Guild Wars 2

It’s about time this happened. But I fear it might be too little too late. Servers that were once great have toppled under the weight of bandwagoners, the population balance has been made a mockery of.

I fear now that the face of WvW has been scarred forever by this, and the intention of the game mode will no longer be fulfilled. Servers were supposed to be of relatively equal population, and skill and co-ordination were supposed to be the determining factors. But now population is the determining factor, and since transfers are likely to slow down dramatically, it’s unlikely anyone in the currently T1 servers will transfer off, leaving a permanent population imbalance, and a ladder format not worth participating in.

Of course, this is not a reason to stop the implimentation of this much needed mechanic. If there’s any hope for WvW to recover, it will be a very, very slow process, probably taking years before the population balance evens out.

Erasculio.2914:

Ashes.6418:

Then I played the story through, each mission back to back. I mentioned pacing, and this is why, playing the story like this became a chore.

You shot yourself in the foot by playing the story like that. Not only you removed any challenge from your personal story – if you read the Personal Storyline forum you will see some complaints about how it is too hard, but the scalling system doesn’t work well enough that a level 80 wouldn’t faceroll through most of the levels 1-60 story missions – but you also asked for repetition by playing all missions back to back, instead of playing through them as they were intended (every once in a while, as you do other things to level up in between).

I played from day 1, there was no information on the “optimal” ways to play the game at that time. I played how I felt I would have the most fun, and tbh I only did the story to get the items it gives, namely the level 80 back piece.
It’s not really a personal story if you’re forced to play it one way to enjoy it. Furthermore, when I want to level, I don’t want story. When I want story, I don’t want to level.
Maybe I did shoot myself in the foot by playing it my way, but that doesn’t make it any less of an oversight by Arena Net to make their story missions all the exact same, boring, monotonous tasks. How the story plays out back to back should have been taken into consideration, because, oddly enough, that is how most stories are consumed.

I absolutely love the lore of GW2 and I enjoyed exploring the world and listening to what NPCs had to say. But whomever wrote the personal story arc has no grasp of pacing in story writing. They also forgot that the climax is the most important part of the story, it is what the entire thing builds up to. The climax of GW2 is standing on the deck of a ship for two hours as it slowly moves around the map, and then mashing one button for 10 minutes to kill a Dragon.
Furthermore, the story had a serious case of 24itis — introducing characters that could potentially be likeable, for the sole purpose of killing them off as a cheap attempt at giving emotion to the story. Even your own character is not likeable, because they do not grow. It is difficult to care for a character’s death when you don’t care about the character, and especially when they die in a stupid and needless way, such as Tybalt. He had the potential to be likeable, if only they’d kept him in through the story to actually grow as a character, rather than giving him a cheap and meaningless sacrifice.

Overall I felt my experience with GW2 was far greater, and far more personal before I ever started the “personal story.” There are things MMORPG’s are good at, and things MMORPG’s are bad at. Combat and Story are the two things they’re worst at.

Also, if you really want an RPG to feel personal, then you make your protagonist silent. Voice acting gives character to a protagonist and denies the player to put any sort of themselves into the character.

I’ve analyzed for a while what makes the GW2 story so poor, beyond the obvious stuff.

Probably the biggest thing for me is the pacing. On my first character I leveled to 80 purely through world exploration, and did not touch the story until I was nearly finished with gearing my character out with full exotics. From exploring the world I gathered this amazing sense of depth and lore in the GW2 universe that I loved because none of it was explained directly to me, it was just there in the world for me to discover and interpret how I will.

Then I played the story through, each mission back to back. I mentioned pacing, and this is why, playing the story like this became a chore. Not only were the instanced story zones so repetitive in their structure (an essentially on-rails experience one expects from an FPS story, not an RPG), but the obligitory combat in nearly ever zone that didn’t even require it was too long and drawn out, and not challenging in the least. It highlighted everything wrong with an MMORPG’s combat system and combined it with J-RPG levels of horrible linearity.
This came straddled on the back of your quick progression of a young person thrust out into the wilderness rapidly gaining favour of your race’s hero and becoming extremely wise and competant very quickly, to the point where people start taking advice from you when they have no good reason to. All the while you’re racing through the story at break-neck pace, leaving behind you story threads that were never fully resolved.
You transition so quickly from nobody to town hero to trusted advisor, and then to rookie of an order, quickly promoted to highest rank after about 2 or 3 missions, and then promoted to second in command of the pact. The progression is not believable because your character never develops through the story, your character never learns anything, and you have no say in how your character acts in your “Personal” story.

