Guild Wars 2

Hey guys. It’s time for feedback. It’s time for iteration.

I’ll try to make this as short as possible, so that many of you guys read this post and like it.

first of all i want to mention that i’m not going to propose a change in the gameplay of the engineer, or at least as few as possible, because we all know, arenanet will not change stuff that people got used to; for whatever reason.

So we got some kits, some utilities, some weaponskills and of course the traits

Kits:

• Tool kit
  should be fine as it is. Prybar some faces. Our (1) Skill is actually a little bit weaksauce damagewise though, considering it is meleeranged and we’re only medium armor.
• Grenade kit
  Sorry for beeing harsh, but this one is completely stupid. It’s OK for it to have a good damageoutput, but there are several things which makes it just beyond any logic. Like say, beeing able to throw a granade further than a mortar could. give it 600 range, should be fine. Also, it’s just stupid that you keep on throwing multiple granades. It serves no purpose at all, but beeing a reason to splash the damage on a further range. It would be way more realistic to throw only one (bigger=more damage) granade. ofc Total DPS should be buffed by, say, 20-30%, since we’re nerfing ourselves in range and splash range. Freeze granades(4) should be changed to some kind of smoke granade, since a smoke field would do a similar job defensewise, reduce movementcontrol of the engineer but making him more teamplay friendly and situational. In addition, skill (1) should definetly be autocasting, it’s never fun to have to mash buttons while others dont. F skill is fine with the abovementioned changes. Throwing multiple granades at once is definetly worth an F skill. Might reduce the amount to 3, with the buffed granades.
• Bomb kit
  This set should definetly outdamage any other set(on multiple targets), since it’s melee range, splash and delay make i predestined for this purpose. standing in front of a stunned dragon or a destroyable building, one must feel “hey i need to switch to my bomb set, cause in this situation need pure DPS!”. (3) will be a second reason to switch to this set, since it’s a rare source for “confusion”. Smoke bomb should be changed to a “freeze bomb” kind of skill, since a melee kit will need movement control. And it’d also make this kit unique for having two movement control skills. F skill is fine, though it has very little use for a melee kit.
• Elixir gun
  It actually feels like it should do some severe single target DPS. It does not. In addition, the constant application of 2 conditions with skill (1) heavily decreases the usefulness of condition remover, making every other player in the game care less about condition remove, since it will not help getting rid of their conditions. Remove bleeding from (1), add raw damage instead. add a reasonable amount of stacks bleeding to (4), reduce damage. remove vulnerability from (3), add damage. no purpose for vuln with this kit.
• Flamethrower
  first of all: FIX MELEE BUG! Skill 1 should apply burning every tic of damage. make skill (2) explodable (like orb of light, guardian skill (2) on staff). Increase the usefulness of skill (4) by making it a big ring of fire all around yourself. It’d be way more realistic, too. F skill is nothing but a damageboost for condition builds, and you dont want to have to pick a kit just to be able to use its f skill. makes no sense.

utilities
The elixir ‘s random factor make no logical sense, they dont serve a gameplay purpose, are no fun and definetly are no excuse for any extraordinary usefulness (since there is no).
Since we’re some accurate and highly skilled ENGINEER’s attempting to face an elder dragon and not a couple of kitten kids mixing some chemicals, the LAST thing we’d expect is an elixir not working how it should.
I like the Ideas for the theme of several gadgets, though some of them need a little twink for them to actually find a niche among the other skills. Pick rocket boots, they’re the movement skill everyone would love to have, but in fact, if u use them they always FAIL. they explode, making you fall to the ground, like everyone else. it should actually make you be able to AT LEAST control where you’re going to. This would actually make this skill at least useful in some situations, as well as serving a purpose no other skill is right now; moving really quickly for a cost (compare to elemental mage’s “ride the lightning” :P).
Turrets are difficult to balance. The extremely high necessity of mobility and evasion, which the turrets have not, need to be compensated by either high amounts of hitpoints, low cooldown or any automatic effects on death. i’m afraid latter would change the purpose of the towers so much, that they would rather resemble bombs than turrets. Thats why it’s better to increase either the HP or lower the cooldown for the turrets. It’s probably the best to add a defense measure against these vastly spreaded sources of AoE in PvE, too. like a damage cap, the aegis buff every couple of seconds, or maybe increase the ability of REPAIRING them. i’ve never seen a turret, which usually gets 2 or 3 shotted by a veteran, beeing repaired. picking up turrets should reduce the cooldown to 1-2 seconds. constantly deploying and collecting them would keep the engineer busy, so no real option for them.

