Engi in 3 years:
Rainbow glowing armor everywhere
3m long greatswords (mirror blade) in every hand (+glowing)
3 pairs of wings on a single char
Critter/Volcano/Tree spawning footsteps
Outwordly flaming helmets with 10 eyes and half-meter spikes
Riding a dragon. With same shiny glowing armor.
And a hobosack.
so sfr came in and took garri.
but didnt kill BB in the same room, just left.
And as soon as inv fell off, garri was flipped.
Nope. No spoon-feeding at all.
this does not change power number or tooltip damage of any skills. And as far as it goes, I failing to notice any stable damage gain on anything at all.
I was not referring to conditions as in condition builds. I meant to say no matter what you face, zerker/bunker/whatever – you will still get swarmed with conditions.
Its a game you don’t need to do anything special to inflict a condition – but you must work really hard to get every single on of them off.
because there just can’t be enough condition meta.
Every second skill in this game inflicts a condition. That is a problem.
AR is only good because there are conditions everywhere, at any given moment.
adapt to what? gameplay getting slower and slower, everything oversimplified in favor of… something that remains unmentioned.
There is nothing to adapt to. Game is just getting longer. Nothing else changes.
Defensive builds are already immortal. But the ones getting nerfed are offensive ones.
What should I think of the game that steadily, over 2 years now, works in a direction of reducing damage across the board and introducing balance workaround over and over?
I don’t do dungeons much. I run around in wvw just for season rewards. I mostly just run around maps, exploring, playing my part as an assasin with hit-and-run tactics and two-shot monster kills.
So why does this game want to ruin yet one more thing I enjoy? I cry when I play engi, I cry when I play ele, at least I still have some fun playing thief.
Games are meant to be fun, no? Or its a serious game with top-tier competitive pvp?
You know of the smiter’s boon nerf back in GW? That is the only one I could never agree with. Nine out of ten changes in gw2 are done just as poorly, with just as much reasoning as that sole one (its too stronk. so we made it unusable. no exuses. exact wording).
well according to what is known already.
My 119 crit damage at 74% crit rate (94% with fury) will be reduced to 74-75%.
10%, yeah.
Well its mainstream now. Fix flawed mechanics with workarounds and nerfs, nerfs, nerfs.
And 39 ( or even all 40) new DEFENSIVE traits.
This is going to go down hard. I don’t even know how would gw2 remain even remotely capable of being considered competitive in terms of pvp.
Suppose world will end or gw2 servers will shut down before engies get any cosmetic love.
2 years have passed. And people still complain about HS.
Hs was already nerfed. It has obvious and long animation. No evade frames. User of HS CANNOT interrupt it. Thief using hs can’t dodge, can’t block, can’t stealth, can’t move.
I can imagine troubles eles have with certain thief builds, but hs spam? Then this game is not for you, at least on ele. Besides engi, I can’t imagine any other class to be able to punish HS spam as much as ele can.
Are we all sure that it is not a problem of decap mechanics instead?
if you stand right outside of the red aoe circle, you don’t get hit by it. But if there is turret on the same spot, it gets hit.
You can easily test it by putting turret right behind the corner, and having any ranged/aoe attack used on the other side – though turret is BEHIND the corner, its hitbox extends from behind it and it gets hit.
The range fact you can get from putting turret between yourself and ranged attacker and then strafing to the side until you, and not your turret, will finally get hit by attacks.
Issue: unlike player and any npc characters, turret hit box is same for melee attacks and aoe.
Where usually target’kittenbox is separate for melee attacks (melee range hitbox) and aoe (limited to small hitbox directly under char – to actually be able to position yourself outside red circles) turrets have melee and aoe hit box of the same size.
As a result, turrets get hit by aoe that they do not stand directly in. To put it simply, the radius of any aoe is increased by at least melee range in case of turrets (since their hit box is always that of melee range).
What should be done: make turrets use standard mechanic where melee and aoe hitboxes are different – if turrets are placed OBVIOUSLY outside red aoe circle they should NOT get hit by it.
Thank You
In group pve conditions are extremely weak.
Apart from hobosacks and general bugs the main problem that I have with engineer – no matter how much I specialize on something, no matter how good I play it, there is always someone doing it better with far less effort.
I was zerk engi once, I just couldn’t stand it – I did no damage that could be counted as “contributing”.
I switched to support. It is much harder, and I liked it at start. But then came realization that ele can keep just about as much stacks of might as me with almost zero investment and inside its regular rotation. Guardian with minimal investment heals for more, more often and by just doing his usual thing – making even my 5 blast finishers on a 3/4 second water field (the healing turret toolbelt skill, that took me quite some time to get right) look nothing more than just flashy.