And that’s the biggest peeve I have about the GW2 story. They advertise it as YOUR personal story, when in reality, regardless of what choices you make, there is only one real story path. There’s nothing personal about it, just a thin veil of choice as to while missions you have to slog through to get to the most anti-climatic ending ever.

If the game, the story and the world was built from the get-go to incorporate it then whatever, I wouldn’t care. But I do not agree with adding it on top at a later date. It’d feel forced.
Furthermore, this is a game designed to appeal to a wide audience of players of many ages and many cultures. The thing you’ve gotta consider in game design is that people whom are offended by nudity will be offended by a game with nudity, while people whom are not offended by nudity will not care if a game does not include nudity. It is simply the path of least resistance in order to appeal to the broader scope.

Anyone who believes that an age restricted or R18 server would work is clearly inexperienced in the ways of the internet. Most teenagers think they’re mature enough to handle R18 stuff and ignore ratings. You can’t stop underaged people from joining them either, where there’s a will there’s a way on the internet. You can have many layers of age verification, but all of then can be frauded. It’s not like a liquor store where you stand in front of someone, hand them your ID, they check your birthdate and that you look like the picture, and then they sell you alcohol.
If you’re over 18, can you remember what age you first visited an age restricted site?
I was 14.

Furthermore, R18 servers tend to attract a rather degenerate crowd, or at least behaviour. This is amplified when nudity is involved, even in polygonal form. The irony of the matter is a mature server is likely to be filled with less-than-mature people. People who think that only teenagers are immature are also deluding themselves. As a woman with above-average sized breasts, I can tell you honestly that men, regardless of age, never stop staring. Mostly when they think you can’t see them.

Add that to internet with pure anonimity? Pure unadulterated males being males.

While as someone who has done countless hours of life drawing, I’m fairly desensitized when it comes to nudity, but that doesn’t mean I want to see it filling my games. This person said it far more elegantly than I ever could:

Weindrasi.3805:

While there’s nothing wrong with nudity in itself, there is a problem with how people use nudity.

“ArenaNet never listens to me, and even when they do it’s always with this disappointed scowl like someone skimped on the meat on their sandwich.
Excuse me, barmaid, you brought me the wrong class! I ordered and extra-large Warrior with beefy arms, extra might and fury on the side. This here, this is a walking grenade-dispenser.”

“Now, you’re thinking about this all wrong. It’s not so much what your skills are like, it’s your balance that they can’t stand.”

“Thank you for summing that up.”

“Look, the point is, stop trying to be something you’re not.”

“I just want to dps like you guys…”
-How to Train your Dragon

Quality over Quantity.
Gw2 might have 500 hours of value in it, but that doesn’t make it a better investment than an interesting and engaging 3 hour movie. At least there you’re likely to find a good story and some character development.

Until GW2 supports spectating in matches, I do not see this game making any headway in E-Sports, regardless of what other features are put in place, or whether the game is interesting or not to watch.

Remember, there is a difference between a competitive multiplayer game and an E-Sport. An E-Sport is something that people watch, and that money is thrown at to pay teams and players to participate. If those things aren’t happening, then it’s not an E-Sport, it’s a competitive multiplayer game.

First you need gamble time to get a rare/exotic drop
Second you need to gamble rares/exotics to get Ectoplasm
Third you need to gamble Ectoplasm to get Mystic Clovers.
Welcome to authorised gambling — the “alternative” to grinding.

Never been a big gambler, never will be. Got to about 12 Mystic Clovers with 30ish Ectoplasm, then got bored. Even with relatively good luck on clovers, I have appaling luck on rare drops and terrible luck with ectoplasm.

I can tell you now from experience, if you start at level 1 and explore all five Cities you will end up at level 8. Then if you do all the level 1-15 zones, you’ll end up around level 25 or so. With increased XP anyone completing all the low level zones in level order will find themselves vastly overleveled for all the content. As it stands, my first character was always overleveled, I was level 80 well before I ever stepped into Frostgorge Sound & Orr, simply by completing every single zone as I leveled in order.

So with that in mind, the XP does feel balanced to me, and to fully experience the world of GW2 you shouldn’t arbitrarily limit yourself to tunnel visioning your own races leveling zones and instead explore the world.

IMO what Arena Net should do is add an Asura Gate hub that leads to every single starter zone, somewhere easily and accessable so we can get there in 2 loading screens rather than 4, and to also make it more obvious to new players how to get to other areas and that they are in-fact viable and encouraged leveling strategies.

