Guild Wars 2

Vagrant.7206:

If you ever played GW2 before condis were fixed (years after launch, btw), the meta was zerker everything. In fact, it still mostly is. Condi represents a break from that trend, as you can be condi with more than purely offensive states. Whereas, if you took anything that wasn’t zerker, you were clearly losing out on DPS.

The reason they’ve been pushing condi harder is because it encourages more diversity in stat selection.

This is part of the reason I quit playing, no gear diversity.

Obtena.7952:

The whole point of the change is that it gives choice.Why are people always so angry when they get choices?

No,people gets angry when the “choices” (aka balance aka rework) they get are made around ….let me guess…. the PVE side of this game without thinking about the side effects on the other 2 MODES.

Now lets talk about this,cos this premise is glorious:

Engineer
Most of the time, engineers were taking turret skills and never deploying the turret because the Tool Belt skill was too important to be overridden by the detonate turret skill.

Its not that Toolbelt skills were too important…turrets just suck.
On a side note… let me guess where this HUGE problem was happening…in raids?!

And dont even try to argue that.The WvW comunity,for an entire year,asked to nerf the Ghost Thief … “worked as intended”/ silence… but the moment it soloed Slothasor “the fix” arrived after 5 days. (just to mention the latest one)

Wanna talk about choices?!Good lets talk about it

• Turrets – not a valid choice (unless u leather farm with other 20 engineers)
• Pain inverter – not a valid choice
• Radiation field – not a valid choice
• Technoblade – not a valid choice
• Personal Battering Ram – not a valid choice
• Gyros – good idea,badly implemented
• Supply Crate – was valid

Talents are a mess in general and what u have to work with are exactly those 4,5 utilities/traits from 2011: as an engineer or a scrapper (doesnt maatter that much).But u know what?!
Condi Meta in PvE aswell in PvP…and engineers always had an “amazing” condicleans right?!

Wanna improve turrets?! Buff the dmg and the resistance.Done.

Grimwolf.7163:

I think a solid solution here might be to just have it begin recharging the moment you drop it, rather than after you destroy it.
It has more active gameplay, you can overcharge it repeatedly much like before, it getting destroyed by attacks isn’t as much of an issue, and the traits become less crap.

that would be a good solution if they choose to keep it as it is now,
it’d be much better than the current garbage,
though it would still be an unnecessary nuisance,

i’m sure i can’t be the only person who deploys their turrets in strategic positions with the intent of having them survive, i use them in pvp so i head to a point and deploy them on cliffs overlooking the point for example.

even if we started the cooldowns once the turrets are placed it would still mean we’re forced to either put turrets in impractical spots (like right by capture points were they will get cleaved down in 2 seconds) or we need to repeatedly leave the fight to redeploy them at good spots.

maybe if they once again added the ability to ground target deploy turrets it could be pretty perfect solution.

First off, it can be normal to feel exhausted after the first legendary journey. It takes quite a while and expectations build as well as many anoyances get pushed aside.

Now on to your class. I would ‘t worry to much. Maybe give thief a break or do some serious research into current spvp/wvw/pve builds. Don’t stress yourself with not being amazing at certain parts of the game. No one is yntil they get some serious practice under their belt.

On to dagger usefulness. Off the top of my head I k ow that necro and elementalost use daggers in meta builds. Necro is a god at wvw roaming and elementalist is still a very useful class in pve. Worst case you could use the legendary on one of these and get good use out of it.

Finally the legendary itsself, I always though incinerator was one of the cooler looking season 1 legendarys. The fact that thief could double wield the skin was just an awesome bonus in my eyes.

Vagrant.7206:

Maybe I’m reading the changes wrong, but this is my perception of the most recent balance changes that we have waited months (MONTHS) for. Is this anybody else’s feeling as well?

This is exactly what I was feeling. If these skills were so unbalanced ain PvP then why where they left alone for WvW? Then they wonder why people feel Anet has an unprofessional treatment of the game mode and the those that play it. It feels like we were snubbed yet again.

