Guild Wars 2

I’m about to make a suggestion spreadsheet thread for engineer to deal with balance inconsistencies (see links in signature for examples)

Before I do so, I’d like to collect information from other players:

What are the current balance problems of engineer/scrapper?
What is too strong and overbearing in build diversity?
What is too weak and overshadowed by stronger options?
How is your experience in PvE / PvP / and WvW?

I look forward to reading everyone’s response.

The only balance problem for the engineer is probably effort. It is significantly harder to get results that are marginally better, if better at all, through rotations.

The rest is fine. I would like to see more streamlined kit based traits rather than general traits but that’s just me personally.

Flamethrower takes too much retaliation damage in WvW.
Too many projectile attacks.
Need more unblockables.
Some bad traits like Thermobatic Detonation, Stimulant Supplier.
All turrets expect healing turret are bad.
Shredder gyro is bad.
Medkit is bad.
Forced to alchemy in WvW.
Hammer doesn’t apply damaging conditions, it really should.
Engi is in good place only in PvE.

guildabd.6529:

Hammer doesn’t apply damaging conditions, it really should.

No, no it shouldn’t. We have more than enough sources of condition damage already, if anything we need better power options. If anything, I would rather see Rifle lose the bleeds and be a pure power weapon.

You’re delusional if you think this or any class is perfectly balanced right now.

From a PvP perspective:

I think Engineer suffers from the same thing most classes do— the rushed introduction of elite specializations, and lack of balance response afterwards. The powercreep HoT introduced made a large portion of the class obsolete in PvP, and with the vast majority of non-elite builds left in the dust, build diversity took a huge hit. This is a problem nearly every class faces right now, and all of them need to be addressed around the same time— if the powercreep is toned down significantly on only engi, engi will just become bottom or trash tier for PvP.

That’s not to say that powercreep is the only problem engineer is facing right now, it’s just the largest by far. Most of the core specializations trait changes in june of 2015 were also detrimental to the engineer, with the explosions/firearms split destroying nearly all of our hybrid damage options, as well as the deletion of a handful of fun build options. The update also brought the medkit rework, which was a big failure that left the kit in a far worse state than it was before. We did get a godsend in the form of updated elites with the update, though.

Stuff that is overperforming the most right now: the scrapper traitline and hammer as well as HGH (and by extension Alchemy) are the biggest offenders. You can read my thoughts on the problem and suggested solutions here. Healing Turret is also overperforming, partially because of hammer 3. Slick Shoes are as well, but that could be fixed if they ever changed the puddles to not kd anyone standing still 100% of the time. A couple other things are overperforming when combined with HGH, but changes to the trait could fix most of this. Traited blowtorch is overperforming compared to our other burns.

Stuff that is underperforming right now:

