Guild Wars 2

Sojourner.4621:

kurtosis.9526:

EdwinLi.1284:

Yep a combination of Power and Condition skills which will be useful for players who have Viper Gear.

I was hoping the Holosmith spec could replace Tools in the current Explosions/Firearms/Tools P/P + Full Kit Viper Condi meta build while keeping the weapon + full kit loadout. But unfortunately it looks like to spec Holosmith you have to trade Mortar Kit for the Holosmith Elite Skill, since that Elite skill changes your F5 to activate/deactivate Photon Forge mode.
.

The minor trait says that your f5 elite toolbelt skill will ALWAYS be replaced by Photon Forge, no matter what the elite skill. You can still run mortars and kits.

Adept Minor: “Photon forge replaces your elite tool belt skills.” from the tooltip

Am I silly for being happy I can use Racial elites and not miss out on the tool belt skill?

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

There was an update yesterday afternoon PDT.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Updating-Text-June-27-2017/first#post6632036

Yeah, but that’s the thing. The game is not patching or letting me play after this.
It’s basically ‘timing out’.

I haven’t been able to play the game after last patch.
The patcher starts figuring out what it needs to download and it says that it needs 24MB still to patch. The download speed goes up to 3Mb/s and slowly starts going down up until 0KB/s. The progress bar stays empty throughout all process.

Afterwards it hangs on the 0KB/s and 2 files for a while until then suddenly everything disappears and it just stays at 0%. It doesns’t allow me to press the Play button either even though it was over the “Playable” part the first time I tried patching this.

Not sure what this is or what to do. Any thoughts?

Lucky Charmz.5089:

That really stinks.

Does that mean, though, that if I don’t care as much about DPS, and I’d rather build a bit more supporty (not exclusively supporting with the med kit, mind you. I still want to do some damage haha), rather than max DPS…I wouldn’t need the kits?

Let’s put it like this, most of our auto attacks suck. Granade is the only kit good auto attacks. Flame thrower is not horrible mind you. But Pistol and probably even rifle aren’t that good, they are just bad.
All our weapons cooldowns are on the medium to high duration.

If you don’t use any kit you will most likely spend a lot of time doing nothing but crap damage with the autos on the normal weapons while waiting for cooldowns.
People use kits because by the time you use the best skill possible in each and every kit that’s enough for pistol skills to go off cooldown for example. So you’re only using the best skills all the time and not using random bad auto attacks.

People do use Rifle if they go for power builds, but most of the time you use it for utility, one burst skill and then spend all your time on Granade Autos.

You CAN play without using kits, but I guarantee you it’s going to be tedious as hell.

So I don’t have to do crazy rotations I only use Flamethrower when casually playing. If I need range I use mortar as elite otherwise Supply crate or Elixir X.
It’s good and will get you through most generic content in the game.

So yes, I second the guy above. You don’t need to use all kits, but you most likely will HAVE to use one. But pick the one you like the most.

draxynnic.3719:

Kenshi Maru.5489:

I feel like changing pistol skills 3 and 4 is one of the changes we need the most.

I think they’re probably thinking about future weapons there. Sure, you might think that swapping them would be an indirect buff to shield now, but you might be glad to still have access to Blowtorch when a mainhand melee weapon gets introduced. Conversely, you might be glad to have Static Shot on the pistol when a new offhand is introduced that is more oriented to midrange damage rather than the relatively close-in nature of offhand pistol.

Granted, mainhand pistol could probably do with some buffs so it’s less of a case of being carried by Blowtorch, but I don’t think that simply swapping over Blowtorch and Static Shot would prove to be the right decision in the long run.

I kinda gotta disagree now because shield is just not used because it’s bad and main hand isn’t either because it’s also bad. They’d have to make an offhand that is very, very broken to be used with main hand pistol. You have no other choice there, just main hand pistol. So you need to have a better DPS than kits and blowtorch. Nothing will ever be better than this unless it’s stupidly broken.

This is mostly due to the auto on main hand being horrible. Also you assume that if they ever release a really good main hand weapon people would ever use shield. They won’t. It’s just bad in every case. And even if it was better it would have to be better than blowtorch.

The season why swapping the skills is good and important is that we have “purity of purpose” as the term the devs misused a while back goes. Because right now P/P is a closed package. It’s hard to imagine running one without the other, even if main hand is bad. And if main hand is actually bad there can never be another offhand that makes up for that.

Same with offhand. You can use blowtorch condi. But then what do you want for main hand? More condi? You already have kits. Power? Nothing really good to use with it. Utility? Eh, off hand also already has utility and a lot of dps.

The thing is, we need to bundle stuff on one or the other weapon so we go for exactly what we want when we choose weapons.

