Guild Wars 2

All Baubles, no achievement.

Infantile is achivement mode.

I originally went to the digsites (on normal) with a shovel and couldn’t dig up the treasure. I thought that maybe I needed the super scoop, but even with that I can’t find any buried treasure. Did they change the locations or something or does starting any zone in a world in infantile mode lockout digsites for every other mode/zone?

So I went and bought the double health refill from W2 Z3. I used them up on the rapids so I went to restock.

And behold, each health refill has now quintupled in cost from 5 to 25, meaning it was FAR more efficient to just leave my health bottle unupgraded.

You know what’s cheaper? Lives! And they only cost 20 baubles apiece for 4 hearts! Seriously Anet, if you’re going to screw me over for buying an upgrade (that everyone has to get for an achievement) you could at least WARN people beforehand. (I’m betting lives will increase in cost the moment I get that 5th heart too.)

Pushed off inexplicably happens because toad attacks are homing I think. One will suck you into a spike trap and the other hits you after you respawn.

I just recently made it through World 2 zones 1 and 2 on infantile mode and I have to say that it’s incredibly frustrating just dealing with the enemies, nevermind the jumping portions that I’ve skipped.

The most frustrating parts are the 1-hit kills that occur over and over. And then I realize that this tends to to happen alot throughout the game to make content difficult.

Fire Elemental? Supposed low level boss whose knockdown/burn combo that is an auto-down without stun/condition removal that low level characters probably don’t even have yet. Becomes nigh impossible to dodge with too many people.

Lieutenant Kholer? Auto-down if you get hit by pull.

And this is just the beginning of the game

Recently we got Liadri, the boss whose primary attacks basically nullify an entire set of stats (toughness, vit, healing power) because they one-shot you no matter what. This is what is classified as difficult content and is gated through a process that requires farming before trying again.

Now we’ve got instant kill knockouts and hard to read deathtraps on modes that aren’t even supposed to be the hardest. It makes me think that somewhere along the way, the designers forgot that it’s the purpose of HEALTH to allow you to make mistakes, not LIVES. And this should apply throughout the entire game.

For just SAB I’d rather that the designers keeping mind Nintendo in particular in the concept of making fair platformers. For a few analogies:

-In 2D mario games, getting hit doesn’t cause you to lose traction. You jump towards a platform and get hit by a bullet bill in mid air and you’ll still hit that platform if you survived the bullet bill.

-In 3D mario games only specific attacks would actually knock you around. If you get hit, you might slide back a few paces, but not enough unless that attack was specifically designed to knock you off a platform.

-In Zelda which is most analogous to SAB, falling down a pit made you lose 1 heart. Falling down into molten lava made you lose one heart. If you die, you might restart a while back, but making 1 mistake does not frustrate you that much.

Finally as on online game, latency always has to be compensated for. There is little finesse in SAB because nothing works like it should for a game designed around platforming, so the difficulty of doing things like fighting need to account for that.

Right now, if you use Acid Bomb and immediately drop the kit, you cancel the jump and drop straight down where you cancelled.

I’m trying to see if I can fit 4 blasts in one turret water field by going detonate->Magnetic Shield->Acid Bomb->Rocket Boots

You can only do this by dropping the kit, swapping doesn’t work.

I think the funny thing about the removal was that Double Pop actually rewarded Engineers for playing at the so called “mid range.”

Too far and it’s not going to hit. Too close and you have to detonate it early. It syncs perfectly with the engineer’s plethora of control, and it only gets better if you used it correctly by having the ball pass over an enemy before detonating (thus using the lower portion of the damage to counter blinds or aegis)

And so
This is the design that Engineers should have. An engineer is defined by his utility skills moreso than any other class. As such, his traits shouldn’t define what utility skills he uses; instead he’ll make his utility skills fit his trait line. Engineers won’t be sidekicks to the other professions, ineffectively filling in one that isn’t present to prop up the others. No, that Engineer is gonna be the one blasting enemies off their feet and bombing their defenses while their allies follow up. Or, they’re the ones that are filling their allies full of offensive steroids to the point where Guardians cry that they’re only the best at defensive support now. And so on.

