Guild Wars 2

Hi guys, as an engineer main I would like to give you my feedback and breakdown of the engineer changes we got today.

Foreword : Some of the scrapper nerfs were VERY warranted. Yes, necro needed nerfs too, but alas necro will be top of the roost alone this time around with engi a bit below god tier.

Lets jump in! I will be glossing over some of the more irrelevant changes and bug fixes.

1. Fragmentation Shot: The damage of this skill has been increased by 14%.
Really does not matter one bit, the weapon has some of the lowest power scaling in the game, achieving hybrid status means the weapon almost needs a complete rework.

2. Static Shot and Blowtorch are a basic buff.

3. Whole bunch of very welcome elixir CD reductions.

4. Healing turret nerf! This is very unexpected but once again a healthy change to the game! 0.25 longer cast actually means skilled thieves can interrupt it!

5. Gadget CD reduction and added functionality, all of which don’t matter in PvE, PvP or WvW. So yay for that.

6. Slick shoes is the one gadget this patch that will have a huge impact on engineers in game.
This skill is extremely weak if it can only get one knockdown, and now it will not strip stability or deal well with breakbars at all. Slick shoes was the only CC engineers had that was competitive with extreme breakbar stripping like revenant staff 5 and the like.

I would have expected them to keep the functionality the same when it comes to stripping breakbars and stability but only allow 1 knockdown per player.

With this change slick shoes will see zero use in any game mode, another useless gadget.

7. rocket charge now 2 leaps. Good change, needed.

8. Hammer auto buff, not really amazing, but I guess its okay.

9. Rapid regen reduction in base healing. This is a tiny nerf to the swiftness and about a 25% reduction in superspeed regen. A good change. Although I would have nerfed the swiftness one a little more.

10. Sneak gryo cast time! Good change!

Now all of these changes as a whole mean the current meta build has seen some serious nerfs, yes its still playable, however my guess is that slick shoes will see a swap for most likely toolkit. This means we may see inventions being swapped for tools but to early to say until further testing.

Something that I find frustrating is that they appear to be pushing more conditions in pvp, at least for engineer.
While the pistols buffs are welcome, the problem with condi engi is the investment required in traits and utilities make it almost impossible to get a decent balance between damage and survivability. The major problem being condition clear.
ANother interesting problem is the lack of a hybrid set taht works well for condi engi similar to how mercs works for mesmer and warrior.

We NEED precision for semi decent condition damage, so a good set would be Power and condi mainstat, precision and vital/toughness secondary.
This would allow us to have decent damage output without needing to invest in a terrible PvP line like firearms and still have decent condi and power pressure when using nades instead of FT.
We need new traits in firearms or explosives to make condi engi work in PvP again.

EDIT: God I want to see more shield changes that give it synergy with pistol.

People will probably move from slick shoes to blast gyro when the new gyro bugs get fixed. Toolkit loses a lot of its usefulness when you’re not running enough damaging stats, and gear shield unfortunately isn’t nearly as reliable as it once was thanks to all the unblockable stuff in the meta.

I would have preferred a cooldown increase on Healing Turret instead of a cast time increase. It feels really sluggish now. Rocket Charge nerf wasn’t enough imo, it really needs to go down to 1 leap finisher, and something needs to be done about shock shield and/or thunderclap. As is there’s no point in running any weapon other than hammer, still.

All of these changes and all I can say is at least condi viper engi has a little more dps for raids

Everything else is really bad, buffing the damage on some Pistol/pistol skills is not going to make them seen in spvp the reason why hammer is better and even rifle is that both of those weapons have solid cc/with worth while combo finishers and hammer has a field.

reduced the cooldown on blow torch that is great but that skill always has had issues with being used on varying Y axis ie stairs or ledges the skill is bugged and kitten when it comes to spvp it is a coin toss to see if it actually hits half the time.

The slick shoes nerf is way to much they could of reduced the time it persists on the ground I think that would of been a better change.

The healing turret change is rough really rough, they could of just reduces the amount of regen cleansing burst gave.

Along with the 2 rocket leaps and having to take longer time to use healing turret and rapid regen getting hit scrapper engi is looking to be in a really rough spot.

Hey, but at least we do more damage in raids

I mean scrappers were scary but us and the necros got hit hard with the nerf hammers, will be interesting to see how the builds change.

Novuake.2691:

EDIT: God I want to see more shield changes that give it synergy with pistol.

