Guild Wars 2

Gadgets and Gryos, all of us engis know that they have issues. I’ve had some ideas simmering for a while and I thought I would present them and see what you folks thought. Both of the skill sets have an issue in being competitive against kits. Sometimes they may be used in unique circumstances, but even then it may be a struggle. Take these as not definite changes, but more as suggestions to perhaps turn this idea into something better, and any numbers given are just ball-park values.
Note: This is going to look at the skills themselves, not the toolbelt skills.

Gadgets:
Besides the GM trait that needs to have the clunky stack mechanic removed, I think the skills themselves could get a bit of buffing in an unique way. One thing that has always stood out for me regarding this type is the skill Utility Goggles. They have a unique ability in giving Engi immunity to blindness for 10 seconds. Perhaps all the other gadgets should have something as well. Here are a few examples:

• AED: Gain 10% damage reduction after the lethal damage is taken for X amount of seconds.
  Reasoning: Personally, while AED is an interesting high risk/ high reward sort of deal, I’ve felt it could use a little help to give a boost in defense so as to not be open for half a minute without a heal.
• Throw-mine: After detonation, gain a 10% increase to damage output for a short time.
  Reasoning: Throw-mine has been a good offensive gadget, and tbh, it may not even need this boost since it already has a lot going for it. But I figured it would allow the engi push out a bit more DPS since you’ll be dropping a kit.
• Slick Shoes: Immunity to soft cc’s for a short time.
  Reasoning: Since Slick Shoes got changed, I’ve rarely if ever seen it much, so with special buff, it’ll allow the engi more freedom as a means to escape when many of his enemies have stability to counter the knock down.
• Rocket Boots: Gain a 25% speed boost for a short time after landing
  Reasoning: Rocket Boots really need to have an evade frame as part of the skill, but I think having a nice passive speed boost for a short time would boost its effectiveness as a means to escape… especially if we are still able to be hit while using the skill.
• Battering Ram: ???
  Reasoning: I still don’t know what to give Battering Ram. The only thing I could think of is that when it hits a target, that target gains a special debuff that causes bleeding after 5s (yah know, from internal bleeding!)

Gyros:
Personally, I haven’t liked gyros all that much. They were put up as the ability to support allies and provide unique functions… But instead they were mostly lacking in actually supporting allies and have issues with poor AI pathing. The only one I really use is Bulwark since it has a good AOE size damage redirection buff, nice reflect, and is the one gyro that seems to be able to follow well. But like the gadgets, I think they could use some unique buffs to make them more competitive but also fulfill their role better as a means to support allies. They could also use some tweaks to how the gyros use their abilities.

• Medic Gyro: 5 allies in the AOE gain a 10% outgoing healing. Increase size of healing AOE to 600. Gyro activates pulse healing every 3 seconds regardless of proximity to the Engi.
  Reasoning: The small AOE it currently gives is too small, and it only activates when close enough to the player meaning a lot of potential healing to allies is dropped off. It would be better if the AOE was extended and it simply pulsed out healing every 3 seconds. This would provide more reliability. The buff is there to focus on party healing, though I could see something like a 15% to boon duration instead. It would have an applied special buff that would last 3s and then get refreshed for each pulse.
• Shredder Gyro: Enemies that are struck by the gyro get a special debuff that “shreds” their armor (up to 5 enemies). Debuff makes the target have 10% incoming damage.
  Reasoning: The Shredder Gyro initial function was very lacking and unreliable as fields can change at a moment’s notice, plus it didn’t really add much damage despite it being more of the damaging type. The debuff would apply on a target 2 or 3 sec debuff that would get refreshed each hit. Since the gyro stays still and can still be CC’d/or killed, it would be up to the Engi to place it at the right time, and the enemy has numerous ways to counter it.
• Purge Gyro: Change the mechanic to simply follow the engi and activate the condi removal effect every 3 seconds in an AOE. Remove 1 condi per ally ( up to 5 allies) per pulse. Make the AOE size 600. While in the radius, a special buff will also pulse out reducing the incoming condi duration by 10%
  Reasoning: Tbh, the purge gyro was extremely unreliable to provide cleansing support. It could be CC’d, interrupted, destroyed… etc. And then your cleansing would be gone. This change would make it more reliable and more supportive to allies. The Special buff would be similar to the healing gyro’s that would last 3 seconds but get refreshed for every pulse.
• Bulwark Gyro: Special buff- Decrease incoming damage by 15% when hard CC’d
  Reasoning: While the Bulwark is already a decent gyro, why not have a bit of a counter against all these CC’s being thrown around? This is inspired from an old engi trait that would give you 20% damage reduction while you were stunned, dazed, knockdown, etc.
• Blast Gyro: ???
  Reasoning: Not sure what the Blast Gyro would give.
• Stealth Gyro: While in the stealth field, gain a small speed boost.
  Reasoning: It is no secret that the enemy knows where you are. So why not give your fellow party members a way to escape that is more constant?

