Guild Wars 2

Here are the things i feel are lacking on engis currently, please keep the discussion civil and hopefully we can give the devs an idea of what needs fixed. And please keep the requests for clearly OP things to a minimum lol

Explosives:

Traits that are fine:
Acidic elixirs
Forceful explosions
Empowering adrenaline
Accelerant packed turrets
Incendiary Powder
Enhance performance
Grenadier
Autodefense bomb dispenser

• Shrapnel: Increase bleeding chance and decrease duration
• Exploit weakness: Add 5 stacks of 5s Vulnerability, or possibly 5s of weakness? overall, still a pretty lackluster trait. No real use for it in either pvp or pve right now.
• Explosive powder: Possibly combine it with forceful explosions or Short fuse? Or combine Short fuse and Forceful explosions. The real issue is that you have several great traits for bombs and no way to take all of them. Especially now that IP is in the master tier.

Overall, the explosives trait line really caters to bombs and grenades. It doesn’t offer anything to any other weapon set, and it doesn’t offer anything to condition builds that don’t use grenades or bombs.

Firearms:

Traits that are fine:
Fireforged trigger
Sitting duck
Infused Precision
Rifled barrels
Hair Trigger
Juggernaut
Rifled mod
Go for the eyes
Modified ammunition
Napalm specialist

• Sharpshooter: 5s duration? Very weak, a –condi duration opponent nullifies this trait.
• Target the maimed: 10%? Our bleeds don’t last long on anything but grenades.
• Precise sights: Again, no real place in either pve or pvp. You could increase the vulnerability duration from 3s to 5s and give flamethrower crit builds a way to apply vulnerability (at the cost of CD reduction), but it seems like you would be better off merging it with exploit weakness and placing something else in its place.
• Coated bullets: This would be great, but pistols have the worst auto-attack in the game bar none. Adding piercing to one of the skills isn’t going to fix that. The bleed needs to be increased to 4s and you need to look at the power scaling. As it stands, coated bullets just gets you killed from retaliation faster than you deal damage.

The big thing that Firearms lacks is anything for condition users, which is kind of funny since it’s our condition damage line. It focuses on using our main weapons, and has some good traits for rifles but none for pistols. Possibly look at combining/buffing some of the weaker traits and adding something that says to a condition user “hey, I’d be a huge help!”. Since all of our conditions have low durations, a trait that isn’t in the grandmaster tier to help with that would be a great place to improve the line.

Inventions:

Traits that are fine:
Explosive descent
Metal Plating
Stabilized armor
Energized armor
Cloaking device
Reinforced shield
Auto-tool Installation
Elixir Infused bombs
Rifled Turret barrels

• Protective shield: 3s protection on a 20s CD? Eh. 15s CD would make it more viable, but it’s usually taken as a filler ability.
• Power shoes: 25% move speed while in combat isn’t terrible. It’s that there are better options in every way. I like the changes to speedy kits, it was too strong with Invigorating speed. Power shoes would benefit from merging with Leg mods greatly, or possibly just becoming 25% move speed when no kit is equipped would help it out.
• Elite Supplies: The problem isn’t with the trait, it’s with the base abilities. Elixir X is terrible, a random chance to get weaker copy of a warrior elite or an ele elite. Really doesn’t fit the engineer at all. And the mortar is bugged, its range is terrible, its damage is terrible, and its utility is terrible =/
• Performance Enhancement: 10% healing to power bonus is okay if you’re running clerics gear and bombs, but it’s pretty terrible if you run anything else. I don’t honestly have any idea on how this could be fixed.

The Inventions trait line fits it’s stats in that it helps defensively and with healing. It isn’t great defensively, the Alchemy trait line does that better, but it does an okay job. I’d like to see more emphasis on the utility of this line, adding in ways to buff or heal other players more effectively. It’s very turret trait heavy, which is bad because turrets themselves are very lacking and it closes the line off to any other builds.

