Guild Wars 2

I stopped playing right about the time when 100Nades build was just found, and they had just patched some stuff to fix Weapon Kit damage scaling with other stuff or something.

I’m thinking about getting back into things. Has Engie changed for the better? For worse? At all?

Kit refinement has been our biggest change. It used to be a good source of condition removal (and 100nades, of course) but now it’s neither. That’s the biggest change engineers have seen in the last few months.

There have been a lot of positive changes, too: turrets have been buffed a bit, super elixir scales better with healing power (although you can’t get a second one from kit refinement any more). My personal favorite, evasive powder keg is now not bugged when explosives trait III is selected. Okay, just kidding, that one’s not noticeable.

Giver’s weapons have been fixed so for condition builds, +100% condition duration is now pretty easy to achieve for WvW. For tournaments, not much else has changed except that people have discovered taking 3 elixirs, HGH, grenades, rabid amulet, and as much might duration you can possibly get makes you good at carpet bombing capture points.

All the weapons got a new 8-bit inspired skin coined “Super [insert weapon name]”

Well except Rifles and Pistols.

Why 4 you hate Engies Anet?

FT got a little better but still needs work, 100nades got nerfed into oblivion because of some Photoshopped image with imaginary numbers, KR went the way of the RNG with hidden global cooldowns and that’s about it. Oh, and turrets got buffed but still break when a stiff breeze hits them and are imo still not viable to waste a utility slot on.

Did I miss anything?

Sadly, engineer has been nerfed multiple times since you last played, 100nades is impossible now, for one thing. It appears that we are supposed to play elixir-users and nothing else.

In the last two patches (26 Feb, 26 Mar) ANet fixed a range of Eng bugs and delivered a range of buffs to Flamethrower, Elixir Gun, Turrets and Elixirs. They als nerfed 100nades and Kit Refinement out of existence.

Who benefited significantly?

• Elixir/condition builds (giver’s weapons now work and RNG on elixirs reduced)
• Toolkit builds in PvP/WvW (Pry Bar stacks more confusion)
• Flamethrower builds (more damage, less misses)

Who lost out significantly:

• Kit Refinement builds (major reduction to survivability; replacement KR trait is widely considered worthless)

Buffs that have had little impact:

• Elixir Gun
• Turrets

What’s happened: Elixir users are happy; 100nades users no longer exist; Flamethrower Engs more common in PvE; the few Elixir Gun and Turret users liked it but their numbers haven’t increased significantly; major migration from other Eng builds to elixirs/HGH/conditions.

Overall the patch turned Engs into an elixir based condition class with a common play style. If that’s what you like, the patch was great. If not, other Eng builds can be made to work, but you’ll have to work very hard to achieve that as 100nades was deleted and all the popular but only marginally effective KR based kit builds were heavily nerfed.