Guild Wars 2

The Toolbelt being the Unique Mechanic of the Engineer offers some, well, unique opportunities, that are being missed entirely – no other class, as far as I’m aware, has a unique mechanic made of skills. It just so happens that, much of the time, either Toolbelt skills are lackluster, or the skill they’re linked to is – like part of a skill was torn off and put in the Toolbelt, without much regard for making sure the skill wasn’t awful.

So, the suggestion is as follows: Reevaluate Toolbelt skills. If they’re not good enough to be considered a skill in their own right, or the skill they’re linked to isn’t, then merge them. There’s no point having two skills to do what one skill should be able to. If that doesn’t work, then figure out a new mechanic – one that’s not a rip of the Elementalist’s Attunements minus cooldown on switching (kits). Also, don’t bind toolbelt skills to utility skills – being able to change them independently would be a great help.

Also: Traits. For toolbelt skills. Right now, there are a total of three traits that explicitly(1) affect the Toolbelt in more than a tangential fashion, as opposed to the eleven traits affecting Kits. For an ability that should be as distinctive and flavorful as a Unique Mechanic, it sure doesn’t seem like much care was given to the poor Toolbelt.

1: Explicitly is used because various traits that seem like they should affect the toolbelt do not. If a trait (typically one pertaining to a specific type of ability, such as Elixirs) affects the Toolbelt but does not specifically say that it does, the assumption made was that it does not.

As a side-note: Kits are an overemphasized bunch of Utility skills, not a reason to gimp the Engineer’s damage (according to the Class Balance Philosophy). They aren’t the Unique Mechanic, Toolbelt is.

Generally the class ability doesn’t have many traits around it. For example the ele attunements gets 1 trait that gives a boon on use and 1 that gives an effect (for each attunement seperately)

Warriors, do they even get anything that changes burst skills?

That class mechanics are flavour, and toolbelts are nothing like attunements (kits are)

Engineers have issues but I think it’s a numbers issue not a flexibility one (kits not being affected by your stats!)
I think once all the bugs are fixed then we can look at how lacking our class is or not :P

They’re taking long enough to fix the bugs that by the time they do, everyone will have gotten so used to working around them that they’ll probably report the fixes as the bugs.

I dislike the Toolbelt and Utility skills being linked quite a bit, myself. Just doesn’t feel like Toolbelt skills compare to other class unique mechanics – partially because choosing a good Toolbelt skill often means sacrificing a good Utility skill, or trying to balance between the two.

Whether our kits not taking weapon stats is a huge issue or not (and it is, for kit engineers), I don’t think we should be penalized in damage over them, either, as they’re just a set of Utility skills. It’s like if they reduced the Elementalist’s Endurance Regen rate to compensate for Conjures.

Conjures remove 3 of our attunements worth of spells :p And if you drop it, it’s gone, 60 sec cooldown.

Still there are bugs on all classes, I don’t think it’s worth being paranoid, they’ll fix stuff eventually, the bugs aren’t really confusable with features (aside evasive arcana – RIP)

Oh, sure, they’ll fix it eventually. Sometime in September, maybe, at this rate – less paranoia than “Well, it’s either black humor or I start getting irritable about it.” I’m really a proponent of the “Fix the bugs, then balance things,” but they haven’t seemed to be fixing many profession bugs – at least not where the Engineer’s concerned. Haven’t looked at most of the other profession’s bug lists, so I don’t know how many they’re fixing elsewhere.