Achievements and achievement points are brilliant. If you look at it from the perspective of a developer, at least.
All you have to do is add an achievement for completeing a simple, grindy or sometimes downright outlandish task with in the game which otherwise offers no reward, and you’ve created a bunch of low-quality non-content that gamers froth at the mouth for these days, and it takes far less time to create than other kinds of meaningful content.

Take crash landing for an example. It gives you no practical reward, in fact it can cost you a repair fee, and yet people are lining up to be pancaked by a falling dragon.
And I pity the person who feels like they need to kill 1000 giants for their achievement completionism.

Achievement points have no value in any sense, so the idea that someone is “devaluing” the system by grinding repeatable achievements is really a non-issue. Your arbitrary points are still of equal value to theirs, cause 500×0 equals 0 and 1500×0 still equals 0.

I haven’t played WvWvW meta-game for a while. Is everyone still running glass-cannon builds? If so, run p/p condition/elixirs.
I run Carrion gear, have won the vast majority of my 1v1 fights, beat thieves almost 100% of the time. Only thing that counters a good Condition build is a good vitality/cleansing build. Anything relying on toughness or just flat out berserker gear will get crushed.

I do feel like the Engineer is quite weak, but it’s not like it can’t hold it’s own ground. Been playing Engineer since BWE1 and I’ve found my condition build to be the most effective thing for open world PvE and WvWvW. May not be the most optimal, or have the most versatility and burst, but my Engineer has the survivability and the DOT to kill pretty much anything but the tankiest of builds.

Rolando.9437:

If a beautiful girl says to you “I want to give you more”, you say: “Bring it on!!”, not: “Excuseme, but i cant fail to notice the extrange way you bend your left metatharsus while we are in the couch, so, until you fix that, I will not accept anything else”

Well… in fact you can say that, but then you dont like her.

This is a poor philosophy to live by, that if you love something, then you cannot question it, or acknowledge its flaws.
I think it’s more important for us to be critical of a game we love, and to acknowledge its bugs and its flaws in game mechanics, and to strive for the game itself to become better than it is.
To love blindly is to live in ignorance.

The patented extendo-ram had a long standing legacy with Isle of Janthir, dating back to beta weekend #1.
We also pioneered the melee trebechet

Unspecified.9142:

EvilExE.3460:

Key aspects of this instancing can be seen throughout the game, players commute in a single city and spend much of their time “Looking for a group” to enter an instanced area that incentivises players to repeat the same content, many of the open world zones are rarely visited by many players, this could be due to low population or player reward factors dependent to the location.

I don’t want to imply that I approve of this system but….

Please point me in the direction of the MMO this does not describe perfectly?

I’ve said it before in the “GW1 isn’t an MMO it’s a lobby based multiplayer RPG” debate. WoW is a one big kitten lobby while you wait for raids (the real game) which are totally instanced.

If you want that completely uninstanced experienced, you have to go old school. I’d recommend one to anyone looking, but these forums probably have an anti-advertising policy on them. You won’t find such a thing in a game made during the post-WoW era.

I wouldn’t say GW2 is becoming more instanced, I’d say it is instanced. I don’t think it’s entirely unexpected to anyone who played GW1. It’s not necessarily a bad thing if done correctly, and quite honestly, I’d say DDO does instances better. I really wish Arena Net would take a leaf out of DDO’s book when it comes to designing instances.

As someone who has not really farmed mobs and never farmed dungeons, my data may prove useful to you. My perspective is of a hardcore-gamer at heart playing on a casual gamer’s time budget.

1. When did you begin playing?
Day 1 Headstart
2. how many hours total do you have?
511 hrs
3. What’s your most gold banked so far?
34g
4. Do you have a max level character?
Lvl 80 Engineer
5. List 1-3 areas / zones / events / tp; where you spend most of your time for income.
Frostgorge Sound, Jormag, event chains around the map.
6. Do you mainly use MF or not?
No.
7. Have you ever got an exotic weapon from a mob? If so, how many and total?
No.
8. Have you ever got an exotic weapon from a chest? If so, how many and total?
No.
9. What’s the most number of rare weapons you have looted in one day or 8hrs time?
3
10. How many rare or exotic weapons do you “expect” to loot in one hour of time?
0-1
11. How many lodestones have you looted total so far?
8-10
12. Do you craft? If so, do you have a 400 crafter? if so, how many?
400 in Leatherworking and Huntsman. 200 in Armour and weapon smithing.
13. Do you sell your looted crafting mats?
No.
14. Do you feel your return, (in terms of items, completion, income, etc) for your time, has been worth it?
No.
15. In ONE word, what needs improved most; from your perspective?
GAMBLING ((needs to be toned down. I do not like having to gamble for rares in order to gamble for Ectoplasm in order to gamble for Mystic Clovers. Ectoplasm should be garaunteed at least 1 from rares and at least 2 from exotics, maybe even 3.))