I can’t imagine taking FT or EG for anything but bunkering – and even at that point I’d rather avoid flamethrower. I’d even go as far as to say that EG is decent – but its use is either extremely situational or contradicts the obvious gameplay.
I will also mention something that I proposed already many, many times in addition to this – separate trait lines and stats they give. Let player choose 2 stats for every trait line he picks, and increase those stats according to the amount of points player has invested into that line.
And, I know it won’t be easy at this point, but consider changing trait lines into trait trees (as it was long proven to be superior), even if without adding new traits.
Even if you play engineer like piano, you’ll do less damage than any dedicated zerker warr/thief/guard.
You have NO single target damage (or what can be called damage), and the most effective combos are widely unusable due to bugs or flawed mechanics.
You know, engi is the only class that can destroy the sPvP heavy dummy in a single burst – but it requires setup that is nearly impossible to pull off in actual combat.
Engi is something that sounds cool, but looks ugly, feels chunky, works buggy and, almost like with thieves, ANET does not even know what they should be doing with them.
My god. Now engies are op. Because they go against condition meta.
Without tool kit and shield offhand you can’t dream to survive against any decent direct damage. And absolutely no defense against range or aoe. And due to very low volume of attacks they are extremely vulnerable to blind.
Condition meta must be stoppable, and engi is the only one who does it adequately now.
If someone gives me warrior, sure. None of my accounts has any now (except lvl 4 purely pvp warr).
As someone who dedicated whole first season to killing and protecting dolyaks I saw way too many of them.
If you are not going for maxing everything out, 25/30/0/0/15 is a solid option as it plays almost equally with any weapon set (so you can switch with minimum effort). 10 in trickery gives a selection of extremely specialized tools to suit you current needs (steal range, boons on steal, stealth on revive, damage from behind, even caltrops on dodge for kiting tasks). Of course, it is never as effective as build specialized for certain weapon sets (10 sa D/D, 20 trickery P/P and the like)
we are talking about whole groups defending doly.
At which point warrior can walk in, kill dolyak, walk away.
To be precise, warrior can just fly by the dolyak, never actually stopping, and still kill it.
Unless the whole group is a dedicated rank A dolyak rescue squad.
Also, from previous experiences, 10% damage decrease for full zerk in their words means around “A minimum of 10% total damage decrease in most optimal setup”. That means around 30% average drop in most situations (since they nerfing whole mechanics but a single stat – loss in a single stat will have to result all of the damage lost).
They simply agreed to the fact that something needed to be done. And in their decisions they focused solely on that fact that “something must be done”. They stated themselves that they have no idea how this change would address the issue at hand.
I (and many other people) have already made many suggestions on how this can be solved properly so I’ll save everyone from having to read that wall of text again.
Well, first of all – it is impossible to defend a doly from a single char specialized in doly killing with anything less than 5 man specialized group.
And I do think that when one player goes against 5 just to kill dolyak, he should expect to lose his life after accomplishing his goal.
Its fine to have gap closer as running moves – its not nice to have those gap closers available in that amounts. I won’t even mention out-of-combat warrior with manual weapon swaps. Speed of those is comparable to that of trebuchet projectile on medium distance.
For every gap closer ONE player can have for running, other player should have for gap closing.
Thing is, for said case, those never run out. They recharge before they run out.
Ranged CnD? This will never be taken seriously even if it will be unrelated to black powder.
You think people will whine less from skill that would allow maintaining stealth at range while still dealing damage rather than a more costly, harder to perform and telegraphed combo?
S/D thief as it is – is easily counterable (for me at least). But with this change(stealth on 5), they would be untouchable.
Sorry, but I think using 5+2 to get into stealth is much harder than pressing a single button at right time.
Actually, I found this more useful as a trait when alone – the vuln from this removed the need to apply other conditions for the +10% damage trait.
How come people continue contradicting points already given here.
Noone is going to change a skill simply because it can be better. ANY skill can be better. Whats wrong with blinding power alone?
Half of people complains about getting hit by thieves, other half complains about not getting hit by thieves.
Even if you can’t deal with stealth, even if it is LTP issue, feel free to do so in topics about stealth. Black powder nicely working skill that in no way relates to the issues people have with stealth.
If you want to propose changes to black powder do it in an orderly and civilized manner, keeping your opinions to yourself or, at very least, making them objective.
Talking about backstab “abuse” (there are targets other than pve mobs that can get beaten with that?), “godly” stealth traits (that essentially require thief to drop the said backstab damage to miserable levels) and “useful” buffs to “not-so-op” thief builds.