Charr tech focus also means less drawbacks. Overcharge Shot and Rocket Boots shouldn’t knock you on your butt. The only random thing about elixirs should be whether they give you Might, Fury, or both! none of this “you have a two in 3 chance of getting something helpful for your current predicament. You got Veil? Sorry that incoming barrage of ranged attacks killed you. But you and your allies working around this is skill!”

Bullet Summary
.Charr tech, not any other race’s tech, Charr tech.
.No uneccessary drawbacks or randomness. The Charr test their Ghost Killing Rifles on non-ghost targets to make sure that they’ll work on the most basic level before real combat. Rocket Boots wouldn’t pass that test.
.Utilities adapt to traits, not the other way around.
.Engineers get a clear role as support. We’re not sidekicks, we’re not the leader rallying troops (leave that to guardians), we’re the masterminds behind an operation… or just the cool tech guy who gives everybody the tools they need to survive.

Examples:
-Acidic Elixirs and Accelerant packed turrets merged into one trait that replaces the Reserve mines minor trait. Damage is equivalent to 2 bomb hits.

-Firearm Rifled barrels affect Turret range as well. Turret rifled barrels replaced with another trait.

Anet really needs a design focus for the Engineers and they really need to look no further than their own lore AND representative for the Engineer class: The Charr.

Engineers need a design goal. Look no farther than the Iron Legion

On the Asura:
The engineer is a tech-based class based on Charr technological advances. Outright magical effects on the Engineer are fairly minimal; in fact I’d argue that since the Engineer is the only class that doesn’t have any sort of signet, it’s the class that’s the least reliant on magic. This means that Asuran technology, which is magic based, can be put aside until an expansion allows magic-based technology (or magitek) to be more fully fleshed out. Right now, focusing on Charr efficiency and reliability would be in the best interest of the class as a whole, eliminating the stereotypical “bumbling tinker” and “mad scientist” archetypes that are holding the class back. It’s because of this split attention to cover as many of these archetypes throughout other fiction that Engineers are failing so hard, as opposed to just using their own in-universe example.

In short, too much Goblin/Gnome WoW style engineering. Not enough Charr GUILD WARS lore type engineering.

The Iron Legion
It’s easiest for me to explain how the Iron Legion functions in regards to how it works in tandem with the Blood and Ash Legions in the Iron Legion personal story. It goes like this: If the Ash Legion controls fights through information and sabotage while the Blood Legion does the heavy lifting by damaging enemy forces, the Iron Legion would be the support that supplies the other two with what they need. While not a perfect representation of the Thief and Warrior, I’d argue that support is the direction that Engineers should be focused towards rather than this crappy “Versatile, but not as versatile as Elementalists” position that they’re in.

Anyways, in the story, your character develops the “Ghostbore musket,” a firearm in terms of Engineer traitlines. However, later on in the story you’re asked to supply your ghostbore prototypes to either the Ash or the Blood legion, both of whom are trying to argue that their legion will put the tech to better use.

This is important! Here we essentially have a Thief and Warrior fighting over who gets to have the most Engy support! They want us because we have the tools that allow them to perform their jobs better! And that’s not all. While the Iron legion has the most engineering tech and comes up with the base designs, the other legions also have engineers that adapt the ghostbore musket into a turret and cannon respectively to suit their roles. If the ghostbore musket is a firearm based kit, this means that those engineers are taking a Firearm base and changing it to work with their Invention traits or Explosives traits.

If the Charr race is the class that represents the engineer the most strongly, why is it that Engineers don’t have this kind of adaptability? When an engineer traits for deep elixirs, he basically has to use elixir utilities or waste an inherent bonus of the traitline (boon duration) because hardly any other utilities grant boons. An engineer has to trait specifically for grenades if he wants to get any use out of them at all. This is totally backwards from how they should be behaving in-game and lorewise. An Explosives Engineer with only Elixir utilities? No problem! Now you have an Engineer throwing Explosive elixir bombs at enemies that happen to buff allies that they come into contact with. We need condition removal, but our Alchemy engineer brings only turrets! Oh wait, an alchemy based engineer has turrets also shoot condition removal bullets in addition to their normal attack.

