Guild Wars 2

Let’s try to gather our feedback in one place again. Keep it simple, keep it short, keep it realistic.

my own:

-main hand pistol skills are still somewhat weak: short bleed on p1, ramdomness on poison dart volley

-almost all of our cooldown reduction traits are just that, they dont give any bonuses like you see in every other class

-glue shot needs it’s travel time reduced

-we need more reasons to use elite skills other than supply crate

-gadgets need more trait interaction to make them interesting

-reserve mines are more punishing than useful, if nothing else make it so they don’t reveal you when someone steps on them, a minor trait outside of player control shouldn’t work againt us

-coated bullets needs some work done. a master trait that works only on 2 skills doesn’t seem right

-normalize and/or buff tossed elixir radius so it’s less selfish and more support oriented.

-no real reason to use potent elixirs, ever.

thats it for now. :p

- Turrets still have too many bugs to be playable (and they are all still rather weak)
- AED is useless. All other 3 heals have their place while AED doesn’t.

Agree with you on the following:
- Gadgets definitely need more added to make them used outside of Static Discharge builds
- Reserve Mines taking you out of stealth is silly.

pistol skills are general too weak. Glue shot for example. 1sec immobilize on impact then only cripple on 30sec cooldown. It is so slow and has so little effect. It is more or less useless and maybe the weakest #5 skill of all weapons.

1/2 sec activation time to cripple someone for 1 sec is a joke.

Compare Blowtorch with Throw Torch from ranger. …

Yes I know our skills hit more then 1 target. But if I could I would replace glue shot with every other #5 skill from every other weapon.

Randomness from Elixir H should also be removed.

Backing up the sentiments for all of the above, especially gadget trait support.

Also…

- Less reliance on elixirs for condition cleansing
- FT autoattack: less retaliation fodder
- AED: cool concept, needs tweaks
- Static Discharge needs to hit selected target to open up gadget options

Pistol 1 sux but thats ok since it’s a “1” skill, gap filler.
Pistol 2 too wide spread, even misses sometimes in close combat >_>
Pistol 3 is ok.
Pistol 4 often does nothing while moving around and enemies run behind you, going on short cd instead of fireing sideways. Also the damage is pathetic if not full condition based and melee.
Pistol 5 needs more range and hold. Or less CD and smaller aoe.

Rifle requires 2nd sigil slot to be viable.
Rifle skills overall are awesome.

Shield is awesome too, less cd maybe (20%).

Turrets crit
recycle a turret should reduce the CD by X % while X = % of the max HP the turret had: 100% HP = 100% cdr, 20% HP = 20% cdr (dungeon viable, moving them around).

Toolbelt discharge should aim for marked targets even if the skill is not homing (grenade spam, heal skills, …)

Xyonon.3987:

Pistol 1 sux but thats ok since it’s a “1” skill, gap filler.

Actually, that’s quite bad. In a kitless build – something that should be viable as well, as kits are optional – the autoattack is used quite a lot, as the other weapon skills will be inevitably on cooldown quite often (especially since we would have a single weapon).
And they can’t just make the other skills more powerful – that would make kits build even better, as they can just use them and switch back.
So if they want to beef up the pistol, the main way to do that is make the autoattack better – as a mean of increasing our sustained dps.

When you trait for the pistol it becomes very viable due the line damage and bonuses, if not, then you are using kits anyway. I see no problem there.

Maskaganda.2043:

-almost all of our cooldown reduction traits are just that, they dont give any bonuses like you see in every other class

This is a big one for me as well. It’s incredible how powerful certain traits are on other classes. Master of Consecrations improves Guardian consecrations by reducing their cooldown and improving their duration. This makes Wall of Reflection go from 25% upkeep (10s/40s) to 37.5% (12s/32s).

And it’s a 10-point trait.

They need to start merging traits. Hair Trigger and Rifled Barrels should be combined. Fireforged Trigger and Deadly Mixture should be combined. The FT/EG combo does fairly mediocre damage already, and shifting Deadly Mixture out of Alchemy will do a lot to improve its effectiveness. A good way to keep this balanced would be to make this a master tier trait, meaning you have to choose between Juggernaut for extra toughness or “Fireforged Mixture” for extra damage.

