Sometime around 1.1, the developers reasonably decided that the pistol part of the Sword and Pistol weapon was too good. As I understand it, this was mostly because of the ability to ignore half of the targets defense/resistance. They did two things to tone it down a bit: (1) reduced the T1 damage from 22 (I think; it's been a while) to 16, and (2) added a one-turn cool-down to the Fire Magelock option.
This second part is terrible in a variety of ways, and should be reverted as expeditiously as possible. The main problem is that a ranged-focused ranger should rarely if ever use Sword and Pistol, since they'll only be able to use their ranged attack every other turn. Since the only other firearm is the rifle, which can't be used with a mount, there are basically no options if I want to have a gun-focused hero who can also ride a mount. From a flavor perspective, this feels bad and unnecessarily restrictive.
Moreover, the damage reduction is sufficient to bring S&P into line with Sword and Crossbow without additional nerfs. The pistol does 16 damage at T1 up to 28 damage at T4, while the crossbow ranges from 20 at T1 to 32 at T4. So S&P will always do less damage against a target with low defense, and pull ahead when the target has high defense. When is the break-even point?
Each point of defense/resistance multiplies incoming damage by 0.9 (multiplicatively). At T1, the pistol only does 14/20=70% as much damage as the crossbow, so you don't break even until the pistol's breaching ability cuts defense by log(0.7)/log(0.9)=3.39. In other words, a T1 pistol will do less damage than a crossbow until you're shooting at enemies with 7 defense. The T4 pistol is more competitive: it does 28/32=87.5% as much damage as a T4 crossbow, and so will do more damage against enemies with 2*log(0.875)/log(0.9)~3 defense, which should be most late-game targets. All of which is to say that the S&P combo is straight-up worse than S&C in the early game, and doesn't pull ahead until you're rolling around with high-tier weapons, by which point you're probably in win-more territory.
And even if you don't want pistols pulling ahead of crossbows in the late game, there are less frustrating ways to accomplish this than only allowing you to fire them every other turn. One possibility would be to reduce the pistol's damage scaling from 4 points per weapon tier to only 3, so you'd be doing 24 damage at T4, which is only 75% of crossbow damage and would therefore not pull ahead until the target has ~6 defense. (In fact, this would keep you doing 75% of crossbow damage at every tier, which means you'd always do less damage against defense of 5 or lower, and more against 6 or higher.)
Or even just lower base pistol damage more. I don't think that's really necessary, but it would still be better than the current situation.
This second part is terrible in a variety of ways, and should be reverted as expeditiously as possible. The main problem is that a ranged-focused ranger should rarely if ever use Sword and Pistol, since they'll only be able to use their ranged attack every other turn. Since the only other firearm is the rifle, which can't be used with a mount, there are basically no options if I want to have a gun-focused hero who can also ride a mount. From a flavor perspective, this feels bad and unnecessarily restrictive.
Moreover, the damage reduction is sufficient to bring S&P into line with Sword and Crossbow without additional nerfs. The pistol does 16 damage at T1 up to 28 damage at T4, while the crossbow ranges from 20 at T1 to 32 at T4. So S&P will always do less damage against a target with low defense, and pull ahead when the target has high defense. When is the break-even point?
Each point of defense/resistance multiplies incoming damage by 0.9 (multiplicatively). At T1, the pistol only does 14/20=70% as much damage as the crossbow, so you don't break even until the pistol's breaching ability cuts defense by log(0.7)/log(0.9)=3.39. In other words, a T1 pistol will do less damage than a crossbow until you're shooting at enemies with 7 defense. The T4 pistol is more competitive: it does 28/32=87.5% as much damage as a T4 crossbow, and so will do more damage against enemies with 2*log(0.875)/log(0.9)~3 defense, which should be most late-game targets. All of which is to say that the S&P combo is straight-up worse than S&C in the early game, and doesn't pull ahead until you're rolling around with high-tier weapons, by which point you're probably in win-more territory.
And even if you don't want pistols pulling ahead of crossbows in the late game, there are less frustrating ways to accomplish this than only allowing you to fire them every other turn. One possibility would be to reduce the pistol's damage scaling from 4 points per weapon tier to only 3, so you'd be doing 24 damage at T4, which is only 75% of crossbow damage and would therefore not pull ahead until the target has ~6 defense. (In fact, this would keep you doing 75% of crossbow damage at every tier, which means you'd always do less damage against defense of 5 or lower, and more against 6 or higher.)
Or even just lower base pistol damage more. I don't think that's really necessary, but it would still be better than the current situation.
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