Guild Wars 2

So I’ve been messing around with classes and builds and I noticed something. With many of the builds, with an exception of a few, they are really well rounded classes. They can do great amounts of damage, heal, and have condition removal. Some classes just dominate in this regard, such as thiefs (with their stealth, damage, and condition removal combined with support skills) and mesmers (with their huge amount of stealth/clones and damage). I played them and found any build I choose I didn’t really have a hard weakness. Then I started looking at engineer builds more closely and many of them have hard weaknesses, and didn’t seem flexible at all compared to the current meta. Some may do awesome damage, but have no condition removal. Others may have condition removal but do little damage compared to the rest. It seems our builds are always on one side of the spectrum, either high dps low survivabliity/condition removal or high survivability/condition removal but low dps. I started play Mesmer in sPvP more often and i was just blown away on how…well how easy it is. Any build I choose I seemed to do amazing in and survived a lot, taking on 2+ people easily.

Does anyone else feel this way about it? If not can you give me some examples of builds that don’t have such hard counters? I’ve been trying to find a build that isn’t a bunker build but can still hold its own really well without relying to hard on teammates (so I can pug) like a mesmer build can (such as clone spams or confusion builds).

Thanks.

This question was posed to the devs in the last state of the game, they replied that they had two pages worth of notes for the engineer… then they started talking about the thumper turret…

I saw the thumper turret and I was quite please. The thing has quite a good range and just placing one on a sPvP point will dominate CC on it. With knockpack and its cripple. Unless I didn’t read something haha, and it seems quite poor.

The thumper turret is fine, but making it cripple won’t exactly fix the problems with our builds. That being, dedicating every rune/sigil/trait to boosting damage (and being the most defenseless glass cannon in game) or being a jack of all trades (and pretty bad at what counts).

In any case, I have noticed this problem with the engineer. Most people who make alts will notice this at some point, but if they enjoy the engineer they’ll still play it. My engineer is still my main despite all his faults, I just like him more than any other profession, but I don’t think he’s efficient or good at anything in particular. That’s what mesmer/thief/warrior/guardian/elementalist alts are for.

@Deified
You may be confused by expecting Engs to perform at the same raw level as other classes. Eng’s aren’t designed to do that, we’re simply not meant to be as strong as other classes. Instead, we’re meant to be masters of flexibility; we’re meant to be more able than any other class to adapt to whatever situations we encounter.

Part of the problem is that our major trait paths heavily define how we allocate our utility slots, and vica versa:

• Explosives: Grenades and Bombs
• Firearms: weapons and/or FT and EG
• Inventions: Turrets (though why bother atm?)
• Alchemy: Elixirs (or if you go to 20 FT and EG)
• Tools: Tool Kit

What’s more, we need to invest heavily in the relevant lines and trait choices to make our weapons and utilities effective, so our builds rarely have much in the way of spare points or unallocated traits. The result is that after making the core of an Eng build work, we have little if anything left to address its weaknesses.

TLDR: We do often end up with more options in play than other classes. But we pay a performance tax for the privilege. Try to compensate for that and you end up with the problems you observed.

Those two builds (Stealth Thief and Phantom Cloak Mesmer) do have hard weaknesses. Phantom Cloak’s weakness is (Venom) Stealth Thief and Stealth Thief’s weakness are all heavy aoe builds (mainly Engineers and (certain) Elementalist because of their innate design of aoe). By attempting to cover your weaknesses you lower your efficiency as a trade off, no exceptions.

If you took on two people at once, you’re build is not op, your opponents were just really bad or your build fits both of their heavy counters (1 venom thief would destory 2 phantom mesmers with ease). Every build has a counter. It’s about how well you abuse it that decides the outcome of a battle.

There are effective builds but never a build with no hard counter.

Zenguy.6421:

@Deified
You may be confused by expecting Engs to perform at the same raw level as other classes. Eng’s aren’t designed to do that, we’re simply not meant to be as strong as other classes. Instead, we’re meant to be masters of flexibility; we’re meant to be more able than any other class to adapt to whatever situations we encounter.

Part of the problem is that our major trait paths heavily define how we allocate our utility slots, and vica versa:

• Explosives: Grenades and Bombs
• Firearms: weapons and/or FT and EG
• Inventions: Turrets (though why bother atm?)
• Alchemy: Elixirs (or if you go to 20 FT and EG)
• Tools: Tool Kit

What’s more, we need to invest heavily in the relevant lines and trait choices to make our weapons and utilities effective, so our builds rarely have much in the way of spare points or unallocated traits. The result is that after making the core of an Eng build work, we have little if anything left to address its weaknesses.

TLDR: We do often end up with more options in play than other classes. But we pay a performance tax for the privilege. Try to compensate for that and you end up with the problems you observed.

I agree with what you said, but I’ve had other friends who claim how dumb is it that engineer’s trait sync so well together with their utilities and weapon choices, while their own classes’ traits is all over the place. The engineer might not be for you, if you don’t that type of traiting or playing style. IMO.

It really depends on the build and the player as well. It really takes a lot more concentration to play a non-stealth class.

JohnDied.3476:

The thumper turret is fine, but making it cripple won’t exactly fix the problems with our builds. That being, dedicating every rune/sigil/trait to boosting damage (and being the most defenseless glass cannon in game) or being a jack of all trades (and pretty bad at what counts).

In any case, I have noticed this problem with the engineer. Most people who make alts will notice this at some point, but if they enjoy the engineer they’ll still play it. My engineer is still my main despite all his faults, I just like him more than any other profession, but I don’t think he’s efficient or good at anything in particular. That’s what mesmer/thief/warrior/guardian/elementalist alts are for.

I believe they are the best at condition application.