Anet has been very careful so far in buffing underplayed professions, so I thought I’d suggest some very small buffs that might make engineers better represented in dungeons and paid tournaments. D/D eles have recently become very popular and effective, but engineers lack the versatility of having twenty weapon skills and still being able to equip stunbreaks, condition removals, or support skills as utilities. The following are possible ways to address this issue without making the engineer a clone of the ele.
1. Fix the kit refinement effects for the flamethrower, bomb kit, and med kit. These effects are flat-out bad (in the case of flamethrower or med kit) or non-functional (in the case of bomb kit, which is bugged when forceful explosions is traited).
—Med kit: the tiny explosion the med kit causes makes no sense (why is a med kit exploding?) and doesn’t do noticable damage. I’d recommend making this kit create a short AoE regen, vigor, or single condition removal on equip, with internal CD, of course.
—Bomb kit: even if the current effect worked, it wouldn’t be very useful. If it has to be one of the current bomb kit skills, let’s make it the immobilize (smoke or concussion would be too powerful). I’d rather see a large-AoE vulnerability bomb or a small-AoE .5-sec daze bomb.
—Flamethrower: the 1-sec burn at melee range just isn’t useful. I’d say change it out for smoke vent. If that’s too powerful (it’s not like any professions have a blind on a 10-sec cooldown, right?) it could be swapped for a chill/immobilize removal.
2. Fix turrets. Right now, they offer bad damage, some control (net turret, rocket turret, knockbacks) and zero support. I’d like to see turrets become a staple of dungeon support builds—for example, the flame turret toolbelt could be a smoke wall to give give us a small fraction of the projectile-stopping power of the guardian. (On that note, elixir U toolbelt could stop projectiles 100% of the time instead of 66%…) Even if both changes were implemented, we still wouldn’t come close to a projectile-blocking guardian, but maybe with our other utility it would be enough to play fractals support.
3. Buff toolbelt skills: Several of our best kits/utilities have sub-par utility skills. This could be a nice place to put a stunbreaker for kit or turret builds.
tl;dr: Kits and turrets are our signature moves, but currently contain zero stunbreaks and very little condition removal. Since you can swap kits while cc’d, a blind or interrupt on swap would be a way of standing in for that missing stunbreak without being overpowered like the old juggernaut (stunbreak+stability any time, no cooldown). An alternative could be to add a stunbreak to a kit or turret toolbelt skill (perhaps flamethrower or elixir gun). Our support builds are nice but lack the projectile blocking needed for fractals, and I feel like turrets could step up to that challenge.