We don’t have many weapons, so being free to switch them around and not feel like missing out would be priority on elites

I feel like changing pistol skills 3 and 4 is one of the changes we need the most.
That and Rifle rework. yeah, shield could use a buff but I’m not sure if it needs a rework.
Idk about you guys but I really don’t think ANYONE wants to keep using kits. Like, 1 okay, but if we could get away with not using any of them we wouldn’t.

Which leads to my point, we don’t HAVE to limit our kits to only one or nerf them or anything. My point is, if we had good weapon skills on a lower cooldown that out-dpsed kits people would start only using kits for their own specific niche purposes like if you want to apply AoE poison or use granade do add vulnerability or create fields with mortar or whatever.

The problem is that we have 1 good skill on our weapons, 2 that are okay to use if you have nothing else and then they have long cooldowns and a horrible auto attack. Then all that time you would spend doing a weak auto you swap though all your kits to “not do nothing”

If our main and offhand weapons gave us reasons to STAY on it we’d need reasons to change to kits when they are particularly needed. The problem is just that weapons are not worth using besides blowtorch.

I don’t think we need that big of a rework imo. The weapons change suggested might be a bit too far but that’s kinda the direction I wanted it to go.

The fact is, kits are not even that viceral or fun to use. Their animations are bleh and besides SFX most of them lack punch. Compare them to mesmer or ele skills, Warrior attacks and revenant animations… it’s just sad.

I’d love to not use kits at all, but that basically means I’ll be using the most boring weak-ass auto attack animation in the game for most of the time and basically do nothing when it comes to damage.

What I mean is: The problem with Engineer is that it unloads everything in 2 seconds then have to wait for 9 doing nothing. That’s where kits come in. If you could space your skills and weave your rotations with your weapons you wouldn’t need to use all the kits.
Unloading only the strongest skills on every kit just to make it so we deal ‘good’ dps sucks. We go out of our way to get that DPS and it’s not even fun.

TBH I feel bat we won’t be able to use elite weapons on different elites. Holosmith with hammer would also be really cool if it is a power build. Elites would keep adding to classes that way until every class can run all weapons.

One thing that I was thinking was if they turned Stamina into Gas for the Holosmith elite. You have ways to get Energy and ways to spend it. So you can be very mobile if you save gas or very bursty if you don’t dodge and just ram all stamina as damage!

Either way the change to turret basically means they are indeed switching the toolbelts somehow. The explanation they gave for the change was hard to believe. Most people don’t use turrets and those that do most likely value Overcharging them over the toolbelt. I mean, if you can’t overcharge now then there isn’t much point to keeping them anyway in most cases.

Anyway, I do like scrapper a lot. I mean, hammer is the most fun thing ever, it’s just not that great on PVE. I’d argue if they buffed gadgets and add scrapper synergy to it it would be a fun playstyle. Gadget Scrapper. A close quarters fighter with high utility. But having hammer only to switch to granade or elixir gun or whatever just kinda sucks.

draxynnic.3719:

leviathan.2148:

Core trait line doesn’t change elite spec mechanics (Besides Scrapper for pve ha ha…)

Technically speaking, function gyro does have a use in PvE. It’s just not a very useful one…

If they’d made downed state more common in PvE, it’d probably be a lot more popular.

Ugh, no. If you could res yourself with it, sure. But most of the times it’s easier to just kill something close to them so they Rally or res personally. Unless in this game we had more ENEMIES on the downed state, but then again you can DPS your way out of this anyhow.

Kits just need to be updated, gadgets buffed and turrets reworked. You don’t need to do all of this, but sure doing some would help.

The problem with kit’s btw is that there is always a clear DPS choice among all the 5 skills it gives and all the rest sucks. They designed it so you’d only use one kit, so they tried to make it so each kit could fit any kind of play style and do everything on it’s own. Almost every kit that is part of our meta builds have an auto, a burn, a CC and a poison basically. If you play condi you’ll always get the all the burns, then all the poisons an by that time you’ll have refreshed the cooldowns of your other burns.

It’s just that all our good damage skills are scattered on multiple kits.
And the saddest part and what makes it a problem is that we need them all, in that order to compete with the DPS of other condis out there that do much less work for it.

It would be okay if we could choose not to use 2, 3 or 4 kits and then still do decent DPS, but we cant. Heck, I’d be happy if I even needed to know what skills (3), (4),(5) in some of my kits did, because I never get to use them and I don’t even have time to, because there is no way anything there would be better than adding up my burn stacks.

The class was meant to be the one with “always the perfect tool for the right situation” but we just have so many tools that are always wrong.

They need to remove the generic aspect of kits and empower them on different ways. Then make the same with gadgets.

If you play ranged you might need a certain gadget and a certain kit and maybe 1 turret or 1 elixir, if you play close-quarters or condi you then need a different kit with a completely different gadget and one elixir or turret that better suits you.

