Guild Wars 2

I sat down and spent some time going over the kits and their abilities. Our kits are gimmicky and the traits they give us seem like they don’t work well with these kits. This led me to an idea.

What if there were Grandmaster traits that let Engineers specialize in a certain kit?

I have put together ideas for improved kits with more powerful skills that are available only an engineer if he/she currently has that kit’s respective Grandmaster trait active.

I will post the improved kit skills with a traited kit name beside the original name. The traited name will take the place of the kit name if you have the Grandmaster trait currently active. For all purposes, the kit skills’ activation time and CD time do not change.

Flamethrower: (Traited: Roaring Flamethrower)

1. Building Flame Jet: Spray fire in a cone pattern while on the move, burning enemies on the final attack. Every 3rd (edited up from 5th) consecutive hit automatically does double damage (+crit damage). The consecutive hit must be within the same Jet; any miss or interruption resets the counter.

2. Burn Notice: Fire a napalm ball that rolls through foes and explodes. Crits by Flame Blast have a 30% chance to inflict 2s burning on enemies. This can stack duration with the Adept Explosives trait Incendiary Powder.

3. Steam Blast: Sear and push back foes and projectiles with a hot steam blast (Damage and pushback)

4. Fanning the Flames Napalm, in addition to the normal effects, also affects Flame Jet, burning foes for an additional 0.2 second for every hit of Flame Jet while Flame Jet passes through Napalm’s combo field.

5. Superheated Steam Vent: Vent superheated steam from your FT backpack, searing and blinding enemies. (Damage and blind AOE)

Elixir Gun: (Traited: Focused Elixir Gun)

1. Potent Tranquilizer Darts: Fire a dart that bleeds and weakens foes. Tranquilizer darts have a 10% chance to stun enemy for 2 seconds. This effect cannot happen more than once every 10 seconds.

2. Sustained Elixir F: Fire a bouncing glob of Elixir F that cripples foes and grants swiftness to you and allies. Elixir F has a 25% cumulative chance (up to 100% chance on last hit) per bounce to double cripple or swiftness duration.

3. Powerful Fumigate: (2 ¼ s) Spray a cone of elixir fumes, inflicting poison and vulnerability to foes and curing conditions on allies with every strike. Fumigate has a 10% chance per strike to remove two conditions or apply two stacks of vulnerability.

4. Sticky Acid Bomb: Leap backward, spraying an acidic elixir on the ground that damages and cripples foes for 1 second

5. Heightened Super Elixir: Launch an elixir orb, healing allies on impact and creating an area of continual healing. (Impact heal improved by 100% (healing for twice as much as normal Super Elixir). Pulse heal stays the same.)

Tool Kit (Traited Name: Industrial Tool Kit)

1. a. Improved Smack: Smack your foes. Repair Turrets. For every consecutive hit beyond the first that repairs a turret, healing doubles additively (x2, x3, x4, up to x5)

c. Stunning Thwack: Thwack your foes with a 30% chance on crit to stun an enemy for 2 seconds. This cannot occur more than once every 10 seconds.

2. Box of Large Nails: Scatter nails that bleed, cripple, and sometimes stop foes in their tracks. 50% chance that crippled foes will be immobilized for 2s.

3. Industrial Grade Pry Bar (1s) Confuse your foe thoroughly by smacking them with a very solid pry bar (6 stacks of confusion instead of 3)

4. Gear Shield: Block Attacks. (No improvement idea here yet.)

5. Powerful Magnet: Pull your target and all of your turrets to you. This also affects turrets placed out by your Supply Kit

These are ideas. I haven’t figured out where these traits could go, but I have ideas: FT possibly with Firearms; EG with Elixirs; Tool Kit with Tools or Inventions.

We do need some help on these. The Flamethrower flame legion guys have the #5 skill that we needed to have just before the launch it was changed. They had something called backdraft that did alot of damage and pulled the enemy to us. That would have been so much more useful imo. because it would have kept the enemy off guard and knocked over, so much more effective then a 1 second blind that’s gone before we can do anything. I suggest they change that Smoke Vent to the Black Powder the thieves get to use so it can be useful and actually cause multiple blinds instead of one.