So, what do you folks think? Does this make any sense? Pros and Cons? Does it help bring unique buffs to the Engi that will benefit the profession and party comp? I would love to hear what you think about this. I do apologize if some of these suggestions have already been floating around… I don’t poke around the forums often. Ha!

its a good start but the major problem with these skills is the amount of application of effect they have versus other skills/traits eg, battering ram versus flamer, like the biggest problem im seeing is if you buff baseline gadgets to much they outshine other skills to much and become a baseline without building around the idea of the skill just like slick shoes befor they were nerfed on the other hand dont buff em properly and they just stay gimmicky as kitten.

i do like the idea of increased damage after using throw mine tho, since it offers good damage with its toolbelt skill baseline and boon removal so it would make it one nasty wombo combo utility skill.

I agree with you. We shouldn’t buff them too much, but they have to have something to make the competitive against kits. Kits have a bit of everything… damage..cc..sometimes support, while a gadget is more focused. Those focused areas should be boosted enough to warrant an engi to consider using the gadget for whatever specific purpose they may have, eg using Throw Mine as direct damage and damage modifier to the combine with other skill to support that direct damage setup.

I would like to add that since the daze was removed from gyros, there is very little incentive to actually detonate them. While turrets already have an overcharge ability, perhaps the gyro skill, once the gyro is summoned, could be changed to an overcharge. It could use some X skill for a short period of time while it is up. It could be as simple as placing a field down that would act like the abilities I gave above (example: Bulwark gyro could place an AOE down that would reduce damage by 15% when cc’d for 5 seconds). This could bring in a more active role with the gyro.

I would enjoy those changes so much! Wonderful ideas.

For your Blasty: inherit player stats and he’s good enough.

Most of the gyros are actually pretty decent and really only need minor changes, if any at all. Bulwark gyro is fine as is. Purge gyro isn’t amazing but it does what it’s supposed to do so I think it’s fine as well. Blast gyro should probably apply daze when it explodes even if it is blocked, considering how rarely it actually hits the intended target anyway. It could probably use a small damage increase as well. Shredder gyro just need to whirl way way faster, as the whole point is that you combo it with fields but it’s garbage even if it lands in a field.

Gadgets are definitely in a much worse position. I like the OP’s general idea of giving them passive effects after they complete. I think the ones OP suggested are good besides slick shoes, since the toolbelt skill gives superspeed which is nearly the same as immunity to soft cc anyway. I would make it something like 25% chance to dodge attacks for a duration after slick shoes ends. As for battering ram, I would do something like “after being hit by battering ram, enemies have 25% chance to be dazed on hit for X seconds” which might be a bit too strong but the numbers could be adjusted and it seems to fit the theme.

Besides player stat scaling on shredder gyro, I think the gyros are fine at this point. Sadly, the minor trait scrapper gets that boosts daze/stun duration is somewhat useless now, only increasing a few abilities on scrapper itself (hammer 5, leap finishers through lightning fields). If this (and expert examination) were to apply to all cc types, it’d be a lot more usable by both scrapper (boosting blast gyro launch distance) and core engi (rifle 4, turret stuff, battering ram etc).

As for gadgets, Slick Shoes is pretty decent, huge super speed duration that combos with regen on scrapper, a useful knockdown. It could make you immune to new applications of chill/cripple/immobolize but I don’t think it’s necessary.

AED needs help, but I’m not sure what to do besides give say protection and resistance IF you trigger it with the enhancement trait as a sort of comeback mechanic. Its toolbelt should probably be “Overload AED” or something, which would grant you lightning aura and there, useful toolbelt (even synergizes with scrapper stun trait!).

Rocket Boots would be fine “for damage” if you could target the landing point like Rifle 5. Additionally, 2 blast finishers wouldn’t be out of place when trait empowered to give it some interesting use (you get hit 5 times, better double blast a water kinda trick). The toolbelt should probably be a charge type move too rather than the awkwardly hard to target thing it is now. Not sure really what to do with it though.

Personal Battering Ram is an interesting launch utility that does a fraction of the damage that blast gyro does with a cd that is 10 seconds longer, and only hits 1 target. A good minimum would be to make it work like Wild Blow (Berserker Rage utility) so it knockbacks additional targets with the body, or even affect like 3 targets in front of you. For the gadget trait empower, it should work like a true battering ram and destroy any protection and stability on the target when it hits (the dispel would happen just before the hit but not on cast). The toolbelt here is quite nice with a low cooldown, good power damage, and a daze.

As for Utility Goggles, the blind immunity is pretty neat, but the gadget trait giving it might seems rather out of place. Maybe the gadget trait could make you unblockable (for half the duration, 5s) as it identifies new weak points with the extra power boost?

