Guild Wars 2

I do believe a PvP/PvE skill separation of Brutal shot is needed. My suggestion for the PvP Brutal Shot: Exact same timing and damage as Aimed shot, but applies a 1 second Daze instead of Vulnerability.

In the PvE environment the 5% vulnerability is more useful than a Daze. This is because all of the many extra +5% damage received on each hit, adds up to a whole lot when you have a friendly group.

However

You don’t see the added benefit from +5% extra damage in a 5v5 scenario. If you use Brutal shot it actually lowers your dps output compared to just spamming autoattack, because of the 1 second cast time. (Brutal shot cast time is 50% of a Killshot!)

This is the most important part:

In the PvP environment a Daze would allow the Warrior to interrupt a heal at range, which is desperately needed to down a “bunker” build, at the same time not forcing a ranged class into melee situation for the interrupt.

As it stands now, if a rifle warrior attempting to take a point utilizing his ranged advantage, is forced into a melee situation to interrupt an opponent’s heal, which is the warriors only real chance of winning because he cannot out damage a bunker at range. Consider that the interrupt (Rifle Butt) is also the only defensive ability on the weapon set. God help you if you miss, get blocked, invulnerability, interrupted, etc.

Fun Suggestions: As another option, how about replace the Brutal Shot with:

“Second Magazine/Reload” (15 second cooldown) Take all Rifle abilities off cooldown.(except itself)

Add a knockback or knockdown to Killshot. <- This seems very reasonable and would fore go the whole PvE/PvP split.

The rifle only seems sub par due to the high effectiveness of other warrior weapons.
Compared to our Warrior Longbow or engineer rifle, it is actually very good.

I’ve seen glass canon build warriors that focus using signet of fury to instantly fill their adrenaline and do Killshot>>Volley>>Killshot for great burst damage. This tactic does very well in WvW and PvE(in places where 100 blades is hard to use).
I’ve been told that it also works in sPvP, but when I tried it for a couple of hours in tPvP with some guildies, I did not get the damage out of it I had seen others achieve and kept switching to my axes so I could actually get kills…

Still the Rifle Butt skill with the 20% cooldown is the shortest cooldown CC skill in the game, as a package rifle is very strong.

I agree that Brutal shot is pretty useless, but getting it replaced with something stronger will probably lead to rifle being nerfed farther down the road.

Heh, I wonder what an American Civil War army of Rifle/GS warriors would be like in WvW.

Calling targets and syncing up killshots to guarantee kills (if they hit), if they get close part of the group switches to GS and the rest fall back.

Kazin.2073:

I don’t get it. Rifle 1 with a bleed spec is the highest single target ranged dps in the game. Whats the problem?

With my build and gear I do 3.4k damage per shot. (Direct damage and bleed damage included)

Not in dungeon boss fights, you don’t. Not while you have a thief and necro in a group with you :P
If the 25 stack bleed cap gets removed I might switch back to my condition build, otherwise I’m happy with my 8-11k volleys, 9-12k killshots and 1.2k direct dmg basic attack.

Talking PvE here… not getting those numbers in sPvP ofc.

Chi Malady.2015:

You need to have more than one source of damage. Volley isn’t strong enough to carry all the damage (4-5k on non-glass cannons with a balanced build of your own). Auto hits for about 300-400 damage per hit, and brutal shot for about 1k. These are very low numbers, and the rifle doesn’t have much utility outside of damage. 5 stacks of vulnerability is decent, but not game-changing (I’d much prefer an interrupt). The best ability by far on the rifle is aimed shot with leg specialist. It’s great for slowing fleeing targets.

You can hit a bit harder with glass cannon, but the warrior doesn’t have any escapes so glass cannon builds aren’t an option in tPvP.

There is a reason why no top teams run rifle warrior in tPvP. It simply doesn’t have enough utility to compensate for its lack of damage.

Not sure about escapes. Warriors have the capacity to have enough endurance for a crucial dodge (cheers to trait Strength-15 and Signet of Stamina, but few builds use signets so this one’s up for debate), has a lot of condition removals and stun breakers, and (in theory) would compensate for the lack of health by being mobile at most times. The concern now remains if it would be worth the trade to be a glass cannon (is the added damage effective enough to compensate for the loss of effective HP?).

The way it appeared to me is that Rifle playstyle never meant for you to have that much utility in exchange for a (believed) higher damage output on a single target. Now if we’re gonna give the rifle what you asked, something else has to go as compensation.

And I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I don’t want that to happen.

Zwets.3785:

The rifle only seems sub par due to the high effectiveness of other warrior weapons.

By other, you mean GS and axe, as all the other warrior weapons stink.

Compared to our Warrior Longbow or engineer rifle, it is actually very good.

I’ve seen glass canon build warriors that focus using signet of fury to instantly fill their adrenaline and do Killshot>>Volley>>Killshot for great burst damage. This tactic does very well in WvW and PvE(in places where 100 blades is hard to use).
I’ve been told that it also works in sPvP, but when I tried it for a couple of hours in tPvP with some guildies, I did not get the damage out of it I had seen others achieve and kept switching to my axes so I could actually get kills…

Still the Rifle Butt skill with the 20% cooldown is the shortest cooldown CC skill in the game, as a package rifle is very strong.

I agree that Brutal shot is pretty useless, but getting it replaced with something stronger will probably lead to rifle being nerfed farther down the road.

Those ridiculous numbers you see in videos are only possible in hotjoin PvP against glass cannons (you have to be using a glass cannon build yourself as well).

The reason why you didn’t hit as hard when you tried it is because you didn’t land a critical hit. A killshot that doesn’t crit, only hits for about 3-4k. Killshot is simply not very good in sPvP. I can see it being effective in the zerg that is WvW (because you won’t be noticed as you cast), but it doesn’t have much use in sPvP.