Guild Wars 2

I think the meta will remain quite the same . The only change, i think , will be slick shoes. I think meta will be with one of this 3 thing :
elixir U
throw mine
blast gyro
What do you think ?

Seems like solid choices for unranked puglet play.

This balance (seems like the wrong word for what we got really…) patch has rev, mesmer, and ele still up at god tier+ status. Competitive teams (that make the meta that everyone emulates) are going to need to decide if engie brings enough to the table to even get a slot on a competitive team. I’ll be surprised if we see many, if any at all, in the upcoming proleague.

The issue with the engie ‘balanace’ changes are that nothing was given in exchange for the amount of survival gutted out of the class. It’s put engie in a pretty tough spot right now.

Also, if anet wants to delete stealth gryo, just delete it already and stop teasing with nerf after nerf after nerf instead.

This is what I’ve been running this off-season.

I find it incredibly easy to 1v1 most professions and really only struggle against revenants and condi mesmers, which is to be expected. I think engineers will probably shift to team fighting this season anyway, letting mes take sides on start.

In team fights the sustain is just absolutely bananas. Paired with a druid or ele you can 2vX a point for quite a long time.

Naix.8156:

The issue with the engie ‘balanace’ changes are that nothing was given in exchange for the amount of survival gutted out of the class. It’s put engie in a pretty tough spot right now.

Super speed still ticks for 380 a second with baseline healing power. It wasn’t gutted anywhere near as much as people make it out to be. You just can’t run Marauder and expect to facetank in 1v2 situations anymore.

gutted is way to strong of a word. engi is more in balance with other classes. the problem will always be the same with engi. Its is not a very popular class and the few that do play it usually follow the “meta” blindly without ever really tinkering with stuff. Engi along with most other classes can bring anything you want to the raid pve/pvp/wvw and it can finally specialize .

Tank build – Check
CC build – Check
heal build – im gonna start tinkering with this next but the tools all seem to be there.
Damage build – Check
Condi build – Check

Phineas Poe.3018:

I find it incredibly easy to 1v1 most professions and really only struggle against revenants and condi mesmers, which is to be expected. I think engineers will probably shift to team fighting this season anyway, letting mes take sides on start.

What’s your measuring stick here? Hot join play? Vs the near random matchups in unranked right now? Curious, what other 1v1 matchups are you going to find yourself in in even midlevel matchmaking matches?

Phineas Poe.3018:

In team fights the sustain is just absolutely bananas. Paired with a druid or ele you can 2vX a point for quite a long time.

So your definition of ‘sustain is absolutely bananas’ is that you can be carried in a teamfight by a support class. Even within your ‘someone can carry me in a teamfight’ logic, wouldn’t you agree that it would be better choice to pair either of those support options with a rev or necro.

Naix.8156:

The issue with the engie ‘balanace’ changes are that nothing was given in exchange for the amount of survival gutted out of the class. It’s put engie in a pretty tough spot right now.

Super speed still ticks for 380 a second with baseline healing power. It wasn’t gutted anywhere near as much as people make it out to be. You just can’t run Marauder and expect to facetank in 1v2 situations anymore.[/quote]

Engie survival was absolutely gutted across the board. I don’t follow how 380 per tick healing when you have super speed is somehow amazing. What’s the uptime on super speed in an avg match again?

Engie survival to damage ratio was slightly too good. The reason was the engie ran all defensive trait lines and paired it with a glassy amulet. Instead of shave anet tweaked nearly every survival tool down – hence engie is in a weak position for competitive pvp.

Naix.8156:

Engie survival was absolutely gutted across the board. I don’t follow how 380 per tick healing when you have super speed is somehow amazing. What’s the uptime on super speed in an avg match again?

Engie survival to damage ratio was slightly too good. The reason was the engie ran all defensive trait lines and paired it with a glassy amulet. Instead of shave anet tweaked nearly every survival tool down – hence engie is in a weak position for competitive pvp.

Hardly, stop using a glassy amulet and use blast gyro instead of slick shoes. Result we have similar sustain but lose out on cc.

Naix.8156:

What’s your measuring stick here? Hot join play? Vs the near random matchups in unranked right now? Curious, what other 1v1 matchups are you going to find yourself in in even mid-level matchmaking matches?

Even though unranked might be a total gong show right now, I’ve had plenty of good matches to develop proper points of comparison between different builds I’ve tried. The one I linked just proved most effective, including successful 1v1s against established PvPers.

