Guild Wars 2

I posted this on gw2guru a few days ago, and thought that I would repost here.

It is my understanding that the weapon kits are intended to function as utility items “out of the box” but investing multiple traits in them should make them viable as standalone weapons.

What niche does everyone think each kit fills (or perhaps should fill if they aren’t effective currently) as a utility and a weapon?

My thoughts below:

Grenades: I think the grenade kit is an example of a kit that doesn’t have much use as a utility, but works well as a weapon. The grenade kit does great damage when fully traited, but I struggle to think of many places where I would want the kit for plain utility purposes. I don’t recall seeing any tPvP builds using untraited grenades either. In fact, most people even suggest that you don’t use them for leveling until you get to level 60. I feel like the extra grenade trait is making this kit slightly overpowered when traited, but too weak without the trait. Additionally, the massive number of attacks makes it hard to balance things like Steel Packed Powder and Shrapnel across kits.

The area that I think it excels is massive condition application over groups/areas. It seems like this should be a more condition oriented kit, but the current iteration scales nearly as well with either zerker or condition setups.

As a thought on how to improve the use of the kit as a utility, I’d suggest making the GM trait less overpowered. My suggestion would be to take the Shrapnel trait (which is worth about 25-30% of a grenade engineer’s DPS in a PvE setting) and put something similar to that on the GM trait in lieu of the 3rd grenade. You’d be able to buff the regular attacks back up to something reasonable, including direct damage and the condition durations so that people could actually use the kit without the trait.

You would probably also want to make the GM version of shrapnel associated with some kind of actual damage stat so something like 100% chance on crit to proc a short bleed instead of 15% chance on all explosions to proc an absurdly long bleed.

You’d end up with roughly the same damage output, but the kit itself would be a stronger piece of the puzzle, and you’d ease up on some of the silly interactions with Confusion/Retaliation and other proc effects that exist today.

Flamethrower: I keep the flamethrower on my bar more often than not because of the knockback and instant cast blind. I don’t feel like it does enough damage to be a standalone weapon at the top end. It seems like the kit should do a better job of taking advantage of the very fast attack rate, but there aren’t enough zero cooldown proc chance type traits to really make that work in the current iteration. I think that the new more attainable Juggernaut trait allows a bit more flexibility in builds, but it may be a bit too powerful for a 20 point investment when running solo. The new Napalm probably needs to be replaced with something that actually increases the damage of the FT to make it competitive as a pure weapon.

I’d like to see the 10% damage to burning foes baked into the FT’s auto attack, and make the Napalm Trait something along the lines of “Burning duration increased by 20%, FT skill Damage increased by 10% on burning foes” which would make the damage of the kit in line with other weapon setups if you wanted to invest fully in the kit. You may need to increase the cooldown on the burst skill slightly if you ramp up the raw damage by that much. It may be better to relocate some of that damage to the Auto attack instead.

Overall, I think that change would make the FT into a fearsome weapon for the people who want to use it as such, while still retaining the majority of the usefulness that it has today.

Bombs: As a utility setup, I typically use it for the spammable fire field, and Smoke field that blinds in an area. The snare is nice, but is again duplicated on the pistol skills. As a weapon kit, I think it does fine in PvE, but is weak without any investment in PvP scenarios where people won’t actually chase you non-stop. I also feel like the damage is too spread out between power and condition damage. Burning isn’t strong enough as a condition for top end damage, and the auto attack is one of the best power scaling attacks in the game. I’d really like to see the auto-attack range bumped up slightly (maybe 150 range for skills 1-3) and the 2 and 3 skills tweaked to use less conditions and more direct damage. This really should probably be the hardest hitting weapon kit available to the engineer due to the positional requirements, but it currently is not.

Continued…..

Elixir Gun: This kit does a decent job of filling what I think is it’s role as a support kit. I think that it is doing a pretty good job of playing in that space without any traits at all, but I don’t think the traits available really make it stand out as a weapon. It would probably be quite a bit more attractive if the Elixir F and Super Elixir skills would benefit from 409 and HGH (possibly the other elixir traits too)

Tookit: I love the utility provided by this kit. I struggle to think of it as a weapon kit though. The prybar is nice, but the auto attack chain is fairly slow, and ends up doing pretty poor damage. I think most people take this kit for the shield and magnet skills. This probably needs to do a better job of tying into the turrets as a weapon for it to be effective. Perhaps if it did additional damage for each turret on your bar or reduced the cooldowns of your turret overcharges when you hit them? I feel like it is just not much of a weapon in the current state.

Does anyone else have any thoughts or ideas about the roles these kits play?

They are all on the clunky and weak side compared to weapons because we can have up to 3 offensive kits in one build. That is why they are inferior to most weapons.

I would love for the developers to consider increasing the power and usefulness of the kits and then compensating that power by only allowing engineers to equip 1 to 2 kits as either our swap set or our main and swap sets.

This would preserve the special feeling of the Engineer by maintaining our access to weapons that no other profession can use, allow us more build diversity by opening up utility slots, and bring the strength of kits up to par with the majority of weapons. This would also open up the ability to use rifle/p+p or rifle/p+s. Imagine that!

