Guild Wars 2

Hmm… you can totally make a build along those lines work. You’re going to want to go for Viper/Sinister gear mostly if possible since you seem to be going for condition damage. You can toss some exotic rampager’s pieces in there as a cheaper, easier to obtain substitute for those sets if you don’t have the means to build those out right away. (Rampagers stats come in certain dungeon armor so if you already have the tokens it’s basically free) Of course, those are all full glass sets, so you’ll need to be careful about avoiding damage.

Grenades is more the “meta” recommendation and pretty much the go-to kit on engie for DPS maximization, but I think Bomb kit might be a nice fit for you. Try ditching radiation field for bomb kit. (Racials are sometimes fun to play around with, but they’re terrible next to class skills by design) Bombs Synergise well with your trait lines, and complement your other favored skills. Plus it gives you another blast with fire and smoke fields (Engie group stealth is occasionally handy), which is much better than the extra poison field.

Also, engie pro-tip: Outside of battle, Toolbelt CDs don’t count against the main skill CD so you can swap the skill after using the toolbelt. This works well with kits because they have no CDs anyways. (If you have long CD skills that you can’t swap yet, you kits will always be swappable to use this trick) So before a battle I don’t plan to use the flamethrower for, I equip it for a moment, use Incendiary ammo and swap the slot back to my grenade kit and I basically have free extra burning stacks to start the fight with. It’s also pretty good for chucking Elixer B and H at your own feet for a couple pre-fight boons, or dropping a medkit drop on a stack before pulling a boss, before changing the skills back to the ones I actually want. (Doesn’t work in PvP since your skills are locked, but it’s awesome in PvE)

Shield is fine. The problem is the pistol, actually. If we had an alternate main hand besides just the pistol, the shield would be much better. Or hell, two shields. I’d rock a shield-shield engie.

That said, Blowtorch is nice and all, and is one of your better damage skills in a condi build, but the shield has saved the butt of both myself and my team-mates quite a bit. The offhand pistol has much more counterplay (If the burn is clensed, so much for your damage, and if that burn is returned to you, enjoy your 10,000 damage burn on a class notorious for bad cleansing ability) Whereas that extra knockback, stun and reflect have let me ruin the day of a few mindless rapid fire spamming rangers and thieves and let me prevent quite a few stomps.

Basically, shield is there to give you some extra defense and control if you’re willing to give up your blowtorch. (Glue shot is pretty meh, so its barely worth the consideration IMO. Offhand pistol is all about the blowtorch)

Basically, I think the shield is still a worthwhile choice in PvP. PvE, not so much, but to be honest I often use it anyway out of personal preference.

I hope some of these things could possibly be added to guild halls.

The ability to start a guild activity so you could have a guild-run game of keg brawl at any time you want, for example.

And some of the other things stupidly taken out of the open world, like having working golem-chess games as a place-able guild decoration.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

It should be mentioned that this 400 points likely includes the runes, sigils, weapon, and armor piece that come with unlocking the line.

This is actually a good point.

We already know that the FINAL unlock in the line is just a weapon skin, which is purely cosmetic and has no bearing on our ability to play the spec. (It was explicity stated that the Scrapper’s hammer is the last unlock, so by extension, it it likely that every spec has their ‘signature’ weapon skin as the final unlock, or possibly an armor)

It would make perfect sense for us to complete the traitline at 150-200 points, about the same as the core specs, effectively fully unlocking the elite spec’s playstyle, and then the other 200 points to be fluff, skins and other such things to give us something to spend our extra hero points on. I mean, people have been complaining about having nothing to spend the leftover hero points on, so having a weapon skin to sink an extra couple hundred points into is actually a good thing.

So maybe we should take a peek at the actual full unlock order before flying into a blind rage. What if it was 200 points for all the skills, then a 100 point jump for an armor skin and another 100 points for the weapon, as a quick example? 400 points for a full trait lock would be absolutely insane, but 400 points for a skin? Who cares, still not nearly as bad as the legendary weapons grind, and it might even give the elite spec skins a tiny bit of prestige if you need near-completion of the world for the skins.

Azure.8670:

As a pvp necro main, engi is the only enemy I respect on the battlefield. The rest I spit on their corpses and visit the homes of their widows.

With that said, engi getting moa is the most evil thing to ever happen. Thank god engi isn’t popular

Hehe, that’s an awfully nice reaper form you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if someone canceled it early, wouldn’kitten
(I’m just glad crate isn’t our only viable elite anymore, they’re all solid choices for different builds now)

Even as an Engie main, I find myself getting annoyed at engies using Elixir S, Gear Shield and Magnet pulls because they’re just annoying abilities to deal with. However, BECAUSE I’m an Engie main, I know exactly how to ruin the day of any other engie using those skills. “Oh You shrank? Enjoy those 4 seconds while they last because you’re dead as soon as it wears off” Whereas I find the invuln from rangers and wariors much more problematic to deal with, but surprise: I don’t play either of those classes.

I think the tricks of classes you don’t play always seem worse, and Engineer is one of the less popular classes to play which is the main source of the issue.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

You might mean October 23rd, rather than December 23rd.

Unless you know something about Wintersday we don’t? ; )

A “Madness on Wintersday” event (rather than Nightmare on Christmas) would be interesting though. Man, imagine the dungeon you’d get from a Tixx/Thorn team-up?

Mad King’s Inquisition with snowballs! Tixx’s Infinirarium where you defend golems from attacking haloween creatures.

And the most ungodly holiday jumping puzzle mashup you’d get from the Winter Clcoktower…

If nothing else, the skins would be interesting.

