Guild Wars 2

For those who still believe that tab targeting won’t work on an AOE adventurer style class in which explosives are used exclusively without the limitations of travel time and ground targeting mechanics that ultimately make the combat unplayable unless you are tripple jointed. let me bring up another class in another game I played exclusively that did similar damage types and who’s explosions were all AOE explosions complete with thief like damage boosts before attacking.

Rift’s own Saboteur.

I used to take out 3-4 enemies at once because i’d do the abilities that improved damage output (much like the thief does in this title) and then stacked my bombs and blasted them. Most of the time I’d take the enemies out in 1 hit but I had 1 backup bomb to take the enemy out before getting to me if they were still alive.

They balanced that class well in that game and yes some people complained but it worked. This class so needs that kind of love for grenades/bombs/mines. Seriously. (well in PVE at least). Oh and I still had the faster run speed (much like the thief ranger 25%)

needs bigger AoE as for speed needs a 50% passive run speed on adept trait like other classes

I hate to say it, but as much fun as the Saboteur was to play as, their entire role was burst damage. While there may be some debate as to the specific role of the engineer is, burst damage is definitively not it.

I don’t disagree with the notion that our explosives need some love, grenades and mines especially, but I can’t get behind making all explosives deal massive burst damage when some of them can provide a significant amount of healing or can be used to great effect in certain niche situations. Instead of simply making explosives deal massive spike damage, I’d much rather see them improve the viability of where the niches where they are supposed to shine.

@Tigirius

Grenade and bomb are among our strongest kit at the moment, especially grenade. I doubt we need any kind of buff to them.

And we already have a perma 33% speed boost, and other option in alchemist to have a good amount of swiftness.

@Hurt

We currently have one of the best burst in the game. If I go 100% burst, without elixir S for defence, I can do a massive combo burst for around 20k damage.

The 100 nade build is a good burst as any other burst.

If there could be a buff, it would be with mines. Nobodies use them, and their damage is a bit lack luster. The toolbelt grenade spread randomly and they have a long casting time. If we could put more then 1 mine at a time, it would be really cool. Might be a bit OP tho ahah!

My point about this post was really to show that a class with explosives can have tab targeted skills and still be perfectly fine, so there’s absolutely no need to make the #1 or #2 skills on this kit a ground target ability anymore.

And to show that the engineer class is first and foremost an adventurer class and should be treated as such, the grenades themselves don’t need a buff no but the mines and bombs certainly do, and so do our traits. We shouldn’t have to wait until we are at 75% before elixir B goes off or wait until 5 stacks of vulnerability are achieved from possible crit attacks instead we should have multiple choices enemy-@-50%-health buffs that improve our damage as trait choices like both the thief and the ranger have.
Our gear should provide a bit more in the way of boons, like the goggles, they should do might and fury (much like the thief’s steal ability when traited) And we should have multiple abilities that give us might like the thief and ranger does not just elixirs so that we can have a more rounded gameplay. (right now our traits system is not elegant.)

Kardiamond.6952:

@Tigirius

Grenade and bomb are among our strongest kit at the moment, especially grenade. I doubt we need any kind of buff to them.

And we already have a perma 33% speed boost, and other option in alchemist to have a good amount of swiftness.

@Hurt

We currently have one of the best burst in the game. If I go 100% burst, without elixir S for defence, I can do a massive combo burst for around 20k damage.

The 100 nade build is a good burst as any other burst.

If there could be a buff, it would be with mines. Nobodies use them, and their damage is a bit lack luster. The toolbelt grenade spread randomly and they have a long casting time. If we could put more then 1 mine at a time, it would be really cool. Might be a bit OP tho ahah!

While I agree that we have a great burst from 100nades, the build is very conditional and is not effective in most situations. Grenades don’t need a remake but rather our explosive traits does. Someone suggested about making Grenadier a Master Trait and reduce the number of grenades by 1 but make it have 50% more damage. We really shouldn’t be sacrificing 30 trait points just to make 1 kit effective.

As for Land Mines, I completely agree with you that it’s underpowered. I think they should add a cripple and maybe 3 stacks of bleeding effect to it. Also, they should make its knock back somewhat like a weaker BoB. As of now, the only use I have for it is it being a blast finisher and having a weak knock back.