It’s easy for me to know when I’m fighting against good players—I recognize most of them. I mean, it’s a pretty small community of players at the top. I also know when I’m fighting against PvE players looking to finish their dailies, and I know when I’m playing with notoriously bad players including that one thief main I won’t mention by name that rushes far ad infinitum.

So to answer your question: what’s my measuring stick? A build that wins battles fighting the people in front of me. Is there some other metric I’m supposed to go by?

Naix.8156:

So your definition of ‘sustain is absolutely bananas’ is that you can be carried in a teamfight by a support class. Even within your ‘someone can carry me in a teamfight’ logic, wouldn’t you agree that it would be better choice to pair either of those support options with a rev or necro.

Uhh… lol?

The build I linked provides multiple water fields, multiple AoE condi cleanses, an unblockable knockback, and good sustained damage. It’s literally the same exact build as what I ran pre-patch except I swapped Elixir B for Bulwark and Slick Shoes for Blast Gyro.

I looked over what hit us most. Super speed heals for less? I dropped Slick Shoes for Blast Gyro and took a quantity over quality approach. Losing out on a leap finisher? I dropped Sneak Gyro for Mortar Kit and opted for more healing.

In reality I think this build fills a pretty similar role to what the scrapper build did pre-patch: a good mix of sustain, damage, and CC. It’s just instead of knocking people down with Slick Shoes I knock people back with Blast Gyro.

As for my definition of sustain being absolutely bananas: it involves winning 80% of my games testing this build and losing over 50% of my games trying lesser derivatives of it—including one particularly embarrassing moment getting almost instantly 100-0’d by Phantaram while I was trying a Mender’s amulet version of something similar.

Truthfully everything is going to be a small sample size given the fact that I’ve only played a few dozen games since the patch with how much fun WvW has been, and I have a general rust to shake off after not playing the game for over five months, but the guy simply asked for a build that worked and I linked one. No one’s planning a parade here.

If you want to poke holes in it to satisfy your “woe is us” narrative, by all means, have at it. But I’ve already made my contribution here and I’m not really interested in entertaining whether a revenant or necro would be better suited as I don’t desire to play either classes currently and I haven’t tested what options they bring to the table. When you find that unblockable AoE knockback and multiple water fields on a revenant, though, you come and find me.

Peace and love.

my favorite part of this post was the part when you considered elixir u mine and blast gyro the likely next meta utility. glad we have some outside the box thinkers

not any logical utils tho that would b too ez

BertBoy.9031:

my favorite part of this post was the part when you considered elixir u mine and blast gyro the likely next meta utility. glad we have some outside the box thinkers

Blast Gyro isn’t a particularly bad choice. It actually provides significantly more sustain than Slick Shoes does in its current form. At 380 hp/sec for 5 seconds, Slick Shoes’ toolbelt can basically be normalized to adding 76 hp/sec to your sustain.

Bypass Coating isn’t that great, giving us only three seconds every 30 … but Blast Gyro only has a 15 second cooldown and gives you 6 seconds of super speed every time you detonate it with Final Salvo. That’s 142 hp/sec normalized over its cooldown, which is actually stronger than what Slick Shoes gave us pre-nerf (94 hp/sec normalized from 470 per tick).

Even still I’d take a pre-nerf Slick Shoes over Blast Gyro, just because Slick Shoes was a crazy powerful CC skill in the hands of a good engineer, but those days are gone and you’re stuck deciding between a one-off KD or a one-off KB—one of which doesn’t have a 40 second cooldown to deal with.

Elixir B + HGH + leadership runes make a very potent combo, especially with the decline in necros. That’s almost 50% uptime on retal, swift, fury and 30% uptime on stab (and whatever RNG on toss). Bonus points for aoe condi clears.

I know everyone liked Slick Shoes pre nerf but even back then i had a lot of fun with Blast Gyro due to the AOE knockback and very short cool down. Paired with Final Salvo i was running Bulwark, Blast and Sneak gyros.

Now with the Slick shoes nerf, i think blast gyro is the clear winner.

I’m running flame thrower, EG and elix B at the moment. Its hard to tell how decent it is given I’m in unranked right now, but it shows promise.

I would love to be able to use bombs viably again. Was really hoping for that this balance patch.

I have been running a few things:

If you want to have some fun, run
Tools (mid, down, mid)
Alchemy (mid, mid, up)
Scrapper (mid, down, mid)

Berserker Amulet, Strength Runes, Fire/Air sigils.

bulwark, elixir b, elixir gun, mortar.