Yeah though, fixed.

Don’t you see?

Halloween dropping on the expansion launch makes perfect sense!

It’s right in the title!

Heart of Thorns

Sure, Mordy is all ‘planty’ and such and might have thorns, but there are much more obvious Thorns emerging on October 23! Namely, Mad King Oswald Thorn and Bloody Prince Edrick Thorn.

The true story of the expansion, will be about how the two royal thorns have a tear-filled heart to heart and finally reconcile thier family issues! It will be a heartwarming tale about how a shattered family finds what truely brings them together in a bond of father-son love: crushing Tyria beneath thier bootheels in a storm of bloody conquest!

Guild Wars 2: Heart Of Thorns:
A Lifetime Original Movie coming on October 3rd.

(Obviously not serious, but am I the only person that noticed the coincidence of the Expansion Title and the Name of our Mad King? Heart of Thorns is totally a pefect title for some sappy story about Mad King Thorn’s family)

Edit: Apparently I have no sense of time.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Arioso.8519:

Seth Chadwick.5317:

Non HoT players can donate to the treasury.

F2P non HoT players?

Or just people with the full base game?

F2P can’t mail out items or put items in (or out of) a guild bank, so only players with the full base game can donate.

That is what I would think, however, the Treasury =/= the Bank.

It is deposit ONLY and all donated items are only used towards guild upgrades. Given that F2P players can still sell base mats on the TP, it would follow to reason that they might also be able to donate said materials to the guild treasury. The main reason, or at least one of the reasons, f2p players can’t use the guild bank is that it would let them bypass the mailing/trading restrictions, this is not the case with a deposit only treasury.

So I would still like official dev confitmation if the treasury is an exemption to the f2p restrictions or not. My money is on “no” but it would still be reasonable given how the treasury works, and it would still be nice if f2p players could help the guild build the upgrades they do benefit from, like WP reduction costs and such.

Seth Chadwick.5317:

Non HoT players can donate to the treasury.

F2P non HoT players?

Or just people with the full base game?

Thank goodness, that is what I was hoping to hear. That way F2p and non-expansion guild mates don’t have to get left out of guild-held events, parties, RP sessions, and things of that nature being held in the hall, even if they can’t use all of the things IN the hall. I was afraid that wouldn’t be the case, which would be a detriment towards building a guild community and would hurt both the HoT and non-hot guild members.

I do have a follow-up question about one specific feature though:

Will non-Hot players be able to contribute to the treasury for funding guild upgrades and expeditions?

Even if I can’t use all of those upgrades I’d still like to pitch in costs to help claim the hall and build it up. I don’t see why I couldn’t since I could always just dump those mats in the bank and let a guildie transfer them for me anyways.

Will f2p players also be able to contribute to the treasury? Since the contributions go straight to upgrades and can’t be taken by other players, so it wouldn’t be usable as a workaround for trading like the bank would, and it would be nice for f2p people to have a method of contributing to upgrades without being ‘total’ freeloaders.

Cleansing Synergy is NOT every 10 seconds because it triggers on heal skill, so you typically get it every 20 seconds on Elixer H or Healing Turret, where it simply adds an extra cleanse to the cleanses already granted by those abilities.

Ideally, Cleansing Synergy would combo well with the med kit which has the lowest cooldown healing skill, on top of many cleanses of it’s own, but the kit itself is poor performance and is pretty much universally hated.

So transmute is actually better on the cooldown since it doesn’t use your healing skill, and in PvP it is a fantastic defense against opponents that start the fight with a debilitating condition like fear or immobilize right at the start of a fight which lets you walk right out of the burst they were trying to land on you.

And the extra cleanses are really about the Alchemical Tinctures + HGH combo. Rather than getting one extra cleanse on your healing skill, you have two on-demand clenses from every elixer you slot because of both the skill and the toolbelt, and those elixers have lowered cooldowns.

It’s less prone to counterplay since people aren’t trying to block your thrown elixirs as actively as heal skills, and is a lifesaver against builds that only use one or two conditions that you can now clear off more frequently, like burn guardian, since you can space out your condi clears instead of bursting all three clenses at once on healing turret+ cleansing synergy.

I actually like the idea of class-specific legendary armor.

I mean, that’s way better than legendary armor all being the same exact skin, or even 3 skins one for each armor class. Any raider that wants to show off the fact that they have a full legendary set of armor is going to look pretty much exactly the same, and that’s boring.

Plus I hear a lot of complaints about how most classes don’t have many armor sets that truly fit their theme, especially among medium armor users.

And that also solves the issue of what sort of effects would make a legendary armor skin legendary, when auras, footfalls, etc. are already parts of the weapons.

Like the idea of having the Elementailist armor change appearance with attunement sounds like it’d be pretty cool. If class exclusive-armor skins interacted with the class mechanic it would be a a way to give legendary special effects without clashing with other legendary gear.

To prevent the issue of needing full sets legendary gear for all your alts, they can be like outfits rather than like cultural armor, where the skin automatically changes itself to the equipped class rather than only being equip-able by a given class.

It’s just that tying the armor’s effect to class mechanics would require class exclusive skins, unless there was an “off” version that didn’t work if you put the armor on the “wrong” class. Like putting the transforming ele armor on a Necro would give you a plain version of the armor that doesn’t have attunement effects.

Ariurotl.3718:

P.P.S. Fess up if you thought this thread would be about (a)symmetrical armors.

Fess’d

Though, rangers kinda do have the highest health pools if you count the pet. And I think the healing focus on Druid is actually an argument against them having high health pools since it mirrors Guardians. A lower health pool with higher damage mitigation means better sustain but with some susceptibility to burst.

