qreeves wrote:Those who were good with the rifle will still pwn regardless, because they use it to stay out of range of other players and render their obviously chosen shotgun useless.
Clearly you're not too familiar with rifle users, there's two kinds: Those who camp at locations and do long range sniping and those who don't.
The latter kind usually use rifle2 to get kills IN range of most other weapons. Excusing the anecdotal evidence, I'll use rifle against people shooting at me from 20m, not 200m. In fact, I don't even shoot at people at distances much above 120m unless they're shooting at me with a rifle, generally it's quicker, easier, or safer to traverse the map using parkour to get to them or find a better spot to rifle2 them from.
Generally, those who use rifle at long range aren't as good as those at short range use (to clarify, long range in this context is over 100m (ghost bridge-to-bridge) and short range is less than).
Regardless, this change is pretty minor on this fact since both of these types of players are nearly always going for headshots, which would still get a kill, except the recent changes (including this reduced damage) is devaluing rifle2 usage. rifle1 is now very, very strong again, being able to two-shot players for head/torso hits and has a much lower attackdelay than rifle2.
Looking at weapon ranges, just about every weapon can deal with short ranged rifle users (except sword and flamer). plasma1, 2 and flamer1 can be used to conceal your position slightly making headshots harder, and the others can generally reach those ranges (although their effectiveness might be pretty crappy). But even so, at 100m being 1 degree out on your aim is enough for a headshot to be a legshot.
It currently seems like you're trying to nerf something that isn't a problem by changing something and then saying you changed it for another reason which isn't all that related. =/
(PS: I'm guessing you haven't commented on the buff suggestion because you don't like it, mind explaining why?)