Guild Wars 2

Doesn’t do that either though Blaine, remaining in shroud as a condi necro plummets your dps, Reaper has done very little to change this. Not dissing you, that may well be the idea behind it, but it fails if it is.
It only seemed slightly better at first because RS applies it a bit faster and on a cleave, giving some nice extra AoE condi-burst.
Unfortunately the most challenging content is almost always the one where you’re hitting a single target and/or high HP damage sponges, so it doesn’t actually ‘fix’ condi-shroud there either.

My pie-in-the-sky dream is still that they’ll just scrap Dumbfire altogether (let everyone else spam fire, necro too cool for that baby) and give condi necros a somewhat unique and viable trait for extra condi-pressure in Shroud.

They actually did something unique and cool with ‘deathly chill’, unfortunately it does very little for shroud and has a bunch of it’s own issues still (give everyone ‘limitless’ condition stacks, give necros another damaging condition that doesn’t stack … yeah, thanks for that).

There’s only 2 ways in which I see prolonged shroud use working for condi:

1: Much longer condi applications on whatever trait gets put on the AA. The cheapest fix imo.

2: A trait that allows you to increase the duration of existing conditions when you AA something in shroud.

Or perhaps just look at the class with technically the most similar mechanic: necros (who also get a new skillset when they fill up a bar).
Give a % of CAF generation to certain skills, now you can balance the thing skill by skill and not run into these unforeseen “supergenerating” builds.

Added on that you can also give a small (a lot smaller than it is now) extra percentage of CAF generation per heal, like necros get per kill.

It’s not the most novel mechanic, but it works; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The point is it’s an extra annoyance for no good reason.
Of course you get better at it as you practice, but it will always be an extra button to push which takes you out of the flow of legend switching that is supposed to be what the class is all about.

This isn’t a l2p issue, it’s a : “why does the game want to annoy me?” -issue, there is just no reason for it not to insta-summon.
GW2 has always been very good about avoiding pointless annoyances so many MMOs are inundated with, this should be no different.

Let’s assume they fix that for a moment, it isn’t enough to make Ventari a worthwhile legend.
Apart from projectile blocking with Protective Solace (and giving a light field with it as well) Ventari offers too little tactical options imo, it’s just healing and some more healing and oh … a little more healing.
It needs some interesting boon application to make it an attractive choice; I think it needs access to either Aegis or Retaliation through just a utility or a trait upgrading a utility perhaps.
For PvP I’d rather have Retaliation but for PvE I’d choose Aegis.
I’m thinking short duration (2 seconds?) on either Natural Harmony or Ventari’s Will.

I just can’t imagine using ventari for anything but a lark until they make the tablet insta-spawn when you switch to the legend.
The legend isn’t really active without the tablet anyway so I don’t understand why I have to summon it as well.

It goes completely against the class mechanic and is just annoying for no reason as is.

Malchior.5732:

You’d have the exact same complaint with the vanilla classes too. Why did so many Elementalists take Fire/Air/Arcana or Water with Ice Bow and Glyph of Storms while wielding a Staff? High DPS, decent enough survivability for PvE, easy to use, and almost everything else was garbage in comparison.

The difference here would be it took time for people to discover all the complexities the classes offered and see the potential D/D ele for instance had.
This is highly unlikely to happen for the Revenant, since that complexity just isn’t there.
Balancing for other classes was always influenced by the experimentation of the players (despite what some people seem to think, the devs have always been fairly on the ball with these things, not as fast as some would hope though).

By limiting Revenant so extremely this experimentation can’t happen and so basically they designed a class they will have to balance almost 100% themselves.

It’s not that other classes are or ever were perfectly balanced, there are always utilities and traitlines under performing, but with the Revenant as it stands they magnified that issue.
Simply adding an extra utility choice to each legend would help a lot, instead of hoping Revenant will somehow be the first class were they magically balance everything.

Griffith.7238:

Look just above your post I literally just shattered the logic of everyone for it. “There’s no build variety with the Rev” bull kitten. Secondly, I never said I was against it just that it wasn’t necessary and it isn’t. Doesn’t matter anyway they won’t add anymore at least not til post HoT Launch. They will continue to work on the functionality of their current utilities for the time being. They spent years working on the other classes they are months away from HoT launch. They are not going to add new utilities in the hopes that by some divine miracle they can balance them in a few months. They still have to balance the current kit and convert things to work underwater you think they are gonna add more skills … nope.