I mean, obviously. Raids (high end PvE), WvW (which seems to be forgotten), and PvP are the only parts of the game where balance is such a big issue. It makes sense that most if not all balance changes would be directed at these parts of the game

I crafted the legendary medium armor just because of the stat swapping feature. But after I realized how awesome the chestplate looks, I am really sad that a giant trenchcoat grows around your character which let it look bad in almost every circumstance.
I think the way to go here is either
1. make 2 skins out of it
2. or let us toggle the animations on/off

In addition I added a strawpoll to see the average opinion about this topic
http://www.strawpoll.me/12984239

The problem here is that the changes they made are nothing but annoying. They won’t magically make turrets viable. I’m still taking Rifle turret because of the toolbelt and nothing else. Noone cares about those 300 dps from rifle turret or 500 from rocket and those are the strongest ones on power builds.

Turrets need major changes / reworks and instead of changing such minor things like they just did, they should invest their resources in that one day rework for turrets. The patch changed how turrets work yes, but they are still basicly useless and they’ve lost the tactical part / utility they’ve had, wich is very very sad. Also HT to blast might sux now :<

For the people who were already only using turrets for toolbelt skills, yeah. This is a buff. Albeit a very small one.

For the people who actually used turrets for the turrets themselves… yeah, no. Not so much. Multiple overcharges per turret life has now been reduced to one overcharge on drop That’s a pretty substancial nerf for people who actually want to keep the turret active. In fact, there’s now very, very little reason TO keep the turret active, the ideal way to use them now is quite obviously to put them down, let them fire their overcharge shot, and blow them up. Nearly every aspect of turrets is now aimed at that sort of playstyle. The shield on drop trait, the overcharge on drop, lower cooldowns, damage and blast finisher on detonation.

So no. As someone who wants to use turrets as turrets, I think I’ll keep complaining that the devs continue pushing me to not do that.

I kind of aggree with you; I like the fact that ArenaNet is trying, it gives me hope that they will push turrets in a better direction.
However from the other side I don’t see the positive effects from this change. You can’t activate turrets again. Other builds like Static Discharge also suffer (no more double SD with detonate + Surprise shot)

We’re now looking at entering the seventh season of Heart of Thorns PvP with little if any real changes to the engineer. A few token nerfs just to make us feel weaker than we were previously without any compensating buffs to push the class in any visible, coherent direction.

I’m just baffled.

Six seasons into Heart of Thorns, entering what is ostensibly the penultimate or even final season of Heart of Thorns PvP (depending on when the next expansion actually drops), and we have seen no real changes to the scrapper elite specialization or the engineer profession overall since the end of season one.

We are still stuck with only running the hammer with gyros, the elixir gun, and the healing turret. Minus the nerf to Slick Shoes following season one, my build has not changed in any significant way for nearly two years—not to say that those two years were particularly comfortable. In that time: gyros lost their daze, their damage, and had their cooldowns increased; Rapid Regeneration was nerfed; Automated Medical Response was nerfed; Slick Shoes was nerfed; and now Protection Injection has been nerfed. It’s been a consistent if not systematic downhill slide since Heart of Thorns launched, and core engi has suffered some of the worst of it. Not including today’s nerf to Protection Injection, other traits and skills like Gear Shield have also seen significant reductions in their utility, rendering any core engi build significantly weaker to the scrapper—a state, I imagine, is entirely on purpose to drive sales and artificially inflate the value of one’s purchase.

To compensate many of these nerfs, ArenaNet has, to their merit, tried to help us by adjusting values and tinkering with things for seemingly random effects. Every patch I see a few changes like Fire Bomb’s physical damage being buffed or seeing Utility Goggles’ cooldown reduced from 30 seconds to 20. Despite the fact that these changes did little if anything to the profession, it was nice to see that ArenaNet was at least trying to make other skills more viable—even if at times it feels like they’re improperly forcing those decisions by just making the status quo less viable.

