Guild Wars 2

I keep hearing that the damage of the engineer weapons is intentionally designed to be lower.
I understand this is supposedly some sort of versatility tax.
What i don’t understand why the engineer is the only class to have such a thing.
My elementalist is easily as versatile if not more.
On top of that, to be truly effective with kits you need to spec and gear for these kits, making you less effective at using others – so surely that’s not the versatility this is about.
Not to mention that using kits will use up your utility slots.

So please, can someone explain to me what this is about? because i can’t wrap my head around it.

For all i know this might be a big lie or there might be another reason – so I’m hoping someone can clarify this.

Nope. The devs just thought it would be a good idea. This has been posted and talked about a lot. I would recommend checking out some older posts for better info.

It’s mentioned explicitly in the Class Balance Philosophy note attached to one of the December patches, I think, if you’d like a better look at it.

Jonathan Sharp:

The Engineer is a highly versatile class. While it doesn’t have the long range capabilities of the Ranger, or the melee capabilities of the Warrior or Guardian, they are comfortable at medium ranges in most fights. They have a lot of control, and use their boons to keep themselves (and allies) alive in a fight. They can use different kits based on the situation, but this extreme versatility comes at a cost in damage on their main hand weapons.

Source

I remember making a thread about it when it just came out, thinking the same thing. It made absolutely no kitten sense. We get kits, but at the cost of weapon swapping. The slots used are from utility and to make up our utility skills we get tool belt skills. While other classes have their class special as a bonus ours is made to cover up our weakness, its almost like having no class special mechanism at all.
So in the end I would say we don’t really have a mechanic that makes us unique, unless you are playing with 2+kits then we can say our mechanisms are worth it.

Then we still get a damage tax. I really want to ask whoever thought of this idea what the hell was he smoking.

That post by sharp makes me laugh so hard I need to cry a little. Or more cry from the fact that what he posted, makes absolutely no sense. MAYBE if the kits were all “good” we could not complain so much. But seriously, our kits are for the most part weaker than our mainhand rifle(if your talking DPS or damage wise) . Elixir gun? Half the damage. Grenades? Nerfed 30% because oh wow sigils now work on kits! Yeah, because that definitely warranted a 30% reduction. Absolute stupidity. Sigil of fire adds 12% more damage boost on a crit ( gotta be a good crit build). Anyways. Not to mention they just put this class together while they were getting drunk or something. This class had/has so much more potential for versatility, awesomeness ( go see sniper kit post haha) and balancing. But they ignore every engineer thread. Always. They are ignorant

Kits seem to take the power of the highest-powered pistols of a given level, which explains why they have a visibly lower attack power than Rifles. Still stupid, of course.

Most of the kits are fine.

Grenade kit is perfect exactly where it is. High damage and utility.

Elixir Gun is mostly fine. It’s great healing, but skills 2 and 3 need some work. It isn’t clear if they are working and swiftness during a battle is slightly weak.

Tool Kit is fantastic. The auto attack could use some work, but overall it does it’s job well. Utility. It even has a really powerful strike in there for when you jump in.

Flamethrower is the worst kit we have. It only has one thing going for it: the CC. If you are switching to flamethrower for damage, you’re doing engineer wrong.

Bomb Kit is fantastic for defense and condition spreading. Nothing to change here. Fantastic kit.

Med Kit is probably the best kit. Up there with grenade kit. Fantastic healing and the ability to prepare an area by placing bandages ahead of time is super useful.

The weapons aren’t really that low of damage, so I don’t know what they are talking about. The rifle is purely for spiking. Blunderbust is huge AoE damage and so is Jump shot. Overcharged shot is just plain bad kitten One of the better defense/offense skills.

Pistol Pistol is great condition damage. The poison skill could be a bit better however. Glue shot is just friggin money.

Pistol Shield is fantastic defense.

Anyone who complains that Engineers are total kitten is a terrible Engineer. If you say that there are some terrible things in there, you’re correct. It’s far from a terrible class. Far far from it. And damage wise, you can DEFINITELY get up there with 100nades.

Study the engineer. It’s worth it.