I think that was the point of Tybalt. He’s there as your partner in the Order of Whispers to completely destroy any notion that the Order of Whispers was only full of stock no-nonsense assassin-temperament characters who are only cold and unflinching. Rather than that, they’re made up of people from all walks of life who each have something to contribute information-wise to the order for the goal of taking down the dragons.

So, you know, rather than an order where everyone is one-dimensional, you find out that everyone feels like a real character that aren’t conforming to your standards of what a spy organization should be like. It also makes it scarier since that Apple vendor who cheerfully sold you apples is exactly who he appears to be despite passing off info to the Order. There’s no finding some cold-exterior under a warm facade, no telling right off the bat that someone is acting nice because they aren’t acting. They really are nice and they’re still a part of a continent-wide spy organization.

The fire elemental is far too hard even for most level 80s.

Now what are you going to do if you’re a level 15 character that hasn’t even unlocked your final utility slot and probably don’t have a stun break with what limited skill points you have?

The worst thing about downleveling is when you’re downleveled below the enemies that you’re fighting. There needs to be two types of downleveling, one for the area you’re in, and an additional one based on proximity to any mobs in the event that their level outpaces the area’s level. Area downscaling should be the area level + 2 while mob scaling would be mob + 1 so that you actually have a tangible advantage rather than just trait bonuses/ multi-stat gear which you can’t really compare in one instant.

What happens when you need to dodge an incoming attacks (telegraphed) but you aren’t in combat yet (whether due to range or just trying to run past mobs)?

Everyone knows that Asuras are the PvP race solely based on their animations being unreadable because of their small size, nevermind that they’re hard to target.

So, I suggest we put forward the resizing initiative

When in SPvP and WvW Asuras get the small debuff that increases damage taken due to their small stature by 25-35% (any number that makes it unfeasible to play them just for the animations)

This effect is canceled out by a size potion distributor that automatically enlargens the Asura to a height comparable to a small human (though being wider makes their animations comparatively easier to read)

Conversely, the large races (Norn, Charr) do not get a damage buff for size, but the size potion distributor will shrink you down to the smallest height available to your race.

This should level the playing field in competitive PvP.

They’ve already demonstrated a PvE/PvP split in a guardian skill as well as disabled Charr Land Mine in WvW (?)

Increasing the stealth delay to 5 or even 6 seconds in PvP/WvW hits the the two problem classes (Thieves and Mesmers). Both are pubstompers, Thieves are still awesome high end SPvP and Mesmers are required in in high end WvW so neither have problems with “already being behind.” Once they actually fix rendering issues, it can go back down to 3 seconds, but 2 additional seconds of stealth when breaking it is in no way balanced and needs immediate hotfixing. Sure there are stealth builds revolving around spamming stealth are screwed, but this is only a short-term fix to an ability that’s far more powerful than it should be at the moment.

The Jump Shot animation needs to be sped up as if it was always affected by quickness (double speed). It actually feels like it’s going at the right speed with that buff up.

I’m not angry that the grenades will spread out and consequentially miss targets that are far away from me.

I’m not angry that this was a ghost change that wasn’t listed.

I’m angry that my grenades will now shoot out of my helmet and boots to avoid hitting a target at point blank range thanks to the arbitrary spread where the grenades have to be X distance from each other when they reach a target.

I’m also angry that I have to do unintuitive targeting by attacking something behind my primary target in order to get them all to hit at point blank. Meaning my character somehow decides to throw fairly straight at far away targets but spill out grenades in random directions at close ones.

Normalizing underwater grenades to land grenade speed was enough of a balancing fix. This arbitrary distance between grenades at target range just needs to go. Hitting an average of 1 1/2 grenades with grenadier traited is just stupid.