What we really need is an increase in the damage on conditions they nerfed them for pvp but pve has been suffering ever since. I do agree tho that weak toolbelt ability needs an adjustment because our crits already cause burnng when we are specced for this type of weapon.

The conditions all need to be revamped on the traits. Crits should cause poison, crits should cause burning (and that 2 second thing needs to be removed) and the use of rifle or pistol needs to cause poison instead of that “chance on being hit” so that the poison can build to levels it needs to be to be effective.

Our damage is nerfed and until they fixit nothing will work well we can change kits all day.

Poison and bleeding are at +1 +2 they need to be double that to even come close to what bursters do until that’s done there will always be an imbalance.

I agree that Smoke Vent needs some improvement. I would love for it to have a larger radius and/or a longer duration. This is before my mentioned traited ideas would come into effect.

Our Tranquilizer Darts should at least get a double bleed instead of being the same bleed as pistols.

I actually wonder what’s going through the heads of the devs who are dealing with the engineer problems.

This is really interesting and kitten would it be amazing if they implemented this. I’m a FT junkie (for no other reason than because, duh, it’s a flamethrower) and I’m salivating at what this would do for me lol. Awesome post! Love your signature btw lol

I like the Roaring Flamethrower but sadly it would be for naught unless it was combined with the existing Juggernaut trait. Even with your buffs, the Flamethrower is still not competing with the Rifle damage-wise and losing Juggernaut when focusing on Flamethrower for the sake of more diverse attacks would be very painful.

The Elixir Gun would be fine if ANet wised up and let the previous “bug” with Super Elixir return so that the healing can actually mitigate the huge damage that end-game sends your way (both in PvP and dungeons). I have a hard time thinking the utility on the 2-4 skills can be improved without making it too strong. Fumigate’s condition remover makes it extremely useful in the hands on an Engineer who knows how to spray it around right and Elixir F and Acid Bomb are already pretty good at what they do. Doubling what Elixir F can do and adding a Stun to Tranquilizer Dart so that your enemy is stunned 10% of the time seems more than a bit overboard. With Thwack I can see because it takes a full second to pull off, it’s at melee-range, and at the end of a combo. Tranquilizer Dart however is none of these things.

And as usual, nobody has any idea what to do with Bombs.

My thoughts on kits:

Flamethower- flame jet needs more damage (at least 50%), flame blast needs to be self detonated, vent smoke needs to make a small smoke field.

Toolkit- twack needs a shorter animation speed (1/2 or 3/4).

Traits need some consolidation.

If Engineer’s Wrench auto-attack acts just like the Warrior’s Mace, then it’s in line with the Mace.

I really haven’t paid attention to the other melee weapon combos, but it seems like the warrior’s mace has the same activation time and delivers the same damage. Only difference is that you can stack 6 seconds of vulnerability x 2 with the first two strikes. It’s not much, but you can stack 6 of them (or more) if you keep attacking.

I’d rather have this attack than the Warrior’s 3-strike combo.

I think all Flamethrower needs is a more solid way to inflict burning and a bit of rethinking. Flame Jet and Napalm inflict burning but… it’s not much as you’d expect from a FLAMETHROWER. Guardians have more solid ways of inflicting burning than our Flamethrower! Napalm’s one second burn requires whatever you’re burning to STAND STILL in the excessively tiny rectangle (as a note, it’s the only field that’s shaped like that that requires the target to stand still in it). Flame Jet has about half its damage in the final hit BUT due to the Flamethrower’s infamous inaccuracy the last hit is never guaranteed to hit which results in you losing half your damage. I think a better way would be to have Flame Jet have an internal counter that would inflict burning with every 5 hits (meaning twice per full blast). It would increase the damage by a decent amount (I think enough to save the Flamethrower from the subpar damage bin) and missing that as-of-now extremely important last hit would be far less punishing. With Napalm it could be shaped and act far more like the Elementalist’s Ring of Fire than the current field and it would be so much more effective. Also complaints about Flame Blast being very mediocre for our 2 skill (where as most weapons get that as their spike skill, Flame Burst isn’t any better than Flame Jet, it just has more range) and Vent Smoke being nearly useless (blind isn’t that great if it’s not repeatable in a consistent fashion AKA not once at melee range every 20 seconds). So we have Flamethrower’s most useful for… Air Blast?

How about that, Flamethrower Engineer is just like the Pyro.

