Guild Wars 2

Could we please get one or more of the following on Rocket Boots?

We need a good reason to take it over Elixir Gun.

• Stunbreak – In the past, I was fine with it not being a stunbreak. Yes, it was risky, but the solution was to not get stunned. With correctly timed dodges and blocks, you could play around them. That’s not the case any more. Thieves can pop Basilisk Venom, then hit you with an instant unblockable steal stun. There’s no counterplay to that, so you need a stunbreak.
• More distance, more speed – Previously, Rocket Boots used to scale with movement speed, so with swiftness or super-speed, you could guarantee it would go far enough to escape. Now it goes 900 range, which is often not far enough.
• Evades – Rocket Boots needs needs needs evades. I can’t count the number of times I’ve used it to escape from a chasing zerg only to be hit by Spear of Justice mid-flight, or take 5k+ damage from Rapid Fire while in the air.

Honestly, I wouldn’t call rocket boots with stunbreak AND evade overpowered at all. Gadgets need some serious love

It absolutely needs to be a stunbreak without that or evade frames its just something you take sometimes to reduce travel time when running around in open world and that’s it.

There is some niche use in wvw roaming and using it as a blast finisher in water+repositioning tool but I’d rather a stun break in wvw with the kind of crap you can run into.

The most ironic fact about rocket boots not being an evade, is that its one of the few skills that evade things like Line of Warding, where’s the logic at?

It just needs a 1/2 or 3/4 second evade frame. Stun break would increase CD and I don’t want high CD mobility skills arbitrarily tied to Stun breaks. At that point it’d just be another copy paste Slick shoes and Bypass coating, we don’t need a third.
The CD is already balanced enough even traited to justify the evade. Now the dmg just needs to go. /thread

I don’t think a stunbreak would be too overpowered. We are using an entire skill slot on something that is almost entirely for escape. Besides, half the time a stunbreak isn’t particularly useful because you need to change direction so you don’t RB off a cliff or into an enemy zerg.

Evades are a must though. What is the point of using an escape skill if you just die while it’s active?

1200 distance would be nice too.

Oh I don’t think it’d be seriously Op with a stunbreak, but I think it would cause problems in PvP if scrappers tank build get an evade/stunbreak/soft cc condi clear on a 15s CD. If Anet did give it an evade, yeah I could see it going up in CD 0-5 seconds. Stunbreak + Evade, 5-15 second increased CD, and that’s something I don’t want. Not totally OP, but we don’t need more nigh immortals in conquest and we don’t need skills to be blanket nerfed because in one situation it gets out of hand. That’s my worry.

Premovement nerf, I was able to utilize Rocket Boots to get out of a lot of bad situations, PvP & WvW. Once upon a time I literally crossed 3/4 of Alpine BL with slickshoes+RB combo running from the SE supply camp all the way past the centaur camp with a war, necro, guard, and ele on my tail. Flippin wars and their mobility kept me in combat the whole time.
Sure another stunbreak was needed if I got stunned, but theirs nothing wrong with necessary synergy. I’d like that mobility and synergy to be restored.

My ideal version of RB would the same one a friend of mine constantly debated about with our guild since the kittening beginning of the game. The changes were to give a small evade frame (1/2-3/4s like discussed) but the game changer here is to make it directional like the warrior skill Whirlwind.

Even you agree the evade is a must, not the stunbreak. If a change is implemented, I don’t want to leap all the way to a stunbreak evade combo, let them just add an evade and take it from there.

To sum it up, I do not at all ever ever ever want more press 1 skill to get out of any bad situation ever skills, and that’s what I feel like this would turn into with your suggested change, frankly when you ask for that I am reminded of Anets terrible track record of randomly and arbitrarily bloating a skill with all the goods and stripping it all from another.

I would be more than content if the movement was reverted alone, the evade frame for HoT powr creep compensation would just be icing on the cake, the directional change would be iced cake, pancakes and waffles, on top of the iced cake already there.

Rocketboots and gadgets in general need love – this everyone agrees.

The animation could be polished a bit as in the end it still sometimes looks a bit quirky. The longer 1200 distance (by the GM gadgeteer) should be baseline.