It’s hard to use against an organized group of people, but the damage output is insane. I have killed people without focusing on them just as collateral damage. If you start attacking someone that’s down, there is no rezzing them. You will down people rezzing faster than they can rez the person.

For something more sustainable :
Inventions (mid, down, mid)
Alchemy (mid, mid, up)
Scrapper (mid, down, mid or up) depending on whether you are fighting condi heavy team or not.

Demolisher/Paladin Amulet, Hoelbrek Runes, Generosity/Nullification sigil.

bulwark, elixir b, elixir gun, elixir x.

Might stacking works wonders for Engi. Though no matter what I do I still can’t survive condi spam.

Phineas Poe.3018:

This is what I’ve been running this off-season.

I find it incredibly easy to 1v1 most professions and really only struggle against revenants and condi mesmers, which is to be expected. I think engineers will probably shift to team fighting this season anyway, letting mes take sides on start.

In team fights the sustain is just absolutely bananas. Paired with a druid or ele you can 2vX a point for quite a long time.

Naix.8156:

The issue with the engie ‘balanace’ changes are that nothing was given in exchange for the amount of survival gutted out of the class. It’s put engie in a pretty tough spot right now.

Super speed still ticks for 380 a second with baseline healing power. It wasn’t gutted anywhere near as much as people make it out to be. You just can’t run Marauder and expect to facetank in 1v2 situations anymore.

^^ If this guy says this build is good it is very likely to be actually usefull. Having great succes with it personally.

Phineas Poe.3018:

This is what I’ve been running this off-season.

I find it incredibly easy to 1v1 most professions and really only struggle against revenants and condi mesmers, which is to be expected. I think engineers will probably shift to team fighting this season anyway, letting mes take sides on start.

In team fights the sustain is just absolutely bananas. Paired with a druid or ele you can 2vX a point for quite a long time.

Naix.8156:

The issue with the engie ‘balanace’ changes are that nothing was given in exchange for the amount of survival gutted out of the class. It’s put engie in a pretty tough spot right now.

Super speed still ticks for 380 a second with baseline healing power. It wasn’t gutted anywhere near as much as people make it out to be. You just can’t run Marauder and expect to facetank in 1v2 situations anymore.

This is the build I was running at the end of last season except swapping Marauder for Paladin. Its also the reason I quit playing Engineer in PvP. Its a super boring build to play and sadly our only build that is even remotely viable right now.

Good thing we got all those Pistol and Gadget buffs! They are all so useful now and opened up so many builds for us! /s

I did try using the toughness 1200, power/prec 900. amulet. You can combine it with the hammer stat that converts tough to power. It makes you a bit suseptible to condis, but really surprises the people whom rely on direct damage. Sort of amusing. You still have decent power to hurt folks with. To mitigate vitality a bit I try it with tools for its healing, and holenbrack runes.

displacedTitan.6897:

Phineas Poe.3018:

This is what I’ve been running this off-season.

I find it incredibly easy to 1v1 most professions and really only struggle against revenants and condi mesmers, which is to be expected. I think engineers will probably shift to team fighting this season anyway, letting mes take sides on start.

In team fights the sustain is just absolutely bananas. Paired with a druid or ele you can 2vX a point for quite a long time.

Naix.8156:

The issue with the engie ‘balanace’ changes are that nothing was given in exchange for the amount of survival gutted out of the class. It’s put engie in a pretty tough spot right now.

Super speed still ticks for 380 a second with baseline healing power. It wasn’t gutted anywhere near as much as people make it out to be. You just can’t run Marauder and expect to facetank in 1v2 situations anymore.

This is the build I was running at the end of last season except swapping Marauder for Paladin. Its also the reason I quit playing Engineer in PvP. Its a super boring build to play and sadly our only build that is even remotely viable right now.

Good thing we got all those Pistol and Gadget buffs! They are all so useful now and opened up so many builds for us! /s

I tried many builds but i don’t see easy to create with pistols something better than with hammer. I don’t like hammer as gameplay , i prefer pistols but in my opinion for pvp /wvw now hammer is quite a must. It is too strong even now

I’m really trying to like Pistols now. I thought I could make HOPE in the future. I even make a full set of viper armor with berserker’s runes to match with a condi build…
But they a re so plain.

Skill 1 is a shoot. 2 is a few shots. 3 is a shoot too. 4 is a shoot with fire. 4 is the only surprise: its ground targeted. Most animations are the same. Is terribly boring.

Hammer is so easy it becomes boring after a while, but at least it has some variety.