Sporadicus.1028:

If Engineer’s Wrench auto-attack acts just like the Warrior’s Mace, then it’s in line with the Mace.

I really haven’t paid attention to the other melee weapon combos, but it seems like the warrior’s mace has the same activation time and delivers the same damage. Only difference is that you can stack 6 seconds of vulnerability x 2 with the first two strikes. It’s not much, but you can stack 6 of them (or more) if you keep attacking.

I’d rather have this attack than the Warrior’s 3-strike combo.

Indeed, all the maces along with the Engineer Wrench have the same animations and execution timing. Warriors and Guardians who use the Mace have to deal with the same 1 second pause for the third hit. They all have a hit and a half in damage but the Engineer lacks compensation for last hit. The Warrior inflicts 5 seconds of Weakness and the Guardian does a small AoE heal but the Engineer just gets a big hit (less than Warrior though). Even more odd is the first and second hits inflict vulnerability but the third doesn’t… I find it very peculiar.

Responding to GoZero’s post:

I agree the actual FT needs to be buffed. Smoke vent would be more helpful if its CD were reduced by at least 5 seconds. But we also need the radius increased. If they fix #2’s obstruction problem, then it will be much better.

On the subject of the Wrench #1, it applies Vulnerability on the first two swings, which (if you keep attacking) can increase your damage by 6%. The other mace attacks do nothing on their first and second swings. I’m not saying this is enough, but our wrench does have an effect when you attack with it.

What we need is traits to dont specialize one kit or weapon, but affect several or all. Its these hyper-specialized super traits that sap any versatility out of this profession.

For example:
Elixir Infused Bombs -> Elixir Infusion: Gain 3 stacks of might when using the FT ever second, lasts for 1 second. so its a boon just for when you use the FT.
Also, gain 1sec of regeneration (refresh every second) and clear 1 condition every 7seconds with the Elixirgun aswell .
Bombs heal allies.

Now you can use three different kits with this trait and benefit from it. They dont stack, but they do offer use to 3 different kits. Giving the player much wider choice in what to pick and play with. Just one example.

Part of the reason for Traits is to specialize yourself in a certain thing. And in GW2 it’s much cheaper to shift your traits around than in any other game. When out of combat, you can simply switch major traits.

The way GW2 has it now, it already tries to group some kit traits together traits together. Bombs and grenades (explosives), EG and FT, pistol/rifle, and . . .well, tool kit is by itself. If they continue to make traits like that, then the engineer is sure to fail.

What the engineer needs is actually a way to make his kits shine. These GM trait ideas I’ve offered are designed to do just that. If put 30 points in two different lines, then you can shift to two kit specializations on the fly.

I’m still waiting for ideas for bombs and grenades.

Flamethrower
I did have one idea for flamethrower, and that would be to make air blast a 2s channeled skill with a narrower width. This would accomplish two things:

• It could still be swept in an arc for an aoe knockback
• It could be directed at a ranged attacker for channeled projectile reflection

A trait might then allow air-blast to combo with fire fields (e.g. FT #4) like a blowtorch, burning foes it hits.

Elixir Gun
Just one suggestion here—to make acid bomb an actual leap finisher, like a mesmer’s phase retreat. This shouldn’t even need a trait.

Grenades
In a way, the grenadier trait is already what you’re looking for. I could see a trait to improve explosion radius or travel time, to make grenades more reliable. A trait for freeze grenade to leave behind a frost field would also be very interesting.

Bombs
The auto-defense bomb dispenser trait (GM explosives) could probably be improved to allow smoke bomb to be dropped manually while stunned, or, even better, for it to break stuns altogether. A similar idea could be applied to other kits as well.

Leo.7942:

Flamethrower
Bombs
The auto-defense bomb dispenser trait (GM explosives) could probably be improved to allow smoke bomb to be dropped manually while stunned, or, even better, for it to break stuns altogether. A similar idea could be applied to other kits as well.

This would make my day. As a kit engineer (3 kits no utilities :/) I would love for a stunbreaker to be in bomb kit (or in elixir gun, just replace the useless fumigate). As it stands I consider bomb kit to be one of the better thought out kits, even if that resulted in it getting nerfed. If a dev ever reads this forum this post is what he needs to get ideas from.