Young Karka are easy to kill. Use your dodge-roll twice, and you’ll evade 90% of the shots.
Alternatively, strafe left and right rapidly at a medium range distance (about 600 in-game metres) and the enemies aiming AI will cause every single one of the shots to miss you completely (it’s something you have to practice, but works on every enemy skill that is not tracking, such as the giant boulders that wurms throw at you).

They only do about 1000 damage per hit; as long as you engage them one on one, I fail to see how even the squishiest of squishies could die to one unless you literally just stand there and facetank the enemy, in which case you might want to reconsider your choice of build. Or your choice of tactic. Or you choice of game.

The Reef Riders I haven’t fought as much. They seem tankier than the Karka’s, but their damage output is lower. I can literally just facetank them on my Carrion geared Engineer. But I can see how someone with no vitality or toughness could have trouble with them.
TBH though, you shouldn’t be playing PvE without one or both of those stats. Vitality is the most important stat in this game. Your DPS does not matter if you cannot stay on your feet long enough to kill your enemy.

The only thing I don’t like about the Veteran Karka’s is their knockdown ability. It has little to no telegraphy, and occurs extremely fast. I feel that these chain-knockdown strategies are a cheap attempt to to add “difficulty” to the game, when really all they add is frustration.

Bluestone.7106:

Newsflash: You don’t have to do the monthly…

Poor defense for a poor mechanic.
When you dangle a carrot in front of a donkey, you don’t get to say “you don’t HAVE to eat the carrot” because you know kitten well that donkey wants that carrot, and that’s why you deliberately put that carrot out in front of it, to keep the donkey moving forward at your whim.
Like that donkey, players are goal driven and motivated by shiney things put in front of them.
Furthermore; telling a gamer they don’t have to get that achievement is like telling a man not to stare at breasts. Just as the male gender has been nurtured over millenea to be attracted toward our mammary glands, gamers have been nurtured by game developers to be attracted toward achievements.

Hate to say it, but World of Warcraft has Guild Wars 2 beat when it comes to repeatable achievements. I’ve never played WoW, but I do hear things from internets and friends about their updates, and from what I understand, in their recent expansion WoW added like a million new daily achievements, so many that it’s impossible for a player to achieve them all in a single day. This is what you would call removing the carrot (or the breasts, depending on which analogy you prefer) and saying “you know what, just do whatever you think is fun for today.”

Gw2 has two repeatable achievements, and both are essential if you want anything to do with the mystic forge. The Karma bottles, eh, they’re a thing I suppose.

Let’s avoid Slippery Slope fallacies. They add one new tier of armour, that does not automatically mean that they are going to add even more in the future.

I feel rather disappointed by the addition of these new armours, but I don’t feel betrayed. My interest in GW2 has been dwindling, this might just be the straw that breaks the camels back. Even if they’re only minor upgrades, not sure if I can be bothered trying to get them.

I am in the same boat. I never like my characters to be a Hero because the game tells me they are. The story constantly telling me what a hero and how important my character is was nothing more than an emersion breaker for me. Every time I did a portion of the story that portrayed my character as special or unique, the first thing that pops into my head is: “Yeah, along with the millions of other people whom have completed this part of the story.”
The gw2 personal story really took the “personal” out of it by putting the development of our character out of our hands and into the hands of whomever wrote the story.

As a fantasy writer I am in constant awe and appreciation for the world you have created and the depth that exists (Fields of Ruin is my single favourite map), I played through every single zone up to Orr without touching the story and I got an amazing sense of the world’s lore. The story, however, was very poorly done. Not only in the story that was being told, but the mechanics used to portray it were poor. There are a couple of things that I think would have greatly improved the story.

Silent protagonist. Think Half-life, Legend of Zelda, Metroid and many other great titles. Having a silent protagonist is a style choice, even when the technology wasn’t able to provide voice-acted dialogue, we still had text. But having a silent protagonist allows anyone to identify with their character. Because the character is not speaking for them they get to decide the character’s motivations, their mood, reactions. Even in a fairly linear story that can have only one outcome, you feel in control, like you’re not just on a rollercoaster.
It is a very simple, yet powerful story telling technique in video games.

