Guild Wars 2

In PvP, not really. It might be a problem if you’re attacking with a multi-hit skill into a big fight where all your enemies have it, but this isn’t that common in wvw. Usually you can only hit 1-2 targets at a time.

In WvW, yes, absolutely. Eg. On my grenade build engi, I’ll throw Grenade Barrage (6 aoe hits) into a zerg. That’s 30 hits of retal damage if I hit 5 players with each. I can only attack 2-3 times before I have to break and heal because I’m at half health from retaliation.

Maybe not, but if you’re going to balance the weapons, you should fix them for scrapper too, and MORE importantly, base engi.

Part of the problem is certainly that condi classes tend to apply their damage in a very un-fun way.

It feels really good to dodge a 10k gravedigger, or a warrior burst. It feels pretty frustrating to attempt to avoid mesmer clones applying condi, or a thief spamming evades while simultaneously dropping condi.

IMO, if the condi classes (the ones that people complain about) played more like the power classes in terms of their attacks/playstyle, you’d see a lot fewer complaints. Notice that no one whines about condi ranger or condi engi. Those are both pretty ‘fair’ condi builds.

Terrible idea. It’d just encourage hiding in towers, which is boring, not engaging in combat.. which is fun.

If you do want to make DoTs take more time, you’ll need to vastly scale back cleanse options (especially traits) to compensate, or condi will drop out of the meta entirely.

IMO, this would involve something drastic like removing all cleanse traits and only allowing condi removal from skills, then balancing those accordingly.

I don’t think zerker stats are the problem. I think it’s more that many classes run around with high toughness and perma-protection, so it feels like you’re doing much less damage than you should be.

I won’t lie, it’s pretty demoralizing to be full-zerk and plinking your opponent for 600 damage crits because they’ve got perma-prot. Coupled with other defenses like block, reflect, and good sustain, it can be difficult to take their health down. It’s tempting to just go condi and avoid all of that.

I’m curious what happens if you pick up an environmental weapon (stick, rock, etc) while using PF. I’m guessing it takes you out and bypasses the internal cooldown on kits/deactivation.

You have to bait out all their defensive kitten, and kitten do they ever have a lot of it.

Pop the aegis procs with ranged autoattacks. Wait 5s every time Shield of Courage is up. Waste a cc to test/proc Hunter’s Determination. Wait out other blocks like Shelter. Wait even longer when they use Renewed Focus.

Oh, and dodge all their offensive kitten because they’ll 1-combo you if you get speared and pull/pushed through traps.

So at this point, it’s been like 30s (pretty dumb for a point capture game, I know). Now that they’ve exhausted their defenses, you can cc or burst and finish them off.

It’s not difficult to beat one, but it is frustrating and time-consuming.

You can’t have it both ways. Either you want condi to be long-lasting, low damage DoT. In this case, you need reduced cleanse available overall. IE: getting rid of all cleanse traits and ONLY relying on cleanse skills, or something similar.

… or you want what we have currently, where condi is basically burst. No one is expected to land stacks of burn/bleed/poison for more than a few seconds and they are balanced accordingly (2-5k ticks).

Personally, I’d prefer the former to the latter, but I get that condi=burst is easier to balance. I just hate that it limits viable builds to ONLY the ones with the best cleanse.

So, regarding those autoattacks..

Using the ‘actual attack speed’ listed on the wiki, we get*

• Ranger: 347.0 (0.9) = 312.3 dps
• Rev: 306.4 (0.95) = 291.1 dps
• Ele: 288.6 (1.0) = 288.6 dps
• … Engi: 326.2 (0.65) = 212.0 dps

So the base dps is actually pretty similar for those weapons. As you point out, the real question for our rifle auto is: Why is our power scaling so terrible?

.* Actual dps depends on stats + target armour. This is just the relative dps

geekilo.8512:

I never say flat out remove condition builds from the game.I say there is should be more way for you to deal with conditions other than just flat out cleanse it
When i talk about Resistance, i’m talking how accessible is it to other classes. As up right now, only heavy armor classes have on RELIABLE ON DEMAND resistance. Middle and Light classes DO NOT have reliable on demand resistance. I’m not talking about what resistance does.

Condi and Power are both viable right now.

