Guild Wars 2

I think most of us can agree that the skill is underpowered or just lackluster in most game modes. Ideas of lower cast time / higher heal / longer delay before the small heal comes out have all been tossed around to make the skill better, but I think the main problem is usually when you want to proc it, you’re going to throw yourself into danger. When the AED does proc, you’re still going to be in danger then, and oftentimes your brand new health bar is going to get chunked down or even removed instantly anyways.

I think it would be nice if when AED procs, the game considers you as having gone “down”, but then instantly revives you. This would mean that it then has synergy with Always Prepared, it cleanses all conditions, and you get a ~1s moment of invuln for breathing room. You could probably even lower the heal a lot in compensation for the changes. I think this would make the skill a lot more interesting by giving it synergy with “going down” procs rather than just being a flat heal.

Healing Turret is just so darn good it’s hard to find a reason to use other things. Just like Shelter is for Guard.

Lots of room to buff AED though, I really wish it has a different toolbelt skill. Not really a huge fan of an offensive heal skill toolbelt skill /shrug.

I would actually like to see A.E.D have a passive damage to heal converter like 10% of your damage or something.
some ideas
1:Remove the on death heal proc replace it with a higher base heal with a normal on use like other heals
2:toolbelt should be a 240 pbae or chain between people and reduce the gadgets cd per target hit by maby like 3 sec
3:toolbelt same 240 pbae removes a condition on yourself and to allies in the area

The engineer is the only class which does not have passive effects on their utility-skills. one could argue that turrets fulfill this purpose since we can set them up for 5min before they go on cd, but then again we have necros who can summon minions and also have signets.

so, lets add passives to our gadgets:

a.e.d.: clears 1 condition and heals for 1k every 10 seconds
utility-googles: improves precision
throw mine: improves power
slick shoes: improves movement speed by 25%
rocket boots: improves condition damage
Personal battering ram: improves toughness

also, delete “power-shoes” from inventions, move “leg-mods” into inventions, move “gadgeteer” into the master-tier of tools and add “refined gadgets” as new grandmaster-trait for tools.
“refined gadgets” allows the passives of gadgets to be active while they are on cd.

also gadgeteer now grants the following boons to gadgets upon use:
A.E.D.: regeneration (more healing for the healing skill)
Utility-googles: protection (to make it into a more viable stunbreaker)
Throw mine: 3 stacks of might (in case you miss the firefield, lol)
slick-shoes: vigor (replenish your endurance while the opponent kisses the ground)
rocket-boots: swiftness (ensures max distance jumps to all times (unless you fire super-speed for it))
personal battering ram: fury (to make sure that your following burst hits like a truck)

there you go, A.E.D. now also gives regeneration and clears boons. welp, it still clears less boons than healing turret and you miss a blast / knockback if traited, but all in all, this skill is more viable now.
And the rest of our Gadgets were made way more viable as well.

missing power-shoes in our traits is maybe a big trade-off, but slick-shoes’ passive will account for that, which also means that we are not forced anymore to put the 2 mandatory points into tools for swiftness on almost all engi builds.

Instant cast with maybe stunbreak too. Or make the base heal comparable to heal turret. That’s the only way it would work.
Assuming reasonable changes. They could always go over the top and merge it with elixir c or some crazy stuff like that.

i think instant cast could make it competitive maybe.

better yet would be to change its usage pattern to something that isnt detrimental to your odds of survival.

The inherent problem lies in the fact that you have to save it until you’re about to die. It gets no proactive usage, and by the time it even has a chance to see proper use, things are already pretty bad.
I think a solid way to solve this would be to give it a half-second or so activation, a duration of maybe 3-4 seconds, and give it an extremely small cooldown (like 15 seconds). Reduce the heal power proportionately as well, of course.
This would allow you to use it when you’re not just about to die, and still have a chance of it being off cooldown by the time you are. It leaves you to give real consideration as to how bad you need the heal now, and how likely you are to die before the cooldown is up.

As it is, using it if you’re not about to die is nothing more than a trap, and as such it may as well be passive.
That’s actually another nice idea. Make it function like a Signet and auto-trigger on lethal damage with a proportionately increased cooldown to match the increased heal, thus preventing the person from constantly and passively dodging death.
Like a 3x heal plus condition removal with a 45 second cooldown instead of 15.

AED is fine as it is, it’s my main heal underwater and going from near death to nearly 100% hp in one go is just amazing.

It’s healing turret that needs a nerfbat if anything, with 2 heals in one and measely 20 secs cd at that.

I’ve been using AED with a full burst no kit build. It it surprisingly good, and I’ve won every game so far with it. (only 2 ranked, 1 unranked) The heal was a little underwhelming, but ONLY BECAUSE IT’S SO UNDERUSED I was able to do some interesting plays with it. If my opponents were aware of how to counter it (happened by 1 player in all games; thief just stealth right after he saw me pop it. Appeared and killed me in one hit right as it dropped) It does nothing. I like the idea of making it instant cast. I just checked and it scales really bad with healing power. I don’t think making the ability instant cast would make it overpowered. And it would allow some very risky, but skillful use against good players as well. (Timing it for the absolute last second) And it could compete with our other heals.

I said it should be instant cast because the way the skill is designed has the whole “panic button” idea in mind. Like when you are chain cc/immobilized(happens to engineers a lot) and the whole enemy team is just dpsing you heal turret won’t save you but AED could.
It can’t do that currently because of the small cast time. Small doesn’t cut it when you are permastunned.

Increase the range of the toolbelt skill to 900 / problem solved

In its current state, the skill is very week compared to the turret or even the elixir. However, people like this skill for its quirkiness, so the solution wouldn’t be to add a condi removal or a stun-breaker (two gadgets have that already) or a heal on the tool-belt skill. What it really needs imo is to be insta-cast, and for the tool-belt skill to be insta-cast as well. It would therefore give a powerful interrupt skill (excellent for SD builds), and A.E.D. would be much more reliable, without being OP (that’s a 40s cast time, surely you can eat two lethal strikes in that interval).