“shattered” may be a bit of a stretch when your main comparison for utilities was just ‘D/P thief can’t viably use a bunch of the utilities for the class’.
Despite that I don’t even agree with your premise (which is only true in the strictest interpretation of any meta), even if there were so few viable utilities for most classes, people were able to choose those utilities and make balanced, well rounded builds getting the most out of their class after months or even years of experimentation.

You’re basically saying all that in game work people did with picking and testing very specific utility combinations will now be done almost completely by the devs for the revenant.
Devs which do great work on overall balance imo, but they’re not flawless and they don’t need this extra micro-management balancing act this one class forces them to do.

sebradle.7034:

Snafoo.2869:

Arkantos.7460:

Rev has 2times more utility then other classes- yes- use it wisely ^^

Engineer says hello.
I can’t help but think this every time people say this, and they say it a lot.

You found one exception does that refute his point for the other 7 professions.

It refutes this idea some people seem to have it’s somehow ok to give Revenant sub-par utilities because they get more.
Engineer had a lot of crappy toolbelt skills at start as well; did toss elixir B not deserve stability because it’s ‘extra’, did the toolbelt for slick shoes not need the stunbreak because the engineer already has 9 other utilities? No.

It proves that a profession can have ‘extra’ utilities as a core mechanic and also have choice without being overpowered.

Arkantos.7460:

Rev has 2times more utility then other classes- yes- use it wisely ^^

Engineer says hello.
I can’t help but think this every time people say this, and they say it a lot.

GS and RS issues have been mentioned, so I’m just reacting to the most underwhelming part of the reaper here: shouts.

A general problem is they scale completely from enemies hit, making them extremely underwhelming when fighting 1-2 enemies.
The Cooldown trait as well, should have a baseline of at least 10% reduction, 5% added for each enemy hit perhaps (with the current power of shouts that wouldn’t be a problem imo).

Most of all the activation times are just so long, I suppose this is all in-keeping with the ‘slow devestating reaper’ theme, but it’s completely opposite to what other shouts are.
Both warrior’s and guardian’s are nigh instant, they promote a very fast reactive frontline playstyle. This isn’t possible with reaper shouts, they are just too slow and easily interrupted.

The fact they do damage has been said to be another reason for the long activation times, but apart from the elite the damage is pitiful tbh, even compared to most auto-attacks.
I mean even the stunbreak has a 3/4 second activation, not being instant sort of defeats the purpose of a stunbreak. Beyond that it’s actually the best out of all the shouts imo, if it were instant I might actually use it, even if the cooldown was increased to 30-40 seconds.

I’d very much like to see a second trait in the reaper line buffing shouts as well to make the traitline look a bit more alluring. Possibly a grandmaster to replace deathly chill, which atm is so weak it might as well be folded into chilling force or chilling nova.

unlucky.9285:

Iavra.8510:

Reaper’s Shroud is very much the only reason why you are going Reaper, currently. Making it baseline would make the specialization kinda useless.

and there we have it the trait line is useless and offers nothing good the entire problem with it. if it was good you would take it even if rs was baseline

+1, Giving up Blood magic was a painful decision to make (especially now that I’m in melee even more) and I’m still not sure it’s worth it in the long run.
Dropping either Spite or Soul Reaping makes RS too weak/hard to sustain and since RS is basically the entire reason for going reaper …

If shouts weren’t so godawful and they got one or two decent traits, reaper would be looking a lot more tempting.

GS2 : I’d much rather see the cast-time reduced (by 80 or even just 50%) when used on targets below 50% hp than the CD. 5 sec CD doesn’t need reduction imo.
I wouldn’t mind the CD being 8 or even 10 seconds if the cast-time was reduced.

GS5 : simply doesn’t work, I mean it does something, but not something that’s of any use as is.
Pie-in-the-sky hope is it gets some kind of mobility.
Realistically I’d be content if you could pre-aim it, it had a tad more range and it worked consistently.

Ventari heal bothers me even more than Shiro tbh.
Yes it’s AoE healing, but that’s all you do; you’re basically giving up all your utility and what you end up with is marginally better than an engi turret and worse than ele water staff.
Protective solace is nice though, albeit quite situational, and an energy glutton like all the channels.

Just ask yourself this: if Revenant had access to 3 or even all 4 legends all the time, would he be OP?
It might put him on par with something like a d/d ele imo.

I’m not at all saying they should give revenant access to more than 2 legends, that’s just how UP his utilities (coupled with the energy mechanic) are imo.

My suggestion for gravedigger:
When the enemy is under 50%, reduce the skill activation by 50%, or even to 1/2 second.

Scrap the CD reduction, at 5 seconds it’s already a very low CD skill and really just replacing auto-attack spam with gravedigger spam isn’t terribly exciting (plus, I can’t imagine this is intended, since you would lose out on the chill from the auto-attack as well).