There’s no denial here that Heart of Thorns introduced a great deal of power creep that needed scaling back. I absolutely acknowledge it and I’m glad to see some of it curtailed. But there’s nothing more demeaning than being forced to run the same build you ran the past three to four seasons while being cognizant of the fact that it’s a lesser version of those previous builds. Much like how the reward nerf crippled season six’s popularity, it’s a tough sell to tell people to keep doing what they’re doing for less pay or—in our case—less effectiveness.

It was Irenio’s comment during one of the AMAs, following the closure of season five, however, that gave me hope, which you can find here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Official-Skill-Balance-Thread-22-February-Update/page/2#post6505559

We would really like to do some in-depth passes on underused utility types across most professions. We did not have time to do that for this update, sadly.

Kits on Engineer are an outlier; as utilities they provide an insane amount of versatility. Inherently it is difficult to bring a single skill up to the level of five skills. This is a difficult conundrum and one we discuss regularly. That said, we do have a few ideas for creating gameplay with other utility revisits in the future.

In particular I’d like to review and revisit Elementalist Conjures, Guardian Spirit Weapons, Engineer Gadgets and potentially Mesmer Mantras.

And I guess I just find myself asking: is this it? Are kits always going to be an outlier for us? Are gadgets always going to be useless? Are we going to just shift from one elite specialization to another, stuck with yet another completely overpowered elite specialization tree that only forces ArenaNet to gut core trait lines further to compensate?

I just don’t get it. They’ve had over 18 months to get this sorted out, and right now, May 17th, 2017, this is what they have to show for it. If this balance patch wasn’t the opportune time to give us something new prior to the next expansion, which obviously will take the lion’s share of the balance team’s focus in the coming months, then when?

I bought into ArenaNet’s fresh take on the engineer when they unveiled the scrapper by purchasing Heart of Thorns, but my hope is dwindling that the engineer will be anything but the scrapper moving forward into the next expansion—to where it’ll then be whatever the next thing is, never again being the class I bought the game to play originally, or being the class that kept me actively playing this game for years.

What they’ve done is take away the uniqueness of turrets. Now, what we have is essentially a poor man’s signet with not one, but two lousy actives. Guardians get to have signets and virtues.

By tying our belt skills to turrets on the right bar it means that we have changeable virtues but otherwise have a button on the right we’ll never use, providing nothing but taking up a slot for another ability we would otherwise want to use- this until we deploy it, it automatically overcharges, and then is exploded(and who in hell is going to want to do that?).

Due to this change, rather than increasing use, Anet is making certain Turrets will feel even more wonky to use and become even more vestigial. Especially healing turret. Making us pay with two slots for having one dubiously marginal ability on the belt bar isn’t an improvement. Even slotting a kit you never use, even all buttons as kits, is at least as beneficial as this and that’s wrong.

Normally I wouldn’t want to have to compare our abilities with other professions(signets) but it seems right here. What we now have seems to be the unwanted child of virtues, signets, and necromancer wells and marks but with terrible timing and no way of making the damage or effects from them unblockable. Yay?

It’s similar to the old Xzibit memes- where ANet says, ‘Yo dog, we heard you loved turrets. SO… After we ruined them the first time so you put them on your bar more for the belt skills and only sometimes deployed the turrets – Check this… Now we’ve ruined them even more so you only use the belt skills and never deploy the turrets!’

Who should login and test this ? The trainee who came up with these changes ? The one who never played engi nor tried to use his brain to THINK about the actual reason why noone out there used turrets in the first place ? BECAUSE THEY SUCK IN EVERY POINT THAT MATTERS:
No valuable traits worth using,
Dies in AoE in an instant,
Long CD,
Useless Dmg / Effects,

The only reason the turrets were good was to use their blast finishers. But even that they kittened up now. It is beyond me how they shine in their inability to read the gazillions of amazing ideas the community had in the past 4,5 years and each “balance patch” they completely kitten up more instead of addressing the issues there are.
Just looking at the bomb trait line, 110% useless in every single trait in there. There is even that video that completely explains why.