The “tax” is three fold. Two are intentional and one is just an artifact. Intentional is that the damage on our weapons is slightly lower than most. Intentional is that the #1 attack direct damage on our weapons (and ‘nades) is lowered. Un-intentional but what really makes the other two so hard to overcome is that we do not get precision and crit-damage in the same trait line (like Ele, Mesmer, Thief, Ranger; look familiar for high hitting classes? Ranger gets a tax for their pets though.) With 0 crit damage it takes 2 crit% to be 1% more of damage. At 50 crit damage it’s 1 for 1. Classes that can up their crit, and at the same time the stat that makes their crit that much more powerful, in the same trait line have a LOT more points to spend in other trait lines. We can make a hard hitting, high precision, high crit damage class but you are gonna be running a static discharge, rifle, (and I think best) turret+elixer build. Classes that do have prec/cd on the same trait line can get 2-3 builds out of it where we can get 1.

So yes there is a tax. Yes it’s a pain. Yes it’s dumb. Ele, Mes, Thief sacrifice something for damage (cooldown, hp, hp respectively). We sacrifice damage for something (“versatility”. I.e., no cooldown on kits). At the least we should have a couple of more weapons and prec/cd on the same trait line to let us try and overcome the handicap.

Lanny.6987:

The “tax” is three fold. Two are intentional and one is just an artifact. Intentional is that the damage on our weapons is slightly lower than most. Intentional is that the #1 attack direct damage on our weapons (and ‘nades) is lowered. Un-intentional but what really makes the other two so hard to overcome is that we do not get precision and crit-damage in the same trait line (like Ele, Mesmer, Thief, Ranger; look familiar for high hitting classes? Ranger gets a tax for their pets though.) With 0 crit damage it takes 2 crit% to be 1% more of damage. At 50 crit damage it’s 1 for 1. Classes that can up their crit, and at the same time the stat that makes their crit that much more powerful, in the same trait line have a LOT more points to spend in other trait lines. We can make a hard hitting, high precision, high crit damage class but you are gonna be running a static discharge, rifle, (and I think best) turret+elixer build. Classes that do have prec/cd on the same trait line can get 2-3 builds out of it where we can get 1.

So yes there is a tax. Yes it’s a pain. Yes it’s dumb. Ele, Mes, Thief sacrifice something for damage (cooldown, hp, hp respectively). We sacrifice damage for something (“versatility”. I.e., no cooldown on kits). At the least we should have a couple of more weapons and prec/cd on the same trait line to let us try and overcome the handicap.

Warriors defeat this argument, I’m sorry to say. (their crit and crit damage are in different trees and they’re the highest raw damage output — both burst and sustained — on a standing target)

I do agree the damage tax is utter BS.

If they expect us to use kits, they should have made the kits F1-F4.

They don’t, that means our weapons should do decent damage on their own so we can make builds that don’t utilize kits.

This is by far the largest hindrance to engis. Sacrificing utilities for our source of damage is just ridiculous.

One weapon set, purposefully nerfed, but we get another “weapon” to replace a utility. So we lose a utility for a one kittenty weapon and a weapon swap with no CD. LOL

I genuinely think that the devs never had PvP in mind when they made engis. We need a stun break, we need kits and we need condi cleanses or the build isn’t balanced enough. so we go 20 up alchemy for an elixir R or S stunbreak, elixir H for cleanses with 409 and then grab nades cuz they’re the only decent damage output. Grats, you have one utility to dick around with. Except turrets are useless and gadgets under performing.

Mif.3471:

Jonathan Sharp:

The Engineer is a highly versatile class. While it doesn’t have the long range capabilities of the Ranger, or the melee capabilities of the Warrior or Guardian, they are comfortable at medium ranges in most fights. They have a lot of control, and use their boons to keep themselves (and allies) alive in a fight. They can use different kits based on the situation, but this extreme versatility comes at a cost in damage on their main hand weapons.

Source

Is this guy for real? Has he played this class, like, ever? Ele is a highly versatile class, engineer is not. In fact if there’s one class that does everything engineer does but better, it would be an ele.

What are these boons he is talking about? 90% of engineer builds have next to no boons (swiftness only mostly), the only builds with boons are elixir ones. And even there uptime is kittenty for most boons (Elixir B has 10 sec duration 40 sec recharge).
“They have a lot of control, and use their boons to keep themselves (and allies) alive in a fight”…. is he talking about ele again? Dagger/dagger eles have 5-6 boons on constantly and bounce me around like a beach ball. Engineer has elixir B with its crappy duration/recharge and doesn’t even get any good protection or stability source.