• Heals other than HT. AED has too high of a cooldown to be useful even with the gadgeteer trait, and its cast time makes it undesirable, as it needs to be used when under considerable pressure for the full heal to kick in. Elixir B is in a better spot thanks to HGH, but it still has the issue of randomness that has plagued elixirs since launch, as well as a very interruptable cast.
• Med Kit. Med Kit needs some serious work. The core specs patch changed its skills from high duration meds dropped at your feet (unless traited), which could be dropped in advance, to short duration thrown packs with different effects, and added a meh only-healing autoattack. Now on paper that doesn’t sound too bad (except for the autoattack), but it suffers from a few crippling problems. The thrown packs have terribly slow projectile speed and a tiny (80?) pickup radius. This means your chances of actually landing them on a kiting ally-in-need are essentially zero. A start to fixing these would be to increase the pickup radius to 120 and up the projectile speed by at least 50%. In my opinion the autoattack simply should not be there; it’s just bad design. Med Kit was also hurt by its self heal (f1) being reclassified from a toolbelt skill to a heal skill, meaning it no longer benefits from the reduced recharge time the tools line offers.
• P/S. Shield is in a terrible spot right now, as hammer offers far more both offensively and defensively. Part of this is a problem of hammer overperforming, but not all of it. Shield’s cooldowns are pretty long even when traited, and they could use a slight reduction (to the base cd, not just a stronger trait reduction like the toolkit trait change). The overshield trait is also badly designed— the protection it grants is applied when you use the shield skill, not when it ends, so a good amount of it is wasted on you as you’re already blocking or reflecting damage.
• Pistol mainhand is also in a bad spot right now. The +condi duration trait helped a little, but the autoattack is still pretty kitten bad, and poison dart volley still misses a lot of hits if you’re not in the enemy’s face. I think a good solution would be to add a short duration vuln stack to the auto, which would address the problem of the cover conditions condi builds lost with the explosives/firearms split (as running double offensive lines simply isn’t an option).
• Explosives. Despite having a couple very good traits, the overall quality of traits in the explosives line is pretty low. The adept tier is especially lacking, offering only a kit-specific option, useless fall damage trait, and nearly as useless +5% damage while above 90% health. One of the GM options, thermobaric detonation, is needlessly cripped by a 10s ICD (which was also added to the normal dodge bomb for some reason), stopping a lot of interesting builds from popping up.
• Bomb kit has been underperforming since the core specs changes. It previously had a niche as a condi-based side node fighter, but the condi changes left the kit in the dust compared to our other burn options.
• Gadgets bar Slick Shoes. As fun as they are, they just don’t do enough to warrant a utility slot right now. Rocket Boots doesn’t go as far as it used to thanks to the leap changes, and personal battering ram is still kinda outclassed by flamethrower and its airblast. Throw mine died with the removal of sentinels/soldiers amulets and the subsequent death of decap builds.
• Turrets bar Healing Turret. Turrets were nerfed to death on purpose and everyone knows it. They need a real rework, and the topic deserves a full thread of its own.
• Supply Crate is (surprisingly) underperforming. Despite being considered one of the best elites before the june 2015 changes, supply crate has since completely lost its place in the metagame. This is partially because the updated & new elites (and their f5s) are just so good, and partially because the accelerant-packed turrets trait is now restricted to our worst line, and also partially because the bunker playstyle its f5 first best with has been mostly killed on purpose.

Sorry for the long rant and kittenty formatting.

What people essentially complain for is that a specialization designed to make the class better at fighting in close range ends up being better than the base class when used into a game mode that forces people to fight in close range.
That’s a fault of the game mode, rather than the class or spec. The proposed solutions essentially boil up as making the whole design pointless by making it average in what it is supposed to specialize to, akin to what happened to turrets before – again another thing that was supposed to defend and control an area, and that was destroyed once it was finally able to do what it was designed for (even if they were able to do so only versus bad opponents).
And as such, it would be better if we finally had some sort of proper balance split, so that any change made purely for the sake of PvP wouldn’t impact any other game mode. Then you will be free to make any nonsensical and stupid decision, as it often happens when players’ whinings are involved, since it won’t affect anything else but that mode.

Core engineer or scrapper?

O.P. traits:
(Inventions) Bunker Down
(Alchemy) Protection Injection —- 5 cooldown makes it strong in WvW
(Scrapper) Adaptive Armor —- -20% condition damage when it also has up to +300 armor

slightly O.P. skills:
(Scrapper) Stealth gyro … up to 30 seconds uptime out of 40 second recharge
(Scrapper) Medic gyro … no cast time or prep time
(Scrapper) Thunderclap … stun and damage + range
(Scrapper) Rocket charge …. triple leap finisher
(Scrapper) Impact Savant

slightly U.P. skills:
Med Kit – give it some water fields… compare Health Insurance + Med Kit with an Ele water blast , Throw Accelerant should remove chill every time
Thumper Turret
Rocket Turret
Net Turret
Rifle Turret
Utility goggles’ toolbelt skill (analyze)
Battering ram/mine (see blast gyro)
A.E.D. toolbelt skill – give it shock aura.