weapon skills
We have 3 options to chose from:

• Pistol/Pistol
  These serve a similar purose than Elixir Gun, condition damage, this time on a small AoE though, which fulfills its role. i’d like to point out that this damage is a really a JOKE, making no pressure at all on any kind of skilled opponent, and serving no purpose at all in dungeons and open pve, where there are a vast amount of builds which do better in any way. Point is, unless you can’t deal as much damage as a normal non-condition build, it will never be useful. you will want to make this weaponset useful AT LEAST against undangerous (no need for shield skills), very high HP non-veteran enemies (where it takes time for condition damage to kick in). and still, this niche would be way too small for a full weapon set.

• Pistol/Shield
  same as above, just a little bit more defensive. a little bit more grindy.

• Rifle
  actually quite good. nevertheless, skill (1) could need a 3 skill combo and a bit of a splash cone. no pierce. shotgun style.

+1 if you like this, cause there might be a small chance that any of those community managers might check a post with a lot of +1’s.

Toolkit
I agree, our best kit.

Grenade
I would hate to see this change happen. It would completly change grenade mecanism. Yes it can be use at longe range, but only again stationnary target. Mortar should be buffed, not nerf grenade. And reducing the amount of grenade thrown would destroy the sinergy between grenade and on proc effect like 15% bleed of shrapnell or incendiary powder. Also, Freeze grenade is our best grenade in the kit, and you want to remove it for smoke? You need the slow to be able to land your others grenade, and to escape. Removing it would be a huge lose. We already have a blind anyway!

Bomb

I agree the damage could be upped a bit, because of the skill you need to land them in melee. But don’t forget they have a big aoe, so you can’t buff them too much. Also, they are already efficient with conditions build. I doubt they would put 2 movement control really smiliar on the same kit.A lot of people use the smoke combo to become invis, don’t think they want to lose it.

Elixir Gun

I fail to see how you came to this conclusion? Bleed + weakness is good to hide other condition, how is that a bad thing? the #4 is awesome for raw damage on static or downed oponent. #2 need some debug, it’s slow moving, buggy and weird. #3 condition removal is too situational. It should double the vuln output. It combo well with #4.

FlameThrower

Not much to say, I agree for most. Incendiary ammo is still a good toolbelt on power build, the burn still hit hard without any condition damage. I used it in a 100nade build and it was really efficient with the perma burn.

I agree mostly. Tho I have few comments on it if you dont mind.

Tool kit (1) is really weird, low damage and just one stack of vulnerability. It should do at least more stacks.

Grenade kit I’m not sure about range, tho I don’t use nades much now so I can’t really comment much on that, tho one granade instead of multiple nades and auto throw is just common sense

Elixir gun I actualy like it as it is since I like being a support class. Don’t mind bleeding instead of raw damage on (1) and if you mean making (4) to give bleeding instead of jump, than no, if you mean instead of damage give bleeding around when you jump, I say yes. And vulnerability on (3) I think is ok if you are in fight and you cleanse your teammates in the same time you put vulnerability on oponents who are harrasing them, that I like a lot.

And turrets seemed like cool concept when I tried my engi, tho I’m not using them at all.

EDIT: Btw, give us sniper kit (or something else really) instead of Mortar elite skill. Even tho I like it a lot as an idea, its useless in a game where movement is most essential thing, to have elite skill which is stationary.

No to everything. We need a slight (10-15%) damage boost across the board, bug fixes, and a few tweaks (Pistol Auto-attack comes to mind).

Very few changes I would do:
Don’t make Flameblast Detonatable. Make it a Blast Finisher.
Add 400 toughness to the trait Power Wrench.
Lower recast of Turrets. And lower their Tool Belt recast.

