Post mirrored on the forums: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/175144-rifle-deadeye-targeting-change-completely-missed-the-mark/
July 14
Death's Judgment: This skill now deals full damage to the foe targeted by this attack instead of to the marked foe. Malice is not consumed and bonus damage is not dealt if the targeted foe is not marked.
https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/174766-game-update-notes-july-14-2026/
July 20
Malicious Death's Judgment: Fixed an issue where malice would not be consumed and bonus damage was not dealt when this skill targeted and struck a marked enemy.
https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/174766-game-update-notes-july-14-2026/#findComment-2495329
Existing use case for Rifle Piercing: the bulk of damage actually comes from Three Round burst:
https://youtu.be/GIJWvPKWDdI
tl;dr
DISRUPTS YOUR FLOW - Using the new behavior (targeting an enemy that is not your Marked Enemy) is incredibly disruptive to gameplay and needlessly punishing, as it BLOCKS consuming Malice even if you strike your Marked Enemy while not targeting them (this is the explicit intended behavior, NOT a bug!).
PIERCING ISN'T ALLOWED TO PIERCE? - The mechanic does not make sense thematically or mathematically, and it arbitrarily tramples on the piercing bullets given to Rifle's Stealth Attack in November 2022. Most of Rifle Deadeye's piercing damage ACTUALLY comes from Three Round Burst which was only begrudgingly provided to the specialization in March of 2024.
THE PENALTIES ARE MATHEMATICALLY UNNECESSARY - The current INTENDED functionality is needlessly terrified of Deadeye applying a MINORITY of its Rifle Damage to an Unmarked Enemy (a 2.67 coefficient vs a total 7.75 coefficient when repeating Three Round Burst three times with Maleficent Seven, i.e. around 25% of piercing damage comes from Deaths' Judgment even if it wasn't penalized with losing half its coefficient when striking an "unintended" target).
BAD PREMISE LEADS TO BAD IMPLEMENTATION - To control that genuine phobia of Deadeye dealing damage, the game now breaks Deadeye functionality when trying to pierce bullets through your Marked Enemy to get some bonus collateral damage: (1) Malice will not be consumed so Deadeye cannot deal good Stealth Attack damage to its Marked Target, (2) it will be stuck Revealed and unable to use most of its Stealth Sources to try to course correct and consume Malice, and (3) it will be unable to take advantage of Maleficent Seven as we can't reach 7 Malice again with another loop of spending Initiative.
BONUS: AXE NEEDS TUNING
While we're at it I'm adding a note for the skill balance team about Thief Axe. Skip this if you just care about Rifle Deadeye:
The projectile velocity of axe skills is too low. Most importantly, Axe 2's velocity is slow enough that queueing together Axe 2 and Axe 3 will FAIL to recall the Spinning Axes Axe 2 should generate. If Axe 2 projectiles were even SLIGHTLY faster, then the player could, as they should expect, be able to input 2 2 3 with the game's comfortable input queue and successfully throw 6 axes then recall 6 axes,
To keep rotation flexibility in tact for PVE, it would be ideal if players could store up to 9 Spinning Axes while still only recalling up to 6. The main reason we want this is because Thief has still not been given "Revealed protection" that lets us consistently use Stealth Attacks when self-Revealing with pulsing damage skills or in-flight projectiles (the latter is Axe's entire gimmick...) despite this mechanic being immediately granted to Ranger for its Spear in Janthir Wilds.
There's a host of other lingering issues with Thief but Deadeye is suffering from lack of attention (and poorly thought out implementation), and Axe is a badly implemented weapon, so I'm focusing on those two here. To wit, you can watch this video which highlights how dysfunctional the projectile behavior of Thief Axe is especially in Open World, the majority game mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5LSYv_hX4A
DEFINITIONS
Definitions for using Rifle's Stealth Attack, to make reading a bit tidier :
- MDJ : Malicious Death's Judgment, Deadeye's Rifle Stealth Attack
- uME : UNTARGETED Marked Enemy, does not have Deadeye's Mark
- tME. : TARGETED Marked Enemy, has Deadeye's Mark
- uOE : UNTARGETED Other Enemy, any enemy that is not Marked standing in between you and your targeted enemy.
- tOE : TARGETED Other Enemy, any enemy that is not Marked which you target.
Note that MDJ stops piercing once you hit your Targeted Enemy (whether or not they are your Marked Enemy), so you won't hit your MT or any uOE unless they are in between you and your Targeted Enemy—you won't hit something BEYOND your TARGETED enemy.