Kidel.2057:

Shiro has a stunbreak. Stunbreak on swap is an extra one. I only use when I have no energy (that happens a lot fast with shiro)

Exactly, Shiro has a stunbreak … the only stunbreak for the entire class outside of the jalis elite (which is a death sentence in most situations tbh).
In other words, doing any sort of pvp makes Shiro as good as indispensable.

Think of it this way: you’re in a fight, you need energy, you’re in Shiro stance, you switch to whatever your second stance is … you are now a sitting duck to anyone that has a clue about Revenant stances.

Kidel.2057:

I literally NEVER wait time for energy. Just legendswap. It gives you instant 50% back for a reason, so you are able to “affect” energy.

I would agree if legendswap wasn’t also one of our only stunbreakers (traited).
Give me a stunbreak in Jalis (that isn’t a 50 energy suicide elite) or mallyx and I might be ok with it.

Valfaros.6908:

Additional rev really needs some condiremovel.

I actually find Revenant has a fairly decent amount of anti-condition options. Some removal, not a huge amount but Jalis heal, eluding nullification, purifying essence; there are options.
The real anti-condi power for revenant isn’t so much in removal as it is in resistance and going into mallyx and corruption you can actually get quite a lot of it.

Energy-wise I’m also not a fan though; it isn’t far off from where it should be, but as it is now I just don’t see what the upside is of having to deal with this extra mechanic.
It’s not like a thief that can just choose between blowing it all in a huge burst or go for more sustained dps.
At the moment it mostly makes me feel like there’s some utilities I will just never use and forcing me to blow one of our only stunbreakers (switch legend) to regain energy feels like too high a price.

Energy management feels a bit off, as has been mentioned I also feel the fact it’s just a completely passive effect is a problem.
You should be able to affect the regen in some way, make it somewhat tactical instead of just a timegated hindrance.

Other than that imo most of the heals are too weak for their cooldown. I’d like to see the cooldowns be brought down to 20 sec or even 15 and the energy they cost increased to compensate.

I don’t dislike legend switching being a staple of the class in and of itself, my problem with it though is Revenant doesn’t get many stunbreakers; which is why I always run with invocation (minor grandmaster turns legend switching into a stunbreaker).

I don’t want to feel forced to use one of my very few stunbreakers on cooldown.

Slightly off topic: it feels generally nigh impossible to make a decent build without traiting invocation, a serious weakness in the class design imo.

Adding it on staff 5 would it make it a very bloated skill though. It already forces you to move, add torment on that and that is some crazy burst potential.
Not that there aren’t other bloated skills in game though

Personally I’d like rather weak (short, few stacks) application, but on a low’ish cooldown, so we can keep it up without getting insane, medi guard burn like burst from it.

Angel de Lyssa.4716:

The necro inflict many conditions, and now that goal more confusion and torment, it would broken.

The necro inflicts less conditions than most other condition builds and no one is asking for more confusion, that isn’t at all what the thread is about and you seem to be the one pushing that idea.
Torment being his signature condition, like confusion being that of the mesmer, makes so much sense from both a thematic point of view as simple mechanics (wasn’t necro supposed to be the immobile death machine you couldn’t run away from?) that it’s mind-boggling they decided to give mesmers better access to it as well.

There’s been a lot of good suggestions in this thread already, my basic ideas:

1. Scrap dhuumfire as it is and replace it with decent torment application, they obviously don’t want necro to have decent fire pressure and tbh I don’t blame them, it doesn’t fit.
Alternative: Dread Visage ; Apply torment to everyone near (5 target cap of course) on a set interval when in death shroud. Short duration, but hitting them with your #1 increases duration.

2. Torment of the still ; Switches the effect of torment, so min damage is applied when the target is moving and max damage when it’s standing still.
This is mostly a possible fix to make torment more viable in PvE (where condi necro struggles the most imo), but offers some interesting options PvP (rooting someone in a torment burst for instance), which is why I’d probably add it as a master trait in curses, as an alternative to terror.

Beyond that I’d most like to see torment added to the #3 on scepter as was already suggested. It’s just such an awkward weapon set atm and really needs that extra little oomph to be a go-to condition weapon.

McFribble.2349:

Hey everyone!

I threw this together and played around with it (while also looking at some of the suggested builds above). What do you guys think about it?

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQJAqenUISbX23FmYBrXGhtQG54wgeTnMf8QAA-TJhAwA62fQzJAYcZAAPAAA

AED may look interesting on paper, but it is honestly our worst heal still.
Seeing as how you lack any condi-cleanse you pretty much need to take healing turret to at least give you some.

