Guild Wars 2

So after much wailing and gnashing of teeth by Engineers, it turns out that they are getting to keep perma-swiftness after all.

Meanwhile, after much anticipation for the proposed Signet of Inspiration change, we are still only getting 5 seconds of uptime, and that for equipping a utility specifically for that purpose, instead of as a bonus to Engineer kits which are useful all on their own. Moreover, we get no core +25% movement trait, which is instead locked to the Chronomancer spec.

Please, just give us this one thing. I know I should be more grateful for the huge amount of buffs we are getting, but our mobility is still one of the worst aspects of the profession, which IMHO is totally contradictory to the image of the finesse-based magical duelist Mesmers are billed as. Please give us sustainable swiftness on SoI. Please.

On the one hand…they get permaswiftness.

On the other hand…they can’t take the revealing trait with it.

I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Eh, we have permaswiftness, too. As a trait. That’s different per class, anyhow.

• Some have perma-swiftness but need to repeatedly use abilities to keep it up.
• Some have passive 25% runspeed but need to equip an ability.
• Some have passive 25% runspeed but need to select a traitline or trait for it.

Anet doesn’t generally consider cross-class comparisons as valid, and I tend to agree with this especially in this case. Engineers have pretty much always had perma-swiftness and for a while now have had a trait to gain 25% passive runspeed.

Forcing a tough choice on them between revealing and what amounts to a QoL thing that they can easily replace with other abilities in the game, still amounts to a slight nerf. It used to be a really low investment to get perma-swiftness and thus was a no-brainer to most builds, but now there is a really hard choice.

For us the change to SoI represents a pretty big boost. Not only do we get at least 50% uptime in Swiftness, but also the CD on the active was drastically lowered.

In short, for Engineers we’re talking about a sizeable nerf being turned into a smaller more palatable nerf.

For Mesmers we’re talking about complaining over a very significant boost.

These are far from being comparable, even if cross class comparisons were valid.