U.P. traits:
Thermobaric Detonation
Stimulant Supplier

Usability-wise:
Elixir U – toolbelt skill randomness
Streamlined Kits – spells sharing the same cooldown
Mortar kit (hand health of using 1 skill)
Grenade kit (not damage or anything, just the hand health of using skill and having to target every time)

I understand that turret engineer was nerfed for PvP, but for PvE/WvW mobility is more important , turrets should be packable probably.

guildabd.6529:

Flamethrower takes too much retaliation damage in WvW.

This can’t be real.

Your choice in weapon and approach is ineffective and it’s an internal game problem?

I can’t!

What are the current balance problems of engineer/scrapper?
They, if played well through skill and rotations, dont have many counters (besides necro, but even then they can stall for a while).

What is too strong and overbearing in build diversity?
Alchemy is so good that it is literally impossible to not take it and remain competitive, for two reasons. Protection injection and condi control. All of hammers skills have damage attached to them, which should not be the case (#4 and 5). Near perma boons are a problem. Passive regen is a problem.

What is too weak and overshadowed by stronger options?
Gadgets, bomb/med/mortar/flamethrower kits, and turrets. Sustain for the condi build is weak. The rest will sort itself out when the op stuff is nerfed.

How is your experience in PvE / PvP / and WvW?
My experience in PvP is positive. I play a wacky build that I made and refined to fit a very specific role. Its not competitive, just an enjoyable experience. I only log in every once and a while and play custom games, server 001. The community there (yes actual public server community) is pretty awesome, or at least was, I havent played in a while.

What are the current balance problems with Engineer / Scrapper?
Scrapper generally performs well however base Engineer requires an obscene amount of effort to come close to Scrapper or even some other classes out there as well. Scrapper is essentially a simplified Engineer and as such it out-shines base Engineer.

As a result I recommend the following to be reviewed or tested in order to bolster base Engineer:

Weapons
Pistol Main Hand: If it were not for Static Shot, this weapon would be worst than it already is. AA has no semblance of pressure to speak of and imo should be raised back to two stacks of bleed, this change would add more condition pressure to this weapon and better differentiate between Elixir Gun AA. Since pistol attacks do not pierce (as they used to be able to be traited for) the benefit of being able to hit multiple targets with pistol AA is simply no longer experienced in the majority of realistic encounters.

Off-Hand Pistol: Pistol 4 carries this weapon (along with main hand pistol) from the abysmal depths of non-usability. At the same time it seems to be affected negatively by Character Height and can miss often in melee engagements because the hit box feels like it is 3 pixels wide (vertically and horizontally) and directly ahead. Targets below you and above you can often times be missed completely.

Pistol 5 is useless in WvW for the most part. An opponent with Melandru/Hoelbrak runes, Bowl of Poultry and Leek Soup and their appropriate -movement impairment trait will not even notice this skill has been used against them or perhaps feel like a micro-second of lag has occurred. To compound the problem here is that such an ineffective skill is on a seizure inducing 30 second cool-down.

Off-hand Shield: The cool-downs are too large for this current meta of PvP. Everything has burst skills on 4 – 8s cool-downs and this weapon simply does not provide frequent enough defensive options to warrant taking over the offensive pistol off-hand. Just dodge roll instead.

Rifle: This weapon appears to be sort of in a ok place strictly for power builds. In 1v1s it performs ok but lacks unblockable pressure versus classes such as Guardian and Revenant. Perhaps this weapon needs more condition applications to give incentives towards the use of the Modified Ammunition Trait over Incendiary Powder, for build diversity’s sake as well as this weapon’s overall performance.

Hammer: It performs well in PvP. You are easily kite-able in WvW however. This weapon operates with acceptable losses under both of the previously mentioned scenarios imo.

