Guild Wars 2

I played Engineer from day 1 of the release of GW2, and I loved the whole adventure that this game provided. The profession looked extremely versatile, offering several build options for how you wanted to play, but they weren’t all that viable. After speedleveling to 80, I burned out on the unfinished endgame content, I didn’t even make it to the first content expansion.

Now I want to start playing again, and I’d like to know what’s changed with the Engineer class. Honestly if anyone can direct me to a condensed list of changes I’d gladly read it myself.

I got a Sylvari partner in some of my early story quests. He was a nuisance at first, but he started to grow on me.

I agree with a lot of things said in this thread. There are certain aspects (I feel the biggest glaring issue for me is dynamic events) that aren’t necessarily as advertised.

I’ve seen a handful of mmos that have been around long enough undergo massive changes to clean up things that needed cleaning, and improve the overall gameplay experience. I would certainly hope we wouldn’t wait years, but I’ll definitely stick around to see if Anet starts making changes to improve upon what they’ve already done so that the game is more like what they claimed it would be.

I admit I thought dungeons were poorly designed too, and they certainly aren’t perfect in some aspects, but it is heavily dependent on your party members and their playing style.

If you go in with a bunch of members new to dungeons who have all gone glass-cannon builds and are used to doing minimal to no dodging, you are going to get wrecked pretty quick.

The key is teamwork, revive your members immediately, try to have healing skills that heal the party if you do. Don’t ignore defense, and don’t ignore your enemy’s attacks, they can easily be dodged if you time it right, or just go hide behind a pillar. You don’t have to stay in the fight, if you need to refresh and avoid dying, get out briefly. Your party members can keep the damage going, and you can get yourself back up to health and keep fighting. You never want to let anyone, including yourself, go into a downed state in a battle, survival first is how you get through.

I’ve had horrible parties in dungeons and it shows, and I’ve had skilled parties in dungeons and we breezed through them. Just give it time, keep trying other parties, and get better at dungeons through experience. That’s all I can really say~.

Yes it does.

You should change your password immediately, preferably to something strong. The strongest would be 20 characters with a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters, as well as numbers. However in my experience any password that is at least over 10 characters and has a mixture of them is strong if you are extremely careful about not letting your information leak, and never visiting any suspicious sites. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the newly hacked accounts are players dumb enough to go to “gold-selling” sites. Lots of those tend to be scams intended to rip your account from you and possibly make some money off you too.

Arisal.9740:

How about that fire elemental in the asura starting zone :P

Maybe he needs to move to Orr lol.

That fire elemental is potentially a good example of a challenging fight. It’s not that he dishes out high damage and has high hp (both of which could be nerfed), but its because a zerg won’t work. Your’e constantly being bombarded by lesser elementals and the fire bombs falling out of the fire elemental, forcing you to actually move around and take advantage of the dodge mechanics, and even make a retreat to briefly recover before attacking again. In a standard zerg there’s so many players everyone can just stand and mash buttons till the enemy is gone since the enemy poses no significant threat.

MilkInBags.5136:

My guild have like 250 people and probably 200 always Represent it. It’s a matter of being interesting.

This all the way. I think this new system will give a very new outlook on how your guild is doing. I’ve joined several guilds thus far where they’ve tried to sound like they’re something good and fun, and then its just quiet all day. No sort of cooperation or planning by the guild leader, just make a guild for the sake of having it and claim to “eventually” do things.

If you’re going to lead a guild and invite others on the basis of certain promises and plans you will fulfill, then deliver. I can understand people sort of wanting to do their own thing, but a graveyard chat is never exciting in a guild, and players shouldn’t be representing you if another guild is better. But if the guild they are in tries to be as dynamic and fun as the world they are playing in, then you’re far more likely to keep their representation.

And if you’re really gonna be anal about it, then just make it a requirement that they represent your guild or they will be removed. You’ll still get the same results, dissatisfied players will simply leave the guild, as opposed to simply not representing it.

Count me as another part of that demand. It’s not the end of the world for my character if I can’t change his features, but I would gladly pay gems to make a few modifications that I hadn’t noticed when I’d first done him.

Agree completely. Zergs of players shouldn’t automatically mean a win for an event. Standing in place mashing buttons should never be an option for a system that encourages so much more. If enemies are going to attack a position in a level 80 area, I want something that I’m worried about losing against even in a zerg of people, like a cluster of veterans with an elite/champion at their center. The Dynamic Event at the Gates of Arah almost has it right. You get an onslaught of veteran monsters that can wreck you, and they are accompanied by an elite. As soon as one goes down, more come to replace it. That being said, it is easily held back by a big enough group of people, and that champion golem war machine tends to distract the spawns more than it should, but when the mobs do focus on the players involved I see many going down and I find myself forced to move around a lot and really watch out for enemies that I can’t just kill in a couple of hits.

And I like your idea for the Dragon’s not always being a lose situation. There should be a limit as to how long you can fight a boss like the Dragon before your “forces” are exhausted, and if you lose there needs to be some sort of negative effect on part or all of the map. People already have no issue telling each other to rally at major events, but it can’t hurt to make them feel like they’re stopping something that could make the world of Tyria less pleasant if they should fail (As opposed to zerg-respawn till the thing dies).

ISP’s have nothing to do with either of the issues. Crashing mid-game is often due to firewall’s or anti-virus’s, and that aside even if you do crash in the middle of a dungeon, you should be able to re-enter your party’s instance, that was the primary issue with my most recent failed run.

