Guild Wars 2

Let me begin by saying I absolutely love the Scrapper, and I am very grateful to the team behind it for making this awesome gameplay style with the Engineer.

So let’s dive right in!
A core part of our Scrapper specialization are a few unique interactions with super speed.

Shocking Speed grants us super speed when we use a blast finisher or a leap finisher in a lightning field. Creates interesting synergy between the Thunderclap/Rocket Charge combo, Final Salvo’s lightning fields on gyro destruction, and Shredder Gyro’s tool belt skill, Spare Capacitor.

Rapid Regeneration allows us to have a flat heal, unaffected by healing power, every second while under the effects of swiftness and/or super speed. A fantastic trait, that really helps with our sustain when we use hammer, and are in the thick of things as a melee.

So, where is the problem? It lies in super speed not truly being a “boon”, and thus not behaving like a boon. It can’t stack.

As an effect, it cannot be removed by boon removal – which makes sense as it stands, because you cannot stack it, and our longest current source of super speed is 5 seconds on “Super Speed”, the Slick Shoes tool belt skill. New applications of Super Speed will overwrite any previous incarnations of it on your character, letting you potentially overwrite a longer lasting source of super speed with a shorter one.

2 changes have just occurred to tone down the power of some our builds. HGH’s might duration was brought down to a very reasonable 15 seconds, and Adaptive Armor’s passive toughness stacking was brought down to – again – a very reasonable 60×5, instead of 100×5. This was to address the most prominent play style arising in the early game – the Celestial Engineer/Marauder Engineer. Many felt these changes were necessary, because they were getting a free 500 toughness while investing fully into damage, and the might stacking of HGH was problematic due to its unbelievable duration – but it inadvertently affected the viability of less popular builds as well.

How can we bring up the viability of low damage, high tankiness/utility Scrapper builds, while avoiding the power creep of Celestial/Marauder builds?

SUPER SPEED

I have two suggestions:
1. Make Super Speed a boon and allow it to stack – this may appear to be fairly overpowered, and some durations of Super Speed granting abilities would have to be looked at, but allowing it to be removed via boon removal would allow for counter play, and it’s conversion could be a potentially devastating movement condition, like Chill, Cripple, or Slow.

2. Alter these traits and/or the Scrapper itself to better interact with Super Speed in its current format – lower the base healing, and allow for healing power scaling on Rapid Regeneration, and maybe add an effect to Shocking Speed to allow for Scrappers to have a unique stacking effect on Super Speed with a hard cap at maybe 8 seconds.

With the Adaptive Armor changes, Marauder and Celestial builds will be less inclined to take this trait, which is great for balance in the sPvP setting, and it still remains a decently strong choice for tankier builds. Healing Power scaling on Rapid Regeneration would make a selfish regen Scrapper build very viable, and Shocking Speed changes would allow us to actually have a reliable uptime on these passive heals, as opposed to the odd 3 seconds here and there.

Thanks for reading! And I hope to hear from you all on what you think should be done about Scrappers and Super Speed.

I already thought that super speed was a gimmick from the reveal but the fact that rapid regeneration doesn’t scale with healing power still blew my mind. As if healing coefficients weren’t bad enough in this game.

Alone.1784:

I already thought that super speed was a gimmick from the reveal but the fact that rapid regeneration doesn’t scale with healing power still blew my mind. As if healing coefficients weren’t bad enough in this game.

Yeah, I can partially understand their reasoning behind this, they wanted to make it viable for all builds – but all it does is reinforce investing in damage and getting good passive heals from it, instead of getting really strong heals by trading in your damage for healing power. It’s pushing players even harder into bursty damage builds.

If Super Speed should get the boon treatment, it needs something to differentiate it from Swiftness. I think a good effect could be that superspeed also removed the movement speed reduction from walking backwards or sideways.

I agree entirely, superspeed needs to do something other then be “well its swiftness…but faster!”

It’s far, FAR too overvalued. Rewatching the PoI, Irenio seemed to believe that Superspeed is some secret totally OP thing that everyone just underestimates, just like lightning fields.

When the truth is that just because it’s rare doesn’t mean it’s good. Just because Lightning fields are hard to come by doesn’t change the fact that the kitten things are useful in all of 1 finisher: leaps. Everything else is outclassed by almost any other field, kitten you get AREA SWIFTNESS when you blast it. Running away or getting into the battle faster is nice, but ultimately it changes nothing about the actual outcome in real PvP scenarios. You aren’t going to get away on low health without instant blinks or teleports, going REALLY REALLY FAST isn’t going to change the fact that the Dragonhunter is bearing down on your bum. Quickness comes in a freaking abundance and it can turn the tide of a fight, superspeed is tiny iddy biddy applications and it will serve little to no purpose.

Superspeed is just as overrated in the eyes of Irenio/the developers as Lightning fields are. “Hey, look at FINAL SALVO! It gives you a lightning field AND Superspeed! Wow look at all that value!…Hey, wait, stop taking Adaptive Armor. Final salvo is useful. Take Final Salvo. I SAID TAKE FINAL SALVO, IT’S GOOD. FINE I’M NERFING ADAPTIVE ARMOR”

Superspeed needs to do something else. It needs to be something more than better swiftness, especially considering how low all sources of it are (2s lol)

Ricky Rouse.1583:

I agree entirely, superspeed needs to do something other then be “well its swiftness…but faster!”

It’s not even faster. Superspeed has been bugged for almost a year, it doesn’t break the 33% speed cap. Anet knew this and Irenio must have known this when designing the scrapper and yet he still made it a core part of the spec.

This is one of the things that really infuriates me about anet and the class devs in particular. They ahve this information, they know that they can’t make things like Ai utilities or even Superspeed work as they intend, they know it. It’s been proven over the last 3 years. They simply cannot balance them or keep them fixed. Yet here we are both of them, stuck awkwardly on scrapper.

There is no excuse.

[/rant]

wolfyrik.2017:

Ricky Rouse.1583:

I agree entirely, superspeed needs to do something other then be “well its swiftness…but faster!”

It’s not even faster. Superspeed has been bugged for almost a year, it doesn’t break the 33% speed cap. Anet knew this and Irenio must have known this when designing the scrapper and yet he still made it a core part of the spec.

This is one of the things that really infuriates me about anet and the class devs in particular. They ahve this information, they know that they can’t make things like Ai utilities or even Superspeed work as they intend, they know it. It’s been proven over the last 3 years. They simply cannot balance them or keep them fixed. Yet here we are both of them, stuck awkwardly on scrapper.

There is no excuse.

[/rant]

Have you tested that? I don’t believe it’s true. I haven’t done a concentrated test, but anecdotally I’ve definitely run next to people who have swiftness, popped super speed ,and passed them while they still had only swiftness.

What i’d really like to see is final salvo granting swiftness to gyros on creation for 15s. then it’d be worth taking so heal/bulwark/stealth gyro can keep up with you without you having to pop ham5 and blast finishers on the run to give them swiftness

Just letting you know rapid regen does scale with healing power and by an insane amount the tooltip just doesn’t show it. I am running clerics and I get over 700 health a second with just superspeed.