What is the point of the rifle?

I don't see why I would would ever want to use it over pistols, when a lot of your firearm skills are geared towards pistols, conditions, and close range crit.

It also seems like a contradiction of design. Why would you want to dive towards your enemy and ruin the only thing rifle has going for it (superior range, immobilization, and knockback)?

I dont know what you mean with firearm skills . you mean traits?I like the rifle (in WVW) because it is a verry flexible weapon which also provides mobility.

Rifle has:-Ranged Power damage Pressure (piercing)-Ranged Hard cc-Ranged Soft cc-Mobility-2 non reflectable damage dealing attacks-Soft cc cleans-Tiny bit of bleeding that can work with "Hematic Focus"-Leap Finisher

@"Rise.8259" said:It also seems like a contradiction of design. Why would you want to dive towards your enemy and ruin the only thing rifle has going for it (superior range, immobilization, and knockback)?

You can use that attack to dive away from your enemies you know. In the past the "Leap Damage" had beter damage but they transfered some of its damage to the "Landing Damage".

Balance Patch 13 December 2016:"The damage of the initial jump has been reduced by 56%.The damage of the landing has been increased by 28%."

Meanwhile pistols give no mobility and most of its utility/damage come from conditions. (resistance counters almost the whole weapon set)

@Rise.8259 said:I don't see why I would would ever want to use it over pistols, when a lot of your firearm skills are geared towards pistols, conditions, and close range crit.

It also seems like a contradiction of design. Why would you want to dive towards your enemy and ruin the only thing rifle has going for it (superior range, immobilization, and knockback)?

Pistols provide multiple conditions, whereas the rifle is good for not only positioning, but also for utility. Dual pistol can only deal conditions with the exception of the unblockable immobilize which seems neat, but the rifle has an immobilize that you can easily use behind you, a knockback which has been recently buffed and a leap finisher, giving the engineer even more mobility.

But to answer your question, it's the only weapon that Holosmiths can use to faceroll on their opponents. It's bad enough that they have Holo Leap, but they can have stability and use the knockback without CCing themselves. Even though I've never been a fan of the pistols when it comes to PvP/WvW, I don't think core engineer has any other choice to be relevant other than having the only weapon type that allows them to reliably keep condition damage on their enemies.

I find the better question to be "when is it good to use pistols?".

Rifle: Power Damage, Pierces, on demand immob, 1200 Range, Has knockback, removes movement conditions, , Rifle 5 is a reposition, a leap, and big AOE damage.

Pistol: MH: Too slow for upkeeping high condi damage, and used more to apply poison and blind in conjunction with Shield defense. The only real heavy damage lifter is Pistol 4, and that demands you be in point blank range as well.

@Rise.8259 said:I don't see why I would would ever want to use it over pistols, when a lot of your firearm skills are geared towards pistols, conditions, and close range crit.

It also seems like a contradiction of design. Why would you want to dive towards your enemy and ruin the only thing rifle has going for it (superior range, immobilization, and knockback)?

Not really, once you realize Engineers don't camp their main weapon, plus the Power based Kits are most effective at short range. The Rifle's big advantage is the ability to modulate the engagement range for a Power Engineer, enabling them control positioning. Pistol MH is more for Kiting, shield for general defense and CC, while offhand pistol is basically about setting up and using blowtorch. But even then, Kits make up the bulk of the Engineer's damage potential, while the Weapons are geared toward various forms of utility. This only changes on Holosmith, since the sword is a Damage focused weapon set.

Rifle, as it is designed, is primarily as a control weapon. As in, control your enemies, control yourself. Pistols are almost entirely damage oriented, with some minor soft cc.

In addition to what the others said, it should be noted that most "meta" holosmith builds and their variations tend not to run firearms. Alchemy is great for survival. Tools brings a lot of utility and DPS. Inventions is great for tankier builds and cleanse. Firearms only offers DPS (which may be even worse than Tools, especially with Static Discharge).

Also, pistols hit like wet noodles on a power build. P/SH is used for its defensive utility with Photon Forge as the main source of damage.

@santenal.1054 said:

Meanwhile pistols give no mobility and most of its utility/damage come from conditions. (resistance counters almost the whole weapon set)

What do you mean resistance counters the set?

@Rise.8259 said:

@santenal.1054 said:

Meanwhile pistols give no mobility and most of its utility/damage come from conditions. (resistance counters almost the whole weapon set)

If you have to fight (especially a warrior) in PvP or WvW just a single boon (resistance) can make your whole weapon set useless for a period of time. You can't Blind, Cripple, Immobilize, Poison , Bleed, Burn or Confuse him, just your lousy direct damage remains. Plus everything can also be cleansed by Condi cleanses . Maybe most engineers don't care about this but for me it's a reason to never use pistols (in WvW).