I also dream of the day when I’ll be able to choose whatever 3 utilities I please.

ManCaptain.3154:

Mif.3471:

Jonathan Sharp:

The Engineer is a highly versatile class. While it doesn’t have the long range capabilities of the Ranger, or the melee capabilities of the Warrior or Guardian, they are comfortable at medium ranges in most fights. They have a lot of control, and use their boons to keep themselves (and allies) alive in a fight. They can use different kits based on the situation, but this extreme versatility comes at a cost in damage on their main hand weapons.

Source

Is this guy for real? Has he played this class, like, ever? Ele is a highly versatile class, engineer is not. In fact if there’s one class that does everything engineer does but better, it would be an ele.

What are these boons he is talking about? 90% of engineer builds have next to no boons (swiftness only mostly), the only builds with boons are elixir ones. And even there uptime is kittenty for most boons (Elixir B has 10 sec duration 40 sec recharge).
“They have a lot of control, and use their boons to keep themselves (and allies) alive in a fight”…. is he talking about ele again? Dagger/dagger eles have 5-6 boons on constantly and bounce me around like a beach ball. Engineer has elixir B with its crappy duration/recharge and doesn’t even get any good protection or stability source.

I also dream of the day when I’ll be able to choose whatever 3 utilities I please.

Well, Shapr is speaking almost what really is happening. But! We’d need to have all traits active to do as he says. We are able to have a lot of boons on almost constantly but thats with P/P condi build with elixirs, tho I’m not sure how we make our allies alive while doing that, since its DPS build.

And kits.. I love them, I use them, again.. BUT! I have no stunbreaker with them, so..

Mif.3471:

Jonathan Sharp:

The Engineer is a highly versatile class. While it doesn’t have the long range capabilities of the Ranger, or the melee capabilities of the Warrior or Guardian, they are comfortable at medium ranges in most fights. They have a lot of control, and use their boons to keep themselves (and allies) alive in a fight. They can use different kits based on the situation, but this extreme versatility comes at a cost in damage on their main hand weapons.

Source

pretty much sums it up OP. smh. can’t even begin…..

anyway maybe a few months from now they’ll begin serious testing because as you can see from my signature, they haven’t had a serious test of class balance since the game launched or they would immediately and without a doubt notice the same things the players have noticed.

The Gates Assassin.9827:

Most of the kits are fine.

Grenade kit is perfect exactly where it is. High damage and utility.

Elixir Gun is mostly fine. It’s great healing, but skills 2 and 3 need some work. It isn’t clear if they are working and swiftness during a battle is slightly weak.

Tool Kit is fantastic. The auto attack could use some work, but overall it does it’s job well. Utility. It even has a really powerful strike in there for when you jump in.

Flamethrower is the worst kit we have. It only has one thing going for it: the CC. If you are switching to flamethrower for damage, you’re doing engineer wrong.

Bomb Kit is fantastic for defense and condition spreading. Nothing to change here. Fantastic kit.

Med Kit is probably the best kit. Up there with grenade kit. Fantastic healing and the ability to prepare an area by placing bandages ahead of time is super useful.

The weapons aren’t really that low of damage, so I don’t know what they are talking about. The rifle is purely for spiking. Blunderbust is huge AoE damage and so is Jump shot. Overcharged shot is just plain bad kitten One of the better defense/offense skills.

Pistol Pistol is great condition damage. The poison skill could be a bit better however. Glue shot is just friggin money.

Pistol Shield is fantastic defense.

Anyone who complains that Engineers are total kitten is a terrible Engineer. If you say that there are some terrible things in there, you’re correct. It’s far from a terrible class. Far far from it. And damage wise, you can DEFINITELY get up there with 100nades.

Study the engineer. It’s worth it.

I agree with you mostly on all of this. The only things I can say is that bomb kit is trash. No use In WvW , and is spvp, any experienced spvp’er will, and does kick a bomb kit engineers kitten Defending nodes with bombs is horridly useless due to small range (since that’s all I can see them ever being used for ) other than that the tool belt skill has the only good part about the kit. Good cc for nodes. And as for damage, you Absolutey have to use that grenade build to maximize damage. That’s IF you hit them with your slow moving grenades. It’s a shame we are so restricted. Lastly, glue shot is the worst skill have ever seen. 1 second immobilize and 1 second cripple? Anet is purposely trolling.

