Guild Wars 2

Sigils are still useless for engineers, dozens of other build-breaking bugs remain unfixed, and mortar is still the worst elite in the game. Anet, I am disappoint.

@Coglin

Just to clarify, I think engineer has the least number of viable PvP builds, which is different than saying the class is underpowered. But you and I always end up in this same spot, with me urging you to stick to the issues being discussed instead of blaming the players for perceived problems of the class. If my claim is incorrect, I’m sure a smart guy like you can prove it empirically instead of resorting to “your just bad / uncreative.”

The jack of all trades, master of none impression is a complete myth. The reality is that engineer has the least viable builds of any profession in any game mode. In PvE you have grenades, and that is literally it. There isn’t any other build that comes anywhere close to the strength of a grenade build in PvE. In PvP the class excels at point defense and sucks at pretty much everything else. You aren’t tanky. You have no stability. You do no damage. But what you can do is provide a magical mix of tankiness, self healing, and CC that makes engineer a beast in point defense.

Don’t believe the “Jack of all trades” crap. It is completely wrong. The engineer in its current iteration is a specialist profession.

I can fill in the bit about the tool kit. In short, its horribad in all game modes. This is not only because the kit itself is bad, but also because the profession does not have traits or utility skills that synergize well with a melee build. Lack of stability really hurts melee engineers as well.

In PvE the Tool Kit is bad because it doesn’t do any where near enough damage to justify putting you in harms way. Again this is also a reflection on the engineer lacking the defensive utilities that would be needed for a melee build to work. It also sucks for tagging so its useless for farming. You don’t even have to compare it to grenade kit to realize its bad. Even compared to a mediocre kit like flamethrower, the tool kit is still horrible in PvE.

In PvP the tool kit is even worse. This is mostly do to ridiculously slow animations, but also due to low damage and the professions lack of good gap closers and defensive utility skills / traits. In PvP gap closers are pretty much mandatory for a melee build. The engineer has gap closers, but they are all horribly slow in terms of activation and animation times. The rifle 5 for instance, takes almost as long to move you to the target location as it would take to run there. The magnet pull on tool kit is good against ranged enemies in theory, but again the animation and activation time are so horribly slow that you are likely dead before it goes off. The melee attack animations are also very slow and this is obviously bad when trying to fill a melee role. The damage numbers seem high, but you will find it very hard to connect with any of the attacks. Again, the fact that engineers have essentially no on demand source of stability would make melee difficult even if the tool kit did not suck. You will find yourself being kited and killed very quickly by ranged, and true melee professions will eat you up with hilariously little effort. Professions that are more melee based do everything better than a melee engineer: better sustained damage, better burst damage, better CC’s (engineer CC’s usually punt the enemy out of melee range making it hard to combo), better defenses and they have some kind of on demand stability.

All in all, the tool kit behaves much like the other kits- you end up using throw wrench and sometimes swapping in to it for the #4 block. You will not find it effective as a primary weapon.

Before I want Anet to spend resources adding weapons to engineer, I think they really need to work on the kits we already have. Tool kit for example, could theoretically be the center of a melee engineer spec but it is just so awful.

I love turrets when I’m playing for fun. I also find some niche uses for them in PvE. But when I am playing for effectiveness they are not justifiable to my team. It is literally a kitten move to roll a turret build in tpvp.

Zair.4102:

Note that 1400 range means you can’t hit the ground from the top of some castle walls. If you set up right on the edge (where the enemy can easily target you), you can hit the ground directly under you in some places, but if you set up back even a little you can’t see the ground in range.

Please make the mortar longer range.

If it was a kit, allowing you to quickly swap it out and put away with no cooldown, could you see yourself using it with the same range and damage it has now?

I don’t think grenades are OP so much as everything else on the engineer is horribly ineffective. I’ve already left this class because of what kitten poor shape it is in, and if Anet nerfs the one functioning build instead of fixing this broken profession, I won’t be coming back any time soon. This class was such a joy to level, and then at 80 you realize that it has the least viable builds of any class, the funnest stuff to use is the least effective, the worst selection of elites in the game (mortar my god, it is useless and just plain horrible), and just suffers from the most horribly implemented design choices of any class (kits don’t scale with weapons, no weapon swapping). I had the bad luck of making my first character to 80 an engineer, and he is benched pretty much indefinately because of the immense amount of work that is needed for engineer to be comparable to other classes in terms of effectiveness, build variety, and fun factor.

coglin.1496:

Wow, jump to conclusions much.

