[Guide] Aika Sniper Skill

The rifleman is a long ranged class in Aika that has one of the higher defense rating, and hp amounts. This lets you take more damage than average, and lets you get out of some sticky situations. It also has remarkable range which is useful since it gets you outside AOE range for bosses, and lets you attack from farther range in PvP. The damage is also very respectable in single target fights. Personally I have not lost a single one on one fight as long as I kept my head on straight. The one time I did lose I tried to be cute and let a warrior in to close while at half health. That said your only real enemies are warriors. Everything else is a free kill one on one. Just get the first attack in on a warrior and you will always win.

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Rifleman Guide 1 to 30

This is a basic guide on how I thought skills were for both PvE and PvP. Also, a little bit on how to be a decent Rifleman so you can rack up a few kills.

Countdown: absolutely useless, don’t’ even waste a point on it. The damage does not scale well, and you have to wait 3 seconds for the full effect after a 1 second cast time. Rating: useless

Rupture: mediocre skill. I’m sure it can have some use, but just doesn’t work out that well. It will increase your damage to a target by about 25%. It can have its uses, but the mana cost to damage and debuff is just not worth it. Avoid it unless you have some surefire way to be useful. For those thinking about pure PvE having to recast it every 6 seconds eats though your mana real fast. Rating: 2 stars.

Hollow Point: Best skill for the rifleman.max it and make it your primary skill In PvE and PvP this skill is awesome. Capable of laying down some massive damage, and a relatively short cast time with no animation lag makes this an absolutely amazing skill. The only con to it is it is slightly expensive in mana, but not that much. Rating 4 stars.

Leg Shot: Great skill, but can really eat up some mana. The damage is okay, but puts a wonderful 12 second debuff. For the mana cost I would have hoped that the skill would have scaled in damage better, and have more of a slow effect than it really does. However all skills can’t be amazing so whatever. For both PvE this skill is a great opener if you have the mana for it since it will often let you kill mobs, in combination with other skills, before they reach you. For PvP it lets you chase down your targets, or run away, while doing a noticeable amount of damage. Works well as a desperate bit of burst damage. Rating: 3 stars.

Hiding: Highly recommend getting at least level 1 of this skill. Needed for ambush which is your only stun, so you are pretty much locked into getting it. Has some major drawbacks though like massive slow unless you invest into it, and a huge cooldown. Rating: 2 stars.

Damage buff (forgot name): Must get. If you don’t get this you will not be able to put out enough damage for anything. Your kills will not happen, and you will not be able to do enough damage to help your party in PvE. Rating: must have no matter what.

Crimson bullet: Great skill in PvE, and mediocre in PvP. This will effectively double your dps, and if you’re in PvP will help keep our target’s health from jumping when they heal due to the half heal recovery effect. A 6 second cast makes this a time and mana hog though, so as useful as it is not the best skill in the arsenal though useful. Rating: 3 stars.

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Precision: increases chance to crit. Noble buff, but 1 minute buff for 2 min cooldown means its not that great. Also it will eat up much needed skill points which could be put other places. If you really want to crit people more just make some +3 crit gear. Rating: 2 stars.

Concentrate: Passive skill, awesome. Increases hit rate and reduces chance of interruption. Very handy if you go with the rifleman’s only real damage skill. It being passive means you don’t have to worry about it falling off for any reason. Rating: 4 stars.

Crit Power: Um, must get…the main damage skill relies on crits for it to really hurt, and guess where the crit damage increase comes from. Also all the wonderful things about passives apply here too. However, if you find some reason for not wanting higher damage, or need to scrounge up a spare point or two here is where to do it. Rating: 3 stars.

Devastation (aoe skill): Our only aoe skill, and okay damage at that. Has an added bonus of causing silence in an area, but requires you to select an area, has a long animation time, long cool down, and makes you lose your selected target. However it is a silence which can save you if you are about to get attacked by something (warrior stun, warlock, mage keeps healing), so it does have its uses. Rating: 3 stars.

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Ambush: A near requirement, because this is a stun and stuns are godly. The long cooldown due to hiding makes it a pain to use, but with this you can easily take down everything but the most hardened target in the 5 second stun with a proper build. Rating: 3 stars.

