Guild Wars 2

On team composition: Ele’s are strong? Huh…we run 5 Engineers. Maybe that’s why we suck so bad.

I really dislike the profession dev’s commentary.

Yeah, I heard that too. I was very disappointed.

Jon Peters on Engineer when asked about the class:

• They’re looking at Engineer kits.
• Grenades are fine.
• They’re focusing on bringing things up to viability right now.
  
  Wishy-washy answers, nothing really substantial.

Absolutionis.9427:

Jon Peters on Engineer when asked about the class:

• They’re looking at Engineer kits.
• Grenades are fine.
• They’re focusing on bringing things up to viability right now.
  
  Wishy-washy answers, nothing really substantial.

Completely agree. Wishy washy.

Oh and until they can do with grenades what Rift did with the Saboteur and they make the dps traits lines for engis balance out with what thieves and rangers have, this class is far from fine.

Can we stop that idea of target grenades? Best use of them is area denial. I don’t want to spend time targetting that downed idiot.

Psst. Auto-target can be turned off.

Some people will like autotarget, some will not. Why not give both groups the option they want?

I was also really disheartened that they seem focused on skill capped players. That’s a VERY small minority of players who I wouldn’t be concerned about balancing for if I were concerned with the financial success of my company.

The reason devs have to be vague about specifics is because the community generally goes kitten insane if something changes during development. If I was a dev, I’d keep it close to the chest too.

It just doesn’t help when the balance discussion starts with a joke about how underwhelming engineers are and then when you finally get to talking about engis, all you say is grenade and bomb kits are fine, other kits are being looked at, and Teldo is good. I understand not wanting to give out specifics, but a little bit of info would have been nice.

What i want devs to do is atleast acknowledge the problems, so we know they know. And that these are things that are being looked at.

At this point, they show very little understanding of the Engineer. Let alone the nitty gritty and the real issues.

I have never heard a dev comment about how on balance between utility skills for example.
Because, how do you do that without gimping one thing? I just dont see anyway this can be balanced in anyway whatsoever.
You have kits, which hold 5 abilities and are there because we cannot weaponswap, so they should rival a real weapon in power and functionality.
But they compete with single-purpose abilities for a utility slot, and how can those compete with a weaponkit if a weaponkit is as good as a weapon?

So we’re stuck between a rock and a hardplace. A weaponkit is either not as good as a weapon, and this means we lose out because we have only 1 weapon. Or they are and then whats the point in a lot of utility skills that do 1 thing?

For example, Flamethrower has an aoe knockback + 4 other abilities versus Personal Battering Ram, single-target knockback with knockdown but nothing else.

This is a balance nightmare, and not once has a dev acknowledged this or explained how they design this to work.

o_____o

Why is it that when the devs talk about engineers I always get really disappointed? I don’t even know that the devs are giving a talk or live-stream before I hear that they bashed-on/skimmed the engineer class again…

Terrible PR

Well at least the devs are aware that we are the butt end of jokes.

Anet always does this, and I totally get why. They are purposely vague so that we know they are thinking about it, but there are no promises yet. If you want disappointment, try saying to engineers that they will have MASSIVE buffs and then not delivering. Then you shall know the wrath of the engineer.

guys, calm down.

Anet can only work on 1 thing nobody plays at a time.

(I kid, I kid. Hoping to see what the revamped/fixed PvP brings! =D)

Translation: We acknowledge engineers need more work and we are deeply sorry for taking so long to fix your class.

They just couldn’t say it in a direct way because apologizing to engineers is even more embarrassing than making a post saying they screwed up.

Honestly I really liked the Dev responses, except in regard to solo queue. Their comments about balancing are exactly what I wanted to hear. The joke dealing with Engineers is recognition that they know the community thinks Engineers are underpowered.

Also, Grenades are fine. There are tweaks they could use, but they are very usable and viable in their current form. Increasing the viability of all the weak gunk is exactly what the Engineer needs.