Engineer Down-State: Conditions build in down-state against literally anything else in down-state will die first. There is not enough reliable conditions pressure from down-state Engineer. Also if you are in down-state as a conditions Engineer vs anything that is standing with a slither of HP, you probably still won’t get them into down state as well.
Grappling Line should instead spear opponents and push them away from you instead of gifting them a better position to finish the job. Consider adding some sort of conditions pressure to Grappling Line (4s of 3 stacks of poison) and Booby Trap (4 stacks of bleeding for 8s). Also Booby Trap is a blast finisher? For what purpose? Would it be better served as something else or removed to improve the skill’s over-all performance?

Traits
Explosives Line
Couple Explosives Descent with Grenadier. All classes have their fall traits bundled with other traits, this is to bring this more in line for the Engineer.

Add a new Trait like: Breaching Payload: Explosives have a 15% chance to remove a boon from the target.

Why this trait? The player now has to sacrifice between a) more reliable DPS and consistent performing game-play mechanics via Grenadier, b) Providing boon stripping capabilities for allies or c) straight flat DPS increase via Glass Cannon

Glass Cannon: Decrease the HP threshold to 80%.

Change Shaped Charge to Crazy Ivan: Immobilized foes take 20% more physical and condition damage while under it’s effects. When Immobilized ends a Timed Charge (ref. Engineer Spear Gun skill number 4) is applied. ICD 20s.

Change Short Fuse to Accelerant Fueled: Bombs explode faster and Bomb and Mortar Kit Fields all activate twice each second.

Siege Rounds: Current Stats as well as ‘Inflict 10% more damage over 900 range’.

Swap Thermobaric Detonation (henceforth referred to as TD) with the proposed Crazy Ivan (referred to as CI) trait. TD becomes Adept level. CI becomes Grandmaster Level.

What do these changes to the Explosives line hope to achieve?
Improve Rifle and Pistol synergy across this trait line.
Bomb Kit builds are more viable in PvP.
Mortar Kit Builds especially for Condition Engineer are more viable in all game modes, especially WvW.
Traits that see no use are bundled more appropriately.

Firearms Line
High Caliber: Current Stats as well as Blunderbuss is now unblockable and applies Box of Nails (ref: Tool Kit skill number 2, consider it to be fallen shrapnel so to speak) under opponents who are blocking when this skill hits.

Serrated Steel: Increase bleeding duration by 33%. Immobilizing or Crippling a foe also applies Bleeding (6s).

Modified Ammunition should be changed to Varied Ammunition Belt. Rifle and Pistol AA have a 20% chance to inflict blind (3s), cripple (3s), burning (2s) or bleeding (8s) on opponents. Deal 2% more damage per condition on foe.

What do these changes to the Fire-arms tree hope to achieve?
Rifle power users now have a GM to use. Better rifle trait synergy.
Rifle bleed condition Engineer is now more plausible.
Condition Engineer traits now have better synergy regardless of power / condition or hybrid game-play style.
Increase rifle and pistol build diversity.

Inventions:
Over-shield: Reduce shield cool-downs by 33%. Protection is applied to party on skill use, for the engineer at the end of their skill’s animation.

Experimental Turrets: Current stats as well as Boon Application interval reduced to 7s. When turrets are destroyed they apply Throw Gunk (ref: Thief Stolen Item from Engineer) with a radius of 240.

Advanced Turrets: Current stats as well as all turret ranges increased by 200 radius. Turrets are ground target-able (400 range).

What do these changes do for the Inventions Line?
Improve shield off-hand’s performance.
Improve turret performance and turret group support options for Engineer. Further performance review will be required.

Alchemy
Iron Blooded: Current Stats as well as ’If you take damage of more than 20% of your maximum HP in a single instance then you gain Protection (3s) on 15s ICD.

What does this change do for Alchemy?
Iron Blooded is more viable for an Engineer interested in taking a tanking role.

Tools
Excessive Energy: While at full endurance do 10% more condition and physical damage.

