Guild Wars 2

I like this cooldown change. I was one of the people that advocated making the cooldowns start immediately to avoid rewarding the player for blowing them up early, but I think this feels more “right.” This also helps the Medic Gyro be a bit more competitive. Healing Turret still needs a small-ish nerf to keep from outperforming everything else, but Medic Gyro’s immediate nature and this new “adaptive” cooldown (compared to the previously intended immediate cooldown numbers) really help. I just hope the gyro will be effective enough to keep out instead of immediately detonating it for the shorter cooldown.

My biggest concern is one you’re not going to be able to reassure me about until HoT hits and I see it for myself: gyro intelligence and longevity. If minions take very little or no damage during raids, that’s great and all, but what about dungeons or just enemy-dense world locations like Orr, Silverwastes, or the HoT maps? If the global change for minions is only what we saw in the raids, I’m a little skeptical about their usefulness in the open world. It doesn’t help that we weren’t told any details about it.

Is effort being put into fixing the Superspeed bugs? I realize that is probably outside of your area, but can you at least let us know if someone is working on it or not? The inability to stack it cripples two-thirds of the Scrapper traits, and it would be a lot more desirable if the movement speed change behaved as advertised.

I can’t claim to know what can be done about it, but Decisive Renown doesn’t feel rewarding in PvE. Again, not really your area, but there’s a distinct lack of enemies that need to be Finished in PvE, which means we’re relying on allies going down to get any use out of this trait. Other classes have other traits related to when players go down, but the Warrior ones I can think of are related to making getting someone back up safer, faster, and therefore easier. Decisive Renown has no benefit until the ally is up. I hesitate to ask, but would bonus revive speed be too much?

You haven’t mentioned Perfectly Weighted and Mass Momentum. These skills don’t seem to synergize at all, and half the effect of Perfectly Weighted is underwhelming in general. Dodging is a really unreliable source of Stability, especially if that Stability is extremely short. For the sake of Stability, you have to be targeted by CC within 3s of dodging an attack. For the sake of Might, you need to dodge an attack every 5 seconds exactly in order to squeeze 3 stacks of Might out of Mass Momentum. It’s too reliant on enemy behavior. The Scrapper has very little control over how effective these traits are with the exception of Juggernaut and what it does for Mass Momentum.

I feel like a Juggernaut build is only useful for purposes of tanking, using it and other reliable combat boon traits to maintain a “high” damage resistance from Iron Blooded. To help contribute more to DPS, a Juggernaut build is going to want to keep its Might as high as possible, which means holding Flamethrower during any moment a specific non-flamethrower, non-toolbelt skill is not called for. If there is an ally Might stacker which makes the self-Might superfluous, holding Flamethrower is still preferable to swinging around the Hammer to ensure that Stability is maintained for its 2% damage resistance from Iron Blooded. The blocks, CC, and leaping through Lightning, Poison, and Water fields absolutely make it useful to switch to Hammer on occasion, but the goal there isn’t dealing damage. That doesn’t do anything to make Perfectly Weighted desirable. Adaptive Armor is more useful to Perfectly Weighted to a Juggernaut build.

As things stand, it’s either one or the other for me. Either I’m stacking up Iron Blooded as high as it will go and using Mass Momentum to help compensate my DPS, or Mass Momentum’s contribution isn’t worth picking over assisting my whole party with Expert Examination. What I’m trying to get at here is that I have no desire to use Mass Momentum and Perfectly Weighted in the same build. To me, these traits might as well be incompatible. This is really counter-intuitive, and I don’t think this is what you intended. I assume the Stability from Perfectly Weighted is going to continue to be really unreliable, because I also assume you’re worried about giving Scrapper too much Stability. If I’m right about that, then I feel like Mass Momentum’s Might duration and interval need to be elongated so that it lines up with Perfectly Weighted’s cooldown. A bit more flexibility could, potentially, go a long way.

I’d also like to advocate you talking to whoever is responsible for the auras about having all of them stack in duration. They’re so short that I feel like using Rocket Charge in any of their fields is a waste compared to what Scrapper can get out of Lightning, Water, and Poison fields. I also think “auramancer” Elementalist builds are getting punished for little to no justification by making what auras did stack in duration no longer do so. Engineers and Elementalists alike would appreciate you speaking in our/their behalfs. And Mesmers, for that matter. In fact… do these aura duration stacking decisions have anything to do with why Superspeed was never made to stack duration? If so, this policy really needs to change.

