lmao i was wrong i love rifle thanks

[Alpha.1308]

i stopped reading posts and i guess my thread criticising rifle (and primarily other poor decisions for this class) got closed for toxicity, im a little sorry, and im so glad i was wrong, thanks to everyone involved in surprising me 

Edited November 28, 2023 by Alpha.1308

[Anela.3867]

I agree!  I was not looking forward to getting a rifle but it's really fun!  It's my favorite new weapon.

[Roadkizzle.2157]

How are you using the rifle?

 

Build and content?

[Artemis.8034]

My only issue well the damage is a little low, but the sound is so annoying. It dont sound rifle like, it sounds like a pirate ship firing cannons, too slow and boomy

[Roadkizzle.2157]

I hopped in to check it out... And I cannot figure how the kitten it'll fit in with any build.

 

It has zero damage so it can't be used by any DPS specs.

It doesn't provide Alac so it will be useless for Mirage support.

It just does not have the clone generation to use any of the changes to the Chaos traitline.

 

 

I was trying to see how much use I could make of it. But with the full 3 clones and full Harrier gear I was only getting 7-8 seconds of Protection or Quickness with a Chrono. But it takes 15 seconds to generate 3 clones with the Rifle. So it's utterly useless as a healer support.

[Passerbye.6291]

11 hours ago, Alpha.1308 said:

i stopped reading posts and i guess my thread criticising rifle (and primarily other poor decisions for this class) got closed for toxicity, im a little sorry, and im so glad i was wrong, thanks to everyone involved in surprising me 

This makes me happy to read after being on the other side of such discussions for a while ^^

12 minutes ago, Roadkizzle.2157 said:

I was trying to see how much use I could make of it. But with the full 3 clones and full Harrier gear I was only getting 7-8 seconds of Protection or Quickness with a Chrono. But it takes 15 seconds to generate 3 clones with the Rifle. So it's utterly useless as a healer support.

Too lazy to type it up again, so going to be that guy and quote myself, please see below:

On 11/28/2023 at 8:41 AM, Passerbye.6291 said:

I don't understand why people are so underwhelmed by rifle after seeing the stream. 5-second cooldown on a ranged heal is very strong by itself with the numbers I've seen, especially factoring in the fact that chrono gets 33% cooldown reduction from alacrity, placing the cooldown at 3.33 seconds, similar skills such as guardian staff 2 or druid staff 2 are on a significantly higher cooldown. The auto attack itself heals, so that's extra sustained healing with no effort. On top of this, you get another skill that gives 12 stacks of might, which is massive btw, as well as fury on cast, which also doubles up as yet another healing skill at a pinch. The portal skill has the potential to either save time on organized groups, or save someone's life in unorganized ones. Granted, this will likely take a lot of time for people to get used to, so initially there will be a lot of disappointment with placing the portal and the other person ignoring it and dying, but that's the life of most healers tbh, facepalming your forehead to the bone. The barrier itself can be used as an extra mitigation tool for big hits that you know are coming, like VG greens or gorseval blacks. I'm not saying the barrier itself will be earth shatteringly good, but this is a healing weapon, that literally has 3 heals and a barrier should you need it. I don't see how this is a bad weapon for a healer.

My only disappointment so far is the fact that rifle ambush trait doesn't give alac or quickness on mirage, as this renders it virtually useless for a mirage. On one hand, I wasn't expecting to have an awesome mirage healer with it, but on the other, slapping fury on it is laughable, are we supposed to generate 3 rifle clones then swap and camp staff to make use of it while providing alacrity? Btw, they said "it is fury for now" with an awkward smile, which makes me hope that they are aware that it is a weird thing to put there and no healer really has a space in any group without bringing alacrity or quickness atm.

Edit: Btw, this weapon clearly isn't supposed to be camped as its clone generation + phantasm isn't sufficient to sustain alac/quick, but couple it with staff, which comes with a 15-second cooldown (10 with chrono alacrity) skill that deploys 2 phantasms by default and you solve the alacrity/quick uptime with a single skill. Assuming you do 100% boon duration like most healers do, staff 3, phantasmal warlock, alone generates 12 seconds of quick/alac per cast. You start combat in staff, use staff 3-4-5, switch to rifle, rifle 3 for might and fury, then 2, once the phantasms turn to clones, you shatter 3 clones, the warlocks themselves alone are enough to cap your boon for the entirety of the 10 seconds you spend in rifle, and the shatter adds yet another 6 seconds to it due to your boon duration. So far you haven't used rifle phantasm at all, and you probably shouldn't seeing how it is a CC skill, I'd rather reserve it for when it's needed. After the initial skills, whenever you go back to staff, staff 3 is your first cast, because the cooldown on it aligns with your weapon swap cooldown, using any other skill would delay the time you can go back into rifle since you want to be casting staff 3 twice per staff switch to generate 24 seconds of alac/quick in 10 seconds from the phantasms alone.

