Easy fix to the "underperforming" Dual Pistols

I personally like the mechanic behind duel pistols, but i dont think it's enough. There's only 4 types of ammo(3 special kinds). I think it should have a couple more ammo types. One I would like to see are:

Resonating Ammunition: Minor -res, but cant compete with sonic. Defender value would be -10% per attack, other AT's would scale from there.(could be either energy or smashing damage)

Charged Ammunition: Could possibly be overpowered with this idea but: stacks short to medium duration mag one holds/stuns per attack OR if thats to OP then: -end and recovery. The only reason this wouldnt be TOO OP is because they would be short duration and would take a while to stack. The duration could be like 5 secs on average(some attacks have longer or shorter times) and because of DP's animations, it would take some time to stun/hold anything(at least to AOE hold anything)

Either a dark themed or flashing themed Ammo(would do same thing): -tohit. Defender values would be -7.50(or 5.83 if thats to much, so we dont step on /darks)

And there could of course be others. I just think there arent enough ammo types for Dual pistols :/

Eh, dual pistols is pretty confusing enough as is, and some of the attacks already provide -resistance (piercing shot does -res with normal ammo) and the normal ammo already gives mitigation in the form of KB, so adding hold/stun to all attacks would just be a little much, plus with the stunning shot (or whatever its called) already doing a stun/hold with different ammo types, would it do an additional mag of hold/stun allowing it to 1 shot hold bosses?

Dual Pistols is pretty middle of the road, atleast from the last DPS numbers that were given. Its not the highest (fire or sonic) and its not the lowest (AR, sonic if you don't count the -res)

The current ammo types need higher debuff modifiers on Blasters and a slight damage boost to take into account DPA and the long animations in DP.

Other than that, I think it works ok. Adding more types just makes it even more confusing.

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Dual Pistols underperforms because it can do a lot of things but none of them well. Adding more ammo types won't help that.

Dual Pistols underperforms thanks to the "jack of all trades" syndrome in power balance. When a powerset is seen as able to do multiple things, then the powerset is balanced such that it really kind of sucks at doing all of them, under the assumption that the ability to adapt makes up for this weakness. This ignores the very real problem that it doesn't make a difference whether you're given four or forty really terrible options to choose between, you're still stuck with using terrible options. Sure, they may be slightly less terrible in the "right" situation, but at no point are they ever better than any of the other sets.

If City of Heroes were a game where most sets routinely run against enemies that they out-and-out cannot handle while Dual Pistols was weaker but never useless, then such balancing would be meaningful. This, however, is almost never the case. As a result, it is almost always better to use a specialist set, because even in the situations where that set suffers, it suffers about as much as Dual Pistols "shines" at its best.

As far as I'm concerned, Dual Pistols needs to have much better damage for how slow its attacks are, and it needs to have decent control and debuff effects.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The tier one attack also needs to actually apply a debuff to help the set stack better.

ether more dmg or less recharge time, more ammo types is only gonna suck even more.

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One way to improve dual pistols would be to increase it's damage across the board.

Dual pistols is "underperforming"? The 4 person all DP Barracuda SF I was on a few weeks back indicates otherwise.

I haven't seen the actual numbers, but just going from my experience I would say DP is middle of the pack when it comes to damage output. When I play my DP/Kin (often solo) I certainly don't feel underpowered.

Edit: The only change I would like to see for dual pistols is having some alternate animations. The "gun-fu" look is cool, but doesn't exactly work for my cowboy-themed character.

I love Dual Pistols, and I have to say it feels a lot stronger than my non-Pistol blasters. I don't know where you're getting "Underperforming" from at all.

You're right, the word I should have used was defended against, since I can only think of Carnies in that regard, as robots of all kind tend to resist psi heavily. Still, I don't see my corruptor shooting ghost wizard bullets.

Actually, on second thought, that would be kinda cool.

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