…

Also, my Engie bias trumps your Ranger bias. BRING ON THE ENGIE BUFFS.

If you want a safety net, make a second f2p account, and give that account admin privileges. That way, even if you accidentally leave the guild it’ll still be reserved by the other account.

But either way, you can have five guild on one account, and your characters can even be set to be repping different guilds. Lots of people have personal storage guilds they only rep when they need to use said storage.

Alternate dumb explanation that dawned on me during the living story.

“The mists” are basically the netherworld where all the spirits of the dead go, right?

There is literally a door to the netherworld smack dab in the middle of a busy city in the center of Tyria!

A player that dies, just wakes up in the mists and walks out of the kitten Asura gate. We’re ALL Revenenants.

…Okay, lore-wise not really, obviously.

But still, when Rytlock jumped into the mists portal, that was my first reaction.
While Rox’s reaction was “Oh no, how will he return from the mists!?”
Mine was “Uh… I go to the mists on a daily basis. For fun. There’s a door that goes straight there right in town. Common, let’s just hop in there, and you can look for him while I knock out my PvP dalies.”

Bellatrixa.3546:

I’d just be happy if my female human Necro would say ‘centaur’ correctly. Very disappointed when I found out who the voice actress was as well.

Are you going to petition for “color” to have a U in it as well?

I hear this complaint a fair bit, but it IS correct. Only, it’s correct for a standard US accent.

The human players have an american-sounding accent, so it makes sense that is how it would be said. I imagine if Sylvari players had the same line they’d pronounce it as what you see as the ’correct" pronunciation since they have a more European-sounding ascent to me.

Now, if you want a player to use proper English English, (as in from England, with the appropriate accent and pronunciations) , I’d be in full support of the option. (Also, Australian would be amazing on ranger, if a bit stereotypical) But to say it’s “incorrect” well, you’re just gonna have to get over it.

Here’s my suggestion: Just color code the icons.

Each base class already has a color, as shown in the PvP stat pie chart.

All Guard specializations are blue icons, all Mesmer specializations are magenta, all engie specs are yellow, all necros dark green, etc. The key here is that each set has the exact same color/shade.

Then that makes it very easy to group them and you can still identify an elite spec on sight.

I think the cutsceene voices are a non-issue.

Because personally, I would be perfectly fine with having cutsceene and story dialogue revert back to the “original” voice and my custom voice pack only plays in open world and in combat.

Would it be a little jarring to have one voice in a cutsceene and immediately have another in the the fight after it? Yes it would.

But you know what else is jarring?

Playing in the open world when you constantly hear other people saying the exact same lines as your own character with the exact same voice.

In an MMO, I think the priority should be on things that make our individual characters better able to stand out from each other, so having more players with different voices enhances MY experience even if I’m not the one using it.

The bottom line is that voice pack customization is something I would gladly pay actual money for, even if it didn’t apply to the entire game such as story sequences. And if enough people agree with me there, that’s really the only argument Arenanet needs, after all.

For that matter, we kind of already have such a voicepack in the form of the Job-o-Tron backpeice. It’s a bit annoying since it’s also repetitive and there’s only one of it’s kind so it doesn’t solve the variety problem. But if there were 20 different voice packs and voice changing items, you’d hear specific ones less often so that problem is solved with time as more are added.

As another suggestion, if people are insisting on story and combat voices matching, even then I would pay for the ability to customize lines. Like the same voice actor can do variations on combat lines so you could pay for a “Manical madman” where the character laughs and says cruel taunts in combat, as an example, and then there can be lots of archetypes like a emotionless deadpan person, a pacifistic person (who’s ‘entering combat’ line might be something like ‘we don’t have to do this’) and so forth. If you have more than one of those packs you could perhaps mix and match and customize which lines are triggered by which actions.

Essentially, I would love for my characters to sound more like what I feel represents my own head-cannon personalities for them, and also for there to be more variety in player voices in general. I have little interest in buying outfits, but would spend a fair deal of money for voices. And this is far more important to me than seemlessness between story dialouge and gameplay. Arenanet already dropped that ball when they made every single one of us the Pact Commander.

Mercurias.1826:

Wasn’t healing bombs almost never used when it existed because the heals were tiny and the rest of the trait line wasn’t terribly good as it was?

I mean, when it existed it was often outright mocked right here on these forums as a bad trait.

Am I the only person who remembers this?

So why do people desperately want it back suddenly?

There were always people that enjoyed using sub-optimal builds, as shocking as it may be to believe. I bet there are even 2 or maybe even three players that use the battering ram once in a while. (Wierdos)

It was useful trait regardless, but a woefully underwhelming grandmaster in a very weak trait-line. If it DID still exist in the current inventions, alchemy or explosives line, I think it would actually see a lot more play than it used to, at least compared to some of the new traits that nobody uses, like thermobaric detonation… or pretty much anything else in the whole explosives line if you’re not running grenades. It was mostly having to go full into the terrible inventions line that killed it. Now inventions is good. so maybe it would have still worked.

Ok, getting into semantics, none of the “on crit” traits truly “rely” on grenades, but grenades are much better at procing on crit traits than bombs are, and that nearly all of the fireams and explosive traits are balanced such that they’re more effective with grenades than bombs.

And that burst healing isn’t quite the same thing. A scrapper support tank is now the replacement rather than a burst healing build, in terms of combat niche. I don’t have beta access to test out a build with it myself, but it seems to do the same job well as a sustained melee range bunker.

