suppressive Fire (the mez) and Swap Ammo. The next fastest cast time in the set is Bullet Rain, at 2.4 seconds. This makes the set painfully slow. All those fancy animations I didn't want add up to a set that is overall the slowest blast set in the game. Which, in turn, is why the set doesn't feel like it keeps up with other sets (at least on Blasters) - it can't make as much of Defiance as other sets can.

The worst part of that is what would happen if they ever do provide a less over-the-top alternatives for the animations. Without the flash to distract the player, the overall slow nature of the set will become frighteningly apparent.

As I said, I like several of the concepts in Dual Pistols - the swap ammo toggles, Piercing rounds, the Hail of Bullets mini-nuke... I just think it all fell apart when someone decided "Hey, lets make the set try to invoke the John Woo style of cinematic gun play" without realizing that it doesn't work without enemy participation...

I think, "You can't have it all" nicely sums up the well thought responses I've read so far.

I will say however that if you don't like the 'gun-fu' look; then really this isn't for you. Because I love it, I'm willing to over look things that I can't overlook in something like assault rifle.

I teamed with a kin/earth and it was heaven. When is it not for a blaster, right? But killing spaws in 2-3 cycles with assistance, I really do enjoy the combo of this set.

Ammo swap is underrated. I play single and teamed a lot. It is SO nice to have soft control alone, and then in a team to not annoy the tank/scrapper, and switch to incindenary. I just think it should be inherent, but it's kind of moot now that I've come back to the game and fitness is inherent (a big to do for blasters IMHO)

Just hitting the 20's now and this is easily my favourite blaster still. Will it stay this way? I don't know.

Thanks for the great responses thus far.

FWIW, I love my dp/dev. I don't care whether it's the best set, or whatever; it is thematically perfect.

I think I'd love it even more if you could set ammo type for each power separately. I'd love to be able to, say, pick the resist debuff for executioner's shot, and follow it up with incendiary's extra damage in something else.

Dual Pistols is lacking.

~ It's single target DPS is bad, mostly due to Executioner's Shot being bad.

~ It's animations are painfully slow making kiting much more difficult.

~ It's AoE is only mediocre, and since they are all DoTd that tick as you animate you end up taking an extra attack over an AoE that winds up first and then delivers damage.

~ The set has redraw.

~ Despite the fire ammo, the set is still mostly Lethal.

Don't get me wrong, it has some advantages. The nuke doesn't end drain you which is awesome even though you have to stand in the middle of the spawn to use it. You can also slot all sorts of weird sets because of the alternate ammo.

If they wanted to tweak the set, here are my suggestions on where to look:

~ For all that is holy, make Hail of Bullets give typed defense as well as positional. The blaster APPs offer typed defense powers, so making the defense on the nuke use positional defense is just bizarre, *especially* since the PBAoE makes no sense on a range capped blaster.

~ Fix Executioner's Round. Lower the animation, increase the range, up the damage, do something to make this power not suck.

~ Make more of the damage use the alternate ammo energy type. Giving the set alternate ammo and still making a majority of the attacks Lethal is totally bizarre to me.

~ Give Piercing Rounds the -Res regardless of ammo type. Lower the animation time to be in line with the damage.

~ Make Cold and Acid rounds worthwhile. For example, you could give Acid an additional -Res effect and give Cold a chance to apply a Hold to minions and Lts when you use it.