Guild Wars 2

lunyboy and phineas +1

pros who understand the math and mechanics of high-level play, correctly raising the need for some minor pve tweaks to make engi skills as useful as war/ele dps in dungeon runs. argue all you want but the fact is on their side: for raw speed and experienced pugs, engis are declined consistently in favor of warriors and eles, even guards. whether it happens for good or bad reasons it’s just how it is, so why? they have real answers to that question, they tell you how the game mechanics are at the root of the problem. to be frank everyone disagreeing with them sounds arbitrary.

hopefully new content will make the whole debate a moot point, since running dungeons over and over can’t be fun… the problem isn’t so much with engineer stats as it is with dungeon design and the importance of existing dungeons to profit/loot. engis have other areas to shine (wvw/pvp) but the necessary pay-off from dungeons makes speed and ease into an issue

The biggest problem holding back GW2’s dungeons is their low difficulty. Anything intended as a challenge is still designed to be accessible to 90 percent of the players. To kill Zhaitan I stand at a turret and click fire over and over. Really? WTF.

GW2 is a button mash except for a few of the bosses who require either a map geometry-exploit or some specific kind of stacked spamming.

I would rather be playing GW2 than WoW, but the dungeons in GW2 have never once been as challenging or as enjoyable as WoW’s, and it really all does come down to design decisions.

In WoW, you had to be very careful what you pulled in a dungeon, and generally based upon your party there was some optimal plan of attack that each group could stick to. The mobs were fewer but tougher, and the fights were slower paced but they really punished mistakes; a single bad fear that you failed to cure/evade could wipe your party.

And wiping mattered. You didn’t just restart from the last checkpoint some kind of Wii platform game. You almost always had to go far back and have to do something boring or tough all over again. You could even miss your chance for loot from a particular encounter. In GW2, wipes are nothing, especially since armor repairs became free. You just run right through the half-dozen respawns and you’re almost good as new. Why even have death anymore, just give a revive on cooldown that we can shorten with $10 gem upgrades? ;P

Specific enemies required tactics. And once you were in a fight with them, based on their enemy class/race, you would have to use different skills. One particular sub-boss might require the group’s mage to keep up the freezing and drop it at just the right moment, for example. There were even cycles of attacks where multiple party members would have to coordinate – or you might not win. Never really had anything like that in GW2. Any pug I go with can get through anything unless someone just doesn’t have a clue, and even that doesn’t matter if you have more than one warrior.

And then there’s the loot. In WoW, the random rolls for equipment were part of the excitement, and that equipment was so scarce that wearing it would make you stand out. It was great but it makes more sense in a subscription game than a pay as you go like GW2. GW2 rewards crafting for gear instead of looting; you’re not going to build up your stock with drops from dungeon bosses, you’re more likely to sell off or salvage everything. Why can’t there be super-rare unique rewards from some of the hardest bosses? It doesn’t even have to be gear – it could be a companion pet, a chest of buffs, a new skin, a new title to select under your name if you had some kind of difficult achievement…could be anything.

All it would take to save GW2’s dungeons is someone going through and reorganizing the NPC positioning and stats so that it’s more important to have a plan than to have raw damage output, which as of now just melts its way through every map.

For what it’s worth, one of the most-dedicated FT engis, Phineas Poe, has given-up on FT in favor of bomb kit, even after the latest patch. He’s done a ton of testing and I’m sure he wouldn’t have switched if the DPS were in favor of FT.

Months back there were a few really active threads about possible buffs to FT kit, unfortunately it seems ANet didn’t think we were onto something….

I’m not saying FT is bad or useless, I’m just saying that top-DPS is far from the case. Just try zerk nades and see….

Giving turrets and FT kit each a bit more boost would do more for build diversity. I was hoping that December 10th would bring at least some kind of buff to the Juggernaut trait, like turning the 200 Toughness into +15-to-20 percent (about the same for most but scales with defensive gear/traits) and, if a damage boost isn’t in the nature of the trait, then at least helping engis with our condition cleanse issues by giving the auto-attack a chance to dump or transfer at least one condition, even if it meant turning the trait into a Grandmaster.

I’m a full-zerk all-nades build min-maxed to the utmost, fwiw, but it just seems obvious.