Gadgeteer: The next time you Evade successfully drop a Mine Field (ref Toolbelt skill: Mine Field) ICD 10s. Your next Gadget is over-charged and recharges 25% faster.

What does this do for the Tools Traits Line?
Better synergy for Condition Engineer builds.
Gadgeteer GM trait now promotes and rewards good game-play from Engineers.

What is too strong and overbearing in build diversity?
HGH is the prevalent theme of many engineer builds and since everything in PvP and WvW throws conditions at you, you then feel like you have to carry the Alchemy Trait line to survive.

What is too weak and overshadowed by stronger options?
Gadgets except slick shoes.
All turrets.
Supply Crate is on a long cool-down and no longer contains a Rifle Turret. As a result beyond the initial interrupt and maybe an immob later it does not provide any further value for Power or Condition builds (since neither of those CCs do damage).
Bomb Kit.
Med Kit thread for suggestions.
Pistol / Shield combination. Neither of these two weapon combinations can carry either through PvP/WvW and even weaker in PvE.

How is your experience in PvE / PvP / and WvW?
PvE – Vipers P/P Condi Engineer. Other options are possible here because you have friends to carry you to victory anyways.

PvP – Scrapper or else you are trying to man-mode max difficulty PvP. Paladin Scrapper hits like you are throwing around wet ducks at your opponent but at least you can survive a bomb or two. Other Engineer builds require you to play around the periphery of fights and make yourself scarce once they pile on top of you (or die).

WvW – Base Engineer does not have enough mobility. Killshot Warriors, Thieves, Mesmers, Rangers, Revenants, etc can disengage from and engage with you at will. You have little control over any fight and you can’t make opponents commit or stay. In summary everyone can escape from you at whim, you have to stay and fight and finally you have to work harder for similar if comparable results.

Scrapper performs as expected in WvW without a cap circle. Average.

As Sins laid out, there are numerous trait lines and classes of traits (gadgets, turrets) that are unusable in every single mode right now. In addition to our weapon sets of MH Pistol and Shield which are both terrible.

The real problem isnt the lack of skill splits or that spvp is all about capture points, the real problem is that ANet DOES NOT incrementally balance. Regardless of all of their talk about shaving and their balance philosophy.

These notes from DOTA2 are what incremental balance looks like. A ton of these changes are small but Icefrog will keep doing small changes to a TON of heroes until their power gets up to par. ANet does ZERO of this type of balance, if they did turrets would be getting slightly stronger each patch, gadgets would be getting a little better, hammer would be getting a little worse, alchemy wouldnt be so required, et cetera.

Until ANet decides to practice what they preach with “shaving” balance, all of our discussion is for nothing. They will do another 180 degree overhaul on some traits and make them BiS or Useless, just like they always have.

“Dota 2 Update – December 29th 2015
December 28, 2015 – Valve
6.86c:

• Alacrity damage/speed rescaled from 30/40/50/60/70/80/90 to 10/25/40/55/70/85/100
• Invoker base strength reduced by 2
• Time Walk cast range increased from 550 to 625
• Faceless Void strength gain increased from 1.6 to 1.8
• Time Dilation duration increased from 5.5/7/8.5/10 to 6/8/10/12
• Time Dilation cooldown increased from 34/28/22/16 to 36/30/24/18
• Call Down first missile damage decreased from 220/285/350 to 200/275/350
• Walrus Punch cooldown increased from 20/16/12 to 36/24/12
• Nightmare cooldown increased from 16/15/14/13 to 22/19/16/13
• Tricks of the Trade cooldown reduced from 70 to 40
• Tricks of the Trade AoE increased from 475 to 500
• Blink Strike cast range increased from 700 to 800
• Blink Strike cast point reduced from 0.4 to 0.3
• Arcane Orb int steal increased from 1/2/3/4 to 2/3/4/5
• Arcane Orb int steal duration increased from 40 to 50
• Shallow Grave cast point increased from 0.35 to 0.4
• Shadow Wave manacost increased from 80/90/100/110 to 90/100/110/120
• Winter’s Curse attack speed bonus increased from 50 to 70
• Tombstone cooldown increased from 60 to 70
• Surge manacost increased from 20/30/40/50 to 50
• Death Prophet base intelligence increased by 3
• Spirit Siphon HP Drain increased from 1/1.8/2.6/3.4% to 1/2/3/4%
• Spirit Siphon slow rescaled from 6/10/14/18% to 5/10/15/20%
• Exorcism duration increased from 30 to 35 seconds
• Radiant Small Camp’s spawn box is now smaller
• Fixed Lone Druid’s HP not increasing when upgrading True Form "