I just +1 all the post because i can tell that some of you actually study your class, and i hope a DEV actually reads this , yet again some of you had some off ideas but that just my opinion but other than that i ’m thinking what you are thinking

pza.8024:

utilities
The elixir ’s random factor make no logical sense, they dont serve a gameplay purpose, are no fun and definetly are no excuse for any extraordinary usefulness (since there is no).

I have to agree with this, the elixer toolbelt skills are absolutely useless.

Omnio.3652:

EDIT: Btw, give us sniper kit (or something else really) instead of Mortar elite skill. Even tho I like it a lot as an idea, its useless in a game where movement is most essential thing, to have elite skill which is stationary.

Mortar is alright in WvW for defending a tower. Its range is way too short though.

Mortar is a ok-ish elite in WvW, maybe in some map where you can bottleneck people in a ravine or something it could be usefull in sPvP as well but predictable :s
FT needs fixed, i hate to see a flamethrower miss, it is not logical for me
i realy like the toolbag and bomb kit, but traiting them makes pistol and rifle a complete joke..

dont agree about the bomb suggestion, freeze bomb wouldnt be a good idea. a melee kit needs a way to prevent damage and the blind plus stealth blast finisher is perfect for that. also the bomb kit has movement control via glue bomb and you can use other abilities from rifle/pistol/other kits for movement control.

FT needs to be fixed. the burn on the last hit misses too often thus damage is wasted.

pistol should actually do an AOE bleed like stated in the tooltip.

CptCosmic.3156:

dont agree about the bomb suggestion, freeze bomb wouldnt be a good idea. a melee kit needs a way to prevent damage and the blind plus stealth blast finisher is perfect for that. also the bomb kit has movement control via glue bomb and you can use other abilities from rifle/pistol/other kits for movement control.

FT needs to be fixed. the burn on the last hit misses too often thus damage is wasted.

pistol should actually do an AOE bleed like stated in the tooltip.

FT should burn on every hit like a kitten flamethrower does….

NaturalPortman.9562:

CptCosmic.3156:

dont agree about the bomb suggestion, freeze bomb wouldnt be a good idea. a melee kit needs a way to prevent damage and the blind plus stealth blast finisher is perfect for that. also the bomb kit has movement control via glue bomb and you can use other abilities from rifle/pistol/other kits for movement control.

FT needs to be fixed. the burn on the last hit misses too often thus damage is wasted.

pistol should actually do an AOE bleed like stated in the tooltip.

FT should burn on every hit like a kitten flamethrower does….

yes. yes FT ahould burn every hit. FT#1 strikes up to 10 times and each strike should increase burn duration: 1,1,2,2,3,3,4,4,5,5 so the longer the foe remains in your flaming party, the longer they burn when they get out. 5sec burn is lots. this would compliment traits like exploit weakness.

though, i dont have issues with the laat strike missing.

NaturalPortman.9562:

CptCosmic.3156:

dont agree about the bomb suggestion, freeze bomb wouldnt be a good idea. a melee kit needs a way to prevent damage and the blind plus stealth blast finisher is perfect for that. also the bomb kit has movement control via glue bomb and you can use other abilities from rifle/pistol/other kits for movement control.

FT needs to be fixed. the burn on the last hit misses too often thus damage is wasted.

pistol should actually do an AOE bleed like stated in the tooltip.

FT should burn on every hit like a kitten flamethrower does….

I sorta agree. 1 second burn on every other hit would bring this weapon where it should be. 10 seconds worth of burn would be a bit much.

I disagree on people wanting more condis from the flamethrower. We already have easy burns and SO many options for condis. I want the flamethrower to be another viable option for power builds. I’m already using it in one, the damage is just subpar and the auto is unreliable, but the potential in that regard is much better than being redundant with more burns.

Mate, I agree with most of what you say, but I can’t help but feeling like you’ve barely given the class any time before you came on to the forums to complain.

Oh, well agree with you. The engineer doesn’t need a major overhaul (possibly) but it definitely needs across the board buffs. Unfortunately, what your post asks for is to change kits that are working great the way they are, so that they may suit you. This if done would probably break even more things for this poorly thought through class.

