Guild Wars 2

Phineas made this post in the mortar thread.

They adjusted baseline skill damage to coincide with the removal of Rifle Mod, just as they adjusted the baseline radius of bombs to coincide with the removal of Forceful Explosives. (It still says 180 but they are 240. Test it by using a mortar shell with 240 radius and drop a Fire Bomb or Smoke Bomb.)

Jump Shot is now considered an “explosion” as well, so if you’re going up the Explosives tree, Jump Shot deals 10% more damage than it did pre-patch. I was running a FOTM 40 earlier this week and combined crits for over 20K damage. This is on level 82 mobs. It wasn’t nerfed. It was buffed.

These things were stated as happening or might happen, and did not.
I felt a discussion on the state of rifle was needed, and should have its own thread.

Lets start off. Testing untraited rifle in silverwastes dummies. got a .65 coeff.
estimated armor 2137 on dummies.
36 shots in 30s. .833 s/a.
40 shots in 30s. .75 s/a with skilled marksman.

R3. 1.6 coeff tested, as expected. no change.

R5. leap up. .88 tested, .9 expected. small sample size variance. no change.
leap down. 1.79 tested, 1.8 expected. no change.
1.4s leap. with and without skilled marksman. (1.46smax range leap with and without.)

does not get 10% damage from explosions, nor applies sharpshooter or extra vul.

so yes. rifle mod is definitely not baseline now.

ran out of time atm. going for a run. will discuss rifle changes/nerfs more later.

Right off the bat, the 10% ias on rifle only effects r1. It doesnt seem to effect leaps cast time whatsever. didnt test overcharged, but I have to assume it does not either.
This is a terrible trait. R1 was not super high dps before. And its not a proc machine. the faster attack does not remotely make up for the 10% damage less. ESPECIALLY the 10% damage lost on blunderbuss and leap, the real core damage.

As an aside, the loss of power wrench in contention with static discharge also is a problem since SD builds made heavy use of throw wrench, and thus prybar.

engineer seems to have gotten nothing but nerfs all around

rifled barrels was supposed to be base on rifle and pistol yet rifle doesnt have 1200 range , as pointed out rifle mods went to hell, the 10% attack speed is negligible and as far as i know only works on auto attack .

Rezzet.3614:

engineer seems to have gotten nothing but nerfs all around

rifled barrels was supposed to be base on rifle and pistol yet rifle doesnt have 1200 range , as pointed out rifle mods went to hell, the 10% attack speed is negligible and as far as i know only works on auto attack .

I am not entirely certain that those nerfs were intentional. Seems like the devs realized making many of those things baseline was a bit too much and tried to course correct, but ran out of time.

Honestly, Engineers feel very incomplete post-patch.

yeah, i really do not understand the removal of riflemod.

the old traits had the problem with too many good rifle traits honestly. you couldnt take them all, and rifle suffered for it.
sitting duck, precise sights, rifle mod, rifled barrels, hair trigger, bunker down, mod ammo.

Even go for the eyes would have been nice.. if you didnt already have 7 traits for 3 slots in firearms.

so, in some ways clearly a number of them had to go. either merged, made baseline or just removed as not everyone was taking them.

Truthfully, I did not run rifled barrels. I ran rifle mod, hair trigger, and mod ammo in dungeons, swapping mod ammo for sitting duck in solo pve, and spvp.

I was expecting a nice buff to power and range…

I can understand rifle mod was boring. the may have wished a more interesting trait.
But 10%ias is near worthless. again, only effects the auto attack… rifle is not for procing things really. 10% ias is nothing. you are swaping to leap/blunderbuss constantly, prybar, gadgets. you should never really be using the aa much. its weaker dps then any kit.

Thanks for doing the math on this. Unfortunate that the Jump Shot doesn’t count as an explosion. Must either be bugged or was changed last minute.

Having seen the numbers, I do agree it appears as though the rifle is worse off post-patch.