I didn’t jump to conclusions. You literally said the reason lots of the threads in the engineer subforum were being made was because people have entitlement issues. That is an exact example of the character assassination strategy of argument. To be fair, you are posting in a thread that is entirely based on character assassination. The OP figured that rather than spend time debating each individual thread, he would just make a thread like this that says, “All the threads that are critical of the engineer profession aren’t legitimate because they are just playing the wrong profession.”

coglin.1496:

It is one thing if someone makes a thread saying I have an idea, what do you guys think.

It is another to say “such and such ability is garbage” It needs to be changed to this that and the other. Do it now Anet.

Not sure what your problem is, but it is fairly rational of me to prefer the the former over the later.

I prefer the former over the latter as well, but I don’t disregard anyone’s feedback, not even people I disagree with. All feedback says something, and if you ignore the portions of it that annoy you then you aren’t getting an accurate picture of the communities satisfaction / dissatisfaction with the profession. I enjoy thinking of solutions to problems, but I don’t mind spending the time it takes to do that. I completely understand that most people just want to quickly leave their feedback and get back to the game. It is okay for people to just say, “Hey I think X sucks, please fix it somehow.”

It is also okay for people to communicate their disappointment with the broad theme of a profession. Not everyone watches youtube videos of all the skills before they roll a profession. Many people just see ‘Engineer’ in char creation and think, “Huh, a technology guy. Probably gets robot pets and mechanical armor. I’ll choose that one.” Then through playing the game they realize it wasn’t what they wanted, and then they are in the position of having invested time in to a profession they aren’t completely happy with. Of course they are going to communicate the difference between their expectations and reality, and that’s legitimate feedback.

Those are just hypothetical thought processes that might lead people to post the type of feedback that apparently bothers you. I’m sure people have many other reasons for posting feedback and suggestions. I personally watched the videos and saw that Engineer had a Mortar. I was very excited for this ability but then discovered that I rarely get to use it because it is short range, low damage, and is killed nearly instantly. I don’t want Engineer to be OP, but I do want to enjoy this ability so I posted my feedback. I don’t feel that I should roll a different profession just because I think this one ability is horribly iterated. At first all I could do is write that Mortar sucked, but eventually the discussion led to what I think is a good fix. The important point is that it started with purely negative and fairly demanding feedback.

coglin.1496:

If you call that a “character assassination” you certainly have a different concept of that phrase then the average person.

It sure appears from your post that you feel there is some need to fulfill the vocal minorities demands, which is a fairly backwards reasoning if you ask me. The abilities, utilities, traits, and skills that are broke, need to be fixed, no one is arguing that. I just can’t justify your perspective that we need to change the class to suit those demanding it, while hosing the rest of us.

As I saw a Mod post on it previously saying:

Hi Everyone,

Unfortunately we have seen a lot of of threads posted on this topic.

As already explained, we are not going keep you updated about this situation every hour, or answer personally to each questions you are asking..

I’m not sure where you found that dev post, but I’d like to know. I’m guessing from one of the “rifle is a shotgun and I want a real rifle” threads. I personally like the rifle as-is. If changes can be made that make the rifle haters happy, without hosing me, then thats awesome. Thats one reason to join in these discussions, to try and see if there is a fix that makes everyone happy. But more broadly, I just don’t want Anet to disregard any feedback. I don’t expect them to overhaul the rifle based on a few peoples disatisfaction, but I do expect them to learn from it.

Kreit.4709:

OP, before post pointless wall of text try to play not only in PvE. Mortar is one of the best elite skills in WvW, especially it’s 5 skill in siege. How can you even compare damage skill only (granade kit) and skill, which can knock from the wall 10-20 ppl?

Unfortunately, MMORPG’s are quite complicated so you might have to read a paragraph or two if you want to join a discussion in a meaningful way.

