Guild Wars 2

Aegael.6938:

One thing that most people tend to overlook is that the Engineer’s gameplay is fundamentally different from every other class. Even the Elementalist, who has effectively four weaponswaps can’t go from fire to earth, then back into fire. He has to wait 10-15 seconds before he can do that.

On the other hand, the Engineer’s kitswapping has a 1 second cooldown. His toolbelt skills are available no matter what kit you’re in.

This is a major part of the engineer’s versatility that’s often overlooked. He’s the class that can bring out whatever tool he needs in any given situation. He’s the only class in the game that never encounters the situation of having made a poor weapon swap and being stuck in a specific weaponset for 10 seconds.

While I agree that the Engineer is one of the less viable classes right now, you have to take this into consideration. Maybe “giving up” a utility isn’t so bad for ultimate control of when we use any of our skills.

i rather have 20 useful skills than 40 useless

sure we can eq 3 kits but its useless

sure we can put 1 kit more but lets face it it aint STRONG as a Main Weapon

we PAY 1 Utility Slot PLUS It HAS To be ALOT WEAKER than a MAIN Weapon Cause its a kit

but yeah we got alot of options if we eq 3kits on all slots we just become 193% useless and will die unless you hide behind team mates

i personally would rather have all kits buffed 200% like main weapons and add 9sec cooldown lol

OP made some valid points which I heavily agreed with. Hopefully Anet notices the flaws that the Engineer class still has and fixes them up. As of this patch do Kits scale with our current weapon stats?

EMAN.6190:

OP made some valid points which I heavily agreed with. Hopefully Anet notices the flaws that the Engineer class still has and fixes them up. As of this patch do Kits scale with our current weapon stats?

Nope, this patch added in the sigil effects, and they are working on weapon scaling for some future patch.

As a preface, I believe it’s important to note that I think what the devs were going for with the class was a jack-of-all-trades, master of none kind of feel. Versatility at the price of superiority. It’s hard to beat a ranger’s damage, or a guardian’s ability to support its group. The draw to play, and group with, an engineer is that we should be able to seamlessly shift between roles to adapt, and do whatever role we’re in effectively, though not necessarily as well as someone who’s specialized in that role.

That being said, what they implemented is more of versatility at the price of effectiveness. Yes, we can do lots of things, but we’re totally ineffective at everything. The biggest problem, as others have pointed out, is that other professions seem to have just as much versatility (or almost as much) but without any drawbacks.

One of the largest drawbacks engineers have in my opinion is the traits. It’s not that we have useless traits that bothers me, it’s that we are so sub-par at everything that we have to spend so many trait points just to play catch up. Other professions seem to be good at everything they do, and traits are for specializing and becoming excellent at something. We are bad at everything and have to spend traits to become okay at something.

Kimbald.2697:

A truely versatile engineer, making use of that benefit of instant kit swapping, uses at least 2 kits.
Sometimes even 3.

You can’t trait for that, you always lose.

That’s the pice we ALREADY pay for being versatile: we can’t specify deep into one purpose if using 2 or 3 kits…

What are the most effective and popular engineer builds?
Are that the most versatile ones?
No: it’s the most specified and least versatile builds that are the most popular.

To do great damage as engineer, you need to sacrifice all versatility.

Grenadier build, being our only realy great ranged option.
Everything else is less good at range. Well, nothing even has the same range… a flaw by design to start with.

- Rifle precision-power build.
Hard hitting but not versatile by a long shot.

- Juggernaut FT build sacrificing everything just to make the flamethrower better than ‘decent’.

- Tankcat build focusing all on survival with confusion or pure power, not doing much beyond surviving and meleeing.

- P/P condition does just that: run around and apply conditions.

All these examples of builds are like what other professions do, without them paying any price.
And most of the time it are weaker copies of other professions builds to start with.

I want the dev’s to show me versatile engineers builds that deserve damage nerfs. There aren’t any.
Basically they let us pay a price for having acces to different NON-VERSATILE builds that do good damage.
But they argue we have some builds that are versatile by themselves and still would have potential OP damage.
This is a major difference!

Engineers have been paying the price for versatility by design.
We don’t deserve to have our mediocre damage nerfed for it as well.

note: I run with 2 or 3 kits normally.
I’m bloody versatile… but I’m also bloody weak in terms of raw damage just because I can’t trait for 3 kits to work to their full potential.
When the devs say my damage could be a potential OP issue, I can’t do anything but laugh at that statement.

