How do you guys buff/rework warrior's Rifle?

[XenMaster.7165]

For me, its normal attack. Base damage and attack speed increase.

2nd ability should shoot faster or rather literally instant barrage like shooting range rifle adventure in Verdant Brink.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

Auto needs to be much stronger. 

2 needs lower cast time. 

3 needs more dmg and a bigger cone. 

4 needs to shoot and evade at the same time. Not one after the other. 

5. Is fine I guess. 

[Jzaku.9765]

Well, I made a thread about it:

RIFLE

Warrior Rifle's function and flavour are both intrinsically tied to it's Burst Skill, with the rest of the weapon generally being boring filler. These changes aim to spice up the base weapon with some additional utility, reimplement the Adrenaline gain that used to be on it, and overall make it a strong option for Power builds.

1. Fierce Shot:
   Cast time reduced from 0.75s > 0.5s
   It's actually not a bad auto in terms of damage, but the cast time was ridiculous.
    
2. Volley:
   If all shots hit, reduce count recharge and cooldown by 4s. Gain increased adrenaline when striking a foe above 15 stacks of Vulnerability.
   The main Adrenaline generator for the weapon. You should be pressing this button constantly to fire it like a machine gun in between burst skills!
    
3. Explosive Shell:
   Now causes 3x blast finishers around the target.
   Adds some utility to the weapon. Warrior doesn't have a lot of fields right now, but check out my banner rework for that.
    
4. Brutal Shot:
   Now evades and shoots at the same time. Acts exactly like the various shortbow evades across the game.
   Yeah... How it used to behave is just baffling.
    
5. Rifle Butt:
   Largely unchanged, this is actually a great skill.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

For keeping it simple and thus easier to implement:

AA either needs the engi rifle treatment or it needs to do 50% more damage than it does now (all game modes). I'm up for more damage on it though at this point since Engi got the super pew pew.

Volley's damage is fine, but the damage is too spread out to be a proper spike. Half the cast time would fit best.

Explosive Shell should detonate regardless if it hits a target, and needs something like a 15% damage increase. makes it an effective 1650 range snipe skill.

Brutal Shot needs to evade first, thats all.

Rifle Butt needs a small movement added to it as a QoL, same distance as Kick.

Kill Shot: no. more. self. root. If the self root has to stay then the damage needs to be increased by 50%. Yes, that makes T3 a 3.0 scaling in PvP/WvW which is completely fair if it remains a self root.

Gunflame: I would remove the competitive split. The PvE scaling is 2.2, no reason why Gunflame can't also have a 2.2 scaling.

EDIT: Two other QOL ideas that would really alter the gameplay and would not be hard to do:

Brutal Shot: Change the evade to roll forwards
Rifle Butt: Remove the knockback and make it a 1s daze instead.

This along with the other changes turns rifle into an aggressive weapon to help advance on a target to get into melee range for quick daze, another burst of fire, then swap into another weapon set to keep pressuring the target.

Edited July 26, 2022 by Lan Deathrider.5910
two other ideas.

[Zekent.3652]

Put rifle 2 on autos, sounds crazy right? they never have done that in any  class, right? that's way too much right? 

[GKC.3851]

Strangely enough i bring a rifle berserker warrior into pvp and wvw. It's not top teir stuff but the amount of unblockable burst is scary. What i can't do with it is bait a player into dodging the non burst attacks. It's too weak. What i usually do is wait for an enemy to be focused on something else, my character mutters something about killing everything, it kills someone, and i wait for the burst to come off cooldown. That's the only way i can get it to work. It's alot of fun, but its not in a good place in the game currently. It doesn't promote a gameplay that they want.

 

Rifle 2 does extra damage. I dont know what rifle 3 is there for. Rifle 4 is a toy more than anything because its a bad dodge, you dont catch anyone with it and its clunky. Rifle 5 is a nice knockback but the cooldown reduction mechanic is counter to what you should be using it for.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

41 minutes ago, GKC.3851 said:

Strangely enough i bring a rifle berserker warrior into pvp and wvw. It's not top teir stuff but the amount of unblockable burst is scary. What i can't do with it is bait a player into dodging the non burst attacks. It's too weak. What i usually do is wait for an enemy to be focused on something else, my character mutters something about killing everything, it kills someone, and i wait for the burst to come off cooldown. That's the only way i can get it to work. It's alot of fun, but its not in a good place in the game currently. It doesn't promote a gameplay that they want.

 

Rifle 2 does extra damage. I dont know what rifle 3 is there for. Rifle 4 is a toy more than anything because its a bad dodge, you dont catch anyone with it and its clunky. Rifle 5 is a nice knockback but the cooldown reduction mechanic is counter to what you should be using it for.

About rifle 3.

Rifle was always about the burst and the rest is just filler. So Warrior needed a Way to get Full Adrenalin fast to get any value out of Rifle.

The Auto used to give extra Adrenalin if the target has Vuln but they removed that. So to "compensate" they gave Rifle 3 an extra AoE effect so you can "technically" get Adrenalin faster (in very niche scenarios).

Does that make sense? No. But thats Anet when they rework Warrior weapons.

