Guild Wars 2

Not sure I understand the condi sniping part. I mean, there’s some burn on gunflame, but that’s about it for the rifle. Then you have lb 5 with a lot of condi but on a 25 cd and it doesn’t pierce, and the burn fields. Lb 2 is more of an up close skill.

So wouldn’t it be better to either focus on direct damage and spam the hell out of gunflame (which most people do), or run a melee set that works hybrid (sword, (primal) mace), etc) and just spam your burn field whenever the opportunity allows for it?

Hello,

Choppy.4183:

Not sure I understand the condi sniping part. I mean, there’s some burn on gunflame, but that’s about it for the rifle.

He’s running a mix a Viper / Sinister, so it’s more of hybrid damage. As for the rifle, all skills but #5 come as projectile finishers, so would inflict burn when shot over a fire field. That’s one reason for taking the Longbow, I guess: aside from the desired ranged gameplay, it offers bizarre yet working synergies and weapon rotations.

I find the idea of using the rifle as an hybrid weapon quite attractive, actually. About a month ago, there was another hybrid rifle build posted on the forum, which IMHO looked promising. I sometimes regret ANet removing the bleed on the rifle AA (I used to run the rifle as a condition weapon before).

I’ve never tried or theorycrafted Rifle/Longbow, so cannot really comment on the posted build (I think I’d consider Arms rather than Strength though). I’ve seen it played however, and it did look fun, as Tesla has pointed out. I believe Obindo has some footage of it, in some of his PvP 1v1 videos.

I know, but what I’m saying is the rifle doesn’t really utilize the investment in condi damage/duration very well.

So shifting toward the more traditional power/ferocity would yield far better results when on that weapon set. Moreover, since we’re talking about spamming in primal state anyway, the quick burst recharge and adren building makes weapon swapping somewhat unnecessary.

In terms of projectile finishers, the bow auto is actually better for this because it has two projectiles per attack with no loss of direct damage. So camping the longbow, spamming and blasting the fields, and then shooting two arrows through it every attack would yield far better results with Viper gear than swapping over to rifle after an lb burst. And lb 3 is a high damage aoe blast that would take advantage of the power side of viper too, so it wouldn’t be wasted by not swapping to rifle either.

Since this is for wvw, consider what swapping the rifle out for sw+x would give you (and going with Arms over Strength). You’d get mobility, fire shield, an auto that works with hybrid by stacking an additional condition, hard hit in Final Thrust, and a whole lot more burning via Flaming Flurry (so you’d have no dead weapon). With your offhand, you could take more condi and a block (sword), defense and a stun (shield), another blast finisher with aoe buffs/debuff (warhorn), or more burns and bleeds (torch).

It just seems better to me in every way, and in no way compromises the backline ranged attack style the OP is going for. In fact, I think it enhances it because camping bow seems better to me with these stats than trying to work riffle into the rotation during berserker mode, while giving you additional utility for when a ranged set just won’t do.

The other approach I was referring to would keep the Strength line, likely trait Distracting Strikes, and use the Mace offhand. You lose the mobility of sword, but you gain a block, you gain a pretty good condi bomb if you use Skull Grinder, gain additional opportunities to stack in confusion, and the mace hits harder than most people realize, so the power side of the viper gear would still work well with it outside of berserk mode.

The reason I’d go with sword though is because of where he’s want to use it. The mobility is more important than a single block, the fire shield is excellent up close, the condi from the auto and Flaming Flurry cleaves/pierces, and Final Thrust cleaves too. Sadly, the mace is all single target, so the sword would be better in a group fight in every way, should the battle shift to where sticking with a ranged weapon isn’t the way to go.

Again, I just see this approach as superior to achieving what I think the OP is going for, and then opening up additional avenues beyond that. But I also think standard gunflame would be more effective in large wvw play, tbh. I’m all for experimentation and the OP playing whatever he finds most fun though.

not optimal so not to be recommended to anyone.

It’s a “Fun Build” as stated in the thread title, so it’s not about squeezing the optimum out of the standard 0815 meta builds, jeeze. He has fun with it, it seems to work for him in his prefered game mode, and thus he decided to share it (and is open to suggestions within his build structure). No rocket science.

I used it in WvW tonight. Optimal my kitten . I would recommend this to anyone going WvW. Spamming burn ticks at 6K and one shoting thieves and squishies with Gun Flame. I ended up specing Burst Precision in Arms.

Gun Flame alone was doing 8K-13K dmg and then burn on top of that. And with 1500 range and 3.5s CD, fun times were had.

OP… You do realize that your gear is the exact same as the PVE meta build for Gorseval and condi war right? How are you going to tell us what it does and doesn’t do when we all have the same gear as you already. At least I do and the rest of the warriors who have the gear to go condi in PVE.

The longbow on the build is great but the rifle on the build is bad. Did you know that the ongoing challenge/joke for all warriors is if you can beat somone 1v1 with Rifle/Longbow than they are total trash. Thats been around for a long time.

There is no way that rifle is optimal under vipers sinister in any streth and saying that well gun flame has additional buring so it works is a huge stretch.

I have played this build of your for hours and hours in PVE and I have tried running my PVE meta build in WvW as a YOLO thing. Its trash in pvp and wvw and rifle doesn’t work even half as good as zerker does.