Guild Wars 2

WTF.
WTF.
WTF.
WTF.

i am angry too but i understand the nerf : 3 secs on 13,5 is really huge… 2 secs every 13,5 means more than 4 secs block per minute … it is not bad and it is in line with other similar skills. Perhaps i would liked an improvement on toolkit autoattack as compensation becouse it is really bad .

It was a bit too good traited, but the solution to that is to tune down the trait they overbuffed in the first place, not to kill the base skill…

Sins.4782:

It was a bit too good traited, but the solution to that is to tune down the trait they overbuffed in the first place, not to kill the base skill…

You guys are too negative. It is not bad 2 seconds block every 13.5 seconds . ANd in this patch we had also something good. In my opinion now core engi is really better. shield if traited is quite strong now and if you take ft and rocket boots you have good damage in condi and 2 heal combo’s ( classic turret + f1+rocket boot) . it is not bad at all . Try it .

3s is necessary in WvW for surviving while passing through AoE. It’s also necessary for surviving skills like Revenant’s Unrelenting Assault, or Ranger pew pew, or Hundred Blades, or Traps, or any number of other high damage skills that last more than 3 seconds.

Now we need to block for 2 seconds, then burn a dodge or two (which are already stretched thin, considering they’re our ONLY other defense – unless you’re running Elixir S)

Re: Rocket Boots + Healing Turret combo – It’s not enough. I can post a video later showing the problem, but basically: Heal Turret takes too long to go off – It actually takes more than the listed 0.75s to go off, so it’s often interrupted or comes too late. Rocket Boots also provides no evades, so you’re vulnerable to aoe, direct damage, and cc’s while travelling. Sometimes you’re taking so much fire that Rocket Boots is a death sentence, but a longer block would save you.

Wow, what an unwarranted nerf. The only one that made my jaw drop. Wtf is up with all the Engi sustain nerfs? Hardly anyone plays Engi anymore since the last 2 nerfs, I hardly do myself now. We were kinda forced into mele with hammer, and now take most of the sustain away. Did warrior sustain get nerfed? Should have put some work into Rifle instead so it’s up to par with HoT weapons. Oh well, I don’t really like to complain about things I can’t change, rather I don’t like to waste my time, so I’ll let the other champion the cause.

Edited to remove smiley

You really shouldn’t use a smiley, they might skip reading and just think you are happy about the patch.

Well if this forum was read at all atleast.

^Good call miriforst. Smiley removed.

And yeah, I hear that about ppl not using this forum. Devs don’t even really use it. It’s so carebear on here it’s pathetic. It’s why everyone has really moved on to Reddit to discuss the game.

PierPiero.9142:

Sins.4782:

It was a bit too good traited, but the solution to that is to tune down the trait they overbuffed in the first place, not to kill the base skill…

You guys are too negative. It is not bad 2 seconds block every 13.5 seconds . ANd in this patch we had also something good. In my opinion now core engi is really better. shield if traited is quite strong now and if you take ft and rocket boots you have good damage in condi and 2 heal combo’s ( classic turret + f1+rocket boot) . it is not bad at all . Try it .

I would agree with you that 3s every 13.25s is far too strong if this was still pre-HoT. Since HoT though there have been a ton of unblockable effects introduced, both damage and CC, that make it rather unlikely that you’ll actually be able to stay blocking for the full 3s anyway, or that you won’t take heavy damage while doing so still. As I’ve said, I’d like to see it go back to 3s every 16s traited instead of 3s every 13.25s, and I think it’ll be balanced at that point.

I don’t think the issues with condi engi have been resolved yet— the shield buffs did nothing to address the problem of p/s simply not having enough damage to be good without sacrificing multiple utility slots to augment it. Regardless, the gear shield nerf did hit core power engi very hard, which does rely largely on that block for damage mitigation.

Sins.4782:

PierPiero.9142:

Sins.4782:

It was a bit too good traited, but the solution to that is to tune down the trait they overbuffed in the first place, not to kill the base skill…

You guys are too negative. It is not bad 2 seconds block every 13.5 seconds . ANd in this patch we had also something good. In my opinion now core engi is really better. shield if traited is quite strong now and if you take ft and rocket boots you have good damage in condi and 2 heal combo’s ( classic turret + f1+rocket boot) . it is not bad at all . Try it .