Rezzet.3614:

needs bigger AoE as for speed needs a 50% passive run speed on adept trait like other classes

that is one of my two beefs with engy, our lack of speed and the lack of stability ( well with my spec that is).

edit: i always have swiftness up and i even picked up the 25% speed in combat…then a warrior with no buffs just ran past me with no effort…i dropped the speed in combat >.>

@ Kardiamond
There was at least in the BWE’s a skill called “Mine Kit” with 5 mines on a separate CD.
one was able to detonate them alone or all together with the toolbelt of the kit.
to get the boon removal and the knockback there were 2 traits, one grandmaster in inventions (boon removal) and one major in explosives (knockback)
it was actually a bit too op (controlling a dolyak route with 5 mines is op imo) so they changed it to “Throw Mine”
i loved to knock someone away from me with a hidden mine (traited to be invisible out of combat) but it srsly needed some tweaking

@Deljion

Yeah I remember playng with it! Didn’t use it much, but I’m sure it was pretty cool. Weird that they had to remove it to balance!

I think it was to balance our utility. We needed one more gadget, so they went with the mine. (weird)

@Sororita.3465

I think you are talking about combat mobility, not “speed” itself. I agree some warrior build, thief, elem, some ranger have a lot more combat mobility then us. I was fighting a warrior once in WvW and it was impossible for me to kill him, he could just jump out of reach anytime.

But I don’t know if we should receive more mobility options, not all class should have them.

@tigirius.9014

I’m not really sure what you want. Seems like you want everything the thief/rangers haves? We aren’t the same class, we have different traits.

I agree tho that our traits lines need a bit of work. Just take our gadget utility as an exemple, this group have like only 1-2 traits that affect them.

Our inventor traits line is really subpart (turret traits, useless traits).

@Kardiamond

I want engis to be elegant, I want to be able to use more then elixirs to get might stacks, I want boons to appear when we use kits, I want the ability to not have to play the entire keyboard perfectly in every fight, I want the ability to run faster from equiping a gadget and the run speed to be on all the time until combat status, I want this class to be able to do everything as easily as the other classes take for granted. It’s not too much to ask and to state that we shouldn’t be able to and that the current state of the engineer should remain lackluster just because it’s a different style of combat is a straw man argument. Engineers are supposed to fill multiple roles, well I say let us. Give us the options for multiple boons from using what we use, like switching to a kit, or putting on a gadget (and I don’t mean just fury). Let us heal as well as the guardian without thinking twice about it, and I don’t just mean the standard regen but I do mean that our skills should properly scale with +healing on our gear. Let us DPS like crazy and I don’t mean the long fight dps that’s been used as an excuse for leaving this class be or the 100nades which might as well be a bug for all purposes to get it to work 100% of the time, I mean give us the traits to do a setup burst initial hit without it being something they’re probably planning on nerfing sometime soon. I’m saying give us more then 1 ranged attack on the rifle and let the rifle be equal to any other ranged weapon in the game both in distance and damage output of the same type of weapon on other classes. Elegance. It’s not that difficult just takes a little time and effort to setup and it’s going to take more then 2 people to fix the mistakes that have been made over the five months that have occurred since launch.

lot of that sounds extremely OP and unreasonable. Alot of it we already have and even though every time you compare us in a generalization to warriors, rangers, thief’s, and make illogical comparisons to professions in other games, we explain to you that we have them.

You ask to be faster from gadgets. We have a gadget designed for that, called super speed. It is great for for running down enemies or escaping them.

Super speed is not worthy to be classified as a ’’great’’ skill considering: Its a 5 second toolbelt skill, and the actual skill from it is the ’’real’’ use of trying to get away, oiling the ground which can work is some instances. Most classes have the easiest time catching up to a ‘’5 second super-getaway’’. If you wanna be fast, you NEED to trait 10 into tools. Even then, swiftness IN combat is hardly effective. Others use weapon skills to fantastically escape fights. Chasing down another engineer, with an engineer, is the funniest thing ever xD Either give up, or hope you have speedy kits and he doesnt.

As for stacking ANY boons or conditions, we dont have the capacity others do. We can do it, in low amounts of course. Some traits allow conditions from crits, but then you need a good crit build which involves loosing survivability ( usually ). With a P/P build, Ive never seen bleeds go further than maybe 5-6 stacks? apart from that, the highest we can do is the 10 stack Vuln from goggles, or a major HGH elixir might stacking ( which I am currently fiddling with). Using 4 utilities as elixirs, My might has trouble staying at 13 stacks. ( this is when your not using FT trait). But FT usefulness is another subject.