Hehe I remember Starcraft balancing a specific unit → built time 35s to 40s to 35s to 30s to 35s something about that – Reaper <3

Yea it’s better to balance small than those hammer nerfs in whack’a’mole style → CD increased from 20s to 40s, or damage increased by 30%! Stuff like that … Makes me cry :/

Function Gyro is 99,5% useless in PvE.

f gyro is 99.5% awesome in raids.

Ardid.7203:

Function Gyro is 99,5% useless in PvE.

No. It takes some time to learn how and when to use it, but it truly is a gift in PvE. You can resurrect players far away, or double the resurrection speed. You can resurrect two people at the same time and even go into stealth while the gyro keeps doing his job. The gyro does not ask if there is an AoE in the way and it not runs away when the HP go down. Even if a partymember is downed inside an AoE, you can simply send the gyro to buy some time.

I use it mostly in fractals, dungeons and HoT maps. But again, it took me months to use it that way.

whirl gyro is useless , might be interesting if the new supposedly datamined whirl finisher sigil works with it

gyros as a whole do not have proper sustain they should work on a fuel system as if they were signets except maybe for stealth gyro maybe

Conditions- as powerful as condi engi is condi engi’s damage comes mostly from burning and confusion so anyone who knows this will save their cleanses for when they get burn stacked and cleanse shutting down 80-90% of condi damage because engineer despite having many bleed skills and traits they all are bad shrapnel needs its bleeding duration cut and proc chance raised, the firearms minor adept needs its bleeding duration raised by 2 seconds pistol and elixir gun’s bleeds need their bleeding durations raised ,poison dart volley and elixir gun’s fumigate need longer poison durations as well, pistol’s number 5 glue shot needs a 25% cd reduction and its crippling pulses to apply 2s cripple instead of 1 , static shot needs its blind replaced with daze as it was during launch , raise poison dart volley’s scaling to 1.2

actually i noticed what the problem is Engineer’s skills were not updated for the new conditions system non of the skills are designed with condition stacking they all have low durations because they are still under the mentality that they stack duration instead of intensity

shield needs a 30% cd reduction

turrets need a Complete overhaul Even if we gave them ranged placement,range and regen and sustain they no longer offer anything worthwhile and some arent even optimized for the new patch for example flame turret still applies a 2-3 second single burn even fully traited for condi this turret is useless same goes for net turret after the double nerf both cd increase + cc duration reduction

gadgets need a bit of an upgrade mines are our only boon strip give them wider activation and blast radius , get rid of gadgeteer trait and lower cd on some gadgets and upgrade some of them maybe give shrapnel 15% chance to boon strip too

i think our skills should be reworked before even having our traits touched

HnRkLnXqZ.1870:

Ardid.7203:

Function Gyro is 99,5% useless in PvE.

No. It takes some time to learn how and when to use it, but it truly is a gift in PvE. You can resurrect players far away, or double the resurrection speed. You can resurrect two people at the same time and even go into stealth while the gyro keeps doing his job. The gyro does not ask if there is an AoE in the way and it not runs away when the HP go down. Even if a partymember is downed inside an AoE, you can simply send the gyro to buy some time.

I use it mostly in fractals, dungeons and HoT maps. But again, it took me months to use it that way.

Ok, you are right.
It’s only 95,5% useless in PvE.