Terrahero.9358:

For example, Flamethrower has an aoe knockback + 4 other abilities versus Personal Battering Ram, single-target knockback with knockdown but nothing else.

This is a balance nightmare, and not once has a dev acknowledged this or explained how they design this to work.

One does literally zero damage. The other Does damage. Although I agree that does not justify the difference in recast timers in the least. But you cannot go around claiming their is nothing different about a pure damage less knock back , and a knock back that does solid damage.

And yes, although once again you make untrue claims, but the devs have indeed acknowledged it. Just because you go around claiming they have never done so does not delete the post that already exist. Your like a chile who acts as if they cover their own eyes, that whatever they do not with to see, no longer exist. They are not posting on any other class forums more then this one. But they do discuss this with those of use that point out specific imbalances in the “suggestion” sub forums.

What do you expect them to explain to you when it comes to how things are designed to work? Do they need to explain to you how every profession is designed to work? They give us tools in the form of skills and traits with a theme. It is the players job to use the tools.

PBR is one of the skills that I agree has way too long of a recast, regardless of its damage, when compared to other knock backs and blow backs. Warriors “kick” is a knock back. Although it is a knock back of lesser distance and a lower damage coefficient, I feel it doesn’t even come close to justifying the 25s difference in recast timers. Just because I feel a balance adjustment is needed here, does not mean I will pretend the devs have never posted on these things, because they have.

I generally liked what the Devs said. It was interesting to hear how many times they referenced Quake and StarCraft.

I agree that they can’t play whack-a-mole with builds and skills. Also, I kind of agree with the guests saying that the warrior is in a good place and the rest of the classes have to balance to that. I main a warrior at 80, and totally agree. The only issue is the lack of builds, but that can be said of all classes.

The main thing that I cringed at was the fact that they ran with 5 engies. Was that sarcasm, an inside joke, or something else? Hopefully from what was said, they are looking at bringing the engies up to the warriors level and balancing everyone based on the low-medium-high skill levels like they explained.

The main issue I have with the class is the lack of dmg, unless you take a specific build. They sounded like they want to get away from that model and open the gates of possibility instead of having the same old skills everyone specs into. Hopefully this will come about in the next 1-2 months.

The 5 engi thing is true. They have run that team and Gasmask said it himself that they had encountered it before. It also seemed to reference the issue that the community feels they aren’t that strong, and they know what is going on due to the comments of “that must be why we are losing”. Especially since they did say they were looking at the engineer in terms of boosting rather then anything else.

I don’t know about that, everytime we had the potential to deal decent damage, BAM, nerf.

Engineers have many fewer viable builds now than at release, but on the otherhand we have just had the first patch that took some steps forward for engineer and increased builds diversity. Although 5+ months to get something as simple as sigils & stats means we’ve been very low on the foodchain of dev time.

Grenades aren’t fine btw, standing on a attackable wall shouldn’t make you invulnerable. Grenades also have issues that are apparent once you get outside of dummy (mob, mist or player) testing.

Being on the receiving end of grenades is basically “oooh look how pretty sparkly grenades floating gently through the air, now which movement button shall I press for a free Evade”. Nades need a genuinely big reduction in flight time, similar to net shot net turret jumpshot glue shot etc. Our ranged options should actually be viable at range. Walking should be less powerful than dodging. Halving flight time or more, would make Nades vastly easier for devs to balance against both smart and dumb opponents.

Absolutionis.9427:

Jon Peters on Engineer when asked about the class:

• They’re looking at Engineer kits.
• Grenades are fine.
• They’re focusing on bringing things up to viability right now.

At least the Devs are looking at something, even if the only thing they mentioned was kits (and the latest update did help a lot with these).

Focussing on bringing things up to viability = Yeah!