Adding 3/4-1 s evade frame and lowering the CD to 16 s would make many more engineers choose the skill.

I feel the stun break should better be incorporated in the toolbelt skill, rocket kick, and at same time increasing its CD to 30 s. I also feel that rocket kick range should be increased to 600 s. Much less of a DPS skill, but giving more utility overall. Nobody will select rocketboots for DPS anyways, because taking any kit instead would be far better choice. Thus we need more utility.

Deniara Devious.3948:

—Snip—

With Gadgeteer, that’d give RB a 12s CD! That’s low for soft cc clear and extra evades. Starting to compete with thief mobility with that, which might be a bit much.

That is a fantastic idea regarding Rocket Kick, as it is the RB and tool belt RK don’t synergize at all, but fill completely different roles. Using it as a gap closer would provide synergy with all the close range attacks and potential combos we have. Way better than our other offensive stunbreak >.> goggles.
I don’t really think there is much more to discuss past this point, anyone else have input?

Would that be so bad? I mean, Ancestral Grace (druid staff 3) is a <15s cooldown traited.

That’s 1200 distance. It evades the entire time. It’s also a blast finisher, and it heals for 1500. Oh, and it’s targeted, so you can choose the distance and direction.

Rocket Boots on the other hand.. 900 distance, no evade, blast finisher, no heal, not targeted, cures soft cc. Longer cooldown unless you take a clunky/bad gadgeteer trait.

I appreciate your thoughts on this though, and agree that a stun break might be too good in pvp. I don’t think it’d be unreasonable to have 1200 distance and evades though, like Druid Staff 3, considering we’re giving up a very valuable skill slot to get it.

Kaizoku.1298:

Honestly, I wouldn’t call rocket boots with stunbreak AND evade overpowered at all. Gadgets need some serious love

That’s what roll for initiative does.

Vagrant.7206:

Kaizoku.1298:

Honestly, I wouldn’t call rocket boots with stunbreak AND evade overpowered at all. Gadgets need some serious love

That’s what roll for initiative does.

And that’s why it has 60sec CD

coro.3176:

Would that be so bad? I mean, Ancestral Grace (druid staff 3) is a <15s cooldown traited.

That’s 1200 distance. It evades the entire time. It’s also a blast finisher, and it heals for 1500. Oh, and it’s targeted, so you can choose the distance and direction.

Rocket Boots on the other hand.. 900 distance, no evade, blast finisher, no heal, not targeted, cures soft cc. Longer cooldown unless you take a clunky/bad gadgeteer trait.

I appreciate your thoughts on this though, and agree that a stun break might be too good in pvp. I don’t think it’d be unreasonable to have 1200 distance and evades though, like Druid Staff 3, considering we’re giving up a very valuable skill slot to get it.

So all you have done was made a case for Ancestral Grace to be nerfed. Which it should and has been in that discussion category, still, for quite some time.

Well, one or the other.. They need to either nerf the HoT power-creep across the board, or bring the older stuff up to par.

Once again, I don’t think there would be a single thing wrong with 1200 range and the evade baseline, I’m sure they could just throw blind and/or burn on overcharge, something to make the trait still useful. I’d still rather the speed scaling return, the fixed distance is what caused the clunky landing, as once you land you get stuck at unmodified combat speed, which is slower obviously than w/swift or superspeed.

As for balancing, its a combo, old stuff has been lacking since start, and needs brought up, new HoT stuff has been needing to be brought down since release. The middle ground needs to be met. I’m not going to get into the debate about similar skills for other professions and HoT rage, that’s not the point of this thread and there is hardly ever a good discussion when you start throwing those things in.

PS we’ll never see RB get a ground target unless the animation is changed, the reason they can do that with skills like AG is because the animation is…lazy, you just turn into a ball of light and revert, also the part of the arbitrary reason Rifle jump is slow is because the animation looks weird if you don’t have that landing phase.

That’s fine. I don’t think RB should be ground targeted. I would just like them to make it a worthwhile skill to put on our bar. I use it because I like the feel of it, but I know for a fact my build would be vastly better if I slotted Elixir Gun instead.

I die a little inside when I use RB and get Spear-of-Justice’d mid-flight, or use RB to escape, but don’t actually escape because it doesn’t go far enough.