Guild Wars 2

Since you already quoted me, feel free to take a look at the rest of my post. It contains several more examples regarding exactly that issue.

Unpredictable is not necessarily bad. However, it feels more like unreliable. Which certainly feels bad.

A defensive turret actually sounds pretty cool indeed.

I just wanted to prevent people from discussing whether or not it is intended. We do know it is a bug.

Engineers are the only class who can’t reliably fight at 1200 range without using traits. We are also the only ones without a proper melee kit (I love it when eles drop their elemental weapons – gives me at least a few seconds of melee goodness).

The randomness… oh the randomness! Just get rid of that and I’ll be happy!

Hmm… possible. I actually never thought of that, because, at least at some time, it dropped bombs all the time.
Gotta test this later on. Thanks for the tip!

There is still lots of broken stuff with the engineer. Just like the situation with elixir b that was discussed here.

If they just swapped the cooldown of 2 and 3, it would be fine imho.

evasive powder keg – often bugs out and stops working

The old juggernaut was a bit cheesy in sPvP, as you would just switch to the FT whenever you wanted to rezz or finish. Basically made you uninterruptible without any drawbacks.

Still think they overdid it now though. It was our only reliable stability source and we now get cc’d to oblivion.

Explosive shot no longer aoe bleeding is a change from the beta. The tooltip is wrong.

Getting back on topic here:

ANet’s logic with elixirs was, that they wanted the randomness to introduce gameplay situation that make you think on your feet. They want the engineer to be somewhat unpredictable so that all parties (the engineer himself and his allies) have to react to the effects.

However, in reality the various effects are way too different and the rng can dramatically affect the outcome of battles without any chance for the player to react in any way.
I recall several boss fights in dungeons where I was desperately throwing my elixir h hoping for vigor, as dodging all the fires was impossible without. Over the course of a 8 minute fight, I did not get a single vigor proc and died several times as a result. If I would have consistently gotten vigor, I most likely would not have died a single time.

Or consider this: with the changed juggernaut trait, a thrown elixir s is now our ONLY source for stability. Stability is something that shouldn’t be random. You want to use to counter specific mechanics and proper timing is already tricky on this. Unreliability is the last thing we want.

I would no longer describe these skills as random. I would describe them as unreliable. Sometimes they give you what you want, sometimes they don’t. That’s not a fun game mechanic.

TL;DR: The randomness can and will kill you and it’s not fun, but extremely frustrating.

Grenades, by their nature, also affect multiple enemies, especially when they are clumped up. Grenades also apply conditions, do greater damage and have a MUCH greater range.

Only downside is you need to trait into them for them to be really effective and they are incredibly clunky to use. They are actually pretty bad in pvp because it’s silly easy to dodge them.

This has already been answered by ANet during the beta:

sigils not working on weapon kits is a bug and will be fixed. There was no ETA on this.