Could someone please convince Colin that Druid, Scrapper, squad UI, and raids are not ready? This squad UI fiasco is making it really obvious you guys are too rushed right now. These things need some proper development and testing time, and Scrapper and Druid deserve to have more significant changes available to them (if needed) that the other elite specs have already benefited from. I’m not going to blame the programmers of the squad UI for this mess. I’m going to blame the release date and whoever is responsible for not pushing it back.

I’ve been reading a lot of the posts here, which alerted me to issues I had not yet noticed on my own and lead me to doing more testing and a lot more thinking. I’m hoping I’m making the better choice by making a new post instead of continuing to edit my own.

In a perfect world, by my perspective anyways, the support gyros would be converted into visual representations for effects pulsing off the Engineer. This would eliminate issues with response time, pathing, getting overly punished by cleave, and general longevity. It would make the gyros reliable, which is much easier to balance on the Scrapper side of things as well.
Also in a perfect world (my perspective):
Superspeed would be reworked so that it stacks in duration and provides a bigger speed boost than Swiftness even when out of combat.
Combo finishers would prioritize the user’s own fields regardless of when the field was placed. The former would make the traits related to Superspeed more reliable and useful and the latter would make the benefits of Rocket Charge easier to control.
Whirl Finishers would aim at nearby enemies/allies instead of shoot off uselessly in random directions.

Of course, this is not a perfect world, Heart of Thorns is releasing too early, and quick-fixes are far more likely to be implemented in time. Maybe Irenio can get some bigger changes implemented some time after launch, but I get the feeling the company is resistant to any mechanical changes that could in any way be described as “significant,” which means we’re probably going to get stuck with the quick-fixes either permanently or for a long time. As such, I’ll try to make suggestions on how to make Scrapper feel good without requiring anything too major.

Here’s a few gyro improvements that should be easy to test without needing a large playerbase do so:

• The gyros need at least +25% base movement speed, to make them harder to leave behind. Blast Gyro can be made an exception.
• The gyros need to have large enough AoEs to compensate for their sluggish response time while the Scrapper is on the move.
• The gyros need to have enough health/armor to survive one or two cleaves from a Reaper with Berserker stats. I’m assuming gyro’s armor and health do not scale to the Scrapper’s, and they need to be able to survive at least a short time despite their complete inability to avoid AoE and cleave damage. This goes especially for the Bulwark gyro. When it takes AoE/cleaving damage, it isn’t actually doing its job. Gravedigger seems like a good reference point to me to keep gyros from being invalidated in any particular gamemode.
• Seeing as how the Shredder Gyro itself is only particularly useful on a condi build (Scrapper and Engineer in general have plenty of sources of Vulnerability, making plopping this on a Lightning field redundant), I think it should be given some bleeding. Lacerations make sense, and it would be very difficult to choose the current Shredder Gyro over core condition skills even if whirl finishers weren’t bad. Speaking of, changing this thing to a projectile finisher would be an option for allowing it to be placed at a much safer distance at the cost of the Scrapper not benefiting directly from the field.
• Sneak Gyro needs to be able to build up 10 seconds of Stealth in 5 seconds to compete with Shadow Refuge for PvE content, and even then Sneak Gyro is a far more significant liability than Shadow Refuge when used mid-run in PvE. Waiting any longer before a run feels really bad. All it takes is 3 seconds of stealth applied each second, and Shadow Refuge will remain competitive thanks to its greater versatility. You can drop the duration of Sneak Gyro to compensate.

I might make another post later with ideas on how the traits could be made to function and feel better, but I think this is a long enough read for now.

I still think Medic Gyro’s mechanics are contradictory and that the cooldown shouldn’t depend on the gyro’s lifespan, but the healing over time is nicer than I was expecting and the gyro itself appears to be instant. I want to like it, but the cooldown is a big sticking point for me. I’d rather not be incentivized to blow it up or “punished” for keeping it alive. I realize that’s not how you look at it, but that’s kind of how it feels. That initial heal spike is more important than the heal over time in most situations, especially in parties with Druids, Guardians, or Centaur Stance Revenants, which is why there’s still that strong urge to explode it and shorten the cooldown even if people still need a bit of healing.