DAMAGE FORMULA
- Weapon Strike coefficients work by multiplying with your Power to determine the damage of your attack. A skill with a Coefficient of 2.0 will deal twice as much damage as one with 1.0, all else being equal.
- Rifle Stealth Attack has two coefficients, arbitrarily picked to cut Rifle Thief's cleave in half when using the Stealth Attack. The skill uses a 1.32 coefficient for any untargeted enemy struck by the skill and 2.67 for the actual target. Previously this coefficient split behaved different for Deadeye and the rest of Thief:
- Deadeye would always apply 2.67 to its ME and 1.32 to any enemy pierced on the way to the ME, where the bullet would stop. Due to the way bullet trajectory works, you generally needed to actually target your ME to make sure the bullet would reach it as targeting an enemy in between you and your Marked Target wouldn't guarantee the bullet would actually reach the ME if they were far enough away. You could however target an enemy BEYOND your Marked Enemy to align the bullet, but the MDJ bullet would stop at your Marked Enemy. The reason you'd do this is to use Three Round Burst to cleave the distant enemy, NOT because we cared about MDJ cleave.
- The rest of Thief would apply 2.67 to its TARGETED enemy and 1.32 coefficient to any other enemy on the way there. The bullet would stop at your TARGETED enemy. The game now uses this behavior for Deadeye, but it makes it arbitrarily VERY disruptive, as I'll explain further down.
- Any OE struck by Deadeye will not be affected by the Iron Sight trait, a 10% damage modifier. This is regardless of Targeting and it's not a problem.
- Rifle Stealth Attack receives up to 70% bonus damage EXCLUSIVELY APPLIED to your ME, 10% per Malice. This is a GIANT modifier (it's close to doubling the damage of the skill when combined with Iron Sight). Previously this modifier would always apply exclusively to your ME so long as you actually struck them, whether or not you pierced any OE on the way or were targeting a distant enemy that MDJ would not reach anyway.
In total then, on previous patch, any OE struck by Death's Judgment in between you and your ME would not be affected by (1) a 10% damage modifier (2) nor up to a 70% modifier, and (3) the calculation would use a 1.32 coefficient instead of 2.67.
TARGETING BEHAVIOR
On previous patch:
- You could target an enemy beyond your Marked Enemy, and the bullet would stop traveling as soon as it hit your Marked Enemy. Therefore, you could not pierce through your ME to hit any OE, but you could pierce through an OE to reach your ME.
On current patch:
- You can still target your ME and pierce through an OE to reach your ME. If you are targeting your ME, then everything works out fine: you will deal full damage to your ME, and any OE you pierce through will only take ~26% of the damage that the ME takes.
- If targeting an OE with your ME beyond them, you will NOT strike your ME, even if you use Action Cam to make sure the MDJ bullet trajectory is dead on. The bullet now stops at your Targeted Enemy, NOT your Mark (they can coincide, of course), which is the behavior of normal Death's Judgment. This is already an extreme negative for Deadeye, but it's largely not a big problem because you could simply target your ME in the distance to get the bullet piercing through the OE in front of you on its way to your ME. Due to the way bullet projectiles work, there's not really a way to cleanly adjust this behavior so that the bullet would continue past your Targeted Enemy to reach your uME even if they were in a straight line, so I'm mostly going to call this user error in some cases (this behavior also occurred on previous patch) and frustrating design in a specific case:
- If you are fighting in a tightly-packed brawl and targeting your ME is difficult, it will feel very punishing for your bullet to stop short at your targeted OE when just a little bit of straight-trajectory pierce could have hit your ME.
- If targeting an OE that is beyond your ME, things go VERY badly. This is the bulk of the discussion in this thread.
- Your Marked Target will receive the 1.32 coefficient and the tOE will get the 2.67 coefficient. This is frustrating, needlessly punitive design due to how much of MDJ's damage is ALREADY tied into a colossal Malice damage modifier, but we'll put that aside for now.
- You will NOT consume Malice to apply Malice damage to ANY enemy struck with the bullet, even if one of those targets is your Marked Enemy. I know that sounds insane after all the explanation so far, but for some reason this is now how the game is now INTENDED TO WORK.
This is EXTREMELY disruptive for Rifle Deadeye to the point that targeting ANYTHING but your Marked Enemy for MDJ in PVE is simply not worth doing.
Currently this behavior is bugged IN THE PLAYER'S FAVOR so that a tOE will take damage as if you had consumed Malice (i.e. the tOE can receive up to a 70% damage modifier). Your uME will not take this damage, and you will not consume Malice.