After they’re done with kits I hope they look at the rest of the engineer, we really need work in the following areas:
- Weapons (fix the pistol rate and remove the self stun on rifle – How hard can those be?)
- Elixirs (scrap the RNG and apply Elixir traits to the Elixir Gun)
- Turrets (fix survivability and cool downs so they’re viable at higher levels – even better, make them a Turret Kit)
- Traits (scrap the worthless ones and replace them with ones that let us trait effectively across more kit/utility combinations)

Just a little thing, I’m new but could you make it so I can use the Flamethrower and use my napalm strike that doesn’t miss. I have to ‘dance’ every time to make it hit right.

Speaking of Dev response, they have been.. lackluster to say the least. Little bugs, just tiny things that have been around since release, haven’t been fixed yet. I’m talking about description bugs, like Sigil of Blood’s ICD being 5 seconds instead of 2. Really? Really devs? Would it take that much time out of your oh so busy day to fix a database error? A little confirmation as to what they are working on, such as that bug or Rifled Turret Barrel bug would be beyond glorious.

coglin.1496:

Terrahero.9358:

For example, Flamethrower has an aoe knockback + 4 other abilities versus Personal Battering Ram, single-target knockback with knockdown but nothing else.

This is a balance nightmare, and not once has a dev acknowledged this or explained how they design this to work.

One does literally zero damage. The other Does damage.

And the one that does zero damage is also a blindfire aoe that doesnt require melee range and can reflect projectiles.
Dont even start with me, with this crap. You know full well what i mean, but want to get into the tiniest of details for the sake of having something to argue about.

A weaponkit, with 5 functional abilities compareable to a REAL balanced weapon wil blow a single utility skill out of the water in almost every single respect. And with the exception of a few of those, for niche tools that you generally wouldnt get from a weapon, most utility skills would be useless.

This is a massive design contradiction. That either holds kits back from being a solid weapon, or renders 80% of the utility skills useless. And on such big dilemma’s i am very kitten curious how arenanet plans on balancing abilities. I dont give two hoots about how they plan to tweak scaling of an ability with 0.1%. But big design issues, yah, they should communicate about that.

As it stands, i dont even think they are aware of the issue, let alone have any idea on how they want to proceed. And this will sooner or later just come back and bite us all in the kitten

I mostly want more traits to work on different levels, like the wonderfull traits kit refinement and static discharge.

Grenadier should effect more than bombs, piercing shots more than pistols (rifles get that for free…) juggernaut on more than flamethrower…

I want that alledged versatility!

We are versatile, and we’re fun.
but we are not versatile enough in traits. Our traits are too narrow in effect, and hence all our good builds are single purpose builds.

hardly any popular engineer build is versatile in my book.
How many really swap from decent dps to decent support to decent tanking to decent cc?
Most do one thing pretty good and all the rest pretty bad…

Traits are the answer: wider range of skills must be effected by many traits.

Grackleflint.4956:

I was also really disheartened that they seem focused on skill capped players. That’s a VERY small minority of players who I wouldn’t be concerned about balancing for if I were concerned with the financial success of my company.

ArenaNet is obsessed with turning GW2 into an Esport. They are pretty much writing off the majority of their playerbase in favor of it.

They pointed out in this State of the Game that the eSport features are lower in priority then the vast majority of their other features for sPvP. Things like spectator mode and the like are quite a bit lower then matchmaking was, for example. Basically I got the opposite impression, their eSports agenda is for it appear with years in the timeline and not something that they are pushing for immediately. As they said it, it takes time for a game to be an eSport and while they do plan to eventually introduce these features it isn’t going to work unless the game itself is fun.

The fact that they kept on harping on how powerful trap rangers are shows how out of touch they are. Someone who doesn’t play GW2 would think that they were on par with d/d eles.. I’m not holding out much hope for any meaningful class balancing.

They talked about the Elementalist the longest, and the discussion was pretty much over when they said they were looking at them. Their discussion on class balance to me was very enlightening and in my opinion a fantastic direction for them to take. Remember the topics weren’t chosen by them, nor is the length of discussion on a topic a fair way to gauge anything about how they are ideologically balancing the game.

