Guild Wars 2

I recall a statement coming from John Peters (or one of the other lead devs) saying that they were going to let the meta settle (ie: have people find work arounds) before nerfing things. Personally, I do not see the reasoning behind nerfing the mine.

Firstly, the mine in itself is not that powerful to begin with. A 20 second cooldown that does very minor damage and requires 2GCD’s to activate for a knockback is not worth taking in itself.

Secondly, I have not heard a SINGLE PERSON complain about the blast finishers, seeing as it was very clunky to activate it with combo fields AND it was very underused.

So yea, just my 2 cents there. The mine is entirely unviable now, if anyone wants to argue otherwise, feel free to.

I’m not quite sure on the nerf as well. The CD on the mine tool belt skills were long and not many people used it/knew how to use it. The other problem is dungeon runs.

I find myself, outside of guild runs, not being in very much demand in dungeon runs as groups want guardians/warriors/archers. It sucks feeling like a 3rd wheel or in this case, the 7th wheel.

This class needs some love – particularly on sigils not transferring to our kits as this severely hampens our potential both from DPS and heal/conditions. There is also that very annoying thing of having to control click skill #1 for our kits every time we switch to them.

So far in dungeon runs the pecking order is 1) Guardians
2) Warriors
3) Archers
4) Mesmers
5) Elementalist
6) Thieves
7 & 8 (Interchangeable) Necros and Engineers

The only thing we really shine at in parties is our combo field abilities and I hope this mine nerf doesn’t follow a trend of them removing our utility in group settings. It’s quite upsetting.

Well, I see the logic in it. Because every mine in the field stacked. In my opinion, the better solution would have been to limit the amount that the mines could stack to.

What I do not understand, is why they fix issues that work against the class, while pushing back issues that would benefit the class and players, such as kits and weapons sigils or stats, and auto attack on kits.

Oh cmon elixir gun + decent healing stat still makes wonders. What can ele do we can’t? =)

It had alot to do with the silly things you could do with it at the start of an sPvP match. Could have your whole team get a 15 stack of might/regen/swiftness etc at the start then swap from mines to something else before the fighting actually started.

If this was the case then they should have made it so that once the game begins (10s countdown) you cannot swap out anything, instead of nerfing it.

Think it’s because of combo-field water with heal-turret toolbelt and the mines resulting in a huge heal-to-full in a giant aoe, as each mine was a finisher.

Look, it was an oversight and has nothing to do with meta or balance. It was clearly unintended and addressed.
Noone likes to see their particular class nerfed, but trust me, this is a good thing. It’s a sign that ANet is watching the game and trying to bring outlier builds in line to make all skills more attractive and thereby making more choices attractive.
If they let this go, all you would see is: ‘Group looking for mine field engineer to go!’

Now, it’s time for an update for all the other issues that need addressing.

Signed,
Anxious to hear from ANet.

BLU.8961:

If this was the case then they should have made it so that once the game begins (10s countdown) you cannot swap out anything, instead of nerfing it.

This wouldn’t solve anything, it would only cause more problems. You could do ridiculous stacking blast finishers in every aspect. The solution was to remove the blast finisher from the “mine field”, with multiple mines, and put it on “throw mine” with the single mine and explosion. Which is exactly what they did.

They did the exact proper and logic fix and everyone seems to have some knee jerk reaction that it was a bad thing. If you want to complain, complain about actual problems and stop complaining when they do the exact correct and logical fix.

Why don’t they just re-add the blast finisher and make it not stack? It just seems like common sense to me. The issue wasn’t with the blast finisher itself, but because it stacked. Or maybe add a stack cap, of 2-4 stacks.

Probably because 2 blast finishers for one utility is too much value. It would bean abuse of our class mechanic.

My biggest issue is with how silly Arenanet are:

Stage 1: Mine Kit stacks 5 blast finishers.
Stage 2: Mine kit removed, mine field created- Blast finisher on the Individual Mine.
Stage 3: Mine Field given 5 blast finishers- Blast finisher on the Individual Mine.
Stage 4: Mine Field blast finishers removed- Blast finisher on the Individual Mine.

MAKE UP YOUR FREAKING MIND.

coglin.1496:

The solution was to remove the blast finisher from the “mine field”, with multiple mines, and put it on “throw mine” with the single mine and explosion. Which is exactly what they did.

The utility mine or throw mine always had the blast finisher attribute, it wasn’t added in this patch.

Yes it was all changed, but no, not all in today’s patch, I agree. Heck, At one point the mine “kit” existed, and now it is a mine"gadget", that is how much it changed.

Necessary change, but they really need to give engineers better options for combo finishers before removing stuff like this. It certainly wasn’t game breaking in any way.

I would love to see it have been changed to remove boons and keep the radius small.
That combined with goggle vulnerability would be sweet.

BLU.8961:

I recall a statement coming from John Peters (or one of the other lead devs) saying that they were going to let the meta settle (ie: have people find work arounds) before nerfing things. Personally, I do not see the reasoning behind nerfing the mine.

Firstly, the mine in itself is not that powerful to begin with. A 20 second cooldown that does very minor damage and requires 2GCD’s to activate for a knockback is not worth taking in itself.

Secondly, I have not heard a SINGLE PERSON complain about the blast finishers, seeing as it was very clunky to activate it with combo fields AND it was very underused.

So yea, just my 2 cents there. The mine is entirely unviable now, if anyone wants to argue otherwise, feel free to.

1) You forget that mines also clears boons.
2) You ASSUME that it is underused. They have server stats, you don’t. Until you can prove otherwise, I’ll assume they know the situation better than you do. Furthermore, I’ve seen lots of people talking about how good it is, like the massive duration AoE retaliation you can get, or the massive AoE burst heal, etc..

There’s nothing worth complaining about here. The mine was and still is awesome.

It doesn’t take 2 GCDs to activate. Detonating is instant, you can even do it while stunned.

It’s decent damage, in an AOE, plus a knockback (still AOE) and a blast finisher, which it still is on a short cooldown for a utility skill, especially for one with so many uses.

The Toolbelt skill isn’t great, mainly because of how unpredictably the mines spread. The only change they made was to remove the blast finisher on the toolbelt skill, which is not a big deal, because it was hard to even take advantage of unless you were deliberately using it for planned combo stacking. It should be easy to see why an instant 5X combo finisher (blast finisher, too, which is arguably the best) could cause balance problems.

TL;DR Mine Kit is great, and you’re crazy for suggesting it isn’t.

The one mechanic that engineers excelled at, and they nerf it.
Still no status on the auto attack issue that engineers have with kits, or the stat transfer issue though.

Orson.8034:

The one mechanic that engineers excelled at, and they nerf it.
Still no status on the auto attack issue that engineers have with kits, or the stat transfer issue though.

You really think this is better than Engineer underwater grenade AoE-spam? (which granted is also probably slated for nerfing simply because of how OP it is)