To pick something:

pza.8024:

• Grenade kit
  Sorry for beeing harsh, but this one is completely stupid. It’s OK for it to have a good damageoutput, but there are several things which makes it just beyond any logic. Like say, beeing able to throw a granade further than a mortar could. give it 600 range, should be fine. Also, it’s just stupid that you keep on throwing multiple granades. It serves no purpose at all, but beeing a reason to splash the damage on a further range. It would be way more realistic to throw only one (bigger=more damage) granade. ofc Total DPS should be buffed by, say, 20-30%, since we’re nerfing ourselves in range and splash range. Freeze granades(4) should be changed to some kind of smoke granade, since a smoke field would do a similar job defensewise, reduce movementcontrol of the engineer but making him more teamplay friendly and situational. In addition, skill (1) should definetly be autocasting, it’s never fun to have to mash buttons while others dont. F skill is fine with the abovementioned changes. Throwing multiple granades at once is definetly worth an F skill. Might reduce the amount to 3, with the buffed granades.
• Bomb kit
  This set should definetly outdamage any other set(on multiple targets), since it’s melee range, splash and delay make i predestined for this purpose. standing in front of a stunned dragon or a destroyable building, one must feel “hey i need to switch to my bomb set, cause in this situation need pure DPS!”. (3) will be a second reason to switch to this set, since it’s a rare source for “confusion”. Smoke bomb should be changed to a “freeze bomb” kind of skill, since a melee kit will need movement control. And it’d also make this kit unique for having two movement control skills. F skill is fine, though it has very little use for a melee kit.

You’ve clearly not played with these kits enough to realize that these are our best kits for a reason. This kind of kitten analysis is what people used to do to toolkit before tankcat made it popular.

Grenade #4 is one of the best chills in the game, and it’s meant to keep enemies off you while you continue to lob grenades or do other things. Now that grenade condition builds are coming out most consider the grenade kit for the utility of its #4 and #5 instead of just spamming #1.

Bomb kit without #4 or #5 is just plain suicidal. We don’t need more control at melee range, we have plenty of CCs for that. At melee range we need to mitigate damage, and bomb kit is the only weapon choice to actually do that. If you wan’t more control in melee range then stop complaining about the toolbelt and use it for the #2.

Freeze grenade does what… 3 or 4 seconds of chill? IN my experience, it’s never got anyone off me. And I try to use it exactly for that reason. Otherwise it’s still an alright skill. As for bombs, I laugh at the kit – it’s just a joke.

Admittedly, I was speaking from a PvE standpoint.
Chilled stacks in duration, so if you land all three grenades (and you will if you have any aim) you can get off 6 seconds of chill on an enemy without any +condition duration.
If you’re wondering why chill is even useful, its because of something very important to a PvE player, Unshakable. Chill and cripple slow down champs when nothing else does because of all the defiant stacks preventing any kind of CCs.
Bomb kit adds another cc (which helps burn through those defiant stacks) and comes with two damage mitigators in the form of a blind field and and 5 stacks of confusion. I don’t know why anyone would call blinds, ccs and confusion a joke, but I assume you just wan’t big numbers to pop up and rarely pay attention to the little things.

Call me crazy, but I like the random elixer effects. Suits the class fluff wise and makes it fun. Sometimes I’ll be super happy cause I get a Wall of Reflection when I need it, another time I might not get what I want and I have to work a little harder. I also use Elixer Gun and I’m fine with the way it is. I play a supporty engineer in PvE and it does its job well.

ok, i might have gone too far with the freeze granade and smoke bomb. this might be only a flavour i would like to have added, but not a MUSTHAVE.
There are way more important things mentioned here though. like the stupid granade range . it’s absolutely hilarious in a negative way. hey i can outrange a freaking longbow. why would anyone use longbows if he can just THROW STUFF further?
Same for theamount of granades thrown. it makes no sense that you keep on throwing 2-3 granades if you can just throw 6-8, like you can with f skill? its just the damage that changes, so you just spam it when you need max dps. i’d rather like to see every granade skill just throw ONE big granade (which is way more rational) and have the F skill be a skill that spreads several smaller granades over a bigger AoE. more logic, more situational gameplay = more fun.