Guys, have you considered looking for the water field (to appear) before blasting the turret? Because the time of turret making a water field didn’t change. There was always a slight delay.

I can understand that when you need the heal, you want it asap to survive so people are tempted to buttonmash. Even with the previous iteration, the water field didn’t appear right away all the time. This just needs mindset adjusting and little paying attention.

I certainly don’t feel that this is the biggest issue. Trying to streamline turrets is nice idea but the thumper turret or rocket turret are much worse now than healing turret is because now you can use the overcharge only once at spawning it.

The general idea, as someone has already pointed out, was to spawn turrets at the place you want to defend beforehand and work on making them survive as long as possible. At least that was what Anet originally designed them for.

This change goes directly against it and if engi wants to use them effectively, he needs to spawn them only when he encounters the enemy and after that they’re quite useless. So engi needs to destroy them, wait for the cd and spawn them again. Most of the time when they come off cd the fight is already over.

This didn’t help turrets and it didn’t incentivize taking them. Turrets need complete overhaul. And yet they are IMO less important than gadgets, rifle or shield. TBH I don’t see turrets being viable in pve ever. IMO they can be either OP or UP, not in between. I’d rather see them focus on skills that could actually change the build meta and create more variety.

Black Lion Keys & Chests are pretty much your standard gachapon system of rewards. That means that each reward is tied to a different percent chance. In the case of the exclusive BLC items, the drop rate is so low that it’s possible to spend hundreds of keys and still not receive the one off item. That’s just not tenable, encourages gambling that goes against the game’s ethos and can ruin one’s faith in spending via the gemstore.

Decent gachapon systems have a mechanism called the ‘pity timer’ which means that after a certain number of attempts the gacha system either increases the odds for the exclusive reward or ensures a near 100% chance. Those without pity timers are usually scam based mobile games which GW2 shouldn’t be

So I suggest that the BLCs add a pity timer mechanism that means that for this month, if you use around a dozen or so keys you get a 100% chance of obtaining the Sworn Zaishen Helm. Or make these exclusive items obtainable only after spending a set number of keys, so that way they can be assigned a monetary value, leaving the random gachapon values for the standard BLC items.

Also don’t add two monthly exclusive items, it’s bad enough getting duplicates of the mail carrier when you only want the helm. Just leave it to one item per month. Or make it that when you receive the account bound item the first time, then it is then removed from the reward pool to avoid pulling useless duplicates.

And… what is the supossed improvement? That we can use the toolbelt with the turret up? They seriously believe that was the reason why people exploded turrets right away?

So I understand that Anet wants to revive Turrets (all the respect for that !)… however you do not realize that you have just completely slaughtered the healing turret. I am pretty sure that I am not the only Engineer out there who finds it completely Mental.
before it was very simple to deploy turret, then activate the healing burst and comfortably detonate with tool skill. however now if you do the same, your turret explodes before even activating the Cleansing burst….
and I know that it is still possible, but in my case it is about 60% that I will successfully detonate the turret during the cleansing burst HOWEVER it takes a huge amount of focus from my side.

before I could easily watch the game and use my turret to full potential, maybe even add a second blast or leap into the water field

Conclusion : Either make sure that the cleansing burst activates the exactly at the same moment you deploy the healing turret, so the chance if linking the blast with the water field will be 100% or just return Healing Turret on the way it used to be where tool skill = Detonation.

I used to manually pulse regeneration from a placed HT during longish group fights, detonating the field with another blast (not destroyng the turret) for AOE healing. Now I can’t do that. NOW I have no reason to have the turret up.
But they weren’t solving that. They were solving the fact that people only used the toolbelt skill. Aka, this change is for raiders that use rifle turret.

Obtena.7952:

The whole point of the change is that it gives choice. Why are people always so angry when they get choices?

What choice exactly? Turrets themselfs are still useless, Rifle turret will still be taken only for its toolbelt skill, Healing turret will still be overcharged right after placement, only to be destroyed – this time, tho, we don’t have to overcharge manually. Only thing that
really changed is even less reason to keep turrets alive.

