Some thoughts on improving Rifle

Hip Shot- unchanged

Net Shot-

1. Remove damage, reduce recharge to 8 seconds, increase Immobilize duration to 3 seconds.
2. Remove damage, add x2 ammunition with 1 second recharge between shots and 10 second total recharge.

Blunderbuss- Remove Bleed and replace with Boon ripping effect that removes 2 - 3 Boons on the initial target dependent on range, x2 maximum range, x3 minimum range. Does not effect multiple targets.

Overcharged Shot- Replace movement impairment cleanse (Chill, Cripple, Immobilize) with Vulnerability that applies additional stacks at same thresholds as Blunderbuss. x6 maximum range, x9 minimum range.

Jump Shot- Replace Vulnerability with movement impairment cleanse (Chill, Cripple, Immobilize) on leap, add Swiftness 6 seconds and AOE Cripple 3 seconds on landing.

Heavily reduce conditions. Focus more on power. Fix the numbers.

Really won't do anything. The problem for rifle is the same as pistols - speed of attacks. The warrior rifle got updated with the ammo system and have volley to weigh it up and improve a sustained attack. The engineer rifle has... nothing. The pistol still have a broken auto attack that is about 30% slower firing than specced by the game. I haven't checked rifle, but wouldn't surprise me if that broken too.

@Dawdler.8521 said:I haven't checked rifle, but wouldn't surprise me if that broken too.

Rifle autos are about 15% too slow, yeah. Overcharged Shot has longer casting time than indicated (and needs an evade frame, tbh).

Is all a mess. A terrible, terrible mess.

I like to use the toy weapon skins just to roleplay what my weapons really are on Engineer.

Why are Hammer and Sword so good in comparison?

@Hannelore.8153 said:I like to use the toy weapon skins just to roleplay what my weapons really are on Engineer.

Why are Hammer and Sword so good in comparison?

Because they're e-specs.

While small changes to numbers would be nice, and of course fixing the fire rate of the auto attack is important (maybe even bringing it to a level where it isn't completely overshadowed by bomb auto) I don't think that would fix the fundamental issue of engineer rifle, that it doesn't seem to be designed at any set range. The main damaging skills, blunderbuss and jump shot, are very clearly designed to be used at point blank range (blunderbuss doing more damage the closer you are to the target, jump shot doing a very reasonable amount of damage in an AoE at the position you want to move to). Meanwhile, the 1200 range skills are both CC effects, one of which being very annoying to use without stability. This ambiguity in the design of rifle makes it so that, for a weapon very close to the top of the list in range in this game, it really isn't very effective outside of melee (at least in PvE). Personally, I would like to see a much larger redesign to the skills of rifle (particularly rifle 2 and 3) to give it more value as the only power dps weapon accessible to core engineer. Perhaps if Blunderbus was reworked to be more like Rusty Shrapnel (although obviously toned down and more power oriented), and if net shot were instead turned into something like Penetrating shot, as a ground targeted projectile line that would cleave multiple targets it passed through.