Guild Wars 2

As a preface, I believe it’s important to note that I think what the devs were going for with the class was a jack-of-all-trades, master of none kind of feel. Versatility at the price of superiority. It’s hard to beat a ranger’s damage, or a guardian’s ability to support its group. The draw to play, and group with, an engineer is that we should be able to seamlessly shift between roles to adapt, and do whatever role we’re in effectively, though not necessarily as well as someone who’s specialized in that role.

That being said, what they implemented is more of versatility at the price of effectiveness. Yes, we can do lots of things, but we’re totally ineffective at everything. The biggest problem, as others have pointed out, is that other professions seem to have just as much versatility (or almost as much) but without any drawbacks.

One of the largest drawbacks engineers have in my opinion is the traits. It’s not that we have useless traits that bothers me, it’s that we are so sub-par at everything that we have to spend so many trait points just to play catch up. Other professions seem to be good at everything they do, and traits are for specializing and becoming excellent at something. We are bad at everything and have to spend traits to become okay at something.