Guild Wars 2

The patch discussion Here

Summary:

The Healing turret
- Has it’s initial healing reduced and the passive healing is a lot stronger. When overcharged, the turret now drops a water field on the ground granting healing to allies and removing conditions. They say this way the Engineer will become a very important role of a group and all members should focus on defending the turret.

Incendiary Explosive
It will now apply 4 seconds of burning every 10 seconds. Chance to apply burning has gone from 33% to 100%.

Elixir S
When drinking , the engineer will not be able to use utility skills. They did this to discourage players from queuing combos.

Here are the important ideas the devs shared:

- Plan to diversify the builds and encourage a variety of combo usage.
- intention to buff PVE damage without affecting PVP and vice versa. This way kits such as Bomb and Grenades may behave different in PVP and PVE
- They admit Gadgets are not strong enough
- Too many Engineers rely on Elixir H and very few on the healing turret
- The HGH is considered overpowered. They did not nerf it directly. In stead, the Thief and Warrior can steal boons on attacks. So be careful how and when you stack your might.
- Grenades are still considered very powerful but will not come down yet.

If I missed some, feel free to post it.
thanks

Important general remarks that could affect engineers in the future:

- they consider a three-way split to seperate not only pve and pvp, but occasionaly give WvW seperate skill mechanics or numbers as well.

- they created new traits which could mean in the future they do this more.

I personally think it’s a missed opportunity they didn’t create or change more engineer traits this go. Next month will be mainly fixes, no big changes. So it’s at least 2 month till they might rework the weaker engineer traits.
They haven’t said they would, at all. But it’s a first that they did it now for other professions, so it opens the door perhaps.
I’m not to optimistic about it, but in theory it’s a good thing they finally did this.

JubeiTM.5763:

The patch discussion Here

When drinking Elixir S, the engineer will not be able to use utility skills. They did this to discourage players from queuing combos.

I understood this differently:

The combo queuing wasn’t the reason for the nerf.
It was the fear of what would happen after the nerf.

my understanding was that players would now queue combo’s more when their target engineer uses Elixir S, since there is nothing the engineer can do while being invulnerable.
So the enemies would basically wait those 3 seconds while queueing up their skills to unleash as soon as the engineer can be hit again.

I think that Grouch was referring to this when he mentioned the combo queuing.

The dev’s themselves gave as reason for the nerf that it was just like the ele change, and that players would still be able to stomp or rezz when using elixir S.
They didn’t give much more explanation, it sounded like it was almost a sort of ‘fix’, something that wasn’t intended anyhow.

JubeiTM.5763:

Here are the important ideas the devs shared:
- Plan to diversify the builds and encourage a variety of combo usage.
- intention to buff PVE damage without affecting PVP and vice versa. This way kits such as Bomb and Grenades may behave different in PVP and PVE
- They admit Gadgets are not strong enough
- Too many Engineers rely on Elixir H and very few on the healing turret
- The HGH is considered overpowered. They did not nerf it directly. In stead, the Thief and Warrior can steal boons on attacks. So be careful how and when you stack your might.
- Grenades are still considered very powerful but will not come down yet.

All good in theory. Lets hope they get the theory crafting to match how Eng’s actually work.

“Intention to buff PVE damage without affecting PVP and vice versa.” That’s a good idea and about time too (though I suspect ‘buff’ is interchangeable with ‘nerf’ in this instance).
“This way kits such as Bomb and Grenades may behave different in PVP and PVE. hope they’re looking beyond just those two kits.

“They admit Gadgets are not strong enough” – sounds like someone has tried them and discovered what we’ve been saying all along.

“Too many Engineers rely on Elixir H and very few on the healing turret” and for good reasons … which are well documented on these forums if they want to know why (healing turret has such poor survival it works best as a 3 step AoE skill: place, overcharge, explode; vs Elixir H with its go anywhere heals, defensive buffs, might and 409 condition cleanses)

“Grenades are still considered very powerful but will not come down yet.” – hey, looks like they’ve learned to give us a break between major nerfs. Hope that when they drop the nerf they keep it within the grenade kit only and don’t end up with another multi-build slaughter.

In stead, the Thief and Warrior can steal boons on attacks.

Warrior doesn’t steal boons on their attacks.
Warrior can get a trait that will enable them to do 3% more damage per unique boon upon their target.

When they talked about the Healing turret not getting aggro, about it living long enough, about players picking them up as a standard method (instead of detonating the right moment in the field as I figure most do)… I crinched a little.

This is not something that should be in a summary of the engineer discussion of SotG as such.
But it did hint at how their changes are mostly theorycrafted, which is a dangerous thing to rely upon.

In that sense i felt it was significant in the whole engineer discussion at SotG.