Any skill comparison is apples to oranges at some point, so you just have to exercise your judgement based on the facts you do have. For myself, the fact is that I use supply drop 99% of the time and Mortar makes an appearance in just a few perfect storm scenarios, and even then its usually just because I’m so tired of Supply Drop that I take advantage of any opportunity in which Mortar could potentially be used, even if Supply Drop is still stronger. From what I have observed of other engineers, they play the same way. I’m sure Anet has metrics for how often each skill is being used, and I would guesstimate that for every 1 time Mortar is used, Supply Drop is used over 100 times. I don’t see how anyone can think this is acceptable. That kind of imbalance in skill usage indicates that the underused skill is either underpowered, poorly designed, or both.

The trick at this point is to figure out how to make the skill more useful more often while preserving game balance. How do we fix Mortar so that it is useful more often than <1% of the playtime in one mode of this game, and how do we make the changes in a way that it doesn’t become overpowered in those situations in which it was already being used? I think the discussion about whether Mortar needs changes or not is settled at this point, and its time to move on to a discussion about what changes are needed.

I think its telling that you think Tornado and Whirlpool are so awful, when we as engineers have access to those exact skills and find them more useful than Mortar most of the time. I use Elixir X in all game modes around 10% of the time, which makes sense because about 10% of the games content is underwater. In underwater combat, the Supply Drop doesn’t spawn all the turrets so Elixir X (Whirlpool) is our best option, and you don’t see us complaining about it. At this point Engineer and Necromancer are much squeakier wheels than Elementalist, save for their downed state which needs immediate attention.

Oh, and you were right about Elixir X not being the only stability source, because we also have Throw Elixir S, a 60s cooldown skill which has a 50% chance of granting 4 seconds of stability, so I stand corrected. I should have said Elixir X is the only dependable source of stability.

@coglin

People make demands when they aren’t satisfied. Who are you to decide if their dissatisfaction is legitimate or not? You have a right to discuss the issues, not a license to engage in character assassination of anyone you disagree with, which is exactly what your “sense of entitlement” argument is. If you like engineer as is, tell us what you like about it. If someone is demanding something that would lessen your enjoyment of this profession, then tell them in a way that doesn’t attack them personally. Chances are there is a way to preserve what you like about engineer and incorporate what another person wants, all while maintaining game balance.

I wouldn’t use nades until you get to 60 and can select the grenadier trait. I used a dual pistols condition damage spec up to 40, a bomb kit spec up to 60, and nades 60-80 and beyond. The reason for bomb kit at 40-60 is because when you only have access to the tier 2 traits, the bomb kit with bigger explosion radius and +10% explosion damage is quite strong relative to its alternatives, and its hard to use bomb kit in PvP so you might as well use it in PvE where the enemies are dumb enough to stand in the explosions.

@Karast, DootmasterX (god its annoying how sometimes the quote function doesn’t work)

Now this discussion is getting somewhere! Thats a good point about the 100% uptime unless its destroyed. This makes it behave like more of a kit than a true elite, but since it can only be placed once and not moved again it has some pretty severe limitations. So perhaps it should just be made in to an actual kit, like the first half of DootmasterX’s idea, and behave the same as any other kit except that when you swap in to it you are immobile. In this kind of iteration, I could see it being competitive with Supply Drop with a base range of 1500 and traits that bring it up to 1700-1800 or so. I’ll noodle this one a bit longer but I’m really liking this idea so far, and it wouldn’t require much re-programming from the devs who I’m sure have a lot to do (like fixing our Deployable Turrets trait in PvE and WvW). Also this would make mortar usable for an opening barrage in solo PvE or as fire support for PvE zergs. As long as it remains immovable after use, I just don’t see it having much use in PvE.

EDIT: Just realized EvilZombie suggested this earlier in this thread, though in such sparse detail I didn’t really understand the greatness of his idea. Wondering what he means tho by “I wont like it to be.” Maybe flesh that out a bit, Evil??

Karast.1927:

Keep in mind that the deadzone / low hp might be part of the balancing that allows us to have mortar up for so long.

When it doesn’t die you can have it up nearly 100% of the time.

Something no other elite can do.

Think what your happen if thieves could chain dagger storm or guardians their tomes.

So mortars weaknesses might be a part of it’s balancing.

I would be fine with the low hp if it could shoot farther than an enemy engineer can throw a grenade or an enemy ranger can shoot a longbow. Balance just seems off to me when an elite skill is only potentially usable in one small part of one game mode and even then grenade kit is arguably stronger on its own merits and allows you to take supply drop.