 

On 11/28/2023 at 9:21 AM, Passerbye.6291 said:

Essentially responded to this above with an edit to keep it tidy, but yeah rifle clearly isn't meant to be camped, but with phantasmal warlock and 1 shatter per phantasmal warlock + staff 2 or rifle 2 is 18 seconds of alacrity or quickness with 100% boon duration, something you can do every 10 seconds. So as Zephidel suggested, we'll likely stay on staff, or scepter sword shield or whatever you choose to use for clone/phantasm generation, and swap to rifle as needed or alternately, depending on your skill choices, if you want to use the boon support of the rifle for fury and might (as 12 stacks of might and long duration fury makes you want to go into rifle even without needing the heals) you'd need to do a sort of rotation where you go into rifle off of cooldown and switch back off of cooldown. The latter, I'd rather not do mainly because I hate the idea of having my heals inaccessible when they are needed as me and my friends mess up fairly frequently and healing may be needed out of sync with your "rotation". This is one of the reasons why I don't enjoy healing on druid for instance, I hate having to go into CA for alac, to me it should be a mechanic that you solely use reactively, as needed. So I'll probably dip into rifle as needed for heals, and solve boon uptime problems with the relic of the midnight king should they arise. With either setup though, going into staff for 10 seconds gives you 36 seconds of alacrity/quickness generation (staff 3 + 1 clone generation twice as the first and last skills you cast in staff) over the course of those 10-11 seconds, leaving you with ample time to stay in rifle for prolonged use if need be. Keep in mind that you have 3.33 seconds cooldown on your clone generation on rifle as well, allowing you a full shatter every 10 seconds from that as well, so you only lose 4 seconds of alac/quick uptime on the group every 10 seconds you spend in rifle, so you would have 26 seconds of buff uptime going into rifle after 10 seconds of staff and it would take you over 50 seconds to run out of said buffs in a stationary situation by merely spamming rifle 2 and using shatter 1 with full clones. (The uptime numbers would be lower for yourself since your own alacrity duration is lower due to the trait but it seems to be really forgiving to me still.)

Currently you can do over 3-4k healing per seconds with rifle autos and 2 alone, so you are able to save anything else that you have at your disposal to heal, so switching to another weapon does not expose your squad to extra damage either.

[Micah.3789]

14 minutes ago, Roadkizzle.2157 said:

[...] with the full 3 clones and full Harrier gear I was only getting 7-8 seconds of Protection or Quickness with a Chrono. But it takes 15 seconds to generate 3 clones with the Rifle. 

The Illusionary Reversion trait returns 1 clone whenever you do a 3 clone shatter.  Meaning you only effectively need to generate 2 clones for a 3 clones shatter. Still, I agree that clone production is limited while using rifle outside of utility skills. You're only other option as a chaos/inspiration healer would be to use Ego Restoration: it has no CD so with Mantra of Recovery it can produce 3 clones every ~10s.

It would probably be more reasonable if rifle 2 were simply changed to provide 2 clones on a slightly longer CD.

[Micah.3789]

10 minutes ago, Passerbye.6291 said:

Currently you can do over 3-4k healing per seconds with rifle autos and 2 alone, so you are able to save anything else that you have at your disposal to heal, so switching to another weapon does not expose your squad to extra damage either.

Agree with pretty much everything you said but I think your math is a little bit off there. Rifle 1+2 on CD do closer to 2-2.5k hps even in full minstrel with monk runes and max outgoing healing %. That's still incredibly impressive though and it's not even including all the healing from regen and Inspiration traits. So I still very much agree with your point. In fact, I think the rifle is a bit over tuned for raw healing output.

[Passerbye.6291]

6 minutes ago, Micah.3789 said:

Agree with pretty much everything you said but I think your math is a little bit off there. Rifle 1+2 on CD do closer to 2-2.5k hps even in full minstrel with monk runes and max outgoing healing %. That's still incredibly impressive though and it's not even including all the healing from regen and Inspiration traits. So I still very much agree with your point. In fact, I think the rifle is a bit over tuned for raw healing output.

