There was a post floating around somewhere, I think it was an AN person who said it around the lines of Thieves are awesome in sPVP and WvW but if you go into tPvP, you won’t see thieves as they are too easy to counter.
That being said, it’s really hard for the people who are trying to learn their class or enjoy the non-serious pvp game, to not get overly frustrated with thieves being able to faceroll and dominate.
On my ranger, I can’t outkite a thief long enough to kill them, there’s just way too many ways to get ontop of my ranger, unless I build specifically to counter thieves, then I am kitten in terms of support and other things which seems counter logic.
Now on my engineer….I just blow them to hell with grenades before they can kill me, abusing HGH to hell while having 11+ stacks of might because it is the only way I can effectively counter thief damage as you can’t peel them enough.
As for the overall balance, there’s a ton of useless skills in the game, which need their place.
For example turrets would be amazing for holding points, but they lack the damage, health and AI to do the job. Possbility to have the turret automatically fire off of the target the engineer is targeting, would be helpful to add more DPS to a specific target, instead of the turret just shooting the same person forever, while the engineer switches off to someone else.
Also having the turrets always provide 1 condition on its normal attack, while its active makes kind of an overcharge which makes it shoot a whole lot faster, but then needs to reload for a few seconds (currently 50% attack speed, why not 100%-150% then 2-3 seconds before it returns to normal firing speed). Also turrets having a % of the engineer’s health might make them last longer, as they are pretty flimsy and don’t add enough significant threat such as mesmer illusions which are scary if you ignore them.
I can’t say much for overall balance as I haven’t been playing long but from where I am sitting the main point of engineer is to have fun toys to bring to the party, each with their uses.
Ranger for example has a different pet, to bring something different. Need a pet for CC? Being a canine. Need regen? There’s a wolf for that. Need DPS? Bring a cat. Pet choice doesn’t take much away from you, as you can have 1 active, 1 standby which allows you to bring a wolf for regen, and a canine for CC, switch out about as often as you can swap weapons in combat.
So currently we have a few different “tools” such as:
Flamethrower – should be the up close and personal touch, with added toughness/health to survive in a close quarters battle because if you are insanely close to them, chances are you’ll get hit a lot more than if you are standing way back at max range
Bomb kit – many of these should be proximity/remote detonation like ranger traps, timed takes way too much setup and are way too easy to get away from, and should be a lot more threatning if you hit it as currently, I don’t see anyone using this
Grenade kit – everybody’s favorite high explosive good time, good for single target, groups, holding points, and dealing with problem people
Tool Wrench – should be used to bolster your turrets and add some defensive things for holding points. It already does give you the ability to heal your turrets which is nice, also might be fun to add extra damage buff to them or something
This is pretty much the problem I see currently, there’s a whole ton of, hey this is broken let’s abuse this for a while because it is strong in like every situation, and less of I want to do X what builds can work with that. Or I like Y what can I do with it.
(Jade to be exact)