I go 30-15-0-0-25. I use rifle with bomb kit, grenade kit, and the 3rd utility is up to you but I take the mine gadget. In explosives I take bigger bomb radius, 10% explosives damage, and obviously grenadier. In Fire arms i grab the 50% chance to proc weakness on crits. In tools I grab speedy kits, and scope. I wear all berserkers gear.

The bomb kit is mainly for the Big ol’ Bomb and the #4 ability smoke bomb. Try to stick to nades most of the time as they apply a crap load of vulnerability stacks. Another quick tip, make sure you swap to your rifle before using the toolbelt skills Big Ol Bomb, grenade barage, or the mine one so you benefit from weapon damage, sigil and stats. Hope that helps!

Esrever.8613:

I find it quite useful every now and then, Usually just for defense in WvW, they are slightly better than grenades by giving up the ability to move.

I mean, you certainly can use mortar, in the same way that you can use a unicycle to get to work each day, buy why would you when you have a ferrari in the garage? I guess if you like a challenge then go for it, but nades do much more damage, not to mention applying tons of vulnerability stacks and allowing movement. You also then get to have supply drop, which is very useful in all tasks in WvW and every other game mode.

@DootmasterX

Sounds great, but maybe too ambitious. I’m sure the devs have a lot on their plates right now. Just buffing mortar range up to 2000 base and 2500 with traits wouldn’t take them much time and would give engineers a reason to use their 30 point elite skill. Don’t get me wrong tho, your idea sounds amazing and I would love to see it implemented at some point.

coglin.1496:

Zandur.5012:

I predict an Anet employee will show up and tell you two to behave. Sadly, poor forum behavior is the only way to get Anet employees post here, so we really have no idea if any of our input is having any impact at all. Can we get like at least one dev post a week that helps guide our discussions? I don’t think it’s too much to ask and would go a long way to make us feel we aren’t being ignored.

Honestly, they have posted in one of the first threads about engineers and hammers, as well as engineers and sword, maces, and other melee weapons also in several of the new kit idea threads……. We have 300 other engineers and “X” kit or “Y” weapon threads, Why do you assume if they do not reply to each and everyone of them, they they are ignoring the conversation as a whole.

If I worked at Anet and I replied to the first few threads on the same topic, and everyone keeps thinking they are so special that they should ake their own personal thread on it, untill we have 300 more threads on it, instead of participating in the already existing discussion, I would absolutely ignore there comments. But that is just me,

Hey man, I’m not against ya on your argument here, although you do have a pretty abrasive and antagonistic tone. I don’t really understand the logic behind asking for brand new weapons when most of what engineers already have needs so much work, so I wasn’t really asking for Anet to reply to this specific thread. But a lot of other threads in this subforum are engaged in polite and productive discussions that end up advocating realistic changes to existing abilities / kits that would improve our profession without creating game imbalances. Those kinds of threads really deserve a dev post that at least says, “Hey we’re super busy now, so I don’t have time to join this discussion but just wanted you guys to know I’m paying attention.”

We all know the change to underwater nades was needed, but I just want to be kept in the loop. Ninja nerfs create pitchforks.

I predict an Anet employee will show up and tell you two to behave. Sadly, poor forum behavior is the only way to get Anet employees post here, so we really have no idea if any of our input is having any impact at all. Can we get like at least one dev post a week that helps guide our discussions? I don’t think it’s too much to ask and would go a long way to make us feel we aren’t being ignored.

The attack speed of underwater nades was nerfed, but nothing was said about the spread. However I too suspect the spread was ninja-nerfed because it is now much wider and much more difficult to hit a single target with all the nades.

Yeah, I’m just too dumb to do puzzles, and am both unwilling and unable to think outside of boxes, or adapt to challenges. Later, gonna go roll a warrior now

Engineer definately has some some strong tanky condition damage builds, but I feel that power/precision/crit damage builds come up short against what some other classes can do. When building P/P/C%, you can still have good rounds but over the long term it just feels like trying to beat other professions at their own game. Tanky cond dmg builds are pretty straight forward and don’t rely on kits so if you are having trouble with kit swapping these types of builds might be for you.

