Guild Wars 2

Grenade Kit: it automatically weapon-swaps itself out. Does this mean it runs on a timer? If there IS a timer, why isn’t it listed in the skill info upon mouse-over? If there is NOT a timer, why does it automatically swap without warning?

Maybe Engineers that keep pistols equipped don’t mind as much, but I happen to keep a rifle equipped. When I’m sitting up on a perch, nice and safe, lobbing grenades at my enemies, it’s NOT VERY COOL when my grenade kit swaps itself out to my rifle without my permission. If I don’t catch it in time, (and I normally don’t,) then I end up lobbing MYSELF into the field of my enemies instead of a lobbing my poison grenades, since both the “Jump Shot” and “Poison Grenade” abilities share the same hotkey.

Is this a bug? Is this working as intended? Because right now, the only solution I can think of is to unequip my rifle. I don’t know if this is a concession I’m willing to make. I mean, c’mon, the Engineer player base is ALREADY small compared to other classes, and those of us who remain loyal to grenades since their damage reduction are a dying breed. One less annoyance screwing us over wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Pretty sure it’s a bug. No other Engie kit times out.

I feel your pain though. I wound up just re-equipping the kit every time I’m out of combat. It’s an annoying workaround, but doing whatever works right now is important for Engies.

EDIT: My theory is that Engineer Kits were originally planned to be like Elementalist conjures, with limited charges and all that. So they just copy/pasta’ed the code to serve as a base for all of our kits. With heavy editing to make kits work the way they do, it’s possible residual conjure code is still in there, like how Conjures only last for a certain period of time, regardless of remaining charges.

EDIT ALSO: To anyone that says “Oh, great, the programmers are lazy, that’s why Engineers are so horrible.” That’s not quite it. Copy/Pasta is a common occurrence in any game development. It saves entire DAYS of work. While it is ultimately lazier than writing all new code, it’s also a lot more efficient, which is much more important when you’re a code monkey with managers telling you to hurry up, deadlines to meet, and a billion other things to do simultaneously.

Maybe you’re right, and I’m not necessarily opposed to code copy/pasting at the beginning, but the game has been launched for months now. How hard of a coding job is it to make kit unequipping manual instead of automatic? I mean, I’m no coder so feel free to actually tell me.

…albeit I’ve only got eng up to 30ish, I’ve never seen it drop by itself (save when I decided I needed a face full of dirt). How long does it take for it to swap out?

it’s random occurence for me.

Grenades swap out by themselves, and med kit never swaps back even if you mash the button (not in pve or WvW)…

Great work, and not a priority to fix at all it seems.

Didn’t use rifle much since last patch. Could be that something got kittenedup in last patch.
What I experienced more than once since last patch though is sometimes when I want to unequip, lets say the TK to get my main weapon up, I end up on my Medkit and can’t seem to get out of it for some seconds no matter what.
Up until now, I blamed my mousebuttons for this, but now you mentioned a GK oddity, it is possible the culprit isn’t my mouse.

Since this is rare and as far as I can tell, if it happens, it happens exclusively in or during combat, I can’t really verify or reproduce this.
Maybe we are on to something here…

Now this being said, the Thief has the Steal skill which shouldn’t remove the item from the Thiefs target, but copy the stolen skill to the thiefs hands.
Is there maybe a bug with Steal? Any Thieves around?

@kasandaro, are you asking how long the timer lasts, or how long it takes to press the swap key manually?

Swapping manually doesn’t take long. I could argue that in PvP every nanosecond, and thus every keystroke, counts towards victory, but the truth is I don’t really mind the time it takes to hit the key. My beef has to do with WHEN the keystroke is typically called for, which in my case is usually too late: after I’ve launched myself away from safety and into danger. Positioning is worth a lot in battle, and often hard to recover after a kit-swapping snafu.

As for how long the kit lasts before it unequips itself, I couldn’t tell you; I’ve never timed it. I’d like to say maybe 4 minutes?

@Pannonica, I don’t believe any kit swapping has to do with any Thief abilities. I’ve seen my Grenade Kit unequip itself while I was in town, doing non-combat chores like selling and banking.

Wow, just wow… how much (random) Kitten is in our profession.

I think it’s about 4-5minutes, I’ve only noticing it happening when idle, during combat I actually swap in and out a lot. At first I thought this was a feature of all kits but yeah I am noticing it is only doing it with grenades. :/

Vallatus.6490:

@kasandaro, are you asking how long the timer lasts, or how long it takes to press the swap key manually?

As for how long the kit lasts before it unequips itself, I couldn’t tell you; I’ve never timed it. I’d like to say maybe 4 minutes?

That one. And weird. And depressing that we don’t have an unbugged kit. I knew MK was screwed up, in that you couldn’t hit 6 again to unequip, and everyone knows about Flamethrower’s LoS issues. (Makes me wonder what the issue lurking in TK is.)

I guess I’m just not in GK long enough to notice – I tend to flip back to shotgun(1) a lot if things get close.

(1) The way it acts, I refuse to call that thing a ‘rifle’.

Bug reported this in beta two. Fixing engineer bugs just isn’t a priority for Anet.

How do I always manage to pick the class that is the lowest priority in every game I play?

/headdesk

Vallatus.6490:

How do I always manage to pick the class that is the lowest priority in every game I play?

/headdesk

Priority is about equal. People are just pissy about a nerf, but honestly, we get as much attention as other professions. It’s just we have more bugs than others, but ANet can’t just work on us or else the others will complain.

Engineer had more variety of viable builds at launch.

kasandaro.8124:

That one. And weird. And depressing that we don’t have an unbugged kit. I knew MK was screwed up, in that you couldn’t hit 6 again to unequip, and everyone knows about Flamethrower’s LoS issues. (Makes me wonder what the issue lurking in TK is.)

TK’s Magnet doesn’t always pull the target to you. They either go:
1. Halfway to you
2. Appear to come to you and then port back to the start location while knocked down
3. Appear to come to you and then port back to the start location while knocked down but once they get up and move; they are actually where they were supposed to be. [usually ending up behind you if you try to run closer to them]
Can’t be a lag issue due to the fact that this only happens on the skill which is a pull. Doesn’t have weird things like this happening on our knockbacks.

TK’s Magnet also most of the time only makes Dolyaks (WvWvW supply Dolyaks) ‘stumble’ a bit, i.e. not pulling them at all.
Side note: it would be great if we could cancel the ability and only have a short cooldown of a few seconds once it is cancelled.
One can dream…

Pannonica.5378:

TK’s Magnet also most of the time only makes Dolyaks (WvWvW supply Dolyaks) ‘stumble’ a bit, i.e. not pulling them at all.

That’s probably intentional since it’s a long walk between bases, and yanking dolyaks around would probably slow things down by a huge amount.

Wasdclick.1764:

Pannonica.5378:

TK’s Magnet also most of the time only makes Dolyaks (WvWvW supply Dolyaks) ‘stumble’ a bit, i.e. not pulling them at all.

That’s probably intentional since it’s a long walk between bases, and yanking dolyaks around would probably slow things down by a huge amount.

weird reasoning.
I only pull dolyaks to kill them, not to ‘slow things down’.