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Rifle Hip Shot: The mid-ranged gun with a long-ranged 1.


Quench.7091

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Engineer toolkits provide a great way to swap between melee and ranged combat, as well as support and CC roles. Weapon choices among elite specializations and condition builds are rather coherent. Pistols do condition damage, as well as provide a means of escape in the offhand. Hammer and sword do a great job at melee ranged combat, with hammer also carrying a lot of self-defense. Shields provide CC and defensive benefits. These weapons suit one or two roles that synergize really well.

Then there's the rifle. A mid-ranged weapon on the engineer with an attack balanced around being long-ranged. It's rare to see any guides that recommend using Hip Shot. I've seen more guides that recommend using Tranquilizer Dart, a mid-ranged attack on a support tool. There are more guides that recommend leaping to a person and slamming them with the Tool Kit wrench. I don't know what they should do with this ability, if anything at all, but shouldn't it be somewhat worthy of being mentioned?

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The almost ancient hint for using a rifle is 2-5-3(-4) and then use anything else. ^^1200 auto-1 is actually already long-range and sometimes even takes corners to hit enemies for some reason.With auto-1 and 3 I use it to tag quickly with some mobility of 5.So, for tagging it's even a long-range weapon. ^^

In a duel, 2 at long-range is easy to evade while 4 should be avoided unless you have stability or can kick enemies of cliffs... perhaps preventing rezz, but even then it's bad.Still, 5 can hit pretty hard, so rifle still see its uses at meme-builds (like pbm holo or snkea-grenade-scrapper), where high bursts are needed. And there 3 adds another quick burst after 5.It's mostly used as a meelee-weapon there, though.

Tranq-Dart is in two situations preferable to weapon-auto. It has higher condi-dmg-output than pistol on condi-builds and it applies perma-weakness while hitting. The latter is good for fighting other burst-heavy classes, like warriors.

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@Dediggefedde.4961 said:The almost ancient hint for using a rifle is 2-5-3(-4) and then use anything else. ^^1200 auto-1 is actually already long-range and sometimes even takes corners to hit enemies for some reason.With auto-1 and 3 I use it to tag quickly with some mobility of 5.So, for tagging it's even a long-range weapon. ^^

In a duel, 2 at long-range is easy to evade while 4 should be avoided unless you have stability or can kick enemies of cliffs... perhaps preventing rezz, but even then it's bad.Still, 5 can hit pretty hard, so rifle still see its uses at meme-builds (like pbm holo or snkea-grenade-scrapper), where high bursts are needed. And there 3 adds another quick burst after 5.It's mostly used as a meelee-weapon there, though.

Tranq-Dart is in two situations preferable to weapon-auto. It has higher condi-dmg-output than pistol on condi-builds and it applies perma-weakness while hitting. The latter is good for fighting other burst-heavy classes, like warriors.

I guess there's some open world usage out of Hip Shot's range. However, I take the range as a negative in other game modes. They take that into account while they balance it with other skills, as they should.

Hip Shot used to be 1000 range and it had the perfect excuse to be that way, because it's a person firing from the hip. It would've also have made sense to make it fire a little faster with the lack of aiming, which would've increased the damage output in a thematic way. Just feels like they could've stuck with the mid-ranged theme to make it fit together well.

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Half the issue is that the rifle is one of the only weapons in the game that has no trait devoted to boosting it... they literally removed it's attack speed buff trait from the game... and this was not made baseline and im pretty sure its damage was not buffed accordingly.

But maybe they need to give hip shot a damage boost the closer you get to your target or cone damage or something, like 4 small shrapnel hits so it would work well with the firearm bleed trait.

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@Stalima.5490 said:Half the issue is that the rifle is one of the only weapons in the game that has no trait devoted to boosting it... they literally removed it's attack speed buff trait from the game... and this was not made baseline and im pretty sure its damage was not buffed accordingly.

Reinstalling a new trait to improve rifle would be great.Also I would like Blunderbuss to get the explosion treatment that Electro-Whirl got.

Enabling rifle to trigger explosives traits on it's own without having to rely on explosive kits would be great. In general, I think that every power weapon on the engineer should have access to at least 1 explosion in the kit for synergy with our power trait line (sword is an exception, it doesn't need an explosion because holosmith gives you access to Corona Burst, which is an explosion already).

If other classes can have returning features in their weapons (all Guardian weapons having a symbol, for example), then why not engineer?

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