Build diversity. Can’t get any better than that.

I’m new in this game, but I want to share a solution to the randomness of the Elixir H.

The buffs are determined accordingly to an health treshold:

Percentage – drink/toss
100~90% – swiftness/vigor
90~50% – protection/protection
50~0% – regen/regen

Xyonon.3987:

When you trait for the pistol it becomes very viable due the line damage and bonuses, if not, then you are using kits anyway. I see no problem there.

Guess we have different standards for “viability” then, cause it seems quite underwhelming to me – apart from being the only weapon we’ll have equipped in a similar case, due to not having a second weapon slot (and that’s just cause we may use kits, as if giving a fixed penalty for something optional even makes sense).
Especially since most of our main weapon traits are fragmented into multiple (usually mutually exclusive) weapon traits.

Various niggles, mostly from an SPVP perspective. All of it has been said before of course, though not yet in this thread I think.

-There are a lot of great traits in the elixir line, but only a few worthwhile choices in inventions and tools. We’re essentially spoiled for choice in elixirs and wanting in these others. Would love to see some new traits or improvements to existing ones in these lines.

-Our toolbelt skills tend to have quite high base cooldowns, and the limited options in tools make it hard to justify reducing them over other skills. Would love to see this change one way or the other, by improving traits, improving %cooldown reduction from tools investment, or lowering base cooldown on some toolbelt skills.

-I quite like buff to power shoes, although I’m not certain it should be a 20 point trait considering our low access to gap closers and mobility skills – especially considering that speedy kits is only a 10 point investment and provides a better speed increase. I feel like it’s now mandatory for anyone running infused bombs at the moment however.

-Most traits in firearms work better with explosive kits than they do with firearms. The traits relating specifically to weapons generally aren’t worth taking over other traits in most situations, meaning the “firearms” tree most of the time ends up being used for anything but firearms. Some strong new weapon specific traits or buffs to existing weaker traits in this tree could make a big difference to kitless build viability which would open up a lot of build diversity.

A certain minimum Investment into the explosives tree seems almost mandatory for most viable builds due to stat and trait distribution, but also because bombs and grenades are arguably our two most viable kits. Moving Incendiary Powder to master tier in my mind has exacerbated this problem somewhat rather than improving the situation since some weapon only builds were attempting to make use of this trait with minimal investment in explosives. Moving accelerant packed turrets to adept was a nice change, I’m sure some more people are taking it now.

Turret and rifle net shot are still one of the least reliable immobilize skills in the game, second perhaps only to ranger pet immobilizes due to their long channel time. I guess increasing the projectile speed would help, but the main problem comes back to how the engine calculates the path of projectiles with travel time on moving targets (especially if said target is juking). While I don’t want the skill to just become guardian scepter 3, I feel it could still use some improvement. Perhaps a short channel time of 0.5 seconds or something (non rooted, otherwise it would be useless) to compensate it’s short cooldown, then it snares instantly if the enemy doesn’t dodge? Not sure, but it would be great to get this skill sorted out.

Our access to stability is extremely limited, yet most of our hard CC is short ranged. This means we tend to be at a disadvantage against both long ranged CC (rangers with longbow/canines, mesmers running offhand pistol/mantra of of distraction and necromancer fears, . At the same time, classes with short range CC and better access to stability also have a a built in advantage at short range, at least until said abilities are on cooldown. Blinds/kiting tools such as cripples help but generally don’t quite close the gap. Not sure how best to tackle this, but it sure would be great to have a stunbreaker with a few seconds of stability on it in one of our slots. Thumper turret is just too short. Maybe a gadget, since they’re fairly underused right now?

Sorry for the long post. Most of this wasn’t related to just the last patch so I’ve probably said way too much stuff (stuff everyone already knows, at that.

Maskaganda.2043:

Let’s try to gather our feedback in one place again. Keep it simple, keep it short, keep it realistic.

my own:

-almost all of our cooldown reduction traits are just that, they dont give any bonuses like you see in every other class

Well, Engi is not the one with worst CD reduction traits at all Actually it’s great that when I’m playing my Engi, these traits are reducing at least CD of 10 skills, not like on my Elementalist.

