Guild Wars 2

It just occurred to me that the engineer may have once been labeled as juggernaut instead of engineer. When developing the professions the juggernaut class, a heavy profession, was scrapped because its role was too similar to the warriors. My theory is that the flamethrower and rifle skills come from it, as they are made to be close range, plus the flamethrower trait juggernaut was from…well the juggernaut. Plus we know that the engineer at one point was a heavy armor class. So does this all add up for you guys too?

Here is this link one more time to show what I’m talking about:
http://tap-repeatedly.com/2011/06/exclusive-interview-arenanets-jon-peters-and-jonathan-sharp/

I think many of the Engineers shortcomings, odd combinations and general vanilla weakness comes from being orginally planned and halfway balanced as a Heavy Armor class.
Your theory is a good one, I’m guessing Rifle, FT, Turrets+TK were all part of the orginal Heavy type Engineer.
I think more than likely when Grenades were added to the mix thats when the changes happened. If we were Heavy with 1500 range AoE, the Grenades would really have to suck, to increase/keep the effectiveness they ultimately lowered our armor.

If Grenades had originally been balanced for a Heavy class they would have been much weaker to start off with, much like the FT, Turrets and TK were/are.

Engineer is a mid-ranged class and was made for mid-range

In fact, we couldn’t hit 1500 range at one time. Our furthest ranged weapon was Rifle traited for 1200 range. Grenades went as far as 900 range only (600 normal, 900 traited).

Our Rifle does it’s best damage up close, but that fact rings true for nearly every profession. Since we we’re designed with only 3 weapon combinations total, they needed all three to be rewarding when shifted into the close combat quarters. Thus why Blowtorch, Jump Shot, and Blunderbuss are the way they are.

The difference between medium armor and heavy armor is 147 toughness total at exotic quality @ level 80. From a balance perspective, I doubt that had any effect on class design.

your theory pleases me, since i use rifle, ft, net turret, and rocket boots.

I think the Engineer was a last minute mash-up of the, joke class, Commando and an Alchemist.

Toughness isnt the only factor between Armor classes, at some point all the traits and skills being developed for the Engineer were being done with the thought of being a tankier class, which would also have so be a separate or hybrid role from Warrior and Gaurdian.

So we were gonna be the control Heavy.
Like how FT was meant to be a stability granting CC machince that pulled and pushed ppl around.

I don’t know if it really had anything to do witht the way the profession was designed there is just alot of things I see that seem like they are designed counter being heavy and slow rather than assist someone with the same armour weight as dancing thieves.

And since the easiest trade of for increasing/decreasing damage is increasing/decreasing defense I kinda figured alot of our mediocre damage on certain skills is leftover from the Heavy phase.

But I should also say that Engineer is the best profession by far and I can’t even manage to play my alts for very long before logging-out to character selection.
Bleh, I switch weapons and then I am stuck with that weapon for like 10 secs, LAMENESS.

From the text of the interview, I don’t think there’s any connection between the juggernaut and the engineer. While both were at one point heavy armoured professions, the juggernaut is described as being very warrior-like, and there is a clear separation between where they talked about the juggernaut and where they talked about the engineer.

While it’s certainly tempting to suspect that some of the current internal balance issues with the engineer are the result of an armour switch, one thing that isn’t really clear from this interview alone is that while they had a lot of discussion about professions, most of it was in the brainstorming phase. It was revealed in 2009 that there were going to be eight professions and, more, I’m pretty sure it was revealed in the same year that there were 2 heavy, 3 medium, and 3 light armoured professions. So there’s been at least three years between engineer becoming medium armoured and release, during which the professions that had been revealed (and those were the ones that were relatively close to being finished) received massive overhauls in their skill lineups, let alone the numbers. So I doubt that any of the current internal balancing issues are a result of hangovers from the engineer being a heavily armoured profession.

Personally, I lay the blame on the Grenadier trait. No other weapon in the game has a trait that increases its effectiveness – not just straight damage, but everything - by 50%, and trying to make the kit useful without the trait without being overpowered with the trait is just trying to do too much. Making it throw two grenades a throw by default helped by cutting the trait down from being a 100% increase, but also had the effect of multiplying the benefit the kit gets from on-hit and on-crit procs. Personally, I think they need to bite the bullet and cut grenades back down to being a single grenade thrown regardless of the trait, but I have a feeling that it’s going to end up being another permasin-type situation.

Pinning the blame on 1 single trait that affects 1 single kit… Seems a bit simple.

Rather, they never really managed to finish the Engineer profession, flesh out the ideas and they didnt want to delay the game release to get it done properly. Grenadier isnt the only example of a bad trait, or poor design.

The very idea that kits are utility skills is a nightmare in and of itself. Balancing kits that contain 5 skills with utility skills that do 1? But, we dont have weaponswaps or even a lot of actual weapons. So kits need to make up for that….

And where Grenadier is perhaps the most extreme example, the FT that picks up perma 7 stacks of Might aswell as a bunch of Toughness is equally bad. These are massive stats, that apparently can be added to these kits because their baseline is to weak.