My recommended skills:
Avoid countdown and rupture at all costs. These skills do not scale well, and eat up mana for no real effect.
Must haves are hollow point, concentrate, and level 1 hiding. Max out Hollow point. This skill is the staple of your damage in anything you do. Get your damage buff maxed too since this is something you need to be able to solo, kill, and party well. Concentrate is a must since it increases hit rate, and every missed hit is lost damage. Not to mention it reduces interruption which is great for hollow point. At least 1 point in hiding. Without this skill you are a sitting duck. This lets you get past guards to raid, escape ganks and getting mobbed.
Optional skills are crimson bullet, devastation, precision, and ambush. Ambush because it requires having hiding, and no matter how good the skill is only being able to use it once every two minutes is not fun at all. Precision could be good when combined with hollow point, but it is a skill point hog, so if you really want it get it, but be prepared to make sacrifices to get it to a good level. Crimson bullet has some serious uses, but to keep its damage at a constant rate you need to keep this skill maxed. It is possible to have it at level 1 for the debuff, but then you are losing out on a lot of potential DPS. It’s either completely invest in here, or don’t and have some free skill points to upgrade hiding or some other skill you like (precision).
Recommended skill is crit power. Increasing crit damage is nice, and it being passive is also cool. However you could survive without it, but 15% or so increase to crits does really add up. Keep in mind double is a crit too (perfect crit). Leg shot is very handy in anything you do. Slowing something down prevents damage from reaching you, and especially with the long range that makes the rifleman deadly. Making something take twice to three times longer to reach you gives you much more time to dish the hurt out, and lets you keep the option to run away open. Did I mention it does a fair bit of damage too?

How to play as a rifleman

In parties you won’t be able to AOE things down, so instead find the softest targets and take those down as fast as you can to give your healers an easier time. Your relatively high defense also enables you to take a bit of a pounding, so parties may use you as an off-tank if things get desperate enough especially since a rifleman can out damage any other class on a single target, so holding agro on that one mob will not be a problem. For PvP avoid the front lines and instead watch the outsides. The strength of a rifleman comes from its solo ability, so look for individuals that you can pick off rather than being in the middle of the crowd where AOE’s fly like crazy.

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Rifleman Recommended skills:

Hollow Point (Main skill for grinding)
Lag Shot (Nice control skill)
Stealth (Must)
Crimson Point (skill for grinding)
Pinpoint Weakness (useful skill)
Sonice Blast (AOE)
All Passive Skills

Notes:

At early stage, don't upgrade the Hollow Point(Cost more MP)
Crimson Point costs less MP, so it's alternative skills when you don't have enough MP
Stealth is a nice skill to escape from fight! But some monsters could also find you even when you are hidden.
A small tips for combos. We all know that rifleman should shot and move, but don't use A/D key to move, instead you could use Q/E key. Just 1-Q-1-E-1-Q-1-E! 1 stands for your normal attack(NO CD TIME)!

Equipments:
Actually rifleman should only focus on two equips: Weapon and Shoes! We pursuit high attack and high moving speed! But +Move Speed gears are so expensive!

Pran: Fire Pran may be the best choice, coz she could increase your critical attack rate!

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Assassin Build:

Max stealth! ( must be lvl 59+. Dont max it if you are not lvl 59+).

sonic blast doesnt work well in predator anymore. Good player can see where the sonic blast come from and figure out your location.

base on my own experience, we have miss problem with player using Air pran. Very frustrated at some time lol. I am currently testing out max concentration to counter player with air pran.

Go solo honor farming in Darkrane and higher lvl map is hard if you dont have predator and max stealth. Mobs everywhere and they hurt as fk. It is ok to honor farm their if you have a group.

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Few important note on builds:

you can see that I have max stealth(only recommend to have max stealth after you reach lvl 59). Why?

max stealth give you the flexibility to easilt run around high lvl map. Trust me, you dont wanna run around AshWood or Darkrane by yourself w/o stealth.
Max stealth give you the extra time to get your self in good position before using Predator. Players can see you using predator, therefore you want to get to their blind spots before you cast predator. Casting predator right infront of Players is a big NO!
Max stealth increases your survivability. RMs are very vulnerable w/o stealth. There is way to get RM stay in Stealth infinitely. Let's me show you some calculation: If you have relics -10% cool down, 10% increase duration and -4% cool down on your weapon. Your stealth/predator will have 103 secs cool down. Your predator last 22 secs and your stealth last 66secs. Your total time in stealth is 88secs. You only need to wait 15secs to use predator again. So you are in Stealth for almost all the time.