Edited July 26, 2022 by DanAlcedo.3281

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

Rifle 3 also pairs well with Leg Specialist for extra immobs. Pair it iwth some extra expertise somewhere and you can chain immob people with rilfe 3 and 4 and kill shout/gunflame them.

[Infinity.2876]

2 hours ago, Zizekent.2398 said:

Put rifle 2 on autos, sounds crazy right? they never have done that in any  class, right? that's way too much right? 

put rifle 4 on autos 😉

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

20 minutes ago, Infinity.2876 said:

put rifle 4 on autos 😉

Put gunflame on autos.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

7 hours ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

Put gunflame on autos.

Would probably not even be Op these days. 

 

[Vancho.8750]

18 hours ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

Put gunflame on autos.

Didn't they do that with the engi rifle.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

7 minutes ago, Vancho.8750 said:

Didn't they do that with the engi rifle.

No, that was volley.

Edited July 27, 2022 by Lan Deathrider.5910

[Vancho.8750]

9 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

No, that was volley.

They added a boom grenade on the end so it has both. 

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

47 minutes ago, Vancho.8750 said:

They added a boom grenade on the end so it has both. 

But does the boom nade deal 9k damage and daze the target?

[Vancho.8750]

11 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

But does the boom nade deal 9k damage and daze the target?

If you trait it with Explosives it would be close enough. 

[Mesket.5728]

 

On 7/26/2022 at 3:39 AM, XenMaster.7165 said:

For me, its normal attack. Base damage and attack speed increase.

2nd ability should shoot faster or rather literally instant barrage like shooting range rifle adventure in Verdant Brink.

 

You really can't. I mean, don't get me wrong, you can always increase damage and what not to make it more viable; but technically speaking from a professional point of view, you can't.

 

Warrior has a fundamental design flaw: All weapons rely on burst from design to be balanced and ANET keeps deciding to remove burst with every e-spec. It is less noticeable when burst is replaced within the same weapon like Berserker, but Spb needs to have every weapon balanced around each other and then contemplate counter as another weapon attack. BS is one hot mess because they remove burst completely, thus, all weapons are by definition weaker than core warrior and that will never change.

 

Until they don't set their minds on how to resolve this design flaw. The weapons wont be properly balanced.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

6 minutes ago, Vancho.8750 said:

If you trait it with Explosives it would be close enough. 

True... Can we get Orbital Strike on our AA then?

[Vancho.8750]

2 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

True... Can we get Orbital Strike on our AA then?

Only if it has like 4 to 5 drawbacks tied to it deduced from reading the Wiki, at least what I gather from the design objectives Arenanet has for warrior.

And after the rework rifle still will be useless like always even in open world content. 

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

12 minutes ago, Vancho.8750 said:

Only if it has like 4 to 5 drawbacks tied to it deduced from reading the Wiki, at least what I gather from the design objectives Arenanet has for warrior.

And after the rework rifle still will be useless like always even in open world content. 

I don't know, coincidentally the guy who was balancing like that was also the senior encounter designer right (at least from the player side)? Anet twitter is advertising for that position... 

[oscuro.9720]

Increasing damage output slightly from the auto, Volley, and Explosive shot, giving immediate evasion to skill 4, and making Rifle Butt into a 300 range frontal aoe knock back would all be really nice and fairly low on the intensiveness. 
 

Im personally not a fan of the kill shot play style, especially considering there’s now an entire specialization build around being a “sniper”. Building it into a power aoe ranged option is really what I’d like to see, but that’s probably somewhat unrealistic considering how invasive that sort of shift is. 

[Morokey.8534]

Rifle is at least playeable, but mace ? It's trash which need rework..

[captrowdy.9561]

Some type of aoe. I just want warrior to have a decent range option in wvw 

[Dadnir.5038]

If we are allowed to go "crazy" on the rework, I'll take some inspiration out of deadeye and suggest:

Skill#5: Fonctionality changed, it now allow the character to switch between the rifle's stance and bayonet's stance with a 5s CD.

Rifle's stance:

Skill#1: Reduce cast time to 1/2.

Skill#2: No change.

Skill#3: No change.

Skill#4: No change.

Bayonet's stance: Your rifle now have an etheral bayonet at it's tip.

Skill#1: Barbed strike: Pierce the foe in front of you applying a bleed stack.

Skill#2: Wild flurry: Leap to your foe and then repeatedly hit it.

Skill#3: Explosive shot: melee attack that destroy your bayonet inflicting burn and blind to nearby foes. You are forced out of the bayonet stance after using this skill.

Skill#4: Rifle butt: Same as current Rifle butt skill.

 

[Verdict is Vengence.6912]

For immediate gratification and seeing quick results, I'd increase auto speed of the #1 skill.

The only other idea I have is: #4 [Brutal Shot] I'd change it to [Cover and Move] where you still dodge backwards but can hit the skill again to do a short ranged tackle forward that has a short knockdown. If you click "about face" using the skill, you can gain even more distance away if trying to run.

That's all I can think of.

In my interpretation, rifle on warrior was based on the turn of the century soldiers, whereas engi rifle was based on the old timey blunderbuss. They need to keep to the soldier theme so as not to step on the toes of other rifle users (although they stomped on our toes when giving rifle to thief but that's besides the point).