This hits the nail on the head. The most effective engineer builds are not versatile at all. I have no problem with that. I would prefer to be specialized and do top-tier damage than be designed to swap rapidly among kits but be incapable of doing anything well. The developer’s statement that we are designed to have poor mainhand weapon damage was indefensible. Few people want to play a buffbot. If that is what the engineer is to be, then let us know so that we can delete and reroll (or jump ship to another MMO).

We can buff?

Oh you mean throw elixir

I thought that was for 409 self-cleanse spam

Not to mention that the builds people end up using to do decent damage without the versatility are EXTREMELY boring to execute. Why are bombs and grenades SO stale? Essentially you trade a complete weapon set with 5 unique attacks – for – 5 base attacks with a different condition applied. Its so unintresting to use I fall asleep while doing it.

Could atleast the 4-5 attacks for grenade and bomb be different? Perhaps a sticky bomb that has t be applied in melee and detonates and pushes back after 3 seconds. Something intresting – anything.

And while we’re at it, could the mortars duration be reduced to 10 seconds but hit like a truck? Would perhaps make me use it now and then.

Could i have Tixx mortars that just hit us in the Infinirarium ? Please ?

Instead of deploying one big useless mortar, let’s deploy 10 of these little monsters ^^

Umungus.8326:

Could i have Tixx mortars that just hit us in the Infinirarium ? Please ?

Instead of deploying one big useless mortar, let’s deploy 10 of these little monsters ^^

Slightly off topic but ha I was thinking the same when I saw them, then made a lame joke to my party about how a toy mortar was doing more damage than my real mortar lol

Pingulicious.8270:

Not to mention that the builds people end up using to do decent damage without the versatility are EXTREMELY boring to execute. Why are bombs and grenades SO stale?

I think this is mentioned far too little amidst all the talk about min-maxing for damage; these kits are purely from a gameplay perspective some of the worst I have ever seen in an MMO and certainly in GW2, where in general so much effort has been put into making weapons interesting and fun.

I honestly wish they just rework or remove them completely because having to even consider them as an option for balancing a class is forcing that class to endure some of the most stale and boring gameplay imaginable in GW2.

I think they forget that, just like other classes can’t switch their equipped weapon sets in combat, we can’t switch kits in combat either.

Conversely, I think they forget that, outside of combat, nothing stops a warrior/guardian/etc. from carrying every weapon they can use and tailoring their equipped weapon sets to the upcoming fight before every battle. This is something commonly suggested to new players, and something I do on my non-Engineer characters (and on my Engineer, as much as I never really have need of pistol or shield I still carry them). That versatility isn’t paid for in damage nerfs, it’s just inherent to every profession, and only Engineer and Elementalist lose it.

I would almost trade the 1s cooldown on kit-swap for the ability to take an alternate weapon set and have my 3 utilities free (I think that’s a horrible suggestion for Engineer and would rather have the problems fixed for real, so I’ll just play something else for awhile). Having free utilities is less of a problem as the kits I used to like become less and less worthwhile (EG, mainly, is now not worth me carrying while I level since super elixir was the only new and especially useful thing it brought me, and that’s not helpful for getting me out of tight spots anymore). Playing a piano to stack confusion with bombs and tools was pretty fun, but I’m rarely in a spot where I regret making a bad weapon set swap in other classes, and in most situations I could get by with 10s in whatever kit is equipped.

I do think it would be possible to map most of the kits to some other weapon set. Tool kit would obviously be perfect for hammer or mace/shield. Elixir gun you could probably map to longbow (firing elixir tipped arrows instead of darts), though the backwards launch on 4 might be hard to justify. You could just equip daggers and have them be about dropping bombs (pretending you use the dagger as a steel to light the bombs, or just use a torch) instead. Flamethrower I’m not sure about though. Maybe that could be torch or pistol/torch. Most of these don’t work well, but they have the ability to customize skills based on both equipped weapons like they do for thief 3 skills, so you could just have kits correspond to pairs of equipped weapons.

Moonrabbit.1543:

This hits the nail on the head. The most effective engineer builds are not versatile at all. I have no problem with that. I would prefer to be specialized and do top-tier damage than be designed to swap rapidly among kits but be incapable of doing anything well. The developer’s statement that we are designed to have poor mainhand weapon damage was indefensible.

The changes to the class seem to be reactionary and lacking in an overall plan. Too many things have been changed individually without consideration to what the class brings to the table as a whole. As a result, this is the least versatile class now… paying for versatility.