However I agree that other classes have usually another benefit linked to the CD reduction which Ele and Engi lacks….

Maskaganda.2043:

-no real reason to use potent elixirs, ever.

Really? Does it actually not affect the Toss-skills? (never tried that, but I reckon that’d make the trait balanced)

Carighan.6758:

Maskaganda.2043:

-no real reason to use potent elixirs, ever.

Really? Does it actually not affect the Toss-skills? (never tried that, but I reckon that’d make the trait balanced)

it does and its not that bad of a trait by itself, but I think it should do something else other than 20% increase in durations to be viable. there’s a reason every elixir build just goes fast acting elixirs, 409, hgh.

Little upset that elixir infused bombs got a 50% increase in healing power which in anet terms means it went from .1 healing scaling to .15 or about 30 or so more hp per bomb explosion. Even with full healing power its less healing per second than warrior passive healing singet with 0 healing power and every warrior build has adrenal heal as well and some have banner regen or shout heals.

Chuck Zitto.2367:

Little upset that elixir infused bombs got a 50% increase in healing power which in anet terms means it went from .1 healing scaling to .15 or about 30 or so more hp per bomb explosion. Even with full healing power its less healing per second than warrior passive healing singet with 0 healing power and every warrior build has adrenal heal as well and some have banner regen or shout heals.

Those things are always presented in the most positive way. You can skew any number with the proper use of percentages, graphs, etc. If they said E.I.B. will get a healing power scaling increase of 0.05, we’d have flipped out kitten. But this way, 50% sounds amazing until we do the math but they can say “hey man, 50% is huge!”

Conversely, they could say they increased the precision gained from skill x from 90 to 105, which makes us think “cool, triple digits” until we realize it’s only a 17% increase.

Happens everywhere.

Anet use tricky word problems. Everyone hates math word problems.

I still wish there was a trait or built in cripple to the 1-4 bomb skills with quick application. Something like locust swarm by way of a magnetic gadget would be cool.

Would love to see somes changes on shield:

- Lower the cooldown of Shield #5 (40s for a 1.5 sec block? geesh)
- Remove the root for Shield #4 Reflect

Random effects on skills.
Turrets are still too fragile for being 100% stationary targets.
Legendary weapons can’t be seen when using kits.
Hobosacks.

-Not a fan of being forced to go grenades to be competitive
-Would love SD to work on all skills (currently, elixir throws, aoe effects, and buff gadgets don’t hit the target)

Most of my issues have already been listed but one: ascended/legendary weapons need to affect kit damage. As it stands now, the patch that introduced ascended weapons has put our main source of damage 5% behind most other classes.

-please add a “+%dmg while holding a kit” bonus to asc/leg weapons, so sPvP will remain unaffected

Chuck Zitto.2367:

Little upset that elixir infused bombs got a 50% increase in healing power which in anet terms means it went from .1 healing scaling to .15 or about 30 or so more hp per bomb explosion. Even with full healing power its less healing per second than warrior passive healing singet with 0 healing power and every warrior build has adrenal heal as well and some have banner regen or shout heals.

healing bombs, backpack regen, elixir gun aoe, perma regen gives us tons of passive healing for bunker builds

pheroth.5306:

Would love to see somes changes on shield:

- Lower the cooldown of Shield #5 (40s for a 1.5 sec block? geesh)
- Remove the root for Shield #4 Reflect

Shield #5 is possibly the best shield skill in the game, so I’d be wary of lowering the cooldown honestly. I agree that the root on shield #4 is unnecessary. It’s very rare to get to use the skill as anything except a push or a blast finisher, because nobody has time to lock themselves out of skills and movement just for reflection. Removing the root would allow the skill to be more than just a double-tap skill, without actually adding to power creep.

I would have agreed before the change, but now it is an epitome of redundancy.
You stun any enemy for a second while in use; and still, you can’t do anything to those enemies while you are blocking…so their stun will likely end before the skill expires; sure, you can throw it when the enemy is stunned – but then you are trading a stun for a daze – or do that when the shield is going to end – something that is useful mostly to remove defiant stacks, imho. Assuming you’ll even get the second hit, since now it destroys itself due to walls (or even due to the ground) quite often.

