First, we saw the Dragonbreath Handcannon in BWL, which had no sense in using it because it was a channel and you gave up your avoidance and would get punched to death trying to use it.
Now in the Enclave, we get access to the Starter’s Pistol. Which no one is going to allow a ranged tank (warrior or rogue otherwise) to initial a “gun pull” on a boss for the sake of the equip proc. These gimmicky equips and on uses make no sense and should be re-vamped to make them actually WORTH using and easy to use. It would be simple to tie it to a ranged special attack, such as Poison Knife or Shuriken Toss for Rogues, and possibly something else for warriors (we’re already seeing that items can have multiple equip passives based on class alone this phase).
I’m not sure what that would do. As it is right now it requires you to do a standard ranged attack with it (e.g. Shoot Gun) which is pointless for most practical pulls to establish a threat lead. But if you’re talking about re-vamping it for a warrior equip passive alternative in relation to what I mentioned for rogues, I would probably suggest something on a slight cd, maybe thunderclap even.
Oh, ew, just re-read the Equip text. Did not see the “regular ranged attack” bit.
Ya, that really needs to be an ‘on use’; off the GCD.
That way you can, as warrior, set up the macro to ‘use’ this first then Shield Slam. Since Defender’s Resolve and this items buff are roughly the same duration.
The equip passive is fine, the condition for it is not. I’d be fine if they set up class-based equip passives like they have done with Queensfall and other items, and just add a cooldown to it or something.
Sure they could do ‘class specific’. But that’s a lot of work to achieve the same effect as ‘On Use’. Because warrior would need to have it tied, probably, to Shield Slam. Which would just be silly.
Something like Queensfall appears to have been made as an experiment with “under the hood” modifiers that aren’t implicitly stated in the tooltip. - Or it was adapted because some other aspect of it was ‘bis’ for the class at the time.
…perhaps they were trying to lean into the D&D of it all.
I think the intent was to create pieces of gear that are more universal to multiple classes, rather than just a BIS for one class. This does lead to more homogeneous gear, but allows them to design fewer pieces for larger benefit (thus reducing loot table drops).