There’s a lot of places Gadgets could be interesting, since they have to make up the lack of a kit in terms of impact/utility, but they’re rather underdeveloped unfortunately.

In my opinion, gadgets/gyros, and pretty much anything that’s not a kit needs to have either a drastically low cooldown, or be completely overloaded with stats, passive abilities, boons, or offensive utility. For Engineer, the problem has always been, you’ve giving up 5 skills for one if you ever take something that’s not a kit. So anything that’s not a kit needs to essentially be worth 5 abilities in one, or it needs to be have a far lower average cooldown than those 5 abilities, or they need to fulfill very specialized roles, if they’re going to be taken. And that’s a hard task.

For example, if Slick Shoes had half the current cooldown, I might consider taking it then. Doesn’t that sound ridiculous? Even after the nerf, a 20s cd on Slick Shoes would be one of the best cc utilities in the game. And that’s how powerful it would need to be in order to be competitive. We don’t have weaponswap, so our utilities need to provide us with defense, offense, and utility. If they only do one thing, they have to do it incredibly well, otherwise they’re just worthless to us. The fact that rifle and pistol MH are incredibly bad doesn’t help things at all — As far as core engineer goes, we can’t rely on our base weapons at all. Rifle and mainhand pistol absolutely completely suck. Rifle has decent damage, but can’t be relied on at all for defense and its “utility” is single-target exclusive, and very prone to projectile hate. Mainhand pistol has a tiny bit of utility and defense, mainly in static shot, and it has absolutely no offense to speak of. All these things push us even further towards kits.

For the expansion, Anet finally got the memo and decided to give us a strong base weapon, the Hammer, which can actually live on its own as primary defense, offense, and utility, so that we’re freed from the burden of having to rely on kits to carry our damage. The only problem being that hammer is so unbelievably OP that it received multiple nerfs and is still the best class weapon by far, and has even gotten the core engineer nerfed numerous times. Anytime you end up taking something that’s not a kit, 99% of the time it’s because the hammer enabled you to do it just because it’s so OP.

Anytime someone talks about engineer problems, it’s actually multiple problems intersecting that cause the absolute CF that is the engineer class. We could receive buffs to pistol MH, or rifle, or shield, or buffs to everything not a kit, or they could just give us weaponswap and we probably STILL wouldn’t be OP (if we somehow took hammer out of the equation and it be swapping between pistol and rifle). But, another patch comes out and nothing, so…

^ So much truth in one post. This person gets it. I wish I could pay 20000 gems to have a developer read that.

Nice! I like these replies

Dinosaurs.8674:

Gadgets are definitely in a much worse position. I like the OP’s general idea of giving them passive effects after they complete.
…
As for battering ram, I would do something like “after being hit by battering ram, enemies have 25% chance to be dazed on hit for X seconds” which might be a bit too strong but the numbers could be adjusted and it seems to fit the theme.

I was thinking about some extra stun effect for battering ram, but I wasn’t sure how to balance it. Having a % chance may be the answer to it. I agree that gadgets are worse off and they were harder to getting an idea together compared to the gyros.

Kiroshima.8497:

Besides player stat scaling on shredder gyro, I think the gyros are fine at this point.

Perhaps, but I want more reliability out of the gyros. A big reason to change the AOE sizes and change some of the functionality would make them more reliable, imo. Bulwark is a perfect example because despite the AI quirkyness, it has a large enough AOE to make up for it. If this thing had been 240 like the healing gyro, we would have had problems helping others. I’ve recently read through some past threads discussing ways the engis could be less selfish, and I believe re-working the gyros to be more friendly to be supportive roles with unique capabilities would help that gap.

Aegael.6938:

In my opinion, gadgets/gyros, and pretty much anything that’s not a kit needs to have either a drastically low cooldown, or be completely overloaded with stats, passive abilities, boons, or offensive utility. For Engineer, the problem has always been, you’ve giving up 5 skills for one if you ever take something that’s not a kit. So anything that’s not a kit needs to essentially be worth 5 abilities in one, or it needs to be have a far lower average cooldown than those 5 abilities, or they need to fulfill very specialized roles, if they’re going to be taken. And that’s a hard task.
….
Anytime someone talks about engineer problems, it’s actually multiple problems intersecting that cause the absolute CF that is the engineer class. …

I agree. Kits are fantastic, but it makes it harder to balance in other skills, though some of this could be fixed by what seems to be simple changes. That’s what I was hoping with my idea… Trying to push gadgets to be more beneficial in a focused area that a kit doesn’t provide… Make Gyros more reliable and having better support elements to break a profession to be less selfish.

Hopefully, these discussions will eventually make way to the Devs. The engi is a good profession, but these issues prevent it from reaching its full potential.