I would try to focus more on a specific role.
If it’s damage, I prefer rifle for it’s burst and ability to lock people down for a grenade burst (also you basically need grenadier as has been said if you want to go that route).

If it’s more defensive/hybrid, bomb kit and/or EG are a good route, but you’d be better served by the alchemy or inventions line.

Needs to be on the scepter.
Scepter is supposedly the go-to condi-weapon, but it only applies damaging condis on 1 out of 3 skills; and the AA isn’t even that good at applying them.

Re-balance some of the fearing, although I’d balance nightmare runes before messing with necro skills/traits, and rework the #3 on scepter to give a nice torment burst (similar to #3 for mesmer scepter, but torment instead of confusion).

I run a more hybrid oriented build with similar utilities and I prefer [fireforged trigger] over [hair trigger], ’cause I find myself using the EG like 80% of the time anyway and getting more [super elixirs] is always great (since condition cleaning remains a weakness).

The global cooldown.
The effects needed tweaking (although I do believe some are too weak atm, mostly because of the very short durations), but adding a global 20 seconds cooldown to a merely ok proc is extremely harsh if you compare it to almost anything similar in GW2.

They should have definitely moved the trait up the tree; the Grandmaster and even most Master traits in Tools are very poor tbh.
Considering it was such a staple in some very focused and unique builds this could have forced some interesting choices, instead they just removed the choice altogether.

Where is engineer versatility supposed to come from?
In my mind Kits mostly, well this trait actively motivated you to expand your choices by carrying multiple kits and/or switching freely between them.
Now it doesn’t.

Siege has a problem imo, especially defensive siege: it’s too ineffective. In reality siege is a battle changer and in this game it should be as well.
Now that catapults have been ‘fixed’ (which is a good thing overall I’d say, it was cheesy as it was) defending a structure is a fools errand. The only thing that really matters is having a big enough zerg and if you do, you’re better off exciting the tower/keep and fighting outside.

In reality sieging an upgraded structure is a battle of attrition, supplies are paramount. In WvW upgrades are merely a speedbump to large groups and supplies are only useful to finish some siege if you forgot to place some before the attack and maybe repair a bit (rarely).

The suggestion:
- Defensive siege should be harder to kill than it is even now (or very hard to hit at the least), do more damage and the people using it should not be able to be hit (even by AoE).
> But that’s completely OP, how can you balance that?
- Defensive siege uses supplies to fire.

Perhaps offensive siege should be somewhat more effective, but use supplies to fire as well (with the exception of rams and golems).

Oil, cannons (perhaps add integrated Arrow carts to an upgrade), these should be things to be feared, not just something that slows you down for 30 seconds while you nuke them.
Having supplies ready and getting more should be vital to defense, not just a thing of convenience.

Why do I suggest this?
- Defense is weak, very weak compared to Offense atm. I am talking about defensive tactics here, not the fact you are fighting near a structure your server owns. Upgrades are but a minor inconvenience to attackers and there is virtually no way to stop or even significantly slow down a large force other than being an equally large force, running out and attacking them in the ‘open’.

- There is just not that much tactics going on when assaulting a structure with a large force atm, beyond “not getting orange swords”.
You decide which gate to hit and then throw everything with a pulse at it.
The only thing that sort of matters is speed, because the only thing that somewhat harms you is if the other side brings a bigger/better zerg.

- There is a huge gap between the haves and the have-nots in WvW; some classes are just vastly more effective at sieging than others. This change would allow more people to be significant in these battles.

- Supply lines aren’t very important beyond getting a few dolyaks in to finish upgrading walls and gates, to slow attackers down slightly during the day and for the full repair during prime time (the full repair is a very cheesy side-effect of upgrading as well imo).
Especially during prime time camps are all about flipping them every 5 minutes to stock up and get the ‘tick’.

P.S.: I fully realize this is mostly a ‘pie-in-the-sky’ idea, in that it would be a fairly big change and probably takes more effort than A-net can/is willing to invest in this atm.
P.P.S: This is coming from someone that’s on Desolation [EU] and has been ‘trapped’ in Tier 1 for many weeks/months now, perhaps it’s different in other tiers but in ours the blob rules all and keeps and towers (upgraded or not) often flip colors so fast the map looks like a disco at prime time.

As long as there is no real tactical disadvantage to massive blobs (and no: skill-lag doesn’t count as a tactical disadvantage :p ) you won’t get rid of them. The risk vs. reward is just too much in favor of zergs for most people.
The irony is that the culling fix we were all waiting for and many thought would help smaller groups actually promotes zerging even more.