Whereas before it would end by itself on a successful block, and you had 2s of stun where you would be free to act – without losing anything, since you weren’t already blocking anymore. Or you would have thrown it directly, if you just wanted the daze.
No redundancy, no “cancel your own skill to make use of its effects”.

Frankly, i think they just wanted to nerf it due to pvp, and they have redesigned it to mask the nerf. But then, in actual use, i find quite hard to justify the change. Maybe just when escaping from many enemies (something the tool kit shield does better, anyway).

This issue has been around since the beginning, but one of my biggest peeves is how both pistol and rifle free shoot in the direction of the camera rather than being level with the terrain, as is the case with the FT. Often I don’t have time to wait for toggling a target or risk the game auto targeting something I don’t want. I just want to quickly free shoot, especially on stealth targets. Having to bring my camera down to ground level and stare at my back while I shoot straight in front of me is both annoying and sets me up for a counter attack that I won’t be prepared for.

I would like anet to add the ability to queue the next mortar shot. It’s bad enough we have to wait 2 seconds per attack, but add in human delay for triggering the next attack and it’s more like ~2.3 – 2.5 seconds. Or you can spam your keyboard and watch as the glyph paint wears out. No thanks!

I also have a very hard time breaking away from an EG/FT build. The damage I pull off with those kits, the survivability, the AOE and wide cone of attack, 200 bonus toughness, quickness and ease of maintaining 25 stacks of might. It’s just to good to give up. I’ve tried hard to go back to bombs, grenades, turrets, riffles, etc. I just can’t. I don’t survive as long and I don’t deal the kind of punishment I’m use to seeing. As Mask and others have pointed out, the primary weapons and their traits need some love. I need a good reason to switch things up. I use to change builds almost weekly. I’ve been pigeonholed into this build for months now and I have not found a reason to leave it.

cleansing outside of traited elixirs sucks. Transmute was all we really had, and they nerfed it into the ground.

Flamethrower and nades vs retaliation is unbalanced in WvW play.

ellesee.8297:

Chuck Zitto.2367:

Little upset that elixir infused bombs got a 50% increase in healing power which in anet terms means it went from .1 healing scaling to .15 or about 30 or so more hp per bomb explosion. Even with full healing power its less healing per second than warrior passive healing singet with 0 healing power and every warrior build has adrenal heal as well and some have banner regen or shout heals.

healing bombs, backpack regen, elixir gun aoe, perma regen gives us tons of passive healing for bunker builds

You have to be quite crazy to even try to compare this (master major):
Regenerate health every second when using a kit.
Healing: 117 (0.05)

with this(master minor):

Regenerate health based on adrenaline level.
Adrenaline level 1 healing: 125 (0.15)
Adrenaline level 2 healing: 240 (0.15)
Adrenaline level 3 healing: 360 (0.15)

If you add a signet to this, warrior beats any passive regen of an Engi with just these two abilities, and I guess that he doesn’t even need healing power to achieve that…..

Edit: Also calling a weapon skill (elixir gun) a “passive” ability, that’s the stuff man…..

i’m not comparing anything because comparing two different skills on two different classes (like what you’re doing) is moronic. i’m saying engi has plenty of sustain.

Oh, the good old “you can’t compare between different classes” excuse.
After all, it isn’t like we are most often on the losing side of these comparisons and one of the least played classes after all.
Oh, wait, we are.
And as for the example above, we find ourselves with major traits (that aren’t even always working – it requires a kit being used) that are even weaker than passive minor traits (even in the worst case). And that’s without considering both armor and base health – something that, in the opposite case, would even have made sense.

Manuhell.2759:

Oh, the good old “you can’t compare between different classes” excuse.
After all, it isn’t like we are most often on the losing side of these comparisons and one of the least played classes after all.
Oh, wait, we are.
And as for the example above, we find ourselves with major traits (that aren’t even always working – it requires a kit being used) that are even weaker than passive minor traits (even in the worst case). And that’s without considering both armor and base health – something that, in the opposite case, would even have made sense.

Thanks, at least someone understood what I meant

If the “you can’t compare between different classes” excuse was a thing, half of the topics on these forums wouldn’t even exist. But they do, so…..