The Sneak Gyro is even more useless than I expected. We start out with Runes of the Traveler which the gyro cannot keep up with at all. The sad part is everything I could say about the Sneak gyro has been said already. It’s a little bit more terrible than I imagined. This skill can work. It’s got great potential, and it’s neat on paper, but two or three things NEED to happen to it.
It absolutely needs to follow the Engineer very tightly. It is too unreliable if it can’t stay glued to the Engineer. The surest thing to kill this skill will be unreliability. Of course, once it stays glued to the Engineer, we will have another problem where it’s too good at giving away the Engineer’s position to enemy players and is too likely to get the Engineer and/or allies hit in PvE. But that is the lesser of two evils here.
I’m not sure I can offer many solutions for the competitive game types, but this thing needs to be untargettable in PvE, or it needs an enormous effect range and stay at a very specific distance. It’s just too much of a liability right now even if the Engineer and friends do somehow manage to stay within the area of effect.
You made the recommendation on the reveal livestream to use it before a run similarly to how a Thief would use Shadow Refuge, but Shadow Refuge only takes 5 seconds. I think the golden ratio for standing under this thing is at 12 seconds. Players aren’t going to want to stand still for 12 seconds, or more, to charge up stealth. I would much rather use the typical Bomb Kit strategy for stealth. Smoke Bomb has a shorter cooldown and allies can help apply its stealth. If you want players to use this to charge up before a run, it needs to charge up its stealth faster so that we aren’t “waiting to have fun” for quite so long.

I love the Air Blast buff. I was a little sad at the Expert Examination nerf, but fair enough. It can still be strong. I don’t think the animation for Shock Shield quite syncs up with the blocking effect. Reconstruction Field and Defense Field spoiled me and now I want Chemical Field to follow me around too. Speaking of fields, is there ANY possibility of having combos prioritize fields you place even over fields that have been placed longer? That would help far more than just Scrappers, but it’s especially important for us. It’s too easy for allies to screw up our Rocket Charge combos in party situations, especially with fire fields being so popular for in-combat Might stacking.
The boons from Mass Momentum and Perfectly Weighted are too short for Perfectly Weighted to have any significant benefit, which leaves the trait in an extremely tiny albeit fun niche of augmenting Juggernaut. Don’t get me wrong, I really like having a Juggernaut tank build, but it feels a little too niche. A couple possibilities are increasing the Might duration and lengthening the interval for application to compensate or giving only one stability stack but reducing the cooldown so that the Stability can overlap if it doesn’t get pealed off.

Edit: It does feel like the autoattack chain has some awkward and obnoxious aftercasts, and I have to agree with others that the directional block and rooting of Shock Shield make it feel like it performs very poorly for a 20 second cooldown. How about having it not root us so we can chase a target and/or turn to face attacks?
I also think Impact Savant benefits the Scrapper too rarely. Dazes are kind of common, but Stuns are really rare, especially coming from the Scrapper itself. I can only think of four Stuns throughout the entirety of Engineer, and I don’t think +25% and -25% duration is too much for both effects seeing as how neither are ever very long. Players should be plenty capable of countering at least the second half of the Thunderclap and Rocket Charge combo once they see how it works, even if the Daze duration is made to benefit from Impact Savant.

Edit 2: Just noticed the Air Blast “buff” is only on the tooltip and its behavior hasn’t actually been improved at all. I’m hoping this tooltip shows an intended future change as that would be rather nice.
The more I use Rocket Charge, the more obnoxious its large cast time feels. In that cast time, a lot of things about the combat situation can change. Shorter duration fields, such as ones from Mortar Kit, might fade before the third leap can trigger. This skill seems intimidating, but the fact that it occurs in three parts means players can react more easily to the second and third leaps. I don’t think the cast time needs to be as long as it is. So very sorry. Turns out I was experiencing skill lag due to player density. It felt fine once the crowd went elsewhere/dispersed.

Chazz.6709:

Your minion idea sounds fun , but QQ in pvp for sure …. PVP AND PVE have to be 2 diffrent systems … in my opinion …

That idea was meant exclusively for PvE anyways. I don’t PvP and kind of assumed the NPCs in PvP either aren’t designated Champions or wreck minions in seconds like PvE Champion creatures do.

archmagus.7249:

I run the med kit. Yeah the kit itself is junk, but the tool belt skill is good. A heal twice as good as the healing turret, and (when traited) a static discharge and vigor. If you got kinetic battery, you can pop it twice in a row when you dodge. I just wish it would get the recharge reduction from mechanized activation.

As for the kit itself, you get 20s of swiftness and a projectile reflect for a few seconds when you swap to it with streamlined kits. Only bad part is there’s no Condi cleanse on it.