@direksone: yeah i know, the relaxed gameplay of running aruond in pve doing a raptor here, a veteran ogre there… but seriously. if you need a freaking wall of reflection to get past those archers in a dungeon, say, caudecus manor, YOU WILL NOT GET IT. so you’ll have to wait a decade for the cooldown, while it was been spent without an use.
i’m not even entirely sure if the skills actually work, or if they really only work as combofields, like stated in the description, but thats a different thing.

from what i read, making FT skill (1) apply burn with every damage tick sounds like common sense. i’m not even sure if it was the coders lazyness or if it’s intended at all.

@ people who demand a damagebuff across the board: this is never a good idea, and will never happen. this always leads to an arms race, e.g, if we suddently have more damage than a warrior due to the blind buff of everything, the warriors gonna get kitten and demand for a damage buff for themselves. and so on. we need niches, although i agree we need a damage buff here and there, cause 95% of PvE is all about damage.

We don’t need an across the board damage buff, nor do we need an overhaul of the mechanics on everything. We simply need our gunk made useful. The bad traits, bad weapon skills, the bad utility skills need to be made as useful as all our other useful stuff. Turrets and Elixirs are probably the only things that need somewhat of a mechanics overhaul in terms of Turrets need to scale and Elixirs need their RNG reduced and/or removed when possible.

In terms of PvE, the only change I desire is making damage conditions stack per player and per target, rather then just per target. Meaning other player’s burns won’t mess with my burns. Mathematically, we do phenomenal damage with a condi build, but of course the damage is delayed and due to the stacking methods often just completely missing.

Well, to put it simply, fixing the class properly by going through our bad skills and traits would take the devs forever. It’s more reasonable that we get buffs to make up for those abilities (looking at flamethrower) while we wait for the class to get fixed. It takes time to figure out every bug (and we’ve had some fixed), but buffs should have been coming from the class balance team workload all along.

When I say buffs I don’t mean damage. I play support so I could care less about damage. I want our healing skills “buffed” by scaling a little better with healing power, I want our random elixirs to have their boon duration buffed so we actually use them (looking at toolbelts). I want turrets to scale with stats.

Things are going to get fixed very slowly in this game (if ever) so at least we need to be competitive with the other classes.

Aristio.2784:

NaturalPortman.9562:

CptCosmic.3156:

dont agree about the bomb suggestion, freeze bomb wouldnt be a good idea. a melee kit needs a way to prevent damage and the blind plus stealth blast finisher is perfect for that. also the bomb kit has movement control via glue bomb and you can use other abilities from rifle/pistol/other kits for movement control.

FT needs to be fixed. the burn on the last hit misses too often thus damage is wasted.

pistol should actually do an AOE bleed like stated in the tooltip.

FT should burn on every hit like a kitten flamethrower does....

I sorta agree. 1 second burn on every other hit would bring this weapon where it should be. 10 seconds worth of burn would be a bit much.

just to respond to this and clarify what I was saying.

Let’s say you open up on a foe and burninate them; unless they stay within your flame for the full duration of FT 1 (this obviously includes the engie moving and aiming because no one stands still), they will not get burned.. at all. The 1 sec burn only applies to the 10th tick of FT 1.

Remember that Burns increase duration, they do not stack, a 3 sec burn with 2 sec left getting overwritten by a 3 sec burn is only going to last 3 more seconds, the dont "add" in that way.

So then, what I was suggesting was that the first strike of FT 1 burns for one second, 2nd = 1; then the third strike (if the opponent is still in the flame *AND* already burning) would apply a 2 second burn, and so on, up to a max of 5 seconds (I thought saying "5sec burn is plenty" would indicate this).

In this way, if you get a full 3 second 10 strike FT1 on a foe, they burn the whole time (not at the end) and they walk away with a 5 second burn assuming you dont hit them again. Remember, burns dont stack power, just duration, so while within the FT1 attack, the length of burn applied is irrelevant, they are supposed to just burn, then, the faster they get OUT of the flame, the shorter the duration of the burn they have to contend with.