We should be able to BUILD to the situation instead of equiping everything and rolling our face over the keyboard.

leviathan.2148:

Corthyll.7635:

I agree that losing the toolbelt would cause us to lose one of our defining mechanics. Hopefully the elite spec would not change us having these available. I was more basing my idea around a solar cell charging; the way the captured energy could be utilised was my point of speculation. I was thinking that it could be our “F” key that activates the additional skill bar (kit) and using the skills might remove energy. This would still enable our toolbelt skills to be active.

Replacing core mechanics is what elite specializations do. They change core mechanics for new functionality while providing new way to approach combat for a profession. It would be nice if engi got finally something new and useful for all game modes that would change the 5 year old playstyle. (I’m looking at you Function Gyro, you useless piece of kitten)

The problem with scrapper is that it didn’t change anything or added up anything to the Engineer’s core mechanics. You add a Res/Finisher for PVP and no extra toolbelt skill, no change in how turrets work, no change in weapon kits (not even a new weapon kit).
It is just an entirely new class with hammer and overpowered Auras for PVP.
What else do they use from engineer? Elixir Gun? Only to slow down enemies even.

It was a total afterthought of an elite spec. I wished the Gyro would only keep one Aura up at a time, being it so that the function Gyro would be wherever you wanted using the [F] key targeting alies or enemies and there it would do the one activated Gyro skill until you toggled it back by the same utility you used.
Then the other Gyro skills would be actives with cooldowns that you could use when that specific aura was not active.

That way you could be a zoner, like how they wanted Turrets to be. Only that this time you can move your zone of influence around freely and fight from far away if you wanted. Would be great because you could make fields with Mortar Kit anywhere and have the Gyro proc the spin finisher.

Instead of AI it should be controllable. Then we’d be good at back-lining too.

leviathan.2148:

We certainly need a new power based main hand. I just fear that they won’t touch the shield to be better in any way and we’ll end up using pistol OH for both condi and power builds.

I’m not sure. If people are running Power builds shield will still be better than offhand pistol. It’s 1 CC and a heavy burn skill on off hand. The poison dart deals up to 2*power scaling damage after all hits. Blowtorch deals 1*power if you’re at really close range. Rifle3 deals 1.76*Power at close range (and it is 50 units farther than blowtorch)

At least Shield offers SOME survivability. I can’t really think of Engineer going melee and not just dying without stuff like the many blocks and evades of Scrapper Hammer. So I think that the shield will still be a must for power.

If anything people would run Rifle and not the sword for power builds if Sword+Shield ends up being horrible. I really want Sword Shield to be viable for both Condi and Power builds tho D= But condi would mostly likely run Pistol off hand for burst.

I just want more options for Main and Off hand weapons.
It’s stupid that we have the least amount of weapons to use, can’t swap them and most of our kits have exactly the same attack repeated 5 times but with different colors.

The fun part of the game (with other classes) is that you have a wide array of actions and utility in the weapons and can swap then around weaving your moves and actions into it. Engineer has just been spamming the best attacks on cooldown, but they all do basically the same thing.

Rifle and shield should be better, same with Healing kit and maybe even Elixir gun on PVE. Then a new main-hand weapon and we’re done.

I confirm the bug.
Please just roll back this change. It doesn’t help at all just makes us more unreliable and it screws up CLARITY OF PURPOSE when leaving your turrets up is most of the time useless as you can’t overcharge it.

THIS IS NOT HOW YOU DO CONSTRUCTIVE FEEDBACK

This makes no sense. Now there is no point to keeping turrets up, which means that the change itself makes it irrelevant that we now have access to the toolbelt skill all the time since we will be picking up the turrets as soon as we place it.

So much stupidity into one balance patch.

What really trigger’s me is this bit:

Most of the time, engineers were taking turret skills and never deploying the turret because the Tool Belt skill was too important to be overridden by the detonate turret skill.

NO FREAKING WAY. Most of the time we weren’t even taking the turrets at all because they suck. We’re using only all possible kits and only 1 or two skills of each kit because anything else we have is absolute garbage. Why not make the turret strong so we can DECIDE at each moment if it would be better do keep the turret or not?

Remember what engineers were supposed to be about? Picking the right tool for the job. Now we just have no tools and no choice on what to use. Make things powerful conditionally and let us figure out what to use and when.

We’re so full of useless stuff it’s not even funny. Every class has trash skills but we have nothing but trash skills. Even our good skills have trash skills (kits).
Missed opportunity here to rework turrets to be useful and powerful. Just give them more scaling and a punishing cooldown so we want to protect them.

HEY GUYS, I noticed one inconsistency with the leaked Elites.
As far as traits go we usually get 1 major, 3 minors, 1 major, 3 minors, 1 major 3 minors on elites.
Here we’re getting 1 major, 1 minor 3 times then twice 3 minors.