The intended behavior (DON'T consume Malice, simply apply a 2.67 coeff to the targeted enemy) has ONE upside: you can adaptively apply a 2.67 ranged coefficient to your tOE.
SINGLE TARGET DAMAGE COMPARISON: STEALTH ATTACK VS THREE ROUND BURST
Theoretically if you can repeatedly enter Stealth in a short period of time (there are two limited ways to do this: Silent Scope dodge which ignores Revealed and Shadow Meld in PVE which cleanses Revealed) you could apply that 2.67 ceofficient again, but...
Let's compare the damage of the 2.67 coefficient Stealth Attack against Three Round Burst (Rifle skill 3) to see if this actually matters.
Let's take the Shadow Meld case: a 0.44 second cast time for Stealth then a 0.68 cast time for the Stealth Attack itself. If we divide the coefficient by the time spent attacking, we'll normalize to 2.30 coefficient per second spent attacking.
Three Round Burst has a 2.25 coefficient and a 0.84 second cast time. With the same calculation, we get 2.68 coefficient per second spent attacking.
So the Rifle Stealth Attack cleaving to a distant enemy is worse DPS than just repeating Three Round Burst, something Deadeye is very good at doing.
In fact, the majority of the cleave Rifle Deadeye applies will always be via Three Round burst with the current model because best case scenario, even if the targeted/untargeted Coefficient split is removed from the game, an ME will take ~80% more damage than an Unmarked Enemy due to the Malice mechanic.
Let's now recall that if you do NOT target a distant enemy, your bullet projectiles won't path cleanly to a distant enemy despite having a straight line to them. You MUST target the distant enemy if you want to hit them with Three Round Burst. On current patch, however, you must now swap target back to your ME for your Stealth Attack due to the following crippling design decision:
GAMEPLAY DISRUPTION
What's further damning about this change is that the game VERY arbitrarily will NOT consume Malice in the above scenario (hitting your Marked Enemy while targeting another enemy).
If you can't consume Malice, you don't have another opportunity to trigger Maleficent Seven for an Initiative refill.
Without an Initiative refill, you can't repeat Three Round Burst.
Without Three Round Burst, you resort to auto-attacks which are 30% weaker than TRB with NO piercing projectile (arbitrarily, because Rifle Thief isn't allowed to pierce and it also isn't allowed to have top damage).
Even without Maleficent Seven, Rifle Deadeye does not want to sit at maxed Malice without spending the Malice on your Marked Enemy, as this huge damage modifier is the only thing that lets Deadeye try to keep up with the power level of Daredevil and Antiquary. The other elements of Deadeye's kit are NOT enough.
With Maleficent Seven, Rifle Deadeye completely falls apart because we can't use the trait if we don't reset our Malice.
I must emphasize that BEFORE this patch, you actually pierce a distant tOE with MDJ if your Marked Target was in the way, but you were not PENALIZED doing so. Targeting that distant enemy was good because it allowed Three Round Burst to reach them and, as I have explained, Three Round Burst will ALWAYS be the bulk of cleave DPS due to the Malice mechanic.
NOW Deadeye is directly punished by attempting to cleave to a distant enemy (the thing you'd reasonably try to do with a long range gun?). Your rotation will collapse if you don't swap your target back to your Marked Enemy, and you won't even deal strong damage to the Other Enemy if you decide to sacrifice your rotation and resort to autoattacking.
If you want the old behavior shown in the video at the top of this thread, you need to be an even better player than the best Rifle Deadeye players currently in the game. I do not want that kind of stupid gatekeeping in the game, and that's exactly what this change did.
MULTI TARGET DAMAGE BREAKDOWN
Let's look at the damage calculation on the old and new patches in detail:
- OLD: uOE took 1.32 coefficient, tME took 2.67 coefficient with +10% and +70% damage modifier.
- Piercing one enemy in between you and your Mark: 1.32 + (2.67 x 1.1 x 1.7) = 6.31
- Piercing 4 enemies: (4 x 1.32) + (2.67 x 1.1 x 1.7) = 10.27
- NEW: uME and uOE take 1.32 coefficient (ME has a +10% damage modifier), tOE takes 2.67 coeffieicent
- Piercing through Mark to reach one enemy: (1.32 x 1.1) + 2.67 = 4.122
- Piercing through Mark and 3 other enemies to reach your Target: (1.32 x 1.1) + (1.32 x 3) + 2.67 = 8.082
- Both patches:
- Pierce 4 enemies with Three Round Burst: 9
- Pierce 4 enemies with Three Round Burst three times, via Maleficent Seven: 27
As a refresher, the numbers here represent Strike coefficients, so a 6.31 coefficient is ~ 50% more damage than a 4.122 coefficient and a 10.27 coefficient is ~25% more damage than a 8.082 coefficient, and a 27 coefficient is more than three times stronger than an 8.0 coefficient.