People want an option to be able to fight and put out consistent damage from at least 900 range without having to break their finger or have their only real long range option crash into ceilings and obstacles (screw indoor areas as a Grenade engy). All of the Engineer’s real damage options require them to get far closer than that though. Dual Pistols require 200 range for Blowtorch to do damage without taking into account the fact that Pistol auto-attacks suck without abusing max range double hit piercing bullet which directly conflicts with the aforementioned 200 range blowtorch.

We’ve already got Charrzookas floating around. Would it be that bad to give us a decent non-gimmicky long range consistent damage source?

I have this idea where they make a clearer distinction between armed kits (flamethrower, elixir gun, tool kit) and unarmed kits (bomb, grenades, med kit)

Armed kits are currently like other weapons. They have a balanced skillset that have a variety of ranges and usage. Unarmed kits, while they may have different effects, are one-dimensional in usage (set bomb, lob grenade, set med pack). Armed Kit toolbelts tend to be lackluster (except for traited throw wrench maybe), while unarmed kits have awesome toolbelt skills (heal, Big ol Bomb, Grenade Barrage or the best instant cast aoe burst ability in the game.)

In order to solve the Engineer utility dilemma (we have too few actual utility skills because our weapons are hogging them) as well as balance kit usage, we move Armed kits into our secondary weapon slots. This makes more room for more utility, skills and still allows multi-kit usage, just no elixir gun/flamethrower combos anymore. This also allows the kits themselves to become stronger.

I just noticed that my coat now has a split at the back that allows my tail to not clip with it. (pirate coat)

Is this the same with other medium armor?

When using Jump shot with the swiftness buff, it only seems a little too fast, but almost at the perfect speed.

Without swiftness, it seems like my character just likes to hover in the air for a moment, taking his sweet time to land on the ground. This is incredibly noticeable when jumpshotting an area right in front of you. My character goes up, slides forward slightly in the air and then takes more time going down than going up.

When you swap skillsets, it’s annoying when you forget or can’t really time the exact point at which a key skill will reset, like CC or leap skills. While you might argue that timing these things is a facet of skill the fact remains that my character doesn’t know that he can’t shoot a gust of air out of his flamethrower until it’s in his hands.

What I propose is very simple. When one of your skillsets has one of its skills on cooldown, a number appears over your weapon swap/attunement/kit icon, indicating how many skills in that that you have on cooldown. Memorizing which abilities you’ve used and their cooldown in relation you’ve used is a lot less of a hassle than counting down each second to each of your abilities.

Grenade Barrage isn’t affected by grenadier. Just test out the range yourself.

As for steel packed powder, that affects explosions. Each grenade or bomb causes an explosion, and since each grenade from Grenade Barrage for example counts as a separate explosion, they all cause vulnerability.

The only thing that affects toolbelt recharge rate is our Tools trait line.

I think the wiki is confusing the ember’s aoe with the bosses’ aoe.

The bosses’ aoe is that bright red circle that causes a meteor to drop on you. This knocks you down and will most likely kill you outright unless you’re at the edge of the room and won’t be hit by anything else.

The ember’s aoe are the those easy to see lava fonts in pairs of 3. They don’t cause instant death.

Every guide I’ve seen says that killing off the embers will stop the aoe. This is NOT true. The boss itself is what shoots out the 1-hit meteors and the times when you dodge out of one circle of death into another that spawns right on top of you is not something you can prevent. It’s not because you can’t down the adds fast enough, it’s because RNG decided to screw you over.

We need an auto-locking long-ranged kit. I’m really tired of pressing 1 and having my grenades crash into ceilings when I’m using it at the range I’m supposed to. It’s also incredibly frustrating when a boss decides to move or chase someone else after I’ve gotten into a rhythm and end up missing several grenades as I have to take wonky movement into account.

Currently, everyone at “endgame” is holed up in Orr, completing all the events ad nauseum. Creating diminishing returns isn’t going to help because not only does Orr host the highest level events, but also all of rare gathering materials (Like Orichalcum.)