Equalizing the damage across the different types of builds would be nice…..and equalizing them with the other classes

god you moaners like to nitpick. you cry about backpack regen requiring a kit for the regen (which we are in 95% of the time) and yet conveniently forget that most people who get adrenal implant also go for cleansing ire which promotes spending all your adrenaline. selective whining.

also engis are strong so quityerkittenin.

And yet you conveniently forget that even at the first level that trait is still healing more than our backpack regen.
Also, we are often in kits because our main weapons are designed to be lackluster because we can use kits (as for last december balance philosophies – and since we haven’t got any others after that, we should assume they are still true). Still, they are optional and cost us utility slots, but we aren’t forced to use them. If a full turret build was viable, it would have no use for that trait. Same for a full gadget or full elixir. Whereas those warrior traits are always in use.

also, engis are so strong that the class is one of the least used. And unlike guardians and warriors, i never see lfg asking for engineers.
Maybe there are other classes being too strong, then.

i’m stopping the argument. don’t talk about pvp traits and then cry about pve engis.

edited to avoid infraction

I like how everyone talks about the bomb heals as if the whole point isn’t to heal the group with them. Why anyone would ever take that trait for personal healing is well beyond me and really… should the trait just get an all-caps “PARTY SUPPORT TRAIT”? Isn’t it obvious enough as is?

The trait currently dishes out ~3x the healing of the warrior signet, and actually scales better than the _active_component. All you have to do is use it with other players around. But since the entire premise of the trait is group support, it makes no sense to talk about it in single target situations.

(This is similar to talking about Mortar in open-field combat, which it is clearly not meant to be used in. That much is obvious. Difference is that Mortar is meh even in its ideal use case, while healing bombs is actually pretty powerful.)

that derailed quickly :p

vitor.2586:

I’m new in this game, but I want to share a solution to the randomness of the Elixir H.

The buffs are determined accordingly to an health treshold:

Percentage – drink/toss
100~90% – swiftness/vigor
90~50% – protection/protection
50~0% – regen/regen

I kinda just want the swiftness gone and i’d be satisfied

I want just the protection.

Carighan.6758:

I like how everyone talks about the bomb heals as if the whole point isn’t to heal the group with them. Why anyone would ever take that trait for personal healing is well beyond me and really… should the trait just get an all-caps “PARTY SUPPORT TRAIT”? Isn’t it obvious enough as is?

The trait currently dishes out ~3x the healing of the warrior signet, and actually scales better than the _active_component. All you have to do is use it with other players around. But since the entire premise of the trait is group support, it makes no sense to talk about it in single target situations.

(This is similar to talking about Mortar in open-field combat, which it is clearly not meant to be used in. That much is obvious. Difference is that Mortar is meh even in its ideal use case, while healing bombs is actually pretty powerful.)

We should talk of the downsides as well, though.
For starters, it is a grandmaster trait that works on a single utility – thus we’re spending half, or more than half of the points if we also get the reduced recharge and increased radius, on a single utility. And we are the only class that has got grandmaster traits working on single utilities.
Also, bombs are an hybrid weapon. The autoattack is a power one, but the other skills are conditions. Thus we’ll either lose on the autoattack or on the other skills by going cleric or apothecary (or we can achieve a middle ground – but that goes for healing power as well – with celestials).
By working only with bombs, this also forces us in melee combat (and as we lack means of reliable protection and our vigor got nerfed, it puts us at risk). In the meantime the damage we’re doing is probably negligible, if we are using cleric or apothecary equipment.
The healing itself is also a sustained one, so if we don’t go in melee, we don’t heal – unlike other forms of burst healing like traited shouts.
As we specialized mostly on healing bombs, even using traited grenades from a distance won’t do much (again, hybrid damage and low critical chance/damage). I say traited grenades cause we’re already using the first tree, so it would even synergize a bit as far as trait go.
Basically, by dealing low damage we’re making the enemies live longer…thus all that sustained healing is needed just to overcome a problem caused by ourselves.
In the end, it would be more beneficial to not get healing power at all, use just the healing power got from the trait tree and just kill the enemy. You don’t heal much, but at least you aren’t weighting the party down.
And this is a textbook example of a trait designed for pvp becomes near useless due to how pve works.
Oh, fine when you just have to stay on a point and survive. When you’re supposed to kill something, it doesn’t work that well.