Besides cond dmg I feel the engineer can come up with some very good point defense builds, not through turrets, but through elixirs. I like 0/0/30/30/10 with pistol / shield, and an elixir gun for #5 condition removal and #2 cripple. It doesn’t do hardly any damage, but 1v1 this build is very tough to kill which means you can camp a control point. Even in 1v2 you can last a while if the enemies aren’t both glass cannon. Avoid 1v3. In this build most traits are up to you but the one that is must have is the 10 points in tools for the tier 1 trait that creates a spell when you swap to a kit. Each kit has a different spell and while most of these suck, with the elixir gun it creates a #5 AoE heal / condition cleanse. Heal is Elixir H, utilities are elixir B and S. Elite is supply drop because even with 30 points in alchemy, Elixir X is still crap and supply drop is a godly point defense skill. For this build to work you need to make good decisions in terms of choosing engagements, retreating when necessary, back capping and avoiding the enemy zerg squad. The idea is to back-cap and camp until you see the zerg squad, then retreat. If you do find yourself in a team battle focus on healing and buffing allies with thrown elixirs, cancelling stomps with shield skills, blocking projectiles and being in the middle of the action to keep the enemy dps off your teams glass cannons.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: One thing about this profession is that it has a lot of stuff that is totally useless, so if something seems totally useless, it probably is. Its not just you Hopefully anet will buff this stuff but until then we at least have a few strong pvp builds.

Belz.9037:

@Simon and @Epicface I use the same setup aswell. What are your builds?

I agree to a degree with the OP that it feels like alot of people wants to mold the engineer to fit their playstyle. I like constructive critcism given in a mature form of feedback. But what many people have done on these forums is giving destructive feedback almost borderline whining.

What is considered as good and bad feedback is mostly in the eyes of the beholder. I only hope that Anet are competent enough to be able to absorb the right kind of feedback for the sake of the game.

I take a few minutes to glance at the other profession forums each day. I think the type of feedback is very telling about the state of each profession. Warrior, Ranger, Thief, Guardian, and Mesmer front pages are mostly build questions, some numbers buffs requests, some nerf complaints. Elementalist is this + “OMG FIX MY DOWNED #2!!” Necro and Engineer on the other hand…the front pages are disaster zones, and I think it’s a mistake to simply write this off as “whining.” Asking for numbers buffs is tame for our front page, as many of the problems are beyond numbers fixes. Our threads want brand new abilities, totally reworked kits and weapon sets, new armor, new animations, new elites, and thats on top of the complaints about bugs/nerfs/buffs you see everywhere else. When there is this kind of discrepancy between the tone of the profession specific subforums, something is very wrong.

Some of the criticism is just “I hate X” and doesn’t say how it could be improved, but even this kind of input is useful on some level and should be considered. Most people realize they aren’t skilled game designers and can only say if they like something or don’t like something. If you don’t have the time to think of a solution, but you aren’t happy with something I say its 100% fine to just say, “Hey, Anet, I think this sucks. Please do something about it.”

Nice reel. You have mad skills but a lot of what you are doing with kits seems achievable with gadgets / elixirs which saves you the GCD. Most use of kits is swap in, use one ability, swap out. And why the tool kit? Is it just for throw wrench?

I am totally with you on #1 and 3, but not 2. Number 2 would just be annoying because of how wonky the engagement system is in this game. I predict frequently standing next to nodes with no enemy in sight and still not being able to harvest.

The question is, did you do anything with mortar and turrets that you couldn’t have done better with supply drop, grenade kit, and the mine gadget?

The flamethrower looks really cool. The flamethrower is very fun to use….at first. But when the honeymoon is over and you fiddle around with other tools an engineer has, you realize that flamethrower comes up short in the damage department. Even without coated bullets, the pistols are significantly more damaging to multiple targets and massively more damaging to a single target, not to mention having longer range and they don’t take up a utility skill slot. When you do get coated bullets the usefulness of flamethrower drops from bad to worse. Oh and pistols proc sigils and flamethrower doesn’t.

I used flamethrower for a few levels early on, and enemies died quickly enough that it was bearable. So if you want to experience flamethrower, the time to do it early on in the levels, because towards the later levels the mobs have a lot more HP and I promise you will get sick of blasting them dozens of times to kill them.

