Guild Wars 2

The Engineer is meant to swap kits as their playstyle, if they choose. It is why the Engineer is restricted to 1 weapon set after all.

And, the Engineer can choose a variety of traits to compliment their multi-Kit playstyle. There is no “must have” trait build.

But let’s be honest and face it…. certain traits are weighted far more heavily than others. There are only so many “key” traits that have synergy with others.

With the new “Refinement Kit” having a 20 second cooldown on ALL kits, this limits the trait to single Kit users, and limits the usefulness of the trait. The trait is placed in dead water.

By having anymore than 1 kit, there is little to no control over the random effect going off. It would be wasted and in no way helpful.

Engineers have mixed feelings about which of the new effects are better or worse, but one thing stands out, most Engineers seem to like the new Bomb Kit effect (Magnetic Bomb) and Healing Kit effect (Magnetic Aura), but hate the cooldown affecting every kit equally, hate the long cooldown in association with the short durations, and hate the limitations of when they’d now use Kit Refinement (which used to be a key trait in builds) over another given Trait (if at all).

Glue Trail vs Super Elixir is a debatable topic. I personally think Glue Trail should be placed somewhere else, while some love it. Yes, Engineers can use Glue Trail to maneuver foes to stay on top of Acid Bomb longer, but it is not reliable. The hidden 20 sec CD is a major factor, as is not accidentally wasting the effect when swapping between kits. Setting up the combo when combat first starts is the only reliable time. Or just mashing the Kit over and over while running away. Any other chance to combo with other abilities requires not having other kits, not using those kits, or carefully watching a hidden cooldown in the middle of combat. It is not user friendly nor allows the player to watch the game, but instead watch our bars to “match-up” with a similar cooldown.

But more importantly, Engineers gain another movement control ability with Glue Trail (why? Engineers have plenty already) and lose a support skill to heal. Supportive play in PvE takes another hit and a backseat spot to the “everyone for themselves” mentality. Magi, Cleric, and Apothecary stats are made even more trivial as options. We already have large groups demanding Beserkers only stats, or they don’t want you. And this leads more people to adopt that mentality too, since they see that as what “everyone else is doing”. Check the LFGGW2 website or /map chat as examples.

As a class able to do Healing Support, the Engineer has the least amount of heals already, even when they try to build around it. The Guardian and Elementalist for instance are able to do damage while using some of their Healing Support, but the Engineer must decide to do Support at the cost of anything else. Med Kits being dropped is a dedicated choice. Firing a Super Elixir is a dedicated choice. And the Engineer lost one of it’s key options for players that built around that choice.

Changes looks nice on paper but in reality? KR is death There are better traits now.

Biggest hit is med kit tho, magnetic aura is great but the kit has heals, condition removal, swiftness and fury, not to mention people love to spam it for speedy kits. Also it’s a strong heal, short cool down ( that can be shorter and recharge when you hit 25% ) in other words, this skill is awesome and you’re going to go in it all the time… so KR will rarely trigger with any other kit..

people go on it every 20s for the fury, and swiftness.. and before getting to fights, so how’s this gonna work out if they any other kits ?

KR is now totaly of kit swaping idea

google.3709:

Biggest hit is med kit tho, magnetic aura is great but the kit has heals, condition removal, swiftness and fury, not to mention people love to spam it for speedy kits. Also it’s a strong heal, short cool down ( that can be shorter and recharge when you hit 25% ) in other words, this skill is awesome and you’re going to go in it all the time… so KR will rarely trigger with any other kit..

people go on it every 20s for the fury, and swiftness.. and before getting to fights, so how’s this gonna work out if they any other kits ?

Basically, you have to “prime” your KR by randomly swapping to a kit for no reason in the middle of nowhere, a count down the timer in your head. Then you need to pop you stim before the timer is up, and then mid fight you can swap back to it and get your magnetic aura up.

How this was ever a good idea, I don’t know. It effectively becomes another case of RNG as we just have to hope that the situation aligns properly with our KR abilities.

I don’t really mind the changes they made to the abilities themselves even though I use the elixir gun profusely. Most of the abilities required a change (i.e. medkit), although the mine from the grenade kit is an odd choice… maybe they feel this is a better way for the mine-type skills to be used since they’re generally not used at all.