I think if they moved blowtorch to pistol 3 and moved static shot to pistol 4, it would go a long way to make shield more viable…
It would make pistol MH a condi dps weapon, Pistol OH a soft-CC with some condi, and shield a defense with some hard-CC. So they can all work better with each other.
I’m not saying it would solve the problems, but it would not harm the pistol dps so much by taking the shield.

Unfortunately the only viable Condi Engi spec requires baseline Alchemy,Inventions, and Firearms. Forced to run Elixir HgH. Honestly the only thing that you can run in Top Tier against decent players. Running grenades or any other kit isn’t worth it, because you’re so vulnerable. They need to buff shield and other trait lines for sure. Another way to sustain without relying on Alchemy/Inventions for us to run other utilities other than Elixir.

lLobo.7960:

Novuake.2691:

EDIT: God I want to see more shield changes that give it synergy with pistol.

I think if they moved blowtorch to pistol 3 and moved static shot to pistol 4, it would go a long way to make shield more viable…
It would make pistol MH a condi dps weapon, Pistol OH a soft-CC with some condi, and shield a defense with some hard-CC. So they can all work better with each other.
I’m not saying it would solve the problems, but it would not harm the pistol dps so much by taking the shield.

Good start:

-Bake Modified Ammunition into Pistol 1; add new MUCH less passive trait in its place

-Make Pistol 5 actually worth using: Should apply around 3 debilitating conditions, not just one. Either further increase its efficacy or reduce its cooldown.

-Swap Blowtorch with pistol 3. Moderately Decrease damage of blowtorch, but make it much easier to land. Now being on offhand, significantly increase efficacy of static shock.

-Significantly Reduce cooldown on shield skills. Ding some durations if you must, but allow it to be used more often.

Would be cool if the throw shield would steal one boon of each target it hits and apply to the engi when it returns…
Now get those dredges in line for me please…

Novuake.2691:

4. Healing turret nerf! This is very unexpected but once again a healthy change to the game! 0.25 longer cast actually means skilled thieves can interrupt it!

I have never had a problem interupting the old HT. It’s so obvious when an engineer will use it’s heal and the animation gives it away for anyone that’s anticipating it.

They could atleast have buffed the other heals to compensate. After all, the reason people use the HT is because the other heals are just that bad.

Novuake.2691:

Foreword : Some of the scrapper nerfs were VERY warranted. Yes, necro needed nerfs too, but alas necro will be top of the roost alone this time around with engi a bit below god tier.

Necro saw some pretty substantial nerfs as well id expect mesmer to be top

Chase.2798:

Novuake.2691:

Foreword : Some of the scrapper nerfs were VERY warranted. Yes, necro needed nerfs too, but alas necro will be top of the roost alone this time around with engi a bit below god tier.

Necro saw some pretty substantial nerfs as well id expect mesmer to be top

The damage was just redistributed. Really don’t see them as significant nerfs.
Yeah mesmer is pretty good.

What really bothers me is cast time change on HT. Other classes have fast cast heals too but I dont see any nerf there. But overall its not a big deal and some scrubs will have 1% better chance to interrupt:-P

Wahoo!

Yea many changes annoy me and I miss some essential changes I’d like to finally see:

• Pistol #1 needs to be an explosion.
• Pistol #2 shouldn’t spread and have 50% cast time reduction.
• Purge Gyro AoE
• Gyros inheriting Engi stats

Those were the patch notes I wanted to see.

On the other hands I’m glad slick shoes got a nerf, it was ridiculous. But it shouldn’t have been nerfed that hard. There are indeed still skills like rev staff that “exploit” the same way. I’d like to see slick shoes also give the threatment to proc 10 times on a mob (max!).
64s knockdown was stupid, I agree. But it’s worse to take away candy from a child than never give it any. So better leave it a bit left to chew on and not start to cry :P Maybe 10 times is still too much, 5? Idk, but 1x 2s knockdown is basicly deleting the skill.

That’s a little problem ANet has imo. If they see a skill being too strong they don’t tune it down smoothly, they first of all just bash it into the ground. Do you remember Well of Precognition? Search and Rescue? Frost Bow? and now Slick Shoes…

You shouldn’t have to buff skills after a nerf. You should do it right the first time.

Greez!
- Ziggy

So how does the engi feel in PvP now? Too easily killed?

morrolan.9608:

So how does the engi feel in PvP now? Too easily killed?