The second thing I believe would have made the story a lot better, in conjunction with the first, would be if Arena Net utilised the same technique for story instances as the “tutorial” areas. In these areas everyone is there. We’re all participating to fight and defend the village of Shaemoor and the Garrison gates, then we all charge out into battle together to take down the Earth Elemental.
Then from there on, you’re alone, and you’re a hero and asking yourself why you’re “THE hero of Shaemoor” instead of “A hero of Shaemoor”. What happened to all the other people you fought along side?
Wouldn’t it be great if all the other story instances, or at least the ones with big battles were like this? More of a free-flowing instance that cycles constantly, with a pre-event for people just joining while the instance is in-progress and waiting for the next cycle to begin.

Both of these techniques would greatly improve the story of GW2, but the first one by itself would be enough. Even stories of “Ordinary boy becomes a hero and saves the world” become better stories when you have a silent protagonist (see: Legend of Zelda).

Playing against SBI and JQ felt a lot like 2v1 when I was there in IoJ a couple of weeks ago, definitely. I was hanging out in IoJ borderlands, and the south map was split up the middle, while we held onto the north half and fended off repeated attacks on both our Garrison and the Orb and its supply camp.

What the problem is, I think, is that SBI and JQ are very evenly matched and well versed in fighting each other, so it’s more difficult for them to push on each other; where as the newbie to the T1 isn’t as good or as experienced. It’s not that they’re deliberately targeting the newbie world, it’s just that they naturally have an easier time when attacking your bases.

When equal pressure is applied to two different areas, the weaker of the two will collapse first.

with HGH and 4 Elixirs you can get about 12 stacks of might max, but you usually hover around 4-6.
This does, however, remove a lot of an Elixir Engineer’s utility. I used to do roll with this all the time, but now I use Cleansing Formula 409 because it has far more utility.

Some extra info:
Drinking and Elixir B gives you two stacks of might with HGH
When Throw Elixir B gives you might, you gain two stacks
Alchemy Traits that make you drink Elixirs at 75% and 25% HP will give you an extra stack of might. (Two for B.)
Throw Elixir R does not appear to give you a stack of might (I don’t think Throw Elixir U does either, but haven’t tested)

If you’re going for conditions, don’t worry about bleed.

Burn is your most damaging condition. Engineers don’t stack bleeds very high by themselves, and there are other classes that stack bleeds much better than the Engineer.

There are, however, very few classes that can make use of Burn like we can with the Blowtorch.

Being rich does not make you a good commander,
But having a lot of cronies vote for you does not either.

A popularity contest is worse than gold driven commander titles.

Try Carrion gear.
+Condition Damage, +Power, +Vitality
At level 80 full exotic, I have 1423 condition damage, 1709 power and 1981 vitality.

Carrion is, in my opinion, the best Condition gear out there. Condition Damage is it’s primary stat, so you get a lot of it, but by having power it also means you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket. Furthermore, any condition build needs vitality or toughness in my opinion, because conditions deal damage over time, you must be able to live long enough for your opponents to take sufficient damage.
I like Vitality best, because conditions ignore Toughness, meaning a condition build stacking toughness loses to a condition build stacking vitality by sheer virtue of having 10k~ HP less.

And condition damage is actually more potent at lower levels. It scales terribly, and is far less effective when you reach the high-end exotic level. It does feel like the game doesn’t want anyone making a con. dmg. reliant build, and rather it be an after thought.

RNG is a great way to add arbitrary difficulty into a game indeed. It’s a poor excuse of a game mechanic designed only to artificially extend the “legendary weapon” content.

Luck =/= Difficulty

But I’m afraid it’s probably the only thing we’ll ever get. Aquiring top-tier weapons in other MMOs is always about grinding and RNG as well, why should we expect GW2 to be any different; It’s not like they wanted to redefine the genre or anything.

If all the non-english speaking servers have a low server population, you’ll probably all be matched against each other and lower tier EU servers. So things should be pretty even for you, right?
Who cares about tier rankings, it’s all arbitrary nonsense. The wvwvw ladder’s main purpose is not to let worlds brag about who is the best and greatest, it is to match your server with other servers of similar ability to provide you with the best match possible.
If the best match for your server’s level happens to be lower on the ladder, then that’s where you will get the best fights.

No point getting so hung up on ladder rankings. It’s not like the top ranked servers get anything other than bragging rights and free kitten extensions. Oh, and lots of server transfers too.

You’d be very very lucky to see this game ported to a current gen console. The biggest reason being the xbox and ps3 are running 7 or 8 year old hardware. They simply would not run this game to an acceptable level. My PC blows a console out of the water in terms of power, and I run GW2 at 20 frames per second on max detail settings, which is pretty atrocious.
On a console port you’d see a significantly decreased graphical fidelity if you wanted to run the console standard of 30 frames per second.