I am not suggesting we get *more* conds, simply a cond that lasts longer.

Take a look at Incendiary ammo, it applies a 3 sec burn to each of your next 3 attacks. Let’s say you apply IA, and then fire your pistol 1 three times (one sec each, accounting for lag drop), you end up with 3seconds of burn during the attack, and a single 3 second burn after, not 9 seconds. Essentially, the middle flaming bullet is wasted.

Same thing happens to FT 1, if you apply IA to it, the first three strikes apply a 3 second burn, but those three strikes happen in less than a second, so you only get 4 seconds of burn instead of a theoretical 9.

So, with the change I have suggested, a) you wont have to waste your toolbelt skill on FT 1, and b) you can better use it with other abilities (like .. throw your daze shield through a small zerg and get three foes dazed AND burned for 3 seconds, i love doing this btw).

regardless, I have little expectation that any of these changes come to pass. but if FT 1 were to apply a burn the entire time, it would at least make sense. what we have now is ...

HE HEE im coating you in liquid flame! ... but you aren’t on fire ....

JohnDied.3476:

Well, to put it simply, fixing the class properly by going through our bad skills and traits would take the devs forever. It’s more reasonable that we get buffs to make up for those abilities (looking at flamethrower) while we wait for the class to get fixed. It takes time to figure out every bug (and we’ve had some fixed), but buffs should have been coming from the class balance team workload all along.

When I say buffs I don’t mean damage. I play support so I could care less about damage. I want our healing skills “buffed” by scaling a little better with healing power, I want our random elixirs to have their boon duration buffed so we actually use them (looking at toolbelts). I want turrets to scale with stats.

Things are going to get fixed very slowly in this game (if ever) so at least we need to be competitive with the other classes.

I think we said the same thing. Fixing all the gunk to me is the same as buffing the things that need buffing. I just didn’t want to use the word buff, because people interpret that as damage somehow. It’s obviously going to take time too, I hope everyone realizes this. There are 7 other classes with the same gunk issues.

FT should burn on every hit like a kitten flamethrower does….

this will be a overkill for ft you will have perma burn with 0 investment into it,and making napalm/incendiary ammo redundant (napalm will only be used as a field for finishers nothing else).
and we have lots of access to burn anyway, just saying.
ft just needs a dmg buff (or just scale like a weapon as do all kits need to be) to make it viable to power builds also.

You’ve clearly not played with these kits enough to realize that these are our best kits for a reason. This kind of kitten analysis is what people used to do to toolkit before tankcat made it popular.

buffs/bugfix made toolkit popular not tankcat,and tankcat was a result build from the buffs.
the rant before was absolutely justified.

*as for nads/bomb kit
noting need to be changed imo love em use em and they are doing ok as is.
only thing i would change is bomb kit glue bomb to be a 3½ immobilize and drop the cripple.
i dont think engineer needs a overhaul just here and there dmg buff(to bring some things up to par)and bug fixes bug fixes bug fixes all over.
this will be the overhaul ppl ask for every day, when things start working as intended the profession will be auto buffed by it.
the only thing i see that need a overhaul is turrets (and gadgets to some extent ,not all but some sure need some love).

*Ayestes everyone that play a condition build wants a fix to diminishing returns tho we suffer less than other professions.

ps: rng needs to go!

cottage.3274:

*Ayestes everyone that play a condition build wants a fix to diminishing returns tho we suffer less than other professions.

Yeah it’s something that needs to be done for everyone, not just us. Which is why I hope it come sooner rather then later. Not to mention, I also hope that clipped condition ticks, .75s of a bleed for example, still do the percentage of damage they need to deal. As that example a .75s bleed should do 75% of your bleed damage on the expiration of the condition. That way we aren’t so obsessed with needing exactly integer intervals and condition duration.