I’m very glad to hear that ‘grenades are fine’. If other kits are brought up to par with grenade kit, that’d be outstanding.

Grackleflint.4956:

On team composition: Ele’s are strong? Huh…we run 5 Engineers. Maybe that’s why we suck so bad.

I really dislike the profession devs.

Given the Dev’s a break – they said exactly the right thing!
Imagine if they’d said “Huh … we run 5 Engineers and we rock!”

Far from Engineers being ignored by the Devs:

1. The Devs are actively playing Engineers.
2. They’re familiar enough with the problems with Engineers to joke about it publicly.

This is the best news I’ve heard about the prospects for the Engineer class, yet. The more the Dev’s play Engs and the more they joke about their failings, the more love we can expect the Engineer class to get.

Go the Dev’s and their all Engineer team!

Zenguy.6421:

Grackleflint.4956:

On team composition: Ele’s are strong? Huh…we run 5 Engineers. Maybe that’s why we suck so bad.

I really dislike the profession devs.

Given the Dev’s a break – they said exactly the right thing!
Imagine if they’d said “Huh … we run 5 Engineers and we rock!”

Far from Engineers being ignored by the Devs:

1. The Devs are actively playing Engineers.
2. They’re familiar enough with the problems with Engineers to joke about it publicly.

This is the best news I’ve heard about the prospects for the Engineer class, yet. The more the Dev’s play Engs and the more they joke about their failings, the more love we can expect the Engineer class to get.

Go the Dev’s and their all Engineer team!

Oh man. I’d love to see that all engineer team get stomped by about any other class run by a competent player. Nerf us more why don’t ya!

EDIT: That being said, I’d like to see what other weapons they’re taking a look at. Other than elixir gun and pistols, everything else we run is pretty much level with post-nerf grenades. I would think it unfair if they buffed everything but grenades, considering that most kits are level with each other now.

Zenguy.6421:

Grackleflint.4956:

On team composition: Ele’s are strong? Huh…we run 5 Engineers. Maybe that’s why we suck so bad.

I really dislike the profession devs.

Given the Dev’s a break – they said exactly the right thing!
Imagine if they’d said “Huh … we run 5 Engineers and we rock!”

Far from Engineers being ignored by the Devs:

1. The Devs are actively playing Engineers.
2. They’re familiar enough with the problems with Engineers to joke about it publicly.

This is the best news I’ve heard about the prospects for the Engineer class, yet. The more the Dev’s play Engs and the more they joke about their failings, the more love we can expect the Engineer class to get.

Go the Dev’s and their all Engineer team!

They’ve joked and said similar things about Engineers before.

They still nerfed us.

JohnDied.3476:

Zenguy.6421:

Grackleflint.4956:

On team composition: Ele’s are strong? Huh…we run 5 Engineers. Maybe that’s why we suck so bad.

I really dislike the profession devs.

Given the Dev’s a break – they said exactly the right thing!
Imagine if they’d said “Huh … we run 5 Engineers and we rock!”

Far from Engineers being ignored by the Devs:

1. The Devs are actively playing Engineers.
2. They’re familiar enough with the problems with Engineers to joke about it publicly.

This is the best news I’ve heard about the prospects for the Engineer class, yet. The more the Dev’s play Engs and the more they joke about their failings, the more love we can expect the Engineer class to get.

Go the Dev’s and their all Engineer team!

Oh man. I’d love to see that all engineer team get stomped by about any other class run by a competent player. Nerf us more why don’t ya!

EDIT: That being said, I’d like to see what other weapons they’re taking a look at. Other than elixir gun and pistols, everything else we run is pretty much level with post-nerf grenades. I would think it unfair if they buffed everything but grenades, considering that most kits are level with each other now.