As far as I’m concerned, the only real issue with this trait is the global CD. If they just had individual 20 second CDs, it would be much better. Yeah, you can take 4 kits and get off 4 free abilities in a row, but so what? Not only have you locked yourself into a specific utility configuration without regard to any synergy between the kits, you’re probably not doing any useful work during all that swapping anyways.

Even if the global CD was reduced to like 3-5 seconds with 20 second individual cooldowns, that would probably be just fine as well. Ele attunements are handled that way. That way, you can’t just pop off a handful of free abilities in a few seconds, but you also don’t end up in this annoying situation where you’re basically shooting yourself in the foot for swapping kits. You can swap to a kit, use its abilities for about 3-5 seconds, then swap out the next one for its KR and abilities, and so forth.

I could maybe see them wanting to avoid a case where you use something like magnetic aura and super speed to get away from things (because we know how annoyed people would get if an engg could escape like an ele or theif), but the duration on the abilities is so short that it doesn’t warrant a 20 second global CD.

This topic has some valid points, but I don’t buy the argument that the hit to KR’s Elixir Gun ability means that supportive play is taking a hit, not for a second.

Why don’t you take a gander outside of KR for a moment, and see that Super Elixir got a tremendous buff?

“Increased both impact base healing and scaling with healing power by 100%.”
“Increased base heal multiplier by 50% and healing power scaling by 100%.”

And why? Well, how do you tend to play a healing support Engineer? Since Super Elixir heals in a pulse, rather than giving a regen buff, don’t you tend to drop two Super Elixirs on top of each other for massive group heals? I think ANet looked at this and decided to allow us to have KR no longer be a “requirement” for support healing builds.

And if you used the two Super Elixirs separately for slightly more consistent healing pulses, you still have plenty of healing and regen options with bombs (they fixed the Forceful Explosives bug too) and such, and your single, 16-second (an impressive cooldown for an AoE healing ability that’s been buffed this much) Super Elixir is just way more powerful now.

EDIT: Forgot to note that the 16-second Super Elixir CD is with Fireforged Trigger, so if you want to run support, you hate KR and you don’t have Fireforged Trigger, put your points in that for sure.

Naught.2316:

This topic has some valid points, but I don’t buy the argument that the hit to KR’s Elixir Gun ability means that supportive play is taking a hit, not for a second.

Why don’t you take a gander outside of KR for a moment, and see that Super Elixir got a tremendous buff?

“Increased both impact base healing and scaling with healing power by 100%.”
“Increased base heal multiplier by 50% and healing power scaling by 100%.”

And why? Well, how do you tend to play a healing support Engineer? Since Super Elixir heals in a pulse, rather than giving a regen buff, don’t you tend to drop two Super Elixirs on top of each other for massive group heals? I think ANet looked at this and decided to allow us to have KR no longer be a “requirement” for support healing builds.

And if you used the two Super Elixirs separately for slightly more consistent healing pulses, you still have plenty of healing and regen options with bombs (they fixed the Forceful Explosives bug too) and such, and your single, 16-second (an impressive cooldown for an AoE healing ability that’s been buffed this much) Super Elixir is just way more powerful now.

EDIT: Forgot to note that the 16-second Super Elixir CD is with Fireforged Trigger, so if you want to run support, you hate KR and you don’t have Fireforged Trigger, put your points in that for sure.

exactly this. i wish this will end the almighty super elixer threads

Cube.1758:

Naught.2316:

This topic has some valid points, but I don’t buy the argument that the hit to KR’s Elixir Gun ability means that supportive play is taking a hit, not for a second.

Why don’t you take a gander outside of KR for a moment, and see that Super Elixir got a tremendous buff?

“Increased both impact base healing and scaling with healing power by 100%.”
“Increased base heal multiplier by 50% and healing power scaling by 100%.”

And why? Well, how do you tend to play a healing support Engineer? Since Super Elixir heals in a pulse, rather than giving a regen buff, don’t you tend to drop two Super Elixirs on top of each other for massive group heals? I think ANet looked at this and decided to allow us to have KR no longer be a “requirement” for support healing builds.

And if you used the two Super Elixirs separately for slightly more consistent healing pulses, you still have plenty of healing and regen options with bombs (they fixed the Forceful Explosives bug too) and such, and your single, 16-second (an impressive cooldown for an AoE healing ability that’s been buffed this much) Super Elixir is just way more powerful now.

