Guild Wars 2

Some ideas to make rifle unique and competitive.

STEADY AIM:

Steady aim is a new mechanic that is specific to the warrior rifle. While standing still, the rifle self stacks a buff called steady aim. Steady aim stacks to 3 levels, gaining 1 stack per .5 seconds the warrior is stationary.

Level 1: Rifle bullets travel 50% faster
Level 2: Rifle bullets reach 1500 range
Level 3: Rifle attacks damage increased by 7%

Steady aim is lost if the warrior moves, giving the rifle the “sniper rifle” feel.

Crackshot now decreases the time between steady aim stacks by 50%, making it take only .25 seconds per stack. This is in addition to its effect of already adding pierce and quickened CDs to rifle skills.

To support the Steady Aim changes, some rifle skills are slightly modified:

1.) Fierce Shot has a new functionality. When the warrior is moving, instead of a single shot it fires a 3 round burst that deals less damage but stacks vulnerability on the third hit and grants more adrenaline than the single shot. When Steady Aim is active, the rifle automatically switches to single fire mode.

2.) When under steady aim Volley now grants might for each attack that hits.

3.) Brutal shot gives fury while under the effects of steady aim.

4.) Killshot is unchanged but automatically stacks steady aim during its channel, causing the bullet to fly faster. Damage is tweaked to work with Steady Aim.

TD:LR

-Rifle is more effective when standing still to stack steady aim and take shots.
-When moving, rifle 1 deals less damage but deals vulnerability and grants adrenaline more quickly to prep for killshots and higher damaging attacks when the warrior is able to reposition and take shots with steady aim.

Your Steady Aim concept sounds like a pretty cool mechanic – Thieves will probably get something like it as their specialty, lol!

but I find when equipping a rifle (on War or Engi) that I need to remain quite mobile. I guess that’s the whole point of Steady Aim, the risk/payoff.

If piercing was made baseline I will probably still use rifle after Tuesday – that way I wouldn’t bother with CrackShot (which would then only have the -20% CD, and maybe a 10% ias like Lead the Wind).

SpookyPoo.8135:

Your Steady Aim concept sounds like a pretty cool mechanic – Thieves will probably get something like it as their specialty, lol!

but I find when equipping a rifle (on War or Engi) that I need to remain quite mobile. I guess that’s the whole point of Steady Aim, the risk/payoff.

If piercing was made baseline I will probably still use rifle after Tuesday – that way I wouldn’t bother with CrackShot (which would then only have the -20% CD, and maybe a 10% ias like Lead the Wind).

Yeah the concept was to make the rifle a powerful sniper weapon but only when setup right. It’s balanced out by having alot of its power locked out when the warrior is forced to move or kite out of position due to pressure.

This should be the kind of weapon that if you allow someone on the fringe to take free reign with this thing, it should do alot of damage to your team.

Also this helps setup warriors combo with teammates. Warriors can capitalize on taking down enemies subdued by allies if they can build steady shot and blast someone that is panic striked by a thief or caught in ranger entangle.

The ranger longbow is different as in it allows the ranger to skirmish with it. The warrior rifle should be stronger when standing still, but weaker when forced to move.

The ranger longbow is all about movement and repositioning, the rifle on war becomes unique by doing the opposite. Warriors are instead rewarded by holding their ground or staying on good position where they can stack steady aim for shots.

This also makes the rifle a really good weapon for finishing off runners by making steady shot rifle deadly when the enemy turns their back and tries to exit the fight.

While I like it for a lot of reasons, the thought of adding another option for people who want to stand on walls, rooftops, or otherwise out of combat to shoot from safety makes me cringe.

I was in ebg yesterday and a pew pew ranger was on the top of a very high cliff just spamming his skills into a big melee from relative safety. Builds like that make me wish magnet, scorpion wire, and mesmer focus 4 had a range of 1500 feet… against those builds only. >(

Love the concept and wouldn’t mind seeing the devs draw some inspiration from it.

My warriors might even start using rifles for something more than avoiding PBAOE spam if they did something like this.

beautiful idea, love it!

Solid idea.

I would probably prefer to see something more “creative” than simple +% numbers to projectile velocity, range, and damage … but those are also quite simple for ArenaNet to tweak to achieve a good balance.