If you give more reliable cleanses + resistance, condi classes will just get more condi spam to compensate.

Uh. I don’t know what class you’re playing, but Engi w/ kits is very much not a “spam all the buttons” playstyle. It’s more “play the piano”.

You need to know exactly which buttons to press and when. Eg. See an incoming enemy, react by switching to Toolkit and block them with Gear Shield. Switch back to weapon, hit them with cc + damage. Drop a field, switch to Elixir gun and blast it with Acid Bomb. Then cancel that with a kit stow.

That’s not thoughtless spam. That’s focused skill.

On the condi arms race:

• Anet wants to make condi viable
• they add more cover condi, more stacks, more frequent condi application
• other builds need to run more cleanse + resist to compete
• cycle continues for a few balance patches
• only builds with lots of condi spam and/or lots of cleanse + resist are viable.

The only way out of this cycle is to cut back on both condi application AND condi cleanse in one balance patch. That’s a tall order, and I don’t think it’ll ever happen.

Edit: also, I think the power burst from PoF will be so ridiculously high, everyone will forget about this in a few months.

Ultimately, players are going to use whatever the rest of their server is already using.

If there’s momentum behind one or the other, good luck changing that with a forum post.

Fact is, they both do basically the same thing with a few different pros + cons.

If I remember correctly, it’s not so much that “it locks you out of kits” for 6 seconds. It’s more that you’re “locked in to PF” for 6 seconds.

Since swapping to a kit would take you out of PF, they share a cooldown.

It’d be a nice QoL change, but I don’t mind if it doesn’t happen. PF technically isn’t a kit or weapon. I think it’s a transformation or something, so it probably doesn’t get the stow weapon button to “drop it” by default.

F5 working with SD is hilarious though. Not complaining, as it’s pretty tough to hit people with untargeted SD procs, but .. still.

Gotta say, these “ZOMG DISCORD SO GREAT” threads are kind of a turn-off.

Tried it. It’s fine. I’d use it if that was the thing everyone else used, but it isn’t, so I don’t.

Simple as that.

It’s just another passable voice comm system like all the rest.

It’s not that rifle is bad. It’s that it’s unreliable. You want your skills to work, but a lot of the time they don’t and it ends up getting you killed.

If you Overcharged Shot, and your target has an on-cc proc trait like Last Stand, you die. If it hits reflect, you die.

If you Jump Shot at your opponent, but hit cc mid-air, you probably die.

If you net shot your opponent (assuming it actually hits), they’re likely to break that immob instantly without even thinking about it or just not even be affected (resistance, movement skills, etc.)

Also, the autoattack damage feels pretty meh sometimes. A lot of builds run around with perma-protection and some block or projectile hate. It’s difficult to put enough pressure on these opponents, and some can just out-heal your damage.

For all that, it’s still useable (barely), and it will be good with Holo, but that will be because Holo is overtuned, not because Rifle is balanced.

The new feature no one asked for. I don’t know anyone that likes it.

Feels bad for people that wanted to finish fights.
Feels bad for the losing team because who wants to stick around and look at your opponents /dance-ing
Feels bad for the winning team because the losing team all immediately leave

Just .. why?

IMO, blind should be a good defense against things like Whirlwind Attack or Surge of the Mists, where your opponent is using a fast charging attack at you. IMO, it’s skilled play to be able to predict an attack like that and blind ought to prevent the damage or cc. Unfortuantely, it doesn’t work because these attacks hit multiple times.

Maybe it’d be better if a blind prevented all damage from the next skill regardless of how many times it hits?

In theory, it’s a fast counter to a single incoming attack.

In practice, it’s not very reliable because many attacks have multiple hits (way more of these since HoT), and resistance stops it from working.

It’s one of those things that used to be good, but now isn’t because the game has changed.

Not necessarily. Eg. I remember a video of an old player (uh.. maybe Teldo?) running bomb kit + pistol/shield engi in wvw and taking on 3 players near ebg red keep.

He wins by exploiting terrain + line of sight with great mastery of the class skills.