Once I got juggernaut at level 60, I tried flamethrower again. Permanent 6-8 stacks of might, how could that not work, right? And 200 free toughness, good gravy that has to be so strong! Since I’m tanky, I will just gather up a group of mobs and AoE them down and power level! Sadly this did not work at all with flamethrower because the damage is too low, but it did work somewhat with dual pistols. At the same time you have access to juggernaut, you also get access to coated bullets. Spec for coated bullets and then whatever source of tankiness you want and you can run a functional gather mobs —> AoE build.

Grenades really don’t shine until you get the tier 3 trait that adds an additional nade to each skill. And flamethrower isn’t damaging enough until you get the tier 2 trait for +15% damage. Early on I just used dual pistols most of the time.

Turrets horribad. Mortar worst elite in game. One viable kit. Armors make me look like an emo vampire. Kits don’t scale with weapons and don’t proc sigils. The promise of what the engineer could be is what lured me to it, but after playing one up to 80 and then some, I have seen that it needs a lot of work beyond numbers changes and bug fixes to deliver on this promise. The kits is really the biggest thing for me…the idea was that in exchange for only getting 2 weapons, we got kits. Well that really hasn’t panned out at all since the one kit that is viable gives you carpal tunnel. Flamethrower is almost there but the other kits really need a lot of work.

I’ve only played mesmer and engineer.

Engineer is still in beta. Big changes are needed to nearly every facet of this profession. And I don’t mean numbers changes, but fundamental redesigns. Most of the kits have one or two useful abilities that hardly justify the global cooldown time to switch to them. The kits themselves don’t scale with your weapon damage / stats, nor do they proc sigils. The one working kit, grenades, gives you carpal tunnel because it doesn’t have an auto-cast basic attack. We have much less viable builds than mesmers. We got stuck with mortar, which is the worst elite skill in the game. Turrets are horribly weak and completely nonviable in any game mode. Many traits that entire builds hinge on are bugged. Even our armor doesn’t fit the theme of the profession and we look like emo vampires. And the worst part: I’ve not seen a single post by any dev that acknowledges the pathetic shape engineer is in.

Mesmers have plenty of issues, but they just seem less sever than those of the engineer. Numbers fixes is all that is needed in most cases. They aren’t great in PvE, but in PvP are much stronger than engineers, with much more variety in builds. The most annoying thing about mesmer is really just the lack of swiftness. They have one ability that gives 10s swiftness and its in a weapon set so in PvE you are pretty much forced to have Focus in one of your weapon sets. Another gripe with mesmer is that the Illusions Tree gives a stat I found to be worthless: 1% recharge on shatters per point. The whole shatter mechanic really is just nowhere near as useful as what other classes get in their F1-F4 slots. But it does have its uses, and this is a small price to pay for solid utility skills, solid weapon skill sets, and amazing strength in PvP.

I just hit 80 with my engineer, and am going to switch back to my mesmer. I picked these two classes because they are the classes that you don’t normally find in MMORPG’s. But after thoroughly trying them both, I advise you to give Anet a good 6-12 months to bring the engineer up to speed. Mesmer all the way, its not even close.

EDIT: Just wanted to add that with Mesmer, I had irritations with useless traits and with my shatters not really feeling that strong, but I never once felt that entire weapon sets were lacking synergy or purposeful design. I cannot say that for engineer…

I fully support rearrangement of skills. I don’t want Anet’s hands to be tied in any way when they want to make big changes to skill sets. Probably just because I’m an engineer and big changes are that professions only hope.

Not saying this isn’t bad design but usually when I take elixir X i also have elixir S. If I’m trying to pop elixir X in combat I first use Throw Elixir S on myself to either cloak or get stability. Sometimes when cloaked you still get cancelled by an AoE KB.

Hilariously I deleted a level 25 mesmer and rerolled from level 1 because my eye color that looked purple in the character creator looked pink in every cinematic.

You mean you don’t like looking like an emo vampire that chucks nades?

Pistols or nades is pretty much our profession at the moment.

You think the damage on #1 is up to par though? The direct damage component was so low that I found the only way to really make it work was to have both the 30% chance to bleed on crit, and the 30% chance to burn on crit to squeeze some extra dps out of it. Even then I just don’t see myself using this kit if the main attack is going to be so weak.