Another difficulty is the number of buttons. The reason most PC games don’t work on console, or have to be dumbed down significantly to work on a console is the number of buttons available on a gamepad. On a PC we have a keyboard, on a gamepad we have 12 buttons. That being said, I think the PS3 has mouse and keyboard support.

Zahdane.4029:

Cheap. Laughable. Exploiters.

Pot calling the kettle black. Saw more exploitation of culling and rendering issues from SBI than any other server last week.

But, no point getting mad about it. Just remember you’re at the top of the table — everyone is going to be using everything at their disposal to win the match-up, cause everyone wants to be #1. Expect every dirty trick in the book to be played, and beat them back with your own dirty tricks. There are no gentleman’s rules in war!

Still not a fan of the intro sequence. It feels too long and drawn out and does not get me excited for the rest of your video. It has too many cuts where nothing happens. At the very least your intro should give us a taste of what’s to come.
It also feels rather pretentious—the only thing it’s missing is more focus pulls.

When you make anything, a film, short film, novel, speech, and even a short montage of gameplay footage like this, you always have to open with the hook to get the viewer interested.
I am not interested in 30 seconds of filler footage done in slow motion with zero action and video effects that just ooze pretentiousness.

Decklan.7540:

The biggest “clown” is the one who accepts mediocrity.

Right now Blowtorch is mediocre and there needs to be more incentive to go P/P over P/S.

I’m not going to argue numbers here. The truth is that P/P and P/S are two completely different play styles, and the two shouldn’t be compared to one another.

But because of the way your OP is written, I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to argue, other than you believe P/P is sub-par to P/S. I think this is where people are getting annoyed:
We don’t want Blowtorch and Glueshot changed into anything else. The mechanics of them do work (apart from Blowtorch having the occasional miss in battle for no real reason) and they provide a different playstyle to P/S.
Your title seems to imply this, and I know many people don’t read past that before posting their opinion.

From my experience P/P is a fantastic build for PvE and WvW, and definitely lacking in sPvP. Terrible for PvDoor though. Where it excels the most is on the fringes of combat, picking off low HP characters with quick bursts of condition. I can down anybody not specced into vitality in seconds. Where it does not excel is prolongued combat against high vitality builds.

I haven’t used P/S for long enough in any situation to be able to make a valuable comparison between the two. The playstyle of the shield just doesn’t click with me, and I dispise having to stand still if I want to use the reflection ability.

I think, OP, you need to clear up exactly what you want to change about the off-hand pistol. I feel like people aren’t getting your meaning here.

I used to dance on people’s corpses. That’s when I was bad at the game so kills felt like an accomplishment.
Now I’ll only do it after a huge victory, not as humiliation of my enemies, but in celebration of mine or my allies accomplishments.

Most of the time I just /no whenever someone tries to engage me and loses horribly. Or they’re doing something sneaky like killing a Dolyak solo behind enemy lines.

There’s nothing wrong with a little trash-talk in online games. It’s always a good laugh when someone dances on me, makes you think “oh yeah you would, but I’ll get you next time.”
Just gotta avoid taking it seriously. Whenever I get mad at the video game I’m playing, I stop, do something else, and then come back when I’m calmer and more relaxed. No point stressing out over some people having a little fun on the internet.

And for the people who do it deliberately to get a reaction? Don’t let them win. Just laugh it off, get back up, and go at it again.

I don’t run from Thief. Thief run from me.

But honestly I don’t think the Thief is even the most mobile class. Last night I was chasing a Guardian who jumped forward four times in a row, it was pretty crazy. Not sure what skills he used, will have to go over my Guardian and find out.

Won’t get a single gem spent on keys from me. I disapprove of authorised gambling in MMO’s.
Fortunately, all I’ll miss out on is a few skins.

Volley’s are a pretty boring skill mechanic any way. It’s just the main attack animation, but repeated a little faster for the same or similar amount of damage each shot, and some kind of condition applied.

This is a problem in any game where stealth is available for one class and not all the others. It is inherently imbalanced. Either stealth is undetectable and overpowered, or it’s detectable and a useless gimmick.

It’s really silly that every class should have to devote an entire skill slot or trait slot to avoiding thief stealth. We don’t have a whole lot of skill and trait slots to play with. This is the other problem with stealth— do you give yourself any available options and kitten yourself against every non-thief, or do you not take it and give yourself a harder time against thieves. In the end, most of the time it’s just not worth taking “Thief specific” counter skills.