Eg. Kites the 3 opponents behind a rock with ranged pistol attacks, drops bombs to aoe damage them as they get close; blasts a smoke field for stealth, repositions to a cliff edge, sets Big-Ol-Bomb near the edge still in stealth, then uses Toolkit-Magnet to pull one enemy in front of the bomb so they get blasted off the cliff to their death. Toolkit-Gear Shield to block the other 2 enemies closing in for the kill. Weapon shield knockback to push one more off the cliff, then 1v1’s the last enemy to finish the 1v3.

Don’t change it. It’s useful for animation cancelling.

I used to solo roam quite a bit. It was fun and exciting testing my skill against other players and builds.

Over time though, builds have gotten more extreme. On my rifle engi, for example, I don’t have much condi cleanse (just 2 per 20s from Healing Turret). In the past, I used to compensate for this by dodging + blocking condi attacks. Gradually though, condi builds got more and more condi application and more unblockable attacks. I just can’t outplay those builds any more – even if I play perfectly, they’ll always beat me.

Thus, I need to run in a duo/group with a support class to help cleanse.

I believe they stated that elite specs were NOT meant to be stronger, but instead meant to offer a different playstyle.

I’m at work, so I can’t go look up the video where they claimed that, but I’m pretty sure it does exist.

In any case, I’m not surprised that they do it that way. They want to sell expansions. I’m just disappointed because it’s bad for balance and the game as a whole.

It’d be balanced with the base specs. I worry that massive power creep is just expected from elite specs these days. I’d rather they be balanced.

Think of it this way: There’s no disadvantage to using Holosmith. You still have the same defense and skill options as a base engi, but you get access to insane burst too. The risk you take is entirely up to you. If you want to yolo in and spam all the skills, you can. If you want to play conservatively and only use PF when it’s safe, you can do that too!

Given that, why would anyone NOT run holo? Maybe some niche raid dps build?.. but even still, it looks like holo will be meta for that too, considering its damage output.

If those weapons are weak, the proper thing to do would be to fix the weapons, not add to the elite spec. That way it also helps core engi and scrapper that want to use pistol/shield/rifle.

• Sometimes when you pull people, then immediately Pry Bar them, it’ll miss even though the animation shows it connecting. This might be lag or server side lag.
• As OP mentioned, target only gets pulled part of the way. It’s too far to be an auto-proc trait, but not anywhere near close enough to be considered normal behavior.

It’s been bugged for fuggin 5 years. TBH, it’s the best it’s been in years right now. I wouldn’t hold your breath on a fix.

Core Engi is at least sort-of melee. Many of its high damage skills (both power and condi) want you to be in melee range to maximize damage: Blowtorch, Pry Bar, Jump Shot, Blunderbuss, etc.

I mean, I’d argue Holo is maybe a bit more melee than those because it tempts you to stay in melee range whereas Core Engi would probably disengage after landing its burst.

Holo doesn’t force you to stay in melee range though. If you want, you can play holo just like a core engi, except with access to huge relentless burst damage and some nice sustain from Heat Therapy. Holo offers you the option to stay and burst until you (almost) overheat, but only if you want to.

Also, I don’t think overheating is a risk. I hardly ever overheated accidentally during the test weekend and I was just getting used to the class. When I did, it’s because I was getting carried away in a big zerg fight in WvW, or accidentally fat-fingered the PF button.Given a few weeks of practice, heat management will be second-nature to most holo players.

Killyox.3950:

I don’t think we need to be afraid of nerfs.

ANet said they want it to be high risk high reward dmg elite spec. I for one welcome DMG build that doesn’t rely on juggling multiple kits.

For world stuff like events, levelling, pve I like Scrapper a lot but sometimes miss that OOMPH! which I get out of Holosmith

What’s the risk though? Compared to base engi, you’re getting way more damage for free. On top of that, you also get a ton of sustain from the healing trait and some good cc/utility from the PF skills.

I found that while condi is good, power is insane.

Condi: not all your skills apply conditions. Power: all your skills hit for insane damage. Yes, you can get 4k-7k burn ticks on a target going by fully landing your skills at close range, but with power, you’re doing 4k aoe+ranged autos and 10-15k aoe bursts.

In general, it felt like I was working really hard to stick condi on my opponents (being close range for rocket kick + blowtorch, ensuring I was above 50% heat before light beam, making sure every photon blitz projectile hits, etc, but for all that, it actually felt like less damage overall than yolo-power-spam.