Alchemy:

Traits that are fine:

Invigorating speed
Fast-acting elixirs
Self-regulating defenses
Blood Injection
Protection Injection
Deadly Mixture
Backpack regenerator
Cleaning formula 409
HGH
Automated response

• Acidic Coating: Provides you with a passive free blind every 10 seconds. It’s alright, but it could and probably should go into a different trait line. You have to give up one of the other fantastic adept tier traits to get it, and it’s really not strong enough to compete with any of them. Possibly move it to another trait line?
• Transmute: Really didn’t need the nerf. leave it at the 8% chance that it had. It helped with Energy conversion matrix and with our condition management, since we have such poor condition removal.
• Potent elixirs: Suffers from the same problem as Acidic Coating. 20% duration increase on your elixirs is nice, but not nice enough to preclude backpack regenerator or cleaning formula 409. Adds 2s of much needed stability when you use an elixir? 5s of Fury? Makes all elixirs instant cast?
• Energy Conversion Matrix: if you had every boon in the game, it would be a 9% damage increase. At best, you have 3-5 boons with uptime on you netting a 5% damage increase. Compare that to every other classes 10% damage increase grandmaster minor traits. 2% per boon would be very reasonable.

Alchemy is by far our strongest trait line. Again and again I find myself going deep into it for backpack regenerator or automated response. It’s focused on elixir use, but also has traits that make it appealing to every build we can use. I would really like to see other trait lines brought up to its level.

Tools:

Traits that are fine:
Deployable turrets
Speedy kits
Power Wrench
Armor Mods
Adrenal implant

• Always Prepared: Terrible trait. You can’t use the bandages you drop, and they’re at best slightly helpful for people trying to res you. 25% damage boost when downed would be alright, but our downed ability barely scales with power in the first place. Needs replaced. 2s Protection on a10s CD when swapping to Med kit is miles better than this.
• Static Discharge: Great trait! The problem is that it only works with a few tool belt skills reliably, otherwise discharging where the camera is pointing. As our only real burst option, it needs fixed so that the discharge goes to our current target.
• Speedy Gadgets: 20% CD reduction is great, but it’s our only trait that affects gadgets and that makes it pretty lackluster. Increased gadget damage is a great way bring this trait up to speed.
• Kit Refinement: Very Clunky, a global 20s CD punishes you for using multiple kits. A 20s CD per kit would be far more reasonable without allowing it to get too strong.
  *Packaged stimulants: No real use for this in pvp or pve. If I’m using the medkit, it’s so I can heal up with the bandages while running away from a group of enemies. It’s a very niche trait that you could use to toss speed boosts and small heals out to someone else? Maybe changing it to “drop 1 bandage near yourself at 75% health. 10s CD” would be more reasonable?
• Scope: Almost all of our heavy hitting attacks are within the 100-400 range, Engineers aren’t very good snipers as none of our skills support that mode of play. Maybe reverse it so we gain 10% crit within 400 units of our target? That would suit the play style and allow for risk vs reward.
• Leg Mods: Combine with power shoes. Place a new trait in its place that buffs gadgets. Possibly something that gives them stats like signets or makes gadgets into stun breakers. Even just giving 3-4s of stability or condition removal on gadget use would be a huge improvement for engineers and would open up a ton of new builds for us.

The Tools trait line suffers from not knowing what it’s supposed to be. It seems like a dumping place for any extra traits that were thought of, and almost all of them don’t really have a place in pve or pvp. The minor traits are overall pretty good, and the stats it gives are great. The line needs to focus more on gadget use and damage dealing, and less on role playing niche builds.

Problems with the base Engineer:

Our main weapons aren’t that bad. The pistol #3, 4, and 5 skills are all great, and the rifle skills are all great. Our shield skills are the best in the game! Our pistol #1 skill is the worst! Worst power scaling, worst condition application, and it’s slow to boot. Pistol #2 just needs to group its shots more tightly and it’s fine.

We’re very reliant on kits because they offer 4 more skills over each of our other utilities. If any of the utilities were to become better, or if our main weapons became better, we wouldn’t rely on them so much.

Turrets need to be debugged. There are plenty of posts around concerning the issues with them, please take a look. We don’t need any more trait buffs for turrets, we need the turrets themselves fixed.