JoxerNL.3752:

Warrior can get a trait that will enable them to do 3% more damage per unique boon upon their target.

Thanks for clearing this out. Than 20 Might stacking is still considered as 1 boon.

For incendiary powder, it’s not necessarily bad (at least, not for all builds). It’s targeted at grenade builds because they obviously proc in constantly, but might hurt flamethrower.

The breakdown is:
- More burst (hits for 4 seconds right at the start)
- Extra ticks at 25% and 75% condition duration help a bit.
- More predictable, easy to know when flamethrower will be guaranteed full damage.
- More sustained damage for builds with less than 1 crit every 1.2 seconds

Yes, if you crit more than once every 1.2 seconds consistently, you’ll do less sustained damage. Only really applicable for veterans and above, given the new version guarantees the damage up front. So if you still consider it a nerf remember you do get something in return

Engineers didn’t get nerf at all, they were just playing around with numbers. The result is almost the same. Curious to see how the healing turret is doing.

The healing turret change is the only thing I’m concerned about. One of those dev guys said he mained engie so I’m confused when he said most pick up their turret when they actually detonate. And they also mentioned they wanted to make the overcharge generate a water field which it already does since it only goes off when the turret refreshes regen. Who actually relies on healing overcharge to cleanse? You have to stand still and pray that your turret survives the 1-8 seconds that it takes to actually go off.

So we can no longer pop elixir s and go into a kit and heal up or prepare with a smoke bomb or whatever?

JubeiTM.5763:

Engineers didn’t get nerf at all, they were just playing around with numbers. The result is almost the same. Curious to see how the healing turret is doing.

The Elixir S change will be one of the bigger nerfs our profession has received.
This is by far our most popular Stunbreaker and really our best means of disengaging.
Since Engineers lack the ground covering skills that most other professions have, alot of ppl relied on Elixir S to either turtle up and heal or combo into another defensive skill to get away.

I spend most my time in WvW and most Engineers that manage to escape don’t do it just using Elixir S, they needed to be able to combo right into gear shield or smokebomb. See we lack RTL or Blink or Heartseeker or Savage Leap or any other quick mobility type skills, so Elixir S allowing utility skills really put us closer to even with other professions. especially in WvW and PvE, since those other professions can use all those type skills to catch right up to us.

This seems to a straight out of tPvP nerf since you don’t draw as much focus and don’t have to run as far to get away. In WvW and PvE alot more Engineers are going to be eating dirt this next week.

kokocabana.8153:

The healing turret change is the only thing I’m concerned about. One of those dev guys said he mained engie so I’m confused when he said most pick up their turret when they actually detonate. And they also mentioned they wanted to make the overcharge generate a water field which it already does since it only goes off when the turret refreshes regen. Who actually relies on healing overcharge to cleanse? You have to stand still and pray that your turret survives the 1-8 seconds that it takes to actually go off.

So Grouch isn’t a dev, he’s the host of SotG. And if you pick up the heal turret instead of detonating you get a slightly quicker cooldown. SotG seems to be mainly from a PvP veiwpoint so what you’ll hear as “standard practice” is going to vary if you mainly play PvE or WvW.

CriSPeH.8512:

JubeiTM.5763:

Engineers didn’t get nerf at all, they were just playing around with numbers. The result is almost the same. Curious to see how the healing turret is doing.

The Elixir S change will be one of the bigger nerfs our profession has received.
This is by far our most popular Stunbreaker and really our best means of disengaging.
Since Engineers lack the ground covering skills that most other professions have, alot of ppl relied on Elixir S to either turtle up and heal or combo into another defensive skill to get away.

I spend most my time in WvW and most Engineers that manage to escape don’t do it just using Elixir S, they needed to be able to combo right into gear shield or smokebomb. See we lack RTL or Blink or Heartseeker or Savage Leap or any other quick mobility type skills, so Elixir S allowing utility skills really put us closer to even with other professions. especially in WvW and PvE, since those other professions can use all those type skills to catch right up to us.

This seems to a straight out of tPvP nerf since you don’t draw as much focus and don’t have to run as far to get away. In WvW and PvE alot more Engineers are going to be eating dirt this next week.

elixir S + heal + supply crate was (is!) such a good combo, probably saved my kitten a few thousand times :p
it was very strong but Im not sure it required a nerf. anyway, it will take some time getting used to, making mistakes will be alot more unforgiving for my usual build.

Well, at least I know I won’t have to bother to take those ten points from inventions to put in explosives for incendiary explosives now. I suppose there’s always a silver lining.

Maskaganda.2043:

making mistakes will be alot more unforgiving for my usual build.

Ouch. When Mask says something like that we know the skill threshold for Eng’s just got even higher!