It’s hard to argue that this wouldn’t make the Engineer more dynamic and diverse (not less) and more powerful and accessible to the average player.

There are times I think the kits have to much utility, compared to normal weapons. Grenade and bomb are the exceptions to this, but think of FT for a power weapon only 2 abilities do power damage, the same is true of toolkit, and even EG falls foul of this. If you swap them to condi the same is true. They don’t full compliment most builds, and you end up taking them for 1-2 abilities, with the rest being situational.

But when I look at weapons on my guardian or my ranger I am utilizing all of those abilities between weapon swaps. It’s not like I swap to axes just for 1 skill. Part of that is the swap cool down but I really feel kits suffer from this. I may take 2-3 kits but unless if it’s a niche situation I won’t use the bulk of the abilities regularly. They just sit unused.

That and with a lot of builds the kits kind of overlap.

I am doing a turret build for wvw guild play. I bring flame and rifle, deploy them in safety to detonate for the new detonate damage on top of SD and tool belts. It’s great burst. I like to take a kit to add on to this. Whether I do FT for the 2 skill, EG for the 4 skill, or grenade for barrage it all really works out the same in the end. Grenade typically wins out if I have a it traited, but untraited it is not much better or worse than the others.

It’s not the same kind of feeling as using s/d on the ranger rather than LB for my second weapon set, with this build whatever I do is going to be in melee, it’s going to focus on power damage, and I am going to want swap back to rifle for jump / blunderbuss after 1-2 abilities.

it might seem like people go in 1 kit for only 1-2 skills but in reality most skills are useful depending on the situation, some skills are offensive, some are defensive, and even some skills such as “box of nails” are great when trying to get away

Only useless kit skills I would say are…
Elixir F…. cast time on a slow, buggy skill with a weak effect, it’s simply not worth the time to cast it and, no cast time and would be worth it.

FT #4: asides from the fire field (which will be overwritten by any other field near) this skill doesn’t provide any offensive, defensive, utility or tactical use. and ground targeting doesn’t even is worth the time you need use it . I wish it was an Circle shaped Fire field that last for 3-4a with no ground targeting… would be more useful that way

google.3709:

it might seem like people go in 1 kit for only 1-2 skills but in reality most skills are useful depending on the situation, some skills are offensive, some are defensive, and even some skills such as “box of nails” are great when trying to get away

Only useless kit skills I would say are…
Elixir F…. cast time on a slow, buggy skill with a weak effect, it’s simply not worth the time to cast it and, no cast time and would be worth it.

FT #4: asides from the fire field (which will be overwritten by any other field near) this skill doesn’t provide any offensive, defensive, utility or tactical use. and ground targeting doesn’t even is worth the time you need use it . I wish it was an Circle shaped Fire field that last for 3-4a with no ground targeting… would be more useful that way

FT has tool-belt skill Incendiary Ammo. It stacks 9 seconds of burning without condi duration, granting immense pressure. You can blind stomp with FT 5. You can kill people with FT 3 on Skyhammer. You can crit people for 2k using FT 2 even in full rabid to get that tiny last bit of health.

FT 4… so pretty. I wonder what it does…

Grenades are balanced around steel-packed powder and grenadier, so of course, grenades can’t be even decent without those traits or they would be horribly OP with them. (Devs—this is not a request to nerf the only two traits making grenades viable.) This unfortunately cannot change without major overhauls, which seems to mean merciless nerf (“Hey engineers! How do you like the new kit refinement we worked so hard to create?”)

The best thing about kits in my opinion is that you can always choose your auto-attack. You literally never have to do a single auto-attack that you don’t want to use: if you’re a rifle user, hip shot is permanently available to you, as are the autos of whatever kits you have equipped, which may be better or worse than hip shot depending on the situation. That’s where most of the “versatility” or “utility” comes from in my opinion.

I’m on vacation with no access to actually play, but I had a eureka moment on the multi kit playstyle and how to facilitate it.

You’d have to do some across the board kit reworking of cooldowns (roughly a 20% increase in kit skill cooldowns, and add a GM trait that reduces the cooldowns of ALL kit skills by 15-20% to facilitate the swapping kits like mad for 1 or 2 skills playstyle.

You’d probably still provide sufficient utility for the people who want to specialize in one kit or weapon even with slightly longer cooldowns on things like air blast and Smoke vent or smoke bomb, but you’ll make a bombs/FT/EG or Rocket boots type build need to spec into the GM trait for the absurd levels of flexibility it has today (and then some additional improvement over that) but at the loss of things like backpack regeneration, permanent vigor, or pistol cooldowns etc.

Most of the multi kit builds would look like 20/10/0/10/30 or 0/20/0/20/30 with that change.

I think that would make multiple kits more of an intentional playstyle choice as opposed to just something you get by slotting the right skills.

You’d probably need to push more of the kit damage onto the 1st skills of most of the kits so that the reduced cooldown trait doesn’t also become the best damage trait for single kit users.