@santenal.1054 said:

@Rise.8259 said:

@santenal.1054 said:

Meanwhile pistols give no mobility and most of its utility/damage come from conditions. (resistance counters almost the whole weapon set)

Pistols haven't been good in a long while, even in PvP. They weren't great at launch, and they're way worse by comparison now.

@"Rise.8259" said:I don't see why I would would ever want to use it over pistols, when a lot of your firearm skills are geared towards pistols, conditions, and close range crit.

It also seems like a contradiction of design. Why would you want to dive towards your enemy and ruin the only thing rifle has going for it (superior range, immobilization, and knockback)?

Kinda feels like what you're actually asking is "what is the point of taking firearms with rifle?"

While rifles can be used as a long-range weapon, they're not really intended to be used that way. Where a rifle really shines is in mobile playstyles: get in, do some damage at close range, then back off (or push the enemy away) if you have to, and the autoattack means you can still pressure at range if you need to. It's part of the reason why engineer rifle animations are all "firing from the hip" - long-range precision isn't really their forte. The power-oriented Firearms traits reflect this.

Another contributing factor is that back in the day Firearms was explicitly a condition damage traitline. Traitlines are no longer directly linked to statistics like they used to be, but as you can probably see, Firearms is still fairly condition-oriented. For a power build - and any build using a rifle has a good chance of being a power build - it's entirely reasonable to take a different line instead.

Firearms can be a thing with rifle but it's very limited.

The old 3/3/2 combo can give you an easy 100% crit chance at sub 300 range with a decent +dmg%

That's all it does though, damage.

Rifle is one of our best cc contributions. Plus mobility and a snare. I tend to use it more when soloing champs bc I can take out the break bar so easily once it comes up.

I use firearms for the increased crit chance traits on my cele hybrid build. It's a bit daft to use a line called firearms with sword/shield but hey, it works.

Pistols = Condi.Rifle = Fun.I like condi, but I love fun more.

Like others said, Rifle is more for mobility/control, providing damaging pressure when enemies are either too close, or too far from you.Pistols, as well, could see a comeback with some interesting builds if direct power damage was brought down across the board. As it stands, anything condi is not viable unless you can burst it (burn guard, scourge, mesmer), but that's because there is so much high damaging power burst that it's basically the makeup of probably 90% of the meta builds out there that isn't support.

Maybe I am just bad, but to me, riffle is really helpful as a movement skill for tricky or impossible normal jumps. You dont get all the drawbacks of teleport/shadow step skills. It just always work !

@Aigleborgne.2981 said:Maybe I am just bad, but to me, riffle is really helpful as a movement skill for tricky or impossible normal jumps. You dont get all the drawbacks of teleport/shadow step skills. It just always work !

I use it for exactly same thing.

@santenal.1054 said:

@Rise.8259 said:

@santenal.1054 said:

Meanwhile pistols give no mobility and most of its utility/damage come from conditions. (resistance counters almost the whole weapon set)

I do run pistols in PvP and WvW because I am some kind of masochist.

Warrior is one of the easier classes to fight with pistols - definitely pretty easy to 1v1 despite their high resistance uptime. As long as you're watching their bar and don't waste your cc conditions on them while resist is up, you'll do fine. Just keep kiting with rocket boots, or elixir s, but keep stacking condi because it'll start damaging them as soon as resist is down. Spellbreaker can't stack resistance forever like they used to and it'll kill them eventually. The only tough part I find is telling the difference between Bull's Charge, which must be dodged or blocked, and Shield Bash, which can be reflex-blinded assuming resist is down. Most don't run a lot of cleanse.

I find Rifle vs Warrior more difficult. You can't rely on Overcharged Shot because Last Stand will proc on a pretty low cooldown, which will ruin your day. You try and interrupt Shield Bash, but passive Last Stand gives them stab, they don't get CC'd. You knockback yourself, then they hit you and you're stunned. You basically lose the fight right there or are forced to stunbreak. You also have to be careful not to OC-shot when they're about to use shield block because you'll get double-cc'd. Net shot doesn't work either because most of their skills break immob. You're left with kiting and harassing with weak autoattacks until their stab is down.

I guess it's a similar fight for both in that you're waiting for one boon or other to be down so you can actually cc or damage them, but I think rifle has more potential for catastrophic failure if you expect your cc to work and it doesn't beacuse of a reflect or passive proc.

@coro.3176 said:

@santenal.1054 said:

@Rise.8259 said:

@santenal.1054 said:

Meanwhile pistols give no mobility and most of its utility/damage come from conditions. (resistance counters almost the whole weapon set)

HAHA, we have something in common XD