Rifleman Archive

The more I use it, the more I can't help but feel disappointed. Even with a T21 rifle.

In PvE, rifles do far lower damage-per-second than pistols. From the stats I've seen, the best weapon in the game is actually the scout pistol, having medium damage and a suuuuper fast firing time when made by a master weaponsmith.

In PvP, this damage per second gap islethal. If you don't kill your target in one shot, they will hit you several times before you can fire again. I find that I usually die 1 on 1 unless I kill my target on the first shot.

The one thing the rifle has going for it is the incurable mind DOT. This is somewhat worthless 1 on 1, as your target can still incap and deathblow you before the DOT knocks him down, but it's very handy in group situations. You DOT someone with Mindshot2 and it's nearly guarenteed to incap him,whereas a hit point DOT would just make him retreat to heal. Throw in Sniper Shot for ranged deathblows and you have a handy support role.

But the rifle tree lacks knockdowns. Worse, it lacks defense vs knockdowns. Pistoleer, which already has the best damage-per-second, also has +30 vs knockdown, while carbine offers +15 and rifle offers +0. Pistoleer also offers it's own melee range knockdown attack, and pistols and carbines lead into the Bounty Hunter tree where you get a great mindshot for pistols and a great knockdown for carbines. Pistols and carbines don't suffer overly much from long range attacks.

So like I said, the mind DOT is the only thing the rifle has in it's favor.

I do hope we can get some concrete improvements to rifles, to make them more generally useful than just this one thing. While we get "Cover", our firing times are so slow as to make this useless in PvP, and frankly I've never noticed it helping my defense anyway. I'd like to see some snaring or "root" type effects, that can help pin a target down at range, or baring something like that, just increase our damage-per-second to compensate for the fact that we really don't offer as much as a pistoleer in terms of damage and usefulness.

I agree with everything you said. But, one thing you need to remember is a rifle AR rating of 2 or 3 versus a pistol's 0. Once people start wearing aromor on a regular basis, this will come into play much more than it does now.

What does that do, exactly?

Is that a chance of bypassing armor by 100%?

Or does a value of "1" mean you get 10% penetration on every shot, etc?

It means that for every point your weapon's AR is above your target's AR you do 25% additional damage. For every point your weapon's AR is below your target's AR your damge is cut by half.

So all pistols except one have AR0. So if you were armor, they will do 50% damage to you. Now if yu take a T21 rifle with AR3 and shoot at somoene wearing no armor, you will be doing 1x1.25x1.25x1.25=195% damage. I fyou shoot someone wearing AR1 armor, you will still be hitting for 156% damage.