Did you factor in maintenance oil? also auto attacks are about 2 hits per second, rifle 2 also gives regen and on chrono you cast it every 3.3 seconds, I only tested with exotics and while missing a backpack and the numbers were already similar to my other healers with full ascended so I'm fairly certain you should not be below 3k on healing while having had to do some guesswork.
Edit: for clarification I'm assuming we're both talking about healing on others right? Since most of the percentage healing bonuses do not effect the healing you do to yourself. I'm also fairly certain there is almost no way the numbers stay the way they are, rifle 2 does more healing than similar skills and is on a significantly shorter cooldown. I expect rifle autos to be brought down to herald staff levels of healing output, as it stands, the sheer output for how little effort it requires is insane, especially considering you have yet another heal if you forego the boons from it, as well as a really significant barrier to use proactively for big hits.

Edited November 29, 2023 by Passerbye.6291

[Micah.3789]

18 minutes ago, Passerbye.6291 said:

Did you factor in maintenance oil? also auto attacks are about 2 hits per second, rifle 2 also gives regen and on chrono you cast it every 3.3 seconds

Yes I was assuming ~50% bonus outgoing healing total, but I think I found the discrepancy. For one, I wasn't adding regen because I'm used to treating it as an assumed boon when calculating heal builds. I guess it does makes sense to add it in this case though. Still that brings us up to 2.5-3k hps. I think you may be over estimating how often you can cast these skills, referring to just the CD. The CD doesn't start until after the cast is finished, and these rifle skills have some pretty gnarly after casts. So even with Improved Alacrity, you'll be casting rifle 2 roughly every 4.5s assuming no user delay whatsoever. Besides, Illusionary Reversion is likely the stronger choice for heal chrono and competes with Improved Alacrity. 

[Passerbye.6291]

22 minutes ago, Micah.3789 said:

Yes I was assuming ~50% bonus outgoing healing total, but I think I found the discrepancy. For one, I wasn't adding regen because I'm used to treating it as an assumed boon when calculating heal builds. I guess it does makes sense to add it in this case though. Still that brings us up to 2.5-3k hps. I think you may be over estimating how often you can cast these skills, referring to just the CD. The CD doesn't start until after the cast is finished, and these rifle skills have some pretty gnarly after casts. So even with Improved Alacrity, you'll be casting rifle 2 roughly every 4.5s assuming no user delay whatsoever. Besides, Illusionary Reversion is likely the stronger choice for heal chrono and competes with Improved Alacrity. 

Hmm, you're right about the cast time on 2, the auto attacks alone are over 1.5k heal per second though, I get 557 tooltip on autos with only 1160 healing power, you cast that twice, per second, if the tooltips are to be believed, you should lose only 1 cast of auto every time you use rifle 2, I did not factor this in either because rifle 2 generates a clone and the heal from clone generation is roughly the same as one rifle 1 auto.
Assuming you get a tooltip of 600 with full ascended giver's or harrier's, not even minstrels, that would be 1.2k times 1.5 from autos alone, then you get regen on top of the already super high healing, and the tooltip I have on rifle 2 is 2.8k atm, assuming it would get up to about 3k or so with ascended, that's another 4.5k per cast, which adds up to 1k heal per second on allies with the 50% modifier after correcting my mistake of not factoring cast time into the cooldown. After adding the regen it should get you over 3k, but yeah, it appears I was overzealous with the 4k ^^.  3.5 could be doable with full minstrels + healing infusions it seems, or around the ballpark anyway.

I'd probably still stick to improved alacrity, getting 33% cooldown reduction instead of 20% sounds more valuable to me than having to only generate 2 clones after each shatter, especially considering it brings down the time you have to spend with your staff  before you can go back to rifle. I'd definitely go for the other trait if I was playing quickness and didn't trust the alacdps to overcap my alac enough though, since I don't know if I'll be shattering enough clones for the self-generated alacrity from flow of time will be enough to keep me at 100%. In the end I intend to test both once the weapons drop to make a final decision.

All in all, I kind of hope the numbers don't stay the way they are, I already find healing to get easier and easier in this game, we're overhealing by so much. As much as I want to heal on my chrono and go pew pew with rifle, if I take a moment to be objective, I feel like it should take active effort and a fair bit of tryharding to pull off this kind of numbers, not 2 buttons :)

Edited November 29, 2023 by Passerbye.6291

[Passerbye.6291]

Btw, I was a bit disappointed by the phantasm on the rifle, extra CC is great and all but tying phantasm to CC on a class that relies on phantasm and clone generation for its alac/quick feels a bit wrong, kind of like how it feels to tie alacrity to CA on druid. As it stands, I'll never use the phantasms on rifle until I need it for a CC in content where breakbars are a thing. Or maybe I'm disappointed by it because everything else that rifle brings are so much more impressive and I'm very rarely starving for more CC on chrono.