This is simply NOT mathematically sound. The ONLY upside here is that an unmarked enemy can now take a 2.67 coefficient on demand instead of a 1.32 coefficient, but you sacrifice SO MUCH to get that.
SUGGESTED CHANGES
Just delete the 1.32 coefficient. The Malice damage modifier and Iron Sight already HEAVILY penalized the damage against that Unmarked Target. If the bullet would deal 40,000 damage to your Marked Enemy, it will ONLY deal ~20,000 damage to any un-Marked Enemy you target. The skill does NOT need to be penalized for the same scenario (hitting an unmarked target) THREE TIMES until the skill is squashed to ~26% of the damage it deals to the ME.
If the 1.32 coefficient truly MUST exist for competitive modes (which is a different discussion entirely!) then just make Thief Rifle in PvE deal 2.67 coefficient to your target and 2.67 coefficient to other enemies struck. Yes, just make it a redundant skill fact, so that it can be tweaked in the game mode where it's relevant. That is fine.
MDJ ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT fail to consume Malice and apply the damage modifier to your Marked Target in scenarios where you DO strike your Marked Target.
And yet that is, somehow, exactly what is intended?
Malicious Death's Judgment: Fixed an issue where malice would not be consumed and bonus damage was not dealt when this skill targeted and struck a marked enemy.
Note here that this "issue" was when TARGETING a marked enemy. The intended behavior is below:
Death's Judgment: This skill now deals full damage to the foe targeted by this attack instead of to the marked foe. Malice is not consumed and bonus damage is not dealt if the targeted foe is not marked.
You CANNOT have Malice unless you Marked an enemy. If you Mark an enemy and strike them with MDJ while targeting another enemy, the game behaves almost as if you don't have a Marked enemy at all! All you get is a 10% damage modifier for incidentally striking your Marked Target and benefiting from Iron Sight while targeting another enemy.
Change this. This behavior makes NO sense, thematically or mathematically. There should NEVER be a carve out blocking Deadeye from applying its mechanic when striking the intended target of the mechanic.
Malice does not CARE if you target an enemy! You can generate Malice if you target a different enemy, you can generate Malice if you target NO ONE. This change is simply bad design.
At the very least, Malice should ALWAYS be consumed and the Malice damage modifier should ALWAYS be spent if you strike your Marked target REGARDLESS of what you are targeting.
The 1.32 vs 2.67 coefficient split is NEEDLESSLY punishing and COMPLETELY arbitrary. Stop treating Deadeye differently from the rest of the game.
The behavior Deadeye deserves:
- (Malicious) Death's Judgment can pierce. It deals 2.67 coefficient to enemies struck with the bullet. The 1.32 coefficient is removed from the game.
- If the bullet needs to stop at your targeted enemy for roleplay reasons, then so be it. This is an unnecessary design choice, but it's not a deal breaker so I won't really litigate it.
- Malicious Death's Judgment will always deal 10% bonus damage against your Marked Target due to the Iron Sight trait. This is how things work before and on this current patch, so we're good here.
- Malice will ALWAYS be consumed if you strike your Marked Enemy, regardless of targeting. In being consumed, Malice will ALWAYS apply its bonus damage to your Marked Enemy. This is, by the way, how Spear Stealth Attack works underwater: any unmarked enemy struck by the attack will NOT suffer the increased damage tied to Malice.
I am not asking for Deadeye to have the highest DPS in game because of the occasionally insane single-target restrictions placed on it (e.g. Iron Sight's 10% damage modifier is not insane, and the giant Malice damage modifier on Death's Judgment feels cool and ultimately it's less than half the DPS dealt since so much comes from the workhorse of Three Round Burst and the hefty base coefficient of MDJ. In the past this was less true as MDJ had 25% bonus damage per point of Malice, but a good patch narrowed this range—it does not need to go away completely).
I am asking for the single-target restrictions to stop being insane. Some amount of roleplay in a roleplaying game is fine, but this Rifle cleaving change was very poorly thought out, if it was even thought out. We certainly didn't see it in the patch preview, so this is one change that should have stayed off the life server.