You’d probably also want to make kit refinement a bit more powerful, and push it to the master tier. I’d probably go to a 5-10ish second cooldown per each kit and balance the effects appropriately. I think that the KR proc for the bomb kit is the type of thing that you’d want. Something that works with the kit you are swapping to without being too powerful (like 100 nades).

Ralkuth.1456:

FT 4… so pretty. I wonder what it does…

troll?

burning (increased FT#1 dmg 10%), area control (smart foes dont run through fire, but around it), area control (knocking foes through the fire), combo field: Area Might.

… in a nutshell.

incredibly useful ability.

nakoda.4213:

Ralkuth.1456:

FT 4… so pretty. I wonder what it does…

troll?

burning (increased FT#1 dmg 10%), area control (smart foes dont run through fire, but around it), area control (knocking foes through the fire), combo field: Area Might.

… in a nutshell.

incredibly useful ability.

Trying to be humorous. Please don’t take it out of context… FT 4 rarely deters foes trying to spike you and can be useful in drawn-out fights over restrictive terrain… it gives ~1second of burning which is not overly significant. I just feel that when put side-by-side with other FT abilities such as the Incendiary Ammo toolbelt skill or FT3 and FT5, it has a rather low priority.

Pre-emptive teamfight might-stacking is nice, I agree.
More often than not, when i’m trying to bunker a point though, I’d be trying not to apply any field other than water to blast finish area healing to keep myself up.

It can be useful.

so… Since people are talking about FT #4! I shall let you all in a little secret!!

If you wanna use FT #4 to it’s fullest, there is only 1 way! Drop it on the ground and use jump shot on it and get fire shield… sadly, this will stack more burning than FT#4 ever could and it will also give you a few extra might

that’s Napalm to it’s fullest potential!!

google.3709:

so… Since people are talking about FT #4! I shall let you all in a little secret!!

If you wanna use FT #4 to it’s fullest, there is only 1 way! Drop it on the ground and use jump shot on it and get fire shield… sadly, this will stack more burning than FT#4 ever could and it will also give you a few extra might

that’s Napalm to it’s fullest potential!!

Honestly haven’t thought of that… but Fire Aura in a rifle power build won’t be very strong burning, unless you’re crazy and slot Rampagers gear…
Indeed, I can blast finish the field to obtain a short-duration Fire Aura, and that may come in use.

nakoda.4213:

Ralkuth.1456:

FT 4… so pretty. I wonder what it does…

troll?

burning (increased FT#1 dmg 10%), area control (smart foes dont run through fire, but around it), area control (knocking foes through the fire), combo field: Area Might.

… in a nutshell.

incredibly useful ability.

What?

Its just 1 tick of Burning… Why would anyone go around it? In my condition damage build thats 700dmg (if i got Corruption stacked full). I doubt most builds that incorporate the Ft into it will be able to get even that.

On a 30sec cooldown. Hardy deters anything. Best use is to put it on someone who is downed, now they cant rez themselves anymore. Unless theyre a Thief/mesmer/ele/ranger and theyll just move out of it or have their pet heal them.

Its a bad ability, with an immense cooldown for such a limited use and minimal effect.

Ralkuth.1456:

google.3709:

so… Since people are talking about FT #4! I shall let you all in a little secret!!

If you wanna use FT #4 to it’s fullest, there is only 1 way! Drop it on the ground and use jump shot on it and get fire shield… sadly, this will stack more burning than FT#4 ever could and it will also give you a few extra might

that’s Napalm to it’s fullest potential!!

Honestly haven’t thought of that… but Fire Aura in a rifle power build won’t be very strong burning, unless you’re crazy and slot Rampagers gear…
Indeed, I can blast finish the field to obtain a short-duration Fire Aura, and that may come in use.

ahh well I’m using a rifle condi rifle build for PvP, Engineer without CC Is free food for Necros now days.

FT4 with blast finishers to push up your might stacks. Long duration field lets you get a lot out of it. I messed around with a might stacking and it helped a lot. Its all about the combos.

Terrahero.9358:

nakoda.4213:

Ralkuth.1456:

FT 4… so pretty. I wonder what it does…

troll?

burning (increased FT#1 dmg 10%), area control (smart foes dont run through fire, but around it), area control (knocking foes through the fire), combo field: Area Might.

… in a nutshell.

incredibly useful ability.

What?

Its just 1 tick of Burning… Why would anyone go around it? In my condition damage build thats 700dmg (if i got Corruption stacked full). I doubt most builds that incorporate the Ft into it will be able to get even that.

On a 30sec cooldown. Hardy deters anything. Best use is to put it on someone who is downed, now they cant rez themselves anymore. Unless theyre a Thief/mesmer/ele/ranger and theyll just move out of it or have their pet heal them.

Its a bad ability, with an immense cooldown for such a limited use and minimal effect.

It’s a fire field that lasts 10 seconds… that’s pretty useful.

I’m not saying it’s the best utility in the kit, but if you can’t see the use in a 10 second fire combo field, you may want to look up some of the guides about how to get the most out of our combo finishers, it’s one of the areas in the game Engineers outshine most other professions.

Its one of the longest firefields, if not the longest in the game. You can stack a lot of might in that time.