Actually… It’s make sense for the others (well, maybe not bomb) to get buffed because they’re more mid-melee ranged weapons, unlike the grenade kit which is a long range AoE wep, you know… The 2 things in the game that aren’t supposed to be top of the DPS charts xD

This forum is full of politicians… take one thing said, pull it way out of context, use it to complain in general about something you are unhappy about.

Believing that Anet spent countless man hours to create a profession exclusively to troll their own playerbase is just a little bit silly.

Less thinking it was created to troll…

More thinking it was hastily thrown together and never finished, and now that the game has launched no one has the will to say “We need to actually fix/finish this class instead of pretending everything is fine”.

Xae.7204:

Less thinking it was created to troll…

More thinking it was hastily thrown together and never finished, and now that the game has launched no one has the will to say “We need to actually fix/finish this class instead of pretending everything is fine”.

It’s not nearly as bad as you think, it’s just bugged, and much more challenging to play effectively than other professions. At it’s summit, it’s not nearly as bad as it’s often presented on this forum.

I think that devs thought these three things would balance out the engineer’s ability for kits.

1. The ability to swap between kits and weapons quickly.
2. Kit damage is (now) consistent with exotic weapon damage.
3. The engineer also gets an extra minor ability in the form of a toolbelt with his kit

What the devs thought was wrong, though. Hopefully they have new thoughts about kits now.

An all-engineer party, eh? Join NERF!

Burn me for this but I think engineer is fine when someone fix those annoying bugs. Removal of RNG on elixir can be helpfull too

lepri.6504:

Burn me for this but I think engineer is fine when someone fix those annoying bugs. Removal of RNG on elixir can be helpfull too

I won’t lie, if they fixed Scope, our damage could get pretty ridiculous. Like, 10-12% more ridiculous than I can make it right now. And that’d be awesome.

lepri.6504:

Burn me for this but I think engineer is fine when someone fix those annoying bugs. Removal of RNG on elixir can be helpfull too

This is what I feel like for the most part. I love the engineer and find it quirky but nothing to laugh at in PvE and WvW.

I can’t however speak for PvP as the current meta doesn’t favor us.

I’ve never been so happy with the engi in TPvP as I am right now. I have never had as many builds before after playing bomb/nade condis until smoke bomb got nerfed.

We’ve steadily received buff after buff recently. The sigil on kits and the weapon stats might have just been what we needed. Right now, the only problem I see is that every single one of my builds are devoted to grenades because that’s the best option we have at the moment. You won’t find more than 3 engis in paids that do not use grenades.

But that’s a problem most classes suffer from as well.

And yes, the kit design is totally kitten. To quote the design philosophy from the dec 14th patch: “They can use different kits based on the situation, but this extreme versatility comes at a cost in damage on their main hand weapons”. This is a bunch of BS. Our utilities are sacrificed for the damage and versatility that is given to other classes for free (I.E. eles or any class with weapon swapping). Of course, if you actually read what the entire thing has to say you’ll realize it has no bearing on what actually happens in game.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-December-14-2012/first#post1061889

There’s a remarkable amount of whining on this forum. Guess engineers don’t want to lose the “my profession is the worst” competition to literally every other profession , who believes they are the worst.

Players would be better served to discuss specific aspects of the profession which could be improved, and why, and waste less time writing manifestos about how the devs are ignoring or trolling engineers, don’t communicate enough, blah blah blah.

Xae.7204:

Grackleflint.4956:

I was also really disheartened that they seem focused on skill capped players. That’s a VERY small minority of players who I wouldn’t be concerned about balancing for if I were concerned with the financial success of my company.

ArenaNet is obsessed with turning GW2 into an Esport. They are pretty much writing off the majority of their playerbase in favor of it.

Obsessed? The “state of the game” chat was not actually a state of the game chat, it’s a cast that’s done specifically for and by PvPers, so that’s mainly what was talked about.

The majority of the comments in this thread seem to be from people who either didn’t watch the cast, or watched it with no real interest in what was being said, by whom, or in response to what. A lot of you are basically looking for reasons to be offended, even when they don’t exist.