The maps aren’t really that big, travel times are quite low and anyone has the ability to rez anyone at any time.
These things would need to be looked at to seriously impact the potential of a zerg, but since that would take a huge rework I think a straight debuff when X amount of allies are near, however cheesy it sounds, is the only feasible way to impact zerging significantly.
Buffing/reworking siege (especially defensive siege) might help a bit as well.

I haven’t used my (fairly similar) SD build in months tbh. From a WvW perspective anyway it just doesn’t offer enough.

It’s all about that big opening burst, but even as a glass cannon it won’t be big enough to outright kill decent players/defensive builds and after you’ve blown your load you really have no recourse but to kite and hope they don’t focus on you.

It’s ok for bursting on other glass cannons, but an HgH confusion stacking build will do that just as well with far less danger to you, and for gibbing lowbies and nubs, but any decent build can do that really.

I am just very disappointed they apparently only looked at 1 trait instead of the traitline as a whole; the Tools traitline blows.

KR needed work (some effects, like an extra Grenade barrage, where too powerful), but why nerf it this hard instead of tweaking it slightly and moving it up the line?
They could have made it so people had to make meaningful choices like: do I want to go 30 in Explosives or 30 in Tools? Looking at balance as a whole and opening up more varied builds.
Instead they started out ok by tweaking some effects and then completely nullified that effort by making most effects so short they’re almost pointless, adding a ridiculous global cooldown and having them activate out of combat.

Another missed opportunity.

For everyone raving about the KR medkit now gets: it is not 5 seconds, from what I saw it’s closer to 2 seconds (and of course it pops and starts the CD even if you switch to it out of combat).

Apart from that some nice buffs, although mostly on paper because in practice this patch does very little to open up more builds or make us more versatile (it might in fact nerf more builds than it buffs even).

I appreciate some of the effects where too powerful and understand why they changed them (not sure why a grenade kit would drop a mine though?).

That said: they should have just moved the trait up to Master or Grandmaster level instead of giving it this ridiculous GCD, since one of the main issues with this traitline that is supposed to increase our versatility most is that it doesn’t actually offer any decent traits for it beyond Adept.

20 seconds globally is rather horrendous considering it pops even out of combat (so if you want to quickly drink that Stimulant for some speed: 20 second CD on all effects …) and the effects really aren’t that good now.
For instance the magnetic aura said medkit now gives, while a lot better than what it used to do, seems to last for an amazing 2 seconds and dropping a single mine or getting superspeed aren’t exactly game-changers either.

Most of all though it goes directly against one of the basic designs behind the engineer and this trait specifically: Switching kits is supposed to be the source of all that versatility we get, because you know: we give up utility slots for them and a secondary weapon.
This trait now stops you from actively switching kits and makes using multiple kits a liability in many situations.

tl;dr: Move this trait up to Master or even Grandmaster level, remove the Global cooldown and/or reduce the cooldown to 10 seconds, that way it actually does what it’s supposed to do.

Some people have touched on weakness being so … well, weak. Compared to defensive boons like protection it is rather terrible.
There is a lot of focus on keeping up buffs like protection and regeneration as much as possible for defensive builds, whereas keeping up weakness is nice if it happens, but nobody really focuses on it.

Basically: weakness should reduce crit chance, since crit chance (and the synergy with +crit damage) is such a large part of bursting in GW2 it’s rather odd that arguably the main defensive condition doesn’t affect this at all.

It wouldn’t just be a buff to necros, but it would help the necro most and go a long way towards him being the corrupting (conditioning) defense/attrition monster it’s supposed to be. As well as making him slightly more useful for support.

This is not so much a bug as an exploit so I am not certain if this is the correct place to post it.
I am doing so because the issue involves being unable to target players, so I could not report them the proper way (I did however file a bug report in game as well).

Today there were multiple players (at least 2 that I could tell) in the WvW map Seafarer’s rest Borderlands that were inside the ground of the map.
Because of this we could neither see them nor target or hit them, they however could hit us and any object or NPC.
They destroyed multiple siege items inside Redlake tower in this manner and killed quite a few Dolyaks and players.
The exploit persisted for at least an hour and dozens of people were witness to it.

I did report one of the players (an elementalist) when I was lucky enough to see him exciting the ground finally in Redwater supply camp. I reported him for “scamming” since I didn’t see an option for ‘wallhacks’ or something similar.
The other player (a thief judging from the skills he used) I could not identify.