I haven’t played a war so can’t say. I’d be very surprised though if the hardest hitting builds they have don’t take both trait lines. Plus they do have to sacrifice weapon versatility (like Engineers) and all those hit points to get those high damage number so it all works out in the end. See. That’s balance.

plasmacutter.2709:

Lanny.6987:

The “tax” is three fold. Two are intentional and one is just an artifact. Intentional is that the damage on our weapons is slightly lower than most. Intentional is that the #1 attack direct damage on our weapons (and ‘nades) is lowered. Un-intentional but what really makes the other two so hard to overcome is that we do not get precision and crit-damage in the same trait line (like Ele, Mesmer, Thief, Ranger; look familiar for high hitting classes? Ranger gets a tax for their pets though.) With 0 crit damage it takes 2 crit% to be 1% more of damage. At 50 crit damage it’s 1 for 1. Classes that can up their crit, and at the same time the stat that makes their crit that much more powerful, in the same trait line have a LOT more points to spend in other trait lines. We can make a hard hitting, high precision, high crit damage class but you are gonna be running a static discharge, rifle, (and I think best) turret+elixer build. Classes that do have prec/cd on the same trait line can get 2-3 builds out of it where we can get 1.

So yes there is a tax. Yes it’s a pain. Yes it’s dumb. Ele, Mes, Thief sacrifice something for damage (cooldown, hp, hp respectively). We sacrifice damage for something (“versatility”. I.e., no cooldown on kits). At the least we should have a couple of more weapons and prec/cd on the same trait line to let us try and overcome the handicap.

Warriors defeat this argument, I’m sorry to say. (their crit and crit damage are in different trees and they’re the highest raw damage output — both burst and sustained — on a standing target)

I do agree the damage tax is utter BS.

If they expect us to use kits, they should have made the kits F1-F4.

They don’t, that means our weapons should do decent damage on their own so we can make builds that don’t utilize kits.

Well thanks for all the answers.

I can’t say i agree with their reasoning but there also seems to be precious little that can be done about it.
I don’t think the engineer is a bad class by any means but things like this are really quite discouraging – to me at least.

Engineer is not made for the current meta at all. Same with Necros. Its why they are the rarest of all classes to see in WvW for example. There goes about 4 warriors, 4 thieves, 3 guardians, 2 rangers, 2 eles and 3 mesmers for every necro and engi in WvW, fair estimate methinks.

Engis can get good dmg if they sacrifice their versatility by going grenades… They are still for the most part only using the ‘nades after all.
And a few skills can hurt like hell… mostly engis are just speedbumps in WvW, like necros. 1v1 they can be pretty hard to take down though, a rifle engi totally stomped my warrior for one. Couldnt close with the engi on my terms, and Supply Crate is friggin’ win in small fights.

Personally still debating if I should continue lvling my engi or let it rot on the char screen… Because the last thing I want is another fully geared lvl 80 that feels useless for WvW compared to most other classes.

Ostricheggs.3742:

This is by far the largest hindrance to engis. Sacrificing utilities for our source of damage is just ridiculous.

One weapon set, purposefully nerfed, but we get another “weapon” to replace a utility. So we lose a utility for a one kittenty weapon and a weapon swap with no CD. LOL

I genuinely think that the devs never had PvP in mind when they made engis. We need a stun break, we need kits and we need condi cleanses or the build isn’t balanced enough. so we go 20 up alchemy for an elixir R or S stunbreak, elixir H for cleanses with 409 and then grab nades cuz they’re the only decent damage output. Grats, you have one utility to dick around with. Except turrets are useless and gadgets under performing.

Pretty much sums it up. I chose to circumvent the problem by PvPing with no stunbreaker. I know it’s less effective but I’d rather be an average PvPer playing the way I want than a slightly above average PvPer playing with nades, pull, and stunbreak.

Drachshyish.2319:

Personally still debating if I should continue lvling my engi or let it rot on the char screen… Because the last thing I want is another fully geared lvl 80 that feels useless for WvW compared to most other classes.