I’m trying to convince myself that learning the meta builds is good for my gameplay… but is hard not to simply switch back to my old, fun, subpar rifle.

displacedTitan.6897:

Good thing we got all those Pistol and Gadget buffs! They are all so useful now and opened up so many builds for us! /s

I think pistol/pistol engi is plenty viable. It’s just not our best choice.

Phineas Poe.3018:

displacedTitan.6897:

Good thing we got all those Pistol and Gadget buffs! They are all so useful now and opened up so many builds for us! /s

I think pistol/pistol engi is plenty viable. It’s just not our best choice.

I think the gap between viable and optimal is far too large on Engi right now. Hammer is just too much better than p/p. It starts with pistols having zero useful finishers or utility and ends with the need to take Firearms to get enough damage.

Engineer specializations are awful right now in the way you are pidgeonholed. Alchemy is 100% mandatory due to it being our only line that can deal with conditions (also makes E. Gun mandatory).
This leaves us with two lines and its where you see the power level of hammer diverge from p/p. Hammer needs no traits to boost its damage to a competitive level so you get to take two fully defensive specializations in Scrapper and Inventions (note how all choices in these lines for meta build are defensive).
Pistols just do not deal enough on their own so you are forced to take Firearms for the bleed proc/duration and especially for burning proc and duration. This leaves just a single defensive line choices AND you are constrained by move speed which you get for free on hammer by taking Mechalegs.

Until ANet MASSIVELY buffs the damage output on Pistol to the level of hammer, we will never see an optimal Pistol build.

PS. Shield is so bad I usually forget it exists.

displacedTitan.6897:

Until ANet MASSIVELY buffs the damage output on Pistol to the level of hammer, we will never see an optimal Pistol build.

Having to take Firearms for the pistol to be effective isn’t a problem. You have to take Scrapper to even equip the hammer in the first place. In reality the opportunity cost is exactly the same, and both options allow you to take Inventions and Alchemy together, which are the two trees that really keep engineer viable in high end PvP.

Scrapper gives us the function gyro, stability, evades, and your choice of either extra toughness + 20% condi damage reduction or a healthy access to super speed to proc Rapid Regeneration.

Firearms just gives us more condi damage and Incendiary Powder.

The issue isn’t that pistols lack damage: Firearms as a tree just doesn’t offer everything that Scrapper does. What ArenaNet needs to focus on moving forward isn’t nerfing Scrapper or buffing the pistol. They simply need to rebalance Firearms, Tools, and Explosives so that forgoing the utility of the baseline engineer in favor of Scrapper’s defensive stature is a difficult choice—because right now it’s not.

I also think a huge issue impeding builds like P/P HGH (Firearms/Alchemy/Inventions) being good again isn’t an issue exclusive to the engineer but the general problem of elite specializations being broken across the board. Try running a pre-HoT bunker guardian or a D/D ele and see how that goes; in truth, baseline engineer is a lot more viable than most. I remember seeing some people posting they got to legendary running it both in the first season and the second one. The main issue is that druid, tempest, revenant, and chronomancer are still absolutely insane compared to pre-HoT damage and sustain. Scrapper, dragonhunter, and reaper got toned down, but it’s really not enough.

And, I mean, we do run Explosives, Firearms, and Tools in raids. Engineer is arguably one of the most balanced professions in the game right now. It has value in PvE, PvP, and WvW. So give ANet some credit.

I think this is just two sides of the same coin, you want the traitlines buffed and I want the weapons that correspond to those lines to be buffed. In the end both would result in another build being worth taking over the All-Defense Boonbot Hammer Scrapper.

A larger issue is honestly that we are stuck with Alchemy regardless of build. Why are all of our boon and condi clear options in a single traitline and utility skill set?

There are just so many useless traits/utilities in this game that its hard to give ANet credit really, its more a happy accident that Engineers are decent in every game mode rather than a conscious well executed design. I bet if you took the meta builds and even the tier two builds for each class you would end up seeing that under 50% of total utilities and traits are selected even a single time.

When they announced the elite specialization idea, I thought it was really cool and would provide for some nice horizontal build options. What we got instead was a bunch of traitlines that pack more value and are just better than any other. Their core design of adding a different way to play each class all but guaranteed this would be the case as they had to make up for a bunch of shortcomings in order to accomplish the goal.

Somehow I found myself yesterday using a scrapper with rifle, without alchemy but with boon sustain for might and juggernaut. I think is more a mental syndrome than a build, but it is fun for me.