Furthermore, it’s unfair on a class when other classes have abilities to hard-counter their main mechanic. There are no guardian skills that prevent Engineers from using Kits. No skill to stop Elementalists switching attunements, no hard-pet counters or sure-fire ways to dispell death shroud. We can hate on stealth as much as we please, but without it Thieves would be nothing but a piece of soggy cardboard in PvP.

It’s part of the game, and the best we can hope for is an eventual fix for the rendering issues.

I had some footage lying around, so I put together a quick video with an example of how I kite with my Engineer. I hope it’ll help you out. The Engineer is a great PvE class, and once you learn how to kite properly, you’ll be soloing champions and large groups of mobs.

You’ll always struggle more with ranged mobs until you get yourself some good gear, so don’t worry about it. Avoid fighting more than 2 or 3 unless your level is higher than theirs.
Always target ranged mobs first. You can kite melee mobs, so they’re no threat to you, get rid of rangers and mages first.

This can be done with any Engineer loadout, but P/P works the best. Against fast mobs like Wolves and Risen you’ll still take damage, but far less than if you walked backwards or stood still. Against your average slow mobs, you’ll take no damage at all.

Get the Power Shoes trait (Inventions line) if your build allows it. +10% movement speed makes kiting even easier.

Calavera.1086:

As for Elixir X, it is a 50/50 but it doesn’t mean it will trigger 5/10. If you toss a coin in the air it’s a 50/50 chance for each side but you can get heads or tails 10 times in a row.

I’ve tested this extensively myself. I used Elixir X one hundred times. The Tornado transformation is given roughly 1/3, or 33% of the time.

Gear treadmills are a poor excuse for content in mmorpg’s. It’s a mechanic that keeps the player paying for their subscription. It’s out-dated and not at all a fun thing to do, and I would hope that with GW2, we would be past this archaic mechanic by now.

Of course, if we can expect higher level caps, we can probably expect higher tiers of armour— sucks for the people who have level 80 legendaries already. They’ll be made redundant by higher levels of whites.

It really does make no sense, as a player, to ever wish for a gear treadmill to be implimented into the game. Every time a new, higher level of gear is introduced, it’s a kick in the teeth to those players who spent hours, days, and weeks collecting and gambling to get their characters maxed.

I think we can expect new cosmetic armours— most likely from new dungeons and karma vendors, maybe even legendary armour sets (oh god please no. Imagine crafting a legendary weapon, six times)— but I do not expect we’ll see higher levels, or better armour.

The other alternative, it’s possible that GW2 “expansions” will be more like the campaigns in GW1. When you buy the new campaign, you play a new character.

It’s hard to speculate at this early stage in the game’s development; almost pointless, I’d say.

I’d say the problem exists somewhere between your chair and keyboard. I main Engineer, and have a Guardian alt. Champions, at every level, are far easier to solo as an Engineer than a Guardian.

You’re probably not kiting correctly. I know the spider fight you’re describing, I’ve done it myself and it is in a narrow space. I’d describe it as being the smallest possible area you can effectively kite a slow melee monster.

As for Guardian, I find it’s less survivable in PvE than my Engineer. The Guardian is a damage soaker, but there’s only so much damage the Guardian can soak. Where as the Engineer can kite infinite numbers of monsters for an indefinite length of time, if done correctly.
Furthermore, a Guardian requires a high damage output. You need a higher damage output than your opponent, because you have far fewer ways to mitigate damage taken in comparison to an Engineer.

Dual pistols are good in PvP. Just be prepared to lose fights when your blowtorch misses for no reason, and your static shot gets obstructed for no reason. Happens way more often than it should.
The main problem with this build is that all your damage comes from 3 skills, two of which are pretty finicky for hitting. If you miss with them, you’re essentially dead-weight for 10~ seconds.

P/P Elixir build is good for WvWvW, but I’m finding it lacking in sPvP.

If you’re looking to avoid using Kits, run a Pistol/Pistol condition build. It is very effective in PvE if you kite monsters in circles, and you don’t even need to be fully geared for it either.
I used P/P with Elixirs to level from 1-80 on my Engineer, and I continue to use the same build to melt face in WvWvW.

The Champ was probably the funnest commander to follow on Blackgate. He always seems to be drunk, and has a good sense of humour. Makes for an enjoyable evening.

There’s only one real option to consider.

Getting it crafted is the best way to do it, and cheapest. If you really, really don’t want to craft, find a friend or guildmate whom you trust to craft it for you. They’ll ask you to provide the materials, but it’s not too expensive (unless you want Berserker gear..).
If you buy all the materials it’ll probably cost you 1-1.5 gold.

Dungeon gear is probably the second best to get, as it only costs time.

Traits look fine. Gear choices are poor.