Edited November 29, 2023 by Passerbye.6291

[draxynnic.3719]

1 hour ago, Passerbye.6291 said:

Btw, I was a bit disappointed by the phantasm on the rifle, extra CC is great and all but tying phantasm to CC on a class that relies on phantasm and clone generation for its alac/quick feels a bit wrong, kind of like how it feels to tie alacrity to CA on druid. As it stands, I'll never use the phantasms on rifle until I need it for a CC in content where breakbars are a thing. Or maybe I'm disappointed by it because everything else that rifle brings are so much more impressive and I'm very rarely starving for more CC on chrono.

Takes a while for the phantasm to change into a clone, too. Makes me wonder if the phantasm skill and the ambush skill should be swapped - have the phantasm make with the pink swirly cone that damages enemies and heals allies, while mirages have a sniper-like attack (making it feel like a small firing squad when you have multiple clones up).

[Passerbye.6291]

8 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Takes a while for the phantasm to change into a clone, too. Makes me wonder if the phantasm skill and the ambush skill should be swapped - have the phantasm make with the pink swirly cone that damages enemies and heals allies, while mirages have a sniper-like attack (making it feel like a small firing squad when you have multiple clones up).

As much as I'd like to yoink that purple flamethrower of a heal skill on chrono, the rifle already feels blatantly OP with 2/3 overtuned heals and a barrier, imagine yet another.

[draxynnic.3719]

5 hours ago, Passerbye.6291 said:

As much as I'd like to yoink that purple flamethrower of a heal skill on chrono, the rifle already feels blatantly OP with 2/3 overtuned heals and a barrier, imagine yet another.

Numbers are a lot more likely to be tweaked in later balance patches than functionality, so at this stage I think I'd rather focus on getting the functionality right and then see the numbers be brought into whatever ballpark is considered appropriate, rather than being stuck with awkward functionality until they get around to a rework.

Part of the problem, for chrono at least, is that the long activation time before the phantasm fires also means a long time before the phantasm turns into a clone and is available to be shattered.

[Anela.3867]

Why are the healing numbers drastically cut in WvW and PvP?  It's great in in PvE.

[Roadkizzle.2157]

14 hours ago, Passerbye.6291 said:

This makes me happy to read after being on the other side of such discussions for a while ^^

Too lazy to type it up again, so going to be that guy and quote myself, please see below:

 

Currently you can do over 3-4k healing per seconds with rifle autos and 2 alone, so you are able to save anything else that you have at your disposal to heal, so switching to another weapon does not expose your squad to extra damage either.

I dislike the rifle because yesterday the developers released a rework of the Mesmer traits to enable healers. But the exact same day they started the test of a weapon that seems designed to be the absolute worst tool in the class to use the reworked trait lines.

The problem with Mesmer healers already wasn't really the lack of healing per second.

They just didn't provide the value that other healers could in the boons.

 

I don't care that the rifle does a metric kittenload of healing... I agree that it can.

It just makes it even harder to provide the boons and value that healers need.

In GW2 most damage is avoidable due to highly telegraphed mechanics. If people die it's because they are not following mechanics and the bosses are doing so much damage that 10,000 heals won't save.

[Varis.5467]

6 hours ago, Roadkizzle.2157 said:

I dislike the rifle because yesterday the developers released a rework of the Mesmer traits to enable healers. But the exact same day they started the test of a weapon that seems designed to be the absolute worst tool in the class to use the reworked trait lines.

The problem with Mesmer healers already wasn't really the lack of healing per second.

They just didn't provide the value that other healers could in the boons.

 

I don't care that the rifle does a metric kittenload of healing... I agree that it can.

It just makes it even harder to provide the boons and value that healers need.

In GW2 most damage is avoidable due to highly telegraphed mechanics. If people die it's because they are not following mechanics and the bosses are doing so much damage that 10,000 heals won't save.

The debate of healing vs boon aside, the rifle just seems borning! 

It's just copy and paste of press for boons, press again for heal. 

Other classes at least have skills affecting one another with their new weapons. 

Edited November 30, 2023 by Varis.5467

[Justine.6351]

Someone shot me a random portal while I was standing outside a tower and I took it. It changed my life, truly.