Manuhell.2759:

Frankly, i think they just wanted to nerf it due to pvp, and they have redesigned it to mask the nerf. But then, in actual use, i find quite hard to justify the change. Maybe just when escaping from many enemies (something the tool kit shield does better, anyway).

If your only example of a possibly better shield skill than shield 5 is toolkit 4, then I think I proved my point. I’m not sure if shield 5 is better now or before the change. As for escaping multiple enemies, stunning everyone who hits you is quite a bit better than an extra 1.5 seconds of block. You’ll gain much more distance due to the stun and you won’t be getting hit while the enemies are stunned anyway.

My point was that shield 5 is very possibly the best shield skill in the game. If you feel a different profession has a better shield skill, I’d be interested to hear. I don’t really care if shield 5 arguably got nerfed if it’s still the best shield skill in the game.

STRanger.5120:

You have to be quite crazy to even try to compare this (master major):
Regenerate health every second when using a kit.
Healing: 117 (0.05)

with this(master minor):

Regenerate health based on adrenaline level.
Adrenaline level 1 healing: 125 (0.15)
Adrenaline level 2 healing: 240 (0.15)
Adrenaline level 3 healing: 360 (0.15)

If you add a signet to this, warrior beats any passive regen of an Engi with just these two abilities, and I guess that he doesn’t even need healing power to achieve that…..

Edit: Also calling a weapon skill (elixir gun) a “passive” ability, that’s the stuff man…..

Adrenal Health gives those amounts once every three seconds. At level 3, the total regen is 120/sec + .15*HP. The scaling (.15) is actually exactly the same as backpack regenerator (.05) because BR gives health every second compared to every 3 seconds, so 100 HP will give BR 5 more healing every second, while 100 HP will give AH 15 more healing every 3 seconds. Also, BR continues to give ticks of health for a few seconds after leaving a kit, which means that unless an engineer is staying in his weapon skills for extended periods of time, BR is always working. Even if a warrior kept max adrenaline up constantly, BR would be just as good. In PvP/WvW, BR is significantly better than AH.

Manuhell.2759:

Oh, the good old “you can’t compare between different classes” excuse.
After all, it isn’t like we are most often on the losing side of these comparisons and one of the least played classes after all.
Oh, wait, we are.
And as for the example above, we find ourselves with major traits (that aren’t even always working – it requires a kit being used) that are even weaker than passive minor traits (even in the worst case). And that’s without considering both armor and base health – something that, in the opposite case, would even have made sense.

See above explanation—BR is as good or better than AH in practically all situations. You can directly compare two professions, but you have to have correct information to do so.

Engineers are one of the least played professions in every game. Warriors were played more than engineers even back when warriors were bad at everything except PvE and zerging in WvW.

Indeed, seems i based that analysis on wrong informations. It makes more sense now, especially for a minor trait. Guess i will see them personally next time.

Regarding the shield, i still think that they nerfed it heavily. And considering the other shield skills in the game, saying it is the best one isn’t a great compliment anyway…

NevirSayDie.6235:

pheroth.5306:

Would love to see somes changes on shield:

- Lower the cooldown of Shield #5 (40s for a 1.5 sec block? geesh)
- Remove the root for Shield #4 Reflect

Shield #5 is possibly the best shield skill in the game, so I’d be wary of lowering the cooldown honestly. I agree that the root on shield #4 is unnecessary. It’s very rare to get to use the skill as anything except a push or a blast finisher, because nobody has time to lock themselves out of skills and movement just for reflection. Removing the root would allow the skill to be more than just a double-tap skill, without actually adding to power creep.

Yeah I don’t think there’s another self reflect skill that roots you except this one. I think they made this change to other similar skills in the past (Mesmer Scepter 2?) I almost never use it for the reflect.