1) stealth stacking – after first 3 seconds any additional stealth in no way contributes to thief’s victory
2) SA duration increase – why would I (and You) want more stealth?
3) Counter what? Blind field? Blind shot? Heartseeker that should NOT hit you to work?
4) Second attempt? If you can’t get what you NEED from skill you won’t use it even first time. It’s not “oh, initiative”. It is a GLOBAL cooldown.
5) Lifesteal on projectiles – what for? Ranged thief does not need lifesteal. If he takes damage he is either dead or uses SoM
6) Blind on leap – for? D/P has unblockable blind on 3 with guaranteed unrestricted and fast teleport (unlike leap)
7) Lifesteal on whirl – again, why? I may assure you, that both poison and blind are much better at increasing your survive-ability
8) Blast finishers aoe blind – black powder gives aoe blind for 4 seconds… Why need more?
9) 2 unloads do way more than any of combos you listed
10) What will S/P use 6 ini stealth for? PW has stun, evade AND damage. Run away? Sword 2.
11) If D/P needs stealth he goes and makes it. Dropping blinding powder in a middle of something more important pretty much guarantees you a party kick/“noob thiev”/lonely future. Since you are not aware of this you probably didn’t play thief seriously anywhere (including dungeons, wvw and s/tpvp)
Still, situational heal is better. Unlike SS, it can save thief from deadly mistake.
if someone not playing gw2 comes to this thread he would most likely think that wvw is nothing but thieves deciding winning server by fighting thieves on an open and empty terrain. And winner is whoever stealths first.
Without both stealth and shadowstep loss of target is more of ltp issue.
Heartseeker has long and obvious animation, decent aftercast, vulnerable to any kind on impairment effects.
Standard melee attacks hit in 180 degree cone in front of you for 180 range.
I find the fact of being totally unable to hit a thief that executed such combo unlikely unless: thief used shadowstep/dodge/hs again. At that point thief literally spends double (if not more) the resources than initially mentioned in this topic.
With proper camera positioning you can even hit stealthed targets with single target ranged attacks.
my god what has this escalated to.
Since point was missed from my post I’ll clear it out:
If your target lives for 30 and more seconds you are most likely not doing a pack of trash mobs.
If you are doing A SINGLE MOB that will live for 30 seconds you benefit your party much more as D/D with vuln on your every-3-seconds CnD.
And at this point benefit from SS is marginal. To maximize efficiency of SS, you need to PW or Unload the target, at which point you
1) do less damage than D/D
2) do less vuln stacks than D/D
For aoe scenarios you proc-base SS will be just as marginal due to randomness and only 3 targets. If you care about team that much you can come on (or invite one) ele/engi that will give you 15+ might, 15+ vuln without any need to invest directly.
No.
Engi’s net turret already get nerfed and no other class can stack immobile alone (except thief with devourer venom or body, but who does that).
You should be promoted to avoid immobilize or situations where multiple stacks of it can be applied to you.
Not the other way. Immobile should NOT be a condition that you can afford to wait out. Don’t dumb the game down.
And what does a stealthed D/P do that needs changing?
You might not believe me, but I don’t really care about being able to stealth in combat. But I do care about being to stealth on demand outside of the combat. We most definitely do not need to improve thief’s ability to stealth in combat.
And from your point of view, what is the difference of doing blinding powder + heartseeker and blinding powder + cluster bomb?
I am not as much against the change, it just like people said – it is not worth to change single ability so cardinally when ability itself is working quite nicely.
If you ask me, I would agree to complete removal of stealth (as much as I like it I would still prefer to play a game where I wouldn’t be pigeonholed into using it) from the game, granted it will be adequately counterbalanced.
For me blinding powder is a perfect PvE skill as it is.
For PvP, only change I would make is something to counter is the extreme ease of countering it (at least increase in radius to correspond to the actual in-game melee range). In PvP, getting more than a single tick of blind on opponent is impossible and cost of 6 ini is really high for that (granted d/p has access to 4 ini guaranteed blind).
As I don’t see how the effect radius increase could affect PvE (as in pve blind from it is always countered by either defiant or aoe cap) so I would deem the change to aoe size in both PvP and PvE much more appropriate than complete overhaul.
I fail to see the problem in d/p or stealth at all.
Stealth does only two things: enables the use of stealth skill and makes user invisible for short time.
I have no idea how any of those are imbalanced in any way at considerable level of play.
Heartseeker is plain leap without any immunities. Even when I play D/something I use heartseeker solely when I can be sure it cannot be countered – it does not matter if you gain stealth at the end of it – everyone who actually saw you do it will know exactly where you are regardless of whether they see you or not.