Engineers in PvE almost always immediately (in my experience) have the turret use Cleansing Burst the moment it is deployed, which results in a slightly larger total heal than Bandage Self. The comparison only gets more unfavorable from there.
(Bandage Self heals 4920 with a coefficient of 1.0. Healing Turret + Cleansing Burst heal for a combined 5040 with a combined coefficient of 1.0.)
Half of Healing Turret’s heal is an AoE, and it removes 2 conditions and gives Regeneration on all allies it effects. If Mechanized Activation worked with Bandage Self, that would only have a faster cooldown by 0.55 seconds, which isn’t enough considering the kit skills are terrible. Healing Turret has a longer cooldown to wait on to benefit from Optimized Activation and Static Discharge, but it can also benefit from Experimental Turrets for 3 seconds of Vigor compared to Optimized Activation’s 2 seconds. This means Bandage Self’s only advantages over Healing Turret are Kinetic Battery and Streamlined Kits. Both of those traits could be used on other skills, and both of those traits could accidentally be put on cooldown by other skills. I used to use Med Kit too, before the Specialization update came and removed Drop Bandages and the newly combined and renamed Streamlined Kits was made to no longer proc Invigorating Speed. This is why it’s so important for the kit itself to be made useful.

I imagine my opinions here are going to get a bit of hate since I’m asking for a particular skill to be nerfed, but I think there’s a pretty glaring balance issue when a vast majority of Engineer builds run the same healing skill and most other skills are never used. I don’t even see Elixir H used on HGH builds. That’s ridiculous.
So, here is what I think should be done with each of Engineer’s heals.

Healing Gyro is rendered crap by the fact that its cooldown is dependent on the Gyro’s lifespan. Even if this behavior is not removed for any of the other Gyros, I’m pretty sure all Scrappers will be thankful if the Healing Gyro’s cooldown is made to start immediately, even if that means removing the Scrapper’s ability to activate a self-destruct. No, we haven’t been able to test this skill yet, but its issue is already quite obvious. That’s a 42 second cooldown if it isn’t blown up early. That’s even more counterintuitive than Healing Turret, and in a way that punishes instead of rewards. This has nothing to offer over the similar-in-function Healing Turret and the similar-in-cooldown A.E.D..

A.E.D. seems to me to be slightly unreliable. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but my experiences have lead me to believe that “the damage is negated” is misleading. I believe that simultaneous damage sources are able to get around the damage negation as I’ve had times where A.E.D. didn’t quite perform as expected when up against Subject Alpha. Additionally, there are some extremely powerful attacks in dungeons that seem to down me even when A.E.D. is active, or it just heals far less than I expected as if the attack cuts into the healing. It takes some experimentation to learn when it’s safe to utilize A.E.D. and when it is not. Besides the occasional inconsistency, though, I think this healing skill is extremely good at its particular niche. I do wish Static Shock would behave differently, though. Utilizing auto-targeting and canceling instead of going on cooldown if the target is out of range, for example.

Elixir H is okay in its cooldown and base amount. Its position will be improved if Healing Turret is nerfed slightly. It does have a problem with its boons, though. Obviously some reliability would make it a lot better, but if the devs insist on some randomness, then it still has a problem in that it gives Swiftness instead of Vigor. I can only imagine the Swiftness is intended to help the Engineer run out of AoEs before they hit, but many AoEs in high end PvE content are too big for Swiftness to be sufficient, and Engineer already has a lot of Swiftness sources already. Swiftness is an extremely disappointing result in combat compared to Protection or Regeneration. I would like to see Swiftness changed to Vigor, which would make it fit better with the effects of Toss Elixir H, or changed to Super Speed which would more effectively help the Engineer flee AoEs and cannot be maintained quite like Swiftness can. I expect Super Speed is a little too good in combination with Scrapper, so Vigor seems like the better choice. That said, I want to reiterate that reliability, one boon I can expect every time I use it, would be even better.

Healing Turret is pretty silly in its current implimentation. Turrets, ideally, should be something Engineers keep out to provide support over time in combat. Let’s ignore for the moment that they, like every other minion in the game, are rendered useless by the absurd spike damage sprinkled throughout dungeons. Healing Turret has two problems unique to it. By picking it up after overcharging it, Healing Turret gains the best cooldown out of all of Engineer’s healing skills: 15 seconds. Because this is the same cooldown as Cleansing Burst, that leads to the turret’s other problem: There is no incentive for leaving the turret on the field. I believe the solution to both of these problems is to give the turret a 28 second cooldown. When picking up the turret, that would result in a much more fair (compared to Engineer’s other healing skills) 21 second cooldown, and it becomes more desirable to leave the turret on the field when party support is more important than self-healing.
As for the problem all turrets (and for that matter all minions and pets) face, I think the solution is fairly simple. Give minions incoming damage resistance and/or a damage ceiling from enemies higher rank than Elite. That would prevent enemies like Subject Alpha from rendering them completely useless.

Med Kit is useless in its current implementation. You can find the reasons all over the Engineer section of the forums, so I won’t beat a dead horse here, but I desperately want developers to realize the problem is with the pickups. Turn them into PBAoEs, modified copies of Med Blast, or really anything more reliable than what they are right now.