This change would help us a bit against strong keepaway ranged builds

Hopefully people are finished bickering over EIB, I just wanted to share my experiences with a couple of the new changes.
Power shoes are great, opening up a minor slot in tools of which I took speedy gadgets to try out the new heal AED. Which is terrible, not just terrible, but MONSTEROUSLY TERRI-BAD on an epic scale. The one second cast time just murders this skill, and the 3/4s cast with however long aftercast of the toolbelt is god aweful.

Now the new Transmute was kinda fun at Jormag, making me practically immune to his long fear chains. But its use in any PvP setting is completely demolished, I used to be able to tank even the heaviest of condition appliers (other engi’s, sometimes necros) and now they just destroy me, even with Automated Response. Engineers condition mitigation is a joke now

Maskaganda.2043:

-main hand pistol skills are still somewhat weak: short bleed on p1, ramdomness on poison dart volley

Ever since i ran a hostile frog with a blowgun, the cone spread of the dart volley has irked me greatly.

It is really not needed, as any block/evade on first hit result in the rest of the stream going wasted anyways.

Not liking how we’re slowly being moved into a handful of useful builds, with the majority of DPS being grenade kit based, by the tweaking of traits. Unfortunately this is an issue I’ve seen in other games with jack-of-all-trade type classes, where Devs become over cautious at giving the class a buff in case it synergies with one or two other skills that when used together makes an OP build (1000 ‘nades I’m looking at you).

Since I would expect any changes to be trait based, these are my suggestions:

Explosives:
Shrapnel now effects all explosions, such as pistol 1, harpoon gun 2 etc
Autodefence Bomb Dispenser isn’t a grandmaster worthy trait. Needs to be replaced with a new trait that can compete with Grenadier

Firearms
Merge Rifle Barrels with Hair Trigger into one trait.
New Adept trait: Precision Tinkering: Gadgets gain an additional effect
Rifle Mod is merged with new version of Modified Ammo
New Master trait: Speed Upgrade: Turrets gain quickness
Grandmaster Trait redesign: Modified Ammo: 20% damage increase for rifle/harpoon gun and 200 condition damage for pistol.
Napalm renamed to Tormenting Flames: Burning you inflict now causes 3 stacks of torment for 5 seconds (3 second cooldown)

The idea behind these changes is to open up firearms to other forms of play as well as improving builds that already delve deep into firearms (SD builds for example). Precision Tinkering would open up the prospect of more gadget based builds by allowing the addition effects to plug up gaps in the gadget line. Example ideas would be:

Rocket Boots: Leaves a fire trail
Slick Shoes: Oil splotches causes poison
Utility Goggles: Cures 3 conditions
Battering Ram: Blast finsher
Mine: Causes a small smoke cloud that acts like a mini null field for 3 seconds
A.E.D: 5 seconds of retaliation

Speed Upgrade would up the overal DPS of turrets in their current state and make them more of a threat than they are now. A Turret engineer should be able to turn a small area into an effective kill zone with turrets but outside of that zone they’re incredibly vulnerable.

Changing Modified Ammo to this new form rewards engineers who want to focus more on using rifle/pistol as their main source of damage rather than kits, which imho should be the focus of the trait line.

The Napalm change is mostly aimed at the flamethrower, presenting a reason to go a full 30 into firearms while at the same time it presents a p/p condition engineer an alternative to taking Modified Ammo (and the 200 condition damage buff).

Inventions:
Merge Metal Plating with Autotool installation as a Master tier trait
New Adept Trait: Re-deployment Beacon: Turrets no longer can be detonated. Instead they now can be teleported to a new location

One of my biggest issues with turrets (other than the list of bugs) is that they aren’t overally useful in areas where you have to be fairly mobile (dungeons/fractals/WvW) since if you’ve put them in places to keep them out of harms way (using rapid deployment) and you can’t reach them then you’ve effectively made yourself dead weight until they’re off CD. This new trait would help reduce the downtime and make a the turret engineer more mobile in a similar fashion to the old spirit herding ritualist.

Alchemy:
This line is mostly okay. Has flexibility between elixir builds and non elixir builds

Tools:
Kit Refinement reworked so that it is usable. Suggestion would be to change cooldown from global to individual kits and either rework some of the effects (med kit, bomb kit and to a lesser extent tool kit are fine) or kits now have the passive effect of a on crit/on kill sigil along with whatever sigils the player is using currently.

