Do you feel strange playing Deadeye without rifle?

I've been playing around with Deadeye and having alot of fun with dual pistols and dual daggers. I like the new "steal" and it seems pretty strong. The rifle though just seems a bit... well meh at the moment.

No. I feel strange playing WITH the rifle, as in it's awkward to work with. It's probably a l2p issue on my part, but honestly I can't bother to put in the effort when P/P is so much easier. PvE mind you... In WvW/PvP, I don't touch ranged weapons. Melee or bust, there's too much projectile hate to rely on ranged unless you're Ranger with unblockables.

Yes, which is why I only play my Deadeye with Rifle and P/P. Anything else feels weird to me.

Because you're supposed to use rifle but rifle is so terrible that other weapons are better even though they feel weird.

outsider here, playing mirrage in pvp/wvw without axe , and feels really good. Sword ambush for example is just too good in a meele weapon set, and u don't want two meele weapon sets. Therefore sword > axe.

Maybe similar with Rifle for thief. I heared its kind of unmobile, and maybe u have to admit to that playstyle.

@TwiceDead.1963 said:No. I feel strange playing WITH the rifle, as in it's awkward to work with. It's probably a l2p issue on my part, but honestly I can't bother to put in the effort when P/P is so much easier. PvE mind you... In WvW/PvP, I don't touch ranged weapons. Melee or bust, there's too much projectile hate to rely on ranged unless you're Ranger with unblockables.

I think a lot of the awkward feel of the rifle is the running animation and the offset facing it can have when trying to face targets even if the skill animations look good for the most part. Those two things make the rifle feel sluggish and surreal for me and frustrating to work into my muscle memory which happened so naturally with say sword or staff, even if staffs holding and running animation are kind of stupid, the skills looked good enough to match the awesome Physical utilities.

2 unloads with quickness from the steal is way better / faster / spikier damage than whatever a rifle could do with its tripl shot and imobilized status from kneeling.

My main gripe with the weapon is that I find Deaths Judgement to be useless on anything outside of an elite/champion or legendary world boss. The ramp up time is so fucking high that even against veterans they are dead before you hit max malice. So shitty stupid that the signature skill of the weapon is completely useless in 95% of gameplay, and the rest of the skills just feel "meh".

Nah, it feels pretty fluid with core thief's weapons. Especially when Be quick or Be Killed speeds up slower but hard hitting weapons.

@Esquilax.3491 said:2 unloads with quickness from the steal is way better / faster / spikier damage than whatever a rifle could do with its tripl shot and imobilized status from kneeling.

My main gripe with the weapon is that I find Deaths Judgement to be useless on anything outside of an elite/champion or legendary world boss. The ramp up time is so kitten high that even against veterans they are dead before you hit max malice. So kitten stupid that the signature skill of the weapon is completely useless in 95% of gameplay, and the rest of the skills just feel "meh".

There is another built in way to speed up the ramp time. Given that DJ gives 15% per stack, you don't need a lot to fuck something up, especially when your sigils are set up to take advantage of it.

I think people are missing the beauty of the rifle; Kneel puts it on a similar, albeit clunkier, damage level to P/P when played right, while without Kneel it's a great skirmishing weapon (low power, but Death's Retreat is a good escape) that can let you kill most melee opponents without them even laying a finger on you.

I think people are waiting far too long to use Death's Judgement - or not using it at all. You don't need full Malice to use it, certainly not in PvE anyway, and taking Maleficent Seven is a huge boon if you're actually using rifle. I run Deadly Arts for the double stolen skill, so with Mug + 2 uses of the stolen skill (which can activate while attacking) I can usually DJ straight away for an insta-kill. Anything tankier than that only needs either 1 or 2 auto-attacks or another weapon skill to bring it in range for a DJ kill. With Maleficent Seven, by the time you've pulled off an auto-attack or two you should have a couple of strikes of Malice anyway; that's still 30% extra damage.

I used to prefer P/P, but now I favour rifle most of the time with the exception of certain very crowded, close-quarter fights. Even then I'll sometimes use rifle because pierce>unloading a full pistol round into just one enemy. I know rifle needs some buffs, but it is far from bad by any stretch of the imagination. It's just very, very different from a standard Thief playstyle so takes some adjusting to.

@Esquilax.3491 said:2 unloads with quickness from the steal is way better / faster / spikier damage than whatever a rifle could do with its tripl shot and imobilized status from kneeling.

My main gripe with the weapon is that I find Deaths Judgement to be useless on anything outside of an elite/champion or legendary world boss. The ramp up time is so kitten high that even against veterans they are dead before you hit max malice. So kitten stupid that the signature skill of the weapon is completely useless in 95% of gameplay, and the rest of the skills just feel "meh".

5 Malice stacks (or 7 with trait) is too high. An easy way to fix part of the spec without getting too complicated is to adjust the Malice ratios. 3 max stacks, 20% increase per stack instead of 15. Trait ups it to 5 stacks if necessary. Burst is faster to set up and is higher. Because you are right... stacking malice is too slow for it to be consistent enough to use in pvp. And even still, this isn't enough, but at least it helps with malice stacking issues.