That said though, and I suppose this needs to be said, if we got Elixir Infused Bombs back NOW, it probably would be terrible. The specialization patch in general buffed bursty specs and basically nerfed the effectiveness of toughness, such that EiB wouldn’t be nearly as sustainable as it used to be. There is no going back.

I think what I’d prefer to see at this point, is an explosives line trait that gives bomb kit #1 a 20% chance at procing a blast finisher in a similar manner to most of our projectile #1’s having a chance at a projectile one. Maybe roll that into thermobaric detonation since it’s rather underwhelming. That’d allow bomb kit AAs to occasionally trigger soothing detonation so you’d effectively get the same thing without throwing things off too much.

This is a bit of a problem somewhat caused by the new system being locked to only 3 traits each tier.

I used to run elixir infused bombs. It worked great in a few niche builds. Yeah, it was far from ‘meta’ but it wasn’t quite ‘bad’. You did need the right gear set-up for it to get just past medocrity, but it was great for a support bunker in team fights, and my old EiB build hard-countered thieves to a ridiculous degree.

Objectively, new bunker down is an overall more effective trait in terms of both damage and healing output (Unless you’re all stacked up, then the group healing of old EiB pushes ahead a bit) and does essentially the same thing while working in many more builds than EiB did without needing cele or cleric gear to be worthwhile.

The problem however is that because it is crit dependent, it relies on grenades like so many other engie traits. If you liked EiB for the bomb part… or wanted something like the old builds I was using, you’re out of luck because bunker down isn’t very good with bombs, and is completely useless in cleric gear.

Bunker down would be a fine replacement for EiB if it didn’t rely on crits. Perhaps if you auto-droped a mine and medkit every 5 seconds in combat, or it was just a chance on hit with an internal cd instead of guaranteed on crit with internal cd. Then you could run the trait in just about any gear without being locked into crit gear.

I don’t have beta access myself to test this, and I have yet to see anyone answer this outright: Can the function gyro be used to revive fully dead players and not just downed ones?

I’d really like to know.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

The new David Bowie Lion’s Arch is a little too slick for Halloween. The Mad King has his work cut out for him.

I kind of agree, plus, it would be interesting to see some of the other cities get some love.

What if if we held our Halloween festivities…

In The Grove.

The Grove would look amazing with a “Haunted Forrest” makeover.

But here’s the thing: there’s been a lot of speculation about Halloween and the expansion launch clashing, but what if Halloween WAS an expansion launch event?

Here’s how I see it potentially playing out:
Mordremoth and/or the nightmare court decide to take advantage of the weakened pale tree to press a finishing blow on the grove and this becomes a huge living world defend The Grove type event.

During the attack, who else but the Mad King emerges, gets kittened at the invaders for taking attention away from HIS holiday, with a general “Ha! These nightmare court fools think they know horror. I’ll SHOW them horror!” sort of attitude, and his Halloween creatures beat back the invaders while he sets up shop in the grove to keep them out. Stuff like the Labyrinth and the Clock Tower return as in last year but with their portals in The Grove.

A few new Halloween events can take place in the non-HoT maguma areas, (mainly Caledon and Metrica) and they can even throw in a few HoT mobs and such encroaching in for these events to hype the expansion a bit more for those who still haven’t bit the bullet and bought it.

Plus, it kind of solves the problem of people already having stacks of candy corn and and ToT bags from Maize Balm farming who’d be able to immedeately snatch up any new haloween items on day one. If the new events involve killing nightmare court goons alongside haloween monsters as allies, then you can have completely new drops and items, with the Mad King’s vendors rewarding you for bringing back evidence for slaying these new foes (Mordrem Blooms, anyone?)

Then, in the first chapter of LS season three, the Pale Tree recovers a bit to protect the grove herself, and this happens in early November just in time for the Mad King to return to his realm.

Alternately, this whole general concept could be part of a whole new “haunted woods” map added somewhere in Maguma or Ascalon.

I admit it’s kind of a silly concept, but it would be cool if Arenanet did something special to make Halloween and the Expansion launch timing complement each other instead of distract from each other.

The AED was always a pretty interesting design idea, but as most of us can agree (as seen by it’s abysmal useage rate) the opportunity cost vs the risk/reward of the kit generally isn’t worth it. It’s satisfying when you manage to use it properly, but since you can use any of the other heals on cooldown twice within the cooldown period of the AED and get almost as much healing on top of helpful mid-fight buffs, you’re basically completely giving up sustain at the cost of a risky burst heal that ultimately isn’t a whole lot better than the healing offered by the other options, and that is only if you’re actually sustaining deadly damage every 40 seconds, which really shouldn’t be happening if you’re mitigating damage properly.

So, what if we simply gave the AED some sustain? It’s essentially a life support system, right? What if it literally operated like a signet? Where every X seconds it either heals you a small bit, cleans a condition or pulses a boon like regeneration for a few seconds so long as the AED is off cooldown?

That way, you’re still getting a sustained benefit while you’re saving your AED for a critical moment. A passive effect wouldn’t do much to change the high risk/ high reward nature of the device, but it would reduce it’s opportunity costs compared to other heals, and a good passive effect could actually let the AED compete with the healing turret or Elixer H.

Godmoney.2048:

Kunikakitty.3185:

Thanks for the advice btw, will probably get me to 25 if I complete the other races areas too.. maybe.

If you do all 5 starting zones you’ll be about level 35-40.

You do not kill mobs in GW2 to level up. Grinding is literally the worst possible way to level.

This. You get enough EXP for a level or two simply from getting all the way-points on a map, for starters.

