Guild Wars 2

Dear fellow engineers!

I’ve playes this class since beta, and only this class. I picked the engineer because of its many skill options, that are imho bigger with all the kits we have, then with all the differen weapon types the other classes have (because of completley lackluster weaponsets, and overusage of some weaponsets).

The reason I love this class is because of a decent amount of tinkering options.
Now, Guild wars 2 does not have that many skills, following there aren’ t many builds (for every class) either. Nevertheless has the engineer community always claimed we are one of the most if not, the most diverse you can get in this game talking about builds and I must agree.

But hell, I’ve to say the tinkering in guild wars 2 is no where near, and will never be near the literally endless amout of builds and tinkering in gw1.

It has come to the point, that I can’t come up with new things. No new builds to use, no new combos to discover. I figured out all the combo options, all effective builds, all nice and epic stuff there is. The only thing I can do now, is wait for arenanet to unleash another wave of tweaks and dinkydoodles at us, making it possible for me to discover some new things and nice combinations. But that is all done within an hour. Maybe two hours.

Why? Why arenanet? Why force us into, maybe 10 at max, cool builds! Where is the time you could invent your own unique build, that literally nobody in the game had except you.

How do you feel about this? Do you guys still find some new stuff you didn’t saw before? Or do you start alts to do that? What do you guys do to keep tinkering?

It depends on what you’re building for. Are you talking about PvE, WvW, or PvP?

I have tweaked my builds regularly since launch and still do. I mostly play PvP, so some of that is because I learn new things about engineers, and some is because other players are changing their builds so I adjust to compensate. I’m very happy with the builds I use now, but may change them again after this patch, depending on how other professions change and what new options open up for engineers.

Ferum Flamebender.5910:

… the tinkering in guild wars 2 is *no where near, and will never be near the literally endless amout of builds and tinkering in gw1.

Yup. Dual-classing was the key. I mean, there was a lot you could do within one class’ own skill set, but dual-classing was when things got wild, crazy and creative. That said, dual-classing just isn’t going to work for GW2. Furthermore, since all but 5 of our skills are decided for us (and 2 of those 5 skill slots are dedicated to “ultimate” and healing respectively), we simply aren’t going to see build diversity in GW2 like we saw in GW1.

Therefore, it comes down to traits as the key to true build diversity in GW2. However since 90% of them are garbage or completely outclassed by the commonly-used ones, build diversity falls again on the three utility slots (which I’ve already said aren’t really enough). Moreover, most commonly-used traits are very straight-forward abilities that don’t synergize with anything outside of lowering a set of cool-downs or spamming attacks. It’s rather unfortunate.

The only thing ANet could probably do at this point to open up build diversity would be to allow the Elite Skill slot to house utility skills in addition to the elite skill options (and I’m not down-playing that at all, that would be amazing and a huge boost to build diversity in all GW2 game formats).

In the end, we’re just going to have to face that we’ll never sit atop a ledge in Jade Quarry with our Ranger/Assassin and cast Scorpion Wire on an approaching Necro/Assassin, walk two steps back, teleport to him and knock him down, cast Expunge Enchantments (because expertise synergized with the touch-attack mana cost) and use Melandru’s Shot (because he’s knocked down), thus ruining his attempt to bomb the nearby shrine while we whittle him down with interrupts and auto-attacks.

Dual-classes helped greatly. But keep in mind, each individual class had a ton of skills in their library all by themselves. Often times only 1 or 2 key 2nd profession skills were equipped on the bar. Our GW2 single-profession skill library is considerably smaller than in GW. If Anet follows through with their announcement to add all weapons and more utilities to every class, then we’ll start to see a lot greater build diversity. The more choice, the more options, the more we’ll be able to tinker. Also, I think Anet recognizes that they have a number of rubbish traits to rework/remove/replace. <fingers crossed>

I still want to know what kind of builds we’re talking about…I can think of six very different tournament builds used by engineers in the top 100 team or solo leaderboards. Of course, PvE builds will be different and WvW builds will be different again. We’re spending a lot of time talking about GW1, but I still can’t figure out what types of GW2 builds the conversation is about.