Rather than just nerf Orr completely, how about creating more incentives to travel around the lower level areas? That’s what down leveling’s for right?

To make the lower leveled areas more appealing:

-The first X (3-5?) Dynamic events completed in a zone give double the rewards, capped at the amount available from the highest level conent.

-Random buried treasure. Throughout the world, you’ll be able to find buried treasure that respawn on a weekittenimer and are placed randomly throughout zones. Buried treasure consists of 1 piece of equipment that is always uncommon or higher + 2 other pieces of random loot such as fine crafting mats.

-Ancient find system. When you hit level 80, Orichalcum nodes and Ancient saplings will randomly replace a few nodes in each zone (upon loading into that zone for the first time that day.) Ancient nodes are tinted Gold on the minimap.

-Cooking recipes that require incredibly high cooking skill, but the minimum level of the ingredients themselves don’t approach that level. Gives a way for players to decide where to farm with this incentive approach.

-Personal Hearts. Heart quests obtained from your home instance. Reset daily and sends you all over the world. Heart quests grant you a nice amount of money, and tokens that you can trade in for special back items, such as capes and scarves. Also incentives regularly going back to your home instance.

Why do kl and yt make a censored word?

Power Tools kit:
Chainsaw
Drill
Noiseblaster
Bioblaster (actually, we already have elixir gun for that)
Grappling Hook

Sniper Kit

Bazooka Kit. More explosions, less burning (as opposed to Charrzooka)

Lighning Rod Kit, set up lightning coils that arc electricity between them to control a field. 5th ability is a taser that paralyzes an opponent by causing daze and immobilize.

A more indepth and radical change would be:

Clear distinction and change between armed kits and unarmed kits

Armed Kits: Any kit that serves multiple functions with a variety of uses (Flamethrower, Elixir Gun, Tool kit)

Unarmed Kits: kits that are one-dimensional in use, but serve a variety of effects (Grenades, Bombs, Med kit)

Armed kits are created using two weapons and equipped into the off-hand slot. For example, Flamethrower is Pistol + Torch, Elixir gun is Pistol + focus, Tool kit is Mace + shield. Incompatible or incomplete weapons result in no weapon at all.

3 new armed kits to go with this system:
Powertools (chainsaw kit)= Offensive melee condition-based kit.
Bazooka= AoE explosion based kit centered around direct damage and Bleed/Burn.
Sniper= Single target long range direct damage kit.

Armed kit comes free of a utility slot, but you can only equip one. Armed kits still count as kits and swapping between weapon and armed kit will only trigger a 1 second cooldown. Armed kits no longer have a toolbelt (the only useful one was Throw Wrench anyways. And that was only with a specific trait to cause cripple.)

Armed kits are essentially weapons that count as kits for the purposes of Engineer abilities.

3 new Unarmed kits or utilities to fill in the gap left by the armed kit change.

As the title suggests, there’s far too little development within each separate act of the personal story. Rather than have each one come one after the other, lets have all 3 stories run concurrently to level 80.

So it would look something like this:

Personal Story:
-Racial Story: 1-80
-Order Story: 30-80

World Story
-Zhaitan Story: 50-80

Notice that with this, Zhaitan (and by extension, Trahearne) are shepherded into a different category of “story.” This means that rather than having him as an integral part of your character’s plot, Trahearne’s arc will be focused on Trahearne himself as an individual and allow him to be fleshed out while the player character is an observer/soldier on the sidelines. Also, rather than have him as an ever present companion (to grate on your nerves) you’ll be sent on more solo missions.

With this we have the Racial and Order stories that can define our characters. Being fleshed out over a far longer span of time allows for better story pacing. Meanwhile, “World” stories will not require players to be shoehorned into a mentor role for Trahearne. Instead, Trahearne’s development will be the central focus to the story with the player character possibly being a random soldier who provides insight at times and recognizes Trahearne as a leader rather than a friend. It allows for more personal actions since a player character who isn’t locked into 100% supporting Trahearne from the get go and having him as a partner butting into to all your missions is allowed to actually speak his mind.