Maybe they are just making it so you can get all the majors first so you don’t waste your Hero points on stuff you won’t use and get get right into playing the elite, but still it’s worth noting this change over the first elites. Maybe they will change them all?
Honestly this makes me believe more that the leaks are real, as I don’t think people would think of this when making fake stuff, they would just copy-paste the original unlock ordering.

As far as holosmith goes we have cybernetics, electricity, light and energy stuff related to it.
I believe their play pattern involve enhancing themselves cybernetically. I’m not sure how supportive they are gonna, get. Engineer dies very easily without scrapper, Alchemy is a gimmick with Elixir S. So maybe all the healing and protective skills we have here are to make the Engineer survive more, not necessarily the alies.

It’s not really hard to imagine that they got the ‘heat’ mechanics from the /scrapped/ Scrapper elite and turned it into “energy” for this character. You fight and store up energy and that gets you to deal more damage and cast empowered spells.

I some people said that they don’t see much stuff related to fire, but some of the force fields do have a glowy fire effect. I wouldn’t say it’s beyond them making it so the elite has some fire related condition so people (that are mostly playing condition) can choose to go Off Hand pistol with condition OR power with shield and be a tank.

It would be the smartest thing to do, give finally some versatility to the character. We can’t forget that we still have to use 2 of the engineer traitlines and Firearms would go well if this does apply some burn. Otherwise it would be what? Tools and Alchemy? Doesn’t look very good as far as damaging goes and I’m not really sure how much damage we are going to get with holosmith.

Anyway, being able to cast light weapons and attacks would be amazing if this is really the core of the elite. It sounds very compelling and fun, I’m very bored of the same playstyle for years on end with neer.

If you hold a Mirror on the first part of the Flashpoint quest and then use an engineer mirror for the speed boost the mirror disappears and doesn’t even respawn where it originally was, so you need to restart the instance

Story too short.
Anti-climatic ending where you figure out nothing. Everybody goes MIA. Kas spends 5 minutes saying how she and Jory are ‘a team’ and then bails when she is wounded and everyone needs her.
Taimi still rocks. Balthazar plot was uninteresting. Seeing Primordius but knowing you won’t fight him is lame. We were so hyped for fighting Prim and Jormag and now it’s taken away.
And most of all: Can we actually get a team again? Sick of everyone on some silly drama when the world is ending and then having the shortest interactions with one or two characters in a whole episode. C’mon we wait 3 months for this.

As far as the Map goes, it’s cool but too deadly and annoying too walk around like Tangled Depths (at least without mastery). Could benefit from another waypoint, especially to reach bosses fast. Mastery really cool but the map punishes you when you don’t have it.

Well, okay, we got some good buffs but I don’t think we got on top of other classes.
Everyone got pretty good buffs on their core classes, just some elites and OP classes got some nerfs but they also got a TON of buffs along with it.
I mean, yeah Ele can’t 1-shot big stuff with meteor shower and lost 7% damage on Overload Air, but they got over 25% Cooldown Reduction on so many skills that it’s not even funny.

I didn’t read everything but what I have to say is:

The reason Scrapper added no Kits to the game is that when ANet was developing the elite they asked the community what they wanted from the class and they said: “Something that doesn’t use kits because we’re sick of using all 4 of them”.

So we got it. An elite spec that uses no kits. Only it also doesn’t use virtually anything else from the core class… or plays like it… >.>

You guys are focusing too much on what condition should or should not be and not on the main issues here.

Condi is a part of the game. Probably to deal with tanks.
It has problems, yes, but so does power. We only have up to 4 stats on a gear.
Do you really think that the problem is that condi only needs one stat to do damage (two, actually, but some people don’t agree with the power of expertise) or is it that of all the 4 stats you can have you HAVE TO use 3 of them for damage?

That kills build diversity and makes many other interesting and cool stats that could shake up the metagame useless because you’d have to give up half of your damage to add something like that to your build.

I’d much rather say that having to build BOTH precision and ferocity is more stupid than condition damage being a thing.

Anyway, this game will be busted until they release the Sigil/rune rework they have been doing under the hoods because right now we mostly care for more stats and some bursty/interesting passive effect procing randomly.

EITHER WAY

Please rework the whole engineer class. Change everything up, make we use different stuff and when we say we don’t want to use kits it means we want to use the weapons and skills we have but are useless. We’re not telling you to make an elite that uses absolutely nothing from our core class.

This is by far the best suggestion I ever saw for engineer ever.

Man, being able to use shield would be awesome, especially without losing DPS.
I could even start to dream about using Shield main hand for the next elite.
I mean, if they swap the pistol skill Main hand shield offhand pistol would be really cool for a CC tank/zoner kind of elite spec hahaha.

We need something. We have the least variety in weapons in the game so far. Tied up with Revenants maybe. That class is just as kitten as engi are. One rushed to release the main game, the other rushed for the expansion.