The other two failures are even less related to ISP’s, as both times the dungeon failed to continue it’s own sequence of events properly, something that you’d think would have failsafes in the event it did bug out.

This is my 3rd attempt, and again it failed because 3 of my party members not only disconnected when we were almost to Zhaitan, but it refused to let them re-enter the instance that me and the remaining party member could re-enter whenever we wanted.

Nevermind the fact that it can still be buggy. Your players should NEVER be AFRAID of doing a dungeon because of a GAME-BREAKING-BUG (and in this case, SEVERAL) ruining hours of work just to get through the dungeon.

I can understand if you are busy fixing other things, but if that’s the case, slap in some code that gives players the (insert swear word of your choosing) completion and all their potential loot if a bug wrecks a run. I don’t care how cheap it is or if I “miss out,” after 3 tries I know exactly how the dungeon plays out, and I don’t care to bust my thorns off to do it ever again if it ever lets me finish it.

Either that or drop all the level 80 monsters to level 10, at least then we can complete it fast enough to avoid the bugs.

On a side note, my previous 2 failed because the dungeon froze early on, and at the very end for unknown reasons, and failed to continue properly

I have no issue waiting for bugs to be fixed, but its incredibly depressing and turns me off from the game entirely when I spend a good several hours trying to get through a very buggy and delayed Arah dungeon, only for the final boss to send swarms and swarms of enemies at us for 30 minutes with no progress or events occurring.

And with that, I think I’ll go play something else for a few hours. This was just too much crap for all that time to be wasted.

Eshellon.5912:

I run full Toughness and Vitality on my engineer and play strictly as support with healing, buffs, turrents, etc. After all, you’re no good to your party if you’re dead

Ha, you and me are two entirely different playstyles. I try to invest in some Vitality and Toughness on my traits, but I went full power for my Engineer, and maxed out my explosives trait line for the Grenadier Grandmaster.

I basically went for long range grenade bombardment with support from elixirs to get me out of tight spots. Usually in dungeons and PVE general there’s a melee taking all the aggro, so I just bombard his position for my support (though I do pack some nice healing AOEs too).

There is no need for a leveling guide. Play the game however you want. You can level by crafting, doing task areas, doing events, or map exploration. Also, always do the story quest as soon as you can, it tends to give nice chunks of exp to help you go along, and I enjoyed my story the whole way.

I would highly recommend going for map completion as you travel to each task area. I usually go to the nearest scout I see, and they will show you were a couple task areas are, and possibly where another scout is. Then I just work my way around the map, picking up all skill points, POIs, Vistas, and waypoints. By the end I’ve probably gotten several levels, and a nice reward for completing the map.

I don’t see any potions listed on the wiki that give stealth. The only cooldown for it is a brief effect (wiki says a few seconds) where they cannot re-enter stealth after it ends if they try to use a stealth skill.

It could be the wiki hasn’t updated all the potions yet, and I don’t think they were using skills that granted stealth. I did poke around on it to see if it was possible to give a group perpetual stealth and it seems like it would just be inconvenient since you’d need a bunch of people of the same class casting AOE stealth (like one of the mesmer’s Elite skills). You can still take damage and you’re forced to wait between each stealth buff before you can be in stealth again.

I have yet to see any information on whether or not this is intentional, the wiki doesn’t say anything about it.

While we are losing a large chunk of stats, we can pretty much insta-switch weapons with a very brief cooldown on the kit. Basically we have the access to the most skills at any given time in combat out of any other class. Assuming you fill every utility slot with a weapon kit of some sort, use the medkit in your healing slot, and account for your default weapons and your F1-F4 skills, you can have access to as much as 30 skills to use in combat, without having to leave combat to switch between the ~20 that aren’t on your skillbar (35 skills total if you’re a charr with the rocket launcher elite skill kit). We’re gaining quite a bit out of each utility slot.

For the time being, while I do use my pistols for some fights, I try to get most of my stats from armor until we can confirm whether or not this is intentional.

Sounds like a bug, most of my story quests has had NPCs actively fighting, usually drawing the aggro for me so I can unload my heavy AOEs on the enemies.

If Retribution is the mission involving re-taking claw island, then I had a similar issue with NPC’s just standing around. But that was the only case, I’ve rather enjoyed every other mission.

Tower Down gave me the same problem, I think the issue is the plague carriers. They usually suicide by exploding on your party.

What I did to get past it was not go near the final tower too soon, I wiped out the plague carriers first (either by killing them or letting then suicide) so when we got to the part where it asks you to clear the beach, every enemy died by my kill rather than by suicide (no more plague bringers spawn after you kill the few that are already there).

Some of the googling I did mentioned the suiciding plague carriers being a possible issue, and it seems to have worked for me by getting rid of them before triggering the destruction of the final tower.

The prices he posted for each tier are the approx. price to buy the entire set, each piece is a fraction of the number’s he listed (Tier 1 would be about 20-40 silver each, in total 1 gold 40 silver).

Also cultural armor has a really cool appearance, relevant to your race rather than your profession (I.E. Sylvari have thick leaf/plant based cultural armor).

Cultural weapons can also be found in your cities, however they can be bought by any race and cost Karma. They tend to have a unique appearance and very high stats. Tier 1 is around 10k karma per weapon and Tier 3 is around 70k karma per weapon. I don’t know Tier 2’s prices.