Edit: Fixed a few typos.

I like Scrapper quite a lot, which surprised me as my current Engineer build is very strained already. I’m reluctant to sacrifice any of my current traits, but Scrapper seems worth it. There’s some problems, however, that I’m not seeing you address.

I’m not going to use a heal with an effective 44 second cooldown, and if I’m hoping it dies early then there’s absolutely no reason not to use Healing Turret instead and continue either picking it up or self destructing it each time.

Sneak Gyro is completely useless in PvE. It cannot reliably and successfully follow me during a run. The livestream made that obvious. I’m assuming it will pull aggro, which will cause me or my party members to get hit when enemies try to attack it, putting us into combat and slowing us down. It was said in the livestream, if I remember correctly, that we can just wait while the Stealth charges up and then wait more while the Super Speed from a trait charges up. So… we are supposed to stand still for 30 seconds for stealth then let a good chunk of our stealth bleed away while we wait more seconds for the full Superspeed length? Shadow Refuge only takes 5 seconds, can be used on the run without pulling aggro, and heals with the only drawback being Revealed if you leave it early. Sneak Gyro needs to be useful either to prepare for a run or during a run, and right now it sounds pretty agonizing in either case.

In Meet the Scrapper, it was said: “the specialization traits were built to emphasize three overarching goals: sustainable survivability, concentrated lockdown, and mobile stability.”
This, strangely enough, is not at all the case. Don’t get me wrong, I like most of the traits, but this claim doesn’t seem to be true. We do have “sustainable survivability” in Recovery Matrix, Expert Examination, and Adaptive Armor, but where’s the “concentrated lockdown”? Where’s the “mobile stability”?

Stabilization Core can give us Stability, but this is only really useful in PvP. In PvE, very few enemies in the game have a downed state, the beta weekend events don’t appear to add any either, so the only time that would become relevant is to get a dose of Stability when reviving a party member. I’ve seen nothing in the BWEs yet that indicates to me this is something that will be in any way needed outside of a couple extremely niche encounters. So… what does that trait have to do with mobile Stability? Mass Momentum is related to Stability, but it aids neither mobility nor Stability. Finally we have Perfectly Weighted which gives us Stability on a successful evade. I guess that qualifies for the term “mobile Stability”? That one trait is hardly meets an “overarching goal” by itself, though.

The claim of “concentrated lockdown” seems especially bizarre to me as the only possibility I can think of is Shocking Speed, Rapid Regeneration, and Final Salvo encouraging us to use Rocket Charge as often as possible in the hopeful abundance of lightning fields. These traits don’t meet the supposed “overarching goal.” They just encourage something the hammer skills are already able to do, and once again only a single trait actually facilitates this goal in any way.

All that said, I don’t think the stated goals are all that important so long as the traits have some synergy and do some useful and interesting things. Ignoring the weirdness of this seemingly false claim, most of the traits are actually pretty desirable and neat. I’m having a hard time deciding on a build, and that is a good thing. A couple things do bother me, though.

As I mentioned Stabilization Core is only really useful in PvP and, depending on the situation, in WvW. Often times, the massive battles or the nature of encounters between roamers will make the Function Gyro kind of pointless, which in turn makes this trait also kind of pointless. Meanwhile in PvP, the trait is absolutely amazing to the point that a Scrapper would have to be out of his/her mind to take either of the other two traits. Seems more than a little lopsided to me.

Final Salvo seems a little disappointing to me as a grandmaster trait. On its own, it only really gives you Super Speed as a consolation for losing a gyro, and can allow you to use the Rocket Charge daze combo again before Thunderclap finishes cooling down. Of course in many situations, we can probably assume the field is NOT going to be on the enemy which means we probably aren’t going to get the full potency of the combo. This trait is pretty great when used in combination with Rapid Regeneration, but I can’t help but feel like these traits are only really great when taken together. Another claim in Meet the Scrapper is: “There is some strong synergy potential and stacking combinations between a few of these traits, but each trait also stands on its own.” That is clearly not the case here. Super Speed is just not useful enough on its own to save this trait, especially when many Engineer builds are already used to permanent Swiftness while in combat.

I suppose it makes some degree of sense that you cannot change how the event works in the middle of the actual event at this point without causing problems, but there is one quick-fix I can think of that I can’t for the life of me figure why it can’t be done. For the individual participation awards, slot in liquid karma, bags of coins, and writs of experience. There, bang, some normal gameplay rewards. It doesn’t fix the myriad of other issues, but at least it fixes that one significant problem, and new players can actually get a little character progression in while doing this, assuming they don’t get disconnected.