If you want to level FAST, run past as many trash mobs as possible to explore maps, (Unless you have a killstreak booster) but complete any dynamic events you encounter and complete renown hearts you are near (Most hearts can be completed by killing said trash mobs in the area, so that’s when you go on a killing spree, but not inbetween the hearts out of range for completing one)

Events and hearts give huge chunks of bonus EXP that dwarf the exp you get from killing mobs, and even then, you kill more mobs in the process of doing those events than you do in areas were nothing is going on so you get more EXP either way.

What I would do, is make a ticket scrap a guaranteed thing. Ie: If you buy 10 keys, you know that you’re getting a BL weapon skin on top of pressing your luck for better items. It’d be like dungeon tokens in a way, you know you’re slowly working towards a goal as you buy keys.

I might note that I do say this as someone who is not a gambler. With chests as they are now, I will never buy keys, ever. The gamble just does not appeal to me. If I knew I was working towards a weapon skin as a sure thing, with an additional chance of maybe getting something else cool, then I would buy BL keys once in a while, because then I get the excitement of maybe getting something nice, but also the assurance I’m not completely flushing money down the toilet even if I lose.

Xyonon.3987:

It would be nice if the FT aa slows your movement speed but has bomb #1 like dps. Like those pesky flame legion FT guys x.x

Hehe but even tough – I like to hear that. I love the FT and I think the aa is pretty useless right now, especially for that nice animation :< But on the other hand as an engineer – every aa needs to be “bad”.

I’m actually all for this idea and it makes sense. If you got locked into walking speed while channeling flamethrower 1, it be a bit more realistic. You don’t think of it much because the game doesn’t have friendly fire and you can run through your own flames just fine, but normally you would NOT be running forward while operating a flamethrower because you’d run into your own back-draft and burn yourself.

A more powerful flamethrower that hinders your mobility a bit would be a little tidbit that makes the kit feel just a bit more different than the others.

A-net just seems to not want to give up on the pick-ups as a mechanic.

If that’s how it’s going to be, then the problem is that the pick-ups are weak, only useable by one person and on a low cooldown requireing you to rotate back into the medkit every 10 seconds if you want to use the skills to thier maximum effect.

The Bandage drop should have most of the same problems, but few people complain about that. Why?

Well, for one, it’s a toolbelt and doesn’t mess with your rotations.
Second, it drops a mass of bandages, so you can either try to keep them to yourself, or there’s enough for your whole party to get a small bit of healing.
Third, and I think this is the biggest one: Bandage Drop bandages last a long time, giving people more time to get them, and allowing people to grab the buff when they actually need it.

12 seconds on the medkit drops is nothing.

I would much rather see the medkit act in one of the following ways.
1. If they are to remain single use pickups, I would much rather them be stronger with a longer cooldown. I mean like a full 5-10 seconds of resistance on a 40-50 second c/d than what the current resistance pack does.

2. Toss a fistfull of several powerups so more people can grab them. If you don’t want the engineer to self-grab 3-5 packs in a row from a single skill, them make a debuff like the one on the Cake Gun where you can’t pick up the same kind of pack twice within 10 seconds.

3. Either way, have more healing on a longer cooldown, making the packs more of a burst heal that makes them worth going out of your way to get. Most people aren’t going to bother walking over to the thing for 400-600 HP and a cleanse when most classes can do that with a simple skill without interrupting themselves. Also, they need to last longer like the bandage drop so that people can actually grab them when they’re needed instead of on sight.

With longer cooldowns it’d be easier to work into our rotations so we don’t need to interfere with our attack patterns as much, if we swapped to the medkit once every 50 seconds to drop a bunch of packs for people to grab when they need them, instead of stopping attacking every 10 seconds it would already be much better.

If the point of ground targeting is to directly chuck heals onto allies, it just doesn’t work. They need to be direct targeted skills if they’re single target, or AOEs like thrown elixers to actually be able to hit things with it.

It’s a shame, because the support skills on the elixir gun are actually very good. Fumigate and Super Elixer are great. If the medkit skills were anywhere near as useful as the elixir gun as a support kit I’d be all over it. The elixir mortar and e-gun are just so much better at the medkit’s own job.

Charr: For both asthetics and Lore, Charr wins. Even their racial skills are basically just more Engineer skills, and even their cultural weapons are the most Engineer-fitting weapons. (Though yes, any race can use the Weapons, and their cultural medium armor is more Ranger-y, imo)

Asura: On paper, they’re the obvious second choice for an engineer, but their own technology aesthetic clashes pretty hard with the engineer aesthetic. It’s a shame the kits can’t be skinned to something more techno-magic like. I’m expecting a future “Scientist” elite spec that uses some more Asura-like tech one day though.

Sylvari: Scarlet. ‘nuff said. Ignoring her, there’s a bit of a visual juxtaposition with flame-thrower wielding plant-people, but engineer actually fits them well lore-wise, with most Sylvari tending to be curious and eager learners.

Human: Tyrian humans are mostly medieval in their tech, but you may have noticed something: The human bandits and pirates are mostly engineers (With some Thieves and a few oddball classes mixed in, but tons of engies) Just play almost any path on CM. If you stick mainly to grenades, bomb kit, and flamethrower you’ll have a pirate or bandit raider that fits right in with the NPC ones. Seeing as almost every viable engineer build uses at least one of those (and some use all) that’s not too hard to do.

Norn’s probably the least fitting engie race, but hey, you can still make it work. I can see a Norn wanting to create his legend via creating the greatest machine ever conceived.