When my engineer picks up a bundle and then enters the water, it disappears.
I have noticed this happening twice now:

- 1 : In the flame temple tombs event chain in Diessa Plateau. You have to pick up a sword bundle (replaces your skills with those of a sword/sword warrior) and afterwards you swim down to the next room.
This works fine on my elementalist, but when I did the event later in the week on my engineer the bundle vanishes as I enter the water.

- 2 : In Fireheart Rise to assist Engineer Verutum you pick up a tar cleaner bundle. Again when my engineer did so and he entered the water, the bundle was dropped and vanished.

I assume this is to do with the fact and engineer automatically switches out of his kit when entering the water, however in the case of a bundle it also disappears when this happens.

I’ll start by echo’ing that it’s a very thorough suggestion, but I can’t imagine Anet would want to do a complete rework of this magnitude.

I do still love to play my engineer, but as so many others was very disappointed at first when my expectations of “turret dropping mr gadget” turned out to be an illusion.
It’s not right that the class now mostly revolves around elixirs/kits; arguably the least ‘engineerish’ abilities we get.

As far as turrets go the main 2 issues imo are:
- the targeting: reworking them to be almost exactly like ranger pets is not my first choice though. Just having them always target what I am targeting would go a long way already.
- the cooldowns: simply too long for a completely immobile pet that dies very quickly as well. At least reduce or completely remove the cooldown even if you pick up the turret.

Even the people defending the FT must see that “but it’s fun” vs. “it may yield more damage, but it’s boring and annoying” is not a great way to balance weapons.

A lot of people here seem to be rather prejudiced against bombs/nades simply because they are just bad gameplay design (i.e. 5 skills that are technically exactly the same is not fun), which I can relate to; it’s the main reason I don’t use them anymore.

I suppose Anet thinks this is mitigated by the fact we can just switch in and out to use a single skill, so you’re not forced to stay in a boring weapon.
If that’s the logic though we’re not just getting a utility tax and a damage tax because of kits, but a ‘fun tax’ as well.
How much should a class get taxed because they get 1 second weapon switching?

That’s been my experience as well: where in the past (before the march patch) I would get skill lag only in the most extreme situations, Stonemist siege with 100+ people participating, it now happens at the most random moments as well.

Only in prime time it seems, so the overall load must have something to do with it, but I can be in a area of the map fighting with only a few people (less than 10) and almost certainly no zergs around the corner and suddenly it will still take 4-5 seconds easily for my skills to fire.
The worst I’ve seen since the game went live, frankly it’s made WvW nearly unplayable for me.

The Gates Assassin.9827:

_If you jump while switching kits, you do not use the spell and, thus, do not waste it.

Is everyone certain this is the case? Because when I tested it with the FT it seemed the effect did not happen when jumping, but the global cooldown was actually still triggered.

As far as being dead goes; I haven’t thought so for a second. Our problem is the same problem you always see with class balance: There are other classes that can do similar things with seemingly more ease.
They did show they’re paying attention to kits and although it wasn’t perfect they did some very nice work last patch (the EG and FT reworks show they’re working with a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer imo, which is promising).

I’d say the first thing that needs to happen is for them to decide what kind of weapon the FT is to be: Condition, Power or Crowd Control? Because atm it falls short of each and only works limited as a damage dealer through sigils/food (to a much lesser extent since they fixed omnoms) or very situational use.

The auto-attack simply doesn’t do enough direct damage to be on par and only the #2 benefits from power otherwise.

Condition-wise it’s already slightly gimped by only applying burn as a damaging condition (not counting traits/sigils for a moment, since they still work better with traited pistols imo) and simply not applying it constantly enough.
The changes made last patch remedy this somewhat and are good to see, but not to the extent of being necessary or even on par in a true condition build.

The toolbelt just gives a very slight bit of extra burning on a rather long cooldown, the weakest toolbelt skill for any kit by far imo.

Personally I think they should make it more of a CC kit again, like it was in beta. We have a fair share of damaging kits already.

- FT#2: add some form of CC, either a daze or perhaps a fear (send your foes fleeing with a burning ball of hot lava?).

- FT#3: knockback is decent, but reducing the blowout distance might be good; no engie wants to push their enemy too far on a condition build.

- FT#5: increase the range or make it a short but persistent field (or both). A single melee ranged blind (hitting more than one enemy is rare with that range) with no damage or any other effect is a bit weak for a skill.

I think the real problem here is: we don’t have enough hobo gear!
I’ve been trying to complete my hobo look for months now, and some of the crafted gear looks almost shoddy enough to match it, but it still doesn’t quite capture that urine stained essence of the hobo sack.