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head but overall I do feel that engineers need to be looked at before they start falling behind in the power creep that is starting to happen with the other professions.

I agree with your post, yes I never understood the random spread of the poison dart gun attack, I mean really. It looses its effectiveness at range, and it suppose to be a ranged weapon. Also the glue shot is pretty lame, gee want to slow down that thief, na forget it as he is already out of the way of the glue by the time it hits the ground.

Malhavoc Adhamar.3675:

Changing Modified Ammo to this new form rewards engineers who want to focus more on using rifle/pistol as their main source of damage rather than kits, which imho should be the focus of the trait line.

Literally every trait in Firearms except Fireforged Trigger and Juggernaut in one way or another benefits either the rifle or the pistol, so I’m not sure it’s as unfocused as you insinuate.

The Firearms tree is fine, and the new Modified Ammo is perhaps one of the greatest buffs we’ve ever been granted. ArenaNet should leave it alone and focus their efforts elsewhere: ideally with turrets and gadgets.

STRanger.5120:

ellesee.8297:

Chuck Zitto.2367:

Little upset that elixir infused bombs got a 50% increase in healing power which in anet terms means it went from .1 healing scaling to .15 or about 30 or so more hp per bomb explosion. Even with full healing power its less healing per second than warrior passive healing singet with 0 healing power and every warrior build has adrenal heal as well and some have banner regen or shout heals.

healing bombs, backpack regen, elixir gun aoe, perma regen gives us tons of passive healing for bunker builds

You have to be quite crazy to even try to compare this (master major):
Regenerate health every second when using a kit.
Healing: 117 (0.05)

with this(master minor):

Regenerate health based on adrenaline level.
Adrenaline level 1 healing: 125 (0.15)
Adrenaline level 2 healing: 240 (0.15)
Adrenaline level 3 healing: 360 (0.15)

If you add a signet to this, warrior beats any passive regen of an Engi with just these two abilities, and I guess that he doesn’t even need healing power to achieve that…..

Edit: Also calling a weapon skill (elixir gun) a “passive” ability, that’s the stuff man…..

Well, first of all, Adrenal Health ticks only once every 3 seconds. So at maximum adrenaline, it’s 120/second—nearly identical to Backpack Regenerator.

Ultimately I think debates over “passive” healing are erroneous, anyway. Most of what the engineer has is active: Super Elixir, Elixir-Infused Bombs, Healing Turret. That doesn’t change the fact that our sustain is quite good compared to warriors, especially considering that we have (1) better blocks, (2) better invulnerability skills, and (3) better damage reduction while stunned.

I think cherry-picking individual traits is a mistake. You have to look at what all is offered in a single build as a warrior and an engineer.

Phineas Poe.3018:

Malhavoc Adhamar.3675:

Changing Modified Ammo to this new form rewards engineers who want to focus more on using rifle/pistol as their main source of damage rather than kits, which imho should be the focus of the trait line.

Literally every trait in Firearms except Fireforged Trigger and Juggernaut in one way or another benefits either the rifle or the pistol, so I’m not sure it’s as unfocused as you insinuate.

The Firearms tree is fine, and the new Modified Ammo is perhaps one of the greatest buffs we’ve ever been granted. ArenaNet should leave it alone and focus their efforts elsewhere: ideally with turrets and gadgets.

Agree 100%

Plus modified ammunition effects kits too does it not? I’m like 99% sure they said it works no matter the weapon…?

We need more gadget traits and turrets need some major help, like you said.

STRanger.5120:

Maskaganda.2043:

Let’s try to gather our feedback in one place again. Keep it simple, keep it short, keep it realistic.

my own:

-almost all of our cooldown reduction traits are just that, they dont give any bonuses like you see in every other class

Well, Engi is not the one with worst CD reduction traits at all Actually it’s great that when I’m playing my Engi, these traits are reducing at least CD of 10 skills, not like on my Elementalist.

However I agree that other classes have usually another benefit linked to the CD reduction which Ele and Engi lacks….

with ele if u go 30 in arcane trait u can got a massive CD on swap elements
we need use all utility skills for swap kit
engy and ele are not in the same boat on CD