Bonus answer:
Dredge. Seeing as they’re a close second to Charr in terms of purely industrial tech.

Ouch. If that happened to you that may be a bug. You can get two level 40 keys in a week from what I hear.

The level 10 key might be set up to check if you got ANY LS reward key rather than just the level 10 one. Meaning if you got the level 10 key and THEN the level 40 key, you’d get both, but if you got the level 40 key first then it accidentally uses up your level 10 key for the week.

I’m not in a position to actually test it, but that’s my guess,

I have a sylvari with an infused mawdrey and it does NOT move like the second pic, it moves just a tiny bit, but it looks exactly the way the first pic does.

So I don’t think it has anything to do with either of those things.

Ging.6485:

Everything aside from Kits and Elixirs is pretty bad. Although I have found that Rocket Boots do synergize pretty well with a condi build.

Rocket boots are actually a lot better than we give them credit for. With the burning trait, the kick actually packs some punch, and the boots themselves are actually a very nice mobility utility on a 20 sec cooldown. They’re even good in some jumping puzzles and such in open world if you get good at aiming them. If the gadgeteer trait wasn’t dependent on getting hit they’d be pretty great together. (seriously, whose idea was that? even if the trait simply made all gadgets always overcharged without the kittens rule it still wouldn’t be a popular trait.)

Slick shoes are handy in PvP though they are pretty mediocre in pve.

But the reason I called out the battering ram is because they fill the same niche, they’re both CC utilities that give a knockback in a single skill. Given we already have much more useful weapons and kits, why would I take one of those for knockback, when I can take flamethrower for airblast, toolkit for magnet pull, bomb kit for big ol bomb, or even just literally any turret with the explosives line? Neither the battering ram or the blast gyro appear to have a unique function that isn’t already done better by something else we can use.

iKeostuKen.2738:

You seem to be the only one looking at the thing as a whole lol. Add Mine and rifle to this and then itl be endless CC.

We don’t need the blast gyro for endless CC. We already HAVE endless cc. On a lower CD than the blast gyro, for that matter.

Granted, the one unknown is the damage, given that the streamer seemed to be using a condi amulet. 1300 damage on a no power build ain’t that bad. If the power damage scales well, and the gyro deals 2000+ damage, then it might actually do well as a component of a burst combo since it could be much more damaging than most other CC options we have.

Also, the stealth gyro hard counters itself. See a stealth gyro? Put another scrapper within range of it and have them reveal.

But yeah, it being visible is fine, it’s more of a mobile shadow refuge than a true hiding tool. It’s more of a defensive measure for direct targeting skills or for aiding revives and stomps rather than being ‘true’ stealth that lets you go completely unnoticed.

Hey now, it doesn’t sound that bad! I’m sure I’ll use it right alongside my battering ram, because this gyro sounds exactly as useful!

/lovingly places the blast gyro on top of the battering ram in the trashcan in the corner.

After thinking about it, I still think Medic Gyro will still be near useless by itself in most of the game, but for PvP, In a 1v1, 1v2 or maybe even 1v3 setting with the engie as the bunker, Medic+Bulwark might actually be very good in combination if the two gyros are capable of healing and protecting each other. They might be able to keep each other alive long enough to give you some extra sustain.

If you equip a kit, that’s a weapon swap.
If you unequip a kit, that’s a weapon swap.
If you swap from one kit to another kit, that’s a weapon swap.

Since engies have essentially no CD on weapon swaps, if you’re rotating kits, you get on swap effects basically every 9 seconds. It may seem like it happens more often than other classes because you have the same sigils on every kit. So to get a similar rate of intelegence procs on another class, you need to have intelligence on both of your weapon sets and not just one.

lorddarkflare.9186:

Not true at all.

-Reconstruction Field: AoE Protection + Water Field
-Defence Field: AoE Reflect
-Bypass Coating: AoE Superspeed
-Space Capacitor: Damage + AoE Stun + Lightning Field
-Chemical Field: AoE Poison + Poison Field
-Detection Pulse: AoE Reveal

Only the bolded two need serious work.

I wasn’t so much speaking on the usefulness as the “work” and visuals.

Almost all of those toolbelt skills recycle visuals from other skills and have no new animations, so it smells a little bit of Dev Crunch Time.

I will disagree that that the Reconstruction field doesn’t need work. Between that and the actual gyro, they’re already woefully underpowered next to the healing turret. (again…) Note that when Jebro made a build he went right back to the healing turret. It’s got a longer water field than the healing turret, which is nice but you have the same longer water field on the Mortar, and you still get the protection on the healing turret with the trait, so you get just as much if not way more out of the turret on a lower CD.

Turret wins. I wish it didn’t though.

The lightning field and stun are useful as heck though, I’m not saying it isn’t. And the reveal on 20 seconds will shut a lot of things down.

The spec itself will grant engineers the ability to do EVERY field/finisher combo in the game solo with the sole exception of dark fields so it’s pretty powerful.

Basically, what I’m saying is some of the new toolbelt skills are indeed very useful, but none of them are terribly impressive.

The function gyro is as much of a new mechanic as the new thief dodges.
That’s neither an argument for or against your point, for what it’s worth. But thieves are having the exact same complaint about their new dodge, that is isn’t a “real” class mechanic.

And technically, we got FIVE new F skills.
The function gryo is also literally an f skill, funnily enough. (Not trying to make a point bringing that up, it’s just an observation)

The toolbelt is the same mechanic we’ve always had, but adding five more skills to it is just as much dev work as something like adding one new F to another class, so I wouldn’t call that laziness.