I would agree with you that 3s every 13.25s is far too strong if this was still pre-HoT. Since HoT though there have been a ton of unblockable effects introduced, both damage and CC, that make it rather unlikely that you’ll actually be able to stay blocking for the full 3s anyway, or that you won’t take heavy damage while doing so still. As I’ve said, I’d like to see it go back to 3s every 16s traited instead of 3s every 13.25s, and I think it’ll be balanced at that point.

I don’t think the issues with condi engi have been resolved yet— the shield buffs did nothing to address the problem of p/s simply not having enough damage to be good without sacrificing multiple utility slots to augment it. Regardless, the gear shield nerf did hit core power engi very hard, which does rely largely on that block for damage mitigation.

Try to use rocket boots with shield . his elite has a good condi damage every 15 secs. i think that if u use it with pistol pistol it can have really a huge damage ….

This nerf is to much, imo. It makes gear shield next to useless now.

That’s not going to save you from a Procession of Blades and Test of Faith trap when you get jumped. It’s not going to save you when a ranger is pewpewing you from 1500 range. It’s not going to save you from Unrelenting Assault, etc. etc.

Glass cannon damage builds, need all the defense they can get. Nerfing Gear Shield makes a dps build less playable, not more.

Nerf the stupid hammer into oblivion if you still think we are too strong. Toolkit saw little enough use as it was.

I hate hate hate how they continue to balance Hammer’s dominance in pvp by nerfing base skills. Eg. Healing Turret cast time went from 0.5s to over 0.75s. Now they nerfed gear shield’s duration.

Just look at the engi numbers in pvp. It must be 95% Hammer Scrappers. Easy fix: Nerf Hammer and put base back where it was.

JDjitsu.7895:

Wow, what an unwarranted nerf. The only one that made my jaw drop. Wtf is up with all the Engi sustain nerfs? Hardly anyone plays Engi anymore since the last 2 nerfs, I hardly do myself now. We were kinda forced into mele with hammer, and now take most of the sustain away. Did warrior sustain get nerfed? Should have put some work into Rifle instead so it’s up to par with HoT weapons. Oh well, I don’t really like to complain about things I can’t change, rather I don’t like to waste my time, so I’ll let the other champion the cause.

Edited to remove smiley

Its so pathetic to see how few of us engis there are in WvW even before this and previous nerf that really screwed us. At that point engi was a viable contender in the HoT meta on par with damage and sustain with others. Now every “balance” more kitten nerfs that make us more and more worthless. while these Op warior/condi necro and such get even more buffs. I have 2tough 3k armor and its a joke the hits I take from classes and then in return when I attack when I manage to hit the enemy I deal 1/4 the damage of every other class. I could go more offensive gear but with the terrible traits and skills you drop too fast. I have been changing my class to fit these kittenty nerfs but at this point just doesn’t seem worth it to waste my time. I love the engi class and have mained since the start but our weak state is too op for them it seems.

at 3 sec, 13 sec cd, it was op as hell… but i dont feel like nerfing its duration is the right course of action. i would rather see its cd increased back to something that isnt absolutely ridiculous. i have always scratched my head at why they buffed it to 13, and even more so once they decided that 33% cdr was too much for ele, because now toolkit is in the same rut. why did they ever even buff the cdr on power wrench. both changes need to be undone, and redone in some other way that makes toolkit have a commanding presence while traited.

If 2s is now the right duration for 13s CD, so please, give us 20s CD and 3s block duration.
2s is just crap, become 100% useless, whatever the CD is, you can delete the skill, would be the same, and also the whole kit which I will never take again.

NOTE: I’m specifically addressing core-engineer, not scrapper, in my post because I find it’s play style to be far funner/harder/healthier and I would appreciate it to not be gutted like they did to older rifle builds like SD engineer.

Gear shield traited is pretty much the sole reason core engineer is actually usable in pvp… If Scrapper is OP then they should nerf SOLELY scrapper skills and traits, leaving core engineer out of it. For one, Scrapper and core engineer have hugely different playstyles, and secondly, scrappers don’t even take the tools traitline if they want to min/max their setup! All this nerf did was lower build diversity and promote more bruiser-based builds as opposed to running glassier higher risk vs reward setups because they simply won’t be able to survive long enough as soon as a revenant, thief, berzerker, druid, chronomancer, scrapper, reaper, tempest, shows up because they all have bursts, which, even if they blow all they can in the first 2 seconds, still have enough to nuke you in the third. At least 3 seconds gave us some time to delay and/or get away. With two it’s just going to be useless against lots of bursts which we won’t be able to outlast, i.e. unrelenting assault.