Otherwise, they just need to tweak the class. The stuff we have is usually good, just the way its used was poorly implemented ( ex, random elixirs, grenade throws, various traits like acidic elixirs [a ‘lawl’ trait]. )

I would be completely satisfied if the switched Grenade skill #1 to be a channeled skill that just kept spamming while you have the button pressed down. It would still be GTAoE, it would just eliminate the need to button mash to keep sustained grenade lobbing.

Imo this would also slightly justify the 30% Dmg nerf the skill received because it would be less diffcult and less annoying to actually use the skill, if only by a small amount.

coglin.1496:

lot of that sounds extremely OP and unreasonable. Alot of it we already have and even though every time you compare us in a generalization to warriors, rangers, thief’s, and make illogical comparisons to professions in other games, we explain to you that we have them.

You ask to be faster from gadgets. We have a gadget designed for that, called super speed. It is great for for running down enemies or escaping them.

It’s not like he’s asking for them at the same time. How unreasonable is it to ask to be put at the same level of the other classes in the same game?

Is it unreasonable to draw on parallels from other games in the same genre?

Sure, we’ve got Super speed. 5 second 133% movement speed increase with a (traitable) recharge time of 45 seconds. That’s cool, for 5 seconds, when a lot of the other professions’ instant-gap closers have either:

A shorter Recharge
INSTANT gap close
Larger effect

Not to mention that immobilizes and snares still affect you while using the speed boost.

Now on nades:

I don’t want Ground-targeting to change. Being able to direct exactly how your grenades land and leading your targets, or to create an area of denial is invaluable.

A channeled effect is definitely welcome, as an “autoattack”, especially if we can move while channeling, interrupt it with another cast, or even drag the targeting reticle around.

^ Thats what I am thinking.
Ground-Targeting would work exactly the way it does now, just instead of mashing your Skill #1 button you just have to hold it down.
Attack Speed and Movement would remain the same.

WOW

Okay, I’m a bit tired of hearing this point on grenades so I’ll just say this once and leave it at that:

The absolute best and worst part of grenades is the fact that you ground target them

I’ve thrown grenades that have all critted and done about 8k damage with things like grenade barrage. If you mix that with a frost grenade, that’s about 11k damage RANGED. And it’s a pretty god kitten good range (1,500). That alone is really powerful. The downside has to be there for such a great utility. That downside is that they are slow and require YOU to be skillful enough to target with them well.

At the same time, ground targeting is what makes this great. I can just chuck grenades at a point and I have effectively rendered that area untouchable. This is great for capture points, WvW, Mobs in PvE…basically everywhere! There is no place where area control isn’t good.

If we make this autotargetted, we’re removing utility and creating a skill that is passively powerful instead of actively powerful. Instead of the wonderful ability to control areas from afar, we just chuck grenades. With auto attack, we don’t even need to aim.

That’s an incredibly boring skill with almost no utility. High skill requirements and utility is what makes this class interesting. Don’t kill it because you don’t have fast ground targeting turned on.

They throw too slow. They at least need to ramp the projectile speed up, thats all I would ask.

they need to ramp the air time of the projectile speed so it’s closer to what pistol shots are now because technically pistol shots are going the speed of rifle shots atm.

Also, if the do make it a channel spell on the #1 of grenades they should definitely make them explode on impact, it’s unrealistic for grenades to pass thru enemies to explode behind them. In fact there’s a ton of abilities that should be doing just that on the engineer that aren’t.

What this is really about is to debunk the argument some people have put out that those of us truly interested in balance (ie making this class on par with the other adventurer classes) are wrong because it has happened in other titles where explosives were used as the main attack weapon.

Some people and I wont name names decide that this class is perfectly fine the way it is and will argue tooth and nail to keep it gimped one has to wonder what his true goals are, he’s in every thread of mine telling me I want unreasonable requests.

I’ll also mention that it’s very weird to have a ranged rifle that doesn’t have the same range as the grenades you toss. It’s just as odd as the napalm #2 ability on the FT having a longer range then the #1 FT attack and even IT doesn’t explode on impact.