With this in mind, we can also have “dynamic personal story events” Somewhat streamlined with race and order. These events could be just say, a Charr helping out with his former Warband and random missions that utilize an order’s resources all over the world (I know that the Order of Whispers has plenty of hideouts scattered around to facilitate this.) Each one of these could offer a bit of insight into each of the npcs.

This could also be expanded upon to provide a more natural progression of a character’s ranking in an organization. Using the Charr as an example again, you could have a “Warband competency level” since you’re technically not a part of it anymore. Higher competency provides better benefits, events in harder areas, and possible side-story or unlocking the higher the end parts of that personal story line. With the orders, your rank and promotions would actually feel proportional to what you’ve accomplished rather than arbitrary.

As for separating the stories into Personal and World respectively, this offers a much more open-ended approach to storytelling since we don’t have to be railroaded from one end to the other. World stories can be used to describe any major event without the player character derailing everything by having to take the limelight while Personal story can actually be focused on the character rather than random hero X who will be your main character for this act so that lore can be coherent.

Optional: Perhaps add in a few new racial abilities or order abilities (balanced of course) that you can unlock depending on your current ranking. Almost every npc in the Order of Whispers can stealth, so once you reach say… intiate rank, you get access to the ability Shadow walk which is short blink + 2 second stealth. (Engineers can get some long duration/cast time cloaking device.) Upon getting to that event in the Order of Whispers storyline, you get the “Apple Bomb” ability (Engies get Apple barrage or omnomnom Apple toolbelt.)

The problem is that you aren’t thinking of any work arounds or their already present lore. One of their legions that they’ve had since GW 1 is even called “Flame Legion.”

Having fur doesn’t automatically mean intolerance for heat. As an example of the opposite, there are normal human people who can wear casual T-shirts and shorts out in the cold snow without it bothering them!

As for fur catching on fire, there ARE such things as flame-retardant chemicals and organic compounds. They might (and probably do) excrete some of these into their fur to prevent them from catching on fire.

Charr’s are felines aren’t they? Practically all felines have the ability to retract their claws (Cheetahs excluded but that’s because they need them for running.)

Stylized safety glasses would be awesome with the engineer. It’s not like they’d fit any other profession or armor type.

What? Why would you make a warsong to the tune of “Once upon a December?”

When you’re swapping weapons, sometimes it gets really confusing as to what range you have currently (really bad as an engineer and pairing grenades + anything else.)

Can we get an option that briefly flashes the maximum range on all of our abilities when swapping to a weapon/bundle, similar to the control point indicators? (or even just the maximum range of auto-attack.)

It needs to use the Big’Ol Bomb effect rather than Grenade Barrage. The problem with Explosive Descent is that while other classes also offer fairly useless effects, absolutely NONE of them end up aggroing everything around them, something that tends to be very bad when you’ve recently lost 75% of your health from falling damage. At least with Big’Ol Bomb causing knock back, we’ll have some time to get up and react as opposed to getting killed after being knocked down from the fall.

Problem is, despite an entire trait tree dedicated to firearms, with the way engineers work each weaponset has to have a ton of utility rather than damage.

Also the way you phrased the uses of other kits as “swap for a specific skill and swap back” seems to indicate that you think that only our weapons should be viable for damage. In reality, we should be able to use any sort of kit as our main “weapon” while treating our limited weaponset as a forced kit.

“A field agent at last! Congratulations, Tybalt. I know how much you wanted that.”

I… I have to give this guy props. He makes a very convincing impression of a synthetic voice. He nailed every single bit of random inflection that those voices would make.

Is he seriously like this throughout the rest of the personal story?

Edit:Aw man, now Deputy Mira is competing for the position of “most synthetic like voice.” I think I’ve been spoiled too much by the Charr story and Tybalt.

I think all leap skills like this have this set delay where you cannot possibly land on the ground until x amount of time has passed. It’s just most noticeable with Leap Shot since he actually hover in the air for a split second before landing.