I’ll admit gear shield is still good, and is definitely still going to be run to allow core-engi builds to still have some survivability, but at this rate of nerfing healing turret, bunker down, and now gear shield, core engineer is going to be in a very sad state because of specifically scrapper and not the engineer itself.
Why nerf something which nobody complained about and promoted lesser-used, higher skill builds?

I think this is the “purity of purpose” part of balance part : the majority of blocks in the game are 2 seconds long so they upped shield and decreased toolkit duration to homogenize things.

Ranael.6423:

I think this is the “purity of purpose” part of balance part : the majority of blocks in the game are 2 seconds long so they upped shield and decreased toolkit duration to homogenize things.

I think this here is the problem and why these ‘balance’ patches are frustrating. Engineer Static Shield is not about blocking for an extended period of time (stalling). This skill is about interrupting and CC’ing an opponent during a singular key moment. The real problem with this skill isn’t that it does not extend on for 5 seconds it is the fact that it was never available for more than maybe twice in a singular fight, the Stun Duration (vs CD length) is pathetic and finally now classes such as Thieves can (through no traiting effort of their own) give their entire krewe Basilisk Venom (BV) and render it completely useless (unlike before when BV was not unblockable). This meant that you could interrupt a thief’s steal + burst combo, but you can’t now and when they (not just thieves) punch through you wouldn’t have gotten it back to use before the end of that fight.

Static Shield does not need it’s block duration increased. It does need the CD decreased and the Stun time increased to 2 seconds instead. What is the point of a 2 second block duration with a 1 second Stun if I stun them on initiation of this skill? This change demonstrates that they just read the tool tips and don’t actually know how this skill is used and for what reasons you would want to take Shield off-hand.

Now thanks to this change a nerf absolutely had to happen to Gear Shield’s duration which puts Rifle Builds that don’t take Elixir S (traited or utility) further out to sea with regards to their defensive options. I do not mind a CD nerf on Gear Shield raising it to about 16 secs but there is a reason why it was at three seconds in the first place.

If one skill can be traited to reflect, another heals, another counter attacks and another simply has a low CD instead, ‘Normalizing’ skills because 5 other classes have a similar skill does not demonstrate any depth of knowledge with regards to the purpose or use of these skills. Ultimately how does this help ‘Build Diversity’ if you feel like you now have to take Elixir S and if you want that to be more reliable you also have to go down the old Alchemy Line and eventually we’re back as square one… just use Hammer instead.

But that might be me putting the cart before the donkey since it could be that the increase of block duration to shield made it necessary that something core with blocks needed to be trimmed to reduce over-all plausible up-time on blocks (at the detriment to another core weapon). So why don’t we get reasons why these changes are made? It would be enlightening if there was a train of thought that could be followed or just a train.

Ranael.6423:

I think this is the “purity of purpose” part of balance part : the majority of blocks in the game are 2 seconds long so they upped shield and decreased toolkit duration to homogenize things.

Did I miss something? Did they cut warriors shield 5 to a 2 seconds block too?
If that really is the reason for this change, then they should nerf warrior shield too.

Okay, but what are you supposed to do for defense if you’re running Rifle or P/P and not P/S?

They took away 1/3 of our main defensive skill and gave us nothing to replace it.

Also where the hell is the supposed pvp splitting? Cause i hardly saw any engineers in wvw before and is a block that only blocks that overpowered in pve?

I mean for crying out loud if they could split rev energy drain and even buff skills in pvp specifically. It feels like they gave the intern free hands on this one. They just didnt teach him to pvp split.

I dont give a kitten about Espuurts insert dorito ad here. They can bathe in mountain dew and nerf every single skill and trait to cinders there for all i care. Go on give healing turret 60 seconds cooldown, make sneak gyro apply reveal instead of stealth on you, make the hammer hit yourself (kitten) and make the fgyro stomp allies and revive enemies. But engineers are “rare as hens teeth” compared to other classes in wvw (take a look at your squad composition and average the number of engineers per other classes, hell even rangers are more common). Even in “roaming” these days we arent exactly swarming all over the place.

they have no kittening idea what they’re doing with engineer. awful. awful