EDIT: Forgot to note that the 16-second Super Elixir CD is with Fireforged Trigger, so if you want to run support, you hate KR and you don’t have Fireforged Trigger, put your points in that for sure.

exactly this. i wish this will end the almighty super elixer threads

I don’t think it will be quite as powerful as the double super elixirs were (numbers would have to be crunched), and it also means one less condition removed, but I think they made the right decision here. It was very common to use elixir gun in conjunction with kit refinement for the sole purpose of having the dual super elixirs, and not taking that trait essentially cut the power of that ability in half.

The way they have it now, the elixir gun is much stronger without being traited into kit refinement. The main reason I took the kit refinement trait was that I liked having the dual super elixirs, but now I think I might get rid of kit refinement for something else that’s useful, and I won’t lose very much healing power off the kit at all (if any). I will miss the additional condition removal, and sometimes it was handy having it in a wider area (it’s exceptionally tough to have allies stand in the AoEs for it), but this mean I can investigate other trait options and not feel like I’m missing out. Otherwise, I can always make use of the glue drop thing.

As far as elixir gun itself is concerned, this was a good thing. But I think the main point that was being addressed here is that this trait becomes a hassle if you want to use multiple kits, and your support utility as a multi-kit build can suffer due to these changes. That support won’t really be healing related though.

If they just had a short global cooldown with individual long cooldowns like ele attunements, I think this trait would be in a fairly good place, although there’s always debates that can be made for the durations of the abilities. I think they want to ensure its not too powerful though seeing as its a tier 1 trait.

Super Elixir did NOT get buffed this patch, that information is left over from the previous patch, and should be ignored. The current healing values today are identical to those before the March26 patch.
The effectiveness of SE builds has been HALVED.

I repeat, it has NOT been buffed.

I think the conclusion is Kit Refinement is no longer a viable trait for active kit swappers if they use more than one kit. There are other traits that are now a better choice for kit-swappers (which isn’t exactly high praise for those other traits).

The only exception is possibly Med-kit: 5s reflect projectiles every 20s could be worthwhile if you didn’t have to avoid using other kits to be able to proc it reliably.

Shame really. Although kit swapping is a core class mechanic, we only have two traits that utilised it and one of those has just been nerfed out of viability for all except single kit builds.

Don’t forget that it now pops the KR skill if you are out of combat. Want to use medkit 5 to initiate / run into a fight? No KR skill for 20 seconds.
Doing a multikit build?
Which KR skill will I get, nobody knows! Round and round the kits flow, where it stops… nobody knows!
We can’t even select by jumping in the air to avoid the KR skill anymore.
KR is bad. It is broken for anything other than single kit build.
RIP.

Phoenix.6149:

Super Elixir did NOT get buffed this patch, that information is left over from the previous patch, and should be ignored. The current healing values today are identical to those before the March26 patch.
The effectiveness of SE builds has been HALVED.

I repeat, it has NOT been buffed.

While I’m not saying you are mistaken, I sincerely hope that you are, sir…

Although oddly enough, I kind of had a hunch that this was the case since that sentence seemed to be exactly the same one that was included in the last set of updates.

There was also some weird entry in there about stabilized armor that just stated what the trait did without any indication of change.

Phoenix.6149:

It is so sad that they removed double Super Elixir. That was one of our best support options, and it is straight up gone. Not nerfed, the ability to plop a second SE within a skillset cycle is GONE.

Compared to ele D/D cleansing wave (Water 5):
We can improve this.
Obtain a second cleansing wave: Dodging in water with evasive arcana.
Obtain a third cleansing wave: Swaping to water with the trait (And another trait to cleanse the condition)

They have THREE. We used to have two super elixirs, arguably around the same power… Now we’re down to one…

ARG. Time to go back to my ele?

Cross post for rage. Er, I mean, visibility.

I just tested Super Elixer from my information I had last week with my healing gear – it has not been modified further from the last update over a week ago. The effectiveness of builds utilizing Super Elixer have basically been cut in half.

This does require builds that are primarily healing to focus on healing power and only healing power – as the healing difference between a build that focuses and ‘dabbles’ in healing power is now fairly considerable.