You switch to staff for the utility;
- #2 gives regeneration
- #3 chills, poisons and gives weakness if chained with #4 (useful in PvE, vital in PvP)
- #5 fears (can be good in PvE, is amazing in PvP)
- and of course the #4 transfers all your conditions and one for other people (iirc) standing near it on activation, which makes it one of the best support skills on any weapon imo.

You can also start the fight with the staff #2 and immediately switch to scepter to stack bleeds a bit more quickly.

Scepter is the main damage of course and especially in PvE you will spend the majority of your time using it.
The real question isn’t why would you switch to the staff though, it’s: why would you switch to anything else? (in a condition build).

CHIPS.6018:

Everything enemies throw at us, we always get hit unless we dodge.

That a necro has no way to increase his endurance regen (outside of an on weapon switch sigil or food).
On all my other classes I tend to at least take a trait to increase regen or have access to vigor, it makes such a big difference in longer fights.
DS compensates a little, but the cooldown and limited UI make it a bit of a hassle when the going gets tough imo.

For biggest strength I’d say the amount and quality of my crowd control.
I tend to run with the staff and the warhorn (both traited) so that’s an AoE chill, AoE fear and AoE daze on fairly low cooldown and the single target chill and fear from DS as well.
Timed correctly (for rezzing and stomping for instance) they are gamechangers.

He is oversimplifying slightly by omitting the direct damage, even though that is a very small part of the overall damage of any condition specced character (wear a full set of TA armor and the scepter direct damage won’t even tickle a target).

So in actuality we may be looking at something like:
- warriors: 3.200 × 10 = 32.000
- necros: 1000 × 10 + 3,750 = 13,750

Although the truth is even worse in this situation since GS warriors will normally take 20 in arms giving them a 33% on crit chance to bleed, or in other words: chance to push off a necro’s bleed dropping his dps even lower.

The point still stands though that direct damage while effected by mitigation has no cap (becoming more valuable with every player that hits the target).
The lack of mitigation for conditions does not make up for the fact as little as 2 condition specced players can reach the cap and negate/lose thousands of dps.

Bhawb.7408:

Conditions are actually stronger than power builds for the very thing you said: there isn’t much that affects their damage. It means that all I need is condition damage/duration, and I have nearly the same damage that power/precision/crit damage would do; less stats for equal damage is a win in my book.

I think what you’re trying to say is ‘condition builds’ here because conditions themselves don’t get any stronger by not scaling with anything else and they don’t scale better than power in general, certainly bleeds don’t.
Except there is no condition/toughness/vitality armor, so you have to invest in another damage stat anyway unless you use Apothecary, but healing power is a fairly poor defensive skill for necros (compared to toughness or vitality).

Bhawb.7408:

Also, conditions (especially because of things like epidemic), are much stronger in AoE.

Conditions are a kind of damage, which is different from how you apply said damage, an important distinction.
In and of themselves conditions have 0 advantage for AoE, necros simply get more Condition based AoE skills. Which, as I said, is one of the many ways in which we are pushed in the direction of conditions despite it overall being sub-par to direct damage.

The basic problem here isn’t down to one thing, the basic design is conditions have advantages and disadvantages as does direct damage and that sounds good.
In practice however condition damage reaches the cap if as little as 2 or 3 condition specced players hit the same enemy.
Add on top of that the multiplicative scaling direct damage enjoys (mainly through +crit damage), which as the addition of Ascended gear and even bigger multipliers shows us will only get worse as time goes on, and Condition damage just doesn’t measure up.

Now people are very creative and they look for other ways to make classes work, because of that there are effective condition builds for necros and rangers for instance (less so for engineers), but that is in no way due to the nature of condition damage.
It is because they find ways to stack fear, or to kite and do incredible healing or they simply make use of the fact that because condition damage is at such a disadvantage it is quite rare and many people run without good condition removal.
Most of these builds are also tailored to very specific (PvP) situations whereas direct damage simply always works to some extent.

If the condition caps were increased/removed Epidemic would have to be nerfed into the ground or even removed though. Imagine being able to spread 50+ bleeds on 5 enemies.

That said, conditions are worse off than direct damage builds in almost every way atm. Not just because of the cap, but because there is hardly any synergy for damaging conditions.

The synergies for direct damage are too good, mainly because of +%crit damage on top of everything else.

Conditions:
- condition damage
- condition duration (although even without any of this you can easily go over 15 bleed stacks with a single necro).

Direct damage:
- power
- precision
- crit damage increase
- vulnerability

Twice as many for direct damage and they all increase the potential of one another. Couple that with the fact so much condition damage is wasted (by hitting the cap, by the target simply dying with multiple stacks on him or by cleansing) and the small advantage of conditions bypassing mitigation just isn’t enough to compare.