I wish Arenanet would make all these skills fly in a neat arc.

What parts of the game just jar you out of the immersion? And which parts of it are intentional bugs?

My biggest peeve is not just invulnerable mobs, but selectively invulnerable mobs. Ok, so I can’t kill something that has no way of fighting back due to terrain. But then those stupid Shadow Imps decide to use their cooldown based ranged attack and then go right back to being invulnerable until the attack is off cooldown again WHILE keeping me in combat. Really? This just stands out more than anything else solely because I can recognize it as balancing mechanic gone horribly wrong.

As for bugs, it has to be NPCs on destructible walls. Hey “Veteran Archer” stop defying gravity and plummet to the ground already. No, DON’T RESPAWN back in the freaking air again!

For non-combat though, npc dialogue loops are of course, the biggest source of annoyance.

This is just for fun.

Does anyone else get those “cartoon” vibes when you use Acid Bomb to jump over a cliff?

You leap backwards, but rather than a smooth arc, you come to a complete stop, hover in the air for just a moment, and then plummet straight down.

It doesn’t really help that the animation is really jerky with my Charr going from the shot recoil animation to a landing animation in midair which quickly clips into the falling animation.

It’s also made funnier with explosive descent. I not only tend to survive those falls, but I cause a little explosion on the ground when I land on my face (We should have a Big’Ol Bomb effect rather than grenade barrage).

Also, does anyone know any other class abilities that work like this?

Maybe a character rebirth option that resets your entire personal story progress as well.

There are several things bothering me about Rocket Boots:

1)It doesn’t jump us back as far as Acid Bomb on the Elixir gun. To be honest the first time I used Acid Bomb, I expected myself to just hop back a few paces, but when I suddenly vaulted all the way to other end of a room I’m like “What the heck just happened?” Sure Acid Bomb isn’t a stun break, but it jumps us back really far, has a shorter cooldown, and has a really nice vertical distance that lets us clear objects in our path.

2)It doesn’t have any vertical height. I can end up crashing into the small hill behind me and really end up only CCing myself.

3)It knocks us down. Sure, the Engineer is a tinkerer, not a soldier. But he’s an ADVENTURER. You’re telling me that my character will never learn to stop landing on his butt from Rocket Boots? And that suddenly popping my goggles on in mid flight will stop me from landing on my butt?

4)Rocket kick toolbelt is very counter intuitive. It encourages melee and divides the uses of Rocket Boots. The only build it fits into are the in-n-out burst combos, but that leaves Engineers without any sort of utility dedicated to escape and/or evasion (Oil slick is both offensive and defensive and the toolbelt only enhances that fact. Rocket Boots is just… ugh.) The main thing is that if you use Rocket Boots for stun break/Immobilize, you are NEVER going to follow up with Rocket Kick because you’re going to be launched way to far back.

So can we buff it so that:

-Rather than landing on our butts like a stereotypical fantasy goblin-esque engineer, we’re experienced enough to roll with the boots and instead gain evasion while blasting backwards and then immediately dive into a roll to prevent ourselves from getting knocked down.
-It gets some vertical height so that it can at least match Acid Bomb in terms of jump-back.
-Rocket Kick is changed to something more conducive to a keep-away utility while you can push other utilities like PBR into the forward offensive control territory.

Like say:

Rocket Jump

Blast yourself upwards, knocking away any enemies around you and evading attacks while moving upwards. Upon landing, you inflict damage and burning on any enemies around you.

Rocket Jump is not a leap, it puts you into a controlled jump state where you can direct your movement as if you were simply doing a normal jump. Rocket Jump moves you higher than a normal jump and can be used while jumping.

Ok, while this might cheese certain jumping puzzles (Like other abilities don’t?) it puts it into clear keep away territory while maintaining the offensive capabilities for in-n-out builds. You can choose whether to make use of the knockback to gain distance, or use it to land your stomp on an enemy. As for “pure fun” (something that only helps the longevity of a game) you can use it before you hit the ground to do a mid air double jump and save yourself.