Rifleman Archive

Been thinking a bit about my character today, and since I seem to do a lot more pve then pvp as of late I've been thinking about perhaps not quite going for master riflemen, and putting the skill points into a bit ofCH along with my master ranger goal.

The plans goes something along the lines of letting pets (getting high enough in CHfor two out at once) draw the aggro, then using the Area attacks (high enough to get flushing or flurry 2) to hopefully take down the mobs before the pets fall down andI find a batch of very hostile things on my rear. Or using the bleedshots first till the mob aggros then letting the pets tank while i run back and finish it off with another headshot.

I guess the quesion to really ask is, how much am I missing out on not working up to Strafeshot2? Is it's damage a LOT more then the others? Or would I be better off just using one of the lower area attacks this way? Just keep in mind it's not really the master speed i'm interested in here so much as damage output.

Viable idea or would speedySS2's nullify the need for tank pets in the first place?

It depends a great deal on the mobs and how fast you can take them down. Due to the state of CH right now, however, pets probably wouldn't be able to tank any of the interesting mobs for very long (if they can, you can probably deal with them just fine on your own). It's not actually SS2 that makes master so powerful (although it doesn't hurt; SS2 has a 5x damage multiplier while the next most powerful AE, Flushing2, has a 4x damage multiplier) but the speed. The difference between a master rifleman and a rifleman with every box except master is a 3x DPS (assuming cap isn't hit before then).

As a note, as a master rifle/marksman, I don't have much trouble taking down groups of 10K HAM mobs, if they don't have ridiculous resists, using a 450 max damage laser. The process usually takes (much) less than 10 seconds. The biggest problem is making sure they're all in my AE, and if they're ranged, hoping they don't one-shot me in the few seconds they get to react. The other problem is that after taking out that group, I can't do much for a minute or two without using Muon Gold.