Its not that bad to be honest. But the slick shoes nerf essentially deleted that skill from all game modes.

With some adjustment engi will be fine.

*The scrapper nerfs were all completely justiable and I am happy that they didn’t touch the core engineer, but is this enough to shift people away from scrapper. I don’t think so. I was actually waiting for more nerfs across the board (why Arenanet didn’t nerf tempest or chronomancer is beyond me!). The main problem of scrapper is the hammer, which offers just too much without a sacrifice. Who uses rifle anymore? And I haven’t seen anybody use pistol/shield either!

The fact remains: Hammer is still brokenly good. The minor shave to hammer #3 was a is not enough. I guess it is the pet weapon of some Arenanet developer and that is the reason why they refuse to nerf it properly to the level of other weapons. It has very good DPS, utility, defense etc. all in one package. The cooldown for both evade and block (which both do damage as well!) is crazily low. It has no high risk/reward skills like overcharged shot (rifle #4), which does self-CC as well. Now the might stacking of hammer autoattack got better so I guess their “balance” idea was that it would better compete with pistol/pistol in pve and make sure nobody would use rifle anymore as hammer has slightly better DPS and now also offers reliable might stacking.

My question is: Why to choose rifle in spvp over hammer?

I have suggested some rifle buffs in another thread:
1. make blunderbuss (rifle #3) a blast finisher (more utility and would fit the skill very well)
2. make jump shot (rifle #5) operate much quicker
50% faster speed for rifle #5 (jump shot) is better than evade frames as it would allow that skill to be used as a gap closer, especially when moving a bit uphill. The animation must be made fast enough for the rifle user to travel faster than merely running with swiftness on. It would also keep rifle as high risk/high reward weapon, getting immobilized while at air is still not fun.

The recent balance changes will probably not shake the meta much for engineer. I predict most engineers will continue to be scrappers, use hammer, healing turret, elixir gun, elixir x/sneak gyro, other gyros like bulwark gyro will also be popular. Elixir based builds (S, B, R, C, X, H) will also be more popular and I guess toolkit might see some use. So I guess we will also see pistol/pistol elixir condi builds more.

The minor buffs to some gadgets were a half-baked attempt from Arenanet. Do they really think that a mere 33% buff and 2 s CD reduction to rocket kick damage will make most engineers pick rocket boots over a kit or an elixir!? I have gazillion times suggested reasonable changes to gadgets to make them viable. Rocket kick should as a gap closer (600 leap) or alternative increase it’s CD and make it into a stun break. Gadgets need more utility, not mere some % of damage to make them more viable. Buffing damage was the wrong way to make gadgets viable. Significant reduction of cooldowns for both the active and toolkit might help.

Medkit is still in sore state: it has a lot of usability problems as the throw animation speed is way too slow and it is very easy to miss the vial in the heat of large scale battles. The activation time and the fact you must throw vials is killing medkit #2-5. These should be turned into 1/4 s cast skills or blast around the engi. Currently you must spend way too much time to use the kit effectively, and while you do that you do no damage. Medkit #1 is probably the worst skill in the game as it doesn’t heal the engineer himself, provides no damage and has a narrow cone, which rarely affects more than just 1-2 allies, unless you are in the middle of a zerg and even then there are better group heals. I do not understand why Arenanet doesn’t fix the medkit, do they really think that skill is okay in its current state?

Running this build at the moment and feel pretty well:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFASncoCtbhlcBGpCkfhlJjS8ZGvAg+vr79e8Dqg4D-TJBCAB5s/g7lBw4CAAwDAAA

Best part is the second moa with Kinetic Battery. Tool kit adds another huge burst skill, block and magnet (! <3)
Switched away from the inventions line since the heal reset below 25% health is less worth with the new cast time of healing turret. Bunker down is a huge miss, but somehow the surviveability seems solid with tools and tool kit. Give it a try!

Forestnator.6298:

Running this build at the moment and feel pretty well:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFASncoCtbhlcBGpCkfhlJjS8ZGvAg+vr79e8Dqg4D-TJBCAB5s/g7lBw4CAAwDAAA

Best part is the second moa with Kinetic Battery. Tool kit adds another huge burst skill, block and magnet (! <3)
Switched away from the inventions line since the heal reset below 25% health is less worth with the new cast time of healing turret. Bunker down is a huge miss, but somehow the surviveability seems solid with tools and tool kit. Give it a try!

I have used something similar. Its okay.