Even through i will stick to my medkit (or healing turret if the need be) i find A.E.D to be interesting in the way that i plays.
Sadly though the toolbelt looks a little, well disappointing. There is a big gap in efficiency between our toolbelt skills, some are a core part of the play like big old bomb, bandage self, toss elixir S and elixir R. Others are mostly waste of spaces. For the most part a lot of these toolbelts have been tidied up (elixir b got stability, regenerating mist is a stunbreak, lowered cool down on turrets toolbelts and functionality changes in general).
This toolbelt though got a little bit of damage and a 1 second stun on a 30 second cooldown. In melee. Well its not horribad as the old turret toolbelts used to be, but its a bit mediocre. I was expecting a defibrillator to help us revive downed players, going with our “there is no selfish heal on the engineer” mantra. It makes sense for toolbelts of the heal skills to also be supportive.
Therefore i suggest (and i expect a lot of flak):
New toolbelt:
2 seconds cast, 30 second cooldown.
charge your A.E.D to heal downed allies directly in front of you and remove two conditions from them, enemies are stunned.
Stun duration: 1 second.
Heal: 20%.
The long cast means that it is best used by charging it up while running to your downed ally, and hopefully timing it to interupt the stompers if they do not have stability. Any kind of damage done to them prevents “insta” rezzes. The skill is essentially a help to revive allies and not a guaranteed revive from range (and you won’t revive yourself as with R). The condition clear is there to help negating stray poison without entirely countering body pressure applied by necros, engineers and other condition builds with cover conditions. Oh and while 1 second of stun might not be much on the original skill, when you use if to revive an ally it is a helpful addition.
And finally i would just like to discuss the matter of scaling.
The reason i dislike the change of transmute is that the old version actually scaled with the challenge ahead. 10x as many conditions? 10x as many converts! It didn’t matter if you fought one necro or an army of them, it helped in a equal fashion. In this game the masses already have so many supporting wheels its uncanny with group reviving, aoe cap and combat speed. We do not need to remove the few traits scaling with the encounter, in fact i would argue that we need more of them. But i agree with the randomness factor being unfun in a lot of cases for both the player and the opponent. Therefore, and this goes for the tools grandmaster armor mods as well (yeah good that your shield blocked one clone attack, now about the rest of the REAL people tearing you a new behind) i would suggest changing it to:
“every X condition/attack is converted/causes aegis”.
Going by the chance for it to proc now it would be equivalent or close to 12 conditions between transmutes. When it triggers you get a dozen stacks of “exhausted/shield depleted” and each condition/attack removes one of those stacks. That leaves counterplay to the enemy, to not use his fear or immobilize when your stacks are gone. Because lets be honest most of the times it will simply convert one short duration bleed (and not even the entire incoming stack, just one of the incoming 3 bleeds) to a short degen. With 15 seconds icd we do not only leave the trait in the hands of the enemy, but it also is limited by that one bleed every recharge. And given how conditions fly all over the place i would be happy to not have that power warrior autoattacking with his rifle destroying my help against that necro blowing his nose in my general direction. And yes there is a big difference between converting one of the three bleeds applied by a shrapnel grenade and removing 25 stacks of bleed every X seconds (comparing incoming and already applied conditions). Or removing 2 seconds of the applied burning versus a whole minute of stacked burn.
So far the interest in armor mods has been cool to say the least, but if it gave more help the more you needed it, it might be more reasonable, the more attacks the more help. A heavy but slow hitter might get a attack blocked and loose a lot of damage, a mesmer with duelists and flurry might not loose as much per hit, but the blocks triggers more often.
Well enough of my rambling.