JohnDied.3476:

Admittedly, I was speaking from a PvE standpoint.
Chilled stacks in duration, so if you land all three grenades (and you will if you have any aim) you can get off 6 seconds of chill on an enemy without any +condition duration.
If you’re wondering why chill is even useful, its because of something very important to a PvE player, Unshakable. Chill and cripple slow down champs when nothing else does because of all the defiant stacks preventing any kind of CCs.
Bomb kit adds another cc (which helps burn through those defiant stacks) and comes with two damage mitigators in the form of a blind field and and 5 stacks of confusion. I don’t know why anyone would call blinds, ccs and confusion a joke, but I assume you just wan’t big numbers to pop up and rarely pay attention to the little things.

Well, since we’re engineers big numbers are not exactly a specialty, so no. Besides, the two builds I run are condition/tank and rifle/medium tank. Good shot though. And in PvE sure. Yea, don’t forget any attack is dodgeable. Any decent pvp player can dodge alot of your bombs. In fact, all.

JohnDied.3476:

Things are going to get fixed very slowly in this game (if ever) so at least we need to be competitive with the other classes.

yeah definetly agree to this one. its almost half a year since release, more than hat since beta, and what we got so long were some really-nice-to-have but unnecessary major events, a couple of bugfixes in dungeons and events and the fractals. any major balancing? nope.

i’m losing faith.

pza.8024:

JohnDied.3476:

Things are going to get fixed very slowly in this game (if ever) so at least we need to be competitive with the other classes.

yeah definetly agree to this one. its almost half a year since release, more than hat since beta, and what we got so long were some really-nice-to-have but unnecessary major events, a couple of bugfixes in dungeons and events and the fractals. any major balancing? nope.

i’m losing faith.

There is always huge difference how balance see skilled people and non-skilled people. Anet said more than once they do smaller balance fixes and watch what it does. I agree with them. Making big changes in PvP makes game more unbalanced in short period of time. So they could nerf something a lot but than the class could be almost useless because of it or some buff could make class too much overpowered.

You say its ALMOST half a year, I think in MMO industry, thats ONLY half a year old. This is a long run, no fix right now and it works thing works here.

Omnio.3652:

pza.8024:

JohnDied.3476:

Things are going to get fixed very slowly in this game (if ever) so at least we need to be competitive with the other classes.

yeah definetly agree to this one. its almost half a year since release, more than hat since beta, and what we got so long were some really-nice-to-have but unnecessary major events, a couple of bugfixes in dungeons and events and the fractals. any major balancing? nope.

i’m losing faith.

There is always huge difference how balance see skilled people and non-skilled people. Anet said more than once they do smaller balance fixes and watch what it does. I agree with them. Making big changes in PvP makes game more unbalanced in short period of time. So they could nerf something a lot but than the class could be almost useless because of it or some buff could make class too much overpowered.

You say its ALMOST half a year, I think in MMO industry, thats ONLY half a year old. This is a long run, no fix right now and it works thing works here.

i’m reading this forum for a very long time, and seriously, there is so much that needs to be fixed and overhauled, that not even an anet-coworker which would read this,, would dare to say that things work how they should. apart from that, BALANCING is called like that, because it’s the method to EQUALIZE things. making changes to the game that results to more fairness. this is not an easy process, so i agree that there need to be small changes. BUT there is is no iteration without changes!

and: we still have 100% broken traits – a blatantly obvious proof that anet does not look into the classes, or only with extremely low effort.

pza.8024:

Omnio.3652:

pza.8024:

JohnDied.3476:

Things are going to get fixed very slowly in this game (if ever) so at least we need to be competitive with the other classes.

yeah definetly agree to this one. its almost half a year since release, more than hat since beta, and what we got so long were some really-nice-to-have but unnecessary major events, a couple of bugfixes in dungeons and events and the fractals. any major balancing? nope.

i’m losing faith.

There is always huge difference how balance see skilled people and non-skilled people. Anet said more than once they do smaller balance fixes and watch what it does. I agree with them. Making big changes in PvP makes game more unbalanced in short period of time. So they could nerf something a lot but than the class could be almost useless because of it or some buff could make class too much overpowered.

