Guild Wars 2

In my opinion, the toolbelt is a fundamentally flawed mechanic and the engineer would be better off with a new (but similar) class mechanic. Getting two utilities for the price of one sounds nice on paper, but doesn’t allow for any of the engineer utilities to be as strong or meaningful as the utilities that other classes enjoy. Because balance is an imperfect process there will always be cases where the toolbelt skill is much better than the slot skill. All too often I feel like I’m choosing my utilities based on the half of the skill that’s good and just ignoring the other half. This is not a fun system.

I’d much prefer we simply had a pool of abilities that were dedicated belt skills that we could pick and choose and have everything balanced accordingly. Could even throw all of the kits up there so they acted and felt more like real weapons (and could be balanced accordingly) instead of taking up a utility skill. Does anyone else feel this way?

My only complaint about the toolbelt is that it is clunky to rebind the f1-f4 keys, without dedicating a second hand to the keyboard ffxi style.

Orson.8034:

My only complaint about the toolbelt is that it is clunky to rebind the f1-f4 keys, without dedicating a second hand to the keyboard ffxi style.

I have mine bound to ZXCV and it works fine.

Weapon skill 1 is set to F and weapon skills 2-5 are QERT, with 1-5 set to heal, utility and elite skills.

I’ve rebound the functions some of these keys used to be bound to to my extra mouse buttons or alt, shift, ctrl.

What you are suggesting would make Engineer identical to Elementalist, since Ele’s attunements (our kits) are located above the skill bar and ultility skills are in their normal location, and with Engineer that is reversed. So that ain’t gonna happen.

I do like the idea of having dedicated pool of tool belt skills though, but I don’t think ANet will consider doing it, since they probably don’t want to reduce a class mehcanic to simply some additional utility skills. Guardian has something like that, and I agree with its critics that its kind of dull that way.
I think simple reworking of some kits and skills, both utility and toolbelt, is the best solution.

Tesler.5783:

What you are suggesting would make Engineer identical to Elementalist, since Ele’s attunements (our kits) are located above the skill bar and ultility skills are in their normal location, and with Engineer that is reversed. So that ain’t gonna happen.

I do like the idea of having dedicated pool of tool belt skills though, but I don’t think ANet will consider doing it, since they probably don’t want to reduce a class mehcanic to simply some additional utility skills. Guardian has something like that, and I agree with its critics that its kind of dull that way.
I think simple reworking of some kits and skills, both utility and toolbelt, is the best solution.

When I say “throw the kit skills up there” I’m referring to adding the kits to a pool of belt skills that we choose to slot.

While I can certainly understand the argument that simply having more utilities as a class mechanic could be considered by some to be dull, I would have to respectfully disagree. Being able to effectively slot 6 or 7 utilities (with the belt skills being weaker than slot skills, for balance) would add much more customization and depth to the build you choose to use and in my opinion wouldn’t really take anything from what we have now. As it stands now I’m forced to take a toss elixir skill that I may not like if I want to take an elixir, while if they were to make the change I suggested I could take all elixirs on my bar and nothing but weapon kits in my toolbelts. This would also fix a problem that I never see anyone bring up: using kits lowers the number of utilities you can actually use.

I don’t agree, I think its a pretty solid mechanic but not without its faults though.

Some skills, are amazing, great and useful: Throw Elixir R, Big Ole Bomb, Grenade Barrage, Throw Wrench and so on.

But then, there seems to be a divide of almost useless skills such as: Throw Elixir B, Throw elixir C, The Turret Toolbelts (except for surprise bullet) and others…

I’d rather all toolbelts be as effective and powerful as the likes of big ole bomb, with others getting buffed, or just nerf the good ones. I don’t like the situation where one kit has a very powerful toolbelt, but another doesn’t.

Actually, I just thought of this:

I ringed the heal skill, 3 other skills, and elite skill around my movement keys. (Like Pink Sock had done) It’s simple enough to rebind the toolbelt keys as an alt command to an alt or ctrl+ version of those same keys. Yes, this requires some more finger work, but it might work.

I’ll have to do some trials on that, but it’s a suggestion!

the tool belt skill gives something no one profession has.

Variety with racial skills

and I agree. Buff the tool belt skills of turrets

I love the Tool Belt. Gives me extra Utility much like the Rangers’ F2 ability does; or the Thieves’ Steal ability.

Every Tool Belt is useful in some way. Only one I would change would be to change the Launch Personal Battering Ram back to its original function which was a Knockback instead of its Cripple.

Throw Elixir B is great when traited to remove conditions and also good for opening a fight. Throw Elixir C is also a condition remover on a short cooldown. Bonus points if traited into HGH for a Might buff. Although, I think HGH should give more than just 1 stack.

My problem is a lot of the toolbelt abilities seem lackluster. Grenade’s is awesome, the elixir ones are great, but all the “fire an X bullet” abilities sort of suck hardcore.

I LOVE the tool belt, and the traits that are linked to it.

Tool belt concept itself is very intriguing and funny. However, most of tool belt skills have too long CD (Incendiary ammo, napalm grenade. 1min… really?) or have too negligible effect (Elixir B toss… I wanted to give my companies Swiftness, but no! It’s completely random). Aside of this problem, I am content at tool belt concept. Of course if A-net patches mountains of bugs of Engineer.

The mechanic in itself is fine, some skills just need some tuning.