With a few notable exceptions, our skills have very poor power scaling and our grandmaster minor traits don’t make up for it at all. To compensate, almost all of our attacks are aoe in nature- making it very hard to block our damage. Unfortunately, that means almost all of our attacks get us killed by retaliation faster than we deal damage with them. Take the flamethrower for example, its auto attack deals damage over 2.5 seconds, but it deals less damage than any other classes autoattack does per second and each hit triggers retaliation. Even running a power build you might crit for 400 only to take 290 damage back in retaliation damage per target you hit, per tick. If you use it against a group and someone uses stand your ground you die before you even know what happened.

We have little to no access to stability and our stun breakers are on long CDs or are just flat out terrible skills. If we get caught, we go down. Fast. Giving better access to them would allow players to be something other than a glass build or a tank build.

Thank you, I hope you take a look!

+1 internet to you good sir. great ideas and well said. now to get the devs to read it…….

Gotta get other engineers to read it first, i doubt they’ll take a look at anything with less than 100 responses =/

I think a lot of engis agree with the kit refinement change. That or that beating in its heart is a grandmaster trying to claw its way out. Imagine if it gave also passive effects. Then as a grandmaster kits would be like signets? But that said even without they are very strong.

Egorum.9506:

Gotta get other engineers to read it first, i doubt they’ll take a look at anything with less than 100 responses =/

I do not grasp the reasoning for you to go out of your way to insult the community as a whole here. how do you suppose this will aid your goal?

Secondly, I do not understand why you would make a new thread for this topic, when we clearly have a thread on this very subject, mad very recently by a dev. So you know it has the devs eye.

So you know there is another dev created thread on this subject. You know they are paying attention to it. Yet you make another thread on the exact same topic for god only knows what reason. Then insult the engineer community with your comment because the do not pile on your thread instead of the devs. i don’t get it.

Acidic elixirs are fine? I mean this trait is useless in my point of view. The damage is more or less ~150 even with might stacks. Our elixirs are our access to special buffs, so we do not throw elixirs at our opponents. If you do, you remove a random buff and make 150 damage. This is never worth the >30sec cooldown. This trait does not work with elixir gun.

Autodefense bomb dispenser
for a 30 point trait not useful. It is useless against mesmer and ele. The effect is something like Cloaking Device but too expensive

Does someone use this?

coglin.1867:

I do not grasp the reasoning for you to go out of your way to insult the community as a whole here. how do you suppose this will aid your goal?

Secondly, I do not understand why you would make a new thread for this topic, when we clearly have a thread on this very subject, mad very recently by a dev. So you know it has the devs eye.

So you know there is another dev created thread on this subject. You know they are paying attention to it. Yet you make another thread on the exact same topic for god only knows what reason. Then insult the engineer community with your comment because the do not pile on your thread instead of the devs. i don’t get it.

Insulting the community? o.O i was referring to the devs not looking until 100 engis have responded lol. My ego isn’t THAT big!

The other thread is for the dec 10 patch trait adjustments, i wanted something a little more specific than that. If we don’t look at all the traits individually we won’t be able to form a collaborative opinion and solution for them to implement.

I don’t know about acidic elixirs, i don’t run HGH very often so i don’t know what you would do with the trait to make elixirs more offense capable. i could see elixir’s splash radius being increased to 280, and i could see the trait just becoming a ‘remove one boon from that guy who’s standing on top of you while you’re buffing’ kinda deal, but that’s about it really.

Autodefense bomb dispenser is actually pretty great. it’s a 4s blind field on a 30s CD, and it’s saved me i don’t know how many times. You can’t get ganked by anyone (barring berserker stance) if you have it. Glass classes that open on you in melee (eles, thieves, warriors, and guards) have their whole opening sequence shut out without you taking any damage. It works on mesmers too, stopping a significant amount of damage from izerker and some of the damage from the blurred frenzy/mind wrack combo. Added bonus, popping your shield’s blast finisher or rocket boots lets you get away from a group that tried to gank you in wvw.

Try running it as a roamer, it’s one of our best and most underutilized traits.