You say its ALMOST half a year, I think in MMO industry, thats ONLY half a year old. This is a long run, no fix right now and it works thing works here.

i’m reading this forum for a very long time, and seriously, there is so much that needs to be fixed and overhauled, that not even an anet-coworker which would read this,, would dare to say that things work how they should. apart from that, BALANCING is called like that, because it’s the method to EQUALIZE things. making changes to the game that results to more fairness. this is not an easy process, so i agree that there need to be small changes. BUT there is is no iteration without changes!

and: we still have 100% broken traits – a blatantly obvious proof that anet does not look into the classes, or only with extremely low effort.

Well I’m not saying they could do a better job. But I think we should have on our minds that no MMO is without bugs, not even after many years after realease because MMO are made to be upgraded, with every upgrade comes other bugs, as I’m sure you are aware of. I think they have full hands of making new content, probably preparing an expansion and in the same time making the game it already is a better game. I can’t even imagine how hard that could be.

Yes things are broken here, some more some less, balance is not optimal, as it never will be in MMO game, yet we all should ask ourselfs one question, are we having fun? I am, therefore I play.

well, i play it because i have fun, and therefore i want it to become even better. there’s a lot of potential for it to become the best game we ever played, which is and always was the goal for arenanet. i’m just a fan pointing out desperately the way to go.

but the way you are pointing is the way that you see things. the difficulty arises in mmos because every player sees and plays differently from one another and differently from the developers.

this is not meant to imply that your perspective is invalid but rather that this is why players break games, especially mmos. and, tragically, the problem actually compounds the older and more populated the game world becomes.

in a manner of speaking, the game world cultures itself (like a real society, or like a petri dish if you are a cynic like i am), but as such builds a series of traditions that are very delicate and fragile in their composition, but extremely hard to break.

making changes of any kind must needs be made with the entire culture in mind, carefully and calculated, or your petri dish becomes chimera without a belerefon instead of penicillin.

it is an incredibly deep and interesting phenomenon to watch, and more so when you trace these kinds of developments both within microcosms of games themselves and collectively within the macrocosmic genre of mmo as a whole.

. . .

perhaps enginner is the JTHM of GW2 and suffers the overflow of RNG in order to provide stability to the game as a whole. you may think i make mountains out of dredge hills, but i really do think the issue is as much a moral one as a technical one.

nakoda, i’m sorry to say, but you seem to have no experience at putting balance into a game. having a “belief” is one thing, but having real experience at this issue is a completely different thing.
As long as the player community cant calculate the effectiveness of anything in a game, or at least a range of effectiveness, accounting for any RNG affecting it(for complexity reasons or just because the formula is unknown) – the “balance” in a game is purely a matter of how it feels. e.g.: you dont know if it’s good and cant find it out? try it out. you’ll get the feeling for it.

and here’s the problem. as long as you dont provide a significant buff to a skill/item/whatever (i’ll stick to skills furtheron, but you can apply this to anything else aswell) that feels underpowered, you will not notice any difference. this is where the power of iteration kicks in:
you should provide major buffs to underrated skills, so that the skills that used to be underused become used. it will not break the game, since most of the skills should be designed very situational and with lots of counters. the only thing what may happen, and actually should happen, is that the community starts to appreciate the buffs and start using the skills you buffed. if they still dont, you should ask yourself why and take measurements: the skill might be useless by design or still too weak. be careful if a skill is not counterable, as it might really break the game buffing it too much.
the iteration process stipulates, that these changes need to be reworked quickly after seeing which consequences they have caused.
in the end this iteration system, that arenanet has chosen (but is currently not using), leads to a large build variety and a mostly satisfied (you can never satisfy everyone) and busy community. arguments like “i dont want to change my build after a patch” are absolutely invalid and counterproductive, since there need to be changes for a game to progress. this includes the players. and most of all, in most cases a player will not be forced to change a build by any patch anyway.

my point in this topic are the OBVIOUS CHANGES there need to occur in the game, which do have nothing to do with balance. i obviously didn’t manage to sort out some personal disaffection toward some skills, but i think i’ve managed to point out the most obvious inconsistences of the engineer, like the granade range, granade amount, melee ranged power (balance issue), disutility of some mechanics like turrets (might be a balance issue), RNG and so on.