Am so frustrated with the lack of dmg engy has, yes we are versatile but even if you go glass to put out dmg with the nerf on grenades it seems we gotta go through our entire list of cool-downs to kill anything where as a thief can just back stab into heartseeker and urs dead so is that fair? u have a class who can just press 2 buttons and ur dead to us having to run a long combo of 7+ skills to have the same effect? btw if we miss any1 of those skills the person lives. I was furious with the decision to reduce dmg from grenades they were my only decent dmg, its one thing to make sigils work with kits but add to that the reduction the outcome is a nerf. how the heck am i suppose to kill anything when my grenades dmg as sporadic as hell sometimes 700 sometimes 300. I rather have it the way it was at least back than i could count on my dmg.

I used to be very happy with the variety engineer had, but even for the kits it’s depressing to realize how limited they are.

-Flamethrower is absolutely useless if you don’t build all your traits around it. It’s best to try and forget it exists.
-Elixir gun is just outright bad compared to other things for both damage and effects. Super elixir is the only worthwhile item, which means you should take other things that have more worthwhile stuff.
-I hate bombkit. It’s good for damage, but it’s extremely unfun imo. Bombs should be set-and-run like Big-ol-bomb, not melee weapons. All you do is mash the effects buttons and hope the target doesn’t run around a lot. I hate it so very much.
-Grenade kit is nice, but whenever I use it I feel bad I haven’t specced for it since it’s the only truly useful option.
-Toolkit I run all the time. The damage is average for being melee, has a really nice cripple, a shield, confusion attack, and a ranged pull magnet for cheesing the enemy in WvW. However I always have to wonder whether I should be using this for a particular encounter or bombkit for better melee damage.

Kimbald.2697:

A truely versatile engineer, making use of that benefit of instant kit swapping, uses at least 2 kits.
Sometimes even 3.

You can’t trait for that, you always lose.

That’s the pice we ALREADY pay for being versatile: we can’t specify deep into one purpose if using 2 or 3 kits…

What are the most effective and popular engineer builds?
Are that the most versatile ones?
No: it’s the most specified and least versatile builds that are the most popular.

To do great damage as engineer, you need to sacrifice all versatility.

Grenadier build, being our only realy great ranged option.
Everything else is less good at range. Well, nothing even has the same range… a flaw by design to start with.

- Rifle precision-power build.
Hard hitting but not versatile by a long shot.

- Juggernaut FT build sacrificing everything just to make the flamethrower better than ‘decent’.

- Tankcat build focusing all on survival with confusion or pure power, not doing much beyond surviving and meleeing.

- P/P condition does just that: run around and apply conditions.

All these examples of builds are like what other professions do, without them paying any price.
And most of the time it are weaker copies of other professions builds to start with.

I want the dev’s to show me versatile engineers builds that deserve damage nerfs. There aren’t any.
Basically they let us pay a price for having acces to different NON-VERSATILE builds that do good damage.
But they argue we have some builds that are versatile by themselves and still would have potential OP damage.
This is a major difference!

Engineers have been paying the price for versatility by design.
We don’t deserve to have our mediocre damage nerfed for it as well.

note: I run with 2 or 3 kits normally.
I’m bloody versatile… but I’m also bloody weak in terms of raw damage just because I can’t trait for 3 kits to work to their full potential.
When the devs say my damage could be a potential OP issue, I can’t do anything but laugh at that statement.

I found a lot of my thoughts here in your post. While I used the FT for the last few days it hurts me to choose between condition remove, and FTdmg+HGH. Of course trait choises should always hurt but if the trait choise hurts we don’t seem to need a overall dmg reduction, too. And here is our versality.
If they say ’Main Hand Weapons" does that mean just pistol and rifle? Because FT dmg seems just to be good in special situations… you know the story.

Same for grenades:
I know they had impressive dmg but hitting a FAST mob could also cause a lot of grenades to miss. So isn’t this a good trade/balance? Supreme dmg for a much harder to hit weapon compared to ‘target-locking’ attack? And at all My tests grenades were now significantly weaker.

Thanks all for sharing your thoughts and I gotta say many of you made valid points for both sides of the debate. Even so, after reading all this, I would be shocked if the devs still decided not to change their philosophy on engies.

I totally agree, and my engie is only lvl 11.

+1 for this thread, and another bump. Just to make a point. Anet’s nerf for engies was beyond heavy-handed.