I wanted to like condi, but I don’t think it’s better than power right now.

I found by the time you did whatever you activated forge to do, it’s been 6 seconds and your kits are off cooldown. I haven’t had an issue with being locked out – maybe for 1 second tops.

Oh, sure. I was destroying people on my rifle engi too. I just recognize that holo is straight up better by a long shot. It’s adding absurd amounts of damage, and taking away .. nothing.

I think you might be misinterpreting my complaint here. I’m not saying other specs are OP and I can’t fight them. I’m saying they all feel way too good. I shouldn’t be able to do that much damage. It drops the TTK significantly.

It’s not a matter of whether it can be countered. It’s added power with nothing taken away.

I know when playing Holo, I’m doing WAY WAY more damage than base engi could ever hope to achieve and I’m not giving up anything to get it. I can run through my regular weapon + skill burst, then activate PF and do THAT burst too. It’s just straight power creep.

It’s not okay for holo to be this overtuned.

It’s not okay for the other elite specs to be this overtuned either.

It’s power creep to sell expansions, and it’s bad for the game.

It’s clear the new elite specs are completely broken. Considering that we JUST got to test them now, and are already walking all over the base + even HoT specs. I think they need toning down a lot.

PvP in this game used to be like Chess: Slow and tactical.
Then HoT happened and it was more like Checkers: Fast and kind of skill-less
Now it’s .. I don’t even know. Hungry Hungry Hippos?

https://media.giphy.com/media/Fwn1auHR2LUGI/giphy.gif

Photon Forge is SO GOOD that it makes all other engi skills feel lacklustre.

It’s not really sacrificing anything to get PF, so it’s sort of a strict upgrade on base engi. In other words, it’s power creep. That’s bad, and I feel like it’ll get nerfed a few months later if it comes out in its current state (after they’ve sold all the exps, naturally).

The heal trait is pretty nuts too if you pay attention and don’t overheat. That will become second nature after a few days getting used to the class.

Utility skills: really fun and well designed, but I hate waiting 30s-1m to use them. Sticking with kits because I hate giving up a slot that could be toolkit or egun.

EDIT: Upon testing the other elite specs, I’ve found some of them are equally OP. This does not bode well for the expansion. Elite specs should be balanced with the regular classes.

Really loving the skills though. They’re fun.

It’s okay. It will wreck unskilled players or uncoordinated teams, but if you come up against a group that has a healbot ele, for example, you’re not going to be able to get any damage to stick.

It also can’t hold a point very well, which is a big part of the game mode.

With the rocket boots ammo + trait, you can play it more like thief now, just skipping between points and +1 -ing poor unsuspecting players that wasted their cleanse, not knowing they would have 9 stacks of burn to deal with in a few seconds.

I use Scrapper for Sneak Gyro mostly, because it keeps you alive and can pull off a clutch rez here and there (if your teammates are paying attention and not spamming 1). Firearms/Tools for maximum killing power. It works pretty well. In unranked I often get top kills, 35%+ team damage, and 0-2 deaths per game. Haven’t tried it in ranked yet, but I expect it’ll be worse. Healbot eles are a problem.

Due to the way movement skills work with immobilize, it wouldn’t interrupt or stop them. You’d need to add a short daze to it.

Unevadable would be interesting though, and would suit the flavour of the skill, as you mention.

Yeah. Rifle problems in general arose with the launch of HoT. It’s not that the rifle skills were bad before. They were actually meta. It’s that HoT + power creep made them far more risky and there were better options available.

The immob used to be good. It’s much worse now, because there’s a lot of immob clear (dd/war) and projectile hate. Plus, there are better immobs out there, like Ancient Seeds (a trait! not even a skill).

Overcharged Shot used to be good – still is IF you can land it – but you can’t land it reliably any more, and if you do, it’s likely to be immediately canceled by a passive on-cc trait. That’s a HUGE liability in a fight.

Projectiles used to be good. They’re less good now because there’s significantly more reflect and projectile hate in the game than there used to be. One only needs to look at Scrapper’s Defense Field for an example. Druid Wall, Ele auras, etc. etc.

