Hello WvW experts that have been playing for months—can you help me out with some sage advice. Trying to pick a race.
I’ve read a lot of references to the Charr hidden pistol toolbelt ability (which synergizes with tool belt traits like static discharge, inertial converter, power wrench). I’m just wondering if it is really that good. The gw2 wiki does not list the damage for it—and using it means you are not firing another standard weapon attack from your build, so it’s hard for me to measure the marginal benefit of this ability. Has anyone worked out the maths on it?
Most vids I see are of Asura. I read Pain Inverter got nerfed, so I’m not sure I see any benefit beyond size.
As everyone knows by now, Norn leopard is a great getaway. Probably the default roaming race for many classes.
Sylvari and Human I don’t see any significant benefits for either.
Human condi removal is meh with a long cooldown. Who would give up a slot skill for that. Hounds aren’t bad for some classes (who want a dps elites), but I don’t see how they’d be much better than supply crate.
Sylvari root—again, I don’t see why an engi would slot that over other stuff.
As I said, Charr hidden pistol toolbelt seems useful on paper—but I’m trying to kitten how useful (i.e. the net benefit of the dmg vs what you’d do with a normal attack plus the slot skill you’d give up to have it). I hear the animation still shoots at the sky (amazes me ANET has nearly a year to fix it and hasn’t).
And I see many youtube vids of asura—guessing that is mainly for size.
My engineer for wvw is a norn, you gotta love that leopard form for chasing and escaping and dash does nice damage too in zerkers. Though salad heads seem to be a good fit too, that grasping vine immobilize plus the extra two sec shield seems useful, I kinda wanna try it out at some point.
Anyone who wants an edge plays an Asura. Its harder to see their animations and although they have a hit box the same as the tallest Norn this is invisible, meaning players wont take shots that would hit you because they look like they will be obstructed or miss. Even just clicking on an Asura in the middle of a zerg can be difficult and with tab targeting next to useless…you have a real edge.
Notice in the SPVP tourney that 70% of players played Asura and the others were human female…now they don’t have the racial’s in SPVP but it just shows the edge has been noticed by other players.
My Engi main is Char, I haven’t used the racials in LOOOONG time. I should tho, hidden pistol is ok, the evade can help, especially if your in zerker gear. And its always fun to pull out a charzooka. But I have to agree with Conan. Size is a huge issue, I’ve even reworked my char to be as small as possible, but I still feel as though I have a huge target painted on my back compared to any asura.
That’s correct most people that choose Asura (in pvp) do so for the smaller size, because it makes the animations in some cases much less obvious and more difficult for the enemy to interrupt.
Most people choose Asura for cool animations and just all around awesome race. Also, larger toons seem slow and blocks views in tight places. This tends to lead to people whining that they have an “advantage” in PvP/WvW but if u look @ both the winning team in US and EU, they had more humans than asura. I guess humans have and advantage too, huh? /s
Your success in pvp combat will have nothing to do with what race you pick, or what colors you dye your armor with. Is all about what spec you run, how good you are with it, how good is your awareness, reaction, positioning, prediction etc.
Your success in pvp combat will have nothing to do with what race you pick, or what colors you dye your armor with. Is all about what spec you run, how good you are with it, how good is your awareness, reaction, positioning, prediction etc.
While I agree with this, I would say that for certain classes having a asura can be a slight and I do mean slight advantage if only because of the smaller animations making it more difficult to tell at times in the heat of battle which skill they are trying to get off (IE warrior killshot, it’s really hard to tell from a distance if a asura is kneeling heh). It is certainly not a game breaking advantage by any stretch of the imagination and all of the things you mentioned are obviously far more important to success.
Thanks for the replies. It’s a tough call. I think bottom line none of the racials are over the top—and engi has so many good utilities that you’d not really ever use one save maybe hidden pistols.
That narrows it down to Asura or Human for me. For Asura, I do like the racial theme and size for the reasons ShadowPuppet mentioned above. But it’s a double-edged sword—because it is also harder to appreciate the gear, because they are so small. Human females can look pretty good in some of the medium armors. Maybe I’ll pick at some point—just leary of not having my mind made up and then wanting to reroll later. I’ve done that before…ugh. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Thanks for the replies. It’s a tough call. I think bottom line none of the racials are over the top—and engi has so many good utilities that you’d not really ever use one save maybe hidden pistols.
That narrows it down to Asura or Human for me. For Asura, I do like the racial theme and size for the reasons ShadowPuppet mentioned above. But it’s a double-edged sword—because it is also harder to appreciate the gear, because they are so small. Human females can look pretty good in some of the medium armors. Maybe I’ll pick at some point—just leary of not having my mind made up and then wanting to reroll later. I’ve done that before…ugh. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
My engi originally was a Asura, I hated that I could barely see the weapons or armor skins so I rerolled to a charr only to realize that since I use kits most of the time I still don’t see the weapon skins and the medium armors on charr clip around the neck on most sets but at this point I have too much invested to want to reroll, just holding out hope that eventually we get a feature to either share soulbound gear with our own characters and I will remake a human engi or they give us something in the store that allows us to change our race, heh. Only downside really to going human is of course if you don’t like the lore or the fact that it is the most common race. Oh also if you like jump puzzles character model size can have a huge impact on how easy of a time you can have with it, the larger the model the more difficult in my experience.
. Trying to pick a race.