Showing Posts For Thelistener.3496:
The Background:
So, I’ve been cheating on my engineer. The rumors, unfortunately, are true. Am I to blame? Is it the engineer’s fault? Those are questions for another day and time. I’m here to talk about how we can make this thing work.
I won’t get into how it came about, but I’ve been seeing an elementalist. She has been my everything: a staff-wielding, combo-field generating giant. Her boons last long and her heals are fierce. And I have enjoyed climbing to ever-higher fractal levels with her very much. I don’t mean to start a comparison of the two, and I certainly don’t mean for us to sit here and bicker about class balance. I just want to provide some context for the discussion that I want to have.
The Here and Now:
I have returned to my engineer mostly for the purposes of farming twice the amount of daily chests out of fractal tiers. It isn’t the best reason to play a particular class, but it is something that I want to do. I also am looking for every opportunity to fall back in love with the class. The only problem is that, after playing an elementalist, I’m not entirely sure I know how I want to play an engineer. At this point you’ll probably be getting ready to point me to the build thread, but this is different. I’m not looking for a run-of-the-mill PvE build; I’m looking for the build that you run and find to be effective at the agony-producing levels (10+) of fractals.
I used to play a cookie-cutter grenade/elixir gun build with power/toughness/vitality armors, and berserker jewelry. Doing what I did with that build, however, I won’t even be approaching the usefulness of my elementalist. So, I decided to shop around for builds and now I reworked myself to be a bomb/healing/blasting engineer using roughly this build:
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcMzM9molNoMMlNoMa0xGaczkqmsM
I have a spreadsheet of intended gear that roughly include pistol/shield, AC precision/vit/healing armors and berserker jewelry, giving me the following rough stats: Attack: 2,892, Crit Chance: 44%, Armor: 2,280, Healing: 615, and 19,322 Health. I’m having second-thoughts concerning this build, however, for two very big reasons.
1) Agony and survivability. A good deal of time should be spent up in the fray dropping bombs. This is potentially going to make it very difficult for me to make sure I get out of the way of things quickly and will definitely end up in me being hit a whole lot with skill arcs and radii. I’ve taken the build into some explorables and I’ve even found myself getting knocked around a good bit there too. That doesn’t bode well for level 10+ fractal dungeons using this build. Granted, I wasn’t geared out with my intended gear for the test runs, but I don’t think the difference will be that vast. This is in stark contrast to my elementalist, with whom I can enjoy almost limitless amounts of freedom around the battlefield and can quickly get myself out of a tight situation most of the time with an insane amount of burst healing.
2) Clunkiness. I love a very active character, and it’s why I have loved playing on my elementalist. But it can’t feel clunky. Want to know what I mean by clunky? The following combo:
Switch into bomb kit, drop Big ol’ Bomb, use Fire Bomb (#2), drop a Healing Turret, destroy Healing Turret, switch to pistol/shield and hit #4 twice for Magnetic Inversion.
If you do this quickly enough and in proper time, it essentially creates a fire combo field (Fire Bomb), and allows you to blast it several times (Big ol’ Bomb, Destroy Healing Turret, Magnetic Inversion) for group might stacks. Sure, it’s a good number of might stacks (3 per blast), but it is torture in how clunky it is to pull off. And while you’re doing all that, you’re very likely completely oblivious to everything else going on in the battlefield. Potentially losing battlefield awareness is totally not cool and totally unacceptable for me.
Another example of clunkiness? Our healing turret creates a water field that is so fleeting that you could have easily reached 80 without even realizing it existed. Blast finishing water fields is such a great source of group healing though, and I absolutely love doing this on my elementalist. But trying to string together Big Ol’ bomb, Turret Destruction, and Magnetic Inversion in order to get repeated blasts on the momentary Healing Turret water field is a pain.
Path 1 remains broken after this patch (as of my posting this). So, you guys haven’t fixed SE. What you guys have fixed, however, is an exploit that people were using in order to finish Path 1 despite it being broken. Which means that SE path 1 is now not only broken, but practically not doable without a very elite group. Before anyone decides to tell me that this is just “part of the game” and that I need to “find good people to play with”, recognize that very few other dungeons require this of you. Off the top of my head, practically every single path in HotW, AC, TA and CoF are not only easily doable with a PUG, but you can almost fall asleep as you do them and still complete them. That leaves people like me, who want the SE armor, getting a raw deal compared to everyone else.
Below are the two methods people used previously and how they have been affected as of this patch:
1) Leave one of the grenadiers alive and have one person stay back and kite him while the rest go and kill the first two bosses.
— This now isn’t possible anymore because waves spawn regardless of whether or not you keep a grenadier alive. This is probably due to the fact that now, as it seems to me after testing this tonight, there is an event trigger attached to the activation of the first boss that leads to the spawning of infinite waves of patrols.
2) Waiting out the patrols and starting the instance after they stop spawning.
— I was fooled into thinking this could still be possible tonight. When you initially wait out the spawns, there comes a point in time where they do in fact stop altogether. As I said earlier, however, there appears to be an event trigger now where waves begin to infinitely spawn again after activation of the first boss. I have waited (and am still waiting as I write this) for about 45 minutes now after the activation of the first boss to see if the waves ever stop spawning. They haven’t yet and, at this point, even if they do it won’t be feasible to get a group together that’s fine with waiting around 1+ hour for the waves to stop spawning.
So where does that leave us as far as SE is concerned on a whole? Path 1 is now largely not an attainable goal for most people. I also tried doing Path 2 tonight without realizing that it, too, was broken. The static field on the last boss is admittedly broken, according to ANet devs, and has been since 10/24 (which means it has been broken for over week now). That means that groups of people have banded together to take an hour out of their day to do this path, only to come up short right at the end without any means of finishing it. And what do they get for their effort? Nothing.
That leaves path 3 as the only viable SE path now for people that want the tokens. If you thought trying to get a group for SE was bad enough already, just wait until people realize that now only one path is viable. This means you will be hitting DR unless you start running entirely other dungeons in between your path 3 runs.
This situation cannot be left as is until the next content patch (11/15?). This needs to be hot-fixed as soon as possible. Path 2 has already been broken for an entire week, but leaving it as is until the 15th would mean having groups of people unwittingly waste their time for a total of three weeks. Additionally, having no way to finish Path 1 now puts most of us in a position where we can only attempt a single SE path, and that subjects us to harsh DR with very little recourse. To have this continue for another two weeks would be unacceptable.