Carrion and Rampager make the best builds in my opinion. I use Carrion myself, the power is nice and it means you don’t have all your eggs in one basket, while keeping an insane amount of condition damage and good survivability with the vitality.

Where as Rampager still offers good Condition Damage, but also provides good critical% if you’re going for a critical chance build. For Rampager gear I’d recommend putting 30 points into Firearms and 20 in Alchemy.

R > U

If you’re using this in PvE, always equip orbs into the slots. Orbs always give a much better bonus to your stats than any runes for your armour.
I like to use Earth Rune (60% bleed chance on crit) in one of my pistols.

I also use Trait V – Blood Injection – in the Alchemy line instead of increased Elixir durations. It gives 5% of Vitality converted into condition damage.

Probably Guardian or Necromancer. Necro has effectively two HP bars, makes them annoying to kill. Guardians can do some pretty awesome heals, makes them annoying to kill.

Thieves and Mesmers? Nah. Any Thief that has enough burst to scratch my Engineer has no HP or Defense, and dies in two seconds to my conditions. Same goes for mesmers, soon as I get a bead on the player, drop dead.

Get Vitality. Get Conditions. Melt face.

It is very unlikely that any class is going to be perfect on launch. The gimmicky ones are even less likely to be perfect. What you see on this forum are people giving their feedback on their experiences with the Engineer.
Even if Developers don’t post about issues we raise, doesn’t mean they aren’t reading. I’m sure these forums are a lot of help for them. If they did post and say they’d make a change, they’d get people going “OMG WHY WASN’T THIS CHANGE MADE YOU SAID IT WOULD BE” every single patch until it is released, even if the actual change is complex in nature and requires several weeks attention.
It’s also bad for class balance to change too many things at once. It may take longer to achieve a good class balance, but rather than see-sawing the class back and forth, they’re slowly applying weight to one side.

Now, as for people who demand changes, they’re deluded. The best we can do for the class we love is to suggest ideas which we think might work, and then be patient. Understand that Arena Net no doubt keep a schedule for updates, and any new ideas they like probably get put at the back of the queue. Even if it’s an idea they like, it may be several weeks or months before they can work on implimenting it into the game. Programming is not an instantaneous thing.

People also need to learn to use the search function of the forum to prevent duplicate threads. But as far as my forum experience goes, that’s an unreasonable expectation to have. People rarely have the common sense to search before they post a thread.

Your build is pretty similar to mine, except I use 20 in Firearms and 20 in Inventions. I also use Elixir R instead of C. I also prefer to use Carrion gear (Condition Damage, Power, Vitality) which gives you a lot of survivability.

You should also replace your pistol runes, as I’ll explain below, they are pretty worthless. Bleed is also the worst Engineer condition to increase the duration of, Burn does far more damage.

Sladeakakevin.4162:

the +10 in inventions is a strange choice, you should go +10 into explosives to get +Condition Duration, and the trait “Incendiary Powder”. It gives you a chance to apply extra burning condition.

+10% condition duration does absolutely nothing to the Engineer P/P conditions.

Condition damage does damage in ticks. These ticks are once per second. In order to get more damage from duration, your condition duration increase must be equal to one second. This means an Engineer must increase their condition duration by 50% in order to see ONE additional tick of damage.

In order to see any additional damage at all, you must put 30 traits into explosives and equip condition duration runes. This is not worth it at all, you gain so, so much more damage by stacking condition damage instead of condition duration.

To answer this question simply: Yes.

But to answer if fully, we need a better understanding of what you as an Engineer use for a build.

The thing with Mesmers is they’re quite a squishy class. Whenever you can do damage to them, they usually take a lot. I’ve downed some mesmers in mere seconds using my condition P/P build.
The simpliest way is to pay attention to the mesmer, not your hotbars. Watch each clone and observe the way it attacks and the way it moves and understand that mesmer clones cannot move in ways that a player can.
A clone does not roll, a clone does not move backwards, a clone does not strafe. For the most part a clone will stand still and attack, or a clone will run toward you.
It’s also pretty easy to see where a mesmer moved to upon summoning a clone to replace it if you pay close enough attention. Sometimes rendering issues can get in the way, but for the most part it’s simple to see.

Also, never focus attention on a player’s adds. Never target the pet, never target the minions, never target the clones. Once the player goes down, the adds are worthless.

Ranger pets and Necro minions are pretty easy to kite, their AI is like mobs in PvE. Just run circles around them while focusing the player. I love fighting players with minions, it means my static shot can do more damage to them by bouncing.

Put up the siege-blocking debuff in the Jumping Puzzle and be done with it.