But…we have kits. Nobody else gets kits except us. And that sounded great at first but the reality is that only the grenade kit is in a state I can describe as ‘finished.’

Flamethrower needs a big damage buff on the #1 skill, and improved usability on the #2 skill and it would be in good shape. Coolest looking kit IMO.

Bomb kit needs an overhaul where it gets a short lob distance or maybe a bowling style roll mechanic. The abilities would be fine if it had this. Having your character standing in the middle of one explosion after another looks stupid and isn’t fun.

Elixir gun needs #3 and especially the #4 skill to be scrapped and redone. #2 isn’t great but it will do for now. This kit at least has vision tho as a CC / support kit with some healing. And its really cool looking so change nothing about the look.

Tool kit needs hard CC somewhere in the 1-3 abilities, and much quicker animations. It is ridiculous how slow the animations are considering that they are melee and not especially damaging. I really like the block and the pull, as well as the tool belt skill, but the 1-3 abilities leave a lot to be desired. Also the heal on the turrets is a joke and needs to be at least doubled

So basically the non-nade kits need so much work that we engineers just need to accept that we are going to be chucking nades well in to 2013.

Fay.2735:

I never played LoL but I have played many other games including several other MMO’s and GW2 by far has the best community interaction by the devs that I’ve seen. That said it’s not perfect either or optimal but It’s a big improvement from what I’m used to and I would say above average.

I would say that the devs seem to respond better in certain areas of the forums like game bugs and dungeons section compared to a lot of the other forums (I don’t visit all of them just the ones of interest to me). While the Suggestions forums for example is largely left alone (Granted 70% of the topics have been suggested before so to reply to every tiny suggestion would be a bit much).

I don’t really mind if they don’t always reply as long as they read the topics.

I’m coming from the trenches of the engineer profession forums, and I have seen precisely one dev post ever, which was something like “Please keep the discussion on topic and avoid personal attacks.”

Meanwhile, on the LoL forums, Lead Champion Designer Morello posts daily, and there are threads where he has more than 50 posts. The effect of this is that the discussion stays on topic, the community knows what is reasonable to expect and what isn’t, and at the same time they know 100% that their concerns are being heard. If left unguided, the community ends up in the twilight zone, engaged in fruitless discussions about game improvements that will never happen because they are too ambitious. Game devs have a way of communicating what the big picture of the game is, where as players can get stuck in the view of the one class they play. Game devs have access to information like win loss ratios, build diversity, profession distribution and more. All this information can really help the community understand the state of the game.

Maybe I’m just spoiled since I’m coming from a 3 year binge of League of Legends, but one of the biggest things I really appreciated was how many devs took the time to join conversations, clue the community in to the thinking behind design choices, and even just joke around in some of the silly threads. It wasn’t just low level devs either; there was a broad spectrum of devs frequently posting in the forums, including lead designers and company founders.

Now that I’ve left LoL for Gw2, I’m really missing that kind of interaction. Not only does it make the community feel that we are being listened to, but it helps guide the discussions to a more productive place. Tell people when changes they are asking for are already in the works. Tell people when changes they are asking for would result in ridiculously OP builds. In these forums the only dev interaction I’ve seen has been related to disciplinary actions, and honestly thats really lame. Many people in these forums take a lot of time to give input and deserve to see at least, “Good post, we will consider this input.” But preferably, devs would join in to help explain their concerns.

The worst thing you can do is not respond at all. Thats when we, the community, start to feel that there is no hope our concerns will be addressed, and the pitchforks come out of the shed.

Seems like any flame thrower build that intends to actually use the kit for more than flame field and toolbelt skill needs to have Juggernaut and the +15% damage from alchemy. 6-8 stacks of might is a lot of extra damage + 200 free toughness is just too good to pass up when you have all that vitality.

YES to excessive obstructions on flame blasts.

Sometimes annoyed by missing of flame jet, but nowhere near the level of irritation caused by flame blast.

Sylvari, Male, Smallest height and build.

Flamethrower is a kit that is very close to being functional in PvE and even in PvP. The issues holding it back are mostly numbers issues, and by that I mean damage needs to come up a good deal on the #1 ability. I get that it is an AoE weapon, and should not have as high of single target dps as the rifle. But remember that the range of flamethrower is very short, so the damage should be high to compensate.

