Guild Wars 2

I feel like each profession should have a staff lead who represents the people who main said class, who play it themselves, and are familiar with it (but also other classes for perspectives sake) and really looks over and discusses the problems brought up by the community so that it can be filtered and packaged and presented to the rest of the team in a way that can be worked with.

Right now it just feels like Engineer is not represented at all. It’s so full of useless and conflicting traits and abilities. For every synergy to be had, there’s just as many things that seem to work against each other (one example: evading to drop a nearly useless bomb, but having full stamina increases damage 10%).

Anet keeps track of profession performance data, right? Surely they would see if certain professions are falling behind in average damage, PvP KDR, or being used less often in difficult content?

Engineer is a bit of a mess due to how at Core it started as a “Jack of All Trades but Mastery of None” design.

Then Scrapper came in focusing on crowd control and Tanking

Now Holosmith is introduced to focus on DPS.

From how things are going the development team are just filling in Role Focus using Elite Spec now instead of revamping the entire Core Profession from its “Jack of All Trades but Mastery of None” design.

A lot of down side does go with this choice of development direction such as not revamping the Core weapons and Core skills to the more current gameplay experience along with having to wait for certain Role Focus gameplay Elite Specs.

I wonldn’t be surprised if 3rd expansion introduced the Support/Healer Elite Spec since we already got a Tank (HoT expansion) and DPS (PoF Expansion) Elite Spec now.

The problem I see with “Jack of All Trades” is that you just have to use EVERYTHING in a very unintuitive complex way to even get on par with the “specialized” classes.

It’s not like “Today I’m just going to use the flame thrower and be a kittenin’ juggernaut.”
It’s more like “If 90% of my high damaging skills aren’t on cooldown and done in the 12 step long correct order, I’m a complete failure and getting booted from the party.”

That said, I love the idea of a jack of all trades, but don’t like how that seems to translate to you having to use all possible trades at once to be anywhere near effective. Then again, how else could it be done?

Weylin.6478:

The problem I see with “Jack of All Trades” is that you just have to use EVERYTHING in a very unintuitive complex way to even get on par with the “specialized” classes.

It’s not like “Today I’m just going to use the flame thrower and be a kittenin’ juggernaut.”
It’s more like “If 90% of my high damaging skills aren’t on cooldown and done in the 12 step long correct order, I’m a complete failure and getting booted from the party.”

That said, I love the idea of a jack of all trades, but don’t like how that seems to translate to you having to use all possible trades at once to be anywhere near effective. Then again, how else could it be done?

D&D 3.5 Bards managed it fine.

Bardic Proficiency – use any armour, weapons, scrolls, wands – anything! Use whatever equipment you like.

Just realise that you where other classes start at baseline 0, you start at -2 proficiency in everything, and you won’t ever be the greatest at any given role – but you can easily 50-50 DPS/Support, Tank/Support or DPS/Tank. You can’t learn every spell in the game, but you don’t need to go through the usual premediation that Mages need – you have your entire spellbook at your fingertips with a limited number of casts per tier of spell, rather than memorising each individual spell.

Somewhere along the line, MMOs decided that the jack-of-all class needed to start at a baseline -10 proficiency in everything and have access to next to nothing.

Kusumura.8642:

D&D 3.5 Bards managed it fine.

3,5 Bards had unique skills/spells and tremendously powerful elite specs. They were also the best ones at being party faces.

Also, if you combined Bards with Crusader or Warblade you got melee monster better than Fighters and Paladins together with tremendous AoE damage support.

I don’t see any of these happening for Engineer.

every profession gets power creep but engineer doesn’t get good power creep every expansion.

Also holosmith looks to be a solo duelist with no support for groups in pvp pve raids fractals or wvw zergs.

Engineer is ….weird…. It has skills that could be so useful to parties.

The only skills i ever use in parties are stealth gyro and elixir s (stealth toolbelt spell) and that ’s it.

Engineer has decent party stealth and maybe their healing turret can be useful for aoe cleansing and healing 5 people.

But everything else is not very good.

Engineer feels like a dps spec that is design for selfishness and roaming or small parties.

For small parties they can bring some utility but i think damage is all they have.

BUT YEA their traits are very horrible, not very good power creep

i won’t lie, i want engineer to get power creep. I want to be OP for 1 expansion so i can feel useful in game modes haha.

The problem is engineer gets nerfed a lot and it’s profession direction seems to be very strange.

Scrapper is like a tank enahncement guy, condition is all damage, power is all damage, inventions is a defense selfish trait NOT a healer line. Alchemy is selfish defensive trait for self protective boons NOT a support line for allies, and scrapper has mostly dps and defense selfish traits with the exception of super speeds,

Fireaarms is so reliant on crit and conditions i guess it’s ok but very niche. Explosives is only useful if you have explosion skills. Tools is actually pretty good i like tools.

Tools can be everything. offense, defense, utility, and selfish buffs. BUt tools is taking primarily for swiftness or damage and endurance regen.

I guess min max and meta makes engineer kind of clunky. We are not very fun to min max and find a meta build for but it’s probably because are utility skills just suck so much (not kits though, but kits offer more complex damage rotations) But engineer is pretty clunky overall in design.

IMO, a good way to define a Good “Jack of all trades” design is:
- Can do everything reasonably good when alone.
- Can fill any gap when on a group, not as an optimal choice, but as a reasonable second.

Meta being meta, it naturally tries to negate any possible gap, taking only optimal choices. This already makes life a bit hard for a Good Jack of all Trades. And right now, Engie is not a good one, because Engie can’t fill any gap as a reasonable second. The lack on support is too big, the skill requirements are too much, and the difference in efectiveness put other professions too far ahead.

Weylin.6478:

The problem I see with “Jack of All Trades” is that you just have to use EVERYTHING in a very unintuitive complex way to even get on par with the “specialized” classes.

It’s not like “Today I’m just going to use the flame thrower and be a kittenin’ juggernaut.”
It’s more like “If 90% of my high damaging skills aren’t on cooldown and done in the 12 step long correct order, I’m a complete failure and getting booted from the party.”

That said, I love the idea of a jack of all trades, but don’t like how that seems to translate to you having to use all possible trades at once to be anywhere near effective. Then again, how else could it be done?

The problem is the shift toward a harder Trinity for Raid design, and the hyper focusing of roles to facilitate that kind of game play. In Core, Engineers were the single most scalable class, and its performance had a strong mapping to the skill level of the player. But where it really shined was the fact that it could adapt to nearly ANY situation within a single build, and perform well at it where every other class would struggle from the diversification. This was also the time when Guardians were extremely over-utilized, since their offensive and defensive traits weren’t mutually exclusive, and their in-line support had no cost on their builds.

Both of these situations were enabled by the fact that half of your offensive and defensive power could come from boons alone. Guardians have defense boons in excess, Eles could stack might like crazy, and Engineers (while middling in performance) had Offense, Control and Support built into every weapon and kit they had. That gives them enough to cover the job of 2 classes in Dungeon meta, and actually was the Condi meta for all 3 game modes for a pretty long time.

It took them artificially raising the bar on DPS requirements, and power creeping Especs to match, to knock the engineer down into sub-par territory. It was never really considered the “best” for any single thing…. but it was definitely “good enough” for pretty much everything.

If you want to present the argument about Engineer being too complicated, you should be turning your attention to the fact that Especs in HOT made nearly every class much easier to use. Aka, they had to drop the skill cap of most classes to bring the power standard in-line; and that more then anything else is what helped players start exploring under used classes.