Let’s say if your nation manage to get the cool down relics to lvl3, you will stay in stealth forever!! People have very hard time to find me in Arena because if I am the last one. They only have about 15secs to find me before I get back in stealth mode .

max concentration to counter players use Air pran. I think there will be more people(pal/war/cler/Warlock) using Air pran later on because Air pran> Water pran in many way. I really hate player use air pran. once time, I miss 3 skills in a row ><.

Rifle smash is obsolete after you get predator (lvl 59)

Regarding head shot skill.

I had tested out max headshot build a week ago. The problem I have with max head shot at lvl 59:

Regarding terminate + pin point

The use of Pinpoint+ terminate didnt work out well for me.

I prefer to keep around 4-5 main dps skill. With these 2 additional skills, I find it very hard to use a long side with HP/LegShot/Knockout shot/Rapture/IR.

They screwed up my whole skills cycle. I messed up lol. I use to cycle HP/ambush/leg shot/rapture/hollow point/knock out shot/rapture/IR/HP.
or normal shot to cancel parry/side step/ambush/HP/Leg shot/knock out shot/Rapture/IR/HP
If you get a -4% cd on weapon, you will be able to cycle them pretty fast.

so let me do some damage calculation here:
Pin point+ terminate take about 2.5secs cast time total.
-Max Terminate does around 2.6k damage and 5.2k crit.( side note: Pint point +terminate dont work all the time. Remember you can only use terminate if the target hp is below the HP threshold.)
-Leg shot+ rapture take about 2 secs cast time total:
Rapture does around 1k damage and 2k crit.
Leg shot does around 1.4k damage and 2.8k crit.

Even though the total damage of leg shot+ rapture is lower than max Terminate, I still prefer Leg shot+ rapture because I am guarantee in that 2-2.5 secs I can deal some damage. I also dont need to take out skill points from other skill to get pin point+ terminate.

I also mentioned that lvl 1 rupture is >> lvl 6 pinpoint.

lvl 1 rupture do 900-2.3k depend on crit or non-crit.
you can argue that oh you dont have a +11 gun. However if you working to your end game gears, you should at least aiming for a +8 or +9 weapon.
You will only do 100-200 less damage.
Anyway, let go back to the usefulness of pinpoint.
Pinpoint will reduce target x crit resistance, and It brings the target hp threshold for using terminate 10%+ depend on its lvl.

targets hp are vary atm depend on class. the hp range from 5k-19k atm. The average HP for each players are around 10k.
Lets assume all the target has 10k hp.

we gonna compare the lvl 1 rupture with lvl 1 pinpoint. 1st they are bost instant cast.
2nd.
lvl 1 rupture would do 900-2.2 k damage depend on crit or not in average. let say the target has 3-4khp left. if we can cast a lvl 1 rupture, the target hp will drop below 2.5k. This will trigger terminate.( passed the 25% hp threshold) However, your terminate will only need to deal 2.5k damage or less to take down the target.

lvl 1 pinpoint, you cast to the target lvl 1 pin pint, terminate will trigger when target has 3.5k hp left(35%). However, Terminate will need to deal 3.5k damage in order to take down the target. Beside, not all targets have 10k hp. The HP threshold increase depend on the target hp. on the other hand, lvl 1 rupture do stable damage.
1. target run out of range before the casting animation complete.
2. the damage comparing to hollow point isnt big. 1-1.3k more in normal damage and 2-2.5k more in crit. Lets say my HP crit 6k, Headshot only crit for max 8.5k.
I can cast HP+ rupture(assuming they are both crit) for 6k+3k=9k damage.
If you target a War or a DG, They can have enough time to put up a parry or sidestep.
I would use headshot if it can crit for at least 12k. Why? it take more than double the time to cast HP so it should have at least double the damage. However, Its damage is pathetic in term of dps.

3. my main targets when I am in Predator are RM/DG/Cleric/WL(with 1 or 2 buff only. It is hard to remove Mana shield if the WL has more than 2buffs). It is easier to kill a RM or DG because most dg and rm use Fire pran. Many Clerics and WLs using Air pran now. It is hard to hit them lol

5secs stun from ambush is not enough to cast headshot. the stun only last about 4-4.5secs. War/dg can put on parry/side step. Dg/RM can hide. Cleric can put on AA or lvl 59 skill. Pal can put on reflect.

my hollow point has 5sec cooldown. I cast it once, I need to wait 3secs to cast it again.
with 4secs stun from Ambush I can cast rupture+legshot+another hp= 9k+ damage > headshot damage. ( you can see this in my Aika RM damage wise vid- I did 6.4k hp, 1k leg + 1k rupture ( non-crit) on Xiara.

© mhauck