One non-numbers issue that needs addressing is the number 2 ability. Despite accounts in this thread that you can push foes back with air blast and immediately hit them with a #2 flame blast, I can assure you this results in “Obstructed” 100% of the time. The synergy between these abilities should be high but at the moment they cannot be used together. Another issue with the number 2 ability is that it needs a detonate mechanic, where you press once to fire and again if you want to detonate it early.

Air blast is fine as is.

The AoE blind isn’t amazing, but I’ll take it if my damage on #1 comes up a good 25% or so.

The fire wall just needs burns to stack up better, as someone else mentioned earlier in this thread. It gives a 1 second burn for every 1 second that someone stands in it. Of course you can spec 30 points in to explosives to get 30% condition duration but this is not a real option because there are must-have traits for flamethrower that do not allow such heavy investment in to the explosives tree.

And that is really the last complaint I have about flame thrower. I really like the traits for it. In fact I like them so much that I can’t use flamethrower without them, and this is a design problem. I think the base effectiveness of flamethrower should be brought up, and then these traits can be brought down to a level to which they provide a nice boost, but are not must-haves. Players don’t want to be told, “If you use a flamethrower, Anet has decided your first 50 trait points for you.” And once you’ve spent 50 points, the last 20 just kind of fall in to place so there is really just one viable build.

I know this all sounds critical, but really this kit has great potential, and of all the kits it is the closest to being what I consider ‘finished,’ so I hope its a priority. The look of the kit and the abilities are great, and everything about it ‘feels right.’ It is satisfying and fun to use. I really like the toolbelt skill for it too.

I use elixir gun on my tanky builds just for the number 5 ability since it removes conditions. But as a whole I think the elixir gun is a disaster and needs a fundamental rework, complete with new 1-4 abilities and better traits in more convenient locations. The look of the gun is really cool and I really want it to work as more than just a condition remover.

I have to agree with the sentiment that hardly any of our armor fits the steam punk, tinker theme of the class.

I have to agree with sentiment that Engineer having random effects is annoying and counter-intuitive to the theme of the profession. Mesmer is the ‘chaos’ profession so random boons and random conditions makes sense. It feels out of place on the engineer which is more of a ‘logic / technology’ type theme.

Caramel Ham.4891:

I personally gave up on my engi until Anet ever decides to want to fix the class. Everything the Engi can go…my warrior can do better, except for the on demand Aoe damage. Now I dont know much about PvP, something i have yet to partake in…but seriously Anet, its time to split PvP and PvE stats. Your insistence on keeping their stats tied together is seriously killing all the “fun” out of playing any class in PvE….except for warrior, but technically, if the stats were to be separated, even the Warrior class would get much more “fun”.

/rant

I’m close to rolling a new character as well. There is just so much work needed on the engineer, and each new patch fails to even fix the bugs that should have never made it out of beta. The trade off for us only getting 2 weapons and no weapon swap is that we get kits. Well the reality is that we have one viable kit, and it gives you carpal tunnel. The flamethrower isn’t in such a bad spot, it just needs numbers buffs and a change on the #2 ability to make it usable. But the other kits are beyond fixing with numbers changes; they need fundamental reworks. And after reworks, numbers balance. So considering the slow speed at which we are even getting bug fixes let alone ability reworks, we are going to be chucking nades well in to 2013, and my tendons aren’t real excited at that prospect.

Right…next time I plan on being chased up a jumping puzzle by 5 people that somehow can’t time a dodge roll on the slowest moving projectiles in the game, I’ll pack mortar with me. Seriously though, if we are trying this hard to imagine situations in which a skill could theoretically be used, we aren’t talking about balance anymore. We don’t get to just tack mortar on to our builds at no cost….it comes at the cost of a different elite skill, most likely supply drop, which has myriad uses everywhere in the game, especially in WvW and specifically in keep defense. So when the opportunity cost is that high to get a skill that is inferior in just about every way to grenade kit, there are fundamental design issues that need to be addressed.

I predict a nerf to grenades without the much needed buffs / reworks / bug fixes to anything else. Then all of our builds will be equally as useless and thus give us options again.

Until mortar is worth using in the first place, this isn’t very concerning to me.