Stick to warriors and mesmers. Engineer is great fun but if you’re worried about efficiency (and gold spent getting different gear) then the engineer might not be what you’re looking for.

okay guys its simple change the words “the engineer is versatile” into “the engineer is adaptable”, makes a bit more sense to me when i say that, the reason being the build that i normally run can be used versus every other class and build why you ask, well its simple i change my tactics not my build to what i’m fighting

The Gates Assassin.9827:

Flamethrower is the worst kit we have. It only has one thing going for it: the CC. If you are switching to flamethrower for damage, you’re doing engineer wrong.

just want to make sure this gem doesn’t unchecked, because it is straight up wrong.

the FT is not the worst kit, it is just a kit that Gates Assassin seems to know nothing about.

nakoda.4213:

The Gates Assassin.9827:

Flamethrower is the worst kit we have. It only has one thing going for it: the CC. If you are switching to flamethrower for damage, you’re doing engineer wrong.

just want to make sure this gem doesn’t unchecked, because it is straight up wrong.

the FT is not the worst kit, it is just a kit that Gates Assassin seems to know nothing about.

It was a little too pessimistic, but not too far off. If you main flamethrower, you do so for the fast hits/AoE/might stacking, not because it hits hard. I’m not sure if it’s the “worst kit.” I use it because I find it to have good synergy with my build, but taken as an individual set of five skills it’s pretty unimpressive. Taken as an isolated set of five skills, each of the other kits could make a good case for being “better.”

Drachshyish.2319:

Engineer is not made for the current meta at all. Same with Necros. Its why they are the rarest of all classes to see in WvW for example. There goes about 4 warriors, 4 thieves, 3 guardians, 2 rangers, 2 eles and 3 mesmers for every necro and engi in WvW, fair estimate methinks.

I agree that they are definitely not for the current meta right now. I don’t always spvp but when I do, I only see mesmers and thieves for offense, and eles and guardians for defense (and sometimes warrs). I don’t think its a surprise that classes with stealth can do well in spvp for offense, and for defense, well eles and guardians currently have that covered. There really is no room for engies at the moment, nothing that really stands out.
Of course they are still usable but I feel that is how the current meta is right now.

nakoda.4213:

The Gates Assassin.9827:

Flamethrower is the worst kit we have. It only has one thing going for it: the CC. If you are switching to flamethrower for damage, you’re doing engineer wrong.

just want to make sure this gem doesn’t unchecked, because it is straight up wrong.

the FT is not the worst kit, it is just a kit that Gates Assassin seems to know nothing about.

I wouldnt say its all that far off. Flamethrower is dominantly a damage kit, but doesnt actually do that much damage.

Its a series of fast hits, Retaliation completely utterly destroys you for using a Flamethrower.
The “big” nuke is contrived and overly complicated to effectively use.
Napalm is essentially a fire-combofield on a looooong cooldown. A combofield your FT cannot even make any use of. And a melee-range blind, which has a niché use but again a massive cooldown for a rather limited purpose.

The whole FT build is designed and falls around stacking Might and Lifesteal-on-hit food.
The Engineer has much better damage builds, and even the best damage builds fall short of what other professions do. Says something about how far short FT falls.

In WvW i use it to hit stuff through walls, send a Blast into the enemy zerg where its bound to hurt a few people. And knockback, which is the only skill that does as advertised.

FT is a damage kit that discourages dodging (has you casting all the time) which I don’t like. But FT is useful mainly because gadgets suck so hard. Switching into flamethrower and doing an Airblast on 18 sec recharge is still much better than Hidden Ram, even if you don’t use any other skill in the kit. The toolbelt skill is also better (and condition cleans if you have refined kits).

PBR can also hit for 3-4k when properly traited and knocks the player down onto the floor whereas air blast only pushes them back.

I do feel it needs a much lower cooldown though.

I dodge all the time with my FT, for example when I screw up rotation on #3 and #2 and need to build distance to let the detonation do its thing.

I love how everyone’s arguments about why each kit may or may not be "better" than another is the same rhetoric y’all use to complain why other professions are better than engie, as if each kit makes us a different profession.

YES .. IT IS OBVIOUS that EACH KIT is better at SOME THING than they are at OTHER THINGS.

pro tip: that’s the whole point.

kek. you guys can be funny some times.