Kenshi Maru.5489:

What really trigger’s me is this bit:

Most of the time, engineers were taking turret skills and never deploying the turret because the Tool Belt skill was too important to be overridden by the detonate turret skill.

NO FREAKING WAY. Most of the time we weren’t even taking the turrets at all because they suck. We’re using only all possible kits and only 1 or two skills of each kit because anything else we have is absolute garbage. Why not make the turret strong so we can DECIDE at each moment if it would be better do keep the turret or not?

pretty obviously targeted at rifle turret both in raids where it can be taken solely for surprise shot and static discharge pvp/wvw burst builds that use surprise shot + detonate turret.

This makes no sense. Now there is no point to keeping turrets up, which means that the change itself makes it irrelevant that we now have access to the toolbelt skill all the time since we will be picking up the turrets as soon as we place it.

So much stupidity into one balance patch.

What really trigger’s me is this bit:

Most of the time, engineers were taking turret skills and never deploying the turret because the Tool Belt skill was too important to be overridden by the detonate turret skill.

NO FREAKING WAY. Most of the time we weren’t even taking the turrets at all because they suck. We’re using only all possible kits and only 1 or two skills of each kit because anything else we have is absolute garbage. Why not make the turret strong so we can DECIDE at each moment if it would be better do keep the turret or not?

Remember what engineers were supposed to be about? Picking the right tool for the job. Now we just have no tools and no choice on what to use. Make things powerful conditionally and let us figure out what to use and when.

We’re so full of useless stuff it’s not even funny. Every class has trash skills but we have nothing but trash skills. Even our good skills have trash skills (kits).
Missed opportunity here to rework turrets to be useful and powerful. Just give them more scaling and a punishing cooldown so we want to protect them.

Oh, also, I was reading through the introduction:
“Skills that tether players together now apply Revealed to provide a stronger window of opportunity to players who can successfully land them.”
So, technically, Magnet should get it too? In theory?

Maybe they should have made overcharge function on an automatic interval…

yes, I agree it is completely a Muscle Memory if u do it 3 years, it is hard to change in 2 hours.

I have to train it at least 5 hours a day

Detonating turrent with my current keybinds was as natural s breathing for me , which is good because you have a lot more time watching the game.

now it feels like a lot of that time is spend actually making sure i get the detonation, failing to do so is very Punishing.

I am, and will continue to be, distrustful of A.Net and their handling of the Engineer.

With that said, I experienced the same problem you did and I came to the same conclusion – it is a muscle memory that will just have to be relearned. The timing is still there, just different. I don’t think this kills the turret, I feel that is an over-reaction. If anything, it makes it more enjoyable. …Or it will be once I re-learn the timing.

I guess this was supposed to be a buff to toolbelt skills, but I’m not sure how since no one is going to keep a turret up that only overcharges on placement. It is akin to detonating via toolbelt anyway.

Either way, the change requires a whole lot of annoying muscle memory retraining.

:v

patch could be worse

Vagrant.7206:

Bravo ANet! Fix a single glaring issue with turrets and call it a day. Nerf the meta, and we’re golden.

What about some real balance adjustments? Rifle has been languishing in obscurity. Our traits are a mess. Most of our gadgets are a joke. This is what has taken the balance team so long?

What came to my mind today is, they have made some time ago a looong, long list of possible balance changes. Now all devs are working on the next expansion, so there’s no HR for real balance team – they just pick some stuff from the list.
3 months later from now, with the next balance patch, we’ll see adjustments to Turrets toolbelt skills, to make them viable with the change they introduced today.

Seriously though, this game needs more frequent balance patches, made by people who actually play the game, at least one person per one profession

congratulations Anet!
as one of the few people who (before today) still used turrets in pvp for fun i didn’t think you could possibly think of a way to ruin them further,
clearly i underestimated the power of your staggering incompetence!

set up turrets…they immediately overcharge,
whether you want too or not,
and when an enemy actually does come along you’re left with weak attacks without the option to overcharge…

someone actually pays you guys to come up with this stuff?!