Open World PvE – It’s easy. Use whatever you want.
Raids/Fractals – I think tools is meta for the %damage increase.
WvW – Definitely worth taking for mobility + the toolkit trait
PvP – Tough to say. I run it. It’s fun, but it’s probably worse than the alternative. You’re giving up alchemy or inventions to get it, and those do more to keep you alive than tools will.

1. Hip Shot at Bomb auto damage would be too powerful. It needs a slight buff for sure (maybe a slight speed increase? Baseline Skilled Marksman or something).

2. Ammo on Net Shot would be a good change.
3. Yeah. Blunderbuss should be all direct damage.

4. Mmm. I’m not sure about this. On one hand, the self-kb on overcharged shot is one of the main reasons Rifle is in such a bad spot. Fact is, if you hit any kind of passive cc-cancel proc, you can lose the fight right there. However, the self-knockback also clears immobilize/cripple/chill. I’d support a backward evade with a short animation instead.

5. Yes, needs an evade. No, doesn’t need more damage. It already hits like a truck. I’d instead give it a lower cooldown. Again, maybe baseline Skilled Marksman.

I’d argue two. Static Shot is a very good skill. An on-demand instant ranged blind that hits multiple targets is pretty useful defensively. It’s my go-to opener if an opponent charges at me. Blind, then hit them with Blowtorch as they miss their first attack. It also racks up lots of damage if there are only 2 enemies close to each other.

The rest of the pistol skills are weak. Poison dart volley takes too long and doesn’t do enough damage. The autoattack doesn’t apply enough pressure, and Glue Shot is short range, slow to fire/land, and doesn’t immob for very long.

Also, despite all that, Blowtorch is SO GOOD it makes up for the rest of pistol’s weaknesses.

It’s not. Its main weaknesses (huge vulnerability to stability, reflect, on-cc traits. no defense, and lack of damage on autoattack) are still problems.

It has slightly benefited from a few trait changes that let you build power more easily and IMO a few traits that benefit the rifle playstyle like Minesweeper.

It still needs a serious look by the balance team, as it hasn’t been viable since HoT was released.

Just for comparison, on my current build with basically 0 healing power..

Healing Turret (20s cooldown):

• 2500 heal, 400 regen (shared)
• 2500 overcharge (shared), 650 regen (shared)
• 1300 detonate blast (shared)
• + 800 regen Regenerating Mist (shared)
• 1300 blast on regen mist (shared)

So if I added that up right, it’s 9450 heal per 20s, almost 7k of it shared.

AED (24s cooldown):

• 12300 heal.

If you scale AED’s heal-per-second to 20s rather than 24, you get 10250 heal per 20s.

IMO, even traited it’s not NEARLY worth the risk of death or the lack of team support for an extra 800 heal per 20s.

While it is much better now, IMO it’s still not reliable compared to, say, Healing Turret.

AED is something you want to use only when you think you can drop to 0hp, so you need to put yourself in a vulnerable position.

If you miss for any reason:

• hard cc (0.75s cast time is often interrupted)
• ally heals you (difficult to avoid other allies’ aoe heals or cleanses)
• enemy notices your heal and stops damaging you

you are probably going to die.

Best case scenario, I still found myself wanting more out of it. I’d be in the middle of the fight, pop AED, die, get the full heal (~12-13k), but then have nothing left for the next 20-24s. Unlike HT, there’s no regen in the toolbelt skill, no team support from blasting water fields, and no option to reduce the cooldown to 16s and trade off a bit of heal.

I’ll play around with it some more, but so far it’s not replacing Healing Turret for me.

But those stack because you can take both, so you don’t want someone running around with >60% quickness uptime. That’s a bit OP. Then factor in boon duration + elixir U .. It’s already pretty strong.

It has always been my favourite skill in the game. I’m now just torn between having guaranteed 2×1200 range RB or the +50% endurance regen.

Given that it now has a full evade during animation, this adds a LOT of difficulty in determining the right counter to a warrior coming at you in the heat of battle.

You now need to decide whether they’re using Bull’s Charge, Headbutt, or Shield Bash.

If it’s the former, you can no longer respond with a quick blind or interrupt. If it’s either of the latter, you can. While these do all have different animations, you have mere milliseconds in which to react depending on how close the warrior is or how late you notice.

I predict people will just not bother attempting to cc any more (too risky) and will react with dodges or blocks for everything.