The main reason you still see condition builds at all is some classes are being very forcefully pushed in that direction by the utilities and traits they get and that’s mostly because of the tPvP meta which is all about very focused small scale combat.

Blood is power is fairly good at stacking some extra bleeds quickly (provided you’re able to throw the bleeds you get yourself on your target as well, with for instance staff #4).
I really like the corruption line in general for W3, there’s some very good moves in there for group combat.

That said conditionmancer has some major drawbacks in W3;
- There’s loads of AoE condition cleansing about and your bleeds just don’t stack that fast (and without easy access to burn/confusion as well it’s hard to get decent dps from conditions against players).
- Burst is King, you never want a fight to drag on.
- you’re nerfing your own DS.
- condition duration is far more useful in a lot of situations, because as a necro you mainly want your debuffs (chill/weakness/cripple) to be up as much as possible.
Unfortunately condition duration was added to the power line for some incomprehensible reason.

1: Have an elected (super)commander option.
Something on the fly like a simple yes/no box, with a time limit (so elections can not be spammed).

2: Add more tactical objectives (such as the orbs) with siege oriented buffs.
Along the lines of items that give the server +10% damage on walls, +10% stronger gates, etc.
The idea would be to have many of these on each map (perhaps not EB though) and they could not be easily defended so it would encourage multiple small’ish groups to aid the zerg’s siege effort.

3: Rework the reward system thoroughly;
- this includes making auto-loot truly automatic (as in: I no longer have to scour the battlefield for tiny bags like a mangy dog looking for scraps)
- remove badges from the jp and add them to certain daily objectives (defences, repairs, successful sieges, …), also add siege as rewards to these please.
- add a wider array of personal gear to spend them on (both stat-wise and aesthetically).

I find meditation healing a lot more reliable (always heals for that 2k, no matter how many people are around), but it tends to be more selfish since you’re not quite the ‘boon-dispenser’ you are with a shout/AH build.

I see you take CoP over Judge’s Intervention though, I normally don’t feel like I need that much extra condition cleaning and JI is just a lovely skill to have, especially with the hammer imo, since it lacks mobility.

Oxstar.7643:

Yes, all classes can do every role in some degree. But what matters is how fast you can deliver what is needed most and if you can do on demand or not. Remember, RELIABLE versatility.

Versatility is first and foremost about the choices you make in combat (because no one retraits between matches, and how many people retrait in W3 because they see there’s a lot of burst thieves today or something?) and engineers simply do not live up to that design philosophy.

Elementalists have a trait line devoted almost entirely to versatility (which comes in a large part from their attunement switching) in arcane power; for engineers this would supposedly be the tools traitline I assume but it adds little to nothing to ‘multi-kitting’ and what it adds to the toolbelt tends to force us into even more specific builds (i.e: static discharge) instead of more versatile ones.

The fact is it is a team game and balanced in part around that so saying an engineer can bring 2-3 kits and do a sub-par job in multiple areas is pointless because: What is the rest of the team doing then?
Versatility isn’t: “I push out almost as much straight healing as an elementalist, but if I do a bit of damage as well I’m up to par!”
It’s about choosing to give the team stability or regeneration, choosing to remove conditions or CC the enemy, considering if it’s time to save others or save yourself.

The idea that kits somehow magically give us versatility because “hey, you can take 3 if you want to! Think of all the skills you’ll have!” is ridiculous.

I get the impression a lot of people (A-net included) wish to make the point that we should look at classes as a whole, but I would like to point out it can be useful to look at skills on their own. Look at the details and the bigger picture becomes clear.
Compare elixirs for instance to shouts; why do we have to aim tiny AoE’s to give our teammates buffs and they just have to click a button? Why do ours only give a single RNG boon and theirs reliable, multiple boons?

Examples aplenty where they tried to make engineers different and quirky, but in reality it’s unreliable and sub-par and what is the trade off? Because it isn’t our phantom versatility.

It still works exactly as it always has today, no idea how you came to that conclusion.

I don’t see how this would be considered terribly OP anyhow, seeing as how it does require you to switch to a kit that has 0 offensive capability (so for about 2 seconds you won’t be doing any damage) and all it does is give another way to (more easily) access buffs we could already get many other ways.
The main stat being healing power is also a drawback for builds looking to maximize damage.

Basically it gives us a slight boost in supporting/buffing others and a bit more versatility (and isn’t that what engineers are about? ).

That said; the runes do fit excellently into my static discharge/medkit build and I love ’em.