Love the idea of chainsword/pistol combo where one of your pistol skills is a charge kind of action moving you towards the enemy while doing some spray-and-pray :) 

Given the game design of single weapon combos, I would be quite happy with the current system of using the first 2 skills of each weapon. Certainly those existing skills could be amended if wished and, in due course.

In respect of using a solitary single handed weapon, personally I think just a blanket increase of the damage caused by most attacks would be the easiest modification to be made. As I type this I would envisage it not being applied to certain AOE attacks, ranged in particular.

But from my understanding it's not being removed because it's buggy, it was not supposed to be implimented at launch - based from a conversation with a staff member. We await clarification on if the removal is permanent however. 

Now for positive talks and happy things.

I like your ideas of giving pistols some bonuses when held in one hand, I think it might be a handful to give them entirely new skillsets but i'd like to see the option of having the skills either the mouse buttons or 1/2 depending on what your preference is and allow the character to gain the needed burst to progress through content.

The issue is in game at the moment that we have dps checks (healing enemies) that serve as a difficulty barrier to the game and tell us when our gear or character are too weak for a set mission. When faced with these enemies you have to use abilities 1-4 in quick succession in order to kill them or "burst" them down. Otherwise you have to leave and rethink your life choices.

The problem is one pistol lacks this burst feature or sustained damage due to low ammo pool and slow rate of fire. So if we had a pistol / sword for eg we would have to go into melee, fire shots and swipe sword for every large daemon that we see. But we would still have the issue that none of the abilities include any meaningful "burst" essentially you have 4 abilities that are all for clearing trash.

It's also to be considered that you now have to rely on melee for any more challenging opponent and yet lack the defensive stats that a shield would have given you. Essentially becoming a vulnerable melee class who has some weak ranged attacks, making it less versatile than it appears on paper.

Options I think could help
Single pistol +20% damage to shots to account for greater accuracy
Single pistol - Option of having either set of abilities from the pistol to create your own combo (would make clearing trash rely on melee tho)

Bonus to other stat like crit / movement speed etc to allow for damage to be gained from other options.


Open to any other ideas that would help this weapon set overcome these "dps checks" as I think they are the largest obstacle toward this function.