However, I do think the actual new TB skills themselves are kinda lazy, they’re basically all just a dropped field. The mortar kit alone covers most of the gyro’s F skills. If the new toolbelt skills were diverse and interesting, I’d strongly disagree with you, but they’re not so all I can really say is you may have a point. Personally, I think the hammer looks amazing and most of the traits look pretty good, so I’ll probably take the hammer and my same old engie kits, thus becoming “just an engie with a hammer”

Hold on, the sneak gyro lasts THIRTY SECONDS.
On a 30 second CD.

And it doesn’t seem to force revealed on itself, so if you combine this with a shadow refuge thief…

Plant SR and the sneak gryo in the same spot, run out like you normally do with SR, but the SG upkeeps your stealth duration during it’s own stealth duration, self-destruct the sneak gyro at the end of it’s own stealth duration, keep running with superspeed…

We’re looking at a full 20-30 seconds of uninterrupted group stealth.

Keep that in rotation with some smoke field blasts, and you can upkeep perma group stealth on the whole party now.

You can easily do some huge dungeon skips with that, if nothing else.

Oh wait, if that actually works, then two engies would be able to permastealth with each other in tow.

The funny thing is, I think the stealth component in it will actually be useless in PvP rather than PvE because it hard counters itself. If two scrappers are in play and both have this, neither one of them is going to get much stealth out of it with both of them pulsing mass reveal at each other.

Sagramor.7395:

Not sure why you need Purge Gyro to outclass HT when they’re not competing for a slot.

Because ANYTHING that cleanses conditions frequently enough to save you from a condition user like a mesmer or another engie is going to outclass the heal turret’s cleansing abilities by default, especially if it’s meant to also cleanse allies and be a group benefiting utility in the same way healing turret is. We already have Elixir C for those massive burst applications of condition damage, so we need something to deal with the constant replications of shorter conditions.

I just want to say, it’s kind of hilarious we got a 6th F skill. I can almost hear the dev meeting:
“Hey we want to give the engineer an f6, but the UI bar is already getting too long and we don’t want to program in yet another fskill keybind.”
“Hey… What if we put the new skill on the actual F key?”
And thus, profession skill F0 was born.

I don’t get why everyone is up in arms about the function Gryo being less useful in PvE. Yes, there is next to nothing to stomp in PvE, but I really want to be in your dungeon groups if you manage to be in such a group that nobody is downed ever. And in open world bosses, people get knocked down all the time.

Being able to use the Gyro to pick up a teammate while being able to continue attacking is amazing. Simply amazing. Elixer R could do this to an extent, but this sounds way more effective.

What if you can deploy your gyro and then do a normal res? Can you res two people at once or res one at double speed? Can this stack with Elixer R for triple resing speed? Will this work on fully dead teammates so you can slowly revive them instead of taking yourself out of the fight for the full minute it takes to pick up a full dead team-mate in combat? If the answer to any of those is yes, then engineer becomes uniquely useful for resurrecting allies in dungeons and raids.

And if you never have teammates because you always play solo, and don’t do open world events with random people around, then most support skills on most classes will be of minimal use to you anyways, so go complain about those.

The stealth Gyro, we’ll see how that plays out, but crate and mortar are probably going to be the go-to PVE elites anyway. If it turns out well, between that and smoke bomb, an engineer could potentially be a complete replacement for a thief in dungeon groups that use skipping tricks. If not, it will pretty much just be a neat party trick for PvP, yeah. Though if HoT introduced more stealthing enemies, the reveal might become surprisingly useful.

What I’m worried about is the Clensing Gyro; given that arenanet seems to NOT want to give engies a good healing skill, considering the medkit is still garbage after getting a total overhaul. A traited healing turret is 3 group condition clears every 20 seconds, so the gyro will need to beat that handily or healing turret will still be the optimal heal. meaning that within 20 seconds, it needs to strip up to 15 conditions off of up to 5 targets, at a minimum.

Basaltface.2786:

maybe they are “mobile banners” with upkeep mechanic? Wouldnt be that far out

I don’t think they will be like this, but if they are banners, I think it could be cool if they were DEBUFF banners that harm enemies rather than add to ally stats. like banners and spirits already do. Some potential options with that route:

Detection drone: Reveals all stealthed enemies within 600 units while active

Corrosive drone: -200 toughness to all enemies within range, enemies have incoming condition duration increased by 10%

Distraction Drone: Reduces precision of nearby enemies, enemies that activate their skills within it’s range have their skill cooldowns increased 20%

Medical Drone: Reduces the effectiveness of enemy heals by 20% (stacks with poison)
Whatever the active or secondary effects on these would be would be the actual main self heal. Maybe the toolbelt skill.

The thing about a lot of the effects on things is that any one of them is just fine, but they pile up way too much. Take conditions and boons for example. Each one has a visual effect that clearly communicates what is on that target. However, pretty much anything you fight has 10 different conditions and at least 3 different boons on them at all times, making the individual condition and boon particle effects combine into a pointless cloud of shiny noise. And some if the effects that I would want to see better, like retaliation, are usually hard to notice behind all those other effects.

Come to think of it, a lot of the game is like that, where much of the info the game puts front and center is mostly not particularly helpful in terms of feedback that would effect my playstyle, but things that would actually help me to survive are obscured. As you mentioned, the crit damage indicator is a bit over the top, and my crit rate is such that I crit pretty much every time I attack. A special damage indicator that shows when I crit is literally useless to me.