I also fail to see how thief mass stealth capabilities should be limited to utilities. As a matter of fact, using blinding powder without utilizing its blast finisher (on the said smoke field from black powder) is just stupid.
Don’t forget, thief can use only 60 seconds worth of cooldowns per minute with two weapon sets. For most classes it is by far greater even on single weapon set – and other classes get team support skills on their weapon skills.
He wanted to point out that these are not separate changes.
Instead, the patch note will look like this:
“Healing signet passive healing reduced by 8%. To compensate, direct damage across the board was reduced by up to 10% (25% for celestial gear) and duration of most common poison applications were adjusted (reduced by 40%)”
remove stats from gear, remove crit damage, remove precision, remove condition damage, remove condition stacking, remove on-crit sigils and traits.
That would be a good start for a good game.
forgot to add the poison changes (since poison affects healing signet passive)
Its only just that warrior rifle 1 has longer range, more damage, longer bleed, nicer animation and same attack speed.
There is no pvp is this game where killing someone means winning.
You are not supposed to have ability to kill anything you want no matter who you or your opponent is. This game is not about that.
Thief can only do ONE of the things you named at once – permastealth, big backstabs, run away better than anyone.
You should try playing a thief and you will be quick to realize how weak any of the named qualities are alone.
It does not matter even if you are godly – it is a game where defense > offence in any pvp. It is normal to not be able to kill something (especially so when alone).
ArmageddonAsh:
Please stop with the “all reward and no risk” talk. Stealth does not have any risks, of course (well aside from fact that you can’t contribute to capture while in it). For the sole reason that THE RISKS OF STEALTH are already included INSIDE thief class already, regardless of whether he uses stealth or not.
but i did play unicorn thief, condition nades engi and a terromancer necro with scepter.
I can’t say I had trouble with condition removal on my opponents.
Thief does conditions 24/7, bunker engi doesn’t care (since you won’t ever kill him alone and will die anyway) and necro… well, you die before you remove conditions. At best, you die before you remove conditions second time.
Well warrior is a model class.
Definition of non-model classes is: a weaker in every aspect, weird and inefficient implementation of not more that 2 of the warriors distinct qualities with reduced visuals and uncertain future.
Wait, engineers actually do damage?
Good (piano keyboard player) engi barely outdamages thief auto with occasional skills.
That is why I went for support engi.
If anything, engi needs a drastic damage increase (don’t forget grenades were already nerfed by 30%)
Zerk won’t be meta the very moment it won’t do the greatest damage.
As much as I would hate that to happen, I am really interested what would happen to game at that point.
and what should thief do dmg with? AA? spam HS? great solution…
plenty of evades come only from acro/trickery s/d build, every other build has to waddle and has 2 dodges like everyone else… so we should all play kitten s/d and scrap every single weapon set and every other tree when we are at it…mkay
Rather than the class being a class that pretty much RUNS the moment they back stab and see hey would have to WORK to kill someone, rather than just going Stealth and repeating the Stealth, Backstab, HS, HS, HS, Stealth, Backstab until the person dies.
Maybe some changes would actually BENEFIT the class, so you know – they don’t have to rely on stealth and they can’t use stealth to run the moment they are beginning to lose.
Thieves use stealth because they don’t have something else. Once you have something to propose for them to have instead of stealth, we can talk.
More damage? you wont agree
More health? you wont agree
More what? you wont agree.
You just want everything around you to become easier. You are not the least bit concerned about the “Maybe some changes would actually BENEFIT the class” you mentioned.
leave black powder alone already. It is already fine (albeit was once nerfed with increased cost)
The is NO perma stealth that involves solely black powder and heartseeker ever since the nerf.
NOONE and i will repeat myself NOONE will bother redesigning a skill that works, is usable and does not involve any of the mentioned “opness”. Except people on forumsBlack Powder is only fine if you combine it with dagger for the stealth combo. Without that it’s just a blind field that is so small you can actually hit someone inside it in melee without being blinded by it. In PvP, when not in D/P, Blinding Powder serves one purpose only and that is securing a stomp against Rangers/Warriors/Guardians/Necros. That is not my definition of fine.
This change aims to make Blinding Powder a useful skill in both P/P and S/P and it does that by giving the sets access to stealth. This would give P/P the boost to survivability it requires to become a competitive set and boost the control options for S/P by giving it access to Tactical Strike. Furthermore this change also keeps the playtyle of D/P intact as it leaves the thief an option to stealth for those backstabs. It’s a great change IMO.