@Manpag.6421 said:I think people are missing the beauty of the rifle; Kneel puts it on a similar, albeit clunkier, damage level to P/P when played right, while without Kneel it's a great skirmishing weapon (low power, but Death's Retreat is a good escape) that can let you kill most melee opponents without them even laying a finger on you.

I just wanted to tack onto this part. The exact multiplier for Rifle autos isn't up, but based on heartseeker values (550-1.5 & 734-2.0), Brutal Aim(545) and Deadly Aim(727) are somewhere around 1.5 and 2.0 respectively. So rounding to those for the sake of simplicity, and using the longer shot to shot value of. 94 (which includes precast and aftercast), Rifle has a Multiplier Per Second of 1.596 and 2.128 for the standing and kneeling versions of the attack (this could very well be lower since I'm rounding). Putting this in perspective, Unload has a total multiplier of 2.4 over 1.5 seconds, yielding about 1.6 MPS.

If you include some melee auto chains for more comparisons:

Dagger AA: 2.75m/1.68s=1.63MPSSword AA: 2.9m/1.88s=1.54MPS (1.697 w/Swindler's Equilibrium)Staff: 3.097m/2.14s=1.447MPS(1.59 w/Staff Master)

This really puts standing rifle on par with melee autos, and even if the Rifle multipliers are 25% lower than the tool tips indicate (or my rounding is way off) , kneeling rifle attacks are still on par with melee auto chains and unload, so I actually really like where the damage is.

That said, Double Tap is bad and Rifle could use some other QoL improvements as well to smooth out its game play.

Edit1: I wanted to emphasize that the base damage numbers on the wiki could be wrong. There's a pretty big discrepancy if you use gw2skills.net. Equipping a rifle and dagger and swapping between them on the site shows a pretty big difference. Based on their numbers, the kneeling autoattack multiplier is about 0.92 resulting in an MPS of 1.0. From quick tests over the past couple of weeks that seems low as the 'Weak Enemy' target had very similar TTK from rifle auto, dagger auto (not a rotation), and chain unloads. I'll have to check over the weekend to see which one is wrong. They might both be.

Edit2: Values on the wiki were off which are now corrected. See later post for explanation

I'm using Rifle as my swap weapon for when I need range instead of p/p and my main is d/p. It feels pretty good, overall, and suits my playstyle. I generally only use ranged weapons when I have to

I dropped offhand rifle because the AoE poison on shortbow w/ stun was too good to give up. Unblockable is critical for making SB a must take over rifle.

The extra stealth and movement impairment removal on rifle is, however, quite good and situationally better for 1v1. The problem is that one of the better traits for DE competes with Sniper's Cover. So you lose both the SB AoE damage/stun while losing the AoE condition/boon aspect in order to take full advantage on the stealth side.

@saerni.2584 said:The problem is that one of the better traits for DE competes with Sniper's Cover. So you lose both the SB AoE damage/stun while losing the AoE condition/boon aspect in order to take full advantage on the stealth side.

That point makes me sigh every day I log on and look at my build.

I play DE P/P (PvE) and my only gripe is the casting time on Malice which is the only real difference between DE and Core.

Cast time on Mark? Or the time it takes to build up Malice?

Alright, I'm back and tested it because as I said in my edit, the wiki numbers might be off... which they were, by a lot. Someone had plugged in damage values at 2225 power instead of the coefficient so it wasn't using the base power of 1000. Anyway, it's now corrected, and here's the results.

Kneeling rifle does pretty well. P/P falls off on targets with a larger healthpool because of the initiative starvation and weak autos, although a build with trickery for the initiative refund on mark while attacking smaller mobs would probably boost it's numbers because of renewing gaze. Without permanent quickness, rifle would probably fall behind S/P because of the DPS loss seen using pistolwhip as opposed to autos. Build choices and buffs were focused on keeping stats relatively flat when comparing weaponsets to each other and trickery wasn't used because I didn't want the fluctuation in damage seen with lead attacks.

For my changes to rifle if they wanted to be on par with melee while kneeling.Kneeling Auto: Bring up to a multiplier of 0.925 from where it is now (~0.776) and pierce 1-2 targets (this would put kneeling Rifle rotation DPS on par with D/D rotation DPS)Standing Auto: Bring Up to a multiplier of 0.65 from where it is now (~0.58) and pierce 1-2 targets (This would put standing Rifle Rotation at about 8% lower than P/P Unload spam)Double Tap: Improve the might duration to 10s if nothing else changes (spamming this skill only resulted in a 6% improvement of DPS over just autoattacking with rifle, so at least make the utility good)Three Round Burst: Improve might duration to 10sKneel: Replace with Sniper's Cover as baseline. Let moving/dodging/jumping break the kneel, but not remove movement impairing conditions. Keep free action to remove those conditions if it's actually used.

TLDW Summary: If we normalize the DPS around the D/D Rotation, currently it stands atD/DRotation(1)>RKRotation(.86)>S/PAuto(.79)>RKAuto(.71)>P/PUnload(.67)>RSRotation(.56)>RSAuto(.52)

I use P/P and S/P in PvE and it works okay.

Rifle is in a weird position. If they buff damage it will be broken in PvP. It currently stands on the okay line there, but lacks the mobility and CC that DD has, but can deal very strong damage on a target if left alone.

Of course they can split damage between PvP and PvE, but that still does not resolve the PvP issue.