However, the duration of boons and conditions are very subtle and hard to see. The only way to know exactly how many seconds are left on a condition are the tooltip, which you never have time to actually check when you’re on fire. I would love for the conditions and boons on the AI to be larger and actually have a numeric timer for when the stacks will run out. That might actually allow me to better ration out my condition clears and such and know when it’s better to cleanse or ride it out. Especially with conditions like confusion, torment or poison.

Likewise, combo fields have really shiny effects, but it’s really hard to tell what some of them are, unless you recognize the skill itself. Guardian and Mesmer fields for example are painfully obvious, as are most fire fields in general, but something like the fields from an engineer’s mortar are actually pretty hard to differentiate because it’s just a small particle effect at the center of it that gets drowned out buy all the other shiny stuff going on in the game.

The map becomes a little bit messier once you get towards mid-levels since it’s a map and not a purely linear path.

For one, you don’t need to stick to your own race’s zones, so you have several different level 25-35 zones to poke around, for instance. To get to them, you might have to cut through some lower level maps. You might want to take the portals in Lion’s Arch to some of the other racial starting cities and run through those zones to get to other maps.

Because of downscaling, you also have the option of exploring another starting zone instead of going straight for a higher level one. You can gain levels in a 1-15 zone weather you’re level 1 or level 79.

As for seeing level 30 mobs in a level 25+ zone, yeah, that’s still in the range. The enemies get stronger in some areas than others so if you’re in an area where the mobs are too strong, try to find the part of the map where they get weaker.

The higher your level, the less linear exploration will get, but you still have plenty of places to explore and level.

I already made a thread to ask this, but I’ll ask here: are we also going to get Vine-Covered Crates from the un-awarded daily chests?

I just got my mail with the missing blooms,

but shouldn’t I also get a Vine-Covered Crate from the un-awarded daily chest?

Did anyone get Vine-Covered Crates or just the blooms?

So what if it’s a “tiny subset of players?”

I’m nowhere near 300mf and I think it is completely reasonable to want another use for essences. It might even be nice as an alternate for those who don’t care to max their magic find.

It’s already a crafting ingredient, so maybe it can be used to make some actual potions and gear (aside from just upgrading the ram backpack) using crafting or the MF.

And a luck eater the functions like Mawdrey II, Princess or The Star of Gratitude, seems like a perfectly fine idea.

Why not?

This is related, but not exactly another thread to dump in complaints about the Mordrem Invasion event. It goes without saying it’s widely unpopular, and I don’t need to repeat all the complaints here.

Now that we more or less have a baseline for what a bad event looks like, for feedback purposes, I wanted to take a look at at past events and other game content, and figure out what instead makes those good.

So everyone, I wanted to ask:

What do you like the most about past events, and what sort of events and festivals would you like to see more of?

Personally, one thing I noticed about this current event that is different from most of the ones I’ve participated in was the timing and scheduling. (Note: I’ve only been playing for a year and missed season 1 entirely) With past events, like Halloween for example, I could participate whenever I wanted, for as long or as short as I wanted. If I only had 10 minutes to play, I could still hunt a few creatures or do a round of an activity. If I had a free 2 hours to play, I could have a nice long lengthy session. Having to play for exactly half an hour, spread out every half an hour makes it much harder to participate in events when you have things to do and can’t literally play all weekend.

Even with the maps like the silverwastes where there are breaks, if you don’t want to take the break, you can always jump maps and get right back to doing events.

So, my own addition to the list is that good events give us the opportunity to play on our own schedule.

Character Slots for one thing.

But one thing I was really hoping for in the sale was a discount on the musical instruments. Seemed like a logical thing for a discount, especially the less popular ones.

Have they ever put instruments on a discount though?

For a while, I was running an HGH Grenadier set-up with grenades, elixir kit and Elixer U, which gave me some nice utility and support and also gave me two stunbreaks which was a nice bonus. More or less this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQJAqelUUhSsY7Ww8KQ7FLsFFYIeiBQYNcRvm4GFjPBA-ThSGABnpDAgHAAwK9GUlg8UC6r6KJqCxRKDYb/RLQxnAAA-e

Since I run sinister/rampager stats for PVE, I thought I’d try out a build with a better output of damaging conditions, so I swapped alchemy for explosives and traded the elixers for the bomb kit and flamethrower:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQJAqelUUhSsYfWwWLQ7FLpFF4J2iHQ4O0R123TFANAA-ThSGABnpDAgHAAwK9GUlg8UC6r6KJqCxRKDYb/RLQxnAAA-e

(side note, The gear in those builds doesn’t exactly match what I have, I got lazy setting the gear and I’m still a couple pieces short of full ascended. Basically, mostly sinister with a couple odd pieces but in general, full glass power/condi/precision)

I haven’t tried to calculate the actual DPS difference, but if nothing else, I’m doing a crazy amount of burning damage in general.

However, I was getting a bit annoyed playing the second setup. At first I just thought it was getting used to a more complicated rotation, but then I realized it was because I have no stunbreaks. You can get away with it for most of PVE, but a lot of bosses and enemies suddenly become very frustrating when they knock you down and force you to lay in their AOEs for a full 3 seconds or so while you’re basically full glass.

Now I’m not entirely sure what I want to do about it.
The egun is probably still the best overall option for me to have a stunbreak, even while untraited, though it is a little less appealing without the alchemy line, and I’m not sure if it’s better to trade the flamethrower or Bomb Kit in for it damage wise.

Engineer doesn’t seem to have to many good stunbreak options outside of elixirs, and poor stability access which makes having that back-up stunbreak all the more important.

So I was just curious as to what your preferred stunbreak skills are on Engineer.

Or if you don’t use one at all, how do you cope with not having a stunbreak?