I explicitly mentioned, that we, players, can and will find the weak and strong sides of any skills and can and will propose even the most meaningful changes.
But issues as small as the ones you mentioned will never be considered. To say the truth, I believe that the fact that the radius of the black powder field is half of the standard melee range is not even known among the people responsible for making class related decisions. And, with previous experience with changes that took effect and, lately, rather troubling livestreams from the people responsible for them, I doubt the proposed (in this topic) changes would meet our expectations should they ever come live.
You should have already taken notice that ever since launch none of the profession-inside balance issues were dealt with appropriately.
It is for that very reason they tend to focus much more on issues that relate to several classes or are simple and with obvious solutions.
This is a bit too wide.
Where problems start in gw2 is the level at which, lets say, one should choose between two or more options.
Whereas the balance (be that full balance or perfect imbalance) is decided either on top level (eg every class has a set of skills they semi-permanently learn and they can use any of them at any time) or the very bottom level (amount of skills is limited, but you can choose any combination of them according to what you will face while you will not be able to change them).
In GW2, though it is clearly oriented to the second one, one point is amiss – instead of choosing options themselves you can only chose between sets of options. Problem lies in the fact that no matter how balanced those very sets of options are, they were never considered for the balance of the options those sets contain.
Instead of optimizing their own skills bar (and thus preserving the said “balance”) players are forced to, sometimes, take a whole sets of skills because a single option they actually need is not available in any other set. So instead of choosing the best option – one you would benefit from the most (and game is clearly balanced around the said use of best options) people are choosing the set of options that would hinder their abilities the least (and game is nowhere near even being considered to be balanced in that regard).
For example, lets take support engineer.
First, choosing one of three weapon sets.
1) P/P – 1: pointless, 2: debatable, 3: pointless, 4: pointless, 5: debatable
2) P/S – 1: pointless, 2: debatable, 3: pointless, 4: good, 5: debatable
3) Rifle – 1: pointless, 2: debatable, 3: pointless, 4: debatable, 5: pointless
So out of 3 sets we choose one for the sole reason that it contains ONE skill that we can unconditionally benefit from.
Half of skill bar is filled with one skill. 12 balanced skills, 3 imbalanced sets.
Well, engi was used as an example because of how little should be written about it.
Now try to imagine how many skills can a typical elementalist consider unquestionable beneficial when he select a single set of 20 skills.
I won’t even mention thieves that, on top of selecting 2 out of 5 sets, at any given time in combat can use only ONE of 10 skills that they have already selected.
I don’t think people will QQ less if thieves will lose stealth and instead will get 20k hp and backstab usable without stealth.
As a matter of fact, I think people would QQ a lot more.
Condition damage is simply not working for the sole reason of being created out of nowhere without much consideration.
From opponent’s point of view, incoming condition is completely.
You do not know how much damage one or another condition will do until it ticks.
You do not possess any ability to actually influence the way conditions affect you (namely, condition stacking).
You do not have any ability to deal with conditions other than removing them.
Due to the way skills are designed (weapon sets instead of separate skills) conditions simply overwhelm anything that might oppose them in this game – the is no penalty to applying conditions however often while penalty on condition removal is extremely high.
Its a bad habit, I know but once again I would want to compare it with gw1 mechanics.
There, conditions had definite effect. Conditions did not stack with themselves. Conditions were not so common (most weapon sets in gw2 apply conditions on 4 out of 5 skills). Conditions were removable on demand, not as additional benefit of some skill. Conditions could be countered with regeneration, for example.
In gw2 the value of conditions was first cut to ground with their mass availability, and to compensate – ridiculously overpowered by condition damage that has no counter mechanic in-game.
Solutions?
First step. Cut either con damage (as stat) or cut the stacking.
Second step. Cut the ways to apply conditions (or, preferably, let players decide what and where to apply)
There is no way conditions that were always meant to be the “pressure” part of the damage (described by the words “apply and forget”) should do same, or even exceed, direct damage that requires certain amount of expertise to reach the opponent and is even then further reduced by passive defenses.
leave black powder alone already. It is already fine (albeit was once nerfed with increased cost)
The is NO perma stealth that involves solely black powder and heartseeker ever since the nerf.
NOONE and i will repeat myself NOONE will bother redesigning a skill that works, is usable and does not involve any of the mentioned “opness”. Except people on forums.
Yes, I would much rather have the whole assasin thing from gw1 over this pathetic excuse of 2 times less base hp, no support and defensive capabilities nerf punchbag called thief.
But then people will cry twice as much.
better give us 1-2 sec stealth at the end of unload